7 10 64 https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/0c7b71cadc255be8a6483d1a921c6ba7.png 5cd2ace395e9791bd109f06664836894 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 Goodwin, Corrine 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-12.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 Corinne Goodwin, October 15, 2021 LGBT-12 01:33:58 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 Goodwin, Corrine Foltz, Mary video/mov 1.0:|27(6)|58(6)|79(4)|98(15)|117(11)|136(14)|159(16)|182(5)|205(8)|226(11)|249(2)|266(10)|283(11)|300(2)|321(8)|342(10)|367(4)|390(14)|411(8)|426(15)|447(11)|470(7)|489(13)|508(8)|529(9)|550(6)|569(14)|592(15)|611(14)|634(9)|655(3)|674(6)|693(5)|708(4)|725(13)|744(4)|763(5)|780(3)|797(11)|816(9)|839(6)|858(9)|881(14)|900(11)|923(16)|944(8)|963(14)|982(15)|1005(13)|1030(7)|1049(12)|1076(4)|1097(13)|1120(7)|1141(3)|1158(8)|1179(7)|1200(13)|1221(6)|1240(4)|1261(9)|1282(11)|1307(2)|1328(2)|1351(15)|1376(12)|1397(6)|1418(9)|1439(14)|1460(10)|1479(5)|1498(3)|1521(6)|1540(10)|1559(12)|1584(2)|1605(5)|1628(11)|1649(9)|1670(4)|1691(5)|1710(4)|1727(3)|1746(14)|1767(12)|1790(2)|1807(3)|1826(9)|1843(7)|1864(12)|1885(2)|1906(9)|1925(15)|1948(3)|1949(2) 0 https://youtu.be/CZvOsnjajNk YouTube video 0 Interview Introductions 0 129 Early Life 0 163 Early Gender Questioning 0 273 Experiences During Puberty/In High School 0 590 College Experience 0 682 Navigating Marriage and Gender Identity 0 745 Coming Out to Wife 0 928 Career 0 1378 Coming Out and Socially/Medically Transitioning 0 1594 Code Switching as a Trans Person 0 1846 Gender Performance and Overcompensating as a Trans Person 0 2062 Living Outside of the Gender Binary 0 2215 Pre-Internet Trans Representation 0 2381 Early Online Trans Support Groups 0 2496 Beginning of Lehigh Valley Renaissance 0 2575 Finding Renaissance in the 2000s 0 2878 Expanding Renaissance 0 2965 Inception of the Trans Equity Group 0 3082 Beginning of Renaissance's Large-Scale Events 0 3226 Partnering with the Bradbury-Sullivan Center 0 3277 Mission and Services of the Eastern PA Trans Equity Project 0 3712 Leadership Journey for the Eastern PA Trans Equity Project and Breaking Away from Renaissance 0 4097 Supporting Trans People and Their Partners 0 4378 Experiences Coming Out to Broader Circle 0 4521 Negotiating Transition with Spouse 0 4591 Evolution of Marriage 0 4891 Vision for the Future 0 4977 Plans for Trans Equity Project 0 MovingImage Corinne Goodwin describes her childhood in Yonkers, Long Island, White Plains, NY, and Glen Falls ; she focuses on her experiences as a transgender girl and the transphobia within her family. For example, she shares how her mother responded when she found feminine clothing in her room by exclaiming that it would “kill” her father if he found out. Corinne describes hiding her transgender identity from family after these formative experiences even as she continued to express her femininity in secret. Upon entering Eisenhower College, Corinne continued to be closeted, but developed important life-long friendships and met her future wife, Deb. When they married one year after college, Corinne discusses remaining in the closet even as she had “girl” days in which she was able to express her full self. In 1987, when she and Deb found out that Deb was pregnant, Corinne came out to her wife. The spouses developed routines in which Corinne could be her “real” self when Deb and her son visited relatives. Corrine also discusses her work life. She describes her 23-year career with Radio Shack, managing hundreds of stores within eastern PA ; her work as Vice-President of Sales for Vonage ; and her development of her own consulting business and then training and development business. &#13 ; &#13 ; Once she left the corporate world and started her own businesses, Corine describes coming out fully between 2008-2014 to everyone in her life, including her clients and living full time as her real self. She describes different parts of her transition, including social, legal, and medical transition. In other parts of the interview, Corinne discusses the import of support groups, like Renaissance, and how she developed the Eastern PA Trans Equity Project with other community members as well as their major work in our communities.&#13 ; Mary Foltz Interview October 15, 2021 MARY FOLTZ: All right, I'll go ahead and start. My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Corinne Goodwin to talk about her life and experiences in LGBTQ organizations in the Lehigh Valley. This oral history is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. Corinne and I are meeting on Zoom. Today is October 15, 2021. We're meeting on Zoom because there's a crazy pandemic going on, and we're protecting Corinne's health. We certainly don't, I don't want to get her ill, so that's why we're here on Zoom today. Corinne, thank you so much for joining me today. CORINNE GOODWIN: I'm really excited about it, thank you. MF: I'm excited about it too. And just to start, a few quick questions, would you be willing to state your full name and spell it for me? CG: Sure, my name is Corinne Dawn Goodwin, my name is spelled C-O-R-I-N-N-E D-A-W-N G-O-O-D-W-I-N. MF: Thank you. Will you please share your birthday? CG: 10/30/59. MF: Okay. And I know you already signed a consent form, but I just want to review the consent for today. So, do you consent to this interview today? CG: Yes, absolutely. MF: Do you consent to this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in searchable formats? CG: I do. MF: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats including articles, websites, presentations, or other things that technology might bring us in the future? CG: Yes. MF: And do you understand that you'll have 30 days after I send you the transcript of the interview to identify parts that you might want to delete, or you could withdraw the entire interview if you wanted to? CG: I do. MF: Okay. All right, formalities aside, I'm just going to begin with kind of a general question. Corinne, tell me about the early years of your life. CG: So, I was born in beautiful Yonkers, NY, the garden spot of the state. In 1959 subsequently moved pretty quickly. My parents bought a house in Huntington, Long Island and I spent the first few years of my life there. So, my very first memory that I can, like, you know, like say oh yeah, I really remember that, was actually there, and it was around my gender. So, I was probably three, maybe four, and I was playing with the little girl next door. Her name was Gina. I remember my house was painted yellow, her house was painted green, and we were in her backyard playing doctor, and that's when I realized that I had different anatomy. And then my next memory, and I'm assuming that it was in the same day or, you know, close to it, was sitting in the bathtub in my parents' house trying to figure out how they had glued my penis on, because they insisted that they needed a boy. So, I remember talking to my mother about my gender, right, and why was I different. She kind of, in no uncertain terms, said, "Well, you know, you're a boy, and boys have penises." And I remember like just trying to figure out how to get it off. So that's my actual very earliest memory. Yeah, so. After that, we moved to White Plains, NY, so in Westchester County. We moved into my grandfather's house, so he retired and moved to Florida, and we moved into his home, and that was probably around I was eight years old, so third grade, and during the next few years, that's when I really began to realize that I was different than most other people. Especially, I think this happens a lot for trans folk, you know puberty is such a crazy time for people anyway, but for me it was like ultra-crazy because you had to figure out, that's when you have to start sort of putting on the "guy suit" you know when you're a teenager or adolescent, right? Or the "girl suit" if you're, you're know, and I couldn't do either (laughs), so. But during that time, I remember becoming incredibly adept at shoplifting, and shoplifting women's clothing. And so, we would go to, my mother shopped at McCrory's, which was like a five and dime store, a lot. It was like a Woolworth's. And I remember you know just really becoming really good at shoplifting and boosting everything from, you know, panties, to pantyhose to skirts, you know, and I would hide it under the mattress of my bed, which is not a great hiding place, right? (laughs) But and then my mom found my stash, and that's, you know, and she made it, my father at the time was traveling a lot, so he was in the paper business, so actually I worked in the paper business for a very short time. I was the fourth generation. Everybody in my family worked for International Paper Company. But he was traveling a lot. He probably traveled three weeks out of the month typically, internationally, to paper mills all over the world, and doing technical support, and he was away on a business trip, my mom found my stash, and I remember very, very clearly her telling me that, you know, this was deviant behavior, and if my father ever found out, it would kill him. That was like, the exact words that were used. And, you know, of course, you know, everything purged and, but it lasted maybe like three weeks and then I started shoplifting again (laughs), so. And that sort of lasted through, all the way up through high school. So, we moved to Upstate New York. So, moving from like the New York City area where like life is sort of like fast and we would go into the city pretty regularly and you know very racially you know, kind of integrated area that I lived in, you know, the junior high/high school that I went to was probably you know 40/50 percent people of color, and then we moved to Upstate New York. Glens Falls, NY. Which, like in the Adirondack Mountains, and it was like going from like, you know, overdrive to first gear for me. And right in the middle of adolescence, and I became very depressed. Actually, you know, I would skip school all the time. Go steal stuff (laughs). Have a girl day. And I did that for like two years. So, I had been a straight-A student when we lived down in Westchester, when we moved to Glens Falls, I became a C and D student. And it wasn't until my senior year in high school that I didn't even realize it at the time, but I was fully embraced by the queer kids at school. Right? And nobody talked about it, right? Nobody said, like, are you gay or are you, you know, transgender. Are you this, are you that? You know, nobody was talking about this stuff back in, you know, 1975, 1976, 1977. Especially when you're in high school, right? Because there's so much stigma around the stuff. But you know, looking back on it, you go like, oh my God! I was surrounded by all these queer kids, and we all took care of each other. That's what was going on. And yeah, so, finally I found my tribe in my senior year of high school, and I became a straight-A student again because of it, which was kind of cool, because it allowed me to go to college. But yeah, so that was my adolescence, you know. Being told I was a deviant several times, and I was going to kill my father if he ever found out. You know in hindsight, I think my father may have been a closeted trans person, frankly. So, he would shave his legs, he wore underwear that, you know, probably could have been classified as, you know, could go either way. You know, male or female in sort of the way it looked. In hindsight, you know, when I kind of think about his life, you know, I think that he may have been a very closeted individual. Whether that's true or not, I don't know, right. He's passed on a long time ago, so. I would have loved to have been able to have that conversation, so. That's the early years, I guess, right? So, I went to college. So, I went to a really small, tiny liberal arts college called Eisenhower College. It's since closed. It was actually only open for I think 14 years. But it was a very intense sort of classical liberal arts education, where you know, we read everything from Plato to the Bhagavad Gida, to the Koran cover to cover, and studied world cultures all across the world. I was an International Relations and Asian History major, and actually used to be able to speak Chinese relatively fluently. Not anymore. But you know, when I was in college, you know, you have roommates and you're living, eventually I got a single room, but even then, you know, you're in such close proximity that, you know, Corinne, who didn't have a name at that time, but you know that part of me, went very much into the closet. But it was really a wonderful time. It's where I met my future wife. And you know recently have started to reconnect with my larger college community, although our closest friends in the world were from, are from college, so. My wife and I, we get together with them several times a year every year for the last, you know, 40 plus years. We, so after college, my wife, Deb, and I got married in 1982. 1982? Yeah. 1982. Because we graduated college in '81. So, in '82, and then Corinne came roaring back. You know, so after a five-year sort of hiatus. Although I wasn't stealing things anymore, I was going out and buying them (laughs), but you know, still very, very secret. Kept it all from my wife. And you know, very closeted at the time, but you know, expressing my femininity through clothing as often as I could. My wife is an avid churchgoer and a believer, and I'm not, so my girl time was every Sunday morning when she went to church, frankly. And then we got pregnant in 1987. And that's when I kind of had my epiphany, so literally, and this is probably one of the biggest regrets of my entire life, and I apologize because it gets me a little emotional. But literally the day that we found out that we were pregnant, is when I came out to my wife. And in my mind, I felt I had to. Because it wouldn't be fair to her, or to our child, to go through life without them knowing about this part of me at some point. You know, there was lots of crying, there was lots of conversation, and what a horrible time for me to come out to somebody (laughs). But you know, in my head, the logic in my head said that you know, this is like the do or die kind of time. You have to be honest with her. And you know, it took a lot of years of kind of negotiating, you know, and ultimately, we sort of settled on sort of a don't-ask-don't-tell life around my cross-dressing, or my transness. So, essentially what would happen is for the intervening gosh, 30 years, my wife would go visit her mom once a month, she'd take our son with her, they'd go visit her mom for a weekend, and I would have a weekend to be the real me. And we did that for literally for decades. For decades. And it was really hard. It was hard when my kid found my fake boobs (laughs). You know, and like you know, he comes out of the closet with his little buddy from across the street you know and says to my wife like you know, "Hey, what are these?" (laughs) You know? And you know, "what are they doing here?" And he found my stash of stuff that I thought I had hidden away pretty good, and my wife said like, "Oh, they're just like for a Halloween costume," or something like that. And when a kid is eight, that's good enough, right? But that memory came up years later when I came up to my son and he goes like, "Oh, well you know, that explains the boobs." So, yeah. So, for years, you know, I worked in the retail business, so I was, I started off, so literally I got out of college, I had a liberal arts degree, I had gotten into grad school, I had gotten into Columbia and Johns Hopkins and some other schools to continue my education, but I really decided I didn't want to do that. And so, it was in 1982 in the middle of like a horrible recession, and I didn't know what to do, so I got a job literally selling shoes. I was in the shoe business for three years, I guess, and then a friend of mine from college, actually a friend of both of ours from college, her dad worked for Radio Shack, the now-defunct electronics retailer, and she got me an interview with Radio Shack. I had a 23-year career at Radio Shack, so at one point or another I ran all of the stores in eastern Pennsylvania, so I ran about 300 stores for them. The biggest territory they had. And then I did that for like 23 years. So I left there in 2004, and when their business model really started to shift and I was not pleased with where the company was going and I was, you know, like 40-something years old and I go like, you know, if I'm going to move, I gotta do it now, because my hair's getting grey, and I'm getting fat, and nobody's going to hire an old fat and grey guy, so I actually went to work, through a contact of mine, I went into the telecom business, and I was a vice president of sales and distribution for Vonage, the internet telephone company, so that's what I did after Radio Shack. I went from like this really established kind of traditional organization into the start-up world, and literally my desk for the first two and a half years was a card table, and it was just the most fun I ever had in my life I think at work was for those two and a half years, and then we went public, and you know, we all thought we were going to get rich, and that didn't happen, but when you go from like this ultra-entrepreneurial startup environment and then you go public, and now you have to comply with all these regulations and stuff like that, it was a little bit of a shift in what was going on. I was recruited away from them to go to work for Sprint, and I was in charge of the sales, consumer sales side, for Sprint's 4G business, when they were starting at 4G. You know, we're now in the 5G, and 6G's you know, on the horizon actually too in that business, but back then 4G was like the hot new thing in the wireless business, so I was in charge of all of their national consumer sales distribution for 4G for Sprint. They, in 2008 decided to merge our division into a new company with another company, called Clearwire at the time so we were involved in all that kind of merger activity, and I was offered the opportunity to go work in Seattle, essentially doing what I was doing for the new company, or I could take like a half a million dollars. So, you know, and the guy I would have been working for out in Seattle who I'd, you know, been working with in this merger thing was just, he was an asshole, so I decided to take the money (laughs), which came in a bunch of different ways. It wasn't just like cash. But the package was pretty lucrative, and really that allowed me to sort of sit back and go, "What is next?" And so, you know, in 2008 I was 50 years old, and you know, I could try to continue in a corporate world, and kind of do what I was doing, or I could go out on my own. And essentially what that money allowed me to do was have the freedom to give doing something on my own a try. So, I started my own consulting firm, and that firm doesn't look anything like it used to when it started, but at the time I was doing consulting work for a bunch of companies, but the biggest one was a company called Retail Business Development, and our business model was to help retailers who were struggling, and so literally what we would do is you know, and they're primarily in the wireless and telecommunications space, but like maybe you own 30 retail stores selling Metro PCS, the wireless carrier, and you were struggling, we would go in and consult with you and help you fix your business. And in many cases that was we would sign an agreement that you would turn over the keys to your business. The entire business to us, for a period of two years. And we would fix it. And that might involve closing stores, opening stores, relocating stores, firing staff, hiring staff. I mean literally we would, some of these businesses we tore them right down to the ground and rebuilt them from the ground up. And so, that took me back into the retail business. I was running about 350 retail stores. I was their senior vice president of operations and business development, and in the two years that I was working with them, we tripled the size of the business, landed a lot of new national accounts through my contacts, like you know, we were doing all of the in-store sales for DirecTV at Walmart, for example. So, every Walmart in the country, and things like that. So, it was just, again it was sort of like in that start-up sort of real entrepreneur-y kind of world, but me and the owner of that business sort of had a parting of the ways. We just wanted to go in different directions with the business, and then so I kind of was back starting square one again, and what do I do? And turned my business into a training and development firm. Because training is something that I always really liked doing. So, our business now is where we develop training and development programs for companies, really globally, so we have clients in the Caribbean, clients in Turkey, clients in Europe, the United States and Canada, and all kinds of different businesses, ranging from consumer electronics to adult pleasure products, so yeah, so one of my clients is the largest distributor of adult pleasure goods in the world. And we've written, a lot of our course stuff is electronic course work, computer-based training. We've written over 150 courses for them on how to use products. So, I know a lot more that I thought I would about things that I never thought that I would be selling, but. It's been an interesting experience. So, that's what I do now. But what that allowed me to do is by working from home, it started to give me the freedom, you know, as my wife was at work doing her job, she's a medical practitioner, is that every day I was able to be who I really am. I was able to be Corinne every day. And so, really my coming out process, my true coming out process started in 2008, when I left corporate world and started my own business, because it gave me the freedom, working from home most of the time, to really just be who I am. And you know, I came to the realization probably in, I guess in 2011, that I had to come out and really be genuine. My wife and I had a lot of difficult conversations, because partners transition right along with us, and family members transition right along with us. I think the other thing, by the way, that helped me with coming out, was that both of my parents died. And it gave me the freedom, I guess, if you want to call it that, to not have to worry about killing my father, because he was already dead. To be perfectly blunt. And to not have to deal with the judgement of my mother, which I think would have been very traumatic. But so, I started my transition, you know, kind of the coming out process in 2008, 2010. I transitioned full time socially in 2014, I guess. When we moved back here to the Lehigh Valley that's when that really started, and then medical transition started in 2016, so you know one of the things that many people don't realize is that transition involves a lot of things, right? So, I was actually just giving a training last night to some college students, and you know, people tend to think about transition, they tend to think about operations and medications. But really, it's sort of social transition, and a lot of people sort of socially transition but don't medically or legally transition. So, for me, social transition started around 2010, legal transition was just a couple years ago in 2018, and my medical transition started in 2016, and it's still an on-going thing, so. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. MF: Thank you so much for sharing. I'm wondering about the period of your life before the social, legal, and medical transition. What was it like to be Corinne, you know, on Sunday morning, or these just sort of selected parts of your week? How did you navigate that? What was that like for you during that time period? CG: So, yeah. Well, difficult would be I guess the best adjective, but probably a few things. So, one of the real challenges, and remind me to tell you about the second one if I forget, but one of the real challenges, and many people with transgender experience who are sort of living in this, you know, back and forth world, and many, many, many, many trans people do-- matter of fact, I would say the majority of trans people do-- is you're code switching all the time. So, you are, you know, mentally you are, you know in my case, a feminine space, or in the case of a transmasculine person, a masculine space, or you know, a non-binary person as well, but you are always having to put on this act. And so, I would have my girls' weekend, but I would feel like I was an imposter, right? So you have imposter syndrome, because in my case, I have body hair, and facial hair, and I don't know how to do makeup, or you know, I don't know how to whatever, so if I would go out, I would be just totally paranoid about, you know, people staring at me because, well, I'm still paranoid about people staring at me, but in a different way, but is that, you know, you're just not practiced, right? And then, when you switch back into, in my case, you know, into "dude mode," you know, there's just like this sort of mental break, and it is just so fatiguing. It is just, it just mentally drains you. And whether it's the imposter syndrome that you have, or it's that sort of, you know, having to kind of mentally switch back and forth, is just so hard. And then the other thing, well, the other thing that's hard, by the way, is that just this idea that you're having to hide, right? So, you know I would get my outfit out, or my clothing out, whatever it is, and then you know, it was, I used to store stuff in like plastic tubs that was like you know hidden in the bottom of a storage closet underneath, you know, our books from college, right? And so, you have to dig it all out, and then you pull your clothing out, it's all wrinkled and cruddy because it's been sitting in you know, in the basement with mildew, and you know, you put it on, and you don't feel right, and then you know, but then you gotta rush and put it all back because you know God forbid if you know a neighbor knocks on the door, or whatever, so you're just in this constant state of fear of being discovered. And I think this is one of the things that's different for many people in the LGBTQ community, or I should say the LGB community versus the trans community, right? Is that LGB folks can navigate the real world, right? So, you're not necessarily, you know, you're sitting home, you're watching TV, you're not worried somebody's going to discover that you're gay necessarily while you're watching TV. But if I'm, you know, was watching you know the Sunday morning news shows, but I was dressed as whatever, my next-door neighbor comes over to borrow a cup of sugar, and I'm discovered. And that is just a little bit different. And I don't mean to discount the fear and the stigma that LGB people have, but there's sort of a difference between being able to sort of move through the world with a little bit of invisibility, I guess I would call it, versus as a trans person, you are very visible. Especially when you're in transition, or you're not fully transitioned, you haven't started to medically transition. It can be really challenging. The other thing that I wanted to get at was because of that imposter syndrome, at least I know, and many people of trans experience that I know, overcompensate. So, for example, there's been studies that show that transgender people join the military at highly disproportionate rates, because they want to, you know if you're transfeminine, you're going to prove your masculinity. And you're going to, you know, become like, you know, an "army man," and you know, sort of beat it out of yourself I guess, right? And I know trans folks who have become like, you know, amazing athletes because they're trying to prove their masculinity, for example, if you're a transfeminine person. In my case, I became like this type A business executive who, you didn't want to get in my way. Matter of fact, my nickname back in the day, was "Evil Dave." And you know, I actually like to think that I was a pretty good boss, and I've actually had many people who say that I was a very good boss, but man, you didn't want to cross me. And I can make people cry in a heartbeat, and I did it, and I liked it, frankly. You know, I mean there were times when if you just, so my motto at the time was "Just do what I tell you to do, it's going to be okay." Right? And I was just this, I could be a total, total, pardon my language, asshole. And I was really good at playing that role. And I have a lot of regrets about that. Not because of decision-making necessarily, I didn't make but because I could have treated people better and frankly it was all an act. It was all an act. And so, you know, that overcompensation led to me living a disingenuous life for 50 years. And I look at those 50 years as 50 wasted years, and frankly a lot of the work that I do now I think, if I was to really look deep into my soul, is about trying to make up for those 50 years, and do the right thing by people, and to help people develop, and you know, get on a path that's going to make it so that they don't have to be on the path that I was. So. Probably a little bit of a mission there, which by the way, I don't think is really unusual for people who get into social services. There's usually some sort of mission, motivation going on back in there, but yeah, so. That's one of the problems I think that trans folk have, right, is code-switching and then imposter syndrome are really, really, really massive. I am so proud, especially of young non-binary people, who nowadays are able to navigate or working to navigate gender in a different way, where you know, wouldn't it be wonderful if we didn't have to fit into a gender box? You know, where you don't have to be this macho dude, or this hyper-feminine woman. You can just be genuine to yourself and on this whole spectrum of masculinity and femininity, you just find your place, and people support you in that navigation and being comfortable with the fact that these thing evolve, and everybody is sort of on their own path, you know some people move quickly across that evolution, some people move slowly across that evolution, some people stop in the middle, some people move back and forth, and I really think that, you know, we are at an inflection point where over the next sort of probably 20 years, hopefully I live long enough to see it, that these gender norms are just blown up, and we just start accepting people for who they are in this area, would make me very, very happy to see that. Yeah. MF: I do want to talk about, you talked about your career, I want to talk about Eastern PA Trans Equity, but first, since we're sort of still reflecting a bit on your earlier years, I'm wondering what was your relationship like with LGBTQ community spaces you know, prior to your social, legal, and medical transition? Were LGBTQ organizations on your radar? Were they not on your radar? How were you kind of thinking about gay liberation, trans liberation, and you know, kind of movements that were going on in the 80s and 90s? CG: Yeah, so, you know, back you know in the 80s in-particular, and even the early 90s, right, it was pre-internet, or pre-internet as we know it now, I should say, and so the way that you got involved with the transgender community in-particular, is that you went to adult bookstores, and you picked up magazines. Whether it was female impersonator magazine, or there was one called "TV/TS Tapestry," which was put out by IFGE in Boston for years, and you know, in the back of these magazines would be ads. You know, so they were filled often with you know, just pictures of people of trans experience often in pornographic or semi-pornographic modes, but in the back of these magazines would be personal ads, or ads for organizations, and two of the organizations back in the 80s that I was familiar with was, one's called Tri-Ess, which is still around, so Tri-Ess is the Society for Second Self, is what the three Ss stands for. And then another one was Renaissance. And what I did is I would, where we were living, I would get a post office box, and you know, sneak into my post office box and pick up my, you know, Tri-Ess newsletter, or my Renaissance newsletter, and furtively read it to go, "Here, there actually are people like me," and "Look, oh there's a picture of a lady with really big hair!" you know (laughs) or whatever, but they would sort of tell their stories, sometimes there would be personal ads, but that's really how you kind of communicated and found community back in the day. At the time, we were living in Upstate New York in the 80s, in Glens Falls again, and there was nothing. There was absolutely nothing locally, so my transgender life was lived vicariously through others in these newsletters. And then the dial-up internet happened, and actually there was, before AOL, there was a service called PC Link, and it was actually the progenitor of AOL, and I was working at Radio Shack as a store manager at the time, and we would sell this PC Link software that allowed you to go through a dial-up modem and find you know communities and I found a transgender support group, or cross-dressers support group I think it might have been called at the time. And I remember dialing in, you know, two or three times a month and getting into these chat rooms, and you know everybody talking about kind of what they're experiences were. Some of them were very sexual in nature, other times the conversations were very much about navigating coming out, or finding doctors, or you know, how do you do various things. But it was all very tentative, and very sort of closeted, at least on my part. You know, so I would do it when my wife was in the other room, and you know I didn't want to offend her, because the last thing I wanted was for my wife to leave me because I was leading this deviant lifestyle, I guess. I didn't want to scare her. But that's kind of how you found community, was like through these sort of like you know stealth newsletters. Things came in plain paper envelopes, you know, and but back in the at least especially in the late 80s/early 90s things started opening up a little bit and I became aware of some of these support groups. And they would often have meetings, although not near where I was living at the time, but Renaissance in particular, which was founded by a woman named Joanne Roberts along with a couple of other folks down in the Philadelphia area actually, is where they started, started opening chapters around the country. So, for example they had a chapter in Albany, NY, which is 50 miles from where I was living, and I was never brave enough to go to one of their meetings. But the way that you used to go to these meetings is you would be given a phone number to call, and that phone number was at a phone booth. So, somebody would say you need to call this number at seven pm on the 14th of the month, right, and you would call, and then somebody would be at this phone booth to answer the phone, because it was all super-secret, and they would interview you. Literally interview you about, you know,about who you are, to make sure that, then they might give you permission to come to a meeting at a super-secret place. So, you like you know you had to know somebody who knew somebody and that's the way a lot of these things really worked. So, you know you kind of fast forward to 2008 when I was, really made the decision to explore transition, I was looking for support groups and locally in the Lehigh Valley here, you know, I went into google and said like, you know, "Lehigh Valley support groups," "Allentown, Pennsylvania transgender groups," things like that, and there was nothing. There was nothing. By the way, there actually was something, you just couldn't find it. So, I remember going like, you know, "there's gotta be something!" And then I remembered Renaissance, this national organization that had things. I went to their website, and it said there was a Lehigh Valley group! And I go, like, "Oh!" You know, "Big win! Congratulations, Corinne!" And there was a website, and there was an address you could send a letter to. A post office box. Well, the website didn't work. It was just a dead end. And the post office box, I sent like three letters to it, and nothing ever happened. And this is one of the problems with a lot of trans support groups, is that somebody starts one, and then they might leave. And then it falls apart, right? These things are sort of you know based community, very community based, but luckily a couple years later, you know, through my therapist, she goes like, "Oh, I know somebody who knows somebody, and I'll get you connected." And, lo and behold Lehigh Valley Renaissance was there, it was just hard to find, and you had to go-- the phone booth was gone, so that was good news. But you know, you had to know somebody who knew somebody who knew where the meeting was and what time it was and where it was and things like that. So, I showed up for my first Renaissance meeting in 2014, maybe? 2015. And walked in, and I found a group of mature, white, women, trans women, some of whom identify as cross-dressers, some of whom identified as transgender, and I walked in there's like a little bowl of potato chips and you know, some cold pizza, and you know, iced tea, and I go to pour myself a glass of iced tea and this one person walks up and they said like, "Oh, you're new here." And I go like, you know, "Yes," and I remember going to this thing and man did I dress up. Like, I was wearing high heels and stockings and a killer skirt, and put my makeup on with a trowel, and you know, I was like really trying to be a girl. And this woman walks up to me, and she starts giving me a lecture on the right way to be transgender. Like, well THIS is how you have to do it. And I almost walked out. I almost walked out. Thank God I met Raquel Hebron who was the chapter leader for Renaissance who came over and saved the day, and she kind of you know just sort of put her arm around me, and she was like, "We don't care how you look, we don't care, you know, how you identify. You are welcome here, and we're here to help you." And I am so unbelievably grateful for that, because I probably would have never gone back, and maybe I would never have transitioned if it hadn't been for that intervention. There were probably, I'm guessing maybe eight people at that meeting. Lots of angst. Lots of people sort of you know complaining about life and you know all the obstacles that they encountered and things like that, but it was a really important start for me, in terms of like just starting to access resources, and that's, you know I kind of went to meetings you know for a few months. And there was another person, her name is Amanda, who was there and she, while not being a web guru in anyway, she went to Wix.com and started to set up a website. It was a little bit of a kluge, it was pretty rough, but you know at least people could kind of find us now, and then between me and her and some other folks, we started going like, you know, "This thing could be a lot more than what it is now." And so, while Raquel was still chapter leader and she would sort of run the support group meetings, we were doing a lot of work kind of on the backside. Frankly, I was paying for it out of my pocket, and we built a real website with lots of resources and like so, now you can go to the Renaissance website and download a list of therapists who are trans-affirming for the entire state. You know, you can, you know, find, you know, if you want to find a place to get your nails done, or where you if you're a trans guy you need to buy a binder, or whatever it is, there's all these resources available. Lots of articles. We started a blog, and things like that. You know, we optimized the site for search engine optimization, so you know now a days if you type in like "Lehigh Valley Transgender," we pop right up at the top, and it becomes easy to find. And those meetings have gone from where we would get like you know maybe half a dozen people would come to a meeting, the Renaissance meeting that we had just two weeks ago had 48 people at it. Which is just sort of controlled pandemonium. It's hard to have a support group meeting when you have 48 people, so we've had to kind of learn to manage those things differently. But that was really the start of what is now the Trans Equity project, is let's build something for the community that works for everybody. And one of the things that we've learned is that not everybody needs or wants a support group, right? Where you kind of come and sit around in a circle and you talk about your problems, and people give you solutions. Sometimes people just want to go to a website and find, you know, where can I find a doctor who will prescribe hormones. Or some people you know may not want to go to a website, they may want to go to a Facebook page, or an Instagram page and things like that, so we started building you know this sort of business plan around what should an organization look like, and about three years ago myself and some others started getting into some conversations and said okay, so if we had a clean sheet of paper, and we were going to build something new, what might it look like? And what it looks like is the Eastern Pennsylvania Trans Equity Project. So, myself and some other folx, trans folx in the area, trans-masc. folk, non-binary folk, we started to sort of you know meet at a Starbucks, or meet at you know one of our houses, and say, "What should-- if we were going to build something new, what would we build?" And I should say that in the intervening time, as Renaissance started to do more, we decided that you know, so for example, when I started coming to Renaissance meetings, Renaissance had maybe $100 in the bank at any given point in time. And you know, we would collect you know five dollars here or there from people coming to meetings, to you know to pay for the cold pizza and the carrot sticks and the iced tea. We had a little bit of money left over. But as we started to expand, you know, that five dollars started to add up, and we'd go like, "Well, what are things that we could do?" And one of the first things that we did is that there is a conference that happens every year in Harrisburg called the Keystone Conference. So, the Keystone Conference is where primarily trans-fem folx, but really anybody of trans experience, can go. It's a four- conference where they literally take over the entire Sheraton Hotel in Harrisburg. The only non-trans people there are the airline pilots who have a layover that night, and they like hanging out with the trans folx, frankly, because we party hard. But you know you go there and there's seminars that happen, you know like, so surgeons that come, doctors who come, therapists who come. Seminars on how to change your name, seminars on you know deportment, seminars on you know how to do makeup, seminars on you know, if you're a trans-guy, what is the right way to fit a binder, for example. Lots of workshops during the day. Lots of social activities at night. And when I went to my first one, it was literally a life-changing experience, because it's the first time I didn't ever feel tall. So, like you know there's a thousand other transgender people there, and I go and I'm like "Oh my God!" You know, "There are women here who are 6'8"!" You know? "I'm little! I'm petite!" (laughs) But it's a totally accepting environment, non-threatening, you're not worried about your safety, and that's when I go like, "Oh I can really do this, and I have the tools." So, one of the first programs that we started at Renaissance was a scholarship to send people to that conference. Because it costs about, you know, eight hundred dollars to go for the full time, for a hotel room, and meals, and conference fees. So, we started to pay for that. But we also realized there was liability involved, so we at that time the Bradbury-Sullivan LBGTQ Center was starting to open up, Adrian the executive director of the center needed a program, we needed insurance, and so we became a program of the Bradbury-Sullivan Center. So, you know Adrian got a ready-made program for trans people, and you know we got insurance to cover our liability. It was kind of like a great marriage of convenience. But over time, we started wanting to do more and more and more, and the mission that we started to put together didn't necessarily fit in with the mission of the LBGTQ Center. So, working alongside Adrian, and working with the trans community, we started to put together the plan for the Eastern PA Trans Equity Project. And our mission is to empower trans people while building community and fighting for social justice, and our vision is to be really the go-to source for resources for trans folk throughout ultimately all of Pennsylvania, but right now we support 14 counties across the Eastern part of the state. By the end of the year, I think it's going to be 20 counties. And we do a lot with very little. So, kind of our tagline is "Life begins now." And it's, from a mission perspective, it's really what is the one thing-- just one thing-- that we can provide to a person of trans experience, to help them navigate life better? And that started off really with legal name change assistance. So, if you think about all the places that you have to use your name, so if you want to buy a drink in a bar, and they card you, right? You have to show your ID, and you know, maybe you know, in my case, my ID said David, but I'm presenting as Corinne, and we've had it happen where people hand over their ID and then a bartender says, "Oh, so you're transgender then." And now the whole bar knows that you're a person of trans experience, and that puts you in physical danger. You have to show your ID if you want to buy a cell phone. You have to show your ID when you want to apply for a car loan. When you apply for a job, right? And you're hired for a job. You want to go through TSA because you want to fly somewhere. You, you know, have to show your ID all the time, and every time that happens, if it's mismatched to your gender, you're outed. And every time you're outed, you're literally put into physical danger. So, the first program that we launched was the name change project, where you can come to our website, you can download all of the legal forms that you need to complete your name change, automatically have them filled out, so you just enter in your name, your address, and you know, you're chosen name, and your current legal name, and all the forms are automatically populated. They come with step-by-step instructions, written in plain English, so that you can do it yourself and not have to hire a lawyer for $2,000. Then you can apply for a grant, where we will pay for your name change, so that you don't have to come out of pocket for that. And then we will mentor you all along the process. So, for example, this year, right now it's October 15th, we've helped just over 150 people complete their legal name change this year. And that is a life-changing thing. Other programs we have is that you can, if you're in transition, or maybe you're a teenager and you're going to school, or a college student you're going to college, and you're trans-masculine person, and you want a binder to help you to present more masculine, we will provide you with a binder for free. We've added, over the last two years, housing assistance, so you know if you're struggling with housing, we will pay your rent for you to keep you in housing. We actually did one not too long ago where a person was three months behind on their rent due to COVID, and the recession that's going on right now, and unemployment. We managed to negotiate away one month of that person's rent with the landlord, we paid two months of the rent to get them caught up, and we secured a letter from the landlord saying they weren't going to take any eviction process for 90 days. We provide food assistance for people who need to feed themselves, or their trans kids. We did four college scholarships for trans folk this past year. We do a scholarship to trans-affirming summer camp for trans kids. You know, the idea is like, what can we do besides the support groups? We run now six different support groups. But how do we really help somebody of trans experience get their life on track so that they can make a difference? So, we started the project in 2019, it's now two years later. It's 100 percent volunteer, nobody gets paid. So, you know, 85, 90 percent of every dollar donated goes directly to help people of trans experience. We have an education program where conferences like the Keystone Conference were canceled during COVID, so we decided to pick that up, and every couple weeks we do a workshop for trans folk and their family members, so we did one earlier this week on de-mystifying health insurance for transition. And how do you get everything you need to get surgeries, for example. We did one two weeks prior to that on "You Transition as Your Partner Transitions," so it's for spouses and partners of trans people. We've done them on surgery, we've done them on name changes, we've done them on, you know, mindfulness and how to deal with dysphoria, and you know, I'm just so proud of not only what I've helped to accomplish in building this project, but of all of our volunteers who put in their time and their effort to make the struggle easier, and to pay it forward for hopefully mainly for young folk, right? So, I mean, we'll help anybody of any age, but you know if we can help a trans kid, you know, get the binder they need that'll let them feel comfortable going to class, and then we help them get their degree so they can get a decent job, and we'll help them with their name change so they can get their name on their diploma, right? And we're sort of setting them up for success as they move forward, and it's just amazingly gratifying. Yeah. MF: Could you tell me a bit more about how you moved into the leadership of Eastern PA Trans Equity Project? You talked about going to a support group at Renaissance, and you talked about a group of people kind of meeting to imagine Eastern PA Trans Equity. I'm sort of more, I'm interested in that personal story of being a member, but then thinking, "No, I want to take a leadership role," with others, in collaboration with others, to really start something transformative in Eastern PA, that's connected to Renaissance, kind of building out of it, but also has a big vision for you know, directly helping trans people with specific challenges that they're facing in our region? CG: Yeah, so it was a coup d'état (laughs), so. So, essentially you know, kind of some of the current leaders of Renaissance were sort of very happy kind of doing what they were doing, and they are still happy doing what they are doing. And but we kind of just said, "like, listen. We think that we can do more," and I will raise my hand and say I was the ringleader in this, without a doubt, and but is it, you know, just through having conversations with other members of the community who said, like you know "What could we do? If you think about your transition, what was the most complicated thing? Or what was the thing that was the biggest, you know, pain in the rear for you?" Or whatever. And then we said, like "All right, so what if we could start building solutions for these, what might they look like?" And I was definitely the person who was behind, you know, kind of pushing all this stuff forward. You know, with input from other community members, but I was definitely the instigator, and ultimately it came down to, you know, I mentioned Adrian Shanker from the LBGTQ Community Center, so we said, "All right, we just want to kind of move in different directions. We're going to cooperate and help each other where it makes sense," but the LBGTQ Community Center is much more about cultural programs and things like that, whereas you know, we're much more about direct aid and intervention, right? So, think about it as the difference between your broad programs, so coming to seeing an art gallery showing, or a movie, or whatever it is, and you got 50 people. You know, our program is about how do we, you know, sort of belly to belly, one person to one person, make a difference in somebody's life. It's just sort of a different philosophy on how you help the community. And so, that was sort of kind of where we started from, is this idea okay so what is that one thing we can do for a person of trans experience to make a difference? Maybe it's a support group program, maybe it's one of these workshops, maybe it's a name change. Maybe it's helping to get them off of the street. But, you know, what are these things that we could do? And so we had a bunch of conversations, this is kind of going on in 2017, 2018, and then like I said, in 2019 is when we incorporated and started it, and then I sat down had a conversation with Raquel who was the group leader of Renaissance, and I said like, "Listen, this is what we're doing." And you know the Bradbury-Sullivan Center has decided that Renaissance really needs to go in a different direction, not be part of the center anymore, because we always were sort of a little independent anyway, like we never had our meetings at the LGBTQ Center, we had our meetings elsewhere. You know, we weren't going to give that up. So, I said like, "Listen, so here's the deal. So, you can go out and kind of become what you were ten years ago, or you can fold in underneath the Trans Equity Project umbrella. More than happy to have you do that. That gives you the [ear?] cover of having liability insurance and things like that." So, really Renaissance is the sub-brand, if you want to think of it from a marketing perspective, of the Trans Equity Project for our support group programs. So, like we have a group for partners and spouses, it is Renaissance Partners. We have a group that we've started up in the Poconos, that's called Renaissance Poconos. We have a group for non-binary folx, and it's you know Renaissance Beyond the Binary. So, Renaissance I guess if you want to call it that is sort of the sub-brand for our support group side, and everything else that we're doing is falling underneath the Trans Equity Project Side. But yeah, so I was the instigator, so I get the blame, good or bad. MF: I think the blame is all good (laughter). You mentioned when you were talking about doing some of the taking over workshops since Keystone was cancelled due to COVID, and you talked about a specific workshop that was for trans people and their partners, and that lead me to kind of reflect on, you know, when you were coming out more fully to your spouse, your wife, you were doing that without, you hadn't gone yet to Renaissance. How did you navigate that conversation? Did you have support? What sort of resources helped you with that conversation with your wife? And I guess there's a second question, is your experience in your marriage fueling some of the programming or workshops that you're building today? CG: Yes, absolutely! So, one of the things I think that-- so, transition, you know, when you're a person of trans experience and you decide to come out, and you know transition, you know, whether socially, medically, or legally, it is an inherently selfish act, right? It is an act often of self-preservation. Matter of fact you know, when people say things like "Oh, you're so brave to transition." It's not about bravery. It's literally about self-preservation, right? You know, the rate of suicide attempts for transgender people is at over 40 percent. And that's because people become so unhappy with the transition process, or the fact that they feel they cannot transition, or the stigma that's associated with being a trans person going to high school or whatever, and so we tend to become very, very self-absorbed, I guess, during that process. It's a very easy thing to do, and it's easy to lose sight of the fact that everybody around you transitions right along with you. So, my spouse, she's had to transition as well. Her transition looks different. But, for example, my wife has five sisters and a mom and nieces and nephews and cousins, and she has a huge family. I have one brother and that's like the extent of it. I guess I have a nephew now too. But basically, is that you know, she had to come out to all these people, and she's very close to her family, and she was worried about being rejected by them. You know, they live kind of in the sticks, they're very rural, you know, not what you would call social activists in any way, shape, or form, and so for her, she had to have a conversation with her mom about you know, I'm married to a woman now. And deal with all the questions that come with that. My son has transitioned right along with me, you know, so when I go to visit him in New York, and you know, we run into some of his friends, so he works in theater, so you know, we'll go to one of his shows and you know he'll introduce us to all of his coworkers on the show, on the crew, and you know, he has to navigate the fact that you know, this is my dad who is a woman, who has a deep voice and you know huge hands, and broad shoulders, and is six feet tall, right? And coming out for trans people never stops. Never stops. And frankly, it never stops for our family. So, we started our support group for spouses and partners, and that was based on my personal motivation of that my wife needed support, right. And you know I'll say that that group is just thriving, and the woman whose the spouse of another Renaissance member is a rock star and does an amazing job, and you know, one of the great things of COVID has been is that you know we started going virtual, so we have people who call into our virtual support groups, especially the spouses group, from California and Texas and Costa Rica, and you know, all over the place. And so, for example, we did the workshop you know on transition, you know as your partner transitions a few weeks ago, we had over 30 people on that from all over the country, and you know, and they were just so grateful because they all go like "There was nothing in Iowa for me, and I don't know how to navigate. I don't know what to do." And so, the gratitude is wonderful, but even better is the fact that we're able to provide some tools and some resources and just companionship for some of these men and women who are going through these transitions. I think it's really important. But getting back to my wife and I, so I'm a huge believer in therapy, so I had my therapist, my wife had her therapist, and then we had a couple's therapist, so we kept the entire therapy population in the Lehigh Valley in business for many years, I think. But so yeah, so my therapist was all about supporting me, my wife's therapist was all about supporting her, and then the couple's therapy was about okay, so let's make a plan on navigating. And literally just because this is kind of how I'm wired, but my wife and I built a spreadsheet listing all the people that we had to come out to, and how would we do it. So, you know, her mom, and her sisters would be a personal face-to-face conversation, right? Our son would be a personal face-to-face conversation. My business clients would be a personal face-to-face conversation. You know, my third cousin twice removed? Well, maybe that's an email. You know, certain friends was a phone conversation, and for other people was just like a Facebook post that goes like you know, "Ta-da!" You know. "I'm here now!" Right? "And take it or leave it anyway you want." So, you know we really, we built a plan together, and that was a lot of work. I think you know one of the things for spouses and partners and families is that, so the way my wife often talks about it, she goes like, you know "You've been thinking about this for your entire life." So, I'm going to be 62 in two weeks. I've been thinking about it for 59 years. And while my wife has known to one degree or another for 34 years, for a long time she didn't really have to think about it. Right? And so, she was like, "You've been thinking about this for 59 years, I've been thinking about it for five weeks. I need time to process." And you know, one of the things that would always happen is like, you know I would do something to push the envelope, right? I went out and got my ears pierced, and I never asked to my wife "So like, hey. Is it okay if I get my ears pierced?" I just got them pierced. Right? And she came home from visiting her mom, and I go, "Hey look! You know, isn't this cool?" And she'd go like, "Why didn't we have a conversation about this? Because now I'm going to have to explain this to whoever." And so, there were real times when I've had to slow my transition down to allow my spouse to catch up. And that's a hard thing for me to do, but it's, you know, I've been married to this woman for 40 years, I've known her for 45, we have built a life together, we have a wonderful child, and it's pretty important to me so I'm not going to lose it. I'm going to do everything I can to keep it. MF: How has your marriage changed over from first meeting each other in college, been married, how has that relationship grown and evolved for you across your lives together? CG: So, I'm not sure that if you kind of take the whole transgender thing just out of the picture, right, I think our marriage has very much evolved the way that many, many marriages do, right? Where you, when you first meet, you know it's about physical attraction, and exploring each other sort of like you know emotionally, and intellectually, and going like, "Oh, does this person, do I like having conversations with this person? Do I like hanging out with them? Does my family like them?" You know, and there's all this sort of initial stuff that you're navigating or you're working through you know when you're in the first few years of a relationship, right? You know, you break up, you make up, you break up, you make up. You know that-- at least we did a lot in college. And then you know you decide in our case to get married or to you know live together, and then you start building, right? So, you know, you buy stuff, and you get a house, and then you have a baby, or you adopt somebody, or you know, but and you start adding layer upon layer upon layer upon layer upon layer, and as you do that, the depth of the connection grows, right? You're growing roots. And then things also evolve, right? So, I can't tell you the number of people who've been married a long time, and they say you know "I'm married to my best friend." Right? So, this'll sound horrible because I'm still very passionate about my wife, right, but you know, but it's a different kind of passion, right? You know, to be honest, we don't have sex that often anymore, right? For lots and lots of different reasons. Some of which is because we're just freaking old! (laughs) And you know, we come home from work, and we just go like you know, "What's for dinner? I want to sit down and vegetate in front of the TV and watch Netflix," right? And then you know you have to go to bed and get up and do it all over again the next day, right? Like so you get into a routine sometimes. That routine is wonderful in many ways, right? And then you decide, "Hey, let's go to Europe and do something fun and spontaneous," or you know earlier this year we decided to take a train, overnight train trip to Chicago, and like the first time ever we got a little sleeper cabin you know, which is a whole experience in itself, but you know, you do different things, and you start to explore. My wife is a really avid quilter, and I am not. I'm a model railroader, so I have a basement full of railroad trains and the loft of our house just outside my office door here, my wife has all of her quilting stuff, and so she quilts on the third floor, I do my trains in the basement, and in the middle is like the common space, right? Where you know we meet for dinner, and we hang out with our friends, and whatever it is, so yeah. You know, marriage and relationships is a lot of work. And so, like I said, I'm a believer in therapy, so you know, when we had our child, not too long after we had our baby, right, which is a life-changing thing, we went to couple's therapy because we needed to figure out how to do it. And yeah, so. I'm guessing that someday we'll probably go to couple's therapy again, because it's just good for you to do it. MF: We're getting towards the-- thank you for sharing that. We're getting towards the end of our 90-minute time, but I wanted to just sort of kind of return to, there's so much going on in your life right now, your passion for your wife, your work life, and Eastern PA Trans Equity Project. I'm wondering, what is your vision of kind of moving forward for you? Either with Eastern PA Trans Equity Project, your career on-going, what is your vision sort of for the future? CG: Yeah. So, something I've been giving a lot of thought to. So, I own my own business, I own my consulting firm. You know, I have people that work for me to support my clients, and that business, you know at times it's a 60 hour a week job, other times it's a 30 hour a week job, but it's really important because it helps provide you know for our household, right? And I get a lot of satisfaction from helping my clients to become successful. Trans Equity Project is taking more and more and more of my time, frankly it's where my passion is right now, so it's probably a 30, 40-hour week gig for me right now, and then you know, obviously my marriage and our friendships with others, and you know our love for our son and his wife and helping him out. Those things all take priority too, right? So, it's a real juggling act. So, I anticipate that I'm probably two years from retirement, fingers crossed. During that time the Trans Equity Project will continue to grow and expand, and as part of that growth and expansion, we need to start thinking about succession planning, and what does it look like. Right now, it's 100 percent volunteer. Our budget is about $60,000 a year, which is not a lot of money. You're not going to hire staff and pay for staff with $60,000, and do all the other work that we're doing, so you know with our grants, you know this year we've given out so far $41,000 in grants, so with that $20,000 left over you know, we have to pay for insurance and rent and printing and postage and you know all this other stuff that we do. Support groups and everything else. We're going to need to figure out how to raise more money, and to create something that can be sustained long-- so we can decide to stay small and awesome, which we are right now, or we can decide to go bigger. And one of the things that, at least for me from my vision, is that in Pennsylvania, for trans folk, while there's not enough programming, you know in the City of Philadelphia there's a fair amount of programming and support of trans folk, and the same is true in Pittsburgh. But in between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, there's a whole lot of nothing. And I think we can fill that role. So, when you-- and we can do it virtually. So, if you think about legal name change: So, we can help people to mentor them through the process, that can be done over the phone or via Zoom webinar like we're doing right now. The grant can be provided you know via check or a transfer, financial transfer through the internet. The legal paperwork can be delivered you know through our website and through the internet. We can do that work for the entire state of Pennsylvania from in a virtual way. Really all of our grant programs are designed specifically to do that, so even though they're not part of our quote-unquote designated service area, I was on the phone the other day with somebody from Elk County, Pennsylvania helping them with their legal name change. I don't even know where Elk County is. It's somewhere out in you know, what we euphemistically call "Pennsyltucky," right? It is out in the western part of the state somewhere, and I think like 30 people live there. But, you know, trans folk in these rural areas need support, and I think from a vision perspective, we will have the opportunity to do that. It's really a matter of getting the money and the staff to support us doing that. So, succession planning is a big one. That's a big one for us probably over this next two to three years. And part of that conversation is also going to be, what do we do with the support groups. So, the support groups, by their very nature, pretty much have to be done in person, versus virtually. And by their very nature, they're local in focus. And so, if we decide to truly fill that gap between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, how do we deal with Renaissance, which is a Lehigh Valley-focused program. Or, you know, Poconos-focused program. And how do we, do we keep it? Do we transition it to an independent organization and make sure that it's set up for success? These are really important conversations strategically that we're going to need to have, and I think that for me, this next let's call it five years, that's a lot of what this is going to be about. MF: Well, we're at the end of our time, but before we close, I want to ask, Corinne, is there anything that you are thinking, "Oh, I wish I would have talked about that!" Anything at the end that you'd like to share? Personally, about your work life, anything that seems important upon which we can conclude? CG: So, I'll just say this. So, for me, transitioning is the best thing I've ever done in my life. And that may even include my marriage and the birth of my child. Because, if I hadn't transitioned, I may not be here to enjoy my life with my family. I may not be here to do the work that we're doing. Not everybody has to transition. You know, so I kind of talked about that evolution earlier. But we're here to support people no matter what, and if it looks like a transition, we want to make that easier. And that doesn't mean it's not going to be hard. So, you know, when I transitioned and I was coming out to my clients, for example, you know, in some cases it was awesome, right? So, like the client that sells sex toys? Yeah, they go like, "Yeah, we don't care." (laughs) You know, "We're into everything here." One of my other clients is like in the Fortune 50, they're a huge, very conservative organization, and they allow me to employ two people, so you know, if I lost them as a client, not only would it impact me, but it would impact two of the people that work for me. I probably would have had to let them go. And so, I was very worried about it. When I went to their offices and I sat down with my long hair in a ponytail and you know the last time I've ever, no sorry I shouldn't say that-- the second to last time I've ever had to wear a business suit, but, men's business suit, my main contact at this corporation said "Okay, so I guess that means you're getting a new email address?" And I go like, that's a win, right?! I don't think I could have had a better response than that, frankly, right? "So, oh we're just going to carry on and you're going to get a new email address. Please tell me what it is," right? I had other clients who just literally went dead silent on me and some even stiffed me on money they owed me, frankly. Luckily not a lot. But interestingly enough, one of those clients just reengaged with me like a month ago. Took them five years, but they did it. We, so I've muddled my way through, I'm a planner by nature, you know, had my spread sheet, but is it, there are people out there who will help you. Right? There will be, you know, that person might be me, it might be someone else completely, but that's really what it's about, is like we muddle through life, right? And not just in gender transition, you know. We have to muddle through figuring out new jobs, or buying a car, or you know, going to college or whatever it is, and if there's an opportunity for one person just to sort of reach out their hand and make one of those steps a little easier, then that's what it is. And so, I would respectfully ask that other people do that, right? Just you know when somebody comes out to you and says, "I'm a person of transgender experience," know that that is an act of revolution. Know that when that person comes out to you, they are scared to death. They are scared that they're going to lose you as a friend, or as a relative, or as a spouse, or a partner, as a business contact. They're afraid they're going to get fired, they're afraid they're going to get rejected. They're frankly maybe afraid that they're going to be physically assaulted. Just acknowledge the strength that it takes to do that, to say those words, and when we do our trainings on these topics with organizations, you know I was doing it last night with a college, is you know, we just say like, "When somebody comes out to you, just remember what a big deal it is." And then you just say three phrases: The first one is, "Thank you for telling me." The second one is, "It's going to be a change, but I'm here to help you through that." And the third one is, "No matter what, I'm with you." If you just do that, my anxiety level goes from you know, an eleven, down to a five. And then we can start having real conversations. So. That's my sermon. MF: Thank you Corinne. It was really an honor, a privilege to talk with you today. Thank you so much. CG: Well, thank you. My life is not particularly interesting. I'm kind of dull, frankly, but I really appreciate you taking the time out for this. MF: You are not dull at all. This was wonderful, I'm so grateful. I'm going to go ahead and stop the interview, but we'll stay on Zoom just to kind of conclude together, and I'll say thank you again. CG: Thank you! Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:33:58 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 Corinne Goodwin, October 15, 2021 Description An account of the resource Corinne Goodwin describes her childhood in Yonkers, Long Island, White Plains, NY, and Glen Falls; she focuses on her experiences as a transgender girl and the transphobia within her family. For example, she shares how her mother responded when she found feminine clothing in her room by exclaiming that it would “kill” her father if he found out. Corinne describes hiding her transgender identity from family after these formative experiences even as she continued to express her femininity in secret. Upon entering Eisenhower College, Corinne continued to be closeted, but developed important life-long friendships and met her future wife, Deb. When they married one year after college, Corinne discusses remaining in the closet even as she had “girl” days in which she was able to express her full self. In 1987, when she and Deb found out that Deb was pregnant, Corinne came out to her wife. The spouses developed routines in which Corinne could be her “real” self when Deb and her son visited relatives. Corrine also discusses her work life. She describes her 23-year career with Radio Shack, managing hundreds of stores within eastern PA; her work as Vice-President of Sales for Vonage; and her development of her own consulting business and then training and development business. Once she left the corporate world and started her own businesses, Corine describes coming out fully between 2008-2014 to everyone in her life, including her clients and living full time as her real self. She describes different parts of her transition, including social, legal, and medical transition. In other parts of the interview, Corinne discusses the import of support groups, like Renaissance, and how she developed the Eastern PA Trans Equity Project with other community members as well as their major work in our communities. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-12 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/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/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/34039fc977efaaf9718c061c280d0d98.png d198d7c968e7a5f9710f78ae0e0f2649 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 Ricardo Almodovar 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-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 January 10, 2022 Ricardo Almodovar, January 10, 2022 LGBT-25 1:22:12 LVLGBT-2022 Stories of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository Support for the collection of this interview was provided by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg Ricardo Almodovar Mary Foltz video/mp4 Almodovar, Ricardo_2-10-22_1080HD.mp4 1.0:|19(9)|54(5)|71(7)|90(2)|115(4)|136(3)|155(17)|182(2)|203(5)|224(16)|249(4)|274(3)|297(6)|314(11)|333(8)|350(10)|369(9)|390(2)|407(5)|420(14)|443(5)|466(3)|487(12)|508(7)|529(2)|548(8)|569(8)|588(3)|611(5)|628(3)|645(10)|666(10)|687(14)|708(9)|731(10)|748(4)|765(12)|784(4)|803(11)|828(7)|851(11)|874(6)|897(2)|918(11)|941(4)|960(3)|985(11)|1008(14)|1031(4)|1052(10)|1073(12)|1098(11)|1123(6)|1142(3)|1159(13)|1180(15)|1201(7)|1222(12)|1243(11)|1264(15)|1283(11)|1306(6)|1327(4)|1350(2)|1367(6)|1386(5)|1405(11)|1426(8)|1445(6)|1468(9)|1487(11)|1510(15)|1531(3)|1554(4)|1575(9)|1600(6)|1623(3)|1642(9)|1667(5)|1690(9)|1697(10) 0 https://youtu.be/KgBfv3rMj90 YouTube video English 0 Interview Introductions &#13 ; MARY FOLTZ: I am going to hit record. My name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with Ricardo Almodovar about his life and experience in LGBTQ organizations in the Lehigh Valley and beyond. This interview is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding currently from ACLS, and we are meeting today at Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College on February 10, 2022. So Ricardo, thank you so much for being here with me today.&#13 ; &#13 ; RICARDO ALMODOVAR: Thanks for having me. 0 120 Early Childhood / Family Life MF: Great. Okay, we’ve got the business out of the way, so I’m going to start our interview with this question. Will you tell me a little bit about your childhood?&#13 ; &#13 ; RA: Yeah, sure. So I come from a relatively big family, with a Puerto Rican background. My parents moved to Lancaster in the mid-80s. I was born and raised in Lancaster, and I have four brothers. So my mom was in charge of taking care of the household and, at the time, four rambunctious boys. And so I grew up in the city, and it was more of an urban POC working-class community. 0 408 Time at Millersville / Impact of Music&#13 ; RA: So after I graduated high school, I actually took two years off and started to work. Built some work experience, made some connections, but then after two years and the lack of upward social mobility and living paycheck to paycheck, I was like, “I need to go back to school. I need to do something with my life.” And so I started off at Harrisburg Area Community College, where I earned my associate degree in social science. I continued and transferred to Millersville University and earned my bachelor’s degree as a dual major in international studies and Spanish language. 0 657 Working with Make the Road PA RA: So after college, after graduating from Millersville University in 2016, I moved to the Lehigh Valley. I obtained my first job fresh out of college, and I worked for Make the Road Pennsylvania. I was able to start their base with our director and several other folks, and we finally opened an office in the Lehigh Valley, in August of 2017, I believe. But we were sharing offices with SCIU prior to that, which is one of our strongest partners. SCIU is Service Employees International Union. Healthcare PA. 0 938 Other Activism RA: And I’ve learned throughout the years that systemic oppression requires systemic change, and we want to organize and mobilize community members to talk to their legislators to push for policies that will benefit us all, particularly around immigration. Particularly around, you know, environmental justice. And, you know, events, for instance -- and that’s evidence that some of the events that we’ve organized -- I remember, and I’ve been arrested a few times, I remember the first time I got arrested was right after the 2020 elections, right before Trump was inaugurated, we wanted to push Tom Wolf to close down Berks Detention Center, which incarcerates families, including children -- immigrant families, including children, and in Leesport, our neighboring county, in Berks, right, and so we took over the intersection, literally in front of the Capitol Building in Harrisburg. 0 1511 Creation of Amor y Rabìa RA: And so almost everyone we talked to were on board, and so within an hour, hour and a half, we were able to collect contact information for about 80 people with a team of about nine or ten of us, simply just having conversations with folks at a gay bar. (laughs) And so then as the organizer, I followed up with every single one of them using our Google forms, which is an important tool that we use, and we collected their phone number, and I was able to -- and their email, and I was able to make phone calls and texts and sent out emails and inviting them to our very first committee in 2018 I believe it was. And so at our first committee, we didn’t even have the name of it, for Make the Road, or the name of the -- we didn’t have an official title for the committee itself under Make the Road. 0 1917 Working with CASA Pennsylvania RA: So in 2019 I came across an opportunity to work for CASA Pennsylvania, and both CASA Pennsylvania and Make the Road Pennsylvania are partner organizations, and they do a lot of social justice work and Latinx immigrant and Spanish-speaking communities in Allentown, Reading, Philadelphia -- or, rather, make the Road is in Allentown, Reading, and Philadelphia, whereas CASA Pennsylvania is based in Harrisburg, Lancaster, York, Lebanon, and Chester Counties. Another thing that CASA does in addition to community organizing and social justice work, because they provide services like green card renewals, DACA renewals, civic engagement work, and even tax prep. 0 2161 Democratic National Committee Fellowship / Organizing for the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center RA: And so after community organizing for years and years, through Make the Road Pennsylvania and CASA Pennsylvania, I felt I needed a break. And so I took a few months to just breathe, to recoup, and I decided -- or, rather, an opportunity came up to continue my organizing work digitally, and so the Democratic National Committee was recruiting digital organizing fellows for about a five- or six-month fellowship program. I was like, you know what, that seems interesting. I don’t have to be there permanently, and who knows who I might be able to meet, and so I was able to spread the word regarding government and politics through the Democratic Party and working with the state Democratic Party and the county and the city of Lancaster, and meeting some of the political operatives in Lancaster and throughout the state. 0 2731 Campus Vote Project RA: And I started up, or I completed my contract with PBPC in July of 2021, and so at this point, what, six, seven months ago, and I started my new role as the Pennsylvania state coordinator for the Campus Vote Project in August. And if you’re unfamiliar with the Campus Vote Project, it was created in 2012, actually we’re celebrating our ten-year anniversary literally last week. And it’s under the Fair Elections Center. And the Fair Elections Center is a national network of legal experts focused on litigation, voting reform, and advocacy. 0 3148 Nonprofit Work RA: So my background is community organizing, civic engagement, and public policy work. So by day, as I mentioned, I am the Pennsylvania state coordinator for the Campus Vote Project, and we work to remove barriers to voting on campuses in Pennsylvania and across the country. And at night, I serve on a number of nonprofit boards. &#13 ; 0 3520 LGBTQIA Activism MF: You talked a lot about all of the organizing work you’ve done. Organizing around immigration policy. Organizing in Allentown and Lancaster for LGBTQ+ communities. All the boards that you’re on. I’m wondering about a kind of personal history question, which is, when did you want to become active on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community? Did that start in college, did it start in high school? When did you decide that was something that you wanted to do, was organizing? 0 3758 Political Motivations MF: Do you have a sense of why you’ve been so interested in political organizing, both for LGBTQ communities, but also organizing for greater access to voting, to strengthen our democracy, to get people to participate in democracy, to be aware of immigration policy that’s impacting our communities? Do you know where that drive comes from? Were politics a big thing in your family? Were politics just something that you thought, this is where I want to put my energy for social change? 0 4048 Cultural Motivations/Passions MF: You’ve talked a lot about politics and your organizing work in both Lancaster and Allentown. I think people that listen to our oral history project in the future might be interested also about the culture. &#13 ; 0 4366 Connection to Religion MF: You just mentioned two topics I wanted to follow up on. You know, healing and faith communities, and conversations with our families about who we are and our authentic selves. Have you personally had challenges within a faith community, or personally you had stories about coming out to family members that you wanted to share today? 0 4718 Closing Remarks MF: We’re about towards the end of our time, but before we conclude, I just want to give you some space. Is there anything you wanted to share today that you didn’t get a chance to share? Anything that you think, oh, I wish I would have talked about this? 0 MovingImage Ricardo Almodovar describes his early life, activist work, the creation of Amor y Rabia, and his multitude of passions. MARY FOLTZ: I am going to hit record. My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Ricardo Almodovar about his life and experience in LGBTQ organizations in the Lehigh Valley and beyond. This interview is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding currently from ACLS, and we are meeting today at Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College on February 10, 2022. So Ricardo, thank you so much for being here with me today. RICARDO ALMODOVAR: Thanks for having me. MF: And I want to start by asking you, could you please state your full name and spell it for me? RA: Yeah. My name is Ricardo Almodovar, R-I-C-A-R-D-O A-L-M-O-D-O-V-A-R. MF: Thank you. And will you please share your birthdate? RA: Yeah. My birthday is November 15, 1989. MF: And before we started this interview, you signed a consent form, but I just want to review the consent questions. Do you consent to this interview today? RA: Yes. MF: Do you consent to having this interview transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in searchable format? RA: Yes. MF: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats? That could be websites, articles, films, presentations? RA: Yes. MF: And do you understand that you will have 30 days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review the interview, to identify parts that you want to delete, or you could withdraw the full interview from the project. RA: Yes. MF: Great. Okay, we've got the business out of the way, so I'm going to start our interview with this question. Will you tell me a little bit about your childhood? RA: Yeah, sure. So I come from a relatively big family, with a Puerto Rican background. My parents moved to Lancaster in the mid-80s. I was born and raised in Lancaster, and I have four brothers. So my mom was in charge of taking care of the household and, at the time, four rambunctious boys. And so I grew up in the city, and it was more of an urban POC working-class community. I was always, you know, curious -- a curious child. And I first came into contact with, I guess, the outside world, or with people that think differently than me when I joined our concert band. And so I built a strong relationship with our director and learned to play not just one but several instruments, but I initially started out with the trombone. And so that's what kind of started my, I guess, engagement in community beyond just my academic life, and beyond what I had to deal with at home. So yeah, I joined the concert band in elementary school in fourth grade. I picked up the trombone and my director, or the band director, was confident that I would, you know, be a great performer, so she signed me up to play my first solo ever, and I did. And that really impacted my life in a way that I never thought would. And so it made me want to dig deeper into the music field and, granted, I'm no musician. I still perform to this day, interestingly enough, and I'll talk about that a little later. But it's what opened me up to meet more people, gain different perspectives in life, and open my eyes to a whole different world. Music, if you think about it, is almost like a whole other language, and being able to exercise that part of my brain and that part of my mind and making these connections helped me further on in my life. So I come from very humble beginnings. My parents moved, like I said, to Puerto Rico in the mid-80s, and we bounced around from apartment to house and back again. My very first year of life, actually lived in a shelter, and I'm a product of the social services and public school system in Lancaster. Who knows where I would be or where my family would be were those services not provided or that support system not present. And so I always keep that in the back of my mind when I'm doing this work or when I'm doing any work, really, in general. And I share that because you never know what's going to happen in your life, and despite some hardship, that there are ways to move forward in your life. And so I went to multiple middle schools, multiple elementary schools, in my early life, and that's how I was able to make connections and meet people, and I still have some of those connections to this day. And I come from a very close-knit family as well. We still have strong relationships, not just with my siblings, not just with my brothers, but also with our greater extended family -- aunts, uncles, my dad has 14 siblings, my mom has four. So my family, most of them live in Lancaster. Some of them live on the island, but we have family members from all over the U.S. But after graduation, or rather, continuing my studies in the school district of Lancaster, I felt like I needed to do something with my life. I knew college was calling me, but I didn't know how that would look like. So after I graduated high school, I actually took two years off and started to work. Built some work experience, made some connections, but then after two years and the lack of upward social mobility and living paycheck to paycheck, I was like, "I need to go back to school. I need to do something with my life." And so I started off at Harrisburg Area Community College, where I earned my associate degree in social science. I continued and transferred to Millersville University and earned my bachelor's degree as a dual major in international studies and Spanish language. But throughout my college career, I joined so many organizations, from the environmental science club, the student government organization, CALOR which is our Latinx student group on campus. But all of that, I guess, originated from my involvement even in, you know, elementary school, middle school, and high school, being part of so many music groups. Anything band-related, you name it, I did it, I'm a band geek. A proud band geek. I played in the concert band, jazz band, wind ensemble, pit orchestra, county band. But I think what impacted me the most, or what I enjoyed the most, is our marching band. And so I enjoy marching down parades. I enjoy halftime shows during football games. And sadly, you know, marching band in college was too much of a commitment for me at the time, working two, sometimes three jobs just to support myself. I decided I wanted to continue my music ambition, and so instead of joining Millersville's marching band, I joined the New York City's Lesbian and Gay Big Apple Corps Marching Band. And we performed for gay pride parades all over the east coast, and I made so many connections with folks, not just in New York City, but the general area. We performed for Capital Pride in D.C., Providence Pride in Rhode Island, which is the only one at night. We have neon lights and glow lights and all of the things. It's so much fun. But I think, you know, music has played a huge part in my life, and in my career, and I'm glad that I'm still able to continue that, even, you know, despite my busy schedule. Pride month, as you all know, is June, right? [laughs] So June is a very busy month for me. So I could dedicate maybe half of May and all of June to perform for all of these different gay events through the gay band, and then every now and then maybe go to a football game at Millersville University. But I'm a huge music supporter. The arts are so important to student life and professional and personal development, and it's played a huge part in my life. So music has helped open so many doors for me, and helped me develop the many skills and abilities I have to connect with people. And so that's how I got involved with so many student groups, and why I wanted to meet so many people and build relationships, not just with all of the different student groups on the different campuses that I'm involved with, but with also, you know, professors and administrators. I always tell folks, "You never know who you're going to rub elbows with, right, you never know who's going to be your next coworker, your next supervisor, your next boss, even," so I always try to be nice, I always try to be kind, and I always try to at least build some type of relationship and keep in touch with folks, even though we may not be in, you know, a direct -- even though I might not be in their direct vicinity. So after college, after graduating from Millersville University in 2016, I moved to the Lehigh Valley. I obtained my first job fresh out of college, and I worked for Make the Road Pennsylvania. I was able to start their base with our director and several other folks, and we finally opened an office in the Lehigh Valley, in August of 2017, I believe. But we were sharing offices with SCIU prior to that, which is one of our strongest partners. SCIU is Service Employees International Union. Healthcare PA. I've learned fairly quickly that we can't do this work in isolation, and that we rely on partnerships and on relationships. And as I emphasized earlier, we need to make sure we build those relationships because you never know what help or support you may need down the road. And so some of these folks at SCIU have actually met throughout my college career. With the different events that we've helped organize and the different conferences and summits that I was able to participate, and so at Make the Road, that first year we were doing a ton of civic engagement work. We led weekly action committee meetings where we not just provided civic education opportunities, we would share an article or a video on what's going on in this country, particularly in Latinx and immigrant communities, but we were able to open up a discussion to talk about how people feel about what's going on in this country, and then close off by how we can take action. And during that meeting, we'd also share a meal. We'd also sing songs, and it's very community-focused. And we wanted to build community through food, through music, and through community organizing. And we were successful in doing so in the Lehigh Valley and in Allentown, being the third-largest city in the state. There's so much potential in this area, and we saw it, and we saw potential in our people. And we were confident that we would be able to do big things in Allentown and beyond. And so like I said, in 2017, we opened up our office in what people would call, "The Hood," where a large number of folks are POC, or people of color. We were very intentional about where we wanted to base our headquarters here in Allentown, and so we were on Eighth Street, right outside of the downtown area, and that's where we not just met for these meetings but we also were able to onboard several canvassers during different campaigns. And so I'm proud to say that, in 2018, during the midterm elections, we had a Make the Road action, the largest canvassing operation of the year, and we knocked on over 200,000 doors and we were able to sway the votes significantly. Granted, our candidate didn't win, but we were able to build relationships with folks, not just in Allentown, but in the general Lehigh Valley and make those connections beyond that campaign. And let folks know that we have the power to change the political landscape in Pennsylvania, and it just takes time. It takes effort. And we may not always win everything, but if we don't try, then we've already lost. And our work basically is us extending that invitation to folks to join in their own movement, to join in their own liberation. And how we did that is through community organizing, through door knocking, through canvassing, through text banking, and generally building relationships with folks. If people don't trust you, it's so hard to bring them on board, it's so hard to get them involved. And it makes it that much harder to implement campaigns or to push for certain policies that benefit all of us. And I've learned throughout the years that systemic oppression requires systemic change, and we want to organize and mobilize community members to talk to their legislators to push for policies that will benefit us all, particularly around immigration. Particularly around, you know, environmental justice. And, you know, events, for instance -- and that's evidence that some of the events that we've organized -- I remember, and I've been arrested a few times, I remember the first time I got arrested was right after the 2020 elections, right before Trump was inaugurated, we wanted to push Tom Wolf to close down Berks Detention Center, which incarcerates families, including children -- immigrant families, including children, and in Leesport, our neighboring county, in Berks, right, and so we took over the intersection, literally in front of the Capitol Building in Harrisburg. And so we had a number of us that represented the different families incarcerated in Berks Detention Center. And we locked arms and they chained us, and we had a sit down, and we demanded that Wolf close down the detention center. And we were successful in that we pushed the administration to revoke their license, the Berks Detention Center license, but during the appeal process, they were still able to function, sadly. And so I remember it was a cold winter, because it was in December, literally right after the November elections, and despite the cold, we had folks that were passionate about creating change and supporting immigrants, undocumented or not, to the point where, you know, we decided to put our lives and our safety on the line, and so that was the first time I -- what is the term? That was the first time I engaged in an act of civil disobedience. And then the second time was for DACA. So the day after the Trump Administration rescinded DACA, a number of us decided that, you know, we need to disrupt business as usual, because 200,000 lives were disrupted because of -- because we don't have those protections for DACA. The folks that are unfamiliar with DACA, it's the Deferred Actions for Childhood Arrivals that protects undocumented youth from deportation, and it allows young folks to work, to drive, and go to school in this country without that fear, and gives folks that piece of mind. And so after it was rescinded, those 200,000 folks were now at risk. And so we went to several Congressional offices and we occupied them. We said, "Y'all are representing us and we want immigrants to be protected." And so after hours of, you know, pleading to the administrators, to their staff, and requesting a meeting with, at the time, a Congressperson -- his name escapes me. We decided to just occupy, and so there were four of us in the Lehigh Valley, and there were actions throughout the state, and we just sang songs. And songs were like, you know -- oh. "We shall not/We shall not be moved," and then we just kept singing that over and over again. And then, "El pueblo/unido/jamás será vencido," or in English, "The people/United/Will never be divided," or some people would say, "Defeated," but that's another conversation. And so after occupying the Congressional office, you know, the police came in and took us away in handcuffs. But despite that, I feel making the -- or spreading the word in regards to DACA, after it being rescinded and getting folks involved and it being livestreamed and, you know, I would continue putting my life on the line if it meant that folks would be protected, if it meant that we could make this world a better place. And so those are just a few examples of some of the actions that we organized through Make the Road and through some of the work that we've been doing over the last few years, but it seems like there are constant attacks, not just against the LGBT community or the immigrant community, but just, you know, the working class communities. Folks in general, you know, they were stripping away healthcare from millions of people, and one of my first actions even before my first arrest in Harrisburg was a 24-hour occupation of Pat Toomey's office, because 24 million people were at risk of losing their healthcare back then, and that's why we were there for 24 hours, to represent each of those folks. And so spreading the word on these issues, you know, we had to come up with different tactics, whether it's an occupation, right, a Congressional occupation or a sit-in or a march or a rally or a protest. You know, these aren't just things we think of out of the blue, it's caused by, you know -- or, rather, it's a strategic escalation on how we can create that change, you know. Sometimes we'll start off with a petition or we'll start off with, you know a meeting with a legislator. But then it goes up and up until, at some point, they need to hear what we have to say, not just in terms of, like, immigration, but in terms of like policy and legislation. And so after a year of organizing with Make the Road Pennsylvania, I was able to we realized that, you know, there are other communities that are being attacked. And that first year, during Trump's administration, it seemed like they were targeting LGBTQ+ folks across the country. They took down the LGBT content from the White House website. They tried to ban trans folks from serving in the military. They tried to take away protections from LGBTQ+ folks in the workplace. Almost every month there was something, and so after having the conversation with our director at the time and several other folks who were like, "Maybe we should open up and start a LGBT committee," and so we went to work. And so some of our colleagues and allies and accomplices, we met and we were like, "How can we get the queer community together?" And so we had to meet people where they were, right? And so we were like, "Well, where are they?" Allentown is a huge city, right? Where can we meet the most amount of queer folks, who are LGBTQ+ people. I mean, we have the Pride event that happens once a year, but then we also have the gay bar. We have Stonewall right up the street from where the office was. And so we organized a group of about ten of us to go to Stonewall, and we created a Google form to keep track of folks, and so we simply went around, at the gay bar, before it was like drunk o'clock, before folks started to get really inebriated, and went out of our way to talk to people, and we simply asked, "Hey, how do you feel about the trans ban in the military?" And then we would have a conversation, and then we would follow up with, "How would you feel about having a LGBT committee or an LGBT group to fight against hate in Allentown and the Lehigh Valley?" And so almost everyone we talked to were on board, and so within an hour, hour and a half, we were able to collect contact information for about 80 people with a team of about nine or ten of us, simply just having conversations with folks at a gay bar. [laughs] And so then as the organizer, I followed up with every single one of them using our Google forms, which is an important tool that we use, and we collected their phone number, and I was able to -- and their email, and I was able to make phone calls and texts and sent out emails and inviting them to our very first committee in 2018 I believe it was. And so at our first committee, we didn't even have the name of it, for Make the Road, or the name of the -- we didn't have an official title for the committee itself under Make the Road. So at that first committee is when we decided, let's think of a few terms. Let's think of a few titles, and so Amor y Rabia came up and people liked it. We voted on it and we were like, sure, that works. Amor Y Rabia in Spanish means, "Love and hate," and that's exactly what we felt like expressed the meaning of the committee, because in the LGBTQ+ committee, we have a ton of love for each other and ourselves and our communities, but there's also -- I'm sorry. Not love and hate. Rabia means, "Anger." So a lot of us are angry because the system is against us, and a lot of us suffer so much because of homophobia, transphobia, and overall hate in this country. And so Amor Y Rabia came about, and we met regularly, Saturday afternoons at our organizing center here in Allentown, and that's where we were able to bring some of those components from our action committee, like civic education and even food and music and we were able to organize different events. And we wanted it to be also community-focused and to also share and express our cultures, and the diversity of our membership. And so we organized different events from open mic nights. We hosted drag shows. We've hosted even a rainbow Zumba night where we just danced the night away and worked out some of the stress that we had to deal with on a regular basis. And then, you know, those were ways to, you know, alleviate stress, just to come together and organize those events, and also develop community leadership. You know, as the community organizer, I didn't feel that I should be the main face or the spotlight for these events, so we were very intentional on building other folks up and giving them an opportunity to, you know, be the MC for the event, or to perform at this event. Or to create a flier or to spread the word, and to really pass on the lessons that we learned as an organization to regular community members, and, you know, I've always learned, we want to organize ourselves out of a job, right? We want other folks to become organizers and provide those tools and resources so they can rise up as well. And so some of those folks are still active to this day and are still working with Make the Road Pennsylvania. Some of them have moved on. Some of them are continuing their education, and some of those folks I still stay in touch with. But at the core of it is to, you know, organize and mobilize LGBTQ+ folks of color in Allentown and the Lehigh Valley, and to combat homophobia, bigotry, and overall hate. And we did that by, you know, simply existing and organizing and mobilizing, and when there was an attack against our community, whether it's the trans ban in the military or other issues, we were able to stand up and organize events. For instance, we had one of the largest LGBTQ+ rallies or marches in Allentown's history right after the Trump trans ban, and we met up at our organizing center here in Allentown, and we were able to recruit speakers to talk about the importance of the LGBTQ+ folks or the LGBTQ+ community. And, you know, raise awareness on queer justice and queer history and we can't sit idly by when they're trying to -- when certain folks are trying to erase us out of existence. When they don't want us to, you know, serve in the military, and if they don't want us to, you know, survive, you know, I learned throughout my organizing career, it seems like there are certain folks that don't want certain communities, particularly marginalized communities, to exist or, you know, they want to enslave us, or they want us gone. You know, so Make the Road gave us that space, that safe and brave space, to have those conversations, to learn and to grow, but to also bring in other folks to participate in their own liberation and their own movement. And so after being at Make the Road for a number of years, and passing the torch onto the next community organizer, and he's still there to this day, Armando Jimenez, and I decided, or rather, an opportunity came up to do this work in my hometown. There's no place like home, like Dorothy says, right? So in 2019 I came across an opportunity to work for CASA Pennsylvania, and both CASA Pennsylvania and Make the Road Pennsylvania are partner organizations, and they do a lot of social justice work and Latinx immigrant and Spanish-speaking communities in Allentown, Reading, Philadelphia -- or, rather, make the Road is in Allentown, Reading, and Philadelphia, whereas CASA Pennsylvania is based in Harrisburg, Lancaster, York, Lebanon, and Chester Counties. Another thing that CASA does in addition to community organizing and social justice work, because they provide services like green card renewals, DACA renewals, civic engagement work, and even tax prep. So working with CASA and some of the AmeriCorps VISTAs that provided those services helped with organizing community members in Lancaster. And with having strong roots in the Red Rose City, I was able to start the base, and not only was I able to open up the office in Allentown for Make the Road years prior, but I was also able to help open up the office for CASA Pennsylvania in Lancaster in 2019 my first year working for them. And so very similar to Make the Road, we organized regular meetings. We had, you know, popular education opportunities, where we would share resources or articles or videos on what's going on in government or in politics. And we were also able to coordinate efforts with some of our other partner organizations, including Make the Road, and we were able to mobilize for different events and for different reasons. And so what's great about community organizing or what's great about partnerships is you can make things much larger, right? And so in some of those events, like, you know, Shut Down Berks or fighting against the trans ban in the military, you know, we were able to communicate with each other. And so oftentimes, if there was an event that impacted folks in the Lehigh Valley or folks that were affected -- particularly around what Make the Road was doing or like what CASA was doing, and if we needed to go to Harrisburg, for instance, to lobby, or if there was a statewide action, we would coordinate efforts. But then if there were any national or federal-level public policy work that we wanted to engage in, then we would also coordinate efforts and we would take buses to go to Washington, D.C., for instance. And as I mentioned, you know, in order to do this work, we have to have strong people-focused relationships, and so with CASA and Make the Road being part of the Center of Popular Democracy, which is a national network that focuses on social justice work and providing those resources and those connections, you know, has helped with pushing for immigration reform, has helped with mobilizing folks and registering voters and getting them out to the polls and providing translation for voter guides or for ballots or many other items that were necessary for non-English speakers. And so after community organizing for years and years, through Make the Road Pennsylvania and CASA Pennsylvania, I felt I needed a break. And so I took a few months to just breathe, to recoup, and I decided -- or, rather, an opportunity came up to continue my organizing work digitally, and so the Democratic National Committee was recruiting digital organizing fellows for about a five- or six-month fellowship program. I was like, you know what, that seems interesting. I don't have to be there permanently, and who knows who I might be able to meet, and so I was able to spread the word regarding government and politics through the Democratic Party and working with the state Democratic Party and the county and the city of Lancaster, and meeting some of the political operatives in Lancaster and throughout the state. And mind you, most of the work that I've been doing is nonpartisan, but if you really dig deep into this country and in our lives, everything about us is political. From the schools we go to the roads we drive on, to the homes we live in, to the type of education we receive, everything about our lives is political. And as a, I would say, political operative myself working with the DNC, I'm also a strong critic of the Democratic Party. It just so happens that one party decides to, you know -- or, rather, let me rephrase that. It just so happens that certain political parties support certain things over others. It's only -- how would I word it? Not to sound political or anything. [laughs] There's a fine line, right? At the end of the day, you know, we want to fight for full justice, you know? I always look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? And, you know, how can we -- or, rather, people shouldn't just survive, you know, the lowest rung, right? Food, clothing, housing, you know, if all of those things were guaranteed to us, how much folks could do in their lives? We want folks to not just survive but we want folks to thrive. And I always think about that when I'm doing this work, and so after my short fellowship with the Democratic National Committee, I came across an opportunity to work for the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center as an organizing associate. And so they offered me a six-month contract, and after working for them for six months, they extended it to a full year. And during my year at PBPC, I worked specifically under the We the People Pennsylvania campaign, which was created in 2018 to make state government work for all of us. And through We the People Pennsylvania, it's essentially -- or, rather, We the People Pennsylvania is essentially three initiatives. Number one, it's a coalition of state legislators. Number two, it's a coalition of nonprofit, nonpartisan partners. And number three, it's an actual campaign. So it's a roadmap for Pennsylvania to move forward for fair housing, fair funding for education, clean air, clean water, and all of those folks, the legislators and the community organizations and community members alike, helped draft that roadmap or helped draft that campaign. And through our statewide coalition, and some of those partners were my former employees, including Make the Road and CASA Pennsylvania, I'm still able to continue our working relationship with them. But, you know, also work through other initiatives, which include language access in Pennsylvania. And so I was able to meet with several issue-based advocacy groups, like the Pennsylvania Immigration and Citizenship Coalition, and some of their partners, and we worked to develop a language access plan at the state level. And I continue some of that language access work to this day. And so our hope, through the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, is to organize a campaign launch or a budget summit in multiple languages. And we were successful in bringing all of our partners together, and one of our largest events, where we had 500 folks in a Zoom room, I believe, right before Tom Wolf's budget proposal, to talk about, what is it that we want the administration to invest in? We want Tom Wolf's -- or we want our state government to invest in our roads, in our schools, in clean air and clean water. And through the We the People Pennsylvania campaign, working with legislators in the Pennsylvania General Assembly, in the House and in the Senate, and through the roadmap we were able to coordinate all those efforts and get hundreds of people rallied together to talk about public policy, to talk about the state budget, and how we can all take action to make this world a better place. And I'm proud to say that we were able to successfully meet regularly with all of these folks and create change. One of the things that stands out in my work through the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center and working with my direct supervisor at the time, was Kadida Kenner, and she's the director of campaigns for the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, and she is the chair for Why Courts Matter Pennsylvania, and talking about the judiciary and the state courts, right? If we learned anything over the last couple years, it's that courts matter. And, for instance, when the last administration tried to contest the election results, where did they go? With Commonwealth Courts of Pennsylvania. We focus so much energy and time on the legislative and executive branches of our government. What about our three co-equal arm, right? What about the judiciary? There are many more MDJs -- magisterial district judges -- in Pennsylvania than there are state legislators. There are 253 Members in the House and the State Senate, whereas in the lowest court, the magisterial district judge, courts -- the lower courts, there are well over 450 judges, not to mention we have the Court of Common Pleas, we have the appellate courts, and so working with Kadida Kenner, my former supervisor, working with Why Courts Matter Pennsylvania, which is a campaign of the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy center, in addition to We the People Pennsylvania, and then separately. But indirectly, working with the 99 Percent, which is also part of the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy -- which is more a federal issue-based advocacy. And Jeff Garris, who runs that campaign and focuses on the American Rescue Plan funding and how we want to use those billions of dollars for things that we need the most. Sadly, you know, there are certain legislators that want to use that funding for a rainy day, and they want to pay back debt that our state government has incurred. But I don't know what other time it's raining more than a global pandemic. And so through the 99 Percent and through the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, we're able to work at the federal level and at the state level to make sure that those billions of dollars, through the American Rescue plan, is able to be used adequately for our communities. And so after completing my year contract with the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center and working with We the People Pennsylvania and all of our partners, I applied for a position to be the Pennsylvania state coordinator for the campus vote project. And I got it. And I started up, or I completed my contract with PBPC in July of 2021, and so at this point, what, six, seven months ago, and I started my new role as the Pennsylvania state coordinator for the Campus Vote Project in August. And if you're unfamiliar with the Campus Vote Project, it was created in 2012, actually we're celebrating our ten-year anniversary literally last week. And it's under the Fair Elections Center. And the Fair Elections Center is a national network of legal experts focused on litigation, voting reform, and advocacy. And so I always jokingly tell folks, a lot of my colleagues, a lot of the lawyers that we work with at the Fair Election Center are sitting behind their desks just itching to sue somebody, because democracy is always under attack, and sadly, voter suppression is a real thing in this country. And so we're working diligently to remove barriers to voting, and through the Campus Vote Project we're able to do that work on campuses in Pennsylvania and across the country. So we work in 41 states, 280 campuses, with 3.4 million students enrolled in those institutions. That's a huge electorate that we're trying to take advantage of -- or that we're trying to get involved and creating change takes a village. And so we want students, we want administrators, we want faculty, to talk about democracy work, to talk about the elections, to talk about what's on the ballot, and that's exactly what we do at the Campus Vote Project. And I basically run three initiatives through CVP. Number one is our democracy fellowship, which is similar to an internship. I supervise 30 college students in Pennsylvania doing just that. And they work about ten hours a week learning about the system, learning and informing and teaching their peers, their faculty and staff, what's on the ballot and general democracy work. And so we have 30 in Pennsylvania and hundreds of democracy fellows and graduates throughout the country. And there are ten -- there are currently ten of me, well, ten state coordinators across the country, so here in Pennsylvania it's myself, and then Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and in the south we have Florida, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, and Arizona. And so we meet with all of our state coordinators on a weekly basis to discuss best practices. To just, you know, vent sometimes, and some of my colleagues are experts in their field. Some of them have master's or even doctoral degrees, and I hope some of that rubs off on me. [laughs] And the second initiative that I'm particularly involved with at the Campus Vote Project as the Pennsylvania state coordinator is our voter-friendly campus program. And this is a national designation that campuses declare to remove barriers to voting. And so campuses have to submit a statement of interest. They have to develop an action plan or a campus plan. And it also allows us to work directly with those campuses. And this is also in partnership with NASPA, the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. And we're able to work more closely with these campuses through the VFC process. And campuses have to provide elections materials regardless, through the Higher Education Act. At the Campus Vote Project, we're able to provide resources, training, and best practices from across the country. And that's why we're on campuses. And the third initiative that I'm involved with is our Pennsylvania Youth Voting Summit, which is the largest in the Commonwealth, where we not only bring college students together but also high school students involved in our democracy. We bring in prominent speakers from the Commonwealth. Last semester, we had it in October, and we had our Secretary of State, [Veronica] Degraffenreid share on what our state government is doing. She talked about her story, and the importance of the youth vote. And so we have a very strong relationship with the Department of State, and in fact, we organized that Pennsylvania Youth Voting Summit with them in conjunction with Pennsylvania Youth Vote. We also work with the Andrew Goodman Foundation. We also work with All In Campus Democracy Challenge. And several other nonpartisan groups that focus in organizing youth. And so that's a basic snapshot on some of the work that I've been doing at the Campus Vote Project and the Fair Elections Center. And through my life and through my career, I want to bring some of those connections and hopefully inspire some of my students to do some of this work and continue not just their education but also to, you know, I always tell folks, Why are you in school? You're there to learn, to grow, but also to build relationships, to network. And I always emphasize -- and I can't say it enough to my students. You never know who's going to be your next coworker or your next supervisor, so use these opportunities to meet people that are doing this work. And so not only do we have our statewide cohort of 30 democracy fellows, and we meet regularly, but we also have a number of professional development opportunities at the national level. We have a national research and curriculum manager that works diligently to bring the most up-to-date materials on redistricting, on community organizing, on voter registration, and so we have discussion blocks where folks can meet democracy fellows from across the country. So we have so many opportunities for folks to meet here in Pennsylvania, but then we also want to open up the doors for folks to meet folks from all over the country. So that's really what stands us out at the Campus Vote Project, and I'm so excited to continue this work and use my background and my experience to essentially inspire young folks to do the same. So my background is community organizing, civic engagement, and public policy work. So by day, as I mentioned, I am the Pennsylvania state coordinator for the Campus Vote Project, and we work to remove barriers to voting on campuses in Pennsylvania and across the country. And at night, I serve on a number of nonprofit boards. I've been part of the Lancaster LGBTQ+ Coalition for about two years now, and so we work with DEI initiatives -- diversity, equity, and inclusion -- trainings and workshops, and so we've facilitated a number of discussions for different businesses and organizations in Lancaster County. One particular is with Two Dudes Painting Company. So imagine a room full of about 50 or 70 middle-aged, mostly straight white men talking about rainbows, butterflies, and glitter. So we broke down what LGBTQ+ means. And the importance of being respectful and mindful for LGBTQ+ folks, especially as clients, or especially since they're going to be potentially working with us. And the other board that I'm involved with is Lancaster Pride. So Lancaster Pride is a little different from the coalition, although we do regularly partner. Lancaster Pride's focus is more of an event planning organization. So we organize our annual Lancaster Pride festival, and our most recent one, for the first time ever, was our Lancaster Pride Fall Fest in October. And we had strict COVID restrictions. Sadly, we had to turn a few folks away. But despite all of that, we had well over 3,000 people join us in a one-day long gay festival. We took over the Clipper Magazine Stadium. We had about 140 vendors join in, business, nonprofit partners, to share the work that they're doing. Through tabling, and we had drag shows on site. And it was just a great day to just be authentic, to be open, and to just be in the community. And so in Lancaster, we have two LGBTQ+ nonprofits at Lancaster Pride, and then the Lancaster LGBTQ+ Coalition. And I just so happened to be on both of their boards, and my goal is to bring them a little closer together, to build relationships, and to make sure that, you know, we know what each other is doing. So we're not stepping on each other's toes. Another board that I'm involved with is the Keystone Business Alliance, which is central Pennsylvania's LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce. And so they support businesses, not just in Lancaster but also in Harrisburg and Lebanon and York. Even as far as Gettysburg. And it's membership-based, and we organize monthly mixers, where we get a bunch of the queer businesses together, and we provide support. It seems like I'm on a lot of boards, but we only meet once a month on different days, so that's why I say during the day I do my office hours, 9 to 5, right, and then in the evening I'm able to jump in on these board meetings. And then the other gay thing I do, and I do a lot of gay things, but I'm proud to say that I was an appointed commissioner for the Governor's Advisory Commission on LGBTQ+ affairs. This commission we don't meet monthly. We rather meet four times a year. And we are the direct line to the governor's office on anything LGBTQ+ related. So we work with the administration at the state level on public policy, on event planning, and general LGBTQ+ issues. So our commission is made up of about 45-ish people, lawyers, executive directors, nonprofit professionals, therapists, educators, and we meet to discuss, to talk, to vent, and to move the needle for LGBTQ+ liberation in Pennsylvania. We're the first and only of its kind in the country to do this work directly with the administration. So if you're unfamiliar, you know, or, rather, as you may know, the governor's administration has several commissions. We have a women's commission. An Africa-American commission. A Latino commission. And then as I mentioned, this is the first and only of its kind in the country we have an LGBTQ+ commission under the Governor's office. And so working with all of these LGBTQ+ organizations and learning what is going on, I'm able to, you know, build all these different relationships and also gain perspectives in life that I otherwise wouldn't have seen or noticed, and, you know, attending these events like Lancaster Pride, going to some of these mixers, meeting with the commission, really inspired me to do more. And I would say has helped me become who I am today, you know. I've always wanted to do something in the queer community. I don't know if I necessarily want to run my own nonprofit or business, but I can at least learn what is going on in Lancaster and throughout the state. MF: You talked a lot about all of the organizing work you've done. Organizing around immigration policy. Organizing in Allentown and Lancaster for LGBTQ+ communities. All the boards that you're on. I'm wondering about a kind of personal history question, which is, when did you want to become active on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community? Did that start in college, did it start in high school? When did you decide that was something that you wanted to do, was organizing? RA: And that's a good question. So I actually came out at the tender age of 16, but only to two of my very close friends. And then it wasn't until 18 that I really started to really come out to my family and more friends. And when I started to embrace my homosexuality. And I didn't know exactly back then how it would manifest itself in terms of like, you know, my career, community organizing, or trying to make this world a better place. But it wasn't until college that I -- or, rather, my first year in college, I realized we didn't have a queer space. But I found out that we used to, and that's when I decided to take action for the first time in my life and in my career to bring the queer community together. And so I got all of the basic requirements to re-found the allies group at Harrisburg Area Community College back in -- when was it? 2010 at this point. And I facilitated our meetings and I eventually became their president. And so we were able to host, you know, fundraisers and drag shows and coordinate efforts with the main campus in Harrisburg, and so that's when I began my, I suppose, organizing experience. And then that's where I met my -- in college I met my mentor, Adanjesús Marín, who eventually became my supervisor, who was the former state director for Make the Road Pennsylvania. So he really took me under his wing and he was part of the Human Relations Commission in Lancaster, and so I met him my first year in college, and he taught me more about queer history than anyone has in my life. And so I continued my educational career, and then we grew apart and then after college he was looking for an organizer, and he hired me on the spot, basically. Not that we grew apart, but life happens, right? And so, in college, I was involved with our allies group, and as I mentioned, our environmental science club. Some government association. And then continued that when I transferred to Millersville University, and I helped out with their GSA. And then I continued, you know, being involved with the gay band, the Lesbian and Gay Big Apple Corps Marching Band in New York City, and I started performing with them since 2014, and I've performed with them every single year since, other than these last two years with COVID. And so -- gosh. Wow. Looking back, I've been doing a lot of LGBTQ+ work way back since 2010, and it's 2022. MF: Do you have a sense of why you've been so interested in political organizing, both for LGBTQ communities, but also organizing for greater access to voting, to strengthen our democracy, to get people to participate in democracy, to be aware of immigration policy that's impacting our communities? Do you know where that drive comes from? Were politics a big thing in your family? Were politics just something that you thought, this is where I want to put my energy for social change? RA: That's a good question. My family has nothing to do with politics. Nothing to do even with music. I just, you know, things kind of, you know, I guess the puzzle kind of came together for me in my life, and as a curious young child, I, you know, took initiative. And in addition to that, you know, with my parents struggling to make ends meet, I didn't want to be a further burden in their lives, having to take care of our large family. So any excuse I had to, you know, be out of the house, I took, which is why I was so involved with band, and we had frequent concerts or after-school practice, and at some point I did do some sports, simply because my older brothers did. But it was never my passion. I always enjoyed music much more than football or wrestling or track or anything. Although I did enjoy it, but it was too much of a commitment for me to join in all of the things, so I had to choose one or the other, and I chose music. I chose concert band and marching band and all of the other music groups, and so that spark, I guess, was created over the years of being -- of having to hide myself for so long, and learning the harsh reality that a lot of folks go through this in Lancaster and Allentown and Pennsylvania in situations much worse than mine, and, you know, I always wanted folks to be their authentic selves, right, to live fully and, you know, I am lucky enough to -- rather, because of the support system I have beyond my family with some of my colleagues and my friends, I was fortunate enough to continue my studies, fortunate enough to be heavily involved in student groups, and meeting all of these folks, and it inspired me to learn more about government and politics and voting rights issues. And it allowed me to not just learn about it but also to share it out with folks, and I'm able to facilitate discussions around our political structure in Pennsylvania, and talk about the judiciary, and talk about all the different facets of our government, and organize lobbying efforts, even. Introduce folks to their legislators. Create opportunities to build bridges. And as I mentioned earlier, systemic oppression requires systemic change, and we need policies. We need laws. We need ordinances that protect all of us, and that we shouldn't just need to survive. We shouldn't hide. But we also want community members to thrive and move beyond their current circumstances. And so through politics, through government, and civic engagement, I'm able to express myself in a way that I feel will help others take action, since there's so much at stake, especially right now in Pennsylvania. 2022 is going to be a wild year with the U.S. Senate race and the gubernatorial race. We want to make sure that whoever takes those seats, for instance, in addition to the other elected positions, that they keep LGBTQ+ folks in mind, and they bring us to the forefront, because when we all rise, or when LGBTQ+ people rise, we all rise. MF: You've talked a lot about politics and your organizing work in both Lancaster and Allentown. I think people that listen to our oral history project in the future might be interested also about the culture. For Latinx community and LGBTQ communities and their overlapping communities, could you talk a little bit about the larger kind of cultural spaces of Allentown or Lancaster where you are refueled in community spaces when you're done working? Maybe you never are done working, because you are amazing. But where you do find joy and community and fun in either Allentown or Lancaster where you're living now? RA: I'm an extrovert, so I am recharged when I'm around people. I'm at my best when I'm with, you know, particularly in queer spaces, you know? I enjoy going to drag shows. I enjoy going to queer events. And I want to just be myself -- I don't want to feel like I'm hiding myself, so as an extrovert, COVID really hit me. Not too hard, thankfully, you know. Because I was still continuing my community organizing work, just in a different way. Just through Zoom and behind the camera, right? And so my passion comes from, you know, sharing the beauty of humanity with others and letting them know that, you know, you might have gone through hardship, but it's not always going to be that way. And you can still, you know, make great connections with people, and you can still experience life to the fullest, but, you know, it's okay to not be okay right now, but just don't let it consume you, and we'll be here when you're ready. MF: Do you have favorite bars in Allentown and Lancaster? Favorite community spaces that are like, okay, I have a night off, this is where I'm going? I think people ten years from now will wonder, "Where did people go in 2022? Where were the hot spots?" RA: I don't know if I could say like I have a favorite, because anywhere you go, as long as you surround yourself in good company, would be a great space. [laughs] Interestingly enough, I was a much bigger drinker in my earlier 20s, more so than now in my early 30s, so although I do enjoy going to bars, a lot of the bars are no longer open. I used to frequent Stonewall. I lived walking distance from there when I lived in the Lehigh Valley. Tally-Ho in Lancaster closed down, which is the only gay bar out there. And so we're losing our queer spaces. But, you know, with being part of the Lancaster LGBTQ+ coalition, Lancaster Pride, the Keystone Business Alliance, I have all these different opportunities, all these different events to be in those queer spaces, so I don't necessarily need to go to a gay bar or a club to meet my, you know, needs or whatever, that I'm able to also be part of those events, and yeah, I don't have a favorite -- all that to say I don't have a favorite. And it's not just, like, the nightlife either, you know? I, you know, with some of the organizations I'm involved with, we want to make some of these events kid-friendly or make them sober, and for some of our more seasoned folks, you want to organize -- or some or our elders, we want to organize jazz events or jazz nights. And even with the faith community, organize an interfaith service or something like that. There's a lot of healing that needs to be done between the faith and the LGBTQ+ community, and we need to have those conversations. You know, we should have had these not just with the faith and LGBTQ+ community, but when it comes to being out, being authentic, and when it comes to social problems, we should have had a lot of these conversations like yesterday. The good thing is the next best time to do it is now. And so I hope that I inspire others to do that, to speak with their relatives, you know? During Thanksgiving dinner, have that conversation, or, you know, bring your partner to meet your family. And just, you know, participate in the fullness that is humanity. MF: You just mentioned two topics I wanted to follow up on. You know, healing and faith communities, and conversations with our families about who we are and our authentic selves. Have you personally had challenges within a faith community, or personally you had stories about coming out to family members that you wanted to share today? RA: I'm very lucky that I didn't have to go through much hardship coming out. I had some resistance from family members. My mom thought it was a phase that I would get over. But here I am, well over a decade later, I'm still hella gay. Some of my other relatives thought it was a phase, but I'm still hella gay. And so I didn't have too much trouble. I think the biggest issue I had is, you know, with the Church itself. I was raised Catholic, and so I've gone to -- or, rather, I've seen several people, and I've tried to ignore folks that have organized anti-gay rallies or marches, and the church I used to go to as a kid, or that I was raised in, ended up having an anti-gay protest in front of their church. Literally right before COVID, interestingly enough, and it just was disgusting for me to find out that the church that I was raised in, that I was baptized in, I had my first communion in is -- and I've known they were strongly anti-gay, but for them to be so clearly anti-gay and outspoken is just, you know, ridiculous to me. And so I actually, you know, called them out and, you know, they took down all the posts on social media, for instance, and they haven't done anything like that since. I think it was mostly new leadership. Their previous priest moved away, or something happened. But that doesn't justify what they did. [laughs] And that's not just in the Catholic Church, sadly. It's common in several churches across the country. And I've been working diligently to build relationships with pastors. In fact, a lot of my close friends are gay Black pastors that went to seminary. In Lancaster, we had the Lancaster Theological Seminary. And a lot of them, a lot of my friends are recent grads or have preached in local churches, and I've been learning a lot in regards to the faith community and some of the work that they're doing to combat homophobia, transphobia, and bigotry in the church. And I realize it, and they also realize, there's so much healing to do, but that takes time. And in fact, one of the things that I'm working to build in Lancaster is an advisory board for Lancaster Pride, and so we realized that not everyone can be a board member and meet every single month, but what this advisory board, they would meet four times a year to help Lancaster Pride in its mission, vision, and values, and one of those seats is one of faith. In addition to business economics, in addition to government relations, and so my official title for Lancaster Pride is their community liaison. To build relationships with other organizations and to bring people in to Lancaster Pride. And so with all of the connections that I've developed over the years, you know, and working with this advisory board, so this will be the first time we've ever had an advisory board for Lancaster Pride. We're working to continue our relationship, but also to more institutionalize some of these changes using some of our partners or with some of our partners and to spread the word that, you know, queer people exist in Lancaster and we're not going anywhere. And that there are different ways that people can do that, and working with the faith community and working with the LGBTQ+ community is one way that we can make this world a better place. MF: Have you found an inclusive religious community for yourself, or have you found a way to -- I guess just found inclusive community that can support your spiritual self, your full self? RA: So I would consider myself more spiritual than religious. [laughs] Sadly, religion really hasn't been my friend, or in some ways maybe, in other ways not so much. But, you know, I've attended several services for MCC denominations and for UCC, and they tend to be, you know, more inclusive and affirming. But those are really, you know, unless I'm going to like a baptism or a wedding where otherwise I wouldn't have a choice, I would much rather prefer an MCC or a UCC church. And we have so many, and I've been to the one in Lehigh Valley. Is Pastor Beth still here? MF: Yes, yes. RA: And there are a number in Lancaster as well. MF: We're about towards the end of our time, but before we conclude, I just want to give you some space. Is there anything you wanted to share today that you didn't get a chance to share? Anything that you think, oh, I wish I would have talked about this? RA: So if you're here listening to my story, yes, I'm hella involved. I strongly encourage you to be involved as well. But please don't compare yourself to others. Don't feel like you haven't done enough. I've had so many people say, "Wow, you're doing all of this, what am I doing with my life?" But it's okay. It's okay to take your time. It's okay to learn, to grow, and to be in your own space. I am just fortunate to have done this for well over a decade, and that I'm able to build strong relationships that I still keep to this day. And I really hope that some of my work inspires you to do the same. You know, whether you're ready or not, you know, we'll be here when you are. So, you know, thank you for listening and for, you know, being part of this story, and this process, and I hope that we can continue telling our stories and educating future generations on what we have been doing, not just here in the Lehigh Valley but beyond. MF: Thank you so much, Ricardo. I am inspired just sitting here with you. You are amazing. I'm a fan of yours and I'm grateful for all that you do. Thanks for being here today. RA: Oh, thank you. You're too kind. Thank you. Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:20:13 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ricardo Almodovar, January 10, 2022 Description An account of the resource Ricardo Almodovar describes his early life, activist work, the creation of Amor y Rabia, and his multitude of passions. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-25 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-01-10 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs.