David Moyer Part 2, February 11, 2022

David Moyer Part 2, February 11, 2022

David Moyer details his marriage, work in HIV/AIDS healthcare and activism with Fighting AIDS Continuously Together (FACT), and personal relationships.

Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives

Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives

2022-02-11

Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs.

video

LGBT-24

Mary Foltz

David Moyer

01:23:25

5.4 February 11, 2022 David Moyer Part 2, February 11, 2022 LGBT-24 1:23:25 LVLGBT-2022 Stories of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository Support for the collection of this interview was provided by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg David Moyer Mary Foltz video/mp4 MoyerDavid_20220211_video_trimmed 1.0:|33(7)|56(15)|73(9)|92(11)|113(16)|132(4)|147(5)|162(8)|185(4)|204(9)|227(5)|248(3)|267(4)|286(2)|307(10)|330(14)|351(10)|374(7)|395(12)|414(11)|431(11)|450(8)|475(13)|490(12)|507(11)|526(10)|547(8)|562(18)|583(11)|600(6)|615(13)|632(7)|651(2)|666(12)|683(10)|700(13)|721(6)|740(13)|761(6)|776(4)|791(17)|810(9)|827(3)|844(3)|863(13)|882(12)|899(6)|920(13)|937(2)|954(10)|971(15)|988(8)|1003(7)|1020(2)|1035(4)|1054(10)|1075(2)|1092(5)|1111(9)|1126(10)|1145(11)|1160(10)|1177(18)|1188(3)|1205(3)|1226(10)|1247(3)|1258(15)|1279(8)|1294(16)|1307(18)|1324(12)|1341(6)|1356(10)|1375(14)|1392(14)|1405(15)|1418(10)|1433(7)|1452(5)|1473(2)|1486(3)|1503(9)|1514(6) 0 https://youtu.be/yzjoiwcuTtk YouTube video English 0 Interview Introductions MF: My name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with David Moyer to talk about his life and experience in LGBTQ organizations in the Lehigh Valley as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This year, our project has funding from ACLS, and David and I are meeting at Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College on February 11, 2022. So, David, thank you again for speaking to me today.&#13 ; &#13 ; DM: My pleasure. 0 73 First Year of Marriage / Daughter's Birth MF: Great. So this is our second interview, I’m so excited to be back with you today and we ended our last interview with a discussion of your marriage, so I thought we’d start there. Could you tell me a little bit about your marriage and that first year of married life? &#13 ; &#13 ; DM: Oh, sure, yeah. The main reason that we got married was because my former wife was pregnant, and that was a long story I think, which is part -- in the first part. But what I didn’t get to say was we had -- well, we had a military wedding. It was a Lakehurst, New Jersey, and it was the Chapel of the Air on the base. 0 422 Finding a New Job / HIV/AIDS Work with the Allentown Health Department DM: Now, I had started at Olin Corporation in 1972, and they closed in October of 1988, it was just a few months after our daughter was born. And the bad thing about that was the day I lost my full-time job at Olin, I also lost my part-time job as an aerobics instructor and fitness instructor with the Body Factory, and they were located in Whitehall at the time, so I had no income. &#13 ; &#13 ; Well, the only income I had was my reserve time, and that was once a month, so it wasn’t very much. The interesting thing is that one of my aerobic students at that time had worked for the Morning Call, and she was one of two reporters, health reporters for the city. And Rose knew about my medical background, that I was a nurse, and all that so she said, “There’s a position that’s opened up at the -- in the city of Allentown at the health department that you might be good at.” She’s like, “And I don’t know that you might -- ” she says, “I know you’re really good at it,” so she gave me the information of who to go see in that. 0 830 Allentown in the Early HIV/AIDS Crisis DM: Let me take you back to the start of HIV/AIDS, and this may help paint a better picture of what was happening in Allentown back in the day. On June 5th of 1981, the CDC, Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, reported a few cases of a rare disease in young, gay men and intravenous drugs users. The symptoms such as Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis pneumonia, they’re generally usually seen in older individuals. &#13 ; &#13 ; The pneumonia is typically seen in patients who were static from surgery, so they have to be flat and not moved, and that they would develop this Pneumocystis pneumonia, which is in the lungs. And then the other form with the Kaposi, it’ a form of cancer that is usually seen in elderly, Mediterranean men, now -- and that can be internal or external. What happens is it leaves these -- looks like black and blue marks on the body like the person was beat-up, and those black and blue marks can be either internal or external. 0 1087 Formation of Fighting AIDS Continuously Together (FACT) / HIV/AIDS Counseling &amp ; Testing at Rainbow Mountain DM: So fast-forward to 19 -- the years 1985, ’86 in Allentown, Pennsylvania. A group of concerned citizens mostly from the Stonewall Bar, Candida’s Bar, and Jeff’s City Line Pub, and the patrons who supported these establishments, these people live and work in Lehigh Valley formed what is known as FACT, Fighting AIDS Continuously Together. &#13 ; &#13 ; They held an event called The FACT Bar Games, which was held in the gay resort in the Poconos at Rainbow Mountain. That was the summer of 1986. This was all due to the AIDS crisis in the Lehigh Valley. I had heard about FACT, but I really didn’t know or participate in any of their fundraising events. 0 1384 Joining the FACT Board DM: So I think it was about 1992, I went to -- I was asked to come to a board meeting, which is what I did, and that time they were meeting at -- in one of the meeting rooms at what was then the Hilton at Ninth and Hamilton, and they had probably 25 people on their board at that time. We’re down to 13 now at present. &#13 ; &#13 ; So they asked me if I wanted to join the board, and I said, “Sure, why not?” By now, I have lost some people and -- but my first -- first person I had lost even before I got into -- with the city, I was still working at Olin, and a good friend of mine, his name was Chuck, would always go to Atlantic City for the summer. 0 1737 FACT Beginnings and Events DM: Yeah, oh, thank you. Well, FACT, like I said, started -- was really started in 1986 -- ’85–’86 with our -- for the LGBT community because nothing was being done for their friends that were passing from AIDS. So their first events -- first event was this game up in -- a bar game up in -- at Rainbow Mountain in the Poconos. And at that time, we had a lot of bars, so we had the Stonewall Bar, we had Candida’s, we had Jeff’s City Line Pub, we had the Red Star from Reading, we had the Glass Door, we had Blue Bugle up in the Stroudsburg area. 0 2158 Educating through FACT DM:And like I said, the education component, we always have that at an event. Whether we’re doing bingo for Pride, we always have an information table along with condoms and dental dams and lubrication and all that good stuff that -- for safe sex. We’re still promoting safe sex. Even this day and age, we still need to do that. &#13 ; &#13 ; One of things that I had incorporated in was being that I work for the health department, I was able to go more places, and one of the big educational components for me was in the prison. And we were in the prison every Thursday to do education on a different unit because they had 12 different units in the local prison here, and then we would get people to sign up for testing, then we would go in on a Friday with our crew and just do testing. 0 2431 FACT Board Diversity / Assisting People with Contingencies through FACT DM: Another thing that’s -- that -- and I need to say this, is that even though we support -- FACT supports the LGBT community, we are not recognized as an LGBT organization because we have both straight and gay people on our board, and that’s important for people to know. I mean the majority of us are gay but -- well, because we don’t know. &#13 ; &#13 ; One of the things too is that especially with the contingencies, which I’ll start talking about now, is that the -- what the contingency request is case managers at Lehigh Valley Hospital in St. Luke’s, they both have an HIV/AIDS department, and they have case managers in those departments, and they have clients -- obviously, they have clients. 0 2808 Work with the AIDS Outreach Buddy Program DM: The one major one that I really was involved with was AIDS Outreach, and they were the first organization to do -- and they were the first religious organization to do anything and that was -- they -- that stemmed out of the Episcopal church. And they started down in Easton before they moved to Allentown, and they had what was called the Buddy program. 0 2944 Other Related Organizations in the Area DM: Gilead House, which was on the state hospital grounds of Allentown, they just had gotten started and then they closed down. Berks AIDS Network, which is called BAN, they’re out of Reading, they’ve changed their whole dynamics and I think they’re doing just more than just HIV/AIDS. We used to have a Latino AIDS outreach, which we don’t have anymore. They were located -- they started in Bethlehem, they moved to Allentown. We still have HAO, Hispanic AIDS Organization. I think they’re located down where the old -- where the original Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce, it’s at Fifth and Walnut. I’m trying to think if we have any other organizations. 0 3074 Longtime Companion DM: One of the things that I do in my presentations is I always end my talks with one of my favorite movies is, and one of the first Hollywood big movies was called Longtime Companion, and it takes place in New York and primarily like in Fire Island, in that area. And the main character, his name is Willy, and there was a whole group of his friends that always would get together and like people still do. But he was the only one left, all his friends had died, and he’s walking on the beach in Fire Island, and the last line of the movie is, “All I want is a cure and my friends back,” and that’s how I feel. I hate this disease. I’m sorry, but [sighs] it’s tough. 0 3153 Dating Culture / The Damron Book / Gulfport, Mississippi DM: Back in the day, you had to know somebody or know where things were if you were to go and meet somebody or hook up. We don’t have that now. We have -- maybe I shouldn’t say we don’t have that now, we don’t. I’d say that we need it now, but we have the internet. The internet has changed everything for everybody, not just the gay community, but for everybody. You’d go to the bar and hopefully you meet somebody and maybe get lucky and go home. Now you can sit in the comfort of your living room in your pajamas or underwear or naked and cruise somebody on a website and have cybersex, which is safe, but it’s not fun. [laughter] 0 3472 Thoughts on the Future of the LGBT Community DM: I mean we thrived here in the Lehigh Valley, we had all these bars, we had -- the cruising places is still there, but you would have to be careful there because of the police now. It wasn’t like it was back in our days. We would drive around and around, and I’d mentioned this before with my friend Tommy and Eddie, we would drive around for hours just cruising, yeah, not necessarily picking anybody up, but you can do that. You can’t do that because you see the signs, no, no cruising 7:00 to 10:00 pm. on this street or no cruising 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. on this street. &#13 ; &#13 ; &#13 ; So I don’t know where it’s going, I really don’t. I know that for ME as a gay man, I have lived through a lot. I’ve done a lot, there’s still more for me to do. I said when I get into this line of work with HIV that I will never stop, I won’t -- going as long as I can. I don’t want to let my friends down because I promised them that I would do this. 0 3661 First Experience with the AIDS Quilt DM: One story that I really do want to give to you is my first experience with the quilt, and it was here at Muhlenberg College, and that was, I’m going to say ’95 or ’96 when it was here. I’m not exactly sure, I think it was ’95 or ’96. We had all the organization that were still going were involved with that, and there was a training on how to display the quilt because there’s a whole ceremony. &#13 ; &#13 ; If you haven’t seen it, Google it because it’s something that is really it’s intense. And we had it at the -- it was the Field House here on the campus. We were in the small palestra and they had these huge boxes, there must have been 30 of these boxes if not more with the quilt panels. They come and they’re folded, so they’re telling us, “This is what you need to do. Once you have the panel, to fold the panel down it takes eight people to do it, a section.” So they said, “Go over and get one out of the box,” so we go over and get one out and put it down. And we each have our space where we’re at, and we’re opening it and it’s -- you do it very slowly. 0 3891 FACT’s Relationship to Other AIDS Organizations in the Lehigh Valley MF: I’m wondering about FACT’s relationship to other AIDS organizations?. Because you’re working in two different fields, you’re also part of the Buddy -- the Buddy program, but there was a program out of the Lambda center that I think became AIDS Services. But how are all of those organizations working together or were they not? &#13 ; &#13 ; DM: No, they were, -- &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: working together? 0 4057 Coming out with His Husband DM: I have another story that’s not really AIDS related, but it’s about my husband, about my late husband. And I guess his and my coming out -- we were together for, I’m going to say, seven or eight years, at least seven or eight years if not more. And one of the goods things is that his whole family is just great, absolutely great. But his mother and his older sister -- because his younger sister was living in Florida for like 25 years, and she’s back here now -- but they would go to a lot of the events. 0 4578 Feelings of Safety &amp ; Security DM: My faith community is by far the best. I have two parishioners who are originally from -- well, [Haley?] has risen from here, but her husband is Filipino, but they lived in California for years and they -- because he has -- he still has family out there, so they go out occasionally. And when Will died, passed away, somebody let them know that he had died, and they called me immediately, and they canceled the rest of their trip and came home just to help support me. Who does that? &#13 ; &#13 ; You hear so many horror stories in the LGBT community, getting kicked out or being spit on or being assaulted or being murdered, I feel -- there’s times where I feel guilty because I haven’t had any of that. I mean I’ve had some looks and some comments but few and far between, not by anybody in my immediate circle. 0 4857 Closing Remarks DM: Oh, I think we’ve covered... I mean I could’ve talked a bit more about my sexual experiences, but I don’t know. [laughs] That’s for the book. I’m grateful to you for wanting to do this. I’m open, I try to be as open as I can. I think we covered -- I really wanted to get in there about my husband and my marriage, which never should’ve happened, but it did. That soured me for a few years because it wasn’t -- it wasn’t me that wanted to end the divorce, it was me that ended the divorce, but it wasn’t me that was at fault. 0 MovingImage David Moyer details his marriage, work in HIV/AIDS healthcare and activism with Fighting AIDS Continuously Together (FACT), and personal relationships. INTERVIEW WITH DAVID MOYER FEBRUARY 11, 2022 MF: My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with David Moyer to talk about his life and experience in LGBTQ organizations in the Lehigh Valley as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This year, our project has funding from ACLS, and David and I are meeting at Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College on February 11, 2022. So, David, thank you again for speaking to me today. DM: My pleasure. MF: We signed a consent form before we began, but I just want to go back through just a few consent questions. Do you consent to this interview today? DM: I do. MF: Do you consent to having this interview transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online? DM: I do. MF: Do you consent to the archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats like films, articles, websites, presentations? DM: I do. MF: And do you understand that you'll have 30 days after I give you the transcript of this interview to identify parts that you want to delete or to withdraw the interview from the project entirely? DM: I do. MF: Great. So this is our second interview, I'm so excited to be back with you today and we ended our last interview with a discussion of your marriage, so I thought we'd start there. Could you tell me a little bit about your marriage and that first year of married life? DM: Oh, sure, yeah. The main reason that we got married was because my former wife was pregnant, and that was a long story I think, which is part -- in the first part. But what I didn't get to say was we had -- well, we had a military wedding. It was a Lakehurst, New Jersey, and it was the Chapel of the Air on the base. It was small, we were only supposed to have a hundred people there -- well we had about a hundred people for the wedding itself, and it was only supposed to a hundred people for the reception, but unfortunately, it also happened to be a weekend that my unit that I was still a part of was drilling that weekend as well. So there were probably about, close to 300 other people there, and they just casually crashed the reception, which was fine, I mean nobody got upset at that. But one of the things too that you don't see in traditional weddings is that my then sister-in-law and brother-in-law, my wife's sister and brother-in-law, they really -- their wedding gift was the wedding. They paid for everything other than the marriage license, the blood test, and the rings. But they also paid for the honeymoon, and the entire wedding party went to Atlantic for the honeymoon. We got down there, Betsy and I were supposed to have the bridal suite, and Will and Donna were going to just have the other room. Betsy could've cared less about the wedding suite, so she said, "The two of you take it, we're fine where we are, we'll do that," sorry for [inaudible]. That's what we did and then we met down in the casino, and I -- there's a lot of things that I know remember. I don't remember the name of the casino that we stayed at. It was not Trump, and it wasn't any -- it was some awful mall one. But anyway, so we went down in their dining area, and we had something to eat, and Betsy wanted to go gamble, so her and Donna went gambling, and Will and I went barhopping because we knew the bars. So that's what we did and then I don't know what time they got back to their room, but Will and I got back later, pretty well lit. We slept in and get up in the morning, met downstairs, checked out, and then we found a diner. We didn't want to have food in the casino area, so we just did that and then we drove back to Lakehurst, and they got in their car and went back up to New York, and we came back to Pennsylvania. So that was the honeymoon adventure. Well often, Will and I would go up to New York because they were living in Yorktown Heights at the time in Upstate New York, and we would go up for the weekend. We spent a couple of times there. I would go up more than Will would because he had to work sometimes on the weekends, and that went on until -- that was March of '88. Our daughter was born April 4th of '88, and she was premature, and she was supposed to have been born in October, I don't remember the time. She was like eight or nine weeks early, she was really a preemie, so she spent several months in the hospital before they'll let her home, well until she reached the right weight. So we would go up on weekends. We didn't go to bars. I don't think I was in any gay bar up in the area where they lived because there weren't any that we knew of. And we didn't need to go to the bars because we would drink at home, and that was it. And that went on for -- the marriage was -- ended in 1996, and that's another story in itself, which I really don't want to get into in here. But in that time frame, I was still working at Olin. Now, I had started at Olin Corporation in 1972, and they closed in October of 1988, it was just a few months after our daughter was born. And the bad thing about that was the day I lost my full-time job at Olin, I also lost my part-time job as an aerobics instructor and fitness instructor with the Body Factory, and they were located in Whitehall at the time, so I had no income. Well, the only income I had was my reserve time, and that was once a month, so it wasn't very much. The interesting thing is that one of my aerobic students at that time had worked for the Morning Call, and she was one of two reporters, health reporters for the city. And Rose knew about my medical background, that I was a nurse, and all that so she said, "There's a position that's opened up at the -- in the city of Allentown at the health department that you might be good at." She's like, "And I don't know that you might -- " she says, "I know you're really good at it," so she gave me the information of who to go see in that. So I walked in, and at that time, the health department was located above the central firehouse on Chew Street between Seventh and Eighth, and they were on the second floor. So I went in, and I spoke to the clerk -- one of the clerks that was there because they had a whole bank of clerks for different departments there. And I said, "I was told that there's a position open in the city that I might be interested in, it was in HIV/AIDS," and they said, "Well, Ann isn't here at the time," -- she was the director, Ann Taylor, not the clothing designer, I know, -- "but she'll be back after lunch." I left, I came back, and I was just coming in to inquire and sat down with Ann and just that brief talk wound up being a three-hour interview, and I said, "I don't have a resume." I had a resume, but I had it for being a fitness instructor because I also had that, and that's really what I wanted to do, I wanted to continue being the aerobic instructor in that because you never -- look at me now, but anyway. So she said, "Well, [Linnie?] if you can get a resume to me by such and such a date, we can consider that." So I had to go home, and at that time, we didn't have the computers, we had the regular typewriters, and I had to go and make a resume, which I took back. And then she said, "Are you available to talk to another person here?" and I said, "Sure," so there was another two-hour discussion. Now, they had already hired one person for the department because they were just starting up their HIV counseling and testing. The health [inaudible] was counseling and testing with all the nurses that were there because they didn't have an HIV/AIDS department at that time. So they had another Hispanic woman, Linda, and they had another person in mind who was also a Hispanic man, and they really wanted somebody who can speak Spanish because of the population. Unfortunately, I don't speak any Spanish -- well I do, but they're all dirty words but that's neither here or there, but I knew how to draw blood. That was the thing that got me in was that I could do that and I had that medical background, so, and we were hired. At that time, we were hired as independent contractors for the city, and the city was union. So I got hired, and I guess about two years into the job, somebody in the union got word that all these people -- because a lot of the people that worked for the health department at that time were considered contract employees, most of them were, and that was a no-no. And the union said that "You either need to make these people employees or you need to get rid of them." And these are all grant-funded programs, and they're not about to lose all this grant money, so they hired us. They grandfathered most of the thing, but they didn't grandfather the time that we had there, so I lost two years of that, so I was a city employee. And prior to that, I knew what was going on with -- I knew that -- I knew about HIV and AIDS, but I didn't know a whole lot of what was going on because we really hadn't started testing yet in the military. And one of the things that really helped me and my coworker Linda is that they actually sent us down to the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, for our formal training of how to do that -- how to do testing -- counseling and testing, which was excellent. I'm working and I'm doing counseling and testing but not really knowing a whole lot, still learning more about this transmission and all that good stuff because now we can test. So really what I'd like to do before I get further is to go back and give a little history about HIV in the area. And I do apologize, I have this written down, and I really want to get it right, so bear with me if [inaudible] here, so... Let me take you back to the start of HIV/AIDS, and this may help paint a better picture of what was happening in Allentown back in the day. On June 5th of 1981, the CDC, Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, reported a few cases of a rare disease in young, gay men and intravenous drugs users. The symptoms such as Kaposi's sarcoma and Pneumocystis pneumonia, they're generally usually seen in older individuals. The pneumonia is typically seen in patients who were static from surgery, so they have to be flat and not moved, and that they would develop this Pneumocystis pneumonia, which is in the lungs. And then the other form with the Kaposi, it' a form of cancer that is usually seen in elderly, Mediterranean men, now -- and that can be internal or external. What happens is it leaves these -- looks like black and blue marks on the body like the person was beat-up, and those black and blue marks can be either internal or external. No one knew how or where it started ; we just knew it was beginning to spread. Everyone was scared, hospitals were starting to see more and more young men with these conditions. There was no definite treatment or medications available. Doctors were not even certain how it was being transmitted, so a lot of quarantine procedures were set into place. Some hospitals were using full-body suits to go into patients' rooms. A protocol of no physical contact with patients was placed -- put into place and -- with big signs on the doors. Food trays and even bed linens and gowns were placed just outside the doors, and the patients, if they were able, had to fend for themselves if they were not bedridden, and a lot of times, the patients were dying, and they were dying alone. No one wanted to go near those people. The first few years of HIV were the worst for everyone. There wasn't a name for it at this time for this condition, as yet a blood test had not been devised, and they were starting to call it HTLV-III, later that was renamed GRID, gay-related infectious disease. And at the time, the gay people were starting to be discriminated against even more. We were the carriers and the cause of this disease. It was God's wrath because we were all bad people, and we deserved what God had placed upon us, all gays and all drug users deserved to die. Organizations were starting to spring up in response to the AIDS crisis, ACT UP, which was the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, and the GMHC, Gay Men's Health Crisis Center, and they were located primarily in New York. And they were all working to help find out more about this condition and to help those infected -- and affect -- infected men affected by HIV/AIDS. Because of these organizations and their push to find out more about what was happening to this -- to their community, we now had a test to determine what we were fighting -- a virus, specifically HIV, human immunodeficiency virus. We had our first medication, AZT, we know definitely how this virus is and is not transmitted, and yet, people were still getting infected, people were still dying, and now the virus had crept into the mainstream heterosexual population. Straight women, straight men, and babies were getting infected. We were seeing more progress -- some progress, but we still did not have enough. Our friends were dying, and there was no one there to intervene for them. So fast-forward to 19 -- the years 1985, '86 in Allentown, Pennsylvania. A group of concerned citizens mostly from the Stonewall Bar, Candida's Bar, and Jeff's City Line Pub, and the patrons who supported these establishments, these people live and work in Lehigh Valley formed what is known as FACT, Fighting AIDS Continuously Together. They held an event called The FACT Bar Games, which was held in the gay resort in the Poconos at Rainbow Mountain. That was the summer of 1986. This was all due to the AIDS crisis in the Lehigh Valley. I had heard about FACT, but I really didn't know or participate in any of their fundraising events. So I knew about them, but I didn't participate because I wasn't out-out with that part, but I had friends. And back then, you had a group of friends that you had dinner with, you partied with, you went here and there. Occasionally, you'd go to the bar, but if you were single and didn't have anybody, that's who you leave when you went to the bar, that's when you had the bar scene but... So I knew about it, and now we were testing in the military, and it scared the hell out of me because the first time I got tested, because I was very promiscuous, very promiscuous. To this day, I still don't know how I dodged the bullet, so to speak. I was tested last year just for the sake of getting tested even though I haven't been active in quite a few years. But I know I needed to get more involved, so... There were people that were coming in to the health department for testing who knew about FACT, and they had said that maybe I should go to a meeting or something, an event or I should go to an event, that's what it was. Eighty-six, I think it was the fourth or fifth Summer Games that was up at Rainbow Mountain, so I was invited to come up and have a table -- a display table from the health department and promote it. A lot of gay men didn't want to go to the health department because we were looked at as the health police, still are. It's gotten better, but I think one of the things that helped is that they had a gay man working in the health department doing this that they could trust. And I think that really helped at least get to where that we, hey, there's somebody there that you can go to, you could ask for, and you could feel comfortable with. So I decided that we need to do testing up at the Summer games. It's a safe place, everybody's -- there is an LGBT part of the community, and what a better place to do this, so I started doing testing up there. The games always started at noon and always ended at 6:00, and that first year that I had tested, I was still testing at ten o'clock at night, and back then, it still took two weeks for test results. Now we're up in Rainbow Mountain, up in Carbon County or Monroe County, I'm not sure where -- yeah, Monroe County but you had to come back to Allentown to get your test results, so, which is what they did. We tested up there and like the following week I said, "If we're going to do this, I need help." I said, "We need more than just me doing the counseling and testing," and I said, "We really need to have somebody that's just going to be able to draw blood," so that's what we did. So we started just having a phlebotomist full time with us even though we could all draw blood, which just makes it so much easier when you have that amount of people that you can just keep testing and educating and doing that stuff. So I think it was about 1992, I went to -- I was asked to come to a board meeting, which is what I did, and that time they were meeting at -- in one of the meeting rooms at what was then the Hilton at Ninth and Hamilton, and they had probably 25 people on their board at that time. We're down to 13 now at present. So they asked me if I wanted to join the board, and I said, "Sure, why not?" By now, I have lost some people and -- but my first -- first person I had lost even before I got into -- with the city, I was still working at Olin, and a good friend of mine, his name was Chuck, would always go to Atlantic City for the summer. My late husband and I were walking into the Rendezvous bar down in Atlantic City, and Chuck was coming out of the bar, and this is in the daytime around noon or so. And he had all these black and blue marks all over him, and I said look, I said, "Wow," I said, "you get into a fight?" He said, "No," he says, "they're -- it's called Kaposi's, and the doctor thinks that I need to be more in the sun" and then like two months later, he was dead. And I think this is really, really what got me more into the activism part was the Lark Inn, which was one of the big bars in Atlantic City, they knew Chuck, and they did a fundraiser for him to help pay for funeral and all that good stuff. I think this is something that I can get behind and that I -- not that I can get behind, that I need to get behind. So that's probably the first part of my activism, which is small steps. So I joined the FACT board, and they were still not sure if I was gay or straight because I didn't say I was gay or straight, they knew I was married and had a daughter. And it happened to be at one of the Summer games that we were up at -- and we were all having dinner together, and I started talking about my partner Will. And they just tilt their head like, "Well," -- [coughs] -- excuse me, "what -- what's the story here, are you gay, are you straight, are you bi?" I said, "Well, I've been all three," but I said, "but I'm gay, I'm gay," and I said, "the person that I'm with is the person that I'm with," which is Will. My wife and I got divorced in 1996, and like I said, that's another story maybe for another time, but... So then he started coming to events with me and he -- we would decorate, and he was part of the -- excuse me [coughs] -- part of the decorating crew. And they called him Balloon Man because he had the helium tank, and he had all the balloons, and he would just whip these all out and get balloons all over the place. So I joined the board, and then one of the members of the board had passed away from AIDS, and he was the education chair, that was, that was Tom. And I said, "Hey, if you need a new education chair, here I am." I said, "It's what I do, it's one of the jobs that I do in my job description." So I've been doing all of the education for FACT since 1992. Of course, I'm still on the board, and they would not let me go. And then we had a former president -- a former board member, and she passed away -- not from AIDS, but she had passed away. She was the treasurer of the organization which she was also what was called a contingency chairperson. And the contingency chairperson is the one that does all of the funding for clients, and I'll explain that a little more down the road here. So I said, "Let me do that." MF: Hi, I'm Mary, I'm back with David Moyer. We just took a quick break, and David was telling us a little bit about his work with FACT on the -- directly the educational mission for that organization. And I'm going to turn it back over to him to talk a little bit about FACT's organizational structure and his work with that. DM: Yeah, oh, thank you. Well, FACT, like I said, started -- was really started in 1986 -- '85--'86 with our -- for the LGBT community because nothing was being done for their friends that were passing from AIDS. So their first events -- first event was this game up in -- a bar game up in -- at Rainbow Mountain in the Poconos. And at that time, we had a lot of bars, so we had the Stonewall Bar, we had Candida's, we had Jeff's City Line Pub, we had the Red Star from Reading, we had the Glass Door, we had Blue Bugle up in the Stroudsburg area. So they would all compete for a trophy but also to raise money. I think it was like $15, which is still a steal today. We have not raised our prices since 1986 for the Summer games itself. It's a good event because you do -- you have vendors, all different kinds of vendors, you have organizations, the other AIDS organizations at that time. And we had plenty of them back in the day who would bring in their literature and things that they would sell like T-shirts or ads or things like that as did FACT, we had our own. We would sell these shirts like I'm wearing, we have hats, we have keychains, we have all kinds of stuff. And one year, AIDS Outreach, which is no more, they sold tree saplings, and you could plant the trees, so there's a lot of trees that are planted up at Rainbow Mountain that are still there, and you dedicated them in somebody that you knew that had passed from AIDS. So there's trees planted there, there's trees planted up at my house, I have two there, and at some of the gay campgrounds, Camp Oneida, which is up near the border of Pennsylvania and New York State, I have trees planted there, there's trees planted at Hillside. I don't think there's planted any at The Woods Campground because this -- that was way too early for that. So there's different committees in the organization. We have structure, we have a president, we have a vice president, we have a secretary, we have a treasurer, those are the four main. At present time, we have two co-chairs for the vice chair and then we have, like I said, the others there. Personally, I have been president twice, I've been vice president twice, I have been secretary three times now because I'm now the current secretary besides being the -- contingency and education chairperson. I've never been treasurer and I'm -- never will be because I can't balance my own checkbook, but anyway, that's neither here nor there. But FACT itself, we became incorporated as a 501[c][3] nonprofit. We are the only agency still alive today that receives no city, state, or federal funding. All the monies that we raise are raised through grassroots efforts, and that can be through -- back in the day, we did house parties. Like I would have a house party at my house, and maybe it was the start for that night of the house parties. Maybe we would just do hors d'oeuvres and you'd go from there to maybe your house where you would have drinks and then go somewhere else for -- or you do the whole thing. You had the option of saying, okay, I'm going to charge $5, $10, $25, $50, or you just put a big fishbowl out and put in what you can, and then all that money comes back to FACT. That was one way of doing it. And then there's bingos that we have ; we continue to do bingos, we have wise -- wine tasting events, we still have the Summer games. There may be things during the year like Pride. We would rent a bus to go up to Pride in New York, and you could do whatever you want. We also have that in December for pre-Christmas. You can go out in December and holiday shop or go to a show or do whatever you want to do. We had one board member who was very creative in writing murder mysteries, and they were interactive murder mysteries, really, really good, Bruce Brown. And Bruce still does radio shows here in -- at the Red Door from Muhlenberg College, and he's done several of those. The highlight of our year is our Snowball, and that's always in -- around World AIDS Day. We had not raised the price on that either in years, but we're looking at that now maybe upping some things. Membership, we've [inaudible] our membership. There's different levels of membership that you can get there as well. And like I said, the education component, we always have that at an event. Whether we're doing bingo for Pride, we always have an information table along with condoms and dental dams and lubrication and all that good stuff that -- for safe sex. We're still promoting safe sex. Even this day and age, we still need to do that. One of things that I had incorporated in was being that I work for the health department, I was able to go more places, and one of the big educational components for me was in the prison. And we were in the prison every Thursday to do education on a different unit because they had 12 different units in the local prison here, and then we would get people to sign up for testing, then we would go in on a Friday with our crew and just do testing. And then if we had tested the week before, then one of us would just go to the unit and do the test results in the unit. Unless there was a positive, then we had to bring that person down and do that in the medical department area because everybody will be warned about this is going to happen in case the person freaked out or whatever, and so, and luckily, that never happened. And then one of the big things in the last couple of years, of course the last couple of years because of COVID, we were able to do this, is that two of the State Reps Pete Schweyer and -- oh, my goodness, his name just went out of my head -- Mike Schlossberg, they hold a senior fest over in the east side of Allentown, and they've invited us -- FACT to be there for education because just because you're old doesn't mean you're not frisky. [laughs] So we have condoms available there too, and it's amazing the amount of people that stop. But one of the things that we did also to entice people to come in at our table is we do blood pressures so we -- because we can't do testing there. But we do blood pressures, so we can do that, and we can talk to the person. And even if they're not active, if they have grandchildren, we say, "Here, take a party pack for your grandson or granddaughter or whatever." And then I've also done several programs for -- at the Bradbury-Sullivan Center for their Silk group, their teens. And I've also done programs at William Allen High School and Dieruff. In fact, I was doing educational programs outside of Lehigh County when I was with the city and then that had to stop because we're encroaching in somebody else's territory, unless we get permission from the county to come in and do that, so... So the education is -- still is ongoing. I have a good friend Hollis who is part of the NAACP here in Lehigh Valley, and we did a very big program for their group. So where we're needed, we go. Probably around 1992, '93, we -- not us but a FACT Bucks County chapter was formed, and they're in New Hope, located in New Hope. So they're our sister chapter, they're still going strong, and sometimes we do events together, but most of the part, they do their thing, and we do our thing. Another thing that's -- that -- and I need to say this, is that even though we support -- FACT supports the LGBT community, we are not recognized as an LGBT organization because we have both straight and gay people on our board, and that's important for people to know. I mean the majority of us are gay but -- well, because we don't know. One of the things too is that especially with the contingencies, which I'll start talking about now, is that the -- what the contingency request is case managers at Lehigh Valley Hospital in St. Luke's, they both have an HIV/AIDS department, and they have case managers in those departments, and they have clients -- obviously, they have clients. So FACT was designed to help people who are infect-- that were infected by HIV/AIDS. [We do not know who we are helping. All we know is that the person is either infected or affected by HIV/AIDS. So you can be straight, you can be gay, you can be asexual, you can be black, white, male, female, doesn't matter who you are, if you need help and we can help, we do. Now early on in the disease, we had a lot of different categories that we were -- would fund. And in fact, we had a lot of money early on that we were able to help support the -- not necessarily the hospitals, but the other AIDS organizations with grants so that they could expand their organization. But with the way things have been occurring, we don't do that anymore. But we would help with rental, insurance, mortgage, drugs and medications are drugs and medications covered by the special pharmaceuticals benefits program that the state puts out, household items like maybe in the summer you need an air conditioner, and we always had a supply of air conditioners handy at the office they'd just take one, heating. And that's changed now because we have the LIHEAP program, which is energy conservation for people with low income or no income. Auto repair, some forms of transportation like for a person to get from -- they have bus passes to get from their home to an employment because they didn't have a car, and then the big one was the funeral expense, and we have all of those categories for years. And we're in the process of changing -- well, we've changed a lot of those. There's a lot of those that we don't fund anymore because we don't need to. And now when COVID hit, nothing was being funded per se, nothing was being funded. The only thing that we were funding were funerals. And when we look at what's happened over the last two years plus, there isn't a need for any of those other categories anymore other than the funeral expense. So that's the only thing that we're going to be funding are funerals, and we'll be upping the amount because each category had their amount. You could apply to FACT twice in one calendar year and then you could come back the following year if you needed something, and we could do that again. The clients really are encouraged to find ways of being able to support themselves because we're -- we really are considered the funders of last resort. They'd go, the hospital would do some things because they have special funding for their clients whether it's for HIV or AIDS or it could be a whole bunch of other things, but they have those. Or they can go to AIDSNET, and AIDSNET serves a six-county area. They do Lehigh, Northampton, Carbon, Monroe, Schuylkill and Berks County, and they'll fund some things too that the hospitals won't be able to fund, and if they can't fund them, then they come to FACT. But none of those organizations will -- are able to fund funerals and so we're -- that's where we're going to be at right now is funerals. And I know that we're in the beginning of 2022, and we've already had four funerals this year that we're funding. So that's pretty much where FACT is. We're the only organization left. We had tons of organizations in the area, which were needed at the time, and now with how the face of AIDS has changed, they really weren't -- aren't needed anymore. The one major one that I really was involved with was AIDS Outreach, and they were the first organization to do -- and they were the first religious organization to do anything and that was -- they -- that stemmed out of the Episcopal church. And they started down in Easton before they moved to Allentown, and they had what was called the Buddy program. The Buddy program was you were trained -- you would come in, and you were trained. You had -- it was like a two- to three-week course, usually on the weekend, and you learned different aspects of HIV/AIDS and care, and that was one of the things that I did. I did the education part for their clients. Once they finished and were graduated, then you would be assigned to somebody that was diagnosed with HIV or AIDS. You stayed with that person -- not physically stayed with that person but you stayed with that person until they died. You would take them to appointments, you would -- if you had to feed them, bathe them, whatever you had to do, that's what you did for that patient. Once that patient died, you couldn't do anything for a year. You needed to have that year off to regroup yourself and then you can come back if you wanted to. And they were located then out of -- when they moved from Trinity Episcopal Church in Easton, they moved to Grace Episcopal Church which is my home church here. And they were there until 2000 and--either 7 or 8 is when they closed, so, yeah, they closed. Gilead House, which was on the state hospital grounds of Allentown, they just had gotten started and then they closed down. Berks AIDS Network, which is called BAN, they're out of Reading, they've changed their whole dynamics and I think they're doing just more than just HIV/AIDS. We used to have a Latino AIDS outreach, which we don't have anymore. They were located -- they started in Bethlehem, they moved to Allentown. We still have HAO, Hispanic AIDS Organization. I think they're located down where the old -- where the original Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce, it's at Fifth and Walnut. I'm trying to think if we have any other organizations. There is still a couple, but we had back -- back in the day, we had the AIDS Task Force, and we had about 30 different organizations that were part of that, a lot of church, the hospitals. [Rick Hoss?] was part of that, the blood banks were part of that. There were so many organizations back in the day, which were needed. And then you had the upspring of the AIDS organizations here, the -- not the AIDS organizations, the LGBT organizations. Le-Hi-Ho, Lambda, and finally with the Bradbury-Sullivan Center, which has done a lot of great stuff for the area here of -- they've helped me a lot especially with the loss of my husband. Then we just keep going. One of the things that I do in my presentations is I always end my talks with one of my favorite movies is, and one of the first Hollywood big movies was called Longtime Companion, and it takes place in New York and primarily like in Fire Island, in that area. And the main character, his name is Willy, and there was a whole group of his friends that always would get together and like people still do. But he was the only one left, all his friends had died, and he's walking on the beach in Fire Island, and the last line of the movie is, "All I want is a cure and my friends back," and that's how I feel. I hate this disease. I'm sorry, but [sighs] it's tough. Back in the day, you had to know somebody or know where things were if you were to go and meet somebody or hook up. We don't have that now. We have -- maybe I shouldn't say we don't have that now, we don't. I'd say that we need it now, but we have the internet. The internet has changed everything for everybody, not just the gay community, but for everybody. You'd go to the bar and hopefully you meet somebody and maybe get lucky and go home. Now you can sit in the comfort of your living room in your pajamas or underwear or naked and cruise somebody on a website and have cybersex, which is safe, but it's not fun. [laughter] We had in the day -- this was our internet, I wanted to show this. It's called The Damron Book, address book. If you were gay and in the know and you were a traveler, that this is what you wanted because if you were going to go to... I'm just going to pick out one in here -- Massachusetts, and I was going to go to um, uh -- where we could go here, oh jeez -- Brockton, Massachusetts, there's an area that says cruisy areas, so this is where you can go, and that's where you would look at. Or you go to Chelsea, Massachusetts, there was only one bar John's, and it was mixed, but it was mostly men, some women, and there's a code. So you could tell if you -- let me see if I can get in here. There's a key code, if you were looking for alcohol, beer, and wine, if there was a B in there, it was multiracial clientele ; if you were into leather, there would be an L there for leather ; N, nudity because there are some bars that you could be nude in, I know that for a fact, it's down in New Orleans, SW had a swimming pool, okay, yeah. So let's see or YC, young and college type. You could know where to go and what you're going to be looking for. And I always had mine with me because I travel a lot. Especially in the military, it's something that I had to hide, I really had to keep that hidden because if that would've come out, I would've been out. But then we get to a point where I would go to -- my unit would go a lot to Gulfport, Mississippi. There's a base down in Gulfport, and it's only like 70 miles from New Orleans. And fortunately, I had a friend who lived in Quakertown, and he had moved to New Orleans. His daughter was there, she opened up a -- her version of the Christmas trees store, and so was all Christmas, right, just a bunch, she was also a lesbian. And he was very creative, so he would make stuff for her to sell in the store. When I knew that my unit was going to be going down there, I would contact him and say, "Pete, I'm going to be in the area, do you got room for me?" So he says, "Yeah, yeah, just let me know when you get here and then -- so he would take me to all the places that I didn't have to -- I didn't need the book because he had it firsthand in that. But there were some wild bars down there that's -- I was very bad and very, very bad. It's just changed, and I don't know how the younger crowd is really coping with that. This is something that we lived through and had to find our way through because we didn't have the stuff that we have now. And I don't know if that's -- for me, I don't think that's fun, you need to be out there and experience. So for the future of the LGBT community, I have no idea what it's going to look like in 10 years. I mean we thrived here in the Lehigh Valley, we had all these bars, we had -- the cruising place is still there, but you would have to be careful there because of the police now. It wasn't like it was back in our days. We would drive around and around, and I'd mentioned this before with my friend Tommy and Eddie, we would drive around for hours just cruising, yeah, not necessarily picking anybody up, but you can do that. You can't do that because you see the signs, no, no cruising 7:00 to 10:00 pm. on this street or no cruising 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. on this street. DM: So I don't know where it's going, I really don't. I know that for ME as a gay man, I have lived through a lot. I've done a lot, there's still more for me to do. I said when I get into this line of work with HIV that I will never stop, I won't -- going as long as I can. I don't want to let my friends down because I promised them that I would do this. I have two diseases that I'm very passionate about, HIV and AIDS and ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. My husband died from Lou Gehrig's disease seven and a half years ago, another horrible disease. Those are really the only two organizations that I helped and I'm staying with. And it's hard to get the younger generation involved in any of those type of work or even an interest. I do have to commend, and I can't remember her last name was. Her name is Rachel, she does a lot for -- she's a teacher at Allen High School and she's the one that runs the GSL groups. And probably about five years ago, we had -- the Bradbury-Sullivan Center had the -- a portion of AIDS quilt on display down there, and she asked me to come in and speak to the kids about my life as a gay man and work in HIV and that. And I think the thing that grabbed them, the kids -- I mean they were interested in the quilt, but there were people on that quilt that I knew and I think that was really meaningful for -- to them, and it really kept their attention. One story that I really do want to give to you is my first experience with the quilt, and it was here at Muhlenberg College, and that was, I'm going to say '95 or '96 when it was here. I'm not exactly sure, I think it was '95 or '96. We had all the organization that were still going were involved with that, and there was a training on how to display the quilt because there's a whole ceremony. If you haven't seen it, Google it because it's something that is really it's intense. And we had it at the -- it was the Field House here on the campus. We were in the small palestra and they had these huge boxes, there must have been 30 of these boxes if not more with the quilt panels. They come and they're folded, so they're telling us, "This is what you need to do. Once you have the panel, to fold the panel down it takes eight people to do it, a section." So they said, "Go over and get one out of the box," so we go over and get one out and put it down. And we each have our space where we're at, and we're opening it and it's -- you do it very slowly. It's like working with the American flag, you -- it's -- you do it, that's how you do it. And I had the last corner of the one that I have, opened it up, and looked at the name. His name was Steve [Kalisky?]. He was the one who was responsible for me meeting my husband... I lost it. And what were the chances of that, me getting that panel? It was meant to happen. I just -- I lost it, I said -- I still get... And I brought Will out that night, so he could be with me when it was opened, and that -- [sighs] I don't know where to go from here. MF: You're describing a lot of moving events that occurred in our community, the bringing the quilt here to the Lehigh Valley. You've also talked about the Snowball, you talked about the Summer games, and you've talked about the public health piece of your work both with the Allentown Health Bureau and also with FACT. DM: Mm-hmm. MF: I'm wondering about FACT's relationship to other AIDS organizations?. Because you're working in two different fields, you're also part of the Buddy -- the Buddy program, but there was a program out of the Lambda center that I think became AIDS Services. But how are all of those organizations working together or were they not? DM: No, they were, -- MF: working together? DM: -- they were. And I say this at conferences that I've gone to. Me personally, I have been so blessed and honored to work with the amount of organizations that we have in the Lehigh Valley. They all work together, they always have, they always will. When one fails, it's like a failure for all of us whether that failure is good or bad. It's good that we don't need the Buddy program anymore for as much I loved it, we don't, I mean the people are living a lot longer. Yes, people are still dying, but they don't need that, that extra kick or whatever it is. And the thing that really, really impresses me, we have two major hospitals here in the Lehigh Valley. We have St. Luke's and we have Lehigh Valley, and they're always at odds with each other, they are. Well, let's build a bigger one here, let's build -- let's put two together here. The AIDS organizations or AIDS department in each of those two hospitals are like this. You don't see that, you don't see that in Philadelphia, you don't see that in New York, you don't see that anywhere. You see it here, and that's -- that impresses me, and that is something that I tell people. We are all in this together, we are, and if you can't work together, it's not going to work. You're setting yourself up for failure really is what it is, so... I have another story that's not really AIDS related, but it's about my husband, about my late husband. And I guess his and my coming out -- we were together for, I'm going to say, seven or eight years, at least seven or eight years if not more. And one of the goods things is that his whole family is just great, absolutely great. But his mother and his older sister -- because his younger sister was living in Florida for like 25 years, and she's back here now -- but they would go to a lot of the events. One of the events that I didn't mention was called Summer Solstice, and we always did it around the twenty-first of June, and we always had it at a private home somewhere. Our former vice president who just passed away several months ago, Carl he had it -- he hosted it at his place and he had the entire meal up in -- off of 512 for a couple of years. But there was a prominent New York doctor who had a place down in Coopersburg, Center Valley, a private area, jeez, and huge pond and -- but a huge house in this. But we had it down there and we took his sister and his mother along down there. His mother was always the center of attraction, a little woman, crazy for her, loved her. And so we're getting pretty lit, and we're coming home, and we got back to the house, opened up some more champagne and or whatever, we're still drinking. And Will decided he was going to go to bed, so he went to bed, so it was just the three of us, me, Fern, and Vicky. And somehow, it came up about me or Will not being married yet. And Vicky looks at his -- at her mother, she says, "Think, Mom, they're gay." And she said, "What do you mean gay?" "They're gay, they've been together -- living together for almost 10 years now," and she said, "Oh, my son's gay." [laughs] Now, neither one of them were able to drive home because they wanted to go home, called the cab, and Vicky says to me the next day, "Oh my God, I can't believe Fern, I can't believe her" -- because she called her Fern -- "all she kept saying to the cab driver is, 'My son's gay, my son's gay.'" [laughs] and she said, "Everybody knows." Well, she didn't know, and Dad didn't know either. He may have suspected, but he never said anything, and he's one of these... But we always got along, nothing was ever said about -- you know. They were at my wedding when I get married to Betsy. I mean nothing was said that -- to Dad that well, you know, your son's gay or whatever, and we still didn't say it because we never -- when we would be together for dinners or parties or something at their house because it was always -- we either met at their place or we met at our place, depending on what the holiday was because we would always do Mother's Day and Father's Day for his parents, Christmas and Thanksgiving was always at their place but anyway. I don't know where I'm going with this ; there was something else I was going to say about that. Oh, gosh, what was it? Oh, when Will passed, and that was September of 2014, and we did everything at the church. His dad was there, he didn't go to the cemetery, but he was there for the viewing, he was there for the funeral mass and that. And they were taking everything out to the hearse, and they said he didn't want to go to the cemetery, but I get up and I stood in front of him, and I said, "You know I loved your son," and he said, "I know," and that's where we left it. So now we can talk, we talk up -- if we're together, but this one's gay or that one's gay or whatever. My great-niece's best friend is gay, still in high school yet. Everything is good, everything is good. Now I couldn't have asked for a better family than his, all of them, all of them. There wasn't anybody in his family that looked down on us because we were gay, every one of them. When Will and I were going to have a commitment ceremony at our church because it still wasn't legal in Pennsylvania. It came a couple of months later, but we had been married in California, but we wanted to do something at our church. I had not been out to -- my only two relatives, really relatives that are alive and my -- were alive on my side were my aunt and uncle, my mother's brother, and I called them up -- no, I asked them to come over for dinner. So they came for dinner, and I said, "I -- we have something that we want to tell you, and we want to ask you and you can either say yes or no," and I said, "Will and I when we were in California, we were -- we got married, and we want to have a commitment ceremony at our church, would you come?" They knew, we never discussed anything but we -- they knew, and they were so grateful that we included them in because that's -- they were the only relatives on my side. When they died -- I'm the last on my side, when I die, blood line ends. My daughter doesn't count, I shouldn't say it that way, but she doesn't count, she's not a boy so she can't carry on my name. Indirectly she could but it's all messed up, so... But, yeah, I wanted to get that in there, so... I have been very blessed to have the support that I've had over these years. My faith community is by far the best. I have two parishioners who are originally from -- well, [Haley?] has risen from here, but her husband is Filipino, but they lived in California for years and they -- because he has -- he still has family out there, so they go out occasionally. And when Will died, passed away, somebody let them know that he had died, and they called me immediately, and they canceled the rest of their trip and came home just to help support me. Who does that? You hear so many horror stories in the LGBT community, getting kicked out or being spit on or being assaulted or being murdered, I feel -- there's times where I feel guilty because I haven't had any of that. I mean I've had some looks and some comments but few and far between, not by anybody in my immediate circle. Even some of the guys in my military unit knew I was gay. You do your job, and that's what I'm there for, I do my job, what I do on my own time is my own time. Yeah, I would go out and party with them, and I would go to the strip clubs, and I'd get up on this stage with the girls and do all kinds of things, not sexual but have a good time. I think they really appreciated that, that I'm not the typical faggot for lack of better words. I am who I am ; I can have a good time with anybody. I just don't know. I pray that the next generation, upcoming generation, is going to be okay and not have a lot of negativity or stuff because there's just way too much of that now. You didn't see that back in the days. You didn't see drag queens getting killed or transgender people getting mugged or killed or -- it's just it's like an epidemic. That shooting down at the Pulse nightclub in Florida that -- a couple of years ago, you don't see that. And I think that's another good thing about the area here, maybe we're just special. There was very little trouble in any of the gay bars here or even at the events. Early on in the Pride festivals that we had at Cedar Beach and that we would have protestors, not a lot, but there'd be some there, but it was peaceful, peaceful yeah. Nobody was flaunting anything, well some of the drag queens were, but that's a given. So I don't know if we're just fortunate to be where we are and have what we have, I don't know. MF: So, David we're right up almost at the end of our 90 minutes, and before we close the interview, I just want to give you some space. Is there anything we didn't talk about today that you really wish we would have and that you'd like to share now? DM: Ohm, I think we've covered... I mean I could've talked a bit more about my sexual experiences, but I don't know. [laughs] That's for the book. I'm grateful to you for wanting to do this. I'm open, I try to be as open as I can. I think we covered -- I really wanted to get in there about my husband and my marriage, which never should've happened, but it did. That soured me for a few years because it wasn't -- it wasn't me that wanted to end the divorce, it was me that ended the divorce, but it wasn't me that was at fault. There's little tidbits here and there of things that I may have missed that are okay, but I think for the most part, that I've answered what you were or gave you whatever you were looking for. If there's anything that I think of, I'll let you know, but at this point I think we're good. Just use what I gave you to include, yeah, paper-wise, and if there's anything else that you need from me, just let me know, and if I can find it, I will gladly help out any way I can because this -- this is just so important. I mean I don't know how many others like this are going on in the country. Hopefully, there's more because we can't be swept under the carpet. We're here, we're queer, get over it, I'm ending there. MF: What a wonderful way to end. Thank you so much, David, for speaking with me today. I'm so grateful to hear your life story. I'm really, really moved by what you shared today. Thank you. DM: You're welcome, you're welcome. Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile=