Liz Bradbury, August 10, 2020

Liz Bradbury, August 10, 2020

Liz Bradbury describes her maternal and paternal family, her upbringing, time at the Maryland Institute of Art and Indiana State University, and relationships before Patricia Sullivan.

Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives

Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives

2020-08-10

Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs.

video

LGBT-20

Mary Foltz

Liz Bradbury

01:57:36

5.4 August 10, 2020 Liz Bradbury, August 10, 2020 LGBT-20 1:57:36 LVLGBT Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive Collection Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository Support for the collection of this interview was provided by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg Liz Bradbury Mary Foltz video/mp4 Copy of BradburyLiz_20200810_video.mp4 1.0:|5(3)|60(7)|85(5)|108(5)|133(11)|158(7)|183(10)|208(3)|229(2)|250(8)|269(7)|294(11)|319(7)|342(7)|363(14)|380(11)|405(7)|432(14)|455(13)|484(14)|509(6)|536(13)|563(2)|584(14)|613(5)|638(10)|663(3)|686(11)|709(2)|732(8)|757(3)|780(6)|801(16)|824(15)|847(16)|874(4)|901(9)|928(11)|953(14)|978(18)|999(11)|1026(3)|1047(2)|1068(8)|1093(14)|1114(16)|1139(11)|1158(11)|1181(7)|1206(5)|1233(5)|1256(16)|1281(10)|1306(7)|1337(5)|1362(6)|1389(4)|1412(13)|1433(5)|1458(14)|1483(15)|1510(10)|1533(14)|1560(9)|1581(14)|1606(11)|1631(6)|1652(14)|1675(15)|1700(16)|1717(6)|1742(10)|1767(12)|1794(9)|1819(6)|1844(10)|1865(15)|1894(3)|1917(5)|1942(5)|1963(14)|1986(4)|2009(2)|2030(5)|2053(6)|2072(12)|2095(16)|2118(7)|2143(10)|2164(8)|2185(11)|2208(9)|2233(11)|2258(2)|2285(13)|2308(13)|2333(15)|2354(13)|2375(10)|2396(3)|2419(14)|2438(8)|2465(7)|2488(18)|2513(14)|2536(10)|2561(3)|2584(13)|2605(12)|2628(9)|2651(5)|2672(8)|2693(18)|2714(3)|2737(18)|2758(8)|2779(10)|2792(9) 0 https://youtu.be/wrbrbA_vjgY YouTube video English 0 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: Okay, my name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with Liz Bradbury to talk about her life and experiences with LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley. This is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. And Liz and I are meeting on August 10th, 2020. We’re meeting over Zoom because there is a pandemic. Liz, I’m just going to go ahead and do the consent really quickly. Do you consent to this interview today?&#13 ; &#13 ; LIZ BRADBURY: Yes. 0 87 Maternal Family LB: I’d love to do that because everybody likes to talk about themselves. I do want to talk about my parents a little bit because I realized how much their life influenced mine. Of course, everybody’s parents do. But I don’t want to get stuck in that because I can talk about them for hours and they are pretty fascinating characters. So, let me say that my mother, her mother was the child of immigrants, she was the child of Norwegian immigrants, and she was very much of a bootstrapper. She wanted to make a name for herself. In fact, she used to say that to me all the time, “Make a name for yourself.” She should be thrilled that a building is named after me. 0 459 Paternal Family / Father's Work LB: Meanwhile, so then go back to where my dad was, my dad was born in South Dakota, in Lead, South Dakota. Lead, South Dakota is a mining town in the middle of literally nowhere. I’ve actually been there. We went on a little excursion to see what it was like and it’s truly in the middle of nowhere. It’s right next to Sturgis, where everyone is getting COVID-19 right now, with that big Harley motorcycle thing. It’s really right next to there. Trish got a T-shirt from Sturgis because she said, “Oh, this would be fun.” 0 1030 Liberal Upbringing / Parental Influence LB: So, one of the things about my parents, and I think that the main thing about them was, that they were very liberal. They were passionately committed to that. I don’t know if my mother would have been that way as much had she had a different husband, but she really liked my dad and she really believed in everything that he did. They had pretty diverse friends considering we lived Greenwich, Connecticut, which was a very white, suburban white flight area, where there was a certain amount of segregation, or gated community kind of stuff. But they were friends with lots of people that were very diverse. And so, that was great. 0 1353 Embracing Lesbian Identity LB: So, I really liked girls. And I knew that I liked girls. And I would think about guys and stuff and was so separated from that that I couldn’t really imagine actually being with a boy, or a man, or anything like that. I never got a thrill from that. But when I started to get older and I started to learn that there were lesbians in the world and that there were women that were attracted to women, it was such a rush. 0 1632 Greenwich High School LB: And I also, in high school, was able to gather -- I went to a huge high school, Greenwich High School. At that time, it was three grades and had 3,000 students, so there was 1,000 kids in my class. And because of that, when I was in junior high, I’ve had friends and hung around with people who were artists, and they still are artists, but the people that I met in high school, I had a sort of 10 friends that were really close, we’re still friends in some ways, we don’t have as much communication as I’d like because we all live so far away from each other. But they were zany, erudite, interesting people. 0 1841 College Days at Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore LB: And then, I went to college. I decided to go to art school, and I went to the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore. I applied to a bunch of different arts schools. I had sort of wanted to go to Rhode Island School of Design, but I didn’t get in there so I went to the Maryland Institute, which was good because everything that happened in my life sprung out of going to Maryland Institute. 0 2192 Woodworking LB: I forgot to say that, Shirley Jankovich, which was the one I had the big crush on, she said to me, “You know since you’re so interested in woodworking you should go talk to this little woodworker guy that does stuff for me for my house. His name is Luigi Cappotelli and he’s a master craftsman. Why don’t you go and talk to him?” So, I went to talk to Luigi, who was in the next town over. I was 15 actually, when I met him, and he asked me to be his apprentice. Or I asked him. We ended up where I was his apprentice. 0 2367 Exploring LGBTQ+ Hangouts / Club Mitchell LB: So, while I was in Maryland, they had a GSA in my last year when I was in college. And so that would have been in 1979. But the people in it were so weird that I would see these people and be like, “I don’t think so.” I didn’t know anybody in the group. But my pal Christine, I came out to her, and I told her about the crushes that I’d had. She had a boyfriend that we knew and stuff. And we had really serious talks about this. And we were really good friends, and we’re still good friends. I just talked to her. 0 2635 Camaraderie in the Woodworking Department LB: But I have to say that in college I worked so hard. I’m still tired from college. I’m really still tired from graduate school. There were days in graduate school that I didn’t sleep for days, for three or four days I just didn’t sleep. And in college I never had time to go out. Maybe after eleven o’clock, I’d have a couple of hours. I guess that’s the way college is now, except I had to get up early for class, because our classes started at eight. And I was a teaching assistant for art history, too. And lots of things happening. 0 2775 Relationship with Jean Ruben LB: Anyway. Then, I decided that I didn’t want to be just an art teacher in school, I wanted to be a college teacher. And I used to say, “I don’t want to have to clean up vomit from a first grader. I just really want to be a college teacher.” And that was smart. I think I did want to be that. But the other thing that happened when I was in college was I met an English teacher named Jean Ruben, and Jean became -- I had her for one class, and she lived right near me in Bolton Hill. 0 3638 Moving to Allentown / Jean in Later Life LB: So, I said, “I think I should think about buying a house because if I have a house, even if I don’t have a job, if I have a house, I’ll have a place to live. I can piss this away really easily if I just use this on rent.” So, she said, “Well, Wayne is in Allentown.” And he was the partner of Arthur Miller who was a friend of ours, who was another teacher, who was a very good friend of Jean’s. And I knew him, he’d been one of my teachers. And I’d done some work for him at his house. And she said, “Wayne is in Allentown. Why don’t you go and talk to him? He’s a nice guy. He’s a sweet guy.” I said, “I’ve met him.” 0 4081 Earning a Woodworking MFA / Finding Community in Terre Haute, Indiana LB: In the meantime, going back to a little bit, when I went to Indiana, and I went to study under [Allen Friedman?] who turned out to be a complete asshole and ended up leaving after the first year, which meant that I didn’t have a mentor while I was there, and there weren’t any other woodworking teachers, so the people in ceramics who didn’t understand anything about wood, there was nobody to teach me everything. And then, they got some part-time guys, and then they got another guy that was kind of an idiot. 0 4827 Leaving Indiana / Moving to Jamestown, New York LB: So, what happened was at the end of my second year in graduate school, I was a teaching assistant, I taught art history, and I done that for the time. And I only had a couple of credits left. I think I had one credit left that I had to fulfill. I’d actually, during the time of working on my MFA, gotten letters in the mail. I’d get this letter that goes, “Now you have an MS,” because I just took enough credits. And then, “Now you have enough credits for an MA in Fine Art.” So, now I had a master’s degree in Fine Art. I’m like, “Whoa.” But my MFA was a 90-degree credit and that had a lot of reviews and stuff. So, I was still going through the reviews. But I had a legitimate masters. 0 5257 Relationships in Jamestown LB: So, I dated some women. And then, I met another woman who was the head of the United Cerebral Palsy offices there in Jamestown, and we had this group of women that were meeting each other, and there was a women’s domestic violence hotline, a lot of lesbians worked there. She was very interesting. I asked her on a date and she was much more excited about the sex, so that was really fun for that beginning of that date. But we were really not ultimately suited for each other. I think we were together for just about four years. 0 5396 New Beginnings / In-Between Relationships LB: So, all this tough stuff was happening. I was in a bad relationship, my mother was going into a nursing home for Alzheimer’s disease, I lost my job that I thought was going to be the most perfect job ever, I didn’t have any money, I had to move to Philadelphia, that relationship didn’t work out. It was a lot of tough stuff. And I was just turning 30. Sasha and I had gone to a party. We knew other lesbians in Western New York and some of them had moved to Eastern New York. And so, we went to a party and we met a group of women, and one of them was Trish. And I was still with Sasha then, but our friend Cheryl, who had the party, when Sasha and I broke up, Cheryl said to Trish, “Liz and Sasha broke up.” 0 5718 Meeting Patricia Sullivan LB: So, Cheryl told Trish that Sasha and I had broken up. And then Cheryl told me that she told Trish that and I said, “What did Trish say?” And Cheryl said, “Trish said Sasha’s an idiot.” And I went, “Whoa, all right.” And then, I got a letter from Trish, remember letters. No, Cheryl asked me to go on a double date with Trish and Cheryl and her partner, at that time, Donna. And they’re not together anymore. But Cheryl has been in a long relationship with another person that Trish happened to have worked with in New York State, because there’s really only about 100 lesbians in the world. 0 6269 Early Days Apart LB: The whole thing that happened with Trish was so fabulous that in the beginning part of our relationship, I was just so overwhelmed by how terrific it was that I was afraid. I’m still afraid. I’m afraid of for when it ends. And if you’re with somebody long enough, somebody’s always going to be sad in the relationship because one person is going to leave. At the end of the relationship one person is going to die, that’s what happened with my parents who were married for 42 years. Trish’s parents were married for 75 years. We come from really great circumstances. 0 6406 Creating a Life Together LB: And after five months, the job in North Carolina, the whole company closed and I got to come home. And we started our life together which was really wonderful. We were far away from each other but Trish had told me in our first conversation that she wanted to retire, because she had lupus. And the stress of her job, which was extraordinarily, it’s a government job, running a government hospital, having to justify every penny you spend, to Albany, when they don’t give you enough money, but when you’re required to do certain things. So, she said, “I’m going to get scapegoated for something. I know that’s going to happen.” 0 6590 Trish's Impact &amp ; Influence LB: Sure. And we can talk about that, and I can figure out anything else I forgot to say. I have to be sure that that’s in there. Because there are a few other things that I didn’t talk about, I think, that have to do with some other civil rights issues that I think are very important that we haven’t touched on that had to do with stuff that Trish and I did. I know that Trish doesn’t sing her own praises as much as she should, but the extraordinary work that she’s done, and I have to say, I’ve done a lot of stuff. I couldn’t have done any of these things if it hadn’t been for Trish. She rescued me. 0 7006 Closing Remarks LB: So, we can talk about other stuff but I did want to say those things, you’ve got that. I’m sure there’s lots of other stuff. Oh, I had all these lists of stuff, here. I think I said all of these things. Yeah. So, my whole life before Trish was just getting ready to be in love with Trish. And that was really the terrific thing. And I do want to say that I had a lot of wonderful support for that, as well. It’s been good. 0 MovingImage Liz Bradbury describes her maternal and paternal family, her upbringing, time at the Maryland Institute of Art and Indiana State University, and relationships before Patricia Sullivan. INTERVIEW WITH LIZ BRADBURY AUGUST 10, 2020 MARY FOLTZ: Okay, my name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Liz Bradbury to talk about her life and experiences with LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley. This is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. And Liz and I are meeting on August 10th, 2020. We're meeting over Zoom because there is a pandemic. Liz, I'm just going to go ahead and do the consent really quickly. Do you consent to this interview today? LIZ BRADBURY: Yes. MF: And you consent to having this interview transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online? LB: Yes. MF: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, including films, articles, websites, and presentations? LB: Yes. MF: And you understand that you'll have 30 days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review the interview, to identify parts you want to delete, or to withdraw the interview from the project? LB: Yes, I do. MF: Well, fabulous. Thank you so much for being with me today. And I'm going to start with just a broad question. Would you tell me a little bit about the early years of your life? LB: I'd love to do that because everybody likes to talk about themselves. I do want to talk about my parents a little bit because I realized how much their life influenced mine. Of course, everybody's parents do. But I don't want to get stuck in that because I can talk about them for hours and they are pretty fascinating characters. So, let me say that my mother, her mother was the child of immigrants, she was the child of Norwegian immigrants, and she was very much of a bootstrapper. She wanted to make a name for herself. In fact, she used to say that to me all the time, "Make a name for yourself." She should be thrilled that a building is named after me. And she was the grandparent that I grew up with in my family. I saw her all the time. And her name was Selma Barry. Her parents didn't speak English. She got an education. She lived in Bonita, an area of California. And she became a teacher. And she intentionally moved to a place where there were very few women and a lot of rich entrepreneurial guys. And she was very beautiful, so she picked one and she married him. His name was Edmund Drinan Barry. And he was the son of millionaires and stuff like that. And then, she soon after had two girls, my aunt, and then my mother. And then, it was the Depression and he turned out to be a terrible businessman. And he had an orange grove, and he had a dairy farm and stuff, and he just ran them into the ground and had no money and they were always turning off the power. And my grandmother, I think, that his parents had been unhappy that he had married an immigrant's daughter, because he really was in the high level of social register. And so, I think his parents had disowned him, but he was going to make it on his own. And he didn't. And my grandmother was pissed off. She was really mad because she was very concerned about appearances. So, she took her two girls and she had been a teacher and she had gone to normal school, which is what they called teaching colleges, and she moved them to the only job she could get in the Depression, which was in the Mojave Desert, teaching in a one-room schoolhouse, which was an interesting -- so, my mother had gone from quite an affluent life, which she never really realized, my mother was very naïve and very ingenuous, and she never really thought anything about it. I think she was just sad her father wasn't there anymore. And she talked about how she loved being a teacher and she ultimately became a teacher. And she was about 14, I think, when they moved there. And so, she taught all the little kids. She was still in the school and her mother didn't know, she was like K through eight, and she was in eighth grade and she didn't know anything. Her sister had gone to the high school. This was in Victorville High School in Hesperia, was the town, which was, in those days, 200 miles from civilization. Now, there's literally civilization, so to speak, all the way from here back to Santa Barbara and Redlands, California, where they had come from. And so, she worked to teach kids and stuff like that. And they lived in a pretty scrubby life, in that my mother did all the cooking because her mother taught and worked all day and my aunt was in high school and stuff. And my mother loved working with little kids, and playing with little kids, and teaching them and stuff, and she thought that was wonderful. But she didn't learn anything. She learned from teaching, but she didn't really learn anything that an eighth grader would learn to prep for high school. So, when she went to high school she kind of had a hard time. But luckily because her sister had been very smart and very good at math apparently people just gave her good grades. And the other reason was because she was really pretty. And she was pretty educated enough and certainly compared to other people who maybe lived in that area that were really poor, in the desert. But here's the other flip side of that coin. Also in the desert in that area were dude ranches where really, really rich famous people would go for holidays. And so, my mother had a friend from high school whose family owned one of those dude ranches. My mom used to hang out there all the time and she would tell me, "I played ping pong with Loretta Young, and I danced with Jimmy Stuart," and she did, because she was really pretty and a young teenager, just the perfect person to have hanging around these dude ranches for other people. And she was polite and smart, stuff like that. And she also learned how to ride because her friend who had had the dude ranch was a champion horse rider and so, she had aged out of the young woman's thing, so she trained my mother to do it, and she went all through these competitions and stuff. And she said, "You know, I wasn't really into it, but my friend wanted me to do it." That's the way she was. "So, I just did it." So, she did all these interesting things and then she went to college at the University of Santa Barbara, and that was right before World War II, to be a teacher. And her sister went to college to be a nurse, because that's what people did. And my grandmother was saying, clearly to them, "Yeah, well, don't rely on getting married because look what happened to me. Thank God I have this teaching degree." So, they went and did what the only thing that women could do in the 1930s to study, which was either being a teacher or being a nurse. Meanwhile, so then go back to where my dad was, my dad was born in South Dakota, in Lead, South Dakota. Lead, South Dakota is a mining town in the middle of literally nowhere. I've actually been there. We went on a little excursion to see what it was like and it's truly in the middle of nowhere. It's right next to Sturgis, where everyone is getting COVID-19 right now, with that big Harley motorcycle thing. It's really right next to there. Trish got a T-shirt from Sturgis because she said, "Oh, this would be fun." So, my father was born in 1914, my mother was born in 1921. So, he was older than she. And when he was four years old, his mother, in 1918, died of the flu epidemic of 1918. She was 32 years old. He had one sister who was older. And he said the only memory of his mother, the only clear memory of his mother, was at one time, she was trying to fix the furnace and asked them to go and get the tongs from the fireplace, and they thought that she meant the andirons. So, they dragged the andirons down, these filthy, dusty andirons down, and she just laughed hysterically. And he said that's the only thing that he could remember about her. So, one of the things about the flu epidemic of 1918, which we all talk about now, it was so, so serious, 50 million to 100 million people died. And 72 percent of women who were pregnant died when they got the flu. If they got the flu, 72 percent of them died. And actually, the death rate of the flu is about 10 percent. It particularly struck people between the ages of 20 and 40. My grandmother was 32. I think she was probably pregnant because she was the only one in the family who died. My father didn't say that anyone else had the disease. But anyway, as soon as his mother died, his father -- and they had both gone to high school in Lead -- his father decided to go with his brother to make roads in South America. And they went to Chile to do that. So, his brother, Phillip, and he, went there and left my father and his sister, Ruth, who they called PD, in Lead, South Dakota, to be raised by his mother's parents, and his mother's father was the mayor of Leads, South Dakota. His last name was Erwin. But my dad had a hard time I think. They were smart people, but he was left on his own and stuff. So, anyway, ultimately, he was smart and literary and his sister turned out to be very capable as well and she ended up being an editor for Antiques Magazine and living in New York City with her husband, Marshall Davidson, who was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the American wing and wrote books and stuff like that. They were very much in our lives when I was growing up. So, anyway, his father left him, his mother was dead, and so, he was really an orphan but when they grew up, he went to Berkeley and he got a really great education there in English, and then I think he had a year of graduate school, and then he went to South America to be with his father and his uncle, and stayed there, and learned to speak Spanish fluently. So, he could speak Spanish fluently and he lived there for a year or two. And then, he came back because it was right before World War II, and he worked as the person who edited the newspaper, particularly the sports part of the newspaper, of the University of Santa Barbara, which was actually then Santa Barbara Teachers College, where my mother went. And my mother and father met that, and that's how they fell in love with each other. It was right before World War II, my father was drafted, and my mother left school a little bit early and went to where he was. He was going into Officer's Candidate School in Miami. This is the tough war thing that he had. He had to train guys how to fly planes. And one of them was Clark Gable. He trained Clark Gable how to fly a plane. And then they went to North Carolina where he wrote flying manuals and stuff. And he really had a great time. I mean, there was nothing about the war that was bad for him, except for that some of the people in basic training had gone to bad places, and he felt a little bit guilty about that. But he just had a great time. So, when he was in South Carolina, he was married to my mother by then, she was teaching in a little school and my father was at the base. And his CO was Ken McCormick. And Ken McCormick was the senior editor at Doubleday. And another person that was there was Mac Showman. You probably don't know who that is but your parents do. So, ask your parents who Mac Showman is, he created the television show Dobie Gillis. They know what this is because it was the funniest show in the '50s. And he wasn't famous then. And he met Ken McCormick, and he wrote a lot of books, and my dad was best friends with Mac, and he wrote plays and stuff like that. Anyway, after World War II, my father got to get a really good job at Doubleday. That's the way it was in the 1940s. If you had a good education and you were a white guy, you usually got a really good job. And so, he went from being an editor for some creepy little newspaper at a college to now he's a top editor at Doubleday in in his first job there. So, this was after the war, so this is in 1946, '47, his first job was to edit Crusades through Europe, which was Dwight Eisenhower's memoir of World War II. I have pictures of him with Eisenhower. My dad established himself as a very liberal guy, and he also spoke Spanish fluently, so he worked with all sorts of people. And that was his career. And he was at a couple of publishing companies, but mostly, Doubleday and he was there at the beginning, and then he left there for about 10 years and then came back for the rest of the time. And he worked with really famous authors. He ended up being the science fiction editor, so he worked with Ray Bradbury. He kind of discovered Ray Bradbury, not related to us, and Martian Chronicles is dedicated to him. He also worked with Isaac Asimov. He was the editor for Asimov, and I wrote down a bunch of other people because this is pretty cool. He also worked with a bunch of other guys, so Catherine Cookson, Velikovsky, Norman Katkov, who wrote Fabulous Fanny, which was about Fanny Brice, that Barbra Streisand movie that is about Fanny Brice. And Irving Stone, who wrote Lust For Life, he worked with him on writing The Agony and the Ecstasy. Irving Stone was the guy who actually promoted Vincent van Gogh. Nobody knew who Vincent van Gogh was until Irving Stone wrote Lust For Life. He worked with Leon Uris, who wrote Exodus, and Irving Wallace, and Fletcher Knebel, who wrote Seven Days in May. Anita Brenner, who was a really significant writer about Mexico, because he spoke Spanish. And he also worked with Martin Luther King. He was the editor of Martin Luther King's books. He was the liberal guy there, so he worked with Martin Luther King. I have pictures of him with Martin Luther King. He edited Why We Can't Wait. And then, after Malcom X's death, he negotiated to get the autobiography of Malcolm X to come to Doubleday. We lived in Connecticut, and so, he would come home and he'd go, "Yeah, Tony Curtis was in the office today," or, "Hey, guess who's going to be working with us and is going to have the office next to mine. Jackie Kennedy Onassis. This will be so fun." And he's always saying things like that. And as a kid, I never really quite got that. I think my sister, who is nine years older than I am, understood this a little bit better than I did. But that was fun. So, one of the things about my parents, and I think that the main thing about them was, that they were very liberal. They were passionately committed to that. I don't know if my mother would have been that way as much had she had a different husband, but she really liked my dad and she really believed in everything that he did. They had pretty diverse friends considering we lived Greenwich, Connecticut, which was a very white, suburban white flight area, where there was a certain amount of segregation, or gated community kind of stuff. But they were friends with lots of people that were very diverse. And so, that was great. My mother was an artist. And besides being a teacher, she was a painter. And she was involved with the Greenwich Art Society all of my life, I think from the time I was in about third grade all the way through the end of the time that I lived with them. And she was on their board, and she was a painter, and she did wonderful, wonderful paintings. And so, I saw that all the time. My sister was also an artist. She was a photographer. My dad was interested in photography. We had a permanent darkroom in our house. My sister became a photographer. I learned how to do woodworking from my dad. It was a hobby of his. Photography was, too. So, as I was growing up I was learning about all of these things. And the other thing that my parents did was, they were volunteers. They volunteered for stuff all the time. My mother was a volunteer for Greenwich Art Society for 25 years. She was the treasurer, and she did all their taxes. She did everything. She wasn't even into that kind of stuff, but she was very dedicated to doing that. She led some of the shows. They have regular shows at the Greenwich Arts Society and she would be the chair of the show and stuff and do that. And my dad was involved with the local libraries. And even just personally, he would do things like we lived on what they call a private road, and so, instead of the association of the people who lived there hiring a person to mow the lawn, he would just do it. There was a little beach at the end of our -- because we lived on the water. We didn't live on the water, but we lived on an area where there was a beach at the end of the road on Long Island Sound. So, I was really into that thing. I didn't really think anything about everybody else's dad isn't going after work when he comes home from New York and then goes, "I'm just going to go mow the lawn at the pier. I'm going to go do that." And he did that all the time. "I picked up all this garbage." He was really into just giving himself. I think I got that ethic from them. So, I picked up those literary things. Let me say quickly that my mother died of early onset Alzheimer's disease when she was 68, in 1988, right after I met Trish. She was already in a nursing home. And that was devastating because she was wonderful. And she also would have really loved Trish. She just would have loved Trish. And she would have had so much fun with her and I'm so sad that they didn't get to really know each other. My mother lost her memory by the time I was 26. She was really not remembering things. And she didn't know who I was by the time I was 30 and I had met Trish. And she died in a nursing home. My father, like many guys his age, had smoked since he was 12 years old and died of emphysema, but quite a while after my mother died so Trish did meet him and he was good to her. He was a liberal guy. But he also had some of those things that men of that day -- like, he belonged to some clubs that wouldn't let women in. He didn't always get the gay thing. He wasn't any anti, but he just didn't always understand the LGBT stuff. He certainly had gay friends but he said, "I wouldn't talk about that." I said, "Well, why not?" So, we had some confrontation, but they were okay. He was a little curmudgeonly for a guy. But because of them, I grew up around books all of the time. I was horrendously dyslexic as a child, so a little bit of a disappointment. Luckily, that's not as much of a problem once you have computers. But in the olden days, we didn't have spellcheck, so I couldn't spell anything. But I did end up writing books and stuff, but I consciously decided to wait until after he died to do that because he was not supportive. He just didn't think I could ever do that. I actually won national awards for the books that I wrote, so I think he would have been happy about that. But he just didn't think other people could just write books because he realized how hard it was. So, anyway, my mother and father were a big influence on me, certainly, and all the time that I was growing up, I was involved with art shows and I was in art shows. By the time I was 12, I was in juried art show, so I've been doing that for more than 50 years, putting my work out, not just in a show but in a show where people might reject it, which is an interesting thing to learn about yourself and how you feel about that. That's the way art school is. So, I ended up going to Maryland Institute of Art. No, let's go back a little bit, about queerness. So, I really liked girls. And I knew that I liked girls. And I would think about guys and stuff and was so separated from that that I couldn't really imagine actually being with a boy, or a man, or anything like that. I never got a thrill from that. But when I started to get older and I started to learn that there were lesbians in the world and that there were women that were attracted to women, it was such a rush. I mean, even really negative depictions of lesbians in movies and stuff like The Children's Hour, I've talked to you about that before, or in the movie The Miracle Worker, where there's like a little mention of women who go after women? I'm like, "What? What? What's that?" It was so exciting. It was Anne Bancroft because she's so hot. And if you talk to any lesbian, you talk about how hot Ann Bancroft is is in The Miracle Worker, everybody is into that. Everybody. Every woman my age who's a dyke will absolutely say that they were so intrigued by The Trouble With Angels. All these nuns living together, and they're having such a good time and they're laughing and stuff, and I know women who were absolutely not Catholic would say, "I've thought about becoming a nun because I saw The Trouble With Angels, and these women were having such a great time." Even in The Sound of Music, the nuns are so cool and they're all living up there all together, and who knows what they're doing and stuff like that, and they don't care about men at all, it doesn't matter. In fact, they're always bossing men around, Rosalind Russell is bossing men around, it's great. And so, all that kind of stuff was going around in my head. And I've always been attracted to older women, so I used to have these incredible crushes on my teachers. And I have to say that, looking back at them, not all of them were unrequited in many instances. And so, I had attractions. And some of those women are still my friends. If they're alive, most of them are still my friends. And so, I had a very good relationship with one of the art teachers that was in what we used to call junior high in those days. And I'm still friends with her. We were really friends. In fact, she ended up getting a job in Baltimore when I was in college, and we were friends. We hung out and stuff and she stayed at my apartment. And then, she got an apartment nearby and we spent a lot of time together. She was not a lesbian. I just talked to her, as a matter of fact. She lives in Maine, now. But other women that I was attracted to, there was a teacher in high school that I was so attracted to, and I spent so much time with her. She'd give me a ride home every day. I'd be at her house. We'd go to New York. She'd say, "I'm going to New York in the weekend, you want to go with me?" I'm like, "Of course." It was like a fantasy. And it was so easy. And I also noticed that she was touching me all the time. She would touch me in class. And I counted, she did it 100 days in a row that she would come and she would touch my shoulder while she was talking to the rest of the class. I'm thinking -- but anyway, apparently, things fell out because I thought that she would be more -- we had some arguments after I was in college, or maybe after I graduated from college, which was too bad. She died a couple years ago and I'm sorry about that because I thought she was a really fascinating person. She was a great artist. And she really influenced my development in art, to love art all the time. But we would go into New York and she'd go, "I want to go to a fabric store," she taught me about Art Nouveau, she was always collecting pieces that were Art Nouveau, and we would go into these stores. She was a Russian immigrant's daughter, so she could speak Russian. She was Ukrainian, actually. We'd go into New York and we'd be in these districts and people would call out to her. And they knew her name and stuff. I thought that was so cool. We had so much fun. And it was too bad I guess that we didn't continue that. Although, I think there was a reason, I think she was more attracted to people that she could push around than adults, because she didn't have as many older adult friends. And I also, in high school, was able to gather -- I went to a huge high school, Greenwich High School. At that time, it was three grades and had 3,000 students, so there was 1,000 kids in my class. And because of that, when I was in junior high, I've had friends and hung around with people who were artists, and they still are artists, but the people that I met in high school, I had a sort of 10 friends that were really close, we're still friends in some ways, we don't have as much communication as I'd like because we all live so far away from each other. But they were zany, erudite, interesting people. They were really smart. They all went to Ivy League colleges and they all really knew about things. They wrote music, and plays, we wrote plays all the time, and they did art. I was the one who was more in the Fine Arts, but as I said, we had this playmaking group called [The Quadnalescent's Players?] and teachers would come to us -- this was the way it was in the '70s. They'd come to us and they'd say, "Could you write a play for tomorrow night? Skip all your classes, write a play for tomorrow night, because we have parent's night and we need a 15-minute play that's funny." And we'd just do it. We didn't have to go to class or anything. School was so open. And it was perfect for me because you could choose a lot of classes. I didn't like math. I thought math was stupid. And it was, the way it was taught was a very stupid model for people. It was an impractical model. And the teachers were not great. And so, I had an opportunity to not take math. I didn't even have to take math in my senior year at all. I don't think I took it in my junior year of high school, even. I was finished with math when I was a sophomore in high school. That was true. And I was able to take all these art classes. It was a very affluent high school and there were all these different things. I could take print making, photography, ceramics, painting, and drawing, and watercolor, just a class in etching. That was how privileged I was. And I knew how privileged I was. I know other people just had the art teacher, we had six art teachers. And they were all significant in different areas. Charles Eames came and spoke while we were in the high school, and his wife, Ray, and they talked about their work. It was like, "We're not having class today, Charles Eames is coming to talk to us." It was brilliant stuff. And so, I was so excited to do that. And I spent a lot of wonderful time with my other friends who were just brilliant. And I realized that being smart and erudite was really fun. And so, I was learning about classical music, and I was learning about writing, and we were in English classes and history classes together, and jazz. It was really great, because it reinforced that. It wasn't a weird, obtuse thing. None of them were gay, though. And then, I went to college. I decided to go to art school, and I went to the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore. I applied to a bunch of different arts schools. I had sort of wanted to go to Rhode Island School of Design, but I didn't get in there so I went to the Maryland Institute, which was good because everything that happened in my life sprung out of going to Maryland Institute. I studied Woodworking and Furniture Design. I was in the Woodworking Department. There was a small department. And I also double majored in art teacher education, because I wanted to be an art teacher and I came from a big history of people who were teachers, so I loved that idea. And I developed friends in my department and I made a very, very good friend who lived nearby, and we had almost all of our classes together. Her name was Christine. And she was straight but she was really, really wonderful. Oh, one of the things that happened to me. When I was a senior in high school I got pneumonia, and then I had encephalitis. And I came very close to dying. I was in a coma for about 10 days and it took me about a month to recover. I was in the hospital for three weeks and then I slowly recovered. And a lot of my friends thought I was going to die. They really thought that that was going to happen. And the doctors didn't know what to do. It came from being overtired and having a high fever when I had pneumonia. Because I was working too hard. And one of the things that made me decide was, first of all, I lost my memory for a while. I couldn't remember telephone numbers. I couldn't move my hands as well. It took me a little while to be able to walk again. Encephalitis is an inflammation of the sac around your brain. And I realized a couple of things that I didn't want to do drugs and I didn't want to drink alcohol because not being able to remember and not being in control and not being able to speak even, at times, or order my thoughts, was frightening. And I thought, "Why would I induce that into myself? I never want to do that." And I had done a little bit of that kind of stuff before that happened to me, I didn't decide to do drugs or other things because of that frightening thing that happened to me. And so, when I met Christine Gaffney, when I was in college, right in the first week that we met -- we had to be in apartments, they didn't have any dorms at Maryland Institute in those days, which was really cool because I was a grownup. All of a sudden I had an apartment and I had to do my own shopping, and I had to clean and do my laundry, and go off campus to do my laundry, and get my own phone hookup and stuff like that. In those days, we had landline phones. It was really fascinating to suddenly go from being a very suburban, privileged young person whose mom did all the laundry to suddenly being completely on my own, in a scary city, which wasn't that scary actually, I love Baltimore, and to be in a place where I had to make all of my own decisions every moment of the day. And also, when you're in art school, as I said, everything you do is scrutinized and criticized. That's what critiques are. Every single thing you do, you put it up in front of everybody and everybody can say rotten things about it. And so, you get a really thick skin from that. It's a great thing in a lot of ways because, like people say, "I don't want to read any comments about myself," I don't really care. If they're valid, and if it's a stupid comment, who cares. People get so uncomfortable." I've been in probably 500 critiques of my own work through college and graduate school. It's what you do. It's not that big a deal. You listen to it, and you take the best you can out of it. You try to figure out how to improve your work and then you let everything else go. And I learned that right from the beginning of college. And I think people who don't learn that end up having problems with the fact that not everybody loves everything they do, which happens all the time to people, and it's a shock to them all of a sudden. "Why isn't everybody saying everything I do is perfect?" Art school is extraordinarily competitive. There is no right answer. There's no, "I answered all the questions that were on the thing, and I got everything right." There's nothing. You're always in competition with everyone else around you, all the time. And there's a lot of technical skills that you have to learn that you come away with from art school. Some people come away from college and say, "Well, I didn't really learn anything in college other than maybe being able to write better or something, or to think more critically," but I can say things like, "Yeah, I learned how to use a table saw and bandsaw and how to carve things out of wood and how to bend wood and how to weld and how to develop pictures in a dark room, which nobody does anymore, and I know how to make prints and silk screen," I've got all these skills. And I already had a lot of woodworking skills because I had done that in high school and through art, and I'd learned how to learn power tools. I forgot to say that, Shirley Jankovich, which was the one I had the big crush on, she said to me, "You know since you're so interested in woodworking you should go talk to this little woodworker guy that does stuff for me for my house. His name is Luigi Cappotelli and he's a master craftsman. Why don't you go and talk to him?" So, I went to talk to Luigi, who was in the next town over. I was 15 actually, when I met him, and he asked me to be his apprentice. Or I asked him. We ended up where I was his apprentice. So, I worked for him. I got about 20 dollars a week for working for him, but I learned a lot about woodworking from him. I bought my first table saw from him, which I still have, and use all the time. That was almost 50 years ago. And it was a pre-war, Sears, cast-iron table saw. I've taken it with me. It's in the basement of our house right now. And I use it all the time. And it's a big heavy stationary table saw. And I bought it for 50 dollars from him, I think I worked it off. But he did not speak English well and I would listen to the words he did understand, and then, when rich people would come in to get him to do work, like to redo their kitchen or something, they would say ridiculous things to him that he couldn't understand at all, and he would look at me and I would translate it into the words he knew. Like, one woman came in one time and said, "I don't want it to look like it's just gerrymandered together." So, I turned to her and I said, "First of all, gerrymander means to take apart." And I said to him, "Do a good job." And he had no idea what she was talking about. But we used to go into New York and install things in people's fancy apartments, and he made cabinets. But he made them out of solid wood, and it was very interesting. So, I had that previous experience of working with him. And I had worked with tools with my dad. I actually created a job for myself when I was in high school, where I would repair and build things for people. I'd build cabinets for people, and people would bring me pieces of furniture that they wanted me to fix and stuff. And I did that for years. I did it when I was in college, too. When I went home, I did it that summer as my summer job. So, I was in woodworking with Richard Breidenbach, who was my teacher. And there was another guy there named [Greg Comstock?], who was a part-time teacher. And he ended up getting another job at Jamestown Community College, which he didn't like, and after a couple of years after I finished my graduate degree, Greg Comstock said, "Why don't you apply for this job? I think you should do this job at State University of New York." And by then, I had my Master of Fine Arts in woodworking furniture design. So, while I was in Maryland, they had a GSA in my last year when I was in college. And so that would have been in 1979. But the people in it were so weird that I would see these people and be like, "I don't think so." I didn't know anybody in the group. But my pal Christine, I came out to her, and I told her about the crushes that I'd had. She had a boyfriend that we knew and stuff. And we had really serious talks about this. And we were really good friends, and we're still good friends. I just talked to her. And in those days, she said, "You know, you need to go out. Let's go to the Hippo." So, the Hippo was a gay men's bar, and it was pretty near the college. We used to go there at lunch, so nobody was there. I said, "This is okay because it's gay, but it's all guys." And so, one time we decided that we were going to go to Club Mitchell. So, Club Mitchell was the biggest East Coast lesbian bar. And it was right in Baltimore. And it was down by the docks. It had little cameras, it was all dark around it, and you'd drive around. First, we went the day before to figure out where it was because it was an industrial site there that you could never figure out where it was. So, we went there. The problem with going with a female friend is that, in general, women will not be as available to you if you're with another woman, which was a problem for me because I was looking for a date, bad. And I had really not been around a lot of women that were identified as lesbians. So, we go to the thing and it's just like this block building with a door, and a little light, and a sign about this big that said Club Mitchell on it. And one time I said to Faye Jacobs, "Did you ever go to Club Mitchell?" she said, "Bonnie and I had our first date there." Every woman in that area, women from DC would go there because you could go there very safely. This would have been like 1976, '77. I had a little car. So, we drove down. It was near Fells Point in Baltimore. And we went to the door, you'd need to knock, press a button, and then they'd look at you to be sure, first of all, that you were a woman, or a flaming gay man. They might let a flaming gay man in. But this was a club, so they didn't have to let other people in. And they'd look at you and then they'd buzz you in. And we'd go into this thing, it's an enormous, big open space. And there's a million dykes in there. It was just wonderful. And it was cowgirl night, so they were giving away for some wonderful reason, free cowboy hats. I still have that hat, as a matter of fact. This was many, many years ago. And Christine said, "Well, this is interesting." Because sometimes you could go to a bar, there'd be six women there. This was hundreds. There were probably 300 women there. The problem was, we didn't know anybody and that can often be an uncomfortable situation. But we sat at the bar. Christine used to drink quite a bit, and I didn't drink at all. I never drank, and plus I was driving, so that was fine. Well, you could drink when you were over 18 in Baltimore. You could drink beer or wine. I didn't drink. We saw these women and they were playing this music. Have I told this story before? This is a great story. So, I look across, and there's this row of women sitting on a wall, and there's a big dance floor but nobody's dancing, people are all shy and stuff. And this one woman turns to this other woman and she leans down, and she kisses her neck. And I think I came close to passing out. It was so hot. And I said to Christine, "If I never have to see anything else this will be enough to jerk off to for the rest of my life." It was so great. But I have to say that in college I worked so hard. I'm still tired from college. I'm really still tired from graduate school. There were days in graduate school that I didn't sleep for days, for three or four days I just didn't sleep. And in college I never had time to go out. Maybe after eleven o'clock, I'd have a couple of hours. I guess that's the way college is now, except I had to get up early for class, because our classes started at eight. And I was a teaching assistant for art history, too. And lots of things happening. I met a couple of women, the two other women in my department who are still my friends now, particularly Barbara Miller who is a wonderful person. She lives in Pennsylvania. And it was great to have other women in the department. There weren't very many people in the woodworking department, and when I graduated, it was just me and one other guy. But when I started in the woodworking department, when I was a sophomore, there were two other women who were just a riot. And they were great woodworkers, much better than I, and I learned a great deal from them and they were really free about sexuality, although they were not lesbians. But I remember Barbara saying to Samantha one time, and they were listening to somebody else and one of them said to the other -- they heard some other women say, "I've slept with about 15 or 16 guys," and Barbara said to Samantha, "Remember when you could still count?" It was so great that they had both had so many boyfriends, Samantha had actually been one of the first five women that had gone to an all-boys school. She said, "They used to line up at my door. And they would try so hard." It was a riot. This was before the AIDS days. In fact, it was right at the beginning of the AIDS days. And we did know other gay men. A lot of them died who were young gay men at the college at that time. Barbara knew a number of them and made their quilt squares and stuff. And they were great woodworkers and I kept in touch with them all the way through, and couple of other people and stuff. Anyway. Then, I decided that I didn't want to be just an art teacher in school, I wanted to be a college teacher. And I used to say, "I don't want to have to clean up vomit from a first grader. I just really want to be a college teacher." And that was smart. I think I did want to be that. But the other thing that happened when I was in college was I met an English teacher named Jean Ruben, and Jean became -- I had her for one class, and she lived right near me in Bolton Hill. I had a wonderful little apartment that I paid 95 dollars a month for in Bolton Hill that was two blocks from the school and in a beautiful view. It was a funky, little, weird place. It was tiny. But it was right in the middle of Bolton Hill, which is lovely. And it was in a building next door to where Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas would visit. One time I was reading about them visiting F. Scott Fitzgerald, who lived next door, in the apartment building next door. I'm like, "That was there." It was pretty great. And Somerset Maugham lived in that neighborhood and stuff, and the Kohn sisters. It was a great area to live in. Very arty. And Jean, I got to know her very well. And she was about 30 years older than I. And she also was not a lesbian as far as she knew. I think she would have been happier had she been a lesbian, or if she had been able to express that in her life. But I remained friends with her. I'm still friends with her now. She's in the nursing home now and she doesn't remember who I am. She's 92, now. But she was extraordinarily, wonderful to me all my life, and all the rest of my life. And she, I have to say, I'm sure she knew that I had a terrific crush on her and she didn't really dissuade me from that, but she never acted on it. And once in a while if I got a little too frisky, she would say, "Just cool your jets on this." Which is too bad, frankly, because I just wrote a little thing in Gay Journal, it was about coming out. And I remember I was in her apartment -- in those days nobody thought anything about having students in their apartments. I slept in her apartment. I used to come in, it would be so hot. This is so unbelievable, but when I worked in woodworking, one of the things we used to say is, "If you're not wearing work shoes and long pants and usually long sleeves, you're not there to work. You cannot work in woodworking in shorts. It's too dangerous. And you can't wear flip-flops because you can really, really hurt yourself." So, I always had long pants on. And heavy long pants. I would go to her apartment in the summer -- because I always went to summer school until I think one summer I wasn't there. I had an apartment, so I would stay there in the summer and take classes and then make money and stuff like that. And I'd go into her apartment. No one had air conditioning, and this is Baltimore. So, it'd be 100 degrees. One time it was 100 degrees in my apartment and I had a fan. I just threw water on myself all night. It was so hot. I go to Jean's apartment and I'd have a big, long shirt on, and then I'd have these heavy pants, and she'd say, "Do you want to take your pants off? Go ahead and do that." And I would do it. I would actually do that in my professor's house. I would go to her apartment and take off my pants. And Christine would say, "I can't believe that you can't see what this is like. You went to Jean Ruben's." I called her Ms. Ruben. It was just ridiculous. But she was wonderful to me and she helped me through lots and lots of things. And when I went to graduate school, I had a hard time communicating with the guy to get into graduate school and she told me exactly what to do. She said, "You need to call him up and this is what you need to say. He's not going to be upset if you just call him," because I hadn't heard back from the college that I was in, and she said, "He's the professor, not the college. They don't get to decide this. He told you you were going to be in the program. Call him up and make it happen." And she really explained that to us. She was very erudite. She had a subscription to the opera and to a couple of other music things, and she would take me. She'd have two tickets and she would take me and we'd go to those things. It was lovely. She was very, very sweet to me. When I went to graduate school, I would visit her. I would come back to go to my parents, it was so far. It was in Terre Haute, Indiana, and I would come back and stay with her, I'd stay overnight, and then I drive the rest of the way because it was an 18-hour drive and I'd often had my cat with me. And so, we would just stop there and stuff. She was very great to me. So, one time I was with her in her apartment and I was fixing a lamp for her because she couldn't do anything stuff like that. So, I was rewiring this lamp, which is one of my skills. And putting a weight in it and doing some stuff. And she was on the phone to her mother who I also knew, she had a very problematic relationship with her mother. And I fixed a lamp for her one time, too. And so, then she gets off the phone, and so we're just talking, and she said, "Who are some of your other people that are your friends?" And I said, "Well, in the building that I live in, when I was an undergraduate, I got to know these people," and she said, "Oh, I know Jay Walter," who was a Facebook friend -- thank goodness for Facebook -- and she said, "Now, he's an attractive guy. Are you attracted to him?" And I said, "Well, I'm gay." And she said, "Oh." And I said, "No, I don't think I'd be attracted to him." And she said, "No, you don't have to explain anymore. I get it. You're gay. Okay, fine." Well, she had a lot of gay friends, including other professors, which I'll get to in a minute. She knew lots of gay people. So, one of the things she told me was that -- people are always saying things to me like this. She went to Smith, and when she graduated right after World War II, she went to Paris, because she could speak French fluently and she wanted to just be an erudite young woman in Paris. She was very young. And she was not particularly attractive. I have to say that she's not conventionally attractive in any way. She had a great, sexy voice. But she absolutely was not something that some straight man would go, "Wow, what a babe." Ever. But she met these guys in a café, and she said, "Well, yeah, I have an English degree and I'm a poet." She wrote poetry. I published a book of her poetry. She's telling me the story, "I met these guys and they wanted me to come and work in this little magazine that they were starting up because they said, 'This is great,' and I wanted to do because this is a poetry writing magazine, and I wanted to do it because I want to be around these writers. I didn't know who they were and they weren't famous but I wanted to be around these writers." And they wanted her to be there because she spoke fluently and she could order the food. And they actually said that to her. And she could also type really fast. She was also a great poet. And I'm like, "Who were the guys who were starting it?" And she said, "It was Zero Magazine," which you should look up, by the way. "The literary magazine Zero." And she said, "There were famous people there," and she named a couple of guys that started. And then she said, "Then there was William Carlos Williams, and the main guy was James Baldwin." I'm like, "So, you're hanging out with James Baldwin every day?" So, she told me all about him and how she thought that really the hardest thing in his life was that he was gay. So, she's hanging out this them. She had all these stories about things. She came back to the United States and then she went to graduate school at Columbia to get her masters, and she was working as a secretary and doing typing, and helping people write papers, and stuff like that. And she said, "We used to go out to jazz clubs. I had a friend that was dating a guy in a jazz band. And we were in New York." This was the '50s in New York, and my parents were there in the '50s in New York, too, and it was all exciting and fun. And she said, "We went to this jazz club, and the musicians, two of them came down and sat with us, her boyfriend, and then they introduced me to the other guy, and his name was Charlie. Charlie Parker, do you know him? 'The Bird?'" And I said, "Yeah, I know who Charlie Parker is. Shit." And I said, "Well, was he good at playing the jazz?" And she said, "Oh, yeah. He was really great. He could play really, really fast." But she never really understood about pop culture. I don't think she could name the Beatles. She was just sort of like that and she would say things like that, all the time. So, she's hanging out with Charlie Parker in jazz clubs in the 1950s, and after she'd written with James Baldwin and was pals with them when she was 19. So, she had fascinating stories. And I wanted to listen to her. A lot of other people didn't appreciate this stuff as much. A lot of other people my age didn't always know who she was talking about because this was the '70s and they didn't know who Charlie Parker was. I was really into jazz. I had his records, for heaven's sakes. And I went to her poetry readings and I was just a groupie, totally a fan. But I continued to be friends with her. Anyway, I said that stuff about coming out to her and him and I said in this little story that I wrote in the Gay Journal, I wish I could say that then we just had this hot little moment together, or more than a hot moment together. But that's not what happened. Instead, we became really good friends. And since I lost my mother when I was very young, I mean, she stopped really understanding things by the time I was 25. So, that was just a few years later where she couldn't really -- and she was wonderful. She was a wonderful, interesting, fun, sweet person, but she lost her memory and that's everything. So, then there was Jean and she was great because also, my parents were terrible at helping me make decisions about my life. They'd be like, "Well, what are you going to do?" If I had a hard thing they'd say, "Well, what are you going to do?" They'd never say, "I think you should do this." I would say to Jean, "What do you think I should do?" I would call her and say, "What do you think I should do about this serious thing that happened?" And she would say, "I think we should think about these things and let's talk about what this means." So, one of the things I found so attractive about her was she was a single woman. She was on her own. She didn't have a boyfriend. She had had relationships with people but she would constantly tell me -- or I asked her several times because -- she was 48 when I met her. I would ask her when she was in her fifties, "Do you have regrets about your life?" And she said, "No, not really. I'm happy with my life. I like my life." I would ask her things like, when I was at State University of New York, I suddenly found out that they were going to cut out my program. And I'd been teaching there for six years. I was in a relationship. It wasn't going very well but I owned a house. I was tenured, so I had no expectation that this was going to happen all of a sudden. I had built the program up to something very significant, and all of a sudden they were just going to cut out the program. It had to do with stupid financial circumstances, and not the least reason was because I was a lesbian. And clearly, there were some issues that they had with that. They didn't persecute me, but there was absolutely nobody that was going to step up for this program, and it was too bad, because it was a jewel in that college's cap. But I remember saying to Jean, "Everything is falling apart. This is what I've worked for all my life and now I'm not going to have this." And she said to me, "You weren't going to stay in this place, in Western New York. This was a five-year plan. You were going to stay there for five years. Now you're going to go on another adventure. That's okay." I was going to move with my partner, who had moved to Philadelphia. So, I moved to Philadelphia. We'd stayed in an apartment for a while. She was in Philly and I was there with her, and things weren't working out. And now I said to Jean, "This is really not working out. Sasha and I are going to break up. I do have some money from my TIAA-CREF fund that I could take out. It's quite a bit of money. And so, I think what I want to do," we had owned a house which we'd sold, and I had a little bit of money from that, about 8,000 dollars, which was quite a bit of money in those days. It turned out I had about 30,000 dollars in my CREF thing, which was a lot of money. So, I said, "I think I should think about buying a house because if I have a house, even if I don't have a job, if I have a house, I'll have a place to live. I can piss this away really easily if I just use this on rent." So, she said, "Well, Wayne is in Allentown." And he was the partner of Arthur Miller who was a friend of ours, who was another teacher, who was a very good friend of Jean's. And I knew him, he'd been one of my teachers. And I'd done some work for him at his house. And she said, "Wayne is in Allentown. Why don't you go and talk to him? He's a nice guy. He's a sweet guy." I said, "I've met him." So, anyway. I did go and see him and he was wonderful to me. And he was lonely. And he said, "I want you to move here. If you fix my stereo, you can store all your stuff in the basement. I'll help you find a new house and then I'll help you fix it up," because he did that all the time. So, I looked at the back of the stereo, turned the on switch on, and then he went, "Yay," and then he helped me. I moved all my stuff because I'd broken up with my partner at the same time my mother had gone into a nursing home because she had Alzheimer's disease, which was very devastating. My dad was moving. So, I had to get all of my stuff out of the house. But I didn't have a house anymore. So, that was very tough. I packed up a lot of stuff that I wanted to have but it was very complicated. So, I really needed a house. My family needed a house. We needed a place to go for holidays. My sister was in the process of moving, as well. She lived in Connecticut but she was between relationships, too, and she didn't really end up having another serious relationship after that time. And I ended up talking to Wayne and moving to Allentown, and really, that turned out to be a good idea. And it was because Jean told me to do that. She said, "Go and do that. Don't worry about stuff that's happened in the past. That wasn't the place for you. It's okay." I think she was absolutely right. And she was saying, "You're young and you don't have to worry about that." So, what I said in the Gay Journal was that when she became older, she was wonderful to Trish. She was absolutely terrific. Every time that she was still cognizant when I would talk about Trish and how long we've been together, because Trish and I have been together for 33 years now, but I'd say to Jean, "Trish and I just had our twentieth anniversary or our tenth anniversary," and she'd go, "I'm just so happy that you found her. I'm so glad that you were able to hook up with her and have this relationship. It's such a good relationship. I'm so proud of you for doing that." And we would go and she came to visit us several times and stuff. But at the end of her life, she was in this little apartment in Baltimore that she'd been in all of this time. It was a condo and she owned it. She began to clearly forget things. We'd go to see her and she'd be walking on a street and she'd say, "I don't recognize this street," and it'd be her street that she'd been walking on for the last 30 years. And Jean's brother took care of her, and still does take care of her, he's five years younger. He said to me, "My wife and I are going to go to Europe and we're worried about Jean because I'm visiting her every week." And I said, "Okay, I'll visit her every week while you're away. So, I'll just go and visit her. I'll be sure she has enough food and stuff like that." So, we did that for actually a couple of months. But it was very apparent that she was at risk. She was over 85 by then. So, she would lose things. Here's a tip, don't buy black things for your parents because if they put a black thing down, you can't see it. If you put it on another black thing, you can't see it. Don't get a black address book. She would call me up, hysterical, because she couldn't find her address book. And she said, "I don't want that bright fluorescent green one." "Yeah, well, that's what we need to have, now." It's true for me, now. See? I have my phone, because my black phone I lost all the time. So, she called me up and she said, "I'm afraid," and I said, "Well, just talk to me." And she felt better after I talked to her and then she said, "Can you call me up now and then?" Well, I was calling her frequently, but I said, "I am going to call you every day for the rest of your life, so you can be calm. I'm going to call you every day for the rest of your life." And I did that for the next six years. And then she stopped knowing who I was and it was scaring her that she didn't know, so I had to stop. So, she's alive now, during COVID, she can't see her brother, she's in a nursing home, I haven't spoken to her in a year, it's a terrible situation. And I miss her so much. But she also can't remember what she's saying from the beginning of the sentence to the end. So, it's not like she's really there. But when she was in her late eighties, she began to express to me that she was not really happy. She did have a lot of regrets. And one of the big regret she had her life was that there was never anyone who wanted to team up with her, in her life. And she said that to me several times. And I remember saying to Christine, "Jean thinks nobody ever cared about her." And Christine said, "Well, why don't you tell her that you cared about her?" And I said, "I don't want to scare her, especially now." But finally, Christine said, "She's not going to remember it anyway," which is true. So, I did say it to her and when she said that again, I said, "You know, Jean, I would have been with you. I would have been with you as long as you wanted." And she paused for a long time, and then she said, "You mean you would have teamed up with me?" And I said, "Yeah, I would have." And then there was another long pause and then she said, "I was too old for you." And I guess she knew that. Maybe there was a possibility that that could have happened, but she had enough integrity to recognize that she was way too old for me. I have to say that she was a little jealous of Trish, particularly at the beginning, and she acted as though she and Trish were the same age, which is really not true. She's about 30 years older than I am, Trish is 12 years older. Not quite the same. But she thought, "Well, wait a minute." But anyway. So, she was wonderful to me through all of that time. In the meantime, going back to a little bit, when I went to Indiana, and I went to study under [Allen Friedman?] who turned out to be a complete asshole and ended up leaving after the first year, which meant that I didn't have a mentor while I was there, and there weren't any other woodworking teachers, so the people in ceramics who didn't understand anything about wood, there was nobody to teach me everything. And then, they got some part-time guys, and then they got another guy that was kind of an idiot. And everything about Terre Haute, Indiana was horrible. It's a horrible place. It smells bad. The water tastes like rotten clams. The college, they had a very good art department in a lot of ways. They had some big-name artists there. They had a few important people. They had a wonderful art history department and two of the art history teachers were very, very, very good to me. I was very indebted to them. And I minored in art history, and I teach art history classes now, and I taught art history when I was at State University of New York, too. so, I got a lot out of working with them. And one of them was gay, and he was wonderful. He was one of the first people who a gay professor that I came out with who really, really supported me. When I went to Terre Haute, I had some friends there. It was so cutthroat in the department that we couldn't even be friends with each other. The other graduate students just couldn't be friends with each other. It was hard. Some people left because of that stress. Some guys in the sculpture department left and just bought a pizza parlor. They just couldn't handle the stress. It was terribly stressful. I just wanted to get my MFA and get out of there. And it was very hard. It was the kind of high-level hazing that you have in the worst hazing circumstances in graduate school. And it was just awful. And I think of that as some of the worst years of my life. But two good things happened. One of them was that I got a wonderful little kitten that I had for 18 years, and the other was that I came out and I started to have really great sex with women, which was really fun. And there were two gay bars there, one of them was predominantly a women's bar, and there was a Gay-Straight Alliance there that I worked with. That was in the '70s. I did programs and stuff like that. So, I really have legitimate credentials that go back to 1979 when I was setting up gay awareness things at Indiana State. And I met a couple of people there in the gay community, in the lesbian community particularly, who were very, very interesting and fun to be around, and supportive. And I think I told you this story before, but after my second review of my work, I was just ripped apart by a bunch of professors who didn't know anything about woodworking, and didn't believe that people should make furniture, they thought they should make sculpture. I was in the furniture department. It was ridiculous. But I had had a horrible review. And I went to the bar, it was a Tuesday night. It had been very, very hard because I went to set up my work in a place where they could look at it, and it turned out that the elevators to take the work to the gallery didn't work, so I had to have another friend help me carry all the stuff up like two flights of stairs. It was pieces of furniture. It was really, really hard. And then I had this review and the things that the people said didn't make any sense, like, "Why aren't you making sculpture?" I'm like, "Because I'm in the furniture department." "Well, why should you?" because they all hated Allen Friedman. He was gone. And they didn't have anything to say. It was awful. There were rats in the building where we were working. I have an irrational fear of rodents, too, so that was very, very serious for me. So, I had this terrible review and I went to the bar, it was called J &amp ; J's this little bar. And I didn't drink, so I couldn't really going get drunk. But I went to the bar. I just wanted to be around queers. And I sat down and there were two women there. One of them I'd had a little relationship with, and the other one I was friends with. And so, it was Debbie and Janet. And they came over. And they don't know each other that well but they did know each other because everybody knew everybody in the bar. And they came over and they sat with me at the bar, and there wasn't anybody else in there. There was about six women in there. It was about eight o'clock on a Tuesday. But they were there. And they came over and they said, "What's wrong?" And I said, "I just had a terrible time at the college." They were both townies. So, I said, "You have these things called reviews and they come in and they talk about your work and they were just horrible to me. And there was nothing supportive. And they were talking about things that didn't make any sense. And they were just showing off for each other who could be meaner to me," it was really like that. And there were a number of other instances where that kind of stuff happened in front of the art history teachers who would later say to me, "Why are they treating you that way?" And I said, "Because they hate Allen Friedman. They hate him and they want to make my life miserable. Plus, I'm a dyke." And a lot of the students were having affairs with professors because that was a way that you could get good grades. And that actually happened, clearly happened, with one person who's my Facebook friend, now. But she had a relationship with several of the other professors, and one guy who was a professor actually raped a student, and all the other professors stuck up for him. It was just horrible stuff like that. I couldn't wait to get out of there. This was in my first year. So, Janet and Debbie come over and Janet says to me, she's a big dykey woman, she goes, "Do you want me and Debbie to go over to their house and beat them up?" And I just laughed because they weren't kidding. They were really going to go over. They would have turned one of their cars over. They would have done that for me. And I thought, "Okay, these are my people. These are the people who understand me. These are the people who I can count on. I cannot count on these people at the college. I can count on these lesbians. They are here for me because we're sharing this thing." And I suddenly felt a totally different feeling about this. So, I did go to that bar, or one of the bars -- there was one called Mothers, and there was one called J &amp ; J, and Mothers was a more mixed bar, it had more men and lots of drag shows and stuff. And then the other one that I went to was this little corner bar, but it had a dance floor. And I would try to go every Friday night. I would work until about nine o'clock, then I'd go out to dinner at this little, tiny Vietnamese restaurant that was in Brazil, Indiana. We don't call it Brazil, because we don't want it to get mixed up with the country, they would say. So, I would go to Brazil, Indiana, and I'd go to this tiny little restaurant that was in a gas station, an old, converted gas station. They had wonderful food and I'd spend 3.98 on this really wonderful dinner. And then, I'd go to the bar and I'd hang out there and I'd try and pick somebody up and have sex with them, which would make me a lot happier if that could happen. And it did happen quite a few times. But I also really decided that I wanted to be in a relationship. And my first coming out was meeting somebody at a bar and going home with them and just praying that this was going to go well because I hadn't been with any other women. And I was thinking that this was why I wasn't having good relationships with men, so to speak, let's say satisfying relationships with men. And I thought, "I'm really hoping this is going to work with this woman because otherwise I'm going to have to go to The Trouble With Angels and be in the nun thing." So, it did. And it was really great. And I thought, "Okay, this is the right thing. This is the right thing." And I had a relationship with her with for about five months and it was pretty serious, and then she dumped me for someone else. And that was really painful because it was the first time that had happened. But I also recognized that I had done the wrong thing in some parts of the relationship. I don't always think about that as a relationship that counted that much, but at the time, it seemed really devastating. I remember going to Charles Meyer's house, he was my art history professor, such a brilliant guy, lives in New York now, and I just came out to him and I said, "I was dating this person, she dumped me, but I want to go on another date, I want to have her to come over for dinner." And he goes, "Oh, let me." And he was a great chef. He started getting me all this food. I was in his apartment and he was setting up all this stuff for me and he's going, "Take these, this is good, this is canned white asparagus, but it's really hot and it's aphrodisiac-like, and you can have that." He was wonderful to me. He was so adorable. That didn't work out either, but I ended up having somebody who did contact me. In fact, I was at a party of lesbians and this woman sat down next to me. And I had met her before at the GSA. And she was very young. She was an undergraduate. I think she was a sophomore at the time. She was way too young for me at that time, for a lot of reasons. But she said, "I want you to meet my roommate. She saw you on campus. She really wants you to go out with her and she's going to write you a letter," because in those days, we wrote people letters all the time. And I wrote Jean a letter every couple of days. In fact, when my friend Christine was on junior year abroad in England, I wrote her a letter every day, sometimes twice a day. And she said, "My roommate here is so jealous because we get two postal deliveries and I get like a letter from you in each delivery." And she was writing me that way, too. I kept them all. I have stacks of those letters. But anyway, this woman, who's also named Jean, Jean Church, and she wrote me this beautiful letter to ask me to go to a play. And it was The Good Woman of Setzuan, it was a college play. She'd actually watched it already, which is typical for a lesbian to do, go to the play to be sure it's okay and then ask them to go to the play. "I saw the movie, it's all right. Now I'll take her to the same movie." And we went out. I sort of messed up on that date because I thought she really wanted to have sex and that didn't seem like something she wanted to rush right into. I ended up writing her a letter back and saying, "I apologize for that, let's go out again," and so we did go out again. We went out a couple more times, and then we started a relationship that lasted about two and a half years. So, what happened was at the end of my second year in graduate school, I was a teaching assistant, I taught art history, and I done that for the time. And I only had a couple of credits left. I think I had one credit left that I had to fulfill. I'd actually, during the time of working on my MFA, gotten letters in the mail. I'd get this letter that goes, "Now you have an MS," because I just took enough credits. And then, "Now you have enough credits for an MA in Fine Art." So, now I had a master's degree in Fine Art. I'm like, "Whoa." But my MFA was a 90-degree credit and that had a lot of reviews and stuff. So, I was still going through the reviews. But I had a legitimate masters. So, Greg Comstock, who was the guy who taught woodworking, he was the other woodworking teacher, not the main guy, but the part-time teacher in Baltimore, said, "I'm in this job in Jamestown, New York. I'm teaching woodworking here. I'm leaving the job. I hate it here. I hate it here because the clouds are too low." That's why he hated it there. And for a couple of other reasons, but one of the reasons was they wanted him to have a masters, and he didn't want to go and get a masters. He didn't want to do it. And he said, "I think you should come here. I think you should apply for this job. I think you could do it. And you have a masters." So, I applied for the job. And during that time one of my other art history teachers, Harriet Kaplow, who's my Facebook friend, although she's well into her nineties now, said, "I'm going away for the summer and my 15-year-old daughter," who's now a Buddhist priest, "is going to be here alone all summer and I would like you to come and house sit for me and live in my house, you and Jean," because Jean and I were together then. And so, I gave up my apartment and we did that. And I was about to graduate soon, I had a couple more credits to do, but I knew that I was going to have to make some decisions about what I wanted to do. But I got a call that I was high up for this job in Jamestown. And they flew me out there, I guess, to interview for the job. And I got it. I got the job in Jamestown. And I was very excited about that because I didn't know what else I was going to do. And that's exactly what I wanted to do. So, I went there and started to teach there. Jean and I drove there, and Greg said that the woodworking department was in a separate building that was actually sort of a big garage that had been converted into a studio at a building that the college owned that was a house, actually, where they put people up and had meetings and stuff. It was a beautiful old Victorian house that had this enormous garage thing that had been converted into the woodworking studio. And Jamestown, New York, has a history of woodworking factories. It was the biggest furniture producer at the turn of the century. At the turn of the 19th century, they had 119 woodworking factories there in those days. And so, 1981 I started the job, they wanted to try to revive that. And they still had a lot of factories there. So, I said to Jean, "I got this job, let's drive out there and then you can fly, I'll pay for you to fly back to Indiana." But Greg said that he was living in his office because there was actually an office upstairs in this building that had a full bathroom. It was a nice big space and it actually had been an apartment. It didn't have a kitchen but it had a place for one, and he said, "My bed is there, the mattress is there, bring some sheets and you can just stay there. I'll mail you the key." I don't even know if this was a legitimate thing to do, but I lived in that. So, Jean came with me, we stayed there a couple of nights. And then she left, and then I lived in that office and taught downstairs. I started in August and all the way through October, I did that. Until one day, when one of my part-time teachers was teaching downstairs, and I had the worst cramps ever, and I thought, "I don't want to be living upstairs when they're making power tool noises." Also, I was beginning to be afraid because I couldn't really lock the doors to my office and people would come in to clean the building. And I was nervous. And I actually jammed pieces of wood to hold them, because I didn't really feel -- I could hear people downstairs and it was creepy. So, I ended up renting a house. And then after Jean graduated, she came to live with me for about a semester, and then she got a job. She was a recreation major, which is kind of a funny thing, but it was like wildlife and she did camp stuff. That's what her degree was in. And they had a big program at Indiana State for that. So, she did her internship on Golden Pond. It was actually at Squam Lake in Vermont. And I visited her there. We were still together and then she lived with me for about six months, and then she got a job at that place, so she went there. And while she was there, she wrote me a Dear Jane letter and said, "I can't do this anymore." And part of it was that she had a lot of really serious issues from child abuse that she didn't want to work on. She just didn't want to talk about them and she didn't want to deal with them and they were affecting our relationship very seriously. And I kept saying, "You're in a place where you can get free therapy. Why are you not doing that?" And she just didn't want to do it. So, we broke up. And that was hard. I had a very good friend who's still my very good friend, I was just talking to her yesterday, who was another new professor at the college when I started there. And I remember telling her about that. She was straight but I remember telling her about that. And she was very, very supportive. She said, "She's not the right one for you." And then soon after that, about six months after that, I met another woman, Sasha Hovack. So, I dated some women. And then, I met another woman who was the head of the United Cerebral Palsy offices there in Jamestown, and we had this group of women that were meeting each other, and there was a women's domestic violence hotline, a lot of lesbians worked there. She was very interesting. I asked her on a date and she was much more excited about the sex, so that was really fun for that beginning of that date. But we were really not ultimately suited for each other. I think we were together for just about four years. We owned a house and it was quite a serious relationship. But when my job was coming to an end, because I talked about this, they cut my job out of the program, she had been working at United Cerebral Palsy then, that job ended and she was working at a big hospital in Erie, and she was commuting from Jamestown, which was a long way. So, she'd actually stay there for three days out of the week, and then she'd drive back. It was a good three, two-and-a-half-hour drive. And very rural drive. And Jamestown is a snow belt area, so it's very hard to drive around. There wasn't any highway to get there. But she was also in a relationship with someone else that I didn't know about. And she's still with that person today, which is interesting. She said she wasn't, but she was. She was living in that woman's house. And so, she got a job in Philadelphia and I moved all of our stuff to Philadelphia, and we sold our house in Jamestown. I moved every single one of her things, including the refrigerator, upstairs, and then she let me know that it was not working out, after I moved all of her crap and all of her huge pieces of furniture. My pieces of furniture, which I made, come apart for easy transport. Her pieces of furniture were just ridiculously huge. So, all this tough stuff was happening. I was in a bad relationship, my mother was going into a nursing home for Alzheimer's disease, I lost my job that I thought was going to be the most perfect job ever, I didn't have any money, I had to move to Philadelphia, that relationship didn't work out. It was a lot of tough stuff. And I was just turning 30. Sasha and I had gone to a party. We knew other lesbians in Western New York and some of them had moved to Eastern New York. And so, we went to a party and we met a group of women, and one of them was Trish. And I was still with Sasha then, but our friend Cheryl, who had the party, when Sasha and I broke up, Cheryl said to Trish, "Liz and Sasha broke up." Oh, and by the way, when I saw Trish, she was so hot I couldn't even look at her. My heart was beating so hard. And at one point, it was a Fourth of July party, so we'd had dinner, we had hot dogs and stuff, and then we were going to go to see the fireworks, and I maneuvered that she would go in the car with me and Sasha because we were all going to go and we didn't want to take all the cars. So, she was sitting in the front and I was sitting behind her and I go, "This woman is so attractive. I can't stand it." And I knew that this relationship between me and Sasha was not working out. I didn't know that she was actually seeing someone else. So, we both knew that this was not working. So, when I went back to Philadelphia because we had gone to New Jersey to this party, and then we were back in Philly at the apartment, and I had applied for a job to be the gallery director, or assistant gallery director at Moore College of Art. And I was very high up. And the person who was the gallery director said, "I absolutely want you to do this job." So, I thought I was going to get this job. And then she said, "We don't have any other good candidates. You're the one. You've got all the credentials." And then all of a sudden she called me up and said, "I'm really sorry, but they want to hire somebody else." I think it turned out to be the wife of a professor in the department, which had been typical in that situation. So, I was really devastated because I hadn't had a job. The money that we got from the house that we sold was running out. And Sasha's rent was pretty high and I was paying half the rent and I didn't have any prospects for jobs. And also, I knew this relationship wasn't working. So, I said to her, "I know that you're not in love with me anymore." And she said, "No, I'm not. I'm not." And I said, "Okay. Let me stay here until I figure out what to do." And she said, "Of course." And we're friends now. It wasn't it a horrible relationship breakup, except for that I had to move the refrigerator and I had paid for half of it, but that was the worst thing. There are worse things in the world. I mean it really wasn't bad. And so, I ended up, then, soon afterwards finding out that I could take all my CREF money out. So, suddenly I had 30,000 dollars, plus I had about 7,000 dollars leftover from our house sale. That's pretty much money. And I said to Sasha, "I'm going to buy a house," and she said, "I don't think that's a good idea, you're going to use all your money for that." I said, "Yeah, but I can always make money. The thing is I don't have any place to live. And I've got all this stuff. I don't want to just move into an apartment." I never wanted to live in an apartment again. We'd already owned a house. I really liked that. I had all my woodworking tools. My parents' house I couldn't move. My mother's in a nursing home, my father's going to move into a condo, I just didn't have any options. And I had huge power tools that were still in Jamestown that we had to move. I moved them into a friend's, Barbara Miller's house, who I had gone to college with. She had a big place in Pike County, in Milford, Pennsylvania. She was a woodworker and she had a big, big space and I said, "Can I move my tools?" She had an enormous warehouse thing in the back of her property that she did her woodworking in. She was a professional woodworker and I said, "Can I move all my wood?" I had wood, even. And she said, "Yeah, move everything in here." I moved my boat there. I had a sunfish boat. It's still there, unfortunately, in the woods with trees growing through it. But I did all of that stuff. I had all sorts of crap that I had to take care of, and Barbara really stood up for that. She let me use her van to move the stuff there. And I ended up having that money and then that was the thing where I met Wayne and I said, "I'm going to buy this house in Jamestown," and I did. And we still live in that house. And I had met Trish. So, Cheryl told Trish that Sasha and I had broken up. And then Cheryl told me that she told Trish that and I said, "What did Trish say?" And Cheryl said, "Trish said Sasha's an idiot." And I went, "Whoa, all right." And then, I got a letter from Trish, remember letters. No, Cheryl asked me to go on a double date with Trish and Cheryl and her partner, at that time, Donna. And they're not together anymore. But Cheryl has been in a long relationship with another person that Trish happened to have worked with in New York State, because there's really only about 100 lesbians in the world. So, we ended up going on this date. We went to a play in the Village, and then we went out to dinner. And then Trish and I, we were walking around, we went to take the train back to Cheryl and Donna's house. I owned my house then in Allentown. And Trish and I sat in the Penn Station and we quizzed each other on everything we could imagine for about an hour. What do you think about living apart? What do you think about being closeted? Because both of us had to have been closeted because of our other relationships and we really hated it. And she was really strong about that. And she said, "What do you think about long-distance relationships?" She said, "I don't believe in them." And we talked about politics, and we talked about kids, and we talked about all this different stuff, really fast, like speed dating in one date. And that was great. And then, Cheryl said that she was going to go to New Hope. And it was near Valentine's Day. I ended up going, and she said, "Trish is going to come." And so, I got to hang out with Trish some more. And Trish had made me a beautiful loaf of bread and I had a really sexy little present to give her, which was a little Christmas ornament that was grapes. It was old. It was an old German ornament. It was beautiful. And Trish said, "I took one look at that and said, 'Okay.'" So, then she wrote me a letter, and invited me on a date. And she said that I had to contact her. She didn't tell me her telephone number or her address or anything. And I said, "You know you didn't do that." She said, "I expected you to work for it." And I did. Because again, we didn't have the internet in those days, so I had to figure out how to do this. And she lived in New York State, Sullivan County. And she lived way up near Bear Mountain. The shortest way is a two-hour drive, but I went the wrong way, it took me three hours to get there. But what happened was at the same time I had had an opportunity. I had been in Jamestown, I'd gone out to dinner at the Chinese restaurant where I loved to go, and I knew the family that ran the restaurant, and the father of the restaurant came and said to me, he said in not very good English, he turned out to be a huge, big-time entrepreneur in Beijing, and his family, his brothers were some of the biggest wheelers and dealers in Beijing. They owned all these companies and stuff. He had actually started this restaurant in Jamestown so he could have a place where all of his relatives could come and get green cards. And so, I knew his daughter and stuff, they'd all gone to college at Edinboro State. So, he said, "I have a possible job opening for you at a paint factory in North Carolina, where they're having a lot of trouble communicating. They sell these specialty paints to people in China and that's my connection, but the guys at the company are so colloquial that they cannot communicate with the Chinese people." Because they would say things to them like, "You can't not never do this," and the Chinese people, who could speak English would go, "What?" And they'd say these wacky things. And they did it on purpose because they were racist, frankly. But he said, "Do you think you could do that?" And I said, "Well, I'm a teacher. If I know how to do it, I can teach anything." And it's in furniture. So, I was going to go to North Carolina. But Trish's date was the weekend before. I was supposed to leave on Monday and my date with her was on Friday night. I was supposed to leave on Tuesday, I think. And so, I went on a date with her, we went to this play, and Trish tells this whole story about this other student and stuff. This is such a bullshit, that is absolutely not true. I talked to somebody for like five minutes, and she was so uncomfortable about that. This was a student that was older than I was that I had happened to see there, and her partner was there, too, that I also knew, or previous partner that I also knew. And we went to this play. It was all about lesbian stuff. It was a lesbian review in the Village. We went with her old girlfriend, for heaven's sakes. And then, her girlfriend. Talk about that, that was problematic enough. So, it was her old girlfriend. Anyway. It all happened that I met Trish through Cheryl, because Sasha had introduced Cheryl to Trish, and then Cheryl fixed us up. That's how Cheryl knew Trish, because Sasha had been taking a course with Deborah, who was Trish's old girlfriend. That's the way these things work in the lesbian world. And those were all in Eastern New York and they all got to know each other, and then that's how Cheryl thought, "Trish and Liz would really be a good item." She was right. So, I had this wonderful date with Trish that started on Friday night. We went to the thing. We came home to her place where my car was. And we sat and talked for hours, and hours, and hours. And I thought, "She's not going to kiss me. I'm going to have to kiss her, because I really want to go to bed with her but I'm tired. I need to go to sleep pretty soon. So, this is going to have to happen before it starts to get light." You know that thing where you start to hear the birds and you think, "Oh my God, I've got to hurry up on this, it's twitter time." So, I thought, "I don't want it to start to get light." So, Trish had come home, she told me later, and taken a nap so that she'd be able to stay up late for this gig. So, finally, I kissed her which turned out to be the right thing to do this time, and she wildly kissed me back, and then we went to bed and stayed there for three days, which was really good. Really good for everyone, except her dog, who was very jealous. Her dog, Obie, who wouldn't let me go to the bathroom because, "Who is this woman?" But it turned out to be a terrific thing. But then, I had to go to North Carolina right then. And so, I went to North Carolina and I called Trish the minute that I got there. I called her as soon as I got home, and then I got in my van, and I drove down to North Carolina, it took 10 hours. And then after I got there, I called Trish again. And then, I said to her, "Could you come and visit me on Easter weekend?" And this was two weeks from Easter. And she said, "I have plans." And then I went, "Oh. Man." And she said, "But I just got a plane reservation to visit you this weekend." Not even two weeks. This is so lesbian with the U-Haul. So, she came. I went to pick her up at the airport. It was a long way away. And I knew that it would be dinnertime. So, when she gets to the airport -- maybe she'd told you the story. But she gets to the airport and she's not on the plane. The people are coming out of the plane and there's nobody there. Well, she had taken an earlier plane. So, she was already in the airport and I was running in. So, anyway, we drove back, we had a wonderful time. The whole thing that happened with Trish was so fabulous that in the beginning part of our relationship, I was just so overwhelmed by how terrific it was that I was afraid. I'm still afraid. I'm afraid of for when it ends. And if you're with somebody long enough, somebody's always going to be sad in the relationship because one person is going to leave. At the end of the relationship one person is going to die, that's what happened with my parents who were married for 42 years. Trish's parents were married for 75 years. We come from really great circumstances. And when I said to Jean Ruben, "I would have teamed up with you," and she said, "I was too old for you," she was right. But I learned from being with older women how to be with older women because that's one of the reasons that I thought Trish was so attractive. She was so capable. She was the head of Helen Hayes Hospital at the time. When I went in her bedroom, I looked over her bed, we were about to go to bed, and I looked over her bed, and she had a handmade copy, silkscreen, from The Book of Kells of a letter of a P. And I said, "That's from The Book of Kells." And I said, "Yes, it is." And she said, "I got it in Ireland." And I said, "Have you seen The Book of Kells?" And she said, "Yes, I have." And I thought, "This is a woman who has seen The Book of Kells. And I'm going to have sex with her right now. This is big. This is a big deal." This was the first time it had happened to me. And she had a book next to the bed, you know how people have things next to the bed for excitement, and it was drawings by [Keta Kellwood's?], of nude women. And I thought, "That's your porn?" It's like a really high-level artist drawing of women. I thought, "This is really, really good. I can't mess this up." Luckily, I didn't. And after five months, the job in North Carolina, the whole company closed and I got to come home. And we started our life together which was really wonderful. We were far away from each other but Trish had told me in our first conversation that she wanted to retire, because she had lupus. And the stress of her job, which was extraordinarily, it's a government job, running a government hospital, having to justify every penny you spend, to Albany, when they don't give you enough money, but when you're required to do certain things. So, she said, "I'm going to get scapegoated for something. I know that's going to happen." Anyway, after a while, and I think Trish talked about this in her talk, we decided ultimately that the most economical and smartest thing to do would be to move into this house, and we did that, and to be antique dealers, which was what I was beginning to do, because Wayne Camburn, he was an antique dealer and he taught me how to do that. And I could use my skills from being an art person to be an antique dealer, which is a very fascinating job. It's one of the few jobs in the world where the more you know, and the smarter you are, the more money you make. That's not true in most jobs. But the more you know, the more you know that this pocketknife is worth 1,000 dollars because they only made three of them, or this piece of art is by Gustav Klimt, and it's a real piece, or that this Hepplewhite piece of furniture is actually from the 1700s. And what we ended up doing is selling sterling silver, mostly, and we have the high-level collection of women silversmiths from the 1600, 1700, and 1800s. And it's very portable. I already knew about furniture that it's hard to move around, and it's not good for it to move around. But I could fix things, too. And so, we did that. And then Trish said, "Let's buy some rental properties, because I have a lot of credit," because she made a lot of money at that job, "And then we can run the properties," because that's what Wayne did, "And we can rent out my house in New York State," which we did, "And then we should have enough income to be able to live off of." And we did. And that's what we did. We did that for 10 years. It was very hard, actually, but also very fun. And then we started to do other things. We are at noon now. Do we have to stop or what do you think? MF: Well, this is actually sort of a good stopping point, although we're starting at the beginning of your life with Trish and Allentown. Would you be willing to do maybe another interview and start there next time? LB: Sure. And we can talk about that, and I can figure out anything else I forgot to say. I have to be sure that that's in there. Because there are a few other things that I didn't talk about, I think, that have to do with some other civil rights issues that I think are very important that we haven't touched on that had to do with stuff that Trish and I did. I know that Trish doesn't sing her own praises as much as she should, but the extraordinary work that she's done, and I have to say, I've done a lot of stuff. I couldn't have done any of these things if it hadn't been for Trish. She rescued me. Because frankly, when we got together, I didn't have any money. I was going into debt. And I had to ask her to lend me a lot of money. I asked her to lend me 1,000 dollars. And we had only been together for about eight months then. And five of them I'd been in North Carolina. Maybe it wasn't even that long. I was crying, and we were hugging, and I felt her go like, "I don't know about that." Because she had other girlfriends and she didn't talk about the other girls, so that's one thing I want to say. When you talk to older lesbians like us, frequently, this thing can happen. You can try this. Ask an older lesbian if she's ever kissed a woman that she didn't go to bed with, because they'll almost always say no. And I have a lot of friends that that would be the case with. It's not as true these days, but it still can be very true. It's certainly more true among women than men. And I've had women say, "Women have kissed me." I say, "No, that doesn't count. You kiss them." And people are like, "No?" Well, here's the deal with Trish. She's never kissed a woman that she hasn't had a five-year relationship with. And she's had four. So, she actually had three other girlfriends before me. When we met, she was 43. And they had really been tough for her. They'd all cheated on her. They'd all really done stupid things because she's so wonderful. But one of the things she said to me right up front was, "I am a jealous lover." And I remember one time after we got together I had a dream that I was having sex with Cher, and the in the dream, I said to Cher, "Oh, wait, I can't do this." And I told Trish the next day, "I had this dream that I was having sex with Cher but then I told her I couldn't do it because you and I were together." And then Trish goes, "You're an idiot. What are you, insane? That was Cher." I said, "Yeah, but." But anyway. The reality is that Trish made my life work. And all the things that I wanted to do right up front, we had a deal. And the deal was that I would put her first, which I have always done, and to see that she is the most important person in my life. That has to be the case. And it has been, for every minute. But for her, she said to me, "I will do everything I need to do so that we can learn new things together. And I'll love learning new things with you," because I'm always about that. And she said she didn't want to be in the forefront anymore. She'd been the head of Helen Hayes Hospital. She had to stand up in front of the New York legislature to justify the budget of a 600-bed hospital. She had been the head of a variety of different professional organizations for physical therapists. She had been at enormous risk for somebody throwing her under the bus because they wanted to get away with something that they were doing bad. She'd been horrendously discriminated against, based on being gay, at the hospital where she worked. And when I met her, up until just a few weeks before we met, every weekend she had had to go into the hospital because she'd had a physical breakdown from her lupus because she'd worked so hard. She'd get up at six o'clock in the morning, she'd come back at eight o'clock at night after working. Even when we were together, she would do that, at the beginning. And she couldn't wait to leave that job. But I think she told you that a new head of the hospital came in, and she was able to be the assistant again, to break that person. And that person was great. And during that time, for the next year, we were fine. And Trish made a lot of money. She was able to vest in her retirement, not get a retirement, but vest in it, so that between the time she was 45 and 55, if we could hold out during that time and manage to get through that she would start to get a small pension, it's not very much, it's about 2,000 dollars a month. She would start to get that pension, and both of our insurance would be covered, which is a huge part. We had to pay for our insurance for those 10 years, which was huge. Trish couldn't afford to let that go because she could never have been insured again because of her lupus. Anyway, I can go on and on about that stuff. But anyway, the significant thing that happened was that I couldn't have done any of these things. I couldn't have done what I did because I never was able to have the time or tenacity to be an activist because I'm too easily distracted by other things. And so, Trish has made it so that we could do all of these things. She's also incredibly, brilliantly frugal, so that we can live. The COVID-19 is killing her because she can't go get bargains at the grocery store. It really is costing us. I had no idea. Well, I did kind of, but it's really costing us a lot of money for her not to be able to shop because she really could make a big difference in terms of our cost. So, we can talk about other stuff but I did want to say those things, you've got that. I'm sure there's lots of other stuff. Oh, I had all these lists of stuff, here. I think I said all of these things. Yeah. So, my whole life before Trish was just getting ready to be in love with Trish. And that was really the terrific thing. And I do want to say that I had a lot of wonderful support for that, as well. It's been good. MF: Well, thank you so much. I think we could set up something for next week and start at the beginning of your life here in Allentown. I'm going to go ahead and just pause the record for a minute, and then we'll just sort of close out. But thank you so much, Liz, for talking today. Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile=