Liz Bradbury, August 3, 2020

Liz Bradbury, August 3, 2020

Liz Bradbury details the transition from The Valley Gay Press to Pennsylvania Diversity Network, providing the Valley with crucial information, meeting Adrian Shanker, and starting an LGBTQ+ community center for the Lehigh Valley.

Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives

Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives

2020-08-03

Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs.

video

LGBT-19

Mary Foltz

Liz Bradbury

01:31:12

5.4 August 3, 2020 Liz Bradbury, August 3, 2020 LGBT-19 1:31:13 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_20200803_video.mp4 1.0:|33(7)|62(9)|79(9)|104(13)|129(4)|158(3)|183(3)|206(5)|233(3)|252(17)|277(11)|302(7)|329(4)|356(3)|385(11)|414(8)|439(14)|468(3)|493(8)|520(10)|543(10)|554(11)|583(12)|608(14)|633(7)|660(7)|683(13)|708(12)|741(4)|764(17)|789(11)|812(13)|835(17)|860(15)|883(9)|908(2)|929(10)|950(9)|977(10)|994(13)|1021(9)|1048(7)|1071(4)|1094(3)|1115(12)|1140(3)|1163(6)|1184(13)|1211(5)|1234(5)|1257(12)|1284(2)|1309(9)|1334(13)|1363(5)|1388(8)|1413(5)|1438(4)|1463(11)|1484(14)|1509(13)|1534(13)|1561(2)|1586(4)|1609(16)|1632(12)|1659(6)|1678(5)|1701(9)|1722(14)|1747(6)|1772(4)|1799(13)|1824(10)|1845(10)|1864(16)|1885(6)|1904(10)|1933(9)|1964(15)|1991(7)|2022(8)|2051(8)|2074(12)|2095(18)|2114(14)|2145(6)|2170(6)|2193(12)|2220(4)|2247(3)|2256(10) 0 https://youtu.be/gFXnnMuRT_s YouTube video English 5 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with Liz Bradbury to talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. And Liz and I are meeting on Zoom because there’s a pandemic going on. Today is August 3rd, 2020. So, Liz, thank you so much for talking with me today.&#13 ; &#13 ; LIZ BRADBURY: So, glad to be here. 0 109 The Valley Gay Press LB: I can’t remember exactly what I covered in the last time when we were talking about Steve Black. I did talk about Steve a lot. And certainly, he was the one who got us involved with the activism that we did in the 1990s which was over a long period, and then well into the 2000s. One of the things that happened was that, in 1998, we began to produce the Valley Gay Press. 0 203 Finding Community &amp ; Sharing Resources LB: And by the way, I didn’t really mention this, but I really miss it and I think a lot of people miss it. I’m sorry that I didn’t get to continue to do it. It connected me and connected all of the different LGBT organizations with each other, and that was one of the things about Pennsylvania Diversity Network, too. We called it a network on purpose so that we could really talk about the relationship between all these different organizations. And if you look at the Valley Gay Press where we indicated the different things that were going on in the community, in the events section, because we always had the events section, there was a list and the communication information for all these different organizations in the greater Lehigh Valley, and there were over 30 of them. And there still are. 0 365 Transitioning from The Valley Gay Press LB: Well, what happened was that, and as I outlined before, that Steve became very, very hard to work with, and it just got harder, and harder, and harder to work with him and it was very frustrating. And we were also beginning to realize as time went by, and this was over a four-year period, that paying to print the paper was extremely expensive. The cost of the paper just went up and it would just double all of a the sudden. We were printing 800 papers, and they’d say, “This is 120 dollars,” and then the next month they’d go, “That’s 240 dollars.” And we’d be like, “Wait, it was 120 dollars last month.” “Yeah, it went up. And it’s not a lot, it’s just like two cents a page.” I said, “Well, yeah, but it was one cent a page before, now it’s double.” 0 462 Goals for the Community / Haven (run at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Lehigh Valley) LB: And we also felt that what we wanted to do was concentrate on bringing information to people and we weren’t going to try to do PA Gala because Steve was running it. And he wasn’t going to stop running it. That was the thing. He was going to continue to run that, and we were going to continue to run an organization that’s primary purpose was getting out Valley Gay Press. And also, other kinds of things. 0 617 Haven Facilitators / Facilitator Age Discrimination LB: So, we were involved in setting up Haven and we worked with Unitarian Church, and we were there for some of the first meetings of that. And I trained to be a facilitator. I was a facilitator at Haven for years. And at one point I was almost at every facilitator meeting. I had a little conflict with one of the people who ran the organization. And I thought that there were some problems with it because I actually didn’t think that we were trained very well. I saw that. I saw youth that had pretty severe problems there that the facilitator had no idea how to handle. And that was confirmed by other facilitators that were there, too, because there always had to be at least three facilitators there during the time. So, it was hard to fill those slots. 0 773 Instilling Pride in Out Haven Facilitators LB: They also had a training -- and I remember this, it was very stressful because Don Kohn was involved with it, a bunch of different. He was on their beginning board, and Tracy Denton was very, very involved in setting that program up, and she really did all the beginning steps to make Haven work at the Unitarian Church. And [Elsa Stole?], who was a member of the church, she really was the other person that made that happen. And it’s done great. They’ve met every single week for, what, 20 years. Every single week they do it. 0 1031 Starting Pennsylvania Diversity Network So, anyway, we had the Valley Gay Press and we couldn’t afford to pay for it and we were having a hard time working with Steve. So, we said to Steve, “We’re going to start a new organization, it’s going to be a 501c3, which is a charity that you can donate to and you can write off of the money. And we’re going to call it Pennsylvania Diversity Network. And Steve understood. We gave him a year to get ready for us to leave, and he was fine with that. And, so we started Pennsylvania Diversity Network, and Robert Roush, who was a development guy, and he now is running a big LGBT youth organization in Western New York that covers the whole part of that state, and he and his partner, Steve Olofson, started the Gay Men’s Chorus in the Lehigh Valley. And I said to Robert, “We will pay you to help us set up the 501c3.” 0 1214 Fighting Anti-LGBT Discrimination at JCPenney So, we had two numbers, our house number and then another number that now is my cell number. And people would call to ask questions about anything. They would call me and say, “I’ve been discriminated against. What should I do?” Well, I was the chair of the Human Relations Commission of the City of Allentown. I was on the commission for many, many years, more than 15 years. I helped to write the antidiscrimination ordinance because when we passed the ordinance, I was involved in writing it so I really understood how the ordinance worked. 0 1477 Providing the Community with Regional Discrimination Information LB: So, I would point out to them how to write the policy that would really protect people so people could be comfortable. People would call me on the info line and say, “I’m coming to a job at such-and-such a place, is this college,” and this has happened, “I’m coming from Princeton and I’m looking at a job at Moravian. Are they LGBT-friendly?” And at the time I said, “No, they’re not. They just removed their nondiscrimination policy. There’s no policy in the City of Bethlehem. You’re really at risk here. I wouldn’t recommend it.” 0 1660 PA Diversity Network's Purpose LB: And I would refer them to lawyers but sometimes the lawyers would contact me because they didn’t really know what the law said in Allentown. It’s not the same from town to town. And I’m very familiar with what the laws say throughout the state, and which laws are the ones that are really protective. So, we wanted Pennsylvania Diversity Network to be able to give that information to people. And we worked a lot on the marriage equality issue, which I talked about. And we also produced the Photo Project, which I talked about as well. So, we did that kind of stuff. 0 1811 Marriage Equality &amp ; Partner Benefits / Effect of United States v. Windsor LB: Did I talk about that one before, Freedom to Marry?&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: You talked about the Photo Project but you didn’t really talk around it, like what other activities you were involved with. &#13 ; 0 2067 Freedom to Marry / Spreading Info to the Community LB: And then in 2014, we got full marriage equality. And so, up until that time, the full marriage equality that happened in 2014 we did these Freedom to Marry things. And Pennsylvania Diversity Network partnered with Metropolitan Community Church to do these things. So, there was a protest outside, and we did that outside the courthouse. And I worked with Beth Goudy a lot about what would be the best use of our time to do this, and what would make the most impact? 0 2208 Making the Information More Accessible LB: So, Pennsylvania Diversity Network was speaking politically, and MCC was speaking from the point of view of a religious organization. And they had larger groups of people to do this. We made a video about it, and we put that up. I would speak to the press. Beth would speak to the press. I would try to have a Spanish statement, because I can read Spanish so it really sounds like I know what I’m talking about. I may have absolutely no idea what I’m saying, but I have a really good accent. So, people would fall for that. 0 2327 Collaboration between PA Diversity Network and the Metropolitan Community Church LB: So, we always wanted to be involved in that and we always worked with MCC, and then MCC would have a service, and I would usually speak at the service. And I usually would go for the laughs. I did a couple of really big laughs ones one time. And I’m one of the things I said was, “You know, we have a lot of different anniversaries when we’re a lesbian couple. And so, lesbian couples, we have all the times that we got married in the church, and the different times we tried to do Freedom to Marry, and our civil union, and our marriage, but for a lot of people, the most important anniversary is their first date, or their first kiss, or the first time they did it,” and people began to laugh. 0 2618 Working with the Community to Disseminate Infomation LB So, we did a lot of different events like that. I think we had some at our house. We were also really involved with ACCO, A Chorus Celebrating Women. ACCO is the name of a mythological woman singer, which is true, actually. But it also stands for A Chorus Celebrating Women, A-C-C-O with a woman’s symbol. And Bev Morgan was the founder and leader of ACCO. She’s a wonderful musician with a beautiful voice. And she had all these women. There was a lot of bi and lesbian women that were involved with ACCO for years and years. She ran that for a long, long time. And we worked with them to promote a lot of their events, or just to be at the events or help them with stuff that they were doing. Because we were very good friends with Bev Morgan and Sandy Fluck. And Sandy Fluck was the chair of the Education Department in Moravian. They live in Rehoboth, now. 0 2733 Meeting Adrian Shanker LB: So, here’s the story of meeting Adrian. So, Adrian was a freshman at Muhlenberg College. And that was in about -- he’s 32 now, so that would have been 14 years ago, so 14 years ago would have been 2006. So, I got a call from Patti Mittleman, I believe, and she was the one who ran Hillel House, and also was involved with running the organization that was really supportive of LGBT students at the college. 0 2806 Including Gender Identity in Muhlenberg College's Nondiscrimination Policy LB: So, Adrian calls me and he goes, “I’m a freshman at Muhlenberg, and I want them to include gender identity to their nondiscrimination policy because it only includes sexual orientation.” I said, “Okay.” So, this is in 2006. So, I said, “Okay, yeah. There’s no problem with that.” He goes, “Well, I want to create a petition to get everybody in the college to support this.” And I said, “No, you don’t want to do that. That’s not what you want to do.” Now, this is one of those few times that Adrian totally listened to me. He stopped doing this. He started telling me what to do, I think, the next year. 0 3173 Adrian's Molding of the GSA at Muhlenberg College LB: And when Adrian started at Muhlenberg, there was about 45 young people in the Gay-Straight Alliance there that they had. And he also did a really smart thing. He stopped letting them worry about changing the name of the Gay-Straight Alliance to spectrum or citron or whatever. Because it’s an enormous waste of time. The federal government allows you to call a group like that Gay-Straight Alliance, and they only actually support that, particularly for high schools. But the thing is that every time a group of college students wants to deliberate that, it usually takes them about eight months to decide what the name is going to be and then they leave, and next year, the next group comes in. 0 3276 Asking Adrian to the PA Diversity Network Board / Making Changes LB: So, after he did that for a couple years, we said, “Let’s have this college student on our board,” and he would be walking by our house. He would walk everywhere, and he’d take other students and walk by our house. He’d ring the doorbell and come in. And we’d hang out with him. Trish would always make him vegetarian food. So, he did that. 0 3535 September 11th Religious Healing Ceremony LB: So, now Adrian’s on our board. And I just want to point out one of the things that happened with that. So, we had September 11th that happened during that time in the beginning part of that. And it was devastating. A year later, there was supposed to be a healing religious ceremony in the community that was put on by the Council of Churches. So, they scripted the whole thing, and they told all the ministers what they had to say. They gave them the script. And one of them was Reverend Beth Goudy of the Metropolitan Community Church. 0 3771 Westboro Baptist Church Fundraiser LB: Well, one of the groups that picked up on this was the Westboro Baptist Church, Fred Phelps’s people, the God hates fags people. This is 2002. Now, I have maintained, absolutely, that these people are our best friends. And there’s a reason for that, and I’ll show you why. Because we could not get the Council of Churches to say anything. We couldn’t get any condemnation from politicals. The mayor of Bethlehem wouldn’t say a fucking thing about it. And we were mad that he wouldn’t say anything. This was supposed to be a healing ceremony and we get kicked in the teeth. So, nobody says anything. 0 4269 Televised Debates LB: And I would be on debates. They called me to be on the TV a lot of times. But they really screwed us on the TV a couple of times, because Adrian and I were going to be on a debate one time, on Business Matters and I said, “We will be on this debate about marriage equality, but you have to have,” because they were considering a Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage in the State of Pennsylvania. I said, “You have to have legislators on. You can’t just have some crazy street preacher who’s just going to scream and scream and scream and say, ‘You’re a giraffe,’ and ridiculous stuff like that.” So, Adrian had set it up. 0 4472 PA Diversity Network Advocacy LB: But that was one of the things that we did as Pennsylvania Diversity Network. We did political things. We did speak on political issues. We did actual advocacy with regard to people who had lost their jobs or who had been denied -- we would help people find lawyers that would help them obtain custody of their children or get second-parent adoptions. We advocated to and explained to people about the second parent adoption law and how important that was. 0 4627 Hop the Bridge LB: Even after marriage legal in New Jersey, we did a big effort, it was called Hop the Bridge. And we had a huge demonstration in Easton. We got three couples to get legally married. One of them was my previous girlfriend and her partner, which was 25 years before, he’s my Facebook friend, she said, “We want to do this.” And they’d been together for the same amount of time as Trish and me. And I said, “Okay, I’ll set it up.” She said, “We have a niece in Easton.” They live in the middle of the state of Pennsylvania. So, they came and we had two other couples. It was Jerry Schmidt and Chuck Woodbury, and -- actually, we did it twice. So, we had these different people that did this. I think that was the next Freedom to Marry thing. We took a bus over and did it. But there was a bunch of different ways. 0 4781 Leaving PA Diversity Network to Start an LGBTQ+ Community Center LB: Now, Trish and I had been doing this for 20 years. Both of us had actually been doing LGBT activism since -- I had been doing it since the ’70s, she’d been doing it since the ’60s, she was in on the starting of SAGE, the national organization for older LGBT adults. I was working on stuff when I was in graduate school. We had been working all the way through on civil rights stuff. And truthfully, we were getting worried because we were thinking, “Who’s going to do this stuff after we retire?” 0 4913 Raising Money for the Community Center LB: And then I told the story. And people stood up and clapped. And Barb Ross, who, her wonderful partner Kathy Bergey had died and she had this estate money, she said, “I’m going to make the first donation.” So, I said, “We need to raise money.” I said to Adrian, “After Barb makes this money, I’m going to call for people to give donations in the room. Let’s just do that. Trish and I’ll donate 1,000 dollars,” which was hard for us, because we didn’t have a lot of money. “But we’ll do this.” And he goes, “Okay. Well, I’ll donate 1,000 dollars.” So, okay, we’ll do this. And then he says, “Maybe we can raise 10,000 bucks.” He said, “We need to raise 75,000 dollars by October for us to do this. Maybe we can raise 10,000 bucks.” 0 5127 Looking for a Physical Space for the Community Center LB: So, one of the things was that the mayor said he would give us a building for a dollar. And the city did do this. Now, we’re running out of time here. But the city did do this. And they arranged to give us this building on Turner Street, and it was a dollar. It was really neat, because it was only half a mile from our house. And it’s a weird-shaped building. And so, in a nutshell what happened was, we investigated that building for a year. And we had architects and hazmat and we did all this due diligence and we figured out there’s no way in hell we can use this building. Among other things, it’s not just covered with asbestos, it’s made of asbestos. It was full of lead and asbestos and Adrian said, “The only thing that was living in that building was dead pigeons.” 0 5463 Closing Remarks MF: All right. Well, thank you so much for talking with me today. It was, again, just such a pleasure. 0 MovingImage Liz Bradbury details the transition from The Valley Gay Press to Pennsylvania Diversity Network, providing the Valley with crucial information, meeting Adrian Shanker, and starting an LGBTQ+ community center for the Lehigh Valley. INTERVIEW WITH LIZ BRADBURY AUGUST 3, 2020 MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Liz Bradbury to talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. And Liz and I are meeting on Zoom because there's a pandemic going on. Today is August 3rd, 2020. So, Liz, thank you so much for talking with me today. LIZ BRADBURY: So, glad to be here. MF: I'm just going to go ahead and do the brief consent and then we'll jump right in. So, do you consent to this interview today? LB: Yes. MF: Do you consent to having this interview transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in searchable formats? LB: Yes. MF: Do you consent to the LGBT Community Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, like films, articles, websites, presentations? LB: Yes. MF: And do you understand that you will have 30 days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review the interview, to identify parts you want to delete, or to withdraw the full interview from the project? LB: Yes. MF: Okay. Great. So, last time we talked a lot about the move to PA Gala, and then we moved to discussion of The Valley Free Press/Valley Gay Press that you had put out for 18 years. I thought today we could spend some time talking about the PA Diversity Network, which was the organization that you started after PA Gala. So, could you give me the origin story of PA Diversity Network, and what your aims were with that organization? LB: I can't remember exactly what I covered in the last time when we were talking about Steve Black. I did talk about Steve a lot. And certainly, he was the one who got us involved with the activism that we did in the 1990s which was over a long period, and then well into the 2000s. One of the things that happened was that, in 1998, we began to produce the Valley Gay Press. And at that time my dad had passed away and we had inherited some money and so we could afford, at that time, to pay Trish and I out of pocket to produce the Valley Gay Press out of our own pocket. So, we paid for it to be printed, and PA Gala mailed it to its constituency, our mailing list for PA Gala. And it was a very welcome piece of information for people to get. We also were making people aware of the kinds of political activism they could do, particularly with regard to the passage of the ordinance, the passage of the hate crimes bill, voting information, that kind of stuff was all included. And then, the Valley Gay Press, which was fun to read. And the Valley Gay Press was such an important thing for me. And by the way, I didn't really mention this, but I really miss it and I think a lot of people miss it. I'm sorry that I didn't get to continue to do it. It connected me and connected all of the different LGBT organizations with each other, and that was one of the things about Pennsylvania Diversity Network, too. We called it a network on purpose so that we could really talk about the relationship between all these different organizations. And if you look at the Valley Gay Press where we indicated the different things that were going on in the community, in the events section, because we always had the events section, there was a list and the communication information for all these different organizations in the greater Lehigh Valley, and there were over 30 of them. And there still are. If you look at all the GSAs, if you look at the colleges, if you look at the churches that are really doing significant things like MCC, or the Quaker church, or the Unitarian Church that had specific programs for LGBT people, if you look in everything from the Gay Men's Chorus to, at the time, the sports organization, there was a sports organization, now we have all these youth groups that are happening, Haven came up during that time. We had, of course, Pride, and a bunch of other things that were happening, lots of different things that MCC was doing and within MCC, they had other organizations that were involved. There were other religious organizations. There was a Catholic organization. And then, once we did the outreach to Berks County, because Trish mentioned that last time, we got this grant to do outreach to do Berks County, we included all the Berks County organizations. And there was a bunch of different organizations in Berks County. There was an organization called "The Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Reading and Allentown." And it was this social group that just hung out and we had events here, we'd just invite all these people and they'd just come and make friends and stuff like that. So, we had all these different groups. And the thing is, that people didn't know those groups existed. And today, people don't know these groups exist. People come to us and say they didn't even know there was a community center. They didn't know there was an LGBT organization at Lehigh University. They didn't know there was the Gay Men's Chorus. They didn't know that there was a Pride Festival. And so, all of those things we felt were really important to emphasize in Valley Gay Press. Well, what happened was that, and as I outlined before, that Steve became very, very hard to work with, and it just got harder, and harder, and harder to work with him and it was very frustrating. And we were also beginning to realize as time went by, and this was over a four-year period, that paying to print the paper was extremely expensive. The cost of the paper just went up and it would just double all of a the sudden. We were printing 800 papers, and they'd say, "This is 120 dollars," and then the next month they'd go, "That's 240 dollars." And we'd be like, "Wait, it was 120 dollars last month." "Yeah, it went up. And it's not a lot, it's just like two cents a page." I said, "Well, yeah, but it was one cent a page before, now it's double." And we were printing, then, front and back so that counted. We were printing the equivalent of legal sheets, and some places wouldn't print legal-sized sheets. So, anyway, the cost was getting very high. And one of the things about PA Gala was that PA Gala was a 501c4 organization, which means that it endorsed candidates. And if you endorsed candidates, if that's the kind of organization, you can't be a charity and you can't get sponsorships. PPL isn't going to give money to a PAC, or it wasn't a PAC, but they're not going to give money to a political organization. They want to give money to charity so they can write it off. And we also felt that what we wanted to do was concentrate on bringing information to people and we weren't going to try to do PA Gala because Steve was running it. And he wasn't going to stop running it. That was the thing. He was going to continue to run that, and we were going to continue to run an organization that's primary purpose was getting out Valley Gay Press. And also, other kinds of things. So, the other kinds of things that we wanted to do was to go and speak on LGBT issues, to help other organizations establish themselves, and continue to run with specific missions that were specific, like Haven. We were really involved in the beginnings of Haven and setting up Haven at the Unitarian Church. There had been another organization that Steve Libby had been involved with through Valley Youth House, that had been the first LGBT youth group in the Lehigh Valley that Steve Libby started, and Robert Roush was involved in that. And that was at Valley Youth House. There were a lot of problems with it. It turned out that the guy that was running Valley Youth House, he made statements to us that sounded as though he was thinking that most gay men were pedophiles. At least he said, "Most people presume that all gay men are pedophiles," that's what he said to us. And he said, "We have to fight that every day." And I said, "Well, I don't know what you mean by that." And he said a lot of other things that implied, and this was a long time ago, this was 20 years ago, that Valley Youth House presumed that any kid that was LGBT had severe mental health problems. Now, lots of kids that are LGBT have the stress, minority stress issues, but they're not abnormally affected by the fact that because they're LGBT. And he was likening them too -- he actually said this to us, "I'm part of a parents' group that the parents have lost a child to an accident or violence," and I said, "And that's the same as being gay? Is that what you think that means?" And he sort of said, "Well, you know, there's a lot of stress." I said, "Well, sometimes, not everybody feels that stress. That stress is external. It's not the same." Anyway. So, we were involved in setting up Haven and we worked with Unitarian Church, and we were there for some of the first meetings of that. And I trained to be a facilitator. I was a facilitator at Haven for years. And at one point I was almost at every facilitator meeting. I had a little conflict with one of the people who ran the organization. And I thought that there were some problems with it because I actually didn't think that we were trained very well. I saw that. I saw youth that had pretty severe problems there that the facilitator had no idea how to handle. And that was confirmed by other facilitators that were there, too, because there always had to be at least three facilitators there during the time. So, it was hard to fill those slots. But so, I did that for a long time. And I was concerned about that. And that was one of the reasons that we started our youth group, because the people who were at Haven, and I know that there were a lot of people that were very, very serious about, and very concerned about the youth, but they didn't have any training. Many of them didn't have any training. They also had some policies that, we felt, was pretty discriminatory, blatantly illegal, that they were discriminating against people who, because of minority status, to be Haven volunteers. A lot of it had to do with age. They said, "Anybody under 25 can't be a facilitator." I said, "I was a college teacher when I was 25. How can you say that? In the City of Bethlehem, it's against the law to discriminate against people based on age. So, you can't do that." And they said, "But what if somebody has a relationship with somebody who's 21?" I said, "Well, that's your training issue." That's like saying, "Well, if we have Black people, what if they're thieves?" Yeah, what if they're not? You can't just presume that somebody's going to be inappropriate because they're a minority. That's completely discriminatory. And I had a conflict with them. I said, "I'm not going to list you in the Valley Gay Press if you continue to have this policy because it's going against our nondiscrimination policy. We don't discriminate against people based on age. If you think that someone is going to be too young, you can say they have to have experience. But if this person is a high school teacher, how can you say that they can't be around a person who's 18? That's ridiculous." They also had a training -- and I remember this, it was very stressful because Don Kohn was involved with it, a bunch of different. He was on their beginning board, and Tracy Denton was very, very involved in setting that program up, and she really did all the beginning steps to make Haven work at the Unitarian Church. And [Elsa Stole?], who was a member of the church, she really was the other person that made that happen. And it's done great. They've met every single week for, what, 20 years. Every single week they do it. The problem was that at the beginning they had this training, so I had to go to the training. Trish and I were both at the training. And they had a form that we had to fill out, which was fine. And we had to fill out this stuff, and we had to apply to be a facilitator. One of the things you had to do was, you had to have three letters of recommendation, or at least references, that they could check of people that had known you for more than 10 years. I said, "Fine, that's fine." And then, it said, "Don't worry, we won't tell them that you're working with an LGBT youth group." So, I said, "Why are you saying that?" And they said, "Well, we don't want to out anybody." I said, "But what if the person who is applying is a homophobe? Don't you want to be sure?" And they said, "Well, we don't want to out anybody." I said, "Well, isn't it kind of a requirement for a person who is working with LGBT youth to be honest about their sexual orientation and gender identity? Isn't that what we want, role models for them?" They said, "No, we don't want to have to have people out themselves." I said, "Okay, well, I don't agree with that at all. I think that's wrong." I remember this. And some of the straight people who were involved with this -- and including Don and Melinda Kohn, this is a long, long time ago. I remember Melinda Kohn saying, "Well, what if somebody doesn't want to out themselves?" Then they said, "They shouldn't be a facilitator. That's all it is to it." If a kid says to them, "Well, are you gay?" are they going to lie? Or are they going to say, "I don't want to say?" because if they say, "I don't want to say, you're instilling in some queer youth that it's bad to be queer, and that you should hide, and that you don't have the tenacity to say, 'Sure.'" So, Scott Lauoner, who always wrote for our paper, he wrote "Scotty in the City", and he was a wonderful advocate, and he lives in New York now and I still hear from him all the time, he works with SAGE and a bunch of stuff like that. So, he and I and Trish and Melinda Kohn and a bunch of other people were standing outside of the Unitarian Church. It was in the summer. We were having this discussion, and Melinda turns to Scott, and she says, "Well, I know that Liz and Trish are out to everybody, but lots of LGBT people aren't out to everybody." She turns to Scott and she says, "You're not out to all of your family members." And Scott goes, "I have some third cousins in Arkansas that don't know that I'm gay. But that's about it." And I think that's the kind of deal. I mean, he was a young Republican, although a very progressive one, I doubt he's a Republican now, and he'd been on the Human Relations Commission as an out gay man. And this was 20 years ago. He was the first out gay person on the Human Relations Commission in the City of Allentown. And he wrote in the paper and he didn't care. And Steve Ziminsky, I just interviewed him for a COVID thing, he was a schoolteacher and people would say, "I'm a schoolteacher," I'd say, "Steve's a schoolteacher. He's written letters to the editor where he outed himself, and he doesn't care. He wants youth to know." He wrote this whole thing, like a kid asked him to go to his installation as an Eagle Scout, and he wrote this whole thing about how the Boy Scouts were discriminatory and how he was very proud of this kid to do all these things. But, and then he outed himself in The Morning Call. So, we wanted kids to be proud of our LGBT elders, of our ancestors, of our heritage. And we didn't feel that Haven, at that time, really got that because it was being set up by people that weren't queer, and we didn't feel that they understood. But we worked with them for a long time. So, anyway, we had the Valley Gay Press and we couldn't afford to pay for it and we were having a hard time working with Steve. So, we said to Steve, "We're going to start a new organization, it's going to be a 501c3, which is a charity that you can donate to and you can write off of the money. And we're going to call it Pennsylvania Diversity Network. And Steve understood. We gave him a year to get ready for us to leave, and he was fine with that. And, so we started Pennsylvania Diversity Network, and Robert Roush, who was a development guy, and he now is running a big LGBT youth organization in Western New York that covers the whole part of that state, and he and his partner, Steve Olofson, started the Gay Men's Chorus in the Lehigh Valley. And I said to Robert, "We will pay you to help us set up the 501c3." It's pretty complicated to do it. And he was a development director in a lot of different places and he knew how to do it. And so, he did it. But he said, "I really think this is great you're doing it." I think we said. "We'll give you 400 dollars to do this." We had the money then. And he said, "I will donate it back to the organization." So, he did that. But he set up the 501c3, which is complicated to do. But when you do that, you have to do it at right at the beginning of an organization because if you run an organization for a long time, and then try to set up the 501c3, it's quite hard to do that. So, we set up the 501c3, we got an immediate okay from the government that said that we could run it, which was provisional, and then we began to run it later. I was the executive director ; Trish was the chair of the board. She did all of the membership stuff. She did all the financials. It was a herculean task. And one of the things we did was, we represented on a lot of different other organizations. So, we worked with other organizations, we helped other organizations, we helped with Pride, we always were at Pride, we helped to try to get information to the community at Pride Festivals, and lots of Pride Festivals and different events about how people could lobby their state representatives and state senators and other elected officials to support LGBT issues, which is not actually a political thing. That's a legitimate thing for a 501c3 to do, to talk about issues and then have people support issues. So, so one of the things we did what we worked on Lehigh Valley Health Network to add sexual orientation and gender identity to their nondiscrimination policy. And we were successful with that. And we worked on St. Luke's to do domestic partner benefits. And we used the Valley Gay Press and the organization to do that. I also ran the info line and I've been running this info line for 25 years, and I still do it. It's running right now. And people would call us, at our number, we had a specific number for a while, and then I just said, "Let's just use my telephone number, what the heck." So, we had two numbers, our house number and then another number that now is my cell number. And people would call to ask questions about anything. They would call me and say, "I've been discriminated against. What should I do?" Well, I was the chair of the Human Relations Commission of the City of Allentown. I was on the commission for many, many years, more than 15 years. I helped to write the antidiscrimination ordinance because when we passed the ordinance, I was involved in writing it so I really understood how the ordinance worked. I also knew other kinds of ways that people could challenge instances of discrimination through other things because when people are discriminated against regularly on the job, it almost always falls into the circumstance of sexual harassment. And if it is sexual harassment, then it's against the law and it's been against the law since the 1980s. So, I had a call from a guy -- and this was before we passed the ordinance -- who said that he worked at a major chain pharmacy which is actually owned by JCPenney, and it's a well-known pharmacy. And he was a manager, but he had a higher-level supervisor. The supervisor was constantly saying things that were very rude to him, including writing him emails that said things like, "Hey, at the Pride Festival, you could get a date down there and you could probably get a lot of dick down there," and stuff like that. Well as soon as you say something about somebody's sex life, it's absolutely sexual harassment. And if it's happening from your boss, it doesn't matter whether it's same sex or opposite sex. So, I said, "Do you have any witnesses?" And he goes, "Oh, I have the emails." I said, "The guy wrote you the emails?" He goes, "Well, he put them in the trash but he doesn't know that you could just look in the trash. So, I took them out of the trash and I copied them so I have copies of them." I said, "So, you have copies of this guy saying you can get dick at the Pride Festival." He said, "Yeah. And then he put posters on the wall about it and stuff like that." Well, this really affected this guy's health. He said, "I've had heart palpitations. I have a heart condition." So, I contacted JCPenney, the highest level of people and I said these things had happened to him, and we had documented proof of that, and I was on the Human Relations Commission. Well, that was before we had the law. That would have been in 2000. I said, "I'm part of this organization, we're a civil rights organization. I'm advocating for this guy. He's going to sue you. He's got health problems. It's exacerbated his health problems." They got back to me within two days. And I said, "This is blatant sexual harassment," and they said, "What does he want?" And I said, "He wants this employee to be gone. He wants a new supervisor. He wants some time off. He wants healthcare, to be sure that his healthcare recognizes this," and a bunch of other things. And they did it within a couple of days. But he thought that it was going to be some other kind of thing. He didn't know how to proceed with that. And we had loads and loads of instances like that, where people would say, "This company has a policy that looks like it's really anti-gay but they don't mean to say that." And I've mentioned this in another thing where policies would say, "We don't discriminate based on the law," and wow, yeah, that's really altruistic of you that you don't do something that's illegal. That's not exactly something to laud. So, I would point out to them how to write the policy that would really protect people so people could be comfortable. People would call me on the info line and say, "I'm coming to a job at such-and-such a place, is this college," and this has happened, "I'm coming from Princeton and I'm looking at a job at Moravian. Are they LGBT-friendly?" And at the time I said, "No, they're not. They just removed their nondiscrimination policy. There's no policy in the City of Bethlehem. You're really at risk here. I wouldn't recommend it." One time, we had a guy who called me who was the spouse, but they weren't legally married because it's before marriage equality, of a neonatal surgeons that was coming to Lehigh Valley Health Network and he said, "Do they have domestic partner benefits there?" And I said, "They do not. They do not and we've been lobbying them for a long, long time." This is, again, before marriage equality. They did pass their thing, and as a matter of fact, they passed it because of this. So, I said, "What's your partner going to do?" And he said, "Well, we have two kids," and he told me this whole thing. I gave him all this stuff. I said, "Here's a good pediatrician, and here's a good school, they could go to United Friends School, it's really terrific but we have this nondiscrimination policy at the City of Allentown, but they don't give domestic partner benefits." And he said, "Well, I'm proud of the fact that he's a star. I mean a neonatal surgeon? Somebody that's doing that kind of work, that's the kind of thing that a big healthcare system has a feather in their cap." I said, "Okay. Well, do me a favor. I'm sure, in fact I know that you can get them to give you the benefits through him. Do not accept that. Say to them, 'We won't accept that unless you give everybody these benefits.'" And they did. They did it. And they did it for a bunch of reasons. I also threatened them with Money Magazine, I talked about that before. But that was something that we would do. So, I would get calls. I remember before Equality Pennsylvania was a statewide organization, it was a Philadelphia organization, and before that, it was called Lesbian And Gay Legal something, it was a group of lawyers. And they would deal with discrimination issues. And they had a bunch of interns. I was talking to them and they said, "We have like five people that field phone calls that have questions about discrimination and other LGBT issues." I said, "I do that, too." They said, "How many calls do you get?" I said, "I get about an average of a call a day. Sometimes it's three calls in one day and then not, but it comes out to be maybe one every two days." And then I said, "How many do you do?" And they said, "Two a day." And they had five people working on this stuff. And I would refer them to lawyers but sometimes the lawyers would contact me because they didn't really know what the law said in Allentown. It's not the same from town to town. And I'm very familiar with what the laws say throughout the state, and which laws are the ones that are really protective. So, we wanted Pennsylvania Diversity Network to be able to give that information to people. And we worked a lot on the marriage equality issue, which I talked about. And we also produced the Photo Project, which I talked about as well. So, we did that kind of stuff. And then we did all these other programs. So, our house is a big open space, and so, we actually had art shows in our house. And we did that once a year. We did that, I think, for four or five years until they realized that there was a little bit of an insurance issue there. We were probably a little bit at risk. And that was a fundraiser but it was also really fun. Trish made wonderful food and there would be all these people looking at all this art in the walls because it's big open gallery spaces on the second floor and the first floor of our house. And we used the living room and stuff. We had six or seven artists displaying their work, and a lot of crafts. It was really great. It was very exciting. As I said, we worked right from the beginning with Haven. We worked right from the beginning with the Gay and Lesbian Taskforce. And I doubt that anybody is talking about that taskforce but one of the things that the Gay and Lesbian Taskforce, and they started in 1998, did was -- in fact, it's the only thing they did because they only lasted about six months -- but they created a survey of 900 people that they actually surveyed and tabulated and analyzed, and I don't know where that is, but it might be in the archives. So, if anybody makes any reference to this survey that the Lehigh Valley Taskforce did, [Chris Bose?] was really involved with that, and [Renee Bennett?], and they're still together and they're still in the Lehigh Valley. They may have that survey and that information. It's really an interesting snapshot of 900 identified queer people and how they felt about things in 1998. Very interesting thing to see what would come out of that. We also worked up with MCC on loads and loads of stuff. And one of the things was the Freedom to Marry events that we had. And I think I talked about that before as well. We did a lot of things with Freedom to Marry that had to do with speaking publicly. Did I talk about that one before, Freedom to Marry? MF: You talked about the Photo Project but you didn't really talk around it, like what other activities you were involved with. LB: Okay. So, one of the things that happened with Freedom to Marry, and I think it started about seven years before we got marriage equality. So, we got full marriage equality in the State of Pennsylvania in May of 2014. And anybody that was legally married in any other state, and Trish and I had been married in Connecticut in 2009, we got that full marriage equality in 2014. In 2012, we got federal marriage equality based on the Windsor case, Edie Windsor's case. And so, in 2012 if people were legally married in other states, then some federal benefits would come to them, including that I was getting Trish's domestic partner health benefits at that time through her job at New York State. She was retired, but I got the health benefits. But we had to pay tax on those benefits as though it was money that she was earning. And it was a lot of money. So, we paid about 1,000 dollars a year for those benefits. But when the Windsor case came down through the Supreme Court, which had to do with certain federal benefits, and we're about to learn about Edie Windsor. I'm going to talk about how significant this was, because only Edie Windsor could have made this happen. There's almost no one else in the whole country that could have made the Windsor case happen. And every marriage benefit we got came out of that case. But only Edie Windsor could have done it. And it has to do with how much money she inherited from Thea Speyer. The Windsor case determined that the federal government should recognize benefits for people who were married in other states, in some instances, and who were married in their own states, fully. And in other countries, because Edie Windsor and Thea Speyer were married in Canada, so they have a reciprocal agreement with the United States. So, Trish and I were married in 2009, so in 2012, we didn't have to pay 1,000 dollars a year on the healthcare benefits that I was getting through her domestic partner benefits. They recognized our marriage. And that was a big deal because 1,000 dollars was a lot of money to us. We also recognize that at that point that from that moment on in 2012, if Trish died before me, I would get her pension. And that wouldn't have happened. Well, actually, New York state had that caveat, but everybody that had a federal regulated pension, which is pretty much every pension, so the pension you get, TIAA-CREF pension or something like that, that would all have been covered for anybody that was legally married. So, I was just interviewing somebody who said, "What's the financial benefit?" Because she has been with her partner for a long time. I said, "If you die, your partner can get your pension the way a married person would get it." And she said, "I thought we designate it." I said, "That doesn't work. You can't just designate somebody, unless you have a special caveat through," and that's what New York State had. They said, through their unions, "You can designate one person to get this benefit." But if we had broken up, she couldn't have her next partner do it. That was it, you get one choice and you can choose anybody. But there were all sorts of tax consequences of that. But after Windsor, that was for everybody. And there was also a Social Security benefit that came from Windsor, as well. That was a big deal. And then in 2014, we got full marriage equality. And so, up until that time, the full marriage equality that happened in 2014 we did these Freedom to Marry things. And Pennsylvania Diversity Network partnered with Metropolitan Community Church to do these things. So, there was a protest outside, and we did that outside the courthouse. And I worked with Beth Goudy a lot about what would be the best use of our time to do this, and what would make the most impact? And one of the things we realized right from the beginning was, as I said before, that if we went to Lehigh County Courthouse, we could apply for a marriage license and then they would deny it, but they would keep it on file. And I told you that before, didn't I? yes. So, that stuff, it was important. But with the Pennsylvania Diversity Network, one of the things we were doing was, we started telling people about that. And we'd share that information with people. So, here's the important thing that you need to know, that if you go to Northampton County to apply for a license, your effort disappears the next day, because they're not going to let you apply. But if you go to Lehigh County Courthouse, 100 years from now people are going to go, "What's the deal about Liz Bradbury and Trish Sullivan and why were they constantly denied a license for seven years in a row? And look, more and more people were doing it," because the first year, we were the only ones that did it, and then it was more and more people until every time, there'd be 30 people that would apply for a license until 2014, when they recognized our marriage, and then we stopped doing that. In fact, after we got legally married, I think we stopped doing it then because we thought that, in effect, we were legally married and so we didn't try to apply for another license because we didn't want to get married again, we just wanted them to recognize us. So, I think that went from 2002 to 2009 for us. Other people would apply because they're trying to get the state to do it. But we were there for all of those protests. So, Pennsylvania Diversity Network was speaking politically, and MCC was speaking from the point of view of a religious organization. And they had larger groups of people to do this. We made a video about it, and we put that up. I would speak to the press. Beth would speak to the press. I would try to have a Spanish statement, because I can read Spanish so it really sounds like I know what I'm talking about. I may have absolutely no idea what I'm saying, but I have a really good accent. So, people would fall for that. So, we were in line to apply for our marriage license, and there was a young Latino couple in line, too. And we did this thing and we went outside and then all the press was there, and the television stuff. The thing about speaking in Spanish was, they often didn't have a lot of Spanish content. So, we could almost always get on the Allentown Spanish station, which is part of WFMZ. And usually, I would just start to read the statement and then they'd have a voice over because I really only said two sentences, "nos derechos es importante," that kind of stuff. Then, they interviewed this Latino couple that was in the line, and then the guy says, "Do you think there's a large percentage of gay people in the United States?" And he goes, "Oh, yeah. I do. I think there's a lot." "Well, what do you think is the percentage?" He goes, "Oh, about 50 percent." I'm like, "Yay." And I'm thinking, "Okay." I thought that was a great thing because I think a lot of people think Latinos are very anti and stuff like that. And this young guy was like, "Yeah, it's 50 percent. Why shouldn't they have these rights?" It was great. So, we always wanted to be involved in that and we always worked with MCC, and then MCC would have a service, and I would usually speak at the service. And I usually would go for the laughs. I did a couple of really big laughs ones one time. And I'm one of the things I said was, "You know, we have a lot of different anniversaries when we're a lesbian couple. And so, lesbian couples, we have all the times that we got married in the church, and the different times we tried to do Freedom to Marry, and our civil union, and our marriage, but for a lot of people, the most important anniversary is their first date, or their first kiss, or the first time they did it," and people began to laugh. And I stood, "For those, ours were March 11th, 1987." And then it just got this huge laugh, and it went on for a long time. There was about 250 people there, so it was a big rockstar moment. And I think Beth didn't want me to say it. She goes, "You're not supposed to say those things. It's a church." I said, "Oh, come on. I got a big laugh." She said, "Yeah, you did." And we had the Photo Project there, we would take more pictures of people for the Photo Project, which is another big Pennsylvania Diversity Network effort. So, another thing that we did with MCC, we had another organization that was one of our branches that was called Rainbow Families. And it was run by Donnie and Earl Snyder. They have a little kid. and Donnie and Earl also wrote "Planet Parenthood," in the last 10 years of the Valley Gay Press. It was about what it was like to be a couple of gay men raising a child, and the process that they went through to get their kid, they had an open adoption, and it was very interesting stuff. We did Rainbow Families, and Rainbow Families would put on a Christmas party. This is kind of hilarious. So, we put on this Christmas party at MCC for kids. It was put on by Rainbow Families and Donnie and Earl were very involved with Metropolitan Community Church. But Rainbow Families was our organization, actually. And so, we worked together with the church. There was a sing-along, and it was Christian because they're a church. There was a lot of Latino kids, and kids would come from the neighborhood would come in -- this is when they were on Fourth Street, so there's all these kids. Then, we had cookies and all this kind of stuff. And I read the Grinch in Spanish because there's a lot of Spanish kids there. Trish read it in English, I read it in Spanish. And Don Kohn came -- this is pretty hilarious -- and you may know this, but he came dressed as Santa Claus. Don looks like Santa Claus, if you think about it. He's got the grey, white hair and he had a beard. So, it's two Jews and an atheist put on a Christmas party, or two atheists, and Melinda was there, too. And the funny thing about Don is, he's really Jewish, and he doesn't know the words to any Christmas carol. So, I think he'd get by with "Jingle Bells," but that was about it. So, we had to print out the lyrics so that he could sing along, we'd have a big sing-a-long in the church, and that was fun. And we did that for quite a few years. We did that to have fun in a variety of different circumstances. And we really wanted to be sure that there was outreach to families. So, Rainbow Families had an event for quite a while, they had an event every month, particularly in the summer, where it would be at a park and a bunch of families, it could either be LGBT families with kids or kids that were LGBT, so it was something about the family that was queer. I remember one of the last ones we had, which I think was about 2008, or no, a little bit later than that. And Hannah was living at our house, then, so I think that was in about 2008. And Adrian was there, and he was in college. Now you may not know this about Adrian, but he can make balloon animals. That's one of his top skills. So, he said, "I will come and make balloon animals." And he can make all those balloon animals for the kids. I'm sure that he can still do that. I'm sure it's on his resume. And he made balloon animals for kids, and we did all sorts of things. The kids were playing and the parents are just hanging out and a lot of fun stuff. So, we did a lot of different events like that. I think we had some at our house. We were also really involved with ACCO, A Chorus Celebrating Women. ACCO is the name of a mythological woman singer, which is true, actually. But it also stands for A Chorus Celebrating Women, A-C-C-O with a woman's symbol. And Bev Morgan was the founder and leader of ACCO. She's a wonderful musician with a beautiful voice. And she had all these women. There was a lot of bi and lesbian women that were involved with ACCO for years and years. She ran that for a long, long time. And we worked with them to promote a lot of their events, or just to be at the events or help them with stuff that they were doing. Because we were very good friends with Bev Morgan and Sandy Fluck. And Sandy Fluck was the chair of the Education Department in Moravian. They live in Rehoboth, now. So, these events that were happening would use the Valley Gay Press, and we'd use our other vehicles, and we had a huge email list that I can send lots of emails out whenever I wanted to. And people paid attention to those emails. Because I didn't send things that were just like, "Give us money," or something like that. It would be like, "Edie Windsor's case has been decided, and this is what this means to you, and this is why you need to get married because now you won't have to pay for your benefits and you can get your partner's pension if your partner dies." These are really important things. And then as I said before, Trish's explanation of how you do that. And then we'd constantly be telling people, people calling us and asking us how to do that kind of stuff. And all of those things happened. And so, we went along and we met Adrian. So, here's the story of meeting Adrian. So, Adrian was a freshman at Muhlenberg College. And that was in about -- he's 32 now, so that would have been 14 years ago, so 14 years ago would have been 2006. So, I got a call from Patti Mittleman, I believe, and she was the one who ran Hillel House, and also was involved with running the organization that was really supportive of LGBT students at the college. We had already known Patti for years. Right from the beginning we knew her. She just died a few years ago. It was very sad because she was such a wonderful advocate and so important to so many people at the college. And in fact, loads of people that we know, we knew because of Patti Mittleman. Everybody says that. And so, she said, "I have a guy who's going to call you," and she said his name, and then Adrian called me and he said -- have I told you this story before? Probably. Oh, okay. This is a great story, then. So, Adrian calls me and he goes, "I'm a freshman at Muhlenberg, and I want them to include gender identity to their nondiscrimination policy because it only includes sexual orientation." I said, "Okay." So, this is in 2006. So, I said, "Okay, yeah. There's no problem with that." He goes, "Well, I want to create a petition to get everybody in the college to support this." And I said, "No, you don't want to do that. That's not what you want to do." Now, this is one of those few times that Adrian totally listened to me. He stopped doing this. He started telling me what to do, I think, the next year. But this year, he was really listening to me, I said, "First of all, realize that petitions are a bad way to go about anything because you're really creating divisiveness, and it's harmful to you because if you go ask your friend or your teacher or your parents or your boss, if they'll sign a petition for your rights, and they say no, you're not going to ever get over that. You're going to remember that for the rest of your life. And if you have 10 people say no to you, it's going to be devastating. You don't want to know where they stand on this issue. It's not up to them. It's to the president of the college." And I said, "We already have a law in the City of Allentown that includes gender identity. Why don't you already have that in your policy?" And he said, because Adrian already had the ear of the president of the college when he was a freshman, he said, "The president of the college told me that the college, first of all, it was a Lutheran college, and because they're a not for profit, they don't have to follow the nondiscretionary policy of the City of Allentown." I said, "Well, that's crap. That's ridiculous. Of course, that's not true. Do you think a not-for-profit can discriminate against Black people just because they're a not for profit? Unless it's their mission to do something, they can't blatantly discriminate against somebody." So, I said, "Let me give you an example of somebody that can do that because it's their mission. The Catholic church. It's the Catholic church's mission to follow Catholic principles. So, if they want to not allow people based on Catholic teachings, a divorced person, to have a position at the church, or they don't want to allow somebody who's Protestant to have a position at the church, they're allowed to do it because it's their mission to do it. Cedar Crest College's mission is to elevate and support women students, that's their mission and it has been since the 1800s, one of the ways that they can enforce that or support that, is by keeping men from living in the dorms. That's one of the things that they do. Now, there is some validity to that, it's a women's college. There's some validity to that. And it's their mission so they can do that. The NAACP's mission is to work for the health and welfare of the Black population. So, they can say, 'It's our mission to give scholarships to youth, and we are going to only get them to Black youth, or people who identify as Black, and it's our mission to do that. It's okay. We don't think white people are bad, we're just working for this disenfranchised community.' With the NAACP, clearly that's racial discrimination. They're discriminating against white people. But that's okay, it's their mission and they're not doing it because they hate white people, they're doing it to support Black people. The mission of Muhlenberg College is not to discriminate against, or promote straight people, or cisgender people. It's not. It's not their mission. So, first of all, that's the thing. The second thing is, it's not even the mission of Muhlenberg College to promote Lutheran principles. That's not their mission either. They dropped that mission in the 1800s. Their mission is to educate people. And that's all they do. They educate people. So, if you came in and said, 'I want to go here but I'm not going to get an education,' yeah, yeah, they can say, 'No, you can't do that.' But you can't say to people that, 'We're not going to support you because of your gender identify.' So, it's the law. But the way you want to get them to change the policy. So, first of all, it's a law. So, you can just say to them, 'It's the law. You have to have this policy. It's the law. In fact, you can't even deny people gender-neutral housing, because it's the law. And they're adults. You can't tell people, 'Well, you have to live in this kind of a housing with the opposite sex.' You can't say that in a hotel, so you can't say that in the college. But that's not what you want to do. Go to the president, tell him it's the law, and then tell him that Lehigh already has this policy. Just tell him that. He'll change it in a week. Lehigh's had this policy for two or three years. They have gender identity in their policy. And Muhlenberg wants to be considered the hot, edgy school, and Lehigh is the stodgy, 'We used to only let men in 20 years ago' school. He'll turn it around in no time." And he did. He did. And I said, "You don't have to ask anybody. It's no work. Just go in there and tell him. And if you want him to talk to me I'll talk to him. But you can convince him of this." Well, that was a big win for Adrian. And when Adrian started at Muhlenberg, there was about 45 young people in the Gay-Straight Alliance there that they had. And he also did a really smart thing. He stopped letting them worry about changing the name of the Gay-Straight Alliance to spectrum or citron or whatever. Because it's an enormous waste of time. The federal government allows you to call a group like that Gay-Straight Alliance, and they only actually support that, particularly for high schools. But the thing is that every time a group of college students wants to deliberate that, it usually takes them about eight months to decide what the name is going to be and then they leave, and next year, the next group comes in. So, Adrian said, "Forget it, we're not worrying about that. We're calling it Gay-Straight Alliance, we're not going to call it anything else. But we're going to do a bunch of different important things." And we worked on some of those things. But he pretty much did this on his own. And within a year, he had 700 students in the Gay-Straight Alliance. Yeah. And then, when he left, there were 45 again. Which is something I point out to people all the time. It takes a dynamic person to make that kind of stuff happen. You have to make it attractive. It doesn't just spontaneously happen. You have to make it attractive. And he did all these things, like he had the sex toy expo, and there was a drag ball, and nobody else had done that. He was the one who had instituted these things. All the other things, they were just worried about changing the name to be more inclusive. Just shut up about that and have a drag ball and a sex toy thing, and everybody wants to join. So, after he did that for a couple years, we said, "Let's have this college student on our board," and he would be walking by our house. He would walk everywhere, and he'd take other students and walk by our house. He'd ring the doorbell and come in. And we'd hang out with him. Trish would always make him vegetarian food. So, he did that. That's how we met Hannah Watson, who ended up living with us and now is a very, very close friend of ours, and lived with us for almost two years. So, we asked Adrian to be on our board. And he was very excited about that. And so, once we had him on the board, he began to point out important things that needed to change. And one of them was that he said that he thought that I should get paid, because up until then, I was getting nothing. I didn't get any money, and of course, no benefits. But I did have benefits from Trish's stuff, and we had a little bit of income, and we were still antique dealers up until 2002, and we did other stuff, and we have some crappy investments that give us a tiny little amount of money. And so, we were getting by. We live very, very frugally, and we were getting by. But Adrian said, "You should get paid. You should get 500 dollars a month." And then I got a big raise, I think the next year I got 700 dollars a month. I don't get any benefits. I think we also had a deal where if we got paid for a training, or whomever did the training would get half the money that the place paid us. We never got very much in those days for trainings, but if they gave us 100 dollars, I would get 50 dollars and the organization would get 50 dollars. So, we actually built up our bank account pretty well with that. He pointed out some other ways that we could -- I had already created the Gala. I've wanted that Gala to be a community event, because FACT's event was very, very, prohibitively expensive. It cost 80 dollars or 60 dollars to go. We couldn't afford to go to it. It was fancy. I wanted our event to be very inexpensive and to honor people who were working in the community, so a party for community members, and then honor people. And Adrian has changed that back into a much bigger fundraiser because we make a lot of money from that, and he really wanted that to make more money. But I wanted people to come to it and I wanted to honor people. And he said, "Let's get sponsors for this." And so, we started to do that. We went from making 2,000 dollars to making 8,000 dollars, and now it makes about 45,000 dollars a year. At that time when Adrian joined the organization, our budget was about 20,000 dollars a year. And I didn't make any money. Well, our budget was about 12,000, then we went up to 25,000, because I was getting paid and so we had to make more money. But I also said, "I never want to take any money from this if we can't afford to do other stuff. So, we need to have a savings account," and we did. Because that was one of the things that used to happen with PA Gala, that we would run out of money, and it was really scary that we just wouldn't have any money. And I'd say, "We spent all the money on the last mailing and now we have nothing for the next mailing," and I didn't want Pennsylvania Diversity Network to have no cushion at all, that we couldn't produce the paper, for example. I didn't want to be hand to mouth with it. So, we decided that we would have a savings account about 5,000 dollars in it, which would be a big cushion and that was about half our year's budget at that time, so that would be good, and we built that up. And we did fundraisers and we would have events, a lot of them we would put on, we'd do it. And we were involved with Theatre Outlet that did the Matthew Shepard play, and we did other protests. We were doing a lot of interesting ways to protest and get money where we would get people to pledge money to us or to other organizations. And we would help other organizations to raise money, particularly if they'd been targeted by an anti organization. So, now Adrian's on our board. And I just want to point out one of the things that happened with that. So, we had September 11th that happened during that time in the beginning part of that. And it was devastating. A year later, there was supposed to be a healing religious ceremony in the community that was put on by the Council of Churches. So, they scripted the whole thing, and they told all the ministers what they had to say. They gave them the script. And one of them was Reverend Beth Goudy of the Metropolitan Community Church. So, because Beth was going to be there and she was going to say positive things about our community, we wanted to support her. And we did this a lot. We were really, profoundly not religious. We don't like religion. And this story is one of the reasons. We would often go to MCC stuff, we were very good friends with Beth, and we'd often go to MCC stuff to support her and to support other things, particularly the Christmas service we'd go, because very few people would go to the Christmas service, so we would go to that, just to support her. She said, "You don't do this because of religion, right?" I said, "No, we do it because we like you. It doesn't have anything to do with religion." But MCC was doing some very good things for the community, and we were pleased with that. So, we go to this big ceremony and Beth's going to speak and there's 25 other ministers who are going to get up and do a five- or two-minute gig. And there's two big lines of people from MCC and other LGBT and queer people that are in these lines. It was in a church on Center Street, it was one of those big churches on Center Street out there in Bethlehem. So, Beth's about to go and they had a lot of white people. And I think they got a couple of Black people. So, this guy gets up and he's a Black Baptist minister from Philadelphia. And apparently nobody knew him. I don't know where they got this guy. But he gets up and he gets the thing, and he tosses the script away, and he blames September 11th on gay marriage, just flat does it. It's gay people, it's supporting gay people, that's why this is happening, that's why God did September 11th, God hates fags, the whole thing. Unbelievable. And nobody says anything. And then, another person goes up, and then Beth gets up, and she's just got this look on her face. She's just totally white. I think she's thinking, "What the fuck am I supposed to do now?" Although she wouldn't have thought it that way. So, she gets up and she does her thing and then she gets off stage. And I look down the row to Trish. I look at the other people. And I look at the other people in the next row and I say, "I think we should go." So, we all stood up en mass and walked out of the church and we stood on the steps and we wouldn't leave, but we stood outside. And the head of the Council of Churches comes to the door and she says to us, "Well, I know that was bad." I said, "You don't know how bad that was. You have no idea how bad that was. And here's the second thing. You should have stood up and said you don't support that and you didn't. So, what are you going to do about it?" "Well, we'll have to think of it," mealy mouth, "We'll think about it, I don't know." So, we of course contacted the press and told them that this had happened. So, there was an article in The Morning Call about it that was picked up by The Wire and other people pointed this out, because it was a pretty big deal to blame September 11th on a bunch of gay people in the room. Well, one of the groups that picked up on this was the Westboro Baptist Church, Fred Phelps's people, the God hates fags people. This is 2002. Now, I have maintained, absolutely, that these people are our best friends. And there's a reason for that, and I'll show you why. Because we could not get the Council of Churches to say anything. We couldn't get any condemnation from politicals. The mayor of Bethlehem wouldn't say a fucking thing about it. And we were mad that he wouldn't say anything. This was supposed to be a healing ceremony and we get kicked in the teeth. So, nobody says anything. So, the Westboro Baptist Church announces that they're going to come to the Lehigh Valley and demonstrate all over the place, and they're going to support this minister that said this horrible thing. So, I said, "Bring it on." And I said, "Let's do a fundraiser. Every minute they are speaking, every minute they're on, people will pledge 10 cents a minute up to a cap, you can make anything but you pledge 10 cents a minute, and then you can say, 'I'll pledged up to 20 dollars,' and we'll time how long they're here." They were supposed to be here two days. Within one week, we'd raised 1,000 dollars. And we gave it all to MCC. And we got contributions from Alaska. People were spreading this all over the place. We had email in those days. We didn't' have social media, though. So, we did this with just email and people were sending the email around to different churches and progressive churches, and political people were pledging, and these weren't large pledges. We had hundreds of pledges. And we gave the money to MCC because they had really been victimized. This was a religious thing. I just collected all the money and I gave it to MCC. It was great, actually. But as per the circumstances of Westboro Baptist Church, they decided to not show up. Well then, we weren't going to get the money. So, now we really wanted them to come because we wanted the money. And we got attention from this. So, they did come about a month later. And this was in November, or something like that, I think. Yeah, it was in November. So, they show up and they're going to protest at Cedar Crest and Lehigh University. Were you there then, at Lehigh? No. Okay, this is pretty hilarious, actually. Now, this is the thing. We don't want them to protest at MCC. We want them to protest at the Episcopal Church. We want them to protest at the Unitarian Church, although the Unitarians are on our side. So, what we want is United Church of Christ. Well, they came to the Episcopal church and they screamed the vilest, rudest, most horrible things at every single person that came out of that Episcopal church that's right downtown in Bethlehem. Suddenly, they're all on our side and the Council of Churches is saying, "Hate is so bad, it's so terrible," because it's happening to them and they're saying horrible things. The Morning Call interviews the Westboro Baptist Church who tells The Morning Call that they do 1,000 protests a year. I point out to The Morning Call in a letter to the editor that that is ridiculous. A thousand is a ridiculously high number. I said, "That's three a day. So, on the day after Christmas, do they do an extra three? Do they do six the next day? Come on. They don't do 1,000 protests. They didn't even come when they said they were going to come." They didn't even do that number of protests while they were there. And in fact, at one point they said, "We're going to do Lehigh," but they like to go to places where there are big college football games. So, they were like, "We couldn't go because we had to go to Philadelphia to go to a big game in Philadelphia." It was really true. This is this really true. When they show up, they're totally bumbling idiots and they have no idea. They have these horrible signs and it's so easy to protest against them because to say, "God hates fags," that September 11th was the fault of somebody else, it's ridiculous. So, because they protested in Allentown, the mayor of Allentown was very direct, it was Roy Afflerbach then, and he said it was terrible that they had done this. We couldn't get the mayor of Bethlehem to say anything because he was a weasel, and I was really angry that he didn't say something. I humiliated him, publicly for years. But they did protest at Lehigh. It was right outside of Packer Hall. And Beth Goudy, and I, and a bunch of other people from MCC were on the other corner from them. And they have these ridiculous signs. But there's like three of them. So, there's three people. No one else would be with them because they were such buffoons. They weren't really on the campus. They were on the street. Cedar Crest let them be on the campus which they didn't have to do, they could have told them they could be the entrance, but they just let them be on the campus. They didn't want to be on the campus, because nobody would see them there, so they didn't even do it at Cedar Crest. They only do it for high profile. Again, they're our friends because they really are, at Lehigh, everybody at Lehigh thinks they're horrible. All the students are doing horrible things to them. Nobody's on their side because they're so outrageous. One of the things they did was, they'll sing, "God hates fags," to different pop songs. So, they're standing in the corner and Beth and I are across the street, and they're singing, "Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, hey, hey, God hates fags." And they kept doing it. Beth and I were just laughing through the whole thing. So, then, after that for years, every time anybody would mention Westboro Baptist Church, Beth and I will both burst into, "Na, na, na, na," we would sing, "God hates fags," because it was just so absurd. That's the best you could come up with? It was so not offensive in a lot of ways. They weren't like the street preachers that really are scary. We couldn't have paid them for more publicity. And people used to say, "If we'd show Matthew Shepard the Matthew Shepard's play, it would be terrible if Westboro Baptist Church," I'd say, "Pray they come, you'll sell every ticket. People would pour out to support you. They'd give you donations because they're there. You want them to be there because they're so outrageously horrible." And they're so much on our side that they didn't just go stand in front of MCC, they stood in front of the biggest Episcopal church and called them vile, horrible names, and said just the worst possible things you could say. And people who had never had anybody shout anything to them suddenly, "Oh, now I know what it's like to be discriminated against." So, we were really involved with that and we were really involved with promoting that. And we did a lot of other actions to try to get people to -- before Silent Witness, which is actually a very effective way of dealing with pro to anti-gay protesters, we worked on schemes to turn around the ability to do those protests and be successful with them. And I would be on debates. They called me to be on the TV a lot of times. But they really screwed us on the TV a couple of times, because Adrian and I were going to be on a debate one time, on Business Matters and I said, "We will be on this debate about marriage equality, but you have to have," because they were considering a Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage in the State of Pennsylvania. I said, "You have to have legislators on. You can't just have some crazy street preacher who's just going to scream and scream and scream and say, 'You're a giraffe,' and ridiculous stuff like that." So, Adrian had set it up. Adrian was then chair of Equality Pennsylvania. So, it was me and Ted Martin, who was the CEO of Equality Pennsylvania, and then there was a guy who had been on school board who was ultra-far right, and we said he would be okay, but I said, "Unless you can get somebody who is a normal person, you can't just bringing that crazy guy that comes with the megaphone and stands at MCC and shouts out, 'I want to have sex with my child.' Forget it." So, they said, "No, we won't do that. We'll have this guy and if we can't get somebody else it'll just be the three of you." I said, "Okay." So, we get out there and it's the three of us and then they have the crazy guy on the phone. And we're already taping. And I said to Ted, "We can't walk out of this because then he gets the whole forum. He'll be able to talk the whole time. He says these crazy things over and over again. Obviously this person is insane, he's a pedophile, this has nothing to do with this argument. You can't even find anybody to speak intelligently about this." And then, at the end, I said to the guy who's in charge of Business Matters whose name I can't remember right now, but he's the head of the Business Council, the Chamber of Commerce, and he's in all the billboards and stuff, and I can't remember his name right now. He's very effective in this job. But he said, "This is much more interesting if we do it this way." I said, "It's not okay for you to do this because you lied to us. You lied to us and I'm out of here and I will never be on the show again because you lied. You said you weren't going to have him and you did. That's a lie." So, Adrian ended up talking to the producer of the show and he said, "You know, broken trust like this is like trying to use a broken condom. You can't just patch it back together." He actually said that to her. He said, "We can't just overlook this." And we've never been on that show again. Because they did lie to us. They wanted it to be a circus and stuff. But I also debated on National Public Radio, I debated that woman -- I can't remember anybody's names, it's like Molly Mase? It's two Ms. She's the woman who spoke to the Supreme Court about Proposition 8, she's ultra-far right, she's disappeared now because her issue was marriage equality and she lost, and I don't know what's going on with her. But I actually debated her on Radio Times. And they have no argument. But that was one of the things that we did as Pennsylvania Diversity Network. We did political things. We did speak on political issues. We did actual advocacy with regard to people who had lost their jobs or who had been denied -- we would help people find lawyers that would help them obtain custody of their children or get second-parent adoptions. We advocated to and explained to people about the second parent adoption law and how important that was. At that point for me, Pennsylvania Diversity Network was all about information. So, we had the newspaper, we had the info line, we had a really, really large, blanket email potential, which was one of the first times that people could do that. We had an enormous mailing list that we could write to people and send people written information. We spoke publicly. We were on television all the time. Trish hates to be on TV, but I don't mind it that much, and so, we would be at protests and I had figured out ways to speak. We had a really great press list that we could send out information to, I would speak publicly. And Adrian still does that in a lot of ways. He will speak publicly in very infrequent situations. He makes it a media event. And, as we got closer and closer to the center, what we did was, we got full marriage equality in 2016, and Adrian came to us and he said, "Okay, we have full marriage equality now. This is one of our biggest projects that we had done," he had done a whole marriage equality circumstance where when he and his husband got married, they went to the Lehigh County Courthouse, applied for a license, were denied, with me and Trish there and I photographed the whole time. We got in the car with them, we drove all the way to Darien, Connecticut where their families were, and they got married there. They got legally married right there. And then it was this whole series of photographs, and he had this whole thing about how he couldn't get married. And we did another marriage action. Even after marriage legal in New Jersey, we did a big effort, it was called Hop the Bridge. And we had a huge demonstration in Easton. We got three couples to get legally married. One of them was my previous girlfriend and her partner, which was 25 years before, he's my Facebook friend, she said, "We want to do this." And they'd been together for the same amount of time as Trish and me. And I said, "Okay, I'll set it up." She said, "We have a niece in Easton." They live in the middle of the state of Pennsylvania. So, they came and we had two other couples. It was Jerry Schmidt and Chuck Woodbury, and -- actually, we did it twice. So, we had these different people that did this. I think that was the next Freedom to Marry thing. We took a bus over and did it. But there was a bunch of different ways. But the Hop the Bridge thing was, Jerry Schmidt and Chuck Woodbury, and Bill Morrow and his partner whose name I can't remember, and Jen and Mary Ann Kelly. And they'd all been together for a long time. I was with them when they got the licenses. I was the witness. You have to have a witness in New Jersey, so you get the license in New Jersey. I set that up for them and everything. And then we had this big demonstration in Easton. We walked across the bridge into New Jersey where Beth Goudy was in a parking lot and married them in the parking lot in front of all this press, and it was on TV and everything. And then we walked back. We got to the middle of the bridge we said, "We're married, and now we're not married. We're recognized, and now we're not recognized." It got national attention. And Adrian and I worked on that together. And one of the things that Aiden was beginning to realize is when you do a press thing, you have all of your people behind you. You don't talk to your people ; you talk to the cameras and have all the people behind you so it doesn't look like you're by yourself. And that was a really good way of doing it. So, we had hundreds of people there. It was really great. And it was really terrific. And we got front-page articles in all the newspapers and stuff. We had always been very serious when we went to get our civil union, because that's when Trish and I went and got a civil union. Did I talk about that? That's our personal thing, but I'll talk about that when we talk about this other stuff. So, Adrian came to us and he said, "Okay, this is what I want to do." Now, Trish and I had been doing this for 20 years. Both of us had actually been doing LGBT activism since -- I had been doing it since the '70s, she'd been doing it since the '60s, she was in on the starting of SAGE, the national organization for older LGBT adults. I was working on stuff when I was in graduate school. We had been working all the way through on civil rights stuff. And truthfully, we were getting worried because we were thinking, "Who's going to do this stuff after we retire?" And we were praying that Adrian wouldn't move away, which he almost got a job and moved away, but he didn't move away. And then he bought a house. That was really good. He's married now. Okay, now he has to stay here. And he ended up saying to us, now in 2016, "We have marriage equality, you've really done this stuff. I think it's time to start a community center, and this is what we should do." And he said, "And I want to be the director of it. And I want it to be a paying job. So, we need to raise enough money to pay for me and to start the thing so I can quit my job." So, we were coming into the Gala, and I said, "So, we're going to make this announcement. We're going to end the organization. We're going to start a new organization that's going to be call the LGBT Community Center," and he said, "We're going to name it after you. You're going to step down as the CEO, I'm going to be the CEO. You both are still going to be working on it." Trish was the chair of the board ; she would stay the chair of the board for the first year. And we're going to make this announcement. We're not going to tell anybody. It's going to be a secret announcement and we'll tell everybody to come." We had the event at the Symphony Hall in Allentown, this big event room, a beautiful room. My sister was there, she came from Connecticut, because I said, "You have to come for this, it's a big deal." After all, it's her name, too. And the mayor was there, and all these different people. But we didn't tell them exactly what was going on. So, people were guessing, "You're going to run for office," they were saying to Adrian. And then I get up, I have a little fake thing. I said, "I'm going to change the Photo Project," and I could see people going -- and I said, "That's not it." And then I told the story. And people stood up and clapped. And Barb Ross, who, her wonderful partner Kathy Bergey had died and she had this estate money, she said, "I'm going to make the first donation." So, I said, "We need to raise money." I said to Adrian, "After Barb makes this money, I'm going to call for people to give donations in the room. Let's just do that. Trish and I'll donate 1,000 dollars," which was hard for us, because we didn't have a lot of money. "But we'll do this." And he goes, "Okay. Well, I'll donate 1,000 dollars." So, okay, we'll do this. And then he says, "Maybe we can raise 10,000 bucks." He said, "We need to raise 75,000 dollars by October for us to do this. Maybe we can raise 10,000 bucks." So, I said, "Okay." I have to say, and this is not humble, but I run a party better than Adrian does. For one thing, I'm funnier than he is. So, I get up and I say the stuff, and I had been running all the galas, I think this was our eighth gala, and I was running it. I said things that made people laugh. One of the things I said was that I had gotten a call from one of our regular calling guys who says, "Well, you know, you do a great job with this but what if you die?" And so I said this to everybody. I said, "Well, I'm not going to die, but this is what we're going to do." So, I said all those things, and then Barb came up and she said, "I'm going to make the first donation," and then I said, "I'm going to donate." And then I said, "Okay, our friends Ann and Laura donated. So, now we have 3,000 bucks. Now you have heard from the lesbians. Where are the gay men?" People started jumping up all over. By the end of the night, I mean people were going, "Five thousand dollars," I mean, they were just like dominos they were just going over and over. And finally, we were writing it down. We thought it was going to be four or five people, we'd have 10,000 dollars, it'd be great. So, I'm like, "Is somebody writing this down?" And nobody was doing it. I'm trying to remember everybody and I'm looking around and people are doing this. And we didn't even know they were, they were just jumping up and stuff. So, at the end of the night, I was awake all night, and in the morning, at about seven o'clock, Adrian goes, "Do you have a list?" I said, "Yeah, I think I have a list," because I'm trying to remember everybody, and we compared our lists, and we had 35,000 dollars. So, we were halfway by then. We actually made the money by -- this was in the summer, why was it in the summer? Yeah, it was in August. And we were actually able to make the money -- I'm pretty sure that's sure. We had the gala in August. No, no, it was in June, and we had the money by August. That was the thing. It was in June because we had it as a Pride thing. And it was a problem because a lot of the high schoolers were graduating, and they were all graduating in the arena, and there was no parking and nobody could find any place to park. So, we remembered as many people as we could and we had 35,000 dollars. And by August, we had the money. Adrian quit his job within a month, and then he did it, and he set it up. So, one of the things was that the mayor said he would give us a building for a dollar. And the city did do this. Now, we're running out of time here. But the city did do this. And they arranged to give us this building on Turner Street, and it was a dollar. It was really neat, because it was only half a mile from our house. And it's a weird-shaped building. And so, in a nutshell what happened was, we investigated that building for a year. And we had architects and hazmat and we did all this due diligence and we figured out there's no way in hell we can use this building. Among other things, it's not just covered with asbestos, it's made of asbestos. It was full of lead and asbestos and Adrian said, "The only thing that was living in that building was dead pigeons." Now, Adrian and I are both scared to death of dead things, particularly rodents. I said, "Don't look down," when we were in the building, because there were all these dead birds because there was no roof. There was no roof, there were no windows. It was going to cost us a million dollars. In fact, it's still there because nobody can afford to take it down, because the remediation of it would be so hard to do. So, we ended up then, it was August and we went to Florida, and Adrian was looking around at buildings, and he said, "I think I found a building. I want you to look at it online." And so, we're looking at it online, and I said, "Adrian, this looks like a mobile home with no windows." Oh, no. We found a building that we really liked. And we tried to get it. It was on Seventh Street. It was close to the arena. It fell through and it was sort of an anti-gay thing that made us very sad. We almost got that building. And then, he had this building. We didn't want it to be in Bethlehem because I wanted to be able to go to work and I really wanted it to be in Allentown. I thought we would get more government support. He wanted it to be in Allentown, too, even though he lived in Bethlehem, then. And there's a lot of reasons for that, and one of them is that there's more people in Allentown, so there's more justification of having it, there's more inner-city youth, that kind of stuff. So, Trish said, "I don't want this mobile home with no windows," which I'm not kidding, it really was only 4,000 square feet. The building that the city wanted to give us was 7,000 square feet. I think the mobile home was 3,000 square feet. And so, Trish found the building that we have online, and she said, "Look at this building. It's great and it's kind of within our price range. It's a little high, but it has an elevator." So, I called Adrian up and I said, "We just sent you a thing, you have to go look at this building today." He said, "I can't go today, but I'll go tomorrow morning." So, he gets Rob Ritter, and he goes to the building, he calls me from the building, and he says, "I love the building. I love this building." I said, "Are you going to put an offer on it?" And he said, "I already have." And we got it. That's the end of that story. Then, there's all this stuff about the center, but other people can tell that story. So, that's what we got. MF: All right. We can conclude today, and then we had talked about maybe with our next interview focusing on some more personal stories, maybe your life history. LB: Sure. MF: Okay. Is there anything else you want to add before we can conclude today's interview? LB: I can talk about the center, and there are things I know about the center that other people, mostly the main stuff that I know about is when Trish and Adrian and I walked into the building and said, "What are we going to have to do to it, and how are we going to fix it up?" And how we fixed it up in the first six months. Adrian was doing colossal efforts to get money, and to make it happen, and get all the other complicated things, including changing over the 501c3, and doing all that kind of stuff. We took the Pennsylvania Diversity Network 501c3 and converted it into the center's 501c3. And getting the board together and doing all the different kinds of things and getting contracts and doing all that kind of stuff, while I was getting 300 different volunteers to prep the building and to clean it and to paint it and to do a few physical changes in tearing up the rugs and rebuilding the moldings and doing all the stuff that we had to do. It was a colossal effort. And it was fun because that kind of stuff I like to do, although it was physically very tiring. And Adrian has no skills in that at all, so I get to do everything. And I just tell everybody what to do. And he told people that. They said, "How did you know what to do?" He said, "Well, Liz tells us what to do and then we just do it." So, I did a lot of work but we also had wonderful, wonderful, wonderful volunteers, hundreds of volunteers. Some of them would just come. We were there all night, and people would come and stay all night with me and help me until three o'clock. "I don't want to come until midnight, is that okay?" You know that kind of stuff. It was terrific. So, I can talk about that. But that seems like other people know about it, compared to me. That was wonderful. MF: All right. Well, thank you so much for talking with me today. It was, again, just such a pleasure. LB: Oh, it was fun. MF: All right, I'm going to pause this now. Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). 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