Liz Bradbury, July 13, 2020

Liz Bradbury, July 13, 2020

Liz Bradbury recalls the inner workings of Allentown’s non-discrimination ordinance, PA GALA’s impact in local elections and national lawmaking, and their lawsuit against Citizens for Traditional Values.

Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives

Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives

2020-07-13

Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs.

video

LGBT-17

Mary Foltz

Liz Bradbury

02:26:32

5.4 July 13, 2020 Liz Bradbury, July 13, 2020 LGBT-17 2:26:32 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 BradburyLiz_20200713_video.mp4 1.0:|27(2)|62(8)|77(19)|106(9)|129(2)|152(4)|175(13)|202(7)|225(3)|248(8)|271(13)|296(2)|319(10)|344(2)|367(5)|394(8)|419(17)|446(7)|475(7)|498(5)|521(12)|548(4)|569(15)|598(18)|619(3)|648(9)|673(13)|702(5)|731(5)|760(6)|787(7)|814(4)|839(14)|862(12)|893(17)|920(10)|949(2)|974(11)|999(2)|1026(4)|1053(6)|1078(7)|1103(8)|1126(8)|1157(10)|1182(2)|1207(7)|1228(7)|1251(14)|1282(11)|1309(5)|1344(11)|1371(4)|1400(3)|1421(10)|1448(2)|1471(10)|1498(14)|1533(10)|1562(10)|1591(16)|1618(9)|1643(11)|1668(12)|1691(15)|1716(13)|1739(9)|1762(15)|1789(12)|1812(15)|1841(3)|1862(16)|1883(14)|1912(6)|1935(4)|1960(4)|1985(9)|2010(6)|2035(10)|2062(11)|2087(2)|2108(7)|2133(12)|2160(14)|2183(10)|2204(6)|2223(11)|2242(10)|2263(12)|2290(7)|2311(14)|2338(3)|2365(5)|2390(10)|2411(10)|2438(16)|2467(8)|2488(14)|2515(10)|2546(9)|2573(2)|2596(9)|2621(12)|2644(12)|2673(5)|2702(5)|2729(14)|2756(15)|2789(4)|2814(15)|2841(7)|2868(5)|2895(9)|2918(4)|2947(8)|2970(5)|2995(8)|3014(14)|3039(9)|3066(2)|3087(6)|3106(2)|3125(12)|3152(6)|3179(9)|3204(2)|3231(7)|3254(8)|3277(6)|3302(7)|3325(14)|3346(8)|3375(3)|3400(9)|3423(11)|3452(8)|3475(8)|3502(10)|3525(10)|3548(16)|3573(4)|3598(5)|3625(13)|3650(3)|3681(15)|3700(12)|3715(15) 0 https://youtu.be/4gjcd6L933Y YouTube video English 0 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 and this is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Center’s Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, and we’re meeting on Zoom because there is a pandemic going on and today is July 13th, 2020. Liz, thank you so much for being here with me today. &#13 ; &#13 ; LIZ BRADBURY: I’m so glad to be here. 0 109 Origins of Allentown’s Nondiscrimination Ordinance MF: Fabulous, thank you so much. So, we had a really wonderful interview last week about PA GALA and your work on voting guides that sort of lead up to the 2002 passage of the PA Hate Crimes bill. I’ll say we ended that interview with you gesturing towards the antidiscrimination ordinance, and you began work on that in 1998. So, I’d like to focus on that today. Could you give us an origin story of how you started in 1998 to work on this antidiscrimination ordinance? &#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Yeah. So, what was happening was now we had PA GALA in place, Pennsylvania Gay and Lesbian Alliance for Political Action. And we were producing voter’s guides and we were being very successful in doing that, I have to say. And we had a few people on the board, but all of the work was being done by me, and Trish, organizing the Lehigh Valley, and Steve Black organizing the bigger efforts, he was the CEO of the organization. 0 385 Mary Cramsey LB: happened -- a group of people who were running for office said that they were in support of an antidiscrimination ordinance. And one of them was a candidate named Mary Cramsey. &#13 ; &#13 ; And Mary Cramsey was a Democrat, and she was running for the nondiscrimination, so we interviewed her. And she was on. She was pro hate crimes bill ; she was pro hate crimes legislation if it was in the city. She was in favor of domestic partner recognition. She was in favor of the ordinance. 0 756 Finding a City Council Co-Sponsor LB: And at the same time, and I think that this was the same time, yeah, so this was in 1998 and this was when people were running for City Council, and at that time, there were three members of council that were running to retain their seats, Emma Tropiano, Terry Spinosa, and who’s the other one? I guess Todd Stevens. And they had all been on council and they were running to retain their seats as incumbents. Okay, so that stuff has happened. &#13 ; &#13 ; So, they’ve seen in effect that we had a very, very public way of humiliating, and I’m not afraid to get up and say, “I’m gay and what she did was lying and it’s wrong,” and it was hard to not see the community thought it was really serious that she had done that. How do you defend somebody who just lied potentially to both sides of the aisle in effect? 0 1139 Emma Tropiano LB: So, now, on council was Emma Tropiano. Emma Tropiano happened to live across the street from us. Emma Tropiano was notoriously the most anti-Latino person in the entire Lehigh Valley. Though she was a Democrat, she actually was so anti-Latino that she would go to City Council meetings -- and this is documented -- and she would just blatantly lie about the Latino population. &#13 ; &#13 ; She’d say, “Every single person who’s on welfare in Allentown is Latino,” and a person from the county would stand up and say, “Councilperson Tropiano, the statistics show that of the 14,000 people in Allentown that are on welfare, 70 percent of them are white,” and Emma Tropiano actually said to them, in this council meeting, “Don’t try to confuse me with facts,” which was a classic thing that she frequently said. 0 1580 Birth of Valley Free Press LB: So, now we begin to work toward this, decide that we’re going to push and have a City Council meeting anyway. So, one of the things we did was, that was the point where we decided to create the Valley Gay Press, and we created the Valley Gay Press for the sole reason -- the newspaper, it was called Valley Free Press then, this newsletter, newspaper, to create a circumstance where we’d be able to get information to people in a way that really explained stuff because most people in 1998 did not have email, we didn’t any social media, we couldn’t get information people in a very good way, maybe we could get information to 200 people. 0 1758 Finding Speakers for the City Council Meeting LB: But meanwhile, Felix Molina is working on this, too, he’s working with other community members, we’re setting up different people to speak, we’ve spoken to head of Equality Pennsylvania then, it was actually called the Gay and Lesbian Legal Aid Society, or something like that. It was the first permutation. &#13 ; &#13 ; And Andrew Park was running it, he had been an EEOC judge, he’s now a really big national activist. But he came to us and he said, “This is what I think you should do and how you should set up this meeting. You should have people who have been discriminated against, you should have ministers speak, you should have people in the community talk about these different issues,” and I found people. 0 2229 Pushing for a Nondiscrimination Ordinance at City Council LB: So, I speak first, and I say my little two minutes thing, and I say there’s all these people here, we want to see this happen, and people just over and over are saying, “We want to see this legislation introduced.” If you look in the Valley Gay Press, there’s actually a list of everybody who spoke, and it says what they were good or bad and basically what they said. It’s in the Valley Gay Press. &#13 ; &#13 ; And so, we’re having people speak and Felix Molina speaks, and Bob Smith speaks, and there were about 24 speakers. And at one point, and we can see how long the line is, and people are beginning to speak, and Ernie Toth says, “We’re going to have to cut this off.” 0 2604 Counteracting Hate at the City Council Meeting LB: And so, he was going to speak and so he was there, I think he was one of the last ones, and then Felix, and that was the end. And then, a guy got up who was standing behind them, and I went over to Steve and I said, “That guy’s going to be bad and that’s going to be a problem but who else do we have to speak?” &#13 ; &#13 ; And he said, “Do you know that guy?” He was a little person. And I said, “Yes, I do know that guy because Gayle Erich,” remember Gayle Erich who put together our Quark files for the thing, when her father died, we went to the funeral and he was a minister who got up at the end and said some of the most horrible things I had ever heard. 0 2902 Outcome of City Council Meeting LB: So, anyway now Trish has done this, everybody has their hands raised, they have the opportunity to do this, and they don’t. But Frank Concannon who’s sitting on the dais, he raises his hand, and he says, “I move to do this,” and they ignored him. And everybody else on council just sits there, they say no. &#13 ; &#13 ; So, we leave and quite frankly, we are very, very encouraged by this because we didn’t think it was going to pass. We didn’t think anything was going to happen. We just wanted to see if we could pull this off. And we did. 0 3021 Coalition Building for Nondiscrimination Ordinance LB: So, then we recognized -- Steve and Trish and I recognized that we cannot make this happen unless we have our own candidate. And we begin to now build coalitions. So, a couple of things happened that were really significant and the first thing -- just a bunch of stuff. 0 3074 Allentown Human Relations Commission Award LB: So, we’re moving along. We think we need a candidate who is actually going to push this legislation and we need a mayor who is going to speak from it in a positive way. The first thing that happens is that I won the Allentown Human Relations Commission Award. &#13 ; &#13 ; Bob Smith, who was the vice chair, put me up for the award and I won it and I got an opportunity to speak from the stage to a big group of people who were very pro-rights, because this is the Human Relations Commission. So, they’re people from all these different organizations. 0 3209 Relationship with Felix Molina/Puerto Rican Day Parade &amp ; Festival LB: But anyway, so I won that. That gave us a lot of momentum. People were paying more attention to us. There was an article in the paper about it, that was a significant thing. So, now, we end up recognizing that we have to do this. The next thing that happens is that we really developed a pretty good relationship with Felix Molina. &#13 ; &#13 ; Turns out, Felix is gay. He never even told us that. All through the time that we were doing the meeting, he never said he was, but he was. And it turned out that he was in a long-term relationship with the brother of somebody we knew who was at MCC, so then he outs himself to us. 0 3618 Hoover &amp ; Guridy City Council Election LB: Okay, so now things are moving along and we’re thinking we have to have a City Council member who’s going to introduce this legislation and we have to have a mayoral candidate that’s going to be supportive of it. &#13 ; &#13 ; So, we fasten on the idea that it has to be somebody who has a very flexible schedule, someone who works for themselves, so we fastened onto Gayle Hoover, and Gayle Hoover expressed that she would run for City Council if we did all the work for her. 0 4103 Primary Day LB: So, now we’re at the point of the primary where we’re campaigning and during the day of the primary, you’d go to various different sites and you’d hand out stuff, and we had people to hand out stuff for Gayle, and Gayle was working the sites and stuff like that. And I went to the South Side Youth Center, and that’s a big polling place in the city, and I was handing out cards for Gayle. &#13 ; &#13 ; And Candido Garcia, who is a guy I know very well, he’s part of the gay community, was standing next to me handing out cards for Julio. And we didn’t want to admit to each other that there was a big chance that one of them wasn’t going to win because it was against Tropiano, and there were only three candidates that could win, and I think one of them was Howells, and so, he was just going to win. He always won every election. He was this police chief, everybody voted for him. So, there was only two other slots in the primary. 0 4314 Mayoral Election LB: So, time goes along, and we get to the election and Roy Afflerbach is running against, I’m not sure, I don’t think Heydt ran again, then, so he was running against a different candidate. He was running against that guy who worked at Air Products. And he wanted me to endorse him. &#13 ; &#13 ; He was a Republican. I can’t remember his name. He was a nice guy, actually. He worked at Air Products. He wanted us to endorse him, and Afflerbach wanted us to endorse him. I said to Roy Afflerbach, who ultimately won, I said, “This other guy wants me to endorse him.” And he said, “Well, you need to go and interview him.” 0 4469 Electoral Success LB: So, we supported Afflerbach. Afflerbach wins the election, Gayle wins the election, all three of the Democratic candidates win the election. This is true. Remember the Mary Cramsey thing I was talking about in the beginning, we didn’t support her, and she lost the primary to Louie Hershman in her election which was two years before, and Hershman was on Council, I guess these are four-year terms. 0 4564 Getting the Legislation Passed LB: So, now, January 3rd, they’re installed into the position of the legislature, to be on City Council and Afflerbach is mayor, and Afflerbach said to us, “Pass the legislation right away we’re still in the sweetheart period. Don’t wait around for this. You need to pass the legislation now.” &#13 ; &#13 ; So, Mara Keisling comes to us, Mara Keisling is the head, now, of the National Center for Transgender Equality in Washington. She was working for an organization that she ran, she’s transgender and she was running this organization in the State of Pennsylvania. She sits with us in our kitchen, this top person in the state, and she writes the legislation. 0 5118 Citizens for Traditional Family Values Referendum LB: But the next morning, Frank McVeigh with Citizens for Traditional Family Values files a referendum in the city to overturn the past ordinance. So, the ordinance is in place, Afflerbach signs it into place right away, we have the pens, it’s in his signed thing, a copy of it is in our waiting room on the third floor, because I kept it, of the Bradbury-Sullivan Center. And we were happy. But right away, we knew that they were going to do this. &#13 ; &#13 ; So, the City of Allentown has an opportunity for people to be able to create a ballot initiative referendum on the ballot by getting 2,000 signatures of registered Allentown voters saying that they want something to happen. So, McVeigh gets his band of hatemongers -- and they really were -- to put together a petition. They filed a formal petition and they’re required to carry around the legislation itself and then get the 2,000 signatures. 0 6200 Fighting Back Against the Referendum LB: So, we went to have a press conference to say that we were fighting this referendum. So, we went to City Hall, and this is a great story. It’s going to go on for a while, though. So, we go to City Hall, I’m upstairs at City Hall, which is where the City Clerk is, Mike Hanlon. And I think he still is city clerk, he’s a great guy. And we are going to present these 80 documents, or 100 documents that say, “I want my name off the petition.” &#13 ; &#13 ; Now, the anti people also showed up. We had the news there, and we had the TV cameras, and we had the Morning Call, and also the other newspaper that was in Allentown at that time. And I had people to speak. One woman, she was a Catholic mom, she had eight kids in her house, and they’re all teenagers. And I said, “Well, you signed this petition,” she said, “I didn’t sign that.” I said, “No, you did. I have this thing,” and I said, “I can tell you what day it was and the person who signed it, it was a guy named Frank McVeigh, this is what he looks like, here’s a picture of him.” 0 7210 Collecting Petitions/Verifying Signatures LB: So, now we’re getting all of this mail back and we’re being very successful. And we’ve gotten hundreds and hundreds of letters back, I think we may have had about 700 of the things back by now. We’ve had enough to nullify their petitions. &#13 ; &#13 ; So, we’re going to Dan Anders, our lawyer, now to support us taking those petitions to Mike Hanlon, who was the City Clerk, to decide whether or not to take the names off based on these letters. So, I said to the city, “Do you need any kind of ability to determine whether or not these are real signatures?” Because after all, how do you know where the petition is? 0 7562 Lawsuit Against Citizens for Traditional Values LB: Okay, so Dan Anders says, “Okay, we’re going to stop this right now.” And I said, “What are we going to have to do?” He says, “We’re going to have you bring a lawsuit,” me, “against those people, against Citizens for Traditional Values, and it’s going to be the first four names of the people on the petitions,” and it was McVeigh, and Hartman and it actually says, “Liz Bradbury versus Hartman,” was the first name. &#13 ; &#13 ; We’d bring a lawsuit against them saying that they were abridging my civil rights by lying to people, and I would represent the rest of the LGBT community because I live here, and I’d be able to speak and stuff like that. I said, “Okay, do it.” 0 8076 Human Rights Campaign LB: So, I want to go back a little bit and say that one of the things that happened during this was the national organizations, particularly the Human Rights Campaign and one factor of the Victory Fund told us, “Don’t challenge the signatures, just let it go into place and let it go for a vote and raise 70,000 dollars and keep people from voting on it.” And I said to Trish, “We are not doing that.” &#13 ; &#13 ; And I’ve said this every time since then, ballot measures, which I am totally against in every possible way, there’s nothing good about a ballot measure because nobody in the legislature is responsible for it, and when people vote for it, they have no idea what the ramifications are. And then, the legislature, whomever the legislatures are say, “Well, I didn’t put it in place, that was a ballot measure. You did it. It’s in place.” They’re never good. They should never be in place. 0 8323 Importance of Passing of Nondiscrimination Ordinance LB: Sure. So, the lawsuit story is shorter because we weren’t fighting it. But it went on for quite a few years. I just want to say one more really important thing. During those 70 days, I actually lost 17 pounds. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I was absolutely hysterically worried about everything. And this is why. &#13 ; &#13 ; If we had lost that, if we hadn’t done what we’d done, because the depositions made it so that they would never do it again because they were afraid. Anti-LGBT people can never get other people, the general public, to be anti-LGBT people unless they lie. They have to lie to be able to get people to hate the minority. They have to misrepresent and lie to be able to do that. And that’s exactly what they did. 0 8520 Next Meeting Scheduling MF: Well, let’s start there. I’ll send a few times that would work for me next week. We’ll start with the lawsuit. You talked a little bit about the Valley Free Press a little bit today, and I’m curious if you have more that you’d want to say about that publication.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Oh, yeah. The paper is a whole other huge thing. I produced that for 18 years. And it had enormous effect for the community. 0 8665 Felix Molina’s Speech at the 1998 City Council Meeting MF: Okay, this is Mary Foltz. I’m back with Liz, and we just thought of a story that needs to be recorded from this period, so I’m going to turn it back over to Liz. 0 8783 Closing Remarks MF: We had to have that story on here.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Yes, it was good for his passion. 0 MovingImage Liz Bradbury recalls the inner workings of Allentown’s non-discrimination ordinance, PA GALA’s impact in local elections and national lawmaking, and their lawsuit against Citizens for Traditional Values. INTERVIEW WITH LIZ BRADBURY JULY 13, 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 and this is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Center's Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, and we're meeting on Zoom because there is a pandemic going on and today is July 13th, 2020. Liz, thank you so much for being here with me today. LIZ BRADBURY: I'm so glad to be here. MF: And, to start, I'm just going to ask you to state your full name and spell it for me, again. LB: My full name is Elizabeth Bradbury, E-L-I-Z-A-B-E-T-H, B-R-A-D-B-U-R-Y. MF: And, will you please share your birthday again? LB: 6/15/57. MF: Thank you. And prior to this interview we talked about consent, and I just want to return to that for a minute. Do you consent to this interview today? LB: Yes, I do. MF: And you consent to having this interview transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in searchable formats? LB: Yes, I do. MF: And do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, including films, articles, websites, presentations, or things we haven't thought of yet? LB: Yes, I do. MF: And do you understand that you'll have 30 days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review the interview, to identify parts you want to delete, or to withdraw the full interview from the project? LB: Yes, I do. MF: Fabulous, thank you so much. So, we had a really wonderful interview last week about PA GALA and your work on voting guides that sort of lead up to the 2002 passage of the PA Hate Crimes bill. I'll say we ended that interview with you gesturing towards the antidiscrimination ordinance, and you began work on that in 1998. So, I'd like to focus on that today. Could you give us an origin story of how you started in 1998 to work on this antidiscrimination ordinance? LB: Yeah. So, what was happening was now we had PA GALA in place, Pennsylvania Gay and Lesbian Alliance for Political Action. And we were producing voter's guides and we were being very successful in doing that, I have to say. And we had a few people on the board, but all of the work was being done by me, and Trish, organizing the Lehigh Valley, and Steve Black organizing the bigger efforts, he was the CEO of the organization. So, when we had these meetings, Steve would come and we would have these. Now, this was all out of our house. We're doing everything out of our house, and out of Black's Luncheonette, which was Steve's restaurant in Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania, in Northampton County. And so, one of the things we began to talk about was that we needed to pass an antidiscrimination ordinance in the city of Allentown, and we were serious about doing that and beginning to organize it. And one of the reasons that we were doing that is because we were beginning to see that we were getting more and more indication that there would be support of that. So, through the voter guides, we were interviewing candidates and some of the candidates, as I think I mentioned before, would say things like, "We don't have any gay people in our county," or something. But then, we were beginning to see that that was obviously not true and people were coming forward to say not only that they did have people that they were concerned about, most people didn't know that we weren't even protected by the law and they would come forward and say things like, "Of course, that should happen." So, we had a number of meetings, we talked about what it would have to look like to be able to move forward to create this piece of legislation and we were talking about this as sort of an abstract idea because one of the things you do when you pass pieces of legislation is, you try to be sure that your City Council or your municipal entity is in favor of it, that you have the votes to pass it, or at least you have the people that would support it. And so, some level of support, you have to drum up that support otherwise it's very devastating to try to bring it to a council and have them all say, "No, forget it. We're not going to do it." It's demoralizing to the community. So, we were working on that and one of the thing we were doing in the questionnaires that we were sending out to people with regard to the passage of an ordinance was, we would write to City Council members -- hold on a minute I have to close this because I'm distracted by the view -- and we would say, "Would you support a passage of an antidiscrimination ordinance in the city of Allentown," or candidates who were running for City Council. And we began to see a pattern of groups of people that said they would support this kind of thing. Also, Trish had a talk with Frank Concannon, who was on Allentown City Council and Frank, who's an older man like I think I've mentioned before, was pretty good about it. At first, he was saying, "I don't know anybody that's gay," and then Trish was saying, "Well, you don't know anybody who's gay who would be comfortable enough to tell you that they were gay." And he very thoughtfully, I mean, this guy was in his 70s at the time, very thoughtfully paused and said, "Well, you're right about that. I don't think that they would tell me that they've been discriminated." And people would say, "Well, these people are never discriminated against," and then we'd have horrendous instances of discrimination. So, what happened was that a person -- and I think this was the order of how this happened -- a group of people who were running for office said that they were in support of an antidiscrimination ordinance. And one of them was a candidate named Mary Cramsey. And Mary Cramsey was a Democrat, and she was running for the nondiscrimination, so we interviewed her. And she was on. She was pro hate crimes bill ; she was pro hate crimes legislation if it was in the city. She was in favor of domestic partner recognition. She was in favor of the ordinance. And she said she would actually sponsor the ordinance because that was one of the questions, would you sponsor the ordinance, would you cosponsor it, would you support it, would you vote for it? And she was indicative that she would do that. So, we were preparing the voter's guides and things were happening. And other things happened that spurred the ordinance at the time, but one of the things that happened was that Mary Cramsey had said all these things, and then somebody in the community came to us, one of our LGBT people in the community and said, "Have you seen this newsletter that's coming out from an organization called 'Citizens for Traditional Values,'" which was an the ultra, ultra-far-right organization, "and it quotes Mary Cramsey saying that she does not support the ordinance. Right here in writing." And I said, "Let me see that." I got the thing, and I looked at it and I said, "Well, this is a shock. Maybe they misinterpreted her." So, I called her up and I said to her, "Ms. Cramsey, I have your handwritten and signed questionnaire right here and you said that you would support this ordinance and you said you would support the hate crimes bill, and you'd support all these things. I've just seen this thing from Citizens for Traditional Values and you're saying exactly the opposite, which is the correct thing? You signed this thing." And she said, "Well, I don't support that hate crimes thing." I said, "What are you talking about?" She said, "Well, I think that what gay people do causes them to be victims of crimes and it's their own fault." And I said, "What?" And I said, "So, you're saying if somebody gets beat up because they're gay, it's their fault?" And she says, "Well, yeah, because you do bad things." And I said, "You lied on this questionnaire. You don't support a law that says that people can't be fired or can't be denied housing for public accommodation at all." And she said, "No, I don't." I said, "Well, why did you sign this thing that said you did?" And she said, "Well, I don't want to talk about that." So, in my mode, I immediately called The Morning Call, and because we had already produced the voter's guide and sent it out to everybody. And we'd endorsed her. So, luckily, we did have internet in that we had the ability to send out emails to people, which I immediately did, to say that this candidate didn't support this. But I also said to Bob Wittman, he was a reporter at The Morning Call, as you know, you know Bob, that this thing it happened. So, he came over to the house and he interviewed me. And I showed him the questionnaire and the Traditional Values thing, and I said, "I've got a big problem with this. This candidate lied to get votes. We've produced voter information. What are you going to do about it?" And so, he wrote a front-page, an enormous article with a picture of her, he said, "Where did they get the picture of her? She looks like a pin-up person in the picture," and he interviewed her and she absolutely said, "Yeah, I lied to them." So, she was absolutely clear. He said, "Did you fill this out?" And she said, "Yes, but I didn't mean it." And he said, "But you misrepresented to the voters." Well, up until that point, and one of the things about when you're working on Allentown City Council is that when you're in your own town you can really see if people have yard signs and stuff like that, and we had seen that she had had a lot of yard signs. And this was in the spring, actually. So, at that time, I actually was driving up the street and I had all of these yard signs, and I could see, the next day, after that article came out, the signs were gone. And I was thinking there's two things about that. One of these things is that this person was blatantly a bigot and anti-gay. But also, she blatantly lied just to get people to vote for her. And I don't think anybody is comfortable, any honest person, is comfortable with that level of hypocrisy for a person to run for office and then just say, "Yes," to every single questionnaire they get. "Yes, I support abortion rights, no, I don't support abortion rights." Come on, you can't have both sides. And you can't have no political consequences. So, we did this thing. We did it very, very publicly. And we were actually heartened by that, because this was the primary, and we were very heartened by that because we felt strongly that this was so wrong, and we were glad to see that she was losing support. And at the same time, and I think that this was the same time, yeah, so this was in 1998 and this was when people were running for City Council, and at that time, there were three members of council that were running to retain their seats, Emma Tropiano, Terry Spinosa, and who's the other one? I guess Todd Stevens. And they had all been on council and they were running to retain their seats as incumbents. Okay, so that stuff has happened. So, they've seen in effect that we had a very, very public way of humiliating, and I'm not afraid to get up and say, "I'm gay and what she did was lying and it's wrong," and it was hard to not see the community thought it was really serious that she had done that. How do you defend somebody who just lied potentially to both sides of the aisle in effect? But I think that it made political candidates concerned that we had a voice in the community. So all of a sudden-- So Allentown has a Human Relations Commission because we have a human relations law that was passed in 1965. It was at that time, the only community in the Lehigh Valley that had any non-discrimination law. Everybody else, Easton, Bethlehem, none of them had a non-discrimination law, they all relied on the federal law and the state law. But Allentown had its own law that was passed in 1965, but it did not include sexual orientation and gender identity. But because we have the law, we have a Human Relations Commission that had been functioning with appointed commissioners who were volunteer commissioners, and they'd been functioning since 1965. And this was 1998. And all of a sudden, we get a call from Felix Molina, who was the chair of the Allentown Human Relations Commission, and he said, "Last night, in the commission meeting, in front of the press, I and our assistant chair, the vice-chair, Robert E. Smith Jr., have announced that we are going to work toward the passage of an antidiscrimination ordinance addition of sexual orientation and gender identity to the Allentown Human Relations law." And I said, "You already announced this to the press?" And he said, "Yeah." I said, "So, what are you going to do?" And he said, "Well, we're going to bring it up in council in the next meeting." And I said, "Well, have you planned this out?" And he said, "Well, yeah." So, I said, "Do you have a sponsor and a co-sponsor? Because you can't introduce legislation unless you have a sponsor and a co-sponsor." And he said, "We have a sponsor, I think. I think Frank Concannon will sponsor it. We don't have a co-sponsor but there is a clause for Allentown City Council in its bylaws that says that if you can get a bunch of signatures, 35 signatures of Allentown voters, you don't have to have a second, you can use that as a second for the piece of legislation." And I said, "Okay. The meeting's on Wednesday. Do you have everybody?" He goes, "No, I want you to go out and get 35 Allentown voters to sign this list." I said, "Felix, I don't just have these people, it's Monday and you need it by Wednesday and these people aren't sitting in my living room. The bars aren't even open. Who am I going to get to do this?" So, of course we did it. We actually ran out and we got 100 signatures. Felix worked really hard on it. We didn't know Felix then, but he worked really hard on it. I was a little shocked that he didn't really have any preliminary, or that he told us, but now we had announced it to the press and it was in the paper, and now we had to deal with it. So, Felix said to me, "I want you to come and meet with Terry Spinosa who is running for office and he's already on office and we want to introduce the legislation, we should go ahead and do that." And I said, "But you don't have a second." And he said, "Well, we have these signatures," and so, he brought them to council, and Ernie Toth, who was the president of council then said, "That doesn't mean that. You can't just do that." Well, actually you can, but he was lying and he said, "You can't just push this piece of legislation." Anyway, Felix said, "Okay, well we should plan on doing this, on pushing this piece of legislation with these signatures. We should have a big meeting." I said, "After all, we have to have the room full of LGBT people, and our allies, not just show up in a meeting and hope a couple of people there are going to be in favor." He goes, "Okay, well, we'll postpone it. But I want you to talk to Terry because I think he will be the cosponsor." So, I go to meet, right at City Council chambers, and I meet with Terry Spinosa and Felix Molina. And Felix, I have to say, is a wonderful guy, a terrific organizer, English is not his first language, and he was not really understanding what Terry said. So, Terry comes into this meeting with us and I say, "So, would you cosponsor?" And he goes, "Well, I have to be sure about this piece of legislation. I have to be sure that it supports your rights," meaning you gay people, "but it also supports the rights of everybody else." And I said, "What do you mean by that?" And he said, "Well, you know they have rights with regard to this issue, too," and I said, "You mean the right to fire me because I'm gay? That's the thing that you want to support?" And he goes, "Well, I think that's important." So, I take Felix out into the hallway, and I said, "You realize he just said, 'when hell freezes over?' That's never going to happen. You can't say to some people, 'We'll support your right to fire gay people, but we'll also support the rights for gay people to not be fired because they're gay. That's opposed to each other. That can't happen." He goes, "Oh." Felix said, because he's not, and he's hoping. I said, "Well, who else do you think we can get?" So, now, on council was Emma Tropiano. Emma Tropiano happened to live across the street from us. Emma Tropiano was notoriously the most anti-Latino person in the entire Lehigh Valley. Though she was a Democrat, she actually was so anti-Latino that she would go to City Council meetings -- and this is documented -- and she would just blatantly lie about the Latino population. She'd say, "Every single person who's on welfare in Allentown is Latino," and a person from the county would stand up and say, "Councilperson Tropiano, the statistics show that of the 14,000 people in Allentown that are on welfare, 70 percent of them are white," and Emma Tropiano actually said to them, in this council meeting, "Don't try to confuse me with facts," which was a classic thing that she frequently said. She was well-known to say stupid stuff like that. She also furthered and instituted Allentown's law that was the English-only law. And it meant that every single piece of paper that ever was produced by the city could not be in anything other than English unless it was an emergency document. Well, the way they were able to get around that, thank goodness, was they pretty much said, "Everything that comes out of government is an emergency document." But it took a while to do that, and she was very loud about it and there were very many people -- there was not as big a voting population of Latino population in the city of Allentown in that time. She went all the way to Congress in Washington to talk about how important this English only -- she spoke in Congress to talk about how important this English only junk was. So, Felix said, "Well, she's not going to do anything she's horrible. She's really anti-minority." I said, "Well, maybe she's not anti-gay. I don't know. Maybe we could get her to sponsor. Maybe we should talk to her." And Ernie Toth was a really, really curmudgeonly conservative, again Democratic, because there are all Union Democrat types, but he was ultra, ultra-far-right, old-school, I think he was 80 in those days. And then there was also on, Council there's Frank Concannon who also was an old man but he was listening to us and he was very supportive in a lot of ways. And then, a guy named Todd Stevens who was a nonentity in some ways. He didn't say much during council meetings. He was on Council but he didn't say much. And David Bausch, who had been the county executive, he was very conservative. He was Republican. I think he was the only Republican. Maybe Terry Spinosa was a Republican, too, on council. And then, Tropiano. And David Howells, Sr., his son, now David Howells Jr., is a judge, they are all a police family, and David Howells had been the chief of police and then he had retired, but now he was on Council, and he was actually, at that time, I think Ernie Toth was president of council, but David Howells served as president of Council. He was a little bit more willing to listen to people because he was more used to public stuff, but he wasn't really on our side at that point. Later, he ended up voting for it, a long time later, but he was the only one on Council that was still -- well, he and Bausch were the only ones that were on Council when we finally passed it in 2002. But this was 1998. So, David Howells, he wasn't there. We were trying to think, how can we get somebody to do this? And Felix was insisting that this list that we had would allow for a vote, because we wanted people to understand that when they voted for this, they were voting against equal rights, because if we can get people on record -- people don't like to do that, particularly Democrats don't like to publicly vote. So, we met anyway, with Emma Tropiano and Terry Spinosa and David Howells. David Howells, we actually went to lunch. He took us to lunch and we talked about it and he listened to us. Emma Tropiano listened to us. She told another person in the community, "Why would I ever support this because every time you have sex you're breaking the law," because this was before Bowers, or this is after Bowers but before the Supreme Court decision and it was against the law. I said, "It wasn't against the law in the state of Pennsylvania for gay people to have sex, but it was in other parts of the United States," but that's making a presumption of how people are having sex, and that's true for straight people, too. But anyway. So, she said that. She just came out with things like that. She was in her early 70s, I think, at the time. And so, we met with those three people that were running, and Emma Tropiano said to us, right out in the meeting, in front of witnesses, "Okay, look. I will cosponsor this if you wait until after the election." This is the election that Mary Cramsey was running in. I think that's the way it worked. Maybe that Mary Cramsey election was a little bit later, but even so, she said, "If you wait until after the election." So, we said, "Okay. So, you're saying, let me just restate this, you are saying that you will cosponsor this if we wait until after the primary election," because there weren't really any other people running against her. If she won the primary and there was some primary challengers, but if she won the primary she would win the election, and that was pretty much true. So, we said, "Okay, we need to have a sponsor, so okay." So, we have the election. It's in May. She wins the primary. She's one of the people who wins the primary and then we say, "Great, now you're going to go co-sponsor." She said, "No, I'm not going to do it." I said, "So, you lied." And she said, "Well, I don't think it's a good idea." I said, "But you lied. You told us you would do it and we would push them --" so, anyway. Now we're really mad and we're never going to trust anybody. One of the things that happen with regards to Mary Cramsey and Emma Tropiano once they did this was -- and certainly this was true for the Mary Cramsey issue,was that we made a decision through PA GALA that we would never endorse somebody unless we talked to them in person, again. We would never endorse somebody based on just their questionnaire. We might endorse somebody based on their voting record because they'd actually voted in pro-LGBT circumstances, but we would never endorse somebody unless we absolutely knew that they were going to be this. And we would have known that for Mary Cramsey. Emma Tropiano is a bald-face liar, but I don't think that, if she had written the stuff, I think that would have been more serious, as well. So, now we begin to work toward this, decide that we're going to push and have a City Council meeting anyway. So, one of the things we did was, that was the point where we decided to create the Valley Gay Press, and we created the Valley Gay Press for the sole reason -- the newspaper, it was called Valley Free Press then, this newsletter, newspaper, to create a circumstance where we'd be able to get information to people in a way that really explained stuff because most people in 1998 did not have email, we didn't any social media, we couldn't get information people in a very good way, maybe we could get information to 200 people. But we wanted to be able to put this into the voter's guides, we wanted to be able to tell people exactly what was happening with regard to significant circumstances regards to the passage of this ordinance. And when we created the Valley Gay Press, we did it for several reasons. We did it for three major reasons, and I need to say this quickly. We did it to pass the ordinance, to bring political information to people, we did it to bring information in general for people so that organizations would stop having conflicting events. There was a time, right at that time, where Pride and the biggest fundraiser event that FACT had, they accidentally scheduled for the same day, which was a Sunday in June. And they were furious at each other and blamed each other for this enormous -- really, it was a devastating circumstance because you could not go. One of them was at the Berkleigh Country Club and the other one was the Pride Festival, and it was this terrible opposition. And I said, "We're going to create the Valley Gay Press with a calendar in it so people won't do that. They won't accidentally create events that were happening at the same time. We don't have that many events that are big events like that. We can't afford to have them at the same time." And then, the last thing was to answer people's questions, that we'd really be able to bring people information, bring people together that way, by advertising all the different events that not-for-profits were doing, and having articles that people were researching to talk about what was going on in the LGBT community, and how it affected people. But at this point, when we created the Valley Gay Press in 1998, we did that specifically to bring people information about the ordinance issue. So, what we started to do was, we started to try to gather people together by communicating with them and getting them and then picking a date of the City Council meeting, the City Council meets twice a month, and to have that meeting be the time when we would introduce this legislation. So, we did that. And we had a lot of telephone lists. So, we'd really call people up and say, "Can you come to this meeting? It's really, really important. We need to fill the room." So, I'm going to fast forward a little bit. We went through a lot of different steps to do this. But meanwhile, Felix Molina is working on this, too, he's working with other community members, we're setting up different people to speak, we've spoken to head of Equality Pennsylvania then, it was actually called the Gay and Lesbian Legal Aid Society, or something like that. It was the first permutation. And Andrew Park was running it, he had been an EEOC judge, he's now a really big national activist. But he came to us and he said, "This is what I think you should do and how you should set up this meeting. You should have people who have been discriminated against, you should have ministers speak, you should have people in the community talk about these different issues," and I found people. I found a woman whose child was discriminated against in daycare, and they told her that she couldn't call -- the child called their other parent "Poppy," and it was a person who had been identified at birth as female, and the daycare said, "She's not allowed to do that." This three-year-old kid was not allowed to do that in daycare, and this woman said to me, "I felt that was blatant discrimination, LGBT discrimination. I wanted to take my kid out of daycare, but I had paid for the daycare for the rest of the year, and so I couldn't do it," and several other people who had spoken about losing their jobs because they were LGBT, and circumstances like that. So, we're setting up these people to do that. I had ministers, a guy who was the minister of the Saint John's Lutheran Church on 5th Street, he was going to speak, he was great, actually, and a number of other people, heads of organization, a vice president from Air Products, first we were going to have Charlie Versaggi who worked at Air Products, he said, "No, no, I'm going to get the top vice president to have him come and speak." And he came, he was one of the main people that spoke there. And we were setting up this list of people that were going to speak and we figured that even if they didn't let us do this, you can always speak at courtesy of the floor, and so I was telling people, "You cannot speak for more than two and a half minutes, you have to practice doing that. If you go over, you'll lose it." We had people from all different minority groups, different parts of the community, and we also had Julio Guridy, who was, at that time, a young guy who had just moved from the Dominican Republic a few years before, he was working in the banking system, and he really wanted to speak in favor of this. He was actually from a very conservative Latino church, but he ended up saying to me, he didn't speak English really, really well but he said to me, "I really want to do this but I want you to help me write the speech because I can't write this." So, we worked together to write the speech so that it would be what he wanted to say but it would be in a form that he practiced it. And we had a bunch of other people. We had Dr. Elizabeth Goff, who's a pediatrician, and she wanted to get up and say, because people were saying, "That's going to just let pedophiles," because gay people are all pedophiles, so that's going to let people do that. Elizabeth Goff actually got up, she is a pediatrician, she got up and she was ready to speak. And we also wanted to fill the room with our people. We made buttons that said "Equal Rights" on them. They were blue buttons and if you see pictures of that, there's some photographs of those in the newspaper and stuff you can see these people wearing these buttons. So, the day is coming closer, Steve Black is ready to do this, he's going to speak, I'm going to speak, we have this list of who's going to go, and now we're hearing that the far-right side is organizing a little bit against us, and we're concerned about that because the newspaper has talked about us having this meeting. So, now the night of the meeting comes, and Steve pulls up in his car and he says, "There is an enormous rainbow over the," he said, "I was driving into town, I could see this rainbow over city hall." I said, "Well, that's a good sign." So, Steve and I, and Trish was in City Council chambers, helping people to be seated, we were trying to get older people that would sit in the front row because we wanted it to not just look like we've got a lot of young rabble-rousers, although we weren't young at that time, but Steve was in his 20s, then, I was in my 30s. I think, maybe. Maybe 41. And we were working on this stuff, and a lot of our friends were preparing to come and people from other organizations. So, Steve and I are standing outside greeting people that are coming in and we're giving them the button. And Steve was very, very nervous. He often got very nervous. I did, too. I was nervous enough, but he was very, very agitated doing things like that. He's also very, very excited. Because a lot of the people that are coming in were our people and they were thrilled to have the buttons, they were putting them on and our friends were coming, people coming in from ACCO, and Sandy Fluck, and Bev Morgan who ran ACCO, and Sandy's mother who was in her 80s were going to sit in the front row, we're all excited about it. And these people are coming in, there are people coming in and we're giving out the buttons, and we're thinking, "This is really good." Then, a guy comes through, and I go to give him a button and he goes, "No, I'm a Christian." And it was Frank McVeigh, who ended up to be our archnemesis, but he was one of the first ones, "No, I don't want it, I'm a Christian." I didn't even know it was him. But there were a couple of scary people who came in. There was a guy who was in army fatigues who was really scary. He was very edgy looking. He was wearing fatigues, he had camouflage underneath, really angry, wouldn't talk to anybody when he walked into council. So, there's more and more people coming in, they're packing the council chambers, we know there's hundreds of people coming in, and these people coming in. Steve is very upbeat about it, because there's so many of our people there and that's a very good way to push legislation, to fill the room with people who are your supporters. And they were at the City Council chambers, there's doors that go in, it's right along Hamilton Street and a car pulls up across the street and these three old people get out and Steve goes, "Oh, crap." They're very conservative looking people, middle-aged gray hair people, and two much older people. And Steve, in his mind he's thinking, "These are the far-right people." And he goes, "Oh, no. Look at those people. They're going to be trouble." And I grab him by the lapel, I said, "Those are our people. That's Melinda and Don Kohn. That's Harold and Roberta Kreider. Those are our people." [laughs] And he's so excited. He's so excited. And they come over and we're hugging, we're hugging everybody that's coming in, we're giving them the buttons, and we put Harold and Roberta right in the front row. They look like they do now. They were in their 70s then, they're in their 90s now, they're still around folks, if you're watching this, and they're in the archives, so watch their stuff. They probably didn't even talk about this because it's just one of the million things that they've done. But I'd already talked to Roberta, and I knew that she was going to be great. And she was set to talk. So, now we have this line of people signed up and we say that we want to push the legislation. And they said, "No, you can't do that." So, then we're going to be at courtesy of the floor. At that time, courtesy of the floor was at the beginning of the meeting. So, I speak first, and I say my little two minutes thing, and I say there's all these people here, we want to see this happen, and people just over and over are saying, "We want to see this legislation introduced." If you look in the Valley Gay Press, there's actually a list of everybody who spoke and it says what they were good or bad and basically what they said. It's in the Valley Gay Press. And so, we're having people speak and Felix Molina speaks, and Bob Smith speaks, and there were about 24 speakers. And at one point, and we can see how long the line is, and people are beginning to speak, and Ernie Toth says, "We're going to have to cut this off." Now, they're not really supposed to do that. They're not supposed to cut it off. It's supposed to go on forever if they want to. But they didn't want to because Ernie Toth is very conservative, and he didn't want all these pro-gay people speaking. So, we had about 28 speakers, and 22 of them were pro, and six of them were negative. And one of the people that got up that were negative actually had those pamphlets, some of them are in the archives, that say a horrible, horrible things about the LGBT community that says gay men eat eight pounds of feces a year, and they kill children, and they molest kids, all this kind of stuff. And two people had that, Frank McVeigh gets up and he says some kind of convoluted things like the state doesn't have this law and you can't do this and stuff. But our people who spoke about being discriminated, I had talked to them about what they were going to say, I think Lenore Johnson actually spoke about losing her job when she owned Diamonz, and she had a job at a transport company, when there was an article that said that she owned Diamonz and that Diamonz was a gay bar, she lost her job the next day. And she'd been there for 12 years and never had a negative performance review. So, she said, "Clearly, I was discriminated because of that." And so, people are talking about that. And I have to say that we didn't even know what the legislation was going to say. So, people could say, "You were only talking about the gay community," that wasn't really true. We hadn't written the legislation yet. That's one of the things about entering a piece of legislation. You first talk about the possibility of passing it, then you have committee meetings and stuff where they would have -- that's one of the things we should have done before we even brought it into fruition, we should have written the legislation and brought it to them and then had somebody who said they were going to pass it. But anyway, this is happening. All these people going through. And brilliant people are speaking, some people are beginning to say the same thing, though. And people in the room, there were loads of people there, everybody that we knew was there, people from FACT, Hoover was there, everybody, our friends [Laura Terrace?] and Judie Arndt and lots of women from the Girl Scouts who were there, and all sorts of really terrific people. And the people from Pride, I think, were there at the same time. They were really supporting this effort. And the room was packed. They have, I think, 200 seats in there and there was about 300 people. At the same time, the creepy guy in the army fatigues is walking around the back of the room, punching his hands like this, and he's walking up and down the street. And in the back of City Council chambers, I actually went over to security and I said, "This guy is a problem. What's going on? He's really scary," and they actually said to him that he had to stop doing that, or they would eject him. So, he kind of calmed down, although he wasn't that calm. He was scary. So, now the line is going along and our community, every time we hear somebody that's really anti, it's very upsetting, because they say terrible things. The guy gets up and he says all those horrible things about gay people, and Melinda Kohn gets up, and she'd never spoke in public before and her daughter, Sally Kohn, who's a famous person on television now, had come out recently. Melinda had never heard anybody say this, and she started to speak about this, and she just started to cry. She said, "I can't believe that people would say horrible things about people just because you don't want them to have the rights. It's awful." Roberta Krieder was brilliant, it was a very positive. And it's significant to say that when you have horrible, horrible people that say awful things you can point to those people and say, "Clearly these people would gleefully discriminate against somebody who was LGBT. This is evidence that this kind of discrimination exists. You can't say nobody will ever fire somebody or deny them housing if you have people who will get up and say these horrible, not true, cruel things." So, the line's going along, they don't let people speak twice, which is the rule, and Steve says to me, "It looks good because the last person that's going to speak, I think, is [Raphael Coneseres?], or maybe it was going to be Felix, and so he was in line, and he was going to say the summation of it, and that was going to be great. And we actually were saying to people, "Don't get up and speak if you're going to say the same thing as somebody else," and Raphael Coneseres was a brilliant artist, he's in Washington DC, a sculptor, he said, "I want to say that people are saying that we can't use the same turns over and over again that aren't in the state law but the state law doesn't have the clauses that Allentown's law has, and I want to point that out," which was a good point to make. And so, he was going to speak and so he was there, I think he was one of the last ones, and then Felix, and that was the end. And then, a guy got up who was standing behind them, and I went over to Steve and I said, "That guy's going to be bad and that's going to be a problem but who else do we have to speak?" And he said, "Do you know that guy?" He was a little person. And I said, "Yes, I do know that guy because Gayle Erich," remember Gayle Erich who put together our Quark files for the thing, when her father died, we went to the funeral and he was a minister who got up at the end and said some of the most horrible things I had ever heard. He said, "It's too bad that your father isn't going to go to heaven because he didn't take Jesus as his personal savior." I said, "If that guy said that there, he's going to say something horrible, now. Clearly he's ultra-far-right." So, Felix and Steve and I look around and we say, "What are we going to do? We've got to have somebody else speak and we've got to control the message." And I said, "Trish is going to have to speak." Okay, this really freaks out Trish. But I said, "Honey, you have to do it. You have to do it." She said, "Okay, but you have to write what I'm going to say." So, I'm out in the hallway trying to write this down and Felix is saying, "You need to say this, you need to say this," and I say, "Felix, shut up, I have to write this, she's coming to the end," and Erie Toth points to Trish, he goes, "Glasses lady, you're the last one." So, we know she's going to be the last one. So, now there's a bunch of people that still have to speak, so we know we have about 15 minutes, but I'm trying to write this thing that's really going to be punchy, and Felix is so worried that it's going to happen. So, what we decided was we're going to write a speech for Trish that's going to specifically say, "These people here all want you to pass this legislation. We want somebody to suspend the rules and to discuss this legislation and vote on it today. We want you to do that, or to at least let this piece of legislation be introduced, formally introduced." So, I'm writing out the stuff for Trish on like the back of an envelope and we're trying to do this thing and the places are getting closer and then Trish gets up and she's doing this [shakes hands], because she hates to speak in public. But she's also brilliant. She's really brilliant. She spoke in front of the legislature and she's brilliant. She's got a doctorate, for heaven's sake. So, she's getting closer and closer. She gets to the thing. This is what she says, and this is what we'd written out and she says this, and she says it so brilliantly. And the Morning Call reporters were there, and they reported on this. She says, "You have heard all of these people who have spoken in favor of these rights. And you have heard people who have spoken so negatively that it's clear that these rights are necessary. If you look around the room, you can see that there are people that vastly support this piece of legislation. So, I am going to ask everyone who supports this legislation to raise their hand, and then I hope that you will suspend the rules and introduce the legislation." Then she turns to the crowd and she says, "Raise your hand if you support this legislation," and every person in the room, and they said in the Morning Call, "A forest of hands raised across the room." You couldn't see for the hands. And you couldn't see the anti people, because there were hundreds and hundreds of people with their hands raised, and like six people who didn't have their hands raised. And Ernie Toth, when the little person spoke, he was a minister, he goes, "I'm a minister and I'm against this legislation. I don't really know why, and I can't really articulate why, but I'm just against it." And then he sits down. [laughs] And then Trish says this raise your hands thing. But before he sits down, points to him, and he goes, sir -- The first thing the little person said was, "I'm a little person, and I know what it's like to be discriminated against." And then he says, "I don't know why this legislation is wrong, but it's wrong." And then Ernie Toth points to him and he says, "Sir, you may be a little man, but you have a big heart." [laughs] What? After all this, and then that's what you say? So, Ernie Toth, he's a nutcase. So, anyway now Trish has done this, everybody has their hands raised, they have the opportunity to do this, and they don't. But Frank Concannon who's sitting on the dais, he raises his hand, and he says, "I move to do this," and they ignored him. And everybody else on council just sits there, they say no. So, we leave and quite frankly, we are very, very encouraged by this because we didn't think it was going to pass. We didn't think anything was going to happen. We just wanted to see if we could pull this off. And we did. And Andrew Parks said, "This was the best meeting I've ever seen. The orchestrated meeting of these people speaking, and everything was just perfect. You did a perfect thing." And so, Steve called me the next morning and he said, "I think we should call Frank Concannon and thank him." And I said, "I think we should do that, too." So, I call up Frank at his house, and his wife answers, and I can hear him in the background, and she says, "Who is this?" She had a great accent. She goes, "Who is this? Rita Concannon, who is it?" And I said, "This is Liz Bradbury," she goes, "Oh, just a minute. Frank, Frank, it's Liz Bradbury." She sounded just like that. And he comes to the phone, and I can hear him go, "Oh," but he thinks I'm going to yell at him because we lost. And he gets on the phone and I said, "Frank, I just wanted to tell you, we're gay. We didn't expect to win this. For heaven sakes, we don't have any rights. Why would we think that this was going to work? People who are straight who have never been discriminated against might think that this would work, but we knew this wasn't going to work. Don't worry about it. We did fine. We did fine. And we're really grateful for what you did." And we were allies with him pretty much through the rest of the time. He was terrific. He became comptroller. He didn't run for city council again, he ran for city comptroller, and he was city comptroller for years and years, and he was great. He was very liberal and very supportive. So, then we recognized -- Steve and Trish and I recognized that we cannot make this happen unless we have our own candidate. And we begin to now build coalitions. So, a couple of things happened that were really significant and the first thing -- just a bunch of stuff. So, we're producing the Valley Gay Press, we're producing voter information, we're building our list, we now have 700 people on our list of Allentown voters who are registered voters, 700 people could swing any election in Allentown because you put 700 on one side, and you take 700 away, that's 1,400 votes, people don't even have 1,400 votes to win elections in the city. So, it's very, very significant. And these are people who are craving our voter information, they're voting, they're super voters, they're developing voting. So, this is very significant. So, we're moving along. We think we need a candidate who is actually going to push this legislation and we need a mayor who is going to speak from it in a positive way. The first thing that happens is that I won the Allentown Human Relations Commission Award. Bob Smith, who was the vice chair, put me up for the award and I won it and I got an opportunity to speak from the stage to a big group of people who were very pro-rights, because this is the Human Relations Commission. So, they're people from all these different organizations. And when I spoke from the stage, Bill Heydt, who was the mayor, then, came up and gives me the award, he said he would sign the legislation but not unless Council brought it to him, but he had lobbied Council to not bring him the legislation. He was not pro the legislation and he wouldn't speak publicly in favor of it. So, he comes up to me to hand me the award, he's got this smile like that, and I say, "Yeah, thanks a lot, this would be great, but I'd rather have actual rights." And I regret to this day because he said, through his smiling teeth, "Well, they didn't bring me the legislation. I can't change things." Well, actually, he could have changed some things. He could have done executive orders. But he didn't do it. He was never positive, he never really supported us, and he was a Republican. He did very little, actually, as the mayor of Allentown. So, I go and I speak and I say, "This is great to have this but I haven't had these rights, and I am pledging my life to work for this," we had three tables of people there, people were very enthusiastic but I rue the day that I didn't say, "I just want to tell you all that Mayor Heydt whispered to me that he's going to support this legislation for the next three years, let's give him a big hand." I really wanted to do that. I wish I had said that. I just really wish I had said that. And I still wish I had said that because I don't think he could have gotten up in front of these people and said, "No, no, I don't support that legislation at all." He did a couple of really stupid things. He didn't support the Martin Luther King holiday, and he made some very foolish remarks about that in public meetings in front of folks like this where he really looked around the room and realized he made a big mistake, which was kind of funny, actually. But anyway, so I won that. That gave us a lot of momentum. People were paying more attention to us. There was an article in the paper about it, that was a significant thing. So, now, we end up recognizing that we have to do this. The next thing that happens is that we really developed a pretty good relationship with Felix Molina. Turns out, Felix is gay. He never even told us that. All through the time that we were doing the meeting, he never said he was, but he was. And it turned out that he was in a long-term relationship with the brother of somebody we knew who was at MCC, so then he outs himself to us. I'm producing more Valley Gay Presses, and I have the who's who, and he was in the who's who of the Valley Gay Press, that's one of the Valley Gay Press articles. He gets up and he says, "We're going to have the first Puerto Rican Day parade and festival, and I'm going to be the CEO of this. And I want you to have a float in it, and Pride to have a float in it." So, Pride had this float, we were all on it, we all worked together to make this float, and this thing happened. So, this, I think, was a year and a half later, in 2000. So, we're at the parade route, and Felix was a great organizer. He doesn't live in the Lehigh Valley anymore, but he was a terrific organizer. The parade started in the parking lot of the Sacred Heart High School, which is down the hill, down Gordon Street, at the bottom of Gordon Street, and we're going to gather there, gather all the floats, it was going to come up that steep hill on Gordon Street, and then go all the way along 4th Street to Jordan Park. It's a huge festival, way bigger, 20,000 people go to that festival. It's enormous. But this was the first one, and it was very exciting. And Felix had done a great job bringing lots of people together, and sometimes people who were a little edgy, people in the community who were a little edgy, different, car groups, and motorcycle groups, and stuff like that. And it's very, very exciting. We're all there early in the morning getting the stuff ready to go and we're going to be on, I think it was a float, actually. We were in the parade several times. Don Kohn had, in those days, a really terrific antique truck that we used to ride on the back of, we were going to throw Mardi Gras beads, we always had thousands and thousands of Mardi Gras beads to throw to people or to hand out, or something like that when we were doing events like this, or at the Pride festival. So, everybody's getting ready, and Felix is there, and he looks great but he's nervous because this stuff is all happening. I see him talking to some suit, and then he comes over to me and he's standing there, and he has this look on his face of hysteria. I said, "What's wrong?" And he said, "That guy's from the city and he says that I have to give him 1,000 dollars for an insurance policy right now or they're going to cancel the parade and the festival." And I said, "What would happen if you did that?" He said, "Well, look around," meaning that there could be a riot if that happened. And he said, "They're so worried that there's going to be violence and stuff like that because it's Latinos, it's all prejudice and bigotry," and he's just furious. And I said, "Well, can't you give him a check?" And he said, "I don't have my checkbook. I left it at home." I said, "Why did you do that?" And he said, "I didn't expect them to do this. This is a complete surprise. They hadn't said anything to me, but they're going to cancel it. He's with the police, there's a bunch of police over there." I said, "He wants a thousand-dollar check?" And he said, "Yeah." And I said, "Okay." So, I reach in my pocket where I keep my checkbook because in those days I was in the antiques business, and one of the tools of the antiques trade, and we had just done big shows, is you have a lot of cash in your checkbook, you often carry a lot of cash. I wasn't carrying a lot of cash. So, I opened my checkbook and I have 1,014 dollars in my checking account. I said, "Okay, I'm going to write you this check but you better damn well give me this money because I can't afford to give you this money." And he said, "Oh, no, no, I'll do it, I'll do it, I'll do it, I'll give it to you tomorrow, I'll give it to you tomorrow morning." I said, "Okay, okay. I understand how important this is." So, now I've got my shaking hand and I'm filling out this check and the guy from the city, so he goes over to the city guy and goes, "I've got somebody that's going to give you a check." He said, "You're kidding." And the guy comes over and he goes, "Let me see your bank balance." I said, "I'm not going to show you my bank balance. You can't ask everybody what their bank balance is when they give you a check. I'm giving you a check and the check is good, that's all you need to know." Well, it was Sunday morning. So, even if my check hadn't been good, he couldn't have done it. Felix could have written him a bad check, which could have been good by the next morning, he just didn't have his checkbook. So, I write him the check and I hand him this thing, and then the guy is chagrined because he really thought that he was going to cancel the whole parade. And Felix did pay the money back the next morning. We walked along. It was not only that there were 20,000 people that were going to be the thing, but along the parade route, there were thousands and thousands of people. It's an enormous, wonderful parade. Or, it was in 1998. And it was so exciting, because it was the first one. So, we do the whole thing. We actually didn't do the festival because we didn't have a booth there, and we didn't have the money to pay for a booth because they actually charge quite a bit, people really do. It's more like now, with our Pride festival. But we did the parade, and we were happy about it, and that worked out. That was an enormously significant moment to cement our communities together to say, "We're here for you, and we're really supportive." And that was a really good thing. Felix and I were already working together, but this was a big deal that this happened. And also, he had specifically invited us to come. And I have to say that the reception of people on the sidelines was jubilant. People were cheering us from the sidelines. Nobody said anything negative or turned their back or anything like that. It was very, very significant. So, that happened. Okay, so now things are moving along and we're thinking we have to have a City Council member who's going to introduce this legislation and we have to have a mayoral candidate that's going to be supportive of it. So, we fasten on the idea that it has to be somebody who has a very flexible schedule, someone who works for themselves, so we fastened onto Gayle Hoover, and Gayle Hoover expressed that she would run for City Council if we did all the work for her. And so, I said, "Okay, I'll be your campaign manager, we have our big double house now, we will do all the mailings, I will help you with speeches," Gayle doesn't like to read speeches but every time she spoke, she would come over to me and I would say, "Say this, this, and this," and then she could get up and she can speak quite well off the cuff if she knows what she's supposed to say. She was quite good at speaking in situations like that. So, we begin to raise money for the campaign and stuff like that and we introduced the campaign. And you have to get signatures for people. And the people in the community did really support her. They gave money for her. We had to go around get Allentown voters to sign the petition for her candidacy. And so, she was working on it, a couple of other people were working on it, and Trish and I were working on it, and you have to have 100 signatures, so we wanted to be sure that our petition had at least 100 signatures on it so that everybody else's would go together, and we would have no challenges on the circumstances. So the other thing that happened at that time -- we were trying to get national organizations to support us, we asked the Victory Fund if they would support Gayle's campaign, they ultimately did. They were very slow and dragging their feet. One of the things that happened was that, also Julio Guridy decided to run for City Council. And we really liked Julio. He spoke for us, he had been very, very vocal. There was no person on Council who was -- Marty Velazquez was on Council but he was born in the United States and although he was pro Latino, he didn't speak Spanish and Julio would be the first Spanish-speaking person on Council that was really representing that part of the demographic of the city. So, we really supported his campaign. So, I said to Trish, "I'm going to circulate a petition for Julio, too." I think we did it for somebody else, but I can't remember. It was somebody who was running for school board, so we were circulating that petition as well, it was somebody who was LGBT. And Julio, although he's certainly not part of the LGBT community, he has members of his family who are not only gay, but also transgender. And at that time, he had a transgender person who was out in his family. So, now we begin to work with Mara Keisling to write the legislation before we move into the introduction of it. But first, we had to get Gayle to win. Well, we processed 35,000 pieces of mail through our house to make Gayle win this election. We got the voters list of Democratic super voters, it was important for her to win the primary, first of all. We had letters, a letter from Frank Concannon, his people directly, he was already elected as comptroller. We did all sorts of different things to make her -- I created some very good advertising documents. In those days, I don't think you can do this anymore, but you could send just a piece of paper that was folded over and people spent a lot of money on glossy stuff. I don't think that's necessary I think people think that people have a lot of money that they can do that. We were able to raise about, I don't know, 20,000, 30,000 dollars to run her campaign over the time of her campaign. I think Gayle Erich actually served as her treasurer for the election and that's a complicated thing to do. So, we did all of these things and we got her in position to do this. I was also circulating Julio's petition. And we had to get her on the ballot, she got on the ballot with no problem, there was about 300 signatures for her. On the day we turned in the signatures, that was the day that every candidate had to turn in their signatures, and I had 67 signatures for Julio, as well. The morning after everybody had turned in their petitions, Julio called me up and he said, "I circulated my own petition, I had 100 signatures on it, no more that. I had 100 signatures," and he said, "I was sure that Emma Tropiano would challenge my signatures, and all they would have to do is get one person who wasn't currently registered to vote, or who might not have been a Democrat or something like that." And he said, "And then I got in there and I saw 67 more signatures from you." And when he called me, he was laughing. He couldn't even speak. He goes, "I can't believe it, I can't believe it," and he was so happy that I did that. I have to say that Julio is still on Council. He's still on Council and every single piece of legislation, he's voted for us, even though he's from a very, very conservative church, and he stood up to his church and he's spoken for us and everything. I've never regretted that for a minute. But the Victory Fund said to me, "So, you've got a Latino guy and a gay woman. Can they both win?" I said, "I don't think so," because during this time, Emma Tropiano had run for mayor. And this was the time when she ran for the nomination against Marty Velazquez who ended up on Council. He was on Council, and he ended up running for Council and he was on Council at that time. But he had run for Council for the primary against Emma Tropiano. And we had endorsed Marty and we worked hard because Tropiano was a horrible, horrible far-right candidate, even though she was a Democrat. When the votes came in, it turned out that she was three votes ahead of Marty in the primary. But when they recounted the votes, when they counted the absentees, and they removed absentees from people who had actually voted, because once somebody had voted and absentee voted, so they took that out, Marty won the election against Emma Tropiano by one vote. And that was the one vote election, 2,640 to 2,641. And so, I said, I used that for years by saying to people, "If you voted for Marty Velazquez, you cast the winning vote." Now, the bad thing was that when they ran for mayor, Heydt won because Marty was a newcomer, he sounded like he was Latino, he didn't run a very good campaign, and so he didn't win. But we established ourselves very significantly as in the ability to win a candidate, a new candidate, against an old-time candidate. Now, Tropiano at the same time, in the next election, so she was on Council, the next election, she ran for City Council, and State Representative at the same time. Well, she lost both things because people didn't really think that she should do that. But she had an enormous following. So, she's been off Council for two years, but she was going to run for Council again, and she had, what we believe to be an enormous following in the City of Allentown because she'd been on Council for 18 years. But during this time some information would come out, she was a landlord, that she was a slumlord. She really was. And she was. She was a slumlord. She lived across the street from us. So, now we're at the point of the primary where we're campaigning and during the day of the primary, you'd go to various different sites and you'd hand out stuff, and we had people to hand out stuff for Gayle, and Gayle was working the sites and stuff like that. And I went to the South Side Youth Center, and that's a big polling place in the city, and I was handing out cards for Gayle. And Candido Garcia, who is a guy I know very well, he's part of the gay community, was standing next to me handing out cards for Julio. And we didn't want to admit to each other that there was a big chance that one of them wasn't going to win because it was against Tropiano, and there were only three candidates that could win, and I think one of them was Howells, and so, he was just going to win. He always won every election. He was this police chief, everybody voted for him. So, there was only two other slots in the primary. So, there were going to be three people in the primary, and ultimately, those people would probably win because there's far more Democrat voters in the city than Republicans. So, I'm there with Candido, and we're chatting, but we're trying not to be in this adversarial position because we're really in trouble because one of us is going to cut the other one's throat. So, we did this. It was cold. We did the whole thing, and we go home and Candido, he's back at his place. And then there's going to be a victory party at a restaurant in South Allentown, that I think Afflerbach had set up. And he was also running as the candidate for mayor. He was running against Sam Bennett. And after a while, we had figured out that Sam Bennett was not a very good candidate and that we really wanted Afflerbach, who said he would absolutely the passage of the ordinance, he would absolutely do it. And he spoke in favor of it. So, anyway, but this is the Gayle campaign. So, now, it's the end of the thing. So, I have to say, we don't like to go to the party until we already know who's won because we don't want to be there to see everybody crying when they don't win. And this is a tense one, I have to say that. I had worked the whole day ; I think Trish was at a different polling place. So, we'd worked the whole day at the polling places. So, we're watching the thing, we're watching the vote tick, vote tick, vote tick, and Julio and Gayle both won. And Tropiano was kicked off the ballot. So, we rush over to the party, and I go into the room, and I see Candido Garcia, and I throw myself into his arms, and we're jumping up and down chanting, "No more Emma, no more Emma," it was so great. He was crying, we were so happy. It was a wonderful moment. I'll never forget that. That was the City Council thing. We go over to Afflerbach's thing with a whole bunch of our people, and Afflerbach has won the nomination by 125 votes, I said, "I just brought your 125 votes in, and don't you forget where you have to be on this piece of legislation." He said, "I know exactly that I would not have won if you hadn't endorsed me." So, time goes along, and we get to the election and Roy Afflerbach is running against, I'm not sure, I don't think Heydt ran again, then, so he was running against a different candidate. He was running against that guy who worked at Air Products. And he wanted me to endorse him. He was a Republican. I can't remember his name. He was a nice guy, actually. He worked at Air Products. He wanted us to endorse him, and Afflerbach wanted us to endorse him. I said to Roy Afflerbach, who ultimately won, I said, "This other guy wants me to endorse him." And he said, "Well, you need to go and interview him." So, I interview him, and I say to him, and I can't remember this guy's name but, "The biggest problem with your campaign is that you are supporting to have your city solicitor be Robert Daday Jr., and Robert Daday Jr.'s father was a big PPL executive, but Robert Daday Jr. has publicly said that he doesn't support the antidiscrimination ordinance, vehemently. In fact, he even ran for office on that platform, 'I'm anti-gay.'" I said, "Why would you do that?" And so, the guy said, "I want you to meet with me and him, and I want you to [inaudible]." So, we go into the room, and I'm meeting him, and Daday's there and he's a lawyer, probably a little younger than I was, and the guy who wanted our endorsement said, "You don't have to not endorse the other guy, but you can endorse us both." I said, "Well, let me think about it." I said, "But the problem is, you want to have Daday." He said, "Well, yeah. He's going to be my city solicitor." So, I turn to Daday and I say to him, "So, do you support this ordinance?" And he said, "You can't have an ordinance like this unless the state has it," and I said, "People don't agree with you on that. People simply don't agree with you on that. Philadelphia has nondiscrimination ordinance ; how can you say that?" And he said, "Well, that's my position." And I said to Robert Daday , "Would you agree that other people don't have that position?" And he said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Other lawyers, other people in the state don't agree with you." And he said, "Well, yes." So, I turned back to the guy who's the candidate and I said, "So, get somebody else. Get somebody who supports it because I'm not going to support you if you're going to have a city solicitor that's going to constantly say you can't have these rights. Forget it." And so, he says, "Okay." So, I left. So, we supported Afflerbach. Afflerbach wins the election, Gayle wins the election, all three of the Democratic candidates win the election. This is true. Remember the Mary Cramsey thing I was talking about in the beginning, we didn't support her, and she lost the primary to Louie Hershman in her election which was two years before, and Hershman was on Council, I guess these are four-year terms. So, Louie Hershman was on Council, and Cramsey had lost. We didn't know where Hershman stood on the circumstances, but Louie Hershman had been comptroller of the city for a long time, and now, he was City Council member. It turns out he was also really, really anti-gay, and we probably would have done better with Mary Cramsey. But anyway. So, now, he's on Council. There's a guy named Tom Burke, who's a Republican, Julio's on Council, Marty Velazquez, Gayle Hoover, David Howells Sr. is still on Council, and Louie Hershman and David Bausch, who was another Republican who was also on Council. Bob Lovett was the guy who was running for mayor. He was a nice guy. He just recently died ; I think. But he was supporting a person that -- so, we didn't do it. Anyway, they won. We were really excited. So, now, January 3rd, they're installed into the position of the legislature, to be on City Council and Afflerbach is mayor, and Afflerbach said to us, "Pass the legislation right away we're still in the sweetheart period. Don't wait around for this. You need to pass the legislation now." So, Mara Keisling comes to us, Mara Keisling is the head, now, of the National Center for Transgender Equality in Washington. She was working for an organization that she ran, she's transgender and she was running this organization in the State of Pennsylvania. She sits with us in our kitchen, this top person in the state, and she writes the legislation. She said, "This is all about the definitions, and so we're going to write this legislation, we're going to write the definition of gender identity, as this," and she writes "gender identity is the," and the language in the law is specifically what she wrote on our kitchen table, that language is in every law that has passed since we passed the ordinance in 2002, and Mara has worked on these things all across the country. She's a major, major activist. But she was working for us, there. It was great that she did this. She was out of Harrisburg, actually. And she helped us do this. Now, we do the same thing. We get everybody ready to speak and to do all of these things and to do these speeches in council. And finally, we go ahead and Steve comes to the council meeting and we're working on all of this stuff. And Steve was involved in all of this stuff, too, and he comes and we're at the council meeting, we're standing up to speak, now I have to say the person who was the head of the anti people, now it's called Citizens for Traditional Family Values, they're totally in the way there, and it's Frank McVeigh, he's the head guy. He had been a Muhlenberg Professor. I think by then he was retired, but he had been the Muhlenberg Professor who was tenured, he was so conservative and he said such horrible things that were not true that they told him he could never teach classes again. But because he was tenured, he got to still get paid for the college for years until he finally retired. And he was a horrible person in every possible way. But he was pretty active. He was in his 70s, then, and he was quite well-spoken because he was a college professor. So, he gets up and he says some stuff about they're never really discriminated against, and it's beyond what the law says, and all this stuff. But then there are also horrible people who say pedophile, stuff like that. But we still have really, really good speakers, terrific speakers. and we had talked to each member of council, we had lobbied the members of council, we're going to introduce a piece of legislation that had sexual orientation and gender identity to add to the Human Relations Commission's Ordinances of the City of Allentown. This was the first time that the words "gender identity" would be used in any piece of legislation in the state of Pennsylvania, at all, ever, for civil rights. And so, Philadelphia didn't have it, Pittsburgh didn't have it, it was covered by some legislation simply by the extension of the definition of what it was to be sexual orientation, but there was no use of the words gender identity. And people in our own community said to me and other people, "You shouldn't try to pass this with gender identity, you're never going to get this through. Just go with the gay stuff," and I said, "You know, we get discriminated against all the time based on gender identity. People are really discriminated against on it, it's more likely that's going to be what happens. Everything that people say in terms of discrimination is couched in those terms anyway, so I think we need to do it. I think it's wrong to leave people behind and I don't think we'll ever be able to add it in if we don't do it. So, we have to do it." And the other thing that hit me at that time was a piece of information that I had read someplace. We still didn't have Facebook or anything, we had email then, but I had read a thing that said that our enemies would deny us oxygen if they could, so we might as well ask for all our rights because asking for less is not going to get them on our side. It's not a compromise that's going to make them okay with it. They're still going to find a reason to say no, so ask for everything. Don't leave any part of the community behind. And I agreed with that. So, we went with that description of sexual orientation and gender identity. So, Tom Burke, who was a Republican on Council took the legislation that we have proffered to them and he wrote five amendments to it that would be voted separately by Council. So, Gayle introduced it, I think Julio was the second, he wanted to be the second. We were pretty sure that we could get Marty, although at one point to me he said, "Well, this thing about gender identity is so new and leading-edge," and I said to him, this was 1998, I said, "Minneapolis has had this in place since 1976." And he said, "But that was just two years ago." I said, "No, '76, not '96. This has been in places in the United States for 22 years and there have never been any problem with it, Marty. It's not cutting-edge. It's now. This is what needs to be done." And in fact, Gayle said, "As a real estate agent are we going to update the 1950s house to the 1970s or are we going to update it to the 1990s? We need to be doing this now. This needs to be current. We don't have to go and make this something that's going to appease people from the '70s, that's ridiculous. We need to make it current." And she said that publicly. So, we had the piece of legislation written, Mara had written it great, Tom Burke wrote these amendments to it and some of them we didn't agree with. One of them was that nobody would have to give approximation of marital benefits, or domestic partner benefits based on this legislation. We didn't agree with that. But they had it. And some of them were procedural. And one of them was that mission-driven organizations would be exempt from the law. Well, that's actually a federal thing, mission-driven organizations like churches are always exempt from a law. If you're a mission-driven organization like Cedar Crest College for the mission is to be pro women, they can say, "We're not going to have men in the dorms." It's their right to do that, that's what a mission does it's perfectly okay for mission-driven organizations like the NAACP to say, "We're just going to give scholarships to Black kids," that's racial discrimination, but it's their mission, so it's okay. That's not against the law, it's based on the Constitution of the United States, and we don't have an argument with that. So, that was fine that they were going to put that in. And they had a bunch of other things in there. Okay, it's been 90 minutes now. Do we have to stop? Can we go another half hour? MF: Yes, let's finish this arc. LB: Okay. So, there's all these different things that are happening, but in essence, Steve and I are watching the people on Council and Gayle is doing what she used to call a bend over, which is where they lean back and they try to talk behind the backs of the other people on Council so they can have a conversation and she's talking to Marty, and I can see her talking to Marty, we knew we had Julio's vote, we had one other person's vote, David Howells wanted to do what the mayor wanted him to, so even though he'd voted no before, we thought that he could be a yes vote. We knew that Hershman was anti, and we knew that Bausch was a stodgy Republican, even though many people would suggest that he's part of the LGBT community. Many people have suggested that, allegedly. So, I think he's still around, lives on 7th Street. So, Steve comes over to me and he goes, "They're going to pass it. We've got four votes. I can see them. I can see the four votes up there." So, Gayle says, "Okay, we're going to vote," and then Julio seconds it, and they vote, and we win. We win the legislation and we're just jubilant. And we felt a lot of positive things about that. I wrote stuff in the Valley Gay Press about it. But the next morning, Frank McVeigh with Citizens for Traditional Family Values files a referendum in the city to overturn the past ordinance. So, the ordinance is in place, Afflerbach signs it into place right away, we have the pens, it's in his signed thing, a copy of it is in our waiting room on the third floor, because I kept it, of the Bradbury-Sullivan Center. And we were happy. But right away, we knew that they were going to do this. So, the City of Allentown has an opportunity for people to be able to create a ballot initiative referendum on the ballot by getting 2,000 signatures of registered Allentown voters saying that they want something to happen. So, McVeigh gets his band of hatemongers -- and they really were -- to put together a petition. They filed a formal petition and they're required to carry around the legislation itself and then get the 2,000 signatures. So, they get about 15 people to do this. And one of them was Lou Hershman who was on council at the time. He said he was going to do this. Bausch didn't do it, which I think was good, at least, that he didn't do that. So, this is the interesting part, actually. They had these people, they were running around. The way the procedure works is, they have 50 days, or maybe 40 days, to get 2,000 signatures. Yeah, this is right. They have 40 days to get 2,000 signatures. Then, the other side, our side, gets 20 days to disprove the signatures. Then, they get 10 days to go back and get more signatures to undo the disproved signatures, and we get five days to disprove those signatures. It all comes out to about 70 days, which was 70 days in hell. So, luckily, we have our big house. We know that Frank McVeigh is running around town getting people to sign this petition. And I start thinking, "What are we going to do about this? We've got to get people to not do it." And so, we work hard to try to stop people from doing it. At one point, I figured that he has done this in his own neighborhood, which is in the west side of Allentown, the northwest side, he's on 19th Street, the northwest side of Allentown. And I actually went door-to-door in his neighborhood just asking people to not sign the petition. It was very hard to do. I still feel uncomfortable about going in that neighborhood at all. Some people said, "Oh yeah, I think I signed that." I mean it was horrible. But the thing that happened was we will begin to realize that he was being successful. He was getting a lot of signatures. And I was sitting at my computer one day at my office in my house, because we were doing this all out of our house, and all the sudden, I saw that the Senior Fest was happening in the city of Allentown. And I thought, "McVeigh's going to be at the Senior Fest. He's going to be working the room to get seniors to sign this thing." The Senior Fest is three days. So, I just drop everything, and I run over there, and in the parking lot is Frank McVeigh. He's there. Trish and I are there. So, I said to Trish, "You, keep him busy," and I rushed back to our house and I sent out an email, and that's all I could do, was send an email to my list and I said, "Emergency, we need supporters to come immediately to Ag Hall's parking lot, immediately, to show up. I need people to back me up." I get back there, and by the time I get there, Steven Ziminsky, Joe Canto, and [Tom Andy?] were all big, tall, heavy guys, very sweet guys. One of them is a schoolteacher. Steven Ziminsky was a music teacher in Allentown City School System and he was a teacher then. And they said, "Here we are." And they stood behind me, and every time somebody walked up to McVeigh, he would try to get them, I would follow him up and say, "Please don't sign that." I'd just keep doing that, "Please don't sign that. Please don't sign that. It's really anti," and people would say, "I don't want to deal with this at all." Well, great. That's what we wanted. The next day, we go to the Senior Fest, and we go in and we see that Pat Toomey, who at that time was our congressman, had a Congressional table, and Frank McVeigh was running the table, and I saw him get somebody to sign the petition. Now, that's a completely illegal thing to do. Completely illegal. To push biased legislation from a taxpayer paid table. Trish and I are both there. So, I go over to the Republican table where they were registering people to vote, and I scream at the top of my lungs, "How dare you have my taxpayer money supporting that guy over there. He's working on anti legislation. He's breaking [every law for me?]," and I'm doing it and doing it and doing it, I'm yelling and yelling, and they're like, "What are you talking about?" I said, "There's a guy over there doing that." So, they go over to McVeigh and they say, "You can't do this here. Stop it. You cannot do this here. You're going to get us all in trouble. You're not allowed to do this. You're going to get Pat Toomey in trouble." And McVeigh was actually a Democrat. And by the way, I remember standing at one point at the table keeping people from signing him and I said, "You know, aren't you divorced? And you say because you're Catholic that's why you're anti-gay?" And he said, "Well, I tried to get the church to annul it, but they wanted 10,000 dollars." I said, "You're just so full of crap. You walk out on your family," he goes, "I didn't walk out on my family," I said, "Look, I've never been divorced and you're telling me that my relationship is no good." I would have said anything to him. And at one point, Trish was standing with him, and she says to Frank McVeigh, and remember, this is a 70-year-old guy. She's standing there, and Frank McVeigh turns to Trish and she was older then, it was a while ago, and he says to her, and I think this was the most telling thing, he says to her, "Aren't you embarrassed that you're a lesbian?" See what that means? Because somebody said to me, "Why is McVeigh doing this?" And I said, "Why do you think? Who is the person who has the most hate for LGBT people? It's internalized homophobia. Nobody does this unless it's internalized. Nobody goes this far unless it's internalized." So, we call Steve, who was a brilliant strategist. So, he, that night, goes to the bar. He goes to the Stonewall and he gets all these people at the Stonewall to call Pat Toomey's office on Monday morning, dozens of people, over and over and over again, every office, "How dare you use my taxpayer money to be able to do this. I'm going to bring ethics charges against you in the state of Pennsylvania for allowing people to do this," and I said, "Steve, how did you get all these people?" He goes, "I'm a bar queen. It's one of my strengths." He worked both bars. He went to Diamonz and Stonewall, and he got literally dozens of people. And they were hilarious. [Donna Masara?] was recounting to me how she had called and had just screamed on the phone at Toomey's office, at both their Harrisburg office and their local office. Pat Toomey, he's a congressman, calls Steve up and says, "How can I get people to stop calling my office?" And Steve says, "This is how you do it. I want you to write to us a statement that we can put on a letter to everybody that signed this petition that says, 'Pat Toomey does not support the overturning of this ordinance, and that the current ordinance should stay in place.'' So, we got him and State Senator Pat Brown and State Representative Jennifer O'Mara. Pat Brown is a Republican, Jennifer O'Mara's a Democrat, she was our State Representative. And the mayor of Allentown, and four city councilmembers, and the head of the Human Relations Commission, and the chief of police, and all of them signed this letter. And we had this letters and we were using it to hand out to people. We would say to people, "Look, you know some of these people. You voted for somebody on this list. They don't want you to sign this petition." And that's what it said. And Pat Toomey said, "Yeah, go ahead. Put my name in it. I don't disagree with this to overturn legislation that's already been in place, especially by misrepresenting it in my space." So, okay. Now we begin to find out that McVeigh is lying to people about what this ordinance is about. And all the other people that are working with him, none of them were as good as he. He ended up getting 1,000 signatures, and the rest of them, altogether, got about 1,500 signatures. And there were 14 of them and one of him. And another thing that happened was that one of the days to get people to sign that kind of petition is during the primary because you had to have registered voters do it. So, if you're standing at a polling place that person that's coming into vote is absolutely registered to vote so you can count on them being registered to vote. So, he and some of his people, he had a woman named [Diane Barra?] who was really active in doing this as well, she was involved with Saint Peter's and Paul's Catholic Church [on Saint John's Street] and she was working that area. And McVeigh was working his neighborhood and he was trying to get people. Well, we got 70 volunteers to cover every single polling place in the Lehigh Valley, in Allentown, keep just say, "Don't sign that petition," and to be sure that their people wouldn't be there to get these signatures. Because if they weren't registered voters, their signature was no good. So, they had to get registered voters. And it's hard to guarantee that people are registered voters, or even from Allentown when you're just on the street or something like that. We had an enormous group of people that were doing this, very, very significant. And Roberta Meek trained all of the people who were doing this. She helped us to do that, to train everybody to act in the right way to people in a positive way, so all of these people that were our volunteers were trained to be pleasant to people, but to say, "Please don't do that," to not be aggressive and not be inappropriate. And we began to raise money for this campaign to make this happen. Gayle Hoover was speaking publicly in a positive way for us. So, did Roy Afflerbach, the mayor. But they were telling people, "This will give you a chance to vote in favor of gay rights." Well, we were finding that McVeigh, what he would do is, he would go into somebody's driveway and he'd look at the bumper stickers on their car, and then he would tell them when he'd go into the door, the petition was about that issue, "This is about green space." "This is about literacy." "This is about honoring Jesus." "This is about pro-life." And they were saying, "I'm pro-life, sign this petition." And they were saying this. We were finding, now, that his people were taking it and putting it as the Bingo sign-in sheet at Catholic churches. They were telling people, "If you don't sign this you won't be able to vote in the next election." It was complete voter fraud. It was absolutely illegal to do that. They were saying to people all sorts of different things and the most dastardly was, this would allow people to vote on a ballot for gay people to have rights. Well, we already had the rights, it was to vote against the rights. And Diane Varra was particularly heinous. She was scary. She was a scary person in a lot of ways. So, one of the things was, each weekend we would go to churches because they would hit all the Catholic churches ; both of these people were Catholic, and they really believed that they could get people to sign. So, we'd hit the Catholic churches. We would go to Saint Peter and Paul's. Diane Varra was awful. But one time, she came up to me and she hugged me. I said, "Don't touch me. Why are you doing that? You're going to make people so they can't get housing and their jobs. Why would you do this?" And she goes, "Well, this is about separation of church and state." I said, "No, it isn't." And she said, "Well, if people sign this," she had this whole theory about how the Human Relations Commission are judge and jury, and they're legislative. But I said, "No, they're not. That's not true. And it doesn't matter anyway, because all this is going to do is take the phrase that we added into the ordinance out." And she said, "No, that's not what --" I said, "Look, if that is what it is, will you stop doing this?" She said, "Yes." I said, "Give me your petition." So, she gives me the petition, and the legislation is on it. I said, "Everything that's underlined is what's going to be removed. There's nothing in here that's underlined that's going to remove how the Commission runs. So, you're lying to people to get them to do this." It was very scary. And later, someone told me that she, allegedly, somebody told me this, but allegedly, that she had actually, again, internalized homophobia situation, where she has been involved with somebody, had been thrown out of her church and then some other things. She'd try to have these serious conversations and I didn't want to talk to her. She was scary. And she was lying, too. But they're getting more and more signatures, it's really scary. But our plan was at that point, once they have all the signatures, then it becomes public information. We can get the signatures and we can try to disprove people who may have signed more than once, or may have not been Allentown voters, or not actually lived in Allentown. So, the next thing that happens is that I get a telephone call from a guy named Dan Anders. He lives in Philadelphia and he was a lawyer at Pepper Hamilton, which is an enormous law firm. And he says, "I am going to work for you for nothing." No, he says, "I can help you fight this. I have a lot of experience in doing this. I'm a Constitutional lawyer, I can do all of this stuff. I can help you fight this," and I said, "We don't have any money," and he said, "No, this is a good thing. Not only am I pro bono for you, but Pepper Hamilton will pay me to do it, so it doesn't matter. I'm not losing any money. I can just do it for you, and they'll pay for every aspect of this suit, no matter what we do." I said, "Yay." He said, "Pepper lets everybody do one big, serious case, and this is mine for the year." So, the next step was that he said, "What I'm going to do was, I'm going to create what is known as a legal document that's an unsworn document that you can mail to people, or they can sign, that says they're requesting their name to be removed from the petition. And this is a legal document. It's not notarized, but it's a legal document. And so, now, when you go around to people, you can get them to remove their name in this way. You don't just have to disprove them ; they can remove their name." So, the next stage was that they filed petitions and hundreds of people, literally hundreds of people, volunteered to come into our house, take the petitions and manually enter them into a format where, because they were handwritten, and manually enter them into spreadsheets so that we could track the names and addresses of these people and then write the telephone numbers. Then, we would call the people, ask them if they wanted to have their name taken off the list, and then if they said yes, I or another Allentown resident, would go to their house and have them sign this removal thing. Well, after about three or four days, we had 150 of those things. No, we had about 100. So, we went to have a press conference to say that we were fighting this referendum. So, we went to City Hall, and this is a great story. It's going to go on for a while, though. So, we go to City Hall, I'm upstairs at City Hall, which is where the City Clerk is, Mike Hanlon. And I think he still is city clerk, he's a great guy. And we are going to present these 80 documents, or 100 documents that say, "I want my name off the petition." Now, the anti people also showed up. We had the news there, and we had the TV cameras, and we had the Morning Call, and also the other newspaper that was in Allentown at that time. And I had people to speak. One woman, she was a Catholic mom, she had eight kids in her house, and they're all teenagers. And I said, "Well, you signed this petition," she said, "I didn't sign that." I said, "No, you did. I have this thing," and I said, "I can tell you what day it was and the person who signed it, it was a guy named Frank McVeigh, this is what he looks like, here's a picture of him." She goes, "He didn't tell me what that was about." I said, "That's to remove the rights of gay people." She said, "I would never have signed that. I have nephews who are gay." And then, one of her kids came in, it was a teenager, she said, "Can you believe that somebody would get me? This is terrible." And I said, "Well, would you speak in front of cameras to say that?" And she said, "Yeah, I would. I would. I'm very angry that I did that." And actually, a woman who ended up to being on school board and then on council, Jeanette Eichenwald had signed because she had been told that it was about freedom of speech. And so, she wasn't there for that thing, but I did have another young woman who was told at her church, she was instructed to do it by her priest who believed that it was for gay rights. And it had been misrepresented and she said, "I would not have signed this. I think that's wrong." And she was a young Latino woman who lived on 7th Street, she had a whole bunch of kids, and she came and she spoke. And then this woman, this mom, this Catholic mom. And so, one of the reporters said, "Well, why did you sign it? What did he tell you to get you to sign it?" And she said, "Well, I'm in favor of that piece of legislation," and he said, "What are you talking about?" And she said, "Well, he told me it was about green space." And that was a huge, significant thing, because she's like, "I'm in favor of green space, of course I would sign a petition like that. He told me that's what it was about." So, now that's happened. So, now all the people who are typing, and Beth Goudy was one of the people, Reverend Goudy, they were amazing during the time. Beth went by she, then. They were amazing during that time. And Beth Goudy can type faster than anyone. She could have done that as a job. And she was one of the main people. And she was entering this data, pages and pages, there were thousands of pages of things. She was really good. And [Stott Lobner?] was doing it, and we had a whole bunch of people that were working on that end. And then, we had people who would get the names, they would look up the persons in stacks of telephone books we had around, to get their name and telephone number. Then, they'd get their telephone number, then they'd call them up and say, "Did you mean to sign this?" And if they said, "No," then we'd go get it. Now, that was a very hard thing to do. Roberta Meeks daughter-in-law, Jenna Azar, who works at Muhlenberg, she is straight, and she said, "This is not bothering me as much as the other gay people," but one guy, Earl Schneider, he was there and we had rooms throughout the house set up with phone lines. Because we had four landlines and then people just were beginning to have cell phone so some people could call on cell phones. But you had to pay for cell phone calls, for every call you made. But people would come in with their cell phones to do that, too. But people were on the landlines and they'd have these lists, and then they'd call the people. Every time we finished a list, then other people would look up the telephone numbers, and then that person would take the list, and they would make the calls. If you call one person and they were anti-gay, "I want my name to stay on there, I hate you gay people," and then you called another one, and that person said that, too, and then you called another one, and that person said that, too, you couldn't do it anymore. It was the end of it. It was too devastating. And every person who had that many people in a row do that, made people devastated. It was just devastating. Unless they were straight. And then it just made them mad. So, the straight people allies that were doing this, like Jenna Azar said, "It's not affecting me because it's not me. They're not talking about me it's just making me mad, so it makes me want to call more people." Most people said, "I didn't sign that," and then they'd say, "Well, you did," and then most people we could get on the phone, at least half of them would take their names off. It was hard enough to get people on the phone. But in those days, we didn't have cell phones. We couldn't have done it if it was cell phones, because we can't get people's cell phone numbers. And people don't answer the phone if they don't know who it is. Then, everybody would answer the phone. So, we would just keep doing that and doing that. Sometimes people would call us back. We'd leave a message and people would call us back and say, "I didn't mean to sign that, I want my name off of it," and then we would deal with it. So, now we were getting more of the sheets. But we finally got to the point where we had entered every one of the 2,500 names, it was a little bit over 2,500 into a spreadsheet. And we did a mailing to every one of those people. And the mailing had the unsworn statement, and then an explanation of what happened, and a letter that came from all of those people that they knew, the chief of police, and all these different people, saying, "You should take your name off it." And we mailed out the letter. We had all these people working to make the letter and mail it, and everything. So, we sent it out in a big, bulk mailing with a stamped envelope in it, with a stamp on it, so people could just sign the thing and send it back. And some of the people who were calling, I remember [Carol Pasquale?] she was talking to a guy and she said, "What? Well, donations," and the guy said to her, "Where are you getting so much money to be able to do this?" And she said, "Donations." Some people would be very negative when we'd call them, and they'd be really horrible and we'd be shocked by that. It was painful when that happened. I tried not to do it because it was hard enough when we went to the churches and the people would just say horrible things. I have to backtrack on this. One time, we were at the Cathedral Church, and we would go and McVeigh was there, and he had this guy who was a man who was Black, which is significant, I can't remember his name, but he had worked in the effort in Cleveland to overturn their non-discrimination ordinance that had happened about eight years before. And this guy, who didn't live in Allentown, so he couldn't really do as much activism as a person who was in Allentown, and he couldn't speak to council and stuff like that he looked like a ringer." He had gone to Liberty University where they actually say that white people and Black people are not allowed to marry while they're students there. And he was married to a white woman. The whole thing was so weird. And so, at one point, he told McVeigh -- or he was going to videotape us all as we worked to try to get people to not sign. I think this is important to point out because it's anecdotal. And Steven Ziminsky was there, and he was a teacher. And this guy, and I can't remember his name, but he pans over to Steven Ziminsky, and Zaminski goes, like that. He didn't care. He was totally out. He had written letters to the editor about being an openly gay man as a teacher, specifically about the Boy Scouts and how it was negative for the LGBT community. He was out. We were out. We didn't care. So, apparently when he was doing it in Cleveland, people were uncomfortable about being in the video and he thought we would be, and we weren't. And he's standing up at the top of the steps and he drops the camera, and it rolls all the way down the steps, and I'm like, "Well, you know, I think maybe this is God." But all of the things that were happening there had enormous numbers of devastating things, but positive things. So, three things. I'll give you one devastating thing. This woman comes up to me, she's coming out of the church, and she looks, to me, as a gaydar circumstance, she looks like a lesbian. And McVeigh runs up to her and says, "Sign this thing," and she starts to sign. And I say, "Please don't sign that. Please don't sign that. It's going to take rights away from the gay community." And she turns to me, and she says, "This was bad. This was a bad piece of legislation. They never give anybody a chance to even know anything about this, they just passed it," and she walked away, and she had a leash for her dog, which I don't know why she was, but she was angry, she was really angry. But then, a few minutes later, a man walks down the steps, a middle-aged man, an older, like my dad's age kind of thing, and she walks down the steps, he comes up to me and he puts his arms around me and he's crying, and he says, "I love my lesbian daughter. I would never sign something like this." And then I see McVeigh go around the side and there's a nun standing in the corner, an older nun, looked like one of those big, heavy, stereotypical nuns. And she's standing down in the corner of this thing next to the steps. And McVeigh goes up to her with the petition, and she goes, "Psh." to him, and I said to Charlie Versaggi, who was a big donor to that church, he said, "Oh my god, you know, I've given so much money to this church, I could kick a priest down the steps, and they'd still listen to me here. They'd never give me a hard time. That nun is one of my best friends. She would never sign a piece of this stuff." So, there was that kind of stuff happening every day. These terrible things where McVeigh was saying all these things, saying you can't vote and stuff like that. So, now, we have these letters, and we mail them out to everybody. And we do it through the bulk mail place, so it goes really fast and gets to people by the next day. So, we had a big post office box at the hub mail place in Bethlehem, so Steve and I, it's only two days after we mailed the letter, but he goes, "Well, let's go and check the mail, and maybe we've gotten some checks from people, and maybe there's some of these return letters back." And I said, "Well, it's been so soon." He goes, "Yeah, but if people did it right away, we could have a few." So, he goes into the post office, I just pulled up to the post office because he was going to go get the mail and just come back and jump in my car, so I'm in the car, he goes into the post office. And about five minutes, 10 minutes later, comes back out, and he has a huge thing of envelopes, and he's screaming, "There's hundreds of envelopes in here. There's hundreds of envelopes. These are back to us. These are return envelopes to us." And we're sitting in the car opening them and they're just one after another saying, "I never would have signed this, this is a terrible thing, I'm totally pro," there was about 300 envelopes in that. And every day for the next 30 days, at least for the next 20 days because we needed them soon because I think we only had 20 days to disprove this stuff. So, during that time we're getting this huge number of stuff coming back, many, many envelopes coming back. And it's very significant. We're also finding out that people like Lou Hershman was a total idiot in that he was getting people at his church to sign the stuff, but he was actually filling in the information himself. And in some instances, he would get them to sign and then he would fill in their address at a later time. He was using his signature, bright blue ink fountain pen, so it showed on every sheet. And sometimes, he would forget and write in his own address. And he did it over, and over, and over again because he just wasn't thinking. He was just being nutty. And he wasn't telling people what it was about. He was making them think that it was his petition to be able to run for office. But he had actually signed some people's names. We could tell he signed people's names because you could tell by the pen. And you could tell by the handwriting. And so, I actually went to David Howells Sr., and I said, "Does Lou Hershman know that if he's misrepresented this, he could go to jail for doing this by signing people's names?" So, he actually told Louie Hershman that, and he reported back to Gayle that Hershman was devastated. He actually blanched and was sitting with his head down thinking, because he knew he had done it. At one point, Ricardo Montero who published the Latino newspaper, El Torero, was notoriously antigay. And Montero and his daughter, who was an adult, were very, very vocally anti this and they said some terribly negative things about Julio, really rude things, implying he was gay and implying he was a child molester, and all sorts of things like that. So, Montero was notorious for this. He was very, very conservative, and oddly, because most Latinos are not that conservative. In this city, most Latinos are Democrats. But he wrote in his paper a lot of editorials that were very negative. And we met with him on call about that, because The Morning Call disbursed El Torero, they gave them away free and we went and said, "Now, this is wrong for you to do this," because The Morning Call had a very positive editorial for us, and so, "This guy is doing this and why are you giving out this paper for free?" they weren't paying him. So, they discontinued it. They stopped giving out El Torero for free. There was another Latino newspaper in town, and we contacted them. And [Maria Lavandere?], who did all of our translating for us, was really terrific in being able to do outreach. She worked at one time, with CASA Guadalupe, and then did lots of really good translating because she could understand a lot of idioms that were from various different communities that different Latino communities would use. And she was one of the main volunteers, too. [Laura Guiteras?] worked with us in every part of us and fundraising and everything, so she created a system that we could enter the names of people who took off their names on the sheet and that we could track the people so that every time we were entering their names and taking off the names and saying, "These are the people," and then we'd make a notation, "Name removed," and Trish and I were going for the voter place, and it was a very complicated than that she created but it was easy to use, this instrument that Laura created. We went to City Hall to the voter registration and found that loads and loads of the people were not registered to vote, many, many of them were not from Allentown. You could see by their addresses that they weren't in the city. They lived in Emmaus, or something. Multiple people, because they were told this was different things, they signed many, many times. Trish went to the house of one guy who said that he was a World War II veteran and that he had been in a foxhole with a gay man who had saved his life, and he would never ever have signed this thing. And he was honoring this person. It was very serious stuff. So, now we're getting all of this mail back and we're being very successful. And we've gotten hundreds and hundreds of letters back, I think we may have had about 700 of the things back by now. We've had enough to nullify their petitions. So, we're going to Dan Anders, our lawyer, now to support us taking those petitions to Mike Hanlon, who was the City Clerk, to decide whether or not to take the names off based on these letters. So, I said to the city, "Do you need any kind of ability to determine whether or not these are real signatures?" Because after all, how do you know where the petition is? We had developed a system based on all of the petitions which were physically in their offices, but we had copies of, to figure out how to designate and find the name of each person. Frank McVeigh had maybe 12 petitions, and then most other people had one or two. So, there would be a sheet of names and it would say on it, "This is McVeigh number one," and McVeigh number one is the one that has the first signature is this person's name." And so, if we say that this person is taking their name off, they are on McVeigh number one, line 17. So, what Mike Hanlon did was, he ultimately said, because he had hundreds and hundreds, so he couldn't check everyone, so he checked every tenth one, and every tenth one was absolutely there. The name was there. And so, he figured that they were all legitimate and there wasn't one single one that was a fake petition, because they claimed that we could have faked the petition. And in the meantime, they had done articles and stuff that made them look terribly bad. They'd done an article with a young reporter from the other paper, it was called the Allentown Times. And he had audiotaped all these things, and he'd printed what they said, and then they insisted that he had made up the things, and he hadn't. He hadn't. He had the tape of them speaking and stuff. And Diane Varra wrote a letter to the editor at one point that was so fraught with lies that The Morning Call wouldn't print it. It was just inflammatory and wrong. At one point, I contacted a woman, I called her and she said she wanted her name off of the petition, so I went to see her and she was over in an interesting part of town. She's an older woman. And she said, "A lot of people wanted to tell me stories about how they were not racist," and she was telling me because she didn't believe in discrimination. She said, "I can't understand. I don't know how my name got on this petition." And I said, "Well, maybe you were told it was a Bingo sign-in sheet." She said, "No, that wouldn't have happened." And she said, "I want you to know that when I was 16, I would go to the canteen for the soldiers and I would dance with the Black soldiers, even though I was white, even though none of the other white girls were because I didn't think that people should be prejudiced against them." And I thought that was so cute. And so sweet. And I said to the woman, "Where did you get this?" She said, "I don't know where this signature --," and I said, "Do you know Diane Varra?" And she said, "Oh yeah, I know her very well." I said, "Well, she got you to sign this." And she said, "Really?" Meaning, you know, Diane Varra who, allegedly, anyway. And I had one woman who said that Diane Varra had pressured her into signing because she went to church every day and she said, "She met me at the church, but I want to take my name off, it was just easier for me to sign because I didn't want her to pressure me, just take my name off. I'm very glad to take my name off." It was interesting. So, anyway, now we have all these letters. So, now Dan Anders says to me -- is there any other stories that I need to tell that are significant? Because there's a million stories. This went on for days and days and days. So, Dan calls me up, and he's calling us every day, and Steve's calling me every day, but mostly Trish and I led this effort. We were really doing this effort. Steve was in Pen Argyl. He really worked on the hate crimes bill, but he was helping us, and he would come up with great ideas but for the most part, we were on the ground here. And Steve really wasn't very good at cajoling volunteers. Now, let me say this. This was one of the worst possible things that you could ever imagine. People would come into our house at 7:00 AM, and they would work on these typing things whenever they had free time and they would stay until midnight every day for 70 days. The only time that we could get away from this was when I would read a book in bed at 12 o'clock because every other minute of the day, I was afraid Frank McVeigh was out getting signatures during this time. And we had all sorts of people working for us to make that not happen, but it was very, very hard. Okay, so Dan Anders says, "Okay, we're going to stop this right now." And I said, "What are we going to have to do?" He says, "We're going to have you bring a lawsuit," me, "against those people, against Citizens for Traditional Values, and it's going to be the first four names of the people on the petitions," and it was McVeigh, and Hartman and it actually says, "Liz Bradbury versus Hartman," was the first name. We'd bring a lawsuit against them saying that they were abridging my civil rights by lying to people, and I would represent the rest of the LGBT community because I live here, and I'd be able to speak and stuff like that. I said, "Okay, do it." I said, "Why is that going to stop them?" He said, "Because we're going to subpoena every one of them, and we're going to make them explain why all these people are saying that they lied to them to get their names. We're going to depose them. We're going to depose everyone." So, people who don't know, when you get deposed, it's like being on the stand. You cannot lie. If you lie, it's perjury. You're there with other lawyers, and now, Pepper Hamilton is paying for all this, and they produced these enormous lawsuits with these booklets and books and stuff, and all this stuff, it's going to cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars. The actual cost of it, for Dan's hours and everything, was about 150,000 dollars that Pepper Hamilton ate for us. At least that much. He would normally get 350 dollars an hour, in those days. So, they had a lawyer, too, and their lawyer was part of that Focus on The Family group where they train lawyers to do this kind of anti-gay effort. It was really gay in those days, to be anti-gay laws. And I want to say the thing about Louie Hershman, so don't forget about that. So, he was advising their group of people. And their group of people came to him and said, "We just got these deposition requests. We're going to be deposed." And he said, "Yeah, you better get a lawyer." And they said, "Well, you're our lawyer," and he said, "Well, I can't do this for every one of you. There's 15 of you. I'm working for myself here, nobody's paying me. I'm just working pro bono. I'm not charging you, but nobody's paying me. But you don't have to worry because you didn't lie to these people, did you?" And they said, "Well, what do you mean?" He said, "Well, you didn't tell them that this was about something else, you just said this was to get this on the ballot to remove the law," and they said, "Well, what if we didn't say that?" And he said, "Well then, you may have broken the law. She could win. She could bring a huge lawsuit against you and make millions of dollars. What the hell? Why would you lie to them? That was wrong. You can't do that. You can't lie to people on this kind of thing." Well, McVeigh had lied to hundreds and hundreds of people. But every one of them had lied. And we actually had a guy who's first name was Mark, he was a Methodist minister, I can't remember his last name, and he was one of our spies. And he would go in his minister garb to all their meetings, and then he would tell us what was happening. And he said, "I saw these people and they were as blanched white as could be. They were scared to death. One woman started to cry. And one of the women took her name, signed the thing," she was a petitioner, she took her name off of her own petition by sending in the form from Dan Anders. It was her own thing. She, in effect, is admitting that she lied. And every one of them had had people take their names off. So, we had the ability to prove that they had done this. Well, now they're absolutely petrified. They're absolutely petrified. And the lawyer says, "I can't help you. If you lied to these people, you're really in trouble." Now, we did that because Mike Hanlon did take, just from those letters, and that didn't even count this huge amount of detective work we found, it didn't even count sending him lists of people who weren't Allentown voters, who didn't live in Allentown, who had voted more than once, he didn't even count those. And that was probably another 200 people. So, we were well within that. So, he was going to take all those names off. The next step was, though, that they got another 10 days or whatever it was to go out and get more signatures. Luckily, Frank McVeigh was on vacation, and he went out of state, so he didn't have an opportunity to do that. And the guy who was from Cleveland, the self-loathing guy from Cleveland, allegedly, said to the newspaper, "Well, he's like my best player and he's out of commission," he was out of town. So, they tried to get more signatures. They would have needed, at the very least, to get 150 signatures, and they got 50. Or they got 60. We disproved about, with those letters, we rushed in, set it up, did a mailing to them all, and we were able to disprove another 20 of those. So, they didn't have the number of signatures. And Mike Hanlon presented that to City Council. There was a guy named Ken Kirker, whose initials were KKK, by the way. PATRICIA SULLIVAN: Kirshner. LB: Kirshner. His son and his grandsons' initials were KKK, as well. PS: Karl LB: Karl Kirker, Karl Kirshner. And he was there and he was so angry he ran up the aisle like he wanted to punch Mike Hanlon. Luckily, he didn't live in Allentown, either. But he was so angry he had to be restrained because he was so angry. And they lost. So, they lost. And there were a load of other issues. One of the things that Louie Hershman did at one point, and I want to point this out because this was so based on discrimination, Louie Hershman at one point was at a church in East Allentown, and we went there and he was there. There weren't very many people. He wasn't really getting people to sign this petition, but he was trying to get people to sign the petition. And I went up to him and I said, "Hershman, why are you doing this? You said you would support this." He goes, "Well, you didn't talk about that gender thing." And I said, "But why are you doing this? People would be discriminated against, and you think they should be?" He goes, "Well, I want to protect the Boy Scouts." And I said, "What do you mean by you want to protect the Boy Scouts?" He said, "Well, the Boy Scouts," which had a policy that was anti-LGBT, "they wouldn't be protected." I said, "Give me your petition." And he gives me the petition, and I open it up to the amendments, and I said, "You see this amendment? This amendment that Tom Burke wrote, it says right here, including the Boy Scouts that would be exempt from this ordinance. And you voted for this. You voted for this. So, that's not even an argument. They're exempt from the law." And he looks at it and he goes, "Well, that wasn't on there before." I said, "Lou, you voted for it. You're a bad legislator for this city." He believed that this kind of work would guarantee that he would be elected in every subsequent election. He was never elected again, for any position. Even though he ran, many times, he was never elected again. So, we were successful with that but the next day --. PS: [inaudible] LB: So, I want to go back a little bit and say that one of the things that happened during this was the national organizations, particularly the Human Rights Campaign and one factor of the Victory Fund told us, "Don't challenge the signatures, just let it go into place and let it go for a vote and raise 70,000 dollars and keep people from voting on it." And I said to Trish, "We are not doing that." And I've said this every time since then, ballot measures, which I am totally against in every possible way, there's nothing good about a ballot measure because nobody in the legislature is responsible for it, and when people vote for it, they have no idea what the ramifications are. And then, the legislature, whomever the legislatures are say, "Well, I didn't put it in place, that was a ballot measure. You did it. It's in place." They're never good. They should never be in place. And at one point, I went to take a person's name off who was a prominent Black family in Allentown. I was talking to this woman, she was about my age, and she said, "Take my name off, but I really do think that this should have been voted on by the people." And I said, "No, you don't. You don't think that. Why would you say that?" And she said, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Look, you understand about civil rights. Do you think people who -- If you're in a place where everybody that votes is white, do you think they should be the ones who determine whether or not you get the vote? That's not right. You should have the vote, you should have the rights, because everybody has rights in Allentown. Everybody has rights in the United States. This is a Constitutional thing. This is a civil rights thing. This isn't something that's decided by the majority, because the majority is always in power." And she says, "Yeah, you're right. You're right." Anyway, we ask for money from the Human Rights Campaign because we're fighting this on the ground, and Human Rights Campaign rarely does anything. They've never really done anything successfully like this. They've never passed a piece of legislation. The only thing they ever did was, occasionally, they'll give money to other organizations to fight for rights. And I'm very negative about the Human Rights Campaign, and here's why. The day after we passed this ordinance and kept it in place, both the day after we passed it and we won to keep it in place, the Human Rights Campaign sent out a fundraising letter saying, "Allentown has passed this antidiscrimination ordinance, we are so proud that these rights have passed, please send us money." And they did it on both instances. Now, the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce did send us two people who had fought this kind of effort in Maine, and they were working on a campaign of another legislature, and they came to us. They came in our kitchen and said, "Do not let this go to a vote because you will be at each other's throats. You will hate this city," and it's true. If you're walking down the street, even if you win, if six out of 10 voters voted for my rights, when I'm walking down the street, every time I pass by 10 people, I'm going to think four of those people didn't vote for my rights. I wouldn't want to stay in this city if that's the case. And that kind of stuff happens all the time, if the city has barely voted for your rights. And then, we went into the next phase, and that was the lawsuit. Should I stop here, or should I go on? MF: I think we should stop, but I'm curious about the lawsuit and I wonder if we could schedule something for next week and maybe start there. LB: Sure. So, the lawsuit story is shorter because we weren't fighting it. But it went on for quite a few years. I just want to say one more really important thing. During those 70 days, I actually lost 17 pounds. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat, I was absolutely hysterically worried about everything. And this is why. If we had lost that, if we hadn't done what we'd done, because the depositions made it so that they would never do it again because they were afraid. Anti-LGBT people can never get other people, the general public, to be anti-LGBT people unless they lie. They have to lie to be able to get people to hate the minority. They have to misrepresent and lie to be able to do that. And that's exactly what they did. We needed to make it so that they couldn't do that again. They couldn't lie. And we needed to show everybody in the state, "You cannot do that." You can't tell people that this is about using horses for dog meat, or using horses for dog food and have people sign a petition and get away with it. And so, we made it so they couldn't. So, that effectively stopped any petition effort, any referendum effort like this in a local circumstance. And all the time that this was happening, since I was really leading this effort and, for the most part, I was the person who made all of the decisions. We had about 10 people who were absolutely essential to make this happen. Certainly, Trish was one, Nadine Anderson was a major component at the churches, Beth Goudy, Steve Black, Laura Gutierrez, Roberta Meek, and certainly Dan Anders, who was stellar, he's a judge now, in Philadelphia. And by the way, when he was successful in this, all the partners at Pepper Hamilton came out of their offices to shake his hand because he was successful in making this happen and it was a big deal because the thing is, it changed precedence across the state. And so did the lawsuit. And all the time that I was worried about this, I thought, "If we fail, every community that gets a nondiscrimination law in place will be at risk. If we succeed, they won't be." And so, I felt like this really, really mattered because it's really easy to pass an ordinance in a place where everybody's for you. But if you're passing one where you have an undercurrent of negativity, you need to show that it can't just be easily overturned. And we did that. But it was really hard. Okay, so that's what I want to say about that. But yeah, the lawsuit stuff, I'm happy to talk about that. That was very significant. And it dovetails into a bunch of other things, including marriage equality. It has to do with marriage equality, too. MF: Well, let's start there. I'll send a few times that would work for me next week. We'll start with the lawsuit. You talked a little bit about the Valley Free Press a little bit today, and I'm curious if you have more that you'd want to say about that publication. LB: Oh, yeah. The paper is a whole other huge thing. I produced that for 18 years. And it had enormous effect for the community. MF: Yeah, so I think we should definitely talk about that, too. If you could just think about this week what a nice arc would be, is the lawsuit a whole 90 minutes, or if the lawsuit leads into something else, maybe you could just think about the structure that would work best for that next one. LB: I think the lawsuit and the paper go together pretty well. MF: Okay. Let's do that, then, next week. I just want to say this was so fabulous to hear this story. You know I've heard it before, little pieces of it at your house for dinner, but this was nice to hear the whole thing. I'm so grateful that you talked with me, today. LB: I'm so glad to talk to you. It was wonderful. I'm very happy that people will be able to hear this story and how significant it is for not just our Allentown community or our Lehigh Valley community, but it really had an enormous impact on the state because I want to say that before the passage of the antidiscrimination ordinance in Allentown, there were six communities, Erie passed it about the same time we did, but they didn't have gender identity in theirs. When we passed this, only six communities had nondiscrimination ordinances that included sexual orientation, none of them included gender identity. Within three months of our passage, Philadelphia passed theirs, immediately addition of gender identity because they were embarrassed that Allentown did it. And since then, 50 communities in the state of Pennsylvania have passed ordinances that have been inclusive. It was really a cascade after that, including three other communities in the greater Lehigh Valley. MF: Well, thank you so much. I'm going to pause on record and then we can talk for a minute. LB: Okay. MF: Thanks, again. [break in audio] MF: Okay, this is Mary Foltz. I'm back with Liz, and we just thought of a story that needs to be recorded from this period, so I'm going to turn it back over to Liz. LB: This is really a definite story, the wonderful Felix Molina who was such an important activist at the beginning part in 1998, when we were trying to pass the ordinance and he was really leading the Human Relations Commission and instigated the first effort to do this, and so, Felix, when he was speaking at the City Council meeting and he gets up to speak, you only get two and a half minutes, and he gets up and he's so angry because council had been doing this long, long meeting after meeting after meeting to discuss the circumstances where a person in the community had a potbelly pig, and they had it as their pet. And literally, four council meetings had been devoted to that issue. And Felix gets up and he goes, and he has a very strong Puerto Rican accent, and he was saying, "You can't even talk about this, you can't even introduce this piece of legislation and you spent weeks and weeks and weeks describing whether pork is a pet or a farm animal, and it's ridiculous." He was furious. And it was ridiculous, because the issue really was, if it was a farm animal, you can't keep it in your house in Allentown. But if it's a pet, you can keep it in your house in Allentown, as though that really mattered. And it had been front-page news. He was furious. He went on and on about it. It was hilariously funny, and brilliant, actually, because it pointed out the absurdity that happens in council all the time. MF: We had to have that story on here. LB: Yes, it was good for his passion. MF: I'm going to thank you again and I'm going to pause the recording. 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