Get Used to It: Ep. 130, "Eric Rofes 1954-2006"

(typewriter taps) (slow funky music) - Hi, welcome to "Get Used To It." I'm Sheila Kuehl, and I'm your lovely host this today and always for this show. (laughs) My guests liked that. Today we're doing a show about a person who is not on this show, Eric Rofes, who passed away this year and was a teacher, an activist, a proud sex radical, a social critic, a complicated man. Did some of his early work in the East Coast, then Southern California, then Northern California. And I have three guests here today, all of whom knew Eric, different parts of his life, and I think interacted with his philosophy and his work at different parts of his life. So welcome, Torie Osborn. Torie is a senior advisor to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the Mayor of Los Angeles, and longtime activist. Welcome, Torie. - Glad to be here. - Michael Kearns, who is an actor, activist, and lots of things that start with A, advocate for everything good, and himself a bit of a sex radical, I guess, or at least a performer about issues of sexuality, and think an interesting work in that area. Welcome, Michael. - [Michael] Thank you, Sheila. - Third guest, Phill Wilson. Phill is the Executive Director of the Black AIDS Institute. Welcome, Phill. - Good to be here. - Torie, let's start with you. How did you meet Eric and what did you know about him at the time when you met him, do you remember? - October 14th, 1979. (Sheila laughs) - [Sheila] Did you look it up? (laughs) - First gay and lesbian March on Washington. - [Sheila] Oh, sure. - And I think it was the night before, actually. It was a culture event, Tom Robinson, "Glad to be Gay." Not Kate Clinton, what, a different era. Anyway, I'm not gonna remember everybody who performed there, and he was very much, I was working on the backstage. Robin Tyler helped produce the event. She was my partner at the time. I was kind of a baby activist in the gay world, in the gay and lesbian world. I was actually working in women's music at the time, in sort of the lesbian feminist separatist world, and Eric Rofes was one of the few men at the time, certainly few white men at the time who kind of crossed those worlds. This was pre-AIDS, this was 1979. So I met him, I mean, I just remember meeting, I don't remember which day, but there was several events going on that week, and the story we share, which is a footnote, a buried footnote, it will never appear in any history of the gay movement, but it's after that march, Eric tried to start an alternative, a grassroots progressive alternative to then NGTF, National Gay Taskforce, called NOLAG, National Organization of Lesbians and Gays. And for some reason, which I can't remember, they wanted to the founding conference to be in Los Angeles. So Eric Rofes, after I had briefly met him at this march, called me two months later in LA, I was living in LA briefly, and asked if I would be the lead organizer for the founding conference of NOLAG in I believe February of 1980. - So Eric thought that the taskforce was too mainstream, it needed to have- - Correct. It was a lobbying group. We needed a multi-racial, co-gender organization that did grassroots organizing. - [Sheila] And he was living in Boston, or- - He was in Boston, he was teaching I believe elementary school. He'd already written two books. He was quite impressive, actually, his resume, but what was most impressive to me, and I was new to LA in 1979, was I had just moved from San Francisco down to be with Robin, was his fluency... well, first of all, that he was a progressive, and second of all was his fluency kind of across cultures and his comfort with a very progressive multiracial, co-gender vision of the world. This wasn't happening much in 1979, trust me. I lived in San Francisco for five years and only knew one gay man, except when we would come together during the White Night riots or when Harvey Milk was killed. So Eric was one of these men who was very, who had women, people of color in his friendship networks, walked the talk, and was a very interesting personality, very forthright, quite... he could be intimidating. Anyway, long story short, NOLAG just imploded, and it was 1979. The men's caucus, there were about 300 people from around the country at the founding conference, about half men and women, actually, and there was a men's caucus, a women's caucus, a youth caucus, and Eric and the men's caucus put forward a sexual freedoms resolution, and it exploded, it imploded the conference. The women walked out, the youth walked out, (laughs) it was like, and, I mean, it's amazing to think of it now, but it was too early for something like that in the marriage, the domestic partnership between men and women at the time, and anyway- - Well, not only that, but the sexual freedom. The men weren't ambivalent about it. As a matter of fact, it seemed like certainly in that era, before AIDS, it was an identity issue, I mean, that gay men were about sexual freedom. It was a pride about it and a thing that the rest of the world was so uptight about, including the women, right? - Totally, well, I mean, sort of the left edge of the gay men's community were already very comfortable. I mean, this wasn't endorsing NAMBLA. It wasn't that far out there, but it was a strong cross-generational consensual. You can imagine, I don't remember the wording of it, but the women went bonkers, the feminists went bonkers. "You invited us to this?" And it was a mess. But what I remember about it was how principled, how feminist, and how much integrity Eric had, although he was a leader of the men's caucus. And then he went back to Boston. The thing blew up, nothing went anywhere, no second conference (laughs) for NOLAG. Nobody remembers the thing, except for me and Eric, and so anyway, he goes back to Boston, we stayed in touch with each other, and then the next thing I know, he's head of the Center. He's moved to Los Angeles, it's 1986, and he calls you and me, you and I were together then, and says, "Want to play Trivial Pursuit? I need some friends." (laughs) So he- (background noise drowns out speaker) - That's exactly right. - And we would plan a series of monthly evenings with Eric, new to Los Angeles, didn't know a lot of people, but he knew me, and then I was with you, and you and I and he and David Mixner and a few other- - [Sheila] Played Trivial Pursuit. - That was 1986- - It's great that the '80s are coming back, too, not just the '70s. (group laughs) - So then in 1987, he hired me to be finance director at the Center, and at the time, he didn't say it to me then, but he said it shortly afterwards, that he really hired me, he hoped to groom me to be his successor, which in fact was what happened. He was at the Center as Executive Director from '85 to '88, and it really began the transformation of the Center. He was very comfortable, again, moving across worlds, and he was extremely comfortable, hired strong feminist women, hired three or four strongly feminist-identified women, started hiring people of color in larger numbers, started to really change the Center, the culture of the Center. Did an affirmative action plan, began what I then kind of concluded in my era. But he was, and he was my management mentor. But, so those were the years that he was in Los Angeles, '85 to '88. - So what was your experience with him? I mean, some people have said there's this sort of dichotomy, here he's running the Center, and the Center was, again, seen as kind of a, I don't know, kind of the- - [Torie] Mainstream social services aid. - Exactly, mainstream. - And AIDS agency, kind of. - And he didn't think of himself as mainstream. He was a leather guy and he- - [Torie] And proud. - Proud, really proud, and there must have been, I don't know, did you see any dichotomy in terms of that? I mean, the women started waking up to sex, too, I mean, which was a new thing for the lesbian community- - We're gonna have a conversation about sex radicalism, but the reality was, as Executive Director of the Center, he was my management mentor, he taught me how to manage. He took very seriously building professional skillsets and sharing them with other people. It was only later during, when he left the Center that I interacted with him more kind of philosophically. He was extremely politically, he actually started with Chris Brownlie, he started this little gathering of gay kind of organizers and leaders that then I institutionalized, became the Monthly Leadership Round Table when I took over. He was, he took very... remember, this guy was 32 years old when he became Executive Director of the Center. I mean, it just blows my mind when I think of it now. He took it very seriously, he knew that the Center was an important institution. He didn't live at the edge. He lived in many parts of the jigsaw puzzle of a movement or of a community and didn't, he stood on the ground of being, he was proud to be an Executive Director, proud to be a manager, proud to be a fundraiser, proud to be all those kind of professional skills, but always saw... he instituted an orientation for new staff at the Center, and I'll never forget it because he talked about the history. He really believed in building social movements, I mean, and about the culture. He wanted the Center to always retain, he didn't call it progressive, his social justice oriented culture, the social movement oriented. We are organizers, we may be service providers, but we are organizers, we are advocates. He carried with him that kind of radical spirit of organizing, or a reform spirit, or whatever you want to call it. He was very strong about sex positive, I mean, that would have been the language he would have used in that time, would have been sex positive messages around HIV/AIDS. He would never have denied he was a leather guy or something, but he wasn't wearing leather to board meetings. (Sheila laughs) He wasn't about making agitational statements, and I say that with due respect because that was one of his strengths, was the ground he stood on, he claimed very fully. Look, the guy was a mountain of a man. He was a big, sometimes intimidating, hairy guy. He had a big old beard and a lot of hair, and he could be intimidating to lots of people, but he used his power in service of always mentoring younger people, mentoring women, sharing his power, building a movement. Somebody wrote this when he died, that he was a mountain of a man and it's like losing him was like a mountain you're used to seeing out of your window, having in your life on a daily basis, and suddenly it's gone. It's almost inconceivable. I mean, it's still inconceivable to me that Eric Rofes is gone in some weird way. He was huge, so, but I know I've seen his books, I've read the articles, he was a machine of a writer. He always read, he was always reading five magazines, four articles, he was an intellectual, but a people's intellectual, or a populist intellectual- - Well, he wanted to explain, too, I mean, I wasn't just- - Yes, and a social critic. - 'Cause he was a teacher, and I mean not just in his profession, but some people sort of have that in them. Phill, when did you meet him? - Well, it's actually funny because I think I met Eric at the same time I actually met Torie. It was during the No on LaRouche campaign. I came out in 1980- - [Torie] 1986. - And then Chris and I moved to Los Angeles in 1982- - [Sheila] This was Chris Brownlie that Torie- - Right, Chris Brownlie and I were partners- - Phill's partner. - And so he wanted to come to Los Angeles, so we moved to Los Angeles in 1982, and I had been involved primarily in Black and White Men Together, and Chris and I were building a successful business, and then the LaRouche initiative hit, and- - [Torie] 1986. - That's right, 1986, and Chris Brownlie and Michael Weinstein and I were part of the left fringe of the No on LaRouche initiative. We were part of an organization called Stop LaRouche that was kind of Silver Lake based, and as was the way in those days, I kind of acted as the moderate or the liaison, and as a result of that, I was kind of dispatched to be one of the people that was involved in the No on LaRouche campaign, and Torie- - [Torie] No on 86. - Right, No on 86. - [Torie] You were No on LaRouche, we were on- - Right, exactly. - That's when I met you. - That's right, exactly- - That's when I met you, initially. - And so during that process, obviously the Center was involved, and prior to that, Black and White Men Together had their weekly rap groups at the Center, and I was the facilitator at that time. And so after the LaRouche campaign, or maybe it wasn't even over yet, Eric called me up and he says, "Phill, how would you like to do the most exciting AIDS work in the country?" And I said, "Well, it must not pay anything." (group laughs) And he said, "Why do you say that?" And I said, "Because if it paid anything, it wouldn't have to be the most exciting work in the country. You only have to introduce it that way if there's no payment." (group laughs) And what's very, very funny, he talked me into taking that job. Now, at the time, Chris and I actually owned what was beginning to be a successful business, it's called Black is More Than Beautiful at the time, but Chris was starting to get sick, and so I called my mother and I said, "We're gonna close the business and I'm gonna take this job at the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center and working on this project called Stop AIDS." And my mother said, "Fine," and what have you, and she said, "Well, how much does it pay?" And so I told her and she says, "Oh, okay," and she said, "Well, what else are you gonna be doing?" (group laughs) So she thought it was a part time job. - [Torie] That was at Stop AIDS. - Huh? - [Torie] Stop AIDS. - It was Stop AIDS, right, the Stop AIDS project, Stop AIDS Los Angeles. And so I said, "No, it's a full-time job." And so my mother hung up, and about an hour later, she called back and she said, "You didn't have to go to college to earn that kind of a salary. (group laughs) This is not a very good return on the investment." - What was that, $30,000 or something? - No, it was $14,000- - Probably less than that. In that year? - It was $14,000, is what it was, and it was half of our mortgage, actually. So we had no idea how we were gonna make that happen. But he convinced me to take that job, and it was at a time when, and as Torie said, Eric was trying to put together the Center as a new entity. And I actually viewed him as a part of the conservative assimilationist traditional part of the gay and lesbian movement, and so interesting to come to work for him. And we opened up a Stop AIDS office in West Hollywood, and during that time, Eric was on this mission that every project at the Center had to have the Center logo. Now, prior to that, each project actually or a program would get their own money and kind of operated as kind of this loose confederation of activities at the Center. And so I was in charge of outreach and promotions for Stop AIDS. So I developed the newsletter, the logo, and all the media materials, and we developed actually one of the most consistent newsletters from the Center, and so every month, our newsletter would come out and we'd have these ads and what have you, and Eric would call us every time something, would call me every time something would come out and says, "Phill, where is the Center's logo? Great, but where is the Center's logo?" And I would say, "Well, we missed it this time. We'll get it though next month," because we were trying to distance ourselves away from the Center because this was on the heels of all the various explosions. Eric was the first ED after Steve Schulte, after the- - [Torie] The women walked out. - The women walking out and all that kind of stuff. But what was interesting about Eric is that although he stood in that place, as Torie said, that actually wasn't who he was. And in fact, he was a proud sex radical, even then, and I remember going to Northern California to a meeting, and it was during the same weekend as one of the festivals. Now, mind you, I was still kind of somewhat in the coming out process, and I remember Eric walking in the parade, not in the parade, in the festival, and taking off his shirt, which is something I would never do, in fact, something that I probably wouldn't do now, but, (group laughs) but taking off his shirt, and I'm thinking, "How can the Executive Director of the Center do that?" But it's all a part of the complexities of who he was, and Torie was right, he was a great, great educator and a teacher, management, and being thoughtful and all of those things. - Well, and this was also, in these days, or maybe it was just before that when it seemed like all of the gay male leadership in the community was sick. - [Phill] That's right. - I mean, so many of our guys were sick, and people were, it seemed to me, I remember people were thinking, what's gonna ever happen to the gay movement, because it looked like everybody was gonna be gone. - Well, we were literally fighting for our lives, and every one of us was looking at each other, wondering who's going to be next. - Next. - And wondering who was gonna be, if you were the last man standing, and in the beginning, as a matter of fact, the Proposition 64 happened on the heels of the HIV test. So prior to that, we didn't know who was positive and who wasn't 'cause you basically got introduced to someone when they had full-blown AIDS, when they were basically six or seven or eight weeks away from death, as it turned out. And so it was a very, very extremely intense time, and so we were fighting for identity in all sorts of ways because it was really our last stand. And so every single thing you felt, you felt it passionately, and anyone who didn't think the way you thought was the enemy. And so that was kind of the way that life was. - Well, and also there was so much denial. I mean, there was denial in the community, there was denial, the government wouldn't even utter the world. I remember when Reagan, somebody said, "Here's a president with this all going on and never once has he even said the word." So it was a struggle, and kind of a community struggle, nobody else. - And Eric actually moved the Center into AIDS work. What people don't remember is that the Kaposi's Sarcoma Foundation, which turned into San Francisco AIDS Foundation came down to the Center, came down to Los Angeles when Steve Schulte was there to say, "You need to start an AIDS organization," and the Center refused, the Center would not do it. And it wasn't until Eric came on board and Stop AIDS Los Angeles was the first AIDS program that the Center did, and out of that grew a whole host of, I mean, not out of Stop AIDS, but around that time grew all of the things. I mean, back then the Center, the Health Department at the Center was still very much STD, which was actually the health component that the Center did. And to move the Center into kind of be front and center as an AIDS organization, though, that was really, he planted those seeds. - The other thing he did, if I can just say one thing, during that time was he wasn't afraid to truth tell about the impact on people's lives in an organization like the Center. At that, during those years, we were losing to AIDS a staff person a month on average. All of us were going to the hospital every night and we were going to funerals at least once a week. And remember, Eric, I'm sure you were there during this time, called these, every time somebody died, he would call a staff meeting. This was very controversial because people tend to grieve privately, and creating public ritual hadn't yet hit, the quilt wasn't around then. And he just forced people to walk into it. He was not afraid of the psychology and the sort of spiritual and cultural and communal impacts of- - Well, and I think that also had something to do, I mean, later when he was... he was always writing, as you said, very prolific, but he was writing about that, about let's be honest. - [Torie] And grief. - About grief, and it wasn't just, well, I just lost a friend. - Well, it's also no accident that sex and death are entwined in some way, and I think that he made that perfectly clear. I mean, his ability to confront or embrace or look at death was as profound as his connections to a sexual identity. I also find, as all of you were talking, just about his largess in terms of even throughout knowing he was HIV negative, he still behaved with the mandate and the mission and the passion of those of us who then later found out that we were. So there's some great irony. I mean, it's almost as if he had a prescient sense of his own mortality, he certainly behaved as if. I mean, I never had the sense when I would meet with him or talk with him that he was separating himself from me in any way, shape, or form, and in spite of people's varying degrees of evolution, a lot of times it just, it's in the room with you when you're having a meeting with someone who's HIV negative and you're HIV positive. I never sensed that, I always sensed that he was as vulnerable about life and as, whatever the words are, so. - Well, he is one of those people that really understood very early on that we actually were all in this together, that some of us were going to die, yes. Now, but in fact, all of us were suffering in this, and that the enormous pain and grief coming from losing people at those numbers. For example, the Stop AIDS team that Eric hired, I am the only man in that team that is still alive, the only one. All the rest of those guys are dead. And if you look at the male staff at the Center in 1986, there are very, very, very few of us that are alive, and yet, Eric, in the midst of that, we had work to do, and he created an environment that you never ever forgot that, that that work had to happen, no matter what. I mean, I did a campaign when I was at Stop AIDS that a number of your later, maybe even up to 15 years later, a agency in St. Louis tried to do a similar campaign, and the ED was fired. And I had this idea of getting porn stars to be spokespeople to fight AIDS, and so I called these porn stars and we did an ad campaign in "Frontiers" and the news back then with these porn stars, and saying that you have to protect yourself. Eric was right there the entire way. - Michael, how did you know him? - Well, I knew him when he was the ED at the Center and I was working as an actor and producing and doing a lot of AIDS-related work that didn't shy away from issues of sexuality. And when I thought back of it today and in the past couple of days, knowing I was gonna do this, we really kind of had, we did have a friendship, but it was almost like working lunches, (laughs) where even though what we were talking about bonded us in a certain man mano a mano way because of the shared grief and pain and everything, we were really kind of working things out, like what is this about? And I learned a lot from him. I mean, his just, his ability to understand beyond the quick "just say no" sort of mentality, and to look at everyone's individual sexuality and not sort of clump everyone together, and he had a profound respect for that. I mean, I think that, interesting that you said the dichotomy, I think the dichotomy with Eric was not that he was leather man by night and ED by day, it's just that he was honest about it. (group laughs) I mean, there are a lot of them, honey, (laughs) he just told the truth. I mean, but it's really, it is the truth. He wasn't ashamed, he was not shame-based, and we know where that shame-based judgment in terms of education, in terms of outreach. And it's interesting because the theater, it provides a different avenue into these issues, and he respected that. In the theater, nobody was afraid to talk about sexuality or to really, I mean, in AIDS Us, which is was done in '84, '85, people were literally dying on the stage and telling jokes about their sex life, and Eric got that and got the importance of humor as part of the lesson, you weren't just gonna put out all these posters that scared you, that you had to approach things more humanistically and not demonizing. He was way ahead of his time. I mean, I think that he was truly a visionary in terms of what's coming down now and what we're dealing with in this decade of crystal methamphetamine use and the breakdown of gay male sexuality, the distortion of it, and I don't mean distortion wearing leather. I mean distortion in inability to connect. I think he saw all that coming, I really do. - Well, he certainly thought about it, too, and it must have been a very, I mean, I had not thought about it at the time, but learning more later as I think the women did as we became more involved with the guys going through this that the story of gay male sexuality was about freedom and experimentation and just pushing the envelope, or whatever you would say. That's what it was about, and some people were very, very critical about that. But then with AIDS, everything became very confused or confusing, what was the community about? Now it was gonna be about death and or surviving or grieving or whatever. I mean, he did write, as well, about survivor's guilt, when you were talking about his being negative and working with people and talking to people and being friends with people who were positive, but still, he identified that kind of, I don't know, psychology in the community. Did you... was that part, 'cause you worked some of that into your own shows. - Well, it's interesting because now those of us who've lived this long are experiencing survivor guilt in a different way than he was experiencing survivor guilt. I mean, it just keeps transforming itself. What you say, I mean, here's how I see it. I mean, we spent the '70s saying we're sexy, we're hot, we're gonna kiss, we're gonna hold hands, we're gonna walk down the streets, we're gonna have all kinds of sex imaginable, and we're gonna laugh and love and go crazy for each other, and this is who we are, you'd better accept us, (claps) then wham, hide it, get rid of it, put a condom on it, don't let us know what you do in bed, you're bad. Jim (indistinct) used to say "the good homosexual." It gave the good homosexual a chance to show, well, I didn't do any of that. I mean, I remember in the nascent days of AIDS, '82 or '83, it's those leather queens who are getting it, or it's those poppers, the ones... I mean, there were these ridiculous- - It's the (indistinct), the guys at Fire Island, or the blacks, it was always someone else. - Oh, blacks, that was, absolutely, but it was all these separating devices, lines of demarkation, and if you used to be a sexual hero and a revolutionary, and then you were a sick freak overnight, overnight. All your... it was political, sex was political in the '70s. It was an identity, it was the formation of our identity. Suddenly it's... and now look at it. I mean, now it's so, we're in a whole horror mirrors of all these distortions and the drug use, and of course the technology doesn't help things, and the fact that people are not looking in each other's eyes anymore, it's just- - [Torie] Talk a little more about that- - We need Eric Rofes- - Talk a little bit more about how you see it now. - Yeah, talk about the distortion- - Yeah, I'm not quite- - We haven't actually done a show, although I've been told by I think all of you I should do a show on the crystal meth use in the community and the epidemic of it- - I just did a piece on that, and I think that- - A theater piece, you mean? - Yeah, a theater piece called "The Tina Dance," and it was first person interviews, not unlike the work I did around AIDS in the early days to try to get the demonization element out and look at the human. What is... it's very easy to say, "Oh, stop doing crystal meth," and, "Oh, why are these sick freaks doing this crystal meth and having sex all night?" That's the easy way out, why indeed? Let's really ask why. Well, for a variety of reasons, including survivor guilt, including grief, including inability to launch into another real relationship, so I'll have a relationship that's drug induced, to recapture that sexuality without... the sexuality of the '70s without the guilt of the '80s. I mean, that's the one thing that you constantly hear about crystal methamphetamine, is it unleashes feelings of shame and guilt. That shame and guilt that we worked so hard to conquer came back in such a devastating way that's very difficult. - Part of it is the technology, and I think that the crystal meth phenomenon has grown out of two places, I think part is grown out of kind of the guilt and kind of what happens, I think all along, I mean, Stop AIDS, for example, was about envisioning a world without AIDS, and all of our prevention strategies for gay men was about "hold on until we get through this." All the sexual, the cultural changes around sexual behavior was about "hold on until we get through this." But what happens when all of a sudden you say, "We're not gonna get that this, this is it, folks"? And so quite frankly, all of the sacrifice that you were making, hoping to survive to the day when this would be over, well, this is now it now, and so what happens to those folks when that reality happens? And then the second thing that happens, because crystal meth is interesting in the cross-generational (indistinct) of it, and then among young people, where people were actually coming to their sexuality in an age where a lot of the stuff that created community, kind of the community that's created by oppression and needing to come together isn't there, and then the technology and way in which people hook up. I mean, the thing about the '70s and the early '80s is that we met in bars and we met in bathhouses, and no matter what else people thought about, they created communities- - [Michael] That's right, absolutely. - They were your families. Now, and I know when I came out, there was kind of this whole process of, well, let's hurry up and have sex and get it out of the way because then we'll become lifelong friends, that's right, that's right, and my friend Reggie used to call it your bristers, your brothers and your sisters and whatever. But it was about creating family. And now what happens is that we're not creating families in those settings, and so you have these folks who have no sense of family and community, and are just so disjointed and so alone and are feeling this kind of pain, and the role models are the folks who can provide mentoring. We're all reeling from not having a chance to kind of deal with kind of the process of bereavement and grieving and moving on. - But I think one of the things that, and Torie, correct me if I'm wrong 'cause I'm thinking about when the women were still kind of separate from this, and as you said, kind of critical of some of it. It was thought about gay men in the '70s that they were also very impersonal. That's what it looked like from the outside, that having sort of impersonal sex, and it's interesting to me what you say, Michael, no one even looks each other in the eye anymore- - In those days, it might have been fast and anonymous, but we looked at each other in the eyes. (Sheila laughs) - But it wasn't anonymous, Michael, because the point is- - Not necessarily. - The point is that the first encounter may have been anonymous (indistinct), but the point is that those guys were going to the bathhouses week after week after week- - Seeing each other and seeing people. - Now, there was a network that was happening, or in the bars, where would you go on Mondays, or where would you go on Wednesday, it was the same folks there, and so- - Where now it's quantity, quantity- - And the same folks who developed the community response to AIDS, the same people- - It's absolutely- - And in fact, I think somebody's done a sort of anthropological study of the people who were the most active, engaged in San Francisco in the bar scene and the bathhouse scene, then became literally that was the network, the infrastructure that became the folks that came together to- - Well, they were the ones who did the initial fundraisers- - I mean, it makes perfect sense. It's logical, but it's a kind of a... people don't think that way. They objectify, they separate, they impose all these kind of ridiculous- - Well, I think that's part of what Eric wrote about was that sex is not separate from the rest of life, and that the critique from the outside of the community was that we were all about sex, but it was separate from life, and therefore we were separate from life. But I think what he said was, no, pleasure was really, it's a good thing and it's part of your life. Try to figure out your identity as a whole human being, including this stuff. - [Michael] That's right. - And I think that's what he tried to, what he did write about and sort of succeed. So you're saying really the younger generation doesn't see themselves holistically this way, as you see them. - I don't think they have a chance to on some level. - Because of this darn internet stuff? - Well, I think the electronic- - The world is breaking down- - The whole entire world- - The entire world is crashing around us- - But also the other interesting thing, I mean, I think that our human needs are the same. I mean, the thing that came up every single conversation I had with anyone who had used crystal methamphetamine, eventually if you could distill it into a word, what are you trying to do, the word was connect. But guess what, they're deliberately on disconnect in order to connect. Well, this isn't only true of gay people in Los Angeles. This is true of a nation and a world. I mean, we're so disconnected and only connected through our Blackberries and Botox treatments and wild- - And we live in a world where, at least in this government, in this society, where we have a government infrastructure that's designed to disconnect. It's designed to divide, it's the politics of divide and to create others all over the place. - Well, and also to create a kind of self hatred, as well. I mean, the government, the federal government in hating so many different groups of people has essentially said, "And you really ought to hate yourselves, as well, because you're not worthy, you're not worthy and you're not worthy and you're not worthy." - The politics of hate are impossible not to internalize, especially in your vulnerable moments of your life, or if you're young and unformed. I mean, even the most healthy person has to be affected by what's going on in the world. - And a lot of times, that manifests sexually. It might not manifest in the office place or in the workplace or in your friendship, but when, behind closed doors, sometimes that's when that behavior manifests. - And is it really a surprise that, given the world we live in today, that there is an increase in the number of people who want to create a different reality? And that's what crystal meth is, does that really surprise us? Does it really surprise us when we have a president that is willing to change the Constitution of the United States to say that there's some people who deserve full rights and there's some people who don't- - [Torie] And torture is good. - Right, right, and that- - Justifiable. - Torture is good, that there are people who want to say, I need to find another place to be, and if I can't find another physical place to be, then I can find another psychological place to be, is that really so surprising? - It makes complete and utter sense. - It's sort of the other side of the same coin as the huge outpouring of spiritual seeking, whether it's traditional religious, the rise of religious fundamentalism, Islam, Hindu, Christian, on the other side, I mean, what is the difference? It's exactly the same thing. It's craziness, it's social... $250 million a day on the war in Iraq. I mean, the statistic goes over and over in my head in this kind of weird perseverating way. I mean, it's insane, truly, the world is insane. Why wouldn't you want to go off and- - And then factor into that all the loss, all the grief, all the messages about gay marriage and all the evangelicals and all the... I mean, there's a lot out there that's saying, "You're not okay." - Well, and also guilt is a very easy place to go. Speaking as the product of a marriage of a Jew and a Catholic, (laughs) we were, I mean- - [Torie] You have both guilt and shame. - I have guilt and shame and guilt, and then there's guilt. - And bagels. - Bagels, but the bagels were good. It's really a question, and I guess Eric's work and his life is, as I said to you, probably going to be a jumping off place for us because when we get together we just talk and talk and talk about whatever comes up, which is great. But it had to do with integration in a way, I think, not just your sexuality with the rest of your life, but you're really talking about a fractured society that leads to fractured individuals, where people are trying to figure out who they are as a unit, but it's very difficult. They're separating much of what they do here from what they do here, and I think, as you said, it wasn't about Eric being a leather guy by night and an ED by day, he said- - Well, I think he had this fierce and probing intelligence and this fierce need, I mean, he had a need to be active, to be an activist, to organize, I mean, he was always organizing some network. I mean, I can't even remember the most recent one, always organizing something, creating something. He had a creative drive, writing, figuring out. An intellectual, he was an intellectual, in a way. I wanted to mention the last time that I saw him, I taught a course a couple of years ago on community activism and public policy at UCLA, and I thought, well, who do I know who's been a professor, because I had never done it before. And so I called Eric up, and he was so generous with his time, he sent me all his curricula. Now, he was teaching education up in University of Humboldt, I think it was. So he was teaching teachers to be, really, and not just gay and lesbian curriculum, but all kinds of pedagogy and stuff that was way beyond my ken. But he shared with me how you teach. He literally... and he came down to LA and we spent a couple of hours together and it was the same. He had been my mentor, he literally taught me how to manage. Everything I teach when I do my executive directors seminars for young executive directs about how you manage, one on ones with your direct reports, all this kind of basic management one on one, I got from Eric Rofes, and here he was teaching me how to be a teacher again. And I just, I wanted to him to know that I remembered that. So I wanted to put that out into the universe. But I think... and the reason I said about this fierce probing intellect is that I think he was much more comfortable with dichotomies, with complexities, with the multiple facets, with multitudes, with a world that has complexity, and where everything doesn't resolve itself in a simple way, at the same time as, I think, when we talk about the breakdown of community, I think he and all of us who have experienced community and the healing power of it and the political power of it feel how intensely it is missing in the world today. There's a grief about that in and of itself. So he understood the times we lived in, he understood completely what we were up against, but he didn't need to make it all fit into some worldview or ideology or feminist or some... do you know what I'm saying? And I think that is rare- - Yeah, and I was- - [Torie] I think people try to resolve the contradictions in- - Well, it's interesting because we have sort of about the way we feel about gayness and AIDS-ness and the connection, we've gone through these different phases, too, and probably not even the four of us at the same time, where AIDS was a gay disease. And then we thought, well, no, it's not, and everyone ought to know that it's not because it kind of, it's stigmatizing our community and it's also dangerous in other communities that are not dealing with it. So then we went into, AIDS is not just a gay disease. And so we de-gayed AIDS. Then Eric convened a male health summit, Gay Male Health Summit, I think in Boulder was the first one. - [Phill] Right. - And then Phill and I were having this conversation about how... well, you should probably say what you said about this notion of gay men's health without it being about AIDS- - Well, when you think about that Eric was evolving over time, and Eric actually was one of the leaders of the discussion on the de-gaying of AIDS and resisting the de-gaying of AIDS, and then kind of his next manifestation was about developing this Gay Men's Health. And for a lot of us, and I think actually strategically in the beginning, it was the discussion about health outside of AIDS paradigm. And for those of us who were still very much inside the AIDS paradigm, and particularly, and I'll just take ownership, as a black gay man dealing with AIDS at the time, I certainly felt a sense of abandonment by that whole movement, in that while AIDS, there had been some successes made in AIDS among white gay men, and while we didn't feel like we shared those successes among black gay men, and now there was a group of men, kind of in the same way that Torie talked about, the earlier thing with the conference, so now there's this group of men who wanted to talk about gay men's health to the exclusion of HIV and AIDS. And while I don't think that that was their intent, and I don't want to put that on them, but that certainly is the way we felt about that. And as that movement grew, it became more mature and able to kind of be, to include more about the AIDS discussion within a larger health discourse. But that was part, kind of the evolution, and I think that what it spoke to for me about Eric and why I always remember him and think about him is that he was a very, very complicated person in a reductionist world. And he was constantly fighting against that reductionism, and if you kind of track the trajectory of his life and his work, there was kind of a constant place where he was becoming uncomfortable with where he was. I think by the time he left the Center, he was very ready to leave the Center. The Center was no longer a place where he was comfortable being because he was evolving. And then the work he did in San Francisco, and then I think even, now he had even transitioned out of, certainly out of being the central figure in the Gay Men's Health work. And I think all of that is about life is complicated and we're complicated, and if you go to embrace that complexity, it creates a tremendous amount of discomfort among other people. - I also, I think that... absolutely, I mean, it's so true, what everyone's saying, and Torie emphasized, which is indisputable, his intellectual component. But also keep in mind that he was going to lunch with me to talk about the artistic element. So not only did he have this ferocious intellect, he also had something humanistic that went with that. We know a lot of intellectuals who would never get down in the mud, as it were, humanistically, as he did. And you could call this male and female in sort of stereotypical terms. Here he was, this white male, but he also had this soul and spirit of an artist in a certain way. His intellectualism was not stifled in any way by fear or camouflage. - And also, that was also the way he reached out to communities. I mean, there was something, it's just vaguely in my mind, about reaching out to the Latino community through foodstuff, through cultural food fare kinds of things. - Brilliant. - That it was music, if it was music, do it around music, if it was food, he did it around food. - Authenticity. - There was a... so in one of the writings about him, of which there are many now on the internet I saw today, that it was an interesting inventive way that he reached out or thought of inclusion. I wish I knew more about it 'cause it sounded very interesting to me, but the thought, just what you're saying, Michael, that the intellectual part of him was also, it was like, let's go to where people are, in terms of what they're kind of about. - [Torie] He was pretty fearless. - He was fearless. - He was one of the most fearless people I've ever met, a truth teller. - And yet I think- - And he could be a pain in the butt, let's just be real. (Sheila laughs) I don't if you were at the staff meeting. I think you were at the staff meeting the day that he was... this is 1987, and we would have these 200 staff people come together once a month, and he would run it like he ran his kindergarten class or his third grade class, and Gabe Crooks walks in five minutes late, he said, "Gabe Crooks, you were tardy again today." And I'm like, Phill and I are rolling eyeballs at each other, he was a prick. (group laughs) So the, so- - Gold stars, and- - So our truth-telling intellectual giant of a man could be a prissy little school teacher, too. (overlapping chattering) (group laughs) - And it was actually very funny, and Torie's absolutely right 'cause he would do those things, and yet he would, though, hire and invite people who under no circumstances were going to tolerate that. (group laughs) - [Michael] That's great. - And he would call me every week and it was like, "No, I'm not changing you, I'm not gonna tell you this, but no, I'm not changing you out of the program." (laughs) (overlapping chattering) (group laughs) - Well, there is something about a really, a great leader that has an idea and has a vision, and yet will hire people that they know are gonna argue with them, or have their own vision or whatever. You have to kind of do that. I mean, I love that Antonio has done that, for instance. He hires people that have their own ideas about things, and it's very difficult- - Lincoln did it. - Yes, Lincoln did it, too. - [Michael] Beautifully. - Well, I wonder, though, for today, if we see that kind of leadership in the community. It's hard to talk about kind of leadership 'cause each of us, we're not solely kind of working being, developing program, necessarily, in what's called the gay and lesbian community. And the thing about Eric is he would have the idea sort of about the next thing and kind of go for it. So do you see this happening? - I think it's a much tougher era, I gotta tell you. I mean, I think we're in an era of reductionist thinking, of right wing, of just the context, it's very conservative. The political space is like this. Now, this may change in years to come, I pray that it does. But, so what that does is, it will marginalize people who had that kind of- - [Michael] Energy. - I mean, yeah, he couldn't have lived anywhere but San Francisco, really. San Francisco has such a counter-cultural community. It would have been tough for Eric Rofes to be Eric Rofes today in Los Angeles. I mean, I just believe that. - [Michael] Fascinating. - There was also the issue of whether or not AIDS is still a crisis and whether you can sort of get people to pay attention and to organize, to be organized around what? - [Michael] Anything. - But, I mean, in our community, it wasn't just an organizing tool that we were all now drawn into work about this. But I can't even remember what the, sort of what the conflict was, but there was a conflict about whether you keep referring to AIDS as a crisis so that you can keep organizing, or whether- - Well, part of it, part of it is that if it continues to be a crisis, then you don't have space for motivation to develop medium range and longterm goals and objectives, and so you lose an opportunity to actually end the epidemic because in a crisis, basically you're just doing triage. That's all you have time to do. And that is a source of a debate, and that doesn't mean that there's not a tremendous need for a sense of urgency, because there is a tremendous need for a sense of urgency. But at the same time, I think that we have to be willing to be strategic, and we have to be willing to kind of bear the heaviness that comes when knowing every decision you make to do something is a decision you make to not to do something else. And so every moment I invest in basically ending the epidemic or preventing new people from entering into the epidemic, part of that is time taken away from caring for those folks who are still in the midst of it, and it is a terrible, "Sophie's Choice"- - [Torie] Do you feel as if you're always triaging? - I don't feel like I'm always triaging anymore, but I feel like it's a choice to decide not to be triaging. I certainly could be triaging all the time, and only triaging, and that could take up more time than I have if I chose to do that. And so I know that, and basically, the bottom line is that there are people who are not going to get what they need because they need it right now because we have to invest some time in making sure that we're looking down the road. - I think also what Eric warned against was sort of the addiction to crisis, the adrenaline, I mean, which we become used to as kids. We become sort of addicted to everything being wacky and that's what we did for all those years. I mean, we were very good at going from one hospital to the next to the memorial to the... and then suddenly when that tapered off, who am I? - You know what that reminds me, he turned me onto Anne Wilson Schaef's books, which really were formative in my life, "The Addictive Organization," "The Addictive Society," the use of addiction, and he and I were both recovering addicts and shared that, and the use of addiction as a metaphor in all kinds of ways, and how it played out in culture, and he was fascinated by the culture of organizations. I completely forgot this whole piece of him, whether it was the Center, whether it was an AIDS service organization. The way that different dysfunctions played out, codependency, addiction, I mean, he was completely fascinated by how psychology and various... but the notion that, the culture of activism, for example, could become addicted to crisis and self-perpetuate a dysfunctional culture, the fact that our oppression, you mentioned this earlier, that our own oppression could become a sickness, Phill used that phrase, sort of institutionalized that phrase, "oppression sickness," that we could externalize in our own organizations, communities, and relationships the issues that we dealt with. All of that stuff was currency. We talked about it all the time in those days when we had a movement and a community where we were creating an alternative as we were living in the old world, in a sense, and Eric was a guide, a pilot as we navigated all those kind of interesting discussions that I don't find I have so much anymore, maybe I'm isolated. - You don't? - Yeah. - I'm isolated, too, I have them when I come on your show. (group laughs) - Well, it's one of the reasons why I say, I don't know what we're gonna talk about, but let's have Torie and Michael and Phill on the show, because we, I think that, and Eric would have loved it, I was thinking about that today. Too bad he was up north because he could have been on this show, not that it's the best intellectual exercise in the world, but I certainly love it. But it was like that, I mean, he didn't intellectualize his life, but he could stimulate a whole round of thinking, and I think you said even from the staff meetings, but also the reality-based issue, the let's think about this big time, but what does it mean to individual people? It was, I think, I don't know, maybe not just an interesting era, I think it was the people. And maybe we don't know the new Eric Rofes. Maybe we don't know who that is, and maybe there are other people coming up, or maybe we're just so damned busy, we don't have these kinds of conversations- - That is part of the problem of this era. - Mollified by whatever, "CSI." (group laughs) - Which is on 24 hours a day, from what I can tell. - [Torie] Choose your drug. - [Michael] "Law and Order," or- - Right, choose your drug. - Choose your drug. - [Michael] Choose your drug. - Torie talked about the possible change in the political climate in the future. What I'm fearful of, that what will happen is that we'll exchange a right wing conservative narrow political climate for a different political climate that's a Democratic, as opposed to a Republican, if you use partisan politics, but it'll still be narrow. And I think that's what we have to be careful about, that what worked before is that we fundamentally behave and believe that we were different and that that impacted who and what and how we did things. It wasn't just what outcomes we wanted, and I'm fearful, particularly now that we talk about political change, that we'll exchange a narrow Republican point of view for a narrow Democratic point of view. - Well, it's a lot- - Wait, before we get into that, I hate to say this, but we have only 30 seconds remaining, and I- - [Torie] We have a show. We have another show. - We have another show on this, especially after the elections, and then we'll come back and we'll talk about elections, and you'll already know what happened, and we don't at the moment. But in the spirit of Eric Rofes, where we're talking about expansiveness and not limiting, where we talk about integration and not sort of fractionalization, I think there are lessons to be learned. We could never sum up anybody's life, not on this show, not any eulogy, not anywhere, but I think what Eric would want us to take away is that we are complicated, we are many faceted. We should try to get integrated, and just "Get Used To It." (slow funky music)