Get Used to It: Ep. 149, "Camp Courage"

(typewriter typing) (upbeat music) - Hi and welcome to "Get Used To It". I'm Sheila Kuehl. And as usual, I take you through this hour of fascinating dialogue. Today we're gonna talk about Camp Courage, which may or may not be something that you've heard about, but it is related to the Obama campaign. It's related to the campaign for marriage equality and yet not, it's its own thing. And I can't wait for you to hear about it. I have two wonderful guests today, Torie Osborn, who her current avatar is at the United Way as the chief civic engagement officer. Is that the best title you ever heard of? I think it is so wonderful, but of course, Torie has been a long, long standing activist in the gay community and the women's community, anti-war activism, has an entire history of activism. She was the executive director of the Liberty Hill Foundation, and last year found herself deeply engaged in the Obama campaign as a just phone banker like soldier person as a volunteer. Torie, welcome as always, really glad to have you here. And my other guest is Lisa Powell. Lisa Powell is the co-founder of Black Lesbians United. She's been also a longtime activist in the LBGT community and in the African American community. And I'm really happy that you're here. - Glad to be here. - Torie, let's start with you. I think that people have been hearing more and more that there is such a thing as Camp Courage. People have friends who might have gone to one of the gatherings in either LA in San Diego, in Fresno, in Oakland. So tell us just as an opener, what the heck is Camp Courage? - Camp Courage is a two day intensive community organizing and political campaign training, hands on organizing skills, but it's also a kind of empowerment model. It's based on Camp Obama adapted for the LGBT and allies community with a focus with an emphasis on the marriage equality issue. And the kind of origin story is that I felt called last summer to drop my life and join the Obama campaign, as did Lisa and as did our other co-founder who couldn't be here today, Mike Bonin, who works for city Councilman Bill Rosendale in LA. And all of us kind of very separately, you know, not even knowing that each other was doing this. I barely knew Mike. I knew him a little bit from my time in city hall working for mayor Villaraigosa, but so I felt called, dropped my life, ran off and joined the Obama circus. And as part of that, because I was what the campaign called a super volunteer, which meant that you basically dedicated at least five or six weeks full time to the campaign. As part of that, we went through kind of a mandatory training called Camp Obama, it was developed by Marshall Ganz, who is a Harvard professor and a 40 year student and creator of organizing trainings and methodologies that he's really drawn from the best curricula around of kind of human potential and empowerment. And then hands on political campaign training. He was for 17 years was field director and head of training for Cesar Chavez at the United Farm Workers. He started out in the civil rights movement, freedom summer 1964 and so forth. And he's really just one of those geniuses. I mean, I'm sure he has many gifts, but his special gift is to develop a leadership training curriculum that very quickly, in two days, trains individuals, calls on them, kind of summons their own leadership ability and then sort of teaches how do you not only learn how to tell your own story, we'll talk more about this later, but the kind of basis of it is that you clear your own channels. You become powerful by owning your own authentic story of why you care about this or that issue, on the campaign, it was Barack Obama. And then of course we deal with marriage equality and then through kind of clearing your own channel and finding your own voice, if you will, learning your own story and learning and grounding your work and your leadership work and your own story, you then learned that relationship building through telling your story, through looking somebody else in the eye, calls on their leadership, or you would develop at least a relationship. And you learn that leadership is about developing other leaderships. It's about building community and it's about building a movement. So it's not sort of corporate top down command to control leadership that you're learning. You're learning how to be a grassroots leader. And actually just read an article where Marshall Ganz said that the Obama campaign was the greatest development of civic capital in American history. And this person says, well, what do you mean by that? And he says the grassroots leaders that were left behind by the Obama campaign that were mobilized, in the Obama campaign, there were something like 25,000 people who went through Camp Obama in California. There were 4,000. Now those folks were so fired up and ready to go. They fanned out, they dropped their lives like I did. They fanned out and oversaw a vast network of phone banks and meetups and very decentralized. They all went out and organized their friends and family and found other leaders and developed this kind of infinitely expanding grassroots field operation that won the Obama campaign. So I came out of the Obama campaign completely empowered first by Camp Obama and then my experience and when proposition eight passed, when marriage equality was snatched from the people of California by this brilliantly evil campaign of lies and disinformation that the right wing put on, where they created a multiracial coalition, religious coalition. And they created a well trained and well mobilized army of grassroots warriors, 100 thousand of them. And the no on eight campaign was, let's just at least say it did not do these things. And really did not allow-- - It didn't engage, a lot of people who were just saying, how do I do this? What can I do? I'm ready. And also a lot of people were saying, I think that's gonna be okay, I'm gonna work for Obama because that's gonna change. - I didn't work on the no on eight campaign. And I went to work in Obama. And as soon as Obama won and proposition eight won, there were many of us who said we gotta figure out how to work for our own issue. Well I think it was within days of the Obama win and our loss on prep eight, that I just had this sense again, of purpose and calling. And I said, you know what? This Camp Obama model, this is what the LGBT community needs, because the LGBT community had become kind of complacent. It talked to itself, it had a lousy campaign. It didn't seem to know how to run a grassroots operation. And it seemed to have lost that vibrancy, that sense of passion and purpose that we certainly had during the AIDS epidemic. - And even from Stonewall. - We've had it at various periods - A little radical and cutting edge, and you're right. It felt like we were not there anymore. - So after the Obama campaign, I felt, you know what, this is something I could give back to my community. I haven't been real. I've been working on poverty and economic issues for the last decade. And I realized that this was something that could perhaps help to transform at least a critical mass of individuals and help mobilize. There were tens of thousands of young new activists and allies who hit the streets and protest after prop eight, many of them had never been active before. Maybe they'd been involved in the Obama campaign. They hadn't been active in the gay community. And there was all of these people who could use training and empowerment. And so I knew that there was only one person who could be the facilitator of this. There was only one person who could help bring Marshall Ganz's absolutely powerful model with me into the LGBT community. And that was Lisa Powell. And along the way, Mike Bonin and said, hey, I wanna work on this too. And he and I started working together. And then I brought Lisa in and well. So we've done four of them. We're gonna roll them out every month. We'll keep doing them. We wanna figure out a way to do it in California to help build this army of grassroots warriors to go back to the ballot box if we have to and overturn prop eight. But in the course of it, it's really also about building a movement that isn't just about one issue, but can be part of the larger progressive movement. - I wanna return to that because that I think is one of the central elements that's so exciting. And the reason why I went to Camp Courage, thanks to your invitation as a camper in Fresno, which for those of you who don't live in California is smack dab in the middle of the state and not a real urban area though Fresno is a city. - [Torie] California's Bible Belt. - Yes, what they call California's Bible belt. And it was a wonderful experience. And there were people there, every different race and straight and gay, I mean, almost equally divided. I was really surprised how many straight people were so engaged in this and the facilitators too who had been through Camp Obama or had been through the first courage campaign Camp or whatever, and said, okay, I wanna keep going. - Takes a lot of people to put it on. It's a huge volunteer effort. It takes 40 to 50 volunteers. - The first person we meet at Camp Courage is you Lisa, really. So will you tell a little bit about, well, tell us more about Camp Courage and kind of why you're involved in what you do for Camp Courage? - Well, when Torie first called me, she said, Lisa, I got this idea to have a Camp Obama inspired LGBT training, and you have to be the facilitator. And first of all, I said, well, yes, having no idea what she wanted me to do. - [Torie] Except if you've been to Camp Obama. - Yes. I've been to Camp Obama. And she said, well, you're gonna fill this role by this gentleman named Akele. I cannot do what Akele does. And she said, no, no, you're the only one who can do it. I said, okay, Torie, I believe in you. And so we did the first one in LA and it truly was a transformative experience for many, many of the campers, but also for me. I had come off of a really difficult couple of years personally, I was able to just get a lot of healing in the Obama campaign just by being able to concentrate on, hey, I gotta knock on these many doors. I gotta make these many calls. It kind of took me out of worrying about myself and what was gonna be the next chapter in my life. But then after the campaign was over, here I am, still needing to have a next chapter. And either I was gonna go back into the courtroom, I didn't know exactly what I was-- - As a lawyer, not as a defendant, we just wanna make that clear. - I might have gone back into the courtroom as I was how I was feeling at the time, but no, as an attorney. And so when Torie asked me to do this, what really captured my imagination of course, was Camp Obama and being able to continue with the spirit of the Obama campaign, which was all about respect and power and include. And as a person who had been an organizer for a long period of time, I was completely impressed and inspired by the experience I had working with all kinds of people that were supporting each other, that were focused on the goal. And it really brought me back to life in a lot of ways. And it brought the organizer back in me. I mean, I had kind of thought after 20 years, maybe I had put in my time and then it turns out, no, you have kind of an organizer's DNA, it's in me. So I am the lead facilitator and also I do a couple of the trainings. - So tell me what it means, what do you do? I mean, I don't know that people can really picture it. And I hope everybody watching this show will decide to go through one of the Camp Courage, because it's absolutely fabulous. But tell us what do you do at Camp Courage? What do you do? - One of the big things that I think separates Camp Courage from a lot of very good nuts and bolts trainings is the culture and the philosophy. And we spend that first half an hour or so really, really cultivating, what is it gonna be like here in this room with these 200, 300 participants, how are we connected to each other? How should we treat each other? So respect and power include for us at Camp Courage is about everybody being seen, everyone being respected, everyone being truly listened to. And so that culture, we make sure that it permeates the entire weekend. And for many people I have a feeling that's the first time anybody has ever really cared about them. - Well, it definitely felt that way in Fresno. I mean a number of small cities or towns across America where certainly the gay and lesbian people and their allies feel so battered. That was the feeling I got from them at the beginning. Not really hostility, not really even, I don't know, blowing it off kind of thing, just is really feeling down and out, beleaguered, literally like from the outside, but then when you started teaching about the story of self-- - Tell them about the model. - Tell what the model is. You're a Ganzhead. - Torie says I'm a Ganzhead and I am a Ganzhead. Marshall Ganz who developed Camp Obama on whose model this is based as Torie just explained, came up with what I think is just a masterful three part model of public narrative. One part of that being story of self. And so the idea behind it is that everyone who is an organizer needs to be able to give public account of themselves, who they are, where they've come from, why they love what they love, what are your deepest core values, with the idea being that people relate to each other based on these core values that we as human beings connect to one another through our values and how do we know what our values are, is through emotion and how do we convey emotion? It's typically through stories. So one of the core pieces of Camp Courage is this story of self. And many times, once people start thinking about, well, story of self, I mean, what would be my story? What have been the challenges that I faced? How did I face those challenges? Did I do well facing the challenges? And what did I learn? So there's kind of an internal arc, just like a good story, has a plot. Something happens perhaps unexpected, and then there's a moral. And so at Camp Courage, we spend a significant amount of time helping people excavate that. And what ends up happening is people discover, they discover that they have a story, that it's meaningful, that they have a voice that once they learn that, oh my gosh, look at what I've been through and how I was able to rise above that whether it might be their coming out story, or how did they deal with a certain crisis in their life, but in sharing that, and we do a lot of dyads. We do a lot of work in small groups. And then we do a lot of sharing to the entire camp. You start to feel this sense of energy rising among everyone in the entire room. You might have felt that. - I mean, you walk in, you're assigned to a small group, you never met these people in your lives. Even the people from Fresno who were all from Fresno didn't know each other. And it's kinda like, oh my God, how are we ever going to relate? But it's the most interactive thing I've ever been to. I mean, it's not a lot. I hate this stuff. And I've certainly been part of the problem where they talk at you because they're gonna teach you something by talking at you. It's just the opposite. It's all about doing, I mean, although you gave us a really great example, would you mind telling us about Rudolph? Cause this is like a story of self we all knew. - Well, when I talk a little bit about stories, I say some of these are very archetypal. They're universal where you have a Phoenix moment where you rose from the ashes or you overcame adversity or something that you believed was a liability for you turned out to be your greatest strength. And that's the Rudolph story where Rudolph had this big red nose, he was teased and picked on. He wasn't allowed to play in any of the reindeer games. And then as everyone knows, Christmas was getting ready to be canceled due to the weather. And the only one who could save Christmas was Rudolph. So what he thought was his greatest shame, this liability turned out to be this great asset. - And everybody goes, oh, I get it now. We really started thinking because you think is my story gonna be interesting? Should I tell a very heroic story, like I overcame all these odds and I was the hero? And most people don't, no matter who they are, they don't actually have a lot of those stories. And that's not the most important thing anyway. - No, because you're really not looking for drama. You're looking for the truth of your life. And no matter who you are, you have faced certain challenges, you've been faced with surprises in your life. Everybody has. And the reason why this is important is because people, once they sense, oh, well, this is who I am, this is what I bring, this is the ground upon which I stand, then they start to see that it matters that their voice is heard and it starts to call up this leadership from within, because I think one of the things we learned in the loss of proposition eight was that we didn't do the work of talking to everyone, of telling people from the heart, why is this important? Why does it matter? - It was all shaped on television. All the impressions. - And there were no gay people in those stories. - Torie, let me ask you then in the sort of in the continuing of this, but now don't have to wait for each other, because I think we've kind of set the stage. That's just the first part. And the other thing that was interesting is that it's leadership development but it doesn't depend on a leader emerging in each group, it was just the opposite. It was like everybody was developing in the group. Every single person in the room was developing and we were all going at the same pace. It was almost kind of magical. But the next thing that happens is what? - Well the three part arc is the story of self, which people find their own leadership and it's very empowering. And then the second part is the story of us, which is really finding what you have in common. And again, it's this asset based... one of the problems with identity politics is it's all sort of about liability and victimhood. It's kind of like, I want my rights too, because I'm just as much of a victim as the next person. I mean, that's a little bit of a caricature, and this is the complete opposite. Everybody is a leader. Everybody has assets. Everybody brings something to the table and furthermore, you can't have too many leaders. Movements can have an infinite number of leaders. We're not looking for one Harvey Milk. We're looking for, if there's 300 people in the room, 300 leaders, because then you can go out and build 300 communities around that leadership. And you can forge a movement, that synergy, that energy of building a movement, which is what the right did on prop eight and what the no on eight people did not . What Obama did, what the no on eight campaign did not. So you have the story of self and then you have the story of us, which is kind of the community, building the community, the teamwork, that synergy, that energy that happens, once a bunch of empowered people get together, it's magic. It's bigger than the sum of the parts. And then the third part is the story of now, which comes on Sunday, which is the urgent, the fierce urgency of now from the Dr. King's words. It's really like, why, what do we do, what's the context, where do we go from here? And it's a little bit more academic or it's a little bit more of an authorized leader speaks and does that, and I've been doing this in the camps. - But the other piece-- - I would like to pause here and let people know that to see this speech online, I mean, okay, I'm a big Torie Osborn fan. I've had her on this show a lot, but this is really intensely important in the moment, because in your speech, the one you gave in San Diego, the story of now, you captured sort of why are we doing this? Where do we fit in what's going on? And to say that it's not just about marriage, it's about justice and equality. And I like when you, I couldn't quote you directly. - We're just another American justice issue now. Marriage equality has risen really. I mean, in a new Obama era. - You framed it as you're either for equality or you're for inequality. - You're for connection, connectedness between people, with the earth, connectedness responsibility, or you're not. And it's really very simple. And it's getting, in my view, it's become really simple. You're for equality and connectedness, mutual responsibility, or you're for inequality, you're for apartness, separation, and that's it. And that pretty much goes to every issue. So I don't think we need to any longer have kind of a litany or a laundry list of progressive issues. It's like you're with the forces of equality and connectedness, or you're not. And we've been battling against those forces of inequality for a long time. And the immigrants have, and the gays have, and everybody has, but it's time to come together. And I think in an Obama era this kind of sense of democracy rising, of justice rising, of the higher American journey towards liberty and justice for all, I mean, it's happening, we're in a movement moment, we're in a window, whether it lasts two years or 10 years or 20 years, but there's something happening and marriage equality no longer belongs to the LGBT community. People sometimes feel a little ambivalent about that. It's like, it's mine. We wanna own it. And I understand that feeling about it, but just as the civil rights movement became an American justice issue, just as other social movements have become an American justice issue. Part of the country's unfinished story, really, the larger master narrative of America, there's always been a struggle. It's like you've got your racism, slavery, genocide, and imperialism on the one side. - Why are you pointing at me? - No, she's just gesturing. - It's my Irish. - And you should drive with her when she's talking like she has. - And then on the other side, you have this aspiration, the American dream, the magnets of the constitution, the promise of liberty and justice for all that's never been quite actualized, but every generation brings us a little closer. And every generation of young people usually kind of rises up and in this case, we're in a moment that where after eight years of Bush and the damage to the earth and the unbelievable economic divide that we see in the richest country in the history of the planet, where you have the hedge fund, the 50 top hedge fund people getting, and I kid you not, averaging $486 million a year as salaries. While you have 50% of Los Angeles people living in poverty. I mean, it's crazy and it's not right. I think the Obama campaign, part of its glory was that it was democracy rising. Obama called it on people, Marshall Ganz organized it. It was a management strategy for a field operation unlike anything I've ever seen, but it called on, it became infectious and people who'd never been involved before and people who dreams had died with Martin and Bobby 40 years ago, and people who had been cynical and apathetic, like just walked through and said, I am ready. I'm ready to reclaim patriotism. I'm ready to make change. And in that wave, that tidal wave of kind of hope is the marriage equality movement. And look, look even since the election, two more states. And just recently the Maine judiciary committee, we're gonna have it in Maine. - [Sheila] It's the new world. - It's a totally new world. - Well, I think your story too, about the African American community in terms of... It's not my story to tell, and I only know it from you, but in terms of a March down Crenshaw in one of the African American communities in LA, can you say a little bit about that? Because I found it very hopeful. Not just there, everywhere, but that was kind of cool. - It's an example of what has changed just since the election. How clear it is that we are in a post Obama world and the way things used to be, expectations, fears that people had even just before the election have been blown away. We, black lesbians in Los Angeles, in the early 90s, walked in a black history parade, not a gay pride parade, a black history parade and the streets were lined mostly with all African American people of all ages. And when we marched down that street with our big purple banner that said United Lesbians of African Heritage, people were covering their children's eyes. The street went silent. The disdain was palpable. Well, contrast that with a march that we had down Crenshaw, a historic neighborhood in black Los Angeles, just what four months after the election of Barack Obama, we got standing ovations, grandmothers were rising up from their little lawn chairs, all of the thumbs up signs. It was incredible. And we were prepared to take on jeers, we were prepared to face whatever because we had had a very awful experience in the past, but that's not what we saw. That's not what we were greeted with. Something had changed. And we're in that moment where we are gonna have to shift our perspective and say, wait a minute, we have friends, we have allies, like you say, at Camp Courage, many straight people have dropped their lives to say, look, we are going to work with you on this marriage equality. We're gonna get that done. And we're gonna move on to other issues of justice. And I'm telling you, if LGBT people don't make that shift in their minds and say, look, we're gonna, this is a new day. Straight people will get marriage equality done for us. We'll be on the sidelines and we'll look around what happened to our little issue? Straight people say look, let's just do it. - Let's get this done cause we got other things to do together. That's what my friend Beth from the Obama campaign says. - She's out there canvasing with us in south LA, west Adams, straight woman is going door to door talking about marriage equality and that's happening all over California. And so when Torie talks about and delivers this third piece of the public narrative, the story of now, there's a very few people who are authorized to give that piece. And Torie is one of them based on her-- - [Sheila] Age. - It's not about age. - Could be something that comes with age like you've with had experience and wisdom. No, it's something else. - And someone with enough vision and perspective, to be able to say, this is where we are at this point in time. And to give an intensely critical analysis of the past era, I mean those days are over and really, it's a new day. And to usher in that new day and to give us this hopeful sense about what that could look like, because we need to start seeing that, we need to start seeing ourselves as a new movement. - With a new culture, with a new organizer. And actually this is the two other pieces that I wanna say, Camp Courage, which, I need to give big props to the courage campaign because when I had this idea and found Mike to help organize it and found Lisa to be the magician that makes it all really happen, we needed to find an institutional home and Rick Jacobs and the courage campaign just jumped on it. So if you go to the courage campaign website, that's where you can find out about it. But there's really three pieces of it. There's Marshall Ganz's arc of empowerment and public narrative, which is a big piece of it, it's 50% of it at least. Then there's the hands on training. People learn how to put house parties together, house meetings really, think about the old United Farm Workers organizing model, where you use the one on ones where you basically figure out there's something that you want, somebody you want, who you think is a leader and use the one on one, it's good old fashioned one on one organizing. Then you learn canvasing, how to go door to door. You learn about tabling, public visibility. We've got a media workshop. We have a leadership development workshop. We have a whole bunch of breakouts session. - [Sheila] Don't forget all the technology workshops. - And the online organizing, social marketing, social networking, and online organizing. Yeah, you love that part. - I love that. I learned to tweet. - And the courage campaign is great. She learned how to tweet, she learned about Facebook. We really cover the gamut of hands on real time organizing, community organizing tools, but the third piece of it, and I think this is really central and this is different from Camp Obama because Camp Obama was a political campaign. It was to get Obama president. So some of it was transferable and some of it wasn't and the piece that we've added that's really different is this persuasion training. And it's based on the idea that the LGBT community hasn't been very good at talking to people outside of itself, that it tends to ghettoize a little bit. It tends to become a little bit internal, either, even friends and neighbors, we're just talking about-- - Me throwing garbage at the Mormon temple is not probably the best way to get people to-- - The kind of rage when you've been hurt, sometimes it's easier to strike out. And sometimes people get stuck in that mode. We saw this during AIDS activism too. And there's outrage, there's moral outrage, which has a kind of a power and urgency that can actually be an organizing vehicle or there's rage, which is just about like shuts it down. And I think that what we do is we have these two modules, one on persuasion that are brilliant if I say so myself, because Lisa does one of them and two women do the other one. And we've really had amazing success where people who have been canvasing for five years on this issue, there have been some grassroots groups that, God bless them, have been going door to door, try to have a conversation with Californians about marriage equality for years have completely transformed their methodology based on the story of self, based on looking people in the eye, based on the persuasion module which Lisa leads between her experience for 13 years as a litigator who never lost a court case and her experience in the church when she was a kid and working actually as an organizer in the black church on marriage equality, she has learned what works and what doesn't work. And there's some subtleties to talking to people who are different. When you're insecure, it's actually easier to get angry. It's like a defensive reaction, a protective, defensive reaction when you're not sure of yourself and you're not empowered, or when you're afraid somebody's gonna reject you. It's either you closet yourself or you get angry. And the gay community has kind of been good at activist rage on the one hand just expressing itself on the streets and sort of acting out or being too silent. And I think what we do... From the hurt, both are from the hurt really, and what we do is we walk right through that. We pull on people, we bring people's power, their higher self up, and then we take them through the training with lots of role plays and lots of chance to practice. And we're having seven to 15% conversion rate when people are going door door to door with these techniques. - It occurs to me for me with the two of you here. And you talked about the two women doing the persuasion that maybe all the men who are watching this show are thinking, this is not for guys. I don't know about this because Mike of course is a big, big part of this. And he would say to you, it's a total man up thing. It really is. Most of, I think, more facilitators are guys, at least at Fresno, I thought. - [Torie] Pretty evenly divided. - We have trans, bi, straight, gay, lesbian, black, white, brown, Asian. - Brown, brown, brown, various shades of brown, right? - We have everybody and it's meant for everybody. And I think that's sort of the beauty of it, frankly, it's America, a little bit more LGBT than mainstream America. And it's really about moving wherever you are, moving you to a place of empowerment where you can become an organizer. And I have to say, I have reclaimed the word organizer, which I was very proud of when I was a kid and when I was in my teens and 20s, I was proud to be an organizer, a community organizer. And then I became an activist. And I'm now believing that the word organizer is the powerful word we need to reclaim, as Lisa talked about. Activism can sometimes lead to acting out and acting up, but organizing is when you're trying to change people's minds when you're engaged in the world outside and bringing them around to our cause. - You've both been involved in movements in the past, a number of different movements, and I've heard you say Torie, and I know that you have agreed that this is what you called a movement moment. What makes this different? Because I don't think, Obama didn't create a movement. I mean, like, as an individual. It's almost like everybody was frozen, waiting for something to turn on switch. - - [Torie] And he turned on the switch. I mean, did it feel like that to you? Cause you jumped into that campaign and everybody did and they weren't making money and they weren't doing anything in it but just feeling good. - I've also heard many people say that from the very beginning, and this is really true with African Americans. From the very beginning many of us loved Barack Obama. We were inspired by Barack Obama. We knew that we supported him, but many of us were afraid to believe, to just believe. And I've heard a number of people say that him winning Iowa and all of us all over the country were crying on the couch. Crying on the couch because that's when that hope became energized to this could happen, we can make this happen. And so the thing that Barack started bringing out in people is the sense of, if you really believe in something and you want to see it happen, then just work for it, just get out and do it. I remember writing friends of mine because they didn't know, should I go with Hillary? I can see her in the oval office with stacks of paper, just getting it done. You know how Hillary can just, she'll just do it. But for me, Hillary, I thought she's an incredible person, but in terms of what Barack Obama brought out in me, this sense of who we can be as a country. And he was the one who said it's not about what I can do. It's about what all of us can do and what you can do. This is what just, I think made so many of us join that campaign. - I always say I showed up, I came because of Barack Obama, but I stayed because of my coworkers on the campaign, who were the pipe fitters union guy, and the wife of a Hollywood mogul and the Mary Kay cosmetic salesperson and the elementary school teacher, and we formed, we were different colors and flavors and classes. And we came together and, I really believe this, that Barack Obama was smart enough to tap into a latent moral hunger. It was like we had been under a spell, George Bush had put us under a spell and the right wing had railroaded since Reagan, frankly, had railroaded this agenda of inequality and Imperial arrogance, and then environmental destruction and people were taken aback and we were divided and conquered and we didn't know how to summon what was possible. And Barack Obama summoned out in us. And then we did it for each other. I didn't even need to go back to the inauguration. A lot of people felt the pull to go back to Washington. To me, it was like, but I will tell you that I did feel the need to continue the energy. And when I saw how batter the gay community was and how hurt and how badly they had mangled it, and I'd seen brilliant leadership by ordinary people all over Nevada and California. And then I saw these brilliant leaders, executive directors of my own community's organization, who I know are excellent executive directors. So mangled a political campaign that we should have won. And it was like, wait a minute, we can do this. I've seen it happen. We can bring the same power, the same techniques, the same training and the same yes we can. There's actually research that shows that what hope does in your brain chemistry is it makes you think more clearly about solutions, I'm not making it up. It's not something ethereal or religious. - It's that thing with feathers in the soul. - [Lisa] It is that 311, Emily Dickinson. - But you know what it reminded me of too, when you were talking about how African American people really loved Barack and really believed in him and were inspired by him but couldn't believe that it would happen. - [Torie] And look, we got marriage in Iowa, too. It's all about Iowa. - Well, wait, but it was the same. That's what I was gonna say. It's kind of like gay people who said not very long ago before San Francisco, frankly, who needs it? Who needs it? We'll take civil unions, oh, please. I mean, we were afraid to hope for the whole enchilada. And the same way that the African American community. And it was all about Iowa. And then they said, look, white people voted for him. We can do this. - [Torie] Now we just gotta get Barack in. - We've got straight people voting for marriage equality. He did early on in Illinois, didn't he? He said that he was for marriage equality. All right, we're gonna stand outside and hold his quote up. - We gotta deal with don't ask don't tell first. - The other thing, when you look at this and you look at the changes that have happened just since the election and the opportunity that we have to really transform our community, I think that if we had prevailed on proposition eight, we would not have had the opportunities that we have now in terms of doing the deep organizing that we hadn't done, about building relationships with people that we haven't built relationships with in the past, quite frankly, dealing with some of the racism. - [Torie] I've never seen such racism in the gay community. - It was all exposed. - [Torie] It was unbelievable. - You mean after prop eight when they said it was the black community that did this? There was no facts to support that. - One mistaken exit poll that was quoted. I'm not even gonna say it because I'm sick of it. Repeat it over and over and over again. But it set off a chain reaction. I heard people talk about Barack Obama in such racist terms. I heard them talk about, I saw white gay men in public demonstrations be so racist and Latino gay men too I wanna tell you. And I've never seen it before. - It's much easier to blame the other than to say my community screwed up. - Well, and here's the thing, because we saw it and it was revealed under the stressful situation of-- - [Torie] The veil was pulled back. - The veil was pulled back. It shows what has already been there and what we have to deal with if we are truly going to be a community that cares about justice. I mean, there's only certain place that we can go. It's gonna be limited unless we can actually deal with some of these things. So our loss in many ways is an opportunity. And I think it would've taken 25 more years for us to have a chance to really transform ourselves, transform our community and really build a justice movement. - So we've been seeing more people show up for API equality, Asian Pacific Islander equality that did this brilliant community organizing strategy over three years. They have more volunteers now since the election, we have seen this influx of thousands of young, new people onto the streets, young professionals, young people of all colors, we've seen Black Lesbians United has come into being. Latino Equality Alliance never existed before. You've got these canvases coming out of the courage campaign, marriage equality, doing door to door canvasing, thousands of people in California having a conversation. And we don't even have a campaign yet. They're having a conversation before we even actually go into campaign mode, having the opportunity to look people in the eye, tell their stories and move the needle 15%, 10 to 15% and deal with... Some of the blogs that we've seen coming out of Camp Courage by brave white people talking about how they had a prejudice against African Americans that came out in spades as it were. That. And then this woman just blogs. And she just said, just seeing all of these facilitators who were African American and being able to, it healed her, she just like got over, she goes, it's time for me to let it go. And she let it go. And she's moving forward. - To be fair we have just come out of more than 25 or 30 years of success by the right wing in using splintering techniques, in using everybody against everybody. I'm not saying it's an excuse, but I'm saying that there are many of us all over this country who kind of bought into that. We were gonna be afraid and will vote for Bush because we're afraid. And we were gonna be afraid of each other, and we're not gonna get involved in anybody else's movement because I don't have mine yet. - And the African American community and the Latino community have lost a lot in the last 20, 30 years between the criminal justice, the young black and brown guys going to prison instead of college. And there's been a resentment, it's been kind of a class resentment against the white gay community. - And we only have five minutes now. So I want you to both think of the one thing you haven't said yet that you really want people to know about. But what happens is we show up for other people, they show up for us, we get to know each other and we go, my God, this is all the same kind of justice fabric here that's been ripped and we're kind of healing it together. And I loved Camp Courage. And I want you to say one or two more things before we finish about or anything you want people to know. These are coming up, what they should do. Something. I don't know. No silence. It's a talk show. - Well, I have to say after three Camps Courage, is that how you say it? After three of them, every time I am simply stunned, and I don't wanna say it, but I spend the first day after each one of them kind of erect, just crying because I find it so moving. It really reminds me a lot of just transformation. - [Sheila] The church of democracy. - It takes me back to early days. I was a teenage evangelist. I traveled the country. - [Sheila] There's a whole nother show in that. - But the reason why it reminds me so much of that is because that spirit of openness, the spirit of I can make a difference. I can make a difference. That's the good news, that you're not alone, that you can make changes in your life and in the community and to be part of a movement. I mean, that's Camp Courage to me. - I guess I would just go back to this thing about us being in a movement moment and just like last year was 40 years since Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed and Barack Obama was, and we came out of the desert, Barack Obama, but it's 40 years this year since Stonewall. And we celebrate our own 40 year milestone. We have built an incredible movement. The LGBT movement has been the single most successful civil rights movement of the last generation. We've transformed in a puritan America, on homosexuality, we have changed hearts and minds. It's extraordinary, just as the right wing has taken power. God has an interesting sense of irony that the queers have won America's heart as the right wing tried to fight us along the way. The last shall be first, the meek shall inherit the earth. The queer shall inherit the earth, but it is now time for us to do it differently, to join with America and take back the country, the world and the earth for the people and that's what's happening. - That's all we want. Take back America and the earth for the people. - For the people. - I don't know where you go for that because otherwise it would be the universe. And we'll do another show on that one. I'm really glad that you joined us for this show. I hope that you will go on the courage campaign's website and find out more about Camp Courage. I hope that you'll sign up for one of them because trust me, you will love it. It's just a life changing experience in the very best sense. And this is a new time for this country and it's a new time for our community. We might have come here on different ships, but we're in the same boat now, so get used to it. (upbeat music)