Get Used to It: Ep. 156, "Voices of Our Lives: Torie Osborn"

(Typing keyboard sounds) (bright upbeat music) - Hi, welcome to Get Used To It. I'm Sheila Kuehl and as usual, I will guide you through this hour with a fabulous guest. And today my guest is even more fabulous than usual because Torie Osborne has been a leader, not only in the LGBT community over many years, but also in the larger issues that relate to social justice. And as you'll hear, as we talk with Torie today about her life and her involvement, the connection between and among these different movements, but also the sort of thread of her life is one of the main reasons why I've asked her to be a guest in this occasional series we call, voices of our lives. So welcome Torie Osborne. - Glad to be here. - Do you have a middle name. - For both? - Torie, for both Osborne no, it's Victoria Alice. - You know, way too much. - I know. I do know a great deal, but if that's the worst I could say about you, we're gonna have a great time. Torie. Welcome. Thank you so much for doing this. You've been our guest on the show, a lot, always full of information, political acumen, interesting stuff to say. And today we're talking about you because people really don't know much about our heroes in the movement. They know them at the moment they know them and read about them in the paper, but this series is really sort of like where'd you come from and how'd you get there kind of thing. So if it's okay with you start at the beginning, where were you born? - I was born in Copenhagen Denmark. My dad was in the state department part of the Marshall plan after the second world war, I say the war. That would be the second world war. I was born in 1950. So it was only a few years after Copenhagen, Denmark had been occupied by the Nazis and that actually is a piece of my story because it's among my earliest memories. I have wonderful memories of Copenhagen. I've only been back once since I was a about four when we moved to Madrid, Spain, but my memories are ironically, I remember Spain as kind of gray and menacing, which I'll talk about in a minute minute. I remember Denmark as light and bright and sunny. And of course that doesn't make any sense. - [Sheila] No weather wise would be just the opposite. - So it clearly was a kind of a social or a, you know, kind of a spirit of the place. So my earliest memories are incredibly happy. My first memory, which I think was very important part of my political story is of, they sent me off when I was 18 months old to kind of like a Montessori school, a very cutting edge, innovative preschool, daycare, whatever. And they taught us how to read. I learned to read by the time I was three. My earliest memories are of a children's book, filled with pictures and telling the story of the rising up of the Danish people against the Nazis to essentially smuggle all 6,000 Danish Jews out of Denmark while the Nazis occupied the country. - This was a children's book? - This was a children's book and what I remember most was King Christian, who was the king of Denmark putting on it, it was a picture of him walking down the main stroget, the main street in Copenhagen with a star of David on his chest and all the other people putting on the stars of David and essentially, that was the story of the Danes rising up on mass and I think, I mean, obviously I didn't know the word then, but kind of the idea of social solidarity, the ideas - and organizing of good, so many organizing and of leadership, and I've always felt that the bar for leadership, what it means to be a leader set very high, very young for me. - Huh. And then your parents to Madrid? - When I was four we moved to Madrid. - Still with the state department? - My dad was with the state department still. And of course Madrid was under Franco. - [Sheila] Oh yeah. - So it was the middle of fascism just after the Spanish civil war. And what I went from was from a middle class kind of happy, quite relatively egalitarian, relatively free, a country where you could feel the freedom of and I played in the streets. The people that I played with was very diverse, different countries cause my parents were in the state department, but there was just a sense of mobility of kind of psychic and actual mobility. And then moved to Spain where I was literally locked inside a townhouse with a 40 foot wall with no windows and I wasn't allowed outside except for, with our nanny. My brother and I had to go outside and whenever we went outside, cause we lived in this kind of privileged world. We had servants, I went from a very middle class, kind of ordinary, lived in a row house to a fancy, it wasn't that fancy, but it was a townhouse and we had servants and we were rich Americans. So I saw privilege for the first time. And whenever we went outside, there were beggars, young kids would come up (speaks in Spanish) were the first Spanish words that I learned. And I saw a food riot. Franco was kept in power by his control over the military. And they called them, you know, las armas de Franco, you know, the military police on every street corner. And I mean, I early on felt, the constraints and the sort of sense of injustice. I saw a food riot one summer on my birthday when I was six and it had a big impression on me. - So, and it, and even the differences, I think, because. - Contrast between Denmark and Spain. - Right? because you have to have a notion of difference. Most of us grow up in one place and we think that's regular and normal. It's like, if you're poor, you don't really know you were poor until you go somewhere and see rich people. But you, it seemed like very early on, got that contrast. Although much of this is hindsight. Unless you were an incredibly precocious political four year old. - Well, here's what I knew. I knew that when I was a kid, when I was in Denmark, that I went to a school where we were free, where creativity was valued. And we just played on this fire truck in the yard that was just parked there in the yard and we did a lot of drawing and a lot of theater. And then I went to a British school. I was sent to this school that like Diplomat's kids went to and it was strict and you set in a row and Ms. Bacon, like wrapped your knuckles and I went bonkers. I mean, you know, the rebel was born out of the contrast from actual individual freedom to this regimented sort of fascist classroom in the middle of fascist Spain. And I mean, there's a lot that I'm sure came from that contrast. - So did your folks come back to the states after that? - When I was six and a half, so a couple years in Spain and then we moved to the suburbs, middle class suburbs of Philadelphia and that's where I spent the rest of my childhood grew up and went off to college from the, you know, upper middle class suburbs went to a, another formative part of my life was going to a Quaker elementary school where a private school, but in Philadelphia area, there are a number of these, I guess on the east coast, there are a number of these private Quaker schools where, you know, values are very much taught and you go to Quaker meeting. Now I was raised Catholic. I was raised Catholic, but once, twice a month, we had to go to first and third Thursdays, I think. We had to spend an hour in Quaker meeting. Quaker meeting is very austere. There's no preacher, there's no service, it's just silence. It's a silent meeting and then whoever, if the spirit moves you, you get to speak well, you know, I'm like an eight year old tomboy. The idea of sitting for an hour, twice a month in this Quaker meeting as part of my school day was quite challenging. - Well, you know, a lot of the guys in our community talk about knowing early, early, early that they're gay and you just use the word tomboy, which sometimes turns out to be who knew, you know, a code for we're going to be lesbians when we grow up though, not all tomboys are. When did you first get a sense that you might, of course we didn't have the word for it, but that you might be a lesbian? - Well, I fell in love with Bonnie Hegenbeck back in when I, you know, I don't know what age it was. I keep trying to, I think I was 10 or 11. I mean, I was in my tomboy phase. I was part of a gang. I was the only girl in this gang of kind of suburban middle class thing. - But you don't mean gang like we think of it now. - Well, no, like I say, a middle class suburban kind of gang, you know, we shot out street lights with BB guns and we had a lot of - but no drugs? no drugs and no, you know, no major brutality other than, you know, rocks inside your mud balls. I had played outside all the time, but when I fell in love with Bonnie Hagenback in that age, you know, kind of pre pubescent or, I mean I fell head over heels in love. And for a while I was in that fabulous lesbian, early lesbian, blooming love or crush on whatever phase that you have in the innocence of it until her mom stopped wanting her to see me, she came from a very strict German immigrant family and her mom prevented her from seeing me. And she was literally kept in the backyard. It was a fence and we would play pyramid and Frisbee, do not ask me how I even knew. I don't even know to this day where pyramid and Frisbee comes from, but I was pyramid and she was Frisbee behind this kind of fence. And she wasn't allowed out to come and play with me and my heart was broken and the way her mother looked at me was my first experience of homophobia. There's a moment in many of our lives when the shame comes from the outside and comes inside before that we're innocent. And then somebody says something or does something, and we realize there's something to be ashamed about. We never knew there was something to be ashamed about because who would be ashamed of such extraordinarily fabulous feelings. I felt so great. I've told this story before, but I learned the power of love, lesbian love of course is the best. I asked her one day, what I could do for her and she said, build me a tree house. Now my father was not good with his hands. I had no carpentry skills. I had nobody in my family who had any carpentry skills. I was clueless how to go about building a treehouse, but by God, I built her a tree well platform in my favorite maple tree in the backyard. I did it by myself. I got some of my boys to help me, you know, saw the wood. I put this thing was a falling down old tool shed. I took the wood, I built this tree house for her. And I learned that the power of love is so great that it brings out things in you that you didn't even know that you were capable of. And it was that tree was kind of my retreat. I used to go there by myself. There were a couple of places. We had a big yard. We had two acres of land and there was a acre of it was woods and there were a number of places that were my private places and up on that tree was one of them. - Well especially if her mother wouldn't allow her after a while to go to the very place you built for her. - Right. Well, in my memory and the way that at least memory has been constructed, the bliss of building the Treehouse and sharing it with her, like getting her up into the treehouse, she wasn't much of a climber was a little bit of a problem. I was much more of a tomboy than she was, but came before that, at least my memory, you know, all these memory is weird, but of her mother's disapproval and of her being not allowed to see me. And then they moved away. Now in my memory, they moved away like suddenly, and I was kind of left bereft. And so that was my experience. That was my first experience of the joy of, you know, kind of a lesbian crush. and it was my first experience of homophobia because it came inside me and I knew that there was something wrong with me. We were raised Catholic, as I said, I started to pray that I wasn't somehow, you know, you hear Queer, we used Queer back then there were Thursdays, if you wore green on Thursdays or something. - Exactly. And I never knew what that was about. I still remember the song that I knew in junior high school, as we called it then, we didn't call it middle school and it came from a song that was on the hit parade, cause this was pre rock, cause I'm much older than you are, but it was a song about wearing green on Thursdays. And I mean, who knew, I'm sure someone is gonna let us know what this story is about. - Some kind of code and you weren't supposed to do it and it meant that you were queer and somewhere, you know, how do we get these signals, these cultural signals without somebody actually sitting down and talking. Nobody talked about my uncle was gay. I had a cousin, my father's first cousin was a lesbian, but we never used that word right until later, certainly until my teenage years. So those were the two influences in my life I think. The fact that I saw a free kind of democratic society that had risen up against evil and then I saw evil and militarism and a gap between rich and poor and I was on the privileged side of that. And then this kind of happy suburban life where I fell in love with Bonnie Hagenbakken. And those two things, the personal and the kind of the political, - Personal and political, - It made me completely a sitting duck for the 1960s. - Well, and you walked right into the 1960s in college, right? I mean, that was. - No high school. I mean, my first memory, the first thing that happened to me around the 1960s was in 1963 when Birmingham happened And Bull Connor and the fire hoses and the dogs were set on the children and having seen, I mean, only made this connection later, but having seen Spanish children and their moms fired on during this food riot in Franco, Spain, and then seeing American children, having dogs set on them because of course, hundreds of children were put in the front of the civil rights March in Birmingham in 1963 as protection and those were brave kids and having them be attacked, it was like, it was my initiation into the 1960s. I mean, in a safe middle class, white - And into what America had as its underbelly too. - Right. And that was the beginning. And of course I was 12 at the time and there wasn't anything for me to do. - Not going to Birmingham. - Not going to Birmingham, not going next year. The following year in 1964 was freedom summer and I begged to be allowed to go down to help register folks to vote and of course I couldn't do that. I was 14 turning 14, but that was the beginning. And then I got involved in the anti-war. My first anti-war rally was in 1965. That would be the Vietnam war. And then it just kind of, no, that was a time for the civil rights movement, of course, exploded into a mass movement, the student movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement and all these movements collided in one big movement. So by the time I was 15 and beginning to be a little bit of a hippie and going to New York and going to Greenwich village and waitressing in a folk club, the main point and, you know, being part of the counterculture and part of the anti-war movement in high school. So I debated the war in Vietnam and had a hooker smoking caterpillar in our Allison Wonderland themed yearbook picture. But, you know, had a life that I joined the 1960s. - And were you very different from people in your class or was this a time when you felt at home and cause there were lots of people who were getting stirred up in your high school class? - Not in my high school, but I found other people from other high schools. I went to New York. I ran away on weekends. I mean it felt like running away, but it was just getting on a train, going a couple hours to New York. I found the counterculture, I found the anti-war movement and increasingly the space where my life was most vivid was "in the movement" and that's what we called it. So by the time I was 16, I would've called myself a movement activist. I would've called myself a radical. I was, you know, profoundly uneducated about it all. And I went to college. I only applied to Barnard College because Columbia University was the center for the students for democratic society SDS. It was the center of the student movement on the east coast, on the west coast, of course you had Berkeley, but in on the east coast, Columbia was the most advanced. So I only applied to Barnard cause I wanted to be at the center of it. Columbia didn't take women in any way. I wanted to go to a girl school. I went to Columbia in 1968. Now, in my senior year was when the uprising happened at Columbia, Columbia, 68. So I was a senior in high school. Darn it's all happening. And I'm still in high school, - I'm not there, - I wouldn't even knew I was going. So I spent the weekends at Columbia, you know, a couple of weekends in the spring of 68 and then I went to college. Now my experience at college was not what I expected. I mean, I went for the movement and it was by then the summer of 68 SDS, at least at Columbia, this was probably not true everywhere, but had devolved into this very kind of ultra left wing, progressive labor wing and then the weatherman and neither of them spoke to me and in fact, by the time I got there, my freshman year in orientation, I'll never forget orientation week. You know, we were tear gassed, we had a anti-war riot, - Same old, same old. - We were tea gassed, same old, same old. And you know, so I had sort of had my initiation into what was the tactical police force, the TPF, the "pigs", you know, that was the height of the student movement. The very beginning of the women's movement but what I started to say was it was my first lesson in organizing because hello, I'm ready to be organized. Teach me, organize me, show me, leave me. Nobody could have been more ready than me and all I got was like one, it turned out to be, you know, straight white read straight white, man after another, up at a podium at low library at Columbia, yelling about the racist imperialist genocidal war in Vietnam and not explaining what any of those words meant. I mean, I'd done some work in high school on racism. I knew about about racism. I had done, you know, some of my own work on learning racism and taking it very seriously identified a lot by then it was the black power movement felt a lot of identification on some of Columbia's expansionism into Harlem. There were a lot of issues. Those were some of the urban issues that we were dealing with the student movement showing solidarity on, you know, anti-racist stuff. But I'll tell you, I was like, when are you yelling at me? I had to educate myself. I had to go into the library, read Paul Mus history of Vietnam to learn why those guys were calling this a racist imperialist genocidal war. And you know, I became a radical, an American anti-war radical. - And you didn't stay at Columbia? - And I didn't stay at Columbia. - Now why? - Well, I think I was a little overwhelmed by the fact that I couldn't find a space where I could be myself, where I could be kind of, where I could become an organizer. I wanted to learn how- - Nothing clear going on there either, huh? - Well, I was gonna love with my best friend. Well, there I wasn't, no, I was being very actively heterosexual. I had run way screaming into the closet. I had an experience in high school that sent me with a couple of girls and that sent me kind of into the closet. And at the time I was actively heterosexual sort of running away from my lesbianism. So I think I identified as bisexual by my sophomore year, the end of my sophomore year. But it was kind of hip to be bisexual for a minute and a half in 1968, 69. But my life was the movement and I found women's liberation. My freshman year, Kate Millet was teaching at, she was blown the minds of everybody including us at the students, at Barnard. and there was the first, you know, they would do dorm organizing. Somebody would come and they'd have a little dorm meeting was organizing, right? And they had their first women's liberation meeting and me and my best friend, Jenny Rothenberg were like, we don't need this, we're liberated women. These girls might need it, but we don't need it. We sort of thought we didn't need feminism. Very sophisticated. So, you know, but I was really drawn to the movement. I mean, I was a movement person. I wanted to learn how to organize. I wanted to get skills behind it. I didn't wanna just be a follower. I wanted to get some skills and it was impossible at Columbia in 1968 to 70 to get skills. So in 1970, after Cambodia was invaded and the whole school went on strike. We had no final exams in 1970 and most universities in America, there were no final exams. The schools by then the administration was just saying, let 'em roll. I mean, there was nothing they could do about it. They didn't wanna have any anymore confrontations. They didn't wanna send anymore police. It was Kent state. It was Jackson state, Jackson state where students were killed, Kent state where students were killed. We just went crazy. And we tried to do teach-ins, you know, there's some self education about the war a little bit more than there had been in 68. But for me, I still couldn't get the skills. I mean, I was going to classes, but my real, again, the space for where I was alive was in the movement. So I took the summer. I was working for the newspaper. I was living in an anti-war commune, - The newspaper for the school? - Oh, sorry. No, no, I did some organizing in New York, but everybody went off to their summer jobs and I became disillusioned with the student movement and then I went back, it was in 1970 and I decided to leave Barnard and to, you know, don't ask me why, but to go to this small college in Vermont, cause a friend of mine had gone there. I didn't know anything about it. I had never been there. And so I transferred to this small college called Middlebury in Vermont and it turned out to be just, well, that summer I was living in an anti-war commune and I went to my first women's demonstration. It was August 26th international women's no, no women's equality day, 1970 marching down. They had the big March down in Fifth Avenue, but I was in Philadelphia. They had a smaller March and I found the women's movement. That was really the summer that I decided that maybe the women's movement had something to offer me and- - Not too sophisticated anymore for that huh? Right. No, somehow this, the personal was put became political. So that was really my feminist awakening. And so by the time I got to Middlebury college, which turned out to be this sleepy little Frisbee, throwing skiing, middle class, blonde haired, blue eyed school, very different from Columbia, but it turned out to be good because I got to learn how to organize. There was one person there, one other radical there whose name was Steve Early, who's still a friend of mine. He's a labor organizer, quite well known. And he and I became friends. And then he became my boyfriend for a while. I would say my last boyfriend, my only boyfriend and he taught me how to organize. Now that was the days of mimeograph machines. I was an editor of the campus newspaper, had a column called notes from women's lib. And I went, I reviewed Norman Mailer and you know, the scathing and I started the Middlebury College women's union in 1971 with Peg Strobel, another feminist kind of progressive feminist activist who was teaching there at the time, African history. She and I and two other women, Chris Chilin, another woman started this organization that actually, well, as of a couple years ago still remained. So it's probably the organization. It's one of the things I'm proudest of to have started the first feminist organization at Middlebury college and to actually have it, it changed its name about 10 years ago, but it still continues I think. - Well, it's interesting because I saw a lot of women who became disenchanted with the anti-war movement, not with the action against the war, but sort of with the organizing in the way- - With the men maybe? - With the men, I might say with the men, you know, it's like, they're making those speeches that you were talking about. you're have to bring them coffee, and so feminism became a place that a number of radical and progressive, as we could say now, I guess, women began to find themselves, but I wanna talk about women's music because that was a very, very important melding, I think of lesbian work, outsider work and kind of in its own way, women's work, but you didn't go right to women's music. - Wait, no, but here's what you need to realize. As long as there was a war in Vietnam, there was an anti-war movement, and for those of us whose formative movement was the anti-Vietnam war movement, that was my first loyalty. So while I was exploring feminism and while I did solidarity work with the black power movement and you know, all kinds of, sort of related work on racism and, you know, imperialism at one point, as long as the war was around, that was my primary focus. So when the war wound down in 1975, that was when many of us sort of migrated on mass into the women's movement. And it's interesting to me, cause all those white, straight men who had been kind of yelling at us and owning "the movement" and trying to marginalize women. I mean, Steve didn't and I found, I had lots of male colleagues and co-conspirators in those days who were friends in the movement. I mean, I was not yet a separatist, but during that period of time that we were all co-creating, we were all part of the movement. No matter whether you were a student organizer at Kent state, or you were doing a free school in Harlem, or you were doing Black Power or the Young Lords, or you were doing whatever your work was, you were part of "the movement". It was one big movement. Now that began to fragment after the war was over. The war was the unifying glue of the movement. Once the civil rights movement morphed into other movements and that's what people my age, who are too young to have been at the height of the civil rights movement whose formative movement was the anti-war movement. When the war ended, everything fragmented. Now, but for men like Steve and others, if they didn't go into the labor movement, many of them, or maybe academics, many of them were quite lost because the flourishing movement, movements begets movements, right? It's kind of, there's a circle, there's a life cycle for everything. The new movements were the LGBT movement. Some of the other movements like Chicano rights, disabilities rights, women's liberation were the movements that the identity movements were what came out of the one big movement. So for somebody like me, there was a home that was just as vital and just as vibrant as the bigger movement had been. It was a little or narrower in the sense that it was about one issue and we explored it more deeply. For me what that calling, the next calling was women's music. So when the war ended in '76, I was already, '75, I was already involved in this lesbian work group in Chicago. I had moved to Chicago with my lover at the time to work on this socialist newspaper called In These Times, democratic socialist, not part of any sector group. It was connected to the new American movement, the late great new American movement. But the newspaper you know, had a bunch of women, but I found it quite sexist and ended up leaving the newspaper. But I was involved with Blazing Star, which was the lesbian work group of the Chicago women's liberation union. And so I found my way into grassroots feminist organizing lesbian feminist. This was Anita Bryant days. This was early women's music. So Holly and I became good friends. - Now let's take a step, not back, but just to explain, because I know there are a number of people watching the show that actually don't know about women's music. How vibrant it was, how many stars we had, but, you know, they were just hours how we didn't get on the radio and how you had to organize your own distribution network. So say just a little bit since there's still so much of your life left and the show is half over. Say a little bit about women's music. There was a fascinating organizing, but culturally enriching time. - Well, I would say it was a radical cultural expression of the new and just blossoming larger women's movement. And it kind of spontaneously erupted in several parts around the country, Washington DC for Olivia records, the west coast for Redwood records, there were four or five labels Pleiades with Margie Adam, a couple of different labels that were Holly Near with Redwood records and then Olivia records that had Meg Christian and Chris Williamson and then a whole host of other women. But what it really was, was it became like think of nationalism as a phase of often a racial justice movement. So you have black power or black nationalism. As people emerge from oppression, from the shadows, they kind of take their own space. Their own identity becomes really important. So lesbian feminism was a radical feminist expression of the women's movement and lesbian feminism kind of came together with its just cultural eruption. Now this was the time, where there were women's coffee houses and bookstores. So there were built in venues. It was like a think of it as the Chitlin circuit or the Jewish- - Women's concerts. I mean these concerts - Oh wait, wait lemme get to that. So what I'm saying is that there were venues, there was an alternative counterculture within the broader counterculture that was for women only, or for mostly women. And so there were these spaces already. So then there became women's music festivals, and then there were concerts and then there would women's music distributors who would take these records, records around then later there were tapes and then later there were CDs, around to the women's bookstores and sometimes they were going to a tower bookstore, a tower records. So sometimes they would mainstream it a little bit, but without radio airplay, which is how most records are sold without anything but this grassroots blossoming network, we sold a million "records" over about a decade, just on word of mouth. You know, we had Carnegie hall concerts. We did these women's music festivals. There's still the Michigan women's festival. So what it was was it was like a lesbian feminist space of liberation. I mean, I was reading recently a book about how kind of change happens and change happens when new spaces are created, they can literally be venues, a countercultural coffee house gets built, a women's bookstore. They can literally be four walls or they can just be social spaces, but you create a new space where new ideas blossom. So women's music came in on top of a counterculture, a feminist counterculture, and it just blossomed and for a period of a decade, or, you know, more or less than late '70s and the early '80s, mid '80s to the early '80s, it was an extraordinary place. People came out all over the place. People changed their lives. They, you know, joined cabin carpentry. The people expressed their lesbianism in a very public and very political way. There were places of organizing. There were places of feminism. - Well, I have to say it was more than that because I went to concerts. This was the very beginning of my, though I was 10 years older than you and very late, but when I was in law school, I went to my very first women's music concert in Cambridge and - Memorial hall. I bet. Yeah, Memorial Hall - Thousand people swaying to Chris Williamson. - It was different from any concert I'd ever been to because nothing had ever spoken to my life. I wasn't out yet, but I was almost out and, you know, I'm in my 30s and the difference between reading a book, although Rubyfruit Jungle I have to say, was also a turning point for so many women. But the difference between that and music and culture, I mean, it's primal, you know, that feeling that this was a place that allowed us to be who we were and no place else did. - I will never forget. I had a little baby blue Volkswagen and a bunch of us would pile into it and come to Boston probably it was at that same concert while I was living in Vermont. But we would bring back these precious records and then everybody would come over to our house. You'd have 30 lesbians newly out in the last year to two years, to three years. We were all in our early 20s sitting around listening to in the middle of winter, swaying back and forth, listening to this music, you know, tears rolling down our face. Absolutely transformative. The love that had no name that dare not speak its name or whatever was suddenly just in the most powerful way. We all know how powerful music is. I mean, it's no coincidence that every social movement has had music that the spirituals that were the backbone of the strength that people find that would, they would sing in jail and the civil rights movement, that women's music was part and parcel of the women's movement. Now was the radical edge because we insisted that the engineers be lesbians, the producers be lesbians, the distributors be lesbians, and we were even not letting the straight girls in. So it was a little bit exclusive, you know, from that point of view, but it was so empowering and, you know, so women's music called to me. So Holly Near hired me and I moved and worked at Redwood records and then- - Let me take you a little bit more forward because I really wanna cover your leadership and the gay movement - I was only 22. Yeah. And camp courage. Yeah. I mean, there's so much, so, I mean, I know you moved to the west coast with Redwood records. I know you decided to go to business school. I know that you moved south from Northern California to go to business school at UCLA. - My true home was in Los Angeles. - Your true home, because your daddy had gone to UCLA and, you know, had lived more or less southernish central California. And I know you felt very at home in California, and I can see why you're clearly a California. - Absolutely - Apologies to all of you in other states watching this, but, you know, we've got our thing and there was a growing and vibrant gay and lesbian movement somewhat, you know, starting slowly, somewhat again, kind of radical, just like you are talking about, really a gay movement. I think very separate from lesbian movement. - I mean, John D'Emilio talks about the gendered '70s and, you know, it's like, if you take the movie Milk it's as if you would think lesbians, except for Anne Kronenberg didn't exist in San Francisco in 1978. Well, I was in San Francisco doing nothing but lesbian organizing at the same time as Harvey Milk. And it's just that, that was the Castro. And that was kind of men's turf. But if you moved the camera a mile south to the mission, you would've seen a lot of lesbians. And we had the Artemis cafe and we had Redwood. - And not only that, but vibrant in social movements as well. When the gay and lesbian center started in Los Angeles, it was a services gay lesbian services center. - It's called the gay and lesbian community. - Not gay. - Well, it's called the gay community service center. but it was started because the farm workers Cesar Chavez and the United farm workers had been based in the community service organization movement. The community service was part of the progressive movement, the progressive what we now call the progressive movement and the gay and lesbian center what's now called the gay lesbian center was aligned to the radical movements, the liberation movements of the 1970s. - And when did you become the executive director of the LA gay and lesbian center? - I went to the LA gay and lesbian center in 1987. Eric Rufus was the ED, may he rest in peace, I still miss him. And I was the finance director with that newly minted MBA that was my concession to the Reagan, the yappy Reagan era. And then I became the ED when Eric left in 1988, - Now this must 1980 must in AIDS pandemic, yeah? - My first experience of AIDS was in San Francisco before I came down here to go to business school But before it had a name and so forth, but when I was at the gay and lesbian center was the height of the AIDS epidemic. It was the late 80s, the early 90s. I mean, we lived in a war zone. It was the middle of the AIDS epidemic in the LGBT, the gay men's community again, bisexual men's community. And I mean, AIDS was my life for five years. - It's interesting going from lesbian separatism, - [Torie] I know - To a pandemic that primarily affected our brothers. - Well, you know, I've often said, I mean, I only know my journey, but I mean, I had no gay friends. I went from the kind of mixed left. I mean, I knew a gay man here or there. I went from the kind of mixed, progressive, you know, new left or whatever you wanna call it, anti-war movements into lesbian feminism into an exclusively women's world, lesbian world, a little bit of straight feminism. I lived in San Francisco during that Milk era. And except for when Harvey was shot and, you know, we drove from Ukiah down to San Francisco and Holly wrote, we are gentle, angry people. The day that Harvey was shot - with you and the car (indistinct) - We came together to fight the Briggs initiative. You know, I worked on the Briggs initiative, organized concerts across California with Holly and Meg. We would come together to fight the Briggs initiative. We came together to fight Anita Bryant. We came together when Harvey was shot, but we were in two separate planets, two completely separate worlds. And the irony of I went to business school and then I got involved in the Lyndon Laroche fight in 1986, the Lyndon Laroche, this wacko, right winger who wanted to quarantine people with AIDS and David Mixter hired me to be the Southern California campaign coordinator. And I began to get close to gay men. It was so I ironic that this lesbian feminist who had not had one, I knew one gay man. I had Greg Day, my one friend in San Francisco, and I got close to gay men, you know, all of these guys and they started dying. And then I just, again, I mean like so many others, not just lesbians, but so many women, so many men as an ally, if you will, my brothers were dying and we were called into service. I mean, I don't know how to say it, but for me, it was a combination of being called into leadership cause I apprentice to Eric and then became the first woman executive director at the gay and lesbian center, right at the time where men were finally kind of moving over and letting us in. Women had walked outta the center, women had picketed the center, there were several waves of lesbians that had left the center and I brought the lesbians back to the center. That was part of my piece of work there. was healing the lesbian gay men's community in the height of the AIDS epidemic. And I learned leadership skills and, you know, we had plenty of fights, but they really weren't fights about gender as they had been in the 70s. The AIDS resolved the gendered 70s. AIDS brought us together. We had bigger fish to fry and in truth, what you saw was the coming together of the grassroots, you know, like lesbians had built a health movement, had helped build the women's health movement. We knew about health, lesbians had dealt with policy. Lesbians had dealt with family issues because they had all those lesbians had all those kids taken away from them. We were at the cutting edge of family issues of sort, of the health issues and of policy issues. So we brought a set of political skills and of grassroots organizing skills. Gay men had what they brought was a fearlessness about power. We had been, you know, - [Sheila] Tentative. - building these countercultures and not being so sure about the mainstream and not being so sure. I mean, not all of us , you know, somewhat. But you bring together people like Steve Kozak who had been head of casting for paramount and who was fired for being gay and experienced. He was the Harvard golden boy, you know, and he had never experienced discrimination in his life and he gets fired because of having HIV and he joins Act Up and you know, there's nothing fiercer than somebody who's experienced privilege and lost it. You had the cops when we had gay riots, you know, and there were police riots and they would batter the heads of Republican gay men who had never experienced anything like what I had experienced in the anti-war movement or what any African American has experienced many times in their life in this country, from the police and the radicalization. So you take people who've had privilege and power and have them experience discrimination, and you put it together with people who have honed those grassroots organizing techniques and it was one powerful movement and gay men and lesbians together when we brought our skills and our best selves and in the middle of this crisis, this moral crisis, this, our friends dying, you know, I ran the center for five years. For three of those years, I lost a staff person a month, I went to the hospital every day and I went to a funeral a week. You know, when I tell people now it's just like statistics, but it was an unbelievable during those years, but it also forged a new phase of our movement. We learned and we taught, I think we've taught the greater progressive movement about kind of inside outside strategies, how to be radical, how to be a radical street activist and at the same time on the same phone and Mark from Act Up talking to me while I'm doing some of the inside lobbying. We wrote a new playbook about how to move an issue forward advocacy, organizing services, creating the community response to AIDS. I mean, we wrote the book on patient advocacy, breast cancer, all these other issues have taken it up. So it was a very powerful, empowering, horrifying time. But one that was, you know, for me was, you know, was like, you're learning a lot of new skills. So from the center, I went to the national gay and lesbian task force. It was my next step. - Right, were you executive director there, - I was there for a minute and a half. - And then did you write the book? - Yeah, I- - You know, you're my only friend in the universe who has written and published a book close friend. I mean, I'm so in awe of that, will you say a little about it Coming Home To America? - Yes. I'm proud of that little book it's called coming home to America. You can get it for like, you know, 67 cents on amazon.com. - You should do that. It's a bargain. - There's still 2000 copies out there in the, you know, circulating. You can say it's a little bit dated. I'm proud of the things that are kind of enduring about it. It was a book written at a particular time. It was a book written by somebody who, I believe I have many books in me, but at the time I didn't have a book in me. I got a big old fancy book contract back when they gave $100,000 book deals. And so that was the next thing that I had. But in other words, they came to me. I had a lot of publicity. And so the Putnam came to me. - Still it was a book really about coming back from the margins don't you think? - It was really- - That's what I got from reading it. - And read it, you did. - I read it before it was published? - You certainly did. You were my best reader, - But the notion that we were separate, we were proud of it. We identified what was different about us. We valued being queer, you know, it was really a very strong movement. And it seemed to me that what you were saying is yes, yes, yes and because of that, we have a lot to teach and we are coming back into our communities. We are, you know, we are showing them what we have to say, but we're coming back. I mean, I thought in terms of looking all around the country at what was going on that I think it was a way to say maybe our next step is to be not assimilated but a person- - Well, at the time, I mean, it's so hard to talk a historically, but at the time there was this big argument about assimilation versus radicalism, right. I don't remember what the discourse was, but, and it just seemed to me that that missed the point that when you come from the margins, you bring the gifts from that place. You cannot forget who you are. And this is true, whether you're an immigrant coming to America or whether you're an immigrant within, you know, living at the margins coming into the mainstream, that it is not either, or it is truly, we kind of queerfy the world as we take our place at the table and that we bring ourselves, if we bring our authentic selves, if we bring our two selves, which is, so I took us from the trauma and grace of coming out and what each individual struggle, because we each have an individual struggle against the closet that each person has into the community building because we get ostracized by our families. So more than any other minority, we have to create alternative family. Nobody knows the value of a circle of friends like gay people do. And so we have to create alternative community in effect our entire movement building has been set on a platform of community building. Nobody else has had those, you know, recovering Mormon, stitch, and beach clubs that I talk about there truly. In Salt Lake city, there was a group of guys that made Mormon themed black and red quilts as part of their recovery from the evils, you know, the sort of damage of the Mormon church, but also is coming out and even, I think they were like rodeo guys too, but, you know, we find each other, we find our tribes, we create our tribes. Nobody does that better or has needed to, because of the kind of oppression that we've had now, as we've become more assimilated, the question is, you know, did we become like them or do we retain our queerness? I think, you know, the struggle, the conversation and the resonance, and kind of a tension, it's a creative tension back and forth, but I think we bring those gifts, our queerness, whether it's the artistry, the fierceness, the gender bending, the creativity, approaching questions different ways. We see things differently. I mean, I'm not really an essentialist, you know, I mean, I believe in that we, I think we have gifts. I think we are teachers. It's not a coincidence that so many of us are artists or teachers or social reformers or poets. I think we have a sensitivity. I think we know how to travel between worlds. We are the Bridgers. We are the cultural transformers, one writer called us the cultural transformers. Now this world, this global world, this diverse world, this world of change, this world of confusion needs people who can translate, who can move between worlds. I think we have a special place. It's a creative place. They don't certainly don't need more kids. World doesn't need a whole lot more kids. Not the gays can't have kids, but I mean, in fact, that's the cutting edge of the revolution right now, I think, is the parenting, and that's where the best kind of assimilation is happening, or, you know, the revolution is happening, but we have gifts as gay people, as our experience. Now, as we get more assimilated, as we become more of the mainstream, the margin moves and the struggle is different. I mean, young people do not have the same struggle. There are fewer young people today that prayed to their God every night like I did, please don't make me gay. I didn't say gay but- - Not in our circles, in the cities, although from what I hear from people who come to the cities to be free - [Torie] In Uganda, in Iraq. - Well, and also in the other countries, let me, because I really wanna talk about Camp Courage and I wanna talk about your future. Say that I think a lot of people are very familiar with your work as the executive director of the Liberty Hill foundation, which is the best progressive foundation in the universe, I think does great work, you brought the fund that funds so many gay and lesbian programs into Liberty hill, which I think was a wonderful way of joining, but you also have insisted as you always have on diversity on taking our relationship among racial groups, very seriously, in terms of cultural competence and understanding each other, a lot of great work that you did there. And Liberty Hill go online. You can see a lot about it, but I wanna talk about the courage campaign and how you got involved, because we've had a couple shows about proposition eight and the aftermath of prop eight. And I know that you were very strongly working in Obama's campaign and that Camp Courage came out of that. Can you say a little about that? - Well, I actually think you did a whole show on Camp Courage. - [Sheila] Yes. That's right. We did. - Well, I mean, I think that the interesting thing is the moment that we're in now, because in the Obama era, I mean, I had a blast in the Obama campaign. It was a healing. - You were a volunteer. - I was a total volunteer. I was totally a worker bee. I was coming out of this horrible gay divorce. I was a bitter gay divorcee, and I needed to jump into, you know, I've learned if AIDS, you know, AIDS has taught me, but other times in my life, I've learned the healing power of activism. If you're in trouble, if your spirit is broken, if you're hurting, if you've been dumped, as I had, no matter what it is, throw yourself into a social movement, be of service to something larger than yourself and you will be healed. So I joined the Obama campaign, cause my heart had been broken and I been through this divorce, gay divorce and it was in fact, totally it put me back together. It was a healing experience, but it also was so amazing to see the work of the grassroots campaign and to see how a political campaign became a social movement consciously through the intervention of developing the leaders, the grassroots volunteers, leaders through Camp Obama. So I went to Camp Obama, I've been to lots of community organizing training and I went, whoa, this is a really cool model. So when prep eight passed, you know, I had my moment of Obama and then it was like, oh, darn. You know, I mean, it was just so heartbreaking to, I was in Vegas - same night, right? Exactly. Not so much for me. I maintained the denial until the next day I was driving across the desert and my straight friends one after another, were calling me and saying, I'm really sorry about prop eight. I managed to stay in the Obama bubble until the next morning. So, but anyway, but then everybody hit the streets on the anger and the misplaced racism and then the anger at Obama and you know, all this stuff and what, and I thought, look, I gotta do something for my community and so I called, you know, I called up Rick Jacobs anyway, long story short developed this, took the camp Obama model and transmuted it into a queer version. I say, we're the queer spawn of Camp Obama and built Camp Courage. And the courage campaign picked it up and Rick Jacobs to his credit and we are going national and we do some national trainings and, you know, go to the courage campaign website and you could find out all about it, but the main thing I think is that what was important for me as a longtime movement activist, was to realize you can create, you can generate through a curriculum, through a really kind of brilliant process. You can help, you can call out people's leadership and you can generate the kind of infectious energy that lives at the core of social movements. You can help to generate social movements. You can build those healing spaces. You can create that boundary crossing coalition building. So that's what Camp Courage is. It's on marriage equality, LGBT rights in general, but it's really applicable. In fact, there's a similar model that in next month here, that center for community change is doing on immigrant rights youth organizing. There are some other, the homelessness of thousand homes, that common ground is doing on to end chronic homelessness in America. They're doing a model of use of this. So there is technology that can generate civic engagement and take it beyond the single issue and help to create the kind of coalitions that we can move forward so that we can actually make the most of this Obama era, because we're gonna have to do that. - Well, I could have talked to you another six hours about your life, because I know another a hundred things about you that we haven't even had a chance to talk about, but I wanna ask you about your future. What are you thinking? - Well, right now I have this fascinating job helping to work in really the business community through being chief civic engagement officer at the United Way. And that is gonna keep me busy for a while, but I'm thinking of running for your old assembly seat in 2012. And I have never thought about being, I mean, I worked as a deputy mayor for two and a half years for Antonio Virallaigosa and had an experience as staff, but I've never thought about running for office until the Obama campaign. I don't know a little piece of the torch got passed. We all have to do everything we can do to make change, and I will be 62 years old and it will be kind of a perfect career capper. So who knows, I may not run something else may come along. I may not win, but I'm going to try to join our brother, John Perez in the California state assembly in 2012. - Well, speaking of someone who's done it, of course, I think you'd be great. I think you'd be perfect. You're probably even more perfect for it than, you know, because I know what the work is and it. - Well, you were pretty perfect at that. - Well, it doesn't look like movement work. That's the funny thing. People say, oh, but that's government. And a lot of movement people have been though lately, have been seeing the connection because government is like, let's take what the movement wants to accomplish in the law and do it. So I think that would be great. So if you had- - So does that mean I have your support? - I endorse you right now, but you knew that. So with only a minute and a half remaining, I know this is, it's much too short, but what would you say to the audience about what you would encourage given the experience of your life? You would encourage people watching this show to do. - That there is nothing more satisfying, nothing more fun, nothing more fulfilling than working for social change on whatever ground is most satisfying for you. Pick the issue and whether it's volunteering doing something or whether it's advocacy or whether it's street protest, all along the range of civic engagement, whether it's working on campaigns, whether it's running for office, that working with other people to collectively change the conditions of our lives is the most unbelievably inspiring way to live. I have no regrets and I expect to do it for another 50 years. - Torie, thank you so much for being on the show. Perfect ending. Thank you very much for being with us too. And remember, get engaged, get involved and get used to it. (bright upbeat music)