Get Used to It: Ep. 25, "Kuehl on the Hot Seat"

oh [Applause] [Music] hi i'm sheila james kewell welcome to this month's episode of get used to it as you know from time to time i've done some individual interviews and today we're going to do something a little bit different i have been encouraged by a few friends to allow myself to be interviewed on this show since i seem to have some notoriety these days my 15 minutes of fame so i would like to introduce you to your guest host today alan acosta who was a journalist and i guess could still be if he wanted to be but is now deputy city editor at the los angeles times welcome alan thanks it's great to be here and so now it's your show great i you know sheila i think your 15 minutes of fame is going to last longer than cato kalyn so i'm pretty sure that could be um well it's a great honor actually to be interviewing you since you are somewhat notorious right now and yes i think so infamous rather than famous as you all know sheila is the first openly queer statewide elected official is that right that's right and the only gay or lesbian member of the state legislature in california so far as we know so far as we know um doesn't that put a lot of responsibility or or sometimes it probably feels more than responsibility it's sort of onerous i would think you know while most fresh people get to labor away in obscurity uh there's been quite a bit of attention paid to you how does that feel well actually it's it's about two months since i started uh in the assembly actually doing my work in the assembly and it has been so much better than i thought it was going to be um the first thing that happened is that a number of people already in the assembly uh sort of sprang to be the honorary gay and lesbian caucus to welcome me to the assembly make sure that nobody picked on me and kind of be my big brothers and sisters uh richard katz who's a legislator from down here in the valley uh barbara lee from oakland margarita hudson from l.a antonio who's a freshman as well with me just everybody sort of knocked themselves out not everybody but most people to make me feel welcome and some of the people that i expected to be the most hostile and i think probably expect that i would be hostile to them we were thrown together right away because we had to engage in these long negotiations about how power was going to be shared in the assembly between and among or between the two parties and uh or it turned out three parties so i was appointed to be on these negotiating teams and what it meant was that from the almost the first minute i was there i was dealing with and involved with people who were not predisposed to want to work with a queer and i think we were both sort of surprised was very collegial [Music] we differ on a number of issues but that there have been no incidents where anyone sort of made me feel uncomfortable uh a lot of them are dobby gillis fans even though they're homophobic really and so even the most homophobic would come up to me and say um can i ask you a it's kind of an embarrassing question and i thought oh my god they're going to talk you know something sexual what do you do what is it you girls do and it would be what is manor g krebs really like so my experience has been very good personally and also we are a group of equals they can't take that away from me and there's no way that i'm embarrassed about who or what i am and i act like an assembly member and it turns out pretty well on the issues however uh there some of them are really stupid on our issues who would you say has been the most surprising in terms of being an ideological opposite of you that sort of been friendly and made you feel comfortable well mr brulte himself i mean the leader of the republican party kurt pringle who is also one of the floor leaders for the republicans um there are a couple of men who are who own christian broadcasting stations and were elected um but i think jim broelty above all just a few days after we finished doing this negotiating stuff he came into my office and he said can i ask you a question i said sure he said if you're gay how come my guys all like you so much and i said well you know that's what discrimination is for it it demonizes people who are truly fabulous good answer so zelda has made you far more notorious than being the first openly queer elected official in a lot of ways i mean people remember that it seems how many years later is it 20 some years later or something like that it's uh i don't want to date you here no it's fine i mean it's more than 20 something though we we finished shooting the show in 63. so it's now 32 years since we uh finished shooting that show now was it zelda gilroy what was that gilroy see i remembered this myself i didn't ask you before um what was that like being having fame early well it actually started earlier than than zelda um when i was uh seven or eight um i was cast purely through a sir a long series of flukes that is a longer story than than this show would have time for uh to be in a radio series back in 1948 49 at the old nbc studio on sunset and vine and from that i got an agent and the agent sent me an interview for this uh the first film television series which was called trouble with father with stu and june irwin and so i had been in television and kind of famous as a child uh you know from almost from my earliest recollections so people were always interested in me i was always a little different at school i mean i i sort of got used to being different even before i had any notion at all that i was going to be really different where did you go to school i grew up in l.a right near the coliseum went to elementary school on normandy and vernon at the normandy avenue elementary school took my first communion at a church down there and when i was in junior high we moved to the crenshaw district and so i went to audubon and then i went to uh dorsey high now you that show the trouble with father that you played a precocious little girl right i mean you were sort of a little bit of a smart alec a smart aleck and a tomboy which of course at that time i guess was a that's what was the word that everybody uh used for baby dieting i think [Laughter] and then um so that really was that what ushered you into the many loves of dobby gilles well yeah because i was an actress after six years of doing that show i was in high school and but i was an actress then i thought i would always be an actress that's what i really wanted to be i loved it i mean it was a wonderful wonderful way to uh sort of pretend and have enormous freedom in what you did and a lot of latitude and who you were and how big a personality you could have even as a kid and be funny you know be class clown and it was okay um and after that i was freelancing for a while there were a lot of uh i forget what they call anthology shows like loretta young and those shows where they did a different thing every week and then about my the end of my sophomore year at ucla i went on an interview for dobie gillis and that was the first year that the show would be on 59. now you in your world clearly you were a celebrity i no doubt at dorsey high i mean you know probably people knew who you were and uh did you know who you were did you know about uh about being a lesbian at that time you know i really i really didn't i didn't even know really what a lesbian was i mean you hear that we heard you hear the word the word gay was not used as far as i knew but queer was certainly used and homosexual i had always had crushes on girls in my class or on you know the the physical education teacher or whatever just i mean classical classic lesbians yes absolutely the gym teacher but i it it's funny i guess um it wasn't so much sexual as it felt like really deep emotional crushes kind of and uh i guess the first experimenting with even with kissing that i ever did was with a girl who was a neighbor but i mean a lot of girls experimented kissing in my generation before they tried it out on the real thing so it didn't feel yeah i mean they it didn't feel like it was sort of queer on the other hand when i was in high school um i i was much fonder of my you know my girlfriends than my boyfriend and i thought well you have to have a boyfriend i mean that's a really important thing to have and the same thing when i was a freshman in college but i never loved them the way my girlfriends would say oh i love that boy i was never in love with them and i thought well there's something wrong with me either i'll never love anyone and perhaps i'm a bohemian artist you know and i'll never love anyone you know you make up all kinds of excuses for yourself when you're not normal it's either uh you're an artist or you you have you're busy i mean you know you're working too hard or whatever but anything but that and when did you sort of first come to terms with that well i went to um when i was at ucla i was a counselor at a camp for underprivileged kids and the second summer that i was up there i met a woman who was also a counselor at the camp and really did fall in love and we were sexual with each other at you know at camp i mean it was absolutely and totally compelling i was about i guess 17. and i was scared to death i mean this felt like a doorway that you'd go in and never be able to come out at that point you know that you are attracted to women but you you absolutely also know certainly in that generation you can now never tell anyone and you hope it's a phase or at least i did i mean i don't know what other people were experiencing but i was very um isolated from anything like a community or or other people who knew anything about this and i didn't know who to talk to about it so i so i didn't and after the summer that was over no it went on for 12 years but it was i mean it in a sense she became my partner and we moved in together while i was doing dobby gilles we were together but i would make up these boyfriends who lived in new york so i would never have to produce them and of course never would take her to anything but you were roomies well we were roommates i mean we and we were roommates and some people had roommates and then after a while you know these these women are not roommates but we thought you know how this enforced ignorance works with any family secrets alan we everyone knows that something's going on and they simply pretend that it isn't i mean i don't know maybe it was just my family but i don't think so my mom and dad would have everybody in the family over to dinner every thursday night and my partner would come with me and um she was a you know a third daughter in the family but i never never never talked about it and so it was just uh not dealt with so finally when it comes around to telling the parents they're surprised even though they participated in this sort of charade for years right well mine were not surprising but i didn't tell them till i was 39. i mean i i broke up with this woman um we were because the relationship was so compressed so circumscribed um all of the pressures of it were sort of inward you know you couldn't go somewhere and tell someone else about it and get any help with it i'm i really think that that helps to doom a very secret relationship so but 12 years of course was a very long time and and after we broke up i didn't know if there were any other lesbians in the world like me i mean i had still had this very negative image of people in the community i didn't know any and uh in a community it didn't really exist at that point almost i mean it was well you know it did sort of i guess the the radical beginnings of it because we didn't break up until 1970. well it was just beginning to sort of be described as a community i guess right but it wasn't until i went to law school in well well just going back one minute did did the other cast members of debbie gillis did they know about you or did they have no and when you got together years later clearly the things i mean you were a professional dyke at that point so did they talk about that well it was sort of somewhere in between in a way i mean i uh my after my career fell apart um really in after dobie and i went back to ucla where i had gone to school and i started working in an office that worked with student organizations and student government and the women's movement was just starting and there was a very radical women's group on campus that i was assigned to advise and assigned to advise the black student union and mitcha and at the same time there was a very fledgling new gay and lesbian group gala at ucla and that was the first contact i really had with an organized gay and or lesbian group that was talking politics about it and not just um even such something so simple as just a lack of shame it was beyond that it was about civil rights and was very exciting to me because it dovetailed perfectly with what we were talking about in the fledgling women's movement at the time but your first really political attraction was more to feminism than to that wasn't it it really wasn't but it was about the same time i didn't quite tie them in yet i didn't really identify um i didn't really identify as a lesbian because after my first relationship kind of fell apart we were friends but i didn't want to go back in that relationship we would sometimes travel together but it was very conflicted and difficult i was 30 years old i'd never slept with a man and i said you know i don't know whether i'm a lesbian i've had one relationship so far my whole adult life and i just don't know maybe i'm bisexual or i really wasn't sure so i decided to sort of experiment and i was very promiscuous for a couple of years with men um you know men that i knew men that i worked with men that i'd known from school etc and uh and i think that was also a very important thing for me i know it sounds kind of funny to say but i think that there are a number of people in our community who identify so unilaterally in a way as gay men or as lesbians and don't know the other sex very well at all it's not the activists because most of us now are really brothers and sisters but there was something about that intimacy with men that was very wonderful actually for me that i learned two things men are wonderful and i can't fall in love with a man that's not where my affectional preference or my you know my real identity is and so um but that was about four or five years i guess until i i was off in law school and still identifying kind of as a bisexual i didn't know um maybe i'll be celibate for a year i tried that you know that was good boy i got a lot done that year [Laughter] lots of energy yes lots of energy won the moot court competition you know i was president of my class at harvard and it was i really got a lot done but then i met this woman at harvard and just completely fell head over heels in love and said to myself nope you're a lesbian hello that's right hello i was in there and now i'm out and out to myself you know how important that is and still as you were discovering this about yourself you became very involved in feminist causes of them that was your your real political work at the time well it's really what got me to go to law school honestly speaking i was at ucla as i said working with students and i i always thought i had this sort of savior complex an oldest kid in my family and i thought well i'll work on these civil rights issues you know that's about them and i i i'm very privileged i've never you know no violence in my family uh got to go to college did television never even thinking that what happened about sort of losing my tv career and being kicked out of my sorority at ucla people discovered i was a lesbian kicked out of my sorority people discovered i was a lesbian my pilot for the zelda series didn't sell but that was so horrible that i didn't want to face that so i thought of myself as someone who was helping other people with their civil rights movements you know and was the advisor as i said to the women's the the new women's liberation front at ucla and one day i was at a little conference about services for women at ucla and how we needed to pay a little more attention to how women were different than men if we were providing medical services psychological services safety and housing that kind of stuff and started talking about how necessary these services were and just broke down in tears just sobbing and i didn't know why so one of my friends was working in the student counseling center and said hey want to talk to me so i just got in touch with the fact that there had been a promotion given in my office to a man who was junior to me actually and i had just like every everything else just sort of stuffed it down and said well he must be deserving you know this life must be fair and realized that i thought it wasn't fair and at that moment i guess became a feminist i mean it's some personal issue that usually they call it a click i guess you sort of switch over and from that point i became totally immersed in women's so-called women's issues went to law school in order to really learn gain some tools so that i could work on these issues when i came back i was working in employment discrimination and family law which is also an area of law that has a lot to do with things of concern really to women and became i guess known as a feminist attorney working on issues of domestic violence and sexual assault and sex discrimination and employment and began to sort of build my career on that this was a very good period of your life i would think it was wonderful it was so empowering and also at the same time because i fell in love with this woman in law school she was very out i started coming out a little more she moved back to la with me but the relationship didn't last very long and i was pretty devastated and had no one to talk to again about this breakup and decided this is foolish i have to really i have to tell my folks i have to tell my sister i have to tell everybody so i did and so at the same time as i was doing this wonderful work really on women's issues i was allowed to come out more and more and my family i mean what you said before about how surprised they were no my mother took my hand and she patted it and she said it's okay honey we always knew you like girls better [Laughter] my dad was great i mean my sister was very you know encouraging and everybody was really there for me at that point did you feel somewhat liberated then to go out and and tell the world or did it come a little bit more it's always a question sort of about how what does it mean to tell the world i used to tell a joke about uh how it seemed like i was so out i i all i had to do was take a a billboard on sunset boulevard to be you know more out which turned out to be quite a joke i was only out to my family to my co-workers and to absolutely everybody i ever knew in my life but i wasn't really a celebrity when i was being a lawyer or a law professor it wasn't like i was going on national television until really sort of two things happened one is i met tori osborne back in 82 before she was actually working on gay and lesbian issues here in l.a and fell in love and we moved in together and we were together for almost nine years and in the course of her career she as you know became the director of the gay and lesbian community services center here so first kind of as a lesbian spouse i would go to events i met an awful lot of people i would come to the center and emcee their national coming out day rally torrey would ask me to do this panel or go on this thing or whatever so i was becoming more active in the community still doing my legal work with women and then one national coming out day tori asked me if i would emcee a rally that dick sargent wanted to come out in and a couple of days before that rally we decided to go on entertainment tonight together and then good morning america and then because dick wanted to geraldo and that was really the most public i had ever been a couple of years before that when i was president of women lawyers of l.a at my installation dinner i introduced tori as my spouse the way every president before me had introduced her husband and there was enormous buzz in the room and the next day it did appear in the daily journal but it was sort of buried on the second page at the bottom you know she introduced her life partner so i guess being on television in 19 probably 1990 was the first time that i'd ever been so public in a national way about it did it feel good did it feel like it was the right thing to do it felt great it felt great the only downside of it is it's the same thing that i experienced a little bit during my campaign is that i you won't be surprised to know that i'm a person that really wants everybody to like me now it doesn't go so far as to compromising a lot of principles and things to get it but i really want everybody to know what a really nice person i really am you know and and when dick and i went on television i had this terrible pain because i knew that there would be a million people at least who didn't really know me who would at the moment that they found out i was a lesbian would hate me sort of the same thing that keeps everybody from coming out they just know that everybody's going to hate them and it's a fantasy for the most part but i had these sort of pains now that i'm so public and also a little frightened that i would get hate mail or you know bombs or as much as you can intellectually accept that there are 20 million people out there going zelda's a lesbian well gosh then lesbians must be okay you know um that's the really powerful thing about coming out is that you have much more power to transform what it means for people to be gay than the other way around the negatives tend not to bounce back on you nearly as much as the positives bounce over on it's true and the positives i think are unexpected to people who haven't come out yet sort of like in quantum physics the notion that all possibilities exist before an event is i think translatable into coming out as well all the bad things that you can possibly think of do exist in your mind before you come out your family's going to disown you your church will kick you out you'll lose your job you'll be destitute everyone will hate you they'll spit on you you'll get beat up whatever then you come out and not all of those things happen sometimes some of those things happen but not all of them so the ones that don't happen are already a plus your mother still loves you you know your sister thinks you're great whatever in addition though the things we don't know is just what dick sargent began talking about after he came out who knew there was this wonderful community of really loving funny um wonderful variety of people that you would come into and you'd have something in common with them right away so they would be your friends right it was great and another very important thing i think in doing that is that for young people all of a sudden there's a role model when for us there really wasn't i mean when we were 15 17 high school that just didn't happen for sure as a matter of fact we didn't have any real role models we just had these sort of fantasy terrible predator kind of people out there in the stratosphere we didn't know who they were but whoever they were they were terrible they were trying to transcend and and reverse gender roles which for some reason unknown to the adult shell was terrifying you know to the young shelicule that a girl would want to be a boy or a boy would want to be a girl it had to be the most horrible thing in the universe and of course now um in a in the political sense i realize that pushing the boundaries of any of those sort of fascistic divisions is a threat to the status quo that's just what it's supposed to be well this is a good place to sort of take a little break we can talk about how you've pushed the boundaries in the last couple years uh don't go away we'll be right back who cares it's it's their fault so what some get beat up such a bag [Music] [Applause] beat up [Applause] [Music] i'm out here every week talking to people about sex my message is simple if you're gonna have sex a latex condom used consistently and correctly could help prevent the spread of hiv and other stds people out there gotta understand that's why i'll go anywhere to talk about latex condoms [Music] even into your living room welcome back to get used to it we've turned the tables today my name is alan acosta i'm deputy city editor at the ali times and i am interviewing the show's regular host sheila james cuell we were just talking about pushing the boundaries and your newest frontier is uh obviously as a state legislator so uh how are you pushing the boundaries there in sacramento well i i've told a few uh people who've asked me that it's a real privilege to be in people's faces just by showing up for work it's a another wonderful thing about being out is that you just show up and if people are going to be pissed off at gay people they'll be pissed off that you just showed up so i am pissing people off probably just by showing up also probably changing some of their very misguided notions about gay or lesbian people i don't have to try i mean we are a great variety of people and i'm certainly not being peck's good girl up there i say what i think i have a lot of latitude to say that but i think i am pushing the boundaries just by being there it's my hope that there will be at least one if not two more after the 96 elections because i know carol migdon who's a supervisor in san francisco is running for willie brown's seat and apparently has a very good chance to win it so that will make a difference there'll be two of us in the caucus and that'll be cool in addition i brought a uh a lot of guy in well that's up to the electorate and you know as you know alan that's a a more difficult issue um lesbians are generally not seen as quite as threatening to everybody we're either insignificant because we have nothing to do with men or um you know we're cute or we're over achievers or as in my case i think we've already got a long history of work in a movement like the feminist movement that is now much more mainstream than it used to be i think probably where the gay movement will be in the first decade of the 21st century where if you've done work like john duran's work for instance or the work of other activists in our community on aids on homophobia on anti-discrimination concerning lesbians and gays people will understand that as health issues as civil rights issues in the way that my work for on domestic violence is now understood as an anti-violence in the family issue an anti-crime issue 10 years ago i would have been seen as a radical you know left-wing feminist working on domestic violence issues but this year it was a credit for me in my district so i know you were kidding when you said when you're going to let a guy in but i do think clearly tony didn't get elected john didn't get elected i did if carol gets elected i don't know who if they'll be a gay man elected too but i think that's a more difficult issue for straight people men are more just more threatening and men's sexuality is more threatening it's more you know it's more real and upsetting to people um i guess the other way i'm doing trying to do something is i have a bill to add sexual orientation as one of the non-discrimination categories in the education code and i'm not the first person to bring a bill that will help the community because richard katz as you know brought the domestic partnership bill and brought it back this year he's a good guy really good guy but this bill is about schools and k through 12 community colleges csu and the uc system just to bar discrimination against us across the board and what would happen if if that were put into place what would be the practical um outgrowth of that well practically speaking uh principals and school administrators would have the responsibility to stop harassment at the school on this basis and it would not just be harassment of gay and lesbian students it would also be harassment of straight students who are harassed because the guys want to take a dance class and they're all called or the girls are playing you know baseball uh and they must be dykes because they want to play sports it's a very i think stultifying culture in the schools where boys and girls are frozen in these very rigid gender roles even if they're not homosexual or gay or lesbian and so what the bill would do would be to require administrations to stop harassment to do kinds of education about harassment and discrimination to make sure that there's no materials adopted as teaching materials that show us in an unfavorable light just the same as it is now for race or religion or gender or ethnic class or national class et cetera we were talking earlier about how high schools really have become this sort of battleground in a way because because youths once they get used to something they really do get used to it and get over it and there's a lot of power in sort of institutionalizing that change well i think that it gives it a chance to breathe anyway if i find that children and young people have generally have good instincts they don't hate people right away except personally you know they might hate somebody who's a really rotten person but normally they don't have these sort of stereotypical group hatreds until they learn them from their parents like that line from south pacific the song that says you have to be taught to hate and so if their instincts toward justice are just given any freedom at all in the school by the administration putting themselves on the side of justice and saying you know we don't we don't allow this kind of harassment here you have to stop that then those students who are in the majority i think who don't like the harassment and don't think it's fair feel supported by their administration by adults and i think it gives them a lot more permission to say yeah you can't do that to my friend because i'll tell you that's what's happening in the assembly for me i mean if i were to be attacked by anybody people would jump up and say you can't do that to my friend because they have permission really to you know moral to to exert that kind of moral authority what other kinds of issues are you trying to get on the forefront of there well i have a whole i have 27 bills and this is the only one that really is about the lesbian gay community i'm i'm really interested in the problem of of youth and how so many of them are on a path to get into trouble and i'm one of those people that wants to try to do something positive early on so i have a bill to create a little space for after-school programs where community-based organizations of all kinds could come into the schools after regular class time and work with the kids or their parents whether it's on literacy or to do a sports league or you know some help with writing or job search or or anything you know that the schools would want to bring in as programming services by government agencies for the kids and their parents just anything to go on because the schools are there to be used as community centers i have about five or six bills about child support about domestic violence trying to tighten the law a little bit on domestic violence and custody make sure that people who owe their child support are required to pay kind of conforming to the new federal legislation i have a bill that bars any establishment or expansion of landfills in the entire 500 000 acres in the santa monica mountains zone uh so that they're not eating up my district with the they call them landfills i call them garbage dumps i mean that's what they really used to call them yeah exactly so i have a great variety of bills and then i sign on as co-author for other bills richard cass's bill for instance the domestic partners bill and a number of other bills that i think will help students and support the schools try to do something between strike one and strike two as sort of enough alternatives to incarcerations help the camps a little bit a lot of stuff i noticed that uh a number of the people you mentioned earlier who are honorary members of the gay caucus that they were people of color do you see that as part of what you're trying to accomplish there's create coalitions with other groups well it's not me trying to create coalitions i mean there is such a sense of coalition uh among people of color and the more liberal members of the assembly uh who are white there's a there's a genuine affection i think and a lot of collegiality and they have reached out to me i mean they've just been there marguerite archie hudson was my she she assumed the role of my big sister from the minute i got there and grace napolitano and just you know a lot of people and there are a lot of uh people of color uh elected from the los angeles area and some of the san francisco areas um who are in our caucus and we you know we've become very close but then there's these old white guys that i love too i have to tell you you know john burton and john vasconcellis forgive me for saying you're old john's but um they're just their hearts are in the right place byron sher who's chaired the in you know sort of all the environmental stuff is the the mainstay of protecting the environment and tom bates from berkeley who's been chairing the human services committee for years and years and is the voice of sanity on his welfare stuff there's a number of wonderful people up there and they have been just like form this protective circle around me until they saw i could take care of myself and i hang out on the floor and talk to people from the other side of the aisle and um the other day they asked me um what i thought about the fact that there was a lesbian character in the brady bunch movie was i offended or did i thought it would think it was good or and i said you know you always knew that the sidekicks in all of these sitcoms were lesbians didn't you know this so this movie says yeah they are so we were laughing really hard and the speaker said to me uh you're getting along with those guys really well i said you know i get along with everybody until i don't and it'll be for good reason yeah that's right do you find that there is an awareness in sort of the progressive whatever you want to call community among politicians that that the queer community is sort of trying to expand its boundaries and become involved in issues that don't just reflect on its own condition i mean proposition 187 or affirmative action for instance no actually i found just the opposite first of all we're not even a blip on the radar screen at the moment as far as i can see i think that the national organizations are doing their work there are some issues in different states you know our legal arms are working but sort of at the threshold of most people's consciousness they're not thinking about gays and lesbians the attention has been shifted in a way that is somewhat positive we're not being scapegoated as much now it's immigrants now it's people of color and i suppose women because they've benefited from affirmative action etc but we are not the people who are seen as having any of the hot issues these days in the other way we're not seen as being very helpful on the hot issues as a community there's a perception that maybe our community doesn't care because what do we care about affirmative action one way or the other forgetting that a huge percentage of our community are women or people of color where were we on 187 we some individuals spoke up about it but i would really like to see our community always there as a community in all the coalitions having to do with civil rights recognizing the connections between all of the issues because we'll be there for them they'll be there for us and yet there are some people who would define that much more narrowly than you they'd say no we need to be there for our civil rights every time we get involved with one of these other groups we we lessen the support somewhere and how do you respond to that well tell me what you mean by lessons what do you think they mean by lesson the support well that if say we are we get involved in proposition 187. then well 67 of the state's voters were against that i mean we're for that and um we tend to weaken our support because we're seeing a sort of a fringe group once again trying to toe the line on you know pc whatever you want to call it and that we can't afford to do that we need to just stay focused on gay and lesbian rights civil rights you know i think it's just the opposite i think that the notion of gay rights as opposed to civil rights is a losing notion we are not discriminated against for different reasons than other people we're discriminated against for a different kind of difference but it's still out of this this completely artificial definition of difference let's find a reason why people are different uh their eye color no no it's not their eye color it's oh yeah their skin color i mean as though it makes sense that you would distinguish between people on the basis of their skin color but not their eye color or their gender but not their height or their sexual orientation you know but not their weight although we do a little bit around weight too these are artificial distinctions that i think are only used to create a hierarchy of better worse you know ursula k le guin in her book the left hand of darkness said different and same are not killing words they're nurturing words they can be learning words and teaching words the killing words are better worse and i think what has happened in our society if you were a martian anthropologist and you came here and said i'm here to study difference in the 20th century in america and the use of it you would say to yourself boy you know those things don't really make a difference in people but they are made to make a big difference because we create this better worse notion and i think that gay and lesbian people should see clearly that that same kind of ruse that same kind of rhetoric is used about us we're terrible we're different women are terrible they're different people of color are terrible they're different it's the same rhetoric and we need to make league and understand those connections because if we don't if we don't stand up on this affirmative action issue if we had stood up better on 187 we would gain friends not lose them because those people that you lose by being in favor of affirmative action they hate you anyway they call you behind your back trust me it is dick army you know that was no slip of the lip about barney frank as we know he's not very happy about affirmative action either he's not very happy about anything that helps anybody but himself and so we have to really begin to understand who our friends really are and we have to ask our friends to be there for us i have a lot more friends on both sides of the aisle because i say what i think and they can trust that i am going to say what i think i'm given latitude to be who i am and say what i think that's sheila she stands for those particular principles and we expect that from her the people who disagree with me totally respect that and i think our community loses face and loses credibility when it waffles on these issues like oh we're going to lose our friends if we don't you know attack these people not at all and yet we were adamant i think people would think more of us yet compromise is obviously part of the political process so something you have to deal with up there i mean you can't just be totally dogmatic well you don't have to compromise principles that's an erroneous assumption about politics it's interesting it's one of those things that i think tries to keep good people out of politics and i think it is a ruse um a lot of good people say to me oh i don't want to run for office because it's so dirty up there you know it's a lot of dirty politics you have to and you have to compromise so much you never have to compromise you never have to compromise if you want to get something through often you will compromise the way in which you go toward a social justice goal but let us say my ultimate hope is that all children will be safe in school there's a lot of different ways to get to that do i have to make it a crime to loiter in front of a school in order to make children safe i don't and i don't compromise on that because i think that arresting people for standing on a street is not a good thing for america so but i still can work in a lot of other ways to try to make children safe in the school so i think what we can compromise are our methods but we don't have to compromise our principles so how do you get to i mean clearly something like equal rights for gay and gay men and lesbians is something that there's some people will never come to at least that are there now and so how do you deal with them on those issues you can't really as you say you can't compromise that's not an issue you're going to compromise on how do you try to educate them and bring them around well i think i try to bring everyone around who's educable and the vast majority of people in my experience are educable there's a wonderful book that came out last year i think david garrow's book called liberty and sexuality and he's the man who wrote the pulitzer prize-winning book about martin luther king and this book is like a huge mosaic of facts and stories and issues about the anti-abortion anti-contraception uh statutes starting way back in like 1870 and what i learned from his book in looking at movement and the notion of movement is that there's always some crazy people at the beginning who are thought to be crazy who are very loud and raucous and no one likes them and they get arrested and they chain themselves to things and they're act up they're acting up and then another line of people start saying you know they may have a point it's not the same thing with the anti-war movement but it's not until the clergy and the press get on board on an issue that public opinion actually changes and what i think is happening with us and what you described in the schools is that more and more and more people are saying i think fairness demands that gay and lesbian people not be discriminated against i think fairness demands that that's equality that's the american way that's fair and so what happens is the people whose minds will not be changed on this become a minority and they can stay wherever they are and be a minority i want to win the vast middle ideologically and i think we are winning the vast middle person by person but how does that square with for instance governor wilson just a couple weeks ago coming out and reversing the adoption policies of the state when really nobody was even asking him to do that clearly there are there seems to be momentum in the other direction as well well he's one man whose mind is not changed i spoke to someone on his staff i spoke to his chief of staff and i said could you just arrange a meeting i just want to talk to the man about what he has against our community because he clearly has an erroneous notion about who we are and i really just want to talk to him my job is to go and talk to him and i'm the highest placed you know lesbo in the state i should go talk to him but he is one man now he's a very powerful man i would say our community should hold its politicians to at least the standard of being for us and never vote for anybody who's not for us i mean it comes as no surprise to you i didn't vote for wilson and i'm not going to vote for him for governor president or anything because he has made it very clear that he doesn't respect my community and therefore my life and if people in our community would just hold their politicians to at least a standard of being for us i think that that would be a good first step for us and that's not a party thing that's uh no because there are plenty homophobes in the democratic party too and i don't think they should be voted for either i just think we should you know it could be peace and freedom i don't care we should say if you're not for me i'm not for you i mean i i think we've been too wishy-washy about it and said well you know but he said he doesn't hate me well that's not good enough thanks a lot um no i heard you speak once and you said people were so happy like they tell their friends and they'd say that they're a gay or lesbian that say well how'd it go and they go great they didn't kick me out of the house right it's true our standards are very low and understandably so we expect to be hated and so you know what happens in any one of our gay parades pflag comes along and everybody's in tears and we all run out and hug them why do we love them so much because they don't hate their children now we only we expect parents aren't going to hate their children but we are so clear about how hateful we are in society that when someone doesn't hate us we are like puppies you know you know we get padded on that oh good i'm going home i'll go potty outside exactly i'll be a very good puppy and i think in many ways our community through our history have been very good puppies to politicians we have not asked very much of them we are beginning to ask more we should ask more for our money we should ask more for our votes we should be in their face it doesn't when you say when i say in their face i'm never hostile with anybody i probably have the best reputation for jocularity of at least any girl in the assembly you know um and i and yet i'm in their face because they know that on issues i will say to them nice vote nice vote voting to starve those children to death really good you know and it it has the same effect as being in their face about it taking that view of we should expect more how would you look at the last two years and president clinton i think that we're at a severe disadvantage with with president clinton because as usual it's not clear who we have as an alternative i don't know how the you know the republican convention is going to come out but if for instance if governor wilson were the republican nominee and he's demonstrated more hostility or maybe he hasn't maybe it's you know the choice of two evils i don't know really what happened with bill clinton i think he sincerely wanted to do something for the community frankly i think he thought it would be a lot easier and was totally caught off guard by the hostility from congress and from sam nunn and from others and i don't know what to say about him i was very very disappointed you know i actually told the first lady that i was disappointed when we were back visiting in washington and what did she say well she said you know we've been doing the best we can you know what are they going to say if that's the best thing i didn't want to be hostile in the middle of it that's the best you can you know but i don't know i think we have to keep the pressure on though i just think it's going to be very hard for our community in the next presidential race because it will make a difference who gets elected as we look at the two people if pat buchanan is the nominee i think we have to work really hard for bill clinton because pat buchanan has been very clear about his hostility and there there's no question just to choose the person who looks like they'll do better for us you know he did actually sign a number of presidential orders saying you can't discriminate on this basis in the executive branch so he did something it's just that the military turned out to be a total debacle but partially as with other instances in his administration it it has been more how he set himself up for the fall than it is what he's actually done and i think of lonnie gunier and joycelyn elders i mean he gave you high expectations in a way and then people have high expectations and they let go of those very very dearly it's true and i don't think that either of them or any or the vice president and his wife are are homophobic in any way um you know alan tipper gore hosted the gathering for a number of lesbian gay people in their house and their it's not that that's the most fabulous thing but they're comfortable right they are comfortable i think that bill and hillary are comfortable too i think that we need to constantly remind people about how they must help our community i mean it doesn't seem very political but if you think about you know george bush being comfortable with that or lyndon johnson i mean there's there's a lot of progress there even though it seems kind of maybe it's not overtly political there is a lot of there's a big there's a big arc between lyndon johnson and bill clinton but you know clinton was at the beginning of a generation that's probably going to be in the white house for a long time you know we've heard a lot about this generational shift from the kennedy bush generation to this new generation so i am a little concerned if this generation isn't going to stand up for us and we're going to have trouble for another you know 25 years with the president i think the best thing we can do as a community is to make certain that we are in concert whether it's me in the state assembly and people outside the capitol making noise that we know in the back room that we have an agenda and this is the sort of strategy of it you make noise i'll be here voting you keep the pressure on the president we are working toward the same goal okay you have a minute to say with the most important thing you have to say well the most important thing i have to say is to thank you very very much for hosting the show alan and for allowing me to you know sort of to be the guest and thank you for your indulgence i hope you didn't think this was too self-indulgent on my part but you know um there are a lot of us lesbian gay bisexual transsexual people out here who are very very interesting and to those of you watching i say get used to it see you next time [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you