Get Used to It: Ep. 43, "Voices of Our Lives: Kerry Lobel"

uh [Applause] [Music] so [Music] hi welcome to get used to it i'm sheila kuhl and i uh lead you through these interviews from time to time uh and those of you who've watched the show probably know that on occasion we spend our time with one guest in a series that we've dubbed voices of our lives there are a number of people who have affected our movement in in important and serious ways and i'm pleased to say that one of them is here with us today kerry lobel who is currently the executive director of the national gay and lesbian task force welcome carrie thanks thanks for having me i'm really glad you're here and glad that you stopped by while you were in la yeah me too um you know it's interesting to me of course since i've known you for probably 25 years right exactly a number of people said to me when you were became the executive director at the task force recently carrie lobel she's a new face a fresh face in the movement you know where we're so where did she come from and it is interesting to me because um a number of people in our movement were activists and uh had a history in other movements but often when come on the scene in our gay and lesbian movement uh people aren't really aware of it so uh in keeping with our sort of biographical series i'm i'm really glad you're here and i want you if you would give us a little notion of who you are where you came from how'd this all start how did it all start well you know it started at the beginning with my grandparents who came over on the boat from russia and poland like many people did so i come from a family of first generation parents who moved to new york who went through that kind of struggle that first generation children do my grandparents were people who in this country were very working class folks my grandfather on my father's side was a tailor on my mother's side my grandfather sort of skipped out after first coming to this country he was a little too fast for my grandmother and so you know i come from a long line of women who were raised by my grandmother who worked three jobs to raise them so that sort of hopefulness of the new country tempered by you know the economic reality of what it was to be a woman alone because they were not working class in russia they weren't they were part of a merchant class and i think there were many people who fled this russia during the pogroms who because of the economic turmoil there thought it would be much better for them and their families here which for my family ended up you know not really immediately being the case and the kinds of stories that you read are pictures that you see about how tough it was for women in particular who knew very little of the language to come to this country and and try to survive alone was very much the story of my grandmother um and then you know after the war my parents were very much like people were in the mid-40s who they decided that they wanted to flee the cities of new york and they fled to the san fernando valley of all places which you know in the 40s was orchards and turkey farms and cheap housing and we lived in a house that was about this big that bordered on the ford motor plant um you know we had like i remember we had like a duck in our backyard well the san fernando valley is very different now of course than it was exactly so a valley girl who would have thought exactly i mean i you know i was a valley girl before you know the zappa's proclaimed the valley girl thing but i was very much a child of of the valley but i was also a jewish child of the valley and so being raised in my part of the valley there were not many jews who lived there i was very isolated from jewish community and again that was a largely an economic issue for my family but my first sort of hint that i was different was in elementary school when a kid called me a christ killer and a matzo ball leader i was like yeah well what's that about but at that time you know there was there was very uh strong an animosity between jews and catholics that you know it was i was very shocked to learn at a young age and i remember being in school and mouthing the words to christmas carols because i know i wasn't supposed to sing though i mean things that are very very different today although people would like to change that of course yes of course of course they would so this sense of difference and and uh and isolation how did it manifest itself when you were in in high school i mean i i know you from when we met when you were a student at ucla which we'll get to in a few minutes but um you were you know very outspoken and very comfortable in in that difference was that the case when before you got to college you know i was a lot like many um young people who were different i was very um much a reader i had my sort of own idea about how you should look and how you should dress and i was a big girl scout and competed for all these merit badges but when i was in high school i realized i was quite different as in my senior year i walked around campus with these billy jack hats on this long overcoat any season of the year oxford's without shoes and hung around with this crowd of people that were sort of high school anti-war activists and i remembered on the way over here that one of our big campaigns was to try to protect a piece of grass in the middle of our campus at james monroe high from cementing over and uh you know it they were a bunch of sort of oddballs just like me a lot of them were people who were involved with theater which i was as well but definitely people who did not fit in and so for my mother who very much wanted to have a daughter who was kind of like everyone else she didn't quite know what to do i was always encouraged to kind of go my own way but i think the billy jack hat the the good in the shoes was it was a bit much now that i look back at those pictures it was quite odd you know it was very very odd well it's a statement i mean it's interesting no but i mean it's interesting to me um a number of folks who've been on the show um you know david mixner and paul minette and phil wilson and tori osborne if you look at their pictures in junior high and high school it was with only a few exceptions i think pretty much the and you know the anti-assimilationist kind of stuff whether they had any gay identity yet or not right um because i think you make a choice i am going to embrace that and kind of flaunt it because i mean in my case the opposite was never possible i was never going to be able to be assimilated right no matter what right so so you were a bit of an iconoclast i guess but was there politics to it you know there was the politics that came from being a jew um from having sort of cultural pride from from knowing that i was part of a rich history of struggle there was a politics of what it was like to be in high school during the vietnam war and being very blessed to have teachers at high school who sort of taught how much the war cost versus how much it was going to feed people i mean the first discussions really for me about you know a defense budget so i think for me high school was a very politicizing experience and again i was drawn to people who didn't who couldn't fit in i mean i was certainly someone who i don't think could have fit in maybe i could have i never tried to fit in and they tended to be people who were were outspoken and um you know i learned that that was the way that you got some attention for yourself and um that it was a productive way to use being different and you know in our own way we became as popular as those people who did the traditional football cheerleader things we stood out which was which was good it was a very good exercise but i don't think i thought of myself then as political i thought i of myself as someone who did what had to be done at a time when something had to happen well it's an interesting thing to carry on because as i see you that's kind of been an impulse that's gone all along yeah i mean there's instead of uh although i see you as a thinker instead of i think therefore i am it's more like i do therefore i am right exactly is there something that has to be done i better do it right then you think about it afterward and you say and i did this because the love love was like oh no that's not really true the clarity of purpose is always in hindsight anyway i think it certainly has been for me so what made you decide to go to college well i was at a tradition in your family no i was the first person in my family to go to college and it was very important to my parents that i'd be able to go my mother in particular had always wanted to go to college and couldn't because of my family's economic situation and because she was expected to marry so it was always thought that i would go to college i always knew from the time i was five years old i wanted to be a doctor so of course you had to go to college unfortunately to do that although not everyone does but um so i knew that i wanted to go but i also knew that it was my way out and it was very important to me not to go to college in the san fernando valley where i lived which seemed to me to be very sort of isolated small place and so you went away to college i went away to college which was um 20 minutes over the hill into westwood but seemed like a lifetime away and in those days it really was i mean now when i think about it it was like why was that such a big deal but then and i think even in some respects now the the geographic thing about being in the middle of the valley and going over the hill um the economic differences between my part of the valley and the other part of the valley but just the the physical act of making the separation was important and most of the people that i went to school with ended up going to school in the valley so it was an odd thing to have done and i was very clear that i was either getting out or i wasn't going to college unfortunately i had the kind of grades that i needed to be able to escape and you know it was it was a good thing it was a good time to escape what was it like going to ucla that first year it was exciting i mean first of all i came from the valley which was small to ucla which had like 30 000 people i mean it's bigger than most towns in the united states so it was a little bit overwhelming um and i learned in my first semester that i could not be pre-med because i hated math and science so that was a little bit startling suddenly it was like i had no idea what i was going to be when i grew up because the thing i had always known i was going to be was not going to be possible and it was also you know it was a it was a lonely time trying to find myself and trying to find community in that big um place and and i really struggled in that first year um and and had the occasion at the end of that first year to work at a jewish children's camp outside of southern california which really was one of those kinds of events that completely changed my life because i met a woman and bam there you go so you went away to camp this is sounding very familiar exactly the same thing had happened to me 10 years before right um and so you had no sense before that that you might be a lesbian i mean not really i mean you know always i think you tend to look back and you say well i should have seen this sign or i should have seen that sign and i certainly realized that i had had this what i would call a crush now on another young woman in high school but at the time i just thought i really like her she's really smart but also she wrote these like you know three volumes of poetry they were very heartfelt and very passionate but at the time it was like i didn't i didn't connect i mean i don't i don't think i was in denial i just didn't have any sense of what a lesbian was i knew one bisexual girl in high school but i mean i didn't even really know like what to be a bisexual was or what to be gay or what to be lesbian was that was just not discussed in my school or in my family so when i went to camp and you know camp is this already isolating surreal experience and i met this woman i was like what in the world is this do i just like her am i a lesbian she was identified as bisexual but i knew that nothing had ever hit me quite as hard as that i mean life literally like stopped you know i was just completely swept off my feet then you have to come back to southern california to go back to ucla right what happened well i was walking into school and on one of these little um things that they have you know where they post signs there was this this sign you know you look for signs in your life it said lesbians myths or realities and it was a section of a women in psychology class and i said lesbian lesbian and you know i had done a little looking in the library about a sort of homosexuality and learned very quickly that people thought that was a sick and bad thing but was feeling really like a fish out of water went to this class this woman who was the um section leader was the most gorgeous activist lesbian that i have ever met in my entire life still stands there with many gorgeous lesbian activists that i've known over the years and it completely changed my life because suddenly i was in a a community of mostly feminist lesbians where it was very safe to to be a feminist and very safe to be a lesbian which isn't to say that i didn't sort of struggle through the first several months and try to sleep my way through it with boys and girls and try to sort of say well am i really a lesbian am i attracted to women am i attracted to men am i just experimenting am i experimenting but you know i realized that i was very fortunate coming out at ucla because everyone was you know it was a tremendously exciting and safe time for a student like myself i don't know that it was so safe for staff staff or faculty well it wasn't because as you know i was staff then at the same time and i remember jan or the woman you're talking about um was the first person ever to say in the daily bruin which is the of course the student newspaper at ucla uh that she was a lesbian or or and no one had said they were gay or a lesbian like in print and it was a very very courageous thing for her to do and a great leadership thing for her to do and she organized i remember a gay straight dialogue that's right and i was in the student activities office as an assistant dean of students at the time and it was just as scary to me and didn't feel as as simple and i'm not saying that it was simple in any way for any of the students because i frankly thought you were all quite courageous in a way that i still at that moment could not i mean it's it's so interesting that we it's 25 years now i think since then you know and how we were in the same room then in the same room now literally in the same room and really having done so much parallel work in a number of things but i remember there was an organization called the this lesbian sisterhood right it started out being the gay sisterhood and it was you know it there was a women's resource center that was formed on campus and the gay sisterhood as we were talking about the other day like moved in you know all five of us or something like that and um it you know i i'd like to say that it was a hard thing for for that to happen but it was also you know the right thing and i think people needed that kind of safety i certainly did i needed a place where i could go and meet other women and talk about issues and i mean those meetings were very much in the context of a political environment though as well i mean we were talking about lesbian feminism we were talking about the events of the day and we were also being able to meet lots of different people ucla was the center of a place where lots of women from around the country came so i mean it was it was the most perfect time to come out and then for someone like me who was really a fairly inexperienced youngster to be around people like jan and then to meet people like you and we talk about sharing the same room you remember i was your program assistant i had my little desk over here you had your big desk over here you know i had tremendous opportunities to be around people who really knew what they were doing and was really mentored as a young woman by people who took a great interest in my having skills and being able to think which you know i never took for granted and which you know i feel very concerned now that many young people don't have opportunities for at that time i mean it was a thing that completely changed the direction of my life to be able to be surrounded by strong women who knew what they were doing and who created a space for me to be able to do what i needed to do well it was a very heady time i mean the early 70s and on college campuses too it was sort of the dovetailing of the anti-war movement the student power movement which was an element of that certainly um the uh black student union and mecca started on campus the asian american asian pacific i can't remember what they had a there was a coalition i remember that began at the very beginning it was a a very um exciting and interesting time and when the women's movement kind of you know took it took hold in the early 70s and we opened the women's resource center there was a lot of space to explore protest or sort of anti-status quo work yes which really opened the space for people to to be able to identify themselves comfortably almost as against the status quo which was not the case when i was in college you know 10 years earlier where conformity was absolutely durger and as you say i mean it was at a time when other movements were really coming to the fort campus as well so i remember very much parallel to each other we were having the fights together about would there be a women's newspaper would there be a black newspaper would be there be a jewish newspaper and so it was also a tremendous time of coalition building where people really i thought watched each other's backs very very closely there wasn't that kind of turfism there wasn't that kind of if you get it i can't get it people tried to i think be very intentional about doing work together um which was also i think a very important lesson of that time i mean the people who stood out were the people who were wanting to maintain the status quo i mean they were like they were losers you know that was not what was happening then and um well it's also been a thread through your work that i've seen as you went along that this recognition of of the similarities and this uh outsider status that i think the status quo always tried to pit against each other right and the work had to be to to essentially reject that notion and to embrace the understanding that although we're outsiders in different ways that that's a very powerful coalition and really the question is sort of the marat side question you know who's inside who's outside right exactly who's crazy and who's saying exactly and it's you know there was this big house of cards that was constructed that was based on this notion that if people didn't talk with each other that this this house could stand and you know what i learned over and over again was every time you talk to someone who is outside of your circle something started to to shift and and those people that wanted to have power and control um suddenly were really quite at a loss you know of what to do and ucla taught me that in a very big way well and and in terms of power and control i mean the next the next thing i knew of you doing was a very central role in the fledgling movement against domestic violence talk about how your work started in that well you know as my mother would say if there's an underdog issue you're going to go and find it and that was certainly the case in the mid 70s that there were very few services for battered women and at ucla through a number of things that i'd done i was meeting women who'd been abused and who had no resources and when i left ucla i ended up working quite accidentally really at a shelter for battered women and it was collectively run so it was a feminist program inside a larger organization sojourn was the shelter ocean park community center was the organization was a very unique program for its time and there still aren't programs that were like it i mean it's it's made a profound change in the battered women's movement around the country and for me it was it was very much a place where i could work on a lot of issues the battered women's movement was a place where everything came together housing child care economics welfare immigration you had to work on all of those things and at the same time i remember giving speeches about domestic violence and having people stand up at rotary club meetings and say you're lying right there's no such thing as a battered woman i mean now people might say they don't know one but i i don't know of anyone who says it doesn't happen but you know 20 years ago people stood up routinely and said women are not battered if they are they deserve it which people still say but no one would admit that they knew someone and so you know i was very honored to be among some of those very brave women those first battered women who spoke out and who took a lot of risk i mean they i mean they they took the kind of risk that you know lesbians and gay men and bisexuals and transgender people take in speaking up people said you're crazy you deserve it you need to go back to where you came from and really had to deal with a lot of stigma so it it was it was a good time i mean it was it was also a place in southern california where a lot of things were were coming together and where there was an opportunity to grow a movement that could bring together battered women but also could really challenge some of those institutions that were being very uncooperative like police and city attorney and district attorney and you know some of the people now who are quite in the news um like johnny cochran who was the chair of the domestic violence council that i helped form when i was working in southern california in the southern california coalition on battered women i mean a lot of us go way back through all of these you know these intertwinings and and that's certainly a way that we have reintertwined as well right when you i had just gotten out of law school you came and said can i take you to lunch or you take me to lunch and yeah i'm sure i'd say ask me to start a resource board for sojourn i didn't have never heard of domestic violence in my life and you know now 20 years later i'm listed on my own biography i should say as a national expert right yeah it certainly changed my life well i think people do that for each other it's really interesting when you were talking about being mentored and yet i've also also felt mentored by you and the work that you did in the domestic violence movement i mean we we have that same sort of activist gee something needs to be done somebody's hurting i better go do something you know um but it was interesting when you were talking about really the imposition of silence which is which is what i think had happened to so many battered women shame same thing that happens in our community um and and your mother's saying you know if there's a cause you'll take it up but i was curious when you mentioned your mother um you decided fairly rapidly i guess well that's me i'm a lesbian did you tell your parents i did what gene cordova i think called the oops method of coming out oh dear where you're with your parents and they say i'm really concerned that you know this company that you're keeping is not good and i'm afraid that you're going to be a lesbian oops i am so my mother had a major motherly crash over it that lasted many many years which left me very estranged from my family and so i think she always felt that everything that i did with few exceptions added insult to injury so first i was a lesbian and i wasn't going to give her grandchildren then i'm like talking about battered women's issues at a time when people think better women are sick or crazy so i was starting down this path of motherly disapproval and you know for me it was a very hard thing i mean coming from a large extended family and being very disconnected from my mother and and having my father and my brother say for 15 or so years your mom's not mad at you she's just having a bad day um you know again i really understood that kind of crazy making um situation that that so many of us have when we're disconnected from our families and um where we don't know necessarily what ground we have to stand on i mean i was i was very fortunate that i had sort of the personal resources and friends around me that i could build my own family and community but you know many years later when i moved from southern california to arkansas and i had this very painful fight with my mother she said you know you've been dead to me since for 15 years it was such a a relief because i felt crazy because your dad was saying no she's not angry you're she's just having a bad day yeah but the truth was that that she had completely written you out of her life right like i didn't get a call from my mother you know unless someone was dead so there was this moment where i was completely freed by my mother's telling the truth and it was a big gift to me you know because i felt like in my life i had really tried to tell the truth that i stayed away from my family because i didn't feel like i could tell the truth and then my mother freed me by telling a very hard truth which then created an environment a couple of years later where i could say to myself you know you stopped trying with your family so something god forbid should happen to them will you feel like you did your part and and my partner at that time said do you feel like you would have done your part and i was like you know no i don't so i really you know i tried very hard with my parents to to make some kind of amends a new relationship and unfortunately just before my father died we had really started on on the right track and when he did die then it sort of left my mom and my brother and me to create a different life with me being you know at that time this lesbian who was doing prison and hiv and aids work and work with prostitutes oh my god in arkansas of our places and worse she's not exactly i think she thought you know i completely lost my mind well but how did you get to arkansas i mean you were doing work about battered women here in in essentially in santa monica right i've been doing work in southern california i decided after a couple of years working at the shelter that as as much as i appreciate people who do that day in and day out direct service that that was not for me i was much more of an institutional confrontational kid and stepped into directing the southern california coalition on battered women which i did for five years which was a coalition of the shelters yeah 30 shelters throughout southern california san diego to santa barbara and you know learned a lot learned a lot about coalition building and confronting institutions and state legislature and wheeling and dealing and training and technical assistance and running the state and had been involved politically in santa monica where i was living ran for city council as an out lesbian lost was on the city planning commission but you were the first person ever to run for that council out right oh yeah and there you know it wasn't until a little bit later um when judy abdo ran that um that another lesbian did it was very fortunate when i ran that you know i got the endorsement of the police and firefighters association i mean it was the our opposition at that time really chose not to make an issue of my being a lesbian i mean some of the sort of people on my side politically were more worried um about how it would fly but then it was not it was never an issue in my campaign no and your i think your opponents were quite wise because it was very much the same in my campaign it felt to me like it would have hurt them to to be that homophobic and you know especially in santa monica which didn't care that much about it and still doesn't you know i mean doesn't care at all i mean the santa monica is one of those interesting places where lots of gay lesbian bisexual and transgendered people live but there isn't much of a movement no it's not really a gay town i think it's a very political town right but it's never exactly like never mind that how do you stand on rent control exactly and that was it like when they said what is your big secret i was like i ate big macs that was more of a sin so you know i ran and i lost and that opened up a space in me to start thinking about is it time to leave southern california and like many things um in our life that moves us unexpectedly i got involved with a woman who lived in arkansas we started seeing each other a long distance and i said i could move to arkansas for a couple of years oh my god you know i was a southern california kid and moved to arkansas where i knew nearly no one and it was it was major cultural trauma and i lived there 10 years and it was the best 10 years my entire life politically and in every other way so what did you do in arkansas well i worked at an organization called the women's project which is a very special organization they're very few like it around the country that works on places where gender and race and sexual orientation intersect so i did a lot of domestic violence work work around hiv and aids women in prison issues hate crimes gl wasn't really so much bt issues it then right um but the women's project really was the center for sort of progressive political thinking and if you could scheme it you could do it i mean it was never that kind of well you can't do that so i ended up doing a lot of of work that i never thought i would do working with lots of different kinds of people um working with women who were working as prostitutes i did a lot of work at the state women's prison and you know i found my sort of political stride there it was a great place to to get the kinds of political skills that i never would have gotten i think staying in southern california because you could call someone and say i want to do that they'd be like uh okay you didn't get you know put through 27 different people you know who are on the food chain who are all going to say no to you so it was very quick and and fun there was something kind of kind of special for you though i know we were talking uh before about this in terms of your work with women in prison will you talk more about that sure i had for many many years been drawn to to women in prison i i don't know if it was those 50s prison movies exactly this total attraction to that sense of women as outlaws women who'd gone against the grain and you know it's sort of not a it doesn't take a lot of sort of smarts to sort of realize that i saw myself as a person who'd sort of historically gone against the grain and so i ended up being able to do a support group for women in prison at the state prison and it was supposed to last six weeks we were supposed to rotate the end of the six weeks i said i'm not leaving six years later i was still there going down to the prison two three times a week doing hiv work battered women's work prison transportation program bring matt bringing magazines and books and i i felt when i was there like it was one of the few places in my life where i was fully myself and where the work that i did made a very critical difference to women who felt very much like me i mean i i saw myself and many of the women that i worked with i thought you know i'd had opportunities that they hadn't had and in some respects for many of them because of their involvement with the wrong woman or the wrong man their life took a turn and because they were poor mostly they pled guilty to a crime which generally they did commit many of them were women who killed their batterers in self-defense but i was very drawn to the women who wouldn't toe the line so here i was you know the big dyke who'd written this book on lesbian battering in a prison doing hiv and aids education in a sodomy state where you weren't allowed to talk about same gender sex feeling like i was home with a bunch of women who were like not liked that well by the prison administration um starting all of these peer-led programs and so all the kind of issues that i had with power and control that are completely about my life well there i was but it was a little bit i mean it's interesting because it it reminds me of kind of student hood in a way you can you can buck the institution you are not of the institution right and in some ways the could the freedom also come from the fact that you could walk out of there absolutely absolutely and you know i had many nightmares for many years about what it would mean not to be able to to walk out i mean i when i first came out a lot of guilt about being able to to walk out and it was really important to me to try to work to get people out of that place and to ensure that when they did get out of that place that there were resources for them and i i worked in a very heartbreaking way with women who were finally released from prison a woman who was a good friend of mine who had hiv we finally got her out on early release tried to work for her to have the resources she needed when she left and she was released from prison with nothing and if i hadn't known resources literally i mean she was released from prison with one day supply of azt which we had fought very hard for her to get she had no driver's license she you know she had no access to housing or health care and so for me again it was another place where issues came together but it was also a place where sort of spiritually i felt like i fit in in a you know i was the least sort of i was like the most traditional good girl in the place in a way because i had no i hadn't committed any crime except once getting arrested for leading a demonstration across the street but you know felt very much like these were my my sisters um in a way that i've never felt before then or since then well there is a great power to acceptance when you know when everyone is so much of an outlaw or outsider um where you in essence how can you judge others you know when you don't you certainly wouldn't want to stand and be judged at that moment although as you said poverty is a kind of crime especially for women of color and especially in the south for them um so it's not so clear whether people are outlaws or just out making a sin out of you know being outsiders i mean it it and it was very clear to me that it was it was so much about the sin of being an outsider it was about the sin of not being willing to toe the line and and so many of these women were women who were in very small or large ways challenged the status quo i mean some of them did incredibly horrible things for which there is no excuse but some of them were people who never deserved to be in prison and none of them deserved the kind of despicable treatment that they had every day and the kind of disrespect that i saw in that system just get worse year after year after year by the time i left it was it was heartbreaking the kind of overcrowding and you know not having access to college courses um groups like mine being like thrown out right and left i mean they tried to do everything they could to to wear us down so that we would not go back and you know me i was like you can't wear me down i'm coming well you mentioned that you had edited a book on lesbian battering and i as i recall in the battered women's movement at that time and even now there was always a tension about the lesbians in that movement and whether we would admit that there were so many and whatever i i personally always thought that the battered women's movement was always separate from the mainstream women's movement and that one of the main reasons for that was that it was so lesbian driven so many of the early shelters uh but nobody wanted to talk about that because clearly what we were doing in the minds of the mainstream was letting women escape or worse than that you know pulling them out of their homes rather than having to be killed there i guess exactly and uh there was some tension in our national coalitions and uh really in the movement as a whole there was and i mean i like to think of the battered women's movement as the lesbian branch of the women's movement although people would probably you know uh not like that that characteristic especially since you know people like ruthie slaughter don't identify as a lesbian no but their pals were and um you know but there was that equation that was feminist equals man-hater equals lesbian and every powerful woman in the battered woman's movement whether she was a lesbian or not you know including some of our best friends like ruth had to deal with this sort of confrontation about being a lesbian because they supported and protected women in a real authentic way every kind of woman race cross class cross you know age and it became very difficult thing around the country because these programs were lesbian baited many lesbians felt the need to be invisible i certainly wasn't one of those but many people did and many programs lost funding because of the fear that you know the government had once government started getting involved well the department of justice played a big part in that well the department of justice did the sort of classic try to break up and divide the battered women's movement over a big grant it gave the national coalition against domestic violence said you can't use the word lesbian and you know when we're talking about battering and not to be able to say lesbians are battered it was a very difficult thing and it was it was one of those times in my life where the you had to resolve the question of would you sacrifice a group for the greater good and i think you know all of us learned a lot from that time but i i find like that choices is constantly thrown you know at me in my work would the national coalition against domestic violence continue to take money knowing it couldn't talk about lesbians it decided not to another group of people that felt like the movement needed the money you know they weren't wrong to think the movement needed the money at the time i thought they were wrong at the moment needed the money but you know it was a ridiculous choice for all of us to have had to make i mean of course it was right to be able to talk about those issues but the department of justice under ed neese at that time knew exactly what it was doing to fragment which it did effectively the most powerful manifestation of the women's movement that this country has ever seen you know in this this time period it worked lesbian baiting worked um and the battered women's movement has never been the same since that day even though there are lesbians and heterosexual women both bisexual and transgender women and leadership there's always that fear that that issue is going to continue to be used as a wedge issue well and of course it's always been a very effective thing to do to straight women including now in the military yes to say uh you must be a lesbian if you won't sleep with me or whatever as men say and it becomes a very powerful label yes to put on straight women it and as long as it's something that one can be frightened with because there are negative consequences in society still to being a lesbian then it will be very effective way to drive a wedge into a women's movement that should be even more powerful than it is but i i think it was a very effective tool if you know what i mean from the opposition to say let's call all the straight women lesbians if they hang around with lesbians then they'll want to get rid of the lesbians that'll take at least half the energy that's right if not more out of the movement um and i noticed it was very much at the same time too that lesbians were beginning to see gay men as potential allies certainly gay men who were becoming politicized because of the aids movement right gay men who had been very in the closet mainstream you know doing their own thing leave me alone i'll i'll just want to sort of be invisible and happy right couldn't anymore no that's right and you know for many of us who are lesbians in the battered women's movement we didn't have a lot of contact with gay men we'd you know that was not our our constituency um that was not our community and for many lesbians who were doing work with gay men the battered women's movement was not their community or their constituency i mean lesbians were as frightened about battering as the battered women's movement was frightened about lesbians so the the sort of selfies in our community about lesbian battering also served as a wedge to keep women that i knew and were lesbian activists and other movements from really being able to support the work i was doing around lesbian battle and they hated that we raised that issue well i have never met a minority community that wanted to admit that there was any battering in the community because then people would think even worse of us right which is ridiculous because it only helps in the denial and you know in the silence that we're all forced to engage in anyway right which is really you know it's really harmed um battered gay lesbian bisexual and transgendered people that that we've had this silence i mean we're we're still in a place in our communities where there's tremendous silence about that abuse and it is because we want to have the appearance that you know we're just like everyone else everything's okay but also we want to hold up that our relationships are somehow different and for those that were raised of us that were raised as lesbian feminists these are you know egalitarian feminist relationship partnerships um we didn't understand that you could like have those things but the battering happened it was about power and control one was not related to the other and right that you could confront battering when you saw it well it's also been a very important part of the battered women's movement to kind of identify it as a gender issue and if you start talking about gay or lesbian battering but you can't talk about gender or roles you know it doesn't fit in exactly either and i think that was a very difficult intellectual place and it is now to get to it is now still i mean you go to many places in this country and have this discussion with battered women's activists and it's like no you're trying to challenge those theories right of patriarchal power and control so how do you get from arkansas to washington i mean i know how president clinton did it but what about carrie lobel well gary lobel was tired and carrie lobel was about to take a six-month sabbatical to figure out what to do with her life and she had known about the national gay and lesbian task force and its work on hate crimes and i said the task force is looking for a deputy director i'm looking for a change people that i loved who are who tend to be fairly pushy said oh you should do that job you should do that job my partner mary said honey i hope you really like to go there and like this people because i'm really ready to move and i i saw it you know as a as an opportunity to be able to bring skills that i had and bring some order to the task force which had been doing a little bit of flailing um before then so i just thought it would be fun you know and i liked the task force and i thought it would be an interesting opportunity i had no idea what i was really getting into though no because you thought you were going to be deputy and now there you are you're the ed i know two years later there i am the executive director well part of that flailing i think uh is some complaint around the country that even though the task force has a good reputation if people are called upon to say what the mission is right often they they really couldn't come up with the words so here's your opportunity nationally what does the task force do what the task force does and what the task force has always done is recognize that the center of gravity has shifted to local and state communities and what we do best is to provide support for activists who work in their local and state communities we we help support them in doing what they need to be able to do often it's behind the scenes it's in a no fingerprints kind of way the worst thing that can happen in in many towns is to say and the national gay and lesbian task force came in and and helped us today sounds like right rolled in in tanks right exactly so we try to do a lot of behind the scenes work to strengthen the infrastructure of our movement so that you know we're in a situation now where two anti-gay bills have been introduced every day this year in state legislatures they're not being introduced in washington dc we've got good state organizations in about 30 states that we've helped nurture over the years these organizations need to stay in touch with each other we keep them in touch by phone by email through the web so that they can stay ahead of the curb we know that the concerned women for america you know did a cookie cutter same gender marriage ban bill well here we were like fighting it in 30 different ways in 30 communities they were calling in the same witnesses the same bill it's like hello let's use the resources that we have to strengthen infrastructure and move forward our own agenda by fighting back bad bills but also introducing good bills on hate crimes and sodomy repeals and family issues and student issues so a lot of what we do is nurture activists at the local and state level through their organizations but then the other piece of work that we do is we have a think tank where we produce some of the best studies and surveys and written materials so that activists like me who have this big pile of stuff who can't ever read it or who can't translate some of the academic writing into plain english have a source where someone says here carrie here's your one page of talking points here's your sample letter to the editorial letter here's your editorial here's you know your sample flyer so that people really can get ahead of the curve and also so that we're not fighting these same battles 25 years from now you know what i don't want to talk about custody and adoption forever you know i want to get ahead of where we are and i would like you know next year and i think we're finally in a place where next year in a number of states our movement will introduce on the same day pro gay bills we have enough gay and lesbian elected officials around this country we can do that and you know what my experience in the legislature is you don't even need gay and lesbian elected officials in every state no to do that because the men and women in my legislature we've got nine bills i'm only carrying one right and it's there's a lot of support for us there and i i think the task force will you know will help immeasurably especially i mean the information that you put out uh on the web etc that i see that says hey california guess what just happened in minnesota and you know and in florida good bad or otherwise i think it's it's really important um i think a lot of people see human rights campaign as a kind of coherent thing they can understand it lobbies congress i get that you know right but it sounds like the missions are very compatible well they are and i think one of the things that the two groups can do the best is to to talk about why our missions are compatible i mean i support hrc and i make a financial contribution to them because i think it's important that we have a voice in washington that lobbies for us i support you know the victory fund because i think it's important that gay and lesbian elected officials be able to run and win and i support the task force because i believe someone has to support activism at the local and state level we can't do those pieces in isolation but the other role that the task force plays which is in some respects more critical than all of the others is the task force is the place where the linkages are made we talk about coalition building we look like at a state like california where there's been anti-affirmative action bills and anti-immigration bills these are the places where queer people have to be visible because we understand that that's how it works that first of all there are queer people of color and queer immigrants but also that it's going to be through building a coalition that we're going to transform society and so the task force occupies that progressive transformational part of that political spectrum that allows groups like hrc to do that kind of important vote counting negotiating maneuvering we're the we're that progressive left that gives other groups the space in which to move and i think it's it's very critical very much on the tradition of feminism too i mean which is a transformational ethic and i always have thought so it is carrie what has this meant to you personally i mean in your history you've been primarily engaged in feminist work although you know in engaged in a way in gay lesbian stuff but now suddenly quite visible as one of a small handful of executive directors of these you know organizations and it must feel personally different to you what has it meant well it feels personally different in two ways one is it's just very different work i mean there's a very different constituency this is a really vibrant time for our movements where there's a lot of attention and we're trying to figure out who we want to be and where we want to go and what we want to do and so for me to try to bring transformational politics to that to say we don't want to be just like everyone else we want to create our own space we want to bring our whole selves to the table i mean for me is personally very challenging and feels like a complete connection with all work that i've ever done which is to be about being able to you know bring yourself to safety and to justice and know that the work would change because of that but it's also been a compelling time because i had to make the decision to to take this this job at a time in my own life where sort of major personal transformation was happening for me internally you know we were talking before about you know the the fact that my brother died in june killed himself quite unexpectedly and so i've been dealing with having to do some reconnection with my family in a very different way but also have to deal with the kind of tension about my brother's death i mean he was a person who was a principal well loved in his community had this incredibly vibrant public life where everyone thought they knew him but he was also a man who had lots of secrets and was arrested in a adult movie theater spent a night in jail came home took his own life and so for me here i am the big dyke the public dyke who's for 25 years made peace with the life that i lead built family for myself around the life that i lead and now have to deal with sort of a loss of a person that i thought like had what people were supposed to have you know what i mean it's like in a in my family my brother was was it he was the man um and i was that isolated like sheep that was out there who was always um going against the grain and so to be in this place in my life where i feel like my i'm on the top of the world in terms of what i've wanted to work for for my whole life and then to have this sort of visible reminder every single day that people around the country don't have that the people who are close to me don't have the ability to be able to make mistakes or to be who they are without tragic consequences i mean it's constantly um propelling and challenging well i think the um the notion that we were talking about of how powerful shame is um and it is it is the deepest irony and i'm sure painful that as you talk about working with the women in prison the ability to bring your whole self to the table to not hide any piece of it right is so empowering where people don't believe that it's going to be empowering people always believe that if you say something that you're ashamed of about yourself people will reject you and it will you'll be isolated when we keep having exactly the opposite experience we are instead embraced for our honesty right and your brother and no judgment on him i mean it's a judgment on society who must have felt so shamed i mean i don't know if this is the the basis of it but even the fact that he could feel shamed by such a thing is um it's such an indictment against society and and such an underscoring really that the truth does set you free it does you know you know it's i feel like so many of us wear the truth you know as like a shield or a cloak or a cape um and i know for myself in my own life that as hard as it has been sometimes to tell the truth that at least i know every day what i said the day before so you don't have to remember any of the lies that's good exactly and you learn i think you know as a queer person the the kind of cost that secrecy and social isolation have to you um and and to know that we live in a society where all kinds of people have to feel shame where they don't feel like they can deal with the consequences of telling the truth i mean that's why you know i will never rest it's why i know you'll never rest because we will live in a place that people will be able to tell the truth about their lives in society will be forever transformed well i would be really silly if i didn't end on that note because that's just the perfect place for the wrap-up and we're actually within a minute of our of our time running out so let me thank you very very much we're going to show the number of the task force at the end of this uh show so that you'll be able to find them in washington which you probably can anyway the national gay and lesbian task force and carrie lobel its executive director wish you great luck thank you and i'm really really glad that you did this thanks me too and for those of you watching uh i want to remind you a couple of themes from the show to take maybe take away the the one we were talking about in terms of the truth whatever it is for you being a freeing thing and also that no matter what you say and who you are there's a space for you because america will get used to it see you next time [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] 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