Get Used to It: Ep. 49, "Judith Light and Family: You Don't Have to Be Gay to Be Queer"

uh [Music] so [Music] hi it's sheila kuhl welcome to get used to it this is our holiday show and depending on when you're watching it could be any holiday we're thinking mostly of the winter holidays and i'm very pleased today to have as my guests a family that i really wanted you to meet we're going to start by talking to one member of this family my my good friend judith light a good friend to our community and frankly to humanity judith is an actress as i'm sure i don't have to tell you and an activist and i'm very very pleased to have you here today welcome thank you i'm so happy to see you i was just going to say that to you whichever one you're celebrating yes right well we celebrate all of them at the end of the year this is good it gets a little crowded but uh i'm so glad you're here i'm so happy to be here well you know it's interesting judith every everyone in our community knows you so well or feel that they do because you never say no to an invitation to show up for us uh but i doubt that people know actually very much about you so tell me where did you grow up well i grew up in trenton new jersey and uh i stayed there until i went to college which was carnegie mellon university in pittsburgh and then after that i went into repertory theater and i was all around the country and i performed in europe and and uh then i left and went to new york and i was on broadway and off-broadway and then i did the so god i mean i'm saying all these things i think i'm really not as old as i sound you know this is like you started very i started so young you streamed to startup well i didn't streak to stardom but uh it was it was a process but why did you want to act in the first place i mean it's not it's not the kind of thing that absolutely every little girl thinks they want to do no i i wanted to i think i wanted to act for all the wrong reasons um i wanted to be the center of attention i wanted approval and the combination of the things thereof the the but the real reason that was underneath which i've just begun to discover is that i wanted to make a difference and i wanted to uh be of service and i wanted to find a way to use my celebrity to make a difference um i think when when we were talking before at one point you said something about service that for those of us who are in public life it's almost a requirement it is certainly a responsibility one's responsibility and i've always felt very strongly about that and when you meet one of the other members of this family a little bit later herb hampshire um when i said that to her when we first met and started working together um he said i can support you doing that he said uh celebrity has a lot of perks everybody knows that um so i don't want to put that down in any way but there's a sense in which it's very hollow and very shallow if you're not finding some way to give back well it's interesting because a lot of people who are especially actors i think are asked to show up for stuff whatever it is uh and it's for a number of reasons one because they think if you're there it's a draw so i'm gonna have a dinner let's have judith there everybody will come see judith and that's fair and we understand absolutely that's like i get that i show up i help make the event you bet not a pr president shows up at the hrc dinner a lot of people want to go hear him and i think right he understands the importance of being there but also that it's going to you know do it but there's something else that happens too and that is that a lot of times actors start to think that they actually have something to say yes you know now the difference with you is you do have something to say and how is it that i'm impressed with how much you really get what the deal is in our community you know for better or for worse how does this happen well we were talking about growing up and and one of the things that i always felt was i always felt that i was an outsider wanting to be an actor so young really made me feel like an outsider i didn't really fit in so in a sense i always felt queer and and i mean that in in in this very general way of feeling like i had my nose pressed against the candy's door window and that inside was this incredibly wonderful world that i could not access uh because i was different in some way because i wanted something that i that other people didn't necessarily want so i kept trying to fit in with everybody and getting people to like me and they didn't i mean you know the harder you try the more they sort of push you away and it wasn't until i finally one summer uh went to a performing arts camp and all of a sudden i there was this whole group of people who were not just literally queer but they were outsiders and we were all there together and i understood what i'd been wanting for so long was not just to fit in but to contribute and make a difference and find a cohesive family that i that i knew that i was part of um i was overweight i was um weird people didn't understand me and so when i look at your community i i feel extremely empathetic i know what it feels like to be prejudiced against pushed aside discounted and what i so love about the the community is the willingness to be courageous in being who you are particularly coming out because i didn't have any role model to say you who everybody this is actually who i am i'm very different and maybe i'm a little weird to you but i know somewhere i'm i'm going to fit in but until i got connected to this community i didn't understand what an incredible role model you are and what kind of an inspiration you are to people well it seems like something there's always something about this community that kind of breaks your heart a little bit i mean it's it's easy to see um and there is an identification and i my own projection about it was that that you understood both the pain of it and the sort of i don't know what the the joy of it the fun of it that you know the campiness of it it also draws lesbians are drawn to gay men's uh culture because of that it's a lot more fun than our culture you know but there's something very brave about it that we really saw begin to be exhibited really in the aids holocaust that's right now when were you first aware of people around you being gay i mean oh when i was very young when i went when i first went to that performing arts camp i must have been maybe 11 years old that was when i first i knew it and it didn't seem bizarre to me in any way they were fabulous people they were just people i've always felt that way it doesn't matter what someone's sexual orientation is it doesn't matter the color of their skin it doesn't matter what they do for a living we are all human beings under the skin and it doesn't all those things don't matter we're we're all a part of what i consider god's world and however you hold that but there's a sense a very strong spiritual um thread for me in my life that i've also seen exhibited in the community it's true i mean lesbians and and lesbians pulled to support gay men during the aids crisis in a way that i i've never seen i mean we have not seen communities operate in this world when the when literally nobody was there for for the community this community pulled itself together and said we will take care of our own i mean everywhere you look there's a level of of inspiration and power and courage and that's what i keep seeing it's interesting you said there's something about it that breaks your heart it doesn't break my heart as much as it breaks my heart open um it's a it's a very thrilling and moving experience to see people operate like that well and you know in the industry there's this myth that it's so open to this and yet i think we saw because of all the brouhaha about ellen coming out that this must not be an industry incredibly open about uh gay and lesbian people what's your impression i mean you're you're a star and you've been working as an actress for a long time what do you see in terms of the industry's response to this i you know i i think there's a level at which um the industry does very well with this it's just like anything you know there and there's a lot of movement um it's not as much movement as i would like to see um i would like to see everybody coming out and everybody standing up and saying this is important and this is important for us to relate to uh so for me it it can't be fast enough but i also know that everybody has to go at their own pace and so of course i'd like to see more um but it's it's everybody in their own time again you know it's it's like what this community demonstrates is that what one needs to work on is their lack of prejudice their lack of bigotry and and and expanding themselves into diversity so while i'd like to see more and i wish they would hurry up and and everybody would get together um it's not it it isn't always that way so it's finding the acceptance and relaxing about it well speaking of diversity um since this is our holiday show this means it's our family show right and um although i'm a great admirer of yours one of the reasons i want to have you on the show is because i want to have your family on the show i'm so glad yeah me too tell us a little about your family well um i am married to uh robert desiderio and um the other part of our family um my my closest and dearest friends and family and managers and business partners are herb hampshire and jonathan stoller who have been in a relationship for 17 years and we travel together we work together they have a place that they can stay with us we have a place where when we go to aspen we stay with them there's a connectedness that is like nothing i've really ever seen before but something that i always dreamed about and something that i always wanted we talk about everything we work together at a level of not just making the business our life or our careers our life but the context of our relationship is that our is our life individually and collectively so that everybody's growing and working and supporting each other to move in the directions and that they want to go in sounds like the ideal family the chosen family as it were huh it is it is and that doesn't mean that it's this i want to be very careful about this because a lot of people say oh my god you know they have this and they have that it it it's hard work it isn't this picture-perfect little adorable little family it is it it it we deal with we we talk about issues all the time if somebody's having a problem with somebody we discuss it uh it's very hard work now you met herb first right i did i did of the other of the other three as we say yeah i met her how did that happen well um herb was so working in philadelphia and um he his background is in psychology and he was teaching a temple and he had a very large practice in temple and he had an assistant who said to him this was at a time of of asked in the hunger project and in which i was very involved in both and stanley um and so was herb and stanley said to her there's this actress in new york that you have to meet and he said why and stanley said i don't know we were just supposed to meet her and um we met uh buckminster fuller was giving a lecture at town hall and so i met him briefly after that and he said i'm going to be speaking next week at buckminster fuller's world game and uh for those people who don't know that there's this thing called war games and so buckminster fuller decided that he wanted to do a world game which is about people getting together and peace and and connection and so herb was speaking at this and he said you could come and we could have lunch afterwards and i said yes absolutely and i heard him speak and there was this voice within me that said oh it's you i i i know i'm supposed to be listening to you now i hope that doesn't sound very southern california woo-woo but we are in southern california and we have something to teach the world i'm happy to hear this but in point of fact it was on the east coast so uh it was in new york and so i i just said everything he's saying is is resounding within me i know this is right i know these principles are are accurate and i was fascinated by what he had to say and so we just started talking and we started working together very casually i mean he was still in philadelphia and he was doing a lot of work with john denver and so he would come into new york and he would come on the set of one life to live and we would start talking we would be talking in the makeup room about the show and people started gathering around and so i knew that other people were responding and they were hearing in a sense what i was hearing and he just started changing the way i was working and it was at that point in time where he said if you want to do something to make a difference i can support you to do that and so it was very kind of casually talking and working and friendship building up building a friendship in a relationship and then he met jonathan and they got together and that was in 1980 and then in 1981 robert came on one life to live and he and i got together and then we all started working together and then they had moved to aspen by this time and were coming into california a bit and then um i was auditioning for several different things when i first got into california and one of them was a show called you're the boss and um i wasn't gonna go in for the audition i was i was going up for three shows at one time and you have to put them in a particular order and one one of them was called staff of life one was called you're the boss and the other one was called command five and so i said i don't know which show to put in first position so i said okay staff of life we've all heard of staff of life you've all heard of staff of life right we've disappeared we don't have any idea where it is and so i said listen i put that in first position and i said i'm not going to go in for the year of the boss audition and i remember herb said to me what do you mean you're not going in for it and i said well you know i mean i've got the other one in first position he said you're not going in because you're afraid he said you get yourself over to that audition he said they're willing to accept you in second place you go to that audition and it was because of that that i ended up getting what became who's the boss well i think it's actually time for us to meet this family and let them speak for themselves since they're ringed around here watching thinking when can i talk about what i experience of that so we're going to take a very short break and when we come back we'll meet this fabulous family don't go away [Music] last night i met the most incredible girl so sexy the way she held her cigarette her clothes reeked of tobacco her fingernails were kind of yellow later we kissed it was like licking an ashtray and then she whispered the sweetest thing in my ear i think i'm in love hi welcome back to get used to it this is our holiday show as i indicated if it's not a holiday too bad it's a rerun so welcome back i'm uh i'm sheila kewl your fabulous host and we've been talking to judith light who is a wonderful actress and activist been very very very supportive of our community as i'm i know i don't have to tell you but mostly we've been talking about judith's family and now i want you to meet them because this is a family that i'm totally fascinated with first herb hampshire who has been is now um a manager and producer in tetrahedron productions about which we'll hear a bit more welcome herb very glad you're here me too and his lover jonathan stoller uh his partner i don't know we'll you'll tell me what what words we're using or actually herb is jonathan's partner you know whatever whatever jonathan is a financial manager of tetrahedron productions and a financial analyst you've met judith we've had a lovely talk so far in the first part of the show and this is judith's husband robert desiderio who's a wonderful actor and whom i love look at this group is this not a great group welcome herb let me start with you judith told us a little bit about your getting together but tell me a little about your life um pre-jl as it were um i grew up in iowa oh which is a lonely existence and um my uh i i was really odd man out in in my family and in my community uh and and so i have really always felt queer and i knew i was gay from the age of eight at least to the age of eight and but i felt queer in in the sense of being an outsider way beyond that um i was i was a good student uh i i liked to study you know um and um my literally my best friends were the ministers of my church uh those were the ones that i could dialogue with and talk to and borrow books from and discuss ideas with and then i read freud when i was 12 and loved it you know so uh that's very odd in iowa um but that's that's what i've always loved and that's why i became a psychologist that's why i became a professor um and when i met judith i was still a professor although i had begun to work a lot with corporations and i was working with john denver and traveling a lot and um working with john denver um in in terms of supporting his career well john and i were both on the advisory board of est that's where we we met and um when president carter appointed the presidential commission on world hunger john was appointed uh harry chapin really got that to happen and um i was um uh also on the advisory board of the hunger project as with john and so i became his uh sort of ally in reading stuff for him helping him formulate positions knowing helping to steer the commission from behind and stuff like that and and inevitably yes it became uh partly uh career input advice giving um and and they're somehow automatically when i know people uh the conversations start becoming about relationship about life about what works what doesn't work so with john as as with a lot of people i ended up talking about everything i'm so sorry you must be you must miss him i do i do i i we haven't been connected for a few years but uh yes it was his death was very sudden very tragic and uh hit everybody uh in a very powerful way i mean he was what what what is gone uh as a result of his death uh is is uh is sad it's upsetting uh but what's more upsetting in a way is that that in my estimation john never really got to own that side of him before he died he was he was in a process everybody else knew john's magnificence in a way much much more than he did and i wish for him that he couldn't he could have gotten there uh he was he was one of those people uh that uh i analogized so often with with being gay it's like i i always say that i always felt blessed to be gay because i knew what it was i i knew why i didn't fit in i knew what it was i had to come to grips with and i truly believe that everybody feels queer in a sense uh i i said i've i've had a a clinical practice for 35 years and i have yet to meet a human being who feels like they are the right stuff like they are exactly what their parents want them to be what they would want to be i i've never seen that person they if i ever saw that person i would expect them to walk on water i don't know you wouldn't trust him right exactly oh i've met plenty of people who think they think that's right said that it was um more difficult when you're you know in a sense when you're not queer knowing what to come out about is that is the the essence of your pain about your difference or whatever that's what i think it's so valuable for the straight community to look to to the gay and lesbian communities because that's where you can see some role models for people who know what they have to come out about and you can it helps you as well so you met through the hunger project we we met through an employee of mine who knew judith in new york and she was working in the new york hunger project i was on the board of the hunger project and and very uh active in in phil the philadelphia uh hunger project uh and so stanley said you you need to know this actress and as students said i said why and she he said i'm not i'm not sure you just said i did you know back in the days i've asked i just get it you know uh so i said okay so we met and and and we we had that kind of connection and uh and judith is um like a sponge i mean she she is uh she wants to hear she wants to talk she wants to learn she wants to deal with things she wants to understand more you know she told me a long time ago about how she wished that as a child she had gotten to stay in the temple and and study with the men and and that's always been my experience of her she uh she wants to to talk about deep things uh she wants to to delve and and i love that uh and and i always said um all i ever want from people is for them to make good use of me i always say use me uh because through my idiosyncratic process of growing up what i've spent my life doing is trying to figure everything out and reading philosophy and theology and psychology and all of that and and and i find people just absolutely infinitely fascinating i love people i love life and i really think that it is we can master it you know i think there are principles that allow us to master life and and and there are lots of approaches to that uh but you have to work at it you know and i've always said to people if they spent uh half as much energy in developing mastery of life as they do in mastering handball or tennis or goal for skiing their life would be magnificent well judith is one of those people that that really wants to and she does well it shines it definitely shines but also from from you jonathan when did you come into the picture i'll call this the picture i realized you had a full life before about two years after they met i met herb and uh actually my twin i have an identical twin brother and he met herb and they had a very powerful connection and he said to her you know i have this weird thing but who do you really need to meet is my brother and he kept saying that to her so herb came out and visited my family my biological family and it we instantly connected and have basically been together ever since um four months later we moved in together um so that's how we met now do you see this as your family just this year before yeah how did that come about i mean well let me just do it because herb wanted this to happen do you know what i mean well there wasn't four of us for one thing when i met herb i mean judith and herb were friends and they lived in different cities and uh we met and fell into a committed relationship instantly and moved in together and some months later i met judith and we connected and i loved her instantly and and then over time and then she met robert soon after that and over time we were working with them in an informal way uh and at some point it just became clear that we were getting more and more connected and and it formalized it and you know we became their managers and i ended up handling the finances i mean a lot of it just came together in pieces because whatever was needed next fell into place well actually it was interesting is jonathan he wasn't into finances before all this i mean he was but not in the way that he is now so there was a a piece missing in terms of we needed somebody we could really trust with our money and jonathan said well i'm willing to pursue this and to study this and see how this turns out so he filled i mean it was something that he was interested in but also it was a vacuum for us otherwise we'd have to look outside because the people that we've had in the past were fine but they just weren't you know that that soul that we well it's an interesting integration of the personal and and the work stuff now when did you come into the picture rob at the end of act 1. this is a big plot point not a bad entry point really in the fly i came involved and not one did not want to have to do anything with herman john like i told you i mean i was this kid from the bronx who uh the issue of them being gay wasn't an issue for me i mean i had grown up with well actually i grew up in college and stuff i didn't i never had an issue with people who were gay uh it was just when i said to judith he said well herb and jonathan are coming in let's spend some time together and and i said in my inimitable way i don't you want to talk that herb and jonathan talk meaning the stuff that was real so i would go around the corner and play video games at the arcade and we would talk harvin jonathan some of that deep stuff for you it's still a challenge for me um so i and it's been a process of literally just hanging in a lot of it's been very passive in terms of you know it hasn't been active but i haven't left i mean i've stayed uh and now i'm in the process of of wanting to turn turn that around and be more proactive which is very demanding for me um because i i didn't i didn't have the impulse that herb had to to meet with the the clergy and to read you know i would go down to the basement and read jules verne or something that without you know and not talk to anybody about it so that was a lot of my history now what made you want to be an actor uh i think i think one of the main reasons as i look back on it was it i was never talkative much i was never i'm not prone to sharing things in a circumstance like this it's a little different uh because you know it's tv it's a camera so i find that that sort of pulls me out a little bit the showman which is the good news and the bad news uh it was because i i i had something to say you know you get a script there's actually this word so you can actually talk and share something which is not your thoughts but it's someone else's so i think it was a way for me to come out of myself uh i mean the story i tell it was i was very shy and couldn't and didn't go to bars to meet with women that was that was not in me so one of the ways was to be involved in theater so you know all these pretty women in theater so it's like okay that's one way but i think the real the deeper didn't it i think the surprise when you beat this game right that was the unspoken part but the gay man was just wonderful i mean i i realized recently actually about a few years ago that most of the men that i knew that i were connected to were gay because they were willing to share and talk um and i and and herb said you need to get into a men's group and i and i resisted that for about a year or two and finally get into a men's group where there are i think there are one or two gay men in it but mostly you're straight guys and it's it was it's interesting experience for me to be around straight guys and to have a conversation and to be willing to push ourselves through that to talk about real issues i think well from what i hear this is this is an issue that's pulling straight men into a number of venues just to be able to talk i mean at the beginning of the women's movement 25 years ago we had the same problem i mean women were not supposed to talk to each other they were in competition uh they were non-verbal they were focused on men etc and so when women started getting together they were just like some of the new men's groups very clear rules about how we would speak to each other in order to take care of each other in order to make sure that we at least said something to one thing positive i mean very artificial uh rules that radical therapy stuff you know about giving strokes and you know how to give criticism and all that stuff and i think that straight men are starting to have the same experience because they're not encouraged to talk so in a funny way this is a this is a cross-cultural family uh in many ways i'm sure i don't want to just say straight and gay um do you think that i i don't want to make more of this than you think but herb do you think this is also i i see it as exemplary does this does this occur to you people don't usually live their lives to set an example but it's a good model i i think it's a wonderful model when actually the one of the things that's interesting you you introduced us as all being a part of tetrahedron productions um the the thing that i was talking about in the uh presentation i was making at bucky's world game that judith originally heard was my uh theoretical analogizing between bucky's geometry physical geometry and psychological reality and one of the things that that bucky talked about is that the smallest most stable unit of matter physical matter is the tetrahedron and so i always hypothesize that the tetrahedron which is essentially a relationship relating to a relationship would be the the most uh stable human societal structure now describe a tetrahedron a tetrahedron is a it's a pyramid that's based on that's built on a triangle so it's a triangular base and and uh then another point so there's four points and four sides but the but the pyramid instead of the usual configuration that we think of in egypt right has only three sides i shouldn't say only but has three sides correct and then the fourth side is whatever side it's standing on that's right and no matter how you turn it it's the same figure right right an equilateral uh tetrahedron it can be put on any side and it's always looking figure right [Music] so we are four points and and it's four points and four sides and and uh theoretically in a tetrahedron all points are equally connected to each other and each has a relationship with the other right so given the tetrahedron configuration does that mean that each one of you feels you have an independent relationship with each of the other three absolutely completely yeah now but was that harder kind of just not so hard sorry it's difficult i'm still working on mine all three of them yeah but but the the truth is that you have as much of a relationship with each of us as each of us does with each other yours is of a different nature uh our connections are powerful i mean you you resist you resist talking the herb and jonathan stuff uh but your connection with my experience is that my relationship with you is every bit as powerful as my relationship with judith uh it's just of a different nature one of the things that we've often talked about is that because robert is here and willing to hang in it's a very unusual position for a straight man to me i have a lot of respect for him for being willing to be in a situation and many times herb and jonathan have said to him particularly herb has said you have to understand that you are a model for the straight community off of your relationship with two gay men because it is an unusual relationship and that's to go back to your point about what we're talking about about this being exemplary i think each one of us in our own individual way is exemplary and as a group we are exemplary and i knew you wanted to say something about that too well basically that that i i think that everybody is an example of something what what makes anything or anybody exemplary is simply they're doing something intentionally and what we do is very intentional it's very conscious i mean we work at our relationships jonathan and i have worked at our relationship from the first minute i mean literally the first minute and uh and judith and i have and robert and we have sometimes uh against his will at a conscious level and but that's okay because that's part of the example but we're all committed to being together so as long as you're committed to staying in the game things are going to come up and if you don't leave the room you're in still in the game that's what i said to you before it's not this perfect thing that everybody goes oh god aren't they no no we're coming to your house for thanksgiving and we'll see the fights i'm just kidding we're not going to their house but it is a dynamic process we are adds so many extra levels i mean i'm sure that people watching the show are thinking you know but the primary relationships are really the you know the dualities or whatever and i what i experienced with the four of you is that is the case and yet there's also not just the work relationship but something beyond i mean you you you cook you eat dinner together you go places together you go on vacation together you i cook what is really exemplary is that the way robert was talking about jonathan coming into finances is the way that robert came into cooking robert did not come into the tetrahedron as a chef no judas is the one she's jude's the gourmet cook i didn't i didn't [Laughter] i would make minute steaks and you know milk cheese on it that's what i did right that's not the way we eat no no no but now he's found oh but see that's part of the growing thing too that i think i mean there's two things that go on here for me one is of course people claim that gay people don't have families that we don't form families and we know that that's a negative myth that really just kind of trivializes the work that we do together and and our found and chosen families and this is definitely one but mostly straight people don't have found and chosen families at least they don't admit they do they have nuclear families but if you have thanksgiving dinner and you invite all your friends over that's your chosen found family and often we feel more comfortable even you know with them so it feels like it's working for all of you straight people are are um are in a way this is a a curious phrase but in a way they are biologically trapped in in a sense that that they are procreating they have their children and uh when when jonathan was talking about his identical twin whom i met first uh when they had their first child uh roger and naomi they said oh it's not going to change our relationship and and we in a way had another little tetrahedron with roger and naomi and uh and and it's totally changed i mean they have two children and and we very seldom see them relatively uh and and they given their choice i think they would love to have a a a chosen family that goes beyond biology with us to a larger degree but the the the press the strain the stress the responsibilities etc of of your biological family um eliminates choice for most heterosexual people well and also that's not necessarily the most healthy relationship that you know that people have i mean i it wasn't until i was talking to you in the pre-interview for this jonathan that i began to to understand who your father had been in his relationship not only to you but to the whole sort of area will you tell us a little bit about him if you can sure my father was a psychoanalyst and a professor at ucla and a researcher he did a lot of work in gender identity and was actually an advocate of of gay not of gays per se but of he's an advocate of the scientific process and said that it can't be shown what makes people straight so how can people say that gay people are sick in any way because we don't know what makes people gay either they're just people acting out and living out sexuality so he was very adamant against the point of view that there's something wrong with being gay and he said there was there was absolutely no reason to expect that that that two gay people in a relationship were any more or less neurotic than any than straight people yeah but he uh and he was engaged in a pretty heated dialogue i suppose you might say with another researcher on yes with charles sacharides charles sacharides whose son richard is our liaison in the white house for our community yes so here's robert stoller your dad a researcher and gender identity with a gay son here's professor sacharides also a researcher very adamantly anti-gay his point is that you can fix gay people to make them you can yeah you can cure them things can be good richard is also gay right very interesting i love when stuff turns out richard and i are almost the exact same age it's very bizarre but your father was not how was his reaction when you came out to him he was very upset and didn't speak to me for three years which was very difficult and and yet it was it was an important part of our process in our relationship because it gave us an issue around which we could get into a deeper level of relating and he was i grew up straight so he was pretty floored by the fact that here i was moving in with a man committing myself to a lifestyle that is viewed as gay uh he thought it was a phase he hoped it was a phase well it's interesting because even when our parents are very good about these things it kind of throws them if they're going to have to deal with it in their own family well that's what happened he theoretically he was totally there and and he's very liberal in his thinking but to have his own son be gay brought up his own internal homophobia which was very difficult for him and and he got angry at me for shining a light in that area of himself he didn't say that but that was my observation and he also felt that it would invalidate his work because people would say he was defending his gay son right which was not the case because he didn't actually know i was going to turn out like this well it's interesting because all of you do have families blood families what is their response if any to this to this arrangement to this family parents adore them i mean they were so happy when i married robert and then when my fa it was very interesting robert was shooting a movie um it was last year and we were all planning to go to visit my parents in florida and so he ended up not being able to come but herman jonathan went with me and my father kept talking about my three sons my i my father i mean i don't remember what it was you were talking with my father about at the breakfast table it was we were talking about yiddish and and my i could see how moved my father was by him it was like he he finally had sons that i think he always wanted i mean in a sense he also treated me because i'm an only child and he gave me in a sense also what he would have given a son that i was not able to appreciate at the time but have been able to appreciate much more now seeing the way he relates to them uh they adore them i mean my mother's forever saying uh are they okay uh you know are they with you is everybody okay i mean it's a group it's a family there's no don't you think your parents experience some critique because you're always going to gay things i mean there must be some people in florida that say to your parents why is judith doing this she's at the great gay march he's at the gay dinner you know what is this people may not even be aware of that i don't drew although there's a lot of television about this now i i know but you know i have to tell you i don't think my i think if that had been said to my parents i think i would have heard i think my mother i think my parents would have said oh my god what are you doing when we said my mother taped the entire march for us and sent it to us she said oh you're going to be so excited and then when he called her last minute we said i'm going to be opening for hrc when the president's beginning i'll tape it up and was so excited my father said i i can't believe you turned out like this this is such a thrill for us we are we're so deeply moved by who you are and what you do and they have gay couple friends there were two women in their condominium in new york that they were really close with two two gay men two lesbian lesbian couple a gay male couple a couple of them i mean so i mean when i was on the cover of the advocate they were ecstatic i don't think they experienced that they took the tape of the hrc thing over to their friends and they all were having brunch and they all sat and watched the whole thing and i i think that the truth is that each of our biological families just simply accepts that this is our family i think what happens is people in their heads it's very strange and they don't know what to do and then they're with us and they they have a more heart connection they say oh yeah i get this i don't know what it is but but this feels good and so uh you know it's just it's just what it is well we we certainly have been saying recently that in our community we we feel we by virtue of some kind of oppression we've had to find other models because many of us get kicked out of our biological families or you know just have to find other models we can't marry etc and so i i think that we've been saying yeah maybe because of this we might have been pushed into it you know to have to find something different but because we have we might have something to teach about this well see that that's actually the point that i was going to make earlier when you ask me about the ways in which we are exemplary um i think that that every human being is is in a position to have to create new models because every life is a is a unique one and and we don't automatically operate in a way that demonstrates mastery over life but with when you're gay and when you're when you know you're gay when you're little you know that you've got you've got to figure it out you've got to find a way to be in this world and uh and if you you take that opportunity and are not oppressed by it but rather end up experiencing it as an opportunity you end up like the community as a whole has ended up as a result of aids we could have been done in by it just like we could have been done in by being gay uh we haven't we we have used that to stand on on top of it and and rise to another level and and and i am so proud of us as a people as a way as a result of the way we've responded to aids i think we've we've demonstrated who we really are now and that's what i think that that we have done i think that that they are so fabulous in being willing to look at a gay couple and say we want to use you as a role model you figured some things out obviously i mean we look at your experience you we know you figured some things out we want to use you as an example and and their willingness to be queer in that way is uh is is exemplary and and and inspires me and and and robert in in coming from where he comes from and and as he said at the beginning it's like uh we're not going to talk about herb and jonathan's stuff are we but the fact that that that you have been willing to participate and hang in there and do something that isn't automatic is uh i i think uh mind boggling and it's true and i was just gonna say that too about their relationship we watch their relationship and it's the best relationship that i have seen um and when i look at that and you said something to me before about i show up but i have something to say that i'm empathetic with the community and when i see that my family doesn't get to get married like we do that is very difficult for me now whether they want to do that or not doesn't make any difference to me doesn't it doesn't matter the fact that they cannot is what really deeply disturbs me it deeply disturbs me about our society and often who we pretend we are as people that we are open and willing and available to have everybody be the same and have everything well that's not true so that's how i feel driven to say something about that because they are in fact my family and they can't have a lot of the things that we have well it's interesting that you were brought together by this connection to buckminster fuller because when i was working at ucla advising student speaking speakers group they invited bucky fuller to come and speak and we got to have lunch with him because that's what the students did and so i was their advisor so i got to go and at lunch you know students they're all very sort of perky and they come with a little list of questions because this fabulous man they have to write down what they ask and one student said to him mr fuller could you describe your work and he thought for a minute and he said well i'm a person who driving along the road and i see there's a log across the road i stop i get out and i move the log and the students i think did not know exactly how to figure this out you know and yet in each of the things that you've said it seems as though i mean you you refer to working on things working with things working together though i think it everything shouldn't be work the point it's not just showing up for our community judith but the way i see you show up for each other well but we recontextualize work as i say work is like working on your tennis game this is fun it's alive and and and also i couldn't show up the way i show up if i didn't have their support every single one of them i would not be articulating the things that i'm articulating if it were not for them these are the things we talk about we're out of time i know it's hard to believe like the whole hour went already i want to thank you herb hampshire jonathan stoller judith light robert desiderio tetrahedron family is really what it is they say we have no families we're doing it for ourselves and i say to the country get used to it thanks for being with us [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you