Get Used to It: Ep. 53, "Voices of Our Lives: Virginia Uribe"

so what [Music] so [Music] hi i'm sheila cuell welcome to get used to it uh today we're doing what we've actually been doing quite often lately which is to bring you another in the series of voices in our lives uh what we'd like to do is to bring you sort of exemplary members of the community i see the one i'm interviewing today is smiling thinking me exemplary but she really is we're today we're going to visit with virginia uribe who is the founder of project 10 which started out as really a very small group of students gay and lesbian students who wanted to talk and see if there was some way that they could improve their lot at school and it grew into a project in a number of different high schools in the la unified school district to support and really empowerment i think of these youth but i'll let uh gina yuribi as we uh know her fondly uh tell you herself welcome to get used to it thank you very much sheila really glad you're here glad to be here there are a lot of projects like project 10 around the country now i think maybe not as old but sort of was like striking a match wasn't it well i think we're the oldest yes yeah and there are we get inquiries all the time from school districts that want to take apart at least of the model of project 10 and apply it to their own school district maybe they can't do the whole thing but they might do some part of it like training teachers or boosting their libraries or whatever so we're getting the word around well it's one of the most difficult places i think to get some kind of support or get any kind of agreement from administration or the powers that be that this is a good thing to do because i think there's this sense that uh if you can discourage gay and lesbian youth somehow by undermining them then they'll suddenly change their lifestyle and be straight and there's there's just been a lot of opposition well you know the homophobia underlying the whole youth issue gay youth issue is really very strong first of all i think there's been a kind of a feeling in education that if you associated gay people with young people there was sort of this picture of pedophilia surrounding it and i think that that discouraged a lot of gay people from becoming involved in work with youth and it certainly scared the non-gay population silly about the idea so that's that's one thing then i think there's another force that's very uh very strong and that is the idea and you mentioned it that unless you speak negatively about homosexuality you are going to somehow influence young people to become homosexual so the theory has always been you know if you're going to discuss gay subjects do them in a bad way make it sound terrible or else the kids will just be rushing up you know signing up so i think those forces have made it very difficult to work in the school system well i you look like everybody's grandmother or the teacher of everybody's dreams i mean or the lady on the sea's candy box i mean you are you wouldn't fit the stereotype of a wild-eyed gay radical activist um so i'm kind of interested as i am i think with everybody to to kind of draw out the threads and see how this all started where where did you come from where were you born and grew up actually i'm really a very traditional kind of person i was born and raised in pasadena lived in the same house practically my whole life and when i finally moved away i only moved two blocks away so i've lived in the same area my entire life i've only been in two schools in my whole life the majority of my teaching profession has been at fairfax high school and i in los angeles and i think that um i don't think of myself as a wild-eyed radical i sort of evolved into an activist without really thinking what was happening i got involved in this area in education with students who were totally underserved by the educational system and gradually as i became involved with them i found myself becoming an activist without really knowing it well it's accidental activism accidental actually i think it happens to a lot of us but when you were growing up what was your childhood like what did your dad do and your mom i had a very normal wonderful childhood i think uh well don't ask anyone to assess it for you i mean my parents were second generation italian uh we live with my grandparents we all lived together in a big house in pasadena my father had a service station for many years down in the center of los angeles near the olympic auditorium and one of my great thrills as i got a little bit older since i was always a tomboy one of my great thrills was that he was just a block away from the olympic auditorium and they used to have the fights on wednesday nights or whatever it was and so his service station had a big parking lot and we used to park cars for the fights and i got to go down there and direct with the flashlight oh i just love that so he was there he had uh station for 25 years and he became then he bought some service stations for what was at that time the flying a uh service stations and lived out his life doing that and my mother was basically a homebody although she did work for my grandfather as a bookkeeper but she was more or less at home and were they uh activists themselves in any way or my family they were democratic party activists and my grandfather was very involved in democratic politics and he used to know a lot of the politicians and we had big parties at our house my grandfather loved this country he was so proud to be part of this country and as a matter of fact he was a foreman of the grand jury which at that time was really something and someone criticized him because of his accent and i remember his answer was that you know they were born in this country but he chose to come here and he loved this country so i was raised with that kind of a feeling and a feeling of of justice people were entitled to their just do in this world and i think that probably did influence me a lot as i grew older and began to try and understand myself and the injustices that were perpetrated on gay and lesbian people what made you decide to become a teacher and what kind of a teacher did you become subject matter the question of how did i become a teacher well i went to immaculate heart college and i graduated in 1955 in those days if you were a woman i mean chances are you could only be a teacher or a nurse or a social worker those were the three things presented to us i had a relative who was a teacher and so i kind of found my way that an immaculate heart college turned out mostly teachers so it was a natural thing for me to go into and i loved science i got a very good science background there and so when i graduated i got a very good job as a science teacher so what what was happening to you at this time about whether you were a lesbian or not i mean i was pretending it wasn't i was pretending i wasn't a lesbian at this time i mean i i knew that what i had to do was get married and that would make me normal and if i just got married and had a family all this gay well i didn't even use the word gay and lesbian was so far from my vocabulary but all of these funny feelings would be gone if i just did this thing that was quote normal and i did meet uh another teacher at uh my first teaching position which was at marshall high school and uh we did get married and in those days you couldn't be in the same school if you you couldn't teach in the same school if you were married so that's how i happened to leave marshall and go to fairfax high school and uh we had some very nice years together traveling and enjoying life a lot but i was in internally i was really going through tremendous turmoil uh over this as yet kind of undefined in my mind as to what it was that was happening and finally after i had been married for many years really i fell in love with a woman and it was just like a bolt of lightning and i began to see what what indeed was my true self i mean making it sound very dramatic uh well i guess very dramatic in each person's life i guess it was very and you had children too and i had children i was involved at the time i got divorced i was involved in a very nasty custody battle over the issue and that i guess uh that was very painful and uh i guess that that also solidified kind of my idea on the injustices that that that one encountered if one really did identify so did did it come out in your custody battle or did you were a lesbian and did that affect your work i mean did the school know uh no the school did not ever know uh it only affected my work in the sense of you know it certainly got me off to track sure but uh no the school did not know um it did come out in the custody case i did retain custody of my children i had a very oppressive uh legal thing hanging over me where i was ordered by the judge never to be the presence of a woman alone in front of your child in front of the children and i lived with that for many years well that was not an unusual order to be made at the time as i look back on it now it was certainly not unusual i mean even in the 80s when i was practicing family law and you know representing lesbian mothers we sometimes the order depending not no longer right here in l.a but sort of around the edges the orders would be very similar that must have been very hard it was there was that was a very difficult time in my life yes so here you are you're a science teacher at fairfax high in the closet uh at least at school um did you have any kind of social social life or um support system at all not much as far as the gay community was concerned i actually became involved in the gay community because i thought i mean this is after all the custody things and everything else i thought well somehow i've got to come out to my children as i found out later they already knew it so i never did end up telling them anything that was unusual to them and i regret now not being honest with my children but i got into therapy because i tried to figure out a way to come out to my children and i was so isolated at the time i can remember the therapist suggesting to me that i go to some event it's funny how things stay in your mind i remember that there was a whitman brooks conference at the university of southern california was the first thing i ever went to that was a gay event and i was oh i circled around the block and circled around the block and just i was so afraid to go inside and then i went inside and i saw all these really nicely dressed well-groomed people intelligent looking people and i thought to myself well they're not nearly as funny-looking as my faculty in school so what am i afraid of but that those kinds of things you know really stick in your mind everybody's got they're circling the block story the circling the block that's right so whenever i hear that story i can really relate to it anyway as i became involved in the therapy process and the therapists kept telling me you know you have to get out you have to do this you have to lead groups you know push yourself out and then on occasion it happened and uh a judge at the time judge rand schrader asked me if i would be on a television program and that was another step in my coming out process you know and when i finally agreed to do that i realized that you know i would have to become more public this was all very new to me it's almost it really was a different life it's something i can hardly relate to now now was this before the group started no this was just this is what precipitated probably my ability to form that group was that i was at that stage and as i've described to a lot of people it's kind of like a cosmic circumstance i mean i was at that stage in my life and then an incident occurred at school where a young man gay young man was harassed out of school was a very nasty incident and one of my students who was gay i assumed he was gay came up and told me about it and he said you know do you think we could talk about this a little bit so i met with some students who were gay we met at lunch time they identified each other they they were all they were all having lunch too right out of there and they picked me right out of the crowd that's that's because i was so welcomed how do so we got to talking and that was really the beginning of project 10 and it was this sort of grassroots group that developed because of this one young person and we got to talking and then we began to meet on a regular basis and how many students came to the first well at first there were maybe eight or nine the first session but within a month there are 25 students that were coming were they all gay or less so well most of them identified as gay or lesbian and some were i don't know they were questioned there i think we'd say well when now we say questioning then they just sort of wandered in you know and so when that when i saw that it was getting so big and there was like you know a laboratory in front of me of these students who were very intelligent but not performing well and so on anyway i thought well i've got to talk to the principal of the school let's talk for a minute about the laboratory aspect that you referred to though before what do you mean exactly well you know i had done a lot of reading about gay and lesbian youth as a matter of fact i got my doctorate in psychology with the emphasis on adolescent homosexuality and uh i knew that there were certain characteristics of so so many young people who were struggling with issues of homosexuality and one thing was there were very many of them got involved in self-destructive acts many of them tried to commit suicide the rates were very high on that many of them did not perform to what their intelligence kosher would you would think that they would perform because they were having so many problems with their families and uh issues at school and being harassed and everything and then finally i'm talking to a group of students and i see all these things that i've been reading in a book are present really in these students that's why i say it was like i had a laboratory in front of me and so i got up my courage screwed up my courage went to talk to the principal and that was the third part of the cosmic experience i happened to find the only principal i think in the lausd that was okay with the issue and he he said you know i explained to him about these students about how we were meeting and what had been the catalyst and so on and he's and i said you know i thought that there was a great gap in the educational system for these students they were really underserved and he said uh he said you know i'm not gay my wife didn't even say he wasn't gay himself he said i don't know very much about gay issues i don't know much about the problems of gay youth but we are public educators and our job is to try and meet the needs of all of our students and if this is an area that that is not being met then then we ought to do something about it so as i say i was very lucky to have him and he stood behind me he stood uh he backed up the program he said he would support me he did do so he took all those first telephone calls that came in including one from jesse helms's office who had gotten wind of it and wanted to know if there was any federal money in this program so he said no there's no money that's what i said i said there's hardly any money at all so but my warren steinberg my principal took all those phone calls and he just kept repeating that we were public educators and that we had a duty to all of our students so that was very fortunate he gave me some good uh nuts and bolts advice about getting people in within the district you know high up within the district to to sign on to this program so that if it was attacked which it was later on that there would be some backing from the district and uh he suggested that i kind of develop a model that could be replicated in other high schools and basically that's what i did and what has happened why did you have to talk to the principal what was necessary about it instead of just meeting with students at lunch can't they just get together and talk the students could have gotten together at lunch and talked and we could have just continued on that level i felt that i felt i needed to talk to the principal because i needed to somehow structure this begin to develop a structure that could extend beyond the group like i could see that one of the things was that there was a real lack of sensitivity on the part of the staff and so there had to be some mechanism for training and sensitizing the staff the librarian knew nothing about any gay affirming literature there had to be as a matter of fact in those days there was still some really terrible stuff in the library sure so we had to begin to approach that there were issues of harassment all of the students spoke about being harassed it was almost universal if not overt harassment and there was a lot of that but subtle kinds of statements that were made that were very demeaning so i thought well there has to there seem to be so many fronts that this led to that i thought that we had to structure it in some in some form and that was really why i went to talk to the principal and maybe i just had to do it to maybe for myself well certainly you had to have some cover too i mean so i didn't think of cover at that time but maybe just you know the kind of energy that that you get when you're in your mid-50s and suddenly you come out you know you you developed this uh well i wasn't quite in my mid-50s yet but i was 50 when all this started and i had been closeted to one extent or another for most of my life so i had this boundless kind of energy and i had to channel it in some way and i don't know i guess maybe i had to talk to the principal just to let him know what was happening and to to get his read on it but and he suggested you better get some support from the district well he was very supportive himself but he suggested that you know if what i had in mind was to try and structure this and he said if you're going to try and structure this program here you want to develop something that can be replicated at another school because he said you can't be taking all the telephone calls you know from all over the district he said this is a program that if will be necessary to have on every campus if we can get it so in order to do that you have to have the backing of the board of education somehow so you went to the board no i really didn't go to the board but i did have a friend on the board jackie goldberg and so i explained to her what was happening she thought it was a great idea and she said that she would support me as much as she could and the board our district has always been committed to the concept of diversity jackie made sure that diversity included gay and lesbian students and i think jackie was such a strong force herself that she was able to be persuasive for the other board members to go along with it well it was very important for i mean she was the first i think open gay or lesbian person she was not uh openly lesbian at the time she was elected that's right she wanted to wait till her right right but she was certainly an advocate she was i mean whether she was open in her own mind yeah i mean she was definitely an advocate and she and we all know jackie to be a very strong person and she was able to talk to the other board members and say you know these are these are our students these are our young people we want to keep them in school we don't want them blowing their brains out you know we want to do what we can and and her arguments were persuasive and and certainly correct so it became pretty much more public i mean other schools heard about it and i guess the right wing heard about it as as it became more public uh the my enemies heard about it also i found out that they were my enemies at the beginning i was very naive about this but as it became more public the people who were opposed to programs like this also became more public and they began to organize and it took them about three years to really seriously organize talk about what they did they um and even who they were i mean well the my uh my most vocal opponent was reverend lou sheldon of the traditional values coalition organization here in anaheim and i had heard that he was he was sort of tracking me somebody told me that his newsletter said things like there's a sodomy class going on at fairfax high school and so i knew he was tracking me but you know never got beyond that and so i didn't think very much about it then i found out that he um had connections with marion lafollette who was an assemblywoman out in the valley and she was on the assembly education commission a committee in sacramento and she and some of her supporters tried to block all of the funds that were going to come into the los angeles unified school district which are in the billions if we didn't stop this little teeny weeny program and the way i found out about it was that some reporter jerry gilliam was his name called me from sacramento and said did you know that this is happening in the assembly i was totally stunned i mean i pick up the telephone at the counter at fairfax high school there's this reporter telling me that this thing is happening in the assembly education committee so when that occurred of course it was a huge furor in the district and the the right wing demanded uh open hearing and so we had an eight-hour open hearing here in l.a here in los angeles at the board of education chaired by jackie goldberg that must have been a problem i mean jackie was great and they tried to have a pro and a con speaker you know all the way through the day but there were very many more pros than khan speakers and ultimately they you know the district stood behind the program and that was uh that was pretty much the end of the really vocal opposition i mean there wasn't anything they could do about the program it existed but they continued to snipe at us in their newsletter and they still do to this day most of the right-wing organizations uh say nasty things about project 10. so when you were growing up did did you ever think you would turn out to be a hero i never thought i would turn out to be a hero i still have trouble thinking of myself as a hero to be perfectly honest with you i um you know i was just a little kid during world war ii but to me the heroes were the fellows that jumped out of the airplanes in the middle of the night behind enemy lines uh you know around d-day not knowing what was going to happen that to me is a heroic thing this never impressed me as being a heroic thing it was just something that that had to i just became involved in it before i knew what was happening but at any given time there's a risk isn't there it's i well of course there's a risk i really never thought of the risk very much and i was so enraged when finally uh when the right wing did attack me uh the the statements that they made i mean i thought i was out there doing really good things trying to keep kids from killing themselves and the my opponents are out there saying oh you know these are a bunch of pedophiles and they they're just all sodomites and they just want to you know corrupt all the young people and you know make them all into homosexuals they want to make up for the losses that they're having through aids i mean they were saying just these terrible things and i guess it just got my italian up i couldn't stand that when i heard that i mean there was just no backing off at that point you know it's interesting to me gina that the a number of the national organizations and i think a lot of the state gay and lesbian organizations have started focusing recently on on youth uh and that really sort of meant a couple of things to me one is sort of the lives of youth what it's like because we all kind of remember but it's it's different than i think it is now because now that young people can be out a little more they feel a little more support or i could be wrong it creates more difficulties for them because they are out and people have consciousness about it and they have to deal with issues around um sort of the visibility of it so it's kind of a good thing and a bad thing and the other thing is i think there's some concern about who's going to come along behind us and run the movement and so you find things like you know youth colleges and queer lobby day and it's um it must be a very different world for them what do you what do you see in the young people that you work with still i mean i know you're retired but we'll talk a little about that later because i don't think you're really retired well i see a lot of different things first of all i do see the students that you're talking about who are experiencing an entirely different thing than i ever experienced or you ever experienced it's a different time there's also a part that's one type of student there's also i think still a large part of the youth gay lesbian population that is suffering the same kind of alienation that existed even when i was young i mean they may have more access to information but they may not even be aware of that access and the young people that are like in small communities they still suffer the same kind of alienation then and i get phone calls about this all the time so even though we do have a group of we do have a whole youth movement in the gay lesbian bisexual transgender community and it's wonderful i'm not worried at all about what's going to come after me because i see young people that have more courage i mean when i was 15 or 16 or 17 i couldn't even say the words and here they're out there they're going to sacramento they're on the internet they're starting up all kinds of groups and support groups so i don't worry about what's coming there i think there will be leadership i do still worry about what i think is the majority of the kids that are still lonely and still suffer a really really isolated existence what kind of phone calls do you get well just last night i got a phone call from a therapist who was working with one of her trainees the trainee had gotten this student referred to him 14 year old student struggling with the issue of whether or not he was gay he didn't know really how to talk to the therapist he had no now the therapist interestingly enough thought that he was really on track and could talk to the young the 14 year old i mean he didn't think he was bothered by the subject at all but as i was hearing the story i could see that the therapist didn't know what to ask or really how to relate to the student but the young man was totally disconnected from anything that we would call the gay culture i mean he had no concept of books or you know he might have seen some things on television and maybe that will have an effect on a long in a long range but still here was a young person that was i think very much at risk for doing some self-destructive acts and here here's this young 14 year old right in the center of los angeles but still far far far away and uh don't well i i don't have to say to you don't forget and it's like i'm preaching to the choir but that's a big choir out here though but you know they don't have any connection with their family that that is the biggest rift of all is that they're they're a minority in their own families so they don't they can't talk to their mother they can't talk to their father they can't talk to their brothers and sisters and you know at the beginning at least uh you know about some of the torment that they're going through so for them the isolation is the way it always has been now is it really sort of out of being a teacher that you care about these kids i mean i i guess in a way you want to take it for granted well i'm a teacher i care about kids but you know we all had a lot of teachers growing up and you said yourself well i went to uh this college you know was a women's college and so many of us became teachers you made it sound like it was sort of the next thing to do not really a passionate avocation i don't this is uh what i what i heard may not be the you know the fact um but you have devoted your life i mean your adult life really uh in teaching to to our kids and it's it's just interesting to me because it's it's not something that everybody has done even if they see a problem they don't they don't wrestle with it and they don't stand up about it um and i know you felt a connection because you and i both know what it's like to you know be in the closet and be scared and remembering what it was like to be a student but why do you care so much about them well i think by nature probably you know i had to have some feeling for young people or i wouldn't have gone into teaching and i think that uh on one level had this never happened to me this part of my life i mean i think i would have been a good teacher and i would have continued to probably improve myself as a science teacher and who knows maybe get some awards as a science teacher because i had a good background in science and that was my life and i was very happy in teaching this tapped something else when this happened this tapped something else and yes it became my life i can't tell you why it did it was an accumulation of all the things that had happened to me i guess in my own life and what i could relate to and it was a way that i saw that i could make an impression that maybe no one else could or that i could do it in a way that that was uniquely mine well you may have saved a lot of lives well i i i hope so i mean what i saw was such pain i mean when i began to it was one thing when i was studying this it was one thing to have my own experience because my own experience was my own and i had to deal with it myself it was another thing to read about these experiences in books you know the statistics on youth suicide it was still another thing again to actually begin talking to these young people what would the dream world look like for sort of the the programs provided by a perfect school district well i not to be simplistic but i guess that if i if my dream would come true it would simply be that gay lesbian or sexual minority youth would be able to take their rightful place within the school population they would be able to be themselves they would be able to socialize in a normal way they'd be able to go to their dances they would be able to talk about their experiences in class without having to worry about what someone would say you know they would be affirmed by the adults around them they would live in a democratic society in the real sense do you think students are protected at schools now um i mean i guess what i mean is that the relationship between having a project 10 at a school let's say there is a group and it meets does that really mean that the kids are protected at school i think that having a project 10 well let me see how i can award that the greater the level of awareness that happens in a school the safer the school becomes so that i think fairfax high school for example is now a fairly safe school for a gay kid because not only do they have a project 10 but they have a faculty which is you know knows that your ruby has been around you know i mean there's a level of awareness so that anybody knows that if they say something they shouldn't say if they make a derogatory comment a pejorative comment they know that there's going to be someone there to you know bring them up short it's become such a natural thing around fairfax that you know we can put up a display case for the last few years that i was there i had a display case that was up for months nobody ever touched it or made a bad comment or anything like that so i think that the more awareness that develops the better the school becomes does that mean that things don't happen things still happen i mean homophobia is still present well you have a new generation every year coming out of the middle schools are there programs at middle schools we have not as formalized but we do have a lot of programs we have a lot of point people and we have material that goes into the middle schools it's a little harder in middle school because the kids are not as articulate about defining themselves yet but it's certainly necessary i mean basically we feel i feel we all feel that this education has to start right from elementary school we have to start an elementary school with dealing with issues of respect for one another and differences differences in families differences in people no name calling those are things that start right at the beginning and work their way up in a way by the time we get them in high school sometimes it's a little too late when you talked about a safe environment or not fully safe environment there's a question that i think comes up sort of pedagogical question or at least in terms of the teaching environment for all kind of minority youth including i think in college and that is whether it's better for us to have a program of our own a safe place a cocoon if you will or whether it's better if if it's a choice to be integrated in everything should there be a gay and lesbian student center that's where all the kids you know hang out should there be a gay and lesbian prom instead of having to take your same-sex partner to the prom i wonder if you have an opinion about that i think that both approaches are very good i think it's good to have some kind of a a special place for a group and it's also very necessary for the group to be integrated we don't seem to have any problem with the black student union existing at school and yet black studies or whatever are integrated at the same time so i think for identity purposes and strength it's very important to have a special group but i think it's equally well probably more important for it to be integrated it's great to have a project 10 group but it's certainly equally if not more valuable to be able to have gay lesbian issues discussed in english classes political sciences for there to be a free and open forum for the discussion of issues around these kids so i don't think it's one or the other and as far as the gay prom is concerned that's kind of interesting because many students are opting not to go to the gay prom anymore they feel comfortable going to their own proms so that may become a victim of progress too and how about a whole separate school don't we have a separate school in the district we have a separate school in the district but the separate school is really a special needs school that is for students who and it's not a large school it's more an alternative school with maybe 40 students that is for students who absolutely cannot function in the regular mainstream environment and we have other schools like that in our district but the population of that particular school is it called the um it's called eagle center eagle center lesbian students i think they have to be 14 years of age and it's uh targeted to gay lesbian transgender students but it's really open to anyone but the population that it serves is really the gay lesbian transgender population these are kids who cannot they either have terrible interruptions in their academic background they can't function in school they have been harassed to the extent where they're not going to school they are cross-dressing or something where they bring on such harassment that they can't function or they're sick and they can't go to the regular school so it's a really a special needs kind of environment and for that i think it has a purpose do i think that it takes the place of a regular school no i think it's much more important that students that we that we make our schools sensitive so that our our sexual minority youth can attend a regular school you um you retired recently i i i saw this with a smile we're both laughing about it by which i guess we both mean you're not teaching full-time i'm not teaching full-time my partner who is at hamilton high school has now taken over coordinating project 10 for the district so what i'm doing is i'm acting as a consultant really when i retired they got two for the price of one because now you know i'm on the phone all day and also we're developing a project 10 website that is um not for students not that it's secretive it's just that the target group for the website is teachers counselors administrators people that need the kind of advice that i think we can provide for them just based on the experiences that we've had so i'm going to be spending a lot of time on that so you're kind of a one-woman question i mean answer uh answer machine when you say you spend a lot of time on the phone i'm just imagining people are they care about this young man he's apparently gay he's very lost he's at their high school they think i'll call virginia uribe that's exactly how a lot of the phone calls come from teachers or they're from teachers they're from counselors sometimes they're from parents not often from parents but they're from teachers counselors principals i get a surprisingly large number of phone calls from elementary school principals what would they say well usually in elementary school the thing that brings them to call me is because the young person is being harassed very effeminate boy a very masculine girl the students are picking on them the teachers don't know what to do the parents are screaming they want the schools to change the kid the administrators don't know what to do and so they say call virginia read me that's a typical kind of phone call that i get from a from an elementary school but those are the kinds of calls i get a lot of people i find are very well meaning i don't really get very many phone calls anymore from the haters because they wouldn't bother calling me i get calls from people who are well-meaning but they just they're very awkward in their mind the issue of homosexuality is so distant in their mind that even though they try to understand they still think of these kids as being from another planet and so you know i try to encourage them to use their the regular techniques that they would use in counseling to work with these kids and so that's what a lot of the conversations are about a lot of the conversations are just gab sessions you know what do i do and we just start talking about how you might play out a certain thing do you have a next project in mind or uh i mean not that you don't have enough work just answering the phone and being the consultant but is there something further you'd like to see happen that you want to be involved in well we um and when i say we understand my partner and i have made an application for a grant that if we get it we think is the next step and that is this the major stumbling block that we have in all of our efforts in the schools is the fact that the administrators are reluctant to go along with it either they're afraid or they're afraid of parents or whatever so even though we produce and distribute maybe 800 packets of information every year during june gay awareness month we send packets of information to all the elementary middle schools and high schools posters lessons you name it it's in this packet and it's all approved by the district every single thing is approved by the district most of those packages end up in the wastebasket because the principals are afraid to act they're afraid to deal with a controversial subject so anyway we have put in for a grant where we would like to do a series of workshops for high school and middle school middle school principles we feel that that's the next step and we think we could get the backing of the district to support this if they didn't have to pay for it they would at least support us in trying to do these sessions we think if we could break down that stumbling block of the administrators make it a lot easier for materials to be circulated in school would make it a lot easier for teachers to use the materials because the teachers are still afraid so that's that's what i have my sights set on for the next couple of years you know it was it's so interesting to me gina because i when i first got into the state assembly um willie brown appointed me to the education committee and the year that i was elected 94 was the same year that um a number of new republicans who were elected uh were brought specifically out of uh sort of the extreme right end of the republican party and what we would call the right wing and they all clamored to be on the education committee and it seemed to me i sort of had a dawning understanding that this is the battleground for these ideas uh and i i i think it's sort of as the twig is bent so grows the tree notion for each student but to also control the content of really what we would pass on as the truth i mean what is it that children must learn and i understood there were kind of two different things in there the subject matter that they learned what did they learn in science in math and language but the other struggle was about how much they would be allowed to think for themselves be creative be who they were even if that was different and how much they would be not allowed to be creative and think for themselves but to learn what was taught to them and to understand there was a norm to which they should adhere and it was this giant struggle um maybe not cosmic so much because after all it is just the government but this notion this larger notion of the struggle over education and to me that's what you've really been engaged in i'm not sure if it ever looks that way from the inside but i mean why the right wing was so focused on this particular well the right wing loves all things sexual and okay and there they want to be on the education committee because they want to get involved in issues like sex education things that touch upon abortion and homosexuality is of course one of their other big battlegrounds so yes we are right in the middle of it yes that things that have to do with set well i don't even want to put this i don't want to put the project 10 program or the whole subject of homosexuality even in the context of sex that's not the way we do because that's not the way we define it that's just the way they define it but that is where the struggle is uh all things connected with that most of the censorship goes on in connection with that and so we are right in the middle of it well it's a serious expression of individuality i mean it's not certainly the only one but a person's sexuality so it's so central to their individuality but you know there were other things too i mean the arts for instance which are not totally the province you know of gay people but certainly we have been involved in the creative arts partly it's been more tolerant atmosphere but also you know when they started doing away with art classes and music classes and all of those things that had anything to do with creativity it seemed to me it was kind of connected like let's keep you from being proud of who you are or what you are and let's you know see if we can't keep you all on the literally on the straight and now i think the more that that you can close down free and open discussion the more you can control people and i think that there is certainly an element of our population that wants to do that but we're not going to let them do that if we can help it so do you feel like your life's been a success i feel that i have gotten everything anybody could want in life i have a wonderful family a wonderful partner i have a great reward in teaching and i have something that i i think i've been able to do that is unique and what more could anyone want you uh you have three children i have two children two children and two grandchildren and are they proud of you i mean do they have a sense of what you've accomplished oh i think that they are proud of me it's funny to think that our kids and grandchildren should be proud of us because normally we're going to be proud of them but you know after a while you do no i think that they are and uh and that gives me uh because i'm very open with my grandchildren i will not make the mistake with them that i made with my own children when they were young and i find that they're very uh i don't even want to say accepting i mean it's just this life for them and they they have no problems of course they watch things on television that i mean that are defined for them even more than i could so no i think that my grandchildren are proud of me my children are proud of me and that makes i mean what more could anyone want well i i think it's i think it's wonderful um i wonder uh have you been asked to help other school districts start projects like project 10 yes well we do do that kind of consulting right that's what i say well i mean i get phone calls from all over the country and the majority of them are in california but no i get phone calls from all over the country and then there are other organizations that have started you know as a result of the opening of the dialogue that we did there are other organizations that have started that are now serving the country also and so that's been a great help do we do you find the same kind of programs in in colleges or do you think there's not as much of a need no in college the there generally is a gay and gay student alliance in college um i think the need that exists in college is different and that is that the people who are being trained to go out in the different fields need to be made aware and sensitive to these issues well we've had a lot of dialogue lately about teacher training uh partly because in california we uh have now had this class size reduction movement so that in the first three grades and i think starting next year in the eighth grade as well we're going to have you know vastly reduced classes which means vastly increased need for teachers which means we've been giving a lot of emergency credentials to teachers and talking a lot about teacher training is there anything in teacher training now that has to do with this kind of diversity sensitivity there are things in teacher training programs that say the word diversity but to my knowledge when the word homophobia is put in there with diversity it doesn't pass the state legislature very easily so i think that there will be teacher training programs that will include gays and lesbians in their concept of diversity that's going to be on an individual basis and that's where we still have a lot more work to do well it's interesting to me the one thing i mean one of the things we talked about being so proud of in america is our diversity right we have diversity of immigrants uh you know your your grandparents from italy my grandparents from russia and germany uh and everybody's grandparents from somewhere else certainly in our generation um and we're proud of that and yet when i bring a bill that has to do it even i think was about sort of gender discrimination in schools had nothing to do with gay and lesbian kids but i had the word diversity in there and uh lou sheldon showed up and said you know well that's a code word for for homosexuality as though as though diversity itself is suspect which i guess in a way it is to them well it is to lou sheldon but to the general population i i mean diversity is becoming more and more inclusive of different groups and as a society i think that we're at a state where we can encompass many groups but homosexuality or homosexuals as a group is still difficult for society to accept well and this is i mean the the school is kind of the place where you first come in contact with others i mean your your home is your home and they're mostly like you and you learn one thing and then there's your neighborhood and a lot of that is mostly like you too whatever it's like so the school becomes the place where you really need to learn about this stuff and i think that's why it it is most important uh in in the whole structure if you were to give advice right now to teachers new teachers especially what would you say to them i think that the most important thing for teachers with regard to the issue of gay and lesbian youth which is what we're talking about is that they must examine their own biases and i have a test on examining biases which will be on my website which they all should plug in www.project10.org starting in august and they should take this test because i think people are not aware of their own biases whether you're gay or non-gay i mean people might be aware of the stuff on the surface like don't say the word okay they're at that level they can understand but the more subtle things like keeping everything invisible when you can bring up a subject in an appropriate fashion those kinds of things teachers need to that's what they need to do they need to examine their biases face them and see how they can overcome them and move on virginia uribe the hour has gone by it pretty much flies by doesn't it thank you very much for spending this hour with us i mean i pleasure admire your work so very much and um i'm glad to let everybody else know about it as well and glad that you were with us uh probably a lot of you grew up gay or lesbian and wondered in high school why you were so amazingly different and now you wish you had virginia uribe at your school and as your teacher because then you would have had somebody who's saying to the whole system get used to it see you next time [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you