Get Used to It: Ep. 65, "Changing Public Perception"

what [Applause] [Music] so [Music] hi welcome to get used to it i'm sheila kuhl your host or hostess and we are here again to talk about an issue of interest and concern uh in the gay lesbian transgendered bisexual community and for all the rest of you because inclusiveness is what we're about today i wanted to explore a topic that is a little unformed i think in the american consciousness because it's so deeply embedded in everything we do and see and that is how do we intentionally work to change public opinion or to create public opinion to craft it we kind of think about advertising we think about campaigns but i wanted to talk today to our guest to see how it is in the broadest sense we come to these conclusions people seem to feel better and better every day about the gay and lesbian community in some aspects in other aspects not so my guest today is pacey markman who is a partner in zimmerman and markman here in los angeles an advocacy firm that works on political campaigns initiative campaigns advertising issue um advertising or you know opinion development all of those things and for the past almost 10 years pc's been a partner um with bill zimmerman in this firm welcome pacey thank you it's nice to be here really good for you uh to be here and i i wish that i could craft this question much more uh strictly so that we would kind of understand it but i'd kind of like to just really sort of jump in and and explore um your role really and how you see it uh in kind of you know the end of the 20th century and everything we're doing to try to develop public opinion about our community so let me start way back not too way back for you but the way i usually do where where did you grow up i grew up in baltimore um the 40s and 50s and baltimore is a very strange city because it's a it's we think of it as a northern city but it had a lot of southern attitudes and a lot of southern practices and when i was growing up it was a segregated city and so does that inform or has it informed i mean always where and when and how we grow up does but how did that kind of inform what you decided as a kid you wanted to do with your life well i don't think i knew early on what i wanted to do but i was aware very early on thanks to my parents who are very politically conscious and socially conscious that there's something wrong at the very heart of the society that i was growing up in for example there was a intersection in downtown baltimore there were four department stores at the intersection and when i was growing up my father pointed out to me that blacks were allowed to go into the department store and to buy in the department store but they weren't allowed to try on bathing suits or hats and they couldn't use the elevators they had blacks had their own movie theaters and i don't know exactly how it happened but i became very conscious that this was wrong i remember once we had we were poor but i had a rich aunt and she had a maid and my rich aunt ruth would go to ocean city for the summers and she would not take her maid there because as bad as things were in baltimore ocean city was this far from the civil war and so um this woman who we called lidgy would would come to our house and one day i was about three or four years old i said to her um you're my slave you know and i who know but i didn't know any better and she looked at me with a lot of love and she said honey none of us are slaves anymore and at that moment i can't i can't explain i just thought you know i've crossed some line and became very aware of the relationship between whites and uh and blacks and by the when i went to i was in i went to college in baltimore and i went to graduate school at the university of rochester from an incredibly northern city you know about as far north as you get and it was amazingly segregated in the 60s early 60s african-american african-americans couldn't buy a house they all they lived in a ghetto and i got involved with the congress of racial equality [Music] and became a strategist for them i had never done strategy on how we and we were working at that point in trying to integrate the construction union in rochester and we didn't do a very good job but that was the first time i began to say well this is interesting this is something because i could see that i had some sense of how you motivated people and where the weak points were in an opponent's argument that was a battle i was bringing to the table but it's really sort of the beginning isn't it i mean really those two things are really the essence of of a whole industry in terms of public opinion i mean it's how do you motivate people to do or not to do something and where the other side is pushing to motivate them as well how do you reveal um the the weaknesses as you put it in in their argument now you hadn't thought you were going to be working in public relations or advocacy or whatever no i was a math i was a graduate student in pure mathematics i was going to be a i don't know a professor and play logic games and early on in that two-year period i realized i didn't want to do that what i really thought i wanted to do at that point was to be a lyricist so i got a master's degree left went to new york and there were not a lot of jobs for lyricists at that time and through a series of moves most of them created by dire financial need i wound up working in advertising in the city and i was good at in just a regular advertising advertising i worked the first the first campaigns i worked on were for the telephone company in new jersey and tanqueray gin and within a real short period of time i was doing advertising for coca-cola and other products and then in in the early 70s i created the the campaign that launched miller lite and i wrote the line everything you always wanted in a beer unless and i guess i'm you know i i think that if there's any penance or atonement i'm not directly responsible for the great argument of the late 20th century does it taste great or is it less filling but overall working in mainstream advertising over a long period of time doing ads that moved people to get their muffler changed and and um or to drink one soft drink or another um i i do feel i'm partially responsible for the death of the adjective in the late 20th century words like new improved excellent terrific have no meaning anymore in our conversation because of what we did in advertising and so that was what i was doing so what might be difficult to sort of wrap up given all of your uh experience since but what what are were the early lessons for you in in product advertising about just the two things that we were talking about what motivates people and i guess in product advertising you don't have a direct argument with the other product but it there must be a way to show either why their argument is flawed though you wouldn't call them arguments i guess with products i don't know that we approached it that way um if you just let's just talk about television advertising for a second you think about the nature of television people watch television to be entertained they don't watch television to be informed it's just not where their head goes and those people who watch television vision to be educated watch public television where there's up until recently has been no advertising and the so people are watching these programs and you come on with an ad for anything an aspirin a car a beer a candidate an issue you're interrupting their entertainment you have to cr you have to reach that person in my opinion in my experience in an emotional way that's entertaining you have to stay true to the form of the medium in which you're working the rules are slightly different when you're doing newspaper advertising but it's television in my lifetime that has been the primary way we reach people and in order to reach people on television you have to reach them in the by using the medium properly so the first lesson i learned was that whatever i was working on whether it was a ballot initiative or and and i'll talk a little bit you know we can talk about that or whether you're selling a product you have to remember that you have to remember what is what what the medium is that you're using and why people are watching it so since we're primarily using television even now you're it seems as though you're saying the the primary way that we get people to move from one thought to another and maybe there's a change of opinion involved is through entertaining them when i yeah but i'm using entertaining in a very very broad way uh terms of endearment made you cry terribly but it was entertaining i'm not we see we hear the word entertainment and you think that i'm just talking about laughter i'm just talking about the big mistake that people in my business make and and people in general make when they use television is they believe that they're that they have to enter their heads and you know create some dialogue in the brain the truth is people are moved by by by what happens below the neck and the best of television advertising whatever it's for reaches people below the neck that's what i mean by entertaining it's it's emotional and that sometimes the emotion is anger and sometimes it's sadness and often it's laughter but people don't turn on television and you know you see a lot of political ads today and they'll just be running a lot of type or they'll show you newspaper headlines well the truth is not a lot of people read newspapers and they sure don't turn on television to read newspapers so you have to respect the the nature of the medium that's just that's the first rule of trying to move people for whatever you're trying to do and also it seems like it sort of bypasses the head in a way it's very it's visceral i mean the because television is a medium of images more than anything else seems to me that what we see gets in faster than what we hear because we have to process that but we don't process what we see so the visual is very important it's become with music videos with all of the rapid cuts that we see in movies it's become even more important seems to me to make certain that the visual sends the message right away there used to be a you know there are all kinds of rules in advertising and every one of them has a hundred counter examples but one of the first rules was in television you have about two or three seconds to grab somebody visually it is a visual meeting um i was as you were trying i was thinking that back in 1978 when the briggs initiative was on the ballot here in california i was not out at the time i was sort of in what i've come to discover was a glass closet i thought i was in a closet but everybody knew i was gay and i was very concerned this wasn't the no on six campaign and i went to i got to david mixner and i said through a mutual friend and i said i would do the advertising for the campaign on the condition that i didn't have to go to a lot of meetings and that at that at that time for that campaign we're actually able to get the work done for free there was the the concern in the community and what we can i know we're going to talk about what has changed in 20 years but there was there were enough people who could do production who helped us out but the message that um we went with in that campaign the message i came up with i i put on the screen and we did do advertising people forget that we spent several hundred thousand dollars in advertising i found a straight teacher in uh san francisco and i put her head up in her hair in a bun to make her look just like your second grade teacher and she talked about how terrified she was by what this initiative might do to her how she could be fired for what she thought and what she said in the classroom and if she's even though she wasn't gay if she felt it was okay for them to be good teachers that was an example of taking of of respecting the medium and and you could feel her her her fear and she was afraid she was telling the truth how did you get from coca-cola to the briggs initiative um i was out here i was the creative director of a big agency out here and it was that you know there's there there had been in me from the time i was growing up this sense of if something's wrong i'm supposed to try to do something to fix it i don't always do that and i'm not i'm not the dalai lama you know but this was a case where um as uncomfortable i might as i might have been at the time with my with coming out i knew this was wrong and i knew that i had skills that i that i could bring to it because i've been doing advertising that people saw on television at that point for about 12 years or 13 years and i and it was just that simple i just dove into it because it's it needed to be done what um have we found a lot of people in our community who who did this i mean that one of the differences in our community is that we we've had the resources and we've kind of had people already in place because we could be in the closet and so we would perk along in our own little careers and suddenly have an epiphany about this and and but already be at some of these places although i'm certain that there were risks for people for coming out in in many of these industries still the ability to gain the skills has been a little bit different for us right because we're in that we're we've been out in the world and there have been very few there were unless we were out there were very few limitations i i think that's true i think that we have access to it you know to a lot of talent um i remember that in the know on six game it was very easy to to to get people to help us i also remember that there was a big headline that ran in the la times that said fear stalks no on six campaign and the fear that they were talking about back in 1978 was the fear that you might be associated with the campaign and if and if you were that people might find out you were gay um in that campaign we raised a lot of money in 49.50 contributions because at 50 dollars we had to report the names of people that isn't true anymore you know the in the larger sense i guess one of the things that intrigues me because now i'm you know i've been a candidate uh obviously in order to be elected and the the notion of even in the small arena in which i am where i have 400 000 constituents to convince the question of how one appears what it is that makes a person want to vote for you or in the larger sense vote for an issue and beyond this notion of television advertising the larger question of what it is that changes public opinion kind of the elements that go into that the fact is it a kind of an ongoing slow process every day 14 more people change their minds or is it more like john demilio was on the show not too long ago and he in his writing about the history of our movement he talks about leaping and creeping in which there will be almost like chaos theory something will come together a lot will change and then you know there'll be a period where we sort of consolidate our gains or you know losses or whatever have you seen that it's kind of like that with with public opinion about our movement i think that um i love the image of a leaping i used to talk about their leapers and then they're those people who make the leap people who are very brave people who come with great ideas they're the in physics they're the einsteins and then along come the millions of people who sort of sweep up and fill all the places until some other keepers and sweepers sleepers sweepers creepers and the sleepers the people who just you know wake up and say oh things are great i wonder how that happened what happens is there are there's you can have in the pressure cooker of of a campaign for example a lot that's one of the moments when you you tend to make leaps everybody's galvanized uh the media pa is already paying attention you don't have to work so hard to get their attention the other side is out there you're out there those are the easy times in which to reach people or they're potentially the easiest times in which to reach people it's those lulls in between where um events happen by happenstance where you over which you just have no control one of the you know one of the dangers of sitting in the middle of history which is i believe what we are doing right now when it comes to uh this the the fight for gay rights um it's been very compressed in time and uh and if for somebody my age we it's incredible to me where we are and if i'm 20 years old i look and say this isn't good enough i don't care what you did 20 years ago nobody is going to fire me nobody's going to do this to me i'm not going to you know settle for anything less than the full expression of myself but when we're talking about just 20 20 years it's really hard to pinpoint within that time what happened there's a one of my favorite stories about this the danger between facts and interpretations that at the end of world war one clem oso who had been the premier of france during world war one was dying and the german foreign minister came to visit him in paris and they were talking and you know what for wars people like talk like nothing has happened and the german foreign minister said you know something history is very fickle and over time it may decide that it was france that caused this great world war we've just been through and clermont said it is possible that they will say france caused the war but but history will never say that belgium attacked germany and so when we look back over this this period of time it's real hard to say we may in 50 years as gays and lesbians have to erect a statue to anita bryant as the leader of our movement because it may turn out that because the uh far right had such a sort of pleasant spokesperson in the first in the early days of the of the in in miami in the late 70s that it gave a face that in turn galvanizes i think of the campaign in 78 and further campaigns is the first time we got together politically where we actually cohered politically and if that's what it took well that's what it took you know and um so it's really hard when you when you um when you look back over such a short period time to say oh this was important or that's the example and we should try to replicate it we can't we're not about to recreate or invent uh enemies we have enough of our own but whether an enemy or or somebody who's against us or somebody who gets public opinion will have exactly the same kind of platform that will move us the same way that's very hard to replicate well it's an interesting concept though that the the people who are most against us may be just the ones best placed to access an argument that we then have to meet uh or to access the ability to make the argument that we then have to meet um there's a a book that i um i have talked about in in a number of contexts um by a a wonderful writer named david garrow who won the pulitzer prize for writing uh bearing the cross which was the biography of dr martin luther king his next book after bearing the cross was called liberty and sexuality and the book was a i think a kind of a mosaic a pastiche of a lot of different materials sermons diaries newspaper articles speeches on the floors of congress everything that he could get his hands on to trace the history of the anti-contraceptive pro-contraceptive uh anti-choice pro-choice movement along in this century primarily and then at the very end to talk a little bit about our movement which was just sort of beginning to uh be public uh as a way of tracing a kind of uh non-reproductive sexuality mode which was a bit and the same arguments were made against contraception against abortion and against us uh sex is bad if it doesn't lead to children kind of thing but it was interesting to me that out of this pastiche i mean you would see a number of very interesting facts for instance um guess who wrote the very first anti-contraception law which was adopted in a state which was uh about the end of the 19th century was adopted wasn't overturned until 1962 in this case in connecticut which established the right to privacy uh by the supreme court in the constitution pt barnum pt barnum was elected to the legislature in connecticut was the the chair of the temperance and other moralities committee um and decided that contraception was a really important thing so i guess when he said you know a sucker is born every minute he wanted to make absolutely certain that that was true by not having any contraception and the first person to break this law catherine hepburn's mother who was engaged in you know this protest so the book's full of stuff like this but interestingly to me what emerges from this uh mosaic is that you have people who are the brave people who are on the forefront who are the leapers and they really don't apparently have any impact they're thought of as bra burners or you know crazy or radical or they ought to be locked up or they ought to be lined up against a wall and shot as people said about students in the anti-war movement until you start to see a sea change in public opinion when you start to see more balance in three major institutions in the country the press the pulpit and the law where you begin to get a little more balance from the pulpit that maybe morality is about equality and not about discrimination or god's anger maybe in the press they start to use the word gay instead of homosexual or they even start to report in any favorable way about our community the law the very first ordinance that says you know you can't discriminate in the workplace on this basis you start to see this and then it kind of becomes a little prairie fire where this sound like we're seeing with guns now or tobacco where there's just a sea change in public opinion it's not overnight and i guess my question to you as in terms of the work that you've done over the course of your lifetime is how do we intentionally push that to happen not just in those three institutions because the press is kind of like television as well not it's also entertainment the pulpit is all people who speak with some authority morally etc is it all intentionally done do we do we push all these buttons or how does this happen well it would be great but you have to understand everybody is out there trying to push exactly the same buttons so how you get attention uh depends a lot on what i call it this we're playing in the marketplace of ideas here and the marketplace gets roiled by events over which you have no control often it's taking advantage of something that happens and sometimes we suffer because we don't take advantage of it i think that we missed a big chance uh for example when the gays in the military debate was going on in congress um i just i don't think our the community coalesced well enough i don't think we had a very good strategy but that was handed to us that was a moment where um in a way we weren't terribly on the defensive usually we're on the defensive well we're out there fighting anti-gay initiatives um we're on the defensive and that's a really it's a very painful time it's a very bad time to be proactive um i did the no on 9 campaign in ark and i did all the media for that and it was very different that was 92 than the campaign in 78. in 78 people were afraid to be associated with the campaign in oregon you had straight people with lawn signs saying no i'm not i'm not saying that you really know pacey or that i do either but it's interesting to me that these are not answers these are not questions that really have answers but there something happens around the thanksgiving table it's difficult but young straight people are saying no you know mom and dad you're just wrong about that where do those ideas come from um why was it different in oregon i i think i'm convinced the biggest change is that the events that have whatever they were whether it's the no 116 campaign here or harvey milk dying a living and then dying in san francisco what happens what's happened over this last 21-year period is that people have come out familiarity breeds respect i am convinced of that there is no parallel in history for any movement where that's an action that that gets any attention because african americans have skin color you know they're they don't have the luxury of being in or out and it's one of the reasons when we deal uh with the african-american community to be very sensitive saying oh we have the same struggle as you to not quite we don't have but the so but the act of coming out i think has is is the key to changing the broad level of of of public opinion um you when we were talking before this you said um something about i brought some numbers of of changes in public opinion over the years and do you want objectives because they're really they're interesting one of them um these come from they're available to everybody they're on the internet on in yankalovich and gallup and and i've just sort of put some stuff together but um in 1992 and some of the some of the numbers we have go back to 77 this is 92. 92 nine percent of the people this is a general poll across the united states so it's everybody nine percent said they had someone in the family who was gay or lesbian in 1999 seven years later the is 21 that's a huge difference now these this is just people coming out um in 1985 22 of the people in the country said that they had a friend or an acquaintance who was gay or lesbian in 99 it's 55 that's a i mean if i'm selling soap i'm king of the world if i'm running an election i'm over when i can move people from 22 to 55 minutes that is huge and what is involved here is people coming out that's you know the good news of the polls the bad news is in um 1978 53 percent of the people thought it was morally wrong to be gay in 1999 48 say it's morally wrong so we have this disjunction that said you know when you look at for example do you think it's wrong to um discriminate against gays and lesbians in the in the workplace the numbers have gone over the 21 year period from like 21 to 83 percent of the people i think it's wrong they're more numbers but what these numbers tell tell me and i'm not a big number guy but what they tell me is is that as you put out in the law when it when it comes to the the law we're we're doing well even though we haven't won victories the public uh is actually way ahead of politicians when it comes to discrimination against uh keys and lesbians in the in the workplace well yeah 83 and that's that's almost you know universal approval it's the the politics of our life people are getting more and more comfortable with the sexuality of our life makes them nuts and that i think is exactly what that's a continuation of what garrow finds in his book this country for whatever for many many reasons not all because of gays and lesbians has a big problem with thinking about they they they they look for titillation in a variety of ways but the ethos of this country is uncomfortable with the idea of sex if it's going to be fun which really leads back to just a sort of underlying current of puritanism which doesn't work anymore which worked at one time and puritanism is was the philosophical basis of the economic system that made sense in order to get you to work at terrible jobs that made you horribly miserable i had to get you to defer pleasure and not to think about pleasure during the day it was a bizarre idea but in the industrial revolution that's the only way you've got people to work seven days a week and in mines and in horrible factories it doesn't work anymore you have people who want to be playful as microsoft where you want them to be happy in their work you know the government you don't want them to sexually harass i mean we have right well we're liars as americans no matter where we are i mean we pretend that we've separated the public from the private and the public is a non-sexual place and the private is a sexual place and the public was always a man's world and the private was always a woman's world that's the way we divided it up jesse bernard wrote a number of books about this and she was absolutely right but we were always cheating because in the public place we would have sexual harassment you know innuendo even sort of forced compliance until we had all these laws about sexual harassment and yet it's interesting that people don't think that your private behavior should any longer impact your ability to work and it's not just gays and lesbians it's also probably 53 percent of people would say it's immoral to have sex outside of your marriage with other people and yet no one hardly would say you should be fired for that because it's a relationship question you know what is that related to competence and also we want everybody to work we want them to work and work and work we want them to work three jobs and then we want them to work out i mean we want them to work in america so i think that seems like the first thing to fall and in that sense i do see a relationship with other civil rights movements because i still remember watching guess who's coming to dinner and it seemed to me that the movie was out quite a bit after it seemed more acceptable not to discriminate at work on the basis of race it wasn't easy to get title vii through in the you know the 1964 civil rights act but still there was this itsyness about whether your daughter was going to marry one i mean unquote and it's kind of like that with us too i think i don't think that you're exactly right i'm sure that though i'm not sure i suspect that if you looked at polling numbers on attitudes of white americans toward african americans with some exceptions like prop 209 and things like that you'd see you know absolute agreement that you know equal rights every place and nobody should be discriminated and then if you ask those same people now how would you how do you feel about african-americans marrying white people the numbers be would lag way behind it's that area of american life that makes people come uncomfortable our problem with um the rest of society is not the homo part of our you know the the our our description it's the sexual part because we absolutely are not with some few in vitro you know counter examples having sex for anything other than pleasure you know well and we've tended to ignore or try to bury because of that right that point in trying to appeal to people's sense of fairness we've incorporated our families who love us into this fight as well i mean it seems to me that pflag has been an enormous force even though their numbers are not that huge and maybe it hasn't i don't know but i love pflag so much because it we all want the love of our parents even after we come out and we've kind of projected that as a community onto pflag oh somebody's parents love me and they get the biggest applause when they walk in the gay pride parades etc do you think that that has had an impact on on america's opinions well let me tell you about a campaign we did for pflag um we were hired by p flag three or four years ago to do an advertising campaign for them at the time we felt about this is a case where i'm comfortable with the civil rights parallel in the civil rights movement in many cases it took white people to talk to white people about civil rights for african americans it may be for part of what we're struggling for that it may take straight people to talk to straight people these are the best straight people we're ever going to find because they have the heartfelt experience it's back to that that's that uh little the vignettes i gave you about how we talk to people on television a mother talking about her son on television i have a lot of trouble being angry at that person or discounting what she said so we came to pflag with a sense that this was an incredible organization that could occupy a platform it wasn't yet occupying in the in the gay pride parades we all you know it's one of those situations where we know them we love them and we get it but the rest of the society has never heard of them and really what they did was they came to us and said we we want to do a nice campaign and the truth is you can do a nice campaign that says my son is a doctor we love him and he's gay i mean that kind of campaign but to move people you'd have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars because people don't want to when when those people turn on television they don't want to hear about abortion they don't want to hear about they don't hear about any of of of these social issues when they're watching television it makes them uncomfortable when we did the campaign in oregon in 92 in two years over the three year period before that there had been an anti-abortion initiative that they had beaten back and there had been an anti-gay initiative which they had lost about um exec gays and the executive department of government and the people told us when we would do focus groups in poland we don't want to vote on this they don't want to think of it think about this so how do you get people's so we looked at this we didn't have the money to do a a long-term national campaign and we also didn't think that it was going to do do much good for them well we thought what we wanted to do was to get pflag to be those that's those spokes people in the national press how do you get them to be the best people we think they should be and what we do is we did we did two commercials to provoke a national debate um and the commercials um just factually married and visually the statements of people like pat robertson and jesse helms and jerry falwell you know what this is television oh we can show them so i think what we should do is to look at those two 30-second commercials because i know that you would rather see them because you're watching television than to listen to pc describe them so as a favorite to all of us here are the two thirty second spots that pacey did in the pflag campaign homosexuality is moral perversion and is always wrong god hates homosexuality homosexuality is an abomination the practices of these people is appalling it is a pathology it is a sickness a lot of us are sick and tired of all the pretenses of injured innocents they are not innocent it is estimated that 30 of teenage suicide victims are gay or lesbian homosexuality is an abomination the practices of these people is appalling god hates homosexuality many of those people involved in adolf hitler were satanists many of them were homosexuals the two things seem to go together it is a pathology it is a sickness my son paul was brutally murdered the fbi said it was a gay bashing paid for by parents families and friends of lesbians and gays basically that's very strong very strong um did those get on the air we actually got on the air in one city we were on the air in houston for a few days and then pat robertson's group threatened to sue every station that ran them and we became a national story and suddenly there were front page articles about p flag frank rich in the new york times wrote a couple of editorials about it uh we were a five-minute piece on the dan rather news case where we reached millions and millions of people we were budgeted to reach a few million people and pflag moms across america were going on radio stations on talk radio which is where people hear the dial the social dialogue they don't necessarily want to see on television so in a very compressed short period of time we were able to provoke a debate and to do do a small once a small part at making pflag a natural group of people the press would go to for comment or for interviews when something happened and so i think it was really a successful campaign well now that's another interesting piece is that when the when the advertising or the initiative campaign itself gets to be news and there again i guess we have our enemies to thank in a way because the more visible they make a protest to something the more access we have because again the media is saying well they've gotten to the place where at least they'll allow debate uh i still don't like debating anybody about whether i'm a human being or not but at least it's not all on their side anymore it's now we get to answer why we want to do this etc well i think that whether we like it or not the media covers conflict that's what they love that's what makes it interesting they're not interested in in just telling nice stories um they want they want people on both sides we rarely get the chance to provoke the debate um and so on the one hand i'm we can be grateful sometimes for what the other side has done but the truth is if you look at the oregon campaign or this upcoming uh ballot initiative here in california back to the no one six campaign they all had ripple effects in the community that were helpful but we don't win anything when this stuff happens this is not like oh something great is you know maybe we want something in the night campaign but in general all we do is hold the position that we had and we spend millions of dollars to do that although it didn't i mean i think i heard you say that uh even though we're in a defensive position and we haven't gained anything that is there's not a new law protecting us etc in the realm of public opinion simply because there's more discussion about it it seems to me that these are times in which we gain something or potentially gain something the knight initiative will probably have to spend 10 11 12 million dollars if we can raise that much and i hope we can um to defeat this initiative and yet at the end of it if all we've done is defeat the initiative we still may have gained something because we're talking we're maybe heard well i you know there's a really good thing that happens in these campaigns because what happens is we we draw towards us natural allies and often they say that what we tried to do in a pflag campaign was to instead of persuading people that it was okay to be gay or it was okay to have a son who was gay what we persuaded we drew them to our side by saying hey we share a common enemy you people in the uh who are fighting for a woman's right to choose you know these are your enemies too we're all in this together the what happens in these campaigns and this is i think one of the failings of of this movement if there is a movement is that we're very good at drawing allies to us and we do persuade people in the course of a campaign and opinions get changed and um the more reasonable and non-violent and uh that we and and humorful we are the better it is during the course of these campaigns and the more people who come out as a result of it all of that dynamic is great what happens is when when this night initiative goes on we're going to look for those natural allies to coalesce with us when they have campaigns and when they have issues we are nowhere to be found we miss the point i can i you know we we successfully can make the arguments to african americans that you are the experts on discrimination this is about discrimination and and we can win some people that way but when 187 was on the ballot here which was an anti-immigrant ballot or 209 which is i think a racially motivated about initiative there was no sense in our community we have to join it we are missing that's uh it may be off the topic that that's an incredible opportunity that we miss is these coalitions the more they those are those are the people we want to carry our message those are the people at the dinner tables we want to be saying oh no you're wrong i know these great people you're not talking from experience you're talking from somebody's placard you're talking from somebody hate-filled poster you're not talking you would you if you had any experience you'd never say that well this notion of hate crimes in in the most terrible sense i think has begun to show more and more to people as the connections are made and they're we're again not making them well enough but for us to show up when the jewish community center is attacked and to be and we should be at all of the gatherings mourning these hate crimes for us to understand that the same men who burned synagogues in sacramento were the ones who killed the gay couple in redding the gay community and the jewish community see across somewhat of a chasm not so much each other and say i know you i understand your grief this is you're right it's not happening enough i mean it happens on my on the floor of the assembly all the time because i look across the floor at darrell steinberg from sacramento and we understand that we have just gone through the same thing but we have not i agree with you pc been there and we have to be there more because you can't just ask and ask um but we also have some aggressive i think sort of positive work which may or may not be successful but i'm thinking of glad for instance that in the anti-defamation arena seems to me that we have not just been reactive or maybe we have what do you think about that oh i think that um i want to now add to the the list of reasons why things are better um with people coming out is television coming out um i make my money running ads but the truth is that we're a lot we're helped probably a lot more and more consistently if there are characters and story lines on television that reach people consistently week after we can never afford that kind of advertising and i think that um i mean it's astounding to me when i grew up there was no word gay and to find the word homosexual i had to look in an abnormal psychology textbook in the library secretly just to see the word in print today i can turn on my television and hear people joke and we can make fun of ourselves on television you can't underestimate don't underestimate the importance of of that for moving and changing society because in in a sense people who watch those shows have that experience as if it's real although just today in the paper there was an article i'm sure around the country i saw it in the los angeles times essentially complaining that very much in the same way as people of racial minorities have said you can't even see people of color on television anymore and when you do they're in you know minor roles or very unrealistic we have said and i i can't remember if it was glad who said it or some other a group has mentioned it i apologize to glad if it was you that we do have a few characters on abc a few characters on nbc but without exception they are white men who are asexual i mean they don't act gay they say they're gay and maybe a little bit because we don't want to go the other way have them be too affected be making fun of them but we certainly are do not see their personal lives we don't want to you know deal the the sexuality on television is all straight um so it's kind of like yes we get there but we're not in control of how we're portrayed no but you know we're it it's it from where we were in a short period of time that's where we are today is it is it enough no i mean that's that's that's a given but it's happening one of the other things that we we sort of gloss are when you were talking about those three pillars that were going to change things uh the the pulpit the law and the newspapers and the press um one of the things that's happened is that we have people who are out in the press i don't know anything about a newsroom or a newspaper or a newsroom on a television station but i know that has to change have changed the climate of what stories get covered what jokes get said in the in the press room to start out with but what stories get covered and how they get covered it's not a perfect world when we did the p flag campaign we tried to run a print out in the tulsa newspaper and we were unable to run this is three or four years ago because it contained the words gay or lesbian unfortunately had no way to get rid of him because that was the name of the organization right right these are i don't i don't want to call it baby steps but these are these are changes that are helpful and our job is to keep pushing for more change but they are changes that are helpful well in the line of pushing for more change and sort of in the large ballpark sense you think of the united states and the the 200 and some odd million people in the united states the goal i think is for them generally to see us and allow us to be fully human and fully integrated into american society you know without artificial barriers how do we continue to push those buttons whatever they are um it you know in a vast number of ways or you know in in some number of ways if you were suddenly made the czar of the campaign to change america's minds forever about us and if that's the goal and you may not even agree that's the goal how would you go about it in in the whole panoply of of available ways wow first of all i like the title and i just want to know about the furniture from my office furniture would be magnificent i assure you yeah the the parallel with the civil rights movement we can go back to that again here the the first thing you can do the the the thing you must do before doing it is to get every protection that you require from law that's the beginning because the truth is i want to be i want to i don't know that i i want to be respected by people but i may not that may not happen in my lifetime we're fighting hundreds and hundreds of years of of a of a thinking of religious training of social conditioning that says it's wrong to be gay it's just the reality so while it may take maybe not hundreds of years but it may take a while to change those people's minds at the beginning you want every protection that you you can get under the law so that people whatever people think they if they act on it in any way they have to know there's some consequences whether it's in the job place or walking down the street you want to limit the behavior and then i can the thinking will take care of itself over a longer period of time but what i want to do is in every instance where i have some control over what people do that's where i start it's much harder to to affect what people think and the truth is i really don't care what people think about me i don't care and yet it is i mean there's a kind of a circle because lawmakers do care what people think and even though it's acceptable for me to bring a bill that would protect gay students i can't get everybody to vote for it because they're worried about people what people think it's you know lawmakers you excluded lawmakers want to be somewhat behind where the public is where the voters are they rarely want to be ahead of the voters so our job is to then move the voters in those along those areas where we want the lawmakers to take action and when we have the voters we need to announce it to the lawmakers for example one of the poll numbers that i noticed and it came out right after matthew shepard's death was that 75 percent of americans across the country 75 percent believe that um gays and lesbians should be added to the as a category uh for victims of hate crimes under the hate crime law that's a huge number i don't know that we've done a really good job of getting that out district by district by district my experience has been in politics whether we're working on on handgun violence is that what i can tell lawmakers that the people in your district are so far ahead of you on this that it's perfectly safe for you to take this position that you're not going to have have any electoral consequences um then they'll take the position so our job is to move the people and then to announce it to the lawmakers in a in a in a powerful way using the media and using advertising if you have to use it using the mail having people call up whatever it takes to move particular lawmakers that's our job and and and once we cover those bases which may take a few years it may take 20 years whatever length of time it is at the very least that that's the stuff i know we can do and that that um and that absolutely has to be done the way people think will change it will change based on their personal experience it will change based on the way the rest of society views them in the same way that it's anathema for somebody to light up a cigarette now it may be anathema for somebody to tell a joke about in five years or ten years we can we limit behavior that way and then the thinking will follow or it won't but we won't be we won't have any we won't be there will be no consequences of their thinking on us casey this has been great i'm really really grateful you for you know coming here and talking about this today and i you know great admirer of your work and and of bill zimmerman's work um it's very important doesn't get a lot of respect when you talk about advertising or campaigning because people although they're amenable to manipulation don't like to think that they're ever manipulated and yet it's really sifting through ideas and coming to our own conclusions i think that lead us to decide i will or i will not hate or discriminate or love or accept or tolerate or whatever it is so keep up the good work all of you out there i hope you enjoyed this hour and that you will do your very best to contribute something every week to just changing one person's mind if you find someone in a what you consider a negative mindset about us because really at uh at the end what we really want for america vis-a-vis the gay and lesbian community is they better just get used to it [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you