Get Used to It: Ep. 66, "Voices of Our Lives: Jean Harris"

my [Applause] [Music] hi i'm sheila cuo welcome to get used to it uh today we're going to do one in our occasional series which is actually becoming more than occasional which we call voices of our lives where we interview one person who has virtually spent their life working for and in the community making a difference and our guest today is such a person jean harris who is a lifelong activist a political organizer a fundraiser and currently executive director of basic rights oregon which is the largest gay lesbian bisexual transgender statewide political organizing organization in the country by membership and i'm sure you know a lot about what has gone on in oregon the anti-gay initiatives and the wonderful and successful work the gene and the organization have done welcome to get used to it thanks a lot happy to have you here good to be here so we know a lot about what you've been doing lately in oregon um but i bet a lot of people don't know you grew up in california probably not tell us about long beach california long beach i was actually born in huntington beach uh-huh and when i was four years old my parents bought a house in long beach and grew up in long beach went to school went to college got married had kids there oh wait wait wait what what a beautiful and ordinary life huh kind of so um grew up in long beach went to college in long beach too yeah long beach state so a a local girl i'm a local girl um were you working while you were married um for a long time i didn't but then i i actually my first job was a a campaign job paid campaign job in in 1971. now you it's not everybody is really interested in politics or giving time to work in politics was this something that came from your family growing up i mean were they sort of politically involved you know when i look back on it um well my mother uh was i remember during the adlai stevenson eisenhower presidential election it was my mother was very opinionated about you know anyone who does not vote for stevenson needs to like leave the country or whatever so you know very strong-minded very opinionated and my dad um was a union steward for the union at the at uh fiverr board where he worked and um i remember him taking me to work when they were on strike and you know walking the picket line and when you were a little girl yeah i was little so what kind of an impression do you think that had on you looking back um well i'm a strong union person today and i know it had to be just from you know just the whole uh justice end of it and being out there i can remember i thought it was pretty exciting at the time i didn't really know what was going on because i was you know a kid sure um but it just seems so powerful you know like hey these people are all out here it's night time they're you know a lot of you know love and stuff going on that you don't really think about when you're a kid but you know it's just kind of exciting and it's cool and your dad's like really into it a lot of the women especially in our community who've gotten deeply involved in organizing whether it's in the community or 501c3s in the community political activism protest whatever have gone through sort of a series of experiences that have which they develop their organizing skills and i was thinking i i joined sag as a child and looking back that experience i mean it was really about organizing and about getting something done through working together what what uh what kind of a union was it that your dad was in it was afl cio um he was a uh ran a printing press and they did you know multi-color printing on egg cartons and tampax boxes and you know not very thrilling you know just sort of routine stuff but um i remember that he used to go to union meetings every other friday or something it was like oh dad's at the union meeting tonight kind of thing so well it's kind of a bit of a stretch though from the i mean apparently ordinary and i know no life is ever ordinary but married had two girls two daughters two daughters um to a community activist and gay and lesbian community how how did that transition come about you know i've thought about that a lot and i think that um if you look carefully anyone who's been a housewife for a certain period of time especially if you're a housewife in a household where your husband has got you know not a really high paying job if you're if it's a young family you're just starting out and you're constantly trying to figure out the relatives and juggling you know the visits and the holidays and you got to get the kids ready and you got to get your husband off to work and you got to get that checkbook balanced and you got to make sure that there's at least 10 cents left in that bank so you don't overdraw and bounce a check and you're constantly juggling things all the time and you don't really realize that what you're doing is totally organizing everyone's life to make things come down right on a on a timely fashion and then everybody's ready and it's happening and and you're not having a breakdown yet and i think a lot of sort of the social issues that i unconsciously learned from my parents and just our whole background and that experience of having to organize so many people's lives every day that you know that was easy that transition into politics was pretty easy now did the transition into politics precede um you're having to kind of come to grips with your understanding that you actually were a lesbian i was in um i was involved in the anti-war movement anti-vietnam war movement when i was still married my husband and i were both involved in it and started doing what i really think is grassroots organizing and through a lot of issues the farmworker issue and the whole vietnam war stuff and um the civil rights stuff and then i got involved in the democratic party and more you know sort of status quo kind of thing but that looks like a real transition to me and i could be wrong so many people in the anti-war movement and maybe say a little more about what that involvement was like don't make a transition to politics don't like the notion of politics or especially electoral politics well that's true but to me it was clear that the system that existed in this country especially about who was making decisions around the vietnam war and the funding and the troops and all of that was right there in the united states congress and that those elected officials were making decisions for us making decisions for people that that we thought at the time the majority of people were opposed to the war and i think that we combined the sort of education and the grassroots of going the people to people and and talking about the war and trying to move people from being hawks to doves that the way to utilize those grassroots people was to go and meet with those elected officials and try to force them or to have them see the light and agree with us on the positions around the war and at least in california there was this thing called the set the date statewide organization and the whole thing was to get people within congressional districts together and organized and go and meet with their elected officials and try to move them around the vietnam war and and that's how i think the realization of as long as this system is here we have to deal with the people who run for office and get elected and we better have our own people have a seat at the table if we really expect things to change so that's how i got into it it just seemed like that fit for me but at this point you were still married still still married i was housewife virtually for 10 years uh-huh and um so what happened gene uh i mean about the house housewife thing well hey it wasn't my fault my husband said you're in love with your best friend oops wait let's back up a little bit um you um you went to cal state long beach i think you indicated to me that you had gone to take a women's studies class right and talk about that time in life you know i was my husband and i actually were both going to we were going to night school together and we had this vision we were going to both be school teachers and we'd have you know the summers off and you know have the kids and be able to spend a lot of time with the kids and that was sort of our vision and um a friend of mine suggested that you know why don't we take a couple classes or try to take a class during the day and there was this whole women's studies thing and let's take this class it's about our bodies ourselves and we want to learn more about you know the whole woman woman thing and so we took this class together during the day when when the kids were off at school and husband was off at work and i just started like hearing things and realizing things that i just had not thought about before like like wow i'm really smart huh like wow look who is in control of all these different facets of of society and and back then it truly was when you turned on a tv screen it was male commentators and um you know in the whole medical industry was sort of run by men and even the the armed forces and the police department were men lawyers were men it's just like i went wow something's not right here like why wouldn't you utilize the the the brains and the intelligence and the experience of half the population and i kind of you know and i would take these questions home to my husband and i'd say you know we did this close your eyes thing and visualize you know what it would you know who is sitting in the chair in this position of power and and i just realized that something's not right and i would you know go home and go through some of the same kind of things that we did in the class and he started getting a little irritated about it and i'm going you know this isn't about you john this is just you know this is like can you believe this can you believe this you know like i was outraged and he was getting uptight and i really didn't understand what he was being so uncomfortable about um and it was just that kind of awareness that you know there was more to what was going on out there than sort of picking the kids up at school and well it was a really heady time i mean i you and i are pretty much in the same generation and i i guess to me some of the strange part of remembering that time is how i had never thought about these things before right you know i mean dating in college i would sit in the car and the guy would get out and walk around the front of the car and open the door for me i never thought gee this is weird you know i can open my own door it was simply so taken for granted that so many little things like that you know adding up to a society and what the women's movement started calling clicks where you would just come to a realization that you've never thought about before it sounds so antiquated now where people grow up understanding that we've identified these problems and you know and been working on them right from the point of view of the women's movement but it was it's very difficult to explain how it just didn't occur to us right those consciousness-raising groups oh it's like we started talking about it's like i just so many things that i didn't think about because i was just doing what i was supposed to be doing you know well but was it really the same way with sexuality i mean that came as a surprise to you you know it did come as a surprise to me my my husband um and i were boyfriend and girlfriend in high school we were like best friends i mean i mean i still love him today he's not talking much to me but um you know we were really good friends and uh and i felt like i was lucky that i and i had a hard time through my whole high school it's like the dating thing was so traumatic and most of it these guys were pretty boring and you know i just had a hard time with it but when john john and i got together and we were like really were soul mates and best friends that was great i mean that was okay i thought okay at last i've met somebody i can marry and do the right thing and it it just really didn't occur to me about my sexuality really until he he said i think you're in love with with cindy your best friend and i just went oh please he goes no i think you are and you know and i thought a little more about it and i thought oh my god i think i might be so you instigated a divorce or did he well i was very confused and very upset about you know what this was all about and i just wanted to i went to my husband i said i want to take a couple of weeks off i want you to take deal with the kids i want you to deal with everything i just need to be away a little bit and and get clear about what's going on and i i mean i wasn't involved with another woman my best friend was straight also but i realized that while i was you know away from home and i thought you know i really do i think i'm i think i'm a lesbian and um i didn't go back home after that and he filed for divorce papers first but that's really what was what was happening you know there are an awful lot of people in our movement um that were married that have children um that sort of went through this kind of painful time and when i was a family law attorney i represented a number of women in divorces and they have terrible terrible struggle uh around custody did that did that happen to you oh yeah yeah i um when the divorce papers got filed and served my mother called me now she was against the divorce she didn't want the divorce to happen you know she was worried about what that would mean and whatever but she basically called me and said i wanted to let you know that your father and i are going to testify against you in the for the kids that we think the kids should stay with john and um you know i was number one devastated well sure um and i think i think now when i i look back on i mean we're now friends and we talk and you know she's my mom and you know it took her years later but to look me in the eye and and you know and cry and say you know that was a mistake your dad and i should have never done that i wished i wished we would have never done that um but the reality is is that i lost my seven and eight-year-old daughter who had been you know the love of my life and um you know they went off and lived with their dad basically you know they're grown now 29 and 30. and did you i mean were you able to get back in contact with them oh yeah we had back into your life we had um joint custody but he had residential rights and and to tell you the truth at the time i didn't really know when i was going through all of that stuff i was you know all this emotional stuff was going on and i had never had a job and i didn't know how i was gonna you know take care of myself and the kids and you know and i was coming out and i didn't have a support system and but i knew you know even in spite of all of those things i had found myself and i had felt like i really like myself i'm really a strong person i have you know i've really done great things so far and and i was there was something in spite of all the hard stuff i just felt whole and happy and excited about what was to come ahead and i had to deal with all of these hard things but i knew it was the right thing you know one of the things my kids say to me to this day was you know mom the one thing we learned from you is that if you're happy with your choices then the people around you will be happy and um you know they do things that i'm not particularly happy about but what are you gonna say when they tell you that yeah when they tell you they're happy right it's your own fault like okay fine so so clearly you did find some work after the divorce yeah i did you know i went um i got a job for a hundred dollars a week at the um the women's health center out in santa ana uh the abortion clinic yeah yeah and i learned i you know got trained to be a counselor and um and worked there you know for a while and now you probably got a 27-page resume yeah it's pretty cool everywhere i've looked in the past and in the present it's like oh gene harris worked here and she ran this place for a while or yeah she's the one that started this program or that program yeah i think i have a short attention span or something i don't know or or you'd like to move on to the next thing maybe you're you're an organizer you know once the thing is organized off you go yeah you ever read solinsky's book he says you know organizers are great but you know there's the time comes when you got to move on because either everybody hates you because of what you've made them do or you get bored and you're done so well you spend a goodly period of your work life in political organizing working for candidates right um talk a little about that oh gosh let's see well i worked in the first um candidate thing i did was uh in the george mcgovern presidential election i just saw mcgovern on cnn the other night made my heart sing go babe and uh you know that was just an incredible incredible campaign i mean that was like a wing and a prayer and we never thought we would ever get any we didn't even think we'd get the nomination but i met some incredibly smart political thinkers and passionate and understood that you know if the good folks who are in politics give up they leave room for somebody who's not going to be so great and i really learned from people that that it's okay to have passion around your politics that if your your heart is in there and your soul is in there you know you win no matter what the outcome is so you ended up meeting some pretty interesting people in san francisco too as i recall i did early on you know the mcgovern campaign i met i met this young he was young man we were both young men john burton who um was at a meeting in los angeles with with sort of the organizers from different parts of the southern california we were there for a meeting to talk about you know what what were the possibilities and this john burton guy he stands up and and he says you know this is going to be tough you know and and no one said it's going to be easy and he goes but you know what you got to have passion behind your politics and it doesn't matter if we don't win and it doesn't matter if this is hard and it doesn't matter if people tell you that this can't be done because if you've got passion behind your politics that's what's important and you got to not give up and i just remember that speech to you know you know he would never be able to give that speech without some scatological words oh yeah well i left out that i left out the color john for those of you around the country who are not californians as the currently the president pro tem of the state senate and i don't think anyone was any more surprised than john when he uh was elected by his colleagues to be the president pro tem and we we served together in the state assembly for a while but he was in the congress and yes his story is a very interesting one too he's a great guy so you were working with john on political campaigns um you know it was that one speech and then i just got really really into the campaign then i just thought it was really exciting and i started out being sort of a neighborhood coordinator and i organized we were supposed to walk 10 precincts and the next thing i know i finished my 10 and then we did more and then i was up to 200 and the next thing i knew i was the director of two assembly districts the field director for two assembly districts and i was having this meeting up in la with this willie brown jr and uh he sort of did this interview and and he called he i got called from long beach to come up and talk to him about this job and and he says he says what is this you know you're supposed to you're supposed to call up your call call the office up in la and give us your statistics about how many you know people you've talked to and all of that and and i said you know we were told that the the that you people upping here in l.a if we did the work and we wrote our letters that we'd get stamps to mail these letters back and when you give me the stamps i'll give you the numbers and he kind of kind of goes like this he goes he goes i guess i should hire you shouldn't i so he hired me to my first uh first paid political job in my career and he's he's a mentor of mine and john and it's we've known each other a long time and now um you know willie and john are both wonderful on gay and lesbian issues and i'm assuming they might have been from the very beginning they seemed like people who really understood about discrimination especially willie brown who used to talk about growing up in texas and was a shoe shine boy and the after he'd shine his shoes whoever he shined the shoes for would flip a quarter into a spittoon because it was great entertainment to watch the little boy dig around among all the you know spit to get his quarter right for shining the shoes and he doesn't tell the story as though it's a great oppression of him but sort of casually but it's just a stunning instance um and there's a man who really gets the connection right between all these different kinds of oppression and has been sort of staunchly with us did you find that as you went along or yeah um john i know that that john and willie early in their careers both really stood up for trying to change change discriminatory laws against gay people in the early days and you know willie brown and his wife when he was a young lawyer moved to san francisco and they tried to buy a house in a certain neighborhood in san francisco and they were refused to be allowed to buy a certain house they wanted to buy because they were black so um he gets it for a whole lot of reasons i mean on some i've had some hard days where you know i've gotten willie on the phone and he said you know genie they hate me as much as they hate you so you just gotta keep going so um and john's always you know talked about uh when he ran for the assembly and roberta achtenberg was was running for this for that same assembly seat you know john talked about you know well but you know i've been working on these issues and on and on and on and um both of them have have been there for us i endorsed roberta i didn't really know john at all after john was elected and i was elected that same year um i ended up being his seat mate in the assembly and there it's a funny relationship when your seat mates in the assembly because you kind of watch each other's back around votes that you missed because you were out on the phone or whatever uh and i found out later that he had asked for me to be his seat mate way in the back of the chamber and i thought oh well i'm the first gay you know i'm for i'm the dyke here so they sat me way in the back and john said to me no no no he said that was jesse unruhe's seat who was a speaker of the california assembly jesse used to love it because whenever he stood up to speak everybody had to turn around and look at him i love that you can learn you know you learn a lot about it but mainly i think these mentors teach us when we got into our own movement because frankly we'd been involved the anti-war movement was our movement but it feels like the gay lesbian transgender bisexual movement is really our movement and we brought so many lessons with us really from them i think you know john's lesson that that speech he made to me in l.a and then when he ran for the assembly i i had a meeting with he wanted to meet with some people about his assembly race and try to explain why we should really support him because he's been there on on gay rights and and i just looked at him i said you know i haven't seen you in years john but you said you got to have passion for your politics whether you can win or not and i said you know roberta's probably not going to be able to beat you but she's she is me she will be she knows what it's like to be a lesbian and she will be have a seat at the table and she will be speaking about something she knows about and i've got passion for my politics and if you win i'll be there for you but i got to do this and he just kind of went well guess there's not much i could say about that well and when did you first then get involved in working on gay issues i got involved in lesbian and gay issues when i was still down in long beach when we were trying to put together a women's commission for the long beach city council and and the whole abortion issue was was up then so i was sort of in the women's movement um working on on lesbian gay stuff and working on um the abortion issue although being a lesbian wasn't that healthy in those days in the women's movement right and and also it was a big dis you know big thing when i realized that also being associated with the democratic party which i had become really involved in from the campaigns and stuff that i had worked on that you know in the women's movement that patriarchal power kind of thing that controlled both both the parties and and that was a that was a hard thing people were very suspicious about you know what was i all about yeah i found it was a difficult thing too that there was a lot of suspicion about electoral politics and that that if you were going to change the world then how are you going to change the world within the system that already existed although it is very interesting about how so many people we've met are now in positions of power because right i think i mean i think you mentioned that you had met marcia scott right um early on i guess yeah in santa cruz back in 83 84 something like that and were you working on political stuff together um i had when i was still straight i worked in a governor's race and the big governor's race with jerry brown and bob moretti and jerry walden and george moscone they were all running for governor in the primary and i was working for jerry waldy and i met this this young man whose name was john laird in that campaign and when i moved to santa cruz i was at this volleyball game down on the beach and i hear this voice going gene gene harris is that the gene harris and i'm kind of going well i i am gene harris he goes it's me john laird and i'm going oh my god you're gay and he goes i know it someday you would be and um so and john was the mayor of santa cruz he'd been on the city council and he was up for re-election and uh and i just i met marsha scott there because my partner was in a class at the junior college and and we got together and had drinks and dinner and then we started talking politics and then she and i worked on john laird's re-election campaign and she used to sit we'd sit and talk about you know she'd say well my friend bill someday when he's in president you know someday he'll be the president and we'll be at the capitol and i'm going yeah yeah right marcia that after he got elected marcia i went to washington d.c for some some political thing i was working on and damned if we weren't sitting in the president's lunch at the white house lunch room at the white house ordering food i'm in my armani suit with my necktie and marsha's going see didn't i tell you [Laughter] so that was pretty amazing so um [Music] it is kind of to trace all of the people when we write our autobiographies well i mean i don't even know whether everyone will be interested in all the people that i knew when they were you know working at behind the counter at woolworth's but right uh it's certainly interesting how many people we keep sort of intersecting with and you know and in different avatars in different places so was most of your work then in the for the community before you went to oregon to uh kind of work on their uh their initiative issues mostly in california um yeah it was mostly in california after i lived in santa cruz for about a year and then i moved up to san francisco because that's where everything was happening and um i was fortunate enough i was involved in a congressional race that was between nancy pelosi and harry britt and harry's the person who took harvey milk's place and nancy won that race by 3 000 republican vote by mail absentee ballots 3 000 republican votes we beat her on the election day but uh um so after i was involved in that congressional race uh i went to work for harry in in city hall in san francisco and i worked for him for about six years and we just did he just was an incredible i mean a lot of people say who's this hairy brit guy you know well harry's mission was and he had he was a great person to work for he didn't care if his name was in the paper he didn't care if he got credit for legislation he said my job is to continue the legacy of harvey milk and make sure that he has not forgotten and why he died is not forgotten and that's why i'm here and that is my only purpose and we did some incredible work together so in in working for harry i'm assuming that some of the work you did at least had to do with issues about our community or for our community in in the city of san francisco right um what what kinds of stuff were you working on for him well we had done it everything from you know immigration sanctuary legislation to um you know we harry wanted to now that dianne feinstein was not the mayor anymore and art agnost was the mayor he wanted to bring back domestic partners as an issue because they had passed it the board of supervisors had passed it in 79 and feinstein had vetoed it back in those days and she had continued to be the mayor and harry could never introduce that again because she would just veto it again but once she was gone we started having a team of people together strategizing about how would we do this and how could we protect the benefits side and you know what was the vision behind that and what we decided to do was create a task force that would look at the benefits that the mayor would create and we would pass a regis a way to register your relationship with the county government through the board of supervisors and of course one of the big arguments was you know don't do that because someone will you know the right will try to you know we had a handful of right wingers in in san francisco would put it on the ballot and we might not be able to win that and it would be devastating if in a city like san francisco the gay mecca of the world that we couldn't pass domestic uh partners at the at the ballot box but we felt like it was important enough to push the envelope and we did we passed it through the board of supervisors the mayor signed it and the right wing put it on the ballot and that first election we lost by thirteen hundred votes wow and it was the year that the earthquake happened and we had to stop the campaign and we we raised i think thirty five thousand dollars for the earthquake relief fund but it was ten days of of not campaigning and then we went in to get out the vote and 1300 votes is not that much but it you know you only have to win or lose by one vote well it's interesting the transition in that time um looking back at it because a lot of what our community decided to try to do when it first did notice that there were laws that could probably help us we worked at the local level there was no question we were going to get anything at the state level anywhere right it was too soon and states were all terribly variegated especially california with 38 million people but we were targeting local jurisdictions a few domestic partnership um ordinances etc and it seems to me it was at about that time that the right wing really began to focus on their own use of the ballot box their own way of using the law or the electoral process as a tool of holding us down essentially right and um i know that there were a number of places in the country where they started putting things on the ballot and on the statewide ballot which was a good strategy for them because statewide it looked like it was always easier for them to win you would find more prejudice less education statewide then you might be able to educate a city or a town right and was it about this time that oregon called you up because they were facing something and they needed right they had um an anti-gay measure on their ballot in oregon in 1988 1992 and in 1994. i got called by the campaign people in 1994. it was it was one of those cases where they thought the court was going to throw out the the measure as unconstitutional and so they kept waiting for this court decision and when the decision finally came it came the way we didn't want it to come they said it's we're going to go ahead and put this on the on the ballot so we had like a 30-day window to raise i mean we ended up raising and spending about 2.3 million dollars which is not a whole heck of a lot doesn't sound like a lot in california but in oregon that's only 1.9 million voters right it's a lot of money to raise in a short turnaround and i got called to come up and run the field operation because people knew i had had some experience in san francisco with the three ballot measures we had three years in a row and how we built you know we kept building on those races on how to finally come up with the right formula to make it click and so i went up to oregon and boy that was you know for some i felt like i'd been in politics a long time but oregon is on the cutting edge of the right wing over here a bunch of lefties from the 60s who moved up there and and oregonians have always been there and then a whole big group in the middle and the right wing was using that tactic to continually put things anti-gay things on the ballot and just keep the community from chasing their tails and spending money and over and over and over again so i i was lucky enough to to go up there and be a part of that whole no on 13 and we we beat them now it was well it's not a different kind of strategy but there is something that at least from a distance it looks like happened in oregon that has yet to happen in a lot of places that really it looks like coalition it looks like a lot of people beyond just the members of our community right caring about it um how did that come about you know that's really what happened in oregon we had to um you know yet to understand this is also a state that's about i think it's 99.3 white and um for someone who came from los angeles and san francisco where you know people of color are like 76 and then you work in coalitions with different groups of people people and sort of help each other on different issues and try to come together and that's how you win i sort of went whoa it's hard to tell the different democrats from the republicans here and how do you build a coalition there to to beat these anti-gay measures and you know we developed relationships with labor with um the pro-choice folks environment the environment is a very big deal in in oregon and we just slowly but surely over the years developed a strong relationship with different groupings of people to the point where we developed a statewide voter file to where we put all of our members all into one pot and we did get out the vote and we figured out a system to where the lesbian gave by trans community's family just kept expanding expanding expanding until this last time around you know we just had business folks in the chamber that i went to oregon and the chamber of commerce was opposing these anti-gay bills and like business was one of the best friends of the community i'm going what and um so and that's still going on in oregon and you know i have to say the right wing came up with this strategy to to keep us busy and to spend our money and they could raise money off our backs from their members right it really raised money for for so they could work on some of these other issues that that they're also anti on and um but it sort of backfired it backfired because we created the people in oregon created this ongoing organization that is his job is to stay campaign ready to fight these anti-gay measures and now we do candidate endorsements and raise money for candidates and we are that we lobby in the legislature and we have an education project that um we work with with the business community religious institutions and educational institutions and lesbian gay by trans issues are talked about more in the state of oregon i think than any state in the union and they're honest about it they've very opinionated and and they really slug it out and it's been a really good education for me and a good experience and i am so proud to have had the chance to work with people who have been attacked over and over and over again and will still stand up and be counted and come out at 3 30 in the morning to go out and do door hangers in all over the state in a place like oregon which is really kind of scary at times and you know they got passion with their politics and boy it was my cup of tea so well it is interesting these coalitions because people in the labor movement have always been passionate people in the environmental movement are quite passionate but often you don't see a real understanding of the relationship between and among these different movements about people just being able to work you know without being treated unfairly right people wanting to maintain the environment for future generations because if we waste it it's gone and then this whole social justice movement about poverty about um really about even urban environmental issues which have brought together coalitions with uh impoverished people who've been talking for years and never made league with environmentalists who seem to be off in the mountains somewhere where nobody lived um it looks to me and i've always been an optimist like these new and larger coalitions are really sort of what will be happening in the next decade and certainly what i think is necessary for us to counter because the enemy is always the same i don't mean to talk about people as enemies but right and we call them the right wing or whatever but it seems like the antagonism is focused on gay and lesbian on those damn environmentalists on the unions i mean you know i hear the rhetoric on the floor of the assembly all the time and when we realize that we're all being attacked and you know on the same basis it seems to make coalition make a lot more sense anyway well as you know now we've got an initiative here in california that seems to me like the right wing has essentially been pushed back a lot on issues of fairness at work and hopefully on issues of fairness at school but where family matters are concerned the sort of the center of it that's where they're still kind of drawing the line around right marriage and even though only a man and a woman can get married in california that's already the law this initiative the so-called knight initiative would pretty much dictate that even if you got validly married in some other state or country it wouldn't be recognized in california do you see the same kind of organizing a going on and b even more important maybe working in california state like california where we don't have all of these connections made yet well california's bigger but you know you just sort of break it down and i do see um in fact harry harry britt called me and we had a conversation about this he says when you coming back to california you know this is before i knew i would maybe be coming back to california but i think that we have to i think that it's really important that we get the vision of and complete those connections with with labor and because you know we can win we can win and we're being attacked unions are being attacked immigration is being attacked people affirmative action is being attacked choice is being attacked gay lesbian stuff is being attacked and it's pretty much the same people who are doing one are doing the other it's you know a few people may not cross over but but a lot of the money sources sometimes come from the same place and that um we need to come together around all of our issues and and fight back and i think that that that's really where we're at now is that we need to do a little more organizing a little more grassroots a little more talking to each other you know i know that when i did organizing in san francisco i realized by about the second domestic partners campaign that i'd never even been in the black neighborhood in san francisco and that the big change in that second campaign was is that we all came together and we walked in you know lesbian gay people walked in chinatown we walked over in the mission in the latino district we walked in the black community and we walked in each other's communities and we worked together and we got to know each other and i think that's what we need to do more of i mean that's what we had to do in oregon we had to talk to business people you know we had to talk to each other and and make those linkages and uh i i think we're on in a really exciting time because we now have the challenge right in front of us here in california the right wing looked at their polling and they saw that gay marriage is a very scary thing for people out there and they know it's our week they know it's a weak link for us but it's a challenge for us to like dive into this thing get to know each other talk to each other register each other get out the vote and really put start putting this whole connection together now it may not all work this time around but this thing i think this the right wing strategy is to go state by state they've been trying to do this anti-gay marriage thing state by state by state and you know we're smart enough to turn that around and make us make it work for us and i think that's exactly what we can do here in california i mean we had the same anti-gay bills in the in the legislature this last time and we had all of our friends who we brought into our family over the last 10 years hammer those electives officials in the legislature we had editorials in the main you know big newspapers and we made sure that every single democrat did not bail on us and we killed all those bills so we don't have a ballot measure in oregon this november well we killed all the bills too which is partly why we do have a ballot measure here i mean it's a it's a last-ditch effort to get stuff on the ballot and paying uh the signature gatherers and there's a lot of money a lot of money behind this and we did not get absolutely every democrat on board for our issues but mostly and i was thrilled at the passionate speeches people made on the floor in favor of our protection bills which we now have sort of gone through for the first time gotten a majority so things do change and you're back in california hey gene i'm back in california at least you you will be for uh but not quite sure what the next step is on work no i don't know what i'm going to do when i grow up yet i kind of have to look around and see what you know what's needed and where i where i plug in and your partner uh gwen baldwin is the fairly new not brand new executive director of the center here in l.a that's right so that's an interesting uh change for you too hey very yeah she's the puba yeah she's the pub it's a wonderful center too but it'll keep her pretty busy it's been keeping her busy so um what do you think about the future for us i mean i think that this combination is synergy of those of us who've worked in movement politics and worked in electoral politics kind of coming together because this is the arena this is sort of the center there are other centers though um all the churches temples i mean every religious body we seem to be kind of in the middle of the griddle i mean it's a lot of debate and discussion about our community um where do you think the next great work for activists in our community will be well i really do think and believe there's a new wave a new generation of young people that are coming into the queer movement and they are hungry to know about all of this power structure and politics and you know who calls the shots and how do you learn how to do all of this stuff and i think that we're going to see a lot more of the connection of mainstream politics and grassroots organizing and building coalitions uh so they think it's going to be a lot harder for the right wing to continue in the manner that they've been continuing on what a great finish for the show thank you so much for joining us on get used to it thank you very much for watching and other uh voices of our lives gene harris long time activist you go out and do the same then everybody will get used to it [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign