Get Used to It: Ep. 68, "Challenges of the New Millennium"

oh [Applause] [Music] so [Music] hi welcome to get used to it i'm sheila kuhl your host and uh this is our first show of the millennium or if it's a rerun it's not but but it was um and so i have a very special treat for you and i and actually a special treat for me i've invited three of the smartest people i know longtime activists each of them a star in their own right to get together for this show and talk about the 20th century and the 21st century and if that's not a a small enough topic i don't know what is i want you to meet my guest today first tori osborne who as i said is a long time activist and author um designer of many of the most brilliant moves in our movement i think in the 20th century and is now the executive director of the liberty hill foundation welcome tori glad to be here i hope that's not too much praise but you know i i think you're the best thing since anything i dedicated my book to you for a reason all right thanks um phil wilson who was the co-founder of the black gay and lesbian uh leadership forum and is now and i'm going to read this from his card the executive director of the african american aids policy and training institute at the university of southern california welcome phil happy to have you here good to be here and finally uh i guess we say last but not least ever michael kearns wonderful actor performer writer teacher uh daddy and uh i guess entrepreneurs since you also sell your classes so you're gonna fill all the categories welcome michael thank you sheila so um i think that probably the way we have to start these shows it's uh uh obligatory uh to talk a little bit about the 20th century i suppose as though it were more than a week ago this gay and lesbian uh bisexual transgender movement really started came into its own gained attention whatever we might say in the 20th century was uh unheard of before then and tori let me start with you what what did you like best about what we did as a movement what were some of our missteps do you feel optimistic or pessimistic about the future good or bad about the past anywhere you want to start oh and all in six minutes um right well i'm completely optimistic about the future um i think the most important thing about the past is that we're here you know we're here we're queer we're fabulous get used to it we we have catalyzed a whole new conversation for the world i think about family about about democracy about diversity about the personal is political and then and that's the bigger piece or that's a bigger piece than just the sheer courage and accomplishment of bringing a new movement into existence in the last 30 years and i think it's safe to say that you know we have sort of 30 years under our belt our visibility is here not that we don't take steps backward and not that there aren't challenges but the foundation is laid and now the question is kind of you know where do we go as a community or communities and as a movement and for me the more interesting question is where do we go as communities vis-a-vis the broader world and the challenges of of which i think are immense of a world facing you know large scale inequities between rich and poor and sort of global questions of vision and policy and and um and that's to me the question is sort of where's the gay was the gay movement or gay communities or gay contributions to the next millennium's key social issues but like all the movements we kind of started out on our own i mean nobody was in our corner but us to start with what do you think we did that was just great in the last century i think we built uh forged really new definitions of family you know we're ostracized by our families of origin for the most part less as time goes on but we certainly have been so having to create emotional support systems i mean nobody does community building like queers do community building um i think we uh the 10 000 the network of sort of 10 000 spiritual and political and social groups you know ranging from the the united lesbians of african heritage to the gay and lesbian choruses to the i mean it's quite extraordinary what we've done in terms of building alternative organizations that support different support us in different ways so i think the the track record of building a foundation of community groups and having community organizing building institutions and networks some loose and you know some more kind of institutional um for for the whole set of service and political and spiritual needs is a is a is a real contribution both in terms of of the skill set you know the kind of entrepreneurial um skill set that it that encourages so that's a big contribution just putting the issue on the agenda i mean i always say i think i think god has a tremendous sense of irony god if she exists has a tremendous sense of irony that in at this country's most conservative era in history the last 30 years the the radical right wing has had more power and more influence than at any other time in american history that the gay movement would come into being and come into power at the very time that the right has what do you think it was i mean we're looking mostly i guess at america although i know we're aware of how this has really happened in various other places around the world what was it about this last century that allowed this to happen i mean why in the 20th century why not the 19th or why didn't it have to wait until the 21st well there's lots of historical work that john demilio and others have done about kind of the rise of of capitalism and urbanism to create certain economic and really cultural preconditions that urban subcultures have have come into being not just in this country by the way in other countries but but in terms of economic and social and political historical reasons there are reasons why sort of post-world war ii you have a critical mass of people in urban areas where you separated from their families of origins off the farm into the cities or in the military actually the second world war that you kind of create the material conditions for um for for some kind of identity development of identity and then of course in this country of the contradictions of a country founded on sort of you know revolutionary notions of democracy and slavery and you know sexism and you know genocide so i think what this country's historic trajectory is how it deals with the paradoxes of having the most idealistic humane visions coupled with such incredible oppression um and a history of such exploitation and so this country's sort of karma is to figure i think is to kind of figure all those things out and we're part of that other movements have come before us we are not the last movement i mean i i must say sometimes the the the arrogance even of many people in the gay community because when you struggle with the closet it feels so intense and so big when you finally come out of the closet and and start to be your best self it's like okay guys that's true and that's big and that's brave and it's wonderful but there are other social movements that have struggled for political space or identity you know space before us we're not the first we aren't the last and so i think there's that that piece too about linking up with other that we stand on the shoulders of other movements other communities and have debt to other other visions in terms of going forward well phil you sort of epitomized straddling two movements and the the problems inherent really in both of them i think when people think about the 20th century they're absolutely going to think about the civil rights movement which still belongs totally to african-american uh community as far as i can tell and we've emulated to a great extent but differentiated as well i don't want to limit you to just talking about that but what what did what did we do right in the 20th century and why was it a good time if it was for us or not well you know i think that as tori pointed out one of the things that we did right is that we're here and there are people who are not alone that at the beginning of this century we're very much alone you know and there are young people who wake up every day and they don't have the isolation that almost every gay or lesbian person had 30 years ago now because you not only went through the sense of being different no but you went through this panic that you were you were the only one now and i'm sure young people continue to feel that they're different i mean i have you know two presumably heterosexual teenagers and they feel like they're different you know so you know i think that certainly gay and lesbian teenagers continue to feel that but at least for a a large percentage of them they don't feel alone so i think that has been a very very good thing i think that the world is different today than it was now a hundred years ago in large parts due to our presence you know and that we kind of bring to know the environs if you will a different way to look at life and love and living and i think that's important i think that's healthy not only for gay and lesbian folks but all folks and i think that is a very you know that's a very very good thing now i think that one of the things that i find most disturbing is that for a great number of us we're still stuck in the identity politics you know um and that is some ways troubling particularly as i kind of look at my own life and the way i move through this process of of living now um and the truth of the matter is that the the power of the success of our movement i think uh happens out of us not being stuck in the work of doing that you know um and and and the more that we're stuck with with the work of being gay or lesbian or bisexual transgender or the alphabet or whatever and we can go there too but the more we're stuck there i think that we're limited from doing great work you know and i think that there's still too many of us who are unable to reach our potential not because of oppression or discrimination based on sexual orientation but but because we ourselves put those limitations because we're stuck and you know the the notion of being and we're in lots and verbs no one cares you know when i go into you know the my kids high school to talk about math or i sit into in a reading class or i i meet with no one of the kids tutors we don't have discussions about whether or not i'm gay or not we have a discussion about whether or not you know courier wilfred no can do algebra and that's important you know um so um i think that that's kind of some of the work that we have left to do still though it feels to me sometimes and maybe because i'm i feel optimistic as well not just about the future but a little bit maybe accepting about the past there's sort of a natural progression where in order to have a movement somebody's got to identify a little more vocally there's a problem and almost always it's the people who have the problem absolutely and we did suffer from discrimination and there was silence and there was invisibility and enforced invisibility so at the beginning it was just us really absolutely and it kind of had to be or has to be and we form these little enclaves so that we won't be alone but we also don't want to hear from people that aren't like us for a while right and you're right it does in a way generate the notion of identity politics but it always felt to me like discrimination identifies the difference that makes a difference and then we have to say okay now we're going to talk about it or we're going to you know we'll we'll courageously do something don't you think it was a natural absolutely right uh and part of i think the power of what we've done is we've understood that process you know and i think that's really magical because it is a process and it's a necessary process and we got that you know um i think that that sometimes we've forgotten that it's a process that is not the goal and i think that and i'm extremely optimistic and i think that we have a real reason to celebrate now we've built institutions uh in the face of tremendous obstacles now we've made changes particularly in the areas of health care and the notion of the right of health care that benefits the planet you know that would not have happened if not for our labor and if not for you know the tragedies that have befell upon us now if not quite frankly is done on on on the death beds of our loved ones you know and we built those institutions and we address the no we continue to address the issues of health disparities for all folks and we should be very very proud of that what do you think we screwed up if anything well you know it really has to do with understanding history i think that we we miss that sometimes the whole notion that what we've accomplished has been done on the show that we do stand on the shoulders of other folks acknowledging that we began alone no but we didn't end this entry alone you know and and where we where we have come we've come with the assistance of other folks understanding that you know what we are a part of you know um you know one of the things that i that i talk about is that you know what are we fighting for you know what what is this about you know now is this movement limited to you know the right you know to you know of individual private intimacy you know or is that a critical part of what we're doing no and if it is a critical part of what what we're doing what are our obligations to do the rest of it you know i think that now as gay and lesbian people we have an obligation to deal with the issues of the environment and of now education and of children and all of that kind of stuff because we we share this planet and when you fight for equality part of that has to be a fight for taking responsibility you know for all of it michael one of the one of the things that uh was uh sort of an issue in this century in america at least and i think in other countries were the arts and who would own them and how free they would be or not and certainly people in our community were kind of smack dab in the middle of some of those fights if you want to defund any of the federal programs it was because there was too much queer energy in them and yet you chose to in essence talk about make the personal politicals make the personal into art so that people would see it would experience it what do you think was uh sort of essential in this last century in in those areas and sort of the spiritual the art well it's so interesting i'd like to think um that all of these people who died didn't die in vain so in some way the influence of aids and hiv just cannot be denied on the artistic community and on all communities and i think that that tragedy somehow has been certainly the force of my life but i also think that it has been one of the forces of our consciousness and back to just for briefly i mean i think that obviously phil and tori said brilliant things that i agree with totally but i i also am i don't want to get too optimistic because i don't want to lose my edge and i don't want to lose my anger and i don't want to lose those things that continue to fuel me on the other hand if we look at ourselves as 30 years old this movement i think that a 30 year old is just getting over most of us in in our maturity level the issue of self-involvement and self-indulgence and looking at ourselves and staring at ourselves in the mirror and thinking what's wrong with me and what can i do about myself after 30 i think maybe here's where i think that the hope really lies is that after 30 i think you start growing up and you start thinking what about the guy next door and what about the woman down the street and what about poor people and what about black people and what about homeless people and what about people in other countries and what so i think that in in some way we're right where we should be exactly where we should be back to the art situation i just i mean i think that one of the things of the last the last century which saddens me is that so many artists who were gay and lesbian went to their grave closeted and were unable to really fully express who they were or were unable to be appreciated as greatly as they should have been and i i and i look at today you know yet today we still have people on national television daytime and night time who are closeted and so we've made incredible progress and again i think that aids had a lot to do with that i mean i think that the arts surrounding aids and the issue of people being forced out of the closet because of aids brought a lot of people into an area of consciousness that they had not been in before well it's interesting that sometimes when we when we're engaged in a very serious or heavy matter and we try to make sense of it we try to make art of it i mean we write books about it we do plays about it and in in a way part of growing up is facing death not only your own but other peoples and it doesn't it brings you into a place i don't know we've talked a little about spirituality but it felt to me like the the whole movement was suddenly had to do this softening this exploration this we're going to be by death beds i don't i don't know i mean i don't know any better than than you but it just felt like it changed us absolutely i think it did i mean i think that one of the most profound things is just the the the relationship between gay men and lesbians i mean i really think that that happened as a result of aids i think that these men myself included had to realize that we were dependent upon women women who were nurses women who were our friends women who were sisters mothers you know we could no longer separate the idea of of sex the issue of sexism that that we've been so entrenched in all our lives and the same thing i mean aids to me has been the greatest catalyst i'm just talking personally and i think that i speak for a lot of people i mean it's just been a catalyst for me to look at all other issues not just homophobia and as as philantory said that all these issues are linked and that they are all these issues are equally our responsibility and to get out of the myopic state of just looking at ourselves and our own identity and our own you know we're responsible for something much greater than ourselves and west hollywood and our whiteness or our gayness or our height or whatever just to stay with the arts for just a minute but i was thinking when the two of you were talking about why this happened in the 20th century does it doesn't it also have something to do with the fact that we can learn about each other i mean we have i was thinking about my grandmother at the turn of the last century her new year's eve party they entertained each other they played the piano they sang a song one of them danced my grandmother recited a poem and they and i think i want to say that's because they didn't have television they didn't have radio but watching new year's around the world that's fantastic live you know from tonga and everywhere and i thought there's a way that we're connected whether we want to be or not we know each other through these as well is this another way in which uh i mean the arts are a very important part of that not just news but is this another way that this happened in this century because we could find each other i mean your performance for instance is known more broadly i think than it would have been absolutely and i think that performances in the future will even be greater i mean the technology that's available now allows us to connect in a much more immediate and intimate way more quickly and i think that that's all good i mean it's a little overwhelming to me at times how quickly but you know it's it's what david bennett talked about the night that he got his award i mean the fact that this this ability for us to communicate and how it's it to make us a a part of a larger community that we're where we're interconnected i mean that's what the internet is for instance and that to me is so exciting to do it in a way that's that's that is not as risky and also to understand the possibilities because with understanding the possibilities comes an expectation of happiness now that if i see how big the world is it doesn't feel to be so much it doesn't seem to me to be so much to expect that i could be happy yeah you know it's funny i was struck by the similarity in my own experience and the women i was sitting with on new year's eve watching abc watching the positive power of television so often all we see is violence and conflict on television which can have a positive catalyzing effect but the global interconnectedness that the world experienced that day that i think opened up a lot i mean you've heard pundits say it but i really felt the positive power of the internet of not just the internet but of television of the global world that we live in the smallness of the world the diversity of the world in this very weird way when you said this thing about kind of death and spirituality my own experience of going through the aids epidemic um and women friends dying as well in middle age of cancer and so forth but of the breaking down of you know the way the heart opens up the way what spiritual energy is everybody has their own definition of it of course but that there is this way in which the struggle the human struggle at this moment in time is about that connectedness is about whether you talk about it in terms of of of the allocation of resources one billion of the three billion people in the world are going hungry for the first time in history they don't need to i mean we're in a post scarcity i believe call me a cockeyed optimist i've been a pollyanna all my life and that isn't changing with this millennium but i really think that what happens with the internet and what happens with abc showing i i happen to watch the world being shown on television this global diversity coming alive in such a vibrant and hopeful way i mean it was it was mesmerizing to watch the dancers at mandela's prison place and him lighting a candle and i think there were millions and millions of people who felt that moment the way that we did so it's the very same way it's as if the next phase of our movement of other movements has to be about that connectedness and about that responsibility to each other and that we have nothing less we we have the possibility for the first time in human history of actually having this kind of you know more utopian or idealistic global movement we have the possibility of democracy we have the possibility of everybody having food clothing shelter we don't right now have any of the mechanisms for making that happen we really don't um we but the consciousness is the first thing and i just feel like that i know that gays and lesbians and our visions and our understanding of some of these things from that the fire of our own experience will play a leadership role in all of that i don't know what it's all going to look like i don't think we have any clear visions about it but it does feel as if the possibility is there i feel i have to tell you for the first time in about 25 years i feel this tremendous sense of it's not political it's too small a word it's like social political spiritual artistic human possibility opening up in a whole new way and you know and i think it's a lot because of what we've been through what we've done the work we've done personally the political work these institutions the self-examination and the deaths and the sense of you know our friends are not going to die in vain um all of it coming together we've also got a metaphor in our own lives for more being more full or actualized because for us there's a demarcation point in the closet out of the closet and at the moment we're out of the closet practically everybody in our community says i feel so much better i'm so much freer i can be totally myself the rest of humanity may or may not have such a demarcation point but so in a way what you're talking about we've been able to experience a moment or a year or you know a real difference in feeling more ourselves it's us it's being set free in a funny way even though it's recognizing that we've been oppressed right the image of a closet door opening is very powerful it's opening onto landscapes unthought of right it's a blessing as painful as it might be as arduous as that process might be and i'm not suggesting that it isn't still an arduous process for many people but what it the landscape that it oh the vistas that it opens to are so thrilling well and it's the power of telling the truth i mean i was thinking about the 20th century in america and you know the women's movement was about telling the truth that civil rights movement all civil rights movements have been about saying this is what has happened to us it's got to stop and maybe that's that's the next step it's like global truth-telling and getting i'm seriously i mean it really is and and furthermore you know i mean it's going to have to be global i mean that's what i've sort of realized in the last few years is is our it's not just about i mean it's just what we've all been saying it's not just about this movement it's going to have to be it's reached a point where it's going to have to be some global responsibility taking for for creating some some some change some real democracy and some real and it's happening actually and it's happening um on a whole host of levels and and gay and lesbian folks around the globe are experiencing the power of who they are you know whether we're talking about uh uh in south africa and johannesburg or in cape town where there's a a growing gay and lesbian movement or in zimbabwe you know or in india you know where similar things are are happening uh where folks are kind of coming to it and understanding the responsibility that comes with the privilege of being able to be who you are and in cultures where the issue of of of not being able to be who who who you are totally separate from the issue around sexuality oppressive cultures where people are now are are beginning to say you know this is who i am whether we're talking about moscow or st petersburg or we're talking about warsaw or you know any of those places where they're now beginning to be growing gay lesbian movements now and these people are coming out not coming out to to spend as much time as we did you know to kind of look at ourselves but coming out and say and saying now at the do at the day they opened the door says well how can i change this world now and that is a very very exciting night and i think that it's a tribute to a lot of the work that has been done uh in this past century but you know organized religion has really tried to separate sexuality from spirituality and really compartmentalize and control it and i think that there is something inherently different with us and our kind of freedom which everyone tries to sort of put down sexuality they're just about who they sleep with and make it sound like it's a very small insignificant thing but i've always had a hunch that because organized religion always has tried to control sexuality not just about this gender stuff but whether you only have sex in order to have children you know whatever there must be something very powerful and maybe that's part of the freedom that we feel when we come out of the closet is to say you know okay well there's a god in lesbian sex i can tell you that but i think i think the real thing is that it's about love i mean sexual energy is very positive and i think one of our gifts one of the gay movements gifts to the broader world is to not be so sex-phobic you know it's like a wonderful thing embrace it don't be afraid of it there's god in sexuality but i do think the deeper peace is that it really and for us as well for our movement as well as to realize that it's about intimacy and about love and about connectedness um and that's what they're all afraid of because love is tremendously powerful people i built a tree house for bonnie hagenbach and when i was nine years old i was clueless how to build a tree house i knew how to climb trees i did it out of love i found new places in myself because i loved her so much the power of love whether it's one-on-one is tremendous and you open people's hearts and the power of human will when it's linked up with other people there ain't nothing that can stop that power and churches have known that repressive governments have known that um and positive movements gandhi king i mean the most powerful social movements are not ones built on rage they're built on love and the sort of collective power of social action is one that comes from love real love you know that you feel that's what they're afraid of that's what people control and have tried to control what sort of repressive institutions have controlled and i think that's a piece of what we also have to give our brand of love so sexual freedom yes but it's really something that unites us with other people and that's the heart and you know the power of heart energy call it whatever you want it's a power of love the other thing that i think repressive controlling religions fear from us is that we give the world the power of developing an individual relationship with god now and that when you come out now as a gay and lesbian person and traditional religious institutions say that you can't have a relationship with god and you discover the lie in that and you discover yes i can you know and then i can develop that relationship between between my god and myself i can develop a personal relationship with my god that's a scary thing because once i know that i can talk to the big guy myself right now right and and she listens to me okay without going through somebody else then i am powerful i am free no i can do whatever i want and once i understand that at the end of the day that i'm going to be judged on what i do i'm not going to be judging what you think i do i'm not going to be judging what the ministers say i should do i'm going to be judged on what i do okay then i begin to have the responsibility of my own action and that's a very powerful thing and all of a sudden i can't be controlled no and so that's one thing that's one of the reasons why we are frightening to the religious right but it's also one of the gifts that we give you know to the rest of the world and to people who interact with us because they discover it now they discover that they can develop no individual private relationship with their god now and and receive all the all the benefits and the power of that relationship and the fact that we have done this in the light of a sexually transmitted disease which is killed x number of people is quite amazing the fact that we have not allowed that to deter our sexuality our sensuality our true feelings is quite an amazing thing i mean they had a lot of ammunition to use against us and have and will continue to and the fact that we have in spite of that managed to stand up for who we are and for the right of our own sexuality and our own relationship to a power higher than ourselves is so such a stunning statement about gays and lesbians so i see you're optimistic look at this the room is filled with optimism so what do you see the living energy isn't it well it is i mean this is very exciting to me of course this is very selfish to have the three of you on the show because we never have the time to all get together just for dinner so this is my selfish way of doing this so here we are you're optimistic we've talked sort of about what we've done what we are bringing into this new century what do you think is going to happen for our community and and or our community's interaction with others i mean what do you see us doing ah good question i can tell well i mean in a most basic sense i think that the next i mean i called it coming home to america but i think it's got to be a little bit less national chauvinistic i mean it has to be sort of a broader vision but i think that that that bringing being who we are in different spheres i'm not going to say bigger but in different spheres in the schools that your kids go to in the neighborhoods just kind of quietly sometimes not necessarily in a big old way you know not announcing it with a neon sign but just being the best of who we are and not being closeted about our spirituality our gayness our whatever it is the truth-telling piece more and more of us being more out and being our best selves in more and broader arenas now could be the school could be the neighborhood it could be on television it could be whatever i think that that's going to be very significant for gays and lesbians to bring ourselves our messages and maybe even our discourse about individual expression and community responsibility individual self-expression and community building like david bennett was mentioned i think he's a great example geocities represented individual self-expression and community building those came from his gayness but they were a gift to millions of people it goes beyond so i think i think that those are the kinds of things that we're going to see more and more i think that's significant i also want to say that i don't think that it's just about our community i mean i really believe that whether you look at 20 000 species of of plants and animals going extinct every year and global warming warming whether you look at a disparity of wealth in this country that is worse than has ever been in the history of this country there are there are major schisms and challenges that exist what i feel optimistic about is that the energy the political space and the spiritual energy has finally been released and is but the potential is there to deal with that that's something i've never felt in all of my 50 long years so are we talking leadership here i mean we haven't talked at all about the ways in which people who in our community who have come out have also started taking responsibility for uh other kinds of organizations i mean you're all your leadership over and over again what people say about sheila kuhl isn't that she's you know she's good for the sexual orientation you know she's a good example of a lesbian in electoral politics they say you do the business of politics better and more differently and your your model of leadership which is somewhat based in being a lesbian and then being a woman you it comes from your position from fighting for against discrimination oppression but you your bravery you have a new model you do it differently and that's the work of the 21st century for us now that we do the work we do now not solely rooted in our sexual orientation but from the lessons we've learned in that now i guess the thing in my life that i that that i cherish the most you know at the moment is this is is what i'm doing as a parent you know and and certainly i am a black parent and yes i am a gay parent you know but at the end of the day you know the the marker on whether or not i do that job well you know will be in the results of you know my two kids you know and and and and and and the work i do there have is informed by race and gender and sexual orientation of course you know but it has to be you know really rooted in the notions of good parenting now and you know the work that you do is that's happening with tori now that that's happening you know you know being at liberty hill as opposed to you know being at the center you know being at the african american aids policy and training institute as opposed to i guess being at the center it looks like a hotbed of leadership right gestation well michael totally i mean i just you know i feel that it's as revolutionary for me to drop tia off at preschool as any gay and lesbian meeting i've ever attended just in the simple act of that i'm integrating myself into a bigger world i'm not hiding who i am she's black i'm white i'm gay she's adopted i mean there's a million social issues going on here but like phil said it's really just the simplicity of this moment and integrating in this bigger world and saying this is who i am this is who we are and these people are learning from it too you know before before i came here um i uh went for it you know my oldest he goes uh uncle phil when are we having our family we have family meetings and he said no we're gonna have family meeting at dinner tonight now the other thing another thing we do is we all have have dinner together and it you know it was a passing comment it happens all the time but maybe because i was coming to the show it struck me now that there are a lot of folks out there who would challenge the notion that we could have a family meeting you know and yet in the face of the living it happens all the times but see that's another aspect of truth-telling i mean one of the interesting things that's happened from our coming out from our forming these chosen families is that people have in what other people call normal and we often call dysfunctional especially about our own families have started to tell truth as well not just that they learn from the fact that we're we had to fight so hard to have a family that worked by god gonna do it you know but also they start to tell their own truths i mean it was one of the interesting things that happened in families we had we talked about this in some of the other shows we would come out in our family or to the world that forces our family to come out because now they've got a gay whatever the hell and then though they sort of start to have the courage to tell the truth to each other about other stuff because we've brought up that's right absolutely and i find the same thing from hearing from my friends happening in the schools where we suddenly understand that there are not any normal families at all in the world normal well that everybody considers it that there are single parent families or well these blended families i mean we are sort of modeling truth telling where people used to hide it i mean my mother wouldn't allow us to write anything about my sister's divorce to any of our relatives in st louis it was just terrible then i came out and my sister was okay again that's obviously right about you know it's so interesting we live in in the richest country in the history of the world and there's more unhappiness in america today there's high school obesity there's mental illness there's depression there's so much unhappiness and i think what i would say is that that part of our process of coming out and building community and the kind of social purpose that we found even through all the pain i think we probably are all happier people even though there's so many people we miss and there's sadness that we can't get away from that we live with but just even the honesty of facing that and the reason that i say that is that i don't i think there's a kind of a quality of life issue there's a disconnect between the official political you know voter apathy is going up and up there are less and less people engaged in the political system or in many of the institutions of society there's a funny thing happening there's a lack of faith in traditional structures and yet bubbling under the surface not just in the gay community in other communities there is beginning to be and it feels to me a whole lot like the end of the 50s at the beginning of the 60s i mean if i'm going to give an analogy of some time during my lifetime and i wasn't around in the 30s which was kind of the previous generation of of uh but it feels as if there is just this bubbling that's going to be yearning for authenticity for more fairness damn it you know for less discrepancy between the rich and the poor for for for getting beyond the boxes and the isms and the schisms for this it's sort of like after the riots in l.a where people just like they just went to south central to clean up you know and there was just this outpouring of humanity and craving naive perhaps you know but really coming from the right place and that's what i'm seeing that there is more and more out there and and in our own communities i don't think there's social political vision or there isn't a national political vision or social vision to kind of name it or capture it but it's abornan in a way that i haven't felt before and part of that for us now comes out of learning through aids a lot now um that you have to fight for your happiness daily right you have to work on it it's something that that that you have to provide put energy in now but one of the things that tori said that has struck me recently is you know the case of the little cuban boy and right now and with all the jingleism going on around that and the issues around communism and and nationalism and what have you the thing that struck me and maybe it's just my i'm from another planet but the thing that struck me that it seems that most people get that yes the issue around communism may be real yes the issue on nationalism may be real but at the end of the day this is about a boy and his father okay and i'm just amazed because and it's made me really optimistic because i'm shocked that that we get there because often i don't think we get those kind of things that at the end of the day after all this little boy has a father and you wipe away all of that and and that's where that decision should be made and and i've really been moved by even though they've shown the writing in miami and all that kind of stuff but people understand the politics of that right but even when they and even if they sympathize with the politics of that they get it the polls were really clear on that anti-communism aside the polls were clear but it's one of the most interesting things about my job and i am an optimist and i know the three of you since you've been friends of mine a long time know that is that as a jingoistic as bombastic as a single issue as i get or any of my colleagues get or politics gets there's some quiet rational common sense thing in the regular body politic that kind of writes the ship no matter what you're doing um and you know and they have their own problems just like we do too they'll hate somebody i'll hate somebody but i just get this sense when i go actually out in public i have 425 000 constituents and i don't see them all at every starbucks where i have coffee but just about and there's just this sort of basic kind of common sense in a group of them where they tend to balance each other if there's a community meeting or whatever and i think that that's what i see kind of when you were talking about the end of the 50s and the beginning of the 60s there was this moment when all those women who had worked as welders in world war ii were sent home because the men needed the jobs in the 50s we built all of those suburbs so the women would be stuck out there and every you know the men would drive to work we were very depressed uninvolved you know my generation was thought to be a total waste of time and then something started bubbling up now john kennedy helped he started going around talking about how he thought the world should be and that was the place where my generation in the late 50s would say john kennedy started making those speeches because there were some students in the south that started sitting down at lunch counters ordinary people who just said no and that eventually and then that built a movement that then pushed him to the left i don't think these things start with the kennedys i mean we may have a difference here i think they start with regular people and i think where we are now is at the beginning of something it isn't named we don't have the kennedys yet sheila you might be one of the candidates but but for the most part we really don't yet and no but you're absolutely right that's where the people with the ordinary courage are you know the people that that have have faced it and walked through the fire and are just saying no just living their lives by example and doing it differently and that touches people like nothing else and that will create a new movement i think we're on the edge of a new movement i don't think it has a name i don't even know what it is but it's sort of like fairness and decency the the regular common sense and the belief in democracy for real not you know and that will include some economic democracy and it will include lots of things that aren't in the current political discourse uh and but i i think i think it is that re or that most people in this country there's 30 percent that are right-wing schmucks but most people in this country are not you know the 25 percent that are probably lefties and liberals they're in the middle but they have good hearts and a good sense of decency they don't want to discriminate against they they are not willingly racist or sexist they're working through their homophobia and there is the potential of something changing in this country but it's gonna you know it it it will come from people just saying no at the lunch counters you know and then the kennedys will articulate no i think you're absolutely right and i the only reason i thought of john kennedy is because it's his voice that woke me up when he came to speak at ucla but you're absolutely right and i'm i'm struck by the fact that one of the most popular influential authors of the 20th century is anne frank who's and that's exactly her vision that's right think what she was went through her family went through the jewish community went through i mean the the holocaust but her voice is about optimism and she says i think at the bottom mostly people are good and i i mean that's kind of what i'm hearing and it's not pollyannish or which has come to me naive although i think we may want to reclaim that word we'll start a new movement i like that you know as teresa it is about people saying no but it also has to be about people saying yes yes now it has to be about people of good will now saying yes i will do something now that i will step to the wall no and i will do something and because that's how that change is going to happen because it's from it's ultimately from love that's right you know i think we're going to see i i i know we're probably nearing the end of the show but the the seattle protests i got to tell you that felt like the beginning of something not just because it was kind of environmentalists and labor union folks you know vegan dykes and teamsters what arm in arm down the streets of seattle whoa there's turtle suits right turtles and you know electricians and lesbians um but because i really do believe somebody i heard on the radio like what's the one thing that's the best idea of the 20th century if there's one thing you think you have to take to the 21st century and i forget who it was but i agree with them i think it's the sort of power and moral um power of non-violent protest the citizen action um non-violent citizen action and i think we're going to be seeing more of it i don't think it's going to be the guys that you know trashed starbucks in seattle and i don't think it's going to be um and i don't think it's going to you know i don't think it's about violence i think it's about the gandhian king version of it but i do think that the structures the economic and political structures that shut people out that that are not appropriate and some of them are our own movement organizations not just gay movement but other movement organizations that get to ossify or get too stuck to capture to in any way match the new energies coming up the new visions coming up you just gotta have a little you know i just gotta kind of blow them up sometimes and i don't mean in a violent way but i mean there has to be non-violent protest um and i think we're going to see more of it in the next 10 years in our movement is that what you would take with you into this non-violent civil disobedience i think it's a really good idea i think we're headed for more of it how about you guys what would you take with you from the 20th century which was only a week ago into this empathy i mean i think that i've told you this on this show and probably personally over and over that i just think that the greatest lesson which i learned from an acting teacher when i was a eight-year-old acting student is to not look at people and say how am i different from those people but to look at people and say how am i like that person we have soul we have heart and nothing really separates us this humanity this bond can exist with any other human creature so that's what i want to take empathy it's funny too michael because it seems like it feels to me like the technological um extension of the arts the fact that when you were talking about watching new year's all around the world or which was on on pbs was all arts it was all dance it was all music it was all performance that but that is one of the ways that i think we're bringing if we discover empathy among ourselves we bring it into the new century because we can see people we've never met absolutely we can connect with people we have we wouldn't be able to find in a million years because you know they're in sri lanka but we can communicate we can see them it reminds me of woody allen's movie radio days which was there's a moment in the movie when everyone in the country is listening to whether that little girl is going to be rescued from the well and it's the first time that the whole country is connected to the same issue at the same moment in time and that's what happened to us as a world on january 31st i'm on december 31st it was we were connected because we were all focused on the same exact issue there was only one thing going on and it felt great it did it felt great how about you phil what would you bring into this century i was the individual action you know the power of of the individual you know i'm reminded of two quotes one is from martin luther king the others from my dad the king quote is now everyone can be great because everyone can serve and the quote from my dad is that i never looked down at another person unless i'm reaching out to pick them up and so the power of what we can do one person at a time now is unbeatable you know i was thinking when tory was talking about gandhi too when gandhi was asked what he thought of western civilization he said oh i think it would be a good idea well this has been wonderful and i i thank you all so much tori osborne phil wilson michael kearns i thank you for watching i hope that you enjoyed it as much as we did because we certainly did enjoy ourselves we're optimistic the 21st century is here we seem to have a very good feeling about it and we hope you'll get used to it [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you