Get Used to It: Ep. 79 , "The ONE Institute"

oh [Applause] [Music] hi i'm sheila cuo welcome to get used to it today we are uh filming our show in a uh a new location because that's what this show is about this is the one institute and archives the international gay and lesbian heritage and research center that just opened in los angeles today i have three wonderful guests to talk about why do we do this why do we collect our past and think about it and share it with each other and visit it what's the importance there that's our topic our guests when i ask them to tell me what epithets they'd like attached to their names indicated collectively we have three activists two authors an artist a therapist and a publisher however we only have three guests and they're quite distinguished we have mark thompson mark welcome mark is author activist therapist very happy that you're here patricia nell warren author publisher activist great to be here thank you patricia thanks for being with us and michael kearns who lists himself as artist and activist fine actor and performer welcome michael good to be back nice to have you back mark i want to start with you if i may tell us a little bit about your background most especially my what might have led you to be interested in sort of bringing together our history well it's been a journey that started for me uh when i came out at san francisco san francisco state university in uh 1973 and was one of the founders of the gay students coalition there one of the very first gay activist groups in california and um in the journalism department and that's when it all began for me in terms of the activist part coming out coming out and organizing and making community and i was graduating in 1975 and one day i got a letter from david b goodstein offering me a job and my journalism professors at the time said don't do it you'll ruin your career you have a great career coming don't whatever you do don't go into gay journalism i offered you a job in gay journalism yeah and i said uh well i'd rather do this than to go work for the san francisco chronicle which i didn't think was a very good paper at that time so i took the the offer and i worked for the magazine as a journalist a reporter and eventually as the senior editor for the next 19 years right i knew that yeah so clearly as a writer i mean it one of the purposes it seems to me of doing a magazine is not just sort of the ephemeral nature of each article right uh it's it's not just there like telling uh even oral tradition actually was meant to last but really an idea of capturing something what was it the advocate thought it was capturing in those days well i think the zeitgeist of the time which was the movement being born or reborn one of the things i've learned through my involvement with this this project is of course that the organized roots of the of our gay and lesbian movement go back to the late 40s and early 1950s but i was what i would uh call a of the boomer generation i was a member of the first post stonewall generation of gay kids to to come out on campus so that was a different kind of activism there was like a wall there between the prior homophile movement and then the gay rights movement which was much more of a civil rights movement take it to the streets kind of movement and we did so aside from all of my work with the magazine i semi here going through the files and i realized i had written or the cover story or edited or in some way contributed to over 450 issues of the magazine i'm also the author of five books on gay history and culture and this has been my life to document and to illuminate and to reveal what the what i think the true nature of our experience is did you have any sense of the history of our movement when you first came out no i i really didn't i grew up in carmel california and uh you know it's uh i didn't realize apparently i was growing up in the sweater queen capital of the world there were in other words the town was filled with lovely gay men but i was a local boy uh i grew up in the same town that where my dad was born and his father too so it was kind of a hands-off and of course like many people that are coming out at that age i was very keeping it very internal and stuff down inside but one day i remember that my father who was a contractor in the area was fixing some pipes in a beloved old theater up in carmel valley called the tanamot theater it was run by two of the most wonderful gay men francois and ralph and they met in boston in 1933 and had a beautiful puppet theater there on beacon hill with marinettes and they toured the country they were very famous in their time they also designed the macy's christmas windows wow during the depression era so anyway they retired and took this old barn and made a marvelous theater and they would do their bring out the marionettes and i remember as a little boy seeing the them perform but on weekends they'd show wonderful old movies like camille and you know musicals and things and uh there wasn't much else to do in carmel valley so we everyone would come so my father and everyone knew that they were a gay couple and they were completely beloved and accepted so my father took me out to the garage when i was about 17 and we had one of those father son conversations i said are you and i said oh i don't think so that he knew better and he said i have a job for you ralph and francois need a ticket taker and an assistant how lovely of your dad yeah he knew yeah so he gave me the keys to the family car and that began my education and they and they took me in and told me all of their stories and gave me self-esteem so it was a very personal history in a way i mean i i think when we talk about the history of the movement there are so many strands and streams i mean i think most of us start with i'm the only one in the world and then there's my own kind of history and then when we meet people especially people of a previous generation two hours we get a sense that this goes back yes you know farther and farther and farther hearing the stories as i have of women in the you know in the uh in the wax and or the women who worked with the general eisenhower you know the stories that we've all heard uh and then to begin to realize that there's a larger story here of a community which of course is woven of all the the stories of of everyone but the the institute kind of has its own story as well i mean this is a wonderful edifice and with i can see an enormous i mean it seems very large a very large collection must be one of the largest well it is quite literally and this is not just hype or anything this is without question the world's largest repository of historical material documenting the experience of gay and lesbian bisexual and transgendered people on the planet the one institute and archives is the preeminent institution of memory on planet earth in terms of gay and lesbian experience now how did the strands come together to form this um institute well it's it's a again we're talking about a thousand and one stories and going from the personal to the collective as you might say and that's how this collection started in 1942 a very dear man by the name of jim kepner started acquiring the first books in a san francisco apartment and it the collection just grew and grew and grew and grew over the years meanwhile here in los angeles the foundations of the gay rights movement in america were being seated by the managing society which formed here in a small house overlooking silver lake reservoir in january of 1950 now out of that came another group that was incorporated in 1952 called one one incorporated and one of their great achievements was publishing one magazine which was the first magazine for gay and lesbian people only it couldn't be mailed through the u.s postal service because that was illegal so the group took their case all the way up to the u.s supreme court and won a landmark legal victory in 1958 so that opened the floodgates for freedom of of expression and freedom of of press for for gay and lesbian people so as the 60s and the sexual revolution and my generation kind of came on the stage the group kind of um you know faded a little bit into the pages of history but you know was still intact so what happened in 1994 as the founders of both groups jim kepner with the collection the international gay and lesbian archives and our leg who had founded was one of the founders with don slater and others of one were ailing it was suggested that the two groups be put together and so that's the one institute and archives is the the two groups merged and then over the years we've had other collections like the homosexual information center collection and we have a lovely uh collection here called the lesbian legacy collection which is a whole dedicated space for women's uh material we have the aids history project here and a whole other wing of the building that is filled with thousands tens of thousands of documents showing the course not only medically but socially of of the first wave of the of the aids epidemic we have a performing arts collection with thousands of videotapes and films and it just goes on and on we have thirty thousand books a hundred thousand photographs over five thousand different titles of publications and 20 different languages we have uh paintings and artwork and artifacts of every description it's uh like the collective attic you might say of the gay and lesbian only more organized yeah and we're still unpacking it i mean the other day we were unpacking a box and i was standing there and out tumbled a letter written by oscar wilde wow in 1988 wow and we have that here on on display well it's very exciting to have this in los angeles of course but to be available really for so many visitors yes uh patricia let me ask you i know that there's been an interest or an association with history your whole life and certainly much of it reflected in your writings but tell me a little bit about your your story and your growing up sheila i grew up in a family that was just really very passionate about history for already many generations the european side the oral traditions of the musicians in the family and uh composers the irish who fought british rule there was a lot about freedom fighters in the family and on the native american side also keepers of histories the ranch where i grew up in montana was one of the old oldest ranches in the pacific northwest and had a real history and life of its own and it was a place where somehow miraculously when ranch is modernized usually the old buildings get torn down and a lot of the old stuff disappears and that didn't happen at our place and because of this love of history and this concern for the preciousness and the survival of artifacts and little by little there was this collection that grew up there at the ranch in the old buildings and to the point where it came to the attention of the national park service in the early 1970s and they recognized it as a sort of time capsule to be able to go there and see what the cattle business and cowboys and that whole era of that is so loom so large and in the american imagination what it was really like the saddles the buggies the buildings all of the stuff is all original to the place and so it's now a national historic site wow so out of my own personal experience i really got to understand the importance um it's it's not an academic or abstract thing when you touch those things when you touch the old saddles that somebody rode in the 1870s or 80s you were in touch with those people's lives and how things were done and how people felt and you get a measure about the changes that have happened and the continuity of history and the continuity of human consciousness and this is a really important thing to sink into a kid's mind so then it also became important for me as a writer than to start talking about these things in my books and what does this place mean to you i mean i know that you are getting involved with the one institute certainly you've been involved with um an interest in collecting our history and presenting our history but what is this institute really represent to you well instead of the saddles and the buggies and the barns you know what we have here are the the books the posters the art the the artifacts that are those things that put us that give us that living contact with people that have gone before us who created everything that we have and bring those people alive for us we touch their lives we touch their beings it it makes it to be not an academic thing but a real living thing so that people can come here no different than the tourists who now go to my family ranch and they get a picture that's very different from what you see on television as far as ranching people can come here instead of giving getting the television picture they get the real feeling of what it was really like to be gay and and to be in the closet in the 1940s and 50s a time when you couldn't associate openly with other gay people you couldn't send things through the mail you couldn't dance with other people socially there were all of these things that we're able to do today that we're against the law then and it this is a place where that all comes alive and so we get that perspective and that measure and that livingness of history where we came from and where we are now well who do you think will use this place or what is your hope about who might use this my hope is that many different kinds of people will come here certainly i hope you know gay people of all ages uh it was wonderful at the opening the other day to see such a range of ages i certainly hope that there will be tremendous ethnic diversity of people that will come here that there will be things in the collection that celebrate the the lives and the beingness of african americans latino people native americans asians as well as whites all the different ethnicities and and nationalities that are out there different religions uh people who are not religious young people old people and also um because i've seen it happen so often with books parents of gay people who have questions so often they will go to a bookstore and buy a book well they can also come here young people who have questions about where it all came from and especially because our young people really need a lot of information kids today generally don't get a very good education on american history generally in school i was talking to a young man just last night 20 years old who was really hazy about what the cold war was and i mentioned the john birch society he said what was that you know so i explained so for our young people to give them the measure of where it all comes from it's going to be very important for them you know it's um it may seem like a sort of an obvious question but i'm interested in your notion in sort of in the larger sense about why it's important to have a sense of history i mean we talk about young people knowing where they came from but you know in a way i mean i just turned 60 and i think we're both in the same decade in our lives but it's important for us too i mean we don't we never had that really in our background and i feel like i still want to capture so much of it it's part role model part wanting to have a cultural history just as an aspect of this important piece of my culture what do you think in the larger sense why why do we need to know this stuff or be in touch with it sheila i think that's a great question i think it comes down to how important it is no matter what our age is to have a sense of perspective about who we are and certainly just from our own personal experiences we get a certain amount of perspective especially as we get older but also we can get perspective from our families and from those larger sources of information that you're talking about and when i think about my family all the different people and things that there were out there the the dog soldiers and and the healers and the tribal chiefs that were on the native side of my family uh the the creative people the the the the quakers the all the different religions there were on the european side of the family and all those stories that's all part of who i am and it it makes me richer to know more about my family and where they came from it's that's all a part of me and a really mysterious kind of way not just my dna but it all kind of comes to rest through the generations of families and how children are taught and dealt with and educated and if you think of the of the gay world as a family and we're not a perfect family and we have our fallings out but that families of who we are that is basically what is happening here and so we really need that perspective in order to understand and appreciate ourselves and if you don't know where you've come from it's hard to be clear about where you want to go it's really true well michael i know we were talking about the oral tradition and i was thinking about your performances because you collect stories people and then you give them back to us through performance it's certainly not the only way in which you've been an artist but it it really reminded me in its individual way of sort of the idea here tell me a little bit your background well you know i grew up bereft of any sense of history and as a teenager in the 60s one would desperately try to find oneself anywhere you know in a library you'd be lucky if you could find yourself reflected in one or two books in a magazine article on the television in the movies where am i who am i what am i and that's what this is this is sacred territory something that you and i didn't have the luxury of being able to connect and say this is a part of me these artists these playwrights these painters i can be this i never had anybody saying to me as a young kid who wanted to be an actor or wanted to be a writer had all these aspirations i never had anybody saying well here's a list of writers here's a list of actors hear their books hear their movies hear their costumes they wore so it's just so rich you know and and stories i agree with you i mean it's it's all about stories every button that's here every poster every photograph every page of every article it's a story there are zillions of stories here we grew up with a few stories maybe if we were lucky and as patricia said we need these stories this is our family tree in some respect and when you look at the young people who are growing up and even not so young people who don't have families who've been discarded by their families ignored by their families even more so they need to connect and these are the men and women that they can connect to are surrounding us what else do you think is to be found here that's important for us to remember and know about well i i think that just to to be able to come to a place i think that you know it's static as it is now and i think that one of the things that i know we're going to endeavor to do is to enliven it and to give it a a living breathing personality so that it we encourage people to come here and talk come here and network come here and read may is develop programs that are very friendly so that people can come and have a discussion about politics in the 60s or politics through the years or aids art or any number of things the women's movement how it's affected the lesbian movement and vice versa i mean i think there's just a wealth of material here to complement thousands and thousands of programs and discussions and to bring people in here to make it attractive and to make it attractive to people of all ages of all colors of all persuasions you know we want to we of course we want heterosexuals to come here we want them to learn about us and especially if they don't know who we are this is a perfect opportunity now mark was talking about one area of the institute being devoted to materials having to do with the with the aids holocaust and of course that's been an issue not the only one but one in which uh cert as a person living with aids you've certainly personally exhibited but also in the characters that you choose and the and the people that you perform about can you tell us a little about that collection well one of the things that i really want to say is i remember in the early 80s specific instances where there was a painter or a photographer or a poet whose parents came in quick especially when these deaths were quick parents came in and obliterated everything there's nothing left their art is gone there is no po their poetry is evaporated their paintings have been burned their words are lost forever that won't happen now people will have the foresight to make sure that these works of art are preserved that's one aspect of it another aspect of it which is so emotional to me and so moving is that so many of my dead brethren are alive in this room i mean and will not die as a result of being on these bookshelves in the photo collections they will be immortal in in this space and we know also that a lot of gay and lesbian people the point was made eloquently by karen oakland i'm not going to steal it from her but that a lot of gays and lesbians don't have children they don't have a trusting loving family to leave their things to this is the place for it to go they don't want to die not knowing where some of their treasures are going to go some of their pain whether they're artists they're not some of the things that they've collected that are pertinent to our lives to our lives and our lifestyles so it's interesting to me the three of you being involved in the one institute all artists authors you know creators actually and this is a place really about creation and sharing but you also all said activists i mean independently of each other activists what does it mean to be an activist in this sense michael well i think one of the things an activist does is preserves and and sets the record straight we've seen what has happened around the holocaust we've seen people trying to rewrite history we have been swept away we have been ignored we have been obliterated one of the catch phrases from the aids warriors that i love the most is silence equals death that's an activist slogan and that's also what this place stands for we are not silent these walls are alive these bookshelves are alive these paintings are alive we we cannot rewrite our history as long as it is preserved no one can rewrite our history and i think that that's another just a crucial element of what one institute is about well tell me what you think also the the patricia mark because it's interesting i mean we have the books some are fiction some are non-fiction we have historical documents but we have you're talking about the buttons the posters although those are acts of creation to make a button and make a poster that's not just what they're about and it was it's interesting to me to bring this notion together sometimes a library is a sort of a an un thinking collection of alphabetical materials but a specialized place this is more than a library that's correct it is a repository of memories dreams and aspirations it is our lives and i know the activist part of me um has always been about first being an agent for social change and moving the story along to whatever the next chapter needs to be and then the other part is the remembering part so that our lives will never be erased like the stories i heard from francois and ralph well you're right i mean you are an historian yes something leads you to want to to do that well in a way it's uh by telling the stories of others um i'm learning about my own story this aspect of my own inner growth and healing from homophobia and all the sins of omission that i think and sometimes commission that gay and lesbian people or any minority group has to endure i also had another thought while michael was speaking that this of course uh it's a special place as you were saying it's a sacred ground for our people but it's really for all people i mean i think there's a history of the history of homosexuality uh by the way uh christopher irish once told me that he hated that word he much preferred the word gay and i said christopher why and he said oh homosexuality is such a mouthful but but anyway the the history of of what we call homosexuality which has been constructed in different ways in different cultures and times and places tells us a lot about the history of heterosexuality how were these categories invented what do they mean for all people so through this particular prism or lens i think many different kinds of people can gain illumination as to what it just means to be human on the planet well i think in your work patricia too fiction there's a lot of history as well i mean i think that you have always sort of seen and presented it and woven it um as a as a background for us do you think it's an i don't really know how much of the collection is gay and lesbian writers or about gay and lesbian people or topics tell me a little bit about sort of what's here and what you think should be here well i think it's interesting that the word story keeps coming up because i've thought a lot about why humans have stories i mean there have been stories for millions of years and ever since we first sat around a campfire somewhere and tried to share our experiences and what humans have learned from this is that statistics or data or raw information somehow don't inspire people to remember things but when you put them in form of a story with a beginning in a middle and an end and something that draws people in and really awakens their emotions and their mind and their spirit and gets their blood racing people remember stories and so everything that's here that can somehow be in a story either it's already in a story in the form of a book or maybe it is data and stuff in the files that the staff of the one institute can pull together and put together a presentation or a program that will make that material into a story then it's ready to be remembered because it has that capacity to really engage people in a living way so to me it's all about stories whether it's in my books or whether it's about how this is all going to be done here stories are the key to everything and patricia i just wanted to say speaking of stories i remember the incredible impact the story that you told in the front runner made on my life i know we we were just like students and it was one of the very first but we ran out and we were we didn't go to bed that night we were just turning the pages i'm not making this up i'm not either and it really made a difference the story that you told made a huge difference in our lives at that time thank you and and there were the stories that had that effect on me uh t e lawrence's seven pillars of wisdom which i read when i was 13 as part of a high school history assignment to read about world war one which was not very real for me as a 13 year old it was this war i'd heard about and something about the the upfront and personal nature of this war memoir and the story of these two young arab boys that was threaded through the whole thing a love story of these two kids who had been an item all their lives and they're in the middle of this terrible war and that story was the first time that i really realized that there were other people out there who because i had already had my first thing i i didn't know there was a gay thing or a lesbian thing but i had my my thing with my girlfriend that i left you know and i thought i was it was like this secret personal thing and that story pulled it out of me to realize that there were other people like me and so that story had the same effect on me and i think as you we look back to the generations there is this wonderful linking together of the stories through the generations that that have this effect on people you know sheila one thing i want to tell you about some of the things that are here you know some of it's very fun and and almost deceptively fun for instance there's an exhibit here now on charles pierce impersonator and you know these dresses you know there are some outrageous glamoury glittery bangly beaded dresses but if the truth be known those dresses were hard won this was one of the most politically motivated careers in existence because in the 60s when he was performing they couldn't wear dresses and the cops came down and arrested them and took them in for performing in drag so that dress while beautiful and fluffy and and may seeming to be a frothy sort of thing is deeply political and that's what i just think is so great about this you know that that we have not only do we have these stories we have costumes and you know there's some outrageous pink leather costume up there and and some military costume clothes not costumes those aren't costumes michael they're sort of my clergy for me they'd be costumes and clear the clergy things are gorgeous see that's a great point i mean when you're putting like so much about the controversy of of gay people in the military it's like in the news today and when you have the dress blues of a marine corps officer and the power that really being able to it's one thing to see it in a photograph or on television but when it's the real thing the sword the the cap the you know it really brings the reality of our women and men that have had this excruciating challenge of being gay in the military it really brings it home and it so it doesn't matter and clothing especially because clothing is so personal any kind of clothing well i remember when our mutual friend tori osborne had a birthday party and it was to celebrate her her radical past or whatever and each of us was to wear some t-shirt that we had worn in the revolution um such as it was or in the movement or whatever and it was sort of amazing because these were articles of clothing and they were each of us was you know were ours and we brought them and we put them up like posters on the wall and it was like the story of both our personal involvement and pieces of the movement right you know the movement and it's interesting mark when you were talking about the beginning of your involvement at a time in history when we had a movement that we could fledgling as it was that we could join there's sort of that bright line in a way of the unknown past which was so hidden which i think is such an important part of what we have here and what we need to know the stories you know of the women leaving their house sometimes married women in their regular straight drag with you know their clothes in the trunk of the car going to the market or whatever quick changing into something you know going to dance for an hour changing out of it and coming back and it was an entirely separate life not known you know it's inconceivable i i'm um i retired from active journalism in 1994 because i too like michael i'm hiv positive and that was kind of a a low point and i just had to stop the presses or i probably would have not been here and i'm doing much better now because of all of the the new medications so i went back to school and got a master's degree in clinical psychology now i'm working as a therapist with a young gay and lesbian youth and one of the reasons i want to do this is so i have a place to bring them and say this is you or a part of you or a very important part of you this is your heritage this is your part of your story too well it's going to be an even more important part because the department of education in california has just issued guidelines about how it is you comply with this new law that says that you can't discriminate or harass students on the base or teachers on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity in any of california's schools and one of the guidelines has to do with materials that libraries should make available it's not a mandate as to what they have to be but somehow as an indicator in the guidelines that they say would be wonderful should the your school library should have some of this and i can see this as a very important resource well let me leave my therapist cap on here in just a minute that's just one of the three hyphenates i guess is that you would expect imagine after 50 or some years of an organized gay and lesbian movement in the united states that homophobia would be curbed or more contained and you know these wounds that are inflicted on us as a as a people would be lessened but i know through my work with these kids that they all they continue to suffer the devastation of homophobic slurs and physical and mental abuse uh i read a report recently i think it's 88 percent of all gay kids in america have reported some form of of abuse and that it has largely goes undealt with by school administrators or other adults and there's not one gay youth that i have counseled that has not reported back to me utter horrible stories i mean uh just when i think i've heard the worst story that you can imagine i hear something else that's even uh greater so this is still going on and of course this affects the capacity to love to be loved and and how we function so what i guess i'm leading up to this is a healing place this is a place for people to come and have their hearts mended a bit and their souls healed just through the power of the objects but you know we're not the first community to want to do this no of course not and i know since i sit on the budget subcommittee that has something to do with funding all the museums in the state that many of our sort of specialized collections which probably opened with the same kind of hopes that we have about how you know everyone would be visiting really are not doing as well as they thought they would do um and i of course it's our hope and prayer that that won't be the case here and there's more than 100 collections at least around the country none of them this large but tell me what your hopes would be both about how this place would be used but how we also would make certain that it's used i know that i mean anybody of course but michael was talking about programming which i think is an important part of of outreach absolutely i think that we really need to endeavor i don't think it's a secret that this organization has been predominantly white and male and there's nothing wrong with saying that that's those were the men who originated it and it was their life blood and and fierceness that allowed this to happen but we're in a different time now and we have to make a concerted effort to reach out and how we're going to do that i think is yet to be determined but believe me it is being very carefully considered i mean we need to make it friendly and sexy and we need to get youth in here and we need to attract women and and all ethnicities as patricia pointed out and and i think that that's that to me that's one of my that's one of my really serious goals about this place is to open it up and and i mean the material is here there god knows the material covers spans all ethnicities and and as well as women obviously and so we just need to bring those people in here and and i think programming is one of the keys i mean how we're going to create programs that are friendly and and and attractive so i'm just sitting here thinking about the preservation aspect i need 80 to 100 000 to put in air conditioning and air temperature in the building we have incredibly rare and fragile items here and while the university of southern california has been more than generous this is their building we're slightly off campus we own the collection so it's our responsibility to preserve it so i my mind is just thinking oh my heavens we have all we we have these treasures you know what i mean well what you mean i mean fundraising is us it's us yeah i mean it's like all this raw material now what are we gonna do with it but we opened uh you know hundreds and hundreds of people were here ecstatic crying carrying on i mean so there is a need you know there was a real need it was an amazing i've been to a million events as you have and it was one of the most spiritually connected emotional days i've ever spent i mean people were just exuberant and and very moved and connected with each other and and it was just an amazing day so i know in my heart that there is truly a need for this place and and and what we're doing here well one of the things that struck me as you were all each speaking is this notion of stories patricia that you were that really we've all been talking about um it seems to me as you've said there's a million stories here and i could sit and listen you know days and days about them as a matter of fact i'd really like you to tell me some of your some of the stories that you know are here one of your favorites or you know what what is here that most appeals to you individually what do you love that's here well for me personally um when i was finally to the point in 1972 after 16 years of marriage and i really gave being a heterosexual a great try and it didn't work the inoculation did not take and i had been living and working in new york state and in the media and so i was in and out of new york and so already on the newsstands there was the advocate which was in those days a little newspaper it's very discreet but it was already sold on the newsstand and so i could go to the new york city office of the reader's digest and nip out on my lunch hour and get the advocate into my briefcase and through the advocate i found out that there was an organization in new york called the mattachine society so that when i was finally ready to make that first phone call and they still had rotary phones so it was none of this touchstone stuff right it was an ear ear you know with my heart fading like this and i did it in the office because it was we had a trunk line in new york and i sneaked the call in on the trunk line and i called the met madishine society and that was for me the first step so that's my story about those early day publications and organizations for me to see those early copies of the advocate which are now quite you know how newsprint gets yellowed right and there they are and the mattachine as it was in those days which for so many people was that first phone call and that was the beginning of my real living contact with the gay world sheila you know i just glanced up a national march on washington for lesbian and gay rights october 11th 1987. it just reverberates there we were that morning it was about 7 or 8 am at the quilt almost everyone i was with that day is dead almost everyone i was with james pickett david stebbins joe frazier robert chesley all dead and that's what that says to me that on some level when i can look at that they're not dead well and that was the whole point of the quilt too i mean not only and it was interesting to me the notion of the quilt it's very much like the notion of this place which is it's first you make something which is a remembrance and that i think is the artistry the the authors the activists who you know made these uh or the artists who drew or the films or whatever then there is the knitting together of it i mean the that's that was the notion of the quilt each piece is a person the quilt is more than one person and it was really to draw our attention to the enormity of the loss and the story but it was also a way to visit them and they were stories very much like these stories i mean each square would have a favorite thing or you know a uh a symbol of something that's like a 600 page novel yes exactly just glancing at it exactly and then the people who would be there looking who knew them or who didn't know them or connected to them i mean i think each book is like that i mean reading reading your books patricia is like that because fiction is very powerful in that it not only it doesn't tell you what happened really but it tells you what happened really by telling a story that you know that brings so much together in one absolutely because for me as a fiction writer all of that comes out of real life and real people experiences that i had stories that other people shared with me and over the years there is this there is this one institute in my brain of all these things that have been filed away that were all real things and real stories of real people and at a certain point i reach into my own archives and i take out this and take out that and and my new book the wild man is is very much things that that are out of my archive of the sixties of another country that i lived in spain where they had a fascist government right so that it was even tougher to be gay in spain than it was here in the united states because of the way the country and the government was and so all of that gets pulled together and people respond to these things in books because they are real and and i think probably most writers if not all work this way in some way it all comes out of real stuff somewhere that you mentioned franco spain and that was actually my first article i wrote for the advocate i i i was graduating and and david goodson said now all right what are you going to do and i said well i'm you know going to europe of course after graduation he said well will you go to spain franco you know and i said sure and he handed me this very slender uh envelope that just had a few letters and after stonewall i mean that was sort of the the shot heard around the world and it inspired gay people throughout europe and other places the world to form groups well that's in spain of course barcelona being the freedom-loving city there there was a group but it was smashed and many of the members were imprisoned uh they lost everything or exiled out of the country so uh he asked me to go and see what i could find so i had to go to amsterdam and wait it was like something out of a spy novel and finally a voice called like at midnight and said come now you meet me at a park bench on the ramp list at a certain time in a certain day and i said okay so i just packed my bags and i got on a train and it was summer so the train was full and i had this for two days uh sleep on the floor boards finally got to barcelona found the park bench and waited and waited and finally this man came and we just like gay people do just a nod and he went and he introduced me to the last remaining six members those were all that had been left they were all in hiding wow and that's that's when i became an activist when i heard what had happened in terms of the oppression there you had asked earlier about what our favorite things are and my favorite thing i think would be the first copies of the latter which was the first magazine for lesbians that a woman dear woman who was here as our honored guest on sunday typed out on a manual typewriter with three carbons she worked as a secretary for one of the big studios and during her lunch hour when no one was looking she would type out the first magazine for for lesbians and then mail them out you know lisa lisa ben lisa ben and we have all of those issues here so that's one of my favorite objects are those are lisa ben's magazines well of course they say that people who don't know history are doomed to repeat it yes are doomed and i think that it it's interesting because ours has been a history of oppression and joy like so many communities that become a movement to tell their own stories and i'm struck by the fact that one of the first acts of activism of any community is to tell stories yes because i remember in with the women's movement the power of finding one other person who had the same experience you did the only way you can do that is you tell the story they tell their story the threads are similar and you found someone that you assume understands out of that group of stories then comes sometimes a sense of uh sadness at what's gone on and then perhaps a sense of outrage uh and then some hope that as a group you know you're kind of a community on wheels that's what i think a movement is it's community that's headed somewhere to redress or to fix or to you know activize your way into some better world and i assume this is sort of the point in a way of the gathering of the of the collection yes well it is a joyful place there is joy here that's very important i'm also uh i'm part my roots in the community go into the gay men spirituality movement and so that always reminds me that joy first you know and the other things can follow now in addition to air conditioning yes what else do you envision in the future for the place well we need uh paid staff see the the story of this place is that it is the result of the efforts of literally hundreds hundreds of volunteers over five decades building this is coming to this culmination it's all been i'm we're all have volunteered and so we're at a point now where obviously we need professional curators and librarians and you know an executive director and you know we want to pay living way you know people have to be paid what are your hopes for this place patricia certainly wonderful events uh because as an activist uh author publisher uh one of the things that i look for is the way of actualizing uh things out of concepts and into real life and so that you get people interacting and and because to tell a story you have to have other people there and you have to have them and so that's where you come into the events the program so this is something that i have been talking about a lot with with mark and with michael also and the other people here is what kind of events could be created around gay and lesbian and bisexual and transgender books and publishing for example because books have been a real important vector in throughout our history and ways for for ideas and feelings to be carried along uh because as a writer it's very clear to me that after i jump off for the great round my books will still be there hopefully on the shelf somewhere so books are really important so what do we do for books what do we do for the artists what do we do for the young people um so event planning is a real important part of it and as we said earlier to make the events really exciting and and colorful so that people will want to be here and so that they will take something away with them that is is useful and meaningful and healing for them and michael what would be your hopes well exactly what they said but i really perceive it as an art space you know i mean i think that this is a place for artists and and especially young queer artists a place for them to nurture their soul and to to connect with that which has gone before them and i think that you know as i said earlier if i had had something like that as a teenager or as a young adult wow we find it on our own but it's right here it's fabulous thank you all so much we've come to the end suddenly of an hour i always go so fast for me because i this is totally selfish endeavor i just say who are three people i would like to be able to talk to for an hour and then make up a reason to do it and certainly you're three of my favorites and i thank you so much for doing it and i thank you thank you for being with us um i hope you enjoyed it as much as i did i hope that you will find a reason wherever you live to visit your local collection archive scholarly center library having to do with gay and lesbian bisexual and transgender issues and because actually this is our history and we better get used to it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you