In the Life: Episode 1401, "The Hidden Agenda"

in its season premiere in the life outs the hidden agenda hearing secret tapes we will be the most powerful political force in american politics a right-wing hit list it is scientific mccarthyism and the true goals of the gay rights movement i'm gonna be out and i'll just have to see how it goes and harvey goes in search of the homosexual agenda it's hard to imagine how we as a community get anything positive done all this and more on america's gay and lesbian news magazine in the life in the life is funded in part by the h van ameringen foundation additional support provided by the ford foundation the gill foundation the pride foundation the arcus foundation broadway cares equity fights aids and the annual support of in-the-life members like you welcome to in the life i'm alan tonight in the premier episode of its 13th season america's gay and lesbian news magazine looks into the veiled recesses of the culture wars casting a light on the covert efforts of a group of religious fundamentalists whose stated objective is to be the most powerful political force in this nation we'll also be looking for the through line in the homosexual agendas of lgbt americans tonight in the hidden agenda in the life delves into god and country if we could have people of faith on the school board we will change this culture life liberty etc there's so much in this world about getting people to feel lesser than and especially and it starts so young and the secret lives of school boards in the early 1990s the newly formed christian coalition launched a coordinated crusade to forge a new political order from the bottom up starting with the nation's school boards tonight in hostile takeover in the life looks at a new hampshire community's school board battle and outs the training tapes of the political machine behind it christians founded this nation they built this nation and for 300 years they govern this nation we can govern again and that's why i founded the christian coalition our public schools are a center for indoctrination for the gay agenda we believe in activism up and down the line what is the mission of the organization it's simply this to restore godly principles and godly men and women to the government of the united states of america if you want to have political control and you can't win on the issues you have to go on demonizing people i don't think that there was anything christian about what they were doing merrimack is a white-collar fairly affluent community in southern new hampshire we've got all the good things but some of the bad things that you also see in in communities throughout america i don't think before this agenda came into place that we were any different from most communities in 1993 i was the incumbent chairman of our school board and that was during a time in which the the christian coalition were making a a effort to focus on school board races and particularly in new hampshire we will develop the ability to elect majorities in the united states congress and the legislatures in at least 30 states as well as the city councils the city school boards and other local bodies part of what we do is to encourage people to get involved in politics at the most basic level and if god speaks to you about participating then run for office run for election and we'll give you whatever training whatever education whatever we can do to help if we execute this in the coming 10 years we will be the most powerful political force in american politics there was a lot of negative things that were being targeted towards me and a lot of money that seemed to be coming in from outside the town i had an ad put in the paper where somebody had forged my signature saying i was selling assault weapons and it was obviously done in the hopes of discrediting me i went to a school board meeting and it was the most surreal experience i've ever had because here were five people that were elected to run our schools and they were contemplating bringing in the lord's prayer into school and they were just talking about things that had nothing to do with education and so i decided to run the following year if we could have people of faith on the school board we will change this culture we'll change our public schools we'll change the mindset the culture that our children are growing up in because they're growing up in a very permissive uh amoral environment and we need to have people of faith who will go in there and and select good curriculum it's been a number of years since they concentrated on global education on multicultural education and those would sound good if you didn't know what they meant but they're really code words for teaching the child that all first of all that all cultures are equal and entitled to respect and secondly that the american or the judeo-christian is the worst now those are just plain lies and all cultures are not equal and to try to mislead children into believing that all cultures are worthy of respect is simply teaching them a falsehood part of their strategy was to look at school boards as a stepping stone at kind of political grassroots to building up a political establishment and new hampshire was a very very critical place to do that in because of the first in the nation primary the mission of the christian coalition is simple to mobilize christians one precinct at a time one community at a time one state at a time until once again we are the head and not the tail and at the top rather than the bottom of our political system one of the other tapes has pat robertson there uh talking very deliberately on how the this political machine they were building was going to target school boards and target local communities and and he lays out in great detail you know having um you know local area captains that will go in and be the organizers of these uh they will be responsible for training activists in their region interfacing with candidates at the local state and federal level and mobilizing people at the grassroots each of those regional directors in each of those seven states will have ten top counties targets where they have to organize down into the precincts by the next election we were facing high class sizes severe overcrowding in our schools our teachers were among the lowest paid in this region and those issues weren't being addressed issues that were being addressed were bringing creationism into the science curriculum introducing a policy infamously known as policy 6540 which was going to ban any positive reference to gays and lesbians so for example walt whitman his works would not be able to be perceived in a positive light or promoted in the classroom if the teacher mentioned that he was a gay person any type of situation where homosexuality was going to be viewed in a positive way was going to be banned i never heard the word homosexual until i was out of graduate school and i don't think i suffered from that the phrase that they use is that homosexuality is normal and healthy and that is a flat out bold-faced lie they were focused on things like putting in an anti-gay policy in a community that never had any significant issues with with homosexuality in our school district i think 80 or 90 percent of america would say they support traditional family values i think when you get into the details though of what the ultra right christian political group support is not what mainstream america supports and family values america a nation founded by christians and built upon biblical values is in danger of losing its proud heritage of national greatness through moral strength i think the real motivation of extremist groups are complete power and control to meet their own ends i don't think they look for the well-being of a community at large in merrimack a lesson that we've learned is that we can't afford ourselves the luxury of apathy the outsiders were trying to implement their own agenda by using our town i don't expect that this type of agenda has gone away there are those in power in our country who would be very happy if the gay community just disappeared in fact to be very happy if it at least didn't show up at the polls this year it's very important that you do make sure you show up and you vote our lives and our liberties are on the line no joke this year more than ever get out and vote due to the vagaries of textbook manufacturing the state of texas largely determines which textbooks will guide the curricula of all of america's public schools to be more precise the very few texans who show up at the state's hearings largely determine which textbooks will guide the curriculum of all of america's public schools and by the book in the life looks at just who is testifying in texas in years past textbook publishers would submit books to the texas state school board and the religious right would line up to battle against them claiming a liberal bias but the tables have turned as this year's book adoption attests health textbooks teaching an abstinence-only curriculum 88 88 of people who took virginity pledges reported having sexual intercourse before they married that is a worse failure rate than condoms my argument is if you look in the public schools you will find children that are going to be abstinent until marriage it's realistic because it happens all the time you know firefighters promote prevention all the time but they need the tools to fight their fires and if we don't give these kids the tools to fight the sexual fires they start that's why we have so many teen pregnancies in texas and so many such a high infection rate young people need to be aware of their bodies understand their bodies they need to be proud of their bodies and they need to be able to make good decisions decisions made in the texas textbook hearings have a nationwide impact because texas represents such a large portion of the national market about 10 textbook publishers tend to respond to their every whim texas wields a big stick when it comes to textbooks and it it and it also has an impact nationwide we're very unique we have a an endowment fund that this board manages it's almost 20 billion dollars in size much smaller school populations they don't have a central purchasing they're not going to write a textbook for those states so generally what texas adopts so goes the nation texas school board hearings have a legendary history of controversy at the 2003 hearings they battled over a biology textbook that didn't teach creationism as well as evolution in 2002 a history textbook was pulled because it referenced the amount of prostitution that existed on the western frontier but the keystone textbook battle occurred in 1994 when another health textbook was up for adoption that included education on sexuality and aids prevention samantha smoot heads the organization texas freedom network one of the reasons this organization was born was because of the incredible controversy over the textbook hearings on health textbooks 10 years ago and at that time board members demanded that upwards of 700 changes be made to the books people complained about things like a line drawing of the female breast in a section on breast cancer and self-breast exams the political climate was so controversial that one publisher holt reinhart and winston actually had to pull their book from the adoption process their book at the time was the most comprehensive book when it came to sexuality education this year the very same company has submitted a new health textbook and like all the other books competing for adoption it teaches abstinence only with no mention of condoms whatsoever all the new 2005 health books submitted for adoption in texas come self-censored pre-censored by the authors and publishers to appeal to the texas market all the books purposefully omit these topics thus continuing the propagation of ignorance among young adults in texas these books are totally different from the health books adopted seven eight years ago and one of the key differences is they flip-flop from being more on the liberal side to the conservative side why did the publishers do that i think it's fascinating that they've jumped on the conservative side i think it shows the nature of the state in the 1970s the religious right as we know it today was a cultural force but it was not a political force and the religious right used the reagan years to build an infrastructure organizing precinct by precinct and church by church with very modern political tactics the year i was elected in 1992 there was one uh what you might call a religious right or right-wing person on the board he was elected the same year that i was elected and that was just one his mission as i you learned later was to get other people to run and the next round of votes saw two people elected to the board and after that the process has evolved and every year more and more elected to the board i happen to believe personally that in this day and age the most important life-saving piece of information a teenager can walk out of health class with is that at whatever age they become sexually active they need to wear a condom each and every time give me a quick update on another big issue that y'all were involved in in education the california district court that tried to remove the pledge of allegiance from the classrooms and y'all were in support of that come on dude i'd just like an update yeah thank you and might i congratulate you mr bradley on the charges being thrown out this week as well we already have the highest teen birth rate in the country if these textbooks pass and go into the classrooms we're talking about tens of thousands of young people having absolutely no access to information also these books are going to be in classrooms for up to a decade this is a whole generation of young people we're talking about here diane hensley of the collaborative abstinence project fought for the abstinence-only curriculum representing my organization i am here because i felt an obligation to the publishers who i think have done a wonderful job i was here nine years ago throwing grenades at them and i felt a moral obligation to come back and say good job these textbooks are excellent this time around two publishers contacted me pre-publication to see if i'd like to consult and so that was really a blessing and uh great progress and actually it was interesting because i found myself telling them you need to add this in and so that was a real interesting turnaround that they had become more conservative than i am the textbook publishing companies involved declined to be interviewed for this show joe bill watkins is a partner in the law firm which represents several of the publishing companies it's a business you don't invest hundreds of millions of dollars in hopes that you can offend everybody that you're coming to my clients respond to what the marketplace says it once holt reinhardt winston hired dr joe mcelhaney to write their textbooks abstinence-only section mcelhany established the medical institute for sexual health to among other things distribute abstinence pamphlets conduct abstinence seminars and distribute abstinence-only videos to teenagers commons reduce the risk of hiv by only 85 it leaves a 15 relative risk of being infected with a fatal disease even if you use them 100 of the time and even if you use them 100 of the time it only reduces the risk of chlamydia and gonorrhea and syphilis and herpes by 50 i don't understand why he would be talking and preaching against condom use you know nothing is 100 but abstinence but we certainly feel that when correctly and appropriately used that condoms are more of the 80 or 90 percent effective it's all sex oral sex mutual masturbation it's all sex it's all sex in 2002 dr mcilheny was appointed by george w bush to the presidential council on hiv aids this is a condom condoms are virtually useless against hpv at a time when the one thing we need people to know is that if you're going to be sexually active you need to use a condom every time to try to stop the aids epidemic we've got a guy who's got a national platform for saying oh don't bother using condoms they're not going to work and many people say oh dr elders you know condoms will break but i can assure you that the vows of abstinence break far more easily than those latex condoms the textbook hearings in texas are still underway and citizen involvement is crucial because as we've seen local politics might seem insignificant but they have nationwide repercussions in the fall of 2003 in the life ran a story chronicling what seemed to be a ghost coordinated attack on the funding of several hiv aids organizations and researchers not long after a staffer leaked a right-wing religious organization's secret blacklist to the press and put a whole new spin on the funding crisis hiv prevention messages like these have made the stop aids project of san francisco a target stop aids was investigated and audited for 14 solid months by the federal government we know that 20 years into the epidemic what it takes to catch the eye of a guy walking down castro street is liable to raise an eyebrow in washington there are certain restrictions put on our funding by the united states congress one of them specifically says that federal funds cannot be used to directly promote sexual activity stop aids was eventually cleared its materials and workshops were not found to be promoting sex still the organization became a lightning rod in a firestorm raging between liberal safe sex messages and the conservative administration the audits and the investigations have been about politics and not about public health and many scientific organizations say this tug of war between politics and public health is also affecting aids researchers the new york times broke the story certain words can trip up aids grants words like sex workers men who sleep with men anal sex transgender and gay several researchers who rely on grants from the national institutes of health said they'd been warned by government health officials to clean up their grant applications this document is at the center of the battle a list of more than 150 scientists who study aids and human sexuality applying for grants for research projects considered by some in congress to be potentially offensive it surfaced last october just after this washington hearing american indian transgender research where nih director dr elia sarhoony was questioned about similar grants at the end when they reviewed all these grants there was scientific justification meanwhile congressman henry waxman decided to look into the so-called hit list as part of his larger effort politics and science in the bush administration he wrote to the department of health and human services which oversees the nih after learning that officials within hhs may have helped draw up the list and he asked secretary tommy thompson to launch an internal investigation it is scientific mccarthyism for politicians to try to interfere with legitimate scientific research because they want to try to make that research go away or fit into their ideology secretary thompson sent back a strong denial saying his department did not generate the document at the same time a conservative group known as the traditional values coalition admitted it drew up the list still nearly a year after that first letter to health and human services congressman waxman is not satisfied with the secretary's response we have never had him come out yet as far as i know and condemn this interference in in research and a hit list by a religious right organization but today hhs says as far as it's concerned the matter has been put to rest meanwhile controversy at the cdc which is moving ahead with a new initiative focusing on those who are hiv positive the epidemic has changed since 1981 and we have to change with it dr valdiserri says the new strategy is necessary because most new infections are coming from people who are infected and don't know it so they're unknowingly spreading the virus so millions of dollars are being pulled out of prevention efforts aimed at the general hiv negative population like condom distribution and clean needle programs our overall hiv prevention budget is over 800 million dollars so you have to put 35 million dollars in perspective compared to 800 million the majority of our resources do in fact target high risk seronegative persons nonetheless a year after our original story aired stop aids like many other community-based organizations no longer receives federal funding and many are asking whether there's a common thread running through all three of these issues the controversy over nih research grants the new strategy at cdc and the investigations into groups like stop aids i think it's completely unacceptable to have this sort of thing go on i think we're going to lose very good scientists we're going to lose our edge in scientific research and i quite frankly think that millions of people may die if we don't get the answers to some of the questions that these researchers are looking at i'm elaine harris and you're watching in the life still to come on in the life special rights i remember what it was like to feel powerless against the adult world the breakdown of the family unit how could it seem to anyone that it's better if it's just this one person than if it's two of us the homosexual lifestyle just saying that you're gay you're an activist right there and harvey's take on his community's missing agenda we're like the biggest messiest most dysfunctional family that ever was the political struggle for the souls of schools frequently reaches beyond the classroom and into the personal lives of students in stranger than fiction in the life investigates the latest round in a 20-year long battle over what literature young people should be allowed to read in their free time young people good to see you here this morning you marked this one down especially mommy told a little me should know it's all about the devil and i've learned to hate himself god's word is clear homosexuality is an abomination why are we labeling children by their sexuality as gay and lesbian people we don't just suddenly become gay or lesbian when when we hit college it's very possible to be 10 11 12 years old and no this is who i'm attracted to and if you were living in a in a society where that was okay and you had a normal development that's who you'd be i remember what it was like to feel on the outside i remember what my body felt like i remember what it was like to fall in love for the first time i remember what it was like to feel powerless against the adult world and all of that stuff just comes rushing back to me when i start writing i would say to mothers out there listening and fathers it's time to do battle over your children 84 percent of lgbt high school students regularly hear words like or dyke on their campus over 91 percent of students hear the phrase that's so gay used to describe something that their peers don't like or don't approve of frequently at their school i think that was the beginning of my calling was saying to myself you know what i want to write a book that i haven't seen in the world i want to see myself represented in the literature i want to see my friends represented in the literature i want to see you know now my kids in the literature i was a boy who was very different from other boys in many ways i like to play with dolls i like to dress up and in my home no one ever said there's anything wrong with who i was but then there was this big outside world and i got the message over and over and over that there was something wrong with me as a teenager i i pretty much stopped reading and as i look back on it i think part of that reason was because there weren't any books that spoke to me in terms of the huge issue that i was dealing with and that was accepting my gay feelings this whole controversy about these books is about god and his word are we or aren't we going to listen and obey the word of god is there a homosexual agenda in public school absolutely part of what school's doing is preparing you to live in the real world and in the real world you're going to have to interact with lgbt people when you can get the minds and hearts of children then you have you have a culture gay straight alliance clubs our children are being brainwashed middle school junior high that's when the homophobic slurs really start kicking in and at the same time that's when young people are hitting puberty 11 12 13 years old and so they're having their first crushes first kisses first attractions and oh my gosh what if that attraction is just someone of the same sex we put a world on the page and we say hey look at this world what do you think about it and maybe give them a little bit of like what we think about it giving them the tools to start thinking for themselves our children are being openly preyed on in public school and we're not allowed to say anything or we're homophobic or we're mistreating or we are haters when you go through school and you never see anybody like you in the books you never see anyone like you in the videos how can you possibly feel like you belong and in fact statistically we know that students who have those kinds of positive portrayals are 27 percent more likely to say they feel like they belong at school i make those comparisons between you know being an immigrant being latino and being gay and the same way we try to you know hide or split off a part of who we are and the damage that that does to us when black people entered the fiction with a book like iggy's house it was black people's impact on white people and so i was growing up believing that black people can't tell their own stories that it's only our impact on white people that can be told and published and then you know i read sounder which i hated because i didn't know what was wrong with the book but i knew there was something that was very false about it and then i realized these people are just totally depressed they never touch each other the only one in the book with the name is the dog you know that people don't even get named and then i realized it wasn't written by a person of color and i was like okay you know this guy obviously does not know the black community the difference between when i was growing up as an immigrant mexican and growing up gay is that whatever issues i i faced as as a mexican as an immigrant my parents they were in the same boat i could talk to them about that and they were sympathetic to that but growing up gay or lesbian we were more isolated we can't oftentimes we can't we're too scared the messages are too strong don't talk about this the most memorable experiences i have as a reader that you have as a reader are when we read something and something we've known to be true but i've never never had the words for never been able to quite figure out just comes alive and we say that's it now i understand that i understand this about myself i understand about the world or something's so clear all of a sudden jim's a very well-known middle school writer virtually every middle school teacher in a country teaches his books and a few years ago he came out with a book in which a group of young people themselves run to take over the student government on a platform for a no-name calling day and they are the students who we know get called names in the schools it's about four best friends who are the misfits of the title one of whom is gay joe and who who run for student council and ultimately decide to create a party called the no name party glsen has taken this idea and run with it the purpose of no name calling week is to simply raise the consciousness of teachers in middle high schools and junior high schools across the country about the problem of name calling of all kinds based on sexual orientation religion race ability size and to say this week we're going to stop this glsen is one of the most radical homosexual advocates they have homophobia week they have days of silence where a homosexual so-called children and kids talk about they're silent because they're supposedly so badly mistreated in public schools now that's not to say that kids in public schools are not bullies that's the favorite word right now and don't use the word oh that's so gay they do i mean they are they are very hard on anybody that seems strange and nobody who wants things to be right would want that to be the case but that does not mean that homosexual kids are being singled out there's so many ways we don't even begin to think about what words can do and so often not just with kids but we'll hear adults say too and teachers can can easily overlook this kind of thing in school we think of censorship as someone going through with a pen and striking out certain you know sentences or phrases or scenes and that's not the type of censorship that occurs with with these books i remember going into the 51 the school in our neighborhood and the librarians saying you know can you not read melanin's son and you know doing a free visit and doing it all my time and i'm sure that goes across the country that goes on where people are like no these books are edgy so we're not going to have them in our school primarily for school libraries there are three three issues um there's the profanity issue there's sexual content issue and then there's a sexuality themes gay gay lesbian bisexual transgender themes that can make some school librarians skittish when i was writing the book rainbow boys the first one it became very apparent you know this is the book i wish i'd had you know that i really wanted and needed to read when i was a young person you know the book that would have told me you know it's okay to be who you are and just the the power of that message that just you know i continue to hear that from young people one of the things that i found in coming out i did did so late in life is the realization of how much of my life i lived from fear how wonderful it would have been to have some of the books that are out there now it would have made a world of difference to me there's so much in this world about getting people to feel lesser than and especially and it starts so young it starts with young people and to like try to figure out how to nip that in the bud somehow to get them you know just you know put some kind of road stop and say no wait a second do not listen to this do not ascribe to this do not become who the world is saying you are don't let the world name you is really important to me and literature is the way i know how to do it many of this country's diverse lgbt communities have agendas of their own for this month's reel to reel in the life looks at the most common gay agenda with the filmmakers of treading water a documentary about the pursuit of life liberty and happiness in rural minnesota that's me don with the big head and that's jamie and that's us we live in saint paul twin city to minneapolis we moved here from duluth two years ago and i was confronted by city folks who wanted to hear the horror stories of living queer in rural minnesota i heard comments like i didn't know you could be out in northern minnesota were you scared is it really dangerous to be a rural queer treading water started out as a project that we'd been talking about for years we lived in duluth and moved down to the twin cities saint paul minneapolis for work when we moved down here a lot of the metropolitan queers had a pretty solid idea of what northern minnesota rural queer life was like and mostly it was boy that was scary wasn't it never been called a i've never been called anything negative to my face yeah people there there might be that out there but i'm not aware of it because i've never had anybody confront me i've never feared for my physical safety at all and i think a lot of that has to do with that i don't really look queer you know like somebody looking at me would say oh for sure she's queer hardest thing about northern minnesota is the closet factor which is there's so many people who are in the closet or in a varying degree of the closet and you run into them at target or on the lake walk and you don't know if you're allowed to say hello there is a lot of discrimination up here not only against you know gays and lesbians but against people of color you are who you are because of what you know what you've gone through in life not because of what you decide to settle sometimes people in a larger city think they have all the answers and that they have to come to the hinterland to explain how to do it and they should really look at what can happen in a small town we were a little homesick and was like oh that's just giving us an excuse to go up every weekend and interview our friends and just make it for fun you know and then the more we talked about it the more it was like wow there's something here these people have never talked on camera before really let's try to get the individuals who you know really don't have a voice out there we kind of started the film with the idea of let's look at duluth let's kind of dispel this myth of scary rural minnesota and then through the process realized that we had our own biases about places like the iron range because the range has a lot of tough people it's an iron mining industry so we decided we should go out to the iron range and check out that area and look at our own preconceived notions of what it's like to be queer in a really rural setting the result is a living snapshot of lgbt life in rural northeastern minnesota with a wide range of individuals sharing their experiences of queer life in a small town individuals like denise a transgendered person who's dealing with acceptance and sexual identity lynn and karen a lesbian couple fighting for equal rights in the workplace and eric an asian american who reflects on racism and homophobia remember the last physical fight i had was because someone actually told me to get back on the boat where i came from which was just insane um i and again i think i've dealt more with that than with my sexuality probably because with my sexuality i've made an effort to be honest and deal with people and i'm probably less aware of the fact that i am asian just because that's something that i've always been i never feel like i have to you know tell people i mean obviously this is it we did focus on a few people more more concretely i don't know than than other people mainly because you know there was something about their story that that people may not expect um you know denise a transgender woman an electrician and she was accepted within her union for me please understand i've been this way all my life i mean i didn't even change really the only thing that changed to me really is that instead of having to hide who i was you know that i can i'm really free to just tell anybody who i am knowing it's an incredible freedom as a man she's married to a woman now she's a woman but she doesn't want to get divorced so does that make her a lesbian how many layers you kind of unpeel that you don't know about and you're like wow that's an interesting dynamic with like lynn and karen we met them as a couple of gals from the range and then these stories start coming out about their experiences working in the mines and all all the steps they went through with sexual harassment within the minds and how you know as lesbians they were able to stand up for themselves in a way that the straight women in the mind didn't feel they could there was day-to-day confrontation because there was a lot of friction because we were two lesbians working at mintac and even though there were a tremendous amount of support from from many of the workers that we worked with there was a lot of tension as well management decided gee we didn't get rid of these women we can't have them integrated with the men we're going to put them on their separate track gang we're going to put all women on one gang and then they can go behind to pick up spikes and hand them to the men and the men can lay the railroad track well the women do women's kinds of work like pick up the things and and give it to them and i said absolutely no way and they said you're going to be suspended and i said so suspend me a lot of people were waiting for an opportunity to say something you know and and we gave them that opportunity to tell their story there's an interesting dynamic between the organized queers and the regular everyday queers and i think everybody has their role and you know i'm so glad they're organizations like out front and minnesota aids project who can go out there and be very political but i think it's often underestimated what your regular everyday person is doing within their own lives just saying that you're gay or queer or glbt just saying it to one person that you're an activist right there and i think that's huge and and if you hear a bunch of people saying it you know then this is somewhat of a movement i guess and that it makes other people able to come out we told so many stories in treading water there were so many stories in there however you know cliche as it is it was just the tip of the iceberg singer-songwriter katie curtis has long lived her life her way out and proud but over the last year as she and her partner have begun to raise a family she's had to adapt her strategy tonight in the life goes backstage with katie for a closer look at one homosexual's updated agenda i love this town you can see the stars at night katie has produced five albums that have carried listeners down a nuanced path of romance and relationships now katie has completed her sixth album and she has a new title which may or may not make it into the press mom when i was in college i was really clear that i wanted to try making it as a musician somehow when i graduated and that i would give it five years or so and then see how it went katie curtis first burst onto the scene in 1996 with her hit album truth from lies a fitting title for a young artist to face the decision to be or not to be out in our career at first i felt like oh well i'd probably be better off not being out you know this was like in the late 80s early 90s and then i started writing songs that were so clearly related to the gay experience that i didn't really have choice and i felt like okay if i'm gonna perform these songs and be myself i'm gonna be out and i'll just have to see how it goes i was at that time sign to a major label and they decided they were really going to go with radical essay not only as the single but also as a way to promote me as an out gay artist and you know she's out she's not afraid to talk about it since she first burst onto the music scene katy has produced five albums that have carried listeners down a nuanced path of romance and relationships crossing the bridge over the ohio river i would say you know 75 of my material ends up being about relationships splitting our time between our long-term partner elizabeth her adopted daughter lucy and a whirlwind touring schedule katie has a lot to sing about while balancing love and a career on the road was hard enough 2003 proved the most challenging and rewarding year of all fortunately filmmaker rob millis caught the year on tape for his documentary tangled stories as i began to shoot she sort of mentioned that oh we're adopting a child and there could be any time now that we'll find out who the child is and where and be matched with her oh and i also left my record label too this year so i'm trying everything on my own for the first time in my career i signed with vanguard and we adopted a baby at the same time and suddenly this became the biggest year of her life i am officially a mother yes it's true my partner liz has always thought that she would have a family and thought maybe she would like to get pregnant and have a baby so for it was more of her decision about whether she wanted to you know go the biological route or the adoption route and i was i think all along sort of pulling for adoption they decided to adopt and katie and liz were eventually matched with the baby of their dreams lucy but in order to bring her home legally they had to confront a system that made katie a silent partner it was really hard when we first filled out the paperwork for me to realize that only one of us could be on the paperwork i think i was the most upset when we had to go to our friends and we had to go to people at work and ask for letters of recommendation for just the one person because i felt like how could it be that it seems to anyone that it's better if it's just this one person than if it's two of us and you know it was very difficult to accept that and i was very angry at the time someday i believe love will make when we went through this process of trying to adopt lucy and you know it was very trying and very uh required a lot of patience and faith because it kept seeming like it was going to fall through well there's a baby being born somewhere once marriage is legal either you know just in massachusetts or or throughout the u.s someday um that's actually going to create some complications for people trying to adopt internationally because if liz and i were legally married when we tried to adopt internationally we would have been denied i remember walking through the airport with liz and the baby and liz was worried that maybe i was freaking out so she was like are you okay and i was like liz this is the best day of my life like i just felt so high like oh my god this feels so right here we are like we're three people now and like we're tribe and i'm really happy i've got something to give in this town where i wanna live what's i think ben opened the door to to the awareness of of um gay persecution in in germany because really until then it wasn't known and it it wasn't admitted germany before hitler was a mecca for gay life it was wiped out in a second it was wiped out in a second so there is a lesson about taking freedom for granted the other lesson is that they could wipe it out very easily because while all this freedom was going on there was a law on the book that outlawed homosexuality it was a dormant law no one paid any attention to it but the nazis simply reactivated it so it also means that one must really really be very careful about what laws are on the book and if people say well that law doesn't mean anything you can't pay attention to that at all you have to change that law and finally in the life's regular commentator and winner of four count them tony awards harvey fierstein tackles the homosexuals lack of an agenda oh geez are we ready getting all worked up i'll forget it you know what the gay and lesbian community does best fight amongst ourselves we're like the biggest messiest most dysfunctional family that ever was we can start a war over our lisp in fact it's hard to imagine how we as a community get anything positive done when i was a kid and first fell into the founding meetings of the gaa that's the gay activist alliance for you not old enough to remember the partridge family on its first run just to get a meeting started was a skirmish who would speak first lesbian or gay man who would set the agenda lesbian or gay man who would represent us lesbian or gay man or drag queen in those early days one of the biggest battles was whether to represent ourselves as heterosexual esque or just as we are there were gay men who believed if we wore white shirts and skinny ties like straight men did we would be accepted likewise our lesbian sisters were encouraged to dress less like katherine hepburn and more like catherine the great and i ain't talking horse feathers beyond the what not to wear wars were how should we portray our goals should we politely argue that our rights are a matter of constitutional promise coming to fruition or do we scream we're here we're queer get used to it until we've drowned out our detractors and at last achieved our long overdue equal protection under the law religion has likewise been another sore spot for us do we stay in our family designated houses of worship and accept that they are who they are and we need to accept them as such do we step gently out of the closet and quietly work for change should we found our own religious homes and shape them to our needs or is it best to desert these institutions all together leaving their pews empty and bankrupting their power to judge and dictate i will never forget the gay civil rights bill hearings in downtown manhattan where priests who certainly set off my gaydar stood and testified against the passage of the bill these pitiful creatures recited their superstitious lies tears in their eyes as we chanted brother against brother under our breaths oh the ugly early days of freedom and how about the lgbt community and our relationship to political parties one would think that an involved evolved caring homo would only support candidates who support our issues no way josephine we have liberals and libertarians and conservatives and radicals our community populates the full rainbow of political affiliations and ideologies well why wouldn't we we come from the full rainbow of religious ethnic and socioeconomic spheres we in fact have very little in common despite our enemies claims there's no such thing as a homosexual lifestyle or a homosexual agenda other than a broad orientation to partners of our own sex we fully represent the panoply of sexual practices desires and expressions no wonder our leaders are few and far between who could possibly represent such a faceted factious fractious community how can one person speak for mary chaney larry kramer and the homeless transvestite who begs on the corner of 8th avenue and 52nd street we have in fact very little in common except for the desire to live our lives with dignity privacy sense threats to our personal being or pursuit of happiness we have common goals we have common history and we share a common destiny but is that enough to join us together as a man without children i've always resented paying exorbitant taxes to educate other people's kids but are they other people's kids or are they the future of my country and don't statistics tell us that 10 of those kids will grow up to be our kids so i shut up and i pay the taxes another example as a well-to-do capitalist i profit dearly from the tax policies of the republican party but is a 300 a year refund worth the aggravation of having those people in office i donate much more than that to fight back their social agenda so just voting them out of office would save me thousands in donations not to mention time energy and agita so what am i struggling to say here we're great at disagreeing with each other that's a given but when we do who wins so instead of tearing into another tirade about how you would run the world think it through put your ego and personal interests on the side and consider what's best for our community as a whole place the greater good before your personal opinions and take a look from that vantage you might just see a rainbow i'm alan and from all of us in the life here at phantom audio in new york city thank you for watching and we'll see you next month in the life is funded in part by the h van ameringen foundation additional support provided by the ford foundation the gill foundation the pride foundation the arcus foundation broadway cares equity fights aids and the annual support of in-the-life members like you you