Joseph Burns (Part 2), October 13, 2019

MARY FOLTZ:My name is Mary Foltz. I'm here with Joseph Burns to talk about his life and experiences in the Lehigh Valley. This is part of the LGBT community oral history project, which has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We're in Joseph's home in Boiling Springs today. It's October 13th, 2019. Carol Moeller is our videographer. And Joseph, I just want to thank you once again for talking with us.

JOSEPH BURNS:Thank you.

MF:We're so happy to be here, and we met with you yesterday, and we talked a lot about an organization called Le-Hi-Ho, which you had been really one of the earliest members of that organization, and we wanted to start our conversation today by asking, is there anything else that you wanted to tell us today about Le-Hi-Ho?

JB:Yes, probably. I was a founding member. I was the first to respond to Ron's letter about forming the organization. You know, of course, we didn't have a 00:01:00name, we didn't have any place. So we met with several other people; one of the men was a nurse by the name of Al Ravert, who became the vice president, and Al had a friend with a cabin in the woods somewhere, I think up in Lehighton, I believe, which was appropriate. We weren't sure -- there had been an arrest not very long before that about the Mafia. A group in the Poconos that had -- Mafia leaders had come out from New York, and they went up and raided them and arrested all these people. So we were a little bit paranoid. I thought -- we thought, is that why we're going to the woods, to be out where we can't be arrested? And I don't know who else felt that way, but thirty-one people who came to that first organization, thirteen of us formed the organization, what was -- decided to meet again. And that's how Le-Hi-Ho started, and that was -- it was in April or May of 1969.

Now, the two stories I want to tell you about Le-Hi-Ho, while I was thinking of 00:02:00them: one was the first time we met, probably, was Dick Leitsch, we invited Dick Leitsch, we formed in April or May, invited Dick for February, I -- January or February, I'm not sure which; February, I believe -- to be our speaker. Well, they had that -- a public meeting, we had that at the church. The Presbyterian church in Allentown sponsored us for that particular day. And so we had the day, Dick came, we had -- the gay community was seven people, seven men from our organization. And we were talking about, the first meeting, we were going to blend in to the crowd, okay, we'll just be anonymous. Four ministers and nobody else. Four ministers and us. Now, we're going to hide, right. (laughter) We're 00:03:00going to look anonymous. That's just -- it's just wonderful, as a matter of fact, our first public appearance being publicly identified as gay was certainly -- there was no hiding. And they were as curious about us as we were about them. At the meeting, Dick Leitsch did an excellent job for us.

The next story involves Barbara Gittings, who we had I think in June, I believe -- true, it was June -- as a speaker, and that was the (inaudible) meeting at which we had a young minister there who was vociferously -- he was going to preach that night about the evils of homosexuality, and all of us knew all about this, and we were invited to come and hear all about the evils of homosexuality. And quite forthright, and several of the ministers, who I think were a little more open to the idea of us being there than he was. At any rate, we decided we 00:04:00were going to go, we were going to go, okay, and so we had the first public demonstration against homosexuals in 1970, and it consisted of Barbara Giddings, Ron Seeds, myself, and my lover, Paul Forrest -- stood outside the church and waited for these people to come. Nobody ever showed up, okay. So the hour comes, and I hear the music inside going on, so we went up to the door, looked inside, and there's the minister up in the pulpit, his wife, there with his son, and he's preaching all by himself. (laughter) That was the first demonstration in Allentown that we ever had, first public demonstration. Wonderful memory.

I just want to get that story out before we get this -- there wasn't another one until we did coming out, and when we did -- the next organization in 1978, and it must have been prior to -- some time prior to the election, I don't know when, exactly. Dixie White, who was then the state president of NOW -- I don't know -- she hadn't been elected yet. This was before the convention, they elected her. It was '77 when Dixie started and we were going to have a 00:06:00convention at the Hotel Traylor, not the Hotel Traylor, Hotel America? Americana? It's on Fifth, is that right? Fifth and Hamilton, I believe. And it was owned by one person -- We wanted to have a convention there, we were going to have a gay convention, we wanted to have our first gay convention, and he says yes, to begin with, and then said no; it went to the paper and [said it descriminated against us?]ot a lot of publicity about that, and got a lot of controversy, but that was a part of the conversation about discrimination after that, because they had, you know, that was a front-page story -- not a 00:07:00front-page story, but a story that got in the Morning Call and led to the Valley (inaudible). But that had started because the human relations commission, I think -- they may have approached us as we approached them, I'm not sure. But Dixie had wanted to include other causes in the human relations commission, which were gay, lesbian, trans, and bi having rights for anti-discrimination against housing, employment, and public spaces. And the commission was fine with that.

There was a fellow by the name of Bob Prince, I believe, was in charge of the commission, very friendly. There was one commissioner who was not friendly at 00:08:00all. He was very forthright about it, too: a young man who had very strong feelings about -- very anti-homosexual. Didn't make a difference. He would've been overruled by the rest of the commission, because the rest of the commission was for us, whoever they were. But we went to City Council on the basis for the first time and talked about the need for gay rights, taking a bunch of us from -- Le-Hi-Ho was very supportive, and people [were?], then, multiple organizations, I mean, we could never represent five or six organizations, just because people were available and sometimes participated in those organizations, so there was a reason to do it; we weren't just fooling around.

But they were not city -- Allentown was -- Le-Hi-Ho and the organization that we 00:09:00founded, which was called the Citizens' Concern for a Better Community, CCBC -- did that because our friend Frank, a professor at Muhlenberg, created an organization as soon as he heard for it, Citizens Organized for Decency, COD. So I just needed a name to respond to that, so we came up with the Citizens Concern for a Better Community as the gay organization. Met at Confront - a number of people came; I don't -- Carol Bloch was elected as co-chair with me of that organization, and we used to sit for several years; (inaudible) for three years, actually, from '77, '78, through '80, and '80 -- on New Year's Day in '80, we started the Gay Alliance Service, which was what we did after we tried for gay 00:10:00rights. There were a number of events involved with that. We had public demonstrations at City Hall. One of the first ones was our coming out. I got a door -- my apartment had doors in the basement that they had taken off the building somewhere, and I got one of those, put it in a frame, took it down to City Hall, set it up, and then we came through the door as a way to "come out," come out of the closet symbolically. Made a speech about the history and the fact that we were so oppressed by history or unknown in history in the Dark Ages, we were kept in the Dark Ages unknowing and unable to reach out to each other. And that has been the key to it, the whole thing, I have always said that if you give them support, give them love, it makes all the difference in the 00:11:00world. It's what makes -- what gives them the chance to grow. It's from where they are, and become the people that they will become, and get -- change that unhappiness to joy of a relation --

I remember a young man who was married, I was confronted with them, personally with him, and his wife, and he was very unhappy in marriage. And I liked her a lot, so I was very unhappy, but he wanted to be gay, and I told him about the Stonewall, and what happens when you go in, people will look at you because you're new, and you have to pay a fee, it's a disco, you dance, just a -- and he did. He said, "I was happy. That was the beginning of my happiness." And I really felt bad that she was gorgeous. She was a very lovely woman, short, and 00:12:00he was also kind of short. They made a really attractive couple, but he got divorced, and happily went on with it. Now, I've had that a lot. When you're out like that, you get people come to you, and tell you that they're gay, and "I'll tell you, but don't tell anybody else," sorts of things. So he was one that did that, and that was historic. So Confront was friendly with me, and friendly enough to sponsor and be very open. We met there through the time that we were - the whole organization whole time we met there. We paid them maybe fifteen dollars for the room or something like that. But it was well worth it -- central place, and I lived beside it; I was next door, literally, to it, at that time, so it was very easy for me to get there. So we had a -- I don't know -- three, 00:13:00or four, or five demonstrations at city hall.

Every week we would go and have some sort of demonstration. Sometimes there were no people around at all; sometimes -- I think that person was -- noon-time, I believe, lots of people out looking at us, watching us do this publicity thing about coming out and opening the door on discrimination, never to close again, and so we got our free -- well, that wasn't true. We had a parade at one point in connection with this, and I think there were twenty-seven people who actually marched that day, maybe a few more than that. Close enough. Not more than thirty-one, who actually marched down Hamilton Street that day. Met at the corner of Ninth and Hamilton, that was -- Rubes was -- I think still in 00:14:00existence then. And we met in front of there. We had a number of people from across the state -- Mary [Antero?] came from Harrisburg, people came from Williamsport, people came from Philadelphia. A friend of mine from Philadelphia brought his peace professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who I enjoyed meeting. I had talked with this person about it for a long time. We're part of a collective down there, a peace collective that he was a part of, and this peace professor was the leader of that collective. Very interesting man, obviously well-educated, and spoke to this -- was one of the speakers along with Mary, and myself, and Dixie White, president of NOW. There was a group protesting us. If 00:15:00you remember the Daddona Park, there's a map there of the Daddona Park down at the end of Walnut Street, and there is an amphitheater on the hill. We were down at the base of it, where we could have the audience in front of us. And there were a number of people there, I said that there were thirty-one -- now, there may have been more at the park, I don't remember that there were or were not. There was (inaudible) number of people -- bunch of protesters up in the top of the hill. A young man again -- oh, I told you about the -- I told you this story, okay. That was Thirteenth Street, that church was Thirteenth Street, and we went into boycott -- still there, still a very small, tiny little church -- you can see it there.

Okay, and I don't know where the young man was from, I don't know where this guy was from that did the preaching. I allowed him to speak, and people were mad at 00:16:00me for that, because I figured, let them see that their word of God is not affecting us very much. But we gave them voice -- I gave them a couple minutes, and people were unhappy with that. I doubt -- I've never considered whether I was truly right or wrong with that. I resent them coming into my space, okay. When I find that straight people are appearing in gay movies, it makes me mad, because that's not fair, really. We need our own employment. It happens, and they're good, and I sort of like Frankie and -- Grace and Frankie very much, and I have appreciated actors who did it more now than I was before, but I still resent it, and when subjects are anti-gay, and that happens sometimes without knowing, unless you really look at it and really understand what they're saying 00:17:00-- the message is really anti-gay. And that's invading my space, and I get really, really angry about that. So I think I could understand people's anger when I allowed it to happen, and that particular occasion -- So we went to Sunday counsel a number of times. They ultimately made the decision that we couldn't speak. They'd had enough. After about three or four meetings, they were going to cut us off and not allow -- cut off that debate. So we went the next time with tape in our mouths to show that we were -- demonstrate the fact that we couldn't speak as clearly as we could. I had known that that was the tactic that had been used plenty of times before, but it was effective then.

I remember the first time that I spoke to city hall, I was pretty paranoid. I 00:18:00didn't know what was going to happen. I was concerned about my own position; I was in the telephone book, and I could be found easily, and I thought, I'm going to be the most hated man in the city. Next morning, I was at work, and I heard on the radio -- the radio was on, and I heard my own voice coming across the airway -- they had interviewed me after that night. And that was the first I had appeared that -- no, I think that may not be true. I was probably out on the radio programs. The first time I'd done it in my hometown. But that was also the first time we demonstrated in Allentown, was when we did that march, all twenty-seven of us, and I remember singing a wonderful Quaker hymn about -- the very famous one from Appalachian Spring. I can't remember -- simple, simple what. "Simple Gifts," it's called. Wonderful plain hymn, and the first time I 00:19:00heard it, singing that, and of course, "We Shall Overcome," and then marching up and down the street. We had a sign from -- my lover had made banners for four different organizations: Le-Hi-Ho, Pennsylvania Caucus, the Reading Group, and a group in Northumberland, little town across from Sunbury. We claimed -- Northumberland only four thousand people, so we claimed we had the biggest group in the smallest city, the other gay group was there. Not quite so. Most of the people came from Sunbury. And my good friend of mine was in charge of that. We were friends -- lifelong; he had married a man before, and they lived together for thirty-six years before he died, and unfortunately not in -- a couple of 00:20:00years ago. Actually, it was more than that, it was more years than that, maybe forty-two or something like that.

Now Le-Hi-Ho is fifty, fifty years old; he met him in '76, so, what -- At any rate, long friendship. The other thing that happened that particular weekend: there was another demonstration in Williamsport. There was a county fair up there, and Anita Bryant was appearing. Now, we had demonstrated against Anita at several points. We went down through Redding one time, and she was appearing at the Masonic temple, and we protested outside there. She was easy to protest. We never saw her, of course, but we did protest, and I remember people came in costume to emphasize the fact that they had to hide their identity -- the first 00:21:00time that ever happened, that I ever saw it happen. And it was a nice demonstration, and that was the first thing we were able to demonstrate. She was there -- appeared then at the Williamsport fair, and I don't remember the county, unfortunately, right off the top of my head. She was to appear at the fair there. So Mary went up. I did not; we had had our demonstration on Saturday. They were to go on Sunday to the fair, and they did go to the fair. They had a meeting beforehand, they demonstrated beforehand in a park close by. They had about fifty people, I think, or more at this demonstration. Not everybody elected to march. I think -- I'm not sure how many people elected to march, probably less than fifty, I believe. They actually elected to march at 00:22:00the fair itself. They did that, okay, and they went up there and bravely marched around -- frightening, frightening experience. Mary still is marked by it; says that was the most frightening day she was ever through. When you've got ten thousand people who hate you, and you're marching in front of them. And I got a letter from the person who founded Homophiles of Williamsburg. Name was Gary. He was the -- he followed me in the co-chair. He was the co-chair of the caucus after me. Then he moved away to Williamsport and founded this group called HOW. The rest of the people -- a lot of people went up there from the state. Thank you.

Tony Silvestri spoke there at that demonstration, Mary did, Dixie was there, I'm 00:23:00sure. My point about that demonstration was that following that, the -- fellow by the name of Dan Maneval was then chairman of HOW. It was chairman, leader, president, I'm not sure -- doesn't make any difference what his title was. He was the leader of it. And that was like Dan's second or third -- no, it was his first organization, I'm sorry, his first organization. He was interviewed that night; following that -- it appeared on television, cable television for Wilkes-Barre. Following that, the neighbor kids began to harass him a little bit. We needed to respond to that. We responded several times. In that day, what 00:24:00happened with gay people when you were an activist, you did everything, okay, and you didn't need anybody's permission; you simply went ahead and did it without -- doing whatever you could make up for a response. And we were often pretty weak about it; we didn't know what we were doing. We had to invent these things -- effective answers. And I don't know -- I wanted to find out what were effective answers. I wanted to have a meeting to talk about, let's -- what was good about what we did, and what were the failure, so we could be instructive to the next generation.

But the next generation doesn't need this anymore. They have the internet, and wonderful, wonderful means, you know -- when we did a newsletter at -- we used to pull the newsletters in our meetings for the aging group in 2000 newsletter -- hell, we had one hundred forty-seven -- we had a lot. We thought, back in those days, by keeping our -- all those people we had been in contact with would never come to the caucus, we sent newsletters as long as they didn't come back 00:25:00to us, and they frequently did, because everybody was young and in transit. But the difference between two-thousand and now -- they, of course, do it by -- they don't send the newsletters out anymore; everything by email. And those kids take great advantage of that. They are so aware, and I went to a conference -- I'll have to talk about that later -- go back to Le-Hi-Ho, and back to how and why I was talking about it -- and Dan was interviewed, began to harass him -- we went up and went around to the neighbors and said, "Look, this fellow is being harassed in his own home, his parents' home" -- he had inherited it from his parents, who were then dead, and was living there all by himself.

We talked to the neighbors, and they didn't -- the cops wouldn't do anything. 00:26:00The cops said, they don't know who it is, and Dan found out later, of course, that the cops had talked to these very people. They had talked to the neighbors and found out, well, yeah, they were talking to the kids. Didn't you know that? No, we didn't know it, and that was very ineffective, and stopped for a bit, started again, around Halloween especially, and it got so intense, so intense, that Dan got really, really scared, because they threw a cinder block through his front door, and attacked his windows, attacked him in his home at night, and it really frightened him to the degree that he actually left home and stayed in an apartment for some time. Ultimately, he sold his home. The cops never did a thing. Our mistake was not to talk to the cops, and not to create this incredible imbroglio over it. We really should have, but I'm not sure that Dan 00:27:00would've been able to stand it, because he was already in danger. He felt -- he was attacked once, but that was some years after that, as a matter of fact. But Dan is still an activist, okay, going on, like, his thirteenth organization right now in Williamsport. He is just incredible, and he's a little trooper. He also got stage three cancer, and he's waiting now to find out the results of his chemo. He'll know about four days, I think the sixteenth. But that was a terrible loss. He was the only one I knew suffered that great a loss, lost his family home over it. Stayed in hiding in a trailer court for a long time, moved back to the city, and lived at the same address for ever since, but thirteenth organization as far as I know.

I really lost contact, and I don't know how many -- up to the modern day, keep 00:28:00re-founding it, and re-founding it, and re-founding it -- Howarth for three years did a terrific job, and then it -- I stayed with him until about two-thousand, he decided -- they had to come to me, now, I'm not going to do it again. Well, three or four years passed, and there were suddenly three organization or four organizations in Williamsport of various sorts, liberal organizations, grassroots, that really carried the banner of gay rights, and (inaudible) always been very difficult -- so the city hall, the city paper, would not publish the word "homosexual," would not advertise meetings for any of these groups for many years. I think they finally did, finally made it a change. It was a long time, a hard change. We interfered another time at Bloomsburg. These friends of ours -- the caucus, essentially -- so it was a multi -- people came from different organization -- met at Bloomsburg and talked to a dormitory. 00:29:00Went and talked to kids in the dormitory, and talked tough, and said, you know, again, we're going to -- we shouldn't have -- of course, we were totally nonviolent, as the gay movement has been, by the way, as everybody should be well aware, is that we haven't killed anybody. We had a few demonstrations in which police cars got turned, and that was Harvey Milk. I remember him being -- we were at Echo -- when there was a demonstration happening on the West Coast, I remember hearing about it, because we were very affected by it, cheering and that kind of thing, and Harvey Milk was there.

But that's when they had a violent period, the only violence that I really remember outside of -- well, there's been very, very little violence, and no guns, nobody killed, a lot of people -- a lot of gays died, but not any result 00:30:00of our actions, or (inaudible) demonstrations, it didn't happen that way. Except this one occasion, and poor Dan lost his home, and it's so courageous, and I honor him so much. We'll miss him terribly. So there are a bunch of us who remain from those days as good friends, having bonded in that way, in that particular bond, which was deeply bonding, you know, when you're doing that kind of work, and you're -- There just wasn't enough time to talk to each other. We didn't have time to party. We didn't have time to know each other. We just talked, went and talked and talked and talked, because there was so much to say about what was going on, to talk about all the meetings, and all the events, and all -- everything we need to plan, and all that kind (inaudible), that we just had rare times. I think we got caught in a snowstorm at one time and stayed at somebody's cabin. Wonderful party. We all had pot, and if they arrested, they 00:31:00would have arrested the whole rural population; all those groups would've been leaderless. That was the only time -- that was one of the few times that we ever had times to just be ourselves.

Now, in the modern day, we've finally really been -- without the organizations we're getting to know each other again and enjoying it a lot. So back to the demonstrations and CCBC. When Frank organized his organizations, we quickly organized ourselves into this -- what we came to this Citizens Concerned for a Better Community, for lack of -- the first meeting we had, I think we got a committee, and said, "Name it," and that's what we came up with. Kind of a dumb name, really, honestly, but then, it was a dumb thing to do, calling it "cod." I 00:32:00can't think of any more demonstrations we did. We went to City Council; there was one councilman who was opposed to us entirely, very vociferously, and he was the one who invited Anita Bryant to come to the city, stirred us up tremendously, stirred up quite a lot of controversially, fortunately, gave us -- there was a lot of back and forth in the letters to the editor. We spoke as often as we could, anywhere we could, went on the radio, went to -- churches wouldn't invite us; several churches invited us, just to understand what we were doing and what we wanted, which was of course just the support for gay rights. Just allow us to have them, you know, say, "We are for it," instead of against us. And what we're looking for is to just be ourselves, not to bother you, not 00:33:00to be immoral, not do strange things to your children, just to be ourselves. And I really -- I am not a particularly good speaker. I would have preferred that other people had done it than me. But I did it anyway, and some other people did.

Somewhere along the way, and this might have been later, we got a chance to talk to Presbyterians -- the Presbytery was meeting, you know. We went to a Presbytery meeting and talked to them. It was a relatively small meeting, because they were just them. It may have been a committee of the Presbytery, I'm not sure. But I did convince them to support gay rights. Now, there were churches -- the Moravian Church was one, the UCC, a number of denominations had actually endorsed gay rights on a national level, and we made a lot of hay with that, put that forward. Le-Hi-Ho was very supportive; when we formed in 00:34:00Allentown, they came across and became memberships without being a part of leadership. That was what they did. They stayed pretty much with themselves, were very supported, wonderfully, and spoke -- City Hall meetings, organized a great packet of literature, better than I could have, because they had resources, they had the library and all the resources to do that, and organize the packet of information for the City Council. Ultimately, there was a mayoral election, and Joe Daddona was the mayor at that time, and Joe lost by seventeen votes. I couldn't help but say, "Look, you know, I didn't endorsed you -- I disendorsed you, and I want you to know that, so we were the seventeen votes." 00:35:00I'm sure that wasn't true, but it was a cruel thing to do, and a stupid trick to do, and that's no politics at all.

That's my most stupid, stupid, stupid -- but I couldn't help it. I had to rub it in a little bit. Seventeen votes. But there never have been -- in that time, the Republicans and Democrats traded administrations every time, and it became a Frank somebody, or -- I don't remember Frank's name, and Joe Daddona was elected again another four years, and there's Joe Daddona Park now down there, and that amphitheater is now called Joe Daddona Park at the end of Walnut Street. When they finally got around to counting on it, to actually voting on it, we lost incredibly. The opposition was there. When we had the tape on our mouths, the 00:36:00opposition stood up to speak, and did speak. The City Council member who favored us said, "Let them speak," and City Council retook the vote then, and said, "Yes, you can speak." So the opposition did speak. We did not. But it was an important occasion that they did, and we applauded and all that kind of jazz, applauding our enemies because they were as fierce as we were as the ability to uphold the Constitution. I always felt that was terribly important. There's one more story I could tell you about that, an instant I thought was really important, that you uphold that right for everybody to do that, speak up, free speech. That was one case we did it. And that was pretty much the end of City Council, whenever they voted that in, and had a letter from the solicitor that they could not do city -- lights in the city, because it exceeded the state, and 00:37:00there was no authority for them to do it.

They wouldn't take states that had -- the state commission had not announced -- went on with that and met -- was a nicely integrated group of people. We had some blacks, which was rare. We had men and women. Allentown NOW was founded by Dixie White, president, the state president, because she wanted more people to 00:38:00participate as leaders. You excite new leaders if you have a new organization, and she was very much in favor of that, so she created several. There was a group in Bethlehem, socialists, led by socialists, who were truly socialists. I think there were seven of them. And they didn't have a leadership. They did everything by consensus, no president. We didn't have a president either in the group in Reading, because I was the most eligible person. They didn't want me to do it. They wanted to have a local person do it, and they were right, and I refused -- I wouldn't take the leadership, because it was their organization. But they wanted me to do it. So we didn't have a leader; it moved by a council that ruled the whole thing.

And this socialist group was the same. They did everything by consensus, very difficult to do. And they got -- were very big on the business -- they wanted to be the -- on the discrimination issue at City Hall, and not allowing us to speak, that was a figurative issue that they really jumped on, and the governor's -- candidate for governor, socialist candidate for governor, spoke at that meeting, also, that demonstration we had in Allentown. I don't remember her name anymore, but she came to speak for us. Good people, they were. I like socialists. I wasn't one myself, and I wasn't really a lefty, but I really, certainly learned to respect them and to love them. E. E. Cummings said, "Communists have fine eyes." Great line, great line. Is there anything to say 00:40:00about the organization outside of the fact that it was -- I was not good about -- never good about really integrating organizations with people of color. I just wasn't successful at it. I don't know why. They just didn't respond to me, like the transsexual community's not responded well to me. And I regret that a lot. I can't bridge it, can't be different somehow and bridge that, and I always feel my distance from them.

And I've known only a few over the years, until, now, the current -- I know a transvestite comes to the aging group -- no, I'm sorry, a transsexual comes to the aging group, our age. She's seventy, pushing seventy, I believe, and is a 00:41:00former teacher, and got me acquainted with the fact that now there is in Pennsylvania a group that has five-hundred people coming to their conferences, all transsexuals, and that's amazing to me. Not all transsexuals, by no means. Some of our people go. And we're very supportive of her, and she's a good friend of mine, and she and I work with the movies now. There have been other people, but she and I are left to do it. But that's -- I was never successful with it. I met a few over the years, but I was not able to make any breakthroughs with them in terms of really personal friendship. One exception was a transvestite who I knew well, who sang in her own voice. She was an entertainer, and we sponsored her several times for organizational meetings, and when we had an opportunity to 00:42:00present anybody, we presented her, because she sang in her own voice, quite good at that. Still living -- now lives in -- I haven't seen her in many -- since then.

She was very forthright, works with women, is a hostess, and went to the police when she was discriminated against, and talked to the police, and said, "You discriminated against me." Very, very forthright. About that business with the CCBC, I was discriminated against once and I didn't even know it. My landlord came to me after I was in the newspaper, sometime after that, and said, "I want to use your apartment; you have to move out. I'm going to be taking over it." At 00:43:00the time, I was ready to divorce my lover, and we did separate, as a matter of fact, then. I was moving out. I also did the separation. I was also going to Confront at that time for personal therapy. Went to that for several years, enormously, enormously helpful, group therapy was. And my landlord was going to have me move out. That day, we moved out everything except the piano, which I was donating to a woman whose daughter wanted to learn to play the piano. So I gave her the piano. The piano was very, very heavy, and we couldn't move it out the day before, it was the fifteenth, or whatever day I'd promised to get it out. So we went back to collect the panel the next day, and the landlord is 00:44:00there, and he says, "That's my piano." I had to pay one hundred dollars to give the damn piano away. He was such a mean bastard. He never moved in, also, and after that, then he re-rented the apartment.

That's when I knew I'd been discriminated against, but I didn't understand it before. I didn't think about -- not realize -- connect the dots, because he didn't present it in any way, like, "You aren't welcome," but he wanted me out of there, and got me out of there as a result of that, right after I'd been in the paper. Rick and I separated after eight years, and he stayed in town; I loaded him down with my dog and all the furniture, I loaded on him so he'd stay in town, not run home to mother -- he was from Milton, Pennsylvania. Bit of a momma's boy. So I made the choice, stayed in town, it was a big mistake. 00:45:00Ultimately, he -- I met him fifty years ago, yeah, fifty years ago, in '69. In 2007, 2008 -- 2007, in August two-thousand seven, in Allentown. I told you I was going out there to see him once a week. But he was married with this woman for thirty years -- he wasn't married. He lived with a woman for thirty years after that, which astonished me. I mean, clearly it wasn't a sexual relationship, but they grew to be interdependent, so interdependent that they really were pretty tight as a couple, not functioning terribly well, low-level functioning, but able to make it, and leaning together really worked for them. She got him to 00:46:00quit smoking. I never thought he would quit smoking, twenty, thirty years now, twenty, thirty, years before, twenty years -- they were together twenty-eight years, I believe, together, when he died. And that was extraordinary, to have him married to a woman, hard to explain, after he'd been gay entirely, and he continued to be gay. He also got beat up one time in a park, right across the street from where I was then living on Turner Street.

If you remember, there's a cemetery there on Turner Street, Ninth and Turner, I believe. And that's where I lived in an apartment there, Dixie White's spouse at that time was Debbie Cedar, and Debbie later became another president of NOW, state president of NOW, I think -- I'm not sure when. Maybe after Bishop Whitley 00:47:00and -- I think after Mary. I'm not sure. That would've been the second (inaudible) of three lesbians, I believe, three or four lesbians in charge of the state organization, you know, in a row. But anyway, I lived in a little apartment there for, like, one hundred dollars a month. They were fixing up. Wonderful -- they gave me the lowest price they could, and I had the whole first floor. And just a good place to live. It had a sun porch on -- loved the sun porch. I could go out there -- it was in March, and I was laid off, go out there and just have my coffee in mornings, enjoy the mornings, warm (inaudible) because the sun was starting right in.

A fellow used to go by every morning with his cat on a leash, thirty-foot leash. 00:48:00(Laughter) That cat was all over everybody's porch, went walking way ahead of him, it was the funniest thing I ever saw. I never saw it again, a cat like that. I saw a lot of people travelling with cats; I never saw one on a leash like that, walking around town. But he was beat up in the park across the street from me. Changed his life. He really became very frightened after that, and all through his going-out pattern, he was never able to cruise the streets as he had. He would go to a bookstore, but he would do it at a building like that, and that's what he did, was adopt a bookstore, the Hamilton and Ninth, Hamilton and Tenth, I think it was. He lived on Hamilton and Eleventh, it was -- I don't 00:49:00remember. That was just a huge change for him, because he had been always promiscuous, even when I first knew him. I hadn't known that for a while, but he just liked anything in pants, he would go with it. He just had anal sex, in particular, once. Never had to have it again, but he had to have it once, with not everybody. You know, I thought it was an act of contempt; I wasn't quite sure with him, why he did it. He was hard to communicate, difficult, an autistic person, I suspect, ultimately. I was very much in love with him. He was handsome to me. He had some sort of feminine tendencies, which I ignored.

To me, he was a virile man; I treated him as a -- I ignored whatever he might have been. Gorgeous legs; he would've been a fantastic drag -- truly gorgeous 00:50:00legs to the end of his life. Very supportive of me. Took me everywhere, drove me all over the state. He had a car; I didn't own a car until I was forty, so we had his. We bought cars together, but they were in his name. I took care of that. And we had a little Subaru, which was then a new car, little tiny thing, yellow. Ah! School bus yellow. We went all over the state. Again, intentionally, we went far distance places, we went out to Pittsburgh a lot, and out to my sister's, and went to the colleges around there, and gay bars where we could find them, just trying to keep contact with what was going on. The caucus itself 00:51:00had people from Pittsburgh come out, not anywhere else, but there was that mutual support among the organizations. They were very helpful to us in Allentown. Le-Hi-Ho was unusually helpful. At one point with the caucus, when we had a crisis of leadership -- as a matter of fact, when I was elected president, when I was elected co-chair, the co-chairs had gotten into trouble because they had done something unauthorized, and as a matter of fact, when we read the by-laws, they were authorized, because in the absence of membership meeting, and being authorized with the meeting, then the co-chairs were legal. But they had done something - I've forgotten what it was -- now, but the woman came by the name of Janet Cooper.

I told you about Janet before. She was a professor at [Ship?], and she really 00:52:00was so against them, and really got us to oppose them, and I finally told her that there is an issue, there was a vote of confidence in the English Constitution -- the English use the vote of confidence is what the Parliament rises or falls on, is a vote of confidence, and you can vote them out of office. So she insisted on a vote of confidence after I finally explained to her what it was, and the current president and the current co-chairs lost the vote. Went to the next meeting and there was nobody there, we were there, and Mary and I were there, and a lot of their people, but the co-chairs never showed up, period. So we figured they've taken the vote seriously and they're not coming back. So we elected a new president that summer, and I got to be president, but in the 00:53:00interim I'd written it up in the newsletter. I said, we're at this point of crisis, we've done this thing, which is very controversial, and we need to address it in the next meeting. And Le-Hi-Ho wrote this letter, and said, "Look, if you're going to be this way, we're leaving. We are no longer supporting you at all. We're not giving you any money, we're not sending any people, we aren't allowing (inaudible)." Very important, because it really made the caucus look at the whole issue and get upset about losing the support of the main organization, of one that we really counted on, being as powerful as they were over that many years. They were very successful.

And that was Ken Burke, another person that I have forgotten, another wonderful person, and [Lou Railer?] was his lover, and those two were students together, graduate students, I believe, and Ken was interested in politics. I think he 00:54:00might have gone into politics, ultimately. But at the time, he was president of Le-Hi-Ho, and a very good one, very strong, and very forthright, and very honest, and that was an important contribution of Le-Hi-Ho to that organization. And they came to the conferences, gave us a lot of staff for conferences, et cetera, and again, they did it without changing their position. They did not personally come to the caucus meetings, but they were -- supported us in every way. Something was key to support in Allentown, and that was the least we were trying for. The other thing that happened at that particular time that I want to talk about briefly was -- she formed the NOW chapter in Allentown. There were thirteen of us. We're all activists. There were two guys, and all the rest were women. We went everywhere. We went to women's conferences. I went to the women's 00:55:00state conferences. It was the year of the women, and they were having a conference in every city. I went to that conference. Wonderful, wonderful conference.

A Quaker conference, I remember, great conference down in Philadelphia. I went to -- fell in love with Quaker meetings. Quaker meetings were unusual because you observe silence, and people are moved to speak. At a Quaker meeting, they have no -- there's no leadership. There were no ministers, no leaders. There are only weighty Quakers. Weighty Quakers are people who are known for their wisdom, and to be a weighty Quaker is a really wonderful thing, if you -- men or women are eligible for it, women can speak as well, because men -- although they do sit on separate sides of the church, women on this side, and men on this side. Long, long tradition, never changed, as far as I know. I don't know what happened in the modern church, in more recent days, but even then, in those days, it was still separated. Went to a Quaker meeting, at -- went on a Sunday 00:56:00that we were there for this Quaker conference, and my expectation was, you were going to get very inward, you're going to meditate, okay, you're going to go into this -- "You all flow out," (inaudible). Had that outflow, and your awareness of everyone else is so intense. For instance, like, there was never a consequence, when you're moved to speak -- I never heard two people try to speak at the same time. I don't know how that works, but collectively, so that you -- and you spoke when you had something to say. When the spirit moved you, then you spoke. And that was revelation, and I really loved that particular form of worship ever since.

I think it's just superb, superior to everything I knew. But it's that outflow that you get, and which you're becoming such a part of the hole, and so moved by the whole, and listening, and open to -- we went to the Quakers once for a 00:57:00meeting, I think, at Reading, Reading, yes. We wanted to meet the Quaker church, so we went to the meeting, a Board meeting, I think, it was something, whatever -- wasn't the full -- we didn't go to a meeting; we went to a -- for the meeting, that was the -- the people who wanted to speak on the issue, and they moved by consensus, and they had -- their whole congregation had to agree, or they couldn't do it. Well, there was one person who didn't agree, and he was pretty forthright, and told us why. I was there at the meeting, and spoke to us directly -- we spoke to him directly, and we didn't get it, but the Quakers and the Unitarians were very, very important to the movement. Unitarians sponsored Le-Hi-Ho membership. The Quakers were often spoken -- in support, were very supportive in terms of congregations and in terms of their actions, whether they -- they were very supportive. We happened to fail on that particular 00:58:00organization; I'm sorry that we did, because the Quakers were wonderful people, always, and had been great.

So NOW, the same thing, NOW had a meeting at that time -- local, state, or national, they talked about gay rights, right from the top, in the presence of any organization, and always talked about it in their meetings. What was happening locally was a part of their agenda. So Lehigh -- the Allentown NOW was a totally active organization. We went to -- we marched on Washington, we went to the '93, '83 march -- no -- We went to the march in, I think it was '79, was the first one, '78, '79, and then there was the first march on Washington. It was the second one in '93, which is also big, and people thought that was the 00:59:00first one, but no, it would've been in '79. Went to Chicago, when we were voting on the ERA, they had a demonstration in Chicago, one hundred-thousand people, as I recall, along the lakefront, enormous event. Washington, DC was an enormous event, the women's march in Washington, DC. NOW marched in the women's march in Washington, DC, was an enormous event; over one hundred-thousand people marched in Washington that year, one of the largest demonstrations. The first and largest demonstration, I think, that had ever been, was back in -- was in San Francisco, gay pride, three hundred-thousand people, I think, at that time, and we had the record for the largest civil demonstration of anything, it happened to be gay rights. We were that kind of active. We were not -- and didn't spend 01:00:00any money in Chicago at all; we crossed the border, never spent a cent in Illinois. Marched, wonderful march.

First time I was in Chicago -- I moved there about two years later, very happily, happiest thing to be in with my lover. There were probably more conferences than that. I can't remember what they were, but they were always important and everything, well-informed. I was also a co-chair of NOW, and I was the only male that I knew of that held that job, and it was on their insistence; they wanted to have equality. But there were only two of us available; and the other was a student, at Kutztown again. It was a great organization, really. Dixie was such a mentor to me, and so politically oriented, and always, always 01:01:00involved, very feminist. My mother was about as strong a feminist as you can get for the forties and fifties, and certainly very aware and very supportive of what she knew -- she was anti-communist like crazy, she was terribly anti-communist. Ran for the state legislature, (inaudible) that she was anti-communist. We had to talk to him all over (inaudible), all over the state. It was really -- I learned to disrespect that. It was the time of the McCarthy era, and -- forty-seven, I think, I think when she was running for -- no, that was school board. I don't remember -- legislature, she ran after that and didn't win. Was (inaudible) anti-communist and talking, and watching McCarthy hearings on television. They were actually on television. House Un-American Commission was one of the first televised events from Congress ever, and Joe McCarthy was 01:02:00leading that pack, and talking about the pinkos, the pinko commies, the gay commies, and all that.

I learned later that in political science, and obviously at home, and told my mother off, and said, you're totally wrong, and I do not believe in McCarthyism or anything about it, it's just terrible evil, evil, evil, evil the organization. She got over it, and was fine with me after I came out, and my family has been very supportive, very supportive. I did not have a wedding, however. I wanted to, right when I -- well, I fell in love with Doug, I really wanted to celebrate love with him and have a wedding, and get married, and we didn't; my sister said that somebody might not come, and I didn't want to know who. I just thought that, I don't want to be hurt, I don't want my family to 01:03:00hurt me now. And I still don't know who might not have come. They've always been supportive to my face, and loved Doug. He was a different person than Ricky was, and they liked him a whole lot more. And Ricky was the kind of person who people did not like, and I had people who'd tell me, "Don't bring him. You come, but don't let me see him," or "keep him away from me." That was tough.

But Ricky, as I said, was probably autistic, not autistic, what do you call them -- there's a form of autism -- Asperger's, probably had Asperger's. It was (inaudible) among other things. Had a high fever when he was very young, one hundred and six temperature, sustained for a while, and I think it affected his brain, and he was thereafter not as capable, not as bright as he could have 01:04:00been. Graduated high school at twenty-one, I think, but he finally graduated. His mother got him to do that, insisted, and he stayed in school that long, and participated, even though he was older. But he had his problems, and wasn't kind to people. He was wonderful to me, but he would turn down anybody else for a ride, for instance. He wouldn't take them, and other people, he did take. But friends of mine, he turned them down. And that kind of -- I didn't know about it until later on myself, and it was a problem. He had an intelligence in his hands that was wonderfully good. He could knit, or (inaudible), or anything to do with sewing and threads, great -- did a lot of macram. My sister has several pieces of that. It was a great skill with them. He just had a mental ability with that.

One time, he made a window -- seventy macram things that he had touched so he could put his plants out there, seventy plants, suspended each one on a string, and he'd take -- lower them and water them. It was crazy. Couldn't see out. He liked the covers when it's three layers on the windows. Couldn't see out. And I love sunlight. I don't put covers on my windows at all, any more covers than are there. These were landlords' -- my landlord wants these because they match his, and so they're his curtains, effectively. But I won't cover them. I have to have the light, all the light I can get. Three covers, good Lord. He lived in a very dark hole. This place is dark enough, as you can tell. I can't tell -- in my bedroom, I don't know whether it's light or day, literally. I don't know whether it's dusk. I'm drawing late, so I don't know, when I get up in the morning, I have to figure, is this morning or evening? What is happening? Is it afternoon? 01:06:00I can't tell. three o'clock in the afternoon, if it's a cloudy day, it's dark as dusk in here, because of that porch. And there used to be a huge elm out there, one hundred and fifty year old elm, that had been there when (inaudible) founded, for God's sake, and -- elm? Maple. It was maple. Dirty old tree, but big. Limbs fell off it twice on my car. (Laughter) It was when they decided to cut the tree down the second time, not because it fell on my car, because they didn't want it happening anymore, and, you know, maple -- everything that falls off a maple tree. So they probably tore it down. They came in and tore it, even the tree, took it down to the roots and (inaudible) that up, so it's completely gone now. It was huge and wonderful, but it's very, very dark. Really made 01:07:00(inaudible). And --

MF:May I ask --

JB:Anything else I can tell you?

MF:Yeah, you met Ricky through Le-Hi-Ho, so how did you meet your second lover? How did that relationship begin?

JB:Well, I met him again at a New Year's Eve party -- I think I -- I don't remember. We might have had a drag party that night. We may have had a Le-Hi-Ho event, drag event on New Year's Eve of 19-- going into 1970, and he insisted on taking me home, which was our first time together. And after that, we were -- I had him move down here by April, I think, after that. Moved away from his family. He'd been going to Canada, Toronto, Canada, weekly, seven hundred miles, to be gay. Which was a little ridiculous, but he was that kind of person. He 01:08:00loved driving, loved driving. Terrible on cars, hard on cars. I didn't know. I thought he knew something about cars; he didn't know a damn thing about that. I had to replace the clutch every six months because he was so hard on the clutches. I'll never forget that. I've never had a clutch since then. I thought they (inaudible). I thought clutches -- I thought that was a normal part of having a car, but no. Very expensive part of having a car. Blew out the two gaskets on the damn thing before we got rid of that particular car, and that's expensive. That was thousands of dollars. The whole car was only four thousand dollars. Subarus at that time were nothing. They were the cheapest cars in America. New import then. And Ricky was not a great contributor, but he was very, very supportive of me. He never said a word to me about taking me to all those meetings. Was there with me, and we had -- something (inaudible) supporter.

He was also -- didn't have a great deal of integrity. He forged a check at least once or twice. We'd give him rent money, and found out later that the rent wasn't paid, or whatever I'd given the money for wasn't paid, and it wasn't gone. So I thought there was personally too much, and divorced him, sadly. He worked at the Shawnee Penn with me, the furniture factory. He was a sewer, I was the distributing supervisor, and he worked in the -- he didn't sew. He was in the layout room where they laid the clothes out and cut them, cutting room. And that was -- there were two guys, older men, American people, five or six or seven Americans in the place, white Americans -- white people. I'm sorry, I 01:10:00apologize. Puerto Ricans were certainly American, and I was very aware of that. They lived at the top of the hill.

There was a -- in Allentown, Hellertown, there's an area up there where it was low-income housing, and they lived up there at the top of the hill, and you can walk down through Saucon Park, which is between Allentown and Bethlehem, and they could walk down the hill to go to work, and I, we used to take the bus out, and when Ricky and I separated, I would take the bus, walk down the hill myself, to that complex down -- They were all Puerto Ricans. Very nice people, wonderful people, but they were very short. I never -- I thought I was tall. I'm only five-eight, and I thought I was tall, because they were truly (inaudible). It took me a long time to figure out that I really wasn't. And I never learned to speak Spanish, either, which I regret. I did learn -- I took it in college, but I never learned -- I missed a great opportunity to speak it. I didn't know them 01:11:00better. And there were -- there was one Mexican that came and didn't like it very much. There was not happiness between the Mexican and the Puerto Rican peoples. They looked down on each other, quite frankly. And I think they -- there was a white guy that came there, young fellow, they told him, don't come back, and he quit in a couple days. They were protecting the jobs for themselves. Which was -- they didn't do that to me; I was college-educated and was a different line of thing. I got to be a supervisor almost right away, because nobody else in the place was educated, either, and then I got the position. It didn't pay me anything; it was -- like I said, we were poor as 01:12:00church mice.

Ricky lived in Milton, was where he was from, and his grandmother went to see us often. She lived to be ninety-six. I had her cane here for a long time, and it broke, unfortunately; I was very sad about that, because Ricky had given it to me a couple years ago, before he died. I had kept contact with him all those years; we were good friends, and -- Doug and I were good friends. It's unique about gay people, that they tend to stay with -- good friends with their exes, and know them, whereas Anne said that's unusual for heterosexuality, that they would divorce, and separate, and not know each other, and stay away from each other, and that just wasn't true of gay people I knew of. We typically maintained our relationships. And I certainly did with Ricky for those forty 01:13:00years, saw him on and off, at least twice a year, once a year at the very least, twice a year if I could, and in the last couple years, when he got -- he got to be about three hundred and fourteen pounds at one time. I had him out here, and I took him to the Y, and I said, I want you to see this. I wanted to take you to The Y specifically so I could take you to see the exercise rooms, throgh all I do, and know that this is a familiar, friendly place, that you don't have to be embarrassed about being here at three hundred and fourteen pounds and so on.

He got so that he couldn't walk down the stairs anymore, and stayed on the second floor for a whole year before he got sick, and then went to bed all by himself, just said, "I won't get out of bed," and he stayed in bed for a year, and I went to see him every weekly, and while he was in bed, feeling terrible 01:14:00for the fact that he had gotten to that bad of shape and he just couldn't get out of bed, lost the use of his legs, almost, could barely stand -- I only saw him standing one time after that, and that was in a nursing home, where they'd taken him out of bed, and they have those lifters that can get people up, and they had taken him for exercises to another place, and I went there and saw him actually standing up, leaning on somebody, practically pushing him over, because his legs could not handle it anymore. That was the last time I saw him stand at all, and that was -- then he fell out of bed on the third of January in 1978. She was out doing groceries, and he made enough of a fuss to get -- enough noise to get -- attract the neighbor, called the police, the emergency people went in, 01:15:00got him downstairs, took him to Bethlehem, which is where they had a mental hospital at St. Luke's in Bethlehem, and they diagnosed him with dementia, and from there he went to a nursing home, and he went to a second nursing home.

The first nursing home, he went while it was free, while he could do it under the auspices of Medicare, and then, when he ran out of that, then they changed him to an Alzheimer's home, memory of care home, and that's where he died, got pneumonia, finally, and died. It was a long time -- he was a long time dying, had a long time in dementia. It was hard to deal with, dementia is a very difficult thing -- would go to see him, and he may or may not recognize me, and 01:16:00he got angry with me several times. I think one time -- when the limb fell on my car was the month I couldn't go -- he felt abandoned, terribly abandoned, and it was -- it echoed forty years ago for him, echoed his family (inaudible). So I've got this man who was seventy years old grieving about the abandonment, and the loss, and the separation for him of being the gay individual in a family of three brothers, who were all very male, and his dad, who was beating him up some regular basis.

And I liked his father; I didn't know this was true. She's told me that Ricky complained about having brothers beating up when he was younger, and I don't 01:17:00doubt that that was true. They were quite male, very strong, solid individuals. I remember when his dad died of cancer, going to see him, and we went regularly, just to see him when he had cancer, because he was dying, and the boys would stand around, and just be strong, silent, would never have -- no conversation. Didn't know what to say to him, didn't know how to love him, or say, "I love you, Dad," or whatever. That was very hard. His mother was a good person, a warm person, very pretty, but she also put him on a clothesline when he was a kid, and a harness -- I mean, this was typical in the fifties. They took the kids, and put a harness on them, and then attach it to the clothesline so they couldn't run around, they'd get lost. Now, we happened to live in a place which was a V, two roads, one on each side of the house, and his dog was killed there. 01:18:00He had a dog, a white German Shepherd, that was killed, that he mourned for the rest of his life, loved that dog. We had a dog together that I loved very personally, wonderful dog, that was given to us by a lesbian couple moving to a -- a Reading couple who were moving to Chicago. Now this was an interesting couple, too, talk about somebody else for a moment.

They had liberated the mines, Bethlehem Steel mines, were the first women to work, to go down into the mines, because they had sued, and were a lesbian couple, and worked together, went down in the mines together every day until they went to Chicago, and then I lost contact with them, sadly, but they had a dog that I went to see one time, when -- she was away, I think, and the dog was there, put away in another part with another lesbian couple that was either 01:19:00living with them or taking care of the dog. I said, "If you ever want to get rid of the dog" -- so they moved to Chicago and gave me the dog -- wonderful, wonderful animal. Turned out to be a transsexual dog -- trans -- a hermaphrodite. Eight years old, she suddenly began to develop -- lose her hair and develop penile bone, and it turned out that I took her to the vet, and the vet said that they weren't sure what was going on here. Either she's not female, or she's -- honest to God, penile bone going on down here, and she's clearly -- I had known her for maybe her whole life, but she was a female who humped everything. (Laughter) Now I've told you, the dog's -- which must have confused the hell out of them, because she felt like a female, she was a female, genetically, but she had been spayed, or they had gone in to spare, and they didn't do anything; they didn't take anything out, and the vet told me that, 01:20:00whenever he examined her, that she's been spayed, and whatever they did, they didn't remove anything, and so she began to develop this set of balls and penile bone, and eight years old. And she was a spiritual animal.

She was a dog that -- you looked in her eyes, she never looked away. You looked into her -- it could look like you were going to her tail, you know, her eyes were that deep, just these liquid pools, she just looked through -- way, way deep into her soul. And I thought she was Buddha. She was my Buddha dog. Suffered in her own way, became nearly blind, and very deaf, and died at seventeen years old, died in my arms, which I wanted to do. I wanted to give her her last -- if this was her last trip through life, I wanted to be done that 01:21:00way, and she died naturally in my arms, which I was very grateful for. But she was -- we were -- she and I were so in love. It was really a special relationship. She was always at my feet, always right behind me, the whole time. She would just follow me around and be right there wherever I was. I had to watch, step over her all the time, as long as she lived with me. And Doug fell in love with her, but she was so much my dog. Special relationship. It just worked out, the first time I had her, I remember -- she came in the house, they gave us the dog, I went and took a bath, put a few pieces of candy up here -- they were cream drops, they were called, I think, they were just sugar -- melted 01:22:00-- fondant with chocolate on them, and she ate them. (Laughter) What a bad dog. That was the start. And then she'd lick me. She loved Irish Spring soap. Loved it. She would lick it off me. And I'd let her do it (inaudible) because it didn't hurt me, and she loved -- whatever she was, boy, she loved that stuff. It was crazy. Very, very special animal, but humped my leg a lot. And again, it was natural to her. I mean, I didn't know -- like I tell you, she got persistent -- great leaper, my God, she could leap eight or nine feet, and did it often. She used to love chewies, and would chew them and take them from her, and she would 01:23:00just leap to the bed, incredible leaper -- was a poodle mix that looked like an English sheepdog. She had her fur done over her eyes.

I had a picture of her there somewhere, but it's not -- she was cut at that time. We had to cut her because she got such long hair that she was only comfortable -- we had to sheer her like a sheep, literally, because it got so thick and so tangled, there was just no way we could handle it, so she was -- every summer, we'd have to (inaudible). Wonderful having her. Really grateful. Doug came to me -- I was busy at being an activist at that point. '80, we were doing conferences and so on. We did four conferences with the caucus. So we were doing a series of conferences, did them in '78, '79, '80, and '83. '81, perhaps, 01:24:00and three, I don't remember, '80, I guess it was. And that -- in different places across the state -- we did central -- we did east, central, west, back to east again. I think it was my turn for east. I told you about the Americus turning us down. After they had said yes, they turned us down, over at the newspaper. A little place called Howard Johnson's up above the Poconos, in the Poconos, they called us, and said they would do the conference. They did the conference. Very, very successful. We had to have it twice. We had a snowstorm the first time. We were going to have it in January, thirty-six inches, it 01:25:00snowed that day. Guy called me in Pittsburgh and said, "Are you going to head to this conference with snow starting in Pittsburgh?" I said, "Of course we have the conference." thirty-six inches. Believe it or not, there's a protest group out there on the highway leaving the hotel. We weren't there. I mean, we called off the cops. We called everybody we knew that had bought tickets, and said, please don't come, but then there was this protest group out there doing their thing without us. (Laughter)

So we didn't have that conference. We had it again in April. Very successful. There were several hundred people, people were crying all over the place, really good conference. Really special. It was the first -- lots of people came and said, "I never saw so many lesbians before." It was just a thrill to see fifty lesbians in a room. And it was just a good, good conference. We were 01:26:00well-organized, I thought we did a terrific job. We did good conferences, quite frankly, in those years, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and a place called Rainbow Resort up in the Poconos again. Near that place? Yeah. It was owned by two women; there was a bar in -- Candida's, they originally owned Candida's, lesbian couple, created it for a gay bar, and then Candida was the waitress at that time, and bought the bar, and took over, and still owns it, as far as I know. Candida's, when I was there, I don't know, two or three years ago, maybe -- I (inaudible) visiting (inaudible) and we decided to go to Candida's. God, I feel like a stranger. I walked in in the middle of the afternoon, seventy-nine years, you know, I'm seventy-eight by that time, seventy-seven, and I was just so out of place. Walked in, (inaudible) looked at me and said, like, "Are you real? 01:27:00You're in my bar?" And I never told him that I had been a frequent consumer once upon a time, although I was always older than anybody else. In gay liberation, I was thirty-five; everybody else was in their twenties or students. And they accepted me, there was no problem with that, and I was always very grateful that there wasn't a problem. I think I was the only one that thought there should be, but there might be; never was. We got along extremely well. They were not objects of my affection.

I had a lover as long as I was around, and -- so I wasn't concerned, as objects of affection -- that never became a thing.

But Doug worked for an airline, and I couldn't get out for a date, so I got a 01:28:00dating service, called a dating service, and Doug responded (inaudible) from Chicago. He worked for an airline, so he flew out, worked for Pan-Am at that time, which was still in existence, and they flew out and saw me, and we were together after that. That was -- although it wasn't true. I told him the first time after about six months, I said, no, I'm sorry, I don't think we're going to be lovers. I proposed to him on New Year's Eve, 1981, and we got together after that, and stayed together for another, actually, eighteen years, altogether. He told me, unfortunately, on the anniversary of our first date, which was the one he met me -- that was one of our two anniversary dates -- the oldest one, 01:29:00because it's when we first met, and then when I proposed to him, was the second anniversary date -- one for each of us, essentially -- but that was important to him. It was quite a relationship. Doug had a -- and he was a warm, friendly, funny person that I needed. That really gave me a lot of space. And he was so supportive in terms of just being who you are, and I thought that that was love. I thought that's what love is all about, it's just being so accepting, and it's really, it's okay. We were fine with what we were.

And Doug got a little bit impotent. He got to be diabetic. I got to be diabetic after, I don't know, about fifteen years ago, but it was long after he had, and he got to be impotent, and that was a bit of a barrier, a bit of a difficulty for us. But not enough to end the relationship. It didn't for many years. But I 01:30:00think I ultimately tired of it and our lack of sexuality. When I went to college then, I went to junior college in Texas, and enjoyed that thoroughly, so much that I just kept going, and going, and going. Ultimately ended up at Shippensburg University to graduate, which I hadn't done before. And I never told him I was in college the first time. I just saw -- had three years of Moravian, and never told anybody -- I never told the college that I had this education. And I'd gone to junior college in Northampton and in Lehigh County, both, I was going to schools at the same time at the same year, because my job was ending -- my job at Shawnee Penn was getting worse, and worse, and worse; 01:31:00they were laying me off more and more times. And I knew that I needed educational background to back me up in terms of shipping, in terms of, what is, transportation, engineering. And they had a degree at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem.

So I went there. Met Doug about that time. That was right after all that business with the eighties, when we started the gay line. And he came to me the end of that year, the first time. Happy life. He worked for airlines, he worked first for British airways -- I'm sorry, he worked for Pan Am, which is an 01:32:00international airline, very famous, very famous American, and Pan Am was famous for innovating travel routes for every country in the world, virtually. But they would go anywhere -- they had rights to fly everywhere, as the pioneering international travel agency, especially for the United States, and they just kept furthering on that basis. So it's a big company, but it was also -- when they deregulated the airline industry, it couldn't manage, because it had been regulated all those years, and they had union wages everywhere, and difficulties that they just couldn't overcome because they had been under such regulation, and couldn't make the shift to do it. So he started to work for British Airways, and an interesting story: he had gone there, and the first time, they didn't hire him, so the people -- all the Pan Am people that had gone over there went to the office and protested, and said, "We want to have this guy. He's really 01:33:00good." I mean, Doug was a good agent, was a good reservation agent. So they hired him, and then moved to Texas, then he had to go to Texas, then they moved his job, and ultimately outsourced the entire thing. That's when he retired in 2000 then, because they were getting rid of those reservation agents; it was cheaper to do it by hiring people in India and so on.

And so we were -- he retired after we had sold the house, moved to Plattsburgh, New York, to be with his lover in Canada, in Quebec, Canada, which is fifty miles away from Plattsburgh, and went weekly to see him. They traveled back and forth across the border, never lived together, but were often together, until 01:34:00they weren't anymore. They ceased being lovers per se, although there was still a lot of love between the two of them. And Doug made a very deliberate decision. He told me that, you know, "This is over. I'm sorry, but it's over, never to happen again." And I had to accept that, and did. But I stayed, then, another year and a half, to get the house ready to sell, et cetera. We painted everything, and, you know, did what we could for the house. When we went to Houston, there had been a large gas recession which hit Houston very, very hard. There were a lot of homes on sale; a lot of homes were in foreclosure. So many people were underwater in terms of their mortgages. This was '80, and it had happened in '78. So they were still in depression, in '80, when -- in '87, and 01:35:00it still was affecting the Houston market heavily by the time we went there in '90, '91.

And we finally -- we took a year to find the house. It wasn't foreclosure, but it was in a nice area, nice house, for a very cheap price. In Houston, they never had basements, okay, so everything was built on a slab, much less expensive. You didn't have to deal with winter, you didn't have to deal with cold, so houses were differently constructed; they were a lot cheaper, since their construction -- And we bought a house, a nice house, for about eighty thousand dollars, four bedroom, in a nice area, which was -- they had sold it -- the house was -- they bought the house for that, thirteen years before, the 01:36:00people had bought the house for the same price that we paid for it, so they did nothing. We made better when we sold it. We sold for a hundred and three, I think, to a nice Hispanic couple. I remember that because the next-door neighbor was a white guy, was on the school board, and I told him I had sold the school to the Hispanics, and he said, "You sold to students? You sold people that have students coming to my school? You dared do that? Hispanic people?" I was incredulous. I really had no idea, but I've always known that they had a lot of -- that the people there in Houston were not very nice to Hispanics.

San Jacinto was the main street, they called Jacinto, not Ya-cinto, no changing 01:37:00to Y, they wouldn't do that. It was called Jacinto. Which was just the attitude they had, that everybody was an entrepreneur, everybody -- they had a Spanish grocery store that was looked down upon like crazy, wonderful store. It was practically a Wal-Mart's in a grocery store, and they sold clothes and all kinds of items that would appeal to the Spanish community, and were heavily supported by the Hispanics. Boy, they just looked down on them terribly. Did not do that in San Antonio, where his brother lived, did not do it elsewhere in Texas. But there, they were. They were very, very prejudiced. We had a happy life in Texas. Good place to live for us. Suburban life, we adopted that entirely. Had to drive everywhere in Texas, anywhere you went. Six miles to the grocery store, six 01:38:00miles to everything, and Houston was sixty miles one way and seventy miles the other way. It was huge. Not my favorite place.

MF:So we're right at the end of our time, and so may I ask one more question before we end the interview? I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the Elder Initiative that you've been involved in.

JB:Okay, I work with a group. I had these papers that I didn't know what to do with. I had all these papers from forty years ago, forty, then, forty something years ago, forty-three or forty-four, from 1969 on, relating to all the organizations in Pennsylvania that I knew about, that were in existence at that time. And I did cover them as well as Ron could have, because he was -- I told you he was down at the mailbox, and he got all the mail. But I had a lot of 01:39:00papers relating to a lot of groups, and a lot of things to do with conferences, all of the papers, for instance, we had all the -- turned in -- all of the people that had gone to the conference. We knew everybody that had attended, and paid prior to and at the conference itself. We had that entire (inaudible) papers, all the workshops, anything we'd done in workshops, all the programs, all the meetings we'd had in connection with it, et cetera, and all these different groups, and all the caucus notes, often, sometimes the attendance sheets. It was five feet of space. Half of it was newspapers. The Philadelphia Gay News, Pittsburgh Gay News, and some (inaudible) -- Pittsburgh and Philadelphia were owned by Mark Siegel -- and both of them -- and were the same 01:40:00paper, pretty much, and I think he ultimately dropped the Pittsburgh paper, because it was most of the same news, with some local stuff.

The group -- I wish -- now I can't think of -- the guy in Lancaster was the newspaper of the gay scene out of Lancaster started out, and one of the members of that group by the name of Dave -- oh, I forget -- took over the newspaper and renamed it. It became the rural newspaper, and it wasn't ours. We did our own newsletter, but he operated a rural newsletter, a rural base, for all of us to 01:41:00state. And it was like the necessary news, you wanted to know what was happening among all the groups, you wanted to know what was happening in the state and local and national news, and you could read this newspaper, because that's what he reported on and made a specialty out of reporting those -- having that knowledge of what was going on in activism. And I had all those from beginning to end -- no, I'm not sure I had them all. I had a few of them, the beginning ones, but I had all the later ones, and turned those over, and that was half the collection. What was also so mad, because (inaudible) way back in the sixties, when that was new, before the Stonewall, and before there was MCC, I had the first advertisements to that. Troy Perry had put in the newspaper and said, "I'm starting this church," and then when he founded the church, and as MCC grew, I was very interested in that.

I'm an atheist, personally, but I've always had very strong supporting about people who had to answer that question; I did, too. And my answer was atheism, but certainly the religious conflict was very strong with me. I thought about becoming a minister, with lack of anything else to do; I didn't know what the hell I was going to do, if it was teaching, or a minister, or anything, and I was going to Moravian College, which had a seminary connected with it, Moravian Seminary, and I was very strongly tempted, but my answer -- and I had gone in high school to -- the two people I came out to, one was my minister at the Presbyterian church who was quite negative, and a supporter and an advisor to what was called MLA, which was Young Masons, essentially; it was sponsored by the Masons. They said it was no connection outside of the sponsorship -- you did not automatically become a Mason, and in no way you had to apply the join the 01:43:00Masons; you had to apply to join the MLA, too, 1421. And I went to an advisor there. I loved MLA, I was quite taken with the whole moral outlook thing about being a good person, a strong value system for me, and I believed in it very strongly. So that was the other first thing I went to, and he was neutral. He was a single man who was the advisor, [Levin's mother?], and I was good friends with another advisor; I was good friends with his son, and went often with them to Allegheny River, and so on, in high school. Whatever. What was the question while I start this? Are we done?

MF:I think we'll just close now, but let us close on tape; we'll wait for Carol. 01:44:00So I just want to say thank you so much, Joseph, for speaking with us again, a second time, in two days. We're so grateful that you would share your stories.

JB:Thank you. I really appreciate it. I wanted to -- I wish I remembered more -- the actual names of people. I just felt very -- I felt they were important in my life, and that supportiveness was important to me, okay, to be able to do what I could, and I knew that we were creating a miracle, and it was clear that we were during a unique time in history, when -- Pennsylvania was its own story. There were fifty stories in fifty states, and how we began to move out from the cities. It had only been in Philadelphia and in Pittsburgh originally. Philadelphia had the Jane's Society, and the Homosexual Law Reform Society.

Pittsburgh had a Persad Center, which addressed the health issues, and Le-Hi-Ho, when it was first founded, was very strong on the draft. Vietnam was very important, and the question was, do you check the box. Ron took care of all that. That was his particular forte, do you check the box or do you not. And the organization was formed on, you know, (inaudible) that important issue, as a resource for it, and it was the resource with schools, because there wasn't anything else. We had a library that people were able to use, did a lot, which is, again, the impact of Le-Hi-Ho, that was part of the impact. We had a regular lending library that was very active. Every meeting, they took the books. I ended up with the books in my home before I left for Chicago. I had the books for about a year in my house. I don't remember how I inherited them, but there 01:46:00was nowhere else for them to be housed, and I handed them off to another member, ultimately, before I left.

I don't know what happened. That was '83. I don't know when Ron left town. It wasn't then, because in '83, I was still going to Le-Hi-Ho, and he must have been there. He left town after that. (inaudible) why he no longer housed the library. They kept the non-book files. Maybe the books would be too much. There were boxes, and boxes, and boxes of books, about four-hundred or more, four-hundred or five-hundred books. I think there were five- hundred books, about that. I had grown considerably from when I had it, and a lot of people donated a lot of other funds, papers, academic works, I no longer had access for. And I didn't have those papers.

MF:Thank you so much again.

JB:Thank you, thank you, thank you. I really appreciate it, and again, I'm sorry that I didn't get to name more people, because they were the important -- they were why I wanted to do it, to remember -- their contributions were enormous. So many, so many, so many people, you know, organized and participated in those conference. So many people came to our meetings and did what they could for us in the lobby days when we lobbied the state capitol several times, supported us in every way, you know, gave us money while -- we were creating a miracle. We knew what we were creating, and I saw it when I went to that concert in Chicago. They were singing for us. (inaudible) people. (inaudible) us.

MF:Well, I think part of what has made this project so important for us is that we want to honor --

JB:People have asked me, do you think we ever made a difference? Yes, absolutely, we made a difference, and I saw it when I went there. That was -- Chicago was everybody that moved to Chicago, okay, was not native, and I was non-native. But they formed these two -- there were two choirs in Pennsylvania. The one that I saw in the first concert was the show choir that had just started that year, and they did this wonderful theme of Yellow Brick Road. Going into the concert was really special. I wanted to do a choir way back when. I thought that was -- one of the first things I thought of -- Le-Hi-Ho, wouldn't it be wonderful to have this musical group that just got together -- that was (inaudible) days, that was folk song days, and people -- everybody sang folk songs, folk songs were very, very popular all over the airways, and everybody 01:49:00was singing, and playing, and learning songs, and learning those particular songs. So it would've been natural for us to do, but there was no -- I certainly didn't have the ability. But I loved choirs. I thought it would be great to have some sort of event and singers like that. Couldn't do it, so it was done for me, and I really -- that's been a great joy, to watch both the choirs -- Harrisburg fortunately has a men's and women's choir, not combined, separate, and Mary Antero was in charge -- the treasurer of that county, and her lover is the president of the organization. Wonderful choir. Have grown to about thirty, forty voices, and rejuvenated themselves in the last couple years, and have become the better choir, while the men's choir has been going down and now reforming itself into a new group.

It had been the stronger for a long time; now, the women's choir has come up powerfully. Very wonderful concert that I had -- an organization for -- they did 01:50:00-- interspersed people of color and refugees, all refugees from all over the world, and they sang the songs -- their country -- the way they combined, I thought, was genius. They did a combination of singing the songs of those countries first, and then -- in a foreign language -- and so that the chair had to work in a new language, very difficult music, and that they wouldn't have known anything about; did a superb job. And then they interspersed them with the people who read their stories, who had written out the stories of the countries they had come from and their struggles to get to be refugees acclimating to America and that sort of thing. It was a wonderful program, really, really special, and the right way to do it, and I had no idea how are you going to combine this. It was splendid, really good concert. And so I just printed all 01:51:00the programs I could get and sent them north to everybody that I -- sent to everybody that I could get to, this is how you do this. This is the way to do this concert. Splendid.

MF:Well, I think we've taken up enough of your time on a Sunday.

JB:Oh, no, no, thank you. Thank you so much, and thank you for the bagel this morning. MF:Oh, thank you.

JB:Enjoyed it thoroughly, and I've enjoyed our time together. Thank you.

MF:So have we.

JB:And I wish I had satisfied more for you in terms of personal -- I don't know if my personal was as interesting as what I wanted to talk about, which was the activities. We were a very active state, and an exciting state, and I was so lucky to be a part of that, inspired by it, totally inspired. My God, we used to go plugged in in New York, once a year; the first time, there were eleven 01:52:00thousand people, the first march, in 1970. It grew to hundreds and hundreds of thousands. There were one of a million (inaudible) didn't get it for Stonewall Fifty. I don't think that -- I don't know what the population was, but they were going to try for a hundred, I knew. That would've been exciting. And we had -- Danny -- we had tickets to go, and he got sick. I couldn't go, so I sponsored a bus for him to take some people, you know, I had to sponsor a bus. I gave him money for two people, thirty-six or forty bucks, to Central Park. That was a great day, great day. That's when the movement really was born. They combined to one lane of traffic, and we just got longer, and longer, and longer, until it was 11 blocks long. More blocks than eight blocks. I don't remember. There were 01:53:00just blocks and blocks of people coming up this single lane of traffic.