Liz Bradbury, July 2, 2020

INTERVIEW WITH LIZ BRADBURRY

JULY 2, 2020

MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz and I'm here today with Liz Bradbury to talk

about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley, as a

part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has

funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, and we're meeting

on Zoom because there's a pandemic going on. Today is July 2, 2020. And I wanted

to start by saying Liz, thank you so much for your willingness to speak with me today.

LIZ BRADBURY: I am so glad to be here. I'm raring to go.

MF: I'm so glad you're here too. So, just to start, could you please state your

full name and spell it for me?

LB: My full name is Elizabeth Ann Bradbury. E-L-I-Z-A-B-E-T-H, A-N-N, B-R-A-D-B-U-R-Y.

MF: Thank you. And will you please share your birth 00:01:00 date?

LB: 6/15/57.

MF: Prior to this interview we talked a little bit about consent and I'm just

going to ask you a few questions about the consenting to this interview, so the

first one, really basic, do you consent to this interview today?

LB: Yes!

MF: And do you consent to having this interview transcribed, digitized, and made

publicly available in online formats?

LB: Yes!

MF: Do you consent to the LGBT Community Archive using your interview for

educational purposes in other formats, including films, articles, websites,

presentations, and whatever else might come along?

LB: Yes!

MF: And do you understand that you will have 30 days after the electronic

delivery of the transcript to review the interview, identify parts that you want

to delete, or withdraw the interview from the project?

LB: Yes.

MF: Okay. Wonderful! So, we'll go ahead and start the interview, and I'm

wondering Liz, if 00:02:00would you mind telling me a little bit about the early years

of your life?

LB: Nope. [laughs] I am perfectly willing to do that, but I really prefer to

talk more about right now. I'll talk about that another time, because, you know,

my life is so fascinating, I don't think it's drastically different than many

other privileged young people, white young people in Connecticut in the 1960s,

but I do want to talk about, I want to start by talking about what happened when

we started to work on activism, LGBT activism, here in the Lehigh Valley, and

when I met Patricia Sullivan, Trish Sullivan, my wonderful beloved partner 33

years ago, and talk about how we worked with other people in the community to

further HIV/AIDS work and, but particularly LGBT civil rights 00:03:00work and stuff

like that. So, should I just do it [laughs]?

MF: I will follow your lead!

LB: Oh, okay [laughs]. So, Trish and I met in 1987, and we fell in love in 1988,

and we made plans as to how we could live together. She was living in Eastern

New York, outside of New York City, and I was living here in Allentown. I had

just moved here to Allentown in 1987. And so, finally we decided that it would

be the best plan, she was going to retire early from her job, to move here to

Allentown, so, and to do some things to be able to sustain ourselves.

And so we moved into a rowhouse in Allentown that I had already owned, and after

about six years we realized although we had LGBT friends, we had gay and lesbian

friends that we had met in the community, we didn't feel like we were doing 00:04:00enough activism to support Civil Rights. And both of us really were very firm

about being out, and being outspoken, and working for the rights of the LBGT community.

We frequently had said in the past, you know, we work for ourselves, and our

parents are dead, so what the heck? I mean, what's the worst thing that could

happen to us? Nobody, even at that point some of our family was still alive, but

our family was supportive. We worked for ourselves; we weren't going to lose our

job. We would often say, like, how could we expect other people to be out if we

weren't 100 percent out? So, we started to really do out activism right away.

And so, one of the things that happened was that in 1993, we had done a little

bit of stuff, we were aware of some events that were happening. FACT was having

some events, Fighting AIDS Continuously Together, that were fundraising for

AIDS, and we went to a couple of things like that, but in 1993 00:05:00was a big march

on Washington. Both Trish and I had been to the March on Washington in 1987,

which was enormous. Just very big.

We were not together then; it was just before we met. It was about four months

before we met, but we were both there, we probably, you know, in the television

video we probably walked right by each other, but there were hundreds of

thousands of people there. In 1997 a million people came to Washington, DC to

speak out for and to demand equal rights for the LBGT community. And we drove,

we had some friends that live in Baltimore, so we stayed there.

You couldn't get a room in Washington. We tried to months -- six months in

advance we called the travel agent and said we would give them $400 to get a

room for one night [inaudible] [laughs] "Oh, we won't have any problem with

that!" And then she -- I could hear her, like, flipping through the thing and

then she's going, "There's no rooms! We could get you 00:06:00one in Baltimore." I said,

"Well, we know people in Baltimore, we'll just stay with them."

So, we stayed with a person, a good friend of ours in Baltimore, we went to the

March, and at the same time in Allentown and Bethlehem, the bars -- we're not

bar people. We don't drink and we don't smoke, and that was a big problem

because people smoked so much in bars then, it was really hard to hang around in

bars where people were smoking all the time.

But we -- so we didn't know a lot of the bar folks, and we weren't involved with

the community that way, but the bars had organized a series of buses to go to

The March on Washington in 1993, and we were very energized when we went there.

We actually saw people that we hadn't seen for like 10 or 15 years. I saw, like,

a really good friend of mine that I hadn't seen. Would you know, there'd be like

parades of people walking by.

At one point I was on -- Trish and I and our friend Wayne, were 00:07:00on one of those

elevated trains going in -- I think we were coming out. It was the end of the

day. We were in the train car, and people were just cheering and screaming you

know, everywhere you went, on the subways and everything, they were screaming,

you know, "We're here! We're queer!" You know, "get used to it!"

And then there were parades, and there was like contingencies of veterans and

people from all these different states and countries, and there were like, the

guys from Canada were saying: "We're here! We're queer! We're cross-border

shopping!" You know, it was just, the whole thing was hilarious, and then every

once in a while, you'd see some little, you know, white, cisgender, straight

family from Iowa who came to Washington, you know, for their weekend. I heard

one kid say, "Why are they making so much noise?" And I said [laughs] "Get used

to it, kid. This is going to be the whole weekend for you."

MF: [laughs]

LB: It was really, really fabulous to have it that 00:08:00way. So, we're on this train

car and I look over, I was sitting with Wayne and Trish, and I look over and I

say, "Oh, there's somebody I went to kindergarten with!" And I went all through

high school, and I wave to her, and she jumped up. She came over. She's my

Facebook friend now, this is from Connecticut, I grew up in Connecticut, and she

came running over and I said, "When we were at the ten-year reunion ten years

ago, I KNEW you were a lesbian!" She goes "I wasn't out then! I didn't even, I

wasn't out to myself then!" I said, "You shoulda asked me!"

So [laughs] and this is a person that I'm I contact with all the time now,

because we're Facebook friends, thank goodness for social media, but and that

was happening over and over. We saw about 15 people that we knew from all

different parts of our lives because we'd been out for a long, long time.

Trish's been out since the 60s. So, it was very exciting, and it was very

empowering, and brilliant people were speaking from the stage, and you know, it

was just terrific.

It was so empowering that what 00:09:00happened in 1994, well at the end of that, all

these buses that came back from the parade in DC, back to the Lehigh Valley,

groups of people got together, and they began to talk about how we need to have

something here in the Lehigh Valley that's like that, and that's how the Pride

Festival was born.

And I believe, because they told me this, that it was [Terry Courtney?] and

[Renee Bennett?] who talked, they got off the bus and they talked for like two

hours, and they said, "This is what we need to do," and they began to organize

various different -- it was a different kind of feeling of organizing. It wasn't

like fighting AIDS, which was really important and very significant, but this

was mobilizing groups of LGBT people so that we could get rights, and that's

what that parade was about, and that's what people were beginning to look at.

So, in 1994, that was the first Pride Festival, and Trish and I did not organize

that Pride Festival, but we had 00:10:00friends who ran a little ice cream parlor called

Jaffrey's at the corner of Tilghman and Seventh Street, and they had been in

contact -- they were lesbians, that's one of the ways I got Trish to move here,

I said "There's lesbians running a vegetarian ice cream parlor at the corner of

Tilghman and Seventh, and I think we could be friends with them," and actually

it's pretty much how we know everybody, because I became friends with them,

Trish came there, and we're still friends with both of them, even though they're

not together anymore, we're still friends with them and they introduced us to

almost everybody we knew. All that lesbian camp Girl Scout connection, actually.

But [Barb Locke?], who was the head of that restaurant, said that the

Philadelphia Gay and Lesbian Task Force, which was run by a woman named Rita

Addessa, wants us to have a booth at the Pride 00:11:00Festival. They have paid for it,

we're going to cover the morning of the booth, and would you cover the

afternoon? And I said, sure, you know, what the heck? We'd love to do that.

And then I said to Trish, you know, if we do this, there's gonna be lots of

booths there. What we should do is work the room, we should go around at all the

different booths and figure out which organization we think is really doing

stuff that we want to be involved with to make change, and we should volunteer

with that organization.

So, there's a video in the archives of that Pride Festival, and the person who

took the video, which was part of the time was Rob Hopkins, because I've

actually talked to him about that, and he -- and I think [John Early?] was the

other person who was making the video, and there's a lot of people I know in the

video, but I kept thinking, like, where are the rest of the booths? But they

sort of stayed up near the stage, and we were farther back from the stage.

This was in the park, at Cedar Beach Park in Allentown, that was the first Pride

Festival, and that was in 00:12:001994. And there were a lot of booths there, it was

about 800 people there, it was a significant event, and P-Flag was there, the

people from P-Flag, there were people from different corporations, and the Gay

Men's Chorus had already started, ACCO which was a lesbian -- or which was a

women's chorus, that we ended up to be really good friends with a lot of people

that were involved with ACCO, we're still friends with those people. They

performed on stage.

There were people from the Harrisburg Pride Festival that were there, and

there's a video of this happening, and in one section, I watched the entire

two-hour video, and in one section way in the back, I'm thinking, "Yeah, I think

that's me. I remember those pants." And I was sort of standing off, I was

watching the stage, and you could see me there. You could see a lot of other

people that were involved in that.

So, we walked around, and we visited a lot of different booths, and one of the

booths that was there 00:13:00was a booth by the League of Gay and Lesbian Voters, and

we wanted to be involved with a political organization, because we firmly

believed, and we still believe this, that political change is actually the most significant.

To make political change requires political action. And you have to work within

the electorate, with elected officials and law-making and the courts, and stuff

like that. You have to work within that to make that happen. You can't just have

a bunch of fundraiser parties.

And really, at that time, and Pride Festival was wonderful, a wonderful,

wonderful event, but it was never a political event. The thing that it did was

it created a framework for loads and loads of different organizations to get

together so that people could learn about those organizations, and that's what

we were doing.

So, we became fascinated by this, the idea that this 00:14:00organization, which was

called the League of Gay and Lesbian Voters, was producing voter information for

voters, specific to how did candidates vote and support specific issues that

were of really significant interest to the LGBT community. And really just LGBT

issues, so we weren't talking about other progressive issues. We're talking

about, you know, gay rights, hate crimes legislation, the potential of

registering relationships-- we didn't even talk about marriage then in 1994.

And so, at that time, we decided to -- the guy that was running that booth was

Steve Black, and we told Steve that we would volunteer with him, and we liked

what this seemed to be doing, we thought this was a really good idea: to create

voter information and interview candidates and stuff like that, so we told Steve

that we would work with him.

We saw the paper printed out, so he didn't have a very good 00:15:00booth, but he had

like a box of books, and we talked to him for a long time. He was great, and

very dynamic. Young, blond guy. He was upbeat. But he spoke very well. Steve

Black was a lawyer actually, and he was really very aware. He went to Temple to

get his law degree.

So, the next part of this was that after the Pride Festival-- Pride Festivals

are always very hard, especially if you're working booths, you get very tired at

the end of the day. But the next day we talked to Steve about, he said, "I want

you to come to," -- I said "We would do work for you. Like, what do you want us

to do?" And so, Trish and I, and this is the hilarious part, at that point we

said okay we're going to volunteer with this organization, we're going to get

involved with this, but the only thing we ever want to do is stuff envelopes.

And we really said that.

And that was the first start, that always gets a laugh when I say that in

public, but so the first thing we did was, Steve said, "I have all these

envelopes. I'm doing this to have..." -- I think it was for 00:16:00a fundraiser that he

was going to do, sort of a "Meet the Candidate" fundraiser event, and he had

about 100 envelopes, and he had labels to put on them with people's names, and

he had collected some mailing lists and stuff like that. He had already done that.

And he said, "These have to be stuffed, and here's the pieces of paper that go

into it." He just gave us all the stuff, and then he said, "I'm going to have a

stamp for the return address, and then you can seal the envelopes and then we'll

stamp the return address, and then they'll be ready to go, and we then we can

mail them next week." This was Sunday, actually. No, it was the Monday after the

Pride Festival.

So, we brought the stuff home, and we stuffed all the envelopes right then, that

night. He said, "We'll get together and stuff them." He always thought that

mailings were harder to do than they were, because he hated to do them. So, we

stuffed all the envelopes, we put all the stuff in, we didn't have the return

address stamps so we just hand-wrote the return 00:17:00address on everything. There

were stamps on it. They were all ready to go. So, when he came over and said,

"Here, I'll help you to work with this," we said, "We're done! We're done. Here

they are."

So, he realized that we were going to be really good volunteers, and we met with

him, and we said one of the things we want to do is we want to create a group of

events that will bring people together that aren't bar events. And they can have

refreshments and stuff in it, but this would be an opportunity to have a dance.

What we really wanted to do was meet more lesbians in town, because we wanted to

know more people in the community and have a reason for everybody to get together.

So, we created -- Trish and I, and Trish and I really did the work to create a

series of dances and events that would be at the Celoron Fire Hall -- Cetronia!

Cetronia Fire Hall. See? Good. Trish helped me with that. The Cetronia Fire

Hall, out near, it's just past the park, the Lehigh 00:18:00 Parkway.

And they had a big space, and a stage and stuff. We had to pay for it. I think

we ponied up and paid for it for the first six, I think it was like $100 that we

had to rent it each time, and we had a mailing list, and we invited all these

people to come, and we had like "Get To Know You" events, and it was sort of a

dance, and we had music, and people got to know, and we think we did about six

of them.

They sort of changed as we were going along. But the first few of them were just

that, it was that [Laura Guiteras?] who we already knew helped us come up,

because she was part of the Girl Scouts then, she was one of the head people at

the Girl Scouts of Greater Leigh Valley, the Girl Scouts council, and she had a

lot of games that would get people to be comfortable with each other.

We met DJ there. We already kind of knew DJ, but we, you know, you go around

with the sheet -- you'd have to check off who has a tattoo. DJ, as you know, has

a lot of tattoos. So, she was very, that was DJ 00:19:00Landis -- she was DJ [Golba?] in

those days. And Steve was there. And we were getting people's names and

addresses on our mailing list.

So, the main thing that moved along on this, and this was really significant to

recognize, that we began to realize that if we were going to produce this voter

information, and that's what we did. We began to see how you produce voter

information. How to do fundraising, how to organize people, how to organize

volunteers to do mailings and stuff like that.

One of the things we realized was that Steve, so Steve Black was, he was in his

early 30s, maybe his late 20s, he might have been 29 then. He was a lawyer, he

had gone to law school, but he didn't have a lot of confidence in his ability as

a lawyer. He did have a little law office that he paid $60 a month for in

Bethlehem, and he would do people's wills and, you know, Powers of 00:20:00Attorney and

stuff like that, but he was really not comfortable with the court idea. He

didn't do that kind of stuff.

On the other hand, he was a brilliant lawyer. He passed his bar exam the very

first time he took it. He was really smart, and he was really politically savvy

in a lot of ways. One of them was, he had been on School Board in North Hampton

County. He was from Pen Argyl, and his family lived in Pen Argyl, and they owned

Black's Caf.

And Steve worked and ran Black's Caf, but he lived in Philadelphia in the

Gayborhood, on Camack Street, and he worked at Susanna Foo's, which is a really

fancy, REALLY fancy, five star Chinese restaurant run by this woman named

Susanna Foo, who had books and stuff like that, and Trish when she found that

out said, "I want you to get" -- She had the cookbook! She said, "Go take this

and have Susanna Foo sign the cookbook!"

And 00:21:00he was a waiter, and he made a lot of money, and half the week he would work

there, and he had a tiny apartment that was about the size of this office. It

was just one room, on Camack Street, and then he had, then he would stay at his

mother's house in Pen Argyl the other half of the week and run Blacks' Caf

with her. She ran it the other part of the week.

And, I have to say that I don't think he had a terrific relationship with his

family. They weren't very positive about his being a gay man. They were kind of

in denial about that. His mother was married to someone who was very, very

conservative. Not his father. And he had to sleep on the couch, I mean, it was

very uncomfortable, but he did that for a long time. He did that for several years.

So, Steve had figured out how to do some very significant fundraising by like,

if he'd have a cocktail party for his -- if he had a birthday party, he'd make

everybody 00:22:00pay to come in, and then he would donate all the money, and he would

have the party, he did that all the time. But he wasn't great at fundraising. It

turned out that we were much better at it.

So, Steve wanted us to, he wanted to really organize -- so, let me say this. The

League of Gay and Lesbian Voters was run by a guy named Chris Young who was in

Pittsburgh, and Chris Young had started the League of Gay and Lesbian Voters to

collect voter information and disseminate it to people in the Pittsburgh area,

and the Western part of Pennsylvania.

And he and Steve had met at a Democratic Committee meeting. Steve had been on

School Board in, I guess, the Pen Argyl area, in the Pen Argyl School District,

he was on School Board. He was openly gay, so he was an openly gay elected

official in the state of Pennsylvania. It was a big deal. It was very early, and

he was very openly gay.

And so, he met 00:23:00Chris, and Chris told him about this organization and asked him

if he would run the Eastern part. So, that's why he was in the booth for the

Pride Festival. They knew the Pride Festival, and Steve said, "Yeah, I'll be the

Director of the Eastern part of the state." And Chris was a very savvy tech person.

Remember, this was 1994, so this was just the beginning of the internet, just

the beginning of email. Most people didn't have email. We had a computer, it was

like, you know, the, it was a Mac Classic, it was like, you know, and the

printers were those "eh-eh" digital ones, and everything was dial-up, and it was

very, very slow still, but Chris had a lot of ability to do high-tech things,

because he worked for a university, and he had a lot of savvy for that.

So, he talked Steve into doing this, and Steve was very excited about that, and

he wanted to do this, and he realized the potential of gathering really cohesive

and really 00:24:00clear information about where candidates stood on issues, and then

giving that to voters.

Because, so, let me say that the model of this was that we would not just talk

about presidential candidates or senators or congress people. We were going to

talk about and give people information about every single office they would vote

for. You know, School Board, City Council, Rural Boards of Supervisors, Row

Offices like, you know, the Auditor of Deeds, the County Clerk's Office, any

elected office. The Coroner's Office.

And the model was there were these questionnaires, that we worked on the

questions, and the questions evolved, depending on what the issues were and

stuff, and there were instances, there were votes and stuff in the state with

regard 00:25:00to pieces of legislation, particularly on the Hate Crimes Bill, that was

one of Chris' big things. He wanted to pass the Hate Crimes Bill.

Actually, in the state of Pennsylvania, we have what's called the "Ethnic

Intimidations Act." It is a Hate Crimes Bill, and it has a list of protected

classes, but it doesn't include sexual orientation and gender identity, nor does

it include a couple of other classes that should have been included, and Chris,

his initial thing was he wanted to get the legislature to add sexual orientation

and gender identity to the law.

So, Steve also said that you know, that was a good idea, and we could do a lot

of lobbying from that point of view. Hate crimes law is hard to argue with, and

so it's a very positive thing. And one of the things we would say to people, is

they'd say, "Well, that doesn't make people to stop hating people."

I said, "Well, one of the things about passing a Hate crimes law, is there is

ot one single piece of legislation at that time, in the state of Pennsylvania,

or any mention 00:26:00state-wide of sexual orientation and gender identity. Gay people

don't exist for this state. Once we pass the Hate Crimes law, then we say,

'Well, you shouldn't beat them up. Well, if you shouldn't beat them up, don't

you think you should also not discriminate against them in employment?' You open

the door for that."

Anyway, I'm digressing here, but Chris was running this organization, he was

doing it very well, and he was in Pittsburgh, which is a huge city with three

million people, and the only way that he raised money was that he would have

these skating parties, and he would charge people to come in, and there were a

lot of drag people in skating, it was really terrific, and he had these roller

skating parties, and he would make like a thousand dollars at these things.

But it was in Pittsburgh, it was 1994, there was nothing else to do that was

really queer that wasn't a bar thing, so it was very, very popular, and he said,

"You should do that in Allentown too. That's how you can raise money. You can

make..." Well, [laughs] Allentown's a little bit smaller than 00:27:00Pittsburgh, in the

Lehigh Valley, but we considered that, and we didn't do it, actually.

But so, he had created this model, and Steve thought it was a pretty good model,

and it was. And a lot of that stuff is in the archives now. Some of the earliest

voter guides that are from the League of Gay and Lesbian Voters. So, Steve said

to me and Trish, "I want you to be the coordinators of the Lehigh Valley. I'll

be the Executive Director, and we'll try to get other people that will

coordinate other parts of the Eastern part of the state." And we did it by two

county areas.

So, Lehigh/Northampton was our area, and we were the coordinators of that. But

we also helped Steve make a lot of big decisions about what was going to go on

in the community. We're almost done. No, so [laughs]. I'm only talking about

this very beginning part.

So, the main thing that happened then, and I'll talk about the Voters Guide in a

second and how 00:28:00we ultimately became PA-GALA, but at that point, we were becoming

very, very aware that Steve's lists of people were just piles of paper that had

like people's names that he was trying to put into a sort of Excel format, and

he had some names in Excel, and then he had like stacks of cards and junk, and

you know, and I said, "You know, we have to get this list together," because no

one had a queer list of telephone numbers and contact information and addresses,

and we had to mail things to people, so we really needed to be able to have an

automated list.

So, one of the volunteers that we had was a woman named Joan [Tadero?] and she

now lives in New Hope, but she was living in Easton then, and she worked for a

company that was very high tech. And Joan, who was a wonderful activist at that

time, I'm so 00:29:00sad that she moved out of the area, said, "You know, if you get me

that stuff, I will scan it into a list." Because, and that was just the dawn of

scanning capabilities. And nobody had -- you couldn't scan anything yourself.

You had to have a big thing to be able to do that kind of stuff.

And I said, "Okay, well, let's try to do that." Well, the thing is that Steve

was scared to death that if he left, gave me the list, or he gave Joan the list,

he would lose the list. It would get lost. He also, finally I said to him, "Is

this, the reason that you're not giving this to me because you're afraid it's

going to get lost, or because it's just a bunch of crap lying around your

apartment and you don't know how, you know, it's just junk?" And he said, "Yeah,

it's 00:30:00that. It's that." And I said, "Steve, get a big box, and put every piece of

paper that has people's names into it, because the excel sheet will even weed

out the duplicates!"

Because that was a problem we were having too. It took me a month of pestering

him. He was so reticent. He was a stubborn guy, and he was hard to work with, I

have to say, but he was way easier to work than Chris Young.

I wrested this stuff from him. I gave it to Joan. She went to her office in the,

you know, dark of night, on the weekend, and fed little slips of paper through

the scanning machine for hours and hours and hours and developed a usable list

of about a thousand names.

Which was extraordinary that we had the ability now to reach a thousand people,

and we could even, we even sort of by names 00:31:00knew whether people identified as

male or female, we could do all sorts of sorting with this, and then we began to

use this list, and Steve did this in a very positive way, when we would collect

names at events, he would code the event so that if there was another similar

event, we could invite people to those events.

Like, the Pride Festival used to have a film festival in it, and so if people,

if we collected the names at the film festival, and there was another film

festival, or another film, or Theater Outlet in Allentown, which is not there

anymore, used to have film festivals all the time, and they would be fundraisers

for us, and we could invite people who'd already gone to film festivals, and it

was just brilliant the way he did that.

And we also began to collect and meld that information with voters' lists,

because whether or not you vote is a matter of public record. Your voter

registration is a matter of public record, and so is whether or not you have 00:32:00voted in each election. And if you vote in every election for five years,

primary and...

PATRICIA SULLIVAN: General.

LB: General election, that is a -- and you do that for five years, so it would

be ten times voting, you are a Super Voter. And elected officials are impressed

by Super Voters. If you write them a letter, and you say, "I want you to do this

and this," they'll look on the voter rolls to see if you voted in the last five

elections, and if [laughs] "this person never votes! I don't care what they

say!" And that's true. It's really true.

So, we were beginning to encourage people to vote in every election, and how

important that was. And we wanted to produce information that we could send

directly to the ones, send them this booklet so that they could vote, and also

have an endorsement card, so now we had that list. And once we had that list,

our organization, League of Gay and Lesbian Voters, and 00:33:00actually, it was PA-GALA

that really codified that list, we became gold. Because no one had that kind of list.

People -- the only other kind of queer list you could get, this is kind of

funny, you could buy a list from the Advocate, of LGBT people who, or no -- of

people who got The Advocate. The problem is that The Advocate, publishers of The

Advocate also published gay porn magazines. A lot of gay porn magazines.

So, a lot of times it's not that the person's name was on The Advocate list, it

was on -- their name was on the gay porn list, and a lot of those people are

very closeted people who may not identify publicly as gay. Dad.

So, if you mail to those lists, sometimes those people feel like they're

colossally being outed. On the other hand, we -- our list was people who were at

gay events, 00:34:00and we actually asked them if we could use their name.

We would say, we'd hand out a card that said you know, and we had a way of

collecting those names that said if you don't want to be on a list, make an x

here, and then we wouldn't put them on the list. But we'd say, if you do want to

be on the list, we will send you really important information.

So, now we had this really comprehensive list and it was from the Eastern part

of the state, but we had a lot of names. We ultimately had about 40 thousand

names on that list, which was colossal. It was really significant. There were

elections that were being won, state-wide elections that were being won with,

you know, 400 votes, and we had 40 thousand names. So, it was very significant.

So, we ended up working with Chris on League of Gay and Lesbian Voters, and we

began to -- so what we would do is, 00:35:00we would collect the voter information. So,

we would -- this is the process.

People would have petitions, they would become candidates, they would file to be

a candidate for a primary election, and when they filed, that's a matter of

public record, and we would go, and usually this was Trish that would do this in

Lehigh Valley, she would go the voter, county voter places and get the names of

all the people who had just filed to be a candidate in the next election.

And then we would get their addresses, and sometimes their addresses weren't in

their filing, so we'd have to get their addresses, and then we would send them

the questionnaires. And the questionnaires are actually in the archives, because

there were earlier questionnaires and then they changed, and we would keep the

questionnaires on file forever, so that we could say, "Oh, you said this in 1994."

So, the person would be asked all these questions, where do you stand on these

issues, and then Steve would collect information, and Trish would do this too,

collect information on how people who were already elected 00:36:00officials had already

voted on issues.

So, a lot of times potential voters would say, "Well, people can say anything!"

I'd say, "Yeah, but we're not just telling you what they said. We're telling you

how they've already voted. How they've already voted on the Hate Crimes Bill.

How they voted on a resolution for a Pride flag. What they said in specific

things. If they'd written articles that were anti-gay. If they'd espoused a

position absolutely anti-gay, we'd put a little skull and crossbones next to them.

And then we had a grid that would have, like if they were part of an

organization that was just, the whole, they were Focus on the Family, this was

their -- they were anti -- that was their issue: They wanted to keep gays from

having rights. Then we'd put a skull and crossbones.

We would have a grid where we would have all the candidates, and we would say

the categories of what they were voting on, and it would be like Rights, and

then we'd have a different level of, you know, a one, a two, a three, and this

was a five, they were really good, and then we'd put a skull and 00:37:00crossbones if

they were really-- I think we did it with checks, actually.

You know, and then if they didn't answer, we'd say, Did Not Return the

Questionnaire, and we'd encourage our voters to say, to actually take the

voters' guide to the voting booth, and when they got there and there would be

like somebody there saying, like, "Oh, vote for me," and we'd go "Well, you

didn't even turn in the thing, so I'm not voting for you at all. Screw this."

You know, "Well, I can't answer everybody." "Well, too bad. I can't vote for

everybody." And this began to make change.

And it was very significant, it was really making a difference for people, and

it made it a lot easier for people to vote, because most people have absolutely

no idea where School Board people stand, for example, and you can't even just

pull a Democrat lever, because in the Lehigh Valley, and in the state of

Pennsylvania, people who run for School Board can cross-file. They can file as a

Democrat and a Republican. So, you have no idea where they stand on issues.

And we would ask issues, you know, would you fire somebody who was a teacher who

said, and it actually 00:38:00said, "In Elizabethtown, PA, a teacher who was teaching a

course on concentration camps during the Holocaust, asked his students in any of

them were Jewish and would have had to go into this. None of them said yes. So,

he said, I am a gay man, and I would have had to have been in a concentration

camp because of it." And then he was fired, because he said he was gay in a

public school.

So, my question, our question for a School Board person was, "Would you support

this teacher for using this as an educational circumstance, or not?" And it

created a lot of significant conversations, and people hadn't thought about that

before. "Well, nobody should talk about their sexual orientation." Well straight

people talk about their sexual orientation all the time. They can't shut up

about it. "Look! I got married!" You know, they just talk about-- "Here's my

husband!" You know, they talk about it all the time.

So, we pointed that out to people, and it became these 00:39:00pieces of information

that people could have on candidates they had no idea about, and it was making a

difference, and when you're talking about an election in Allentown, we actually

had an election that we were involved with, where in the primary, the person who

was running for Mayor as the primary candidate, so it was Emma Tropiano who was

notoriously, she was a Democrat, but she was notoriously anti-gay.

She was horribly anti-minority, and anti-Latino, and she was running against

Marty Velazquez who was a very positive candidate, and Marty won the primary by

one vote. And we had sent voter information to about 600 people, right before

the election, and caused people to know that he was a positive person. And, by

one vote. It was 2,640 to 2,641. Every single 00:40:00person that voted for him, cast

the winning vote. And I used that as a thing to vote, you know, as an impetus to

vote, for years.

So, go back a little bit, back to the League of Gay and Lesbian Voters, and

we're talking about how it was sort of hard, so we would -- Trish would do a lot

of this work all through the time that we were running the organization, she

would get the candidates, we would send the questionnaires, they would send the

questionnaires back.

If we decided that we were going to, we ultimately decided that if we were going

to endorse a candidate, we would actually interview them because we wanted to be

sure that they understood the questions.

We would take that information; we would put it into a useable format and then

we would send it to Chris Young who would put it into a Quark program, print the

voters guides for the West and the East, but the East was a separate one, he

would pile it up, he would rent a van, and then he would drive back across the

state, give us 10,000 guides, of those booklets, that had about 75 00:41:00pages in

them, they were the size of a TV Guide kind of thing, like that big, and then we

would have to hand them out to 10,000 queers who were going to vote.

So, what was happening was, that Chris was taking a very long time to process

the information, and he would show up like, three days before the election with

10,000 booklets, going "Okay! Hand these out to people!" As though we had 10,000

people sitting around. And the only place that we could really hand out these

things at that time was in bars. And frankly, frequently, people who were in

bars may not be the most likely people to rush out and vote on Tuesday.

So, we needed -- so we were seeing that he wasn't giving us enough time. We had

a group of volunteers that would disseminate the information, they would be

ready, "Here's the booklets!" And they would take them to Delaware County,

they'd take them to New Hope, they'd take them to Philadelphia, we'd take them

to all the bars here, we'd take them to the Unitarian Church, and MCC, and all

these other places. We'd stack them up in various places, but there wasn't 00:42:00 even

an opportunity to stack them up for them to be there at any time, because it was

only a few days before the election.

And then what happened was, this was the second Clinton election. So, we

produced these booklets for every election. So, it's twice a year. So, including

off year elections. But this was... The Clinton election. I think. Yeah, we did

it for Governor, so one year it's the big Governor's race, two years later it's

the President's race, two years later it's the Governor's race, because those

are four-year terms. Okay.

So, we get all the information together, we send it out to Chris, and, I don't

know, like three or four weeks in advance, and we're waiting, and we're waiting,

and we're waiting, and we're waiting. And finally Chris shows up in his van

with, you know, 20 boxes of these guides, and he's at our 00:43:00house, and we're

helping him bring the boxes in because the next day, some of, I think we had

some on the porch, because the next day, or even that night, I think it was

during the day, and it was like a Friday during the day that he'd taken the day

off from work and then brought this stuff out.

And he was exhausted because he'd stayed awake for hours and hours and hours to

-- days! To process this work, and then he had to drive all the way across the

state. So, he brings the boxes in, and they're there, and I call Steve.

Steve was in Pen Argyl, and he goes, "Okay, I'll be there in a little while."

And I said, "Well, Chris has to go because he has to take this stuff to

Harrisburg. He just brought them here, and then he's going to drop them off on

the way back," and he said, "Okay."

So, Chris leaves, and Steve gets there, and we open up the boxes, and I give

Steve one of the guides and he looks at the front of the guide and goes, "Is

this a joke?" And I said, "What do you mean?" And he said, "Well, this is the

Clinton Presidential Election, and the front of this guide says Rendell, which

was the Governor election 00:44:00from two years before, and the date was wrong, and

what Chris had done is he'd used the template for the cover -- the covers were

very drab, actually.

They just kind of had a little bit of writing on them, and then they said League

of Gay and Lesbian Voters Guide, and it said, you know, Presidential Election,

and then it had the date, this was the wrong year, it was for two years before,

everything was wrong on it, on the cover. And Steve said, "Is the whole thing

wrong?" Everything was right in the guide, but the cover was wrong.

So, [laughs] I said, "What are we going to do? We've got three days! And people

are here to get the things!" And he said, "Well, we're gonna have to, let's see

if we can get a label, we'll put it on the front, and it'll say the correct information.

I said, "Steve, I have to tell you that I don't know how to set this up. You

know, to print these labels. We're going to have to get labels. I can, we can go

and get the labels, I think we have some," you know, we're thinking like, how?

Where can we go? We'll go to wherever, you know, 00:45:00some stationary store and get

boxes and boxes of labels, because we have 10,000 guides.

I said, "I can put the labels on, but I don't know how to set it up." He said,

"I got two guys here who are tech guys, who live such and such," and they came

over to our house, and they set it up, and we printed out the labels, and as the

sheets were coming off, Trish and I had stacks of these books, and we didn't

have time to call volunteers. It was just going to be me and Trish.

So, each one, each things that came off, you know it had about, you know, it had

33 labels on it, we'd take the label off, I would stick it on, Trish would pull

the book out of the way, we figured out we could do, I think we could do 1,000

books an hour, and we did it for 10 hours, so that the next morning, all the

books were done.

And then, we had people come out Saturday morning, so we missed Friday night,

Saturday morning all these people come to take the books, they take it out, and

they're out of our hands now. You know, there's nothing we can really do, but

we're thinking "That was a 00:46:00fiasco!" I mean, you know, 10,000 books and we had

three days to get them to people. It was ridiculous.

So, so we were mad, and Steve was really mad, because we, one of the things that

we did to finance these books was there was advertising in the voters' guides.

Well, people who paid for the advertising were hoping for a little bit more

exposure than a couple of days, and Steve wasn't even there to do the books.

This was the kind of stuff that Trish and I always did. We were always doing

things like, you know, staying up all night to label stuff, or doing colossal

mailings in a very short amount of time. We did that for 18 years; we did these

enormous mailings.

And actually, that was before we'd even gotten the second house, so we were

really -- we had a row house, and then ultimately, I'll talk about this at

another time, but we bought another row house next door, so we could have bigger

space to do [laughs] more mailings. It was really the deal.

We had two big 00:47:00open rooms so that we could do enormous, we could have lots of

people in the house, to do mailings, and to do volunteer work, and we really did

that on purpose. We created spaces where we could fit a lot of people with a lot

of tables, all working at the same time.

So, soon after that we actually, because Steve was really running the Eastern

part of the state, but Chris was in charge, and he said we needed to have a

meeting of the board. So, we had about seven people on our board, and he had

about six people on his board, which is kind of funny, since he was in

Pittsburgh where there's a lot more people, but we had a meeting in State

College, and one of the people who was in State College got a room, it was

actually at the college, and we were able to have a big board meeting.

And Steve, we had a woman named Ruth Rose who was running the Bucks/Montgomery

part, she was in charge of 00:48:00the Bucks/Montgomery area, and she was a pretty

active volunteer for quite a long time. And she said that, so she was working

with, and she also recognized that this was, she said, "You know, look, I ended

up with, I have 2,000 unused guides in my house because I couldn't give them out

in time. I gave out," you know, "I gave out 700 guides in three days," which is,

a lot! But to have all of those guides, the cost to print each guide was a

dollar, so it was a huge waste of money, and it was very depressing for us, and

we were upset.

So, we all, so, we were going to say to Chris, we wanted to print and compile

the voters' guides in the Eastern part of the state. We would take the

information and we would do that. So, we wouldn't have to wait until the last

minute and have him do it 00:49:00 all.

So, we went to the meeting, and Chris was there with his, I guess boyfriend, and

then his other four board members, and we had our seven people, and I can't

remember who the other people were. I didn't really know them that well, but

they were Steve's friends, and so, I think one of them was Ruth's friend and

then there was three other people. We'd all converged on this space.

And Steve and I and Trish and Ruth had talked about that we were really going to

say this to Chris, that we couldn't do this kind of -- it was embarrassing to

us, and it wasn't working. So, we, at one point, so Chris went on and on. The

first part of the meeting was him talking about how tired he was, and how hard

it was to compile the guides, and how he had to stay up all night, and then he

had to drive across the state, and then we said, "You know, there was this

mistake, and stuff," we pointed out that there was this mistake at the meeting,

we said, "We're very concerned about that," and stuff.

Now we get to the point where Ruth is 00:50:00supposed to say to Chris, she's supposed

to say, so we're all board members, so she's supposed to say, "I would like to

move that we're going to have a discussion to have the voters' guide for the

Eastern part of the state compiled and printed in the Eastern part of the state."

So, she goes, so she comes to the point where there's going to happen, and she

raises her hand, and she says, "I want to make a motion to do this." And Chris

says, "Yeah, I don't want to talk about it. I don't think it's a good idea." So,

she says, "Okay." [Laughs] And Steve is like...

So, Trish, Steve, and I all go-- like this, and Steve looks at me, and he looks

at me like this--. That's all he did. And I said, "Yeah, I understand that's a

problem Chris for you, and you're not comfortable with that, but I would like to

move that we are going to discuss this.

And I'm going to move that, and I think we're going to discuss this, and here's

why: You have 00:51:00just told us how hard it was for you to compile the Eastern part

of the state. How you had to say up all night. How you had to drive across the

state. And you made a colossal mistake on the -- because you were so tired.

That's what you said. Because you were so tired." He said, "Well, that's my

working style." I said, "Yeah, but you made a big mistake because you were so

tired. That's why you said it.

So, what we're talking about is that we're going to, we'll get all the

information, we'll compile it into the booklet template, we'll have it, and once

we've done that, we'll send the finished information to you to look over, you

can decide whether you think it's all right, and if it's all right, then you can

send it back to us. If you want to make changes, you can make changes, so then

send it back to us, then we'll take it to the printer and we'll have it printed.

You won't have to do all this work. All you'll have to do is look over the book

and be sure that it's done right."

He said, "No, I don't want to do it that way." I said, 00:52:00"Okay, but I have already

moved that we've had this discussion, and now I'm going to move that we're going

to vote on it." There was more discussion, but in effect, "I think we should do

it this way. I can't see how this would be a bad thing for you. It takes a lot

of pressure off you. It will make it easier for everyone. We'll have a better

circumstance. It's easier for us to get the advertising. And it just won't be a

problem. All you have to do is give us the template from what you've been using

for the Western guide."

So, he says, "No. I don't want to do it." So, I said, "Okay, well, I'm going to

call the question. I want to have a vote on this, because this is the Board, and

we have 13 people here, it's not just you." So, Steve seconds it, or somebody

seconds it, maybe it was Trish, and then the next thing is we vote, and 11 of

the 13 people there say yeah, we should do it that way. Of course! It doesn't

make any sense. Including his board 00:53:00members all thought that that was a good

idea, except for him, except for Chris, and his little boyfriend.

So, I said, "So, this is a decision that's been made. So, all you have to do,"

and you know, one of the things about two elections a year is they're always

coming up. You know, the next one is coming up soon.

The minute the primary is over you've got about a month and then people are

filing again, to collect the petitions for the election in November, and then it

happens again for the election in the spring. So, I said you know, "You're just

going to have to give us the template, and that's the deal. That's all you have

to do."

Well, we go back to Allentown, we're waiting around, and he's not giving us

anything. This actually happened in the fall, so the next election was going to

be a spring election. It was going to be in May, so that would be the Primary.

So, he doesn't give it to us, and he's just ignoring us, and he's not paying

attention to the emails, and he's not sending 00:54:00it, and he's saying, "I don't

think you can do this, you won't ever be able to do this, and you won't be able

to compile it."

Well, meanwhile, Steve has found in some of the stuff that we've been handing

out to people that there is a person who volunteered named [Gayle Erich?] who

happened to live a block from me and Trish, who said, "I am extraordinarily

capable with Quark. I use it every minute of every day, and that's my job." And

she's a lesbian.

So, we go, "Great! Okay, well," so we go to Gayle. She's actually quite a, she

still lives there, she's very reclusive in a lot of ways. Hard to get her to be

in any situation where there's more than two or three people, she would never go

to a party, she would never come, she would have dinner with us once in a while.

Not really like to do that, but she was willing to work. Sometimes you'll get

people who will volunteer, and they'll do the volunteer work, because they'll

think like, "This is my task. I don't even have to social. I don't have to be

social. I just do the task." And she's a wonderful 00:55:00person, really love Gayle.

So, she says, so she comes over, and we've also never been in her house, and

we've known her for 20 years, and she lives a block away. But she comes over and

she looks at the book, and she says, "Sure! Piece of cake. I do this every day.

This is nothing for me to do, I know how to do this, I can set it up, it's not a

problem." She said, "If we're going to do it, we'll have to -- it's going to be

a little bit complicated, but we'll do it."

So, now we say to, because Chris is saying, "There's no way that you have

somebody that knows how to do this." I said, "Well, we do. We have somebody." He

says, "She's not going to be able to do it." He says, [inaudible]. So, Steve

comes to us, and he says, "Okay, he's not going to do it." So, he said, "I'm

blowing him off, I'm starting a new political organization, are you with me?"

And we said, "Of course! Of course, we're with you."

He says, "We're going to call it PA-GALA, because I want it to be an 00:56:00alliance. I

want this imply allies, and we will, we'll do this, and I made the logo for it,

and we'll just do it, and do you think Gayle can do it?" And I said, "I really

think Gayle can do this. I mean, I saw it, she sets up whole books!" You know,

at her company they made preliminary books for when you're doing a book before

it's published, when they used to not have print on demand, they would do short

runs for critics and reviewers and she just, she did it every day. So, she said

yeah, she can do this.

So, now it's like the winter, and we say to Chris, "We're gone. We're done.

Nobody's going to run League of Gay and Lesbian Voters Eastern part of the

state." Chris kind of got Rob Hopkins to do it for a while, but nobody would

produce the information because you have to be on the ground to do it, and it's

really hard. 00:57:00So, we go to Gayle, and we say we're going to have a new guide, and you can see

that the, what are we called? PA-GALA Guides, they're called Gay and Lesbian

Vote, and they're really dynamic. They have really dynamic covers, they're very

different looking that the League of Gay and Lesbian Voters. And we came up with

a couple of other things about how we wanted to set up the book, but for the

most part it was pretty similar.

So, we input the information, and we also talked about past information too,

which was, you know, for the previous books that we had, from League of Gay and

Lesbian Voters. So, Gayle and Trish are working on it. Trish does-- at that

time, I really couldn't type. I never really was able to type very well. I'm

better now just because I have to do it all the time, but I can't, but Trish

could really type, and Gayle and Trish just start to work on it, and it's March,

we have to have this 00:58:00ready and printed by May.

We had the information, but my father died. We were about to have a fundraiser--

so, I do want to say, let me just digress a little bit and say this: One of the

things we did was, we did have the skating parties. We had skating parties at

roller rinks, and they were called "Gay Skating." [laughs]

We actually called them "Gay Skating." You didn't say "LGBT" in those days, so

just like, "Gay Skating Parties," right? Wasn't that it? And I made a little,

you can see pictures of the different, because we have these things, and we,

they were great! I mean, they were like, you know, drag queens would come, and

they'd be dancing and skating, and they had, and Steve was a very good skater,

and I can't, I'd never skated because [laughs] I said I like being able to use

my arms, and I didn't want to break anything, and so Trish and I didn't skate,

but the other folks were just, they were terrific, and it was very, very fun.

And we would advertise, and one of the places we wanted to 00:59:00advertise was on the

Service Electric has a little line that goes under it, when you watch the

weather, and the news thing, and then at the bottom is has announcements and

stuff, so I went to Service Electric to say, "We want to advertise Gay Skating."

This was the first really public thing. And the woman at the desk said, "We

can't do that." And I said, "Why?" And she said, "Well, it's taking sides." I

said, "What do you mean it's taking sides? What do you mean by that?" And she

said, "Well it's a political thing." I said, "No it isn't! It's gay people

skating! You have, you know, you have church skating, that's okay." She said,

"But it's political." I said, "You have political advertising! Vote for Pat

Brown! It's on the thing!" You know, and she goes [laughs], "Well, we can't do it."

So, I say, now this is me, because, I'm the wrong person to say this to, instead

of me going, "Oh, okay," I call up the CEO of Service Electric and I say, "I've

just been denied this," there was no law, so we weren't protected by law at all,

there's no law in Allentown at that 01:00:00time, but I call up the head and I say

they're telling me that we can't have this skating thing, and I don't understand.

He said, "Well, is it a political thing?" I said, "No! It's a skating party!

It's a gay skating party! It's for-- we're not telling people they can't come,

it's just, it just says Gay Skating!" He said, "Well, it's just skating, why are

they saying no to you?" I said, "I don't know, I guess they're anti-gay!" So, he

calls the woman back and tells her she has to do it.

So, then I go back in, because now I'm all, you know, "Up yours!" And I got the

stuff, and she says, "Well, just for this as long as it's not political." I'm

like, "Okay..." So, now we're like every day we're watching, like "There it is

again!" As it's going on the little thing, and we got a lot of people that came

to that because, for some reason people watch that all the time. [laughs] Oddly

enough, in those days.

So that was one of the first, and we used that as an example of public

accommodation and discrimination 01:01:00frequently. Also, one of the things I said is,

"You know, if people say no to you, ask somebody higher up. Because it might

often be just a middle management martinet, who's decided that they're not going

to be supportive of you when that's not the policy at all. And making up the

policy." And that was very successful, to be able to point that out.

So, we have Gay Skating, and we did, we made some money from it. It wasn't as

successful as, what we did, was we had Candidate Nights, and we would invite

candidates to come and talk to people, and they were often in John Cochran's

office. He was a chiropractor in Bethlehem, and he would let us use his whole

big office space, which is enormous area, to have these, and it was great.

It was in a mall in Bethlehem over in the middle, near where the Carmike Theater

is. And they were very well-attended, and they would get bigger and bigger, and

lots of people would come and they would talk to 01:02:00candidates, and sometimes

candidates would say really bad things, and I would accuse them in the voters' guide.

One person said that the "n" word wasn't a bad word to use. She was white, and I

said, "Okay, I'm going to be writing that down." [laughs] Because it was wrong!

So, anyway, it was really wrong. But and we would get people to get this information.

So, now we create -- so my dad dies, and it's two days before a skating party

that was going to be in that Morristown skating rink on the Ben Frank -- it's

still there, the Ben Franklin Parkway there, and it was all set up, and

wonderful Laura Guiteras our good friend, and my dad had died at St. Luke's, and

you know, it was a very calm death.

He had emphysema, and I held his hand when he died, with my sister, and Trish

was there 01:03:00for most of the time too, but I was upset, he'd been sick for a long

time, but he was perfectly lucent at the end of his life, but Laura and another

friend of hers and ours, Lynn Rogers who was a member of ACCO, said, I haven't

seen Lynn in a while, but she lives in Easton, she said, "We will cover the

skating thing. Don't come, don't worry about it. We'll take care of the whole thing."

Well, we were working on the voters' guide at that point, and this was actually

earlier then... I think that was still League of Gay and Lesbian Voters. Or

maybe this was a later one. I think this was a later one, because this wasn't

the first one that we did, this was a later one. And Steve said to me, this was

an example of Steve being hard to work with, but he actually 01:04:00said, "Don't worry,

I know this is very upsetting for you. Don't worry about doing any of the work

for the voters' guide, just don't do it, we'll cover it, it won't be a problem."

So, the punchline of this is, he didn't do any of the work, and once I, you

know, a week after he's figuring I should be okay now, and then I would come

back and do all the work, so he just didn't do anything. You know, it's sort of

like when somebody says, "Oh, take a day off." Well, you still gotta get your

work done! You know? And so, that was the thing.

Anyway, the thing that happened with Gayle and Trish's work, that's not the

issue that my dad died. My dad had died, that was the year before. I know this

is the chronology. So the next year is when we were not with League of Gay and

Lesbian Voters anymore, and we were PA-GALA, and I think that was around 1996,

and so Trish and Gayle are working on the new voters' guide, and it's very hard,

because it's not just creating the templates, it's entering all the 01:05:00 information

into it, because it wasn't just Lehigh/Northampton, it was seven counties that

had all these different -- every town could have a race in it, and in fact we

covered every single race, and if people didn't send the information in, we'd

just say no information came in, but if we had people working there, we would

have significant information.

So, Trish and Gayle are working on this, and in the meanwhile, Chris Young is

furious that we're doing this. So, he is actually saying, "There's no way that

you're going to be able to do this, and you don't have a right to that, you've

stolen the information, it's proprietary, it's against the law for your to do

that," and Steve Black, who is a lawyer, goes to the bar, because as he used to

say, "I'm a bar queen, and that's my strength!"

And he talked to another lawyer, it was in Philadelphia, and he said, "Do you

think it's illegal for us to take information and then, in our new organization,

create a similar 01:06:00guide that uses some of the information that was public

information that we gathered, and produce this again?"

And this woman, who was a business lawyer, said, "It's absolutely illegal.

You're going to get sued. You can't possibly do this." And Steve comes back to

me and says that's what she said, I said, "Steve! We're not a business! We're a

not-for-profit that gives this information away for free!"

So, I go to my lawyer, who was Susan Mauer, who is a wonderful lawyer, who had

always been very supportive, and she says that she was a lawyer for

not-for-profits, she said, "Not-for-profits that produce free information have

no rights to that information. If you give information away on the street, you

have no rights to that information."

And so, therefore, somebody could take his guide, tear off the cover, put their

own cover on it, give it out, and it would be completely legal to do that. There

is no way, nobody's making any money from it, nobody's losing any money from it,

all of us were volunteer. There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing it.

I come 01:07:00back, and I say that to him, and he goes, "Is she sure?" [laughs] I mean,

he's the lawyer! And I said, "Yeah, I actually researched it. I'll research it

some more, but I think it's really true."

Then, so they're working on the guide and stuff, meanwhile we have bought the

second house, so we have our second house, and we're scheduling the guy to break

through the walls and put, the new side of the house has no electricity in it,

there's no plumbing, we've got holes through the wall, there's all this dust and

everything, we're working on that, and then my best friend from growing up, who

is still one of my dearest best friends, husband suddenly dies.

And she called me up, she said, "Paul is very, very sick." And I grew up with

her, she's like my sister. And I said to her, "What's wrong?" And she said, "We

don't know what's wrong with him, but he's in Mass General, and he's in a 01:08:00 coma,

and it's looking very bad." So, I was very worried, and I said, "Do you want me

to come there?" And she said, "No, but if he dies, I want you to come." And I

said, "Okay."

Well, three days later she called me up, it was about seven in the morning, and

she said, "He died." And I said, "I will be right there. I'll be there today."

And I packed a bag, I didn't even ask her how to get there, I had been there a

couple times, but it's hard to get to, it was in Cambridge. He worked at

Emerson, he was a professor at Emerson, and she worked at Harvard. She still

works at Harvard.

And so, I said, "I'll be there right away." So, I dropped everything, I said to

Trish and Gayle, "I am really sorry, but I have to go." And so, I went there,

and she was a mess. She was really devastated. He had a superinfection, which is

like the kind of infection that Jim Henson died from, the creator of the Muppets.

It just ripped 01:09:00through his body and killed him, and also Mass General lost his

tests when he first got there, and actually didn't treat him fast enough. He

couldn't breathe. His last words were, "Tape Chicago Hope!" I mean, he had no

idea. He said, "I can't breathe," they rushed him to the hospital, and three

days later he was dead.

So, I went there and I -- she had a terrible time. There were a lot of people

there, his friends had come. He was friends with Mark Jepsen, who was the head

of the senate of Connecticut, and he had gone to Harvard, so he had a bunch of

friends from Harvard. Another guy was there who was the Attorney General of the

state of Arizona, and they were all staying there. And after a while, after a

few days I said, "Why are these guys staying here? We've already had the

memorial service. Why are they here?"

And she said, "Well, you know, they're taking a break." I said, "They're not 01:10:00helping." They were expecting her to make food for them, to clean up after them,

they were guys. They were also hitting on her. They were all hitting on her.

This happens all the time apparently when straight women's husband die, their

friends hit on the widow. So, this really happened.

So, anyway, I was very proprietary as far as this went. I was there for a week,

and then I came home, and I mean, I settled some things, and I helped her do

stuff. I covered the -- I actually negotiated the cremation and... When my dad

died, we inherited some money that was -- made it so I didn't have to work as

hard, and we had, I was able to, you know, cover some of the stuff that she

needed, and it was tax time, and he had to do his taxes, and I actually took, I

called up my tax person here, this is an 01:11:00important plug for her, Cindy Ernst who

works in Emmaus, and I explained this stuff.

She said, "Take everything she has, put it in a big envelope mail it to me, and

I'll take care of it. You don't have to do anything, I'll even --" and then she

actually said, you know, "I'll cover everything, I'll do an electronic

signature, you don't even have to do anything." And Cheni actually used her for

years after that because she was so terrific. We use her still.

And so that, but she needed somebody to tell her that. People were hard on her.

Other people were wonderful. I mean, people would just come in the door and say,

"I'll wash all the dishes." You know, or "take care of everything." You know,

people brought food over, like they do. But people get tired of grief, and they

don't, they're not always there as long as the person needs it.

So, I came home after a week, and then she called me three days later, and she

said, "I can't do it. I can't... I can't..." And I said, "Okay, I'll come back.

I'll come back! Don't worry about it! I'll be there -- I'll come back 01:12:00 tomorrow."

And she said, "Well, actually I'm so relieved that you're coming back, take a

couple of days."

So, I said to Trish, I have to go back, had to pack more clothes, and I said, "I

don't know when I'll be able to come back." She was at risk. She was really at

risk. So, I went back, and I did a lot of things that she wanted, and I ended up

sort of taking apart, like he had an office, he was -- Cheni used to say that he

was like me, and it was a little creepy, right, that we were similar to each

other. When I went back, she kept calling me Paul. And I said, okay, you can't

do that. You have to recognize that I'm not Paul.

But I did stay there, and she said that she'd always had a hard time with the

way his office was, it was very cluttered, so I actually went through every

single -- ruthlessly! Went through every single paper in his office to be sure

that he didn't have any bills.

He had a problem 01:13:00with buying stuff and running up bills, and I found everything.

And I thought, and people were, like one of his friends said, "Well, I don't

think it's really appropriate that you're reading through his notes about his

psychologicals." I said, "I don't care! I don't care. I'm not here for him. He's

dead. And he didn't take care of himself when he had an infection, and he died.

And now, she's alone, and she's my sister, and I don't care about anybody but

her. So, I'm going to do all this stuff, shut up unless you're going to do it."

So, I did all the stuff, and I moved the things for her and everything. It took

about three weeks, and at the end of the three weeks, so I'd been there four

weeks about, she said, "Okay, you can go now." Truthfully, she really wasn't

okay, and she needed a lot more support, but other people were supporting, and

she had other things.

Now I come back, you know, Trish and Gayle are pretty much done with the thing,

and the walls are 01:14:00finished with all the dust and everything, and I'm so sorry.

Trish, I was just reminding her about that, and she was going, "Oh yeah, I

forgot about the walls. Yeah, that was a mess." Because everything was covered

with dust and everything, and we're still trying to do all this stuff.

So, we produce the voters' guide. Now we've got the voters' guide, we're about

ready to print it. We take it over to Roblin Press, and Roblin Press is a

gay-owned organization that they had done lots of stuff for the FACT guys, and

they said, "We'll print this, we'll give you a good deal on it," and they were

very generous about this, and then Robin, of Roblin Press, Rob calls me up and

he goes, "I just got this fax from Chris Young who says you're not going to pay

your bill." And I said, "What?!" And he said, "Well, first of all I know that's

not true, but I think you should see this letter."

So, I go over, and I get the letter, and I think, "How dare he say that!" First

of all, we had the money, and second of all, I would have paid the bill out of

my own pocket if I had to, but it was 01:15:00absolutely libel.

So, we went to Sue Mauer, our lawyer, and she wrote Chris a cease-and-desist

letter and said if you ever do this again, we will -- I mean this is, it's one

thing if somebody says something about you. It's another thing if somebody

writes to a business contact and says they're not going to pay their bill! It's

the definition of libel.

So, we turned around to Chris and said, "cut it out. If you do this again, we

will sue you, and you're going to be really sorry." Because this was a personal

thing, you can't do that. And obviously that's not true. So, we didn't have any

trouble. I said to Robin, "I will pay you right now. I've got the money in the

thing." It was $1,000 to pay for those books, and we paid.

So, we were very successful in doing that. The books were much better, we had

them there, we were able to get them out to people. But after a while, Trish and

I began to realize that the booklets were a problem. Because the booklets had

lots and lots of information, and people really didn't need to know who was

running in 01:16:00Abington if you lived in Carbon County. Who cares? You know? Who

cares about the School Board in an area where you're not voting?

So, what we suggested to Steve was, that we would no longer print -- also it was

expensive to print the booklets, and there was a lot of storage and stuff like

that, so what we decided -- Oh, we're already past, oh we've got a little bit

more time.

So, we decided that we would print just a page of interest to the person based

on their own district, and where they lived, and what town they lived in, so

that they wouldn't have to look up in the booklet. You looked in the booklet by

the number of your state representative district. Do you know what the number of

your state representative district is? I'm asking you. Just nod or shake your

head. You do?! Good for you! Because most people don't. Most people 01:17:00 don't.

Because congressional district numbers, state representative district, and state

senate districts are all different numbers, and if you had to look through that,

nobody knew that! They'd be like, and then people would immediately turn to

their partner, and they'd say, "Well, what's our district?" And they'd say, "I

don't know!" So, what we wanted to do was send a letter to people, and in the

envelope, it would say, "This is your district. These are the people that you're

going to vote for."

And then the label on the front said you're registered to vote, or you're not

registered to vote, register now, voter registration must be done by this time.

At the top it said their polling place, where they voted, because that was a

matter of information, so it actually said, "Your polling place is in the 400th

block of Seventh Street at St. Luke's church. You go there to vote."

And then, it had their name and address, and then on the inside it had these are

the people, this is how they stack up against their candidates, that are the

people that they're running 01:18:00against, and then there was an endorsement card,

these are the ones we really think you should vote for, but you can go back, and

lots of people said, "You know, you endorse a per -- I don't want to just go by

your endorsement. I want to know where they stand."

Well, we were sending information that told them. This is their past voting

record, this is their current voting, this is what they say they're going to do,

this is a quote from them, this is that kind of information. And we were able

then to, then we mailed that directly to people, and we also had an envelope in

there that they would give us, a donation. To mail a donation.

Pennsylvania, PA-GALA was a 501c (4) organization, which means that they can

endorse candidates, but donations to that organization are not tax-deductible,

because you can't, we don't want people to be able to tax-deduct, in effect,

lobbying for a candidate, 01:19:00because in effect that looks like you are paying the

candidate to do something. Businesses could do that, and we don't, that's not

able to do.

So, we didn't have sponsorships, and stuff like that. What happened in the

middle of that was two things, because we were doing now colossal mailings. They

were enormous mailings; we'd have sometimes have 20 or 30 people be in the house

to do the mailings. They were going to seven different districts, seven

different counties, sometimes it would be 30, 40 thousand pieces of mail, and

each piece of mail had different pieces of information in it.

We'd actually have the cards that were the endorsement cards be color coded, so

we didn't accidentally put the endorsement card of the wrong place into somebody

else's envelope, so we had to keep those, we had to have enough space to really

make that separate.

We used to do the mailings -- before Trish and I had the two houses, we would do

the mailings at the Unitarian 01:20:00church, because they used to let people use space

like that. They got so that they didn't do that anymore, but then we

intentionally set it up so that we could do it in our own house.

So, we did two things that happened in the middle of that, and one of them was

that we recognized that Pride, which was running its Pride Festival since 1994,

wasn't doing very good outreach to places to tell people when the Pride, even

when the Pride Festival was.

So, we allowed Pride to print a piece of, a flyer, a folded flyer, that we would

put in that mailing that would tell people where, about the Pride Festival,

because we were sending it out to 35,000 people, and Steve used to say, he lived

in Philly then, he'd say, "People in Philadelphia love to go outside of the city

in the summer, so they could go someplace cooler and go to a fun gay event! So,

this will be very successful."

And it is true that once we 01:21:00started to do those mailings, the numbers of people

going to Pride jumped from about 3,000 to about 7,000 in the next year, because

we're mailing to thousands of people! And the deal was that they would then help

us with the mailing. They would print their own flyer, and then we would all get

together, stuff the whole mailing together, and you know, that's when we had the

20 or 30 people, and then they would do this. Those were the biggest mailings

that we were doing. We did a couple of other things for other issues, but that

was particularly for that.

And that was very successful for a while, although Pride frequently would not

quite get the need to -- like, they wouldn't fold, I would say to them, "Pay for

the printer to fold the piece of paper, because otherwise all the work that your

team will be doing, is folding your flyer. We want everybody to work together."

And one time I remember having an argument with a guy who was supposed to be in

charge of that. I can't 01:22:00remember his name, he was a problematic guy on the Pride

board, he ended up quitting the Pride board on the day of the [laughs] festival

for some reason, not very smart, but he wasn't responding, and he was the one

who was supposed to be giving me the information, and he just wasn't responding

and stuff, so I couldn't make public the information -- I couldn't even tell

people when the festival was, because we didn't know what day it was going to be.

So, he would, so he said that he was printing the things, and I said, "Okay,

we're going to do a mailing that's about 35,000, so you're going to need 35,000

or 30,000 pieces of paper that have your information but pay for them to fold

it." And he said, "We don't want to do that." And I said, "Well then fold it

before you get here."

And then he said, "Well, I don't know that we'll have time." I said, "Well,

look. I will pay-- I personally will pay for the folding machine so that you can

fold the papers before." And he said, "No, we don't want to do it that 01:23:00way." I

said, "So, you're going to come to my house with 1,000, you know, 30,000 pieces

of paper and sit there and fold your folder, how does that help us to do the

mailing?" But they did it. They did that, and it was very stressful for us.

I really, when they showed up, they actually came and they had the papers and I

said, "These are supposed to be folded." And they said, "Well, we'll fold them

now." [laughs] They were also really slow, so one of the things that we found

out that was really terrific was that some people can do mailings really fast,

and some people can't.

And if you have people, like Jill DeLong was one that was a friend of ours, and

she had several other friends, Lauren, Judy [Arden?] and a bunch of other people

could do these mailings pretty fast, and they could do fast, but Jill could --

she was amazing! And she could do the work of five slow people. Well, we didn't

need to have the five slow people around they were in the way.

So, we were trying to develop a team of people who could really do fast. Now,

Trish and I can do mailings very, very quickly although we haven't done 01:24:00them in

a while. But so we were very successful in doing that, and doing those mailings,

and we set up the house to be able to do that.

Another thing that happened was, and I was talking about how we collected names,

what we did was we were trying very hard to pass the inclusion of sexual

orientation and gender identity to the state Hate Crimes Bill, and that was our

first big effort, and that was Chris Young's thing, he really had wanted to do

that, and he had advocated for that, and he was working on that right from the

beginning in 1994, and when we were working on it, and one of the things about

Steve Black was, he was pretty good at lobbying.

One of the things I said that I never really wanted to do was I didn't want to

go to Harrisburg and talk to legislators. I don't like doing that. I look like a

dyke. They're not comfortable with pushy women. Those kinds of guys aren't. It

just didn't work very well. And we 01:25:00actually did it a few times, but we did it,

we ended up doing it for other reasons. We weren't really lobbying for -- we

were helping people lobby, helping our own community of people lobby, because

they would often go, they were nervous, so we would go with them. But we didn't

want to do that.

Steve, on the other hand, was quite good at doing it, and he was working on the

Hate Crimes Bill, and he figured out that Charlie Dent, who ended up being a

congressman, he was a state representative at the time, and he was Republican,

and he was supportive of the bill, and we also had a prime sponsor, and I can't

remember that guy's name, but he was a prime sponsor of the bill, but Charlie

Dent said that he would work behind the scenes as a republican to get

republicans on the legislature to pass the Hate Crimes Bill.

So, and he and Steve really worked on that together, 01:26:00and one of the ways we

lobbied state legislators was that we would take a sheet of yellow card stock,

bright yellow card stock, and we would, and you could make two four by six cards

next to each other, so it was a long thing. One to the representative and one to

the senate, and you would get, we would get people -- it would say we want you

to pass the Hate Crimes Bill, in effect.

The other side would say, "Dear State Senator", "Dear Representative", and then

there was a blank, and then there was a space that said we want to add sexual

orientation and gender identity for the Hate Crimes Bill, you know, stuff like

that, and then it had your name and address and your other contact-- I think

your telephone number. And so, we would get those, and then at the top there was

a place for an X if they didn't want to be on our mailing list.

Well, we were going to Pride festivals and we were collecting like four or five,

six hundred cards from people at every 01:27:00festival. Trish and I were particularly

good at getting people to do that. We would call people over to do that. We

would stand in the middle of the road at the Pride Festival and say, "Come and

do this!"

Other people who were working on those kinds of efforts would sit at a desk and

hope somebody would come over to them. They would get 20 cards done, and that

was the way Chris Young was. He would sit there, he would get a booth, he

wouldn't have a table, he wouldn't have a tent, he would take off his shirt, he

would sit in the middle of the thing with a box of cards, no pens, nothing, and

then hope that somebody would come up to him, and Steve Black said, "You're

really good at the booth."

Well, we were antique dealers. We had a tent, we had tables, we had black table

cloths, we had signage, we had things that stood up, we had water that we would

give away to people, we knew everybody. We would say, "Come over here! Come over

here! No, you 01:28:00have to do this today! Look, you can have fun, but you have to do

this thing today. This is the one thing that you have to do."

We'd have 15 people in a row signing the cards. We did it at Reading Pride, as

soon as Reading Pride opened, we did it at Reading Pride, and we would get, you

know, hundreds and hundreds. Like at the end of the day we'd have stacks of

cards like this, we'd put them in the thing, and there would be the

representative and the senator, and then Steve, this was one of his strengths,

he would look at the person's address, and he could tell what legislative

district they were in. Almost always.

And he would sit down, and he would, we would like "district" the cards. We were

calling it districting the cards. People could call him up and say, "This person

lives on such and such a street," I mean, Allentown has three, four districts,

and he could figure out which district it was by where they lived, by looking at

their address. He was really good at that.

And he understood the districting maps too, which are very gerrymandered. Much

better than even people in 01:29:00Harrisburg. So, he would be able to do that, and that

was one of his big jobs to be able to figure out the district.

We would district all the cards so that the representative and the senators'

names were, and people said, "I don't know my senator." We said, "We'll put them

in. Don't worry about it." Because they'll put the wrong, they put the US

senator. "No, no. We'll write that in, don't worry about it."

And then we would send these stacks in big envelopes to the state

representative. Oh, 700 people just told me they wanted, you know, this Hate

Crimes Bill to pass. But at the same time, we were gathering those people's

names on our mailing list for to be able to send them voter information. That's

how we were growing the lists up significantly.

And Steve actually would sit at, he ended up, he stopped living in Philadelphia.

He kept the apartment for a long time, but he stopped, it was very expensive, he

stopped living there and he just was running Black's Luncheonette. He took half

of the Luncheonette, and it was set up as his political office.

And all 01:30:00day when he had a break, he would sit down at his computer, which was in

the Luncheonette, and he would type into, he would type the names and addresses

into the mailing list, and he did that. Trish also managed the membership list.

We had a membership list too, and Trish managed the membership list, I think for

a long time. And did that, it's very hard to do that, actually. It's very, very

time consuming. It's a full-time job.

But Steve was doing that, and he actually got a lot of PR from that, and he was

in The Advocate as one of the Out 100, and there's a picture, I have it in my

office actually, of him and me, sitting at his computer in Black's Luncheonette

with his tie one, which he never wore in any other situation, and he is typing

in to the, you know, from these stacks of cards that we had this voter

information, and it was really significant that we had this enormous list,

because nobody 01:31:00else in any other state nobody had lists like this, so this was a

big deal.

So, soon we began to see that voter information like this was winning elections.

That people who were running for office were very impressed at the number of

supervoters that we had. And one time, Roy Offerbach was running for Mayor, and

he was running as a Democrat, and he said that he would support the addition of

sexual orientation and gender identity to the non-discrimination ordinance in

the city of Allentown.

So, one of the things that people who are running for offices have is a list of

registered voters, and it's something you buy for your campaign, that's

completely public. And you can actually sort the list to see if they're

supervoters. So, Roy Offerbach said that he was going to share the list with

PA-GALA for a couple of 01:32:00reasons, and it had to do with being able to figure out

how to send certain information to people.

So, he was showing me how to use the list, I was in his legislative office, he

was running for, I think that was when he was running for, he was running for

Mayor of Allentown. So, I sit down with him, and he says, "Well, let's just take

your city district, which is the eight one ward." And I said, "Okay." So, he

puts it in, and he goes, "So, we're going to just take the Democrat supervoters

out of this."

And this was because I was working on a campaign. I was working on Gayle

Hoover's campaign to pass the ordinance. So, he shows me this thing and what

pops up is there's ten supervoters, okay? Because most people are not

supervoters, and I live in a small district, so at any given time we'd maybe

only have 125 people who actually vote, sometimes less. Maybe 57. But of those,

are supervoters. It's a small district, though. We have a small population. 01:33:00So, the ten people who pop up, I look at the list, and there's me, and Trish,

and Gayle Erich, and then there's I think Ann [Slechter?] and Jim Gallucci and

Gayle Hoover lived in the district, and I said, at the end of it, I said, "Seven

of those ten supervoters are on our list as LGBT people." And I could sort of

see his face blanch.

Now, he wasn't afraid of us, because he was on our -- but he was realizing that

we had become an enormously successful and significant block vote. We could

control the vote by giving people information. We could win elections for people.

Now, we ultimately did that, but one of the things was that Marty Velazquez and

Emma Tropiano election where Marty won by one vote, there was no question, that

he -- would not have 01:34:00won the primary had we not told people to vote for him.

Because even if just four people voted for him, he won the election based on

that thing. So, people were becoming aware of that, and it was very successful

and significant.

So, let's see, I've talked about that, so we're collecting the information,

we're collecting this, okay. So, now we get to the point where Steve says, so in

2002 there's a vote for the Hate Crimes Bill, and it passes, and it was a big

deal. And I remember Steve says that Charlie Dent, after it passed, he was

dancing a jig, because he made it pass.

Even though our prime sponsor was someone else, he had taken guys out to dinner,

it was the quintessential lobbying, you know, "You really should do this," you

know, and we were able to pass that, and Steve was very, very happy about 01:35:00 that.

At the same time, Chris Young was furious. Because Steve, everyone knew,

state-wide, and there was another organization called SPARK that was kind of

working on it, but they didn't -- they weren't very effective, and they ended up

dissolving, they were a state-wide organization. They dissolved after six months

and they'd done some, they had some problems and stuff, but there were people

involved that were pretty significant. And but Steve was the one that was

working on it.

Also, there was an organization in Philadelphia called Gay and Lesbian Legal

Defense and then they became Equality Pennsylvania, which ultimately Adrian was

involved with. They're not really running anymore. At that time, it was just a

Philadelphia organization and Stacey Sobel who was a lawyer in Philadelphia was

the one that was the executive director of that organization, she was working on

this too, and trying to work on this piece of legislation, but really it was

Steve Black who made the Hate Crimes 01:36:00Bill pass, because he, we just chipped away

at that.

I mean we sent to legislators 10,000 lobbying cards to support the passage of

that piece of legislation. It's an enormous amount of people. It's hard to

ignore something like that. And it was to every, and Steve said it was to every

single district. Every single district across the state got at least one card.

Now, one of the things that we had at the beginning, when we were saying to

people, we want you to fill out this questionnaire that said, so that gay and

lesbian voters could vote for you, they would say, "We don't have any gay and

lesbian voters in our district."

And we were showing people that that was absolutely not true, because here we

have these 10,000 cards. And people frequently said, "We don't have any gay

people!" I said, "Yes, you do. You really do." And there were a number of things

that proved that, but one of the things was, we were in the 90s, we were

generating thousands and thousands of 01:37:00cards for people, and so it passed in

2002, and Steve was really, really happy about that.

Meanwhile, while that was happening, in 1998 Trish and I decided, and Steve and

Trish and I decided, that it was time to try to pass an anti-discrimination

ordinance in the city of Allentown, and one of the reasons we were going to do

it in Allentown was because Trish and I lived in Allentown, we had worked on

campaigns, we had people that could help to make that happen, and we had the

largest number of our people on our list in Allentown. But also, because we

lived here. Because you can't push a piece of legislation unless you have local

people. And we lived here.

So, the city of Allentown already had an anti-discrimination ordinance that was

passed. It was the only city in Lehigh Valley that already had an ordinance, and

the ordinance was passed in 1965 in 01:38:00conjunction with the Civil Rights Act of

1964 that was in the United States.

And the primary reason that those acts were passed, was to support people based

on race. Because people were discriminated against routinely who were black,

frankly. It was really about that, it was the time of Martin Luther King,

responding to Martin Luther King's death, all that kind of stuff happened.

And it was true that people who were black were rampantly discriminated against,

so the state, so our law and the state law and the federal law said we'll

protect people based on religion and race and national origin and sex and creed

I think, and ancestry I think that's what the Allentown law said.

So, we were going to have to add sexual orientation and gender identity into

that law. We also wanted to add the words "actual and perceived," and by the

way, the hate crimes law when it passed also had the protected classes of

disability, because people who are 01:39:00disabled are often discriminated against as

hate crimes, and we also had actual and perceived in the law, because that was a

loophole, people would say "I was beating up that person because they were

black, it turns out they weren't black.

So, I'm not," or "I beat up somebody outside of the gay bar. The person wasn't

really gay, so even though I beat them up, I didn't do it as, it wasn't a hate

crime because I perceived them, it doesn't matter, because they aren't really

gay." Well, actual and perceived takes care of that circumstance.

At the time that the Hate Crimes Bill passed, it was the absolute most

progressive Hate Crimes Bill in the United States at the time. It was very, very

significant, and we talked about that at length all over the place. It was a big

deal. And it was a big feather for Steve, he was really, really happy about that.

Meanwhile, I just want to toss in, that Chris Young was furious about it. But

[laughs] and he 01:40:00said stuff about it, and he said like you know there's problem

with it, and there was a problem with it, in that it was put into another piece

of legislation that as actually a farm terrorism bill, and it was supposed to

protect, as Steve said, they gutted it. They took out the farm terrorism, but

they put in that you can't discriminate against gay people.

And that's actually a technique that legislators do all the time. Steve said,

"It's too bad that vegetables are no longer protected, but fruits are." So

[laughs] I thought that was very funny. Steve also said that Chris Young was

furious about the passage of this because, [laughs] and Steve said, I remember

him calling me up, and he goes, "Yeah, I can hear Chris now: 'Steve stole my

bill! And he passed it!'" [laughs] Because Chris had been trying to pass this

bill for eight 01:41:00years. So, it passed.

And there were some problems, some very serious problems with the way they

passed it, but it did pass, and it was in 2002. Okay, so, go back to 1998 when

we were talking about adding sexual orientation and gender identity to the Hate

Crimes Bill, and we really wanted to do that. I mean to the Civil Rights Bill in

the city of Allentown.

And we talked about doing it, but we weren't ready to do it. I mean, for one

thing you shouldn't really try to pass that kind of bill unless you're pretty

sure that you have the votes to do it on a council, because losing is really debilitating.

All of the sudden, the Human Relations Commission of the city of Allentown, and

at the time it was the only city in the Lehigh Valley that had a Human Relations

Commission, because you have to legislate that, usually with a

non-discrimination 01:42:00law. The guy who was the head of the Human Relations

Commission of the City of Allentown was a guy named Felix Molina, and we knew

Felix. We had known Felix.

And he calls me up and he goes, "Last night at the Human Relations Commission,

we made a public announcement that we're going to add sexual orientation and

gender identity to the Non-Discrimination Bill." I said, "How are you going to

do that?" And he goes, "Well, we're going to get City Council to support it."

I said, "Have you talked to anybody on City Council about this?" And he goes,

"No." And I said, "Well, how do you know that they're going to do that?" And he

said, "Well, there's a way to do that that is, in Allentown where if you have 35

signatures from voters in the city, that they will introduce a piece of legislation."

Because you can't introduce a piece of legislation unless you have a sponsor and

a co-sponsor. They have to be a sponsor and at least a second, to move the 01:43:00legislation, and then a second, and then it goes to committee, and then it goes

to a vote after the committee passes it through.

Well, they didn't do any of that! They had no idea as to whether or not it was

going to pass! So, okay. So now it's 12 o'clock, does that mean we're at the end [laughs]?

MF: Well, what I'm wondering, so really, we probably shouldn't go over 90

minutes, but I'm wondering if this isn't a good place to stop, because we kind

of have that PA-GALA arc right to the Hate Crimes Bill in Pennsylvania in 2002.

What if we set up our next interview, we start here with the Anti-Discrimination

Ordinance in 1998? I mean, that adding to the Civil Rights legislation, does

that seem like a good plan?

LB: Yes. Did I say anything wrong that I should..?

PS: No, you didn't.

LB: [laughs] She says no. So, yes. See how long? I can go on forever, Mary. I

can talk for the rest of the day.

MF: It's so great! I mean, the 01:44:00kind of stories you share are so fabulous. And I

like this idea that we're sort of seeing from the Gay and Lesbian League of

Voters to PA-GALA, it's sort of a nice arc for the story, and maybe we it, we

can take as long as we want on the Anti-Discrimination Ordinance.

LB: Well, the ordinance and 2002 were significant, because when we started the

ordinance in 98 it didn't pass until 2002. And several other things happened in

2002 that were very significant, so, it is probably a good idea to stop here.

MF: Okay.

LB: No, I can go on forever. But, yeah, that would be tiresome for somebody to

watch [laughs].

MF: So, I know you're busy next Friday, so what I'm going to do is, and I'm busy

next Friday afternoon, I'm going to send a few times to see if we could, because

we have good momentum, I think if you're available to try and do it once a week,

I think would be good.

LB: Sure!

MF: 01:45:00Okay, so I guess just to end, although now we've had a conversation about

dates, I'll just say it is such a pleasure to hear this sort of deep history of

those two organizations, especially the information about the voters' guide, I

mean, I'm just so grateful that you took the time today, thank you so much.

LB: I want to add at the end of this that that model of, that voters' guide with

that voter information, I firmly believe, and I'm not even done talking about

it, but I firmly believe, that if progressives in every state had that kind of

organization, we could win every election. We just could. And we did! We changed

the entire direction of civil rights and of progressive politics in Allentown

because of that thing, frankly. So, yeah. I would love to keep talking about it,

and I love talking about this, this is great, and you know I can go on forever, so...

MF: Well, Danielle and I talk about that 01:46:00frequently, like if one of us didn't

have a full-time job, we would do that voters' guide. I mean, every -- I can't

tell you, every time we go to vote, and we're supervoters, you know, we've done

our research, but we have friends consistently, even my parents, "Who should we

vote for? I can't find it in The Morning Call." You know, it's a huge issue, and

you really gave that incredible model and as you already have articulated, it

was transformative!

LB: Yeah, it was totally--

MF: -- For our region, for our state! I mean, you have that arc to the 2002 Hate

Crimes Bill, I mean, that is an arc that shows like that kind of work really

changes things! But also, what you show, and I think this is the piece that

Danielle and I keep talking about, like oh we'd love to do that as a kind of

model, is like how much time it took [laughs].

LB: Oh, God. Remember, that in effect, for Trish and me at that time, we were

antique dealers. We started doing that antique dealer 01:47:00thing when... And we were

landlords. So, and we all through the 90s and the end of the 80s that's what we

did, up until, until my dad died in 1997, we stopped doing it in 1997.

We were able to do this stuff because we didn't have a regular job. And Steve

didn't have a regular job. He worked for himself, he was doing it in his

business, and we can see as I go on to talk about this, some of the other people

who were key to do this, they had to have the kind of jobs that allowed them to

be extremely autonomous, and that's one of the things about elected officials.

You know, if you have a fulltime job, it is really hard to run for office.

So, but yeah, to produce that 01:48:00information, it worked particularly well -- well,

I can go on and on. But in producing that information, it worked particularly

well to mail it to people, because sometimes when you put that online, it can be

exploited in a negative way, and you have to be careful about that.

Plus, it was really significant for people to get this in the mail. It was

another thing that Trish, that I haven't even mentioned, but the day before the

primary, we would get a whole group of volunteers to call up every single person

on our list and tell them, thousands of people and say, "Tomorrow is the primary

election. Do you have your voters' guide, do you have your endorsement card?

Don't forget to vote." In those days everybody had answering machines. Nobody

had cell phones. Or few people. Really nobody had cellphones.

We would pray, I would PRAY 01:49:00that no one would answer the phone, because I didn't

want to talk to them. I just wanted to remind them. Because it's hard for me not

to talk. But I could do a hundred people in an hour, and if we had, if I had --

if my job was to call 1000 people, then I could finish it in 10 hours, but if I

got someone on the phone and I talked to them for ten minutes, it blew the whole thing.

So, now, it would be much harder, because it's much harder to get people's

telephone numbers. I mean, we can, but people don't answer their phone unless

they recognize the number. Many people don't. And many people don't even pay

attention to their messages.

So, on the other hand, social media makes it much easier to reach large amounts

of people by pressing a button. And that is very significant. I think most

people are more aware of when the primary election is 01:50:00now than they were then. I

remember one time Candida, who is now a City Councilwoman, we were driving by

the bar, and she was standing on the steps of the bar, I rolled down the window

and I said, "Did you vote?" It was a primary day, and she goes, "What?" And I

said, "It's primary day!" And she said, "It is?"

I mean, and now she's a councilperson! And she didn't even know that it was a

primary day. Now she's, you know, a savvy political person. So, you know, lots

of people don't know. Lots of people don't even know there is a primary, or off

year elections. That you vote for coroner [laughs]. You know. And that there can

be LGBT issues with regard to being a coroner. So. Anyway.

MF: Well, I am so grateful to talk to you today, and I'm going to stop

recording, but then I want to talk to you for a minute out of the recording.

Thank you, Liz!

LB: Bye! Thank you. It was great.

MF: So, let me--