Liz Bradbury, July 27, 2020

INTERVIEW WITH LIZ BRADBURY

JULY 27, 2020

MARY FOLTZ: Okay. My name is Mary Foltz, and today I'm 00:01:00here with Liz Bradbury to

talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley.

This project is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project,

and our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities

Consortium. Liz and I are meeting on Zoom today, which is July 27th, 2020. And

we're meeting on Zoom because there's a pandemic going on. So, Liz, thank you so

much for your willingness to speak with me, today.

LIZ BRADBURY: So, glad to be here, again. It's great to see you.

MF: And to start, we'll just do the consent, which I know we've done many times

before. But do you consent to this interview today?

LB: Yes.

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

publicly available online?

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 maybe some things we haven't thought of yet?

LB: You bet, yes.

MF: And do you understand that you'll have 30 days after the electronic delivery

of the transcript to review your interview and you can take out parts, you can

redact parts, or you could withdraw the entire interview?

LB: Yes.

MF: Okay. So, today we're really continuing a discussion that we began last time

in which you talked about the work of PA Gala, espeically in relationship to an

anti-discrimination ordinance for the City of Allentown. And we ended that

conversation with your successful organizing work to stop conservative residents

from repealing that ordinance. And you mentioned in that past interview that

there had been a lawsuit. And I thought today we could just continue that 00:02:00 story

and tell us a little bit about what that lawsuit was about, and how long it went

on. Would you like to start there?

LB: Sure. So, let me say that first of all, I didn't mention last time one of

the other people that was very, very active, one of the 10 key people was very

active in all the work that we were doing, and I named a bunch of people last

time. And one of them was Allison Hamm, who's still around in the community. And

she was very, very tenacious with regard to -- at one point, she actually went

to Gross Towers, which is a place for disabled and older adults, where they had

gone to get lots of people to sign the ordinance, she actually went door-to-door

and had people remove their name, and they all did. I mean, they all had been

misled into signing the ordinance repeal of ballot question.

So, let's see. So, one of the things that was happening then 00:03:00was, and I can't

remember what I said this in the last thing, but I have to say that this was a

physically, desperately, big toll on both me and Trish and a lot of other people

that were working on this. I think I mentioned I lost 17 pound in 70 days. I

couldn't eat. And one of the reasons for this was that we were afraid that if we

weren't successful in making the people that were circulating a petition to take

our rights away, if we weren't successful in demonstrating that if they lied to

people, they would not succeed, they would get in trouble.

If we weren't able to show that, it would put every ordinance at risk in the

state. And I felt every morning when I got up at six o'clock to start working on

this, and every night at midnight, or later, when I went to 00:04:00sleep, and that was

the only time that we weren't working on it, when we were sleeping -- maybe when

I was reading a little bit before I fell asleep. It was the only time that we

felt calm, because we didn't think that Frank McVeigh was out there, collecting

more signatures. And it was devastatingly hard. And people shared that feeling

with us, and they were terrific about it.

So, when I finally got to the end of this story, we were successful. And the

city took the thousands, or the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of names off

of the ordinance. And we still even had additional names that could have been

removed, but they just took the ones off of the people who had signed documents

saying, "I was misled on that, take my name off of the ordinance." And had they

come back and said, "Well, there's not enough," we would have had hundreds of

other names, too, because among other 00:05:00things, people signed three or four times

because they were told that it was about something else.

So, if you say, "This is a thing about civil rights, this is the bingo sign-in

sheet," that would cause it. So, that was all done. So, we won that. And the

ordinance was in place. We were very, very happy about that. It was a huge

relief. The other side was absolutely furious, to the point of physical

demonstrations of violence.

And I have to just say this at one point, Trish and I -- this is to give you an

idea about Frank McVeigh, who believed that he was doing God's work, I suppose,

but also I think there was all sorts of other things going on in his mind, I

don't know what they were. Many people thought he was a nice guy. But he wasn't.

And here's an example. We were sitting in the car. His second 00:06:00wife, whom he was

married to, had a disability. She had a disability that caused it to be hard for

her to walk. So, we were sitting across the street from City Hall in our car

getting ready to go into the city council meetings which were very trying. I

mean, when you're in this and people are saying just horrible things about you,

and you think, "How are we going to deal with this and what are we going to do?"

But this was it. This was the thing.

We're sitting there in our car and we see Frank McVeigh, we were across the

street, across Hamilton Street, and we see Frank McVeigh pull up in his car. And

he parks in a no parking place because it's a handicap parking place. And you

can see him, he's reaching in his glove box, and he takes out a hang tag, and

puts it on his mirror. His wife is not in the car. And then, he gets out of his

car and he goes over to the 00:07:00sidewalk, and there's a set of stairs there that

goes into the wall, it's very steep, and he runs up the stairs. And I think,

"Okay, that says everything. That's Frank McVeigh." He thinks that anything he

does is okay because he's doing it.

So, anyway. We were successful in the meeting and they said that they didn't

have the numbers. We had to affirm that all the way through. And we were

successful in that. And the other thing that was successful was that we had

brought this really frightening lawsuit against these other people. And they

were petrified by that, as they should have been, because they lied using very

serious public documents that they had to swear on and stuff, and they lied. And

nobody told them, "Oh, by the way you can't just lie to people and get them to

sign this ballot 00:08:00measure petition to remove these rights. You can't lie to

people to do that, because if you do that, you could get in trouble." Nobody

said that to them. I guess it's possible that the lawyer didn't think that they

would do it. But in every ballot measure, that's what happens.

And I think it's important for people to understand that ballot measures are

bad. No matter what they are. Even if it's a really good cause it's a bad way to

do it because when you have a ballot measure, no one is responsible for the

language of the law, no one understands really what it's about, because when

you're voting on it the little blurb is so short that, how do you really know

how this is going to affect people? And if it turns out to be bad, if it turns

out they have other ramifications, the legislators who have been elected say, "I

didn't do this. People voted for it. It's not my responsibility. I'm not going

to do anything to fix this. You voted for 00:09:00it, it's in place." And so, the only

way to change it is another ballot measure, which is equally as hard.

And throughout the United States, every time there's been an effort to have a

ballot measure to remove or to sanction LGBT rights, the people that are

circulating the ballots have always lied to get people to sign it. And so,

people need to understand that we are a representative form of democracy and we

should not have ballot measures. They're bad. They're dangerous. They're bad.

They relinquish the ability to fix a law when it's got problems in it to nobody.

There's never been a ballot measure that really did the work that it needed to

do. And in places like California, when you go into a voting booth, they hand

you a booklet that's the size of a 00:10:00phone book, an old-fashioned phone book, with

hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of ballot measures. And you just have to know

what they're about. And nobody knows what they're about. And it's really a very

dangerous thing.

So, we were successful, and it was a big relief. Two days later, the bad guys,

the lawyers for the bad guys that had come out of Focus on the Family that had

trained them through an organization that's supported by Focus on the Family,

brought a lawsuit against the law, saying that because the ordinance was

different from the state law, that we couldn't have that law. And they filed the

lawsuit. And we looked at this and the city said, "Of course we'll fight this."

The city was great. The City of Allentown said, "Yeah, we'll fight it. How dare

they say that we can't have something that's beyond what the state has. We have

all sorts of laws that are 00:11:00beyond what the state has. Even traffic laws are

beyond what the state has. We have a different constituency. The people who live

in Allentown are different from the people who live in the rural parts of the

state, and the laws are different from town to town, from municipality to

municipality, so why shouldn't it be done?"

So, Dan Anders, who had been our wonderful lawyer, got together a dream team of

lawyers, including Edward Khan, who the federal courthouse was already named

after. So, the federal courthouse in Allentown was named after a guy who was on

our dream team. And Dan Anders and people from Biddle & Smith, which is a big,

big law firm in Philadelphia, Tiffany Palmer, who's a wonderful lawyer, she's a

judge now. She was just elected 00:12:00judge. She was on that team. People from the

Human Relations Commission, the lawyers of the Human Relations Commission of the

state, and the lawyer from that spoke very, very well about it. And lawsuits

like that take a long time. So, it's probably a year before it actually went to court.

And so, this was in a lower court and the judge was a guy named Black. And

Franklin Cannon, our pal Franklin Cannon had said, "This guy is really pretty

good. He's not a negative guy. He's not anti-gay." And the point of view that

the lawyer had for the bad guys' side was, "You can't do this because it's

beyond," and we knew that that wasn't going to fly, that was just a ridiculous

point of view. The problem was that the judge himself said this, and this was a

legitimate thing. He said that the legislature of the state of 00:13:00Pennsylvania had

passed a law that said that commerce laws between cities had to match.

And at the time, Roy Afflerbach was our mayor and he had been in the legislature

and he said, "The point of that law was to be sure that like, if there was a

rule that said you can't sell red dresses in Allentown, and there were

manufacturers who were trying -- then you couldn't just presume that that was

true in Bethlehem," that kind of stuff. It was a commerce law. But this judge

said, "The wording of this piece of legislation, I don't see how you could get

around having different nondiscrimination laws from municipality to

municipality." Well, that's going to affect every municipality in the State of

Pennsylvania, including Philadelphia. So, there was a lot of effort to look at

this law. And the judge at that time -- so, now it had been a year, maybe a year

and a half 00:14:00later he said, "Okay, we have to nullify this law. I'm going to

strike down this law."

So, the lawyers immediately moved -- I just want to say we found that out on my

birthday. And it really sucked to find that out. I just remember hearing it on

the news and thinking, "Holy crap." I literally screamed at that point, because

after all of that work, it was unbelievable. But the city said, "We will appeal

this," and our dream team said, "Don't worry about it, we'll repeal it," and the

judge, who was a good guy said, "Let's keep the law in place while it's under

appeal, because it's a civil rights law and we don't just repeal civil rights

laws. It hurts individuals if you do that. And the intent of the civil rights

law is fine. The problem is that it goes against the other law." So, that was

very, very devastating.

So, now it was going to be appealed to the superior 00:15:00court. So, we passed it in

2002, now it's about 2003. And so, we had to wait a long time. Now, the law's in

place. So, we kind of had breathing room there. And then here's the great thing

about this. Trish and I, and Steve, and all the other people who had worked on

the ground to get it to where it was, we didn't have to do anything. This was in

the hands of the brilliant lawyers; it wasn't our fault. If they screwed it up,

it wasn't our fault. There wasn't anything we could do about it. It was between

judges and lawyers, it was going to superior court, and people across the state

were very worried about this, so they were working very hard.

And anybody could have brought this lawsuit in at any time, and frankly, because

it happened in the City of Allentown, we were lucky because Allentown appealed

it. And if it had been in a small municipality, the small municipality 00:16:00 might

have said, "Yeah, we can't afford an appeal, we're not going to do an appeal."

Or if it had been a law that had been challenged, say, in New Hope, and the

dream team didn't show up to work for that, they just said, "Well, okay. We

won't have it now." Well, that would have set a really bad precedent.

So, the dream team worked on it and worked on it. They were really wonderful. It

was right before Tiffany Palmer's daughter was going to be born. She was

pregnant. And now she has a beautiful daughter who's just about to go into

college now, I guess. And we ended up just waiting. And it was another maybe two

years. So, now it's like 2005. And now it's in the state superior court, and

that's in Easton. So, we went to Easton. There were very few people 00:17:00there. And

we were glad that the anti people weren't there. There were no anti people

there. They weren't even following it anymore by then. And we were there, and

our dream team was there, and maybe a couple of other people. Do you remember

anybody else? Steve was not there. And we watched the case.

Now, this is what happened. In between 2003 and 2005, the Supreme Court of the

State of Pennsylvania had been charged to make a decision as to whether the City

of Philadelphia could have a domestic partner requirement, which was an

ordinance, for their own city employees who were LGBT. And the State of

Pennsylvania had made a Defense of Marriage Act, which is a misnomer, that said

that the State of Pennsylvania could not have same-sex marriage in any

municipality, that the legislature voted against same-sex 00:18:00marriage. And so, that

kind of stuff is kind of a figurehead situation, but they were saying, "We don't

want to have same-sex marriage, so okay." They made a legislature.

But some people were presuming that what they were saying was that other

communities could not have domestic partner benefits that approximated marriage,

and Philadelphia had done that. So, the anti-gay people had brought this lawsuit

saying that domestic partner benefits approximate marriage and the State of

Pennsylvania had made a law that we can't have same-sex marriage in the State of Pennsylvania.

And all through this time, and all through the time up until we got marriage

equality, or up until we got the LGBT Caucus in the state, which Adrian was

involved in doing, and also the lobbying that Steve did, we were in danger of

the Republican legislature voting to 00:19:00pass an effort to have a constitutional

amendment in the State of Pennsylvania that banned marriage, because

constitutional amendments are horrible, because in effect, it is, again, a

ballot measure. So, the way that would have happened in the State of

Pennsylvania was, the legislature would vote, "Yes," on it, then they had to

wait a whole cycle, so another two years, then if they voted, "Yes," on it

again, then it would go to a vote for every person in the state.

Having every person vote in the state on whether or not you could have the right

to protect your family through marriage is a devastating vote. It's horrible.

Because you find out that people you know, or restaurants that you like to go

to, or stores, or 00:20:00legislators, or your postman, or something like that, decides

that they're going to make a public issue of taking your vote away. Or even that

they just say, "Yeah, I'm going to vote that way."

And we would have had to go door-to-door. It would have just been a thousand

times worse than the effort that we went through to try to keep the ordinance

from coming. Luckily, that never came up and it never got all the way. It did

come to some first votes, but we had good people in the legislature that kept it

in committee, so that it wouldn't come up, including Pat Brown, who did a lot of

work to keep that from happening in the State of Pennsylvania. He's a Republican

State Senator. And he's our State Senator in our area.

But this lawsuit was looking at that and it had gone to the Supreme Court. And

the Supreme Court of the State of Pennsylvania in 2003, I 00:21:00guess, decided that --

so, this was after our law was shot down in the lower court. The Supreme Court

made the statement, and it was a pretty strong vote, and the gist of their

decision was that municipalities had the right to make laws that protect and

govern their own people. That's the point of government. And that's what they said.

So, therefore, the City of Philadelphia's elected officials think that they

should have a domestic partnership rule for their employees, they can do that

because they have decided by a vote of the people, they've been put in office by

the vote of the people, and they've decided that that's good for the community

and they're responsible for that.

Well, that was a big deal for two reasons. One of 00:22:00them was when our case then

went to court in the Superior Court, Dan Anders had already said this Supreme

Court decision is very good for us. And so, that was the thrust of every one of

our dream team. They said, "Look, the Supreme Court has said this in the State

of Pennsylvania that our constitution in effect says we're allowed to do this.

The Supreme Court makes decisions about what the constitution says." And that

was irrefutable.

And so, the Superior Court, they have to go away and come back and issue a

thing, but they didn't have any argument and the anti people's argument was --

what were they going to say? "No, the Supreme Court didn't say that?" They

couldn't say that. So, what they said was, they reiterated that the Defense of

Marriage Act was different from what state law said, but that was made moot by

the Supreme 00:23:00Court. So, we won. And we were very happy. And we issued that in The

Valley Free Press, big headline, "We won, the law's in place." And the other

thing was, the second thing about this is, that from that moment on, because at

that point, only six communities when we passed our law, it was very close to

the time that Erie passed theirs, they passed theirs just after ours, although

they didn't specifically enumerate gender identity. But it was in the definitions.

At that point, then, once that was in place, all these other municipalities

started passing laws. And they were contacting us, contacting me, to say, "How

do we write this law? How do we do this?" We passed the law in 2007 in Easton,

that was the next passage. It was pretty easy to pass it in Easton. They had no

law, so we crafted a law and they put it in place. And Tim Herr, who just died a

couple days ago, and Earl Ball 00:24:00led that effort, and Ernie Schlegel led the

effort in 2009 in Reading, to pass it. They had an existing law, so they added

sexual orientation and gender identity into it. That passed pretty easily. They

had a very Democratic city council.

And then, finally, in 2011, it was hard to do this, Adrian led the effort and I

worked with him on this, to write the law and write the language to pass it in

Bethlehem. Bethlehem was the one that was dragging its feet. And one of the

reasons is that Bethlehem's people who are Democrats are very, very comfortable

that they'll always be elected because there's never any Republican votes, so

there's never any worry that you could -- see, in Easton, here's the significant

thing that happened in Easton. Maybe I said this already. But through PA Gala,

we were able to get a mayor and a city council person to win their elections,

because they said they would pass the ordinance. And the mayor of Easton was a 00:25:00Republican. And he won.

I think I mentioned that in the last time, where he won by 57 votes. And we had

200 Democrat voters in Easton and we contacted them directly to say, "The

Democrat says he will not support this. The Republican says he will support

this. We are endorsing the Republican." Well, literally -- it's not even 57

votes, it's half of that, if you just have one more than half of 57, one more

than half of that amount, he would win. If you took 28 of those people out of --

no, it would be a little bit more -- of those people out of the 57 that guy

would have lost. Well, he won. And we had 200 votes.

Well, there's no question that Tim Herr and Earl Ball and all those people, our

people 00:26:00in Easton voted for him, because Easton is a Democrat city, and it's

primarily Democrats. So, there's no question that he won because of that issue,

and that really influenced elected officials all across Lehigh Valley, from then

on. They really thought, "We have to be pro-LGBT or we will lose elections." And

so, the Democrat lost, and the mayor, true to his word, it was introduced by a

woman who had won for city council who said that she would support it.

There were a couple of other people that said they would support it, too, and so

we endorsed those three, and she won by 53 votes. So, again it's very

significant that people turned out for these people, when you're talking about a

block vote of 200 people who don't know where each of these people stand, to

make the Republican they've had a Democrat mayor in 00:27:00Easton for about 15 years,

Sal Panto. So, it's rare. And the Republican guy was only in for one term

because he didn't turn out to be that great a representative of the people after that.

So, the city councilwoman introduced this bill, and then it went through, and

then the bill was to set up a whole Human Relations Commission, a whole

ordinance that protected everybody, which is easier to do, because then you can

get the African American community, and the Latino community, and religious

minorities, and all sorts of people who have disabilities, all together to say,

"Of course there should be a Human Relations Commission, and there should be an

ordinance that says you can't discriminate that would locally protect people."

And so, that won. And that was very, very significant.

And that happened solely because of the information that was sent 00:28:00out. And that

was a big win for us. That was a big deal. We're starting to win things. That

was a big deal. And that was in 2007. So, that was the next big Lehigh Valley

thing. There really hasn't been any other Lehigh Valley passage since then,

other than Bethlehem. And Bethlehem was harder because we had to write the vote,

but there was a lot of Catholic agitation.

The city solicitor was sort of in the pocket of the Diocese in Bethlehem and

they were telling him, "You have to have a huge religious exemption that would

allow anybody to just say, 'My religion keeps me from doing this,'" and they had

written it that way, so Adrian said to me, "Take this law and rewrite it so it

doesn't say that without them knowing." So, I took it and they had "any entity,"

and I said, "Any mission-driven religious 00:29:00entity," which is actually protected

by the Constitution of the State and the United States.

So, I just changed it so that it couldn't be like somebody who was religious

running an ice cream store, it had to be somebody who was religious running a

church, which is fine. Churches can do whatever they want, and that's based on

our constitution. So, finally, we passed those things. And now, we had

demonstrated that the Constitution and the Supreme Court of the State of

Pennsylvania absolutely supports these laws. And since, all of those other laws

-- now, we have 58 municipalities across the state, some of them are counties,

Allegheny County passed theirs, Erie County has a law, and we'd passed all of

those different communities all across the state.

And some of them were rural areas in parts, like Pittston has one way up there,

and Scranton passed theirs, soon after that. A lot of them are in Bucks and

Montgomery County, but there were some that were outside of Pittsburgh. So, all

of these were a big deal. It's still only about a 00:30:00third of the population of the

State of Pennsylvania, but several times after that, reporters called me up and

said, "We would like your statement on this because a person in this passage in,

I don't know, Plymouth Meeting said they're going to bring a lawsuit because

it's not the same as the state."

I said, "Well, they can bring a lawsuit but it's completely frivolous because

there's already been a lawsuit and the Supreme Court said, 'No,' so you can't

just keep bringing the same lawsuit over and over again." And reporters will

actually go back to the person and say, "Well, this is what she said, and you

can find that in any kind of piece of information about the Supreme Court," so

it stuffed the guns of people who were doing it. It was a big deal.

So, our passage in Allentown made all of those things happen, and made all of

that, not just the first mention of gender identity, but all of it. And since

then, every law has had gender identity in 00:31:00it, using the same language that was

written on our kitchen table, which was written by Mark Keelson, which I think

was really terrific. So, that is a big legacy, I think, for us and for all of

the people that worked on that and how significant it was to really make that

happen. And the lawsuit was over and we were done, and we were really relieved

by that. So, I think the other thing that I was going to talk about, I was going

to talk about the Valley Gay Press. Is there anything else I need to say about

that? Yeah, I'm going to say some stuff about Steve Black.

Steve Black died about six years ago and Steve was an extraordinary advocate, an

amazing activist. He was kind of a hermit in a lot of ways, particularly in the

last years of his life. And he was a young guy, he was quite a bit younger than

I am. And when I started this 00:32:00stuff, I remember turning 40 and he said, "I

thought you were like me, in my twenties." He was in his twenties, then. But he

was -- he was very, very dedicated to all the things. He was very smart. And he

was really terrible at relationships. And that was a big problem. And one of the

things was that he was self-effacing and he never wanted to take money. He was

very honest. He often spent his own money on making things happen.

And one of the things that happened, he was the head of PA Gala, and he never

kept me from speaking. He never said, "I'm the only one that can talk, don't let

anybody else speak, you can't make any statements for this organization, you

can't do that." We were on the same page on everything. I mean we often would

just come out of her room after somebody had said something and say, "Can you

believe that that person said that?" at the same time. We were really on the

same page with that. He was never 00:33:00afraid that I was going to take away his

limelight or anything like that. He liked to do work and he liked to get

recognition for it but he also really wanted other people to get that recognition.

And when Out100 contacted him, so that's the top 100 out LGBT people in the

United States, and it's in The Advocate, and they contacted him and said, "We

want to know whether you or Liz Bradbury should be the Out100 person," he called

me up and he said, "Well, I think you should do it," and I said, "Well, Steve,

you're the head of the organization, and I'm perfectly fine with your doing it.

You're the head of the organization, you made all these things happen from the

beginning." He said, "Well, let me see if we can both be it." And I said, "Okay,

fine, if you want to do that," and they said, "No." 00:34:00So, I said, "I want you to do it." And he said, "Okay." And then he said, "But I

made it so that both of our pictures will be in the magazine. So, you have to

come up here, and I have my little fake tie, so I could go up to the

luncheonette in Pen Argyl." We set up a camera to take a picture, and then I

actually shopped the picture and everything so it looked really good. He used

that pictures for years, just of him. It was a funny tie. I only saw him wear

the tie three times. It was the same tie, every time. And he got to be in the Out100.

He was the Grand Marshal of the Pride parade that year. And he got hit on by a

lot of guys because of that. It was incredible. He said, "I can't believe how

much I'm getting out of this. The Out100 thing is really -- I mean, people are

calling me up for 00:35:00days," and that had never happened to him, although he was a

very nice, an attractive guy. The thing about Steve was that he never had a

long-term relationship and he told me at one point that he never wanted to be in

one. He said, "I always pick people that I can't possibly be involved with," and

that really hurt him.

And I'm going to talk about that at the end but I do want to talk a little bit

about because he was involved in all of the stuff that we did from the

beginning. He was the one we met, Trish, and I, and Steve did all of this stuff

for years and years and years. But it got harder and harder to work with him

because I think I described what happened at the beginning with Chris Young,

where he's always holding things to the last minute. Well, Steve started to do

that too, and I don't understand why he was doing that. It would be time for the

voter's information to come out and people would be saying to us because we were

often the face of that, "Why don't I have my voter's guide? The election's only

five days 00:36:00away," and I'd say, "Ask Steve," because he was the one who generated

all the components to the mailing.

So, we would do the mailing, but he will generate the components to that. And it

wasn't something we could really do because he figured out how all those things

were going to be. And we would create how they were going to look, but then he

would print them and stuff like that. And he'd often wait until the last minute.

One time, he waited until the last minute and he said, "I can go to the William

Way Center in Philadelphia and use their copying machine for free," for

something that he was going to do, "And then they have a folding machine." He

hated to fold things. And I would say, "We would just do the folding. It's not

that hard to fold." "No, I hate to do the folding."

So, we went down there, and it was four days before the election. So, it was

Friday and the election was Tuesday, and the machine was broken and he couldn't

use it. And we had a big argument about that. I said, "Steve, for heaven's sake,

if you wait until the last minute, you're 00:37:00always at that risk." And so, I think

we had to take it to like Staples and pay a whole lot of extra money to have

them do it and stuff. And he said, "It's okay, we'll have enough money," and I

said, "Yeah, but it's so late." And we would often do the mailing on Monday for

people to get it on Tuesday. And that's a terrible thing to do because people

don't always get it. And people would say to us, "I didn't get my mailing until

the day after the election." Or, "I didn't look at my mailbox," you know, that

kind of stuff. That was never what we wanted. And it was very, very frustrating.

And also, Steve could be very, very rude. He never really understood that we

were doing an enormous -- even though he was generous in terms of our attention,

he never understood how much work we were doing and how we were getting people

to donate and we were doing a lot of fundraisers and we were doing it in our

house, and we were getting people to do fundraisers, and also, we were

producing, by then, the newspaper, The Valley Gay Press, which I'm going to talk

about in a 00:38:00minute. And that was in the voter's guide, and the mailings that he

was sending out. He was sending the mailings. That was getting people to pay

their membership in PA Gala because it was a membership organization, and to

donate. And we did. We were getting plenty of money but if there was a flux.

Another thing we kept saying to him is, "You can't use all the money so there's

nothing in the account. We need to have a savings account so that if anything

happens, we still have 5,000 dollars to do the mailing of the voter's guide,

because we have to be able to have that money. We can't just have nothing and

then hope we're going to get this money to come in." And also, we were a 501c4

organization, so we never had sponsorships, people couldn't write off their

contributions to us. And Steve, he wasn't too rude to me, but he was often very,

very rude to Trish. And one of the reasons was that Trish did an enormous amount

of the maintenance of mailing 00:39:00lists and the membership list. And he did that a

lot, too, but she did a lot of that kind of stuff. And she would remind him

about things and he'd get really, really rude to her. There's no reason for him

to be that way.

It was like she'd just say, "You know, this person is dead and we keep getting a

call from her dad that says that it makes him upset that she's getting these

mailings, can we just take this person's name off the mailing list?" I think we

told him that four times, and that would have been something that Trish would

never have let happen, but he was like, "Well, I can't manage it," I said,

"Yeah, but it's really influencing us," and he'd get really mad at us and stuff

like that. But he tended to just passive-aggressively not get stuff done. And it

wasn't the intention of not doing it, in some ways he had a lot of things going on.

He was running the luncheonette. But it made us nuts, and it made us look bad.

And that's the 00:40:00thing that we just really didn't want to have. We had a presence

in the community. So, I said to Steve in, I don't remember when it was, I guess

it was in about 2002. I said, "Trish and I are giving a one-year notice," and we

didn't want to get mad and say, "Okay, we're not going to do anything anymore."

I said, "We will work with you for the next two voter's information things," but

we were paying out of our own pocket for the production of The Valley Gay Press,

and that was because we couldn't get donations that were sponsorships.

And this dovetails into The Valley Gay Press but we wanted to have an

organization that was an information-based organization. The voting information,

we just couldn't get any donations for that. And we wanted to continue to do The

Valley Gay Press which we did for a long time, the newspaper. But we couldn't

afford to pay for it out of our own 00:41:00pocket anymore. So, I said to Steve, "We're

going to create an organization that is to produce The Valley Gay Press, to do

advocacy," because he didn't like to do that, "And to run the info line, and do

other on the ground kinds of things. People will call us up and say, 'We need

you to advocate for us,' we'll do that. You continue to do the voter information

stuff, that's fine, but we're not going to help you anymore after a year."

So, we gave him a whole year of this stuff. And at the end of the year, I don't

think he thought I was kidding, but he said, "Well, you certainly gave me enough

time." And I said, "I'm never going to say anything bad about PA Gala and I'll

write about it in The Valley Gay Press and I'll encourage people to support you

and everything." And then, Pennsylvania Diversity Network was also a membership 00:42:00organization which was very inexpensive, it was 15 dollars for a membership to

get the paper and stuff. That was mostly to get the paper. And he was a little

upset, he said, "You didn't say you were going to make this a membership

organization because that's going to keep people from giving money to me." I

said, "No, it isn't. People are still going to give you money for the voter

information. They really like that. And I'll encourage them too. I'll do that, completely."

But what happened was that he didn't anticipate that we were doing an enormous

amount of work, and we were doing these huge mailings for him all the time, and

we were raising money for him all the time, and he never really saw that until

he realized that he had to do it himself. And he pulled it off for a year. And

one of the people that came to help him was Corey Horvath, and I think Allison

did, and several other people. He also got people who were just in the

luncheonette, who hung out in the luncheonette to 00:43:00do the mailings. Some of them

had no idea what they were doing, but they were just like, "Here, do the

mailings," and they just hung out in there all day, gavethem a hamburger,

which was actually adorable.

And I think they did it for about a year to two years. And then he couldn't do

it anymore. It was too hard. It was a huge undertaking. All that stuff where he

had to go find out who the candidates were, Trish had been doing that for years,

we'd been interviewing people for years and he just wasn't seeing that. And

then, suddenly that was an issue. So, we went through and I still was on the

board for a while. At one point, we were sort of at odds about who we were to

endorse for mayor of the City of Allentown, so we had sort of a dual

endorsement. It ended up that it petered out. He couldn't do it 00:44:00 anymore.

And this is sort of the end of his story. He was still there; he was still

running the luncheonette. It was a mess because half of it was the food area,

and the other half was all of his papers and computers and everything. You could

just see everything there. It was kind of hilarious, these big packages and

boxes of envelopes and stuff like that, all over the place, in one half of the

luncheonette. And it was cordoned off, so you couldn't sit there. And it wasn't

working anymore. So, he ended up running for treasurer of the City of Pen Argyl

-- no, tax collector. And he won. And he ran as an openly gay man. It was a big

deal that he won. And that's actually a paying job. It doesn't pay a lot but it

pays probably equal to what he was making from the luncheonette, so that was a

good deal for him to do that. And he did that for a couple 00:45:00 years.

But it became really apparent to me -- so let me just say this, that as I said,

Steve was bad about relationships, and he was really bad about friendship. He

didn't understand what friendship was. And he would say things like, "Oh, this

person is my really good friend," and then I'd say, "Well, where does she live?"

And he wouldn't even know. And I'd say, "A friend is a person who helps you

move. A friend is a person you call in the middle of the night and say, 'I think

there's somebody in the house,' or, 'There's a bat in the house.' Those are the

people that are your friends. It's not just somebody you had a beer with." And I

think that that's a dangerous thing, when you think that those people are your

friends. And that was the circumstance. And he was also drinking a lot and he

was going to the Republican Club because they have no Democrat clubs there.

So, he'd go to the Republican Club, and he would drink a lot. He had a couple

DUIs. And that had happened, actually, in 2002. And I'd actually taken him to

court and stuff. And it was a 00:46:00sting at the Stonewall, as a matter of fact, that

they followed him. He was right there at the Stonewall, andthey followed him.

But he knew that he was over the limit. And he ended up really having a hard

time. And he told me at one point that he was dating a guy, a political person

who had been convicted of a crime with regard to politics, and he was waiting to

be sentenced, and Steve was meeting him at the bingo afternoon thing at Diamonz

every Sunday. And he said, "Yeah, I'm dating," and he told me who it was,

Michael Sona, actually.

And he said, "Yeah, that's one of the examples of me dating somebody where the

relationship could never really work out," because I think Michael Sona went to

prison for 20 00:47:00years. I think he's still in prison, now. He was scapegoated by

the other politician. And not the best relationship circumstance. So, he ended

up having these DUIs and stuff. And apparently, he dated some guy who was a

criminal who, according to Steve, stole a whole bunch of the money that he had

from the tax collectors. Because people would come into luncheonette and give

him cash.

So, "Here's 1,000 dollars in cash for my taxes," and people actually pay their

taxes that way. So, he'd have these huge piles of money around. And Steve was

very cavalier about stuff and he just didn't care. Sometimes he would meet

somebody who was drunk at the bar and he'd let him come and stay at his place.

He never really cared about his environment. I remember one time, he had an 00:48:00apartment in Philadelphia and he finally let that apartment go. And I went with

him to Philly and I helped him move all his stuff, because I was the friend. And

I wasn't really friends with him, but he said, "Will you do this?" And I said,

"Yes." So, I helped him carry a big couch up, because he lived in an apartment

over the luncheonette. It was outdoor stairs. We carried it in, we got it into

his kitchen. You walk into his apartment, there's a kitchen there, and we put it

down, it was sort of on its back. He said, "Just put it down there." And then,

we went out and he had some boxes of papers and stuff, we brought the stuff in,

we put it in something. I just put it on the edge of the couch. It was lying on

its back.

And then, he moves the rest of the stuff so that he wasn't paying for this

apartment anymore, which was actually very, very inexpensive. He kept it for a

long time. And then a year later -- like, we're not friends so I didn't used to

go over and see him, but I brought 00:49:00some other boxes in, and I carried it up. It

was literally a year later and I carried it up into his kitchen, and this couch

was still there on its back with the same boxes on it. And I thought, "This is

the way this guy lives." This is his living room and the couch is on its back,

because he never had anybody over. He never entertained. He didn't have any friends.

But anyway, apparently what happened was, he got caught because he didn't have,

literally, thousands of dollars. I think it was 25,000 dollars or something was

missing from the stuff, and he was indicted. At that time, he'd had several DUIs

so that was on his record and he was indicted. And there was a lot of press

coverage on it. By then he was not communicating with anybody and I couldn't get

him -- he won an award through our 00:50:00gala, and I tried to get him to say -- this

was when I first started the gala, the first gala we had, which was 14 years

ago, I guess, and I called him and he wouldn't answer the phone. He wouldn't

answer my calls. He wouldn't answer my messages, because we had answering machines.

Finally, I called him on the number at the luncheonette where you would get

takeout orders, because I knew he would answer. And I said, "This is Liz, what's

going on? Are you going to come to this?" And he said, "Well, I haven't

decided." And that's all he said. And he didn't want to talk anymore. He was

just unhappy. And by then, what had happened was that the hate crimes bill had

been overturned. The hate crimes law that had passed in 2002 was overturned on a

technicality. And the technicality was that they had passed it as a farm bill.

And it went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said, "This isn't really 00:51:00true." Now, they do that all the time. But by then, the Supreme Court of the

State of Pennsylvania was pretty conservative and they said, "No, you can't have

a bill like this."

And so, all the work that he had done for years and years, this was his legacy,

was gone. And the hate crimes bill was gone. And it was done. Now, a federal

hate crimes bill passed soon after that that includes sexual orientation and

gender identity, so there is a little bit of balance for that. But his work was

gone. I think it was devastating for him. The organization was gone. The hate

crimes bill was gone. He figured out he didn't have a lot of pals. And then,

this money thing happened. And there was an article in the newspaper that was

public information that he had gone into a park and tried to kill himself. And

they had taken him to 00:52:00someplace, like a lockdown, because he'd been indicted.

So, I thought that he tried to kill himself because he knew that if he went to

jail, it would be a terrible, terrible thing, and that it would be an

embarrassment to the community, and that he wasn't going to be able to explain

that this money had been stolen. Some people thought that he had taken the

money. It was hard to know because it was all cash. But I knew that he never

stole money like that. He never did anything. He never misused money, so I don't

think that that would have happened.

I didn't know that this had happened, but I got a call from him and he was in

jail, but he was in the hospital jail. He was in lockdown in the hospital. Part

of the reason of that was that he had tried to kill himself. So, he gets on the

phone and he 00:53:00says, "Well, you may have already read in the paper that I tried to

kill myself." I didn't know that, but I immediately looked it up, because it was

way up in Pen Argyl, so it was a different paper. It's not the Morning Call. By

then, maybe I had heard about it. So, I said, "Okay, yeah. What do you need me

to do?" And he said, "Well, I'm in the hospital and I need to get out." And I

said, "Well, why are you in the hospital?" And he said, "Well, they think I'm

going to try to kill myself again." And I said, "Well, are you?" And he said,

"No, I need to get back to my job."

But the thing is, the way he was talking, it was weird. The way he was talking

was very strange, like he'd been sedated or something like that. So, I said,

"Well, maybe what you need is to get a doctor to say that you are okay, and that

you're not going to," because he said, "I need a 00:54:00lawyer," and I said, "Well, I

think what you need is a doctor." So, he said, "Okay," and then he goes, "You

mean Dr. Brown?" And I said, "Well, who is that?" And he said, "Well, my family

doctor," and I thought, "He's really messed up." So, I said, "Let me see what I

can do."

Here's something you always need to know. If anybody ever gets hurt and you need

to get into a hospital, get a minister. A minister can always get into a

hospital. So, I called Beth Goudy, who was a close friend at the time, and I

said, "This is what's happening with Steve," she said, "Do you want me to go and

make a hospital visit?" I said, "Yes." She'd get in anywhere. She'd get into a

lockdown hospital because she's a minister. So, Beth went over to see him and

then she called me the next day and I said, "I know you can't really tell me 00:55:00because there's confidentiality, but is he okay?" And she said, "Well, he's in

the right place. He needs to be where he is."

And then I didn't hear anything about him, and then maybe four months go by, and

then all of a sudden, John Dawe, who was the head of NEPA, the LGBT organization

up in Scranton, said, "I just heard that Steve is dead." And so, I thought he'd

gotten out and killed himself. I really thought that's what had happened. And I

was devastated. I just thought, "This is terrible. None of this should have

happened. This is awful." And I really thought that he'd killed himself because

he was a young, healthy guy. And so, I couldn't imagine what would have taken

him. He would have been in his forties, then.

And so, then what happened was, I was going for a walk and Rob 00:56:00Hopkins who had

known Steve all along through all of this time, Rob Hopkins is an activist in

the community and was on the Pride board for a long time. He said, "I have to

tell you something. Northampton County made a huge mistake and published,

publicly, every death certificate in the county for the last 10 years, including

my mother's, which is completely illegal because it says what people died from

on the death certificate.

And that's breaking HIPPA and everything. But it's totally searchable. So, I

searched Steve's, because Rob knew Steve very well, and he said, "It said that

Steve died of a brain tumor, and it was the kind of brain tumor that you get

from AIDS." You only get that kind of brain lesion from AIDS. And he said, "Did

you know that he had AIDS?" I said, "I don't think he knew that he had AIDS."

And Rob said, "I don't think so, 00:57:00either. I don't think he did," because he was

very, very honest. We knew lots and lots of people who were HIV-positive, we'd

talk about them all the time. He wouldn't have not told me that. He told me

everything. He told me everything, even though we weren't really friends. When

he was selected as a delegate to the Democratic Convention in LA, and he went to

it, it was when Al Gore was running, and it was first time he'd ever been in an

airplane before.

And he called me from there to tell me all about it and it was real great

stories that he told me, including that he got to get into all of these really

great parties because he checked the gay box, and the other Democrats --

including Bob Casey who is now our senator -- couldn't get into the parties

because he wasn't gay. "I have to tell you this," he's saying to me, "I have to

tell you this story. These guys who aren't gay can't get into the cool parties."

And so, it's so exciting. 00:58:00So, anyway I was doing a training in Pen Argyl, for Pen Argyl High School. And

at the end of the training, most people left and this younger woman came over to

me, and she said, "We have something in common. I'm Steve Black's cousin," and I

was Steve's best friend, and I was the executor of his will. And so, we talked

about him and she said he didn't know he was sick until the very end. He didn't

know that he was HIV-positive until he was dying of AIDS. She said, "His mother

said that he died of AIDS, but he really died of a brain tumor." And I said,

"Well, the brain tumor was from AIDS," and she hadn't known that. And we talked

about Steve for a long time, about how wonderful he was and stuff.

I think the reason I want this to be in this archive was, first of all, he was

an extraordinary activist. But because he didn't have a lot of self-esteem in a

lot of ways, he was afraid in a lot of 00:59:00ways, he didn't have any support from his

family, and he didn't seek out good friends to build that family support that

you can get from a chosen family, things didn't work out for him. And he

couldn't recognize that. And I wrote an obituary in The Valley Gay Press about

it. I also published it on, by then, we had Facebook. And I wrote that, and

among other things, I said, "He was great at politics, he was great at activism,

and he was terrible at relationships," and he was. Because we would gladly have

been his pal and been his friend and hung out with him and have dinner.

We would say, "Come to this party," and he'd never come to a party. We'd have

parties at our house, he'd never come to a party. He would never have dinner

with us or anything. We have so much in common with him that we didn't have with

other people because he was all political and lots of other people don't know

about that kind of stuff. It was devastatingly sad. I 01:00:00write notes to him on his

Facebook page. Every time some big thing happens, I say, "I wish you were here

because we just passed domestic partner benefits in the City of Allentown." "I

wish you were here; marriage equality just went through."

And I'm glad that Rob told me this, because he obviously had this illness when

all these things happened with the money, and it makes more sense that he would

be clouded by the fact that he had this brain tumor that was killing him, and

that's why he wasn't able to keep track of the money and made bad decisions

about these people being in his space. And I think that's really true. And

people said to me I shouldn't have written that. And I said, "Look, it was

public information that he was indicted. He had serious mental health issues,

and one of them was, now it turns out, from a brain tumor." I would rather

people think that he had problems with mental health issues than that he was a 01:01:00thief that just got elected and stole a whole lot of money for his own gain. It

wasn't the case at all, so I want people to understand that about him. I think

he was a really good guy and I think he deserved better in the world. But I hope

people understand that sometimes you have to make that happen for yourself. So,

that's about Steve and I did want to be sure to say that.

Now, I want to say some stuff about The Valley Gay Press and I want to say it

really fast because we don't have much time left. So, we started The Valley Gay

Press in 1998 because we were trying to pass the anti-discrimination ordinance

and we need the vehicle to get information out. And we created The Valley Gay

Press to pass the ordinance. But we also created it to get information to people

because we didn't have any way to get people information. We didn't have the

internet then; we didn't have social media. And we also recognized that there

was this huge problem that was happening in the community because at that time,

there were 30 LBGT organizations, FACT, the 01:02:00Gay Men's Chorus, a bunch of GSAs in

colleges, a whole bunch of different organizations that were serving the LGBT

community. And some of them were big, including Pride of the Lehigh Valley.

One time the Pride Festival and the biggest fundraiser that FACT had, which was

a big country club event, were on the same day at the same time. And they were

furious at each other that that happened. And I thought, "If I create a

newspaper and I put a calendar in it and people will have this information long

in advance, there won't be any excuse for people to do this." One of the things

we also found out was that lots of people who go to bars all the time believe

that everybody in the LGBT community go to bars all the time.

Right after we started to produce The Valley Gay Press, which was a newsletter

that we were sending out with all of the fundraising letters that were coming

from PA Gala, we were sending it 01:03:00regularly out and then people would send money

to PA Gala, and it was really bringing in a lot of money. It was very

significant. We started The Valley Gay Press with 12 issues. It was on a piece

of legal paper, so we were four pages in the first one, there were eight pages

in the second. We decided to go with eight pages for a while. And at first, we

were coming out every month and it was killing me because we still had a job, we

were antique dealers then, and it was killing us. We couldn't do it.

I reduced it to 10 issues because we had two months where we had big obligations

that we just couldn't produce the paper during that month. It's also an enormous

amount of work. And we produced it for 18 years. I ultimately made it to three

sheets of paper, which was 12 pages. It regularly had about 80 articles in it.

And I wrote and edited and compiled everything.

In fact, let's see, I 01:04:00wrote the "Hot News" page which I set up. I wrote the

thing about legal weddings. I wrote my column, which started out called, "A View

From a Dyke," which I thought was really funny and nobody got it. You know View

From A Kill, that's a James Bond movie. And a kill is a stream, like Catskill.

That means stream. So, I thought "View from a Dyke," I thought that was really

funny, and people just thought it was pejorative. And I was talking about

Boudica and "Bou-dyke-a" and that's where it comes from, it just never flew. So,

after about five years, I changed it to "Liz Out Loud," which had been the name

of my article that I had written for Above Ground magazine for a long time

before we started The Valley Gay Press.

And when I changed it back to "Liz Out Loud," Mitch Hemphill, who produced it,

he thought of that name, and he was so happy that I was using it again, because

by then, his magazine wasn't going anymore. I set up all the front-page news. I

took all the 01:05:00pictures in it. I wrote, "What's That About," which was sort of

like a write-in piece, people would write in questions or ask me questions and

these were the answers to the questions.

Sometimes I'd just use that as a way to get information to people. Other times,

people would really contact us on the info line and ask questions, and then I'd

give them the answer, and I'd write the answer there. I wrote the quiz that was

on the back. Sometimes the quiz was particularly to get people to know things,

like, "What does a super voter mean?" that kind of stuff, or "When is the next

election?" but lots of the times, they were just queer things that were fun.

When we did a survey within a year of the paper coming out and loads and loads

of people were getting it -- maybe it was two years after -- and Beth Goudy told

me, "Loads of people said that they always read the quiz. It was the second

thing they read." She said, "I read the front page, then I turn it over," it was

on the back page, "and I read the quiz. That's the next thing I do." 01:06:00So, it was

a big draw. But it was interesting that 50 percent of the people said they

always read the quiz and 50 percent of the people said they never read the quiz.

There was no in between, it was one or the other. So, that was interesting. I

created the comic. There was a comic called "Distelfink," that I had for a long

time, probably about five years in there. I wrote a bunch of other articles. I

did every single edit.

And people would write press releases and I'd say, "These have to be small

because I've got to fit 80 articles in and the type is really little, it's only

eight-point type," and people said, "It should be bigger type." I said, "Yeah,

if it was bigger type, then whose articles am I going to cut out? I'd have to

have less articles. Use a magnifying glass." I used to say that all the time. I

used a magnifying glass. I still have that magnifying glass in here. I wrote

book reviews in there for a long time. I wrote quotes of the month and photos of

the month. I took those.

And the 01:07:00quotes of the months were something that I generated from stuff that was

happening either in the community or nationally, I would put that into the

paper. And then, we had all these other columnists, and we had a lot of other

events. We had Sylvia Comics after a while. Nicole Hollander, who produced the

syndicated Sylvia Comics, told me they had been stopped in the Tribune papers

and she told me I could put them in. I contacted her personally and she said,

"Yeah, sure. Put them in your paper. What the hell."

So, I had the right to do that. She had, "I have full rights to those, I can let

them go for anything. You don't have to pay me just go. There's no other venue

that the comics are coming from, so go ahead and put them in." So, I put those

in all the time. She gave me the comics to put in. I had a community calendar of

events. I had all the contacts for all the different LGBT organizations in the

community, all the recurring events that always came out every time. And then

there were the columnists. So, like Steve Libby wrote "Rants and Raves." They

were terrific pop culture things. Trish and I used to say we never knew anything

about pop 01:08:00culture, except we read it in Steve Libby's column, and now we know

nothing because we don't read the column anymore because it's not there.

We had "Planet Parenthood," which was about LGBT families with kids. And that

was actually multiple different people who did it. The first person who wrote it

with a pseudonym was Elizabeth Goff, she's a pediatrician and she wrote it for a

while, and then a bunch of other people did it. And ultimately, for the last 10

years, because it was 18 years, Donnie and Earl Snyder wrote it. They had a

little boy. And it was a great article, the way that they wrote it. Later,

Adrian had a commentary in it. Adrian's ex-husband, he was a nurse and he had a

column about health. "Scotty in the City," which was written by Scott Lauoner,

was right from the beginning. Scott was living in Allentown, but then he moved

to New York. And they were great articles.

But the first articles were terrible. I remember Steve Black saying, "So, Scott

wrote a book report." And 01:09:00then he got really good. The more people wrote them,

they just got better and better at them. We had some financial ones that never

really worked really well, I have to say. We had [Adra Liance?], who was a young

person that I knew, I met through Facebook, who wrote a column called "Angry

Black Lesbian Rant." And it was really short. It'd be a 100-word rant. Sue

Sneeringer wrote stories about theatre. [Phil Healing?] wrote a column, he lives

in England now, but he wrote a beautiful column for a long time. And then, Adra

wrote the book reviews for a while. We did some really significant things.

We did real reporting. So, people will contact us about issues. One of the first

things that happened was a young guy named Travis contacted us about a thing

that happened to him. He was 17. He was living on his own in the Lehigh Valley,

he'd come from New York 01:10:00State. And he went to Borders Books to buy an XY

magazine, which used to be a magazine -- I don't know if it's still around --

but it was for teenage gay kids, or LGBT kids. And they wouldn't let him buy it

unless his parents bought it for him.

And there was nothing in the magazine that was any different than Teen Vogue or

Seventeen or something like that, except for that it was a gay magazine. So, we

actually did this whole undercover thing where we had Patti Mittleman's son,

Joel, who was 14, they said that it was a mistake, so we sent Joel in as an

undercover guy to see if he could buy the magazine. It was really great. He was

a straight kid and he goes, "I don't really want this." But he was great. And

[Laura Gutaras?] called because she was working for the Girl Scouts and she

said, "How can you say that this is any more inappropriate 01:11:00than Seventeen," and

various different things for young women that actually have body image issues

and stuff like that that are much more serious than just talking to kids because

they're queer? It wasn't like a sex manual in any possible way.

So, we were successful with that and they changed their whole policy. We

actually went national with that, and they changed their policy nationally to be

sure that every Borders Books across the United States, that they would never

keep an LGBT kid -- I called Borders in other states to see if a teenager could

get it. They were like, "Of course, it's a teen magazine." And then, other

people were like, "No, we don't sell it," so Borders told them they all had to

be able to sell it. They couldn't do that. That was a big thing.

We used the paper to change Lehigh Valley Health Network's nondiscrimination

policy because they had made a big announcement, they had big billboards that

said that Money Magazine had 01:12:00said that they were one of the 100 best places to

work in the United States. Well, one of the questions in that Money Magazine

thing was, "Do you have a nondiscrimination statement that includes sexual

orientation?" And you have to say yes to that, or you can't be one of the 100

best places to work. And they didn't have that in their policy. So, I went

online to look at their policy and it wasn't in their policy.

So, I actually called up the head of HR there, the vice president in charge of

HR and I said, "You obviously told Money Magazine that you have this policy and

you don't. And you're in trouble." And the guy said, "Well, we have an internal

policy we just don't tell anybody about it." I said, "Yeah, I'm looking at your

policy right now on your website and it's not there." And he said, "Well, you

know, these are hard to change." And I said, "Well you better change it. I know

it's a Friday afternoon but if you don't have this in place by Monday, I'm about

to release a newspaper that's going to really expose you, and then I'm 01:13:00 calling

Money Magazine to get them to remove you from the list and keep you off of it

for the next five years," which is what their rule is. So, they changed it that

night. They went in and they changed it. The guy's like, "I can't change it," I

was like, "You can, too. You're the vice president of HR. It's not hard to

change a website. I can do it right now to my website. I'll show you how to do it."

So, we did that. We also did a thing where we used the paper to get St. Luke's

to give domestic partner benefits, and we did that in a variety of different of

ways. But all the information was going out to all these people in the community

very significantly. We had a college rating system. And Moravian College had

done a really bad thing. We had an intern, Jonna Finocchio, who was one of our

first interns, she's now a really top psychotherapist in Colorado. But she was

at 01:14:00Moravian and she wanted to work on a project.

Here's the deal. Moravian had a nondiscrimination policy that said, "We don't

discriminate based on all these classes," and they included sexual orientation,

gender identity, "as per required by law." Well, there wasn't a law in

Bethlehem, so in effect, it was saying, "If the law says we have to do it, we do

it." Well, there wasn't a law. So, I had called them up and said, "I think you

should change that," and they said, "Well, no, it's a legal thing." I said, "No,

it's a weak thing. You're not doing it." So, I said to Jonna, "Why don't you

work on this thing?" So, she went to them, and she went to her professor and she

tried to do the stuff, and the reaction was that they took the whole policy

away, and said, "We just 01:15:00don't discriminate against anyone, as required by law."

So, they didn't even have the intent language there anymore. They removed sexual

orientation and gender identity.

So, we produced, and we had on our website, a list of all the colleges that

included Moravian with a skull and crossbones next to it. And we also did that

with the Catholic colleges, who were very, very anti-gay. We'd have some very

significant problems with DeSales and a couple of other things. But Moravian had

the skull and crossbones. So, Liz Kleintop, who was a professor at Moravian, a

graduate school professor who's transgender and ended up on our board, contacted

me and said, "How do I get that skull and crossbones off of that? I'm trans,

I've just transitioned and everybody's been great to me."

I said, "This is how you get it. You have to have them have a nondiscrimination

policy that includes sexual orientation and gender identity without any caveats

saying, 'If we're required to do it by law.'" And she said, 01:16:00"Okay." And she did

it. But it was all because of all that stuff that we did which was really great.

And then she ended up on our board and she's been great. I just talked to her on

a COVID interview.

We had a Who's Who of 80 people in the LGBT community, and allied community that

had their picture and all the different stuff that they had done and it was an

insert that we put into the Pride Festival paper. We always had a paper come out

at the Pride Festival. So, I'd go hand them around. I'd had 1,000 papers out to

people at the Pride Festival. They'd say, "Oh, I get this in the mail," and I'd

say, "No, it just came out today." "Oh, great." And at one point, there were

people sitting on the hill at the Pride Festival, this little hill there in the

shade, and every single person was reading the paper. I took this great picture

of everybody intently reading the paper or asking each other the quiz questions.

So, that was a really successful thing. 01:17:00We certainly used it at the beginning to get all the news of every step of our

passage of the ordinance, and all the other ordinances to people, "You must come

to this meeting, you need to write these letters, you need to do all of these

things," and that was very, very successful because we got information. And then

Trish would always write these amazing articles. It was called "Trish's Column."

And I would dash off my column, Steve Libby could write his column in 10

minutes, they were great columns, his were great columns.

Scott took a lot longer to write his. But I'd call up Steve and go, "You didn't

do your column," and he'd say, "I'll get it right to you," and he'd have it in

10 minutes. I would do mine in a day or something. But Trish would research her

column for days and days and days and she had brilliant columns. She had a

column about places that older LGBT people could retire to that were

specifically for LGBT people.

She had columns about how to change your name, step by step and what it was

then, if you were a trans 01:18:00person. And she did this column about how to get

married, if you were a same-sex couple, in the closest place, and I've told you

this before, to the Lehigh Valley when marriage became legal in some states, and

the closest place was Darien, Connecticut. And so, Trish and I went. She

researched the whole thing and we decided that --

Well, first of all, let me just take a step back and say that Trish and I were

the first couple in the State of Pennsylvania to get a civil union. And we were

the first of anybody to get a civil union. That was in 2000 when Vermont

instituted civil union. It was the first state to institute civil union in the

United States. It was the highest legal recognition of our relationship we could

get any place. So, they had just done it, it was in August of the year 2000.

We called our 01:19:00friends, Bev, Morgan, and Sandy Fluck. Sandy Fluck was a dean at

Moravian, and our other friends, Barb Ross, and Robin Dingle, we said to them,

"We're going to go to Vermont on such and such a day," and you just have to go

in, you don't have to have residency, you just go in and get your civil union.

"We're going to go up there and do that. Do you want to go?" And they said,

"Yes." So, they said that they would go.

Bev and Sandy went in our car and Robin and Barb, and they're all still

together, went in their car, Laura Gutaras and her then-girlfriend came with us,

they met us up there, and my sister who is a photographer who lives in

Connecticut, she met us up there to photograph the wedding. And we invited The

Morning Call to come with us. And they did. They sent 01:20:00reporters with us. So,

people would say, "How did the paper find out?" I said, "We called them." So,

they came with us and they sent a reporter and a photographer, and they did

every step of it.

And so, this is a civil union in 2000. So, we go up there, we do the whole civil

union. You had to get a Justice of the Peace so we went into the office -- now,

civil union had only been in place for two days in Vermont. And so, the six of

us went in, three couples, and people through the whole courthouse, we went to

Brattleboro, which is the closest place, it's closest to the border, and we went

to the City Hall, this little, quaint, New England City Hall, and all these

people from the whole thing came in to say, "Congratulations," to us because we

were the first out-of-state couples to really show up. And it was three couples

and we'd come all the way from Pennsylvania. 01:21:00So, we got the licenses and then we met this person in a little gazebo down the

street. And now, The Morning Call is taking all these pictures of us and

everything, every single part of us, the pancake breakfast, and the rest of it,

they came to our hotel room to see when we were getting dressed to get ready to

go. Trish and I kissed. It was in an article of us kissing, which you've

probably seen that. It's in the archives.

And then, the woman gets up to do the wedding for us, and she screws up every

single line. She kept saying, "He," she kept saying, "Husband," she was totally

cool, she wasn't anti, but she was just so used to doing it the other way, she

couldn't do it. She just said, "That's one way to say it, but this is the way

we're supposed to say it," and then she'd say, "Do you take your wife?" We used

wife or spouse; I don't know. Finally got all finished with that and we come

back to Allentown, and then it's Musikfest. And on the Musikfest edition of The

Morning Call on the 01:22:00front page is me and Trish getting our civil union, and then

there's a two-page article about us getting the civil union.

And as a result of that, over 100 people stopped us, literally on the street, in

the gas station, the neighbors came and congratulated us. No one said anything

negative to us. The reporter got a lot of shit, but we didn't get anything

because everybody loves a wedding. In fact, Steve had gone to the Democratic

Convention and he said, "I can't believe that you're getting more coverage as

the couple who went to get the civil union than I am at the Presidential

Democratic--" and I said, "Everybody loves a wedding. What are they going to

say, 'Those damn people, how dare they be together for 12 years and love each

other so much that they want to have a formal, you know?" Paul Carpenter's

column was about it; we got a lot of attention for that.

Fast-forward to 01:23:002009, when Trish writes an article about how you can go to

Darien, because you can drive to Darien in two and a half hours, get married,

you don't have to stay overnight, you can actually have the Justice of the Peace

meet you at the courthouse in Darien, or you can go to the beach which is where

we've done two other weddings there, which both have broken up since then,

including Adrian, Adrian got married there. And you go there, and you have the

Justice of the Peace, or you can bring a minister with you.

Adrian had a friend marry him, and Hannah got married there, too. And so, we got

married -- it was raining so we actually stood across the street with an

umbrella. We didn't even go to the beach; we just did the thing. My sister was

there. It was my birthday because we had been married so many other places

because we did Freedom to Marry and all that kind of stuff, and we had our civil 01:24:00union that we're never going to remember it, so we did it on my birthday so we

could always remember the day we were legally married in 2009. And Trish then

came back and wrote an article that step-by-step explained how to do it. We also

put it on our website.

There was this exodus of huge numbers of people from Pennsylvania, the guys who

were the head of Reading Pride, Barb Ross and Kathy Bergey, Adrian and Brandon,

flowing up to Darien to get legally married and get back in one day. You could

get legally married in one day. And people would say, "I want to get married in

my own state," I said, "What if something happens? What if something happens?"

And that's what happened to Kathy Bergey. She died. She got leukemia the next

year and died, and Barb Ross was able to sue the state, and she sued the state

and said, "I was legally married," and she didn't have to pay the tax on the

inheritance that she had because she had married early. We really made a big

deal to tell 01:25:00everybody that they needed to do that.

So, that was another thing that The Valley Gay Press did. One of the things, and

just as a little aside because this was an amazing thing, we had the info line,

and people were calling me. I think we started that in about 2000, and before

that, people called us anyway. We had this number, which is still my telephone

number, where people would call me to ask questions.

They would say, "What's the nondiscrimination statement mean? I've been

discriminated against," and we did a lot of advocacy for people through PA Gala.

And when we started to do the marriage equality, everybody was calling us about

marriage equality. "How do I get married in Delaware?" Well, it's hard, it's a

four-day wait, you're going to have to stay at a bed-and-breakfast for four

days, "What should I do?" Explaining everything, how you did 01:26:00it. "How do I

dissolve my Vermont civil union?" Well, you've got to go live in Vermont because

it's not recognized here.

And then it turned out there was a way to do that in Delaware, remote control,

you just paid Delaware money and they would dissolve it for you. So, typical of

Delaware. But I had all the information. So, people were calling me all over the

United States, "How do I get married?" because it would come up on our website.

So, I get this call from a couple in Israel. And they say, and I knew this,

"Israel will recognize a marriage from any other country, but they won't perform

same-sex marriage unless it's performed through Judaism, by conservative Judaism

in the state of Israel. We don't do the marriages here but we'll recognize them

anyplace else."

And the problem is that this 01:27:00couple is from Israel, so they can't get married in

Belgium, because you have to be from Belgium, or one of you has to be from

Belgium. They said, "The only other place is Canada," but Canada, you have to be

there for several days, and they don't have the time. I said, "That's okay, they

need to go to Darien, Connecticut." So, I actually explained to them, "Fly into

Kennedy International, get a car to drive you to Darien. It's only about an hour

from there. You can get the thing, get married, get the car back, and fly back,

and you can do it in one day." And they did it, these people from Israel, so

that they could be legally married. Probably huge numbers of people from Israel

then were flying to Darien in effect, just to get legally married.

In the play 01:28:00and the movie, Auntie Mame, with Rosalind Russell, they talk about

the conservative place where her nephew's girlfriend that he's going to marry

lives, or the family lives, where they're antisemitic and gated communities, and

Mame hates that because she's really, really progressive, and she says, "I don't

want to have you marry that Aryan from Darien." And they meant Darien, Darien,

Connecticut. It's like the most conservative. It's in Fairfield County, which is

where I'm from, actually, and my sister lived in South Norwalk, which is right

next to Darien. And so, that's why she was able to be there right away for the

wedding. But, anyway, a huge number of people have their wedding licenses. Of

course, now, you can get married in Pennsylvania and it's not necessary to go to

Darien anymore, unless you have to do it in one day, which you can do. 01:29:00What else did we do? We had a list of all these different organizations and

not-for-profits that were signed onto our statement of equal rights. One of the

things about the paper was, we were noticing that a lot of newsletters, like

MCC's newsletter, if they were talking about people, they would say, "Many

thanks to John W. and Mary R.," and all these different things. And I said,

"We're not doing that in the paper. If you're not going to put your whole name

in, we're not putting your name in." We're going to put Liz Bradbury, we're not

going to put Liz B., because that's not what we do. We're proud of who we are.

If you're going to be the head of the Pride organization -- that actually

happened. The guy who was the head of Pride at the beginning in 1995, he

wouldn't let his name be in the newspaper. So, the Morning Call covered it as

the head of Pride. It had a picture of him, you can see it in the archives, of

just his torso with a shirt, but not his head, and not his name. It was John 01:30:00 F.

I said, "It's Pride. Pride. The word is pride." So, we made a decision we would

never do that. We'd say, "If you don't want to have your name in, then you don't

get any name in. You don't get any recognition."

The other thing we said was, we're not going to put any articles in for

for-profit businesses. If you have an event, say a bar has an event, it has to

benefit in some way at least 10 percent to a not-for-profit. So, if you're going

to have Lea DeLaria come, and you want me to advertise it, 10 percent of the

gain has to go to a not-for-profit that's signed on to this list of equal rights.

And it was everything from Turning Point, it could be anything. It just had to

be a pro-LGBT organization. And so, when we have this big list of things, there

were two organizations that you would think should have signed on that didn't,

and I made a big deal about this, too. One of them was 01:31:00WDIY. They would not sign

on. Their board was very, very anti. And after a while, Marcy Lightwood said,

"Why?" I would write periodically, "These are the two organizations that

wouldn't sign on, and we need to lobby them," and she was on the board.

She was actually a performer, she had a show, and she went to them and said,

"Why?" And they said, "Well, we think that we are supporting this group. We have

to have both sides." And she said, "There is no other side to civil rights." The

other organization was Godfrey Daniels, that absolutely would not. And one of

the things their board said was -- and get this, their board said, "We let them

perform on stage," in effect, "We let them dance for us. Look at how happy they

are, they're singing out in the fields. They can't eat at the table but they can

perform for us. 01:32:00We're going to support their rights."

And when we went to pass the antidiscrimination ordinance in the City of

Bethlehem in 2011, we couldn't get either of those organizations to sign on.

Godfrey Daniels would not sign on as one. And I was very vocal about that. And

people like Dena Hall and a couple of other people said, "But they're really pro

there," I said, "No, they're not. You can't have it both ways. You can't say,

'We let LBGT people there, there's LGBT people that work there,' unless they're

going to say, 'Sure, as an organization we believe that everybody should have

equal rights.' You can't get them to say that." She said, "Well, it's a matter

of opinion." I said, "Yeah. It is. This is my paper. Screw you."

So, one of the things that happened with the paper was, the paper was called the

Valley Free Press at the beginning. And after a while, when Bush, George Bush

won his second election, everybody was so discouraged by that because he was

such an asshole. It seems 01:33:00like nothing now. But he was so horrible that I said,

"I'm changing the paper's name to The Valley Gay Press. But the real name of the

paper will be The Valley Gay Press: the Lehigh Valley's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual,

and Transgender Opinion and Newspaper. So, that when people would say, "I want

you to put this article in because it's news," and I would say, "It's my opinion

that it's not news," or, "I don't have to put in something that I don't think is

going to help the community," I had an out for doing that.

And there were several instances, not a lot, but there were a couple of

instances where that happened. And part of it was like, when we were trying to

pass the ordinance, we were really trying to get people to come to the meetings.

And the person at that 01:34:00time who was in charge of Pride who is not around in the

community anymore, wanted to have a board meeting that night. I said, "Look,

this is the night of the passage of the ordinance and you want me to advertise

people to go to a different meeting? I can't do that. This is really, really

important." And she said, "Well, it's not going to pass anyway."

Well, it did, dammit. And I wouldn't put it in. And they said, "Well, you have

to put it in, it's news." I said, "No, I don't have to put it in, I can do

whatever I want because this is an opinion newspaper." And I did that on

purpose. But I also wanted to be sure that L, G, B, and T were totally included.

I think it even said it's A and there was a plus and everything, because

although I was calling it The Valley Gay Press, because I didn't want it to be

hidden, I didn't want the queerness of it to be hidden, I really wanted people

to understand that it was fully inclusive of everybody.

Another thing that was pretty important about this paper is that we had equal

readership between men and women. And I made a 01:35:00big effort to be sure that they

were men writing articles, and women writing articles, and people who identified

as trans writing article so that people wouldn't just say, "Well, this is really

just a gay man's rag," or, "This is a thing that's only about lesbian activism,"

or something. It wasn't like that. And it never came off that way. We always had

a very equal membership with the organizations, and also, representation in The

Valley Gay Press.

When we did the survey, we asked a question, and this was a few years into the

paper, and we sent it out to 1,000 people and we got about 400 responses, which

is pretty good for a survey. It was written responses, not online, and we gave

them envelopes to mail back. And of those, one of the questions we asked is, "Do

you go to a gay bar," and then it was a 01:36:00different amount of time, like almost

every night, every week, once a month, six times a year, and then it said, "Two

to three times a year, or never," and two to three times a year or never, 90

percent of the people who answered the questionnaire said that.

And I said, "People need to understand that you cannot get a wide demographic of

the LGBT community from a bar. You just can't. Even though people who are in the

bar think that's true, it's not. Hanging up a poster in the bar is not going to

let everybody see the poster." So, that helped us get a lot more of the

circulation of the information because we wanted to tell people what's the next

meeting of FACT, when is MCC's Christmas service, what's that going to be like?

Here's the Gay Men's Chorus, how do you get a part of that? And we really made

an effort to help other organizations start 01:37:00up and run. And that was one of the

main reasons that I really wanted that paper to do that.

And because of that, we had a very good relationship with all the other

organizations. I also made a decision to never say anything negative in the

paper -- not out of my mouth, but in the paper, about any organization that was

trying to do something good for the LGBT community. If they were trying to do it

even if I thought what they were doing was stupid and pointless and it wasn't

going to work I'd never write that in the paper. I would never say that in the

paper. I'd never run down anybody that way. And people would write me things and

they would say they did this thing and it was really discriminatory, and I would

say, "I don't know if that's really true. I'll talk to them about it. I'll try

to advocate for that." There was an LGBT support organization that was really

discriminating against 01:38:00young people really seriously, and it was clearly a bad

circumstance, and I didn't write any big articles about that, but I did lobby

them and say, "You can't really do this. You're breaking the law of the City of

Bethlehem, and we're not going to list you anymore because that's going against

our nondiscrimination policy, which has age as one of its nondiscriminatory

classes." But I wouldn't run it, and I made a decision to not do that.

Let's see, I had a big bulletin board in my office that had every issue on it so

that I could like, "When was that?" and I could look at it. My office was in a

different room. Let's see, I told people when to vote, but Pennsylvania

Diversity Network was a 501c3, so we couldn't endorse candidates anymore, but we

could talk about issues, and we could talk about what was happening, and what

people said, and we did that all the 01:39:00time. And I wrote obituaries in the paper

because that wouldn't come up in other papers. And I was already doing

trainings, then.

What other things did I want to say? We had no ads. At the very end, once Adrian

was on our board, he said we should have somebody sponsor each issue, so they

could pay a lump sum, and then we would put a thing in. They had to be a pro

LGBT organization. So, Air Products did it for six issues. And it did help us to

be able to get more money to run the paper. I have to say that I stopped doing

the paper when we started the community center. I was the programs coordinator

at the beginning, but Adrian said, "I want you to run the training institute,"

and I was doing that anyway. I was doing trainings. I had been doing that since

we started the Photo 01:40:00Project, which is another thing I'll talk about another

time, but we're coming close to the end, now.

Can we go till 12? Or is it too -- should we end? Can we go till 12?

MF: No, we have about 15 more minutes fine.

LB: Well, I can probably talk about that. One of the things we did, and I did it

through The Valley Gay Press was to create The Photo Project. And the Photo

Project, we just had this idea. We were going to go to a Freedom to Marry event.

And Pennsylvania Diversity Network was involved with every one of the Freedom to

Marry instances. The Metropolitan Community Church did that Freedom to Marry day

was in February, and we wanted to bring attention to the lack of marriage

equality in the United States. And Trish and I, we figured out that if we went

to Lehigh County to get a license to get married, that Lehigh County would keep

the license on file, but they would deny it.

In Northampton County, they would just not let you 01:41:00get the license. And in most

places, like in Texas, they would take it and tear it up in front of the people

to be extra mean. But in Lehigh County, we'd go to Lehigh County Courthouse,

you'd go in there, plunk down 35 dollars, fill out the whole thing, they would

stamp it "Denied," give us a copy, so that's in the archives, too, all these

copies that are denied, and then they would put that in their file, so, it's a

historical document. And we wanted to make that a historical document.

So, we made the decision from then on, once we realized that all the Freedom to

Marry actions would be all these people would be getting these licenses, and we

were the first ones to do that. And then, for seven years, people would go in

and they would plunk the money down, and they would get denied and then we'd all

go out and stand out and point to our wedding rings and do stuff about that.

Once we could be legally married in 2014, we stopped doing it, because there

wasn't any excuse. We didn't have to do Freedom to 01:42:00Marry anymore. And in fact,

once we didn't want to do Freedom to Marry anymore because we were legally

married in Connecticut, and we expected people to recognize that, but we have

all these denied certificates.

So, I got off the topic. What was I talking about? So, one of the things that

happened with the Freedom to Marry, we were going to go to a big Freedom to

Marry celebration, I think that was, and I said, "People don't understand."

There was a guy who was a football player and he was running for governor for

the State of Pennsylvania. He's a famous football player and I can't remember

his name, so that tells you everything. I'm not a sports dyke. Somebody said,

"Should there be a constitutional amendment against marriage in Pennsylvania to

keep same-sex couples from marrying in Pennsylvania?" And he said, "Yeah, that

has to get 01:43:00in there so that we can get them out."

And I thought, "Does this guy think that if this constitutional amendment is in

place, we will all just disappear?" We're all here. We're all in these

relationships. We have civil unions. We have all these different things. How

dare he suggest that. So, I said to Trish, "I want to do a Photo Project of

couples who would be public with their picture, and then underneath the picture,

their names, and their professions, how many years they've been together, when

we took the picture, and if they had any kids or grandkids.

They have to have their name on there and they'll have to fill out a form of

release and stuff." And she said, "I think we could do this." And I said, "Let's

see if we can get 25 couples at the end of Freedom to Marry." We had 01:44:0050 by the

end. In one day. We sat there and we talked about people who would do it, who we

knew would do it. And we had all these people.

Right away, we had 150 in no time. But we realized that there was a huge number

of white people and there weren't really a lot of people of color. So, we went

to Philadelphia to a big event, and we had a table there to give information

about our organization and what we were doing. I said, "I want to take pictures

of people, too," and Allison Hamm was volunteering for us and she said, "What do

you want me to do?" I said, "Go around and find people of color so that this

doesn't look like the Aryan same-sex couple party thing."

And there were lots of different people and we met Rich Spangler, and Ben

Renkus, 01:45:00who that year said, "We want to start a Pride Festival in Reading, will

you help us?" And we said, "Yeah, let's go to these meetings and talk about what

you need to do," and so, we did some stuff with them. And they did. And they ran

the Pride Festival for 15 years. This year didn't work out very well, not the

least of which because of COVID not being able to fix it up, but Rich died just

a couple weeks ago. But they had 15 wonderful Pride Festivals and I was at every one.

We met these people and we did that. And we came back and we started to just

gather all the pictures. I would get 20 or 30 or 40 pictures at every Pride

Festival. And ultimately, we had 900 photographs of same-sex couples, 1,800

people, of people in every different circumstance. And we got a grant. So, at

first, I had them in framed pictures with the matted thing and the picture was

in there [inaudible] are in the project. And we had them in lots of different 01:46:00places and we had them in different formats. And we actually had it you know at

the entrance of the Senate in Harrisburg on a day that they were voting on a

constitutional amendment.

And they tabled it. They didn't vote on it because there were 225 same sex

Pennsylvania couples' pictures in the hallway, right there, and they couldn't

miss it. It was very vocal and very out. We had it in over 150 venues in hard

copies. I also could project it. I was doing trainings on it. We ultimately got

a grant from PPL so that we could put multiple pictures on big things on stands.

I think the last time I had it in the frames, we had 375 pictures, and it was in

the Hicks Art Gallery at Bucks County Community College. It was magnificent. It

looked great. They were all 01:47:00framed. It took forever to put it up. It took three

days to put it up.

So, we created a new way of doing it where we would put it on easels, and we had

it at Lehigh on the easels there, in a big thing with all of the hundreds and

hundreds. Then, we had all 800 photos on that format, almost 900 photos. And

that was very, very successful. We had it in every place, from Knesset Israel,

the synagogue in Allentown, to Air Products, we had it at PPL, PPL gave us the

grant for the thing. We had it in many, many colleges. We had it in every one of

the Delaware Community Colleges. We moved it around to every Delaware Community

College. I think it was seven different colleges.

We had it at the Power and Light Company in Philadelphia. We had the whole thing

set up. It was very, 01:48:00very successful. One of the things that was so

significantly successful was that no one ever said anything negative about it.

What do you say about that? How dare those people love each other? How dare

those people be happy together and be long-term?

There were people that were together for 20, 30, 40, 50 years. There were huge

numbers of people that were together over 10 years. In fact, more than half of

the people were together over 10 years. But then, lots of cute little new

couples that had just been together for a few days, and they're so happy and

everything, and they're like, "Oh, I love this." And the pictures were

beautiful. Everybody was smiling.

I hit on this thing where, if people put their heads together, where they touch

their heads, they would automatically smile. So, everybody is happy. The biggest

criticism I ever got was, "Well, it's a lot of happy people. They're not legally

married." Fuck you. But I also had interspersed a lot of pieces 01:49:00of legal

information, other countries that had legal marriage, all this different kind of

stuff. It was very, very successful. It was a huge project that we did that was

very good. That was all done through Pennsylvania Diversity Network. We ran that

for 10 years until we got full marriage equality in the State of Pennsylvania.

So, Adrian came to me and he said, "You're going to do the training institute."

I'd been doing the trainings with the Photo Project for a long time. And he

said, "You're going to do the training institute." And I said, "Great. What do I

not have to do? I feel like I'm doing everything," and I wasn't getting paid. I

was only parttime. He said, "You don't have to do The Valley Gay Press anymore,"

which was enormously complicated. I was producing that paper six times a year. I

was editing 80 articles.

During the time I produced that paper, I produced, myself, over 400 articles on

LGBT issues, lots of them were researched. I wrote for other places, too. I

wrote for Pansy Press, I wrote for Diversity 01:50:00Rules, which is in New York State.

I wrote a column for Gaydar I wrote a column "Now," for Gay Journal. Before The

Valley Gay Press I wrote for Mick Chapple's Above Ground, I did that for years

and years, and it was very successful, I think. I'm not really trained as a

writer but I got good at it, because the more you do it the better you get at it.

One of the things that Bolton Winpenny said to me about the Pansy Press was,

"None of my articles are very interesting. The other people don't write very

interesting articles." I said, "Yeah, they don't research them. They just write

them off the top of their head. They muse on a point. Who cares, really?" That

gets old really fast. People want to learn things. And so, I really wanted the

articles that were in The Valley Gay Press to be something that people would

read it and go, "Huh," that was my thing.

And I wanted almost every 01:51:00article either like that, or, "Oh, look, Kathy Griffin

is coming to State Theater and we have a special gig for that," or, "We have

special tickets to Lily Tomlin," or something like that. Or, "An organization is

doing a special event that is important for the community," or, "The Pride

Festival is going to be on August 16th," people would want me to tell them when

the Pride Festival was because there wasn't any other way to find out what that

was. So, that was very, very successful and it turned out to be a really

positive thing.

We produced a thing that was The Library Project. And we got grants. And a

little bit of 01:52:00this was involved with Adrian doing this. He got some grants where

we could place really significant LGBT books in libraries. But one of the things

that we did was, there was a circumstance in Emmaus where a mom complained in

The Morning Call, I think it was a letter to the editor, that she went to Emmaus

and her little five-year-old child took out a book and when they got it home, it

was King and King.

And the book King and King is about a prince and his mother, the queen, wants

him to marry a princess, but he doesn't want to marry a princess, he wants to

marry a prince. And it's a beautiful book, actually. It's a great book to act

out, and it would be a great little theater book. I tried to get the rights to

do it. It was actually written in Switzerland. I couldn't get the people to

respond to me. But it's a brilliant book.

This woman made a big issue about it. So, what I did was, Trish and I created a 01:53:00program where, if you donated us 20 dollars, you could name any library and we

would make that library take a gift of King and King. We placed about 40 copies.

This woman goes, "How dare they have it in Emmaus," and now it's in 40

libraries. That was our thing. It was great. It worked out really well. They

said, "I want this in Parkland Library," and we'd call up Parkland Library, we'd

say, "This is a Caldecott Winner," and they'd say, "Sure." And we took it to

Easton Library, we took one to Wilson Library, we did it all over. It was really

great. And that was a big positive.

So, I just wanted to add this one thing that happened that's going back a little

bit. And it has to do with a lawsuit and all the ordinance passages, and even

back to Gail Hoover's election, and Julio Guridy. Julio is still on city council

now. We 01:54:00worked to get him a nomination and he supported our ordinance, and Gail,

of course, introduced the ordinance and stuff. Well, because that happened, Emma

Tropiano was not elected.

And I mentioned in a previous thing that Emma Tropiano was a terrible racist and

nobody could disagree with that. And she really was anti-gay and she

[inaudible]. She was horribly anti-Latino. She had been on council for 18 years.

She wasn't elected and a lesbian and a Latino man were elected. And when they

were installed into office in January of that year, which I think was 2002,

about five days later, Emma Tropiano died. And she wasn't old. She was 78. She

apparently died of a bowel obstruction, meaning she died of constipation, and I

think she could not live in a 01:55:00world where a Latino man and an out lesbian would

be on a city council that she tried to make so negative. It was a relief because

she had a following and I'm sure that she would not even be a Democrat anymore

if it were today.

The other thing that happened was that even after all of these different things,

when with the ordinance and we'd pass the ordinance and then the effort for the

referendum, referenda is still a possibility in the City of Allentown. And

although all the other people were really, really intimidated by the fact that

we had made them understand that they couldn't lie to have these ordinances

anymore, Frank McVeigh was tenacious.

And we really believe -- and I think he even said this at one point, "I'm just

going to do it again," that he was going to do the whole thing again, and we

would have to fight him forever. But while the 01:56:00lawsuit was going on, he was

hoping that the whole law would be overturned. But it wasn't overturned, and it

was kept in place. I think that was in 2005. And that year, he died. And I have

to say, again, he was also 78, he was a very robust man. I was surprised that he

died. When he did the work that he did, he had walked to everybody's house and everything.

And some person in his family or something wanted him to get the Human Relations

Award for the City of Allentown. I was the chair of the commission on it and we

just laughed out loud. We said, "Yeah, sure. Somebody who's trying to overturn

an ordinance that we passed in this committee and he wants to get an award for

taking people's rights away? I don't think so." And I told people at the time,

"I will tell you the whole story about Frank McVeigh," because some people on

the commission then didn't understand. And then I said, "I don't 01:57:00want to talk

about it, it's too much." But I was greatly relieved because I have to say that

I did think that he was so mean and maniacal, that he was going to go on

forever. He was just going to keep doing it. And he was gone.

LB: So, on that note I'm done with this for this time. I think I covered

everything but I wrote some stuff down, so we'll see.

MF: It was just wonderful, Liz. It was really wonderful to hear the stories

about that lawsuit, but then to really think about The Valley Gay Press and its

impact. I guess I didn't realize it was 18 years.

LB: Yes, 18 years.

MF: That is amazing.

LB: Let me say that we had a grant to distribute The Valley Gay Press. At one

point, we got a grant from Berks County. And so, it went into Berks County, and

we changed it to "Lehigh Valley and Berks County," and it was in distribution to

all of the libraries in Berks 01:58:00County. We mailed them to libraries in Berks

County for years and years and years. We also mailed them to a lot of other

libraries, and a lot of other drop off places. So, we didn't just mail them

direct to people. We mailed them direct to, ultimately it ended up being 300 or

400 people when we were doing it.

When we did it through PA Gala, it was thousands of people. But once we had all

the drop-off points that we did in the libraries, we would get responses from

people that would say, "I saw this in the library and it was so exciting because

this community, this rural community where this library is in Berks County, I

was astounded that it would be there." I said, "Libraries are subversive

places," and they are. But there was a membership form in there and then we

would get the torn-out membership form and then they would get it so it was

mailed directly to their house.

And bringing that information to people and people would say, "I 01:59:00read every

single word of that paper, every month." And the most hilarious thing was that

people would quote me to me. So, they'd say, "I just heard this thing," and then

they'd make this quote and then I'd go, "Yeah, I wrote that." Because it was

about something that was happening in Allentown.

PATRICIA SULLIVAN: They couldn't tell us apart.

LB: And Trish really wants this, this is a big thing. Everything we did in The

Valley Gay Press was very calculated. And we would place things in certain

places, and all of a sudden we realized that people we knew well just didn't

know us apart. They didn't know us apart, and they couldn't tell which one was

Liz, and which one was Trish. And for the most part, we're pretty interchangeable.

But we'd have to do a bulk mailing every time we did this. I should say this

quickly. We would take the papers at the end, the last six or seven years, I'd 02:00:00finish the paper usually all night, in the morning, we would take it to EBC,

which was the printer in Trexlertown, and they would print the papers through

the presses, and as they came off the presses, we would grab the paper and fold

it and put it in the envelope, and lick it, and stick it, and put it together.

And we could do it as fast as the machine would do it.

So, we could do a 400-piece mailing in the time it took for it to be printed.

And then it would be ready to go. We'd put it in the big balers that you take to

bulk mailing, and we'd go directly to the bulk mail place, and we would take it

to Jerry in bulk mailing. And here's an interesting thing, is that almost

everybody that works in bulk mailing is gay. I don't know why that is. But they

were either gay or really, really pro.

Sometimes, when we were doing political mailings and we'd had to put stamps on a

little short, they would look around, they'd be behind the desk, and they'd look

around, and then 02:01:00if there was nobody else, they'd come out and help us put the

stamps on because they were our team. It was so great. And so, this woman Jerri,

comes out. Ultimately, people couldn't tell us apart, so we put our pictures --

and I did this for everybody, but I put my picture on my column, and Trish's

picture on her column. I did it with the other folks, too, so the people would

know who we were.

So, Jerri gets the thing, and everybody had -- they always got us wrong. So,

Jerri opens it up and she goes, "You have your pictures wrong." I said, "No,

that's really our names. I'm Liz, this is Trish," and I think hundreds of people

were opening it and going, "Oh, that one's Liz and that one's Trish." So, Trish

thinks that's really funny. It was really, really hilarious. So, that kind of

stuff would happen. We were doing this stuff every day and people would say, "I

volunteer for a 02:02:00day," like I pretty much volunteer all day, every day. It was a

full-time thing. So, anyway. That's it. Is there anything else to throw in?

Trish is saying no.

MF: Well, it's such a pleasure to talk with you today. We'll set up another

meeting. But we'll stay after and talk a minute after I stop the recording, but

I just want to thank you now for giving me another two hours of your time. I

really appreciate it.

LB: Yes. Okay.