David Moyer Part 2, February 11, 2022

INTERVIEW WITH DAVID MOYER FEBRUARY 11, 2022

MF: My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with David Moyer to talk about his life

and experience in LGBTQ organizations in the Lehigh Valley as a part of the

Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This year, our project has

funding from ACLS, and David and I are meeting at Trexler Library at Muhlenberg

College on February 11, 2022. So, David, thank you again for speaking to me

today. DM: My pleasure.

MF: We signed a consent form before we began, but I just want to go back through

just a few consent questions. Do you consent to this interview today?

DM: I do.

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

publicly available online?

DM: I do.

MF: Do you consent to the archive using your interview for educational purposes

in other formats like films, articles, websites, presentations?

DM: I do.

MF: And do you understand that 00:01:00you'll have 30 days after I give you the

transcript of this interview to identify parts that you want to delete or to

withdraw the interview from the project entirely?

DM: I do.

MF: Great. So this is our second interview, I'm so excited to be back with you

today and we ended our last interview with a discussion of your marriage, so I

thought we'd start there. Could you tell me a little bit about your marriage and

that first year of married life?

DM: Oh, sure, yeah. The main reason that we got married was because my former

wife was pregnant, and that was a long story I think, which is part -- in the

first part. But what I didn't get to say was we had -- well, we had a military

wedding. It was a Lakehurst, New Jersey, and it was the Chapel of the 00:02:00Air on the base.

It was small, we were only supposed to have a hundred people there -- well we

had about a hundred people for the wedding itself, and it was only supposed to a

hundred people for the reception, but unfortunately, it also happened to be a

weekend that my unit that I was still a part of was drilling that weekend as well.

So there were probably about, close to 300 other people there, and they just

casually crashed the reception, which was fine, I mean nobody got upset at that.

But one of the things too that you don't see in traditional weddings is that my

then sister-in-law and brother-in-law, my wife's sister and 00:03:00brother-in-law, they

really -- their wedding gift was the wedding. They paid for everything other

than the marriage license, the blood test, and the rings. But they also paid for

the honeymoon, and the entire wedding party went to Atlantic for the honeymoon.

We got down there, Betsy and I were supposed to have the bridal suite, and Will

and Donna were going to just have the other room. Betsy could've cared less

about the wedding suite, so she said, "The two of you take it, we're fine where

we are, we'll do that," sorry for [inaudible]. That's what we did and then we

met down in the casino, and I -- there's a lot of things that I know remember. I

don't remember the name of the casino that we stayed 00:04:00at. It was not Trump, and

it wasn't any -- it was some awful mall one.

But anyway, so we went down in their dining area, and we had something to eat,

and Betsy wanted to go gamble, so her and Donna went gambling, and Will and I

went barhopping because we knew the bars. So that's what we did and then I don't

know what time they got back to their room, but Will and I got back later,

pretty well lit.

We slept in and get up in the morning, met downstairs, checked out, and then we

found a diner. We didn't want to have food in the casino area, so we just did

that and then we drove back to Lakehurst, and they got in their car and went

back up to New York, and we came back to Pennsylvania. So that was the 00:05:00honeymoon adventure.

Well often, Will and I would go up to New York because they were living in

Yorktown Heights at the time in Upstate New York, and we would go up for the

weekend. We spent a couple of times there. I would go up more than Will would

because he had to work sometimes on the weekends, and that went on until -- that

was March of '88.

Our daughter was born April 4th of '88, and she was premature, and she was

supposed to have been born in October, I don't remember the time. She was like

eight or nine weeks early, she was really a preemie, so she spent several months

in the hospital 00:06:00before they'll let her home, well until she reached the right

weight. So we would go up on weekends.

We didn't go to bars. I don't think I was in any gay bar up in the area where

they lived because there weren't any that we knew of. And we didn't need to go

to the bars because we would drink at home, and that was it. And that went on

for -- the marriage was -- ended in 1996, and that's another story in itself,

which I really don't want to get into in here. But in that time frame, I was

still working at Olin. 00:07:00Now, I had started at Olin Corporation in 1972, and they closed in October of

1988, it was just a few months after our daughter was born. And the bad thing

about that was the day I lost my full-time job at Olin, I also lost my part-time

job as an aerobics instructor and fitness instructor with the Body Factory, and

they were located in Whitehall at the time, so I had no income.

Well, the only income I had was my reserve time, and that was once a month, so

it wasn't very much. The interesting thing is that one of my aerobic students at

that time had worked for the Morning 00:08:00Call, and she was one of two reporters,

health reporters for the city. And Rose knew about my medical background, that I

was a nurse, and all that so she said, "There's a position that's opened up at

the -- in the city of Allentown at the health department that you might be good

at." She's like, "And I don't know that you might -- " she says, "I know you're

really good at it," so she gave me the information of who to go see in that.

So I walked in, and at that time, the health department was located above the

central firehouse on Chew Street between Seventh and Eighth, and they were on

the second floor. So I went in, and I spoke to the clerk -- one of the clerks

that was there because they had a whole bank of clerks for different departments

there. And I said, "I was told that there's a position open in the city that I

might be interested 00:09:00in, it was in HIV/AIDS," and they said, "Well, Ann isn't

here at the time," -- she was the director, Ann Taylor, not the clothing

designer, I know, -- "but she'll be back after lunch."

I left, I came back, and I was just coming in to inquire and sat down with Ann

and just that brief talk wound up being a three-hour interview, and I said, "I

don't have a resume." I had a resume, but I had it for being a fitness

instructor because I also had that, and that's really what I wanted to do, I

wanted to continue being the aerobic instructor in that because you never --

look at me now, but anyway.

So she said, "Well, [Linnie?] if you can 00:10:00get a resume to me by such and such a

date, we can consider that." So I had to go home, and at that time, we didn't

have the computers, we had the regular typewriters, and I had to go and make a

resume, which I took back. And then she said, "Are you available to talk to

another person here?" and I said, "Sure," so there was another two-hour discussion.

Now, they had already hired one person for the department because they were just

starting up their HIV counseling and testing. The health [inaudible] was

counseling and testing with all the nurses that were there because they didn't

have an HIV/AIDS department at that time.

So they had another Hispanic woman, Linda, and they had another person in mind

who was also a Hispanic man, and they really wanted somebody who can speak

Spanish because of the 00:11:00population. Unfortunately, I don't speak any Spanish --

well I do, but they're all dirty words but that's neither here or there, but I

knew how to draw blood. That was the thing that got me in was that I could do

that and I had that medical background, so, and we were hired.

At that time, we were hired as independent contractors for the city, and the

city was union. So I got hired, and I guess about two years into the job,

somebody in the union got word that all these people -- because a lot of the

people that worked for the health department at that time were considered

contract employees, most of them were, and that was a no-no. And the union said

that "You either need to make these people employees or you need to get rid of

them." And 00:12:00these are all grant-funded programs, and they're not about to lose

all this grant money, so they hired us.

They grandfathered most of the thing, but they didn't grandfather the time that

we had there, so I lost two years of that, so I was a city employee. And prior

to that, I knew what was going on with -- I knew that -- I knew about HIV and

AIDS, but I didn't know a whole lot of what was going on because we really

hadn't started testing yet in the military. And one of the things that really

helped me and my coworker Linda is that they actually sent us down to the CDC in

Atlanta, Georgia, for our formal training of how to do that -- how to do testing

-- counseling and 00:13:00testing, which was excellent.

I'm working and I'm doing counseling and testing but not really knowing a whole

lot, still learning more about this transmission and all that good stuff because

now we can test. So really what I'd like to do before I get further is to go

back and give a little history about HIV in the area. And I do apologize, I have

this written down, and I really want to get it right, so bear with me if

[inaudible] here, so...

Let me take you back to the start of HIV/AIDS, and this may help paint a better

picture of what was happening in Allentown back in the day. On June 5th of 1981,

the 00:14:00CDC, Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, reported a few cases of

a rare disease in young, gay men and intravenous drugs users. The symptoms such

as Kaposi's sarcoma and Pneumocystis pneumonia, they're generally usually seen

in older individuals.

The pneumonia is typically seen in patients who were static from surgery, so

they have to be flat and not moved, and that they would develop this

Pneumocystis pneumonia, which is in the lungs. And then the other form with the

Kaposi, it' a form of cancer that is usually seen in elderly, Mediterranean men,

now -- and that can be internal or external. What happens is it leaves these --

looks like black and blue marks on the body like the person was beat-up, and

those black and blue marks can be either internal 00:15:00or external.

No one knew how or where it started; we just knew it was beginning to spread.

Everyone was scared, hospitals were starting to see more and more young men with

these conditions. There was no definite treatment or medications available.

Doctors were not even certain how it was being transmitted, so a lot of

quarantine procedures were set into place.

Some hospitals were using full-body suits to go into patients' rooms. A protocol

of no physical contact with patients was placed -- put into place and -- with

big signs on the doors. Food trays and even bed linens and gowns were placed

just outside the doors, and the patients, if they were able, had to fend for

themselves if they were not bedridden, and a lot of times, the patients were

dying, and they were dying alone. No one wanted to go near those 00:16:00 people.

The first few years of HIV were the worst for everyone. There wasn't a name for

it at this time for this condition, as yet a blood test had not been devised,

and they were starting to call it HTLV-III, later that was renamed GRID,

gay-related infectious disease. And at the time, the gay people were starting to

be discriminated against even more. We were the carriers and the cause of this

disease. It was God's wrath because we were all bad people, and we deserved what

God had placed upon us, all gays and all drug users deserved to die.

Organizations were starting to spring up in response to the AIDS crisis, ACT UP,

which was the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, and the GMHC, Gay Men's Health

Crisis Center, and they were located primarily in New 00:17:00York. And they were all

working to help find out more about this condition and to help those infected --

and affect -- infected men affected by HIV/AIDS. Because of these organizations

and their push to find out more about what was happening to this -- to their

community, we now had a test to determine what we were fighting -- a virus,

specifically HIV, human immunodeficiency virus.

We had our first medication, AZT, we know definitely how this virus is and is

not transmitted, and yet, people were still getting infected, people were still

dying, and now the virus had crept into the mainstream heterosexual population.

Straight women, straight men, and babies were getting infected. We were seeing

more progress -- some progress, but we still did not have enough. Our friends

were dying, and there was no 00:18:00one there to intervene for them.

So fast-forward to 19 -- the years 1985, '86 in Allentown, Pennsylvania. A group

of concerned citizens mostly from the Stonewall Bar, Candida's Bar, and Jeff's

City Line Pub, and the patrons who supported these establishments, these people

live and work in Lehigh Valley formed what is known as FACT, Fighting AIDS

Continuously Together.

They held an event called The FACT Bar Games, which was held in the gay resort

in the Poconos at Rainbow Mountain. That was the summer of 1986. This was all

due to the AIDS crisis in the Lehigh Valley. I had heard about FACT, but I

really didn't know or participate in any of their fundraising events.

So I knew about them, but I didn't participate because I 00:19:00wasn't out-out with

that part, but I had friends. And back then, you had a group of friends that you

had dinner with, you partied with, you went here and there. Occasionally, you'd

go to the bar, but if you were single and didn't have anybody, that's who you

leave when you went to the bar, that's when you had the bar scene but...

So I knew about it, and now we were testing in the military, and it scared the

hell out of me because the first time I got tested, because I was very

promiscuous, very promiscuous. To this day, I still don't know how I dodged the

bullet, so to speak. I was tested last year just for the sake of getting tested

even though I haven't been active in quite a few 00:20:00years. But I know I needed to

get more involved, so... There were people that were coming in to the health

department for testing who knew about FACT, and they had said that maybe I

should go to a meeting or something, an event or I should go to an event, that's

what it was.

Eighty-six, I think it was the fourth or fifth Summer Games that was up at

Rainbow Mountain, so I was invited to come up and have a table -- a display

table from the health department and promote it. A lot of gay men didn't want to

go to the health department because we were looked at 00:21:00as the health police,

still are.

It's gotten better, but I think one of the things that helped is that they had a

gay man working in the health department doing this that they could trust. And I

think that really helped at least get to where that we, hey, there's somebody

there that you can go to, you could ask for, and you could feel comfortable with.

So I decided that we need to do testing up at the Summer games. It's a safe

place, everybody's -- there is an LGBT part of the community, and what a better

place to do this, so I started doing testing up there. The games always started

at noon and always ended at 6:00, 00:22:00and that first year that I had tested, I was

still testing at ten o'clock at night, and back then, it still took two weeks

for test results.

Now we're up in Rainbow Mountain, up in Carbon County or Monroe County, I'm not

sure where -- yeah, Monroe County but you had to come back to Allentown to get

your test results, so, which is what they did. We tested up there and like the

following week I said, "If we're going to do this, I need help." I said, "We

need more than just me doing the counseling and testing," and I said, "We really

need to have somebody that's just going to be able to draw blood," so that's

what we did.

So we started just having a phlebotomist full time with us even though we could

all draw blood, which just makes it so much easier when you have that amount of

people that you can just keep testing and educating and doing that 00:23:00 stuff.

So I think it was about 1992, I went to -- I was asked to come to a board

meeting, which is what I did, and that time they were meeting at -- in one of

the meeting rooms at what was then the Hilton at Ninth and Hamilton, and they

had probably 25 people on their board at that time. We're down to 13 now at present.

So they asked me if I wanted to join the board, and I said, "Sure, why not?" By

now, I have lost some people and -- but my first -- first person I had lost even

before I got into -- with the city, I was still 00:24:00working at Olin, and a good

friend of mine, his name was Chuck, would always go to Atlantic City for the summer.

My late husband and I were walking into the Rendezvous bar down in Atlantic

City, and Chuck was coming out of the bar, and this is in the daytime around

noon or so. And he had all these black and blue marks all over him, and I said

look, I said, "Wow," I said, "you get into a fight?" He said, "No," he says,

"they're -- it's called Kaposi's, and the doctor thinks that I need to be more

in the sun" and then like two months later, he was dead.

And I think this is really, really what got me 00:25:00more into the activism part was

the Lark Inn, which was one of the big bars in Atlantic City, they knew Chuck,

and they did a fundraiser for him to help pay for funeral and all that good

stuff. I think this is something that I can get behind and that I -- not that I

can get behind, that I need to get behind. So that's probably the first part of

my activism, which is small steps.

So I joined the FACT board, and they were still not sure if I was gay or

straight because I didn't say I was gay or straight, they knew I was married and

had a daughter. And it happened to be at one of the Summer games that we were up

at -- and we were all having dinner together, 00:26:00and I started talking about my

partner Will.

And they just tilt their head like, "Well," -- [coughs] -- excuse me, "what --

what's the story here, are you gay, are you straight, are you bi?" I said,

"Well, I've been all three," but I said, "but I'm gay, I'm gay," and I said,

"the person that I'm with is the person that I'm with," which is Will. My wife

and I got divorced in 1996, and like I said, that's another story maybe for

another time, but...

So then he started coming to events with me and he -- we would decorate, and he

was part of the -- excuse me [coughs] -- part of the decorating crew. And they

called him Balloon Man because he had 00:27:00the helium tank, and he had all the

balloons, and he would just whip these all out and get balloons all over the place.

So I joined the board, and then one of the members of the board had passed away

from AIDS, and he was the education chair, that was, that was Tom. And I said,

"Hey, if you need a new education chair, here I am." I said, "It's what I do,

it's one of the jobs that I do in my job description."

So I've been doing all of the education for FACT since 1992. Of course, I'm

still on the board, and they would not let me go. And then we had a former 00:28:00president -- a former board member, and she passed away -- not from AIDS, but

she had passed away. She was the treasurer of the organization which she was

also what was called a contingency chairperson. And the contingency chairperson

is the one that does all of the funding for clients, and I'll explain that a

little more down the road here. So I said, "Let me do that."

MF: Hi, I'm Mary, I'm back with David Moyer. We just took a quick break, and

David was telling us a little bit about his work with FACT on the -- directly

the educational mission for that organization. And I'm going to turn it back

over to him to talk a little bit about FACT's organizational structure and his

work with that.

DM: Yeah, oh, thank you. Well, FACT, like I said, 00:29:00started -- was really started

in 1986 -- '85--'86 with our -- for the LGBT community because nothing was being

done for their friends that were passing from AIDS. So their first events --

first event was this game up in -- a bar game up in -- at Rainbow Mountain in

the Poconos. And at that time, we had a lot of bars, so we had the Stonewall

Bar, we had Candida's, we had Jeff's City Line Pub, we had the Red Star from

Reading, we had the Glass Door, we had Blue Bugle up in the Stroudsburg area.

So they would all compete for a trophy but also to raise money. I think it was

like $15, which is still 00:30:00a steal today. We have not raised our prices since 1986

for the Summer games itself. It's a good event because you do -- you have

vendors, all different kinds of vendors, you have organizations, the other AIDS

organizations at that time. And we had plenty of them back in the day who would

bring in their literature and things that they would sell like T-shirts or ads

or things like that as did FACT, we had our own. We would sell these shirts like

I'm wearing, we have hats, we have keychains, we have all kinds of stuff.

And one year, AIDS Outreach, which is no more, they sold tree 00:31:00saplings, and you

could plant the trees, so there's a lot of trees that are planted up at Rainbow

Mountain that are still there, and you dedicated them in somebody that you knew

that had passed from AIDS. So there's trees planted there, there's trees planted

up at my house, I have two there, and at some of the gay campgrounds, Camp

Oneida, which is up near the border of Pennsylvania and New York State, I have

trees planted there, there's trees planted at Hillside. I don't think there's

planted any at The Woods Campground because this -- that was way too early for that.

So there's different committees in the 00:32:00organization. We have structure, we have

a president, we have a vice president, we have a secretary, we have a treasurer,

those are the four main. At present time, we have two co-chairs for the vice

chair and then we have, like I said, the others there. Personally, I have been

president twice, I've been vice president twice, I have been secretary three

times now because I'm now the current secretary besides being the -- contingency

and education chairperson. I've never been treasurer and I'm -- never will be

because I can't balance my own checkbook, but anyway, that's neither here nor there.

But FACT itself, we became incorporated as a 501[c][3] nonprofit. We are the

only 00:33:00agency still alive today that receives no city, state, or federal funding.

All the monies that we raise are raised through grassroots efforts, and that can

be through -- back in the day, we did house parties. Like I would have a house

party at my house, and maybe it was the start for that night of the house parties.

Maybe we would just do hors d'oeuvres and you'd go from there to maybe your

house where you would have drinks and then go somewhere else for -- or you do

the whole thing. You had the option of saying, okay, I'm going to charge $5,

$10, $25, $50, or you just put a big fishbowl out 00:34:00and put in what you can, and

then all that money comes back to FACT. That was one way of doing it.

And then there's bingos that we have; we continue to do bingos, we have wise --

wine tasting events, we still have the Summer games. There may be things during

the year like Pride. We would rent a bus to go up to Pride in New York, and you

could do whatever you want. We also have that in December for pre-Christmas. You

can go out in December and holiday shop or go to a show or do whatever you want

to do.

We had one board member who was very creative 00:35:00in writing murder mysteries, and

they were interactive murder mysteries, really, really good, Bruce Brown. And

Bruce still does radio shows here in -- at the Red Door from Muhlenberg College,

and he's done several of those.

The highlight of our year is our Snowball, and that's always in -- around World

AIDS Day. We had not raised the price on that either in years, but we're looking

at that now maybe upping some things. Membership, we've [inaudible] our

membership. There's different levels of membership that you can get there as

well. And like I said, the education component, we always have that 00:36:00at an event.

Whether we're doing bingo for Pride, we always have an information table along

with condoms and dental dams and lubrication and all that good stuff that -- for

safe sex. We're still promoting safe sex. Even this day and age, we still need

to do that.

One of things that I had incorporated in was being that I work for the health

department, I was able to go more places, and one of the big educational

components for me was in the prison. And we were in the prison every Thursday to

do education on a different unit because they had 12 different units in the

local prison here, and then we would get people to sign up for testing, then we

would go in on a 00:37:00Friday with our crew and just do testing.

And then if we had tested the week before, then one of us would just go to the

unit and do the test results in the unit. Unless there was a positive, then we

had to bring that person down and do that in the medical department area because

everybody will be warned about this is going to happen in case the person

freaked out or whatever, and so, and luckily, that never happened.

And then one of the big things in the last couple of years, of course the last

couple of years because of COVID, we were able to do this, is that two of the

State Reps Pete Schweyer and -- oh, my goodness, his name just went out of my

head -- Mike Schlossberg, they hold a senior fest over in the 00:38:00east side of

Allentown, and they've invited us -- FACT to be there for education because just

because you're old doesn't mean you're not frisky. [laughs] So we have condoms

available there too, and it's amazing the amount of people that stop.

But one of the things that we did also to entice people to come in at our table

is we do blood pressures so we -- because we can't do testing there. But we do

blood pressures, so we can do that, and we can talk to the person. And even if

they're not active, if they have grandchildren, we say, "Here, take a party pack

for your grandson or granddaughter or whatever."

And then I've also done several programs for -- at the Bradbury-Sullivan Center

for their Silk group, their 00:39:00teens. And I've also done programs at William Allen

High School and Dieruff. In fact, I was doing educational programs outside of

Lehigh County when I was with the city and then that had to stop because we're

encroaching in somebody else's territory, unless we get permission from the

county to come in and do that, so... So the education is -- still is ongoing. I

have a good friend Hollis who is part of the NAACP here in Lehigh Valley, and we

did a very big program for their group. So where we're needed, we go.

Probably around 1992, 00:40:00'93, we -- not us but a FACT Bucks County chapter was

formed, and they're in New Hope, located in New Hope. So they're our sister

chapter, they're still going strong, and sometimes we do events together, but

most of the part, they do their thing, and we do our thing.

Another thing that's -- that -- and I need to say this, is that even though we

support -- FACT supports the LGBT community, we are not recognized as an LGBT

organization because we have both straight and gay people on our board, and

that's important for people to know. I mean the majority of us are gay but -- 00:41:00well, because we don't know.

One of the things too is that especially with the contingencies, which I'll

start talking about now, is that the -- what the contingency request is case

managers at Lehigh Valley Hospital in St. Luke's, they both have an HIV/AIDS

department, and they have case managers in those departments, and they have

clients -- obviously, they have clients.

So FACT was designed to help people who are infect-- that were infected by

HIV/AIDS. [We do not know who we are helping. All we know is that the person is

either infected or affected by HIV/AIDS. So you can be straight, you can be gay,

you can be asexual, you can be black, 00:42:00white, male, female, doesn't matter who

you are, if you need help and we can help, we do.

Now early on in the disease, we had a lot of different categories that we were

-- would fund. And in fact, we had a lot of money early on that we were able to

help support the -- not necessarily the hospitals, but the other AIDS

organizations with grants so that they could expand their organization. But with

the way things have been occurring, we don't do that anymore.

But we would help with rental, insurance, mortgage, drugs and medications are

drugs and 00:43:00medications covered by the special pharmaceuticals benefits program

that the state puts out, household items like maybe in the summer you need an

air conditioner, and we always had a supply of air conditioners handy at the

office they'd just take one, heating. And that's changed now because we have the

LIHEAP program, which is energy conservation for people with low income or no income.

Auto repair, some forms of transportation like for a person to get from -- they

have bus passes to get from their home to an employment because they didn't have

a car, and then the big one was the funeral expense, and we have all of those

categories for 00:44:00years. And we're in the process of changing -- well, we've

changed a lot of those. There's a lot of those that we don't fund anymore

because we don't need to. And now when COVID hit, nothing was being funded per

se, nothing was being funded. The only thing that we were funding were funerals.

And when we look at what's happened over the last two years plus, there isn't a

need for any of those other categories anymore other than the funeral expense.

So that's the only thing that we're going to be funding are funerals, and we'll

be upping the amount because each category had their amount.

You could apply to FACT twice in one calendar year and then you could come back

the following year if you needed something, and we could do that 00:45:00again. The

clients really are encouraged to find ways of being able to support themselves

because we're -- we really are considered the funders of last resort.

They'd go, the hospital would do some things because they have special funding

for their clients whether it's for HIV or AIDS or it could be a whole bunch of

other things, but they have those. Or they can go to AIDSNET, and AIDSNET serves

a six-county area. They do Lehigh, Northampton, Carbon, Monroe, Schuylkill and

Berks County, and they'll fund some things too that the hospitals won't be able

to fund, and if they can't fund them, then they come to FACT.

But none of those organizations will -- are able to fund 00:46:00funerals and so we're

-- that's where we're going to be at right now is funerals. And I know that

we're in the beginning of 2022, and we've already had four funerals this year

that we're funding. So that's pretty much where FACT is. We're the only

organization left. We had tons of organizations in the area, which were needed

at the time, and now with how the face of AIDS has changed, they really weren't

-- aren't needed anymore.

The one major one that I really was involved with was AIDS Outreach, and they

were the first organization to 00:47:00do -- and they were the first religious

organization to do anything and that was -- they -- that stemmed out of the

Episcopal church. And they started down in Easton before they moved to

Allentown, and they had what was called the Buddy program.

The Buddy program was you were trained -- you would come in, and you were

trained. You had -- it was like a two- to three-week course, usually on the

weekend, and you learned different aspects of HIV/AIDS and care, and that was

one of the things that I did. I did the education part for their clients. Once

they finished and were graduated, then you would be assigned to somebody that

was diagnosed with HIV or AIDS. You stayed with that person -- not physically

stayed with that person but you stayed with that person until they 00:48:00 died.

You would take them to appointments, you would -- if you had to feed them, bathe

them, whatever you had to do, that's what you did for that patient. Once that

patient died, you couldn't do anything for a year. You needed to have that year

off to regroup yourself and then you can come back if you wanted to. And they

were located then out of -- when they moved from Trinity Episcopal Church in

Easton, they moved to Grace Episcopal Church which is my home church here. And

they were there until 2000 and--either 7 or 8 is when they closed, so, yeah,

they 00:49:00 closed.

Gilead House, which was on the state hospital grounds of Allentown, they just

had gotten started and then they closed down. Berks AIDS Network, which is

called BAN, they're out of Reading, they've changed their whole dynamics and I

think they're doing just more than just HIV/AIDS. We used to have a Latino AIDS

outreach, which we don't have anymore. They were located -- they started in

Bethlehem, they moved to Allentown. We still have HAO, Hispanic AIDS

Organization. I think they're located down where the old -- where the original

Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce, it's at Fifth and 00:50:00Walnut. I'm trying to think

if we have any other organizations.

There is still a couple, but we had back -- back in the day, we had the AIDS

Task Force, and we had about 30 different organizations that were part of that,

a lot of church, the hospitals. [Rick Hoss?] was part of that, the blood banks

were part of that. There were so many organizations back in the day, which were needed.

And then you had the upspring of the AIDS organizations here, the -- not the

AIDS organizations, the LGBT organizations. Le-Hi-Ho, Lambda, and finally with

the Bradbury-Sullivan Center, which has done a lot of great stuff for the area 00:51:00here of -- they've helped me a lot especially with the loss of my husband. Then

we just keep going.

One of the things that I do in my presentations is I always end my talks with

one of my favorite movies is, and one of the first Hollywood big movies was

called Longtime Companion, and it takes place in New York and primarily like in

Fire Island, in that area. And the main character, his name is Willy, and there

was a whole group of his friends that always would get together and like people

still do. But he was the only one left, all his friends had died, and he's

walking on the beach in Fire Island, 00:52:00and the last line of the movie is, "All I

want is a cure and my friends back," and that's how I feel. I hate this disease.

I'm sorry, but [sighs] it's tough.

Back in the day, you had to know somebody or know where things were if you were

to go and meet somebody or hook up. We don't have that now. We have -- maybe I

shouldn't say we don't have that now, we don't. I'd say that we need it now, but

we have the internet. The internet has changed everything for everybody, not

just the gay community, but for 00:53:00everybody. You'd go to the bar and hopefully you

meet somebody and maybe get lucky and go home. Now you can sit in the comfort of

your living room in your pajamas or underwear or naked and cruise somebody on a

website and have cybersex, which is safe, but it's not fun. [laughter]

We had in the day -- this was our internet, I wanted to show this. It's called

The Damron Book, address book. If you were gay and in the know and you were a

traveler, that this is what you wanted because if you were going to go to... I'm

just going to pick out one in here -- Massachusetts, and I was going to go to

um, 00:54:00uh -- where we could go here, oh jeez -- Brockton, Massachusetts, there's an

area that says cruisy areas, so this is where you can go, and that's where you

would look at. Or you go to Chelsea, Massachusetts, there was only one bar

John's, and it was mixed, but it was mostly men, some women, and there's a code.

So you could tell if you -- let me see if I can get in here. There's a key code,

if you were looking for alcohol, beer, and wine, if there was a B in there, it

was multiracial clientele; if you were into leather, there would be an L there

for leather; N, 00:55:00nudity because there are some bars that you could be nude in, I

know that for a fact, it's down in New Orleans, SW had a swimming pool, okay, yeah.

So let's see or YC, young and college type. You could know where to go and what

you're going to be looking for. And I always had mine with me because I travel a

lot. Especially in the military, it's something that I had to hide, I really had

to keep that hidden because if that would've come out, I would've been out. But

then we get to a point where I would go to -- my unit would go a lot to

Gulfport, Mississippi.

There's a base down in Gulfport, and it's only like 70 miles from New Orleans.

And fortunately, I had a friend who lived in 00:56:00Quakertown, and he had moved to New

Orleans. His daughter was there, she opened up a -- her version of the Christmas

trees store, and so was all Christmas, right, just a bunch, she was also a

lesbian. And he was very creative, so he would make stuff for her to sell in the store.

When I knew that my unit was going to be going down there, I would contact him

and say, "Pete, I'm going to be in the area, do you got room for me?" So he

says, "Yeah, yeah, just let me know when you get here and then -- so he would

take me to all the places that I didn't have to -- I didn't need the book

because he had it firsthand in that.

But there were some wild bars down there that's -- I was very bad and very, very

bad. 00:57:00It's just changed, and I don't know how the younger crowd is really coping

with that. This is something that we lived through and had to find our way

through because we didn't have the stuff that we have now. And I don't know if

that's -- for me, I don't think that's fun, you need to be out there and

experience. So for the future of the LGBT community, I have no idea what it's

going to look like in 10 years.

I mean we thrived here in the Lehigh Valley, we had all these bars, we had --

the cruising place is still there, but you would have to be careful there

because of the police 00:58:00now. It wasn't like it was back in our days. We would

drive around and around, and I'd mentioned this before with my friend Tommy and

Eddie, we would drive around for hours just cruising, yeah, not necessarily

picking anybody up, but you can do that. You can't do that because you see the

signs, no, no cruising 7:00 to 10:00 pm. on this street or no cruising 6:00 to

9:00 p.m. on this street.

DM: So I don't know where it's going, I really don't. I know that for ME as a

gay man, I have lived through a lot. I've done a lot, there's still more for me

to do. I said when I get into this line of work with HIV that I will never stop,

I won't -- going as long as I 00:59:00can. I don't want to let my friends down because I

promised them that I would do this.

I have two diseases that I'm very passionate about, HIV and AIDS and ALS, Lou

Gehrig's disease. My husband died from Lou Gehrig's disease seven and a half

years ago, another horrible disease. Those are really the only two organizations

that I helped and I'm staying with.

And it's hard to get the younger generation involved in any of those type of

work or even an interest. I do have to 01:00:00commend, and I can't remember her last

name was. Her name is Rachel, she does a lot for -- she's a teacher at Allen

High School and she's the one that runs the GSL groups. And probably about five

years ago, we had -- the Bradbury-Sullivan Center had the -- a portion of AIDS

quilt on display down there, and she asked me to come in and speak to the kids

about my life as a gay man and work in HIV and that. And I think the thing that

grabbed them, the kids -- I mean they were interested in the quilt, but there

were people on that quilt that I knew and I think that was really meaningful for

-- to them, and it really kept their attention.

One story that I really do want to give to 01:01:00you is my first experience with the

quilt, and it was here at Muhlenberg College, and that was, I'm going to say '95

or '96 when it was here. I'm not exactly sure, I think it was '95 or '96. We had

all the organization that were still going were involved with that, and there

was a training on how to display the quilt because there's a whole ceremony.

If you haven't seen it, Google it because it's something that is really it's

intense. And we had it at the -- it was the Field House here on the campus. We

were in the small palestra and they had these 01:02:00huge boxes, there must have been

30 of these boxes if not more with the quilt panels. They come and they're

folded, so they're telling us, "This is what you need to do. Once you have the

panel, to fold the panel down it takes eight people to do it, a section." So

they said, "Go over and get one out of the box," so we go over and get one out

and put it down. And we each have our space where we're at, and we're opening it

and it's -- you do it very slowly.

It's like working with the American flag, you -- it's -- you do it, that's how

you do it. And I had the last corner of the one that I have, opened it 01:03:00up, and

looked at the name. His name was Steve [Kalisky?]. He was the one who was

responsible for me meeting my husband... I lost it. And what were the chances of

that, me getting that panel? It was meant to happen. I just -- I lost it, I said

-- I still get... And I brought Will out that night, so he could be with me when

it was 01:04:00opened, and that -- [sighs] I don't know where to go from here.

MF: You're describing a lot of moving events that occurred in our community, the

bringing the quilt here to the Lehigh Valley. You've also talked about the

Snowball, you talked about the Summer games, and you've talked about the public

health piece of your work both with the Allentown Health Bureau and also with FACT.

DM: Mm-hmm.

MF: I'm wondering about FACT's relationship to other AIDS organizations?.

Because you're working in two different fields, you're also part of the Buddy --

the Buddy 01:05:00program, but there was a program out of the Lambda center that I think

became AIDS Services. But how are all of those organizations working together or

were they not?

DM: No, they were, --

MF: working together?

DM: -- they were. And I say this at conferences that I've gone to. Me

personally, I have been so blessed and honored to work with the amount of

organizations that we have in the Lehigh Valley. They all work together, they

always have, they always will. When one fails, it's like a failure for all of us

whether that failure is good or bad. It's good that we don't need the Buddy

program anymore for as much I loved it, we 01:06:00don't, I mean the people are living a

lot longer.

Yes, people are still dying, but they don't need that, that extra kick or

whatever it is. And the thing that really, really impresses me, we have two

major hospitals here in the Lehigh Valley. We have St. Luke's and we have Lehigh

Valley, and they're always at odds with each other, they are. Well, let's build

a bigger one here, let's build -- let's put two together here.

The AIDS organizations or AIDS department in each of those two hospitals are

like this. You don't see that, you don't see that in Philadelphia, you don't see

that in New York, you don't see that anywhere. You see it here, and that's --

that impresses 01:07:00me, and that is something that I tell people. We are all in this

together, we are, and if you can't work together, it's not going to work. You're

setting yourself up for failure really is what it is, so...

I have another story that's not really AIDS related, but it's about my husband,

about my late husband. And I guess his and my coming out -- we were together

for, I'm going to say, seven or eight years, at least seven or eight 01:08:00years if

not more. And one of the goods things is that his whole family is just great,

absolutely great. But his mother and his older sister -- because his younger

sister was living in Florida for like 25 years, and she's back here now -- but

they would go to a lot of the events.

One of the events that I didn't mention was called Summer Solstice, and we

always did it around the twenty-first of June, and we always had it at a private

home somewhere. Our former vice president who just passed away several months

ago, Carl he had it -- he hosted it at his place and he had the entire meal up

in -- off of 512 for a couple of years. But there was a prominent New York

doctor who had a place down in 01:09:00Coopersburg, Center Valley, a private area, jeez,

and huge pond and -- but a huge house in this. But we had it down there and we

took his sister and his mother along down there.

His mother was always the center of attraction, a little woman, crazy for her,

loved her. And so we're getting pretty lit, and we're coming home, and we got

back to the house, opened up some more champagne and or whatever, we're still

drinking. And Will decided he was going to go to bed, so he went to bed, so it

was just the three of us, me, Fern, and Vicky. And somehow, it came up 01:10:00about me

or Will not being married yet. And Vicky looks at his -- at her mother, she

says, "Think, Mom, they're gay." And she said, "What do you mean gay?" "They're

gay, they've been together -- living together for almost 10 years now," and she

said, "Oh, my son's gay." [laughs]

Now, neither one of them were able to drive home because they wanted to go home,

called the cab, and Vicky says to me the next day, "Oh my God, I can't believe 01:11:00Fern, I can't believe her" -- because she called her Fern -- "all she kept

saying to the cab driver is, 'My son's gay, my son's gay.'" [laughs] and she

said, "Everybody knows." Well, she didn't know, and Dad didn't know either. He

may have suspected, but he never said anything, and he's one of these...

But we always got along, nothing was ever said about -- you know. They were at

my wedding when I get married to Betsy. I mean nothing was said that -- to Dad

that well, you know, your son's gay or whatever, and we still didn't say it

because we never -- when we would be together for dinners or parties or

something at their house because it was always -- we either 01:12:00met at their place

or we met at our place, depending on what the holiday was because we would

always do Mother's Day and Father's Day for his parents, Christmas and

Thanksgiving was always at their place but anyway.

I don't know where I'm going with this; there was something else I was going to

say about that. Oh, gosh, what was it? Oh, when Will passed, and that was

September of 2014, and we did everything at the church. His dad was there, he

didn't go to the cemetery, but he was there for the viewing, he was there for

the funeral mass and that. 01:13:00And they were taking everything out to the hearse,

and they said he didn't want to go to the cemetery, but I get up and I stood in

front of him, and I said, "You know I loved your son," and he said, "I know,"

and that's where we left it.

So now we can talk, we talk up -- if we're together, but this one's gay or that

one's gay or whatever. My great-niece's best friend is gay, still in high school

yet. Everything is good, everything is good. Now I couldn't have asked for a

better family than his, all of them, all of 01:14:00them. There wasn't anybody in his

family that looked down on us because we were gay, every one of them.

When Will and I were going to have a commitment ceremony at our church because

it still wasn't legal in Pennsylvania. It came a couple of months later, but we

had been married in California, but we wanted to do something at our church. I

had not been out to -- my only two relatives, really relatives that are alive

and my -- were alive on my side were my aunt and uncle, my mother's brother, and

I called them up -- no, I asked them to come over for dinner.

So they came for dinner, and I said, "I -- we have something that we want to

tell you, and we want to ask you and you can either say 01:15:00yes or no," and I said,

"Will and I when we were in California, we were -- we got married, and we want

to have a commitment ceremony at our church, would you come?"

They knew, we never discussed anything but we -- they knew, and they were so

grateful that we included them in because that's -- they were the only relatives

on my side. When they died -- I'm the last on my side, when I die, blood line

ends. My daughter doesn't count, I shouldn't say it that way, but she doesn't

count, she's not a boy so she can't carry on my name. Indirectly she could but

it's all messed up, so... But, yeah, I wanted to get that in 01:16:00there, so... I have

been very blessed to have the support that I've had over these years.

My faith community is by far the best. I have two parishioners who are

originally from -- well, [Haley?] has risen from here, but her husband is

Filipino, but they lived in California for years and they -- because he has --

he still has family out there, so they go out occasionally. And when Will died,

passed away, somebody let them know that he had died, and they called me 01:17:00immediately, and they canceled the rest of their trip and came home just to help

support me. Who does that?

You hear so many horror stories in the LGBT community, getting kicked out or

being spit on or being assaulted or being murdered, I feel -- there's times

where I feel guilty because I haven't had any of that. I mean I've had some

looks and some comments but few and far between, not by anybody in my immediate circle.

Even some of the guys in my military unit 01:18:00knew I was gay. You do your job, and

that's what I'm there for, I do my job, what I do on my own time is my own time.

Yeah, I would go out and party with them, and I would go to the strip clubs, and

I'd get up on this stage with the girls and do all kinds of things, not sexual

but have a good time.

I think they really appreciated that, that I'm not the typical faggot for lack

of better words. I am who I am; I can have a good time with anybody. I just

don't know. I pray that the 01:19:00next generation, upcoming generation, is going to be

okay and not have a lot of negativity or stuff because there's just way too much

of that now.

You didn't see that back in the days. You didn't see drag queens getting killed

or transgender people getting mugged or killed or -- it's just it's like an

epidemic. That shooting down at the Pulse nightclub in Florida that -- a couple

of years ago, you don't see that. And I think that's another good thing about

the area here, maybe we're just special.

There was very little trouble in any of the gay bars here or even at the events.

Early on in the 01:20:00Pride festivals that we had at Cedar Beach and that we would

have protestors, not a lot, but there'd be some there, but it was peaceful,

peaceful yeah. Nobody was flaunting anything, well some of the drag queens were,

but that's a given. So I don't know if we're just fortunate to be where we are

and have what we have, I don't know.

MF: So, David we're right up almost at the end of our 90 minutes, and before we

close the interview, I just want to give you some space. Is there anything we

didn't talk about today that you really wish we would have and that you'd like

to share now?

DM: Ohm, I think we've covered... I mean I could've talked a bit more about my

sexual 01:21:00experiences, but I don't know. [laughs] That's for the book. I'm grateful

to you for wanting to do this. I'm open, I try to be as open as I can. I think

we covered -- I really wanted to get in there about my husband and my marriage,

which never should've happened, but it did. That soured me for a few years

because it wasn't -- it wasn't me that wanted to end the divorce, it was me that

ended the divorce, but it wasn't me that was at fault.

There's little 01:22:00tidbits here and there of things that I may have missed that are

okay, but I think for the most part, that I've answered what you were or gave

you whatever you were looking for. If there's anything that I think of, I'll let

you know, but at this point I think we're good.

Just use what I gave you to include, yeah, paper-wise, and if there's anything

else that you need from me, just let me know, and if I can find it, I will

gladly help out any way I can because this -- this is just so important. I mean

I don't know how many others like this are going on in the country. Hopefully,

there's more because we can't be swept under 01:23:00the carpet. We're here, we're

queer, get over it, I'm ending there.

MF: What a wonderful way to end. Thank you so much, David, for speaking with me

today. I'm so grateful to hear your life story. I'm really, really moved by what

you shared today. Thank you.

DM: You're welcome, you're welcome.