T. Scott Allen, July 2, 2020

T. SCOTT ALLEN

LIZ BRADBURY: -- on this computer. Now to see other things, that there's a little dot up there that tells you it's recording. And now I know. I must look at that all the time.

T. SCOTT ALLEN: Yes. I see it on mine too. It tells me you better watch what you say, bud. It's being recorded.

LB: And I think you're pinned in there. I just want to be sure that you're pinned.

TSA: Oh, I see.

LB: And you are.

TSA: You are using the enhanced encryption recording.

LB: Pardon me?

TSA: It just says I'm using enhanced encryption. So, I guess the Russians can't tap into (inaudible).

LB: Thank goodness because they could use this. I know you have another thing right after this, so I'm going to -- and you've already done some big deal this morning. Man, you're a busy guy.

TSA: And they're doing construction next door, so if you hear the sound of drills and circular saws in the background, that's what's going on. Of course they would pick today to do that. Of course, my neighbor decides always in the middle -- when I'm in the middle of noonday prayers daily to leaf blow their front porch at about midway through them. So much for urban living. We live in the city. We live close to each other.

LB: And there's fireworks.

TSA: Oh my God. Yes, there are.

LB: On Monday night, I was working until about 1:30 in the morning to finish a project. And up until then and after I went to bed, I could hear the fireworks. And at 5:00 a.m., somebody set off two other huge, bomb like fireworks. Woke me right up. I had gotten three and a half hours.

TSA: I thought there were gunshots for a while, and I thought oh, Lord, have mercy. But it wasn't. It was just these stupid one-boom fireworks that were just --

LB: It's fireworks. And the problem is because of this new law, which is I'm sure going to be repealed because it was such a mistake, but you can buy fireworks everywhere.

TSA: Well, I don't know where they're getting these because most of the fireworks I see are just kind of small things.

LB: You can buy those big, scary ones everywhere now. You can get them at the dollar store.

TSA: Wow, really? Because I think they're making them --

LB: They're at every convenience store because they repealed the law because they wanted to tax revenue to fulfill some kind of deficit. So, they said, "Well, we'll just let them buy fireworks everywhere, and we'll tax them really high." And so, they are double tax than the regular sales tax. It was the biggest mistake ever because it's every person in this city who has to -- who doesn't like to be woken up twenty-four hours a day or hear gunshots is furious. And throughout the state. It's not just in the cities.

TSA: It's bad for dogs and dog owners too. I remember I would take Martini, my dog -- who -- she's dead now -- but I would take her up to my bedroom -- which I had a window air conditioner in my bedroom -- turn on the air conditioner, turn on the TV, and that -- between the air conditioner and the TV, that blocked out a lot of that. She couldn't hear it. It was good.

LB: We're on record, so I got to read you this stuff now. I got carried away. Let's see. I've got that. Oh, I need to turn my phone off.

TSA: My only concern was having to give you my birthday.

LB: Rose didn't want to give me her year, and I said, "Of course you don't have to do that." You don't have to do that if you don't want to.

TSA: I was born just before Kennedy was shot.

LB: Oh, you're young. We're not there yet because we have to do this whole thing. So wait a minute. I have to say this. With this project, Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and Trexler Library at the Muhlenberg College will collaborate on forty years of public health experience in the Lehigh Valley LGBT community, collecting and curating local LGBT health experiences from COVID AIDS to -- from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19. My name is Liz Bradbury, and I'm here with T. Scott Allen to talk about his experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT community during this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive. We're meeting on Zoom, and today is July second, twenty-twenty. And you are in Allentown, is that correct?

TSA: I'm in Bethlehem right now. But my church is in Allentown.

LB: I have to put down where you are when you're doing this. You're in Bethlehem?

TSA: I'm sitting in South Bethlehem right now.

LB: We did all of those things. I pinned you. Thank you so much for your willingness to speak with us today. To start, can you please state your full name and spell it for me?

TSA: Well, I'm just going to use my initial, T, period, Scott, S-C-O-T-T, Allen, A-L-L-E-N.

LB: And would you please share your birth date or day?

TSA: December twenty-second. A couple years before Kennedy was shot.

LB: You're way younger than I am, Scott. Because I remember when Kennedy was shot.

TSA: Well, no, I was in first grade actually.

LB: I was in kindergarten, so you win. But anyway, do you consent to this interview today? This is the consent portion.

TSA: Yes.

LB: Do you consent to having this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in searchable formats?

TSA: I do.

LB: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, including films, archives, websites, presentations, and even other formats?

TSA: Absolutely. I'll be a movie star.

LB: Yes. Do you understand that you will have thirty days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review your interview, identify any parts that you would like to delete, and, or withdraw the interview from the project? If you say I don't want to do this at all, forget -- we'll do the whole thing again, if you wanted. Although, let's not do that.

TSA: No.

LB: But I will if you want me to.

TSA: It's not like an answering machine message. Re-record.

LB: So, you understand that? Okay?

TSA: I understand that, yeah.

LB: Good. Let's just start right into this. We sit in the middle of the current public health crisis, where experience that we had -- we want to take this opportunity to look back and reflect, and to capture the stories of those who lived through the worst of the HIV epidemic in the nineteen-eighties and nineties. And we start right out with that question. Do you remember the first time you became aware of the disease? And then just start talking from there. You can say whatever you want.

TSA: Well, I came to the Diocese of Social Missioner in January of nineteen eighty-nine from Wheeling, West Virginia. I was aware of HIV/AIDS before I got here. But it was just starting to become in the national conversation, I should say. It was a few people sick in New York City and in urban areas, and hadn't really filtered out yet to towns and smaller rural areas. It was just starting to be of great concern in the national conversation when I arrived in eighty-nine. And it was a time of obviously great fear because the AIDS Quilt was just such a reminder of how many people were dying of this disease. And I remember seeing the AIDS Quilt in about eighty-eight in Cobo Hall in Detroit, Michigan. And the whole basement of Cobo Hall, which is a huge -- if you've ever been there, it's a huge convention center -- was just covered with the quilt. It was a very moving moment for me when I realized each one of these squares represents someone who's died. And usually, a gay person who died, at that point. That was also the sadness, that a minority community was being hit so hard by this virus. Anyway, so I came here in eighty-nine. It was also a time of great community energy. There was a lot of energy going on here in the Lehigh Valley that you just -- lots of coalition building. Lots of making connections, doing stuff together, writing grants together. Unusual bed partners: the Red Cross, the Episcopal Church, and -- Fighting AIDS Continually Together would do stuff. As I remember, it was an exciting time in a way because I saw so many people coming forward, and so much effort and energy that was having some effect happening. When I got to the Lehigh Valley, it was much more -- engaged me much more because there were actually people here that had HIV/AIDS and people that needed help. I mean, and it was lots of things that they needed. It was like some of them just needed food, and some of them needed healthcare. Some of them needed housing. Because there was no safety net from Washington at the time or Harrisburg, really. It was a very hopeful time. While it was sad and this was a tragic thing going on, a lot of innovative things were being done, especially -- the church had a chance to really be a partner with groups that they wouldn't have had partnerships with otherwise, and make friends, and show them the church wasn't -- I mean, it was -- religious communities weren't all great at the time, as you know. There was a lot of fear in churches. There was a lot of blaming. Seeing it as a class issue as opposed to a virus. And by class, I mean a category of people. And so, I think that was one of the things that was so amazing to me, is how much we cooperated with one another. I wrote grants. I was a grant writer for the Diocese. I wrote grants for the AIDS Services Center. I wrote grants for FACT. I wrote grants for AIDS outreach.

LB: What were the grants for? What did they --

TSA: General programming. I mean, they were for what they needed. Basically, for services to people with HIV and AIDS. And it was at that time that I met Rose Craig and became actually good friends with her. And she was a great ally, being at the Red Cross I think at the time. And David -- I forget his last name -- at Lehigh Valley Hospital.

LB: David Moyer?

TSA: He was a vice president up there. Jo Clare Hartsig with (inaudible) of the homeless.

LB: You just stopped for a minute. You said Jo Clare Hart--

TSA: Joe Clare Hartsig was at Center City Ministries, which was the standing homeless shelter here, which no longer exists. But she got involved because many of the people who came to her shelter were also HIV positive or having just full-blown symptoms of AIDS. And so, she got involved in stuff. Billy Leh. Real involved with him as his -- working on projects together, Rob-Win Press, with that. And then Linda Lobach at the time. She's got another last name now. But anyway, Linda at AIDS Outreach, which was started actually at Grace Episcopal Church. She was an Episcopalian. And of course, another Episcopalian became the director of the AIDS Services Center, was Dixie White. There was this explosion of cooperation, advocacy, concern. We spoke with a pretty loud voice when we all spoke together. We spoke in a louder voice than we would've spoken had we spoken individually. For me, it was a great honor and privilege to be connected in a network with these people, who were all bright and articulate people that had a lot on the ball. And thank God. And then we tried to start, as you may remember, the Gilead House, which was supposed to be the Lehigh Valley version of Rainbow House in Berks County. And Kit Hower headed that project up. And that didn't have a long life, mainly because some of the times, I hate -- and I'll say this, and you can edit this out -- but sometimes, once the hospitals saw they could make money on something, they withdrew support of the community project and started offering it themselves.

LB: I know that's true.

TSA: Right after we started the Transitional Living Center down here in Fountain Hill, which was for -- wasn't exactly for people with HIV, but it was for people that -- and it wasn't -- what we discovered is we found out about a lot of underserved people in general, who were being released from hospitals that had no place to live. People that lived alone, who had to give themselves eye drops. They couldn't manage that. Or give themselves some kind of complicated medication that involved maybe injection or IV. And so, we started the Transitional Living Center down here in Fountain Hill, and wrote grants, and got it going for people that were released from hospitals. And it also would include people with HIV and AIDS, who were treated and then released. And many of them, because they had become unemployed, lost their employment, had become homeless. And so, it was a sad time on that level. But we tried to make up for it in the Lehigh Valley. There was a great deal of compassion here at the time, and a great deal of understanding about how people became homeless because they had an HIV diagnosis. We had to fight a lot of fear in the culture because like this pandemic, we didn't know everything about it. We didn't know everything, how it was transmitted. I mean, there was a time we had no idea how it was transmitted.

LB: Yeah, it took years.

TSA: We suspected, but we didn't have solid proof that kissing someone would not give you HIV. So, anyway...

LB: People still say that now.

TSA: Really?

LB: People still will describe certain circumstances, and they'll talk about it, and (inaudible) at the same risk as needle sharing or at the same risk as anal sex. You could say, well, you could get it from this, this, this, and this, or anal sex, or needle sharing. I'm thinking yeah, well the first two, I mean, there is no statistical circumstance where anyone has ever gotten it that way.

TSA: And in our church tradition, communion is so important that we had to do a lot of stuff with the church about communion, about how you couldn't -- finally, we got doctors to come out and say, "You cannot get this from the common cough. Period." You can't. Unless you're doing something else at the altar rail besides taking communion, you can't get HIV. (laughs)

LB: You still can't, even if you are. You still can't because once you have --

TSA: Unless you're engaging in unseemly behavior in church, you can't get it at church. And that was one of the things that we were fighting, is that prejudice and that fear in the culture. Because one of the blocks, as you know, to getting people to buy onto, and volunteer, and giving money to HIV as service groups was to relieve them of fear of a lot of the fear they had. So one of the big things that we did in the Episcopal diocese that we did ecumenically, actually -- it wasn't just us, but it was kind of spearheaded by us -- but it was the healing -- we had that first healing service at the cathedral. I don't know if you remember it. But it was at the cathedral and we did it for a couple of years or three years. Then it kind of died out because it wasn't needed. As with a lot of things that you do, things take on a life of their own, and they outlive their time, and it just kind of dies this really sad death at the end. Because for what it was started for, there's no longer a need. I remember that first thing. The bishop, Mark Dyer, was the celebrant. And we got the guy in New York that Cousin Bobby was about. I don't know if you remember Cousin Bobby. It was about Jonathan Demme's cousin, who was an Episcopal priest in Manhattanville that was doing a really active ministries with people with HIV. In fact, helped start that hotel there down in Christopher Street that was pretty much a residence for people with HIV, which started to expand rather quickly to not just gay people, but straight people too, particularly in areas like New York. Cousin Bobby was the preacher. I can't remember his name. We wanted to let people with HIV and AIDS know that we would touch them, that we would actually touch them, that they can take communion with us, and we're not going to be afraid of you, and we want you not to be afraid of us. And so, that was the big message that we were trying to put forth in that service. And I remember that it was packed. I mean, there was not a seat left in the room, mainly because allies -- a lot of allies came. Once again, all these organizations that were in relationship from one another would support each other in that kind of thing. I would encourage people to go to FACT events from the Episcopal Church. I'd advertise the summer games, and the Snowball, and things like that. It was a ton of great cooperation that I haven't seen a lot since, although I'm seeing it again with the Black Lives Matter movement now. But there was great cooperation in the Lehigh Valley.

LB: When we compare this to COVID, we have to remember we've only been dealing with COVID-19 for about four or five months, or six months. We're not talking about by nineteen eighty-nine, people in the Lehigh Valley had been working to codify our community for four years. But when you had that big healing service, where was it?

TSA: It was at the Cathedral Church of the Nativity down here. I'll never forget this. This was great. At the time, they were just drag queens. Now we probably call them transgender people: men who dress like women, but not all the time. Anyway, but they came dolled up, their wigs, everything. Looking very conservative, but they weren't like they were going to go on stage at The Stonewall or anything. And I remember one going up at the time of laying on the hands of healing, one going up. And I think Dixie and I were sitting together maybe at that. I don't remember. But I remember her leaning over to me, and say, "I wonder if the bishop realizes that the woman that he's laying hands on is not a woman." (laughs) I said, "You know, it doesn't matter." She's still getting healing.

LB: Because those people were cross-dressers. They really were not trans people. They weren't transgender people who were living their lives as women. They were people who were --

TSA: These were cross-dressers, yeah.

LB: -- who would dress as women. That was a really big contingency of people at Renaissance early on. And I remember that some of the first work that we did was in that community as well. Yeah, that was pretty interesting.

TSA: I mean, Billy Leh was about the most secular person I've ever met in my life. And he came up to me and said how meaningful that that service was at the end of it for him, that we were touching, embracing everyone, not caring what your HIV status was. And offer you communion. We will drink after you. It was very powerful at the time in nineteen ninety-one, ninety, ninety-one maybe. But it was also trying to be a message to the churches that you don't have to be afraid either. There's not this huge outbreak of HIV afterwards.

LB: Of course, with COVID-19, it's a different story.

TSA: That's a different story. Absolutely. But we're kind of in that same place where we're not sure. We don't know. We don't have a really good personality profile on this virus yet.

LB: That's true.

TSA: And there was a point we didn't really have that for HIV either. We didn't know exactly what was going to happen, how it -- if it would mutate, how it would mutate. Would it get better? Would it get worse? Will the antivirals that we come up with still be effective in two or three years? There were all those questions back then, I remember. But still, we persevered. We persisted.

LB: Did you have any friends that were -- that you knew well that were HIV positive that went through this time, or are still around, or whatever?

TSA: Yeah. Well, everyone that I met who was HIV positive I met through my work, or being social in the gay community, or hanging out, and volunteering, and doing volunteer work at the AIDS Services Center. I didn't have a lot of close social friends, if that's what you're asking. But I've had close social friends die since then, who were HIV positive, and had it for a long time, and long-term survivors, and had other underlying conditions that wasn't good to have with HIV. I remember David Houseknecht. And what a character he was. And I remember our bishop. The house of bishops in the Episcopal Church, the presiding bishop told each one of the bishops in the house of bishops that he wanted them to go back to their diocese, and befriend and make a -- work on a friendship with someone with HIV/AIDS. And so, our bishop did that. And the person he chose was David Houseknecht. And Bishop Mark would visit him, and call him, and stay in touch with him. That's kind of one of the remarkable things that happened at the time, Liz, that just -- unexpected relationships grew up that, except for this disease, otherwise wouldn't have happened.

LB: The Episcopal Church really rose to this occasion, and I think there were a lot of people that sort of shifted their allegiances from other denominations to get into -- become Episcopalians because of this. It was remarkable because several people that I've interviewed have said, "Well, the Episcopal Church was really different compared to the other churches, other church involvement."

TSA: And I wonder about that, of why that was, and I'm not quite sure why that was. But I think part of it was we were such an urban church. Our strength is really in cities. And I think probably the first wave of people with HIV were members of those congregations who had to get over it real quick to minister to them, and had to learn real quick how to minister to them and how to -- and that this was something that they weren't getting support for in the general culture. Maybe that's why it was. I don't know. I don't know. But it was definitely a time that our church really became anti -- I don't know how to say it -- anti-homophobic. I don't know. Well, it wasn't just homophobia. Treating them like lepers. We decided that Jesus didn't treat lepers like they couldn't be touchable, so why should we? I think that was it. But then also, the time I'll never forget, Peter Helt was the pastor up at the MCC church.

LB: Yeah, before Beth Goudy.

TSA: Yeah. And I remember going to a dinner at Linda Lobach's house, and having -- because of that dinner, becoming friends with him, and was glad to know that he was ministering to gay people that wouldn't step foot into a traditional church. Those are the kind of connections that were invaluable. And I could refer people to him too that I knew weren't going to come to the Episcopal Church and sit through an hour and a half service, not knowing that they were really welcome. I'm enough of an evangelist as a Christian. I want them to become Christians. So I sent them up to Peter. But it was really a time too that I think we had to really get over fear, prejudice. And folded into that, which was a blessing, was homophobia. I think if it weren't for the AIDS/HIV crisis, we wouldn't have heard the stories of gay people that moved us so much. Even though we were clear that gay people weren't the only ones getting it, they were really the first wave to get it. Gay men particularly. And people got to hear their stories, see them as human beings, have compassion for them. And then following up from there, why aren't we ordaining them? Why can't they be ordained? And that came out of that, really.

LB: Oh, that's interesting.

TSA: It did unlock the stories of gay people in a way that nothing else had before that.

LB: When you were talking about Gilead House and that was a -- where -- was that a place? Where was it?

TSA: It was a place. We got a place over at the old Allentown State Hospital. They gave us one of the buildings. Of course, we thought, oh, this is great. Well, then we went in there and found out that we had to remediate half the building because the floor and the ceiling were asbestos.

LB: Made of asbestos, yes.

TSA: Anyway, we were like --

LB: Having been there empty, they can't even tear them down. They'd kill everybody by just tearing them down.

TSA: Well, they had to remediate Martin Tower for that reason before they blew it up. They had to spend all that money getting the asbestos out of Martin Tower because all of that stuff would be aerosolized when they blew it up.

LB: That's why it stood there vacant for so long. That building that we were going to have for the community center that's on Turner Street turned out to be totally made of asbestos. And we would say what needs to be done to that building is to tear it down, but they can't tear it down because the cost of tearing it down is worse than just leaving it there.

TSA: Well, and the health danger. All that dust flying over the city and into windows.

LB: You can't just go and tear this thing down. You've got to put it in a giant plastic bag and then carefully take it apart.

TSA: Well, we thought that was a great thing at first. And then we found out about the asbestos problem. And of course, we were trying to get personal care home licensure. We did do some remediation. We wrote some grants. Rose was on the board, actually, of that. Because we really wanted to have a home where people with HIV could go, whose families didn't feel like they could manage them. Because as you know, at the time, there weren't the pharmaceuticals and the antivirals that we have now. And it was a debilitating and withering disease. And eventually, you would -- you couldn't even go to the bathroom by yourself. People had to make everything you ate and bring it to you. You weren't able to do any of that. So that was the need at the time, which thankfully was not as much of a need shortly after its demise. We only had one person in Gilead House. Only had one person. Well, and this is, once again, the hospitals realizing, oh my God, we can get money for having a HIV floor and putting on the floor. Okay. And so, then when they realized they can make money off of it and get third-party payments, which is how we were going to support the Gilead House. We were completely undercut by the hospitals on that.

LB: I had an interview with Bill Aull, who was really involved with Rainbow House. And there was such a significant community building feeling with regard to Rainbow House that -- I mean, I want to steer you into saying something about the fact that when a hospital takes over something that's run by a minority group, things are different.

TSA: They are different. You don't have to steer me that way. I think when you have people whose primary concern is running a place to make money off of it, as opposed to people that are running the place to care for people, the quality is different. And it begs the question, had we not done the Transitional Living Center, had we not done Gilead House, would the hospitals have done what they did? We were kind of the canary in the mineshaft, and they said, "Oh, wait a minute. If Medicaid or Blue Cross Blue Shield is going to pay for them to be in these places, or the state's going to give us money for that, why can't we do that?" I think it really spurred them on to do what they did. But as you say, the quality is very different. And I know people were well taken care of at the Transitional Living Center, which was pretty full from the minute it opened.

LB: Where was that?

TSA: That was here in Fountain Hill. I forget what street it's on. It's not far from where I'm sitting. There's Old Silk Mill that we got a piece of. And it had rooms. It had probably about eight or ten rooms and a kind of a nursing station, so there was medical access to people. You could see all the doors and all the rooms. What's that street north of me? I'll think of it in a minute. I think that one of the things that we did in that period was we made the culture start responding, albeit not with the same caring touch that we had. No question about that. Another remarkable thing of the time is that nonprofits, churches, were stepping up immediately to deal with the people and the needs of these people who were diagnosed with a disease. It wasn't a plague. It was a disease like cancer or anything else. We did, I think, remarkable work on very little. It was kind of like some projects were like stone soup. Okay, I have this idea. Okay, well, we can do this piece of it, but we probably need someone to do this piece. Well, you know what? We've got the infrastructure to do that piece of it. That's kind of how a lot of the things have happened. And I remember that there was energy, enthusiasm, support, particularly in the gay community at the time. It was a galvanizing force in the gay community. It was like you had a common enemy. Nothing galvanizes people more than having a common enemy.

LB: That's so true.

TSA: And the enemy was multi-fraught. It was prejudice, and discrimination in the culture. It was the medical community and providing services. It was we can't let our brothers and sisters languish. We've got to do something. We can't just sit by and watch this happen. There was a lot of energy around that.

LB: That's a good point. That's a good way of framing it, I think, the common enemy thing. I think that's the way maybe we need to frame COVID-19 because I don't think people understand that as much. We need to say that's the enemy. The illness is the enemy. The pandemic is about that. It's not about the (inaudible). The enemy isn't the mask.

TSA: The problem we have in this culture, and it happened with HIV and AIDS too, is things get politicized right away. It's like you're a red state; you don't wear a mask. If you're a blue state, you wear masks. Well, that's ridiculous. And Ronald Reagan -- you know how he was. Ronald and Nancy? They didn't want anything to do with AIDS/HIV.

LB: These archives will really put -- will give people an opportunity because these will be archived at Muhlenberg College, and people will be able to access these online and stuff. Thirty years from now, the way history will be written is Ronald Reagan was a beloved, moderate Republican president and was still, for the LGBT community -- we're like wait a minute. That was not what was happening.

TSA: I thought George W. Bush was the worst president in history until -- I'd love to have George W. Bush back now. (laughter) I'll take him back in a minute.

LB: But I don't think people always understand that when you're talking about Ron and Nancy Reagan and what they did or what they wouldn't do -- and so, talk about that a little bit. I think everybody was aware of --

TSA: Well, I think what the result of that was ACT UP. I mean, people just had to go to the streets because of the ignorance, because of the lack of response from the national government, and the lack of compassion coming out of the White House seemingly. ACT UP had to be in your face, and they were until people -- until political leaders were afraid of ACT UP. They didn't want ACT UP to show up at their office doing some kind of demonstration because it would not be -- it would be pretty explicit if they did. The phenomenon that I saw was that the Reagans were singularly unhelpful for a period. They came around, but begrudgingly. Here's the other thing. It also tied to homophobia. It was interlinked with homophobia with just -- initially, anyway. And thank God straight people started getting HIV because then it's like, oh, they're not gay and they got HIV. Oh, this must be a disease. This was not a gay thing. And of course, gay people always get politicized still. People vote for Donald Trump because he's going to put Supreme Court justices that are going to limit transgender rights or repeal same sex marriage. I just have one, two words for them: stare decisis. We've already done that, man. We can't keep spinning that wheel. That was -- been decided. But I do think that it was a lot of things going on like that at the time. I mean, I remember ACT UP, I think, was compliments of Ronald Reagan. If we hadn't had Ronald Reagan's response, people wouldn't have felt the frustration that they had to go out and set their hair on fire in public to get attention and say this is worthy of public funding, and public research, and public attention.

LB: Did you go to any of those ACT UP things?

TSA: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There weren't many in the Lehigh Valley, as I recall. I don't think. But I went to one in Philadelphia, and it was in front of City Hall, actually. But being in the church, I had to -- well, I wanted to engage my own folks in a way. I spent my energy trying to engage people who claimed the Christian faith to actually claim the Christian faith, and to be what they said they were, and to give them opportunities to show that towards people with HIV and AIDS, and inviting them into that. Because Martin Luther King, he -- I think one of the things I've noticed that -- a lot of people have read King, but not thoroughly. And one of the things that I'll never forget -- and this was when I was involved in the anti-nuclear movement in Connecticut when was in seminary -- but we did demonstrations up there where we actually were arrested. But Martin Luther King always said that whatever public demonstration you do, you always have to have an element of it be an invitation for those who witness it to join you. You cannot create a demonstration to be intentionally off-putting, which I've always thought was really good advice. It's got to be non-violent, and it's got to be an invitation to people to join you, not to reject you.

LB: Trish and I were just in a pride parade in Amelia Island, Florida last year at this time actually. It was their first pride festival, their first parade. They have a little park there. It was about eight-hundred people there all together. It was small. It's a small place though. The first thing we did was we paraded down the street a few blocks, maybe five or six blocks. And we came back up, passed by the Episcopal Church. All these people, they were the mom and dad's brigades, and they were coming out and hugging everybody. It was really wonderful. It was some church. But the church didn't participate, but the congregation did. It was sort of interesting. There's someone in the congregation that organized people to do this thing. But one of the things that Trish and I were doing -- we were near the front of the parade -- is that every time we walked by and we would see people that were clearly LGBT standing on the side of the road, and we would -- or even just people who had -- and they were cheering and they had -- and we would say, "Come on. Come on. Come and do this." Because sometimes, they feel like, well, I'm not part of that particular group. And we would say to them, "Come out to be with us and walk with us. We want you in our group." And I think that that was a great thing. People are still doing that today. That was a significant thing. What other organizations were you involved with? Were you part of the Gay Men's Chorus? I don't remember whether you were part of that now.

TSA: No, I wasn't. We started Integrity at the time.

LB: Oh, right. Of course. Yeah.

TSA: Which was the Episcopalian LGBT organization, which is now -- well, I'm declaring it defunct. I've got to go close our bank account. We don't need it anymore. We don't need it. And that's a good thing. We won. We won.

LB: If you have any leftover money, I know someplace that you could donate the money to.

TSA: Oh, no, no. We're donating it to the Bradbury-Sullivan Center for the Dixie White room.

LB: Yes, okay. Definitely do that.

TSA: It's not a lot of money. I warn you. It's like two or three-hundred bucks.

LB: That's terrific. We're about a little bit less than six-hundred dollars -- three-thousand six-hundred dollars from the goal. We're doing really well with that. It's very significant.

TSA: And what room is it?

LB: We haven't decided. That will be something that Dixie's folks and other contributors and stuff can decide. There's a lot of different options, as far as that goes.

TSA: While Dixie was still alive, Dixie and I, and David Moyer were about the last three standing people that could still -- were still vertical that --

LB: Well, now there's two of you.

TSA: Yes, and now there's only two of us left. But anyway, we did say we're going to close this account because Dixie was very concerned that we not just let this money languish and just put it in a checking account. It's a little of it. We need to put it towards something. And I suggested that we send it to the Bradbury-Sullivan Center in thanksgiving for the ministry that Integrity had. And we had a good ministry for a few years. It was really good.

LB: I used to advertise it in the paper.

TSA: Yeah. And we provided affirmation and a safe place for gay Episcopalians to be and know they weren't alone. That was really great. But we started that. That came out of that. I think there was a clergy group that Ann Hughie may have convened that I was part of. Donna [Seepley?], Nancy Adams, Jo Clare, me, Peter Helt. God, these are old history names, aren't they?

LB: There's a guy at Saint John's Lutheran who was (inaudible).

TSA: Yeah, Tim. No, no, no. He was at the UCC church. But that was the other thing, is getting -- doing education for clergy about -- so they could assure their congregations that they could have communion. Because it would scare people if you say, "We don't know if anyone in this room is HIV positive or not." They don't care. And they'd say, "Oh, yeah. It bothers me. I'm not going to take communion." And people thought by dipping their wafer they were going to be avoiding that bad germ floating around in the wine or something. I don't know. Rather than sipping from the cup. Whatever you need to do. And some people stopped taking the cup for a while. They just took the bread. So we had to do a lot of education with clergy, not just Episcopal clergy, but ecumenically. Presbyterians, Methodists, UCCs, Mennonites. Of course, Roberta Kreider was doing a lot of work with the Mennonites. And she was kind of doing this underground Mennonite gay ministry.

LB: Was that then?

TSA: She was starting it then, I think.

LB: Cool.

TSA: It was just before I left. That was starting to happen just before I left. I went to North Carolina from here. I was kind of burnt out after six years of just being on a treadmill, and I wanted to go to a little Southern sleepy town and be the rector for them, just be a priest for a while.

LB: Where did you go?

TSA: I went to Pittsboro, North Carolina, which is twenty miles south of Chapel Hill. But that's a whole other story. That was not a good idea on my part. But anyway...

LB: It's interesting that you have this idea that it's going to be like Mayberry, and then you look underneath, and you say, "Oh, wait." Look in the closet of those guys in Mayberry and there's a bunch of white robes hanging up in there."

TSA: Well, I told somebody, "I'm on the diocese in anti-racial and social -- and racial justice committee here in the diocese now." And I was telling them about my past and that when I was rector of that church, the Daughters of the Confederacy invited me to give an opening prayer for their centennial meeting, which was a big deal. Culturally, that was a big deal. I struggled with doing it. They were asking me because Saint Bartholomew's is one of the oldest churches in town, and a lot of the glorious dead were buried in our church yard. So anyway, I went down, and it was real creepy. The place was decorated in red, white, and blue, but there were the -- there was the Confederate flag everywhere. But the Daughters of the Confederacy are singularly responsible for most of those monuments in the South. These women baked pies and raised money for that statue of General Jubilation T. Cornpone in the (laughs) --

LB: Well, and I raised the money, and I think people don't quite understand that those statues were just being bulk produced. They were spitting out one after the other. They all looked exactly the same: Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, a couple of other generals, Jefferson Davis. They didn't have any artistic value. They weren't put up as a monument for a specific battle that happened. It was just absolutely created as a white supremacy --

TSA: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

LB: -- thing.

TSA: I was not a racist, but I didn't know enough not to be anti-racist. And there's a difference. I mean, I grew up in the South. I had a Confederate flag in my bedroom as a teenager. My parents didn't see anything wrong with that. I didn't either. We're related to the Lee family, the Robert E. Lee family. We're related to his brother, actually. But when the Sons of the Confederacy found that out, boy, howdy, they came and got me and wanted me to be a member of the Sons of the Confederacy. I'm like, "I'm really busy here at Saint Bartholomew's. I can't join one more organization." But both of the Sons and the Daughters of the Confederacy had chapters in Pittsboro. It was crazy time. It was crazy time. And here's this guy that came from the activist northeast. I'd just done all this stuff, as you heard, with AIDS and gay people, and stuff. There was some backwardness in the town, no doubt. But fortunately, a lot of my -- it was an Episcopal church. And so, there was a huge retirement community nearby called Farrington, and a lot of my parishioners came from there, and they had moved down from New Jersey. There was a level of sophistication in my congregation that was saving for me. I wasn't stuck with just southern ethos. There was a little more progressiveness going on.

LB: Twenty miles from Chapel Hill means you're twenty miles from the university too.

TSA: Right, right. And we had people that worked at the university in the congregation. And it was a place for cheap land if you wanted to build a house, and people did. It's in Chatham County, which is south of Orange County, which is the county that Chapel Hill is in. But it was --

LB: How long were you there?

TSA: I was there for four years.

LB: And then you came back here? Directly to here?

TSA: Yes, came back directly to here. Came back here again.

LB: Did they provide you with a church? I don't know how this works, so I'm not really --

TSA: No. Oh, coming back here?

LB: Yeah.

TSA: No, I was unemployed. I left that church under, let's just say, stressful circumstances. As you know, I was married and have two children. And actually, my involvement in HIV/AIDS movement and interaction with the gay community started making me ask questions and be honest to me about myself, and stuff that I was terrified to face, and did everything I could, including getting married, not to face. But I came out in the wrong place, which was down there. You can bleep this, but it was an S show, as you can imagine.

LB: Bleep it. I love this kind of stuff. If you want to take these things out, you certainly can. But don't think that you need to do that, Scott, because, believe me, this is [nothing?].

TSA: I don't want to scandalize people. But it was a shit show. Let me just tell you that. It was awful. And the bishop didn't know what to do. And he was coming down to retirement. He was in his last lap, not wanting to deal with this. And there was a lot of scandal and rumor that wasn't true that was going around about my behavior, and that I was an alcoholic sitting in the house with my -- the gun in one hand and a bottle of vodka in another. It was crazy stuff. And I'm like, "What?" It just opened a floodgate of homophobia that I didn't think existed.

LB: I think that often happens with people who are tangential to the community. I have two friends who were going to adopt. They were a lesbian couple, and they were going to adopt a baby. The adoption agency said, "It would be a good idea for you to be a member of a progressive -- a church that was a progressive church." So they went to the church in their neighborhood that was the denomination they were very comfortable with. I think it was the Church of Christ. And they went in, and this was in New Jersey. And they explained their situation. But they said, "Look, we don't really want to come out to everybody right away. We're not out like that in the neighborhood. We're going to have a child. We'll ease into it. We need to know people, et cetera, et cetera. But please be discreet about this and don't tell everybody."

TSA: Oh, God.

LB: They've already filled out the forms to go into the position of becoming a member of the church. And the next day, they go in there, and some really well-meaning clerk in the office there said, "Everybody's so excited that we're going to have a lesbian couple." And they're like, "Whoa. You told everybody at the church before we even got there?" What happens sometimes is a very, very caring, well-meaning straight person, who has no idea what kind of world of discrimination happened to LGBT people -- that was before could get married -- they were relatively new to the community -- thinking we're just -- I'm one-hundred percent supportive of you. You seem like a nice group of people. Why would people be negative toward you? And they (inaudible) into two-hundred people in one day.

TSA: Well, I was sent off for psychiatric evaluation, which was like what? They sent me to Minnesota. In all of this retrospective, it turned out for good. There was grace in all of this because the guy in Minnesota, who was my -- the psychiatrist who was overseeing my -- I had to do the Wassermann test, and the MMPI again, and all that stuff. But he turned out to be a guy -- a gay man, who said, "The bishop wants to defrock you." I said, "Why? I've done nothing wrong except announce the divorce from my wife, and trying to be honest about myself at the same time, and trying to be discreet about it as much as possible. But that's obviously not going to happen." And so, he said, "I think I can get your bishop to back down with this. Are you willing not to work in the church for a few months?" I said, "Absolutely." I said, "It's like an attorney. You can lose your practice. You don't want to lose your license. And being what we call deposed is losing your license, and I'm fine not to have my practice for a while." He says, "What are you going to do?" I said, "I'm going to move back to Bethlehem. I own a house in Bethlehem and the tenants are really bad, so I feel no compunction giving them eviction notices. And they're four months behind in rent anyway. And I'm going to move back there. And he says, "Well, you know, one of my best friends is a therapist in Bethlehem." It was John Falbo. I don't know if you remember John Falbo.

LB: Oh, of course I know John Falbo.

TSA: But this guy in Minnesota --

LB: (inaudible) around, isn't he?

TSA: -- hit me up to be probably condemned by him and said that he's a raving lunatic. Don't let him be a priest anymore. Sent me to John Falbo, who was the best thing for me.

LB: Oh, yeah. No, I recommended a hundred people to John. And it was such a shock when he died.

TSA: He died too soon. What happened? That was awful.

LB: I'll tell you. He died after a huge snowstorm. I think he was out there shoveling snow.

TSA: Oh, God.

LB: He had a massive heart attack, and frankly, what would cause that? It was a blizzard day, and that night, he died. And I think that's what it was. I think he was outside. I really think that's what it was. I'm just guessing about that. I mean, he wasn't in the hospital or anything. He just had a heart attack and died. And I had literally dozens of people calling me up saying, "You need to refer me to another openly gay therapist in Bethlehem." I said, "Well, I'm sorry. But I don't have anybody." And it's been what, three years? And I still don't have anybody. And I just got another call from somebody who said, "I really need somebody that's more -- that's a man." Really what they were saying is, "I need a man." This is a woman. And she was lesbian, and she said, "I need a man to be in this position for me." And I just don't have anybody. I don't know.

TSA: He was a lifesaver for me, and I was with him for three or four years, decreasingly seeing him. But when I first got here, I saw him about every couple weeks. I mean, no one was more helpful to me in coming out than John. He was great. But that's another story. And when you do the people's coming out story video, I'll be in that if you'd like. Because I have a hellacious story. Everything awful that could happen to you as an Episcopal priest happened to me. The only fault of mine is coming out as a gay man.

LB: Mary Foltz at Lehigh University is doing a series of archive videos of people in the community. She's done Harold and Roberta Kreider, and they had ten people. And I contributed. They could only do ten people. That was the first grant. And they're still working on this, and there's going to be more money to do this. But the first grant was to do ten people, and I said, "Well, you got to do Harold and Roberta. They're in their mid-nineties. Hurry." And I said to do Dixie, and they were set to do her, and then she died. And it was so -- such a shame.

TSA: That's such a loss.

LB: I'll do Charlie Versaggi later today, and then I will have ten of these HIV/AIDS interviews. And every single person has mentioned Dixie White. I mean, she was so essential in that early (inaudible).

TSA: Well, she had the AIDS Services Center at a critical time. That makes perfect sense to me that they would mention her, and as well as Linda Lobach and Rose Craig. Those were some always people that had -- were big noises in the AIDS community at the time. Absolutely.

LB: So there will be more, and I will suggest that they interview you because I work with Mary. She's going to interview me tomorrow. I think that's one of the last ones. And I said, "Honey, you got to give me more than one day." They're like, "You can do this in ninety minutes." I'm like, "No way in hell. I can't even do five years in ninety minutes."

TSA: That's funny. Well, I think back on those times as -- they weren't dark days for me. They were good days, as far as working with the HIV/AIDS stuff. They were full of hope, and there was joy in it. There was sadness. People died and we were sad about that. No question about that. But there was also equal and opposite joy and feeling of community and support that I haven't felt like that since really. Maybe a little bit I'm feeling with the Black Lives Matter movement now, but it's starting to feeling a little more like that. But it was just all of the breakthroughs that we made at those times in the -- and really had to break through a lot of prejudice and misinformation, just like now. I mean bleach and lights in your body, and things like that. I was like, "No, no, no. That's not going to take care of this."

LB: We had really good local leadership. We had a common enemy. And here's another thing, Scott: we were a lot younger.

TSA: Oh, hell yes. I can't imagine myself doing now what I did then. I just can't imagine it. The Summer Games, the FACT games, were always on Sunday, which was hard for me because I had to do church somewhere. But I remember Saturday, there was something, and then Sunday, I had to do church. And then I got right in the car, pretty much changed while driving up thirty-three in my car, and attended the FACT games and was at an information table there. That was it. The reason I was going is I was going to stand at a -- I think it was the AIDS Services Center information table or something. I didn't think of it at the time. Now, I'm like, oh my God. I'd no more do that now than fly to the moon.

LB: Yeah, we did a lot of hard work in those days. We're still doing it.

TSA: We're still doing it. Well, we can be the elders that give wise advice now.

LB: And have people not listen to us.

TSA: Well, we've got some wisdom. We've got some scars here and there, and some places that still hurt that we can talk about.

LB: That's true. Let's see. I know that you're busy and you've got some stuff that's coming up really soon. I always ask people if they had been in a situation where they were caring for anybody with HIV, where you had to go and bring them food or care people like that.

TSA: Not on a consistent basis, no. Because you have to remember I had a young family then.

LB: Oh, that's true.

TSA: I had little kids. In addition to doing my day job, I had a night job of being a father, and doing laundry, and do things like giving baths, and things like that. And that was important to me, to be present to my kids, even though I would leave early in the morning sometimes. And sometimes, I had night meetings. They didn't see me until the next morning because they'd gone to bed by the time I got home. Or I saw them briefly at dinner and had to run out to a meeting at seven o'clock or something. So, no. My only really tangential work in that direction was taking meals with Dixie to David Houseknecht and visiting him with her when she took --

LB: I didn't know him. I mean he was obviously a (inaudible).

TSA: He was one of the first people diagnosed. He was a character. He was flamboyantly gay. Flamboyantly gay. He wore clothes like I have on, and then he'd have a yellow feather boa that he'd wear. He always had some accessory on that was outlandish, or long earrings that dangled and stuff. And it was clearly women's earrings. These weren't like Mr. Clean little gold things. These were dangly, sparkly things. So, yeah. He was one of the people that was first. I don't remember a lot about his story, where he came from. He was from this area. Of course, Houseknecht is not an unusual name in this area. But he had been involved in something. Dixie adored him, and it took a lot for Dixie to adore you. Dixie didn't have a long adore list.

LB: I knew Dixie pretty well. I know what you mean.

TSA: And usually, it was mutual, so it worked out fine. Well, as you know, I was a primary source for a David Houseknecht article on Dixie in The Bethlehem Press. There's a big article on Dixie in The Bethlehem Press, and I was a primary source. I didn't realize it, that I was going to be a primary source. But David Houseknecht was someone that she originally -- was a client of theirs at the AIDS Services Center. Since they're both dead, I don't think I am violating any HIPAA laws by saying that. I don't know. And he was the one that Mark Dyer decided to have a relationship with, and I think it's because of Linda Lobach that had -- because he was also -- Linda Lobach was very enamored of him. Her name's Eisenreich right now. She's still around. She might be a person on your list to talk because --

LB: Well I had grant funding for ten people. And you're the ninth. And I have one more. I have Charlie Versaggi later today, and then I'm going to be done.

TSA: Cunningham. What was her name?

LB: Vicky.

TSA: No, she had a man's name I think. She had short black hair. I think she was Jewish, actually.

LB: Marty?

TSA: What?

LB: Was it Marty or something like that?

TSA: No. I'll think of it in a minute. She had a whole other ministry. I mean AIDS Outreach did material aid to people with HIV: food, medicines, connecting them to social services, things like that. Randall. No. He's a baseball -- I mean, a football player. No. But she did a spiritual -- just did spiritual stuff. Just did prayer services, coached clergy on dealing pastorally with people in their congregations that had people with HIV and the kind of concerns that they might want to be looking out for and being sensitive to. And also, having them know the referral points, where if they hear this need, you send them to this person. So it was making them a better helper to people in their congregations. What was her name? Bernie maybe. Bernie Cunningham. I think that was her name.

LB: That makes sense. I didn't know her.

TSA: She wrote several editorials in The Morning Call, as I recall. Bernadette Cunningham. That was her name. And they called her Bernie. Bernadette Cunningham. She was a very striking looking woman: tall, thin, kind of Sinead O'Connor hair.

LB: Was she a minister?

TSA: I don't know. Like I said, she's Jewish, and Jews are less I guess clergy focused than a lot of places -- I mean, a lot of religions. I mean, they have rabbis of course. But you don't have to be seminary educated to be a rabbi. So she could've been. But I never heard anyone refer to her as rabbi. But she did a lot of work at Temple of Peace in Easton. I think that's the name of the Temple there. So she was another character that was in the mix. But David Houseknecht was a favorite of Dixie's and a favorite of Linda Lobach's, which meant he got a lot of attention from both AIDS service organizations. So whenever he lifted his little finger to want, one of them provided it for him. He was a spoiled brat of the people with HIV (inaudible). And he was also witty and smart. Also, the Rodale's involvement too. I don't know if anybody's talked about that.

LB: I interviewed Maria Rodale on Monday.

TSA: Okay, good. Good.

LB: And I talked to her about her brother and then about her mother, and it was interesting. I mean Ardath Rodale's extraordinary. I'm very happy about her because she had a different take on it.

TSA: And she was great. I had several interactions with her, as you can imagine. I was always wanted to just touch the hem of her garment because she was such a wonderful person. It just brought out the best in the community. It brought out goodness in people that didn't have an opportunity to be brought out until that crisis in a way that I don't COVID-19 doing yet.

LB: It's only been four months. Five months.

TSA: I know. Well and truth is, we never came up with an HIV vaccine. I mean, that's the thing. It's funny how the language has come back to me because we were always talking about viral load, T cells. All of that language is back. All of that language is back. And the ELISA test.

LB: I don't know about that. What was that?

TSA: The ELISA test was the second -- if you -- the first one was a simple test that would say if you're HIV positive or HIV negative. But it had a lot of false negatives and false positives. Particularly if you were positive, they'd send your blood to a second test, which is a little more specific because the first one -- if you had a virus like HIV but wasn't really HIV in you, it would trip the alarm on this one test. But the ELISA test was what you did for a deep analysis of your blood and the viral content of your blood.

LB: I see.

TSA: Many times, the ELISA test would come back as negative for people that had taken that first test and gotten a positive. I don't know why it's called ELISA, but it's called ELISA.

LB: If it came back negative, that was because they didn't have it?

TSA: Right. I mean, the ELISA test was authoritative, which I don't know why they didn't give that right away. But there was some reason. It may have been cost. It was a costly test. And there was a simpler test that could -- you could show symptoms of HIV and AIDS, and that first test was enough. It's clear you've got this. We don't have to go any further. But then sometimes, you would get a positive test, and you're asymptomatic, and they'd send it to the ELISA test to make sure that you had -- often, it would come back negative, saying, no, you don't have human immunodeficiency virus. But anyway, I notice a lot of the same language is happening. A lot of the same uncertainty about the personality in the virus. Are there long-term effects, even if you were asymptomatic? Do you have some kind of organ involvement and compromise because you had it? They don't know any of that yet.

LB: Yeah, they don't.

TSA: As we said, it's only been four months. There haven't been any longitudal studies that can be done yet.

LB: We're at the last ten minutes of this. If we're thinking about how people are going to be watching this someday in the future thirty years from now, some kind of -- or more, and they're going to look back at this, and here's your chance to talk to the future. Tell them a little bit about just sort of the summation about that time in the Lehigh Valley with regard to HIV/AIDS during the height of the epidemic, and maybe some other words that you might want to toss in there. What do you think?

TSA: That seems like a very heavy task, to talk to the future. But I think more what it taught me was communities can rise up together and address problems that seem insurmountable and seem bigger than us, and they can do it in a way that is phenomenal and not only helps the people with the disease, but it helps you. It helps you focus your own humanity. It helped us focus our own relational needs, our own relational -- what am I thinking of? I can't think of it. And our common humanity to be able to address something that seemed so -- and it was very frightening. A lot of misinformation. And just to keep serene during all of that and focus on the sick people. What do they need? Not answering questions about the future. Not blaming things for the past. But being present to those who had HIV and AIDS, and to advocate in governments and health systems for care, and increased services, and more useful services to these people. That really was part of it for me, just focusing on your mission. Not making your mission complicated, like I'm going to cure AIDS in the world. I am going to make life for someone with HIV living in the Lehigh Valley more tolerable, more humane, more compassionate, by golly. And whatever else is happening in the world, I can't control that. But I can control my environment, my community, and the people that affect me the most. And I can have something to say about that, and I can do something about that that's good, and positive, and makes a difference. And I think that's what the AIDS crisis taught us in the Lehigh Valley, is that we are better together than apart. We are stronger together than apart. We're actually smarter together than apart. And we can address things together that we couldn't address by ourselves. And the encouragement we gave each other too, the encouragement. That was also it too. Sure, there were moments you just wanted to just sit down, and throw up your hands, and cry or whatever. Are they ever going to get it? Are we ever going to get this resource for this person? All of that. And there was always someone there to buck you up and say, "Yeah, we're going to get it. We care a lot about that person. We care about that person, and they're going to be okay because of us. So fear not."

LB: I lost you. There you are.

TSA: I'm sorry. I missed that.

LB: We both froze up a little bit. I said I thought that was great. We just have a couple minutes left. So I just want to thank you so much, Scott, for this (inaudible).

TSA: Oh, it was my pleasure.

LB: Really great.

TSA: I was just remembering all the stuff and the energy then, and just -- and all the good people that -- some of them aren't with us anymore, and that makes me sad. But also, that's life, isn't it?

LB: It is. And there's (inaudible) wonderful thing you've done.

TSA: People that come after us are going to do phenomenal things together like we did.

LB: I want to thank you personally for a couple of times when I desperately needed somebody who was wearing a minister collar to show up fast at an event. I remember when we were fighting the ordinance that time in City Hall --

TSA: I dragged Malloy. I said, "Come on, boy. We got to get up to City Hall and show -- put our mugs on the TV camera."

LB: That's so great. And the look on your face. You had that great, serene look. And we were plotting out that we were going to fight this effort to repeal the ordinance, and we already had hundreds of people who were going to take their names off of the petition. The anti-guys were just petrified. We're riding up in an elevator, and I think we were with you in the elevator, and the bad guy. And he's thinking, oh, there's a guy who's a minister (inaudible). I love that. Thank you for that. That was a long time ago. Way more than twenty years ago.

TSA: I'm crying thinking of that moment because it was just so moving for me to be able to be there on a moment's notice.

LB: That was really something.

TSA: Have collar, will show.

LB: And there was television. It was television and reports, and we were saying to people things like, "These people are lying to people to get them to take their names off." And plus, I have to say, you're really eloquent. You did a terrific job on this interview. And I'm thinking, oh, yeah. Scott's really good at this. Thank you very much for doing it.

TSA: Well, thank you. I've verklempt. No. But also, I remember doing that in Bethlehem too, and going to those interminable city council meetings. And it seemed like we had to go every week for four weeks.

LB: Truthfully, we had to do that in Allentown too. But it's just harder to remember because it was so long ago.

TSA: Oh my God. And Dixie always went. And Esther Lee was there, and I think she was begrudgingly okay with it. She's a very conservative African American woman.

LB: The big difference between Allentown and Bethlehem was that when we passed Allentown's ordinance, the ordinance was already in existence, and it was passed in nineteen sixty-five to protect people based on race, religion, national religion, sex, and, I don't know, one or two other things. And so, we had to add sexual orientation, gender identity. And that's a tricky thing. And that was two-thousand and two. It actually started in 1998, and we worked all the way through two-thousand and two to actually pass it, and then we had to fight that referendum. It took seven years to put that in place, and it was really hard. But when we did the Bethlehem one and Adrian led that effort -- and Easton was a breeze -- but in Bethlehem, because of really some odd city council problems and some other issues -- but the thing about Bethlehem was that ordinance was created to -- from scratch, and it included everybody. In Allentown, it was a lot easier to say don't keep those gay people in. It's okay to protect these people but not those people. We don't need those people. We never had. Blah, blah, blah. But to say we don't want to protect anybody, and that's what they were doing in Bethlehem. And so, Esther Lee, who's the leader of the Black community -- that ordinance has protected people based on race. It was awful hard to say, well, you can protect me, but not them.

TSA: And you know who the main opponent was in Bethlehem?

LB: Yes, but go ahead and say.

TSA: It was the Allentown diocese.

LB: Yeah. So what happened was that they were really trying to manipulate people who were Catholics on council.

TSA: They did. And they sent their attorney. I remember that. But I was astounded. And so, I was just like by golly, I'm wearing my collar every time, and I would stand up and I'd say, "I'm here on behalf of the Episcopal Church to support this ordinance to be added to the City of Bethlehem's ordinance and civil rights ordinance." That was the most discouraging thing about that whole situation for me, was that they were pushing one of the members had -- was thick of thieves with that. He was actually somehow on their legal team of attorneys.

LB: Their legal counsel was trying to rewrite the law to have such a religious exemption that anyone could just simply say it's against my religion to do this. But they tried to write the law that way, and then I rewrote it. And I said, "Okay, this is the language we would have because churches are always exempt for any kind of thing because, after all, a church doesn't -- a Catholic church doesn't have to hire a rabbi to be the leader of the church. They get their mission church, and then that's their mission. That's perfectly fine." So I changed them to say religious entity. They said, "Any business that had a religion -- that was tied to religion." And I changed it to any church or other religious congregation or something like that. And that's the way the law was, and that's protected by the Constitution anyway.

TSA: And with this COVID thing, the governors didn't close the churches. The churches closed themselves, following guidelines of the health department. We could've been keeping church open. Of course, we'd have everybody on a ventilator by now if we'd done that. But it wasn't the government that was closing the churches. Nobody got that. Churches were never closed by the government in Pennsylvania, and I don't think anywhere else. There's too many Constitutional issues with that. But they closed themselves out of protection for their people.

LB: They should.

TSA: And they should have. Right, exactly.

LB: I know you have another gig in a couple of minutes.

TSA: I know. And I have to run upstairs and see a man about a horse. But one more time, was in front of the federal courthouse. One of my favorite pictures I have of Dixie -- and you may have it -- is Dixie and I standing there with a no DOMA.

LB: I told (inaudible).

TSA: Yeah, you did probably. But that's one of my favorite pictures of us. It kind of encapsulates how our relationship was throughout the whole thing: no DOMA.

LB: That was the picture I used for all of the mentions of her. I said, "Here's a picture of Scott." Because Dixie looked so great in that picture.

TSA: She did. She looked happy. She was in her element. She was in her element, man.

LB: It was a (inaudible) thing.

TSA: Thank you, Liz. Namaste.

LB: Thank you. I really appreciate it, Scott. You're the greatest. See you around.

TSA: Yes, ma'am. Let me know how this all pans out.

LB: We'll send you the transcript of this too pretty soon.

TSA: Okay, great.

LB: Bye-bye.

TSA: Thank you.

LB: Bye.

END OF AUDIO FILE