It was the 1980s and by all reckoning, although many major cities had made strides in Gay Rights since Stonewall, California’s two major cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles were ahead of most of them. The state and these cities still had a ways to go, but at least there was forward motion in spite of the convenient excuse AIDS gave the Christian conservative right to work for our genocide in God’s name.

I was the cartoonist for the Gay newspaper in Long Beach, California as well as a member of the Gay Men’s Chorus of that same city, so when I became active in the teachers’ union, the interests of Gay teachers was a natural concern. My involvement in the Gay Community came to the attention of some of the union’s leadership and the effectiveness of my cartoons in educating  teachers and the general public about the need for and the reasons for a teacher strike showed I could meet goals. Although the union had a Gay and Lesbian Education Concerns subcommittee, like most subcommittees, it existed to exist and had no power or authority to act in the name of the union or participate in the activities of other full-standing committees beyond an assistance role.

One of the members of the executive board, a Gay teacher who would eventually move up the political ladder making a difference for Gay people as he moved toward the state legislature, asked if I would assume the long vacant chair position of this subcommittee as it might become more active with full standing committee status especially as, once the dirty work was done, there would be people who would want to chair it without having helped to create it because full standing committees come with power and position.

It was the end that counted.

We took steps to make this happen knowing there would be tremendous support from the board and rank and file membership and made it so.

As was usual then and continues now, such committees had co-chairs, male and female in most cases with specifically a Gay man and Lesbian in this case not for exclusion of others but because in the 1980s that was about the extent of gender understanding. There were certain benefits to being a full standing committee, one of which was a position on the executive board that was more than advisory but contributory. The others were being sanctioned to speak as a standing committee representing the union  and the power to seek funds for activities we could justify.

The establishment of the full standing committee took place toward the end of the academic year and just prior to the Pride Parade in Los Angeles that year, and, so, members of the committee asked for and received the union’s blessing to march in the Pride Parade officially representing the United Teachers of Los Angeles. With little time before permission to march and the parade, I made a banner at home identifying who we were, making sure the name of the committee was clear.

There were less than a dozen of us. For some, this was a crowning moment and perhaps one of the last memorable moments of their lives because of the times. As we rounded the bend on Santa Monica Boulevard just at Barney’s Beanery, the person acting as Emcee for the local cable access channel covering the parade lost his cool and asked if it were a serious entry when he read from the card in his hands that we were members of the Gay and Lesbian Education Committee of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, an entry that took him totally off guard and having him register his disbelief.

The spectators went nuts.

It was not a quiet debut. 

I was a celebrated one.

Some thirty one years later, having had as my only certain objective to attend the Pride Parade in Oklahoma City and then continue on to the West using an Amtrak Rail Pass to do some historical research and the reset of history, I was sitting sipping a beer in the Mine Shaft in Long Beach CA when the obvious lack of customers had another patron, the only other one on a hot Saturday afternoon, ask where everyone was. Apparently people were up in Los Angeles for all its Pride Parade activities as the Parade and Festival were the following day.

It had not been in my plans as I had no idea my timing was that good, but the following morning, I rose early and went up to L.A..  I was on the train from downtown L.A. to where I was hoping the Parade was staging, hoping I had the right train and wasn’t going to spend my day traveling the city only to read about what I missed in the newspapers the following day. I approached a proudly rainbowed fellow passenger and told him I was following him so he better know where he was going. He was a proud Transgender person about to be in his first ever Parade, so we had a nice conversation about parades and parted ways when we got to Highland Avenue and went in search of our groups to join the city’s largest Pride Parade. I am sure if I ever got to tell him about what happened after we parted, he would be happy to hear it. He was a character in the day’s stories and had a connection to much.

I got the number of the Teacher Union staging spot and was overwhelmed when I arrived  where, unlike the first parade, instead of a few people taking a deep breath as we did not know how teachers would be received in the parade, there was a large flatbed truck and a good fifty or more people of all ages, races, etc. that increased in size by the time the parade stepped off.

I introduced myself to the person who seemed to be in charge, but with the assembling confusion, she did not really hear the whole story but invited me to march with them as a former UTLA member. I had previously arranged to visit the union headquarters prior to my trip on that Monday via emails, not knowing about the parade, so the next morning on my visit all details got explained to this very person.

The theme of the float was “Banned Books”, and as part of that we were handed enlarged copies of the book covers of the most banned books in the United States at the time and I was randomly handed “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M Johnson.

Why this was a notable coincidence can be seen from this previous blog entry, https://www.quigleycartoon.com/?p=18963.

I surprised myself by making it through the whole parade, asked to keep my enlarged book cover, thanked the Union leadership for allowing me to march and close a circle while remembering those in the first group, and went back to my motel in Long Beach, and composed this letter to George Johnson.

“George,

You might not remember me. I was the old guy in New Bedford who told you about your connection to Frederick Douglass when you spoke at the Lyceum.

If you were to google me in relation to Oklahoma City, you would see I advocated for inclusive language in school district policy that finally happened in 2009 with the addition of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity”. It came at a cost, but it came.

Five years after I left the district, after seeing the language stick for two years and not wanting to become a focal point to distract from the students, and with none of the originally predicted horrors the first language addition was supposed to bring down upon us, the district added “gender expression” in 2018.

If there had been problems with the first two, why would the district add to them especially in light of the misrepresentations, false prophecies, and wild claims that were offered to prevent the inclusive language in the first place.

Sadly, when the state house in Oklahoma went after Trans students, for some odd reason, this was never brought up by advocates, state and national, to counter this move. They ignored this actual case study that showed inclusion neither created problems nor caused harm, choosing, instead, to use boilerplate, universally applicable arguments with no direct connection to the state whose capitol city’s school district had been inclusive for twelve years. They had their evidence right there in the capitol city.

For two years I wrote letters to the Gayly, the Community rag, the Daily Oklahoman, the major newspaper, and others asking why all the other stripes on the Progressive Flag are content to keep their rights while they are comfortable with the Trans students losing theirs while not fighting to get them restored.

The Oklahoma City Public Schools Class of 2022 was safe at school from the first grade to twelfth, first and only group to do so in that state. Now, some will have had rights for the majority of their time in the district, some for a smaller part of theirs, and, from now on, all the students who never had them but could have will be entering the schools.

Using a USRail pass, I traveled to OKC and found that, while the older members of the Community are bothered by this, the younger members seem to have not noticed or choose to ignore it because it is unpleasant, or if they do, think a big Pride Parade will change hearts and minds. Those with experience know it takes hard work.

The glitter is for the after party.

After your presentation in New Bedford, I got on the internet and wrote all about it, your Douglass connection, the information you artfully wove into stories so there was no lecture or preachiness about it, and the make-up of the audience. I taught English for 38 years on the Middle and High School levels, all grades, sometimes Special Education classes. In my haste, I used standard pronouns and, in spite of any of the substance of your talk and its importance, the only comments were about my disrespecting you by not honoring your pronoun preference, (apparently no room for error) which, although I am sorry for having done that, seems less disrespectful than ignoring your message entirely.

After Oklahoma City, having additional segments left on the pass, I traveled to Long Beach CA where I had lived too many years ago and found that the L.A. Pride Parade was the same weekend as my arrival, and this is the reason for the letter.

I taught in L.A. back in the mid-80s to mid-90s and was the chair of the teacher union’s subcommittee on Gay and Lesbian Education Issues (it was the vocabulary at the time) and got it accepted as a full standing committee which was a big deal then. Because we now had the Union’s blessing to officially represent it and had access to funds, I was one of the first 12 or so members of the United Teachers of Los Angeles who marched in the 1990 L.A. Pride Parade behind a banner I had handmade in my apartment since it was too short a time to get an official one printed in time.

When I saw I was in SoCal at the right time, I went to the parade as I read the union was going to be in it. This time, some 34 years later, there was a diverse crowd of people, a truck with the union banner for the teachers on one side and the state Federation of Workers AFL-CIO on the other, and parents with children, diversity, the old, and the young.

I spoke with the person in charge and explained who I was and why I would love to march since I was there by coincidence. It was like the closing of a circle.

Someone announced the theme of the “float” was “banned books”, and started handing out enlargements of the covers of banned books at random and when it came to me, I was handed “All Boys Aren’t Blue”.

So, here I was, 34 years after having been one of the first teachers to march officially in a Pride Parade in Los Angeles, representing the teachers’ union which had recently won in a huge strike, doing it again, this time carrying the book cover of a person I hope I added to by telling of the Douglass connection at the Lyceum, marching as a total unknown to most of the marchers while watching their joy doing what that first group started.

Too many in that first group did not live long after because of the times, so I marched for them, after having been told in OKC by some former students my being open and true to who I was as a teacher helped them and now some of their children by their acceptance of their true child. That was a brave group of people.

I have included a picture of my old Gay self and what I got to carry in the L.A. Pride Parade. There are so many threads connected in this picture.One might say this picture draws so many ends together and, so, I also carried it for my former students.

The picture:

And, George responded,

“Thank you so much! This is really beautiful. I’m so appreciative of this and you. 

G”.

What a way to close a circle.

That night, after composing and sending the letter, I told the gentlemen at the Silver Fox about the day’s adventure.

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