I was at a meeting called to discuss what we could do locally to influence what is happening in Gaza, specifically, to bring about a ceasefire, a real, lasting one but, if one does no happen now, how to help get all monetary and military support of Israel ended, while, of course, having the Palestinians protected even from Hamas to get peace.
Members of a local community hoping to do what they can to end the horror in Gaza.
Having spent my adult life in the world that is made of such meetings on a variety of topics, I understand the almost exaggerated exuberance of some that will never end because it is the correct level of it, with, in some instances, there being some adaptation over time, called for by the realities unknown earlier.
People have varying levels of enthusiasm toward the minor parts of a larger issue but are united in the whole.
And there are those whose enthusiasm becomes extreme as they see things only from their point of view and begin to add anger to their enthusiasm when others are not at their level because of certain realities. Basically, for them, everyone is expected to be at their level of enthusiasm even though the level that person is on is based on their realities regardless of those of others.
Self-centered exuberance.
At a certain point of the meeting, when we had discussed public actions, like gathering in front of the local offices of various local, state, and national politicians throughout the area, letter writing and phone call campaigns to those politicians and to their constituents to get them involved, and where and when to hold stand-outs at highly visible areas, the suggestion was made to send an election message that we were not pleased by only voting for the down-ballot offices, but not that of president, if there was no ceasefire by November 5. The justification being that this would eliminate either candidate getting a landslide victory which would hold the implied message, “we are watching you”, the winner, who probably really does not care what anyone thinks after the election anyway..
I recalled back in my youth that, because Michael Dukakis had angered people by his not fulfilling his too many campaign promises, people chose to deny him a second landslide victory but a win nonetheless. Too many voters had that idea and sent the message in the uncoordinated, grassroots, leaderless action, and we got his opponent.
This could happen in this case, and my reality is that I spent my adult life in many places fighting for my rights as a Gay man and, regardless where I have Iived, from the most liberal to the most conservative, I finally got my Civil, Human, and Constitutional rights at the age of 61 when I returned to Massachusetts, and I do not want to take the chance of losing my rights, the cost of which I knew and paid, to make a point.
I was suddenly put in a position to have to choose between people in another country, and at my age I have seen that a country of concern at one moment does move on one way or another so an immediate concern, no matter how great at the time, becomes a misty memory or piece of rewritten history, and people in this country I know have suffered for the life of this country and were ignored and stood to return to the days and conditions we fought to get away from depending on the outcome of this election.
For that reason, I informed those present that I will not leave the president-bubble empty. It would be a betrayal of friends and loved ones.
I was accused of being pro-genocide.
I was so typical. I have no problem watching a genocide take place because I do not identify with these people because they are not like me and this difference is accentuated because I see things from my privileged position, and understanding the realities of a genocide is foreign to me.
However, it was a useless attempt at a guilt trip.
Although for me my being in college, along with my Draft Lottery number being 364 and the old guy at the town hall who had taken my draft registration card so that I had fulfilled the law by filling out the card as he had done his duty in accepting it, then skirting the law by placing it in the shoe box with all the other registration cards to be discovered after the war was declared over because he had fought in the “war to end all wars” but was part of a system sending kids to a war that should not exist, I was spared, my peers faced the Draft immediately upon graduation.
The Class of 1968 graduated to death.
That could have been me.
A number of years later, after connecting dots, missing and seeing signs, resolving inner turmoil, and all that goes with self-acceptance and coming out, when I finally accepted my realities and entered the Gay Community to live the life that was me, my Welcome Wagon Hostess greeting me at the door was an epidemic with AIDS in the basket.
From 1981 through 1990, AIDS took the lives of 100,777 persons with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), “weeds” pulled by God to clear the Garden with the help of the evangelicals and conservative politicians who wanted their votes and refused to save lives in order to get them. Almost one third of these deaths, 31,196 people, were reported during 1990. At that point the allowed spread of the disease became apparent. By 1988, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection/AIDS had become the third leading cause of death among men 25-44, and was estimated to be second, surpassing heart disease, cancer, suicide, and homicide by 1989.
I entered the Community just in time to see the people I should have gotten to know begin to die away because the government wanted us gone. I do not have to see pictures of a genocide somehere else to know what one is and what it is like, whether a bang or a whimper. I saw one. I got through it. My losses were not the people in pictures, but the people.
It is from a position of privilege that someone dismisses another’s experience with a genocide because they choose not to see it as what it was.
Genocides do not always use explosives.
Carefully consider the importance of this coming election and how it will affect you for the rest of your life. Be careful not to become a one issue voter without seeing the full effect of that position on the totality of your life.
If the people who were in power during the first genocide return to power they very well may try another way to commit a quiet genocide and, just as the first time, there will be no guarantee that convenience will not let it happen again.
But, it has been decided that I don’t know what genocide is.
And DO NOT let anyone attempt to guilt trip you into voting against your own best interest, your best self, to keep them happy.
Separate head from heart and empathy from suicide. Those with little to lose and have always had what they have can easily advise others to lose everything they finally have.
Some Gay History items had been removed from the push cart I had been given instead of the classroom I had the previous year when I refused to remove my Gay History Month display. They figured the best way to remove the possibility of my having a display in my classroom was to have my schedule having me roaming (that is the nice term, the real one being “running”) to various rooms so there was no room in which to have one.
My room was given to a new teacher in the building who had no idea of her quiet role in things. They were not above using a new teacher. To get through the between class hallway crowds to my next classroom, I had attached a bike horn to the pushcart I had to use to get books, papers, my required laptop, etc. From one room to the others and one of those flags attached to bikes so they can be seen in traffic to which I affixed a Rainbow Flag. Over one weekend the pole and flag were removed from the locked teachers’ room and, although the assistant principal was willing to conduct an investigation, in light of his past comments and the fact he is the last person to leave the building on Fridays, I did not trust him to investigate anything and I let that be known. The assistant principal laid possible blame on students, they used everyone.
A subsequent discussion as to whether or not there really was a true concern for Gay students and this was not a political tool led to the principal’s wishing there was some sort of survey and that gave me the opening to suggest that, rather than take the time to design a student safety survey, we use the one GLSTEN had been using in high schools for years. I forwarded him a copy of the survey designed under Governor Weld of Massachusetts when he began investigating the conditions faced by Gay students in Massachusetts public schools which resulted in state laws there that guaranteed equal protection and treatment of Gay students.
He was concerned about limiting it to just things related to Gay students and suggested a broader survey of intolerance in general. He thought such an idea should be brought up to the Faculty Advisory Committee, so after our meeting I immediately drafted a letter to all Faculty Advisory Committee members explaining my conversation with the Principal and the purpose, neutral nature, and importance of such a survey and included a copy of the suggested survey and some supporting evidence of its need in envelopes addressed to each member, and upon leaving for the day put one in each member’s mailboxes for their consideration.
Totally unaware of the maelstrom that was raging, I went about my regular duties until that Wednesday morning when, as I entered the office to sign in, the principal shouted that I was there, and swiftly, he, an Assistant Principal, and the Union Building Representative whisked me into his office closing the door. The principal was a little hot under the collar and asked me if I knew what his previous evening had been like.
It seemed that one of the members of the Faculty Advisory Committee had read the packet from the Friday before, and had then gone to her pastor at a nearby church with it, who in turn spoke to his congregation and other pastors about the course on homosexuality being taught at the school and the survey that had been taken by the students that was sympathetic toward Gay people. There apparently had been prayer meetings over the last few nights for the redemption of the school, and calls to the school office to discontinue the course and fire the teacher who taught it. The school secretaries had no idea what was going on as they fielded phone calls, as no such course, survey, or teacher existed. But the calls were many and the anger vehement.
The evening before I was whisked into the Principal’s office, a group of ministers had shown up at the Principal’s home to speak with him trying to bring him back to Jesus, and he was mad at me because of this. I could only point out to him that the person at whom he should be directing his anger was the Faculty Advisory Committee member who brought this to his or her pastor before it was dealt with by the committee, and who misrepresented it as a done deal, thereby causing the furor. I was within my rights as a teacher to bring any topic to the attention of the Faculty Advisory Committee, but no members of the committee should take it upon themselves to bring it to the public before discussion.
It was a fine example of the very same attitude the Principal had exhibited in regard to the History Month poster, overreaction based on little knowledge and understanding with no room for hearing anything from those unlike himself. Here were these people, with no investigation, demanding certain things be ended based solely on the possible connection with things Gay, and doing so in very uninformed public displays.
Toward the end of that day, I was called again to the office. This time the Principal was a little more subdued. He had just spoken with one of the angry pastors and had filled him in on the way things really were. The pastor had apologized for his overreaction, being a little embarrassed that he and others went off without investigation. The pastor was going to contact all those whom he had previously contacted to explain the mistake, and the Faculty Advisory Committee member had agreed to call all the people she had contacted and explain her misrepresentation. The principal, however, did not feel a formal reprimand for her damaging conduct was necessary in light of her agreement to make those calls.
At the meeting the principal brought up my yet unresolved grievance concerning my reprimand for not removing the Gay History Month display, and his hope that we could resolve it all then, as he slid some papers across his desk to me.
The papers were a proposed resolution to the grievance. The Union had informed me that no resolution to the grievance would be acceptable if everything negative was not removed from my file, but these papers did not state this would be done. They did state that I was to accept two conditions if I wanted the grievance settled in my favor.
First I was to agree to stick to the curriculum, which I had always done and which, therefore, being required of all teachers would not be a stumbling block for me. Second, I would have to agree to adhere to the provision in the faculty handbook about the hanging of posters. As this handbook provision dealt only with posters to be hung in the halls to advertise events, and as I had no reason to advertise any event, it too was not a stumbling block.
However, rather than sign the offer, I took the papers home for further consideration, and, suspecting that this might not be the language to which the Union agreed, I called the Union President, and found this was the acceptable language, a previous draft having been returned to the District’s legal department as totally unacceptable. Also, the Union had required that the Principal send a memo to all teachers in general terms reminding them to stay on curriculum and to follow the handbook.
And so, on September 20, 2000 the reprimand that had been placed in my file the previous October was rendered null and void, and anything negative related to the poster was expunged.
I was also given a classroom, but the games did not end.
The grievance had centered on the Gay History Month bulletin board posting but, while signing the grievance resolution after consultation with the Union President, I was handed a memo regarding bulletin boards dated September 14, six days before I had signed any grievance resolutions papers and was addressed to all faculty and staff. Although the memo referred to the Faculty Handbook section on the “Posting of Bills”, it had an additional paragraph that was to be considered added to the handbook.
“Anyone wishing to post or display any promotional materials, advertisements, meeting announcements, motivational sayings, signs or posters, or informational signs and posters shall request permission from the principal prior to displaying such material. The principal will only consider approval of those materials which relate to instruction, curriculum, the course syllabus, or extra-curricular or co-curricular activities, and those materials which generally promote school activities or relate to the courses being taught.”
This was a transparent ruse for eliminating any Gay related posters, especially as I was the only one on the faculty and staff in receipt of the memo that I and others had not received on or after September 14, 2000. It was dated so as to appear to have already been released to all faculty and staff to make it appear that I was aware of it already when I signed the resolution. This addition came as a surprise to the Union President and its timing unacceptable, but my signature was on the resolution papers.
In the spirit of the resolution and this newly created policy on the hanging of posters, toward the last few days of September in anticipation of Gay History Month, I wrote a letter to the principal requesting permission to hang posters related to the topic. His reply was, as expected, a refusal to allow it couched in educational babble about preferring more than a “one-dimensional” approach to which posters were by nature limited, and the fear that information without education would result in reactionary behavior as there was no forum for give and take. He did suggest that I work with my department to see if they would like to come up with an educational approach that he and the Dean of Instruction could help undertake. After all, we did want to be inclusive, not exclusive.
In the meantime, if I knew of any students who needed counseling, I was to refer them to our crisis counselor.
I immediately wrote a letter to the principal pointing out that it was an insult to Gay students to imply that their only need was for counseling from a crisis counselor, and how dismissive of them that was, while every effort was being made to prevent them from getting positive information that did not imply that they and those like them were deviants or troubled. They could go to counseling; they just couldn’t have Gay History Month mentioned and all the positive results that that could bring.
Within days I was, once again, summoned to the Principal’s office. Apparently, a parent had called to complain about the Gay History Month display in my classroom. It was disturbing to her daughter, and to the Principal’s way of thinking might be in violation of the spirit of the memo on bulletin boards which could begin the process for dismissal since I chose to violate the Grievance Resolution. He told me of the parent’s concern that I was “promoting the Homosexual Agenda”, and he agreed with her that school was not the place for that. Endeavoring to be honest and educational, I asked him what “promoting” meant, and if it was also promoting if it was what the majority was pushing, such as “prayer around the pole”, or the many other religion-based activities we had on campus. Was it simply informing when the majority did it and only promoting if done by the minority?
I challenged him to point out one non-heterosexual thing we did at school that would make a Gay student feel that he or she was not just ever so lucky to be a guest on everyone else’s campus. Should we wait for them to drop out or die before we cared, and then wouldn’t we be relieved if and when they were not our problem anymore?
I did not have a display in my room. He had accepted the parent’s complaint and commiserated with her without verifying that there was a basis for it.
The next day, realizing I was just as much in trouble for not having a display as I would be for having one, I put up a very small one. And, because it was a book display and not a poster, I did not think I would have to get the Principal’s permission, nor that it violated the fictitious all-staff memo the rest of the faculty had yet to see.
The Assistant Principal, who was to observe me again that year, wanted an informal chat. He had been apprised by the Principal of a parent’s complaint about my Gay promotional display. He was still talking about the previous week’s complaint of a nonexistent display since his description of what it consisted of was the same as what the principal had described the week before. He was not aware of the real display which consisted of books with short stories written for, by and about Gay and Lesbian teens, historical documents, books on the Holocaust that centered on Homosexuals in the concentration camps of World War II, books by and about African-American Gays and Lesbians, three reference books that answered not only questions for Gay Teens, but their straight friends as well, and a book on Two-Spirited Native-Americans.
This particular Assistant Principal had grown some since the previous year’s events and having recently received his law degree was a little more open to discuss legalities. He was familiar with the 1984 case against the Oklahoma state ban on teachers supplying positive information about Gays and Lesbians, and had to admit that “promoting the Homosexual Life-style” was a hollow charge at best. His main concern was that whereas I, as a teacher, was on campus because I chose to be there, the students were there by law and had no choice, so they should not be made to feel uncomfortable in a classroom. He was, obviously, concerned for the Straight students.
I smiled and told him that had been my point all along.
Gay students had to attend school every day by law, and we didn’t have one thing there for them. We even removed posters they might get to see for only one month a year while there was a multitude of heterosexual activities all year. People tried to ban books that may be the only positive thing we had for Gay students on an exaggeratedly heterosexual campus. I asked if he knew at what point these kids began to count.
I honestly admitted that there was a display, now, but it was not the one he had been referring to or describing. He went to my room, saw that the book display was at the back of the room, and, as there were two doors to the room, no one was forced to go near it. He saw that by sitting in any desk in the room, students could not see the display unless they turned totally in their seats. And, finally, he checked out the contents of the books and saw that they were educational and of no threat to anyone. They did not contain any of the expected mandatory dirty pictures that Gay people were supposed to automatically rely on. He decided on delaying my evaluation until after October so he would not have to contend with the book display in the room, but he later decided he could not treat me any differently than any other teacher, and so he would not be able to delay my evaluation after all. He would, however, overlook the books.
So in that one week in September 2000, I had fun with censorship, theft, angry pastors acting on assumption, avoiding a book banning attempt, small as it was, multiple false charges of grooming, called recruitment in those days.
I was born in Boston over 70 years ago and within days became a Boston Irish Catholic which one remains the remainder of their life in spite of any moving away or loss of Faith. As such, we learned from the Sisters of Saint Joseph, Cluny, why the Red Sox were better than the Yankees. We also learned all about those people we know who might be good people, but, sadly not being Catholic, will not be saved and that is why we needed to bring Jesus to them.
We ransomed “Pagan babies” for this.
In the first grade I heard officially that the Jews were still waiting for the Messiah and I thought it was lousy that no one told them about Jesus yet, and suggested to my first grade teacher, Sister Mary Frances, that I could be the one to go tell them since no one else had. Thought that was nasty of us not to tell them and then claim they killed Him and act accordingly.
And so, I, along with the other religious who uselessly meant well but would not be saved, I became familiar with the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, the Mormon Temple and all, of course through the filter of the Nuns. The Mormons had a great choir and a big church with an angel on top made of gold. I saw documentaries, the choir on TV, taught many Mormons over the years especially where there was a concentration in the part of L.A. where I taught, Carson, with my many Samoan students, the Osmonds, and all of that, but I thought, since I had no reason to go to Salt Lake City, the Temple would be something I knew about but had little chance of seeing or wanting to see.
There are things all over the world I will never see because I cannot get there while there are others I can see if I choose. Resigned to that, I accept that I will not see everything but will be glad to see what I can without any regret toward the other situation.
Whenever I have gone to a strange city, the first thing I do is note the tallest building seen from my starting point if I am walking, and between noting its position and, in the day, the position of the sun I can always find my way home.
With all I knew and had seen about the Temple, I was looking to be impressed on my way from the airport as the Temple stood tall and proud above the city like a beacon on a hill. Johns Hopkins does not allow any building on campus to be higher than the main building’s dome so if you plan a building that would violate the height rule, those excess floors go underground.
I assumed such a rule regarding the city below it and the temple, but for some reason that is not the case, and my Uber driver explained that since modern buildings have no such restriction, the unseen Temple was inside that “cluster of buildings over there”.
Not to worry, as I will just go among those buildings when I was exploring.
The Uber driver also explained I should have an easy time getting around as all street signs indicate where you are in relation to the temple. I told him that that was all well and good if you lived here and you knew where the Temple is, but that is useless to me as I can’t even see it from the highway and, because the cluster of tall buildings, would not know where it was until I had entered the forest. He laughingly agreed and said that was a standard assurance to tourists knowing full well that, if they were there the first time, they had no idea where it was, so trying to establish where you were in relation to a hidden thing could get annoying. Which it did.
I am not looking for any scientific explanations or some techno-over explanation of how, why, or why that is not what happens as I lived it, so, accepted or not, this is what I found through my experience.
Other than Boston where downtown streets are laid out according to colonial usage leaving a series of spider webbed streets of all sizes and destinations, or none, to be rectified in the back Bay that came from landfill, cities that I have visited began with a plan and that included grid streets based on numbers and the alphabet with the letter being left alone or used as the first letter of a name. A and Adams Streets come to mind.
In Salt lake City all streets are numbered to indicate where you are in relation to the Temple. My hostel was located South of the Temple but to the West. Being familiar with grid layouts I had assumed I would be on SW 600, but that is compass direction not Temple relationship so I was on W (of the temple) 600 (street number) South (down from the Temple). Put the Temple in the center of a square and it seems easy enough. But this was only convenient for visitors in the old days when there were fewer and shorter streets, and you could see the Temple from anywhere in the valley to find your location. But that was then.
At a certain point, although I had not changed streets but was at the Temple line, my street became S 600 W . You could not see the Temple, and as they are getting ready for the 2035 Olympics, there is a lot of construction, mostly hotels in the area I was in and lots of remodeling that leaves the hotel up but perhaps without the soon to be replaced whenever they get to it hotel sign. Lots of huge, unnamed plywood palaces there.
If you missed the change, apparently GPS does often as well.
I stayed at a hostel one block from the reunion hotel where my three-day stay was the price of one night and so I had to walk where I wanted to go and I used my phone’s GPS. The reunion hotel was the Hampton Downtown, formerly the Hampton Inn, the sign still on the side of the Building. There are Hamptons all over the city with variations of the name, Hampton Court, Hampton by Hilton, Hampton Gardens, the Hampton Rye. I had arrived hours before check-in time and I decided I would drop my backpack off at the hostel to be held while I wandered around looking for the other hotel. On the map it was just around a corner or two
It took two hours using GPS to locate the hotel as GPS was sending me everywhere. I finally did what men do not do, I asked directions and found I was actually one block south and one block over from the hotel and GPS had brought me almost to it more than once. The manager of the hotel informed me that driving with GPS is one thing as you zip through the “vortexes”, walking is another as you slowly pass through. The difference between jumping over a chasm in a car with speed and trying to walk across it. Had I been looking for the Sheraton, things would have been easier as it was one hotel with a huge sign. When I entered my address as starting point it apparently confused the GPS which I eventually heard from many of the people I talked with was common, so that as I approached a “vortex”, what people called the concentrated point of the satellite signal that like light through a magnifying glass eventually gets concentrated at a single point, the omni-direction point, anywhere in that field, the GPS will either continue you on your way or switch you toward another location from that spot because of the odd street numbering. If you could see the Temple there would be no problem, but you can’t, so there is.
This might not be the scientific explanation but it is the one that makes experiential sense.
I found my hostel was very close to Harvey Milk Way. In spite of it being Mormon Central, they have already had a Lesbian mayor, there is a Gay district, and the city is rated one of the most accepting cities in the country. I found one bar with Drag shows that was a block from the Temple. Either the Mormons are in their own hell now, or they have a great, but unseen sense of humor as you see many sarcastic product names based on Mormon tenets, real or assumed, like Polygamy Porterhouse BBQ Sauce and Sister Wives Toast. Although it was not my intention, I ended up going to that Gay bar by the yet to be seen Temple only because the GPS route to Harvey Milk Way had become too complicated and had too many sudden re-centering notifications when I was following the voice telling me where to go. I finally gave up and spent the $10 on a cover charge and the same on a drink in a highball glass that stopped a fingers width from the rim.
The next night, I entered the name of the bar on Harvey Milk Way that I had entered the previous night but this time from the reunion hotel not my hostel that was two blocks down and one over, and the direction had me go straight down 300 st. for 8 blocks, passing my hostel on the next street over and taking a right to the door of the bar where the $10 drink from the night before was $4 and I got the word that the other bar was the tourist one with tourist prices, frequented by the locals only occasionally because of the prices unless you are one who buys expensive coffees while complaining you cannot afford essentials.
From the reunion hotel it was one straight line then a right when the night before from my place, one street over, I kept getting the recentered while following the route I was being directed on.
The hostel manager said that because of the similarities, yet differences, between W600S abutting S600W, it is best to get away from that area and then begin your walking GPS search to avoid this, and he apologized for not having told me that on signing in.
This explained why any attempt] to find the Temple by foot and GPS was so confusing and easy to give up.
I attempted to see the Temple by getting to it by the on-off train, but GPS often had me at the wrong station platform so I eventually gave up looking as the train had me everywhere but on the line that goes right by it with my having been directed by GPS to get on and off a lot of platforms that went elsewhere or were around the corner or near a building blocking the view so I got off as directed and missed by that close.
I did get to see a lot of the city this way from top to bottom and side to side.
I got philosophical about this and figured that as close as I had gotten, I would just never see the Temple. I had been searching the equivalent of day and a half and, as I was to find, just missing it until I gave up and went GPS-less and, looking for something else, turned a corner, and there it was.
I was standing in front of a building that I had seen on film and television, had heard good, bad and rumored things about, knew a lot about without being a member of the church for 74 years.
If it had been one, a goal was reached or an item could be checked off on the bucket list.
However,
Recently, as the LDS became concerned about the arrival of the Big One, the biblically proportioned earthquake out west, and realized the Temple, being of old construction, was not earthquake proof and decided to address that. They needed to get the Temple on to piles and a firmer foundation while making all necessary adjustments to the building and surrounding structures because, I guess, they have some doubts that God likes them enough that He will preserve the building.
So in my 74th year, I stood before the Salt Lake City Temple that was totally surrounded by construction equipment, wrapped in scaffolding and that orange mesh protective fencing. Here I was standing in front of the Temple, physically standing in front of the Temple, looking right at it, I have pictures, yet unable to see what I was looking at.
At my age and with no need nor desire to return to Salt Lake City, I have to accept that I will never see the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City in my life time.
Talk about a lesson in setting goals. Imagine if I had made a religious pilgrimage to see the Temple before I die but, while I could see where it is, I could not see it.
Ironically, I now know that I will go my whole life without ever having actually seen the Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints and I was right there.
Tonight, May 18, 2022, the senior class of North West Classen High School in Oklahoma City, Ok will be graduating.
It is the last of the week-long series of graduations for all the high schools in the city, and it seems fitting that NWC would be the last, and, therefore, most remembered graduation. You may have liked all the songs in the show, but there is a good chance you remember the last song best.
Although discussions to add Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity to the city’s school district policies on bullying, harassment, and nondiscrimination had begun slowly and rather quietly as the topic in the Buckle of the Bible Belt was an awkward one for most, it became very public and complicated when the principal of the high school overreacted to the first piece of positive information for the Gay students that was hung in accordance with the spirit of the policy on nondiscrimination as school policies applied to all students, listed or not, as was established by the district’s own committee on equal rights, by taking it, somehow, as a personal attack on him and a political move detrimental to him and the school and was joined in this by assistant administrators who saw being Gay-Positive might ruin their chances of advancement.
For the 10 years out of the twelve that it took to move the school district administration, the 10 superintendents (there was an amazing turnover as each failed to be the expected miracle), an amazing number of mid-level administrators who came and went with surprising frequency, and 3 principals, rather than let the topic be discussed in the central administration building, school administrators assumed the roles of the defenders of the status quo, and with each poor choice of action, they would double down to erase the memory of one mistake by committing a worse one.
Although it was slowly becoming obvious that the main administrators of the district might have begun acknowledging the importance of the addition of these words to policies but were just trying to find a way to do it or pass it down the road to someone who would, in such a way it did not come with political and religious related problems. They wanted to save face.
After 12 years during which time people had gone before the School Board to, among other things, advise that if they did not extend protections for the Gay students in the district for the correct reason, being responsible for the safety, wellbeing, and education of all students in its schools, they should do it for the self-serving reason of avoiding litigation when, after all the times people appeared before the School Board and read from reports and offered statistics to justify the need, if a child were to be harmed, a parent could point to the many times the board simply chose to ignore the facts.
At least do it to avoid future litigation.
And, so it was, that in December 2009, after the passage of the Michael Shepherd law, the board sat at the dais and marveled at all the information they had accidentally come across individually, on their own, over the weekend explaining their legal standing according to this law and decided to finally do what it had been asked to do for years, claiming they had come to this moment totally by accident and totally on their own. Much of their newly self-discovered reports and statistics had a familiarity to them as they were merely read from what had been handed to each board member over the years.
So, tonight the students from the high school which for some unexplained reason chose to be the major battlefield a war that wasn’t the one they thought was being fought.
With this final graduation the 25-year chapter from a request in 1997 to this night comes to a close as the Oklahoma City Public Schools class of 2022 graduates as the first class of any school system in that state having had Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in school policies their whole educational career without any of the predicted problems having taken place.
When the last graduate of NorthWest Classen High School is handed a diploma, that will end one chapter, and this milestone will become the status quo.
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.
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.
In March, 2023, when I headed West on the USRail pass, I was hoping to visit the cities I used to live in and see if I could reconnect to people I knew back in the day but hadn’t seen in decades. To this end, when I arrived in Long Beach CA, I went to the LGBT Community Center assuming they would be the repository of the Gay History of Long Beach, and, having worked and known many of the movers and shakers back then, this would be the place to start.
The people at the front desk of the umbrella LGBTQ Community Center, which should be aware of Community history, were unaware that from 1985-1996 their own city had a very well respected Gay Men’s Chorus that, among other things, had been the first non-Disney entity to be allowed by them to perform songs from Little Mermaid for which they gave approval at the opening performance which allowed us to continue that section of the show in later performances. Being under 30, the people at the reception desk had no idea that the chorus had existed and only knew of the one that took its place in another city when a large number of the members of the original chorus, who had been very active when it came to all the AIDS business of the time, succumbed to the virus and are now unknown. They were aware of the new chorus and assumed it had been the only one.
I spoke with the young people at the desk and to the person in charge of the Center at the time who also had no knowledge of the chorus.
I next asked about the newspaper that had existed in the 1980s and which also faded away with AIDS. They only knew about a recently begun one that claims on its website to be the first such Gay paper in the city.
I was in the chorus. I drew cartoons for the newspaper. I know these existed and I recognized the erasure due either to a grotesque lack of interest in the Gay Community History in Long Beach, or, as was in my case with the revision and rewording had been expunged from the record because, with AIDS, a lot of the history of those days was unpleasant without glitter and it was just ordinary people dying not idols and myths.
I wrote to the Center’s leadership pointing out this hole in the Community’s history and was assured it would be looked into after the Pride Month activities were completed and there would be time. The matter died as the correspondence ceased.
And so it was that when I decided to take the train trip again in 2024, I would go to the Center allowing for more time to follow up on this erasure.
The two people at the desk this time were a young person and a middle aged woman who should know something of the Community’s past. Again neither had any knowledge of the paper or the chorus and, to be honest, showed little interest in either.
I asked to use one of the community room computers to look some things up that might be helpful, including links to the local newspaper that had advertised and reviewed the Gay Mens’ Chorus of Long Beach concerts and in whose social pages covered our doings. While I was doing my “research”, the people at the desk changed and when I reported back to the desk the two new people showed much more interest than those the year before and those they had just replaced. They asked many questions, had connections made to things they had heard about that now made sense, and were quite surprised the information about the chorus was nonexistent. They gave me the name of a person to contact.
With this encouragement and when I was at the Silver Fox that evening waxing eloquent on Gay History to a group of interested people, I was further encouraged as one of the people with whom I was speaking was on the Board of the Center and a little disturbed that the chorus, some of whose concerts he had attended, seems not to matter in the Community’s History.
With this need to restore history and in light of the reaction of those with whom I spoke that night, I sent the director of the Center the following letter.
“Having been a member of the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus, upon moving to Long Beach it did not take much for a friend already there to have me audition with him for the Los Angeles Gay Men’s Chorus, something he wanted to do, but not alone. From the fall of 1985 until the following spring, I was able to participate in major performances, the usual trial period of rehearsals and dress rehearsals before a person’s first actual appearance in a concert was waived for the very practical and very sad reason that in the mid 1980s membership in the chorus suffered some attrition from AIDS. I sang at Elizabeth Taylor’s AIDS Benefit at the Bonaventure Hotel, attended by anyone who was anyone in Hollywood. That would not have happened under better circumstances. I had only been there a short while.
During the spring of 1986, the chorus director suggested we attend the first concert of the newly formed Gay Men’s Chorus of Long Beach. It was a small chorus performing in a small venue, but it was important to show solidarity with those willing to be public faces of the community and, at the time, a possible bright spot during some dark times. A walk around the corner from my apartment was a much more convenient trip than that from Long Beach to West Hollywood for rehearsals and the more spread out distances on the days of concerts or one of the many funerals of members and friends of the chorus.
When I joined the chorus it was still small enough that the pianist was also the conductor. As the chorus grew so did the need for these to be separate positions. Just prior to this happening the GMCLB was asked by the Los Angeles Chorus to assist them in singing at the 1986 exposition of the full AIDS Quilt at the Pauley Pavilion at UCLA attended, again, and participated in by many Hollywood personalities. Our task was to fill in the voices that might be lost to emotion, such as the moment the quilt dedicated to the recently deceased music director of the Los Angeles chorus was lowered from the rafters by accident or design, one among many, in front of the risers where the combined choruses stood with members overcome with grief.
Members of the GMCLB are present in the official video of the event and are clearly visible.
Until this time, all work, other than that of the accompanist/conductor, was shared work with each member contributing in all aspects of concert production and promotion. Performance spaces are expensive and getting the use of them can be competitive, so the accompanist made arrangements with the Ebell Club that in exchange for refurbishing the pipe organ in the theater at great saving to the organization and a potential money maker as organists would perhaps begin concerts there again, the Gay Men’s Chorus of Long beach had a standing arrangement for use of the rehearsal and performance space.
The arrangement was mutually beneficial. This would be in the Ebell clubs records.
As with any organization, especially where people and money are concerned, eventually a board had to be formed and its first task was to find a conductor. As the chorus was structured, the musical director would work with members of the board to design each show and members would have some input about upcoming concerts as it was a group structure that grew organically and not a situation of people joining an already existing and highly structured organization. Concerts were collaborative efforts.
The new conductor had ideas of his own as it would become clear over time. He seemed to be under the impression that everyone, board members and rank and file members, worked for him and, therefore had little input just as his soon to be Ex had structured the chorus he had founded and of which the GMCLB’s new conductor had been a member. This caused tensions as the chorus members were being treated like employees in a non union shop. The tension this created led to a parting of the ways which was another mutually beneficial arrangement as the conductor went off and began his own chorus of which he was in full control.
Like other such choruses at the time, the chorus sang at many funerals.
Every Friday night, as many members of the chorus as were able to show up would begin their Friday evenings at the Broadway on Broadway in Long beach, a piano bar where Eddie held court. The evening would begin with Eddie accompanying those members who showed up singing Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Java Jive in four part harmony. Toasts would be made, those chorus members present would leave, and Eddie would return to his evening’s planned repertoire.
Eddie passed away and, being a seemingly devout Baptist, had arranged for a very Baptist funeral complete with the usual hymns, the exceptions being the songs the Gay Man’s Chorus of Long Beach sang as his remains entered and then exited the church, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Java Jive respectively much to the surprise of the Baptists and a delight to the rest present.
When the conductor departed, the chorus returned to its roots, producing entertaining concerts with both light and serious elements as opposed the more formal black tie only concerts.
The Ebell theater could be more creatively used and was.
By 1990 a new member of the chorus who was employed in Disney’s music department and was one of the people responsible for arranging music for, among other things, Disney On Ice, wanted to show the company he would be as good with choral arranging as instrumental, struck a deal with his supervisors. As the movie had just been released and there was no four part arrangement for male voices, he was given the Disney blessing to produce such an arrangement of songs from the recently released Little Mermaid and have it performed for their approval, or disapproval as the case might be, by a male chorus which was to be the Gay Men’s Chorus of Long Beach.
On the night of the concert with the Disney portion opening the show and being easy to excise from future concerts that season if the Mouse did not approve, sitting in the front row, clearly visible as the curtains opened, were five men in similar suits, wearing their Mickey lapel pins. They approved as the arrangements were good and the chorus treatment of it respectful.
The chorus member had proven himself and the Long Beach Gay Men’s Chorus became the first non-Disney entity to perform music from Little Mermaid and retained the permission of the Mouse to perform whatever four part all male choral arrangement the chorus member and promoted Disney employee might create. Disney, of course, retained the rights to his work.
In subsequent concerts the chorus performed Carmina Burana, Les Miserables, Little Shop of Horrors with sets, props, costumes, and projected chorus generated art and featured a soloist from the San Francisco Opera for selections from the Student Prince.
Meanwhile the founder of the Orange County Choral was working separately with his own chorus during this time.
Also in 1985 upon moving to Southern California, I contacted the two men who ran the Gay Community newspaper hoping to be able to continue the political cartoon work I had been regularly doing in Boston for the Dorchester Community News and occasionally for Bay Windows. They took me on and for the next several years until health made continued publication difficult, I produced cartoons and other work for the publication. Although there were a number of informational resources during the opening years of AIDS, this paper was more localized and, therefore, more relevant to the Long Beach Gay Community.
Because of my affiliation with this paper, I was able to attend a press banquet at the Ambassador Hotel, one of its last such events, where I was able to tell Patty Duke that her performance in Miracle Worker, which I had seen on film in high school, got me interested in Special Education as a career.
It is a shame that the existence of the chorus, the newspaper, and those fine men who gave of their time to the community, many as the last thing they were well enough to do before they became the next funeral have been erased and replaced as if these men did not exist or were so easily erased and knowledge of their existence and their work nonexistent to future generation who are being denied a true account of their Communal History.
The chorus once had standing as some form of tax status, perhaps a 501 (c), and should be traceable, and concerts were covered in the Press Telegram. It may take a quick search on the internet but the time spent researching is a service to those men and a service to the future that has a right to its true history.
In these instances alone, I have seen myself erased in both, as a chorus member and a community political cartoonist whose work was known and who also was the cartoonist for the United Teacher, the newspaper of the Los Angeles Teachers Union (UTLA).
There has been entirely too much revision and rewriting of the past to make it more palpable for the youth when for those living and dealing with fighting against the conditions of the past it was anything but. When honored to have my art and legal papers related to my successful advocacy for the inclusion of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in Oklahoma City Public Schools student policies catalogued at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmund, I was also quite shocked that in the official account of my work, taking out trigger words and making other edits to have the story of the advocacy and opposition less uncomfortable, the fact I had been fired for the advocacy and regained my job through a district court case upheld by the appellate court had been reduced to a mere series of strong discussions with the district embracing diversity in the end which it definitely did not in the real history.
When traveling the country I have found conscious acts that erase the real history and those who made it, replacing the people and facts with a mythic figure based on carefully chosen happy bits and selectively rejected unhappy ones in many cases replacing the real hero with a Dr. Frankenstein hybrid as real people who could serve as realistic role models are swept to the curb because, perhaps, they lack a sufficient amount of glitter.
These conversations were not in isolated places with certain opinions sought. Many came from casual conversations with strangers I would talk to in bars and in one case in a city I was in only because of a train cancellation due to dust storms in the desert, and too many older men would mention their feeling of being sent out to pasture by those who have come after them but lacking any respect for what they may have done or are, as has happened in my case few times.
It is unconscionable that an organization like the LGBT Center which has taken upon itself the task of ensuring the safety, wellbeing, education, and living conditions of the Community would deny the Community its true history.
I first broached this erasure in March of 2023 with the Center when I had traveled to Long Beach after the establishment of the Quigley Collection at UCO in Edmund OK and in follow up emails. I brought it up again in June of 2024. It had not been addressed during that time and the reaction to my inquiry at the Center was repeated surprise that such a chorus and paper existed showing there had been no interest in any restoration of the historical record.
Others used to erase us. Now it seems we erase ourselves for comfort.
These men deserve their place in the Community’s historical record.
The owner of Hot Stuff, having seen the ongoing erasure of history, the watering down the Broadway Strip’s real history, warts and all, and may be someone to work with as she expressed to me a desire to preserve the history of what was once a vibrant street. I lived there for a while and know the history is uneven but it is better to show the best and worst of the place than a fiction.
I look forward to hearing of any progress.
The only ones who will preserve our real history is us, and we need to repair the damage.
During the time that I was dealing with both the administration at the high school’s almost comic overreaction to a simple list of names of GLBT people who contributed to society that I had posted on my classroom bulletin board during “Gay History Month” which, who knew, was going to become a bigger thing than anticipated, I never forgot that the main and original objective of my advocacy was to make the inclusion of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender students in the policies on discrimination, harassment and bullying in School District policies a reality, and to have the district hold in-services for teachers on the existence and needs of Gay students in our schools just as it did for all the other groups to which our students belonged.
I had been informed by the Office on Civil Rights in Dallas, Texas that wherever the word “Student” appeared in any policy or statement of the District, it automatically included the Gay students. The problem was that this inclusion was left up to the individual feelings of individual teachers without a district wide statement. So, if I were “liberal”, inclusion was automatic, however, if I were less than liberal and thought, perhaps, that there was a moral objection to homosexuality and discounted the existence of Gay students, I might be less than willing to be inclusive unless, in spite of my personal bias, I was told that while dealing with students I must be.
It was at this time that I “discovered” the internet as a way to keep a record of events and to keep people informed of them. I felt that, if the discourse became public and the terms defined not by others, but by Gay people, the “issue” would be clear and people would become educated as to facts and less adhering to stereotypes and old wives‘ tales.
My being polite and keeping most of the district administration’s reluctance to do the moral and legal thing in-house, this, rather than its being seen as my being polite and professional, was being used to either not do anything since no one knew something needed to be done, or they used their advantage as a public school district with all its political, religious, and, media outlets kept on spreading negative tropes about Gay people and I saw that they were seeding the ground so they could rely on their propaganda having prepared people to give them support for their defending the good people against people making unreasonable demands that threaten children.
It was about this time that GAYOKC.COM popped up on the internet and having seen how video use had evolved from home movies over the years to what we have today, maybe, this internet thing would evolve the same way and here was a person starting a Gay web news site, just at the right time.
Rob Abiera came out of nowhere, organically. There was no training, no assignment to duty, no business model under the control of a media mogul. There was just a guy with an interest in computers when it was all new and becoming a major instrument of change, and, as the details of events became known to the Community because of his publication, he exposed what should have been kept in the school district’s backroom being done by unknown people in the shadows that was supposed to protect the identities of those with the big public Gay smiles, but had the knives at the ready to plunge into the Community’s back in hopes of reward.
He was active with the Oklahoma Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus and in October of 1998 his news site came live hoping to get OKC’s GLBT Community to take advantage of the resources available to them on the web. He focused on current and breaking local, state, national and world news, and provided access to online human rights resources and local businesses, groups and services. He did all the work, webmaster, designer, publisher, editor, and head writer.
His publication would no longer give those who were obstinate in their erroneous assumptions a comfortable space in which they could hide from realities and pretend they were making quiet progress when in actuality they were inert. Because the district seemed reluctant to do the right thing for the right reasons, it became important to have it done for whatever reason appealed to the District‘s self-interest. The Board might see that in-services would be preventative, and that clearly inclusive policy language would help avoid future litigation.
The district lost deniability and could not claim they were not aware there was an issue if people with internet access were reading all about it.
Although there were many times the Board or its agents could have spoken clearly to the events transpiring at my school, the District seemed content to let things unfold with very little interference. I took the opportunity through the website to make it obvious to anyone who read the posts that there was a mindset within the District and a passivity that let a hostile atmosphere exist. People needed to see what the problem was. If my Principal was willing to supply proof of the problem and I to supply examples of the incidences of hostility toward things beneficial to Gay Students, I had no problem airing them for total removal of deniability.
What the district read, the public did, and either the District would respond, or people would begin becoming concerned and address the issue and the District’s reluctance to do the right thing.
In order to control the discourse and not hand it over to others, those of us who were working to get movement from the District needed to become visible and speak openly. Otherwise, we would spend all our time defending ourselves from those who, although claiming to know no one who was Gay, felt perfectly free to tell people what we thought, who we were, and what we meant. Not being from Oklahoma City originally; having total support from my family and friends; and, because of this, having no one who could be embarrassed by the revelation of my being Gay, I had nothing to lose, and, therefore, had the moral obligation to at least try to accomplish the changes necessary. To not do it would have been immoral.
Whenever I had a meeting, received some document, or anything happened relating to the school, with the district, and reactions to any progress, I would send copies of the documents and a write up of events so people could follow things in real time with some days having more than one update.
It was such an effective approach that when I arrived at school one day, I found a letter-sized piece of paper hanging on my mailbox in the teacher’s room with a computer printed picture of the opening page of the website on it and a note accusing me of duplicity because while claiming my motivation was pure, I had a website. I wasn’t sure what the connection between my motivation and having a website might be, but it did show the website was having an effect and that people were reading it and were either the good or the bad guys.
Ownership of the site had to be clarified. Beethoven may have written the piano sonatas, but what good is it unless he went to the piano. Over time, the principal would refer to the website in such a way that he knew it was not mine and because of that, perhaps, the concerns I expressed might have actually gone further than me, and was referred to by the principal a few times in meetings.
Whenever he referred to the anagram for the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network instead of pronouncing it “glisten”, its regular pronunciation, the principal would just insist on ” gilson”. With “Abiera” it always came out as some more complicated Portuguese sounding name, unless he slipped and said it correctly. I assumed his pettiness made him feel better and, perhaps, more in control.
National Gay advocacy groups have fancy offices, budgets based on donations, and slick media presentations that give the impression that they are the reason for progress in the GLBT Community as if they patrol society to weed out the oppression and apply rights to places they find do not have them. However, in reality, change comes about because some individual saw an injustice, spoke up, maybe had to act up, and may at some point either come to the attention of the nationals or find they would be more effective with back-up and sought them out. In both cases there is the 50/50 chance that the discovery won’t happen or the National has no interest to help but a 100% guarantee that if the individual produces good, they will try to find a way to have it appear they had been there all along.
In 1999 two major national organizations refused to help in Oklahoma City because they claimed they needed to be mindful of their fiscal responsibility to donors and, as Oklahoma city was not a big name town yet and a victory there would most likely go unnoticed, chose, instead, to back a similar case in a big name city which they lost because the OKC case favored the teacher while the other clearly the administration. Rather than a win in the Bible Belt which would have been huge, they lost in a big city.
Although lodged by a Gay teacher, the OKC win would have had national application about every teacher’s control of their classroom space, but the loss increased administrative control over what had been traditionally the fiefdom of the teacher.
What was done in Oklahoma City had to be done by locals and I have the receipts to show it was.
Rob’s website was local and relentless in its covering and exposing of the machinations employed by those who through bigotry, willful ignorance, or a desire to throw the kids under the bus so they could have the jobs and keep making the administrative salaries and perks.
He is a fine example of an effective keyboard warrior, he produced, and is proof that change comes about because of the little people.
I was standing in a crowded Tramps as Miss Patty Melt was busy tossing tortillas around the bar during her rendition of some song involving them. It was back in the days of shoulder to shoulder audiences, and Patty was a draw. I turned to reorder a drink and, as I did so, the patron next to me did the same, but, rather than looking into the eyes of the one whom the cosmos meant me to be with, I was facing an assistant superintendent of the school system in which I had recently begun to work.
I was recently arrived from Los Angeles where Gay Activism had me mixing with all kinds of people in Gay bars with little surprise, although sometimes a won bet, but this was Oklahoma City, and reactions were a little more protective. I had not seen the shocked look I saw on his face for quite some time and, being familiar with it, knew to respond appropriately to someone whose closet door had just been ripped off.
Up until that point, the bar, apparently, had been a safe space for the man but with it being a little naive most likely due somewhat to an unrealistic assumption that being the only Gay person you knew it meant there would be no one in a Ga bar who might know you, and I instantly assured him that If I saw him there, he saw me there as well and, according to the attitude at the time, we both would suffer if we told on the other. How would either of us know the other had been there if we had not been there myself?
I had yet to begin my advocacy so I was a non-person, inconsequential, and equal vulnerable. I immediately pointed him out discreetly to a friend to have a witness that he had been if he were to take any action against me in a panicky attempt at self defense by offense.
As I was walking through the central administration building and he and I passed in the hall, he called me into his office. We spoke of the awkward moment, I filled him in on my activism vitae assuring him his secret was safe with me unless he did something bone-hearded. In exchange he informed me that by his estimate at least one quarter of the school district’s personnel throughout the system were Gay and Lesbian but had to remain quiet about it. They survived in the system by playing along as he did.
I understood their need for the closet in the Buckle of the Bible Belt and that they were, in a sense, role models for the Gay and Lesbian students who figured it out while contrarily supporting the idea that there was something wrong with being Gay ot Lesbian if, in order to be that, you had to be secret and only become known to those who needed them as such by accidental discovery.
Interestingly, although during the advocacy I got a lot of secret and invisible thumbs up, but little if any actual support going beyond the subtle.
I have mentioned before that there had been some initial reluctance to hold any meeting to discuss the inclusion of Gay kids in school district policy and it was made clear right away that while discussing the needs of other students was educational the same for Gay kids was political.
At the meeting finally called by a different deputy superintendent than the one from the bar at the insistence of the local Union President who understood the importance of inclusion, this was stated by the deputy at the meeting when he admitted that after hearing the facts and the results of studies and reports that he had originally allowed the meeting just to get it over with but had learned that when it came to the Gay kids it was educational too.
He pointed out that he was a fat, Italian kid from New Jersey who was bullied for being “big boned” and always had his immigrant mother ready with some comfort food that really was not helpful. He realized when he had cried to his mother, unlike many Gay kids, he was not rejected even if the sign of acceptance was unhealthy. He saw how his being pushed away by his mother when he needed her the most might be how it is for Gay kids. He saw the horror in that.
A few days after this meeting, as I was again in the central office building, this deputy superintendent handed me a hard copy file of a court case from 1985 that was little known but which made it illegal to fire a teacher merely because they were Gay but, like a Heterosexual teacher, could be for defined moral turpitude under which definition being Gay did not fall. He was confused why the many Gay employees continued to ignore this ruling upon which I relied heavily for protection and cited often in future district actions and in the District Court case.
He went from a definite knee-jerk ‘no” to the original request for in-services for teachersabou he existence and needs of Ga Sudens to slipping me a paper I wasn’ meant to have before moving on to being a highly respected superintendent in Texas where he was conscious of diversity in that district.
Just before students returned each year, the school district’s legal department went over the most recent court rulings that might have a bearing on the upcoming school year with district administrators. I had been called to the district’s legal department who wanted to see some documents I had, and when we finished with that matter the attorney handed me some legal papers.
A case had been filed by a student in Fayetteville, Arkansas, that had extended Title IX sexual harassment protection to Gay students. There was a legal ruling relevant to inclusion.
In the case of Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services Inc., the Supreme Court made same-sex sexual harassment suits possible. If the district was to enjoy any protection in relevant cases, blissful ignorance would have been its only defense which it lost when the attorney did her summary of applicable case law.
Along with the reports and studies I continued to supply to the Board, I had included a press release about the case of Jamie Nabozny from Wisconsin who had successfully sued his local school district because nothing was done about the verbal and physical harassment he constantly faced as a Gay teen in school. In my correspondence throughout the previous year, as well in future ones, I reminded the district about the possible litigation that a student could initiate against the district if it insisted on doing nothing.
These rulings bolstered my case and gave me strength, and they were papers that would normally be filed away somewhere out of sight of teachers, yet I had them and would use them all the way to the District Court case.
I was approached initially by Joyce, an administrator in charge of the Minority Student Affairs office and known to many people the world over without them knowing it. In high school she had been at a civil rights rally in Oklahoma City and is seen in one of the many grainy, B&W stock films of the protests and law enforcement’s treatment of protesters as she is being dragged away by a police dog. She showed me the teeth marks on her arm. I would thereafter burden her with my dropping in and unloading with her patiently encouraging me and, by comparing notes, gave me strength.
She introduced me to Clara Luper with whom I remind a friend
Unbeknownst to the administrators who were attempting what they thought was a clever use of information had no idea that I was being supplied information and encouragement from within and this also led to information from without.
Because of these court rulings, teachers were informed verbally in 1998 by yet another deputy superintendent who, unfortunately, was an extremely Gay-presenting heterosexual who was obviously bothered by this confusion,
“Recently there have been same-sex sexual harassment complaints. And, more and more we have to realize that among our children there are some of them who have not determined, fully, their sexuality, and there are some of our children that may be Gay. Regardless of what
you think, let me tell you one thing that is an imperative. Those children must be protected. If we don’t pay attention and protect those children we are in violation of their rights under Title IX, and we could be liable.”
Although this was said vocally, it would take another eleven years of fighting before Gay students were protected in writing and the importance of writing it down was clearly illustrated when my principal, who had not been at our school’s in-serv9ice when this was said, explained as he had not been there and did not hear it, he had no proof it was said, and denying it’s having been said, would only honor it if it were in writing regardless how many people I could have come to him and say they, too, had heard the statement.
By a certain point, from Gaydar mainly, I became aware of who many of the Gay and Lesbian administrators were, but none ever stepped forward to support me in any visible way, and this became a tool for those objecting to inclusive language because the play-along-to-get-along attitude ran deep in the system.
The most supportive people from the beginning and throughout the advocacy while in the district had been four Heterosexuals in positions of power, five counting the Union Prsesident, with no Gays or Lesbians in similar positions visible. They may have been supportive over the dinner and cocktails to which I was not invited, but none ever spoke before the board at meetings, voluntarily attended any meetings, or spoke out in any situation until the goal had been reached and they wanted to let people know they had been there all along when in reality they hadn’t.
The condition of the insulting and demeaning tolerance was so ingrained in the system that the visible or verbal support was so lacking from the Gay and Lesbian administrators that it was seen as evidence that I was out of touch as things certainly did not bother the Gays and Lesbians already known in the system, usually administrators unwilling to take the chance of losing the high paying job. I was even accused officially at a meeting of not looking Gay and was most likely a political operative attempting to create a political issue just to cause trouble.
At my school there was an openly-secret Gay teacher who was used as a counterpoint as he was a “Good Gay” man who knew his place and was no militant. An open acknowledgement was considered militancy.
The belief was that my advocacy was out of place because none of the Gay and Lesbian administrators were speaking out and this belief was clearly illustrated when the principal, desperate to prove this point, brought a woman over to the school with whom he had worked as a vice-principal at the school where he been before being assigned principal at this one, and she, being a cooperative Lesbian kept her job because she allowed herself to be controlled as an open secret whose denial prevented waves kept her in the job and career is he could have lost if she did not keep her place.
This is the vice-principal who stated to me in her office, while neither of us was aware that another teacher was standing by the open door waiting her turn to enter to deal with her own business, that “there are no Gay kids in highschool. They experiment sexually and then settle down one way or the other when they get older.”
The principal had his ally and he assigned her to be the person in charge of all the nonexistent Gay students and the information that was given out based on her and his beliefs
Since no school district would admit that No Child Left Behind was a scam but they all fell over each other to show America that they were in total control of a system based on smoke and mirrors and so had no actual substance to grasp with the universal solution to all education problems, those invented by politicians as they ignored the reality oi the classroom, the Oklahoma City Public School hired someone from Texas to be superintendent who brought with him a number of Texas administrator, all of whom left in a short time as applying the scam with the same fervor that made it seem to work in Texas.
It was obvious that the superintendent wanted a friend in the principal chair and, while squeezing out the principal, he did allow him to bring a new assistant principal over from the school where I had worked with her and had been a friend both at school and socially. As a Lesbian perhaps, she could offset the one who denied the existence of Gay kids in high school. It was clear that while one was less competent than the other, both hoped to get the Principal slot and vied with each other to get it. One sought it by always backing the homophobic principal but that was not the best approach. The other got it because she was the better person and I was glad of that because she was open minded and open enough to offset the machinations of the other and add to the progress we were making.
She would have made a better principal had she, having gotten the position, stayed true to herself and had not played some of the games she employed to secure his position and move further away from the classroom where the real money is.
There are documents on file at the University of Central Oklahoma that contain emails I received from both about each other revealing the competition and how the advocacy to add inclusive language in school policies was playing into that when both found treating it like a tool for them to use against each other, to hell with the kids. They wanted the job, the prestige, and the money.
At a meeting when the future victor was sitting in for the Texas principal who was on a medical leave for a week or two, I was asked by her to remove something from the Union bulletin board that she decided was negative information about the School Board during contract negotiations. The bulletin board belongs to the Union by contract and over which principals had no control as they were no part of the bargaining units involved. It would really make her look good if I, as a friend, would betray my union members on campus so she could impress the principal and get the job because she showed she was a team player, backed their homophobia, and she was the one who got things done while the other merely complained a lot.
She wanted me to do it as a friend, and I had to explain that a friend, especially one who knew my dedication as a union representative who had once successfully represented her when she had a contract related problem in the past, would have never asked me to do that for that reason.
Times were changing but the district leadership was stuck somewhere in the past, and, as this inclusion thing was becoming more uncomfortable, if the message could not be stopped on its own, it might end if the messenger was eliminated. Thus began the process of having me dismissed from my job.
They wanted to do this right, so, going over the head of their inhouse legal department the district began to spend thousands of dollars on a private firm whose draw was that the situation would be handled by a Lesbian at the firm and, from phrases used by the administrator who evaluated me, she was directing them to create the case she could win. By this time I had been representing Grievances to close to quarter of a century and was familiar with a lot of the legal lingo that would simply be legal jargon to the people I was dealing with so their constant refusals to answer substantive questions that could not be safely answered with smoke and mirrors became “Asked and answered” followed by silence or a question to me as if I had npt asked one.
“Did Trump win the 2020 elections?” “Asked and answered.”
As became clear at the eventual Circuit court trial, they should have at least formulated answers as that response did not please the judge when exercises before her bench.
I marched in my last OKC Pride Parade as the Gay teacher the year after I left the district but before heading back East. Two former students came from the spectators apologizing for what role they might have played in what happened surrounding the whole dismissal business. They had been students in my class and were burgeoning Lesbians at the time and they knew the principal was one too. She had also been a phys. ed. teacher and coach and these girls, being athletes, saw her as a role model and hat is who they would report to on my actions and words used in the classroom as because, as was explained to them,while this principal and the district were working to make schools better than they were, I was obstructing that and if I was found to be worthy of dismissal and eliminated, progress would be made. Assuming they were on the side of right, they would report things to the principal and get friends to also report. and would create situations that would put me in difficult to handle situations so they could do what they assumed was the correct and moral thing to do for the greater good.
It was only when they went to community college and mixed with kids from the other city high schools and mentioned my name, that they learned from those kids what had actually gone on and how they had been used.
Although I accepted their apologies, because of the realities of high school and adult machinations, I let them know they were not at fault for being used for the selfish benefit of an authority figure while not only getting nothing in return but preventing anyone like themselves from any benefit.
They were used against themselves.
During the advocacy, in spite of the deputy superintendents statement of the number of Gay and Lesbian administrators, no such administrators helped beyond allegedly invisible moral support. While two Lesbian administrators were obstructing any progress and were joined by a third using her law firm to end the advocacy for including the Gay kids openly in school policies on bullying, harassment and nondiscrimination, the rest of the gays and Lesbians in the syrem who could have been effective for the sake of the kids did nothing. They continued to play their roles.
Meanwhile, straight people in the central office were slipping me legal documents, and assembling the case that reinstated me to my position and got the inclusive language while Mary, Mona, and Jaqueline did what they could to deny the kids their rights so as to get a promotion and a big payoff for the law firm.
The kids got their rights and the district had to pay the lawyers for their services and the Union’s legal bills when I won my case.
For most of the twelve years from the first request for attention to the existence and needs of Gay students in the district, the addition of the words “Sexual Orientation” and”Gender Identity” into district policies, and my dismissal and reinstatement.
The consistent and supportive people were the Straight ones. Obstruction came overtly and covertly from within ourselves and they had no problem costing the taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars to impress in order to get a higher paying position and to prevent the students from getting the protections afforded to all other kids. I know how much these three worked to prevent the inclusive language for their personal advantage because, as the main plaintiff in the Trial de Novo, I had to sign over the settlement and Union court cost checks.
This is GLBT History Month and not all of our history Is good if we are as honest about ourselves as we want others to be.
Forty-seven years ago yesterday, on October 14, 1977, in Des Moines, Iowa, during a televised appearance, Anita Bryant, a retired American singer popular in the 1950s and 1960s with three Top Twenty hits in the days of Classic Rock and Roll, Miss Oklahoma in 1958, and the brand ambassador for the Florida Orange Commission famous for the slogan, “A day without orange juice Is like a day without sunshine”, had a pie thrown in her face by Thom L. Higgins, a Gay Rights activist protesting her major anti-Gay bigotry and homophobia.
She was also an outspoken opponent of Gay rights running the Save Our Children” campaign to repeal the local ordinance in Dade County, Florida that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, using the false Christian belief that Homosexuals were after children for recruitment to some “lifestyle” they insist exists, and molestation as her weapon.
She said such things as,
“As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children”;
“If gays are granted rights, next we’ll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail biters”
And,
“All America and all the world will hear what the people have said, and with God’s continued help we will prevail in our fight to repeal similar laws throughout the nation,”
all while referring to Gaypeople as “human garbage”.
Not content with her activities in Florida, which, although successful at the time, brought about a national boycott of Florida orange juice with Gay bars not serving any drinks with orange juice and the idea spreading to ally bars, politicians, and social justice advocates, an action that would bear results, she went national most notably with her anti-Homosexual campaign inspiring the Briggs Amendment in California which would have made pro-gay statements regarding homosexual people or homosexuality by any public school employee cause for dismissal in effect, besides preventing GLBT students access to, at times, lifesaving information while making verbal harassment and bullying on school campuses directed toward GLBT students unstoppable, Gay teachers could be purged throughout the state.
It failed.
When I taught in Los Angeles I worked with and knew many fine teachers who would not have been there had Anita Bryant been successful, nor would I have even been hired as I would not be allowed to teach.
Times were changing, and Gay people, in becoming more open and visible, revealed that we were as normal as Straight people, and reality began to push aside religious based false fantasies.
Her activism began to be seen as the fanaticism it was, and there was fallout from it.
The Singer Corporation rescinded an offer to sponsor a possible weekly variety show, and the Florida Citrus Commission allowed her contract to lapse after her divorce, a divorce that killed off her Christian fundamentalist audience with invitations to appear at their events drying up which meant the loss of a major source of income.
Although divorce went against her firmly held religious beliefs, since it affected her directly, she eventually came to the belief that,
“The church needs to wake up and find some way to cope with divorce and women’s problems.”
A series of failed businesses in which she was involved with her second husband ended in bankruptcies, a series of unpaid employees and creditors, and unpaid state and federal taxes.
In explaining their divorce, Bryant’s first husband blamed the Gays by playing the victim, claiming those who reject being victimized by him and the Missus were in the wrong for not accepting it, saying,
“Blame gay people? I do. Their stated goal was to put her out of business and destroy her career. And that’s what they did. It’s unfair.”
It would appear that the people who rallied others to victimize people based on lies so they could lose their jobs and homes is what was unfair, not those people refusing to be further victimized.
The woman who had worn her religion on her sleeve and worked to have her religion the basis of civil laws applicable to all citizens, when asked just a few years ago her views on Gays, she said, in my opinion patronizingly, dismissively, and hypocritically,
“I’m more inclined to say live and let live, just don’t flaunt it or try to legalize it”.
She had caused such damage to Gay people and threatened to do more.
So that is why the pie was thrown.
During Bryant’s fading years, I was living in Oklahoma when Brad Henry was elected governor. He was young, a Democrat, and a creature unique in that state at that time, a Liberal politician. I was on the Board of a political committee in the GLBT Community of Oklahoma City who backed him during his campaign as he spoke strongly for the rights of GLBT people. We helped on his campaign with time and money, and this resulted in our getting an invitation to his inaugural ball after his election.
Henry was popular and this led to having three settings at the ball. On one floor there was a child-oriented room with games, child friendly eats, and adult supervision. The governor had children. Another floor had the Blue Room for those who had donated money and/or given of their time up to a certain level. The third floor had the Gold Room for the high-end donors. Most such events would have just had the one Gold Room for the moneyed and influential, but, because of the guy he was, Brad Henry extended the invites beyond the “elites” while still keeping them feeling special.
The Board I was on met the requirement for the Gold Room, and, as with other organizations being appropriately identified, our table had a sign sticking out of the centerpiece with our organization’s name on it.
We had opted to abandon the totally irrelevant boy/girl seating pattern for the more relevant boy/boy/, girl/girl or whomever you came with pattern, and at dessert were chattering like children planning to do something naughty about going to the dance as the true couples we were, rather than dancing like Heterosexuals.
It may not seem so now, but this was in the Buckle of the Bible Belt that was Oklahoma in 2003, quite close to what 1958 had been in other states when it really had been 1958, at a state wide function of the state’s movers and shakers where there was a lot of press, and where such an action would not go unnoticed, perhaps the very opposite with unknown reactions, so this was one of those little moments that was actually a pretty big deal.
It was a time in that place when anything done by a GLBT person openly as themselves with no shame or fear was most likely the first time it was done out of the closet making it “A First”.
While we were whispering, the MC for the evening had introduced the local, well known dance band whose leader then introduced its guest performer for the first set as the woman who used to sing with them way back before she became famous, and the dancing began. We hadn’t heard the singer’s name over our and the tables’ around us talking.
We walked into the middle of the dance floor and added a little Gay club spirit to it, dancing men with men and women with women, cutting in and mixing up couples, ending up most of the time right below the singer and getting a lot of thumbs up from the other dancers who I thought were signaling that they supported what we were doing.
That would have been enough to show we were among allies.
However, as it turned out, it wasn’t just that we were unabashedly dancing as the Gay people who had earned our invite just as the other people on or near the dance floor that they thought was great, but more that we had been dancing right below Anita Bryant, herself, as she sang her set just above our heads.
Those of us dancing had no idea of this until the set ended and we were approached by a lot of happy people as we left the dance floor who could not believe we had not only taken the bold step of dancing as Gay couples so freely and proudly, but we had taken the further step of doing it blatantly under the gaze of Miss Anita.
It was a big thing, the memory of which makes me proud to have known, been with, befriended, and worked with the people who sat at the table and danced for the Community.
This was that moment in time.
Those at the table who took that step on to the dance floor that night, at least the ones I can remember after the intervening years, were Edward Kromer and his spouse, Paul Bashline, Anthea Maton, a wonderful artist, Margaret Cox, a power house in the fight for women’s rights in general and Lesbians’ in particular, Tom Mac Donald who, perhaps just doing instead of considering possibilities, came up from the Blue Room to the Gold Room with his date because, well, there was live dance music, and me.
I was teaching Special Education at the James P Timilty Middle School in Eliot Square in the Roxbury section of Boston when cable television was being introduced to major cities many of which required that any company bidding for the municipal contract had to include a provision for community cable access so that community members could produce local programming by locals which would require training in video production.
In the ancient times of the 1950s, a big moment at school was when Sister Chabernelle wheeled a small, not mid-century, sized television on a movie projector cart into the classroom, turned it on, and introduced us to Madame Slack who would have us “regardez, écoutez, répétez” to learn French over the airwaves via closed-circuit television. Surprisingly, it was a time when television was new and its uses expanding. it was more than clear that the proper use of video in the classroom could go beyond showing 16mm films that gave the audio-video club members purpose on special days, and many school districts, Boston included, either got to use a local studio on a set schedule or had the wherewithal to purchase one to produce their own programming as time and technology moved on.
A teacher at the James P had signed up for the training at the Campbell Resource Center that had a television studio in order to learn how to produce videos from concept to broadcast and be certified to use the Center’s equipment for school district produced programming. The class had decided they would work toward an elementary level quiz show based on the elementary school curriculum, and since this would need a non-student to be the emcee as they all would be busy with production she asked if I would attend classes beginning at a certain point in the process to be the non-production emcee. I was just another prop on the set for their production work with sound, lighting, and all the rest being done around me. I got to monitor the class and learn without the threat of “failure”.
I learned without pressure.
In 1985, Face-Off premiered on Boston’s public access channel as a fifteen minute show because that was the length of the free airtime then and it was all so very experimental and could die as a nice idea. It did increase to a half hour when it later got sponsors after the bugs got worked out and it was seen as a good thing. It was designed for elementary school students because, face it, they have the cute factor that influences the critics in a good way after all, with each school having their moment of fame by way of a short verbal promo followed by each kid getting introduced with some follow up banter. Questions were based on the teams’ grade level curriculum, and the winners got t-shirts from Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
Students at Boston Technical High School began producing their own intra-mural high school level show, followed by Copley and Dorchester High Schools, and the Jeremiah Burke.
Although the teachers were trained in the technology of video production, set design flaws, which did once involved the background logo I had designed and gravity, creating a Frankenstein buzzer system to answer questions, falling wings, and the exuberance of elementary school kids squealing spontaneously with each “technical difficulty”, added much to the behind the scenes and re-enactments of high school drama club performances where the major piece of scenery was held upright by the same kid for all of Act II.
I left for California at the end of the 1984-1985 school year and Face-Off continued and evolved into something more formal and professional.
I was rummaging around in the rarely use library closet at Carnegie Middle School in Carson, California when I came across a 1980s version of a convenient home video camera and, having seen how magnetic a video camera can be for kids and knowing that producing videos would have my Special Education students conceiving story ideas, writing them down, following directions for a successful production, and what skills they might learn in the process, I brought the camera to my classroom and my classes became known for their video productions especially as they got so into the process, the students began to employ what special effects could be produce with a single home video camera and imagination.
In the alphabet of the day, my students were LH (learning Handicapped) and PHBOA (Predominantly Hispanic, Black, Asian, and Other which included Filipino and Samoan) and hey all had to help write the scripts, memorize lines, build the sets, block the scenes, and record the work. Participation in what was considered fun depended on where you were academically. Doing that math assignment could make you a star.
One video got sent to Nancy Reagan at the White House because of its anti-drug message with a student assigned to my class only because of the choice given to him by the drug court judge, school or jail, as the main character of the druggie who just said, “No’”, so all was well, and for which we received a wonderful note from Nancy herself a few months later and after the student, while not curtailing his business, toned it down to a somewhat acceptable degree.
The District took notice and instituted the VIC (Video in the Classroom) Awards which is still around. It also found my class useful as budget discussions about whether or not the school district in a city of various forms of audio and video production should continue to own a fully equipped and staffed television studio based only on the assumption at the time that video’s only use in the classroom was for entertainment as opposed to education by using m class as a case study to justify the continued ownership of Station KLCS which it still owns.
The case study noted that,
“Self-generated videos have the additional force of linking classroom work to student self-image. The Image of the student on video has the remarkable paradox of being both close to the sense of identity yet far enough removed to allow self-evaluation and critique. It is clear that when self-generated video is used in instruction the tremendous perceptual pull of television is further strengthened by its objective ground in self-image. Self definition is such a driving force in the formative years that its combination with the medium yields an instructional tool tha has been ermed ‘the ultimate candy’”.
And what else did these kids end up doing?
The report concluded with,
“There is a tendency in some situations to think of self-generated video tapes as ‘cream’, to give the video equipment to a select group such as the gifted class, in spite of insistent studies that demonstrate that learning technologies make their greatest impact among “students at risk”. At Carnegie Junior Highs School [those kids in room 45] is making great strides in demonstrating the equitable nature of the power of video tape.”
Middle school Special Ed kids saved a television station just by being the kids they were.
These are those kids:
I had arrived in Oklahoma City in March of 1993. I was intending to stay a short while as my professional file was being reassemble after some papers were lost in the bowels of the Los Angeles Unified School District and the State Department of Education in Oklahoma had the power to make an apathetic system like Los Angels interested in an inconsequential to it teacher problem, and one of the things I chose to busy myself with, besides what brought in a salary, was getting involved in the fight for Gay rights as I had been previously and this had me doing political cartoons for the local Gay news rag.
I had brought a cartoon to the editor of the paper one day and broached the idea of a cable access Gay News program as I had had experience and some degree of training to produce one and it was just a matter of finding the best people. I had been a recent arrival while the paper and its staff were well connected and could find the right people, more so than I could. I was sure Oklahoma City had to have a community access arrangement with the local cable company that would allow studio access after training but before that we could produce the shows ourselves wherever we had the space and deliver tapes to the station which is what we initially had to do.
Since we knew each other from the paper and local Gay Rights activities, and considering we were friends I took the idea to her and, when I had the chance, would stop by the offices to see if she had found anyone who might be interested. We spoke of the format of the show, where we would get our stories which was a no brainer as we both worked for the local Gay rag with its wire services.
Our first meetings of people interested in being involved took place at a small eatery on The 39th Street Strip that never had much luck no matter the cuisine or desired patronage. We bounced ideas around and the editor introduced some people she had rounded up as I did with the one or two people I brought and we discussed the program as we ate.
Our news source would be the wires the paper was connected with, and many times we spent up to the last minute before taping, sometimes finishing copy and editing some as we taped. Crew had to improvise equipment, initially using an ironing board as the tripod, make the wobbly secure, and step in to make something happen that otherwise wouldn’t.
Very reminiscent of Face-Off except it had had real studio equipment.
It was a group of people working as what appeared to be a team, an improv troupe, people quietly making a difference. There was no need for a boss. It was collaborative as I came with video production experience which once learned by others from experience made my skills redundant so that I was just a talking head, others came with writing skills and an artistic camera eye. We solved problems together and produced a weekly show.
Our video editor was a school teacher from Norman, Oklahoma, who would edit our raw footage on the equipment he had in his audio-visual class at the high school where he taught and, considering this was Oklahoma in 1993 and he was using school equipment to edit what any person at that time and even now might claim was tantamount to pornography and he could have been embarrassingly dismissed from the system and profession. Naively or bravely, he always came through.
It was all very grassroots with occasional exercises of authority assuaged for peace in the house.
I had already been a teacher for some twenty-plus years and as a Union officer and activist had had to speak to crowds planned or spontaneously, friendly or hostile, and with experience both behind and in front of the camera, I was at ease with taping a show.
We had just finished covering the International Gay Rodeo at the state fair grounds and were heading back to the house we used as a studio to review raw footage and assemble a special show about the Rodeo. At the time my transportation was foot, pedal, or public, so it took me longer to arrive than people with cars. The editor of the paper, my co-host on the show, was not pleased with the rodeo coverage for some reason although there was really nothing other than clips of the activity and few interviews, so I arrived expecting a party like atmosphere only to arrive at a locked door and being informed by the person opening it that I was no longer wanted upon which declaration the door was shut and locked. Waiting on the porch resulted in a person coming out and informing me “they” had voted me off the show when I had no idea there was to be such a vote nor that I was not going to be allowed any involvement with it. Mine was just to accept how “they” the Star Chamber. voted.
For thirty years I never knew what had happened and being Boston Irish Catholic just assumed as we do that I had done something unspecified for which I felt guilt without knowing what it was I had done, and doing the mental flagellation thing where I asked forgiveness if I ever thought the motivation of others was wrong and I was being too judgmental. My impression that this was a control thing was a source of my guilt until recently when posting a reminiscence of an event, I was corrected by the person I have wondered about as the JD Vance like defenses made things even worse.
While admitting that she had always credited me with the idea for the show, she never made it known her intention was to run the show and to own it and her justification for this being a correct action was that, as I stated before, I had brought the idea to my friend for us to work on together mainly because I had the technical expertise while she had community contacts, But as she now states,
“We did meet more than once but I worked with the people I put together to get it done.”
In order to make extra money, the editor taught Country Western dancing at a local Gay Country bar. As we worked together on the newspaper, she brought up her idea to publish an instruction book and would love me to do illustrations. I am not a Country dancer and I had never really studied Country Western dancers, still or in motion, and to illustrate to book I would have needed a copy of the manuscript to read through and decide what I was best able to draw. I had the manuscript in my possession throughout the process, so she could not publish it without the illustrations unless she gave up on the idea. I did not ask for money as she was a friend asking for my talent to benefit her so my finishing the illustrations and publishing on my own would have been possible a huge betrayal. I could have bypassed her and stolen her idea while telling everybody about the book being her idea with no benefit to her.
Making matters even more worse was that in denying the events of that night she refers to a vote about my ghosting and that only she and the man who has since passed voted in my favor. She will not inform me of that vote which opens everyone to suspicion even people I had assumed for 18 years were friends without knowing the action they had taken against me nor upon what a decision was based.
Unless there was a secret board for whom I had been unknowingly working, with me not present and two votes in my favor, my being thrown off my own show unceremoniously lies at the feet of the camera and sound man?
As she went on to explain,
“I felt so bad about that but it was before we had incorporated Tri-Pride Productions, and had a board” compounding things by mentioning, “You were voted off by a majority of those working on the show”, who were, at the time me, her, Phyl, the camera guy, the lighting guy, and the video editor from Norman. The only two no votes were from me and Phil Byrum. I always wanted to tell you that, but it was going to be hurtful though and I just couldn’t do it.”
Better to have me voted out by unknown people who made a major decision and with whom I continued to live like the ignorant spouse who is the only one in the neighborhood who doesn’t know his spouse cheated on him.
There is more, but suffice it to say that Joan Crawford and I have similar experience with rodeos.
I saw signs, went instantly into activist Union member protection mode, hoping I was not seeing what was becoming clearly seen.
To that end, I wrote a letter to the local Gay newspaper that connected her and me, and have to assume that as of that date and since, as this was known to her before publication as she was the editor and has been in print for 21 years with no rebuttal, as editor, she must have read it and approved its printing or she was very lax in that and in this situation.
The letter as published in the Gayly, Volume 11, number 23, December 1, 1993.
“As the originator of the concept for a cable access news program, I would like to thank the Gayly for its efforts to promote the program. I also thought I would offer some background on where the idea came from and some of the philosophy behind it.
I come from out of state. I have lived in, and enjoyed, the 20th Century. Being Raised in Boston/New York areas, and having taught school there as well as in both Northern and Southern California I have enjoyed the rights of American citizenship. There were always those who, for their reasons and prejudices, sought to limit my rights, but the atmosphere existed that allowed me to maintain the rights I had and work, with a reasonable hope off success, for those I still did not have recognized.
In Boston and California I did not have to hide who I was. And conversations about my home life were as acceptable as anyone else’s. In Los Angeles I could chair the union’s Gay and Lesbian Committee, march in a Gay Parade under a banner that proudly proclaimed I was a teacher, and I could stand with a group of Gay men and women in front of TV cameras on “Coming Out Day” and come out as a Gay teacher. I could choose if I wanted to and how far out of the closet I wanted to, come.
When I came to Oklahoma, although I was still in the United States, it seemed I had to give up quite a few rights to be here. It was the same country, but with different rules. Besides the law that labeled me an automatic felon for what I was regardless of what I did or did not do, I encountered an attitude and a form of Christianity that seemed based on hatred of those who were different whether that difference was based on race, color, creed, or whom you fell in love with.
I noticed that in the news, whereas in other places I’d heard the negative along with the positive, in Oklahoma I only heard references to Gays when there was a condemnation, a crime committed in which there was a tantalizing hint that one or both the perpetrators or the victim might be Gay, or if the crime was a pointedly defined perversion or could be used to imply there was one so you would be sure to stay tuned. The many good things done by, for, and with the Gay people go unmentioned and this implies there is nothing to report.
By correcting this void with a cable Gay news program I wanted to accomplish two things. I wanted to keep our Gay Community informed about ourselves, the positive things we do, and help keep us in touch with what is happening elsewhere. If we don’t hear the good stuff, we may tend to believe it isn’t there. And very importantly, I wanted to let the young Gay people who may be struggling against a limited image off Gays- one controled by those who care the least- who are attempting to accept their difference to see some positive role models and accomplishments. Too often the younger Gays and their friends who are also facing problems of acceptance have to snuggle for self-esteem in an atmosphere that denies it.
And if as a by-product the larger Community begins to shed the fears and prejudices born of ignorance, well, then, I’ll take that too.
It is time that the blackout of positive news about the gay Community be lifted. There’s a lot of good news out there, and now that there’s Gay new program in Oklahoma City, I hope it won’t be long before other cities follow suit.
There’s enough talent in the Community to accomplish that. Perhaps in time there could be other types of shows to showcase our community: talk shows, variety shows, even (now, wouldn’t this be bold?) a Gay and Lesbian soap. The field is there and so is the talent.”
In one person’s an attempt to have power, the students I brought with me in spirit to another experience beneficial to their peers were pushed aside and what they could contribute by proxy was sacrificed for someone’s ego, and, as I said, I defend my students.
