>> It's Saturday, June 21st, 2014.
This is An Graham and Heather Oswald,
archivist with the Kennesaw State University Archives,
and we're interviewing John C. Greaves in the studios of
the Audio Video Technology Services at
Kennesaw State University as part of the voices series.
So thank you for coming in today, John.
>> Thanks for having me.
>> So first, we're going to talk
about your family and your background.
So if you could talk about where you
were born and where you grew up.
>> I was born in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
My father was finishing
a degree at Oklahoma State University,
and he was also, I think,
a student assistant basketball coach or something.
Lived in Oklahoma for a brief period of time.
He got a job in with North American Aviation.
He was a plant manager for
North American Aviation out in Downy California.
We moved to California during the Apollo program.
He worked managed a plant
where they made parts for the Apollo program,
and we lived in a series of places Cypress,
Anaheim, and Lakewood, California,
Anaheim is where Disneyland is, which was great as a kid.
We'd go out and watch the fireworks at night
from Disneyland outside our house,
but lived there from when I was 3-7.
And then the Apollo program ended,
and they closed some of those plants,
and we moved back to Oklahoma to Tulsa,
where I grew up and lived until I went away to college.
>> And can you tell me about your family structure?
How many siblings you have parents?
>> Of course, mother and father,
and then my sister and brother.
Mother's Joyce, my father was John, also, John C,
John Charles, my brother Jay,
and my sister Julie.
My parents got divorced when I
was nine or 10 and both remarried.
My father moved out back out to California,
and his new wife was Terri.
I have two half sisters Carrie and Kelly from California,
and then my mother remarried,
and stepfather, Walter,
who's really been a father
more in my life than my biological fathers.
I call him dad. Walter had kids already,
too, so I have two stepbrothers, Skip and Sam.
Skip is actually Walter the third.
And then stepsister Susie.
So it's a large family.
>> Wow, certainly.
>> Large mixed family.
>> So can you talk about your relationship with
your mother and your stepfather and your father?
>> Mother and I are very close. We've always been close.
I was firstborn, and we
still talk and enjoy talking with each other.
And I talked with
her and gotten advice
from her on and off through my life,
and she does the same with me since I've been an adult.
So she talks to me and gets advice sometimes.
My father,
when the parents were relationship was going bad,
and they would fight a lot.
I was the oldest child and would see them
fight and for some reason, he had anger.
That he directed at me, too, his oldest child.
I'm not quite sure why, but after
the divorced and remarried,
we went to visit my brothers and sister and
I during the summer with the father on occasion,
but he had not the best relationship.
He would get mad at me for things
like I remember we
went to visit for two weeks in the summer,
and after we'd been there for two weeks,
he's told us, you're going to stay for another month.
It was too much money to bring you here for
just two weeks and my brother and sister started crying.
They wanted to go home. I stood up for them,
and he got mad at me for doing that.
But anyway, we had not the best relationship growing up.
It wasn't horrible.
He's taking me hunting and fishing.
I grew up in Oklahoma,
and I loved outdoors and fishing.
And there were times we spent together that were good.
But after at a point where I told him I was gay,
he told me that he
couldn't have a relationship with me anymore.
He didn't want to condone homosexuality.
And he just passed away
this last year the Tuesday after Labor Day last year.
And at that time, we'd only spoken once in 17 years.
And it was at the funeral of my nephew.
So my brother, Jay, is also gay.
And my brother kept
trying to get my father to have a relationship with him.
He told him the same thing once
he found out he was gay, too.
And my brother would contact him periodically,
and my father would say,
"Great, I'm glad to hear from you.
How come you haven't come around?
And did you change your mind?"
And my brother would say, "What do you mean?"
He said, "Did you decide not to be gay anymore?"
And my brother would say, "No,
it doesn't work that way. I'm still gay."
And he'd say, "Well, I can't have a relationship
with you." Repeat that again.
So it's really kind troubled my brother a lot.
He just tried to have that relationship and
then went and spent
the last week before my father died with him,
actually, with the family there.
But then after my father died,
my stepmother told him he wasn't welcome at the funeral.
So they didn't want any homosexuals at the funeral.
So that's based on some they were evangelical Christians,
and their particular set of beliefs of
their version of Christianity
was that the homosexuals were evil.
>> But you mentioned that you
were close with your stepfather?
>> Yeah, it's interesting.
My own father didn't want to have anything to do with me.
My stepfather was pretty gruff guy.
He was in the Korean War.
He got a battlefield promotion.
He was a major, and there's actually a life magazine,
coffee table book that has pictures of Korean War.
He's in one of the pictures.
He's standing on a ridge with a couple
of other guys eating food out of
a mess kit with what they call
that thousand mile stare in the eyes.
And there's all the trees or everything's all just
splintered after an artillery
barage or something there in the war.
But his military service
is probably the most important thing in his life to him.
And after the war, he stayed in
the National Guard and got his 20 years in the military.
And they reduced the rank
after the war from the battlefield promotion.
He retired as a captain.
But he used to if we were doing something wrong,
he would say, You've got too much energy.
So get down to 20 push ups,
and I want you to run around the block two times.
And he'd come up and he'd look at you and he'd say,
"Are you ready to behave now?"
And if you didn't say the right thing,
two more times around the block.
He was very stern and very strict,
but he liked the outdoors, too.
We used to go on family camping trips,
and we had a fishing ski boat.
There's some big lakes near Tulsa in Oklahoma.
And he was really upset
when he found my father wouldn't talk to me anymore.
It really bothered him.
And he said, "Well, what do you care about him anyway?"
And it takes more than just giving
birth to someone to be a father.
So we have a good relationship,
and we still talk.
He's 84 now, and I just talked with him for Father's Day.
And it was a little difficult.
He's starting to forget
things sometimes in the middle of a sentence.
So hopefully he'll be around for a while longer.
He's outlived all of his friends.
All of his military friends are dead,
and he doesn't have any living friends anymore.
Told me a couple years ago
that he's not in any hurry to go,
but when it's time,
he's ready he's lived long enough.
>> So can you talk about
your perceptions of being gay as a child
and what informed your opinion as you were growing up?
>> Of course, as a little kid,
I didn't even know there was such a thing.
I guess I probably figured out that I was attracted to
men when I was 12,
13-years-old and figured out
pretty quickly that it
wasn't everybody else wasn't the same way.
And I just didn't tell people,
tried to keep it quiet.
And I didn't know
the word probably homosexual at that point,
but maybe later in high school, somewhere there,
I became aware of the word homosexual and what it meant.
And of course, that was in the late '60s, early '70s.
Is a time it was very different from now.
1968, which is the Stonewall riots.
At that time, it was against the law to be
homosexual in all the states except Illinois.
I don't know why not Illinois,
but it was literally against the law to be gay.
And when they had the McCarthy hearings,
McCarthy went after communist and gays.
They wanted gay people
to name the names other gay people,
and they wanted to get gay people out of
government and out of the school systems.
They had something similar in Florida
called the John's Commission.
And in those days,
as I started becoming aware of this word homosexuality,
and people that were homosexuals, every now and then,
you'd hear about someone that they'd been arrested and
charged with having sex
somewhere with another man or something,
and they'd be something about him in the newspaper,
and then you'd read about them killing themselves.
That was what you did once your life was ruined,
once you were out.
Your family didn't want to have anything to do with you,
and people would want to beat you up
and you couldn't get a job.
And there was a friend of my brother's.
I can't think of his name right now.
His father was one of
the editors of one of the Tulsa newspapers.
There was the Tulsa World and Tulsa Tribune.
I don't remember which one, but he had
gotten arrested in a park somewhere at night,
meeting another gay man,
and he went out to the City Reservoir and jumped
off the dam the next day, killed himself.
So as a high school and getting into college,
I didn't want anybody know I was gay,
and I didn't even want to be gay.
I just hoped it would go away.
We knew it wouldn't,
but just at that time,
it meant you were going to have
a pretty miserable life
or maybe you would just kill yourself.
And so it was something
I tried not to think about too much.
>> And at that point,
I guess Stonewall had maybe just happened.
>> I didn't know about Stonewall until
I came to Atlanta and came out, actually.
But Stonewall happened in 1968,
in the summer of '68 in the third week in June,
which is why they have Gay Pride in
most cities that week.
And there wasn't any kind of
gay literation or gay activism
going on any place I ever lived until I came to Atlanta.
Heard about some in Atlanta.
I lived in De Moines,
Iowa for a while and worked as
a volunteer on a community crisis phone line thing.
It was run by the Red Cross,
but we did had
this phone line service where people could call
in if they were lonely or suicide prevention,
drug problems, things like that.
And I met another guy who was
a volunteer there also that was gay,
and I was probably the first gay man I knew as an adult.
And it was in De Moines.
And when I moved from De Moines,
I didn't know him anymore.
So he wasn't around.
I still knew him, but wasn't till
I came to Atlanta and I moved to Atlanta in 1983.
Worked in retail for six years
and was in De Moines and retail and moved around
different cities opening stores and
training the staff and was in Knoxville,
and then got opportunity to move to
Atlanta to open a new prototype store for the company.
And my brother lived here. So I was
excited about that and moved in with my brother.
And when I got to Atlanta,
there was a gay center, and
you would see some stuff in the news.
And there was a theater the Garden Hills, maybe.
I was one of the Lafont theaters
that would show foreign films,
and they had a foreign film one time called El deputato.
It was about a Spanish politician that had an affair with
another man at the time when they were trying
to get rid of Franco and trying to move toward democracy.
The fascist assassinated his partner
and tried to use it against him in the politics.
But I went and saw this movie.
I'd run movie festival
while I was in college, and I love movies.
But I saw this movie after
the movie looked around
in the audience, and it was all men.
And I could see couples and
groups of men together and people hugging each other.
It was a sad movie afterwards.
And I just felt really lonely.
And I thought, I'm going to try
to find other gay people and meet some people.
I'm tired of being by myself.
So that was probably 1984, maybe.
So I came out at a late age.
I was born in 1957,
so I was almost 30-years-old.
>> And so [NOISE] can
you talk about where you went to school?
>> How far back?
>> Childhood.
>> I don't remember the name of school.
I went to a school in California,
and I remember I had a teacher
in first grade named Miss Ortega,
and she used to speak Spanish to us,
so I knew a little bit of Spanish when I was that age.
And we also had a next door neighbor,
Kenny Heada, who was Japanese first generation.
His parents wanted him to learn Japanese and asked me,
we were best friends if I wanted to learn Japanese, too.
And I actually at one point,
could read and write Japanese on a second grade level,
and I've forgotten almost all of it.
I can't remember very much of my Japanese, unfortunately.
But there was that school.
And the first school I remember the name
of was in Tulsa, Robert Fulton Elementary.
And then I went to Skelly Junior High School,
and the Nathan Hale High School in
Tulsa and then went to Wabash College in Crawfordsville,
Indiana at a small private Liberal Arts College.
It's an all male Liberal Arts College, actually.
And took a couple of classes.
One at Georgia State and one at Oklahoma State in
the summer one time just for stuff I
was interested in where they let me take a class,
even though I wasn't working on a degree.
>> So why did you pick Wabash?
>> So I was a pothead in high school.
I was a little pothead kid,
but I was a really good student in spite of that.
I made really good grades,
and I was a national merit scholar.
And I got offered scholarships
to Washington University in St. Louis, MIT.
I got offered a commandants appointment to West Point
and Wabash offered me a scholarship.
And I've always liked smaller,
more intimate places where you get to know people
and MIT got kind of ruled
out right away because their MITs
all the prestige of being at
MIT is really their graduate program.
Being an undergraduate, MIT is like
being a cog in
the wheel or just a number and it's a huge place.
And Washington University of St. Louis,
I actually was interested in, but
ended up ruling that out later for another reason.
Wapa was a small place.
It was a small Liberal Arts College.
They had 830 students,
and it had a really good reputation.
At the time, William F. Buckley said it
was the best conservative school in the country,
which he based that on. It was a good school.
I had a good academic reputation,
but they didn't take any government or religious funds.
It was the only and I believe to this day,
it's the only private,
completely privately funded
higher education institution left in the country.
Everybody else takes some kind of funds from
the government or churches or somewhere.
But I went and visited,
and it was this beautiful,
old brick buildings with
the patina copper roofs and ivy growing in the walls.
It had a long history.
The administration building had
a plaque on the back of the building.
It was a list of names of
the students who had died in the Civil War.
The college was found, I think, 1823 maybe.
And it was a neat place.
There were some large freshmen classes like
introduction to biology or
psychology one that kind of stuff.
But there were other classes,
and especially as you became a junior and senior,
sometimes you would go
and you didn't even have a classroom.
You would sit on sofas and
chairs in the office with your professor,
and there'd be six or eight of you in
the class and discuss the materials.
So it was just an environment
that I found real attractive,
and they offered me a full scholarship and grants that
paid most of my expenses.
So that's how I ended up there.
>> What was your major there?
>> Well, that was, Wabash
at the time that I went to college,
I had severe asthma as a kid,
and my brother and I
both had grown up getting shots and going to
the doctors and badly
enough that asthma was so bad that at one point,
the doctors had told my parents they should
institutionalize us that they
wouldn't be able to keep us alive at home.
It was sort of before they
had some of the treatments they
do the shots that they give people for Asthma now,
that was experimental at that time.
But I got this really great respect
and admiration for doctors growing up,
and I thought I wanted to be a doctor.
Wabash had a great premed program
with nearly 100% acceptance in the medical schools.
If you got recommended by
their premed committee, you got accepted.
And so I thought I was going to be premed,
but I also was really interested.
I like liberal arts. I wanted
to take a broad range of things.
I interested in sciences,
in anthropology, particularly psychology and philosophy.
And so I could be premed and major in something unusual.
And so I was a double major.
They didn't call it double major.
It was a major in an area of concentration,
but I was a major in philosophy,
and the area of concentration was psychology,
and originally thought I was going to be
premed till I took a couple semesters of biology.
>> Can you talk about your relationship
with your brothers and sisters?
>> So my half sisters,
when my father quit talking with me,
one of them will talk to me,
and we get along okay,
but don't talk often.
It's very seldom.
The other one didn't want to talk with me
anymore and I don't have a close relationship with them.
My stepbrothers,
one Skip he's the oldest one, Walter. The third.
He lives down in
Singer Island outside of Palm Beach in Florida,
and we talk occasionally and get along well,
but we're not close.
Stepsister Susie still lives in Tulsa.
And keeps an eye on my parents
and helps take care of them,
and we get along great, and I always enjoy when
I'm there visiting and getting to spend time with her.
My brother, Jay, and I are very close.
We went through a period of time
where we weren't that close.
He struggled with being gay
also and with the route of going to
church and hoping that he could pray
his being gay away would go away,
at some point, he finally figured out that doesn't work.
And came out after I did.
And he sort of got involved in
the gay party scene and was hanging around with
all the guys that traveled around what
they used to refer to as circuit parties.
There was the white party in Montreal,
and there was the Black party in New York,
and they had this schedule of parties and
people there was a whole lot of
[inaudible] that would plan their schedules around,
getting time off and going
flying to these different cities to go to
these big dances and parties that
would go on for two or three days.
And my brother got involved with that,
and I wasn't a circuit boy,
a party boy, and his friends
thought I was boring because I was involved in politics.
And so we didn't talk for about 10 years very much.
I mean, we were nice to each other, but it's
like we just had nothing in common for a while.
We're very close now and
talk regularly and spend time together.
And when we can.
And he lives in Long Beach, California.
He lived here, he and I lived
together when I first moved to Atlanta.
He worked for Delta at that time.
My sister, Julie, also lives in Long Beach.
She's lived out there for years
before he moved back out there.
And my family likes California a lot.
I'm not real fond of it, but they like it.
But Julie and I are not quite as close.
She's had three kids and struggled
financially with raising a family and
all the time that you have to put into having children.
Her life for years has
been taking care of
her kids and being the best parents she can be.
And all the activities,
the sports and celllo lessons for
my niece and different things.
And they're finally, my niece and nephews are
now two youngest are in college and finishing up college.
And my sister, financially, they're in better shape,
and she's actually flying in
tomorrow with my brother in law.
Interesting enough, they're evangelical Christians,
and we get along just fine.
My brother in law he's a independent rep for
a number of companies that sell
gift items and books to
Christian bookstores and gift shops,
and they're having a convention
in Atlanta for that industry and
a trade show and
different companies with their wares and things.
So he's coming here for the trade show,
and my sister is coming
along so she can spend time with me.
And so I take a couple of days
off and spend time with her while she's here.
>> That's great. So you had
a really interesting story about
coming out to your brother.
Will you talk about that?
>> Okay. Yeah. So,
I struggled with being gay for a long time,
and my brother did too,
and for my brother, I guess it
was an even bigger struggle.
He went to a church here,
the Mount Paren Church of Christ or Church of God,
Church of God, I think, Mount Parent Church of God.
And his religious beliefs
have been important we grew up in the Lutheran Church,
and we had a strong Lutheran family,
but his religious beliefs have been important to him.
And I guess he thought he could you away would be gay by,
going to church and praying.
And he figured out that didn't work,
eventually, but he hadn't figured it out yet.
And we were living together in a house in Marietta,
and I talked about
going to this movie and feeling lonely.
So I went home from that movie and looked up
gay and the yellow pages and found the Atlanta Gay Center
and called and talked to somebody
there and found out there was
a newspaper and there was a club for
gays called Friends Atlanta
and got involved with the club.
And so I came home one evening and I thought,
I was afraid to bring anybody home or tell him about it.
And I started feeling like,
why should I be afraid in my own home? I live here.
So I decided I would tell him I was gay.
And I told him, and he just kind of sat
stonefaced and looked and didn't say much of anything.
And at the time, I thought,
well, he didn't get mad.
He didn't call me any names or anything.
So I guess that went okay.
I came home the next,
and this would have been 1984,
85, and the AIDS crisis had already been begun.
I came home from work
the next day or a couple of days later,
and he had some little rubber made gloves on
and then and,
cell or something, and he's cleaning the bathroom.
And I came in and I said, oh,
you're doing cleaning,
which I just thought he was cleaning.
And he said, well, you never know what kind
of disease you might bring home to me.
[LAUGHTER] I said, What?
[LAUGHTER] And we had a little fight,
and he told me I wasn't allowed
to bring any gay people to the house,
and he didn't want to be around him,
and he was still struggling.
[LAUGHTER] So, eventually,
we decided we probably shouldn't live together.
And he moved out.
I met David Greer not long after that,
and not too much longer.
David moved in with me,
but my brother in the meantime, I guess,
saw that I could come out and that I was
happy and started thinking about it.
And he decided that maybe he could do the same.
And he met a guy that he started going to I don't know,
to clubs or where exactly,
but he met somebody that he liked.
And one night, we were
already up in bed to get ready to go to sleep,
and there was a knock on the door.
And who's at the door?
And I went downstairs opened the door,
and it's my brother, and he said, hi,
I want to introduce you to someone,
and you want to introduce me to his boyfriend.
So that was his way of telling me he was gay too.
So I think it's
changed and things some people
still have that kind of struggle,
probably especially people
coming from religious families.
And I think for a lot of Black gay men and lesbians,
it's difficult because so much of
the Black community is organized around the churches,
and I think kind of it's harder for them.
But for a lot of young people,
I think it's a lot easier now and people
don't maybe go through as much struggle as we did.
>> Did you have any concept that
your brother was gay before he showed up or [inaudible]
>> I didn't but when
I didn't tell my mom right away that I was gay,
but when I finally did tell her,
she was upset at first,
not upset that mad at me anything, but it was upset.
She told me later on that she actually went through,
like, a griefing process,
and she said, I suddenly
felt like you were not the person that I knew.
You were somebody else,
and I felt like I'd lost the person I thought I knew.
She and I had always been really
close, and that upset her.
And later on, that was fine.
But even she didn't want me
even originally to tell my stepfather.
She thought, he's this military guy
and real gruff and serious,
and he won't like it.
And she was kind of scared to death.
He was going to find out.
But eventually, she told him herself
because she didn't want to just know this herself,
and sometimes she worried about us,
and she didn't like worrying about herself.
So she told him herself
after telling us we couldn't tell him.
But he and she both told me later on that they suspected,
even back in high school,
that my brother was gay,
but they were shocked to find out I was gay,
that they never would have guessed that.
They thought I was this rough and tumble guy,
and I had dated
some while I was in high school a little bit,
even, and they were surprised.
I didn't have a clue my brother was gay.
I was surprised when he told me.
>> So you came out in
Atlanta and you talked about realizing that you were gay.
Maybe in your early teenage years earlier than that?
>> Knew it without putting those words on it,
probably the time I was 12 or 13, probably.
But we're at a point
where using the words and saying, okay,
I think I'm gay probably
that didn't happen till I was maybe 19.
>> So why did you decide to come out in Atlanta?
You talked about the movie.
>> Well, first all, just loneliness.
When I worked in retail,
I traveled around opening stores.
I worked for what was called J Branham.
It was like a Ross Storbto and Rostors owns those now,
but it was like a Marshall's or TJ Max.
And I would travel around.
I'd open a store.
I'd go in when they were building
it with the constructions being finished and
train help finish setting
up the store and hire the staff and train them
and get an assistant manager to
the point where they could run the store and be promoted,
and then I'd move to another city
and do the same thing again.
So I lived in five different cities in six years.
And so aside from being gay,
I'd go in and work 70,
80 hour weeks for two or three months,
and then at a point where I
had a staff that knew what they were
doing and they could take care of problems.
I wasn't there, I'd start having time off and I'd start
meeting people and get to know some people in
the community I was in and then move.
So I had gone through six years of not having
any close relationships really
that lasted very much time.
So I was lonely to begin with.
And then seeing that movie and recognizing,
not only was I lonesome just for other company,
but to be around
other gay people and people I could be myself
with that just sort of made me want to meet people.
So I did some coming out
going to meet other
joining the friends Atlanta organization,
and I ended up doing some volunteer work
at the Atlanta Gays Center.
I did some of those things, you know,
to start meeting other people and have some friendships,
but then eventually came out very publicly on television.
After I met David,
David was younger than I was.
And he just sort of
assumed that everybody should treat him fairly,
and if they had a problem with
someone being gay, that was their problem.
He never went through any struggle about being gay.
It was any internal struggle.
And he joined Friends Atlanta also.
That's where we met through Friends Atlanta.
They had a we'd get
together on Sunday afternoons when the weather is
nice and have pick up
volleyball games at one of the parks in town.
And we'd play volleyball
and he'd seen me playing volleyball,
one of the volleyball games
and decide he wanted to meet me.
So we got together,
and some of the people
and friends were politically active or
activists in addition to
being part of this social recreational group.
It was a small segment of them.
Most gay people are not politically active and
they hate politics, just like everybody else.
But we were at Gay Pride,
I think in 19 probably 1987.
And the friends group sponsored a volleyball tournament,
a friendly volleyball, not competitive volleyball.
Anybody that wanted to play could play.
And we sponsored a volleyball tournament
at the Gay Pride.
And if you looked at
the film footage from
the news in those days at Gay Pride,
they would focus in on
drag queens or somebody wearing leather or,
and that was the kind of
image that gay people had in the media.
I was, we were all
drag queens or people or guys wearing leather.
And the people were
very ordinary and pretty much like everybody else.
In this volleyball tournament,
one of the news stations
came to film the volleyball tournament,
and they wanted to interview people,
and nobody would talk to them.
And everybody was saying, you can't
put my face on this screen.
So when they showed the news story,
it had those little fuzzy things
that go across people's faces.
And I went up to talk to the reporter,
I was apologetic, and I said,
you need to understand why
they won't talk to you. They're scared.
They're being fired at their jobs,
or scared their families will disown them.
They're scared for a lot of reasons,
and, you know, they don't want to
talk to you on camera for that reason.
They said, well, would you talk to us on camera?
And I thought about
it a minute and thought, somebody should.
And I was kind of scared, but I said, yes, and I did it.
So I did an interview with them on
camera and it was on the news.
And it was probably
Saturday evening or Sunday morning news.
And I was terrified when I went to work Monday.
I thought I'm going to get fired when I go into work.
But I didn't, it actually turned out okay.
>> Were there a lot of people at
the time who have been out in
the gay community but weren't
openly out in terms of friends and family.
>> Yeah, and there's still some like that,
especially among older gay men.
One of my best friends,
he's year and a half younger than I am.
And he thinks his whole family knows he's gay,
but he doesn't talk with them about
it, especially his mom.
He doesn't use those words,
and he's not comfortable saying that to her.
And that was even more that way in those days.
There were people, you were out to other gay people.
But the whole business about coming out and being
open with other people was really scary for people.
You think about the people you love,
your family, your support network, your friends,
and for gay people then and probably for some still now,
that's a really scary thing.
If these people that I love and
care about who I know love and care about me,
are they still going to love and care about
me after they find out I'm gay?
Am I going to lose the most important people
in my life if I tell them this?
So it's a tough decision with the friends and family.
And then there are
no protections that protect you from being
fired if you're gays in Georgia and a lot of the country.
So that's always been a fear for people.
If they find out I'm gay at work,
I'll lose my job and then I won't be able to
support myself. I'll be homeless.
The whole set of fears.
If you don't have a money coming in,
you can't feed yourself and you'll die.
[LAUGHTER] So there was
a lot more of that then than there is now.
I would say that was in
the '80s and still even in the early '90s,
that was more common than not.
The majority of people not everybody in their family
knew and probably the people at work didn't know.
>> So can you describe your process for coming out?
Talk about maybe your relationships
and political activism?
>> So some of the coming out had to do,
getting involved with David Greer was
part of a motivation for coming out.
I admire the fact that he just was who he was and
didn't try to hide anything and he just assumed that
people should treat him with
respect and dignity because he's another human being.
And if they had a problem with him being gay,
that was their problem and not his.
I admired that he was like that and was so open,
and it inspired me to try to be more open.
But then he was interested in politics.
I had been interested in politics.
I had done some political activity
going back to, I think when I was.
>> Sorry.
>> I'll take a drink of water.
>> I'm actually going to use the restroom.
[LAUGHTER]
>> Do you want to turn the thing off or?
>> No, he'll just edit it out.
I think that was just some background noise.
>> Am I talking too much and being too verbose?
>> Not at all.
>> Okay.
>> No, no.
>> I can do that. I can talk people's head off, so.
>> That's what you're supposed to be doing. [LAUGHTER]
>> For here, it's okay,
sometimes I'm around somebody at work or friends,
and people I work with
closely or friends have given them license.
I said, Get off into a tangent or I'm
talking too much about something and
you're tired of it, just tell me.
[LAUGHTER] I know, but.
>> So we're just, are you an extrovert
by nature or are you introvert?
>> I've done one of those Myers Briggs things,
and I'm probably an introvert that has learned to be
extroverted because of the things
I'm interested in that require you to be outgoing.
But I would say, probably
I've had to work at not being shy.
The first time I talked before a group of people,
I was terrified and shaking
and I could get up for any size group now.
I could get up on a stage and
speak before 100,000 people, I'd be fine now.
But the first time I had to do something like that,
I was just terrified.
Like giving a speech in speech class before other kids.
The work that you're doing
for the archives and this project,
is it a project that
Kens decided they wanted to do or did
you all get to decide what you wanted to
do or how did that happen?
Is it an area of interest for you two or?
>> Yes and it's also for the archives,
because we are part of
the Georgia LGBTQ Archives project.
So it's got Emery,
Georgia State Center, Atlanta History.
>> So the archives decided
they wanted to be a part of that project,
and you're involved because of that.
>> And well we had looked at
documenting voices that weren't
heard that were part of the minority.
And so we're also doing some oral histories
with people in African American community in Cobb County.
We'd like to move into some Hispanic.
>> That'd be a good thing to do. [OVERLAPPING]
>> Interview you.
>> There's a huge Hispanic community in Cobb.
[OVERLAPPING]
>> An immigrant community in general.
>> There are a lot of people from
India that live in Cobb County.
>> Yeah. They're in my program,
actually, so it's really interesting.
>> I think we found that so much of
especially just the university archives really
tells that very official administrative history,
and we'd really like to broaden that perspective.
>> We've got a lot of the official history now,
so we've like to have some of the unofficial history.
It's a lot more interesting.
It's always a lot more interesting.
As much as we love memos.
>> Yes. Is that great.
[LAUGHTER]
>> I do this at work.
>> No, I think it's interesting that
you do not want to be on the computer when you come home.
I admire you for that because I
can't peel myself away from it.
[LAUGHTER]
>> There was an interesting story
recently on NPR and they talked
about people being so engaged with their devices,
and all the phones have got great cameras now,
and people are going around taking pictures, everything.
And they did this thing where they had people
go to this event and told them, take pictures.
And they told another group of people, go to the event,
take pictures, but pay attention to what's going on,
so you can tell us about the context of the picture and
what was going on when you
took the picture and what the pock picture meant.
And they had another group of people, they
said, go to the event,
and you can't take any pictures if you've got your phone,
leave it off while you're there.
And then talk to them afterwards
and ask questions about
the event and what happened at the
event and different things.
The people who were told go there and take pictures,
they couldn't tell them what was going on at the event.
They're there so busy taking pictures and engaged with
their devices that they didn't
experience what was going on around them.
They're not at all engaged.
And that's another reason I do that.
I think that's one of the problems
with technology right now
is people get engaged with
their devices and not other people.
>> It's very true. I taught a session at
an institute that the Museum of History
and Holocaust Education was doing,
and I was telling Ann when I got back from it.
It was the first time I've taught
a class where I had asked them
to look at objects and just look at them,
try to figure out what they were without giving them
any context because that was what I wanted them to do.
They all got off their phones and Googled immediately.
And you don't need to do that.
You just need to interact with
the actual object and try to learn from it.
And they didn't seem to understand that concept.
>> All the bars have the trivial pursuit nights,
I used to love playing trial pursuits,
and it's no fun anymore.
>> Because they're all goggling [inaudible]
>> Yeah, or who can hide if they're on Google, the best.
>> I think you were talking
about David's influence on coming out.
>> So David, he influenced me a lot,
especially with his family.
I didn't know how much David if he
talked to you any about his family.
David, his mother and father both
came from families where
they were one of seven children, each big families.
Some of them were Georgia Mountain people.
I think David may have been the very first person in
his family or extended family
to ever get a college degree.
A couple of his uncles were in the Ku Klux Klan.
I can remember trying to talk to them and
be friendly with them at family dinners and things,
and I'd say hello,
and they wouldn't even say hello back.
They'd act as I wasn't there.
Actually it was David who was in there.
But his grandmother was the matriarch of the family,
and they had their holiday events there.
And when he told her she was gay,
and he met me and he told her about me.
And she had a family meeting,
apparently, with the family and said,
look David's going to bring
John to the Thanksgiving and the Christmas dinners.
And if any of you have a problem,
you just keep it to yourself
because he's welcome in my home,
and you better treat him like he's welcome.
David expected people to treat him that way,
and most of the time people did.
It was that,
the fear that people had about coming
out is like putting yourself in jail.
This fear is like a prison and
the bars are probably stronger than any steel bars.
If you can keep people afraid,
you can control them.
And it was people were
being afraid of coming out, control themselves.
So I saw to David,
here's a way to not be afraid,
and good things happen to you.
So that was that part of it.
But then the political part,
I had grown up and some of it came from my stepfather.
When we go on these family camping trips,
he'd get his military side out.
At the end of the camping trip, he'd say,
we need to police up the campsite.
That's what he called it. And he'd line us up.
My brothers and sisters, we'd line up
like two yards apart and walk across
the campsite and pick up
the trash and clutter and throw stuff away,
including stuff that people had
left there who camped there before us.
And he said,
we're going to leave it better than we found it.
And I thought that was
a good thought to
leave things better than you found them.
And some of my objective in
life and being involved not just in gay activism,
but other community volunteerism and things that I've
done is to be a part of
the community and try to do what I can to
make the community be a better place
and leave things better than I found them.
And for gay people,
it was so hard when I was growing up to be a gay person.
It's getting politically involved and trying
to use the political process, both street activism,
but also mainstream politics,
getting involved in party politics was
a way to hopefully create social change.
And make it easier for future young gay people
to have a better life
and to leave things better than I found them.
So that was some
of the inspiration about getting politically involved.
You've met Dick Rhodes,
and Dick became a friend pretty quickly.
I met him through Friends, Atlanta,
which was a social recreational club
for gays and lesbians at Atlanta.
Dick was the president one time,
and later on, I was the president for a while.
And at its height, we had between 450-500 members.
And it was at
a time where there were a few organizations.
There were maybe three organizations
in the whole area for gays and lesbians.
There was the Atlanta lesbian feminist Alliance Alpha.
And a lot of the women who were in
that organization had been
abused by men for being lesbians.
And they didn't allow any men there.
They had a house where they had their meetings,
and no men were allowed over 12.
If they had children and the boys were younger than 12,
they could bring them, but once they hit
12, they weren't allowed there.
But there was the Alpha group,
and then there was Atlanta Adventure Sports,
AVS, which was a gay sports club.
They would go on camping trips and and things.
And their friends grew out of AVS.
They had some fight.
I don't know what about, but
a split between some of the members,
and some went off and started their own group,
but they wanted to run differently.
And that became Friends Atlanta.
And Friends had game nights,
we'd meet at someone's house and play
board games and cards and have refreshments.
We'd go out dining out club.
We'd go on dinners together.
There was a bowling league that was formed.
All the gay bowling leagues in
Atlanta grew out of Friends Atlanta.
And there's a gay volleyball league,
there's a gay swim team in Atlanta
that grew out of Friends Atlanta.
We had camping trips and different things we do together.
But there was a handful of people,
I would say, out of that 450, 500 members,
there was probably less than two dozen
who were politically active,
and Dick was one of them.
And he at one point,
was the head of the DeKalb Democratic Party.
He was the first openly gay delegate
to a presidential convention from a southern state,
went to the 1988 Democratic National Convention,
and he ran for office at one point.
I have one of his buttons, my button collection.
But I had been
involved a little bit in
politics and always had an interest in it.
I'd done some activism as a kid.
Mostly around anti nuclear stuff back in
the days when there was the craze
about nuclear power plants.
But I had also done when I lived in De Moines in Iowa,
John Anderson was one of
the Republican presidential candidates
that ran that year.
I really liked him. I thought he was
a smart guy and had a lot of good ideas.
And actually I collected personally,
three fourths of the signatures he needed
to get on the presidential ballot in Iowa.
I went to the Iowa Caucuses when I lived in De Moines.
And so I'd done a little bit of party politics already.
And seeing what Dick was doing,
I got involved in the Democratic Party and started
doing both street activism
but also getting involved in party politics.
And so I'd say David and Dick were my big inspirations.
I considered Dick to be my political mentor.
>> I'd say, Dick was probably a generation ahead of you.
>> Dick is 77 now, maybe.
So he's 20, 21 years older than I am.
I mentioned before about McCarthy hearings
in the Johns Committee.
Dick came to,
I don't know if you know he came to,
about the John's committee, and then he came to Georgia
because of the Johns Commission in Florida.
It was a McCarthy inspired commission
where they decided McCarthy
hearings were so great and wonderful,
they'd have them in Florida, too.
And the Johns Commission was formed,
and they wanted to get
homosexuals out of the schools and government
and I'm not sure if the Johns Commission had
an anti communist sec portion of it, too,
but they were going around
and finding out people that were rumored to
be gay and subpoenaing them and threatening that they'd
ruin their lives that they didn't give
names of other gays that they knew,
and they'd name names and they
print these lists of names in the newspaper,
and then you got fired and you killed yourself.
And Dick had some people
that he knew who had been brought before
the Johns Commission and
figured his name was going to be
named at some point and fled
the state terrified of the Johns Commission.
And that's why he moved to Georgia.
So that he's an older person
than I am and was probably as a younger person,
even more closet than I was from talking with him.
And things like the Johns Commission
dealt with some pretty awful stuff,
now he's still involved, though,
and he's working on senior activism and trying to help
get services for gay and lesbian elders
in assisted living facilities and things.
So he's an inspiring person.
>> Excuse me.
>> He calls David his granddaughter.
[LAUGHTER] I don't know if he's ever heard. He's always
referred to David as his granddaughter.
I don't know why but.
>> Well, he gave us a copy
of David's wedding invitation,
so he's still very involved.
>> David is getting married today, officially.
>> That's great.
>> Yeah, and I couldn't go
for not just because this was scheduled,
I would have rescheduled this
if that was the only reason.
And he knew that a lot of people
probably wouldn't be able to come from out of town.
But it's the second time they actually rushed to
San Francisco and got married in
the brief little period where it was
legal to get married.
It seemed to be in San Francisco,
but then the court later threw those weddings out.
I've thought of he and Lee as
being married for a long time,
so it almost seems strange
that they're getting married now
because they've been married.
>> Like a recommitment, sir.
>> This will be official and it'll be state sanctioned,
and their license will mean something,
and the state of Illinois will recognize it,
and their kids will have married parents.
>> So I know
you talked about looking up gay in the yellow pages,
but just maybe talk a little bit more about how you got
involved in the LGBTQ community in Atlanta.
>> So I looked up the gay and yellow pages,
and I found this Atlanta gay center,
and it had a phone number,
which was a helpline, interestingly enough.
I'd worked on the helpline
and I'd actually done that three times in my life.
I worked on a telephone helpline.
They were really popular in
the 70s and somewhat in the 80s.
I worked on one starting when I
was 15-years-old in Tulsa,
called Crisis Open Line, I think it was called.
And then I worked on one in De Moines,
and the gay center here had one,
and it had this phone number.
I called, and I was talking with someone there,
and they told me about the gay center
and they had a newspaper,
and they had little get togethers and they said,
Oh, and there's some clubs and things,
and there's bars that people go to.
We can give you a list of stuff.
And I went up to the gay center
and got one of their newspapers
and got information they gave me.
And one of the things was the club Friends Atlanta.
I found out when they were having one of
their game nights and went to the game night,
met a few of the people there.
And I ended up
volunteering on the telephone help
line at the gay center and getting involved in friends.
And I probably got
really involved in a bunch of stuff fast after
having been lonely for six years
and not having any close friends around where I lived.
And it was so I was just it was exciting
to suddenly be able to have
a bunch of new friends and people to do things with,
and I probably went overboard
and got involved in everything I could think of to
get involved with for a while.
I got involved very quickly.
Within a few months, I was involved in
the leadership in Friends Atlanta.
I was helping plan activities and run activities.
And I don't know how much of
the if I answered the question all the way or not.
>> Just as much as you have.
>> You're you'll ask follow up questions if you need to.
>> Absolutely. So coming from Tulsa California as well,
did you have any concerns about coming out in the South?
>> Sure. First of all,
Tulsa is extremely, extremely conservative.
Oklahoma in general, Tulsa probably a little bit less
than it's a little more
cosmopolitan because of the oil industry.
I had the largest airport in the world in the 1920s.
Paris was second, and it was because of oil men
flying in and out for the oil fields there.
So that made it a little bit more cosmopolitan,
but it was a weird place, too.
They had a group in Tulsa that wanted to do opera,
but they didn't have an orchestra.
And so they did one of
Wagner's operas as Reader's theater.
You know, that's something I read about
they did in the 1930s or something.
[LAUGHTER] It sounded really strange.
I was trying to figure it out, too.
But Tulsa had this religious fundamentalism.
It's very conservative state.
It's very much a Republican state.
I grew up in a conservative household,
and I'm actually a fairly conservative person.
I might have been a Republican,
too, if it wasn't for being gay.
It's the Republican Party has been so unfriendly to gays,
and they've been so exclusionary
toward people who didn't fit
a particular set of
a mold that they wanted people to be in.
I just there's not any way I could
participate in the Republican Party.
The people, some of the people like
Pat Buchanan that were there in
the past are just horrible.
But a lot of that is fueled.
It's not just conservatism,
but it's conservatism fueled by religious fundamentalism.
You look back at, like, Barry Goldwater conservatives.
They were not religious conservatives.
And Georgia, the South has that same thing.
It's in some ways,
Georgia may not be quite as conservative as Tulsa.
But you also have here the history of the hate groups.
I became an expert on hate crimes as a volunteer,
and knowledgeable about hate groups and worked
with victims of hate crimes for
years and tried to get hate crimes legislation passed.
And I knew about hate groups fairly here,
it used to be pretty common
for people to get attacked for being gay.
Morris Brown College, it
used to be a tradition among graduating
seniors to get together and come into midtown and beat
up gays for an activity as part of their graduating.
I had friends that were attacked.
And when I was doing working on
hate crimes and public safety stuff,
I knew people that were murdered,
and so the hate groups,
the hate activity, the anti gay,
conservative religious fundamentalism,
all those things all made it uncomfortable.
When I came out,
I was worried about being fired mainly.
But later when the Cobb County anti gay stuff happened,
and I was on the news so much,
and I expected that I would get threats, and we did.
I had a listed phone number,
and people were calling the house
and threatening to kill us.
We got tabs set up on the phone with the police.
We authorized them to set up tracers on the phone so they
could try to find out who was making these threats and
stuff, and it's scary.
Georgia has the history of the lynching of Leo Frank,
which has marked both the birth of
the Jewish Anti Defamation League
and the modern rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan.
We both grew out of that event here in Georgia.
There are in 1992,
I've got a report that I'm going to give you
about hate group activity
in Georgia that was done in 1992,
and it's even got a synopsis of
all these different Neo Nazi
and skinhead and Ku Klux Klan groups.
It's got a synopsis of the different things
that happened a chronology through the year.
It's interesting report, but in 1992,
in this map that shows where
the different organizations were based.
There's a huge bunch of them
up in the northwestern part of the state,
but there's some down in this area.
And there were 22 active hate groups in
1992 in Neo Nazi and Ku Klux Klan.
There was a group that had a Hitler's
birthday party celebration in
1992 in Marietta with a cake.
It actually says that in the chronology in the synopsis,
they had a Hitler birthday cake.
That was a point where Neo Nazi skinheads young,
skinhead white supremacist Nazi's,
there were a lot of those groups growing at that time.
So being out publicly,
it was not there's
an added element that was here and probably worse here
than it might have been if you if you were in
California or New York or something,
is just worried about
your physical safety about somebody trying to harm.
>> And let's see.
So you mentioned coming out publicly on television.
So you didn't have any repercussions at work about that?
Did anyone ever mention that to you?
>> Something funny happened at work.
There was this guy that was my supervisor at work,
and he was this big heavy guy.
His name was Darryl.
And Darryl was a class clown guy.
He was constantly making jokes,
and he liked people to laugh at him, laugh at his jokes.
And he made racial jokes,
and he made anti gay jokes
among the different jokes he made.
Not all of them were those.
But I was really kind of offended by
him and but afraid to tell him.
And it's one of the reasons I
expected to be fired when I went to work the next Monday.
So I went into work on that Monday,
and Darryl walked up to me almost as soon as I came in.
He said, Hey, I saw you on television, John.
I said, You did. And he said,
Yeah, you did really well.
I said, I did well.
He said, Yeah, you spoke really well.
You looked good on there.
I said, I was dumbfounded.
I said, Darryl, I was scared coming into work today.
I thought you were probably going to fire
me after seeing me on there.
I said, You make jokes about gay people sometimes,
and they're pretty awful jokes.
And he said, I like to get a laugh out of people.
I'm sorry I shouldn't do that and I was really shocked.
It was but it was also,
like, a big relief.
It was like, what have I been so scared of all this time?
So that's the truth about all the stuff we're scared of.
A lot of things we're afraid of never happens.
But as long as you're afraid of it,
it can still control you.
>> So you were talking a little bit about
you've been active in communities like,
maybe from the time that you were part
of the hotline in Oklahoma.
So can you talk just a little bit
about how you got started with that.
>> The very first thing I did getting active in
the community was when I was in junior high school.
I heard about this thing called the walk for mankind.
It was a March of Dimes event where
you had this 20 mile walk and you
got people to sponsor you for amount per
mile to raise money to fight birth effects.
And I don't know
why I got excited about that, but I read about that.
I thought that was really cool,
helping raise money to fight birth effects.
And I called up the March of
Dimes office and told him I wanted
to participate and asked him how I could do it.
And they said, come by our office and
get one of these packages, or sponsorship package.
And so I got my mom to take me over there.
And while I was there, they said,
Oh, you're young.
You're in school. What school do you go to?
And I told them, and they said, Would you be
your school chairman for the walk for Mankind?
And I said, Okay.
I said, What do I do? And I said, Well,
get other kids to be in the walk for Mankind.
So I asked to speak before the student council
and asked for permission to put up posters on the walls.
And I recruited other kids to be in the walk for Mankind.
And so that was my first community involvement,
there was a move
in the 70s to build nuclear power plants,
and a lot of people were scared of
nuclear power plants and afraid that they weren't safe.
And I think the first political kind
of activism I got involved,
there was a nuclear power plant
was going to be built in Oklahoma.
I think it was called the Black Fox or
Black Hat nuclear power plant.
When I was 15, I knew I found out about it,
and I knew some older persons that
were involved in ant nuclear stuff and got
them to take me and go to a protest
outside of the site where they were
building the nuclear power plant.
But I always liked reading.
I used to start reading
Time magazine when I was eight or 9-years-old and
liked to know what was going on in the world
and got worried about wars and
different things really at a very early age
and got interested in politics,
you know, and who our leaders were and
what things they stood for,
you know, whether or not they were good leaders or not.
That was something that I was interested in by the time I
was 12 or 13-years-old, just reading stuff.
But while I got involved in college at
Wal Base College in a couple of things.
They had a group.
We had a small group of Black students there,
and we had what was called the Malcolm X Institute.
And the Malcolm X Institute,
the guy who was the faculty advisor to
the Malcolm X Institute was also
the advisor to the college film series.
And I loved movies,
even when I was there
was a girl that I was really
close friends with in high school.
We used to go to foreign films together in high school.
So I got involved in running the film series and then
got involved with the Malcolm
X Institute because he said,
You should come to the Malcolm X Institute meetings.
And there was a T is a time when
Nelson Mandela was in prison in South Africa.
And there was the efforts to try to end
apartheid in South Africa.
And there was a movement mainly among Black colleges,
but some other schools, too,
to try to get schools
to divest of their investments
in South Africa from the school endowment funds.
And so I got involved with a group,
the South African Studies Group,
which there were people from the Malcolm X group,
but there was also some of the professors
from the Philosophy Department,
one of the one of the professors,
her name was Ann Roberts.
I got to know her pretty well,
and she was she was a philosophy professor.
She was also a Marxist.
She was a dyed in the wool Marxist.
She really believed in Marxism
and work for the collective,
for the benefit of all people.
And she got involved in that as well.
But we began studying,
you know, working together as a group,
researching the Apartheid and
the political process in
South Africa and the way that Blacks are treated.
And we built up a case and went to the board of
the college and asked them to
divest in the college's investments in South Africa.
So that was another of the political things.
And then I think
the first party politics I got involved with was
in was in the 1980 election when I lived in De Moines,
and I really liked John Anderson.
I thought he was a smart guy,
had lots of good ideas,
many of which Ronald Reagan
took from him and used after he got elected.
But I went and collected signatures and found out
about the Iowa Caucus and how
the Caucus process worked and went to the Iowa Caucuses.
So that was some of my early stuff.
>> And I was really interested in the fact
that you were answering,
like, a suicide line when you were in your teens.
>> So they used to have
this thing on television years ago
called The Movie of the Week.
You know about that?
>> I do.
>> You're kidding. [LAUGHTER] I
didn't think you're old enough to know about it.
>> I am much older than you think I am.
>> So they had these movies of the week,
and one of the movies of the week once it was when I
was 14 or 15-years-old was about,
and it was about a suicide hotline in California,
these kids, teenagers and college age,
they worked on the suicide hotline,
and then it was the movie of the week about how they were
saving lives and people
would call and it had
some weird thing where they weren't
supposed to meet the people.
You only talk to them on the phone, which that was
always a rule every hotline I ever worked.
The gay hotline, it wasn't
was okay to meet people off that one.
But the one in De Moines and the one
in most of the crisis hotlines for your protection,
you stayed only talk to people on the phone,
and in the movie, one of them goes
and meets someone who just seems so
lonely and they really need somebody
and they end up getting killed or something,
something stupid in the movie.
But I got fascinated with this idea of the hotlines,
and I found out they had one in Tulsa called Open Line,
and I decided I wanted to work there.
So I called them and said,
I'd like to volunteer. How do you volunteer?
And they told me that they
had you had to come in and fill out an application,
and you had to take psychological tests.
And then they had
a training classes that you had to go through,
and if you went through all that okay,
then you could work on the hotline.
And they told me about they were having
a meeting coming up for people
who were interested in being volunteers,
and I should come to this meeting.
So I got to the meeting and I went through
the whole meeting and
listened to their whole spill and stuff,
and at the end, told them I wanted
to fill out the paperwork and
wanted to join, and they said, You're really young.
How old are you? And I said 15,
and they said, Oh, I'm sorry, you can't
be a volunteer unless you're 18.
We don't let anybody under 18 volunteer.
I said, why not? And I argued with them
and I persuaded them to let me go
ahead and take the classes and do everything and they
could see how well I did and then
decide later on whether or
not they're gonna let volunteer.
And I went through the psychological stuff
and the classes and everything.
And part of the classes was role
playing and they decided after I
did all that that I did well
enough and they let me go ahead and be a volunteer.
Most of the people that were there
were there were a few that were 18, 19,
but most of them were in their late 20s or early 30s,
and there was a couple of
psychologists that were like the sponsors.
The people with credentials that made sure that
we abide by good guidelines
and processes and policies and whatever.
Definitely I was the youngest person there,
but I really liked doing it.
It was really nice to I felt
good about doing something to help other people.
I've always enjoyed that,
it's nice to do something for other people
and it was it was an interesting experience.
Most of the people that called
those things were people that were lonely.
That was probably the number one reason
people called just,
they wanted somebody to talk to lonely people.
And then after that probably
people with relationship problems.
That would be number 2, they were having
fights with their boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever.
Even though it was suicide
prevention and drug overdose stuff,
those were very tiny percentage
of the calls you actually got.
But I dealt with when I was 15,
I talked with some people on
the phone that were suicidal,
and we had a thing called
the physicians desk reference, PDR.
You know, somebody'd call up and they'd say I decided
to kill myself and I took this overdose of pills.
You'd say, what kind of pills did you take?
We'd look them up and find out was this
a dangerous dose or not and we'd talk to them.
Anyway, that's how I got involved with that.
I really enjoyed it.
When I got to De Moines
moving around in the retail business.
I got to De Moines and found out they
had a similar thing there.
The one in Tulsa was
just a group of people who thought it'd be a good idea to
have something like that because some of them had
had friends that had died of drug overdoses.
And they said, we need some kind of place
that will help people and prevent this here.
So this group of people got together and raised
the money and set the one up in Tulsa.
But the one in De Moines was actually
run underneath and was
sponsored through the Red Cross in De Moines.
So the one in De Moines,
in addition to doing that,
also had a contract.
Again, probably because it was through
the Red Cross they could do this.
They had a contract, part of the training
we had to have in De Moines was
in screening phone calls after hours,
screening for child abuse complaints.
We handled the after hours calls
for the De Moines area for child abuse complaints,
and we could page on call workers if a child was being
abused or that a caseworker
needed to go out and investigate a home or something.
And so while I worked there,
I also dealt with child abuse calls.
I had a call once that I took
where a man had been going by a house I heard screaming.
It was in the summertime and
the windows were open and he went up closer
and he got one of the windows and
he heard the screaming and it sounded like
a child scream to him and
he looked in the window of the kitchen and
saw a chair propped up
against underneath the handle
and propped up against the oven door.
And it seemed like the screams
were coming from the kitchen,
and he climbed through the window and took the chair out.
Somebody had beat up this little girl and
stabbed her in the head and put her in
the oven and turned the oven on.
You can tell it bothers me to think about that,
that was a child abuse complaint I took.
So we had pagers,
we had to page so to call the police
and the child abuse worker that was on call.
That had nothing to do with being gay.
>> So how does something like that affect you, though?
>> Gosh, that's upsetting.
In taking calls,
talking to somebody that's lonely is not intense
but when you actually did get on a call it
was a suicide call or something,
it's a very intense and emotional experience.
Usually, if you did take a suicide call, afterwards,
you were required to not take
any more calls for the evening and you would
call the people that
were the psychologists that
were in charge of the program,
and they'd have somebody come and sort of debrief you
and talk to calm you down afterwards and stuff.
And I talked to some I talked to over the years,
maybe a dozen people that
were suicidal and I had one of those persons
that killed themself while I was on the phone with
them and that was pretty devastating for a while.
But I knew it
wasn't my fault and
sometimes people get overwhelmed and,
gosh, what did I do wrong?
And for whatever reason I knew not to think like that and
I got over it but it was it was a tough experience.
>> So did those experiences
inform how you live your life now,
how you address problems?
>> Yes.
My last partner killed himself.
After having worked over in
Russia and having a run in with the FSB
and stuff which I can tell you more about
that another time but he hung himself.
He was having panic attacks
and went into depression after being
interrogated and scared by the FSB in Russia.
I went to a support group afterwards
survivors of suicide after
that and I didn't
connect well with the other people in the group.
There's so many other people in the group and
it's really common for people after
that when someone close to them commits
suicide or if you're
a person who has
a friend or somebody and you're trying to stop them.
A real common reaction is guilt, people feel guilty.
What did I do wrong?
Somehow I should have been able to stop this.
And that seemed to be a lot of what
the survivors in the support group were struggling with.
They had just overcome with feelings of
guilt about maybe they could have stopped it somehow.
How could they should have seen that
this was coming and somehow
I've known that you're
responsible for your own actions and
other people are responsible for their actions.
And you can try to help people but ultimately,
when people decide something like that they decide it
themselves it's not you that
did it. You're trying to help them.
So I've been when I've had situations in
life that involve other people and stuff
like that but even getting into arguments with people.
I've been really good about
understanding what I'm responsible
for and what other people
are and it helps to process and move
on and go on with things so that's been good for them.
I said I was a pothead when I was in
high school and I can remember
working the first outdoor concert
I ever went to at the Tulsa State Fair ground.
There was somebody that took acid
and was climbing up to
the top of this thing and was going to kill themselves.
And somebody said, "That girl said she's going to kill
herself," and these other people are all
high and they're they're saying,
"Oh, my gosh, she's gonna kill herself. "
And they're just sitting there, "Look, there she goes."
I got up and went after her.
I see a problem and I do something about it or I'm not
afraid to get involved and so
that's part of things also too.
It's great to talk about stuff and you
can tell I like to talk about things
but sometimes somebody needs to do something too.
And I've been willing to do
things and take action on the things I think
need to be done and not just talk
about them and some of that
comes from some of those experiences too, I think.
You can you can make a difference by getting involved.
I like that quote,
is it Margaret Mead, the anthropologist.
There's a quote from her, it's something like
never doubt the abilities of
individuals to change the world.
Something like that. Individual people
can do a lot sometimes.
>> So you mentioned some of
your earlier political activism.
When you came and were living in Marietta.
How specifically did you begin to get involved?
>> So there's a number of things.
I mentioned about getting involved with
hate crimes and the hate groups.
When I met David,
David lived in Mapleton. You know where Mapleton is.
So he was still living at home when I met him and
the first time I drove over to his house on
a weekend to pick him
up and we're gonna go out and do something.
I was driving and I got to the intersection
of some road in Bankhead Highway.
I can't remember what road I was on
but there were Klu Klux Klansmen
in robes on all four sides of the intersection.
They didn't have their hoods on them
just their robes but they were
doing the white power salutes to cars as they went by.
And when the cars were stopped on
their particular side for the red light
they were handing out literature.
I knew that there were things like
the Ku Klux clan and I knew but I thought of them
as history and not something and I was shocked.
I hadn't lived in Atlanta that long and I knew a
little bit about the clan.
There had been groups here before but I didn't know
there was people who still did that stuff.
I was just shocked that
here's these people and they're not the least bit
ashamed of what they're doing or
how the things that they're saying
and their handing out literature in broad daylight on
a Saturday afternoon on the streets.
I got interested in
the civil rights movement and the stuff that was working
against hate groups and equal rights And I
started reading up on some of
the history of the civil rights movement here.
And I also having
been discriminated against and
treated badly as a gay person,
I felt like I understood some of that.
And once I got involved in the gay groups,
a lot of the gay groups we
made up of people that lived here.
And Atlanta has been this mecca that's attracted
gay men and lesbians from
little towns all over the South,
places where it's still hard to be gay.
And they brought with
them the attitudes of their communities.
I was shocked when I started coming out in Atlanta,
among other gay men and lesbians that I met I sometimes
heard people use the N word and say I found out,
I just kind of assume having been
the victims of prejudice and being
mistreated you would understand that you should treat
other people with kindness and respect
and not treat other people the same way.
And I was shocked to find out there were gay men who
were bigots and there were some.
So I started getting interested
I had past interest in politics in general,
but I started getting interested in
gay activism not just
trying to make life better for gay people,
but gay activism as part of
the civil rights movement
and became interested in not only
changing society's attitudes toward
gay people but working to try to get
gay people to understand that
our struggle was part of
the Civil Rights Movement and that
they should treat other people with respect.
And so I guess that's some of what I
got interested in Dick Rhodes.
Let's see, there was an umbrella group.
As other organizations started coming about in Atlanta,
there was an umbrella group.
I can't remember the name of it now,
but it was a group of groups,
and it didn't have a membership,
it didn't have a headquarters or anything.
It would just meet at different places
but representatives of
all the different gay and
lesbian groups would get together
periodically at this organization.
And we started sharing ideas telling each
other about the events on our calendar
and asking for support from each other.
But we started talking about how can we work together
to advance gay rights.
And we started as a group,
people started talking about we
should get involved with getting
the police to quit beating us up
and should start we should start looking at hate crimes.
And I joined the ACLU.
The ACLU of Georgia had a lesbian gay rights chapter
and I joined the ACLU and
started going to the ACLU chapter meetings.
Later on I was president of
the ACLU gay and lesbian rights chapter.
The president before me was Kathy Ward,
who was president of
the Atlanta City Council for a while.
But so through those the involvement
in both street activism and
protests and rallies but
also starting to look at how to get involved
in the mainstream political process in
parties and in city and county government.
Some of that all started coming out
of these group all of us
talking about how we could change things.
And I remember Dick was interested
in we formed a group called,
it was Legal Lesbian.
I can't remember what it stood
for even now but it was basically
a lesbian gay political organization
to recruit people to work on campaigns,
to get involved in party politics,
to ask to get
appointed to boards and
commissions of cities and county governments.
So we could start getting involved in
the political process and have a place at the table.
>> So you've mentioned Atlanta a lot,
but at this point in time lived in Marietta.
Was most of your activism based in Atlanta?
>> So if you look back at that time,
the community that was out and active and public was in
Atlanta and there were
gay and lesbian people living all over the place.
>> If anything, I'll tell you right now if you
look at the last census,
I found out this recently
the Guardian and London newspaper
ran an article not too long ago about this.
The zip code with the highest percentage of
gay and lesbian households in
Georgia is Blue Ridge, Georgia.
>> Really, I've actually heard that from someone.
>> Yeah, there's some articles
apparently in the Guardian about it back at the time
when this during the
legislative session there was a thing
the Religious Freedom Act or
something that they were trying to pass.
That if a business wanted to
deny tell a customer that they wouldn't
sell them their product or
service because they didn't like gay people and
they were gay that they couldn't
be sued for it or something.
It was some strange law
the legislature was talking about that.
There was a move to try to do that in, I think,
like 16 or 17 of the state legislatures all at once
some organization
planted model legislation all over the country.
But anyway, that's when the Guardian did that article.
But there have been gay lesbian people living all
over and there were plenty of them out in Cobb County.
It's expensive to live in Atlanta.
So people live out in
the suburbs for the same reason
other people live in the suburbs,
maybe it was close to their jobs.
You could get a house you could afford,
maybe you couldn't afford to live in one in Atlanta.
But there wasn't a Cobb County gay lesbian group or
Gwinnett gay lesbian group
or just wasn't stuff going on in other places.
And even though there were people there.
Even before I met David I
lived in Marietta with my brother,
and when I started getting involved with the groups,
and then David and I lived in Smyrna,
and we would come to Atlanta and do stuff in Atlanta
but I think we
knew one other couple that lived in Cobb County.
People were pretty low key and invisible.
There was in 19,
I think it may have been 1989,
I'm not sure, we
decided we wanted to do something about that.
And we got the Pride committee,
and the Southern Voice was the newspaper in Atlanta.
And Etcetera magazine,
guy that was the editor of Etcetera magazine,
most of the time it was
being published as a friend of mine.
I got named Jack Pelham.
Dave and I were good friends with Jack.
And I could get anything I wanted
published in etcetera magazine.
But we got everybody to put our house,
us as a contact,
and we said to Cobb County's first Gay Pride event.
And we had a Gay Pride potluck
at our house for gays and lesbians.
And we had about maybe 40 people
that showed up at our house for a potluck in Cobb County.
And let's see. This actually,
it must have been '88 not '89
because so we had the potluck, and these people came,
and it was supposed to be from, it was on a,
I think we had it on
a maybe Saturday from
four in the afternoon
until eight at night or something like that.
We had people at our house till three in the morning.
They wouldn't leave.
There was all these people came,
and they were so excited to meet
other gay and lesbian people who lived in Cobb County.
They were doing the same thing we did.
If they wanted to socialize with gay
and lesbians, they went to Atlanta.
They didn't know anybody else either who lived there.
And the people were just so excited to meet
other people that lived in Cobb County.
And we finally at
3:00 in the morning said we got to go to sleep.
And the last people left.
But before everybody left,
everybody said, This is so great.
Let's do this again. So we made
a list of names and phone numbers and addresses.
We made photocopies and then mailed everybody a copy.
And somebody before the evening was over,
volunteered, and they said,
Let's do this again next month.
Let's have a potluck every month,
and I'll have it at my house.
So they did.
And the next thing the next time we did it,
we had like 90 people.
And then somebody else volunteered for the next one,
and I think it was a summer month,
and they had a swimming pool in the big yard and it
was going to be a pool party.
And 200 people came.
And it started getting we went
in four or five months
I think like the fourth or fifth one,
we had like 600 people came to this thing.
And it was all these people who were
hungry to meet other local gay and lesbian people.
And all these people lived in Cobb County.
And it was really interesting.
But the thing that made me remember it was
1988 is 2088 was an election year.
And there were people running for office,
and there was a woman,
her name was Lynn something.
She was like 62 with bright red hair.
She was an engineer, she had gone to Georgia,
but she was interested in politics,
and David and I were interested in politics,
but most people weren't.
And most people were very closeted.
And Lynn invited a guy who was
running for office in Cobb County for
county commission or city council
or maybe state House of Representatives
from Cobb County, something.
Invited him to come to one of
the potlucks and told him he
could give out literature
and meet people and ask people to vote for him.
And the potluck this is our sixth one or something.
I blew up. There were people there that said,
How could you have a pot?
In this house, people were really
scared of being out. Lots of people.
Said, How could you have
somebody who's running for political office here?
Do you know what will happen? He knows who we are now.
He might have got our membership list. We'll get fired.
He'll take that and give it to
people, and it's going to ruin.
And there was this argument that started.
There were people who were scared that
were they were just furious that
she had brought this guy to the potluck
and had violated the privacy,
which we didn't have any rule or anything,
we didn't have any rules.
But the thing blew up and got ugly,
and there was like a fight,
and people got their cars left,
and the big potluck thing that
grew overnight just in a few months huge disintegrated.
We had one or two more and people,
I'm not coming if there's going to be fights,
and I'm not coming if there's going to
be government officials there
and the majority of
people weren't interested in politics,
and they were scared of losing
their jobs and their families
or if people find out you're
gay people will come beat
you up because that stuff happened.
So that was our Cobb County activity.
And then at some point,
I don't know how Stan Wise.
He was on the County Commission at one point.
He's a member of the Public Service Commission
now and he was a Republican.
I had started getting involved in
Cobb County Democratic Party politics,
go to their Democratic Party of Cobb County meetings,
and I went to some NW ACP stuff,
and I met a guy that was trying to organize Latinos.
There was an early thing called HPAC,
Hispanic political action committee,
he was trying to build,
and there was a huge Latino community around Smyrna.
One point back in 1992,
there were like 20 to 30,000 people that
Spanish was their primary language in Smyrna,
which is but the something that I went to,
I met Stan Wise and talked with him,
and he called me up about a week later and said,
Would you be interested in being on
the Cobb Community Relations Commission?
He said explain to me what it was.
It's this commission that's supposed to
foster good relations between
different groups and people in the community and
also between the people
in the community and the community government.
And he said We have
representatives of different religious groups.
We have Jewish and Catholic and Christian,
and we have people who are white and black,
and we have Asian persons,
and we have a Latino person.
And he said I think it would be really good to have
an open gay person on the commission.
And I said, Okay, he said
I need you to get me a resume.
And he got my resume,
and he nominated me
and the County Commission voted on me,
and I became a member
of the Cobb Community Relations Commission.
So that was my first involvement on a political body.
And I was a member of
the Cop Community Relations Commission
when the anti-gay stuff happened.
But we did some other stuff before that.
The 1992 hate group activity thing,
I'll get you later that has the chronology of stuff.
One of the things that's noted in that we did it in 1992.
There was one of the efforts
going on at that time was to get rid of
the old Georgia flag because it was
offensive to Blacks in Georgia.
And one of the things we did was to
sponsor at the Cobb Civic Center.
Organization sponsored a community open community forum
on the state flag.
And we had a panel that talked about it first,
and different people gave their opinions about it.
And then we had open mics,
and people were allowed to come
up and they could speak for
a minute and a half about their opinion
and give their opinion.
And so we sponsored this,
and we had the,
I think it was the Cobb County police, probably.
There were some police there to
provide security or whatever.
But there were some people that just came to it,
but the largest part of
the audience was made up of people from
local NAACP supporters and civil rights groups
and people from some
of the local Klan and white supremacist groups.
And it was really interesting
because we set up these rules about how
it was going to work and you
got to speak for so long and
you had to treat other people.
We told the rules at the beginning anybody that you
have to treat people respect and let
them speak when it's their turn to speak
and there's not going
to be any arguing or shouting or whatever.
We recognize this as a heated topic for a lot of people,
and we wanted to have a civil discourse, and we did.
The different people came up
and said what they wanted to say,
and everybody listened to each other.
It was a really interesting event,
especially, think of the two groups that were there,
and everybody listened and
let each other have
their turn saying what they wanted to say.
It took years after that before
the state flag was changed.
It wasn't changed until I can't remember
if Was it changed under Sell Miller
or Roy Barnes. Roy Barnes sorry?
>> Is the first version of it, I think.
Were there any other notable projects you worked on
with the Relations Commission?
>> We talked about we would have
people come to the meetings and tell us
about different problems in the community Cobb.
That was the biggest thing we did.
There were a few occasions where people
came and presented information to
us about homelessness in Cobb County
or I think there
may have been something about some vandalism
at a synagogue somebody came and talked to us about,
and we would write up
reports and send the report
to the county commission and say
here's something we want you to be
aware of and we recommend you
do this or that I think
the homelessness thing we sent a recommendation to
them that they should do
some research on the homeless problem,
and there were probably more homeless people
in Cobb County than they knew about.
And we we got
the police and put the connected the police
up with the synagogue about the vandalism.
They'd had vandalism but not called the police.
And somebody had spray-painted
swastikas on the synagogue.
Somebody came and told us about it and
nobody at the synagogue had called the police,
which is unusual with the ADL here,
but they hadn't done it, there wasn't
a lot that went on and I was a member for a year.
>> Can you talk about the founding of
the Cobb Citizens Coalition?
>> So when I read in the newspaper that Gordon Wilson,
who was a county commissioner,
planned to introduce a resolution
supporting family values and saying that the,
I can't remember the exact wording,
but that the lifestyles of
the homosexual community were contrary to
community values and family values
of Cobb County or something like that,
that he planned to introduce
a resolution at the County Commission about this.
And I read it, and I was horrified.
And I was a member of the Communications Commission.
So I called the head of Community Relations Commission,
the chair, and said,
I've got an item I'm going to put on
the agenda to talk about the next meeting.
But then I got on the phone and started
calling the County Commission offices,
and I told him I'm on
your Community Relations Commission,
and I understand that this
is I read that this is going to happen,
and some of the other commissioners
didn't even know about it.
But then I told them about it,
and they listened to me on the phone,
and I said this is a really bad idea.
You shouldn't have an official resolution
where you single out a group of
your citizens and basically
say that they don't stand up to
the values of the community less than everybody else.
And there was put on the agenda,
and it was scheduled for one of the commission meeting.
So I went to the first commission meeting where it was
on the agenda and listened to the meeting.
And basically, at that meeting,
they announced that he hadn't put it on
the agenda properly and they
couldn't discuss it at that meeting,
so it was going to be a later meeting.
And nothing happened. But now
all the commissioners knew about it,
and then there was more stuff in the news about it.
And I called some of the commissioner's office again.
And most of them didn't want to talk about it.
There was one commissioner, Bill Cooper.
I think he was a pilot with Delta Airlines,
but then he was also an accounting commissioner.
And he listened to me and he said, I agree with you.
I think that's a bad idea.
I wouldn't support something like that.
And he said I don't know about the other commissioners.
He said you know where we live,
and you know the way things are here.
He said That's probably something people are going to
feel afraid not to vote for.
He said I'll see what I can do.
So anyway, they had the next meeting.
I can't remember when it was.
I called for a rally if it
was before or after the next meeting,
but at some point,
I started speaking out about it,
and I thought we're going to have to fight this.
And I knew part of politics is positioning,
and the names of things are important.
And Cobb Citizens Coalition is
just a generic name that citizens.
How could anybody be against citizens?
It's something and it sounds like
a political body that our political system supports.
You should have groups of citizens
who are interested in their communities.
And it also had the same initials since
the Cobb County Commission, the most CCC.
So I decided I'd form a group,
and with a group,
if we had a group, we could work better against
it if they actually tried to pass this resolution.
So I called the Secretary of
State's office and reserved the name.
Got a corporate registration for a non-profit.
And then got the Southern Voice and et cetera
to publish announcing a meeting.
And we had a first meeting,
and a bunch of people came to the meeting,
and we talked about forming a group.
There were other people that were interested in it, too.
We probably had about 20,
22 people, maybe, 24.
And we had a meeting at a restaurant somewhere in
a private dining room at
some Italian restaurant or something,
but other people were
interested in getting involved in it,
too, and they were worried about this resolution.
And interestingly enough, they
weren't all gay and lesbian,
there were some people that came who
just didn't like the idea and wanted to support us.
Um, the Glamour,
I think it was Glamour magazine.
I may have been Vanity Fair.
One of them did an article at one point.
When Hate Comes to Your Backdoor,
and it was about the straight women who got involved
with the Cobb Citizens Coalition
to fight the Anti-Gay resolution.
But we began talking about what we would do and once
they they had the next meeting
where anything that goes on the County Commission,
it has to be read into the minutes of a meeting
before they can vote on it at least two meetings.
So the resolution was read into the minutes of a meeting,
and there was no discussion
and it was just put into the minutes.
And then the following meeting,
they brought it up for a vote,
and the commissioner had a brief discussion,
and they voted and passed it
with Bill Cooper voted against it,
and the other commissioners all voted for it.
And at that point,
we'd had the meetings of the Comp Citizens Coalition
and I got invited to be on a radio station to
talk about the resolution on
a live morning talk show on a Sunday, I think.
And just spontaneously on the radio show,
while I was talking, I announced that we were going to
have a rally in Marietta Square.
I hadn't talked with anybody about it.
But I thought we'll have a rally and protest this.
I announced we were going to have a rally
in Maria Square on
the following Saturday at such and such time.
And the radio station,
they made a public service announcement.
They were friendly and began playing it.
And I got a phone call a few days later,
and it was the chief of police of Marietta Police.
And asked for me and then told me who he was.
And he said I understand you're having a rally on
the Marietta Square on Saturday at such and such time.
And I said, Yes, he said,
Well, you're required to have a permit for that.
If you will if you can we
can schedule a time that's convenient
for you to come down here to the office.
He says, My guys will help you
fill out the paperwork and get you
your permits so that you have
all the proper permits and everything.
He was really nice.
I think for whatever reason,
they wanted to make things go
smoothly and not have problems and they
didn't want to have us have
a rally and then be arrested a bunch of us.
[LAUGHTER] And I should
have known you had to have permits.
Being an ACLU, I knew about protests, and permits,
and what you could do on public right of ways and
where you had to get permits
and I just didn't even think about it at the time.
I said, all that stuff. But I went
down and filled out the paperwork,
and got the permits and
then announced it was getting this airplay on the radio.
And we had several thousand people showed up.
That square around the area around
the gazebo in Maria Square was standing room only.
And the friends people I had that were
in Act Up and Queer Nation,
some of the gay activist groups in
Atlanta called me and said what can we do to help.
And I knew that act up people were used to doing
demonstrations and being around
counter demonstrators and keeping their cool.
And I asked him if I
said it's going to be in Cobb County.
And there were hate groups in Cobb County.
The guy, oh, what was his name?
I can't think of it right now.
He was involved in the bombing in Birmingham,
where the church was
bombed during the Civil Rights Movement,
and little girls were killed in Sunday school,
served his time in prison and
then got out of prison and was back living in Marietta.
JB Stoner maybe that's his name.
But I knew there were hate groups
in Cobb County from doing
some of the stuff I'd done with hate crimes and all.
And I was a little worried about counter demonstrators.
So I asked the act up people,
would you come and be peace marshals?
I'd like you to get your people and
position them around the fringe of the crowd,
especially in between our people and
any counter demonstrators and keep people from
getting into confrontations, help keep the peace.
And so they said they'd do that.
But then we had
already started getting some phone calls
with death threats and stuff.
And some of that got into the newspaper.
And the day of the rally,
like 6:00 AM sharp in the morning, my phone rang.
I was still a bit asleep was a Saturday.
And it was the Marietta Police Chief again.
And he said John,
we know about death threats against you,
and we're not sure we can protect you.
And we want you to call off this rally.
And I was thinking, oh, goodness.
I said, well, no, we're not going to call it off.
I don't even know how we do that.
It's been on the radio, and people are gonna come,
even if I don't show up,
and we're going to have the rally.
And he said, Well,
we're gonna have a lot of police officers there.
There's going to be a whole bunch of police officers,
and I want you to know it's
not to intimidate you or anything.
They're there for your protection.
They're there to protect you and
your people we want to have a peaceful rally.
And I said it's what we want, too.
So we had the got there for the rally,
and there were police all over.
I found out later on, they had a group of
state police on call off a couple blocks away,
could come in quickly if they needed to.
They had sharp shooters on
the roofs of buildings up above.
They had police helicopters or
state police helicopters flying around all over,
noisy and there were counter demonstrators there.
There were people with big signs like, 3,
4 feet wide and
six feet tall signs that said things like,
praise God for ads out of the closet and into the coffin.
God hates fags and things like that.
So there were a handful. And [inaudible],
the guy I was talking about, I'm pretty sure.
As I'm getting older, my memory's not as
good for names and dates and things.
But I think he was one of the people
there holding the signs and they're
screaming at us and stuff.
And it was quite an event.
We had several speakers
and different people out on stage.
And I was scared when I got up on stage at first.
I was a little bit afraid I was going to get up on stage
and get shot or something.
And actually, there was something that happened,
toward the end of the rally, I was
onstage and I was speaking.
We had a sound system set up in a microphone.
And a police officer came up
on the stage while I was talking
and put his hand over
the microphone and he whispered in my ear,
and he said, you need to get off the stage.
We have a device.
And I said, what?
And he said, you need to get off the stage.
We have a device. I said, what is a device?
And he said, we think there's a bomb under the stage.
And I was just taken
aback and get off the stage and they
moved people and got people away from the stage.
And here came this guy with one of
those armor suits on and the helmet
and it wasn't under the stage.
It was behind the stage and maybe 10,
15 feet back from where I was standing on the ground.
There's this metal cylinder with
wires and he came up and they
brought up this pickup truck
with a trailer with a bomb disposal unit,
a big round thing with a top
that would open and they brought it up,
and he came and picked up
this thing and carried it over real
carefully and put it in there and
they closed it and drove off.
And I think I started crying.
It was just something that was
upsetting then and it even upsets me even now.
Is sometimes you wonder why do people hate us so much?
What did we do? Why do
people don't even know us hate you so much?
It turned out it wasn't a real bomb.
They took out to
some bomb disposal range somewhere that they had
and blew it up and
then and it was just an empty metal cylinder and wires.
But it found out afterwards this guy
had this was in the summertime is in August.
So guy with a coat on and a bulge in
the front of his coat was walking up toward the stage,
and the police spotted him
and yelled at him to
freeze and asked him what he was doing,
and he dropped this thing out from under his coat.
He was coming up to put it under the stage.
So he had made a fake bomb
to put under the stage to scare us.
So and it did.
Times are a bit different
now and a little bit better than they were then.
>> And what year was this?
>> That was in 1992. I think that's right.
So anybody who watches this video,
if I missed up names or dates,
it's it's my I'm giving my best recollection.
>> Do you recall the names or
roles of anyone else that was
involved in the Cup citizens spam?
>> Yes, were there were three couples.
It was interesting.
We had these three couples that
were involved and did a lot of stuff.
And then this one guy.
So there was a guy from Atlanta,
who was the Atlanta head of GLAD at the time.
GLAD is the gay, lesbian anti defamation.
Something like that. I don't know. They're still around.
GLAD is still around but his name was Carl Lang.
And he was from Atlanta,
but he was very savvy about he did PR for a living.
He was very savvy about press conferences
and press releases and things.
And we were friends.
And he came, and he said I'd like to offer to help.
I can do press releases for
your events and about your positions about things.
And then there was Ann and Elaine,
and I'm not going to say their last names
because I don't remember for sure.
That's awful. Having been involved in politics.
You should remember people's names.
That's one of the most important skills
and I've never been very good at it.
But Ann and Elaine were a couple that got
involved and became part of the leadership.
And then a couple Noel and David.
Noel Lido. I can remember Noel's because
I was looking through the stuff I brought
earlier today and I saw his name on there.
And they're in some of the pictures.
And they so that
was really the core group is David and I,
Noel, and David and Anna Lane and Carl Lang.
And there were lots of people who
got involved and offered to help do things,
but that was the leadership of the group.
When Dave and I eventually moved out of Cobb County,
and we moved because
we were getting all these death threats,
and we were scared and we didn't feel
comfortable living our home anymore.
And we just wanted to go somewhere
else, not too far away,
but someplace with an unlisted address and phone number
and we had a listed address
and phone number at that time,
and had got some pretty awful threats
that were made toward us phone messages and stuff.
Some really scary ones.
People with one of the worst ones.
There was a couple that were really bad.
I'll tell you later because I'm getting
off subject, but anyway,
the Ann, I was the initial president of the group,
but I said, I don't have any need to be president.
I was initial president because I called for
the formation of the group and
reserved the corporate registration.
But David was an accountant
and really good with business stuff.
And he followed through on
the corporate registration and got
all the paperwork done and formally
registered we'd reserve the name.
And Noel was just good with logistics
and making sure that
all the pieces came together for things.
David and Noel were helped
put together the pieces of the rally, the event.
And Ann and Elaine
would just help with just about anything.
Ann was a good speaker,
and she was good at speaking and
getting other people involved and very good at
focusing on the issue
and pulling out the extraneous stuff and saying,
well, here's what the real issue is.
And Ann and Elaine
were both flight attendants with Delta.
They flew on mainly
they had worked with Delta long enough.
They got to pick the flights they wanted to work on,
and they worked together on flights
between US and Germany.
They told a funny story after the rally.
For whatever, there's a variety of
reasons why this ended up being such a big news story,
but it ended up being international news at the time.
And in those days,
Delta had they would get
the CNN news of the week roundup videos,
and they would play it on the flights before
the movies on the international long flight.
So they were serving people in
first class flying back from Germany and they're
giving out food and wine or whatever
they told this story about and they look
up on the screen and there they are.
Oh, my gosh and they're looking at the people.
Do these people recognize that we're
the ones up on the screen and nobody did,
but they said it was really startling to see
themselves on the screen on the flight
coming back from Germany.
It's like the following week.
And Ann became the head of the group
after I was present for
just a brief period of time and then we set up
a formal election and she
became the president and we had a board,
and all those persons I just mentioned
were all except Carl.
Carl wasn't a board member.
Even though he offered to help us and help,
he didn't want to be
an officer or a board member because
he didn't live in Cobb County.
The majority of the people that were
in the group were from Cobb County,
about 40% of the group was straight people, mostly women,
not too many straight men,
but we had a lot of straight women
who were sympathetic and wanted to get involved and help.
And it was really nice.
Oh, and the red headed person Lynn from our old potluck,
she got involved too.
But she got involved,
but she had a temper.
And when we talk about issues and there was disagreement,
she could get heated and passionate a
little overly passionate sometimes about stuff in there.
So after they took
what we didn't know was a fake bomb away,
we actually finished the rally.
And this rally,
there's a newspaper out there I
brought with me that I gave you,
and got a picture of me standing up on
stage at the rally with a clipboard and
a suit and tie and my sleeves rolled up on, no jacket.
But there's a thing in that article
that describes me as John Greaves on
the stage at the rally looking more
like an insurance salesman than a gay activist,
which I was really pleased with because
I lived in Cobb County.
I was a member of the Community Relations Commission.
I like the idea of a peacemaker.
I love that Jimmy Carter
was a peacemaker when he was president.
I like the idea of helping people get along.
People talk all the time about
the founding fathers of our country.
And I was a philosophy major.
The political philosophers that were
popular at the time in this country was founded Hopp,
John Hobbs, John Locke, David Hume,
Rousseau they talk about
why do people even have communities?
Why do people band together in the first place?
And they do it for their common good
and that's been something else.
It's been a theme through stuff I've
done in my life is to try to be
a peacemaker and bring people together and help people
recognize the things they have in
common rather than fight
each other for what's different about them.
And so I wanted to present a face at this rally
of the Cobb citizens as being
your next door neighbors and the people that you work
with and live next to you like,
and we're just like everybody else.
And so I made a point of I was trying
to build affinity and support with people to support us.
And wanted to look
like somebody they could identify with.
So I made a point of wearing my suit in
August on a stage outside in Marietta.
And we had things at the rally.
We didn't have any real strident rebel rousing speeches.
We talked about the rights of
citizens and the freedom of speech and freedom of
religion and we had
a mother who had a gay son that contacted me and she had
a song that she composed and
little electric piano that she'd
composed a song about she loved
her gay son and asked
if she could sing, and I said, sure.
And she got up and sang a song about loving her gay son.
So that was to play up the family stuff.
So we had a variety of different speakers,
and I spoke to and MC the thing.
But we got up at afterwards and finished the rally.
And I made a point of asking the crowd
to saying we're citizens of Cobb County,
and this is our community where we live,
and we want it to be a nice place.
Please pick up your trash before you
leave and clean up and people did.
They all started picking up the place
was spotless afterwards.
And I thanked the police and said we really appreciate
the wonderful Marietta police for being
here to protect us and keep us safe and thank you,
Marietta police and that was the end of it.
It was followed by after I had announced that rally,
like the next day,
the gay activist groups in Atlanta,
Queer Nation and Act up decided they wanted to have
a rally because they were angry
with Cobb County for what they were doing.
And they had a rally the following week.
And they called theirs the Queer family picnic.
They asked everybody to bring food and
it was a very different a rally.
>> Was that in Marietta as well?
>> It was on the same place.
Exact same location the following weekend.
And it was a difference
from approaches because my approach was,
we live in Cobb County.
This is our home, and we
shouldn't be singled out and treated
badly by our county government
just because they don't like us,
we're citizens, and our county
government is here to serve us,
not to mistreat us.
But also this is our home and we're citizens.
We're neighbors and we're part of the community.
And so that was
our point of view and what we're trying to
play up and trying to draw on the support of
our neighbors and other people in Cobb County.
And the Atlanta gay groups really were angry
and they came and had the speeches,
which I participated in at other times.
You do different things depending on what's
appropriate at the time and what you're doing.
And there are times it's important to show anger.
And maybe some of their anger was good,
but it's not something
when you're angry and you're in people's faces,
you don't usually make them feel like,
gosh, I like you and I think I want to support you.
And so they had speeches about we're here,
we're queer, get used to it.
You don't like queers.
And that was part of Queer Nation,
was using the word queer.
They wanted to take back to
make it a name that had been used
in a mean way they wanted to take it
back and use it and say, we're proud of it.
And so, they had a very different a rally that was
fiery speeches and and
condemning people for their hatred.
So it was interesting.
The two rallies, it was a character of
the suburban gays who wanted to blend in and be part of
their community and probably
weren't particularly most people politically active.
And a lot of times,
suburban gays didn't identify
with the gay activist groups
who were doing the street activism.
They were uncomfortable with them and said,
gosh, they're scaring people.
They're going to make people mad at us.
But there really is a place for all of it,
but it was just kind of interesting.
So like the two rallies
it was the suburban gays and it was
a different character and
a tone of we want to be your neighbors,
and we have a right to live here just like everyone else.
And the we're going to show you
how mad we are because you're
stupid and you've done this stupid stuff,
and you don't like queer people,
and we're going to
make lots of noise and make your life miserable.
And that was the Atlanta street activism approach.
So it was interesting.
>> What was your sense of the community reaction
to the rally and the other work of the CCC?
>> The news media they were pretty supportive
and wrote to some extent, fairly positive things.
They're supposed to be reporting and reporting the facts.
But we were portrayed in fairly good light.
And the Marietta Daily Journal,
Otis Brumbee was the editor,
and they were a conservative community newspaper.
They were conservative Republicans,
but they were old fashioned conservatives.
They were not the current brand
of neo cons or religious conservatives,
religious extremists,
they've gotten involved in politics so much.
And I would say
they wrote editorials saying that this.
They talked about the rally that they didn't look like
a bunch of rabble rousers or extremists.
They looked like just everybody else in Cobb County.
And somebody's mother sang
a song about how much she loved her son.
And these are not the ways
that people think of the stereotypes of
gays and they seem like
people that should be
left alone and allowed to live in their community,
and the county should rescind this resolution.
There's no reason why the County Commission needed
to give themselves a black eye and do this.
And they really started in and from then on,
took a stand against the
County Commission in the resolution.
And I would guess I don't know for sure.
I talked with Otis Brumbee once for a little bit.
I went over their office and talked with them.
And did an interview with the reporter afterwards.
But I would guess that he probably wasn't terribly happy
about here's a county where
there weren't any gay groups
and there wasn't any gay activism,
and there weren't any gay bars.
And they probably knew
there were some gay people living there,
but they were invisible.
And here within two weeks,
they'd had two demonstrations with
thousands of people off of Marietta Square.
All of a sudden, here, Marietta
is a hotbed of gay activism.
And I think probably they
would prefer that things had just stayed the way it was.
And there was no reason,
one for the County Commission to
go pick a fight with a group of citizens.
That was wrong in principle.
But two, that for
somebody who wanted to use
the political process to beat up on gays and lesbians,
instead made themselves look
stupid and foolish and drawn a bad light on the county.
>> Do you think the county was able
to differentiate between the two groups,
the Atlanta Based Groups and the Cost Citizens Coalition?
>> I don't know the answer to that.
I'm not really sure.
I don't know. That's a good question. I don't know.
>> What was the reaction of the county commission?
>> They wouldn't take my phone calls
anymore, the commission offices.
Bill Cooper, who had abstained from the first vote,
apparently got all kinds of
nasty mail and messages at his office,
which I don't think reflected
a majority of view of people in the county,
but there were people that were part of
the hate groups or people with
really strong opinions that
didn't want gay people around.
There was a very vocal minority that
was stirring up trouble.
But the commissioners had
some people telling them how great what they did was,
and I think Gordon Wilson
got invited to come give speeches at
some churches and in his public statements,
he hardened himself after the rally
and said see how see how they are.
They're having these demonstrations.
He tried to portray us as if we
were attacking the peace of
the community and we were upsetting
the peace and good order of the community
and see what they're bringing.
And part of what happened at this time,
remember that Atlanta had bid on
the Olympics and the Olympics were coming to Atlanta,
and there was a group,
gay and lesbian chamber of commerce or business group in
Atlanta that was bidding on
having the gay games come to Atlanta.
And he would talk about that.
He'd said God only knows what gay games means,
what things they do.
He was pretty hateful and stuff.
And he began making public appearances and speeches,
and he got invited to go to places in
other states and speak before groups.
Bill Byrne who was head of
the County Commission he
tried to be a little more pragmatic and saying,
we'd like this things to die down and calm down.
And not have this big dispute.
Cherry Stark and I and
Bill Byrne set up a series of meetings.
We agreed to get together and have
private meetings and not talk about what was
going on in the meetings in the news media and
discuss how we could get rid of this,
calm things back down and get rid of this resolution.
And we had a series of meetings with him.
His daughter came out to him during
this time and told him she was
a lesbian and that she was ashamed of what he'd done.
And that may have impacted him some also.
But I think that the county and
Otis Brumbee and this was played up in
the local and the national international press,
these counter protesters with the signs that said,
praise God for AIDS,
and they're screaming, go home faggots.
And they got in the news a lot,
and I think that just about everybody,
Gordon Wilson wouldn't talk about those people.
But when I heard
Bill Byrne make statements
and you see the stuff in the news,
I think just about everybody was embarrassed by that.
They thought, oh, my gosh,
that's what Cobb County now looks like.
The people who support this.
Those are the people who are at
this rally who support the resolution.
And they were embarrassed by that.
>> Can you talk a little bit more about some of
the threats you received afterwards?
>> We started getting phone calls,
and it wasn't a whole lot of them.
I would guess we maybe got under a dozen phone calls,
10 to a dozen, something like that.
It was scary to have people call you.
One of the first ones they got, the guy said,
if I see your faggot face on the news one more time,
I'm going to kill you.
And then we had
somebody that called and said they were going
to come drag us out in the street and slit
our throats and let our faggot blood
go down in the gutter where it belonged.
And then said, don't think we can't do this.
And then they described our house and our cars and
the license plates of the cars and
told us what our address was.
We found out later on,
there was a predecessor to websites where newsgroups.
They had news groups on the Internet
and found out there was
a white supremacist news group had put
my name and address and
phone number on the newsgroup and
said the world would be better without this faggot.
And they didn't say, get rid of them,
but they put this on
their news group out to
the other people who supported them.
So that may have been where some of the stuff came from,
but there was another guy that left a recording.
I may have the tape somewhere, still. I don't know.
It was one of
those little microcassette recorders when you
had answering machines, microcassettes.
But this guy left this message,
and that one actually really probably upset
us more than anything because it was on our recording,
and we played it over and over again
and obsessed about it.
But it was somebody who sounded crazy.
This guy, the message started out, and he'd say,
I saw you queers or faggots
or somebody used some derogatory,
I can't even remember what,
but on the news and I see you talking and he said,
you people are animals.
No, you're worse than animals.
And as he's talking, he's getting
louder and louder and ranting.
It's like you can hear he's
working himself into a frenzy.
He's leaving this message.
He says, no, you're worse than animals.
Even the animals don't do
the filthy stuff that you do you faggots.
And then he starts talking to himself.
He said, calm down. And he said,
you can tell you're making me really mad.
And he said, I'm going to kill you if you
don't stop this and get off the television.
And we played that over and over
again and called the police,
and the Smyta police sent
a police officer came to the house and talked with us
and took a report and
talked to us about blocking our doors.
And showed us how
to check our car before we touched the car.
She told us first tried to downplay things,
said, most people make
these threats and they don't ever do anything,
so you shouldn't worry about too much.
But you should be careful. Be sure
you lock your door at night.
And when you drive home from work,
look around and look at your surroundings,
be sure you're aware of
everything when you go to the house.
And then she proceeded to take us outside
and show us how to look into the car and check the car,
to look for wires or signs of someone tampering
with the car before you got into it.
So she tried to reassure us,
but ended up leaving us feeling pretty disturbed.
I told you my father took us fishing and hunting,
and I used to do target shooting,
and I had bought a '38 revolver,
and had the gun in within reach at the house
whenever we were home.
I expected to get threats and calls,
but I had this naive idea that by expecting it,
that I could control and it wouldn't bother me.
But it did. And it just got
where we felt unsafe in our house.
We'd come home from work and
change clothes fast and go out to
eat or drive to go visit with
friends in Atlanta or something.
We didn't like being at home.
We didn't feel safe in our house
and eventually moved because of that.
We just didn't want to be there anymore
and didn't sleep well at night.
And one of the things
from doing working with hate crime victims,
you hear about it now with people in the war,
but it was a thing with hate crime victims a lot,
too, and crime victims in general,
but more with hate crime victims.
They have a greater propensity
to have post traumatic stress disorder.
And as I learned
about that working with hate crime victims later,
I recognized that I had some PTSD for probably a year
after all of this stuff from living at home,
being frayed for months.
There were several months where we
lived there where it was like that from
August up through October.
It was October when we moved.
People were sending threats to my office.
I worked at Pactel Cellular. I'm sorry.
I worked at Pactel Cellular when I
became member of the Community Relations Commission,
which was in the news because I took it before
the thing before the Communication Relations Commission,
I put it on the agenda,
and it's a public meeting under
the public records, public meetings laws.
And the news media came,
and the Community Relations Commission
voted with one abstention,
Jerry Barr, who was Bob Barr's wife.
Bob she voted to abstain,
but everybody else voted to
recommend to the county commissioners
that this resolution was
ill conceived and that they should rescind it,
and it wasn't fostering
good community relations in the community or whatever.
When Stan Wise had asked me for my resume,
the resume was part of the public record in
the county commission meeting where I was nominated,
and somebody got my work information,
and I was called into office at work
by the vice president for Pactel Cellular,
which later became Airtouch then Verizon.
I was calling office one day,
and he said you've been on the news a lot,
and I'm thinking, oh, no, I'm in trouble.
They're going to get rid of me.
He said, we've got some threatening letters here at work.
I said, threatening letters?
And he said, yes,
someone sent letters here,
and he said, their letter is pretty hateful.
It's got some horrible language in it.
It says, they're not going to do business with you.
They're recommending that other people
quit doing business because you work here.
And I said, well,
I hope I'm not in trouble.
He said no, you're not in trouble.
That's not why you're here.
And I said, can I see the letter?
He said, no, I'm not going to show it to you.
He said, the language in it is too awful.
I don't want you to see it.
He was mad. He was actually angry about this letter.
He said, you need to be careful what you say and do.
He said just be sure that you don't ever
mention anything about our company
and what you do on your own time,
that you represent yourself and not the company.
I said, of course, that's what I do.
And he said, what is it?
I'm going to have our PR person set up a time to meet
with you and give you some tips
on working with the media.
So that was interesting.
I found that they had gone to the corporate security,
and they were worried about somebody trying to
come at work and attack me at the office.
So that was scary too.
>> You mentioned the Olympic Bit.
Can you talk a little bit about the Olympics out of
Cobb movement and how the CCC was involved with that?
>> Well, first of all,
the CCC mostly wasn't involved with it.
There was a guy named John Ivan Weaver
who lived in Atlanta,
and I'd never met him before.
He called one day and
he introduced himself over the phone, and he said,
I've got an idea about how to help get rid of
this resolution in Cobb County and how
to punish the county for what they've done.
Which that was never the Cobb Citizens Coalition,
we did at one point call for a boycott,
other prior to that,
and we wanted to be left alone and allowed to live
in peace with our neighbors and
not singled out for mistreatment.
Our objective wasn't to punish the county,
although I guess, but at any rate,
that was the main thing he was concerned about.
And he had this idea about they're going to
have Olympic volleyball at the Cobb Convention Center,
I think is where it was going to be.
I think that's where it was going to be
planned to have events here and he said,
I want to call for the Olympics to not have
the volleyball in Cobb County
because Cobb County is not welcome to all people.
And I said that sounds like a good idea.
And he wanted Cobb citizens to join in with him,
and he wanted that to become the focus of what we did,
and to be the main effort.
And I told him you can do that and I think
it sounds like a good idea that we put pressure on
them but we live in Cobb,
and we're trying to portray
the way we're positioning ourselves is that
we're part of the community,
and this is our home.
And that we want to be left alone
and recognized that we
should be treated the same as everybody else.
And we might work together some,
but that's not the main thing that we want to work on.
And he got mad.
He was really angry about that and I don't know why.
I didn't really know him very well,
but there was a person, Pat Hussein,
who was another Atlanta activist,
got involved with him, and
they headed that up the Olympics.
So that was really a whole separate effort
and for the most part.
There wasn't anybody in
Cobb Citizens Coalition who
was doing anything with Olympics out of Cobb.
They were two completely different efforts.
Olympics out of Cobb got a lot of publicity
because they did some high profile stuff.
A lot of the traditional street activism stuff
that I'd done in other kinds of protests and things,
they got together and had cars with signs on them,
Olympics Ada Cobb and got side by side in
all the lanes on 285 and
drove 10 miles an hour with the traffic behind him,
and the people honking their horns and yelling at them.
They called it a rolling protest.
They did things to disrupt
and they were really
successful in getting the Olympics out of Cobb.
They removed the volleyball events from Cobb County.
There was a guy, Dick something,
had been the chief operating officer of
the Olympics organizing committee.
I had a couple of meetings with him, and we talked,
and he asked what is it you want?
And I know you've
been having these meetings with Bill Byrne,
what's going on in those meetings and I talked with him,
and we had some honest conversations.
And he told me he was trying to get
information to find out what
the organizing committee should do.
I started to say king in Norway.
I don't know if they have a king.
President of Norway, King in Norway?
Something. Norway was one of the first places to have
same sex marriage and to make and to
have public policy that
gay people were to be treated the same as everybody else.
And he wrote a letter to
the Atlanta organizing committee and said that
the people the Norwegian Olympic team did not feel safe
coming to Atlanta for the Olympics and that
they needed to remove the Olympics from Cobb County.
So they were successful in getting that out.
But the two groups didn't really work together too much.
And the fact that we didn't work together too much,
the John Ivan Weaver guy just
infuriated and he didn't like us.
And I mentioned about wearing the suit and tie.
If you look at the act up activism people were
dressed very differently and didn't
wear suits and ties or street activists, most of them.
A lot of the act up people were people that
had AIDS or their friends were dying of AIDS.
And and they were
young flamboyant New York gays originally.
But the act up people here were tended to
be some of the young,
angry a lot of people involved in AIDS activism,
and that's where a lot of the activism
came from at that time,
were angry about their friends
dying and about the way people were treated.
And a lot of the activism was
focused on anger and showing the public how
angry we were that we're going to make your life
miserable unless you get with it and help us.
When we started having the meetings with
Bill Byrne I would get phone calls from
the head of Act Up for
the other activist groups in Atlanta,
and they'd say, what are you doing?
Why are you having these secret meetings?
You're selling us out.
And I used to say, oh, yeah, what do you
mean? What am I going to do?
And we'd go to
these meetings with Bill Byrne in the daytime
and then I take time off work,
and then I'd go over at night and
have to go meet with the Act Up people and
reassure them that we weren't doing
anything to sell out the Atlanta gay community.
I don't even know how we would have done that.
We given away their gold or something.
But the John Ivan Weaver guy
he was putting this stuff out there.
These people, they're not
supporting our Olympics out of Cobb thing.
They don't want to talk with us.
The Cobb County people,
there's something wrong with them and it got hostile.
They eventually wrote a self published book,
he and Pat Hussein about it,
and they attacked all kinds of people,
including other people who had joined in with them and
had been part of the Olympics out of Cobb thing.
It was a very weird dynamic and I didn't
ever know either of them very well and didn't
understand why that was that way.
Pat Hussein and I have gotten to be
friends in recent years.
She ended up having
really severe depression and problems with depression,
and we met and talked before,
and then I found out about
depression and talked with her and
got to be friends with her partner,
and we get along fine now.
And I don't know where John Ivan Weaver is now.
There were two separate things in
that came from a very different perspective
and with different goals.
And the Olympics out of Cobb was Atlanta based,
and the Cobb Citizens Coalition was based in Cobb.
>> What other work did the Cobb Citizens Coalition do?
>> So when this all started,
there was a politically active group,
the Christian Coalition and
they would have meetings
in different parts of the country,
and they had had a meeting in Marietta
a few weeks prior to all this starting,
and Gordon Wilson had gone to the meeting.
I don't know if it was at his church or he'd gone
to the meeting from another church,
but he didn't talk about that,
but that was part of where
the inspiration from this came.
And there was this new strategy
that was starting to evolve in
the politically active religious community
to get political bodies to do stuff.
This is where DOMA came from eventually.
Was to pass laws to try to
put a stop to gays and lesbians.
And I think Gordon Wilson,
Atlanta was this oasis
where you could be gay and lesbian and relative
safety and comfort compared to the rest of
the South and it's across the river from Cobb County.
So I think Gordon Wilson he saw
the Atlanta activism and gay pride parades
and there wasn't the talk
about same sex marriage in the way there is now,
but there was in the news for some reason.
I don't remember what. And he heard
about this group that
was trying to get the gay games here,
and he was upset about that.
And then there was
a play that had been at Marietta in the Square,
a play called Lips Together Teeth
Apart by Terrance McNally.
I can remember some names. I wish I
could remember all the ones I want to remember.
And it's a play that's not a gay theme play,
but it does have a gay element in it.
It's a group of couples that go and spend a weekend or
a holiday at a beach house
together and they talk about all kinds of stuff,
what's important to them in life
and how much they love their kids and all this
kind of stuff during the why they're at this.
And that's the whole play is around this interaction
with them and them talking about
the things that are important to them in life.
And at some point during the play,
they're talking about they love their kids
and would you love your kids if.
What if your kids got into trouble?
What if your kids got arrested?
What if one of your kids turned out to be gay?
And they said, well, I'd still love them.
And that infuriated Gordon Wilson.
He said they're having
gay plays in Marietta Theater in the Square,
and the county gives grant money to through
the Arts Commission to Marietta Theater in the Square.
So there was this attack
on gays to have this political thing,
this resolution, but then
also there was a two pronged attack.
The other side of it was to
attack the arts community because
the arts community not so much that supported gays,
but I think that the conservatives,
they know gays are here
and that's fine as long as we're invisible.
They wanted us to stay invisible.
And I actually saw a talk show at that time by Chance,
not long after that,
where they had a person from one of
the religious nonprofit groups that was talking
about why the arts were bad and he said,
arts can depict gay people.
Therefore, the arts are bad.
And so there was this attack to pull.
The County Commission decided they would not give funding
to Theater in the Square anymore
because Theater in the Square had had
a play that was a gay play,
which it wasn't, but that's the way he depicted it,
they wanted to have
this thing that's in
the book that I gave you out there from
that meeting the resolution to change
the county ordinance about grant funding to make
grant money that went out to
organizations and for the arts to apply
a community and family values
standard to grant applications that they couldn't
give money to any organizations that would use it for
something that was contrary to
community and family standards or values.
So they had hearings
about that at the county commissions.
And besides the fighting
the resolution and want to be treated fairly,
we also all thought,
this is a bad idea to not
support the arts in Cobb County.
Again, we live here as our home,
and we like having arts in Cobb County.
And I think that adds to the quality of life.
Plus, it's free speech.
We have a constitution and guarantees free speech.
That's un-American to take away.
And so we went and we
organized members of our group
and talked about who would go
speak and what they would speak about,
so we wouldn't all go talk about the same thing.
And we had an organized effort to go and
participate in the two hearings
that they had about the arts funding,
which is why we got the Penn Newman Awards.
And there was this affinity that
happened almost from the start where the
supporters of Theater in the Square and
the Cobb Citizens Coalition we got along really well
together because we were both being attacked by
the same person for the same reasons.
And the sad thing was that we testified.
Speaking at the public
participation portion of those hearings,
we talked about that
it would be unconstitutional to single out and
decide who got grant money based on
the content of the art they
couldn't decide that some art was okay and
other art was was not okay.
And People for the American Way is
a national organization they sent
one of their organizers here,
and they came and testified,
and they were an organization that
worked on a number of issues,
but the arts and free speech was one of their big issues.
And then the county attorney, I guess,
told the commissioners that that was
probably right that they would probably get sued if
they single out particular types of art and said,
we're not going to fund that art because we don't like
the content or what it's expressing,
that that would be unconstitutional,
and they'd get into trouble,
they'd get sued and probably lose and
have to pay the court fees and everything.
So then Wysong announced
that they were changing the proposal,
and the proposal was that the county
wouldn't fund arts at all anymore
and they killed arts funding in Cobb County.
Which I think they have arts funding now,
but they defunded things like programs
for plays to be put on that
the school kids could be bussed
in to be able to see a play.
They killed funds for a Cobb County art museum.
They killed funds for some choir groups,
all kinds of stuff got defund.
It wasn't a huge amount of
money that Cobb County did give a lot,
but it was really sad thing to have
happen that all arts funding just got
killed completely because they didn't want there to
be depictions of gay people in art.
So that was really a lot of what all this was about,
was we're going to slap
gay people and tell them to keep in
their place and we want them to be invisible.
And I think the County Commission
was probably a surprise to Wysong.
I think he saw these gay actress in Atlanta,
and a lot of this was very anti-Atlanta,
and the gay people in Cobb County were invisible.
And I think it was probably a surprise and a shock to him
when this group of
Cobb County gay people came up and stood up against him.
I don't think he expected that to happen.
He expected it to be Atlanta versus Cobb County fight.
>> Did the CCC continue after
this work was done or did it slowly begin to dissolve?
>> So they worked to rescind the resolution,
and they worked against the arts.
They worked to try to get art funding
restored and not defund the arts.
The work went on for a period of time.
I'm trying to think exactly how long it was.
And we wanted to get this resolution
rescinded and get the arts funding restored.
It became clear after a while that there was
no way that the county commissioners were
going to vote to rescind this resolution because they had
so much pressure from the religious groups.
And it also became clear that they probably
were not going to refund the arts.
In fact, Commissioner Bill Cooper
told some of the people in
the art community that they just needed to be
quiet and not say anything and let things die down,
and they would get money restored after a while,
but that if they made a big ruckus and
further kept fighting against the commission,
that the commissioners weren't going to
do anything for them.
And so the arts community,
other than the people in the theater in Square,
who tended to stay active,
the rest of the arts community in
Atlanta was relatively quiet,
just hoping that they'd get some money restored.
But they worked on having fundraisers for private donors.
And they initially got a big influx of
money from people outside Cobb County,
out of state who donated money to try to
make up for what the county had taken away from them.
But the CCC group kept working on that and
kept having meetings and activities.
But after that summer and the next in the fall,
it died down where it wasn't the same intensity.
And people I think
people were at a loss of what else can we do?
And somebody who was an attorney and
knowledgeable about the county commission stuff
had read through things,
and they found something that said that
a resolution passed by
the county commissioner was considered
to be the sentiment of
the commission who passed it.
And so, basically, once
that county commission was
no longer the county commission,
so next election cycle,
that any resolution is not binding,
first of all, they don't have to do it, but if they
passed a resolution that said
we'd like all of our meeting minutes
to be on green paper,
once their term is up and there's a new commission,
that resolution doesn't have any force at all.
It's not even a wish of the new commission.
And so the idea came out
that once the commission term
is up unless they pass a new resolution,
for all practical purposes,
that resolution will be gone and dead.
And we talked about should we keep fighting this and
should we keep trying to get them to formally say it's
dead even after it really is dead.
And we finally decided
that we'd accomplish what we needed to accomplish,
which are a couple of things.
One is, there was
a strategy coming from the Christian Coalition and
these religious political actor groups
to start using political bodies to pass stuff,
similar to what had been done in Cobb County,
to make things difficult for gay people.
And by fighting back and getting
this tremendous press and
the media coverage that we got, we inoculated,
and there was a story
actually in the press later on that was written
about a dozen other places that were
considering similar resolutions
and passing similar stuff,
and nobody else passed any.
They all put them aside,
and I think they all saw what happened and said
we don't want to have this big ruckus in our place.
This is not a good idea.
So we inoculated, I think,
other places and helped
protect them from having similar stuff passed.
But the other thing that happened is
that we had this quiet
invisible gay community in Cobb County,
and it wasn't a quiet invisible community anymore.
There were groups of people that were meeting
out of that group social networks,
and there's a gay bar that
announced they were going to
open a gay bar in Cobb County, and it's still there.
Instead of suppressing the gay and lesbian community in
Cobb County and giving them a slap on the hands,
what actually ended up happening,
and we decided that it was
okay the way things ended up was that they
woke up and we had
an active gay community
and people who weren't invisible anymore.
So I guess we
decided we were all satisfied with that
and moved on to other things.
>> So, you had mentioned before that you had
some friends from Atlanta from ACT UP and
Queer Nation who organized the Queer family picnic count.
Was there any really coordination
between Atlanta groups and Cobb County code?
>> We appreciated that offered to help us.
And I was friends with Jeff Graham
who was the head of ACT UP at the time.
He's the head of Georgia Equality now,
and we're friends to this day.
Lynn Cothren was the head of Queer Nation at that time.
Lynn made his living,
he was Coretta King's administrator secretary.
He was her personal secretary
and went to South Africa and got to
help write the South African Constitution
or provide advice on it.
But anyway,
they'll offer help for the first rally
and say, what can we do?
We had these meetings where there was
some suspicion and people worried
that we were somehow doing
something that didn't look like what they were used to,
and they wondered if we were undercutting the
[inaudible] but we met and talked about that,
and we were fine and got along well.
And when they had the second rally,
the Cobb Citizens Coalition participated,
and we said to them the same thing.
They suggest the first one. How can we help it?
And they gave us some stuff,
here, you can help us do this or that.
That was their rally and they wanted to run that one,
but we participated in it and continued to talk
about what we could
do and how they could help each other.
So that worked out okay. The other groups.
The only group who really had
an ongoing problem was with
the Olympics Out of Cobb people,
and we just didn't talk to each other anymore.
So much of the activism in Atlanta, Stonewall was anger.
It was an act of anger when Stonewall happened.
And the early gay movement was anger.
The Stonewall was this bar
where there were a lot of
drag queens that hung out there,
a lot of them were Puerto Rican drag queens.
And gay bars, including the bars in Atlanta,
a lot of them used to be run by
the mob and they would
pay the police to leave them alone.
But the police would once in a while come in and raid
the bars and arrest people, harass people anyway.
And Stonewall that would happen periodically.
And what Stonewall was
was the police came in to raid at one time,
and the Puerto Rican Drag Queens
said we're not standing for this anymore, enough of this.
And they took off their heels and were
throwing at the police and yelling at them,
and they had to call for backup.
And they had a riot
basically started by Puerto Rican drag queens.
They said, enough, we're not going to
let you treat us this way anymore.
And it was anger.
And the early gay movement grew out of anger.
There's people angry at
being treated the way they'd been treated,
and angry at being marginalized,
angry at being afraid of losing
your job. So much it was anger.
And then AIDS happened.
The early days of the AIDS crisis,
I knew guys that were in the hospital at Grady,
and the nurses didn't want to come check
their blood pressure because
they didn't want to touch them.
They were afraid of them, and
people's friends would have to go in and help provide
some of their care for them while they were in
the hospital and that was that way around the country.
I was anger that people were dying
and there were
medical people who didn't want to treat them.
There are other medical people that were great
and were really helpful.
But the anger at the way that
the whole process for the way drugs are
approved by the FDA was
changed because of the AIDS crisis
because of AIDS activism.
The process was short.
It used to be this thing that went on for
years and years to develop new drugs.
Some part of the AIDS activism was anger at that process.
People are dying after
they find out they're HIV positive.
They're dying in less than two years.
And you've got this process for developing
new drugs that takes 10-15 years.
You need to stop that.
If you have a drug that looks promising,
let people try the drugs,
let them sign over a waiver that says they
know that the drug's not fully tested,
but give them something that has a chance to live.
So the groups that were active,
the activist groups were
people who had formed around anger,
and so a lot of the activism was anger.
These protests, you would go and chant stuff.
One of the chants that was popular,
"No justice, no peace."
"You're not going to treat us fairly,
we're not going to let you live in peace."
So I can't remember how you asked that question exactly.
>> If there was coordination
between not even necessarily the Atlanta groups,
but the same people.
>> So there was coordination,
but I think, in a way,
what we were doing in Cobb County was
really different and unusual.
And the mainstream activists in Atlanta,
the people who were established activist groups,
didn't quite know what to think of us because we
weren't having angry protests.
And that was mainly what
gay activism consisted of in those days,
it was angry protests.
So one of my heroes in the gay rights is Harvey Milk.
Harvey Milk was a mainstream politician,
and he did stuff, but he was assassinated.
And this guy that killed him,
Dan White, got off.
They call it the Twinkie defense.
He wasn't thinking clearly,
his blood sugar was elevated because
he ate too many Twinkies because he was
busy being a fireman and
a politician and didn't have time to eat properly.
And he was acquitted of murder.
There's a really good film
that won Academy Award of Best Documentary,
Life and Times of Harvey Milk.
And they show you all about
Harvey Milk's life and building and being part of
the community and how to become
part of the community and how to
show the same things that are
important to other people are important to us,
too, good safety and clean environment,
and the trash being picked up regularly, all that stuff.
That reminded me of what the cop citizens were doing.
But after the murderer was acquitted,
the gay community in San Francisco,
who he'd helped mainstream and make part of
the community and get a seat at
the table and be part of the political process,
they were angry, and they turned over police cars,
and burned them and busted the windows at City Hall,
and they had riots for two days.
And it's hard not
to be angry sometimes at some of the stuff that happens,
and that's just where so much of the stuff was.
So we did work together,
and we coordinated things,
but the approaches and the way of
looking at things were different.
And it's interesting. Jeff Graham,
I've stayed friends with, who was the head of
ACT UP in Atlanta in those days.
And if you go to Political Activism 101,
the class he teaches to people who are members
of Georgia Equality and
want to get involved in political activism,
he talks about the importance of understanding
the people who you want to impact and
understanding what their values
are and how to connect with them,
and how to be someone that they feel that
is like them and show them what you have in common.
He will tell you if you're going to go up and
be a citizen lobbyist at the legislature,
you need to dress a certain way.
If you come in and you're wearing crazy-looking clothes,
he said, you may want to take off some of
your piercings and things.
He says if they can't identify with you and
you look like somebody who's nothing like
anybody they identify with, they don't listen to you.
So it was something that I
think we already knew in Cobb County,
and it was instinctive somehow for us.
And the gay activist community,
not just in Atlanta, but all over
the country hadn't learned that yet at that time.