>> It's Saturday, July 26, 2014.
This is Anne Graham and Heather Oswald,
archivist with Kennesaw State University Archives.
We're interviewing Jon C Greaves in
the studios of the Audio Video Technology Services
at Kennesaw State University as part of
the museum's Archives and
Rear Books Oral History Project.
This is our second interview with Jon.
>> So to get started, Jon,
can you talk about your experience at
the two Democratic National Presidential Conventions
in 88' and 92'?
>> Yes. So the Democratic Convention in 1988,
a good friend of mine,
Dick Rhodes had run as a delegate
from DeKalb County for the Democrat Convention,
and he was selected.
So he was going to be a delegate at the Convention.
And there were groups of us that got together
and talked about what he was going to be doing there.
But something else that happened at that Convention.
Dick was inside the Convention.
He was a friend, and he was one of the first and
not the first openly gay delegate
to the Democratic National Convention.
But the national organization,
the Gay Lesbian Task Force,
and at that point,
it was not HRC,
it was a Human Rights Campaign Fund,
HRCF decided that they would jointly sponsor
a gay and lesbian press booth and press suite
and that they would talk about
the issues that they wanted to
get into the platform and that they wanted
the candidates to address and
provide press packets to the media.
And that was a first.
There hadn't been a gay and
lesbian press activity there before.
So as the convention started,
the joint press suite asked for
volunteers to come help get things ready,
and David and I volunteered.
So we went and oddly,
that's probably not that odd.
Most people don't like politics.
And most gay and lesbian people are
apolitical unless they are
really motivated because something
has come hit their back door or whatever.
So there weren't a lot of people that volunteered,
and there was the head of
the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
at the time was Urvashi Vaid,
and her partner, Kate Clinton was a woman comedian.
It's hilarious. And we
showed up to help at the press suite,
and it was the night before the convention started,
and nobody else was there,
just Kate and Urvashi.
No other volunteers had come.
So they said, we've got to get
all these press packages ready for the media,
and they had all this stuff they'd been
copying at Kinko's or
somewhere and contact information.
And so we sat in
the press suite and stuffed press packages till maybe
2:00 in the morning and Kate Clinton
kept ordering rounds of drinks brought up to the room,
charging them in her credit card and telling jokes.
So we stuffed press packets and
drank and listened to jokes till 2:00 in the morning.
We went back and volunteered and worked there
some more and talked to
Dick a little bit in the evenings,
but he was really busy,
with the activities going on.
And I was already a member of
the Gay and Lesbian right chapter of the ACLU of Georgia.
And the ACLU was
concerned that groups that wanted to protest,
which there are always our groups at the conventions.
That they be allowed to protest
and their First Amendment rights would be respected.
And they had talked some and met with the police.
One of the groups that got a permit to protest was
the was the Ku Klux Klan,
one of the chapters, and
I don't remember where they were from.
But there was an effort among lots of
different social justice groups from
a variety of communities from the Black community,
from the gay and lesbian community,
from people connected with Civilierties,
from the ACLU, people that were
connected with the anti-defamation league.
They said, we need to have a
counterprotest and not just let
them be there saying what they're saying, unchallenged.
So that was one of the things I showed up for.
And they had this group of Ku Klux Klansmen.
There was maybe eight or nine of them,
and they had little blow horns.
Those are called little megaphone,
things, you speak through.
And they're doing some chants
and there were policemen in a ring around them,
like where they could
link arms and completely surround them.
And so there's seven or eight Klansmen
and about 4-500 counter-protesters.
And you could tell the police were really on edge.
And I was with the counter-protesters and we
were shouting back at them and
really drowning out the Ku Klux Klansman.
And at some point, somebody picked up
a rock or something and threw it at
the Klansman and some other people threw things.
And I remember saying, stop that.
Don't do that. And yelling
at the people that were
close to me that were picking stuff up.
And this is happening.
The police told the Klansmen and they said,
Come on, we can't protect you.
You could hear him say this.
And there was this ring of policemen with
the Klansmen in the middle running at a jogging pace,
running away from the official demonstration area,
and people were throwing stuff at them.
This four or 500 people might have
been may have been
eight or nine or 10 people that were throwing stuff,
but it looked like it could turn ugly. And I stepped out.
I got out in front of the crowd and between the crowd of
protesters and the Klansmen
and the police that were running away,
and just as loud as I could, yelled. Stop it.
Don't drop to their level.
Don't throw things at them,
and somebody slugged me and knocked me to the crowd.
[LAUGHTER] So I laugh at that because
I wasn't hurt badly,
but I learned a valuable lesson.
If you're going to be a peacemaker
between groups that are agitated,
angry with each other, be
careful about how close you are to them,
if you're going to get in between them.
So that was useful for later things, useful lesson.
I did some work with the ACLU later
on clinic escorts when people
were protesting outside abortion clinics
and attacking the people who were going in for abortions.
Learned to keep your distance from people
and they were angry at
each other and he did political confrontations.
So there was a group that came from New York ACT UP,
which is a group that was formed
really to fight for better drugs for people of
AIDS to fight for quicker and faster research and
better treatment by caregivers, by the government.
And it came out of New York.
And the New York ACT UP people
were one of the groups that came to
Atlanta for the demonstrations around the convention.
They needed some places to stay,
and David and I hosted a couple of them in our home,
and I participated in
some of their demonstrations with them.
And one of the things I
have that I can't fit into anymore,
but it's an ACT UP shirt.
It's got the black shirt with
the pink triangle and the silence equals death.
I think I showed it to you last
time I was here, and I have it with me.
But they gave me one of
their shirts and so it's a prize possession.
And it was before there was
an ACT UP chapter in Atlanta, but it hadn't formed yet.
It formed actually after
the convention in the following year.
So that was some of the experience there
as being an outsider outside the convention,
participating in demonstrations,
trying to get the intention of
the media and of the people attending
the convention and the political
leaders attending the convention.
And knowing Dick was inside,
trying to work to do a little of what you
do as part of
the process instead of being
an outsider outside protesting.
So that was the experience being an outsider at
the 1988 Convention and working outside the convention.
In 1992 for the Presidential Convention, I ran.
Dick Rhodes and I mentioned was a political mentor,
and he had run as a delegate.
He ran and became
the chair of
the DeKalb County Democratic Party for a while.
And I followed some of his lead and got
involved in Cobb County Democratic Party politics.
Which was disappointing. They didn't do a lot.
They had meetings and talked a little bit,
and they didn't recruit candidates.
They didn't do voter registrations,
but they'd get together and eat and
drink and so they didn't do much.
But I decided I would run as
a delegate for the '92 Convention.
Paul Tsongas was running for president that year,
and I really liked Paul Tsongas.
He was a Democrat from Massachusetts.
And I went up to Cartersville,
was where they had the the caucus
to go run as a delegate.
And the process was that you went into rooms,
you split up in rooms
by who it was that you were supporting.
So there were Clinton people in
one room and there were Tsongas people in one room,
and there were a couple other candidates
that had people supporting them,
and I can't even remember who they are now.
But I was in the Tsongas room,
and each person got the opportunity.
That wanted to be a delegate,
got the opportunity to make a speech,
and then the people that were there voted on you.
And the number of delegates
picked for each person who was running was
based on the support
that that person had gotten
proportionately in the primaries in Georgia.
So Paul Tsongas got a number of delegates based on
what proportion of the primary vote he got in Georgia.
And I was one of three Tsongas delegates.
So I was a delegate to the convention.
The convention was in New York.
The host hotel in New York for
the Georgia Democratic delegation
was the Helmsley Park Lane across from Central Park,
and the airfare and the hotel rooms are very expensive.
I got selected as delegate,
and then I realized I couldn't afford to go.
And I raised a little bit of money.
There were groups of friends in the community here.
Some of them raised some money and gave me money to go.
But the Communication Workers of America
actually had scholarship money available.
I told the Democratic Party that I was
having trouble finding money to go, and they said,
the Communication Workers (CWA)
has got some scholarship money
and let me give you this phone number.
And I think they gave me $250 or $350.
They helped. David went with me.
And David wasn't going
to be able to get in the convention.
I had credentials because I was a delegate.
We went to a friend of ours,
Jack Pelham, he's the editor of
Etcetera Magazine for most of the time it was published.
In fact, I'll see him this evening,
his other half's birthday party is tonight.
But we went to Jack and said,
would you fill out the forms and list David
as a reporter representing Etcetera,
so he can get press credentials?
And so Jack said, sure,
I'll do that for you and
David filled out the forms and submitted them,
and he got press credentials.
So there were times where he couldn't get on the floor,
but he got inside the convention,
and he got to go places I couldn't go because he went
into the press suite and he
could go to the little press things that were going on
and got to hang around with
the other reporters and stuff.
There was a woman who went as a delegate also,
I can't think of what her name is right now.
She was a Clinton delegate.
And then we had one other person,
a guy named Eric Spivey,
who was an alternate delegate for Georgia.
Eric, he already had AIDS at that point,
and he was really interested
in bringing up awareness about AIDS.
And he was open about the fact that he was
an alternate delegate to the convention and had AIDS,
and that was the first there
was somebody here given the timing,
that wouldn't have happened in the '60s or
the '70s because there wasn't AIDS then.
But he was followed
around by reporters from CNN and from the networks
a lot because he was there
openly as someone with AIDS trying to get
the entire convention and the press and
the elected officials to pay
more attention to the AIDS crisis.
He died not long after the convention and those of us
that knew him thought that he had run himself down,
he's working so hard in New York and
didn't recover his energy from that.
But attended the convention.
Paul Tsongas asked me if I would
be one of his whips at the convention.
And I said, okay, I'll do that,
and I got to have a seat on
the aisle in our delegation so that I
could get up and move around when I needed
to and go talk to other people.
And there wasn't a lot
involved with being a whip for him because he
was obvious he wasn't going to be the nominee.
But he still tried
to get certain issues
that were important to him on the platform.
So we attended the delegation meetings and
the convention sessions and went to
the parties afterwards at night.
But there was also that the '92 Convention,
where Dick had been one of the first,
if not the first openly gay
delegates at the Convention in '88,
and there were just a few of them there,
less than 10, I think.
There was a group probably close to 130 of us,
gay and lesbian delegates at '92 Convention.
So we had a separate gay and lesbian caucus
and Senator Ted Kennedy came and
talked with us and some of
the other candidates and elected officials came,
and they made sure they let us
know that they were going to try to get
some of the issues that were important to us.
And we worked out a strategy
about when we would demonstrate on
the delegation floor and
what things that we were going to
push for within our delegations.
So that was something we were doing too.
And working again as insiders,
something that happened as it was on
the first night that we were there.
They had a welcome party for the Georgia delegation,
and the welcome party was on one of
the double decker ferry boat.
They had food and a bar,
buffet on one level and a band,
and whatever, on the other level.
And the whole Georgia delegation,
and all of our elected officials from
the Congress and the senators from
Georgia and the governor and some of
the state elected officials
who were there as part of the delegation,
we're all on this boat and we went out and cruised
around the Statue of Liberty and whatever.
But there was talk already.
One of the issues that was important
to us was, of course,
AIDS was really important
and getting better treatment for people with AIDS,
more money for research.
But also doing away
with the ban of
gays and lesbians being able to serve in the military.
And Clinton had already talked with
gays and lesbians and he came
and talked with our caucus,
and said that he intended to end the ban in
the gays and lesbians in military and it
was already in the news.
Sam Nunn, who, of course,
was there with our delegation too,
was the head of the Armed Services Committee,
and he came out publicly and said,
he didn't think that would work.
And that he would work on something,
and he had started talking already about the "Don't ask,
don't tell" policy,
that he thought that there was this
middle ground that they could
come up with where gays and lesbians could serve.
But they had to hide
who they were and make sure
nobody knew they were gay or lesbian.
And so I took advantage of us all being together,
and Sam Nunn was there on the boat out cruising around.
And while we were out cruising
around the Statue of Liberty,
I went up and asked to talk with him
and talked with him about this plan of his,
this "Don't ask, don't tell" policy,
and told him what a bad idea I thought it was.
I hadn't served in the military,
but I heard all the time about these honor codes in
the military and to
ask people to lie about who they were,
to conceal who they were, and hide,
I said it was not only
bad for those people psychologically,
but it was wrong,
and it wasn't consistent with the code of ethics,
of the different branches of the military.
And he just politely listened and shook my hands,
and thank you for your ideas and that was that.
And of course, they put the "Don't ask,
don't tell" policy into effect anyway.
But the other thing
I'll tell you about that happened at the convention.
I mentioned Eric Spivey,
so this was an opportunity to work as an insider and
get to talk to Sam Nunn and get to talk
to the governor and get to talk to some of the candidates
and some of the senators and
congressional people as an insider.
And instead of wearing jeans and a ACT UP T-shirt,
I was in my suit and tie the whole time.
There was a heat wave during the convention in New York,
which is not well air conditioned.
And it was miserably hot.
We were just soaking a good part of the time.
But one of the things that was
done by the people outside the convention,
and the gay and lesbian caucus
came out of the convention and joined in,
and it was purposely scheduled so it wouldn't conflict
with the time when we needed to
be on the convention floor,
was a march outside the convention center,
Madison Square Garden,
and marched down through
one of the big streets in New York,
calling for, there was a list of things,
demands, calling for better
treatment for people with AIDS.
And I remember, Eric Spivey had already gotten tired,
and he and Whoopi Goldberg led the parade.
And she was pushing him along at his wheelchair.
He couldn't walk so well at
that point because he was already exhausted.
But those of us from the Georgia delegation got to walk
at the front of the demonstration
with him and Whoopi Goldberg.
As I said, he died not long after that,
I remember how much energy
he put into all of that while he was there.
And he accomplished what he wanted to.
He got tremendous amount of
press coverage and drew a lot of attention that I
think helped make AIDS
research and better treatment for people with AIDS.
It actually helped get it
into the Democratic Party platform.
So that's what I can tell you about the two conventions.
>> Going back to the '88 Convention and
the large differences between the number of
gay delegates and
the activism outside of the convention,
did you feel your voices were
heard at that time as an activist?
>> That's a good question.
There's two reasons why you demonstrate.
One of them is you want people to hear your voice.
But you also sometimes you demonstrate
because it's a matter of
self-respect and dignity that
you don't just sit quietly and
suffer and say nothing when you're not treated properly.
And so whether you're heard or not,
there's still something you get out
of, and it's very exciting.
I get to bring some clinics with me today.
[LAUGHTER] There's a sense
of satisfaction that comes from demonstrating.
We hoped we were hard,
and what happens at that time, the 88 convention,
we were the official demonstration area was right
where the delegates had to come and
line up with their credentials to go through security.
So they saw us.
The elected officials and the senators and congressmen,
they had a back door somewhere they came in through,
and they didn't see us, but the press
saw us and the delegate saw us.
What happened over the years,
and you'll see it now is that big events like that,
they have to give people their First Amendment rights,
and they have to allow people to demonstrate.
But a lot of places,
if they don't mind the demonstrators,
they may treat them very well.
But if they don't really like them,
and they're just begrudgingly giving them
their First Amendment rights and
giving them a place to demonstrate,
what they do at a lot of things nowadays is
they designate a free speech area,
and they put it off the site somewhere
where the people that they want to see don't see them.
But those demonstrations, the audience that you
wanted to target was both the delegates,
the elected officials, and
also the media who were going to then put it out
over the hundreds and hundreds
of media people there from all over the world.
And we did get in the news and in the media.
And the parade I mentioned
with the fact that
Whoopi Goldberg and there were some other Hollywood stars
that were already starting to talk about AIDS and
were in the parade and that
Eric he was an alternate delegate
at the convention and open
about the fact that he had AIDS.
That got tremendous coverage and
really drew a lot of attention to the AIDS crisis.
>> So Jon, can you talk a little bit more about
the proposed DS hotel policy with Sam Nunn?
>> So there was that initial conversation
I had, and of course,
they was a big topic of discussion among
gay lesbian groups here in Atlanta and
other places and with Sam Nunn being head of
the Armed Service Committee and our Georgia senator,
one of our Georgia senators,
we felt like we had to take some lead in fighting that.
There was a group here,
a gay and lesbian service members group that formed.
A guy named Danny Ingram was the head of the group.
And they did all kinds of things.
But there was some protests also that
we had after the policy was announced,
and then it was passed in Congress and put into place.
Sam Nunn had offices both in Washington DC and
he had his office in Downtown Atlanta.
And we had stickers that said, "Don't ask,
don't tell," and it had the little red circle with
the line through it superimposed over,
don't ask, don't tell.
Made and there was a group of us
that went and got military haircuts,
and we bought Army surplus store
and got uniforms and boots,
and we got dog tags made and everything.
And then there were real
people who had been in the service.
Their uniforms, and we had
a protest outside of his office the day after.
Within a couple of days after
the bill was signed into law.
Protesting, they don't ask, don't tell policy.
And we started the protest.
We went inside the office.
There was no security there,
and we didn't get arrested for vandalism,
but we put the little stickers we had made everywhere.
There were on walls,
and on the windows, on the chairs,
and the few people that were
inside were caught off guard and surprised,
and they didn't know what to do with us.
And then we went back outside and had our protest.
They was a pretty angry protest this particular one.
I think I'm not sure who it
was that put together
the protests that was sort of leading it.
But one of the chances was don't ask,
don't tell Sam Nunn can go to.
So it was an angry protest.
But there were ongoing efforts
in the group that Danny Ingram was
head of was involved
with them all the way up until the repeal.
They don't ask, don't tell policy
that went to meetings in Washington,
and there were letter-writing campaigns to
the members of Congress and Senators
and if you look at any of the video footage,
the Gay Pride parades in Atlanta,
that group let off from the point where the don't ask,
don't tell policy was put into place.
The gay lesbian service members organization would put
on their uniforms and they were the color guard leading
off the Gay Pride parade every year from then on.
So my friend Joanna,
I mentioned to you earlier,
that's not on video,
who's the forensic illustrator.
She served in the Marines,
and she carried the Marine flag in the color guard.
>> Searching gears a little bit, can you talk
about your experience in attending
the Atlanta Conference of Christian Coalition organizers
in conjunction with people for the American Way?
>> During the activities in connection with
the Cobb County Anti-Gay Resolution, there was support.
We got support from the Georgia ACLU,
and we got support from
the National Organization for People for American Way.
They actually sent one of the staff
to help work with us in
the staff person when
the Cobb County Commission had
public testimony hearings about killing the arts funding,
she spoke and gave some of the public hearing testimony.
But I got to know some of the people
from American Way then because of that.
They invited me later
to come up to their office in Washington DC,
and they brought activists in from
other cities and states.
This kind of effort that
the Christian Coalition had a meeting here,
and this Anti-Gay Resolution
happened at the Cobb County Commission was
a new tactic that was
being pushed by the Christian Coalition,
and they were trying to get similar things
happen in other places in the country.
And so they asked me to come in and talk about
what had happened in Cobb County and
were trying to put it into right of
an overall strategy and
talk about how to defend against it.
So it was in early in some point in 1994,
and I can't remember the date.
I got a call from the People of American Way,
and they said that
the Christian Coalition was going to have
their annual grassroots organizer
conference and development conference here in Atlanta.
It was a conference where they
had training sessions for people who were
Christian Coalition members who wanted to
learn how to be political activists and how to be
involved in running campaigns and
running for office and influencing political officials.
So as a whole series
of workshops that went on for two days.
So they told us that this was happening.
They told me it was happening and said that they wondered
if I would be willing to go
to the Christian Coalition conference,
sign up, that they would pay my way and
go and attend and document
what was going on at the conference.
They had some concern that there
were things that the Christian Coalition,
which was a 501 (c) (3) non-profitization,
and the political activity they're allowed to
engage in and political activity they're not.
They had some idea that there were
some violations of the law that they were engaged in,
and they wanted to see if they
could get some evidence of that.
But they also wanted to get all their materials,
the training materials that they
were giving out to activists.
And they told me that I could
go in my own name or I could
use an assumed identity if I wanted to.
You know that didn't make any difference,
but they wanted me to just seem like I fit in there,
and they had a woman who was willing to go,
and the two of us could go as a couple
so that we look like we were this male,
female couple to fit in,
and it was Cecile Richards.
Cecile was the daughter of Ann Richards,
been the governor of Texas.
So Cecile is now the national head of Planned Parenthood.
And so I agreed and
Cecile and I had dinner the night before the conference.
She came in from Texas,
and we got to know each other a little bit.
And then we went together as a couple to
the Christian Coalition Conference
and attended the conference,
got their materials, and took notes,
and we turned all the information over to
the people from American Way afterwards for them
to use to work with
other organizations to look
through the materials and what they were doing.
So it was kind of fun. [LAUGHTER]
>> Talk about your experience with David hosting
the gay pride event in
ENCO County and the organization that resulted from it.
>> We were involved with
gay pride, and David, especially,
gay pride was a big deal to him,
and we'll tell you more about that later.
But we decided to have a gay pride event.
There was an official calendar in the Southern Voice.
We put out for gay pride each year,
and Southern Voice published it,
and then may have put it in some of
the other publications, too.
But we asked to have
a Gay Pride Cobb County Gay Pride Potluck
put on the official calendar,
open to anybody who wanted to attend,
and had our phone number for contact information.
And it was going to be the first
Cobb County Gay Pride event.
So we got the refreshments,
things for people to drink,
but we asked people to bring
food to share, so potluck basically.
And we had no idea how many people were going to come
or we just knew a few other people in Cobb County.
And this was prior to the Cobb County NGA stuff.
So we hadn't met yet all these people who we met through
the Cobb County NGA initiative
and the Cop Citizens Coalition.
So the day of the event,
actually, it's an evening.
We had it on a Sunday the weekend
before or maybe it was a Saturday,
the weekend before gay pride.
So there was a week long of
different events in the calendar.
And we said that the event was going to be,
I think four in the afternoon
till eight at night or something like that.
So these people came to our house,
and it was a pretty good sized group of people.
It seems like it was probably
30-40 people, I don't remember,
but both men and women
and some people individuals, some couples.
But they came and we had
a little pollic dinner and people
socialized and drank and talked.
And people that came
they were excited to meet
other gays and lesbians in Cobb County.
Gays and lesbians were mostly invisible at Cobb County,
and people sometimes knew
other people in Cobb County but not very many.
And there weren't any gay bars,
there weren't any gay organizations in Cobb County,
and there was just a lot of energy and enthusiasm around.
Here's this big group of gay and lesbian people we met.
And before the evening was over,
the decision was made,
and this evening which was supposed to go till 8:00 went
till early after midnight.
It went pretty long.
We finally had to say, we got to go to sleep
and and send people on their way.
Just in the conversation with everybody,
it just came up that everybody wanted to do this again.
And one of the persons who had attended they
volunteered that they would
have something the next month at their house.
And we made a list for everybody that was
interested in being part of it and being contacted.
We took down names and phone numbers and addresses.
And with this organization,
it was a very loose organization
popped up where the next time we had over 100 people.
And then somebody else volunteered to have one.
And then and it just kept getting bigger and bigger.
And we had four or five of these monthly gatherings.
The biggest one someone had is
a garden party or
yard party, and they had a swimming pool,
told people they could swim if they wanted to
and lived in Astel, I think,
and had a huge backyard,
and there was probably 4-500 people there.
It was huge. You had to park blocks away to get there.
I'm sure the neighbors didn't like it.
But so we had this gigantic group that formed
and realized there's all these other people here.
At the organization, I think I talked
about there's someone who last time we talked,
we were getting close to election time,
and somebody had an acquaintance or friends,
someone they knew who was running for
office who they thought was gay
friendly and brought them to one of the gatherings.
And this was a social networking group.
It wasn't a political group.
And gay and lesbian people just like everybody else,
most of them are political.
And at that time,
most of them were closeted.
And there were people who
were horrified that there was somebody who
running for office who would be
potentially a public official
and could have seen our lists
of people that were members in names,
and there were people who were scared about that,
and it ended up actually causing the group to fall apart.
People got angry that that someone
had brought this person there and there
the loose organization that was
born and grew very large quickly
and disintegrated all within about seven months.
>> And what year was that?
>> I think it was 1994.
>> 1994, so it was after the NGA resolution?
>> Yes. No, wait a minute.
It was not after the NGA resolution,
it was before the NGA resolution.
It had to be probably 1992 then if it was election time.
>> Can you talk about the change in
Pride celebrations in Atlanta,
from a small celebration to a large one?
>> The first pride that I went to was probably in 1986,
maybe '86 or '87.
It was a fairly small thing that we had a Pride parade,
and the pride parade was mostly people with signs,
some had signs some didn't,
but all got together in
a group in the street and marched down the street.
And there weren't floats.
There weren't marching bands.
There were a few groups that
had banners that were organized groups.
But it was mostly just people who wanted to get
out and have gay and lesbian people be visible.
So we had this pride parade and we'd march down
the street down Peach Street Street
and into Piedmont Park,
and then there was a little stage set up
and they had a sound system and some speeches,
and they had a DJ that played some music.
And the festival would end with a drag show on the stage.
Drag is part of Southern gay life,
so they would have a drag show at the end of the evening.
But there would be anywhere 900-1200,
1300, maybe in a big year 1,500 people.
An exception to that, it was
before I was involved in a Pride,
but I'd heard about it,
was when Anita Bryant in Florida started
her crusade against gays and
lesbians and she came to Atlanta.
It had been in Atlanta, and it made a lot of people mad.
And I heard that they had close
to 5,000 people that year.
But the pride was fairly small,
and there was a Pride committee that organized Pride,
and it was a group of buddies.
There was these guys,
there was maybe a half dozen of them.
The main person was a guy named Dale Biggers.
And they all worked at bars.
They were all bartenders or
bar managers in gay and lesbian bars in Atlanta.
And at some point,
they had decided Atlanta should have gay pride,
and they started organizing gay pride.
So it was fairly small.
I remember we had
the volleyball that was part of the Gay Pride one year,
and this is where I came out
on television with the television people.
But David and I attended the pride together,
I had two years,
and David had been in marching band.
David Greer in marching band in high school,
and he thought the parade should be more than
just a bunch of people walking
down the street with signs.
He thought we needed to have floats,
and we need to have marching bands.
He liked fireworks. He went to see
fireworks at the end of the evening after the drag show.
And he contacted the Pride Committee.
And he said I want to come to your meetings.
I have some ideas about Pride.
And they say, sure, we'll let you know when it is.
And they wouldn't contact him.
And he tried again and they wouldn't contact him.
He'd try again and they figured out after a while that
they didn't want other people getting involved,
that they liked being able
to do what they wanted to do and control it.
So David decided he
would just organize his own Pride committee.
And he did a press release and announced,
it got a meeting space at one of
the public library meeting rooms,
and announced that
the Pride committee would be expanding,
and they were looking for
new activities to enlarge pride and make it a
bigger celebration and invite
anybody who wanted to participate to come,
and he scheduled a meeting of
the Pride committee and then called these guys and said,
you're welcome to come if you'd like.
And they came and they were angry.
And I think initially came with
the idea of telling him, you don't get to do this.
You're not the pride committee, put him in his place.
But there was all these other people that were there.
There was 50 or 60 people who wanted to be part of
the pride committee and wanted to
see it become a bigger activity.
And I think they saw this big group of people,
and they backed off and they gave in and said,
maybe we should let other people get involved.
And so from that meeting,
the Pride committee got bigger and they started talking
about other events they could have at
Pride and how could they fund those events.
And Pride went from the early days.
It was a parade and usually on a Saturday or Sunday,
used to always be the third week
in June to commemorate the Stonewall riots.
It's always hot. But it would just be
this parade and then activities
in the park and the drag show, and that was it.
It was all a single day event that went
from noon until a little bit after dark.
So the plans were made to make it a two day event,
to have a Saturday and a Sunday and
have a festival to go along
with it so that they would have booths
and organizations could be there,
and there would be food
and to have more entertainment and fireworks.
And also to announce that the parade that
they wanted people to apply
to inner floats and bands in the parade.
So the first year that Pride after this enlargement,
the Pride committee and more people got involved,
we had 25,000 people that came to Pride.
So we went from this 900 or 1500 people to 25,000 people,
and it really happened largely by getting
more people involved and giving more people
a voice in what was going on and enlarging the event.
That happened also to be the same year that we
ended up on the cover of the Atlanta paper.
I don't know if the bigger
Pride activity was part of the reason
the Journal Constitution decided to run
this big series about the gay community in Atlanta,
or it was just the growing presence
of gay lesbian political activities,
both protests but also
some mainstream activities and
the issues of concern the gayism community.
But that probably also
contributed to a larger number of people.
But Pride went 25,000 people that year,
and I think the next year,
it was over 30,000.
And now, typically,
there's 300,000 people that come to Pride in Atlanta.
>> What year was that? [OVERLAPPING].
>> Ninety one. That sounds right.
So it was probably in 1990 after Pride had happened,
it was probably in the winter of 1990,
I would guess was probably when David was organizing
when he decided he was going to get
involved and he called this meeting.
>> Were you at all involved in the planning?
>> I attended the meetings. We did some things together,
and we also did things separately,
but we were a couple,
and we support each other.
So I went and attended the meetings.
But really, that was David took the lead in that,
other than the attending the meetings and being there
for support and speaking up and saying,
there needs to be more people involved
and there's a whole community of people here.
It shouldn't just be a group of
buddies that plan this event every year.
Other than that, I didn't really have
any leadership in that,
this Pride committee was an ad hoc group,
these group of buddies.
It wasn't a 501(c)(3).
They didn't have any staff. They didn't have any offices.
It was just this group of guys that got
together once a year and
decided what they were going to do for Pride that year,
and they did the same thing every year.
And really out of those meetings,
there was a formal Pride organization
that was created and it became
a year round organization with a director,
and it became a
501(c)(3) so they could get donations
and start getting corporate donations.
And once you become bigger,
if you want to have fireworks and you want to
have an event for 300,000 people,
you've got to have a lot of money.
You have to provide security,
and you have to provide portage potties.
It's expensive to put all that on.
So they really out of that became
the formal Pride organization that exists today.
>> Can you talk about your move
from Cobb County following the anti-gay resolution?
>> During the efforts to fight the anti-gay resolution,
we had our phone number
and address listed in the phone book,
and we were getting death threats and threatening calls,
and got to the point
where we just didn't feel comfortable in our home.
I liked it when I was at
work because I wasn't scared at work.
And at home, a lot of times I felt scared.
We didn't initially plan to leave Cobb County,
but as time went on,
we started feeling more and more uncomfortable,
and David and I talked and said,
let's move out of here.
Let's go somewhere and get unlisted,
definitely don't want to have a listed
phone number and address.
We don't want it in the phone book.
And so we made the decision to move,
and on the one hand,
I felt a little bit bad about that
because the Cobb Citizens Coalition,
I talked with you something before
about the Olympics out of Cobb and there
was a sort of outside people that didn't live in
Cobb County and their efforts to
fight the anti-gay resolution,
but they were fighting it as outsiders and not people
who lived in and were part of
the community and wanted to be a part of the community.
And the Cobb Citizens Coalition
informing that in the approach we took really was
people that lived there that wanted
to be allowed to live in peace in
their own community and not be
treated badly by their neighbors or their government
and were part of the community
and make a decision to leave I
knew we're not going to be part of the community anymore.
So there was a part of
me that felt a little bit like we were
abandoning the Cobb community when we
left but we literally
were having trouble sleeping at night.
We were scared. We'd go out
and before going to work or any place in the car,
we'd get down and look under the car and go around it and
look for signs of a car had been tampered with or bombs,
and we just couldn't live there anymore.
So we started looking for a place to live,
and we found a place
and I'm thinking it was October of 1993,
moved into the city of Atlanta.
And I had been
a member of the Cobb Community Relations Council,
which you need to be living Cobb to be a member.
And we'd also Cobb Citizen Coalition at
some point to call for a boycott
of the newly built Cobb Convention Center.
The combination of calling for
a boycott of the convention center
and moving out of that.
I felt like it
wasn't appropriate for me
to be a member of the community relations council
anymore and let them know I was leaving the county
and resigned from the conventions group.
There was something interesting that
happened when we had made the decision to leave.
I don't know how
the press people got news that we were leaving,
but we got contact by the press and they said,
we heard you're leaving the county.
And we confirmed that,
and it was written up in the paper.
The city of Smyrna where Dave and I lived when we had
contacted the police about the death threats
because we were scared and they sent an officer,
and we arranged to have traces set
up on our phone so they could try to figure out who
the people were that were calling us.
And they did find out who some of them were,
and we never knew who they were.
They went and talked to them and decided
that they we're just making
idle threats and they didn't
represent a real danger
to us and they wouldn't tell us who they were.
But there was a police captain
in the city of Smyrna that called me and told me he
was gay and that he really didn't want us to
leave and that we shouldn't
be worried that they would protect us.
And I remember that phone call
and being really surprised that he was
a police captain on the Smyrna Police Department.
So the mayor of Smyrna at the time,
Max Bacon, I think he may still be mayor today.
He didn't think there were gay and lesbian people in
Smyrna from some of the stuff he said at the time.
>> What was the reaction of
other members of the Cobb Citizens coalition?
>> Nobody said anything to us
that they were upset that we were leaving or anything.
There actually were people who said they understood,
and they knew about the death threats too.
And there were other people
that had been in the news
and had gotten some threats and there are
other people that were a little bit scared about it.
And they really told
us they understood why we were leaving.
And I think people
wished we wouldn't leave.
They wanted us to stay and not be scared away,
but also, understood why we were and why we did leave.
And it's not something I regret doing.
You can't do much in
your life if you're scared all the time.
And you hear about post traumatic stress disorder.
I actually think that I had
some post traumatic stress disorder after living for
several months with these death threats
and the stuff that was going on.
I became angry and
short tempered to the point that friends would tell me,
said, you're need to chill out a little bit.
This has really affected you.
So I think that for our own health and safety,
we had to leave where we were.
We could have, I suppose,
gone to someplace in
Elson Cobb County and just got
an enlisted phone number and address,
but we didn't really want to live there anymore.
>> Can you talk about the transition to
local Atlanta politics and your work on
the Atlanta Community Relations Board?
>> Now, I had been a member of
the gay and lesbian ACLU and had
done some work and
actually became president of the chapter,
which doesn't mean a lot because we just had
one half dozen or so people that were active.
There were a lot of gay and lesbian members of the ACLU,
but they didn't necessarily come
to meetings and get involved in activities.
Kathy Woollard had been
the previous president of that chapter.
And met her after being a victim of a hate crime.
She worked with the police.
The police wouldn't investigate it,
and she contacted the police on behalf of the ACLU
and asked why they weren't investigating and things,
got more involved in the chapter after
that and had done some work on hate crimes.
So when we moved into the city,
I was contacted by a guy Phil McDonald.
And he told me about
this gay and lesbian public safety committee.
It was a advisory committee to
the Atlanta city council public safety committee.
And they met monthly and
would meet with the police chief and
a fire chief or sometimes a deputy chief and
the head of the Department of Corrections for the Ccty of
Atlanta and dealt with issues
between the gay and lesbian community
and those different organizations;
police, fire, and corrections.
So he said, we're sorry that you're leaving Cobb County,
but we're glad you're coming to Atlanta,
would you be interested in joining
us on the public safety committee.
And so I started attending
meetings of the public safety committee.
And there was frequently just three or four of us there.
Again, a lot of people are apolitical and
people don't like to go and
sit in boring government meetings.
We'd go sit in these meetings and sometimes we'd
go months without accomplishing things,
but we did actually accomplish
some really good things over time, but Phil McDonald,
who'd asked me to be a part of that group,
and he was a member of the committee,
he had come from Arkansas.
His family, they were comfortable financially.
I don't know exactly how comfortable,
but he was a full-time political person.
He worked on people's campaigns
and he was a political advisor,
and he became an advisor
during the campaign for Bill Campbell,
who ran for mayor in Atlanta to Bill Campbell's campaign.
And after Bill Campbell was elected,
he was hired as
a gay and lesbian advisor to
the mayor of the city of Atlanta, to Bill Campbell.
And Phil told me that Bill Campbell
wanted to put together an Atlanta community relations.
There wasn't a community relations council then.
And these community relations councils,
they were actually something that came
up nationally as a response after the Watts riots in LA,
and there was this effort,
actually, mediators in the Justice Department,
I think came up with the idea to create
community relations councils around
the country and they would be
these groups of citizens
who would work to foster good relations
between different groups of people
in their communities and
also between the people and their government.
And also, in some cases,
these groups were given mediation training,
and they could go in when there
were disputes or situations
like alleged police brutality or a hate crime,
something that might lead to civil unrest and riots,
which you don't want to have.
People that could go in and mediate with
the groups and try to diffuse situations.
So Atlanta didn't have one,
and there weren't as many of them in the south.
At the point where Atlanta was forming,
there was the Cobb County one I'd been on,
and there was one in DeKalc,
and there may have been the only two in the state.
So he thought it would be a good idea
to form one in Atlanta.
And Phil asked me if I would be on it.
And I said, sure, I'd love to do that.
It actually fits in with what I'd like to do.
I like being a peacemaker rather
than fighting with the people who are against you.
I like the idea of talking
to them and trying
to turn them from enemies into friends,
and to resolve the issues that way.
So that seemed like a really good thing to me,
and I agreed to be on it.
So Mayor Bill Campbell,
when he announced the the community relations council,
it was set up so that he
appointed a certain number of people to it,
and then each of
the members of the city council
each got to appoint a person.
So when he announced it,
he announced who his appointees were,
and I was one of the persons appointed, got involved.
They didn't give the Community Relations Council
any money or any staff,
and we would go and have meetings and we'd hear
about problems that were in
the city and things that they
thought was good for us to,
there was some people in the city administration.
They would have persons
they thought should come talk to us.
But then there were people from the community
after this announcement he made,
they informed us that they wanted to come talk to us,
and people had come talked to a group
about the homeless situation in Atlanta,
all the homeless people.
One of the things that was happening then that was really
big was neighborhood gentrification.
There were people starting to move back
into the city into old neighborhoods.
A lot of them were neighborhoods that
maybe in the '50s and '60s had been white neighborhoods,
and then when they had white flight
with the school integration,
people moved out of the city,
they became black neighborhoods and now they're
at the point where this was in the early '90s,
one of the problems happening
in Atlanta and it was actually happening in
cities all around the country
was this neighborhood gentrification.
People were moving back into the cities,
getting tired of the long commutes to
come in to work and wanting to live in the city
and you had these neighborhoods that had
the largely older retired Black people who lived in
homes that they owned
and suddenly people are coming in and renovating homes,
and the property value started going up
and they started getting hit with higher tax bills.
They're on fixed incomes,
they couldn't afford to pay their taxes,
and there started being
some tension between the Black community
and young people who were moving to
these neighborhoods and a lot of them were
gays and lesbians, interestingly enough.
We've been pioneers at
renovating neighborhoods in a lot of cities,
there was this tension that came out.
That was something we worked on,
but it was disappointing
being on the Community Relations Commission in
Atlanta because we didn't have the staff or
budget or there were things
that the group wanted to work on,
and we couldn't have hearings,
we couldn't subpoena people,
we couldn't ask the staff to research stuff for us.
We could, but they didn't have to.
As I said, we had no budget, and in retrospect,
I think part of the establishment of
it was a photo wop and
something that Bill Campbell could say,
look what I've done, and we never saw him again after
the press conference where
he announced that he was forming the group.
But in spite of that,
we did do a few things,
and one of the things,
was around that neighborhood gentrification.
There was a neighborhood called
Kirkwood in East Atlanta,
and it was one of
the neighborhoods that people were moving into,
and there were a lot of
lesbian couples that were moving in this neighborhood.
There was a minister,
Black minister, didn't have a church,
but he was a minister,
and he organized a march through
the neighborhood with some of the older Black people
that lived in the neighborhood to
demonstrate against
lesbians moving into their neighborhood.
It took on this straight versus gay thing,
but it really grew out
of this financial pressure being put on older people that
didn't want to see their property values going
up because they couldn't afford the higher taxes.
And we held some community forums in the neighborhood
and allowed people to
come and talk with each other and actually
helped diffuse that situation.
It was interestingly enough, well, interesting to me,
the city council person from
that neighborhood at the time was
a person named Sherry Dorsey.
Her husband was the sheriff of DeKalb County,
and Sherry Dorsey as a member of the city council,
you would think she'd try to diffuse the problem.
She'd actually marched with the minister
and she publicly was speaking out and saying,
these gay people shouldn't be
moving in these neighborhoods,
we don't want them here.
And she was openly hostile.
She didn't stay in the city council,
she wasn't re elected partly because her husband
assassinated the guy who
beat him in re election for sheriff,
and so her husband is in state prison now.
But that was a sad thing to see somebody in
the city council fanning flames
and trying to create dissent in the community.
Of course, I've seen that in Cobb County, too,
so sometimes elected officials
are good at what they do and sometimes they're not.
>> You pulled back from community activism around 1997.
What was the rationale for that decision?
>> First of all, I had been involved in activism
since probably '86 or '87,
and I was always involved as a volunteer.
I worked full time.
I was never a person that got
a salary from a nonprofit group to do what I was doing.
I was doing stuff during
the anti gay stuff in Cobb County,
and at times when I worked a whole lot on public safety,
and hate crime issues.
When someone would get attacked in the community,
this was after the Cobb County stuff
or during the Cobb County stuff,
I was available to the press.
They'd call me and I worked for a cell phone company,
so they'd get me on my cell phone
and I was responsive and
I'd call them back before their press deadlines.
They liked calling me,
but I'd take my break at lunch at work and drive
over to a shopping center parking out somewhere
and do an interview with somebody on the news.
Then I was going to community meetings at night and
my days were my lunchtime and my break times and
I took vacation time to go work on
conferences to get training
on victims assistance for
the hate crimes work I was doing.
I took vacation time to go to Washington to help
plan the hate crime conference that Bill Clinton had.
I was doing all this stuff work
and all this community stuff
and not leaving much time for myself.
I'd come home at night and eat dinner at 9:30 or
10 o'clock and go to bed and then
get up and go to work again.
I just was really getting burned
out and felt like I needed to take a break.
I think probably there
was an emotional component to that too.
I did a lot of work
on public safety issues that came out of
the work with the gay and lesbian ACLU.
They had a project where they worked on hate crimes,
and we had some hate crimes initiatives
I can tell you more about.
Then being on the gay and lesbian public safety committee
at Atlanta City Council,
gotten really involved with hate crime issues.
And initially, we had
this effort where we were trying just
to get statistics on hate crime,
so we set up a toll free state wide number people
could call and report that they were victims of
hate crimes and we were just trying to
gather statistics because there was
no requirement in law in Georgia for
anybody to record hate crimes
and to document that hate crimes occurred.
We'd try to get hate crimes
laws passed in the legislature,
and they didn't even want to talk to us.
They said, we don't have a hate crime problem.
How many of them are there? Nobody could tell them.
The city of Atlanta had an ordinance, actually,
that required them to collect hate crimes data,
but they were the only jurisdiction
in the state that did,
and it was iffy,
what they did because there
was no definition in state law in Georgia,
what hate crimes were, so I think it was
sometimes confusing to their officer.
If somebody got beat up by somebody and robbed,
and the person was saying,
you get what you deserve,
you fag while they were beating them up.
They dealt with it as a robbery,
and that wouldn't get reported as a hate crime.
But as I was doing this statistics,
I was the one that took the calls off the recorder from
the 800 number and would call people
back and ask what happened to them,
and I went through training on how
to document hate crimes and gather
hate crime statistics using
the Department of Justice crime reporting methods.
I would talk to these people,
and I'm getting this information,
and I wanted to get it to create statistics.
They wanted somebody to talk to.
They were victim of crimes,
and sometimes they'd been really badly beat up
or hurt or had ongoing injuries.
They were traumatized,
they're afraid to go out of their home,
and I ended up spending lots of time
talking with hate crime victims.
Then I thought, well, maybe I need
some victims advocacy training,
and I went to
the governor's office of
criminal justice coordinating counsel.
They distribute victim of
crime funds in the state for victims of
violence and they work
with victims assistance programs throughout the state.
They have annual conferences.
I went to some of their conferences,
and I started acting as a victims advocate
and giving people somebody to talk to,
if they didn't have medical insurance,
helping them apply for
victims assistance funding to pay their medical bills.
I found a group of gay and lesbian psychologists
that would provide free counseling
to people who didn't have
medical insurance that were crime victims.
Where all this was going is
this talking with people who had
been beat up and abused and just horribly traumatized,
it really wore me down,
and I got to a point where I just needed a break.
And I said, I don't think I can do this anymore,
and I think I need a break from
everything and decided to step
back and stop being
involved in the community for a while.
>> Can you talk a little bit more
about what you accomplished as part of
the Public Safety Council and with
the hate crimes before you decided to take a step back?
>> We accomplished a lot of good stuff.
There's a book I
gave you a copy of where I helped publish
one year hate crime statistics for Georgia jointly
with the National Association of Anti-violence programs,
which was a loose organization,
loosely formed umbrella group
over gay and lesbian
Anti-violence programs around the country.
There were depending on what year it was,
there would be 15, 16,
up to 2024 programs around the country,
and they were organizations that worked on hate crimes.
Some of them just gathered statistics.
Some of them also provided victims assistance,
and some of them also dealt
with same sex domestic violence issues.
In working with the gay lesbian ACLU,
it was their project to put
this 800 number and try to get
the statistics and start documenting what was happening.
We were able to pull together information
and to document and get some data,
what was going on in the state.
So we accomplished that.
When I started doing the victims assistance stuff,
I felt like I was doing something good for people.
I was helping them deal with
what had happened to them as crime victims.
A lot of times they were afraid to reach out and go
to other victims assistance programs
because people that are
hate crime victims a lot of
times when they're attacked because of who they are,
they worry that the attackers
represent the values of the communities
they live in and they're worried about and re-victimized.
They're much less likely
to report that they're victim of crime to the police.
They're much less likely to go to
victim assistance programs and ask for help.
So what they do, a lot of times,
and they are also much more likely than victims of
other crimes to have
longer term posttraumatic stress disorder from it.
And a lot of times they just
withdraw and stay in their house and suffer.
So I felt good about helping,
give them somebody to talk to who they
felt safe talking to because it was
a gay and lesbian organization and and helping them
access services that were available
to them and to deal with.
So that was something good that came out of
the gay and lesbian initiative
through the Gay and Lesbian Chapter
of the ACLU and the hate crime at work.
I kept working on hate crimes over time.
And eventually in 1997,
Bill Clinton had a conference on hate crimes and
worked with attended meetings at the White House,
a couple of sets of meetings and
helped with members of the NA,
National Association of Anti-violence programs, NAA.
[LAUGHTER] Anyway, BP, the umbrellization.
That group and I representative from
the group in Atlanta helped plan that conference.
So Bill Clinton had a conference at the White House and
had people from all over the country
that drew attention to hate crimes.
We helped get more attention at hate crimes,
and there were hate crimes laws
passed in a lot of the states.
We didn't have one in Georgia at the time.
We did get one passed later on,
which the Supreme Court threw out.
I can tell you more about that if you want to know,
but we were able to get more attention to it.
And through the data collection,
we were able to convince
the Georgia Bureau of Investigation who's
responsible for collecting crime data in Georgia.
We're able to convince them to add
hate crimes to the standard crime reporting
forms in Georgia and begin collecting data on it,
even though they weren't required to by law.
And so the GBI added that on their forms,
and they had training programs for
the police department trainers at
different law enforcement organizations
around the state who could
then go back and train their departments.
They had training on hate crimes and
recognition of hate crimes and
hate times data collection.
They brought in trainers from the FBI to
the state police academy for that training session,
and I got to go I was invited by the FBI trainers to go.
Attend along with a person from the ADL.
So that was something we accomplished.
I had meetings with the Center for Disease Control and
doctors on the administration
at Grady Hospital Grady Emergency Room,
got contacted by them.
I didn't know how they found out
about what we were doing,
but contacted me at one point and asked if we would meet,
and they were wanting to establish
protocols for dealing with hate crime victims
that they would then put out as guidelines for
doctors in emergency rooms around the country.
So that was something that I think came
out of that. And we accomplished.
And that pretty much is all hate crime stuff.
There were other public safety issues I ended up
getting involved with because
of working with
the Atlanta City Council Public Safety Committee,
again Lisban Public Safety Committee.
Prior to the organization of that committee,
and they were actually created,
I think a year two before I was involved,
and the city ordinance that created them,
they allowed for there to be 12 or 14 members,
but there was never more than six or seven people.
They had trouble finding people who were
willing to come and as I said,
sit in what could sometimes be just long boring meetings.
So there was a guy,
Phil McDonald and then another person,
David McDonald and I
that were oftentimes the only ones there at the meeting.
But over the years,
I guess I was part of that group for 3.5-4 years.
We were able to accomplish several things.
One of them was
that when people were victims of hate crimes,
if they did call the police,
sometimes the police wouldn't investigate.
They take their information down,
and then they wouldn't investigate the crime.
There were cases where people were
attacked or brutalized by the police.
There were allegations of
police brutality toward
them because they were gay or lesbian.
And through those meetings,
we were able to get the police to add
gay and lesbian sensitivity training as part of
the Atlanta Police Academy as part of
their standard training and
also the ongoing training that officers went through.
We were able to get them to address some of
the allegations of police brutality,
attacks that had come from police officers.
There was one guy that was a hate crime victim that
I dealt with one time is one of
the people that he had been attacked.
And after being attacked,
you can imagine you'd be really
angry that you'd been attacked.
And when the police came, he was angry,
and the police took his anger as being directed at
them and ended up
telling him to calm down and when he wouldn't calm down,
they put him in handcuffs and he got even angrier,
and then they beat him up with their nightclubs for
resisting arrest and took him and put him in jail.
And here he'd been a crime victim.
So we were able to get the police to
recognize some of those issues.
I mentioned the criminal justice coordinating council and
their annual victims assistance conferences
they had here in the state of Georgia.
After attending their conferences
and they found out about what I was doing
they asked me to put on a workshop one year at
the criminal justice coordinating council for
all the other victims assistance persons,
professionals around the state to talk
with them about these particular issues for
gays and lesbians dealing with gays and
lesbian crime victims and hate crime victims.
So that was a way to get
some sensitivity to special issues out
there among professionals who
were dealing with people all over the state.
There were also gays and lesbians and historically,
and back at that time,
it was much worse than it is now
people, again, we're closeted.
A lot of times they wouldn't report they're victims of
crime because crime reports are public information.
They didn't want to,
you left a gay bar and some people
mug you outside the gay bar and rob you and beat you up.
And then you report it,
and then that report,
it becomes public information,
and if it gets into the newspaper or something,
then you might get fired from
your job because you don't have any protection
for employment because you're
gay and lesbian and still not in Georgia.
So people would sometimes
be victims of crimes and not report them.
We provided a organization
that people could come to if they were afraid to report,
and we could sometimes encourage
them to give information to police,
but we could also sometimes
help them provide information in a way that
would preserve some anonymity
for them so that they could get over
this fear of being victimized.
And that really made a difference.
If you look,
in the late '80s or early '90s.
The most likely place to be mugged in the city of
Atlanta was in two to three blocks of
a gay bar at bar closing time.
There were people who would come and go around
gay bars and mug people.
They would come out,
they'd been drinking, they're a little tipsy,
and they knew that they weren't going to get
caught because most of the time people didn't report.
An example of that is there was a bar called Burkhart's.
It's on Piedmont Road, it's still there.
I had a guy that contacted me
and he had been robbed at knife point,
leaving Burkhart's at two o'clock in the morning.
Going out to his car, some two guys came
up with a knife to his throat and robbed him,
and he was terrified and
he didn't want to report to the police because again,
he was afraid of being outed and
losing his job or something.
But he thought somebody needed to know
about this and he called and told me about it.
He said, I know this isn't a hate crime,
so I took his information down
and talked to people
in the police department and told them about it.
And they they said,
we'll see what we can do about it.
So they set up a stakeout in the Burkhart's parking lot.
And at closing time,
the week after this had happened to this guy,
I think it may have been like on
a Friday night or a Saturday night.
So they had people out there,
you know, hidden in the parking lot.
And sure enough, there was a creek down behind the bar.
These guys came up from
the edge of the parking lot from behind bushes in
this creek and came up to somebody
with a knife and the police came and arrested them.
When the police were interrogating these guys,
they admitted to having been
doing this for weeks and as best they could remember,
they had robbed over 20 people
and not one of them had reported to the police.
So we were able to
help make place a little safer for people by
giving them somebody they could talk to
without being afraid of being
outed and get the information back to the police.
So that was useful.
A couple of other things that we worked
on without as much success,
they didn't catch the people that did it,
but there were murders.
There were gays and lesbian people being murdered
and could have been hate
crimes or might not have been, but we worked.
There was a series and
probably a serial killer that's never been caught
still that at least 14 people,
we know the person killed,
and they were targeting black female impersonators.
The Black nightclub had young and they were usually
older teen and young 20s gay men that did
the female impersonation shows
across and there was someone who was going
to these shows and not sure what happened exactly,
meeting them after the show or
something but was killing these people.
And over a period of seven or eight years,
we started putting together when people in
the Black community and Black gay and
lesbian community came in and talked to us and said,
there's these murders going on,
and nobody's doing anything about it,
and the police weren't investigating it.
At the time that we were approached,
they knew of seven or eight murders.
And we went to the police
and started asking about these murders,
and they were you see
sometimes you watch television and the crime shows,
and a prostitute is murdered,
and the police don't care much
about it because it was a prostitute.
Well, they didn't care a heck of a lot about
black female impersonators, transgendered people.
The transgender people are still probably
the most marginalized group in our community.
And we were able to put pressure on the police and say,
you need to start looking into this.
And these murders look like they're connected.
It's all targeting the same kind
of person in the same place.
And the police did start investigating.
They put together a task force to investigate the crimes.
And over time, they pull
other records we didn't know about together,
and as I said, came up with
probably 14 murders that had been
committed by the same person, a serial killer.
And then the murders
stopped for three or four years and then started again.
And they told us at the time that
probably the person prison or moved away.
But then they stopped again,
and they never have caught anybody.
But at least they investigated
it and they gave a little bit
of dignity to the persons who had been killed.
Prior to this happening,
through us getting involved and getting the police
and putting pressure on them to investigate it,
one of the persons who was killed
had been reported as missing by friends,
and the police actually went to her house.
She went by her nickname,
and the community was precious.
And I think there were articles
written in creative loafing about her.
The police went to her house and
the door was ajar and they went in and walked
around in the house and there was
nobody there and they said they couldn't find anything,
and they didn't know who to contact other family,
they didn't know if there was family around or whatever,
and they just closed the case.
And maybe a week later,
neighbors called the police and said
there's this horrible smell coming from the house.
And Precious was dead inside the house.
The person had murdered Precious,
had thrown laundry on top of her,
and the police officers,
she was there in the house when they walked through
the house on the missing persons report.
And in the autopsy report,
one of the things they found was a boot mark on Precious,
which they at first thought might lead to the killer,
and it turned out it matched the boot at
the police officers who had walked through the house.
They had stepped on Precious walking through the house.
And they
weren't particularly interested in investigating.
So there was another string of murders that happened in
Atlanta where someone was
targeting there was a street in
Atlanta called Cypress Street,
which back in the '80s and '90s was a street where
male hustlers hang out
and people would go pick up male hustlers there.
And again,
people that the police didn't really care about,
didn't want to have much to do with.
But there was somebody who
started murdering people on Cypress Street,
and during a period of
two or three months there were
three different men that were murdered on Cypress Street.
They would be found with their pants down and
their heads smashed in with a hammer.
Somebody was, apparently,
they were hooking up with a hustler,
and there was a pair of people that were there and
somebody would come and bash them the head and rob them.
And again,
the police they had
those murders recorded and they had the reports,
but they didn't have them assigned
to anybody to investigate.
So we were able to put pressure on
homicide to go investigate those.
And they investigated. That's another one
they never found anybody,
but at least we got them to investigate.
Part of that particular set of murders,
we called a rally and called out the police in
a protest and had speakers that spoke about,
they gave some fiery speeches about,enough.
When are you going to start protecting us?
We're citizens in this community, too.
And we ended with
a candlelight ceremony for
the persons who had died that they may have been there,
picking up hustlers, but they
still didn't deserve to be murdered.
And I guess the other thing that I
would say came out of all of that is
there was this safe sex initiative,
for aid because of AIDS.
There's all this stuff to talking to people about
young gay men and about having safe sex.
And I started going around and talking to
organizations or groups about safe sex, too.
But my talk was all about being careful who you met,
who you went home with,
and what things you could do to protect
yourself from being a victim of crime.
One of the things I brought with me as
a crime brochure about
what to do if you're a victim of crime,
how to prevent being a victim of crime.
And we published a little brochure that
we put out in all the little bars
and some of the gay and lesbian businesses
for people to try to help make people be a little safer.
That's a long answer. I just get you.
>> Well, can you tell us more about any of
your recent or current community involvement?
>> I'm still working on public safety issues.
After the break that I took,
I really enjoy being involved in the community,
and I get a lot of satisfaction out of
feeling like I'm doing something for my community.
So there came a point where I decided I
wanted to get back involved and do something.
It was really after my partner Gary's death.
there was about a year where I was
just a mess after that.
But when I started
really getting over that grieving process,
and I decided I wanted
to get back involved in the community,
and that that would be a good thing to do too to
help give me something to focus on.
So there was an organization
called The AIDs Survival Project.
And they had a thing called the Thrive Weekend.
Jeff Graham, who is currently
the head of Georgia Quality,
was head of that organization at the time.
The survival Project originally had started out as
the National Association of Persons
with AIDS and then changed and became a survival Project.
But they did a number of things.
They helped advocate to get
medications for people who couldn't afford medications,
housing for people with AIDS that were disabled.
They lobbied at the legislature,
trying to get more funds and both at
the state legislature for
housing and to preserve the Raya and White funds,
and I don't know if you're familiar with those,
but federal funds for
the Raya White Act that are given out to
the states as block grants to use
for drugs and housing and things for people with AIDS.
But they also had these things called thrive weekends.
And when people were given an AIDS diagnosis,
they usually expected they were going to die.
if this is a death sentence, you're going to die,
which changed over time because of
the availability of effective drugs.
But people still,
even though there was these drugs that were available,
and you weren't necessarily going to die.
That change from people
finding out that they were HIV positive,
and they knowing they could live.
That change to that from thinking,
okay, this is a death sentence.
I'm going to die, and I'm going to
die horrible deaths with,
awful illnesses, that took a while to sink in.
And I think even now probably some people that
are finding out their HIV
positive probably think, I'm going to die.
The Thrive weekends were designed to tell people,
Look, you're not going to die.
You can live.
You can not only live, you can thrive.
And it was a weekend workshop that was
free put on by the A Survival Project.
And we had doctors come in and talk about medical issues.
We'd have people come in that were experts
on Social Security and talk about if you were sick
enough that you were eligible for disability,
about how to apply for disability.
And talk about insurance issues and dealing,
we had sessions that we talked through about how to talk
with people you met that you wanted to date
about being HIV positive had sessions on,
talking about in discussing the pros and
cons of telling people you worked
with and your friends and your family,
and they had nutritionists
and came in and talked about nutrition and
things to do that would help enhance
your life and make you live a better life.
So these drive workshops were designed
to take people who thought they were going to die,
which a lot of
times people who thought they were going to
die and live and have horrible illnesses.
So I volunteered to talk to Jeff and we'd been friends.
Jeff was one of the founders of Act Up in
Atlanta and then and Jeff worked with Act Up.
And then he became the director of a survival project,
and now he's director of Georgia Quality.
He's one of the people we're really lucky to have
in Georgia great person.
And he and I have been friends
over the years. We stayed friends.
But he told me,
we have all these different things we can do,
and we have this volunteer coordinator.
Why don't you come talk to our volunteer coordinator
and you can see what all we
do and what things you might like to do.
And so I ended up.
It was the Thrive workshops.
And part of the workshop,
they had all these professionals come in,
the doctors and nutritionists and lawyers
and Social Security disability people.
But part of it is too,
was that these people
you're having to go through this adjustment in life.
You think you've just got a fatal illness
and you're worried about,
what's going to happen to me and you're worrying
about who should I tell.
So part of it was you would have the recessions on
nutrition and then a break and
then a session on legal issues,
and then you would break into smaller groups, and there were
a little support groups through the weekend.
And you get together,
you had the same people
in your support group through the weekend.
You could sit through and talk
about what's going on with you
emotionly and I became a support group facilitator.
So support group facilitator
and set up person and clean
up and sweep them off the floor afterwards person.
So I did that with
the A survival project for about two years.
The A survival project is no longer exists,
and I didn't do anything else for a bit.
Jeff Graham became the director of Georgia Quality,
and just the respect that I have for him,
I started getting more interested in Georgia Quality.
I hadn't done a lot with them, and they've been
a struggling organization that
had had leadership and board issues,
and they were doing
some stuff for the community, but not a lot.
And with Jeff Graham there,
I felt like they were going to do more.
So I have volunteered
and I worked their booth
at Pride and worked their booth at the Endman Park,
some of the neighborhood festivals.
But the other thing that I've done is to
continue to be because I've
spent hours and hours and hours in
money out of my own pocket getting
training on dealing with victims of crime,
and Rob Pitts was a Fulton County Commissioner.
At one point he was in the City Council Atlanta.
He had asked me to be on the Metroropolitan,
Atlanta Crime Commission, and I didn't do it at the time.
But I really got a lot of expertise
on public safety issues and crime issues,
especially relevant to
the gay and lesbian community and hate crime.
So I'd volunteer for
different things that come up that Georgia Quality needs,
but I also try to stay available
as an organization expert within the organization.
As a volunteer, an expert
on public safety and health hate crime issues.
And so when something comes up,
I'm a resource that they can rely on.
I review the Department of Justice,
the FBI hate crime statistics
as they come out each year and look for
trends in the statistics and
especially focused on what's going on in
Georgia and provide a summary
of that information to Georgia Quality.
There's not a lot of interest.
There's limited resources for
the organization Georgia Quality,
and there's limited resources for ADL and NWICP
and all the organizations
sort of have to decide what they want to work on.
And hate crimes is not
one of the things that's high priority right now.
So there's nobody working on legislation,
but at a point,
if that comes up that there is an opportunity to work
on an interest in
getting hate crimes bill passed in Georgia,
then I would be a resource and somebody that could go and
testify before the committees that
would hear it in the legislature,
for instance, and provide expert witness information.
So I continue getting that information.
Have met through Georgia Quality.
Hate crimes has some of the people that
are targeted more recently has been immigrant groups.
The Sikh community has
had a temple up in Wisconsin where the guy came
in and shot people and Sikh men wear turban hit.
For whatever reason, the people who don't
like Arabs and Muslims
think that Sikhs are Arabs and Muslims.
And there's been a huge increase
in hate crimes against immigrants,
Latinos and with all the immigration talk that's going
on and against the Sikh community
and against Arab Americans.
Georgia quality had a meeting
with a person from the Department of Justice
that asked meet and talk because
they knew we had some expertise on hate crimes.
This would have been in 2012
and asked me to attend the meeting with
the Person Department of Justice talking
about how we might provide some of
our expertise and reach out
to and work with the immigrant community
and the Sikh community on hate crimes.
And so we've had some meetings to provide
some of our information and exchange ideas
with them and with the Justice Department.
The other thing that I did.
All the time I've worked
with and talked with the police officers,
they have a thing called the
Atlanta Citizens Police Academy.
I never ever attended it
and I actually attended it this last year.
It's ten weeks of training one night a
week for with the Atlanta Citizens. Police Academy,
and you go out to the Police Academy,
and they bring in
the people from every part of the police department.
And go through and talk to you about how they do
their jobs and the legal framework
that surrounds them and give you
expertise on what the police do
and why they do it the way they do
and how the police department is organized.
And through that, I've got to
meet the current set of police chiefs
and deputy chiefs and
zone commanders and the head of homicide and whatever.
So I have that sort of
expertise there waiting if something
comes up where we need somebody
to interact from our community, I'm available.
And then, most recently,
Last year, Rob Pitts,
as a Folk County Commissioner asked
contacted me again and asked me to be
on the Citizen Advisory Board
to the Folk County 911 system.
So I'm a appointed member
of the 911 Advisory Board now.
So that's what I do now.
Not a whole lot. It sounds like a lot.
But it's, once a month meetings and stuff.
I don't do nearly as much as I used to.
But there's a lot of other people who do stuff now, too.
There was a time when there weren't
very many people doing stuff,
so we had to do a lot more.
>> What are your perceptions on current activism
in the gay community?
>> It's grown up. It's matured.
Activism time that I started,
and then you go back to the Stonewall riots.
Activism started as people
getting angry and saying, enough,
we're tired of being treated like this,
and it was pushing back and it was expressions of anger.
And a lot of it was
demonstrations and street stuff and marches and rallies.
And some of that still goes on.
And also, it was
done by groups of people who got together and said,
Did you see what happened yesterday? I hate that.
We should do something about it.
Yeah, let's have a rally and group
of friends get together and you'd have a rally.
Activism, there's some of that still that goes on,
but what's happened is our community has grown.
A lot of the activists who were activists in their 20s,
Jeff Graham, I mentioned,
who's been an activist his whole life, I think,
since he got out of college
and founder Act Up here in Atlanta.
Now he's the executive director
of Georgia quality Project,
and he goes to the legislature and lobbies,
and he knows how to write bills,
and he knows who
the people are that support us and who they don't.
He knows how to talk to people,
and he knows how to train and other people.
And we're activism in the days
when we were marginalized and
invisible and people it was okay to treat us badly.
We're reactive and we were angry,
and we didn't have a place at the table,
so we made lots of noise and had big demonstrations and
rallies and we're not going to let you just ignore us.
We're going to be so noisy and loud,
you have to listen to us,
and we're going to make so much noise,
the media has to listen to us.
We've grown past that.
Now we have people who we have a seat at the table.
We have people who do listen to us.
We have people who are friendly to us.
Who are political leaders and
community leaders and religious leaders.
And we have organizations
that they've got budgets and directors,
and we have people that know how
to write laws and how to access things.
So it's different now that
a lot of the activism now is being
done through organizations and by
organizations organized by professionals.
Who are, to some extent,
have a seat at the table and
are working within the system,
instead of being angry people who are
marginalized and left out
who are working outside the system.
>> And where do you see it heading in the future?
>> I went to the Netherlands, 1996.
David and I went to the Netherlands during the Olympics.
We rented our condo out to
the German Olympic corporate
sponsors of the German Olympic team,
and we stayed here part of the Olympics,
but we went to London and
Amsterdam with some of that money.
And while we were there,
I met this young guy who was an editor
of the gay newspaper in Amsterdam.
And talked with him
quite a bit and David and I both talked with him,
but he and I connected mostly.
I don't think David was as
interested in talk to him as I was.
But we talked a whole lot
and spent part of an evening and part of the next day.
He came and he said, Let me show you
some places around in Amsterdam.
And in the process of talking,
I'm guessing he was 26,
27 somewhere in there.
I asked him at some point.
I said, are you out to your family?
He says, What? I said,
Are you out to your family?
What? What do you mean out?
Well, do they know that you're gay?
Well, of course they know I'm gay.
And later on, talking to some more,
I said, how was it when you came out to your family?
He says, What's this out again?
I said, Well, you know, when you told
them that you're gay, was it difficult?
He said, I didn't have to tell them.
They just know. No, it's not difficult.
He didn't get the questions.
The Netherlands has been gay friendly,
and people have accepted
gays and lesbians to the Netherlands
probably longer than most other countries.
It happened earlier in the Netherlands
for reasons, I don't know.
And Frank house is in Amsterdam.
And Frank was a lesibian.
A lot of people don't know that.
But, these questions didn't make a lot of sense to him.
He didn't have to come out because there
wasn't anything to hide because it's perfectly okay.
And his experience of life is very different from what
mine has been as a gay person
and even gay people are here now.
And that's where I see things going in the future.
I think that we've
had this gay community and we've had gay culture.
And I think to some extent,
it's going to disappear,
and we're going to assimilate and be part of
the bigger culture and become a non issue.
That may not happen as much as it's happened
in the Netherlands because
of the attitudes of people
who don't feel comfortable with,
in some cases, don't like gays and lesbians
because of their religious beliefs.
And I think the evangelical Christian community
in the United States
probably keep that from
happening as quickly as I'd like for it to happen,
but that's where eventually things will go.
And even they will come around.
My brother is gay also, my younger brother,
Jay and his partner,
who they got married after
on like two days after the California law.
They live in Long Beach, California.
Two days after the California law,
the judge released the stay and
said people can start getting married again.
If the law was overturned.
His partner is a United Church of Christ minister,
and my sister and
niece and nephew are evangelical Christians,
and young evangelical Christians have gay friends,
and they don't understand why they're some of them are
actually upset with the religious teaching
that they've grown up with because they don't understand
why their friends are being treated so badly.
So even they'll come around.
>> Can you talk about how these
epidemic has impacted your life?
>> Oh, God. It's been an impact in lots of ways.
When I was living in Des Moines,
Iowa, I hadn't moved out this way yet.
When I first started reading about the gay cancer.
The new gay men were getting this disease and dying.
They didn't know what the disease was.
It was just kind of scary,
but it was this little fringe thing,
and I kind of knew about it.
You'd read about it in The Advocate or something,
but I didn't worry
a lot about it because didn't know what it was.
And thought, well, I don't know,
it was happening to
gay men mainly in San Francisco and New York.
By the time I moved out toward this part of the country.
I was in Knoxville before I came to Atlanta,
and there was a guy that I met and I
dated while I was in Knoxville,
a real nice guy.
His name was Joe Nemus,
and after I moved here, he became sick,
and there were beginning
to be some experimental drugs available,
but they were really strong.
They had bad side effects,
and he got what's called neuropathy in his feet.
It hurt horribly to stand up.
He couldn't drive anymore.
He went from being this young, happy,
healthy guy to being very debilitated,
couldn't do anything in six or seven months,
and in 10 months he was dead.
So there was this sadness and then here in Atlanta,
when I was involved with friends in Atlanta,
the organization Gay Lesbian Social Recreational Group,
we had 450,
500 members, and there
was somebody from our group during the late '80s,
early '90s that was dying all the time.
It became scary, worrying about it,
but also it was
taking up resources and energy in our community.
All of a sudden, instead of
fighting to be treated fairly,
not discriminated at work,
all of our efforts started going into trying
to raise money for
AIDS research and provide support for people with AIDS.
And it was something that just really
drained the community and drained the resources.
But it also, I was
saying earlier about most people
are gays and lesbian apolitical.
Being apolitical goes away
when you have to fight for your life.
And AIDS activism really energized and
helped build the activism
within the gay community to work for all kinds of stuff.
But there was a period there where
it was just so difficult.
We were going to memorial
service or a funeral, it seemed,
like at least once a month and sometimes
more than one a month for a period of several years.
And I had close friends that I saw that died,
and some of them some pretty awful deaths,
the infections and diseases
that they would get when their immune systems broke down.
Some of them were really just horrible.
And I saw people treated, in some cases,
wonderfully by their families when they got AIDS,
in other cases, families
that didn't want to have anything to do with them.
There was a guy that was an editor of
the Gay Center newspaper in Atlanta.
There used to be a place called
Atlanta Gay Center on 12th Street.
And they had a newspaper that they put out,
it was pre-Southern Voice, etc.
And his name was Ralph Ginn,
G-I-N-N, and Ralph was the editor.
And when I worked
on the help line at the Atlanta Gay Center,
I became friends with Ralph.
He would be there a lot of the evenings,
same evenings that my shift was on
the helpline working on
the newspaper and Ralph got AIDS,
and his family didn't know he was gay.
And when he became so sick,
he was in the hospital, he told them not only he was gay,
that he had AIDS, and they said,
we don't want to have anything to do with you.
And they not only said they
didn't want anything to do with him,
they went to all his extended family, to uncles,
and aunts, and brothers and they said,
"He's not our son anymore.
We're not having anything to do with him.
And if you have anything to do with him,
we won't have anything to do with you."
And they put pressure on the rest,
his whole extended family to shut him out and disown him.
And Ralph was actually,
there was a Time Magazine article
about what was happening with
AIDS and how badly people were being
treated that had AIDS.
Ralph was one of the people featured
in the Time Magazine article.
And there was not a person from his family when he died,
but he had 25 or 30 friends
from the community that were there with him.
And his family had
no interest even of picking up
his body or planning his funeral or anything.
We put paperwork in place
to allow friends to take his remains,
and it was sad what his family did to him.
So things like that that we had to live with.
It was kind of weird.
I don't know if you have grandparents that are living,
but as your grandparents,
they're older and you go visit them,
and you haven't seen them in a while,
and you sit down and you start talking,
and invariably, they're getting older,
and their friends are dying.
And there's, do you remember Julie Smith?
She passed away two months ago.
And do you remember Sam?
He got cancer.
I don't know if you remember, he died of cancer.
And you'd hear this discussion.
My friends in their 20s and 30s talk like that.
We get together and say, did you hear about,
and it occurred to me at one point it's like we
become old early in life,
because all our friends are already dying.
That doesn't usually happen to
people until they're a lot older.
[LAUGHTER] But that's what life
was like there for a while.
So it changed a lot
of things because of those kind of experiences.
It gave us something to focus on and work for.
I was mentioning about Public Safety stuff earlier,
and I left actually,
one of the things off that we accomplished in
the Public Safety Committee with the City Council.
There was a guy that was head of
the Department of Corrections, Tom Pocock.
And really nice guy,
and he was willing to listen to us.
He was a very open minded person.
And if you told him something was
a problem, he would listen,
and if he understood it
was a problem, he'd try to fix it.
And the early drugs that came about,
they had these really tight schedules.
You had to take two of these every four hours,
and if you missed it by more than a couple hours,
you would start building out resistance to
the HIV and the drugs would become ineffective.
So not taking your drugs on this tight,
really close schedule, you'd die.
The drugs would become ineffective and they would become
resistant to the drugs,
and you couldn't take them anymore.
And the police had this policy when they arrest somebody.
If you had any kind of medication or drugs,
they didn't want medication or drugs in the jails.
So as part of the intake process into the jail,
they would take anything you had on you and
throw it in the trash and throw it away.
And so that was one of the things
that we were able to talk with him about is look,
you're killing people when you do that to them,
and we were able to get them to change
the intake process in the jail system
to where if somebody had AIDS medications,
they would stop the intake process
and bring one of the jail
nurses in and look and see if
those drugs were for AIDS and verify if they were.
And then rather than throwing them away,
the nurse would take custody
of the drugs and find out what the schedule was they
needed to take them and give them as
they needed them while they were in
the jail, so they wouldn't die.
I mentioned about the Thrive.
The people who were at
the Thrive Workshops that were
coming in when I was working at those.
In early days, it was gay men that
were primarily as victims,
gay men and IV drug users.
And you still see that.
But that's changed over time.
And these Thrive Workshops.
There were Black women who had had men who they'd had sex
with who were also secretly having sex with other men.
And they had become it was Black women
with children who were HIV positive.
But there was also this country,
we arrest people and put them
in prison for small amounts of marijuana.
There were young Black males
who had been arrested for things
like having a small amount
of marijuana and put in the prison system,
and had been raped and made
HIV positive while they were in prison.
That was three fourths of
the people who were at these Thrive Workshops.
So the AIDs gave us something to focus on.
That was something else that we worked on,
I was trying to change the prison system and
the jail system and make condoms available.
So I did all those things that affected us in that way.
It personally affected me.
I'm HIV positive.
I used to go get tested once a year.
If you're a sexually active gay person,
you should do that.
And for several years the tests were always fine,
and I was not doing any crazy stuff.
I wasn't using IV trucks
and thought that things would be fine.
But at some point, and I quit going as often.
And I had skipped two or three years and
went to get a test one year.
And I thought I
haven't done this a while I need to do that.
And that was a very scary thing, by the way.
You go get this test.
If you had any reason to
believe that you might be HIV positive,
going to get that test and then waiting for the results.
The results used to take two weeks.
So you had to wait for two weeks afterwards,
and that was a lot of anxiety.
But anyway, I'd gone two or three years
and went and got tested and found I was HIV positive.
And it was a shock.
I had to adjust to that,
and it's affected me personally and
that I have to take medications.
Medications are much better now.
They don't have some of
the horrible side effects they used to
have and there's a variety of medications.
So if you do build up a drug
resistance to one medication,
HIV becomes resistance resistant,
you may be able to take something else.
But the drugs most
of them affect your liver
because your liver processes stuff that you take in.
Some of it can affect your kidneys and other things,
and there are some side effects.
But I have to have that regular.
I go every six months.
I used to be every three,
but now I go every six months,
I have to have my complete blood work up
done to check and be sure that
the drugs are not adversely affecting my liver.
And in the back of my mind, nowadays,
HIV is mostly manageable illness.
But there are still things
you have to deal with because of it,
and some people do get
worse side effects than others had.
If at some point it starts impacting your liver
and you start having
liver damage from taking the medications,
you have to stop taking them.
And so for anybody who's HIV positive,
one of the things you know is if you reach a point
where you can't take any of the medications anymore,
then you have about two years left to live.
So in a way,
that's a bad thing, but in a way,
it's a gift too,
because it puts you in a position of appreciating life.
And most of us especially when we're younger,
we don't think about
some of the stuff that's most important to us.
We get worried about paying our bills and
whatever it is that we do on a day to day basis,
and we lose track sometimes
of what's most important to us.
And when you are in touch with your mortality,
it helps you refocus on what's most important in life
and be sure that you
do the things that are important in life,
that you're doing something that you want to do.
So that's a good side of it.
So I rambled there with the answer to that,
[OVERLAPPING] but it's had an impact
in a lot of different ways.
I don't know if you were going to ask
about the AIDS Quilt or not.
>> Yes, actually. Our question
was to talk about your work with
David Greer on the main project Quilt.
>> And I mentioned it because it's connected.
And that's the names project Quilt.
There was a guy out in
San Francisco that came up with this idea to make
a Quilt with the panels that
were memorialized that people had died from AIDS.
Which is a really cool idea.
I don't know how he ever came up with that.
But the Quilt,
I've helped make panels for some friends that we put on
the Quilt and other people put
panels from all over
the United States and all over the world now, too.
And it started the names project was in San Francisco,
and the Quilt was in San Francisco.
But there was this really strong
names project chapter here in Atlanta.
And as the Quilt got bigger and it got to be
harder to move it around and display it and store it.
It's gigantic.
It takes a warehouse to store
this thing and a big warehouse.
It in 1987, at the March in Washington,
they displayed the Quilt on the mall in Washington.
The big grassy mall.
It won't fit there anymore. It's too big.
They couldn't display it there now.
It's been too big to fit there for 10 years.
Sadly, because so many people have panels on it.
But during the time period,
there was so many people were dying
the first time that it was going to come to Atlanta.
Atlanta panel had one of
the large gay communities in the United States.
So they decided that they were going to have
a display of it here in Atlanta.
And the first time it was brought here.
It's been here two or three
times and it's here permanently now,
but it was at the World Congress Center.
It was just big huge space,
and they had the Quilt there,
and there was plans to have it.
David and I volunteered.
They needed volunteers to
help work on the display of the Quilt.
So it was there through a weekend.
It was there all day
Saturday and Sunday through a weekend.
And we both volunteered,
and they wanted everybody to dress in white.
The volunteers are all white,
and then they're all the color and the Quilt.
And I'm not quite sure why that was big.
So we had white shorts and white T-shirts
on and we had volunteered.
We had lots of friends
who had died and wanted to be there for that reason.
And it just seemed like an important thing to us.
Something brought
attention to all the people who had died,
but it also was
a real amazing way
to remember the people who had died, too.
And we volunteered for
a shift on Saturday and a shift on Sunday.
I think they were three or four hour long shifts,
probably four hours.
So we get there on the Saturday.
And they say, Oh,
you're assigned to the Georgia room.
So what this was,
they had this big main body of the Quilt in
the World Congress Center and a huge was huge.
This is like a football field size Quilt.
Panels that had been made over
the last year for people who had died in Georgia,
and they had them in a separate room.
And they were there,
so that people from Georgia who were
here could go and easily find those.
And at the end, they had
a ceremony where they then joined
those to the rest of the Quilt.
And so they said, you're in the Georgia room,
and we said, okay,
so we go to the Georgia room.
We were as volunteers,
what we were was monitors.
We were there to keep people from stepping on the Quilt,
if somebody crazy came
in from trying to do anything to damage it,
and go get the security people, whatever.
But they had boxes of clinics
everywhere this box of clinics down here.
And they said, this is a real emotional experience,
and you may have to to help
somebody take them to a seat to sit down or talk to them.
They may need somebody to talk to.
I don't think we knew exactly what we were
volunteering for when we volunteered.
But we worked in that Georgia room,
and it was a steady stream of
people coming through who were
looking for the quilt panels
from friends and people who had died.
And it was four hours of
hundreds and hundreds of people crying.
It was probably
the most intensely emotional thing I've ever done.
I just literally hundreds and hundreds
of people just a line of people coming by,
crying for four hours.
And it was just completely emotionally,
physically exhausted at the end of that day.
Leaving there, I remember telling David,
I don't know if I can come back tomorrow. We did.
We came back and told him, we
can't be in the [LAUGHTER] Georgia Room.
To this day, that's still probably
the most intensely emotional experience
one or two that I've had in my life.