>> It's Saturday, September 20th, 2014.
This is Anne Graham and Heather Oswald,
Archivist with the Kennesaw State University Archives.
We're interviewing John C. Greaves in the studios of
the Audio Video Technology Services
at Kennesaw State University,
as part of the museum's Archives
and Mirror Books Oral History project.
This is our third interview with John.
So John, could you talk about
your relationship with David and how that developed?
>> David and I met through Friends Atlanta.
One of the things Friends Atlanta had was
a friendly volleyball during
nice parts of the year at a place called
Wynn Park over behind Colony Square in Atlanta.
On Sundays, just pick up volleyball.
People would go and anybody want to play,
we divide up into teams and play volleyball.
And I love to play volleyball.
I'm not very good at it, but I still like playing.
And David, he would have been 18 and I was probably 29.
And he had found about friends in Atlanta and was
there with another with a friend of
his watching us play volleyball,
and had seen me and
decided I was somebody who wanted to meet.
So he arranged to meet me at some point.
We went out a couple of times and then he and I
and two other guys went
out together for Halloween, that year,
for Halloween evening and we just kept spending
more and more time together and he introduced me to
his family and parents,
and we eventually moved in together.
We were just spending all of our time together
and lived together for initially in Smyrna,
where a place that we lived out
Hawthorn Boulevard, I think it was in Smyrna.
We're close to Dom's Airforce Base,
later on, moved into the City of Atlanta.
But we would go dancing together and out to dinner with
friends and travel a
little bit. We didn't have a lot of money.
We were poor. Neither of us was financially
well off when we moved in together and I
remember we had a complete set of bedroom furniture,
two sets of dishes and cookware,
and we had a box with
a towel over with a television and living room.
And my sleeping bag fooled
out on the living room floor with some pillows.
We didn't even have chairs so we could
watch TV sit on the floor.
And we had a second bedroom that
was empty didn't have anything in it.
But we had we had a great time together.
We spent evenings. Sometimes, we
go out and do things with friends.
But most of the time working during the week and
at home during the evenings and
during the week on weekends.
We were out going dancing or dinner with
friends or going to the park. We went camping.
We went to Cumberland Island and camped
out at Cumberland Island tents and in woods up,
in North Georgia Mountains and North Carolina.
We had friends in Friends Atlanta
that we did bowling with volleyball.
I played volleyball. They've never played
volleyball. He'd just watch.
But there was a Friends Atlanta had
a thing dining out people
would get together and go eat somewhere.
But they also have what they call a Gourmet club.
People get together somebody's home
and each each person or
a couple would cook different dishes
and have dinners together.
There was a lot of outdoor people.
So we had camping trips and, sometimes,
we'd go day hikes, so places.
And we got involved with people through friends,
Atlanta, who were involved in activism,
were interested in politics.
And I think that's where both of
us started our political activism.
So we lived together after moving into
the City of Atlanta for a long time
and we were together for 12 years together.
We grew apart toward the end of our relationship,
but still cared a lot about each other and lived together
for two years after we decided
we really weren't a couple anymore,
which was odd, especially
if one of us wanted to go out on David.
But we stayed friends and,
eventually, David left Chicago.
We had a friend Dan Zanella that
had been the fund raising person for
Easter Seattle in Atlanta and he got
promotion and got moved to Easter Seattle in Chicago.
Dan also played the clarinet and the piano,
and he started playing change in a Chamber Orchestra.
I think in while he was in Chicago,
and he moved from Easter Seattle into
fundraising for orchestras and symphonies.
But we went up and
visited in Chicago a few times up there
and David fell in love with Chicago and
decided he was going to live in Chicago.
So when we did finally move apart,
David moved to Chicago.
And I stayed in Atlanta.
I don't know what year that was.
We have to figure out backwards from the days.
[LAUGHTER].
But we had I have to say
I still love David very much and loves me.
I'm so glad with
12 years invested in a relationship together that
we've been able to remain
best friends and still
keep close in touch with each other.
I think probably talk
to each other at least every other week.
Sometimes [inaudible].
I think he uses me
sometimes as somebody to confide in and talk to
and he doesn't want to talk to other people or
to people that he's around all the time up in Chicago.
[LAUGHTER] So it has been nice.
And we both have kept he's
kept a lot closer in touch with Cody,
his nephew than I have over the years,
but we both have kept in contact about Cody
and so discuss what was going on with him over the years.
And that was part of our relationship.
There was a point where Cody was born
and became part of
our lives and lived with us in
our household for almost a year.
And that was really interesting.
It was a shock to suddenly have a baby,
no more going out nights dancing,
I was getting up every two hours feeding him
when he was before he started sleeping
through the night and really caused
some drastic changes in our relationship.
But we had friends that would voluntarily
say call him say, de some time off.
Can I come over and watch Cody
for the evening and you can go out and do something,
or they would collect clothes
and give us clothes for Cody and stuff.
Some of our friends helped us adjust to that,
but it was such a weird adjustment to go through
and we did it on very short notice when we got Cody,
he came to live with us maybe two days notice.
And we went from having a life
of game in going out to dancing all night,
going to parties with friends sometimes
to taking care of a baby and
house and trying to
figure out how to fit everything else you
have to do in life in with that
because that's like a full time job.
[LAUGHTER]
>> Can you talk a little bit about how
Cody came to stay with you?
>> I'm sorry. I missed this,
but you said we were going to do
all of that stuff at the end?
>> Right.
>> Well, then I'm going to turn off that camera.
>> Oh, yeah, sure.
>> I'm sorry.
>> It's okay.
>> Because it's got a smaller card that doesn't work.
>> Yeah. No [inaudible].
>> No, not until the end.
>> Go ahead.
>> So you've got a nice long shot at this one.
>> Yeah.
>> Great shot.
>> Can you talk about how Cody came to live with you?
>> So David his family
some of them are Georgia Mountain people,
some of them are people that grew up in
Atlanta and then moved out to Cobb County, I think,
during the white flight time period,
after the school integration and
stuff but his mother and father are both families.
So they were both one of seven children,
lots of aunts and uncles and cousins.
And David had his own family, just his sister.
And his sister Mary
she got married and had her first child,
I think, maybe when she was 17.
That relationship didn't work out and then she got
divorced and then had
a new boyfriend that they weren't married,
but had another second child and then a third child,
Cody was the third child.
And David and his sister got
along pretty well and
even I got along well with her, too,
but we didn't see that much of her
but when Cody was born,
there were problems that I'm not going to tell you
all the details about
but there were fights between Dina,
his sister and the father over some issues between them.
He was abusive toward her even when she was
in the hospital recovering from having given birth,
and then he fled the state and went to
Alabama where he was from and just disappeared.
And there were issues with Dina, as I said,
I'm not going to go into detail about
but David was concerned about what was
going on and talked with his sister
and tried to get her to straighten out the issues.
And it wasn't real successful.
And there were things she was doing
that was endangering her children.
And David contacted Family Children Services,
and they did a check of
the home and they ended
up taking the children away from her.
So the oldest child,
a daughter from her first marriage
went to live with her father.
The next oldest child went to live with David's parents,
and nobody wanted to take care of a baby.
She had a two-month-old baby.
And nobody in the extended family
at all and his parents
the parents said, we're too old for that.
We can't deal with the baby.
And there was talk from
the Family Children Services that were going to
place Cody in foster care.
And David came home from work one evening and he said,
John, I don't want my nephew to go into a foster home.
I want to take care of him.
I want to bring him here.
And I bring him here and you don't have to do anything.
I'll do all the work to take care of him.
I said that's crazy. I'll help you.
Maybe he'll do all the work.
And so we told
the Family Children Services
that we would take care of Cody.
And they did a really fast we had to get fingerprinted,
they did a background check on us,
and then they certified us
or I don't know what the formal process
is as family foster parents.
It's different. We couldn't have
foster children that weren't related to us.
And they came and did a home visit, too,
as part of all that but they placed Cody with us.
And so that all happened like in two days.
And so we all of a sudden had
a two-month-old baby and
neither of us had ever taken care of babies before.
I remember we got this book,
What to Expect in the First Year and,
like Cody would be crying and pull out of
his ear and you could go look up in this book,
baby won't stop crying, tugging, ear.
And it would say, baby probably has an ear infection,
and we got some tips from his mother and we got,
some clothes and things that he already
had but we quickly had to make
a place for Cody and our home and a crib and we had to
range for childcare and Cody,
that's how he came to live with us.
He was placed through Family and Children Services.
I used to tell people at that time that when
the Cobb County stuff happened and the
Gordon Why song and
the people who supported him would
talk all the time about family values.
And I used to tell people
the Department of Family Children Services of
Cobb County knows who has family values.
>> Was there ever any question about the fact
it was a gay couple taking Cody in?
>> No. What they
were concerned with is that he had a safe,
clean home, and secure and
that we would be good parents to him.
>> And what year was that?
>> Oh, god. Let's see.
So Cody is 18.
So it would have been 18 years ago
and I'll let you do the math.
I try to do that my head when we sitting here but no,
that didn't seem to be an issue or concern for them and
they told us they had a preference for placing him
with family over putting him in
foster care with people who weren't family.
So they really preferred
I think they were happy with the way it came out.
And by being certified as family foster parents,
that meant that we got Medicaid.
So his medical care was
paid for by the State while he was with us.
And I think we got $60 a
month for baby formula
or something like that. I don't know.
We got some minor amount of money.
They didn't care about that,
and as I was saying,
I think the Family and Children Services
knew they were experts in
dealing with family and children and they knew more about
family values than the politicians in Cobb County.
>> So was there any thought of Cody
remaining with you permanently
or was this always a temporary?
>> So I mentioned that Dina
and Cody's father were not married.
There was no record of them being married.
And during the process
when David went and talked to Family Children Services,
he never mentioned his father's name is Billy,
never mentioned Billy and
they didn't ask about it and it wasn't any records
and when Family Children Services went to Dina and
talked with her and told her,
what was going to happen
if I think that they gave her an opportunity
to fix some of the problem
first and not knew what she was doing.
She never mentioned Billy either. And we didn't know it.
We didn't know that they were unaware that he
existed, but they didn't know.
So there was a period of several months where we were
caring for Cody and Dina never
contacted us and asked us
how he was or what was going on with him.
We start treating him like he was our little boy.
We'd take him to the family gatherings and things.
There's some interesting experiences
we had because of that.
His father never contacted us.
And then about maybe eight or nine months
after he was living with us.
One day, we got a phone call
from his father, Billy, and he said,
I've moved back to
Atlanta and I'm going to come get Cody,
he's going to live with me now.
We said, well,
you need to contact Family and Children Services.
He's been placed with us through court order,
and we can't just give him to you.
You've got to talk with him. So he contacted him.
They didn't even know who he was.
And they told him,
no, you can't go pick him up.
And we don't even know who you are,
and he was furious.
And he was angry
that when he wanted Cody, he couldn't just have him.
He became very angry with us
and wouldn't talk to us and he
went and got an attorney and began
the process to legally fight to get custody of Cody.
Which we weren't trying to interfere with that,
but when he'd left the state and had been
abusive to Dina and left the state and was gone,
he wasn't in the picture and somebody had to take care of
Cody and we were
concerned when he wanted to get him back to,
we were concerned and point out
Family Children Services that for
months for the nine or 10 months had never contacted us,
and never asked about him,
how he was doing, anything.
So Dina straightened out
some of the problems that
she had they got to back together.
She straightened out some of the problems
that were caused
the Family and Children Services to take
the children away from the first place.
And Billy and his attorney went into court
and in a process like that,
they had his attorney.
They had attorney that represent
the Family and Children's Services.
And then I think they're called the guardian ad litem is
an attorney that's supposed to be
a neutral attorney that
represents the interest of the children.
And the attorney had
contacted us and interviewed us, ask questions.
I think talked to Billy and Dina
and talk to the older children that could talk
with him and he was there in
the court to represent the children's interests.
And the court eventually
made the decision that the children would be placed
that they would come out of foster care
and the care and with
the different family members they were with and
the custody would go back to Dina and Billy.
And so that was actually a really horrible experience.
Either if you have children? I had
never had children before either,
but I never understood people
said how cute babies were always when they look ugly.
But within a week of
taking care of how I was so attached to him.
There's just something that happens when you're taking
care of another human being,
they're completely dependent on you.
I was so attached to them and it was really like he
was my little boy and to both of us.
And when we had to
give him back part of the agreement was that we would
get to visit with him once in
a while and Billy was still fury with
furious because he thought we'd interfered with
his control over his children,
which I think he did that on his own.
But it was horrible when
Cody when we had to give him back to
him and he wasn't going to live with us anymore.
I was giving up my own child,
David and I both cried quite a bit.
That was a difficult thing.
>> And you mentioned some of
the experiences the family gatherings.
Would you like to talk a little bit about those?
>> So David's family,
some of them were Georgia Mountain people.
I don't know what David will think about me saying this,
but there were a couple of his uncles we
thought might have been Ku Klux Klan.
And when David and I got together,
David went to his grandmother.
She was sort of like the matriarch of the family
and told her about me and she had
some family meeting David told me
about or she told everybody what do you
think about David and John
being together and I don't care
what you think because I think it's good.
And when we have thing gathered here at the home,
they're both invited and
if any of you have anything to say about it,
you need to just be quiet.
And you'd go to
these family gatherings for
Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter,
whenever we drink potluck,
and food and whatever.
And the uncles would all be out in
the driveway drinking beer and
talking and walk by and say,
hello, how are you or Merry Christmas, whatever.
And there were a couple of them that would
just ignore me like I didn't exist.
They wouldn't say anything to us.
It was literally we weren't there.
And something really interesting
happened after they saw us,
we brought Cody with us a couple
of times we were taking care of Cody,
they began talking to us.
And one of them actually said to me,
he came up and shook my hand.
He said, John, I appreciate
that you care about family and
you're taking care of Cody
and that you're a real family person.
And he said, why don't you come out and
have a beer with us?
And it was a shocking experience,
but that showed me something about people's attitudes.
Again, some people know real family is.
Anyway [LAUGHTER] we got
along well after that with all of them.
I think that some of the bias that people had
then and still a lot of people have toward gays.
One of the ideas that a lot of people had
was gays chose to not
have straight relationships and have
children because they didn't want
the responsibility invert that,
that all we wanted to do was to have parties and sex,
and so that we were irresponsible people.
And I think some of that attitude
may have been there would
be the uncles and the couple that wouldn't talk to us.
And the experience with
them showed me that you can break down
negative feelings and bad treatment with
just about anybody if they
get to know you and they learn what person you are.
>> So we're going to shift gears a little bit.
And could you talk about your relationship with Gary?
>> So David and I had grown apart.
I mentioned we were still living
together for a couple of years
after we realized we weren't a couple anymore.
We had a two bedroom condo,
so that was good.
And I had met Gary.
I think it was around
1997 we met in a chat room online and met and
had a beer and dinner together and I
just really liked him and we hit it
off and we began spending time together,
actually after he and I met,
he had to barbecue his house one time and he
invited us to come over and he knew that
David and I lived together and had been a couple,
but we are now more like roommates.
And David went to the barbecue with me at
Gary's and that was all fine.
But we began spending more and more time together
and just when you meet people,
you connect in different ways.
Some people you have in common,
you like to read the same things
or you like to go to movies or you like to
go dancing or there's
different things that you have in common with people.
Dave and I had a number of things in common,
but I never met anybody I met
Gary that I had so much in common with.
We had the same favorite book.
We both liked our favorite book at least at that time,
as I Dian by William Falk.
And we both loved music and all kinds of music.
We would go and put our suits on and go to
the Alana Symphony and we put our arb boots and
jeans on and T-shirts and go to
the club and dance to 90s nails,
industrial music, and we both
loved traveling and later
as we went on some trips together,
we really traveled well together.
We traveled the same way,
the kind of ways that we did things on
trips and so we just
built this strong relationship
because we connected in so many different ways.
Gary lived in a house in Cabbage Town that he bought.
He had gone to University of Georgia.
He was a double major in business in Italian.
And after graduating, he had gone
to Italy and taught English or
lived in Florence and taught English for six months
while living with a host family,
an older woman and learning Italian.
And he made some Italian friends while he was
there and he could speak Italian really, really well.
We were in Italian restaurants
before and he would start speaking Italian
or an Italian or
some place where the Italians and he talked to
the Italian and they'd
ask him what part of Italy is from there.
He didn't have any accent to
the Italians that he lived over.
After that, he at some point
decided he wanted to be a nurse and he went to
Emery and got nursing credentials.
He worked at Charity Hospital in Ochsner in
New Orleans and then he came and worked
in Atlanta when I met him,
he was a trauma nurse in
the emergency room in the trauma at Rady Hospital.
He was the person he
literally was saving lives every time he went to work.
He was the person that was that was there
dealing with gunshot wound victims,
knifes, people crushed in
construction accidents and car wrecks.
It was amazing the stuff that he was
doing and he was really, really good nurse,
the people there at the hospital.
I met some of them and they spoke so highly of him
and it was and he loved nursing.
We built this relationship and at some point.
We went on a couple
we've been on one trip together where I was actually,
he was on a trip.
He at some point,
decided to go into travel nursing.
And travel nursing, there's there's
a shortage of nurses in almost everywhere in the world.
If you have a nursing license,
you can go all over the world just about and
work and people will pay
you well to go be a nurse somewhere.
And he started doing
some travel nursing assignments and he was in New York at
NYU Medical Center for a couple of
assignments this before we moved in together.
And I went up there and
part of his his New York paid more than he made in
the Trauma Center in Grady and gave him an apartment that
was like on a 26th floor of
this building with this incredible view in Manhattan,
and I went there there
would be like 90 days at a time, three month assignments.
I went there a couple of times while he was there.
It spent time with him in New York at the apartment
there and he did a couple of other travel assignments,
but there was one that he got here in Ukraine in
Kiev with Raytheon Corporation
and the defense department,
the defensive threat reduction agency had
a contract that Raytheon was fulfilling there.
And he went to fill in
for a full time nurse that would be
there that was one was going to be out
for a while for some reason and he'd
be filled in for 90 days.
And he met these gay guys while he was there and,
we stayed in close touch because
we'd gotten really close at that point.
And he's told me you need to come here and visit.
And so after he finished 90 day he stayed
for two more weeks and I went over to
Kiev and Ukraine and we
stayed together in his apartment with
some some gay Ukrainian guys in
downtown Kiev and went
sights in Kiev and did things there.
After when it came time for me to leave and come home,
he was still going to be there for a few more days.
And we both kind of cried when we were separating.
I think we had
really started falling in love at that point.
And when he came back for that trip,
he said, "I want to live with you."
And then we moved in together.
So then he moved in with
me and put his house in Cambridge town on the market.
And I don't know how
much more you want me to tell you
about relationship with him,
but we went on some trips together and we
did stuff and we just had a blast with each other.
We really had a good time.
>> So you brought a photograph
of you and Gary with Joan Rivers.
So it was taken in April 2000.
So could you talk about how that happened?
>> So I don't
know if you're familiar with
the UNESCO World Heritage List.
[inaudible] List.
I want to see as many of the places on
the UNESCO World Heritage List as I can in my lifetime.
It kills me that they're destroying some of them in Syria
right now because of the wars that is going on there,
and they destroyed some of them in Afghanistan.
The list is actually smaller than it was 10 years ago.
But Gary had the same interest
in traveling and going to
see as much of the world he could,
and we both had had an interest in going to India.
So we planned this trip to India.
My brother was still working at
Delta Airlines and he gave us buddy passes.
So we got to fly first class to Frankfort and then
on to Bombay, which was nice.
We went to India for,
I think we were there for 12 days, maybe.
We flew into Bombay and spent a few days in
Bombay in the Garden District in Indian Hotel in Bombay,
not far from the Timber Hall Hotel
and the Gateway to India in Bombay,
which official name is Mumbai,
but the people who live there still say Bombay.
Then we took a train over and we went
to Jaipur which is sometimes called the Peak City.
There's all these fabulous palaces there.
We spent time in Jaipur,
and then from Jaipur we took
an overnight air-conditioned bus.
It was like a 5.5, six-hour trip.
It was supposed to be from Jaipur to Agra.
The bus had a flat tire,
blew out on the way there,
and this is in the dry season,
it's kind of desert area.
We're an hour outside of Agra's,
like 110 degrees out and
the bus driver couldn't
repair the tire that damage the wheel.
He took Gary's luggage off and gave it to the people that
were on the bus and he locked
the bus door and walked off down the road.
And there were some British people, some French,
and then some Indian people that were on the bus,
and we're all standing on the side of
the road in the desert in India in 110-degree heat,
whatever we going to do.
The driver spoke,
I don't know if he spoke Hindi,
but nobody in the bus could communicate with him and
he couldn't tell us what he was
doing and we thought he'd abandoned us,
but he apparently walked until he could get to
a phone and made phone calls.
And after a while here came this Indian military truck,
huge trucks that's open in
the back with some soldiers in it,
and they picked up all the women and
children and loaded them in the truck.
Then they said, "We don't have room for
the men" then they drove off.
And it was weird.
We're in the middle of nowhere, there's
no buildings in site.
People had started a period who wanted to sell us stuff.
There was some guy with a dancing bear with a muzzle
on that wanted us to give him money
to make the bear dance,
and there were people that had
drinks they wanted to sell us.
I don't know where they came from
or how they knew we were there.
But then a local bus
came and we found out that the driver had,
actually, made these phone calls in range for people.
There was a local bus that had a bus route,
and they came further out
past their bus route and picked up the rest of us.
We just barely fit in the bus.
I actually had to stand the seat
behind the driver like this over the driver,
and we stacked up
our suitcases in the stairs that come up
into the bus and Gary sat on top of the suitcases.
So we got to the local bus station in
Agra and then we carried our luggage.
We had luggage that had backpack straps and wheels,
so we could carry in the back and we went to our hotel.
So anyway, we went to see
the Taj Mahal while we were there,
and we went early in the morning.
In the morning, the sun is supposed to
shine off the marble and makes
it look it's glowing almost some
of the white marble at the Taj Mahal.
We saw the Taj Mahal,
and the Taj Mahal
it's one of the stories about it
is that it's a monument to love.
The man who built it built it as
a monument to his wife who died in childbirth.
So we saw the top pool was
just incredible place and it's hot weather,
again, 110 degrees, 130 degree day.
We went back to the hotel,
we're at the override trident
and Gary said, "I'm going to the pool.
I'm hot." I said, "I need a beer." So he went in the pool.
I went to the dining room and I ordered my beer and I
look up and there's nobody in the dining room
except me and then another table,
two people, and I look over at
one of them is Joan Rivers.
And so, I run outside,
I said Gary, he loved to get autographs by the way.
We got autographs at theaters or stay outside,
the stage door after a show and get people to sign and he
got autographs from musicians and bands.
Let them sign albums.
I said, "Gary, come inside and
have lunch with me and Joan Rivers."
So he changed clothes quick,
he came running back with his travel journal and
a little Fuji cardboard box camera
because he invested his camera,
dropped it vested Lin's day before.
So we had one of those disposable green Fuji cameras.
And we had our lunch,
she had her lunch, and we
left her alone until she finished eating,
and when she finished
eating Gary walked over and he said,
excuse me, miss Rivers, we saw you here.
We're from the United States,
and we're traveling, could we
have our picture taken with you?
And she said, "Yes."
She grabbed the camera out
of his hand and she said, I want my friend take it.
He's an Indian fashion photographer.
And she pulled us together.
He got ready to take the picture
and she put her arms up and said,
I don't have any make up on.
No, and then she said, well,
and she put her arms back down and
smiled and he took the picture.
And then she pulled up a chair and sat down at
our table with us and sat and
talked with us for a few minutes.
The friend didn't say anything, he just listened.
But she was really friendly and nice
and Gary asked if she would sign his journal,
and she wrote a paragraph in his travel journal and
signed it and after
three or four minutes then they got up and left.
But that picture is special to me not
just because we had this weird experience.
We met Joan Rivers and we're in
India after going to the Taj Mahal,
but that evening we came and had
dinner and Gary ordered a really nice bottle of wine.
I told him before the trip to
India that I'd fallen in love with him.
And he was caught off
guard in surprise when I said that and he told me,
I don't know what to think.
I wasn't expecting you to tell me that.
And he said, I need to think about this.
I said, okay. And I hadn't said anything else.
So we're having dinner and we
had a good bottle of wine and over dinner,
he said, I've been
thinking a lot and I love you
too and I want us to be a couple.
So you couldn't get married in those days and I consider
that picture to be the day that we got married.
And we came back from our trip to
India and got rings and exchange rings.
>> So can you talk about Gary's job,
and you've already talked about
some of the travel involved with
it and how that affected your relationship?
>> When he started in the travel nurse,
I mentioned the trip to Ukraine.
Gary loved traveling.
Before I knew him, he had been on a trip to
Ireland and loved Ireland and loved Irish people.
And he found that in Ireland,
like here you go to somebody's house and they
might turn the television
on and you sit and watch television together.
In Ireland, you'd go and have tea or a beer and
talk and people didn't ever sit
down in a room and turn on a television together.
And he felt people connected with each other
more and he also felt like when he was traveling,
not only was he getting to see and experience
in these places and meet people,
but he felt he was more open to
new experiences traveling and he loved that.
So one of the reasons he became
a travel nurse was a chance to travel.
And he had hoped to have for some time
a long-term assignment where
he could go live in another country,
not as a tourist but live the way the people did,
local housing, food, make friends,
and get to experience another culture and learn
the language as a person
living there and not as a tourist.
And he'd been looking for a long-term assignment for
quite a while and hadn't found any opportunities,
just these little short-term assignments.
He had the short-term assignment in the Ukraine and
that assignment that he was on
there was after the Soviet Union had broken up,
and what the Defense Department contract
was that was going on there.
There was a treaty that was signed between
Russia, Ukraine, United States,
I think maybe European countries
where Ukraine agreed to give up the nuclear weapons they
had on their soil left from the Soviet Union
days in return for guarantees that
their territorial integrity would be protected and
Ukraine they would need them for defense.
Of course, what's going on recently,
and we know that that's maybe not entirely true,
but Gary was this short-term assignment
he got filling in for another nurse was providing
medical care for the American employees who were there
both observing and helping
the Ukrainians dismantle their nuclear weapons.
He told me a story about
one day one of the Ukrainian military officers saying,
have you seen the nuclear warheads?
And he said, no, and he said, let me show you.
And they took him down into this door and unlocked and
went down underground into
this bunker and there were catwalks,
metal catwalks, and down beneath them was
rows and rows of nuclear weapons on the ground,
nuclear warheads that had been taken off the missiles.
They were waiting there for them to be shipped out of
the country and destroyed under
the trees with the US and European Union.
And so that assignment
got him on the radar of
Raytheon and the Defense Department.
And we were living
together and we came back from media and
exchanged rings and he's working at the Grady he'd gone
back and worked as a contract nurse at Grady at
the Trauma Center and wasn't their employee,
but as a contractor and let him free that he could
still maybe get travel assignments as they came up,
but he accepted that
he wasn't going to get a long term assignment.
And then here comes this offer for
a long-term assignment to go work for a minimum of
a year with each of the defensive threat reduction agency
on in Vodkins Russia and again,
when the Soviet Union fell apart
the weapons that they had in Russia,
we were really worried about
them being able to protect their weapons.
And because the Soviet Union when it fell apart,
was broke, and they didn't even
have money to pay their soldiers.
In some cases, the soldiers that worked at
their nuclear facilities weren't being paid.
And I think our government was really
concerned that something
was going to happen those weapons.
And then there was also
provisions in the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty,
the SAT Treaty that was signed under Reagan.
Both to monitor nuclear weapons,
new ones that were being made,
and to destroy some older ones
to reduce the size of both of our country's arsenals.
Russia agreed that they would uphold
their treaty obligations that
had been entered into by the Soviet Union,
and we agreed to help pay for that and
help run their portion of some of
the treaty obligations in return for the upholding those
and also letting us
monitor to be sure that
the weapons were protected properly.
So there's two portions
of that treaty that were going on in Russia,
one in a place called
[inaudible] that was close
about 30 minutes away from
[inaudible] and then the one in [inaudible].
The just was what was called the portal monitoring site,
and that's where we had nuclear monitors that
monitored new nuclear weapons
that were being made by the Russians,
new missiles to be sure they're in treaty compliance.
The Russians had a similar portal
monitoring site that was in Utah,
where they monitored our weapons.
Then at the site and that was a super secure site.
The people that lived there lived inside a wall of
advanced military compound and all their food
was flown in from the United States forum.
Anytime they left the site,
they had to leave with armed bodyguards,
and every everything is really tightly controlled.
The site where Gary was in Vokins was the site where
they're supposed to a Mark and
dismantle the older nuclear weapons.
And that site didn't exist yet.
It was being built.
Raytheon had the contract with
the defense department to build it.
And they don't have good medical care there.
So part of the contract was to have
nurses to provide medical care for employees.
So his job was
he was supposed to be in the clinic manager and he was
a certified emergency nurse certified
trauma nurse and if somebody was sick,
he could take care of them, if they got hurt,
he could take care of them or make
a decision where they need to be
metab out somewhere else.
And they were building a facility
there where they would take the older nuclear missiles,
so he would remove the warheads from the casings,
cut up the missile casings,
burn off the rocket engines,
and then and destroy the older nuclear materials.
So that was under construction
and he got this offer to go there.
He didn't he said I can't go.
Now, we just exchanged rings and became a couple
and I don't know what I'd do if
I wasn't here with you and I told him he should go.
I knew him really well and I knew,
how much he wanted to
go live in another culture and I said,
you don't do this.
You've been wanting to do this for years,
and you haven't found an opportunity
now you have one if you don't do it,
you're going to regret it. And so he went.
And he was over there
working they were building this facility
and we would talk
on the phone with each other every Sunday.
He had to get a background check
the FBI did a background check on him and everything.
Where he worked wasn't as secure as the EJ site.
He could come and go and meet local people
and travel around Russia if he wanted to.
But, they didn't ever
tell him they didn't give him any training,
which they later on figured out they should have done on
what to do if there, security issues,
what to do if approached by the Russians,
like the FSB or the Russian police or do anything.
But we knew, even though they had given
this training and it was
talking about the people who worked
there that the FSB monitored the employees.
And we knew that listen to our phone calls.
We were talking on the phone every Sunday.
And the phone calls,
you were talking on the phone
and at 28 minutes and 30 seconds,
the line would go dead always happened almost
always and it happened when
other people were talking with each other
from the site there other employees
that were talking to somebody off-site.
And the running joke among
the American employees there was that the FSB
used 30-minute cassettes that they would cut off
the phone call so that you wouldn't talk,
couldn't talk, so they wouldn't miss
anything while they flipped their tape over.
And there were a couple of
times we had conversations where nothing
happened at 28 minutes and 30 seconds and we
knew that they probably weren't listening that day,
but that didn't happen very often.
So I wondered off what your original question was.
So that was his job there.
They had interpreters that worked with them
because Gary didn't speak
Russian and the other American employees.
They had one American employee spoke
Russian and English and he was the logistics manager.
And at some point,
the Russians for some reason got mad at him,
they didn't like him and they demanded that the Americans
remove him and send him back to the United States,
and they gave him like 72 hours to
get him out of Russia or they
said they were going to arrest him.
And they thought he was up
to no good or something. I don't know.
What was going on, but I always said they didn't
have a logistics manager and Gary began
doing temporarily in addition
to being the clinic manager,
which there wasn't that much demand because there
was only eight employees.
They weren't getting sick every day
and having accidents every day.
He actually helped take care of
some local Russian people that got
hurt and the local doctors
didn't know what to do with them and stuff.
He treated a person with
an anthrax infection on their skin while he was there.
Had to look up online to figure out
what it was the person had,
but he began doing the logistics as well,
which as they got their offices, the building built,
he was helping order and bring in supplies
and coordinate shipments and
occasionally there would be people from
the defense department or Raytheon that come to
survey the site and check on progress and
sometimes military personnel generals
from the United States,
and he'd have to arrange,
local places for him to stay in food and dinners,
they'd always have big dinners.
Remember one time he had pizzas flown in
from Moscow and the generals told him, this is logistics.
He got pizza in the middle of nowhere.
Which really was in the middle nowhere
Sabotkins was over a million people there,
but it had been back in the Soviet days,
one of the secret cities that didn't
show on maps or anything.
The factory, they're called
[inaudible] is an arms manufacturer.
And they made I think I
factored SS 22 nuclear missiles there
and as well as small arms
and some other types of non-nuclear missiles and stuff.
In addition to, I think,
pressure cookers and pots and pans.
It's kind about the strange place.
So that was that was what his job was there,
what he was doing and he was there
for a year and decided he wanted to stay longer,
and I said he'd been there two years
at a point where some things
happened that changed everything.
And I can just go ahead and tell you the rest.
So when Botkins is
on the West side of the Mountains from Siberia.
It's cold during the winter months,
they have 3.5 hours in daylight,
the cold in the longest winter days and it was
a miserable place to be in the wintertime.
But he made friends there.
There was a Russian high school teacher name is
[inaudible] taught English in high school,
and she found out that
she knew that there were some
American people working there.
Apparently, everybody in town knew about
these eight American people who were there.
>> And she contacted Met Gary and asked if he
would come speak at the high schools and
native speakers so they could hear
a native speakers speaking in English.
And Gary's mother had been a teacher
and he'd always thought it would be need to be a teacher.
And he enjoyed the experience
and he talked with the lawyer afterwards and said,
could I do a reading group with the kids where we read
English books together and talk about them
in English to help them with their English.
And he made friends with some of
the Russian high school kids that
way and got to know some of their families.
Because their place was miserably,
cold and awful in
the wintertime and Americans assumed that people wouldn't
be making friends with Russians
that they wouldn't be able to
communicate with them and that they want to leave.
They got two weeks vacation every three months plus
$1,500 allowance to buy
an airline ticket to leave and go somewhere.
We would meet somewhere.
I didn't have enough vacation and money that I
could fly somewhere every three months.
But twice a year while he was there,
we would go meet somewhere and have a vacation.
We spent some time in Scandinavia together.
We spent Christmas one year in London.
We went to Vietnam and
Thailand together and had some great trips.
Then he went on some trips on his own
and saw other parts of Europe and whatever.
But after he started doing
these reading groups like
the Christmas rear of me in London,
he contacted me a month before.
I knew about the reading groups
were talking every Sunday.
He said, John, I need you to bring 30 copies of
the new Harry Potter book with you to London.
That's what the kids and I are going to read next.
So I had an extra suitcase full of
paperback Harry Potter books.
And he had made these friends.
We had some code between us.
Again, he hadn't had any training,
but they knew the FSP watched him.
They knew that they came
in and he would look at his apartment when he
wasn't there and stuff
and they knew that they listened to the phone calls.
And there was a employee in
there who ran their their computers for him.
The IT guy was a local Russian guy named
Serge Nirkov and he
and Big kind of became friends over time.
And Serge one day said,
let's go for a walk.
And they went for a walk and
walked outside the city into the woods.
And Serge said,
"I give information to the FSB."
Gary said, you work for the FSB he said,
no, I don't work for them.
Said I got this job and they came to me and they said,
you have to tell us what the Americans,
the people are doing and we want to meet with you
regularly to know what's
going on there in the office
and you work on their computers.
We want you to get stuff from their computers for us.
And he said,
you don't say no to the FSB, I have to do it.
And he said I meet with them weekly for lunch.
So you should be careful and never say
anything around me that you don't want
the FSB to know because I can't lie to them.
And when we were in London,
Gary told me this.
That's not something we talked about in the phone,
and we had some code and things.
And one of the code things
was my friends took me to lunch.
That meant that you had contact with the FSB.
And so on one of his vacation times,
the emergency nursing certification,
advanced cardiac life support certification,
you have to renew those periodically.
His were coming due where they need to be renewed.
So he found a class in New York,
that he could go take and get recertified.
And he was going to take his two weeks, go to New York.
It's been a week doing these classes,
redo his certifications,
and then I was going to come meet the second week
and we were going to do stuff in New York.
We used to do the Delta weekend there things.
You'd get a special deal where you could fly
round trip on short notice
to New York from Atlanta for 130 bucks or something.
And we'd fly in and stay at the Y that's close to
the Met and go get standing room tickets
at the Met and go to Roadway Show.
And New York seemed like
a great place to be and so we have this trip planned.
And I was at work
working and he called and he was crying on the phone.
I thought that he was
on his way to New York for the certification.
And he told me he was on
a plane and he waited to make the call using
the air phone on the plane after
they left the ground in Moscow.
And he was crying.
And he said, John, my friends took me to lunch today.
He said I need you to come [NOISE] to
New York now, not next week.
And I knew that the FSB had done something to him.
So I told my work,
I needed emergency time off,
and I got a ticket and flew to New York.
He got there a day ahead of me.
I checked in at a hotel at W Tuscany Hotel.
I remember a nice place.
So I got there and I got there and he was a basket case.
He was crying and upset.
He was alternately depressed and having panic attacks.
And he told me the Russia the FSB
had picked him up in the airport in Moscow,
he'd got the airport early,
probably the people who
arranged transportation for him and had
been told to arrange to make getting there early.
They had taken him.
They picked him up in a place where he was
checking in with his passport and immigration.
They said just a moment and these men came and they said,
"We need to talk to you Mr.
Thacker. " Name was Gary Thacker.
And they took him to a room
somewhere and there was FSB agent.
And they said that,
where are you going and he told them that,
he's going to get to New York to get
his nursing certification renewed and,
where do you work and he told them,
which they hardly knew.
And then they put these pictures in front of him.
And there were pictures of him naked with teenage boys,
naked sitting next to him in Asana.
Now, that sounds really awful.
The Russians have these things called banya where they go
sit in the steam mass and everybody does it.
Even the poor families have got
little bans out in
the countryside in their vegetable garden,
they'll have a little wooden building.
They go heat up rocks and put
steam water over and make steam and stuff.
When I was in Ukraine, we went to
the steam bass in Ukraine in Kiev.
The Russians don't feel like
they're clean until they've been in
Asana and sweat just taking a shower by itself.
There was a community center in
Botkins that the local people could go.
It had a swimming pool,
it had weights and exercise rooms,
and it had saunas or banyas,
men's one and a woman's one.
Gary had started going there and
using the community center, swimming and exercising,
and some of the kids from
the reading group would be there
sometimes and they would see him and come
talk to him and they'd be in this sauna,
which could have 30 people in it.
They'd be sitting talking with them and apparently,
the FSB had put
cameras hidden them in there and had been taking
pictures when they were in there and they
cropped the other people that are out so
you don't know that well they're in
a sauna with 30 other people adults.
And they put these pictures in front
of him and said who are these boys?
Who is this boy? And what
are you doing in these pictures?
And he said, Well, what's the banya at
the community center at Opkins.
And they said, we're going to show these pictures to
your employers and tell them that you're
a child molester unless you do what we tell you to do.
Later on the Defense Department
security guys I talked to,
they wanted to turn him.
They wanted to get him to be
a spy for them against the United States.
And it's crazy because
he didn't have any secret knowledge.
What they wanted from him was
they wanted to know who were the employee.
What the employees other habits were?
What were those in their medical files?
Who had medical problems?
Who was dating local people?
Did any of the of them have drinking problems?
They wanted to use him to get information they could use
to blackmail other people who had secret information.
And they showed him
these pictures and he said,
"Go ahead and show them to him."
He said the other people have been at the banyas too.
And even when people come visit for our company,
the local people take them,
they go out for dinner and
then they take them to the banya.
They know what the banya.
Showing it to them. I don't care.
And I guess the FSB must have thought of people.
And It used to be,
they wouldn't let gay people work in
security services because they thought they'd be
ashamed and they'd be easy to blackmail.
And I think the FSB must still thought that was the case.
Gary didn't care. One of
the kids in the pictures was a boy named Daniel.
And Gary had gotten
to meet Daniel and introduced him to his family,
and they had taken him out to
their little banya outside
in the countryside, the vegetable garden.
And he had traveled with them on a weekend a couple of
times and gotten to know
the whole family and the children.
And when he said,
go ahead and show him the pictures,
they said, who is this boy?
And he said, well,
this Daniel and I can't say his last name,
something I've it written down.
And they said, you spend time with him and his family?
And what's your relationship?
He said, Well I become friends with them.
I like them, and they're very nice people.
They said, " What would you think if something bad
were to happen to them?" And they threatened him.
And this is hours of
talking and interrogation is going on
and went on for four or five hours.
So he said, what is it you want me to do?
And they said, we want you to cooperate with us.
We want you to meet us once
a week and we'll ask you questions and we'll
ask you information and we want you to
cooperate and tell us what we want to know.
And he said, okay, I'll do what you want to do.
And they gave him a pad of paper and
a pen and had him write out in long hand,
I will cooperate with the FSB and signed and dated.
And they took it. Then they said,
go on back to your trip.
Your flight is leaving in an hour.
You're going on with your trip just like you had planned.
And when you get back from your trip, we want you,
the second weekend when you're back
to go to EGS for lunch,
and we'll meet you at EGS to talk.
And you can't tell anybody what we've talked about,
we'll be watching you
including in New York.
So when I get to New York to the hotel,
it was late afternoon
and he like I said, he's just a basket,
he was crying and his family had had depression,
his father, his mother,
he told me about some depression and
once when he even a
suicide attempt when he'd been a teenager.
He was beat up by
other kids in high school because he was gay.
And that was what
triggered the suicide attempt in the things.
But but he wasn't depressed when I knew it.
He wasn't having problems with that.
But whenever this contact with the FSB
had just scared the heck out of him and
he was just having an emotional meltdown.
And he was alternately
panicked and scared that there was somebody
who was going to kill him and so I tried to
calm him down and we stayed in the
in the room and at some point he started talking about,
I shouldn't have told you to come here.
They're watching us.
They'll know you're here.
Now you're in danger.
I shouldn't have told you to come here,
and he was worried
they're going to do something to both of us.
And we eventually went
to sleep in the middle of the night,
I heard something woke up and he was
opened the window and was going to
jump out of the window at the hotel.
I stopped him and pulled up
my chair to the window and sat there
awake the rest of the night and we got on a plane in
the morning and came back to Atlanta.
For my days working with the ACLU,
their attorneys that I knew had contact with the FBI,
and I talked with one of them
and he called people he knew at
the FBI and told them what had happened
and arranged a meeting with the FBI.
I told Gary, we've tell the FBI about this.
So then we went for a meeting.
And he felt safer and
calmed down some when we were back in Atlanta,
but he was still depressed and
this triggered some depression
that I had not seen before.
He was really, really
depressed and still having these panic attacks.
And he felt safer in Atlanta and was a little bit better.
And the FBI said,
don't come to our offices,
they watch our offices.
We don't want to meet you here.
And that scared him because he thought,
there may be they're watching me here too.
And they had us go
to the old Sonoco building downtown Atlanta.
And go up to a floor that was sheet rock walls
with a tape that hadn't been painted yet
and stuff and metal and tools laying around.
It looked like a construction site,
where they're building out of space.
Didn't look like there's anybody there.
We go up to this floor and are we in the right place?
And then here comes this guy out
from around behind the wall.
And he said, you know, Mr. Thacker,
and he showed his FBI credentials.
He said, we're going to go,
we're going to talk here and they
opened this door and there's a conference room,
video cameras and recording equipment.
And they said to me,
you can't be here during the call.
During this debriefing, you'll need to wait downstairs.
So I waited downstairs, when they debriefed him.
And during the debriefing,
he told me afterwards,
they wanted him to
go ahead and pretend to cooperate with the FSB.
They wanted him to go back to Russia
and just keep working and to meet with the FSB,
and they wanted to use him to pass
misinformation to the Russians.
Which he said no [LAUGHTER] because he was terrified.
He was scared to go back to Russia.
But he literally he'd had to leave all his belongings.
He'd walked away from the friends,
the people made his job.
The FBI asked him
not to tell his employer what happening.
He just told his employer he was sick and couldn't go
back to Russia and then he was really sick.
And they were wondering what in the role is going on
and event when he told them, I can't go back there.
I'm too scared, I can't do that.
They said, okay, well, give us some time
to to look into this
and we have to do background checks on both of you
and just to be sure what's going on here.
And don't tell your employer,
continue to tell him you're sick,
let us talk to them. Let us handle that.
So about two weeks passed and he
continued to be depressed and panic attacks.
We went to a, I found
a psychologist therapist and
he started going to the therapist and got
some medication and he was going to therapy sessions.
But they eventually told his employer and
the employer called and they said,
we'd heard that they tried to turn somebody.
We didn't know it was you.
And what I'll tell you about this is,
it turns out we both had talked with
the FBI and there was
Defense Department Security people
that came and talked to him.
They told us that the SALT
treaty the Strategic Arms Limitation treaty
had closet countries know they spy
against each other because decreasing
nuclear weapons required that the countries
trust each other in a way they hadn't before,
it was written into the treaty that they would not try
to compromise the people,
the employees of each
other countries who were working in a treaty,
that they were off-limits,
that they couldn't they couldn't be
targeted by their spies that they
couldn't approach them and
try to do what they've done to Gary.
And what they had done was the biggest violation
of the treaty between the United States and Russia
that had occurred since the Soviet Union collapsed.
And that the State Department was preparing a D Marsh.
I didn't even know what that was.
I had to ask and it's a formal diplomatic demand.
They were preparing a D Marsh to give to the Russians to
demand that they explain what they
were doing and to stop this stuff.
And I asked
later on about it if they
delivered to D Marsh and I said,
we can't tell you anymore about it.
That's a secret and it's up to
the Secretary of State at this point.
But they apparently they made
this formal diplomatic demand because it was
such a bad treaty violation that they had done this.
And Gary, the Raytheon tried to take care of him.
They said well, once they
found out what all had happened and they
offered him a job to be a nurse down
at the research station in Antarctica,
had an opening and he was
still having panic attacks and depressed.
Sometimes I would go home
from work and he would just be curled
up on the ball on the sofa.
And it went on and
he eventually arranged the Raytheon
packed up his belongings.
And Sergei Nikov that he'd become friends
with who talked to the FSB,
but an FSB agent,
volunteered to fly to Atlanta and bring his things.
So he checked all his trunks and stuff,
his luggage and he brought the stuff.
And that was Labor Day weekend in 2002,
the Gary was happy to see Sergei,
he's happy to get his things back
and he went through his things and he picked out
some things to give his gifts and asked
Sergei put tags on him,
you give this to Daniel and give this
to his mother and give this to,
you know, different people and settled things.
And he had started working again
just two weeks before as a nurse.
He had started being a little less
depressed and I thought things were getting better.
And I've told him
previous questions about doing
my work on suicide prevention hotline.
This had gone on for about three months at this point.
These panic attacks and depression
and he was he was non functional.
And I was terrified,
worried about him and I knew he tried
to kill himself when we were in New York.
And he had started saying things at
one point that he was a burden to me and I'd
be better off without him and I
was really worried about him being suicidal.
When he seemed to be getting better,
I was relieved but I
was worn down for
three months of worrying
about him and taking care of him.
And I didn't recognize one of
the things it's a warning sign when you have somebody
that's suicidal and they're
upset and they're they're volatile emotionally.
They suddenly become calm and that changes.
Sometimes that's a warning sign
because it means they've made
a decision and they are calm
by that they've made a decision and they're not worrying,
there's no more anxiety about what's going to happen.
Because they made a decision what they're going to do,
and they're going to kill themselves.
And I think that
may have been what happened with him, but he got
his things back and sent
made arrangements for the things to go back
to be given
to people that he had gotten close to in Russia,
with Sergei, and he
wanted to thank Sergei for bringing his things back
and we went and took a little tour up
around he showed him around
Atlanta and then we went
Labor Day weekend and went up the mountains.
We went whitewater rafting on
the koi went hiking up in near some waterfalls.
So it would have been Sunday night
We've gotten back and I was
asleep and Sergei came and woke me up and he said,
"John, John come fast."
It was maybe two or three o'clock in the morning.
Sergei had gotten up to go to
the bathroom and the television was
on, and he didn't
see Gary anywhere and he didn't know where he was.
And he started walking around
the apartment or condo and he found him.
He had hung himself in our laundry room.
So he woke me up and Sergei
was in a panic attack and I went in and I saw
him hanging and grabbed a kitchen knife and
cutting him down and I could tell he
was already dead and
called the police and the police came and
the coroner came and I
told them that we've had some things going on
with the FBI and gave him the agents names,
the counter espionage agents
have been doing the debriefing
and told the police to contact
them and tell them what happened and
the FBI agents came by the next day.
I talked with them and told them, "Look,
Sergei is the guy from his office,
Sergei is here in the house and
Sergei brought his things back.
Sergei is the guy in
his office that had to meet weekly with the FSB,
and I don't think Sergei did anything to Gary
but please make sure."
And then they said they wouldn't.
I wasn't considered family under Georgia law.
The coroner was not allowed to talk to me,
the medical examiner or coroner
or whatever it's called in Atlanta.
The FBI talked to them and said,
after you get your results,
we want you to talk to John and answer
any questions he has and give him
any information he asked for.
And they arranged for me to have a call afterwards with
the coroner to talk about what their findings were,
and they said that he had told
himself that nobody else had done anything to him,
and they explained even in detail why they knew that.
Apparently, with people hanging
themselves or somebody else hanging,
you would be grabbing at the rope and
trying to get it off and you scratch
yourself and have skin under
your finger nails and he didn't have any of that.
The FBI told me,
they said they've never harmed someone on our soil,
and we don't think he did anything to him,
but they wanted to talk to him,
and Sergei said, "I can't talk to you.
When I go home, the FSB is going to
ask me questions and if I talked with you,
I'm going to be in trouble.
I have to tell them did you ask me to talk to you."
And in Sergei,
I think it was pretty traumatic experience for him too.
I don't think he did anything
here and I think he was a good guy
actually just living in a crummy country.
But Sergei went on home after that.
And so that was the end of our relationship.
Gary's father was really
happy when the two of us had gotten
together and that we were
so close and while Gary was in Russia,
he and his father and I would meet and have
lunch together about monthly, same as Rod.
Going back up a minute and get off
topic, but my own father,
I told you earlier,
we didn't talk for years.
My own father,
the last time we did
talk before we could talk to each other,
we talked on the phone and he
was quoting me Bible verses and telling me he
couldn't have a relationship with me
and talk for a long time on the phone,
an hour, hour and a half.
At some point, I said to him, "Well, Dad,
it sounds like this may be
the last time we talk in his life together."
He said, "Well, yeah,
and we won't be talking in the next one
because you're going to be burning in hell."
That was the last thing he ever said to me before he
broke off and we didn't talk for years.
That was traumatic.
It had been nice getting to know
Gary's father and he had told me he actually said,
"I love you, John.
You're part of our family."
And he knew Gary. Gary the depression,
which I think is what the Russians did triggered it,
I don't think they caused it exactly.
Although he's still terrified of them.
But his father had pretty severe depression problems.
And at one point,
when I was trying to take care of him but I
had to go to work and he was doing so badly,
and he would talk to me about being suicidal, he said,
"I think I'm going to go stay with my dad for
a while so I'm around somebody all day long."
And he called his dad and asked him,
he said, "I want to come stay with you."
His dad already knew what had happened.
And he knew that I was taking care of him.
He said, I'm going to come stay with you
for a couple of weeks until
things calm down and
I get a little better and his dad said,
"No, I don't want you in the house.
I've got enough to deal with myself.
I can't take care of you."
But when Gary died,
his dad came to see me.
He said, "John,
you decide what the funeral should be,
he was your partner and Gary loved you."
And we went together the funeral home and made
funeral arrangements and we had
the funeral and two days after the funeral,
Gary was getting paid very well to work in Russia.
They paid for his Fridays housing.
They gave him a food allowance.
They gave him this $1,500 every three
months to go somewhere else and travel.
So almost all the money he was
making was going into a bank account,
and they paid him three times what he got paid to do
work as [inaudible] at Grady Hospital.
And he saved a bunch
of money and three days after funeral.
I kind of Rod got to
be sort of a substitute father a little
bit and it was
nice having this nice relationship with him.
Three days after the funeral,
he called me up and he said, "John,
I've been talking to my accountant and he's
explained how things work to me
and this isn't going to be you anymore.
It's not going to be you and me.
He says, "I'll take care of
this date and everything from now on.
I don't want to talk to you anymore.
Goodbye." So I was like all over you and my own dad,
it was just a really powerful experience.
And I talked with a Friday and I guess he found out,
this money and things I have no obligation to
share it with John and I can just keep it for myself.
Apparently, at that point,
I wasn't beloved partner of his son anymore.
I talked with a friend that was an attorney and said,
"What do I do about this?"
He said, "Well, Gary didn't have
a will and those things go to his father,
there's really not much you can do about it."
The particular friend I talked to did a lot of
wills and estates with gay couples.
And he said, "I'm just going to be blunt, John."
He said, "This happens a lot."
He said families that will tell
their gay sons partner how much they
love them and they treat them nice and
they include him in things when they're alive.
And he said once once
their gay son is dead, everything changes.
He said this works out this way most of the time.
The whole thing was
an awful experience the way things ended,
and I still miss Gary a lot to this day.
I think about him a lot.
But since that time,
Sergei contacted me a couple of years later
and talked and he
would see me online sometimes and chat online,
and at some point,
he contacted me and said he was
going to come to the United States on a vacation and
he wanted to stop by and
spend a couple of days with me and get
some closure and stuff that happened and visit
with me and he came and
visited and stayed with me for a couple of days.
And after he left,
the FBI called and said,
"Can we have lunch with you?"
We're going to have lunch.
"We want to talk about Sergei,
what he did while he was there and who he's visiting,
why he is here and what's going on."
And I've had meetings with the FBI two or three
times since Gary died to talk about
Sergei after contact with
him or he came to visit with me.
They didn't get Gary to go back and
pretend to cooperate with
the FSB and pass misinformation,
but they knew that Sergei
worked in the office and that he met
weekly with the FSB and that he was
in the IT systems Raytheon.
And I don't know who arranged what,
and nobody ever told me this is what happened,
but I think that they used Sergei for that instead.
Sergei got promoted and he works in
the main headquarters office at the DTRA,
Defensive Threat Reduction Agency
American Defense Department in Moscow,
that's overall of our defense department operations
in Russia
and he's their IT computer person
and you can get into their computers.
So I think that they use him
to plant information and put there
what they want him to pass on to people.
Whenever I've had contact with him,
they want to know whatever he has had to say to me,
which that hasn't happened for about three years now,
so maybe that's done with.
So I have a collection of buttons,
I've always like buttons
and this is not my whole collection,
but some of them and I just wanted
to point out some of them and talk about what they are.
So one of them appears at
the top is the campaign 92 AIDS,
voters of your life depending on it.
During 92, 93 and before
that the AIDS crisis was at its peak and people were
dying and when Bill Clinton was going to run
for president and he said things,
he was very gay-friendly and there was
a really big push to
register voters in the gay and Lesbian community,
had to get out to vote and to support
Clinton because we thought here's
somebody who's going to make a difference
and not just be friendly with her gays but
help with policies to
research and combat AIDS and voters if you're
like to not merely meant that to us
is we need to get Clinton
in office because our friends are dying.
And so was that one.
This is Minnesota lesbians and gays for Clinton Gore.
When I was at the Democratic National Convention 92,
one of the things you do with the Convention
is you trade buttons with each other,
you swap and so I got that from the Minnesota delegation.
I was at Open Gay Eliot
there and there were others and we had
a pretty good sized group of
people there are over 100 of
us in the gay lesbian Caucus.
This is the march in Washington for Gay Rights from 1987.
David and I went to the gay rights to that march,
we went with a group of friends.
We flew in and stayed at a hotel out on
the metro line and went to the march.
And I can remember probably
the most feeling of pure exhilaration,
the gay prides here were small at that point and
wasn't anywhere that I went where the
gay pride you saw 50 of us,
on a on a good gay pride.
But most of the time, you didn't see that many people,
I can remember getting out of the metro station and
walking up the hill toward the Washington monument.
And we got up to the top of the hill
and we look around and there's
hundreds of thousands of people and just at the time,
just sit shivers down my spine.
It was wonderful to be at that march.
That was a good experience.
And it was wonderful
seeing I think we came back from that energize.
We knew how many of us there were and how
many of us we were working for gay rights,
and we came back reenergized to work even harder.
Lift the ban is from 90,
probably 93 after Clinton was elected and
they passed through Congress,
the Dona's Dotel policy for military.
This was a button for Lift the ban on
gay serving the military.
This button is Elect Dick Rhodes.
Dick was a member of Friends of Atlanta,
one of the first gay guys I got to know in
Atlanta when I came out
and I got involved with Friends, Atlanta.
He'd been president of Friends and he
was active in politics.
He was a delegate at
the 1988 Democratic Convention and he
was to some extent my political mentor.
I looked at what he was
doing and the things he was doing and
did some of the same things and he
decided to run for office,
Georgia House seat 46.
And so that's a button in the year that he ran.
We went out and campaign for him and unfortunately,
he did not get elected,
but the guy that got elected in his place,
his name was Doug Teper turned out to
be a pretty good guy.
Doug got famous for
when the politicians in the state were all
trying to jump over each other
to see who could pass the strongest hard on crime bills.
And they were wanting to pass
all these mandatory sentences
that were just getting draconian and Rupert Doug got
up on the house floor
and made a speech where he wanted to have
public guillotine for people who
committed crimes and he was fun.
So even though Dick lost in the primary,
we all ended up helping Doug Teper afterwards.
We'll decide November 3, Naral.
This is April 5, 1992,
and November 3, of course,
was the election day for the election that year.
Naral was the National Abortion Rights action league.
There's a number of buttons here that deal with
abortion and freedom of choice.
And there was really strong affinity between
the freedom of choice
and women's rights movement and gay lesbian movement.
There were straight women
who were part of the women's rights movements,
who were some of the only straight people
in the early days of age where
people were 98 who would come
and support their gay male friends.
So we work, we support each other,
I support gay lesbian rights.
That's a militant looking move with the fist there,
I was talking about it being non violent,
but it has a little peak triangle signals in it.
This one is reproductive freedom
for all women that
goes along with what I was talking
about the Naral button.
Stonewall 20, Twin Cities lesbian and gay,
and that was for the 1989 price celebration in Minnesota.
And I think I got that button at
the 1988 Democratic Convention, demonstrating outside,
there were delegates to the,
they weren't open gay delegates,
but there was a small gay lesbian caucus at
the 1988 Democratic Convention
and I was talking about the people swapping buttons.
And they also had
made these buttons and they were trying to get
people to come from other cities for
their gay pride for the 20th anniversary,
and they had these buttons already made up a year in
advance and we're giving them out to people.
Lesbian and gay caucus
member Democratic National Convention.
I was a member of the Caucus
as Open gay member open delegate 92.
So that was our caucus button.
It's a really big button.
The board Operation Rescue dealing with,
again, the reproductive rights and freedom of choice.
Operation rescue got to be
a real difficult anti abortion group.
They were difficult because they were militant,
they were assaulting people outside of clinics.
I was involved in supporting pre choice
partly because of the affinity
between the gay and lesbian activist movement.
Also had been a clinic monitor
as part of the efforts from the ACLU where when
they abortion operation rescue started
getting physically violent or
people and some people had gotten hurt.
Part of our strategy in dealing with that,
the ACLU was to have
civil liberties monitors go
outside claims when they knew there
would be demonstrations and we'd have
a thing you hang around your neck that
said civil liberties monitor and we
had a tape recorder and a camera,
and we would announce to
everybody that we were there to protect
free speech rights and be sure that
everybody had their free speech and that we were
recording and there weren't
any assaults that happened when when we were doing that.
The people were all nicer to each other.
Fight AIDS, not people with AIDS.
That's self explanatory. It's a good button.
Legal was a group in Atlanta, was it?
Legislative equality for gays and lesbians with
the Lambda signals there taking rightful place.
It was a early organization
after 98 1988 Democratic Convention.
Dick Rhodes was one of
the people that I think helped start
that group and it was a group of politics.
People politics is always a small group of people.
Most people don't like politics,
but it was a small group of us,
maybe a dozen people within the gay community.
Who were interested in
the political process and using it to
get rights and we formed
this group that lasted for two or three years.
This is a Keith Herring button for National
coming out day and Keith Herring, of course,
died of AIDS famous artists
from that time period and the National coming out
day was really important with
all the activism that we did, Okay.
I think that the single most powerful thing
that anybody could do then politically and still
to some extent is to come out
and be open that you're gay and let people
who know you know that you're a gay person because then
they know that they like you and you're a gay person.
And that's still one of
the most powerful ways of
changing not just things politically,
but changing hearts and minds.
Committed Pro choice Georgia delegate, a Rogan,
Maynard Jackson who worked for him and he got
him elected and he vetoed the domestic partnership.
Gay and Lesbian voters for Clinton Gore, Wham Women's.
This was Action mobilization Women's Health.
Heart String As Memorial Quilt
and I haven't mentioned this to you,
but my brother, Gay also,
he got involved and he did mostly fundraising.
He was the chair for three years of the masquerade.
I was a fundraising event for Project Open hand.
He worked on heartstrings was
a traveling show with entertainers and singers,
Dion Warwick traveled with it one year to raise
money for as research and to help people with AIDS.
And they had some tie
in where they would be in
a city doing their show to raise money.
The tickets you know,
from prices raised money for that and they'd
have the AIDS quilt on display at the same time,
they kind of traveled together one year.
My brother was the He
was the VIP coordinator for heartstrings,
he worked with the movie stars and people and stuff.
But anyway, that's for that button
when the heartstrings came through
and the quilt was here one year.
Harvey Milk School, there was
an effort I think
the first Harvey Milk school I
think it was in San Francisco,
there were kids that were
buoyed and beat up because they were gay or
lesbian in schools and there
was a Harvey Milk school created.
This button actually belonged to David.
He really liked this.
They created a high school just for gay lesbian students.
They wouldn't be bullied and beat up because
they had their own school and there wouldn't be
any gay lesbian students there and there was a I think
a few other schools like that that popped up maybe
as alternative schools in other cities.
That's nice to have people who
are bullied and beat up and
abused and didn't want to go to school,
give them a school of their own it's a nice thing.
CA is communication workers of America.
This is one of their little teeny buttons
and they gave it to me
at 92 Democratic Convention and I'm not a union person.
I worked for a telecom company that I'm
not unionized at and they don't like
the union but I wore their button because
they help they gave me a grant and
helped pay my way to go to the convention.
They were they supported
the Democrats and they were
very supportive of gay and lesbian community.
The labor movement has been good about that.
Card carrying member of the ACLU.
I've been a member of the ACLU for 30 years probably
and was president of
the Lesbian rights chapter of the ACLU of Georgia.
I've always been proud of that button and
still proud of being a member of the ACLU.
The silence equals death.
This is an act up button
and it's just the call not to be silent.
If we re silent and don't say anything, you know,
and we don't prompt we don't
by making noise and speaking up.
We don't prompt people to do more about the AIDS
epidemic that people just keep dying.
That was the slogan for act up really powerful.
They they were really good at doing
graphics and coming up with catching words.
Things act up was a brilliant organization.
I love that button too.
These things, I want to talk about
these was from the 93 march on Washington.
And each of these has a number.
This one says it's 067389, I think,
and this one is 067321,
I don't know if these were made in America,
the numbers are hard to read.
But everything is political
when you get involved in politics and numbers
are political at demonstrations.
We would have the march of Washington in 1987,
and I mentioned about coming up over the hill,
the Washington monument and seeing
the hundreds of thousands of people
and the March organizers
said we have three quarters of 1 million people here,
and the people who didn't like gays and lesbians said,
there was probably only 70,000 and we said,
there's way more than 70,000.
Look how many people filled the ball and look at
a picture of this compared to when
the march in
Washington Martin Luther King gave the speech.
You can see you can tell how compare
the crowds and there's this politics,
the effort to try to make what we did and make
our voices quieter and
less important because we didn't have as many people.
That's the whole thing in the politics and number.
We asked the park service,
what's your official count?
After the 87 March,
when I say we the march organizers
and the media and they said we don't do crowd counts.
For the march on Washington 93,
they made these old bracelets and they numbered
them there were a buck a piece
probably or something and they
tried to get everybody to buy one and they
could say how many of these sold and
each one was numbered sequentially.
They did that and they also paid
a private organization with helicopter.
You know, to fly over and take pictures and
new official crowd estimates to try to deal with
the people who try to marginalize
us and make what we make
our voices smaller by
saying that there weren't very many of us there.