1 20 43 https://history.okeq.org/files/original/0982d06f9a2f92fbf7fe2f9136d901e2.mp4 a9de7829384dba075a9196f77cfcdd6e https://history.okeq.org/files/original/ad0d0594064e8fa1c25d3be91a009043.pdf 162b575cf68ca5c82dd758b4c47c8b4e PDF Text Text Oklahomans for Equality Oral History Interview with Bob Inglish, Mike Green and Dennis Neill Interview Conducted by Kerry Lewis Date: May 5, 2003 Transcribed By: Dennis Neill using Reduct.Video, March 14, 2026 Restrictions: Interviewee requested: N/A Oklahomans for Equality History Project 621 E. 4th Street Tulsa, OK. 74120 918.743.4297 historyproject@okeq.org 1 �Discover the early days of Tulsa's LGBTQ+ activism through the personal stories of key founders. This episode explores how the community built a social, legal, and health infrastructure amidst societal resistance and growing awareness of HIV/AIDS. Main Topics Covered:         Origins of TOHR and OHR in Tulsa (1980s) Community challenges and societal attitudes Formation of advocacy, social, and health programs The role of gay bars and underground networks Personal experiences of coming out and safety concerns The impact of HIV/AIDS on community activism Milestones: First events, legal battles, and social acceptance Resources and support organizations then and now Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction to Tulsa's LGBTQ+ activist roots 00:34 - Personal backgrounds of Dennis, Bob, Mike 01:12 - How and when the community organized in Tulsa 02:06 - Early social hubs: Bars and clandestine meetings 03:04 - Challenges and societal perceptions in 1980s Tulsa 04:16 - Community safety and personal disclosures 05:55 - Formation of Tulsa's LGBTQ+ advocacy group 06:57 - Establishing social activities and their significance 08:14 - National awareness and influence from outside Tulsa 09:55 - The community's response to Stonewall and pride events 10:53 - Visibility and openness issues in the community 12:06 - Overcoming societal fears and the early fight for rights 13:31 - Personal safety, coming out, and legal discrimination 15:07 - Attitudes toward the LGBTQ+ community in Tulsa 16:00 - The role of community support and opposition 17:23 - The importance of social activities beyond bars 2 �18:53 - Early efforts in education and health services 19:55 - Community milestones: Growth and societal change 21:20 - Encountering hate, violence, and the bravery to stand out 23:52 - The significance of making history and feeling of impact 25:09 - Responding to societal prejudice and the evolution of acceptance 26:30 - The pioneering moments during the AIDS crisis 28:01 - Community outreach, resources, and forming alliances 29:49 - Reflections on why OHR and TOHR were critical 31:19 - The influence of legal, social, and cultural shifts 32:45 - Social programs: Sports, dances, and community events 34:27 - Responding to the AIDS epidemic: education and activism 36:44 - Community response to initial activism efforts 38:24 - Internal community conflicts and how they evolved 40:34 - The importance of social support and combating loneliness 42:14 - Fundraising events, health clinics, and advocacy work 44:40 - Building social networks and the importance of social activities 48:55 - The community's response to HIV/AIDS and health initiatives 50:04 - Early reactions to AIDS in Tulsa and community education 52:01 - How epidemic shifted community behaviors and perceptions 54:11 - Ongoing issues: Safe sex, relationships, and legal protections 56:34 - The cultural significance of marriage and family for gay Oklahomans 57:23 - The continued evolution of community activism and health issues Bob Inglish, Mike Green, Dennis Neill oral history interview May 5, 2003 Kerry Lewis: Hi, I'm Kerry Lewis. I'm with the TOHR's Gay History Project. I'm here today on May 4th interviewing Dennis Neill, Bob Inglish, and Mike Green. They are three of the original organizers of TOHR in the early years, and so we're going to begin by talking to them a little bit about who they are and then also how OHR and TOHR began. Well, good afternoon. What I'd like to do is to begin by asking you a little bit about who you are and what you do and things like that. So we'll start with you, Dennis. Dennis, if you wouldn't mind, let us know when you were born. Dennis Neill: I was born on March 18, 1952. Kerry Lewis: And that makes you? Dennis Neill: I'm 51. Kerry Lewis: You're 51 years old. And have you always been from Tulsa? Dennis Neill: I was born in Ponca City and then went to school at Stillwater and University of Texas Law School. Kerry Lewis: And then did you move to Tulsa after that? Dennis Neill: Right. Dennis Neill: About what year was that? Dennis Neill: In May of 1977, I joined the law firm of Conner and Winters. 3 �Kerry Lewis: And you are and have been single and you have no children? Dennis Neill: Well, I have a partner, but I do have no children. That's correct. Kerry Lewis: And your profession? Dennis Neill: Well, I'm a lawyer by training, but have responsibility for the technology and office assets of Samson Investment Company, an oil and gas company headquartered in Tulsa. Kerry Lewis: We'll probably go back in a minute and ask you more about what you were doing at the time, the OHR beginning, et cetera. But I'll probably just move on now to Bob. Bob, could you give me your date of birth and how old you are? Bob Inglish: 1954, 49. I grew up in Okmulgee and practiced law there out of school and still do. But I've always lived in Tulsa since getting out of school. Kerry Lewis: And Mike? Mike Green: I was born June 25, 1932. Born right here in Tulsa. And I grew up in Tulsa, graduated Central High School, went to OU, got my BA there. And then went in the Army, spent two years in the military. Married while I was in the military, met my colleague, sweetheart. And we had two children. And returned to Tulsa when I got out of the Army. Was here for about a couple of years with my brother in the oil field supply business. And then went to Waterloo, Iowa, where I worked with my father-in-law in the retail clothing business. From there I went to Tempe, Arizona, where I went to school and studied writing, creative writing. Then returned to Tulsa, once again in the oil field supply business, for about five years. Then went to night Law School and started practicing law in 1966. Retired one year ago and moved to Palm Springs with my partner. By the way, I got divorced. Kerry Lewis: My understanding from your answer is that back in, say, 1980, in that time period, you were practicing law. You were in private practice? Mike Green: In private practice. Kerry Lewis: What kind of law did you practice? Mike Green: I always say general practice. When I first started practicing law, I was one of the three Tulsa County public defenders that was appointed. I did that for a couple of years. I always did a lot of criminal work, did domestic work, personal injury work, just general practice. Kerry Lewis: And were you working at that time with a firm or individually? Mike Green: There were three of us that did form a firm, but it was back in the 70s. That was for about five years. So I think I was probably by myself at the time in the 80s. Kerry Lewis: What about you, Bob? Say, around 1979, 80, in that time period, what was your profession like at that time? Or what did you do at that time? 4 �Bob Inglish: Well, I practiced in Okmulgee, which is a town of 14,000 people. At that time, the oil boom was in full force. I did a lot of oil and gas work. I always did a lot of probate work, real estate work. And, of course, in a small town, you do a lot of things, but that was primary emphasis. Kerry Lewis: And Dennis, in 1980, what were you doing? Dennis Neill: I was a third-year associate at a firm of about 30 attorneys, and I was spending a lot of my time working with the securities partners on oil and gas and real estate securities offerings. Kerry Lewis: Do you have any recollection of when you first met, the three of you, back in the, I'm assuming, the late 70s? Do you have any recollection of how that occurred? Mike Green: I met Dennis. There were three of us that had a bar in Central Plaza. It was part-time, it wasn't our day jobs. And we did it for fun at nighttime, and Dennis was living there, and Dennis would come in and sit there and have drinks and smoke cigars every time. That's how I met Dennis. I think I met Bob, I think Bob actually lived in Center Plaza for a while. Bob Inglish: Yeah, I did, I didn't make that connection. Mike Green: And that's when we first met. Kerry Lewis: And that was well before TOHR, OHR began? Mike Green: A few years, I would say, before that, about many years before. Bob Inglish: Well, of course, I was out of law school in 79 and TOHR started when? Dennis Neill: 80. Bob Inglish: 80, yeah, yeah. I think I met Dennis, like, at Zippers, and it wasn't, you know, the next week there was supposed to be a meeting at his house to come to. That's how I remember that, so. Kerry Lewis: Do you remember when the first time the discussion came up about we need to form or have some sort of an organization like OHR? For right now, it's limited to OHR. I understand there may have been some stuff going on before that, but do you remember how that first came up? Dennis Neill: Well, I remember talking with, I think, probably both of you at Zippers one night. I definitely recall, at least visiting with you, Bob, didn't I, at Zippers, and we were talking about the concept of having an organization. And I don't know if Mike and I kind of met separate on that issue or not, but very quickly we kind of got together with the four of us that became the first officers, including Gary Durst, and very quickly started meeting in some homes and laying out some thought processes, given the stimulus that we had from the Oklahoma City organization that had formed a few years before. Bob Inglish: There were probably about 10 or 15 people at that first meeting, I remember, at Dennis' house. And of course, one thing that seemed unique then that 5 �may seem peculiar now is that it's very important to have the support of the bar owners, because that was the center of gay life. And I remember John Willis was there, and Tim was there from Tim's playroom, and whatever, and there was... Mike Green: I think Jim Smith, too. Bob Inglish: Jim Smith. Kerry Lewis: How many, just to give us today a little bit of an idea, how many bars did you estimate were around back in 1980 that were kind of gay or gay-friendly bars in Tulsa? Bob Inglish: Well, there was Zippers, there was Tim's, and then there was the, wasn't there a trio of bars downtown? Mike Green: Right, the Taj Mahal and the Zebra. Bob Inglish: Zebra, which is awful. And the Queen of Hearts. Mike Green: Yes, and then what was the other, the disco down the street from the Queen of Hearts? In fact, it was the first disco in Tulsa, and it was so popular, the straights began coming to it. Took it over? Well, yeah, we put up a good fight. So it didn't ever really become a straight bar, but in fact, one of the owners was straight, and the other two were gay. Bob Inglish: But there wasn't anything about gay life, from a congregation standpoint, except the bars. Mike Green: Right. Bob Inglish: I mean, there wasn't a supportive church, there wasn't a non-profit group, there wasn't a group of common interests. It was just, if you were gay and you wanted to see people, you went to a bar. Kerry Lewis: Were you three, at that time, aware of nationally what was going on with the gay community? Were you aware that there were some organizations outside of Tulsa and Oklahoma that did something like this, or just, what was your level of knowledge as far as what else was going on as a whole as far as the gay community at that time? Mike Green: I'm not real certain of the time period, or the time frame, I should say, but I do remember that my practice had kind of taken a turn while I was doing an awful lot of gay work, representing people, gay people in divorces, both men and women, in criminal matters and other things like that. And I remember getting contacted by Lambda and some other organizations nationwide as to the work I was doing and wanting to assist and even pay some clients fees. They couldn't afford the fees themselves. Bob Inglish: Well, you certainly could take the Advocate to keep in contact with what was going on nationally. I think several of us were well-traveled and certainly at that point in time, the Castro area in San Francisco had developed and Greenwich Village had developed, so if you traveled any, you were certainly aware that there was a lot going on in the gay movement. Certainly, I had just come from OU and there was a lot of activity as far as gay student groups getting started at the 6 �university that was well publicized and so everything was in its early stages, but there was things going on that we were aware of here in Oklahoma. Mike Green: When was Stonewall? Bob Inglish: 1969. Mike Green: I'd ask that because I remember Gary Durst was there in New York when Stonewall occurred. I remember Gary telling me that he thought it was just another night out in New York City when it happened. He had no idea what was going on. Kerry Lewis: Well, at that time, did cities tend to have big pride-type activities like pride parades and festivals? Dennis Neill: Not locally at all. I think we saw some of the flamboyant stuff probably occurring in San Francisco and New York that you see on TV, but this was certainly pre-internet, pre-email, so you looked more for these static publications rather than the wealth of resources that you can have today with regard to knowing what other community centers are doing throughout the U.S. or what's going on with the gay and lesbian movement in other locales. It was a little more difficult, but there were a couple of reliable, viable sources of information. Kerry Lewis: How out were you in your personal lives at that time when you decided to be involved with organizing OHR, the Tulsa chapter of OHR? Were you fairly open with being gay to your family and friends at that time? Dennis Neill: Well, I was with my sister, but I wasn't particularly out with my parents, although I think they were aware. I do remember approaching a new junior partner at the law firm as we were first contemplating formation of TOHR and asking him if he thought I should go to the partners meeting and explain my activities with the gay community in Tulsa. He gave me the wise thought that really that was probably the focus of the partners meeting, that maybe if it was important for civil rights issues to go ahead and pursue it, but not really a need to visit with the law firm at this stage. So that was probably the right discussion because that was in 1980 and even that firm, that would have been the first gay individual that they would have had to deal with. It was probably better for them to get it more down the road after things got informed and in a little bit better shape than probably at that point in time. Bob Inglish: I think contextually you'd have to remember that when you talk about the gay movement coming into its own, that the Castro area in San Francisco or the Greenwich Village in New York City probably started developing as a gay center in 74 or 76. So we're talking about Tulsa in 1979 and 1980. We're certainly not the Castro area and we're certainly not Greenwich Village. The movement was fairly recent and the concept of people being openly gay and out and having activities as a gay community was still pretty new in other cities other than major metropolitan areas. I would think that we might have had an exuberance about starting the organization, but you weren't aware of roadblocks at the time until you tried things. You didn't necessarily know that doors were going to be shut until you tried things. Or tried a case, Mike, I would guess. You didn't necessarily know that there might be prejudice or confrontation as you tried things. 7 �Mike Green: I think I divorced in 66 and I had two children, like I said earlier. They were born I think in 58 and 60. And I never actually came out and told my family I was gay. I never came out and told my kids I was gay. They told me and they told my ex-wife who was very, very receptive and we're still very, very close to this date. But when TOHR was being formed, by that time my practice had become I'd say at least 50-60% gay. And as far as the community, the outside community was concerned, I grew up sitting in maybe four or five gay bars. And we had the liquor problems back in those days and there were a lot of liquor busts. And they got used to when they would bust a bar and take the owners in or the bartenders in, they would expect Mike Green to show up within a few minutes to get them out. And so my name was becoming associated with gay issues. And I realized too, some other attorneys learned I was gay and I never seemed to have a problem with it because of their knowledge. Kerry Lewis: And that kind of leads me on to my next question. I mean, what is your evaluation or your sense of the climate in Tulsa at that time as far as their attitudes towards gays and lesbians? Mike Green: I think it was negative. I really do. I don't think the people were educated, and I think they were fearful of the, quote, gay political agenda. And Tulsa had become a very, we used to call it the buckle of the Bible belt. And it was not at all, I don't think, gay friendly. But because they had not been exposed to that kind of lifestyle that we were going to try and present to them later on. And I know in some of the court situations I had, just the mere fact that you were a lesbian or you were a homosexual male would mean you were unqualified to have custody of your children. And I had problems in visitation issues even, where if you had a partner, that partner could not be in the home when the children came to visit. And it was just presumed that if you were gay or a lesbian and you had a partner, same sex partner, that you were doing something that was not presentable to the children. Kerry Lewis: And I'll ask the same question to you, too, in a second. But just as a follow up question to you, Mike, did you ever have a sense of risk as far as your personal safety or your personal status? Mike Green: Not my safety, no. Personal status, yes. I was concerned at times. I had a lot of clients who I'm not sure how receptive they would have been to knowing that I was gay. And also, I had two children I was supporting, and a son I was sending through college. Kerry Lewis: Bob, do you have any differing views on how Tulsa was as far as its perception of gay people? Bob Inglish: I don't think I would disagree, but you also have to remember where gay people were. I mean, I laugh at some of the things. You know, I remember, you know, you would dress a certain way. I mean, gay life was very clandestine, even for people who were out. And by out, I mean, they might go to gay bars or they might consider themselves homosexual and admit that personally and not have a problem with it. But, you know, if you were wanting to meet other homosexuals, you might dress a certain way. I mean, it went through trends. You might dress, have an IZOD t-shirt. How many IZOD shirts did you have? But that was... 8 �Dennis Neill: Are they out of style? Bob Inglish: They're back in, I think. But you would wear, you might wear an IZOD shirt and your jeans, and jeans, your hair might be cut short. And that was like a universal symbol. Or there was an absurd fashion statement where you flipped your collar up in the back for a while, which really looked dumb. But it was a, that was a signal to people that you were gay. And then you also had this feeling if you were like in an airport or you were at a store or something and, you know, you would see somebody and maybe detect that, some of those universal symbols that you go, wow, I mean, here's another gay person, like, oh, wow, you know. And of course, I think people were very sexually promiscuous then simply from a repression standpoint, they had been repressed for so long and there was such a exuberance about accepting the fact that you were gay that, you know, you might meet someone and you'd go, oh, you're gay, you know, maybe this is going to be a sexual encounter because, you know, you weren't going to meet gay people in another way. And so, you know, yeah, Tulsa had a feeling, you know, I think all of us perceive that to be negative, but gay people were not out and open and comfortable like they are today. I mean, you know, that was 24 years, 24 years ago, is that right? 23, yeah. So it was very different. Kerry Lewis: What about your sense of personal safety, your sense of status? You're just coming out of law school, or a few years out of law school. Did you have any, were you conscious of what the effect might be on your life and your career by being open or being part of a group like this? Bob Inglish: I don't really know that I was, but I think there was always some discretion that was involved. I mean, you just, you know, for example, now, if I interview a secretary or something at work, you know, I might say, I just want you to know I'm gay and, you know, I hope you don't have a problem with it, perhaps. You know, back then, I wouldn't have that discussion. You know, I mean, you wouldn't think about having that discussion. I was always out to my parents, but as far as, at least, you know, Okmulgee being very open, I don't think that I was. I never hid anything. I never dated, you know, a girl to give some kind of cover, but I never, but I don't know how particularly open I was. I had a pretty convenient out that I could drive back to Tulsa and be in a larger city and have that little bit of protection, but I don't think I ever had much fear for adverse consequences, and I think early on, I knew that it wasn't worth the sacrifice. I fortunately had counseling whenever I came out and had a pretty good, firm feeling that being openly gay was not an option, but an essential character. You know, something was very essential to one's well-being, and if something adverse had happened, I think I knew that I had other options, and perhaps there were areas of the country where you could go live, where you could be accepted. I mean, you could move to San Francisco. You could move to New York. You didn't have to stay here if you didn't want to. Kerry Lewis: So what were your perceptions of the climate in Tulsa with regard to gays and lesbians? Dennis Neill: Well, I felt we were definitely on the frontier here, and, you know, it was a time of contrast, too, because there were certainly some very supportive institutions. All Souls Unitarian Church, where we were first meeting, some of the 9 �members of their congregation really had a lot of outreach to us. The ACLU, in working with them, very interested in the gay rights movement in Oklahoma. So we certainly had some friends and some advocates, but I think they were pretty few, you know, and we really weren't pushing them too hard at that point in time to help us with some of the more advocacy type of activities that they've certainly become well-known for since 1980. But I certainly think I recognized we were dealing in a little bit different world then a lot of our heterosexual friends were, because I, for example, was taking materials to Zippers one Saturday night, and I got clobbered by some teenager kids that smashed in my eye, and that was in 1980. That was a time period that several people were getting beat up outside of Zippers and some of the other bars by kids with baseball bats. One of the co-hosts of our first Black and White, which also happened to be in 1980, disappeared and was presumed killed, whether it was gay-related or not. He was very out in the gay bar community, so very possibly a victim of a hate crime at that time. A couple of the drag queens were killed in the 1980 to 83 time period. So I think, and then there was that murder down at Taj Mahal. Mike Green: Double murder. Dennis Neill: So, double murder. So I think, you know, we were certainly aware that there were some risks being gay. Certainly risk being a closeted gay or an out gay in the community at that point in time. But I kind of go back that we also had some very important friends that helped us as we moved forward with regard to the advocacy issues and the legal issues for the gay and lesbian community. Kerry Lewis: And you may have already answered this question, but it kind of leads me to wonder whether you had a personal sense that you were making history of sorts at that time. Was there that sense of excitement that you were doing something new, something that hadn't been done before in Tulsa? Did you understand or comprehend or understand that at that time? Or is that something that just comes since then? Dennis Neill: Speaking for me, I definitely felt it because we would get people coming to our functions that were really so excited to have an organization like TOHR and we had so many of these activities outside of the bars, the skates, the softball, the volleyball. It became a very important outlet for people to get socialized within the gay and lesbian community. I remember doing a radio program and talking a little bit about gay issues and I was really speaking more of an ACLU attorney and getting many, many hostile calls during that talk radio program, but that really made you quite aware that you're pushing the envelope in the Tulsa community. The next morning I had a strange bag on my front lawn and I thought, man, maybe this is a bomb, but it was actually my neighbor leaving some trash out for the trash bin the next day, but just decided to put it in my yard instead of her yard. I think there was definitely a feeling and I think we definitely, I certainly felt that we were having an impact through this organization of reaching out to some of the newer members in our community as well as those that have been here for a long time. 10 �Kerry Lewis: Bob, what about you? Did you have that sense of that you were doing something that hadn't been done before, making history? Bob Inglish: Well, it was exciting and it was a needed service. I don't know that I really had much of a historical perspective. I mean, frankly, I think the three of us are just thrilled to death that TOHR is still here and that it has the many functions that it does. This is all pre-AIDS and there have been a lot of changes in the gay community, but if you think today what the gay community has compared to what we had then, we had nothing outside of the bars. Absolutely nothing. And today, and perhaps it is the result of some of this early work, you have at least two if not three gay churches. You have churches that are certainly accepting of gays. You have Prime Timers. I point to Mike. You have Project Open Arms that deal with gay youth. You have youth services that deal with gay youth. You have, gosh, help me out here, what are some of the other things that we just take for granted today that go on in Tulsa? Mike Green: Council Oaks. Bob Inglish: Council Oaks, Men's Chorale. Now there's a women's group of Council Oaks. There's probably support groups that we're not even aware of that, there was just nothing. There was just nothing. Everything we did, you know, softball team, I mean who would think that gay people would, I mean, you know, it would be stereotypical, but you know, we've had three or four meetings and somebody's talking about a softball league and you're going, why would we want to play softball? Dennis Neill: Who wants to do that? Bob Inglish: I didn't have any desire. There was a big combination of cheerleaders, I remember that. But we sponsored plays. We registered people to vote. We had health clinics because the venereal disease was rampant in the gay community. We did political surveys. We had a lot of programs and it just mushroomed and every year it mushroomed with more and more people involved. I mean, I didn't realize that, but Dennis, you were reading something in 83, which would have been three years later, there were 250 members of the organization and we maybe started out with 10, so. Kryy Lewis: What about you, Mike? Mike Green: I found it very exciting. I didn't realize what was going on as far as, like Dennis said, pushing the envelope, but I always remember the, when Virginia Opulso [Note – Virginia Apuzzo served as Executive Director of the National LGBTQTask Force in the early 1980’s], was that who it was, came to Tulsa in 1983, was that when she came here? And spoke and then we, at a dinner we held at the Trinity Church, we asked earlier, it was downtown, which of course is one of the bigger churches. And I remember the feeling that I had that evening that it was the very first time I had ever gone to a real presentable place for a gay function. The very first time ever. And I knew it was important. I remember I was so thrilled by it. And I remember that she, the thrust of her message was that if the gays would unite, we'd be one of the strongest, the strongest forces in the entire world. I remember going back to Tim's bar after that was over, being so enthused and walking in and all of the 11 �disagreements, the arguments and so forth, I dawned on me that it would never happen. But still, it was just the idea that I had gone to a gay function in a presentable place among presentable people. And that was unique, it really was. To be gay was unique back in those days. Today it's no longer unique. It's just accepted. Accepted the fact, oh, you're gay, like Bob said, in being a secretary. It's not an issue anymore. Of course, I live in Palm Springs now, so out there. It's certainly not an issue with me and my lifestyle. Kerry Lewis: You all have touched on it, but do you have anything else, I guess, to add than what you've already said about the reason for beginning OHR, to start organizing? What you said so far is normal. There was definitely a need for some social events to gather. There really was. The only alternative at the time was the network of bars. But was there any other compelling reason or something that you really felt personally why you wanted to see OHR go forward or having this kind of a group go forward? Mike Green: I think it was the thought, and I think Dennis presented this thought to us, was that we could make a difference somehow. And we didn't know when or how, but by actually organizing and doing something, we could make a difference in what was going on in our lives and those who would have come after us. Kerry Lewis: Are you referring to a political sense or just... Mike Green: Political sense, yes, social, in every aspect of gay life. Because gay life back in those days, as far as I'm concerned, was not acceptable. I remember being in the courtroom representing gay people and the attitude of some of the judges. Just the fact that they were gay made them guilty of something. Maybe not the crime they were charged with, but guilty of something. And that changed. I'm not saying we changed it, but I think that groups like TOHR, OHR, throughout the country and around the country did change it. And so we certainly had our place in it. I remember one judge, a good example would be one judge who was homophobic. And it even said in the courtroom that he would not believe anything a gay person said on the witness stand. Merely because they were gay. And that judge went to a judicial conference in San Francisco and came back a changed individual. And he even said things like, if I would have carried my thoughts to San Francisco, they would have run me out of town on a rail. And he came back just totally a different person. Bob Inglish: I think, you know, not only was TOHR a force, but those of us that were involved, we didn't want TOHR to be a social organization. But at the same time, in addition to maybe having a real feeling that we were doing something, you know, frankly from a personal standpoint, it was a wonderful way to meet people. And, you know, I think a lot of people became involved in the organization because you could meet people and visit with people and do things. And it wasn't that you had to go to a bar at midnight and have a drink and try to converse with people. It was, you know, you could really get to know people. And I know so many people in Tulsa, you probably feel the same way, and Dennis, you do too, that we met in the early days of the organization that we wouldn't have had the opportunity to do. And, you know, you too got involved with Black and White, you know, because, you know, 12 �there was a need to have social activity in the gay community, again outside the bar, so they started the Black and White Party. I, along with several other people, started the Harwelden Party in probably 1981 or so. I think it was probably 81. But, I mean, there was a desire to, like, you know, we're gay people, we can go out, we can have a nice party, a nice social function outside of the bars. And that still goes on today. It's still a nice function and a nice part of the gay community. It seemed like there was some other... Well, to me, one of the pioneering moments of TOHR was the AIDS crisis, because we, as a result of early on, 1983 or whatever, we sent Jeff Beal, and did you say you went too, Dennis? Dennis Neill: Yes Bob Inglish: To a conference about AIDS, and they brought back information about the disease that probably would not have gotten to Tulsa for another year or two. And so we were educating people about AIDS long before it would have happened otherwise, and you just would hope that you would save people's lives, that people's lives were saved as a result of getting that information. But also at that point in time, and I don't know if it was a function of our age or a function of the organization, but people weren't out, and as a result of talking to people and coming to these groups, they...became out. I don't know what the proper English is, but, you know, they became comfortable with being gay. And they weren't before that. And just by having all these activities, they were. And you don't hear... I mean, now people come out when they are 16. They go to a youth group after school. But I can assure you that wasn't the situation at that point in time. And some of our earliest meetings, in fact the first one you noted in the newsletter, was a psychiatrist who came and talked about being gay. I mean, did we have some horrible, awful disease? Were we somehow psychologically impaired? You know, what was wrong with us? That was what was going through a lot of people's minds. And we were able to bring information to people to indicate that wasn't the case. Kerry Lewis: You Dennis, do you have any other reasons other than what had been said for why OHR was formed? Dennis Neill: No, I think it's a good point. When we first started meeting and understanding what the Oklahoma City group orientation was, and we were a chapter initially of the Oklahomans for Human Rights that was started in Oklahoma City about two years before we really got started. It was probably a lot more advocacy at the front because the co-founder of that, Bill Rogers, was a very involved attorney, very involved in the ACLU, very involved in social cause issues. So he was probably much quicker to, in Oklahoma City, take it to be a political advocacy group to the extent it could while it was still a 501c3 non-profit organization. And we felt like here we needed a little more time to develop ourselves and understand for new people coming into the organization, kind of the socialization issue. So we probably did kind of focus on the social side quicker at the beginning, but very promptly got focused on the advocacy side too. In fact, it's reflected in our first 13 �bylaws, which really haven't changed since we organized in 1980, talking about really focusing on non-discrimination for all people. So that was certainly part of our charter at the beginning. It became a focal point fairly early in the organization. And I think that was evidenced by the fact that the news media, the political environment, very quickly became aware of us and we did become the spokespeople for the gay community. Whether we wanted to be representative of the gay community or not, you do need a focal point for the media and for the political establishment. I think we very quickly became the focal point. Kerry Lewis: What kind of response did you receive when you first decided to post your first few meetings and try to get people together? Was there a positive response? Was it easy to reach people that were in the community? What was your sense, Dennis, if you want to... Dennis Neill: Well, Bob has a better memory of this. I had forgotten that even in our initial meetings that we were able to get many of the bar owners together, although I think they probably had a little bit different agenda than maybe we did initially going in. So I might kind of pass it to Bob, because I honestly don't recall a lot of what those first meetings really looked like. Bob Inglish: You know, what I recall is that there was a group of gay people, and we're really speaking from a male perspective because the lesbian community, I think, has evolved a little bit differently. But there was an older group of gay people that I think were very non-supportive of TOHR because they were so used to being closeted. They had their little bridge nights, and they had this and that that interested them, and they had their very private parties. But as far as doing anything publicly, to come out publicly was a threat. They had definitely a system, a code among themselves that you could be gay, but you weren't supposed to tell anybody about it, and you certainly didn't go to an organizational meeting, and I think there was some hostility from that segment of the gay community. I think people that were our age were fairly supportive. Dennis Neill: That's a great point. I've forgotten, a mutual friend of all of ours was very adamantly against us when we first started OHR. He worked in the same building that I did, and he criticized us for about two or three years and eventually became a very big supporter of TOHR and participated in many of our activities, but gosh, Bob's right, the environment even within our own community was somewhat hostile. Bob Inglish: That was a kind of a function Mike served with some of the older members of the community. Mike Green: You guys are right. Now that I remember. Bob Inglish: I would go, Mike, would you talk to these people? Mike Green: And it was fear-based is what it was. We had people who held large positions with oil companies and banks. There were doctors, accountants, and these people were frightened they were going to be drug out of the closet, and Bob's right about the lifestyle they had. They even had their own little language. They had words 14 �that meant certain things that even today most of us don't know what they mean anymore. Bob Inglish: Watch the boys in the band. That will give you an idea. Mike Green: Mitch at the Tea Room had a whole different significance in those days. These people were scared. They really were, and the idea that they wouldn't have to come out. I think also it was a knowledge that they wanted to come out. They wanted this openness, and yet they were afraid what it might bring to them, a loss of earnings after a 55, 60-year-old man who's faced with losing his job. Even to this day, you can be fired because you're gay. There's no protection whatsoever under the law in Oklahoma. These people did not want to lose their source of income, and this was looming in the future that appeared to them. For some reason, many of them did come out, but there are still many older gays who don't want to be associated with these kind of things. As for myself and for the younger people, a gay lifestyle could be a very lonely lifestyle. By organizing, it got rid of some of the loneliness and some of the fear of the future of living a gay lifestyle. I think that was very important to many people, and that's why they opted. Because like Bob said, although we had a different agenda, it was very social. We were talking earlier that when we were organizing it, it got to the point where sometimes the food that was served, not at my house, but at other houses by some of the people that were organizing the group, the main issue was the food and tables that were set for us and things of that type. It's still social, but that's any organization you have nowadays. Any political organization becomes social or any selfimprovement organization becomes social, that's just the way life is. You meet people that have common interests with you, and it becomes very much easier to develop relationships. Kerry Lewis: What kind of things did you do? You mentioned several, but in addition to having meetings where speakers would come and I guess occasionally having dinners and meetings where you ate, apparently, what else? What other kind of activities toward the beginning did TOHR or OHR do? Mike Green: We had the bowling. We were talking earlier, we had the softball tournaments. Bob Inglish: Gay Skates. It was always a surefire fundraiser was to have a roller skating party. I still can't believe it. Dennis Neill: Because we also served alcohol, and we had an open bar at those things. It was a cash bar, and there was one of those skates that we had out in Sand Springs, and somebody, I think it was J.L., ran into the wall and injured himself and was in the hospital for three days. It was probably somewhat alcohol related, so we took some risk with regard to that. I think the skate's demise was when we decided we were going to cool it on alcohol. Mike Green: Then we had a group that met down at Riverside Drive to play volleyball on Sunday afternoons. 15 �Dennis Neill: Very quickly when we first formed, the drag queens were very supportive of the organization, had some fundraisers. Then we did our own Turnabout Drag Show, which became the Follies, where some of us that definitely shouldn't have been doing drag end up doing drag. Hugely successful fundraisers. They raised a couple of thousand dollars each event, which was very vital for our organization at that period of time. Bob Inglish: They did health clinics, registered people to vote, did questionnaires. Dennis Neill: Our picnics were kind of different than the picnics now in that we had a lot of games at those picnics. We had the softball games, chariot races, activity booths. When we started that, like 82 or 83 at the Chandler Park. So that it was very much about trying to get people involved in each activity. So we tried many things. And for the women, we certainly did outreach through the volleyball and the women's softball. Dennis Neill: And we started seeing what would you say, within the first year or so, women starting to get involved with the TOHR. Because by 83, I think two of the six or seven officers were female. And we started seeing a balance develop by the mid 80s where the females were getting involved with, at least at the organizational level, they probably weren't as involved in the meetings and as representative in the community at the meetings, but started getting involved in the leadership positions. Kerry Lewis: Did you have any other activities that you guys can recall at that time? Maybe I should ask this. When did the helpline begin? Was that toward the beginning of the 80s or about the same time? Dennis Neill: I remember we had the training at John Dratz's apartment where he lived there about 15th off of Peoria. And then that Steve, I think that was his name, at his house we had some early training. Typically you'd have to spend all day as a volunteer going through the training. And then we even had some professional trainers and got some training from the Community Service Council's helpline to help us. But gee, it had to be early on, didn't it? Because we had it well before our first office, and our first office came about in 83 or 84, and that was when we used to have it down in Zippers before we even had an office. Bob Inglish: When we had a recorded message, we were listed in the phone book, so it wasn't necessarily staffed, but people could call. Mike Green: We would staff that, I think, in the evening hours, is what we'd usually do, and then record a message in the daytime. I remember one time walking into the clerk's office in one of the courts, and they were all laughing about something. And I realized what they were laughing about was that somebody had told them of the gay helpline, and they were calling it just to get that message. They weren't saying anything, they weren't really harassing phone calls, they were just calls just to see what the message was. And these people could not believe there was actually a gay helpline in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They were so amazed by it. Dennis Neill: Dean Dugan and Steve Wilson, who both worked with Southwestern Bell, helped us get the phone number, because we won that Vanity phone number, 743-GAYS. And I remember that when they put it in, that the central office of 16 �Southwestern Bell, the supervisors, all got together in an office to dial that number and get that recording, because they'd heard about it. And Dean or Steve just happened to be walking by and noticed them all in there wondering what in the world they were doing on a speakerphone. They were listening to our phone number. And within the first few months of putting it in, some students at that Rhema Bible College took a pledge to try to tie up our line. And we understand that was even discussed in the classes, to encourage students to dial our number, because they thought it was not appropriate to have the gay helpline here. And so we had a tremendous volume for about the first six months, and many of them were just hanging up, trying to tie up our line. But the group of dedicated volunteers, we got through that first six months or so, and then got down to the point where we were getting very important calls from people needing health information, needing to know what was going on in the community. The tough ones were the younger people calling, because we at that time felt uncomfortable talking to anybody under 18. And fortunately, we found a couple of resources. I think one of the churches volunteered to be a resource for those that were under 18, and we would provide a phone number for them. But we started getting lots of very important calls. I think the line made a big difference in people's lives. Now, obviously, still 67 percent of the calls might be somebody out of town wanting to know what bar to go to, what activities might be in the community. But a lot of them, particularly, as Bob mentioned, kind of this pre- and emerging AIDS time frame, we could really start seeing the swing over to the health issues by 83, 84. Bob Inglish: Didn't we donate books to the public library? I mean, there wasn't hardly any gay books at the library, or knowledge. Didn't we donate books? Dennis Neill: I think we did. Kerry Lewis: Logistically, how did you guys handle the helpline? Was that kept at somebody's home? Mike Green: No. John Willis, who owns Zippers, volunteered Zippers for the helpline. He had a private office in there. Wasn't there a small office behind his office where we originally set it up? And then later, when we got our first offices, we moved it over there, of course. Kerry Lewis: The impact of HIV and AIDS on the community and your impressions of that. I'm not sure at the time it was happening that it was as clear as it might be now. Looking back on it, what did the sudden emergence of a gay disease, as it was called, have on the community in Tulsa? I Mike Green: think it came around. It evolved so slowly. I can remember sitting up at Rick's and a friend of mine who's no longer living, who's a doctor, reading from Time magazine. I think I handed it to him, a little excerpt about the gay cancer thing. And him just kind of marveling, what is this thing, gay cancer? This really can't be. You know, if it's disease, we're just gay people. It just slowly got bigger and bigger. And it wasn't a long time before it hit Tulsa. Bob Inglish: You could read about it and watch TV about it, but it was all going on in San Francisco and New York. You thought, well, this isn't going to happen in Tulsa. And then it just eventually started happening. One of the first things I remember was, 17 �do you remember, it was at Sophian Plaza. It was at Don Donaldson's apartment. There was this guy that had AIDS. And of course, at that point in time, he knew he had AIDS because he had Karposi. And he had an identical brother. And they were going to go to Baltimore or someplace to have this bone marrow thing. I mean, it was real early on. Dennis Neill: Gosh, I do remember that. Bob Inglish: And we charged like 50 cents. You had to make a donation of 50 cents or something like that to help this guy out, pay for this medical treatment. I mean, Lord only knows the watershed of dollars after that, whether 50 cents a person mattered. But I remember that distinctly. Mike Green: Yeah, now that you talk about that, I do remember something about that. Dennis Neill: Yeah, I had forgotten about that. And then the first one I remember was that by mid-1983, as we started having these TOHR meetings focused on HIV, we started getting aware of it. I think it was in like early 1984, an individual came to one of our meetings and was actually in a wheelchair and was HIV infected and was ill from that. That's the first individual I remember that came to an OHR meeting and was also clearly ill from AIDS. And one of the first deaths I remember was Randy Anderson's death. Bob Inglish: Well, that's who I was talking about. Dennis Neill: Oh, was it Randy? Okay. Bob Inglish: But we were talking about, A, the gay community being very sexualoriented, that you would meet a gay person at an airport and you would just be excited that you met a gay person and that there would be maybe a compulsion to have sex. Dennis Neill: Bob's speaking for himself here. Bob Inglish: Not me, I'm not talking about myself. But then the AIDS crisis comes along and, of course, everybody's sexual activity became very cautious and then so many of us have become coupled. And, of course, you were then saying that that wasn't true for the very older generation, but those people were never out. It's kind of a different generation. Mike Green: That well may be. Bob Inglish: But I can see now where before it was like, well, we're not going to get pregnant, so why not have sex? And you would have a gathering. I mean, Sunday brunch was always a big time. And it would be like, Dennis went home with so-andso and did this, and so-and-so went home with so-and-so. But no, I went home with so-and-so the night before. I mean, that was gay life, really. Mike Green: Well, I think it unfortunately or maybe I don't know what it is, that's still gay life. In many respects. After all, we do have a thing called safe sex nowadays and many people practice it. It's amazing where I live right now, there are a number of people who do not practice that. It's just kind of unbelievable but they don't. And 18 �they're very proud of not practicing safe sex. But now they do have safe sex and when AIDS first came out we didn't know what caused it. We thought if you could be around somebody you'd catch it. I remember a friend of mine went to California and came back and told me he'd been in a party where a guy was dying of AIDS. I said, how could you be near him? How would you be around him? So it was such a very scary thing. The disease was unknown as to how it was transmitted. So it's evolved and it better be bad that we know more about it and we know it's more difficult to catch than most things and that you've got to be promiscuous in certain ways to come down with it. So I still think that there's a lot of sex going on. In fact, that's one of the problems today with HIV spread, is that there's too much sex going on, too much promiscuity in the gay world. Bob Inglish: There certainly wasn't a lot of couples to maybe feel like you were modeling after that wasn't a very normal part of the gay community. And then we're talking now that at least gay people in other areas are adopting children and whatever it is. Mike Green: That is coming around. As far as older people, I have a lot of friends who have celebrated 50 years or more with the same partner. I'm not saying they've been in a monogamous relationship, but they've been together at least 50 years. Bob Inglish: I bet the percentages, though, are very different. You're talking about a pretty narrow percent of the population that you're talking about. Dennis and my generation, you're talking about a lot more people have established relationships and homes and things like that. Or do you not think so? Mike Green: Well, the only thing that will tell is time. Because I think maybe you have more monogamous relationships now than we had before. Dennis Neill: Well, it could be part of the deal, might be, don't you think? Not that there's these huge generational gaps here, but probably in your generation, Mike, there may be more people that were willing to live the lie, i.e., always stay married to a female, and therefore there weren't as many opportunities for some of those people to couple up with a guy where probably in our generation, certainly the younger generations, there's less acceptance of living the lie. And so much earlier on in their development, they may be looking at, one, exploring the sexual side of the gay life, but then, two, realizing that it is important hopefully at some point in time to find an individual that you can kind of revolve your life around. And then our societies get more mature in supporting those relationships. Mike Green: I think that's a good idea. It's much easier to maintain a gay marriage. Dennis Neill: I mean, this whole argument about gay marriage is so ridiculous because if the heterosexual world really wanted to help control the promiscuity issue, it'd be very supportive of the gay relationships, the gay unions, and so forth, much like the Netherlands has experienced and some of the other countries that have a much formalized union process to celebrate the union and to support it in various ways. Mike Green: And two, a lot of people I meet, I'm sure you guys have met too, they look at this idea of being married and getting into a heterosexual relationship and having children and so forth. It really belongs to the Midwest. It's not an East Coast 19 �thing, it's not a West Coast thing, but it belongs to Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas. It may well be. I don't know. I have a lot of friends in California now from Michigan, New York, San Francisco, and most of the guys have not been married and do not have children. Whereas back here, I still have a lot of friends who are my age who have raised families with grandmothers now. Some of the great grandmothers. Organizationally, you had mentioned that TOHR started in 1983 to deal with HIV by having programming that kind of revolved around educating or finding out what's going on with HIV. I know eventually there became testing, but what other kinds of things were going on in the early to mid-1980s involving HIV? [Tape Ended] 20 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [Series] Oral Histories Project > Interviews Description An account of the resource <strong>Physical Media:</strong> <br />Box 7, Folder 7 - Dr. Leisa Meyer Program<br />Box 7, Folder 8 - Interviewees Materials, Original Series 2003-2007<br /><br /><strong>Digital Media:</strong> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [2003] Bob Inglish, Mike Green, and Dennis Neill Interview Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource May 4, 2003 Description An account of the resource Bob Inglish, Mike Green and Dennis Neill Oral History Interview with Kerry Lewis on May 5, 2003 - Discover the early days of Tulsa's LGBTQ+ activism through the personal stories of key founders. This episode explores how the community built a social, legal, and health infrastructure amidst societal resistance and growing awareness of HIV/AIDS. Subject The topic of the resource Bob Inglish, Mike Green, and Dennis Neill Oral History Interview from May 5, 2003 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bob Inglish, Mike Green, Dennis Neill, Kerry Lewis 2003 activism AIDS AIDS/HIV Bob Inglish Dennis Neill Dennis R. Neill HIV HIV/AIDs interview Kerry Lewis Kerry R. Lewis Mike Green OKEQ Oral History Project oral history oral history interview Oral History Project oral history transcript TOHR transcript Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights (TOHR) video https://history.okeq.org/files/original/21d02a6d92c0f1bbc38aeacb4b197e21.mp4 d3d143b8975e231e89aee433ebbabac8 https://history.okeq.org/files/original/7fda3ee82db9d17466e3443f6b5400c5.pdf 2acf3458bfdcb44db5b39b13eba43da3 PDF Text Text �������������������������� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [Series] Oral Histories Project > Interviews Description An account of the resource <strong>Physical Media:</strong> <br />Box 7, Folder 7 - Dr. Leisa Meyer Program<br />Box 7, Folder 8 - Interviewees Materials, Original Series 2003-2007<br /><br /><strong>Digital Media:</strong> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [2003] Dennis Neill Interview Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource December 10, 2003 Description An account of the resource Video recording and transcript of oral history interview with Laura Belmonte on December 10, 2003. Dennis discusses his early life growing up in Ponca City, Oklahoma, experiences at Oklahoma State University and the University of Texas Law School. In 1977, he moved to Tulsa to begin his legal career and then joining the Schusterman family in their oil and gas business. As a co-founder of the Tulsa Chapter of Oklahomans for Human Rights, which in 1985 became Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights and then in 2006 Oklahomans for Equality, he reviews the early years of the organization and involvement with other civic activities and the beginnings of the HIV/AIDS crisis in Tulsa and the community response. Subject The topic of the resource Dennis Neill Oral History Project Interview from December 10, 2003 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dennis Neill, Laura Belmonte 2003 AIDS AIDS/HIV Dennis Neill HIV/AIDs interview Laura A. Belmonte Laura Belmonte OkEq OKEQ Oral History Project Oklahoma State University Oklahoma State University (OSU) Oklahomans for Equality Oklahomans for Equality (OKEQ) oral history oral history interview Oral History Project oral history transcript OSU TOHR transcript Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights (TOHR) University of Texas University of Texas Law School video Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [Series] Oral Histories Project > Interviews Description An account of the resource <strong>Physical Media:</strong> <br />Box 7, Folder 7 - Dr. Leisa Meyer Program<br />Box 7, Folder 8 - Interviewees Materials, Original Series 2003-2007<br /><br /><strong>Digital Media:</strong> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [2003] Mike Green Interview Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource May 4, 2003 Description An account of the resource Transcript only of oral history interview with Kerry Lewis on May 4th, 2003. Born on June 25th, 1932, in Tulsa, Mike served as the Oklahomans for Human Rights, Tulsa Chapter as its first Vice-President when it was formed in 1980. He often represented members of the LGBTQ+ community with various legal issues, including incidents of police entrapment. Married in 1955, he and his wife divorced in 1967 after which he became involved with Tulsa’s gay community. Mike passed in Tulsa in the early 2020’s.<br /><br />Need deed of gift. Tape says "1st Treasurer 1980-1982." <strong>Video and Transcript available at the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center for on-site research.</strong> Subject The topic of the resource Mike Green Oral History Project Interview from May 4, 2003 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Mike Green, Kerry Lewis, Dennis Neill 2003 interview Kerry Lewis legal protection Mike Green OHR OKEQ Oral History Project Oklahomans for Human Rights Oklahomans for Human Rights - Tulsa Chapter oral history oral history interview Oral History Project oral history transcript police abuse TOHR transcript Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights (TOHR) video https://history.okeq.org/files/original/3f257b237fcb28eacc3a53644888ae6c.mp4 b7854c07569e72010538c04ee38ad435 https://history.okeq.org/files/original/dc8193d4ab8cf0eb7f5c31a11315bcfe.pdf a2e2ac0ad4e26f5a886e10f91d43280c PDF Text Text Oral History Interview with Anna Dodwell Interview Conducted by Laura Belmonte August 1, 2004 OKEQ Oral History Project Oklahoma Oral History Research Program Edmon Low Library ● Oklahoma State University ©2004 �OKEQ Oral History Project Interview History Interviewer: Laura Belmonte Transcriber: Allison Richmond Editors: Anika Benthem The recording and transcript of this interview were processed at the Oklahoma State University Library in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Project Detail The OKEQ Oral History Project is a series of interviews documenting the rich contributions of LGBTQ community members in the state of Oklahoma, with a particular emphasis on Tulsa and the surrounding area. These interviews were conducted by members of Oklahomans for Equality, formerly Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights. Legal Status Scholarly use of the recordings and transcripts of the interview with Anna Dodwell is unrestricted. The interview agreement was signed on August 1, 2004. 2 �OKEQ Oral History Project Anna Dodwell Oral History Interview Interviewed by Laura Belmonte August 1, 2004 Tulsa, Oklahoma Belmonte It is Sunday, August 1, 2004, and I’m Laura Belmonte. We are interviewing Anna Dodwell today at my home. Anna, we begin with some really basic stuff. Just tell us your full name and where and when you were born. Dodwell Okay. Anna Dodwell, I was born here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, September 7, 1963. Belmonte Have you lived here your whole life? Dodwell Yes. Belmonte Okay. Tell us a little bit about your childhood and your family background. Dodwell Well, I went to Eisenhower Elementary School and grew up with lots of kids in my neighborhood. We played, and they teased me, and I teased them, and it was just kind of a fairly normal childhood. My father was a plumber, and my mother was the manager of a restaurant for many, many years. I went to Edison Junior High and High School. Went to school with one star, Jeanne Tripplehorn; she’s been in a few movies. Went to—I’ve known her since elementary school. Just had a lot of childhood—close childhood friends. Nothing really significant. I was in Camp Fire for twenty-six years, so it was very special to me. Belmonte Any brothers and sisters? Dodwell I have an older brother and I have—actually three older brothers who are all half-brothers, and then I have a sister, and that’s it. Belmonte That sounds like enough. Dodwell Yeah. Belmonte How have you classified your sexual identity for most of your adult life? 3 �Dodwell To begin with, when I was in high school or even junior high, I knew there was something different, and I didn’t know what it was. I knew that whatever it was, it was strange. I shouldn’t have to like girls. Why should I—why am I liking this? I tried to go with society and decided that I knew that I was a lesbian, but there really wasn’t a name for it. There was no support, zero support, for any teenager, or any adults for that matter, as far as coming out or anything like that. We just kind of tried to do what society says to do. I had a son, and I tried to say, “Well, this is it. This is where I’m supposed to be,” but I was miserable. Belmonte How long have you been out to yourself? Dodwell To myself, I’ve been out probably since I was nineteen or twenty. Belmonte When did you have your first same-sex sexual experience? Dodwell When I was about nineteen, I think, nineteen or twenty, yeah. Belmonte How did you find this woman? Did you meet through a mutual friend? Dodwell In a bar. Belmonte Do you remember what bar? Dodwell Seeker’s Choice. Belmonte Where was that? Do you remember anything about it? Dodwell I don’t remember… Belmonte Terry remembers. (Laughter) Dodwell It was on Admiral, yes. I don’t remember exactly where, but yeah, I picked someone up—well, I guess she picked me up. It was in a little, tiny strip mall. Belmonte Was it predominantly a women’s bar? Dodwell I think so, yeah. That’s all I ever saw in there, really, was women. It was—I do know it was owned by a transgendered man. Belmonte Oh really? Is he still alive? Still live in Tulsa? Dodwell I don’t know. 4 �Belmonte Did you go to this bar again? Dodwell I went occasionally, but the woman was really scary, and I didn’t want to see her anymore. (Laughter) Belmonte We’ve never heard that story. (Laughter) Dodwell She had whips hanging from her wall, and I really didn’t like that. Terry Scared you to death. (Laughs) Belmonte I could see why. Living in Tulsa your whole life, when do you recall having met a gay person for the first time? Dodwell I knew that my nephew was coming out, and he would talk about how gay he was when Rocky Horror was really big. We’d go to Rocky Horror all the time. He was kind of the first gay person that I really was around. He used to correct his lisping in front of the mirror and all that kind of stuff. Other than that, he just—he was about the only person that I can think of; everybody else I knew was straight. Belmonte You heard of Seeker’s Choice how? Do you recall when you first began to hear about places where gay people went in Tulsa? What were some of those places other than Seeker’s Choice? Dodwell I believe I called the helpline. I think I called the helpline to find that out. I either did that or I looked in the phonebook, but I think it was the helpline. I can’t recall exactly how that came about, but I know they gave me two or three different choices of bars that I could go to. Gosh, that was ’83. Belmonte That would have narrowly ended the helplines if— Dodwell Yeah. (Laughs) That’s kind of when I got involved with the community. Belmonte Well, what were some of the other places that you met gay men and women after going to Seeker’s Choice? Dodwell The only places that I knew were bars, really. Zipper’s, I grew up in Zipper’s. Belmonte Tell me what Zipper’s was like for women. I’ve heard a lot of men talk about Zipper’s. Dodwell It was okay. I mean, there were several women there. They did have a few drag king shows there. It was kind of far and few between, but it did happen. There were so many young people and so many underage people there, but 5 �for women, there was like a—if I remember right, it was an area that was— you’d walk into the bar, you’d go up these steps and to the left; it was like almost all women. Anywhere else in the bar they were just scattered here and there; they weren’t grouped in certain areas, but one area I always knew that they were. Belmonte Where else besides Zipper’s? Dodwell TNT’s. Belmonte Do you remember what TNT’s was like at the time? Dodwell I think it was a little rougher than—well, of course—than it is now. Belmonte It’s straight now. Dodwell I know. I think they’re trying to keep it gay, but it’s not happening. Oh, Tracy’s. Yes, I went to Tracy’s too. I don’t remember where that one was— off of Utica. I didn’t go to Tracy’s very often. Have you ever been to Tracy’s? Belmonte This is the first time I’m hearing about Tracy’s. Tracy’s and Seeker’s Choice. Dodwell Tracy’s was a nicer bar—well, much nicer than Seeker’s Choice, I think it was. Belmonte You said Seeker’s Choice was off Admiral. Dodwell Yes. Went there, not a whole lot, but went there now and then. Then I started going to Zipper’s a lot, went to Zipper’s all the time whenever it was in its glory. Belmonte Over at 31st and Yale. Dodwell Yes. Oh yeah. I remember all the car bashings and the people that would be standing outside when the bar would close, and they would have baseball bats in their hands and, you know. Belmonte Tell me more about that. I’ve heard that policemen would take down names of license plates, but I hadn’t heard what you’re enumerating here. Dodwell Yeah, because there’s a lot of apartments that are around there, and there’s probably four or five different apartments. If you would leave the bar— mostly for the guys, you know, they would leave. They would just stand there; it was like an intimidation thing. Either they had already bashed their 6 �car, or they were just wanted to stand there just to make sure that they were afraid, I guess. It was frightening. They would yell at you from the balconies and tell you—call you names and things like that. There, for a while, Zipper’s started losing some business because people were afraid to go. Belmonte Do you recall any instances where people and not just property were harmed? Dodwell I know that there were some fist fights and things like this, like some of the queens would come out and be drunk, and they would say something, and they would just start just fist fighting. That’s the only thing I saw myself. I know the police were called a lot. Of course, police came inside the bar all the time. They would just look at you, and they would harass you, they’d ask for your license. It was a really big deal. They did harass a lot. Belmonte Now, in your circle of friends, what did you and your lesbian and gay friends do outside of bars? Dodwell Went to each other’s houses, had parties. We didn’t really do a whole lot as, actually, as a group. We’d go out to eat sometimes, and sometimes we’d go to a movie or something, but no real planned activities. Of course, I was young. My gosh, I was a baby, so it was party all the time. That’s all I wanted to do. Belmonte You made a comparison of Tracy’s and Seeker’s Choice and said that Tracy’s was nicer. Tell me more about this bar—this is the first time I’ve heard about Tracy’s. Dodwell The clientele I think was a little nicer as far as—it wasn’t as rough of a crowd; at least I don’t think it was. Belmonte Mainly women? Dodwell Yes. Well, actually, there were half and half at Tracy’s. At Seeker’s Choice, it was a lot of women. A lot of—well, I remember older women without teeth, but (Laughter) I don’t know if that’s something to write about. (Laughter) Belmonte Oh yeah. Terry They had split clientele. [Inaudible] Older women, it’s like there’s this real age gap. [Inaudible] Belmonte It’s my impression, and you can correct me if you think this is wrong, that a pretty hardcore butch femme culture in the bars in Tulsa persisted pretty long past when it did in other places. In many cities, Buffalo, New York, for 7 �instance, this began to disappear by the late ’60s. It sounds to me like that culture was still in place in Tulsa pretty late into the ’80s. Dodwell Definitely. I know some people who are still stuck in that, so it’s— Oklahoma is really backwards with that. They’re catching up to the things in different cities with things like that. Belmonte Did you witness a lot of violence in these bars? Fights? Dodwell A few, yeah. A lot of jealous butch girlfriends, that somebody would look at their girl, and they’d go after them and try to be the man of the house and do whatever they needed to do to take care of that. I saw a few fights, mostly alcohol-induced. Belmonte How did this physically manifest itself? Were there very rigid codes of what you would wear or not wear or how you would act, or was it more of a kind of attitude sort of thing? Dodwell Yes, there was. I was told when I was first starting to go out—it jarred my memory; this is great—that if you had any amount of sized breasts, you know, like mine, if you had them, you were not a lesbian. (Laughs) I was told that many times. Belmonte By whom? Dodwell By butch women, the older butch women, mostly, saying that’s just not right. “You just can’t just have big boobs and be okay and be with us. You’re not one of us.” I’ve heard that many times. Things like if—I remember I used to have this smock thing or whatever, and it had some pink in it. I don’t classify myself as butch or femme; I can do either one, and I’ve always been like that. That was not—that was an issue with some people. “Pick one, what are you going to be? Butch or femme?” I can’t be butch because I have boobs. Okay, maybe I can be femme, but I have to wear a dress, and I don’t like dresses. I would wear this smock thing, and they would tell me that if you’re trying to be butch, it’s not going to work because you have a pink flower on this. It’s not going to work. Belmonte How did you find a middle ground here? It must have been personally quite challenging, really not feeling like you fit into either category here. Dodwell I always thought labels were silly and stupid, so I don’t know. I’ve always just been myself and said, “Okay, this is what you get, and if you don’t like it, then you can go away.” A lot of people went away, especially back then. If you didn’t do a lot of partying and a lot of drugs, and if you didn’t fit into this particular group of gay culture, or if you weren’t the butch or the femme, where did you go? A lot of times I didn’t go. I also went to Crash 8 �Landing, which I loved Crash Landing. It was on 5th and Lewis, and it had a real airplane inside. Belmonte It’s amazing you guys didn’t meet each other sooner. (Laughter) Terry We have friends in all of the same circles, and we knew a lot of the same people, which is really ironic that we had never met. Belmonte Small world. Dodwell The Crash Landing was a combination bar. Have you heard of that one? Belmonte No. Dodwell Oh my gosh. Okay. Well, they had every—I don’t know if it was every month or every other week, but it was like a women’s dance they would have. The person you get lots of history from for that, all the bar stuff, is Ms. Carol Brown. I think maybe Renee, hopefully you know Renee. She would be a wealth of information for you. Belmonte Great. At the end of the taping, I would love it if you guys give me some names of people you think might be potential interviewees. That would be great. Dodwell You got it. Crash Landing did have a lot of—it was a neat bar; it was a really big place. It was high energy dance stuff, whatever it was back then. Terry It was three stories. Belmonte Quite substantial. Dodwell Isn’t it a church now? I know they tore it down, maybe it was a parking lot of a church. Terry There was a bar on every level, and it was just a really cool place. They had the most irritating final song I have heard in my whole life. Do you remember it? It can get people out of the bars. They put [inaudible] constantly. It said, “Bye bye, see you later. Bye bye, see you later. Bye bye, see later.” It would drive you out of the bar. Belmonte I suppose that was its intent. (Laughter) Terry Yeah, probably. Belmonte Was Crash Landing a mixed bar too? 9 �Dodwell I think so. Yeah, mostly. Except when they had the women’s dances. Belmonte What were these women’s dances like? Dodwell Popular. Belmonte Can you estimate how many people would go? Dodwell I don’t know. I would say fifty maybe. It was a lot for back then, and it was—there were just quite a few. Belmonte When would this have been? Dodwell This would have been ’82 to ’86, probably. Two, three year period there, but it was a very popular bar. Belmonte What were the atmosphere of these dances like? Dodwell Pretty—I think they were pretty light, and real fun. People didn’t seem like they had the barriers like a lot of people in our community have today. It’s like they were maybe more trusting, or maybe more accepting, or something like that that was—it was okay to go into this place by yourself, and people would talk to you, you know, things like that. Now it’s a little different. There’s— Belmonte A different spin on it. Now, in conjunction with this butch femme roles, do you recall that there were sexual expectations that went with that too? Like if you were butch, there were certain things that you did and didn’t do and vice versa? Dodwell I think so. Yeah. The butch was the more aggressor sexually, even romantically. The femme was more the little wifey kind of thing, just kind of went along with everything that the butch wanted to do. That’s what I saw. I don’t know if it’s the same now or not. Belmonte Let’s say you wanted to go on a nice date that wasn’t at a bar. Were there any restaurants or places in town that were known as gay-friendly? Dodwell Absolutely not, no. Just your own home. Belmonte In your circle of friends, let’s talk about some of their experiences you might remember. Do you remember—well, let’s start with your own family. When did you come out to your own family, and how did they respond? Dodwell My father died before I could come out, but my mother—I came out after I had my son to her, and I had my son at nineteen. I came out to her after that, 10 �and it was really difficult for her at first, especially. She was very angry. Then it got better. She hated my first girlfriend with a passion. She just started getting better with everything. She just started understanding a little more, and then my nephew came out to her. My nephew was a drag queen, and he was very flamboyant. I think he lives in Dallas now, but she would help him get ready for drag shows, and she started wanting to do things. If PFLAG [Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays] would have been available or there back then, my mother would have been right in the trenches with that. I know she would have. She slowly learned that we’re people, too, and it’s okay that I love somebody of the same sex, but it’s not about sex. My mom would—even before my mother died at a nursing home, and we were talking to the whole staff about things, my mom would say, “If you have a problem with lesbians, you need to tell me now because my daughter is one.” She’d out me all the time, but I took her to see Boy George; I took her to see The Village People. She went to one gay pride picnic. I think—so she was okay with it later on. Belmonte Sounds like she was more than okay with it. Do you recall other parents being at that picnic or was she the only one? Dodwell She was pretty—I think she was pretty much the only one. That’s when it was at Mohawk Park. Oh my gosh, she just loved it. She used to love the gay boys, oh my gosh. She came a long way from when I first told her. She always was afraid for me being beat up and things like this; she didn’t want that to ever happen. The rest of my family—my brother, my oldest brother, doesn’t—he has an issue with gay people, mainly because of my nephew. My nephew is just, “I’m in your face. I’m gay. Deal with it.” He’d been out for years, and it just kind of turned him off, so I can’t really blame him for that, I guess. The rest of my siblings—they know that my sister has a problem with it kind of, so it’s—I don’t have anybody really with open arms in my family. Of course, on my dad’s side, they’re all from Arkansas, so I mean, they don’t even want to talk to me. You know, that’s their loss. Belmonte What about your son? Dodwell My son is okay with it now. Belmonte Well, I mean, you must have had to come out to him pretty early in his life, I would guess. Dodwell Yeah, I did. Actually, it was more like fourteen when we talked about it. He was okay with that, too. He just wants me to be—he said, “I just want you to be loved, and I want you to be cared for and not be hurt.” That’s kind of what he looks at. He doesn’t really talk about it a whole lot; he’s a very funny kid. He’ll—he used to—oh my gosh, he used to borrow my car or my ex’s car, and he’d get in it, and he’d come back, and all the stickers would 11 �be taken off of the car. (Laughter) He’s like, “I don’t want to ride in your car; people are going to think I’m gay.” (Laughs) It’s like, “Fine, then meet me there.” He’s twenty-one now, so he’s a grown man. He’s doing his thing. I recently went through a divorce, a break-up, and he dealt with that okay, and you know, he’s still working on that, but he’s just—I think he accepts me. He just wants to make sure I’m safe. I’m okay. I’m happy. Belmonte You mentioned that you work for Sears. How long have you been with Sears? Dodwell I have been with Sears since January. They have the GALS program there; it’s the Gays and Lesbians of Sears. They also have the domestic partnership benefits. They’ve got diversity days. [Inaudible] (Laughs) Belmonte She’s not in the frame here. You have to wonder who she is. Dodwell Yeah, we have diversity days, and that’s toward the end of this month, where I guess we come up with activities or things to celebrate [inaudible]. Belmonte Now, have you encountered discrimination on any of your other jobs? Have you ever encountered harassment yourself in coming out of a bar? Tell me about some of that. Dodwell Coming out of a bar, no, I haven’t really. I’ve just witnessed other people having problems. I did at Woodland Hills Mall one time, when—let’s see, it was probably ’84—when I was with this other girl that—we were walking in the mall, and all of the sudden, all of these kids from, I guess, Broken Arrow or Bixby High School, whatever, they followed us out and started shoving us around and everything, calling us, you know, “you dyke,” and “you this,” and “you that.” That’s about the only negative thing, really. I mean, I’ve had people scream at me and say things, but not real bad. Of course, it’s gotten a lot better over the years, but I can’t think of anything else other than what happened at Woodland Hills; that was kind of scary. Belmonte Let’s talk about your jobs. Dodwell My jobs. I worked at the Tulsa Police Department; that was a real fun thing. I was an animal control officer in a man’s world, so I had to prove myself. I got lots of comments about being gay. “Where’s the lesbian in the house?” There would be a lot of comments. Through the police department, you had no protection, not back then you didn’t. Maybe they do now, I don’t know. I kind of doubt it. There were just—mostly the comments, they would—there was one time in my mailbox, they had shoved a tie in there, a man’s tie, and boxers, and things like that. That’s when I first started working there. Belmonte When was that? 12 �Dodwell From—let’s see, I quit in ’89, so I worked there four or five years. It was during that time, ’83. That was probably the worst of it. A lot of times I would get harassed by my boss, actually, at a part-time job that I had at a supermarket. He found out that I was a lesbian, and he was just all for finding somebody else to help him out. “Come on, let’s go and have a big ole three-way party.” Oh my god, I hate that place. Oh, god. That was awful. No, no, no. I don’t [inaudible] you. Okay? It just doesn’t happen. Belmonte Being a lesbian is not a package deal, sorry. Dodwell No, it’s not. (Laughter) Belmonte In your circle of friends, I’ve been told, for instance, that there was a man in the community who was pretty well-known in the bars who was murdered in Mohawk Park, and the crime went unsolved. Do you recall hearing anything about that case or anything else along that nature? Dodwell I had heard about it, and I—but I don’t know any of the details. I just knew that it happened, but I really don’t know anything. Belmonte Tell me about what some of your gay male friends had to say about their lives in this period. Where, for instance, did they go if they were looking for a sexual encounter? What were some of the bars that were— Dodwell Tim’s Playroom was big. A lot of their experiences as far as—just in the general Tulsa area, I guess—violence, a lot of violence, what I’ve heard. A lot of loneliness because really the only place to go to meet other people were at the bars at the time. If you didn’t drink, or you didn’t like to go to the bars, then you were out of luck for the most part. I know that they went to Turkey Mountain quite a bit. I don’t know if they went back in the ’80s, but I can’t recall [inaudible]. That was just for just like sex, nothing more than that. There might have been a few little groups that popped up here and there. There was a men’s supper club that went on forever. Belmonte Do you remember any of the men who were a part of that group? Dodwell Dennis Neill, I believe, knew about it or was a part of it. Belmonte I’ll have to ask him about that. Dodwell Yeah, see if he knows something. Belmonte What about “the fruit loop” in downtown? Did they ever talk about that? 13 �Dodwell I’ve heard of the fruit loop. I don’t know that very well. I don’t know of that. That might have been maybe before my time. I don’t know. Belmonte It sounds like that went pretty far back. Dodwell Yeah, it did, but I have heard about it. Belmonte You mentioned the gay picnic. Did you go to any of the meetings of TOHR when it was first founded? Dodwell Oh yeah. Belmonte Tell me about what made you do that, and what those meetings were like, and whether you found that a positive experience? Dodwell Yeah, I started with TOHR, I want to say ’84, ’85. It was founded in ’83, right? Belmonte Right. Dodwell It was already going by then. Mostly men. I think my first meeting I ever went to—that’s when I first met Dennis Neill—was that I was the only woman there. For the most part, I felt accepted, but it was definitely lacking females. (Laughs) They just weren’t there. Either they didn’t know about it or what, or maybe they didn’t feel welcome. Belmonte Were they still meeting in the library at this point? Dodwell Yes. They were meeting at the library. I had talked to Dennis about, “Gosh, we can do this or do that,” or “Gosh, we…” He’s like, “Well, come on aboard!” so I started getting involved with that about a year later. Belmonte What were some of the things you did? Dodwell I was the helpline coordinator, and that’s when we moved and got the office space at 41st and Harvard. I did that for four years, three or four years. Belmonte Describe that experience. What were the calls like, what kind of training went into— Dodwell Oh my gosh, there was a lot of training that was involved. There was tons of volunteers. There were people knocking at the door to volunteer. Belmonte What types of professions were people in? 14 �Dodwell Doctors, lawyers, laymen, I mean, just anything. All kinds of people. We had chefs, and we had counselors; we had unemployed. We had lots of different walks of life, and that’s what’s needed for that kind of thing. We had people who had never done a helpline or anything like that, and so when they would come aboard, they would be terrified. What happens if they get a phone call and somebody is wanting to commit suicide or wanting to do this—and which we had those calls, and we had to talk people either out of it or try to get help to them as soon as possible. It was a lot of trading involved. The phones rang off the hook. It was constantly busy, especially in the evening because people in the community found out that we started having the helpline from eight to ten every night. Oh my gosh, it was just incredible. Belmonte What were some of the more memorable calls you had? Dodwell I had a phone call from a man—actually a straight man who felt that he was a woman. Back then, transgenderism was just not really talked about a whole lot; there was not a lot of education on it. We had books and brochures but not a whole lot of experience with it. He was—I was on the phone with this man for over an hour. He was—didn’t know where to go, how he was going to fit in, and trying to find the resources to help this person was almost impossible. The nearest resource I had was Dallas. While I had him on the phone, I start looking at different resources that we had from different states that surrounded us, and the nearest one I had was Dallas. I remember this guy because he called back, and about two weeks later, he called these other people and said he was better, and he felt much better about the situation, and he was happy and that he might be on the road to recovery for whatever reason. We’d get the calls that—you know, from the kids, they would—that’s normal. A lot of the volunteers would get upset over it. It’s like, they’re just curious. I mean, yeah, if they’re calling you and saying they’re going to kill you, yeah, that’s a different story, but they’re not. Belmonte They would call just to prank call. Dodwell Right. There was a woman who called when I was training somebody, and she was being—she was locked in her bedroom, and she was being beat by her lover. You could hear in the background the sounds of her being hit and the screaming. It was probably the most disturbing phone call that I had ever gotten. The poor guy, it was his first day that he had started working there, just trying to calm her down, but it wasn’t going to make her situation any better unless she was going to get out of there. I was able to get her to get to the phone and pick up the—she threw it on the bed, I guess, and she got the phone, and I got her address. I was able to call the police. That’s probably the worst. There were a whole lot more needy calls if you want to say it because back then is when AIDS was really coming out, and really, people 15 �were being, “What’s this gay disease?” It was a really big deal. Had a lot of phone calls about health issues, and it’s really hard. They’d have to call the Center for Disease Control for the most part because we didn’t have all of that information that they needed. Everybody knew that it was a gay disease, so we also dealt with that, all the different HIV and AIDS calls. Some of them were just—people were just bored, or they’re lonely. I know that there are still people out there like that who need a helpline, and I hope that we do it again. That was a very good experience for me. Belmonte We’re actually talking about reactivating it, trying to keep it going through the day, actually. Dodwell Good, it’s very much needed. Oh, god. Belmonte People call all the time, Dodwell Yes, they do. Belmonte Those pained coming out calls in particular. Dodwell Yeah, the coming out ones. Oh yeah. Oh gosh, yeah. Belmonte You’ve alluded several times to drug and alcohol use in the community. What are your impressions of the role that it’s played in gay life in Tulsa? Do you think the situation is similar now, or has it changed over time? Dodwell Well, even back then, I think the drug use—I don’t really think it was any different than in the straight community. We might have used a little more poppers, but I don’t think there was that much of a difference. As far as the role that it played, I know that, especially when HIV came up so strong and they finally realized what it was, there were so many people who continued to want to use drugs and knew that it could lower your immune system, or it could do some damage to your system for whatever reason. I think as far as—there’s a lot of people in the straight community who think that we’re all about drugs and sex, and maybe they need to look in their own backyard. Belmonte Right. Let’s backtrack a little bit and talk about your nephew. It sounds like he was quite flamboyant. It sounds like you might have had some familiarity with the drag community in Tulsa, which is not something I’ve heard much about. Dodwell Really? Belmonte Could you tell me—well, I have some interviews scheduled, people that are definitely going to fill that gap, but it sounds like you have been seeing drag 16 �shows and knowing the people that perform drag for quite a long time. Care to elaborate on that? Dodwell Sure. I came out during the times when Trudy Tyler used to be real big, real big. Patty and Tuna Melt were real big. Have you heard of them? And Miko, yes. Miko. Belmonte Nico with an N? Dodwell With an M. Belmonte Miko. Okay. Dodwell Yeah, I’m real close to the drag community even today. I think they’re an important part of our community. Sure, they’re dramatic; they’re supposed to be. (Laughs) Early on, the drag community was very small. Now it’s very big in Tulsa. It’s even bigger in different states, but it’s much bigger now than I ever imagined it to be. I just think that they played a really important part in our community and the way that—I don’t know if the mainstream society will ever see them as being okay, but that’s their problem. Belmonte Tell me some about what you think that role is and has been historically? When was the first time you went to a drag club? Dodwell Oh gosh, it was Zipper’s, and it was the early ’80s, ’83 or ’84, something like that. I just fell in love with them. I just did, and I don’t know why. (Laughs) I still don’t know why. (Laughs) I thought they had attitude, and most of them had talent; most of them did. As far as their role in historic— maybe just from their sheer talent and guts and strength, they’re very strong, strong people. Maybe when they just have a wig on, but at least they’re strong then. Maybe if they take the wig off, it’s not so much, but at least they get the point across. I’ve been to drag queen car washes that used to be on Peoria quite a bit, and they would be in full drag in the heat. Can you imagine? Heat and heels: no, no, no. (Laughs) They donated all their money to whatever, and most of the time, most of the drag shows—unless it’s a competition or a pageant or something—they donate their money to causes in the community. They pick certain ones to do that with. There’s always some kind of a drag queen war going on in between each other, but they all do the same thing. Belmonte What were some of the other bars that became known for drag? Dodwell There was Zipper’s, and Tracy’s was a big drag bar, definitely. For a short time, and I don’t know why, but TNT’s was a drag bar. It wasn’t all men, but it was kind of a combination of drag queen and king. They did it for a while, and then of course, there are plenty more now. I know that there’s 17 �another one that was really big into drag, but I can’t remember. Of course, The Jewel Box, (Laughs) yes, with their shag carpet, and The Bamboo. That’s it. There may be more, but those are the ones that I remember the most that people knew that they could call and say, “When are you having your next drag show?” and all of that. Belmonte When was the first time you remember hearing about AIDS in Tulsa? Dodwell While I was working on the helpline. I was on the board, and we got something. Doug Hartson was president at the time, and we got something from the newspaper or somewhere, but we had an emergency board meeting about it. They were talking about this gay disease, and we need to—and also from Nancy McDonald because she was working on something up there too. Just kind of a combination of a couple people. Belmonte How did the community mobilize in response to AIDS? Did it mobilize? Dodwell Well, I think the leaders of the community did, and the health department, of course. Once the news media got a hold of it, that’s all we needed. It was just “Get away from gay people,” “Oh, he’s gay. Yeah, he’s got AIDS. I’m sure.” We had the stigma just probably like every other community did. Ours might have lasted a little longer; there are people still very uneducated over that. Belmonte Did you ever go to follies review or any of the—what were some of the fundraisers along those lines that you recall that helped raise money for AIDS? Dodwell Went to a lot of drag shows. They did that. I went to the follies, and I went to two or three of them at least, maybe more, that the money that was raised went to some sort of research, or through Tulsa Cares, or something like the HIV helping agencies and things like that. Mostly the bars, the bars really kicked in on a lot of things. “We’ll have these shows, no problem. We’ll lower the drink prices so people will come in, and do this.” I think as a community as a whole, I know everybody was terrified. I know they were. They didn’t know what to do, and so they were doing everything they could to maybe make it better. If the money helped, then great. Belmonte Were any of your personal acquaintances or friends victims of the disease? Dodwell Oh yeah. I’ve been to more funerals than I’d prefer to be. My very first friend who died from AIDS is Eric Guinness, and he was a very good friend of mine. When his partner—when he was dying, and his partner took him to the hospital, it was the St. Francis’ in Broken Arrow, took him over there. He was throwing up blood, and he was just really bad. They would not touch 18 �him because they knew he had AIDS. They would not touch him. They told him he needed to go to the one in Tulsa, the hospital in Tulsa. Belmonte Do you recall what year that was? Dodwell That was ’89 or ’90. Belmonte Tell me if you can recall any other instances along those lines: people’s family reactions, people whose partners might have then had clashes with family. Do you recall any instances like that? Dodwell Are you talking about for AIDS? Belmonte For AIDS in particular, with hospital, medical authorities. Dodwell Medical authorities, oh yeah. It was a real big deal. Of course, it was full gown, and facial, and gloves, and everything for everybody that would enter the room, including the doctor and nurses. I was an HIV care coordinator for OSU, and this—just recently I guess. I’d go up to the hospital—even today, would go to the hospitals here, TRMC or any of these hospitals around. It’s awful, but especially like St. John’s and St. Francis, they just don’t know how to treat it; they don’t want to treat it. I don’t know why, whatever, maybe it’s a religious thing. I do know that TRMC is the most compassionate, from my experience, with people like that. As far as reactions, they just get treated differently. Whenever I was going before to my friends and seeing them in the hospital and to now, it’s getting a little better, maybe because education is better, I hope. Back then, even the doctors and the nurses were not as educated as what they should be. They would never think of kissing somebody on the lips who had AIDS. I mean, they just don’t understand what it’s about. Belmonte When did you become an HIV/AIDS educator? Dodwell Let’s see. When I went to work for OSU, that’s how I started— Belmonte OSU Medical School? Dodwell Yeah, off Southwest Boulevard. It was a grant-funded position, so it was a short-term thing. I started doing that four years ago, almost four years ago. I worked there two and a half, three years, two and a half years, I guess. I did testing, HIV testing and counseling. Did the statistics and everything as far as the patients that were coming in. I learned, and I saw a lot. A lot of times they’ll come in to be tested, and they’re straight. It’s like, “I can’t have AIDS because I’m not a homosexual,” so I have to educate them and talk to them, and it takes forever. It was important to me that if they did, if they were positive, they needed to be educated just for the safety of their own 19 �self. I saw a lot in the community. Some people who get AIDS, they have a whole different look at life after they get over all the pissed off stage and everything else, and they kind of get down to it. It’s like, “Okay. Well, let’s see. I’ve got this much to live or not to live or whatever. I’m going to make a difference.” Hopefully they continue to do that, and most of them did. Belmonte Have you had much experience with members of the black gay and lesbian community in Tulsa? Dodwell Very little. Very little. Belmonte Do you have any theories why there may be such a—it’s a tremendous gap in this community along this line. Do you have any impressions as to why that might be? Dodwell Do you really want to know? Belmonte Yeah. Dodwell The ones that I do know—the ones that I’ve met and talked to, I’ve asked them—especially when I was on the board, I would say, “Why are you coming to be on the board? Have you volunteered? Bring some of your friends. We have a resource here, and this is really good.” It was like, “I don’t have enough money for them.” That’s been the rumor for years. What do you do? I say, “No, no, you have this talent. You have this, and you have this. You can do it,” but it’s going to take more than just one or two people to go out and say, “Come on in. Come in and talk to us. Join us here.” Other than being a cultural difference, I don’t know what else it would be. Belmonte Do you think that class gap that you’re alluding to affects a lot of white members of the gay and lesbian community? Dodwell You bet it does. Belmonte Tell me more about that because this is not the first time I’m hearing this charge made at TOHR. (Laughter) Dodwell I have no real issues with TOHR. I believe in it. I want to continue to believe in it. There are a lot of people who are believing right now that it’s an elitist society. As far as—you have to be somebody to be a part of it. I’ve been a part of TOHR since the ’80s. Belmonte For twenty years. Dodwell Yeah. I don’t think I have much of a balance on my checkbook. You know, I don’t have that much money, but I believe in the community, and I believe 20 �in the people in the community. But from what I have heard—I get a lot of emails from people just telling me things that they’ve experienced like, “I went into TOHR. I went into the office, and they looked at me like I was just this bum, and I wasn’t going to be accepted, and I didn’t feel right. They’re all walking around with suits and briefcases.” Anyway, they would say this, and I’d write back and just like, “Give them another chance and go back up there. Try to see what you can do.” There are a lot of people right now—I cannot believe I’m telling you this—but there are just a lot of people that have lost any kind of hope for TOHR. You know that. Belmonte I do know that. As someone who’s on the board, it’s something I care about and hope to change. One of the reasons why I founded this project is I want everyone’s voices to be heard as part of this. Dodwell Right. It’s important to me that people understand that TOHR is what you make it, or the community is what you make it, period. I may not agree with everything that they do, but who does? That’s crazy. Everybody has their own agenda and whatever. I just—there’s a lot of people on the bandwagon right now that are just saying, “Oh, they did this, and they’re doing this. They’re doing that.” One thing that I have preached and preached, and you know, it’s [inaudible] thing. I’ve said, “Keep whining because that’s all you’re going to get is whine. That’s it. Do something about it. Get up off your butt and go down there and volunteer and do something about it. Stop your frickin’ whining.” I will continue to say that. If things work out—if a building is built, and these people still think this way, it doesn’t always— people don’t always come when you build the building. You have to get it going. It takes some time. Belmonte It sounds like you’ve done a lot of different things over the years for the community. You mentioned HIV and the hotline. What are some of the other things that you have done as a volunteer in the community? Dodwell I was on the board. I’ve been on the board twice. The first time was the helpline, and the second time I was the programming. Belmonte What year was this? Dodwell When I was on the board the first time, it was 1985 to ’89. Yes. Belmonte Do you remember who else was on the board with you at that time? Dodwell Penny Humphrey, Doug Hartson, Dwight Kealiher, Bonnie—and I can’t remember her last name. I think she was with Penny. Steve—I can’t remember his name. Anyway, most of the people—I’m sure people who know them will see this—McCurly, Steve McCurly. I think Cynthia Corberay, I think. 21 �Belmonte Cynthia what? Dodwell Corberay, I believe. Yeah. Belmonte Tell me what you felt—what was the board like in that first period? What was TOHR like? Dodwell The board was actually fun. There was a lot of energy, a lot of motivation to get people involved. There were some problems in the sidelines, just like any other board, but they were, for the most part, pretty positive. We had a lot of speakers at our meetings. We did our best to plan events and to increase membership and then members coming in to the center. We had a little—a small library, and I think we had a few videos people could check out, but not a lot. The main focus of the actual office was the helpline. It was a big deal. It was really kind of nice to be on the board and just to see—or to be a part of TOHR at that time. There were a lot of changes that were going on: some negative, some positive. Belmonte Give me some examples. Dodwell The negatives were changing with AIDS and having to make those precautions. Changes with—as far as positive—just more people being interested in what’s going on. We have more—we had garage sales and things to raise money for different events that were coming up. The follies were real big, and of course gay pride. The picnics were really big too. Belmonte Tell me about those. What was the first one of those that you went to? Dodwell I went to my first picnic—it was at Mohawk. Belmonte How did you guys get the word out in the community? Dodwell Through the bars, for the most part, and through—some through TOHR but mostly through the bars. Lots of signs. That was when the bars are the ones really who put it on. People from TOHR and other people came to it, but they would cook hot dogs, and they’d have hamburgers. It was just—they’d have their kids there and whatever. It would be a big, ole—well, by the end of the day, it was a drunk fest, but it was fun! (Laughter) Belmonte Do you remember how many people would go to those? Dodwell Hundreds. It was pretty big. Never really had any trouble at Mohawk Park that I know of. Went there a couple of summers a couple of times, two that I know of, maybe three. Then it was moved to another park on the west side 22 �of Tulsa, and we were there for a couple of years. I think from there it went to Veteran’s Park. Belmonte Do you—you remember ever going to the Black and White parties? Dodwell Oh yeah. Belmonte Tell me what those were like. Dodwell Well, the first Black and White I went to, The Village People were there to perform. That’s when I took my mother. That was a lot of fun. People were in there—I mean, it was packed. It was at the fairgrounds; it was packed. It was every combination of black and white you can imagine was there. Some people were in tuxes, some people had limos they’d come in, and they would—of course that’s when I think the bar—it was an open bar, you didn’t have to pay or something. I can’t remember, but it was a real big deal because they had to limit your drinks. The music was great, and it was just—it was a huge success. I went to three of them. I do remember, however, whenever the Black and White used to be by invitation only, and if you didn’t know somebody who was going or who was a part of it, then you couldn’t get in. I remember that. I was so mad because I thought, “Why?” Belmonte It changed from an invitation-only event to one that was publicized, and you could just pay at the door? Is that what you’re telling me? Dodwell Yeah, several years later. There, for a while it was like, “You got Black and White too? How did you do that? Who do you know?” It was a big deal. Belmonte Did you go to any of the Harwelden? Dodwell No, I did not. No. Belmonte Which remains invitation-only. Okay. Dodwell Yeah. Belmonte You were on the TOHR board. What made you get off the board the first time? Dodwell I think I had some personal issues with my family that I had to pay attention to that I wasn’t able to do it. I was still involved; I just stepped down from the—well, from the helpline the first time. The second time that I was on the board, I was helping take care of an elderly family member, my ex’s. Belmonte What year was this? 23 �Dodwell This was just a little over two years ago. I wasn’t going to have time. Well, they were also phasing out the programming, and so basically I wasn’t going to be on the board anymore. I thought, “This is probably a good time for me to step down.” Belmonte What was the rationale behind that? Dodwell Let’s see. Belmonte I know some of this might be sensitive in terms of personalities. Dodwell No, that’s okay! People are people. They’ve got to do what they’ve got to do. We had a training with the board. It was downtown, and it was a whole day training. At that training, they decided to go ahead and eliminate the programming of TOHR. I thought, “Okay, where does this leave me?” They wanted to do it until either they got a building or until they got things a little more straightened out with legalities. We had issues—we had so many programs that we wanted to work. We had one for the elderly where we could go and check on our lesbian and gay elderly people and make sure they were okay, run to the store if we needed to or whatever, and we had volunteers to do that. Issues came up with—“What if they didn’t have insurance on their car? Is it going to come back to TOHR because they’re volunteering in TOHR?” It was just—it just kept building and building and building, and it got to the point where it was like, “Okay, wait. We need to stop. We can’t have these programs anymore.” We had the Rainbow Families, which was huge, and they met at the center, and then they met in other different places. There were some people who were uncomfortable with children being in the center. Mainly—there were some of the transgendered people who were a little concerned because they didn’t want to confuse them, because a lot of times they would be dressing in one room, and they didn’t want the kids to run into the room and things like that. It was just—it was kind of a legal thing. They wanted to have everything written and drawn up, and they wanted to have enough volunteers to run those programs. We didn’t at the time. People were dropping out of TOHR just right and left because of whatever they disagreed with or whatever. Belmonte What were some of those reasons? Do you recall? Dodwell Most of the reasons were—they felt like—they would volunteer information; they would say, “Okay, I have an idea. Why don’t we do this or this or this?” and then someone on the board or whatever would just say, “Well, that’s a stupid idea.” Or, they would make time to come to our board meeting, which usually was like five hours long. 24 �Belmonte Still is. (Laughs) Dodwell They would make time to go, and they would sit there during the whole meeting. It’s like “No, we need to get them out of here and listen to what they have to say.” When they would listen to what they had to say, nobody else would respond to it. They would say, “Well, okay. We’ll look at it.” They would leave the room, and as soon as they would, they would just turn the paper over and go, “Okay, next.” They wouldn’t about it. They wouldn’t even think about an idea or a problem or something like that. There were a lot of emotions involved whenever I was involved the last time I was on the board. As far as changes and people getting hurt or feeling like they weren’t being listened to or that “Oh, it’s just like it was before. You’ve got to have a lot of money. You’ve got to be a man before you’re in TOHR.” I don’t believe that myself, really, but you know… Belmonte This was in the—this period you’re talking about now, be more chronologically specific. Dodwell Chronologically specific. About three years ago. Belmonte Was this when Carrie and Greg were the president—who was president during this period? Dodwell Brent. Belmonte Brent. Okay. Dodwell Yes, Brent was, and Carrie was President Emeritus. There were issues even there. Greg was still on the board, too. Belmonte Right. They were—this was when Dee was president very briefly, and Brent came up. Dodwell Yes, I was on the board then, too. Belmonte I’m sure there was some fallout in the wake of that. Dodwell Yeah, there was. I will say something, though. I will say that I don’t know what Dee did. I don’t know what she did, but it was—considering the time I have known about TOHR and the things that TOHR has done, she is the only person who has every brought that many people into the center, in my opinion, in history of TOHR. I don’t know how she did it. I know she probably did some things, and maybe she shouldn’t have, but she brought the community together more than I have seen anybody else. I don’t even—I don’t know Dee all that well, but I just know that I wish we could do that again because we were having people—we had waiting lists for people to 25 �get a space at the center. There were that many people there. It was just incredible. You’d go into the center, and you’d have to go down the hall and squeeze through people and stuff; they’re everywhere. I just wanted to say that. Belmonte That’s good to know. Bought all of her volunteer mobilization policies. (Laughter) Dodwell No kidding. Belmonte That’s one thing that’s very interesting about being a historian: there are many sides of the same event. I’m sure that Dee’s take on this would differ from others. Dodwell It might even differ from mine. (Laughs) Belmonte Right. Were you involved on the board when they started having the gay pride march? Dodwell You mean the… Belmonte The actual march that precedes the festival. Dodwell Yeah. Well, was I? No, I wasn’t on the board when they first did it. No, I was not. Belmonte Okay. We talked about the origins of that some. Oh! Let’s talk about your alter ego, Dyke Divine! How could we not talk about that? How long have you done this? Did you do it before email? Tell me some about the history of Dyke Divine. How could I forget that? Oh my goodness. Dodwell (Laughs) I’ve been doing the Dyke Divine thing for a little over six years, roughly. How it started was my mother got really sick, and I needed an outlet over something. I was depressed, and upset, and I didn’t really know what to do, and so I started to write. There was a guy named David Jennings, a real asshole—oh, sorry. Anyway. Belmonte That’s okay. (Laughter) There’s profanity on it elsewhere. Dodwell Okay. He did something called GayTulsa.org. I was starting to read his stuff, and it was like, oh my gosh, he was horrible. He was cutting down the bars and all this. I thought he was very funny, but some of the stuff was like, “Man, that’s going to get you killed!” Well, I started writing to him, and as I did that, he said, “If you’ve got something to say, why don’t you write for me?” “Okay then.” I just started doing that, and I started just being myself and writing about things and people. Sometimes I did bar reviews, and 26 �usually that got me death threats. I started with the community and talking about those kind of things. Belmonte Do you have hard copies of a lot of these things? Dodwell You bet I do. Belmonte Would you be willing to donate copies of them to the project? Dodwell Sure, you bet. Belmonte Great. We’ll talk about that in the future. Dodwell I just started to get emails. I mean, I would open my email, and I’d have thirty, forty a day. It was like, oh my gosh, it’s like, “When are you going to write again? When are you going to write again?” He’d post all of my articles and things, and I’d try to write every other day. Then people started writing, just like, “You know, you really helped. You helped me.” It’s like, “I can’t get enough of you.” Belmonte What type of things would you write about? Dodwell Sometimes I would write about breakups. I went through a really—well, it should have been a better breakup than what it was. Belmonte Isn’t that always the case, though? Dodwell Everybody tried to help. I wrote this really, really, really, really bad article about people minding their own frickin’ business. It was a hit, (Laughs) and I just—I didn’t stop. I think part of it, I was angry about my mom. I didn’t want her to be sick, but it was a real good release for me. I never mentioned anybody’s names, and most of the time—most of my articles have a lot to do with something I’ve either experienced personally, or I know personally somebody else who has done it, but I don’t use other people’s names. Sometimes it’s like, give me a break. It’s like the whining thing. I wrote about that. It’s like, you know, just shit or get off the pot. Come on. I don’t believe that people—maybe I say things—and I’ve heard this from a lot of people, but I say things that most people don’t, or never would want to say to anybody else in their life, because I try to tell people how it is. I try to do it. I love to write. Then I figured out that I had something to say to the community, and they were listening. Oh my god, they were listening to me. (Laughs) Belmonte Thirty, forty emails a day, boy, that’s a lot of time to invest in— 27 �Dodwell Yeah, and it got more. I got a whole lot more. Then I finally got my own domain, and I have my own site now in which I do all my own stuff. Oh man. Belmonte Did you teach yourself how to do all of the web design and everything? Dodwell Yeah. Belmonte You started building this rather amazing email database. How many people do you think are in that list now? Dodwell I have 2,800 people on my list. Belmonte That’s impressive. Dodwell (Laughs) It’s a lot. Yeah, it’s about 2,800. Belmonte Mostly women? Dodwell Combination. A lot of straight people and just people who have said, “Put me on the email list. I want that.” Belmonte What do you do? You do a weekly newsletter, postings, what do you use this list for mainly? Dodwell To give information out about things that are going on in the community. I don’t use it for things—that other email that was going around. I might send that to one or two people but not the community. It’s usually community events. I don’t know, just—I believe that these—I don’t know. I kept telling my ex, I said, “How in the world are they—it’s like they’re not working or sleeping or something. It’s like they’ve emailed me two, three times a day.” I didn’t know what to do with all that. Boy, let me tell you: it gets your head really big. I had to really watch it. (Laughs) Belmonte That’s clearly serving a need. Dodwell Yeah, I’m glad I am. It makes me feel good, makes me feel really good. Terry You’ve got a big gay pride parade, and she wore a t-shirt, and on the back it said “Dyke Divine.” People would walk up and go, “Oh man, I love your website!” Belmonte That’s great. In some ways, it strikes me as you’ve just taken the helpline work you did digital. 28 �Dodwell Yes. Then I’ll get an email that will say “searching for help.” I’m like, “Oh god, here we go.” It’s like, “Okay.” Sometimes it’s something real basic, and sometimes it’s, “I need to get out of this abusive situation,” or “I just left my husband. I know I’m a lesbian, but he’s going to kill me.” There’s just—I can’t stop it because now people depend on it. It took me a while to figure that out. I was just like, “Oh, they don’t pay attention.” The very first—two prides ago, maybe three, I was DJ’ing at the picnic. It was when, right in the middle of the ole Dyke Divine thing going, and girls would come up and they’d always be like, “Where’s Dyke Divine?” They would come up to the picnic thing; they’d come up to my little booth, and they’d go, “Can you sign my shirt?” (Laughs) “Sure,” and I’d dot my I’s. (Laughter) It’s been a lot of fun. It really has. I’m glad it’s helped some people. Belmonte That’s great. I think I have covered a lot of ground with you here, and I certainly appreciate your time, both of your time. Unless you have anything you’d like to add … Dodwell I do have one thing I’d like to add. I want to tell you a small story about—it was Christmastime, and we did what’s called a fairy tree at the center. It was for people who had some kids or knew people who had kids that might need some help at Christmas. The whole community would get together, and they would buy gifts. They would bring them to the—instead of an angel tree, we called it a fairy tree. Anyway, we were there one night, and a whole bunch of us were there, and there was a guy that came in. He looked like just this big, ole, burly—this bald-headed boy; he was just tough-looking. He said, “Is this TOHR?” and I said “Yes it is.” He said, “I’ve got some toys for you. You may want to come out and get them.” I thought, “I don’t even know this guy. Okay.” I went out, and he did. His whole back end of his truck was full of toys. We were on our way out there, and he said, “I can’t use them anymore,” and he would bring the toys. He starts bringing them in and all this. On the last load, he’s bringing them in; he starts to cry. He said, “You want to know why I’m doing this?” I said, “Okay.” He said, “I just came from”—he had just came from his parents’ house, and I guess his—not his parents, his oldest daughter’s house. His oldest daughter would not let him give all these gifts. He had four grandchildren he had never met. She would not let him see them, or give them gifts, or even leave the gifts for them because he was gay. He was in tears. This big man put the sack down, and he just grabbed me and just was crying. He said, “I don’t know what I would have done if you all would not have been open.” That is why we need [inaudible], and that was why we need [inaudible]. Belmonte That’s a pretty poignant way to end this, and I appreciate your time. This concludes this interview. 29 �------- End of interview ------- 30 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [Series] Oral Histories Project > Interviews Description An account of the resource <strong>Physical Media:</strong> <br />Box 7, Folder 7 - Dr. Leisa Meyer Program<br />Box 7, Folder 8 - Interviewees Materials, Original Series 2003-2007<br /><br /><strong>Digital Media:</strong> Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [2004] Anna Dodwell Interview Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource August 1, 2004 Subject The topic of the resource Anna Dodwell Oral History Project Interview from August 1, 2004 Description An account of the resource Video recording and transcript of oral history interview with Laura Belmonte on August 1, 2004. Anna was born on September 7th, 1963, in Tulsa. She attended public schools in Tulsa. Around 1983, she became aware of Oklahomans for Human Rights, Tulsa Chapter, [predecessor to Oklahomans for Equality] through her contact with its Helpline. She recalls the bar life around this time and other aspects of the Tulsa LGBTQ+ community. She became an active volunteer with OHR and then its successor organization Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights, serving on the board and active participant with the Helpline. Through Oklahoma State University, she became a HIV/AIDS educator. She wrote the highly popular “Dyke Divine.” She discusses the various challenges facing the organization and the “class” divide within the community. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Anna Dodwell, Laura Belmonte, Dennis Neill 2004 AIDS AIDS/HIV AIDS/HIV education Anna Dodwell bar life Dyke Divine helpline HIV HIV Education HIV/AIDs interview Laura A. Belmonte Laura Belmonte OHR OKEQ Oral History Project Oklahoma State University Oklahoma State University (OSU) Oklahomans for Human Rights Oklahomans for Human Rights - Tulsa Chapter oral history oral history interview Oral History Project oral history transcript OSU TOHR TOHR helpline transcript Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights (TOHR) video Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [Series] Oral Histories Project > Interviews Description An account of the resource <strong>Physical Media:</strong> <br />Box 7, Folder 7 - Dr. Leisa Meyer Program<br />Box 7, Folder 8 - Interviewees Materials, Original Series 2003-2007<br /><br /><strong>Digital Media:</strong> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [2004] Bob Inglish Interview Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource January 30, 2004 Description An account of the resource Video recording and transcript of oral history interview with Laura Belmonte on January 30, 2004. <strong>Video and Transcript available at the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center for on-site research</strong><strong>.</strong> Bob grew Okmulgee, Oklahoma. He attended Oklahoma State University and received a law degree from the University of Oklahoma. While at OU, he came “out.” He returned to Okmulgee and entered into a law practice with his father. Although practicing in Okmulgee, Bob lived in Tulsa, where he realized in the late 1970s that the gay life was almost solely centered on the bars. With Dennis Neill, Mike Green, Gary Durst and others, in 1980 they became the Tulsa Chapter of Oklahomans for Human Rights, which was formed around 1977 in Oklahoma City. Bob served as the first treasurer of OHR. The early focus of OHR was to provide social and educational opportunities to the LGBTQ community in addition to the bars. In 1985, the organization became its own nonprofit under the name of Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights. Bob highlights the early challenge of engaging with the lesbian community to broaden OHR and TOHR’s outreach. He discusses the origins of the Harwelden Party which began in 1980, and the Black and White Party held for 10 years in the 1980s. He talks about his involvement with the ACLU and Tulsa’s and TOHR’s response to the AIDS crisis. Subject The topic of the resource Bob Inglish Oral History Project Interview from January 30, 2004 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bob Inglish, Laura Belmonte, Dennis Neill 2004 ACLU AIDS AIDS/HIV available at Center Black and White Gala Black and White Party Bob Inglish Dennis Neill Gary Durst Harwelden Party HIV/AIDs interview Laura A. Belmonte Laura Belmonte Mike Green OHR OKEQ Oral History Project Oklahoma State University Oklahoma State University (OSU) Oklahomans for Human Rights Oklahomans for Human Rights - Tulsa Chapter oral history oral history interview Oral History Project oral history transcript OSU OU TOHR transcript Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights (TOHR) University of Oklahoma University of Oklahoma (OU) video Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [Series] Oral Histories Project > Interviews Description An account of the resource <strong>Physical Media:</strong> <br />Box 7, Folder 7 - Dr. Leisa Meyer Program<br />Box 7, Folder 8 - Interviewees Materials, Original Series 2003-2007<br /><br /><strong>Digital Media:</strong> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [2004] Dwight Kealiher Interview Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 25, 2004 Description An account of the resource Video recording and transcript of oral history interview with Laura Belmonte on July 25, 2004. <strong>Video and Transcript available at the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center for on-site research.</strong> Dwight Kealiher was born in Tulsa and lived in Poteau, Sallisaw, Sulphur, Ada, and Checotah. He grew up in a Southern Baptist family, living a pretty typical small-town life. 6 After graduating from Checotah High School, he enrolled at Oklahoma State University (then, Oklahoma A&amp;M College) in 1955 as a business major. After college, he married a girl he knew from Checotah, staying married for twenty years and having three sons. During that time, however, Dwight also fully recognized that he was gay. Also after college, he spent six months, active duty, at Fort Leonard Wood in the National Guard. He then moved to Tulsa where he fulfilled the remaining five and a half years in the Reserves of his six-year commitment and got a job with a CPA firm. He took some accounting classes at University of Tulsa and later passed the CPA exam, and in 1989, he ventured out on his own, opening his own office in Tulsa. Over the years, he’s been active in local LGBTQ+ support groups such as Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights (now Oklahomans for Equality), Regional AIDS Interfaith Network (RAIN), Tulsa Cares, and Health Outreach Prevention Education (HOPE), along with being a successful businessman. Subject The topic of the resource Dwight Kealiher Oral History Project Interview from July 25, 2004 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dwight Kealiher, Laura Belmonte, Dennis Neill 2004 available at Center Dwight Kealiher H.O.P.E. Health Outreach Prevention and Education (H.O.P.E.) HOPE interview Laura A. Belmonte Laura Belmonte OKEQ Oral History Project Oklahoma State University Oklahoma State University (OSU) oral history oral history interview Oral History Project oral history transcript OSU RAIN Regional AIDS Interfaith Network (RAIN) TOHR transcript TU Tulsa CARES Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights (TOHR) University of Tulsa video https://history.okeq.org/files/original/18ab089ee94d63ffd9e7d04ee1d65c33.mp4 7d9e214b99d8ee9a56603bf83ef4c16e https://history.okeq.org/files/original/bd38c834e284b300aec3bb350b6559a0.pdf c65882cf093a1122f482853b3eeea6c7 PDF Text Text Oral History Interview with Janet Gearin Interview Conducted by Laura Belmonte February 22, 2004 OKEQ Oral History Project Oklahoma Oral History Research Program Edmon Low Library ● Oklahoma State University ©2004 �OKEQ Oral History Project Interview History Interviewer: Laura Belmonte Transcriber: Janet Gearin Editors: Anika Benthem The recording and transcript of this interview were processed at the Oklahoma State University Library in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Project Detail The OKEQ Oral History Project is a series of interviews documenting the rich contributions of LGBTQ community members in the state of Oklahoma, with a particular emphasis on Tulsa and the surrounding area. These interviews were conducted by members of Oklahomans for Equality, formerly Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights. Legal Status Scholarly use of the recordings and transcripts of the interview with Janet Gearin is unrestricted. The interview agreement was signed on February 22, 2004. 2 �OKEQ Oral History Project Janet Gearin Oral History Interview [Editor note – Janet provided an update in March 2026 which is at the end of this transcript in an Addendum.] Interviewed by Laura Belmonte February 22, 2004 Tulsa, Oklahoma Belmonte It is Sunday, February 22, 2004, and I am Laura Belmonte with Jennifer Davis, and today we are interviewing Janet Gearin. Janet, will you just begin with some basic, biographical information? Gearin You want my age and all of that? (Laughs) Belmonte Your birthday, occupation, you know, that sort of stuff. Gearin Now, I just turned February 3. I was born in 1947, so I’m fifty-seven years old. I’m from Oklahoma, born in Vinita. Didn’t live there very long. Folks lived mostly in Duncan, and I actually finished high school in Lindsay, Oklahoma, which is south of Oklahoma City. When I finished high school, I decided that I wanted to go to college, did so, and went to the University of—Oklahoma College of Liberal Arts, I should say. It had changed—it was OCW, which was Oklahoma College for Women, but the year before I went, they actually changed it to a co-ed school, so that was really quite an experience to be there at a university that had been a women’s college for fifty-some-odd years. I had a really good time there. I was a biology major, minored in chemistry, and I was pre-med at that time. When it got time for me to go and interview at the University of Oklahoma for med school, I was declined admission, primarily because I was a woman, but at that time, I didn’t really want to take issue with it. I kind of started to get cold feet anyway, so I—after I finished my degree there, I went ahead and worked for a year at Saint Francis. I worked in labor and delivery and decided that that was my life. I really like labor and delivery and thought seriously that I would be like a midwife. I stayed there for a little over a year. I applied to nursing school and was accepted into the University of Colorado and was there for three years getting a bachelor’s of science and nursing. However, along the way, while I 3 �was in that process of three years, I realized that there was very little work and employment for midwives. Unless you lived in Kentucky or parts of Tennessee, you really couldn’t practice that. I made a course change as I was in nursing school and decided that I really psychiatry. From that point on, I became invested in pursuing a career in psychiatric nursing. While there, I was talked to by my professor, and she suggested that I consider going to get my master’s degree and becoming what they were calling a clinical specialist. It was a brand new role, been out for a couple of years. I looked at the various universities across the country, and basically, there were ten that offered that degree: places like Rutgers, Boston University, Case Western University, University of Colorado, University of California, San Francisco, University of Washington—really great places. Had no way of being able to travel and seeing where I wanted to go, so just kind of talking with various professors and ruling out places because they only accepted men, which was really (Laughs)—I had no idea that I would get accepted to all of them, and I felt that surely if I found one that would take me, that would answer that question. I ended up getting accepted to all ten universities, and then I had to make a choice. I decided that I wanted to go west and went to the University of California, San Francisco and lived there for two years while I worked on my master’s degree. Then decided at that point in time that I really needed to come home. My parents were aging; I had a grandmother that was in her eighties, and I felt like I really needed to come back to Oklahoma. I’d always said that if I got my degree, I would come back to Oklahoma and try and help upgrade nursing here because it was really quite antiquated compared to how progressive it was on each coast. Did come back. The only way I could come back was by working with the Department of Veterans Affairs because no one else was going to pay me the salary that I felt like I at least needed and wanted, so I did come back, work with the VA in Muskogee. Started there March of ’75, and I’ve been with the VA ever since then. Opened a brand new mental health clinic in Muskogee. I was the first person they hired for that clinic, and then, when we moved up to Tulsa in ’79, I opened the clinic there, helped get that set up. Then three years ago, we relocated here in Tulsa to 41st and Mingo and opened that one. Actually have now been in three different mental health clinics, but all with the VA. I now have twenty-nine years of experience there and work with veterans within mental health, and love my work. I truly do. I have still great energy and a gift for my work and love it, dearly love it. That’s kind of where I’ve been. The other parts of my life, in terms of more personal, is I’m the youngest of six children, and it was yours, mine, and our—I’m the “our” child. I have, surviving, I have two older brothers and one older sister; the other two are deceased. There’s a difference of twenty-one years between me and my 4 �oldest sister, and the next youngest is eleven years older than I am. For the most part, I was really kind of an alone child who grew up pretty much kind of on my own, latchkey kid. My father was a grocery man and did that until he retired because of health reasons. Parents are both deceased. When I was in college in Chickasha, realized that I probably was not quite like everybody else in terms of my sexual orientation, and that’s really kind of when I began to explore some of that. Belmonte Now, have you classified yourself as homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual for most of your adult life? Gearin Homosexual. My family has pretty much known about that for the last thirty years. Didn’t really while I was out and away and going to school. It really was never talked about, you know, any of that. My one, big, huge regret is that my mother died before we really had a chance to talk about that because I was really very young. I was just into my thirties when she died and was in a very early relationship, my first real relationship, and just didn’t really get a chance to talk about that, and I regret that. I really wish that I had. I’ve had talks with brothers and sisters and my father, had a good talk with him about it. You know, that’s kind of how that got involved. When I started work here in Tulsa, I never really belonged to any kind of organization. I know that part of your interest, I guess, still is TOHR [Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights], but— Belmonte Not specifically, the whole community. Gearin Okay. When I moved here, I was in a relationship, and it was another nurse that was with the VA, and she had to medically retire because she was injured on the job. Altogether, we were in a twenty-five year relationship. I have a long history here in Tulsa. I’ve met lots of—I don’t even know how many hundreds of people I’ve met over the years. I feel that I’ve had a very rich life, and it’s been very different from my professional life, though, because I’m not exactly out, as you would say, in terms of my work, but I know that those folks have known me all these years. A majority of them do know, and I do have a couple of really good friends at work that do know. When I was—my relationship ended a few years ago, it was very difficult for me, and I confided in the psychiatrist that I work with here. She already knew pretty much anyway, so without her help and my other friends’ help, I really would have had a difficult time. Belmonte How old were you when you had your first homosexual experience? Gearin Let’s see, I think I was fifteen, if I remember…I believe I was fifteen! And it was in the back of a car! (Laughter) That’s not even the best part. The best part is that it was moving; it was being driven by the girl’s mother. We were 5 �on our way to California. I was just about to panic; I’ll never forget that. That was probably the most priceless experience I had in my life. Belmonte Had you suspected there was something different? When do you recall thinking that for the first time? Gearin Actually, it was because of her. When I was in high school—this will really—well, I’ve already told you how old I am. I was in band. I was a very active band student, a very good musician. Belmonte What years did you go to high school? Gearin This would have been, let’s see, I was in ninth grade, so this would have been freshman in high school. It would’ve ben ’61? There were a group of us girls that we’d hang out. The other girls were a year older than I, and so they would have been sophomores in high school. It was so funny. We really were close; we were really tight knit. All of the sudden I realized—I went to class one day, went to band; band was first thing in the morning, and it was like, “Okay, we’re not talking to Vivienne.” “We’re not? Why?” “She’s queer.” I thought, well—my definition was queer was “odd.” I had no other definition for queer. I’m thinking, “Well, what’s that got to do with not talking to her?” Had not sexualized this at all. Had not a clue. I was just so naïve. We go then to another class, and I’m sitting there, and I’m talking to one of the students before the class starts, and I said, “I don’t really understand what the heck you’re talking about. What’s so strange about Vivienne?” She said, “Janet, that’s not queer. Don’t you know what queer is?” I said, “Yes. It’s strange, odd.” I’m trying to remember what else it was in terms of Webster’s Dictionary. She said, “Janet, no. She’s a lesbian; she’s gay.” Or homosexual, I’m sorry, I don’t even think gay was being used then. I said, “Oh.” I still wasn’t even sure, and I thought, “Huh, how do you know that?” That was my question, was “How do you know that?” Belmonte What did she say? Gearin She said, “Well, one of the girls, Martha told us.” “Well, how does Martha know?” It was like—I was no big deal, so what’s the difference? As it was, the ostracization that she suffered, it was just terrible. I’ve never been able to understand how people discriminate. To me, you care for somebody because of who they are, the person that they are. This was a girl that we had all been friends for many years. We had grown up together, we were in band together, we ran around together, we did things together. Now, they’re saying that because she was queer and she was a homosexual, that now we could no longer have a relationship with her. I probably endured that for, I’d say, maybe a month. I just couldn’t do it anymore. It was like, I would 6 �watch her. She would walk by herself to class. Nobody walked with her, nobody talked with her. Boys made fun of her. Girls would—I mean, it was just awful, it was just absolutely awful. I literally could not tolerate it, and so I just decided one day, I’m walking with her. I went up and walked with her to class, I don’t care. You know, if they don’t like me, that’s it. If I’m like her, then I guess I’m like her. It was at that point in time that I really became very interested in humanity and how we treat each other for being different and not really understanding why we were treating people that differently and hating her and calling her names. I realized that there’s sometimes that you take a risk. I lost my naivete. I realize that there’s times where you take a risk for disclosure of some of this information. I really found her to be extremely brave. I don’t know how she did it because there was a lot of abuse that she endured. I never saw her cry, I never saw her break down, I never saw her complain. It was a really troubling time, but yet it was also a really good time. I became her friend. We had been friends, but it was like I just wasn’t going to let my relationship with her go because other people wouldn’t associate with her. Slowly but surely, and I don’t know that I ever got much in terms of repercussions because after all this time, I don’t really remember anybody saying anything negative to me or distancing themselves the way they did, but it was kind of like people followed suit as I started talking to her again and interacting with her again, other people, I guess, decided that it was okay. I think that maybe many of them felt badly because this was a small town, a small school. There were like sixty of us in my class and maybe about that many in the class ahead of me, so we’re really talking about a pretty small school. A lot of that started to stop and I don’t remember people calling her names or anything else like that after that. It was—but this was the young girl that—she kind of became infatuated with me, and I guess I could understand that, and I did become infatuated with her; she was really my first love. I had no idea until we were in the backseat of that car going to California, and she kissed me. It was like, “Oh.” (Laughs) “I don’t think we should be doing this,” because it was not just a kiss on the cheek, it was like—oh my word. Then I didn’t know what to do because I knew I shouldn’t say anything because her mother was driving. I’m all the sudden thinking, “Oh my god, is she able to see in the rearview mirror?” You know, all these are going through your mind. It’s like, “Stop it, stop it. Don’t do that to me. Stop it. Help. No, no, don’t do this.” Then I was like, “Oh no, you know, this is just not supposed to be happening.” It was really pretty traumatic for me, but at the same time, I think I really was kind of intrigued by it as well. That was the first time. Belmonte Did you wind up having a relationship with Vivienne? 7 �Gearin To some degree, yes. You’re in high school and you’re doing different things, and she was a year older, so this was the summer before her junior year and my sophomore year. We really only had two more years together. We really were good companions. She was a latchkey kid; I was a latchkey kid. We lived close in terms of proximity, and it was kind of a—it was really just a very good friendship. It never really did progress the way it probably would have if I had really known what was going on and understood things. I didn’t push for that much, and she didn’t either. When she went to college—she went to a small college, went to the Oklahoma College for Women—I followed her. I basically did follow her. Since the last—I didn’t want to go to a big university. I knew that I really was not prepared to go to a big university; I had always thought I would go to the University of Oklahoma. I had been—had music scholarships and everything, but just couldn’t quite cut that, so I made the choice to go to a small school, which was just about thirty-five miles from where I lived. They had changed that over that year, and it still was predominantly women, you know, young girls, young women that were at the university there, and it was just a fun—I had a marvelous time for those four years there, just had a marvelous time. Belmonte You know, many women’s colleges have had very active lesbian networks, social lives, you know, even through the twentieth century and late nineteenth century. How would you describe the climate of your school on that? Gearin It was extremely closeted, let me tell you. I didn’t really appreciate the dangers involved. Vivienne, my friend, was really—I think she was always kind of cut out to be the one that was going to be taking that step and be on the edge. She wanted the freedom; she wanted to be who she was and to do what she wanted to do. She ended up being expelled my freshman year for homosexuality, and it was like—I think it was pretty late into my second semester. Belmonte This would have been around, what, 1966? Gearin This was ’66, no ’65. No, I’m sorry. It was ’66, spring of ’66. It was really awful. It was an awful, awful time for me. I can remember, you know, having—we were in a social club. They didn’t have a sorority on this campus, but they had social clubs for women, and we belonged to the same social club. Several of the members were real upset that she was just flaunting her sexuality and had been caught several times in the dorm by the dorm mother and stuff like this, and was just making no secret of it. It was causing a lot of uncomfortableness. They had tried talking with her and everything else and knew that she and I had been friends and said, “Janet, please talk with her.” I did, and she said, “Hey, I’m in love. I don’t care.” I said, “But you have to care. You know, this is—you know, you’re also looking at your career, your life, you know. They’re saying that you may get 8 �kicked out.” She said, “I don’t believe that.” It’s against the wall, or something like this, I can’t even remember. It’s been so many years ago. At any rate, she did get caught and got turned in. I remember she was coming out of the auditorium from the business offices with her mother and father, and I just absolutely was devastated because she was gone. You know, she was gone. The next thing I knew—it was a couple of days later— I get called into the Dean of Women’s office and that was an even bigger eye-opener because at that point in time, I’m told that I’ve implicated that I’m one of the homosexuals on campus. I’m sitting there, and all of the sudden I realize, this is not when you really want to tell people who you are. I’ve just seen what happened to my very best friend and knew that that was, you know, going to be really difficult for her for a long time. I had seen the look on her parents’ face, and I thought, “I will deny. I will do what I have to do.” I really was just still very naïve, and it wasn’t very difficult for me, as well. I just didn’t say anything; I didn’t volunteer. I said, “Well, that’s really not true.” I really had not been active on campus, but yet, you know, this was what was going to be said. Didn’t know if it was—if I had been implicated or not, it was all very hush-hush. This was a very crucial time, and this woman was really not a very nice woman; she was pretty mean, pretty vindictive. She had already had a…kind of a reputation among the students anyway as being somebody that was very bold, and so I kept my mouth shut. She made some comments, and I can’t remember now what it was that—I went to my friends and I said, “What does this mean?” (Laughs) I think she used the term “active.” I think that was what it was. I had not a clue what she was really talking about. I could remember running over to one of the few women that I really, honestly did know that she was a homosexual or a lesbian, went running over to her room afterwards—she wasn’t even going to let me in the room because everybody then—talk about shutting down doors. I mean, it was just really serious business because I wasn’t the only one that got called into office; several did. As far as I know, nobody else got dismissed, but it was— Belmonte It sounds as if Vivienne was asked to name names. Gearin Oh, and that she did. She did. She named quite a few, which really was kind of bad. I felt worse in terms of her having done that because of the repercussions for all of us. I often wondered if she was angry at me. I’ve often wondered if she was angry at me, and that’s why she did that for some reason. Although, I didn’t know what I had done to anger her. Belmonte It’s possible they told her if she did, they’d let her off. Gearin Might have, yeah. It’s hard to say, not knowing what the conversation was. 9 �Belmonte It’s interesting because a lot of students, I think, have—you know, they think the ’60s, they think wild sexual revolution but don’t really understand that policies like this were still in place all over the country, that these changes were really not made until after the ’60s, in some ways. OSU had very similar policies during the same time. Do you know what happened to Vivienne, ultimately? Gearin Yeah, she left school. She and the woman that she was involved with, they both got expelled from school. She went to California, where she had a brother and a sister living out there, and lived out there for several years and then ended up moving back to Oklahoma. Lived in Norman and worked with the post office. When I actually had finished my master’s degree, that was ’75, I came back in ’75, she was working with the post office in Norman. We actually got to meet up again after all those years, and that— but I never did remember to ask her that question, why she did do that. It was like we didn’t talk about it. I don’t think—I spent a few months with her. Off-and-on, we had a talking relationship for maybe about a year, but we didn’t get to see each other very frequently because I was busy with my status in my career at Muskogee, and she was very busy there and was in a relationship. I never did really find out exactly why she did what she did what she did. We had never talked about it. It was just kind of—we never really talked about it at that point. She was pretty actively involved in the gay community in Oklahoma City, Norman. You know, she was really—I think she may have even been out at work. I’m not so sure that she might not have been. This would have been ’75. Belmonte Sounds like someone who would have just been compelled to do it. Gearin Absolutely. Belmonte After this rather horrible experience in college, did you just go back in the closet to yourself? Gearin Oh, absolutely. Oh, listen. This was—we were about fifty miles from Lawton, and Lawton was a big military town, Army primarily. It was like the Army guys were always up every weekend because this was a women’s college, remember, so it was great for women dating soldiers. I mean, it was a great atmosphere. After that happened, [inaudible] decided, “Okay, I’m going to look real normal on this campus,” (Laughs) because I valued what I was doing there. I really wanted to make sure I got my education. The message was really clear; I mean, we were just—there was no way; everybody on campus knew what had happened. The Dean of Women made it very clear; the president made it very clear that, “Hey, you behave that way and we catch you, you’re gone.” It was like all of us—talk about going into the closet; we were down underneath the ground. We were so buried so 10 �deep. It was—I, at that point, in time decided, “Well, I think I’ll go and explore the other side and see what that’s like.” I really became heterosexual at that particular point in time in my life. It was like, that’s gone. I’m not going to do that again; I buried it. It’s too costly. It’s too much to risk. I don’t want to lose all of these things I wanted. That was kind of the brunt of that, and really it was not bad because I think all of those experiences of dating the military men have helped me in my career with the VA; it’s interesting. Belmonte When did you once again decide this is a part of me that I am not willing to sublimate anymore? Gearin When I was working on my master’s degree—this is kind of a funny story— when I was working on my master’s degree—here I am in San Francisco, which, I mean, the openness of the gay community, even in the ’70s, the early ’70s, was really pretty remarkable. Belmonte Do you recall how you responded to them initially? Gearin Well, I can remember thinking, “Oh, they’re really bold here!” It was like, “Oh my god, are they going to get arrested?” Then I realized that nobody noticed. It was like nobody saw two men walking down the street, holding hands, hugging, kissing; it was like nobody paid any attention. It was a normal part of behavior. My brain started trying to unwind some of all that I had twisted, and it was like, “Okay, if it’s all right to do this, well, now the thoughts come back.” Maybe this is the time where I can start to go back and look at this because I knew that I really was not heterosexual; there was no doubt in my mind. That was not where I wanted to be. I had gone that route just to be normal, and I had engaged myself really, totally in studies. I was a really good student, and I loved school. I really just kind of sublimated all of my sexual energy in just, you know, “Okay, we don’t exist. Let’s just do well in school, study, and have friends.” I did a lot of fun things, traveled a lot, and enjoyed my college—my careers. Remember, this is my third university now. I’m at the University of California, San Francisco, which is actually my third stop. Along the way, I had to take a course with getting a degree in—a master’s in psychiatric nursing. One of the courses that I had to take was human sexuality. In fact, we had several courses that we had to take. I had several clinical hours that I had to do stuff. It was like—I remember the first class, and we were sitting there, talking. There was like twenty of us in the class. The professor came in, and she said, “Okay, these are the things that you will be doing by the end of the term.” We had to [inaudible], we had to— yeah, see the life of prostitutes and all this other sort of stuff. We ended up having to go the sexual history museum there, which was just incredible. I mean, if you’ve never been to San Francisco and been to their museum of 11 �pornography and sexual history, it just—it was incredible. Had to go to a gay bar, had to go to—had to interview people with disabilities that had sexual dysfunctioning because of physical limitations. It was all sorts of things that was included in this course. I became very familiar with SIECUS [Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States]. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with SIECUS, but that was my first introduction, really, to SIECUS and knowing and understanding that that really existed. Belmonte SIECUS is the nation’s, I think, oldest sex education advocacy organization. Gearin Right. They provided all the film work, and all of the films that we saw in the class were actually done by them. It was like, “Well, you’re turned loose on the city, so here you go.” Belmonte Now, this would have been coexistent with the time that it was tremendous tumult in the psychiatric profession about the removal of homosexuality from the— Gearin It was. It happened actually just two years later. I’m trying to remember what year was that... Belmonte ’74. Gearin Was it ’74? Yeah. This was ’72 when I was there. Belmonte Do you recall what you were being taught about homosexuality and whether or not the professors you had were challenging that? Gearin They were not challenging that, and they were really already talking pretty much as if it wasn’t an abomination; it was not a mental disorder. I can remember that several of the professors, several of the psychiatrists that we came in contact with in our clinical rotations, we had homosexual patients, but they did not really—unless their sexuality was an issue with that particular person, it was not an issue. I mean, if they were depressed, and they happened to be gay, that was not—you know, you didn’t treat them being gay. We didn’t try to change them or anything like this. I had seen some of that when I was in the University of Colorado, where there was some real effort to change. You know, they were doing sex changes in San Francisco, by the way, and I got in on doing some interviews with psychologists and joined through some of the progress—some of the process of what they were doing to see if indeed this person was mentally stable for a sex change operation. They had to go through a huge psychological evaluation before the surgeons—you know, they would really do any kind of procedures and things like this. Being involved in how they 12 �were preparing for those interviews and what kind of information they wanted to get and, you know, all this sort of thing. It was really a pretty fascinating time. Belmonte Definitely. When did you decide to come back to Tulsa? Gearin I had really pretty much decided when I went to graduate school, that after I finished, I really wanted to come home. I had been away for a long time. I knew that the education I had gotten, that nurses here were not getting that. I really wanted to be able to bring some of that back and to perhaps do some changing in education for nursing here in Oklahoma, and the only way you’re going to do that is you have to bring what you learned back. So I did do that. When I interviewed for the job position in Muskogee, I had to, first of all, be approved by the University of Oklahoma. In fact, it was a clinical appointment. Muskogee and the VA would not have been able to have hired me had not the University of Oklahoma approved my. Now, mind you, the irony in all of this is that the University of Oklahoma denied me admission to medical school, but now I’m good enough to teach their students and their residents. I thought that was really kind of a neat irony in my lifetime, that I had come back around, and, you know, that bus does keep coming back around. When I interviewed at the University of Oklahoma and talked with them, they asked me to do a colloquium because they had no idea that nursing education was as broad as [inaudible] and that I could do and that I had the ability to do what I did, which was primarily to be a psychotherapist. I had a huge background in medicine, as well. I had several classes in psychopharmacology, and they were just asking me questions. “Well, what about this drug? What about that drug? What about this diagnosis?” They could not believe the level of the education that I had, so I was the first clinical specialist to come to the state of Oklahoma and practice. I was the first to be asked to do a colloquium for the University of Oklahoma. Went down to Oklahoma City and, you know, did a presentation with—I think it was—it seemed like, to me, it was two hundred of them at that audience because I was a little overwhelmed that everyone there was a physician, but they were all fascinated and wanted to know how I knew what I knew and what kind of education I had gotten. It was really a very rewarding experience to go back and talk with the doctors, and, you know, they really treated me as a peer, which was a real special feeling for me. Belmonte How did you find out about gay life in Tulsa? Gearin It’s kind of interesting. When I got to Muskogee…you’ll laugh at this. This will tell you how I really met my lover of twenty-five years. I was working at the VA, and I had just gotten there from California. This—when I was when I was a nurse, and she worked on one of the units. She was—they 13 �were actually the first unit to call me for a consult. They had a patient there that was giving them some problems, and they felt like maybe I could come in and see the patient. So I came in, all very serious-minded, and I had to wear lab coats at that time, but I couldn’t wear regular clothes. Now, I was a California girl by this time and grew up just after the flower children. I was in the—lived right on Haight-Ashbury, lived right on Ashbury Street, just up from Haight. It was all a lot of flower children, free thinking, and I had had a wonderful, rich life when I lived in San Francisco. One of the things was mini-skirts were really big then, and I had some wonderful mini-skirts and things like this. I was much slimmer, and I’m tall anyway and was very tan. I guess when I came on to the hospital, I had all the doctors just absolutely coming in, married or not married, and it was like, “Oh no, don’t want to go here, don’t want to do this.” When I first came on that unit, Linda saw me, and she was the one that had actually requested the consult. This is a straight woman; she had already been married three times, I think it was. Belmonte Clearly didn’t take. Gearin Cleary. (Laughter) Clearly didn’t take. At any rate she—after I finished the consult, she says, “Why don’t you call me sometime?” Well, I’ve never— when you do that, you have to ask me specifically. I’m so naïve, and up in here, I don’t see things. I had no “gay-dar.” Absolutely none, zero, zip. I still don’t have a whole lot of it, but she had good “gay-dar,” which was good for us in our relationship because that’s really how we made friends. She was able to sense and understand, and after we did get together, we started dating and things like this. We met a couple there in Muskogee, and they told us about a bar here in Tulsa. It was over on Memorial, and “Let’s just go up.” I can remember that we, the four of us, came up one Saturday, drove up from Muskogee and walked into that bar, and I thought, “Oh my god, this is wonderful.” Belmonte What was the name of this bar? Gearin Oh my lord, you would ask me. I know I know it just as well, and everybody will know it…The Club. Just The Club: that was it, The Club. Jody and Muriel did—they were a great couple. We became pretty regular customers. (Laughs) You know, every weekend, we’d come up, and, you know, pretty much every weekend, met a group of women and started socializing. Then I had an opportunity to move up here in ’78 because we were going to open a clinic. We knew by that time that we were going to open a clinic here in Tulsa. I had made some really good friends, a couple of guys that we met— they were really—one of them was really quite closeted. He worked at American Airlines, so that was still, you know, early ’70s, late ’70s, early ’80s. He was not inclined to be too out at that particular time, and so we met 14 �these two guys and we just had a great time. Jan was from Amsterdam, and we just had a—we were just kind of soulmates, the four of us. We always had a really good time in doing things, and so the house next door to them came up for sale. Even though I knew we were going to move up here eventually, I didn’t really anticipate that it would be ’78, but it was ’78 when we bought the house and moved in. A year later, the clinic opened. Seventy-nine is when the clinic in the VA opened, so I no longer had to commute, which was much better, because that was a long commute. Once we moved up here, then things really began to grow and stuff. Linda was always a very social person, I mean, and very talented. She was a singer, so she was always out in clubs and things like this. She never met strangers. We very rapidly developed a good, close network of friends, and actually met Dennis Neill through—who’s involved—founder, really, of TOHR, pretty much. Met him and started doing some socializing through the Black and White group. I don’t know if you’ve—have you heard about the Black and White? Belmonte Tell me what you know about it. Gearin Oh, lord. That was a group of guys that decided they wanted to have fun and have a big party every year, so they would have a black and white party. You wore black and white. I mean, the theme was always black and white. You knew what it was, what it was going to be. I’m trying to think—there was quite a few of them at first. I knew several of them, and the first one we went to was down—the first one that Linda and I went to was on—just off of Riverside, at that club—I can’t think of the name of it—but I do believe that was the very first year they had that. That was at like 19th and Riverside, just right up over Riverside. It was the most wonderful time; we just had a ball. It was just all gay people. I mean, it was just absolutely wonderful to think that there’s this many of us, you know. It grew and grew and grew. I mean, every year, it got bigger and bigger. I think—I’m not sure how many years we did that, but it was quite a few years that they did that. It was the big party of the year. Belmonte Was that the first time you recall being at a place with a large number of gay people in Tulsa? Gearin Yes, so it was really fun. It was a lot of fun. Belmonte One of the things that strikes me was being in Tulsa in 2004, is it’s very easy to tap into networks of guys here, but the women’s community is very different. Yet, every once in a while, you’ll stumble into a party or something, and there are two, three hundred people that you probably will never see again. Do you recall similar experiences earlier? 15 �Gearin You know, it was really difficult to meet a lot of women. Most of the women we met were through The Club, which was predominantly a women’s bar. Yeah, you know, it was like—most of the times we went to events, we would be sometimes the only women, or there might be one other couple. Now, at the Black and White, that was not necessarily true, and gradually, more and more women did come. That first year, there weren’t nearly as many women as there were men, but it’s always kind of been that way; it’s an interesting phenomenon, I think, for here. I think today, it still is, to some of that degree. Lots of times, we’ll go to dinner parties and things like this and be the only women, you know. I know that these gay guys have other gay women friends, but it’s—I don’t know, it’s just kind of a strange situation. Belmonte You’ve mentioned The Club. Do you recall any other lesbian establishments? Gearin That was the major—there were several other bars around, but that really was the one that was best known for the women. It was owned by the women and operated by them, so even though the guys would come in there, it was pretty well known that it was primarily the women’s bar. You could go to some of the other gay bars in town, but lots of times, if you went, there may not be any other women there. It was pretty much the men that were in the other bars. Belmonte Now, were you involved in any sort of sports networks? I know that’s always been a good place for gay women to find one another. Gearin Actually not. I didn’t play sports. I really was a very good softball player, basketball player in college, but somehow, didn’t fall into that—how I really started meeting women outside of the bars was through TOHR. I was just earlier talking with a friend, trying to remember exactly when that was. I believe that I first started getting involved with TOHR about ’84, ’83, ’84…’85. How I really got involved with them—I remember doing by-laws; I can remember all sorts of things. They developed the telephone hotline, and John Dratz, who was an attorney here at that particular point in time, was trying to get it going. I had helped Tulsa, the city of Tulsa, develop the hotline here and train, and so he wanted me to work on the hotline for TOHR. That’s—I’m not sure what year that was that we opened that, but I think it was like ’85, maybe, or ’86. I’m not real sure. That was when the helpline really came into play. We even had it at a bar; we had it at Zipper’s. That’s where we were the very first few times that we took calls. (Laughter) I’d go down to the bar and, you know, walk in and go through the bar and go to the back office, you know. It was just amazing, it was just amazing. Belmonte Zipper’s sounds like it was quite the hub of gay life here for a long time. Do you have any memories of Zipper’s? 16 �Gearin Oh yes. It was really a great place. It was for everybody: you know, lots of dancing, lots of good music. It was really a pretty fun place to go. As I said, when I first was going there, I was working. You know, I was going into the back rooms and answering the phone. It was really was a fun place. Lots of folks would be there. We would always just be real decadent and acting out and doing our thing and thinking, “Oh, I wonder if anybody knows what really goes on behind these walls.” By the way, that would have been a good name for a movie, If These Walls Could Talk. You know, we had lots of fun with that. That was kind of interesting times, fun times. Belmonte You began telling us this story about what happened to Vivienne. Do you recall instances of discrimination and harassment of women you knew or men you knew in Tulsa in this period? Gearin You know, kind of by hearsay, never somebody I really knew closely. I can remember hearing stories of somebody that lost their job or was refused housing, you know, this kind of thing. We were—you know, I think in the early ’80s, we were still careful. I mean, you weren’t just real free with— you were careful with what you did. There were a lot of things that we did in homes, lots of parties and things, dinners. I went to a lot of events that were in people’s homes. A lot of that I think was because of safety issues; it was more that we felt like we were—you know, could be safe and not have to worry about walking out to our car and having the police follow you. I can remember tales where some women and guys would have left the club and been stopped by the police and harassed because they knew. The police knew that it was gay bars. They knew, you know, they knew where they were. We weren’t fooling anybody; they know where we were. I never personally was involved in it, and none of my really good friends were ever a part of that, but I did hear about it. I knew a couple of times there were some beatings. Some of the guys got beat up, but they were never people that I really knew. I may have known of them, but I didn’t know them really personally, know them well. I was pretty fortunate in that aspect. Belmonte Tell me about what you remember about AIDS reaching Tulsa? Gearin That was horrible. I had several really good friends that died in the mid ’80s and in the late ‘80s. I started having veterans come in at work, as well, and it was probably the worst time of my life: to have people that you know and love and you care about, and to watch them just very rapidly deteriorate and die. They didn’t live; they died. It changed my whole approach to life because I realized how precious it truly is. We don’t, any of us, have the luxury of knowing, but those guys had the misfortune of knowing that they weren’t going to live very long once they received their diagnosis. Most of them had been positive, probably, for quite some time, but we didn’t really 17 �know and understand the diseases nearly as well as we do now. Those times were really difficult, and I felt compelled to do something to help, not just professionally but also within the community because we were losing a lot of gay men. How follies was born, and I was a part of that. TOHR had been real active with that. This was 1988. I’ll never forget this. How I know this is I’m an OU fan; I love basketball. The University of Oklahoma was in the final four in 1988. They played the University of Kansas, in fact, in the championship game and lost. We were at follies, which TOHR produced as a fundraiser every year, and my lover and Ellis Wagoner, who at that time worked with the Tulsa Tribune—there were two papers at that time—he was the entertainment editor, and he was gay, and his lover was there. We were there—the four of us were there, and Linda and Ellis get off on this tangent, and they’re talking about, “You know what? We could put on a musical variety show and raise a hell of a lot of money,” because there were like, maybe a couple of hundred there. “We could really do this big; we could really do this.” We know all of the musicians; we knew—they knew talent. They started plotting all of this out. That was actually the birth of follies review, which for ten years did a musical variety show annually, and all the money that we made from that, outside of our expenses, we turned over to the community to agencies such as Tulsa Cares, RAIN, you know, anybody that was taking care of—St. Joseph’s. We gave money to anybody that was providing any kind of health care or any kind of benefits to people with AIDS. That was the birth of that, and that was through—and TOHR actually sponsored us our first two years. We did the first musical variety show in 1989 downtown at the PAC, the Performing Arts Center. We had the small stage—one of the small stages, John Williams, and we ran these people across and did music—it was a musical variety show. Had it for three nights, and that was 1989. Did it again in ’90 with TOHR, and then decided in ’93 we’d incorporate it and just decided to do it all on our own. The next eight years, we just did it all as our own…our own source, our own wings, [inaudible]. We gave away almost 300,000 dollars in ten years. We raised quite a bit of money and gave it to these little grass-roots organizations. I was very actively involved on several boards with Shanti. I was on their first board of directors. I did group therapy with AIDS patients, and the community helped establish some of those groups. I was just as—I mean, really there was days during the week that I would leave work and go do some of this stuff, and it was like, almost a twenty-four hour kind of thing. I was just very actively involved in doing everything that I could. Did so for about ten years and gradually kind of started to burn out with some of them because you just don’t have the energy. Buried a lot of friends during those years; that was an awful time. Tremendous losses, you know, you had such a 18 �wonderful, talented group of people, and they’re no longer here. It’s really too bad because they were in the primes of their lives. They would’ve, you know, had AIDS not come around, been there, been here. Belmonte It sounds to me like Tulsa was actually pretty bold in responding to AIDS in the early stages. Gearin Very. We got very well organized through the Community Service Council, which was a United Way foundation group. Janice Nicolas and Joan Flint were kind of the spearhead of that, and they started getting the community together. All the organizations that were doing anything, we all started networking and we would meet down there once a month, and we would do planning. We would look at, “What are we having problems with? What do we need?” but there were several organizations that—respectable, you know, straight organizations—that were involved. It still offered, I think, for all of us, a little bit of a hope that not everybody is discriminatory, not everybody is going to dismiss us, that, you know, we are real people, we do have something to contribute. It was through those efforts of those women and some of the other—like the Visiting Nurse Association, our affiliation there—it was, really it was a wonderful time of networking and doing liaison work and growing and developing and, you know, meeting people and trying to see that we had a real need here, and we had a real void, and what could we do to plug in. It was a great time. It was a busy time, a hugely busy time, but very successful, as well. We had an infectious disease physician, who was very well-known in the community, Dr. Jeff Beale and his lover, Ted Campbell, and they were spearheading all the medical parts of it. They helped, you know. Everybody was involved; everybody was doing things. If you weren’t doing things, you at least went to some of the events and gave your money, you know, like follies or some of the other things. I can remember ice cream—there was always something going on. Interfaith AIDS Network was also around then, and they were an even—really smaller group. It was the Quakers and some of those folks, and they were involved, and they were doing ice cream socials and street fairs, and you know, everybody was trying to turn a dime. I mean, we were all trying to get money because we were wanting these organizations to help these young men. Trying to provide them buddies, trying to provide them support groups…we felt they were just hugely necessary. Catholic charities had St. Joe’s house, which was taking care of those that, once they became so debilitated, families couldn’t take care of them, and we could—you know, or they were abandoned. We could put them in there, and we could help take care of them. It was a time when everybody kind of bonded and pulled together. I think the gay community really started to see that they could have some support with the straight community. I mean, it 19 �was like—there were some real inroads made during that time. The AIDS crisis did a lot for other things, too. It wasn’t just the bad things; there were also some really very good things, very positive things that came out of that. This is just an incidental we’ll add in here. (Laughter) We’re going to backtrack a little. There were a lot of really funny things that happened when Linda and I used to go to The Club. They had a woman that was all into her; her name was Suki. Suki would always kind of monitor if we came in and came out and stuff like this. Jody usually was working behind the bar. Mary would sometimes, as well, and they would kind of circulate. They were the owners of the bar. One night, Linda and I were there, and it was a big crowd. I can’t remember exactly what happened to start it all off, but as I recall, I think a guy got pretty drunk and started getting pretty disorderly. Jody came flying across the bar, (Laughs) nailed a guy, pushed him up to the wall, and was holding him. Well, everybody is jumping up, and it’s like— everybody is now going to—when you know that something is happening, like a fight or something like this—it was the closest I ever came to being in a fight. It was like, everybody just wanted to, just gravitate. I’m up and out of the table, and the only thing I was really going to do was just to try and prevent other people from getting involved because Jody really had the situation under control, and the guy wasn’t really trying to fight her once he realized what was going on. I don’t think he ever expected that Jody was going to do that. None of us really did, but anyway, I was just trying to keep people back and keep them away. When I went back to the table, Linda is sitting there, looking at me, and she says, “My god,” she says, “I thought you were going to get in a fight!” (Laughter) I said, “Fight? No, I wasn’t going to fight. I was just trying to make sure that Jody didn’t get into trouble because all the other people trying to climb in top of him and get involved,” because back then, some of those women would have really just loved to have gotten involved. I was like, “Okay guys, Jody’s handling it. Just, you know, let’s let her.” I mean, they really would have liked to have handled it because there was a lot of role changes there. A lot of that was going on, that was when I was coming out with all of this. Women that were the butch and the ones that were the femmes. Belmonte So this was even in the ’80s that was still entrenched here. Gearin Actually, yes. That would have been the early ’80s. Probably because Tulsa is still behind, you’ve got to remember. (Laughter) Everything gravitates from the coasts, you know, either the West Coast or the East Coast. It takes it a while to get to the middle part of the country. Belmonte Janet, you were describing a few minutes ago a rather volatile situation at a bar in Tulsa and alluded to… 20 �Gearin Yes. Very exciting. Belmonte …the existence of kind of defined butch/femme roles in the Tulsa lesbian community. This is interesting, given that this was the early ’80s. Tell me a little bit more about that. Was that common among the couples that you knew? Gearin Oh, absolutely. When you went to the bar, it was—a lot of times, it was very much—you knew who was butch, and you knew who was femme—couples, you knew who were couples. I can remember Linda and I laughing and saying, “Do we look like them?” I never did see myself as one way or the other, but it was like when you went to the bar, it was really—it had to be kind of clarified as to who was who. You know, I would have people say, “Well, is that your wife?” and these kinds of things. I’m going, “Linda [inaudible] ever going to be my wife?” (Laughs) you know, because I had never—we didn’t know. We really were both pretty green with all of this because I didn’t have a whole lot of experience, and she had absolutely none. It was kind of fun because we didn’t really know how we were to behave, or if we had to assume a certain role, or not assume a certain role, or how we were to interact with these women. Over a period of time, you just kind of—you don’t even look at it, you don’t even see it, but I can remember the first few times going into the bar and seeing women who really looked more like men than they did women and thinking, “Wow, this is kind of interesting,” and wondering, “Should I—do I need to do that?” You know, this sort of thing. “Or are they just going to think we’re both femmes? What are we going to both be?” Struggling with some of that and not really knowing, having no [inaudible] what a lot of these women had gone through, it was kind of interesting to learn that they were very much that way all the time. They were that way in their jobs. I can remember my brother worked with Telex—one of my brothers—and there were several of the women that worked at Telex. They worked on those boards; you know, they did the computer things like that, and he knew them. He knew these women. He knew that they were lesbians, so at that particular time—we’ve since talked about all of this, I’ve asked him about it in terms of—retrospectively. It was kind of interesting at that time that they really dressed that way, they looked that way, and they had their wives, they had their girlfriends, whatever. You were real careful. I did see some fights. It was a whole new world to me to see women fighting, you know, across the lines and things like this. “Oh no, that’s my woman. That’s my wife. Leave her alone.” It was an interesting time at the bar. 21 �Belmonte Sure. That’s fascinating because this is something other parts of the country have been documented as disappearing. It’s starting to disappear in the ’70s. Gearin We probably, as I said, weren’t there. We probably weren’t there because we’ve always been a little bit behind. Belmonte You mentioned that you started to get a little burnt out with the AIDS activism. Gearin More burnt out, not so much with the activism, but with the follies. That was a ten-year, a year-round job for us. Rehearsals were in my house. (Laughter) All this sort of stuff, you can’t imagine. We made props in my house, and you’ve seen the house on [inaudible], so thank god it was as big as it was. We’ve had rehearsals out in the backyard by the pool, in the yard, dance lessons—I mean, the whole nine yards. It was a rigorous undertaking because it took a big part of the year to plan it. You had to know what you were going to do in terms of music. You had to get the music. Then we would have auditions and get entertainers and people across the city to help us backstage because we had to have a lot of help backstage. It was really a huge, huge undertaking. We did this on a shoestring budget. We would just leave ourselves enough money at the end of the previous show—we would just leave enough money in our budget to get started again the next year. We were always on a shoestring, but I knew it was always going to come through. I wore lots of hats: I sold advertisements, walked into businesses in the city and tried to sell ads, sold tickets. We did what we had to do. It was like ten of us that were on the board; we were a working board, and we worked very hard. It was a year-round thing. Belmonte Why was follies disbanded? Gearin Primarily because we just burned out with it. After ten years, we did ten years, and it was just too much. We were extremely successful; it was a very—by the time we quit, we were really doing quite well financially with it because we were making a lot of money. We had a patron chair; we started doing that early on. Bob Caesar was one of our board of members, and Bob was very—he’s an interior designer like Charles Faudree—and he was very—knew a lot of people. When we first were getting started with this, we wanted to try and get into the community—the straight community, if you will, because the gay community was getting pumped out, I mean, money-wise. They were supporting all of the AIDS things going on. We really felt like Tulsa, as a whole, needed to know about it, and they also needed to contribute. We needed the money; we needed their support. There came a period in time while follies was doing this, and I believe it was like around ’92, ’93, ’94, about those three years, that AIDS and HIV 22 �became a real popular bandwagon for you to contribute to if you were in the straight world. We took a real big hook and advantage of that. Part of that was Bob helped us to get chairmen—our patron chair, who would lend their name to the event and give us their guest list. We had huge numbers of people that we got involved and bought tickets and came to the show that were straight. We brought in a lot of money that wasn’t being tapped into, and that was really a good thing. That was a really good thing. During the course of the show, I would always give some interesting statistics. I was the announcer. I never was on stage. I was always backstairs, behind the scenes, with the camera off the stage area. You just heard my voice, and I always was the one that would announce the acts and introduce them and do all of these neat little things. I would develop some kind of dialogue so that I would give some information and history during the course of the show about what was going on in Tulsa and nationwide and worldwide. Belmonte Are there any tapes of any of these shows? Gearin I may have some of them still around. I’m not sure if I do or not. I’ll look in the archives and see. Belmonte It would be wonderful to have some of those, copies of some of those. Do you recall, in conjunction with the work you did with AIDS, getting opposition from the community in Tulsa? Gearin Yes, I got a lot of doors slammed in my face when I would go and want to try and sell ads or something like this. People, “Oh no, I’m not supporting that. Those men deserve what they got.” That sort of thing, I got it a few times. Not too much, but I did get it from a few businesses and things like that when I would try to sell advertising. When you have somebody that’s very well-known in this community, and very powerful, and very rich, and very wealthy, and they’re behind your show; they’re your chairperson, that’s pretty hard to say no to. I found that I would make it clear who was our sponsoring chair and what was going to be our patrons. Once they found out that, then I opened a lot more doors and was really helpful to us in getting incredible amounts of help from printing at the program. We got our program usually printed free, Judy Rogers’ lithograph. We had Kery Walsh, who was our designer for that. He still probably is very active in the community. Kery was wonderful to do all of our graphic work for our program and our layout, and we had several—we had two board members that primarily just did nothing but work on our program and our posters. We had some very well-known artists do posters for us: P.S. Gordon, for one. We just had an overall response that just helped bring in more and more people and get more and more involved. As I said, when you have patrons that have a name for themselves, then you have a little bit more 23 �legitimacy. That helped us. It opened doors. It did open doors for us. It was just a matter of like, after ten years, you just got [inaudible] about it. Belmonte Right. So the last year of follies was… Gearin ’98. Belmonte Oh, so not that long ago. Gearin We did the first one in ’89 and did the last one in ’98. Belmonte How do you think the gay community in Tulsa has changed from the time you’re describing, the years of the club, and now? You’ve recently made the decision to be part of TOHR again. Gearin Back—I was an active member for, I guess, about four years, five years. Then to come back after all this time…. I missed kind of some of the old things, to be quite honest. It’s interesting. I know—like with TOHR, when I first was going there and was really actively involved, we had huge meetings. I mean, we might have a couple hundred people come to a meeting. It was lots of folks; that’s what they were involved in. I miss kind of that. I miss the [inaudible] of getting up, conducting the meeting, all the things that go with that. The little subcommittees that, you know—I did bylaws one year, and I’ll never do that again; that was a terrible job for TOHR. I do miss some of those older things that we had because it was really nice. Now, it’s pretty much just the board and not so much the whole community as a whole that’s involved. That was nice. That was a nice thing to do. It was a great time. Belmonte I hope we can get that back. Gearin That would be nice. I really think it would be nice. It was very much needed back then, and I suspect it still is probably very much needed, that people do need to be out. I think the difference—in terms of following along with that—the difference is that, I think, I now go out more to people’s homes, even more so than I did back then. Years ago, I was out to the bars and things like this quite a bit, doing things, but now, it’s like you have small dinners with friends, maybe there’s ten of you and maybe there’s eight of you. It’s not quite so many large functions that I go to. I still know people that I met in the late ’70s, the early’80s, and they’re still good friends and we still socialize and things like this. I kind of—this is one reason why I wanted to get back with TOHR, was to get back with the [inaudible], see how much change has there been? Sometimes when you’re in a relationship, you don’t always see things and do things. When I was in follies, that was year-round. Even though the gay community was very much involved in all of that, it was also the straight community, as well. It was like working both 24 �of them because there were people on the board that were gay, but there were people on our board that were straight. I was not doing a lot of the other social things that I was doing when I first got to Tulsa. I was getting my social needs met differently, I guess you would say. It was more smallerscale in terms of homes and things like this. Belmonte Politically, Oklahoma obviously has a lot of work to do on gay rights issues. What’s your sense as a long-term Tulsa resident? Gearin I’ve always thought that there’s a certain part of Tulsa that’s going to be the redneck part, probably no matter what. You’re going to meet people that have bias; they’re probably not going to change their minds. I worry less about changing people’s minds directly; I’ve always been somebody, who, if I can lead them there and they don’t know I’ve led them there, or I can push them there—and I’ve done this for patients. That’s, I think, why I’m successful as a therapist is, I let the patients talk their way through things. Eventually, I give them little guidance here and there, and eventually they come around to where I feel they need to be to be healthier. They would agree with that, I’m sure. It’s the same thing in terms of the gay community. It’s like, you know, sometimes we beat that wall and we don’t really need to be beating it. If we just let life go, people come around. They realize that this is a democracy. This is, you know—we all want to just be treated equally, and that “Oh my gosh, did you know that your brother’s gay?” You find out that you know somebody gay. Back then, we didn’t find out that because we kept it more of a secret. Now, I think you see that people do know somebody that’s gay or they know of somebody that’s gay, and it’s like “Okay. Well, they’re a nice guy,” or “They’re a nice lady, it’s okay.” I think as we’re out, and that’s the beauty, I guess, of being out, is that people will see and understand us and know us for the people that we are. Eventually, our sexuality is not going to be a big issue in that. We’re all going to get there; it’s just a matter of time. It’s a process that we all have to kind of go through. I think that’s kind of where we’re headed. I think that’s a positive thing. Being a little bit of along the conservative and an old hat, some of the new things that were going on, like with the gay marriages, and I’m sitting there going, “Am I appalled or not? How do I feel about this?” (Laughter) It’s like, “Parts of that scare me and parts of it not scare me, but parts of that bother me in a sense that—oh, I guess I get the people with honey, not put it in their face.” There’s a little bit—it’s a fine line. Sometimes I really have to put it in people’s face, but then I don’t know if I want to be the one that does it. It’s like, “Okay, I’ll just sit back and watch it, see what’s going to happen.” I don’t know that I could honestly be on the front part with some of that, either. I would probably be more inclined to be—unlike Vivienne. Vivienne’s probably out there leading all of this. I’m sure she’s probably 25 �been on the steps of San Francisco. I’m not really quite that way. I’m kind of more of a behind the person, but I’m not going to lie to you, either. If people ask, I generally will tell them. I’m not going to try and hide that. I’m one of those that doesn’t talk about it a lot, it just is. As you get to know me, you probably know that, or you’ll sense that, but we’ll talk about everything, talk about me as a person, as a human, that comes first. Belmonte I think we’re going to end on that note. Davis Well, I have one thing I was going to throw out to see. You remember the VA. What was the impact of the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” in that community? Belmonte That’s an excellent question. Gearin The military guys—it’s really—I’m in mental health, so everyone I work with personally is very progressive. You’ve got to understand that they’re not going to be the ones that think that. We’ve been working in therapy with people who have been gay for years, so it’s not an issue. I think for other people, we all kind of laugh at it. It’s like, you’ve got to be kidding. That was the dumbest—I still think that was such a huge error in judgement to even have that as part of the military. Gays have always been in the military. They got by; they did well. They weren’t out, for the most part, although I think, again, a lot of people probably knew that they were gay, but they didn’t flaunt it, so they left them alone, and they didn’t—they just managed to make it. I’ve had too many men that were very actively gay when they were in the military, but they were also discrete, too. It’s a line of—you have to be real careful with it because there are some serious repercussions; you get booted out. If you get a dishonorable discharge, that’s a terrible thing. I think most of the guys would probably like to just see it not be there at all. It’s almost like it was an embarrassment to have it. It probably caused more bad than it helped. That’s usually perception of the military men that I’ve talked with. I have a lot of straight guys that talked—they knew they were fighting next to a gay guy, but they couldn’t care less. In Vietnam or Desert Storm or wherever, if they were able to fire at the enemy and protect his backside, I guarantee you they didn’t care that he was homosexual. They cared that he was a good soldier because that’s really why they were there, was to be a good soldier. I guess overall, it was—I think it was—probably most of us would probably say it was a bad thing. Again, I think it was a bad thing because originally, Clinton wanted to get rid of it altogether. When he realized he wasn’t going to be able to do that because he didn’t have the power to do it, then they changed it. To be quite honest, I think it probably would have been better off just to have left it as it was. I’ve always felt that that was—I think probably 26 �most of the people that worked with the VA or veterans probably feel the same way. I think we’re already doing “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” I mean, when you really think about it, isn’t that kind of what we’ve been doing all along, to some degree in various ways? It’s always “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” I’ve had people ask me over the years, “Well, how did your brothers find out? What if somebody asked you?” I’m going to tell them. I figure if they ask me, then they’re wanting to know, otherwise they wouldn’t ask me. I want to tell them if they ask me. If they don’t ask me, I may not necessarily volunteer; it just depends. Depend on how comfortable I am. Belmonte Janet, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us this afternoon. Gearin You’re welcome. I’ve enjoyed it, thank you very much. Belmonte This completes our interview. ------- End of interview ------- Addendum – Janet added this additional information in March 2026: Janet finished her career with the VA in January 2013. This is a brief synopsis of her career highlights with special emphasis on her carryover of her HIV work within the VA system. “I am not sure of the date, but I was invited to attend a 1-day VA Conference in Dallas Texas. That conference basically brought me into the HIV approach about treatment and education of VA personnel across the country. Since my area of practice within the VA was in Mental Health, I was a bit confused as to why I was invited. The conference was led by Dr Bopper Deyton from the VA Central Office. At the end of the 1 day event I was asked to attend a more detailed 3-day training in Baltimore. It was at that training event that I had been selected to be one of an HIV Consortium that would work across the country to other VA Hospitals to train medical and nursing staff on the care and treatment of persons with HIV/AIDS that presented to the VA for care. It was to be one of the most gratifying and rewarding experiences of my career. As an aside note I was sent to Chicago for an HIV National convention. Dr Deyton met me at the Conference Center and sent me to sit beside his friend and mentor. I was stunned when during our introduction to each other he noted he was Dr. Anthony Fauci. It would be the first of several HIV meetings/Conferences that we would meet. 27 �As a “by the way” I learned that Dr Deyton learned of me through a mutual friend…. Dr Jeff Beal! 28 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [Series] Oral Histories Project > Interviews Description An account of the resource <strong>Physical Media:</strong> <br />Box 7, Folder 7 - Dr. Leisa Meyer Program<br />Box 7, Folder 8 - Interviewees Materials, Original Series 2003-2007<br /><br /><strong>Digital Media:</strong> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [2004] Janet Gearin Interview Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource February 22, 2004 Description An account of the resource Video recording and transcript of oral history interview with Laura Belmonte on February 22, 2004. Born in Vinita, Oklahoma on February 3, 1947, Janet lived in Duncan, Oklahoma and graduated High School in Lindsey, Oklahoma. She attended University of Oklahoma College of Liberal Arts (previously Oklahoma College for Women) in Chickasha, Oklahoma. She attended the University of Colorado and received a master’s in clinical psychiatric nursing from the University of California, San Francisco. With aging parents, she returned to Oklahoma and practiced with the 9 Department of Veteran Affairs in Muskogee and then in Tulsa. Janet entered into a 25- year relationship with a fellow VA nurse, Linda Stevens. In the 1980’s, both got involved with Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights (TOHR), the predecessor to Oklahomans for Equality. Janet helped with the TOHR helpline and became a key volunteer in TOHR’s HIV/AIDS outreach and testing. In 1989, Linda, Janet and others revamped TOHR’s annual Follies Review (dance and song stage show) for HIV/AIDS programming support. The Follies Review was presented annually through 2008. She also served as a counselor and advisor to Shanti, an AIDS support program started in Tulsa in 1986, and served on the TOHR board. Subject The topic of the resource Janet Gearin Oral History Project Interview from February 22, 2004 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Janet Gearin, Laura Belmonte, Dennis Neill 2004 AIDS Support Program AIDS testing AIDS/HIV AIDS/HIV testing Department of Veteran Affairs follies HIV testing HIV/AIDs HIV/AIDs outreach HIV/AIDs testing hotline interview Janet Gearin Laura A. Belmonte Laura Belmonte Linda Stevens OKEQ Oral History Project Oklahoma College for Women oral history oral history interview Oral History Project oral history transcript Shanti Shanti Project TOHR TOHR Board of Directors Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights (TOHR) Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights Board of Directors Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights HIV Testing University of California University of California San Francisco University of Colorado University of Oklahoma College of Liberal Arts video Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [Series] Oral Histories Project > Interviews Description An account of the resource <strong>Physical Media:</strong> <br />Box 7, Folder 7 - Dr. Leisa Meyer Program<br />Box 7, Folder 8 - Interviewees Materials, Original Series 2003-2007<br /><br /><strong>Digital Media:</strong> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [2004] Ken Youngblood Interview Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource August 22, 2004 Description An account of the resource Video recording and transcript of oral history interview with Laura Belmonte on August 22, 2004. <strong>Video and Transcript available at the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center for on-site research.</strong> Ken was born November 22, 1949, in Vinita, Oklahoma. From sixth grade through high school, he played the piano and organ at the local Baptist Church. He attended high school in Jay, Oklahoma, married in 1971, went to Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma and obtained a degree in Music. He divorced in 1973 and came out soon after. Ken attended graduate school at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. In 1975, Ken moved to Tulsa and attended a hairstyling school and later opened a flower shop after working in the floral department of a local grocery. Ken discussed his early experiences in the gay scene in Tulsa and his first drag appearances, including participating in the Follies fundraiser for Oklahomans for Human Rights. In 1994, the well-known Tulsa artist Pat Gordon asked Ken to model in drag as part of a series of such works over the next few years. He discussed his awareness of AIDS and its impact in Tulsa and his volunteer work with the helpline maintained by Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights. In 1992, Ken and his long-time partner had a well- known “wedding” attended by some 300 gay and straight people. Subject The topic of the resource Ken Youngblood Oral History Project Interview from August 22, 2004 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ken Youngblood, Laura Belmonte, Dennis Neill 2004 AIDS AIDS/HIV available at Center follies HIV/AIDs interview Ken Youngblood Laura A. Belmonte Laura Belmonte Northeastern State University Northeastern State University (NSU) NSU OKEQ Oral History Project oral history oral history interview Oral History Project oral history transcript OU Pat Gordon TOHR transcript Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights (TOHR) University of Oklahoma University of Oklahoma (OU) video https://history.okeq.org/files/original/182841b5bd7e55b943d05de2623c91ee.mp4 6330d87f3fed54f29ed4c8a1f379ad99 https://history.okeq.org/files/original/3a1265439872f9ac4dc74328b7f2c8b7.pdf 71c65239e0bd48317bf6dd3411d1f65d PDF Text Text Oral History Interview with Nancy McDonald Interview Conducted by Laura Belmonte July 18, 2004 OKEQ Oral History Project Oklahoma Oral History Research Program Edmon Low Library ● Oklahoma State University ©2004 �OKEQ Oral History Project Interview History Interviewer: Laura Belmonte Transcriber: Allison Richmond Editors: Anika Benthem The recording and transcript of this interview were processed at the Oklahoma State University Library in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Project Detail The OKEQ Oral History Project is a series of interviews documenting the rich contributions of LGBTQ community members in the state of Oklahoma, with a particular emphasis on Tulsa and the surrounding area. These interviews were conducted by members of Oklahomans for Equality, formerly Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights. Legal Status Scholarly use of the recordings and transcripts of the interview with Nancy McDonald is unrestricted. The interview agreement was signed on July 18, 2004. 2 �OKEQ Oral History Project Nancy McDonald Oral History Interview Interviewed by Laura Belmonte July 18, 2004 Tulsa, Oklahoma Belmonte Here we are. It’s Sunday, July 18, 2004, and we are at the home of Nancy and Joe McDonald in Tulsa, Oklahoma doing an interview for the Tulsa Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender history project. Nancy, we’ll begin with some basic biographical information. Tell us where you were born, a little about your childhood. McDonald I was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Raised on a farm in northeast Nebraska, Beemer, Nebraska. Attended the University of Omaha at Nebraska, graduated from the University of Nebraska school of medical technology. Worked in that career for a number of years. Grew up, really, in a very traditional family, farm values. Tremendous amount of talents and respect for individuals. I grew up with a lot of—particularly from my father—a lot of empathy and understanding for various people and different cultures. As I reflect on that, I think that’s pretty remarkable for a man born in the early 1900s. I married Joe when he was a senior in medical school, followed him to the University of—San Bernardino Charity Hospital. We were in the Air Force for ten years, career in medical. Traveled all over this country thanks to the Air Force. Settled in Tulsa in 1966. Belmonte What were you doing for a living? Were you working outside the home when you moved here in 1966? McDonald No. I stopped working the day our first child was born…full time. Then I taught at the University of California school of medical technology for a year. Then we went overseas to Turkey and to Germany, and we had another child. We returned to San Antonio, Texas, where Joe took his residency in anesthesiology. We had another child, so I was full-time mom. I did not go 3 �back to work until 1975. I went back to work in a totally unrelated field because I had been a community leader in the voluntary integration of Tulsa Public Schools. The school system asked me to come to work to organize the voluntary integration program and to respond to the additional quota for desegregation, to organize a parent involvement program which I had started as a volunteer at Burroughs…also to begin to look at using private donations and foundations for support of public education. Belmonte Had you always been a community volunteer, or did you begin that when you moved to Tulsa? What—were you into that originally? McDonald No, I think I grew up with that whole notion of helping and giving. My parents were very involved in projects in our little town. My mother insisted that I be a part of Girl Scouts, even though that was foreign to rural America. She took me to town so I could be a part of Girl Scouts growing up. I think in many ways, that was just part of my whole growing up experience, was seeking out and helping and being sensitive to other people’s needs. At Christmastime, we always, as a family, made baskets for people who didn’t have food. In the early ’40s, there were lots of natural disasters, flooding, and my parents were always involved in helping people get out of their homes in floods. It was just—I just grew up as part of that; it was just part of my experience. It wasn’t foreign to me to do volunteer work. I don’t think I even had that word at that point. You just saw some needs and you did it. You just helped. We did that in California. I mean, it was a whole new experience for me with the Hispanics. When we went to San Bernardino Charity Hospital and the Hispanics were just moving into Southern California, and they were sleeping on the hospital grounds trying to get medical care. We organized an effort to get tents for people to sleep in. When we went to Turkey, it was—I think that was really my first experiences with a family of support services from the Air Force, which was pretty phenomenal because in Turkey, we lived on the economy. We lived three miles from the base. A lot of American women would come and couldn’t handle it, really had difficulties living on the economy. This was in 1959. So I got very much involved in the family services, which would probably help the families make the adjustment to the Turkish economy, help them to learn the language, to learn about bartering. Then when the men were gone, there was an incredible need for the women in this little town called Yalova, Turkey, which was about a hundred miles south of Istanbul, who really were supportive of one another. Then we did our internship—our residency in San Bernardino, and then we were stationed at MacDill Air Force Base, which was where the F-4 pilots were stationed, and they were the first pilots to go into Vietnam. So many of our friends were shot down over Vietnam and were prisoners of war. Their 4 �wives and families were left in Tampa, so there was always an incredible need for community and support for them because these men were prisoners of war. That was all part of—it was just part of my whole experience. When I moved to Tulsa it was really—I was really lonely. Belmonte What would you describe Tulsa like in 1966? McDonald From my point of view, it was a very difficult city to get acquainted in. It was a very cliquish city. It was just not a very friendly, neighborly community. I had a lot of difficulty because I didn’t know anyone when I moved here. I shouldn’t say I didn’t know anyone, I knew—interesting enough, one person. The reason that we came here is because there was a position that was in—ahead of Joe in residency, and he asked Joe to join his practice. I knew her, and I knew—interesting enough, I knew another woman, who I didn’t know lived here at the time, but she was stationed at Lackland Air Force Base with us, and she just lived a couple blocks from me. I had worked with her in officer’s wives clubs in Lackland, so I knew two people, but it was a difficult city to get acquainted in. It was a very cliquish city because you had to be invited. You had to be invited to be a part of an organization, you had to be invited to be a part of the social element of this community. It was very difficult to break into because if you weren’t from Tulsa, you didn’t know anyone, you weren’t invited to be a part of the Junior Association of Tulsa Boys Home, or Children’s Day Nursery, or Junior League, or any of those things. It was difficult. The Girl Scout council laughs, and they still have this story on record because I was the first person that ever called them—in the summer of 1966; they had never experienced this before—called them in July and asked them if I could be a Brownie leader. I had been a Girl Scout Brownie leader in Tampa, and I wanted that experience for our oldest daughter, Joellen. I didn’t wait until September when they had to “go out and recruit leaders.” I called the council and said, “I want a Brownie troop at Patrick Henry. What do I need to do? How do I get it organized?” They just said, “That’s completely foreign.” People just didn’t do that. Belmonte Did they respond positively? McDonald Yeah, oh yeah. My god, yes. They were excited to have somebody. That really was my introduction into volunteer work in Tulsa, was that I had a Brownie troop. I had another baby, but that was my beginning of my volunteer service. Then from there, I went to the Junior Association of the Tulsa Boys Home. It was an invitation for membership. The second year I lived in Tulsa, I was invited to be a member of the Junior Association of the Tulsa Boys Home. I think in some ways, that was probably my first introduction into social work because this was an organization that…. At 5 �that point, it was a little different. It was sort of the attitude of, “Well, we can buy clothes for the boys, and we can have parties for the boys, and we can organize those kinds of activities.” It was my first…it really was my first introduction into education because—well, there really were two cases. There was the case of the kids that were special education and had tremendous behavioral problems, were kept at the home, were not allowed to attend public school, and I just thought that was wrong. I thought these kids were entitled to go to school, and they were in a classroom in the basement of the home on Sixth and Quincy. They did not have a qualified teacher, and I just got really interested in that and sort of took that on. It’s a tremendous project. The Tulsa Boys Home now—we talked about their educational facility and their classrooms for boys, and it all started in the basement of the home. That’s also where I started tutoring. [Inaudible] he was brought into a Tulsa Boys Home in 1967. He was abandoned in this city. He was African American. He was picked up by the police. It was April of 1967, and the director of the home came into the meeting of the Junior Association and said, “Well, the federal government is going to make us take black kids, and we might as well take this…kid,” although he used a different name to describe him. He was eating out of garbage cans and sleeping in cars around Tulsa. He was the typical example of malnutrition. Although we didn’t know at that point in time, but he was placed at the Children’s Medical Center by DHS [Department of Homeland Security]. He was nine. He had very little language, if any. The social worker, Jerry Dillon, came in and asked if there might be someone who was willing to tutor this kid because if we could help him with language, he could even go to school. So I volunteered. You know, I think the rest people know about. He eventually came to live with us. He was starting center for the University of Tulsa basketball team. Graduated from the University of Tulsa with a degree in elementary education, did not make the NBA, but he was picked up by the pro team in France. He’s played professional ball in France until this past year. He’s part of our family. He married a French girl; they have two children. They’ll be home in a week. He’s fifty-one. He’s bilingual; he’s fluent in French, beautiful child. Belmonte What’s his name? McDonald He grew up in this community known as Clark Jones because when you would ask him his name, he would say “Clark Jones.” He grew up with that name, Clark Jones. His mother came back on the scene when he was a junior at the University of Tulsa and was being recruited by the NBA. It was at that point we learned that his real name was Zackery. He came home from picture day, his senior year picture day at the University of Tulsa, and said, “I think I’ll use my real name,” and so he started using Zackery. Professionally, in France, he’s known as Zackery Jones. We call him Zack, 6 �but many people in this community will know him as Clark Jones because he was an outstanding basketball player at Central High School. We kept him at Central because we thought it was important that he have an experience in integration. He was a key in the desegregation of Central High School. One time the assistant principal called me and said, “Nancy, get down here right now.” It was in the desegregation of Central which was in 1970. He was in the middle of the street, and the black kids were lined up on one side of Cincinnati and the white kids on the other side of Cincinnati, and Clark was in the middle of the street, trying to negotiate all of this between these two groups of kids that had walked out of Central High School in the integration process. He grew up seeing an integrated environment, and yet he was black, so he really struggled with all of this. He didn’t struggle, but he had a lot of sensitivity to it. You know, just pretty phenomenal, really. It’s interesting to talk to him because of what he experienced in the integration at the University of Tulsa. Even in the early ’70s, one time he called, and he and his fellow black players were not allowed to stay at a hotel in Louisiana because they were black. The University of Tulsa didn’t accommodate them, so the white players stayed in one place and the black players stayed in another hotel for colored only. It was just so foreign to him that…anyway, that’s my experience. Belmonte Right. Was it through Clark that you became involved in the desegregation efforts? McDonald Really, I think he was certainly a part of it. Part of it was really selfish because of our second son, was really—this is his mom speaking, but he was very bright. We were in a traditional neighborhood school where he was not really being allowed to move at his own pace. They were just beginning to talk about and—particularly in this community, but also nationwide— curriculum that was individually paced, individualized for each student. The superintendent of the school system was doing some innovative things at that point in time and had built a new school, Columbus Elementary, and had piloted the integrative curriculum, continuous progress at Columbus, at Barnard, and at Lee. So I thought that curriculum would really be good for Jason, our second son. But I couldn’t get to it. They wouldn’t let me transfer out of the neighborhood school. At the same time, the school system was being faced with the integration of the school system. It was court-ordered segregation for the five elementary schools that were built for segregation. Carver Junior High School was closed in the summer of 1971, and six hundred black youngsters were bussed—not six hundred, 1,200 black youngers were forced bussed out of the old attendance zone of Carver Junior High School to five, south side junior high schools. That happened three weeks before school opened. There was a lot of unrest in this 7 �community, both in the black community and the white community. Petitions were flying. I remember one time at the corner of 51 st and Harvard, I was stopped and asked to sign a petition against forced bussing. It was just sort of—to me it was just sort of a—it wasn’t right. There was some things that just weren’t right in this whole thing. There was no one seeking any kind of solution to it, no one seeking any kind of alternative solution. Lines were drawn in the sand between the black community and the white community. They were not—they just forced this on this community. A group of people—it was not my idea—a small group of people, three or four of my friends, really began to talk about the possibility of offering an alternative: voluntary integration. Negotiating with the Board of Education, if we could have a curriculum that we wanted input into staff, hiring, and parent involvement because prior to that there were signs on the doors that said “no parents allowed” in Tulsa Public Schools. If you wanted to go to a classroom to see your child or to talk to your child, that was not allowed. There were signs on the neighborhood school that said no parents were allowed. That was completely foreign to me. That was not part of my experience growing up. Belmonte Was this sort of in loco parentis policy for the system? McDonald Yeah, absolutely. That was what we negotiated with, and we had an assistant superintendent who was very supportive of us. He thought the idea would work because he was interested in expanding his idea of continuous progress, individualized education. He was really innovative, and he said, “I think we can do this. I think we can demonstrate that this will work.” He said to—I guess there were maybe twelve of us—he said, “If you could get maybe forty families, we’ll start this project called voluntary integration.” So we did. We were successful in getting about forty families. We took our kids north to Burroughs Elementary School, which was a demonstration project that voluntary integration would work if you gave parents choices. This is 1971. If you gave parents opportunity to be involved in their children’s classroom, if you gave parents an opportunity to evaluate teachers and to be a part of the hiring process, and also, if you would look at community resources. If you look at that, you can see my job emerge because that was my job in Tulsa Public Schools. We started. It was the first time in the nation that they’d ever heard about voluntary integration, and we had incredible coverage: ABC, we even had a television from Germany came in and televised our kids getting off the yellow school buses and going to an all-black school. Belmonte Have the uprisings in Boston against forced bussing started by this point? McDonald Sure, absolutely. 8 �Belmonte This is of course, really, abutting the national curve. McDonald Absolutely, it was just incredible. This was happening across this nation, forced bussing, in Charlotte-Mecklenburg…there was one we visited in Atlanta and certainly Boston and Delaware, Dover, Delaware. It was pretty incredible. That project was so successful that—and we worked very closely with some leadership in the black community, black ministers and some black community leaders—to really pull us up. At that point, we had sixty percent white, forty percent black, so you always had to be in the majority. That’s a key point in this whole thing. That project was so successful that then Bruce [inaudible] said, “Do you think you could do this for Carver?” As parents, we’re saying, “How do we continue this experience for our children?” A good friend of mine and myself tackled the whole reopening of Carver, and the school board said, “We’ll let you do that, but you have to recruit 150 white kids and seventy-five blacks.” I’m not sure what the number was—we had to recruit 250 and they had to be sixty percent white and forty percent black until they would reconsider reopening Carver. The other thing that was so exciting at that time in this community is that Bob LaFortune was mayor and involved in the whole urban renewal project. He said that if he thought we could do this, that he would get the money to renovate Carver. It took us a while because we didn’t have a school, we didn’t have teachers, we didn’t have principals, we just had an idea that this would work. We were successful. We got that done in October of 1972. We finished Carver in October of 1972. The courts said we could reopen Carver, we could match it, sixty percent white, forty percent black. We had our 250 students, and we would expand it to 500 the next year. Bob LaFortune came through on his promise to renovate it, and we had to hold those students until September of 1973. Then at the same time, the courts came down and said that the school system had to desegregate Booker T. Washington, and then the school board approached us as the parents and said, “Do you think you could do this on a volunteer basis?” Belmonte Is Carver a high school as well? McDonald No, it’s a middle school. We started it as an innovative middle school. It was Tulsa’s first middle school in 1972, ’73 when it opened. Part of that was because Bruce [inaudible] had been at the University of Iowa. He had done his doctorate on emerging adolescents, and how junior high schools really didn’t meet the needs of emerging adolescents. This was a project, really, that had national recognition for what it was doing for the emerging adolescents. It was very exciting. Anyway, then the school system approached us about the desegregation of Booker T. on a volunteer basis, although they had to put it in place alternative plans because they weren’t sure that it would work. Could you really get six hundred white students and 9 �six hundred black students? When we decided to go with the volunteer plan, one of the black leaders got up at the school board meeting and said, “We’re not going to do this because this is our school. The only way that we will consider that is if we have equal status. We’re asking that you go fifty-fifty.” That’s how we came up with this fifty percent ratio, which was absolutely the best thing that ever happened because when that—when the school board decided to go fifty-fifty, we went fifty-fifty at Carver and fifty-fifty at Burroughs. No one was in the majority then, and it just worked so much better. Belmonte Now, had Booker T. Washington historically been an all-black school? McDonald It was an all-black school. It was built as an all-black school. It was built to contain the black community. The black community that lived in West Tulsa was bussed past Webster, past Central to go to Booker T. The black community that lived in Altuma (?), which was a black community in South Tulsa, was bussed past Edison and Central to go to Booker T. I mean, they contained the black community in this school. It was built for segregation, as were five elementary schools, built for segregation, as Carver, built for segregation. They were built to contain the black community. Well anyway, I decided—I shared the whole thing for the development of Booker T. and the recruitment of students to go to Booker T. It was a difficult project. We hired—the principal at Hale exchanged the principalship with Granville Smith at Booker T., black and white. He recruited the faculty, and there’s a lot more history to this, but he recruited the faculty. That summer of 1973, H. J. Green and I had seventy-five meetings with parents, trying to get them to give permission for the kids to go to Booker T. When we went out to the students, the students signed up immediately, but we couldn’t do that; they’re minors. They had to have parent permission, and the parents wouldn’t sign. We soon learned that we had to do this in very small groups, that we had to really talk to parents about their fears. What did they fear? I think we see some themes developing here, that I’ve often said, as I’ve worked in the gay community, that it’s almost like I’m reliving history, because in many of the things that I’ve dealt with in the gay community are the same things that we’ve dealt with in integration, the fear of the unknown, myths. A lot of repetition of central themes in people’s prejudice. What we learned is that if we could meet with parents on a oneto-one or small group basis, we’d get their kids signed up. We eventually made it. It was August, and we were still short 167 students, white students. The black community held their petitions until I got the six hundred whites. As soon as I got the six hundreds whites, then the blacks came in. We had our 1,200 students, and the board of education voted at the last meeting in August to go with the voluntary plan. So we were set. It worked. The rest is history. 10 �Belmonte Now, do you recall—how did people approach you in the community? Did you encounter harassment through your work on these issues? McDonald Well, there were days I came home—one day I came home and had black shoe polish thrown on the front door and called “nigger lover.” Certainly some hate mail, hate messages on the phone and things like that. Belmonte Goes with the territory. Now, it sounds like you had your hems pulled in racial integration, but were you involved in other things at the same time you were doing this? McDonald Yeah. The school system hired me in 1974 because they thought they could just ride on the reputation that we’d established, but it didn’t work because the second year they almost lost it because white kids didn’t come. What we learned is that you had to do this every year. You had to sell a whole new group of parents on this whole concept of black and white, that this was a project that would work. Then the school system was also phased with a court order of desegregating its elementary schools that were built—that were segregated based on the school board policy that said as soon as your race was in the minority, you could transfer out. We had five more elementary schools to desegregate. That’s when Bruce [inaudible] asked if I wouldn’t come to work. I did not have a degree in education, and I never said I did. I developed the whole—maintained and developed the whole magnet school concept: the recruitment of students, the marketing of the school. It was a whole new idea to go out and sell a school, to market a school, to give parents choices within a public school arena. Who heard of that in 1973, ’74, ’75? We really were doing some very innovative work, and I also did lots of school volunteer programs which was parent involvement. I had a grant from the Ford Foundation in New York to do that. I was one of the founders of the national school volunteer program at the national level. I was part of the beginning of the Adopt-a-School Program with a woman from Memphis, Tennessee, and the woman from Dallas developed that whole concept of corporate involvement in public schools, which we merged as Adopt-aSchool and eventually became partners in education program, which was promoted by President Reagan. Had some national recognition from my work for doing that. President Bush, the first president, recognized me and ten other people for our work in community involvement in public schools. That was always the highlight, I think, of some of my work, is I had tea with Mrs. Bush in the White House. Then I also was president of the Girl Scout Council at the same time. I was president of the Girl Scout Council from 1976 until 1983. Belmonte How were the Girl Scouts changing in this era? 11 �McDonald Well, that was a difficult time, because this Girl Scout Council had experienced a tremendous tragedy. Had three little girls that were murdered in Camp Scott in June of 1977. That was difficult because I had made the decision that we would close the camp and move the camp because I just felt that it was important to have a new beginning in this council. We were sued. Two of the families sued the council for negligence, as well as the hunt for Gene Leroy Hart, who was subsequently mistrialed for the murders. That was a difficult time for me because I felt really responsible. I was president of the council, and you look back and think of what were things that you could have done or should have done that would have helped prevent incredible tragedy. I negotiated with the [inaudible] and asked that we move the camp to Camp Tallchief, and [inaudible] was very supportive, and the rest is history. We have an incredible camp out there, Camp Tallchief. I was just out there with four hundred little girls out there having a wonderful time…memory. [Inaudible] council survived. I went through that; I learned a lot from that. I always say grew up that day because I had never dealt with media or law enforcement, parents of lost children. I learned a lot about nonprofit management from that experience. Belmonte The women’s movement is going full tilt in other parts of the United States in the mid ’70s. When do you recall that starting to have an impact in your activist circle in Tulsa? McDonald Well, my first experience with that was the Tulsa Boys Home because I had been so involved and so successful with the junior association. I was president of the junior association. I had done their education component, and they thought that was really valuable—the men thought that was really valuable, so they asked me to be a member of the men’s board. That must have been 1972, ’73. I’m not quite sure what that year was. They couldn’t see anything wrong with that, why I couldn’t just become a member of the men’s board. That was just such an enigma to me; they just didn’t get it. “Why couldn’t you just accept that, Nancy, and be a member of—we think you’re great, and we really want you to be a part of this, but we’re known as the men’s board.” It was the board of directors—now I look at it, and there’s a president of the board of directors of the Tulsa Boys Home, a woman. You had to break that cycle. The other thing that was first—I was also a member of the Thornton Family YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association]. Here again they thought, “Gosh, I’ve done some work down there,” so they invited me to be a member of the board, but they weren’t quite sure whether or not I, as a woman, could be a member of the board of directors of the YMCA. Could they handle that, or could they do that? It just presented a lot of controversy in the YMCA if they could invite Nancy McDonald, a woman, what would she know about the YMCA? Pardon the fact that I had two little boys that were very active at the YMCA, plus two little girls. It was just crazy. It was 12 �built as a family YMCA. I sort of broke that barrier for that because a lot of controversy in this community: whether or not they could invite a woman to be a member of the board of the YMCA. [Laughter] When you look at that, it was an experience of breaking that in the not-for-profit world. Belmonte It was around this time that TOHR is being formed, and other interviewees have suggested that you’re really starting to see a very small, public presence of the gay community in Tulsa. When do you recall first encountering gay people in your life, either prior to Tulsa and then in Tulsa subsequently? McDonald Well, you know, this was a topic that was not talked about. When I look back at my own growing up, it was not a topic of discussion. I remember Joe talking about an airman that he took care of in Turkey that he thought was probably a homosexual, and he was really—he was just concerned about—I just remember a brief conversation, and as we reflected on that conversation, he said, “I just felt that he was experiencing some really hateful messages on the base.” Another time, I remember us talking about—it was another airman that worked for Joe in surgery at MacDill Air Force Base, and just passing conversation. I was aware that there were people who were attracted to the same sex, but it wasn’t part of my experience. It’s interesting when I look back on the desegregation and the alternative education—we didn’t have that fancy term “magnet;” we called it “alternative.” I think about the kids that came looking for the alternative, and as I look back on them, many of them were gay. I didn’t consciously know that, but I knew that these were kids who needed to have a different kind of experience, who were seeking a different kind of experience for whatever reasons. Many of them talented, bright, young people but were having difficulty in their home school. Really, unbeknown to me, I was taking a lot of gay kids to Booker T., didn’t realize it at the time. But as I reflect back on it and look at it, obviously it was there. I just never, ever made that conscious connection that this was an alternative for gay kids and that maybe we should be doing something with faculty. It didn’t click for me. Yet, we had a faculty that was very sensitive to diversity. We built that school on diversity, racial integration. It wasn’t a factor—a conscious factor in my mind about an alternative for gay kids. I knew that there was something different about these kids that were coming for whatever reasons, and I can tell you story after story of individuals as I reflect back on them and how they came and were looking for an alternative but never, ever discussed their sexuality. Interesting. I really wasn’t really conscious of the gay community in Tulsa until our own daughter came out in 1985, ’86, when we started dealing with her issues, that I then began to think about…. Well, there are lots of things that happened there. Morva came out to us, and I read an article in—I can’t 13 �remember, Woman’s Day or Family Circle—written by a mother whose son was gay. I had made a reference to PFLAG [Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays], so I—January 1 of 1986 when Morva announced, “I think, Mom and Dad, I’m gay,” I looked for that article. I called the national office January 2, and they said, “There’s no one in Oklahoma, and there’s no one in Kansas.” This young woman, her name was Laura, and she said, “There’s no one in Missouri,” and she was just going down; she was just verbalizing this. She said, “There’s no one in Texas.” She said, “There’s this woman in Denver, Colorado, who I think would talk to you.” I was convinced that I was the only mother in Tulsa, Oklahoma who had a lesbian daughter. It was just—I was alone; there wasn’t anybody else. I just thought that I was the only one in the Midwest. Belmonte It certainly sounded like it. McDonald This wonderful woman, Eleanor Lou Ellen, talked to me and said, “You’re not alone,” and all that stuff. She sent me some literature, and so I certainly started reading everything that I could, learning about what our daughter was dealing with. I’m an avid reader, so I read a lot, trying to get up to speed on homosexuality and certainly about what youth were dealing with. Joe and I—Eleanor Lou Ellen and her husband came down to see us. The national organization was just really emerging; it was just starting as a national movement. She came down to see us, and she said, “Why don’t you and Joe think about developing a Tulsa chapter?” We got to thinking about, “it’s pretty obvious that we’re not the only parents in Tulsa, Oklahoma that have gay kids.” I don’t know if this is—this is probably not common knowledge, but I looked in the paper—I was always looking in the paper to see if there was any records, and one Sunday there was in the social concerns column PFLAG: call such-and-such a number. I thought, “Oh my gosh, there’s somebody else in this community.” I don’t mean this in any way to be critical. I called the number and it was a church which I had never heard of, the MCC church, Metropolitan Community Church, and a message. I left a message and said I was interested in attending the PFLAG meeting. Someone called me back and told me where it was. I thought I knew this city backwards and forwards and certainly have been all over this city as part of the school system, and I could not identify where this church was. I went out during the day to see if I could find this church. I swear to god, it was behind bushes, and it was just—I told Joe; I said, “I’m going to go.” He said, “Well, you’re not going to go alone. I’m going to go with you. I don’t know anything about this; we’re going together.” It was March, I think, and we went up to this church. We walked into this room, and it was dark. There were these little, tiny candles all over the room, so you couldn’t see these faces; you couldn’t see people’s faces. They 14 �invited us to come in and sit down, and a woman across the table said, “You’re Nancy McDonald,” and I said, “Yes.” They were showing a film— of course, this was the time of HIV/AIDS was really emerging, and it was very much a crisis. This whole group of people never introduced themselves, and it just sort of ended up [inaudible]. We weren’t quite sure what to think about all that. We went to our second meeting and had the same kind of experience, except there was a woman there who said to me, sort of in the dark, she said, “If you would take this chapter, I’ll help you. I know who you are. I’m a teacher in Tulsa Public Schools.” She said, “I’ll get back with you.” Didn’t know her name, nothing. I was out at the school the following week, and this teacher came up and said, “When are you ready to start PFLAG?” It was through her encouragement, then, that Joe and I decided independently to start a chapter. It was also then that we learned about TOHR, and we went through our meeting. Our first meeting at TOHR was at the library, and Dennis Neal was—I believe Dennis was president. I’m not quite sure about that; I think he was president. He was very active because he was organizing Tulsa’s first HIV testing clinic in west Tulsa. Jim Perry was very active in it, and Jeff Beale, but it was also kind of an interesting experience because there really wasn’t a lot of support. You know, we were parents attending it…it was okay. There’s also a lot of crying going on. We were kind of past the stage. We really were not crying about Morva; we were wanting to learn and be supportive and figure out what we can do. I’ve watched TOHR go through a lot of ups and downs and struggles. We started the PFLAG chapter. No one came to our first meeting—no, I shouldn’t say that. One young man came to our first meeting. He was a young man from Muskogee who was just coming out to his parents. Somehow he had learned about our—and came to our meeting. We had our second meeting at the library, and one of the young men said, “This is not working. People are not going to come to the library because it’s too public.” We moved it to Joe’s office, Surgicare. We held our meetings there for numbers of years. We had our support group meetings in the recovery room, the only support groups we ever had in the recovery room. The chapter just grew—incredible—until we needed to find another space. At that point, then the HIV resource center—that was probably about 1990, spring of 1990, we moved it to the conference room of the HIV resource center. That worked until the outdoor events phase, and then Russ Bennett said, “Why don’t you move PFLAG to my church?” We’ve been meeting at Fellowship Congregationalist Church since the early ’90s. Belmonte Tell us a little more about Morva’s experiences. How old was she when she came out? 15 �McDonald Well, I think as any gay or lesbian young person in the ’80s, early ’80s, and in our subsequent conversations with her, she obviously recognized that she was different, but she didn’t have the words. She didn’t have the labels for it; she didn’t know what it was. She knew that she was attracted to the same sex and experienced that in middle school: probably thirteen, fourteen, typical emerging adolescence. Realized that she wasn’t the same as her peers; she wasn’t attracted to the opposite sex, but here again, did not have the words for it, didn’t know what it was that she was dealing with. Just knew that this was something different. Moved to high school, of course, she was an excellent student, very athletic, excellent soccer player, swimmer. Went to high school and in many ways was certainly different than our other three children. She tended to be more withdrawn, quiet, although she’s five years younger than the next one, she was sort of raised almost as an only child. Wasn’t very communicative. Our other kids were much more engaged in family discussions and give and take. We always had family meals together and lots of lively discussions, and Morva tended just to kind of just stand back and watch all this, not engaging. You would ask her periodically, “Is there something you’re dealing, or you want to talk about it?” “Nope, I’m fine,” just not very communicative. She was obviously attracted to a girl in high school, frankly one that was, I found, very difficult to accept. We put some barriers in front of her that probably were not the best, appropriate. She tended to hide her sexuality by dating. She dated probably the most popular kid at Booker T. I thought he was a great son-in-law, but he was gay. That’s how these kids survived. You know, that was—I don’t think—unusual in the mid ’80s. She dated Allen for whatever they needed—proms, whatever. She went away to school; she went to Tufts. It was when she was a freshman at Tufts that she really dealt with it. Came home her freshman year and said, “Mom and Dad, I think I’m gay.” Then it’s in our ball park, so then we have to deal with it. I’m sure she felt much better; we felt lousy. That’s when we—then the rest is history; we developed PFLAG. Belmonte So you and Joe started PFLAG. Tell me a little bit about Joe’s part in a lot of your activism. It sounds like he’s been amazingly supportive. McDonald Yeah. Joe’s been absolutely fabulous. He’s always said, “I can’t do those kinds of things because of my work.” An anesthesiologist doesn’t have a lot of control over his time. He’s at the mercy of the hospital and the mercy of the surgeons, but he’s tremendously supportive of what we did and what I was all about and was very much a part of PFLAG. He’s done the support groups for years and years and years. He took a little break from it for a while, but he’s back doing it again. In some ways, Joe’s not very patient with parents. He said, “Get over it. This is a fact. Your child is who she is; she’s been here—she’s been very honest with you and open with you, given you a tremendous gift of honesty. Let us help you understand that. Let us 16 �help you understand homosexuality, but then let’s get beyond that and figure out what we can do collectively and make it better for our kids.” Joe has a lot of empathy but not a lot of patience with people. I think as anybody knows, he’s always there, many times doing a lot of the gut work that people don’t always see or appreciate. I often think about—Joe and I have done PFLAG almost for twenty years, and it’s Joe McDonald that sets it up and takes it down, puts away things, and just does that kind of work. That’s just—that’s our roles. Belmonte Describe to me how the chapter developed. You began mingling with the support groups. Is that correct? McDonald Yeah. Traditionally, if any PFLAG chapter grows, it grows out of support. You have a support group that comes together to offer that support for one another, and it’s really helpful for parents to talk to parents. It’s also helpful for gay and lesbians to talk to parents about what they’re dealing with and how they’re dealing with it and for parents to be available for gays and lesbians who are coming out to talk about what they can expect from parents, how to prepare them for what parents may respond and how they may respond. We were really—interesting enough—and I can’t tell you exactly—we must have been probably the fourteenth or fifteenth chapter organized in the country in PFLAG, so we’re really one of the first. We were right on the brink of support because traditionally, that’s all PFLAG did, was to come together and support. I’ve been very controversial at the national level because I said PFLAG had to move beyond that. PFLAG had to move beyond getting together and holding hands and crying because we had gay and lesbian kids, that we needed to move beyond that and think about how we could make the world better for them. It really, in many ways, although I was not alone, it was another faction within PFLAG that moved PFLAG toward its three-pronged admission that we articulated that we would offer support, support always, in any way that we could, but that we would also be much more aggressive in educating ourselves and the broader community, and that we would finally get involved in advocacy. It was in the late ’80s that a new mission was hammered out for PFLAG, which was to support, to educate, and to advocate on behalf of our GLBT kids. I was sort of at that brink of just making that move in PFLAG. They were moving from what I said, a mom and pop organization run strictly by volunteers, to a national organization with a national presence, with a national stat. I became active in PFLAG at the national level probably 198— very shortly after I started the chapter, ’88, maybe. I forget. Dates just kind of mesh, ’88 maybe. I had gone to the Seattle conference. Joe and I went to our first PFLAG national conference, encouraged my Morva. Morva went with us to the PFLAG conference in Detroit, Michigan, and she met us 17 �there. We had a wonderful time. I think it was the first time that all three of us could be really open and honest in an environment that was supportive. Then the second conference we went to was in Seattle, Washington, and it was so disorganized. It just was not functioning. They asked me if I would be a regional director, and I took that position. I subsequently developed chapters in Kansas, chapters in Oklahoma, and chapters in Texas, chapters in New Mexico, chapters in Colorado, really became active in Colorado in amendment two, organized that year fifteen chapters in Colorado in response to amendment two. Organized chapters in Casper, Wyoming, Cheyenne, Wyoming. I’ve done a lot of organizing: Dallas, San Antonio, Houston. Belmonte What do you think the biggest challenge is you’ve faced in your PFLAG work has been? McDonald The homophobia, the bigotry at the national level by our national leaders. It’s pretty incredible. I testified in congress on ENDA [The Employee NonDiscrimination Act]; I testified on Defense of Marriage Act. I never experienced such incredible hate as I did on the Defense of Marriage Act, the judicial panel. I was on the panel with Andrew Sullivan and with Elizabeth Birch. I think we both know that those were incredible individuals. I saw them just brought to tears by their questioning. You know, I think it was that point I really realized the incredible power of PFLAG because I was the third panel member. I went before the judicial committee, and the environment just changed; it was quiet. You could have heard a pin drop in the room that day. I introduced myself as a mother and a grandmother, and they could identify with that. Hyde, Representative Henry Hyde, was—you know, he said some horrible things, but I’m really proud of that. I never flinched in that. I never lost my composure. Although we lost that Defense of Marriage Act, and Steve Largent was the author, I think in some ways, we began to see the tide turning just a little bit. I testified on the first Employment Non-Discrimination Act with Representative—from New Jersey— Belmonte --D’Amato? McDonald D’Amato. Belmonte From New York. McDonald From New York. [Inaudible] That was a difficult one also, but he was really just, at that point, on a fact-finding mission in that hearing. Then I testified in the House of Representatives again, which was not as difficult as the—the most difficult one was the Defense of Marriage Act. That was really difficult. I think when you asked what are the challenges, the challenges are you just continue to pound away and trying to educate people, educate the 18 �people who are the decision makers and policy makers; that’s where it is. Simple. Belmonte Right. Let’s backtrack in some of the advocacy efforts that the PFLAG chapter in Tulsa has taken on at the local level. I know, for instance, you guys were involved in some issues with the library in the mid ’90s. McDonald Well, we had a lot—the library really didn’t want to have a display of gay and lesbian materials, books, et cetera. We had to go before the library board of trustees. We had some support from the board of trustees, from individual members who then said, “Well, this is blatant discrimination, and they ought to be allowed to have a display.” Our first display was the Ku Klux Klan was in town. Although we were not the original intent of the Ku Klux Klan coming, they learned about our library display and demonstrated in front of the library. It was a pretty incredible experience to look at the Ku Klux Klan in their hoods and to hear such hate. You realize this was the Ku Klux Klan; I mean, this was awful. They denounced our exhibit, but that barrier was broken. We handled that; we just had a display. There was not one complaint filed about our display. We’ve had—this is our fourth year. We have it every other year, so it’s eight years since we’ve done that. We have always met with the editorial board in the Tulsa world. I’ve always felt that it’s much better to be pro-active than after-the-fact. Whenever I felt that there was an issue that they needed to be aware of or that they needed—that we needed to bring attention of the editorial board, I called for a meeting, and they’ve always been receptive. Never once have they ever turned me down. Then I went to the editorial board before I started PFLAG and told them what I was going to do because as a community leader, I’ve certainly had a lot of exposure to the editorial board, and I just knew that was the thing to do. I just knew that it was so much better to meet with them and that they’d have a level of trust and respect for me if I did that. Took on advertising department of Tulsa World. PFLAG chapter changed their policies about—could not buy an ad that used the word gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or homosexual in an ad. I took them to task for that, and after—that would be four or five years, finally got that policy changed so we could run an ad. We ran our first project, Open Mind, and could not use those words in the ad that we even paid for. It was a 7,000 dollar ad, and we couldn’t use the words that we wanted to. We certainly have done that. We certainly were involved in Tulsa’s second try to change the [inaudible] policies of the city of Tulsa, served on that subcommittee of the Tulsa Human Rights Commission. I’ve lost track of the number of presentations that PFLAG has made to churches and civic groups and organizations, and schools, and all of that, and the educational outreach. Call that advocacy, you could call it education; it’s all about changing policies. Certainly 19 �changed the Tulsa Public School’s policies on the inclusion of Title IX and discrimination against gays and lesbians, harassment policies. Went before the executive committee of Tulsa Public Schools, and those were changed immediately. There was no trouble, which was very fortunate. John Thompson did it. We were very fortunate. Belmonte What do you think are the biggest issues facing the local GLBT community now? McDonald Well, the biggest one is, of course, the constitutional amendment—the proposed Oklahoma constitutional amendment. Personally, I don’t think there’s any chance of it being defeated; I think that if it’s defeated, it will have to be in a technicality withdrawn from the ballot. Nevertheless, you have to put every effort to making that you educate as many people as possible that this is wrong. This is institutionalized discrimination. It’s wrong. We live in a state that, unfortunately, is very conservative and [inaudible]. Belmonte Has the PFLAG chapter had any success in being racially inclusive? This is an issue that TOHR has never been successful with. McDonald No, we have not. There’s hope, but we’ve not been successful at the national level with PFLAG. This has been a big issue. I think what you have to do is you have to recognize the fact that you’re dealing with different cultures. The African American community is not—it’s not part of their culture to have support groups to get together to talk about their gay and lesbian kids. It’s just not going to happen. I mean, we’ve learned that the hard way. You have to look at a different avenue of delivering information and education to a culture, be it Hispanic, be it Native American, be it African American. You know, the Caucasians, we like to get together, hold hands, and talk about it. That’s not true for the black community. That’s not true in the Hispanic or the Asian American community. What we’ve seen happen is that we have seen the Latino, Hispanic, African American, Asian American people come together to design what it is they need within this arena of support, education, and advocacy. It takes different forms. We learn from the Asian American community that for them, it’s best to have a video that they check out and take home and watch. We’ve learned with the African American community that it’s important to find a religious community that’s supportive and that perhaps through that religious community—I learned this from the Reverend Tim McDonald, who is one of Martin Luther King’s followers in Atlanta and the minister at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. I met with him when I was national president, and he really taught me a lot about how to work within the African American community to try to reach them with PFLAG’s mission. He said if you can identify African American religious leaders who 20 �understand your message, then they in turn then can help you identify your parent support group or define it. In Tulsa—and here again, I think this happened certainly because I—it may be my own ego, but credibility within the black community—so that I could go to some of the black ministers and talk to them about homosexuality. Consequently, they were willing to meet with us, so we had a meeting—I took two young, African American gay men with me. We had two absolutely incredible meetings with them just these past couple months. Did we change any ideas or any of their attitudes? Yes and no. What did emerge out of there was interesting; we identified a minister who was very supportive and who took our video, “All in the Family,” which is a video produced by [inaudible]—I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it’s wonderful. It has, interesting enough, a native Tulsan, whose name is going to escape me now. He’s a professor of African American studies at Harvard, just moved to Princeton— Belmonte Cornel West. McDonald Cornel West. He’s a graduate of Booker T. He’s on the video, and so some of these black ministers knew him, which was very interesting. Anyway, one of the black ministers said, “You know, I think what we could do, Nancy, is we could do a PFLAG chapter in North Tulsa, and I’m willing to host it.” You know, you never know. Sometimes things happen. I was at a meeting a couple months ago for the League of Women Voters, and an African American woman came up to me, who I’ve known for thirty-seven years, and she said, “I need to talk to you, Nancy.” When anybody says that, I know what I’m going to deal with. She said—her son happened to be our son’s roommate at Harvard—and she said, “I need to tell you that my son is gay. You’re the first person I’ve told outside of the family,” and she said, “and I need to find a new church.” She said, “Because I can’t go to this church anymore because every time I go to church, this minister stands up and talks about how awful homosexuals are.” She said, “I can’t stand it anymore because my son’s wonderful, and he’s a physician in Chicago.” She said, “You know how bright he is.” “I know.” I said, “Well, why don’t you go to this church?” knowing darn good and well I was setting her up because now I have a minister and a mother. I’m going to meet with them this week about starting a chapter. I think maybe this might be how we get it going because over the years, I’ve collected all of these names of these African American parents who have called, many of whom I know, but who feel alone and isolated and not willing to come out. Maybe, it just may be that I can get them together now with this woman who’s—everybody knows in this community, and she’s willing to step up. That might work. I don’t know. 21 �Belmonte Worth a try. McDonald Worth a try, but it will have to be done very quietly. I don’t care. As long as it’s there and it’s servicing the needs of people, it will gain momentum and slowly, slowly gain enough confidence to be open enough. What’s that timeline? I don’t know. Belmonte You’ve described some positive experience with religious leaders in this community, and I can’t imagine you haven’t had many negative ones. Can you just tell us a little more about some of the resistance you have gotten? McDonald Well, it’s interesting. There’s certainly been some resistance publicly. One from a minister of a denomination here in Tulsa who’s, interesting enough, was a roommate of the president of the Houston PFLAG chapter, who’s also a minister, Methodist minister. Now I’ve given it away, haven’t I? Don’s son was murdered in Houston. He became very active in the PFLAG chapter in Houston. His roommate is the minister in Tulsa. This minister—every time we go to this church, he will not deal with me. He’ll refer me down to his assistants. He doesn’t want to recognize or will he take a stand on behalf of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender people in this community. He’s wellthought of in this community; he’s a religious leader in this community, but he will not touch this subject. I always—sometimes it feels sort of devious. He’s been very active in another organization, a not-for-profit organization and just finished his leadership, and I wrote him a thank-you because he did an incredible job as a leader. He wrote back to me, and he said, “Nancy, I appreciate your note of thanks,” but he said, “I want to tell you, and it means a lot to me because I really respect all that you have done in this community on behalf of gay people.” That’s one-on-one, you see. He can deal with that, but publicly, in his denomination, he just can’t make that bridge. What do you do? Another Baptist minister. Well, I have to tell you, I was scared to death to go see. Absolutely scared to death, because this man is powerful, he is well-known in this community, he sits on the board of trustees at Hillcrest Hospital with me for twelve years. I went to see William about Project Open Mind, and I was scared because this man is incredible; everybody respects him. I got into his office, and he was sitting in his office with his arms folded, and I thought, “Oh, this is going to be awful.” He kept talking, and I kept talking about Project Open Mind with this other PFLAG member who was a member of his church. He finally leaned forward, and he said, “Let me tell you something, Nancy,” and I knew it was just going to be awful. He said, “I want to tell you something. I have a lesbian sister. I can’t do anything from my pulpit, but what do you want me to do individually?” I think that in some ways just tells you what the challenges are within the denom. It’s the denominational challenge collectively. It’s their doctrine, their dogma. 22 �There are not strong enough individuals or enough individuals to raise the questions or make the challenge. Will it come? I don’t know. That’s just sort of how I see it. They operate out here individually. I believe they know what’s right, and yet they do not have enough courage or backbone to step up and make a difference. It takes a real special individual to do that. It’s their job, it’s their denomination, it’s—defines them, and they’re not really willing to buck it. Belmonte Moving to another subject, some of our interviewees have talked a lot about a club called Zipper’s that existed in the ’80s here, and there used to be a lot of police harassment of people who went to this club. You and I discussed privately that—your relation with the Tulsa Police Department. Has PFLAG encountered a lot of victims of hate crimes, and how has PFLAG tried to work with the police department? McDonald I think we’ve seen tremendous changes in the police department, incredible changes within the police department, part of it because of Drew Diamond, part of it I think was a change in the culture of the police department as a whole. I think we have—as an organization, certainly we’re aware of harassment: we’ve had some calls on the help line, we’ve had some calls from individual families of kids being harassed by police with their driving on Memorial or 11th Street or wherever. Here again, I think we’ve had some good relations with the police department, where we can call them and talk to them about it and have some of those issues addressed. I still think there’s a lot of work to be done in the police department, and part of it is in their training program. They use a program—a canned program—out of Dallas called Pace. It’s really very vague; it doesn’t talk about specifics of cultures, and we need to make it much more relevant for police officers. Had some conversations with Chief Dean about it. There’s a lot of inertia right now with the police department and Bill LaFortune, and the race relations committee has been abandoned. He’s organizing a new kind of commission under the auspices of the mayor’s office. Chief Dean will talk to me a little bit about it. I’m not sure where that’s happening. Belmonte Jenny, can you think of any areas that we didn’t touch on? Davis Well, I noticed that you’re experienced in the medical field. How hard is it for a GLBT person in Tulsa to find a supportive doctor or someone that they can talk to about—have you run into that? McDonald There’s evidence, the documents. There’s evidence in the needs assessment that we’ve just completed, the Tulsa Reaches Out needs assessment, which has some specific questions about their physicians. Difficult, which points to the need that there will have to be some work done in the medical society in raising the level of awareness of their gay and lesbian clientele. It’s documented; it’s there. 23 �Belmonte Is there anything you’d like to add? McDonald I could go on and on, Laura. (Laughter) A thousand and one things. Belmonte We appreciate your time. Thank you. That concludes this interview. ------- End of interview ------- Addendum (Dennis Neill January 14, 2026) Nancy McDonald of Tulsa, Oklahoma June 4, 1936 - October 24, 2023 Nancy McDonald, a longtime Tulsa community volunteer and activist, died Tuesday. She was 87. A celebration of life will be held at 4 p.m. Nov. 12 at All Souls Unitarian Church, with a reception to follow. Per McDonald’s wishes, her family invites everyone attending the reception to bring homemade cookies. Known for her vision and tenacity, McDonald was a force for change in Tulsa for well over 50 years, embracing a variety of causes including public school integration, the arts and LGBTQ rights. Notably with the latter, her influence extended throughout Oklahoma and beyond. McDonald and her husband, Joe, were the founders of the Tulsa chapter of Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, the first in Oklahoma, and she later served as president of the national PFLAG organization. It was during her tenure as president, in 1998, that the organization extended its mission to include transgender people. McDonald was active on a state and national level in promoting legislation that advanced LGBTQ rights. And when a proposed law threatened that advancement, she was there to fight it. That included testifying before Congress in 1996 in opposition to the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Toby Jenkins, former director of Oklahomans for Equality, said McDonald was a source of needed encouragement for her fellow LGBTQ rights advocates, assuring them that “incrementally, bit by bit, relationships would form and change would come.” “Nancy taught us to show respect and civility to everyone, even if they were hateful to you,” Jenkins said. “If they spoke that way, she believed it was just that their hearts and minds had not been opened or challenged. Eventually the change of heart would come. I will miss that most about her.” A Nebraska native and graduate of the University of Nebraska, McDonald moved to Tulsa with her family in 1966. She didn’t waste any time getting involved in her new community. As a parent of school-age children and PTA member, she joined a small group of Tulsa Public Schools parents in helping with voluntary integration, starting with Burroughs Elementary School. Then, in 1973, district officials turned to McDonald to help integrate Booker T. Washington High School. 24 �Chairing a committee for volunteer recruitment, McDonald led the successful effort to recruit white student volunteers to attend the previously all-Black school, holding a series of meetings with students and parents. Her volunteering led to a full-time job with TPS, coordinating volunteers and leading the further development of the magnet school concept. Motivating more community volunteers to get involved in their public schools was at the heart of McDonald’s love for the Partners in Education program. She participated in a related White House Symposium and wrote the guidelines for PIE groups that were published as a book. She remained involved with PIE through the end of her life. McDonald was also passionate about scouting. She was a former board member and president of the Girl Scouts of Eastern Oklahoma. In that role, she helped guide the organization through the tumultuous time following the 1977 murders of three girls at summer camp. McDonald was recipient of a number of honors and awards. They included induction into the Tulsa Hall of Fame and the dedication of the Nancy & Joe McDonald Rainbow Library in her and her husband’s honor at the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center. McDonald’s commitment to the LGBTQ cause began in the 1980s when one of her daughters came out as a lesbian. The experience of supporting her daughter would shape McDonald, and later she became a mother figure to many LGBTQ people who found themselves facing alienation from friends and family. “We called her ‘everybody’s mother,’” Jenkins said. “She was a surrogate parent for so many whose families had rejected them or had not accepted or understood them. There are national LGBTQ leaders who came out of Oklahoma who Nancy mentored about family relationships.” And her motherly influence didn’t end with the LGBTQ community, Jenkins said. “If anyone was marginalized, it became her cause,” he said. Morva McDonald, McDonald’s daughter, said her mother was “just so good at seeing every individual.” “At her core, she was always trying her best to help people be seen, be recognized for who they were. And that’s what allowed her to reach across so many different causes and arenas.” “The issue for her was always helping people be seen. It was a tremendous gift.” For her mother, part of valuing people as individuals included helping them find ways to participate, Morva added. “That’s why we’re asking people to bring homemade cookies to the reception. It was her idea. Baking was a favorite activity of Mom’s with her grandchildren. “Even at the end she was thinking about how everyone could share and participate.” McDonald’s survivors include her husband, Joe McDonald; four children, JoElyn Newcomb, Paul McDonald, Jason McDonald and Morva McDonald; eight grandchildren; a brother, Howard Nellor; and a sister, Sharlene Clatanoff. Memorial donations may be made to the Foundation for Tulsa Schools’ Partners in Education program. To send a flower arrangement in memory of Nancy McDonald, please click here to visit our sympathy store. 25 �Services Celebration of Life Sunday, November 12, 2023 4:00 PM All Souls Unitarian Church 2952 S. Peoria Ave Tulsa, OK 74114 26 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [Series] Oral Histories Project > Interviews Description An account of the resource <strong>Physical Media:</strong> <br />Box 7, Folder 7 - Dr. Leisa Meyer Program<br />Box 7, Folder 8 - Interviewees Materials, Original Series 2003-2007<br /><br /><strong>Digital Media:</strong> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [2004] Nancy McDonald Interview Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 18, 2004 Description An account of the resource Video recording and transcript of oral history interview with Laura Belmonte on July 18, 2004. Nancy was born in Omaha, Nebraska and raised on a farm near Beemer, Nebraska. She graduated from the University of Nebraska School of Medical Technology. She married Joe McDonald when he was a senior in medical school. They worked with the Air Force in medical fields for 10 years and settled in Tulsa in 1966 where Joe continued his medical practice. While facing a great deal of pushback, In the early 1970’s , Nancy became one of the leaders of the successful effort to voluntarily integrate the Tulsa Public Schools. She was further involved in the public sphere as head of the Girl Scout Council when 3 girls were murdered at Camp Scott in 1977. She became involved with the Tulsa Boy’s Home where Joe and Nancy soon helped raise the first Afro-American boy admitted to the home. They helped him through school and as a star player on the University of Tulsa Basketball team. Joe and Nancy became involved in the Tulsa LGBT scene as one of their daughters came out in 1986. At that time, Nancy had recently learned of PFLAG and set about creating a Tulsa chapter. Soon after, she became aware of Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights and its work addressing the AIDS crisis. With Joe’s support, she developed a very effective chapter and served as national president of PFLAG and also served on the board of TOHR. She testified before the U.S. Congress against the Defense of Marriage Act. She arranged for pride month displays at the downtown Tulsa City- County Library and led so many other efforts to improve education, children’s welfare, LGBTQ+ acceptance and the work to support open and affirming churches as noted in the interview. An addendum to her transcript includes an obituary as Nancy passed on October 23, 2023. Her beloved and constant supporter Joe McDonald, passed on February 12, 2026. Subject The topic of the resource Nancy McDonald Oral History Project Interview from July 18, 2004 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Nancy McDonald, Laura Belmonte, Dennis Neill 2004 AIDS AIDS/HIV Air Force Defense of Marriage Act Girl Scouts HIV/AIDs interview Joe McDonald Laura A. Belmonte Laura Belmonte Nancy and Dr. Joe McDonald Nancy and Joe McDonald Nancy and Joe McDonald Rainbow Library Nancy McDonald Nancy McDonald Rainbow Library Obituaries Obituary OKEQ Oral History Project oral history oral history interview Oral History Project oral history transcript Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) Parents Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays Parents Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) PFLAG PFLAG Tulsa Chapter Rainbow Library TOHR TPS transcript Tulsa Boy's Home Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights (TOHR) Tulsa PFLAG Tulsa Public Schools Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) University of Nebraska video Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [Series] Oral Histories Project > Interviews Description An account of the resource <strong>Physical Media:</strong> <br />Box 7, Folder 7 - Dr. Leisa Meyer Program<br />Box 7, Folder 8 - Interviewees Materials, Original Series 2003-2007<br /><br /><strong>Digital Media:</strong> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [2004] Rex Ball Interview Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource January 30, 2004 Description An account of the resource Video recording and transcript of oral history interview with Laura Belmonte on January 30, 2004. <strong>Video and Transcript available at the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center for on-site research.</strong> Born in Oklahoma City in 1934, he attended Oklahoma State University and served as a commissioned officer with the Army Corps of Engineers. Married in 1960, he and his wife had four daughters. In 1986, they divorced and he became involved in the Tulsa LGBTQ+ community when he moved to Tulsa in 1986. As a gay man, he entered into a long-term relationship and continued his work as a well-regarded architect and urban designer. Subject The topic of the resource Rex Ball Oral History Project Interview from January 30, 2004 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rex Ball, Laura Belmonte, Allison Richmond, Matthew D. Williams, Dennis Neill 2004 Allison Richmond available at Center interview Laura A. Belmonte Laura Belmonte Matthew D. Williams OKEQ Oral History Project oral history oral history interview Oral History Project oral history transcript Rex Ball transcript video Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [Series] Oral Histories Project > Interviews Description An account of the resource <strong>Physical Media:</strong> <br />Box 7, Folder 7 - Dr. Leisa Meyer Program<br />Box 7, Folder 8 - Interviewees Materials, Original Series 2003-2007<br /><br /><strong>Digital Media:</strong> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [2004] Steve Aberson and Brent Ortolani Interview Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 25, 2004 Description An account of the resource Video recording and transcript of oral history interview with Laura Belmonte on July 25, 2004. <strong>Video and Transcript available at the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center for on-site research.</strong> Steve was born in Okemah, Oklahoma on July 1, 1959. At age 5, the family moved to Tulsa to be more involved in the local Jewish community. Brent was born in Pittsburg, Kansas but was raised in Coffeyville, Kansas. In the interview, Steve and Brent discussed their early experiences with the gay life in Tulsa and awareness as the AIDS crisis began. Brent discussed his experiences at two universities in a public relations role and involvement with Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights (TOHR), including as president in the early 2000s. Steve talked about some of the prejudices he faces as a Jew and out gay person in the retail business. Both discussed their coming out experiences with family and friends. Steve discussed his volunteer work with the AIDS service organization Shanti, Brent talked about his experience as a volunteer HIV/AIDS educator. Brent reviewed the challenges TOHR faced in the early 2000s. They discussed the rewarding experience of helping raise a transgender high school boy originally from Thailand. Subject The topic of the resource Steve Aberson and Brent Ortolani Oral History Project Interview from July 25, 2004 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Steve Aberson, Brent Ortolani, Laura Belmonte, Dennis Neill 2004 AIDS AIDS/HIV available at Center Brent Ortolani HIV Education HIV/AIDs HIV/AIDs outreach interview Laura A. Belmonte Laura Belmonte OKEQ Oral History Project oral history oral history interview Oral History Project oral history transcript Shanti Shanti Project Steve Aberson TOHR transcript Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights (TOHR) video Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [Series] Oral Histories Project > Interviews Description An account of the resource <strong>Physical Media:</strong> <br />Box 7, Folder 7 - Dr. Leisa Meyer Program<br />Box 7, Folder 8 - Interviewees Materials, Original Series 2003-2007<br /><br /><strong>Digital Media:</strong> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [2005] Bill Bissey Interview Description An account of the resource Video recording and transcription of Laura Belmonte’s November 19, 2025, interview. <strong>Video and Transcript available at the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center for on-site research.</strong> Bill was born on July 6, 1932, in Clay County, Illinois and passed on April 10, 2019, in Tulsa. He served in the Air Force and moved with his Tulsa-born wife from Illinois to Tulsa in 1956. Following a divorce, he moved to Houston for his job and entered an eighteen-year relationship until his partner developed HIV and died in 1996. When he returned to Tulsa, he was active with the Prime Timers, the social organization for gay and bisexual men. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource November 18, 2005 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bill Bissey, Laura Belmonte, Dennis Neill 2005 AIDS AIDS/HIV available at Center Bill Bissey HIV HIV/AIDs interview Laura A. Belmonte Laura Belmonte OKEQ Oral History Project oral history oral history interview Oral History Project oral history transcript Prime Timers Primetimers transcript video Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [Series] Oral Histories Project > Interviews Description An account of the resource <strong>Physical Media:</strong> <br />Box 7, Folder 7 - Dr. Leisa Meyer Program<br />Box 7, Folder 8 - Interviewees Materials, Original Series 2003-2007<br /><br /><strong>Digital Media:</strong> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [2005] Bob Cisar and Kirk Holt Interview Description An account of the resource Video recording and transcript of oral history interview with Laura Belmonte April 9, 2005. <strong>Video and Transcript available at the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center for on-site research</strong><strong>.</strong> Bob Cisar was born on February 18, 1942, and grew up in Oklahoma City. Married and then divorced, Bob served in the army as a surgical nurse in Vietnam during the war. In the interview, Bob discusses his career and social experiences in Tulsa, and early involvement with Oklahomans for Human Rights and Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights. With his partner of twenty-one years, Kirk Holt, was a well-known interior designer until his death on March 10, 2006. Kirk Holt was born on July 2, 1961, in Oklahoma City. He graduated in 1983 from Oklahoma State University with a degree in interior design. Together, Kirk and Bob ran a successful interior design studio and retail operation. Before his passing, Bob worked with Kirk in helping design the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center prior to the 2007 move-in. Kirk lead the design effort in 2017 when the Center underwent a major re-design and served for several years on the Board of Trustees for Oklahomans for Equality. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 9, 2005 Subject The topic of the resource Bob Cisar and Kirk Holt Oral History Project Interview from April 9, 2005 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bob Cisar, Kirk Holt, Laura Belmonte, Dennis Neill 2005 available at Center Bob Cisar Dennis R. Neill Equality Center Equality Center Equality Center Opening interview Kirk Holt Laura A. Belmonte Laura Belmonte OHR OkEq OKEQ Board OkEq Equality Center OKEQ Oral History Project Oklahoma State University Oklahoma State University (OSU) Oklahomans for Equality Oklahomans for Equality (OKEQ) Oklahomans for Equality Board Oklahomans for Human Rights Oklahomans for Human Rights - Tulsa Chapter oral history oral history interview Oral History Project oral history transcript OSU TOHR transcript Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights (TOHR) video Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [Series] Oral Histories Project > Interviews Description An account of the resource <strong>Physical Media:</strong> <br />Box 7, Folder 7 - Dr. Leisa Meyer Program<br />Box 7, Folder 8 - Interviewees Materials, Original Series 2003-2007<br /><br /><strong>Digital Media:</strong> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [2005] Glenna Cooper Interview Description An account of the resource Transcript of oral history interview with Laura Belmonte on January 31, 2005. <strong>Transcript available at the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center for on-site research.</strong> In the inteview, Glenna discusses the challenges facing the deaf community and their interactions with the LGBTQ+ community.<br /><br />No tape, done on computer. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource January 31, 2005 Subject The topic of the resource Glenna Cooper Oral History Project Interview from January 31, 2005 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Glenna Cooper, Laura Belmonte, Dennis Neill 2005 available at Center deaf community Glenna Cooper interview Laura A. Belmonte Laura Belmonte OKEQ Oral History Project oral history oral history interview Oral History Project oral history transcript transcript Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [Series] Oral Histories Project > Interviews Description An account of the resource <strong>Physical Media:</strong> <br />Box 7, Folder 7 - Dr. Leisa Meyer Program<br />Box 7, Folder 8 - Interviewees Materials, Original Series 2003-2007<br /><br /><strong>Digital Media:</strong> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [2005] Jack Waggoner Interview Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource December 3, 2005 Description An account of the resource Video recording and transcript of oral history interview with Laura Belmonte on December 3, 2005. <strong>Video and Transcript available at the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center for on-site research.</strong> Born in Western Kansas in 1936, Jack graduated from Pawnee Rock High School and then joined the Navy in 1954. He attended University of Kansas and began his professional career in Kansas City, Missouri and became involved in the gay community. Upon moving to Tulsa, he became an interstate truck driver. In the interview, he discusses the various gay bars, his eleven year relationship with a bartender and other activities and interactions in the Tulsa gay community. Subject The topic of the resource Jack Waggoner Oral History Project Interview from December 3, 2005 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Jack Waggoner, Laura Belmonte, Dennis Neill 2003 available at Center bar life gay bar Gay Bars interview Jack Waggoner Laura A. Belmonte Laura Belmonte OKEQ Oral History Project oral history oral history interview Oral History Project oral history transcript transcript University of Kansas video Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [Series] Oral Histories Project > Interviews Description An account of the resource <strong>Physical Media:</strong> <br />Box 7, Folder 7 - Dr. Leisa Meyer Program<br />Box 7, Folder 8 - Interviewees Materials, Original Series 2003-2007<br /><br /><strong>Digital Media:</strong> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [2005] Janie Reeves Interview Description An account of the resource Video recording and transcription of Laura Belmonte’s interview with Janie Reeves on November 19, 2005. <strong>Video and Transcript available at the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center for on-site research.</strong> Janie was born in Denver in 1971. She attended the University of Tulsa and became involved with Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights, the predecessor to Oklahomans for Equality. She served as board president in 1991. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource November 19, 2005 Subject The topic of the resource Janie Reeves Oral History Project Interview from November 19, 2005 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Janie Reeves, Laura Belmonte, Dennis Neill 2005 available at Center Board President Janie Reeves Dennis Neill interview Janie Reeves Laura Belmonte OKEQ Oral History Project oral history oral history interview Oral History Project oral history transcript TOHR TOHR Board of Directors transcript TU Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights (TOHR) Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights Board of Directors University of Tulsa video Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [Series] Oral Histories Project > Interviews Description An account of the resource <strong>Physical Media:</strong> <br />Box 7, Folder 7 - Dr. Leisa Meyer Program<br />Box 7, Folder 8 - Interviewees Materials, Original Series 2003-2007<br /><br /><strong>Digital Media:</strong> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [2005] Murrel Wilmoth Interview Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource October 22, 2005 Description An account of the resource Video recording and transcript of oral history interview with Laura Belmonte on October 22, 2005 (Laura misspeaks at the beginning of the interview and says it is the 21st). <strong>Video and Transcript available at the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center for on-site research.</strong> Murrel was born on April 4, 1932, in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. At the age of four, his family moved to Tulsa, graduated from Daniel Webster High School and attended Oklahoma A&amp;M (now Oklahoma State University) for 2 years and then joined the Coast Guard for four years, serving in California. He completed his degree at OSU, then returned to California for seven years before coming back to Tulsa in 1965, after which he started his coming out process. Murrel worked in the Tulsa Planning Commission office, became involved with the Metropolitan Community Church and Prime Timers, an organization for older gay men. He discussed his network of friends and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” environment in Tulsa in the 1970s, 1980s. At age 92, Murrel passed away on February 25, 2025, in Tulsa. His obituary is included in an addendum to his transcript. Subject The topic of the resource Murrel Wilmoth Oral History Project Interview from October 21, 2005 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Murrel Wilmoth, Laura Belmonte, Jensen Bridges, Matthew D. Williams, Dennis Neill 2005 available at Center Dennis Neill Dennis R. Neill interview Jensen Bridges Laura A. Belmonte Laura Belmonte Matthew D. Williams Matthew Williams Metropolitan Community Church Murrel Wilmoth Obituaries Obituary OKEQ Oral History Project Oklahoma State University Oklahoma State University (OSU) oral history oral history interview Oral History Project oral history transcript OSU Prime Timers Primetimers transcript video Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [Series] Oral Histories Project > Interviews Description An account of the resource <strong>Physical Media:</strong> <br />Box 7, Folder 7 - Dr. Leisa Meyer Program<br />Box 7, Folder 8 - Interviewees Materials, Original Series 2003-2007<br /><br /><strong>Digital Media:</strong> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [2005] Tay Clare Interview Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 13, 2005 Description An account of the resource Video recording and transcript of oral history interview with Laura Belmonte on April 13, 2005. <strong>Video and Transcript available at the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center for on-site research.</strong> Tay was born on September 5, 1932. She lived in New York City until her father’s work at American Airlines resulted in a transfer to Tulsa in 1950. Soon upon arriving in Tulsa, Tay attended the University of Tulsa. She described herself as a cultural and social lesbian more so than a sexual lesbian. She discussed the lesbian scene in Tulsa, the bars, sports, relationships and social activities. Also, the various efforts in the 1970s to form LGBT organizations and the Human Rights Commission’s survey and report on sexual preferences and the need for anti-discrimination protections. Tay was one of the organizers of the first Metropolitan Community Church which began by meeting in her home. She discussed Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights, including some of her concerns about their focus and training issues around the information line. Tay passed in the 2020s in Tulsa. Subject The topic of the resource Tay Clare Oral History Project Interview from April 13, 2005 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tay Clare, Laura Belmonte, Dennis Neill 2005 anti-discrimination laws available at Center Human Rights Commission interview Laura A. Belmonte Laura Belmonte lesbian Metropolitan Community Church OKEQ Oral History Project oral history oral history interview Oral History Project oral history transcript Tay Clare TOHR transcript TU Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights (TOHR) University of Tulsa video Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [Series] Oral Histories Project > Interviews Description An account of the resource <strong>Physical Media:</strong> <br />Box 7, Folder 7 - Dr. Leisa Meyer Program<br />Box 7, Folder 8 - Interviewees Materials, Original Series 2003-2007<br /><br /><strong>Digital Media:</strong> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [2005] Trish Spurgin Interview Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource November 18, 2005 Description An account of the resource Video recording and transcript of oral history interview with Laura Belmonte on November 18, 2005. <strong>Video and Transcript available at the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center for on-site research.</strong> Trish was born in Tulsa in 1941. [Editor’s note – full name was Agnes Patricia “Trish” Spurgin. She passed away in Tulsa on June 27, 2021.] She attended Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. In 1959, she experienced her first same- sex relationship while in college. She returned to Tulsa and attended the University of Tulsa. Trish worked in accounting and collections. Regarding the Tulsa lesbian scene, she discussed the bar life, social activities and the frequent police harassment. She discussed her interactions with her gay brother and observations about lesbians and gay men and her exposure to Tulsa Oklahomans for Equality. Subject The topic of the resource Trish Spurgin Oral History Interview from November 18, 2005 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Trish Spurgin, Laura Belmonte, Jensen Bridges, Matthew D. Williams, Dennis Neill 2005 Agnes Patricia "Trish" Spurgin Agnes Patricia Spurgin Agnes Patricia Trish Spurgin available at Center Dennis Neill Dennis R. Neill interview Jensen Bridges Laura A. Belmonte Laura Belmonte lesbian Matthew D. Williams Matthew Williams OKEQ Oral History Project oral history oral history interview Oral History Project oral history transcript police harassment TOHR transcript Trish Spurgin TU Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights (TOHR) University of Tulsa video Western College for Women in Oxford Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [Series] Oral Histories Project > Interviews Description An account of the resource <strong>Physical Media:</strong> <br />Box 7, Folder 7 - Dr. Leisa Meyer Program<br />Box 7, Folder 8 - Interviewees Materials, Original Series 2003-2007<br /><br /><strong>Digital Media:</strong> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource [2006] Kelly Kirby Interview Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource May 6, 2006 Description An account of the resource Video recording and transcript of oral history interview with Laura Belmonte on May 6, 2006. <strong>Video and Transcript available at the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center for on-site research.</strong> Born on November 25, 1953, he graduated from high school in 1971. Faced with a draft number of 25, Kelly joined the Air Force in 1972. While very closeted during his service, while based in California, he would make trips to Santa Barbara and a few other locations to some bars and on occasion attended the Metropolitan Community Church in Santa Barbara as he was dealing with his sexual orientation. After leaving the military in 1975, he returned to Kansas and got involved with a cult Christian Group, The Way. In 1977, he married and they had 4 children. In 1980, they moved to Oklahoma City, he soon started a CPA practice and by 1986 relocated to Tulsa. He joined Homosexuals Anonymous as part of dealing with his conflicts with sexuality, family and religion. In 1990, his wife and Kelly agreed to separate and eventually divorce. He became an HIV tester with Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights in 1991 and discusses his further involvement with the gay community and TOHR, serving on the board in the early 1990s and treasurer, president and later serving as TOHR’s accountant. He became active with the local PFLAG Chapter and with the support of Nancy McDonald, joined the national board of PFLAG in 1993. He reviews the difficult environment in the 1993-1994 time period when the Tulsa Human Rights Commission proposed some ordinance changes to address LGBTQ discrimination. Subject The topic of the resource Kelly Kirby Oral History Project Interview from May 6, 2006 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kelly Kirby, Laura Belmonte, Dennis Neill 2006 AIDS/HIV Air Force available at Center discrimination HIV HIV testing HIV/AIDs Homosexuals Anonymous interview Kelly Kirby Laura A. Belmonte Laura Belmonte Metropolitan Community Church Nancy McDonald OKEQ Oral History Project oral history oral history interview Oral History Project oral history transcript Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) Parents Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays Parents Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) PFLAG PFLAG Tulsa Chapter The Way TOHR TOHR Board of Directors transcript Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights (TOHR) Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights Board of Directors Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights HIV Testing video