>> It's October 23rd, 2014.
This is Anne Graham and Heather Oswald,
archivist with the Kansas State University Archives.
We're interviewing David Neubecker in
the studios of the Audio Video Technology Services at
Kansas State University as part of
the Museum's Archives and Rare
Books Oral History Project.
So David, can you talk
about your family and your background?
>> I was born in Atlanta,
and at the age of four,
my parents moved out to Cobb County.
They were very young parents.
When I was born, my mother was 16,
my dad was 19, and he fortunately had gotten a union job.
So that helped us squeak by,
but it was a meager existence through my childhood.
We moved out to Austell and most of
my life I spent in that South Cobb part of the area.
We would move every few years from house to house,
always trying to buy up a little bit each time.
And so I wasn't in any particular school at any one time,
but jumped from school to school in the South Cobb area.
I have one sister,
Dina, that's two years younger than myself.
And so we, like I said,
settled there in Cobb County and
lived up until I moved in with John up in Smyrna.
>> Once again, you talk about
your relationship with your parent?
>> Sure. My mother was
a stayed home mom for most of the time growing up.
But it was a difficult position for her,
I think, just because,
she was a foster child growing up.
And so she didn't have a lot
of modeling for parenting skills,
and so it was
a interesting life growing up in the household.
I think they tried to fit into
the stereotypical mode of
her staying at home and providing.
And she did volunteer at the school,
and she acted as room mom and did top
for a parties and Stanley parties
as a house cleaner they used to sell.
And then my dad, of course,
worked in the factory as a paint mixer.
He mixed paint for years.
And so we lived in a track housing development that
had just been built where every single house
looked exactly like the other one.
The only thing that was different was
the color of the house.
And the neighborhood kids.
We had a playground in the middle of the neighborhood
and my dad would come home,
he would spend time on the weekends with us.
But for the most part, the relationship
wasn't as close with him.
He tried to get me to enjoy fishing,
because he was a fisherman and a hunter,
and that didn't work well at all.
There were a couple of memorable moments with my dad.
The first was my realizing I was gay.
And with my father,
I had a crush on a boy in the neighborhood,
in this track development and
his house was behind our house.
So we shared backyards over the chain link fence.
And I had a super big crush on him at five years old.
And I remember my dad sitting
there shaving in the mirror,
in the bathroom, sitting on
the toilet seat just as vivid as yesterday.
And I was watching him shave and I said, "Dad."
I said, "I think
a girl is pretty," I said, "She's pretty.
But what if I think a boy is pretty?"
Because I didn't have a word for that.
I knew pretty wasn't the right word.
I remember that so vividly.
I don't remember his response.
But I do remember,
and became evident that
it wasn't something I was supposed to talk about.
And so I buried away and kept my crushes to myself.
I was quite flamboyant as a kid,
and the women in
the family seemed to think that I was just fine.
I would hang out in the kitchen, talk with them
and gossip about family members,
and the guys I don't think knew what to do with me,
and all my uncles and all that stuff
because they were all quite macho.
I remember that, when I got to be about 10 years old,
my mom and dad started
letting me stay at the house by myself,
and I remember her getting so mad at me because,
they had left and I took her shears down.
I don't know if you what shears are,
but, the curtains you can just barely see.
You can see through and there's sherry fabric.
And I made this great dress,
shears and I had wrapped it all around,
and I thought I should have been
a fashion designer, I think, at that point.
And I paraded around that house in
those shears and of course,
they were all wrinkled when she got back,
and she was quite upset with me about it.
They had to put up with those antics,
and I think they handled it pretty well.
And I was so surprised years later when I
finally came out that all those years
of me wearing her curtains and all the decorating I did,
and my room was always perfect,
and at Christmas time,
I'd always asked for things to decorate my room with,
they didn't realize I was gay.
For some there wasn't a connection.
I don't know if it was the denial
or what was going on there,
but it still the coming out process
was difficult when we got to that point years later.
My favorite holiday was Christmas,
and so not only did I fully decorate
our house in Christmas decorations,
I would even save my allowance to buy decorations.
But then my grandmother would not decorate.
She always waited for me to come over.
And that was a special thing that I did with her,
going over to her house and decorating.
And then when she died years later,
she gave me all of her vintage Christmas ornaments.
So to this day,
I still have this wonderful collection of
1960s Christmas decorations that I just really love.
I've continued that tradition with my kids as well.
>> She said you had two stories about that your father,
what are the other memories that you have?
>> I didn't say two. Gosh, the fishing, that trip.
So he really want trying to connect with me.
Fishing was very big with my dad,
and we'd go down to Sweetwater Creek,
and we would we would fish.
And he tried to get me to like it.
In first, I couldn't
stand the thought of killing the fish.
That was hard. And so I would never bait,
my hook or any kind.
I just like the boat rides and sit
on the side of the bank.
But he got so furious.
And I think my last fishing trip with him
was when I was still quite young,
and we had gone and picked up all the bait from
the bait shop and he had bought worms that day,
because the minnows, he already knew I would set free.
So that I think he had given up on.
Today, we were just doing worms,
and he's fishing and he turns around to get a worm.
There's no worms left, and he's like,
where are the worms?
Well, I had tried,
I don't know why I did this,
but instead of letting them run into the ground free,
I had taken all of them and put them into his beer can.
And so I had fed them all down
into the hole of his beer can to hide them from him.
And so not only did I get rid of all of his worms,
but I had also ruined his but wiser.
So that was about the last fishing tip I had with my dad.
So you had mentioned
that your parents didn't realize that you were gay,
but you got subtle cues not to mention it?
>> Yes. I was quite flamboyant,
like I said, as a kid when I walked.
And I didn't know I had to walk.
Who would know as a child?
But I remember my parents getting
on to me about walking the way I walked.
I think my hips just went from left to right.
It was just way too over the top.
But it was natural for me.
It was who I was.
Mannerisms, which sometimes, today,
I use my hands at times when I talk,
and little things like that.
And I think they were trying to, if you want to call,
butcher me up or make me conform to what they thought was
appropriate for someone in that era for a male kid.
But I resisted.
I don't think there was anything I
could really do about it.
It was who I was.
I think my mother was trying to be cruel.
I think they were just trying to help me in their eyes.
And so I do remember being told not to walk that way,
not to talk that way, things like that.
>> So can you talk about
any family members who influenced you?
>> My grandmothers, I think.
I take bits and pieces from each of my family.
It wasn't an easy childhood, as I had said,
but I can find bits and pieces from each of
my family members that I think have
helped shape me into the person I am today.
My mother, from her,
I think I have
my desire for everything to be in order and to be neat,
obsessive, compulsive almost.
And I certainly see that from my mother.
My father, I think I've gotten a work ethic.
In spite of how difficult life was as it
was a struggle growing up financially,
he really worked every single day
and stayed at the same job my whole life.
The only time he left that job was
when the tornado came through in '75,
I think it was, or '74.
We had a massive tornado that came through.
I think it was in first grade,
and it tore his plant down.
He was working in Atlanta.
It was the same tornado that hit the governor's mansion.
And he luckily survived the tornado,
but he was out of work for some time and took odd jobs,
laying carpet, and
whatever he could do to provide for the family.
And I think I really respected that about him.
He may not have been able to show
a compassionate side and caring side, but he provided.
And so I gained that from him.
And with my grandmothers.
My mother, even though she was a foster child,
she did re-engage with her mother.
She was in and out constantly,
going back to live with her mother and then
going back into foster care.
And so she had a relationship with my grandmother,
with her mother, and I knew her quite well.
She was pretty feisty and gruff,
and just a nice lady,
and she was protective of me,
and I was the oldest grandchild
on that side of the family.
And I felt loved by her,
even though she wasn't maybe necessarily
the traditional grandmother.
The other grandmother was quite traditional.
She had the garden and I would
help her garden in the backyard,
and she cooked,
and I remember she would always have biscuits
and sliced cucumbers and vinegar sitting on the table.
That was a staple every day at
her house for guests that would come by.
And we would just sit there and cackle and laugh.
She almost looked like Lucille Ball in some way.
She had, I thought it was natural red hair,
later I learned it wasn't,
[LAUGHTER] but a bright red hair,
and she wore it in a bouffant up.
And then later years,
it got lower and lower.
And she wore a red lipstick,
and she was just quite a character.
And she loved cooking, and I still,
I have her cookbook,
and like I said,
all of her Christmas decorations,
and she was just quite a character.
And when I came out,
both of those grandmothers,
they really were the pillars in the family that set
the tone with how I was to
be treated by the rest of the family.
I'm not very close to my mother's side.
They've scattered.
And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact
that even as early and an early age,
all of my mother's siblings
were split up, and back and forth.
So I think that caused the whole family just to split up.
The Greer's side, my dad's side is quite close,
and even growing up,
we would all caravan
[LAUGHTER] down to Panama City every year.
And this had started when my dad was little.
My dad, I think he said it started in
the 1950s or something,
before the expressways,
because he said that they would have to drive
down the highways to get to Panama City,
and it started out as a fishing trip,
and then when we
came along it became more of a vacation,
and we would drive and stay in
the same motel every single year.
I quit doing that.
I got too cool for it by
the time I graduated high school
and couldn't be bothered with Panama City.
I was trying to distance myself,
I guess, from my Southern roots.
And so I boycotted Panama City for quite some time,
and then when I had kids,
I started thinking about how
important those trips were to me.
And so I've started going back,
and so I drive now from Chicago
every year down to Panama City with my kids.
We stayed one year in the same hotel I did as a kid,
but our family has gotten so big now that
we've gone to other hotels that are
still those 1950s motels, but bigger.
I think, last year we only had 35 or so,
year before that we had 54.
But slowly, the generations are dying off,
and it's harder for some of them to get down,
but it's still very special to me and my family.
>> How large is your father's descendant family?
>> My father had seven brothers and sisters,
and my mother had seven brothers and sisters.
My dad, it was all boys and one girl,
and my mom, it was all girls and one boy.
The funny story about my parents and the two families,
they actually were quite
intertwined and connected in some weird way.
My mother happened to be in a foster home
that was a close friend of my father's family.
And so my father met my mother through
the foster home that she was staying in.
And somehow the families became just quite intertwined.
And there were even some years in
Panama City where my mother's side,
my aunts and uncles that would come down,
it would be even larger.
And they would sometimes mix
and mingle with holidays as well and things of that sort.
But for the most part,
because of the size of the Greer's,
they've kept things just for themselves.
Flat Rock, I think, was the name of the park.
We would have a family reunion in
a state park every year for the Greer's,
and then we'd always
have Thanksgiving at my grandmother's and
we'd have Christmas Eve at my grandmother's,
and so we just had a very set
of customs that we would do with the Greer's.
And I think that's probably why I continue it today,
because as I've gotten older,
I realize how important
all of those things are to family.
I did want to mention one other thing
too that I think is unique about the family.
On my mother's side, even though they were scattered,
I did have a great,
great grandmother that I knew.
They lived a long time on that side of the family,
and she lived to be, I think, 105-years-old.
And because my mother had me at such a young age,
everyone was having children
at such a young age to the generations,
that when I was born, we actually
had five living generations.
And that made quite the news when I was born,
and I still have newspaper clippings
of them celebrating five generations of our family.
And when I was nine-years-old,
I had all my bones
broken in both my legs through surgery.
My legs had grown very strangely,
and at the time,
they felt that the best way to correct it was to
break all my bones and reset them.
And I never will forget Granny Pierce was her name,
and she acted as the nurse for me that year.
And I would sit there in
my grandmother's apartment where
she lived with my grandmother,
and she would nurse me,
and I couldn't walk.
I was in full body cast from the hips down.
And I introduced her to potato chips.
She had never tasted a potato chip in her life.
[LAUGHTER] And so we
[inaudible] some eating potato chips.
And she would not drink coke.
She thought coke was quite sinful,
but I was allowed to drink those.
But having connections with all those generations,
on either side of the family,
I think really has helped
shape me into the person that I am today.
I talked about it a little bit,
but what were your perceptions of
being gay as a child or did you have?
>> The only perceptions that I had Pauline on Bewitched.
And believe it or not, I actually really liked him.
I would cackle and laugh at
his antics and how outrageous he was.
And I absolutely to this day,
love bewitched definitely Pauline was an influence.
And I would also say that, my family,
even though I got a negative vibration from them,
that it was not okay to be gay.
They still had gay friends.
My father's sister worked in a beauty shop in Mapleton,
Georgia, and she washed hair.
And one of the hairdressers named Mike,
still alive today, was her best friend.
And everyone in the family knew was gay,
it was not a secret.
And he was quite stereotypical in that manner,
if you could think of a 1970s hairdresser
in Mapleton, Georgia.
And there was there was always,
when they would talk about him,
they would excuse it,
well, that's Mike, he's okay.
But you could always tell that
they felt there was something wrong with it,
but he was the exception.
And then on my mother's side,
my aunts were being into softball.
And so they had many,
many lesbian friends and some of them were coupled
up and it was quite open and it was accepted.
But again, for them, it was okay.
I don't know, it seems strange to think back.
But it seemed like they would make
the exception for the person that they knew,
but the idea of the gay community,
there was something wrong with that
because that's what they had been told.
My mother's side we were at a primitive Baptist church.
Wood floor and it it was pretty intense.
And we quit growing to church at a young age,
but they still felt the obligation, I think,
as a southern and they identified as a baptist at
that time to follow,
the total line to follow
the beliefs that the southern baptists
had about gays and lesbians.
>> So did you realize that you were gay?
>> I think I really do go back to
the age of five when I had that conversation
with my father in the bathroom
about the neighbor and my attraction to him.
I think that was the moment that I realized I was gay,
but I also realized not to talk about it.
And so I knew I was attracted to kids to,
the boys, my age.
But I didn't take it past that.
And I think when I talk to people,
they always find it interesting that I was
such a late bloomer when you
think of the sexual component of being gay.
That part never occurred to me.
I knew what I was attracted to,
but it didn't go past the attraction.
I didn't understand the dynamics of sexuality and sex.
And so I didn't really have
my first experience until after high school.
I went through high school, again,
identifying by that point as openly gay,
but never having actually acted on it,
I guess you could say.
I think as I entered high school,
I became quite open about it.
I was lucky enough that the high school,
Pebblebrook High School, where I attended,
they switched over, I think it was 1983
to the Cobb County Center for Performing Arts.
And that was great
for me because I'm sitting in
class and they're making his announcement.
I'm like, that means there's going to be a lot of
gay kids coming to this school. I was right.
There were a lot of
kids from the district from around Cobb County
different high schools that came to
Pebblebrook for the performing arts component,
and they were quite creative, all the stereotypes,
and we put together our own little community.
It was gay enough that there were
different communities within the gays at the school.
And so it was a fascinating dynamic in high school,
because you still had Pebblebrook,
the high school with the big monster trucks in
the parking lot and the guys with
the dip in the back pockets of the hats,
and all other things you can think of
with the Southern High School.
And then you had these gothic kids,
which I identified with more.
Guys wearing makeup.
We were wearing makeup in high school,
and it was quite out there.
And I talked with
some of my friends just recently when
I knew I would be taping this,
and I said, do I remember this correctly?
And we talked about, what it was like in
high school as gay kids,
and there were definitely instances
of bullying and harassment.
I don't want to minimize it in any way.
We really couldn't leave a classroom without being
called faggett or being
hit on the shoulder as we walked down the hall.
But given the two sides
had been pushed together into this high school,
I think overall, it wasn't as difficult of a life
as you would think in
the 1980s in a Southern high school.
We did have some friends, one friend,
his head was pushed through a window once.
He had gotten he was a little he was very flamboyant,
and I think he was also quite flirty with lots of guys,
and they would get mad at him about it.
And so his head was pushed through a window at school.
And then there was another guy whose head was flushed in
the toilet and then people would be thrown in trash cans.
And that's tough.
It's tough situations, for sure.
I managed to escape a lot of that somehow, I don't know.
But aside from those three incidences,
there was a somewhat understanding
that we were to co exist.
To this day, I still go to the reunions,
I have many friends
that I keep in touch with from high school.
From our graduating class, I would say,
many people would identify as being very gay supportive,
who are straight and married and I think that I
was in a special place
in time there in Pebblebrook in the 80s.
>> So you talked about being able to be sorted out.
Did that include having open gay relationships?
>> What I think of as my first boyfriend
was a guy at Power Brook and again,
I wasn't sexually active.
In no way want to present that that was occurring.
But we gravitated toward each other,
and I think we did have
just an intense connection and love for each other
and we exhibited that by wearing matching outfits.
And I have actually a photo of that,
so one of my friends recently just sent
of me and Chris sitting beside each other at lunch,
matching members only jackets on.
And again no one said anything about this.
And we worked at this department store
called Richway at the time,
and it's like what Target would be today and we were
both cashiers and we would not work,
I can't believe they let us get away with this.
We would not work unless we were
allowed to be right beside each other.
Our cash registers had to be
beside each other so that we could
talk while we were ringing the customers up.
And again, we looked like twins,
we were matching, talking,
and then ringing everyone up on the cash registers.
And we spent every moment together,
it was such intense relationship in that regard.
But then by senior year,
I think I was starting to want to take it.
I was wanting to take and I don't think he was
there yet as far as
his identity and we haven't spoken since then.
We've never spoken since that day,
so I find that sad.
But one of the other things that was interesting about
the time period with me
and Chris and the other people at Power Brook,
we had also started realizing that there were
gays outside of the Power Brook arena
and so we started meeting them.
They were at Osborn and Campbell and
South Cobb in the different high schools
in that South Cobb area,
and we started hanging out.
We found a club up on the Marriott square called
Our Place and that's where the Galton Museum is now.
They actually were welcoming to punks,
new wave kids, and many of us were bisexual.
That was the term,
I was gay but they were bisexual.
And there were some others that identified as gay,
but most of the guys were bisexual,
he said but we would go there a lot.
But as I got older and when I say older,
16 was the age.
I got a car and Chris had gotten onto,
he was a computer whiz at that time and had gotten
ahold of a bulletin board and
a dial up and which I thought was quite cool.
And he had found
a gay bulletin board and he connected with
this huge group of gays in
the City of Atlanta and
so unbeknownst to my mother and his mother,
we were driving to Atlanta.
And so we started driving to Atlanta at 16
and they thought we were hanging out
at Rocky Har Picture Show or Our Place,
and we were in some of the toughest parts
of Atlanta hanging
out because there were no places for gay teenagers to go.
And so we would be literally in
Piedmont Park at 2 AM in the morning
where guys are cruising around to pick each other up.
And here we are sitting in our car talking,
and the other Cobb County students
from the other schools had learned about this and so they
started coming down and I have
photos that I just recently come across of
those moments where you've got
all these high school students who are
identifying as gay or at
least they're friends of ours and we're hanging out in
these just tough cruise areas
of Atlanta because we had no place else to go,
and that was a place that we felt some connection to
a broader community that we wanted to be part of.
So I'm glad that we've gotten to
the point now at least where
kids can congregate in
safer places because luckily we were never hurt,
but it could have turned out really badly.
>> So did you ever interact with any
of those living in
Atlanta or was it really just a [inaudible]
>> We did. Chris befriended one guy who was 29,
which we thought was extremely old but he seemed nice.
Again, we're on a computer we didn't even know this guy.
He seems nice.
So we decided that,
he said we could stay the night at his place.
I can't remember the name of the apartment complex
, that seems fine.
So we pack our bags and we
go to this 29 year old guys apartment.
Thankfully, he was nice.
We both slept on sofas in his living room.
He took us on the tour of,
all the gay spots in Atlanta.
So again, we interacted.
But again, how unsafe it was for
us to put so much trust in
people who could have not been very nice people.
But that's where we learned about
Ansley Mall and at the time that
was quite a gay area in Westminster Avenue,
or I think was the name of the street,
which was another Cruz Street.
We learned about where the bars were.
Although we couldn't get any immediately,
we certainly worked our way in eventually.
So he opened the door to
what the older gay life looked like in Atlanta.
And so by the time he had introduced that life to us,
we would walk up and down Peachtree Street
at night and he wouldn't even recognize it.
But at the time, Peachtree Street in
midtown was all three story buildings.
It was quite much lower,
no high rises around.
And the Cabana Hotel
there which stores they owned
and they had the pool in the front.
It was all just quite fun.
There was a crystal right next to the backstreet bar,
so we would get our burgers at crystal and we
would just walk the strip and
it was bar after bar after bar.
And it was crowded and we loved it and I
remember one night, I was with another friend.
I was with a girlfriend from Power Brook
and we came across this bar called Illusions.
So we wheeze on our way in,
and we were just so excited about it.
We're sitting there in this bar,
and they have a show.
So we're hope do this, we good.
And this person comes out fully dressed,
and she starts singing the eurythmics
and I looked over it and we were both amazed.
We're like, Annie Lennox is in a bar in Atlanta,
and it's not even publicized, how lucky are we.
Well, we didn't realize we were in a drag bar
and this was a look like.
So we learned that after a little bit.
But we loved Illusions,
and they were one of the bars we could get into.
And so we would go there
and watch the shows, and we weren't drinking.
That was a neat thing about, we
weren't wild to the point like we were drinking.
In fact, we didn't know what to order,
we were just in there to enjoy
ourselves and to be part of a community.
And there was another bar called Weekends
and that was right across from Illusions.
This was all the cock Johnny teenagers we
had all devised a plan and it
worked where one who
was old enough got in and they would stamp.
Well, he would run right back out to
the back parking lot and quickly,
we would all dab our hands.
So we worked this so we
could get in, this is just amazing.
So we would go into Weekends and this was the time
RuPaul was working there
and I remember it is just as vividly as could be.
She had this grocery cart
and RuPaul lived right
around the corner off of 10th Street
and he put all of his dresses and
everything in the shopping cart and he pushed it on up to
Weekends and just park it there and they had
this little box in the corner of
the bar that he would perform on.
And so we were just dancing
and there was a balcony above us and
we'd hang over the balcony and he's
got his own little space.
And then I remember
he started advertising for Star Booty was
a movie that he was self
promoting in midtown and
the flyers are all over the neighborhood,
and we were just fascinated with a life.
Of course, not knowing that he was going to
move to New York and make it big and all that stuff.
But it was such a fun time to
be young and gay in Atlanta.
I missed those days so badly
because from my perspective,
it was just a wonderful time.
>> Just changing gears slightly.
Could you talk about your relationship with your sister?
>> Yes. We were not close,
I think it was a tough tough relationship.
And that I don't feel like we had
a structure in place in the family to
really teach us how to interact well with each other.
And my parents also
weren't really good at at parenting at that point.
And so my sister, I think, unfortunately,
got the bulk of maybe abuse.
>> They're recording lights. [LAUGHTER]
>> Does that mean something when
there's a recording light on?
>> Nothing. It definitely draws people
towards it. Look at the light.
>> I don't know what [inaudible].
>> Now, am I talking too much so far?
>> No.
>> Absolutely keep talking.
>> There's no such thing.
>> This isn't on, isn't it?
Don't let me know.
>> 36 seconds [inaudible].
>> Plenty of time.
>> Okay.
>> Plenty of time.
>> All right.
>> Did you want to start?
>> No.
>> Okay.
>> Keep going.
>> So the relationship with my sister,
because my parents were so young when
we were born and she's two years younger than myself,
it was difficult growing up.
I didn't necessarily, I wasn't a straight-A student.
I wasn't excelling terrifically
in school, but I did well.
And I was an easy kid.
I didn't really get into trouble or anything.
And my sister, I think went in the opposite direction,
she always seemed to find herself in
trouble and my parents didn't react very well to that.
And so I have vivid memories
of how difficult her life
was and some of the things that were said to her,
and it was just it was
tough seeing all that and reflecting back.
And as we grew up,
she became more of a,
if you want to classify it, like a headbanger.
She started smoking in high school,
she did eventually drop out of high school.
She had a child at 16
and then ended up with four children.
She today has an addiction problem.
She never finished her schooling.
The day before my prom,
I remember Cindy and I were going to the prom together.
And for some reason,
I had taken my parent's car
to get last-minute things for the prom,
and I had this old beat-up Camaro.
It wasn't anything nice,
but it was what I had been able to save up for.
And my sister had taken the keys
while I was out at Lenox Mall,
shopping for last-minute stuff with me and Cindy,
and she had stolen my car,
and she drove it through a fence.
And it was a chain link fence
and then so she pulls it back out of
the chain link because it goes
under the chain link fence,
and these scratches just scratched
through the whole car windshield and everything.
Well, both mirrors ripped off.
So she thinks, well, I'll just park
it back in the driveway.
No one would notice. So I get home.
And you can see it as you're driving up,
I'm like what has happened to my car?
And it was that kind of situation where it just always
seemed to be something and
she just never could get above it.
And we used to fight horribly and violently.
I mean knives being thrown,
just horrible, horrible situation.
And I could not wait to get out of the house,
and I think that was part of by 18,
me just getting out of there.
And I'm shocked that I have
any relationship with her at all to this day. But we do.
I think once we were able to move
out and I was able to put things into
perspective and understand what
had occurred in her life and how
our paths had turned
the way they did and
how things had influenced our decisions.
I was able to understand her a
little bit better and have a relationship with her.
And I would say that we're close today.
She comes up to visit.
I've visited with her.
But it's tough to actually really have much of
a connection on a deep level with any of the family
because of the problems that have
continued in their lives.
I always feel like I'm having to
rescue them or help them,
and it's been hard with the addictions and all.
It's something that I have a closeness,
but I keep them at
a distance at the same time if that makes sense.
>> Going back a little bit
to your high school experience,
did you ever have any issues with
teachers or other priority figures?
>> The teachers were not supportive.
I will say, there was no safe spaces in the school.
I remember when I came out to
my parents on the beach in Panama City.
Cried all the way home my parents did.
They were so devastated.
It was the longest drive home from
Panama City and immediately
they wanted to put me into therapy.
And so they contacted because we didn't have much money,
so they went to the county social services agency
and hooked me up with a psychiatrist to change me.
And the first thing he said,
he said, do you want to be gay and I said, yeah.
I mean what kind of question is that?
And he said, well, then we need to work on your parents.
And how enlightened that was at the time that he
understood that it wasn't something I was going to really
be able to change and I didn't need to change.
And so he did we had a few family meetings.
And I think it just frustrated my parents more to know
that this was something they were
going to have to accept.
I don't think they were there yet.
And so my dad did kick me out of the house.
I went and stayed with my grandmother for
a bit, Granny Rose.
And then I stayed with an aunt for
a bit until he was able to calm down
because he was really physically upset
about it to the point where I didn't feel like
I could safely be at the house.
And eventually,
it calmed down enough where I could come back
home and continue at school and everything.
And I remember that
I think we got to the point where okay,
it's who you are, but we're not going to accept it.
We're never going to accept it.
And I remember coming across a article in
a gay newspaper because at that point I'm going
downtown to Atlanta and
I'm getting all the gay rags and everything.
So there was a letter on the back
of this newspaper that
a mother had written about the suicide of her son,
and she was pouring her confession out in this letter.
And I remember clipping that out
for my parents and I said,
is this one you're wanting?
I think it really shocked them.
I got to the point that after that,
I think they pulled back a little bit and they
realized that it was
too much for me to handle the way they were acting.
And so by the time I moved out of the house,
I graduated, no problems with my parents.
I just needed to be quiet about it.
I couldn't be open too much.
The rest of the family wasn't to know or anything.
At that point, let's see.
I was still in high school.
We were going downtown to Atlanta.
I was growing tired of going to the cruise spots,
and I knew there was more out
there because I had seen there was more.
I had come across a gay organization
called Friends Atlanta.
And they did volleyball and normal activities,
I thought I could really enjoy this.
And so I talked to my friends and
they thought I was crazy that I want to go
spend time with older people in their 20s and 30s.
And so I remember them dropping me
off and I walked into this all-men social club.
And they're just talking and all that.
And of course, I think they were just dumbfounded that
16-year-old or 17-year-old at that point came in.
And that's where I met Dick Rhodes.
He was bar tendering there.
And he was still in his late 40s, I guess, at that point.
And then John was there as well.
I was overwhelmed with
how many people were there, but they were all there.
And so when I found out about
the volleyball so I started doing that kind of stuff.
And so I'd go to Piedmont Park and play volleyball with him.
And that's when I actually met John.
We played volleyball together,
and not very well,
but we met and started dating,
and I then graduated.
I think I had just graduated high school by
the time I met John that summer.
And we moved in as soon as I felt
that we were at that point
and moved into his place in Smyrna.
And my parents were a little
surprised because he was closer to their age than mine,
because there's only 16 years difference
between my mom and myself,
and there's 11 years difference between me and John.
So that raised some eyebrows,
but John was caring,
compassionate, friendly guy,
and they could tell that he
wasn't a threat and he was not a dangerous person.
They accepted that, he was
my friend at all the family gatherings
for a while but yeah,
he became part of the family.
Even years later when John and I divorced and everything,
they would still invite him to family reunions and I
always found that to be funny but yeah.
>> So you talked in great,
talking about your process and coming out.
How old were you then?
>> Well, there's different levels of coming out.
I came out to myself at a very young age,
came out to my peers and to my family when I was
16 and different people through high school.
But the big coming out [LAUGHTER] came,
I think it was 19',
was it 1991 or 1989?
It was the year that we had been approached.
John and I had been approached to be part of
a newspaper article. We didn't really understand.
We knew that they were doing a study on
what it was like to be gay in Atlanta.
And, of course, Friends Atlanta was
the social men's group
and so they reached out and were like,
that sounds interesting. Of course, we'll do it.
And so they interviewed us and they're like,
well, do you mind if we take a few pictures?
I'm like, well, sure. What's wrong with
a few pictures and all that stuff?
I'm comfortable enough for myself,
I'm comfortable if my name shows up in the paper.
Well, [LAUGHTER] that Sunday,
we get a phone call.
I think we got a phone call in the morning.
I don't remember exactly how we discovered,
but we discovered quite quickly that we were on
the front page in full color with us arm in arm,
like American Gothic almost,
on the front page of the paper with the headline,
Gay in Atlanta, over our heads.
And we were getting calls from South Georgia,
friends were down there,
I was at the grocery store and I just
saw your face all up and
down the newspapers that were stacked there.
So we knew it was going to be big that day.
And that was Pride Weekend
and so when we were going to the pride event,
people were approaching us recognizing us immediately.
So we realized then that we had really come out
and my family tells me
a funny story that one of my aunts,
whom I'm quite close with now,
they were just aghast [LAUGHTER] that I had done this.
And she goes over to my gran, Rose's,
house and walks into
the kitchen and she slams that
paper down on the table and she says,
what do you think about this?
[LAUGHTER] And my granny, Rose, looks at it,
she says, I think it's
a lovely picture of John and David.
[LAUGHTER] And that, again, set the tone.
My other grandmother,
being more gruff and all that,
she actually made phone calls to the family and she said,
I just want you to know I have
no problems with this and I want you to be,
she verbally told all of her children,
to be nice about it and so that was my full coming out,
I don't think you can come out much
more than that at that point.
And so since then,
I've just been quite open.
And I think that what I learned from that experience
was that it was worth putting yourself out there,
especially in those early days when there weren't
very many images of what a gay couple would look like.
And they seem to
be quite interested in
just the mundane things about our lives.
And I think we realize the value.
To being more public and open,
we could educate people about just how normal
and ordinary we really are.
>> So going back to when you came out to your parents,
was there any particular reason for
deciding at that time you wanted to tell them?
>> I think it was just my desire.
I had this teacher,
a sixth grade teacher, Karen Kleinschmidt.
And she came from Ohio
and didn't have very many role models, as I mentioned,
as a kid of someone that I felt really took an interest
in me for who I was and care for me and for some reason,
she and I clicked in sixth grade and she was quite young,
20 something year old teacher,
full of energy and
she would pick me up in the summers and bring me to
her classroom and help her get set up and I
just idolized her as a teacher.
And so having her help was certainly,
I'm sorry, I'm losing my flow.
What was the question again?
>> Absolutely. If there was
any particular reason you decided
to tell your parents when you did.
>> Well, I think her giving me
this building that foundation of who
I was as a person and giving me that self worth,
that started the building blocks of me taking ownership
that I'm okay with who I am and what that looks like.
And so by the time that I
had gotten through middle school,
I think she helped in a lot of ways just to help me
get through those years that were hard
in school too with bullying,
even though she wasn't any longer my
teacher or anything like that.
Just people don't realize
how much of an impact
a single teacher can have on a kid's life.
But I kept in touch with her all those years.
In fact, I still keep in touch with her today.
I spoke with her this weekend,
she's coming to see me tonight.
And she really empowered
me and shaped me to be able to come out.
And, of course,
didn't know that that was what was happening at the time.
But just knowing that for who I was,
I was worth something and was okay,
I think, meant a lot
and was able to allow me to do that.
I hope that makes sense.
[LAUGHTER]
>> So coming out in a very public way here,
I guess your final coming out,
did you notice any differences in [inaudible]?
>> Yes. John and I,
obviously, we lived in Cobb County.
And there weren't any organizations
in those early days in Cobb County
because we would later found Cobb Citizens.
But we were getting quite active in the gay community in
Atlanta and we were active at the time and ACTUP.
ACTUP was one of the early activist organizations.
And you have to realize at this time frame,
the gay community is being ravaged by AIDS.
And Friends Atlanta was no different than any of
the other gay organizations that were predominantly men,
and people are dying constantly.
You look back on how many friends you were losing at
that point and it was just numbing.
And I think that we were
empowered to do more and to be more open and more out,
and we were certainly participating
in ACTUP demonstrations to
try to bring attention to that.
And that was spilling into our lives here in Cobb County.
I remember one day we went into a restaurant in 41.
Wasn't the Hickory House but
it's something along those lines,
a place we'd always eat it.
And I had a t-shirt
on with two men kissing and it said, read my lips.
I had a very radical and in-your-face t-shirt.
Today, people wouldn't even blink at it.
But at the time, it was quite out there.
And I remember us being yelled at in the restaurant.
People verbally, I don't think they were
cussing but they were just telling us how awful we were.
And us looking to
the management and stunned that we were being
verbally yelled at by
customers and the management didn't respond.
They just sat there quietly.
And so it was tough with bumper stickers.
You would drive around Cobb County with
a bumper sticker on the car,
and at the time, it was a pink triangle.
And that was enough to
elicit just nastiness by people in cars.
So certainly we quite quickly learned that was
going to be part if we were going to be
out and open that we were to
expect people that we don't know to treat us badly.
I don't really remember
anyone treating us nicely or having
good responses about what they were
seeing when we were out in Cobb County, unfortunately.
>> Did you feel like you were living two lives?
>> Yes. I think
the Atlanta experiences going into the city,
working in the organizations there in
the political groups and attending,
that was our safe zone.
But I think we were comfortable enough with ourselves,
and it was just the personalities, I think,
John and I had that even
though we knew that it was dangerous and that
it was tough that we couldn't afford to live in Atlanta,
we were really here,
and this is where we were going to have to live
until we could afford anything else,
and we were just going to make the best of it.
>> So I think you
touched on it briefly before but can you
talk about how you became involved
with organizations in the gay community?
>> There weren't a lot of gay organizations back then.
Women's groups had their own organizations.
The men's groups and there were
maybe a couple of where they would mix in me.
But in 1987, there was
a call for a national march on
Washington and Kathy Woollard,
who would later go on to be
the head of the city council in Atlanta,
she worked at the time at
the Ernon Park Trolley barn, I think it was.
And so she was
organizing the Atlanta contingency
to the march on Washington,
and we knew Kathy and everyone was excited.
The energy, the idea that
a bunch of gay people were going to get
together and march was quite exciting to us.
And you have to keep in mind that back then,
we had had a large gathering
of people during the Anita Bryant protest,
which happened years before I came out.
But since then, the community was quiet here.
And I remember in '86 as an example,
when the Hardwick decision came out, now,
that would have been in June of '86 so I
would have just graduated from high school and I
was just so incense that the Supreme Court would
uphold the Georgia ban on sodomy,
essentially outlawing gays and lesbians,
that I went down to the Russell,
I forget the name of the building,
but it was the federal courthouse building to protest.
And you would think that that would have
deal and it would galvanize our community.
And I think there was 25 of us at the
most and that was what
we expected it was just a
very complacent, quiet group here.
I remember a Pride one year was at the state Capitol.
It was such a small number.
And you knew everybody,
[LAUGHTER] so just that small.
Anyway, when I talk,
I start forgetting why I
started talking about this stuff.
>> Just how you became involved with the organization?
>> Yes. So with the organization, now I'm back on track.
So it was small here,
and the idea of going to Washington and being
part of this bigger picture was exciting to all of us.
And so we get up there and it was everything we had met,
hundreds of thousands of gays and lesbians and I looked,
in every size and shape and age.
And there were gay bands from other cities.
It was just eye opening and energizing.
And when we came back,
we were all on fire,
and that really lit the gay and lesbian community.
Shortly thereafter, you had
ACT UP starting and after that, of course,
Queer Nation, the human rights campaign fund
at the time is now a human rights campaign.
But at the time it was HRCF.
They had their first dinner,
I think it was in '88 here in
Atlanta and
the political establishment started coming in.
And we had hundreds of people that Black Tai affair.
And we were just amazed with
ourselves that there was
actually a real community of size here.
And organizations were popping
up and we were getting more and more organized.
And from Friends Atlanta,
we stayed with friends, Atlanta, obviously,
because that's where all of our friends were,
and we had really built a close group
out of that organization.
But we knew there were
enough organizations that we needed
some umbrella group to
communicate all of this
to each other, what we were doing.
And then we pulled together and formed MEGLO,
Metropolitan Area Gay and Lesbian Organizations.
And Jeffrey Lehman was the head of MEGLO.
And it was once
a month meeting where representatives from
every gay and lesbian group would come to
the Peach Tree Branch Library there on Peachtree Street,
and we would go over what we were doing in our groups.
We were organizing like nobody's business
and it was wonderfully empowering.
And at that point,
you were able to see
the other organizations what they were doing,
you get more involved with them and help out.
And it was just an exciting, exciting time.
And I really do see that moment,
that period after the March on Washington
in '87 as the moment when really
the movement really became
something substantial in Atlanta.
>> Would you say that using that to
clinate political powers, actually.
>> Yes. We were working.
I want to say that it was
White Fowler's campaign. It was interesting.
The political establishment, they weren't quite ready
to publicly be supportive of us in many instances.
Maybe a few council member,
I think Mary Davis was a city council person at the time.
And she was comfortable having publicly said,
that she was supportive of our causes.
But most of them were
quietly supportive and wouldn't be public about it.
And I remember there being large tips within
the community over that, and even today,
I think there's still that component
where you have some gays and lesbians who are okay
with politicians maybe quietly
supporting our cause but not being very public about it.
And then you have
the other side of the community that said if
they're not willing to stand up with us publicly,
then are they really with us?
I remember those discussions in
different meetings and how difficult it was,
especially with some of
the protests that we would be doing
because you had at that time, Lambda.
Gosh, I forget the name of the Democratic group.
But at that point,
we had established a gay Democratic group that really
just supported Democratic candidates and
the calls of the Democratic Party.
And they were going for that mainstream
let's be a little
more structured in how we deal with politicians.
And then you have Queer Nation on
the other side and ACT UP who were in the streets,
and if the politicians weren't towing the line or weren't
doing something or were
working against us in any way or weren't supporting us,
they would be protesting,
and that really caused some riffs.
>> Can we talk a bit about
actually founding Cobb Citizens.
>> Cobb Citizens it came out probably primarily
from the resolution that the Cobb Commission had passed,
Gordon Weissg and Bill Byrne.
But before that, John and I having lived up in Smyrna,
we were already starting to reach out and
trying to find people who were
identifying as gay or lesbian in
Cobb County because we knew they were here.
It was just a matter of trying to find them.
And so we were casually having
potlucks here and there and
things like that, trying to reach out.
We would host events for groups in
Atlanta and hoping that
other gay and lesbians
in Cobb County would see it and say,
oh, gosh, there's one closer to us,
let's go to that potluck.
Really Cobb Citizens really
took shape when the resolution,
the anti-gay resolution was passed by the Commission.
I think at that point,
there was a feeling that we had to
do something more than a potluck.
We had to get organized in Cobb County.
That it's one thing to be yelled at by a passer by
in a car or talked down to negatively in a restaurant.
But when the politicians
who are supposed to be representing you
are publicly telling you that
you're not worthy to live in the community,
that takes it to a different level.
And at that point,
we formed a Cobb Citizens coalition with
some other couples both
lesbian and other gay men that felt that it was needed.
>> So had you known those couples before Cobb Citizens?
>> No. It really brought us all together.
And so we formed new friendships and allegiances.
And in fact, even after we moved out of
Cobb County and moved into the city in n '92,
they were still here in Cobb County,
working with Cobb citizens
to continue the work that need to be done here.
>> So we talked a little bit about family members who
have been an influence on you.
Were there other peers or other people?
>> My sixth grade teacher, certainly was
a huge influence as I mentioned earlier,
and her given me that foundation.
And she also, what she did too of that she
didn't realize was that when she would go travel places,
she would bring me back flyers and brochures
and I would hang them up in my room.
So I was opening
my eyes to what New York was like
and all these other cities.
And so I think that helped me when
it was time to leave Atlanta it didn't seem so scary.
I knew she had done it,
and she had left Ohio to come down here,
and then I could stretch out
and move across country on my own and be okay with that.
John certainly was a huge influence.
I think, when I look back at my life with John,
I don't know that I would have had
the ability to go to school after high school.
My idea of life when I was in high school,
my goals in life at that point,
in all seriousness was
to get a factory job on Fulton Industrial,
which my mother at that point had started
working and to find a trailer someplace.
And that was the goals I had set,
and that was how high I thought I could reach.
And when I met John,
not only was he my partner,
but he really instilled
a belief that I could do more than I could.
I could do better than that.
And I had already started
working out of high school because,
the college wasn't even in the picture at that time.
And he helped push me
to give me the idea that I could attend school,
and that's how I enrolled here at Kennesaw.
And it wasn't easy.
I had not planned for it in high school.
So it was definitely
a struggle in those early days attending class and
working and just trying to do well with my studies.
But my confidence grew,
and I think with
all the activism and meeting
the different people that I was meeting at
the time that also built instilled an idea
that I could do
whatever I really wanted to at
that point and that helped.
At that point, I realized that
we were going to HRC dinners
where Scott King sitting
there beside us and we're talking to her.
I had jumped in two years,
from Pebblebrook High School.
I was in a different world,
and I was really starting to understand what
that world look like and what my possibilities were.
And I remember dancing next to Mayor Jackson,
the Mayor of Atlanta at the time at
the Park Barn where
Kathy was working and we we were having
a New Year's party,
and he stopped in and dancing with John,
I'm like, dancing to the mayor here.
And so it was
just a collective influence of
having those people around me who
were mostly older than myself.
But they were helping me understand
that I could do more than I realized I was capable of.
>> I think we talked about
a little bit getting started in community activism.
Would you like to talk more about how you get started?
>> I started school here and at that point,
it was much we were just with Friends,
Atlanta and going to Magalo meetings as representative.
At one point, I think I became vice president of Friends
and so I was literally organizing
events and sending out the newsletters,
I typed the newsletter, it was all
very old school and got to
key and get it copied and mail it out.
No emails or anything like that.
And so they gave me
the foundation to understand how Organizations worked.
And so then by time we came
back from March on Washington and we
started and then the Democratic Convention,
we were friends with Dick, Dick
became delegate to the convention,
that was all quite exciting for us.
And then we had hosted some ACT UP members from New York,
and they were looking for places to stay in Atlanta.
So John and I decided to host ACT UP in Georgia.
And so they came and stayed with us and you just really
listening to them and the things that they
were doing in New York at the time.
We were really understanding
what needed to be done here in Atlanta.
And so I think that probably
Kennesaw wasn't ready for me when I came on campus,
and I didn't realize that I was going
to really get active here at Kennesaw.
I'm sitting here spending my evenings,
taking classes and again,
always mindful that I'm not
the only gay person in the room or on the campus.
I thought there's other gays here,
I know it and how am I going to find them?
So I thought, well, naturally,
you got to start an Organization,
you got to let them know about it.
And so since I was spending
so much time here Kennesaw classes, I thought, well,
it makes no sense to not do
an Organization except for where
you're stuck most of the time.
And so we put together and I thought, well,
it's got to be a fun name and it's got to
be something that's going
to get people's attention and all that.
So we came up with the name Glue
and I remember just putting those flyers up well.
I started understanding the politics within
the school and how to get an Organization started,
and I can tell you it was not,
they weren't necessarily negative and mean about it,
but they certainly weren't going to
be overly helpful either.
They were quite straight forward this is how you do it.
So we really struggled.
I think I started putting flyers up first.
And they were hard to keep up.
Almost immediately, you put one up,
and by the time we went back down the hall,
after class, they were gone.
It was just so quickly because
people just weren't going to have it.
But they were up long enough for me to
find at least a couple of
other people and that's all I needed.
I just needed a couple of other people and so
we were able to put together and literally think.
I know there was two of us it was
me and I cannot remember the female's name.
But I think I want to say her name was
Jane and she was really nice.
And, we thought, well,
we can do this and then Chet came along,
and there was enough of us
that we knew that we had something.
And so then we had to get a sponsor.
And so that was really tough trying to find
a faculty member who would even consider helping us.
We asked around and searched,
there were there were not
any openly gay faculty members here on campus,
but there were gay members of
the faculty so we approached them thinking,
of course, that they would say,
sure, we'll help you.
Well, that was not the case at all.
They wanted nothing to do with the Organization.
They would quietly support it,
but they could not jeopardize their position
on staff or they didn't feel like they could.
And so they wouldn't sponsor us.
I went to sociology and the professor in
the sociology department put me in touch
with the psychology department.
And I want to say I can't remember her name.
It was doctor it started with the W.
>> Doctor [inaudible].
>> Dr. [inaudible] and there was another doctor as well.
There's two females.
Dr. [inaudible] She may have been in the sociology.
Was she in sociology?
>> Yes.
>> She was the first one we approached.
And then the chair of the department of the psychology.
I think sociology and psychology may have
been tied together at that time.
And the chair of the department,
she said you should speak with her.
And we reached out to her and she said,
yes and we were thrilled.
And so she was nice,
she was really nice about it,
and they were helpful and everything.
But it was still hard,
we were still battling trying just to
get the publicity out about the group.
And there wasn't much they could do to help with that.
They would keep it on their doors,
I don't know if the professors still
do that now on their doors or not,
but always posted things on their doors.
But, that was still very
limiting to how many students were reaching.
I think we started running it at that point in
the Central magazine in
Atlanta and in the Southern voice,
and then eventually, I think
we were able to get things into the Sentinel,
I think was Sentinel newspapers is it still here?
So that helped. But even with the publicity,
what we quickly learned was that many people
like John and I had done, had separate lives.
They may go down to Atlanta and
have their weekends with
their friends or gay friends and all that,
but their lives in Cobb County
and at school were quite different.
So I think it was was a big hurdle to get past,
to get people who felt comfortable merging
those two worlds at that time.
But that didn't really deter us.
So even though we were small,
by 91, we were ready to get into the parade, downtown.
We were quite proud of ourselves because at that time,
I don't think a group
outside of downtown in DeKalb County.
I think Fulton County and DeKalb County were
the only counties that really had
any gay connections at all.
So the idea that Kennesaw,
that a group of students,
no doubt, from Kennesaw,
Georgia, would be in the parade,
I think was shocking to the other parade participants.
And keep in mind, now,
Kennesaw at the time, I don't know if they still have it,
but they had gotten tons of publicity because they
required every homeowner to own a handgun.
So this is the environment in which
we are working within.
And so people for both sides,
people up here were shocked
that we were doing what we were doing,
and people in the gay community
were shocked at what we were doing,
but we were doing it less.
And we were having fun doing it.
So we were small, but it was funny.
I remember the tables,
at the beginning of school here each year,
they would have an affair
with all of the student organizations and we were like,
well, we're student organizations
so we should be able to get.
So we set our table up,
and of course, keep in mind,
we're still dealing with the AIDs crisis.
That is a huge issue within our community,
the gay and lesbian community.
So I don't think they quite knew what to do with
this group that not only is gay and lesbian.
It says it all over their table,
but they have condoms out,
and they're just very,
very much open about
what's going on within their community.
I think that was tough for a lot of the groups to take.
There were lots of complaints,
I remember from some of the other Organizations,
but they really couldn't keep us out
because we were following all the rules
that were set up by the university.
But we knew that we
weren't welcomed necessarily by everyone here.
And at that time, we had also tried to
get Southern voice on campus,
which was the Gay and lesbian
community paper at the time.
And they were really nice.
They were having quite taken that we
wanted to have the paper all the way up here.
And it was almost like the Berlin embargo drop.
We were running stacks of papers
from downtown to the campus
and setting them up in the student center,
and they were being thrown away
almost as quickly as we were able to fill it up.
But we just knew every time we went downtown,
we had to grab more papers because we had to at
least try to keep it populate.
And I remember at one point it
was and I can't remember where the box was,
but it was set on fire.
It was just that nasty.
It was either the box or the flyers
that were set on fire once,
but that was the environment.
Certainly the message was getting crossed
that we were not welcomed here,
but it didn't deter us.
It didn't stop us at all.
And we did make friends or two.
At one point, I ran for
the student government Student Senate,
I think is what it was called.
And so I quite proud of myself
again to be the first openly gay,
which seems so strange to think that that was important,
but member of the Senate.
And I really found that there were
other students here that were going to be my ally.
And there was a female that worked in
worked in the student organization
like the student center.
She like managed all the groups
and she was quite friendly and
helpful as well in getting us through that period.
And there was one particular female student.
I don't remember her name, but she
also really seemed to trumpet
our calls and tell the other members of the Senate,
just how important it was that we have
a seat at the table and all that stuff.
We didn't get much accomplished
during that time, I don't think,
other than the fact that we were
just helping to educate people that were here
and we wanted to be here and we were proud to be
here and deserved to be here.
But it still took a toll.
I think by the time 92 rolled around,
I was just completely burnt out.
I tried to do too much.
And it was too frustrating
with the amount that we were not able to
do that I just felt that it was time to leave that.
And also,
with all the threats that we
were getting because of the Cobb Citizens coalition,
because by that point,
not only were we dealing with the stuff here on campus,
but we were also dealing with John and
Cobb Citizens and the public role that he was taking
as spokesperson for that group
and fighting the county commissioners.
And that had upped the anti of
violence tored us to the point
where it really felt like it was just time that we
had to get out of Cobb County. And so we left.
The individuals that you met and became part of GLUE,
did they become involved in
Atlanta activism at all or were those two separate?
>> No. And again,
it was a small group.
And remember, Chet.
The main people that were active in GLUE in
the earliest days was Chet,
Jan, and myself.
And anybody else that came,
they would come and check us out and all that,
but we could never keep anyone else really active.
And I think that part of it was
just the environment that
was taking place here on campus.
Chet was a writer,
and that was really where his passion was at the time.
And so he didn't really have time or interest,
I don't think, in getting
involved in the organization's downtown.
And Jan, I don't feel like she was an activist herself.
That wasn't who she was,
at least from my perspective.
And so she didn't seem to be
active in any of the organization's downtown either.
We kept in touch with Chet for some time,
but once we left Kennesaw,
I don't think I really ever saw Jan again.
>> Can you talk a little bit more about what it was
like to be a gay student on campus at the same?
>> It was tough. It was isolating.
The environment here at the time was very
different than it is now, anyway.
It was a commuter college.
Most students at that time would come here,
get out of their car,
after you fought forever for a parking space.
I don't know if that's changed or not.
[LAUGHTER] So you were just, I think,
beaten down by the time you found a parking space and you
would walk all the way to class,
and you attended your class and then you went home.
So I think probably a lot of
the organization suffered from involvement
anyway because of the way
the campus life was set up here.
We just had the extra level that was a gay group,
and it was just so out of the mainstream for the time.
So student life,
there wasn't much of it, really,
other than going to the student center
to maybe eat some cold pizza.
I think Pizza Hut was here at the time.
It was almost like a cafeteria,
like a lunch lady place.
It was a very different environment
than it is now because it wasn't
a place people really stayed in.
And I don't even know that, for the most part,
most students even formed
any relationships with their peers here on campus,
other than the ones who were really
dedicated in the other student groups.
As far as being a gay person,
I can understand why it was so separate
because it was so separate for most students anyway.
You had your school life and your work life,
because most of us were working
when we weren't going to school at that time.
And of course, today, that's
a totally different picture here on campus.
>> So did you
continue college after you left Kennesaw State?
>> I did. [LAUGHTER] So we moved out of Cobb County.
First of all, before we touch on that.
With the Cobb Citizens Coalition,
when I talk about the threats that we were receiving,
I'm not talking about just people
screaming at us in a restaurant.
At that point, it had ramped up
to phone calls in
the night telling us that we were going to be killed.
We had the FBI or the police,
I can't remember which one it was,
working with us just to monitor,
make sure that we were staying safe,
because I remember someone coming out because we
thought a bomb had
been planted in our car and they were checking our car.
It was just such a level of
stress that John had started carrying a gun,
which I was very much against guns,
but the level of concern over our safety had ramped up to
the point where it was
really hard to stay in Cobb County at that point.
And I think also,
the fear of our safety,
but emotionally, it was hard.
It was just hard to live in
an environment where you feel like you're hated so much.
And so we did find a condo downtown that we
could afford, and we left.
So when we did that,
I ended up attending Georgia State.
I applied to school at Georgia State,
and by that time I had finished all my core classes
up anyway here at Kennesaw.
And I entered their School of Education.
They had a good program at the time.
And so I was happy to do that.
And campus life there was different than here.
And I really didn't get involved in
campus life on campus in Georgia State.
And I think part of that was
because of the burnout that I had
experienced in dealing with the campus politics here.
But what I did discover was the fraternity.
And so at the time,
there was a fledgling group of
guys who wanted to start a gay fraternity.
But there was no large enough gay population
in any of the schools to really
warrant a full-scale fraternity.
And so these guys used to put the call out and a group
of us all got together and we created a gay fraternity,
Delta Lambda Phi,
that actually serviced all of the metro area colleges,
and it was fun.
I never experienced Greek life,
and I don't even think it was really anything
compared to what Greek life
was like in the other frat houses.
But two of the guys were a couple and they
had a beat up old apartment on
Piedmont that acted like our frat house.
And the similarities, it was an all-gay men's fraternity,
which was very different.
But there was lots of drinking going on.
And I wasn't a drinker.
Again, when you think back to
what I was talking about high school,
I didn't smoke, I didn't drink.
I was just quite, easy,
and well behaved, I guess, in that regard.
And so I remember sitting on the sofa in their house and
watching all these antics and the guys and drinking,
and talking to a couple of
the other brothers there sitting on the sofa with me and
were watching one of the brothers tumble
down the stairs and he didn't spill his vodka,
and it was a vodka fraternity.
There was tons of vodka,
and that was the antics,
and there was tons of drag.
I don't know what in the world was
going on with the drag.
It was an absolute blast.
And I remember like Christmas parties,
which is not politically correct today,
but we had a redneck Christmas,
and we all dressed up in
the tackiest redneck clothes you could possibly wear.
And I had found a plastic Christmas tree skirt,
and I put tensil around it.
It was the tackiest drag you had ever seen.
Christmas balls on the ears.
And we had the bathtub full of ice,
and all of our booze was in the bathtub,
and I think we had string cheese.
And we had found a cedar tree.
We cut a cedar tree down from a yard,
and that was our Christmas tree, and it was decorated.
It was just fun.
And so finally, I was connecting with guys my age.
They were also in school,
be it not the same school.
Some of them were Georgia State students,
but not all of them.
And I was getting the first taste of being with
just guys in a social setting and just having fun,
and it was just a wonderful time,
and it was a great group.
I ended up eventually becoming
vice president of the fraternity.
I graduated from Georgia State in '95.
I would say it lasted maybe two more years
after my class left.
And like many organizations,
it just faded out.
The national fraternity is still there.
But that produced lifelong friendships.
I'm still in touch with many of those guys today,
and it's just it was a wonderful experience.
>> So you mentioned earlier that,
at one point, you also became vice president [inaudible].
Is that a group that
remained generally older and
you were one of the younger [OVERLAPPING]
>> I was the youngest member by a far margin.
I would say most of the men and friends, Atlanta,
were maybe late 20s,
30s, and 40s.
Thirties and 40s would be the main demographic,
and then a 17-year-old.
They were really nice guys.
I think, people can come up with all sorts of images
of them trying to
come onto me, but it wasn't that way at all.
They really took me under
their wing and they were just nice,
and that produced a lot of great friendships as well.
We hosted a jamboree,
a camping trip up in
the North Carolina Mountains and rented a camp up there,
and that was a big controversy when we rented that camp
because they didn't want a gay group to rent a camp.
And we finally found a camp that would rent to us.
I think it was an Episcopalian camp.
And we didn't all call to
men's groups all around the country and
held this huge camping weekend up there,
and we go whitewater rafting and dinner is out.
And because the gay community wasn't public,
just the fact that we were all gathering in
the sizes at that point, it was exciting.
It was fun, it was a really neat experience.
>> And going back a little bit to
your time in Cobb County, two questions.
First being, can you tell us a little bit
about what the role
you played in the Cobb Citizens Coalition?
>> I think that my focus more was
on the campus group here at the time,
because those were happening close together.
And I was still working and going to school.
So there was a lot on my plate at that time.
I think the way John and I worked at
that point was certainly we were helping each other.
He would come to public,
like when we would march
in the pride parade and things like that.
He would come and support
the student group in any way he could,
and he helped me certainly with
flyers and things of that sort,
and if we were having gatherings at the house and all.
And I was acting in
the same role with Citizens Coalition.
I was helping in any way I could,
but he was really more the front man.
And at that point, I was still pretty shy
about talking to people.
I hadn't really come out of my shell yet.
And so the idea of talking to the press,
that was all still very new to me,
and he seemed to be more at ease at that time to do that.
>> And finally, can you
talk a little bit about when you took care of Cody?
>> That's a tough story.
I talked about my sister
earlier in her battles with addiction.
So when Cody was born,
he was the third child that she had,
and I knew she had an addiction problem.
I had just graduated from
Georgia State and I had
just gotten my first teaching job.
I was teaching 1st grade.
I had taken a job in January,
because I graduated in December,
Cody was born in December,
and I had taken my job,
and two weeks after he was born, I get a call.
I don't remember if it was my sister who
called or if it was a social worker.
But essentially,
Cody was not going to be allowed to live with
my sister because he had been born cocaine positive.
And I asked if I would be willing to take him.
I just said yes.
I guess, there's no way around. I just said yes.
And keep in mind, I hadn't even
spoken to John about this,
and I have just taken a two-week-old baby into our home.
And I guess it was because I knew he wouldn't care,
I guess, or he would be supportive.
And it was love at first sight with Cody.
He came to me,
and I was quite scared to raise a two-week-old,
and we had no daycare.
I was just starting a new job,
and life was chaotic trying to get settled in
the city and find my way there.
There were just lots of changes at that time.
And here I have the responsibility of a two-week-old.
And I think I did
just a great job, and John did as well.
And we showered him,
and so did everyone else,
all of our friends,
with everything they needed.
It was just wonderful.
And it didn't hurt that I had just graduated with
a degree in early childhood education,
and so I knew what I was getting into.
And I worked through
the classroom day and I couldn't wait to get home to him.
And I found a sitter near by
a lady that was quite a Christian lady,
and I was so worried about what she was going to say
about two men raising this baby,
and she was just wonderful about it.
And I remember the first Father's Day and
her making a card from Cody.
Of course, he was only a few months old at that point.
And I did everything
a proud parent would be and would do with a kid,
and with tons of photos and great clothes,
and we take them to all different things
and trips to see Santa,
and just everything that parent does.
And then at the same time,
I'm trying to manage my relationship with my sister.
I've just taken her child.
And that wasn't easy. And so it caused a lot of friction,
especially with her husband,
who felt that he should not
be punished by the deeds of my sister.
And so when the time came,
I would attend the court dates and
make the reports about how things were going
and that I had done all that they were required
as far as doctor's visits and
all things you do with a child.
And unfortunately,
things weren't progressing on my sister's side.
She wasn't doing what she was supposed to be doing,
but the courts,
at that point, they just wanted,
I think, to close the case.
And so I had to fight.
I hired an attorney,
because I did not want to give Cody up.
We've been the only house he'd ever lived in.
And he was walking at that point,
and it was just the three of us,
and we had to go to before the judge in Cobb County,
because she was living in Cobb County at the time.
And I had prepared the case,
and I pointed out all the issues.
Here are the things that you required of
my sister and she hasn't met any of these requirements,
and so he should not be going back to her.
And they couldn't get past the point,
the fact that two guys were raising this kid.
And so they said, no,
he's going back with her,
and they took him away from me.
And I kept all those papers.
I was just so hurt and so angry over losing him,
and that really, I think,
started the unraveling of my relationship.
By '98, the relationship had disintegrated,
and I couldn't live in Atlanta anymore.
I could not be that close,
and seeing him living
in an environment that he was now living in,
and going over there and
still having that bond where he just want to be with me,
everything, but he can't be with me.
And it became too painful to be here.
And so that's when I left to move to Chicago.
And kept in touch with him,
as I did with the rest of the family.
My sister and I, surprisingly,
were able to make
up in each of
these instances where we were having these issues.
And so I kept
in touch all the years and would go back and visit,
and John would bring Cody up to visit me in Chicago.
And then when Cody was old enough, he'd fly solo.
And I kept a very strong connection with him.
And then just recently,
he became a senior in high-school and I get
a call that he needs me again.
So I fly down on a moment's notice,
and to go to court,
and this time it's in Douglasville,
and he's old enough,
he's 17 at this point.
And they asked him what do you want to do,
and he said I want to go live with my uncle.
And so they granted me guardianship,
and I thought, my goodness,
book ends, I'm there at the beginning of his life,
and now as he leaves childhood and becomes an adult,
I'm back with him.
So I took him up to
Chicago and he enrolled in high-school there,
and it was tough.
I still get angry
because I think about all those lost years,
and if he had been with me that whole
time how different his life would be,
because what I realized was
that I had an impact
in his life but I didn't have enough of an impact,
and to expect him to be able to come into my household,
which now has two kids already,
and we have a way of doing things,
it's very different from the life that he grew up in.
And we have rules that he didn't have to follow,
and it was too stifling.
It was too hard for him,
and he just wanted
to come back to something that was
comfortable and was familiar.
And so he finished out the school year,
and this was,
again, a kid who had no plans on going to college,
and by the time he graduated
from OPRF in our neighborhood,
we had gotten him to the point where he was
able to apply to Michigan State,
which he was accepted to,
to Kennesaw, which he was accepted to,
to Arizona State, which he was accepted to,
and to UIC, which gave him a scholarship.
And I had a conversation and I said,
Cody, you got a scholarship to UIC here in Chicago.
But again, it was just too much,
and he turned it down, and he came back here.
So I'm glad that I did what I did,
but I think the regret was not being able to,
because of outside circumstances,
being able to really control that any more than I could.
>> Going back to a bit of broader questions.
Can you talk a little bit about your perception of
the gay community in Cobb County versus Atlanta,
especially later as you moved into
Atlanta and really saw the differences?
>> When we left Cobb County,
we had such negative feelings about the county and
what had happened that we really
didn't want anything to do with
Cobb County after we left.
And so we got fully involved in
the Atlantic community and worked
on political campaigns,
and with social groups and with pride,
and immersed ourselves there in
that large vibrant community.
And we were actually amazed when we would hear
that anything was happening in Cobb County.
I think later on there was a gay bar that
opened on Franklin Road.
So we were like, what? A gay bar in
Cobb County, that's odd.
But we would never visit it.
It was too difficult to come back to Cobb County,
and we just avoided it at all costs.
So we knew things were happening.
We kept in touch with Lynn and with
Sherry Spencer Stark of the theater in the square,
and her husband,
and all the people who were active with us during
that hard time fighting the county commission.
But we never really came out to visit them.
It was just there was definitely
an emotional wall that we put up at 285.
And it wasn't really until I was
well into adulthood and had moved to Chicago even,
before I could bring myself to come back
and retrace the houses I had lived
in as a child and revisit my high-school and
come to terms with Cobb County,
and with what had happened here.
And I think that as an adult I was able to look back and
understand that while there was a lot of pain,
there was also a lot of joy in different ways,
and that you have to take the pain and the joy,
and that all of that collectively
makes you the person that you are.
And so I look at Cobb County
differently now with that grown
up perspective and accept, and I'm amazed.
I'm just amazed at how large the county has
grown and how diverse it has become,
and how they're tackling that diversity.
I think that's a real struggle for
Cobb County right now and how to make
that work with all these different populations together.
And the fact that there is
a gay community in Cobb County now, I think is great too.
And I can't even tell you
how amazed I am with Kennesaw State,
having come back here last year,
and to see how large the school has become,
how organized,
and that it's a full-fledged university
now and the size it is.
But then you look at the gay and lesbian component
and what they've been able
to build here with
the faculty and with the students they have today.
I'm just amazed. I'm absolutely for,
I became so emotional after
visiting last time and even I think this week
being back on campus and to think where we
were and where it is now is just phenomenal.
>> Can you talk a little bit
about the movement or the change and
Pride celebrations and the very small celebrations
[inaudible].
>> [LAUGHTER] Yes, I can talk a little bit about that.
I talked about how
the community was in
Atlanta and it wasn't a political community.
And by that point,
I'm looking at New York and Chicago and San Francisco,
and they're getting these huge parades,
and we've gone to at this point by '93,
we've gone to too much on Washington
and hundreds of thousands of people,
and you come back to Atlanta and you've got 500 people.
I'm thinking that there's got to be
something that can be done about this.
And at the time with Pride here,
it was a closed group.
It was a group of men.
And I would affectionately
just say they were a bunch of bodybuilder guys.
There was a group of bodybuilders.
They were all just built to the hilt
and they were friends with each other,
for the most part from what it seemed.
And they organized Pride. That was their thing.
I think they did it because at the time,
nobody else really wanted to.
But you know they got into
their comfortable rut And
so they did the same way every year,
and it wasn't growing. It wasn't expanding.
And I used to just get so frustrated.
I don't know what it is about me
looking at things and thinking,
this is where it is, but this is where it can
be and wanting to take it there.
And they had no interest in me
[LAUGHTER] helping them out
because they've got it all down.
They had their group of friends,
and so I wasn't going to have that,
I was never going to take that as an answer.
And I was friends with Jack Pelham at the time.
Del Biggers was the organizer of
the parade group at that time.
And Del and I were friendly with each other.
He didn't see me as anything other
than just like a Chihuahua barking and aggravating them.
And so I was just so mad.
I was talking to Jack Pelham,
who is the editor of Etcetera Magazine,
which was the bar rag,
is what affectionately I'll call it.
And I said,
there's got to be something that we can do about this.
And so I said, we're just going to announce a meeting.
And so I ran a Pride meeting in Etcetera Magazine,
and I think Dylan were just shocked,
what is they doing with a Pride meeting?
Because we're Pride,
[LAUGHTER] and there's a meeting.
So I remember hosting that meeting with
Jack and Dylan them walking in.
And it was full of people.
People really wanted to change.
And so just having that meeting,
was the impetus for them to
realize that there were people in
the community that wanted more.
And it was not just me and it wasn't just Jack or
anyone but it was a room full of people.
And then we had ideas and we're willing to do the work.
And that was really the only involvement.
I didn't really go
any further with it than that because at that point,
I didn't feel I needed to.
I had a room full of people,
and I had just gotten them together to talk.
And then that next year, it wasn't a huge.
I think they had $5,000 or $8,000,
but it was a huge jump.
From what we had before.
And then each year, and the
group that formed out of that meeting.
Brought a level of professionalism to the organization
and built it to what I had knew it always could be.
So I was very excited about
that and loved Pride after that.
>> You said you believe that was great?
>> It might have been '92 that that
happened because I'm trying to think back.
But it would have been around that time period.
And if you look at the time, you'll see the time
when Pride jumped from like a few hundred people,
and then it jumps to a large and it was
during that year where we held that meeting
and pulled it away from
Del's group and it became its own organization.
And I'll tell you the story about this.
I did the same thing in Chicago.
When I got to Chicago,
the same thing was happening there.
And almost to the letter.
A group of people that had always done
Pride was running Pride, and I thought.
Because at this point, I had seen Atlanta and I thought,
Chicago is not doing it right.
And they may have the numbers,
but there's so much they could be
doing a cabaret at night,
I thought that there could be so much more,
and they had no interest in me at all either.
And so what? What did I do?
I put a little thing in
the paper and let's have a Pride meeting.
And I went in the opposite direction.
I did not have the support of the community.
I did not have many people show up to the meetings.
There are people that would show up and give their ideas,
but there wasn't the same level of energy.
It was a different community.
I really got dragged through
the press in Chicago over that.
And I learned early on that
every community is different and there's
a different way you do things in different communities.
I learned a lot from that experience.
Our parades are huge,
but they're different up there
in Chicago than they are here.
[LAUGHTER].
>> And can you also talk about
your involvement with the [inaudible] peach tree.
>> Coming back from the march in Washington,
the first one and the second one,
there was a gay lesbian band movement
occurring in the country at that time.
Most of the major cities at that point
had gay lesbian marching bands.
And at Pebblebrook when we talk
about being performing art school,
well, you know, I was in the band.
That's really about the level of talent that I
had ran drum line.
I was part of the drum line.
And it was fun.
I just loved playing drums.
And I loved watching the marching a bomb rules.
I don't know if you know of them,
but they're out of man Park,
and there was a bunch of adults that would march
around different parades here in
Atlanta and the crowds always enjoyed them.
And I knew that you had
this gay band movement
occurring in other cities and I thought, well,
then we have to have something here in
Atlanta because the other cities have it,
and there's enough adults,
obviously that seem to like band still.
And so again, looking for
the catchy name and
all that stuff like that they had done with glue,
I'm thinking, what can I call this?
And so I came up with Pride of Peach or
just Peach being the main street
and where the parade goes,
and primarily we would
be marching for their parades each year.
And so I ran my little ads
for people who wanted
to get your instruments out of the closet.
I think it was the way we would run the ads.
That was the tag line.
And there was actually
a good group of people that came out,
and we sounded horrible.
It was so bad.
But it was fun.
And we would practice at the libraries meeting space.
They had a separate meeting space
completely removed from the library,
so we could practice.
And then from there, I think we moved over to [inaudible]
Park from what I remember, we practiced there.
And it was hard running
a band because I didn't pursue music as my degree,
and I couldn't conduct.
So I had no skill set for this.
I've started this organization that I can't really run.
So I was really dependent on other people.
And so I found someone
who had the talents to be a conductor and director.
And he did that.
And we enjoyed it.
We would do bar raids,
which was really fun.
We would talk to the bar ahead of time.
So they knew he come the patrons didn't.
And we all had our little Pride of Peach Tree shirts
on and we had our instruments,
and we would start marching into the bar, playing music.
And they would, of course,
part and we called them bar raids.
They were bar raids.
And that's how we would get the name
out and we'd collect money donations.
And we would hit bars all over the city, doing bar raids.
And then there was
a fundraiser one year while we were
still active with the band in Dekalb County.
Again, AIDS is still
an issue in the community at that time.
And they were raising money,
I think for Atlanta at the time,
and it was a drag queen basketball game.
Why we don't do these things today, I don't know.
And so you had these guys playing basketball in
full drag in this high school gymnasium
in Dekalb County somewhere.
And we did the halftime show.
And so we play up in the stands of the game,
and then we get down and we had
choreographed this cute little.
And it was absolutely just so much fun.
We had flags. We had guys twirling rifles in the band.
And tragically, the conductor was in a car wreck,
sometime after that and never recovered.
He went into a coma,
I think it was and then passed away.
And there was no one else to run the band.
We did not have anyone
else that could act as our conductor,
and we tried finding someone and just didn't work.
And so we fell apart after that.
And that was the end Pride of Peach Tree.
But during that time, we
had attended national conferences,
we had performed on a cruise ship
with the other gay bands across America.
We had done all sorts of just fun things.
For the moment that it existed,
it was a lot of fun.
Then years later another band did
come onto the front because
clearly Atlanta needs a gay band.
I think they've been really successful since.
>> How many years was Pride of Peach Tree active?
>> I would have to look back in the papers.
It would have been the early '90s
as well because by the time I
had really gotten full fledged into the fraternity,
the band had already fallen apart.
And I was involved in the fraternity by in '94,
'95, so it would have been before that.