KATHY KOZACHENKO, HIRAM RUIZ, PETER TAYLOR

POLITICIAN, GAY LIBERATION FRONT

Hiram Ruiz and others at a New York City Gay Liberation Front consciousness raising group session by unknown, 1970.

In this oral history, we’re joined by three key figures from the early gay liberation movement who helped shape LGBTQ+ activism across the country:

Hiram Ruiz was a member of the Gay Liberation Front in Tallahassee, Florida, organizing in a conservative region where visibility came with real risk;

Kathy Kozachenko made history in 1974 when she became the first openly gay elected official in the U.S., winning a city council seat in Ann Arbor, Michigan;

Peter Taylor was active in the Lexington, Kentucky, Gay Liberation Front, one of the few LGBTQ+ organizations in Appalachia at the time, advancing local organizing in a challenging environment.

Together, these panelists embody the regional diversity and radical spirit of the gay liberation era. Their stories remind us that queer resistance didn’t happen only in New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles—it flourished in college towns, rural communities, and unexpected corners of America. Through their courage and commitment, they helped ignite a movement whose ripples continue to shape our world today.

— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project

August Bernadicou: Peter, can you talk about learning about homosexuality and gayness?

Peter Taylor: Personally, I remember being attracted to, well, Roman statues. I was a big reader, and I loved the encyclopedia. We had a set of encyclopedias when I was about four years old, and those were my favorite books. I don't know that I thought a lot about it until I was maybe 10 or 11. I was always a person who liked the library, and I found the word “homosexual” somewhere. Every time I'd go anywhere, I'd go to the library, and I'd look it up in the card catalog and see what books they had. I tried to educate myself about it.

That's when I knew about it. I had read all the dumb stuff, like that it's an illness and that it's caused by having a smothering mother and all this business, and I said, "I think this is all so silly. It doesn't even make any difference." I always said, the minute I get a chance, I'm just going to see if I can just live like that and see if anybody cares. I was all excited about The Boys in the Band when I read about it. I read a lot of movie and play reviews, of course, so I knew something about it because there'd been a little bit of a presence in the movies, especially.

It's a very disappointing presence because most of the gay people in the movies are just dreadful, or they were back in the 1960s. I don't know. When I came out, I just dispensed with all that. It's never really changed much. I've had a lot of people—my family didn't think it was real.

August: Kathy, can you talk about the first protest you attended and what it stirred up in you?

Kathy Kozachenko: Well, probably the first protest I ever attended was against the Vietnam War. At the time, I was with thousands of other people in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who felt that it was an unjust war where the United States was trying to impose its will on another nation and that we had no business in it. It was an exhilarating feeling, but I also noticed that the protest was being led by men primarily. I questioned some of the tactics.

They led us up to a road, a major highway, Route 23, to stop the traffic, which I didn't understand. I just followed and then ran when the police came. I'm trying to think about when my first gay march was, but I can absolutely tell you that I helped organize and attended the first large lesbian and gay rights march in DC in October of 1979. It was just like nothing I experienced. The feeling was indescribable. It was just amazing. It's a feeling that folks can't have today because there are not hundreds of thousands of us together. It was wonderful.

August: Hiram, you told me that you learned about the Gay Liberation Front by attending a meeting in Los Angeles. Can you talk about that first meeting and how it inspired you?

Hiram Ruiz: Well, obviously, in Tallahassee, there was really nothing, no gay bars, no gay anything when I first went there. I literally just came out about the time that I went to Tallahassee. I just need to go back a little bit before I get to LA, because when I was in Tallahassee, there was nothing there. A group of friends from Tallahassee went to Mardi Gras in 1970. That was the first time that I had been in a place where there were gay people in the street, kissing and holding hands, and just partying, being themselves out there.

That was just very motivational for me, because I thought, well, really, it should be like this everywhere. This should be normal, not just something that I would experience when I go to somewhere like that. It wasn't very long after that that I went to Los Angeles briefly just to visit my grandfather. I have no idea how I heard about a Gay Liberation Front meeting, but I went there. Again, now that was an eye-opening in a completely different way because the experience in New Orleans had been one of just people partying, et cetera, et cetera.

Here, it was people who were seeing their being gay in a political context and wanting to organize to promote gay rights or gay visibility, all the different things that Gay Liberation Front at that point was trailblazing in. I only went to that one meeting, but I left there and said, "Okay, this is something that has to happen." When I went back to Tallahassee, this small group of friends, I said, "Look, this is the experience I had, and these are the kinds of things I heard. I think we should be doing something like that here. So what if it's Tallahassee and not Los Angeles? Let's just do it." That was the start.

We put up some posters around campus at Florida State to publicize the meeting. People that I had not known before came to that early meeting. Really, the first couple of meetings that we had were just like, what are we going to be? What are we going to do? Why are we here? We decided, "Okay, well, we want to be like other student groups on campus and try to be recognized." That's how we proceeded. We applied to be recognized as a student group, even though we had people involved that were from the city of Tallahassee, local residents, not students.

We decided that we would go the route of trying to be recognized as a student group. Then, of course, that began a whole process of resistance from the university, et cetera, that served to really fortify us and to really motivate us to do much more. That begins to be another long story, so I'll cut it there.

August: Peter, how did you come to embrace your identity in a time when there were so few role models?

Peter: I don't know how to explain it. I decided it didn't matter. It was nobody else's business what I did. I did it. I got picked on a lot growing up. You're talking about development of identity. I was getting called a queer before I had any idea what that really meant, because I went around calling other people that in response, and everybody said, "You don't know what that means." They were right, I didn't. Again, I got on a kick of looking everything up. I was very well researched by the time I was 13 or 14.

I think I remember going to the library and they wouldn't let me check out The Persian Boy by Mary Renault, which was a book about, I think, Alexander the Great and his boyfriend. I went to one school where the teachers were enlightened enough, they let me read The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris, which was a very neutral description of human sexual behavior, so then I knew all about it. I took it out of nowhere. I never knew any other gay people.

The first gay person I knew that was gay that I ever saw horrified me because he was a person who cruised the truck stop bathrooms at a place where I worked when I was in the 10th grade, and it frightened me. When I got to college, I was convinced I didn't have to do any of that negative stuff. When I saw The Boys in the Band, I didn't want to live like that. I just said I want my own life. I was always very attracted to the whole hippie lifestyle too. I just said, why not just be natural? I don't know, eventually it worked out. Eventually. It's a complicated problem.

August: How did you learn about and join the Gay Liberation Front?

Peter: I was a freshman at the University of Kentucky. They were putting up posters. They had these Xerox posters. What was it? Homosexuals, bisexuals, heterosexuals, asexuals, and just plain sexuals are invited to come to a meeting about this. They were meeting over in one of the buildings on the campus. It was in the winter. I know that because I didn't see them at first in the fall. I just went over to go to the meeting. I was checking it out. It was a very similar group to what you're describing, Hiram, which is to say it was a mixture. There were just a few students.

There were some agitators from the town, from Lexington, not UK students, who showed up. This was during the early stages of planning. There's a certain number of hoops you have to jump through to apply for recognitions as a student group. The mission was also the same. We weren't really trying to be huge political activists at that point. We were trying to generate a gay-friendly social alternative for gay students. At the time, the only thing that was going on was a notorious gay bar in Lexington that had been there for many years.

It had probably been there since the '50s. This was in 1971. I couldn't get in. You couldn't get in unless you were 21. There was an enormous population of gay kids at UK who had no outlet whatsoever. They were just wandering around lost. We wanted to start some kind of a social outreach for people like that. That was our plan. I didn't start that idea, but I probably refined it. We were paying student activity fees, so we thought we ought to have a right to have some kind of social group that meets our needs.

I didn't feel like going to a basketball game or football game, two activities that were just adored at UK. We wanted to provide social activity choices for gay students. That was the plan. The mission, I guess you'd put it.

Kathy: What year was this, Peter?

Peter: I got involved in '71. I understand now because I looked at—like I said, I read up on this before I came in so I can actually tell you accurately. I think it started the year before. There was a gay liberation group in Louisville before UK, but it fell apart. I think there was something that went on with the police busted them because they had some underage kid they were giving shelter to, and it turned into a mess. It dissolved. One of the people from there, when I got in, was the president of the GLF.

I don't know, I thought he was the first president. The timeline that's on the UK website now says there was a person before that, but I never met her. She didn't last after that year. By September of '72, there was nobody left from the first round. They needed officers. I agreed to be the president because nobody else would do it. I just said, "Okay, I'll carry the ball here and see what happens."

August: Kathy, can you talk about being recruited for office? What issues did you care about, and what issues do you care about now?

Kathy: I was a member of an organization in Ann Arbor called the Human Rights Party. It was primarily started by students, although it did have a statewide presence in Michigan. I was an active part of the organization from probably 1971 when I got to U of M. It was an organization that was multi-issue. We believed in economic justice. We believed in the breaking of gender roles and gender stereotypes. We did strike support work, welfare rights work, and, of course, worked against the war in Vietnam.

Peter Taylor by unknown, circa 1974.

We really had politics very much like those that Bernie Sanders espouses. We wanted a more just society in every way. We used electoral politics as one way of making change, of putting our ideas across, and trying to basically show a different way of living and being in the world and fighting for what we believed in. We were very much a part of the social movement of the '60s and '70s. We elected two people to city council quite by surprise in 1972. One was from the student ward and one was from the first ward, which was a mixed ward of working class and students. We were quite surprised to win in that ward.

When it came to 1974, their term was ending, and some folks from the party approached me to run. Basically, most of the people that I thought would be much better at it had finished graduate school and were going on to start their life elsewhere and to start their careers. I was just finishing with my four years of undergraduate and had no particular plans, so I said yes. After the fact, after I agreed, my campaign manager suggested that I run as openly gay, and I said yes. As a collective organization, we made decisions in meetings often by consensus and talking things through. The organization agreed that I should run as openly gay. That was a part of my campaign.

Now I'm very much involved—well, I shouldn't say very much involved. I'm involved as much as I can be in what's going on today in terms of standing up against the backlash and the reversal of policies that people my age fought very hard to win for us, such as the right of a woman to decide what to do with her own body and the right of LGBTQ people to have rights and to be free and be proud and not have books banned and so forth.

There were large protests all over the country yesterday against what's going on in the Trump administration. I was there, and there were many, many, many gay flags, many gay flags, many people with signs saying, “Be who you are,” “Love who you want to love,” of course, among many other signs, such as, “We support immigrants” and “Hands off Medicaid.” It was a wonderful collection of people speaking out against what's going on today.

August: What was the 1979 March you mentioned earlier?

Kathy: It was the first national lesbian and gay march on Washington, DC. It was organized. There was a steering committee of folks throughout the country. I don't know if the Gay Liberation Front or who came up with it. I know that I was a part of the organizing of folks to go to the march here in Pittsburgh, but people came from all over the country. It was wonderful. There were musicians, speakers. It was a phenomenal turnout.

August: How did it compare to marches for Vietnam that you went to when you were younger?

Kathy: The anti-war marches were obviously very political. We felt like we were doing destruction in Vietnam. Also, of course, many young men, my age and older, were faced with the draft. They didn't choose to go to fight in that war or to choose to be a part of the military at all. Young men were drafted, and those who did not want to go to Vietnam and be part of basically a killing machine fled to Canada or sometimes became conscientious objectors. We were really fighting for the Vietnamese people and for our own young men in America as well.

The difference in going to the march in D.C. was even though our rights were probably still pretty minimal back then, it was so celebratory and so joyous, and the feeling of all of us being there together, all shapes, sizes, ages, skin colors, it was just a phenomenal feeling of joy, and also determination that we were going to change things and we were going to change the face of how we were seen and how we were going to be able to live and walk in the world.

August: Hiram, Peter, did either of you check the box? How'd you get out of the draft?

Hiram: Well, in my case, well, in 1971, when all this was going on, is when they brought in the lottery. Everybody got a number assigned to your birthday. If your birthday, the number was in the first 50, you were going to Vietnam. If you were 50 to 100, be prepared because you might well get called up. Then, subsequently, by the time you got to 150, you were pretty clear, and mine came up 191. I remember very clearly, we were at the student union, hundreds and hundreds of people just glued to the TV all waiting for their birthday to be called up.

Everything from people screaming and crying and others just screaming with joy later on. That's how the draft issue came up. I assume, Peter, it must've been similar for you.

Peter: Very. I hadn’t turned 18, though, but I got lucky because I turned 18 in '72. I came to college when I was younger than the norm. In '72, when I turned 18, they canceled the draft that year. I don't think there was any drama at all. I was like, about time, but I had been exploring what to do. Now, see, some of the first gay friends I made were these two guys that were both Vietnam vets that were at UK. They said that they told the recruiters they were gay when they got drafted, and they said the recruiters didn't care. Because I had expected to use that initially, I was actually exploring other options.

A very well-known activist in Lexington, I think he was already in federal prison for conscientious objection. I wasn't sure what I was going to do. I was up in the air about it. I had been raised over by the Air Force Base in Ohio. Apparently, my family thought I was going to join the service immediately when I turned 18. I guess they didn't know me very well in a lot of ways because they were really offended when I said I wasn't going to do that. They thought I was being a traitor.

I hadn't quite solidified what I was going to do, but I didn't have any intention of going, I'll say that, for many of the reasons that you're talking about, Kathy. The whole thing was a completely ridiculous exercise and well, imperialism, frankly. The United States gets mixed up in this stuff so often that they don't care if they kill people in other countries to get what they want out of them. Yes. I didn't have to.

August: Hiram, how did you define liberation during the gay liberation movement?

Hiram: That's a rather complex one, because I think I always thought of it as being on two levels. First, the personal liberation of not really coming to terms with being gay, but accepting that in a very positive way, so learning to see myself as a gay man in a very positive way, having grown up with only negative stereotypes in my head. I knew I was gay at the age of 14. Even though at that time I was in Miami, not Tallahassee, there were absolutely zero positive images of it and any of LGBTQ people. There were plenty of negative ones on TV, in the news, or something.

Just socially, obviously, what Peter was saying about kids calling each other queer, just that kind of social construct of gays being seen as queers, faggots, something very negative. When you don't have anything positive by way of imagery, you don't know. You don't know. Until I went to Tallahassee, I was, I guess, scared, ashamed, or whatever. The first really liberating experiences for me was when I started to tell a few people that I was gay.

This is just before I went to Tallahassee, I was, I guess, 19 by then, 18, 19. I told my best friend, my closest friend, and he stopped being my friend. I think probably more than anything else, frightened. I looked back on that time. I think I could have really just gone inward and been upset by that. In fact, it made me angry, that this is my friend and this is me and how can he not accept me? It made me really angry and confrontational. I went around very confrontationally telling a few other friends, and they were like, "Oh, okay." Others, "Okay." I thought, "Oh, okay. Maybe it's not all negative."

Then, I think after that, after that when the whole Tallahassee and then the gay liberation began, then it was a liberation on a very different level, because, then was the liberation as LGBT people, LGBTQ people, and what did that mean? It was liberation in the sense of liberation from oppression as gay people, liberation from the laws that existed at the time against homosexuality. In Tallahassee, during the time we were involved in GLF, there were still statutes on the books in Florida.

I can't remember, but they were all called like abomination against nature acts or something like that. People could get arrested for that. It was liberation from that kind of legal oppression. It was liberation from social oppression in general. It was a very multifaceted thing. Then, in the summer of '70, after we had started the GLF in Tallahassee, I went to spend the summer in New York, and I was involved in the New York Gay Liberation Front that whole summer, which was a revolutionary and revolutionizing experience.

At GLF, we had consciousness raising groups. They were small groups away from the politics of the—well, somewhat away from the politics of the main GLF group, where we explored our own inner prejudices about ourselves and about being LGBT, our prejudices about each other. I was in a group that was all African-American and Latino gays. We were looking at liberation from the attitudes and the exclusionary attitudes even within GLF.

That was a very interesting experience because it was personal, but it was also a group effort within GLF to really seek your own personal liberation. Yes, it was something that had many, many different levels, and I think continues to.

Kathy Kozachenko by unknown, 2024.

August: Peter, what do you wish younger activists knew about the early days of the gay liberation revolution?

Peter: Well, that it pays to have the nerve to do it. You expect pushback, but if enough people stand up for something, it becomes very hard to retaliate. I don't know that I have anything huge I can tell them about it because I don't know that I understood it very well. I really felt like the way I handled my—the potential of what we did, looking back, I feel like I handled it probably wrong, because we didn't accomplish any of our goals particularly. We survived for three or four years and then it faded off.

It was not something I understood very well then. I had a lot of time to think about it and wish I'd have been more strategic. I think the young people now need to realize that you can change things if you stand up and try. You don't even have to be real perfect usually, because most of the people that are rearranging the furniture right now for us, especially about women's rights and trans rights and all that stuff, they don't expect any pushback. They're bullies. If they can get a super majority in a place like Kentucky, then they can just do whatever they want to.

If you really push back, they fold because they don't really have a lot of standing, and I don't actually think they're very popular. If they weren't cheating flagrantly all over the place and in order to exclude votes that they don't agree with, I don't think that they'd have even as much power as they have now. You got to stand up. I think the Vietnam War, in particular, is a good example of that, better than the gay movement at that point. The Vietnam War was clearly stopped by the protests. Would you agree, Kathy?

Kathy: I do. I do agree.

Peter: I was totally shocked that it happened, but I couldn't believe they stopped it. I didn't understand how politics worked then. They were afraid to say, "Well, we're really sorry, we're wrong. Excuse us." They just decide this is such a loser, we're going to stop funding it, and so they pulled the funding and didn't do anything else. That's how that stuff works. With gay rights, it's taken a lot of effort. I never thought we'd come this far. I never thought we'd be so free about it based on how awful everybody was in the 1970s. It pays to stand up for it.

August: Kathy, when you look at LGBTQ activism today, what gives you hope and what concerns you?

Kathy: It's hard for me to answer that question in great detail because I'm not as familiar with all the LGBTQ organizations that are out there that are being active. I know they're there, and I know that what gives me hope is that there are so many young people now that have grown up with an image of gayness that has been positive and that has been out there. I do not think that people are going to just accept being pushed back, being made to seem as less than, other than, and so forth.

I went to a meeting recently in Pittsburgh of women, obviously much younger than myself, and they were people that had formed an organization for social reasons, to have fun, get together, et cetera, and decided based on what's going on that they wanted to do more. They wanted to not only fight back for themselves, but they were interested in what they could do in Pittsburgh for the immigrant community, for the people that might have issues with food, and so forth.

I think that really gives me a lot of hope that people are seeing that our struggle is not separate from other struggles and we need to combine with other groups, because what's happening is that people are being made to be "the other.” We saw that in the election when they used transgender ads to make transgender people the other, and therefore, the Democrats are supporting transgender. Then, the other people that were the other are the immigrants, whether legal or illegal, they were also the other.

It's very easy to just look to the side and deny people rights when you forget their humanity. I feel very strongly that the gay community and lesbian and gay people, transgender people, we are going to fight for the humanity of everyone, for our transgender youth, for immigrants. I don't know if people are aware that one of the people in this roundup of Venezuelan gang members is a person by the name of Andre Hernandez who is a gay makeup artist who was rounded up and is now in the El Salvadoran prison because these people were given no due process.

He has no gang affiliations. He has a tattoo that says mom and dad with a crown on it. ICE rounded him up, said he was part of a Venezuelan gang, and he is now sitting in El Salvador in prison. I really feel this is an opportunity right now. It's a terrible time, but it's an opportunity for us to all band together and fight against these kinds of things that are so very undemocratic, unconstitutional, and un-American.

Hiram: If I can jump in and go back for a couple of minutes, we started to talk about how we viewed some of the effects from then. Peter mentioned that you weren't sure how successful it was because it didn't continue. There were a lot of things that began and didn't continue. I think all of those were like pebbles that created a rolling-on effect. Sure, maybe the GLF in Lexington, the GLF in Tallahassee didn't continue beyond when we graduated, my group of friends. Two years later, there was another organization, and then followed by another one.

In fact, I was invited to come back to celebrate what they considered was the 50th anniversary of the founding of the present Pride Union, even though there was no direct continuity with the GLF. I think if you look at that nationwide, the fact that we began all of these organizations, that we became visible, that we brought our issues to the fore and in our local communities, especially important in our smaller, non-coastal communities where there weren't any positive images.

Maybe the images that we're portraying not everybody thought were positive, but they were images of people who were being proud and who were being assertive of their rights. Maybe the freshmen who were watching the seniors do this, it helped in a way to liberate them personally to go on and maybe join whatever other activities they went to in other cities. I think that pebbles growing into stones, growing into rocks countrywide is what led to things eventually like the march in 1979.

When I was in New York for that summer of GLF, we had the very first Gay Pride march in the summer of 1970. Eventually, that was probably 30, 40, 50, I don't know, maybe a few hundred people by then. It was a few hundred people. Of course, that grew over time into something gigantic. Now, I'm not enamored of what Gay Pride parades became over time, which was parades rather than protests or a demanding of rights. It was people being on floats, throwing their clothes off and whatever, and the commercialization of these events with companies that don't give shit about gay people or actually are homophobic.

Again, that's another story. For many people, those events can be critically important—you get a young person now from Lexington or some even smaller town somewhere that sees that this kind of event goes on in Washington, in New York, or everywhere else around the country, and they say, "Hey, we have a place in society. Whoa, now they're trying to take that place away from us. Maybe we better start doing something about it."

That's my hope, that the younger people will not just want to party, but feeling that threat to the rights that they never really knew they didn't have before, will want to start taking a stand and doing something to protect those rights.

Kathy: I forgot to mention one important thing, August, when you asked about organizations. There's a national organization called the Victory Fund, which helps lesbian and gay folks, transgender folks who want to run for office. They do seminars that help people understand the ABCs of how to run for office, how to fundraise, how to get your message across, et cetera. They're a great organization, very effective. I went to one of their seminars here in Pittsburgh recently.

One of the things that people said, one of the great values of having lesbians, gays, transgenders elected to office is that when things come up, when issues come up, when bills come up, we're not being talked about, we're in the room and we have to be talked to, whatever bill it might be that's coming up whether it's, I don't know, transgender in sports, or whether it's bathrooms, or something of this nature, the libraries, we are right in the room for the conversation. There is important work and serious work being done throughout the country. I should have mentioned that before.

Peter: Based on your question, I did actually have something I thought was worth sharing, which is that I would like for the younger gay activists to recognize that it's not just about being gay, it's a broader issue of social justice for everybody. I think the way that George W. Bush got into power is because of the divide-and-conquer strategy that they used when Clinton was president.

Gay people forget that we’re a minority, and that we have to work with allies. We need to respect our allies. I can tell you that in our group, like I said, we didn't have a ton of gay support from the community, because they were terrified that somebody would think they were mixed up in it. We had straight allies. The People's Party made an actual conscious effort to say, "Hey, we're on your side." It was one of the things that made me cynical about politics, is that neither Republicans or Democrats would ever even say the word gay.

Bill Clinton was the first person to ever actually mention it as a platform, and he was treated like a failure because he couldn't make good on his promise to remove the ban against gays in the military. He actually stopped the non-gay status as a condition of being a federal employee, for example, which was a huge social step that got zero support. I heard people ranting and raving about him. That's a divide-and-conquer kind of philosophy. It'll happen again, because, again, gay people are, what are we, 5%, 6% of the population at the most. We can't outnumber anybody, except maybe in places like New York. We've got to work with people.

August: What happens when we internalize our oppression?

Hiram: It fucks up your mental health. That's one for sure. I'm really very grateful that I did not go that way beyond the age of 18 or so because that really paralyzes you. I don't see how you can move beyond that and be concerned about liberation in any broader sense if you are so self-oppressed that you can't even come to terms with it for yourself.

Peter: I can tell you can see it in American politics. The situation we're in right now is caused by a self-hating gay man, Peter Thiel. He just spent an enormous amount of money to get Donald Trump reelected. JD Vance is a protégé of his. JD Vance, who comes off as ambiguously gay, frankly, working actively against gay people. That's happened again and again. Gay people who don't love themselves and they politically oppress other gay people.

Ken Mehlman was the chairman of the Republican Party. He came out after GB was president. That's appalling. How could you do that? I think that's what happens when you internalize oppression. You become an enemy of yourself and all the people that are like you. I don't know how people like that can live with themselves at the end of the day. I've made mistakes, but I certainly tried to do the right thing for other people.

August: Can you be a Republican and care about civil rights at this point in history?

Hiram: At this point, no. I think that's it. No. I'm sure that in the past that there were Republicans who had—there were even liberal Republicans supposedly at one point in time. I think there were Republicans who had a social conscience, who shared maybe even some values, but who just had a very different idea of how you went about things. I think that has completely disappeared. I think anybody who supports today's Republican Party is opposed to any kind of social justice equality for anybody. Other than that, nothing else.

Peter: Maybe Teddy Roosevelt. He was the first president that had a Black man for dinner at the White House that wasn't waiting the table. He horrified everybody in the South by doing it. He was a really classy Republican. The problem is that the labels are also degraded. You can't tell who people are from their party. Dwight Eisenhower, if I figured it out right from reading the history, he was a globalist. He was very farsighted. He was very open-minded. The Republican Party took a nosedive after him. It turned into a gang of thugs and idiots. The idiots are all just the tools of the thugs that are really running it. That's a really hard thing.

Kathy: I think that there's a dangerous thing happening right now. In the efforts of the current powers that be being anti-woke, they're going back and taking things off of websites like contributions of historic Black figures, Native Americans, and so forth. There's no thought to the history of this country that led to the necessity of diversity and inclusion. It's just like, oh, that never happened. There was no historic discrimination, lack of understanding, lack of celebrating everyone's contributions to the country or what we've done to other people, such as the Indigenous folks. There's no thought to that at all. It can be scary to rewrite history.

August: An issue that Republicans and people feel strongly about is trans people playing in sports. Does anyone want to talk about that?

Peter: I hate to say anything about it. The thing is, it's a really old story. I remember the Olympics in the '60s and '70s. There was an enormous issue about people that were clearly intersexed from the Iron Curtain countries playing against women to get an advantage. It caused them to have to start doing chromosome counts before they would let people play. I don't think that maybe parity in that particular area is entirely thought out very well, to be fair to everybody.

At the same time, I don't think it's such a tiny little problem, part of the issue of being transgender. I think it's a divisive point that is causing a lot of grief to people that are trans who need to be treated just like equals in every other respect, at the very least. There may just need to be accommodations there. The smartest thing I ever heard was that maybe they need to have a third category of sports participation, which is non-sexed. It's not for males or females—let anybody play who wants to play. That would actually solve the problem. Because I don't think you can take a person who's developed physically as a man and expect a woman to compete against that person. That was the problem in the first place.

Again, I think it's a really nasty little point that doesn't make much difference. The people that are trans have such a hard time gaining self-respect and self-acceptance that making them feel unwelcome, making them feel like they're freaks, which is clearly what's being done. The entire debate is destined to do that. I just think it's outrageously cruel. Frankly, the people that are doing it could care less. They're just using it as an issue to attract morons to vote for them. That's my take on it.

August: A question that seems like a non-issue, but it's important to LGBTQ people right now, is straight actors playing gay roles. Do any of y'all have any opinions about that you'd like to share?

Hiram: Not really. Obviously, gay actors have been playing straight roles since Shakespeare and since the birth of cinema. As long as the characters are being played in a normal, respective way, not trying to be stereotypes or something. I think most of the movies that I've seen in recent times, I think the straight actors that have played gay roles have done that in a way that I found quite reasonable, usually. The same for the gay actors that I've seen playing straight roles.

Peter: Well, they're actors. No, this gets to it.

Hiram: That is the point. They're actors.

Peter: You know what? To me, this gets to a point that we don't quite address because of the argument we're having about all these rights, is that I think that gay and straight are just social constructs. Most people are not black or white. Most people are shades of gray. There's this pressure to say you're on one side, and the pressure is all one-sided. Nobody's pressuring you to say you're gay because if you say you're gay, they're going to punish you for it. That's where this all comes from. It wouldn't matter who you had sex with if they weren't going to put you in jail for being gay or beat you to death or something like that. It's an imaginary line because most people are bisexual.

With Kinsey's research, a third of people, a third of guys at least have tried it. Women, too. Everybody messes around. It takes a ton of sexual pressure to get people to be straight, to get everybody to be straight, and it still doesn't work. To me, that's a huge issue with defining people by their sexual behavior because I don't think that's adequate.

Hiram: You see, I find that a difficult argument there because regardless of where people are on the spectrum of gay, straight, trans, whatever… Yes, I was gay because I had sex with men, but I think part of the whole gay liberation and self-liberation was to develop an identity as a gay person, part of a group that are LGBTQ people who, regardless of the ins and outs of their sexuality, shared cultural and societal oppression.

To me, my identity as a gay man was much more to do with that than just with the sex. At my age, I still consider myself very much a gay person, and my identity is that of a gay person, regardless what's going on in my sex life or not. I think an identification as gay or LGBT is something much beyond and much more complex than where you fall on the sexuality spectrum.

August: Did any of you ever feel oppressed by the church or a church?

Peter: Yes. The only church I ever went to was the Southern Baptist Church. Man, they're awful. You can't go out and say it. Right now, my brother-in-law, who is a Pentecostal minister, rails against gay people on the pulpit every Sunday. The cognitive dissonance of the fact that my sister has always been really nice to me just breaks my heart. She tunes in to service every Sunday and she knows better, but she never challenges him on it or calls him on it. The people that do that are just—I think they create a lot of hatred in the world. I don't know, I'm not sure what they're spiritually shepherding anybody into except a mess.

Yes, I certainly felt like that. I was very hostile to the whole idea of religion because of that. I got really tired of the whole thing. It's really hard to live without some kind of metaphysical meaning to life, for me anyway. I had to figure out how to work around it.

August: Kathy, your view?

Kathy: I never felt oppressed. I was raised Catholic, but really stopped believing in the Catholic church when I was probably in 9th or 10th grade. I never thought I would find a church or a spiritual community that modeled my beliefs of my own inherent worth, but also of social justice and equality and essentially love. I became a member a number of years ago of a Unitarian Universalist church here in Pittsburgh. The community meant a lot to me. It's a very welcoming organization. It is not dogmatic. There are people that come from various religious faiths or believe in no higher being at all.

Hiram: I rejected religion at the time that I first self-identified as gay as an early teen. I think despite the fact that my gay liberation self-process didn't come till I was 18, 19, even at that much younger age, somehow I felt that if God was supposed to be loving and accepting of everybody, et cetera, why was I supposed to be like this queer faggot that was something so negative? That just led to my questioning everything about religion and just stopping believing and stopping having any connection with the church at all. No, I never let them get to me.

August: It seems that conservative religious organizations are becoming increasingly aggressive in their discrimination against queer people, especially in southern and rural parts of the country. Do any of you have any insight or advice on how to combat this uniquely sinister form of oppression carried out in the name of religion?

Peter: I tell you, it's easy to forget, but the religious oppression of gay people, among others, is going on all over the world in a really bad way. I've recently had a job where I've been talking to gay people in countries like Egypt, several countries in Africa who are gay. It's so triggering because they're living a nightmare over there. In Saudi Arabia, at least technically, they could execute you in the town square on Saturday for being gay, or for just talking about it on the internet, for example. It wouldn't do to get complacent, but you can't stop people from thinking like that.

The people that are pushing this in the South, I don't know that I think it's any worse than it was. Those churches there never give up on all that stuff, especially the Southern Baptist Church. They're avidly anti-gay.

Kathy: Now, this religious right is very much Christian, white supremacist-based, and they're highly organized. My advice would be to be on the lookout for them. This group, Moms for Liberty, is very much going around the country trying to get LBGTQ books banned from libraries and schools. If anyone is in a religious faith, be it Christian, Judaic, whatever, I think it's important for those religions to speak up against the hatred that the Christian right is espousing because what is being done in this country is in no way enacting the values of love that most religions say they espouse.

Even if you believe there's a problem with too much immigration, you don't round people up like cattle and throw them into El Salvador with no due process. I think just to be alert to who they are and watch for them in your community. For us to become better organized, for us to make sure that our friends and family that believe in our rights and believe the way we do are registered to vote and are voting. That's only one way to do things, but it is one way.

August: Kathy, can you speak of any challenges you face by running as openly gay? Can you speak about your personal journey to exit electoral politics as an office holder in favor of raising a family?

Kathy: I was very, very lucky. I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and ran for office in 1974. It was a radical college campus. I chose to go there because it was so radical. There was sentiment on the campus that you can't be a true feminist unless you're a lesbian, which, of course, was ridiculous. It was, at the time, a very radical and accepting community. Now, not necessarily the other people on city council, but it was a governmental body and I was treated with respect.

I know that a lot of people have said, "Oh, you were so brave to run and this and that." I wasn't. I'm glad I did it. At the time, I didn't have the risks as if I would have been running in 1974, in Pittsburgh or Lexington, or somewhere. I got out of electoral politics at the time because I didn't believe it was the most effective way to make social change, certainly not in Ann Arbor and not for me, period. I did continue to do some activism. I was with an organization in New York called Dykes and Tykes at the time. This would have been about '76, '77.

Women were coming out and they were realizing they were gay, and their husbands were trying to take custody of their children on the basis that they could not be a good mother based solely on the fact that they were identifying as lesbian. I worked with that group. I worked with the March on Washington. Then, yes, I did. I was one of the first lesbians in Pittsburgh to get pregnant as a lesbian and raise a child with a partner. That was one of the best things I've ever done in my life.

I have a wonderful son and a wonderful relationship with him. That did consume a lot of time and energy. I was, by that time, ready to be more a supporter of things, such as Black Lives Matter. Obviously, I wouldn't have been an organizer for it, but a supporter of struggles and things that went on rather than a leader. I did work throughout the years with the Unitarian Church and others on common-sense gun laws. That's been something I've been passionate about for years, but it just transitioned for me. I don't know if that answered the question fully.

The Tallahassee Gay Liberation Front at Florida State University by unknown, 1970.

August: Are there any activism tactics that y'all tried or saw but learned didn't work? What mistakes should we not repeat?

Kathy: I think we're in a time right now, with what's going on, that people have to be very careful about what we're doing. The ACLU and other groups do have—they have training webinars and so forth that tip you off, like when you're going to a protest, what to do, what not to do, what to say, what not to say, which is basically not to say much in terms of if you were arrested. I think that we want to do things.

Legally, I've never been an advocate of any kind of violence anyway. Passive resistance, yes, but I think now we have to be careful because they are so repressive that we want to make sure that we do things as legally as possible.

Peter: I don't think violence works either. Clearly, it creates secondary issues. I got farther by working with everybody that oppressed me, honestly. I ended up working, like giving lectures at the police department, and they picked on me nonstop. They picked on everybody that was gay and, like I say, nonstop for decades. By aiming myself straight toward them, I might've been lucky, it made a difference. If I would have just totally stayed in opposition to them, I would have never been able to do that.

It's a bigger thing that I noticed about how big gay people got their acceptance. When people started coming out, you could see it demographically. The more people that said they knew somebody gay personally, the more likely they were to be in favor of equal rights and of treating gay people with parity. That seems to be the thing that makes the difference. You need to get to know people. When people know you, it makes it harder for them to pick on you. That's not a very upfront strategy, I realize, but it's something that's important to bear in mind. You win people over with positive stuff more than negative, usually.

Again, I don't know how a person who's a minority can really force things. You can just start killing people or something like that, but that never lasts. The French Revolution, I see people on the internet trafficking that all the time about the situation now. That didn't work. The government in France was worse after the revolution than it was before. They had a whole series of tyrants for another century. You've got to really be responsible and you've got to treat people with respect. That actually works better than anything else for me in my life.

August: How does one stop the avalanche of hate?

Hiram: I think that's an overwhelming question at the moment because the avalanche is so huge. Again, as everybody's been saying, you just have to keep fighting against it with your allies and not turn on each other, not give in, not give up.

Kathy: I think that we stop it or we counter it, we resist it by showing love, by not being defeated, by not caving in to despair, and by not becoming bitter ourselves, and to live our lives as fully as we can with joy, despite everything that's going on while we resist. That's the way I'm looking at this and trying to counter what's going on. I think it helps finding support amongst others who think like you, who you can turn to when you are feeling down. I think that fighting the hate by being a loving, positive person who is strong in the world and resisting what's going on. Not just oppression of gays, but all of this.

Peter: The University of Kentucky GLF existed without being recognized by the university. We ended up staying on campus for years. I don't actually have to explain all that, the way it went there, but we had a group without being recognized up until at least '76. We had a speaker's bureau. We were invited to classes. We were invited to social organizations. We went and talked to people about being gay. It was typically a Q&A kind of thing, but it was tremendously effective in making people understand what's going on.

I had any number of people tell me, "Well, I didn't really understand this because I just heard all this stuff from my parents or whatever, but I see your point of view." To me, that was a really, really constructive thing that I'll never regret being involved in because I did a lot of it. We always had a panel of people who went around, went to classes, answering questions, being patient. Educating people about stuff never hurts.

Kathy: No, you're right. It doesn't.

August: Who gets left behind when Pride becomes a brand?

Kathy: I don't know who gets left behind, but I know you have to wonder what's authentic and what isn't. I was at a Pride march once. A company sent people there and I heard people talking and saying, "Well, I really didn't want to come, but they volunteered me to come." I think it's interesting. I think it's very interesting that Target—I'm going to be interested to see what happens this May and June, because Target very much showcased a bunch of Pride T-shirts and swag and this and that. They were a company that a couple months ago said they were dropping their diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, based on the wishes of our current president.

Hiram: You look at the list of all the companies that have rushed to get rid of DEI policies and caved on that, that's so much for all the support that they gave, lending their brand to gay Pride parades in the past. It just shows the hypocrisy of when Pride becomes parades and dependent on money from corporations.

Kathy: I would say to buy local and support small businesses. I know for me, I intend to be—well, I was going to say in as many Pride marches this year as I can, because I've had it with what's going on. I'll be in Pittsburgh and I'll be in Detroit and I don't know where else.

Peter: I feel the same way. I don't much care about all the stuff, like crowds, but I'm going to have to go. I'm going to have to stand up for it anyway. It's an interesting question. It's hard to answer, I think. I was watching real close in the '80s because it was a breakthrough. I said the minute they start showing gay people and they start advertising for gay people, that means we've arrived, we're safe.

We kind of were, because they started having gay beer commercials, and big advertisers started advertising in The Advocate and stuff. It's like, in a capitalist society, that's making it. It isn't perfect and it doesn't mean anything to humanistic values, but it means you're being treated like an equal consumer in a consumer society. Then it gets sour. Like you pointed out, it turns into this cynical commercialization. Frankly, everything in the United States ends up that way. If it goes on too long, every single human experience becomes a buying opportunity and they merchandise it into some retail hell.

August: Does anyone have anything else they would like to say?

Kathy: For everybody out there, I think this is really—as you are able, and obviously, people have different things at risk and so forth, but as you are able to be out and to be active, and even voting, sending emails to your representatives, making your voices heard, it is important right now. I think this is the most important time of my life to be active, sadly.