Good evening, everybody. How are you?
[APPLAUSE] This is really happening.
It's so cool.
I'm Susanna Rinehart.
I happen to currently be
the chair of theater and cinema here at Virginia Tech.
A couple of months ago in the middle of a busy day,
I got an email with the subject heading,
Derry Hutt said I should contact you.
Derry Hutt knew that that was
exactly the right subject heading.
In the middle of that day, I opened it up and it was
an email from Ms. Nancy Kelly
[APPLAUSE] Who I believe
some of you described in your interview
as a really good instigator.
She has not lost that touch in 40 years.
By that afternoon, Nancy Kelly was in my office.
She said, "You have about 20 minutes."
I think after about an hour and a half to two hours,
she laughed with me
having sold my soul to anything I can do.
As I did that, I was like right,
between now and then I think I'm
directing a show but I'll figure it out.
They're not words for
the honor and privilege I feel to be standing here,
to be part of telling the story of people in this room.
To have spent 40-50 hours or something in
the last week looking at
these interviews and not sleeping very much,
because I did it in my spare time.
But being blown away by who you all are
and who you were as people 40 years ago
and now seeing this incredible through-line of who you
all were at 19 and 20
and who you all are now at 60 and 65.
It's stunning.
I had to take
about 15 hours of interviews and decide what
to cut out to get it down
to about an hour and 20 minutes of interviews.
The first thing I want to say tonight is there are
about five more films just in that raw footage,
and I'm not joking.
Having done this most of my life,
it is an exceedingly rare thing
to look at rare footage of
interviews. You typically go, yeah.
Immediately there's going to be 50, 60,
70 percent of it that I want to toss out.
It was the opposite.
There was not a word, there was not
a moment that I wanted to leave out for tonight.
That is not only a tribute to who you all are,
the words you found to describe
these relatively indescribable experiences,
but also the people who are interviewing you,
the people who are filming you.
It's an incredible piece of
work on so many people's hearts.
[APPLAUSE] I just want to say,
to me, the words that kept coming up were
community, chosen family, tribe.
By the time I finished sitting with you and my laptop,
I felt like I was part of
that tribe or getting a sense
of that and I felt very honored about that.
There's also a lot of laughter.
These people have beautiful laughs.
I thought about laughter,
the laughter of survival,
the laughter of overcoming and
living through fear and pain and loss,
and the laughter of pride and of
understanding the power of
action and of showing up and of speaking out.
That's what tonight is about.
I have with me two of my dearest students,
Caroline Silas and Kevin Foster,
sitting in the shadows up there.
They will have light on them.
Some of you may recognize them as leads in Fun Home,
The Alison Bechdel musical from about a year ago.
I got to direct them in that.
It is just a great blessing to have them here.
Of course, most of the words that they're going to be
speaking are words that are not in their heart.
They're going to be reading a lot of the nasty,
awful letters and editorials.
We're going to go back and forth between
the film and some of the primary documents of the time.
We're going to start that
now. Thank you all for being here.
[APPLAUSE] January 9th, 1979 Collegiate Times,
the Gay Student Alliance at Virginia Tech has
received permission from the Commission
on Student Affairs to advertise and sponsor
Gay Awareness Week, January 15th-19th.
Fifteen members of the GSA
went before the commission last Thursday to
request its approval of the Gay Awareness Week.
A spokeswoman for the Alliance
explained the events scheduled for the week.
On Monday, January 15th,
WUVT will broadcast a public affairs program,
Gay Talk for Straight People,
which will include a discussion of
gay lifestyles and music by gay artists.
Tuesday will be Come Out to a Friend Day during which
gay students will be encouraged to tell
a friend about their chosen lifestyle.
Wednesday is labeled Denim Day.
Gay students and supporters of gay rights will
be encouraged to wear jeans or denim of some sort.
A panel discussion, We Speak for Ourselves,
is planned for Thursday in McBryde 113.
The discussion will attempt to educate
the audience about gay lifestyles and some
of the problems they encounter as
a result of their chosen lifestyle.
When that came out in the newspaper
on beginning of January,
the campus absolutely erupted.
It was stunning, and people were
outraged that we were going to co-opt
their dress choice for a day.
You also have to understand, contextually,
we had no cell phones,
so there was one payphone on every hall for
100 people and they were all plugged in the wall,
and you had to know the number.
No social media, no laptops, no computers.
We had flyers, newspaper articles, television, and radio.
But, of course, television only had four stations.
Everything went through The Collegiate Times.
This little article created a huge uproar
and a record number of letters to the editor and outrage.
People were furious and upset,
and it is only 10 days.
[LAUGHTER] There was a lag time because the letter,
you had to actually write,
put it in mail, whatever.
The university received 25,000 letters.
That wasn't just in 10 days,
but over the time period.
The letters to the editor,
some were beautiful and
understood what we were trying to do,
and others were vitriolic and hateful.
Let's put them in pink dorms,
and you all are fine but keep it to yourselves, and etc.
Part of what we did at the Gay Student Alliance,
we made flyers.
One of the most effective things we did is we did
this little half flyer in a dorm room closet that had
a pair of jeans and
a denim jacket and it had
a person's hand coming out of the closet.
The Gay Student Alliance was 20 at the most,
five women, 15 guys roughly.
We had a little army
of people on the night before Denim Day.
We made thousands of flyers and
we went under every single dorm room door and just said,
"Don't forget tomorrow is Denim Day."
Come Denim Day, we learned that
the Blacksburg merchants had
more sales of dress clothing in
the winter than had been recorded.
People were pulling together their corduroys,
anything but blue jeans.
Some chose to wear denim skirts and to mock us.
Basically, we went and there was a sea of corduroy,
and everyone knew what day it was.
There was no, "Is this the day?"
Maybe a few people that lived off-campus wore
jeans and then somehow
understood what the implication was.
But again, there were no allies.
It's not like you would be an ally.
The Campus Crusade refused and said,
"We're going to carry a toothbrush and wear jeans,
but our toothbrush says we don't support gay rights."
We're just talking about basic human rights.
[LAUGHTER] That's all we said,
support gay rights, wear denim.
Could you speak a little bit about
your expectations regarding Denim Day?
Clearly you didn't expect
a wave of support given your experience.
No. We didn't even know people would pay attention.
But you were trying, slipping under every dorm door.
Absolutely. We tried, but the point
was we did not imagine.
At that time there were 20,000 students,
and then faculty and staff.
So we did not imagine that there
would be an up welling of support for
gay rights because gay people didn't have rights.
It was unthinkable for us to be
treated to have equality in marriage or any.
I never believed that would ever happen personally.
But the point was to think
and to cause a conversation, to cause awareness.
So when people, even people today, as I said,
we had Gay Awareness Week and we had the Denim Day,
support gay rights wear denim, nobody wore denim.
They're like, whoa, whoa you failed. It's like.
We started conversations, but most important
for us is that we opened the door for many,
many people that were questioning or understanding
or just trying to understand themselves.
We had married people that are going,
I have three kids and I
think I'm gay and I don't know what to do.
The other thing that it did is it thrust us,
these 20 kids into being gay experts.
Like there were no resource centers,
there were no therapists, no centers.
We got referrals from all over
Southwest Virginia, people calling us.
Will you talk to these people?
People didn't know what to do.
Yes, we knew [LAUGHTER] people hated us.
We did it anyway.
In any movement of any kind,
there has to be something that starts it.
The other thing is that everybody
thought that gay people lived in
New York City and in San Francisco, and in Miami.
They did not think that they were in Christiansburg,
and Shawsville, and Elliston, and in Blacksburg.
That was a big reckoning
and I think there have been so many changes and
so many ways too that have
progressed because it's really about people.
Unlike when you get to know someone,
then you realize, oh,
they're just not this [LAUGHTER] person,
they're my brother, anyway.
So what happened after Denim Day was
this huge eruption and I
have to say there were many gay people
that were furious that we did this.
We outed them, we made them not
wear jeans or this or that and so they were upset.
But it really wasn't our intention,
but it is what happened.
On that day, there
were like 20 people wearing
jeans, [LAUGHTER] wasn't many.
I had on my bib overalls,
I'd like to stay with my button,
that was very trendy at the time that said,
better blatant than latent
because if you admitted you were a gay person,
that meant you were being blatant.
Denim Day came and went and then being a co-president,
the other co-president and I, John,
were hauled off to Burruss Hall and the Dean Dean,
which his name was James Dean sat us down and just
said, you all have,
embarrassed your group in this university,
and you have embarrassed
our university throughout the state,
and we've heard from
the governor's office and I want to be very clear,
you are never going to do this again.
Hence, he was the gentleman that had to answer
the 25,000 letters [LAUGHTER]
that the university had received.
Who was the Governor at the time?
John Dalton. We just said,
okay, [LAUGHTER] I don't have all the memory but,
it wasn't just the community at large.
We were sat down by the administration to say,
this is not okay,
supporting your stunt, your whatever,
and it was just basically.
If you can imagine now changing
the preferred dress choice of
25,000 people in the middle of winter,
what that would take.
Even with social media,
it was pretty epic,
so the next year,
I'm happy to say we tried to do it again,
[NOISE] [LAUGHTER] and I was there,
I believe still co-present,
but there's another guy,
Scott that was the new co-president and we tried to do
it again and Dean Dean was
there and he just was like that I remember him
put his hands behind his head is
like "No way you're doing that again."
I think there's a quote in the paper that said,
even if I lose my job,
you're not doing this again.
Then we scrambled and said, well,
we'll have a pray for our gay oppressor day.
So we'll just all get together and pray for you all,
just like hope you get over yourselves.
But anyway, it was needless to say,
it was not as effective,
but for those of us in it,
I mean, we were leaders of
a thing that was highly unpopular and
dangerous and we did it anyway. [NOISE]
January 12,1979
Collegiate Times. To the editor.
My reaction to the Gay Awareness Week
stunt involving the denim look
for support was a mixture of shock and disbelief.
Come off it.
Why did you pick denim including blue jeans,
which I might add is almost the tech uniform?
Were you trying to get people to dress
like they supported the gay cause?
Were you that worried that you
wouldn't get enough support?
Were you so worried in
fact that you would claim those who are
possibly uninformed of this stunt and
accidentally wore denim supporters of gay rights?
Personally, I've worn blue jeans
every day that I had been to tech,
and now I have to work corduroy pants,
preferably not blue, just in case.
Let's face it, you just didn't
think about this action long enough,
or maybe you did.
Well, if one of you or your group per chance
happen to see me walking across the drill field,
I will be dressed in my corduroys and a sweater
showing where I stand on the views of gay rights.
Hopefully others will read this so that we can get
a true account of gay rights support on campus,
predicted in a much earlier article
on gay rights to be 2,000 strong.
Tony Pirrone, junior Biology [NOISE].
Same day, Collegiate Times. To the editor.
In reference to the GSA Denim Day,
we feel that it is not fair to play
on people's preference to wear denim.
Observation of students will show that
a very large percentage
normally wear denim and therefore,
it is unfair to assume that those students wearing
denim are gay or are in support of gay rights.
Let it be known that we,
the undersigned, and most other normal people,
do not support GSA and will not recognize
a Denim Day and
therefore will continue to where our jeans.
If the GSA insists on a Denim Day,
we proposed that all non-supporters of
GSA and gay rights wear shoes,
boots, or other footwear on
Wednesday, January 17th, 1979.
Watch out for barefoot people.
Earle McMichael Animal Science, Senior.
Kevin Squires, Forestry, Senior.
Walter Nelson, Animal Science, Senior.
Sue Betterly, Accounting, Sophomore.
Well, I was an engineering student at the time,
and I remember that day vividly.
Getting up, putting on my jeans
because it was cold; it was January.
It was rainy, and anyone that
come to Tech knows the Drillfield is a mud pit.
I got my duck boots, I got my jeans,
and I'm heading off to my 8:00 AM engineering class.
I walked in and the entire class,
all the students were dressed in suits.
Every single one. When I walked in the class got silent.
Everybody looked up.
Nobody said anything,
but that reaction was like, "Oh."
I thought to myself,
"Don't you look ridiculous sitting here? "
The women were in high heels and
nylon stockings when the Drillfield
has two inches of mud,
it's pouring down rain, it's 30 some degrees.
I thought to myself, "You're the one that looks stupid."
I had a good friend from high school.
I thought she was going to wear jeans that day.
She knew. She didn't.
When I saw her, she said she had intended to wear them,
but she slipped and fell when she walked out of her dorm,
so she had to go change,
and she had nothing else to change into,
so I just had to take her at her word, but that hurt.
It was almost like she didn't
think I deserved equal rights.
I was less than human or not as good as
her. I forgot about that.
But she was aware in high school?
I'm pretty sure.
I think it was the first year we had Gay Awareness Week.
One of the days was Oh By The Way,
I'm Gay Day, so you had to come out to somebody.
Of course, I went to tell her,
and I was like, "Fran,
by the way, I'm gay."
And she was like, "I know."
I said, "But I had to tell somebody,
I didn't know who else to tell."
She knew. Her not wearing jeans on Denim Day hurt,
but there's no hard feelings.
That's where she was at the time.
That's where her mindset was,
her knowledge base, her experience.
I don't fault anyone for not wearing jeans that day.
That's where we were at that time.
When I came out to my parents,
they struggled with it.
It was the time.
It was the lack of knowledge, I guess I should say,
lack of knowledge, lack of experience.
They didn't have that knowledge because there were
so many of us still in the closet.
We didn't come out. We weren't open.
We weren't out there, so to speak.
The Gay Student Alliance couldn't meet on campus.
We had to meet off-campus for fear of whatever,
and I was subject to that living in the dorms.
Especially after Gay Awareness Week
because I was probably the
only one in my dorm that wore jeans.
But I would come
home from classes or I would wake up in the morning,
not sure what I was going to find outside my dorm room.
I came home one time, someone had taken shaving cream and
sprayed faggot over the door.
They Vaselined my doorknob,
so I couldn't grip it, I couldn't get in.
I came home from class one day and they had shoved
newspapers under my dorm door and lit them,
so they set my dorm door on fire.
That was probably the most terrifying.
Their behavior started changing.
I get up in the morning and go to shower,
they would run out of the shower.
They'd shout faggot.
They'd shout things like,
"Don't drop the soap."
I held my head high and I just went about my day.
It's who I was.
I remember the RA came to me when all this was going on.
I certainly challenged them,
I think because they had a responsibility.
They worked for the university.
They had to maintain, whatever you want to call it,
the culture, but they
didn't necessarily agree with what we were doing.
He came to me one time and said, "We've gotten complaints
that you've altered your shower schedule."
I was like, "What?"
He says, "Yeah, you're now taking
showers at different times during the day."
I was like, "Do you want to see my class schedule?
I have always had 8:00 AM classes.
I have always gotten up.
I have always showered at these times.
I think it's just that they're more
aware that I'm in the shower with them now."
But yeah, to accuse me of adjusting my shower schedule,
I don't know what he thought I was
going to do in the shower.
I was 5'9" and 110 pounds,
what am I going to do to some guy in the shower?
But that was the ignorance
back then, and I mean ignorance,
meaning lack of knowledge. They were just ignorant.
They didn't know any better.
I was living my life so they could see
that a gay person is
just a normal person out there and living their life,
and being gay is just a small part of who I am.
I was a student, I was a brother,
I was a son,
I was career-minded, and I happened to be gay.
I never really thought of myself as an activist,
I just was doing it because it was the right thing to do.
We wanted equal rights.
We wanted recognition.
We're here. We don't want to take anybody's rights away,
we just want the same ones that you have.
It's like when marriage equality
finally got through the Supreme Court.
The CEO of the company that I worked
for came up to me and said this whole marriage thing.
[LAUGHTER] He goes, "Is it
really about the word marriage
or is it about the rights?"
I said, "It's about the rights."
You can call it a banana.
I don't care what you call it.
We deserve the same rights
and legal protections that you get.
He had said to me in an earlier
conversation that he admired me at
work because everybody knew I was gay.
I didn't walk in the room and say, "Hello,
I'm a gay person."
They just assumed.
I came to work and I did my job and I
was very good at my job.
He says, "You didn't flaunt it."
I took a step back and I said,
"You mean the way you flaunt it." He said "What?"
I said, "Your wedding band, you're flaunting it.
You're flaunting you're heterosexual.
I don't have that right."
I said I walk in your office,
there's pictures of your wife and your kids.
I can't put the picture of my partner in my office.
I said, "So you flaunt your heterosexuality every day."
Needless to say, I did have a picture of
my partner in my office after that,
and I'm proud to say I've been with my partner
almost 29 years.
We've been married almost four.
Everyone said, "But what took you so long?"
I said, "The Supreme Court."
[LAUGHTER]
January 16th, 1979.
The Collegiate Times.
We believe it is time that
campus heterosexuals be given
rights equal to those of homosexuals.
We should not be discriminated
against because of our sexual preference.
We are referring to the dorm visitation policy.
Heterosexuals have restricted visitation
by members of the opposite sex,
whereas homosexuals have unlimited
visitation by members of the same sex.
We do not feel that this is fair and propose a solution.
We suggest that the university set up
a special alternative lifestyle dorm,
where homosexuals would be required
to have roommates of the opposite sex,
and room visits by members of the same sex
could only be made during certain hours.
The dorm should be painted pink,
making it easily recognized and
avoided by people of the normal lifestyle.
Then again, maybe a better solution is for gays to just
stay in the closet and consider themselves lucky.
Gary Bray, Engineering, Freshmen.
Kevin Hauschildt, Engineering, Freshman.
Mike Gogol, Engineering, Freshman.
Guy Kemmerly, Engineering, Freshman.
Editor's note: This letter was accompanied by
18 other signatures which could not be
printed due to space limitations.
My time here at Tech, I found me.
I discovered who I was.
I think my values
and morals might have became more grounded.
I had that at home,
but it just became more clear.
I think sometimes pride,
whether it's gay pride or regular pride,
is just all about showing
up and just being your true self,
doing the best that you can be,
helping others, lifting each other up.
To me, that's pride because somebody said something
about gay pride parades and stuff like that.
I said, "I understand them.
It's not who I am.
For me, gay pride is just showing up every day
in everyday life and showing them that
being gay is just a small part of who I am."
When I came out to my dad,
he was my primary parent because my mother had passed
away and I had a step mother that I was not close with.
My dad was my primary parent,
so I came out to my dad when he asked,
and then he went to
my high school and had
my whole high school schedule changed so I won't
be in any classes with any of
those gay friends that he had me disclose to him,
if it's a friendly manipulation.
He also went to my girlfriend's house
and told her parents,
who were extremely conservative.
It very much affected that girlfriend
negatively because she was not
completely gay, she was bisexual.
She was not out to them?
She was not out to them,
and my dad outed her.
We were not a long-term relationship
probably because of those stressors,
and probably because she was bisexual.
He made a mess of that.
He's very authoritarian, policeman.
But he took control and had me drop out of my classes.
I'm very glad I never
mentioned Sueann's name to him as one of
my gay friends because she is
the friend who drove me to Virginia Tech,
the girlfriend, and I didn't mention her name.
[LAUGHTER]
That was intentional?
I think that was, maybe.
Yeah. Maybe. It probably was,
for how it worked out.
Also you said, "When he
asked," about coming out to your father.
Yes. He had some clues.
My father was published in
police journals and the main topic he was
published in was why
these homosexuals should not be in the force,
so I was his nice surprise.
[LAUGHTER] Big Hispanic family;
there's a lot of Hispanic lesbians,
but at the time I came out,
I don't think it was as popular,
that that culture would
not follow the traditional path of lifestyle.
My father was a tough one.
My father was extremely tough.
When I came to Tech,
and the way my father did with
both my brother and I when did
something bad as a child.
If Peter did something bad,
his love was guitar,
so the guitar would be taken away.
I don't know what they did for me,
because my brother was much more bad than me
[LAUGHTER] and had his guitar taken away a lot.
[LAUGHTER] Although I had
come out to him and they sent
me to my stepmother's shrink,
and this is just around
the time the diagnostic manual for psychiatry
changed homosexuality from disorder to more normalcy,
which was a big deal in psychiatry.
She sends me to her
shrink because they're hoping it's a phase.
They're hoping it's a big phase.
The shrink, thank goodness,
said, "I don't think you have a problem.
It's your parents that have some things to work out."
He was a very good turning point
in my acceptance of myself.
But that was a wonderful experience for us.
I think we felt brave,
and I think we felt an opportunity to
share something about ourselves that we
valued and help define ourselves while we were speaking.
I think that was really fantastic.
January 16th, 1979. Collegiate Times.
The Gay Student Alliance stated
that to wear jeans on Denim Day,
Wednesday the 17th, will signify support of gay rights.
We consider the term "gay rights" ambiguous.
Will wearing jeans show individual gayness or will
wearing jeans be interpreted
as a support of individuality,
in this case, expressed through gay practices?
Our belief is that wearing denim on Denim Day
will express our support of individuality.
Therefore, we support the gay's right
to believe that homosexuality is right
for him while still believing that
homosexuality is wrong for us.
Robert J. Wendt, Fisheries.
Dan Oakley, Geology.
January 19th, 1979.
Collegiate Times. To the editor.
On behalf of all the straight men on campus,
we would like to thank the Gay Student Alliance
for holding Denim Day.
We haven't seen so many well-dressed women
in skirts since we don't know when.
Bob Lunney, Cass Lawrence, and Charlie McCauley.
To the editor.
Just a thought: if this week is Gay Awareness Week,
why was it that
the Gay Student Alliance flyers advertising Denim
Day were distributed in my dorm between 2:00 and 3:00 AM?
Was the GSA representative
or supporter ashamed of something?
John Wiley, Junior, Communications.
I think in my case though,
it didn't come out of a healthy place [LAUGHTER] I
came from military family.
My father was a lifer,
he was a marine, and Catholic,
and Cuban, and I was the firstborn son.
I had a lot of baggage that I had to throw off.
For me, the whole activism thing
that period was survival.
It was not an acknowledgment.
It was I'm here, I'm not going to go away.
I'm here, I'm queer, I'm not going to go away.
It was more like stepping
into an identity or stepping into my own identity,
and this was part of it.
But I'm really convinced I would have been dead five,
seven years if I had stayed in that mindset.
There was so negative and so repressive.
When I got the invite to speak to a class,
it was a sociology class in the winter of '77,
somebody word of mouth,
and this professor calls me,
wanted me to come in and speak to
his social deviance class.
Today we'd say that's a little offensive,
but at the time was more like,
well, I guess that's what gay lifestyles come under.
My experience of that was so empowering.
I didn't have to do anything. I just showed
up and I answer questions.
It was a sociology review class.
It's probably about 150,
200 people in the room.
It was liberating because they were
expecting a freak and I wasn't a freak.
I was just myself.
I think just by showing up,
I helped to dispel a lot of their stereotypes.
For me, it was
acknowledging and it was an ego trip at first.
The student group evolved around
that time and it was mostly the women.
Nancy had taken the lead and Sueann.
There were few people that pop out of here.
Then they were a few guys but they didn't really
want to be out there.
I identified more with the lesbians.
[LAUGHTER] I had to admit and to this day
really a lot of
my values and where I come from and everything else.
But that's how it started for me.
It was an invite to speak to a sociology class.
They got repeated and then I
would bring people with me and that kind of thing.
But my parents who had
told me nothing gay when you go off to college,
we don't want to hear or see anything.
My mom called me that weekend I was
trying to make my mind up about speaking to this class.
She calls me and she tells me, "Well,
if you do it, I'm dishonoring
you," and she did for a couple of years.
I said, "Well, gosh, thanks for
calling mom because you really helped."
[LAUGHTER] That's my attitude was like really, so for me,
it was more a psychological necessity
that I get up and I speak,
I be there, I be present,
I be that exist and not to stay invisible.
For me, that's what it was.
I'd say with Nancy,
this is a total projection on my part,
she was much healthier in who she was.
For me, it was a journey to find myself and I was 18,
19, 20 years old and in that sense,
it was extremely positive.
[NOISE] It was a few schools
that had done it up to that point in
the US and so we were not the first.
But at the same time we thought, oh,
that's a great idea.
It's something easy to do and I think we had
a whole week of activities.
It wasn't just a Denim Day.
I think there was a round table.
There's a number of
different things that happen in a week,
but that was the big piece of it if you will.
I think it might have been a Monday or
Tuesday and it was,
for me the day itself was less dramatic than
the night before when
we had to put the flyers underneath the doors.
For me, when I remember that day, that's what I remember.
I remember starting at the top of Lee Hall.
I believe it was with Steve Free,
I believe he was the other person we were teamed
up and I don't remember many of the names.
We put flyers under the door and I fully expect it
to be verbally accosted.
Maybe physically.
I had all these ideas and
when I stepped out of that building after 20,
25 minutes and putting these fires under the doors.
I was a different person because I was so afraid.
We all were really we didn't know what to expect.
[NOISE] As we're putting
these flyers and I just fully expected the doors to fly
open and guys to come [NOISE] at us,
but they didn't do that.
There were a few guys that
would open up their doors was an all-male dorm.
They would open their doors and look out to see.
Okay, that's a fag or that's a gay person.
But none of this shouting or threatening,
and the few that did
stick their head out and make themselves known.
I just want to turn around and stop like, okay,
what are you going to do? I was bigger.
I was bigger now, but I mean,
I was a big guy and people didn't mess with me.
I think that had something to do with it.
But I got to tell you,
the person who walked out of that building was
a different person than started that process.
I took that with me.
To this day, if we're in a mixed group and someone
makes an off-color remark because they
don't really know. I make sure they know.
But I don't shy away from just saying your own truth.
But there was quite a bit of outrage the next day.
But for me, it was the night
before and whatever happened that week
was [LAUGHTER] anticlimactic because
I felt so empowered by
the act of just
being out and then letting people know about this event.
Of course, pissed off everybody
because they only had jeans I
wore jeans today in honor of that event,
but they really resented not
having the choice to
wear their usual costume which was jeans.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't know, besides the fact of remembering
and wanting the young people coming up now to
know the past so
that they can not make the same mistakes,
hopefully, and appreciate what they're enjoying now.
But I think the other piece of that would be,
given what's happening now
in the world, especially in the US,
how important it is to resist in any way that you
can against these forces which I
would call the deplorables.
Sorry. Sometimes it does feel like that
but the folks that will judge you,
people that would put you in a box,
people that would kill
you really for just being who you are,
not make your cake because you're gay.
I mean, that is still alive but at the same time,
it's important for each of us,
in our own way, to resist that limitation and
that reinforcement that shows up in our environment all
the time, the unspoken.
I guess I would say it's now as
important or if not more to be present
and resist in ways that you're comfortable in
and don't let people put you in a box.
[LAUGHTER] You know, you're a gift.
We are each a gift.
In our craziness, we are all a gift. I see it that way.
At the time he was a student,
Andrew Alvarez had a different name, George Alvarez.
Collegiate Times, April 10th 1979.
To the editor. In response to
Mike Johnson's letter on the March 30th issue,
in which he very clearly
spells out the will of God for us,
I wish to remind Mr. Johnson that he forgot one fact,
God is in each of us.
Gay people and non-gay people alike.
Jesus, the son of the above God,
never said word one about sex.
You know, that filthy human activity.
Further, Mike, we're told in Matthew that when
asked the most important commands in the laws of Moses,
Jesus replied the first being,
love the Lord your God and the second most important,
love your neighbor as much as you love yourself.
It's my opinion that we need to expand
the context with which we view
love and sexuality for everyone.
Men can love other men and women
other women with or
without the physical expression of that love.
Contrary to popular myth,
gays are not total sexual beings.
Further, as sex and love-making
are not solely procreative acts,
it's time we viewed sex as
the creative expression of the person.
Every person's needs are different.
Gays are not creatures from space,
they live and breathe a lot like you
all around you. Who knows?
Perhaps you have friends who are
gay and hiding, oh my God.
Who aren't ready yet to deal with
your distorted thinking about what gay is.
To set the record straight, so to speak,
gayness is the ability and desire to love
and physically express the love
for someone of the same gender.
Amen. George Alvarez, International Studies.
April 13th, 1979. To the editor.
After reading the editorial "Will of God" today,
I was commenting to myself
about how all the author had to
say was a bunch of crap, malarkey, et cetera.
Then signed at the end, to my dismay,
was with my name,
that's right, my name.
The purpose of this article is to
redeem myself in the eyes of
those Virginia Tech students who may
confuse me with the author of that letter.
I am not a faggot nor do I even
condone such an attitude of that lifestyle.
George L. Alvarez, I have had enough.
After being harassed by my banker about
a bad check passed by the Gay Student Alliance,
written to you and credited to me,
receiving letters from grandmothers
I don't know and now this,
I must demand that it all end.
George L. Alvarez, get
back in the closet before you ruin me.
George E. Alvarez, Accounting.
April 13th, 1979, Collegiate Times. To the editor.
This is in response to the letter which appeared in
the April 10th issue of the CT by George Alvarez.
Mr. Alvarez, we commend you for looking to
the Bible as the word of God as your authority.
Unfortunately, you have passed by many points in
scripture which seem to
contradict statements in your letter.
The first mistake you make is the statement,
God is in everybody.
According to the Bible, Mr. Alvarez,
this is clearly not the case.
You see, God could not exist in everybody,
indeed in anybody because we are
all sinners, Romans 3:23.
The payment which God has set forth for sin
is death, Romans 6:23.
Fortunately, he sent Jesus Christ
to pay this penalty for us.
God now only exist in
those persons who have asked Jesus to
come into their hearts and pay
their penalty for sin, John 1:12.
We could not appear before God on
our own because we are sinners,
but Christ represents those
who are willing to be led by him.
You see, Mr. Alvarez,
a person is only born of
God if he makes a decision to be born of God.
Just because you are born an American and a
non-Jew doesn't mean you're born a Christian.
Therefore, we doubt many gays
are born of the same God we are.
The second point we'd like to mention
is that Jesus did speak about sex.
If you turn to Matthew 5:27- 29,
you can clearly see that Jesus did
indeed speak about sex and that
his advice is that if your eye causes you to sin by lust,
it would be better for you to pluck it
out than to continue sinning.
Speaking of sin, Mr. Alvarez,
this may surprise you but the Bible
does speak about homosexuality.
In Leviticus 18:22-29,
homosexuality is spoken of as another word for sin,
an offense against the Lord.
You can't argue, Mr. Alvarez,
that the Old Testament is outdated
on this point or doesn't speak
to us today as much as
the New Testament because God doesn't change.
He considers a sin today with
the same attitude he did 5,000 years ago.
If you read through the verse 29,
the penalty for homosexuality and sodomy was that
a person be cut off from the people
to cleanse them from any evil.
Now, we don't argue that we should
shut off homosexuals from
society but we don't think God
wants us to condone their behavior in the least.
Another good example of God's view of homosexuality and
sodomy is found in
the account of the destruction of Sodom,
where do you think the word sodomy comes from?
And Gomorrah, Genesis 18 and 19,
which God utterly destroyed because of their immorality.
We agree that gays need to be loved just like anyone else
but it is possible to love the sinner and hate the sin.
God has been doing it ever since man's fall into sin.
Mr. Alvarez, we submit for your consideration that
Mr. Johnson is not as ignorant
of human nature as you may think.
You are right in saying that whatever occurs in
nature is natural and according to the Bible,
the natural thing for man to do is to sin.
Romans 1:18-32 speaks about
our progression of sin and ends
in verse 32 by saying that we
as humans take pleasure in sin.
11 Thessalonians 2:11 and 12 also speaks of this,
sin is fun but just because it is fun and
natural doesn't mean that it is necessarily right.
We can rationalize our ways into
or out of anything and ultimately,
it doesn't really matter how man views homosexuality.
The most important aspect is how God views it.
Mr. Alvarez, let us encourage
you to consider this last point.
Every way of a man is right in his own eyes but
the Lord ponders the heart, Proverbs 21:2.
Mary Siewert, Junior, Biology.
Betsy Green, Sophomore, Family and Child Development.
Roseanne Gunter, Junior, Biology.
January 16th, 1979.
Point counterpoint on Denim day and day awareness.
Editorial, "Gays Subject to
Repression and Discrimination," by Sherry Wood.
The question most people are asking about
the gay student alliance is Denim day
on Wednesday is, why denim?
Denim is the tech uniform.
Why not wear something like
a red scarf to show you support gay rights?
I believe that the GSAs reasoning
lies somewhat deeper than the obvious.
Appearances indicate that the GSA
is trying to take advantage of
the tech inclination to wear denim so that on
Wednesday it will look like
a lot of people support gay rights.
But I do not think this is the GSA's purpose.
I think the GSA is trying for a more profound point.
The majority of tech students wear denim.
It seems that many students resent
the GSAs ability in this case to stifle or
alter their prerogative to wear
jeans and expect an accepted part of their lifestyle.
I think the GSAs point is this.
If the tech community is upset because for
one day its wardrobe choices stifled by the GSA,
how should gay students feel when
every day their sexuality choice is stifled?
Wardrobe choice is a trivial matter
when compared to choice of sexuality.
One day of repression is trivial when
compared to countless days of oppression.
I think the GSA is trying to
make students get a taste of oppression.
From the looks of the letters to the editor we've gotten,
tech students don't like it.
Well, think, people, think.
You are persons human beings who do not enjoy repression.
Gays are persons, human beings
who also do not enjoy repression.
Most of us are undeniably repressing
gay person's rights to express
even nominally their sexuality.
You don't like repression.
You don't like being told what to wear.
What can I say? You want to
have freedom, but you don't want to share it.
That's just plain ignorant and unfair.
Even the Bible says it best,
"Do unto others as you would have them do
unto you." Sherry Lynn Wood.
I don't really remember protest per se,
but what I did notice when I went to class that day
was that there was a noticeable absence of denim.
In fact, I would say that
maybe 20 or 30 percent
of people wore denim instead of 90 percent.
That was a pretty big statement in and of itself.
Speaking of fashion, do you happen to
remember what you wore on Denim Day?
I do. I wore jeans because it was January,
so it was cold and I had a denim vest.
I had two pieces of denim on.
My first-class that day was
philosophy class, existentialism, and phenomenology.
I walked into the class,
sat in my usual seat, took off my coat.
A guy who had been sitting across
from me through most of the other classes came in.
He takes off his coat,
he sits down next to me.
He takes one look and he had been
smiling at me before he took a closer look.
His whole face transformed into this
really contemptuous, angry, disgusted look.
He actually snorted.
He made a [NOISE] sound.
Got up, picked up his books and jacket and walked off,
and moved to the back of the class.
He wouldn't even sit next to me.
So it did have impact?
It did have impact.
I was really again,
maybe it has to do with being 20
and like a positive, upbeat person.
It was a good lesson for me though,
I was like I had this very minor encounter in
my everyday life with somebody
who ostracized me in a way.
A very minor way, obviously,
because of a statement
I was making about my political views.
That was an eye-opener for me.
I didn't think anybody would
pay that much attention really.
So in hindsight, would you call
the event itself a success?
It was a success because so many people paid
attention to it and I think
more people than the GSA anticipated.
Certainly as evidenced by
the flood of letters to the newspaper.
The other thing that came out of that for me,
as far as the Virginia Tech Community,
was after that editorial appeared,
I was contacted directly by a number of
people who were in the administration
or teachers who were
closeted gay people who
wanted to have one-on-one meetings and just talk.
Again, everything was off the record.
This was a personal meeting.
This was not about something I was writing for the paper.
One of the people I met with for lunch,
he was a professor.
He was in his late 30s
and told me that he lived every day
in fear that he would be outed and would lose his job.
He was quite convinced he would have no support in
the Virginia Tech Community to keep
his job if it were revealed that he were gay.
Another person worked in
administrative support at Burruss Hall,
not in the president's office,
but that whole administrative complex there.
We met at a bar for a drink.
One thing I noticed he had
very nicely manicured fingernails,
his hair was long.
As we were talking,
he started telling me these stories about
how at that time it was called cross-dressing,
obviously, not the correct term now,
but that was what it was called in 1979.
How he had these encounters.
He would go down to Roanoke,
which was the closest gay bar,
and dressed as a woman.
How he'd had some really near scary experiences
because sometimes these guys would hang out,
rednecky guys,
wait for people to come out late at night from
the bar because everybody knew it was
a gay bar and harass people.
On one case, he said he only didn't get assaulted because
he could outrun these guys
in high heels. He had high heels on.
That's funny in a way,
but it's also speaks to the times.
I mean, people were prepared to beat
you up when you came out of the gay bar
in Roanoke which was the only gay bar
that I knew of when I was a Virginia Tech student.
So fast forward to 2019.
Talk a little bit about where you are now in
your life 40 years later and [NOISE]
anything about your life now
that relates to this experience from 40 years ago.
Well, probably personally the biggest event
related to me about
gay rights was having my own son
come out when he was 16 years old
and now that's been 18 years.
He's 34 now. Even though I thought I was
a relatively open-minded, sensitive,
sensitized mom on the issue of gay rights,
it still was a shock to me and he
later told me that he was disappointed in my response.
I wasn't negative, but I was just quiet.
I didn't really say that much.
My primary concern and you hear this from
a lot of parents of gay children is,
I was worried about his health,
I was worried about his safety.
I wanted him to have a normal, safe life.
The biggest revelation for me is I suddenly
understood he was 16
and at that time I had an 11-year-old daughter,
that's when it really came into
my consciousness that there is no such thing.
You can't control your children's lives.
You have to open yourself up [NOISE]
to what their experience is.
So that was a personally politicizing moment.
I did become more involved locally
in [NOISE] the whole issue of gay rights.
In fact, the moment I'm
involved with local historical society,
I've been involved with forever,
but we're doing a gay rights-oriented exhibit
that opens this May of 2019,
related to [NOISE] this region we live,
that I live in, in Seacoast,
New Hampshire and so that particular gay experience,
but also it coincides with
the 50th anniversary of
the Stonewall riots in New York City.
That'll be 50 years in June.
We're doing a whole bunch of stuff during Pride Month,
which is in June, all sorts of events related to that.
So it did radicalized me,
I'm not marching around with signs or anything,
but I quietly and
consistently try to find ways to support the whole issue.
I know gay rights,
it's LGBTQ, and more.
I understand that, but you
have to make allowances for my age
so gay is the operative word that I grew up with.
[NOISE] It is part of my daily consciousness.
January 19th, 1979.
Sherry Lynn Wood, Editor in Chief.
Student awareness of Gay Awareness Week began with
a very small article on
the bottom of page two in the Tuesday,
January 9th issue of the Collegiate Times.
When we ran the article as
a routine report on
a commission on Student Affairs meeting,
we had no idea we'd be unleashing
a flood of opinion that started with
a trickle of letters and culminated in
our record setting editorial response.
In the past four years, the only topic to
elicit more response was a letter in
1977 about two male tech
students whose past-time was
kicking the guts out of cats.
The cat kickers got about 50 letters, all abusive.
Awareness Week, most particularly Denim Day,
got about 30 letters some were abusive,
some were favorable, but all had strong points of view.
"I am disgusted" began one letter.
"It would be a cold day in hell before I let a gay or
anyone else influence my dress. " another letter said.
"I personally find it hard to
believe that people are so willing to brand
any segment of society as abnormal or
unequal on the basis of
their sexual preference, religion, etc.
For those who are so quick to pass such moral judgments,
I cross my fingers and pray that you are
not the people who will one day run my country."
One letter read, and so on.
But whatever the individual opinions,
there were definitely opinions about "Gay Week",
as most students called it.
We didn't expect this kind of response,
a member of Tech's Gay Student Alliance said.
We figured the week would go by pretty much unnoticed.
There have been other gay awareness weeks
at other schools in this country.
Rutgers University in New Jersey
has a Gay Awareness Week and Denim Day
every year so do many other Eastern West Coast schools,
the GAS spokesperson said.
"If this sort of thing happened in New York,
people would probably yawn." The spokesperson said.
"But they didn't yawn at Virginia Tech.
Is your world going to come crashing down if you
don't wear blue jeans one day out of the year?"
Another CT reader wrote, and so it went.
But whatever the side taken,
there was plenty of sound and fury and response.
For a generation, college goers with
a reputation for comfortable silence
and settled apathy this
response to notice that Gay Awareness Week,
whatever its implications hit close to the Hokie heart.
I didn't date at all in high school either sex,
either gender, either identity.
At one point my father said,
"Why don't you take the car and get a date and go out?"
I said, "Well, I've got studies
to do" or something like that.
He said, "What are you? Some kind of queer?"
And I thought, "Oh my gosh.
There goes my college tuition."
[LAUGHTER] At that point then I
became even more withdrawn,
and internalized, and chose to,
instead of going to the University of Nebraska
to go to a small college,
where didn't know anyone.
Because a lot of high school kids would
have gone to Nebraska,
also went to high school in Omaha.
That was an escape mechanism,
but it was also interesting that
you had to deal with your own internal struggles.
I think Denim Day was sort of that for many people.
Just the idea that you had to make a decision.
To wear it on the outside.
To where it on the outside,
and if you were wearing denim,
people might not think,
"Oh, he is gay or she is a lesbian."
But oh, they identify, okay.
One of the strange things,
and I know I didn't create this,
I've talked with at least one other person about it.
There were some students who wore
toothbrushes around their neck.
We've heard that, yeah.
Okay. Have you heard that?
Yeah.
I'm not sure, were they going to just
brush away the bad stuff or what,
but it was ridiculous
to walk around campus and there weren't a lot of them.
I'm not sure exactly which religious group it was.
I've got an idea, but to see
students wearing toothbrushes around their neck,
sort of an anti-statement.
I don't remember if there was anyone in class who
had a toothbrush around their neck that day.
January 12th 1979, Collegiate Times to the editor.
The idea of a Denim Day is
an outrage to any thinking student on this campus.
Such a demonstration severely lacks originality,
even indicating an absence of
careful thought among its originators.
Since almost 70 percent
of Tech students wear blue jeans every day,
a visitor to the Tech campus on Wednesday
will be amazed at the scarcity of denims,
because the majority of Tech students we
hope are not homosexuals.
We sympathize with those people whose college
wardrobe consist of nothing but blue jeans.
Therefore, to keep these students
from being inflicted with
the social embarrassment of
association with the gay community,
we propose that straight students
who must or wish to wear
jeans carry a toothbrush with them all day Wednesday.
The authors of Denim Day are afraid to
be different and be seen with their beliefs.
However, we are not afraid to
be different in show that we are straight.
Eric harder, freshman biology.
Diane Chase, freshman computer science.
David Fadaley, sophomore Electrical Engineering.
Jeff Feamster, freshmen business.
Fall quarter, so in the sophomore year,
he came out to me and
invited me to go to a talk that his boyfriend was giving.
He was dating the President
of the Gay Student Alliance at the time
and he was going to be on
a panel talking to a human sexuality class.
I went to go see Leroy's boyfriend talk to this class.
It was one of these big lecture halls,
like a 100 students or whatever and
three gay men on
this panel sitting down in front of the room.
It was great, just listening to their interaction with
the class and then being honest and
open about who they were and telling their story.
But the one thing that I felt like was
missing was the fact that all three of
them were men and
they were missing the women's perspective.
I thought to myself
that next time they do one of these classes,
I am going to be there to
present the lesbian side of the story.
Keep in mind, I had not at this point come out.
That was another step in my journey and even that day,
even though I had
that realization and I
was there with my best friend Leroy,
I didn't say a word to Leroy about it then.
I think it was a few weeks later that I
did and and sure enough,
next time one of those classes came up
I was indeed on the panel
and one of the people sharing my story.
So cool and so powerful.
It's an interesting thing for
me to have chosen to do because I
am not somebody who craves the spotlight.
I shy away from it as much as possible.
It's a little odd that I'm even doing this interview,
but I think that
I really saw how important
that was and how meaningful it could be.
I mean, that panel
that I went to had an effect on my life,
and if I could help ease
the way for just one other gay or
lesbian student that would be worth the
fear of getting up
in front of a crowd of people and talking.
Honestly for me it's like a phobia,
a public speaking phobia.
I'm a little better now than I was then,
but talking in front of any class was hard for me,
reading a book report or something in front of a class,
and yet I was going into this classes
in Virginia in the seventies
where people were not
necessarily very supportive of gay and lesbian students.
I was getting up there and saying,
this is who I am and this is my story.
It was an amazing and powerful thing for me,
very empowering for me,
and I definitely felt
like I was doing a good thing for other people.
The feedback that we got from
the students that were in the class,
they would come up to us afterwards or would
call a week later and say,
hey, I went to this class and now I know.
It turns out I'm gay too.
I mean, we had those experiences all the time and it
was or somebody would come up and say,
my brother came out last year and I
haven't known how to talk to him about it,
and this has really helped me.
I don't even know most of the people
what influence that may have had
that we were all willing to come and and talk like that.
Kids that were in those classes that are
parents now and their kids come out.
That's something people connect with and remember.
It's something I'm proud of having been a part of.
I'm also very proud of you.
Can you talk about Denim Day?
Yeah, Denim Day was a pretty significant event.
Well, the whole week was significant really.
It was Gay Awareness Week.
It was not Gay Pride Week. We weren't there yet.
I think that the first step that anyone needs to
take towards having any kind of equal rights
is just for people to be aware that you even exist.
We were pretty much an invisible minority at that point,
particularly at Virginia Tech or other places similar.
Outside of New York or San Francisco,
there wasn't a lot of visibility for LGBTQ folks.
We didn't even have all those letters then.
Like I said, even the phrase
gay pride, we weren't quite there yet,
it was just making
people aware that we even existed was that first step.
We plan this whole week.
The centerpiece of the week was Denim Day.
It was something that had been done in other places.
It wasn't our idea,
but I'm pretty sure it had never been done in
State of Virginia or anywhere within a huge radius.
The whole idea was,
on Wednesday, you should wear
denim to show your support for gay rights.
The concepts went over
most people's heads which was pretty interesting.
I mean, it ended up that on Denim Day,
practically no one wore denim and denim was
pretty much the uniform for all college students.
That was really the whole idea,
was to make people something
that would come so naturally to everyone.
Just slipping on a pair
of jeans in the morning that they had to
stop and think twice about
whether that was something
that they wanted to do that day,
that to have this fear that people would think they
supported gay rights if they
just were themselves and
dress the way they always dressed.
There's multiple levels there
of what that's doing because first of all,
why should anyone be afraid
of showing support for gay rights?
It doesn't necessarily mean you're gay, except that,
that is what [LAUGHTER] everyone would think.
That’s what people were
thinking that if you support gay rights,
it could only be [LAUGHTER]
Basically, the whole point was to
make people have to stop and
think twice about doing something that was
just as natural to them as
slipping on a pair of jeans in the morning.
Having that fear that if you did
that thing that came perfectly natural to you,
that people would have a negative opinion of you.
They would think that you were supporting gay rights.
Then there's that level 2 of just the whole idea that
supporting gay rights is somehow a bad thing.
That people would automatically think that you were gay,
which was even worse.
But these are all things
that would be running through people's minds and this is
what caused most everybody at Virginia Tech to
come dressed in khakis and corduroys, anything but denim.
People totally avoided them and people got really mad.
People wrote tons of letters
to the editor and then they're all like,
why did you pick this?
You should have realize
that this was what everybody wore.
Yeah. That's the point.
[LAUGHTER] Totally out of work, although like I said,
I always was and I get
this part of me that
I've asked myself this question like,
why is it that I always was so out?
When you balance that out with being
someone who doesn't crave the spotlight,
doesn't like to call attention to myself really.
Yet I always felt compelled to be very out.
That was important.
I think part of it relates to one of
the things that I used to always say in
the introduction to when
we would do those panel discussions.
One of the things I always said was,
I'm here because I don't want to be.
That I don't want
for this one aspect
of my life to be considered so abhorrent to
so many people and so weird
and different that it's something that they
need somebody to come in and talk on a panel
about this strange thing that nobody really understands.
I think that society has
changed over time where it is much less of an issue.
I've seen that in being always very
out all through my life that
now it's like nobody even gives it a second thought.
I always was out at work.
But now where I work,
I march with my contingent of
co-workers in the annual gay pride parade
in my Park Service uniform with my rainbow
Boa and it's an amazing and wonderful thing.
I remember in 2016,
the first year we
had the Park Service in the pride parade here in
Seattle and I was so
happy because you were so happy. [LAUGHTER]
I was phenomenally happy.
[LAUGHTER] Yeah.
I think you said you never
thought that you would get to do that.
Yeah.
January 16th, 1979 Collegiate Times. To the editor.
Having read all the articles
degrading the Gay Awareness Week in
the letters to the editor section of
the January 12th issue of the Collegiate Times,
I would like to humbly congratulate all the writers in
an extremely effective display of their ignorance.
Tony Pirrone, in your letter you seem to be
quite worried about how you appear to other people.
I'm pleased that you are wearing corduroys to show
everyone where you stand on the view of gay rights.
However Mr. Pirone, I believe you missed
the point in your question
addressed to the gay community.
Where you trying to get people to dress
like they supported the gay cause?
Where you that worried that
you wouldn't get enough support?
I feel that the purpose of
the Gay Awareness Week is not to gather support,
but rather broaden the closed mind
of individuals like yourself.
The fact that denim was picked as
a material to wear seems to deeply concern you.
Perhaps drawing this concern was the intended purpose.
After all, the fact that you
took the time to sit down and write
your letter proves that
Gay Awareness Week touched at least one person.
You Mr. Brown, are a victim of your own ignorance.
As for the writers of Watch Out for Bare Feet,
I'm elated to find four people
who believe they are normal.
[LAUGHTER] According to their letter,
one can infer normal people have
the instinctive ability to
condemn others who don't act as they would.
God I'm glad this world is not
strictly comprised of normal people.
Finally for the writers of Bring Your Toothbrush,
in your letter you state,
"The authors of Denim Day were afraid to
be different and be seen with their beliefs."
Where in actuality, it is you who are afraid of
appearing as if you support any gay cause,
or you would never advocate
carrying a toothbrush to prevent
the social embarrassment of
association with the gay community.
I feel sorry for all of you.
Mark Erikson, finance.
[APPLAUSE]
February 13th, 1979 Collegiate Times.
Note; the following letter was written by
a member of the Virginia Tech Gay Student Alliance.
If the author's name were revealed,
it could threaten his job and
CT does not print unsigned letters,
so I am submitting his letter under my name.
To the editor and the Virginia Tech community.
Some of us are your parents, children,
brothers and sisters, friends,
teachers, employers and athletic heroes.
We were burned at the stake by
the thousands during the Middle Ages.
We were the second largest minority
exterminated at Buchenwald in Auschwitz,
although history books seldom
mentioned as in those contexts.
We are still the butt of jokes and
the target of violence in America today.
Many of us have contributed to the arts,
sciences and all of the other areas of human ingenuity,
but most of us are ordinary people living ordinary lives.
We aren't sexual perverts or lost sinners.
The professional, psychological and
psychiatric associations have stated that we aren't sick.
An increasing number of theologians
are beginning to re-evaluate their positions
on the basis of more accurate understandings
of scripture and cultural history.
We aren't any more promiscuous than anyone else.
Some of us have had partners with whom we've
shared our lives for 30 years or more.
We aren't lonely because we have children,
relatives and friends who
love us and accept us for who we are.
We don't often conform to your stereotypes of us,
so you probably wouldn't recognize us if you saw
us walking across the drill field
or shopping in Kroger's.
Because we are people first though we happen to be
gay and because human beings have the right to life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness,
we feel justified and expecting
the rights to which we are thus entitled.
We aren't asking for anything that
Americans don't take for granted.
We simply want to live without fear for our dignity,
our jobs, our lives.
We want people to acknowledge
that those who are different from
the majority aren't acting immorally or illegally,
only differently from the rest.
A few of you wore denim on Wednesday to
indicate your support of our struggle for human rights.
On behalf of the gay community
of Blacksburg and of Virginia,
I thank my straight brothers and
sisters for their help in our struggle.
But many more of you had to search
your wardrobes for something other than jeans.
Most of you are straight, but some are
gay or unsure of your sexual orientation.
Some of you hate us irrationally,
others are ignorant and still others were
afraid of the remarks which might be directed at you.
I understand you all because I once felt as you do.
I'm sorry if you felt oppressed,
but my gay sisters and
brothers and I feel oppressed every
day by a straight society
which forbids us to be ourselves.
If someone you love and respect were to
tell you that he or she is gay,
would your attitude toward
gay people and their rights change?
Remember that one of every 10 people you know is gay.
Remember that as long as even one member of
our society is oppressed, none of us is free.
Sueann Brown, architecture member, Gay Student Alliance.
We were okay but
the university at that point was not very friendly.
We couldn't even meet on campus.
When someone would call the gay hotline,
you had to go into
town with at least two people and meet in
a public place because you didn't know if
somebody was going to beat you with a baseball bat,
nor did the person calling.
They were worried that
maybe we were going to beat them with
a baseball bat [NOISE]
so you had to meet in public places.
It was an interesting time. I can remember
going to the first gay rights march in D. C. All of
the chance we went down fourth Avenue and to all things
it was more of a festive thing than it was anything else.
What year was that?
I don't even remember. It had to
be about the same time, '79, '78 maybe.
There's a bunch of stuff in there.
The hotline, the purpose of that
is to make contact with the GSA or what's the?
Yeah. Basically [NOISE] they contact you,
figured out maybe you were gay or bi and obviously,
there was no way to figure out who else was.
The phone numbers were put up around
campus and places like that.
They were put up and torn down just about as fast.
If you were coming to college for
the first time and you know what your persuasion was,
this was a way that you could basically call and meet
up and meet people like yourself,
gay and lesbian at that point.
I think as we gay and lesbian,
there's been more accepted than the groups have
splintered to become almost two separate groups.
They still work together, but back in those days it was
one group but you'd call and come up.
At that point it was mostly a social thing,
get together for drinks
or parties because back then by the way,
remember you could drink at 18.
It was also a community.
[NOISE] Occasionally people would get kicked
out and their parents would find out and
so everybody would make sure they had places to stay,
so they had to go home.
Donations were collected because back then,
I think it was $270 a quarter for tuition.
You could actually raise the money
to keep people in school.
That's largely what it was.
It was a way that you actually reach out.
I understand the fear
that motivates this secrecy around surrounding it,
but were there actual instances of someone say
posting a number as bait or
calling the number for reasons of.
I never [NOISE] heard of
anybody posting the number
for making somebody getting hurt.
I know it's happened in other places.
I do know that we would get people to
call and they would never meet us,
but they would start off acting serious
and then all of a sudden they would start
calling funny names and then you just hang up on them.
It's a shame we didn't have caller ID
back then. That would have been fun.
[LAUGHTER] I personally never
experienced any real animosity
but I will say back then, you lived two lives.
I was out to my family.
I was out to certain friends,
but I wasn't out at work.
I wasn't out in all the classes that I took.
I wasn't out to my professors
except for the ones that were
gay because it was just a different world back there.
Like for example, on Denim Day,
we talked about Denim Day.
I remember we sat around and we were talking about that.
I don't know if it was our idea or whether we
copied somebody else's idea,
but I do remember the whole point of the,
it wasn't really a debate,
a discussion of the group where we did this
was people were saying,
''Well, it's going to make people uncomfortable,
it's going to make them mad.''
Then other people were saying, ''Well that's the point.
You want to make people inconvenienced.
You want to make them feel uncomfortable because
as a gay or lesbian, you feel that way.''
[NOISE] I think we
did a really good job on that part of it.
I don't think we did such a good job
of getting out the word the day after,
why it was done but then again, the newspapers,
the Collegiate Times really didn't want to print
stories about this or that because again,
there was still this animosity from
the university towards the whole idea.
Yeah. You wore denim on Denim Day?
I did, but I was in the College
of Agriculture and interestingly enough,
a lot of the guys from Tazewell and Grundy and
Giles County wore blue jeans
that day too because
they didn't have anything else to wear.
They just walked around with
their baseball hat on. I wore.
I know a lot of gay friends
though that they did not wear them.
My boyfriend did, and he caught hell
at the engineering school,
people making fun of him all the
time because they thought
they were making fun of him because it was like,
you forget to wear green on St.
Patrick's Day, where you do.
They assumed he was straight
and they were just making fun.
I just don't think most people got it.
They didn't understand what it was all about.
What they remember was is,
jeans support gay rights.
A lot of people in that culture,
I don't think they'd thought much about it at all.
I don't think they weren't necessarily anti-gay rights.
It's just it was something totally new.
It was a whole new movement at that point in time.
I'm sure you've experienced in other things,
but you poke fun at your friends.
You make fun of them for
things that are probably not
the socially most acceptable, but you do.
Back then, it was largely sociable acceptable to,
say, are you a fancy guy to your buddies,
even though you were 90 percent sure they weren't,
you just called them out.
I can remember the day that the Denim Day thing was,
I had to go to the bank
because I worked part-time at that bank,
and so at 1:30 I had to leave class,
and go to the bank, and there I had to put a suit on.
I didn't have a denim suit,
[NOISE] and you had to wear a suit.
But I can remember working in the drive-in window.
I'd see friends wearing
khakis walking up and down the University of Boulevard,
and I had the PA mic.
I'd be like, "Hey, Randy,
[LAUGHTER] you're better dressed
than I've ever seen you",
[LAUGHTER] it would burst out over the thing.
Which bank was this? Where in town?
Now it's BB&T, but we were by the foundation office,
and so you could see the University Boulevard.
I remember one friend of mine who I know was straight,
because I've noticed his girlfriend
and now his wife and we're still friends,
but he was walking up.
I mean, he was just total
civil engineer oblivious to everything.
He probably didn't even know Denim Day
was going on [LAUGHTER],
and I've got the PA system and I'm like,
"Hey, handsome," and he's looking around, "This is God.
[LAUGHTER] Should you have those jeans on today?"
Just doing stuff like that,
and he's looking around and he's like, "You."
[LAUGHTER] Even I, at that point in time,
was poking fun at everything because that's what you do.
Is that something you did often with the PA?
Yeah. [LAUGHTER] I remember
one time Arthur Squires
and his boyfriend were walking from,
I think it was the Holiday Inn back then,
and they were walking into
Kroger's or something and I'd be like,
"Dr. Squires, you have a message from God, she's pissed."
[LAUGHTER] Just stuff like that. I had fun.
My branch manager would get annoyed at me sometimes.
Yeah, I guess. [LAUGHTER]
But oh, well. [NOISE]
January 16th, 1979, Collegiate Times. To the editor.
I must say that I got a chuckle
out of the announcement of Denim Day.
I got even more of a chuckle
out of the letters of outrage in
Friday's CT. Having been a student
of movement media campaigns over the past 10 years,
I think I can say with certainty
that Jerry and Abbie would be proud.
I'm not gay, but I am a firm supporter of gay rights.
I know too well what it's like
to have other people think that they can
control my life by their values. It's a serious issue.
Nonetheless, a little humor lightens up any movement,
and the very idea of
a Denim Day certainly provides that humor.
I can't speak for the GSA,
but if they are taking this thing seriously,
they're missing the beauty of their whole idea.
It's unfortunate that those people who wrote
the letters feel so threatened that they miss the humor.
It does my heart good to know
that there are people around who
are creative enough to come
up with these beautiful ideas.
There's nothing more healthy than to
be confronted with something that makes
us draw a sharp breath before we burst out
laughing at ourselves and
the silliness we've created around us.
Carol Hall, Senior, HNF.
She was the one who outed me to Mark,
she blew my cover.
How did that go? What's the story there?
She was looking for a place to live,
and I just met up with some lesbians,
and we were going to rent a house,
and so I felt,
for whatever reason, the need to let her know,
to be honest,
that there were going to be lesbians living there,
and if that bothered her,
I wanted her to know ahead of time.
But please, don't tell my brother.
I'm not out. Yeah. Well, that didn't work.
It was at midnight, I think,
after one of his night shows,
and I get this call.
I was in Ambler Johnston.
Which is hilarious because my father, Ambler Johnston.
Sixth floor.
Was girls only.
Virgin vault, they called it.
The virgin vault. [LAUGHTER]
The top two floors.
My father.
Yes.
Put her in there specifically to keep her away from boys.
[LAUGHTER]
The irony. [LAUGHTER]
He was worried about them boys getting a hold of you.
Yes.
So he put you in the virgin vault.
[LAUGHTER] Exactly, which was perfect.
Yeah. Perfect.
Perfect.
Mark wasn't too happy about it.
Pretty upset about it.
What? No, come on, be fair.
Oh, because of, "It's going to kill our mother.
You're going to kill our mother.
This is going to kill her, it's going to kill her.
How can you do this to your mother?" Blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, that's true. I didn't care.
I didn't have an opinion about your sexuality.
I mean, I was scared.
I was only concerned about our mother,
that's all, handling it.
Right. No, but you scared me that night.
It was like, damn, that was my first
coming out experience, really,
in terms of [LAUGHTER].
Yeah. It was like, "Fuck."
[LAUGHTER] I don't know if I can handle this or not.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah, I was just being protective of mom,
but I never once tried to change your mind.
Right.
Criticize you.
True.
For being gay or whatever.
True.
Because it really was
the '70s were still the leftover '60s.
It was live and let live,
and I believe that everybody should be happy.
Just don't mess with my mother. [LAUGHTER]
Right.
That was interesting.
Losing the family dynamic,
losing that Christian family was quite a bit,
and really the only group that really stuck with me
was the women I met at Women's Space.
They were my community.
So they really did step up.
They originally engaged you as the sister of [LAUGHTER]
Mark Barroso. [LAUGHTER]
Did that actually require
any getting over or was it just an observation?
I think they thought it was just hilarious.
Yeah.
That Mark Barroso would have a lesbian sister,
and I had heard stories of him
and in the activism, in the CT.
What stories?
I guess stuff he must have written. I don't know.
That's what I remember was that you had made it known.
For Denim Day, there were some of
the guys who wore skirts and protested.
Or in support?
Wearing a skirt on Denim Day, hell no.
You're supposed to wear your denim.
No. What? [LAUGHTER]
I'm trying to rewrite history here. Come on.
I see that.
Work with me.
No, not this one.
[LAUGHTER] I'll give you
a lot but not this one [LAUGHTER]
So I learned a lot about my brother [NOISE] from them.
Mark, what did you write?
You were at Tech for Denim Day.
Lisa came after, just after in the fall after.
Just after.
But it was still a thing people were talking about,
the women's collective, the GSA, the campus.
So how did you get that reputation that Lisa encountered?
Well, Tim Chase actually wrote,
there was a pro and con editorial on Denim Day,
which I want to emphasize.
It was not pro or con gay rights.
It was about the validity of the protest or the action.
I may have written something.
I was just churning out copy,
so I don't know specifically what I wrote.
[LAUGHTER]
[NOISE] We all wanted to be a Hunter S.
Thompson rolled into John Belushi,
rolled into Carl Bernstein.
So it was a real schizophrenic persona I had.
I might be writing an investigative piece one week.
In the next week, I'm writing some off-color humor.
The off-color humor was probably what got me in trouble.
Probably.
With your friends.
I could see that.
Yeah.
I could see you doing that.
But I know in our editorial meetings,
we would all discuss the position
the paper was going to take and it was a split.
I agreed with Tim.
I thought Denim Day was a dumb idea because to me,
it was like saying if you support gay rights, wear shoes.
Why don't you do pink
shirt or something that
identified you as a supporter of gay rights?
So it was more of a technical objection I had.
Picking denim jeans.
Yes.
That's called normal.
Yes, that's mine.
You can't take my clothes.
[LAUGHTER]
I get it now. All right.
Like the pink ribbon for breast cancer thing.
Yeah.
Don't link those two together.
Yeah. I didn't get
it that the point was to start a dialogue.
If I understand correctly,
the point was [NOISE] to start
a discussion between supporters and maybe non-supporters.
Just get people talking
about these invisible people among us.
True.
Right?
Right.
Which is a good thing. I didn't understand that at
the time but that was the point.
Right.
I thought the point was to make a show.
I was wrong. But Sherry Wood,
who was the editor,
wrote the pro-Denim Day editorial
and I think she's going to be here.
I think so.
I think you're all going to interview her
via Skype or something.
[OVERLAPPING] She was ahead of her time.
Except for not keeping my request.
[LAUGHTER] Just saying.
[OVERLAPPING] Okay, got it. Connecting the dots.
Just saying.
Let her know.
Anyway, that was my take on Denim Day.
Does that make sense?
Yes. Was it Sherry's argument that helped to
evolve your understanding of what
they were attempting to do or is
that something you came upon later after the fact?
Well, I'm a slow learner.
You have to plant an idea in my head,
and it has to be fertilized,
and watered before it spreads.
I think Denim Day and Sherry's article,
made me begin thinking about it more.
Of course, having a gay sister,
made me think about it more.
Now, I think I understand why she told you.
She probably did out me just
because it would help you, maybe.
I don't know. You know what I'm saying?
Right?
Okay.
Like, "Hey, Mark.
You're such a jerk about queers.
Guess what? Your sister is queer, Mark Barroso."
I was not a jerk about queers.
I was really a live-and-let-live guy.
I just didn't understand gay.
But you have a way of speaking with gruff. [NOISE]
What am I, Mr. McGruff or something?
Maybe. [LAUGHTER]
[NOISE] Oh, my goodness. This would
be that counterpoint to Sherry Wood's op-ed
written by Tim Chase aka
possibly also Mark Barroso. We're not sure.
Tomorrow, much to the chagrin of many students,
the Gay Student Alliance will sponsor Denim Day.
Judging from the flood of mail
we have received in opposition to this day,
we must conclude that a great number of
students find the whole concept very disturbing.
They should, not that
some gay awareness day is bad and no doubt
few people would have cared if gay supporters were
supposed to wear red bandanas or straw hats.
The disconcerting aspect of the whole incident
is the choice of denim as the medium of recognition.
On an average day, according to James Dean,
Vice President for Student Affairs here at Tech,
some 7,000 students are wearing denim.
Why not say, everyone who supports gays wears a shirt?
The net result would be the same.
Actually, there may be more support
for gay rights than most people believe.
A recent poll by the Post
indicated that nearly 50 percent
of the population of New York would
support gay rights legislation.
Time, July 1978.
The issue of gay rights is not the question.
It would be difficult to justify
legalized discrimination against gays.
While one might not be willing to ask for
legalized discrimination against gays,
he could draw the line when this group attempts to
impose its ideals on the general public.
Reverend Ron Ballard of Emporia,
Kansas may have put it best when he said,
"We are not advocating
any new laws to persecute them, gays.
If their sexual preference is kept to themselves,
that is within the range of what we can accept."
Time, May 1978.
This is the major point that the GSA had kept to itself,
rather than drawing attention to
itself in the manner that it has,
this whole issue would never have come up.
Instead, students are now forced to make
a decision concerning their stand
on gays before Wednesday.
This type of publicity may not be
particularly beneficial to the GSA.
The GSA's stand on
sexual behavior may be fine for them but
they should refrain from forcing the issue
on other people, Tim Chase.
I'm so calling the Gay Student Alliance.
I'm ready for this because I was not out to anyone.
So I called the Gay Student Alliance
and Leroy answers and I'm like,
"Leroy, is that you?"
He goes, "Helen, is that you?
Come on down." So downstairs, I went.
There was Leroy and Owen and he said,
"Let me call Nancy Kelly" and she
was Assistant President of GSA. We've got another one.
Let me call Nancy Kelly. I'd have to think, Oh my God.
I've never met a lesbian before.
I wonder what she looks like.
All this internalized homophobia
we're raised with at that time.
She walks through the door.
She doesn't look gay or odd.
I don't know what I was expecting,
Medusa with snakes coming out of our head.
I realized my own internalized homophobia. This is crazy.
So [NOISE] all of a sudden, I had 15,
20 friends and my roommates
were wondering where did
you get all these friends all of a sudden?
[LAUGHTER] Hush.
One of them was gay also and she knew I was gay,
but I found my tribe.
Oh my goodness. I had found my tribe
and I'd found people who spoke my language.
We called ourselves chosen family way back then.
I was high for months.
I'd finally found people that were
like me, that I could relate to.
It was a social thing at that time,
[NOISE] more of a social thing.
I'm sorry. What year was that?
That was 1978.
I came here 1978, '79, '80, '81.
I took my time.
Took your time finishing.
I took my time finishing because I
was a work-study student.
I worked on the experimental farms here at Virginia Tech.
I was an animal science major, of course.
I was interested in all different things.
I wanted to take my time.
I was part of the Block and Braudel Club.
I love the animal science side of things and I
threw myself into the whole meat science.
I had a hard time with
it slaughtering animals and I became vegetarian.
Anyway, Nancy,
she took me under her wing and she was an instigator.
She used to use the term consciousness raising.
It's the first time I ever heard
the term consciousness raising.
We got to raise your conscious. I was like, "Okay."
One day she calls me up, she goes,
"I need for you to be on this panel of gay and lesbians."
It's not an animal science quad because
the thought of coming out in
the animal science quad just freaked me out.
It was across the quad
and it was a deviance in society class.
She goes, "I want you to be part
of a panel of deviants in society."
I said, "What's a deviant?"
She goes, "You're a deviant and you're coming."
I said, I really don't like that word
deviant and I've just
finally embraced the word lesbian
and I do not like deviant.
What the heck, they're calling us deviance now?
What is going on? She goes,
"I need you to be on this panel
and it's going to be five of us.
Come on, do it." I said, "Okay."
She says, "Nobody in animal science is going to be there.
This is a different college
and this is more like sociology-psychology."
I had a sense of somebody is got to do it.
Somebody's got to show their face.
We got to start coming out to some people because we are
not these monsters, we're not crazy.
I got on that panel and I look
over and people start talking and asking you questions.
Then it dawned on me, was like, that Nancy Kelly,
she got me out here because I'm
the only virgin on this panel.
She was smart, she had everybody represented.
There was the bisexual
and all these different diversity, and I was the virgin.
You would engage with the students and it was
funny because you'd get some funny
little questions and, of course,
they would come to me and they're like, "Well,
how can you be sure you're gay, you're a virgin.
You've never even slept with anybody?"
At that time in 1978,
'79, there was a lot of virgins on campus.
What I said was, is there any virgins here in this class?
My goodness, how do you all know you're straight?
You'd come back with those kind of things.
By the end of the class,
you had become buddies with them,
friend with them. They liked you.
Some of them were angry about it.
But you were able to calm people
down and make them think.
You could tell you had some light bulbs go off.
I did about three of those classes
and that was good for me.
Mostly those were positive experiences?
Positive experiences but I
felt like I couldn't not do it in animal science.
I was like walking two different worlds.
I was totally in the closet when it came
to animal science and my animal science fraternity.
I was on the meat and meat judging teams.
I loved being there.
I walked within two different worlds.
As gay people at the time you had to put your mask on.
Through your participation in those panels,
you were making some kind of
a difference in folk's perception?
Yes. Well, it's the first time
people stood up and said, "I'm gay."
I would wish would wake up one day
and everybody that was gay had
different colored hair or a dot on
their head and that would identify
them who they were and people would just have to get
over it because there was so many of us.
We were all amongst everybody.
So somebody had to start putting a face on it.
Yeah.
January 19th, 1979 to the editor.
I'm sitting here in the middle of
my 11 o'clock class this fine Wednesday, Gay Day,
writing this letter because
the intense scrutiny and attended loathing I'm
receiving makes it infeasible for me to
consider anything but getting this letter written.
Look, I'm going to the garage after this class.
Do you want me to get oil and grease or
something on my good pants?
No. Me neither.
So I'm wearing jeans.
So what? Screw you all.
Anybody wearing no jeans today on purpose is
obviously insecure about his or her own sexuality.
Kevin FC bring.
Same day, Collegiate Times to the editor.
I wish I had worn jeans today.
Looking around me at the rows of
corduroy and skirted legs,
I feel a growing embarrassment.
How hard we try to show how straight we are.
The individual has left each
one of us, venomless at that.
Did you walk around on campus today gawking at the jeans?
Did you women who will graduate to
higher salaries and greater opportunities
know that behind those jeans
is one of the major forces behind your rights?
I don't know about you, but I was embarrassed.
Embarrassed to be part of
any movement and there is a movement
behind our cords against freedom, any kind of freedom.
I wish I had worn jeans and a jean jacket
and jean shoes. Diane Dolton.
Did you meet any form of persecution here in Blacksburg?
I don't think it was any different
than I would have encountered anywhere
else in America except for maybe gay havens like
San Francisco or Fire
Island or whatever, [LAUGHTER] Key West.
I didn't feel particularly put upon being here.
I've never felt comfortable anywhere [LAUGHTER] to
the degree where I could completely let down
my guard and always feel safe.
It's just something that gave people don't get
to experience, I think.
At least people at my age are just
aware of the possibilities of what
could happen if you were too open.
As nice as it is,
[LAUGHTER] as good as it's gotten,
I always have the lingering,
lurking suspicion, I guess.
I think I'll always have it.
I'm not constantly up nervous and feeling in danger,
but I'm just aware.
There were episodes and events here in Blacksburg
that fed that that could have happened anywhere.
Yeah.
Harassment, just personal harassment,
violence against people I knew and things like that.
Did you experience violence?
Myself?
Yeah.
No. But I had friends who were killed, murdered,
beaten here in Blacksburg. That was enough.
Yeah.
What was the nature of your involvement with them?
Well, the meetings, of course.
It's how I got to know everybody.
They had regular weekly meeting or something like that.
Maybe every other week.
My involvement immediately really
started to focus around public speaking.
The first time I did it, I did it with Nancy.
We spoke to some humanities class.
Anthropology, which I don't think they offer anymore.
They were looking for volunteers.
Some professors and instructors were asking for
people to come and be available to talk to classes,
answer questions, and not really give a presentation,
but just be available.
I said, "Well, I'll do that.
Yeah, that sounds interesting."
[LAUGHTER] It was.
The first one was pretty horrible.
The professor was really
hostile and pretty much encouraged some of the guys
in the class to attack us verbally
and make it difficult to carry on the presentation.
I have a friend today who was in that class,
who I did not know at the time.
We've had a friendship now for
over 40 years and it's all based on that one
experience [LAUGHTER] of him being
embarrassed at what was going on,
the situation for us when we were in the class.
But Nancy took care of it by bringing
up an incident that she'd been
involved with before she came out of the closet.
She had a roommate who was in a class that was
also inviting gay people to come and speak.
Nancy pointed out that when she went,
she was the one that was making
these nasty remarks to the guests. [LAUGHTER]
She told us that story.
Yeah. The best defense is a good offense.
That shut him up, but it
also was an educational experience for me too.
Don't take the bait and don't give it back.
That worked pretty well after that.
We did it dozens,
I did over 100 of them,
I'm sure, these presentations over several years.
Not just here, but in Roanoke College, Hollins,
Ferrum, Radford, for eight or nine years like that.
That was great. I loved that. [LAUGHTER]
Going around to different colleges, yeah?
It was fantastic.
Why?
Very effective. I mean,
people would come up after the class
sometimes in a state of shock.
They couldn't believe that they had been so stupid.
[LAUGHTER] It was just
so unaware and it was a revelation.
It was some really emotional encounters
sometimes with people like that.
Is it that they're
unaware of the existence of gay people?
They had never encountered gay people.
They had only encountered the popular conception,
which was really negative, extremely negative.
People have no idea now,
what it was like.
I mean, the subject wasn't even
discussed when I was growing up.
There were no homosexual people,
basically, or maybe Liberace.
[LAUGHTER] That was it.
The popular image was limited to a few caricatures.
There was no ongoing open discussion
about gay people that involved gay people.
I think it was a shock to a lot of people to
find out that gay people were human beings.
I'll tell you there was one incident we had.
In those days, Squires Student Center had
an overhanging roof on the front toward College Avenue.
There was space up above it and everything.
It's changed so much.
But anyway, every year they would have
a student organizations fair
under the tables from
all the student organizations on campus.
Then you'd come and look at them,
pick up their literature
and see if you were interested
in joining any of these groups.
We were for the first time,
I believe it was in '80 probably
or maybe the fall of '79, we had a table.
I think it was Nancy and I,
and I'm not sure who else,
but we did it for a couple of days,
might have been Sueann Brown.
Our job was just to sit there and hand
out literature to people who are interested.
You have no [LAUGHTER] idea what that was like.
It was as if two little aliens had come
down and sat down their chairs there underneath the roof,
like, what the hell is this?
I mean, people were looking at us like we
were not from this earth. It was amazing.
Not thinking you were serious?
[OVERLAPPING] Couldn't believe you'd step out there?
Not thinking we were human. Not thinking
we were human beings.
I mean, they were looking at us like, what is this?
How can this be in public?
How can there be people here
talking about this or exposing it to my eyes?
How can this be? It was a shock for them.
Interestingly, and we don't know who did this,
but we were placed between the Baptist Student Union
and the Campus Crusade for Christ.
In between was the Gay Student Alliance?
[LAUGHTER] They couldn't even look at us.
It was as if there was a wall between us.
That time, there was a lady who
many Old Blacks burge-rs knew and loved, Emily Stewart.
I don't know if she was the founder, but she was
the major force behind
the YMCA here on campus for many, many years.
I had met her on a Y-hike in 1971,
when I first came here.
She and her husband lead the hike.
Bob Stewart, he just recently died, 100 years old.
But I had met Emily and we were acquaintances,
becoming friends over the years,
but she didn't I was gay.
She happened to be walking into
Squires that afternoon while
we were sitting there at the table.
[LAUGHTER] She looks at me, looks at the table,
and just, "Wow, I didn't know that."
Then she could see, that she saw we were
chatting and she saw the situation,
the people on either side of us, ignoring our existence.
She went up to each of them and introduce them to me.
[LAUGHTER] Just to be an agitator for good.
But I guess what I remember about that most is
just the shock that
people experienced when they saw actual living,
breathing homosexual people in public being normal.
It was an absolute shock.
I mean, when I think about it,
I can't even believe that it was like that at anytime.
It wasn't born of malice,
It was born of ignorance.
I think I'm just kinder to
people who are ignorant than
I am to people who are malicious.
[LAUGHTER]
If you were doing some outreach,
feel you're making some positive accomplishments,
and also taking this tack
of forgiveness and addressing
ignorance in a constructive manner,
is that the the context within which you participated in?
How much did you participate in
the planning of the Denim Day?
I guess as much as anybody in terms
of us trying to come up with something,
everybody contributed their thoughts and ideas.
I can't remember that I had
any particular specific suggestion to make or anything,
or if I went along with what I
thought were really good ideas.
It intrigued me. I definitely wanted to do something.
But I think Nancy and some of the others who
were in there before me,
who had brought this group together earlier than, I mean,
not long before I joined it,
but originally they were the real dynamos
in the Denim Day and Gay Awareness Week.
I mean, Nancy and several people.
I don't know how many of them,
some of them aren't still alive,
but I don't know who will be here that you'll meet,
but there's quite a few people.
I wasn't on campus,
I wasn't really a student,
but I was as much as anybody,
I guess, I was part of it.
Did you have expectations as to how it would go?
I think it went exactly as I expected It would go.
[LAUGHTER] Outrage, stupidity, more ignorance,
reaction, which was really what we were after.
We were after a reaction.
We were after getting
people to think about
it for the first time in their lives.
Maybe actually be able to think about
it in the context of real human beings.
So that they would meet in the course of this exposition,
this week of exposing ourselves to the community.
Like, [NOISE], whether you like or not, we're here,
and you can actually look at us and hear us,
and talk to us if you want to.
I didn't expect a wholesale change
of heart and we certainly didn't get that,
but there were certainly a lot of people
motivated to come out and support us.
It's a seed.
You plant a seed like that.
I think it had a tremendous effect on
campus and in the town.
In the town, the high school also.
The kids at the high school did
a Denim Day at the same time.
Really?
In Blacksburg High School.
But of course, it was completely negative.
[LAUGHTER] But it brought
the subject up in a context where
it would never been presented.
Homosexuality and talking to
high school students about it, unheard of.
We didn't have to do a thing.
They did it themselves,
because we were in the paper, we were on TV.
When people became aware
of the activity that was going to be going on that week,
it spread to the high school and the local community.
Well, I see them now as being much more consequential.
Then I thought they were at the time.
I could see some immediate
consequences at the time with people
actually coming up to me and
verbalizing how their minds were changed,
or their hearts were changed,
but it sneaks up on you.
Before I knew it, the whole society had changed.
I realized it was those little things
that people did that really add up,
and you don't have to be Martin Luther King.
[LAUGHTER] You can be
Rosa Parks and just not get up or do
one little act of defiance
or compassion for people's ignorance.
You don't have to change the world,
you just have to push it in that direction a little bit.
I know we're in violation of time.
This is a year later.
Then we're going to have a little bit at closing,
couple of minutes of Nancy Kelly.
This is April 29th,
1980, The Collegiate Times.
The Gay Student Alliance was denied
permission Thursday to sponsor Denim Day
as part of its Gay Awareness Week to be held on
May 5th through the 9th by
the Commission on Student Affairs.
This action came after James Dean,
chairman of the commission and
Vice President for Student Affairs told
the commission that he would fight
the alliances effort to sponsor the Denim Day.
When Denim Day was held last year,
students who supported gay rights were
encouraged to wear denim.
As a result, many tech students wore
corduroys instead of traditional jeans.
I received 25 thousand pieces of mail opposing
Denim Day last year and it took me
five or six weeks to answer all of it.
He said, "I will not go through that again,
even if it costs me my job.
Dean does not have a vote on the commission."
Some members of the commission said they felt that
Denim Day inconvenience to
many students and restricted their right to wear jeans.
I wonder if any organization has the right to
restrict the normal attire of so many people, said D.K.
Brockett, Class of '81 President.
GSA Representative Scott Beetle said that
the organization's purpose was not to antagonize people,
but to make them aware of
the problems gay people encounter.
Doug Waters, editor of The Collegiate Times said,
"Whether or not your purpose was to antagonize,
you did antagonize and generated
the largest volume of mail written
to the CT on any issue.".
The alliance will sponsor instead a Gay Prayer Day
in which gays are encouraged to
say a prayer for their oppressors.
The alliance also will sponsor a radio show on WUVT,
which will discuss the problems of
lesbians and Not Your Typical Blanket Night,
which will be a series of educational films on gays,
a panel discussion, and Tell a Friend Day,
when gay people are encouraged to tell
a friend about their lifestyle.
Not Your Typical Blanket Night was originally
to be called Not Your Average Blanket Night,
but was changed after a protest by
Virginia Tech Union's President
Eddie Stowe who thought the title
was too similar to the
VTU's Not Your Average Lecture Series.
In other commission action,
Sigma Chi Fraternity requested permission to
advertise foreign sponsor Derby Day on May 17th.
The commission granted permission with
the stipulation that the fraternity charge
at least 25 cents for each beer served
in order to control the amount of
alcohol consumed at the event.
The commission also requested
more information on the security
arrangements that the fraternity
would have to set up for the event which has
helped to raise money for
the fraternity's philanthropies.
The reason I came back was,
there were several things, but one,
I work with college students
or graduate students primarily.
Identity is very important.
I started sharing some of my story with a few of them,
and they were like, "Really?"
[LAUGHTER] That was like, yeah,
it wasn't always okay to be gay,
now it's a little trendy but it really wasn't.
I told them my story a little bit and that inspired me.
But honestly, the biggest inspiration that I have is
our current political climate where I see so many
of our laws and rights are being challenged,
are being rolled back or just chipped away a little bit.
Those are things that have been
long incoming way before
me and have been very hard fought.
I think it's so important that current students get
that these people don't
give you rights because they should,
sometimes you have to stand up.
It's unpopular.
There's all sorts of reasons to
not stand up for yourself,
but we're talking basic human rights.
My hope is to inspire
current students to understand that
these things happen very incrementally.
When they start rolling back,
they roll back incrementally.
There's an ebb and flow sometimes.
You can't stop living your life because
the laws aren't to your liking.
For us, is perfectly clear.
We just did what we did and we
navigate laws and we do things,
but I think it is so important that
people understand that you must pay things forward.
You do things for yourself,
but you must do them for the next generation.
That is the reason that I felt it important.
For me, I'm 60 years old.
Whether or not I trans in
the military doesn't matter to me personally.
It matters to me emotionally but it's not my job.
But I do think it is so
important for all of us to stand up for each other.
We still don't have a lot
of [LAUGHTER] basic human rights.
It's still not done, and it's never done.
It's always about being more inclusive,
talking about people of color,
talking about trans,
talking about different gender identities.
Those are our concepts of that in the 1970s,
wasn't even part of a conversation.
I understand it intuitively,
but I think that when we
can deal with the underpinnings of
racism and homophobia and sexism,
those are the things that keep us restrained.
I think I'm just talking about obviously being lesbian,
but there's many more things to it,
and when some of us are repressed,
all of us are repressed.
Maybe that's activism, but that's just my life.
That's just how I feel. I am
certainly much more political.
I have made way many protest posters
since 2016 than I ever did as a younger.
But things have rolled back and that's okay.
It's not okay, but we just have
to not give up. It's very important.
Then despite things like 2016,
do you remain or are you hopeful?
Is there progressive arc that you [OVERLAPPING]
Yes. There it is because we have basic rights,
but we also have allies.
That is the single biggest difference in many ways,
because people get it.
It's just human rights.
It's why can't you love who you want to love?
Why can't you be who you want to be?
That's a basic human right,
and now it's just more understood.
That won't roll back.
There may be laws that will roll back,
but that basic human understanding,
I don't believe will roll back.
[APPLAUSE]
Many of the extraordinary people that you
just saw on the screen are in this room with us,
and I just want to say thank you to
all of you for what you contributed to that.
It is frigidly cold in here.
I violated the time constraints radically.
Whatever happens next is up to us collectively.
It might be that we don't stay in this refrigerator,
but I imagine that there are
conversations that you-all would like to have,
so maybe going out
into the light and somewhat warmer spot.
But I just have to say,
I am so deeply proud to be part
of this community that you all helped to build here,
so thank you. [APPLAUSE]