 Welcome to our interview show in which we interview LGBTQ guests who are important contributors to our community. We want to acknowledge that all things LGBTQ is produced at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which is unceded Indigenous land. Enjoy the show. Periodically, when I'm talking about the legislature and political work, I make a reference to GLAAD. We thought maybe it would be time for you to really hear exactly what is GLAAD and how people here in Vermont might be impacted by the work that they're doing. So, to that end, I couldn't be happier to introduce someone who has already helped here in Vermont work on parenting issues. This is Paulie Crozier. Welcome Paulie. Thank you so much for having me, Keith. It's fantastic to be here today. So, why don't we start with you explaining to the people who are watching what is GLAAD and how you came to be involved with it? Oh, absolutely. Well, GLAAD is GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders. So, we are a New England-wide organization that works to promote a just society on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and HIV status. And we were founded in 1978, so over 40 years ago. And we were founded actually because of arrests in Boston of gay men at the Boston Public Library. And really, there was a need to represent them. And John Ward, our founder, stepped up and started that work. And GLAAD arose out of that early work to protect the community from over-policing. And then started to work on anti-discrimination laws, and it all just kind of went from there. So, but currently, we're engaged in all New England states to really make New England a zone of equality for LGBTQ people and people living with HIV. And of course, in our work at this point, we're also working really to address systems of racism and make sure that we are leading for our community and the folks who are most vulnerable and most impacted throughout New England and nationally, of course. And so, how did you come to work with GLAAD? Oh, absolutely. Okay, right. Well, that's a funny story. You can stop me. I could talk about myself too long. So, well, I've known of GLAAD forever. I feel like growing up as a queer kid in the Boston area, it was kind of always in the back of my understanding. And then I went to law school, and I learned more in the Boston area, and I learned more about GLAAD's work and did some volunteering during law school for the organization. And then, when I came out of law school, I went to work for a really small family law firm in Boston that for a kind of a lesbian trailblazer, Joyce Kaufman, who had been involved in the really early co-parent adoption case in Massachusetts in 1993's adoption of TAMI, and had such a wonderful opportunity at that firm to do really kind of cutting-edge work for the LGBTQ community and family law. And through that work, I came to know Lawyer's at GLAAD. I worked with Karen Lowy on the Hunter versus Rose case, which was a really important case. I represented a mother, a non-biological mother, whose child was essentially kidnapped out of Massachusetts. And I represented her at the trial court, and then GLAAD helped me on appeal. And on a known donor case and on an unmarried parentage case. So through my own practice, I got to do really wonderful collaborative work with GLAAD and to get to know Mary Bonato and other lawyers there. And so when my law partner said, you know, moved on to retirement, it was a wonderful opportunity to say, let's move over to GLAAD and really expand my ability to do work in the LGBTQ community beyond family law. So and so I've been at GLAAD since October of 2016. I started two weeks before the election of that year, which kind of, you know, changed everything. But yeah, so it's been a really it's been a it's been a busy, busy four years, needless to say. And you mentioned Mary Bonato, who people here in Vermont will probably recognize as the person who helped Beth Robinson and Susan Murray with what ended up in being Vermont's civil union law and then truly marriage equality. Right. So I hear you're talking a lot about family law. And that's how I came to meet you was Vermont's parenting bill. So I'm getting the sense that different attorneys at GLAAD have a different speciality. That's absolutely right. Where we each of us has a different speciality and also each of us has different connections to different states, which I think is really fun. I'll tell you a little bit about that. So so for instance, I do a lot of work on youth and family issues, right, because of my background as a family lawyer. So I do a lot of work in family law in the child welfare system and the juvenile justice system. And my colleague Ben Klein, for example, he's really the expert in HIV and health access to health care. And Jennifer Levi is our director of our transgender rights project, because transgender rights has really been core to GLAAD's work for an extremely long time. And she's really the expert on on transgender rights. And then our newest attorney, Chris Archill, he's really been focusing a lot on elder work, right, and also identity documents. And in any event, so we are all generalists because there are so many issues, right? The LGBTQ community has so many needs and so many issues, but you're right that each of us kind of has our area of expertise. So if it's a family law issue, folks are going to say, you know, what does Polly think? Although obviously Mary Bonotto, Mary Bonotto is an excellent family lawyer as well. And I really enjoyed the documentary. I watched the documentary about the freedom to marry in Vermont. And obviously, I think, you know, Vermont's history in in family law is just tremendous. And then some of us really have relationships with with particular states. I have had the pleasure in my family law work of working in all states, but I'm particularly assigned to Rhode Island. That's the state that I convene a public policy group of advocates in Rhode Island. So we can all kind of communicate and network and get to know each other. Mary's based in Maine. Jennifer does a lot of work in Connecticut, so we all try to kind of connect to a particular state. So if I'm hearing you correctly, in addition to the work that I know from you, I could approach you as an individual client asking for advocacy and legal representation. Absolutely. So we actually have a legal intake line called GLAD Answers, which provides referrals, information, and does intakes for people throughout New England. And so folks can call in with an individual legal issue or they can write in or chat in. And we will either, you know, work to assist them or work to refer them to some to a another organization or another lawyer who can be of assistance. Obviously, we do a lot of impact work. So we often take cases that really are going to have a tremendous impact because we're only five lawyers, to be honest, working in the whole region. But it is an important resource for the community to know about and kind of we try to provide folks with referrals. So we also have, I'll put a plug in for our lawyer referral service, which is, you know, a network of lawyers who has some competency and LGBTQ issues and we're always looking to build that. Right. So if there are folks in the community who are working with the LGBTQ community, we want to know that so we can point callers to those lawyers. And finally, I will say we also have an identity project, an ID project, which provides pro bono legal services to people who want to change their name and gender marker on their state and federal IDs. And we work with a community organization called MTPC and with the law firms of ropes and gray and Goodwin and Proctor to provide that pro bono assistance, which has really has served so many people over the past four years. So there's a number of ways that community members can connect with GLAAD and get help and resources. So you are our experts. So reading some of of the articles specific to GLAAD, it also sounds as though GLAAD has some priorities of the types of legislation and policy development that they would like to see throughout New England. As you've clearly said, we want to make this a more inclusive and supportive and legally protected places for the LGBTQ plus communities. Could you share what are some of GLAAD's current priorities? Absolutely. And we're actually, although I want to share that we're actually kind of right now trying to reevaluate those because we are at the end of a strategic, we had a strategic plan that went from 2016 to 2020. So we're really actively thinking about those issues and how we can make sure that we're doing work that is most impactful for the LGBTQ community, particularly again breaking down those racist systems. So I will say right now, I'll speak a little bit to family law, right, which is obviously my area of work. You know, I continue to work really hard to make sure that every child and every family is protected in New England, no matter the gender of their parents, the sexual orientation of their parents, the circumstances of their birth. So we're continuing to do work in Connecticut and Massachusetts because, I mean, hats off to Vermont, which has already comprehensively reformed their statutes, as well as New Hampshire and Maine and Rhode Island, but Connecticut and Massachusetts have fallen behind. So those are priority states for us. We are also really working hard to address systems and structures that are harming LGBTQ youth, the child welfare system, the juvenile justice system. My colleague, Jennifer, does a tremendous amount of work in the prison system, right, making sure that transgender people that know we're working on harm reduction, not only, you know, obviously moving away from prisons, but reducing the harm to transgender people in prisons. We're doing a lot of work on access to healthcare. That remains a tremendous priority. What we can do to make sure that everyone has equal access and real access to healthcare in a non-discriminatory manner. My colleague, Ben, is doing a lot of work in the HIV realm to increase access to PrEP and reduce stigma and discrimination for particularly gay male sexuality. And we're working, my colleague, Mary, and is working very hard on the Equality Act federally to make sure that we have those federal protections, right, because while we're very lucky here in New England to have so many protections, we need to make sure we are that these protections are across the country. We're also doing a tremendous amount of work to combat the anti-trans bills, right, that are happening in New England. We have bills in New Hampshire, we have bills in Maine, we have bills in Connecticut, and needless to say, I think we all need to be working tremendously hard against anti-trans discrimination and against, like, lifting up trans youth, because I think that the national conversation has become quite harmful. So that's an area of focus as well for us. So, again, I think, you know, defense against those bills, access to healthcare, parentage protections, working to improve systems that are harming the most vulnerable in our community, those are some of our priorities at this point. And with that, thank you for spending this time with us. And I'm going to be following the work that Glad's doing. And when you have another one of those significant landmark decisions, I'm going to expect that you're going to come back and visit us again. Anytime. I would love to come and talk with you. It's always a pleasure. I love working in Vermont. Working on the Parentage Act and the work I've done with Vermont folks has just been such a pleasure. It is entirely mutual. Thank you. Hi, everybody. Percy Bischelli famously said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. I'm here with Sam Stockwell, who is a poet and an acknowledged legislator of Ward 3 and Barry. We're talking to her on the heels of her recent City Council win. So welcome, Sam. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'd like to start with a little biographical information, if I may, delivered in the second person. You grew up in Connecticut, lived in Marshfield and Montpelier. You moved to Vermont in 1980 and moved to Barry five years ago. You've been teaching at CCV for 25 years and you're teaching there now a range of courses ranging from human services to writing. And you're currently teaching a poetry workshop at the Montpelier Senior Center, which leads right into your career as a poet. You have two collections of poetry that have been published. So is there anything you'd like to add? I grew up mostly in Maine and Connecticut. Oh, I see. Most of my family is actually from, so I have experience in living in the extreme country and the suburbs. I see. Well, my first question is, how did you happen to get involved in electoral politics? I've been interested in politics, but I didn't see myself as being involved until I sort of ended up on the Council through happenstance the first time. And I was only on for a couple months filling in for somebody. But while I was on the Council, I was incredibly impressed by what the Council did. And I understood that what the Council can do is a tool for improving people's lives. It's possible to make changes in a city or town that will make it possible easier for people to live. So that's really exciting to me. And what do you hope to achieve as a city councilor? I was a home visitor for a long time, and I worked for Head Start. I worked for the Family Center of Washington County. And so I was visiting people in their apartments and in their homes. And mostly there were people working in convenience stores and fast food restaurants. Their lives are so difficult. People have no idea because people live lives of such isolation. Most people in middle class don't know anybody who's poor. They just don't. So in seeing their lives, I thought there are things that can't happen. I can't raise a minimum wage. Neither can the City Council. Too bad. There are a lot of things that I cannot do. But you can improve housing. You can look for businesses to come in who are going to pay better. So it seems like you can make the cities more walkable for people. So it seems to me that those are some of the things I hope to do. I hope to improve housing. I hope to improve housing options. I hope to draw more businesses to Barry. And like all these small cities and towns, the infrastructure needs work. How much time? What kind of time commitment do city councilors undertake? I think far more than anyone would realize. I get paid as a Barry City Councilor $1,000 a year. The meetings are too... Yes. The big bucks. So there's a two-hour weekly meeting. But when you're going into that meeting, you need to know the issues. You need to be informed. You need to be ready to go. You need to understand the legalities. Like, I didn't really know the difference between a charter and an ordinance till recently. Got it now. So there's a lot of work. And what are other cities and towns doing in Vermont? What's possible? It's a lot of work. So my next question then is with your teaching and your poetry, how do you find time to be a city councilor? How do you fit it all in? Well, my priorities are the council and teaching. I feel like if people elected me, I won by a fairly good margin. People elected me to do what I said I would do. And that's an obligation that I take seriously. I also, you know, I have these stories of families I meant that always spin in the back of my mind. And I would like to feel at the end of my tenure, whatever it ends up being, that I did something that made life better there. How do you integrate your poetic sensibility with your legislative vision? I think being a lesbian and being a poet are actually incredibly helpful because they're ways of viewing the world and their experiences of being in the world that are different. So, you know, particularly having been a lesbian for a long time, you know, how long have you been out? Since the mid-70s, I would say. Me too. Seven years for me. So, you know, I lived in Plainfield for a while and there were women's dances once a month above the town hall, which was so exciting. It was so great. But when we came out of the dances, the young men sitting on the stone wall threw rocks at us. And it wasn't that we didn't protest, but it was so unsurprising. You know, it was like snow in January. You can complain about it, but it's the way things are. So, having that experience of being on the outside and receiving, yeah, compared to some other folks, not bad experiences of discrimination, but it's certainly real. And that feeling that you weren't part of the discussion, you know, if you're hanging out in a middle-class workplace where most folks are married to a guy, you know, the women are married to guys, the conversations that you're assumed to be a part of, you know, it's really different. You're not part of those, you know, how you wedge yourself in or I think, excuse me, I have a slight difference here to detour in the road. So, I think all those experiences are helpful. You know, and I remember beginning when I first started teaching, I had just come out and I wasn't open. And, you know, it's so striking how often teachers talk, heterosexual teachers talk about their husbands or their wives in the classroom, you know, and I don't think they realize it. And so, you know, it took me a long time to come out. I was always an open lesbian scholar, but it took me a long time to come out to my students. Yeah, I didn't for years. And I never, I just never talked about my personal life, but partly that was the habit of surviving before it was more permissible to be me. Exactly. Exactly. So, the poetic sensibility, how does this play into your legislative vision? I think to be a poet of any worth, you need a few things, but a couple of those are imagination and empathy. So, I think the empathy, like understanding people's lives who are not mine is a part of what I bring as a council member. You know, you think about, so if you go into the city hall at Berry, there's a dais in people, you know, the councillors sit up and the mayor sits in the middle and, you know, it's an intimidating setup for people who do not feel like they're part of the conversation anyway. So, like how do you make it, so for people who already feel like no one listens to them, which is a fairly common experience if you're very poor or different in any way, I understand that it may be difficult for people to come into that setting and feel like someone's going to listen to them. And I think that perspective is valuable. I agree. And it seems like the distrust of government is maybe diminishing a little bit, but the last administration really exacerbated it. And even now, the hacky-derm-like workings of the Senate in the House nationally where, you know, people get hung up on procedure and so forth, I think a lot of average people, including me, think, you know, I can't help this. I can't, you know, I'm alienated. So, it's really to your credit that you're taking the initiative and joining, you know, running for elective office and trying to change things. Well, thank you. I felt, I do feel that I have an excellent understanding of poverty and its impact. I know what it's like to be a lesbian and to feel like, I'm not part of this. You know, I'm not part of this. I'm not allowed. You know, I used to, when I was a home visitor, you know, I'd be out in the country somewhere trying to find somebody, you see this huge sign that says, take back Vermont. I thought, and if my car breaks down here, keep walking. And is this just this house or is this a whole neighborhood agreement? So, I think flying the Confederate flag is like that for people of color. You know, you see that Confederate flag flying in a neighborhood and you think, I should maybe not stop here. To think as by flying the black lives flag matters so much. You are welcome here. We hear your voice. We know something about your experience. Well, I think it was Tip O'Neill who said, all politics is local. Yeah, in some ways, I guess it is here. What are some issues before the city council that you expect to come up in the in the current session? Some issues? Yeah, some projects. I think we're looking at some of the charter and ordinance changes, which will probably be a source of debate and a source of interest. Like Montpelier had the non-citizen voting charter issue for a while, and various localities are considering that. Is Barry talking about that at all? I don't think so yet. We're just looking at heating ordinances, which in Barry, it consists, the entire heating ordinance is about two lines. It says there must be heating appliance available in a rental property. So it doesn't say that it works. It doesn't say that there's fuel. It doesn't limit it in any way. So we started talking about that last Tuesday. We'll probably continue talking about that for a while. Some people are definitely not going to like that. Landlords are not going to necessarily embrace that obligation to upgrade heating. And yet upgrading the heating and reducing the burden of poverty on poor people is a great thing to do for a city. The less people are poor, the less they're suffering from cold and from insufficient food. The easier it is for the kids to go to school, for the parents to make a little success. As an instructor at CCV, most of the people that are in my classes, they're working two jobs, they have small children, they're trying to go to school, and some of them are trying to do their homework on their phone. It's probably much easier if you're 20 years younger, 30 years younger. But can we make it easier for people to succeed? Can we take some of the bricks off their back? I would like to be part of doing that in some way. I remember I worked in fuel assistance in Cambridge Mass for a few years when I was living in Boston. And heating issues are so crucial. And it's such a human right. And there are so many angles around it that landlords use to save money. I mean, it's just criminal. So I hope your legislation will improve that circumstance or rectify some of those crimes, really, that many landlords are committing to save a dime. I'm hopeful. You know, there are mostly good landlords and mostly good tenants. That's true. That's true. I didn't mean to trash it. However, people need to have access to heat. You know, when I was working in human services, I would get these calls from families that couldn't afford the minimum delivery requirements from the fuel truck. So they were going to be cold. Or, you know, I worked with a young mom of an infant who said, oh, my landlord's not making me buy the heat. It's good. I, you know, he's working at a convenience store. That's so good because I can't afford it. And I'm really happy that I'm on the second floor and some heat will rise up. But you know, she has an infant. She has an infant. And I thought, it shouldn't be like this. It shouldn't be like this for anybody. I know it's those nuts and bolts issues that, you know, make people crazy and cause so much stress. So that's where local activism or local politics can come into play in a really direct way. Yeah. You know, just making it easy for people to walk around or having more grocery stores. That'd be a great thing if people have a choice between going to the convenience store for chips and actually being able to buy fruits and vegetables within walking distance. That helps people. Absolutely. So, Sam, thank you so much for coming on. Are there any last words that you have for our audience? I guess not, but thank you for having me. This was fun. And I hope you'll come back and tell us about your progress and how things are going. Definitely. My first poem about City Council, I'll bring it here. Oh, wonderful. Love to hear it. Hi. I'd like to welcome Dawn Yordi to All Things LGBTQ. Hi, Dawn. How are you today? Thank you, Linda. Very good to see you. I'm good. Good. Good. I haven't seen you since New York. Linda, it's been over a year. Yeah. It was in the... November of 2019. Before the pandemic. Yes. Yes. That was a nice time. Yes. I enjoyed that. That was a good poetry reading. And it's a good bookstore. And I really enjoyed being there. So, I'm going to read a little bio, which only talks about a small amount of things that you've actually done. So, we'll start with that. Dawn Yordi is a poet, educator, and garden activist living in New York City. He's the author of three poetry collections, A Few Swimmers, Appear, and Poet Laundromat, and Spring Sonnets. And is included in Out of This World, an anthology of poetry of the St. Mark's Poetry Project, 1966 to 1991. His novel, What Night Forgets, was published by Herodias Press. Is that right? In 2000. Poems from his 20s, entitled Fucking and Other Poems, will be published by Indelinta Books in 2022. Dawn's blog and archive of current art, his own writing and work of other poets, can be found at DawnYordi.com. And we'll put that up so that people can find your vimeos and books and whatever else they might be interested in. So, I heard you saved a city park in New York City. What is that about? Well, I helped save it. Sometimes I say I saved it. And there was a period of time when I was the one who didn't drop the ball. So, it began in 1987 and I live across from the park and it had been there. This could be a whole long story, so I guess I have to make it short. But it had been there from the time I moved in. Puerto Rican youth in the neighborhood, the young lords had taken a vacant lot and actually vacant lots. And they made it into a little park. They threw out all the garbage. Buckminster Fuller got involved. He did a little geodesic dome. And they planted willow trees. And there's actually a stream that goes under the park which came out of Tompkins Square and goes down and still exists. And apartment buildings on this block still have very leaky basements, things like that. So, the federal government and the city government wanted to put up a housing project and we opposed it. And we were sort of pariahs at first because it was going to be an old folks home, a HUD project, old folks home. And we said, well, why can't you put this like on the upper east side or something where there's hospitals and pharmacies and old people. At the time, it was a very bad neighborhood. There was a lot of drugs and things going on here being sold on the street and you know, blah, blah, blah. And the Fed said forget it. The state said, I mean, everybody wanted this housing project and we took it to the New York State Supreme Court to fight it. And we really were like pariahs. In the 80s, the gardens were, development and housing was the big thing. And to be against housing was a very, was a very big deal. And people looked at you in a very bad way. I went to meetings and people would walk out of the meeting and stuff. I mean, we really were. But we kept them off in state court, but we lost. And the state Supreme Court said, no, no, no, these are just city lots. They're not a park. During that time, there was a New York Times article and the economic, the guy who, who decided whether or not a HUD project could be put in a certain place thought that this was a very bad place to put the project. And everything he was saying was what we were saying was, you know, put it on the upper east side to do this, do that where there's hospitals. And Senator D'Amato at the time wanted the project because he wanted developers on Long Island who would campaign for him and given him donations that he wanted this project. So, and the HUD guy got very angry at the very end and called the New York Times and said, I want to tell you something. So there was a big scandal. And we thought, okay, story's over, we're going to keep the park. And what that actually meant was that the government, the city and the state just wanted to do everything quicker so that if a scandal developed, they'd already be doing it. And sorry, folks, we're already doing it. So we took it to federal court and we actually won in federal court. And I guess partly because it was the HUD project and D'Amato was involved and there was this conflict of interest. And what we were saying, the judge agreed with. And the judge said it's a park. He said if it looks like a park and it's used like a park, it's a park. But what happened after that? So we won and there was this nice article in the New York Times and everything. And then HUD, we actually won on a technicality and HUD could only build so much low income or subsidized housing in a tract area because it would in essence get a wise the area. So we proved that there was already more than enough of the subsidized housing. So HUD changed their guidelines and said we can put up as much subsidized housing, which is probably still there today, folks. So after we thought we won, it was sort of like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when those guys keep coming. It was like, who are they? But they kept coming. So we fought HUD again and again. And eventually, actually through Mike Bloomberg and Elliot Spitzer, who as Attorney General was really helpful to the gardens, not just our garden, but all of New York City's community gardens, Spitzer and Bloomberg were really, really, really helpful. And Giuliani had been very anti-garden and very pro-development, I mean, really pro-development. And the dark of night, he had one garden bulldozed, which actually got him into trouble and began the whole Attorney General Spitzer investigation. Anyway, the park is a park today, but there's still work to do and there's, there's, it's never over. There's always going to be a developer. Well, you know, it seems like New York is historically, I mean, lots of cities, Boston, San Francisco are just, you know, have a real hard time with having affordable housing or enough green space or, you know, whatever. All of those things. I think now with the pandemic in New York, rents are going down. I know two people who've actually changed places because of, of it being more accessible. So hopefully all of that is going to help make it more livable city for more people. Yes. So I know I got a clip from you that I found extremely interesting and fascinating. Do you want to, we'll show the clip. Do you want to give us a little intro to? Well, this was initially shown at the, at the Portrait Project New Year Marathon. We had to put something together and we could either perform live or put something together. And I thought I'd put something together with Vimeo's I had done much earlier. So on them, I look much younger, but that wasn't why I was doing it. And it was, it's kind of called the prologue. And it's the beginning when I was in my twenties, I began to earnestly work on poetry. I started writing when I was a teenager and had kind of made a little bit of a splash. Louis Intermeyer saw my poetry and John Wheelock and there was all these people who liked my poetry when I was a kid. And it kind of went to my head, or I don't know if it went to my, but anyway, I kind of lost the, the Jenga as a, as a Brazilian might say, I sort of lost the spirit. I didn't know why I could write or what it was that people liked. So for a long time, I wasn't really doing it. And in my early twenties, having read Whitman and Emily Dickinson and I guess Bald Lair and Junkie, there were a couple poets who really showed me what a poet was, especially Whitman, I think. And, but all of them were really very helpful. And so I began to write again. So this stuff was early poetry actually that I've wrote in my very early twenties. So all of the poems you're seeing, even though there's a man in his late sixties saying the poems, he wrote them in his early twenties. And it's called the prologue. It's about being able to speak and say something. All right, let's look at the video. You are before it. We make a oneness, a reflection. Two separate moments come together. But the word is still between us. Someday, there'll be no words. Someday, we'll simply be like flutes playing each other. Strike a match. Light up this page. Watch them go black and vanish into flame. I think that I'm a candle whose flame stays around the wick. Whether set in one place or carried. Never wavering an inch from where I've always been. I hold out my hand like you did. When I'm happy and look at it, it's not the same I see, sadly, desiring or when I'm tired. It changes with my feelings, which usually, I don't notice like light and shadow pass over the day revealing as the morning sun obscured by clouds or tears. When you vanished, did all vanish? With a change of heart, I changed the world. I was in Philadelphia and crossed the bridge to Camden. I'm satisfied, I said. There's grass growing here and I no longer care what anyone might think of me or what the future holds or when and if comes money. I heard you speak. You are not dead, nor have I lived more than I lived when you first spoke. I kneel down in the grass, slide out some blades to chew. I've read you, know your caress and see out in the void your hand still is trembling for my touch. Walt Whitman, you're the spit green along my lips. Help me to trust in it. Okay, that was that was really wonderful. I'm so glad you sent it. Thank you. And now, just as an aside for our audience, your last poetry book, Spring Sonnets, was in the Amazon bestseller. You know, that's pretty good, I got to say. I didn't know, I mean, I'm learning this for the first time. So I didn't even, I didn't even know it, but that's very, that's very nice. Yeah, maybe I'll go. So somebody call Coffee House Press right now and I will, but and you have some cards you want to show us? Are you working on? Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, I was going to show you, I've been doing postcards. I can show you postcards. Here is a postcard. It's a haiku. And I never really, actually, here's the pile I'm going to show you. Here's the pile I'm going to read from. So let's stay organized here. Okay. So here's a haiku. I never write haikus. And I guess maybe you're seeing it backwards. I'm not seeing it front ways. But good, good, good. So these pictures, the drawings are drawn by my husband, a crumb, who is actually a doctor. He's studying now for to get into a hospital. But he never schooled or anything, but he draws pictures sometimes. So I started to put the pictures together with the poems. And here's a haiku. I don't usually write haikus, but I wrote this actually sitting at a poetry project reading. I think Sarah Shulman was going to read. I'm not sure. It doesn't matter who. But and I was sitting next to Cal De Cullian, who's the director there. And I really like Kyle. So I think he kind of was the muse for this one. But I am here with you. But what is even better? You are here with me. So there's a haiku. And there's a crumb's drawing on it. So I've been making little post, whoops, little postcards. And, you know, you can hand them out. And C.A. Conrad does a lot of that. You know, he always has this sort of satchel full of poems. He's always handing things out. Are you still with them? Or where can people get them? Oh, you know what? Actually, I've been thinking about I do them myself. So I cut these. I sort of designed them and I put them in a on a template. And I have a color printer and I have a cutter. So I cut so they're they're all made in an eight and a half, 11 piece of paper. And then I get card stock and cut them in four. So I get four postcards out of out of one. So and right now, people said to sell them and I have a website where I sort of advertised to sell my books. And so I was thinking maybe of offering the postcards there. I'm not quite sure how you'd go about doing it. But it would require me to I'd have a little home factory and I might be making them. So I'm not quite sure. Maybe they'd be able and I would figure out how much the postage how much this how much for the envelope and then and then send them. So I mean, you know, it's it's nice. It's like an absolute postcard and people are always emailing and, you know, we email now and there's so little being sent. So I think it also encourages people to just write to someone and say hi. And I send these to people sometimes people say, wow, this was so great. I never get anything in the mail anymore. So I think that's and they can be good for, you know, like gifts for whatever, anniversaries of arrages, you know, I mean, any of that, I think would be appropriate. And I have one here. Yeah, I also wrote, which is not in the prologue, but it's a poem that's in the prologue, which were the poems that people just heard. And on this one, it says, in the circle, I've pressed my lips. If you press yours, there too, we will have kissed. Now, some people like this a lot. Sam Hamill, the poet really hated this. Well, anyway, Sam has has gone to his reward. But so but don't ever send this to Sam Hamill, whatever you or anybody related to him. But it's I like it. So and it's kind of like a valentine part or just to tell someone that you love them. And someone sent one one back and she had with very, very red lipstick, she kissed it. So I got this thing in the mail coming back with this really nice kiss. So I was like, yay. So that's a postcard that I put together. So people can find these on your website? Not right now. I'm just gonna do I'm just gonna read now. So I was gonna read from the postcards. I'm not actually selling postcards right now. But I am thinking about putting them up and I'll show some sonnets then that I've been doing as well. The very first postcard was this postcard that an artist as Stefan Spara did back in the 80s when my book, a few swimmers appear, a chat book came out. And Stefan made this postcard, which sort of advertised the book and actually the title of my novel what night forgets is in the poem. So this was actually also a very early poem I wrote in my early 20s. When I was starting to get the spirit of poetry back or what a poet was after I'd lost it from about I don't know from about 18 to 23. I didn't know what I was doing. I would never go back to my early 20s for whatever I just was not the happiest time in my my life. I just, you know, I sort of want, I knew I wanted to do something but I didn't know how to do it. So it was this very frustrating period of time and I wanted to write and people everybody said, you know, like my parents get a job and why don't you just finish college and be a school teacher and you can write in the summertime. I'm going to law school. Yeah. Forget law school. I would, but so that's a postcard. Oh, and I should read the darn thing. When sleep vanishes, then you swim. Awake is no island, merely swift stroke and breath. The moon is not the sun's skull. Day is not what night forgets. So back in my 20s this was probably like the first poem I think that I wrote where it was like, okay, I think I know again what I'm supposed to be doing. And then I worked the best that I could. I tried. Here's a nice little poem that was written later in my 20s. I had lived in Philadelphia in the 1970s and Philly was a great, great, great place for poets. There was a lot of poetry going on. Dennis Cooper came to town and thought it was this great, great scene and he hung around for a little while. Ethridge Knight who was married to Sonia Sanchez for a while and she was in Philly and Ethridge Knight would be at like the painted bride all the time. And I mean, there was just all sorts of people who were in Philly in the 70s and I began to perform poetry, started at the painted bride and which was on South Street at the time. Now, if you go to Philly, the painted bride is up on Arch Street, I believe, kind of still in the old city. But so this poem I wrote later and it's called Oh Pretty Self. And it's kind of a poem for somebody. Sometimes I stutter and stammer. I can get all nervous and everything and actually performing helps you get over that because you sort of rehearse and you know what you're going to say and there's no surprises kind of. But anyway, I wrote this more toward my late 20s going on 30 and I grew up in Pennsylvania in what was the South Mountain. And so this poem was, I wrote that poem there on the South Mountain and it's called Oh Pretty Self. And there's a little flower that a crumb wrote. So anyway, Oh Pretty Self, a snake curled in the sun feels my shadow come and goes ripples over stones. The stream falls down and oozes out of moss and mud where a deer stepped. No, I won't pick this violet, let it clutch the cracking rock, blue out of yellow from a black dot. When I leave these woods to work and stammer or say two words at once, I'll think of it and stop. Nice. So I like this poem. I mean, we only have a few more minutes left, unfortunately. Okay, oh my god, oh my god. I know, I know. I'm going to have you back again for another interview. Okay, fine. You know, and we could talk about more of what you're doing and the work you've done and your incredible activism. And we just didn't get to enough. I know you taught China. Yes. And that would be very interesting to hear about, you know, as a gay man working in China. And so much more. I didn't. Well, I was actually very open. I taught from 2006 to 2000 in just in the summertime. I taught in Wuhan, actually. And a great school there. Wuhan U, a beautiful campus. And it's sort of like Stanford. They're all biologists and physicists. Everybody was smarter than me, but I could speak English. That's what they were there for. And a few of them are still, I have some friends. They were kids then. I mean, now they're like in their 30s or something. When I started in 2006, nobody was gay. There was no gay anything. Some of the teachers were gay who were teaching from, it was a thing that Ohio State was putting together. And so the teachers were, we were there partly just, you know, for this cultural thing. So the gay teachers remain gay. I mean, like people didn't hide anything. And I would say by 2010, at a period of time, some of the students themselves began to come out, or they'd tell you secretly, or I had a few students who would talk to me. But then it actually became, as the world and the kids today, it was like suddenly things were kind of open. But in the very beginning, it was sort of like it didn't exist. You didn't need to talk about it because it didn't exist. Why talk about something that doesn't exist? And then that changed. And it was very interesting because in class, there's a lot of affection. They often boys sit with boys and girls sit with girls. And it was very strange for us because they will be very affectionate. So two boys, if I gave them a project, the one boy might put his arm around the other boy and lean over him and they were working on it. The girls would cuddle. So, and they, it wasn't that they were gay and in love, though there was a couple that actually was. But I was thinking how interesting because it's the custom to kind of do this. So anybody who really wants to cuddle can really cuddle. It was kind of an interesting thing. But their affection toward each other was very open when they worked together. Well, I'm going to have to have you back to talk about more of this, which seems like we only just got started. But I want to thank you for coming on the show and letting our viewers at least get a little taste of who you are. And I really appreciate talking to you. And I hope to see you in New York when we get there, maybe this summer. Well, I'm looking forward to it. We'll go out to dinner and hang. You can come over. All right. I'll give you some postcards. Thank you. Okay. Bye-bye. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you in two weeks. But in the meantime, resist.