 Hi, welcome to the All Things LGBTQ Interview Show, where we interview LGBTQ guests who are making important contributions to our communities. All Things LGBTQ is taped at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which we recognize as being unceded indigenous land. It is my great pleasure to welcome Carla Jay to the show. Carla is a scholar, activist, author, renaissance person, pioneer, veteran of Stonewall, which we'll talk about a little in the show, and I'm proud to call her my friend. Welcome Carla. Thanks for having me. We're here to celebrate the release on Audible of Carla's wonderful memoir, Tales of a Lavender Menace. I just had the great pleasure of reading it over the last week, and I loved it. It's funny, it's thoughtful, it's well researched, it's fast paced. You know, Carla and I spent some time at the Modern Language Association, and there was a panel there for several years called I Couldn't Put It Down, and that's the way I feel about this memoir. It's really fabulous, I can't recommend it enough. And I listened to five minutes of the Audible tape, the sample five minutes, and you can get it on Audible by Googling Audible, by Googling Tales of the Lavender Menace on Audible, and another reader is reading. I'm disappointed because as you'll see, Carla has a lovely Brooklyn accent, but you're pleased with the woman who is reading the recording. Yes, I actually had a role in choosing her, they gave me a choice, and I think her name is Hilary Huber, and she was available, she does those Ferrante books. Oh, I love those. Yes, and she does those books, and see, I thought part of the charm was she could be me without the Brooklyn accent, and for many people that might be a plus. Well, it certainly has a lot of appeal with Bernie Sanders. Let's talk about the memoir, if we may, just for a moment. I remember visiting you in New York, and you were kind enough, I was living in New Orleans, and you were kind enough to take some of us around. You took us to Barney's and Ellis Island, and you mentioned writing a memoir at the time. How did you happen to write it? I started writing this memoir, it took me a really long time because even though the book doesn't contain footnotes, every element of the book is researched very carefully. If I said that for a certain March, the weather was sunny and 70 degrees, I went to what was then microfiche and looked it up in the newspaper of that city in that day. Everything really took me a long time to do, and I think the book took me about seven years to write, and I had finished, I guess, a previous project that I was looking for something to do, and I was about to donate my papers to the New York Public Library, and I thought I should write my memoir while I still have these papers, while I still can remember things pretty well. Things weren't on the internet so much in the 90s while I wrote the book, but there was the possibility of doing a lot of research. Now, of course, it's easier with things just being mostly at the tip of one's fingers, although I think some of the things that are in there like court cases and so on, you would still have to go around and dig in courthouses. Yes, you can really see the research. It's very historically accurate, and well researched, and took you about seven years. You were also teaching full-time. Yes. And there was a heavy course load at PACE, if I recall. Yes, PACE is and was a teaching institution. So even though by the 90s I was a distinguished professor, it really, the course load there was pretty heavy, and a lot of the courses contained a lot of writing, so it was difficult to find time in between things to write these things. Did you have a schedule? No. I mean, of course, I wrote more in the summers and during breaks and things like that, and when I could get away to do research. But I just wrote whatever I could. I was very disciplined always about writing, and of course I was writing newspaper and magazine articles, and I wrote for the New York Times book review back then, and I wrote for many publications, many LGBTQ publications at the time. So this was published in 1999 originally. Yes. Is there going to be a sequel? Not that I know of, not anything LGBTQ. You know, sometimes I think that it would be interesting to write about the birth of the queer academic movement. I was one of the original members of the Gay Academic Union, and it was certainly a lively group to put it mildly with some surprising members in there. But I've also thought about writing about, you know, my current life and, you know, having poodle guide dogs, which is, I think, you know, a kind of unique perspective on the world, because they're, even in the guide dog world, they're rather different from other dogs in that poodles like to make their own decisions. You know, they say if you have a lab, for example, you can walk down the same street on your way to work every day, but if you do that with a poodle, the poodle will quit. So they really have their own opinions, and I've had two very artful poodles that they really don't agree with me on what we should see in a theater or what art we should look at. And it's been very interesting having this kind of third opinion in the house, because, you know, the dog is rather a biological, she's like an evolutionary social climber, you know, on her way to trying to be a human. And when we talked last night, you were in the middle of a guide dog board meeting. Yes. Yes, I'm on, I'm on the board of two guide dog foundations. So I'm very active in this world as well, you know, the, the world of fighting for disability rights. I think that if we don't change in our lives, we might as well be dead anyway. I mean, we have to be open to change and to taking on new perspectives and doing new things. So I, yes, I'm on the board of two of these guide dog user organizations. And it's clear you bring your activism wherever you go. And yes, according to the memoir, some of it and correct me if I'm wrong, some of it started when you were an undergraduate at Barnard and part of the 1968 riots at Columbia. And as you talk, I'd like to show you a picture. I'd like to show the audience a picture of you with your flip hairdo, which was very popular at the time, juxtaposed by you in your current incarnation. So you were at Barnard in 1968 and you friends called you and said the riot was occurring. You were involved a little bit in the student uprising, but you found some sexism in the Columbia group of radicals. Yes. Yes. The students had taken over the buildings mostly to protest the war in Vietnam, the draft Columbia's collusion with the military apparatus. And there was also the issue that Columbia was building a gym in a public park that the community would not be allowed into except through a separate but unequal door. You know, it's kind of, you know, it seems shocking today. It should seem shocking. It was shocking then. And after about, this started on April 23, 1968, which is kind of easy to remember, you know, it was Shakespeare's birthday. And, you know, it ended with the police dragging people out of buildings. I wasn't involved in the buildings, but I was there the night that the tactical police force bloodied people on the campus and dragged them out by their hair and kicked people with horses and batons and this overreaction of the police, which many people have seen today happen. It really radicalized me because I think I really did believe as a young and somewhat innocent undergraduate that there was justice in this country. And I also believe that there was a quality among the young but these men in SDS, the students for a Democratic society, they believe that they were the ones who are going to be the leaders. And women who spoke were booed off the stage. Men on some occasion said they should be pulled down and raped. There was that to happen. And we were expected to make sandwiches and throw them into the building to feed the men. There were some women in the buildings, but it was a very unequal situation. And so I became a feminist and joined a radical Marxist group called Red Stockings after I graduated. Yes. And I learned a lot about Red Stockings. They relied on consciousness raising. And I'm four years behind you. So I missed the whole consciousness raising era. And I learned from the memoir that it started with Che Guevara. And there was also Maoist started the idea of consciousness raising. And it was adopted by the Red Stockings. And you in 1969 or so you began to go to Red Stocking. When did you graduate? 68? 68 was at the end of 68 that I became involved because I started Barnard in 69 and had my own political epiphany while I was there at Columbia. So in June 69, you participated. You were involved tangentially in a very noteworthy action involving the Stonewall riots. Another riot. You quit at some point that riots follow you around. Yes. Wherever I went, there was a riot. This, of course, Stonewall had nothing to do with me. The Stonewall Inn was not inhabited by many women. I mean, the regulars were kind of street people, guys, some people who were trans, mostly trans women, we would call them today. But when the riot happened, I heard about it and I went down there the second the second day to see what was happening. I heard about it on the radio. It was briefly in the times and I went down to see what was happening and it was quiet when I went down there during the day. There was a lot of detritus on the streets, but there were a lot of knots of angry people in the village on various corners, not far from the Stonewall talking and saying that they were angry and fed up and that something something had to change. However, in the window of the Stonewall Dick Leach of the Mathershine Society, which was the pre Stonewall gay male group, there might have been a woman in there, had put a big oak tag sign that said to cooperate with the police to go home and cooperate with the police. And I looked at the sign and I said, Oh, too late for that. It's good. You know, if a horse has ever been out of the barn, it's out of the barn. And I didn't know. I mean, I wish I could say, Oh, I knew this was the start of the revolution, but I didn't know. I didn't know whether people would simply go home. It was the end of June, the fourth of July was coming. People were going on vacation. I had no idea that people would really stay angry. There was really no live media coverage of this. There was no reason to believe that, like, otherwise, this wouldn't fade into the background. There were other bar raids before and after Stonewall. People forget that the police continued to raid bars in New York City when politically convenient to them. That Stonewall was either the beginning nor the end. And so I, I kind of took it in. And when I saw a sign, I think, you know, somebody had tacked up somewhere or handed me a leaflet that there was going to be this new group called the Gay Liberation Front. I ran right over there. Let me read to you what you say in the memoir. Are completely uncritical about Stonewall, are completely uncritical glorification of Stonewall as a monumental event, a revolutionary moment. In some ways, the events that night weren't at all sudden or shocking. The Stonewall uprising was not, you just said this, was not so spontaneous. After all, it arose out of the courage and vision of participants and other movements. That's a key point. Yes, yes. Stonewall could not have happened if it hadn't been for the civil rights movement, for the women's movement, for groups like the Yippies, the war resistance. All of these groups had resisted and disrupted society. And there was now a tradition of standing up and the events of Columbia and May 4th after that, 1970, of standing up on campuses all over this country. People were standing up against the war in Vietnam. And you know, that's something, of course, we're lacking today in part because of the demise of the draft. You know, when everyone had a stake in going off to one of America's well-begun wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, you name it, people had more of a stake in going and people resisted more heartily. And people had more of a civic engagement in being a pacifist. It's, you know, and that was perhaps the one upside of the draft, of having an actual draft rather than having registration. In addition to it being more across class and race lines, rather than this volunteer army, which tends to cold people from the working class, whether black or white, or Latina, the Latinx. Another key point is that it wasn't really the actual event of Stonewall so much as the formation afterwards of the political formation afterwards of the gay liberation front and all of those responses that made the difference, really. Because, as you say, I mean, I was living in Buffalo in 68 and raids were occurring there. I mean, they were routine, but it was the activism afterwards that made the difference. Yes, raids were routine all over the country. There was resistance in both flow in the 1940s and 50s and bars to protect that space from the police. And if the gay liberation front hadn't emerged, we would not have the modern movement we have today. And we organized, we, you know, Ellen Broidy of the GLF announced in Philadelphia at a group called Urca, which was a kind of meeting of people from various organizations. She announced this idea of a march on the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. And if there hadn't been a march to commemorate the Stonewall, if the Stonewall had been named something like the Pink Pussycat, we wouldn't have this modern movement. You know, it didn't hurt that the name was strong like the Stonewall. It's the commemoration that makes it different. There were worse bar raids in New Orleans, as you know. There was, there was a fire, you know, at the St. I think it was called where many people died. There was a, you know, there was a fire in 1970 in New Orleans or 73 in New Orleans. There was a police raid in New York in 1970 after which a man jumped out of the police station and paled himself on a fence and was taken with a fence in his stomach to the police station. So those bars aren't remembered. And we remember the Stonewall not because of the Stonewall, but because of the uprising resistance and because of this organization, which formed an annual march. And it pains me sometimes when people celebrate the bar, when we're celebrating the resistance to the bar and to the police. And the oppression of the people in the bar, the oppression of all of those people who went to places like that. Yes, and the bar which collaborated with that by paying off the police by, you know, probably being tipped off to many of the raids, maybe not all of them, but they were certainly tipped off to a lot of them. So the bars were not our friends, they were collaborators with the police. We shouldn't be celebrating places like the Stonewall, which were owned by organized crime. This is kind of quite ironic. So you were also involved continuing to go to see our groups in red stockings. And you talked very informatively about the feminist organizations at the time and how you happened to join red stockings. And that must have drawn you into the action, the memorable action on March 17th of the Ladies' Home Journal. And let me show the audience a picture now of gathering of people. The one man is John Mac Carter and the woman who's, you know, most forceful is Shulamith Firestone. And you're there, it's not a great picture because your eyes are closed, but you're in a headband carrying a purse. So this was memorable. Tell us about it. Well, we were very upset about the way women were being depicted in magazines. They still had these post-war recipes for Jell-O recipes that took 50 minutes. And one of the great columns in Ladies' Home Journal was, can this marriage be saved? Not even should this marriage be saved. We chose the Ladies' Home Journal because it was the only one of these major magazines that was edited by a man. And so we targeted the Ladies' Home Journal. And a hundred of us went into the journal. We had a diagram of the floor. We went in there about 9 a.m., looking, we hoped, like the workers. And we took over their offices. We held consciousness raising with the employees to tell them that they should be having better jobs and be moving up and paid better. And we tried to negotiate with John McCarter about improving conditions at the journal. He was not having any of it. But about 5 o'clock when the cameras started to roll, Julie Firestone, you know, who really was a wonderful genius who wrote The Dialectics of Sex, but she was also a hothead, she jumped up on the desk and was going to push John McCarter out the window. He was standing up and he had his back to the plate glass windows. We were on, we were way up, I think on the, you know, we were on the 19th floor or something. And I was on the side of the desk and I grabbed her outstretched arm and I had been studying Judo and I flipped her over my shoulder and she landed on her back on the crowd of women. She didn't hit the floor. It was like landing into a mosh pit. That's how I describe it. And she wasn't hurt. I don't think she ever spoke to me again. But after that, John McCarter and he blanched and he decided to negotiate. I think we all better after that. And he gave us an issue of the magazine, an insert. We were paid $10,000, which was a lot of money in 1970. And we were, you know, we gave that all of that money to a revolving bail fund for women. We didn't, we didn't take any of the money. However, Susan Brown Miller, who is one of the organizers that very weekend, the day before on March 16th, had published an article in the Times Magazine in which he called lesbians a lavender herring, which was in response to Begley Friedan calling us a lavender menace. And some people didn't show up at the ladies home journal action because they were so upset with Susan and some women in the movement. So that also led to the formation of the very famous lavender menace action. Which we'll get to. Yeah. Following up personally, John McCarter approached you afterwards in the last meeting that you had with him and gave you a personal memento. Didn't he say something like, I don't know what you were thinking, but well, he gave me a gold heart, which I still have that is engraved with the motto of the ladies home journal. And it says never underestimate the power of a woman. It's just kind of, it's really kind of hilarious because, you know, so for me to get this, this heart, you know, for a straight man, which I, I still have. I mean, it's a wonderful memento. Well, I think you sort of changed his life. I don't know. I don't, you know, I have no way to judge whether the, how strong the glass was, whether he would have fallen to the floor. You know, I don't know. I just, I was thinking about shooing. I thought that I was thinking there, shoo is going to push the sky out the window and spend the rest of his life in jail and, you know, surely that would be terrible. And I'm a pacifist. I really don't believe in hurting people. Even John Mac Carter. I mean, whatever horrible recipes he published about Jello, he didn't deserve to die for bad advice given to women in his magazine. I mean, that's how I feel about it. Um, these are not death penalty offenses. And I just don't believe in hurting people. Well, Susan Brown Miller talks about it in her memoir against our will. And she said, Carly Jay had the presence of mind to interrupt it. So, you know, let's move on to March 1970. And the ogling, that was another action that you initiated in this instance. And we have a clip now from that wonderful film. She's beautiful when she's angry, which I would also recommend to all the viewers that they haven't seen it. So let's take a look at 55 seconds of the ogling. And then you can tell us a little bit about it, Carla, how you happened to think of it and so forth. They startled Wall Street one day by an exhibition in which roles were reversed. Oh, they're so beautiful. All of them. Ah, those men, those sex objects. It was reported in the newspaper that there was a woman who worked in the Wall Street area. She was very well endowed. And men would wait for her outside the Wall Street train station. And they would pinch her, make sucking noises at her. And I thought, this is pretty disgusting. Oh, wow. Look at the legs on that one. So I organized what I rather grandly called the First National Ogling. Those pants, they just bring out your best. Hey, how do you like that hat over there? Oh, why the shackle? Okay. There was a an article in the New York Times about a woman whose name, as I remember, was Brenda. And she worked on Wall Street. And she was what we would call a well endowed secretary who liked to wear sweaters that were a bit tight on her. And when she emerged from the subway Wall Street, men in pinstripe suits would follow her to work. I mean, dozens of them whistling, catcalling, talking about her body. And they did this days, every day after day after day. And she couldn't go out for lunch. And they made her life a living hell just because she wanted to wear what she wanted to wear. And I read this article, I thought, was really awful. We did not have a word like sexual harassment in 1970. And I thought, yeah, we should do something about this. And so I organized a group of friends, I called the media, and we went down to Wall Street. And when the men came out of the subway station, we harassed them. We called them names, we made comments on their bodies. And they didn't walk away, they ran. It's really quite hilarious. They just started running for their lives. When we talk about, say, they had a lovely rear end, they would just take off. And it was really quite humorous. And ABC filmed it. And so it got a lot of coverage. And it led to this modern group today called Hollerback, which is all over the world, and which fights street harassment of women, gay men and women and trans people are harassed. And they teach people how not to be bystanders in the street. Yes. And I remember, I was living in Boston in 1979. And I watched a Neil Lehrer news hour in which they had a short segment about sexual harassment in the workplace, in this instance. And I thought, wow, there's finally a name for this. And it was occurring to me at my then job at the Boston Conservatory of Music. I was being sexually harassed. And, you know, this was so prescient, this action, the overland. So you have to be commended as the originator of it. It was fun. You know, people forget we, we had a lot of fun doing these things. We had a lot of laughs. And, you know, and, you know, interestingly, many times, particularly at the Ladies Home Journal, I expected to be arrested. But I was never arrested. And it is really interesting. We never, unlike these buffoons and thugs who went into the Capitol, we never damaged property. We never hurt anyone. We never threatened anyone. We were very respectful of people who worked in environments. And we never, we never were arrested. We, we, we tried to make these people our friends. Well, let's talk about the National Organization of Women. And the, I have a picture I'd like to show everybody. It's from the memoir called Fighting Homophobia, Take a Lesbian to Lunch. And here's a picture of a group you are among them. Right before the second New York Second Congress to Unite Women in May 1970. This is moments before the zap that I'd like you to talk about. But let me tell you who's in the picture. From left to right, Rita May Brown, you in a hat, Arlene Kisner, Lois Hart, and Martha Shelley. You're all wearing lavender menace t-shirts under your clothes and carrying the woman identified woman manifesto. That was a fabulous manifesto, by the way. When I taught lesbian lit, I always started with that. Tell us about the lavender menace action, which is also featured in She's Beautiful when she's angry. Well, but Betty Friedan, you know, had called us lavender menace that we were going to ruin the women's movement if people felt there were lesbians in the movement that would tarnish the movement. And there were a lot of lesbians in the movement. So she went around firing as many lesbians as she could find who worked. And now she just kind of had a purge. And we decided we had enough, particularly after Susan's article, dismissing us as a lavender herring, you know, a kind of significant false trail. So we got together, about 40 of us, a small organizing committee, maybe of about 10 to 20 wrote the woman identified woman. It really was collectively wrote, written primarily by Artemis March, but we all put our two sense in and wrote parts of this. We got together on East 6th Street and we dyed t-shirts that said lavender menace. And we gathered outside the Chelsea location of the Second Congress to unite women in May of 1970. It was sponsored by now. And there was nothing on their agenda about lesbians or about race or about class. And we were wearing our street clothes, as you point out. And I was planted in the audience, some women filed in, and we had a couple of people backstage and they pulled the lights off. When the Congress started, when the lights came back on, the lesbians had filled the stage, taken off their outer clothing. And the audience was completely surrounded by lesbians holding signs like take a lesbian to lunch. We are your worst nightmare. We are your best fantasy. And we had a lot of these signs that were kind of humorous. And I was planted in the audience. I was wearing a blouse and I stood up and I said, I'm tired of being in the audience. I'm tired of being in the closet. Sisters, I'm going to join you. And I pulled my blouse off and I had a lavender menace t-shirt underneath and I joined the women. We went up on stage and we added things like lesbianism, race and class to the agenda, to the workshops. And they never really came off the agenda again. I mean, it's kind of shocking to think that these things were not being discussed, any of them. It was really shocking. And one thing that needs to be mentioned over and over again is that neither the women's movement or the pre-stone wall lesbian and gay movement, because they really weren't trans people in in Mathershine and those of Blythus, there might have been one, were intersectional. And they really didn't care about issues of race and class. And they didn't care about the war or if they cared about them, they were extraneous. And we people who are more radical in the gay liberation front and radical lesbians and to some degrees more radical feminists, these intersectionalities were at the heart of who we were. And we aligned with groups like the Black Panthers and the young lords who were the Puerto Rican Liberation Group and many other groups. And they were not without controversy. But we wanted to be part of a larger fabric of people who were fighting for social justice. Yes. Let's move on if we could to the demise of some of these groups. And I'd like to read from a passage where you talk about barracuda behavior and the context of this is the accusation that certain feminist leaders were trying to be stars. Members of the movement began to attack one star after another. This kind of barracuda behavior, fighting anything that shines, continues to this day, which is one reason no unifying leader has ever emerged in the gay lesbian or women's movement. Do you think that's true today? I think to a certain degree, we could say if there is a leader, maybe Gloria Steinem, she wouldn't want that title. But she may be the most widely recognized national figure, I think. But in the LGBT movement, we really still sometimes rather viciously tear down people who dare to rise above. And we can be quite cruel to people who are exhibiting star power. And it's really a shame because the message is to go someplace else. We used to call these people star trippers. But what we do really is we've driven many people and countless talent and brain power people out of all these people out of our movement. We only defeat ourselves in that regard. It really is a difficult situation. On the other hand, we have to acknowledge that as queers, to use that all-encompassing moniker, we don't really have that much in common. We are a very broad spectrum of people. And the only thing that we might have in common is the disapproval of the patriarchy, especially of the right wing, which would like to legislate us and otherwise get us out of existence. And that's the only thing we have in common. But because people hate us in the same way doesn't mean that we are actually the same or that we have the same issues. And so it's a difficult situation to be in. Unlike women who are raised as women, or if you're Italian American or Jewish American or African American, we don't have a cultural heritage that we were brought up in that might unify us from the moment of our birth. And so we are in a difficult situation in terms of thinking like a people. And that's why people like the Stonewall story because every group of people likes an origin myth. And whether this story fits or not, the Stonewall uprising is probably going to be our epic of Gilgamesh, whether or not it's actually true or whether or not it's actually appropriate. Those biblical and worldwide epics aren't true either, probably, and yet they exist. Although you've mentioned in the memoir that even Gloria Steinem was vilified and accused of being a CIA agent, but she was able to weather that storm and was disproved. These charges were disproved by her biographer Carolyn Heilbrunn and others. So she survived to the barracuda behavior. She did admit that the organization she was working for was funded by the CIA. And the CIA back in probably the 50s when this happened was not the same as the CIA today. I mean she has explained this that many, many organizations were funded by them. That's not the same as saying that she was an undercover agent on their payroll. They were slipping organization's money. I think that when we deal with people, whether it's Gloria Steinem or we're dealing with someone like Roberta Kaplan who you know recently got caught up in the Cuomo scandal, we need to look at the totality of what people have done for us and not say, oh look, she made a mistake. Let's just throw her overboard. We really have to stop this kind of behavior and look at one thing that a person said in his, her, their past and have that tip the scale totally overboard against everything else. We're being totally without any kind of sense. We allow Biden, for example, to evolve in quotes even after what he did to Anita Hill. We allowed him to evolve. He became our candidate. You know, many people including myself somewhat reluctantly backed him. I worked for him because look what the alternative was. Why are we so less kind to our queer people? Why are we like that? We don't need the right sometimes. We're just eating each other up without them. Very true. After many of these groups disbanded, you became an academic and you know, some of it overlapped. And as a lesbian scholar, I can't tell you how important your work was to me. Particularly, you know, I'm very interested in women in print always have been. I'd like you to talk if you would about the cutting edge lesbian life and literature series. You published 24 volumes. Half of them are on my bookshelf. Some of them I was able to review. So that made a huge difference to me as a scholar and tell me how you happened to start it and how long did it last? Joanne Glasgow and I edited a book called Lesbian Texts and Contexts, which was a post-structuralist look at lesbian studies. And it was actually the first lesbian studies anthology that came out from a university press. And it came out in around 1989 or so. And it was very popular. So I looked around and there were no lesbian studies series at any university presses around 1990. So I spoke to my editor at NYU, Nico Fund, who was, he's at Oxford now. He's a darling and incredibly smart man. And I said, what if I do a lesbian study series? And it was really out there to be doing such a thing. Because unfortunately, I have to say we as lesbians, we make less money. You know, a household of two lesbians do not make as much as a heterosexual couple or as two gay men. You know, the only group that will make less than two white lesbians would be two black lesbians, right? So, you know, lesbians really, as women, are still down there on the economic scale. So it's really, and we're women in academia. And then we're lesbians in academia as a percentage of the graduate school population of the professorship. But be there as in May, we, they took a risk. We tried to market some of these books to a more general readership, especially I wanted to bring back some of these forgotten classics that were out of print, into print again, books like Lady's Almanac, which was then out of print. And to bring into print for the first time, books that had never been translated, books by Natalie Barney were translated, Lucy De La Rue, Marjous were translated. And I also, the book I'm kind of proudest of was I met up with Helena Whitbread, who had found the diaries of Anne Lister in a library in Yorkshire. And Helena is not a scholar. She was just a person who came across these and she liked a puzzle. And the diaries were written in code. It took her many, many years to break this code and to put the diaries together and to edit them and cut them down. And I published those in the United States. They became the TV series Gentleman Jack. But at first when they came out, in the, they came around maybe 1994, they were mocked by other scholars. You know, other scholars mocked me. They accused Helena of being a fraud. They accused her of having made these diaries up. Why? Because they were social constructions, the scholars, that is. And they said there were no lesbians prior to 1869. And of course, the diaries are from the early 1830s. And therefore, you know, this is kind of the conclusion, Anne Lister could not have been a lesbian. She could not have said this. The diaries were fake. Well, my reasoning here is, you know, having studied literature is that if you're going to have a fake diary, you discover it in an attic in your uncle's trunk after he dies. It's not in the public library in Yorkshire. Well, let me give you a tip if you want to create a fraud. Don't leave it to the public library for everybody and his brother and sister to look at. Put it up in the attic for somebody to break into. So I believed it was true. I met with Helena. I believe she was genuine. It was a bit of a risk. It was a risk to my reputation. But I think that Helena is having the last laugh, I hope, all the way to the bank. Exactly. Believe it or not, we're drawing to the end. So let me ask you for your last words to the audience before we leave. I think my last words are that people should get involved or remain involved with something in the movement. And we should also, in this time of COVID, people say to me, shouldn't the pandemic be over? Well, this is the after. We have to live our lives in a way that makes us feel safe. But that should involve other people who haven't had the benefits we've had in getting through this pandemic. Those of us who are listening to this show are the survivors up until this point. And we need to help people who are worse off even than they were before. Certainly people in our movement. But we need also to get out there more and think of people in our communities. And let them know that we're here and that we're part of them, that we are their neighbors and their relatives, and that we care about people around them. And we're not just there for ourselves. We also need to get out there on those marches. If choice goes for women. And I recently heard a horrifying podcast in which now fetuses are being relabeled, the pre-born, as if like cars are now pre-owned. These are the pre-born. If our rights go as women, then trans people are not going to have rights over their bodies. And then marriage rights are going to go. So we all need to get out there for women's reproductive rights. You don't have to have anything done if you don't want. And get out there, everyone, to fight for the rights of trans youth to live the lives they want. What they do, like women's rights, it's between them and their doctors. And it's none of your business. It's none of my business. And we all need to get behind this. And those are my last words. And I'm still out there, my legs work. I'm still out there marching. Do what you can, even if it's 30 minutes a week. Spoken as a true scholar, activist. Carla Jay, thank you for joining us. Okay. And remember, in the meantime, to resist.