 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. Thanks for joining us and enjoy the show. Hi, everybody. I'm here with Elena Gross and Julie Ensar, two illustrious guests. You may have seen Julie before. She's kind of a friend of the show at this point. And we're here to celebrate the publication of this wonderful book that they have put together, Outright, The Speeches That Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture. It's been a wonderful read for me. And before we get started, let me tell you a little about our guests. Julie, our Ensar is the author of four poetry collections, including Avowed and the editor of the Complete Works of Pat Parker and Sister Love, The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, 1974 to 1989. Ensar edits and publishes Sinister Wisdom, a Multicultural, Lesbian Literary Art Journal, Literary and Art Journal, and You Live in Central Florida. Nice and warm there now, I bet. Well, today it's cold. It's only up to 65. So by Floridian standards, we're freezing. Well, Elena, you live in Oakland? I live in Oakland. I am currently sitting in San Francisco right now. Also kind of warm, compared to Vermont, anyway, both of them. Yeah, comparatively. It's a decent day today. I think it's like, I think we are up to 59 degrees or something like that. It's like the low 60s today. Oh, that's lovely. Elena is an independent writer, curator, and culture critic living in Oakland, California. Her research specializes in conceptual and material abstractions of the body and representations of identity in fine art, photography, and popular media. Welcome to both of you. And thank you for joining us. Thanks for having us. Let's start with the book. How did it come together? Do you want to start, Elena? Sure, yeah. So for how it started for me was that I was invited to be a part of this project that E.G. Crichton was developing called Outlook the Birth of the Queer. It was kind of a look back at the Outlook publication the first day in lesbian quarterly. And she invited these different different folks, artists, writers, scholars, activists, basically to respond to an issue, an old issue of Outlook. So she kind of matched make, you know, she did her like matchmaker thing and kind of matched us with an issue. And in the issue that I received, you know, you could select anything to kind of respond to it in whatever, you know, fashion, you know, you you start. And so I was really struck by the ads for the Black and White ads for the first outright conference in 1990 in San Francisco. And just, you know, in diving in and starting to research what the conferences were, because I had was previously completely unfamiliar with them. I was one amazed that that was my first introduction to to the conferences, but then just just so overjoyed, just imagining what just imagining what these conferences would have been like, to be in the room with, you know, all these writers who I'd been reading, you know, on my own or through, you know, other, you know, academic research for so long, and people who I really admired writers who I never knew about, you know, and I ended up writing kind of a responsive essay around how important the conferences were and, you know, why it felt, why I wished what I hoped would be, you know, how we could revisit this, this event as a means of thinking about what this could look like, you know, in our future and our present day or future. And so, so after that project, EG put together a panel of different respondents from that project for the Queer History Conference in San Francisco and invited me to read my essay, which I did. And in the audience was Julie, who was, you know, kind of sitting, like, enraptured with like a twinkle in her eye. And after the panel was over, you know, she she came up to me and said, you know, I really think that this could be this could be a book. And so that kind of began that summer after that conference, like the slow build up to, you know, can we do this? Yeah, I think we can. And so that's really how, in my mind, that's kind of how the project came together. And if I may interject, before we go to Julie, I had the privilege of reading that speech that you delivered on that panel, and I loved it. And I really love that you mentioned T. Corrine, whom I have hired for years, and of course, Dorothy Allison. And I loved in skin her tribute to Bertha Harris, another writer whom we need to remember. So, you know, your, your speech was very historically resonant for me. And so. Oh, thank you. You can read the whole thing on your website, right? Yes. Yes, you can. So then Julie was in the audience and well, and so, you know, we started we started talking about this and one of the things I didn't want to do was work was was work on the project much before we had a publisher. And I had been having some conversations with Kim Gwinta at Rutgers University Press and not kind of had the right project. But we pitched this to her. And she had heard about the conference before and Jeremy Granger, who's the director of marketing at Rutgers University Press, had attended the conference. So there was lots of kismet there with the press and they signed on and that's when we got serious and said, All right, what does what does the book look like? And I can't. I think we were kind of in the pandemic. We signed the contract before the maybe just before the pandemic. And we did there was a and so we were like doing some research and we were having some stuff. But then the pandemic came. And in some ways, I think of it really as a pandemic project, in part, because like we were listening to all these speeches and thinking about this conference in this time when we couldn't go out of our houses. So it carried even, I think, more kind of intellectual and emotional weight with the possibility of gathering with people at a time when we were in this chosen isolation for everyone's health. And what's interesting, what struck me immediately is how well researched it is. And so how did how did you do all that research in the pandemic? Yeah, it was definitely complicated because, you know, at the, you know, obviously, Julie and I are separated by, you know, she's on one side of the country and I'm on the other. But then there's also archives and papers of all of these writers, you know, libraries were shuttered or were, you know, shuttered universities. So being able to even access information became we had to get very creative around finding, you know, so it was it was a lot of different things like finding YouTube videos, finding audio, you know, tapes and Julie can talk more about the tape specifically, reaching out to researchers to, you know, is there any way that like, you're still in the office or going into the office, you know, one or two times a week that we could like, you know, kind of access these files. And so it all kind of came together in not the most elegant of ways. But but yeah, it was it was pretty interesting to kind of embark on something so research intensive at a time when there were even, you know, there's always kind of access issues when it comes to archival material. And this was the biggest access issue of them all and in a certain way. And so yeah, we just kind of, we just kept chugging along and tried not to let the tourists. Well, I was able to be outright 90 some of the speeches are on YouTube. And I listened to some of them. And I thought, oh my gosh, because, you know, you really they're not very good. You can't really hear that well. And I thought, did they, how did they do this? How did you do this? Did you have the I mean, was the audio pretty bad usually or difficult? And did you transcribe or what are the nuts and bolts of this process? All of the above, you know, so we so I had a couple tapes that people had given me like they had attended the conference. And a good friend of mine, he mailed he mailed me not only the tapes that he had but like programs from the two that he had attended. And then we had the YouTube ones and use the transcription service for that one. Right. And we used it. And it's amazing in the past decade or so transcription that's computer driven has gotten much better. It's not perfect, right? There's still a lot of cleanup and editing with it. But you know, it's much faster than human transcription. And for some of the pieces, like the John Preston piece, Preston did publish versions of it in his book. And so we took the transcript compared to the book version and sort of sifted out like Mining for Gold from that. Similarly, the same little piece is published in his book. We listened and did a transcription of his full speech, which was riveting. It's long and but it's this incredible story that's just spreads out like a flower and then all folds back in on itself at the end. And so, you know, it was a lot of sifting through transcriptions and audio and listening for what's and thinking about what's going to make a great volume when we were all done. And I tried to follow along on some of the speeches and I noticed some editing. Would you say you heavily edited it or shortened or We definitely did some editing, some condensing. One just we had, you know, because the manuscript had a word count that we had to, you know, kind of be consistent, considerate of and wanting to make sure that we had as as full of a cater of writers represented but also, you know, being having to fit within a specific with it in specific parameters. So that was one consideration. Some speeches, when you listen to the tape, you can hear how how they come across when delivered as a speech doesn't really read the same way on the page. So there were some considerations there. Some speeches that had been, you know, like as Julie was kind of mentioning a number of the speeches have appeared in other collections. So wanting to really wanting to choose works that are lesser known or, you know, or, you know, perhaps they're in a collection that is out of print now. So really thinking about, you know, what's going to make this a, you know, a special kind of collection as opposed to just a reprint of a reprint of a reprint. So yeah, there were a lot of there were a few considerations in that required, but I wouldn't say that I would say for most of the speeches, I wouldn't say that most of the speeches are heavily edited. I think we tried to make sure the material was as consistent with the original as we were able to. Well, I think part of it was also, one of the things we were also really thinking about is sort of balancing the experience of what your readers have when you sit down to read a book. You have a different sort of expectation than when you sit down to hear somebody speak. So we wanted to both fulfill the reader expectation, but also preserve a little bit of that excitement of being in a space where someone's speaking, you know, often speaking from a prepared speech, but there's even from a prepared speech, there's still the intimacy and excitement of the oral tradition. And one of the things that I know I deliberated a lot about, there's a part in Allen Ginsberg's speech where he gives the phone number of the FCC, right? And we went back and forth because I was now reading this in a book, you're going to be like, why is this phone number here? And I don't even know if the phone number is still correct. So I was like, oh, we should just cut this. And I think Ginsberg's speech was, I mean, I think it would have been exciting to be in the room with him, but he also read a little bit in a monotone. But it was both monotone, but also this passionate thing of telling everyone, free speech is so vital to us as gay people that you must call this number now. And he kept repeating it. And that, like when he gets to the number, like that is really when you can hear his voice shift, you can picture his body language shifting, like that's where it really hits this crescendo for him. And so yeah, I was glad because I think that hopefully you get that from reading it, that he's like, no, I'm going to stop like what he'd already had prepared to like insist that everyone in this room write down this number and like insist that you call it as soon as the speech is over, as soon as the speech concludes. And I think, yeah, that's one of those things that you get from being in the room that you don't always get from reading a book. And so being able to balance that was really, was really important. I know what you mean, because for example, when I, I love the as an example, Hempill's speech. And I didn't realize until we got to Minnie Bruce Brad at the end, that people had hissed that, you know. And so again, you were able to convey it not in the speech itself. And I listened to that recording and you couldn't hear it. It seemed like, you know, he was resoundingly applauded. And that's such an important speech, I think that, you know, applies to contemporary times as well. Well, I didn't realize you had a word limit, because one of my, in the beginning, in the 1990 conference, there were two plenaries, one involved AIDS and the other was lesbian and gay literature in the marketplace. And my question was going to be why you chose not to include that. The word limit is probably one answer. And what else? And also we didn't, I don't, we didn't have tapes of that. I hear that there's a full collection of the tapes for the 1990 outright at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, but they were closed during the time that we were doing most of the research. So that was one, I had hired someone who photographed all of the materials at Northeastern University, sort of related to the conference. So we had, so I had this kind of photographic trove of all of the program books and things like that, so we could piece together things about the conference. And Northeastern University archivist Molly Brown was working during part of the pandemic and did digitized copies of a couple of the speeches for us, as well as some photographs. But the Historical Society in San Francisco was closed the whole time. So I've actually not heard the speeches from that panel, which I think must have been an amazing one. I know it. But another, another reason I thought might have been that so much has changed. And that is really clear from this collection also. And in fact, I think you might say at some point that it was before, oh, you said in the other interview that I loved that we'll talk about in a minute, that you couldn't, you had to announce room changes. You couldn't send it around on people's phones. And, you know, technology has produced so much since the 90s. So I have, since you mentioned hiring somebody, I let me ask you about research assistance, because it's so impressive all, you know, did you have research assistance? Or did you do it all yourself? Well, so I, I hired somebody that that went up to the Northeastern Library and I highlighted all the folders that I wanted her to look at and everything. And, and Elaine, I think this was like really early on, I'm not sure we were, I don't know if we were working together at that point, or we had just like sort of started thinking about things. But Malika Fitzhugh did that for me. But no, I mean, research assistance, and in some ways you're talking about an old, another time, a time when we also talked to, taught, used, talked on phones that hung on the wall. You know, I think neither of us, while we were working on the book had university appointments and the things that come with that, which is of course research assistance and those sorts of things. So we, we did it. We were our own research assistants. And I applaud that because research is really important and it doesn't reside only in the academy, as you have demonstrated. Judy Gron says, if there is a gay or lesbian writer who has never done any organizing, that person is taking a free ride. And that seems like a light motif that runs throughout all of the speeches, the relationship between activism and writing. And Sarah Schulman understood her speech when she says, do your writing during the day and then go out and lick envelopes. Another day, well, go out and pick it up, then go out and do activism. Do you have any response to this? I think they straddled it beautifully in the book you put together. Do you have any response to that? I mean, I think, especially with both Judy and Sarah's, you know, being, you know, the first conference of the, you know, the first instance of the conference and also it being 1990, I think you really feel an urgency because this is, you know, the height of the AIDS crisis. And so I think there's a real sense of, I think it's something that we, you know, can and should look to and learn from at all periods of time. But I think there's a real sense that, you know, people are dying, like not in an abstract sense, not, you know, but our friends, our family members, people who should be at this conference right now are all dying every single day. And no one, no one cares. You know, the people, people who should care do not care. And so it's really up to us to care for not only what, you know, not only what we do or the literary production, you know, the written word, but we need to care for one another and we need to care for our community because no one else is going to do it. And we kind of, you know, in a much more, in a similar impassion, but maybe less shaming way than, you know, say like a Larry Kramer, I think they're really trying to activate the people in the room to stay true to the work that they're doing because it's necessary because it's needed, but also to galvanize everyone around, you know, our kind of collective, our collective struggles and our collective oppressions and to really bolster one another and to help each other out to, to, we're, you know, the only ones who are going to, we are in charge of saving ourselves. No one else is going to be here to do it. So let's get off our asses and do it. Well, I've come across a certain mindset that the 90s were a terrible time and of course it was, but I also think of all the activism, of course there's age activism, the lesbian Avengers were active and there was so much pushback going on that is often overlooked too. So it, you know, it's terrible the things that were happening, but there was also pushback that we really was significant and energizing, I think, for a lot of the writers. And I think it applies today, don't you, that activism is, you know, age is still with us. It may not be, it may not be as pressing as it once was, but there are still issues that we, as writers and artists need to push back against. I mean, you know, we think of the culture wars in the 90s and Jesse Helms and what's going on here in 2022. I think, you know, I keep, I've been thinking a lot about, about Judy's challenge, because I also think one of the things that she was, she was speaking to at that point that's, that does get a little lost is she's speaking to really the need for men and women to work together. And I think that was one of the things that this outright conference coming out of the Outlook Magazine, like one of the things that Outlook really took on as a fundamental commitment and challenges, like how are men and women going to work together? And in the late 80s, that was, that was in the air very much after, I think, a period where a lot of lesbians were, had been organizing with women in feminist communities in lesbian only communities. And there was a real kind of sense of the need for co-gender work. So I do think that's one of the, the resonances of what she says. And, and then of course, Ginsburg talking about the, the challenges to free speech about the censorship that was happening. I think we're, I think there are different registers today. You know, I think that writing communities more broadly are really invested in organizing against authoritarianism. And one of the things we've sort of seen come out, even in the past two or three weeks is so much translation work of Ukrainian writers, and really of people thinking about how does writing happen under authoritarian threats. Similar things came out when Trump was elected in the United States. So I think that there are different registers. I guess one of the things I kind of wonder about is, and one of the reasons why, why I wanted to do this book is what are the unique challenges that LGBTQ writers should be organizing around to engage the challenges of the moment. And I think, you know, Ginsburg really was making vital connections between queer work and broader attacks on free speech. And I think there's, there's the need for us to do that work. And I think it is happening. I don't think it's necessarily distilled right now with the same intensity that outright was distilling the work. And that speaks to the end of Elena's speech that she delivered in 2016 on the panel, where she says, she quotes Laverne Gageabeeb who says, of her need to write and her need to read more explicitly gay and lesbian writing, we will fight to keep it. I'll fight to keep it because I've got to have it. And so I think the need is equally pressing that you announce so eloquently in 2016. And I think I have no evidence for this, but some, I think a lot of resistance was ceded during that period and has continued and expanded and proliferated in various ways. Let's talk to a little bit. Well, I want to mention Melvin Dixon's wonderful remarks, a pro of AIDS. The title of his talk is, I'll be somewhere listening for my name, in which he talks about his friend Greg who died, who's going to be listening for his name. Dixon is going to die shortly after this speech and he'll be listening for his name. And let me use this opportunity to call our audience's attention to a wonderful interview with our two guests that occurred that was conducted by the National Poetry Foundation off the shelf series. And it's called Listen for My Name. And you both talk very cogently about all the issues that your book raises. And that interview can be found at www.poetryfoundation.org. So I encourage our audience to tune in to it. And it explores a lot of the avenues raised by the book and talks about the 90s and the difficulties they're in. Can we talk for a minute about Christos, a wonderful writer who's included. And I'd like to read a little of what she says because I think it's timely. She says, as long as we butcher language ourselves, such as writing the word blind to mean ignorance or insensitivity, we are cooperating with our oppressors. When we hold events in inaccessible places or charge rates that could buy a bag of groceries, we imitate the very people whose aim it is to eliminate us. I applaud that sentiment. And I think it applies today. Do you have any response to those remarks? Very pithy, I think. I was going to say two things. One, just in relationship to the Melvin Dixon, is that another powerful thing about listening to different speeches is at some point during all of the conferences, they lifted up the names of people who died from AIDS. And we listened to that in two or three different conferences. And it was really just a stunning moment, again, reminding us of the power of what happens when we collectively gather because you could hear, it sounds odd to say, but you could hear this very large convention center room and the sort of shuffling of over a thousand people in the rooms and the names first being read from the stage, but then people standing up and saying them. And it was just, there were always incredible transcendent moments of the conference. And in Christos's speech, she says that a little bit before the part you quoted, of the 60 original members of gay American Indians in San Francisco, only 10 have survived because of AIDS. And so I think there's just so many kind of imprints in this book that remind us of the devastation and loss that AIDS brought. But then also how it really taught us to speak to power. And I think that's the quote that you brought from Christos also inspires that. And the other thing I'll just say about Christos is everyone should go and read and discover her poetry. I mean, that that sort of attention to language, to words, to how they're arranged on the page, to their resonances within it, I think really characterizes her writing. And she's an extraordinary, extraordinary poet. And apropos of the naming ritual, you know, I was thinking, someone I was speaking with this morning talked about their workplace naming the names of people who died. And I think that might have begun, I thought of this conference. And I think it might have begun there because it's a tradition that's been kind of almost incorporated into the mainstream. I mean, didn't Elizabeth Warren list the names of transgender people who have been murdered in a political arena? So another example of how groundbreaking the outright conferences were. Then let's talk a little about the craft of writing, which appears, you know, it's a writer's conference after all, and people are talking about what to do with your writing. And Jewel Gomez on page 153 of my volume mentions writing and says, what I'm actually saying is, using our political eye, we can approach our writing and just as importantly, the business of writing with integrity. And that the idea of writing with integrity, I think is very provocative. How do you respond to the idea of writing with integrity? What's writing with integrity? Well, I think what I love about that excerpt specifically is when she says the business of writing with integrity. I think there's a real sense of being gay and lesbian writers writing from a place of authenticity and a place of speaking to one's experience and not sanitizing, not reducing, not diminishing the very real realities of a queer life at this moment in time. I think a lot about the many turns to make queer writing or queer art content in general sexy, that I think we're kind of like sellable and palatable in certain ways, especially kind of coming out of the 90s and into, you know, talk about authoritarianism and into like kind of the Bush years as well, you know, coming out of the Reagan years, but then going into the Bush years and that kind of long stretch, and obviously up to where we are now. And I think this idea of the business of writing with integrity is very much staying true to, is writing without fear. I think it really speaks to Witt Ginsburg saying, I think it speaks to a lot of that. It's speaking back against the authoritarianism, as Julie was pointing out, speaking back to these attacks on, the sensorious attacks on on queer writing, it's speaking back to the ways that marginalized communities are being silenced, are being criminalized in certain ways. So I think that those are all the things that I kind of think of is, you know, is important is important for the gay and lesbian writer is to is to write without fear and to write from a place of authenticity about about one's life and about the world around you. Julie? Well, and I really connect it with with Preston's, John Preston talking about the work he did in Maine in the last years of his life. You know, in the, in the, in the go-go 70s, as I understand John Preston's narrative, which I'm still discovering and learning about myself, but in the go-go 70s, he was writing great erotic porn for gay men and, and also, you know, doing like he's he has such a great biography, like founding the advocate and other sorts of things, right? So, but he really, and he describes himself and, and Joe Nestle writes about this beautifully, he describes himself as a pornographer. And then in the 80s, he moves up to Maine. He knows that he has AIDS himself. He knows that he's going to die and he starts working at the Maine AIDS project and doing essentially oral histories as people are telling their life stories and he's recording them. And, and, you know, and I, and I imagine he alludes to like some people diminish this work, sort of say, like, you know, I think very much in a tradition of, you know, like, like, like John Preston should have been aiming to be Proust or another kind of writer that's really recognized in the, in the high literary world as greatness. And here he is doing these oral histories of dying people in Maine. And he says, you know, that this is the greatest work he can do to be of service to his community. And I think that's also a part of the integrity that dual is talking about, that to do, to do work with integrity is thinking about partially where will I, how will I be appraised by history, but also how am I serving my community, the people who really nurture and lift me up. You each have been influenced no doubt by this project. What essays have influenced you the most and how? It's a hard question, because they're all wonderful. And they all affected me variously. I'm going to let my dogs out in one minute and then I can come back, but Elena can start. Okay, I'll start. I guess I'd have to start with the first one in a sense, or the first, the first of the speeches that I, you know, when I was first working on the essay for the Outlook for the Birth of the Queer Project, that really kind of inspired me, which was Sarah Schulman's speech and the responsibility of the writer. And again, exactly as we've been talking about this idea of, you know, doing your work at night, but then putting your body on the line. And if you're not, you're kind of, you know, like that, you know, that's like the responsibility of the writer at this time, in this moment in time is to be both, is to be both writer and activist. And your activism can take place via your writing in certain ways, but there are also, you know, how there's also other avenues of mutual aid, avenues of showing up for your community that are, that are necessary. So I think that's a speech that I, that was the first speech that I really connected with that like led me to, you know, become interested in this project, but also one that stays with me a lot now. There, but there are a couple others that I think Patrick Caliphia's speech and, you know, really not kind of similar to Preston really, you know, seeing themselves as a pervert and really, you know, and the importance of, you know, of, of queer desire, of sexuality and queer desires being necessary, being part of their community, their literary community as well as their community outside of, outside of writing and that not being compartmentalized for the sake of being palatable, for the sake of being accepted in a certain way and those things being necessarily entwined and making the writing better and making, you know, the community better. I think, especially because there are so many divisions along those lines, even now I think that's a conversation that we have every year in the lead up to June, you know, so I, that's like, that was also an essay that I think really resonated with me as well. But of course, so many of them, you know, I could pick out moments from almost each and every one. Julie. You know, I'm, one thing I want to highlight is the way, particularly after the conference moved to Boston, they would do a closing plenary with a performance by some kind of performance artist. One that we included in the book is a selection from Luisa Alfaro. And Judith Katz has a wonderful story of like from Alfaro came out on stage in skates and started performing his final show, his final, the final performance of the conference. And you know, I think the ways the conferences had a commitment to really thinking not only about writing, but across queer arts. That feels like another important element of what people were doing. You know, I talked earlier about how Judy's mobilizing a shared sense of solidarity between gay men and lesbians. I think people were also experiencing solidarity as writers, but also reaching for and thinking about solidarity as artists, right, you know, performance art and other kinds of theater that were Peggy Shaw has a selection in this. Peggy also performed during one of the conferences. And I think that those kind of linkages are really important as we sort of think about the conference, but also as we think about queer letters more broadly. And then, you know, Essex Hemphill's speech, also where he gives where he talks about his critique of the Maple Thorpe photographs and is booed by the conference, but is also this sort of reminder of how important it is that we that we listen to people with different perspectives. That we may feel galvanized and inspired by the ways that Ellen Ginsburg speaks against censorship. And we may, you know, and part of that was the censorship of Maple Thorpe, but that there are other stories and other perspectives on that same incident that are all so important for us to hear and listen to. And to me, neither, to me, the two don't diminish one another, but they help us have a more full picture of what's happening in our world and how it's affecting people in different ways so that we can think more intensively about how we want to be and how we want to respond. So those are, you know, some of the ones that stand out to me. And I love that they both talk about Maple Thorpe because it's like the speeches in form on another. It's part of an ongoing conversation. And it reminds you that this was live, you know. So, you know, Ellen Ginsburg gives his keynote and Elstead Temple is listening to this and thinking about his place in the world as a Black gay man and thinking about, you know, it reminds you that, you know, it's not just responsive in the sense of, you know, we often think about people being inspired or being influenced by writers who have another generation who came before them, reading them and then responding in kind. And this is a writer of another generation that you're in the same room as and responding in the moment to, you know, like this is discourse. This is ultimately what we all desire. This is why we all get into this. This is the discourse that we all seek. And it's, yeah, like that's one of the things that I think was most exciting about this project is just imagining that room and being reminded of why it's so, especially during COVID, as we're all trapped inside our houses, being reminded why it's so important for us to gather, why it's so important for us specifically of, you know, of these, you know, marginalized communities, why it's so important for us to gather with one another and have these conversations in real time. And what can come, you know, what can come out of it, what can be generated, what new is produced from from those relationships and from that coming together. Have you been personally changed by this project? And if so, how? I mean, I definitely have. I think this has been the most, like one of the most exciting, probably the most exciting and inspiring project I've ever worked on. And I think it's similar to, you know, what I was saying, I think it's, it's generated a lot for me and given me a lot of direction in terms of how the work that I would like to be doing and sort of, you know, how I see the work that needs to be done in my place within it. I think it's been, yeah, it's been a project that will lead to a lot more projects that will lead to a lot more projects in the future. Julie? Yeah, you know, how have I been changed by this project? I think one of the, it's nice to, I received the first tapes from outright well over 10 years ago, probably maybe even 12 or 14 years ago, somebody was like cleaning out and said, oh, you're interested in lesbian print culture. Here are these tapes. And I've been carrying them around. So, so one of the things is, it's nice to see projects come to fruition. Like I feel like that when things come to fruition, one of the things that does is gives more confidence of like, let's try, let's try the next project. And that, you know, that kind of part of the change is always a sort of sense of confidence or ability to take on the next thing. So I think that's one piece. You know, I was an activist and around during the 90s and knew about the outright conferences, but never went to them. And so I also feel, so I feel like this in some ways is, is the apology to my younger self that I never got to the conference that like, but I didn't get to the conference, but I got to explore it and think about it in these ways. It's also, it's prompted me to rethink how I think about the 1990s and activism and print activism and publishing during this time. I think it tells a story of publishing that's important for us to think about because there was this flowering and this, this great acceptance of queer authors in the mid 90s by commercial publishing houses. And, and, and we can kind of trace some of that trajectory through some of these speeches and think about, you know, the kind of perpetual question of mine is, you know, is commercial publishing our friend as in as LGBTQ people? Or are there other, and I think there are times that it can be, but I think it is not a long term faithful friend. I think it is a more of a feckless friend, commercial publishing, maybe like the Democrats, which may just enrage some of your viewers, but I, but that can be my, you know, that's my statement. So those, those are the things that are coming out for me from having this book out in the world and the things I'm thinking about. And you're right. They, I think that tension between mainstream and small press runs through the book, you know, so it's an ongoing concern for all of us now too. Well, this leads me to one of my last questions, which is, what are you working on now? What's next for each of you? You can start, Julie. Well, you know, I'm always working on a sinister wisdom issue. That's one of the things about being a quarterly publication that the schedule is relentless, which I must like in some way. But, you know, I'm working on two, I'm working on a couple new projects. One is I'm finishing a copy at it for a collection of poems by a poet named Lynn Launadier, which sinister wisdom will publish later this year, maybe early next year. It's another, it's like the Pat Parker project. When I finished Parker, I said I'd never do like another big collection of a single poet's work. And yet here I am again. So I'm working on that. I'm working on finishing the book that Ann, you and I have talked about of lesbian feminist publishing, which continues to, I continue to press away at that hoping to get that finished. And then I'm also, of course, always working on new poems. And you have a collection coming out. Is that right? No, no, it's the Launadier that I have. Before we get to Elena, let's talk about your immediate future and the immediate promotion of this book. Some of the events will have occurred by the time we air, but you have a couple of other items you'd like to share with us. Right. On April 10th, at three o'clock, we'll be at the Bureau of General Services Queer Division inside the LGBT Center in New York City and we'll be with Mariana Romo-Carmona and Linda Villarosa and the poet Reggie Harris and Elena and I. So we invite people to join us in New York. Look at the Bureau's website to sign up. And we'll also be with the LGBT History Project in Boston via Zoom on June 30th. And we're still putting together the panel for that, but we'll be announcing that at OutrightSpeeches.com. Wonderful. So Elena, what are you working on now? What's your current or what are your upcoming projects? So kind of the one that takes up the most of my time is my day job. I am the Director of Exhibitions and Curatorial Affairs at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. But outside of kind of what I do there, I have a few writing projects for responding to specific artists' work that are coming up this this spring. One is a catalog essay for an artist, Angela Hennessey, for her solo exhibition. There's another work that I'm working on for the artist, Adia Millett, as well as a few smaller, there's a work that's coming out in Lightwork this summer on the work of Dion Lee. But really in terms of what I think, my next big project would be is I'm very interested in diving. This is really like open the floodgates for me in terms of work that I would like to do in areas that I'd like to study. And so I'm really interested in learning more about specifically queer culture at the end of the 20th century and lesbian enclaves of artists and writers and how visual artists were connecting with poets and writers and this thinking through abstraction as a vehicle for expressing queer, specifically lesbian identity and resistance. And so that's something that I'm hoping will evolve into a academic practice in hopefully the next couple years as I begin thinking about going back to going back to graduate school. What's striking is that, you know, when you were asked to write about by the outlook people when you were asked to write that you focused on the outright to indicate an ongoing interest in material. Yes, exactly. Yeah, this is not the end. This is not the end of this project by any means. It's just the beginning, the scratching of the surface. We look forward to seeing what comes next from each of you and we have a little time. So do you have any last words that you'd like to share with the audience? Well, let me thank you then. The book is widely available. Let me encourage everybody to pick it up. You'll find it really rewarding, full of all kinds of interesting. And I'll put the copy of the cover on the screen also. Well, thank you very much both of you and you'll have to come back again and keep us posted on what you're up to. It's been lovely. Yes, thank you so much for inviting us. This was wonderful. Thank you for joining us. And until next time, remember, resist.