 Hi, this is All Things LGBTQ, our interview show. We'd like to acknowledge that we're taping in Montpelier, Vermont, which is unseeded indigenous land. And I'd like to welcome you to the show. If you have any suggestions about who you'd like to see interviewed here, please let us know and we'd be glad to check it out. Thanks for coming and I hope you enjoy the show. I'm here with Hunter Ohanian, who is the executive director of the Stonewall National Museum and Archives. Welcome, Hunter. Thank you, it's great to be here. It's nice to see you. Even though it's not in person, it's virtually, but it's great to spend some time with you. And welcome to Fort Lauderdale. Welcome to the Stonewall National Archives. Thank you. I've been to Fort Lauderdale and I've been to the huge gay complex that you have the center, but I didn't realize that you existed or I would have visited in person, but you know, there's time. It's another reason for you to come back. Exactly, exactly. Well, let me tell the audience a little about your illustrious history. You joined the Stonewall National Museum and Archives as executive director in October, 2019. Previously, you were the head of the College Art Association, the largest professional association supporting art historians and visual artists in the world. Prior to that, you were a founding director of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, the only museum devoted exclusively to artwork that speaks to the LGBTQ experience. And that is such a contribution. I love that museum. I go every time I'm in New York, it's such an important institution. So shout out to the museum and to you as a founding director. Prior to joining the Leslie Lohman, you were the director of the Foundation for Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. Before that, you led two renowned artist residency programs having served as the president of Anderson Ranch Art Center outside of Aspen, Colorado, and director of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, which is the largest residency program for emerging artists and writers in the United States. The Fine Art Work Center recently permanently endowed a fellowship in your name. And that's impressive. Yeah, thank you. That's very nice. You have a long career of nonprofit board and community involvement. You're the past board chair of the Alliance for Artists Communities, the National Membership Organization for Artist Residency Programs. You graduated from Boston College and received your law degree from Suffolk University. You have an honorary doctorate of Fine Arts from the Art Institute of Boston. So you're a resident, you're a Renaissance person, a lawyer, a supporter of the arts, a writer, and let's go to your writing. Having authored countless articles and papers, in 2014, you completed the figure-based project titled Self-Portraits by Others, featuring the work of more than 50 artists who use photography in their work. In 2015, along with Robert W. Richards, you released Stroke from Under the Mattress to the Museum Wall. In 2018, you released The Reprobate Sense, the illustrated version of Peter Damien's book of Gomorrah. I love that title. Let's talk for a minute about the publication Stroke. Sure. It contains steamy illustrations from the 1950s to the 1990s. Yeah, it was based upon an exhibition that we had done at Leslie Lohman. Robert Richards and I, Robert has since passed, but he was a wonderful illustrator. Here's actually a copy, and this is a piece of Robert's as well too. And so what the exhibition was about was, and what the book is about, is the idea that there were many gay male artists who did beautiful, figurative work in an aesthetic sense that was used in many of the gay male magazines. For them, this was really their personal work. A lot of them at the time were doing illustrations for Bunwit Tellers and Bloomingdale's and a lot of the big ads that you would see in the New York Times at the time. But they were doing that to make money. This was work that really sort of reflected themselves and the community around them. And the only avenue that they could show it at the time would be through some of the gay male skin magazines, but beautifully rendered drawings. So that's what the exhibition was about. We brought that exhibition here to Fort Lauderdale at the time. We brought it to San Francisco. I think it traveled to two other cities as well too. But so what the book is, is a series of biographies of the artists and then several pages for each artist of their work. And people can get it. It came out as you said, I think in 15, but they can go to Amazon. I know it's still being sold and at different places. You know, Tom of Finland is in it, right? Of course, Tom of Finland's in it. I mean, some of these names are, you know, this is kind of the who's who of everybody from Antonio to Bastille to Tom of Finland, Colt. Some of those early Colt drawings are so beautiful. David Martin, Mel Odom, who is doing beautiful work today. Quaintance, Richard Rosenfeld, Tom of Finland. So it's a beautiful collection of work that was very important. And the reason why it has the name that it has from under the mattress to the museum walls is really for a lot of gay individuals, this work had to be secreted away. It was kept under the mattress or someplace where somebody else wouldn't see it. And it was a wonderful opportunity, as there have been many more now, about bringing out gay work and putting it up on the walls and letting people actually see it. Well, you know, to give you an example of the divide between lesbians and gay men, when Tom of Finland came up in some context and my partner and I didn't know who he was. And we mentioned him to our co-host, Keith, who was appalled. You don't know Tom of Finland? He brought in a book. So now I'm educated about time. You know, and we all could, many of us lesbians could use a little education about some of that early gay art. Well, and of course, you and I are old enough to remember that at a certain time in the 60s and the 70s, 80s, you know, there was a fair. And I think AIDS actually brought a lot of gay men and lesbians together to work side by side. But you know, there was certainly a fair amount of sexism that went on in those days. And it still happens today as well too. I think we're far better than we were 30 years ago as a community. But you know, it has to do with so many things about being gay, but as a young man growing up gay, you had to identify with strong male images. Otherwise, if you appeared a fit feminine, you would be outing yourself as being a homosexual or being gay. And so that's why there was an importance to be even hyper masculine. And I think that's what Tom of Finland brought to people. He brought a sense of hyper masculinity, which right now may feel a little toxic because we've been so steeped in it for so long. But for gay men of the time, he was pretty important. Where did you grow up? I grew up in Rhode Island. And then I went to Boston to go to college and ended up living in New York for 10 years, which was great before coming down here to Fort Lauderdale. I love New York. I went to college there and then stayed a couple of years at very graduated. I was in New Orleans. I didn't go back for like 10 years. And what a loss. But now that I'm in Vermont before the pandemic, I used to, you know, I was able to go fairly regularly. But let's talk about a reprobate sense. The illustrated version of Peter Damien's book of Gomorrah, I love the title. Well, you know, the title of it is really Peter Damien's words and just to remind everybody, 12th century, 11 hundreds. He was a saint, but he had the ear of Rome at the time and he wrote the book, what ended up being called the book of Gomorrah. I think it was letter 41. And he just laid out all the sins of same sex attraction or same sex action, primarily between men. And the sexism is so clear that quite frankly at the time, they couldn't care less what women were doing. They were only thinking about what men were doing. And then you read his background and what was going on. And he had been orphaned as a child. He'd been abandoned as a small child and his brother, his older brother rescued him. He was actually as a small infant living in a pigsty. And the brother actually saved him and he took his brother's name, Peter. And anyway, so he went to live in a monastery. He was very well trained and he then went into the church and then he stayed in the church his entire life. I'm sorry. But it's okay. And so then he would be writing the letters to Pope Pius. I can't remember the number. And then this letter 41 came out and it's where he laid out all of the sins that were associated with same sex attraction. And he even went so far as to detail specific acts and then talking about how long you would be in hell or in purgatory or go to hell for committing these particular acts. So the little book that I did about it, so a reprobate sense is his own words. It was about a sense that individuals had who committed those acts. So it's definitely tongue-in-cheek. And then what I decided to do was I used 1970s gay porn but sort of blurred it. And that's how I made the illustrated version of Peter Damien's reprobate sense so that the idea was just to really nail it, make it absolutely clear that this is what the man was speaking about at the time. Historically it's important because this is really, this is really where the anti-gay movement within the Catholic church was really baked. I mean, clearly it had been around for a long time and there were a variety of ups and downs but again, this was also at a time in which the Catholic church was fighting about all of the things that were going on within the church itself such as you could buy your title as a priest or as a bishop and there were so many things that were happening. This was the least of their worries at the time. But it's what actually those of us in the church in 2020 we're still living the consequences of these decisions that were made so long ago and are so baked into our culture. And it's not just you and me and it's a 20 year old who's just trying to figure out what their life is about or who they should love or not love. Exactly. In the five minutes we have left tell us about the Stonewall National Museum and Archives. It's important that it's national because it does have a national scope. Yeah, it is definitely national. Just to give you a sense, like right behind me you can see this is part of the library. There are 28,000 volumes and books here in the library. It's believed to be, who knows, but it's believed to be the largest LGBTQ library in the world. All cataloged under the Library of Congress system. And so right here you're in the fiction section here. And this is all open and available to the general public. We are actually open despite COVID. I mean, here you can just see like here's the Amistad Maupin section here. We're in the M's here. Over here is biographies. And it's almost all gay, although there are some gay adjacent people here. So, you know, here's the life of Judy Garland. There are a number of books about Judy Garland here. So this is the library part. And then we do exhibitions. And these exhibitions are based primarily on items in our archives. This is a show that just went up last week called Elected Sisters, pioneering by lesbian and trans political leaders. So right here you're looking at Kathy Kozonenko, who was the very first open lesbian elected in the United States in 1974 in Michigan. Here's a first publication of something she would have been reading at the time called The Lesbian Connection, which is still in existence today, but here's a very early copy. Elaine Noble, who was the first open lesbian elected to the state legislature in Massachusetts. May I interrupt you with a personal reminiscence. I came out in 1975 in Indiana, and I went to my first LGBTQ conference in Bloomington, and Elaine Noble was the keynote speaker. I mean, she really energized me and the other speaker was Leonard Mantlevich. I'm dating myself, but these are really important figures. So I'm glad that you're highlighting them in this exhibit. Yeah, and these are people who, these women really are pioneers. I mean, here's Deborah Glick. She, I think she's in her 30th year. She was the first open lesbian to be elected to the New York state legislature. So this exhibition is good. So in addition, so also what we have here is I'll walk you around and we'll take a little look at the archives quickly here. This is another exhibition space we have. This is a quick little exhibition we put together of some things from the archives. We have many, many publications. And let's take a quick peek over here. Oh, yes. Well, if I may, a lot, all of this is available online for those of us who aren't at liberty to go to the archives personally. You have public programming. You have tours. You have, I mean, one could spend days there at one's laptop. You know, it's astonishing. And again, so for example, well, just to give you an idea as this cabinet is open. So here you're seeing New York native, you know, in the time of the original run. Here is Frontiers. Here's Washington Blade. Oh, yes, that's still publishing. Yep, it's still, but again, these are complete runs of all of these, all these publications. Seattle Gay News, Philadelphia Gay News. So from a historic standpoint, this stuff is incredibly valuable. And then we do subject cuttings as well too. So just open up this one drawer here. Log cabin Republicans to a long time coming to Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, Los Angeles Research Group. And so it's almost endless as to all the subjects. Here's Lesbian Front, Lesbian Feminist, Lesbian Feminist, Lesbian Ethics. Do you know this publication, Lesbian Ethics? Lesbians and our... Yes, and I might have a copy. But that wasn't a philosopher. I read some lesbian philosophy, but not much. So it gives you just a quick idea of, you know, of all of the stuff that we have here. We have probably private collections of maybe 150 people. And what will be coming up soon, everybody should go to our website, which is stonewall-museum.org to learn about all the stuff you were just saying, but also to see what we have in the archives. And I put that out there for two reasons. One, we're always looking for more information. So if you have things in your attic in some place that are gay, know that organizations like us exist. And we always say, let us throw it away. Don't you throw it away. Send it to us, put it in a box. You know what Andy Warhol used to do? He would just take his arm and just sort of take everything on his desk and just put it in a box and they'd seal it up and they put it into an archive. Well, we all need to take all of our gay stuff and do the same thing with it. Don't worry about it, just put it in there, send it here, or if you have some other gay archive and then let us make a decision about whether or not it should be saved. Because what you might not think is important is very important to document our history. Well, thank you, Hunter. Are there any, in the half a minute, we have left, are there any final words you'd like to share with our viewers? Well, just keep up. I think we all just need to keep on doing the good work that we're doing about trying to make ourselves safe and comfortable, but also trying to make the next generation safe as well. So thank you for your time. And thank you for coming. We'll head back to talk more about it. Okay, anytime. Hi everybody, I'd like to introduce our illustrious Vermont poet and James Cruz. Welcome to the show, James. Thanks for having me, Linda. I know we got read together once at the LGBTQ reading at the library. That was a lot of fun. So let me tell the audience a little bit about you. And James Cruz, work has appeared in Plowshears, Raleigh Review, Crab Orchard Review, and the New Republic, as well as Ted Cozer's American Life in Poetry Newspaper column. And he is a regular contributor to the London Times Literary Supplement. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a PhD in Writing and Literature from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. The author of two collections of poetry, The Book of What Stays, Prairie School and a Prize and Forward Book of the Year Citation in 2011, and Telling My Father, Crawl's Prize 2017. Cruz is also co-editor of several anthologies of poetry, including Healing the Divide, Poems of Kinship and Connection. He leads mindfulness and writing workshops and retreats throughout the country and works as writing coach with groups and individual. He lives with his husband, Brad Peacock, in Shiasbury, Vermont. So there you go. And this is James' new book that just came out recently. And I will have on the webpage when this airs. It'll show where you can purchase that book. So James, where are you from originally? So I was originally born in St. Louis, Missouri. My parents were both born and raised in that area. And though I've lived a lot of different places now all over the country. And when did you arrive in Vermont, like a long time ago or? No, actually, I arrived here, I guess it's been about five years ago now. So I was living in Providence, Rhode Island and teaching in Boston and was really kind of tired of the city and wasn't in a relationship. And so I ended up meeting the man who would be my husband online on a dating app, actually. And I mean, I thought it was a joke when I first saw it. How cool is that? What's that? How cool is that? Yeah, yeah. Well, I thought it was a joke when I first saw his profile, like a fake profile or something because he said organic farmer living in Vermont. I'm like, well, why is this organic farmer in Vermont looking at my profile in Providence? But of course, because of the low population here, you have to look a little bit outside of the state. And I ended up meeting him halfway in the Brattleboro and we have this kind of marathon first date. So I pretty much fell in love with Vermont right after that and in love with him too. So started going back and forth and then eventually moved here. An organic farmer. And so you are organic farmer's husband. That's right. Kind of a romantic story, you know? Yeah, yeah. I mean, well, it's very enticing, an organic farmer like, wow, that sounds great. Well, do you have any influences growing up? Did you always write poetry? Have you tried other genres to write in? Yeah, well, I always thought I was a fiction writer. I think because I thought that was the only way you could make money writing and be successful, kind of make that your life. But I was introduced to poetry at a very young age in the third grade. I had a teacher, Mrs. Brown, who asked us to memorize a poem every week, and which seems like, you know, unimaginable now, but that was still going on then. And then I think I got the idea. I was inspired by, you know, like Shel Silverstein, I think I was reading a lot then. And, you know, the few books in the library that were poetry collections. And I just thought that I would write my own poem one week for like, show and tell or something. And of course, my teacher was thrilled, you know? And I was always super shy, so I have no idea how I mustered the tenacity to stand up in front of people and read my own poem. But I guess I must have done it. Maybe I blacked out afterwards. I don't know, but that kind of got me started writing. And I think I've never really stopped since then. I would like make up cards for family members and write a poem inside and just find little ways to keep writing poetry. Well, I really found the poems about your father. Absolutely beautiful. And you make it look so easy, you know, like just getting across the sort of, the pain. I was, and one that really stood out for me was when you were talking, because I related to it because we had similar experiences with Ann's mother was, which was, you know, not letting her eat whatever it was she wanted to eat. And all she wanted to eat was birthday cake. And, you know, we sort of gave up and just let her eat the birthday cake. And so that really stuck with me. I thought it was a beautiful poem. I thought they were all really, really, really good poems. And, you know, speaking about some very hard subjects in a very accessible way is an important thing, I think, for a poet to be able to do. And not easy, really. And, you know, I really enjoy Bluebird. And I imagine that you would like to read a poem, if you wouldn't mind reading a poem from your new collection for us. Absolutely, yeah. Let's see. So, maybe I'll read the poem. I mentioned the marathon first date with my husband Brad in Brattleboro. And one of the things that we did was, we went to Putney Mountain and just sat up there. And so I wrote this poem actually after that experience. And I think they also call it Hawk Mountain because a lot of people watch the hawks migrating, especially we're kind of getting to that time of year again. So this poem is called First Date Hawk Mountain. We sat together on the grassy mountain where the sun shone clear and hard on our faces as we inched closer. The stone beneath us soaking up our heat and giving us back an ancient cold that told of a love larger than the self. I shivered when you took off your gloves, when you took off my gloves and kissed the hands that touched you for the first time on top of that mountain, I knew we'd always carry within us muscle and bone of the place where birders gather to trace the hawks migration as they cross overhead. I had this vision of a thermal sweeping in and lifting us into the same welcoming blue as soon as our lips finally met. But when I came to, we were still earthbound, of course, seated on grass and leaves, eye to eye, arm in arm, keeping each other warm. Oh, that's really nice. How does your husband feel about that? Does he get a little shy when you read about it or is he sort of like, oh, that's me? Yeah, I think it's the latter. I think he's like, oh, yeah, this is nice. You know, I like being acknowledged like this because I asked him once, you know, there was a, I think after the last book I came out had come out, I was doing a lot of readings all over the state with some friends and I was reading some of these new poems too. And I asked him one night, like, does that really bother you? Like please tell me if, you know, I shouldn't be sharing some of these personal things. And he said he really loves it. So I appreciate that because I know that not every poet's partner feels that way. So, yeah. You lucked out in a lot of ways there. Definitely, yeah, yeah. And so you went to Wisconsin, Madison, University of Wisconsin, yeah. My partner also went there, got her PhD there. It was, did you like Madison? It was kind of a small town. I really loved it, yeah. I love Vermont more. I'll just say that, but but I still have great friends in Madison and I really love going back there to do the occasional reading when one can do these things again. Yeah, it's a great city and I think really supportive of the arts and very liberal. So I always felt really at home there and the program that I was really supportive. A big LGBTQ community there too. I was just there for two years, so 2005 to 2007. And so do you teach? Do you really enjoy teaching and students and working with people's writing? And, you know, cause that's a whole mother skill set, you know, really to kind of find that way of teaching that's supportive, but also critical, which as writers we know if you have to be able to take critique, in order to grow, you have to really be able to get a hard shell and accept those rejections or whatever it is. And so you enjoy teaching and you find that to be fulfilling in a lot of ways. I do actually, yeah. I mostly work with younger writers, younger students at SUNY Albany and they're typically from 18 to 20 years old and they're actually quite a diverse group too. So I love, you know, we are somewhat lacking in diversity here in Vermont. So I feel like, you know, when I get to see them, I, you know, just get a taste of how other people are living and sort of, you know, the experience in the city, which has been challenging for them during the pandemic. But I really do enjoy teaching. It's a delicate balance as you say of, you know, trying to encourage but not discourage too much with our feedback and with any sort of criticism that we offer. So what I do with younger writers especially is just really encourage the effort and maybe point out a few places where, you know, they might think a little more deeply or, you know, make some changes because I think that a lot of students got discouraged in high school, especially when it came to poetry and they sort of weren't really exposed to living writers or contemporary poets and especially accessible poetry, which is, I feel like just my thing, like I really believe in lifting up accessible poems that people can understand and really relate to. Not that that's the only kind of valuable poetry, but it's the poetry that has helped me the most and that I value the most. So I love sharing that with those students. And then I teach a lot of private workshops too and do one-on-one work. So really kind of every group and every person requires something different. So that's what makes teaching really exhausting sometimes. You know, you have to kind of modulate and really stay in touch with your intuition whenever you're meeting with someone, which is still possible via Zoom, which I was worried about when the pandemic happened. But, you know, I do find it's more difficult, but you can still get a sense of kind of what people are looking for and what they need. I think it's really important work. Yeah. So I would like to ask you to read a poem before we have to say goodbye for this session. So if you could read one more poem, we really appreciate it. Yeah, so I'll read this poem. I've been thinking a lot about kindness. So my last anthology, Healing the Divide, was all about poems of kindness and connection. And so this is a poem where I try to define, think about how kindness lives in us. It circulates like blood in us, like rivers flowing into the ocean, where it moves through a room like air coaxed to blow cooler by the blades of an oscillating fan. It is the sweating glass of water your lover brought and left for you on the nightstand before bed. It's the woman I watched once on a plane, smoothing her daughter's hair back from her forehead over and over, running her fingers through the curls until the girl slipped into a deep sleep, resting against her mother's shoulder. It's the held door, the pause that lets another go first, and you feel the heat of it pulsing near when a father waits patiently while his son chooses a single ripe fig from a bin at the grocery store and holds it gingerly in his palm as if it were made of blown glass and might break open at any moment. Well, thank you, James. And our audience, we'll be very glad to see you, and we'll talk to you soon. All right, well, thanks so much for having me, Linda. So, one of the things that I was actually talking about with today's guest just before we started taping is that how Zoom was allowing all things LGBTQ. To this, of course, to the state where we may not have been before. And even though Vermont is a relatively small state, getting from one end to the state to the other isn't necessarily all that convenient or all that easy, particularly since the majority of our time we're dealing with winter. So the guest for today is from Bennington, which is a place where people from, you know, Burlington, Montevideo, may not have spent a lot of time visiting. So this is Lisa Carton, who is the founder and current director of QueerConnect. Welcome, Lisa. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for agreeing to come on. So looking at some of the history relative to QueerConnect, it identifies that you moved to the Bennington area about 30 years ago. So where were you prior to 30 years ago and what drew you to Bennington in particular? Yeah, I was actually in Albany at the time. I had moved up to Albany to get my master's degree and I had a partner there and she actually got a job that took her to Bennington. And so I was, you know, driving over a lot and I loved it. I immediately was like fell in love with it. It's somewhat ironically part of what I loved was that there were little grocery stores on every corner instead of little bars. I remember saying, wow, other places I had lived there were little bars on every corner. And it was like really refreshing. So I just fell in love with Vermont and we moved to Woodford shortly thereafter and my life went through major changes from being a foster parent, which was amazing to then just, I moved away actually. I was in Baltimore when 9-11 happened and I wasn't really loving it down there anyway. So after 9-11, I was like, you know what? I'm back. I am so back in Vermont. And I hit the, I got back. And I've been back ever since, started my private practice. I'm a psychotherapist in private practice. So, and that has been, you know, amazing. Very grateful. I love my work. The best clients, it's just incredible. So I've been doing that since pretty much 2000, 2001. 2001, yep. So, yeah. And then one of the difficulties I had, well, when I first was in, I was living in Bennington, I was side of Bennington actually, but I was commuting. So, and I worked in AIDS work in Albany. So I was surrounded with a LGBTQ community in Albany during the day and I would just kind of go home. And for a long time, I didn't know anyone. I didn't have friends and I didn't know anyone. And I would, I remember so distinctly, I'd see all these pink triangles on cars and I'd say, okay, where is everybody? For years, for years. And finally, I just moved, I moved to Bennington. And then even more so, I was like, where is everyone? Like my mantra for years, it was not a happy mantra. It was rough. It was like, you know, and then I met a ton of lesbians because, you know, they're all social workers and therapists like me. All partners and lived together for years and years and kind of just stuck together. So, you know, there was no visible community ever. Ever. There was a few little things here and there that they weren't able to laugh. And finally, like about two years ago, I was driving down the road for the umpteenth time. Someone, another parent called me. So one of the saving graces for years and years has been outright who has, I've been on their list of resources and they've been wonderful. Every year they would say, anything different? Can we still refer people to you? And I was always like, wow, there's good stuff happening for LGBTQ people, but not here, you know. And that one day when I got another parent calling me about their kid, and I had to say, well, there's not, they told me, we Googled it and you came up and two other people, and those are two people I knew who didn't even live in the area anymore. One of them isn't even LGBTQ. So I remember like driving saying, so sick of this. And I caught myself, I mean, I've said that a lot. And then it hit me like, I don't want to be sick. I don't want to be sick anymore. I don't want to be sick because of it. Boing, little boy said, just create something and don't worry about space, just create something and it'll happen. So I just started Queer Connect like that week. And literally I had people coming to me. I got an interview in the banner and then boom, I had an AmeriCorps VISTA worker who approached me and said, can I work for you? And by the way, I have money. What? You come with money? We have to do pride. And literally that was like maybe three weeks after I had that little thing, like I have to just start something. And she said, yeah, and we, that's how it started. That was like in March and pride was June 30th. So from March to April, May, June, basically like worked nonstop around the clock. And we had our first pride, which I don't know, it was pretty legendary in my mind. Nobody expected it to be as amazing and big and incredible. Even me, I kind of knew, but it's nice when what you think can happen. And then exceed your expectations. Oh. I wanted to step back a little bit because you touched a little bit on what might be really helpful information for people watching this who live in other parts of Vermont, better rural. Yeah. When you went about reaching out to the LGBTQ community in Bennington. Yep. To try and pull queer connect together. How did you do that? Yeah, that's a really, really good question. So I like have lived in the area so long and I've done various jobs and things that I knew a lot of people. And I basically just expanded on that network. And I just literally, my middle name was pride. Pride, pride is the key for our success. So we call ourselves queer connect. And actually that's been a double-edged sword. I think we would even be more successful in some ways if we didn't say the word queer because a lot of especially older LGBTQ people, they don't like that word. To get offended by it. And younger people embraced it more. And it was a very intentional choice. Yet pride, my middle name was pride. I talked about it nonstop to my LGBTQ friends who basically said the same thing they almost always said to me for years. It's like, well, that can't happen here. And on that day, I literally had, I can't tell you how many of my friends who have lived in the area, oh my God, you really did it. I can't believe it. I know I thought you couldn't do it. You did it. It really opened up, it really like opened up some kind of, I don't know what, for the town. And the other piece is engaging our allies. It was so, you know, we have so many allies who really want to show support and maybe haven't even called themselves allies because there's not a visible community to ally with. How do you ally with something if there's not a community to ally with? But when you say we're having pride and we're gonna do this and a lot of our allies know about pride. So it really helped. Pride was the momentum that pushed that out. We hit, it was very grassroots, completely grassroots. I hit the farmers market every weekend. I was there, I talked it up like crazy. I have everywhere I went and I know a lot of people. I met people like crazy at the cafes and I just engaged everybody I could think of. And then I just was shocked myself. I thought I knew everybody living in the town which is a small town feel for sure. And I met so many people that I never knew were in town especially gay men, which I had missed because at Bennington's, it's like the lesbians and the gay men are like separated. It's like, I missed that. So yeah, it was really, really incredible and so many levels. And now I have to say it's still challenging because especially with COVID, you know, we were poised to do our really, really big second pride when COVID hit. Almost all of it was planned because I like to plan things ahead of time and we didn't have planning ahead of time last time. So we were like really planning ahead of time this time. Then it hit and, you know, I lost my board of directors, most of them and we lost our funding for the year, primary funding, which was gonna be, you know, our sponsorships, our pride partner and pride sponsors. So it's been challenging and now I have to say, it's like, I feel lately, it's a struggle for me because I feel like I'm so happy to be on this show with you. Oh, something gay, Keith Herring in the background and Keith in front of me, yay! Because I feel so disconnected and I know that has to be the experience in town because how can it not be? Everybody was coming up and saying, crying to me, everybody cried for a long time. After pride, everybody cried when they saw me crying. Oh, I know, me too. So it's an interesting thing, I'm rambling a little, but it's still a little overwhelming for me to think and process everything that happened over that basically a four month period. And then we had such a great response to pride that I got a little board from it and that we became an activities oriented board and we had a lot of activities. October, we had a coming out day, Halloween parties, Trans Aver Remembrance, we supported, we did all this stuff. And then basically when January hit, we all went in, we had really nice holiday gatherings, like five of them, games all, it was fun. And I'm very proud of, this is partly the answer to your question too. I've engaged like every age, lots of kids, our primary like focus was on our youth. So I think that helped us too from the get-go to be hitting and we're very diverse. I'm so proud that we are like the diverse group, the meetings we had were the most diverse meeting I've ever attended in Bennington. I would sit back and go, I can't believe we're in Bennington, this is so amazing. So what is it that Care Connect is able to offer now or are you at a position where what you really need are volunteers and people to come forward, to give another momentum to move into the next step? Because it sounds as though this, very similar to other LGBTQ plus organizations right now, due to COVID, everybody's in transition. Yes, so we made the transition right away to doing things online. We did not get a good response to participation wise. Now I think it's one of those things that's hard to gauge because a lot of people will watch recordings of stuff that you do after the fact. So our presence is pretty, I think people know we're here now, I know because I still get calls from parents. Got one two days ago. So that is happening. But for the organization itself, I'm happy to say that I have a brand new board and I'm so excited about that. We could use two or three really committed new members and then we'll be really rocking it. We're rocking it anyway. We have a new sort of vision and this is pretty cutting edge. I'm so happy to tell you about this because I haven't really put that out publicly, but we're looking to acquire some land and have queer land in southern southwestern Vermont. Yes, it's true. And we want to, it's pretty radical actually what we wanna do. I wanna form a small, I live in a tiny house and I wanna move my house into the country. So I've been looking for land for a long time. It hasn't happened. I think this is why I think I'm meant to do this. I know I am actually. So we found this amazing land and we're right now very much in the process of looking for investors, including people who wanna be stewards of the land of three people now and live tiny and ecologically in harmony with the earth, honoring sacred Mohican land in Poundall is where we wanna be, which I never thought I would say. What is this is like? This is like, we're putting a big push out right now actually I've raised quite a bit of the funds to acquire it without requiring a bank because the bank straight out told us it'll be three to four months before we can even touch this because of COVID. So anyway, the big upstart, the big point here is anybody who's interested in supporting an LGBTQ organization from the ground up literally. This is the time we really could use, we really need loans, private loans. Like I said, we have two of them already. If we have two more people who can do a loan for us at a very, it's a win-win, 12% interest. That's a really good investment. We could acquire this land immediately. We have such plans. There's an amazing barn that we want. We created the first Southern Vermont LGBT Archive last year and it has been planned to be housed at the Bennington Museum. They're a major supporter of ours. But I think this barn is supposed to be our archive and venue. I see a lot of artists. We have a lot of musicians locally. It feels like a destination and a place where we can actually offer affordable, community-supported housing for people in transition, our young people, homeless people. We know we're the highest risk for all these things, right? We know it. So anyway, I'm really super excited about this. And that's what we're putting our energy partly into now, which is a huge new sort of vision. But we have never had a space. Queer Connect has never had a space. So we did everything we did without an office, without storage space. Stuff is all over, scattered all over Bennington. And I feel like it's imperative for our sustainability to one, have this paid director position we're creating so we can sustain the organization, but mostly to be rooted in the land. It feels Vermont to me. It feels like what we're supposed to do. It sounds very familiar. So I will make sure all of contact information is up. And with that, I need to say thank you. And I wanna check in in six months and see how this venture is going. So Lisa Cotton Queer Connect, thank you very much for being on all things LGBTQ. Thank you, Keith. It's really good to see you again. So that was our show for this week. Thank you for joining us. And Linda. And as our weekly reminder, do not forget. We resist.