 Well, let's start right at the very beginning. Tell us a little bit about your early life, a little bit about your family. I was born into a father-nose best family in 1950, and my mother got cancer. When I was in third grade, she was hospitalized, and then she passed away in fifth grade. And we went from this very small, little nuclear family into an incredibly large family when my dad remarried when I was 14. And she came along with three kids of her own. We already had two, they had two more. So all of a sudden we went from father-nose best to the Brady Bunch. Where were you living at the time? I was living in Waukegan, Illinois. And I stayed in Waukegan until I was 18. You know, back then, even with a good family, you could have wanted to get out of the house by the time you were 18. Not so much anymore. My kids, I still have one of them living with me, and I don't think he ever intends to leave. So when you left your home, you went to college. And that had a very tumultuous time. Yeah. In sort of the mid-20th century there. Tell us about being a hippie in college at that time. Went to school, and I graduated from high school in 68. So I was at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. It's the summer of love. It's the time when, depending on your point of view, you were either in a crumbling society or you were at the dawning of the age of Aquarius. I tended to believe we were at the dawning of the age of Aquarius, and we got very involved in the student movement, the anti-war movement. I became a hippie through my hair out. So I identified with the youth movement at the time. Why did you think it was the age of Aquarius as opposed to the crumbling society? I believe we were headed for a revolution. I believe that we were going to transform society, which we did in a way, not the way I thought it was gonna be, but we did transform society and we did go from that father-nose-vest into a, you know, as the dawning of the women's movement and the black movement and the gay rights movement. And everything was just kind of starting at that time. And my friends believed that that was gonna make for a better America, a better world. How did you see the student violence when you were at Northern Illinois University? Things happening, for example, at Kent State or in Mississippi? Well, that was unusual for me. By the time that Kent State occurred, I had become a police officer. So I was faced with, really, it was a very personal issue. My parents wanted to keep me in the dormitories and I was going on my third year of college and there were no upper-classmen that were still in dormitories, except the ones that were being controlled by their parents. So I decided I would make a break. I would go get a job and I would earn my own way so I could get my own apartment. And I quickly found out how much they were paying students. And as I looked around, civil service seemed to be the way to go. But if I was working for the city or the county or the state, I was being paid a huge wage by comparison. So I initially went on to the radio desk as a student, a dispatch police. And then when I turned 21, I went on to the street as a patrol officer. And the violent part of that movement rarely occurred after I became a police officer. So against me, Jackson State, those all occurred. Where were you, a police officer? I thought you covered that piece. I actually worked for three different departments. I started with the University Police at Northern, in DeKalb. And then I was recruited by the little city of Portland only had part-time officers. So I was hired by that after a particularly anxious Halloween weekend. And they increased their staff so much so that they didn't have any more badges left. So I was actually sworn in as the last marshal in the state of Illinois. I was given a Marshall's badge that they took out of the display case in the city hall to give me to wear. My third department, I was eventually recruited by the Oklahoma County Sheriff's Department, which is the county immediately last at DeKalb. And I stayed there until I came to Chicago to enter the hospital. But you told me that you worked with the first female police officer hired in the United States, is that correct? Prior to Diane, prior to her appointment, Lemon had been youth officers. They had been administrators. They had worked on the inside, but they didn't put on uniform strap a pistol to their hip and go out on the street. So Diane Columbo was hired by our department and she became the first officer in the United States to go on routine daily patrol. The issue in my police department was that the wives didn't like the idea of their husbands being in a squad car for eight to 12 hours with this single woman. So they assigned her to me as the only single guy and she became my partner. And it was amazing. It was a lot of attention. We had, she had Life Magazine, Look Magazine, What's My Line show, a lot of news. People would ride with us for the evening. She was also a lot of fun. We would pick her against some of our most difficult issues because we were hoping somebody would take a punch at her so that we could like, that's just, that's the way police work. That was, that was awesome. You know, I might imagine when we were talking about similarities, it's a very similar time back then. The police were under a lot of pressure. They were thought of as pigs. They were, you know, especially since the demonstrations in 68 here in Chicago, the police department was seen as trying to maintain this old order and doing it with force. Basically from about 70 moving forward, a lot of departments started looking at change. They started hiring people with college educations, not big, beefy, strong men type, which of course I did shit. And they started making changes to serve the public more responsibly. So in our department, Noble County, we took the police star off of the squad car and went from a black squad car to a brown squad car with a black black Indian on the side. We went from a military looking uniform to a cowboy looking uniform. We eventually took our day officers out of the traditional uniforms all together and put them in blazers. So a lot of things were happening to make the police department not only more responsive but more like society itself, more reflective of us. Society, they became more diverse, they were more people of color hired. Diane ushered in the beginning of a change that we're still seeing with women taking their place, not only in police departments, but fire departments on ambulance crews and in the military. None of that happened up until the changes in this country in late 60s, early 70s. You mentioned when we were preparing for this, there was an occasion when you actually patrolled on my stage. Thank you. I did a lot of crazy things, because you know I didn't, my mind wasn't where the typical police officers mind was, so they would tell me to go out on foot patrol and at my request, I would go out and cut off shorts and the T-shirt riding a 10-speed bike and I could go, we have to back up a minute, but by that time I had shoulder length hair as a police officer too, so I could just go anywhere and merge into college crowds and get a different perspective than a guy in a squad car with a uniform was gonna get. So the ice skating in particular, we had had an ice storm and most of our cars weren't getting out and they called me in because they were trying to assign like people more like patrol, foot patrol in areas because the squad cars weren't moving. The ice, so I strapped on my ice skates to get into the department and they just basically said, go ahead. So I patrolled that day on ice skates, it made the cover of our local newspaper the next day. My reputation for being an odd one on the force was enhanced. But yeah, I did patrol that day on ice skates. But you mentioned at a certain point you gave up being an officer going to go to law school. I did. An unusual circumstances because most of my life has been unusual circumstances. Our state's attorney had mental health issues. He ended up shooting his wife, shooting his son, shooting one of our deputies. One of our deputies ended up shooting and killing him. And the new replacement for him, in order to catch up on his cases, he asked me since we lived close together when I start coming to his house to work on my cases. And as I did that, he basically told me, you don't want to do this the rest of your life, you want to go to law school. And he got an application for me, which he filled out with me, but he hand delivered it to what would become my alma mater, but then his alma mater. And next thing I know, I was accepted to the Chicago Kent College of Law and on my way to Chicago, really with no concept of what I was gonna find in Chicago, no idea of what it was like to live in a big city on your own. I had led pretty sheltered. I mean, in my years in DeKalb, I was living the life of a student, even when I was a police officer. And by the time that I got out to Oval County, it's such a rural, different kind of life. I really didn't have any idea of what to expect in Chicago. Then I found myself here enrolled in law school and at the dawn of the gay rights movement. Was it difficult to make that transition? No, not at all. I have always embraced change. I've always kind of felt like I should take the path least traveled. So it wasn't difficult to make the transition. The hardest thing I had to face with Chicago, I was used to living in a very natural area with a lot of forests and trees. And you got to Chicago and you wouldn't even know that seasons had changed. So I spent a lot of afternoons and cemeteries at the conservatory in Lincoln Park, just anywhere where I could be around plants. My house in Oval County, I had a living room about this size and you could barely move through it. There were so many plants alive. And I was making, I was still a hippie. I was making my own bread and shirking butter and running my coffee by hand. And now I'm in the city learning how to be urban and that was the only real difficult time that I had. I really embraced the change and the movement that I found here. But you said when you came into the city it was the dawn of the gay rights movement. How was that for Chicago at that time? Well, it was, our parades were much, much smaller. Our protests were much, much smaller. I was, you know, the very first bar anyone took me to was the old carols. Actually, I think it was the carols in exile. And the Gold Coast, which scared the shit out of me. And then the bistro. And the bistro was, wow, they're not as scary here. It's not a drag queen. You know, Mother Carol met us at the door with her tongue out wanting to kiss you and one eyelash flopping down on the Gold Coast. My college roommate was the only other gay person that I really knew at that time. Well, I had T.We. Tudor men if you're out there T.We. But Kenny, which is another interesting story, Kenny Smith, who would later turn out to be Roger, the owner of Cell Block. Roger Hickey. Excuse me, Roger Hickey. Kenny turned out to be Roger's boyfriend for sure in some years while I was Chuck's. And that was just really odd. We were, you know, Kenny and I broke up. We moved apart from each other, basically because we were in love with each other and didn't know how to tell each other because neither of us was out of a closet back then. Wow. And so he took me to the Gold Coast, scared the shit out of me and left me there. And then I discovered bistro. What about the Gold Coast, was the terrifying? Everything, everything. You know, one time very early in the relationship I took Chuck's car and went to the Gold Coast and I locked the keys in it with no way to get back in. And I'm scared to call him. I went to these guys trying to find somebody who would help me, Jimmy, the door's open and nobody knew how to do that. There were people back then that had motorcycles on the street that they didn't know how to ride. So it was just, it was scary because they didn't know it. But you also mentioned the bistro. Tell us a little more about that because it became very important to you. It did. So the bistro, my initial impression of the bistro, again, I had come from the anti-war movement. Even as a police officer, I was very active in the anti-war movement. I saw the country is facing these really huge issues. And when I got into the bistro, it felt like watching Nero play while Romans were. I just, I couldn't believe that everyone was just having this big party, which I enjoyed, but it wasn't responsible. So that led me to what was then called the Barbara Beckman House. It survives today, after many incarnations, it survives today as the center and also. So you could go in there. There was a helpline that was in the front room, 929 Help. And I was an operator on that, answering phone calls and dealing with people's issues throughout the evening. But there was also a coffee house. There was a library with great publications from around the country. So I got very active in that and very active in the bistro. And the two of them kind of balanced out. It was okay for me to party at the bistro or the trip was another bar that I own out. On Illinois Street. But they were party bars. And then my social responsibility was fulfilled by working for the horizons or Barbara Beckman House. And getting very active in the movement, standing up and doing what I was always doing in DeKalb, making speeches and helping to organize protests. Tell me a little bit more about working through the hotline and things like that. What were you doing counseling people that were trouble-moves? Kind of. I mean, we weren't really counselors back then, but yeah, you would get everything from kids that were coming out and were afraid. And they were calling people that were calling, trying to find out where they could find other gay people. Where the bars were asking questions about how to find publications or if there was a protest coming up, how safe was it gonna be? Where are we gonna meet, who's organizing? So there's a lot of questions. A lot of people would call looking for a medical doctor. They thought they had an STD and they didn't know where to go. They didn't feel like they could go to their family doctor. So we feel that a lot of those, we had a book of resources that you could flip through. During my time on the going to law school, I'm not in the closet. That, back in the early 70s, that was unusual. You didn't have people that were out of the closet. They were the ones that were organizing the trades. They were the ones that were organizing the demonstrations and protests and things. The vast majority of people were still in the closet. There were no gay professionals that were openly practicing. So I took a job at Broadway Limited, which was a bar on Broadway. And Mike Siegel was a straight guy that owned the bar, but he immediately identified that it would be difficult for me to work for him and go to law school at the same time. But he wanted to encourage me to go to law school. He thought that that was incredibly brave thing for a gay person to do at that time and to be out and open. So he had, Broadway Limited was a mall, and you would go down through all of these storefronts and at the back there were two train cars and those were restaurants. And then you could go up a flight of stairs and the disco was upstairs. So he had me moved from the disco down to the railroad cars so that I could go home earlier in the day and not run to four or five in the morning. And then when he rented one of the spaces to Ralph Paul, he put me into that space and my job done was to produce an in-house magazine for Broadway Limited called The Limited. And that's when I came to know Ralph Paul. And Ralph Paul at the time was producing a map and it had advertising all the way around it, but in the middle would be a map showing where the gay bars were. And it was a folder that he was producing that and together we produced a very similar to what we were doing at 929 Health. We had a phone line called What's Happening in Gay Chicago? What's going on in Gay Chicago? And we would record a recorded message every day telling you tonight that to take it easy in it's $2 drinks and beginning tomorrow at one o'clock. So people would call in and they would get this two or three minute recorded message and I would record those for Ralph. So eventually this led to us developing Gay Chicago magazine and I became the associate editor of Gay Chicago while I'm in law school. So I'm publishing every week. So it just, it came time for me to graduate and it just so coincided with so many things. One of them was that attorneys were first a lot of the advertise in Illinois. So when I hung my shingle out for the first time I was able to tell people I'm a gay attorney. I was able to put my ads in Gay Chicago magazine. I was still writing, at that time I was writing for five different publications around the country. I owned one of them with Erin Criss. She and I started Metron magazine which eventually had Ohio, Michigan and Indiana and Wisconsin, you know, separate publication that we eventually put together up there. So I was very out. I was very open and literally overnight when I went to work with a partner, Hope Keith and we opened our doors to a thriving practice. I had so much of the gay community. Most of the bars, a lot of the organizations. If the police would make a bunch of arrests in one of the forest preserves or, you know in Marshall Fields Tea Room, the next day those people would be in my office. Much like the people who were calling 929 help looking for a doctor because they couldn't go to their family doctor. You get arrested at the Tea Room in Marshall Fields and you don't want to call your family attorney. So people would call me. That's how Eddie ended up. You know, I was going to the Vistor all those years and I didn't know it and do it. He called me very early on in my practice and said, I only have one question, are you really gay? At that point, the only person who was practicing in doing it openly in the gay community was Paul Goldman. He was writing a column in a gay life newspaper, similar to what I was writing. Mine was more of a hybrid between legal advice and political commentary. His was more legal, but he would take the opportunity in almost every other issue to tell you he wasn't gay. He had a roommate in college who was gay and that's why he felt he had to stand up for the gay community, but he was not himself. So Eddie called me and said, that's the only question I have, are you really gay? I said, yes. He said I'd like an appointment. He showed up at 10 o'clock in the morning dragging a full-length fox coat and with an entourage of cute young men around him, freaked my office out, but became an incredible client for me. Eventually I was holding my office hours. I had an office in the loop, I had an office on Broadway at the time they called me the mayor of Broadway and I would spend Friday nights walking up and down the street stopping at all the gay businesses and the straight businesses and then taking their issues and their concerns down to city hall where my activism had given me a large network. So Eddie comes in, he hires me, I'm at the bar often anyway and now that he knows who I am, I'm invited kind of into his inner circle, Tommy Noble, Ludovito, I eventually start running office hours out of his office in the basement of the Bistro because it's easier for my bar clients to meet me there in the evening than it is to stay up all night and meet me in the loop in the morning. So I don't know, my practice at that time was pretty astronomical. For a young guy right out of college, I was doing a lot of activism still, I was lobbying the mayor's office, I was lobbying the governor's office, I was not lobbying in Washington but I was there in Washington assisting with the foundation of some of our earliest national organizations. Such as? Well, my problem now is gonna be remembering what we call ourselves back then because every organization that exists today comes from an organization that started back then. So, you know, the Gay Medical Students Association today is Howard Brown. And I think back then we were the gay and lesbian, it wasn't glad, glad it came later. It was what was the human rights campaign. And I don't remember what we called ourselves back then. And we had crazy names, you know, that the organization that I was one of the founding members of here in Chicago was the Greater Chicago Line Gay and Lesbian Coalition for Metropolitan Coalition for Great Human Rights. It was like, it was crazy. But then the gay communities always had it. You know, what are we now, the LGBTQ, LGBTQ, XYZ? We've always had this passion for being more inclusive. How were you able to do all these other jobs and still maintain your... Well, one, I've always found school to be easy for me. I were, where my brother would study all night and hope to get a C. I could not study at all and get an A. Oh my God. And I just, I'm very fortunate for that. But the primary thing, so, you remember, I told you that this new state's attorney, Jerry Weller, had told me and I'm gonna get you into law school. I told him I don't wanna go to law school if it's gonna so consume my life that I don't have any fun at all. And I just made it a point from the beginning to integrate who I was and who I was becoming. And they were both the same thing to me. So there were times, believe me, when I was studying for the bar or when we were, you know, I don't know how you did, if you understand at law school, you don't have like weekly tests and daily tests. And you have maybe a midterm, maybe not. But you have a test. It's like going to court. You're either gonna win your case or you're not. You don't get a second try, which is the theory behind the bar school. I mean the bar school, the bar exam. You have, you face the music in this one trial and you either win that trial or you lose that trial. So believe me, when I'm studying for my final or when I'm in the bar exam or in bar review, I wasn't going out to the bars and I wasn't doing all these other things. But during most of my law school career, I was able to maintain them both. And in my legal career, I was able to maintain them both. It just meant some adapting. Like I said, I was holding office in the basement of the Bistro. It was some adapting. Eventually I opened offices in the Gold Lex department stores. So I was always kind of not practicing. Wasn't a cop the way other cops were and I wasn't aware of the way other lawyers were. What was the most challenging issue you had to sort out as an attorney? You know, people would ask me all the time if I had suffered discrimination and the truth is I never had. I was very open and I brought my boyfriend to the dean's cocktail reception for incoming freshmen. I wore a pair of cherries, made out of sequins on my jacket. You know, I was a fruit. So I, by never really being in the closet, I didn't really have any discrimination. But my office got people every week that had lost jobs that had been kicked out of their homes that had been unable to get housing. Discrimination, people don't understand. Back then the police would come in and raid a bar. Bars that operated with impunity during the regular course of the year and a lot of times the cops knew the people they were dealing with. A lot of times they were on the take. But then it would come election time and everything would change and they would come in and raid this bar and they would print every person's name that was arrested and they would print their address and they would print where they work. And they would print this in the Trivium and in the sometimes. And people would lose their life. They would lose their livelihoods. Literally there were people that would commit suicide. So I think the most challenging thing for me was, and what moved me in my activism was that all of that had to change and until it changed we needed not just myself but a lot of people, a lot of professionals go out and fight the good fight. And to that end I don't think, well it was unique to us because we were gay and it was our fight. I don't think it was unique at all. It was what was happening all over the country with women, with people of color. People were standing up and having that battle and that was probably the most difficult. My one and only jury trial was also challenging but the day after that trial I was able to leave for Hawaii for three weeks. So I managed to handle it. But during this time, you knew former Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne back in the day and she appointed you to something. Tell us about that. Jane Byrne was an innovator within politics. I remember the night that she was elected. So she had been running against Michael Blandic. There was a huge snowstorm. I mean, a legendary snowstorm. And the images on television were Jane Byrne standing at an L station shaking hands against Michael Blandic who was down in Florida someplace telling you what a great track record or air airport has for cleaning snow when you can't move your car. He made the mistake of condensing everyone. We'd been at home for a couple of days and he convinced everyone to go shovel your cars out and have other people help you shovel your car out and take them to the school parking lots. And we all did when we got to the parking lots and none of them had been shoveled. So it was just, it was a mess. I remember coming home and people would say, did you vote? You'd say, yeah, yeah, I did. Who'd you vote for? I voted for that woman. So did I. And when we woke up the next day, she was the mayor. And she did a lot of innovative things. She moved into Cabrini Green when crime was so high and she said, you know what? There's no crime on my street because there's a million cops that patrol it. So she moved into Cabrini Green to bring attention to the problem there. Do you think she was successful with that? Because I seem to recall that was a very controversial move. You know, it was a controversial move and when you say, are you successful? We remember it today. It was the beginning of attention being paid to the people of Cabrini Green, which was a futile exercise in white privilege to even build those types of structures and like we're gonna segregate all of these people over there so we don't have to see them in our neighborhoods and we don't have to deal with that. You know, we don't think of that. They started taking those projects down and integrating people into the communities and saying, yeah, you have poor people and yeah, they live next door to you, but that's America, folks, you know. If you never see that poor person, how does your children, you know, get an empathy? How do you understand the various realities that we have in pluralistic society? So was she successful? She didn't stay there that long, but she brought national attention to the problems over there. She was also the mayor who wrote, she was the first mayor to ride in a gay pride parade. For me, towards the end of her administration, she appointed me to the commission of the City of Chicago Commission on Human Rights, which was amazing. I was the first openly gay person that was appointed to anything political. Not that we didn't have closeted gay people in politics, but no one who had been open and out and an activist like I had. I met her on several occasions during that period of time and while my confirmation hearings were going on, she was just an amazing woman who had a lot of foresight. Chuck Renslow owned Gay Life at the time and Chuck had sent me to Chicago. First of all, he got Gay Life newspaper, a press desk in the press room at City Hall. That was in itself an amazing achievement. So the gay community actually had a reporter with a desk in City Hall and that gave him access to all of the council meetings, it gave him access to interviews. So Chuck had set up an interview with Mayor Byrne that he and, or that, or Steve Kubicki were going to. And I was off to Washington, D.C. for a gay leadership conference. And I got a call telling me that during the course of this interview, Jane Byrne asked Steve and Chuck, what can I do? And Chuck said, well, you can end discrimination. And she said, well, I can't really do that, but I can give you an executive order ending discrimination in the city of Chicago. So the city of Chicago employment eventually had led to anyone who was a contractor doing business with the city of Chicago, she did issue that. Back then it was kind of like every time one little victory and not that Chicago was a little victory, but a victory in one place gave us so much hope and so much promise that we were on the right path and we were going to eventually succeed. But yeah, Jane Byrne caused that to happen in Chicago and was a much bigger friend of our community than a lot of people know. Back then, I want to mention one other person, there were a lot of people. But the alderman who had the most to lose and was in our camp leading the cause, I mean, he was the sponsor of Gay Rights Amendments and Cliff Kelly, who didn't have to, he was from a South Side Black ward where the churches gave him untold shit for standing up for us. He would say, you know what, if we aren't going to support them, then how can we be asking for rights? Back then, you know, we did have Alice Levin, Levine Down in Springfield and Don Netsch. So we had some support, but he was really upfront and Jane Byrne, like I said, she led the way for all the mayors and made it easier for all the succeeding mayors to take a stand, you know? I mean, she, believe me, the days she wrote in the Gay Pride Parade, Monday's newspapers in Chicago at or in the Gay Parade. Fascinating, because in a lot of ways, I think she's forgotten or overlooked. So, well, much like Harold Washington, the powers in Chicago wanted to erase her. When time moved forward, they did not celebrate her, they wanted to erase her. And it wasn't until really the end of Richie Daley's term that they said, all right, we're gonna have to give her something, and they gave her a little park, and they gave her an expressway interchange. Yes, yes. So she still isn't really recognized, and it's because she didn't fit their concept of what the power in Chicago should look like or should act like and who they should be beholding to. And we are still seeing the old machine in Chicago. We're still seeing vestiges of it. We're just now, Mike Madigan is just now being charged after what, a lifetime of running the state and patronage, you know? And after things like the Shackman decision and court decisions that ended the practice, we have an administration in Washington that hires any relative, any friend, you know? So Chicago was a lot different back then and Jane just didn't fit the image that the powers that be had for Chicago. Well, moving on to a little bit lighter subject matter because that's pretty heavy stuff. You were the first IML contestant handler. Now that is fascinating for me because I've been an IML contestant handler for about 16 years or so, I think. But technically, you were the first to tell us about that. I came to IML in its third year and they didn't know what to do with me and we had no contestant handler at that point. So they just said, hey, you know what? You're gonna be in charge of the contestants. You're gonna be in charge of checking them in. Back then we would have to confirm that you would want a contest and was this a real leather bar? Well, we'll look it up in the Damski guide and Dammin' guide. We'll look it up and make sure it's a leather bar. You know, you're gonna ride the bus with the, back then we had fans. You know, enough contestants for a bus. But you're gonna ride with the contestants and make sure they get from here to there. So I just kind of invented the position which later became the contestant host which now is the handler. But yeah, that was my first position with IML. And moving forward from that, they basically produced up until you're, I think, 13, Gary Chichester and R.J. Chaffin would handle the show itself. But everything else about IML was done by Chuck or I which really meant Chuck told me what to do and I did it. But everything from getting the posters out, you know, we used to do the posters really early. By February, they were in the mail all over the world. So advertising and getting the posters built on selling the tickets. Back then we allowed you to pick your seat and you'd get these requests that I absolutely can't be anywhere near this person. Or I have to be seated at the same table as that person. And a lot of times those requests didn't come in at the same time. And I'd be sitting there on the dining room table with stacks of little papers with who is seating where and trying to seat them in the room. So basically we just, we grew over time. And we grew to the point where we started getting department heads. And they started getting staffs. And now I'm told that it takes about 300 people to run IML, which is amazing because we went from Chuck Gary, R.J. and myself to 300 people. But yeah, I started out as the contestant host. Fascinating. It was very fascinating because it wasn't a world that I was familiar with. But throughout this interview as we've been speaking now for a little while, there's been a great big elephant if you'll pardon the pun, a big elephant in the room and we need to talk about that. And that is Chuck Renslow, your partner. And Chuck Renslow was an iconic public figure. My second ever fireside chat, which I wish to say on record, I wish I could redo and do better. But tell us about Chuck Renslow because you were together 35 years, you were central in the Renslow family. Who was he? Well, I don't know where we're gonna be able to answer that question. They can tell you who he was to me. So I met Chuck through, I mean I was aware of Chuck during the early days, the Metropolitan Coalition and so I knew who he was. But I really came to know him through my association with Gay Life Newspaper. Chuck had a pension for Young Myun and he gathered them like a flock of sheep and I was one of them. And when Chuck set his sights on you, he promised you your fondest desires, anything that you could want. So very early on, he started having me share the editorial board meetings at the newspaper in his absence and then he would find reasons to be absent. He started letting me advise him and that led to us taking a trip together to a gay leadership, the first gay leadership conference that I'm aware of, which was held in 1982 in Dallas, Texas. He asked me, did I want to go? And of course, yes, oh my god, yes. I'm gonna be able to meet these people that I've read about and the advocate and some of the early publications. So I'm all excited. I go home and my friends all are telling me, are you? After I'm getting me, you're gonna go down there. Do you know who he is? Yeah, he's the guy at this. No, you have no idea. And they start telling me about the leather community, SNM, things that I didn't know. So I'm still going to Dallas with Chuck and I did go. I was nervous. We got to Dallas and we're told on Chuck that there was only one room instead of two. And then we got up to the room and there was only one bed instead of two. And I'm now totally convinced that I'm gonna get raped tonight. All of this terrible stuff is gonna happen to me and I'm gonna get trust and bound and beat. And I'm really nervous and we went to bed that night and he shut off the light and rolled over. And I laid there and I laid there and I laid there. And I turned on the light and wanted to know what the hell is wrong with me. And he said, what are you talking about? And I told him all the things that I had been told he was gonna do to me. And he laughed and proceeded to do all those things. So that trip, he also exposed me to his concept of family and invited me when we came back to Chicago to come back to his house that night and meet his family, which I did. And I stayed. And several weeks later I told him I wanted to ask a question and he said, wait a minute, we're all something on a piece of paper and go ahead and ask a question. We were at dinner table with everybody around and I said, it's kind of senseless. I haven't been home in weeks. I haven't been home since Dallas. Why do I have that other apartment? And he flipped the paper over and said, yes, Ron, you may move in. I didn't know at the time, I don't know if you've ever done that with a paper before, but I didn't know at that time that that's how everybody had been kind of brought into the house. But he had this amazing family of individuals. At its core was David Grooms and he and they were open about the fact that they were looking for a third person that they had always viewed the family as having a core of three people. Earlier when he and Don were a Judas it actually set up what we referred to as the first family, although it's really an incarnation of the same. There were always three of them. And in fact, when Don eventually, they got to the point where couples do, they say, well, I can't live with you anymore, but I'm still in love with you. They came up with the concept, well, don't leave. Instead of leaving me, bring him in. And that's how the concept of family started. And the family was very inclusive. I mean, no one had a problem with Mike coming. We always said that, you know, no one can bring you in or kick you out. You do that yourself. That you determine that this is my family and you determine at some point, maybe, that it's not. But as long as you have it, you turn that it's your family. So, like I said, it was very inclusive. I was welcomed into that family. Eventually, I did end up marrying a cult ceremony, David Inchok, the young man who's no longer alive, Bobby Winters. And I'm still, that's my family. Through them, I came to understand my biological family. I came to understand God, as I've told you. I came to understand my place in the universe. I will say, I believe that I am leathered by marriage. It was not anything that I was aware of before that. Chuck Renzlo introduced me to Asanel. And it was like coming out all over again. It was exciting. I think I told you that after Chuck's passing, I was selling man's country and going through a lot and 45 years ago in that building. And we had a storage of just tons and tons of stuff. And I came across a book. I think it's in the other room now, but it was a journal that I had kept from when I had broken up with my boyfriend of seven years, Billy Aldi's. When we split, I was devastated. And I became keeping a diary and mostly working out my emotions. So if you read that diary today, it talks at the beginning about spending a year trying to take the road less traveled and new experiences. And it ends with my meeting Chuck Renzlo and being introduced to leather. And people amazed. One that I was attracted to Chuck Renzlo, who was the total opposite of anything. I mean, I was dating little Twinkie Boys. I also discovered that I could continue to date little Twinkie Boys and still be one of Chuck Renzlo's partners. So yeah, 35 years. I have always and want to underscore here that Chuck had many partners. Chuck was married to an entire community. There were, I knew, I mean, there were probably 70 people that I would consider part of the Renzlo family. There were maybe eight, 12 living together. But others would become home for holidays and stuff. There were hundreds in the community that I know he was counseling or handling issues for. We've had many talks where he told me his mind was like a post office box and he was capable of opening, dealing with somebody's issues, shut that door and open another one and this one would stay closed. When he passed away, people came out of the woodwork and stories, letters that I got from people that told me things that I didn't know of how he really was a daddy. He liked to think of himself as a godfather. But he was an original daddy, man, to hundreds and hundreds of people. What's one example? What's one example of something someone told you? People who were kicked out of their homes, people who were, well, through AIDS, he was paying people's rents. He paid rents for, again, what would become Howard Brown, helped purchase the VD van that traveled to the bars. People that, I mean, people continued throughout the entire time I lived with them to just show up at the door and they needed five bucks and they needed 20 bucks or people that were in prison that would be writing and needed money. People who, I don't want to mention her name, but a very close friend and associate of mine that never told me and years later I found out that when her mother died she had no way of getting home to the funeral and Chuck just heard that and brought her a flight home and helped take her to the funeral. He believed that what was his, not that he didn't, I mean, Chuck had everything he could wish for and he did. But he also was very generous with whatever he had and shared it in any way he could with the entire community. And the community, you know, for owning man's country, a Gold Coast leather, a nail leather bar, man's country, a club where it was only from young, at least until the very young, that's not who he was. His businesses were inclusive. There were women in the Renzel family, there were straight people in the Renzel family. We know by my two kids but these were not the first two children in the Renzel family. We raised David Grimmsum in the family. Dom's two brothers were taking him when they were young. So there were a lot of kids. Chuck was a very inclusive person and, you know, maybe not his public image but he certainly worked for, I mean, I don't want to give him the credit for somebody else's organization but he was instrumental in the rise of the International Miz Leather. He was instrumental in the rise of now and remained a member of a lot of feminist organizations till the day he died. Fascinating. Fascinating. It was. It was. It was a privilege and it was just an amazing life to live with him. Not that I didn't have an amazing life before I met him but it just was an amazing life. I could start my morning talking to the police department and do lunch with the president of a university and then I'm out of airplane to go to Springfield and lobby the governor and a lot of that was stuff that I was already doing but certainly stuff that was made much easier with Chuck's ability to finance it, with Chuck's ability to network it and make a phone call. You know, I credit Chuck with my appointment by Jane Durham. Chuck was the person that knew Jane. So when Chuck passed away, I reached out to Cliff Kelly who had long since been forced to retire from politics. He was doing a radio show at WVON but he came and he was one of the people that eulogized Chuck. As was Congressman Mike Quigley, who immediately when I called his office, I talked to the staff and he called me back personally to tell me how sorry he was for Chuck's passing and he came in and eulogized him as did our Alderman. Chuck really did belong to the entire community. Yes, I think that's a massive understatement. He does. What's the biggest misconception about you? You know, I knew you were going to ask me that question and I spent a lot of time trying to figure that out and the honest to God's truth is I don't know that there's a lot of misconceptions about me. I have always lived a very public life coming out very early in the late 60s. I didn't really hide anything. In fact, I made it a point to be public about my personal life because I wanted to be somebody that other people could look up to and if he can do that, I can do that. Certainly when I associated with Chuck Renzlo, I moved into a fishbowl. I had no idea. You could go out to the bar on the next morning at breakfast. People are telling me at my breakfast table, people are telling me what I did last night because everybody talked. I mean, we always were very open about having a family, having children, being involved in SNL, being Masons. We've never hidden any of that from the community at a large, the public at large. I can remember in my early activist days, my boyfriend Billy Aldi's and I, we were doing a lot of television, radio, I was in the Tribune. It would really upset my mother. Everyone in my family was pretty down with the fact that I was out. My liberal, Democrat, South Side of Chicago mother couldn't handle it. My Republican, American Legion dad, his question was, well, when did you decide to, well, when did you decide to restrict? Which has always been this way. My mother had a lot of difficulty with it and she had difficulty with it because she was concerned with what other people would think. So she would call me up in the middle of the night furious because we'd been on the DeKalb show. Or, you know, I'm sitting here watching your boyfriend on television right now. And it's like, yeah, how does he look, ma'am? So I don't know that there is much that I haven't been public about, that people don't know about us. If there was misconceptions about our lives, well, one, there could be a misconception that, as I've already told you, I was leathered by marriage. I did not naturally come out of the leather community. I had to be trained. I think that there are probably people who only knew Chuck in his public persona and therefore maybe me in that public persona. Chuck was very much a home family person. Like I said, we raised children. We got Robert the day he was born in his half brother, Patrick, when he was two years old. So, you know, diapers. Chuck was always the one to get up in the middle of the night and handle the middle of the night stuff because if you'd get up, Chuck would get up and himself a pot of coffee and go back to bed. So if the kids, when they were babies, woke up in the middle of the night, Chuck took that duty and that certainly didn't fit the public image that he was promoting. But that really, that's, you know, maybe somebody only sees one of our images and says, oh, that's who they were. But I think we've lived pretty publicly. Certainly since I've associated with Chuck Ransdahl, we've been in a fish ball. Ron Eamon, I would like to thank you for an amazing, amazing man. Well, thank you for including me. My pleasure, I assure you. Thank you. Thank you.