 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 Bettina Aptheker, and it's my great honor to welcome her to the show. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, Ann. I really appreciate it. I think it'll be fun. I do too. We're all smiling. That's right. That's right. Let's start with a brief bio for those of you who don't know Bettina and her work, hard to believe, but Bettina Aptheker is a distinguished professor emeritus of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she taught for more than 40 years. An activist scholar, she co-led the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964 and the National Student Mobilization Committee to end the war in Vietnam. She played a leading role in the International Movement to Free Angela Davis, and you've written several books about it and co-authored some. She's been part of the LGBT movement since the late 70s. She has published several books, including a memoir, Intimate Politics, How I Grew Up, Read, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel. I love that title. Our most recent book, and one reason we're here to celebrate, is called Communists in the Closet, Wearing the History. She and her wife, Kate Miller, have been together since 1979. They live in Santa Cruz. So welcome again, Bettina. It's really delightful that you're able to bring to join us. We'll put a shot of the book cover. I have many questions. And so let's get down to it, if that is okay with you. That's fine. Thank you. Oh, thanks. You worked on this book for 10 years. Very impressive. Can you tell us how you managed that? What was your process? I fell into this subject a little serendipitously because of a generous invitation from Aaron Lecklider, who's a colleague in Boston, who recently published a book called Love's Next Meeting, which has some similar themes to mine. It's a little bit, it's quite different and broader. But he got me started on this and I started talking to people about it. And I did a presentation at NYU when I was there as a visiting professor in 2010. And my huge crowd turned out for this. And they all seem to be either ex-communists or ex-socialists or still communists, you know, whatever, and many of them were queer. And they had so much to say in response to my little presentation that I ended up mostly just taking notes and listening to them. And as a result of that, a lot of them came up to me afterwards and said, you've got to write a book. You need to write a book about this. And because I hadn't thought of that. I just thought of this as a paper that I was, you know, like that. So I discovered that the Communist Party Archives were in the Tamament Library, which is at NYU. And I started researching there. And the problem in all of the archives, including the Communist Party Archive, is there's no category if you're a left, if you're in a left archive or something like that. There's no category for lesbian or gay or homosexuality or anything like that. So you have to know people to look up or organizations to look up or you have to have some kind of lead, you know, that gets you into it. So that's why it took so long. The point is, that's why it took so long in the archives. And what I was, I was in the Communist Party Archives. I was also in the Archives of Smith College, because there were specific individuals who I knew were communists and queer. Likewise in the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, and so on. And I was in the one archive in Los Angeles. The San Francisco Public Library has most of Harry A's papers. The New York Public Library has a lot of papers. So it takes a long time, because I was teaching full time also. So that's why it took 10 years. But once I got started on it, I was just fascinated by it. And one person would lead me to another would lead me to another and so on. And so it became a passion, a passion to pursue as much as I could. Well, and you include your personal experience with some of these people. Yes. Yes. In the book, when you were starting out after you gave the talk at the panel, you expressed concern about all the archives that I am not mistaken. And your partner Kate said, you yourself are the archive. So, you know, your personal experience adds a lot, I think, to this study. It was very helpful. First of all, because I was in the Communist Party for about 19 years in my youth. I left in 1981. And just so people understand the Communist Party banned gays and lesbians for membership for 60 years from 1938 to 1991. And so in that span of time, I knew that I couldn't have been the only lesbian. I mean, that's just logical. And I also knew how the party operated. And I knew who people were. And so that lent a certain helpfulness to me in terms of who to look at and I had suspicions about people. My father occasionally would mention somebody to me and tell me to look them up how he knew they were gay or lesbian don't ask me I don't know. But that was what happened that once I found one person that I could see well who they corresponded with right and the kind of letters that they wrote and then that would lead to somebody else and so on. So it took a long time but I was very I was very persistent about it because I knew that this was a history worth finding. And didn't your mother connect you with Lillian Walde I mean they had both been in the party so long that they had a lot of. My mother's story is very funny was was so when I came out to my mother, finally, because I was very nervous about coming out to her. She told me that about Lillian Walde you know she was trying to be helpful and she was trying to say people that she had known in her in her life you know who were who are lesbians. And I asked her how she knew about Lillian Walde, who was not in the Communist Party, but Lillian Walde for those who don't know was the founder of the Henry Street settlement in the Lower East Side in New York. And, and she was a lesbian, and the way I knew she was a lesbian was because I had read an essay by Blanche boys and cook, the scholar Blanche reason cook, who had written about her very recently. So I said to my mother well how do you know how and this is in the book you know but I said how do you how do you know Lillian Walde, and she she just looked at me and scoffed that she said the whole neighborhood knew. So, so that's a one point I say so much for historians at our archives right, because if you talk to people, I mean this actually was significant because in terms of, for example, a rain hands very also. The archive that contained all of her lesbian writings and reflections on being gay were sealed for 50 years by, you know, by her by Bob Nemiroff who was her husband that were at that point her ex husband but her executor. And, and so because they were sealed. People went and just talk to people in the great in the village. They just went out and talk to people in the village and Barbara Greer also sort of broke the lid on that. Before, so before the 50 years were up people knew and so on but I was fortunate in my timing, and that by the time I started writing about Lillian Lorraine Hansberry in my book, the files were open. And, you know, I was went to college at bar between 69 and 73 and I saw, speaking of Lorraine Hansberry, I saw the last performance of to be young gifted in black, and I didn't come out till 75 after I left New York, but I thought. I just felt that she was a lesbian but Robert Nemiroff Nemiroff was her husband so I thought well she couldn't be a lesbian I was sort of wondering about myself. So that leads me to a question about the lesbian sensibility when you write about in the chapter especially about Betty Millard. You mentioned a lesbian sensibility, and you mentioned it at various points would you mind describing it, because I'm so interested in that idea. Sure. So I talk about that so for people again, just a brief thing about Betty Millard, just to put her in context. She was this marvelous communist for many years, and she was a member of an organization called Congress of American women, which is an early early formation, during the time of the popular front in the in the in the 40s and the popular front against fascism. And it was an organization which many communists were involved, although it was a month it was much broader than the Communist Party. And so she also was an editor, an assistant editor at the new masses, which was the cultural publication of the Communist Party. And that put her right in the center of so much communist politics and things that were happening and so on. So while she was at this two things to say, while she was at the Congress of American women, she was elected as a delegate to the Women's International Democratic Federation, which was an international organization that was set up at the end of directly at the end of World War two. By women, many of them communists, many of them from the socialist countries at that time, and many of them not who were resistance fighters during World War two. And so she was a delicate to the WIDF the Women's International Democratic Federation. She was an editor at new masses. She ended up writing a pamphlet, or a 24 page pamphlet that was called woman as myth. And it's an eye detail it in that chapter because it's quite extraordinary. And it's really, it's, it's the first effort toward a Marxist feminist analysis of women's oppression. And it was very feminist and very original in its thinking, and it was published in two parts in new masses and then they publish it as a pamphlet. And the Congress of American women sort of scooped it up and people reading it talking about it and so on. And I write at some point in there that although she was very closeted and Betty was closeted almost her whole life until nearly the very end of her life and thank goodness she lived long enough and she was very closeted, but that's another story. But at that point, she was very closeted but I say she had a lesbian, I felt a lesbian sensibility in that first because of her love for women, not not but the feeling of it. And her devotion to the idea of women's oppression and women's subordination and the way she wrote about it led me to think and also because it that's see women's subordination was contrary many ways to her own experience as a lesbian she was an independent woman. And that's what I meant by, there's a certain consciousness in there, that's what I meant by lesbian sensibility that you could that I felt, as I was, as I was reading woman Smith, even though of course I already knew she was a lesbian, but it's a very powerful is very powerful work. And as I say I detail it I detail the chapters of it in my book so that, because I assume that people don't know about it. I just want to say this lesbian sensibility I think sometimes it's also in the art. There was an artist that I talk about in the book very briefly my don't know is I don't even know if she was in the Communist Party I just say that I don't know. And I don't know if she was a lesbian I don't know that but there's a sensibility about the power of her drawings of the women. And I sense them in a certain kind of solidarity with each other, rather than as victims, you know, or passive that led me to so I would say that also like that's a lot to me that's a lesbian sensibility. And in the introduction, you identify a concrete feature with yourself in that a lesbian sensibility makes you notice heterosexuality. Yeah, I noticed it. When I notice it when I meet people, and it doesn't, it doesn't make me prejudiced or something it just, it's just something I noticed, whereas I think a many heterosexual people don't particularly notice it because it's the norm. Notice is if you're very flamboyant as gay. Right, you know, it's very close back. But even, even if you're not, you know, I learned this when I was teaching and, you know, if I didn't come out to my students, very early in the class, they just assumed I was straight, right. Because I know I'm just dressed and you know I didn't, I didn't wear some, I just didn't, you know, it's not my personality. So I'm not criticizing anybody I just didn't do that, but they would, they would see me. And they would, they would think I was, I was straight. And, and so I had to be very open with them very early when I finally was comfortable with being out. So earlier and earlier in the quarter, I would come out until it was the first day, you know, and then make sure that they knew. I was coming out to one student in the, in one class and one of the students eyes just expressing shock and surprise. They just seen some weird animal or something. Walk across the stage before. Right. So tell me who's the audience for the book. It's hard. It's interesting because I always wonder how writers struggle with how much to explain and how much to take for granted in terms of knowledge levels. I tried to write the book in a way that would make it accessible to anyone who at least had a high school education. Certainly anyone who was in college community college anywhere so there's not, there's not a lot of theory, there's no, you know, there is a little theory in the book but it's very carefully explained. And it's not the primary way in which the book is written the book is written as biographies of people, people stories. So it's a book of stories of people's lives. And so I wanted to make the audience as broad as possible. I also wanted to reach the left. That was not necessarily gay or lesbian. I wanted to reach the gay and lesbian community because I wanted them to see that there were communists who were very important in helping to found gay liberation. You know, in the, you know, one of my people was a Stonewall veteran, you know, that sort of thing. But I also wanted communists now. And also just people on the broader left, the socialist movement like, you know, the socialist party, Democratic movements like that to know, and, and to have a different attitude toward gays and lesbians, where they would see us in as fuller than people with not only yearnings, but insights that they don't have if if they're straight. There's a different consciousness. And that's what I was. So my audience was that way, you know, people who are activists people were gay and lesbian, the people who were straight, and particularly on the left. And that was, that's what I was trying to trying to reach. And so then the way I handled some things, you know, because this, some of the some of the stories in the book take place, take place in the 30s and the 40s and the 50s. And I'm referring to political cases. So for example, a Willie McGee case, Willie McGee was a black man who was legally lynched in the south in 1950. 51. And so what I, what I do is I have extensive reference notes at the back. So if anybody wants to understand who somebody was or what was this case about. What is this organization or something like that they can go into the reference notes and I'm very detailed there. But in the text itself, it just reads as a narrative. I love a the story component, and also the research. You know, I go to the footnotes right away when I open the chapter. So I applaud both of those features. And four of your chapters focus on individuals, Harry Hay, Elizabeth Betty Boynton, Millard, Eleanor Flexner and Lorraine Hansberry. How do you get happen to choose those four figures. So that's an interesting question. I knew I was going to do Harry Hay, because he's so important to the founding of gay liberation and the founding of the Madison society. He was 51 of all times, you know, you think my gosh, that's when the McCarthy period and he, but he was in the Communist Party. And there's a whole story about how he joined the Communist Party, because he actually got married. You know, but anyway I chose Harry and I also because I had access to his papers. See that was also important. I had to have enough material to be able to write a full chapter, rather than more of a vignette, you know. So I had his papers, and then Betty Millard fell into my lap, basically, when she passed away in I think it was 2012. I think it was when she died she was like almost 100 years old. She was 99 years old. And when she died her papers were deposited at Smith College. I've already been in there for somebody else and but I got a call from one of the archivists, who was a former student of mine who knew I was doing this work. And my name is Kelly Anderson and Kelly called me and said, her papers are here, if you if you want Adam. And so of course I wanted Adam. So then I had her papers you see, and then as for Flexner. It was very, very important to me personally, because of her book about woman I taught women's history, and her book about women's suffrage. And when I read that book, which was a long long time ago, first read it. I said this woman is a Marxist. I mean, I didn't know she was in the Communist Party but I knew she was a Marxist. And, and then when I and I had no idea she was clear, just not I mean that would have even entered my mind when I read that book. And then what happened was, I was in the archive of another woman, Bertha Reynolds, who's also in my book but in a shorter section, and Bertha was corresponding with Eleanor they were friends. And I noticed in the letters that when she corresponded she always sent her regards to someone named Helen Terry. And she wrote to both of them like Ellen, dear Eleanor and Terry, they called her Terry didn't call her Ellen. And I thought, who is this. So that's what led me to go check out Eleanor Flexner. And in her oral history and in her papers is perfectly obvious that that she and and Ellen Terry were lovers. So that's how, but I had the papers there again. So that was very exciting to me and personally important to me. And Lorraine Hansberry was just for me that writing that chapter was the most emotionally powerful for me personally. I was thrilled to know she was a lesbian. I knew of her I'd been to see raisins, you know, obviously, in terms of my background, but I knew almost all of the black communist intelligentsia that she knew. And those that those are the people that mentored her. So once I had access to her papers, and knew that she was a, you know, absolutely in the Communist Party, I could, I could verify it. And I knew she was a lesbian. She just that chapter was just very important to me to write. And I had read the Amani Perry. And I just can't get enough of Lorraine Hansberry. She's a wonderful figure and inspiring. And Imani I just want to say Imani Perry's book was very important to me. It's a very good book. Imani Perry is just amazing. She won the National Book Award last year. Absolutely. She's an amazing person. And I've dedicated to her for that book. But there was some things in there she to me she didn't dwell enough on the lesbian she didn't understand that component of it. And I think she also didn't realize the significance of Hansberry's connection to the Communist Party. And one thing that emerged in from your conversation with Sarah Shulman in an interview, correct me if I'm wrong, you were talking about the Communist Party, having downtown branch and a Harlem branch. Tell us a little that's so interesting. Can you tell us a little about that. Well, the National Office of the Communist Party was on 26th Street, the West 26th Street in New York. And so that was the National Office. And, and then of course the party had. That's that's the national leadership and then in different cities and towns and all over there were clubs. There was like, and then a state organization so like in California, Northern California, where I spent most of my life. There was the Communist Party of Northern California, and it had its, its leadership and likewise in Southern California and so forth. But in New York in there was a Harlem club of a Communist Party, you know, it was like a hub. I don't know if it was actually a club but there was a hub of black Communist intellectuals, then they were, they were featured around the newspaper or a news journal published by Paul Robeson, the great black singer who was a communist, who was of course blacklisted and that's a whole other story. But Paul was publishing Robeson was publishing a news journal called Freedom. And the Rain Hansberry went to work there. And that was right at the center of this really huge, powerful set section of black Communist writers. It included WBB Du Bois, Shirley Graham. Those are people whose names people might know, but it also included Louis Burnham. It was very very and he was the editor. And so, in including these people, it also included a woman named Claudia Jones, who was, who was part of this, the artist, Elizabeth Catlett, that some people may know she's getting much more famous now. She died a number of years ago. The artist Charles White. So it was a cluster of remarkable people. I knew almost all of them. And so that's that that's kind of why she was such an important chapter for me to write. And one thing that I learned in that chapter was her, the significance of her insight that I had never thought about that. Brown versus Board of Education ruling as a result of that backlash about that Emmett Till was killed and then as a response possibly to Emmett Till's murder, the Montgomery bus boycott began. And so that that's really a sharp analysis and I never thought of it. Well, when she said that she was by that time she was editor of the of the newspaper for the monthly magazine of the labor youth league, which was basically the young Communist League at that time. And so that so that's an interesting point to make also you see she shifted from an old black environment when freedom folded. And she became editor of this monthly news magazine for the labor youth league, and that was predominantly white. So she turned that magazine into a sort of monthly way of educating white people about racism. And when Emmett Till was murdered, as you point out, she wrote about that. And she saw it as. I mean the specific, the specific reasons why Emmett Till was lynched that happened, but it didn't surprise her in the sense that she thought there would be a huge backlash of violence in the south as a result of Brown versus the Board of Education. Yes. Historians have definitely concluded that the Montgomery bus boycott was in response to the murder of Emmett Till. Can we switch back to Harry Hay, his theory of LGBT consciousness, and how it might foster social change. Sure. So Harry. I just fell in love with Harry. And I think, you know, he's very charismatic and anyone who listens to his oral history, which I did with my little earphones on in the New York public library that John D'Amelio did with him and Jonathan Katz is a wonderful, wonderful personality, wonderful person. Everybody who founded the Madison Society, the first Madison Society, they were all communists. That's, you know, it was like this. So, and then there's a story about how they founded it, which is very interesting how they got enough people to the founded, but I'll leave that aside for the moment. But Harry was an erudite Marxist scholar. And as a member of the Communist Party, he was the education director of his party club. And as education director of his party club he often did educationals that related, first of all to black liberation, because the party was very strong in its anti racist commitments. And in its theories of the special oppression of black people. Let's put it that way that was, that was the language that would be used. And as a result of enslavement and and the, the, the impoverishment of African Americans. So he was very familiar with that. And he was also a teacher at the California Labor School. And when he that that was also a party run Marxist school, it had branches in both Southern California and Northern California, and his class was on music. And he taught a class on how music through folk music through popular music, you could trace the class consciousness of people. So you see he thought a lot about consciousness about class consciousness about anti racist consciousness and so forth. And this idea that because queer people. They didn't use the whole LGBT then you know but they didn't even use queer it would have been gay and lesbian people were, he used the language culturally oppressed minority. And this parallel to the idea of black people as a nationally oppressed minority. You see the, the straight the stream there of consciousness. And so, just as black people have a particular consciousness of racism, and just as working class people have a particular consciousness of class. Because of our experience or consciousness is fade formed by our experience. His point was that gay and lesbian people had a revolutionary potential as a consciousness of a culturally oppressed minority. And he saw it as a revolutionary potential. And that's when he wanted the Madison society to, to organize and to coalesce. And it's not what happened, but it was what his vision was. Well this has been very diverting we could talk for a long time but let's pause and I've asked you to prepare a reading so let's give the audience a taste of the book. Okay, so I'll put the idea a little preparation here and this is from the beginning of the book and I appreciate the opportunity to read a little book a little bit from it. This is like the first paragraph I came out of the closet with confidence in 1965 as a communist. I had been a prominent leader in the free speech movement on the University of California Berkeley campus the previous year. I was running at a student wide election for a position on the rules committee that would govern free speech on campus. I thought the students should know my political affiliation which at the time was still only semi legal. I wrote an open letter to the students on the Berkeley campus of the University of California and it was published on the front page of the daily cow. The next day headline on the front page of the San Francisco examiner read, but Tina admits it. She's a red. I won the election in a landslide. I don't remember feeling particularly fearful about my communist coming out. This was because it was emotionally congruent with my family and friends. I did get a lot of mail some of it viciously misogynist and anti Semitic. There were also death threats, more some some more serious than others I lost my auto insurance because the company now considered be a target person. I also got hundreds and hundreds of letters of support, some of which were deeply moving to me. And then a few pages later. I make the point of course that the Communist Party had banned gays and lesbians from membership already. I came out as a lesbian. 10 years after Stonewall. There was November 7 1979. I fallen in love with a woman and I was soaring with happiness. I was also sometimes stricken with absolute terror. She'd heard had no such tears. Kate was thrilled to claim a lesbian identity and called up all manner of friends from her adolescents and young adulthood to proclaim it. They may have been more than a little startled, but most of them were supportive swept up by her affirming enthusiasm. Born and raised in North Dakota in a working class family, whose parents were Republicans and devout members of a Lutheran church. I had somehow escaped all of the intense and damning homophobia that I had absorbed in and around the Communist left. This might say something about what the word radical means. It is also striking that Kate did not internalize homophobia, while I was saturated with it. The process of unlearning the deep layering of it in my consciousness remains ongoing, even after all these years. My lesbian identity is secret from my parents for years and drove Kate crazy with my endless speculations about whether or not my mother knew. Really in retrospect it was ridiculous but at the time I was on an emotional cliff, alternating between ecstasy and paranoia. Finally I talked to my mother and she told me that she had known I was a lesbian since I was 16. And when I shrieked, why didn't she tell me she said, because I hoped for the best, the best from her point of view was marriage and children. So that and then I go on to talk about Lily and wall but we already talked about her. So that's from the opening of the book. And the book is dedicated to your partner Kate. Yes, it is. You've been involved a long time now. Yes, she's put up with me. Let's talk. You have little vignettes that are chapter length of a couple of people. Would you mind telling us a little about David Du Bois. Very interesting. Yes, so I David is his full name was David Graham Du Bois. And he was the son of Shirley Graham, who in later life married w e b Du Bois. At the time of their marriage he was. I don't know this. She was about 50 58 years old, and he was about 40 years older. So, um, when they married, David took on the Du Bois name. And was very proud to be associated with w e b Du Bois. He lived most of his life, his adult life in Cairo, Egypt. He was a radio journalist. The way I knew him was that my parents, especially my father was very close to w e b Du Bois. And for those who may know, not know, my dad was a historian, mainly of African American history. And he and Du Bois are very close. And so the Du Bois is Shirley Graham and w e b Du Bois were frequent visitors to our home where we visited them at their home. And I grew up knowing them I basically knew them my whole life. And David, when I was still quite young, was still living in the United States, following their marriage in the 50s and he came, and he would visit me. Well, really, he was visiting my parents, but he would visit with me. And so he was like an older brother to me, very much older, you know, considerably older, but, but he had that kind of relationship. And I just adored him. And, and then at various times, he would take me on excursions, just me and him together. And those excursions sometimes ended up at the Brooklyn Museum that had a very extensive collection of artifacts and art and so forth from Africa. And he delighted in teaching me about that. So that was our relationship. And then as I said he moved to Cairo, and he was there for all of most of his life. In 1973 he came back to the United States to edit the Black Panther newspaper. And that was because of the terrible. So that was in Oakland and because of the terrible repression against the Black Panther Party, most of their leadership was in prison at that point. So, I hadn't seen him in years. And in 1987, I was in Amherst University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and David was spending six months in Cairo at that point, and six months in Amherst. He was teaching at the University of Massachusetts in the journalism and African American studies departments. And he was also there in order to make sure that the papers of Dr. Du Bois were properly assembled and properly placed in the, in the, in the library in the, in the, in the library at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. My father had been very involved in that also. So in 1987. I was visiting Amherst, because I was involved in another project with with colleagues in African American studies and unbeknownst to me. They arranged for David and I to have a reunion. And so that's that's in the book. And that's how that chapter starts. And we fell into each other's arms, and we were crying and we were laughing at the same time, you know, as you do when you love someone and you haven't seen them in a long time. And when we finally separated and just looked at each other, you know, sort of holding each other by the shoulders, you know, and you look at somebody. He said, you know, I'm gay. And I had no idea, of course, although it made perfect sense then, and a lot of things fell into place. And then he talked about his life in Cairo and the work that he was doing and asked about me and so on. So that was a very important moment for me. And to know that this remarkable man was gay and how closeted he was. So that's what I write about in in the chapter and it's it's short it's not it's it's just a vignette, because there's no papers. I have no access to anything. There's no personal papers that there's nothing I could grab on to there. So I had to rely upon my personal experience and my conversations with him. And then subsequently to 87 I saw him quite frequently until his death. And I spoke, I was, I was called by the head of African American studies. At that time man named John Bracey called me to let me know that David had died I was very shocked. I just sent David an email telling him I was coming to Amherst. I had no idea he was ill. And, and, and, and John asked me if I would come and speak at his memorial service which I did. So that's really a moving story. And one thing I like about the book is that you bring all these historical figures to life by spotlighting their significant others, their wives, their children, and you grew up with all of them. I mean, one thing we haven't we didn't mention at the outset I'm glad you mentioned your father now is that he was a huge historical figure. I mean, I when I was a partner and I read his work. To follow and you followed in his footsteps because let me just say something about you. When I was a graduate student at University of Wisconsin Madison, I took a class called women racing class after Angela Davis's book and your book women's legacy was assigned. So, it's a very illustrious intellectual family. Thank you. Thank you. It's the truth. So let's talk about the Berkshire conference of 1978 and how it is significant in your life and development. So, people may know the Berkshire conference is sort of the very important meeting of women history women, people doing women's history. Let's put it that way. Now it's also women and gender history they've updated it. And this conference was, I think it was at Mount Holyoke. If I'm remembering right I haven't looked at that little section yet but I think it was at Mount Holyoke. And I was struggling to come out. This is 1978 see I had met Kate yet. I mean I knew Kate but we weren't lovers yet. And so I'm struggling with my identity and so forth. And I was giving a paper at this conference and there was a panel that had been put together by the great Audrey Lord. And the panel, you know, we will read her know her work and so forth. The panel was originally scheduled by the Berkshire program committee for a small room and they took the word lesbian out of the title. The word lesbian had been in the title. And it was a panel on a lesbian literature basically you see, and they took the word lesbian at the title so you don't do that to Audrey Lord, you know, you just don't do that. So Audrey organized and they put out a flyer, and they announced this panel, and they put the word lesbian back. And the, and then it was, it had to be held in the largest auditorium that Mount Holyoke had. Okay, so of course I went. I was thrilled. And I'm sitting there, you know, in my little seat. And Audrey read the erotic is power that was the paper that she gave her which had tremendous impact on me to think of the erotic is power and the way she was writing about it and so on. After that panel was over, somebody stood up and gave an account of what I just said of how the program committee had tried to obscure this panel and take the son, and so on. And then that person asked, if all the lesbians in the room would stand up and the, there were 2000 people in that room, and almost the entire room stood up. And I was frozen in my seat, terrified of coming out. But I looked around and I thought, all of these women are not lesbians. They can't be. I don't know that. You know, and I had them, I had the moment of insight where I thought, those of us who really are lesbians are still sitting, because we're not out and we're too afraid to stand up. This is a tremendous moment of consciousness for me. I never did stand up. But I remember then Audrey stood up afterwards and she said, the first thing a minority must do is make itself visible to itself. And I knew that I knew that from all my work, all my work in solidarity with and as an ally of African American people all my work. So in the in the Communist left. I was still in the Communist Party at that point. I knew all of that. And of course you have to make yourself visible. Otherwise nobody knows you're there. And so that was a tremendous moment for me. And I'm very indebted of course to Audrey Lord, and to all the, all the women who stood, who stood in solidarity at that, at that conference so that was earth shaking for me, and it helped me a great deal. You know, I remember some of those conferences in the late 70s and early 80s they were electrifying so much energy in the room and it was so exciting. Yes, this is exactly right. Believe it or not, we're getting, we want to leave time for a couple of more questions. One concern. Well, let me just ask you about your current projects. This has been a wonderful book and I imagine you're doing book tour. And, well, one more question. What has the reception been I know you've been going around giving talks. Anything surprise you or the reception has been wonderful and I've just been having a ball with it. That's all I can say as Sarah showman. Absolutely. She's, I mean, she's just, you know, I love the woman. She's just phenomenal. And she, she was so helpful when I was finishing up the book and, and so praise, praising of it, gave me so much confidence. And then she asked she said can we do a couple of programs together. Yeah, I'd be very honored to program with you. So we ended up, I was on her schedule, you know, whenever she was available we ended up doing two programs in New York in April of this year. And the reception was wonderful. And we were at clags. That's the Center for Lesbian in case studies that at CUNY CUNY graduate center. We had a huge audience. It had originally been sold out and then they opened up another room. So we had quite a lot of people there. And many of them were red diaper babies. Right, which means that they came from communist families, some were queer some weren't some were my former students. Marty Doberman was there who was, you know, he's 90. I'd never met the man but I'd read his work. That was it was fabulous, you know, Charlotte bunch was there. I mean, it was the most wonderful evening and then these most amazing people and then Sarah gave, you know, asked wonderful questions and we had I think a quite a quite good dialogue. And people it was just to me it was just a hoot and a half, because it was just so much fun. And there were people there whose parents had been in the Communist Party, and who themselves lesbians and and I mean so they shared a lot of stuff. It was one reception that was especially, especially outstanding I have to say Blanche Weisencook was there that night with with her lover the wonderful playwright Claire Koss. So it was a marvelous evening. But that's how it's been. I did talk at NYU I did another one at Hamilton College I was up in Rochester, New York at the LGBT Center in Rochester, New York. And everywhere I've gone it has been a well no matter the size of the audience sometimes large sometimes smaller it doesn't matter. It's been a wonderful reception to the book. And then there's very nice there's been some nice reviews, including in the gay and lesbian review magazine there was a very nice review in there. And there've been some others and I expect one to come out any day now in lesbian studies. There's a journal of lesbian studies and that's going to be a review in there. So I've been very gratified by the reception, including at bookstores, and there's another, another, and this is fun. So every year in San Francisco, there's an annual Howard Zinn literary fair, right. And so this year, the Harry Bridges Communist Party Club of San Francisco will have a table at the Howard Zinn fair, and they will have a panel about my book. Wow. It's going to be so much fun. That's all I could say and I'm going to be in dialogue with one of the fellows who's clear and is in that club came to a talk I did in San Francisco. So it's just been a wonderful, a wonderful journey. Let me tell the audience that some of this material is online. I was able to zoom in to the Klags talk, and it's available if you go to YouTube and Google you. I mean, you have an illustrious past history of talks and lectures, but you know, we can join in after the fact. And you're right. I could just feel it even though I was online in the presence at Klags that night. I just wanted to say that I did it. It's also online on c span, if people are interested. I did a, I did a presentation for the California Historical Society. And I was in dialogue there with the esteemed scholar Estelle Friedman. I love her work. And so you can find that just go to c span and you can find that also. I think that was in January of 2023. What are your current projects besides going around promoting? Well, I have a couple of different things that I'm working on. One is this is just an amazing experience I've had. I did an online class through the platform that's called Coursera through my university. It's on feminine. It's the title of the class is four lectures on feminism and social justice. And as of it, they launched it on International Women's Day in 2019. And as of Monday, we had 100 110,500 students. I'm taking this class and it's global. People from all over the world. I just hadn't I just had a message from a woman from Istanbul who just took the class. I'm in conversation with a woman in Chicago or India, who's a professor of sociology, who asked me to do some lectures for them. It's been people literally all over the world, Latin America, every continent, literally every continent. So it's been an extraordinary experience and I've been collating the comments that I've gotten from people, the letters I've gotten from people, and also people's experiences, where they talk about what their definition of feminism is, or what the issues are that are facing women. And I think most of them are around domestic violence, and more generally violence against women. I had an incredible exchange with a woman in Tehran, Iran, before the recent uprising, who was trying to write a paper was writing a paper about the hijab, and she asked me to read it, which I did, she translated it for me into English, I read it. And so it like that. So I'm definitely going to write something I wanted to write about that experience. Just to open up this incredible global feminist passion that's out there. So that was that was one, that was one project. The other project that I'm is a byproduct of my memoir intimate politics that you refer to, in which I was asked by a colleague at NYU for whom I've done lectures already on sexual unincest and sexual assault on women and child sexual abuse, to write something. And I've agreed to write that so I have some projects like that. And, and then some journal articles that people have asked me to write. I don't think I'm going to do another book. I don't think I have it in me at my age to start another major project, but I think I do have it in me to do public talks, and to be allied to various struggles that are going on, and to write shorter pieces like these. Well, you have seven books, a nine, including two you wrote with your father. So that's a pretty good legacy. I think it's eight books all together. Not too shabby. Yeah. Well, I'd love to have you come out again because I feel like we've just begun to talk about things and what I liked about our conversation was they all, you know, each comment led down other paths. And, but we still have time for you to share last words with our audience. Well, my last words are, I guess what I want to say is, we're in a very difficult period right now of tremendous. I'm calling it a fascist movement that has taken over a significant section of the Republican Party. And is doing very great damage. And especially to gay and lesbian rights and to transgender people. They sort of like the whipping post. They've been like the whipping post of this fascist front that's coming in. You can see it in Florida, of course with the sentence, but you can see it with Greg Abbott in in in Texas, but all over the country, especially in the Midwest and so on. And there's resistance everywhere there's resistance, but at the same time you have this fascist front. And I think it's very, very important for us and the gay and lesbian community to stand in solidarity with each other to take on, you know, and support the very courageous people that are standing up in the libraries, the librarians and teachers that are being fired or smeared or terrorized really demonized and terrorized by, by people. And, and then the escalation and racism and the, and at the border and immigration, these issues are all related and of course, the terrible assault on reproductive rights for women is just horrific. They're all connected to each other the way I, the way I see it. And I think that as, as a progressive and radical gay and lesbian people and transgender people. We do everything in our power to unite with each other and to unite with others in order to make a counter movement to defeat this fascist upsurge. It's a backlash, it's a backlash against what was, what has been accomplished and they're trying to put us back and we have to resist with everything we have. I agree. And as your colleague Angela Davis says, of course you have to hope what else is there. Right. You do whatever you can. You stay in there and you do whatever you can. Bettina Aptheker, thank you for joining us. Thank you for joining us. And until next time, remember, resist.