 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 Martha Shelley, who is here for her third interview on the show. She's become a regular, and she's been very busy. We're here to celebrate the publication of her memoir. We set the night on fire, and we'll show the cover periodically. But before we begin, I'll just, if you haven't by any chance, tune in before I'll read you Martha's biography, if I may. Martha Shelley is one of the authors and owners of Abyssal Publications. She's a longtime political activist from Brooklyn. After the Stonewall riot, she organized a protest march that morphed into today's Gay Pride Parades and was one of the founders of the Gay Liberation Front, and all of that is in the memoir. She has published four books of poetry, Crossing the DMZ, Lovers and Mothers, Haggadah, and Released from the Wheel, as well as three novels in the Jezebel Trilogy. The Throne in the Heart of the Sea, the Stars in their Courses and a Meteor Shower. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and is passionate about social justice, dancing, and mango cheesecake. And now she has produced this memoir. Welcome Martha. Hi. Thank you for having me. It's great to see you again, to catch up a little bit. So how did you happen to write this? Let's cut right to it. How did you happen to write this memoir? Well, what I do is I write a blog, and I was writing, got into writing blog posts about what had happened in my life, as well as, you know, blog posts about contemporary politics and things. And after a while I realized that I had a memoir, and so I just put it all together and added more stuff that wasn't on the blog, and all the connecting stuff, and there it was. Well, I thought that might be the case, and that accounts for the fast pace. It's like a series of short chapters. And as Ian Northrop said in your interview on Gay USA, you just, the reader just flies through it. But there's a lot of important information as you're flying through that, that about lessons that you've learned and that we can take heed to. How long did it take you to write it? I would say maybe a year and a half. Well, one of our first interviews with you, you had just retired. And so you've been busy. You've used your retirement well. That was exactly it. It was from, I retired May, the end of May, 2021. Excuse me, I seem to have a course throughout this morning, and I guess by the end of last year it was done, and I had a publisher. Will you thank someone in the acknowledgement or suggesting the publisher? Right. Phyllis Chessler. Oh, really? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You know, the memoir is full of celebrities, Phyllis Chessler being one of them. I remember our wonderful work, Women in Madness. Well, though, living in New York all those years, that's what happened is that I was involved with the women's movement, and there were all these people who became writers and celebrities of one sort or another. Well, and even growing up, there's Robert Joneiro and Stokely Carmichael and all kinds of luminaries and past. If you wanted to become famous, you went into New York. And luckily for you, you grew up there. And you talk about your family, and all of that was very interesting. Your mother emigrated from Poland to Cuba, and your father was from Brooklyn. Right, and his family emigrated from, what was Russia then? Mm-hmm. And another connection is you were in Slovenian therapy. And I'm sure you know Esther Newton. Oh, yes. Did you talk about that? Esther Newton's stepfather was Saul Newton who founded Saul of Indian therapy. Were you able to talk about it when you met her in later life, or did you know her? Very briefly, when I met her, when we got together, it was through the women's movement. And what we were talking about was, you know, we had these women's consciousness raising groups. So we didn't really talk about the Slovenians. That was already passed from me. I had left. And what I loved about the consciousness raising groups is that a hierarchy developed. That was so cool. One thing readers need to know is this is very funny memoir. I mean, it's, you know, there's a lot of important information, but it's very funny, too. Like you have the anecdote about confronting a teacher in grade school and all the other students being asleep, you know, metaphorically or literally, and saying, what did she, you know, waking up when a confrontation occurred? What did she say? What happened? That was so funny. There was a lot of great. Yeah, that was in, that was at Bronx High School of Science. That was my social studies teacher. And, you know, she was teaching about World War II. And then she seemed to be bloating about how after the war, we had tried these Japanese generals and hung them. And my best friend at the time was a Japanese girl who was living in the United States studying here. And I raised my hand and I said, if the Japanese had won, they would have done that, I suppose, to our generals in Franklin Roosevelt. The teacher blew up. I mean, she had lived through the war and I guess she was pretty partisan there. And anyway, the other students, you know, there had been falling asleep through all of this. I wondered what I'd said, but I was proud of myself. The teacher was furious with me, but I walked out of there with my head held high because I had defended my friend. And from my point of view, I had told the truth. And Stokely Carmichael during a session, I don't know if it was at the same school said, get the bread from the baloney. Oh, yeah. This was the biology teacher who was at one point he said, we're saying, well, when I was your age, and that was when Stokely sang out past the bread, here comes the baloney. And the teacher threw him out of the class. That is so funny. I mean, gems like that throughout. So you've been kind of on a book tour. What has been the response so far? Well, just a couple of readings here in Portland and then on Gay USA. And then early in August, going to Vancouver, BC. And. Fort Townsend and Seattle. In September, the Bay Area. Mm hmm. Francisco. The East Bay. And then in October, New York. Oh, great. Great. What are you going to do in New York? The Gay Center has this place where I'm going to be doing a reading there. And then I'm going to see my sister lives in New Jersey and I'm going to see her and old friends like Phyllis. You know, I became liberation from people. Oh, that's great. So it's wonderfully detailed too. So I have two questions about that. First, you must keep journals. Because, you know, how could you. I talked to Carly J a while ago about her memoir and she said she wrote it when she did while she can still remember. You know, a lot of this happened, you know, in the past. And you seem to have all these details. How do you remember them? They stick in my head. That's amazing and laudable. I mean, I had. I started keeping journals when I was younger. And then what happened was when I was moving some stuff around. This, these people stole my backpack with my journals in it. And of course at that point I was pretty paranoid about the FBI and such. And I thought maybe I shouldn't be keeping this stuff. So I stopped keeping journals. I did keep a journal about a trip to Indonesia, which is not, which happened much later after the memoir. And I had the journal with me when I went backpacking in Yosemite and a bear ate it. Oh, well, that's eventful. Maybe it was a sign. Well, you're gifted with a great memory. Yes. It's one of the, it's nothing that I am. What would you call responsible for? I can't take credit. It's a gift kind of like taking credit for being born in the United States. Well, the reason I was born here is my ancestors struggle to get here and to get away from the problems in Eastern Europe. And that wasn't my doing. It's my good fortune that they did it. I know. And given all the problems around the country, I'm lucky to be in Vermont, but I just sort of landed here. It wasn't any, you know, active will in any major way. So I was what I would have found difficult maybe is trying to figure out how much background to put in, you know, because I knew some of it, not, I mean, I learned a lot, but other generations might not know. So who's the audience for your book, would you say? I would say other gay people, people who are interested in history. And hopefully young people. This isn't like a recipe book for how to make a revolution. But I'm hoping it inspires people to figure out what they can do given their circumstances. Just as we had to figure out what we had to do, given the time, the place, and what was going on with us. Our circumstances of being, you know, oppressed as gay people. You did fill in a lot of historical information, which I think was important. Did you do, you did some research? Yeah, I had to. I mean, if I put one of the things that feel felt very important to me to talk about was the economic situation. Because when I was growing up, the United States was at the peak of its power, the peak of empire. We had passed through the Depression and Roosevelt and working people had a better shape than they had had in many decades. And it was possible for somebody like my father on 70 bucks a week take home to support a family in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn. But nowadays, you would need both parents employed and really, really struggling. And it's important to keep the economic situation in mind and I went and I refer to that over and over. Because that's the basis. At one point I talk about when I was selling come out newspaper and ducked into the a coffee shop. And there was, it was near New York University and this professor was talking to one of his students and saying that the reason for the success of the women's movement was that the industry needed more women in the workplace. And I'm sure you can see the power of the women's movement that we had seen in the past, but much later I realized, yes and no, the reason for the success of the women's movement getting into these jobs had to do partly with economic factors, but also with our ideas and our pushing it. Things don't happen just because business leaders decide what capital wants and what labor is willing to put up with them and what we demand. Yes. Well, and ideology, that's important too, our ideas. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And the energy that we put into activism. Absolutely. And it's been so diverting talking to you. We need to get to you've prepared some reading so let's listen to one of them if we couldn't tell it set the scene for us if you want. Okay, let me get to one. If I can make this thing open up here we go. This is about when I was, when I first joined a lesbian organization, the daughters of the leaders which was the, the organization of time in November 1967 when I was 23. I found my way to the daughters of the leaders meeting. The do be rented a suite in an office building inexpensive but hello. You froze a little bit, but the do be rented a space office building. Okay, the do be rented a suite in an office building inexpensive but in a reasonably safe area with nondescript furniture and no decorations on the walls. Like the bars, we kept a low profile. The do be chapter had monthly business meetings, during which we folded and address the newsletter. It included a calendar of events, a lecture by a psychologist, telling us why we gaze weren't crazy, or an evening with a middle aged lesbian couple who lived in suburban New Jersey, and would give us tips on how to make our relationships work. There were about 200 women on the mailing list, though only a handful showed up for events. Gene Powers and Eleanor Pravitz, the couple who ran the New York chapter for an early 40s gene always attended meetings, but Eleanor rarely came to the office, and I never got to know her particularly well. She worked as a bookkeeper and was disabled from having survived polio. She was from Oklahoma. She'd been forced out of the defense department suspected of being gay, and in any case was too big, too smart, and too well organized qualities that would get a man promoted to manager, but that men found threatening in a woman. She used her managerial skills to keep our chapter running. And during the day she had some kind of computer job. For instance, she was a Republican and I was far to the left of Democrat. We seem to like each other. Gene and Eleanor saw that they could make use of my youth and enthusiasm and asked me to run for treasurer. I was honored until I realized that I was recruited because no one else wanted the job. I reported income and expenditures in a black composition notebook, including the times when I borrowed 15 cents for car fare and reimburse the Treasury when I got my paycheck. After two months Eleanor reviewed my work. These are the screwiest books I've ever seen she said, it took me a week to make head or tail of them. But I'll give you this, you didn't steal a penny. Nobody ever taught me how to keep books I replied. Eleanor took the job back. She then tried me out as chapter president. That didn't work well either. I had no idea what the duties were and they hadn't given me a to do this. Finally, since I was a frequent and articulate participant in our group discussions. They asked me to be the public speaker. Perhaps because McCarthyism had been discredited, perhaps because I hadn't invested years in a career that could be destroyed if I were known to be gay. Perhaps because I was young and thought I was immortal. I said, yes. In September 1968. I started a new job at Barnard College. Jean T. Palmer, the general secretary of the college, which meant she oversaw everything non academic, including fundraising and admissions. I would be her secretary. I saw her as a nice lady from the Midwest, probably upper middle class, warm and well mannered. She was short like me, but with white hair and sparkling blue eyes. In the evening in the spring of 1969, I spoke for DOB in an interview with a reporter for W or radio. It would be part of a show on the sexual revolution, and was to be aired the following day. The next morning I was sitting at my desk when Miss Palmer sailed in. Guess what she said, W or radio was here last night, interviewing girls from the new poet dormitory, and I must stay up tonight and tune in. In a panic, I called gene powers. What am I going to do. The boss is going to hear my voice on that program. I'm going to finish and explain gene replied calmly. They'll understand and they'll take that segment off the air. I couldn't do it. Maybe it was the poster of Martin Luther King looking down at me. Maybe it was the question I always asked myself, what would you do if you've been a German under the Nazi regime. Would you have been too cowardly to stand up for the persecuted or brave enough to resist the regime. The rest of the work day I was so obviously agitated that my co-workers wondered a lot of what was wrong with me, though they didn't ask the right at five, just as the boss was about to leave. I gathered my courage. Miss Palmer, I said, I'm going to be on that W or radio program. What for I'm representing the daughters of the leaders. Civil rights organization. I started to sweat for lesbians. Miss Palmer gave me a big wing. How nice that you young people are involved in so many causes. Now help me out with my coat, dear. I'm going to be late for the opera. That is so great. And I missed you at Burner because I enrolled as a freshman. We might have talked about this in September of 69. Those women, Martha Peterson, I sure would have loved to have known they were lesbians, you know, because I was questioning at the time about myself, you know, what a fabulous story that you own. It wasn't only Martha Peterson. It was a whole lot of them, you know, that's right. There was Kate Miller to it was firing before you showed up. Right. Of course, there was the first dean of the college before they gave the woman the title of president Virginia guilty sleep. I mean, there was like gilder sleep everything you know she was an icon and you know, I just thought she was probably a stodgy. I mean there was a stodgy component of some of the burn at some of the Barnard faculty but when I got there. There were lesbians Catherine Stamson was there. Sue Larson taught me philosophy and became involved with one of my class. I mean you know I learned a lot from you and then from other people mostly from you. I mean, you know somehow. But anyway it was too late to help me a lot in my personal journey but that is a fabulous story, you know, old Barnard, and you left then and moved on to other things you did social work. Well, what happened is I worked at Harlem welfare center before Barnard. I quit when they started being really hard on people in intake. You know I realized very early on that I was a kid. And here I was going out to deal with people who were mostly, you know, single mothers who are on welfare or black or Hispanic and really struggling. And what did I know, the only thing I had to give them was money. And the information, we were not allowed to give them information about contraceptive because Cardinal Spellman the arch bit, I guess, well he was the head of the New York diocese was against that we didn't want to offend our dear Cardinal Spellman. And some of us gave them the information anyway and I learned the terms in Spanish. And when I was dealing with my Hispanic clients I would tell them about the diaphragm, the diaphragm, those pastels, the pills, and how to get that you know how to get those things. And the other thing you did that I really want to talk about we mentioned it in other interviews, but from 1972 to 1974, you hosted lesbian nation, a lesbian radio show. And if I may turn to page 142. I'd like to read what you say about that and then ask you, you say, working at WBA I changed my life in many ways. I regret Rena, Rena, and Gary freed our deceased they were the people who whom you work with there. And I regret never thanking them enough for giving me that opportunity. So working at WBA, BA I changed my life in many ways would you mind elaborating. Okay. I got to interview a lot of people, you know, with the women's movement. I took my little cassette recorder and traveled around the United States and did interviews with different parts of the country, particularly the Bay Area, and put them on the air. And I met people who I wouldn't necessarily have met other ways. I learned that I didn't want to be a radio programmer. I didn't want that career, but it was really useful. You didn't want the career because you've been writing it. I wanted to write memoirs you're writing. So similar things happened. Let's see. I'm trying to remember this job that I picked. Oh, okay. This was years later and not in the memoir but I was at San Francisco State studying to be a teacher of English to foreign students for teaching ESL. I realized that was taking up all of my mental energy composing lesson plans, and I couldn't write so I quit that and took, again, a part time job, secretarial, whatever. So that I would that didn't require a whole lot of mental energy. So that would have time to write. I think it looks like WBA, I was a 20 hour a week job to produce a half hour radio program. I'm so into it. I know exactly what you mean, make sense to me. Let me ask you, do you have a writing schedule. No. I just write whenever I can. My wife and I have a little farm in Portland, we bought a double lot. And we form it very intensively we have like 23 raised vegetable breads, beds, fruit trees, chicken poof cornfield, berry patches, and there's a lot of work so usually I get to write when it's after dark. You're a night person. No, I'm not really a night person but the sun goes down and I can't work in the farm anymore. Do you have a writing group, or yes. You know, friends of friends that I read stuff to them they read their stuff to me or we share it on the computer and then we critique it. It helps people catch my typos for one thing, and then my wife, who is also a writer, does some editing, and then I've got something that's ready to go. That's great. And you and she co-founded abyssal publications. Yeah. That's where your blog is. Right. It's named after the Japanese God of prosperity. What happened was some years ago I went to Japan. My Weber at the time had a lot of frequent flyer miles and so we went to Japan for, I think it was three weeks. And it happened to be around the Christmas time. And we went to the Ebisu festival in Kyoto and, you know, hung out drinking hot sake and eating roast split on a stick and singing under our breath so as not to offend the Japanese. Ebisu, Ebisu, pretty, pretty big. You're a pretty drunk on that. Well, when I got home, my boss at the time had decided he brought in his girlfriend to work, and he decided that he didn't want to have me as an employee. He wanted me as a independent contractor. So I thought, okay, I need it. I need a business name. And I was thinking, well, Ebisu God of prosperity helped Japan. Japan is very prosperous. Maybe it'll help me. So became Ebisu associates. And then once we started the writing stuff with the Ebisu publications. And that's how it happened. Another interesting nugget is that you chose the name Martha Shelley because of the FBI back in the old days. Can you tell us about that? Okay, what happened was, when I joined daughters of Boletus, I was ready to use my birth name Martha Altman, and the engine powers who had been hounded out of her job told me, no, no, no, you have to choose an alias because the FBI might get hold of you somehow, and you don't want them, you know, etc. So okay, all right. I wrote down Martha Shelley care of Martha Altman and then put my address, you know, for the mailing. And I thought this is absolutely ridiculous. The FBI wants me, they'll know where to find me. But I started being known as Martha Shelley within daughters of Boletus and pretty soon that became and I started writing for the latter the daughters of Boletus publication under that name. And pretty soon, my whole social circle everybody knew me as Martha Shelley so I ended up changing it legally. Martha Altman Shelley, that's me. That's great. Let I should we do another reading now because let's hear another slice of Martha Shelley's life. Okay, do you want to hear about the Stonewall riot? Whatever you say, whatever you choose. Okay. Oh, here's another one. This is funny. This is about the gay dances. So around the time of our first gay protest march, this was after we started gay liberation front, which took place one month after Stonewall. The more radical members of the traditional homophile organizations and some gay members of the leftist organizations began to meet at alternate university. The institution, formerly known as the Free University of New York, or alternate you occupied the second floor of a loft building on 14th Street. The spirit of the place, and of the times was perhaps best characterized by the bathroom graffiti high up on the wall someone had scrolled, and God said, he equals MC square. It's a light show movie. Just above the role of toilet paper another person wrote Harvard diplomas take one. I brought the name gay liberation front to the second meeting and it was adopted unanimously. We were pretty free willing. There was no official membership, you just showed up, and there were no officers. There were people with others of like inclination and made things happen. We organized demonstrations put on dances and published a newspaper. Bob Kohler was one of the people working to put on the dances. I remember him lugging in cracked ice and cases of beer, filling barrels with them and selling the beer for 25 cents a can. We had people away from the mafia run bars, which overcharged for water down drinks, and made patrons pay extra for admission to a windowless inners room where you had to, where you could slow dance with someone of your own sex. To put on dances. Nobody had to plug coins in it. You could gyrate for free to rock music on the sound system under the swirling light of a disco ball until it was time to stagger home and let the cleanup crew sweep the floor. I think a problem with this. Hold on. One soon found that mixed dances didn't work for us. The gay men were involved with each other oblivious of those few straight men who took advantage of the crowded floors to growth lesbians. So we arranged women only dance nights. Now we could strip to the waist on hot summer nights just as the men did. We danced in ecstatic circles, expressing a new sense of community, rather than coupling off. The majority of those showed up at one of our first all women's dances guns in their belts pretending to be cops. I guess their bosses were worried about losing business. They tried to intimidate the women, and according to Carla Jay in her book tales of the lavender menace, even punched some of them. I was cavorting in the middle of the dance floor and didn't even notice the confrontation. Meanwhile, someone had called Bob Polar and also the local precinct. Bob arrived first, pretending to be alternate use manager and got rid of the goons before the real cops showed up. In 1970, there was an incident at Giannis, a popular lesbian bar just north of the village, where a couple of straight businessmen came in for drinks and saw two women dancing together. One of them tried to cut in, but was rejected. He punched the butcher looking woman knocking her to the floor and then left. The low level mafia guys who own the place and was supposed to provide security in exchange for their overpriced drinks did nothing. As soon as the news reached GLF, about 15 of us men and women marched on the bar. We selected some fast tunes on the jukebox and danced in circles, but did not order drinks. Once again, I was selected as spokesperson. Knees shaking, I went up to the owner and his partner. As I remember they were about a head and a half taller than me and more black pinstripes suits. Cinematic memories of Al Capone machine guns and the St. Valentine's Day massacre flickered in the back of my mind. Later I realized that they must have had frightening visions as well, a smash furniture and liquor bottles of thousands of dollars in uninsured damages. After I'd finished shooing them out for not protecting the women who provided their livelihood, the taller one frowned down on me. Do you know who I am. He said, I don't know, and I don't care. I'm the gay liberation front. And I turned and walked back to the dance floor. That is fabulous. And another anecdote that you mentioned is at one of the meetings Carla Jay presided with the baseball bat. Yes. I mean, it just catches the spirit of the time and the insouciant activism that you know I'm, I'm a little younger than you. So I missed a lot of it, but was there for some of it. Um, that's the liberation front meetings were pretty anarchic so we definitely needed somebody to be a moderator. I'd like to switch if you don't mind to ask you about the women in print conference in 1976. I was able to go to the second one in 1981, and I just found it transformative personally. But you said that one. What was your experience of it. Well, I was having a good time. But then an awful lot of this stuff I was having a good time anyway. It was really exciting to be part of all of this to be part of all of these women who were producing all this feminist literature and to my mind flooding the country with it, and making social change via literature. I remember it being hot. I remember the various people coming up with ideas, some of which probably made sense of this did not like Nancy Stockwell who worked for plexus newspaper in the Bay Area, and who was from the Midwest. Got the idea that we would use grasshopper spit which was brown and try to make ink printing a doubt of it. Because she was serious or not. And there was a I think there was a swimming hole that was fun. And never. And the woman from Chicago whose name I cannot remember. I think had organized the whole thing. But I confess that one of my fond memories of that was discovering wild cannabis sativa growing along the banks of the river, and harvesting a bunch of it and stuffing it into the trunk of my VW driving home and finding out that it hadn't ripen. And it was about as potent as toilet paper. And the grasshopper and it don't reminds me of that film left on Pearl. Did you see it about women over Harvard in those days. And so they took over this building at Harvard, and they thought they would release marbles. So when the police and they would follow the trip on the marble. You know, be just armed. I think some people try to do that at a demonstration in New York where the idea was to throw marbles under the hose of the mount of the horses mounted police. I don't know if it worked or not. A lot of colorful ideas there. I could talk about a little bit about lesbian feminism if you want another hilarious really interesting episode is when you went on the boat ride with men's magazine. Can you tell us about that. Okay. So what happened was, Phyllis Chesler had these tickets and she didn't want to go. So she gave me and this other woman who was part of our very small social circle. The tickets. Okay, I went there and I thought I'll meet other women writers. I went there, found that first there was a dinner, the kind of a rubber chicken dinner. And the glasses of wine. And I was sitting around the table. Next to the woman I had come with who was kind of big and much. And then that came dessert. And there was pineapple. One guy who was sitting across from us at this rather large oval table. Look at the woman that I was with. And said, Oh, you want to be a man, why don't you cut the pineapple like a man. I got this was he and his wife was sitting there had been making some nasty anti gay remorse. So I jumped up and threw my glass of wine in his face. And Myrna Lam with playwright was sitting next to me and she said, Why don't we all get out of here and I thought that's a good idea. Well we're on the boat we couldn't just leave. This was the circle I'm going around the pattern. And so we went to the dance floor. And by then I had realized that the important people at this miss magazine anniversary party were the advertising people that we writers were decoration, but the idea was to make money for miss. This is in July 1973. So, I'm, you know, a little bit. A little bit drunk but not very. And I'm dancing with the one I came with. And this guy, another advertising guy steps out of the crowd. And another guy was bigger than me and looks down at me and he says, Why don't you go hang yourself. And I got mad. I just went. And I just shoved him in the chest and didn't realize he was standing at the edge of the staircase and he went backwards down the staircase metal staircase and caught himself on the railing. So he didn't die. He didn't get injured. But, and I'm partly I was relieved because I didn't want to end up in jail. And partly I was saying, Oh, too bad I wish he was lying there in the pool with his blood. I had mixed feelings about that. And then Pat carbine Patricia carbine who was the managing editor, a business editor of this stepped out of the crowd and shoot me out. Trying to say, Hey, you know that you hear what did you hear what he said to me. She didn't want to hear any of that she just didn't want to brawls happening on the boat, which looking back and it was pretty understandable. I wasn't even 30. And the title of the chapter is a brawl in the boat. But when the thing was over, I said to myself, I am never going to be at parties where there are a bunch of straight people and drink. And I did that. Oh, well, switching to lesbians. You talk about your first one of your early experiences in the bars. And where they, the, the Deutschland, over all this episode was that touches was that far. I, I'm trying to remember the name of the bar I had, you know, covered windows. It was a shirt square. Rita may Brown calls it the four squares and one of her novels. I don't remember the name of it. I found the judges very scary when I was trying to come out. No, it was before they even started the Duchess this was like the, maybe the only lesbian bar that I knew of. So I went in there I sat down at the counter. And there were a couple of women on either side of me and I tried to make stupid small talk with one of them. And I, I wasn't dressed right I didn't know what the, what, you know, that you had to be either very butch or very feminine. The premise showed up in the addresses and the butchers showed up in suits and ties and stuff. And there I was in a pair of blue jeans and flat shirt. So these two women on either side of me, one of whom I think might have been working. She looked like she was an airlines flight attendant or something. They started singing Deutschland for hours. And I realized that they looked at me and saw that I was Jewish, I mean, very Jewish face. And I was very hurt, angry, walked out of there. And I didn't go back to the bar after that that's after that I started going to the daughters of the leaders. Yeah, the bars were really a tough scene in those days, and I came in and the tail end of it. And I'm not really a bar person I don't drink very much. I mean there were very few occasions when I did drink much like that parties and stuff but most of the time I don't drink. Nowadays I don't drink at all. You know, totally boring with clean and sober. I know I don't drink at all now either but I grew up in Buffalo, New York, which was a real bar town. In fact, there was that wonderful book about the lesbians in Buffalo boots of leather slippers of gold. You were on gay USA or mentor program. You gave a lovely interview. And at the end they asked you for a veledictory. And I understood you to say that the three things we need to worry about our first climate change, second economic inequality, and third, LGBTQ rights. Am I right in saying that. Except that the third part would encompass also women's rights and the rights of ethnic groups like, you know, black people in this country. So all of those other rights, because with climate change, which is obviously accelerating far faster than anybody had anticipated including the scientists. If we have an uninhabitable planet what good are our rights, you know with the pride. Second, the economic inequality I think is inextricably tied to the climate change. It's people who own the oil companies who own, you know, all the fossil fuel companies who are making big bucks off this and have the delusion that they're going to escape to planet B, or they will find places where they will survive and the rest of us will be out there struggling for crumbs, which is the way they want it. And if we don't deal with them. We can't deal with climate change, even our beloved president, not my beloved president. Just, you know, just gave the green light to a lot of fossil fuel exploration and pipelines and so on. He's made he and his administration have made some changes. But as he said when he was running for office to his rich donors, if I'm elected nothing substantial will change. And I think he's kept his word on that. Well, it is very discouraging. I would disagree a little bit if you don't mind. It reminded me when you said that it reminded me of in the early days, heterosexual men whom I knew would say, Why worry about feminism in the face of nuclear proliferation. You know what I mean. And so I would suggest maybe that it's all important. It's overwhelming but you know, Okay, I don't disagree with you actually. I think it is all important and I think that in order for us to be successful with women's rights with gay rights, etc. We need to make alliances with the a lot of other groups what may give gay liberation front successful in the way that homophile organizations weren't was that we reached out we reached out to the black panthers the young lords the women's movement and so on. Yes, and I think what will make us successful in the future in terms of protecting our rights and expanding them in the face of the current assault on women's reproductive rights on gay rights and so on. Is or expanding and reaching out to other groups. One thing that gave me hope recently was until I first the gay pride parade in London. A bunch of people from just stop oil, including LGBTQ people sat down in front of the floats that were put on by polluting corporations and stop them. They will, they will hold off but this. These are the kind of people we need to ally with. This is what we need to be doing just focusing on our own rights but seeing how it all fits together. And that's a lesson from the early days that has stayed with you and I certainly believe that too. So it's not like ranking impressions like in that. It all needs work. So speaking of that tell us what words of wisdom you would like to. First, if you could assess the current situation. You end your book by saying to young people fight keep fighting, keep fighting, and it applies to us to even though I'm no longer a young person trying to fight my own way. So if you wouldn't mind assessing the situation and telling us how we can act, engage in activism or what your thoughts are. Okay. Now, remember, young people aren't going to listen to me anymore than we listened to. But I'll say what I can. Aside from it, you know, getting together with other groups. I think what we need to do is work on several different levels at once. The people who work like a activist alliance work together with politicians pressure them. And then there were the people who are out on the streets like me, and the people who were pressuring the politicians could always say, look at those people if you don't listen to us if you don't make some concessions. They're going to be coming after you with pitchforks. So we need to be some people need to be in there working to make changes with the within the system. And others need to be saying, down with the system and pushing as hard as we can to try to finish the revolution that we started back in those days. Another model for that was act up, which learned from the gay liberation. Right. Also, and had people in all different capacities. And Bill McKibben, a climate activist from Vermont said, famously, someone asked him what they could do individually and he said the problem is in your question. You know, alliance building and coalitions. Precisely. And in the long run, and this is, I'm kind of worried about this. In the long run, the people who control the system, the CEOs, the people who, you know, they were, you know, this there are three individuals in this country who own as much or more than half population. Yeah, and they got to go. That, that wealth has to be taken away from them. And the same thing with the billionaires around the world. They cannot be allowed to run the world for their own benefit. Barbara Tuckman and one of her books. I remember this more than anything she said, people think that their leaders, King's presidents whatsoever, are really knowledgeable. And that's not true, because they surround themselves with yes man. And they're living in that echo chamber. And they don't really have more wisdom than the guy in the street. And I remember that we don't need King's presidents, great leaders to follow. We don't need that. We need to work together with each other. There are some people who will we thinking of Retta Tundra. Who said an example. She's not like, oh yes, you know, same brother and I will follow her wherever she goes. I have to think for myself and so does everyone else. And everybody's contribution matters. However much you can do, however little you can do, whatever you do is important. And your, your contribution, your thoughts. Learning about stuff on your own. These are all important. What I worry about is that the people who have, who have overpower may not will not want to give up and we will end up like they did in France in 1789. So that's apocalyptic. I hope, I hope it doesn't come to that. It might. And remember the French are much better off now than it has a result of having done that. I mean they have universal health care. They have four or five weeks paid vacation every summer. And they have activism. That's right. This has been wonderful. Do you have any concluding comments you'd like to leave us with. Just get out there and do the book. Yes, I have fun. Yes, revolution can be fun. I had a great time. Anybody who thanks me for my contributions. It was like a great sacrifice. It's, you know, I wasn't out there being killed having like soldiers coming home with amputations and PTSD. It was a great time. It was the best time of my life. Martha Shelley, thank you for joining us. Thank you very much. Thank you for joining us. And until next time remember resist.