 Welcome to our interview show in which we interview LGBTQ guests who are important contributors to our community. We want to acknowledge that all things LGBTQ is produced at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which is unceded Indigenous land. Enjoy the show. Welcome, Alferuc. I'd like to start by reading your bio if I may, and I'll read it in the second person. And correct me if anything is wrong. Thank you. You were born in Tanzania, which your family fled in 1971 escaping political persecution. Your parents arrived in Canada in 1974 and settled in Vancouver where you grew up. You earned a law degree from the University of British Columbia before moving to Ottawa in 1988. You've lived and worked in Toronto since 1989. You're a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada, and you've been in private practice since 1993, although now you've been much more involved in human rights law. We could talk about that. Yeah, I actually don't do, my practice is actually confined to just doing refugee work, but so my activism, my community activism is around human rights. And the lens for that human rights activism through my law practice is refugee work. Excellent. On June 26, 2014, you married your longtime partner, Troy Jackson. Congratulations. Thank you. Congratulations to you both. You were the 2009 Parade Grand Marshal for Toronto Pride. That must have been fun. It was. In May 2009, the Toronto Unity Mosque, El Tahid Juma Circle, if I pronounce that right, was founded by Laurie Silvers, a University of Toronto Religious Studies scholar, alongside you and your husband Troy Jackson. Unity Mosque ETJC is a gender equal LGBTQ affirming mosque, a rarity from what I understand. Two more quick points. In 2016, you were named by the Advocate Magazine to a list of 21 LGBT Muslims who are changing the world. In 2018, you participated in a TED Talk about intersectionality and validity of gay Muslims. One more quick point. You founded Salam, the first gay Muslim group in Canada, and the second in the world in 1993. I mean, this is just a brief summary of what you do, El Farouk. Welcome again. Thank you. Let's talk about how you happened to start the Unity Mosque in 2009. So the starting of the Unity Mosque itself is part of a much longer process. And I want to acknowledge that I'm here in Toronto, which is the traditional territories of a number of different nations, but most recently the Mississaugas of the new credit. And I named this because it's common practice in Canada, but it is also integral to our mosque in terms of knowing our histories so we can go better in the future. So the starting of the Unity Mosque, or ETJC, in May of 2009 for me was a result of many years of different activities and activism. So starting Salam, and I actually started Salam not in 93, but in 1991. And at that time it was a social support group for lesbian and gay Muslims because back then we didn't include the bisexuals and the transsexuals and the progressive part that it was a lesbian and gay and the lesbians came in the name before the gay did and so on and so forth. And back then I wasn't prepared to sort of deal with the theological issues. I was thinking more along of the lines of creating community and networks and a place where people could come together where they didn't have to justify who and what they were. And maybe in sharing their stories they could find some healing and reconciliation and community and all of that. And for myself too. I often call myself the accidental activist and a lot of it is about my journey has been looking for space and not finding the space and so either creating or being part of creating it or recreating a space. So when I started Salam in 1991 I didn't know that whether there had been any other group and so on. Some years later I found out this is what the internet does. It sort of connects the world and sort of globalizes us on some level. And so I found out about an organization that had existed in San Francisco called the Lavender Crescent Society. And it had been it was in the 1970s and it didn't sort of end well. It did end and some people had unfortunate endings when they went back home because of surveillance and so on and so forth. But I didn't find out about this until sometime after I had started Salam. And so on some level I was saddened that this was the first queer Muslim organization. And I kept that alive for a couple of years and then close it. There was a bunch of things happening in my personal life. There were some threats that had come in as a result of an article that I had written anonymously with another active member of the community. But I have a certain degree of visibility for a number of different reasons in terms of my other work and my other activism. And so some people seem to know that it was me that was being talked about and so on and so forth. So I closed Salam in 1993. And then it reopened in 1999 as al-Fatiha after that started in the United States. But I wasn't actively involved again for another couple of years. The name changed back to Salam. In the process of all of this sort of and I named this because in that process it became apparent that there were multifaceted needs. And for some people being Muslim was a social identity or cultural identity. For other people it was a religious identity or a racialized identity or a political identity or a spiritual identity. And people were looking for some people were looking for different kinds of spaces and ways to connect to different to their different aspects and to their different intersectionalities. In 2003 I ended up organizing the Salam al-Fatiha International Queer Muslim Conference here in Toronto. And at that time it became I was able to pull together a number of folks that I knew in the community at that time mostly folks who were Muslim or Muslim identified and queer. And we started doing some reaching out and so on and so forth. Now keep in mind this is after 9-11. And one of the things that 9-11 did the internet connected people who thought that they were unconnected or that they were alone. And you know it's done that in good ways and bad ways for good causes and bad causes. But it certainly brought certain types of Muslims who were questioning who were who wanted a more who had a more inclusive vision or who who were in search of something different than what their dominant culture Muslim communities might have provided them right. So these kind of conversations around social justice Islam and social justice around gender gender justice around sexuality and so including sexual orientation started to pick up they had already been taking place. But how do you connect people that are so far and wide dispersed right so first of all it was on yahoo groups and so on and so forth and then and then other and other modes. So these conversations had already started so when we started organizing the this conference in 2003 they were non-queer Muslims who were interested. What are you doing what oh this is really interesting blah blah blah it's different from from the dominant culture spaces right a different and different emphasis. So we had the first that I'm aware of and I always put it in that way because you know a lot of our histories are not written right for or not documented for a lot of different reasons including technology including fear including whole bunches of forethought or lack of it you know and in the moment. But the first sort of community Muslim prayer led by a female identified person in Canada was at this conference in June of 2003 here in Toronto. And you know it was the time when we had SARS so here we are with SARS 2 there was SARS 1 in Toronto and Toronto was on the no fly list. I was like expecting like 100 Americans and we ended up with only 30 Americans but we still ended up with 120 people at the conference and some people came from England some from Spain across Canada etc right um but it engendered uh an interest and people were interested in in this form of prayer and and uh and coming together in a sort of a judgment free environment and a pressure free religious environment. We tried to after the conference we tried to maintain the prayer but again how do you outreach it was just through the salam yahoo group it's in the middle of the afternoon it it didn't sustain after a while. So you know there were then we used to have special occasion uh female led prayers so International Women's Day we organized and we organized the the peace iftar starting in 2003 which was uh which is a bridge builder bringing Muslims and non-Muslims queers and non-queers together for during Ramadan to break bread together. So we would usually have women leading prayer or queer folk leading prayer and so on and so forth. So there were all these sort of little things that were happening and then in 2009 Lori had moved up here so Lori is actually American and Lori moved up to Canada you know people travel the world for love so Lori traveled to Toronto for love not for me but for for her spouse and um and we had known each other online we had met each other online through the Muslim sort of activist Muslim community and so she was here for a while and at one point she sort of came to me and said let's do this and this is part of an ongoing conversation about mosque spaces and so on and so forth and so long story short or short story long as you will she comes to me and I said well I can't do this without without Troy I need to have a buy-in because I I understand that you need to have uh at least some kind of a buy-in from your spouse if you are in a in a relationship because you know community work is commitment and it and it is also emotional labor uh so uh Troy was fairly new to Islam at that point in time but uh he was uh into the idea of it and so the three of us came together to uh start the unity mosque we wanted a place where everybody was welcome where you didn't have to hang up some part of yourself at the door in order to be acceptable once you came in the door uh my notion with that is if you believe in an omniscient all present all-knowing creator then uh your creator already knows the fullness of you why do you have to hide for other people uh right and of course people have to hide because there is fear because there's there's fear of harm there's fear of rejection all all sorts of things we wanted to create a space where people didn't have to fear that I first read about you in Samra's Habib we memoir we have always been here and she talks about you know spending her life going to conventional mosques and how wonderful it was to find your mosque she talks about um the fact that there's no gender separation and so forth can you tell us a little more about how your mosque differs from conventional mosques so I use the expression dominant culture uh I don't use uh traditional because I think tradition is dynamic and changing and what we may perceive as tradition today won't be tradition a hundred years from now and was not tradition a hundred years ago um I never said conventional yes you did say conventional yes you did but I just sort of I want to make the point that I don't because sometimes people say oh traditional mosques I'm like I don't think it's traditional so I use the word dominant culture right so conventional is also good it it it doesn't give them any authority or any greatness or any historical validity other than their dominance right I like that so how do we differ well we pray we pray meccan style and when you go to Mecca and when you used to go to Medina there was no gender segregation all genders prayed in the within the area of the mosques prayed together okay the current administration in in the Hijaz in what is now politically called Saudi Arabia the political and religious interpretation influences there have now turned Medina into gendered space so the mosque in Medina which was not gendered is is now gendered uh there is a push to gender mecca as well and and separate people along binary genders uh uh during during prayer and and during certain rituals and so on and so forth this is not the tradition the tradition of the prophet peace be upon him of the prophet Mohammed peace be upon him is that people prayed side by side irrespective of gender there is a common assumption around gender segregation and in fact the reality is that today Muslim spaces are identified by gender segregation in particular types of dress so a lot some people will come to our mosque and say well this is not a mosque because we don't impose a dress code and we don't impose any form of segregation gender or otherwise but we identify our mode of prayer as meccan style because we believe that that is the original the original Muslim space that the that Mohammed peace be upon him created and so we refer to our mode of prayer as meccan style we don't impose a a dress code because um you know in Islam god's greatest gift to humanity is intellect and um some folks will say oh you know you keep the Quran and the highest level in your house if they wrap it in velvet and they stick it on the highest shelf but they never read it but the highest level in the house is your is your intellect you know it's not like a sign that i saw a trumpets the other day this was back in January saying um faith over logic that has never been um an Islamic narrative right uh at least not in the Islam that i was taught um where i was taught that your intellect is your is your is your highest um is god's greatest gift and and and our highest capacity so um we have tried to create a space where people can exercise their own uh agency in understanding what is modesty the Quran uh speaks about modesty for believers um some folks will argue that it specifies a particular mode of dress um but i in my understanding and that of many many scholars uh it is not specific in terms of what modesty means and you know my belief is that if you believe that your tradition or any tradition it's not just Islam if it is for all peoples at all times and the and Allah in the Quran says i've created this religion for you for all peoples for all times then it needs to be organic and dynamic and responsive to to to the human condition uh and so the notion of an absolute sense of modesty as opposed to a a relative sense of modesty um we allow people to have agency as to what they think is modest for them and uh the Quran says if you think that somebody is not modestly dressed lower your own gaze and so this is what we direct to folks so i think people would would would see those two as being the most visible or the most apparent differences with uh dominant culture or muslim mosque spaces um the other thing is that we we strive for um a notion of shared authority um so a lot of religious institutions so even though i act as the imam i actually don't give the sermons every friday i don't leave the prayer every time in fact um it's the way our mosque is set up is that every friday there's a different person giving the sermon and a different person leading the prayer and so we believe very much in an inclusive participatory model as opposed to uh spaces where there's one person who's always sitting at the front and always the one who's uh teaching or lecturing or educating um in real life when we uh would meet in real life uh and assuming that at some point we will again um we would we sit in a circle and the notion of the circle being that so in traditionally in islam a circle the halakah is a place of learning and we sit in a circle during our services uh because the circle circle is always rotating and there is no there's no front or back there's no uh higher or lower it's just simply this rotating circle so there's a sense of equality of egalitarianism and also we speak of my islam so people are asked to speak of their understanding and their experience and um their personal uh journey uh journeys so that's i think what you would find different al faroo believe it or not we're at the end of our time you'll have to come back and tell us more i think we need to add to your long list of descriptors scholar i've learned a lot and please come and join us again to tell us about your exciting work it's very i certainly will thank you so much i'd like to welcome in mcann mcann sorry already um to our show all things lgbtq welcome in how are you i am fine linda and it's great to be here i wish i were with you in vermont instead of sitting all the way down here in north carolina but don't you want to be here in the summer yeah oh absolutely i mean i want to be there all the time well i know you're coming up for a writing retreat in yes hero we said it north hero um yeah up in the hero island chain and i've been um vacationing in north hero now and when i say vacationing i mean i probably spend about 10 weeks a year up there uh for about 25 years and so this is kind of your spiritual home or your oh yeah totally it totally is you know i've lived in a lot of different places i was born in pennsylvania lived there until i was about 10 and then we lived in northern delaware we lived in olinoy and then we ended up in north carolina where i've been now for about 46 years and the first time i went to vermont it was actually kind of uh like randomly picking a place out of a hat you know that might be a fun place to try to vacation and it was in mid july height of the tourist season and um getting up there turned into a nightmare um the airline was i don't even you name it and it happened we were supposed to land in burlington vermont and instead we ended up in montreal at about one o'clock in the morning we had to rent a car in quebec and drive south to this tiny little vacation cottage we had rented sight unseen that i think was in north alberg and it was it was like one of the summers where there had been no rain no rain this place was supposed to be on the lake and the what little water there was was like about a mile out um and and the place ended up just being a nightmare it was like the bates motel you know i'm not even kidding so it was clear that we weren't going to be able to stay there so we contacted the the rental agent and next morning got in the car and just started driving south on route two trying to find a place that wasn't already all booked up and i had one of those commercial um tourist maps you know from a gas station and and on the back of it it just had all these ads for different little ends and stuff and there was an ad for this place called shore acres in north hero and because i worked professionally as a graphic designer then i was immediately attracted to the ad because it was so well designed so i thought let's find this place you know so we get to north hero and you know i don't know if you've ever been there but yeah when you probably when you see this place from from the from route two and it's just this absolutely they're on they're on like a nice wide part of the lake and and it's manicured grounds in this long driveway and you know and we drove in and i felt like this is going to sound really weird but um if you remember maybe from from sunday school or something the story of when um elizabeth who was the mother of john the baptist was pregnant and mary who was the mother of jesus who was also pregnant when the two of them were cousins and when they got together elizabeth talked about how the baby inside her just left with joy because it knew that it was he knew it knew that it was next to the divine right so that's how i fell when we turned into that place it was like something inside me just came to life and i found my home i found my spiritual home and that's never changed and every single year since then we have we have come to north hero and stayed and we stay for a month in the summer and then we usually come a couple other times of the year for a week or two you know now i know that was way more than you wanted i don't know that was really great i i feel a lot that way about vermont also vermont's just a holy place it just is beautiful um and you sort of feel so enclosed and and and yet free with the mountains and the water and you know all of it it's just so incredible let me let me just though before we get into any more discussion talk a little let me read your bios so that our audience knows who you are if they know please please leave out the arrest record okay okay you know no convictions no convictions okay we won't we won't even talk about that you know it's it'll be our secret and big man is the author of 10 novels and two short story collections she's a two-time lambda literary award recipient a three-time independent publisher medalist an eight-time winner of golden crown literary society awards and a laureate of the alice b foundation for her outstanding body award a career graphic designer ann is a four-time recipient of the t koreen award for outstanding cover design she lives in winston salem north carolina so that's correct very impressive so um i know a few of your books are set in vermont yes um i think a fictionary a fictional uh st august is that right that's right i had this uh i wanted to i've written two books two novels they're actually set in in vermont one is set in north hero um that book is called backcast and it's um it's actually really it was my way to kind of lampoon and make fun of lesbian writers and how specific our genres are you know the vampire genre the the you know the mystery the what did they you know all that and all that stuff so i i created this um i wanted to write a novel about 13 lesbian authors who get together for a writer's retreat yeah at a country in and vermont i can only imagine it's everything that could possibly go wrong goes wrong but while they are there a small group of them knowing nothing about the sport decide to enter a tournament bass fishing competition hence the name of the book backcast so one of the things that happens is um they they they get this old beat up pontoon and retrofitted and they managed to find a local fisherman who's willing to help them and guide them and tell them what all they need to do and um one of the main characters in the book and you have to go here is a 200 year old bass named phoebe who no one has ever caught so she becomes a very prominent character in this book so that's backcast and i i actually set the book at a fictionalized um shore acres so it's literally that place that's described in the book so that's one and then a couple of years ago um i got this idea that i wanted to write a book because i've worked my entire life in higher ed that's kind of what i know and it can be really absurd as i'm sure you can imagine that that whole kind of closed higher ed community so i thought it would be really fun to write a book set at a small college so i decided to create the small college and set it in st albin's vermont and the set that book is called bail wolf for cretins bail wolf for cretins and the reason it has that title is the main character is an english professor named grace warner who's up for tenure and she she describes something there's there's a there's a scene in the book where she's you know meets this woman on an airplane they're both traveling to an event in california and the woman says um what do you do and and grace says i teach four sections of bail wolf for cretins so that's how she describes so anyway so i had a blast with that and i made it i made it a small college that at one time had been affiliated with the roman catholic church but wasn't anymore and you know and and if you read the book everything in it you'll recognize like all of the restaurants and and places they go are all real so i had a blast and i actually wrote that book in vermont on my retreat on one of my little self-styled writing retreats i wrote that book in vermont and that book won a lammy won a lambda literary award so that was that was kind of my love letter to vermont well it's i'm sure it's you know it's absolutely i think you'd get a charge out of it on my list of books to read real soon oh good um or you can just call me up and i'll read it to you cheap as i said not cheap i might be cheap but i'm not free and so a lot of your you seem to write books in series like you have the jericho c series the eight what is it evan evan evan evan read yeah there are two of those yeah and uh dis and clarissa two oh yeah those stories those are fun those are all short stories about the same characters and june mcgee are yeah there's just one of those that's that book is fun okay this one so when did you start writing i know you did chalk as a little kid you did chalk writing you know i started writing um like writing writing many years ago um when i was working at a college in in uh greensboro i started writing um kind of little fun editorial pieces for the local newspaper like a couple of times they asked me to review books and then they started giving me little assignments to go and you know look at something and write a piece about it so i i always did that kind of writing you know but i never wrote fiction and um it was about 11 years ago i guess you know when the when when the internet suddenly made a wealth of fan fiction that you could read for free available online you know i in common with every other lesbian on the planet you know discovered that and spent a lot of time you know the old aol thing where you waited for the computer you know and you'd log into these you know you go to the academy of rds or the atheneum or some of these sites and start reading a lot of these stories for free because as you know there were next to no books available i mean there were some the old nyad books but but not very many you know and there certainly were not very many bookstores where you could get them so so i so i sort of got i read as much as i could find i didn't even realize i was a lesbian until i was 30 which is ironic because everybody else who knew me had figured it out i know i'm just like y'all could have saved me you know five years in therapy okay so but you know but once i got that news flash at age 30 i read everything i could get my hands on everything you know every book every magazine every anything i could find i read it i even got a part-time job working in a gay bookstore yeah you know silly me i thought this would be a great way to meet women as it turned out um i had about 42 gay boyfriends you know but but so i became really interested in in the literature that was available and also kind of sadly impressed by how bad a lot of it was you know i mean there was there was wonderful stuff but there was also a whole lot of it that was that was just really terrible so i kind of thought i i i think i could write one of these books yeah you know they're kind of formulaic it's not you know so i started writing one myself and that was my first book Jericho and it took me about a year maybe 18 months to write it and when i finished it i just threw it in a drawer and this friend of mine said you need to you need to do something with that book and i'm like you're crazy like nobody's going to want to read this she said well at the very least send it into one of the online sites that take you know put it up there for free carve it up into 10 parts and start posting it so i thought okay i'll try it but first i invented a fictitious name because i like i know this book is gonna suck and everybody's gonna hate it and i don't want anybody to know it's me so i threw it up there and i i created an email account you know under and McMahon which is not my real name but now i have to live with it um and put the book up there and then i waited a few days and then i was like with great trepidation like kind of you know i kind of went in and looked i had like 400 emails from people saying oh my god oh my god what are you gonna and i was like you gotta be kidding me and within a month i had offers to publish from three different you know so that's kind of how i got my humble start that's amazing man i mean well i don't think that would happen today i think honest to goodness i think 10 years ago the time was i got lucky the time was exactly right you know but you know just to have such validation so so quickly but just i know i was very lucky really so that jericho that you know that jericho book then um turned into what is arguably the series of what i would consider the most popular books i've written because i mean there are people who just love those books they're all set in a small town in the virginia mountains and all of the books are about the same kind of quirky bunch of people and in fact the book i just finished a few like a month ago is the fourth book in that series it's called covenant and it comes out in july so all these books are available at audible and we're going to have your website online oh thank you people want to order your books especially the two vermont books yes yes so it seems like we're we're pretty much out of time oh my gosh i'm so sorry i know no it's fabulous and um so um just let me ask you how long have you been publishing with buywater books um six years i think that's right i think it's six years the first book i did with buywater was backcast one of the two books set in roman well this has been lovely thank you i'm so sorry i i i have verbal diarrhea that's what we want you know my mother my mother always said she spent the first three years of my life trying to get me to talk in the next 30 trying to get me to shut up you know that's what we love though we want our authors on here talking about their work and you know being enthusiastic and thank you so much thank you so much it's been an honor okay give us a call when you get into Vermont i sure will now you're in montpelier is that right we're down in montpelier yeah and um hopefully we'll have COVID under control and um yeah we can meet for dinner or something that'd be awesome yeah okay take care of yourself and lovely to meet you bye bye if people who routinely watch all things may have noted and it started with that and charles all things is making a commitment to reach out to trailblazers from within our community to tell our stories and to share our legacy and for today i couldn't be more delighted that the person who is agreed to spend this time with us is somebody who was a personal role model for me when i started doing political advocacy in the mid 1980s please welcome from main dale McCorvick welcome dale hi hi keith it's great to be here over in vermont and i and you shared prior to our starting to tape that you had actually gone out and started taping your maple tree so it's very appropriate yes so i really wanted to invite you to be part of this process after stumbling across you to again add a new england wide conference because indeed in the the 80s you were a prominent figure in the main lgbtq political structure but actually prior to that you had already created a first when you were out in the mid west yeah in iowa of all places where you were the first woman in the country to be certified as a journey woman how did that happen well in the international brotherhood of carpenters and joiners there might have been other unions but i was the first in the carpenters union well how it happened was that there was a recession and i didn't have a job and it was the middle of the women's movement and no it was the middle of the beginning of the second wave and um our job you know was to push the envelope to push the definition of what women could be and so i had always known how to use tools and i was handy and so i went down and applied and i'll give you the short version because this is a great story but uh they accepted one apprentice and it was me that year and then they got in trouble with the international for accepting a woman in a heavy construction local so i for one i know of you i think you were probably more than adequate to meet the task this year yeah i was go on i was gonna say so how do you get from iowa to main um well i wasn't a matriarch of the iowa city lesbian feminist community we really had we had the infrastructure of a town we had a restaurant a bookstore a carpentry company mine two plumbing companies a press um the iowa city women's press and other things a medical free medical clinic two daycare center i mean we created all of that and um and and a culture as well i'll send it around the uh it all happened at the uu church now i now i'm a uu but i didn't even realize that i was hanging out at the uu i i sort of knew it but i didn't know what uu was anyway so um so uh it was ready for me to leave and this guy from main um uh who uh was a owner builder school owner in other words had an owner builder school that was a thing back then there were like 10 of them around the country and he said he had read my book against the grain a carpentry manual for women and he wrote me a letter and said how would you like to come out here and um teach a month long course house building for women and so i said well i would like that a lot so i basically commuted for one or two years about i think the first one was 78 or 79 and then i and then i moved and then they offered me a full time job so i said okay but i didn't leave iowa because i didn't like iowa iowa is a great place and iowa city is one of the greatest cities in the country so it was it was just time to go to grow it was insular there and you know i mean from what you were describing about the community that you helped to create in iowa i i would have been ready to just nestle in and stay there my first question though is your first trip to main was it in the summer or in the winter it was in the summer yeah that so once you got to main and you know you started teaching how did you one find an lgbtq plus community and what drove you to become involved again that was a very good question and the answer is i i i and others created it i mean where i was which was in brunswick main there wasn't anything like what iowa city had so it was it was a whole year culture shock but i remember cornerstones where i was teaching we had a big a big big room huge room where we had the classes and and they said we could have dances on saturday night so lesbian dances so of course this is uh you know the early 90s no the early 80s excuse me yeah and so we had to figure out a safe way to tell everybody about this so we put a little add in the paper in code and we said the local chapter of the sarah the lavender caucus of the sarah orn jewice society is going to be having a meeting at eight o'clock on saturday night at cornerstones and and this worked very well for a while until the real sarah or the president of the real sarah or jewice society down in portland called and said what is this lavender caucus we are the sarah or society who are you busted that was funny anyway so it sounds so you were given this opportunity in may it was an opportunity for personal growth for you and you just took that role of matriarch with you and recreated aspects of the community that you had helped to create in iowa absolutely thank you so how do you then decide to become involved in mainstream politics and as we were talking before we started taping you were the first out lesbian elected to a state legislate senate getting placed in the country i think all these firsts were were the times you know i was just plopped down i was in the right place at the right time or the right place at the wrong time i mean it's never you know our history has been bumpy especially back then and um so what happened first was it was it was uh it was a process because back in my in high school in sygony iowa they wrote in my yearbook that i would be the first lady vice president of the united states so i already had and my father had run for congress my stepfather and not made it but was very active in politics so um when when i got to iowa city and which was a real blossoming period um and when i when i got to um main um in 1980 i there was a forming of a little community and we put out we put on it i i bet there's people in vermont who might have seen this we wrote together the men's and the women's community wrote a version of west side story called gay side story and we put it on we practiced it for six months and put it on for one night so therefore no royalty police um copyright police came after us and um it was it was we we all think that because the men and the women gay men and lesbians worked together on this um that we we didn't have the kind of schisms that other towns had and and after that um i ran to be a delegate an outdelegate to the 1984 democratic convention in san francisco because back then that was a big deal i mean it was it was a once again an envelope we were pushing we should be we should have a seat at the table and that's what we used to say and we also formed um nationally and elected and appointed lb it wasn't it was lesbian and gay elected and appointed um officials uh organization um of which tammy baldwin was one of the founders as well and when i got to san francisco as the outdelegate there were like 10 of us or something now there's 400 but they were there was 10 of us and guess it was like it was like going to the mountaintop um for me it was we were followed by the gay press brandy schiltz wanted to interview me uh we we had the gay community the gay tv news following our little our little caucus and all the other delegates for main were going oh how is this sort of boring over here i'm like in the middle of everything we were in the middle of everything and um and they wanted to they wanted to know uh particularly it wasn't just me it was what happened in main which was charlie howard a young gay man had been thrown into a river and drowned in bangor and and it woke it not only woke them up because they thought main was as they probably thought about vermont very you know idyllic place to live and so did mayners think that and so based with that kind of impetus and also i think it for me it was amazing to go to the top of the hill and look over to see what they had out there in san francisco we started the main lesbian game political alliance and that grew into a quality main and that grew into and then you see what we have done with marriage equality we were the first state ever to to buy on the ballot to people passed it you know which is let's not even get into that well how anybody is voting on a minorities rights you know that's like isn't that anti-american but so so that's how that's how it sort of got started and then once we formed the main lesbian gay political alliance which of course the main thing was to get an anti-discrimination bill i mean back then it was and the issue of marriage actually lapped the the anti-discrimination bill in main it surged ahead for reasons that we can all understand because that's a good thing and anti-discrimination just happens when people have been bad things to you so anyway so i would go the president i was the first president of mlgpa and and sort of was the role of the first president to go and plus i lived in agusta to go up to agusta and lobby and once you do that once you go to agusta and lobby you meet all these people and you realize that hey i could do that um and so and so um after a little while in 1990 um i ran for the state senate because that i had a really really right wing you know the right christian right point man and the legislature in the senate i sort of skipped the house my senate seat and i ran for the senate and it was quite the campaign it was got more ink than the governor's um you know the lesbian upstart versus the stalwart right wing guy who was anti everything he named one good thing that vermont likes and he was against it and um so i won by 0.05 percent about it with landslide macormick i barely barely made it but i that's how that's how i got elected to the state senate and from that you moved on to become the state treasurer right and i think that was also a lesbian first i bet that's true yeah and and you're you've just continued to be a trail placer for us so in the couple of minutes we have left people coming up you opened the door what is it that we need to do to invite our communities to take that next step forward and what do they need for support to be able to do that i i'm just writing something down because there's two sides to that um and the first side the the side i'll get off is i now am inspired by the young people in our movement and for instance over here in in main equality main runs this i call it it's colloquially known as gay camp for kids from 13 or 14 to 18 or 17 and they each time they do this it gets bigger bigger bigger and i think they had 50 or 60 students before covid so not this summer but the one before and they had it at unity college and every time they do this they invite the veterans and and i'm always like to go so they always invite me in there's the usual suspects go over and i i just had the best time uh i had a little posse they love they love to have it they love they were the most excited about having the the veterans workshop than anything else it's not neat and uh so um and then a guy i met there andy who i just love is uh he's now on the board of the equality community center and i'm on the board too and we um he's 18 or he might even be 17 and um and he's he's great he's fantastic and and and so we're i think we're doing a good job of of pulling kids young people in um and what and in terms of if you're asking about politics with a big p you know running for office i think we just need to to have you know you and i we need to be mentors we we need to be available and um and i think i i hope he's not watching this but i i hope i think i'm being that for andy and and when i do it whenever i i can i i look for those opportunities but um i wanted to say another this might be get us all in trouble but this summer you know when there were we had the protests against against murdering black people and black lives matter protests for for a short word um and and they coined the slogan um defund the police i'm gonna be interested if you had the same uh reaction that i did um but it only took me one i totally understood what they meant but it only took me one day to say we cannot say that politically that is not a mess a winning message better to say you know social workers on the police are you know the issue that they were trying to get at and um um so that made me think you know somehow um those of us with long what now 50 60 years of political experience uh should be should should be integrated we we should have been and we should have been at the table there we weren't at that table um to to give that with that you know and with that i need to say thank you and and i am definitely reaching out so we can continue this conversation and maybe bring some of those other you know rabble browsers in with us dale thank you for being the trailblazer you were and the role model you were thank you thank you thank you for joining us we'll see you in two weeks but in the meantime resist