 Good morning, Highline family, familia, buenos dias. Wow, what a week it's been already and the fun has just begun. My name is Joshua Magallanes and I'm faculty counselor here at Highline College. Over the past 18 years, I've seen many areas of growth be expanded and also areas in which we can still grow. Today we've got a pioneer here to talk about that and how heroes, she-ros and they-ros are around us daily. Yesterday on National Coming Out Day, I recorded my own story. Sharing story is important because if we don't share, someone else will. Now, before we get to our esteemed guest and speaker for today, Stephanie Oheraponse will offer the land and labor acknowledgement. Thank you for the introduction, Joshua. I am going to paste the text of this in the chat for accessibility and because I'll be delivering it in Spanish. Reconosemos que Highline College fue construido en territorio colonizado originalmente, protegido por la gente indígena, Pee Wallop, Muckleshoot, Coast Salish y Duwamish. Reconosemos estos tribos y toda la gente indígena impactada por colonización y opresión. Dentro de nosotros tenemos la capacidad de aprender la historia de los tribus, de aprender de nuestras raíces indígenas y de respetar y apoyar indigenidad con nuestras acciones. And I'll paste something in the chat so that you can find out whose land you're on and in the chat you can also find out whose land you're on and how you go beyond acknowledgement to action. Thank you, Stephanie. It helps if I unmute myself. Wow, what a beautiful sentiment and way to get us going today on this Tuesday, this special day. Where do I even begin? Dr. Sanlo, who is with us today, brings a breath of knowledge and has really steamrolled ahead of their time and has really put us on the mark. And as we were thinking about who to bring for this week and how to really set up the week in terms of speakers and how to really inform, we thought about the past and the present and the future. And I believe Ronnie does that today. Just a little bit of information before we get this going, Dr. Sanlo is an LGBTQIA historian and playwright. Dr. Sanlo is the director emeritus of the UCLA Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center and frequent keynote speaker and consultant on LGBTQI issues and higher education. Dr. Sanlo now retired, was a professor and director at the UCLA Masters of Education and Student Affairs. Prior to UCLA in 1997, Dr. Sanlo was the director of the LGBT Center at the University of Michigan. Dr. Sanlo was an HIV Epidemiologist in Florida from 1987 to 1994. Dr. Sanlo under bachelor's degree in music at the University of Florida and a master's in doctorate in education from the University of Florida in Jacksonville. She developed the initial standards and guidelines for the LGBTQIA work in higher ed and was founding chair for the consortium of the LGBT professionals in higher education. Dr. Sanlo is the originator of the award-winning Lavender graduation, a commencement event that celebrates the lives and achievements of graduating LGBTQIA college students. She continues research and writes a focus on LGBT history, which is the foundation for award-winning documentary letter to Anita and her play, Dear Anita Bryan. She has over a hundred academic publications, post-retirement books, historical novel about the last five months of the World War II entitled Soldier, The Aviator, The Holocaust. I could go on and on. Dr. Sanlo and their partner live in Palm Springs, California and squim. We're neighbors and it's wonderful to have you Dr. Sanlo with us today. And with that and without further ado, I welcome you to the stage and let's give a warm welcome to Dr. Ronnie Sanlo. Joshua, thank you so much and thank you to Highline College for inviting me to be here. What an exciting time this is national coming out week, national coming out month. And I'm going to go ahead and get started with my slide presentation. So hang on because this is what I do and there. This is what I do and there. And hopefully you can all see this and we're in this together now. So I'm absolutely thrilled to be here with you today and I wish you a happy coming out week. This is one of those special times when we gather together as a community to honor our past and to celebrate the diversity within us and around us. Before I begin, I want to honor the Jamestown Scallum people on whose tribal land I live here in Squim in the Pacific Northwest. And I dedicate this talk to the memory of Matthew Shepard, the University of Wyoming student who was killed because he was gay 24 years ago today. Now, I'm kind of an accidental educator. You don't believe I ever said to my parents, when I grow up, I want to be a professor. And I'm quite sure I never said, when I grow up, I want to be the head lesbian at a major university. But there I was, big dyke on campus. And now after having been the oldest living lesbian in institutional captivity, I'm retired focusing on LGBTQ history preservation in the books and plays that I write. Now as an educator and activist and apparently one of the top 20 most powerful lesbian academics in the country, according to Curve magazine, to which I replied who knew there were 20. Anyway, being an educator, I love this opportunity to share that which has been invisible for so long. The stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people and our communities have been missing. You probably didn't learn about Alan Turing, a gay man who's considered the grandparent of computer science and who broke the German code in 1945 to help the allies win the war or bisexual storytellers or Neil Hurston or transgender tennis professional Renee Richards or lesbian astronaut Sally Ride. People need to know that we LGBTQ folk didn't just pop out of a bar last Thursday night or pride last June. For LGBTQ people having a grounding in history that's inclusive of our experience and our stories increases our sense of self and security. For non queer people having this grounding expands the world of ideas and knowledge. So I'm gonna share stories with you today about people and events about which you've probably never heard just sharing history as I've found it. I want you to know the names of those who came before us. Now, when I was 11 years old in 1958, a curious thing happened. At a slumber party of us fifth grade girls one girl began chatting about boyfriends. I didn't have a boyfriend so I made one up but I realized to my surprise that I really wanted a girlfriend. And when I mentioned how Annette Funicello the best mouse kateer ever could be my girlfriend they made fun of me. One girl said, that means you would be a ew homosexual. What's a homosexual ask another? The first girl responded, I think it's a boy who likes boys. That's what I heard my uncle say. He said, boys who like boys were queer. This time a collective ew arose and my newly discovered closet door slammed shut. I spent the next 20 years trying to be something I wasn't. Like so many LGBTQ people, I grew up in a society without an historical context. No heroes, no reflections of who I was as a young lesbian. I had no culture, no history and no understanding of anything more than I must be the only one. In the famous words of Marcus Garvey a person without any knowledge of past history, origin or culture is like a tree without roots. I had no queer roots. I searched my school's libraries for any reference to homosexuality. All I found were books about strong women such as Babe Diedrichsen and Eleanor Roosevelt and Margaret Mead. But there was never a mention of their love for another woman. But that word homosexual stayed with me. Homosexual, I looked everywhere in my school library in the encyclopedia which had everything in the world in it, nothing. But in 1962, there it was. The Britannica's yearbook had an entry. Homosexual, men who love other men, see lesbian. Hmm, lesbian? Lesbian, a woman from the Isle of Lesbos, see homosexual. Really? What did that mean? And what did the Isle of Lesbos have to do with anything anyway? I was even more confused. But I put it all away until many years later when I began to explore in more available resources which took me surprisingly to the Isle of Lesbos and Sappho. Sappho lived on the Isle of Lesbos and wrote beautiful poetry to the women she loved much of which was lost, destroyed by papal decree in 1073 AD. Was there anyone before Sappho? Of course. Meet Niankem and Nidhotep both of whom were chief manicurists to the Pharaoh in the fifth dynasty of the old kingdom. Their tomb offers the oldest evidence of queer lives. Incidentally, there's no evidence from ancient Egypt that homosexual acts were punishable offenses. Jumping to the Romans, King Titus is the first recorded married man to leave his wife for another man, a mime named Paris. After public outcry, Titus killed Paris and went back to his wife. But he continued his affairs with young men and so his wife had him assassinated. For the first thousand years, Christianity was fairly tolerant of homosexuality and even honored queer love through brother making rituals for male couples. A shift began when the church joined forces with political and military powers near the end of Christianity's first millennium. In 1120, the church ordered burning at the state for homosexual acts and contributed to the deaths of thousands for homosexuality over the next 700 years. Which burning occurred in the same period and claimed the lives of countless lesbians whose non-conformity was condemned as witchcraft. But Michelangelo was beloved by the church and of course he was gay. Had he been straight, the Sistine Chapel would have been painted flat white with a roller. In 1604, England's King James I authorized a new translation of the Bible, cleverly known as the King James Bible. Interestingly though James was married, he also had male lovers as well, regardless of what his Bible says. His last male lover was George V.A. The king was not ashamed of his love for V.A. and he compared it to Jesus' love of John. Christianity is generally no longer used to justify state sponsored extracutions, executions for homosexuality, but religion is still a big factor in nations where executions continue. Today, 13 countries still execute for the crime of being gay in the name of religion. And we must never forget that the Nazis sent about 60,000 people to the concentration camps for homosexuality. I'm a voter, so I love the stories of lesbian pirates Ann Bonny and Mary Reed. Of course, like all tales of the high seas, their story comes in wildly different versions. The only thing consistent about them is that they were lovers. Another favorite is stagecoach driver, Charlotte Charlie Parkhurst. Parkhurst, who registered to vote in 1868, may have been the first female-born person to vote in California. It was a medical examiner who upon Charlie's death discovered that Charlie was female. Gentlemen, Jack and Lister traveled to Wales to meet the ladies of Langolan in 1822 and spent the day with ladies Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, who were two upper-class Irish women whose relationships scandalized and fascinated their contemporaries during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Butler and Ponsonby lived together for 50 years and are buried together at St. Collins Church in Langolan. Woman chief was a warrior and a crow chief. Interested in traditionally male pursuits from an early age, she became one of the crow's most significant leaders, joining the Council of Chiefs as a third-ranking member. She was killed while on a peacemaking expedition with the U.S. government. She left behind four wives. Catherine Lee Bates was an American professor and author who wrote the song America the Beautiful, which I think should be our national anthem. And she helped launch American literature as an academic specialty. Throughout her long career at Wellesley, she shared a house with her lover, Catherine Coleman, who was also a Wellesley professor and a dean. Anna Sperling was better known as Anna Ruling. She was a German journalist who gave the first known speech addressing problems faced by lesbians. She was described as the first lesbian activist. You've probably heard of Gertrude Stein, who was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. She moved to Paris in 1903 and hosted a salon where the leading figures of modernism and literature and art would meet, including Picasso, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Matisse. Stein's partner, Alice B. Toklas, was the de facto hostess for the wives and girlfriends of the artists in attendance. Gertrude and Alice lived and loved in Paris as an open lesbian couple until Gertrude's death in 1946. They're buried together in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. And there were anthropologists, Margaret Mead, and her lover Ruth Benedict, and the popular, powerful Eleanor Roosevelt and her lover, journalist Lorena Hickok. These are my foremothers, the women on whose shoulders I stand. Now, where women had Boston marriages thought to be non-sexual lifelong relationships, men had romantic friendships. Another example is John Lawrence and Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton wrote, I wish my dear Lawrence that it might be in my power by action rather than words to convince you that I love you. Any documentation of the lives of same gender loving women from this era in American history is exceedingly rare. At the time, intimacy was simply never discussed, regardless of sexual orientation. In the late 19th century, white, freer enslaved, richer poor, no one divulged their intimate liaisons in mid-century America, mid-19th century America. But we do know about the charismatic Rebecca Primus, born in 1836, and feisty Addy Brown. Brown and Primus were best friends and romantic companions. They worked hard, battled racism, spoke their minds, and loved each other passionately. Mrs. Natch, a laundress with a seventh U.S. Calvary, died in 1878. She'd had several soldier husbands. Upon her death, it was revealed that she had been born male. Her last husband, a corporal, died by suicide after that revelation. And there was poet Angelina Welgrimke and her lover, playwright Mary Burrell, writer Sarah Orn-Jewitt, and her lover, writer Annie Adams Fields. And suffragist Susan B. Anthony and her lover, Emily Gross. The popular blue singer Ma Rainey was arrested in 1925 in her house in Harlem for hosting a lesbian party. Her protege, singer Bessie Smith, bailed her out of jail the following morning. Rainey and Smith were part of an extensive circle of lesbian and bisexual African-American women in Harlem during that time. Eve Kochever was a Polish-Jewish immigrant who opened Eve Adams Tea Room in Greenwich Village in New York in 1925. The lesbian gathering place had a sign at the door that read, men are admitted, but not welcome. In 1926, the Tea Room was raided, and Eva Kochever was charged with disorderly conduct and writing an obscene book entitled, Lesbian Love. She and her lover were deported back to Germany. They were eventually arrested and died in Auschwitz concentration camp. And then there was the sewing circle, a group of famous lesbian and bisexual writers and actresses who kept their sexual identity a secret and often married some of the Hollywood gay men to remain publicly closeted. They included Agnes Morehead, Mary Martin, my favorite Peter Pan, Marlena Dietrich, Greta Garber, Barbara Stanwick, Joan Crawford, Tallulah Bankhead, Audrey Hepburn, Dorothy Arsner, Mercedes Dacosta, Billie Holiday, and Hattie McDaniel to name a few. The male actors didn't have such an elaborate flowchart, but they were in the same closet to make sure they didn't lose their box office standing as leading men. In fact, many were lovers with one another. The men included Anthony Perkins, known for his role as Norman Bates in the psycho movies, who died from AIDS-related complications, actor Rock Hudson, who also died from AIDS, Tab Hunter, Rudolph Nureyev, Stephen Sondheim, James Dean, Montgomery Cliff, Tyrone Power, Cary Grant, and probably a hundred others. Now, civil rights issues, laws, disasters, and demonstrations permeate LGBTQ history, though you've likely not heard about much of it. For example, President James Buchanan served as the 15th President of the United States from 1857 to 1861. He married Anne Coleman in 1818, but she died a year later. Buchanan remained a bachelor for the rest of his life. He had a very close relationship with former Vice President William Rufus King. Buchanan and King lived together and attended social functions together. King was known as Miss Nancy and as Buchanan's better half and wife. In 1917, U.S. immigration law was modified to ban persons with abnormal sexual instincts. That would be us from entering the United States. This ban was lifted in 1993. In 1924, Henry Gerber founded the Society for Human Rights in Chicago. It was the United States first known gay rights organization. The society was quickly shut down, however, and Henry was arrested for creating an obscene organization. American feminist and political activist Mollie Dueson, a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, was appointed head of the women's division of the Democratic Party by President Roosevelt in 1932. Dueson and social worker Polly Porter were lifelong lovers. They were among the many women couples who held positions in the Roosevelt administration. The year I was born in 1947, the State Department began firing suspected homosexuals under President Truman's national security law program. When I was five years old, in 1952, Christine Jorgensen was the first American whose sex reassignment surgery became public. Her surgery caused an international sensation and for many, she was the first visible transgender person in the media. When I was eight years old, Dale Martin and Phyllis Lyon and six other women formed Daughters of Biletus, the first national lesbian rights group. The organization took its name from a collection of poems called Songs of Biletus. Biletus was a female character who was romantically associated with Safa, remember her? Now two of the most insidious people in the political world were Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover served as the first director of the FBI. He abused his power to terrorize people of color, homosexuals and others, and yet he lived with his lover Clyde Tolson, who he appointed as his assistant. Hoover bequeathed his estate to Tolson who accepted the American flag that draped Hoover's casket. Tolson is buried a few yards away from Hoover in the Congressional Cemetery. Attorney Roy Kahn assisted Hoover during the 1950s investigations of communists and homosexuals. Kahn was a closeted gay man and McCarthy was suspended of such as well. Kahn died of AIDS-related complications in 1986. During the lavender scare, Kahn and McCarthy enhanced anti-gay fervor by suggesting that communists overseas for blackmailing gay men for governmental information, though there was absolutely no proof of that. Yet President Eisenhower signed an executive order in 1953 that barred homosexuals from obtaining jobs at the federal level. The McCarthy-inspired hearings initiated anti-gay witch hunts in 1954 during which more than 1200 men and women lost their jobs in the federal government, including Frank Kamini. Kamini was fired from his position as an astronomer in the Army's map service because of his homosexuality, leading him to spearhead the homosexual rights movement of the early 1960s. Higher education was not immune. The 1954 McCarthy-like Florida Legislative Investigation Committee harassed the NAACP thinking black people were communists. The NAACP ordered them to back off, so they went after Florida's homosexuals on college campuses. The lesbian and gay witch hunts began. The eight-year investigation didn't end until 1964. I arrived at the University of Florida as a first-year student the following year and heard the horror stories. Those stories kept me in the closet for the next 14 years. And in that year, in 1965, as I started college at the University of Florida, the first public picketing to protest government discrimination against lesbians and gay men took place at the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon, led by lesbian activist Barbara Giddings, Frank Kamini, and others. On June 28, 1969, as I was graduating from Florida, drag queens, transgender people, and gender non-conforming people resisted arrest and yet another routine bar raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York City's Greenwich Village. Though we rarely see their names and photos, the leaders included transgender women, Sylvia Rivera, and Marsha Keith Johnson. The leader also included the bisexual Barbara Howard, who was known as the mother of pride. Howard was an active member of both BiPAC and BiNet USA and was a founder of the nation's first alcoholics anonymous for bisexuals. The Stonewall riots have been the center of queer imagination in the United States and abroad for decades. While Stonewall has come to represent a revolution in which we fought back against the society that had become complacent to the violence against us, it didn't happen in a vacuum. On November 15, 1937, the La Paloma nightclub in Miami was raided. Unlike Stonewall, law enforcement wasn't behind this raid. Instead, nearly 200 women and men from the Ku Klux Klan wearing long white hooded robes that both concealed their identities and created fear, burned a fiery cross, then stormed La Paloma, roughed up staff and performers, and ordered the night spot closed. La Paloma soon reopened. In fact, one of the skits for its reopening was a satire that clans raided the club, including performers wearing white hooded robes. Although wildly different, the reason the events at Stonewall and La Paloma share some general overlapping threads is that queer bars have historically been key sites of resistance, change, and even revolution. There are dozens more examples of such raids and resistance, including the Turkish baths in New York in 1929, Cooper's Donuts in Los Angeles in 1959, Gene Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco in 1966, and the Black Cat Cafe in Los Angeles in 1967. We shouldn't assume either that such raids are simply cautionary tales of a bygone era. More recent events, such as the raid of the Rainbow Lounge and the Eagle Bar, both in 2009 and Fort Worth in Atlanta, make clear that these so-called safe spaces, even as they've evolved and transformed over time, are still hotly contested, surveilled, and harassed in this current climate of paid field rhetoric. Such spaces are also prone to massive violence. While the Klan didn't kill anyone that night in 1937, the intimidation they hope to incite finds commonality in the 1973 Upstairs Lounge arson attack that killed 32 people in New Orleans, and the 2016 Pulse Nightclub attack that killed 49 people in Orlando, all acts of domestic terrorism. The KKK raid at the La Paloma in Miami has been erased from popular consciousness, but it fits into a long and rich tradition of queer resilience and resistance. Milestone moments matter, and so do these forgotten stories. After all, discrimination and violence have many guises, and to focus on only one example like Stonewall is to risk missing the real story of how progress happened, how much more work there is to be done. Gay liberation required that we put a face on the issue. Coming out back then was the hardest, most costly choice we had ever made. Not everyone could do it because coming out led us into a no return life outside of social acceptance. Many of us were kicked out of our families, lost their children as I had, fired from our jobs. We were deviants according to the lies told by Anita Bryant and Jerry Falwell and Fred Phelps and most other evangelicals, but their public crusades against our civil rights and bolden rather than scared most of us. I got married in 1971, two years after Stonewall. My grandfather said, you're almost 25 and not married. What are you, funny or something? I was stunned. I was still in the closet, never told anyone I was a lesbian and certainly never acted on it. I thought my grandfather had discovered my secret, that it had oozed out somehow. I weighed my options, marriage or suicide. Coming out was not an option because I thought I was the only woman who felt this way. I thought I must be queerer than queer, sicker than everyone else. So I called a guy who'd been my default date at the University of Florida who I actually thought was gay and asked if he wanted to get married, never mind that we hadn't seen each other in over two years. He said yes. We were married within three months of my grandfather's remark and I was pregnant several months after that. My daughter was born in 1973 and my son in 1976. No one would ever again accuse me of being funny or something. I was a stay-at-home wife mother of two. While I was hiding deeply in my clueless closet in Orlando in 1973, a seismic cultural change caught everyone by surprise. The American Psychiatric Association changed defining homosexuality from a disease to a dysphoria disorder, which was then quietly removed in succeeding years. But I was in the closet and I didn't know. In 1975, U.A. Noble became the first openly lesbian or gay legislator as she took her seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. But I was in the closet and I didn't know. And then came Anita Bryant. In 1977, popular singer and Florida Orange Juice Queen, Anita Bryant headed a fundamentalist church-sponsored campaign in Miami called Save Our Children, which resulted in the repeal of Miami's new gay rights ordinance. The following year, in 1978, similar ordinances around the country were repealed as well. But the BRIGS initiative in California, which would have prevented lesbian and gay teachers from the classroom, was defeated, as was a similar initiative in Washington state. Anita Bryant's work backfired and she nearly single-handedly coalesced the LGBT community to fight even harder for our civil rights. But I was in the closet and I didn't know. Two other pertinent things happened in 1978. Gilbert Baker created the rainbow flag for the San Francisco Pride Parade. And San Francisco supervisor and gay rights leader Harvey Milk was assassinated. But I was in the closet and I didn't know. The next year, in 1979, at the ripe old age of 32, I came out. I came out and lost custody of my two children ages three and six, because I was a lesbian and an angry one at that. So I didn't know the law and I didn't know our history. I did know that losing my children wasn't fair and it wasn't right. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to do. My anger fueled my activism. And within 18 months of coming out, I was the executive director and lobbyist of the Florida lesbian and gay civil rights task force. The only statewide lesbian and gay organization in the country at the time with a full-time paid lobbyist. My claim to fame with the Florida task force was that we fought the Bush Trask amendment, from Florida's colleges and universities. If the schools allowed gay student groups to meet or gay courses to be taught, we fought it and we won. The Florida Supreme Court miraculously, unanimously found it to be unconstitutional. Other states imitated that bill as well, but in each case, it was defeated. My next job was as an HIV epidemiologist with the Florida AIDS program. In 1981, doctors identified the first cases of what they termed gay-related immune disease or grid, gay cancer, which later became AIDS, acquired immune deficiency syndrome. By 1982, we gay people were feared by the general public, not only for the assumption of preying on children, but as carriers of imminent death. Even my own children were told that if they touch me or hug me or kiss me, they'd get sick and die. I didn't see them again for many years. Back then, we cared for and buried thousands of our friends because their families and our own wouldn't have anything to do with them, and neither would many funeral homes, churches and cemeteries. They said gay equals death. We said silence equals death. The first national LGBT market on Washington was on October 14th, 1979. The second national march with over a million strong was on October 11th, 1987, and gave birth to the first national coming out day a year later. In 1994, October was declared National LGBT History Month thanks to the creative mind of Missouri High School history teacher, Rodney Wilson. Once again, rather than be defeated by the culture of sickness and death that threatened our future, we became strengthened in our resolve to overcome fear and to fight back. We did so by organizing and lobbying our religious, political and corporate leaders, by forming our own health care, community and youth centers, and by marching in annual gay pride parades and by creating the larger community of our community. And by marching in annual gay pride parades and by creating the largest, most magnificent folk art artifact in American history, the AIDS quilt. We started newspapers and radio programs, flew our flags, wrote books and songs and TV and movie scripts and ran for office. And during this time, Wisconsin passed the first lesbian and gay civil rights bill in the United States prohibiting discrimination in the United States. The bill was passed in the United States because of the lack of public housing, employment and public accommodations. Don't Ask, Don't Tell became law in 1993 that said that people who engage in a homosexual acts are unacceptable for military service. It was repealed in 2010. The Defense of Marriage Act, denying federal benefits to same sex spouses, became law in 1996. The first same sex marriage in the United States wasn't in 2013. It was actually in 1877 when Sarah Pollard, as Samuel Pollard, married Marancy Hughes in the Nevada territory. Donna Perquette and Manonia Evans applied for a marriage license in Wisconsin in 1971. The application was refused by the clerk. The two women filed a lawsuit but the suit was dismissed. I had a wedding anyway without a license. But Jack Baker, who was a law student and student government president at the University of Minnesota and Mike McConnell applied for and received a marriage license in Blue Earth County, Minnesota in 1901. Vermont became the first state in 2000, the first state in the country to legally recognize civil unions or domestic partnerships between gay and lesbian couples. In 2003, the pre-mortem ruled that Lawrence v. Texas that they ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that stotomy laws in the United States are unconstitutional. This paved the way for the legalization of same sex marriages. The following year, in 2004, Marcia Cadish and Tanya McCloskey became the first legally married same sex couple in the United States when Massachusetts was the first state to legalize same sex marriage. Now, though I've touched on it, I want to talk about coming out for a moment. Coming out as I did in 1979 meant giving up so much, including family and children and jobs. In my lifetime, out gay people were legally denied service in restaurants and could not serve openly in the military. Gay sex was illegal in the United States until 2003 and one could not visit one's partner in the hospital nor claim one's partner's body at the time of death until 2015. Regardless of however different the coming out experience may be for each person, even today, it's still usually a major and carefully considered moment in one's life. Will that ever change? Will there ever be a time when we queer people won't be expected to explain who we are and who we love? Strangers always ask Kelly and me if we're sisters. I always say no, we're wives. By the way, the name of our boat is straight not. When asked about the origin of our name, we say we live on the straight and we're not. But the politics of coming out has helped us help make us more visible and better protected by law. And knowing our history helps. It helps us explore the future. Remember earlier when I said I wanted to research my school's libraries for a reflection of itself. Well, once I began work at UCLA, I had the opportunity to build a new LGBTQ center. I included a 400 square foot library and filled it with hundreds of books. So students would always have a place to go find reflections of who they are, where they could find people from the past on whose shoulders they stand. Because of my sexual orientation, I lost custody of my children, was fired from job after job, became homeless and suicidal, lost nearly every male friend I had to AIDS and lost my own way, feeling hopeless and full of shame. And then something happened. With a newly minted doctoral degree, I was hired by the University of Michigan to grow a center for LGBTQ students and for higher education. I want to share some higher ed queer highlights with you. In 1937, Morris Kite formed the first gay student organization on a college campus, the Oscar Wilde Study Circle at Texas Christian University. In 1967, the student homophile League at Columbia University was the first lesbian and gay campus group to gain official university recognition. The first office for lesbian and gay students was created at the University of Michigan in 1971 as a quarter-time space. Several other such offices were developed in the late 1980s, and I was hired by the University of Michigan in 1994 before some of you were born. And I was recruited by UCLA in 1997. I was called to do this LGBTQ work in higher ed. I have no doubt. Though I didn't have my own children, I had other people's beautiful LGBTQ children for short periods of time, and I created the award-winning lavender graduation to celebrate their lives and achievements and scholarship, their gifts to the academy. I called it lavender because I thought combining the black and pink, signifying the black triangle lesbians had to wear in Nazi Germany, and the pink triangle gay men had to wear created the color lavender. It does as it turns out. But my intention was to celebrate the memory of those lesbians and gay men who died in the Holocaust during World War II, along with my Jewish relatives. I created that first lavender graduation in 1995 to honor our graduating LGBTQ students. The lives had been miserable on campus. I wanted that last taste of their college experience to be positive. I wanted LGBTQ students to know that their lives and their scholarship mattered to the academy. Today, many universities celebrate lavender graduation, a legacy I'm proud to leave as I retire from this work. There were only a few lesbians and gay service offices when I, on college campuses in 1994, when I accepted the position as the director of the Lesbian Gay Programs Office at Michigan, they weren't using the terms bisexual or transgender yet. I added the words bisexual and transgender to the office name because bi and trans students came to me for assistance. They too needed to be understood, respected, seen, and served. I created standards and guidelines for LGBT centers and higher ed as part of the council for the advancement of standards in higher education. I was the founding chair of the consortium of higher education LGBT resource professionals. And I published books about working with LGBT college and with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender college students. Today, I'm retired, but I continue to research and write about LGBTQ lives and experiences. My books this day in LGBTQ history, volumes one through four, were published just this year. As I write, as I wrote about each person, I said their names and thanked them for paving the way for us. They are sheroes and heroes and they rose, and we need to know who they are. As I've shared with you, when I came out in 1979, I lost custody of my kids and I had no contact with them for many years. I'm happy to tell you, my children did return to me when each was in their 20s. We say we're actually lucky because I didn't have them for puberty and they didn't have me for menopause. And I'm the grandma of four creative and rather unusual grandchildren. One is pan, one is bi, one is trans, and one has some amazing role models. My life today, even for the painful challenges along the way, is so blessed for which I'm deeply grateful. Know your history, share your stories, as Joshua said in his introduction, to quote Holocaust survivor, if you sell, whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. As we tell our stories, we become more visible and we provide a path for those coming up behind us. My friend, Brian McNaught said, naming and acclaiming ourselves releases our magnificent light. As you go forward, learn your history, then share your story and release your magnificent light. Happy coming out week and happy LGBTQ history month. Thank you. I mean, I hope you can hear the applause. Dr. Sanlo, it's been wonderful having you. I've rolled up my sleeves as I do daily. And it was a pleasure to meet you, I think back in 2008. And so it's a pleasure to have you back at Highline College. We're going to take a brief moment. We're going to take a 10 minute break at 11 now until noon. And then Dr. Sanlo will be available for a 30 minute Q&A in which you all can stick around and ask questions. We ask that you use the Q&A feature. I think we've put information in the chat box for those of you who are here. And so I know some of you probably have class to get to if you're on campus, or if you're just zoom in from one place to the next. So we're just going to take a short minute break. And then we'll be right back at 12 o'clock. Thank you again, Dr. Sanlo. Thank you. All right. Welcome back. Welcome back everyone. It's good to be in space and community with you all. At this time, we're going to open it up for our Q&A. Hopefully folks have some awesome questions. I think we've got some questions prepared for our esteemed guest and historian. Wow. It's always nice to remember all of the. Good. Not so good. Reminders of my history as a queer person, as I gave mail. And Dr. Sanlo, thank you for, for bringing that up for us. Thank you so much. And to all of you, you can use the Q&A. Stephanie and I will be monitoring that and helping you out. Or you can use chat as well. So please do chime in y'all. And I'll keep an eye on the chat for us, Joshua. I'll kick off with a question that I had a part about something you said in your lecture today, and I thought it was really beautiful and it really resonated me when you said that, quote, my anger fueled my activism. And then later on you talked about some sense of hopelessness, about the losses, significant losses that you experienced. What for you were some of the ways that you were able to turn that anger and hopelessness into like a productive way of processing it? Because sometimes it's hard to get out of that, that space and into the action space. Right. It's, it's very hard to get out of it. And when it, I'll tell you the primary things for which I'm grateful is that I don't drink and I've never done drugs. And so in that situation, a lot of people would have done both. And it never occurred to me to do it. When one of the things that happened when I got married was my mother gave me a set of silverware service for 12. And when I got divorced, I left with not much, but I did leave with that service for 12 and when, and it was about five years later that I was homeless. And during my time of being homeless, I had a set of silverware and I would sell it piece by piece in order to get cheap food. I had food stamps that I get when I have, you know, if my daughter would come see me, but after a period of time, they quit coming to see me. So I did a lot of, of speaking on radio. I did a lot of public speaking and I was, I was like homeless. But I was out there talking about lesbians and gay men, which is, which is how I ended up getting that job with the Florida task force. Nobody else wanted to be like the head of the queer community in Florida. And it was perfect for me because I had no job. I had no car. I had no income and he gave me all of those and I had this great anger that gave me a focus. So, so the job was perfect for, for a period of time. I did that for about three years. But then, then I, well, I was found on the street actually by some friends who took me to someone else's home and she gave me a free place to live for a little while. And that's when I got the job with the AIDS program because nobody wanted to work with people with AIDS back then. It was too frightening. People were afraid they were going to catch it just by touching people with AIDS. And of course, I knew I wouldn't. I was invited to apply for the job only because I wasn't afraid. And that was, that was my qualification. And I had a bachelor's degree in music. I couldn't pronounce epidemiology. And they hired me. I was the only person to apply. And the federal government said, if you don't put someone in this position, we're pulling all of our AIDS money out of Florida. So, so I got hired. And then they sent me to the CDC in Atlanta to learn how to say epidemiology. And I was, I loved that work. I was really good at it. It gave me such purpose. And, and it was that job that part of the benefits of working for the state of Florida AIDS program was that I got free education. And so I was able to get my master's and my doctorate on their dime, which is ironic. The state that took my kids away from me, you know, gave me my master's and my doctoral degree. And that's what put me on track to be eligible to get the job at University of Michigan. So, but, but it was, it was a very challenging time. And, and I, you know, I go back there with my therapist. But, but not a, I don't go into lots of detail at that point, but, but I also knew that. And this is looking back over all these years. I, I'm a survivor. I've survived a great deal. And for whatever reason, for as low as I thought I'd gone, I hadn't hit bottom. And, and I knew I was okay. I just didn't know when or how I would be okay. But, but I was and, and really it was allowing other people to take care of me. And that's hard for a lot of us to do. Because we're not very trusting anyway. So I hope that, I hope that answers your question. I know I went a lot of different directions. Yeah, it does. Thank you so much for sharing so candidly. Yeah. It looks like we've got a question in the Q&A. I think the next question comes from Ajah Perkins. Dr. Sanlo. What are your favorite places to find resources on historically queer information? You know, there, there are a number of sources out there, which is interesting because they're, they're not connected to each other. I mean, if there, maybe, maybe this would be a next project for me, but maybe bringing all of those sources into one spot. So, among my favorites are the Stonewall LGBTQ archives in Fort Lauderdale, the one institute in Los Angeles, the Mazer Institute, which is a lesbian archives, also in Los Angeles. There are a number of online places back to Stonewall is one quest is another or quist. There are a number of other books that were published. I can't find a lot of new IST. Those, those are some of the primary ones and they, and they'll lead me to others. So, you know, there, there are lots of others. There are books that were published. The most recent one I could find was 1999. I can't find a lot of more recent history books because I, I'm more involved in politics than we have in history. And so people have really quit doing a lot of the LGBTQ historical writing. And so, so I, you know, I find the older books, there aren't that many. I mean, it's just really just a handful. It looks like there's another question in the Q&A. I know you said that you and your kids finally got back into contact when they were about 20 years old. They were already in their 20s. They were, they were mid 20s actually. My daughter and her husband, I hadn't been invited to the wedding. But she and her husband moved from Florida to Ann Arbor, to Dayton, Ohio, which was only three hours away from Ann Arbor. And she sent me out of the blue, really. She sent me an email and said she would like to meet with me that she's nearby. And so she and her husband came to my house in Ann Arbor and, you know, she stood there on my doorstep and, and she's tiny. My, my kids are small. And, and so she had her hands on her hips and she's standing there at my door when I opened the door and she goes, I'm pregnant. And I want to know if you had the same feelings about me as I have about my baby when you were pregnant with me. And I thought, that's a pretty gutsy question. And she already knows the answer. She wouldn't have asked it. You know, and I said, of course, of course, I loved you with, you know, when I was pregnant with you, I loved you every bit as much as I love you right this moment. And, and we reunited. I mean, she's the one who initiated it. I didn't even know she was in, in Dayton. And so she gave birth five months later and we started spending weekends together. And when she gave birth five months later, she invited me to be in the birthing room with her, not her husband. And, and so I was there for the birth of my granddaughter, who I got to hold, you know, that first hour of life is called angel time. I was told, and if you hold a baby during angel time, you'll never lose them. And so I held my granddaughter, my first grandchild during her angel time. And today she's, she's 27 years old. And we've been very, very close our whole lives. So, and then I was there three years later when my other granddaughter was born. So, so we, we stayed connected over all these years. She lives in Florida still. My son, who lives in Seattle. He, he sent a letter to me. And he said, it said, dear Dr. Sandlow or mom, I don't know what to call you, but in searching for myself, I know I need to find you. And, and so based on his letter, his outreach to me, he and I reunited. He, and he came out as a gay man. When he was 28. He was disowned by his Florida family. And so he came out to LA and moved, moved in with me in LA. And then when I moved up to Seattle, came up here, started coming up for half the year. He moved to Seattle. We have relatives up here. And he's been up here for probably eight years. And he, he now identifies as pan and he's married to a female born person who also identifies as pan. I have a great family. I mean, they're all, they're all just so unusual. I just can't imagine that the little eight year old is, is actually going to be a cisgender heterosexual male. That would just be so unique in my family. Thank you so much. So I've been trying to practice pleasure activism, activism of doing things that make us feel good and that bring us joy and make us happy. What are some of the spots of joy and pleasure. That you've experienced in your career that you loved to highlight and reflect on? Well, I loved my, my higher ed career. I loved it. I loved working with college students, keeping students at the center of my focus was a thing that I learned my very first day in higher ed by the vice president at Michigan Royster Harper. She said, no matter what you do, however you do this work, keep students at the center of your focus. And I always have. And when I got to UCLA, I was single. And I became a faculty in residence. So I actually, in addition to running the LGBT center, being a professor, full professor in the higher education graduate program and running the masters of education and student affairs, which I founded at UCLA. I became a faculty in residence and I lived in the residence halls in a hall with a thousand of my best 19 year old friends. And, and I had a, in my apartment on campus, I had a kitchen. And, and even though we all got food in the residence halls, the students love to come to my kitchen and cook because they missed cooking at home. And so my rule was they could cook in my kitchen as long as there were leftovers and it was vegetarian because I am. And, but straight kids, gay kids, they all came together. So I would show LGBT related film in my apartment. So straight kids got a ton of queer. For all the years that I, you know, about almost 15 years that I lived in the residence halls. So I found so much joy there. So, you know, all the time constantly. And since I've retired, my life is very different. I have very little interaction with students, which I miss, although I do some mentoring of students. But, but today, I mean, I get great joy in just sharing the world with my wife. I mean, I'm going to be 75 and she's 70. And so each day we find joy just in our lives. And, you know, we have a new puppy and I've never had a puppy in my life. And so we, I find immeasurable joy hourly with this little guy. And we're boaters and I find great joy being in my boat out in Puget Sound, you know, just cruising all up and down from Olympia up to the islands. So, you know, it's, it's hard to find joy when there's stress in your life. But I'm here to tell you that when the stress is dealt with and it's gone, the joy is just a bounding. And as a therapist, I appreciate that. Dr. Sandlow, joy is a wondrous thing. We've got a question from Amy Ryder, King, and they ask, thank you for sharing your profound story of survival, resilience and shining your light. I was moved by the image of the resource center you filled with books for students to see reflections of who they are. What ideas do you have for advocating for resource centers on college and university campuses? You know, that's a really important question. I'm doing another presentation for another institution who asked me to look at what, what I thought the future of LGBT work is in higher ed. One of the reasons I retired, and this is just being completely honest with you. One of the reasons I retired, primary reason is that when I started this work, I had a vision for what the work should be and could be. My vision of the work was met. And, you know, and I'm grateful for that because whoever really gets to say that in their work. But my vision was met. And I was a little bit stuck as a 65-year-old lesbian working with 18-year-old college students who don't even use the word lesbian much anymore. And they're using other words that I just, I'm having trouble understanding, you know, not today, but, but I mean, I retired 10 years ago. So, you know, that, that was a challenge for me. That was why I retired. My vision was met. And I didn't have a vision beyond that. I needed to get out of the way of the people who have the vision to go beyond that. It wasn't mine. And so when I was asked to do this presentation coming up about how I envisioned the future, I asked my young colleagues how they envisioned the future. A lot of it is not about LGBTQ centers. Where my vision was, theirs is not because they feel like that's too focused. That it needs to be much broader than that. That there needs to be more of, you know, where institutions are now beginning to hire vice presidents or that level anyway of diversity and inclusion personnel. And it needs to be something that's much, that's as broad as that and probably more of looking at the whole concept of diversity and inclusion as a much larger community. And not siloed. You know, here's the black group and here's the gay group. And here's the Latino group, the Latinx group. And, you know, in the Native American group that, that they all need to come together. So. I believe that the vision is that much broader understanding. Of where everyone fits into the future of higher ed work. And where everyone fits the reality is it's together. So. So that's, that's the best I can answer that question for you. I don't, I mean, I would hate to see LGBT centers go. You know, be part of my history presentation, you know, from that perspective. But it's possible, you know, to be part of that. Given higher ed given. We've, you know, discovered over the last two years that, you know, distance learning is kind of a cool thing. Hybrid off-campus learning is a very cool thing. And, and that may be what happens, but I don't know, it's up to you all, you all make that change. And then let me know what you did. Okay. We've got about five more minutes, folks. For more questions. Also, if you're in the audience, if you're out there, if you want to raise your hand on the screen, we can bring you up to the stage. So you can ask. Your question. Thanks, Joe, for that insight and information. That was going to be my question as well. I know that's something we've been working on here at Highline College for many, many years. And so it's great to hear your insights around that. It looks like we've got a question here from William. Hi, William. Hi, Joshua. How are you? I'm great. How are you? Thank you. You're on the air. Yep. I'm on the air, my friend. Excuse me. Hey, Joshua. What's your, what year did you, what year did you work at Highline? This question is for me. Yeah, because I didn't mean to share stage with you, Dr. Any time, my dear. William, I currently reside at Highline College. Whoa. Yeah. So I'm still here going strong. So thanks for your question. You're welcome. I love so much hearing the stories in, in history that you were telling the, the romances. And if I could say it, the, the scandals and the drama. I love the salacious stories and like historical fiction dramatizations both in literature and media on the stage. I wonder if that's a part of research that you, that could be fun sometimes. And for people like me who, who like to learn our history through entertaining stories. Do you have resources that you would share for like, I'm thinking of like the Sorjuana Ines de la Cruz series that played through Netflix about her poetry and her lovers and things like that. What did you come across that you would recommend for fun reads? So, so, you know, I, as I read this stuff, I'm always going to my wife. I'm going, whoa, look at this. Look, look who did what with whom. You know, there, there are some great films that, that come out. There's a one out right now that I haven't seen yet called cured. But we did a film on, basically it was on my story dealing with Anita Bryant. And, you know, there are a lot of things that we don't know. Well, it was a documentary. So that one, all that stuff was true. But there are some stories we don't know that we just sort of embellished. I really didn't do that in, in these history books that I wrote everything that I found like Susan B Anthony, you know, I mean, we never learned that she was a lesbian, but she had a number of women lovers. I just named one in this thing, but you can, if you research her as lesbian, all this stuff comes up. And, and as long as there are resources to cite accuracy, in her case, there was a letter from her niece who validated that, that she had these lovers. As long as there's that validation, then I'll put that stuff in my books, but just to do a rumor mill in my books, really technically, I just, I don't do that. That doesn't interest me. I am working on a play. Remember, I talked about the 1954 witch hunts at the University of Florida that during that time, during those witch hunts, over 800 students were kicked out of school for being perceived to be gay. They didn't even know if they were lesbian or gay or not. They were just kicked out because someone said they were. Over 100 professors lost their jobs for the same reason. And a number of them died by suicide because of the embarrassment of the whole thing. I'm writing a play about that period of time. It's a rather dark play. It's rather depressing. But I was able to find, you know, if you dig far enough, you can find just about anything. I was able to get into the Florida higher education archives. And I found all of the information about that, those witch hunts and the legislative investigation committee and the transcripts to the interrogations that they did on students who were, students and faculty who were interrogated in a dark room with a single light bulb. I found those transcripts. And so this play is being written based on the transcripts. So there might not be some things that are exactly accurate because most of those people, you know, if they're still alive, they're, I mean, I know one guy I've been able to interview him and he's almost 90. So, and he was an older non-traditional age student at the time. So a lot of these people are gone. But, you know, you can find all kinds of information in hidden treasures. You just always have to look for them. You know, I found a lot of information about lesbians and gay men when I went to Germany. Because I was doing research for the book on the last five months of World War II called The Soldier, the Avatar in the Holocaust. And, and I wrote a play about that also. And that was actually a story based on my dad's life. He was a 19-year-old Jewish soldier who was one of the liberators of Dachau. And I wanted more information about that. But there was other information that I needed. And I, and so I had the story be told through the eyes of a lesbian, a 19-year-old girl who's a lesbian, a woman who's a lesbian and, and time traveled to 1945 to accompany her 19-year-old great-grandfather through the last five months of the war. And she interviews several teenage girls from a German town, German bombed out town. Now we don't know, I made up these girls. They don't exist. But what I was able to find was a little bit, not much of the history of what happened to the teenage girls in German towns. We know the boys were sent to war, but the girls were, they were treated terribly by every army that went through their towns and there were many. And so I captured that story. And that story is so profound that I tried to get a youth theater to perform my play this summer. And while the leaders of the play loved it, it was the kids in the play just, they just had trouble with it. It was really dark. But, you know, but I had, I knocked on to Germany and, and my wife speaks German and we were able to find a bunch of this information. So, you know, you, you go places, you read things, you dig up stuff. And if it, if it looks too salacious, you know, you might like doing salacious stuff. I don't particularly. I like doing the truth. And if the truth happens to be salacious, so be it. So I don't know if that answered your question. I get worried. I'm sorry. No, that was great. Thank you so much. I'm, I'm in Joshua. Yeah. Hi, everyone. Thank you. We've got, I think one last question. And the question is what is a piece of advice you have to live a fulfilled and purposeful life. Be true to yourself. We got that from Shakespeare to thine own self be true. And live your own truth, live your truth. Don't live somebody else's truth. If you're living somebody else's truth, you better check out what your truth is and, and go there. Beautiful. I love it. It's been wonderful hearing you speak today. I really dropped the mic on some historical content that I, I feel folks don't hear. I'm constantly bringing this up with individuals that I talk about. And, and in my travels to, you know, I tend to do that research as well and, and understand what was gay and queer culture like in Berlin and, and whatnot. And it was very eye opening for myself. Thank you so much again, folks in the chat. Thank you so much for joining us today. And that would be to QI history. And in the chat, there's information more about Dr. Ronnie Sandlow, where you can find the books, et cetera from. Thank you, Dr. Sandlow again tomorrow. And tomorrow we've got more coming at you a history of the HIV and AIDS and Seattle and the memorial pathways. But again, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Thank you so much. And Dr. Sandlow. Thank you. Thank you.