 Well, good evening everyone and thank you for coming. This is part of the Letter Archives and Museum Fireside Chat series. My name is Doug O'Keefe. I am one of the co-producers and the host of the chats. This evening I have the distinct honor of interviewing Mr. Victor Sahn. Let's just start going at the beginning. Please tell me a bit about your family and about where you grew up. I am Italian. Those of you who did not know, that's in Salvo. I am a second generation Italian. My mother and father were both born here. My great-grandparents were both born in Italy. If you've grown up Italian, you know that that brings with it a certain degree of insanity. That's just part of life and that's just kind of the way it is. That was the environment which I grew up. I was born in 1957. You guys can do the math. I feel like in many ways it straddled eras. Ike was in office at the time. I was just happy since I was in home. I was in office and my family was born in Little Italy in the hospital that became Co-County Hospital. Which is now a stroke in the fancy new building. My family was part of the group of people that were very intrepid to set out to move to the western suburbs. Which at that time really just kind of formed fields back then. These images that I showed up here before, which end up with my mom and aunt Yama, who are the biggest party in old brawls you can ever imagine. They really kind of set the tone for our feeling. We moved out to the suburbs. All the relatives out of Mass had been about 18 months. They all moved from relatively to within four blocks of each other. It was an amazing time. I was only two years old when that happened. You can see with the union of all these people's genetic makeup produced. There it is. The world's most horrific baby picture. Please note the pinky and the charming accusatory look I have gazing upon everyone. This is from a series of one of the most horrific series of baby pictures ever taken. I'm wearing a plaid diaper. My mother was a seamstress. She was very proud of that day. This series of photographs, this is one of the best ones, is so bad that I was 35 years old before I knew the series of pictures existed. My mother was too afraid to show it to me for a fear that I would seek to destroy them. I originally wanted to turn them into a line of greeting cards called my inner child. Each one of them captures a different sentiment. I have used it to make handmade Christmas cards over the years. I'm a believer in reincarnation. I kind of think that I came to cognition and looked around and said, what life did I get to inhabit? Here I am 57 years later. That's six months from when my picture was taken. Anyway, so I moved to the suburbs. We have pretty much kind of a normal sort of a leave-it-to-beaver kind of existence. I watch leave-it-to-beaver every day because my partner John can attest. It is very much like what my life was like except for being Italian and insane. But it was just a move that I was exactly like leave-it-to-beaver. We had a very fun household. We were at a house where we argued all the time. It was multi-generational. My grandmother lived with us. English is not my first language. Many people don't know that. Actually it was raised speaking Italian as a child because we were not allowed to speak English in the home because my grandmother did not speak English and she thought everyone was trying to poison her. So we spoke in a language you cannot understand. She was clearly kind of a little off of her rocker for most of the time. Most of my grandparents, my grandmother, she was sort of nuts. So yeah, I did not learn how to speak English until I started Catholic grade school. Basically, you know, I obviously picked it up. Except for the D-Stems and Don'ts, I suppose. So yeah, that was my background. Catholic grade school, good times. When we were preparing for this chat, you told me that you were bullied in school. Would you be willing to share that with us? Yeah, I don't think that that's terribly unusual for a gay kid. It's almost like a requirement to say that you were bullied because we just were. I know that it's hard to believe looking at that adorable child with such a pleasant look on his face that anyone would ever want to pick on him. And trust me, as I grew older, it did not get much better than that. I was looking today for some of those pictures of my childhood. It was just like, oh my God. I definitely lost it when I hit my 30s. I wasn't slow going. But yeah, in Catholic school, you know, when you're a little kid, little little kids, everyone just sort of like plays together. And then, as whatever that miraculous thing that begins to happen, like around third grade, when they start to differentiate and start to, you know, coalesce into little groups and start talking to each other, I always, like most gay boys, gravitated towards the girls, and it wasn't long before I was going to call them, and all of them and this and that. And I, of course, did not even know what those terms meant, except that they were used against me. They obviously were not terms of endearment. So you began to get the sense early on that there was something wrong. But I was still just trying to be a little boy, and I was doing what I was told. The hard part I think about, for me in a Catholic school, is that my family was so super Catholic that we weren't allowed to ever challenge the church, or challenge the priests, or anything like that. So if something bad was happening to you in a Catholic environment, we were raised to believe that you probably deserved it. So, and as I got older and moved through that spectrum, it was like sixth grade, seventh grade, and seventh grade was probably the worst when it became physically abusive. And literally the nuns just stood there and did nothing. And today, to this day, I'm still flabbergasted, because I was raised to believe that whatever the nuns and the priests said was sacrosanct. So if they weren't intervening, then clearly I deserved what was happening to me. And I've got the therapy bills to prove that I went through Catholic school. But when you're a really little kid, and those are the messages that you get, and it's one particular non-sister Patricia, she's like 200 years old, and my sister had her, she was teaching there for like 20 years after I left. And she used to say, your place in heaven is measured by how much pain you can endure in your earthly sphere. You're like two years old. And this stuff gets hardwired into you, which is the reason why I think a friend many years ago, Mary Farquhar, said the very idea that any gay person can arrive at adulthood with any symbols that their models intact is a miracle. That's why we are really, really tough stuff, because I survived that. Well, your high school recently bestowed upon you the honor of the distinction of love. Please tell us about that. My horrific high school graduation picture, they put this on, I was inducted into the Alumni Hall of Fame, which was startling. It was my cousin Terry's idea, and I had never even, and even our high school had the Hall of Fame, let alone that I was being nominated for it. And then all of a sudden a year later I get this letter that I was being inducted into it, and the first person that was ever inducted for gay activism. And this is in the heart of Republican DuPage County. So this is kind of like a big deal. And I went to this thing not knowing what to expect. This is one of the first things I saw when I walked in was this horrific picture of me. The terms horrific in picture will be repeated a number of times in this presentation. And I had to finally stand up and say my piece about how it felt about being there, and the whole thing was so surreal, because obviously I was positive in high school, almost to a score, and I mean I was in the middle and all that, which has its own level of other gay people in it of course. But I went back to that school every day fearing that I would have a repeat of what happened to me in grade school. I started out high school determined that I was not going to have a repeat of that, but you're always living that fear that would actually end up happening to you again. And I made it my life's mission to become like the most popular kid in school. And I was very funny, and I was very clever and creative, and I was a singer, and I was an actor, and I was a dancer, and I did all this stuff. And for some reason or another I went through my entire high school career and was never bullied except for one time. And it was this one guy who everybody kind of hated anyway, so it wasn't like you were really being put down that badly. But he threatened my life outside of the cafeteria for being a fadhead. And it was like in one instance of everything he was fighting back to me about how worthless I was, and how everyone was a big joke, and who was actually leaving. It was a horrible experience, but it was followed up a few hours later when the captain of the football team came up to me and took me aside and said, rumor has it, so-and-so. He said he was going to mess you up, and I just wanted to know if that ever happens or if he ever says anything or does anything to you again. You just let me know. We'll take care of it. Well, that guy was at this thing that I went to for high school because he's the football coach now, going to high school. And we were talking and it came up, that conversation, and it's like, you know, say it was there and it was like, I was like, you know, what are the odds of that person being there? That one person. I just don't know if you know that. Anyway, the rest of the evening was like really bizarre because when I started talking, I didn't know what kind of reception I was going to get from all of these folks because everybody else was a teacher, they were business, they were going to book, everything was all, and I was just like, all I had done was gay activism and stuff. And I didn't know how it was going to be received and it was really, really well-received and I think the next day, when I went to the homecoming path rally to be introduced because, and I wasn't going to go because that's terrible, but my cousin was like, because I had like meetings in New York City, and she's like, you have the entire rest of your life to go to meetings, you're only going to have this opportunity one time. So I went to the path rally and I just saw, we were all going to be trotted out. I didn't know they were going to individually introduce us to the high school. So I had to walk out to the middle of the gymnasium floor announced as a gay activist in my high school and I literally just, I was so just a bit of like broken bottle stick thrown at me or something. And it was like this thunderous applause, you know. And I think part of it was that it was the path rally because you were just applauding for everything. But it had this like lightning and a bottle kind of experience, you know, that it was really possible to move through time and have things be different. And I'm so glad that I went, I would try that experience. I recall when we were preparing for this you told me that you have an almost pathological fear of self-aggrandizement. How did that come about and building on that, given that, how did the award from Willowbrook make you feel? To truly understand that fear for me, and it's taken me decades of therapy to get to the root of it, you really have to kind of go back to my grandmother who came from Italy in 1912. And I'll try and rush through the story but I think you'll get the gist of it. My grandmother was born out of Wetlock in a very, very tiny Italian Catholic town of 300 people. And the man who she fell in love with was also in that town. Well, her mother just owned her, her father wouldn't claim her. So from my grandmother's earliest childhood she was just a disembodied person and she lived in other people's homes as a servant girl. She had like four different last names because she took on the name of the household in which she was employed. And that's what they gave her a rope over her head. Well, you know, she had a very, very tough existence in her 20s. She had the opportunity at the end that she loved. He had moved to America and she got, you know, a letter or a holiday that happened, you know, he was sending for her. So she packed up everything that she knew and she took off and went to America with $30 in her pocket, did not read, did not write, did not speak English. And she came to America and was greeted at the dock not by the man that she loved but by his brother whom she despised, who had sent for her under his brother's name because he had obsessed about my grandmother who apparently was quite lovely. And he told her, you don't marry me. I will tell everyone I slept with you and no one will want you. And of course, she's in America. She knows no one. She has no family here. She has no choice but to marry this man she despised. And she's told everyone she would marry him but she would murder him because that was apparently a very popular thing to do. She did not murder him. She went out to have three or five children with him. And two of her children died. And she had a horrible life. He was a drunkard. Most people would know my grandfather was murdered by El Capone's driver for cheating in a car game. And every Sunday for the next several years a basket of food was left from the doorstep to my grandmother's house like El Capone's people to care for the children. Which if I had not heard of this stuff from these people's own looks, I would never believe it's true. But she ended up having to raise all these kids by herself. Two of them died from spinal meningitis. By the time I came to cognition of her she was so mean and bitter and old and cranky and I could never understand why she was not a hugger. I had the wonderful grandma. She did not do all that stuff that you saw grandmas do. She was a really, really mean lady. And she raised my mother without ever hugging her or appreciating her or doing anything to make her feel good. She was extremely judgmental. And we were raised with a philosophy that and you'll get where this is coming from never aspire to want more than you've got because God will take away from you what you have that was drilled into us as children. That along with self praise stinks. Never be proud and never demonstrate but believe in yourself never do anything. So, you know, my sister and I were basically like psychotic by the time we were teenagers, right? And so the very idea of doing anything that brought attention to you was terrifying. That you're point about self-aggrandizement. I didn't even want to tell anybody that I got this award from high school and you can only imagine embarking on something like the Legacy Project, which we'll talk about soon, has brought so much attention on me that I basically had to develop an alter ego just to be able to deal with it because it's really hard for me to stand any place and talk about myself and this hard-wired fear that something will happen to me for doing it. Well, please tell us about your political activism. What brought you to that? Well, my first campaign that I worked on was for Jane Byrne. Y'all remember Jane Byrne? Personally, female mayor of Chicago. I had a real thing for Jane Byrne. I adored Jane Byrne and she became mayor of Chicago at the same time that Adita came to Chicago. So there was all of this like overlap and parallel between this powerful woman and so I worked in her 79 campaign and I worked under the failed re-election campaign. It was my first taste of electoral politics. It wasn't really activist stuff yet, but it got me thinking in terms of how politics worked and I was raised in a democratic household so machine politics is basically what I knew and it made me very, very pragmatic as a political instinct. The idea of laws clauses and working on them anyway had not yet occurred to me. So when I started dabbling around the edges of gay politics, it was sort of as an antidote. My father was dying from cancer and I needed some kind of a distraction and I started working on a campaign for someone called Dr. Ron Sable who ran for all the men of the 44th War in 19, you know, in, say, 86, 87. My father passed away in 86 and the primary campaign was in February of 87 and that was the first time I actually worked on anything that was gay, you know, and that of the people and I really kind of got drawn into it to be perfectly honest because I had gone to a town meeting and gay, lesbian town meeting became Illinois Federation of Human Rights which became equally Illinois. So at that very first town meeting as Lord Rick Garcia and Johnson, all these folks who eventually became these huge icons were really just there for the first time and they were all talking about, you know, the human rights ordinance in Chicago had been defeated and they were trying to strategize about what was going to be needed to act together to get that passed. So I went to that meeting and I stood up and I thought that we should, you know, do whatever our alderman, Bertie Hanson says to Bertie Hanson, told the students because he was our friend and he was going to tell us that he was like this and that. And it was because that was one of the Jay Burns' goals of the act. And this one guy named Joel Wange made a beeline to me from the back of the room after I talked and he was the campaign manager for Ron Sable and I became the lightning rod for what he was going to have to overcome to get people to work on this campaign. So he started working on me and talking to me and just giving me all this like wrap and just like he was so full of enthusiasm and just going on and on and on. And all I could think was, oh my God, this guy is so cute. I would do anything this guy asked me to do. So that was how I got involved with my first election. And he was awesome. Joel ended up fasting away. He was really the first person I knew who died from AIDS and he was an amazing guy and was a terrific mentor for me. So that was kind of like how it sort of got started. I'm looking to see when I have to change the slide. I'm sorry. What stands out for you the most from your years as a political activist? We are. The marginal Washington in 1987. From the sable campaign, a number of us would work in the campaign and Ron did not get elected but he only lost by like 400 votes and put the fear of God into Bernie hands and became the world's biggest gay activist after that. And 400 people worked on that campaign and it was one of the most meticulously run by the numbers of electoral campaigns and it put the gay community into trouble on the map. And because we came very close to defeating the first turnout, we didn't come there. And the people that had worked on that campaign we wanted to do something and I had heard about that there was going to be a marginal Washington in 1987 and that that was something that I thought Chicago should be represented at because of my belief that if we went there, the experience of being there wouldn't use us with so much energy that we would bring that back and we would be able to move the ball forward here in Chicago. So the marginal Washington three critical things happened that are very germane to my career now. One was simply being there. I was the chairperson from Chicago for that march and I never chaired or done anything in my life and that was an amazing experience to have that kind of leadership thrust upon me. It was the first time the NAMES project AIDS Memorial Pope was on display and nothing will ever rival no matter how big it got nothing will ever rival stepping on it the first time and those of you who were there know exactly what I'm talking about because it made AIDS real. And then it was the first time that what would come to be called National Coming Out Day was celebrate October 11th and the idea that we were supposed to embrace our shared legacy and the juxtaposition of all those things in my mind was like we're supposed to embrace the history that we don't know and here we are an entire race of people and we're all going to die and who is going to remember who came before us when we were gone and we don't know ourselves. So it's planted the seed in my brain that we had to figure out some way to preserve, not only just preserve LGBT history and contributions to history but actually put it out there for people to know and to learn about the idea that an education system would ever teach this simply not in the cards and I became fixated on an outdoor display that would circumvent the education system that people would go to and kind of learn about it. Of course coming back from the arch you know what did we have activism 101 in Chicago over the next several years we're basically starting fighting amazing battles to get the respect of the city to change the political structure in the city and to find ourselves and to find our own voice and so I was able to work on my project because we were busy doing what we had to do and fighting these battles and burying our friends I mean I was totally one when I was 29 years old I didn't know anybody who was HIV positive by the time I was 36 and my friends were dead it was unrelenting and most of the people in this room know exactly what I was talking about you all saw the normal heart just take that and multiply it times like 100 and that's what it was like so we basically did what we had to do to keep ourselves going but the idea of doing something about gay history never really left my mind Recently the entertainment industry has drawn attention to the audience would you explain who he was and what influence he has or has had upon you? Well it kind of began a little bit before trying I'm looking at the reflection this particular poster I think started the process for me this was from the 1988 display that we went to for the Names Project well and you'll see from this poster sometimes history gets a little too straight it even has the original footprint on it from where we found it on the sidewalk I wanted to preserve it exactly as it was and it's still how I had it because I looked at that poster and I saw those names Cole Porter and Bessie Smith and one person in particular you heard her right I had no idea about the background of Elmer Roosevelt's life and when people assured me that she actually was a member of this community all I could think of was of our friends who were dying was that people knew about people like Elmer Roosevelt and that she was part of this community maybe they just wouldn't hate us so much we were living through a plague and everybody was rooting for the plague you know so Roosevelt became kind of a lightning rod for me because she represented this mystery and I started working on this concept of could there be a way of preserving this history and putting it out there on this little video sequence just kind of takes you through some of the creation process that I was going through and you know we'll get to the point of touring in 1998 the city of Chicago installed pylons on Halstead most people don't know that that was actually Mayor Daley's idea and many people in the community were opposed to it because they thought it was going to drive down property values of course there was property values that almost doubled I'm sure one had nothing to do with the other and but once all the battles that we went through to get those pylons up were done we were kind of left with what what are we going to do with them and I could never shake this idea that stuff was happening and people were still being bullied the same way I was and we needed to get this information out there you know some statistics about this hopefully it's the way to write it back I remember that these things sort of like guideposts for me about what our actual experience was like so when I got to the point in 1999 Time Magazine put out a series of those top 100 so and so of the 20th century were entertainers and they got to the top 100 scientists of the 20th century that brought me to Alan Turing who read the story about Turing and I'm going through and I get to the last three sentences you know the male was the father of considered father of computer science he wrote the original code that became binary code in 1936 and there he is that's my news and he had been hired by the British government to work at Blushland Park to break the Nazi enigma code in World War II which had been used to coordinate the U-boats which traveled the North Atlantic and were sinking the ships trying to supply the European theater of war because he broke the code he and his team the allies were able to stop that destruction from happening and it set the stage for D-Day and within roughly 14 months of breaking the Nazi enigma code Hitler surrendered so I'm reading this man's life and I get to the last three sentences that he was homosexual during a time when it was illegal and considered a mental illness and he was arrested for having admitted to having had a sexual liaison with another man and I always stop when I do our chores and find out he wasn't caught in the act of having a sexual liaison he admitted that it had occurred and instead of arresting the person who had robbed him they arrested him tried and convicted given the choice between imprisonment and chemical castration he chose chemical castration and they flooded his brain with female hormones and the effect that it had was it altered his brain chemistry he couldn't think anymore this is a man whose entire life is in his mind he's the father of artificial intelligence the test for artificial intelligence is still called the Turing test he couldn't think anymore and two years before his 42nd birthday he'd been into an apple laced with cyanide and ended his life and it's the once bitten apple that's the logo of Apple computers now and I read this story and you know if you ever had I don't know if you've ever had a moment where lightning bolt went through you this was the moment for me because I burst into tears because I have been inducted into the gay and lesbian hall of fame the year before this is me with roughly a third of my family that was there there was somebody of them that could not all fit into the picture and their daddy thought I would never have them I was inducted into the gay and lesbian hall of fame and all I could think of was who in the hell am I that I should be in the hall of fame with this man who changed the course of history is unknown and it was at that point that the pipe dream of creating the legacy project of the legacy walk became an obsession how do you select the legacy project inductees who are some of the notables and who are you inducting this year well some of the notables of course are notable in many ways I created the legacy project and ultimately the legacy walk just so I guess I'm supposed to put a plaque for it then we also have Byert Rustin who was the architect of the 1960s civil rights movement Jane Adams who was probably the most influential social justice activist in history Congresswoman Barbara Jordan certainly Harvey Mill who was the first transgender person to come out publicly a variety of people and in the the second year we did our second of the dedication last year we added Walt Whitman and I'm dropping the link for your collos in there anybody who knows feel free to jump in but it's a mixture of different folks I always like to actually show that I did install a plaque to Alan Turing and I am very proud of the fact that Ars is the only plaque in the world that actually says he was a gay man and what happened to him because of that even the plaque paid for by the gay activist community in Manchester, England for him does not say that he was gay which I think is a just an outrage and it is still the only plaque that has that and of course the film The Imitation Game that I did later here and oh yeah so he's going to become really really famous all over again he was officially pardoned I believe by Queen Elizabeth for the crime of gross indecency between males through which he was convicted it was the same crime that Oscar Wilde was convicted under many people worked for decades to get that to happen many people who were also very upset that she did not commute the census for the 80,000 men who had also had their lives destroyed by that law and I guess it was still working on having all those convictions over time so the new people coming on in just a little over a week are a poet Audrey Gord who is being sponsored by the Friends and Family back to the screen to pray I'm thrilled about that Cole Porter who is being sponsored by Lou Pitzley out there in the audience in memory of this father who was a gay man who did not get to have the kind of career that he really should have had because of the expectations that he placed upon him David Richardson who was the Olympian from the early 1930s is also the founder of the ladies professional golf association Father Michael Judge who was the the saint of 911 he was the priest of his life after giving the West rights at the base of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 Astronaut Sally Ride is being sponsored by renowned WGM meteorologist Tom Scilling I'm thrilled by that Kerry Maxwell in the audience wrote that by Audrey which was edited by her partner on the University Board the possibility that Tamo Shaughnessy will be coming for the party on the 18th I hope that actually works out but not least is David Cato the slain abandoned activist who was the first martyr because of the hole in Santa T that's happening in Uganda right now because of the killed gays bill and the final plaque is our first milestone which is our commemoration milestone fantastic what are some of the misconceptions about the legacy of our country first of all it's not just a bunch of us sitting around and deciding who's going to be on it a lot of people think that we're just like this little club and we just pick up and it's not as it worked that way it's actually anybody who knows me and how my mind works I'm going to appreciate that this is rather disengaging for a feature that's involved you know we're not academically aligned with the institution we're not part of the cultural institution we're a completely independent largely activist driven effort so it takes lots and lots of volunteers to do the research and to bring these folks into focus we have a nomination process with our website and nominate somebody and most of the people have actually been nominated by somebody else and I have a curve with 90% of the people who are on our database before I got into doing the work on it and once they pass a threshold of academic study to make sure that the resources that are supported would craft biographies as well on the website and then about every other year we have a team right now that's up to about 30 individuals it's international, it's all PhDs and EDs, librarians archivists biographers the whole gamut of folks who all have a vested interest in a scholastic understanding of LGBT contribution to history and then we are required by our agreement with the city of Chicago to approach these professionals so we actually have them vote on who from our database should rise to the level of what we call the candidates for induction from the nominees who exist and that generally tends to be a pool of around 36 individuals at any one point in time and that's it's extremely diverse in all the categories you can imagine it's also international and it spans a number of different fields and then comes the process of actually trying to find people to sponsor them so it's you know, we do a pretty good job we've got more to like 36 countries now and 21 fields of contribution and spanning about 4,000 years of history so it's a really really terrific group of folks to choose from and we work on trying to find sponsors for them the other thing I think most people don't realize is that it actually is an education program what you see on the street is only it's literally typically iceberg it's 10% of the offer it costs the most it's extremely costly installation as you can imagine but the academic work and the background the people that we have on our board who work on the education pieces of it everybody on the legacy block has a lesson planned there's multimedia there's video, there's study guides there's all this information that's been created so that we actually have a tool for people to begin to learn about this stuff we're not the only history website there's plenty of them out there many of them are actually I think more sophisticated than ours and they've been at it a lot longer but what we have that nobody else has is an installation and I cannot stress to you enough the significance on the part of LGBT kids who come hundreds who come to the street and experience the tour and take part in symposiums that we offer that what it means to them to actually see those words lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender cast and bronze nothing rivals seeing it in person and it's something that I'm tremendously proud of of what we have achieved here what future do you see for the legacy project? oh we have a very big picture first and foremost we're actually in the process of rebuilding our website and we have this website right now which I have to tell you is very serviceable but was created on the $189 software that lives on my computer it's actually nine websites that are linked together now there's over 500 pages on it it's the biggest website that's ever been created with the software and it's basically held together with chewing gum and spit and swear so we are a wonderful former board member who has arranged for us to work with the developer out of Seattle who is rebuilding an extremely sophisticated platform and we've got a bunch of folks that are working on migrating content so we're very, very excited about that we're also in preliminary negotiations about creating an app for the legacy project which we'll actually work with let's see if our slides continue yes it is who here has heard of NFC, Deerfield Communication it will be all the rage everyone will be talking about it a year from now because iPhone 6 and every Apple product from this point out will have NFC built into it it'll be the first time we were able to actually digitally link everything on the legacy walk to digital content about the person simply by having to scan a code phone against it and I'm really proud of the fact that it is the first and only education based use of NFC in the United States and the only outdoor application of that we'll work with a company out of Australia that's working with us and if everything goes well based upon our success of our satellite installations that we put up we have a first and only permanent satellite installation inside the Quality House into the Kansas which is the rainbow house across the street for the Westboro Baptist Church we installed a tribute to those 18 of our bronze black mock-ups inside there and over a thousand people have traveled there from surrounding states to look at our content and based upon that and our success for when we did our mode installation in Springfield where hundreds of people stood there and read every word a very frustrating amount of houses for the one that's cost the most people are so busy texting as they're walking by many of them are not even aware where the plaques are there but when we do these remote installations people will really really read about it so we've come up with an idea to create the legacy wall which will be a traveling exhibit which we hope to launch at a couple of universities in Illinois and up into Milwaukee in Michigan and Indiana as a precursor to a national tour that will be involved in 2015 if we can find the sponsors that would be necessary to do that and what's really cool about that is that the remote installations can be linked to the same NFC technology and we'll be able to gather metrics and survey data on thousands of people who will see this that have never seen this content before on that display this is just a proof of it we'll have about 60 biographies on it and we'll be working with GLSEN and a couple of other organizations to position this installation for six weeks at a time inside areas of concentrated GSA's so that we can bring as many high school kids as possible from all over the country to where this is going to be at and we'll be working with this installation one of the other things that we're working on too is my elusive dream of gateway markers at the entrance points which right now I actually do have a meeting scheduled with someone in the mayor's office it's like two years I've tried to do this to get these things going and it basically would be bronze steel tiles surrounding a large bronze plaque dedicating the streetscape to LGBT youth saying here's our past, the future is up to you and on the backside it would be a revenue generating on the advertising board that would face the street side and that kind of revenue would go a long way towards helping an organization like ours which is really small and desperately in need of funding it's an incredibly expensive installation to put up and maintain and our hope is that we will be able to get it together and launch a visitor center possibly by the spring of 2016 and the holy grail for us is if everything should work out and all the stars line up is to actually have a physical museum on Halsted Street for LGBT countries to the street sometime in five years or more range which would be possible by using the revenue generated by these other tools so that's kind of our long range plans a lot of it depends upon support from the community but you know make them small plans that's amazing but what advice can you offer people interested in preserving LGBT history never have an idea that's the best if you do have it honestly I am very blessed I became obsessed with doing this many many years ago you know when we dedicated on October 11th 2012 it was exactly 25 years to the day that the idea had occurred to me to do this there are not very many people who get to actually have a dream and see it come into fruition but I gotta tell you if I had known what it was going to be like trying to get it together I probably would have talked myself out of it because whenever you do something like this because this is a partnership with the city of Chicago it's an unfunded partnership as I am well aware but we have to get everything approved by them we have a user agreement to attach our objects to publicly owned pylons that's 100 pages long to two teams of lawyers two years to hammer out that agreement because it had never been done before because the city of Chicago assumes legal responsibility for every word on those plaques the moment they are attached to a city owned object and wrangling with corporation councils to do that it's I'm still stunned even though in my mind's eye for the moment I thought that's where we could put those plaques in the next ten years it was just a little secret I didn't tell anyone but every time I walked down the street I saw those pylons and those plaques were already on them but I had no idea what was going to be involved with actually doing it so the fact that they are there at all is really kind of a miracle and it's a testament to the city of Chicago I have to tell you because in spite of the fact that it was not easy I never once got shaved from anybody I never once got talked out of it I was really challenged about it it was just really really complicated so anybody that would want to do something on this scale I would say you really need to get your dots lined up you know I took two years to interview everybody, the mayor, the governor all the elected officials, business leaders everybody that needed to be talked to to be brought on board this all had happened before we even went forward with it so there was like two years of crap before we went public with our declaration we would do it in 2012 and it worked out and I'm exceedingly blessed that it did because of the hard work of so many people we have a fantastic board some of our board members are here tremendous volunteers, carers here donors on the sponsorship of Leonard Mavovich Black somebody please let me know of course Blue's Black is going up in 10 days you know and I've had a fantastic family for all the trouble and stuff that we've had I've always been a terrific source of support for me my partner John has got the patience of the saint to put up with the fact that we basically live together inside a two room filing cabinet that really is it's like that it's just a different family so it's extremely difficult to do but there's a reason for doing it and I think that this image probably kind of says it all you know that message is what this project is about and we owe it to the next generation because I firmly believe people of my generation are really the last ones that are not only going to care about this history but who actually still touch that past and still know some of those people and live through that time I'm not taking anything away from young activists who certainly have already had their own challenges but we're sort of like the last talisman that really sort of wrote a number of what it was like to be in the closet kids are coming out when they're 10 years old now the closet's not going to be a factor in one more generation and everything is going to change and I feel like it's up to us to create a sense of stewardship for the next generation which is why the education piece of this is so important to me and I can see it in the kids that we work with they're just when they first come they're sort of stunned into silence they don't know what to expect and by the time we're done there's just jabbering and jabbering because they just can't believe and Byrd Rustin and all these folks and the Alan Turing thing just stops them in their tracks, there isn't a single device we touch today that does not have a computer chip in it somewhere our contributions to history are not incidental they are central to the actual quality of life and we have paid an immense price for having them redacted from that history every single thing that's ever happened in this community has happened because we were written out of history people want to blame down the church politicians those messages would not have had resonance if the seeds have not been planted by a society that never allowed us to exist free and open in the daylight and so to me this has been the most gratifying work of my life I feel like it's really the reason why I was born into the world was to actually do this and it's something that's not for the faint of heart but I can't think of anything that would be more worthwhile thank you for an amazing interview thank you guys very much