 Hi everybody. Welcome to our second interview show. Before we begin, I'd like to clarify that we're taping in Montpelier, Vermont, which is unceded indigenous land. And now let's move to my first interview of the show with a my esteemed friend Steven Danski, who has a very illustrious biography, and I'd like to share some of it with you now. Steven is a writer, photographer, and activist. He was an initial member of the Gay Liberation Front in New York City in 1969 after the Stonewall Rebellion. He worked on the GLF newspaper Come Out. In 1970, he wrote Hey Man, a polemical essay that was published in Come Out, Gay Flames and Rat. The controversial essay of gay male sexism, it was critical of gay male sexism and advocated gay male living collectives and support of the right of gay men to be involved in raising children. He was the founder of the movement of anti-sexist pro-feminist men called a feminism that published a feminist manifesto considered to be an historic document. And if we have time in the interview, I'd like to talk a little more about this. But there's more. Steven was active in the HIV AIDS pandemic as an activist, healthcare administrator, psychotherapist, and volunteer in underserved communities such as Harlem and the South Bronx. He's the author of two books How Dare Everything, Tales of HIV Related Psychotherapy and Nobody's Children, Orphans of the HIV Epidemic. He's also the author of Bearing Witness, Images and Reflections of the LGBT Movement, 1969 through 71, a collection of essays, photographs, and speeches. He's a frequent contributor to the gay and lesbian review worldwide. And I've read several of his essays and I can testify to their critical insight. The Feminist Movement was published in the anthology Smash the Church, Smash the State, The Early Years of Gay Liberation. A short story, Broken Gender, was published in Gertrude, a journal of voice and vision in 2006. As a photographer, Steven has exhibited in New York and Las Vegas, Nevada in a group show, More Than Meets the Eye. One person shows in public studies from the street and shelter from the storm at Chelsea Hotel in 2011. He curated Gay Liberation Front, a 40th anniversary retrospective in New York in 2009. He was married in Williamstown, Mass. In 2004, on the first day in the first state, that same-sex marriage became legal anywhere in America, he lives with his spouse, Barry Saffron, in Canaan, New York, on Las Vegas, Nevada, and there's more. Welcome, Steven. Thank you. It's delightful to have you here. You're still, you're in Las Vegas now? Yes. Staying in your apartment, like the rest of us? We had, we made a trip to New York in February, the last week of February, and when we flew back to Las Vegas, it was clear that there was an epidemic, it hadn't been cleared, a pandemic as yet. And we had been stay at home since the beginning of March, the first week of March. That doesn't mean I don't go out. I do go out because I'm involved in a couple of projects, working on a new documentary called Attend Me, a Pandemic Journal. And so I've been doing a lot of videotaping on the streets of Las Vegas in an area called 18B, which is covered with street art. That's wonderful. Well, tell us about your current projects because I think of you now as a filmmaker, even though you have many other professions. Well, the project that I've been working on for the last five years is something called Outspoken, Oral History from LGBTQ Pioneers. And to date, I have interviewed over 100 people across the country in every city, well not every city, but across the country, and also globally. These are videotaped interviews with people who are self-defined pioneers. That is not my role to put an imprimatur on people as to whether or not they're a pioneer. I leave that up to the interviewee. But I've interviewed gay men, lesbians, transgender, queer folk. And all these interviews, all 100, are on a dedicated website. It's my belief that these oral histories should be accessible to anyone who has the internet. Often, though I'm a huge supporter of archives, they're not always accessible to the general public. So it's on a dedicated website. You can go to www.outspoken-lgbtq.org. And you can look at any of the interviews there. They're all alphabetized. But I've also decided that all content should be archived. I've had an agreement with one in Los Angeles on the campus of the University of Southern California in LA, which is the largest LGBTQ archive in the world. And all content also resides there. So anyone who's doing research can go to the website. But if people are in an archive like one, they have access to all the material for the past five years. And from that project, I evolved to wanting to make a documentary of the project itself, not the process of making the interviews or during the oral history itself, but taking clips of as many people as I could, representative of the body of work, into a full-length film that's an hour and a half long. A 90-minute film. It's called From Trauma to Activism. And the idea from trauma to activism is that all of us have suffered the oppression, both in terms of race, in terms of gender identity, in terms of sexual orientation. And from that hurt, from those wounds, from that trauma, we've evolved into activists. So I wanted to show how people can come from a very painful place and transform that experience into something else that is both healing to the individual who suffered, but very instructional to people who are going through very similar experiences of discrimination, oppression. I remember we brought that film to the Kellogg Hubbard Library here in Montpelier. It was a great success. So I don't have a distributor. It's available on Vimeo On Demand, and you can't download or purchase the film, but for 99 cents, you can look at that film for 72 hours. That's a good deal. Say it again. That's a good deal. It's a good deal. 99 cents. And to have it on Vimeo On Demand, you have to charge something. So I charged as little as possible. And the film has been screened in New York City, in San Francisco, in Montpelier, in Las Vegas, in San Diego, in many cities. So that's available for people to look at, or if an LGBT center would like to have a screening of it, it's 99 cents. Well, the biography I read began with the Gay Liberation Front. Would you talk a little more about your pre-Gay Liberation Front days, the history before you became a Gay Liberation Front member, and then I think you left it, but you tell us. Well, I grew up in the Bronx in the 1950s. And my milieu was the street. The apartments in the South Bronx were very small, and especially in the summer months, you would go out to the street. So my earliest memories of activism date back to when I was in pre-puberty. And I was a supporter of Adlai Stevenson for president in 1952. When I was eight years old, I made a poster, walked across the South Bronx to deliver this poster to the Democratic Club. So I consider activism in my DNA. The big change that occurred for me in terms of my consciousness was when I moved to the Lower East Side. And when I moved to the Lower East Side, I became very involved in leftist politics. When I was at City College in New York, I was a member of Students for Democratic Society, SDS. And on the Lower East Side, I purchased a mimeograph machine that wasn't electric. It was a hand-cranked mimeograph machine. If anyone knows that very primitive technology, you take a tube of ink that looks like a huge tube of toothpaste, you squeeze the ink out onto a drum, you put a stencil over it, and then you hand-crank and paper goes through and you have leaflets. So for a penny, I used to go out on the streets of the Lower East Side as a reporter and sell issues of peace, La Paz, a bilingual community newspaper. And that's what I was doing before Gay Liberation Front. When the Stonewall Rebellion happened, I went to my first meeting in August, which was about a month or so after the Stonewall Rebellion in the village. And I was, I can't explain what this, I felt that I had come home. I had been involved in politics, as I said, all my life, but I was never at home. And when I came to Gay Liberation Front as chaotic and as contentious as that organization was, it really was where I belonged. So my early days in GLF were trying to find a radical ideology that made sense in terms of sexual orientation. There had been nothing before. And Come Out Newspaper was the first newspaper that came out of Gay Liberation Front. It was the first newspaper in the early LGBT movement. And I wrote an essay which you mentioned in my bio called Hey Man. I never thought that essay would have a life, but just last year it was republished in the Stonewall Reader Penguin Books. It was edited by Jason Bowman, who is at the New York Public Library. And what I got, what the big treat about Hey Man was to hear it read on audible. So I got to hear someone reading the essay. I was stunned by it because the language is not at all the way I would right now. Not that I wouldn't engage in hyperbolic language. It was just I wouldn't have used terms like cock privilege. It just is not the way I talk now. But in that era, that was the zeitgeist. That is how we spoke. And we wanted to shock people. A lot of leftist politics was shocking when you think of guerrilla theater. That's that shocking. So a lot of the work that I did in those early years has survived 50 years forward. It's quite a surprise to me. And then from from Gay Liberation Front. While I was there I discovered the works of some major feminists. So I had read the sexual dialectic by Kate Millat and sexual politics. I'm sorry sexual politics by Kate Millat and the sexual dialectic by Shulameth Firestone. And I was I was just thinking of that today. The dialectic of sex introduced me to the idea of children's liberation. And when I was reading your feminist manifesto, your last point involves men participating in childcare. But anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt you. At all. I think it's a very important point. And then I had read the anthology Sister is Powerful and the Red Stockings Manifesto. These are the things that greatly influenced me. And what happened after I learned of feminism. It was the experience that Emily Dickinson describes when she was asked what is poetry. And she says when the top of your head blows off, you know, it's poetry. And that's how I felt about feminism. I felt that this was a theory and ideology, a struggle for liberation that made total sense to me. And I've had the same belief since the early 70s till now that if we don't end the patriarchy. If the patriarchy isn't dismembered, oops, pardon the expression, but if the patriarchy isn't taken down, this planet will not survive. So it was so awe inspiring to me. And then that's what triggered feminism, I felt that men could actually be supportive without getting the way of women's struggles but actually be supportive of the struggle. So I began to do childcare. The two children that I've taken care of, I'm going to start to cry. One, one was the son of Robin Morgan, well known feminist writer poet, and Kenneth Pitchford who just died two weeks ago. And John Knavel, who was still quite active in terms of LGBT politics, reformed the effeminist, but I began that relationship of doing childcare for Blake, and I'm still friends with him. He was six months old when I met him. And I had never changed a diaper in my life, but the technology had advanced to Pampers. So that was much easier than cloth diapers, except the Pampers that currently have tabs where you can close them with a tab, they had safety pins. And I was always afraid that I would make a mistake with the safety pin and I would stab him right to the heart and kill him. And that didn't happen. What it meant is that I had to learn about the care of another human being. I had never done that before. One of the basis, tenets of feminism is that we should be involved in life giving, perhaps not biologic life giving but the creativity of art, the child raising, the support of women in their struggle. That's all about life giving. Well, I just was able to read the effeminist manifesto and it's full of really revolutionary ideas. I read and I heard an interview with Kenneth Pitchford, who said that it didn't really take some of them haven't really caught on. But I think the culture has changed in many different ways. What was the immediate impact of your publishing this? Did you leave the Gay Liberation Front then over questions of gender and male domination, but also that the point in which we made a declaration of leaving, GLF was really falling apart because at that point, many of the lesbian feminists had left and formed radical lesbians. So the organization was beginning to dissolve. Believe it or not, we're running out of time. I know it. You'll have to come back because we have so much more to talk about. Let me just say something about the manifesto. Please. One of the things about writing a manifesto, I warn you all if you decide you want to do that, is that it's a non-negotiable document. However, almost 50 years later, I'm negotiating, I'm still negotiating some of the statements of the manifesto. And in particular, I no longer hold any view that is anti-transgender. I became a psychotherapist. I joined a practice in Upstate New York in Albany, New York with Arlene Isdor Lev. And the clients I had were only transgender. And it completely changed my thinking, sitting opposite someone and hearing the authenticity of how they viewed their gender identity changed my mind completely. So I wanted to mention that that's one of the things that I've, I've tried to discuss whenever the feminist manifesto comes up. I know. And the thing about the beauty and limitation of a manifesto is that it's of the time. How do you feel about camp? Well, I think, you know, I believe in, of identity politics. And I believe there's a gay sensibility. And I've always believed that. So I wrote an essay for the gay and lesbian review on camp and I tried to do a historical perspective. I have no issue with camp, as long as it's not mocking women. But camp can very easily be thought as mocking certain kinds of mass duality. It's very easy to do a camp impersonation of John Wayne, if people still know who that horrible. So I think, you know, I liked camp. I think camp is part of Stephen Dansky's humor. I don't have much of an opportunity to do that because the generation that had that kind of humor is dying off. And I don't know that camp humor still exists in the same way, but I don't, I don't have any problem with camp. Are there any last words that you want to share with the audience? Well, I thank you and Linda for doing this program. These are all labors of love. They, I know that sounds like a cliche, but I really mean that these take take over your life in ways, these types of projects really overwhelm and take over your life. And sometimes we don't always get the support that we need to continue this work, but I think if it's very much in your in how you view yourself, you will be able to do it without support. And I do most of my work alone. And I sort of create within a bubble. But I thank you and Linda for doing this because I know what it takes to do this. And I wanted to express my appreciation to you. And thank you for your work as well. It's been tireless and wide ranging. And I'd love to have you back to talk more about it. I would love it. Thank you so much. So, we are back to talk with Mara Iverson. First, we want to acknowledge that we are indeed taping in Montpellier, which is unseated indigenous land. This time, however, we're going to talk tomorrow, not about outright and her role as director of education. Mara is a community appointed member of the ethnic and social equity studies work group. This is based on some very high profile legislation that occurred. But we really want to talk with Mara about what this group is truly charged to do. And what the process is going and what might be happening next. So Mara, my understanding was that there was a coalition that formed around this issue to support the legislation. And it was this group of people who were responsible for appointing you. So, Mara, thank you so much to this work group. So, can you tell me something about that coalition, how it came together and what's happening with it now? Yeah, absolutely. So the coalition came together. It's the Vermont Coalition for ethnic and social equity studies in schools. That is not the correct list of the words. But if you put those keywords into Google, you'll find them. There was a group that came about because there were concerned parents and community members who knew that for a long time school curriculums and the way that we do work in schools and the way that we even have set up schools. It races a lot of identities and a lot of contributions that people have made outside of the history of like straight white cisgender middle class land owning men. Specifically in the United States. So the group was really focused on trying to find ways to get schools to make changes. And the predominant way to do that was to go about some legislation that would set different expectations for what sorts of things ought to be covered in schools so that we have a broader and more complete picture of history and of the way that the world came to be that it is and of the people who contributed and built it. So yeah, that was the, that was the goal. And this bill was the one that was initially introduced by Kaia Morris. Yes. And then was reintroduced by Coach Christie when Kaia did not run for reelection. So, so exactly. Can you give us a sample of the groups organizations that are part of that coalition? Who does it truly represent? Yeah, absolutely. It is possible for for people to be in that coalition, even just as individuals. So people who are passionate about the cause can join even as individuals, but voices for Vermont children and of course my brain just gap confuse absolutely evaporated right there. I was on it as as part of outright and representing the LGBT youth community, but various organizations that fight for recognition, racial equity, liberation are the groups that are represented overall. And there was a commitment to ensure that underrepresented communities had a room at the table. You know, Palestinians living in the US, Islamic Muslim community, the Jewish community, the indigenous community, the Latinx community. And not just the seat at the table but led by which is an important distinction. So exactly what does this legislation mandate needs to happen now? I'm really glad that you asked that question because there's a lot of misconception about what this legislation was intended to do and what the working group is charged with. So I first want to clarify that what the working group is charged with is creating a list of learning standards, educational standards for ethnic and social equity studies in schools. And standards are basically a list of gold star. This is what your, your curriculum should be aiming to fulfill. It is not proficiencies, proficiencies are a list of skills and capacities that students are supposed to have by the end. It is not proficiencies. It is not specific content so it doesn't itself change the content of what teachers teaching classrooms, what books they choose, what things they they choose to focus on. The standards create expectations for what information, what worldview, what, I don't want to say content in a concrete sense, but like what do, what do we want students to walk away understanding and knowing by the end of their careers as students in our remote public schools. That's what standards are. So they are a, a goals list to work for their guiding documents, but they do not require specific actions within schools. The actions within schools is the work that the Vermont coalition continues to do. So they continue to facilitate and help the people who are on the working group to do outreach and to gather community input, and to just be resourced. But the work that comes after the standards is individuals and groups going into schools and asking how the schools intend to meet those standards. So that's where we get to ask, are there proficiencies that you're asking? How does your curricula intend to reach for those standards? Is there, are there any that are missing and what gaps do we need to fill? How might you fill them? So the standards group is really just creating the ideological difference, the container at the top that says this is what we think you should be coming out of here knowing. And then how you get to those standards is the matter of the grassroots work in communities, in schools, in classrooms that we all need to do hence forward. And the standards themselves. We have about roughly two years from this point, like into the 21-22 range to finish and publish them. I'm a little bit wonky now because of the COVID situation, because it really kind of, you know, knocks some things off kilter schedule-wise. But aside from that, that's really the timeline we're on. Now, there were 11 community members who were appointed by the coalition to serve on this workgroup and you're working with the agency of education and other state entities. So, how is that working relationship going? Or is the agency of education receptive to hear what the coalition members have to say and to contribute? So I feel like that is a complex answer in the time that we are living in, which is that my experience of what it seemed like, and this is just my personal experience viewing from being part of the group, their process orientation, their involvement was different before the sudden shift in schooling, where all of a sudden the entire statewide education system had to be online and figure out how to do everything in the world from online. So I would say that there is cooperation coming from the AOE, but the AOE is also very intent on helping us to be clear and wanting us to make clear to others that we are, again, creating standards. These standards do not dictate what happens in an individual classroom. We're actually a pretty decentralized state. We don't have a lot of really controlling guidance that comes down from the agency of education and instructs individual districts or schools or educators to do particular things. So I think that that has been something that the AOE has been trying to make very clear is that the AOE predominantly provides standards, resources, guidance for what we're trying to get out of the education system, and then the execution falls to superintendents, administrators and the educators in the buildings, which is why our work is to create the standards and that that relationship with the AOE is going pretty smoothly. And there's some mutual education that has to happen. There's lots of stuff about the agency of education and how education works and how education law work. Those of us who are community appointees do not already know. And there's lots of stuff about us as community appointees, specifically because we represent marginalized backgrounds that the AOE doesn't fully understand and realize. So it's a mutual education effort that is now taking place in, you know, an emergency backdrop that wasn't the plan. What that led me to for a question is, it sounds as though the intent of the coalition was to really bring about change within Vermont school systems, you know, what is being taught, how is being taught, who's being included in that process. You working with the agency of education you're going to create a framework in which the coalition's work then really is going to kick into high gear, because they're going to need to go out to individual school districts to advocate for specific inclusions and maybe even recommendations for curriculums and be participants in that training process. Absolutely. And I think that that the point of the standards and sometimes people feel disappointed when they hear like wait you're not changing things in the classroom. The point of the standards is to give people something to point to when they do the advocacy to give people something that says look, the AOE and legislation in our state say that this is important and that these are the things that we are meant to be striving for. Without those, there's nothing that says that we need to be doing anything different than what we're already doing. So the standards are really intended to be the thing that we can now use to say this exists. So me as an educator I've been wanting to make change in my classroom but I have an administration that doesn't work very well with me. I can now use these standards that are advocated by the agency of education as a tool to say this is why I'm making changes in my classroom. I'm in adherence with trying to strive for these goals that are supported by educators throughout state. And it gives people different traction than they had before to make the inroads that we need to concretely and in classrooms and in hallways and in policies. And if I heard you correctly, you are still part of the coalition itself in that if there are individuals who, by hearing this conversation say no, I really want to invest my time and working on that. They could still join the coalition as an individual to participate in this process. A sort of broad question. Is the coalition looking at creating a repository of curriculums that they think are good models and creating some type of available statewide resources that individuals could then go into their school district and advocate for inclusion of that curriculum. I do not know the answer to that because one of the things that is true is that I have pulled back some from my coalition involvement in order to focus that energy instead on working group involvement. So I'm not up to date on the details of exactly what the coalition is hoping to coalesce. But I do know that they are very interested in getting people on board to do work. And they're also very interested in reimagining what work needs to be done moment to moment because that's the that's the entire point of grassroots organizing is that it is capable of shifting and being nimble to address the things that are emergent. So it what the plan is right now being educate people on what the standards are and how they can use them to advocate and then talk about what specific changes could be made in schools and how people should ask for them. There are only two of the things that we know need to be done right now and there may be other things that are that become emergent or that as new people join and involve their energy and their passions and their knowledge become a parent that also needs to be done. But the end all be all of what that coalition is isn't even defined and settled yet because it has the capacity to move with the people who make it up. What I'm strongly hearing from you is that this is not a point in time process. This is an ongoing evolutionary responding to to continuously assess and responding to need and how do we defining and then having that need, which means since we've run out of time again. That as this work continues, you're going to need to come back and give a second. I think that sounds fair. This is not a moment. It's a movement to promote Hamilton. Thank you for your work. Thank you to your for your commitment to our youth. I look forward to bringing you back again. Absolutely. Hi. I'd like to welcome Julie answer editor of sinister wisdom. Welcome Julie. Welcome I'm glad to be here. So just for the first question before I read some information from you about you. Is sinister wisdom now the longest running lesbian publication do you know, to the best of my knowledge yes sinister wisdom was founded in 1976 and we've been publishing issues pretty continuously since then. Yeah, I know it's very exciting to still have that publication with us. And just as an aside, one of my first poem was published in sinister wisdom by Adrian rich. So I'm like, you know, very exciting. Oh, that's great. Julie, tell our audience about you. Julie answer is a scholar and poet for scholarship is at the intersection of US history and literature with particular attention to 20th century US feminist and lesbian histories, and cultures by examining the lesbian print culture with the tools of history and literature and literary studies. She reconsiders history histories of the women's literary, sorry women's liberation movement and gay liberation. Book manuscript a fine bind lesbian feminist publishing from 1969 through 2009 tells the story of a dozen lesbian feminist publishers to consider the meaning of the theoretical and political formations of lesbian feminist separatism and cultural feminism. So, welcome and I see that you went to the University of Maryland. I did that's why I did my MFA and my PhD. Okay, and did you teach it all or I did I taught there I taught there of course the whole time I was going to school and then for I think two years after after I graduated before we moved down here to Florida. And that's that's a good question why Florida. Well, that's an easy question answer that's where my wife's company transferred her. Okay, we came we came down here we live outside of Tampa, Florida, and so not to retire, although it is beautiful down here. I know I went to the. I went to Tampa for a basketball championship a few years ago. And it's a great city. I really liked it. The NCA a women's Final Four. Yes, we were there. You were. Yeah. It was great fun. Yeah, and the lesbian area to I know. Yeah, in Tampa. Okay, well, as I said, Julie answer is publisher and editor of sinister wisdom. And it is one of the longest running publications so how did you become editor and publisher of sinister wisdom and why did you decide it was, it would be a good thing to take on. Well, I do like to joke that I became the editor and publisher of sinister wisdom because I was the last person standing who said yes, I like to think that I was the editor before we went to everyone else on the planet and asked them first. I started in in 2010 as the editor and Fran day asked me, I had been editing an issue, a special issue. Well, she was the editor and as as we were getting ready to finalize that she asked me if I would take over the editorial take over as the editor and publisher of the journal and she I knew that she had been sick and she died a few months later. And, you know, I mean, it's a little bit of I thought about it a bit. And I mean I thought about it enough to know that I had to be serious about it that I wanted the journal to survive that I didn't want it to fold a collapse under my editorship so I knew that I had enough of a commitment to to take it forward in that way. And also you know I was in the throes of studying all of this wonderful lesbian feminist print work that happened during the 1970s and 1980s. And in one hand I felt like sad that I missed that. And so when the opportunity came up to be the editor of the journal I thought I had the opportunity to create this this sort of renaissance of lesbian publishing in my own life and so that's the work that I've been trying to do for the past 10 years. And you've done a great job I gotta say. Thanks. Yeah, we've, you know, we've expanded when I started, we did three issues a year now we regularly do four issues a year. I think we'll do a couple extra special issues as we approach the 50th anniversary so, you know, Wow, 50 years. Yeah. 2026 50 years. Wow, that's amazing. So, how, how has the pandemic affected, you know, like I see you're doing a lot more podcasts which I guess is necessary at this time but you know how, how are people responding to that you're getting a good response to podcasts and. Yeah, so the podcast so we're getting. So, you know, we started the podcast a little bit on a lark with a wonderful woman Nadine Rodriguez who's been an intern. And I'm fascinated by podcasts you know like I listened to them and, and I, and I feel like there's a synergy between literary journals and podcasts. I have learned through our process of creating the podcast itself that it's a huge amount of work to do really good audio. On one hand, people have in their hands in the form of cell phones, great ways to record work, but stringing it all together making it a really compelling 30 minute podcast is is a huge labor. The podcast is a little bit on hold at the moment, when the pandemic hit. I mean the first thing we did is just sort of batten down and stay in our house here in Tampa, Florida, and I was teaching on I had been teaching online, even before that so I was teaching and just trying to like wrap up the semester and do other work. And then as as we got a couple weeks into the podcast I know or into the pandemic, I noticed all these people doing online events through zoom. And I thought, oh, we should maybe try this with the journal. So we were do so we were called on to do these these zoom gatherings and we did the first one for the April issue of the journal. And then, and then we did one for the for she will when she will passed away who was a friend of mine down here in Florida one of the first lesbians I connected with when we moved down here. And, and then we did another launch for our summer issue and, and, as I said, it's like the lesbian potlucks they can't get enough of them so I haven't even announced it yet but I'm planning another one for the end of August. And we'll do one in the fall when the fall issue launches. And you know it's just part of a broader. I mean sinister wisdom our primary mission is to publish the journal and, and now we do it quarterly. But I think our broader mission really is to promote lesbian art and think about how artists and writers and people committed to lesbian culture can do that work in the world and connect with one another. And so we're trying so I'm always interested in following different platforms and trying to find different ways where we can create opportunities to celebrate and help people create art and literature. And, you know, like, I know that you know you've been you've been doing like I noticed that you've been doing some themed issues, and I didn't notice that before like the last few years so is this something that you wanted to develop and that you are developing now. Well, themes issues have always been a part of sinister wisdom since actually issue number two was the first themed issue edited by Beth Hodges and editors have used them in different ways over the different editorships of the journal. I think one of the, there's, there's a variety of reasons I we've been doing themed issues one is it gives people space, it gives other lesbians an opportunity to edit, and also to like create a vision for the type of conversations that they want to be having. The lesbian feminist activist herstory project is a great example of that where it's a group of women documenting Southern lesbian history that's been really vital for us. Of course, some of the other themed issues in the, in the past have been really influential the issue that Beth Brandt edited about indigenous with indigenous voices. And so it's really a way to engage more women in the work of editing and in the vision of shaping the magazine, and particularly one of the things that I try to work on is inviting women of color to have to edit different issues of the journal so that it's not exclusively my editorial vision as a white woman. So yeah, so the themed issues have have a lot of have a lot of functions for us. But we also always like submissions are always open for the journal. I never shut them down I go through I try to get people responses within three to six months. We accept work and we do open issues on a on a regular basis as well. It might not be a full issue like 117 is actually three issues packed in one. It's a great collection of writing about lesbians in the city. And then there's this whole lovely set of stories from the Southern lesbian feminist activist herstory project and then there's new lesbian writing. There's kind of three mini issues all put together. And yeah, so the themes are new and we try to envision them in different ways. But also try to be always open and publishing new interesting writing. Speaking of writing, you are a prolific writer yourself. So for my last question, I would like to ask you how you find time to do all that you do with sinister wisdom and find time to write and publish. And do you have a book in the works. I think one of the things I always say how I have time is that I didn't have children. And so there's actually like, there is a lot of time that's also why I have three dogs I didn't have children I had a little extra time I thought oh well, we'll just start collecting dogs. No, I'm. I don't, you know people always ask how, how, how do I do things that it's the usual writer thing I try to set a time set aside a little bit of time each day, even if it's only 20 or 30 minutes first thing. When I get into my office to work on my own writing projects. And it's not the the big projects that take the work. It's the little bit of time every day that then adds up. And that's really what I try to do. I have a couple projects in the work I'm trying to get my academic book done with the history of the lesbian feminist presses. I'm working on another anthology project with a new collaborator which I'm really excited about we're not quite ready to talk about it yet but we've been working on it this summer. And I'm writing a new I did a sequence of poems that was published as a chat book late last year called the Pinko Kami Dyke. Which were really the sort of series of persona poems that I had a great time with and now I'm doing another just this summer. Since the beginning of pandemic I have a new series of persona poems that have been needling me in the back of my mind and there, those are stacking up, you know that the 20 minutes a day are starting to stack up with those so I'm hoping that in the next couple of months that might be a more full manuscript we'll see. You might have to just like make bigger slots. Exactly. Exactly. Well I want to thank you so much for being here I really appreciate it. And this is our new show. This is our interview show so thank you everybody for being here and for enjoying Julie, and all the work that she does for our community. So thank you Julie. Great. Thank you so much it's been a pleasure talking with you Linda.