 Hi, welcome to the All Things LGBTQ interview show where we interview LGBTQ guests who are making important contributions to our communities. All Things LGBTQ is taped at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which we recognize as being unceded indigenous land. Thanks for joining us and enjoy the show. Hi, everybody. I'm here with Joan Sennow-Lester, a writer, scholar, educator, activist of great renown. Welcome, Joan. Oh, thank you for that. I'd like to read your bio if I would, and I'm going to deliver it in the second person. You're an award-winning columnist published in USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, Cosmopolitan, New York Times, and others. You're the author of six critically praised books, including your just released 2021 memoir, Loving Before Loving, A Marriage in Black and White, and we're here to celebrate the publication of that memoir. Thank you. As a member of a biracial family, your lifelong passion has been understanding race, exploring how the concept ever came to exist, pervading US life until it's so prevalent that this bizarre concept seems normal. All your books center on this immensely charged topic. In your non-writing moments, education and ally activism have shaped your life. True so far? Absolutely, you got it. You have a doctorate in multicultural education from the University of Massachusetts. You co-founded and directed the Equity Institute in 1981 and your partner, I think you want to say wife, is involved in that effort also. This national nonprofit based first in Amherst and then Emeryville, California, pioneered the diversity wave of the 80s and 90s. You continue as a member of its successor, the Equity Consulting Board. Your recognitions include the National Lesbian and Gay Siegenthaler Award for Commentary on National Public Radio, a finalist award from the Penn Bell Water Prize for socially engaged fiction, and the Arts and Letters Creative Nonfiction Finalist Award for Narrative Nonfiction. What an illustrious biography. It sounds so impressive. I love hearing it here. I am just living my daily life trying to pound out my words. It's very nice to hear that. And to bring it up to the minute, you're a member of several writing communities and you live with your wife in Berkeley, California. So let's start with, as you know, this show is all things LGBTQ. So would you mind talking a little about your the biography focus, if I'm not mistaken, on your marriage to Julius Lester, an African-American activist and performer. A celebrated author. Yes. Who had some time in St. John'sbury, Vermont, I read in his biography. But talk, if you wouldn't mind, for a minute about your current relationship of 40 years. How you had to come out at mid-midlife? Are you identifying as pansexual and would you mind sharing a little of that? No, I'd love to. And actually, the last third of the biography of the memoir, sorry, does get into that. I do talk about how I came out. I had been married twice to men and been in a number of relationships with men, had children with men. So I was a mother. And after my second marriage to a man ended and my heart was broken once again. My poor little heart. I was kind of looking around. I was very strongly involved in the feminist movement of the late 60s and the 1970s, which I also have many chapters about in the book and how crucial that was in my own development as a strong person. And I was kind of looking around and I knew women who were in relationships with women. And I thought, oh, wow, this kind of looks more egalitarian. And that had been really the issue on which my heterosexual marriages had foundered both times, I would say. I was not a compliant wife in the sense that they expected me to be. And yeah, so lots of fighting ensued. Then I read, and the book also talks a memoir a lot about the influence of various, mostly books, but also some articles on me. And I read Adrienne Rich's very now famous essay in the journal Signs that was called something about, I have the book right here, I can look up it's a chapter title, but heterosexuality basically. I got it. I'm closer to heterosexuality and the lesbian existence. Yes, thank you, Anne. So I read that article and it kind of blew me away because she talks in the article about the continuum. And what she says in the article is that using Kinsey's research, which at that time was not so outdated because she wrote this in about 1980, maybe the late 70s or 1980, which is when I read it in that first in the issue in which it was in the women's bookstore in Northampton Womanfire, which I crept into and slunk over to the lesbian section, got a couple of books and journals put them face down on the counter, paid as fast as possible and ran at the bookstore. So I got home read the article, she talks about Kinsey's research in which he demonstrated that 5% of people he posited were exclusively heterosexual by sort of inclination innately 5% of people were exclusively homosexual and 90% 90% were on a continuum somewhere leaning one way or the other. And I felt when I read that that I was smack in the middle. And I remember telling a straight friend of mine that I was coming, you know, I was going to be a lesbian. So I announced it to all my friends and family before I had a lover because I just had it with men. I had just had it. I was at that time in my late 30s. I was just about to get a doctorate. You know, I felt like I was on my way and I was not going to mess up my life anymore for me and my children. And so that was it with men. Too difficult. So a friend of mine, I told that I was coming out that I was going to be a lesbian and she said, Joan, but I thought you liked sex with man. And I said, I did. It wasn't the sex. I didn't like it was the sexism. And, you know, I thought sex is sex. So and I had seen actually my friend Maxine Wolf, whom you had on this show twice recently was a very, very close, one of my very best friends. And she had just after two heterosexual marriages like me, she had just started a relationship, a sexual relationship with a woman, her first one. And she was calling me up. She lived in Brooklyn. I lived it by that point in Amherst, getting my doctorate. And she called me up. She said, Joan, it's amazing. Without sexism in the relationship, it's so different. You really can have an you're not fighting that particular battle. You're still two people and, you know, you have your issues, but that huge battle is removed. And she was just I was like, oh, this is interesting. So I really didn't know how to quote meet lesbians. So I had heard there might be lesbians on the softball team in Amherst. That was so naive. And my son, who was then about 10 or 11 12. And he and I started, I didn't tell him why I was going to join the softball team in Amherst, but he practiced me all spring. He said, my, you've got a good arm, my, you could do this. And he even he was so sweet, he went and he umped some of the games for the women. So there was a whole league, which of course was all lesbians, but I had no clue. I went with my little pink pocketbook slung over my shoulder. And I was thinking, Oh, the picture, she's kind of cute. Maybe she's a lesbian. Well, yeah, she was maybe the first base woman is like, well, it took me the whole summer to realize that everybody on the team, except me. What's the lesbian? Well, as it happened, we played another team. I was doing anti racism work at that point. And had actually, I guess just gotten my doctorate and had made a brochure. Joan Steina Lester anti racism workshops. And this other woman, Carol Johnson, also did anti racism work at that time for the federal government, which actually still did do that things like that before Reagan was just taking over. Anyway, she'd heard about me. She was on another team and one night our two teams were at a local watering hall and she came over to me and she said, are you Joan Lester? I said, yes, she said, I've heard you do anti racism work. She was a white woman also. And she was doing it and she said, oh, I could help you get some gigs and I have contacts and come over to my house will go through my Rolodex. And it turned out that she lived in a house with four other lesbians and she was a lesbian. Oh, this is so interesting when I went over there because, you know, I didn't even know until that point that there was a lesbian culture. You know, I had no clue. I think it's a lot like what a lot of white people don't really realize that there's a whole black culture. I mean, black people are not just oppressed. There's all this vibrant, incredible culture going on. So I didn't realize and all these women were younger than I was. I was then 40. And most of women were in their 20s or early 30s and nobody at that point had kids. So I felt very different as a mother. Anyway, Carol Johnson was quite wonderful and took a long time for us to kiss because I was waiting. She was the lesbian when she kissed me first. But she was like kind of what do you call it's a word like she thought I might be a little sketchy as a partner because I was a straight woman. So she was holding back. In any case, we finally did kiss and made out. And I said, oh, you're so soft. Look what men have been getting all these years. I was, I've always been so much about fairness. I was like, this is so unfair. What men have been getting from my body all these years, these soft breasts. And oh, anyway, here we are 40 years later. And she is just the most remarkable woman, totally politically active, totally kind, totally loving, a great, she's not really a stepmom to my kids who are now in their mid 50s, but a wonderful friend to them and a wonderful grandmother to our three grandchildren who regard her as equally as much a grandmother because she's been there their whole lives. So what a wonderful story of how I came out. Well, you know, my partner and I had a Boston romance, and we went to woman firebook store in Northampton. And it was the same kind of thing. All of her friends were lesbian mothers. And none of my, all my friends were single and nobody had. So it was two worlds coming together. It was two worlds. Yes, yes, it really was. And it, yeah. So we've melded those worlds. And as well as melding into as two white women and two a lesbian couple into in California, a world of African Americans, both straight and gay, a lot of gay men, black men are our closest friends. And it's just been wonderful here with Oakland and Berkeley and San Francisco, the Bay Area. Well, let's turn to the memoir. Okay. How did you happen to write a memoir? And why this memoir at this time? My mom died. Did you want to say something else? I want to say I can't wait to read it. Oh, you're fine. Thank you. I'm getting really great feedback. I mean, it's just been very exciting. This is my sixth book. And they've all gotten good critical reception. But this is the first one that now we're, I don't know, eight months out from it being published or something. I still get emails and Facebook messages and other messages, you know, several a week anyway of people just saying they're so excited about it. So why this memoir? My mom died. And I was pretty devastated. She was my second parent to die. And she died as an old person, like 94. And I was already whatever I was, I was 74. Could that be right? Yes. She was only 20 years older than me. So I wasn't sure what I was going to do. It kind of rocked my world, the second parent dying, more than you would think at my advanced stage. You know, I'd be kind of used to the idea of no parents, but the reality of it was kind of strange. And I long thought of writing a memoir. This is because I feel like I've had some unusual experiences, especially in terms of being married to two African American men. And the title, Loving Before Loving, A Marriage in Black and White, in this one, of course, refers to the 1968 Loving Decision, or was it 67? My mind today is kind of flipping a little. Yeah, the Loving Decision legalizing nationally, Supreme Court decision legalizing interracial marriage. But I married in 62 to Julius Lester, who was a writer, although as yet unpublished when I married him, but became rather eminent, very award winning and so on. So I knew that that was an unusual experience. And also I'm just a writer. So I write about everything in my life. But I hadn't written a memoir, but I'd written a biography of a close friend, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, who's also a heavy presence in my book because she was a friend from college from DC. Excuse me, you went to Antioch. I did to Antioch and so did Eleanor. And we met there and became close friends. And I'm a writer. So but I mentioned about my parents, my mother dying because even though I had very loving parents who I think nothing in this book, I didn't write anything that I couldn't have written with them alive. But there it was a kind of freedom with nobody in that older generation. I have no uncles, no aunts, no mother, no father, no grandparents, you know, your whole life when you're young, you have all these older people. And you see here my I'm in my writing cottage, I have my writing gloves. Um, I don't I think there was some trigger about that. I actually gave up a book that I had a book contract for a novel that was a second in a series. The first novel was black, white, other my first and only young adult novel. And I'd gotten a good contract and I had a good draft of it. And I just was kind of disinterested and all of a sudden I I don't know the turning of the generations, maybe it's that like a mother passing and my kids were grown and the grandkids were growing up. It just seemed like the time to write about my life. And then with Black Lives Matter, bursting onto the scene, certainly not without a lot of antecedents. But there was a heightened interest, I thought, in race and in allyship. And I do have something to say about being an ally. And I have a blog on my website, JoanLester.com. And one of my more recent blogs within the last year is about being an ally. And I always thought that one of the key things was knowing a lot about the population you're trying to ally to or if that's how you pronounce the verb ally. So I informed myself, but I had never really realized until Black Lives Matter has caused so much more even introspection, how much it was so important for me to examine internally white supremacy. I've been very happy to examine it in other people and institutions, which I've done a lot of in the last 50 years. But I started to realize more in myself. Well, the analogy is to male supremacist attitudes, but white supremacist attitudes. And I was for many, many years a member of a women's choir in Oakland that was all African American except for myself. And many good friends in the group over the years that I saw outside of choir as well as in the choir. Anyway, one day I heard myself when we were, the choir director told us to move all our chairs. And I heard myself saying, oh, Altos move over here and Sopranos, you know, I was kind of leading and organizing the whole thing like, hello. And I turned to a friend who happened to be Ellis Walker, who was in the choir. And I said, oh, white people are always used to being in charge, aren't we? And she kind of gave me a withering look and said, yes. And that was such a moment for me. So I wrote a blog about that. So I don't know, allies, being allies, I mean, I think we need to know something about the population we're trying to be helpful to so that we could see what might be needed. And something about the culture. So we're just not clumping in completely unawarely, but we also need to be looking at our own stuff. Well, your writer, do you have a writing schedule? Ah, I do. Informally, it's not like to the hour, but I get up in the mornings and I do a little, little 15 minutes of domino exercises, have my breakfast, go for a hike in nearby woods. And then I come home and I write in the morning and then have lunch. And if I have the oomph for it, I continue after lunch. Sometimes I just read or take a nap then or do, you know, they're always a million. When you're a writer, you're not only writing, you're promoting all of your books and doing your blogs and submitting op-eds and yeah. Who are your administrative tasks? What's that? They're always a lot of administrative tasks. Oh, yes. Who are your literary influences? I think one of my main ones is Zora Neale Hurston. And I read their eyes or watching God, her eyes are watching God. I've read that so many times because she just, she stimulates me to these unlikely metaphors. Her imagery is so delicious and her use of African American vernacular, you know, that she relies on. I've read all of her books, I think, and many of them repeatedly. She's just a huge influence on me. And she was the first author that I started reading as a writer. Instead of reading just as a reader, like, oh, what happens next? And, you know, this is exciting and started to really appreciate her writing. What are your future projects? You said you have an uncompleted manuscript that you're revising. Actually, yeah, it turns out to be a children's picture book, which I woke up a few weeks ago with in my mind and I never thought I'd be writing a children's picture book, but and I submitted it and just got yesterday some rather, I submitted it to a publisher where the publisher is a friend of mine, and I got some rather harsh feedback yesterday. It's like, and I did exactly what I, when I occasionally still coach, I used to do freelance editing a lot and occasionally still do it. And I'm always advising other writers, stick to one theme, stick to one theme. But in this picture book, I had three themes, evidently. And she says, yeah, so I, that was completely, you know, she said, my friend said to me, you make, it's very harshly, you, and she's a good friend, you made them mistake every debut picture book author made with having all these things. Everybody thinks it's so easy to write a picture book. It's not, it's not just something you can throw off. You know, you have to do the research and you have to see what are the competing books and you know, all this. So I'm like, okay. So it was kind of disheartened last night, but I woke up in the middle of the night and spent three hours, a little night in my mind, completely rewriting it. There's your writing schedule. Yeah, that's part of it, unfortunately. But that good editors are invaluable, aren't they? Aren't they? Yes. I've been in so many writing groups where everybody just praises and that doesn't help, you know. Yeah, a good editor is wonderful. I've had a number in my life. Some op-ed editors from newspapers, when I used to publish more op-eds, were wonderful teachers and editors. And I've had a few good friends. And this person who just gave me the harsh feedback is actually a writing partner. And we give each other feedback. I can't wait for her to submit something rotten to me, but she doesn't usually. She's, she's such a good writer. Well, in the minute we have left, what are your, what is your final message to our audience and talk more? I'd love to. Thank you, Anne, so much. This is, you're such a delightful interviewer. Last message is be of good cheer, people. You know, we, we are getting somewhere. Sometimes it feels like we aren't in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, class, LGBTQ, right, you know, but we are, we have moved, we are moving along and COVID is supposed to peak soon. And actually, maybe the spring will be better. So be of good cheer. Well, that makes, it's perfect sense. Joan Lister, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Anne. Everybody, I'd like to invite Michael Wilson to our show. He's going to tell us about a very exciting ski party and rendezvous in Stovermont, that all you LGBTQ people should get out and do. So hi, hi, Michael. How are you doing? Good, Anne. How are you? I'm good. And you want to tell us a little bit about yourself? How did you get involved in this very exciting project? Well, I, I do adventure travel. I have a travel company and JW adventures. And I do a lot of scuba diving and wine tasting and smaller groups. And this particular event has been going on for 39 years. I've been producing it for about 13 years. And originally, it was just a social club called PIKU, an organization outdoor, getting lesbian outdoor association. And that was about 39 years ago. And over the years, it's just grown into this amazing thing. About 13 years ago, the guy who was organizing it just basically said it's too much. You know, he just wanted to have, go fun and have ski, you know, ski. And so it kind of fit right into my wheelhouse that I've already been doing the adventure travel for many years. And so we just went from there. And it's just a great event. It tracks around 300 to 400 people up the stove every year. And it's always the Wednesday after Martin Luther King. So it's five days of wintery bliss. And it kicks off every day. It's like a circus. There's so much going on. Wednesday. And we do a big event at the local bowling alley, which is a beautiful boutique bowling alley. We take it over. Everyone comes in and we set it up so that you have to change lanes every 20 minutes. So like for the serious bowler, they get really offended. But anyway, I didn't finish that frame. You're missing the point, you know. And it's a blast. So it's a great mixer. That starts off on Wednesday. Thursday, you know, they ski all day. The mountain is really generous with Bell Resorts, the Stomach Resort. They give a discount from the lift tickets. And then Thursday, and see this year, we have, we're going to do an open bar, bonfire VIP cocktail hour at the host hotel, which is the top notch resort. And all of our sponsors are very gracious to donate product. And this is a fun event. And that's followed by Sean Palowski, comedian, who's coming in from LA and she'll perform at the town hall. Then on Friday, again, they ski in London while that's during the day. And we have this huge indoor pool party at the Trap Family Lodge. And that's just amazing facility. Oh, have you been at the pool? It's insane. Yeah. So we are just very privileged to use that facility. The trap is just amazing, just amazing to the whole event. So we bring a DJ in, we set up a bar and we go for about three and a half hours and it's the highlight of the event. And it's funny because a lot of the guys are body conscious and they're, oh, I'm not going to go over the pool party, you know, and then they show up and it's like, it doesn't even matter, you know what I mean? So then we give them a break. There isn't actually an unofficial event at one of the local clubs. Wild Elfies brings in a DJ. A lot of the people go there. But I go to sleep that night. And on Saturday, we have Drag Bingo in the afternoon at Elfies Wild Ride again. Then we have Dina Martina coming in. And Dina is hilarious performance drag queen artist. A lot of people know her from Provincetown. He's there or she's there every summer for like 20 years. She performs at Town Hall and then it follows up with this big blowout dance party Saturday night. So there's a lot of seven, eight events that take place over the course of the five days. And what we do is most of the guys just buy a bracelet, a party pass we call it. They get their bracelet and they're good to go for all the events throughout the course of the week. And yeah, I just hope everyone will join us. It's a lot of fun. Oh, and as far as COVID goes, you know, we have COVID this year. Last year, we weren't able to have it. So we are requiring Vax cards for each of the events. So your vaccination card or a picture of your car as well as your driver's license. That's a little more, as you know, a lot of towns doing it, not New York's been doing it, Boston is doing it. It's becoming commonplace, unfortunately. But you know, we just decided that we want to caution on the side of air and just really create a safe environment to the extent that we can for everybody. So so far, the feedback has been pretty good. But that's how it's going to be this year. And hopefully next year we'll be done with this mess. One can hold, huh? Yeah. But we do have a clip I sent you that maybe we can show everybody. I'm going to show that clip at the end of our interview. So so people must come from all over New England and otherwise to be able to come to this event. Yeah, we attract people from literally all over. But primarily it's the East Coast. We market in about seven or eight major markets starting in Montreal, down to New York, Florida, DC, Philadelphia, New York, obviously, New Jersey. What we find is for a skier, usually we don't attract people beyond Chicago because they go West to ski. But we've had people from other countries that's really, I mean, the diversity of the group is amazing. And it's partly because it has been going on for so many years. But I gotta tell you, there's people from 21 to 71. And, you know, a lot of times you'll go to a gay event or be themed. It'll be a certain genre, whether it be the Bears or the Twinks or whatever it may be. This is just a broad canvas. And the way the people mix is just amazing. There's people that have been going to all of them, all these years. So it's just a really, really fun group. And the LeMage are going to be there, aren't they? They're from one. It couldn't be went around without the LeMage. I know. You know the LeMage? I do. Oh, yeah, well, they're great. Lucy, Val, and Amber will be there and they help out a lot. They host a lot of the parties. They'll be at the opening party for the bowling alley. They will host the drag queen bingo on Saturday. And that's a fundraiser for Harvard to the Bay, which is the AIDS bike ride here in Boston. So 100% of the proceeds go to that. And yeah, they're a blast. They're there every year and people just love them. And they do so much for even our local community by when they do things, they donate so much of the money to different organizations. It's really, they're really. They're amazing. I'm so lucky and happy to have them. And every year, every year, it's a sometimes I take them for granted. And I know I shouldn't. But yeah, they're just great. Both of them are just amazing. And tell us what days these are now and how would people register? I know we're going to show the video, but maybe we'll can put up some information on the screen about, you know, how people will register for this. And can they just go to Stowe and sign up or do they have to register ahead of time? Well, it's best that they go to the website, winterondievue.com. And they can, they have choices. They can buy a party pass, a full party pass. The event starts on Wednesday. The event starts on Wednesday, January 19th. There's something on my screen. I don't know if you can see it, but anyway, and it runs through Sunday. So the party pass, it will, it starts on, it includes everything from the opening night to the closing party. We also sell a weekend pass. Because there's a lot of people thinking of Boston guys that will come up for the weekend. And the weekend pass is get you to start with the full party on Friday. That's the first event. So it does the full party, it does the drag and go, it does Dean Martina and the blowout party. That's $140 in advance online. The full pass is $225. And then they can also buy in advance tickets at a cart on the website. So say they just want to go to maybe a dance or one of the shows, something like that. So we try to accommodate everybody. People might live locally. You just want to go to one or two events. Yeah, we do encourage them to buy the tickets in advance because we do have limits. So for the most part, we're pretty good. I mean, sometimes we have to turn people away from the shows because we can only see 225 people at the feeder. Outside of that, we're pretty good. But yeah, we encourage people to go to the website, decide what they want to do. And a lot of times what we'll do is look for me and say they'll buy a party pass for the weekend. They show up on Thursday, but shit, I want to go to that too. So no problem. We upgrade them. And we have great staff to take care of them at the door. So really, whatever works for them is what we try to do. But we encourage everyone to go online. And do accommodations too, or do people kind of do that on their own? Well, we have the Host Hotel, which is the top notch resort, which is a wonderful resort right close to the mountain. I think we're down to about a couple of rooms there. But we also work with other hotels as well. The Stowe Motel, the Snowdrift, is a much more affordable kind of different tier. And it's Motel Stowe, but the guys love it. They stay there. What I've found over the years, though, is that people kind of spread out all over the mountain, you know, that we groups get Airbnb's and they'll have their favorite place. Once upon a time, we were all just one nucleus at one hotel. But that's kind of unfortunate. We've lost that over the years. So they're everywhere. And the events are spread out everywhere as well. But the top notch is the place to be. It has a beautiful spa. It has a lot of social areas. It has a bar. So I imagine even some of the people are not staying there. Well, kind of congregate there in the evenings and late nights and whatnot. Yeah, I imagine some people probably stay at the Trap Lodge too up there. Oh, yeah. The Trap Lodge. Yes, they stay there. It's a beautiful place. Yes, it really is. So is there anything before we show your fabulous clip that you'd like our audience to know before the event? Just come and be happy and get vaccinated. Yeah. And be happy. Okay. And if you can't make it this year, there's always next year. But yeah, because everyone's welcome. All right. You coming up. I hope you do. Well, I'll come and look for you. Just ask for me. Maybe we can do interviews up there. We'll bring our camber and that would be wonderful. Absolutely. And just talk to people and, you know, have them tell us what's going on. It's a great group. It's really a fun weekend. And yeah, we're just so happy that we can do it this year. And we're going to be safe as we can. And then hopefully next year, we'll be back to normal. Alrighty. Well, thank you, Michael, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. And we'll get the word out. It will be going out very shortly. And thank you again for coming. That's all okay. Thank you. All right. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. She was the first LGBTQ person elected to the Vermont State Senate. She was the first woman and LGBTQ plus President Pro Tem of the Vermont Senate. That apparently is not quite enough because she would also like to be Vermont's first woman and LGBTQ member of the US House of Representatives. Please welcome back Becca Ballant. Hi. Good morning. Hello, Keith. So nice to see you. And I just want to say, although I was the first woman LGBTQ member of the Senate, we actually had two, we had Ed Flanagan who came in before me representing Chittenden County. And then I came in with Brian Campion, a member of the community from Bennington. But it is true, the first openly gay woman in the Senate. And I'm very excited that I announced my candidacy for Congress two weeks ago. And the campaign is going incredibly well. I am just thrilled with the response that we've gotten across the state. I couldn't be happier right now. I feel like people are ready for the kind of leadership that I'm offering. So you led me right into my first question. But first, a brief disclaimer that all things LGBTQ has been an endorser of your campaign. So with that said, Becca Ballant, what makes you the best candidate and the best person for Vermont to send to the US House of Representatives at this point in time? Well, it's such an important question. I just want to say the voters get to decide, right? I'm going to make my case. I'm going to run on my strong record and what I see as a vision for leadership, but the voters get to decide. So I look forward to making the case. But why I'm running is because we are facing enormous challenges, not just in Vermont, but in this country. And I know you're well, you're well versed in them, but I just want to just really highlight working families are really struggling. We are still in the midst of this pandemic, you know, we're coming on two years still raging on. We have real climate action that can't wait. And, you know, basically at the core of why I'm running is that our democracy itself is at risk. And the future to me feels very perilous. And I know from my work in the Senate and my work in my community that we can't tackle these enormous challenges if we continue to remain so deeply divided. We have really deep, sometimes dangerous divisions in our country in our state, but even in our communities and in our own families. And I just want people to know that despite the darkness that we all are feeling, I know that we can get to a better place because I've seen it in my own life. But I feel like this is a time when people have to show up with some courage, some political courage. We can't be afraid of the tough fights that we have to have on policy considerations. But that doesn't mean turning away from each other. It doesn't mean demonizing each other, dehumanizing each other. And those of us in the LGBTQ, you know, community, we know this. We know this deeply. We have been demonized. We have been dehumanized. And so I feel like I bring that perspective to these really stark differences and challenges to say we cannot just dismiss each other because of difference. And I want to be a voice for those who are ignored, who are people who are forgotten, who are people who, you know, are trying to find their place in the political sphere. And we need to show up for each other. And that's what I've been doing really my whole life as an educator, as a community member, as a senator, showing up for other people. And I want to bring that to Vermont. I want to bring that spirit of Vermont with me to Washington DC. And I'm really excited to be another progressive champion in Washington for all of these things that we care about. Climate action, paid family medical leave insurance, really thinking about decoupling insurance from our jobs. This isn't working. It's not working at all. We know this, right? And the pandemic showed it writ large. It is time for us to commit to doing things differently. And I know that this is a really tough agenda, but I am so fired up and ready to go, Keith. I am so fired up and ready to go. So don't you've just knocked off my next three questions of these priorities and the current political climate and, you know, how we move forward. Looking at national politics, we have never been so polarized in our political history. Is it possible for us to move back towards the center again? And if so, what is it going to take for that to happen? Yeah. And so I will answer that thing. It has to be possible or we're doomed. That's the moment where we're at right now, Keith. Like, I have no illusions. It has to be possible or this whole experiment in democracy is lost. And so for me, all of us need to get really clear on how we want to show up in the world. And so how we lead, and I don't mean just as politicians, how we lead in our communities is who we are, right? It's not different, right? What you see is what you will get in an elected official, right? So my leadership is, and we talk about this in my video that we released on our launch day. So the campaign kickoff. So my leadership is really grounded in my family history and my grandfather's murder in the Holocaust. And my parents really taught me that people can be horribly cruel to each other if you don't tend to being courageous and kind with your native. If we don't listen to each other, if we turn away from each other, that innocent people get hurt in that scenario. And so that is definitely the way I've lived my life as an out queer woman in this state too. It's not always easy when you have neighbors who are homophobic. It's not always easy if you have colleagues who really don't understand where you're coming from. But you have to keep showing up, right? If it's safe to do so. And I just want to make a caveat here that I know, especially for Black trans women in this country right now, like showing up is a different level of dangerous. So I just want to say that up front. Those of us who can show up and have those conversations and represent each other bravely and courageously need to do so because other people may not have the ability to do that, the safety to do that. And so, you know, I've always known since I was 11 that I was gay and that I was different and that the world didn't really appreciate difference, right? Bringing that with me into the work that I do makes me a deeply compassionate person. It makes me a believer that change is possible because, you know, 10 years ago, I wouldn't have imagined that we would be here in this moment where we have legalized marriage across the country, that we have the young people teaching us the way about gender identity and pronouns. You know, my kids, I've got a kid who's 11, another 14, they teach me every day how to be a more complete person in the world. So I actually, despite the darkness, I am feeling so hopeful in this moment because people want something different and that's what I've heard from the video that we released. So many people reaching out to me, people I know, but also strangers saying I'm craving some hope and some positivity and not Pollyanna, not naivete, but a belief of that dogged we show up for each other in Vermont. That's what we do. We have to keep doing that. So a lot of your campaign is going to be based upon the change that you have already started here in Vermont. Could you talk a little bit about some of those initiatives that you have put forward that's changing how Vermont governs itself and how we reach out to our neighbors? It's such a great framing for the work that I've done with my colleagues. So for those of you who are watching who may not be as familiar with my career, so I'm heading into my eighth year in the Senate. Thank you. My sixth year in Senate leadership, I was a majority leader before I was pro tem. We have done incredible work together on huge investments in housing, really making huge investments in housing. Millions and millions of dollars. We know it's not enough, but we know that you can't help people and families and communities if at a basic level people don't have safe, affordable housing. And so I made a huge investment, over $135 million in during Phil Scott's first term. We've been building on it every year trying to get more rental and housing units online. We're going to make another huge investment with the American Rescue Plan dollars. When I first came in, we didn't have paid sick leave available for people across Vermont. We now have paid sick leave. We made investments in in childcare. We've realized and when we say we, I mean, we as a state, because many of us have realized it for a long time that the workforce can't work without childcare. It just can't and we see it now with this pandemic as well. So continuing to make those investments in in childcare. And of course, climate change, again, first came in people that the conversations we were having around climate change were simply, you know, they were binary. They were like, you're either for a carbon tax or you're against a carbon tax, right? We're at a different moment right now with every year that goes by and the winters get weirder and the weather gets wilder. People realize, oh, wait, it's not in the future, right? The climate change is here. So we are going to be making millions of dollars investment in weatherization for, you know, all Vermonters to make sure they are not just reducing their carbon footprint, but have warm toasty and cool houses, you know, warm in the winter, cool in the summer. And also looking at our, our electric electric, that's such a hard word, we're going to electrify more things so that we're moving away from fossil fuels. And again, that was a huge fight early on, but now there seems to be a collective acceptance that this is going to take huge, you know, investments and that we have luckily the legislature and the executive branch largely in similar places on these issues. So again, feeling very hopeful about that. So you're about to start this major campaign. You're also the president pro tem of the Senate. You have some very large issues coming up. You've mentioned housing. There's the pension that needs to be dealt with for state employees and educators, you know, there, you know, childcare is again going to come up proposition five. How are you going to balance those, those two realities in your life while not forgetting you have a family and constituents? Absolutely. Absolutely. So one thing I always want to remind folks of is pretty much every single male politician that has been through the state of Vermont has run statewide while also having another really important job. So, you know, from, from speaker of the house to the attorney general to the president pro tem. And so I would not be the first person to undertake this really daunting task while also having a very important and consequential position. That being said, the pro tem, much like the speaker of the house, we're really sort of like the team captain of a team that functions largely in these smaller pods, right? So you've got people who are experienced, who have so much wisdom, who have so much experience doing this really hard work. And you're really the person who is enabling people to do their best work. And I'm not going to lie to you, is it going to be challenging? Yes, it is. But here's what I learned this morning already. Two weeks into this campaign, I already have a thousand donors, over 1000 donors. And so that means I've got people across the state who want to help me who want it's a team effort to get to DC. This is not about me doing it alone. And so the campaign is going to have to, you know, be doing some of the work behind the scenes without me there when I'm, you know, deep in the work, the important work in the Senate. And, you know, the session is from January to May, maybe the speaker and I can get everybody out by the end of April. And then, you know, we'll be diving into the primary. But I don't have any, you know, false sense that this will be an easy task. But I do know I have an incredible group of people both in the state house and outside of the state house that is going to help me do this. And we are not going to take our eye off the ball. As you said, we have so many important issues that we're dealing with. But we've also made really good progress on these. And feeling really hopeful that we're going to come to a very positive resolution about the pensions, continuing those conversations, those really wholehearted conversations with the state employees and the teachers union, we're going to continue to work together to get to an agreement that we all can, you know, that we all can sign off on. And if we can't get to that place of everyone feeling like it's a fair package, then we're not going to solve that problem this year. We're not going to ram something through that the state employees and the teachers are not coming together with us on. So we've already made that decision. The speaker and I are very clear on that. And because schools are really struggling right now. I mean, we don't have a whole other hour to talk about what schools are dealing with. But I just want to thank while I've got people, anyone in the community who's working in schools, anyone who's working in our healthcare facilities, this past two years have been absolutely brutal. And we need to be thanking those workers every single day. And so I'm going to keep my eye on those issues for that reason. So important to me. And with that, I need to say thank you because and as always happens with you and I just get going. And so we're going to put up the contact information so that people know how they could become actively involved in your campaign. And also, if they have questions or want to provide information regarding a legislative issue, they can do that as well. And I look forward to our next interview when you are the official candidates running for. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Keith. Thank you for joining us. And until next time, remember, resist.