 Without further ado, I'd like to thank Audrey Joseph for joining me on the stage. So Audrey, please tell us a little bit about where you grew up and a bit about your family. So I'm from Brooklyn. I grew up in a neighborhood that was bordering Crown Heights and Bedford, Stuyvesant. So I grew up in the ghetto, a poor ghetto. My father was a lawyer. We did a lot of civil rights work and my mother was my mother. And I had a kid run it. You've depicted Brooklyn as a very dynamic place when you were growing up. In our pre-interview, you called it a tough neighborhood with a lot of love. How so? It's true. The whole world's a suburb of Brooklyn. Truly. Brooklyn is just the fourth largest city in the United States and it's only a borough of New York. It's very diverse. Every neighborhood has its dynamic. I grew up in a neighborhood that was full of gangs. And you learned how to live on the streets pretty much. You walked down the street, you looked into the store windows to see who was following you. And you learned how to take care of yourself by the time you went to school. And most of us started school at five. So it was diverse. Lots of people. My neighborhood was primarily Black, Puerto Rican and our family. And so it was dynamic. But if something happened, everyone showed up. So if someone got sick, everyone showed up. If somebody died, everybody showed up. Everybody showed up for everything. You depicted a game you used to play where you would jump from porch to porch. Oh climbing porches. So in New York in the winter it snows. And so there were two primary games we played on our block. One was to build forts out of snow and have snowball wars. Now some people had snowball fights. We had full-on war. And then there was, in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, there were apartment house buildings on the corners. And in the middle were these houses that people lived in. And I had to walk up a flight of stairs to get to the porch. So the idea was you started at the end of the block and someone said go. And you ran all the way down the block jumping porches. So you run along a porch, jump over, run along a porch, jump over. We race climbing porches. That's how we entertain ourselves. In school you produced school programs. Please tell us about that. New York was famous for something called Sing. And they made a movie about it called Sing, which I guess became a re-movie. But Sing was a competition between the grades. So junior, sophomore, seniors and freshmen, your high school had freshmen. And the competition was you had to put on a show. You had to write the music. You had to write the lyrics. You had to do the scenery, do the prox, do the choreography, create all the acting and put on the show. It was a competition. So that's how I got involved with Sing. When I was a junior, our class won. Junior's never won. Only seniors won. And it was a big deal. I think also our class was different because we were really bad kids. And we didn't do things in a timely fashion. So we did something like we broke into the school at night so we could finish our scenery. I mean literally broke the windows in the gym to get in. So that's how I mean we did great shows at Sing. They don't do that anymore. That's a shame. But you danced on Broadway and on American Bandstand. You share that. Look at the reaction. Look at the reaction that you loved before. Yeah, I share it. I was on Broadway for five minutes. No, I was part of a chorus line that was, we did a show called Florida Red Menace. And the lead in the show was Liza Manelli. It was her first Broadway show. And I was part of a group that danced in the chorus line. I was a dancer. And the show opened and closed. It was about seven weeks, I think we did. An American Bandstand. In New York there was a show called Big Beat. It was hosted by a guy named Alan Frieden. He was very much like American Bandstand at the time. He was as popular as American Bandstand when American Bandstand was first coming up. And they were trained. So we went to Philadelphia and went on American Bandstand. And interestingly enough, a little sighted bit. More than 50% of the kids on American Bandstand were gay. And I was 14. And I knew I was gay when I was 14. And I saw these kids from TV, they were gay too. It was pretty awesome. How were you going to nightclubs at age six? At age, oh. My father was, two weeks. My father was a lawyer for a club. It was called Town Hill. And it was a black club. But the top of his hill and bets died. And often they would call him up and, you know, I always stayed at the lawn with my dad wherever he went. And I remember that. He took me to the club one night. And I think the group that was playing was the Drifters. And so they weren't, when they were doing their nightclub out, they just weren't a singing group. They also did, you know, comedy and other things. And I remember this guy saying, what are you eating there? Chicken. Shit. Man, I love chicken. I got a leg in each hand and a breast in my mouth. There's another club called Bend Massick's Town and Country. And they have all clubs in Brooklyn called Town something or other. And I remember going there one night, and there was a show called the Jewel Box Review. And all these gorgeous chorus girls came out on stage. The MC was this very sharp gentleman and a tuxedo. Turns out the gentleman was a guy named Stormy and all the gorgeous girls were men. And so it's true. What dating advice did your grandmothers have for you? My father's mother always wanted me to come over to her house on any night that I had a date, especially when I was younger, like 15, 16 or whatever. She used to make something to eat and was always infused with like massive amounts of garlic, especially if I was going to go to the movies with someone. This way she would ensure that no one would kiss me, right? Exactly. But my mother's mother was a little different. She just wanted to make sure they had a job. Please tell us a little bit about the gay scene. The leather SFC in New York City, as you experienced it. Well, I came out into the leather scene with my dear friend, Sasha Hyatt, who some of you may know. And Sasha, for those of you who don't know, the first internationalist leather travel fund is named Sasha. And she was Judy Tolling McCarty's partner, Land Judy 1 in Zul 1. So Sasha and I were, I don't know, in high school, I guess. We discovered the leather scene. We discovered accoutrements first, you know, like dildos and handcuffs and things like that. And then we went searching. The leather scene in New York then was very underground. But if you got through the door and you got underground, it was alive, it was vibrant, and it was super hot, super sexy because it was so clandestine. So going to the Hellfly Club or any other party, everything in the world was a dungeon or it looked like a dungeon. It was family. All of a sudden you got taken into a group of people where you had a common interest. And when you walked out into the light, you didn't know what you were. But if you needed something or something was going down with you or you needed advice, everyone stepped up to the plate. It was an interesting kind of family that almost, I felt like they looked in my soul. And they were willing to teach and help you get experience and Chester, as you were doing something wrong, but it was a very interesting thing. The leather bars that existed were not really leather bars. They were more like leather costumes, as opposed to people really living the life or being in the lifestyle. It was more about men being butch or women being butch. It wasn't about really practicing. That's kind of what it was like when I first got into it first. How did you get past the barriers to get into that, to get into those very private places? There was a shop in West Street, north of Christopher, and it was a very small shop. We walked in, Sasha and I walked in, and they sold all kinds of things. It was kind of like a head shop. They sold cock rings, little things like that. We knew that behind the door, behind the counter, was the entrance to the club. We walked in and said, we know what's there, we want to go in. They said, you have a lot of balls and they opened the door. That's really how we got in. Pretty much. That's how we got in. Once you're in, then you know people. It wasn't that hard afterwards. Is there anyone particularly memorable that comes to mind from that time? There was a man named Adam Krause. That, those of you from Chicago, you might have known him. He was the president of Hellfire in Chicago, close friend of Chuck Renslow. He passed a long time ago. I met Albert Krause in New York. He stands out because, in one way, because he really liked me. I don't think he liked girls very much, but he really liked me. I guess I'm drawing a blank. Please tell us how you came to work in the night club. I was going to college and I was working for a time. I was working for a company. A girl worked in my department. Her boyfriend inherited $10,000. She knew I had done dancing. She came up to me and said to me, my boyfriend just inherited $10,000 and he wants to open a night club. You're in show business, so you must know how to do it. Could you meet with us and tell us? I said, oh sure. I didn't know anything about it. I wasn't going to admit that I didn't know anything about it. After work that night, I went to my local neighborhood disco. Walked in the door. Some guy came up to me. His name was Joanie. I was dressed for work. I had a skirt on. I stopped by and was dressed for work. He said, what are you doing here? What do you want? I told him. I fessed up and told him what I was doing there. He said, you've got to meet my son. He owns this place. He introduced me to this guy Barry. We hung out all night, drinking a lot. The next day I went and quit my job and went to work for Barry. That's how I got into nightclubs. You attended Woodstock. Please tell us a bit about that. What is there to say about Woodstock? I remember a lot of it. It was in this nightclub that I was working with. The guy who put Woodstock together actually lived across the street. Literally across the street from the nightclub. We had heard about it a lot. I really wanted to go. He had given me three tickets, one for each day. I still have them. I drove up with a girl named Diane. We drove up in my Mustang, which was a bucket seat, two-seater car at the time. We drove up to Woodstock. We got there early. It was amazing. Except for the fact that there was no water. There was no water there at all. I had a five-gallon gas can in my trunk. We dumped out the gas and cleaned it out and filled it full of water. I had more water than anybody. There was no water there at all. It was an amazing place of crazy people who were being probably totally free for the first time in their lives. I had the opportunity to meet a lot of people from communes from New Mexico and Arizona. Cogfond was there, Buffalo and Morningstar. They fed us pretty much. They came with like a truckload of brown rice so you ate a lot of rice. It was the most amazing experience probably in my whole life. I've had a lot of amazing experiences. But to wake up in the morning to hear Grace Slip, a Janice Joplin singing, go to bed at night. I mean, it was just, you know, it was amazing. Jimmy Hendricks and Crosby Stills and Nash and anyone who was anybody and people who had nobody at the time that became somebody. It was, it had a half a million people there. It was a city. It produced a newspaper, which was a mimeographed sheet of paper, but it was a newspaper. There were babies born there. I think one of the most memorable moments for me I think funny was the emcees were a guy named Wavy Gravy and a guy named Chip Monk. And I remember Chip Monk coming out on the stage when I'm going, okay, I have an announcement to make here. Anyone who's doing the green flat acid go to the medical tent. The double dome purple Osleys or the white linings are good, but the green flags have straightened out in there. And I was floored like, it's like it's okay to do drugs. It's like, you know, those are the kinds of announcements they were making. I met people from all over the country. It was an amazing experience. I didn't bathe through a week. I had water, so I brushed my teeth, but that wasn't bad, but I had gasoline water. But I had water, I brushed my teeth, and you said, uh, you're a pussy. A prima donna, I think. So, yeah, it was amazing. It was one night when it rained, and of course the card buckets seats were really uncomfortable sleeping in the car. And we didn't bring a tent. I mean, we didn't think about a tent. I'm from Brooklyn. There's no tent, no camping, no nothing. So we slept under the car in a bed of mud. It was... I made a lot of friends there that ended up being my friends a lot. It was pretty cool. Absolutely incredible. But you once drove a cab. How did that happen? I was starving. And I did a job. So I drove a cab. I did a lot of stuff to work my way through school and to support myself when I was trying to get into the music business. So I bartended, and I drove a cab. I was the second female cab driver in New York. The first woman was from the Bronx, and I was from Brooklyn, and it was interesting because my hair was probably longer than it is now. I made really good money. Guys would give me great tips and their business cards. So... I can take you away from all this. Give me the money. But that's how I drove a cab. And driving a cab, actually, not only supported me at one point, I supported a group that we lived in a residential hotel. It was a bunch of us living in one hotel room. So I made enough money to buy spaghetti for everybody. But I supported... I helped support... One is the support people for a musical group, which later became Chic. And it was probably the first gold 12-inch single ever dance, dance, dance question. But we all lived in that room together. The boys would go out and open their guitar cases and play music for money. I drove a cab. We did what we had to do. And... It was... There was an air of community. More on the commune than the itty part. But there was an air of being in a commune constantly through, I don't know, the middle 60s to the middle 70s. So people just did that. I mean, it wasn't that I was unique in doing that. That's what people did. Fascinating. How did you come to work in the music industry? Chic. So... The interesting story is this. In 1976, New York was going to put on an event called Operation SAIL to celebrate the 200th anniversary of America and all the tall ships coming into the harbor. In 1975, they put out a call to musicians to remake the Rodgers and Hart song, I Like Me Patton, from that song. So we put in a bid and won the bid because we asked the president for no money. And they gave us the job and they gave set us up in the studio and we, you know, made that song kind of into a pop song and they let us create an instrumental for the B side and we called it Unique New York. Well, the city went bust on the Big Mac bonds, literally New York with the glad bankruptcy at that time, and they couldn't pass. So they gave us the take of the B side because we didn't have the rights to the Rodgers and Hart song. Our drummer got a job as a janitor in a recording studio and when he went in at three in the morning to clean the studio, we all went with him and we put the tape in the machine and we started, you know, doing stuff like adding vocals and hand claps and we added a horn section and that song is the song that became Dance Dance Dance by Sheik. We were starving, literally, and this guy Roger Bell came up to us and he said, that's a really good song. He said, we should try and sell it. So, he took it to a record store and the dude at the record store thought it was such a great piece of music that he pressed it into a record and it had a white label with a turtle on it and it was called Turtle Productions Dance Dance Dance by the Big Apple Band. That's we called ourselves, we had no idea. The vice president Singlesales, which is a promotional division of Buddha Records, heard it and thought it was a hit for his label. So, and he couldn't do anything about it because he were a Buddha. So, he got another guy to shop it to all the record labels and Atlantic Records bought it and they changed the group's name to Sheik and they put it out as Dance Dance Dance Yauzi. So, that was the name of the song and we got $5,000, which we probably divided among 11 people. There were 11 of us. It was more money than God. Let me tell you at the time. And it was put out and they had this idea. The industry was trying to increase the fidelity of sound. So, they decided to press the single on a 45 rpm speed but on a larger disc, on a 12-inch disc. So, it was the first gold 12-inch single ever. It wasn't the first 12-inch single, but it was the first one that ever went gold. So, it went gold and all of a sudden, famous in like five minutes. It was like, amazing. So, that's kind of how I got into the record business. They thought we had some kind of secret formula about how to make music action good. No idea what we were doing. Absolutely no idea, just, you know. But you knew Donna Summer. You produced Sister Sledge. How did that happen? Well, Sister Sledge is easy. They were the backup singers for Sheik. So, Sheik was a very interesting group. All the people in Sheik were studio musicians. They also played weddings, bar mitzvahs, unirals. I mean, you know, they played, they would pit musicians on the Broadway. Musicians are starving people. They do whatever they can to stay alive. So, for instance, one of our background singers was Louisa Van Dros. And if you look at the first record, you will see his name on the record. So, it's from Van Dros. Yeah, so, that's how we went. When we hit it with Sheik, with dance, dance, dance, we put out a second single called Everybody Dance and then we put out a second album. And on that album was Good Times and Sheik LaFrique and those songs. And we had, we were still cost-conscious because the way the record labels paid you in those days, they paid you for the first record after you put the second record out. And they only gave you a certain amount of studio time that you could use. So, we decided to maximize it. And we took the background singers and we created Six to Sledge. And you can hear, and he's the greatest dancer, or that's all a family. You can hear in the song one of the girls going, play it, Nard. Well, that was from Sheik on the bass. So, it's an interesting thing. That's kind of how that, and Donna, the way I met Donna Summer was when I was in that nightclub, one of the business partners was a guy named Lucidado. And, you know, he was a money guy. It was Brooklyn, you know. He had a garbage company. He was the mafia. He had a son named Bruce. And Bruce wanted to be in the music business and he had a group called Brooklyn Dreams, which later became Brooklyn Bridge. And it was produced by Tommy James, Tommy James and the Chandels. And they became a pretty famous group for their time. Bruce met this up-and-coming singer named Donna. And he fell in love and they got married. And that's how I met Donna Summer, before she was Donna Summer. His family, however, didn't approve. And this very Sicilian family, and so they had a wake for him. Oh, yeah, they did. Of course, after they had their first child, Bruce's mother announced that I have a grandchild. Fuck you all, I'm taking the kid back. And so they made up. But yeah, so that's how I met Donna Summer. She was married to Bruce again. But you mentioned, actually, getting together with her relatively shortly before she died. Yeah, about three years ago, Donna came here to do a... She came out with a new album after not having an album for years. And she was doing... She did a show at the Paramount Theater in Oakland. And she did a radio station reception at the W Hotel here. And I was invited to it. And I remember I walked in. They invited me in. I went to the green room and everyone's there, all about Donna Summer. And I walked in and I was looking for Bruce. I mean, I hadn't seen him in years. I was like, me and Bruce was like... You know, and everyone's like, what is she doing in life, you know? So, to Donna walked over to us and talked with us a little bit. But for me, it was more about, you know, regrouping with Bruce who I hadn't seen in a really long time than it was about her. Well, we share an interesting statistic in that we are both survivors of terrorist attacks. Please, tell us what happened to you. April 5, 1982, I was asleep. I had a loft apartment in an old bank building. Mine is its own. I had a loft apartment in an old bank building and I'm very lucky that it was an old bank building. It was converted in New York. They called it AR apartment. It's obviously residents. And I had a recording studio in my apartment. I was there with my dog. And a girlfriend who I was fighting with came over that night and actually stayed over. And I guess I took her down to go to sleep. And because I couldn't listen to her anymore. And she was waking me up. You know, something's wrong, something's wrong, something's wrong. What had happened was, someone planted a plastic bomb in a restaurant that was attached to the building. And the bomb went off and it went off with such force that it blew the fire escapes off the building. And it was the PLO. And they took credit for it. There were 20 locks in the building, each rented by one person. So there were 20 of us that lived in the building. Seven of my neighbors died. Because it was an old bank building, the ceilings were very high. And you know, New York's cold in the winter. So a lot of people had dropped their ceiling. Now the ceiling in my bathroom was dropped, but not in the rest of my place. And so the explosion caused a fire. The fire went up through the walls and hit the dropped ceilings. In the case of one person, it traveled through the dropped ceiling down the wall and she was in bed and incinerated her in her bed. So I got out with my dog and my girlfriend, who passed out on me along the way and I was on the third floor and I was dragging her through the fire to get out of the building. But I got out and actually I got out with help. The building was pretty much cleared of people and there were two guys that lived across the street and one of them said, where's Audrey? I sent a fireman into the building to look for more people. And when it happened Linda, that's the girl I was with at the time, I was dragging her along and she was dead weight and I couldn't drag her anymore because when you have smoke inhalation you feel like your chest's on fire. So I threw her down a flight of stairs. I think it is, she'll break a leg, at least she'll be alive. And they found her at the bottom of the stairs and they carried her out and they said, is this the girl? And he said, no. And they said, oh my God, there's more people in the building. And so the fireman came back in and held me and my dog where I was, walked through the fire. I spent four months in the hospital smoking inhalation. But I lived, the fire was so hot that it melted the refrigerator. It was really a bad fire. And I do believe that the reward for the bomber is probably still in existence today. They put out a million dollar reward and I never found it. Hey listen, you want to get on the first front page of the New York Times? That's how you do it. What? So, we had a neighborhood vet. My dog wasn't the only dog in the building. He took the animals in. And the dogs survived. You know, yeah, he was awesome. He took all the animals in and he kept my dog for three weeks until my cousin came and got the dog. But, yeah, there were lots of good masks on the dogs. See, Sarah knows how I feel about dogs. Good question. On a lighter note, what brought you here to San Francisco? The bombing. When I recover, when I got out of the hospital, I did some crisis intervention therapy. And then I decided that I almost died. So, I wanted to see all my friends and family that had scattered all over the country. So, I took a year off the work and I got in a car and I started, you know, seeking out my friends and family and traveling across country. And when I got to Portland where Sashi was at the time, my next stop was San Francisco. And when I got here, a friend of mine was really sick. His name was Patrick Cowley. He was a record producer. And he died three days after I got here. And so his business partner said, hey, listen, we had this record label called Megaton Records. And he said, hey, can you watch the label? I need to take Patrick's body back to New York. That's sure. So, two weeks later, Morty comes back and I said, okay, going off to Yosemite now. And Sylvester was an artist that lived in San Francisco at the time. And he says, you know, you really should stay. We need to put out Patrick's music. So, I agreed to stay for one song. And that song was, Do You Want to Funk? And it went gold. And the next thing I knew, two years later, I still kept surfing. Decided to find an apartment by a bed. And took 10 years to get to Yosemite. That's how I got here. What was the Townsend building? The Townsend building was originally a beer warehouse. And for a short time between the beer warehouse, it tried to be an auto repair shop. But Townsend was a 20,000-square-foot building on Townsend Street. Off the corner of 3rd, it went between Townsend and King Street. And we built a nightclub there. And it was the home of Pleasure Dome at Club Universe. And Club Universe ended up morphing itself into the Studio 54 of the West Coast, I think. I had a friend who started Pleasure Dome in this place. And he was going to lose it. And the place was going to close. He said to the guy, you can't close this place. And he said, electricity's off. The water's off. I'm out of here. And I had a liquor license this guy. So Bill said to him, you can. Pleasure Dome's a hit club. He says, you want it? You can have it for six months. You make it work cool. You don't make it work. You're out of here. So we were standing there in the dark with flashlights. Because the electricity was off. And he said, so you want in on this? And I said, sure. And he said, how much money do you have in your pocket? So I had five and four singles. And he went, OK, you're in. So for $9, I got in and we opened the nightclub. And it ended up being the home of the leather community for years and years and years. And I was in Imsalea, in Miss San Francisco leather, Miss San Francisco leather, drummer, all the fetish balls were there. Stormy leather. Did their thing there, Mr. S. And that was Townsend. How did you come to produce Imsalea? Oh, you come. Well, the AIDS crisis was rampant. And what happened was it jumped into the women's community. Primarily with sex work, but also with nurses. Nancy Sawyer was a nurse in our community that was administering to guys with HIV. And she got it and died. So there were a group of us that were very concerned that women were not being addressed. We had a conversation with Chuck Renslow about how he was doing his contest. And a group of us met one night. The person who really came up with the idea was Kathy Gage, Mr. Scatman. She totally came up with the idea, but Imsalea was born in a room where Ellen Selmae, Jim Ann Thompson, Peter Radd, Patrick Toner, all these dead people, you know, Patrick Toner, Kathy Gage, Skyrim Thoreau, Helen Ravelis, Shadow Horton, me. I don't think I'm leaving anybody out. And I am, forgive me. And we decided to do this in man and raise money for it. So that's how it started. And the women's community, the women's leather community is not on our side. I mean, for a lot of reasons. They didn't like the idea that we had guys involved. They did, but we wanted our contest to be welcoming to all women. We didn't, you didn't have to be gay. You could be straight, you could be whatever you were into. So welcoming to all women. So it was, and we got a ton of pushback. And amazingly in that, I recently, last year, had a conversation with someone who will go unnamed, but if I said her name, you'd all know it, who remembers it differently. But I'm almost sure I'm right because I've gone over this with Sky and Chad and other people. We just, we did everything. We reinvented San Francisco leather, put it on so that we would have a contestant. We put it out among the, the dominatrix community, who was able to get the word out for us all over the country. And that first year, I think we had 18 or 19 contestants on the stage, like that was this big in a club called DVA. There was no fan, they couldn't even get all the women on the stage or like crunched up together because you couldn't fit on the stage. And the judges were on the stage. I mean, everyone was on the stage. And I produced it and my gopher was Patrick Toner, who was IML 85. And we just did it. And we raised a little bit of money and we gave it away, all of it, it was stupid because we didn't hold any money back to do it again. So, some people came to our rescue, including Chuck Ranslow, Tony de Blas from Drama, and we raised more money and the following year, we did this insane thing, we rented the gift center, which is this very upscale place in San Francisco and we put on internationalist leather, Lamar and Skye as our MCs on a real stage in a place that held a lot of people. And that was pretty much, I mean, kind of how it started. And in those days, we all did everything. We stood on the corner and handed out flyers. We did it all. And it was like being back at sing. We did the scenery, the props. We wrote all the stuff, we did all the choreography and that was pretty much how it started. You were always backstage. Yeah, I was actually on the next stage to choose on. No. How long did you produce? Why did you stop? I don't know. 10 years? 8 years? I don't know. I don't remember. I have to think about how many emzels there were. Judy Chan, Suzy. I don't remember who my last emzel was. I don't remember. So 8, 9 years? So it became a burnout. I wasn't particularly burned out. But Helen was totally burned out. Kathy got burned out. Jim Edd died. And Patrick was very sick. And the epidemic took a toll on all of us. And so, I don't remember. I don't remember. I don't remember. I don't remember. I don't remember. And so, we passed it on to Linda Lopez. Was that the year of Linda Lopez and Gail Wood? We passed it on to Linda Lopez and Gail Wood, who were these two women. And they were in the imperial court community. They did a terrible job. It was powerful. They did a terrible job. We took it back. And then, I can't remember if that was before or after. But then, after that Amy cut a deal with Helen. Was it when Helen you cut a deal? Amy cut a deal and we licensed Emzel to Amy for a dollar. And that's all she wrote. Amy added after that. It's 10 years for a dollar per year and our price hasn't been 10 dollars. I've never seen. I'm sure it wasn't cashed. I'm sure, you know. I know that church on Eureka, where all the kids were taking place. Yeah, that's right. So, for the sake of the camera when Pam just said it was the church on Eureka and the FCC check. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And then Amy got it from there on in. And we just, we walked away. It's very hard to walk away from the contest because it was our baby. And what was amazing is that it brought women in from everywhere. Women started coming in from Canada. And to get your shit over the border was very hard. I mean, driving it over the border was hard. Flying it over the border was hard. Shipping it, you know, UPS over the border was easier. But people got stopped and got their, you know, stuff taken away, get their floggers taken away and all their sex toys and whatever. It was very difficult. But people came from everywhere and we met some pretty incredible people. And a lot of organizations started because people came together with IMSL. And unlike INL, which started out as a beauty contest, IMSL really was a community organization. And we started a dialogue and I remember the bridging the gap between the women's community and the men's community and the gay community and the straight community. And INL in its beginning was fashioned after IML. But I produced Drummer and IML was okay. Boring. So we decided to add the fantasies like right away in the second year to just spice it up because we were about the fantasies. We were about you know, depicting what we did and there was some super creative shit in those early years for sure. And lucky enough to be in the club because when we were in the club I had this extraordinary lighting rig and this great sound system. So we were able to do a lot of special effects for the fantasies and give them extra hope that you can't do in a club that has that or a theater. But the dialogue that it started became nationwide and made you believe that the leather family was born around that time. Because we all you could go to any city in the country and there was somebody there. I mean there was someone there you knew. There was someone that would take you around. There was family there and I really do think that came out of INL. How different is INL today compared to the early days? Well I'm not on the inner workings of INL. But I think INL today for sure is like a convention. You know people come together. I mean I had a lot of fun last night running into people. I have friendships that will never go away. Camile, Sarah. I mean you know there are people that I stay in touch with that I will always love forever. I don't know that I'm not sure what INL is doing. I am removed from it. I admit that. I'm not sure that INL is building the same relationships. I imagine it is. I don't think that the women's community today has the same level of stressors that we had then. We had the epidemic for sure. We had women in general have a lot of issues that we were dealing with and coming out. Having people taking us seriously in the BDSM community was also a big deal. And then people not liking some of the stuff we did. Women really brought blood sports out and men would go Sorry Doug, never go. So making that transition I think was a big deal. And I think it brought us closer together. We had more to fight for. Today we are fighting for equal rights and marriage and stuff. I think in those days we were fighting for our lives and it was different. What's the biggest misconception about you? What's the biggest misconception about me? I have no idea. I'm right out there. Does anyone have a misconception about me? Am I something that is not like her? I don't know. I'm not sure what the biggest misconception about me is. That I'm not soft, that I don't like soft. I am tough. What do you mean? I'm a soft red boot. I think that people think that I don't have a whole lot of compassion or I'm not soft. I am. I am the dog rescuer. I just am dog mommy. I love dogs and people, but I think that I show up for people as much as they show up for me. I think maybe that's it. I think I'm just too tough. I don't know. I'm not sure. So I do have to ask everybody else. Thank you, Joseph. Thank you very much. My pleasure.