Get Used to It: Ep. 28, "Torie Osborn: Portrait of an Activist"

(letters thudding) (letters thudding) (line thudding) (letters thudding) (upbeat music) - Hi. I'm Sheila James Kuehl. Welcome to Get Used To It. Get Used To It, as I hope you know, is a series about issues that affect the lesbian gay community. And every so often, we are lucky enough to collar an individual that we can have for an entire hour for an individual interview. And today is one of those rare and special shows, and it's about a rare and special kind of individual. You know, there are some people that we refer to in our movement as activists. Not very many. And I think in the 275 million Americans, you probably wouldn't find more than a handful, 50, 60, 70, the people we'd refer to as activists. They are the people who really move our history along. They are the people who make the noise, who start the organizations, who try to get everybody else to help fix the problems. And one of those activists is our guest today, Torie Osborn. Torie Osborn, anti-war activist, women's rights activist, women's music producer, lesbian gay activist, executive director, writer. It's been 30 years Tor, of activism. And I think one of the things that people rarely get to learn is kind of what motivates an activist. How do you become an activist? And more important, why do you stay one? Where did it all start for you? - I think if you were to ask my mother, she would say it started when I was a little girl. And as a state department brat, my dad was stationed in Madrid during the Franco years. And we'd moved there from Denmark, which was a very progressive country, where my earliest memories were reading books, kids books, that told the story of King Christian wearing the yellow star and acting as a real leader, an example of real leadership, in taking on the entire Danish Jewish population and basically protecting them and saving them from the Nazis. And then we moved to Madrid, and I don't remember Denmark really well, but in Madrid, my earliest are of on my fourth birthday, seeing a food riot. Living in the shelter of the state, being a state department, an American diplomat had quite a bit of privilege. So it wasn't as if I was in the food riot, but I watched it, literally on my birthday, my fourth birthday. And my mother claims that I came home that day in an outrage against the militarism, against Franco's guns on every street corner in Madrid. And I think that was, I mean, I don't remember. I remember the feeling of chaos and terror that I picked up from women and children being shot at, in, you know, less than 50 yards away from me and a sort of a sense of outrage, I guess, a childish sense of outrage. So that was probably my earliest influence. And I always really think that that another piece of it, at least in terms of the development of my queer political views was when I was a teenager, and I was attracted to girls and extremely guilty about it and ashamed of it and loved being a tomboy. Didn't like being a lesbian. (Sheila laughs) And at the age of 15, I had my first sexual, you know, experience with another girl, and experienced sexual desire, which I think is a powerful thing to feel, you know, no matter when you're a kid, when you first feel it to begin with, it can be overwhelming, regardless of what variety. And suddenly, went out and got a boyfriend the next day. I mean, we're talking right into the closet, right into denial, right into terror and right into the beginnings of a double life for several years till I was 21 or 22. - [Sheila] So a sense of outrage at the kind of oppression, but you didn't really connect it with being a lesbian at the time. I mean, it was, these are kind of two separate threads starting out really early of your own feeling of having what you had to hide, but this sense of outrage. And you also were in high school and college at a time when activism sort of came into its own in the schools too. - Well, that was the next thing I was gonna say, was that I actually don't feel, I mean, some people perhaps feel they choose their professions in some conscious and individual fashion. I feel like I was chosen by the times I grew up in. The spirit of the '60s swept me up into it as it did, you know, millions of other people. And I was a little too young to do other than watch the Civil Rights Movement on television and be inspired by it, outraged at what I saw take place in the south, but I was really I'm to be a part of it. But as soon as I could participate, I was totally active in, you know, going to anti-war rallies, going to folk clubs, participating in the counterculture of the '60s. It was an extraordinary time. It was a vibrant time. It was a time when structures of authority were toppling, where everybody was questioning everything, and when we really believed that things could change. It was a time when there was no question, but that things had to change. That, you know, poverty could be eliminated. Racism could be eliminated. And there was a sense of total adamance and hopefulness about that, and it imprinted on my soul. So that this little closeted, kind of queer dyke, hiding from her own self and with a lot of shame and a lot of compulsory heterosexuality happening for a few years there, as Adrian Rich calls, the sort of script that a lot of lesbians are put on in the sexist culture, came together, or sort of was lurking in there, I think, for later years. But what really caught, grabbed my passion was the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement. That was my movement. That was my formative movement. For others, it was Civil Rights Movement, and the Student Movement to some extent, but that was really a piece of the anti-war movement. But I mean, lemme be very clear. I was not a leader. I was not an organizer. I was one of millions of people who knew this war was wrong. At first, it was an inchoate kind of a feeling. We believed the voices who told the truth about the war and we disbelieved the government. Intuitively, instinctively. And I actually think this is the way a lot of movements begin, a few people who sense the truth and speak it and begin to articulate, and it captures something. It takes off like, you know, like sort of wildfire. - [Sheila] So there were other people like that for you? I mean, somebody was leading something. Somebody called the whatever, the demonstrations or- - Well, of course. There was a movement. I mean, there was an anti-war movement. There was certainly leaders. There were no individual leaders that I recall. I mean, I can remember being inspired by Bernadette Devlin, who was an Irish revolutionary, but she was talking about Ireland at the time. I mean, there were people that, but there weren't. This was much more of a, for me, participating in a mass phenomenon. I was a kid. I was a teenager. Frankly, it was hip to be a part of the counterculture. It was, now I gather it's hip to be a Republican when you're 15. Times have changed. - Don't believe it. (Torie laughs) - No. I mean, I say that seriously. I mean, with not anything, any ill will towards Republicans. Just that I think the culture has shifted to the right, and certain sort of peer pressure is very different. But in 1966, at least from where I was sitting in my kind of middle class, suburban Philadelphia corner of the world, it was kind of hip to me smoking pot, you know, listening to Rubber Soul and going to anti-war demonstrations on the weekends and being a weekend hippie and going to the Greenwich village. - But it didn't stop there for you. - [Torie] No, but the critical thing for me was when I went to college, and I went to Barnard College because it was the most radical, most activist campus that I could find on the East Coast. And when I went there, I was, you know, sort of swept up. I mean, really, we're talking the first week I was there, we were tear gassed and chased down by tactical police force on, you know, battering people with the billy clubs on horse back down 116th and Broadway. I mean, that was my orientation to freshman year in college and, you know, tear gas the next week at Fort Dix and so forth. Those were the times, and this is 1968. But I was really very much somebody who had a lot of questions. I didn't understand when these kinda you know, male, white male radicals would stand up at the podium and talk about the racist imperialist genocidal war in Vietnam. And there was something oppressive about being bludgeoned by this rhetoric with very little structure. I mean, it was very anarchistic and very chaotic. And by that time, I think earlier on there was much more of a, an educational process and a much more organized process. By the time I got to Columbia, SDS, which had been the lead organization, Students for Democratic Society had already become the weatherman, you know. I mean it had sort of disintegrated into its most fringe moment. But so for me, what was really instructive about Columbia was what it didn't do. I was hungry to be educated. I was hungry to learn organizing skills. I was hungry to be trained as an activist. I mean, I didn't know it, but I was choosing my profession. And I can remember changing my major from creative writing. I was an English major in college and state, but from creative writing and not quite knowing why, but having a sense that I didn't wanna write about the world, that you could sort of be a writer who wrote about the world, or you could be a participant in this extraordinary time. And if I kept any distance between myself and the time, there would be, you know, a rawness that I would miss. A vitality that I would miss. And it was one of those decisions you make in sophomore year. I don't know why I don't wanna do this at anymore. I wanna be involved. Later, I found out you can be a writer and be involved. You just have to sort of (Sheila laughs) take turns at it. But so for me, what Columbia was was kind of a training school in what not to do as an organizer. You know, you don't talk down to people. You don't yell rhetoric at them. When people are hungry to be organized, you listen to them. And then I went to another college, a smaller college. I really sort of fled New York. I fled being in love with my best friend who wasn't interested in me, and being afraid of my own lesbianism. I fled. I had one gay friend, gay male friend who was out. This is 1970. And when he told me about the Stonewall Riots, I was so terrified. He said something to me about about, "Well, maybe you're scared of your own self." And I mean, I practically hauled off and slugged him. I mean, I grabbed him. And I was so vehement to my own denial, my own self hatred as a lesbian at that point that I kind of fled New York. New York was too much. And it was, it was early women's liberation. And it was, I mean, it was a- - [Sheila] But there was still a big dichotomy. I mean, there was straight women and lesbians, and it was very shadowy, kind of the lesbians- - [Torie] No, this is actually before all that. This is 1969. Women's Liberation Front had just been founded. Gay Liberation Front had just been founded. I was one of these people who, when the women's liberation group came to, did dorm organizing in 1968 and sent out one of their, you know, cadre to come and talk about women's liberation, I, and my best friend who I was secretly in love with, you know, said, "Well, we don't need feminism. We don't need women's liberation." So I sort of shunned early feminism. And then in 1970, was involved in kind of an anti-war collective. These were the days where everybody was in some collective or other. And went actually on my first women's march in the summer of 1970 and felt it got kind of swept up into that, began to feel the spirit of early feminism. Really wasn't so much about myself. It was still about being part of a sense of change in the world, a sense that the horizon was the limit, and there were different ways you could do it. You could support the work of, at the time was the Black Power Movement, became the Black Panther Movement. You could fight the war in Vietnam, which was always number one on my agenda. And I actually say this, and although I came out a couple of years later and got, and came out openly as a lesbian in my early 20s, I never was able to turn my attention to lesbian or gay and lesbian politics until the war was over. It never stopped being my priority till 1975 when the war was over, and then I moved into doing women's music. But let me tell you one story, because those were the days when today the right wing has its own counterculture. It kind of frames the so much of what we see. There's so many Christian cable shows, and there's so much, so many think tanks and so much sort of alternative media that's controlled and directed by the radical right. In those days, the left or progressive people had an extraordinary network. Wasn't as sophisticated technologically, but of newspapers- - No computers, no internet- - [Torie] Right. Mimeograph machines. (Sheila laughs) Mimeograph machines. Oy. Anyway, and there was a collective called the Newsreel Collective that specialized in alternative films. And I saw a film in the summer of 1970 that was about Vietnam. And it was about how American soldiers were raping and mutilating Vietnamese women. And it was that film that somehow brought together for me the women's issue and the Vietnam issue in a way that, I mean, the analogy was there, of sort of a foreign aggression and colonialism. Imperialism, as we called it in those sort of more lefty days, and rape and oppression of women, and it all came together. And I walked out of that film, in the summer of 1970, a permanent feminist. Though it wasn't about myself, see. It wasn't as if I had experienced, or admitted that I had experienced any sexism. - And then, wasn't, it's not so much a matter of denial as you just don't even let it in. I mean, it feels to me sometimes like people suffer so much themselves, gay people and lesbians, and, you know, women, children, whatever, you just have to not have it at the top of your consciousness all the time. So some of what I hear you saying is that sometimes it's easier to focus that energy and that rage that you feel to help them, to work for them, even though it turns out you're one of them too. - [Torie] I think people come to these, come to those connections, sort of that the personal is political, as opposed to the political is personal. I have to tell you, in a very real way, the political was personal for me. - [Sheila] Mm-hmm. - And still is in so many ways, in a very real way. But that changed my life. That was one of those moments (Sheila talks over speaker). - So then you got more, you began to work more in sort of women's issues. I know at Middlebury, (Torie speaks faintly). you founded the women's union. Is that what it was? (Torie speaks faintly) - [Torie] This I have to tell you. There's few things in my life I'm really proud of, and having founded, actually co-founded with a woman faculty member, the Middlebury College Women's Union in 1971, which is still thriving, alive, well, and thriving is one of them. To create something out of a kind of a passionate moment of knowing that something had to change, and you wanted to create an institutional response, to found a group that's still going on 24 years later feels great. - [Sheila] But that's leadership. I mean, you're going from being sort of in the streets, you're doing, it's grassroots, you're doing what other people are doing. But now, this is leadership. This is starting something. - That was the beginning. That was the beginning. Taking the lessons I learned at Columbia about what not to do as an organizer, going to Middlebury, a small, fairly placid, fairly conservative campus, where I could, I could kind of test out, flex some muscles. And actually my sense of outrage was constantly, (Sheila laughs) you know, up front because it was so apathetic. And I had come from the hotbed of radicalism of the '60s. - [Sheila] Right. - I was the first feminist in Madison County, Vermont, trust me, in 1970. (Sheila laughs) I started writing a column called Notes From Women's Liberation. I founded the Women's Liberation Union, and I co-founded a group called the Radical Education Action Project, which was with Steve Early, who became my organizing mentor. And it was actually embarrassing to be a feminist and have to learn how to organize from a man. - But of course, a lot of us did. Let me just, it's time for a break. We're going to be right back. Don't you dare go away because there's so much more. (serene music) - Do you ever think about what your pet means to you? To me, it means unconditional love. Imagine what that means to someone who's ill. Hi, I'm Greg Louganis, and I wanna tell you about an organization called PAWS LA, that's Pets Are Wonderful Support. They help people living with AIDS or HIV keep and care for their pets. PAWS LA needs your help. If you'd like to ensure someone else's quality of life, please call 213-876-PAWS. (serene music) - Hi. Welcome back to Get Used To It. I'm Sheila James Kuehl, your erstwhile host. And today, I'm very, very pleased to have with us Torie Osborn. Torie's telling us a life story of activism. I think exemplary of some activist. Well, it's quite a story, Tor. You were saying that you really, until the war was over, you really didn't focus on sort of the next step for you in activism. Yet, there was a lot of organizing going on around women's stuff. So where did that take you? - Well, what captured my passions about the time that the Vietnam War wound down was something called women's music, which was really the place to be in the mid '70s. I had kind of a brief flirtation with gay and lesbian politics in the mid '70s. I was living in Chicago, working with a lesbian group called Blazing Star, a wonderful group in Chicago in the mid '70s, part of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, which was one of the largest grassroots women's groups ever. Had hundreds and hundreds of active members in the late '60s and early '70s, mid '70s. There was the Metropolitan Gay and Lesbian Coalition, which I was a Blazing Star representative to. And it was during Anita Bryant days, 1976, and sort of had this moment of working in gay, male dominated, sort of mainstream gay politics. And it was, how can I say it? - Sexist. - [Torie] Sexist. (Tori and Sheila laugh) In a word. It was totally sexist. - How did I guess? - [Torie] You know, like 60 guys in a room and two women. And they laughed if you suggested childcare and the notion that it just, We were on different planets in the mid '70s. So I kind of said goodbye to the anti-war kind of new left straight guys that I'd worked with and said goodbye to the gay guys that I had worked with for a moment in the streets against Anita Bryant, and got very active in women's music. I don't think I'll ever forget my first women's music concert, which was in 1974, I think in Boston. 1000 women in at the State Harvard University Hall. I forget the name of the- - That's where my first women's concert- - Were you there? - Not that year. It was two years later, but the same place. - [Torie] Yep. The same place. Well, I mean, I don't think Harvard University ever had that kind of erotic energy bouncing off the walls. - [Sheila] Never. - People think of the sort of revisionist history on women's music and that era is that we were these kind of, I don't know, uptight, Well, this is the kind of queer, you know, postmodern rewrite on women's music history is that it was all sort of Birkenstock and no roles and sort of boring blue-jeaned, Birkenstocked women who didn't have a lot of sex. And in fact, you know, we were smashing monogamy all over the place and much of it, yes, to Chris Williamson and Holly Near. And women's music concerts were extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary experiences. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Women had never on mass acknowledged their love, their sexual attraction for each other in a public... Pride doesn't begin to capture it. It was- - And appropriate pronouns. I mean, for the first time too. - [Torie] Oh, it was incredible. And the identification and the openness. And as I say, I mean, pride is sort of a pale word about what, this was ecstatic. This was joy. And those concerts were transformative experiences. - [Sheila] But you weren't just participating. You were producing. As a matter of fact, that's how you got to California, right? - [Torie] Well, this first concert made me say, "This is where I have to be." This is the first thing since the anti-war movement that stirred my soul in the same way, where I knew something was happening here and I had to be part of it. So, you know, I did some bunch of producing and then Holly Near became a friend. I produced some Holly Near concerts. She became a friend, and she asked me to come help her run Redwood Records. And so I moved to Ukiah. Literally lived in the house where Holly had grown up. And four lesbian, four women lived in this house together, ran Redwood Records, and it was an amazing time. I mean, it was a time when men and women were, gay men and women were completely separate. I mean, this was lesbian separatist heyday. This was an extraordinary time of empowerment in building our own institutions and our own organizations. And we had a network very much like the counterculture of the '60s, with our own coffee houses and our own newspapers, and our own kind of countercultural economic network. - [Sheila] Lesbians, you mean. - [Torie] Lesbians did. - Right. - [Torie] And we were part of it. I mean, women's music in its heyday had 100 women distributors making a living, about two or 300 producers, about 15 or 20 record labels, 25 artists or more. And a lot of us, tens of thousands whose lives were changed. And there were a few moments, historic moments that brought gay men and lesbians together. I remember, I will never forget, the day that Harvey Milk was shot. When Holly and I were up in Ukiah, which is a couple of, Mendocino County, couple miles, hours north of San Francisco, getting the phone call that he had been killed. And it was a rainy day. And Holly and I did not say a word to each other. We looked at each other, we jumped in the car. We drove in the rain, in the pouring rain with, I mean, tears coming down both of our faces, crying, it raining outside in silence. So silent, shocked grief down to San Francisco. And in that car, in the middle of that drive, this sound started coming from Holly. (Torie hums) I can't sing. I won't even try. We Are A Gentle Angry People. First, the sound came, which is why it sounds like a funeral dirge because it came out of that pain of that moment. And she wrote, 'cause she was invited to come down to the candlelight vigil that happens, you know, that night, We Are A Gentle Angry People, and wrote what sort of has become certainly her anthem for the gay lesbian movement. And that night, of course, I mean it was lesbians and it was gay men on the streets of the Castro, and lots of non gay people as well. Moscone was a great friend to many progressive- - [Sheila] Right. - People and a friend of the gay community. But those moments were rare. It was the time of the gendered movement. The gay men's world was very separate from the lesbian world. - [Sheila] And yet, when people think of your history, the people who know you and have seen your work, people think of you in the gay lesbian movement. I mean, this is the moment when you enter the consciousness of most of the audience, I think, is at, I think as executive director of The Gay and Lesbian Center in Los Angeles. But here you are in San Francisco, the day Harvey Milk is killed. How do you get there? And how do we get to be a co-gendered movement, which we are now? - I like these small questions that you ask. (Sheila laughs) Well, my own journey was, you know, took me to business school from San Francisco. After I worked with Holly, I produced, co-founded and co-produced the West Coast Women's Music Festival. These wonderful Amazon Woodstock in the woods that continue. I mean the Michigan Festival, that are really key empowerment experiences for still, for tens of thousands of lesbians annually. Then I ended up, it was kind of, you know, transitions in our lives. We make different choices. And for me, I had had moved, I mean, I saw my life by this point, as being sort of a, a professional activist. Different movements, different ways, different collectives. Now, remember this is 19, by now, it's 1982. Reagan is in power. The new right is coming along. I produced the rally that marked, in San Francisco, the rally that marked the end of the equal rights amendment. It was kind of the end of an era of feminism's kind of coming into maturity, I think, in the '70s and really making its mark. And I was kind of at loose ends, frankly. The festival was over. My lover and I had broken up in the middle of it. It was lesbian drama all over San Francisco. That's a whole other story. - Another town you had to leave. (laughs) - Another town I had to split, leave. But at any rate, so basically what happened to me was I decided it was kind of, I decided I need to consolidate some kind of professional identity behind the skills that I had learned. You know, organizers get sometimes thought of as just organizers, grassroots organizers, which is basically what I had done for 20, you know, by then 15 years or whatever. Making my living, not a very good living, but working whether it was fighting the war, you know, or working for an alternativist newspaper, or working for women's music. And I decided that I wanted to see, I decided to go get an MBA, to go to business school to sort of see kind of how these, running this lesbian record company and the skills that I'd learned there, the skills that I'd learned as circulation manager of a kind of radical newspaper in the '70s, how this all stacked up, what it all added up to in terms of professional skills. And so I came to UCLA to LA and went to business school. And actually thought I was gonna go into the entertainment industry. This was my kind of transition, my concession to the yuppie '80s. In fact, my mother was so happy I went to business school. (Sheila laughs) You have no idea. She used to say, this was her stock line. "Well, she's a radical and she's a dyke, but at least she'll have an MBA." (laughs) (Sheila laughs) So this was sort of the, this was my kind of... And I was in my 30s and it was a time of change. - So when you say you thought you might go into the entertainment industry, were you thinking, "Okay. I had my youth. I had my activism. Now, maybe if I get my MBA, maybe I have to do something more traditional?" - Well, in a sense, but I also knew we were the end of an era. It felt we were at the end of an era. The '70s were the '60s. They were the '60s for women and queers. I mean the gay and lesbian movement was taking off in the '70s and the women's movement was exploding in the '70s. And with the '80s and the Reagan era, there was definitely a sense the horizon was narrowing. And so I knew I had to kind of figure out where to go next. But remember, I was doing music. So I actually thought that women's music was kind of, you know, the independent music industry. So I thought maybe I'd go into the, the mainstream music industry. I don't know what I was thinking, but I was thinking it was time to kind of put some, put a professional skill mix together, make some, a little bit, you know, of a change in my life. Make some money, if you really wanna know. I was tired of making, I think my last salary was $800 a month before I went off to business school, and it was true. I mean, I was getting older. So I went to business school where I met you. (laughs) - I was working next door. (laughs) - That's also a whole other story. - It is, and we'll tell it sometime, (speaks faintly). - [Torie] Some time, we will. But when I graduated from business school, AIDS, by the way, was just beginning to happen in San Francisco when I left in '82. I remember vividly a poignant picture. I had a number of friends who were lesbian nurses, several of whom were at my house one night having coffee or something before they went off to a lesbian, there was like a lesbian nurse's organization. And one woman pacing my living room floor, talking about this sickness that gay men were getting and how San Francisco General was having trouble getting nurses who would work there because people didn't know how it was transmitted. And it was, could have been a high risk situation for health workers and people didn't know what was going on. She was gonna organize all 11 lesbian nurses and her lesbian nurses support group to go to San Francisco General because it was gay men who were dying. This is 1982. This is early in the epidemic. This was extraordinary bravery, and it, and I remember this vignette. But I came to business school, stuck my head in the sand for two years, really had nothing to do, and had lived so separate from the gay men's community that I didn't have any gay male friends in San Francisco. I really didn't. I knew one gay man the whole time I was there, five years. But so I came, got involved. When I graduated from business school, I really thought I was gonna go into show business. Or maybe, you know, well, I think I had interviews at Xerox and a couple banks, and- - Yes. - [Torie] You know. - A couple of banks. - [Torie] You remember this, don't you? - I do. - [Torie] You're not gonna embarrass me though, on television. - Not at all. - [Torie] And you know it. But what ended up happening actually, was you, I had all these interviews in these kind of 'cause I had a, I got a finance degree, and you came in one day and showed me this article in the LA Times about a organization called PRO-Peace and a fellow named David Mixner who was- - Who was organizing a march. - [Torie] Of 5,000 people across the country. And again, I felt that little feeling I'd felt at the Chris Williamson concert. I felt that little feeling I'd felt in the early anti-war movement. - Tore up the appointments with the banks. - [Torie] Forget the bank. - You did. - [Torie] We're gonna go do this. - Right. - [Torie] You know, you can never, It's sort of like once an activist, once it's imprinted in your soul, you can do it in different ways. There's many different ways to try to change the world, but you know, just go work in a bank, eh, not for me. So I worked at PRO-Peace, and actually the best thing to come out of that was meeting David Mixner, and a series of members. - 'Cause you did the proposition, the organizing against the proposition. - [Torie] No 164. - [Sheila] Right. - Stop the LaRouche initiative, quarantining people with AIDS, 1986. And that was my first foray into AIDS work. And it was during that, and working with gay men. It was, except for that moment in Chicago that we just as soon forget. That was the beginning of AIDS work. And then that passion stirred again, and I knew I had to be doing AIDS and gay and lesbian stuff. It made sense. Unlike in the '70s, where lesbians had to do our own own thing, had to build our own sense of our own selves, and where our agenda and our concerns were radically different from gay men's. We had to deal with being women, first and foremost, and we had to find our voices. We were coming from nothing and we had to build ourselves up first. But by the mid '80s, I think, you know, lesbian feminism, women's music, certainly lesbian feminism was pretty much dead or dying. Not as a piece. Autonomous lesbian organizing will always be important. It's always important for groups to have their own spaces. But likewise, gay male reform, urban oriented politics was sort of going nowhere too. I mean, we got, had a little bit of political power in a few cities across the country, but basically, it lacked a vitality, and any sense of capturing the imagination of large numbers of people. And then AIDS struck, in that context, with the right wing coming on. And I mean the gay community was a happening thing, but this separation and fragmentation was very deep, and AIDS brought us together. I mean, there's no question about it. And I like to think of it as a combination of our agendas tilting towards each other. Gay men in the '70s, really, for the most part, did not care about much other than protections, you know, sort of discrimination protections and sexuality, where sort of sexual freedom was the key issue. Lesbians had kids, either from marriages, or mostly from marriages, had to deal with custody issues. Family issues were always top of the agenda. Because of how women are treated in this medical system, healthcare advocacy was always a key issue, as well as violence because of rape and, you know. There were a whole set of issues that we inherit, the lesbians inherited from feminism, from being women, that brought us involved in kind of larger organizing and social advocacy questions. The gay men were very single issue. What AIDS did was totally shift gay men's consciousness. They experienced discrimination, many of them for the first time. I'll never forget Steve Kolzak, you know, the Paramount casting executive who died of AIDS. Wonderful, beautiful man, who said, "I was a golden boy." He said to me, " I was the Harvard golden boy. I came to Hollywood, get rich, get famous, be part. It never occurred to me I could be discriminated against." - And his story was replicated and replicated. - [Torie] Right. - Time for another break. Don't lose that thought. We will continue with Get Used To It. Don't go away. (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Pick up your telephone right now and call the number on your screen. And find out how you can enrich your family values by learning about your gay children. - We had no idea what the gay community was like. - [Narrator] Learn how these parents deal with their fears about attending parents' FLAG meetings. - One of my biggest fears was that I would see someone that I knew. - [Narrator] Call the telephone number on your screen right now and see how these parents have taken themselves to acceptance and beyond. - Because that parent does not know the positives yet about the gay community. - Hi. Welcome back to Get Used To It. You may have noticed, if you watch the show, that we're not in our usual digs. Rather, we are on the fabulous Sunset Strip at the Argyle, and we thank them very much for letting us use their West Hollywood location to shoot today. We're talking to Torie Osborn, and we were just talking about AIDS, and about how it was an element of men and women getting together in our movement. How did that happen? - Well, I think there's a lot of reasons. I think that gay men's experience of genocide, which is what it was, at least genocidal neglect by the government, gave them such a radically different experience of oppression. And that it brought and it brought up issues that had always been lesbian issues. Issues about family, family issues, legal rights, inheritance rights, recognition of family, healthcare advocacy, connectedness, interconnectedness of issues. I know more, you know, well educated, white, middle class gay men who are for single payer health insurance, who are essentially, you know, incredibly progressive on a number of social issues who, for example, felt an instant solidarity with Anita Hill a few years ago during the Clarence Thomas Anita Hill hearings. A kind of sense of understanding because of the incredibly awful experience of what this epidemic has done politically. - [Sheila] And they're so outraged when they don't get their rights that I felt like we started to pick up that kind of sense of entitlement too. I mean, from sort of from the women's side, where as we began to get closer together, the sensitivity, the assumption of power, I mean, you were the first woman, were you not, to be the executive director of the center here in LA? - Yes. Yes. The Gay and lesbian Community Services Center here in LA, which is the oldest and largest center (Sheila talks over speaker). - But no woman had ever done that. - [Torie] Nope, I was the first girl. - So how'd you get in there? - Well, it was because of a feminist man, Eric Rofes, who was executive director before, me hired me. Actually hired a critical mass of feminists and sort of began to bring women back to the center. The center, like so many gay community institutions, has on been almost been a microcosm of the community's struggles over the years. So that when the gender wars happened in the '70s and gay men and women were kind of carving out separate turf or battling over the extraordinary sexism that existed, women walked out of the center any number of occasions. I mean, the center was primarily, I think one would have to say, with all due respect of the brave lesbians who hung in there or came back over multiple years at the center, the center was really mostly, its vision, its funding, its programming for the most part was really crafted and nurtured by gay men. And I do no disrespect to the women who were involved, but it really was an institution that grew out of the gay men's community. It changed actually, Eric began the change, by bringing in women, by making it safer for us to work because he was a feminist man. He believed in affirmative action. He believed in bringing, in diversifying the institution. So he opened up the door, and I, and another and many other women came back. And then I was able to take it to the next step and really sort of institutionalize or eradicate institutionalized sexism and kind of lead the women back to the center and then take it to the next step and create a really multi racial organization. - And take it to the next step and buy a whole building. - [Torie] Right. - This fabulous building right now. - [Torie] Right. The center, you know, these centers are incredible, and there really is a community center movement across the country. There's something like 100 centers that are established, another 100 that are in the process of formation, and they're really important organizations. I mean, one of the things that the gay and lesbian... I mean, gay and lesbians are exiles from mainstream institutions, beginning with our families. I mean, we're ostracized. Sort of the worst punishment that a tribe could inflict on anybody is ostracism from the tribe. Well, gays and lesbians, for the most part, are ostracized by our families, by our blood families. We at the very least grow up in an environment in a heterosexual institution that ignores us or denies us if not expresses outright hostility. So more perhaps than any other minority group, we must create our own alternative institutions and organizations to build ourselves back up, to create our identity, to create affirmation of our identity, and that's sort of what the gay community is in a nutshell. The gay and lesbian community centers in all their forms across the country, I think are our most vibrant community and significant community-based organizations. In some ways, they're kind of taken for granted. I think for many years, the center here in Los Angeles has been taken for granted. And I think the New York center is, and the Minneapolis center is because they've been around so long and because they're social services based, and there's something, there's a schism in this culture between sort of services and politics or political organizing. And I don't just mean electoral politics, but advocacy organizing. You sort of have your GLAAD and your Human Rights Campaign Fund or your Life Lobby or your Angle on the one hand. And then you have, you know, the services groups. And in fact, what I think we did at the center and why I think the center is so significant, is we in integrated organizing, advocacy and services, and showed that, you know, it's not just about helping the kids get off the streets, but it's about empowering them, sending them off to the march on Sacramento when Wilson vetoed AB101. Those kids from that shelter, youth shelter, got on that bus, went on that freedom ride to Sacramento and learned about activism. - [Sheila] And not only empowering them, but it's their experience that informs what you demand out in the world- - [Torie] Exactly. - As a movement. I mean, you don't make it up on your own. - [Torie] Exactly. And you know, centers are also sort of places where you develop professional skills and leadership and lobbying skills. I mean that government money doesn't just get handed to you. But, you know, we were talking about AIDS before. And one of the things that I think was really and a significant legacy of AIDS, although, you know, I have to say, I think we were in a terribly difficult time at that age, a sort of a a despairing time in many ways. And is not just that men and women came together. And to some extent, people of color and non people of color began to work together in a, I don't think that battle's by any means over yet, but I think it's begun in good faith. And I think there's much more unity within many communities because of AIDS. It's brought us together because we had to be a family, because we were dealing with death and dying and we showed a love. I call it the ethic of caring. The gay lesbian community ethic of caring that's emerged from the epidemic. But there's another legacy, and you kind of referred to it, is that AIDS activism revitalized gay and lesbian politics. Gave it an edge, gave it an understanding, which I as a long time grassroots organizer sort of have always had. But a lot of politicos don't have because community-based organizing is always so separate from electoral politics. Sort of the never the twain shall meet. It's a kind of a sense of a tactical toolbox. I call bitacticalism. It's my little queer thing. (Sheila laughs) Which is the thing that you needed act up on the streets and you needed the suits inside lobbying the brilliant folks like the treatment activists and the Marty Delaneys of the world that learned how to negotiate the FDA and crack the most encrusted bureaucracy in human history to get treatment to people faster, combined with street organizing. No movement has ever so successfully... All movements have different, have a tactical spectrum. No has ever so brilliantly and successfully strategically. I can remember Mark Kostopoulos when I was sitting on the AIDS commission and we were lobbying for the AIDS ward at County General. And Mark Kostopoulos and other ACT UP people getting on the phone, planning strategy for when the street demonstrations were gonna happen, and when the sort of inside the system lobbying pressure tactics were gonna work. That is quite unusual. It isn't that movements haven't had the suits and the radicals, the inside the system outside the system, but it's never been so cleverly done. Or Sean Strub, who now has done POZ Magazine, who was a democratic party activist for years also blew up a 300-foot condom on Jesse Helms' roof one day, and, you know. (Sheila laughs) The edge, the urgency, the vitality, the creativity that ACT UP led AIDS activism brought into gay and lesbian politics. - [Sheila] Well, it seems to me your mark is really the recognition of how important the individual is. I mean, each individual's bringing it. When you talk about the spectrum, you're really talking about a spectrum of individual contributions, very much like your life. Grassroots, you know, the center. And I know you spoke at the march on Washington, and the theme of your speech was coming home to america. And that out of that speech, you wrote a book, I know, that is recently finished. Will you tell a little about that? - The book is called Coming Home to America. The book was written because I think we're in a moment where the gay and lesbian issue is coming home to America, and where individual gays and lesbians are coming home to America, out of exile, home. Literally home to small towns. People are coming out in rural areas, suburban areas, small towns. They never did before. There's a mass migration out of the closet. It's slowed a little bit in the chilling, post Clinton euphoria of the initial, of his initial, you know, campaign and so forth. But the book is, so that's the moment that it tries to talk about. But it's not an academic book. It's meant to be read by sort of everybody. Mostly, I mean, it's written for the gay and lesbian community. It's a book about coming out. It's a book about hope. It's kind of an organizer's memoir. My mother says it's a motivational handbook. It's really an attempt to say to people, "Come out, come out, come out. You know, you can't be free until you do." And then the next step, from my own experience, for me, it was women's music in the '70s, is community building. What the right wing knows how to do is build community. What we know how to do is build community. We've done it. We've almost done it so much 'cause we had to 'cause we were exiled from our families that we don't know what incredible gift, what incredible talent it is to have, you know, these thousands of organizations from the gay bowling leagues to the lesbian softball leagues, to the centers, to the, you know, the Stitching Bitch Mormon Gay Cowboys Sewing Club. I kid you not. (Sheila laughs) They exist. They're in Salt Lake. They made me a quilt. (Sheila laughs) I mean, this is incredible. America needs us. So the book is really about the diversity of who we are and what we have to teach America. I turn it around. I don't say, "Join the mainstream because we wanna fit in." I say, "We know about having complex answers in a complex world." We reject fundamentalism. We don't just accept diversity. We don't know any other way to be, whether it was the drag queens and the leather men in the gay men's bars, or the middle class lesbians and the working class dykes in the old bars, we have always been diverse. We don't know any other way to be because we've had to be 'cause we've needed each other. And so we understand about diversity, and we understand about the ethic of caring. We understand about family values. We understand about morality. We understand about spirituality. I think AIDS has radically transformed... There isn't much of a discourse about it yet, but I think we are beginning to help shape new values, new visions that I think, I think America's soul is hurting, and I think we've always been the healers. Gay people have always been the shamans and the poets and the healers and those- - [Sheila] And the witches. - And the witches. And we have a very significant role to play. We always have throughout history, but at this time in history, as we face the millennium with the right wing on the rise, with fundamentalism, which proposes simple answers to a complex and rapidly changing world that is wrong, answers that deny human freedom, that deny democracy, including democracy and personal life. This is my new thing that, you know. We are about, I mean, we're about the personal is political, but it's more than that. We're about democratizing personal life, bringing the notion of democracy into how families are arranged. It's about family democracy, family diversity, and that's what sort of gay liberation is about, and feminism. So my book is about all of that. (Sheila laughs) I mean it's really an attempt to kind of make gays and lesbians feel, not just proud of who we are, but feel important about the role that we have to play at a very tough time in the world politically. - So what role are you gonna play in this very tough time? What's next for you, Torie? - [Torie] Well, I've had my year off. I've written my book. Well, what I'm getting really excited about is transforming gay sort of national gay and lesbian politics, bringing, you know, I'm really a community organizer and sort of empowerer and teacher. And I'm concerned that electoral politics, which we must, as you know, take our place in more and more, whether it's as elected officials or as transforming, you know, the gay and lesbian vote and raising funds and affecting policy in more and more powerful ways. I'm concerned with the disconnect between our community, building our community, organizing our gay bowling leagues and our lesbian softball teams and gay and lesbian political power. The worlds don't intersect. So I'm gonna be working with Human Rights Campaign Fund in Washington to work on a national voter project, a mobilization project for 1996, to try to, you know, help create a more pro-gay Congress, to help sort of unplug our homophobic speaker. To change what's happening in the beltway a little bit. I mean, it's a nonpartisan bipartisan effort, but to try to vitalize and re-invigorate electoral politics is I think where I wanna go as a community organizer. - I think it's really needed. I mean, you know our community is very tentative about electoral politics, really, except for very few people. And then when they look to us, they say, "Well, we know you can raise a lot of money. So why don't you raise a lot of money for this candidate?" But I don't think as a community we've really focused on it. I was very fortunate here because people got very excited about my race. But I- (Sheila talks over speaker) - So will you be going around the country and- - [Torie] Well, it's just at the beginning this summer. So I don't know exactly what the shape will be, but what I wanna be part of creating, I will be one of some people who'll be helping to create, I think, some unprecedented models for mobilizing the gay lesbian community, for activating, for connecting our community-based infrastructure of organizations more into, transparing it more into political, sort of more traditional political terms. And you know, it excites me. I think it's really necessary. I'm very, very concerned about what's happening in this country. And I also feel we need, we deeply need antidotes to the despair, the loss. The political disillusionment with Bill Clinton is fierce. The sense of having been let down at the same time as we experience, continue to experience death after death after death and the fragile ecology of our community, of our family networks, of our friendship networks constantly being ripped apart by loss upon loss. And for me, if I've learned anything, it's that connecting to something larger than yourself can give you what Gandhi called that sort of transcendent sense of purpose. And creating a sense of, it's not just fighting back as an individual, but joining with others. And as one poet said, where hope and history come together. - [Sheila] Don't go any further. We're at the very end of the tape, and that's a wonderful ending. Torie, thank you so much. This was a wonderful hour. I'm really, really glad you decided to do this, that we decided to do this. And I'm glad you were here to watch it, and I hope you'll watch it again and again, 'cause you can tape this show. And you know what we say about gay and lesbian politics, spirituality issues, and just being here. Get used to it. (Torie laughs) See you next time. (upbeat music)