Get Used to It: Ep. 34, "Voices of Our Lives: Elizabeth Birch"

uh what's up [Music] hi i'm sheila kuehl welcome to get used to it our monthly show about issues of interest to the lesbian gay community and as you may know if you've been watching the show for three years or so every so often we have an interview with a person that a lot of people know but may not know as well as they'd like to and so we do a one-on-one interview for our whole hour and today we're very fortunate to have with us elizabeth burch who is the executive director of the human rights campaign which as i'm sure you know is our movement's lobbying arm in congress and also does a lot of wonderful work in the states on uh the initiatives etc and you'll hear a lot about that but even more about elizabeth welcome elizabeth thank you glad that you could be in la so that we could snag you this uh early sunday morning i bet they don't know that we're up bright and early here and it's even earlier for you right it is and i'm delighted to be here and i love that you have the time to do this in addition to being the greatest openly gay representative in the state of california and the only openly gay representative in the state of california that's true actually that's a pearl i appreciate it anyway it's true but this is uh this is one in an occasional series as i as i indicated at the beginning and uh one of the things that we rarely get to do i think with our heroes and sheroes is to have the time to hear kind of how they got where they are and i know since i know you that you're an introspective kind of person and and know a lot about how your life hangs together so i wondered if you would share with us kind of where you grew up and especially the the first sense that you had that you might be a lesbian i know it was pretty early in your life well i was some you know a person that was born in the united states but i grew up outside of the united states and i think that a number of factors have really influenced my my upbringing and and the way i came uh came of age as a lesbian you know i was very acutely aware at a very very young age probably around the age of seven or eight that i was very different very special by the time i was 12 i was could articulate that i was a lesbian and my friends were somewhat mystified by not only the fact that i would utter the word but that i just thought it was the greatest thing on the face of the earth i literally thought that it was this incredible variation on the species and that i got to carry these sacred seeds so were you in some fantastic country where this was a great thing to be unlike every other country in the world or how how did you escape that that the sense of disapproval about this very awful thing to be that that most people grow up with um where i was is i grew up all over canada and i think that what saved me and i think what saved a number of um women i mean it was still a rare experience to sort of understand um how special it was to be a lesbian but i came of age in my early teens right in the middle of the emergence i mean the heyday of the second wave of feminism and if you know you know this intimately that the women's movement although there was a lot of wedge driving and a lot of ordering of of lesbians out of now and a lot of disassociation sort of at the formal level in terms of lesbians i mean you know that there was this very potent sort of celebration of what it was to be a woman in the middle of all that and through a 12 year old size i had already been absolutely obsessed with british feminism because in canada we didn't really look south uh you know we saw we saw the sort of uh the the movement in the united states as sort of liberal but we looked really to britain and the turn of the century and we got our inspiration from people like the pancurse and and i told you once that you know i really thought i have got to spend my life with christabel pankhurst even though she'd been dead for you know 60 years at that point so i think there was a way in which to understand my sexuality in that context really fortified me and gave me a lot of strength i also was acutely aware as a young woman that and i credit my lesbianism with understanding so young that i would have to be my own provider i would never be able to depend on anybody and i think that it caused me to make a number of and if you look at my life in perfect parallel you see very mainstream traditional choices right beside kind of organic activism well you have a line that you use about yourself about your and i you could say it i can't i really remember about having an activist heart i always say i'm i'm more or less to sum it up i have a very vibrant activist heart but when it comes down to it i'm a capitalist tool and it's true i mean i've made very conventional choices i um i eventually was an oceanography major did a lot of science it was a dual major with political science as well but you know i became a lawyer i went to one of the oldest firms in the country 125 year old firm i went on to be an executive at a fortune 100 company i mean how conventional can you get and yet in every single setting i was out and not only out i saw it as a competitive advantage to be a lesbian but was it a competitive advantage to that 12 year old who was so certain i mean you must have grown up either fiercely independent by virtue of needing to be out of your family or else incredibly supported by your family because this kind of confidence that early it's very unusual i was i had enormous conviction as a young woman but it was the latter scenario i i almost hovered above myself when i was small and there was some wise old woman living in me that looked down and said this kid is going to suffer developmentally through the teenage years if there is not a well-honed escape plan um and i spent i was very conventionally successful good student president but unconventional in in the execution out i mean well i was i was out only at the latter part of high school i would talk very intimately to my friends but in terms of institutionally being out was the very end of high school and then my escape and by the time i was 16 i had left home and it i left home in a very unconventional way i was a rabid feminist i was very progressive in my political analysis and one day this shiny group of young people came swooping into my small town in canada and i they i would not let them they look like the frosted mini weeds but i have this sense that oh my god these are my people they're gay and i wouldn't let them perform at my high school because i was too hip i mean we were doing things like running folk concerts for bangladesh and doing big rock concerts it turned out it was up with people oh i see that the and the frosted mini wheats i guess exactly and these people um ended up being really uh that organization ended up in a very convoluted way literally saving my life these were this was my first exposure to gay people and i was thrilled uh to be and but had to reconcile i mean people thought they were religious and so on they're not but they certainly were wanting a shiny new america i ended up not going with the american troop because i couldn't quite handle that but i ended up literally running off with the european equivalent of up with people and i spent a year and a half on the road i lived in 10 countries in europe and north africa in the united states but most important i got to be a lesbian i got to live out my life and it was a very exciting nurturing way to take care of myself to escape the conventions of the town that i lived in and to be around gay people at a young age so there was a kind of a conflict i mean i hear you talk about you use the word escape you describe yourself in a sense as your own guardian angel without self-consciousness i don't mean you know that this is a bad way to think because sometimes you do have to be your own big sister or your own best friend i've heard people describe it too but the necessity for escape it was really i know you sort of have said in the past you almost felt like you would like your very life was threatened as though you would be squeezed to death by having to be someone that you weren't or by having to hide who you really were which is the experience of a lot of us i think before we're able to come out and instead of coming out you actually went somewhere geographically where you could be yourself it's true i mean it was also a sense that in being out which inevitably you know i had to be i mean i i absolutely could never i was never one of the people that could reconcile trying to manage all of that to live in the kind of imprisoned closet but i guess that the way it felt is that also my spirit would be crushed i mean i just developmentally i might have walked around and looked like a very successful teenager a lot of gay people do i mean they look good i mean it's a kind of a classic um it reminds me of adult children of alcoholic behavior they look like they're succeeding they're trying to hold it all together but i'm you know underneath just chip by little chip they're being diminished and i knew i had to get into a setting now believe me the authorities and up with people were not thrilled with my pride and how you know we were pretty robustly being gay and lesbian people within that troupe and it caused a lot of consternation um but you should know that organization is chock full of gay people always has been the other people that were there with us is a lot of people escaping vietnam in my troops so it was very poignant i remember sitting in spa belgium um in a very vast we we learned how to sing and dance on a military base um and nixon was resigning they brought in a tv so it was a it was in that time frame and you know i had tremendous experiences living with 60 or so different families over that period of time and my one lesson um is that there are gay people everywhere and and be and generationally everywhere if i could tell one very quick story um one time we were in a little town called brezna italy and i was with a family and i had a host sister that's what we would call them named gabriella and i was flipping through a photo album of this this family with gabriella and i spotted these old photographs from the 20s of these two women that were roughhousing with each other and i said gabriella who are the who is that who are these women and she said sort of in broken italian oh that's my clunky old aunt she lives up the road you know and gabrielle was totally hip and loved to live in the disco she was like a quintessential heterosexual teenager and so we kept flipping and i saw again these women together and i just said well did your aunt ever get married and she said oh yeah she got married and i said oh and she said but it was during the war and it was for less than a year and she really never saw her husband after he went off to war they broke up and i said oh and i said where's this other woman and she says well she lives with my aunt up the road so i arranged for my lover at the time and me to go and meet these two women and i was so excited and gabriella who had hoped for a very hip you know other teenager to go spend time with was going why does she want to go see my aunt and to make long story short we made our way up this old apartment building in italy and up to the door and these this aunt and her friend had no idea why this kid from canada wanted to meet them and as soon as the door opened i stood there with my lover and they looked down on these two kids and they they just teared up and they understood exactly why there was this drive to meet the two of them and we spent the whole evening together and gabriella was going why are you all crying you know it made no sense well i think that's the thing about our um the the joy that no one ever tells you about when you come out when you meet other people when you finally have this sense of feeling like you've come home and you have family everywhere because their shared experience that you're not really allowed to think of in almost every other minority your family is part of that shared experience whether the experience is a negative or a positive or the sort of the unification of it we don't have that and but there are you know there's sort of more steps as we seek that so you came back from europe and then what i came back from europe i was madly in love and i'd had the most romantic beginnings of my lesbian life my lover was from hawaii but we couldn't work out the immigration issues in canada for her to be there we tried very hard so then we ran away again to my pa my parents stood on the sidewalk saying you are not leaving i mean screaming at me and i just said well aloha i mean it was very difficult um and they you know and i think they just they wanted the best for me i was at university of toronto i was one of the best schools in the country um but i left and and made my escape again to hawaii and i lived there for five years and that's really where you became deeply involved in in feminism yeah i mean the women's movement was then it was you know in full gear it was so fun there were conferences and conventions around the country and i spent a lot of time with the uh the you know hanging out in the women's studies department um even though iran you know you always see this you always see these choices in my life i mean did a lot of women's studies but it certainly wasn't my major for example although i got sustenance from it and so i was involved in that way well these parallel tracks that you talk about it's interesting to me because a number of people follow an activist track you know from high school and especially in that time frame other people i know follow you i don't know you call the corporate or the more traditional track you refer to it up until probably even late in you know in your life so far as parallel tracks not intersecting tracks this um sort of more traditional successful good student um going to professional school and the kind of the activist part what was it about women's studies that that drew you well women's studies itself was simply an excuse to get together with lesbians i mean that's the truth because frankly i had read everything before you know most of the things we ended up actually studying and dissecting um you know i had already read and and loved and had a lot of passion about i almost felt like the way in which it was uh you know sort of put into a context and a structure within how to study it almost sort of sap some of the spirit of it even though i wholly think women's studies is essential for all women uh and a lot of men but not just lesbian women so it really attracted me to get to be in the presence of other women studying important material i loved all the activist activities around it as well we did a lot of things on the campus we did a lot of things at conferences and conventions you know have passionately passed resolutions on important issues affecting women but even though i describe it as a parallel track there is enormous cross-fertilization that occurred all the way along and very frankly it i think that it's allowed me to make change occur in some very conventional settings um and that change otherwise would not have occurred at least in my life i mean well i know one of the referent points about that is is your work at apple but i want to kind of get you through law school and to apple because i'm i'm interested in kind of in life decisions what was it that made you want to get the professional i mean is it just sort of you you needed to be a professional or did you have something in mind really going to law school well i have you know the same set of i you know i had a very idealistic spirit as do many many young people that choose the law and i think we have to look back a little bit at my childhood i uniquely experienced my own country poking over a border i mean i observed it from afar and it was more difficult to come out as someone that actually had this passionate admiration for the united states um than it was to come out as a lesbian because this was the heyday of canadian nationalism and i was not a naive person i really understood the atrocities of american history tenement housing in the lower east side in the late 19th century slavery i mean the most painful scourge on this nation blaming scapegoating immigrants in the 30s for disease the japanese internment in world war ii i mean i understood you know how awful america could be to its own at different junctures of history but it was my view then and it's my view today that no country tries harder i mean it stumbles all over itself it's like this wayward teenager that has not quite grown up but i truly believe that in a real sense no country no nation has ever struggled so hard to preserve individual liberties and so in going to law school it was out of a deep deep admiration for the american constitution and you know and it really explained why i wanted to be a part of a profession that hopefully would help to uphold that constitution well you know it's interesting we were talking yesterday about various influences on our lives and i one of the things that is so clear to me and it came out of the or was crystallized in david garrow's new book liberty and sexuality is that there are really three institutions that are when you see them begin to shift in the way they respond to a concerned group etc that's the point at which you see public opinion start to shift the religious institutions the press and the law which is why i think there's such a struggle in congress in state legislatures even in local school boards about who will make the rules and who will make the law so i very much understand what you're saying it's we use the law to create slavery we use the law to undo slavery we use the law to put the japanese into camps we use the law to stop the camps i mean it is it's more than a double-edged sword it is the most incredibly powerful tool so but i was just gonna to to point out not to be you know uh this is not in any way gratuitous it's why we absolutely need um courageous and wise leaders and representatives it's why we need you there it's why we in in the california assembly it's why we need people who have the strength and courage to actually gamble with whether or not they get to return to that chair and so often representatives get into the chair you know they are so overwhelmed with the notion that they get to sit in the congress of the united states that i think at times in some cases they forget you know this the sacred duty that they have in terms of shepherding this nation well it's interesting the roles we each have at the moment i mean your current role which i want to get to but not too fast because i really do like the the journey um and sort of the articulation of it i think it's wonderful but the work that you do in impacting who's there and what they think and what kind of support they get while they are in congress or while they are working in local or state government it's another choice to say we think this is a very powerful place to be because they do make the laws but you didn't use your law degree right away for sort of movement stuff i mean there's still this i actually did oh tell me the um again i mean i did go in and i was a complex commercial litigator and so you can't get more conventional i was very um concerned that the antitrust laws get enforced appropriately and so on and so forth securities law that's what i did for a living but immediately in embarking on my legal career i was involved in very important pro bono work around a number of issues including primarily aids and hiv because when i graduated from law school it was into that world of aids i was the founder of aids legal services a program in northern california we trained dozens of lawyers to provide really solid services to people with hiv but i worked on a number of pro bono issues including what is called redlining in the insurance industry uh which is to target zip codes where there might be high level of populations of gay men so that they could frankly write them out of the insurance history of the nation to systematically deny insurance to people primarily gay men between certain age groups i did a case involving um the notion of the when someone recalls and usually it's through therapy that they have been molested as a child and they have full-blown recall that the statute of limitations not bar them you know from bringing a case against the perpetrator and there were a variety issues i worked on cases that were actually on my caseload um to find the marcos lost millions um and get them back to the aquino government i was at a fantastic law firm that fully mccutchen doyle brown and anderson we might as well give them credit that had become a little bit of a gay mecca in those years in the mid 80s and that really stepped up to the plate in terms of of its duty to give back to the community and allowed people like me to to use the resources of that big firm to really give back to the northern california community so i'm very grateful and and and i find that to be a life lesson over and over again when you give the conventional institutions an opportunity um when you give mainstream america a chance they'll probably fool you well that's a perfect place for a break we're going to take a very short break come back don't miss the second half it gets even better when you party don't forget your safety net anti-german helmet and love gorge man of warship french letter permission slip pig in a blanket ruby slipper rubbery thing in the package condom comedy central the most fun you can have without a condom [Music] hi welcome back to get used to it i'm sheila kuhl your host hostess narrator moderator whatever the heck the proper term is and today we're very fortunate to be talking to elizabeth burch who's the executive director of human rights campaign in washington um welcome back and going forward elizabeth what we were just talking about you were talking about the pro bono work that you did and before we talk about apple which i want to get to next because you were talking about you know sort of give corporate america a shot you might be surprised at what the attitudes are what was it that drove you to do pro bono stuff i mean i've been in law firms and some people do it and some people don't care at all well i believe that it is should be and i think it is in california an absolute requirement to do pro bono work because the institutions that you mentioned earlier um you know when you look back into sort of the middle ages and coming out into the renaissance and the reformation these are the shrouded sacred i mean all the trappings of society and with that flows enormous privilege who says the fair market value of a lawyer you know in corporate america should be sort of three or four hundred dollars an hour i mean that's an astounding thought if you take a lawyer put that person up beside you know a cafeteria worker you know some might say boy it's more important to me to get fed um than to have this person um advocating i mean it's it's obviously an important service to society but there is an enormous amount of monetary reward that flows to that profession and for that reason i think in the institutions where that privilege is built in it should be just built in as a professional requirement well of course and so much of it has to do with sort of the serving commerce i mean the enormous bulk of legal work is really around serving commerce and i think one of the most interesting things about your story is that you were enormously successful i mean you were chief litigator at apple for i was uh director of litigation at apple and i was general counsel of claris corporation the wholly owned software subsidiary of apple right you get their software built in to apple i remember that having had one of the very first macs under serial number 5000. well let's let's go to apple how did you get there and decide to to work at uh what became known i guess or always was a very forward thinking kind of firm but not necessarily associated in any way with movement stuff or anything having to do with our movement certainly well i loved apple i had i watched apple get i watched birth happen i knew in the early 80s that this was you know going to be one of the corporations where a unique set of values was going to be played out and i'll expand upon that in a moment i tried to go to apple right out of law school that's how much i loved the company and what they were doing and well any place whose address is on infinity loop i'm sorry i think that's great that's true infinite loop yeah the what i saw happening and i think i was right when you look out at corporate america today and it's part of this notion of at least opening up your mind and giving conventional institutions a chance beyond any other sector any other institution in america today and i mean the traditional conventional institutions that you look to to to kind of chronicle and monitor change corporate america is way ahead of congress and way ahead of other institutions on the issue of of gay and lesbian civil rights and about half of the fortune 1000 have already instituted non-discrimination policies a number of them including you know the disney company kodak last week um have instituted domestic partner coverage quaker oats johnson and johnson um just instituted non-discrimination policies the coca-cola this week this is fascinating behavior and but this isn't really a lot of people think this is a top-down thing like the ceo one morning wakes up and goes uh queers i love them and they're all through my company i'm just sure of it though i haven't met one i'm going to put in a domestic partnership policy not i mean for instance what happened to scully at apple well uh what happened to to j well let me describe the anatomy of the process because nothing happens top down nothing you know those institutions that you mentioned religion con the law and and the press none of it happens without person to person brick by brick change we sometimes call it grassroots organizing it goes by many names but what it really is doing is it's changing the underbelly of an institution so it can pop out the top and hopefully be a fair-minded progressive stance on an issue really all that happened to john scalia at apple is he was given an opportunity to do the right thing there had been and i only use apple by way of example by the way because dozens of corporations have gone through the exact same series of events um there was the grassroots component apple lambda very essential organization gay and lesbian employee group that got formed at apple by a man named bennett marks and they went about the business of getting a non-discrimination policy went on to uh to advocate for domestic partnership and what happens inevitably in corporations is it sort of is uh everyone picks the right route to sort of start to advocate and to escalate the issue and often it ends up rattling around inside the human resources department or the multicultural department and often no one really wants to take the risk out of these whatever department the employee group might select to go and advocate to the ceo and with a whole heart and a good you know solid um conviction about it and also there's always looming out there the board of directors and all of the customers of the corporation and so what i always tell employee groups is don't forget the ceo the ceo usually got that position because he or she is a risk taker inevitably in some way shape or form they lived through the 1960s and something got stamped into their dna and again it might surprise you that if the case is put forward directly with the ceo sitting right in front of you often they will you know simply say this makes complete sense it costs it's de minimis the cost of implementing implementing domestic partner coverage so this slightly more um uh a slightly older 12 year old baby dick who was so certain of herself and was proud of being a lesbian is that the person who talked to scully yeah but yes and also frankly an executive that cared very very deeply about this company i could not stay at a company that was going to trade on a progressive image and not deliver to their own employees something that is so fundamentally um easy to implement now at the same time were you also doing work in what i guess people would call more traditional activist circles i mean i know that you were one of the founders of baymec which is a like a gather up money and give it to candidates group in northern california right the bay area municipal elections committee i actually wasn't a founder i was on the board and helped to do some of a lot of their development work and to really launch them into sort of much in into bigger amounts of money um very strategic organization and in sort of the sister organization of a num you know their world remember they were all sprinkled mecla and there were a number of them in california and i was also on the board of and very active in the national gay and lesbian task force that's an interesting combination because the task force for years i think i probably first became aware when uh irveshi was the ed of the task force had a reputation of being very very grass roots very pc very radical in a sense and in the sense that people use the term about me which means you believe in the right things as far as i'm concerned um and here you are you're you know you're a corporate lawyer but you're on the board of the task force and eventually the co-president or co-chair of the task force right how did that come about well it was interesting i was basically harassed for so long by the task force to come on the board that frankly to stop it i thought okay i'll go to a board meeting and i fell in love with the national gay and lesbian task force but i was always the lone corporate wolf despite all the rhetoric the actual work of the task force in those years um was quite conventional i mean look at what they were trying to do pass a gay civil rights law well you know they weren't trying to overthrow the government they were lobbying in the congress of the united states they developed one of the cutting-edge violence programs um in this nation the work of kevin barrel was second to none back in those days i loved the kind of intellectual roots of ngltf and i felt that i could bring a way of thinking strategically and frankly i think i did bring you know lots of resources to the task force i think that though ultimately it is it is a left organization and in a way um you know the river wants to go to mambaza you have to let it go um i had dreamed of uh a little bit more centrist approach but the task force is a vital voice i think for the left and we've got to have that voice i ended up seeing i'm sorry well i ended up actually choosing an organization that did business a little differently and and not so in touch with the grassroots and i think it needed change and so i ended up going uh to the human rights campaign fund at that time and hopefully we've been able to commingle some of the organic activism with with pretty corporate marketing and communications approaches and i think i hope and it's reflected that we've brought about um i think some vital uh success and very explosive growth well i had a a sort of a chuckle response when i heard that you were going from being co-chair of the task force to being the ed of hrc because in the way that people who are involved in neither and probably not involved in much else try to set them up as competitors like in a movement you can only have one group doing something when god knows we need everybody doing everything you were in a way and i think i see now that you have before carrying a kind of dust on your shoes from one place to another so that i mean you have a toolbox you have an activist toolbox tools in the toolbox you have the you call them corporate or traditional or just you know the the tools that the majority of america seems to value in that toolbox and wherever you are it's almost like you say what don't they have here that i've got tinker a little bit now what don't they have here that i've got and i think it's very valuable that you're at human rights campaign and i think it'd be good for us to understand a little bit about at this moment in our history at the last two breaths of the 20th century or whatever what what is the role of a national organization like hrc what what is it what should it be and i think most especially what can it be well i saw the the human rights campaign fund and we changed the name during my first year to human rights campaign and really it's a human rights campaign for gay and lesbian americans um it began as a and i'm going to put this in context but it began as a as a pack a political action committee in the early 80s it had developed a very quack lobbying team highly intelligent and effective but what was missing was the notion of a field and the gay and lesbian movement has never in for the purposes of defending ourselves protecting ourselves at the national level and to strategically proactively pass some protection at the national level we have never systematically built a field we have incredible robust organizations locally like the most premier los angeles gay and lesbian community center but the center can't it may now i mean it'll be able to be very effective because there's a new network of community centers around the nation that'll be an essential tool but we've never systematically connected the dots now we're very vulcanized as a movement and we have a chance to move forward into a new era of connectedness and i hope wisdom and maturity to try to engage trust as a vehicle so at the human rights campaign first of all we've changed we've augmented a lot of our activities with a lot more community activities community-based events and activities we've also tried to communicate all the battles the result is very immediate we've seen a doubling of the membership in one year and it's unabated it's still growing we need all of those voices we've also launched a partner program to specifically in a formal way partner with statewide organizations we've done this we've launched minnesota and georgia so far but you'll see a number of them coming on board this year where we actually invest money in like a joint venture we work together and that builds the trust so that when they turn around and want to do statewide work there is an infrastructure there there's they can use all of our membership we use theirs it's collaborative and we win together um in terms of you know as we look just you know the the turn of the century is just a stone's throw away and i'll tell you it's both terrifying and hopeful what is happening in america as i've said many many times you cannot find a poll that will give you less than 70 percent of the nation that says they don't want to see this group of americans hurt or discriminated against it's 74 percent and it's the majority's of republicans democrats and independents which is surprising the other thing that's happening in america right now and we've seen this front and center in this 96 election is that it's gone way beyond pat buchanan who's a walking hate crime they're actually having small microcosm nuremberg type rallies in places like iowa around anti-gay marriage and of course gay people should be able to marry but that's not why they're doing it they have found an incredible scapegoat and they're building on the hate that got thrown around the republican convention in 92 and we see it unleashed tenfold at this point i think it's a complete miscalculation of where this nation is i think it's wrong-headed i think it's mean-spirited and cruel i think it will fail and it'll bring the republican party down but it's hard to hang on to hope and gay people must remain engaged in the political system overcome disappointment that gets layered on us every once in a while and understand that the rhetoric from the republican party the candidates for president does not represent america it is not where most americans are and it's hard to remember that it's hard to hang on to that hope well it seems to me part of the strategy of the right is not only to build up and engage that very powerful emotion which is really sort of hate or directed hate in one segment of the population but to also develop a kind of hopelessness in us i mean i see good people bailing from congress because they themselves no longer see the efficacy of their work they're used to having at least a few wins and they see this and i see the same thing in sacramento there's a sense that you you must go home and you know do what holly hunter did network news take the phone off the hook and cry for 15 minutes put the phone back off the hook and get back to work in broadcast news broadcast news that was it and that's part of the strategy so i'm really glad to hear you talk about combating hopelessness because god knows as gays we're hopeless enough to begin with anyway you have to overcome self-hatred then you have to overcome you the imagined or real hatred from you know your own intimates and your friends when you come out and then you you worry at every step of the way will they not love me will they not love me will they not love me and so our own community becomes so much more important but our own sense that we will prevail i mean remember that they didn't allow slaves to marry and after the emancipation they still didn't allow interracial marriage even though people said now we will not do discrimination anymore we'll have the 14th amendment 13th 14th and 15th we will not discriminate we still don't want them to marry us i mean it was a joke all the way up to guess who's coming to dinner or and beyond you know so i see that we are just in a sense where we can be historically moving through what is essentially the newest or one of the newest movements you know in our track and it just takes more time than people think but our movement seems to be very much in a hurry loses heart oh gays in the military didn't win it's over for me i'm not quite sure why we're in such a hurry i think that one of the most instructive things that people can do um is to read uh parting the waters by taylor branch to understand the real dissection of the civil rights movement in this country for african americans and there was it was a long long journey and there was infighting and there were factions and you know it wasn't clear martin luther king would be the anointed spokesperson and it was and and one thing that that movement did that i think we can learn from is it was rooted in a kind of spirituality that was not to be denied um but we are on a long journey and i just i worry about things like the marriage issue in the sense that we passionately want the choices that all free citizens get in this nation and some things will come sooner than others we've we will see protections in the workplace coming quite soon we're going to see the hawaii marriage decision hit this nation like a tsunami but i believe what it will trip off is actually a number of sacred battles at the state level and those battles will go on for some time i don't think we're going to just see silv silver wedding bells everywhere it's simply another chapter in our struggle but i love a hundred years of solitude when you know the lead character turns uh to another one in in the struggle and says what'll happen if we really slay the dragon we won't get to do this work anymore and there's a part of me that thinks um what a gift to be able to be engaged in this work with each other to have that experience like when i got to see these two aged italian women in their seventies they had lived through mussolini and they had found each other and they eeked out a way to celebrate whatever level of intimacy was in that relationship so there is no doubt in my mind that to be gay or lesbian is an absolute um gift from god and or the goddess or whatever we're in california whatever is your higher power and your oversoul that's my new one well that's good um and you know there is something incredible about the journey that we're on i mean it's a gift as well well part of the gift too is the gift of the outsider that's it's occurred to me in more than one interview that people who accept early on the fact that they are quote different and celebrate it in a society that doesn't in a society that really wants you to conform and especially young people's own society in schools that makes them want to and need to conform that where there is a celebration of this difference there is such capacity to dream a world that doesn't exist or can exist not yet kind of thing and i think that's the gift or one of the gifts in our community in essence we've also learned it a kind of a terrible lesson with aids where we have had to care for our own think up all the solutions often outside of the traditional governmental solutions and deal with death at such a young age that we've also there's a spiritual quality to it that you wouldn't have chosen you know it's a but it but it is a response that's transformed our community and i see that we are teachers as well as struggling and learning on our own how to be a movement that often as an example we teach i mean i know that when when we come out to our family sometimes other family secrets then can be spoken it doesn't even have to be about being gay or lesbian they won't just tell you about your aunt who was or whatever but another kind of secret that no one could talk about that the honesty of our movement um also is exemplary in a way and i'm not sure whether um that sounds right to you but i just it sounds perfectly right i was talking to um there's a group from i was in boston the other day and there's a group that's going to do a study of the workplace behavior of of these gay employee groups and why corporations adopt protections and we were you know formulating what that study would look like and one of the things i've observed is that and and when i say workplace i mean all workplaces i mean little bakeries and you know the people that are brave i mean you know helen in the middle of iowa who who might be a lesbian you know in some small town and takes a stand but i believe what's going on is that gay people are leading and what they do is by leading because they are the most controversial they are the most the ones that it is sort of major risk to be on the front lines they make room for other employee groups so i think there's a parallel to what happens in families given our hopefully long life expectancy you can't even be halfway through yours what do you see for yourself in the future i want to leave behind at the human rights campaign i mean we are on such a major growth path i want to leave behind all of the tools for the next century and one of the things i'm enormously excited about is that for the first time in a conventional electoral legislative sense we're going to find 26 of the most talented young gay leaders in this nation and train them very high-end campaign training we're going to be doing an incredible hrc convention this summer a gay convention in between the republican and democratic convention so frankly we can take back the mainstream um electoral system and celebrate it and grab it and try to return a fair-minded congress so i hope to leave behind all of the right ingredients so that we can continue to be very goal oriented focused to to bring some real deliverables i mean i do turn corporate when i when i talk about how i think we need to think about moving forward so i hope to leave all that in place and then i'm not sure i mean i think it could go in one direction or the other i think it would be very fun uh to have my own company with my new little dream team i mean i've been able to attract not just some of the best gay talent in the country but some of the best talent of our era i mean i truly believe of this century from silicon valley um into the human rights campaign with me one person is susan schuman one of the best marketeers apple ever had i mean she's a wireless specialist everything how all that magic floats around on your cell phone she knows how that works and she's just an amazing manager i mean she's come in as number two to help run the place day to day this is incredible talent and i think when we build i hope a magnificent legacy we can move on and maybe do um some great high-tech innovation but have our own gay focused company you know a little gay ben and jerry's or something a la high tech something but i'm not sure what that looks like i may go the route of some kind of public service or i may do law i haven't you know figured it out i kind of work in four five year increments and the next stage doesn't tend to emerge until the last couple of years a year or two you know of each stage so i've only done one of the five year plan at this point well as a person who i think is in my seventh career as others you know it's you just decide what three things or four things or 20 things sound interesting and instead of choosing among them you just choose what you'll do first and which you'll do next because the interesting thing is people say oh no you know an opportunity will come up and you have to grab it well it is true in an era of term limits in california for instance when my predecessor decided not to run that was a good time to run because i didn't have to run against an incumbent but still who knows that i couldn't have done that in 20 years and you know done something else and i want to have children i mean oh here we are in the last minute of the show and we're coming suddenly into the personal stuff well that that will i mean i don't want to leave this planet without having um you know been able to nurture children i love children so stay tuned for that as well well i think that this is this has been a wonderful hour i don't i can't believe it's gone by so fast and i'm really really grateful that you were here it was a great twist of fate that you were in town for the big dinner and um thank you very very much thank you sheila if you had one lesson that you have learned that you would share with the thousands of folks watching around the country what would what would you say to them come out you know we must come out and trust the heart of the person you're coming out to even if they're thrown off agitated shocked which frankly is a very rare reaction trust that in most cases rob eichberg sort of chrono chronicled this and i'm so sorry he's gone from our earth he said that sort of in most cases well over 90 percent of families you know they come out the other side and they embrace their child so come out thanks elizabeth thank you thank you for being with us and we'll see you next month next week tomorrow whatever it is get used to it [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you