Get Used to It: Ep. 38, "Voices of Our Lives: David Mixner"

what's up [Music] hi welcome to get used to it i'm sheila james cuell your hostess and uh today we're bringing you one in an occasional series that i'm very proud of interviews with people who have been not only the movers and shakers of our time but also people who've left their mark on our movement and on our time in history i'm very very happy today to welcome david mixner who's been an activist for three decades on social justice civil rights movements a number of them as we'll hear and who of course now is a writer well he's always been a writer but now we all know he's a writer because of his wonderful book stranger among friends if you haven't read it i'd like you to run out after the show not right now and buy it welcome david thanks sheila it's nice to be here i'm so glad you're here i am too well it's um it's a pleasure to be able to spend a whole hour in a sense talking with uh with you about you because i think people read a lot about you and hear a lot about you and of course i think you're one of those people that people have said david mixner i have an opinion about him or i know that he did this or i know that he did that but i don't think anyone until the book came out has gotten much of a picture the full picture actually i've been very successful maintaining a pretty private life while i'm doing public work and god knows there's never been a shortage of an opinion about me that's true and that's good i mean dialogue is good debate's good it's healthy and there's not enough of it well i guess i want to start by asking you if you were to identify a couple of major themes that have run through your life what would they be unbelievable and unshakeable determination to live a life of non-violent deeds and actions both in words and actions and on intolerant of injustice and that no matter what no matter what the odds and no matter what the difficulties and no matter where you're at in your own personal life good people must speak out against inappropriate behavior by government but this is a lesson that we learn in a way it's not a lesson that i think we're born knowing um tell me a little about your your background where i grew up where did you come from i grew up in southern new jersey uh i was probably the last of the generation that didn't get their television set into their low teens so the world that we knew came through life magazine and the philadelphia inquirer when mr schaefer delivered it in 1938 dodge my parents my dad worked on people's farms he mostly worked on a corporate farm and my mom worked shift work in a glass factory and they had good they were good folks though uh we were poor so was the whole community poor it was a farming community and it was in the country so we didn't feel like we deprived and we had nothing to compare it to actually uh except some sort of abstract world out there and i think the thing that was most determined in my childhood was the fact that i knew i was different i knew i was a homosexual from my earliest years that wasn't surprising me that i had the knowledge what surprised me was that i knew that i couldn't tell anybody i'm not sure where i got the information that i couldn't tell my family my religious institutions my friends or anyone in my community because no one no one talked about the issue where i grew up but somebody must have talked about it somehow for us to have learned and i totally identify with this that there was such a thing that it had a name even though the names were usually unspeakable or unspoken and that you could not tell i mean some information filtered well i think there was information out there i mean uh when people would get arrested in parks for homosexual activity gay men uh their names would be printed in the newspaper and they would be whispered conversations between my mother and father about what shame they had brought to their family into their community there was a young man who was my age in school who was much more courageous than i or anyone else i knew at that time who clearly was much more secure with his homosexuality but he was quite persecuted for it and ended up being sent away to a private school by his family to get him out of town to another school and end up killing himself at 16 and i remember my family's reaction upon his death dad came in and said mary so and so son killed himself and and they sort of said oh that's terrible we've got to take a cake over and bake some food to take over to their house and and my dad looked at me said well you know they're probably better off that he's dead and my father's a good man you know and he's not a mean man he's not a hater he's not a someone who goes out and get riled up with people who are different but it was just almost an accepted way of life that this young man who was bright and and nice and kind as far as i knew uh was better off dead had this terrible terrible tragic flaw yes and how hard for his family too how hard for me to hear it because i knew i was just like him but i meant the attitude was that's right not only i mean no one it sounds like no one said oh that poor young man would have tortured young man he killed himself but rather the victim was the parents not the young man the victim was to parents who this young man had shamed and and uh degraded them in front of their neighbors in front of their friends uh it wasn't him uh he was uh he was almost uh non-existent in most people's mind except this the perpet perpetrator of this horrible deed against his parents so we have these two threads that are either going to converge or maybe ultimately seem to be the same thing this sort of hunger for justice that i i i only met you probably what 15 20 years ago but it was already there and very strong and having been expressed and this feeling of shame about who you were a knowledge of who you were but this feeling of shame where does this justice thread start the justice threat i think started with from the outside world i felt shame i felt that there was nothing i could do i immediately started changing my dreams my aspirations for myself my plans for my life because i did not think any of the dreams that my friends had at that age would be fulfilled you know when the teacher said does anyone here want to be president i didn't raise my hand because i knew i couldn't be though at that time it was still a noble goal to aspire to be president when you were a young man well some people still wanted wait for your inauguration thank you the the other thing that was concurrent when i was growing up was the birth of the modern day civil rights movement it certainly had existed long before my birth but little rock was happening uh the integration to force integration of the schools in 1957 rosa parks was refusing to give up her bus seat four students were sitting at a lunch counter in greensboro north carolina and say i'm not moving until you serve us as blacks and integrate this lunch counter and those started to come across in the pages of life and eventually when we go to television and i was in awe of people who had the courage who clearly was viewed as different from the rest of society separate from and and who people had strong disapproval especially in the neighborhood i grew up it was a segregation was a way of life even in southern new jersey at that time and uh and they who had the courage to fight back who had the and could do it with dignity and i was absolutely captivated by dr martin luther king who gave a philosophy and a reason and a prose and an elegance and a dignity to to their actions and i didn't have the courage to fight for myself then i didn't have the courage to say who i was and uh but i could certainly i knew support their courage so do you think that's it's interesting because so many members of our community who were not out then and and many who still aren't out are drawn to to social justice work there's this and it's not just gee i think i'm going to be a good person and go do it and i a little projection here but i always almost felt like i couldn't not do it not for somebody else but like there was this driving thing and i didn't think until we began to talk of how those things were meshed is that what resonated in the civil rights movement i think i think not only among gays and lesbians but i think among jewish americans who went down in record numbers who understood the persecution for being jewish in this country who had to change their last names so they could get jobs in the 30s and the 40s who were denied accommodations themselves in many hotels i think all of us who have experienced the pangs of bigotry and discrimination cannot find it very difficult to remain silent whether it's done to us or someone else because we feel the pain and we know how close it is to us well it's not it's not exactly forrest gump but it looks to me in reading your book and knowing you and just knowing where you've been but i mean you have managed to be in so many not managed to be but volunteered to be in so many of the the you know the critical historical movements and moments of our time and and originally i think through a a route that many would see as more political tell about that well i sort of accidentally got dropped into the political component it wasn't my plan actually i wanted to be a poet so much for that the fact of the matter is is that both john kennedy and martin luther king opened the world to us as young people at that time john kennedy told us we had a responsibility for the planet we lived in that we should go off to these far away exotic plans uh lands as as youth and and donate our services to help the poor michael harrington was writing books about poverty in america and opening her eyes to poor children in appalachia native americans in the mississippi delta it was an extraordinary time where people felt responsible for the kind of planet that we we lived in and and and thousands and thousands of young people were going south to register uh black voters to get arrested in sit-ins and freedom rides and getting beaten and some even gave their lives to fight for the calls of justice the only crime i could think of at that time was to remain silent and not to be a participant in it and that quickly my eyes was opened in opposition to the war in vietnam by dr king who said that we could not have select morality that injustice here in the south was also injustice in vietnam and became a very active participant against a war in 1968 senator eugene mccarthy and then senator kennedy ran as peace candidates against the sitting president we were all told that this was unthinkable to criticize a sitting president that we should remain silent and and and and uh wait until after the election before before we took the war to the american people uh but what was happening was affecting millions of lives people were dying and people's lives were being destroyed by this war and we once seated lyndon johnson and and at 22 23 24 years of age young students were running states we're going door-to-door canvassing we're becoming press secretaries and we're accepting responsibility for their fate i learned very very strong lesson that people with courage can create great change and that never to accept the limitations of society who tell you you have no right to speak out uh because generally and usually they're wrong well it's true and i there's a portion in your book we were talking about after the uh the 68 convention in chicago uh trying to find a way to to be very honest about how angry we were at mayor daley um and and a sort of a critical moment i thought it was a really good example well you know again when bad things happen people don't want to deal with them you know it's like the relative who's sitting in the room and everyone's pretending they're not there you know the old 600-pound gorilla there was enormous brutality in chicago and bloodshed and hundreds were arrested and a number of them were being placed on trial simply to come to chicago to express their opposition to the war in vietnam and i felt very strongly that this had to be made public the press had moved on to sexier stories and the politicians issued their words of regret immediately after the incident of chicago but had been forgotten and we i was very fortunate because of my involvement to be appointed to the mcgovern commission to reform the party this is the commission that made it mandatory to 50 percent of women be included in the political process and young people and minorities and we forget that in 1968 a few white men picked all of the delegates to the convention lester maddox mayor daley maribar and pennsylvania and the people almost had no say whatsoever until this the whole process was opened up and we had a hearing which was the first time the democratic party had returned to chicago after the 68 bloodbath in chicago at the convention and uh senator mcgovern and senator stevenson and senator bai did not want me to come to this hearing even though i was a member of the commission and we had a rule that anyone could attend uh and there was a huge battle in the room behind the stage with senator stevenson pounding the table demanding that i not be allowed into the hearing room that because i had every intention of asking mayor daley when he appeared before the commission to issue amnesty to all the people he had arrested in the nation to apologize and to apologize for the violence that he was responsible for more than the police because he was their leader he provided the tone he whipped up the fear he created the tension instead of using his position of authority to heal and to bring people together and uh so finally in an agreement to sort of keep me contained uh it seems to have been a problem that has stuck with me all my life in an agreement to keep me contained uh george mcgovern agreed to ask my question if i promise not to ask any questions at all during the hearing and i said this is not important whether i speak what's important is whether the issue is heard so we went out and i kept my agreement when they came to me the press was sure that i was going to ask questions so they came to me and the lights came on and stuff and i said i have no questions sir and everyone just thought whoa what happened to him that's right exactly boy that room back room must have been rough and then they came to george mcgovern and he said mary daley will you uh as a healing gesture as an attempt to bring people together which also spoke very highly of george mcgovern bring people together and issue amnesty for those who are on trial in your city and apologize for the violence in the bloodshed at the convention so we can move forward as a party mayor daley wasn't thrilled uh he pounded the table and shook his finger at us all and said uh we're you're destroying the democratic party and stumped that of the room you radical radical people yeah uh you know it it the lesson though is as much current as it was then there is this feeling uh that in election times that we're not supposed to discuss issues we're not supposed to conduct dialogue around issues we're not even supposed to disagree you know i remember as a child going to the salem county courthouse and there was actually live debates between two candidates outside an error gone by and we let them know the people let them know what was on our mind the farmers were talking asking about crops and it wasn't any press there wasn't any lights it was the people sort of expressing their concerns and arguing with the candidates you know as part of the debate uh uh whether mostly about agriculture but uh you know about other things that were of concern to the people in our community and it taught you know and i have always felt that elections were a time for issues for discussions for differences to be aired should run for the election at my level that's exactly what happens nobody has any respect at all you know that's the way it should be sheila but we do get to talk about issues i mean i remember i i was opposed to prop 187 and i had was completely able to explain why and my district voted for prop 187 barely but you know but the perot people wanted to meet with me because they were adamantly pro 187 and we had a wonderful dialogue and ended up actually you know fine with each other i have no idea if they voted for me but it was it was the element of debate and discussion that was really important but you you have been able to engage in in these issues and really to shape the issues sticking for a minute with sort of with the democratic issues i know that a lot of people know that you are uh that you are a friend of bills but i mean an old friend of bills but i don't think many people really know how that first came about and how you met president clinton we met in 1969 after the mccarthy kennedy campaigns a group of staffers decided i think to have like a big chill anti-war reunion on murphy's vineyard to see where we should go in our opposition to the war which uh from those meetings sprung the vietnam moratorium the big demonstrations against the war in vietnam and uh taylor branch who wrote the book parting the waters and rick stearns who's now a federal judge asked if they could bring a friend of theirs who they met at oxford bill clinton to this meeting and we all said sure fine clinton actually wasn't a very active participant either in the civil rights movement or the anti-war movement and he came and we became pretty close friends real quick we had we were born three days apart actually in 1946 and we both came from small rural poor communities and we were among the few people at that meeting who actually knew people in our classes who had died in vietnam who when we went home or expressed our opposition to the war had to face the mothers and the fathers of our classmates who had died in vietnam and uh and that made it as an instant bond you know because many of the people in that room were the sons and daughters of harvard you know and he wasn't he wasn't and i wasn't right and so we became close friends in the sand dunes actually the marshes and the sand dunes of martha's vineyard was that a problem for you coming from your sort of your background um i mean again a little projection i grew up working class and one of the things i always worried about was you know as i started to go in wider circles there were too many forks and spoons at the table i didn't know exactly what to do did you feel oh yeah and i developed a persona to deal with my insecurity it was sort of the good old dave persona you know joking at my own awkwardness sort of a a little more classy gomer powell you know i mean golly we have enough civil war here to fill the whole county um and i learned to observe you know and and the uh the other thing that was just critical uh to opening up the world to me and teaching me how to survive and it was libraries my parents did not have money for books and my mother and father took me every saturday to the woodstown high school library in the public library and taught me how to read books and made me check out books and i think one of the greatest tragedies today in this country is our shutting our libraries absolutely well any aspect of public education exactly public schools public libraries it seems like they're under attack there must be some anything that are designed well exactly i mean anything that will make information and access to knowledge available to all people who choose to pursue it uh is coming under attack you know our libraries are closing at four o'clock in the afternoon just as the kids get out of school we're not putting computers and poor people's neighborhoods so that they can learn and not be computer illiterate by the year 2010 when they have to go into the job market young people who are not learning computers today it's going to be like not learning to read and write when i was growing up they're not going to be able to function in the real world they're not going to bank shop all of the things that are necessary to do by computer uh it is a it's a very appalling trend you know it's one thing david i've always uh admired about you is that you you're a weaver of themes um you see the relationships between the various movements uh and and they're all about justice for you the anti-war movement the civil rights movement the women's movement the gay lesbian movement that kind of integration and the ability to explain it but alongside of that in your own personal life at least early on because we haven't yet even come to a point where you've talked about being out there must have been an incredible loneliness i mean you're so close to these people even the title of your book stranger among friends yeah i mean it's uh my journey as a gay man was a difficult one i don't want to portray it as a unique one because unfortunately i think there's way too many like mine [Music] but uh the first man i fell in love with in college uh was a fellow athlete at arizona state university and about six months after we started going together we were the first for each other it was like a pepsident commercial sweet and it was sweet it was lovely and it was gentle and it was kind he was killed in an automobile accident and i was convinced that god was punishing us for what we had done i was absolutely convinced that because of what we had done he had been killed so for about the next five years my sexuality consisted of parks made up names made up backgrounds lies about who i was lies about where i worked anything to prevent anyone from becoming close to me from putting themselves in danger anything so that i would not be disclosed or discovered society encouraged lies encouraged to seat on my part then in 1969 after the mccarthy campaign four students myself included a woman named marge glencar sam brown and david hawk formed the thing called the vietnam moratorium which was launching major massive demonstrations against a war in vietnam and it was very heavy experience i mean when it covers a time magazine and life magazine and from one office and 320 dollars in march by november millions were participating and we had three floors of a building and stats of hundreds and every campus in the country closed down to discuss the war i mean no one will ever convince me of our lack of capacity to create change i've seen it firsthand and during that period we had meetings with nixon who wanted to know if i believed in god and i had meetings with kissinger who tried to convince me at night that he was a dove even as he was conducting massive bombings during the day and eric men who threatened to throw us in jail with conspiracy indictments unless we stopped protesting against the war which scared us very much but i also met another man during that period everyone else had someone else i mean uh all of the other coordinators everyone in the office especially in the 60s i mean this was the age of hippies and free love and you know and you know breaking down barriers and exploring new turf and i would go home alone every night to an empty room and with no one to talk to and no one to share and no one to even say i existed that i existed and i met this extraordinary man named frank who i fell head over heels in love with and i trusted him more than anything in the world and that last year was someone i could even just tell my name that was a victory and i didn't and he knew that i was in the moratorium because of all the press and so i didn't have to tell him that i didn't have to lie about that and he was a washington bureaucrat and his apartment was just the most warming loving trusting place it was filled with yates naruto and tennyson and mahler and beethoven and family pictures and incense burning and candles and about a month after we met sheila he said he had to go away for the weekend on business and so as he put on got dressed in the morning and put his plane ticket in his jacket and bent down and kiss my goodbye we agreed to meet uh the following monday at the hilton coffee shop at 16th and k street and so i very eagerly that morning went afternoon went went to meet him and was greeted by two men in the blue suits and they sat down at the table and they said frank's not coming and my first reaction given the experience of my first love of dying was that frank had been killed in an accident of some sort and and at the same time they did that they poured on the paper table photographs of frank and i engaged in sexual activity there's no way to describe the devastation no way at the time that they put the photographs on the table they flash badges now i must say that i wish today i'd had the president of mine to look at the badges carefully and examine them my eyes were riveted to the table sure riveted to the table i don't know who they were i don't know if they were official government agencies or or maybe the beginning of the gordy litty operations for the nixon administration i do know that they gave me three days to become an informant on the anti-war movement which was out of the question or they would send these photographs that were on the table to my parents and to the press they left it took me a while to collect myself in fact the clerk thought something was wrong and asked if i needed help and i got outside and i ran to frank's apartment i had a key but obviously it's been spending a lot of time there and opened the door and there was nothing inside there were four white walls wooden floor uh no photographs no poetry no music nothing not even a dust ball and it was pretty clear i had been set up and i hadn't decided to kill myself because certainly informing on my peers and doing anything to belong in the vietnam war was out of the question for me i went on a drug and alcohol binge for three days somewhere got the presence of mine i only can give credit to god because i don't know where it came from that they probably couldn't send it that maybe the taxpayers wouldn't be thrilled with their money being used this way and i went out and they were waiting and i had made up my mind that if they ever did send it i would kill myself instantly if my parents ever said anything and because at this time i was well known nationally i could not think of any bigger disgrace and a horror that somehow i might have belonged to war in vietnam by who i was was almost more than i could bear but i looked him in the eyes and said send it to him as if i didn't care and and then for months every time i got a call from mom and dad i thought they had just gotten a photograph they never did get sent i didn't come out then i just lived in fear and terror and when did you come out came out in 1930 1930 1930. no i came out i got a little shook up by that story well it is i came out when i was 30. because the i'm thinking this must have been an extraordinary act of courage everyone's coming out as an act of courage but considering the punishment that you felt you had and realistically you had received um it's i mean it's it's really a story of of overcoming adversity in so many arenas but this one especially i think is really exemplary well like so many people in my generation anita bryant bought us out of the closet i think she'd probably be appalled she heard that i certainly hope so i would like to see her involved but she bought us out of the closet she started these initiatives in 1976 1977 the very first initiatives to use the ballot as a way to oppress homosexuals and it was in dade county miami and she put it on to repeal the sexual orientation clause of the civil rights bill in dade county she won two to one there won two to one in eugene one two to one in saint paul wichita it was sweeping the nation it didn't look like it could be stopped and then they went one step further and in california they put on proposition 6 the briggs initiative that would make it against the law for homosexuals to be school teachers and they had trouble getting anyone to run to campaign against it it was leading two to one they had a very distinguished able man named don bradley a campaign consultant but they couldn't put fill out the staff like because it was viewed as a leader in fact many our own community did not want to oppose it because they said well let's just challenge it in courts we can't possibly beat it we can't fight back we'll have to come out of the closet and they came to us several times and asked us to do it and i just knew that we'd have to come out of the closet and my best friend at the time peter scott said we got to do this and i said i can't and he said if we don't do it you won't work anyhow you know it will catch up with all of us sure and so through a process of i finished coming out of the closet i had told some people previously i finished the process and and so anita bryant bought me out my coming out when i first told my family which was about a year before that no one politically knew i had had a nervous breakdown my mother and father had a terrible time coming to terms with my coming out uh and uh yelling and weeping and banishing me from the house and it was very difficult very painful and the combination of all those years of oppression the blackmail of death and devastation and finally losing what i thought losing my parents so eventually they came around took a toll on me and i had a breakdown then and i just bounced back from that and just reestablished myself politically then i uh like most things i do these days i not only send a letter to all my political peers you know i've been very active nationally in politics but i enclosed an envelope the fight to briggs initiative when i came out dear fred i know you know this already but i wanted to tell you i'm gay please send your contribution it was almost exactly that bad and we raised some good money off of it actually yep and but almost instantly people in politics treated me differently the day before they found out i they would ask me my advice on foreign policy or domestic policy especially in relationship to poor people they'd asked me about issues of justice they would ask me to sit on committees to advise senators and congressmen the very next day after they found out i never no longer was asked many progressive democrats returned checks to me because they didn't want my name on their disclosure forms politically after i came out people who i'd worked with for 10 12 years you know and and eventually over time sheila i have gotten to a place in politics where now they eagerly seek out the support sometimes and eagerly seek out the money and the votes but they still really don't want to deal with us on personal terms and that's how i got the title strange among friends i as you know it was very critical of the president on gays and lesbians in the military and went to jail a mutual friend of the president of mine who works in the white house and we both have known this individual for 25 years and he came to me was very upset the fact that i got arrested by that time the president wasn't speaking to me for a while and he said how could you do this to us suddenly they were the victims how could you do this to us we have known you for 25 years we are your friends we have been there for you we walked through your nervous breakdown we walked through when peter died we walked through when you came out of the closet we are your friends and that's just the way he said it and i looked at him and i said what's the inside of my house look like and he had no idea he said tell me what peter's funeral was like after he died of aids and he had no idea because he hadn't been there neither had any of them i said tell me if i have children and he got the shock looked on his face and he had no idea if i've even had a family i said am i in a relationship now do i have a partner he had no idea i said you don't know anything about me we are political allies but you have not even taken time to know the very basics about my life and that's where the title grew out of stranger among friends well it's it's so fascinating that i mean people who are elementally gay activists who are wary of electoral politics uh in great part there can be a sort of great joy about working in that arena and you have worked in that arena and you have been a leader in that arena but much of your heart is in the bridge between that arena between our movement and governance uh more than that public policy because without the bridge between our community and public policy we cannot as a community live full lives because the government like it or not is ubiquitous it has so much to do with us and i see this every day so there must always be a place where the door is not open for you even though mostly i guess you're fully embraced in our community although probably wary about you in the community because of that political involvement yeah the political involvement yeah you know it's it's a little bit of times like a man without a country yeah you know and that's okay that's okay i mean i've had a very rich uh fulfilled life i mean david you're not even 50 yet yeah i know but i've been a witness to a lot of history and and have been fortunate to uh to interact with a lot of participants in that history uh but i've learned something you know it was interesting after president clinton was elected everyone assumed that i would go after an appointment or set up a lobbying firm in washington dc and make a million dollars a year cashing in on all those years in politics with my friend and buddy in the white house and that they would all have to come knocking through my door to get approval now lord knows i i had opinions of how i wanted to see this administration proceed and the kind of caliber people like roberta achtenberg who i believe should have been allowed to serve and talk about courage she's one courageous individual what she went through to get confirmed but you know there's a responsibility that goes along with all of this you know and if we expect politicians to act in a responsible way then we must live our lives the way we want to see the world be we can't have dual standards i deliberately turned down an appointment for a whole set of reasons but among them was the fact that i didn't want the community to think that i was trading in on all their work their work their votes their money not mine i didn't own it we immediately set up a transition team in the gay and lesbian community with the heads of all the organizations ngltf hrcf at the time of the victory fund you know where they processed the candidates for appointment you know when they reached an agreement i helped lobby vigorously for them like bob hattore and roberta achtenberg and bruce lehman and the other thing is is that i decided not to go to washington up an open office because that's not what i'm about it's not what i'm about i thought that i would probably have to speak out against some of the president's policies not as quite as often as i am right off the bat exactly yeah you know and uh and there was a moment of an incredible euphoria uh we were filled with hope we didn't really think our friends might have to die of aids we thought that when he said that there is no battle too tough or too strong that i will not be by your side that that had taken care of us that we had turned a corner and in many ways we had we had jumped light years of not decades ahead having witnessed other movements into a position of power and influence in this country and as a major part of the dialogue but we hadn't gotten to the promised land yet and there was a lot of work to be done and a lot of work to still be done and so we had a president who sort of really thought he was going to be somewhat messianic and really didn't think he had to show courage or pay a political price because he didn't in the campaign and was just going to do this for us and be revered and our pitcher was going to be in his living room our living rooms for the rest of our lives right like an appalachian family with john kennedy exactly right and uh and we thought that he was going to take care of it for us you know i was somewhat guilty of that you know i was somewhat guilty of that i mean but you know we had lived 12 years of darkness under reagan and bush it was such a contrast it was such a contrast and it is a contrast i mean a man who said as our friend kate clinton no relation um said the first president who could ever say the words gay and lesbian without spitting up well and just saying those words were a victory for us absolutely i mean i remember long meetings how to get candidates just to say the words that was the issue no substance nothing about a cure nothing about this just to say the words just to even acknowledge the existence of aids after all it took ronald reagan to 1986-87 before he acknowledged his existence of aids you know in his in his speech so we were excited and then we got involved in the military thing you know and we have a tendency to think on the military marriage colorado that leaders sit in a room straight or gay and pick the issues that we as a society will deal with you know and that we have that i wish we could you know god i wish we could but it's a myth sheila it's a total myth it is brave citizens who lead us and it always has been you know dr martin luther king and the montgomery ministerial alliance didn't put rosa parks on that bus they didn't even know she was going to work that day she just refused to get up and they ran to catch up with her courage roy wilkins and whitney young and shirley chisholm and barbara jordan didn't tell those four students in greensboro north carolina to sit at that lunch counter they just did because they were no longer willing to live in a segregated society and the leaders ran to catch up with their courage it's true but there were organizations i mean people think rosa parks was some kind of housewife that got on the bus one day and was tired and that's not exactly not true at all she was extremely active in her community right and uh and and it was part of a time of rising expectations but i i do hear what you're saying i mean these the the the heroes often of the time the people who really lead are often the people who touch someone's hearts you know the real heroes but they don't have to do it every day that's right and leaders really do that's right and people who govern really do and it is messy well you know what they say there's two things you never want to watch being made sausage and law and public policy is a very messy thing it kind of happens accidentally and what you're saying is nobody plans this stuff no one plans it i mean in the euphoria of the election the clinton staff were more concerned about who was going to be white house chief of staff than any issues they were on top of the world as well as they should be it was an extraordinary moment and an extraordinary accomplishment on their part but no one wanted to deal with the gay issue in fact they were a little taken back what an integral part we played in that election one out of every seven votes for bill clinton was a guy or lesbian vote over three and a half million out of 20 million raised for the dnc was gay and lesbian money and so suddenly they didn't want to look too beholden to us you know so there was a little bit of a plantation mentality to set in and i said we'll take care of you just don't be too visible don't make too much noise and we were new to this process we have never even before in our history as a community be invited into a transition process ever so we were learning the new rules and the new games just as much as many of them were and because the president hadn't felt any backlash during the campaign when he talked about the military when young ensign keith meinholt's case came down he was asked about it at a press conference he had no briefing he hadn't notified the joint chiefs of staff he hadn't notified the head of the armed forces committee he just said yeah i plan to sign it i don't think he had any idea that the reaction that would come from it and it was instantaneous because as you know sheila there's a difference between the rhetoric of a campaign and the reality of putting it together when you're in office and and we were off to the races the genie was out of the bottle and no matter how many of us would have liked to put it back in and said give us time let's do it right let's go bring brief to joint chiefs let's get our community ready uh we the history doesn't give us that luxury and the press doesn't give you that luxury either i mean i never have so many microphones shoved in my face in my life as when the right wing has brought these uh bills to bar the recognition of gay marriage that would be legal in other states which of course isn't even happening anywhere yet just like anita bryant however it's often our enemies that drag us even more into the spotlight and once there we go well let's just talk about it and we turn out to be quite articulate and rising expectations go up again i mean i would have settled happily for domestic partnership legislation last year and this year i said what are you handing me the second class stuff for you let's talk about here and people who said domestic partnership was the worst thing that would ever happen to the nation are now advocating and there's a way to avoid marriage exactly why don't we give them three or four things and then they won't ask but the only crime is not to fight back the only crime is to remain silent and the only crime is not to fight and deal with the hand that history has dealt you and the fact of the matter is six months ago over 70 80 percent of the people this country opposed same-sex union and the latest poll had it at 58 under political terms that's an extraordinary job uh we are educating the american people we are eradicating the myths uh we are building bridges uh we are creating knowledge and it is the opportunity to do it now not next year not two years we can't close our eyes and hope that it will go away and it will come back on our own terms that lawsuit was fired filed by two courageous couples a gay male couple and a lesbian couple in hawaii just like that lunch counter because they didn't want to live this way anymore right and they didn't check with us did they they didn't check with us they didn't tell them they just were not going to live within dignity any longer and we're running to catch up with their courage that's true it is true you know the interweaving of themes also in in your life and your sense of justice seems to have come together pretty um powerfully in your work on the holocaust museum will you say a little about that well you know i mean i think that again there's two things that are important to understand our responsibility to remember and learn from history when we think that so and so would never do that or such and such could never happen in this society we only look back need to look back to history when good people were saying the same things in nazi germany in the 1930s to understand that society is capable of great evil if good people remain silent and so from that perspective the work of the holocaust museum is essential to us as a society hundreds of thousands of school children go through that museum every year for many especially given the textbook censorship that's going on in some states it is their only exposure to real information about the holocaust when they go on that school trip to washington i think it is one of our most important national monuments and the other thing is it's important for us as gay and lesbians to reach out to all communities whether it's the jewish community we're raising two million dollars uh to support the work of that museum and they in return are establishing an endowment for the study of gays and lesbians in the holocaust or the welfare bill for poor people or african americans on affirmative action and defeating ccri here in the state well i i think that's a lesson that you have really taught by the way you've lived i mean the your idea of the great peace march um which as we both know didn't turn out exactly the way you planned it but still the the notion that people ordinary people would walk across the country to demonstrate to witness really in the you know in the in the religious sense um how they would stand for peace it was a magnificent undertaking uh you described some of the failure of it having to do with your own hubris but i think it's important to acknowledge that you see i think that we code over too many of our own weaknesses and we code over failure as if that that is a terrible word failure in the pursuit of good things is bound to happen if you keep at it long enough you know i don't know of an individual in their life who in some form or another hasn't experienced failure uh the great peace march and the things that did not go right with it was my responsibility it's important for people to hear that that i'm not afraid to say it it was my responsibility and some of it happened because of decisions i made that were just incorrect politically some of it happened because of my ego and some of it happened because of events outside my control but it was important not to gloss it over you know because it is important for young people to know that they will be setbacks there will be difficulties there will be times where it seems like we'll never move forward you know and if you keep at it and if you don't let those moments those dark moments hold you down and people tell you that you no longer can participate you can go ahead and create great change you know paul simon has a song the title is you got to learn how to fall before you learn to fly exactly and i think one of the lessons too because i see you as a great risk taker in your life now there are times when you would say no no no i didn't act courageously or whatever but overall looking at this this 50 years the first 50 shall we say oh please no real risk-taking and you have taken them but you continue to take them why because when you fail you fail i mean it's one of the interesting things that you learn is that you're hurt you it's something could have gone terribly wrong which ain't dead yet and you really have to go on and and take the next risk well there's even more important points there's a lot of people who can't take risk at all because of their status in society they are so discriminated against are so poor are so excluded and so oppressed that for those of us who still have voice of any stature whatsoever to remain silent as we're licking our wounds and feeling sorry for herself dishonor all of them our silence it is criminal for us to remain silent uh yes it was painful it is still painful for me to talk about the pro-peace march i it was difficult time for me uh it was good intentions but it didn't work out for a whole lot of reasons there was a very courageous story that took place on that of the marchers who came out of the collapse and was sheer determination on their own made it across the country there is an enormously courageous story about their effort and and their and their epic journey across the country again a wonderful story of out of the ashes to phoenix arising but for me to to mope around to be the victim because i'm in pain because it didn't work out the way i had hoped because i'm not popular anymore you know this whole thing about being popular and liked would have been an unconscionable act when there's children dying of lead poisoning when there's children not being fed when our school lunch programs are being cut back when gays and lesbians are being beaten up on the streets when people are dying of aids how could i possibly sit on the sidelines is there anything that would keep you from speaking up these days no nothing i you know sheila in many ways aids have liberated me i've lost 258 friends to aids 85 percent of the gay men i was struggling with in 1980 are dead at one time i looked at the president when we were having a meeting in the office and i said you don't have anything i want except freedom and a cure i said i don't want an appointment i've seen the inside of air force one i've been upstairs in the white house and some of my friends have better china than you do you know i said just i don't have anything left to lose when i put peter scott away when he died [Music] suddenly i became free there was like nothing left to lose and truly nothing left to lose except our dignity and our integrity and our freedom and i wasn't about to give it to him well it looks like your book is going to do really well i can i mean if it looks to me walking in the bookstore like it's going to do great and certainly it's it's well reviewed and well thought of and everybody i know is reading or has read it and i know that there's never just one book in a person what's next for you david or what what things are next because i know there's never one thing on your plate one of the things i saw and have learned from this community that i'm a part of the gay and lesbian community is extraordinary courage over the last years in the process of coming out in fact fighting aids fighting for choice ordinary citizens rising to extraordinary heights accepting a credible responsibility against insurmountable odds and so i'm going to write a book a second book about that the ordinary citizens and the power to create great change well i guess we've got maybe two and a half minutes left if i if i judge right what would you say we have an audience all around the country now and i don't think it's just lesbian gay people though my hunch would be primarily after this so far long life of activism of commitment of really unwavering love of justice what would you say to the people especially young people watching you right now i'm saying that we're at a turning point i think that the passage of the welfare bill was a wake-up call for all of those who love justice and believe in progressive and liberal politics if we can pass a piece of legislation that puts a million children into poverty and have it signed and not a peep be uttered then something is seriously wrong and just like in 1968 when older america remained silent as their sons and daughters were being shipped to vietnam and it was the youth of the world who woke us up i think it's their turn i think they have to save our children save the poor and once again awaken our conscience to the to the problems of this nation and what if they're saying to themselves what's that got to do with me well it's got everything to do with you because if you walk down the street and don't feel safe it's most likely you don't feel safe because of drug abuse or poverty if your taxes are going too high and going down the drain it's most likely they're going too high because they're not being spent wisely and it's not we're not planning for the future we're trying to do patchwork if you can't swim in the river because it's polluted it's because no one's doing anything about it has everything to do with you it's the whole quality of life you cannot build enough gated communities to protect yourself from the world you live in it is our world and it's our neighbors and we're going to accept responsibility for it or we're not david mixner thank you very much this has been great the quickest hour i think i've ever spent in my life thank you for being here thank you for being here um you know the theme of our show is of course that there's so many of us now who have said this is who i am this is who i truly am now i'm free to say it and what we want to say to the rest of the world is get used to it thanks for joining us [Applause] you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] food