Get Used to It: Ep. 97, "Everything and the Kitchen Sink"

(logo crackling) (upbeat music) - Hi, welcome to "Get USED To It." I'm Sheila Kuehl your hostess or your host or whatever and today we have one of my favorite kind of shows every so often, maybe once a year, bring together three of the smartest people I know in the universe and just talk about sort of more global issues as they relate to our lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered questioning and everybody else that wants to be with as community but not necessarily limited to that. So I'm very pleased to introduce my guests today. Torie Osborn who is the executive director of the fabulous Liberty Hill Foundation in Los Angeles county and the former executive director of our LA Gay and Lesbian Center and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Torce. Welcome Torie. - Glad to be here. - Glad you're here. John Davidson who is senior council at Lambda Legal, which used to have a much longer name but is now just Lambda Legal, our Premo legal arm. I won't say arm but defenders of our lesbian gay community and everybody else's civil rights. Welcome John. - Thanks. - And a new fabulous intellect joining our threesome here. We haven't seen her on our show before, Alicia Lara. Who's the vice president of program at the California Endowment and for those of you that do not live in California and even for those of you who do and don't know this, when we allowed a number of our healthcare concerns to go from not for-profit to for-profit, we extracted from them a bunch of money and established what we called these transitional foundations or can't even remember... - Conversion. We called them healthcare conversions, - Conversion foundations that was it and they do the good works that our for-profit groups may not be doing anymore. Alicia didn't tell me that, I made that up. So welcome, Alicia. - Thank you very much. - Torie let's start with you. This is our sort of January 1st only it's March kind of show about kind of the global picture about what's going on in the world, the nation, the rights of people are human rights issues, the broader social and economic issues and its relationship if any, to our lesbian gay community. Are we kind of irrelevant these days? Are we sort of all over the map? Do we have anything to say about this? Does it have anything to say to us? Is that a big enough or a small enough question? Start anywhere you want. - Wow, well, I do think these are really challenging times. In fact I think they're startling times. In fact I think they're astonishing times. Sometimes they feel like insane times. I think these are times that sort of call on the best of each of us and the creative of all of us. So I think what I'm feeling is that the gay the unfinished GLBT revolution continues, the amazing work just in everyday life that people are having, who are having kids the Gayby Boom continues to explode. Some of the international work is very interesting and it's connection to kind of, to other human rights issues. It's kind of ratcheted up, I think, in the last five years or so, the continuing vibrancy of the GLBT youth movement both as a sector of our own movement and its own linking up, I think with other movements. So and lots of other issues, healthcare and community building and continuing the same issues that violence, anti-violence that have sort of continued to be the key issues, continue a pace. I do think though that we don't live in a lavender bubble, were are not separate from all these other forces that are acting with increasing speed and increasing intensity on all of our lives, the political force, the global forces, the political forces, the Bush presidency that has 'rought havoc on so many not just communities but sort of changed so much, whether you pick your issue, environmental, civil rights. - Well not to mention gobbling up so much money for the Homeland Security and more security and more security when we don't feel all that much more secure as we sort of march away to war and all the money going into that instead of the safety net, the social fabric, the sort of community work that you've been doing. - Well, he's continued the right wing agenda. That's been pretty much dominating the political agenda for 20 years with a little bit of a left word turn under Clinton in some regards not completely but it's just moved forward at such high speed and intensity that I actually don't think that people have caught up with the reality. I think people are still reeling. It's almost whiplash. You know, you read, I was reading the headlines a few weeks ago and surgeons were on strike in West Virginia and threatening in three other states and 50% of the plant species are gonna be extinct in two generations if we don't change environmental laws and global warming and these are like front page. This is only the front page not on A17 and abortion is threatened and right wing judiciary takeover and two million jobs are lost and 1.4 million new people off health insurance and less economic security and less economic growth than we've seen in 50 years, the economic divide continues to widen and we're marching off to war which I call Bush's weapon of mass distraction from the fact that our schools are crumbling and our civil rights are threatened and more than anything else I think sort of a vision of democracy and a sense of hope that things are getting better. I mean this is a country that has a kind of optimism for all of its dark side and for all of its history of genocide to the Indians and slavery and the unfinished work on racial injustice, there has always been this kind of sense of optimism. Well I was thinking about my own movements of the sixties and the great victories that that era gave to the world in terms of raised expectations. At least now those are a lot of the actual policies have been rolled back or are threatened but the fact is the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the gay and lesbian movement and the environmental movement were new movements or resuscitated movements that really transformed the society but you know what wasn't on that agenda? Was economic democracy. Now we had fighting poverty was a big piece of the great society, the new frontier and we all thought really in my youth and my idealistic youth, we really thought we would end poverty. I mean we really did and it was on the agenda but we took for granted and expanding state sector in this country. We took for granted a safety net. We took for granted the new deal we were building on top of the new deal. The great society was building the next layer of foundation kind of economic security. So there was a Commonwealth, there was a sense of a foundation of economic, at least the a modicum of economic democracy on which we were then doing the business that hadn't been taken care of, of sexism and racism and then the environmental movement was really pretty much a brand new movement and I look now and this whole issue of economic justice has to come back front and center. Doesn't mean we stop with the other movements but and so as gay people, as gay and lesbian people as GLBT movement, we really have to start thinking a little differently. I think we need to think of ourselves and this in no way means we abnegate ourselves but we have to take our best selves and we have to say there is a global crisis and there is a national crisis and we have to say not just our struggle matters. We can never be backburnered or we can't let homophobia happen but we have to say, we are part of a broader human rights agenda and we are part of a movement for economic democracy and I don't know how you do... you know, I don't know how we do that. - I remember in when we were talking and looking around before there was a real strong LGBT movement, there were a lot of gay and lesbian people involved in leadership in these other movements. I mean we saw them in the anti-war movement. We saw them certainly in the women's movement, we saw it in the environmental movement. We would comment in the social justice movements of the time we would say, "yep, there's one. and there's one and there's one." - From Bayard Rustin to Jane Adams. - And I remember we had a conversation once about the outsider quotient. That is sometimes when you are an outsider and this was something I think you talked about even on an earlier show, it gives you the opportunity to be a critic in a way that helps you to find action kind of outside the box and I wonder if we can't, I still see that kind of energy in us and in our youth. - Well gay, there is a strain of... I happen to believe that throughout history, gay people have kind of played this role as bridgers, as translators, as artists, as poets, as reformers, as visionaries, we've often had to be chameleons. We've often had to be in camouflage but we do have gift our queerness if you will of thinking ... of creativity, of bringing empathy as outsiders with other people who are marginalized but I really think this is the time that calls on all of us. I think we're in a crisis but people are not. I think people are in denial about the level of crisis everybody's scrambling around. You know the crisis is so deep and so pervasive that it will call on us and I think this is my kind of queer exceptionalism. You know my queer show of it itself. I think it will require us to step from wherever, whatever ground we're comfortable on. It may be within the gay movement it may not be it, you know, your ground, you have to work where you work best but the best of ourselves, the part of us that bends gender, that crosses communities, that builds coalitions that has learned how to be militant and work inside and outside the system. The aids movement was the first movement that I've ever seen in 35 years of working in social justice that brilliantly worked outside the system, direct action act up and inside the system the smartest treatment advocates and the smartest lobbyists, we must do the same. We must learn every... bring every lesson that we've learned from every sector of our own movement or our own experiences and across communities into a broader, you call it a movement, if you're not comfortable with that broader democracy force. - Well, and we're also rule breakers. I mean in a funny way, we have sort of not only gender bent but we have broken rules and I wanna toss this to you John because you're in the rules business. That is in a funny way. I mean, when I went to law school, I thought we would learn about the law but it turned out there was no such thing as the law. What we would learn is how to make a really good argument about what the law should be. So since you're in the rules or changing the rules I guess business, what's going on with that Torie talked about? Our families and how we had, our community has kind of changed about our youth. These are issues that I think you're engaged in these days. - Very much so, I think one of the things that makes our communities struggle different from so many others is that for most LGBT people, that identity is something we don't share with our parents and so we have to come and find a community and establish a network of family of our own that we share that with as well as our family of origin and so that is this new kind of experience of kind of breaking some rules but of also not coming from a place where we may not have in some ways fit in, that I think helps us in in lots of other struggles but one of the struggles that's going on right now where I have optimism, where I kind of see all these things that Torie is talking about around the world but I also see around the world an incredible progress in the rules starting into take into account that we exist. I think for so long LGBT people were just invisible that the rules pretended that there were no LGBT people that we were total outsiders and that had incredible consequences in terms of what happened in our lives and we are now seeing two countries in the world, the Netherlands and now Belgium, where same sex couples can marry legally and we are seeing incredible progress within this country of our relationships beginning to have some legal status beginning to be treated for at least some purposes as worthy of recognition and of taking into account that we experience crises in our lives just like other people and that the rules need to take that into account and recognize that we have loved ones and if they're in the hospital, we should have the right to visit them just as any other person in a relationship could that if that person can't make a medical decision, the law should presume that their partner is the one who's best able to make that decision for them. That would be the person who would best know what that person wanted done and take that person's interest most into account and so we're starting to see that through creation of new legal entities with new rules, whether it be called domestic partnership or civil union or reciprocal beneficiaries, we're struggling to create those rules as we go along and one of the things is citing here in California is we created this domestic partnership concept where people can register with the state and it started out that you basically, all you got was hospital visitation. Well that was important that we got that but then we added on some more rights to it, some important rights of medical decision making and being considered in first position if somebody couldn't make legal decisions to be their conservator and being able to sue for wrongful death so that wouldn't have the situation like when Diane Whipple was killed, whether Sharon Smith would be able to recover and the law started to deal with those situations and then the next year we have added a few more rights, be able to inherit if somebody didn't have a will and you authored a wonderful bill that included domestic partners of being able to have paid Leif to take care of sick family members. So we're seeing that, well, this year there's a new bill that was just introduced, AB 205, the domestic partner rights and responsibilities act of 2003 and it says, well, wait a minute, why should we get these 15 rights that we now get? And not all these other rights and responsibilities? You know, why is it that we can make medical decisions for somebody? But at the moment we still can't consent to an autopsy for them after they die? There's no rule to that. There's no sense to it and I think what we're saying is all right, you've conceded that our relationships are valid, that the law should take them into account. All right do that across the board, at least as far as California law goes and we're seeing that same struggle being played out in Connecticut and in Colorado, in quite a number of states in the United States but it's also happening across the world and one of the things that's I think happened as there's more information sharing, and we have the internet of ways people seeing things going on in such a close proximity of time is that what happens in one country now sparks developments in another country and so that there's lawsuits going on to actually get marriage and I continue to believe that until we have that same choice to marry or not, we will not ever have equality and their lawsuits Lambda has one in New Jersey, there's a case going on in Massachusetts but there's also cases going on in Canada and the develops in one starts having impacts in the other and in that way that gives me some hope because all of those things are actually moving in the right direction around the world. - Well you know there's economic impacts too. I was thinking when Torie was talking about, what is the relationship? Sort of between any kind of work for economic justice and our community? First of all people think we're all rich and mostly we're poor. I mean, we're poor because we haven't been able to in many cases really achieve everything we could. Now in California, we've been fairly lucky. We might be able to go to college without prejudice. We might be able to get a job more or less without prejudice that's not the case everywhere and so a lot of people were not really doing very well but the family and not being able to form a family and not having health benefits that you can share with your family and not, you know, in a number of ways. I think that also was an issue for us of a very hidden, I think, a deeply hidden issue about the impact financially even on our families and our ability even to survive because other families were given much more encouragement, you know, a tax break in many ways, community property even. - There are so many ways that economically we suffer as a result of discrimination and as a result of exclusion, Lambda is involved in the case right now on behalf of a woman down in San Diego, who was her... the doctor, she had health insurance. She was one of those fortunate people through her job that had health insurance but there was only one doctor who she could go see within the plan who would provide assistance with respect to insemination and she had medical condition that required medical assistance in that and that doctor refused to provide her the services because of claimed a religious objection to helping a lesbian get pregnant but the reality for her was that she didn't have the sort of resources to make it easy then go outside the plan. - Right. - For that. So even if she was fortunate enough to have the insurance, the discrimination had an important financial cost to her. Similarly we've done work for a woman, Lydia Ramos, whose partner was killed in a car accident and really a tragic story but this tragedy was compounded by the difficulty that she had dealing with the funeral home and then when her partner's, who she considered her wife, they had had a ceremony, her partner's family, brother and sister came and basically took their daughter away who was born in their relationship. - Right. - And luckily she was able to go to court and make a showing that she should be considered the guardian but she never should have had to have done that and it was really because the law didn't respect their relationship, that the other family members felt free to do this and she and her partner both worked two jobs they didn't have the money and time to go and figure out exactly, oh, well, maybe we could go do a second parent adoption or maybe we should go to a lawyer and do this and that, they did have a ceremony and so they wanted to do that and in some ways they thought that was gonna take care of them and I think it's actually the people who are the least privileged in our society that are most hurt by not having the rules that are available to all sorts of other people to help them in those sorts of times of crisis. - Right well it's funny how we keep coming back to talk about healthcare which is the perfect segue to you Alicia. I mean here you are in the... not exactly in the healthcare business but the endowment certainly is deeply engaged in affecting the ways in which we feel about our own healthcare and what we can access but it's a bigger issue than just our community. Is there a special issue about our lesbian gay community? Are we doing better than other people? Who nobody can get insurance or is it sort of just the same for us as for everybody else? - You know, oddly enough, there still needs to be a lot of research to look at our health as gay and lesbian people. That's not something ordinarily that you see and there are not enough researchers out there that are dedicating time and effort around looking at, are there any particular disparities for gay lesbian people? That you see such in... as you see with research being done for the African American community or the Latino community, you have a lot of data that shows incidents of diabetes among the African American community being much higher than say white people but you just don't see that kind of direct kind of research for gay lesbians. So it's hard to say how we're doing, certainly you track around HIV issues but you don't normally track say for example, whether or not lesbians are more inclined to have breast cancer for whatever reasons. So you have to look at the other kinds of issues that are going on for gay lesbian people like access to care. You know and John kind of touched on this issue a little bit and that is the quality of care that we get and the discrimination very profound in many ways that gay lesbian people face as they're trying to access care. You know, there's been some studies that have shown that about a third of pediatricians, do not wanna deal with gay lesbian youth. Won't do it and I don't know that you would find that that's a pretty high number and then among family practitioners, you still have a high number of physicians who for either religious objections or because they say it's immoral or whatever it might be. Aren't willing to step out of their own cultural beliefs and understand what it takes for gay lesbians to be healthy and I think that those are some of the things that we've gotta talk about. So when we look at the issue of cultural competency, we look at issues certainly of race and ethnicity and language as barriers to help or hinder someone's ability to access care but what we really need to do is put on a lens around sexual orientation and look at the role of homophobia in a person's ability to access that care and then we have to think about how we organize around these things 'cause Torie spoke about this issue of this human rights and I think that's absolutely true because we all are related in that particular way, whether or not you're gay lesbian and or a person of color and or male or female whatever it is and I think it's all together too easy for people to put us all in these really small boxes and say, well you don't have any particular health issues because you're lesbian are gay but because you're poor. - Right. - And lesbian and gay. Now you've got some issues going on, now you can't get access to a doctor and when you do get access to a doctor, you're made to feel pretty bad because you wanna talk about whatever else is going on for you and your health and it's associated with who you are as a gay lesbian person. - Well and if there's a sort of automatic questions I know for women it's kind of like, what kind of contraception are you using? - Right. - And you say, I'm not and they go into this whole lecture about how you need to do safe sex and all of this. - Right. - If a woman is not inclined to come out to her doctor, it's kinda like, well I'm just not going back there. I'm not gonna mess with that. - Right. - Which is another issue of access not only may we not get it, not only may we not be insured but we might opt out of it because of the attitude that we get, which gives our community and I'm sure other communities that feel that there's no cultural competence, another reason why they're not getting adequate care.. - Well, and especially if you work with clinics or whatnot, so much of their funding is so categorical that someone will sit there and say what kind of contraceptives do you use? And you say none I'm lesbian and they sort, okay, now they can't pay for your care. So they say, "why don't you just say condoms?" and okay I'll just say condoms and now I can get a pap smear. and it doesn't feel true because now you've gotta play this game with your practitioner in order to get care and then fundamentally that's a problem and it's something that I think we have to think about and talk about. - Well, yes and of course then we're part of the whole global issue as well. I have never heard people talk so much about healthcare as they have in this past couple of years, now it used to be that no one took for granted that we should get healthcare. So in a sense, we've built up, at you were talking about raising expectations and we have our expectations have become raised in a way that we think of healthcare now I guess as people did about public education before we had universal public education, where there was a real movement to explain why this was a good thing for society. - Yeah. - But we didn't have public schools everywhere century or so ago and now I feel like people are doing that around healthcare. - And I think that's a good thing. I think that the paradox that we... or the dilemma that we have to deal with, is that we all believe that healthcare is a right, in a society where healthcare is a business and at some point these things continue to push against each other and it causes huge tensions I mean you see that all the time and so one answer might be regulate, regulate, regulate because for whatever access is going and then you've got the business of healthcare with a huge amount of resources that try to influence what the direction of that regulation and then it becomes about choice, affordability, all of these things, which basically will scare people and so I think we have to really come to blows on this issue, just like this issue of public education, if we believe healthcare is a universal right, then it can't be a publicly traded commodity it just can't be. - The problem with the universal right and I'll open this up to conversation Is we don't have a right to healthcare. I mean a right when we talk in the law about. - That's true. - A right. It's kind of like, where do you find it? It has to be written down somewhere. It has to come from the constitution. It has to come from somewhere or we don't have it, I mean we sort of think of it as a God given right but it's so unenforceable when it's a God given right. If you know what I mean (chuckles) what the court is just way too remote. So the issue of how we do it but you were talking Torie about, and of course in the movements that you were talking about, we did it by organizing, by changing people's opinions about things. - Yeah, I mean, we didn't have the eight hour day, we didn't have the five day work week. We didn't have child labor laws. We didn't have any number of, I mean, I don't know the legal language but I mean that's now policy. That's now legislative encoded both in the social fabric, in people's ideas of what the right way to live is as well as within the law. We didn't have any of those things until people organize and for more equality and over our entire country's history, is a history of people getting together and deciding to expand or invigorate or reinvigorate what democracy means and what access to opportunity, economic and other opportunities and so I think that on the healthcare issue, I mean I don't know what the best answer is but I sure think that, I have a lot of respect for capitalism. I used to kind of be rapidly against it when I was a young and idealistic youth but I actually have a lot of respect for the resilience of capitalism and for sort of the vibrancy of small businesses and the economic engine that capitalism is. I also think that the market is a lousy way to deal with certain human needs and there has to be some new vision. Now we're in a very conservative era. We don't even think out of the box but I think we have to start thinking out of the box and naming it and starting to say capitalism or the marketplace is a really good way to organize certain things and it's really not a good way. It's a good way to organize goods and services. It's not a good way to organize human needs and start tag-looking at other systems in this country. - And there was an idea for a little while about universal healthcare under the Clinton administration and I think the insurance industry did a very effective job of somehow making, turning that into a joke but we're seeing again, I think at the state level, certain states beginning to re-explore that and maybe saying, all right, well let's at least start with all children should be guaranteed to that they will have their basic medical needs taken care of and that leads to some funny things where the children will get it but their parents won't and then if the parents are sick, well, are the children really getting taken care of but it's at least starting to kind of say, well we can make this a right. We can have a statute pass, a law pass that will say it will be a right. - Political will. - Well it's interesting what's happening. I mean, in California, for instance, at the moment we have at least five pieces of legislation being proposed and going through the committee system about universal healthcare and so the conversation is changing from whether there should be universal healthcare? Sort of, we haven't quite gotten there yet to how do we achieve universal? I mean, really universal healthcare, three of the bills are pay or play, which is what came out of the, really eventually came out of the response of the Clinton administration, which says you're either an employer who provides healthcare or if you don't you pay into this fund and your employees will be covered but every employer will pay something. I have a bill for universal health, truly single payer universal healthcare because 27% of all healthcare dollars go into administration. - Right. - If you have single payer, that is the state is the insurance company you choose your own doctor. The benefits would be incredibly better than most people have no copay. The taxes you would pay would be generally less than your premiums are now because it's 21 billion of wasted money in terms of what we spend on pharmaceuticals, et cetera. Anyway but the healthcare crisis is on everyone's mind kind of now. (mumbles) - It's not just the uninsured or the uninsured. are more and more. - In the middle. - Not just the working poor, the poor, the working poor, but the middle class everybody knows somebody who's lost health benefits as a result of cutbacks at work or had some catastrophic illness that's wiped out their house and it's a middle class crisis in this country with whatever it is now 44 million or I don't know what but the numbers are, but it's become it's... and in this country for better or for worse, if you don't have the middle of the country, thinking about it, it won't reach the public agenda. The problem is that some of those mainstream middle America issues, whether it be social security, access to drugs, healthcare are being sort of preempted by the right wing agenda, whether it's the war agenda and partly what that is probably about I think but it's as if there's this whole other conversation happening about the war on terrorism and the war on Iraq. When ordinary people from poor working to middle class to upper middle class people are in crisis about basic issues, healthcare, education, job security, basic economic and sort of just the very basic thing, can their kids afford to go to college? Can front page of the New York times had this whole article about woman who went to Penn for Lord's sake? It's an Ivy league college. She cannot afford to go to law school. She's working as a legal secretary, 'cause she has to pay off her debt and this is the privileged ones that went to an Ivy league school. This country is an economic crisis in it but it's affecting everybody and I think finally the healthcare crisis may be the one that sort of catalyzes, a broader sort of class response or something, 'cause everybody's affected whether you're poor or middle class and maybe it will push the agenda to the left. Finally maybe that'll be the catalytic issue I hope so but meanwhile here we all are, whether we're gay or not here we all are in this nonprofit sector, whether we're advocates, whether we're working at foundations, whether we're activists or whatever and the dollars are shrinking, the government dollars are shrinking, the state tax is gonna be repealed. The rich are getting richer. I mean the basic economic kind of, I don't know material basis for doing anything, you have to cut 25% from the California budget. Is that not correct? - That is correct. - I mean that's bone try cutting 25% from your own family budget. It's not fluff. You know, you're getting down to borrowing. - It's not only that but we've got, if we laid off every single state employee, we wouldn't even be halfway to our deficit. - Well, I mean it's insane. - If we closed every prison. We would only be 4% towards our deficit. I mean, people think, (mumbles) they have to get it mostly in healthcare and education. - We have to start talking about revenues. We have to start talking about taxes. We have to start talking about re-baking the pie on the revenue side but this is exactly what the people in power don't want us to start talking about because this is where you would find 70% of American people. I think if you started, if we started a campaign that was as aggressive as the right wing has been on shrinking government about some of the economic justice and economic security issues that I think are on everybody's daily life, people are thinking about this stuff, healthcare, jobs, economic, social security but see here we are again, we're not talking about gay and lesbian issues and this is what I think is really the challenge is how do we weave this? How do we become citizens of the world? Of the country? Bring our identities with us and yet, you know and I think this is, I mean, I don't have any of the answers. I just have this instinct that until we stop just caring about our issue. I mean, when I look at, if we don't start really building coalitions, I mean you are gonna have the advocates for the poor people and the advocates for the gay people and the advocates for the domestic violence people. Everybody is fighting over crumbs. I just got back from, you know, Liberty Hill raises money where a non endowed public charity and I can see the desperation you probably experience it yourself, or you're very Zen about it but of these larger foundations, while government is shrinking, they're saying philanthropy, you take care of business. You do what is government's job to do. How the hell do you take care of 40%? 50% of Los Angeles county lives in poverty, not below the poverty line. 'Cause the poverty line is absurd but lives in working poverty on $35,000 or less for a family of four or more, 50% of Los Angeles county. I mean how is one foundation or my little foundation gonna help take care of these massive number. You know, you have 30,000 people coming off life. They're not welfare limits. - I mean and I think you're absolutely right. - So we have to change policy. - We're not, we're not and I think that with foundations and I know you all do this really well, is that we have to fund the advocacy and we have to fund the organizing because we could put every single penny into the services which is not that that's not important but at the end of the day, who's holding folks accountable and making it okay to talk about raising taxes and I think that going back to this issue of this boundary crossing is how we have to organize ourselves because it is far too easy and we see it again and again, it is far too easy for me to stay in this box called the gay lesbian box or the Latino box or whatever box and not pay attention and so, you know, it's okay if someone else gets taken out, at least it wasn't me and I think we have been lulled. You talked about being lulled. We had good economic times. We had a democratic president for a while. We were all okay and there's nothing like having George W and this economic downturn to wake everybody up and say you better figure this out because the next thing you know it's $400 billion or million dollars or a gazillion dollars in a rock. - Right. - And we can't even feed our own people. - Well I think there's a lesson. You know a lot of the work that I do is about trying to say that the same rules that apply to everybody else should apply to lesbian and gay people I mean I find it so funny that we get accused of wanting special rights when what we want is the same thing that other people have and so we're fighting to say, you can't have one set of criminal laws that apply to the intimate sexual relationships of straight people but when gay people engage in those same acts it's a crime. We have a case it's being argued before the Supreme court on March 26th. This challenging Texas is sodomy law, which only applies to the same sex couples and the basic rule is same rule is for us is for everybody else but that applies if when gay and lesbian people have something, it should be available to non-gay people too we can't think about only for us. It has to go both ways and so when there are people in our community who are privileged, they need to think about what about the people who don't have those privileges? - But John then no one would serve in the military if they had everything we had. We got about rights and responsibilities. We named that act in California, the rights and responsibilities because it really means that we have to also be allowed to pick up our own responsibility and I don't know whether our community as a whole is very engaged in all of this. I mean everybody's sort of regular there, everything else that everybody is in one grand large city or grand Faloon, as your cousin Kurt Varnigard would've said but sometimes I just feel like there's sleepwalking not just our community. - Yeah it's a lot of America's sleepwalking. - Yeah. - But you know there've been plenty of times when we've slept walked, sleepwalked in the past and they've been just a few days before the Dawn, when people have kind of woken up, I feel as if, I mean, call me crazy Pollyanna but I feel like we're living in two worlds and one of them, you know, like the dinosaurs, the oil addicted old white boy, captain, corporate guys who are shielded from any of the economic insecurity that is affecting middle class America as not to mention poor America across all racial and secular orientation lines are sort of railroading these ideas and this kind of ridiculous notion that of America as free to consume gas, free to buy things as if being an American is about your SUV and your material goods. Well I don't think most Americans think that, I really, really, really don't. I mean look at the voter apathy, look at the signs of social disease of spiritual disease in this country but I feel as if there's like these dinosaurs roaming around and they're kind of at their feet, boy they don't bother to look down there's this other world coming alive. I have never seen such organizing among young people. I mean, not certainly since the sixties, on campuses in high schools around justice issues, it may be education reform, it may be around juvenile justice or police reform. It may be the queer use. - But a lot of it's been about global economic issues. - And globalization and global economic issues and you know they talk about another world is possible. The global justice activists have this kind of, another world is possible. It's a little vague. - But that there are global economic issues, you know. - Totally and the young people do and I'll tell you something else, young people don't sit in those boxes. I mean young people don't say I'm a woman first then I'm a Latina and then I'm queer and in what order, they don't think like that they are the postmodern, the next generation coming up, they cross boundaries. They own that and they get the economic stuff and so, you know, to me it's our responsibility. I would speak as an older, you know, as an elder, in my fifties, been around a while, it's our responsibility to present the lessons that we learn, the wisdom that we learn to the people who have a whole lot more energy and a lot in some ways more vision and for whom this new global world is much more their world and queers or gay people or GLBT I don't know what to call us anymore. You know, we'll be in leadership. We've always been in social reform movements for all kinds of reasons but we'll be out, which means our vision and our leadership can be clearer and sharper and be much more in the mix and not just working on behalf of other people but it isn't, you know, it's like Rabbi Hillel says, "if I'm not for myself who will be? If I am only for myself what am I?" And that's the spirit of it to me, we saw that we put our agenda on the back, burner it's that we have to come with some bigger agenda. That's why I've been talking about human rights and economic justice and environmental economic and environmental justice. I mean, I don't know what the words are. I think we're gonna... - You know the end of that quote also is if not now when? - You are right. - And I think that that's the other thing is that I feel that, as you said, feel that sort of energy building and I don't know, I mean, in our own little worlds, I mean, my little world is little government world and yours is a little foundation world. Yours is a little healthcare foundation world. - There's a big foundation world. - I know it's all big. I don't mean any of it is truly little but in our own way we're forced in our day to day working lives we think about it. You may be more fortunate or I may be or each of you on different days saying, oh we get to see this sort of global picture but I think it's both a problem and a promise not to do identity politics because if the young people think, oh I'm not gonna check those boxes then you and I know that the funding's not gonna go for programs that really target certain populations and so far race for instance, has been like another label for poor because we're not measuring everybody's sort of income but we'll talk about how many of these? And how many of these? And how many of these? And if we resist that, then we have to sort of see whether there's going to be a cost to that I don't know, because it can be manipulated if you say to young people, " good, good don't identify with anything that's fine well just be citizens of the world." Then those dinosaurs, that with their SUVs are still gonna own the world because when we don't identify as something with each other then we see sort of like Americans always think that they better protect the rich because they might be one, one day. At least that's the only thing I can figure out that they all feel that way. - I just think we need to move beyond the boxes, we need to all engage in border crossing and whatever that I think we are in the hour of the Wolf, the darkness before Dawn, the tectonic plates are shifting. I mean, I see so much brilliance poetry and music and youth movements of all kinds and the women's movement still has lots of juice and the GLBT movement is extraordinary in the face of this right wing attacks 20 years and it's only gotten bigger and won 20 to 30 points depending on the poll. I mean, it's really... it is a lesson encouraged that this movement in the most conservative time in this country's history, at least in a hundred years, has made such extraordinary gains, it really is, has forced itself to become a popular movement and issue but we have to change it. Something is gonna have to give because as long as we're all fighting with each other for shrinking dollars and not talking about, "well, let's bring government back." We are accepting the terms of the debate that the dinosaurs are throwing out there and we're just fighting among ourselves and for shrinking dollars and we're keeping on trying to sort of hone very small pieces of the pie and we have to re-bake the whole pie. - But one of the things I do see among young people is that it's not necessarily that none of the young people claim an identity. I think they have a more, actually more sophisticated notion that identities can shift and that what they do claim is alliances in a way that I don't think we did when I was younger so that the movement that we've seen in high school campuses of gay-straight alliances was wait this shouldn't just be an issue for gay people. This is an issue for all the students here about how do we really make school a safe place and a place that is embracing of whatever your identity happens to be at a particular moment and that again gives me hope. - That's a really good point. - Well and I would agree. I would say that this, how you identify in multiple ways is about, I wanna check all the boxes. You can't make me check just one box. - Right. - And so here I am, I'm gonna check all these boxes because when you put it all together, your race, your ethnicity, your gender, your sexual orientation, there is a newness that it is created that is extraordinarily powerful and I think young people today really sense that and I think the more we see that in very public ways, be it an art or political environments or whatever the environment may be, it stops people, you see it constantly, it just stops people there and it is an amazing thing and I think we just are gonna see more and more of that and people who are gonna say this is all mine and I'm completely responsible for it and taking care of it and using it and all of that and I think this is an exciting time for that. - So what are the great barriers? What is the pushback? I mean, we talked about some what the federal government does. It always strikes me that the same people who don't like the environment or who don't wanna protect it perhaps they love it but don't wanna protect it. - Don't believe global warming is happening. - Don't believe global warming is happening, who are beating the drums of war who are really cutting back everything. - The people who put their own personal profit motive above all else. I mean I just think when you reading the paper about this executive who got a $5 million bonus last year. - When his company went under. - And it's just like, wait a minute, why is it that okay? And then that we've cut the tax rates so that he wouldn't have to pay the same as lots of other people. - In addition from his company, which, oh he doesn't have to pay back. - Right and then if he were to die, that all gets passed on to some somebody else who had nothing to do with the creation of that wealth, other than being born into it. - Well but it's a sense of community. I mean I know this is such a cliche but when my parents felt that they were part of an American community whether they actually were not, they were pretty poor. You know, they hadn't benefited greatly from it although, they had changed from very poor class to working class, which they saw as a great leap forward and I think many families did. I got to go to UCLA for $58. I mean it was an incredible benefit but they thought of themselves as part of the country, the way FDR used to talk about how they were all in it together and I think that this notion of greed has always struck me as being anti communities, anti communal, that is people truly believe in my colleagues who believe in greed really believe that you earn it you should keep it, that it is almost like God loves you and like Calvinism, like God loves you and gave you money. - But that's fine but the reality is that the top 1% in this country and corporations pay less taxes now than they did 30 years, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, 60 years ago, 70 years ago. So it's all very well and good. We could all agree that individuals who build wealth should keep much of their wealth but the rules have been so changed by the people at the top of the last 20 years that most people don't even know that most people don't even know that wealthy individuals were paying 70, seven zero percent income tax. - Only on thee top increment not on their whole income. - Yes. - Right. - And that corporations during world war I and world war II were paying 90% income tax that in the last 20 years there's been such a revolution, a right wing revolution and anti communities, as you put in anti Commonwealth, anti-American, I would say revolution, that in the words of Kevin Phelps, who is a Republican, we have a plutocracy in this country. - And they then are able to say, oh well no new taxes, which a lot of America public who are struggling with paying what taxes they do say, oh, no I don't wanna pay any more taxes. Whereas it shouldn't be, that it should be looking at how we need to restructure our tax system and not that that's restructuring that we should top of our list be thinking about is how dividends shouldn't be taxed. - (chuckles) Right. - And people, it's been people always because this country is about kind of individualism and making it and people come to this country and they wanna get ahead and you know what? That's okay the American dream is very powerful and it's almost a faith in this country but the fact is that previous generations were able to say, when it got too outta whack, something has to change. You know, government has to help redistribute opportunity and individuals do have to give back to the society as a whole and tax laws have been different than they are today and we can go back to that and then if we create more government, we create go back to kind of a much broader sense of mutual responsibility. - Well you were talking about the fact that people who benefit from education, from research, from even when there's entrepreneurs that have made money off of research, there's federal dollars that went in to help them. - Sure. - Many times with their education, many times with the research at the universities funded a lot of it by the government, although corporations are doing more and more now but no one sees what they've benefited from and thinks I must give back maybe because we don't even see ourselves as a country anymore. - But I'm also thinking about the quality of life issues. Even among the wealthy, privileged people there is, out of control, depression, anxiety, spiritual malaise in the richest country, in the history of the world. - Could this be because things don't make us happen? - Right materialism and individualism, we have extreme individualism, extreme materialism and they're supposed to substitute for God or divine awe and community, and sense of connectedness to one another. Well, I mean, it just doesn't work. So in the long run I think what we're gonna, I hope have is a sort of a revolution in values that will unite people across. There's a lot of people who are privileged in the society who don't like the way things are going now, - Right. - And are beginning to be organized and I mean I know I'm like a die in the world, sixties activist but it's time for a revolution again, where we're all part of one big movement but I think it's gonna be a revolution in values and take the best of America and the best of the kind of promise of democracy and great pluralism that this country offers out but we've gotta kind of come out of our boxes take some risks, join together, build allies, learn from each of the experiences that we've had as GLBT people and other parts of our lives and build some sort of I don't know, what a new global justice democracy movement or force or vision and I really think that we're gonna see extraordinary those tectonic plates are shifting. There's gonna be some earthquakes. I think it's gonna get worse before it gets better but I'm tremendously optimistic and we will, I mean, queers will never go back. We'll be in the leadership of this whatever the heck it is. - Well I know you won't believe this but there's like 30 seconds left in the show and I was thinking about the old Helms Bakery in Culver City which is part of Los Angeles, where it says on the side, "where there is no vision that people perish" and I think it's absolutely true. I wanna thank my guests, Alicia Lara, John Davidson, Torie Osborn. I wanna thank you for joining us. We've gone pretty wildly into a lot of things that we normally don't talk about and I for one I'm totally delighted and I hope that you will have just these kinds of conversations at work around the dinner table everywhere because we really do need a new vision in this country. I think we can be a part of it and I hope you'll get used to it. (upbeat music)