In the Life: Ep. 1004, "History & Humor"

on this edition of In The Life Lifting voices and Spirits bringing the magic of music to people with AIDS at home with cartoonist Alison Bechtel and her company of comic strip characters plus Disney Dynamo Tom Schumacher and gay Pioneers who paved the way for Stonewall all this and more on in the life good morning in the life is funded in part by the H van Ameren Foundation additional support provided by Michael a lepin Alan middlesdorf Alan a shoe Peter Zimmer and Jim stepp the Colin Higgins Foundation The Guild Foundation the Mitchell Gold company in the hopes of eliminating all types of fear and Prejudice and the annual support of in the Life members like you thank you welcome to in the Life America's news magazine on gay and lesbian culture I'm Catherine Linton stories about AIDS and HIV may not grab the headlines as much as they used to but the epidemic is far from over and the numbers associated with the disease are devastating over 30 million victims worldwide 19 million deaths and more than 5 million new cases diagnosed in the last year alone the campaign to give Karen Comfort to people suffering with AIDS continues to be waged on many fronts on this episode of in the Life you'll experience the medicinal power of music as Andy hum tunes into performers who are lifting their voices to entertain and educate about AIDS and we visit cartoonist Allison Bechtel and her comic strip characters at her home in Vermont and will introduce you to the manned behind some of the most popular movie characters today Disney's Tom Schumacher there were no limitations creatively put on Aida we have Financial limitations obviously I have to work within a budget and has to make sense but I had the resources to call upon almost anybody and say hi I'm working on a musical so I actually say to Elton hi I'm working on this thing do you want to write on it I look back at gay history and a group of pioneers who are in the Forefront of the fight for civil rights The Stonewall Rebellion is generally viewed as the event that marked the beginning of the modern gay rights movement but years before that 1969 protest in Greenwich Village a handful of men and women had already been staging quiet but courageous demonstrations against job discrimination in the government lifelong activist Barbara Giddings and Frank kameny were among those who engineered the pickets in places like New York Washington DC and Philadelphia laughs this is the front of the famous Independence Hall in Philadelphia and this is where we had gay picketing demonstrations every July 4 from 1965 through 1969. people think of the Stonewall Rebellion as the start of the gay civil rights movement that's a myth there was a movement starting back in the late 1940s and it gradually evolved and it picked up steam and we were doing this very revolutionary picketing in the 1960s before Stonewall ever happened Frank kameny was instrumental in organizing the pickets not only in Philadelphia but also in Washington D.C where he keeps an informal Archive of the picket signs in his attic these are these are stacks of various gay related picketing signs from a variety of demonstrations in Washington and also Philadelphia in the middle 60s um activism and expressions of dissent hadn't uh reached the levels that they did by the latter 60s and picketing in some such places as the front of the White House was the extreme expression of descent par Excellence things hadn't gone beyond that yet there had been a big debate within the gay movement about whether or not we should have public demonstrations and a lot of it was based on the fear we thought boy if somebody knew you were gay they'd Stone you to death or you know attack you you know we didn't dare walk holding a sign saying that we were homosexuals see in those days people thought it was very much smarter to pass and that people who didn't want to pass were in just inviting trouble nobody was out there I was probably certainly for example in my group down here I was the only person who used my own name those early pickets were scary it was scary because there were so few of us who could take the risk of being so public for example what if my boss sees me on the six o'clock news and fires me or what if my picture appears on the front page of my parents Hometown newspaper and causes grief or shock waves in the town and what if some bystander starts throwing insults at us or Worse bricks or stones and what is the government going to do with all those photographs and tape recordings that they're taking of us we had a dress code and it's easy now to look back 35 years later and laugh at it and make fun of it because it was a very strict code but I think it was appropriate for the time and I strongly supported it at the time and I think it was right then because we were trying to get across a very unpopular message we didn't want people to gawk at us we wanted them to gawk at the messages on our signs and and in our leaflets well the philosophy was to make us look normal the way everybody else looked so did we succeeded so well that as Frank Hamilton said some people thought we were actors I remember specifically when we picked it in front of the Civil Service Commission my uh um my Approach was they we want them to employ us therefore within the normal mode of the day uh we have to give the appearance of being employable we were representing we felt all those hundreds of thousands and millions of other Americans that were homosexual this is Independence National is what we saw it was a chance to remind Americans on July 4th that we were equal citizens and what better place to do that than in front of the Liberty Bell pendants Hall is where the thing was done both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution we're right there it was right after the parade the July 4th parade and the folding chairs were stacked up still and then everything had to dismantled the bleachers so then we came on and picketed I just felt a sense of commitment and a sense of passionate involvement you know it didn't bother me if people were negative and there was a surprising lack of negativity there on the part of bystanders I think they they were surprised but they didn't give us any trouble that I recall there was a photographer there who told me that all I needed was a good man you know just or perhaps he even said that all I needed to do was sleep with the man and and I I said something like I didn't need that or something and I just filmed you know and he stuck out his tongue at me otherwise it went off fine and then at the end uh on a signal everybody we had you know signs on sticks and everybody flipped down their signs the demonstration was over once they're flag lawing at music that was from the loudspeaker started and we saw the flag along and we all stood and put a right hand over our heart just to show that we were good Patriots and we respected the flag you know we were first class American citizens and we had wanted that's a message we have wanted we had wanted to tell everyone from the beginning we're first class citizens we are not marginal people I feel that those demonstrations led directly into Stonewall in 69 and that without our demonstrations starting in 65 Stonewall would not have happened because what they did was to create the Mind Set for gay people who had never ever before done this to demonstrate publicly to dissent publicly to to do things out in the open and not nobody had ever done this before the 1969 demonstration took place just about a week after the Stonewall rebellion in New York City a lot of people who were fired up by the fight against the police at Stonewall came down to Philadelphia or came from other cities into Philadelphia and joined the demonstration and it was the largest we had ever had there were about 150 people that sounds like very little today but for us it was a huge turnout here we saw men in blue jeans t-shirts we saw a mixture and it was that like the transition from the old to the new all of this it was sort of a movement pulling itself up by its bootstraps if you want to pursue the metaphor we created the bootstraps and then other people pulled and pulled and pulled and up it went pretty soon you have a marches on Washington with hundreds of thousands of people you know coming out in a picket line in 1965 was downright revolutionary for that time it took gumption it really took gumption and the conviction that we were right and the world was wrong we were just at the start of cracking that Cocoon of invisibility thank you they have names like Mo Sparrow and ginger and be cautioned they are dikes to watch out for or maybe you've already encountered them they're characters in a comic strip of the same name created by cartoonist Alison Bechtel Bechtel is one of the most successful cartoon artists in a genre known as lesbo and gay Comics this comic book style first appeared in the 1980s long before gay characters came out in mainstream newspapers and magazines Bechtel has been drawing Dykes to watch out for for 17 years and what started out as a feature in one feminist monthly now appears in more than 65 Publications Nationwide foreign my strip is not a defense or an explanation of lesbianism or it's that's like the ground that's what I take for granted and and the character's experience is normative Allison Bechtel is a university Arts graduate who grew up one of three siblings in a Pennsylvania Farm Town she has lived in places as varied as New York City Minneapolis and Northampton Massachusetts but for the past nine years she calls rural Vermont home where she shares her life with her partner Amy we've been together almost eight years she's trained as a playwright so she's really helped me a lot with my work how to dramatize it how to make the stories more gripping she's sort of my director I started trying when most kids start drawing which is like immediately I mean as soon as you can hold a pencil and I just never stopped I started drawing these lesbians these kind of wacky little drawings in in the margin of uh letters to a friend of mine from college I called the first one Dykes to watch out for plate number 27 as if you know I had 26 other of these drawings which of course I didn't but I that concept of a series really kind of interested me and I started doing more and more of them I heard about Allison bechdel in a store not very dissimilar from this one the women's bookstore in New York back in the early 1980s the owner of that bookstore said you really need to read the local newspaper the women's rag because there's this great cartoonist that comes out every now and then and her work is hysterical and you'll love it like one of my very first fan letters was from this woman Nancy biriano and uh uh she asked me if I was interested in doing a book and the book came out in 86 and I've stayed with Firebrand ever since we've done I think 10 books all together now I hate trying to reduce the characters to a single sentence because I worked so hard at creating these complex um three-dimensional people but basically the characters all different aspects of my own personality yes my characters are probably a little a tad more diverse than the average community in this country but I think that's important I know what it felt like to me growing up as a lesbian and never seeing my myself represented anywhere I know how much it means to people just to see themselves most sort of the central character in this strip of all the characters she's probably the most me Sydney is this she's the evil women's studies Professor Sydney is Moe's girlfriend Clarisse and Tony they've been together for almost 20 years at this point they have a son and they're like this really stable pair in the community and then over at this whole other bunch of characters um this sort of group household where Ginger and Lois and Sparrow and Stuart live it used to be just Ginger and Lois and Sparrow but then Sparrow got involved with this man Stuart and there's been a lot of sexual identity upheavals going on at their house look in a perfect world I wouldn't have to call myself anything but for now by Dyke works for me okay I think I'm a Butch lesbian in a straight man's body soft Butch Maybe she just has an uncanny ability to create a distinct cast of people to give each person a distinct physique and personal history it's one of the hardest things about creating a Serial strip is creating more than one person who doesn't sound exactly like you one of its weaknesses is also one of its strengths Allison has always been very good about integrating politics and social issues into the strip well after I moved to Vermont I really started to worry like how am I gonna keep up with things because it's really very quiet here so I read a lot I get you know I get like a stack like that of gay and lesbian newspapers every month um I get lots of other magazines and newspapers and uh but the the internet has been my savior I used to do this all the time before I could afford Polaroid film um I just look in the mirror and pose myself so all the characters they really do look like me like if they have my hands and move like me I think Allison has created a tradition of presenting unusual multifaceted portraits of of women in comics portraits of women who are intelligent and have a sexiness all of their own changing your body to conform to a rigid conventional gender identity is just more binary thinking what was wrong with being a Butch Dyke he doesn't feel like a Butch Dyke he feels like a gay man oh my God Geraldine from Rainbow Automotive I used to have such a thing for her I mean him I mean don't get too excited to do he goes more for the stud horse type to me success has been the fact that I'm earning my living at this you know that I really get to keep doing it every day and that's all the success I could hope for well that in a Pulitzer Prize she was approached by Universal press Syndicate which is one of the major newspaper syndicates in the country about originating a strip for them it's not that they wanted to Syndicate Dykes to watch out for they wanted to Syndicate a much more sort of cleaned up kind of cartoon strip she turned them down like I need to add that somehow being a lesbian saved me from going over to the dark side because you know I grew up I was just this kind of average oblivious white middle class American kid I didn't know how the world worked I didn't know what was really going on and it was only after I realized I was a lesbian and I was suddenly outside of that little comfortable system that I was able to see it I was able to see how it worked and what the nasty underpinnings of everything really were she does a phenomenal job of identifying the comedy and the tragedy in situations that gay and straight people can identify with across the board Allison's trick is to originate all these discussions within a queer framework but she does it with a very Universal touch yeah I just I wrote for lesbians and gay men and that's all I really care about but in truth I've always wanted other people to read my work but I don't want to have to sacrifice the authenticity of the characters who I write about I don't think she's necessarily assimilated her cartoons I would almost argue that Society has sort of assimilated around them I just read an interesting review of my work I was talking about how lesbianism is becoming mainstream and assimilated and that I don't mainstream lesbianism rather I Dyke's dream heterosexuality that's going to be my new motto gay and lesbian youth are coming out at earlier ages and many schools are becoming more and more open to their visibility but some of these kids are facing a backlash fortunately students across the country are coming together to form groups called gay straight alliances where issues are discussed and schools are made more supportive and safe by forming gay straight alliances these students are changing the way communities deal with difference student Pride a nationwide Coalition of these groups hosts a website that offers information and support to learn more about starting a gay straight Alliance in your community look for a link on the end of life website at inthelifetv.org I'm Robert lafoss and you're watching in the life on this episodes in the news activists take to the streets in two major cities the world March of women involving more than 5 000 groups in 159 countries culminated last October 15th to the 17th in New York City and Washington DC we are marches and rallies in both cities mobilized women to demand that leaders eliminate poverty eliminate violence against women and ensure equality between women and men the Marchers included a large number of lesbian activists there are lots of lesbian women including in the OR amongst the organizers of the conference and in all of the marches because as always much of the strength of the women's movement has come from a strong lesbian presence of women who are committed to women's rights across the board including lesbian rights so the one demand that addresses sexual orientation calls upon the United Nations and governments to recognize that this is a fundamental violation of women's human rights that women are persecuted and should have the right to Asylum because of persecution on the basis of sexual orientation the day's events and message did not go without challenge the best thing we can get from this March is to have the solidarity within women's movement also one of our specific objectives was to bring to the United Nations are our demands for me personally I think that having the word lesbian be spoken in the UN floor is is a small but very important symbolic victory we are here also last October Philadelphia was the site of the behind our masks literary conference a celebration of the work of gay lesbian bisexual and transgender writers this event was hosted by the Lambda literary Foundation whose mission is to support and further the creation of writings by for and about the LGBT community so your job your job is to develop an audience Poetry Slams open readings that's another good thing to do emphasizing the idea of the story we want to tell a story why do you want to tell this particular story you want to remember somebody do you want to honor somebody are you angry about something hundreds of aspiring and established writers hone skills and exchanged ideas at the three-day conference hi I'm Mo from Dykes to watch out for and you're watching in the life still to come on in the life the very animated Tom Schumacher well I am Thomas Schumacher thank you thank you very much and hearts and voices go out to people with AIDS but first our next segment is an award-winning report from the in the Life archives about the pink triangle a symbol recognized throughout the world as an emblem of lesbian Gay Liberation but the triangle wasn't always a badge of Pride little more than a half century ago it was displayed in only one place on a strip of cloth next to a number identifying a prisoner as homosexual in the Nazi concentration camps of World War II in the Life traveled to Washington DC to explore the history of the pink triangle at the Holocaust Museum the world's largest testimony to the millions of lives destroyed by bigotry and hatred in the 1920s and 30s the gay movement in Germany was the world's most advanced LED by Dr Magnus hirschfeld gay and lesbian culture in metropolitan areas like Berlin included bars publishing houses and gay journals but in 1933 all this changed when Adolf Hitler became the German Chancellor in the early days of the Nazi regime that gay bars were closed they publisher houses and journals were forbidden and it became very dangerous for gay men we asked Klaus Mueller why gay men reviewed as such a danger to the Third Reich basically you have to do with a highly gender biased society in which one of the major goals is to to produce a strong iron race a homosexual men were seen as uncertain candidates and as a threat to this major Nazi goal lesbian women were not targeted to the same degree it's not logical but lesbian women were seen as still future breeders of the iron race they could give birth to children and it didn't matter if how they would feel about that well the Nazis were in power approximately one hundred thousand gay men were arrested and about half of them were sentenced to prison 10 to 15 000 were sent to concentration camps where they were marked with a pink triangle the death percentage of gay men in concentration camps were relatively high if you compared to other smaller groups that were incarcerated like political prisoners or Jehovah's Witnesses then the death percentage of homosexuals was hired was 60 percent David mixner is one of the founding members of the Holocaust Museum's gay and lesbian campaign I visited the museum and I was very moved and was able to have lunch the next day with the director of the museum that led to the project of them being the first Museum in the world to officially include the gay and lesbian Community as part of the museum to study our history to set up a center for scholarship for the study of the what happened to homosexuals in the Holocaust it's a historical breakthrough no other Museum in the world has ever done this we were very moved that they were going to do this project whether we raised a nickel foot or not they were dedicated to fighting homophobia along with anti-Semitism and racism more school children more people more visitors to Washington DC go through this museum than any other Museum I think it's important that these people do see the histories of gay men who were incarcerated along with the other victims of the Holocaust one of these gay men is Stefan k I was arrested only for this reason that I laughed and then Stefan K was only 17 years old when he began a relationship with an Austrian Soldier for this he was imprisoned for five years they wanted to know whether I had more soldiers not only one but I was very very ashamed young I didn't knew even the meaning of these words homosexual for the because our love was love only love the treatment was not good it was not good scene there was not tolerant they traded us homosexual as a something wrong but many gay prisoners were subjected to even worse some were victims of hormonal experiments others like Friedrich Paul Van grosheim a local Merchant from Lubeck Germany was arrested tortured and forcibly castrated by the Nazi state for many gays and lesbians today the Nazi persecution of homosexuals holds an added resonance you know I've lost over 250 friends to AIDS and my partner of 12 Years and I've gone to a Great Lengths personally to remember their faces and their names and I was over in Amsterdam and I met two survivors of the Holocaust who Not only was able to get out of the camps when the Allies liberated them but were rearrested by the allies and put back in prison because they had deemed that the Nazis had justifiably arrested the gays and lesbians it was one of the most horrifying stories I've ever heard in my life we have to know what exactly happened how worse it has been and otherwise we can't learn if if we can prevent it at this moment there's a strong discussion going on about the radical right in the states using propaganda that resembles National Socialist propaganda so we have to find out if this is true where are the similarities where are the differences to analyze in which situation we are living and we can't do that if we only live in the present sometimes then even when I wake when I remember this bedtime and so many this is I smile everything so everything's okay but the memory is too bad that too said you will never forget to put Christianity on this episode's in the Arts a new hit comedy comes to Broadway Charles Bush the eminent gender Illusionist steps out of drag and into a suit as the much heralded writer of a new Broadway play called the tale of the allergist's wife dubbed the musk see comedy of the Year allergist wife Stars Linda Lavin Tony Roberts and Michelle Lee the plot centers around a midlife crisis engulfing Marjorie Taub all right and a bit of same-sex Intrigue which helps to stir up the already shaken Marjorie it's just that frisky androgynous free Spirit Ira I think you'll get a real kick out of him Bush who over the years has enjoyed great success in Off-Broadway theater Savor the November 2nd opening of allergist's wife his first on Broadway reliving this uh moment for a long time on the small screen lifetime television brings us Cherry Jones and Brooke Shields as lesbian parents in the original movie what makes a family when Jones the biological mother dies her parents fight shields for custody of their daughter Janine starts off as this girl she falls in love they they have this wonderful relationship they have a child after being together for several years Sandy decides that she really wants to have a child it's something that she's been thinking about she's a natural mother but they're living in a society that is just does not predicate itself on accepting relationships based on love and based on anything other than conventional mores and she gets thrown right into the system and has to fight for the custody of her child Jerry Jones family played by Al Waxman and myself and we're very supportive of the relationship and the commitment ceremony in the beginning and the christening of the child and it's only when we lose her but she dies that our Focus becomes blinded to what our feelings were before because we want to keep the granddaughter people have to appreciate the extraordinary love that these women had for each other and and for this child that they so desperately wanted I thought it was one of the most beautiful love stories I had read I the relationship between these two women and then the relationship with this child is just so pure based on a true story the lifetime original movie was executive produced by Barbra Streisand and Whoopi Goldberg among others and I also think this film is very important for gay people to understand that they need to write those Wills you know they have to they have to protect their rights as family we don't have I am gay and and gay people do not have familial rights that way with each other I think we're opening up a little bit and I think it's movies like this that are going to shed so much light in such a positive way without getting cute and without this isn't us on a soapbox saying anything it's just us telling a true story okay when it comes to having a major impact on the face of Pop Culture only a handful of people in the world can boast the accomplishments of Tom Schumacher and many of them probably work right alongside of him at the same company we're talking of course about the Walt Disney Company where Tom Schumacher participates at the highest level now you're probably thinking who the hell am I well I am Thomas Schumacher along with thank you thank you very much we caught up with the always busy Tom Schumacher on the day of the final dress rehearsal of the Los Angeles production of The Lion King tonight the audience that night was made up of Disney employees we are taking photographs tonight you are not taking photographs I've been an out gay man since my freshman year of college I have never once in my entire now almost 13 years of working for this company had anyone questioned me ever on this topic I said I make work for families and make work for children that's great to me that's not in any way at odds because I my whole life I've done this when I was a in high school I directed The Children's Theater Company I've was a playground leader I was a camp counselor I've been a Drama teacher so to me it just is a natural extension of what I do I've spent so much of my life working with kids and it is kids who are perhaps the most familiar with his work Tom Schumacher is the president of Disney theatrical Productions president of Walt Disney feature animation and president of Disney television animation he has overseen every major animated hit since Disney's animation Renaissance began in the late 1980s at the core of almost every animated movie is some fundamental theme or moral lesson inside also all the movies is this idea of self of who are you Aladdin is searching for self the Beast has to find out who he is and the reason we search for self is because we fear that we're not accepted from the point of view as a gay person these movies speak to everyone who feels that they're outside that they haven't been given access they say that we do need to accept others bring people in that we're made mightier by inclusion not by exclusion but as as like an out gay character it's never been one in a Disney animated movie mindro set out as strong as Schumacher feels about the films he's made animation was never an area he expected to work in before coming to Disney in 1988 Schumacher worked in theater with those all through high school I obsessed on theater went to UCLA to be a theater major immediately when I graduated I began working for a very important Theater Company in the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles eventually you know it's a bazillion job but I ended up coming to Disney with no animation experience to produce an animated movie Schumacher was brought to Disney by Peter Schneider you know I first met Tom back in 1983 when we were both working on the Los Angeles Olympics we had an office about the size of a postage stamp at the market Taper Forum it was during the Olympic Arts Festival and we had to share an office really about as big as the back seat of my car five years later Peter Schneider as the new head of Disney Animation asked Tom Schumacher to produce The Rescuers Down Under the rest as they say is history come on in everything written about Disney's Renaissance and feature animation Tom Schumacher and Peter Schneider are almost always mentioned together I'm the young one he's the straight one you know I think it's very rare to find someone who can be a partner with you and we've shared almost 15 maybe 18 years of working together and knowing each other I can tell you what Peter will say to almost everything that comes up and vice versa if we're very much in sync about how to problem solve what to do it's the most unique relationship in my life in terms of being able to think the same way you never know who's in charge of what we share things completely so I think we're really indistinguishable in some ways and yet we are completely our own people the two were so successful with animation that Michael Eisner asked them to take Disney to Broadway with the now hit musicals Aida and The Lion King when the idea of taking Lion King to Broadway first came up my response was well we can't because it doesn't fit if it's not a Broadway style musical to begin with and it's it's all animals and that only made one phone call one phone call together and that was to Julie taymor Tom in particular was really interested in pushing the boundaries of what commercial theater was what people would expect to see on a Broadway stage you're dealing with budgets crises firing actors hiring getting rid making changes it's just who wants to do it ironically for Peter and I the day we stood there holding our Tony Award in our hands for The Lion King we got a Tony Award by coming to a company to make animated movies and then going back into the theater where both of us had started Disney's Next Broadway Venture after The Lion King was Aida where Schumacher again got to work with Lion King composer Elton John there were no limitations creatively put on Aida we have Financial limitations obviously I have to work within a budget and has to make sense but I had the resources to call upon almost anybody and say hi I'm working on a musical so I could actually say to Elton hi I'm working on this thing do you want to write on it there is nothing to decide I love thematically what the piece says these two lovers Who Come Together from Opposite Worlds who find each other I think it's kind of a spiritual side to it I like long-term commitments play an important role in Schumacher's life he's been fiercely devoted to Disney for over 12 years his close friendship in partnership with Peter Schneider reaches back 18 years but his longest commitment is to his life partner and other half Matthew white they have been together for 19 years we met at the Los Angeles ballet Matthew was a dancer and I was hired to be the assistant general manager of the company and on my very first day at the Los Angeles ballet a board member who has since been a good friend of ours said to me I want to let you know that as a staff member here you are not allowed to date any of the women in the company and I said yes ma'am that won't be a problem since his ballet days Matt white has turned his Focus to Interior Design his work on their New York apartment was featured in the September 2000 edition of architectural Digest we visited Tom and Matt at their Los Angeles home where the design decisions mostly went to Matt Tom has great taste I mean look at what he does I mean he has great taste but when did you finally throw out all my stuff it's not thrown out it's in the basement boxes and boxes you know when you mess when you mesh lives it's it takes a while to sort it out and finally we've sorted it out and his stuff is all in the basement their years together have made them keenly aware of the limits of the law in treating gay couples as a family unit well for us in terms of just the organizing of our business Affairs the simple protection you would get in California the simple protection you get from from being married the stack of paperwork that we have to have the ridiculous it's a it is it is as much as it's appalling medical power of attorney so that if Matt's in an accident and hospitalized so that I can get into the hospital and make decisions about his health care let alone just visit him in the hospital that I have to walk in with a legal document disgraceful it's disgraceful in America that that happens no matter what your level but you know it it can all be taken away like that because there's no legal Binding Together on the company level Disney added domestic partner benefits in 1996. Michael Eisner you have decided to give health benefits to all your employees same sex benefits was that a tough decision we have a non-discriminary policy at the Walt Disney Company but you might have been easier to taking the safer Road right no the no the safer road is the right Road you know but when I came here you know that we didn't have domestic partner benefits which we do now it was very important to me and I was given an opportunity because I'm the senior executive company I was given an opportunity to make it very clear how I felt and I felt very listened to I probably wouldn't be here today if we didn't extend these benefits in an artistic environment when you are trying to Foster people being completely open you think what people have to do here they pour their souls out whether onto a piece of paper onto board when they're painting not to something when they're drawing people are giving giving giving of their souls and the way you get people to do that the way you can do that is try to create an environment where people are just open I work for the ultimate in family entertainment company you think about it you know do you feel like you know I'm you know like super homo you know is that my job everywhere I turn on one hand you feel like oh I I have to be the model gay man then you realize no I just have to get my job done and support my family and do my work and always do something that I'd be proud of gay men and lesbians are still struggling to achieve the rights that most Americans take for granted among them are equal employee benefits some government agencies and many Fortune 500 companies like Disney are doing the right thing by providing domestic partner health benefits that include their employees same-sex partners if you want domestic partner benefits in your workplace the Human Rights Campaign website is a good place to start you'll find step-by-step instructions for lobbying your employer to find the link go to the in the Life website at inthelifetv.org I'm Tanya Barfield and you're watching in the life in our final segment we focus on the music world's response to the AIDS epidemic in 1992 the music industry found that an organization called lifebeat to raise money to help support artists living with AIDS lifebeat also established a program called hearts and voices that provides educational materials about HIV at concerts and stages musical performances in Manhattan for people with AIDS hearts and voices is completely driven by volunteers like actor and singer Ennis Smith one of the veterans of the program who takes his show on the road to places like this Rivington house a healthcare facility on Manhattan's Lower East Side initially my goal was to be in the theater but uh you discover that there are lots and lots of uses for your talents so it's been everything from soap operas certainly live performance theatrical performances everything from that to recording work I heard about hearts and voices a number of years ago when I first began to do Cabaret someone came to see my show and asked if I'd heard of the organization and if I'd be interested in volunteering my time and I said of course go away call around someday I think what was initially Difficult about doing the volunteer work is that you're in a hospital and you're returning kind of to the scene of a crime this place where you felt so much incredible sadness where you've witnessed so much sadness I lost my ex and uh my very best friend two eights in 1993. and um it's a very curious thing about losing somebody to a catastrophic illness it uh it makes you feel pretty helpless in the face of things and um this opportunity came along and it was oh this is what I can do I want to serve in some way and at the same time I want to enjoy myself it's kind of a reciprocal thing and I find that through the lifebeat organization I'm able to experience that in the beginning it was it was a little bit scary for me I was a little unsure but once you come into the places that you sing and you meet these people you fall in love with them and there's no way that you could think of not doing it a few shows for people living with AIDS and some of these people are in these facilities for months and and in some cases years and longer this is their their night out and many of them can't go out because of the illness the first ever heard Han voices I felt a tingling me they share a lot of Joy a lot of entertainment that we see here we wouldn't be able to see because we're not able to get the accessibility to get to get to see them when they're playing out there and it brings the outside world to us life Pete uh the hearts and voices works with quite a few volunteers I would say you know 75 to 80 very active and then there's another 100 or so that are in the loop they go there and help out before the musicians get there they set up the rooms they uh they visit we say hey we're having a show I want to come down I believe that you couldn't sit on the sidelines for this amount of time and not do anything when I sit in the back I meet the residents or if they like the music and get up and dance that's pretty much fulfilling hearts and voices is one of the programs that we have that's a part of lifebeat we have um two main programs that we do which are tour Outreach and then hearts and voices tour Outreach is basically a prevention program where hearts and voices is our direct service program we're primarily right now focused on prevention for young people over 50 percent of new infections are from people under the age of 25. so the message either isn't getting through or it's not being done correctly young people tend to have a feeling that they're Invincible this is not going to happen to them so we're not seeing the numbers go down tour Outreach is our way to reach them we go to concert venues in New York um and in LA and then we also do National tours we either have a representative or a local Aid Service organizations go to each venue they set up a table and they do Outreach we've been on little Affair Oz Fest Red Hot Chili Peppers just tons of Tours and it's a real non-threatening way for young people to come up and get information about HIV prevention unfortunately we still have this day a lot of people that kind of shun people who have AIDS their families may have turned away from them a lot of their friends may not be visiting them so it's it's a real uplift for them when we are there and it's just an amazing experience and I just I recommend anyone to come and be a part of hearts and voices because it's amazing yes I feel great after a concert I feel like I was actually performing in the service of something and the results are immediate you know right then and there how you're doing another minute Valium is a little down and out I'll still come because they made me feel better in fact I know I can get better I just hope they keep coming because I'll be here to see them from all of us in the Life thanks for watching and we'll see you next month our room is still a room even when there's nothing there hold you tight and no one there you can keep good night fears even when there's no one sitting there in the life is funded in part by the H van amerengen Foundation additional support provided by Michael a lepin Alan middlesdorf Alan a shoe Peter Zimmer and Jim stepp the Colin Higgins Foundation The Guild Foundation the Mitchell Gold company in the hopes of eliminating all types of fear and Prejudice and the annual support of in the Life members like you thank you foreign