In the Life: Ep. 1611, "Every Picture Tells a Story" [repeat]

this month on in the life looking back on our first 13 years real live gay on the inside no one ever done a gay and lesbian show before so we were all starting from scratch the sister for our community the church is the people of god the church isn't merely church leaders and food for thought i knew her as the the straight married girl you know all this and more on america's gay and lesbian news magazine in the life in the life is funded in part by the h van ameringen foundation additional support provided by the ford foundation the gill foundation and the annual support of in-the-life members like you welcome to in the life i'm kate clinton you're not 13 years ago a small group of people had a big idea to create the first gay and lesbian tv show i had the pleasure of hosting that debut program teleprompters had not been invented by then i made up a great deal of the material i had bigger hair larger shoulder pads it was a different time but tonight i'm excited to be here again as a blonde but before we move forward let's look back at the people and places that made us in the life when i heard about homosexuals for example in the news it was probably because of a sting operation in a park men's room so everything that had to deal with sexual orientation in my mind when i was a young adult was either very negative criminal or a stereotype that was laughed at i myself couldn't imagine seeing gay images especially real gay people you know real life gay on the inside you know that we weren't just fictional characters the general atmosphere during the reagan and bush era was was one of absolute um disregard of the gay community criminal disregard in regards to aids people were dying and they didn't care so what makes you think that you're ever going to have a show on tv about these people i think i'm about to kiss you i think i'm about to be kissed gay sex is so hot there was no will and grace there was no ellen show there was no queer as folk there was no the l word come on help me out here you know i mean it there was nothing absolutely nothing on television but the political landscape was changing bill clinton's inauguration signaled a new era of hope and opportunity william jefferson it was an incredible time for the gay community because clinton had just been elected and there was such a sense of of hope in the community the reagan bush era was over and we had somebody who could say the word gay without throwing up and that we for once we're gonna have a chance to have our voice our voices heard and our and our images seen i would talk to gay people they would tell me what they were doing it all sounded very exciting i said you know this should be recorded this should be you know nationally shown somewhere so that people can see all this action fueled by that energy john scagliotti a documentary filmmaker initiated a novel idea to launch a gay and lesbian tv show the time was ripe i was looking at an issue of outlet a magazine that doesn't exist anymore and i remember a thin column on the side there might have even been a picture at the top or big heading about public television or radio producer john scagliotti um plans to create a series on gay life when i read that i thought wow i saw an ad i i picked up my first backstage ever i was waitressing studied acting saw an ad for a gay and lesbian uh news magazine why sent a picture of myself waitressing and i didn't have an eight by ten catherine linton new and exciting changes are going on in our community they called me and i'm a part of it did the audition and called the show in the lice remember if you're in the lice and you if you're in the lights if you're in the life hope you don't have life lice and somehow land at the job should i leave out the lights part no one ever done a gay and lesbian show before so we were all starting from scratch there was no template so as we were making up as as we were going along it really had the feel of um that old movie babes in arms with judy garland and mickey rooney where you know they're on i think they're like in a farm a rural environment but they want to put on this show so they just get all their their friends together and somehow put on this great show in the the barn it real in the life in those early years really had that feel of let's go ahead and put on the show you trade away my offspring but my culture still survive you steal our land and rob our natural resource with genocide and damnation you'll discard us john's idea was to combine the um the talk show host format like um say an oprah or a phil donahue with the old 1960 series the ed sullivan show which was a performance-based show thank you very much thank you what a way to come out when kate clinton our host came out for the first time we had to rehearse it a few times even with the audience the applause that she got it was as if you know we landed on the moon for the first time it was amazing amazing it seems that the broadcasting apologists are hiding behind big bird mr rogers and masterpiece theater laying down their quality smoke screen while they shovel out funding for gay and lesbian variety shows on the floor of the senate then senator bob dole was denouncing funding to pbs we had to lobby every single pbs station across the country so we had to gain their trust and convince them that by being gay doesn't mean that we're going to be we're going to be nude or that we're going to be talking about sex the whole time we had to convince them that we could be serious and that we were okay for to be on their channel i think the first thing they said was oh you're not going to use bad language are you they just assumed that gay people used bad language i can't tell you how many program directors said oh please don't use bad language as if every gay person was walking around you know swearing there was nothing that we said that was offensive i mean nothing we had to they would we would find tooth comb our show they would find tooth comb our show unbelievably before they ever aired it and every month we had the lobby and make sure that they were still putting us on behind the scenes it was a bare bones operation one of our staff members desk was made out of apple crates stacked on top of each other you had to edit at three in the morning in someone's broken down studio that was freezing i love cats but they had the maddiest nastiest cat in this studio that would just walk through the studio you know mid last sentence of a take it was like i'm going to kill that cat after the first year a television producer from the nightly nightly news on nbc came and said gee i'd love to produce something for you and i said oh this is great great fantastic and then he said what would be my budget and i told him what the budget was it's something like a thousand dollars a piece he says we spend more than that in an hour on messengers getting on tv was only half the battle the other half was convincing people that the gay and lesbian community had the right to be there i had to personally call every pbs director and if we weren't on ask them why and of course their usual response was we don't have gay people here and you know it was a constant battle we went from six stations to 100 stations to i mean it was phone call after phone call they did not want to have to air us and we just had to keep reminding them it's your mandate to represent all communities and then they did this pride special with leah delaria hosting i am leah and i'm a big dank leah shows up in a pink taffeta dress you know talking about herself as a drag queen in this convertible car and calling herself a dyke and at one point in the special she's straddling a cannon which is hysterical now but at that time most of the complaints came from gay people they were freaked out this was gays gone wild this was wrong this was not it was this was so terrifying to people because it was like how can you show this woman yelling i'm a dyke you know my parents could watch this there was a tremendous amount of self-censorship because nothing else was on so when you when you have no room in the culture and you have no images of yourself people were really protective over what that image was that that eeked out on this one little show you know the only thing out there at the time and to put someone kind of quote controversial on within the community i think might have uh raised a few uh hairs on a few backs of a few necks and we did the board members people really responded and and decided to go 180 degrees in the opposite direction and then next you have you know um ken and and drag queen barbie me which was you know greg and myself suddenly behind you know a desk i had more makeup on and jewelry than i'd ever worn in my life we're here to bring you the personalities performances issues and events that put the gay community on the front page of your local news that's when the lights start moving towards the news magazine format that we have now and that allowed us really to get out of the studio situation as well as travel around the country and tell even more stories not just in new york but around the country and eventually all over the globe really you might expect it to be even more difficult to be an openly gay politician running for mayor in a city that's less gay friendly than san francisco was really surprising to me is how many gay people didn't know what other gay people were doing there was really a you know a lack of information gay and lesbians in the urban centers had no idea what people were doing in ohio where the car is king so we wanted the program immediately not to feel like it was a new york centric program or a city centric so we wanted to get out on the street montana still has a law on the books that declares any same-sex sexual contact illegal helena montana was having their first uh gay pride parade ever and i flew to helena montana to cover this pride parade for our june pride special and first thing that happens is that i see a bunch of yahoos with their signs you know steers not queers so i said let's go over to these guys so you're out here because it's god's law that's right what are you i suppose you're lezzy huh are you yeah can you truly say i'm straight uh-huh that's what god put us on here you're a woman i'm a man that's why we're here is two right so so what what so what gives you and what you think is right about being a lesbian or being a gay that's my question to you and one of the guys you know um brilliant little cowboy that he was figures out that i'm a lesbian and starts attacking me going on right now nobody sticks up for our kids and i was like cut done with this interview don't you guys just get in that closet where you belong people like you that night i went out to the dance to the gay dance and guys were driving by throwing bottles saying we are going to kill you you effing and i was absolutely sure that they would i couldn't believe the bravery of these people from helena montana knowing where they live knowing that they have to go home to their ranches knowing that they're on the nightly news you know marching out proud i mean it was to me it was it was a testament again to how strong our community is and how much people were willing to sacrifice um in order to be out sometimes the stereotypes were surprising for us you got to rural america you expect homophobia you expect the horror story and you find a real positive story one of the first rural stories we did was this mayor in missouri and he had been reelected 10 times and i you know we went out to see him he was there with his boyfriend living in this trailer for you know 20 years before we got there it was pretty rough because it was everybody was very closeted about it and i thought actually i thought i was the only one so i think that also has an impulse that helped gay people to come out in rural areas in a much greater way than than people believe they could the stories were fascinating some were brutal some were wonderful and and anytime you can tell those stories it was a real opportunity and an honor to meet people all across america by the end of the second season we're preparing to do a show on the second march on washington for lgbt rights that uh was incredible and for such a major gathering of people and celebrities coming out and you know you had martina and melissa and you know suddenly we started to have more public icons it was about really a coming together and fighting for our civil rights for the first time and saying we are american citizens and yes we have public figures that we that are coming out and proudly coming out for me it was an incredible milestone to do the march on washington episode um it was one of the most exciting things i've ever done in my life really one of the major moments was the 1996 display of the quilt and it was it was such an incredible thing to see spread out you know peter age the march on washington years before the entire mall was filled with bodies you know it was filled with people you know fighting cheering and then in 96 you know it was covered with quilt that showed how many of those people we had lost and you know you always wonder how far we would have been at that point had we not been knocked down you know by that devastating plague we take united cleveland where a young boy named robby kirkland really lived robbie kirkland was a high school student who knew he was gay from the time he was in in junior high his mother was able to piece together how much he was struggling with his own sexuality through his diary writings finally had found a youth group that he could go and meet other gay teens and the week before he was supposed to go to his first meeting he went to the attic and shot himself i flew to cincinnati where he's where his mother was and i'm sitting in this woman's kitchen and then she says do you want to see robbie's room and i said i said yeah of course and um and we go into his room and she hadn't made his bed and he had killed himself i think eight months before and she couldn't make his bed you know he was right at the edge of getting help but it was too late we kept getting letter after letter week after week not just from kids sometimes from parents too family members you know you know thank thank god you're around now i can understand my gay son or daughter better i had no idea that these are things that my kid's going through there were so many different people who would come up and generally whisper or in a very low voice say thank you for what you're doing we had the opportunity to at least give a piece of who we are you know on television then how could you not want to do that how could you not want to wake up every day and do that still to come on in the life a sister for us all well i decided to do the film because it would give much more exposure to the work that i'm doing for lesbian and gay people a chef story i love shopping for food i love looking at food i love eating food and a place to come out regarding my parents i i really regret not telling them that i was gay this is a story about anita lowe a not so typical celebrity chef who has built her entire life around food five years ago she and her partner opened up aneesa an upscale restaurant in new york city's greenwich village let's go backstage to see their shared vision take shape my earliest food memory was when i was two years old and my mother was was feeding us oranges and i was just eating this orange and it was and it was so juicy i remember it was like dripping down my chin and like down my shirt and and it was like dripping off my elbows okay okay 3 30 you got my fabulous mustard today i love shopping for food i love looking at food i love eating food i like the physical sensation of chopping things i love the smells it's very essential thank you oh and if you want some people do kimchi juice which i like i always forget i like being around kindred souls who love sweetbreads as much as i do you know okay good job we've got a really great crew yeah check out all the bones with the you know the little yeah yeah you can cut off the head you can cut off the tail as well not that you know it's important to me that everyone on my staff like respect the food it's just a beef broth it is really really hard to do a 13 table restaurant when i come home i mean most restaurants couples break up a lot a lot of them do good evening anissa yeah where's anita am we booking table 2 at 8 30. there's a clear delineation of front of the house and the back of the house i need any four of them for sunday and i'm in charge of the front of the house and she's in the back she's great at what she does she's using her palette or something oh it's so good she's clearly the more social of the two and yeah and i think she's really good at putting people at ease i was a cook as well so at one point we thought oh well you know we'll we'll cook together and then if you think about it we would kill each other i mean it would be terrible i grew up in a really multicultural family my mother is is chinese malaysian and malaysia is like the crossroads of asia my father who was from shanghai you know which was also you know different culture my mother remarried to my stepfather who was waspi you know we had we went to the cape for the summer so this is this is um this is the moon and you take the namion in there it's a cold korean noodle soup so you take um i have a nanny who was hungarian my nanny would teach us how to forage we would pick dandelion greens and she would teach us that we could eat them and yeah we'd have them in salads and we would pick wild blackberries and you know mix them into the yogurt that she would make for us i call my cuisine contemporary american it is upscale it is adventurous it draws on many different influences for her american is using what we have here all the the different ingredients all the different cultural uses of food so that's how we see american cuisine as as being not hamburgers or hot dogs and apple pie i have two little blossoms on flow you see her in the press you see her in magazines but she has no celebrity chef mentality i mean it's just i'm just a cook yeah it's not i certainly i hate the word artist i hate it when people talk about that you know like oh you're an artist i'm like no i'm not i met jennette cann restaurant it was my first chef job there was me and jen and two other cooks they were both from malaysia and they barely spoke english it was just basically me and chen we had a great time did you go deep how deep did you go i had a bit of a crush on her but you know i'm from the midwest and gay is not okay and um and you know do i look gay you know it's sort of like that mentality like you know why would you make your life harder several years later i got married anita came to my wedding with her girlfriend i knew her as the the straight married girl you know the cute straight married girl she was probably the first person that i came out to i think i flicked her out she was definitely shocked she said well i had i had had a really i had a bad crush on you it can um you know and that's probably when you were like yeah that's where i was like falling off the couch yeah summer here is like our our prize oh my god but i didn't see all the ones there's a million of them no there's a lot okay there's a ton i mean we come out every weekend you should get them do you want any swiss shirt any greens no okay do you want that stuff uh i could yeah or i could use a liquid from your chucking i don't care people that really love her food um love the inventiveness they love the combinations that you wouldn't normally see but once you have it on a plate it makes such sense to you do you want me to try and strain this out i think more than most chefs she's really heady about coming up with recipes i'm not as strong i'm not trying to recreate the wheel you know reservation for 6 30. it's just food at the end of the day it's you know it's a meal people are coming out for dinner it has to be a passion to do this if you're going to do it well i don't six six hi sister anna hi i hear you come here often as much as we can okay it's very good you know the greeting in chinese is like is is not hello it's have you eaten yet you know it's all about the food sometimes radicals appear in the most unlikely places defying a vatican order to silence herself a gutsy catholic nun has spoken out against the church's view of homosexuality for over 30 years tonight's reel to reel follows this woman's quest in filmmaker barbara rick's documentary in good conscience since i was about that high as they say knee-high to a grasshopper i thought that god was calling me to religious life so after high school i entered the school sisters of notre dame and was a a good little nun for many many years until i met a gay man and that friendship really changed the direction of my life i just feel that uh dominic who got me into this ministry in 1971 when he said you know what's the catholic church doing for my gay brothers and sisters and i said i don't know he said well sister you know you better do something i think there's a spirituality there that i can bring that a straight person cannot but yes my church has abandoned me why should i spend time going to a church that doesn't like me that doesn't want me for who i am i've been offended by actions of members of roman catholic church that i've grown up in my job is to try to help people like you reclaim your church and to try to help the church institution to welcome back its lesbian and gay members this has been a project that first came to me in 2000 it was the spring of 2000 and i read an article about this nun who was very gently and very radically defying a vatican order that she silenced herself about her ministry to gay and lesbian catholics a nun visiting rock island could get expelled from her religious community for speaking her mind but that's not stopping her what is the place of silencing in the social teaching of our church there are many things in scripture that had meaning she felt she was called to be a bridge between gay and lesbian catholics and church hierarchy so let's not censor ourselves from things in the in the church that we have a right to so she started new ways ministry many years ago and this was a way to kind of introduce gay and lesbian catholics to the good parts of catholicism that kind of embraces them and also to introduce catholic hierarchy to the good men and women who are living really spiritual lives who happen to have a different sexual orientation if the eucharist was meant for people who are pure and holy god who would go there who which one of us is worthy to receive christ no none of us the vatican became increasingly unhappy with her tone and they felt she was not emphasizing the sinfulness of homosexuality enough so they went after her to shut her down that's the offices for the congregation for the doctrine of the faith that building has been the home of the bureaucratic department of the vatican that has silenced a number of people over the centuries and from that office came the piece of paper the notification in 1999 that said that i should no longer be in pastoral ministry with lesbian or gay people she actually pointed out the office of the inquisition this is the same office that had ordered the excommunication of all these amazing people who were later embraced as visionaries this is the same office that had tried to silence sister janine i would be acceptable to the vatican if i were quiet if i were silent but um that's not right we should not be treating others as second-class citizens lesbian and gay people have a rightful place in the church just like everyone else when you have the vatican representing the church go so far as to say you can't speak how do you how do you stay catholic how do you keep your faith through that you you stay catholic because we realize that the church is the people of god the church isn't merely church leaders she has a great respect and a great love for the church and that's what i think makes the film most effective is that it's not a hate document you have someone like sister janine who has this very radical idea of taking on her enemies completely without rancor and it's just a whole new ballgame i wanted to talk with you about banning homosexual priests yes do you do you believe that we should do that i mean isn't that kind of unfair in the seminary in the seminary get the gays out of the seminary yeah they turn into an underground uh pollution but there are good priests who are homosexual we wouldn't want to root them out i have to take the risk of looking homophobic i have been in a ministry a church ministry to try to tell lesbian and gay catholics that you know they're part of the church too they have gifts to offer the church do you know sister grandma do you work with sister i am sister grandma by continuing her work by continuing her ministry by continuing to speak out when she has been told to be silent she does run the risk of stirring up the vatican's ire and they wanted her order the school sisters of notre dame to silence her and many times the school sisters of notre dame came to her defense and in the end because of a fear of retribution from the vatican and what might happen to the order if they continued to support sister they finally had to buckle and ask her to be silent my response to my superior general in rome was in conscience i choose not to collaborate with my own oppression and the superior general of the ssnds she asked if there were any other options and i said well i could transfer to another community and i immediately thought of the lorettos it's the oldest order of american nuns in the country and they have long stood for justice and they said you know if it helps you we want you to come and do your ministry with us and that gave her reprieve from the orders silencing from her own order she left the school sisters of notre dame and came on board with the sisters of loretto who were sort of like the cavalry they're pioneer women they're frontier women and i just feel in my heart so much like a loreto well i decided to do the film because it would give much more exposure to the work that i'm doing for lesbian and gay people it just resonated very deeply in me this idea that this woman was being ordered silenced and i said you know this is the subject of my next film it's about celebrating the courage of this woman who is on your side and working diligently to make life better i hope that this film will enable people who are not lesbian gay bisexual transgendered to understand oppression this is a universal story that is much bigger than a catholic story or a gay and lesbian story this is about humanity and and treating people decently and and standing up for what you believe in hi i'm jennifer aniston no i'm lying i'm carson cressley from queer eye for the straight guy and you're watching in the life for more than 40 years the work of broadway's jerry hermann has defined the great american musical in fact he's the only composer lyricist in broadway history to have had three of his musicals hello dolly mame and lacaja fall run for more than 1500 performances each in a rare interview jerry who was literally born on broadway talks about his incredible life in the theater i was born in a hospital room where my mother's window overlooked the marquee of the winter garden theater and of course she had no idea that 34 years later her son's musical mane would be emblazoned on that marquee it is probably a cliche to have a gay son who thinks his mother is the most glamorous wonderful thing in the world but my mother ruth was all of those things she was a piano player and singer she had her own radio show before i was born my parents loved the musical theater and the night i they took me to andy get your gun they really created a monster it really was a turning point from that moment on i knew that if there was one dream that i had it was to write songs like irving berlin wrote and to give the gift of music to other people the way he had given it to me so jerry pursued his dream to write music and through his teens and twenties he honed his craft writing songs for review and small off-broadway shows with the premiere of his first broadway musical milk and honey in 1961 everything started to change it got wonderful reviews and i got nominated for a tony award and i was really swept away following the success of milk and honey jerry was asked by broadway impresario david merrick and director gower champion to work on a new musical based on thornton wilder's play the matchmaker it was to be called hello dolly i had written the score for ethel merman and when it came time to play it for ethel she announced that she never wanted to do another broadway show i was devastated of course because that was my my idol and my goal was to you know to have her in the show of mine but gower said i have an idea i worked with a woman named carol channing in a review called landoneer and i think she can be marvelous in this role well it changed my whole life it was truly love at first sight for both of us he really was gorgeous it was love at first sight and jerry insists it was mutual now you know i mean really here i had a score that was written for ethel merman and so all of ethel's what we call money notes you know those high seas were way out of carol's range and to break the ice i said carol i've always wanted to hear these songs way down in the register that the men sing in he said i want mother earth that's what i want and he said that's the way i conceived it and that's the way i always wanted he lied in his teeth no composer wants his song sung down there and we did it anyway and i relaxed completely because and i just said hello harry well hello louie is i did do a lot of changing for carol and all to the good we hugged and we laughed and we had never stopped laughing it was a partnership that worked when hello dally opened on broadway on january 19 1964 it was a smash hit it was the hit of the decade we won not only ten tony awards and grammy awards but drama critics awards i had no idea that i was about to follow it with another experience that was as as satisfying or more satisfying a little thing called mame we were searching for a lady to play name and we had at this point honestly seen every lady who was breathing in new york city i had just done a tremendously exciting musical called anyone can whistle written by stephen sondheim which had run for exactly nine performances and had closed so i went home to california with my tail between my legs i remembered this stunning lady who of course i knew as a great screen actress belting out a sondheim song and she knocked me out of my seat and so i picked up the phone and i called our producers and i said i found i found our name the producers were hesitant to even audition lansbury she was best known for playing matronly roles in films certainly not for being a glamorous leading lady but jerry insisted and a few days later there at my front door was this tall elegant lady in a mink coat and i took one look at her the first time i'd ever seen her in person and i and i my heart stopped for a minute because i knew that that was mame what was a foot was a huge broadway musical which jerry had written and he the only one at this point who believed that i could play maine i started teaching her it's today the opening number and if he walked into my life i thought the contrast between those two members would show everything that that that she needed it gave me great confidence because if he felt i could do it then i thought well um if he thinks i can do it i can do it i made her a tape and i said go to bed with this tape in your ear and i'll meet you tomorrow morning and we'll go over it once more jerry was absolutely adamant that i that i impress them with my prowess as a singer and also to act the role and so he said look what i'm going to do is i'm going to play the piano for you and she walked out on stage with her mink and threw it on a chair in a wonderfully uh uh uh dramatic and and and theatrical gesture and she heard this arpeggio and she went light the candles get the eyes out roll the rug up it's too dark the most exciting thing in the world and jerry was overjoyed i mean you never knew anybody who was more supportive of an actress at that moment than jerry it was a lovely thing to see a great actress emerge as a great musical star she became the the darling of broadway musicals and she won four tony awards two in shows of mine name and dear world jerry's next three shows dear world mac and mabel and the grand tour were not considered successful the decade of the 70s was difficult but everything changed one day when jerry went to the movies i went to see a film called la cajo fall at a little art theater with my friend chuck and i walked out of that theater into the daylight and i said this is going to be my next musical i want another tony award and i had a five-year run and it was one of the most joyous experiences i've ever i've ever lived through one song from lakage i am what i am has become particularly meaningful to the gay community i didn't really know how that song affected the gay community until a gay pride parade a float came by and i am what i am was blared out of that float and everybody in the group that i was in stopped and i saw people crying and it was one of the great moments of my life and i had no idea until that moment how how important that song was these days jerry remains one of the busiest people in show business traveling the country speaking to college students about musical theater buying and completely redesigning houses like this his current home in beverly hills spending time with his partner and writing his next musical called miss spectacular i follow him implicitly but he was handed so many different talents the range of the man is unbelievable i don't think jerry has ever been given the credit that he that he should have over these many years because he's an extraordinarily good lyricist and he's also a great melody spinner i mean there's no question about it when somebody writes me a letter and says when when my housework gets too too overwhelming and when the kids are really i i turn my my main album on and i sing we need a little christmas with with with miss lansbury and i get through the day that way that letter made me cry because that's the stranger that i made saying the way urban berlin made me sing that night that i went to siena yet chibon throughout this next season we will highlight touchstone experiences that collectively bring us together almost everyone has at least one coming out story that they will never forget i had a lot of brothers and sisters and i had to come out to every single one of them you know that's why god invented voicemail that's the difference in 13 years tonight in the life is going to feature personal memories of this pivotal moment i was 19 years old my mom was sitting in the kitchen and she said to me you know it's so strange i just recently found out that uh jeff down the street is gay and last year we found out that john so and so and his brother pat were also gay and she said i don't know what's going on i mean this is on one street in suburban america you know is it something going on in the neighborhood or is there something in the water and i just started to laugh i just started to crack up and she said why are you laughing and i said mom i'm gay too and i just felt so i mean it was so unplanned and so spontaneous and you know i i i felt terrible doing it that way but i just couldn't let the opportunity go by just to tell her that um you know hey you know it's an epidemic on our street and she just kind of um dropped her peeler or knife or paring knife and kind of put her face in her hands and she didn't start getting hysterical but she teared up a little bit and um i went over and hugged her immediately and just said mom it's okay it's okay you know i'm just me i'm just me and then i think we heard my father coming and she quickly said okay you know we're not we're not going to tell your father about this right now it didn't take me long to realize that there was this woman with really blue blue eyes and i just was like wow she's cute and she asked me to dance and i did and we're going back in the car and i said so does this mean that you're you're queer and uh dusty says well yes and i asked the other people in the car and all of them informed me that yes they all were and when i got back to the barracks i got my best friend up kahuna hana who's from hawaii and i we were very very close friends i knew about her sex life because i drove her to a motel with her boyfriend and i woke her up we went up to the kitchen because that was one of the safe places to talk it wasn't always safe to talk in the barracks and in the kitchen you could make enough noise for it to be safe so we're making noise in the kitchen and i said to kahuna i think i'm gay and she says what i said i think i'm gay well how do you know i said she had blue eyes that's all i can tell you my grandmother and i have this relationship where we kind of get snarky with each other sometimes and so i said something to her that might have been sort of sarcastic or whatever and she was leaning over the sink and then i noticed that something was weird and she's there for a bit and i could she just started to cry and i was like what's wrong and she said justin i've just been wondering about your sexuality and i was just like what and i i didn't know what to do for a moment i kind of just stared at her and i was i was feeling like first of all i felt kind of trapped like oh wow i'm going to have to say something here and then the other thing was just to sort of completely back away from it which is what i did and i i just i was like what do you mean and she said well it's just something that i've been wondering about and i was like well i don't understand why you're asking me these questions and so then i left the kitchen and i remember the next thing that i said to her after that was that the computer was fixed i had just started to think about being a lesbian it was just like an inkling in the back of my brain and i was at the front porch and we keep our our actually piano table desk in front of the porch to protect from any outsiders which is kind of ironic and uh time magazine was there and ellen degeneres was on the cover of time magazine because she had just come out out on her show and i said to my mom and i don't really believe that i just said it like this i was like mom i'm gay and she looked at the cover of time and she said you've been watching too much of this regarding my parents i really regret not telling them that i was gay the the rationalization i used for myself was that they couldn't handle it or they don't want to know probably that they don't want to know it was was more correct and and i think they could have handled it really and then and then my father died i was a grown man of course by this time and there was this disappointment that he really didn't know me and we had stopped talking about personal issues about your personal life i called my dad and i said bonnie and i want to move in together and we're buying a house together and he said oh what are you buying a house with another girl for you'll never get married if you do that and and bonnie was across the room saying to me in sort of sign language tell him tell him and she finally looked at me like she was going to walk out if i didn't tell him and i said well dad i want to buy a house with another woman because he says oh it's the wrong thing to do i said well dad let me tell you it's because we want to live together um for the rest of our lives uh do you understand what i'm talking about and he said i think so i said well how do you feel about that there was a long pause and he said well it is 1982. and then i heard him say to his wife my stepmother joan get me a drink i'm kate clinton this place is great so you know from all of us at in the life thanks for watching and we'll see you next month or i'll come to your house do in the life is funded in part by the h van ameringen foundation additional support provided by the ford foundation the gill foundation and the annual support of in the life members like you you