Dear Friends,
I’m thrilled to share a special LGBTQ+ History Month announcement with you—a big deal for OUTWORDS and for the preservation of our community’s history. The announcement is made possible by YOU, our faithful community—and it begins with the story of Phyllis Jenkins.
Phyllis was born in the Bronx in 1930. Even while she got married at 15 and had a couple of kids, she knew she was gay. At 19, she kicked her husband out and started over, raising her kids as a single mom while going to nursing school. Rising through the ranks, Phyllis eventually became a founding member of the National Black Nurses Association.
There’s much more to Phyllis’s story, which is why, in 2010, a pair of filmmakers named Brian O’Donnell and Lara Spotts sat her down for an interview. Brian and Lara were working on an OUTWORDS-like project called Legacy of Voices—interviews with LGBTQ+ elders. Over a four-year period, they conducted around 20 interviews, including Phyllis’s. But as time went on, Brian and Lara got involved with other projects. Their interview tapes eventually ended up in a box in Brian’s bedroom closet, with nowhere to go.
Phyllis’s story was in danger of being lost forever.
That’s when Brian and I met, about a year ago. As he told me about Legacy of Voices, my heart raced. I asked if Brian and Lara would consider donating their Legacy of Voices interviews to OUTWORDS, to preserve and share them for generations to come. Through a series of conversations, Brian and Lara said yes.
Today, our official collaboration takes flight, with the publication of Phyllis’s interview. Click here for a short excerpt, or here to access Phyllis’s full story.
None of this would have been possible without you—the OUTWORDS community who have supported this project from Day One. I’m convinced there are countless interviews with LGBTQ+ elders out there, recorded for one project or another, that have never seen the light of day. Today, that changes. I had always envisioned OUTWORDS not just as a project to record new interviews, but as a place to collect and preserve orphan interviews in search of a safe, permanent home. Today, thanks to you, that vision has become real.
Stay tuned in the coming weeks as we publish the rest of Brian and Lara’s extraordinary Legacy of Voices interviews. Please join me in thanking them for their visionary work. And if you want to support OUTWORDS’ efforts to find, preserve, and share more priceless stories like Phyllis Jenkins’s, please consider donating, or becoming a member, today.
With excitement and gratitude,
Mason