ANDREW LUSH:

Here we go. I'm going to start recording a backup in the Cloud. Yeah, there he is. And okay, we're good to go. I'm going to minimize your video here, Jude, so that you're not tempted to look at it.

JUDE PATTON:

Okay.

ANDREW LUSH:

And I'll turn my mic and camera off.

MASON FUNK:

Great. Alrighty, take two.

JUDE PATTON:

Take two.

MASON FUNK:

Well, Jude, let's just jump right in. We'll spend a couple of hours, and we can take a little bit of a break around the midpoint, if you'd like. I'll let you know when that time arrives. And I have notes, I rewatched your prep interview conducted by Jack, and I took all kinds of notes and then I went through and I sort of highlighted the things I wanted to be sure we touched on.

MASON FUNK:

I think we both can take comfort in acknowledging that we cannot possibly cover the entire span of your life.

JUDE PATTON:

Oh, no.

MASON FUNK:

So we can relax right into that, into that reality. We'll just try to pick up on some of the most important highlights and some of the most important stories you have to share. I'm confident we're going to have great, great material at the end of two hours.

MASON FUNK:

First of all, we should get started with the formalities. Could you just state and spell your first and last names please?

JUDE PATTON:

My name is Jude Patton. Jude is spelled J U D E, Patton is P A T T O N.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. And could you tell us your date of birth and where you were born?

JUDE PATTON:

I was born on July 8th, 1940 in St. Louis, Missouri.

MASON FUNK:

Okay, terrific. Thank you. You've mentioned that you had loving, supportive parents. I wonder if you could just introduce them to us briefly and give us a brief overview of some of the ways they demonstrated being those kinds of parents to you.

JUDE PATTON:

My parents were my adoptive parents. I was adopted when I was about seven months of age

JUDE PATTON:

and they had been childless for the first 10 years of their marriage. My mother had a 10th grade education. My father had a ninth grade education. My father was raised in an orphanage himself, he and his sister, after both their parents died. I'm not sure how, but at the same time. My mother was raised in a larger family of seven living children. Both of them wanted children very badly

JUDE PATTON:

and they didn't conceive, so they adopted me. I think that may have accounted for some of the ways I was treated when I was younger. My brother came along, by the way, about eight months later. My mother was actually pregnant without knowing it at the time of my adoption. The entire background of both my family, particularly, and I can talk about it or not,

JUDE PATTON:

but I did not learn about the details of my biological parents until I was about 69 years old. I was then able to meet my biological mother who was still alive at that time. But going back to my adoptive parents, they treated my brother and I as if we were little pieces of gold. Anything I think that we might have wanted, they tried to provide for us.

JUDE PATTON:

The difficulty was that growing up, at least my father, although he had become educated through a union process and became a pipe fitter, which provides a pretty good income when you are working, work was off and on. It wasn't always available. So my growing up years, we experienced almost poverty to something like lower middle-class income.

JUDE PATTON:

That did affect all of us, but it never affected the way that my brother and I were treated. I would say I never knew a time during the time I was growing up that they favored him because he was their natural child. Especially with my mother, who was an at-home mom. Those were the days you could be an at-home mom and most moms were at home.

JUDE PATTON:

If mom wasn't watching you, somebody else's mom was watching you. So there was a whole village raising the children. In that sense, I felt very valued. Actually, I probably shouldn't have taken that for granted. I only learned later that my peers did not have that kind of unconditional love,

JUDE PATTON:

and it has taken me almost a lifetime to find another person who has unconditional love for me as a partner. My current partner is that way with me as well. My parents ... Let me start with my father. A year after they got married, my father was in a terrible industrial accident, a block and tackle fell from a crane,

JUDE PATTON:

down one side of his body. He had on a hard hat, or he probably would have been killed. Had 22 broken bones. He was in a body cast for a year, and this was like the first year of their marriage. So that probably also entered into how they treated each other. You know, that life is here for only an instant possibly, and you need to value what you have. My brother was,

JUDE PATTON:

let me just put it this way, less ambitious than I was. And in many ways, my dad was less ambitious than I was. So if he wasn't working, he didn't work. He never worked two jobs. He did take on some jobs and because of his experience in pipe fitting and heating and plumbing, fixing things for friends, but he never took on two jobs at a time. My mother had with her limited income had only menial type jobs during the time.

JUDE PATTON:

And very few and far between, I also had a grandmother who was my mother's mother, who was very influential simply because when the money ran out, it was back to grandma's house. And thank goodness, my grandmother had a tiny little house that would allow us to live in it during those times. And I spent most of my high school years there.

JUDE PATTON:

My father began having heart attacks when I was 14 and he was 47. He had two or three heart attacks a year, every year, until he died when I was 20. That impacted not only the income, but, I would say, what was going on for all of us. Again, the ups and downs of that.

JUDE PATTON:

The good thing is that later in my life, when I was seen by others as past the time I should be a tomboy, if you will. My parents began defending me to their friends and to neighbors and whomever else for my behaviors and my hairstyle and clothing that I wore. They would often come down on my parents, saying, you're doing the wrong thing.

JUDE PATTON:

You should make her wear a dress. You should let her hair grow along and so on. I remember my dad saying to them, more often than not, she's our daughter, if this makes her happy, that's all we want for her. I don't hear many of my peer trans folks having that kind of defense from their parents in that early time.

MASON FUNK:

That's amazing. That's an amazing tribute to your parents that they ... Do you have any idea where they, your father and your mother, maybe you referenced it when you mentioned your father's accident, but where did they get this spirit of seeing you as a unique individual who should be allowed to follow your own path without outside interference? When so many parents would be worried and nervous and concerned and so on?

JUDE PATTON:

Well, I'm not sure where that came from, because they didn't have a lot of formal education. Even up until the time my dad died, neither of them had an intellectual understanding of what was going on. They really didn't. And neither one of them were big on reading. My dad would read the newspaper every night, the sports page and the front page, and what he called the funny papers, the cartoons. My mom didn't even read the newspaper. She did read to us when we were children, from children's books.

JUDE PATTON:

I never saw them do anything like that. They never watched educational television. We didn't have enough money for them to introduce me to the arts and culture or those kinds of activities, to libraries even. But I was lucky along the way to have teachers who saw some possibilities in me at least. My first grade teacher introduced me to the love of reading. And from a very early age, I was reading, reading, reading, reading, reading.

JUDE PATTON:

When there was nothing else to do, I was reading. In those days, boys and girls played a lot together, if there were both in the neighborhood. Not all of the girls were into all the sports, one other girl in my neighborhood was. I was the only girl on the softball team and the baseball team and playing football or playing basketball with the boys. They didn't think anything about that, I think, at the time. My brother did, because he was a year younger and not quite as good as I was at that time with the sports activities.

JUDE PATTON:

I was always chosen first when they choose sides, I was chosen first to be on whatever team and he was chosen last. That didn't sit very well with him. I was also a kind of a natural leader, I think, and I was older. So if we got in trouble, it was my doing. I was thinking of all sorts of things to explore and maybe took risks that I shouldn't have taken, but had very few injuries or accidents in that.

JUDE PATTON:

The other thing that I do want to mention is my grandmother seemed to be a bitter, depressed old woman for the most part. She was very religious. I won't say which religion, but a very fundamentalist type religion that had strict rules for everybody and mostly for women. But in her own curiosity -- she had a second grade education, by the way -- she had collected a series of newspaper clippings from old magazines and newspapers.

JUDE PATTON:

It all had to do with oddities of nature, for the most part, or oddities of human beings, if you will. So there might be something like a snake with two tails or two heads, or a calf with five legs or some sort of thing that she had collected over the years. I started reading those clippings when I was seven or eight years old. And so my grandmother had, along with all the other things that she was dealing with,

JUDE PATTON:

she did have this curiosity about things that perhaps she passed on a little bit to my mom.

MASON FUNK:

Those clippings about the anomalies and the oddities of existence of different species, did you tuck those away in any way, shape or form?

JUDE PATTON:

You bet. I didn't get to have physical, other than reading them and putting them back into boxes for her. I didn't necessarily start collecting those myself as far as clipping things, but I started reading more and more. I've always been fascinated with whatever it is that's outside the ordinary, whether it's whatever it is and science itself. And it really instilled that process. I don't know how many people remember this, but before the comics code authority,

JUDE PATTON:

I was collecting comic books. Every Saturday morning, the kids would get together and trade comic books, you know, so as to have something new to read, and some of those had some incredible stories. Some of those were based on old classic tales, like Edgar Allan Poe too. In the center of one of the comic books, when I was about eight years old, I found an ad for a company that was selling what were then called,

JUDE PATTON:

and still they're called, Little Blue Books. And it was a publishing company that was owned by socialists who lived in the middle of the country, by the way. The books were meant to fit in your pocket so that the ordinary person could get an education. Believe it or not, in their catalog, they had a limited, just a few, one or two dealt with homosexuality,

JUDE PATTON:

at least one dealt with what we now call intersex conditions, and more than one about cross-dressing. Now, I'm eight years old. Okay. I am already curious. I ordered these books and learned, what was then in the late forties, whatever knowledge they had about this, written by whomever.

JUDE PATTON:

I was 12 when Christine Jorgensen's story hit the headlines. I was fascinated by her story and I definitely wondered if they did it for people like me, the other way around. And in my child's mind, I thought, well, I'll probably have to go to Denmark and I'll probably have to spend at least a hundred thousand dollars, this'll never happen for me.

JUDE PATTON:

Other than the inner life I had about being myself and trying to express as much as I could in my outer outward appearance and behaviors, this was the last, probably the last information -- even though I read a lot -- in academic books and science, I never read about it again until I was in my late twenties. I just didn't find anything, as hard as I looked.

JUDE PATTON:

And of course, when I was in my late twenties was in the late sixties ... This is going far beyond ...

MASON FUNK:

Yeah, let's pause before we go that far forward, because again, lots of terrain to cover. You mentioned that you simply did not go to university when other people might have, or college, because they were going to make you wear a dress.

MASON FUNK:

Can you tell us, just give us a glimpse of your life and your world and your understanding of yourself and how the world perceived you, and so on, at that critical age of around 18, when many people are sort of like setting off on their journeys into the wider world.

JUDE PATTON:

Well, it probably started, this sort of awareness that I was, first about orientation rather than identity. I mean, the identity piece was there, but I didn't know what to call it.

JUDE PATTON:

But sexual orientation, I learned that at about age 14 or so that I was attracted to girls. And that came about initially in a dream, over a nighttime dream. But when I woke up, I didn't question it. I thought, well, that's what it is and only what it was. I understood myself probably to be a Butch type lesbian at the time. In high school, that was harder.

JUDE PATTON:

There were still dress codes and I was just absolutely mortified at having to turn up in school every single day, I never wore a dress, by the way, I would wear skirts- somewhere in those late high school years, they came out with styles for women, believe it or not, that had a zip front and a belt buckle in the back. Because belt buckles at the back of the pants for men were in style then. I managed to get a few of those to wear in that style.

JUDE PATTON:

And I would wear layers of clothes, I would wear a plain type blouse type thing that looked generally like a man's shirt. And I always wore a jacket. No matter how hot it was, I sweltered, trying to disguise the fact that I had what I had on my chest. I couldn't even speak about it. It's hard for me to speak about it now and call them by their correct anatomy. So every single day I went to school, I was miserable

JUDE PATTON:

because of the dress codes. I did cut my hair in a crew cut when I was 14. With the excuse that Mary Martin was doing Peter Pan at the time, and she had a short haircut. I did wear it all that way through high school. I was, interestingly, not really a pariah to my peers. They'd grown up with me. This was Jude. This is how I behaved. Or at that time, this is Judy.

JUDE PATTON:

This is how Judy behaved. This is what I was to them, and they had no problems with it. But toward the end of high school -- I can feel it, even now -- I was called in on a multitude of occasions by school counselors, by my physical education teachers

JUDE PATTON:

and a couple of other teachers. And even the vice principal called in, and let's say counseled about my appearance. PE teachers were getting after me, because I wouldn't take showers at school because there were gang showers, and no private place to dress and undress. One of them even threatened me that she would have me expelled from school and gave me an F and I was a straight A student on the honor roll.

JUDE PATTON:

I got so mad. It was my first bit of activism, I guess, in my behalf. I wrote to the state department of schools or what do they call it? State superintendent of schools, and I told them what was happening. Not about the harassment about how I looked, but the fact I was getting an F grade. They actually did an investigation of the school and reprimanded them for what they had done. That was in my junior year. In my senior year,

JUDE PATTON:

I got the butt of that. They kept it up and dared me and threatened me if I did it, you know, reported them again. So that was very difficult for me. Also, about the same time, adults other than my family's friends, when I was in public, it was, he, she, it, what is it, name calling, all the things you hear from many of us,

JUDE PATTON:

I think. All I know is, I learned to endure. Somehow, that base that my mom and dad gave me, that pride in itself, if you will, or that absolute knowledge that I was okay. I endured a lot of that. The worst part as an adult was finding a job

JUDE PATTON:

where I could work in men's clothes. That meant, and most folks talk about what they called it in those days, "truck driver dykes." It meant that you were driving a delivery truck. You were working in a factory, you were doing something that was probably menial. Nobody would want you at a front desk.

JUDE PATTON:

The funny thing was people would hire me to babysit their children, even though I was supposed to be this awful thing. I couldn't understand that piece. The work I did initially was in the factories. Initially, my first job, real job actually was driving a delivery truck for a florist. And then I went into factory work. In the area, there were only two large factories hiring. Work was seasonal, sometimes, or they'd have long layoffs and I'd have to pick up just odd jobs in between.

JUDE PATTON:

I did not, as you mentioned, I did not go to college. I had a full scholarship to any college in Illinois for four years, and I chose not to go because I would have still had to wear a dress and that delayed my education. I delayed it and I delayed it until post-transition, and then I started right away.

MASON FUNK:

You remember what feelings you had when you realized that you were effectively going to be deprived of an experience of going to college, at least with your peers, because of this unalterable fact that you couldn't do it if you were going to have to be subjected to a certain dress code. What feelings did that stir in you? If any.

JUDE PATTON:

Well, it's kind of an odd feeling in a way, there was so much going on about that time too. My dad was already very ill and it was just before he passed away. My mother wasn't very well. My mother had been depressed for some years, by my mid- teens, she was having episodes of severe depression with paranoia, and with almost psychotic-like features.

JUDE PATTON:

That became off and on as long as my dad was home. After my dad died, she got worse and eventually ended up hospitalized for a year. But there were so many things going on, the deprivation from the lack of money, the changes in lifestyle, the move back to grandma's house, my dealing with my own feelings about women and girls. At the time, always age peers within five

JUDE PATTON:

or so years of my own age. Knowing that no matter what I would have labeled myself, none of those labels fit society's norms at the time. And that I was getting a feedback about it that was negative. It was all that mixed in together, plus not having the opportunity for work. What I did with that time that I wasn't working was

JUDE PATTON:

I just drenched myself in self-education. Everything I could read, I poured in. I was reading four books a day or more. And I could do that, I'm a pretty good speed reader, and I do have pretty good comprehension, even now. And I just did that to keep myself going. From an early age, people came to me for advice and for counsel about a number of things.

JUDE PATTON:

I was always ahead of things. Adults would ask me for support for something that should have been coming from another adult instead of a teen or a younger child. And so my life was just this- full, full, full of things. When I felt at my worst, I would retreat. I'd go to my bedroom and I'd read some more, or I'd simply lie there for hours listening to music

JUDE PATTON:

and trying to get away from the thoughts. It seemed like there was nothing I could do. However, even then I had this feeling that, this is me. If I give in, I will have lost my own integrity. If I give in, I will have lost myself. While I may have other losses, I wasn't willing to do that little piece

JUDE PATTON:

of giving in for the bigger loss of losing myself. I frankly don't know what the other kids, the people that knew that were straight, they were just doing what straight people do, you know, getting married, going off to college, having kids already, whatever, whatever, whatever. And that wasn't me.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. You mentioned, of course, having become aware of Christine Jorgensen,

MASON FUNK:

but I just want for the record, did you have any representation? Did you see any outside your world indications that you eventually could follow the path that Christine chose and rewrite your basic gender identity?

JUDE PATTON:

Only those stories in those Little Blue Books and Christine's story were the only things that I had at the time. And I thought they were impossible. It doesn't mean I didn't still dream or wish or hope or pray for,

JUDE PATTON:

it just meant that underneath all that, I didn't. And no, there were no role models. There were role models for butch lesbians, which again, that was my initial identity. Some were in my neighborhood and some were in my school and certainly working in factories, and that sort of work, some were there as well, maybe more were there. The other thing I found later on was that many more of them might have befriended me,

JUDE PATTON:

but they were very conscious of my age. It was only after I was an adult that I had more access to people that I saw or had met in the neighborhood would reveal themselves to me as also being a lesbian.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Okay. So in my notes, again, I know we're going to skip some years.

MASON FUNK:

I know you mentioned first becoming aware of Steve Danes, Danes or Dane.

JUDE PATTON:

Dain.

MASON FUNK:

Dain. Okay. And then I also wrote down that somehow you made your way to Mar Vista and you were working at a pet grooming facility, and that was the first time that somebody gave you a book by Harry Benjamin. So I'm not sure of the sequence there, but it sounds like that moment when someone gave you a book by Harry Benjamin was like a catalyst.

MASON FUNK:

So can you paint a picture of where you were at this time in your life? Don't spend a lot of time on pet grooming because it's obviously not

[crosstalk]. But how old you were and where you were and how you were living, and then the moment when this ... It sounds like a ray of lightning, almost.

JUDE PATTON:

I've always been fond of animals, wanting to be a veterinarian as a child. One of the things I learned as I was older was that,

JUDE PATTON:

it's a place where I could wear the kind of clothing I wanted to, if I were an animal caregiver and I got into being a veterinary technician, got licensed as one, worked in vet hospitals and so on. Then I learned that I could earn more money doing dog grooming back in the poodle days. And I was working in a little shop in Mar Vista, California. 1969, toward the end of the year.

JUDE PATTON:

And Christmas is always a time when people want their pets to look nice, as themselves. They needed an extra groomer, they hired this guy. He came in looking for work. That day, we were standing at our tables, side-by-side, grooming poodles, and he struck up a conversation. He didn't say anything much about himself, just casual talk, but he kept asking me different questions, and not so pointedly

JUDE PATTON:

that I necessarily knew what direction he was taking. At the end of the day, he said, "You know, I have a book at home that I think you might be interested in. If you come by my apartment tonight, I will show it to you." When I got to his apartment, he hands me Harry Benjamin's book, which was printed in 1966, this was 1969. I just flipped through that book. As I said, fast read, looking at his stuff, and it was like a light bulb went off.

JUDE PATTON:

This is what I am. I'm not what I thought I have been all along. This is who I am. Everything described me to a T, and that's no pun. He then opened up and told me that he himself was a trans man. Until then, nothing about his appearance or anything else had given him away as being one.

JUDE PATTON:

He actually was one of the first six trans men who underwent treatment at Johns Hopkins University. There was a cohort of trans men who did that before trans women, at the time. I didn't know that. He gave me the name of his endocrinologist, whom I called the next day. Got an appointment, went to the endocrinologist, who pronounced me a classic case and said, "But I can't start you on hormones until you see a psychiatrist."

JUDE PATTON:

That person referred me to a psychiatrist who spent 45 minutes with me and picked up the phone and called the endocrinologist and said, "You're right. I agree with you. He is a classic case. You can start them on hormones right away." So none of that dance around the corner stuff, even though they were supposed to be doing it back then too. This was before the WPATH or Harry Benjamin organization formed. The person's name, who told ...

MASON FUNK:

Sorry, one

[inaudible] just for the record. What was that book by Harry Benjamin?

JUDE PATTON:

The book was called The Transsexual Phenomenon. It was one of the earlier -- It wasn't the earliest book that discussed transsexuals, by any means, but it was the one that everyone quotes now as being the first one, at least in the United States, of modern times,

JUDE PATTON:

that was written and referred to. There is a big history of Benjamin that you can look up easily.

MASON FUNK:

I want to end up again, Andrew alerted me that there was a dog barking, so let's just pause that's in your neighborhood somewhere

JUDE PATTON:

Right next door, unfortunately.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Let's just see, I think it actually stopped again. You gave me a smiley face, so that's good. Keep going, I'm sorry for the interruption.

JUDE PATTON:

The person who gave me the book revealed himself to me, his name was David. By the way, David went on to be, at least one of the first known transsexuals in modern time to serve in the US army. Long before the more recent people who came out doing that.

JUDE PATTON:

He and I stayed friends. Actually, he was at my wedding years later, but I haven't really seen him since. And he is, as many at that time, stealth, not out, doesn't want to be out. I was really fortunate, the doctor who was the endocrinologist became my personal doctor for many years, subsequently. Was really a wonderful human being,

JUDE PATTON:

saw a lot of trans people before he retired. He started the process. I eventually, within the same year, met another trans man whose name was Jason. And he was important during that time, because both of them were instrumental in making it easier for me to stay near Stanford University, where I had my surgery. Jason's mother lived in Oakland

JUDE PATTON:

and they let me stay with them during one of my surgical procedures, and after, until I could go home. David had rented a house there, or at least a house, about a block from the hospital. After two of my surgeries, I could stay there before I could be able to go home.

MASON FUNK:

Can you say, I think people are, generally speaking, probably a little more familiar with the groundbreaking program at Johns Hopkins.

JUDE PATTON:

Yes, they are.

MASON FUNK:

It sounds like Stanford was almost like the West Coast version, of Johns Hopkins program.

JUDE PATTON:

Yes. They started there, Stanford

MASON FUNK:

Start by saying Stanford, sorry.

JUDE PATTON:

Yeah. Stanford started their program in 1969. I didn't go there to have surgical procedures until 1972, and spent a year, four different times, back and forth there.

JUDE PATTON:

The base started in 1969. Unfortunately, the very first person they did, who was a male to female trans person turned around and sued them for a million dollars, because she didn't like the surgery. She said later that she actually sued them because she thought she could get money out of it- It wasn't about the surgery itself, but nevertheless, that made them much more cautious. Here they were just trying this. It was still considered experimental by everyone. Insurance companies weren't paying for it then and so on.

JUDE PATTON:

They, however, they didn't shut their program. They kept the program and everything was done through the same people, but the site of the surgical procedures was moved to Chope Memorial. It was a hospital, which is a County hospital in San Mateo, and they started doing surgeries there. Most of us were put in the prison ward while we were there as patients.

JUDE PATTON:

Because it was more modern and there were fewer people housed there. So we were kept there to protect us from prying eyes and people bothering us, if we were in the general population of the hospital. It was more for that than the secret about it. Not long after that, about the same time that Stanford was coming up, within the next two or three years,

JUDE PATTON:

at least 22 university affiliated hospitals started doing surgeries, all across our country. And within a few years, those disappeared because of backlash toward them. Like Johns Hopkins people closing theirs, it led to everybody closing their doors. But while they were open, they were able to train some physicians who were independently practicing, who then took over much of what the surgery became later on,

JUDE PATTON:

until the last few years when they started opening up programs again.

MASON FUNK:

In your prep interview, I think you said that you were the third female to male trans person who basically went through the Stanford program, is that correct?

JUDE PATTON:

I think I was a third female to male. The only reason I have that as a basis is that they only had pictures of two other people to show me,

JUDE PATTON:

of their surgery having been completed. I might be wrong, that's what I base it on, at least at Stanford. I must say that Dr. Laub is still alive, my surgeon, he actually has written a book about his life that includes some of his work in the trans community. His other work was focused on reparative cosmetic surgery.

JUDE PATTON:

And he did work with Doctors Without Borders, and groups like that for a long time, doing that in other countries.

MASON FUNK:

That's fascinating. Well, let me ask you this. You mentioned, again, in your prep interview that in those days the programs themselves insisted that for your own wellbeing,

MASON FUNK:

that you should move on, essentially leave your entire past life behind, go to a new place, start life over that. This was the suggestion on the part of the programs themselves. And this is, in fact, the path that a great number of early female to male trans folks followed. Can you paint us a picture of what that was like, this kind of pervading mentality

MASON FUNK:

that you should just disappear into your new life and hide, effectively, your identity as a trans person? Is that correct?

JUDE PATTON:

When I was at Stanford's program early on, much of the people, well, all of us were counseled about not ever revealing that we were anything other than our new identity and our new sex.

JUDE PATTON:

We were told that this was the best outcome, that in fact they would have considered us a failure if we didn't do that, that that's not what they wanted, and saw that would be a success. Most people at that time did do that. And not just female to male trans people, but male to female trans people as well. The other thing they had was a no-no is that you couldn't be anything other than heterosexual post-operative.

JUDE PATTON:

If you even suggested or hinted that you thought of yourself as a gay male or as a lesbian woman, you were denied surgery. That went on for years. I have been heterosexual. I have always loved women, so that was not an issue for them. I didn't agree, nor did I talk about, or did I admit that I would go off

JUDE PATTON:

and never to be seen as my old self. There wasn't anything political about that at the beginning, for me. It was just, I love my mom, I love my friends. I got a great deal of support for what I was doing when I went through. It was things like, "We always knew. If anybody could do it, it'd be somebody like you." Or, "This is the best thing for you. I'm so glad you did it." There was no reason for me to want to leave this nice little nest of folks to go nowhere,

JUDE PATTON:

if you will. Nor was I ashamed. I'd already learned to deal with all the negatives that people were throwing at me, the name calling and stuff. I knew that I could probably deal with that for the rest of my life. And what I had experienced with hormones, nobody knows what's underneath your clothes unless you reveal it to them, whether you had surgery or not. For me, at least, my voice changed within a couple of months,

JUDE PATTON:

I started growing hair on my face and started growing long side burns at first. It just pushed me over the edge of being androgynous or what is it, into looking male and masculine. And, nobody asked. They didn't know. It was up to me whether I revealed it or not. I can tell you that I did get started in doing a lot of media stuff back then.

JUDE PATTON:

I was ahead of all these other guys you hear about because they weren't out. Remember, they're stealth, doing what their doctors told them to do, or are on their own afraid of what the reaction would be if they were revealed. I didn't have that. I wasn't going to lose anybody that was important to me. They stayed with me all the way through this stuff. The ones who didn't stay were good riddance as far as I was concerned.

JUDE PATTON:

So I'm always a helper. People would come to me because I was one of the first people who knew about it. And eventually, I did some ... Remember Jason, the guy I mentioned, one of the guys. He was asked to come and speak about his own story to a college group, and he didn't want to do it, so he gave my name to the professor who asked him.

JUDE PATTON:

Once I did it, I was hooked. Also, since I was the only female to male person, and sometimes the only trans person of either sex, who was doing it, I at one point was talking to over 200 college classes in a year, locally up and down everywhere between, I would say, Sacramento and San Diego or the border. And as time went by a few people would join me.

JUDE PATTON:

The other person, that was sort of outed. And this is important too. The next female to male people who came after me, that you know names of today, who are in our history, the majority of them didn't deliberately come out. They were outed by someone at their job or something. And they had a choice to try to hide all that and try to repair it, or stay out.

JUDE PATTON:

And another choice about whether to educate other people about it. Steve Dain was one of the earlier ones. James Green didn't come out until 1988 or so. I was in touch in the early years with two people who were out. One was Rupert Raj, who lived in Toronto, in Ontario, who was a younger trans man and who did get some support from his parents in the beginning.

JUDE PATTON:

He and I corresponded for years and years, I only met him, actually met him in person, just within the last 10 years. There was a book that came out in 1977, called Emergence, which was written by a person whose pen name was Mario Martino, and he's since passed away. But it was the very first book about female to male trans,

JUDE PATTON:

that I read. There turned out to have been others in other countries, but he's the first I read. He and I corresponded. He was on the East coast and he knew Dr. Benjamin. He was one of his patients and was one of his supporters back there. So, there came to be, what I would call a very small network of folks who were aware of each other, but not in the public's eye yet.

JUDE PATTON:

And it wasn't until 1995 that there was a first Female to Male Conference of the Americas, they called it. There are all kinds of conferences now for all the above. What I found, which isn't in most other people's stories, is I lived in Los Angeles, and boy was I lucky! I was really, really lucky. That first professor I spoke for, his name was Howard Fradkin

JUDE PATTON:

and Howard knew Bill Hartman and Marilyn Fithian who at that time were running the Center for Sexuality in Long Beach, and they were considered the West coast Masters and Johnson], at that time. He was also at Cal State Long Beach and Bonnie Bullough was teaching there in the nursing department. Vern and Bonnie Bullough have written so many books about sexuality and history, over the years.

JUDE PATTON:

All these folks were bigwigs, the movers in the field. In the seventies when this was all happening for me or beginning to happen, birth control came out. Women's freedom about their own sexuality, sexuality in general- when I was going to college classes, Orange Coast College alone had 22 different sections in human sexuality, 101.

JUDE PATTON:

It was just like bursting at the scenes. These people that I met, for some reason, they really liked me. They would not only invite me to speak with them, like Bill Hartman would give me extra tickets to the Angels games. And Bonnie and Vern would have me come and do things, professionally, that were opening doors. They thought I should be an academic and get at their level and do those things in sexuality and particularly about transsexuality.

JUDE PATTON:

And I was just eating it up. I loved it. I really loved these people. They were wonderful, wonderful people. I became certified as a sex educator and sex therapist by AASECT, and also held membership in the society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, and several other groups like that. And I would do some education about trans stuff there long before anybody else was doing it.

JUDE PATTON:

In that context, I met Dorr Legg, who was the one of the founders of One Incorporated. Dorr was supportive of me. I remember having lunch one day with him and Virginia Prince, and as we left Dorr's office, somebody ran by and stole Virginia's purse, right out of her hands. It was not a good day, but I was able, through introductions by other people

JUDE PATTON:

who were trying to foster my, if you will, development as an educator. I just got to meet,

MASON FUNK:

Sorry. I heard the dog again.

JUDE PATTON:

Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Yeah. I think it's very intermittent and it stopped. So, but let me break it anyway, since I broke it, and I apologize. That's really, really, really, really interesting hearing about this early year of the explosion of interest in sexuality

MASON FUNK:

and your own studies. One of the things that I jotted down was that as you moved into, I know that you also got licensed as a psychotherapist and you had a private practice, and you mentioned, a lot of your clients were straight men who "cross-dressed", and we've never had anybody talk about this from the perspective of a clinician,

MASON FUNK:

who these people were in general and how they were different from you. I think there's probably tons of misunderstanding of the phenomenon of straight men who liked to cross dress, but who do not necessarily see themselves as transgender. Can you give us a little bit of a one-on-one style primer on some of the truths that you gleaned from working with these individuals in this population?

JUDE PATTON:

I will try. Okay. I didn't mention, I was talking about all the work I was doing in sexuality, but during this time, once I had finished my transition, I did start college, I did earn a master's degree in psychology. Right after that I went to medical school to train to become a physician assistant. I had a license, still do, as a marriage and family therapist. Had my own private practice for over 17 years in Santa Ana

JUDE PATTON:

and continue to have a part-time private practice. During this time, although I met a lot of people who did, and still do, identify as being trans, there were several things that were happening at the time. We talked before about being stealth and being expected to be heterosexual in your new identity and so on and so forth. Well, having met Virginia Prince,

JUDE PATTON:

I think I was the very first person like myself to ever attend her Tri-Ess meetings, which was a group for straight male cross-dressers and Virginia herself was confused about me. She thought I was a straight female cross-dresser. I said to Virginia, "No. Here's what I am." I was trying to educate her about that. This is way back. She certainly became much more educated on her own about all this. But in those days,

JUDE PATTON:

Virginia was a real pioneer. A lot of people do not understand why would a straight male want to dress in women's clothing if they didn't want to be a woman, feel like they are a woman or so on? And there are many, many explanations. I wouldn't call myself a real expert, but I do have the experience that a lot of trans folks have not had, either by choice or just didn't have it. Some of our community does come from people

JUDE PATTON:

who did at one time, identify themselves as a straight male cross-dresser. What's the difference? Okay. There are some for whom that is who they are, that is their identity. It will not change. There are some who are gay cross-dressers, not to be confused with drag queens or with performance or anything else. The categories abound. People are still trying to identify themselves

JUDE PATTON:

and move along. What I see for myself is just like I had initially identified, as a butch lesbian. That you come in with an identity to try to explain your behavior, you educate yourself, try to find out more about it. This is typical of the story. You find that maybe that is it. You might explore another option and find that isn't it, but somewhere you learn where you are along the spectrum of that.

JUDE PATTON:

And there continue to be many, many men who are straight who do cross-dress. For some, they will actually reveal that it is a fetishistic sort of thing. So, a certain type of clothing or certain texture, or something's involved with it, or some other sexual expression involved with it. I did become a member of what's called the Kink Aware Professionals, meaning that in my work with sexuality,

JUDE PATTON:

I did work with people who had these other behaviors attached to their orientation and identity. Again, what happened was I was given entree to these meetings. The only people that I know who have also attended these meetings are people who did initially identify as a straight male cross-dresser, went on to re-identify somewhere along the other part of the spectrum

JUDE PATTON:

that, no, in fact, I'm trans and I need and want to have some intervention to live as a woman, part-time or full-time. Having met Virginia, I began to go to Virginia's groups. And then there was a splinter group in Los Angeles -- that's still around as far as I know -- called CHIC,

JUDE PATTON:

which is Crossdressers, Heterosexual, Intersocial Club. CHIC gave me full entree, both because I was doing the work I was, but also they were willing to be subjects of people's dissertations, if you will, to have people understand them more. I met a number of folks, and as a therapist, at one point, I had more straight crossdressers as my clients than I did trans people.

JUDE PATTON:

All I can say, if you think that folks like me who are open and out, get treated terribly, the fears that go along with being -- I had people who were politicians, had a bank president, I had a radio announcer. I had people who had really responsible, very known publicly positions,

JUDE PATTON:

that if their secret crossdressing became known, they would have lost everything, and certainly their marriages in most cases. I developed this heartfelt affinity to the people who are in that position for something that's part of who they are, part of how they express themselves. In those days,

JUDE PATTON:

there were already week-long conventions, if you will, not much of it at that time was educational. So a person who would, let's say, live in Podunk, Iowa, could fly to the coastline somewhere, and there was a week long where you could dress or the little town that was there, thought it was funny and didn't care, and didn't bug you. You could dress all week as a woman, and you could learn how to purport yourself, how to sit properly and walk properly

JUDE PATTON:

and choose clothing and wigs and hairstyles that would be more amenable to help you to look better. Just to get the support of other people. I would cry, honestly, to think that people had to compartmentalize their life that much, just to stay safe, just to keep their partner, just to keep their job.

JUDE PATTON:

As time went by, they had more educational conferences, or at least two or three days of education attached to their conference. Long before we had these trans conferences going on. The trans guys conferences were the last to come online, so to speak. Big LGBTQ or LGB, very few trans at the LGBT conferences.

JUDE PATTON:

At that time, very little acceptance by the LGB community for trans people, and vice versa, in some cases. I saw myself as dipping my toe in all these little ponds of interest, and in each single case, whether it's me, that my own interpretation of what was going on in meeting folks,

JUDE PATTON:

and still today, when I meet folks and I sit down and get to know them as human beings, some of the most wonderful people I've ever met in my life are these folks who are dealing with every day, not being able to be who they are, not being able to be visible, visibly who they are, in a sense. Not being able to reveal that part of themselves that's probably the most worthy part of themselves, for fear.

JUDE PATTON:

I'm very pleased, date this, but I'm very pleased that yesterday that our new president restored almost everything that he could so far with LGBTQ rights that we had in the Obama era.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Yeah. That's a fantastic overview. We covered a lot of ground there, but I really appreciate all the context you're providing for us. Let me look at my notes real quick.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. This is a more of a factual thing, but along the way, you mentioned that you were part of the ACLU's first Transgender (awareness and) Rights Committee. Can you place that in time? Give us what year that was and what that was about and how that came to be?

JUDE PATTON:

Some of the early things I got involved with came about in conjunction with working with other folks,

JUDE PATTON:

a couple of really good friends were involved. I'll start with that. Back in the mid- seventies, I started a newsletter called Renaissance, which I published for five or six years. It was a quarterly, it was a little rag, you know, not many subscribers at first. I mean, it was really primitive, but there wasn't another FTM person until just a short time later,

JUDE PATTON:

who was doing the same thing. There weren't very many people at all who were trans people doing it at the time. Then I started, as a tag onto the newsletter, a group called Renaissance Gender Identity Services, in which we provided education about veterans' rights for trans people, information about legal rights for trans people, and we affiliated with a group in Orange County called Orange County Gender Dysphoria Group,

JUDE PATTON:

Dr. William Heard. The person who was most instrumental coming on board with me for this was Joanna Clark, who's still alive and kicking. We Skype every Sunday morning. Joanna was interested in the legal aspects of this. We did then form some groups,

JUDE PATTON:

I think that were out there. Joanna with her legal interests was the one that dragged me on board with her. She knew someone who was with the ACLU at the time, who is not an attorney, but a legal aid. The idea came up to form this transsexual rights committee. The very first one. Joanna and I, Dianne Saunders,

JUDE PATTON:

who was the legal aide, Joy Shaffer and Candice Brown were the first people on the committee. I do have a scanned photo of that. And I still am in touch with Joanna and Candice. We did what we could, there wasn't such a thing. That was Joanna's baby,

JUDE PATTON:

that's something that she created. She asked me to come along on that. For much of the other stuff, it was the other way around. I created it and would have Joanna come aboard on stuff that we were doing together. Joanna, by the way, eventually became a nun, formed her own order, if you will. Episcopalian, not Catholic. Catholics wouldn't have her at all. When the Episcopalians found out, they didn't want to be associated with it either, but she continued on her own. It's called the Sisters of St. Elizabeth.

JUDE PATTON:

Later, she stopped doing that. You'd need to know about this person. She didn't get totally away from trans issues or LGBTQ issues, but she did become the creator of and mastermind behind AEGIS, which was the largest service for AIDS information in the world at one time. She just retired from that about four or five years ago.

JUDE PATTON:

She spent, literally, 16 to 18 hours a day, seven days a week, running that service along with some folks that she got to work with her there when it was very busy. Those were the early things. These are the things that people weren't yet interested in. You know, the last 15, 20 years, advent of internet,

JUDE PATTON:

everything's proliferated beyond ... I think I first had internet service in 1988, or so. It's so proliferated since then in terms of information and groups popping up, and one group not happy with the other group. If you build it, they will come, kind of idea and creating their own work.

JUDE PATTON:

I would say that the majority of them do good work. What I don't like to see, as a person of the community and as a person trying to help other people, is the infighting. The, "I'm bigger than you are, I'm better than you are, or I was there first," or whatever it might be. I also have a problem as an older person, I don't have a problem with younger people at all, except those younger people who have no sense of history

JUDE PATTON:

and don't want to learn their history. Who think they invented it all. Five years later, another group of young people will come along and treat them the same way. I love what your group is accomplishing with preserving the history so that they can see that there are many, many, many, many of us who did and are, and are continuing to try to preserve the history, at least.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Yeah. That definitely is one of the objectives of this entire project. We understand, as I'm sure you do, that it's natural for young people to think that they created this all from scratch. But I also think it's tremendously empowering. And I find that the vast majority of them actually do want to know, when they catch a glimpse of people like yourself who have gone before them

MASON FUNK:

and who have their back. They actually do want to know. They just don't quite know they want to know until somehow someone brings them in. That part it's just about like, "No, I'm doing it. I'm making this up. I'm creating my own world." That part of youth as well.

JUDE PATTON:

Well, it's just part of what I discussed before about, you know, to ask, to describe, in some ways, how my life was like, in general. What was I doing, if I had to say a daily basis

JUDE PATTON:

at a certain point in my life at a certain age or a certain time or certain circumstance, my thoughts may not have -- For instance, for years, my friends and I, who had been through this stuff, we got over it. In other words, if we had a meeting at my house to have dinner or something together, we didn't talk about this stuff at all. We were talking about our other interests. We would have long conversations. I had a house with a pool for 17 years. I had a gas fire pit.

JUDE PATTON:

We'd be out there at two o'clock in the morning, no drinks, no drugs, getting high on each other, in a sense. Just our conversations. And it had nothing to do with trans or us being trans or anything else. And then, as we talked about earlier, I have had, and still have folks that I communicate with, who are stealth and, and maybe I'm the only person in their life right now

JUDE PATTON:

who knows about the other part. And that's what they need to talk about. It's all they talk about, because they can't talk about it to anybody else. And I find that sad.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. This is great because this is also kind of a good transition into some of the things you did express, a couple of things, wishing that people were interested in

MASON FUNK:

what you've experienced and learned along the way, but also wishing that people would not only define you by being a transgender person, because you've done a lot of other things in the world, and are continuing to do a lot of things, that you also feel are of value. You don't want to be defined as, "He's a trans pioneer, he's a trans elder," and that's all your patent is.

JUDE PATTON:

Thank you for bringing that up. Most of us who are trans elders, and I think not even elders, but at any point in our process where the trans becomes what other people think is the most important part of our identity, and in some ways, it will always be a part of my identity. In fact, I define myself as a trans man, not as male. I checked all those boxes, but I define myself as a trans man,

JUDE PATTON:

because in one way, that does set me apart. It tells me how I got my feelings and got to be who I am in the world today, and my philosophy behind that. But that's not all I am. It's not all my friends are, who are trans. More and more, in the work I'm doing now, with writing and editing books and trying to preserve some history of other folks, it's a broad spectrum of lifestyles, broad spectrum of talents,

JUDE PATTON:

and a broad spectrum of interests, and I find that the people that I've kept in my life, who I met initially because of some trans commonality, that people who are in my life are the people with whom I share my other interests. Joanna and I are both environmental nuts, climate change.

JUDE PATTON:

Anything to do with saving the world and the natural beauty within it. But I have remained an animal welfare and animal legal nut as well. In fact, I call myself a social justice advocate, intersectionality, the whole idea of how those various parts of myself fit together, my various interests fit together. I know that I can't save the world

JUDE PATTON:

and everything in it, as much as I might want to try, but I do my share for the environment. I do my share for these other causes. I become involved. Not only am I online still, all the time, I am an education nut, if you haven't figured that out, I am a seminar nut myself. I never get enough online seminars. This past year, instead of being a punishment for not being able to socialize, has been a boon.

JUDE PATTON:

If this could only go on forever. I'm watching things that share the environmental stuff. I'm on so many different interest groups with everything, from police reform, gun violence, animal welfare, as I said, the environment and clean water, enough food, all those things that one might say that we all need, and we all should be hopefully involved in supporting,

JUDE PATTON:

immigration law, prison reform. That defines more of myself, I think, than the trans does. What I would like to see happen, and others have talked about it, and some are doing it, is the cross-pollination that those of us who are out as trans people and trans advocates or gay and lesbian or whatever our identity might be, or orientation is,

JUDE PATTON:

that as an openly such person, that we do take ourselves to these meetings and these other groups, and be visible. It's not just about being visible as being on the spectrum amongst straight people in terms of identity, but being visible so that people get to know us as human beings too. That we do share these interests, and then we are part of the solution there as well, and not part of the problem.

JUDE PATTON:

The more we can do that, I think, the more integrated all of this will be. That's one of my dreams. I didn't really, and I'm not, I would never be a creative writer. I could never write a novel or anything like that, or create characters in a story, but I can be a documentation kind of person,

JUDE PATTON:

and that's what I've started to do. I thought, well, I'm not an artist or visual arts person, and I'm not too good at technology. I can never do what you're doing with this project, with OUTWORDS, but I can edit and I can recruit, and I can support people who want to tell their stories in a book form, that sort of thing. But mine's more specific, I think, than the project you're doing. Mine's about trans elders and their healthcare concerns,

JUDE PATTON:

the end of their life, you know, their worries about what happens if I go into a nursing home, am I going to forget who I am? Are they gonna put me in a dress after I've lived as a man all these years, or vice versa, are they going to allow me to wear my wig? Are they going to use the right pronouns or not? Are they going to bury me as my other self,

JUDE PATTON:

family stepping in and doing that? I've heard all these things happen. All the worst, most terrible stories connected with end of life, lack of care, lack of interest, interfering with a person's whole identity at the end of their life when they could no longer defend themselves. Who's going to be there for that person? It doesn't matter who you are when you're older.

JUDE PATTON:

Sometimes you've lost. Even if you have that support system, sometimes they die before you do.

MASON FUNK:

Or you had to move or whatever. I'm so glad you brought that up. Because we are just in the early stages here at OUTWORDS with forming a partnership with the national organization, SAGE, that you've probably heard of because they do competency training around LGBTQ identities across the country.

MASON FUNK:

And they do a lot of these trainings. In conversation with them, they specifically asked me, which I wanted to do anyway, was to have you share either any personal difficulties you've had or stories you've heard of experiences or difficulties with accessing inclusive and safe healthcare, specific instance, from your life or from people you've known

JUDE PATTON:

The phone. Take it down, because the phone's ringing and I can't get to it. I thought I had it shut off, but

MASON FUNK:

Well, we'll be okay. We'll just keep rolling and we can edit this part out.

JUDE PATTON:

Well, I hear you and you open up a Pandora's box for me, because that's been my aging and end of life care for trans people and all people LGBT, but particularly trans. I turned 65, 15 years ago, okay.

JUDE PATTON:

As the decades went by, as a young person, I thought I'd be dead at 30. I didn't want to be dead, but I couldn't see my life beyond 30 years old. As the years went by, it always was 10 years from where I am now. Now, at 80, only two people out of a hundred live to be a hundred.

JUDE PATTON:

So my thinking has increased about how much time I have left. And being glad I have, hopefully, a few years left. From just being carefree about that and not thinking about it personally, but in terms of other people, because I've always had been a caregiver in my family, from my dad, my mom, my partners, former partners, moms and dads,

JUDE PATTON:

and so on and so forth, and all that stuff. I've lost many friends to death already. And that's one of the things about aging that I think is the most difficult for anyone who's aging is you're still alive and those people you love are gone. Every year, my address book has a few more people I don't have the opportunity to write to anymore. The one thing that has irked me,

JUDE PATTON:

and I will say this out loud on this interview, in 1979, I was the first trans individual to be elected to the board of directors for what was then the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, now WPATH. The vote was 15 to 14. 14 of the doctors didn't want me or any other trans person on that board

JUDE PATTON:

because (they thought) we were nothing but mentally ill. That year, they put out the first edition of the Standards of Care or the guidelines for care for trans individuals' health care. It is now more than 40 years ago that they did that, and they still don't have a section of healthcare for elder trans people.

JUDE PATTON:

I have been lobbying them privately, sometimes in public at their conferences, to get that section in, and I've been turned down more than once. Ignored a lot, and so on. The very last comment I got from them was that, well, they'll add it as a "me too" kind of section onto every other section that already exists, instead of giving it its own category.

JUDE PATTON:

When I see something I think that's not right, I can't let it go. I continue to lobby with them. And then I started this other stuff about the writing and so on and so forth. My first knowledge about this came, not in a trans group, but in a social group in Garden Grove, California, called the Jacks and Jills. There were gay couples and lesbian couples for the most part.

JUDE PATTON:

Four straight couples, and I was the only trans person with my partner in that group. One of the group members passed away. Everyone was prepared to go to their funeral and support their friends and so on, and partner. The parents of the individual, the woman who passed, would not allow any of us to attend the funeral. They didn't want "those kinds of people"

JUDE PATTON:

at the funeral. Within a short time, one of my trans clients, not a client at the time, but a friend, was not told that her mother had died until months later, by her family, because they didn't want her at the funeral. I've since heard worse stories than that. And more of the same, we do have a law in California, as you're probably aware,

JUDE PATTON:

about nursing home care and what that should be like, even with a fine attached to it if they don't do certain things. We have another law that mandates that those who are writing the death certificate use the preferred name and identity, because there was a test case for that, where a guy was living for 10 years as a man and the coroner, not the coroner, the funeral home director

JUDE PATTON:

who filled out the death certificate, the person hadn't had bottom surgery, and identified them as female at their death. And so there's another law about that. I don't think there is a national law about either one. For me, it's important to continue to do that work. There's this piece in this that's not being done or being done by very many people. And we are having the dialogues, and many, many more. You'll see if I went around the country

JUDE PATTON:

and I got into every local LGBTQ center that did have the T attached to it, that they will have a group for elders, trans elders. In fact, I have one in Sacramento, close to where I live. Sacramento's about 50 miles away from me, that's an LGBTQ elders' group, and I'm the only trans member of the group.

JUDE PATTON:

I'm used to being the older, almost always the only person over 40 at trans meetings and groups. The importance of it is absolutely there, all those are getting older. The population of elder people, right now in the United States, equals the population as exactly the number of percentage of the population of people under 16.

JUDE PATTON:

And we pay all this attention, as we should, to our children and our teens who are fit in a category along with us, and we pay no attention to the people who are, in numbers, every bit as large and growing larger in numbers, we pay no attention to, whatsoever, and that's everywhere. I'm starting to see a few more projects, not necessarily like yours or anything,

JUDE PATTON:

but a few more projects coming up. And a few more books are being written by elders or the piece about elder care. I am a member of SAGE, I'm a SAGE Ambassador, which means I go out and talk about it. I'm also a member of SAGE Connect, so I volunteer to be a contact for persons who are isolated. They do wonderful work.

MASON FUNK:

I want to still get a little bit more specific about people who are nearing their latter years and possibly going into care facilities. You started off kind of down this path earlier, where they may face a whole range of difficulties finding inclusive care. And this can be anybody across LGBTQ, anybody kind of in this community who may have to re-closet,

MASON FUNK:

who may encounter a lot of just ignorance. Can you talk about specific challenges in that kind of setting that either you've experienced or people that you know have experienced?

JUDE PATTON:

What I've experienced most in healthcare, from other people, all the way along younger, older, in my age has been the need to educate every doctor I see. They just haven't had the training for it

JUDE PATTON:

and they still aren't getting a whole lot now. That's okay, I'm used to it. But to a person who isn't used to it or expects their doctor to have that knowledge in advance, it's very, very unsettling. It makes you a little bit more fearful about following orders they might give, or their lack of knowledge. In a nursing home, what do you do if you're demented

JUDE PATTON:

and you're trans and nobody's with you and nobody can vouch for you and nobody knows your former life. They're not trans themselves, so they may not know your needs. You don't even know your own needs, perhaps, at the time. One of my clients commented to me, "Well, then it won't matter, will it?" If I don't know what I need, or that people are treating me badly, maybe I won't have a reaction. But for those of us who still have part of our mental ability left,

JUDE PATTON:

I'll give you an example, almost four years now, in February, I had a mild stroke. I could still move, I could still think, and I could do both of those things. What I lost was I couldn't get the words out temporarily. I couldn't get the words out, and I was mildly confused. I knew what they were saying, but I couldn't make myself understand. It lasted about 30 hours or so. Thank God I have a partner.

JUDE PATTON:

Okay. I woke up like that. She knew immediately that something was very wrong. She took me to the local ER, and she got a wheelchair. She left me in the car, went and got a wheelchair, wheeled me into the front desk. The only hospital in town, only ER in town, they were busy. She pushed her way up to the desk,

JUDE PATTON:

and they were kind of nonchalant. It wasn't about trans at all, it was about old. They immediately assumed that I was senile. They started taking information and they asked her, how long has he been this way? So they weren't talking to me. "How long has he been this way?" She said, "He woke up this way. He was fine when he came home yesterday.

JUDE PATTON:

He worked yesterday." They said, "Worked?" She says, "Yes, he's a physician assistant. And he worked all day yesterday." I was treated immediately like something worthwhile instead of a senile old man who didn't have any wits about him. I was there five days, I had to educate -- Well, here's what we did. We told them right away, soon as we got to the room,

JUDE PATTON:

"Jude's trans, if you have any issues about that, you ask me," my partner said. She said, "I expect him to be treated with dignity and respect. If you need to know anything about this or about his health, I've got the information." They put me in an ICU. They ran, I can't tell you how many times repeated, MRI scans, CT scans,

JUDE PATTON:

angiograms, you name it, heart studies. And they finally said, well, probably a little piece of cholesterol or something, you know, temporary, something. They couldn't find any blood clots. They couldn't find anything that was stopped up. They couldn't find any evidence of what caused this event, but it was there. However, it's the kind of thing that when the physical therapy people came, it was like a troupe of them.

JUDE PATTON:

It was four of them, instead of one person, and they all had "that look", you know how people have that look in their eye that they're curious, you know, there's a little bit off. It means somebody has passed the word around that this person is this such. I didn't say anything to them. Nobody treated me badly, if you will. In fact, the social worker who was talking with us before I went home, invited me to come back to the hospital to train all the social workers too,

JUDE PATTON:

about trans issues. I volunteered to be a consultant for them as a professional, if they needed to have a client come in our patient navigator, which is what I'm doing now, privately, in my private practice. It's almost all pro bono, but when I have a LGBTQ person who's elder and needs to have a guide advocate, a support in a doctor's office,

JUDE PATTON:

in a hospital and an emergency room, then people have my number to call. Hopefully, I could get people to call me in advance of the need and get something set up.

MASON FUNK:

You mentioned, for example, you proactively saying to your doctor or your partner saying, this is the situation and the doctor may feel a certain responsibility to simply treat you as a human being,

MASON FUNK:

but there are other people who may bring certain biases, cultural biases. Again, I think this is one of the stories we hear that people may simply end up in the care of someone at a facility who thinks their lifestyle is wrong. Who thinks that this is a form of deviance. What do you think can be done to increase competency? Whether that takes the form of tolerance, whether that takes the form of acceptance, but making sure that the care is competent to the individual?

JUDE PATTON:

The competency is what's really needed today for any people in a serving position. When you offer services, which is what health care is, whether you're in a hospital or an office, you need to have the competency and understanding of as many parameters as you can about people whose identities or orientations ...

JUDE PATTON:

To me, the religious freedom act is a, well, I don't want to say a pile of ----, but their rights end where mine began. My religious feelings or my spiritual feelings are all-inclusive of people. They may be denying me care, based on a religious or cultural kind of no, no, in their mind,

JUDE PATTON:

they're actually denying another human being the care that they need and deserve. How we can get around that, what I see more in this is not -- It sounds negative about other cultures, but it's just to me, a glaring truth. Our country has lost a lot of people as church goers. We really have, no matter how vocal they seem to be. We don't have as many people who attend church or would say

JUDE PATTON:

that they belong to a particular religious affiliation. So our missionaries and the people who try to get money for their particular churches or missions in life go to foreign countries and spread their rigid belief systems. And who are the caregivers in most of our nursing homes and facilities like that, people from other cultures, for the most part. People who can barely speak English, for the most part.

JUDE PATTON:

That's just the way it is. You know, it's just the way it is. Some cultures, by tradition, take on caregiver jobs. That's a tradition. We have some cultures that everybody's a taxi driver. That's a stereotype, but it is true when you go out and you're in the situation and you're offered these services that you tend to see certain subgroups who are the people who were employed in those positions.

JUDE PATTON:

So what if I come into a nursing home and I can barely think for myself, I lost part of my mental ability. I've certainly lost most of my ability to fight for myself. And my caregiver comes into the very room, preloaded with religious antagonism toward me or anything like me, and unable to speak much English to me.

JUDE PATTON:

I've had clients whose caregiver got down on their knees and prayed, whose caregivers said, "You'd be better off dead than alive." Whose caregiver said this or that or the other. And almost always, it was based on some sort of a religious doctrine that that person had, or their lack of education or both. I can't say that I'm right or wrong. I'm not saying everyone is like that. I'm just saying it all too often seems to be coming from those two sources.

JUDE PATTON:

There's a big thing right now about detransitioning too, that a lot of people haven't talked about, and most of the people who detransition do that because they found religion, or they came from a very starkly, rigid religion, themselves battle with their feelings through years. Finally sought their transition,

JUDE PATTON:

and then were back in the public being spoken of in such disparaging ways by their religious peers, that they detransition. Many of them will say it wasn't the wrong decision for me, but I can't live like this. I can't live with the negative stuff from the people I care about in my family or my church.

MASON FUNK:

Wow. Wow.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Well, I think you've given us some really, really important content around that issue. In a way, I kind of want to shift the focus from the problematic side to the area of people who have, you mentioned, we asked this in our questionnaire, people who you want to talk about, who were important to you as peers, as role models. The three people you mentioned in your questionnaire were Jamison Green, Hawk Stone

MASON FUNK:

and Zander Keig . Jamison is part of the archive, so we do have an interview with him, but I wonder if you can just give us a minute or so about what specific importance you attach to Jamison in the community, in the world, and especially in the trans world.

JUDE PATTON:

Well, I'll talk about three people who have been important, I think in terms of role models for me,

JUDE PATTON:

or just in my awareness, and doing some of the same kind of work, and I admire their work intensely.

MASON FUNK:

One second. I'm sorry. You shifted whatever your computer is sitting on. You rotated it a little bit. Can you go back to the other direction?

JUDE PATTON:

This direction?

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. That's about right.

[inaudible]

JUDE PATTON:

Okay. Well, I'll start. There are more than three people, but we have limited time. But within the trans community, or more specifically, the trans men's community of folks who are doing activist work and advocacy and education, there are three people that stand out to me. The first I met was Jamison Green. Jamison, to my knowledge, transitioned in 1988,

JUDE PATTON:

which was 18 years after I did. So I had a head start on him with some of the edge, some of the things that he's doing. His focus has been primarily on law and getting insurance and things like that. Making a difference in that way, educating people, creating new laws, helping to create new laws, helping to get new standards up. He was at one point, then later on, much more recently,

JUDE PATTON:

a past president of WPATH, and the second trans man to do so. I knew his predecessor, Stephen Whittle, whom I have corresponded with for years in England as well. But Jamison has been, I think the standout folks said. If it's a default for who does every trans man know, young and old? It will be Jamison Green. He's done so much work, so much good work for our community.

JUDE PATTON:

It would take a lifetime for somebody else to try to begin to match all of the things that he's done so far, and is still doing. He and I never did become close friends. He and I never did become boos and buddies or anything like that, but we know of each other, we're friendly and we correspond, we see each other at conferences, we have a lot of similar interests and so on and so forth. And so in that way he remains an influence.

JUDE PATTON:

I follow what he's doing, appreciate what he's doing and all that, and hope that he feels the same way about some of the things I'm doing. Another person that's been influential is Hawk Stone, who is Moonhawk River Stone, who is a therapist and a minister who lives on the East coast near Albany, New York.

JUDE PATTON:

Hawk, I met at a conference initially and he and I buddied up at a lot at conferences. In other words, he's coming from the East coast, I'm coming from the West coast and we're usually meeting in Philadelphia, San Francisco, somewhere else, where both of us have to stay in a hotel, and we're really good roommates. Hawk gives in to me. I can't stand the heat, he will forego having the heat on and I give him all my covers. He and I are really good hotel mates,

JUDE PATTON:

we're very, very good to each other in that way, and compromise. Hawk is an amazing man too. Hawk has not ... how can I put it? He's gone a different direction and how people know of him and know him, where James has been out there, as I think in some ways, because it's a business for him in terms of what he does, has had to capitalize on publicity

JUDE PATTON:

and so on and so forth. Whereas Hawk has never written a book. He's written a lot of papers, by the way. Hawk is more like me in the sense that he has frontline contact with clients and with his ministry. Ministry came much later within the last 10 years or so, I think. He does a lot of things about questioning the Standards of Care.

JUDE PATTON:

He's not afraid to speak up. He and I share a lot of interests, especially about animals. Hawk has cats. I usually have dogs. And we just are, you know, the environment and all that kind of stuff as well. Not that James doesn't value those too, but Hawk and I more often communicate about that. And then, since we traveled together and stayed together, we've had a lot more time for just chit-chat human being talk, person to person

JUDE PATTON:

than I can manage to get with James. James is often surrounded by admirers and other people who want to have his ear for the moment. The last time I was with Hawk, we were in Provincetown, and we had some adventures there and it was funny because we're both older guys and Hawk has some disabilities and had his crutches with him and so on. I was helping him in a wheelchair from time to time.

JUDE PATTON:

We were there together, and all the young gay men at all the restaurants thought we were lovers. They were just literally oohing and aahing that we were so old and still out there together. And we just let them think it because we enjoyed getting the treatment we did because they thought that. They were just so kind to us,

JUDE PATTON:

made space for us, made sure the chair was pulled away so we could get Hawk in his wheelchair up there. Zander, I met much later than either.

MASON FUNK:

Give me his full name.

JUDE PATTON:

Zander Keig, K E I G. Zander, I met much later and he's younger than Jamison and Hawk, and I. He's a social worker. He's a veteran. He has done so much work with the veterans' affairs

JUDE PATTON:

and with trans stuff, and as a social worker. He's getting a lot of awards more recently, as a social worker, for the work he's done -- and that's within the general association of social workers, not just about trans issues. In fact, there was someone doing a little seminar online in late March, who has asked all three,

JUDE PATTON:

Zander and Jamison ... Zander is doing a program at the University of Victoria for their Moving Trans History Forward conference in March, and has asked Jamison and I, and another person, Charley Burton, to be on that panel to talk about mentoring, older trans men mentoring younger trans men. That's an effort that each of us are trying too, to try to create that space for this dialogue between youth and elders.

JUDE PATTON:

Hawk and I had done that in the past, several times. There used to be a trans men's conference called American Boys, put on by American Boys on the East coast. Hawk and I used to go there, and almost every year they'd have us do a youth/elder dialogue. Charley suggested a woman who's doing another conference on trans elders in March,

JUDE PATTON:

a couple of days seminar online, basically doing the same thing, having some trans elders on there to be able to speak about that because it is about aging and not about the rest of the age spectrum. So things are happening, as I said earlier, things seem to be happening. These three men are always on my mind. They're always kind, we try to let each other know of conferences

JUDE PATTON:

and seminars or things that might be going on, research or educational things. I'll just forward something to them to let them know that they're there. We're also trying to be more inclusive. All of us are white guys (except Charley). Well, Zander's Mexican, but the three of us. So, we're trying on our own because we believe in diversity, inclusivity to involve people from other cultures

JUDE PATTON:

and from other backgrounds and racial stuff, more equity and equality, and make an opportunity. It's sometimes hard to find people in other cultures because elders are regarded in a different way, and being different is regarded in a different way. So many of the people all of us know are stealth or not out enough to want to be included. That makes it difficult.

MASON FUNK:

Sure. Yeah. Let's talk briefly. We're kind of beginning to wind down and we always have a few questions at the end about four that I want to save a little time for, but I definitely want you to talk about your TRANScestors book series. Tell us about the inspiration for that, where you're at. I've seen one of them,

MASON FUNK:

I went on Amazon, I saw one of them on Amazon. I believe you have more in the works. So tell us about that project.

JUDE PATTON:

It's been longer than a couple of years ago. It isn't that I move slow with projects, it's just the way it is, and me being naive and not knowing how to go about necessarily recruiting people to be part of a project like yours or so on, or how I don't have the money to advertise, I don't have the equipment,

JUDE PATTON:

I can't hire a printer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, I had thought of doing a book series, or even one book about trans elders, and inviting other people to write their stories to be included. About four or five years ago ... In fact, I had two book projects; that one and another one called LGBTQ People and Their Companion Animals, about the importance of our dogs and cats and our, whatever we have in our life,

JUDE PATTON:

and their health value. I made up little flyers, colorful flyers, and I'd put them on tables at conferences and then some of them would disappear and I would get very few people contacting me about being a part of the project. And I almost gave up, honestly. I'd got to the point where I even tried to ask and recruit all these people I'd known for years, people like Jamison and some of the other folks to do the elders book.

JUDE PATTON:

Well, first of all, some of them were under 50, that eliminated them. But the rest, "I'm too busy", "I don't have time", "I don't know how to write", blah, blah, blah. They just don't want anything to do with it. Finally, I thought there's gotta be a way to get more people I can contact. I taught myself, it's not hard. I just hadn't thought of it. I went into social media,

JUDE PATTON:

and you know how on Facebook, it lists all your friends, and their pictures usually, and how many contacts you have in common. And I used it sort of as an algorithm to then message on Facebook. Because most of the time, I never had nor did they publish their email. I made up not just a flyer, but I made up guidelines for submission so they could see what they might be writing about

JUDE PATTON:

and invited them to include art drawings, photos, poetry, or any other art type project. For a moment after that happened, I was almost overwhelmed with responses. I actually had over 80 responses. So far, I've got two books printed, there are about 22 people in each book

JUDE PATTON:

who did their stories. That means about half of the people who initially said they would, did. The rest of them, as hard as I've tried, the majority of those people have not gotten back to me or did anything. I'm going to do one last try. I figured this, there's a couple of people that I know have seen that the other books are out and maybe they'll wish they had done it, you know what I mean?

JUDE PATTON:

That, "Gee, I see there's some other people who did do this, maybe I should have." I'm hoping some of those who initially dropped out that I can contact and see if they changed their mind. I'm very happy to say the number one was out. How this got started, and how it would ever happen is, I'm sure that if I went to a Jack-in-the-box publisher, a national publisher, that's well-known, they would have discarded. They wouldn't even read the damn thing, let alone agree to print it.

JUDE PATTON:

However, in 2014, I went to the very first Moving Trans History Forward Conference. I had known Aaron Devor for years and years and years. At the conference, he put on a pioneer panel that he had me moderate, the first one. Then I met a friend of his, who was at the university and who was the Dean of anthropology at the time, Margot Wilson.

JUDE PATTON:

Margot, after watching the pioneers' panel, approached each one of us who was on the panel, because she was sitting there with her wheels grinding, saying, "What's going to happen to these folks." None of them at that point, none of us had written a book about their own biographies or anything else. Other than one who had done a lot of writing, including a little biographical piece. So Margot asked us, and four of us accepted her invitation to write for a book called Glimmerings.

JUDE PATTON:

And that's in print as well. It has about 18, or I think 15 or 16 people who wrote their stories, not so much about aging, but how they first became aware, the first glimmer of being trans. I wrote a little article that takes up about a third of my life, maybe, if that much, for that book. Margot, bless her heart,

JUDE PATTON:

one of the people she asked to write this story and who accepted was Stephanie Castle, who at the time was 93 years old and had done some work in Canada. Mostly in Vancouver with trans people and written a bunch of novels whose characters were trans. Stephanie had four publishing companies, four different, small publishing companies. When Stephanie passed, she gave them to Margot.

JUDE PATTON:

Now, I have a publisher. If it's halfway decent or on the subject, Margot will publish whatever I might put together, and probably even if it's not halfway decent, but anyway, if it preserves the history

MASON FUNK:

And what do you see as the importance, just tell me, from the heart, why is this important to you? Why is it important to gather these stories and publish them in some way, shape or form.

JUDE PATTON:

To me, this is to me. Other people might think differently. I think it's important to do what you're doing, to publish stories, to publish books, to gather information on video or however, visual information as well, to record the histories of people who were actually there at the time. We see, every time, for instance, somebody contacts me when it was a 50th anniversary of Stonewall.

JUDE PATTON:

Well, I wasn't at Stonewall, but I was in the bars in St. Louis in the early sixties getting thrown out because I was too butch looking. They would actually usher me out the door when they learned the cops were coming, because they didn't want me there, because I was so obvious. These kinds of things, and living through the AIDS pandemic and so on and so on, seeing my friends dropped like flies and whatever. So we have these times

JUDE PATTON:

when people try to sort out the one or two people who are still around, we need more people telling the history, we need more individual histories. I think every person on earth has at least one story, and is important to tell, let alone us trans folks and people who are outside the so-called norms. We need it for ourselves, we need it for the mainstream people, and we need it for our children and our teens.

JUDE PATTON:

I have often been approached at conferences by a young person, no story, don't lie, sometimes, I think maybe the only value I have at this point to them, they'll come up to me and say, "Are you Jude Patton? Are you the same Jude Patton that I heard about? Oh, I am so glad to meet you. It makes me happy to know that I can live to be old

JUDE PATTON:

and have a decent life." I have not gone into my relationships, and maybe there's not time for that with this interview, but I have had overall not just a good life, but a wonderful life.

MASON FUNK:

That's wonderful. And it is true. I'm sad to say we probably don't have time to go into your relationships, but I am happy to hear you say that overall you've had a good and a wonderful life and you have referenced your partners, at least your current partner.

JUDE PATTON:

I will interrupt just long enough to say that I was lucky in the first part of my life to have someone I dearly loved. I was lucky in the middle of my life to be married for 26 years to my wife and have the experience of what was looking like a traditional heterosexual marriage, with step kids and grandchildren. And now, at the end of my life, I have a partner who is so dear to me

JUDE PATTON:

and loves me so much and really treats me well. I'm a very lucky man, a very lucky human being.

MASON FUNK:

That's wonderful. Let me ask you normally we have four final questions, but two of them pertain to the importance of capturing stories and you just covered them so eloquently. So I'm going to just have two more final questions instead of four. The first one is, if you could look back and tell your 15 year old self, anything, what would it be?

JUDE PATTON:

If I could look back and tell my 15 year old self, what I think would be important for them to know at this point, and that's any 15 year old or a trans 15 year old, that is to be yourself. In one way, don't let the bastards get you down. Don't lose your own integrity to try to be something you are not in order to please somebody else.

JUDE PATTON:

Just hang in there, it will be different. You can succeed. You must do this for your own happiness, in a way. Without that, when you give in to other people's notions of who you should be, what you should be doing, you've lost yourself.

MASON FUNK:

That's true. Thank you. And then the last question I have for you is I love asking this question.

MASON FUNK:

It's as LGBTQ people or queer people, whatever term you relate to, do you see some, what I like to call super power that queer people either have from birth or learned that we uniquely have to offer to the world?

JUDE PATTON:

I think the biggest thing that queer people, LGBTQ people, whatever your term is for yourself and others, like you,

JUDE PATTON:

I think the biggest thing we have to offer, and the biggest thing we've learned, if we've survived and thrived, is compassion. We've learned to love ourselves, and you can't love somebody else before you love yourself. We understand what it is to be treated in a way that's not healthy by other people. We understand what kind of strengths it takes to get past that. And I think we want to give back in some way,

JUDE PATTON:

it's almost like being a missionary, someone with a purpose of saying, "We can do this, we will do this. We are here to support you. We want you to be happy. We want you to thrive in what you're doing." I do believe, I want to say we're a Vanguard. I also want to sort of paraphrase something I heard a long time ago; the world is not changed by the people

JUDE PATTON:

who are in the middle. It's changed by the people who are on the fringes. And I think that basically holds true anywhere. And if we want to talk about some personal power or not, I think just standing up for yourself under any circumstances makes you a very different human being. People respond to that. I think they respond more to the quiet standing up.

JUDE PATTON:

The other part of me is I've never been a rebel. I've never been in your face, never been in somebody's face. I'm the guy behind the scenes. I'm the quiet guy who's persistent. But we need to have people in your face. And we need all kinds of people who come out in different ways to support whatever our cause is, or it wouldn't be happening. And I appreciate the people who sometimes have the loudest and filthiest mouth,

JUDE PATTON:

trying to get people uplifted. I didn't appreciate it from our former president, for what he stood for, but I do in our own community. If it takes that, if it takes interrupting, if it takes a different calling attention, then that's what it does. It will be the quiet people behind the scenes who work with the others who actually get the laws changed, probably.

MASON FUNK:

Right. Yeah. I fully, fully, fully agree with you. It takes all types.

MASON FUNK:

It takes people who are yelling and rabble-rousing and breaking things, as well as people who are doing an end run and getting into the side door and the back door. And we couldn't exist without anybody, any person within our community, who's doing one

[inaudible].

JUDE PATTON:

Well, actually I'm an antiviolence person. I do not believe in violence of any sort toward anyone or property or anything.

JUDE PATTON:

That does bother me as a human being, whatever groups doing it. It shouldn't take that for people to stand up for what's right. And I'm sorry, it does happen. We don't like it when it's directed to us. I'm sure if we were directing it to other people under the guise of freedom for homosexuals and freedom for trans people or freedom for queers,

JUDE PATTON:

nobody likes that either. It just drives their lack of understanding deeper into the ground and a reason to hate even more.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Well, thank you for that. Thank you for that opinion. That's interesting as well. Yeah. Well, listen, we have reached the end of our time together. I thank you so so much. And also Andrew mentioned that you had, I was already thinking this, looking at your book online on Amazon,

MASON FUNK:

your first volume, I was thinking, Oh, I hope you could connect us to some of these extraordinary people.

JUDE PATTON:

I can.

MASON FUNK:

Maybe have a separate conversation. Jack is our official kind of archival researcher type person. But I looked at that first volume and there were several people who I thought seemed really fascinating. We only have one intersex person in our archive thus far, and it looks like there were at least one, if not more,

JUDE PATTON:

There were two in that, one had an affair with Michael Phelps and well, it's true because it's not a story. It is true that she did. Michael Phelps wouldn't like you to know that probably, but it was actually in the gossip, rags and everything else. TRANScestors, by the way, I got sidetracked, TRANScestors' first volume came out

JUDE PATTON:

in middle of 2020. The second volume came out on December 15th. I'm currently working on a third volume, which should be out at the end of March, if I'm lucky. And then I continued as a series, depending on how many people I can ... We're all growing older, so every time somebody turns over 50, I get to ask them. And there are a lot of people who are elders that are just not visible to us.

JUDE PATTON:

They're not at our conferences. If you can imagine I'm semi-retired, I still work part-time. This is off the record, but I get a little bit of extra income from doing that. If I didn't have that extra income, all I've got is social security. If I didn't have a partner and we're splitting expenses, I'd be living in a little tiny room somewhere. So those of us who might be more active, but don't have the -- We don't have a computer, we can't afford internet.

JUDE PATTON:

We can't afford transportation. We may not be able to drive anymore because of our disabilities. We're not able to get out there. And yet these are the stories that need to be told more than the stories, I think, of those of us who are out and open and being advocates,

MASON FUNK:

That's a great point. That's actually a fantastic point to finish up.

[crosstalk] the competency training as well.

JUDE PATTON:

Where are those people who are just out there living, what I would say, kind of an ordinary life. The intersection of aging period, with anything else that you are, until you get there, until you have a disability, until you have something that slows you down, until you've had six little tiny fender-bender accidents and your kids take your car away. I mean, you don't know what it's like to have to depend on public transportation, and then maybe even handicapped, you don't know what it's like

JUDE PATTON:

that you can't walk to the store that's only two blocks away. Until those things about aging in general get told, we're not going to have much help for aging trans or aging LGBTQ, except that we've learned to make our own family units.

MASON FUNK:

Right. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you again, Jude. This has been really, really wonderful. I'm so glad we got connected to you.

JUDE PATTON:

Well, thank you. Tell Zachary. Thanks.

MASON FUNK:

I will. We will. I've never met Zachary in person, but I hope to have more interaction with her. And that was through Andrew, who had a relationship.

JUDE PATTON:

Interesting. Well, I did meet Zachary, for an interview, so that was very nice. I really enjoyed them. I have obvious,

JUDE PATTON:

I think it's obvious, a special affinity for my own people. I didn't tell you this, but I have a high affinity for gay male friends, even though I'm not gay myself. My best friend for many years is a gay man, who was Mae West's fan club secretary, I could tell you stories about Bob and I, and all that we went through together. We would go places. We'd go all kinds of places together.

JUDE PATTON:

Sometimes, the guys would hit on me. Sometimes, the guys would hit on him. Well, I wasn't interested in being hit on in that way. And so I say, Oh, no, thanks. I'm with my husband or I'm with my friend or with my lover, and we're not interested. If it was someone he didn't like, or didn't want to be picked up by, he'd use the same excuse. And then if it was someone he thought he might like, I'd just bow out and go home,

JUDE PATTON:

so he could have his time with this new acquaintance. But I had such a wonderful time. One more, this is not for the tape, but a few years ago, a friend of mine invited me to a spectacular party. They were having to celebrate three different life events and actually pay my way down to Burbank. We went to Hollywood for this party. It was the night of Michael Jackson's death. That's how far ago it was.

JUDE PATTON:

And we're in this big hotel, and this guy really did it up well. Most of the people there were couples, right? Some were trans, some were gay and many were straight. At the time, I was still married. My wife was ill and I got my daughter to take care of her. Anyway, I'm there by myself. He puts me at a table with six gay men. After the thing was over, he apologized to me. I said, Oh my God,

JUDE PATTON:

don't apologize. I had the best time of my life I've had in 25 years. You know what? These guys were kind of like the guys I used to hang around with, you know, just banter that goes over everybody else's head. I'm right there in the middle of it, loving every minute of it. I said, if you ever have a party like that again, please put me a table like that.

MASON FUNK:

Well, awesome. Andrew, are you still there?

JUDE PATTON:

We put him to sleep.

MASON FUNK:

No, he's riveted, I'm sure, as well as I am. Andrew, do you need ... Jude, Andrew and I have to do a little bit of like technical stuff. In other words, we have to have a little follow-up meeting. Andrew, do you need to just wrap up things with Jude and then you want to tell me, should we reconvene in five minutes or 10 minutes?

ANDREW LUSH:

Well, it'll take a little longer than that, cause I need to copy the files for Jude.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. You want to text me?

ANDREW LUSH:

Sure. Yeah. Let me text you.

MASON FUNK:

Or why don't we say roughly in about half an hour, would that work for you?

ANDREW LUSH:

Sounds good.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Right around right around 4:50. We'll text each other.

ANDREW LUSH:

Alrighty. I'm going to stop the recordings here.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. And Jude, I'm going to get off. Thank you again so much.

JUDE PATTON:

It's nice meeting you online. Someday in person, I hope.

MASON FUNK:

From your mouth to God's ears. Take good care. I'm getting off. Andrew will stay on bye-bye.