KRISTIE TAIWO-MAKANJUOLA

Perfect. You guys are good to go. I'll be in the background.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Thank you.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Thanks Kristie. So Brett, do us a favor and start off just by stating and spelling your first and last names.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Brett Bigham, B-R-E-T-T B-I-G-H-A-M.

MASON FUNK:

Alrighty. And what is your birth date and where were you born?

BRETT BIGHAM:

June 24th, 1964. I was born in Sparks, Reno, Nevada.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Alrighty. Lots of Nevada connections in my family, in Northern Nevada.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Oh, really? Okay.

MASON FUNK:

But give us an overview of your ... I gather from your interview or your conversation with Tom, you got a mom and dad and you had an older brother who brought a unique presence into your family's life and kind of helped make you who you are, but paint us a little portrait of your family. Also you mentioned that you moved around a lot, so maybe give us an overview of how that happened and why that happened.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Okay. Well, both of my parents were in the service, my dad was in the air force and my mom was in the Navy.

BRETT BIGHAM:

She was an air traffic controller in Brownsville, I think Brownsville, Texas. And my dad was flying in one day and said she sounded kind of cute on the radio, and asked her on a date. My parents went on three dates and got married and they were married until my dad passed. They were almost 30 years married. At that time, when you married,

BRETT BIGHAM:

a female service member had to leave the service. So my mom left the service, but my dad was still in for a while. And because of that, we did quite a bit of moving. And once he got out of the service, I think he was still in that habit of moving a lot. So we ended up moving almost every couple of years, it seemed. By the time I finished college, I had gone to 13 schools.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Do me a favor, just tilt your computer. I want to get rid of a smidge just a little bit.

MASON FUNK:

Now split the difference if you want.

BRETT BIGHAM:

A little bit more?

MASON FUNK:

A little less. Okay.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I don't think it moved. It kind of moves in and goes backwards.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Now you added headroom so that, sorry.

BRETT BIGHAM:

That's all right.

MASON FUNK:

There we go. Perfect.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I have a giant head, by the way.

MASON FUNK:

Beautiful head. Tell us about your older brother.

BRETT BIGHAM:

My brother was six years older than I was, and he had some real issues when I was born. In fact, he had to go live somewhere else. He and I grew up kind of separated most of the time, but when he was at home it wasn't the best experience. He was kind of violent,

BRETT BIGHAM:

and he blamed me for having to move out of the house, so he was kind of angry at me. As a kid, I had to balance his anger. I had to be the source of relaxation for him, in a way. I had to kind of have to manipulate him, even though I was six years younger, to keep him in a good mood, to keep him in a good space

BRETT BIGHAM:

and to deescalate him from getting angry. He ended up moving out completely when he was in high school, he went and was institutionalized for awhile. And that kind of gave our family a break and kind of a chance for him to grow up and get over quite a bit of it. When he came back to the family after he graduated, things were much better. But my whole childhood was spent trying to keep my brother in a good mood.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I just ended up having these skills that most little kids don't have, but it was just, you know, how to keep someone in a level good mood.

MASON FUNK:

Queer people, growing up, have difficulty, sort of, erasing themselves sometimes, and you kind of had to maybe diminish or reduce some parts of yourself in order to kind of keep this explosive situation in control?

[inaudible] that sucked.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Yeah. It was a whole childhood of anytime I did anything where I excelled or made something that was nice, my brother would destroy it. So quite often, if I was being creative, it couldn't be at home. Or if I was creative, it had to be in secret. I had to hide those things. I mean, just as simple as making a model.

BRETT BIGHAM:

If my brother saw me making a model, he would stomp on it, that kind of thing. So I did have to hide a lot of things and I didn't like being singled out. I didn't like compliments. Anytime I was complimented in front of my brother, I think he took that as a slur against him, not a compliment to me. So yeah, I did. I had to kind of be a ghost sometimes, so that no attention was on me, so that I could just kind of fade into the background. That was a pretty common part of my childhood.

MASON FUNK:

Thank you for that. That's interesting. Now, your mom and dad, you described, some point later in life when they own taxis, and I believe you were living in Alaska, and your dad would hire the taxi drivers that no one else would hire and your mom would make them

[inaudible]. That just gave me such a beautiful picture of these two individuals who I'm sure had their challenges, but tell us about that.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Well, it was pretty amazing because I grew up in some pretty small towns. And in Alaska, there was not a large number of minority groups. We had native Alaskans, but there weren't a lot of other groups. I remember my elementary school, we had one black student, so you didn't see a lot of color. But my dad, he owned I think seven taxi permits. So it's seven cabs, three drivers each, so we had 21 drivers. And my dad hired the people that nobody else would hire.

BRETT BIGHAMK:

He had African-American drivers that no one would hire. He hired a woman who was 73, she needed a job.

BRETT BIGHAMK:

I can remember, her name was Dorothy McDonald, and driving cabs in Alaska was not an easy job -- the weather, for one thing, and it was during the pipeline boom. Alaska was full of Texas oil workers, and there were very few women. The rate of unmarried men up there was very high, and it wasn't an easy place for women. My dad hired this 73 year old woman to drive cabs and they treated them like family,

BRETT BIGHAMK:

which I don't think everybody did, back then, especially with the cab drivers. And what my mom did every Christmas was she made them gifts. One year, it was giant boxes of cookies. But I remember the year she did the Afghans and my mom the entire year knitted or crocheted every night, these little squares that then you sewed together into a big Afghan. And there were piles of them all through the house. She knew everybody's favorite colors.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Then, I think it was Christmas Eve, we drove to all of the families and dropped off this giant afghan and a big box of cookies. When we visited one driver, he lived in a studio apartment, I remember just thinking it was the strangest thing to see this adult man living all by himself in the studio apartment. So I asked my mom when we left, I said, "Mom, why doesn't Art have a wife? And my mom said, "Oh, honey, not every man wants to have a wife."

BRETT BIGHAM:

It's obvious now he was gay, but at the time, all it did was click in me. It was like, Oh, that's me. I don't want a wife either. It just made sense. It was a very good lesson to learn early, but my mom has always been that kind of a person who makes sure that everybody that is in her realm is happy and treated specially. And I learned that from her. That's probably the greatest lesson I learned from my mom, was just,

BRETT BIGHAM:

you have an ability to impact the people around you in a positive way all the time, even when things are terrible, you can still do good. And that's my mom. Then my dad, the flip side, he was hiring these people nobody wanted, and kind of setting an example for all the other cab drivers or cab owners. It was just a really good lessons to learn, at a young age, especially.

MASON FUNK:

You sound like you were a real sponge,

[inaudible] you were like watching, taking it all in. Do me a favor, just for the record, I want to know the name of the town, so maybe just start out by saying, "When I was eight or nine years old, we were living in the town of

[inaudible]."

BRETT BIGHAM:

Okay. In 1972, when I was just turned eight, we moved to Anchorage, Alaska, and that's when my dad started buying taxis.

MASON FUNK:

Okay, great. It reminds me of a story, I'll keep this really short, but a long time ago, 25 years ago, one of my first writing jobs for television was to write a biography, a documentary about Mother Teresa. It was a great story about how as a little girl, she grew up in a little town called Skopje in the Macedonia. There were to constantly be strangers at the dinner table. And she would say, who are these

[inaudible]. Oh, it's your aunt. You know, it's your uncle, they're visiting from out of town. And she later learned that these were not her aunts or uncles. They were just

MASON FUNK:

whoever needed a place to get a nice warm meal. And that reminds me a little bit of your mom and dad. They kind of made these taxi drivers there as if they were aunts and uncles.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Yeah, that's nice. Yeah. My mom's 85 now. She makes baby quilts for a homeless shelter. So she hasn't stopped. She still keeps going. It's amazing.

MASON FUNK:

Wow. Good for her. Good for her. Where does she live now? She

BRETT BIGHAM:

Lives just South of Portland. So she's pretty close.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Okay. Well, I switched back and forth between the screen or I can see you at the place where I had your questions. You also talked about how you've kind of alluded to it, that growing up, you had to learn how to not let external challenges affect your sense of self. You kind of had to have a little place inside yourself that was safe. Can you talk about that? Kind of talking about that as a kind of a developmental step for a queer kid.

MASON FUNK:

Getting that bedrock sense of self that can survive the storms and the challenges from outside.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Wow. That's a hard question. Kind of. Could you ask it again? Would you mind?

MASON FUNK:

Sure. Let me refer back to my notes real quick.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I mean, I have

[inaudible], I think I'm good. What I really found happening with myself is I started to rely more and more on myself for everything.

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, just insert the word, 'as a kid'.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Okay. As a kid, I kind of found myself having to be everything for myself. There were other problems in my family didn't talk about,

BRETT BIGHAM:

but my dad, when he was 36, had five heart attacks. Spent the next year in the hospital, while my mom tried to run the business, while my brother was institutionalized. So my poor mom had to run the business, go visit my dad, go visit my brother, try to get home before I was in bed. And I was in fourth grade, so it was this really strange time where I didn't have very many people in my life.

BRETT BIGHAM:

My mom was so busy, I could not ask anything of her. Even at that age, I was pretty young, I knew that she was doing more than any human could possibly do. I found myself kind of just stepping back. I began to make my own food, I began to do everything I needed. If I needed a note for school, I would write it out and I would set it next to my mom's bed so that she would know to copy that note, because I needed a permission slip for school.

BRETT BIGHAM:

In some ways, I'm sad about that because I didn't get a normal childhood with the big brother to play with, and a dad who was home, but he was sick. They were sick. So there was no helping the situation. It was just, merely survive the situation and try not to tell it bring me down. I just kind of became self-sufficient for emotional issues. I didn't seek out my mom for anything

BRETT BIGHAM:

that was bothering me because she had too much on her plate already. It's not something I would recommend anyone having to learn, but it sure gave me a tough coat, a teflon skin that allowed me, as I got older in life to realize I've stood on my own two feet for a long time and I know they'll hold me up. I was able to walk into situations that I think some people would flee from, but where I was just ready.

BRETT BIGHAM:

And well-versed in knowing that it's not an easy path sometimes and you just gotta stand you have to stay strong. And it started when I was a kid, it's kept me going all through my adult life.

MASON FUNK:

That's great. Thank you for that. That's a great, excellent answer. I think it's just a good time to sort of ask in terms of the, you not only chose to become a teacher, but you chose to teach kids with special needs. Do you see a connection?

BRETT BIGHAM:

Absolutely, absolutely. I did not go to college to be a teacher, at first. I was a journalist. I worked for a couple of magazines and then I worked in advertising, and ended up taking a job as a substitute teacher. I'd moved to California to write. One of my best friends from college lived in Palm Springs and he called me and said

BRETT BIGHAM:

he had HIV and he said he was getting sicker. And he was at a point where he needed some help. So he either needed to move home to his very religious parents who were not that kind to him, or he asked me if I would move to Palm Springs and help him out for the end. We didn't say the end, we were hopeful. We were always hopeful. But I ended up in Palm Springs, and there's very little employment there, except for the tourism industry.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I took a job, substitute teaching. I had no background, and I had never had any desire to be a teacher. It was out of the blue. It was just one of the few things that were available. My first day I taught kindergarten and it was the most fun you could ever imagine having at work, teaching kindergarten. Then it just continued from there, and I started getting tougher and tougher classes. A lot of the substitutes in Palm Springs were retired teachers,

BRETT BIGHAM:

so they were in their seventies and they could not handle behavior classrooms or kind of the rougher kids. And I had no problem with that. Because I had these crazy skills from deescalating my brother through my whole childhood, I was walking into behavior rooms where they couldn't get a teacher to stay more than a day. And I had no trouble in these classrooms. I took those skills from my brother, put them to work as a substitute and within,

BRETT BIGHAM:

I think it was two months, I got contacted by the superintendent and was told I was their most highly rated substitute. They had a teacher who was leaving and they were going to have me take over her class. So with no training whatsoever as a teacher, none, I was the classroom teacher for an academic and behavior, third, fourth, and fifth grade classroom, suddenly. I walked in the room

BRETT BIGHAM:

and it was almost a homecoming. These were kids who were very similar to my brother in that they had trouble focusing. They got angry very easily, but they were not bad kids. They just needed some skills on how to manage their anger, basically, and that's what I was really good at. I spent the year with those kids and by the end of that year, I knew I'd found the right job for me. I absolutely loved it. I left that position.

BRETT BIGHAM:

They offered me to stay and to pay for my master's so that I could get a full license, but I didn't really want to stay in Palm Springs. I returned to Oregon and did the masters, started teaching. That whole course of my life 100% happened because of my brother. Was a 100%. Because the hardest part of teaching is classroom management. The hardest thing about teaching angry kids is deescalation.

BRETT BIGHAM:

It's a science, but it's also an art. It's a complex dance, almost, of having work that doesn't escalate them or having things that can make them feel successful. And then having them just feel that pride of their teacher being really proud of them. That's what I threw at those kids, and they did so well. This was a throwaway classroom, these kids had been thrown away by the district, that's how I felt.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I got contacted by, all these years later, one of these students from my very first year, it was 1992, and he had gone from a class, he'd gotten back into general ed because he'd stopped having the behaviors. He had learned how to control getting angry. There were three boys in that class and he told me about three of them. They all three ended up graduating high school. And when I met them, the district had already written them off. So,

BRETT BIGHAM:

what a pat on the back too, to hear from your first year as a teacher and them saying, "You changed my life, you saved me." It was very nice.

MASON FUNK:

That's wonderful. I know you've also, for example, you've written a lot about students with autism. Just want to get clear, is this what you would call a special education?

MASON FUNK:

What's the right terminology? Special education, to me, sounds pejorative, but I don't know if it necessarily is. But you basically made a career of working with students who had special education or behavioral needs. Is that correct?

BRETT BIGHAM:

Yeah. We say special needs. So a student who had special needs and then the classroom would be a special education classroom.

MASON FUNK:

Sorry I had myself muted. Just out of curiosity, because when we refer to your brother so much, is he still with us? He's still alive?

BRETT BIGHAM:

Yeah. He's doing quite well.

MASON FUNK:

Start by saying, I'm sorry, my brother.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Oh my brother is doing quite well actually. Poor guy, he's gonna see this and be like, Oh my gosh. But he reached an age where his body, I think the chemical changes that happen when you hit your early twenties, after you get out of your growth and everything else, he became a very different person.

BRETT BIGHAM:

A lot of those issues that he had either disappeared or by then he learned how to manage them. He's gone on to be successful. He's a truck driver. kind of runs, not his own business, but he works under his own license. He's been married for quite a while and has a lovely wife. He was also a good example for me that some of these behaviors that you see are not long-term, necessarily, there are going to be changes.

BRETT BIGHAM:

There's going to be abilities that come out, as you get older, to control them. I share my brother's story with a lot of parents so that they know that there are big changes that will occur in their students. I can't tell where they're going to go. I can't tell them where they're going to end up, but they won't be the same person they are when they're 10.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Even I, who have very little experience in that field, have seen enough examples. We have a very good friend who was married to a woman before he came out,

MASON FUNK:

so he has two boys. One of them was like the rock star who always did everything right, and the other was just flailing. But they were very patient. They just believed in him and trusted that he would eventually kind of find his path. And sure enough, he did. Just took him longer, and his path was very different from his older brother's. So I try to encourage people as well, if they're worried about a specific young person. Like, no, they seem to work it out, some people sooner, some people later.

MASON FUNK:

But I'm sure your guidance and your support was incredible to helping them through a period that could very easily go wrong.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I hope so. I hope so. And you know, the truth is I might be a well-known teacher and respected as a teacher, but I was a terrible, terrible student. My mom saved some of my early report cards and showed them to me when I was about 30, and they were awful. The academics were fine, but all of the, 'is kind to others',

BRETT BIGHAM:

'shares', all of those things, I was not a very nice kid, it looks like. I think it was really more, I wanted to be left alone. I'm doing my own thing, just leave me alone. But I look back at that and I think, if you look at me on paper, I wasn't a good student. So I look at my students and I realize on paper, they don't look like good students, but they are not the person they're going to be. You cannot set their future by what they are when they're younger.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I can remember, in fifth grade, they gave us these really complex tests up in Anchorage, where they had you doing all of these tests, manipulating pieces to put things together, and when you got done with that, they told you what you should look at for your future employment. When I got mine back, it said I should be a factory worker. Factory worker.

MASON FUNK:

Nothing like that to build a kid's educational confidence, right?

BRETT BIGHAM:

I wasn't happy with that. I remember being really depressed by that. I didn't want to work in a factory, but I understood it. Because my mom, the crochet artist, I'm the same way. Every night, I'm doing some sort of project where my fingers are very busy. I guess I was pretty good at putting those round pegs in the round hole quickly.

MASON FUNK:

Now we cannot finish with your childhood without having you tell us the

MASON FUNK:

now infamous Romper Room story, which we've chuckled about as a team.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Oh. I've looked all over for that picture too. I have to find it for you. When I was four, we were living in Sacramento and Romper Room was filmed there for the West coast at the time. Romper Room, for those who don't know, was pre Sesame Street.

BRETT BIGHAM:

It was the kids' show before Sesame Street came around. What they would do is film live, and they would use kids from the community and they would be on for two weeks. If you got chosen, you'd be there for two weeks. In Sacramento, that was a big deal, "Oh, I'm going to be on Romper Room." I ended up being on Romper Room, but we lived very close to the studio, so after the first time I was on, they sat down with my mom and I guess made an agreement

BRETT BIGHAM:

that I would be the substitute child. If a kid was late or sick, they would call us and we would, we'd get down there because we lived close by. I could be on, you know, 30 minutes, and I was there. 20, probably. So this one morning, the call came, I don't remember what we were doing, but I had to go use the restroom, but there was no time. My mom grabbed me, we jumped in the car, we got to the studio. Just as it was like, the music was playing kind of thing.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I was still asking, "I need to use the bathroom." And they're like, "No, no, go, go, go." They shooed me onto the set. I sat down just as things started, and the show went on and on. It has the whole opening, and I thought it was going to wet my pants. I can just remember how horrified I was because there were a lot of rules with being on the show, and talking about going to the bathroom was one of them. Y

BRETT BIGHAM:

ou weren't supposed to talk until you were spoken to, but I couldn't make it. I finally just interrupted the show and I said, "Miss Barbara, I have to use the bathroom." And she whispered, "Just wait, there'll be commercials coming," and she kept going. And I think I asked again, but I was getting desperate, and they finally got to the commercial and they said, "Go, go, go, go." I run to the bathroom. I'd been there enough, I knew where it was, I could go by myself. I got in the bathroom and there was a urinal

BRETT BIGHAM:

and a stall and I was too small to use the urinal. There was someone in the stall. I am dancing around, the guy in the stall is not coming out. So I finally, I got down on my hands and knees and I looked up under the stall and it was this large man sitting back and he had his eyes closed. He was probably just hiding from work for a few minutes, but I thought he was dead. I'll tell my mom's version of this, because it's better than mine. My mother is sitting in the lobby with the five other moms,

BRETT BIGHAM:

and the five other moms were all watching TV because their kids' on TV, they're so excited. My mom could care less at that point. Probably crocheting. And she said, you hear this terrible blood curdling scream come out of the television set and a little voice. Then there's a crash. And a whole bank of lights goes off because I went running in, I ran into a light bank, knocked it over and I'm screaming at the top of my lungs, "There's a dead man on the toilet. There's a dead man on the toilet."

BRETT BIGHAM:

My mom says you hear the producer or the director screaming, "Cut to cartoon, cut to cartoon." And then everything went away and then the cartoon started. Finally, they took me back into the bathroom. The guy had left by then. They showed me he was gone. I got to go to the bathroom and I just went back out like nothing had happened, but I might've been pretty close to the end of my Romper Room career.

MASON FUNK:

That's awesome. We're going to ask you for lots of photos and I'm hoping you're the kind of person who saves photos. You don't have to have a photo of you screaming, but a photo of you on Romper Room would be just a real treat.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I know I have a scan of it. I just don't know where I put the original

[crosstalk]. Okay, good. That I can get you.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Thank you for doing things like introducing the story by saying, "For those who don't know, Romper Room was about --" That's fantastic. Otherwise, people might be like,

MASON FUNK:

what's Romper Room? You're clearly a good storyteller and it's understandable why, but thank you for doing that. Okay. So I'm going to fast forward a little bit. Is that me? My computer is supposed to be silent. It's okay. I was talking. Along the way, you kind of knew from an early age that you were gay.

MASON FUNK:

Tell us about that. What I want to kind of get to in relatively short order is that time when you were about 17, and by now you're living near Portland and you and a few friends who would get together and go ... It's such a great, like, Oh my God. I wish I had had that experience when I was 17 years old and gay. Just to have a few buddies and be able to go to kind of ... A place where they were adults.

MASON FUNK:

Just kind of coming into your own. Could you take us through that part of your life, in those years? The kind of gay, coming out to yourself and then exploring the community?

BRETT BIGHAM:

Yeah. I knew really young. I was just one of those people who, who knew young and I was sure my --

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favour, tell us what you knew young.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Oh, I was one of those people who knew I was gay, pretty young. My father was pitching for the Sacramento bees at the time

BRETT BIGHAM:

when I was four or five, six, right in there, same time as the Romper Room. I would get to go to the games or the practices with him, and after the practices, everyone would head into the locker room, and my dad would take me down. I would just sit there on a bench while everybody undressed, showered and dressed. I knew at that time, I just knew I was in the right place. I've never had attraction to women, so I knew from this very young age.

BRETT BIGHAM:

And then all through elementary school, I had a boyfriend. We hung out. We stayed the night at each other's house, two, three, four times a week, all the time in the summer. I really had no questions. But it wasn't until high school where you start looking at your adult community, where things start to really come together. And what happened for me is, my senior year of high school,

BRETT BIGHAM:

the last term of school, I'm signed up for college so I was taking full load of college classes at night. I had high school during the day, I had tennis team right after school, and then I drove to the college and I had a three hour night class every night. One class had you go and see plays in Portland, and it really changed my world. I was 17, I had my own car, finally, and on Thursday nights I had to drive into the big city, it was about 20 mile drive,

BRETT BIGHAM:

and go see a play. And after the play, I would go out there was a gay restaurant in Portland called Hamburger Mary's, and I would go there and I would eat, after the play. It was such an amazing experience for someone coming in off the farm, as I like to say, because we did live on a farm at that point. My dad had retired, so we had a farm South of Portland.

BRETT BIGHAM:

To drive in and just see gay people eating dinner with their partners or with their friends, seeing that community, and then finding the gay newspaper -- it was there on the cigarette machines, back when everybody had a cigarette machine -- there was the gay newspaper. I could sit there and eat dinner and read this paper. And it opened a whole new world to me. There were ads for the bars, ads for all of these events going on,

BRETT BIGHAM:

so you could just see that there's a whole world waiting for me. One night, I just got brave, and I went down to where one of the bars was after dinner and I got into a bar. I didn't drink or anything, I just kind of stood in the back and just watched. I watched people dancing, seeing two men dancing was so amazing. At that time, if you were gay, your childhood, your youth, your first sexual experiences were all secret and hidden,

BRETT BIGHAM:

and not so nice. And here I had this opportunity to just see what was waiting for me without having to go through all the rough stuff to get there. I remember, I told a couple of friends at school, there were two guys at school that I was pretty sure were gay. We'd never talked about it, but my junior year, I created quite the hubbub because I wore a pink Izod shirt to school.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I lived in a very religious community, and that was shocking. People were shocked. But, yes, over the course of the next couple months, these other two guys also got pink shirts. And I was like, okay, alright. Hey, I have an idea that these guys are on my team here, so we just started hanging out a little more. Then I told them, and we started going together. So on Thursday nights, all three of us were driving to Portland

BRETT BIGHAM:

and sneaking into these bars. One of them told the teacher. We had a teacher we were all sure was gay, but nobody knew for sure. It's 1982, so it's not spoken about. He told the teacher, and I have to say, I might choke up when I talk about this too, because this was an important person in my life. Was never my teacher, had very few conversations with him,

BRETT BIGHAM:

but he was close with one of my other friends, and he pulled my friend aside and he taught him everything he knew about AIDS. It was 1982, we're 17, getting into bars, and we had no idea about AIDS. It was not talked about at my school. He probably saved our lives. It was all the years later, looking back, especially after I got into my hot water, made me realize

BRETT BIGHAM:

he risked his entire career to tell us about that disease. And when I stood up later, when my time to stand up came, I thought of him -- choking up, I can't help it. I did think of him. I thought, you know, he put everything at risk for me. I will do the same and I will pay that forward.

BRETT BIGHAM:

So that was just an important time. It was an important time. I went off to college and my friends started dying. They never got the knowledge I got. They never had a teacher say, "You need to wear a rubber or you're going to die." It was that simple. And nobody was willing to say it back then. It was an interesting time to come out, during the AIDS era. There was so much weight attached to that. Any of us who made it were lucky.

MASON FUNK:

That's an amazing story. I totally understand why that moves you so deeply. Moves me too. I had two, kind of, similar guardian angels for me. Even though I was substantially older than you, I was still very naive when the AIDS epidemic really got going. I had one incident on the streets of New York city

MASON FUNK:

and another incident in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where two people said, "Hey, this is going on. You need to be careful." And I'll never forget those two individuals as well. So thank you for sharing that story. Especially, as it impacted your decisions many years later, when you were, not just in the frying pan, but actually in the fire. So thank you for that.

MASON FUNK:

I just want to make a note also, along the way in your conversation with Tom, almost as an aside, you said "There's a lot about my story that people don't know." I don't know what those things are because I don't know. So I just want to say if this feels like a safe space, of course, we would be delighted to hear any of those things that you feel like, you know, maybe I'm ready to share this now and I haven't shared it before. And if you don't want to, that's also totally fine.

MASON FUNK:

Because everybody deserves to keep some things to themselves for

[inaudible] love to hear stories that you just ... You're great at telling stories as if you're telling them for the first time, even though I know you've told some of these stories before. But thank you again for that story about that teacher. Are you in touch with those two friends by chance?

BRETT BIGHAM:

You know, I'm not. Well, I know one of them is on Facebook.

BRETT BIGHAM:

My time in high school didn't end well. I had a best friend who passed away of cancer, just a few months before graduation. My dad was sick again, and in the hospital for almost the entire year, and a friend killed himself. So when the time came for me to get out of there, I ran. I had to get out of that town that had just too many dead people. That's the truth.

BRETT BIGHAM:

My mom still lives there, and she's like, "Why don't you ever come visit me?" I was like, "You come visit me." I don't really want to go there, too many memories that I don't need to relive.

MASON FUNK:

Are you comfortable sharing the name of that town or would you rather ...

BRETT BIGHAM:

Sure. Canby, Oregon. When I grew up in Canby, it's a little bit bigger now because it's pretty close to Portland, so it's grown, but it had about 3000 people when I lived there, and it was called the garden spot of churches.

BRETT BIGHAM:

It had the national recognition of having the most number of churches per capita, for a small town, in the United States. Extremely religious community. I sang, when I was in high school. I was in the choir. Almost everybody in the choir sang in their church choirs and they all did nothing but argue religion at every time we had a break.

BRETT BIGHAM:

It was this constant, you're going to hell, you're going to hell, and I had all of these churches arguing. I didn't go to church, I was the guy right in the middle. I still kind of laugh, but the only thing they agreed on was that I was going to hell before they were. I think I brought them together in that way, because they were so stuck in the ways of their religion and that their religion was the only right answer

BRETT BIGHAM:

that everybody else was wrong, but they were going to that extra step of, "Well, you're going to hell my church is not." I would just sit there in the middle and just listen to this all day long. And I just have never understood why people use religion as their excuse to hate other people or to judge them. They used it to judge me constantly. I don't know. Like I said,

BRETT BIGHAM:

when it was time to get out of that community, I ran. I have one friend there who I just love to death, but a very religious family. I was in his wedding and one of his groomsmen. But when Oregon was having all of its anti-gay laws in the nineties, you know one of them was about marriage, or I think it was the teaching one. There was a law that no gay person could work in the schools and it almost passed. But my friend called me and said,

BRETT BIGHAM:

"I feel like I have to respect you enough to tell you that we're voting 'yes' on this." And I couldn't believe it. This is someone I'd grown up with. I knew all of his little children, I was in his wedding. It was a case where his pastor was telling me he needed to vote this way, and he was willing to vote against what his heart knew. And it was that way across that whole community, all these people you cared about and knew,

BRETT BIGHAM:

but they're willing to vote in this way that is a stab in the back to their gay friends. Moving on, it was time to move on from that

MASON FUNK:

Totally makes sense. I know the story of these ballot measures very, very well

[crosstalk]. And we had the delight and the joy of interviewing a woman named Donna Red Wing, before she passed,

MASON FUNK:

exactly three years ago, I think in March, and she died in April of 2018. Amazing woman. As well as a woman named Kathleen Saadat, incredible leader there in Portland, around these movements, these ballot measures. And Donna tells a story of getting stuck on a bridge in Portland, kind of one of the bridges where

[crosstalk]. She got stuck there and she looks over

MASON FUNK:

and there's a pickup truck next to her. This was in the time of ballot measure nine. She's a recognizable face of the opposition, and the guy in the pickup truck literally leans out his window and spits on her, through the window of her car. That's one of the stories she tells. I'll send you a link to her, a little portion of her

[crosstalk]. Incredible.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I remember during all of that, I'd gone down to see my parents, and I stayed the night ... You're you're muted

MASON FUNK:

Start over by saying during the ...

BRETT BIGHAM:

During those ballot measures, ballot measure number nine, I was in graduate school to be a teacher. And here's this law they're trying to pass saying no gay person can work in the schools, even as a volunteer. That's when my mom said, "You can't be a teacher, you're gay." But I was in their little small town, and I was reading the little small town paper,

BRETT BIGHAM:

and there was a quote by the pastor of my grandparents' church, saying if Jesus was alive today, he'd be a member of the Oregon Citizens Alliance, which is a hate group, a nasty hate group. And I sat there just thinking, this is a church that I have gone to for many Christmases, the room where they do flowers in this church is named after my grandmother, she did the flowers for every service and every wedding. If someone couldn't afford flowers, my grandmother did them.

BRETT BIGHAM:

If you go in this church, there's this room with my grandma's name on it, and 30 feet away is this man preaching hate. I was infuriated because my grandmother had just passed and I thought she would never stand for that. We had a farm truck and we had a giant orchard ladder, and I went downtown at about three o'clock that night with a bunch of 'No on 9' signs.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I put that giant ladder up against every telephone pole that surrounded that church, and I covered them with 'No on 9' signs. Saturday night. And then I went home and I slept well, knowing that when they all got to church at eight in the morning, those signs were so high up that nobody was going to be able to touch them. It was a small action, but I couldn't ... I sat in that church. It wasn't my church, it was my grandparent's church, but I sat in that church. I was preached at,

BRETT BIGHAM:

in that church. It was never a hateful place until this pastor came and turned it into a tool for this hate group. It was a small fight back, but I sure felt good about that.

MASON FUNK:

Well, you should have. That's a fantastic story, including the fact that you had the tallest ladder. Well, this is great. By the way, thank you for all your stories.

MASON FUNK:

I feel like we've reached the point where I want you to start telling us the story that you're, of course, nationally known for, which is being named teacher of the year. And then being told you can't be out and gay, and everything that ensued.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Okay.

MASON FUNK:

What I want to do is just start by having you walk us through the process. What does it mean to get nominated? How does that happen? And then you're nominated, and then your school has to kind of approve.

MASON FUNK:

Just kind of walk us through the process really, without even involving yourself so much, just how does it work until someone gets named teacher of the year? Or what does that mean and how does it work?

BRETT BIGHAM:

Well so I was working for a County level special education program. So my kids only came to me if the surrounding districts just couldn't manage their needs.

MASON FUNK:

I'm going to interrupt you just one sec, just state what County it was.

MASON FUNK:

I think it was

[inaudible]. Just say I was working for the County, whatever County it was, and then just keep going.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I was working for Multnomah education service district, which is a County level education district that manages high needs students. And the basic way that it works is the city, which has nine different school districts in the surrounding area, what they did is they made

BRETT BIGHAM:

one central district education agency that would have complex classrooms. So my room was kids with severe, special needs, multiple disabilities, and they were coming from all of the different school districts. I had kids coming from different parts of the city on bus. I basically had the toughest kids from every school district, would funnel into my program. And it was just the greatest experience

BRETT BIGHAM:

I just had. I was there seven years, it was a fantastic job. I had five assistants, three of them were the longest serving employees of the district. So between those three paraprofessionals, I had a hundred years, almost, of experience. They were all in their 30 years. It was just this room with this incredible amount of brain power and experience. And we turned it into a model program.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Now, because I worked for the County, I wasn't in a regular school. We leased a room in a closed school building, and then were moved to our administrative buildings. So I wasn't in a school. I didn't have a principal. What I did was my creation and my staff's creation. We made a program completely built around the needs of our students, but we ignored all of those things that say, "No, you can't do that. You can't do that."

BRETT BIGHAM:

We just said, "Why not? We'll find a way to do it." And we started kind of changing how my city works. Special education goes to age 21. So at 18 you leave the high school, but you're in school for three more years. Not every student, but my students, all. I had them up to age 21. We started to throw a prom for them just because they didn't really have an end of school experience like everybody else did.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Well that prom, the first year, it was just my classroom. And the next year it was the whole school. And then the next year we had kids coming from 20, 30 miles away, and over 300 kids showed up at our prom. We had 8 the first year. Over 300 coming from all over the city. Rainier, which is 30 miles North of us, their kids came, because they had nothing, they had no social events whatsoever. It just became a center for growth,

BRETT BIGHAM:

where everybody started seeing, well, these kids deserve a little bit more and they can do a little bit more. And we started showing them. They weren't having dances and events because they thought these kids couldn't handle them. Well, teach them how to handle it, and then they'll handle it just fine. That was our premise. So we threw little dances at school all the time to teach them how to go to a regular dance with more people. Built this bigger program, and it grew and it grew.

BRETT BIGHAM:

NPR came and covered it, and you have the newspaper. I'll tell you, my students don't get recognized very often. If there's a big story about school, it's going to be the star athlete or the spelling bee champion or something like that. My students get ignored. And there was a one day where the Portland Oregonian ran this photo montage of the prom.

BRETT BIGHAM:

And here were my girls in there, they're in their wheelchairs, but in their beautiful, beautiful gowns and giant pictures. There's a picture this big on the cover of the living section, of one of my girls. It was so nice because their parents don't get that, their parents don't ever see their daughter on the cover of the newspaper. And here she was, just looking gorgeous.

BRETT BIGHAM:

That's kind of what started getting attention my way. But I wasn't looking for the kind of attention, I was looking for better for my kids. And that's how my ability guidebook project started. This is why I was named teacher of the year. But the prom, and then I had to kind of figure it out that some of my kids, they couldn't go on outings. Every time we tried to take them out, they were having emotional meltdowns.

BRETT BIGHAM:

It was really difficult. There was a self abusive behavior where a student didn't want to go and they would just start hitting themselves to avoid the situation. So I started making books. Like, we have a tram here in Portland, my husband and I went the week before, I took all these pictures of him, every step that you need to do to ride the tram. And I made a picture book, and then I sat with my student who got so upset and we read the book together every day.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Gave her the book, and she took it with her and went on the outing. And there was no issue. It was as if any high school kid in the United States, you just said, "We're taking you to the tram." And they just went and rode it and came back. And this is a kid who has never been able to go anywhere. So I started making books for every week. You know, now we're going to go on the sky bridge, I just, I kept these books going, and eventually she didn't need them anymore. She got this confidence from going -- and I can talk about her because her parents have all been interviewed

BRETT BIGHAM:

and they've told the stories, so I'm not sharing personal information. She suddenly had a brand new life. After 12 of these books and a year ... This will tell you how big a change it was, the year before I got her, she was sent home 36 times for hurting herself, like punching herself in the face. It happened three times the first year I had her, none the second year

BRETT BIGHAM:

and none the third year. So it went from 35, just at school, there were more at home too. The behaviors just completely disappeared because the anxiety disappeared. Part way through the second year, her parents said, "We have never been on a vacation since she was a little girl. We're going to Hawaii. Will you make us a book?" I thought, Hawaii, Oh my God. Oh my God. But I went online, I found pictures from people's holidays.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Here we are in Aloha Airlines, they are inside the plane, showing all the crowd and all the luggage. I needed pictures like that, so I made a book. This is what your plane looks like. I was able to get, like, the exact, even the same material that are in the current planes, from these pictures. So she saw everything that was going to happen, before. Imagine being a family who's not been able to leave your house, this child would get so upset.

BRETT BIGHAM:

She had busted the doors and pulled cupboards off the walls and would get so upset she'd injure herself right in front of you. You watch it. It was terrible. The flew to Hawaii, she read her book. She didn't do anything except flying the plane. Got there. They had a great vacation, read the book. Flew home, had no trouble on the plane. The family has a completely new life. They've renovated their house. This girl has a job, she goes to work every day. Well, five days a week, sorry,

[inaudible].

BRETT BIGHAM:

It just really changed her life. And then what ended up happening is I'm sitting on all these books. I thought, well, the internet is here now, so I just put them all online. And that's what got the attention. I was nominated, actually by a staff member, for teacher of the year, and then that goes through a process where they go to your supervisor, they go to your superintendent,

BRETT BIGHAM:

they do interviews. Those people have to put you forward. They have to agree, yes, this is an excellent educator. My superintendent said I was the best educator she'd ever worked with. Then that puts you into the next level where you fill out all the applications. If your district approves, then you fill out all the application work and then they go through an interview process, and then they pick finalists and then they pick one teacher of the year.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Now I never, never, for one second thought I would be chosen. I was openly gay, which to me was that, that right there would do it. But I also was teaching special education. I believe I'm the 55th teacher of the year in Oregon, and I was the first one to teach special education. So, we're the red headed stepchild of education,

BRETT BIGHAM:

in so many ways. And it's telling that that year, there were two other teachers chosen who were the first special education teachers for their state. It's just something that isn't recognized, but I was hopeful that by being nominated and maybe being a finalist that I might get some money for my classroom. That's why I did it, to be completely honest, because I never expected to win.

MASON FUNK:

Hold on for one second, I just want you to sit back in your chair.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Am I moving forward as I talk?

MASON FUNK:

It's just a little more comfortable. You don't have to press yourself back. I know you're also comfortable leaning in, but just, it's a little more comfortable

[inaudible].

BRETT BIGHAM:

So I just, you know, I never expected it.

MASON FUNK:

Sorry, do one more thing, rotate your shoulders a tiny bit. You've kind of gotten a little squared up to your ...

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. And then just scooch ever so slightly to your right. Like an inch. Yeah. Good. Okay. Here we go.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Alright. I just never expected to win. And then, you know, they surprise you, you don't know. They called me in, up to the office for something stupid and then said, "Oh, we have something to show you," and took me downstairs.

BRETT BIGHAM:

And there was the whole County program and my students had all been snuck up, and they surprise you, you're teacher of the year. And it's an amazing experience, but it is not what people think it is. I thought it was a prize, you know, it's an award. It isn't, it's a new life. You get picked up out of your life and you get put in a new life, just like that. It's overnight. You don't know what's happening until it's done.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Suddenly you are a nationally recognized voice for education. Anything that you have written is now quotable by regular media. New York Times will quote a teacher of the year. We're a vetted source. We're considered an expert vetted sourced for our industry, for our trade. And there you go.

MASON FUNK:

One clarification, in that moment you were named Oregon teacher of the year, and then it goes onto like a national?

BRETT BIGHAM:

Yes. The way teacher of the year works is you're named for your state, so I was named the Oregon state teacher of the year. So it's an official title, like Miss America is always Miss America 2015. They say the same with us, we are always the 2014 Oregon state teacher of the year.

BRETT BIGHAM:

That makes you a finalist for national teacher of the year, or maybe a semi-finalist. I'm sorry, I should say semi-finalists, there are 55 teachers of the year, they are all up for the national award. Then that's broken down into a finalist position and then they choose one. But to go from a basement, special ed classroom to contention for national teacher of the year, overnight, is quite a change. It's quite a change,

BRETT BIGHAM:

and mine, more so than most. I had that happen, I won. They send you down to meet with all the other teachers of the year, they give you media training, they start preparing you for what's coming your way over the course of your, it's called a year of service. I started that process. And after my very first speech as teacher of the year,

BRETT BIGHAM:

my supervisor was there. She called me up afterwards on the phone. I saw her in the parking lot, having just given the speech. She was supposed to be there to talk to me and she was gone. She called me on her phone. She was driving home and she said "You need to shut your mouth. And I said, "What?" She said, "I mean it. If you say you're gay in public, someone's going to shoot you in the head." And I said, "What?" And she said, "I mean it.

BRETT BIGHAM:

You shut your mouth or someone's going to kill you." And then she kept talking for a minute and hung up. I drove back to work and couldn't, couldn't figure out what just happened because everybody knew I was gay. My superintendent knew I was gay. And in fact, when I found out I was a finalist for the award, I had a meeting with her and I said, there could be people who are upset that a finalist for teacher of the year is gay. There might be some pushback.

BRETT BIGHAM:

And she said, "I don't care. I 100% support you." I had the support of my district. They knew I was gay, but then this one person, it wasn't my district. It was one person who started making all of this fuss. And what they did is they called me in a couple of days later, and they had a written set of rules for me that I had to sign. And I was told that I was no longer allowed to say anything, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, unless I got their permission.

BRETT BIGHAM:

That's a very open-ended order. And I was like, well, what do you mean? And they're like, we're serious. You represent the school district now, 24 hours a day, you will not speak anything unless you have our permission. They gave me the same rule for writing. I was not allowed to even write an email without their permission. The rules were just so out of line, just unheard of.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Then they added, I could not meet any person that they didn't agree with or that they didn't approve of. And I was told that I would have to bring all personal mail from home for her to open and read, or I'd be fired. All of these things that are illegal and they wrote them down. I knew, coming out of that meeting, I mean, I was kind of distraught because I'd already been picked up and put in a new life. And now suddenly someone just hit me over the head with a hammer, basically.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I didn't know what to do. I honestly, I came home, I talked to Mike. I tried to resign. I went back and turned in my resignation. I resigned two weeks before I was supposed to meet the president. Teacher of the year is honored at the White House, go through a White House honoring ceremony. And I resigned. It was a difficult thing because I loved my job.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I loved my staff. I love my students. I resigned and I'm sitting in my room, just sobbing. The assistant superintendent came down and just said, "No, we won't accept it." They would not accept my resignation. And then they told me if you quit, we'll go after your license. We'll make it so you never teach again in the state, if you don't finish your contract. So I was trapped. I was absolutely trapped and didn't know what to do.

BRETT BIGHAM:

But two weeks later I was at the White House. As I was standing there, at the end of it all, and it was an amazing thing because -- Let me go back for a moment. We're at the White House, we were honored by the president. You know, you get your portrait taken with the president. I too had some personal things going on with the president. I wrote him a letter before the event and what the letter was,

BRETT BIGHAM:

was me just saying, thank you for all the things that President Obama had done for gay people, because truly, he had really stepped up and done things that nobody else had been brave enough to do. I felt like if I ever saw this man to his face, I must thank him. But I was going to meet him at a teacher of the year ceremony. It just didn't seem like the right place. So I wrote a letter. I didn't hear anything back, but I just thanked him, and in the letter I mentioned

BRETT BIGHAM:

we might get married while we're in Washington, DC, because it was legal there, and it was not legal in Oregon. Got to DC, and there's a luncheon that you go to. So Joe Biden, Dr. Jill Biden had us for lunch at the vice-presidential mansion. I'll share a picture with you of that. And I was the last person going in the door. It was a kind of a trend, everywhere we went, everybody was so excited to get where they were going, they would just rush.

BRETT BIGHAM:

And to me, I was like, I'm walking through the vice presidential mansion gardens to the door. I am going to lollygag. Everybody else rushed in and started lunch. And I came in last. The guy checking our credentials, I handed my paperwork and he goes, Oregon? And he shouts in my face, "You're the gay one." Yells at me. And I jumped, because he yelled. The secret service jumped and they come rushing over and he tells him,

BRETT BIGHAM:

"Oh no, I'm sorry, everything's fine." And then he apologized to me and he said, "I'm so sorry." He goes, "I've been waiting to meet you. We're all excited to meet you." I said, "What?" And he goes, "The president shared your letter with everybody. We have all read your letter." And I'm shocked. I'm just shocked. It ends up that this man was Joe Biden's secretary. He took me through the vice presidential mansion, introducing me to all the office staff, because they had all read my letter

BRETT BIGHAM:

and they all wanted to know if we got married. "Did you get married? Did you get married?" I told him, "No, we thought that we would probably get married when we got home." And I was overwhelmed. The man tells me -- I can't remember his name, I'm sorry -- he says, "The president follows you on Facebook." And I said, "He does?" And he goes, "Yeah. He reads your stuff." So, you think,

BRETT BIGHAM:

I don't know. I don't know. A couple of weeks later ... Oh, I should finish the White House. No, let me finish the marriage story. Sorry. A couple of weeks after gay marriage became legal in Oregon, and Mike and I went that day. The minute school got out, we met downtown and we got married. The press found out. Well, I put on Facebook, "We're getting married today." And that's all I said,

BRETT BIGHAM:

but the press was there by the time I got to city hall. Mike wasn't there yet, my incredibly shy husband. As I'm waiting, someone says, "Brett Bigham?" I turn around and it's a reporter from the Oregonian. She said, "I'm going to be following you today." And I said, "What's that mean?" She goes, "I'm following you. And there's a film crew coming." A film crew showed up and they filmed us through the entire day, standing in line to get our marriage certificate, paying the $50, filling in the form, all of it.

BRETT BIGHAM:

And we walked to where we were getting married, they followed us. We're just walking down the sidewalk in Portland, in our suits. We looked nice, with the camera following us and a reporter. We got to where they were doing actual wedding services, and the building was packed. There were people getting married all day and they were going there for the celebration. There'd been a ballot measure for gay marriage. Since it was no longer needed, they took the money

BRETT BIGHAM:

and they had a venue waiting. They had places to get married. They had champagne, they had a buffet in the basement so you could get married and celebrate. We got there and the national press realized who I was. I was the sitting teacher of the year getting married, gay, married. They pushed their way into where we were having our ceremony and they wouldn't leave. Finally, the venue people said, we're sorry. You either have to get married in front of the media or you have to go somewhere else.

BRETT BIGHAM:

And I looked at poor Mike, the shyest person I know. And I said, "It's up to you, honey." And he said, "I have waited so long to marry you, let's just do it." So we got married on live TV. But I'm under an order, if I say anything publicly, without the district's permission, I'll be fired, and here, I am doing gay marriage vows. But I had already started to fight. When I was at the White House, after the ceremony, the international press corp was there,

BRETT BIGHAM:

and they asked us if anyone who wants to step forward and speak about your students and your job. And I stood there and I stood there and I haven't shared this with you yet. But when I was 15, my best friend came out to me, went home and killed himself that weekend. It was hard. I have carried his face in my mind, my whole life,

BRETT BIGHAM:

because I learned very young there were people who'd rather be dead than grow up gay. And that's because of how people treat them, not because of themselves, but because of their fear of what people are going to do to them. I was standing there at the White House with the international press Corps. I remember, the teacher of the year from Georgia and Minnesota were right in front of me. And I said, "Pardon me, ladies, I'm coming out of the closet."

BRETT BIGHAM:

I was already out of the closet, but I was coming out of a bigger closet, I guess. I stepped up to the microphones and I made a statement about LGBT youth and anti-gay laws and how they are harming our students. And I drew a line in the sand with my school district basically, and that was, you're not going to shut me up. My being an openly gay teacher of the year is going to save some kids' lives

BRETT BIGHAM:

And they wanted to stop that. I drew that line in the sand right away there at the White House. Returned to Oregon. Things were terrible. Then I got married publicly. It was worse, but we have the Rose festival here in Portland that has a very large parade, and it's a big celebration for the city. I had gone to them when I first got named teacher of the year and said, "You've never done an event for kids with special needs.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I'd love to make that happen." So I worked with them. We had their very first special needs event with the Rose festival. And they called me up and said, "We've never had the teacher of the year ride in the parade. We'd like you to be one of our VIP honorees." And of course, I said, yes, they had just done it, they'd just agreed to this event. After Mike and I got married, they called us and said, we'd like your husband to ride with you. We've never had a gay couple ride in the Rose festival parade.

BRETT BIGHAM:

We've never honored one. You'll be out first. Poor Mike, but he agreed. Mike knew that it would save some lives. Some kids would see us riding in that parade and it would be important. We rode on, I think it was a Sunday. We rode in the Rose festival parade and Monday I'm back at work. I'm sitting at my desk and I suddenly got a weird feeling. I looked up, the superintendent is standing in the doorway of my classroom.

BRETT BIGHAM:

She is beet red, she's clenching her fists, and she's staring. If looks could kill, you know, there's that saying? I looked at her and I looked at her, and I thought, well, I didn't know what to say. I just said -- I didn't say anything, I only waived, which infuriated her and she spun around and disappeared. And that was any end, whatsoever,

BRETT BIGHAM:

of them even pretending to be nice. The whole experience being teacher of the year kind of went downhill from there. It became a constant and daily battle at school. I was given 36 warnings in a week. If these things aren't done today by three o'clock, you'll be terminated, like paperwork things. They started to do everything that they could to catch me making a mistake.

BRETT BIGHAM:

It became this long-term battle, and it got bad enough that the union was involved. I never went to the union. I was hoping to just get through it and leave. But following the Oregon teacher of the year in 2014, the union named me their educator of excellence for 2015. Now, suddenly my district is trying to fire the union's ... It's not their teacher of the year, but it is the educator that they have chosen to represent the entire state union.

BRETT BIGHAM:

That was me, and now I'm under fire from my district. They began just doing all sorts of things, like I couldn't go meet with anyone. One of the first events I was supposed to do in that fall in September, when school came back, I was going to a Gay, Straight Alliance at the high school, and we were going to talk about teen suicide prevention. I got an email from my supervisor

BRETT BIGHAM:

saying I was not allowed to meet with these students because meeting with them has no value to this district. And that was one of the straws that, that was just finally too much. I got that email. I took a personal day and I went to anyway. And then what began,

BRETT BIGHAM:

that started this really concerted effort on the district to fire me, which they did eventually do. I can say I got my job back. I was only fired for two weeks. The superintendent was fired permanently but they acted in such a way that it became incredibly clear that they were completely willing to throw everything I brought to that district, everything.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I was the Oregon teacher of the year. I was at that point, the educator of excellence. I was named a global fellow. I brought $17,000 of prize prize money into my classroom. All of that attention and all of that. This is the best program. This was all coming to my district. And they were willing to throw all of that away to protect one employee who was gay anti-gay. She is the one who broke the rules. She put all these things in writing.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I mean, the minute they wrote down, you must give us all of your personal mail from home, or you'll be fired. That's a federal offense. It's a federal offense. And instead of talking to her and saying, don't do this, they went after me. They did a full investigation and no matter what I said, I was wrong. It went to such a level that it was sickening. This supervisor, she was having her wine of the month club delivered to where my students were.

BRETT BIGHAM:

We worked in the mail room, which was next door to my classroom. And her box wine of the month club was coming every day that my students worked in the mail room, I would go and look and make sure that that box of wine had not shown up. Well, she calls me to her office and she says, your students are going to start cleaning my office. I said, what? She goes, they're going to start cleaning my office. Well, first off, that's illegal. She's not supposed to benefit from the work of my students, but she has a box of wine sitting on her shelf.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I pointed to it and she laughed at me and told me she wanted the kids to clean my room. When they investigated this incident, I said to the investigator -- He said to me, "Why does it even matter, that your kids are around the box of wine? They're too retarded to read the box, anyway." Sir, I cannot have my students around liquor. Well, the superintendent, in the report, tells me that I'm a liar

BRETT BIGHAM:

and that I have to go to counseling three nights a week, two hours a night for my constant lying. And I said, "I don't know what you're talking about." She opens up the investigation and she flips through to the page she wants and says, you said that Jeanie Zuniga had liquor in her office. Wine is not distilled, and therefore is not considered liquor, and you are going to counseling for this lie. And I didn't know what to do. I stood up and I said,

BRETT BIGHAM:

"You're right. There is a liar in the room, but it's not me." I said, "If you want to argue this in public, that's just fine." And I walked out. I went home that night. I filled out state and federal complaints to protect my students. At that point, it wasn't about me. I was finished there. They were hunting me actively. They had boxed up my computer, in my classroom and then started writing me up because my paperwork was late, but they took my computer. That's how they were acting. I had a medically fragile classroom.

BRETT BIGHAM:

They told me my office would now be on the opposite end of an empty building, down the locked hallway, and I was not allowed in my classroom during prep planning or breaks, two and a half hours a day. I was told if I went in my room, I'd be fired. But I'm the only teacher in the building, I have medically fragile students. We were calling 911 monthly, if not weekly, at times. I can't leave that room without kids. So that was it.

MASON FUNK:

Let me interrupt for one sec, because I want to ask, first of all, I think for the sake of time.

BRETT BIGHAM:

That's a long story.

MASON FUNK:

Find out what the ultimate outcome was. And then secondarily, maybe before we do that, I just wonder, like, how was this affecting you at the time? Because you haven't talked about that yet. I just don't know the answer to that question.

MASON FUNK:

How were you dealing? How were you coping? How were you not coping? How are you sleeping? How are you not sleeping? And so on, throughout this ordeal.

BRETT BIGHAM:

It was difficult. It was a difficult time because it was all playing out in the newspapers. These were all front page, newspaper stories, teacher of the year is fired, but nobody knew why. The head of HR, who's also a lawyer, sends me a letter,

BRETT BIGHAM:

well, to the union lawyers, saying if I take back my state and federal complaints against them, they will allow me to go to Washington DC to pick up another teaching prize I had won, so they tried to blackmail me. I'm sorry, I'm not supposed to say blackmail, I'm supposed to say coercion. Coercion of the state official is the official law that they broke. They began to break laws right and left. They fired me in ways that weren't legal.

BRETT BIGHAM:

That's why I was only fired two weeks, because they fired me illegally. I'm a teacher with a contract, there are steps you have to go through. I had never been written up or reprimanded. I had nothing in my file except their letters of recommendation to be teacher of the year. That was all very clear. I guess it is important to say this because truthfully, I believe that they had a second plan and all this. I don't talk about my health a lot,

BRETT BIGHAM:

but 15 months before I was named teacher of the year, I had a Widowmaker heart attack and I wasn't being treated as somebody who just survived a heart attack. I was supposed to be relaxing. I wasn't supposed to have a high stress, and they knew this. I had my heart attack in my classroom, on the last day of school. Because I didn't want to leave work early on the last week of school. So my health was not good.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I hate to say this because I like to think people are good, but I believe that their plan was to compromise my health so much that I would just drop dead. When that became clear to me, and it did become clear to me because they went to extreme measures to draw this out and to make it much more stressful on me than it needed to be. I feel like their intent was if that could destroy my health, then everything would just end. And I believe that's what they pushed me for.

BRETT BIGHAM:

In that, maintaining my health became as important as anything else, because to do so stopped what I thought their plan was. I did my best to stay healthy, but it wasn't easy. I was under constant pressure. And it wasn't just the bad stuff that was so confusing and emotionally disturbing because I was named teacher of the year,

BRETT BIGHAM:

which is this, you're here and then this, but then this and this. My whole time of teacher of the year became this rollercoaster. Other teachers of the year were getting all of the highs because there are crazy things that happen when you get this award. It's an honor that few people get, and you're treated almost like a star, during your year of service.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Dr. Stephen Hawking invited me to his office. I mean, the smartest man in the world heard of my work and thought it was important enough to meet with me. The president, after Mike and I got married, a few weeks later, a letter arrived from the president and Mrs. Obama. Congratulating us on our wedding and telling us, "We hope that you have a great life ahead of you." That was a beautiful letter,

BRETT BIGHAM:

but it was a high followed by a low and another high and another low. But I was protected on all sides at one time or another, from so many people. Secretary Arne Duncan's office sent a letter to my superintendent and told her to knock it off. The head of the White House communications office, when it hit the press, because everything stayed pretty silent until I filed the complaints. When the press found the complaints,

BRETT BIGHAM:

then everything was public. I got a call from the White House, it was an hour long conversation with the head of communications,

[inaudible], I think the president asked him to call me and make sure I was okay. I had the support of all of these incredible people while all the bad things were happening. So that helped. It made a big difference when the teacher of the year organization came out in defense of me,

BRETT BIGHAM:

when the department of ed came out in defense of me, when the president came out in defense of me. I mean, these are amazing things to happen, especially when I'm still in their hot seat. I did get fired, I mentioned that. They finally pulled me in and ... They didn't tell us we were being fired. They showed up at the meeting with their lawyer. I did not have my lawyer with me because we were told there would be no lawyers at the meeting.

BRETT BIGHAM:

And they just passed a letter across saying that you're fired. I'm not even out of the room yet, and my phone starts ringing. While we were sitting in this meeting, they were sending emails to all of the press saying that they'd fired me, before they fired me. So the press knew before I did. I can remember that night, seeing the news here and the newscaster Jeff Gianola, it's not a quote, but saying, this is highly unusual. This is a state agency. And when a state agency fires someone,

BRETT BIGHAM:

they never say any reasons, they don't do that. And here they are. This is unusual. And the district continued to attack. I mean, they gave newspapers, my W-2 form, my W-9 forms and my tax forms, my banking information, attached to the settlement. The Oregonian newspaper had my tax forms on their website attached to paperwork that the district sent them.

BRETT BIGHAM:

They did everything they could to ruin me. It almost became a chess game of survival, trying to plan out what they would do next. But it was a good day when the superintendent was fired. It was a very good day when I saw the headline that said, "Emails show district tried to blackmail teacher of the year." And then when the state investigation came out,

BRETT BIGHAM:

that was a big day because it said these things happened. They interviewed all the people that were involved and all the people in my classroom. When it all ended, I ended up taking a settlement. Now I did not sue my school district. People think I did, but I did not. I never did. They gave me a large chunk of money to buy out my contract so I would disappear,

BRETT BIGHAM:

but I did not sue the school district. But when they did that ... I just lost my train of thought. Sorry.

MASON FUNK:

For a second. Sorry. I just sneezed. Because of time again, let's ...

BRETT BIGHAM:

Too many details.

MASON FUNK:

Because I have some follow up questions I want to ask, and we have about a half an hour left. We blew through the time when we would normally take a break,

MASON FUNK:

which is totally fine. See what you can do to sort of just, you mentioned the settlement, see what you can do to kind of bring this very complex story to sort of a resolution, vis-a-vis the legal stuff and the firing and so on. Just so we can move into follow-up questions.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Okay. The way that it ended was the district gave me a settlement to buy out my contract.

BRETT BIGHAM:

But by taking that, it sealed the state investigation. It ended it and sealed it. My district immediately, the head of my school board, went public and said, I was a liar that the investigation was in their favor, and if they'd gone to court with me, they would have won. The state investigators saw what the district did, which was completely lie about the situation, and so in an unusual move, they unsealed my case. And every question,

BRETT BIGHAM:

every interview were released, verbatim, for the public to read. The public was able to see that everything I said was true and that the district had continued to lie up until the very end. And it was their lying that actually cleared me, because that investigation would have been sealed. I never would have seen it nor would anyone else. I did not know all the things that had happened in there. By them continuing that path of just continuously lying,

BRETT BIGHAM:

they ended up sinking their own ship. That ended up in July, by August, every single administrator at that district was gone except for one. And that one person is the only one who did the right thing with me while I was there. It became a battle. I knew I was losing the job. I knew that I would not be there. And I decided that that house had to be cleaned, because I wasn't the only person.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I was contacted by other teachers who had been treated poorly by this district, and I had decided that my role here was different. I told you before that, Mike and I thought just by being ourselves and standing together, we would be teaching our lesson to the gay youth of America. There's a gay couple that is successful, that is respected. And that is what I thought I was doing. I thought that that was how I was going to represent

BRETT BIGHAM:

the LGBTQ community, just by being myself. And it wasn't what it was. I realized that I had been put in this place to fight. To fight in the way that I fight, which is thoughtful. And I look at the future and I count my steps. And I took my fight to them with the intention of getting legal change in the United States.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I wanted to set a precedent and that is why I didn't sue them. I wanted to take them to court. I didn't want their money. I wanted them to stop this horrible behavior. I can say that this June, just this past June, the Supreme court had the LGBTQ employment case which I'm sure everybody's familiar with. While buried in that case is an Amicus brief from the Southern poverty law center,

BRETT BIGHAM:

and it details my story. It tells what happened to me and how a district decided that an employee was a throw away person because they were gay. And that's a tiny part of that case. Just a tiny, tiny little piece. I paid a high price for that piece.

BRETT BIGHAM:

It feels good to win. It does feel good to win.

MASON FUNK:

I can only imagine sitting in your chair, the weight that you carry just from that battle,

[inaudible], so to speak.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I won sooner than that. I personally won before that. The day I was fired,

BRETT BIGHAM:

I came home. I was very upset. There were news crews at my house. I had to get inside and catch my breath. And I got a message from one of my coworkers. And she said, "Google your name and the word Nigeria." I said, "What?" And she said, "Just Google your name, but spell it wrong with an N," because everybody spells my name wrong. I Googled it and it was the Nigerian Times, and they were running a story about me being fired,

BRETT BIGHAM:

but they showed the pictures of Mike and I in the Rose festival parade, on the car with the flowers and the crowds. And it showed a picture, it said it was our wedding, but we were at the Capitol building meeting Senator Merkley, but it looked like a wedding picture. So they got confused. I looked at that, and in Nigeria, gay people are being executed, still. Gay people in Africa are being murdered, right and left. That day in Nigeria,

BRETT BIGHAM:

people saw in the newspaper, Mike and I in the parade, they saw us at our wedding, and that was hope. That's helpful for people who live with the threat of being killed all the time. And I knew from that minute I had won it. I still had a heck of a bad fight ahead of me, but I knew I'd won on that day because that was so much positivity going someplace that didn't have it, that that was worth it.

BRETT BIGHAM:

All of it was worth it for that. The story ran in Singapore. The story ran in Russia, on Russian radio. In places where gay people are not treated that well, where civil rights abuses are happening, those pictures of Mike and I were in their news. And that's a big step if you've never seen anything like that. Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Thank you for that story. That's beautiful. That's amazing.

MASON FUNK:

Just to fill in the years, since all this happened, what are you doing these days?

BRETT BIGHAM:

Well, I had a hard time at first because

[crosstalk]. Oh, okay. I had a hard time in the years following, right after, because I was this highly respected person. I write a column for Portland state university.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I write a column for Education Post. I write a column for the teaching channel. I was going, I was internationally meeting with teachers and students and representing American education, but I didn't have a job. I took the first year off, after everything, I took off, just to get my head back. I continued to be teaching as a substitute. I worked as a sub,

BRETT BIGHAM:

back to where I started, because no one would hire me. Nobody really knew what had happened at first. It took years for me to be able to even get an interview, because everybody had seen teacher of the year is fired in the headlines. And they went on for months, months as things were churned up, there were headlines and headlines. But the wrap-up of it, the state investigation,

BRETT BIGHAM:

was one day, and so many people missed it. People didn't know how it ended, so I just kinda got to be in this limbo where Stephen Hawking is asking me to come see him, but I don't have a job. I'm not a teacher right now, I'm a substitute. Which is a teacher. Subs work hard, don't get me wrong. But I'm supposed to be a teacher of the year, but I don't have my own classroom, that's maybe what I'm saying.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I kept living in this very strange existence where I'm being interviewed by the New York Times, and I have an interview by the Chicago Tribune, but I can't get an interview. I'm applying for every special ed job in my city and I can't get an interview. It took a little time, but I used the time well. I decided that if I'm going to be out of the classroom,

BRETT BIGHAM:

I'm going to do my best to still support education. So I just kept doing what I was doing. I kept writing books. When I was named teacher of the year, I had written 12 of my ability guidebooks to help kids with autism, and there are 170 of them now. I took those years to ... I wrote 160 books. They're short, they're picture books, but it's a full, proper production of a book.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I worked the internet to find people who would translate. Those books are in six languages now. And then I had the most amazing offer. Two years ago, I went to Bangladesh. They had opened their first special education schools, but they had never seen special education classrooms. They had gone to India and got some training, but they had never worked with teachers who knew what they were doing in the classroom. I went over for a month,

BRETT BIGHAM:

and for a month I trained the whole up and coming generation of special education teachers in Bangladesh to my best practice. And my best practice is high. I push. Being able to go to another country and say, this is the best that I found in my entire career and give that to them as their starting place. What an honor, and what an amazing thing. I, sometimes, feel so blessed because

BRETT BIGHAM:

I have been allowed to see such victories and such great things from a special education classroom. And even going to Bangladesh, I saw the same thing. They had a young man there. I won't say his name but he was non verbal. He was 14. Didn't speak, didn't pay attention. Nobody knew what he knew. Just everything from that boy's inside, except he could draw. He was a wonderful artist. The prime minister of India did a competition

BRETT BIGHAM:

where people with special needs all did a picture and she chose his picture for her Christmas card. And that's amazing. So I'm sitting in this classroom and I'm watching the student, and he's got all these pictures and they're showing me his pictures and he's still drawing. I'm experienced enough where I can tell something is up. I don't know what's up, but something's up. I'm looking at his pictures and some of the pictures are very detailed. He's drawn a Coke machine or sorry, a Pepsi machine.

BRETT BIGHAM:

And it has some of the writing in English. So I asked this teacher, was he looking at the picture when he drew this? And he said, "No, there's a picture of a helicopter with parts labeled in English." I said, "Was he looking at a picture?" No. I'm looking at this boy. And I think I know what's going on here. Something clicked. I wrote on a piece of paper, in English, because I only speak English, "Draw an animal."

BRETT BIGHAM:

No, I'm sorry. I said, "Draw a fish." And I put it down in front of him. And his teachers were like, no, no, no, it'll upset him. They were afraid to get violent or angry or whatever. They tried to take it away from him, and I stopped him. I was like, no, no, no. Only one of them spoke English too. So she's the only one who knew what was going on. But I said, no, no. And I gave it back to him and they tried to take it again. Finally, it took about five minutes, and he's just staring at me. He pulls the piece of paper to him and he draws a fish.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I'm in Bangladesh. No one speaks English in the room except one person and myself and this boy read English. I wrote, "Draw a dog," and he draws a dog. I wrote, "Draw an animal." Because that's a little bit different, I'm not telling him exactly, he draws an elephant. I said, "Draw five animals," he draws five elephants. His staff was all standing around, just their mouths were open. They couldn't believe it. I could see on their faces.

BRETT BIGHAM:

They'd probably been saying he can't do this, he can't do that, in front of him this entire time that he was in their class. And that was a great lesson for them to learn, you don't do that in front of your students because you don't know what's inside of a kid, especially if they're non-verbal. But the turnaround from that was, they said, "Will you please come to his house with us?" They drove me to his house where I met his mom. Who's a university professor and we're sitting there and I sit down at the table

BRETT BIGHAM:

and I write, "Draw fish." And his mom can read English, his mom does speak a little English, but they don't speak it at home. And she kind of laughed, she was like, Oh what are you doing? He drew a fish, and she just stopped. I did a couple of other animals. Then I wrote, "Draw your mom." He stared at it, and he stared at it. His mom was right here. She's in tears, because her son who she thought wasn't inside there,

BRETT BIGHAM:

was. Just like she always hoped. He looks at, "Draw your mom," picks up the pencil, and he crosses out 'mom' and writes 'mother' in perfect handwriting. I got to leave that home knowing that that family, that's where they're starting now. Because I got fired, that family is starting in this place.

BRETT BIGHAM:

And it was just because I recognized some patterns in this drawing that probably nobody would notice if you didn't speak English. But that was the key. Another school I went to, there was another student like that whose father had just died, and he wouldn't leave his bed. I got him to come out and sit on the couch and eat. That was moving the world for his mom. She still contacts me just to say, "I'm doing a better job." She was very sad, her husband had just died. I told her, you have to be a better actress

BRETT BIGHAM:

because all she sees now is your sadness, and an empty chair where her dad was. That's all he has. I got that card from her, just said, "I'm being a better actress." Those are these little victories in other people's lives, and they all stem because I'm so well known because I was fired.

BRETT BIGHAM:

It's a strange place to work from. It's not a normal anything. There's nothing normal now about my life. Because there's been such a ripple. Dropping that rock in the water, there's this ripple and it impacts people far away. You don't know who's listening. You don't know who's paying attention. I have the honor, in a couple of weeks,

BRETT BIGHAM:

of speaking at Portland State's graduation, and I was so excited, I'm going to speak at graduation because only respected people are asked to do that, not fired, thrown away teachers. I showed it to Mike and he goes, "Did you read all this?" And I hadn't, I just got

[inaudible] they wanted me to speak. At the graduation, they're giving me an honorary doctorate. That's a pretty high praise for a teacher who's fired five years ago. That's very high praise.

MASON FUNK:

Wow. I'm a little speechless. That's a good thing.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I tell you, I don't know why I've been given this platform, opportunity. It was expensive price to get it, but to be a person like me and to be

BRETT BIGHAM:

asked to come now and help change, come here and help us make this better. What do you think of this? How could it be a system that's more equitable? To go from that high pinnacle to nothing back to this high pinnacle, it's a story that's come around on itself, and I'm grateful. I'm grateful that I'm not the fired teacher anymore.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I have to say, actually, I have a job now, I teach kindergarten through fifth grade at a school for kids with kind of extreme behaviors. My school is a three-minute walk from my house. I love my students. We just did a whole year of online teaching and I saw growth in my kids. Even though so many people aren't, my kids were growing and doing better. I don't know, it has come around,

BRETT BIGHAM:

and it's a good place to be. Still a weight, sometimes, but it's an opportunity to help people. Anytime I want to make the effort, if I see something I don't like, I can contact them and say, I don't like what you're doing. Let me show you how to do this right. I've done that with several organizations Empatico, which is this great program for introducing classrooms around the world to each other.

BRETT BIGHAM:

It wasn't set up very well for special needs kids, so I just sent them an email -- this is when I was fired, I gotta do something. I wrote them a letter and said, your program could be adapted really easily. They wrote me back and said, we want you to do this for us. So I adapted their program. And that's the sort of thing I can do now. My free time doesn't exist anymore. There is always someone I can help.

MASON FUNK:

I had this idea that we LGBTQ people have maybe a little bit of a unique ability to transform the trauma that we've basically experienced our entire lives into resilience. You say, I don't know why this happened, and this is an opportunity, a platform, but I feel like we're given more of these opportunities

MASON FUNK:

and platforms maybe than most people, because we've already come through so much. You've come through more than most. But my pet theory is that we all came through our childhoods and our adolescents,

[inaudible], except for those who didn't make it, unfortunately, there's those as well. But those of us who did make it are kind of empowered. That's just my personal pet theory.

BRETT BIGHAM:

But I don't think those platforms are given to us. I think that we see them,

BRETT BIGHAM:

we see that what we bring to the table is needed and we make our platforms, I think. They're not offered to us very often. I don't think. But we have come through a lot. The happiest, most well-adjusted gay person probably came through a lot of fire when they were younger. And that's one of the things that I hope my story does do, is bring some ... Well, it does bring strength to these young people.

BRETT BIGHAM:

While I was fired, I visited a lot of Gay, Straight Alliance clubs at high school, when I didn't have a job, and one of them I went to and I spoke and it was a really nice conversation. Kids wanted to stay and talk afterwards. There was this one young person, and they were standing kind of in the back of the room. And I don't know, as a teacher, as a gay person, as just a human, sometimes, you sense that fragility in another person.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I see her back there, she just was on my radar, there's something. As everybody was leaving, she didn't, and she came up. She was a few feet away from me. She wasn't looking at me yet, and I was still talking to someone. But she finally stepped up, and looking at her face ... She's looking at her feet. And she takes this deep breath and she looks me in the eye.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I always choke up when we tell this story too. I'm such a wuss, I'm sorry, but she looks at me and she says, "I feel like what you did, you did for me. You made me feel important." And that was another one of those minutes where life had been really hard at that point. It was a tough time, and you have a kid say that to you, and you realize

BRETT BIGHAM:

my tough time equals that for her. It was another moment where suddenly, I just want to let go some of this, let go of the pain, let go of the grief, stop mourning that your classroom is gone, because you're still making an impact. I carry that girl's face in my mind because she might be a kid I saved. She was so fragile, just so fragile. It made me cry.

MASON FUNK:

As we say in my family, I'm not crying. You are.

BRETT BIGHAM:

When I give public speeches, I cry. If I talk about the kids, it makes me cry.

MASON FUNK:

Right? Well, I have a favorite story. This one might make me cry, but we interviewed an amazing woman named Betsy Parsons in Portland, Maine, who was the first teacher in her school district,

MASON FUNK:

the largest school district in Maine, to publicly come out. And it was against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic, when the amount of hate is just off the charts. She tells the story, and this is in the work that we've published, which I'm going to send you a copy of. She tells the story of a student. She eventually came out, but there were years she taught, quite a few, when she wasn't out. Much later, a student came back and visited her,

MASON FUNK:

who had subsequently come out, was out and living as a lesbian. The student told Betsy about how during that whole year that she was in Betsy's, Betsy taught English, this student was suicidal, was so depressed, but was a top performing student. Was one of the shining stars, and really was just dying. And Betsy said, I'm so sorry to hear that. I'm so sorry to hear that you were suffering so much

MASON FUNK:

when I thought you were just off the charts achieving. What could I have done. And the student simply said, you could've come out. You could have been out.

BRETT BIGHAM:

That's it, that's it. I had this really crazy experience, 2015. I was asked to speak at a school rally, at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, in that same spot

BRETT BIGHAM:

where Martin Luther King stood, and where some of the greatest speeches in our country had been given. To get invited to speak there is just so ... It's part of the American experience that nobody gets to experience, but I got to stand there and speak with incredible people. Diane Ravitch spoke before me and the Reverend William Barber spoke right after me. I jokingly say I was his warmup act, because he's such an amazing man.

BRETT BIGHAM:

To have those moments where you get to stand there ... I look at the road that we've taken, it's all part of the same civil rights march, different people are in the march, but sometimes you're lucky enough to be a person who takes one of the steps where you get to push things or drag things for that little bit. When I gave that speech, I don't remember what I said.

BRETT BIGHAM:

It was a good speech. I worked really hard on it. The only thing I remember is saying "I did this so people would know, that gay youth seeing me would know that they are not alone." And it really became kind of the core of why I stayed in the spotlight because I could have disappeared. I had job offers to go, not work in education anymore, but I didn't want to disappear. I didn't do anything

BRETT BIGHAM:

that I should disappear for. I really kind of tried to boil it down into that message that you're not alone, and me standing here is the proof. It's the best I can do. My being here proves that there's someone who's got your back. I've tried to make that the core of everything that I do now. I'm here to show people that there's someone they can talk to. And I'll tell you,

BRETT BIGHAM:

even that, being the person to talk to at times has been the heaviest weight to carry in all this. I told you about the Supreme court case that was in June. I wrote some tweets that week, or the day that it came out. I think it was like 10 tweets in a row, tweet chain, whatever they call it, explaining what had happened to me, just telling my story, but in tweet form, you know,

BRETT BIGHAM:

so not very in-depth. But I tried to be really concise and careful. You know, who reads your tweets? I figured a handful of teachers are gonna read my tweets and that's that. And they went viral across all social media platforms. The Twitter results were 44 million Twitter impressions from the tweets, 44 million. And when it started, I thought, Oh my gosh,

BRETT BIGHAM:

this is insane. But my email, you know, people could contact me, all that information was public. I'm guessing I got over 30,000 messages in June. At first it was good for you. I got some hate mail too, mind you, I got some horrible threats, but at first it was people who had just seen the news, but then it started being younger and younger people as it trickled down.

BRETT BIGHAM:

And I started getting these messages from kids that were on the edge of suicide. And I spent the entire month of June in this frantic state of just trying to open every single message to see if it was somebody on the verge. I must have had the Trevor suicide hotline, Trevor project. Yeah, it was right there next to my computer, memorized.

BRETT BIGHAM:

"Hey, if you're feeling really bad please --" And that was one of the heaviest weights in this whole experience, was having unopened messages two weeks later after they sent them, and I still haven't answered this. I think this one young person in Texas who said, she's never heard anyone say a kind thing about a gay person in her whole life until she saw my tweets and I had an inbox full of people like that.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I've never been so frantic to get through so many messages. I'm still answering them. I still find messages and still getting messages. I'll open up my email and I'll find 10 that I somehow missed, just 10 messages I never opened. And I have to check them to make sure.

MASON FUNK:

So real quick, because we're out of time. I don't know if Tom mentioned,

MASON FUNK:

but we interviewed you because Microsoft gave us a small grant to interview LGBTQ educators. You're one of the three that we chose to ... It doesn't make

[inaudible], but you're one of the three that we started deciding would make a great group, the other is, the first person we ever interviewed in the state of Missouri as a gender nonconforming teacher in St. Louis, we interviewed this -- I don't know what their pronouns are, I'm gonna use them. And then a woman in Amarillo, Texas, who was also, not sure if it's the same honor, but she's also a teacher of the year.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Is that Shanna?

MASON FUNK:

Yeah.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I love Shanna. Here's the thing, I was in the news. I'm in all the headlines, gay teacher fired, just as she was named Texas teacher of the year. Then she was a finalist for the national teacher of the year. She contacted me and just said, "Can we talk about this?" She and I had some very long in-depth conversations about

BRETT BIGHAM:

what it would mean if she was out during her year, if she came out in the way I had. And I remember telling her one thing, and that was, if you come out, all of the kids that you work with now that you're advocating for will be forgotten. I could not have a conversation about special needs kids for three years after I was fired, nobody wanted to hear that they wanted to hear the gay stuff.

BRETT BIGHAM:

They wanted to hear what happened to me. Nobody cared about my students. That's why when the Supreme court ruling that came through, the Today Show, interviewed parents and students of mine. That was so touching to me because they had been left out, nobody ever asked my parents, "How did this impact your kids?" "Mr. B was in their life for three years, and suddenly he just disappeared and never saw them again." That was a big deal,

BRETT BIGHAM:

but poor Shanna, because here I was telling her my absolute nightmare, because it was the worst time too, it was when everything was the hardest. Here she was trying to decide how out she could be. I do have some sadness about that, it's not that she wasn't out, because her partner, they were pictured together. But it wasn't a conversation and the news left it alone. It wasn't covered in the press at all.

BRETT BIGHAM:

What a loss? I, sometimes, think if what happened to me didn't happen, she might've been very out. She might've saved more kids, but she will anyway. She's amazing. She's amazing. I'm in her book.

MASON FUNK:

You three are the three that we're going to include. And what we'll do is, hopefully it'll work with your schedule, towards the end of May, we're going to do a little public program, like some kind of, a panel, a webinar, and I'm hoping you'll be able to participate. It'd be so amazing to have the three of you together.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Oh, it would be fantastic. It'd be fantastic. I presented with Shanna, we did a one presentation in Chicago.

MASON FUNK:

That's amazing.

[inaudible] such a cool connection. I had no idea.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Yeah. We presented how to support LGBT youth. Was pretty cool.

MASON FUNK:

That's cool. I have a few other thoughts because you might be able to, maybe we can have a side conversation. One of the OUTWORDS' biggest priorities,

MASON FUNK:

and we've just completed our first strategic plan, is, of course, connecting our stories with queer youths. So you might have some ideas on that. But let's wrap up right now with four short questions. And literally I challenge you to answer them in a minute or less

[crosstalk] and believe me, I love every single one of your stories, but at the time we're basically out of time. So here's the final four.

MASON FUNK:

If you could tell 15 year old Brett anything, what would you tell him?

BRETT BIGHAM:

Oh, 15 year old Brett, a 15 year old Brett would get told, wait for Mike, don't date that other guy. That would probably be it. And to wear my seatbelt because I've been in six car accidents, not very good stuff, but that's what I would tell myself.

MASON FUNK:

That's brilliant. We touched on this kind of what I call queer superpower before. Do you think there's such a thing as a kind of a queer super power? Something that all of us share, to some extent that enables us to bring good things to the world. If such a thing exists, what do you think it is?

BRETT BIGHAM:

Oh, the gay superpower. Well,

BRETT BIGHAM:

I believe that a lot of the equity work that's being done right now is energized by gay people. I know that I'm doing a lot of equity work and it's not just kids for special needs, it's not just LGBTQ youth. I've met all of these other teachers working in equity. I'm a LEAE or a leading educator ambassador for equity for ECRA, which is the Education Civil Rights Alliance.

BRETT BIGHAM:

And that's a group that it's the NAACP of the major equity groups, it's their legal teams and I'm a spokesperson for them. And I just think that because gay people face so many obstacles and so many stairs to climb that by the time we get to the top of those stairs, by the time we are out into our adult life, we have the ability to understand,

BRETT BIGHAM:

I think, better what maybe our black friends go through, or our Latino friends go through, now our Asian friends, what they're going through, because we have tasted that, we have had that thrown our way as well. And as I fight for myself, I'm dragging everybody with me. Every step I take is a step for everybody. I think gay people are very in tune to civil rights. I'm sad to say, I don't feel like the black community

BRETT BIGHAM:

and the gay community have always walked side by side, but I think that we're on the same path. I look back at the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and I think of those Act Up people who were on their last leg, they were not going to be around much longer. I was in LA at the time, and I watched those gay people fighting so hard to get AIDS education to the urban poor schools because they saw that that's where AIDS was going next.

BRETT BIGHAM:

And I don't know, I've always thought that that should be the bridge to bring the communities together, that early fight to save black kids and other kids of color. And I've always kind of been sad that that has never moved forward as quickly and as healthfully as it could. And that's my dream for the future, a real dream for the future.

MASON FUNK:

Great. Thank you. Thank you for that. Again, try to make this answer as short as you can. Why is it important to you to share your story? You've answered this a million different ways, but give us a compact statement. Why is it important to you to share her story?

BRETT BIGHAM:

I think it's a good story, but what's really important

[crosstalk]. I think my story is a good story. It's interesting.

BRETT BIGHAM:

It's a made for TV plot, maybe, but that's a bad answer. Ask me again, please.

MASON FUNK:

Why is it important to you to share your story?

BRETT BIGHAM:

My story, though it's personal, is something that so many people have traveled, the path that so many people have been on. I just feel like when people hear my story, they know they're not alone. I say that on my speeches, you're not alone.

BRETT BIGHAM:

I am here with you. There are people like me here with you, and I'll introduce you to them. If you follow me, that's all I can say, you're not alone and you're loved

MASON FUNK:

Great. And lastly, OUTWORDS being essentially a project to capture stories like yours, and many, many, many other people across the country from all different communities and sub-communities and sub sub communities of this big LGBTQ community,

MASON FUNK:

but elders, people who have kind of walked ahead, what do you see as the value of doing that? And if you could mention OUTWORDS in your answer, that would be helpful.

BRETT BIGHAM:

You know, I see projects like OUTWORDS as being so important, because there is a gap of understanding and knowledge, I think, with our new generation, whom I love. They are brave, they are out there and they want everything right now.

BRETT BIGHAM:

A project like this shows everybody that getting to where we are right now was a struggle and a fight. The fight that you're taking on now in 2021 is not the fight that we took on 10 years ago or 20 years ago, but we're the foundation. We know it goes slow. I see these young people being frustrated because it's not moving quick enough for them, but I think, Oh my gosh,

BRETT BIGHAM:

the first things I knew about gay people, I remember seeing something in the early seventies, it was illegal for two men to dance together, anywhere on the West coast of the United States. That's in my lifetime. And I look at that and they think, Oh, these young people have no idea how far things have come, but I wanted to keep going. I wanted to just put it all out there, do what I did. Take your story,

BRETT BIGHAM:

show people you're not alone. The young people are amazing. I'm so inspired. The transgender youth, oh my gosh, that is a hard path. It's a hard path that most people don't understand because we know what's going on from our own feelings inside. And I see these transgender youths standing up and it's beautiful, brave.

MASON FUNK:

It's so interesting. Our whole campaign for tolerance and acceptance, that we eventually won, was based on the idea that love is love. And everybody can understand that feeling. It may be for a same-sex person or an opposite sex person, but everybody can

[inaudible]. But when you think about what transgender youth, there is very little relatability. How do you

[inaudible] so as you point out, the braveness, the courage, when there's so little relatability. You can't say, well, you've experienced something,

MASON FUNK:

a cis-gender person, because most cis-gender people had never experienced anything of the kind. And it's very hard to communicate what it's like, so that's a really, really brilliant point.

BRETT BIGHAM:

But it's -- I don't know. I feel like there's a big change happening now. I'll be honest, when I was young, maybe I shouldn't say this in public, but I can remember being 18, 19 going into my first pride events, and you know the news would show the pride parade,

BRETT BIGHAM:

and it was always the most outlandish drag queen or somebody in like really skimpy clothing, you know, just not me. That's not me. You don't see yourself in those pictures. When I first started seeing more transgender people, I was very confused by them. I didn't understand. And as you grow, you learn more and you learn more, but being teacher of the year and suddenly being asked to be a voice for the LGBTQ community meant,

BRETT BIGHAM:

Oh my gosh, I'm so ignorant. Basically, I had to go and to say, I need to hear your story. I need to know your history. Because I'm being asked to speak for you, and I cannot do it in my own words. I have to do it in your words. I've met a lot of transgender people in the last couple of years, and man, I carry their stories right here.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm texting Kristie real quick. She has to go to class.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Oh, she has a busy day too.

MASON FUNK:

We're going to have a side conversation at some point. I have a few follow-up questions and notes. I have some people I'd like to introduce you to. For now, I'm going to literally say thank you and I'm going to get off and Kristie's going to wrap up the technical side of things and then we'll be in touch.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Okay. Thank you so much for your time. I'm looking forward to reading your book.

MASON FUNK:

Well, thank you. And thank you so much for your time and everything you've done. It's much appreciated. Be in touch. Stay on for Kristie.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Hi there.

BRETT BIGHAM:

Oh, were you listening the whole time? It made me cry. I'm done with that now.