Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
Hi, Cheryl.

Cheryl Qamar:
Hi, Jack.

Jack MacCarthy:
How are you feeling?

Cheryl Qamar:
Pretty good. We're having a bit of a blizzard here today.

Jack MacCarthy:
Oh, wow.

Cheryl Qamar:
I think we've gotten about, I don't know, almost 12 inches so far.

Jack MacCarthy:
Wow!

Cheryl Qamar:
Hopefully the light won't change too much while we're doing this. We'll see.

Jack MacCarthy:
Yeah. Okay. If it does, we can, we can pause. I'm gonna have you start by saying and spelling your first and last name.

Cheryl Qamar:
Okay. Cheryl Qamar, C H E R Y L, Q A M A R.

Jack MacCarthy:
When I ask you questions, I'm going to just have you restate my question in your answer. If I asked, “What did you have for breakfast?” You wouldn't just say “Oatmeal.” You would say, “I had oatmeal for breakfast.” When and where were you born?

Cheryl Qamar:
I was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1950.

Jack MacCarthy:
What was growing up in Wichita like for you?

Cheryl Qamar:
Well, it was the 50s and it was Kansas. It was very much like what you saw on television at the time. Two parents, dad worked out of the home, mom was a homemaker kind of like leave it to beaver existence. We were the only Arab family on our block. We were surrounded by Catholic families and Jewish families. That was interesting in and of itself. I sort of grew feeling like an outsider anyway, from the very beginning, I have to say. Yeah. At the same time growing up in Kansas was lovely. I mean, we could play outside. It was a safe and secure upbringing in many ways. I'm grateful that I had that, but I knew when I was 10, I said to my mother, “I am not staying in Kansas. When I grow up, I'm gonna live in a big city.” Jack, I can keep talking. I mean, you tell me if you like I could go on from there, but I'm gonna let you guide.

Keywords: Childhood; Family History; Introduction; Wichita

Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
Yeah, yeah. You were the only Arab family on your block, did you have other Lebanese or Arab community?

Cheryl Qamar:
Yes. We were one of the first families to move to the east side of Wichita. Most of the Lebanese families at that point were living on the west side. The community was actually centered around the church, the Orthodox Christian Church. Every Sunday we would go to the west side and whenever there were events of the church, we would go there, but it was sort of this split life. In school, I remember kids asking me where my family came from and I would say the old country, because anytime I said Lebanon, they thought I was saying lesbian. So, I just avoided that. At the same time, there was this sense on the west side of this beautiful extended family, which was very important to me. We weren't as close to my dad's family who lived in Wichita. My mom's Canadian. She's the only one who immigrated to the states. We would spend every summer up there in Canada. So, this community of about, I don't know, I wanna say 500 families, became our extended family. Growing up with all those kids, they were like my brothers and sisters and my aunts and uncles. In fact, we called them aunts and uncles. Really no different from what I think most second or first generation ethnic groups go through in this country.

Jack MacCarthy:
Did you experience your parents and the community emphasizing and taking pride in Lebanese identity? Was there an emphasis on assimilation? Was there both growing up?

Cheryl Qamar:
There was a big emphasis on assimilation at the time, in the 50s and 60s, in fact, in the church, all the services were done in Arabic. All the people who belonged were Lebanese at the time, in fact, whole villages would move together from Lebanon. There were a lot of cousins and second and third and fourth cousins all living in that area and going to church there. I forgot the question. Let me start over.

Jack MacCarthy:
No, I think you answered it. I was just asking about like acknowledgement and pride and identity …

Cheryl Qamar:
Yeah. What I wanted to say is assimilation was really the goal and it has over time as Lebanese families have become more of the fabric in Wichita and had success financially and otherwise, become the professionals, whether they're doctors or bankers or whatever. I've watched my nieces and nephews now claim their ethnicity in a way that I never wanted to, never felt comfortable doing. That's pretty interesting to see how that has changed with wealth and prosperity and status.

Keywords: Arab; Assimilation; Canada; Childhood; Christianity; Ethnicity; Family; Immigration; Lebanon; Parents; Race; Religion; Siblings; Wichita

Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
Did you have siblings?

Cheryl Qamar:
have a younger sister who's three years younger and she has stayed in Wichita her whole life (except for when she went to college) and raised her family there. She now has two grown children, one of whom has his own children. Even though we grew up in the same family, our lives were very, very different from inception on.

Jack MacCarthy:
In what ways?

Cheryl Qamar:
My sister and I had different childhoods from inception on because when I was born, my mother was relatively new to Wichita. She was an immigrant. She left her family in Canada, whom she was very, very close to. She was just starting to feel the support and the connection of the Lebanese community there. My father was at that point traveling for the family business. Even when I was born, I was born a little early. He wasn't around. I think she was quite nervous giving birth without my father there. I was born premature, breech and then I was colic. It was difficult for her as a young mom, first born all by herself. My sister's pregnancy was planned. She was an easy baby. I can remember as a child saying to my sister, “You're just trying to be good to make me look bad.” But I think she watched and she learned, I was a rebel at a , young age. What can I say?

Jack MacCarthy:
In what ways were you rebelling?

Cheryl Qamar:
Well, maybe I shouldn't say rebelling so much, I was pretty willful and pretty independent. So, rebelling in the sense that little girls shouldn't be like that. In fact, there are home movies of my parents taking me to some kiddie park, like theme park, and you see me running in and out of frame and they're chasing me and trying to corral me. That's kind of what it felt like, whereas my sister would be standing next to my mother the whole time. I think I always had a sense of where I wanted to go, and I would pursue it.

Keywords: Canada; Childhood; Family; Immigration; Siblings; Wichita

Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
What was your relationship with your parents like as you got older and became a teenager?

Cheryl Qamar:
My relationship with my parents’ pretty strong actually. I was close to my mom and my dad. I got different things from each of them. I'm just flashing back on some memories. They entertained a lot in their home, and in the Arab community, the women are always in one room, the men in another. I remember going back and forth between the rooms as a young child, in the room where dad was entertaining, the men were smoking cigars and talking politics and world affairs, sometimes about books. I found it very interesting. I'd go into the room where my mother was entertaining, and the women would be drinking and laughing and dancing with each other. That kind of explains how I related to my parents, actually. My dad was an intellect and a very warm and gentle man. My mom was beautiful and vibrant and loving. I think I got the best of both of them until I became a teenager. That's when I would say some of the rebellion started to take hold. Let me pause here. What do I wanna say about that? Okay. That's when some of rebellion started to take hold. I was a very good student, but I was curious like my dad. I would question things. Growing up in my father's extended family who were all quite religious. In fact, his father was very established, not only in the local church, but nationally, as a scholar, et cetera. He taught adult Sunday school. I would question things that I was reading in the Bible or hearing in church. He would get very frustrated with me. My father actually would support me. He would say to my grandfather, “Let her question, it's good. Her faith will be stronger.” My father was an ally in that way. I think probably because he was an independent person himself, a free thinker. He didn't really care what people thought. I mean, he was a respectful person and always respected others, but he was his own person, his whole life. He could see that in me. I probably got a lot of that from him. Whereas my mother was more of a conformist and well, let me say that differently. Sorry, Jack.

Jack MacCarthy:
No apology necessary. I love that. You're taking your time.

Cheryl Qamar:
Yeah. Thank you. Was she a conformist? My mother cared more about what other people thought, how one looked, how one presented oneself and young women were supposed to represent sort of the mores of the family, be good, be kind, be selfless. As I became older and sort of started having my own mind and questioning things, that wasn't what she expected in a daughter and she was pretty strict growing up. I dated some in high school. I had boyfriends, actually. Whenever I would go out on a date, my mother would wait up for me. Not only would she wait up for me, but she would sit behind in her living room, which looked out into the front door and there were these sheer curtains, and she would be sitting there – a little difficult to see, but I always knew she was there – waiting for me to come home.

Keywords: Childhood; Christianity; Family; Parents; Religion

Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
How was your relationship to religion evolving as you became a teenager?

Cheryl Qamar:
Well, as a young girl, I was very passionate about the church and the church service itself is very beautiful and ritualized with icons and candles and incense. As a young child, it was very magical to me. I was quite religious as a young girl and during the holidays I would fast. In fact, in some ways I followed the church doctrine more than my parents as a very young child, around 10 or 11. But then as I started questioning things, as I mentioned and particularly when I went to college and got involved in the civil rights movement, and I would come home to this church that was preaching Jesus' words, but not really acting in accordance with Jesus. There was no diversity in the church other than Lebanese people. Having the service in Arabic was exclusionary. There was racism among members of the church. At that point I was getting involved in … We were sitting in lunch counters in Lawrence, Kansas with other black activists. So, to come home to this insular very closed community that was preaching God's word, it was such a disconnect. It was very, very difficult for me. That's the point of which I left the church. I was 18. I remember the day, during the church service, I went up to the adult Sunday school class. My grandfather was no longer teaching. My mother might have been teaching at that. No one was in the classroom. I went up there and I wrote this diatribe on the wall, the chalkboard about how they were not walking the walk basically. Then I quietly went back to the church service sitting next to my mom and never said anything about it. Years later, my sister asked me if I was the one who had written something, and I did own up to it. But I've never looked back. I've feel like spirituality is a big part of my life, always will be, I believe in a sense of community that can come together around shared beliefs and values, how important that is. But I think I transferred a lot of that – Lebanese community, church community – to other communities that I found as I left home.

Keywords: Activism; Childhood; Christianity; Civil Rights Movement; Community; Racism; Religion; Spirituality

Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
Where did you go to college?

Cheryl Qamar:
I went to the University of Kansas in Lawrence and that was 1968. It was a hotbed of radicalism, if you can believe it, at that point. There were many professors who'd actually come from the east coast. I went to social work school there. I became a hippie and a civil rights activist and an anti-war activist. Suddenly, a whole world opened up. I felt like I was following the values I had been brought up to believe in, that I was my brother's keeper. That let me say that differently.

Jack MacCarthy:
All right.

Cheryl Qamar:
Let me take that from the top. You asked where I went to school. Okay. I went to college in Lawrence, Kansas in 1968. It was probably the most forward-leaning, radical place in the entire state. I was exposed to thinking and reading that I could not have ever imagined living in Wichita. Reading writings from the Black Panthers at that time, being exposed to the anti-war movement, reading about Marx, reading about Buddhism. It was like suddenly the whole world opened up. At the same time, I felt like I was living out the values that I had been raised with, those Christian values that were so important and I still believe in, to a degree. I wasn't feeling the contradiction within myself. I only felt it when I went home and I wasn't fitting in anymore. My parents noticed it, and that's, I would say, when things really got rough between us. I wasn't coming out then, but I was doing drugs. I was having sex. I was doing all the things that a good Arab girl shouldn't really do. But nothing was gonna stop me because I was finding myself. It was a very, very heady time. I was learning about the world. I was learning about other ways to really practice what I'd been taught. Again, sitting at those lunch counters, that was a difficult thing to do when people were being ousted and jailed, and marching against the Vietnam war. I have to say, even the drugs back then, they were a chance to really experience another level of consciousness. I had a group of friends that we would get high with and we would do art and we would do theater. It wasn't this degenerative sort of thing that my parents assumed it was. I'm very grateful that I had that opportunity. I don't know, had I stayed in Wichita, that I would be the person I am today. My mother does blame a lot of the change in me to going to school in Kansas. Yeah. I mean, University of Kansas.

Keywords: Activism; Anti War Movement; Black Panthers; Civil Rights Movement; College; Family; Lawrence; Parents; University of Kansas

Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
In college, you weren't coming out yet. Was there an awareness of your queerness or of queerness as a concept? How did that evolve over time?

Cheryl Qamar:
Yeah. Queerness as a concept was not known to me growing up. I do remember very distinctly, I was watching television one night with my mom, and it was a Johnny Carson show. I'm really dating myself here. Jill Johnston from The Village Voice came on and she was a writer for The Voice, she was also an out lesbian. She said, the word lesbian, I'll never forget what she was wearing. It was such a moment, you know those moments in time where everything becomes so crystallized in your vision. I remember looking at her, liking her outfit, because that was important to me at the time. She was dressed in a dress and this little vest and she said something about being a lesbian. I turned to my mom and I said, “What's a lesbian?” My mom changed the channel. She didn't answer me. She changed the channel. I didn't ask a question at the time. I just registered it in my mind. In terms of a sense of myself as a lesbian, as I look back, I can see things that I wasn't aware of then, because it wasn't an option. It wasn't a word I knew. For example, in middle school at the dances that I would go to, I had a boyfriend, but it was really just to have a boyfriend in middle school. What I had was -- I was the dear Abby for my junior high newspaper. I called myself -- instead of Ann Landers -- I called myself Fan Linders Sock hops in middle school are a very traumatic event. He's not looking at me. Oh my gosh, he's with somebody else. So, these girls would seek me out and we'd go into the showers in the gym during the dance, and I would console them. I would give them advice, and I loved it. I was more interested in hanging out with these girls in the locker room than dancing with my boyfriend out there. I had a job to do, I was Fan Linders. Looking back, a little glimmer there. In high school, the boyfriend I had went to another school. A lot of the kids in my classes didn't know that I had a boyfriend. They never saw me with anybody in the halls. I remember one day this kid turned to me and he said to me, “Are you gay?” I had no idea what the word was. This is 1966. I said, “I don't know, are you?” Again, I remember that moment. I remember his face, but I didn't think anything of it. Then fast forward to college and one of my very, very dear friends in that group that I was talking about, where we did the theater and the artwork when we were on psychedelics, he came out, and I adored Bill. He was one of my dearest friends. I started hanging out with him and his gay male friends and felt very comfortable. In fact, there was a comfort I felt with them that I didn't feel with my boyfriend at the time or other men at the time. It just felt like home, like my family. I think I might have experimented once in a party with a woman, but it was more experimentation. Well, this is interesting, it wasn't until I went to Boston university in 1973 that I came out.

Keywords: Boston University; College; High School; Jill Johnston; Lesbian; Middle School; University of Kansas

Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
I'm curious how much other Arab community there was at University of Kansas and then at Boston university, and if you were able to connect with that.

Cheryl Qamar:
Sure. There wasn't much Arab community at the University of Kansas. In fact, I can't remember any. Oh, I take that back. There were a couple of guys from the church, from Wichita, who were going to school there. That's right, I forgot. One of them was dating my sister and the other was a dear friend of mine. I was close to his wife, at the time, he was married in college, but that was it. Again, my life was always fragmented. I'm this hippie at college, but my Arab identity goes sort of undercover, except when I'm with these friends. Then when I went to Boston, at Boston university for those two years in social work school, no, I can't say that I was ever involved with Arab community at that point in time. Oh, I gotta take that back. Funny how you forget these things. All right. I'm gonna start over. Shall I take it from the Arab thing in college? Want me to do that better?

Jack MacCarthy:
You can just go to … Oh, did you forget something from University of Kansas or from … Okay, I think you can just go to Boston University.

Cheryl Qamar:
When I went to school in Boston, I didn't know anyone there. In fact, it was kind of a fluke that I ended up in Boston. I knew I had to get out. Remember the 10 year old girl who said she was gonna leave Kansas. Here I am, I'm 22. I've graduated college. Here's my chance, so I decided to apply to one social work school. If I didn't get in, I was going to go to California to live with my boyfriend at the time. I got into Boston University, and there I went. Because I didn't know anyone there, I actually lived with an extended family in Boston, initially. They were very gracious to open up their home to me. I lived with this family that consisted of a widowed aunt, husband and wife and their adult daughter, and was in Brookline. I would commute to college every day, and it was lovely. But because I'd already left the church, I wasn't really that interested in the Arab community and their church events that they were very involved in at the time, so I kind of kept to myself. And then when I came out, I realized I had to move out, which I did. I never came out to them actually. To this day, I've never come out to them. Again, just having to have these hidden identities, fragmented parts of myself, but no, my Arab identity was really, I don't know what the word is, I guess, put to sleep while I came out. Again, it was another very heady time just like being in college was, it's like all of a sudden it's Boston and it's the 70s and it's feminism and it's queer, and it’s just unbelievably exciting.

Keywords: Arab; Boston University; College; Lebanon; Race; Social Work; University of Kansas

Partial Transcript: Cheryl Qamar:
In fact, I met my first lover at a school of social work there. She was a year ahead of me and we were in a class together. It was actually a group work class. You kind of get to know somebody in a group work class. I don't know. I don't remember how we got together. I think it was the end of the semester and we had a potluck and she asked, I wanted to go out afterwards. I said, sure. We went to a gay bar and that night we slept again. It was like, wow, this is home. I felt like, for the first time, that I could have sexual intimacy and emotional intimacy with a person, again, I always felt like those things had to be sort of fragmented off. I had emotional intimacy with my girlfriends, but not with my boyfriends. With Margo, I had it all. I think for her as well, with me, because she had, at that point, sort of hidden her racial identity. In the process of us discovering each other and ourselves, I think we each found a certain kind of home and safety we hadn't had before.

Jack MacCarthy:
Were both of you involved in activism at the time and what did that look like?

Cheryl Qamar:
We were. We were in social work school when the whole busing debacle happened in Boston. We volunteered to do some groups in South Boston. They wanted leaders of mixed race to go in, and we were both group work majors. They wanted white and black co-leaders to go in and do groups. But then the school wouldn't let us do it and they wouldn't give us credit. We found other things to do at that point. I was doing community organizing in a project in Cambridge. I helped women organize a health center. It was an extension of Cambridge hospital in the project so that people wouldn't have to travel for healthcare. I met some very feisty women in the projects who I worked for, I would say, to get that off the ground, and we did. They became my mentors and my friends and family of a kind as well, such that when I graduated social work school, I invited them to my graduation, because at that point I didn't think my parents were coming. My sister, I think, was graduating college at the same time, so I thought they were going to her graduation. Lo and behold, the last minute, they decided to come. I'd already invited these women from the projects and I wasn't going to uninvite them, so I got extra tickets and Margo came as well. The first time, maybe ever, all my worlds are coming together, my parents, some of my activism, and my queer life.

Keywords: Activism; Boston, MA; College; Femism; Girlfriends; Health; Lesbian; Lovers; Margo Okazawa-Rey; Mentors; Relationships; School Bussing; Social Work

Partial Transcript: Cheryl Qamar:
I'm visualizing the day. My mother was dressed beautifully with a big wide brim pink hat, lots of jewelry. The women for the projects, of course, were dressed up, but not as elaborately as my mom. Then there's Margo, and I remember sitting in the room after graduating. I think we all, I don't remember where we went. I guess we went to my apartment and had some tea and cake. I remember looking around and thinking, this is odd. These people, only thing they have in common is me. If they only knew. Shortly thereafter, my parents gave me my graduation gift in front of everyone. It turned out to be a diamond watch. I remember looking at it thinking, this is so not me. You don't see me. This is what you want for me. I was embarrassed that was in front of these women who didn't have access to that kind of wealth. I remember giving it back to them, which was probably rude, but just saying, give this to someone else. It's not something I would ever feel comfortable wearing, but I'll tell you something about that watch. They kept it. That's 1973, years later, 2015, when my partner and I had been together already 22 years, we decided to get married. I called my mom. I said, “Mom, do you still have that watch?” And she said, “Yes.” I said, “I'll take it now.” I took it and we took the diamonds out and we had it made into a wedding ring. That felt like a beautiful, full circle and a bit of integration of those different facets of my life.

Jack MacCarthy:
I love that story.

Cheryl Qamar:
Here's the ring.

Jack MacCarthy:
Oh, wow. Wow.

Cheryl Qamar:
Little teeny diamonds.

Keywords: Activism; Boston, MA; Class; College; Family; Girlfriends; Graduation; Margo Okazawa-Rey; Mentors; Parents; Relationships; School; Wealth

Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
That's great. Just reminding a tiny bit, while you were at school in Boston, how were you accessing lesbian community at that time?

Cheryl Qamar:
I was immersed. When I graduated social work school, my first job was actually to develop lesbian services for one of the first federally funded women's alcoholism programs in Cambridge. Right outta school, I'm getting paid to do community work and for my own community I was also … I mean, at that time, bars were where women met, there were women's concerts, women's bookstores, where I worked and then Inman Square in Cambridge, and I think maybe half mile radius there was our program, there was a women's mental health collective, new words bookstore, a women's bakery, a women's credit union. I mean, it was Nirvana as far as I was concerned. It was, again, community, which is so essential to my life and my wellbeing. I was very, very involved in community. In fact, how do I say that? I don't have words for that right now. Except just, it was a fabulous, fabulous time to be gay, to be coming out, to be a feminist in Boston with all that support. Oh. And there was the Cambridge women's health center. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what else ... There's so much I could say about that.

Jack MacCarthy:
Yeah. Yeah. Were you going to daughters of Bilitis meetings at this point?

Cheryl Qamar:
When I came out with Margo, I wasn’t really sure that I was a lesbian. I knew I liked her. I knew I loved her, and I knew I felt comfortable with women in a way that I hadn't with men, but I wasn't ready to make the commitment. I think, in part, because I knew what it would mean, the loss of community, the loss of my family, potentially. So, I sought out some support independent of where all my friends were going. I went to Daughters of Bilitis meetings, and I remember they were held in the upstairs of this church in Cambridge. Learned a little bit about the history of that organization, history of lesbianism, and started to build sort of my own community outside of Margo which was important at the time, because she was so engaged with so many people. I needed to get a sense of myself. And well, I don't know. I guess I don't have much I wanna to say about that. I'm sorry. This is so choppy.

Jack MacCarthy:
No, no.

Cheryl Qamar:
It's not? Okay.

Jack MacCarthy:
Yeah. I think it's fine to pause and think and …

Cheryl Qamar:
Trail off.

Jack MacCarthy:
Yeah. It's okay. If things aren't always linear.

Cheryl Qamar:
Thank you.

Keywords: Boston; Community; Daughters of Bilitis; Feminism; LGBTQ Community; Lesbian; Margo Okazawa-Rey; Women’s Movement

Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
Yeah. I'm curious about the Combahee River Collective that Margo was part of. Was it already formed? Was she already part of it when you met?

Cheryl Qamar:
Margo and I got involved in ‘73 and somewhere in 1974, she became a founding or essential member of the Combahee River Collective, which was an incredible group of black lesbian feminists, including Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Demita Frazier, Chirlane McCray, and others. I'm not remembering all their names. For Margo, speaking of community, this was a chance for her to come home. The work that they did in terms of looking at the overlay of gender, sexual orientation, class, and having that form their politic was really, believe it or not, we talked about intersectionality now, but back then, that was so radical. Because so many of those women groups had not found a home in the black movement as women, certainly not as queer women. For Margo, it was a very, very important connection. Yet as she began to identify and embrace more of her blackness, it became more of a disconnect between us, and our relationship pretty much fell apart. It really struggled during that period, but we remained friends. In fact, I would say we were more like extended family for a chunk of time after that. Still very important to each other, but for her, I think to stay, at that point, in relationship with a woman who is not black was just not going to work for her. Interestingly enough, at that time, so many of the women that I was doing political work with were Jewish, and I felt an affinity with them because we're really the same tribe and enjoyed the same food and had that same ethnic sensibility. Yet, as I learned more about Palestine and became more involved with movements that were seeking justice for Palestine, that, again, another fragment in my life, I lost some friendships over it at the time. Not all, but some, it became a real tension. I did, at that point, find other Arab lesbians. It was hard. It was really hard, but I did and through them did a lot of work for Palestine. In fact, my very dear friend, Dominique Ghossein, and I, every international women's day … Is it WBUR? The television station in Boston – I'm not remembering the letters – would open up the whole studio for 24 hours for women to do programming. We'd sleep over at the station, et cetera, and Dominique and I would always do something on Palestine. Now, I'm feeling I have community, I have community with queers, with Arabs, with activists, finally. Now, how old am I at this point? I guess I'm probably 29-30. It took a long time. But thank God, for my own well-being and sense of self.

Keywords: Arab; Combahee River Collective; Ethnicity; Feminism; Judaism; Lesbian; Margo Okazawa-Rey; Palestine; Race

Partial Transcript: Cheryl Qamar:
Now mind you, at that time, I'd come out to my mother, but not the rest of my family. When Margo and I broke up, after we'd been together, I think, three years. I went home to Kansas for the summer for a brief period in the summer. My sister had just gone through a breakup as well, with a doctor. She was, oh, heartbroken, like going from room to room, sobbing. My mother was so tender and attentive to her. Meanwhile, my heart's broken, but I'm afraid to talk about it. I'm watching this go on day after day and trying to hold it together. Finally, my mother turns to me and she says, “What's wrong? I know something's wrong. Please tell me.” I think I was like a deer in the headlights. She said, “Is he Jewish?” And I said, “No.” I'm like, I don't know what to say to her. I'm like, again, frozen. She said, “Is he black?” For a flash, I thought, oh, I could tell a half truth, but I said “No.” And said, “She's a woman. We've been together for two years and we just broke up.” I remember that moment, again, those vivid flashes of memory, my mother clutched her chest. She said, “Oh my God, I thought so, but never in my wildest dreams that I want this to be true.” Because they had met Margo a couple years ago at the graduation. I remember leaving the room. She stayed in the room and I just walked out because I felt relief and terror at the same time. I went to see some friends. There's actually pictures of me from that day. I felt kind of liberated, like finally, it's off my chest, finally. But when I came home later that day, my father and sister were still at work. My mother had lit all the icons in the house, we had icons in almost every room in the house, and she had her Bible and she was praying. I walked in, and she was furious. She spent the next few days, whenever my sister and father would go off to work, basically being furious and outraged and saying things that I don't really think she meant, but they were incredibly hurtful. Things like she never wanted me as a baby. I mean, she was desperate. She had had a very serious bout of depression when I was 13, the only bout at that point. In fact, she'd been hospitalized for a good year when I was 13. I'm terrified mom is going to end up in the hospital. I'm just taking this from her. I don't know what else to do. I don't want her to break. I'm breaking inside, but as soon as my father and sister walked through the door, everything was fine. We're not having a problem, we hid it. That went on for a good, I don't know, five or six days until I went back to Boston. But the day before I left, my mother said to me, I wanna take you to the bank. I wanna give you something. We go to the bank and she's got a safety deposit box and she pulls it out. Then there is this gold cross. It's like this big, an Orthodox cross, and said “I want you to have this. I don't know why you've told me what you've told me now, but there must be a reason, and I want you to have this. I want God to protect you.” At this point, after five or six days of her berating me and really casting me, I'm kind of broken inside, I'm thinking, oh, maybe she's giving this cross because I'm going to die. I mean, that's how fragile I was. I was fragile even before I arrived in Wichita because of the breakup.

Keywords: Breakups; Christianity; Coming Out; Family; Homophobia; Lesbian; Mothers; Parents; Relationships; Religion

Partial Transcript: Cheryl Qamar:
Now, I'm terrified, to be honest. I put the cross on and I go back to Boston. It's under my clothes, of course, but then I think about, I don't know, two or three weeks later, I’m at a lesbian picnic somewhere. I don't know where we were, but we're hanging out, it's a beautiful summer day and we're taking our shirts off and now the cross is out there. I don't think anything of it, but when one of my friends said, “Cheryl, what is that?” I broke down. I just broke down. My friends were very comforting. No one had quite experienced a coming out story like mine. But they were very sympathetic. Mind you, the tension between my mother and myself did not stop. When I would go to work, she would call me at work, screaming on the phone how worried she was about me, how much she actually hated me. Finally, I think after about a month of that, I said, “This has to stop. You have to stop this. What's your bottom line? I'll tell you what mine is. Mine is, you cannot call me …” Oh, she would send me this religious stuff in the mail. “You have to stop sending me things.” I said, “What's your bottom line, mom?” She said, “You can never come out to the family or anyone in Wichita and you can never bring anyone home.” I said, “Okay.” I was just so ready to be done with a torment. We lived like that for, I don't know, what I thought was maybe three years. Then my father started having heart problems and he had a heart attack that he recovered from. But again, I was very close to my father.

Keywords: Christianity; Coming Out; Family; Homophobia; Lesbian; Mothers; Parents; Religion

Partial Transcript: Cheryl Qamar:
I suggested that we go on a family vacation to Hawaii. Everyone agreed. A little side story, right before we were to go, my dad had another heart attack so we had to cancel the trip. But my girlfriend at the time was moving to LA. She said, “Listen, why don't we go?” So, we went to Hawaii. I never told my parents. We camped. We went to every island, we camped. She stays in LA, I come back to Boston. About three months later, my dad's fully recovered and he calls and he says, “Let's go to Hawaii.” I'm like, okay, when do you wanna go? We went and I had to pretend I'd never been there before. But on the trip, my dad was cool towards me in a way I hadn't experienced before. I wasn't quite sure what was going on. Well, I come to find out, like, I think the night before we leave, my mother tells me, she had told my father about me being gay, and my sister. My father and I have a conversation and he says to me, “I've known people like you,” meaning gay people, “and I have to say a lot of them weren't that stable, but I've never been able to control you. I don't think I'm gonna be able to control you now. I hope you take care of yourself.” And that felt like love and support, relative to what I've been through with my mom! But I still kept to the agreement after that. I didn't bring partners home whenever I came home, which was usually around Christmas. I would come by myself and I didn't come out to people. Of course, when I'm in these extended Lebanese family gatherings, “Cheryl, when are you gonna get married?” “Oh, I have a job. I love my job.” “I haven't found the right guy yet.” All those excuses, which I thought they bought. I don't know. Until many decades later, now we're talking, let's see, I think 19… Let me do the math. I'm sorry. I have to do the math. Because I get all the years confused, because this is kind of important.

Keywords: Coming Out; Family; Fathers; Hawaii; Parents; Siblings

Partial Transcript: Cheryl Qamar:
Okay. All right. Where shall I pick up so it doesn't look like a big jump?

Jack MacCarthy:
Many decades later.

Cheryl Qamar:
While I'm coming home, my sister's going on with her life. She's getting married, having a family and we get close, actually. I'm the maid of honor at her wedding. Her first child is born, she comes to Boston to see me, stays with me and my partner. I become close to her little infant daughter and starting to feel like, well, maybe my life can come together a little more.

Jack MacCarthy:
Can you just go back because there was the sound of a motorcycle or something outside.

Keywords: Family; Homophobia; Nephews; Nieces; Siblings

Partial Transcript: Cheryl Qamar:
Sorry.

Jack MacCarthy:
It's okay. But can you just go back to her coming to visit Boston and staying with you.

Cheryl Qamar:
Let me see, it's also disjointed, I realize, when you don't tell it chronologically. Hold on. Because I was talking about, I'm coming home, but I'm not bringing a partner. Okay. While I'm coming back to Wichita, never bringing a partner when my sister gets married and then has her first child, She decides to connect with me and my life, because I think she wants her child to have an aunt. I'm her only sister. We're it. My sister comes to Boston, brings her baby, and it's wonderful. We have an incredible visit. I go there, I become close to her and her daughter and her husband and the family. It's starting to feel again, like there's some coherence in my life. My sister had a second child. Somewhere along the line, the kids grow up and they realize, oh, Cris isn't Cheryl's roommate. She's not aunt Cheryl's roommate, they're more than roommates. Now, they've been raised in the same church, which is not accepting of gay people. And the kids being, as kids can be, very binary about life and things. They disowned me in their own way. I call my sister, say, “What's going on? You're the grownup, explain to them. They're just kids.” She said at that time, they're my family. So, like, okay. So, there it is, right. I forgot to mention, my parents asked me to change my name. Those first years I was working for the women's program in Boston because I was publishing a lot about lesbians and alcoholism and they didn't want my name associated with that. I chose an Arabic name, Qamar, which means moon in Arabic, and let go of my family name and I've kept it ever since. But back to my family. There's, again, this break, this rupture in the family. I continue to go home for a bit. My mother and father decide, finally, they will come visit me. This is 1993. I think couple of months before they were to come, my father dies of a heart attack. He never came to New York. You won't know how I got to New York, will you?

Jack MacCarthy:
No, it's. Okay. We've been doing this for about an hour. This actually might be a good time to take a brief break and then regroup

Cheryl Qamar:
You gimme some pointers about where you want me to go.

Jack MacCarthy:
Yeah, absolutely. [crosstalk]

Cheryl Qamar:
When you talk to old people [crosstalk] the story is so long.

Jack MacCarthy:
I think after we come back, we'll talk about your time in Boston and Cambridge after graduating from social work school. And working with lesbians around.

Cheryl Qamar:
Oh, okay. And the video work.

Jack MacCarthy:
And the lesbian community.

Cheryl Qamar:
The soap opera. Okay.

Jack MacCarthy:
Yeah. The soap opera, amethyst women.

Cheryl Qamar:
All about that.

Jack MacCarthy:
The video and documentary projects. And then how you ended up moving to the [inaudible].

Cheryl Qamar:
Okay. Got it.

Jack MacCarthy:
Okay.

Cheryl Qamar:
Thank you, Jack.

Jack MacCarthy:
Yeah. Yeah. Let's take five and come back here at 13 after the hour.

Cheryl Qamar:
Okay.

Keywords: Family; Parents

Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
Backtracking just a little, let's go to right after you graduated, you were hired to work with the lesbian in relation to alcoholism. What were the specific needs of that community that you were there to kind of specialize in?

Cheryl Qamar:
When I started working at the women's alcoholism program, there was no safe place for lesbians to get sober. They weren't welcome in AA, which was really an old boy’s network at that time. There wasn't much consciousness about alcoholism even being a problem. It was such a part of the fabric of our community and the bar scene. You could be in the bars and just see how much rampant alcoholism there was, but nobody was getting help. Nobody was admitting it. There was a stigma for women to be alcoholics anyway, and for a lesbian to admit she was an alcoholic, it was unheard of. The first task was really to create safe places. We did that by starting our own women's groups in the program. It was really an outpatient clinic, but a stronger component really was doing what we called community education, where we went out into the various agencies. At that point in time, there were a lot of women's counseling groups, and teaching them about alcoholism, how to identify if someone was in trouble with alcohol, how to help them, et cetera. By taking that kind of two-pronged approach, providing the education to our community, helping to reduce the stigma, providing support groups, I think we really did change the culture in our own way. Those women that then came to our support groups felt emboldened to start their own AA meetings. Then you saw the growth of lesbian meetings and then gay men's meetings. That was pretty exciting and rewarding to be a part of. I should mention that there still wasn't enough alternative ways for women to socialize back in the day, in the 70s and 80s.

Keywords: Alcoholism; LGBTQ Community; Lesbian

Partial Transcript: Cheryl Qamar:
I became involved in two different projects, related projects. We created a collective, we called ourselves Amethyst Women. Amethyst because, obviously, the lavender color. But was it Greek? The Greeks or the Romans, in one of their bacchanals, if they were done drinking, but they didn't want anyone to know they would put an amethyst in their glass of water so it reflected and looked like wine and they'd be drinking soberly with the amethyst in there. Amethyst Women was a collective that sponsored dances for women, so we didn't have to go to the bars if we didn't wanna drink. We had our own lesbian DJ and we held those gosh, I dunno, maybe once a month, they were incredibly popular and wonderful. Women finally had a place to go and meet and have fun and not worry about drinking or being tempted to drink. In fact, a lot of women came who weren't even alcoholic, just because it was a whole other feeling in terms of gathering. Then shortly after that, another smaller group, I formed an improv group about women in recovery, and we called ourselves The Mood Swings. We had a captive audience, of course, at that point. The recovery community in Boston, the lesbian community is quite large. We had a readymade audience and we would do these performances, these improv performances about life and recovery as a lesbian. Those were a lot of fun. Yeah, it was fun. It was also reflective of the depth of our lives at that time. The films that were available were about the tortures of coming out or of having to be closeted. Here we were, talking about the day to day living, the trials and tribulations, the fullness of our lives. It was very welcomed and I was so glad to be a part of it, both that and Amethyst Women.

Keywords: Amethyst Women; Comedy; Improv; Lesbian; Performance

Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
How did Two in Twenty come about?

Cheryl Qamar:
In the early 80s community access television became a real source for activists to produce their own programming. Where I lived at the time, in Somerville, the director there was very open to progressive programming. Actually, you could borrow the equipment, do your own documentaries. He would post them on the station, the local access station. I was at that time, I think I'd left the women's program. I was doing therapy on my own, in a private practice as a social worker. I was really curious about different aspects of lesbian life, so I decided to do a couple of documentaries. The first one was called The Families We Choose, and it was a portrait really of different lesbian families in the Boston area. Some had children, one of them was the saints collective, which was the bar in Boston. It was a group of women who had run the bar for many, many years, but were considered family for each other. It just showed the full array of chosen family. That was a really wonderful project to do with Lisa Pontippadan was my co-producer. Again, being able to show that back to the community, I think there's a point there's always searching to, I wouldn't say normalize, but to say here we are, our lives are rich. They're beautiful, they're powerful. See us, we're here, we’re queer, get over it – no, not even that really. Just I wanted to reflect the fullness of my life and my community, and that was one way to do it. The next documentary I did was on sexuality and long term lesbian relationships at that point in time, if you were together five years, that was a long term relationship. Again, interviewed a variety of couples, and talking about sexuality was something that people didn't do. Again, it was kind of bringing that out of the closet.

Keywords: Chosen Family; Community Access Television; Documentary; Family; Film; Lesbian; Lisa Pontippadan; Public Access; Relationships; The Families We Choose

Partial Transcript: Cheryl Qamar:
I think that's been another part of my life work has been to bring things out of the closet, whether it's my Arabness, whether it's addiction, sexuality, and, and the freedom to be sexual. Right around that time, right after I'd done making it last, a woman named Laurel Chiten approached me about doing a soap opera, a lesbian soap opera, this is 1983, I think. I wasn't really into soap operas. Didn't know much about them, but because I'd done the documentary work, here's another way to connect our lives. But through the arts, through something a little more creative, a little more fun. We organized, I would say about, probably a total of 200 different women working on this project. Whether they were the sound people or the light people or the camera people. We did it all in public access, in the studio there, and this is long before The L Word mind you. Again, we're looking to portray the variety and colorfulness of the community that we're from. There was one lesbian household that had a musician who slept with everybody. She lived with a med student who was not sure of her sexuality, and those two lived together in Dorchester. There was another household that had a dyslexic tarot card reader, a lesbian therapist, of course, her partner was a tradeswoman and who else? Oh, and they had a daughter, a 15-year-old daughter. It was about the interplay between those two households that come together because the one who wasn't sure of his sexuality sees the lesbian therapist in the other household, and anyway, it gets very involved. It was kind of a cross between Days of Our Lives and Saturday Night Live, because we did spoofy commercials and we would invite, at that time, the lesbian sort of musicians and popular artists to do cameos. Holly Near had a cameo. Oh, Meg Christian. We did five episodes and it was fantastic. It was so much fun and brought so many people together. We actually toured with it. We went, obviously, to the women's music festivals. We were in London at a showing there. It was so well received. It's actually how I met my partner. When I moved to New York, we had a showing in the New Paltzarea. The word got out, and by the way we called it Two in Twenty because the acronym was TIT. Two in Twenty, the byline was “two in twenty because one in ten sounds lonely.” One in ten being the statistic of the number of gay people in any given group of 10 people. Yeah, Two in Twenty. It's available, I think, on VHS, that's how old it is.

Jack MacCarthy:
I was about to ask if I could watch, available to watch somehow.

Cheryl Qamar:
It might be. I'll look it up for you. It's quite dated, but there's a lot of really good stuff in it.

Keywords: Community Access Television; Film; Lesbian; Media; Public Access; Relationships; Television; Two In Twenty

Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
We'll get to moving to New York in a second …

Cheryl Qamar:
Talk about my separatist period.

Jack MacCarthy:
Yes, I would love to hear about separatism.

Cheryl Qamar:
Yeah. Okay. Around the time that Margo was really embracing her blackness in her community, I took a different direction and I'd always been a strong feminist, even actually the University of Kansas, I was in a consciousness raising group back in the day. Feminism was always a strong part of my life. There are these feminists who are talking about life without men. There was a poster, it was very popular in the day. A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. We really took that to heart and I became involved with separatists, not because I hated men, but because I wanted to push the boundaries. I wanted to push past the limits that I had been taught to believe were mine because of my gender, my being a woman. It was about discovering our capacity to excel and to exceed past those limits. What it meant was we had nothing to do with men as much as possible. I went to women mechanics, women doctors, everything I needed or wanted, I was sure to interface with only women. At the time too, I cut my hair really short and dressed in androgynous clothing and I passed, believe it or not, it was so kind of exciting. Like, I'd go into a store, like a hardware store or something and they say, “What can I do for you, son?” And I'm like, yeah. Yeah. Actually, when I came out, one of the things I enjoyed almost right away was the loss of sexual attention with men. I felt like I was on a level playing field with men. Again, growing up in a culture where that was not an option, it was very empowering. What can I say? The separatist movement was another really growth spurt for me, I would say. It's funny, at the time when I'd go home to Wichita, my mom would say, “If you hate men so much, why do you dress like them?” And I'd say, “I don't hate men. I just don't need them, mom.” That sort of captures the essence of it. I think so many political movements have to go through a period where they self-identify, where they're exploring those outer edges.

Keywords: Feminism; Lesbian Separatism; University of Kansas

Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
When did you live in the commune?

Cheryl Qamar:
Oh, let me just think what period was that? Okay. In that period, when I was a separatist I lived in a commune with other lesbian women in Cambridge. Also, there was a farm on Cape Cod called Feather’s Farm. I went back and forth. In Cambridge, we made meals together, had political meetings. In fact, if you wanted to join our commune, you had to be interviewed, pass the politics test. You had to have good politics, et cetera. Again, it was another source of community and family. On the other hand, at Feather’s Farm on the Cape where we grew our own food, chopped on wood, had campfires, swam naked. It was a little looser, a little more artsy. I enjoyed that as well. But there were other women in that, in the Feather’s Farm commune that were more of a pagan. We called ourselves ‘witches’ actually. We were political witches in our coven. In fact, I don't remember the year, but when the Briggs amendment was being voted on in California … Do you know the year? I could look it up.

Jack MacCarthy:
I'm going to just Google it. Yeah. It was 1978.

Cheryl Qamar:
Oh, wow.

Jack MacCarthy:
Okay. Briggs Initiative was 1978. Okay.

Cheryl Qamar:
In 1978, when the Briggs initiative was coming up for a vote, our coven met, there might have been a full moon. I seem to remember seeing that. We went out down to the ocean and we had these clay tablets with Briggs on it. We did this entire elaborate ritual where we broke the tablets on the rocks and basically sent energy out there for it not to pass. Oh, I forgot to mention the Briggs amendment was about prohibiting gay people from teaching in the schools. Yeah. I don't remember if it was all California or just LA. Do you know Jack?

Jack MacCarthy:
I think it was the state of California, the State of California.

Cheryl Qamar:
It was a really big deal, and it didn't pass. I'm not saying we had any special powers, but I think the special power we did have is that we were combining spirituality, with politics, with activism, we were combining community with not just being local, but national, there was a sense again, of connectivity to something greater than ourselves and the importance of that and working towards that always.

Keywords: 1978 Briggs; Cambridge, MA; Cape Cod, MA; Communes; Feather’s Farm; Feminism; LGBTQ Community; Lesbian Separatism; Spritiuality

Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
Then it was someone connected to the commune that led to you moving to Woodstock, is that right?

Cheryl Qamar:
In the Cambridge commune, as I said, you had to interview to get in and this woman shows up, who's an acupuncturist and really very butch, I'm very attracted to her. She interviews well and we decide to let her in. True to form, sometimes, we slept with the interviewees. We had a very nice connection, but she decides to move to Woodstock, New York. But we maintained a friendship and a connection over the years. At one point, I would say many years later, probably about 10 or 13 years later, we decide to see what the connection’s all about. As I said one had to interview to get into our commune in Cambridge and this woman shows up who's an acupuncturist and very charming and she gets in, and true to form, sometimes we slept with the people who are applying, and she and I started a little fling, but she decides to move to Woodstock, New York instead. We stayed friends over the years. In fact, I go on to have my own relationship in the Boston area, with a wonderful woman, she was part of the mood swings actually. But there is always this other pull towards Woodstock and towards this other woman, Eventually, I need to find out what this pull is that's not letting me go. I moved to Woodstock in 1989.

Jack MacCarthy:
The thing that led you to finally decide to pursue this was that connected to Two in Twenty?

Cheryl Qamar:
Tell me why you wanna hear it and I can figure out a way to say it.

Jack MacCarthy:
Just in terms of connecting the dots that you were, you did this, this soap opera, and then that also led to this major life move.

Cheryl Qamar:
Okay. Thank you. Yes. Interestingly enough, with Two in Twenty, for Laurel, my co-producer, our lives sort of became like a soap opera in the midst of all of this. She got involved with one of the lead characters. I got re-involved with that woman who showed up at the commune and was living in Woodstock. It was a very tumultuous time in my life because I left a very loving relationship, but I felt like I had to follow this pull towards her and towards Woodstock. I moved toward Woodstock in 1989. I have to say within a couple of years, the relationship fell apart and I was kind of stuck. It's like, what do I do now? Actually, I kind of felt like my mother who'd left Canada, not knowing anyone, a very solid community and sense of family. Here I am, stuck in Woodstock, New York. I really miss the city. It's a very rural environment compared to Boston, people hibernate in the winter here. I don't know that I can survive here. I actually talked to my mom at the time. I said, “How did you do it? How did you get through those first few years of living in such a different place?”

Keywords: Communes; Lesbian; Relationships; Woodstock

Partial Transcript: Cheryl Qamar:
All she said to me is, oh, you'll get over it. There are many fish in the sea, because at this point she's still not happy about my life. In any case, I decided I would give it a year. I was either going to move back to Boston or to Cape Cod or New York city or stay in Woodstock. I had a very good job, so that helped, and good friends, the beginning of good friendship. Nine months later, I fall in love with Cristeen, who was studying at the Woodstock School of Art, which I had also studied at. She was such an incredible artist and she was running a model session where you have live models and you draw. I went to the model session a couple of times and she's kind of cute. I guess she was eyeing me in the same way. We had a mutual friend who also studied at the school and I said, “What do you think?” She said, “I think she likes you.” But I had been so burned, when my other relationship fell apart, it was a very, very difficult separation, very painful, very public, which I wasn't used to in a small town. I was a little shy of getting involved again, but I thought I'll just have a fling, she seemed safe and so solid, so trustworthy. We did things like we would bike and we would ski. Then one day I had her over because I needed to, I was renting an apartment, but it had steps down to a stream. She being the very strong person she is, I invited her to come help me build some stone steps down to the stream. She shows up with work boots with sparkly shoe laces, and that was it. I'm like, that's my girl. We consummated our relationship that night, but she was moving to Montana or so I thought, she was taking her art and she was gonna do painting out west and maybe find a job out west. Actually, that suited me fine because, again, I wasn't sure I wanted to be in a relationship forever. She comes back like three months later and we found our way back to each other and been together ever since. It'll be 30, hold on Yeah. It would be, 30-some years we got married, as I said. Did I talk about that yet? Oh yeah, I did with the ring.

Keywords: Lesbian; Relationships; Woodstock; Woodstock School of Art

Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
Oh yes, yes. You did talk about the ring. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What was your life like in those early years in Woodstock? What different communities were you interacting with than you had been interacting with in Boston?

Cheryl Qamar:
One nice thing, when I first moved to the Woodstock area is there was a very vibrant gay community. There were cultural events. I think they even call themselves Active Culture, and they would sponsor different musicians. In fact, years before I had come to show Two in Twenty, Active Culture, brought Two in Twenty to this area. There was also women's dances called Sojourners. Sojourners of Truth is from this area. Was it every week? There were dances and lots of ways to meet other women, which I really thrived on. But no Arabs to speak of. Once again, I'm feeling like I have to put to sleep parts of myself. But then with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, I decided I had to get active again. I started an American Arab Antidiscrimination Committee group up here, hoping to find other Arabs. I found a lot of men who happened to be Muslim and we did some really good work. We did some educational sessions for the community. We did some good work but I didn't come out to them. I never came out to them. But then one day we did a march for Palestine. It was a summer and I wasn't shaving my legs. Here I am, marching with them, with my hairy legs hanging out. I think the women, their wives, that came along in the march kind of figured out, she's different and the group fell apart. I was the leader of the group and they all decided to kinda leave after that. When that fell apart, that was hard. But I helped found another group, Middle East Crisis Response in this area. But I wanna fast forward from there because interestingly enough I eventually found a national organization called Jewish Group for Peace. Now, you come full circle. Now, I'm working with Jews around justice for Palestine, and that's been very, very healing for me because I feel that if anything's going to change for Palestine, it's going to have to come from Jews in this country who have a lot of voice in what happens in Israel. That's been really healing, and I continue to be active in that group. I've recently become a board member of Eyewitness Palestine. I would say wherever I am now, whether I'm working for justice for Palestine or working on tenants’ rights, which is a big issue in this area, or healthcare, I'm out wherever I go. There's been a level of acceptance that I don't think I experienced in Boston and maybe it's because it was so long ago. Times were different. I'd like to think though it's also me that I've come to find a way to be comfortable with myself, to be out in a way that … Well, I mean, I don't know how it sounds so trite, where I feel a sense of pride and let me say this differently. What is it about it?

Jack MacCarthy:
A word you used earlier that feels relevant to this as integration. I don't know if that feels like ...

Cheryl Qamar:
Yeah. I would say that, no matter where I go now, I'm out; that's with my family, that's with whether I'm fighting for justice for Palestine or tenant rights or healthcare. While I think a lot of it has to do with the times, I think it's also, in part, about me and the integration within me, the coherence that I now have as a person. So, much of my political work continues to be about bridging the divide. I think my whole life has been about that. Now, I'm also involved in a project called Wichita2Woostock, where we invite, on camera, people in Wichita to ask questions of progressives in Woodstock and we go back and forth with those questions and have discussions off camera. But so, there's a degree of separation that gives a level of comfort.

Jack MacCarthy:
I love that.

Keywords: Arab; Culture; Ethnicity; Eyewitness Palestine; Judaism; Lebanon; Middle East Crisis Response; Palestine; Race; Religion; Sojourners of Truth; Two in Twenty; Wichita2Woodstock

Partial Transcript: Cheryl Qamar:
I didn't talk about … I dunno if you want to – and you don't have to, please. I'm not wedded to any of this. If you wanted to hear about the resolution with my family and my mother accepting Chris, [crosstalk]. Do you wanna hear that story? You don't have to. It's up to you. It's gone pretty long.

Jack MacCarthy:
Well, I'm also interested in hearing about like, over the course of your relationship with Chris, I know that in early years, this is when Chris and you were losing a lot of people to HIV and AIDS, and I'm curious about that. I'm also curious about the resolution with your mother. If there’s one of those you would rather talk about, please feel free to.
Cheryl Qamar: 01:40:09 Why don't I do both and I'll do it abbreviated. How's that?

Jack MacCarthy:
That works.

Cheryl Qamar:
I think one of the things that brought Cris and I together so deeply so quickly is that early in our relationship, we suffered some major losses together. I would say over the course of the first five, six years of our relationship, we lost 13 different people, mostly to AIDS, including my friend Bill, my gay friend from college. We were, for half of those people, the primary caregivers. It was a very difficult time, but if you've ever helped someone die, it's one of the most intimate things one can do. Cris and I went through that together. As painful as it was, I was so glad to have her with me. Her brother was one of those people that died of AIDS. Around that time, as she and I are getting very, very close, I mean, she is truly family to me.

Keywords: 1981-present the AIDS epidemic; Family; Lesbian; Marriage; Mothers; Relationships

Partial Transcript: Cheryl Qamar:
I truly trust her probably more than anyone in the world. My father never made it to Woodstock to meet her. He died two months before they were planning to come. But the year after that, my mother decides to finally come to Woodstock and she meets Cris, she meets my friends, and continues to visit us here about once a year. I would go back to Kansas, keeping the contract, not coming out to anyone, although not denying it if asked, by the way. Finally, Cris says, “This is hard, it doesn't feel comfortable that your mom can come here and I can't go to her home.” We had the talk with mom and I realized I have to make a choice. I can't keep denying Cris. It's hurting Cris. So, I decided I'm not coming home until I can bring her. But mom is welcome to come here. A couple years after that, my niece gets married. The one who decided aunt Cheryl and Cris are Haram, that's sin in Arabic. Anyway, she invites us to the wedding. I get the invitation. I call my sister, “Are you sure Cris and I are both invited?” She said, “Yes. As far as I'm concerned, you’re family and we want family there.” Cris comes to Wichita for the first time. Now, we've been together 20-some years and we get off the plane. My mother meets Cris and she says, “Will you ever forgive me? I'm sorry. It took me so long.” Cris being the incredible person she is said, “Alice, we’re not looking back, we're just looking forward.” I forgot to mention two weeks prior, mother had pulled all of her friends together. Again, her Lebanese friends were like aunts to me. She said, “I have to talk to you before the wedding. It's about Cheryl. I need to tell you something.” And they go, “What, what?” She goes, “She's gay.” And they're like, “Alice, we figured this out. We knew.” My mother had sort of a, I'm gonna say, come to Jesus moment. I think she realized that all those years that she lived in shame and fear that people are gonna find out about her gay daughter were so unnecessary, and hurt her really more than anyone else. I was actually happy for my mother, that she had that experience. Of course, happy for me and Cris. We've been part of the family ever since.

Jack MacCarthy:
It's beautiful. We are almost out of time. Is it okay if we go just a few minutes over?

Cheryl Qamar:
Whatever you want, I'm happy to do.

Keywords: Family; Lesbian; Marriage; Mothers; Relationships; Siblings

Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
Okay. I have one last question and then there's brief questions that we ask every OUTWORDS interviewee. Coming home to Wichita for that wedding, there's a story from the prep interview that I really loved about challenging the priest of your home church and writing him a letter. I wondered if you could touch on that because I also think it really adds beautiful context to like coming back for that wedding.

Cheryl Qamar:
Okay. Let me see. I'm trying to remember. It doesn't matter chronologically, which happened first, but just in terms of how I do the lead in.

Jack MacCarthy:
Well, it was a year after 9/11 with the priest, right?

Cheryl Qamar:
It would've been about the same time. Okay. I guess it really doesn't matter for the story. When Cris came to Wichita for the wedding, of course, it involved going back to the church and that involved the priest whom I had actually had a pretty difficult dialogue with a few months before, I had been home in Wichita, and I always went to church with my mom, not because I wanted to, but because it was important to her, she always said in the front row and I'm sitting there with her, it's just after, or a few months after 9/11, and he is saying, “Do you all remember what the public discourse was during 9/11?” He's actually asking the congregation and people are saying this, that, and he says, “No, no, no.” He said “Gay marriage.” Then he goes on to imply that people like to think of God as a loving kind, God, but God has wrath. And 9/11 was God's wrath against gay marriage. I was so incensed. Now, he knows I'm gay. I was so incensed. I stood up and I walked out down the center of the church. And by the way, by now that little church that only spoke Arabic is a huge cathedral with probably, I don't know, maybe 3/400 people, and I'm happy to say is very diverse now, very inclusive, all kinds of people, all face, all ages. But anyway, I walk out. My mother, of course, wasn't happy about it, but she understood. I decided it wasn't enough just for me to do that. I decided to write him an email and I said to him, “Remember after 9/11, many people in your congregation were targeted as Arabs. You know what you did can only hurt the people in your congregation who are gay. I know there are many, you may not know who they are, but I do.” He wrote back, I can't really remember the content, but long story short, we have a couple more exchanges and he's contesting that this is about Sodom and Gamora. It's about lust. I write back to say, no, this is about civil rights. This is about denying us the rights our due rights as American citizens. It’s about having entitlements for, it's about loving who you love. It's about love. We finally agreed to disagree, nothing more is emailed or said. I guess around that time, he's said to my mother, “Cheryl and I have been having some correspondence.” She said, “Yes, I heard.” He said, “I guess I have to be more thoughtful about what I say.” That felt like, okay, that's good enough. That's a start. When Cris and I go there for the rehearsal for the wedding, he actually pulls Cris aside and he's teaching her about all the icons in the church and the history of the church. I have to say, again, about bridging the divide. I've had so many beautiful moments like that in my life that the pain and the ruptures have really taught me how it's possible to repair. Not always, but it's important to do so. Yeah.

Keywords: 9/11; Christianity; Homophobia; Priests; Religion

Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. These last four, we ask every OUTWORDS interviewee. First one is: if you could tell your teenage self one thing, what would it be?

Cheryl Qamar:
You're okay. You will be just fine.

Keywords: Advice; Support

Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
Just got goosebumps. Do you believe in the notion of an LGTQIA superpower? If so, what is it?

Cheryl Qamar:
The power to claim who you are in the face of adversity, in the face of rejection. The power to claim who you are and find your community.

Keywords: LGBTQ Community

Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
Why is it important to you to share your story?

Cheryl Qamar:
I thought about that. Like, why am I doing this? I think in part, because I don't know of many Arab lesbians of my age who would tell their story, and I want it to be known. We were there, we existed. Here we are. Here I am.

Keywords: Arab; Lesbian; Oral History; Storytelling

Partial Transcript: Jack MacCarthy:
Last question, what is the value of a project like OUTWORDS that is telling these stories? And use the word OUTWORDS in your answer.

Cheryl Qamar:
Projects like OUTWORDS are really essential. It's so important to know our history, to have a sense of where we come from. When I was coming out, it was so important to claim a label. It was empowering. I think it's because of the claiming of those labels and getting the comfort with that, and the power from that, that now the labels are in their own way a barrier. I mean, I just think to have context and to appreciate all those that came before, it's important to honor our ancestors.

Jack MacCarthy:
Is there anything we didn't touch on or a clarifying point about something you shared that you want to share before we wrap up?

Cheryl Qamar:
I don’t think so. You and Astra have done such a fabulous job. You guys are great really. You're so warm and respectful and so well organized. I'm very impressed with this project. Thank you. Thank you for doing all that you do.

Jack MacCarthy:
It's such a pleasure and such an honor. I just really appreciate your openness for sharing a story with us and for the insight that you share about it and the work you have done and continue to do in the world. Just thank you for so many reasons.

Cheryl Qamar:
Thank you.

Keywords: LGBTQ Community; LGBTQ History; OUTWORDS; Oral History