MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, start off by just telling us your first and last name.

GWENN CRAIG:

Gwenn Craig, C-R-A-I-G G-W-E-N-N.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. And would you mind telling us the date and place of your birth?

GWENN CRAIG:

I was born April 14th, 1951 in Atlanta, Georgia.

MASON FUNK:

Okie dokie. Well, let's talk a little bit about growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, especially it being an iconic

MASON FUNK:

location for the black civil rights movement. Just in general, we always like to kind of know, what kind of family was someone born into? What values did your parents espouse around the dinner table? How many other siblings, if any, were there? Paint us a little portrait?

GWENN CRAIG:

Okay. Well, I was the middle child, the one girl between two brothers. The part of life that

I can recall, the earliest home I recall was housing provided to us on the campus of Gammon Theological Seminary. My father was the librarian there. It was a beautiful campus and it was happy years. My parents were Methodist and we grew up with Methodist values.

MASON FUNK:

What are those values?

GWENN CRAIG:

Mostly I remember them being common sense religious values of 'do unto others as they would do unto you'. I heard that a lot. My father would often espouse that it was important to be kind and to be generous.

GWENN CRAIG:

If we get criticized for anything, it was about being selfish. He thought that you had to be big hearted, learn to share and show compassion. Just show kindness to other people, that was the important things that we were brought up with. Of course, any sort of cruelty was, well, in the

GWENN CRAIG:

language of the Catholic, it's a Cardinal sin. But there was none of the kind of hardline religion that I would come to know about later. They weren't staunch religious people.

GWENN CRAIG:

We got to church as much as we could, and that was seen as more of what you were supposed to do, more than God expected you to be there. My father was the librarian there until there were plans for Gammon to become a part of a larger theological university. It was being molded into that and that was going to be in a different part of Atlanta.

GWENN CRAIG:

When that occurred, we moved out of that house and moved across town. Now, he was only there at that university for a short while because he got an offer to be college librarian at Morris Brown College, which is one of the historically black universities. He was part of the Atlanta university complex, which includes Morris Brown, Spelman, Morehouse,

GWENN CRAIG:

and Clark. Well, it was Clark college there, now it is folded up into what was Atlanta university, which was the graduate school for those colleges, a thriving epicenter of black universities and colleges. We lived in on campus housing provided by Morris Brown. My mother had been a graduate of Morris Brown,

GWENN CRAIG:

so she loved that he wound up there. I loved the new school that I wound up at. My parents were part of black society in Atlanta and the children that I was going to school with then all came from middle-class black families.

GWENN CRAIG:

I come now, in this Facebook age, to realize how much of a tight circle these families were. The children that I grew up with have become now the new middle-class leading families of Atlanta. I think how different, sometimes, my life might've been if I had stayed on that course and stayed in Atlanta, not going

GWENN CRAIG:

away to college and gone to Spelman like my mother wanted me to. But I longed to get away from Atlanta. I just wanted to spread my wings and see something different and see the world.

MASON FUNK:

Let's get there in a minute, because I am very curious to hear about you going to Chicago. But you mentioned walking past Martin Luther King's house. [Inaudible].

GWENN CRAIG:

I didn't know Martin Luther King lived so close by, but I developed a friendship with a girl in the ninth grade, I think it was. She wanted me to, you know, where we would walk her home to her house first and then I would leave and go to my house. She knew a way we could walk where we went by his house. She was so eager to show

GWENN CRAIG:

off where his house was. I was impressed. I was amazed. I didn't know that he lived within such a short distance of my own. I mean, it was quite a few blocks away, but kind of walking distance, at least you might say. His church was one that was very close to our home, one that I could pass.

GWENN CRAIG:

The people who were interviewed on TV, who you saw filmed as being part of civil rights actions, and those sorts of things, were people who were from Atlanta, who were within the Atlanta community and some of them, very few, but some of them were friends of my parents'. Ralph

GWENN CRAIG:

Abernathy, who was one of Martin, was the King's chief lieutenants used to hold house parties for teenagers because he thought that they should be occupied with something that wouldn't get them into trouble, so he used to hold parties in the basement of his home. My parents used to make me go to those. I remember them quite well. He was a nice man.

MASON FUNK:

They would make you go as in

MASON FUNK:

like, it was almost like the proper thing to do.

GWENN CRAIG:

It was the proper thing to do. And they thought that was a good thing for him to do, that he was doing something very worthwhile, and they should support that, so we'll send Gwenn.

MASON FUNK:

Did your brothers get off the hook or did they have to go as well?

GWENN CRAIG:

I don't remember them going. My older brother is five years older than me, so

GWENN CRAIG:

he was kind of beyond the age group that was going to the parties. My younger brother is three years younger, and it was just at a time when he was sort of not quite in the age group, so I got to go.

MASON FUNK:

We interviewed a gentleman several months ago, born and raised in Atlanta. No, he'd been born and raised in Kansas City, he's now in Atlanta,

MASON FUNK:

but he talked about his African American [inaudible]. He talked about from his family's perspective, what Martin Luther King was up to and what he was advocating was not, they didn't agree with it. They saw him as a rabble-rouser. Within your family and the people that you circulated among, your parents and their friends, how was Martin Luther King viewed?

GWENN CRAIG:

Well, my parents were nowhere near radical, so they

GWENN CRAIG:

were right in line with the kind of civil rights tactics that Martin Luther King was employing. They thought he was on the right trail on what he was doing and they thought that it was successful, what was happening. I think they really looked up to him for having a lot of courage

GWENN CRAIG:

for doing what he was doing. They knew how dangerous things could be. My mother grew up in rural Georgia and there were things that happened as she was growing up that really told the tale about how dangerous it could be to just to be black. When I was a child, I spent summers at my grandmother's and the children,

GWENN CRAIG:

of course, [inaudible] we were supposed to be kept away from hearing about things, but sometimes I'd overhear snatches of conversation that talked about some man who had been caught doing something or thought to be doing something or whatever, and he had been taken from his home and everybody knew that he wasn't going to be seen again, those sorts of things. We knew

GWENN CRAIG:

consequences, we knew about those things. They knew how dangerous it was at one point to try and vote. They would say, oh, you don't want to do that. So they thought that he was really brave to go into some areas

GWENN CRAIG:

that he was going to, to fight for people like that, to be able to take a little power. Just the small indignities that I saw my grandmother have to take when white men would come to her house and she would have to show this excessive amount of dignity to them, 'yes, sir, Mr. So-And-So', and all of this.

GWENN CRAIG:

It was painful. It was painful. She knew that she had to be very careful. She had to be very careful that she showed exactly that amount of subservience. So yeah, she thought that it was amazing that he would take that on, somebody like Martin Luther King.

MASON FUNK:

This may seem like an odd question,

MASON FUNK:

you remember witnessing your grandmother behaving in this way, knowing there was something like she shouldn't have to do that, she shouldn't have to adopt that posture. Do you know kind of how you knew that?

GWENN CRAIG:

Rather than that, I'll tell you a story about being instructed by her. There was a store right across the road from her house that was owned by a white man, and she told us,

GWENN CRAIG:

"Now, when you go to the store, don't go inside. You wait outside and he'll come out and ask you what you want, and he'll go inside and get it and bring it out to you, and you give him the money then." That's what we had to do. If we wanted a candy bar, soda pop or something, the white children would go inside and everybody else,

GWENN CRAIG:

but we had to stand and wait. And we had to wait until he wanted to come out and ask us what we wanted. He might go through quite a few white customers before he decided on, let me see what they want. So the indignity of that. I wasn't used to that because, well, for one thing in Atlanta, we didn't really go downtown, as they would say, we didn't go to white areas. But even then, we didn't

GWENN CRAIG:

expect that. My grandmother was telling me that she knew a certain subservience that you had to adhere to, the rules you had to adhere to, and she wanted to make sure that we knew it so we wouldn't get in trouble, we wouldn't be punished for not knowing these rules.

MASON FUNK:

Well, some other part of you, as you came into adolescence, was already also experiencing the sense of seeing injustice done to others. You told Tom the story of the sissy kid when you were in eighth grade, and you rose up and defended him. Can you tell us that story?

GWENN CRAIG:

Well, there was a boy, his name was Percy, and he started getting picked on by the boys.

GWENN CRAIG:

Percy was very queeny, we would say today, but they didn't have that word. They didn't really even call him a sissy, they called him a punk, that was the word they used. He would get picked on mercilessly and it just, oh, it just offended me to the core. Two other little girlfriends that I had, we would say, you better stop.

GWENN CRAIG:

We just went on this campaign, 'leave Percy alone'. That was our theme, 'leave Percy alone'. We had this campaign going then. Something had to be done and these boys had to stop picking on Percy like this. I can't remember clearly enough exactly what our little campaign did accomplish, but I just recall that

GWENN CRAIG:

we really decided that we were going to have to do something serious about it. And we went and confronted these big boys and said, you're going to have to stop this.

MASON FUNK:

And what'd they say to you?

GWENN CRAIG:

Oh, they talk back, they talked a lot of stuff, "Why are you so interested?" And

GWENN CRAIG:

we talked back at them and said, "You have no reason to be this cruel to him. He's done nothing to you," and things like that. We finally got to them where they were shamed enough, at least, not in our presence the way they'd been doing. It wasn't on school grounds, maybe.

MASON FUNK:

Did you have a friendship with Percy?

GWENN CRAIG:

No. I didn't even know him.

GWENN CRAIG:

But what I observed just really made me so angry and I just felt like I had to do something about this.

MASON FUNK:

Well, it wasn't long before you got involved in your first political campaign,

GWENN CRAIG:

Yeah. Exactly.

MASON FUNK:

I mean, that, combined with your first political campaign at 14, do you remember having a sense of

MASON FUNK:

like, this is something that comes naturally to me? Or maybe you were just kind of just living in the moment.

GWENN CRAIG:

Not really. I think I volunteered for Maynard Jackson's campaign because it seemed like interesting things are going on in this place, and I wandered in and said, "Hi, is there anything I can do?" And they said, well, yeah. Would you like to volunteer? Sure. We have some things you could do. I just enjoyed the excitement of it.

GWENN CRAIG:

When I heard more and learned more about what Maynard Jackson was trying to do, that he was trying to unseat this segregationist, Herman Talmadge, I rallied to that. I mean, that fell right into the kind of things I've been seeing on TV, and I really thought, that would be great, let's

GWENN CRAIG:

do this. I had no idea this was a symbolic campaign that was going to raise important issues and these sort of things. I really thought he had a chance to do this. I was really surprised when at the end he didn't win and they said, it's okay, we got in this to do this and that. And I thought, you did? I thought we were in it to win. But

GWENN CRAIG:

it was just really great to see someone like Herman Talmadge who had always been so smug, to have to actually be at a debate, and actually answer questions from the press. Of course, he was still rather smug, but this time he actually had to put in some time and he would have to do things to say, well, I have black

GWENN CRAIG:

support, let me get some black support and that sort of thing.

MASON FUNK:

This was for Mayor?

GWENN CRAIG:

This was for Congress. It was before Maynard decided, based on all the support he had earned and the connections he had made, that he would run for Mayor.

MASON FUNK:

Gotcha. So you got a taste. So funny you mentioned the losing and

MASON FUNK:

the stress, the people being like, no, no, we lost, but XYZ. We interviewed a woman Mandy Carter

GWENN CRAIG:

Oh, yes, I know Mandy.

MASON FUNK:

She introduced us to the concept of losing forward. She talked about the Harvey Gantt campaign and she said, we didn't win that campaign, but sometimes you lose forward. And then, I forget what [inaudible] but these people were saying, you lose forward.

GWENN CRAIG:

Yes. Yes. That's exactly what had happened, but I

GWENN CRAIG:

didn't know about that at 14.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah, of course. I think the other place I want to touch on is the year you were a senior, which was the year that both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were killed, right when you're ready to spread your wings

GWENN CRAIG:

Yes. Yes.

MASON FUNK:

Tell us about those two events and what you remember of those two assassinations in particular.

GWENN CRAIG:

Right. Well, Martin Luther King's assassination shocked me to the core.

GWENN CRAIG:

We hadn't had anything like that since 1963 when JFK was assassinated. Now, this time for it to be someone who was so important to us, known to us, and who was leading us somewhere, it just seemed like he was too vital

GWENN CRAIG:

to what we were going towards for us to lose him. It was sad and it was frightening at the same time. It just seemed everywhere you looked, people were just so broken up about this, everywhere you turn. I think

GWENN CRAIG:

when he died, it's funny, it seemed like I'd been away and come back, I'm not sure, but I know that I was there for when his body was available for viewing, and when they had the big march down what is now Martin Luther King Boulevard, it was Hunter street at the time, my family was in that.

GWENN CRAIG:

We went and we saw his body, and that is indelibly printed upon my brain, seeing him in the casket and all, and just sort of the mournful quality of the crowd as they march, almost silent, so silent, going to see his body. Everybody, just so sad, so melancholy.

GWENN CRAIG:

But we knew that there was this amazing cast of people who had been active, who had been surrounding him, who would still be there to fight. There was Andy Young and there was Jesse Jackson and there was Ralph Abernathy, just a host of people that

GWENN CRAIG:

were still there in leadership roles. We came to believe that they would be able to carry it on and do things. It took a while for people to feel like we were totally bereft. But I think when I first became so impressed with Bobby Kennedy was after Martin Luther king was killed and

GWENN CRAIG:

Bobby went on to try and talk to people about not rioting. He was so impressive and he seemed so sincere and he knew just what to say to people, and people started to really take another look at him. He already had his following, I think, in the African-American community because they had always loved the Kennedys. They'd

GWENN CRAIG:

always loved JFK and what he had done for civil rights. When Bobby Kennedy started running for president then, I think a lot of people say, "I think he's the one. I really think he's the one we should get behind." A lot of people were pinning their hopes on him and he had this new spirit upon him, it seemed, when he was running for

GWENN CRAIG:

president that we hadn't seen before. He seems so deep within himself and able to articulate things in a way he never had before that made people feel that he really had powerful new things to say. He was reaching out to diverse communities in a way that really enthused people, reaching out to the farm workers, going to see Native American communities. He's really leading a movement, not just

GWENN CRAIG:

the campaign. So when he gets shot, once again, it was like, again, hopes dashed. Again, someone who seems to be leading a movement and we lose him. You start to get scared at that point. You start to say, wait a minute, what is happening? Everyone who sticks their head up is going to be assassinated?

GWENN CRAIG:

You started to get a little paranoid about the conditions in the world. That was the way 1968 felt, it seems. Since I was heading off to Chicago, I took a lot of interest in the democratic national convention being in Chicago that year. My family always used to watch the democratic

GWENN CRAIG:

national conventions. They always took that interest in politics in that way, but I was really interested in following that one. In particular, when there was all this political activity from the youth movements that were happening at that time, I thought, I really gotta pay attention to this now. And when suddenly everything blew up with Richard Daley

GWENN CRAIG:

decided he was going to take this hard line approach against the student protesters and calling out the cops with their batons. I remember thinking this is something new. I was used to seeing civil rights demonstrators getting beat in the streets with batons, but to see the police called in to bring out their batons and beat

GWENN CRAIG:

on white children? I thought, they're willing to beat down their own children? Something different is happening in this country that I've got to come to understand because I thought it was all about race. This is about something else that I need to learn about. I'm going to college now and I've got to make it my goal to learn what other power dynamic is happening here that they

GWENN CRAIG:

would do this, that it would bring them to this point that they would be willing to beat these children. That was a real epiphany for me.

MASON FUNK:

Wow! I can't help but leap forward and ask if you ever found out, if you ever answered that question.

GWENN CRAIG:

Not completely, not completely. I think I'm still opening up to what it is to be

GWENN CRAIG:

threatened by the loss of power, which is, I think, what that was ultimately about. They were challenging the war. And why is it that you couldn't have the ability to wage war threatened? What is it about that war or war in general?

GWENN CRAIG:

That was a dynamic that I understood more when I saw it repeated. Then I understood it wasn't just the Vietnam war, but it was war in general. When you see that repeated, then you say, okay, this is about something general. This is about something more than what happened in one country. This is about when they do it anywhere. Let's examine this power

GWENN CRAIG:

dynamic and understand that there are forces at play greater than us but determined to put down even the smallest example of pushback against what they're doing, that even those of us who seem like we have so little power against them, we'll be crushed if we're not careful. That, too, was frightening, but

GWENN CRAIG:

I knew our only recourse was to still build on challenging that, because I do believe in the end, the student protest, protest in general against the Vietnam war brought it to an end. It brought it to an end earlier than it would have otherwise. We'd probably still be there.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. That's fascinating, that whole era.

MASON FUNK:

So intense. So you went to Chicago and you threw yourself into political organizing, if I'm not mistaken. I don't want to spend too much time there because I do want to get to San Francisco. But how many years did you spend in Chicago?

GWENN CRAIG:

Six years.

MASON FUNK:

So maybe just start by saying, I spent six years in Chicago, and maybe just give me like one or two of like the takeaways, but that kind of set the stage for you ultimately to decide

MASON FUNK:

to head west.

GWENN CRAIG:

Well, my first couple of years in Chicago was when I sort of got into the black power dynamic and the black cultural awakening that was going on. Those were real movements forward for me that I think were very important in my political development, in my

GWENN CRAIG:

own identity development. It's where I met my daughter's father and gave birth to her, and tried my best at being a single mother. Before I was moving to San Francisco, my parents said, listen, we gave you a pretty good upbringing, and we

GWENN CRAIG:

think that we could give our granddaughter a good upbringing right now. If you want to move to San Francisco, let her come stay with us. If things really succeed beyond your wildest dreams, then we can talk about her coming there. But we think that we can make a happy life here. And she was very happy in Atlanta. She replicated my life growing up there in many ways,

GWENN CRAIG:

she had a musical education and all that I had managed to have and she thrived under it. She was a very talented young girl, and continues to be. Off to San Francisco I went, for a number of reasons. For one thing, I couldn't take the weather in Chicago, it was reason number one.

GWENN CRAIG:

I said I gotta get out of here, this is not right. But also because while I discovered a lot of things about myself, I knew that there was more I had to do. There was too much that was confusing. One thing that I found confusing was my sexual identity. I knew that the heterosexual relationships were not right. It

GWENN CRAIG:

wasn't quite right. It wasn't making me happy, and I think I was coming into acceptance of my lesbian identity as I left Chicago, but I had to really come to San Francisco to accept that.

MASON FUNK:

Talk to us about what San Francisco represented in 1975, for queer people, for so many people in general, but especially for gay and lesbian,

MASON FUNK:

that year, what did San Francisco mean?

GWENN CRAIG:

Well, I would talk to people who had ...

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, give me a date, roughly.

GWENN CRAIG:

About 1974, I'm talking to people about San Francisco and saying, I hear San

GWENN CRAIG:

Francisco, and the pictures I've seen of it, that looks like a pretty neat place, and the weather looks good. You visited there, huh? Or you used to live there? Anybody who had any information to tell me. And what feedback I got, I got the picture that San Francisco was a place that was very welcoming and that you were free to explore your inner identity and to really find yourself and free to

GWENN CRAIG:

be whoever you wanted to be. The hippies were just in that stage that they were kind of winding down. Didn't know that yet until I got here, but that it was known for being a place where you could have this personal freedom that I thought that sounds ideal. I want part of that.

GWENN CRAIG:

I don't have that here in Chicago, God knows. I would love that. I had a roommate, gay man, I lived in the household about six people, and he picked up on the same dream, "I think I like that. Do you know there's a lot of gay people there?" "Oh, really? Okay. All right, let's do this." And we did a

GWENN CRAIG:

thing where you could drive somebody's car out to a city for them, we had this wonderful Saab, we drove it from Chicago to San Francisco, and everything went wonderfully, everything went great. He was a great companion

GWENN CRAIG:

and we remained friends forever until, unfortunately, the AIDS epidemic took him. But we arrived in San Francisco in February of 1975 and I immediately thought, this is it. I have found it.

GWENN CRAIG:

This is the best place, I don't ever want to go anywhere else.

GWENN CRAIG:

We had the best luck, we got here and he said, "I want to see the Castro". I didn't even know about the Castro. We went there, we immediately ran into someone we knew from Chicago who's out here now. I didn't even know he was gay. He was bartender at a gay bar. He said, "Oh, two of my roommates are moving out and we need somebody."

GWENN CRAIG:

So we moved into a place right at the corner of 18th and Hartford, which is at the heart of the Castro. Hartford was one street over from Castro street. It was just perfectly located. Everything seemed to fall in place like that.

GWENN CRAIG:

Home, boom. Job, boom. In those days, they just worked out for everyone. Everybody had the same experience.

MASON FUNK:

We're going to get back to that. But I wonder if there was ... I know that I can relate to this, when I graduated from high school, I had to get as far away from home as possible, and I kept going like multiple steps until I literally got to Europe. Did you feel like you just needed to breathe air different from, however happy your childhood was --

GWENN CRAIG:

Yes. Yes.

MASON FUNK:

Can you talk about that?

GWENN CRAIG:

Yeah. I felt that way so long in Atlanta. I felt like I just needed to get away and get some place different and experience whatever was out there. I used to stand at this window, this particular window in our house and look out and stare out and think I want to go whatever is

GWENN CRAIG:

out beyond there. I just knew that I wanted some place that wasn't as enclosed as my world seemed to be. And that was also when it was time to go to college, I thought, this is my opportunity. This is my ticket to be someplace different. So when I was searching, I thought, okay, big city, I think Chicago or New York.

GWENN CRAIG:

I was only looking at those two areas and Chicago worked out, so I went there. It was as simple as that,

MASON FUNK:

But San Francisco was obviously like a whole, maybe like a bit more ... I mean it's West.

GWENN CRAIG:

Yes. That seemed almost like a foreign land to me. When you live in Atlanta, you don't think so past Chicago and you don't think pass

the Mason-Dixon line. So those were the two that seemed like potentials. Plus, I think my parents would have totally said all the way to California? Oh, no, I don't think so.

MASON FUNK:

But by the time you got to be older, it was kind of up to you.

GWENN CRAIG:

Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Of course. Give us your daughter [inaudible].

MASON FUNK:

We're going to go to the politics pretty soon, with Anita Bryant, leading into Harvey and all that kind of stuff. But one of the things that I loved was the coming out story. You didn't give a lot of details about it, but what you talked about was getting to San Francisco and realizing there were lots of people who were gay in San Francisco but the people at home did not have any idea. Talk about, maybe just as part of the story of coming to San Francisco, when did you then come out? When did you come to terms like this is who I am? How did you tell your parents? And maybe along the way, kind of, fold in

MASON FUNK:

the awareness that there are a lot of people who were not coming out to their parents. Talk to us about that.

GWENN CRAIG:

Coming to San Francisco, now, all of a sudden, I'm surrounded by gay people. I'm living in the heart of the Castro, which was mostly male, but there were a lot more women than they are today, who were in the Castro, and a lot more straight people. In fact, it was a very diverse community in 1975.

GWENN CRAIG:

It was a changing community. I began to interact more and I was sort of feeling my way around, finding out where the lesbian coffeehouses I'm hearing about, that sort of thing. Just sort of getting my feet wet and saying, well, how do I meet women so I

GWENN CRAIG:

can sort of gain relationships and this sort of thing? I was just such a baby about this. I'm 24 years old, and I'm just learning who I am. It seems like everybody else has known forever. I felt like I'm so behind. I mean, nowadays I hear people not coming out much later,

GWENN CRAIG:

but at the time I was identified as a late bloomer and that made me feel so inadequate. But I did eventually form relationships and meet lesbian women and come to know, this is who I am. It's not just who I want to be, it's who I am. This is where I'm happy and this is what's natural

GWENN CRAIG:

for me. I had a lot of heterosexual relationships, but that was more about trying to figure out why is this not quite working? Now I know why, and now I can see where I was always meant to be if I'd only paid attention. But you didn't know in Atlanta, growing up in the age that I grew up. I mean, I had to look up homosexuality in

GWENN CRAIG:

the dictionary, didn't find any mention. I had a boyfriend, I was a junior, he was a senior. He was gay and I didn't realize. He certainly didn't come out to me, but then he went away to college and started writing and sort of coming out because then he was speaking openly about the boys that he was so attracted to.

GWENN CRAIG:

And I thought, this seems quite natural. Yeah, Teddy's always been gay. I see this now. But I had to find my way in a way that kids today, youths today, 20-somethings today don't have to. I'm so happy for them that they don't have to go through the way that we did back then.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. I know I was also a late bloomer so I can totally relate. At what point did you make the decision ... I'm not quite sure if we should talk about you becoming political and suddenly being thrust in front of cameras.

GWENN CRAIG:

Yes.

MASON FUNK:

Tell us how that happened.

GWENN CRAIG:

Well, it seemed like I was coming out in recognition that I was a lesbian and suddenly I was asked to be a public lesbian around the same time,

GWENN CRAIG:

because I came here in '75, and then '76 is when Anita Bryant started her campaign in Dade county, Florida. All of this idea about how I was just going to dwell on finding inner peace, and they burst that apart because I was so incensed about what she was doing

GWENN CRAIG:

and the kind of themes that they were promoting in their campaign. Particularly the theme of, 'since they cannot reproduce, they must recruit'. This idea that to be homosexual is to be a pedophile, they are out to molest children. Nothing offended me more than that. The idea that someone would

GWENN CRAIG:

harm a child by nature because they're gay just infuriated me. And I thought we must answer back to. This is the thing we have got to let people know is the biggest lie. I went to a public meeting that was being held in San Francisco of people who were likewise horrified and

GWENN CRAIG:

frightened by what was happening in Dade county and wanted to have some sort of response in whatever way we could from San Francisco. There were a lot of meetings being held during the time, rallies, meetings. What can we do? Shall we form an organization? A couple of little organizations were being formed, so you might go to one and say, is this the one I want to join, is that the one?

GWENN CRAIG:

One I went to and I started mouthing off about, well, I really think we need a strong media campaign. This thing's going to be waged in the media. Nobody will know what we're doing, what we're saying, unless it's on the news. Then the newspapers saw a strong media response, that what's needed. They would say, 'thank you, thank you' they'd go on to some topic. And I had to, 'I'm sorry, but I just gotta come back to this. I hear what you say, and that's a good plan as long as there's also a media component,

GWENN CRAIG:

dah-dah-dah.' I kept harping on this media theme and I think I drove everybody crazy, maybe, but all I know is about the end of the meeting, they said, "Why do you do that?" And they elected me media coordinator, which I think they kind of made up on the spot. I don't know. But anyway, I became media coordinator. I said, okay. I left it, and said, what do I do? What does a media coordinator do now? I know I said it had to be done, but I am

GWENN CRAIG:

not sure I know how to do it. Well, there was a guy in the neighborhood, because I was always at a cafe in the neighborhood that was very popular, the bakery cafe, because I worked in the evening shift at the hospital. I was always there during the day, and he was always there, and I knew that he got a lot of press. He was known as the mayor of Castro street. He really knew how to get himself on TV about

GWENN CRAIG:

issues that were happening and such, his name was Harvey Milk. He had a camera store right there, up the street from the bakery cafe. And I'd go talk to him and see if he could give me any advice about all this. I took a little courage, walked up and walked in and introduced myself. Said the reason why I wanted to talk to him, that I was the new media coordinator for this organization that they formed,

GWENN CRAIG:

and he said, oh, that's very interesting. He pulled me to the back of his shop and he gave me a two and a half hour tutorial on how to work the media. Gave me the thing that came in the most handy, his map of all of the TV stations, radio stations, and newspaper offices, and how you could drive to all of them if you use this route, you

GWENN CRAIG:

get there in the most time efficient manner. If you needed to drop off any press releases or anything like that, this is the way to do it. I said, okay, thank you. That came in very handy because a short time later Bill Kraus, my political pal and I were passing by the drug store at the

GWENN CRAIG:

corner of 18th and Castro. There was a notice, handwritten notice, that someone had put up on the wall saying our friend, Robert Hillsborough was killed in the mission last night by a gang of thugs, by two men or something, I don't know quite how they put it, and they cried 'fag, fag', as they stabbed him to death and blah, blah, blah. And we just said,

GWENN CRAIG:

ah, this is horrible. See, this is what happened. This is what Anita Bryant, and by that time, John Briggs from California had also gotten involved, [inaudible] Florida and was also working with her. We said, "Anita Bryant, John Briggs, the things they do is what leads to these kinds of incidents." We said, "Let's see how the Chronicle covered this." We went to the newspaper stand right there on the corner, and we pulled out

GWENN CRAIG:

the newspaper. Well, nothing on page one. We kept flipping and flipping and flipping and we're seeing nothing. Page 43, I remember it, there was a small article, just man stabbed in Mission, no details or anything. He said, this is wrong. This is wrong. No, they need to tell a real story. So we went to my apartment, which was very close by, borrowed the electric typewriter

GWENN CRAIG:

from my neighbor downstairs and fired off a press release, saying we blame the Anita Bryant's and the John Briggs for bringing ... First the details of what had happened, and then the part about naming John Briggs and Anita Bryant for bringing these hate crimes. I don't think they had hate crimes yet by then, but these anti-gay crimes that are killing people, this fiery

GWENN CRAIG:

rhetoric. We got Harvey's map and we drove around and went to every one of the media outlets and we'd walk in and we see somebody at the gate and we'd tell them why we were there, and we showed them the press release. They'd say, okay, thanks. We'll see if they get it. By the end of the evening, Bill said, "You think they're going to do anything?" I said, "Nah, they didn't seem really that interested at all."

GWENN CRAIG:

We were sort of deflated and went home. The next morning, I think the first my phone rang was around 5:30 AM, and it was a radio announcer and he said, "Hi, I'm live on station, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I've got your press release right here. We'd like to run with it. I think what would work best is if you could just read it aloud, when I go to you, can you do that?" "Yeah, I think I can." "Do you have a copy there?"

GWENN CRAIG:

"Yeah, I think I've got a copy right here." Okay. And from that point on, I was not able to leave my apartment. I wasn't able to get off the phone. Radio, TV, they sent camera people out to the house. Can you come down to the front? We'll shoot it out here. All day long, all day long. By the end of the week, it was a front page story,

GWENN CRAIG:

and by that weekend, was it that weekend? But it was pretty close to it, it was gay pride day. And at the parade, people had left flowers on the steps of city hall saying, from Robert Hillsborough, covered from end to end. And because of all the attention, his killers were tracked down and found

GWENN CRAIG:

and tried. Harvey's map, using it the way it should be.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Do you have any sense of like, was there something in the air that caused that first radio station to call you and like that the story got picked up and didn't just fade away into obscurity. Like, it was the right place at the right time

MASON FUNK:

of a tragic event?

GWENN CRAIG:

If there's one thing I've learned about the media is that they like for you to make the story for them, give us an angle. What's our angle here that we can pitch? Okay, you're saying that we can bring in the Anita Bryant story into this. We can talk about gay men getting stabbed, bring that story into this. Okay,

GWENN CRAIG:

this is great hookups here. All right. I think people will listen and we've got two hooks, they work. All right, let's put this on and see if it gets attention. And it got a lot of attention, so it worked. They covered that on the news for at least three days, maybe longer. Then he kept going once the D.A took it up and said, you know what? I gotta respond to this now. Then it kept going.

MASON FUNK:

Right. Wow. It's such

MASON FUNK:

an amazing story. I realized, to my surprise, I had never heard of Robert Hillsborough when you told Tom that story. So it was really a revelation to me that I did a little bit of digging on the internet last night. I saw that there's been substantial articles written about Robert, thankfully, that he didn't die in vain, although he died so tragically.

MASON FUNK:

Another phrase you learned was, you did what, today, almost has become such a dirty phrase, you politicized his death. Today, people are like, you're politicizing this event, but it struck me when you use that phrase that politicizing is nothing more than connecting the dots to the bigger issues. I wonder if that resonates

MASON FUNK:

with you at all?

GWENN CRAIG:

I mean, we truly believed that these larger figures were to blame. We really believe that Anita Bryant and John Briggs and the people who were demonizing gay people were to blame for influencing teenagers who would go out and then beat up

GWENN CRAIG:

or even stab gay men and lesbians, that they caused these sort of attitudes to develop into violence against us. They needed to recognize that what they were doing had grave consequences. It created danger for us, that we were saying, we're human beings and you're making it so that we live unsafe lives,

GWENN CRAIG:

and you have a responsibility about that. You're responsible when people take up violence against us because they believe what you say. You make it out to be that we're not whole functioning, fully equal human beings, and people think it's okay to kill us. We weren't just doing this because we can get a lot of publicity saying it's due to these

GWENN CRAIG:

people, we truly believe that, and we just thought it had to be said.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Now do us a favor, just to backtrack a little bit so that we have some of the connective tissue, I'm gonna have you tell us what the Briggs initiative was and what the outcome was.

MASON FUNK:

Because that'll provide some connective tissue. So what was the Briggs initiative and what ultimately happened? Can you give us the year? I know it was '78, but just tell us.

GWENN CRAIG:

Okay. Well, in 1978, John Briggs, who had been a member of the California state assembly representing ... I'm not going to say representing because I'm going to get it wrong, but

GWENN CRAIG:

he was down in Orange County, California, which had been Republican for years and for decades. He placed on the ballot a statewide initiative to say that if you were a lesbian or gay and you taught in the public schools of California, that that would no longer be allowed,

GWENN CRAIG:

that any such teachers would be terminated and no one who was lesbian and gay could be hired after that. And that if you promoted, supported, tolerated, I can't remember the exact language any longer, in any way, advocated for support of gay rights

GWENN CRAIG:

in any way, then you could no longer be a teacher. That second part was really his undoing in particular. He got this idea from what he had seen in Dade county, Florida, working on the campaign there with Anita Bryant. He thought what she was doing was just marvelous and he thought he could bring some of this popularity upon himself.

GWENN CRAIG:

It did make it onto the ballot, and he also put a death penalty initiative on the ballot at the same time that didn't get nearly as much attention, but the one against having lesbian and gay teachers was proposition six. Our chances when it first went on the ballot were

GWENN CRAIG:

polling very badly. They said that it was probably gonna pass. In San Francisco, Harvey said we've got to mount the best campaign that we possibly can in San Francisco because the rest of the state is going to really depend upon us putting a lot of votes into the bucket to counteract what they're going to be getting elsewhere.

GWENN CRAIG:

There were other campaigns going on statewide, but the most active center was in San Francisco. He immediately came to Bill Kraus and me and asked us if we would co-manage the campaign, the two of us. Bill had worked on Harvey's campaign, been his sort of

GWENN CRAIG:

we would co-manage the campaign, the two of us. Bill had worked on Harvey's campaign, been his sort of field coordinator. I had worked on the get-out-the-vote portion.

GWENN CRAIG:

Harvey and Sally Gearhart

GWENN CRAIG:

And Harvey really mapped out a great campaign committee. He drew from all the important sectors of San Francisco, chair of the democratic party, important union people from some of the most prominent of the democratic clubs that represented the different ethnic

GWENN CRAIG:

communities, just all of the important diversity on the campaign committee. Brought people who had not necessarily been working in partnership with the lesbian, gay community before and brought them into the campaign. It had other agendas working too that were very successful. We started

GWENN CRAIG:

out, people from the community were extremely supportive. We had very little problem in raising funds and no problem whatsoever in getting volunteers. It was amazing handling all the people who were coming through the door to volunteer. At one point, it got to be, 'I don't know what to do with all these people.'

GWENN CRAIG:

'Have them blow up balloons.' Okay. Okay. We had the most festive campaign [inaudible] ever seen. At one point, we decided that we were going to go with a campaign where we did door to door canvassing, which meant not just dropping off literature at the door and moving on, but we were

GWENN CRAIG:

going to knock on doors and talk to people. That was a big deal because the person on the other side of the door was going to assume you were gay, whether you said anything about it or not, when you told them what campaign you were there to discuss with them, and you had no idea what their attitude was going to be. But the volunteers came in, we told them exactly what

GWENN CRAIG:

they were going to be doing, and that we fully intended to cover every neighborhood in San Francisco, nothing was going to be left untouched. People said, "I'm down with that. Okay, I'll do it. This is too important not to." To this day, I look back and I applaud the bravery.

GWENN CRAIG:

Just the bravery, is all I can say, of people who were willing to go. Some of them, they hadn't come out yet. They had been quietly gay, but they also felt the fear of things like this initiative passing. "It's not my profession, but they'll come from my profession next, maybe.

GWENN CRAIG:

We've got to stop things like this. I thought I lived in San Francisco, things like this wouldn't happen, I was safe here, but this just goes to show, it could happen here, it can happen anywhere," they'd say. And they say, "I know I got to do this." We would give them a briefing of what they had to do, what were the best strategies and how to say it, how to deal with people. If they say this, then you say that dah, dah, dah, and they'd head out the door with their map and

GWENN CRAIG:

a partner, they always went with a partner. They'd say, This is great. I could never do this myself. This is so wonderful. They're so great. And we did, we covered every precinct in San Francisco, all the places that other campaign managers say, now you won't be able to cover this one, I mean, it's kind of a risky neighborhood. Or this one, they got a lot of apartments and you probably wouldn't be able to get in. They would

GWENN CRAIG:

go and come back and say, oh, I figured out a way to get in, and they had covered it. Other campaigns were just amazed at the proficiency of what we had done. Given what our volunteers did, given what Harvey did in the public debates with John Briggs, where he and Sally Gearhart

GWENN CRAIG:

were masterful and showed John Briggs to be the blathering idiot that he truly was, we did win. We won in San Francisco and we won statewide because we did pour in a bucket of votes. Maybe it wasn't just because of us, but we did pour in that bucket of votes. We didn't do badly up and down the state either, not really badly.

GWENN CRAIG:

But it was one where we started out so afraid. On the night of the election, we were so nervous as the votes were trickling in, and for it to end in victory, the joy was overwhelming. It was such an explosion of joy.

MASON FUNK:

Did you find out that night?

GWENN CRAIG:

Yeah. Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Tell us about that. Where were you when you found out?

GWENN CRAIG:

Well, we were at the campaign headquarters. Our campaign headquarters was a former nightclub. It had been an after-hours dance club, gay bar, that had closed down and it had been empty for quite some time. We snagged it for the headquarters after we had looked at a couple of other locations. Harvey was against us going there first, he said, "A gay bar? They're gonna say they even put

GWENN CRAIG:

their campaign in the gay bar, they just [inaudible] about gay bars." He said, "Harvey, nobody's going to say that." And of course, no one did. So we had tons of space, tons of space, that was great. We had a little stage, already there, we didn't have to do anything. What they also had was, in the middle of the floor, there were these trap doors that opened, you went downstairs to where they had kept the drinks and stuff.

GWENN CRAIG:

So what we had that evening, I didn't organize this myself, someone else did this, organized for us, they had the gay marching band stashed downstairs in case it was a victory. When it was a victory, they had gotten everyone to clear the area, keep that area clear, the doors were thrown back and the marching band came marching up the stairs, playing San Francisco.

GWENN CRAIG:

People were just, this is too much. It was a glorious night. Stage managed like our community could do so well.

MASON FUNK:

That's amazing. That's amazing. And this is November, 1978?

GWENN CRAIG:

Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Well, of course, we have to go a little backwards sideways,

MASON FUNK:

because by now Harvey had been elected supervisor. It sounds like this probably was the height of his political power.

GWENN CRAIG:

Absolutely. Harvey had been elected in 1977. That was our first big, "Yay! This is incredible." Huge celebrations everywhere. He was riding high. He had had a fairly successful supervisorial span. He had put forth legislation

GWENN CRAIG:

that had passed. He had been popular on TV. He brought his sense of humor, and he had done some things. They got great media, he was so good at that. It's per usual. He was riding high. Riding high. The 'no on six' campaign after his debates

GWENN CRAIG:

against John Briggs and being the conqueror, the city was this ticket, it seemed. The huge powerbroker for San Francisco was our Congressman at that time Phil Burton, who was a power broker in Congress itself. At one point, he was destined to be speaker of the house. I don't know exactly the history of that, he just missed out

GWENN CRAIG:

on that, but they thought one day he would probably attain that seat. Phil Burton took an interest in our campaign when he heard about all we were doing and how successful we were being. Harvey had brought him down for one of our Saturday rallies, he came down and he was very impressed. I mean, I told you we had hundreds of volunteers,

GWENN CRAIG:

we had told them we really needed a good showing, "the congressman's going to be there with lots of people," and they were cheering. I like what I'm seeing here, this seems to me the most energetic thing I've seen in San Francisco right now and for a long time. He started inviting Harvey over, and Harvey would say to certain ones of us, I want you to come along with me so Phil can

GWENN CRAIG:

meet some of the people who I have in my sphere and get to know you all too. He'd had me, Bill and Pavich, Rivaldo -- Dick Pavich and Jim Rivaldo, they had a big firm that developed campaign literature and also worked with Harvey politically -- and people like that, so he was riding high. He obviously was looking at a bright future.

GWENN CRAIG:

The victory over the Briggs initiative, proposition six, just showed that he had his ticket to go anywhere he wanted, and he knew that. The last conversation I had with Harvey was when we were clearing out the campaign office after we had won the election. He came by to see

GWENN CRAIG:

how things were going with closing things down. He knew that Bill and I were taking a vacation, so he wanted to just say goodbye to us before we left. Bill, unfortunately, had just left before he got there, to go run an errand, so I was alone in the office. I think I hadn't really had a one-on-one sit down with Harvey since that meeting, when I went

GWENN CRAIG:

to him for mentoring, so we had a long talk about his excitement about what the future held in store. He had some very ambitious plans about where we were going to go as a movement, and also in city politics. He saw different positions that he saw different people should go for.

GWENN CRAIG:

He was just the happiest that I'd seen a long time. He really felt optimistic. Then Bill and I headed off to Hawaii on our vacation.

MASON FUNK:

Let's pause there for a second. What do you remember about some of those things that, of course, in retrospect, is like the legacy he left, at least a vision? What did he picture?

MASON FUNK:

Not so much like I want this person to run for that office, but like, what was the bigger vision?

GWENN CRAIG:

Harvey really thought it was important, the connection that we had made with the democratic party apparatus, with the office of congressman Phil Burton, that we could start to operate on a higher level

GWENN CRAIG:

beyond just municipal politics. That he and other individuals that he had in his circle could form relationships that would be very important and start to shape policy. It wasn't just that individuals could be

GWENN CRAIG:

in positions, but that it would have some meaning about those people being there. He hated the notion of people who got positions just to be in positions, and just for their own self acknowledgment, but how we could then use that to advance the community forward. He only wanted to make sure that people pass muster with that, that they were on the same mission.

GWENN CRAIG:

That's what he saw going forward, that we could start to work on important policy.

MASON FUNK:

Was he mostly focused on the rights of gay and lesbian people, or was it a kind of a broader coalition that he pictured?

GWENN CRAIG:

Well, Harvey had this whole vision of, he always talked about working in coalition and that was always important to him, that was always an important theme for him.

GWENN CRAIG:

When he was elected to the board, and he talked about this, that they also elected the first African American woman, they elected a feminist identified woman, there was also a Latino on the board, not the first, but there was one elected along at that time, Asian-American that he was very closely working with at the time.

GWENN CRAIG:

He thought that this kind of representation of the diverse communities and viewpoints in San Francisco was extremely important. He also felt that having me and Bill co-manage the campaign, and having himself and Sally Gearhart be co-chairs of the campaign, that was

GWENN CRAIG:

in line with Harvey's thinking that there needed to be equity between men and women in leadership of organizations and campaigns, and different efforts like that. That was something that had come out of the community insisting upon that. Mainly it was the lesbians who would always say we need parity here, and this leadership by men only has got to come to an end. Harvey was right down with that, and started to insist about it too,

GWENN CRAIG:

we need a woman also, to be partnered with the man here. He always had the idea that as we rose as a community, as a movement, that we also had to find a way to be in partnership with other movements and find ways to

GWENN CRAIG:

bring others along, I guess, or that maybe there was a way that in other movements we'd find ways to partner with them in sharing their successes in some way, but in some way he thought that there's not going to be success unless we're all conjoined in some way.

MASON FUNK:

There's one thing in my notes that you mentioned just in passing, well actually two things. One was, you mentioned that the Briggs initiative came on the heels of losing human rights ordinances in four locations [crosstalk] California. Correct?

GWENN CRAIG:

No, in other states.

MASON FUNK:

But I think it's important just

MASON FUNK:

to set up that the Briggs initiative, it felt like a domino. It was going to be the next major defeat for our community. Can you just say briefly

GWENN CRAIG:

[Inaudible]

MASON FUNK:

But maybe you can just say, almost as if it's an aside, the Briggs initiative, right before they put it on the ballot,

MASON FUNK:

we had lost four other elected elections around the country, human rights ordinances had gone down to defeat, so we just felt like the deck was stacked against us.

GWENN CRAIG:

I'm not sure if it was before Dade county though or after Dade county. That's what I can't recall for sure.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. And then there was another thing that I put in my notes. You mentioned to Tom,

MASON FUNK:

maybe it was the night of the defeat or maybe it was the conversation you had with Harvey later, but he said 'dream big'. You used that phrase with Tom. Does that ring a bell with you? Do you know what you were referring to?

GWENN CRAIG:

I may have said that or was I looking at the Elizabeth Warren poster when I said it, maybe, and that dug into my head.

MASON FUNK:

But I do have a question for you. You were a black woman, a black woman. I wonder if at any point when you were playing these roles and being so incredibly effective, like you were born to do this, do you remember any times when you also felt like there was some pushback? We haven't talked about that really, your identity

MASON FUNK:

as a black woman in these circles you were starting to move in. Does anything come to mind for you of some of the challenges or times when people weren't as welcoming and embracing of you as they might've been otherwise?

GWENN CRAIG:

No, there weren't. I think that people were so happy in some ways that there was a black woman who was going out

GWENN CRAIG:

and speaking on their behalf, as they saw it, I remember doing a couple of TV things, and then I would come the next day and be in the Castro, just going somewhere, walking down the street, and all of these white gay men, mostly, would come up and say, "You, you, I saw you on TV last night. Thank you so much." And

GWENN CRAIG:

it'll always be, thank you. Someone said outright, my mother, my parents, my family is this way, and it was kind of like they were saying that they thought seeing me might break some ice. I don't know if it was because they were

GWENN CRAIG:

seeing a black woman, but something about me, they thought that I would get through to their family. These were white men, by and large. I think it was just in those times that someone would go on TV, period. That was the main reason that I wound up doing so much TV, because I would. Because

GWENN CRAIG:

Bill and the others would say, "Listen, they're calling, they want someone to come do this interview live, or they want someone to be on this panel or whatever. Gwenn, you gotta do it." "Oh God, really?" They said, "No, really, it's gotta be you." There was a very sort of moderate lesbian who was with the gay power elite, she

GWENN CRAIG:

was aligned with the people who had opposed Harvey's election in the community, and that sort of thing. They'd say, "If you don't do it, they're going to call this woman." I said, "Oh, okay, fine." They always got me. I was doing so many of these TV things that I finally said,

GWENN CRAIG:

I think maybe you better tell your family. They haven't gotten the news about this. Sooner or later, somebody is going to see something. I can't go on [inaudible], I'm all the way out here in California, it's not exactly another planet. That was when I finally wrote a letter so I could express myself fully, I said. I sent it to

GWENN CRAIG:

my parents and just waited to see how they respond. My mother was the one who wrote back and she had a very positive response. She said her only concern was that I would be safe. She was just worried about that, that I would be safe. I just feel she spoke for both herself

GWENN CRAIG:

and my father, and let it go with that. But I thought, well, I had finally taken the step that everybody else has. Now, I'm one of the gang, in some ways. It wasn't until much later that I found out that all these people around me hadn't come out to their parents, or they were very gay in San Francisco, but 'no, my family, they have

GWENN CRAIG:

no idea', 'Oh, no, I wouldn't be telling me', 'oh, my family back in wherever', I was shocked. I was shocked all of these gay rights were totally in the closet where it came to their families. In some ways, I thought, I went through this and you didn't? That doesn't quite seem fair, but it was good. I did an

GWENN CRAIG:

interview in 1984 ... First in 1980, I was a delegate to the democratic national convention. We had a big effort to get gay delegates for that, I was among the group for that. Then in 1984, we got even more lesbian, gay delegates. We didn't say LGBT then, that's the only reason I'm not saying it now because I'm using the vernacular that

GWENN CRAIG:

we had at that time. I was selected as co-chair of the lesbian, gay caucus. Since it was in San Francisco, the Today Show was there, and they were doing a lot of feature stories about the gay community. They asked me and my co-chair, who was a gay man from New York to do an interview. I remember I had to get up at three in the morning.

GWENN CRAIG:

After it was done and I finally went home, I said, I'm going to go back to bed. But before I could, my phone rang and it was an old friend of my mother's from New York, who said, "I just saw you interviewed on the Today Show. I just wanted to tell you that it's all right with me.

GWENN CRAIG:

It's just fine with me." I'm glad I came out to my parents before they got her call.

MASON FUNK:

I love that imitation. [Inaudible] The thing to connect the dots, of course, you referenced this yesterday in your talk with Tom, this was Harvey's big thing, come out.

GWENN CRAIG:

Yes, yes.

GWENN CRAIG:

How could I not come out when Harvey's main message was we all need to come out. The most important thing you can do is come out to your families, to your coworkers, to whatever colleagues you have, whatever associations you have with none gay people, you need to come out. They need to know who we are. They need to know that they know gay people

GWENN CRAIG:

so they can know who we are, and they can know we're not the evil people that they're making us out to be. That's the only thing that's going to make a difference.

MASON FUNK:

Do you remember, by any chance, a book from that year called, Coming Out: An Act of Love, does that ring a bell?

GWENN CRAIG:

It doesn't ring a bell.

MASON FUNK:

[Inaudible] he passed of AIDS, but we interviewed his mom, 95 years old, she was kind of like the keeper of his legacy. He wrote this book, Coming Out: An Act of Love. Then he later co-founded

MASON FUNK:

national coming out day.

GWENN CRAIG:

Oh, really?

MASON FUNK:

[Crosstalk] Jean O'Leary.

GWENN CRAIG:

Oh, yes, I knew Jean O'Leary

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. They were like the official co-founders, his name is Rob Eichberg. Because it was the same thesis. His thesis was, coming out is an act of love, telling the people in your life that you care enough about them to tell them who you are. Okay. Now, you said,

MASON FUNK:

"and I headed off to Hawaii," but I have a question still before [crosstalk]. What were you picturing for your own future at that time? Do you remember? What were your ambitions? And set it up as, after we defeated the Briggs initiative ...

GWENN CRAIG:

After we defeated the Briggs initiative and that campaign had ended, I'd been

GWENN CRAIG:

too wrapped up in that to think what comes next. I just hadn't done the planning after that. I thought that while I was away on vacation in Hawaii, I was going to be there with Bill and with a woman named Andrea Jepson, who had worked on the statewide campaign initiative. I thought she had the kind of political savvy that I could

GWENN CRAIG:

get some feedback from her, maybe. It was in my head that if there's anyone I want to talk to about any kind of political life after Briggs, it would be those two people. So maybe I'd have a chance then to talk about what should I do, try and continue a job doing campaigns, or try and become an aide to some politician,

GWENN CRAIG:

or should I even want to consider doing a job in politics? I got selected for this because my heart was in it. For me, that's why I accepted it. Maybe my heart won't be in it for another campaign or working in a political office. I got to decide.

MASON FUNK:

That's interesting. When you were in Hawaii, you got a call. Tell us about that.

GWENN CRAIG:

Headed off to Hawaii with Bill Kraus and Andrea Jepson, who had worked on the statewide campaign. We decided to go to the big island. We had only been there for, I think, a day. No, we'd been there for a little while because I remember Jonestown happened in between, watching that on TV

GWENN CRAIG:

and saying, oh my God, what's happening in this world is going crazy. Then the day rolled around, I think a week later was when it happened, from when Jonestown happened. Andrea and I were talking, and Bill went off to answer the phone and he was in the other room and all of a sudden we heard him crying, just wailing.

GWENN CRAIG:

We were like, what in the world, Bill, what's going on? What's going on? He finally gathered himself enough to say that Harvey had been assassinated in San Francisco. I was just devastated. It seemed like I couldn't even speak, I couldn't accept this, almost. Andrea had the presence of mind because we were both just basket cases.

GWENN CRAIG:

She said, pack your bags, just pack everything up right now. We just started doing that and we headed to the airport. Andrea just said, stand right here. She marched up to the front of this long line of people waiting and said to the woman at the stand, we're with mayor Moscone's staff. He has just been shot and

GWENN CRAIG:

killed in San Francisco, we have got to get on this plane to get back to San Francisco. The woman said, oh yes, I understand, right this way, and let us onto the plane. The hallway that we flew there, we were like the quiet people on the plane, the shell-shocked people on the plane. We got off. Somewhere along the way, I don't know quite when it happened, someone had called Billy West, Bill Kraus'

GWENN CRAIG:

roommate at the time, and he met us at the airport and drove us down as fast as he could to market street, because the story was that there was going to be a candlelight march from the Castro to city hall. We stood there and we said, well, I don't see any sign of a march. We went over to city

GWENN CRAIG:

hall at first and we saw a few scattered people with candles. We said, really, is that all? Then we said, well, let's go back over to market street and just see. Bill's like, I can't believe this. Then we looked up and over the hill, came this first row of lights, and then it came more and more and more, and that was the real march, coming over the hill from the Castro. When they reached where we were, we just stepped right

GWENN CRAIG:

in and joined with the marches on the way into, now, civic center. Joining with everybody else who was just crying or in shock. So glad to be with other people that night, so glad we made it for that. It became so important that we could be together with people.

MASON FUNK:

You had, if you look back 10 years earlier to the assassinations of Dr. Reverend Martin Luther king and Bobby Kennedy, I mean, I try to put myself in the position of someone who had been so close to people who were such visionaries and with Harvey, you literally sat in the offices with him, hearing his voice and having him mentor you, it just makes me wonder, how

MASON FUNK:

do you bounce? I mean, I know you don't bounce back anytime soon, but how do you even take something like this in, when you've already seen two such great leaders you know assassinated 10 years earlier?

GWENN CRAIG:

It definitely hit me hardest because of the relationship, this time I really knew. It took me so long to

GWENN CRAIG:

sort of come to terms with it and everything was so painful from it. Rob Epstein made the wonderful documentary about it, and interviewed everyone in Harvey's circle. He interviewed me but that didn't give him very good interview, so I'm not surprised he didn't use it.

GWENN CRAIG:

But seeing that again and again, it seemed like everybody was always showing it somewhere for something, to this day. It took a long time before it didn't just break my heart. Every time I would hear Dianne Feinstein's announcement, "Harvey Milk and George Moscone had been shot and killed in the --" It would hurt all over again.

GWENN CRAIG:

It would just like a punch to the heart all over again. It took a long time before it doesn't have that effect now.

MASON FUNK:

You served as a delegate to the national convention in 1980 and 1984, I think I jotted down in my notes other involvements, you stayed

MASON FUNK:

connected for a good while afterwards.

GWENN CRAIG:

Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

How did you find just the optimism that you need to put yourself into politics and into organizing?

GWENN CRAIG:

Well, I had been involved with what was the San Francisco gay democratic club and then renamed itself the Harvey Milk club, in Harvey's honor after

GWENN CRAIG:

he was assassinated. First, the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club, and Harvey Milk Lesbian and Gay Democratic Club, and on and on, now we are the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club. I felt almost an obligation to stay active with the club that bore Harvey's name, just to stay

GWENN CRAIG:

on top of what was happening there. The club had this tradition, had this stature in the city as a leading progressive organization, and I really wanted it to maintain that. If there was any local effort happening in the city, then what the Milk club was doing was looked to

GWENN CRAIG:

as well, how should we vote on this? Which candidate should I vote for? Let's go down to the corner and get the Milk club's slate card so I can know who the candidates we should support. We maintain this reputation that I thought was very important and I wanted to help see that it stayed on course, and I have done that for a long, long time now. I can't say that now,

GWENN CRAIG:

at last, that I am as close as I used to be, but I've covered my decades there. At one point, we went through a bad patch in the Milk club. We had a president in the Milk club who wasn't very responsive to the needs and the issues that

GWENN CRAIG:

the black caucus was raising, things we were seeing that were very troubling and how it was responded to was even more troubling. So the black caucus split off from the Milk club. It became an independent organization which was known as the LGADDA, which stood for Lesbians and Gays of African Descent for Democratic Action. Then I was most active, still

GWENN CRAIG:

a member of the Milk club, but most active with LGADDA, and building that organization, and so proud to have this black LGBT voice in the community, and what we accomplished there in such a short period of time. People found it so interesting, refreshing. People were

GWENN CRAIG:

very intrigued by what we had to say, projects we were doing. And that became a keen interest of mine for quite a long time. That was pretty close to my heart. Whenever there's something that jumps out that I say, we really got to do something about this, just like Briggs, just

GWENN CRAIG:

like Anita Bryant. Then I seem like I can't resist getting in there and getting involved with it.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah, yeah. It's in your blood, it seems.

MASON FUNK:

Let's bring it up to the present. You talked about the spirit of hatefulness, on one hand that it feels like it's been simmering under the surface and suddenly unleashed by Trump, but you also said you feel like there are more soldiers and allies than ever before. So maybe talking about what you see right now, when you look out, say over about the past four or five years, what do you see that causes you both despair and gives

MASON FUNK:

you hope?

GWENN CRAIG:

The rise of Donald Trump, really a little bit before him, with getting involved in national politics and becoming a delegate and that sort of thing, I started to take a bigger interest in national politics, almost leaving local politics, in the way that I'd been so involved in that, leaving

GWENN CRAIG:

that behind, and recognizing that what was happening to our country was much more vital. But it became especially so with the rise of Donald Trump. I thought, surely, this can't be happening. Surely, people are not going to elect this man president. I mean, I just thought there can't

GWENN CRAIG:

be enough people who will go along with this. Tell me this country hasn't come to that. When they actually elected him president, I thought, oh, no, we got to really find like-minded souls that we can organize with. Fortunately, there were a ton of people who felt the same way, and that was the most inspiring thing to happen in a long time, was to see the people who bonded

GWENN CRAIG:

together to organize, to do something about the direction of the country, and to organize in ways we hadn't in the past, to find new ways to respond on the national level, to find new ways to get people to communicate what they wanted to say. Using all the technology, all the social media,

GWENN CRAIG:

just ways to get people to do things they've been so reluctant to do in the past; call their local representative's office and get people to go to town hall meetings and that sort of thing. This became such a joint activity with so many people, those kind of things that they say, 'oh, no, you'll never get people to do that,' they were doing it and they were excited about it.

GWENN CRAIG:

And it was making a difference. It was really making a difference. I am so excited about that. Now, I think we have a real chance to survive this right wing hysteria that's going on in this country. They are formidable, they are formidable. There's still plenty of things to be quite worried about. I saw something just maybe this

GWENN CRAIG:

morning that said that gun sales are at an all-time high, to the point that ammunition has become scarce, that it's hard to find it now. I thought, well, I know who's buying the guns and it's not our side. Why do they want all those guns? It's not just

GWENN CRAIG:

because they decided, oh, they're going to take away our gun so we better buy as many as we can. I think they've got plans, and I think that that's frightening. If we didn't think that they had plans, I think January 6 kind of told us more about that. It told us, yeah, they think that they can do things that are very scary. So the fact that people

GWENN CRAIG:

are ready to say let's use all the legal means at our disposal to fight back and make sure that we are ready for whatever is coming, and that so many people are willing to march together on this, I think our numbers are greater. I think our numbers are really much greater and that gives me such hope. That gives me the most hope I've had in a long time.

MASON FUNK:

More hope now, you would say, comparatively speaking to, say, maybe 10, even in the year when Barack Obama was elected or was that another swell of hope?

GWENN CRAIG:

I didn't feel as threatened when Obama was elected, so I didn't feel he came along to protect us in quite the same way. I thought it was a very positive sign

GWENN CRAIG:

and that maybe he could bring some much needed change. It didn't end up with that much change as we had hoped for, I think. We didn't see systemic change happening, but I think there was some attitudinal change that occurred and that's always helpful.

GWENN CRAIG:

But in some ways I do ascribe to the theory that perhaps Obama begat the right-wing hysteria that brought us Trump. I hate to say it. I hate to say it. Maybe I don't believe it entirely, but it's not like it's his fault or anything, but I think there's a part of that racist mentality that said,

GWENN CRAIG:

'this is frightening to us, we can't have this, they are taking over and we've got to do something about this'. That brought them out of their shacks and militia camps and everywhere else to say, yeah, I like this guy, Trump, he's the one to do it.

MASON FUNK:

It's interesting. You referenced you being a boomer and

MASON FUNK:

as this very common phrase, [crosstalk]. Younger people don't respect or don't think that we really know what's going on. As a boomer, I'm a boomer as well, what do you feel like we have to say today that is as relevant, if not more relevant than ever, to the so-called, whatever the gens, the gen Z's, millennials, what do they run the risk of missing

MASON FUNK:

that we understand when they say, "Okay, boomer."

GWENN CRAIG:

Well, first of all, it was funny to me when boomer became a term of derision. I used to take such pride in being a boomer for so long. I thought we were the most interesting generation, back when we were still like 40-somethings, I guess. Then when we became more 60-somethings,

GWENN CRAIG:

then they started to say, yeah, you boomers need to get out of the way. It was like, what? But I think there's a lot of history that they're missing because they're intent on being so dismissive, and it's a learning experience that could benefit the gen decades.

GWENN CRAIG:

The things that have happened in the past that are instructive to our present, what we did in terms of politics, the kind of organizing that we did -- what worked, what didn't -- I think could help the people

GWENN CRAIG:

that I see now trying to do something. I don't want to fall into the trap of saying, oh yeah, we did something like that and it didn't really work, therefore you shouldn't try. Maybe they'll do it and this time it will work, but I think there's something to be gained from saying, well, let's look at what came before. They did it this way, but I think if we

GWENN CRAIG:

tweak it here and now that we've got the benefit of social media, then we can do that. But sometimes, when I do panels and

GWENN CRAIG:

such, and I tell stories about things from our LGBT history, I just get these reactions that people say, wow, I didn't know any of this. And I think that's sad that you didn't know any of this. I mean, there are books. I also think that we lost a lot when we lost so many people to AIDS. We lost a lot of voices. We lost a lot of expertise and we lost a lot of talent. So many people with such incredible talent that we lost.

GWENN CRAIG:

There's no way I can convey to people what we lost, the great numbers and just the extraordinary people. It's like that epidemic [inaudible], let's take your best and your brightest, that's what we're going to select. I think the generations that came after them are already

GWENN CRAIG:

left with the deficit and don't recognize it, don't realize it, couldn't possibly realize it. Get what you can from the ones who are still here. I'm just saying, use us, before you throw us out the door. At least, it doesn't hurt to listen to our stories. Maybe they get a little repetitive,

GWENN CRAIG:

maybe they're a little boring, but some of it is stuff you can use.

MASON FUNK:

As I mentioned, I left home at 18 to go to college, but just kept going. Lived for seven years in Europe, and I moved back to California in 1993, and in 1994, of course, prop 187 was on the ballot. I had just come back from living overseas and I

MASON FUNK:

was all fired up because here was this really big deal, and talk about thinking you were gonna win. We lost, we got slaughtered, [inaudible] stepped in, but I literally was so excited to just go from door to door in my neighborhood. I think to myself that this generation doesn't know what it's like to literally knock on people's doors [crosstalk]. Most people don't get rude or vicious, they just say, you're knocking on the wrong

MASON FUNK:

door, [crosstalk] and you move on, and then you have people who are totally on your side. They're like, yeah. Then you have the people that are somewhere in the middle [crosstalk]. I'm just talking here.

GWENN CRAIG:

No, I think it's true. There's one scene in Rob Epstein's documentary, the times of Harvey Milk, where he shows two volunteers talking to an older Asian couple. Shows an example of the canvassing, I guess.

GWENN CRAIG:

They are very polite and everything. They listen and they're doing our talking points and everything. They said, "Did you know that if this passes, then these people will lose their jobs?" And they say, "Oh, that's not right. That's not right." He said, "In fact, even if you just support gay rights, you won't be allowed to teach." "No, I didn't know that."

GWENN CRAIG:

There's a benefit in going and giving people their information. A lot of people at the door genuinely are interested and are benefiting from what you're bringing to them. If they could know that, maybe they'd be less afraid of it, I don't know. I was afraid of it. I was there at the headquarters [inaudible].

MASON FUNK:

Were you very specifically like someone who really didn't want to go knocking door to door, but you were happy that other people would ...

GWENN CRAIG:

I was very happy that they ... But

GWENN CRAIG:

by the end of it, when they were telling me back with these wonderful stories, then I was convinced, well, it's not bad at all, I guess. Because they're coming back to say, oh, I talked to this wonderful woman by the end of it, she was ready to come down here and volunteer, herself, you might see her. I thought, this is incredible. This is just great. These people are having wonderful encounters, and I guess it's okay, nobody's coming back

GWENN CRAIG:

saying, oh, this guy came out and punched me in the face. Nothing like that ever happened.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. For me, like I said, kind of restored my faith in humanity to do that. I also did the same thing in 2018, when we were focused on taking back the house and I went to orange county, [inaudible], subsequently get lost again in 2020, but when you meet people, it's just like, they have great stories. There's just like this guy who was a World War II veteran. He may not vote for [inaudible], but he's

MASON FUNK:

just a cool guy to spend 5 or 10 minutes with. People walk you into their houses, like, ain't you terrified I'm going to knife you [crosstalk]?

GWENN CRAIG:

You know you shouldn't be doing this.

MASON FUNK:

Well, I have four final questions I ask every interview. I do want to see if there's anything that it feels like we haven't covered from your personal story, from your experiences. Inevitably, we haven't covered everything, but is there anything that comes to

MASON FUNK:

mind for you, that you like talking about?

GWENN CRAIG:

Gosh, I'm going to think we probably covered it, because it was so recently that I've told my story, but gosh, goodness knows I can talk to you for another hour, but I can't think of anything I should throw in.

MASON FUNK:

Well, I have a few final, short questions. If anything gets [inaudible],

MASON FUNK:

you can tell me. The first question we ask as our final four is if you could tell your 15 year old self anything, what would it be and preface your answer with rephrasing my question.

GWENN CRAIG:

Okay. If I could tell my 15 year old self anything, I would say, you should know it really is going to get better, a lot better.

GWENN CRAIG:

Trust in making good decisions, if you just take time to think about things and not just let things happen to you. Don't be so easily convinced that something is the way you should go. Think through what you're doing and decide if

GWENN CRAIG:

that's really going to make you happy. Not just because someone else says that's the way everyone's done it.

MASON FUNK:

Great. Okay. Thank you for that. Now, my second question is that I have a little pet theory that there's a kind of a queer superpower. One of our interviewees brought this phrase to my attention, and I've always loved it, that LGBTQ gender nonconforming, gender non binary people,

MASON FUNK:

intersex people, that there's something that kind of unites us all, a quality or a characteristic, that is our so-called superpower. Do you relate to that notion? And if so, how would you define that superpower that we all carry inside of us?

GWENN CRAIG:

I do think that once people sort of step outside of the norm, that once we open up

GWENN CRAIG:

that door, that something happens to us and we do see the world in a different, more accepting way. I am so glad I'm a lesbian,

GWENN CRAIG:

and I'm glad I'm African-American. I'm glad I can see the world through the lens of being the other, even if in that way, there are things brought down upon me that bar me from certain opportunities, certain experiences, but there are the things that I'm opened up to that I think I'm glad I have that. I'm glad I have that. I'm glad

GWENN CRAIG:

I have the community of people who are similarly discriminated against, similarly oppressed, and we share something just from our identity that people who are just white and just straight, they don't have. I know in many ways, they kind of

GWENN CRAIG:

envy us because they try so hard to understand what it's like to be us, and they can't get there. But the way that black people can just see other black people and immediately feel kinship is something that I think is much more valuable.

GWENN CRAIG:

I wouldn't give that up to be white and have the privilege that comes with it.

MASON FUNK:

Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. This person who used that phrase before she talked about being in Louisiana or Mississippi, and she's African-American as well, with her wife, who's white, and going to like a Walmart, they were shopping for a family reunion, going up and down the aisles, and she's a little bit like, I'm a fish out of water here. Then they see a gay couple, they're also shopping,

MASON FUNK:

and they're like, there's some gays over there. I think she said first one of them saw the gay couple and they said, hi, and the gay couple said, hi. Then the other one of them

MASON FUNK:

came around the corner and the gay couple realized they were a lesbian couple, and they go 'HI!'.

GWENN CRAIG:

Yes, my partner and I, when we're out, we'll say, oh, I think we have another church member over there. That was the expression I learned a long time back.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Second to the last question. You've done this a lot, but why is it important to you, when we come knocking, to share your story? Why are you willing to do that?

GWENN CRAIG:

Well, I guess I've got one thing. I've got Harvey in my ear talking about how it's important for us to tell our stories. I came to learn that it's important, not just to

GWENN CRAIG:

tell straight people who we are, but it's important, maybe even more so, to tell other gay people, particularly, well, I was going to say younger generations, but I think it's important to tell the older people who

GWENN CRAIG:

had a harder time of it. I've talked to older people who were more closeted and had more struggle, more oppression, just went through much more difficult times and they feel so much more comforted knowing that things have gotten better. In some ways, I think it's important for all of us to hear the stories and share that feeling that we get from one another, that unity of

GWENN CRAIG:

knowing about all our lives. I recently watched the documentary Word Is Out, made in 1972. And these diverse people and what it was like for them at the time, being gay, and what had happened to them over their lives, some old, some young. I remember seeing that in '75 or so

GWENN CRAIG:

and thinking, wow, wow, glad I didn't have to go through that. But it's important to understand that people went through things like that. I mean, gee, it could've been so much worse. What if I had told my parents when I was 15 and I was just starting to say, huh, what is this homosexuality, kind of

GWENN CRAIG:

intrigued. They had said, all right, get her off to the asylum and get the paddles out. It's important for us to know our stories. I just feel that we do a service telling ... I know that I had the opportunity, the great

GWENN CRAIG:

fortune to be placed in very special places in history that I got a chance to work with Harvey Milk. I'm always getting people who say, what was that like? I know there are a lot of people interested in that and I'm very happy to tell them about it. I looked through photographs that I have, and I see that working with the democratic party, I met all these people. I ran

GWENN CRAIG:

across a picture I had with Walter Mondale, and a picture I took with Ted Kennedy. Just along the way, there were just different experiences of being placed in positions where I'm with the lesbian, gay caucus, I'm with the national organization of Lesbian, Gay Democratic Clubs, and we're here to talk to you about our social movement agenda.

GWENN CRAIG:

There were things along the way that it's kinda lost to history unless we tell the stories about them, so I don't mind telling those stories. I think it's an obligation.

MASON FUNK:

Well, that resonates with me very much. The organization, OUTWORDS, that is doing this interview, that I founded. We went through a strategic planning process earlier this year and kind of looked at our mission statement, and is this

MASON FUNK:

really what we did? And we added the phrase, we said, "We record, preserve and share the stories of LGBTQ elders to build community." We didn't have it initially. We just had the part about catalyzing social change, which I think we are, but I was like, we're missing a piece here. There's a piece that happens when we just tell each other our stories that builds community, so we inserted that phrase. What you just said really resonates with me. Final question is

MASON FUNK:

very much about OUTWORDS. It's a little shout out to OUTWORDS. If we are the organization that's traveling the country, recording stories like yours, what is the value of that? You've really just kind of answered it, but maybe just rephrase it, adding the word OUTWORDS. The value of a project like OUTWORDS.

GWENN CRAIG:

Well, the value of a project like OUTWORDS is that you can touch base with so many people who might not

GWENN CRAIG:

come in contact with someone wanting to hear their story and make a record of it, and make it available to people who want to hear those stories and want to have that record. I mean, people do enjoy, and not just enjoy, people hunger for history, in many cases.

GWENN CRAIG:

To have an accessible history about LGBT people that tells others who we are, who we been, how we got from back then, whatever that is, to where we are now, is a fascinating story. I think it's one of the most fascinating stories right now,

GWENN CRAIG:

because how we developed as a social movement and just as a cultural phenomenon is really unique, is really quite unique. There are things that a lot of people in my generation, older than me, thought we'd never see at this point.

GWENN CRAIG:

We moved to gay marriage a lot sooner than a lot of people thought we would. I remember when it was first talked about, I thought, oh no, oh no, they're talking about this too soon. Oh no, they're jumping out way too soon. There's going to be backlash.

GWENN CRAIG:

And they were right. Time was right.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. I was just like you, I was like, oh no, you gotta be kidding me. People were like, if we lose in the Supreme court, we're screwed.

GWENN CRAIG:

Yes. Yes.

MASON FUNK:

Those pieces came together. Here in California we lived just like our own enormous drama around [inaudible]. Well, great. This has been absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much. Is there anything else you want to say before we just pause? Cut.

GWENN CRAIG:

I can't think of anything.

MASON FUNK:

Right. Well, thank you so much. We're going to do room tone, which you may have heard the term. We're going to just record the sound of this room with no one talking for say, 30 seconds.