Mason Funk:
All right. Thank you so much for sharing your story.
Pam David:
Thank you for doing this.
Mason Funk:
Could you start by stating and spelling your first and last names?
Pam David:
Pam David, p-a-m d-a-v-i-d.
Mason Funk:
Okey-dokey. On what date and where were you born?
Pam David:
I was born on September 2nd, 1952 at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, Illinois.
Mason Funk:
Okey-dokey. Now, talk to us a little bit, if you wouldn't mind, about your family and how
00:00:30Mason Funk:
they made it to the US dating back 170 years ago, roughly.
Pam David:
Both sides of my family, my mother's and my fathers were German Jews from the area around Ulm, Germany, and I don't think they knew each other, but they ended up immigrating to the US the late 1840s,
00:01:00Pam David:
which was the first kind of major wave of Jewish immigration to the US. They didn't necessarily want to come to the US but on my mother's side, I don't know much about my father's side, but Great Britain had very strict immigration policies and would not let a lot of Jews in. So my mother's family came to Wheeling, Illinois about 1848, and they were Haberdashers and they set up a clothing store
00:01:30Pam David:
and eventually, along with a lot of other Jewish families, maybe a thousand, maybe not even that many, moved to the south side of Chicago, near university of Chicago. They all helped each other out in business and get started. Then over the years, gravitated north of Chicago to the North Shore, to Glencoe and Highland Park, which were the only two villages on the North Shore
00:02:00Pam David:
that allowed Jews. My father's family ended up in Rochester, New York. I know much less about them because when they got married, my father moved to Chicago. He had two brothers. I met my grandfather a few times, but then he died, and my father's mother died before I was born. I'd met relatives at
00:02:30Pam David:
different times, but I didn't really know them, and my father talked about
having to trudge miles through the snow to go to school. The one time we went to
Rochester, we saw the school across the street from their house
Pam David:
want to stand out, but at the same time, there was antisemitism and exclusionary laws and exclusionary zoning, but they wanted to emulate everything of what they saw in, kind of, American mainstream society. More so on my mother's side than my father's side. On my mother's side, I grew up with a Christmas tree, with my mother
00:03:30Pam David:
hiding painted Easter eggs and always forgetting one of the hiding spots
Pam David:
in Glencoe, right on the lake, again, because they couldn't join any of the others. They started off something called a standard club, which is like a men's club downtown. Again, because they weren't allowed into any of the gentile ones. So they created these alternative structures that mimic gentile society, but were for Jews. And again, I don't know much about my father's family.
00:04:30Pam David:
My great-grandfather, Marcus, I think was a lawyer. I just have a picture. I thought was a lawyer. I have a picture of him on a big horse, but later I think he owned a clothing store too. And then Lester, my grandfather worked there. I don't think he owned it. I don't know. My maternal grandmother, I think, was the only one of my four grandparents
00:05:00Pam David:
who didn't go to college in the United States. That's really unusual too, with my contemporaries. So many of my contemporaries, their grandparents were the ones who immigrated. It was my great-grandparents who came over to the US. Is it great or great, great. I don't know, long time ago. Yeah. I knew a lot of my mother's family and I knew a lot about them, and I knew a lot about kind of
00:05:30Pam David:
Jewish history in Chicago, and then I learned more when I started to work for the Levi Strauss family, because they came over to San Francisco about the same time my family came to Chicago, and they became very wealthy. There were parallels though, in terms of San Francisco in that period versus Chicago in that period.
Mason Funk:
Let's talk a bit more. I cheated a little bit and I asked Robert, like,
00:06:00Mason Funk:
what are a few questions I should be sure to ask Pam?
Pam David:
Mason Funk:
And one of the ones he said was your childhood and how it affected your activism later in life. What seeds of some sort were planted there?
Pam David:
I feel really fortunate that I came of age in a period of great social movements. I talk about that with my students
00:06:30Pam David:
because I think it's very different coming of age now. There are things they have that I didn't have, but I grew up with a sense your actions could really influence the world, and together movements can change the world. My very first political activism was when I was 14 and I went to high school and they weren't allowing girls to wear pants. And I organized
00:07:00Pam David:
a demonstration to allow girls to wear pants. We petitioned the administration
and the school board and got the rules changed, so I got to wear pants to school
and that led to --
Pam David:
comfortable in them. And number two, you just can't do everything in them. And it wasn't fair. I've always had this sense of it's not right, it's not fair. But when I was 15, my oldest sister -- the one who passed away after Cheryl and who I was really close to, she was my role model -- she went off to college, to the East coast
00:08:00Pam David:
to Pembroke Brown, which was where SDS was launched. I went to visit her and
stayed in the dorm. First, she got me stoned. She
Pam David:
I said, "How am I gonna know when I'm stoned?" She goes, "Oh, you'll know."
Pam David:
I started connecting to people organizing against the war. Particularly, I think they were some lefty group, the Student Mobilization committee were organizing high school students against the war, so I became an organizer of high school students against the war. Those were creative days. We organized sit-ins and little bit of Guerrilla theater. I got suspended for carrying a Vietnamese flag draped
00:09:30Pam David:
fake coffin through the school. I'd go down to demonstrations in Chicago and I'd walk past a line of Chicago, cops known as the Red Squad. These were in the Daley years, and they would go, "Hi Pam." Because they they tracked all of us. So I'm sure I have an FBI file somewhere, but I've never bothered to look for it.
Mason Funk:
I can probably guess what a Red Squad was.
00:10:00Mason Funk:
But Can you tell us what it was?
Pam David:
Oh, just tracking political activity?
Mason Funk:
Do me a favor. Just say "A Red Squad."
Pam David:
A Red Squad is a division of police departments. They track political activity, in the sixties, of people they thought were radical. Being radical back then meant being against the war. It didn't take much to be radical.
Mason Funk:
Then how did you end up crossing or intersecting with the Chicago seven?
00:10:30Pam David:
So, 68, I was a junior in high school and the Democratic convention was happening, and my parents would not let me go downtown, which was probably smart of them because a lot of people did get their heads cracked open and got arrested. But afterwards there were seven people who were tried for conspiracy on the riot thing, including Bobby Seale and
00:11:00Pam David:
Jerry Rubin, and I don't even remember all the names. And I volunteer. There was
like a Chicago seven headquarters downtown in some big office building, and I
would go down with a friend, my friend Sharon, and we would volunteer, which
usually meant we would run off mimeographs. We would run paper from one office
to another. I mean, it was no big deal. But I had totally forgotten it until I
saw the film
Pam David:
Yeah. And I went, wait,
Mason Funk:
All right. You mentioned one thing in your prep interview that in a way you learned about antisemitism, partly, from your mom.
Pam David:
She was the most anti-Semitic ...
Mason Funk:
Do me a favor, start by saying, "My mom,"
Pam David:
My mother, who
00:12:00Pam David:
I got very close to in the last 15, 20 years of her life but was probably one of the most antisemitic Jews I'd ever known. One of the things that happened with Jews who came over in the 1840s, 1850s, they were not very religious. They were what you call middle class. They were educated, they admired everything kind of Anglo-Saxon.
00:12:30Pam David:
They wanted to assimilate and they were totally freaked out by the next wave of Jewish immigration. At the turn of the century, people came who were less educated, poorer, more religious. spoke Yiddish came from Eastern Europe, not from big cities in Germany or France.
00:13:00Pam David:
It was threatening to them.
Mason Funk:
It was threatening in what way? What were they afraid of?
Pam David:
They were afraid of a new wave of antisemitism here. It was like, shhhh, be
quiet, don't advertise that you're Jewish kind of thing. Don't talk so loud,
don't talk with your hands.
Pam David:
Which I never got that memo
Pam David:
they actually helped people set up chicken farms in Petaluma, which, at that time, without highways and good cars, took a day to get to Petaluma. Kind of outta sight outta mind. You do this, we'll help you do it. People thought it was very philanthropic that people were helping them get set up, but it was also very self-serving because they helped 'em get set up outside of San Francisco.
00:14:30Mason Funk:
Amazing. That's interesting.
Pam David:
Yeah, it was super interesting. I would imagine to some extent the same thing happened in Chicago because by the time that second wave came, turn of the century, these guys had made their lives here and they had started businesses, Sears, Roebuck, Florsheim shoes, Hart, Shaffner and Marks clothing. They all had helped finance each other's business. They all had stock
00:15:00Pam David:
in each other's business. They all lived in a small area of Hyde Park next to University of Chicago. They intermarried. I mean, it was a very tight community and they were protecting what, or they thought they were protecting what they had gained. The irony of where I grew up though, was I grew up in Highland Park, which was about probably 60% Jewish,
00:15:30Pam David:
70% Jewish. The schools I went to were 70% Jewish, and it was a mix. It was old guard, but it was new guard. In spite of my mom, I grew up heavily identified as Jewish, culturally, knowing nothing about the religion, but heavily cultural. And not until probably
00:16:00Pam David:
my teen years did I understand how strange it was that we had a Christmas tree, because all my Jewish friends, which were all my friends, wanted to come to our house to see the Christmas tree and sing Christmas carols and eat Christmas cookies. And I didn't understand what was weird about that until I was a little older and I went, oh, this is really weird. Now I don't celebrate Christmas.
Mason Funk:
Mason Funk:
would that have been seen as also like a "we don't do that, dear?" Was that kind of at odds with this notion of working hard, making money, creating community, but not getting in the dirty work of politics?
Pam David:
Yes and no. Not a simple answer to that.
Mason Funk:
Yes. If you can sort of simplify it because we have to move on, but I was curious about that.
Pam David:
My mom was a consummate kind of community volunteer.
00:17:00Pam David:
During World War II, my great-uncle was head of the Chicago Board of Trade, because the business they were in, they were grain commodities traders, which, in that day, you bought grain from the farmer, you stored it in a silo and you sold it to the manufacturer. Now, it's like Bitcoin, none of it's real. But my father, for show and tell for us,
00:17:30Pam David:
would bring us little bags of corn and wheat and whatever we could take to show and tell. My great-uncle traveled with a delegation during World War II to meet with FDR and, as were most Jews, they were supporting FDR and they were democratic. But then FDR in a side
00:18:00Pam David:
conversation with a good friend of my great uncles, during this thing, called him a kike and something derogatory about it. After that, my immediate family voted Republican, because they were so pissed at -- I mean they were all antisemites, but when it hit you personally. And it wasn't until the Vietnam War that both my parents kind of re-looked at that, my brother was close to draft age, and
00:18:30Pam David:
it was like, hmm
Pam David:
My father really didn't like my politics
Mason Funk:
Specifically what?
Pam David:
Just being a lefty, which I got kind of pulled into left politics in high school
and continued it in college and after and still am
Mason Funk:
But was his critique primarily that he saw you as anti-capitalist?
Pam David:
Yeah. Yeah. And he made a living in the market.
00:19:30Pam David:
He didn't understand it. He wasn't freaked out about my being a lesbian, but he
was freaked out about my politics. My mother was freaked out about my being a
lesbian and couldn't care less about my politics.
Mason Funk:
That's a marriage made in heaven.
Pam David:
Marriage made in heaven.
Mason Funk:
Mason Funk:
in the soil. I think I want to jump to the Highland Center, which I know we're jumping to college now. And you taking this period of time when you went under the leadership of someone named Guy Carawan, whose name I had never heard. Let's talk about what happened. How did you end up in Tennessee?
Pam David:
Good question. When I went to college, I looked for a progressive college
00:20:30Pam David:
that didn't have a lot of prerequisites, that I wasn't gonna be sitting in large lecture halls because it's not the way I learned very well, and I wanted to be either on west coast or east coast, kind of, as far away. I got into something called Pitzer College, which is one of the Claremont Colleges. It specializes in social sciences and education, which I had a great interest in. They had at the time
00:21:00Pam David:
external, a limited external studies program that you could do your sophomore junior year. For a semester or so, you could go either to this ghost town in Nevada and throw pots with an art teacher, very cool guy named Carl Hertel. Or you could go to Appalachia, an even smaller group of students, with a part-time instructor named Guy Carawan.
00:21:30Pam David:
Guy Carawan was one of the freedom singers and helped write, We Shall Overcome. If you look at the sheet music of We Shall Overcome, it will show Guy as a credit for having helped write it. He was on staff at the Highlander School in New Market, Tennessee. It didn't used to be in New Market, Tennessee, it used to be in --
00:22:00Pam David:
Anyway, another state, and got burned down by the Klu Klux Klan. It was an organizing center. I mean it was a school, but it was an organizing school. It's where Rosa Parks was trained in civil disobedience and where she met the founder, Myles Horton, of whom she said, it's the only white man in the world I've ever trusted. And 1972,
00:22:30Pam David:
I had taken the class with Guy and he invited me to be one of the students who went back with him to Appalachia and he would place us with families. We would do volunteer work for non-profits. On most weekends we would get a ride or hitchhike or somehow get to the Highlander School and help him conduct the workshops that they did every weekend there.
00:23:00Pam David:
In the fall of '72, so this is where I get confused, I don't know if it was '71 or '72, but in the fall with another student, we drove down to Highlander, got a little bit of an orientation, and then I got sent by myself to Harlan County, Kentucky to live with a coal mining family for a couple of months. ]
00:23:30Pam David:
They did have running water, but it was cold, so when you wanted a bath, you had
to heat up water, big iron tub in the kitchen, take your turn. They were very
kind to me. They went to a holy roller church up the holler
Pam David:
who were involved in it. They had a farm on the Wise River, Wise, Virginia, right across the river close to Highlander. One weekend, I got to help record an album of Mountain Movement music. Sarah Guthrie was there and Hazel Dickens and Pete Seeger and all these young musicians. Amazing, amazing, amazing experience. I'm at the farm overnight
00:24:30Pam David:
and one of the ex-nuns hands me a copy of the Red Stockings Manifesto. I'm totally being blown ... I think, really, the importance of this whole experience, I was completely out of my depth. I was in an environment I had never been in before. I was by myself most of the time living with a family who were very kind. But our lives couldn't have been more different.
00:25:00Pam David:
I've never really spent time in rural United States, much less the South. I worked, at first, for Kentucky Black Lung Association, which was part of United Mine Workers. Two things about that: Bill Worthington headed up Kentucky Black Lung, he was the only African American man in any leadership position in the United Mine Workers. I was living in District 9, one of the United Mine workers districts,
00:25:30Pam David:
the most conservative, run by a guy named Tony Boyle, who had had his prior opposition assassinated. Bill, who I was working for, was part of Miners for Democracy Against Boyle. We would drive around the mountains to these rallies for Miners for Democracy, all of which ended up in fights. He'd have these white punks come up to him and say, "What are you doing with that white girl?" And in his car,
00:26:00Pam David:
he pulled out a shotgun and say, "She's working with me." I was too young and
stupid to not be scared
Pam David:
to Kentucky from Chicago the first time, it was late spring and everything was beautiful and leafy. And then summer, as the leaves started to fall, you saw entire tops of mountains stripped off. I mean, strip mining does outrageous environmental damage. On the immediate side, doesn't have as many men having
00:27:00Pam David:
to go down into mines and getting black lung. But long-term damage to the environment and to the kids? Incredible.
Mason Funk:
Looking back -- I mean, you wrote somewhere, you said it totally shaped the rest of your life.
Pam David:
It did.
Mason Funk:
So talk about how that set your trajectory. Do me a favor, start by saying, "My time in Kentucky" or "My time at Highlander."
Pam David:
Well, my time in Appalachia
00:27:30Pam David:
gave me a set of experiences that were so out of my comfort zone that they did change me forever. It's what I learned about race. It's what I learned about people, how people took care of each other. There's this image that I never can forget of; we went to visit a miner who was dying of black lung, and we walk into his small home and he's in a hospital bed
00:28:00Pam David:
in the middle of the living room, which is smaller than this room. There are several people in chairs along the side of both beds. His daughter is nursing his grandson at the foot of the bed. You have life and you have death. He was probably in his fifties and he looked 90.
00:28:30Pam David:
My experience of death and sickness was very antiseptic. You go to a hospital, you don't die at home. You have medical care and you have a doctor or nurse or something there. I mean, it was the whole scene. This was about community and family and real issues of life and death. And working in a mine all your life and having black lung and not being able to breathe and
00:29:00Pam David:
no assistance. It was before miners got assistance for black lung. Meeting people like Myles Horton, spending time with Guy and his wife, Candie, and seeing what happens when you devote your life to social justice, that it's not just, 'do it while you're in college.' These were adult, ex-Mary Knoll nuns.
00:29:30Pam David:
What happens when you commit yourself to a life of social justice and what does that look like and feel like? It's the first time I've got a close ... More than a sense of it, I saw people living it. I saw people living an active political life. Having to figure out how to make a living, but committed to this.
Mason Funk:
Seeing these people who had devoted their lives to social justice. It didn't make you run back to --
Pam David:
No, it was the opposite.
00:30:00Pam David:
Being there, meeting the people that I did, rooted my politics. I was already leaning that way, I was already doing things, but it made it a permanent fixture in my life. The moonshine didn't hurt either.
Mason Funk:
Now go back to the Red Stockings manifesto. How did that also change you?
Pam David:
Well, I mean that's the craziness of it, right? Here I am, already having my mind blown and feeling like
00:30:30Pam David:
a fish outta water and all these things happening around me and learning these things and experience going to a holy roller church. The pastor is speaking in tongues and he's jumping up and down and he points at me and says, "Have you been saved?" And I went, "Yes." Because I didn't know what else to say. I masqueraded as a Protestant because I was afraid if they knew I was Jewish, they would think I killed Christ, and that would not be a good thing. Not that I knew what a Protestant was,
00:31:00Pam David:
but I knew it wasn't Jewish
Pam David:
events around support for Appalachia and against strip mining and folk history and some things there. But I, also, with a couple of other students and with some faculty, organized the first women's studies class at Pitzer College, which was the first women's studies class in the Claremont Colleges. We're talking now 19 -- Probably 1973. We start a women's center
00:32:00Pam David:
and a medical self-help group because we'd all gotten copies of the Boston
Women's Health Collective. There we were, with our speculums and mirrors, all
learning how to look up each other's vagina
Pam David:
they were telling us their coming out experiences. I had been having some dreams
Pam David:
So I wasn't a lesbian. Then this cute blonde woman came, was one of the women who came and talked to our class. Her story was -- Essentially, she said the same thing that I would've said, "Well, I didn't know I was a lesbian. I didn't think I was a lesbian." That made me think maybe I was a lesbian, but I still wasn't quite ready to act on it until I went up to graduate school.
00:33:30Pam David:
Then at the first opportunity with a softball team named the Ls, I came out with
first base
Mason Funk:
That's a great transition. That was gonna be my next question, was how did you get -- Because I knew that you'd gotten yourself to San Francisco. I want to sort of without giving a graduate school short shrift, but I want to kind of get into San Francisco in the seventies
00:34:00Mason Funk:
leading up to the Briggs initiatives.
Pam David:
Everything that was going on.
Mason Funk:
Everything. So place us in San Francisco. When did you get to San Francisco and how did you dive in? Or was it just getting dragged in or whatever?
Pam David:
A little of both. 1974, I graduated from college. I had gotten accepted into a doctoral program in education at Stanford. Which I thought would be more fun than going to law school. I got into law school on the east coast,
00:34:30Pam David:
Stanford on the West Coast, thought I'd stay in the West Coast. My sister was living near there at the time. Hated the school, but I got involved, in a bunch of different ways, in community stuff, and met a woman who was a tennis player. We started playing tennis together. One day, she had to leave tennis, because she was gonna go to a softball team practice.
00:35:00Pam David:
And I'm like, softball? I love softball. I wouldn't have been a baseball player if they'd let me. Can I come? And she was like, hemming and hawing and hemming and hawing.
She said, "Well, you can come, but you need to know that everybody on the team is a lesbian except me. I'm a neuter." That's how she described herself at the time. I'm like, it's okay. I have friends in college who are lesbian. I'm totally cool, da da da da.
00:35:30Pam David:
She said, "Well, you can come." So I went to this practice. Within a month, Peggy came out with third base and I came out with first base. And just like the woman who came and talked to us from the Los Angeles Lesbian Gay Community Center, as soon as I slept with a woman, I'm like, what the fuck have I been doing? Excuse my French, but this is -- And I wasn't in love, which I think was a good thing, I just wanted to -- I knew that
00:36:00Pam David:
I had to have sex with a woman to know if I was a lesbian or not. As soon as I did, I was like, that's it. I am. And I've never thought twice about it since. It was a very politically fertile period. We had a little lesbian collective in Palo Alto and we wrote opinion pieces for the local paper. We read stuff,
00:36:30Pam David:
we studied stuff together. Then San Francisco State launched a bachelor's degree program in women's studies -- they'd had women's studies, but it hadn't been a cohesive program -- led by a few really wonderful women. Sally Gearhart and Jane Gecko and Nancy McDermott were the three key people. They were advertising for people to come teach
00:37:00Pam David:
in that and to bring them curriculum. I had crafted a curriculum at Stanford for undergraduates with another woman in graduate school about sexism and education. I sent them the curriculum and I applied to become an instructor. I took a leave from Stanford. They gave me a master's, which was good because I needed to have that to teach at the university level. I went up to be interviewed
00:37:30Pam David:
Pam David:
come out and here were all these folks thinking I was an expert on women's stuff, which I wasn't. They hired me and next thing I know, I'm teaching women's studies in San Francisco State and I meet all sorts of people. Then Anita Bryant does her thing. Harvey Milk gets elected. I mean, Anita Bryant does her thing. Briggs does his thing.
Mason Funk:
Yeah. Let's talk about those things.
Pam David:
Well, I got involved.
00:38:30Mason Funk:
Okay. But what did Anita Bryant -- I mean, just briefly, we know the basic story, but as if people don't quite know.
Pam David:
Well, let's see if I can remember. What I remember about it is there was a human rights ordinance that got passed in Dade County, Florida. The orange juice queen, Anita Bryant, who was a former Miss America, but selling orange juice and Florida oranges forever on TV, decided she was gonna take a stand against that,
00:39:00Pam David:
and became the public figure against the acknowledgement that lesbian and gay
people -- it probably was just gay people -- have human rights. There was a
nationwide boycott of orange juice
Pam David:
lesbian gay rights activism on the other side. There was a state senator in California named John Briggs, who decided that he would bounce off of Anita Bryant and crafted legislation in California that was gonna go on the ballot. Any lesbian gay person or anybody supportive of lesbian and gay people were not gonna be allowed anywhere near public schools. You couldn't work
00:40:00Pam David:
in the cafeteria. You couldn't be a janitor, much less be a teacher, if you were lesbian or gay or supportive of lesbian and gay people. Which sounds now a lot like what's happening in Florida and Texas. But it was shocking. It was in California. Briggs had another initiative that expanded the death penalty. So I jumped in, I mean I'd been organizing stuff forever and I kept organizing
00:40:30Pam David:
and jumped into going to the kind of big community meetings that ended up kind of splitting into a couple different coalitions. One coalition, which I would call more centrist, was just focused on the Briggs initiative that was about gay people. The second one was fighting both Briggs initiatives because they understood who populations were hit by the death penalty more than others, and that's folks of color.
00:41:00Pam David:
And we're trying to build alliances and had a more progressive perspective. That was true of a lot of the women because we'd come through the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, and often came out through the women's movement, so we had a broader sense that this wasn't just gay rights, that gay rights was connected to other issues that had not been settled. We were still fighting for the right to abortion and against infant mortality and all sorts of things.
00:41:30Pam David:
Then this stuff. So mainstream of the gay community just focused on the one Briggs initiative, and then there was a splinter of us who focused on both. There was both women and men, but probably more women than men.
Mason Funk:
Yeah. It's like really when I heard that in your prep interview, I was like the last to know. This is like the untold story of the famous Prop Six.
00:42:00Pam David:
Right, right.
Mason Funk:
Does that mean that the one about the death penalty had like a different number altogether
Pam David:
It was like Prop Seven or Prop Eight. Yeah.
Mason Funk:
Do me a favor, start by saying, "The one about the death,"
Pam David:
The one about the death penalty had a different number to it, and honestly, most people in the gay community could care less about it. Just wasn't important to them because it didn't affect them personally.
Mason Funk:
Let's set this in context. This is in the seventies, the late seventies, mid to late seventies, in San Francisco.
00:42:30Mason Funk:
Characterize, for us, what the Castro was like in that era, from your perspective, just observing, but also as a woman.
Pam David:
I moved into the city --
Mason Funk:
Say the city of ...
Pam David:
I moved into the city of San Francisco in January, 1977 and got enmeshed in broader progressive politics as well as lesbian and gay politics. My first serious
00:43:00Pam David:
girlfriend was on staff at the San Francisco Women's Centers, which then became
the women's building after. Side note, after the women's centers moved out,
that's where Mark Leno moved in with his sign store.
Pam David:
was the international hotel, which had been where there were a lot of elderly Filipino men, in particular, who had come to San Francisco after World War II, been promised citizenship and support and hadn't gotten that and were essentially living in an SRO in Chinatown. Some developer bought it and wanted to tear it down. It was a huge fight.
00:44:00Pam David:
It brought the people who were protesting and building African American and third World studies at Berkeley and San Francisco State, and people who were doing progressive organizing in neighborhoods in San Francisco. It brought all sorts of different communities together, including progressives of the lesbian, gay community, to try to stop the eviction, which we didn't. Meanwhile, the Castro was becoming
00:44:30Pam David:
increasingly gay, gay businesses, gay homeownership, and gay bars. It's where people congregated, but it was not a friendly place for women. The second place that I lived in the city was the 20th and Castro. I'd walk through the Castro every day and over the time, until the very early eighties, it became less and less friendly to women.
00:45:00Pam David:
I'd be there in my blue jeans and frye boots and flannel shirt, because that was kind of the uniform at the time, and gay men would hiss at me and spit at me and tell me to get out of there, this was their space. Meanwhile, they were evicting us left and right because they had more income. It was often they had better jobs than a bunch of dykes,
00:45:30Pam David:
and they bought property. We were renting and living collectively, and they evicted us. I moved, I think, four times in four years. Lesbians created their own small community area in San Francisco because we moved to the mission. We had one bar in the mission. We had Amelia's, which was an offshoot of Maud's,
00:46:00Pam David:
which was one of the oldest bars that I loved, Maud's
Pam David:
There was this little strip, about five blocks of Valencia Street, it was also very mixed. It was in the middle of a Latino community and hipsters. But it became a set of safe places for women, but, also, which didn't last. And AIDS changed everything. I should say, before AIDS though,
00:47:00Pam David:
Harvey got assassinated. Let me go back to that a little bit because I think it's important. Harvey gets assassinated along with George Moscone, the mayor. Diane Feinstein becomes the mayor. She was almost out of politics. She becomes the mayor for 10 years, and San Francisco's politics, which had moved significantly to the left with Harvey and George, moved back to the right.
00:47:30Pam David:
Had moved to the left and went to the right. After Harvey died, I became part of a small ad hoc group of lesbians. We called ourselves the Lesbian Caucus, and our job was to try to get an audience with Diane Feinstein to get her to appoint Anne Kronenberg, who was Harvey's top aide to be the supervisor.
00:48:00Pam David:
I was the youngest at the time, which is kind of funny because now I'm one of the oldest, but I was one of the youngest, and Sally Gearhart was part of it. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyons and Roma Guy, and I dunno, there were probably about 15 or 20 of us, some whom had relationships with Feinstein. I was the youngest and probably also the most to the left. I was the radical one,
00:48:30Pam David:
for what it was worth, at the time. We tried to get an audience with Feinstein, the most conservative of us who knew Feinstein, she would not meet with, she absolutely refused to meet with because she knew what we wanted. We eventually asked Harry Britt -- who had also been an aide to Harvey, but has been described as a glorified mail room guy for Harvey, I hate to bust people's chops --
00:49:00Pam David:
he went in as our emissary. He got a meeting, went in to represent us, literally came out of the office as the supervisor and never came back to us to tell us what had happened. Never came back and said, "She wasn't ever gonna appoint Anne, but she offered to appoint me, and I said, 'yes.'" That's all he would've had to do. But he never did that. Then he became a supervisor and
00:49:30Pam David:
it changed San Francisco politics. Because Harvey was a visionary and a leader. Understood connections between communities, led the Coors boycott, because of Coors labor practices. He really shifted San Francisco politics for a long term, and it just went back.
00:50:00Pam David:
Out of their assassination then came all the stuff around Dan White and his treatment, kind of preferential treatment because he'd been a cop. Then the verdict, the Twinkie verdict that he got off on manslaughter because he had had too much sugar in his system. But he had so much sugar in his system that he brought a gun, that he brought extra ammunition,
00:50:30Pam David:
that he climbed through basement window at City Hall to avoid the metal detectors that had been set up because there was a trial going on in the City Hall of Hell's Angels. The metal detectors had been set up around the Hell's Angels. He knew that. He crawled through to not be detected. He first -- I don't remember who he killed first. I think he
00:51:00Pam David:
first killed George, in the mayor's office, there was an outer room and then a long corridor that you had to get buzzed into, and then the kind of inner sanctum, and then a room even behind the official office. That was a private room. He had resigned his seat and he went to beg George to get his seat back. George said no, and he shot George in the head. Then gave him
00:51:30Pam David:
a coup de gras when he was already on the ground. Then he went to find Harvey. He had to reload, and he did that and killed Harvey in his office. That whole thing unfolded. So when he got seven years for manslaughter, for killing two incredible human beings, changing the politics of San Francisco for a long time,
00:52:00Pam David:
we got mad and we did one of our marches from the Castro down to City Hall. People were really pissed off and they had a really good reason to be pissed off. There were some people who got up on the city hall steps. And if you're facing city hall to the left, there's kind of a statue at one side, and you can kind of climb up there and use a bullhorn to speak. People were telling us, calm down,
00:52:30Pam David:
go back home, da da da da. People were just too mad. Some people did start throwing rocks at City Hall when the windows started to break. There were those of us who felt -- I mean, the cops were out in force with their hardhats and their batons and their teargas and was like, we don't want this to deteriorate. We created a line of people holding hands across the city hall steps,
00:53:00Pam David:
and the cops charged us. I always considered it a police riot. I was with a friend who had multiple sclerosis and was in a wheelchair, so my priority at the time with another friend was to get her out of there quick, when the cops started beating up people and the teargas started coming. We got her out of there and in a
00:53:30Pam David:
pickup truck. And then by that, it had deteriorated so much. They're a bunch of cop cars parked in front of the state building and folks torched them and more stuff happened in front of City Hall, but people mostly ran and dispersed, and the cops chased them. The next thing we know, the cops were in the Castro going into the bars and beating people up
00:54:00Pam David:
and dragging them out. My friend Annie and I, in her Toyota pickup, ended up playing World War I ambulance driver. We were driving through the streets first downtown, near Civic Center. There were barrels of trash that had been set on fire in the middle of a street. We were driving through them and we would see where cops had cornered somebody or some group of people. We would drive right up, we'd
00:54:30Pam David:
honk our horn and make the cops go. Then the people who were beaten up, we would put in the back of the pickup, drive down to San Francisco general, unload, and go back. Jesus. We did that all night long. It was important and
00:55:00Pam David:
it also set the tone for San Francisco politics, particularly between the gay community and the cops for a number of years. Cops that raided a women's bar out on Geary Avenue in the sunset called Peg's Place. There was really nasty stuff happening and a lot of violence against gay people.
00:55:30Pam David:
We formed an organization called Lesbians Against Police Violence, LAPV, for those of you from Los Angeles. And again, we did all sorts of stuff. Well, one of the things we had to do is they convened a grand jury to look into who incited the riot, the White Night Riot, so we did this whole thing in the bars. We had this whole skit with musical numbers and everything about what to do with the grand jury comes calling, how not
00:56:00Pam David:
to cooperate, how to stay out of trouble, what the grand jury was, why nobody should get arrested. There was one woman in particular who we were really serious about protecting, and to this day, I think the time limit for being charged has run out, but we still protect her. We took it into the lesbian bars, we took it into the gay bars,
00:56:30Pam David:
we took it to the streets. We did all this kind of guerilla theater stuff. We had pamphlets. We just really took it upon ourselves to educate the community about what the police could do, couldn't do, what a grand jury was, what it wasn't. I mean, it was a very intense period.
Kate Kunath
I lived in San Francisco from 2000 to 2004, kind of between
00:57:00Kate Kunath
Oakland and San Francisco. But I lived on 18th and Dolores pretty much, and the Lexington Club was a place that we would go. That little area, I felt like, well, as Osento was still open, the Lexington Club was there. Hearing you talk about it and the importance that that area had to you and your community
00:57:30Kate Kunath
is really interesting. I wonder if you had any thoughts or if you could sort of opine on the importance of those spaces and what you think about like the intergenerational connection. Because it was important to your generation. It was important to mine
Pam David:
But there was a disconnect in --
Kate Kunath
There was a disconnect.
Pam David:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the lesbian community
00:58:00Pam David:
in San Francisco was really, at its height, involved mid to late seventies and maybe very early eighties, then things changed because of AIDS. I mean, San Francisco changed because of AIDS, but every community was impacted. I think there were a couple different things going on.
00:58:30Pam David:
One of which was lesbians stopped drinking as much
Pam David:
bar league in which 200 plus people would come and watch us play fastpitch at the corner of Potrero and Army, which is now Cesar Chavez on a Sunday afternoon and then we'd all go to whatever the home team bar was. We'd all go over there and drink until we were sloshed and whatever. But it was a big deal. There was this sense of a lesbian community. There was a little bit in Oakland, Berkeley,
00:59:30Pam David:
but most of it was centered in San Francisco, and by the late seventies, a lot in the Mission, but in other neighborhoods too. Peg's Place was in the Richmond, and A Little More was in the Excelsior, and Scott's was in Duboce Park. But Maud's was in the Haight, but it still -- The Mission kind of became the epicenter. It's where
01:00:00Pam David:
a lot of us got pushed out to live during all the real estate speculation going on in the seventies, late seventies. I ended up living on 29th and Mission with a couple of other people until we got evicted from that. Then moved to Bernal, but bought in Bernal. Which was a big deal. We bought a three unit, very funky old farmhouse
01:00:30Pam David:
for $130,000, I think. We each had to put about $5,000 down. My mortgage was $75 a month. Because we were tired of being evicted. I mean, I had lived 1, 2, 3 places in a couple of years. The bars started to disappear.
01:01:00Pam David:
Cheryl and I met at a bar, in 1986, called Sophia's, that was there, literally,
for a minute.
Pam David:
true to form. Part of what happened to me in the late seventies, early eighties, as I was doing a lot of organizing, I really wanted to connect the different issues in my life that were important to me. I didn't wanna just do work within a lesbian and gay community. There was an organization that was just starting
01:02:00Pam David:
up in San Francisco called The Alliance Against Women's Oppression, and the Alliance Against Women's Oppression actually started as the Women's Caucus inside of SNCC, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, during the civil rights movement. Then had become the Black Women's Alliance, mostly in New York, little bit out here, and then became the Third World Women's Alliance. Then they decided to become multiracial
01:02:30Pam David:
and it became the Alliance against Women's Oppression. It was connected to lefty groups. But for me, the draw was that it connected the anti-war work, the civil rights work, the women's movement and LGBT work in one, or could contain it within one organization and draw connections between what was going on. Because if you were trying to understand how the government was responding
01:03:00Pam David:
to HIV/AIDS, you couldn't understand it without looking at race and class and how drug companies worked and how the federal government worked and what they could do and what they couldn't do. It had to be intersectional before we started using that word. Many, many years before we started using that word. That's what really pulled me into doing this work, pulled me a little
01:03:30Pam David:
away from lesbian and gays, because so many of the lesbian gay rights folks I knew and had worked with were just solely in that movement, and I was cutting across movements.
Mason Funk:
This may sound like a silly question, but why?
Pam David:
Because it made sense to me and because it was my values, I felt you couldn't even understand the lesbian and gay rights movement unless you understood women's oppression. And if you understood
01:04:00Pam David:
capitalism and you had to look at race, I mean, this is the period that black men couldn't get into gay bars in the Castro without showing 17 IDs and still would get turned away. So a movement led heavily, particularly, by white gay men, was just never gonna do it for me. I always wanted to understand
01:04:30Pam David:
and felt like things needed to be understood in their complexity and the relationship to each other. That was it just wasn't that common. I feel like my history took me there. Yeah. Yeah. It just was my values.
Mason Funk:
So then AIDS comes into the picture.
Pam David:
AIDS comes in and a lot of the progressive gay men
01:05:00Pam David:
I came of age with all died. I mean, tremendous number died, and we were trying to understand it. Meanwhile, lots of things were going on other than AIDS. A lot of stuff happening in Central America and apartheid, and to me it was all connected. AIDS was not my biggest focus, but I did help write this Politics of AIDS Brochure.
Mason Funk:
Tell us about that.
01:05:30Pam David:
There's a woman named Nancy Krieger, who was an epidemiologist, getting her PhD at Berkeley, and she took the lead on it. But taking a political frame to both viruses and illnesses and how it's, when it strikes vulnerable populations, what the FDA role is, what the federal government role is. Unpacking it so folks could understand it. Looking at what are the political
01:06:00Pam David:
strategies that might be useful in this period. Act Up kind of came about at the same time. The quilt came a little bit later. At first people were dying within weeks, then months, then within a year. It wasn't until AZT that people maybe lived two years, but they didn't live well. Then the cocktail in
01:06:30Pam David:
the mid-nineties. We had a good -- '82, people started getting sick, but nobody knew what it was. I think about '84, we started to understand what was going on, that it was sexually transmitted. So you had a good 12, 14 years of a lot of people dying.
Mason Funk:
We touched on this briefly before, what do people mischaracterize about the response of the lesbian community to
01:07:00Mason Funk:
the epidemic? What do they get wrong?
Pam David:
That we were just so new --
Mason Funk:
Start in the complete sentence please
Pam David:
I get totally pissed off when, particularly lesbian roles characterized in response to the AIDS crisis, that we just came and took care of our gay male brethren. We did do that. We did a lot of that, but I think we
01:07:30Pam David:
were the ones who got angry first that this was going on, and led the way for gay men to be angry about it. This was not normal and this was not right. You could do some things about it. We were used to taking our health into our own hands. We had to fight for the right for abortion. We had to learn what our bodies looked like. We had to learn how to take care of ourselves.
01:08:00Pam David:
When somebody had a botched abortion or needed -- I mean, all the kind of underground stuff and activist stuff around health issues, we understood that we'd been there, we'd done that. We were still doing it. I was part of the Alliance's work here in the Bay Area. We were doing all sorts of work around infant mortality, and particularly in the East Bay where the infant mortality rate in the African American community was like 50 times more than in the white community.
01:08:30Pam David:
That had to do with how healthcare delivery was impacted by racism, class. We brought that to the struggle against AIDS and I think that was as important as our taking care of people. I want you to talk to people like Diane Jones so much because she was a new nurse, one of the founders of the women's building, at San Francisco General,
01:09:00Pam David:
and saw that most of the nurses and LVNs and other healthcare workers didn't want to take care of these new patients. And gloved up, I mean, everybody was scared of its own, but some of them just absolutely refused to see these folks. Diane helped create the first AIDS ward at San Francisco General and helped recruit healthcare workers who would
01:09:30Pam David:
take care of people with HIV/AIDS. It would take too long, but someday, I should tell you about the time Mother Teresa visited the AIDS ward. It's a story I heard from then mayor, Art Agnos. It's an incredible story. But long before Mother Teresa, Diane, and colleagues helped start the AIDS ward. Then the community adopted
01:10:00Pam David:
the AIDS ward and brought entertainment in and food in, and just tried to make sure nobody died alone.
Mason Funk:
This is a little side note. Do you know the playwright Terry Baum?
Pam David:
Yes.
Mason Funk:
She's one of our interviewees and she has spent a lot of time writing and thinking about women's anger, women's rage. What I'm getting at is you mentioned women,
01:10:30Mason Funk:
they didn't just come in to care for, they got angry. They led the way. And the role of women's anger, which of course is such a thing like, oh no, women can't be angry. Can you just talk about your perspective on the powerful unleashing of women's anger as a force for good in the world? Even when it's like, no, no, don't go there. Is that too broad of a topic?
Pam David:
It might be a little too broad, and I haven't really thought about it like that.
01:11:00Pam David:
It's funny because I came from a family that was so uncomfortable with anger, and yet I picked a road for myself which I was often angry. Not angry at the people I love. Angry at the world and what it was doing at Injustice and
01:11:30Pam David:
fuckedup-ness out there. And I haven't really thought about that as women's anger and what that is. Yeah. Terry
Mason Funk:
Mason Funk:
I want to get to the March on Washington.
Pam David:
So before the march on Washington, I'll tell you what led up to the March on Washington. In 1984, I was doing a lot of Latin America solidarity work. San Francisco had the largest expat population of Nicaraguans in the country, and there was a revolution happening. After the revolution, the organization I was working with, the Alliance Against Women's Oppression,
01:12:30Pam David:
organized a group of women from around the country, multiracial, and we were invited to go to Nicaragua as the guests of the Women's Association of the Sandinistas, which, similar for me to being in Appalachia, was unbelievably mind opening experience because I was, again, totally out of my element. I didn't know Spanish. I was with
01:13:00Pam David:
a group of women, some of whom I knew. Marcy was on that, Gallo, with Carmen. That's when they got together. There were a lot of little romances that happened. It was not a lesbian trip, per se. Yeah. But lesbians always figured how to do something. So '84, we're in Nicaragua, we're in Managua. We're meeting with all the top leadership of the Sandinistas,
01:13:30Pam David:
particularly the top women, whom of course we all have a crush on. The transition was so interesting. I'm going from leading a revolutionary battle to then all of a sudden being in charge and having to worry about how the garbage gets collected. Not easy. Went to Esteli, which was on the front lines of the Contra war, stayed with a family, just overnight, had to speak
01:14:00Pam David:
to the village that evening, heard gunfire. I said, I'm in a war zone. You know,
it's kind of like the same thing with Bill pulling a shotgun now. And all of a
sudden, I'm in a war zone and the 14 year old girl in the house sees that we're
a little freaked out about hearing gunfire, goes to the closet, pulls out a
Russian made rifle, and says, "Don't worry, we'll protect you."
Pam David:
down the river to Bluefields on the Atlantic side of Nicaragua. Totally different. So I'm in Nicaragua, I come home, I am doing some work. Well, we did a lot of work kind of telling the stories and bringing stories back.
01:15:00Pam David:
I was editing this newspaper called Somos Hermanus, bilingual -- which was pretty interesting, editing that, because I don't speak Spanish -- talking about what's going on, how people can support it. I was a little away from LGBT politics, but I was always get pulled into things. And then in 1986, it must have
01:15:30Pam David:
been '86, Cheryl and I meet in 1986. I give her a hard time for a while because I had just gotten out of a relationship and wasn't sure I was ready to jump into one. But she was very persistent, and she made me laugh all the way to the end. She made me laugh. Had no idea we were gonna be together for 34 years. I mean, that's just crazy.
01:16:00Pam David:
Pat Norman was an activist, just recently died, she worked for the department of public health. She's the one who helped convince gay community to close the bathhouses at the height of the AIDS epidemic. She ran for supervisor a couple times unsuccessfully. There had been a march in Washington in 19 -- The original one was 1979. I was there
01:16:30Pam David:
with a contingent from San Francisco with banners that celebrated the White
Night riots that showed, and I have pictures, which I will share later,
Pam David:
Some of the people who organized that march formed a steering committee, still in the height of the AIDS epidemic, to organize the '87 March on Washington for lesbian and gay rights, and they needed staff. The steering committee and all their wisdom said, let's have one person from the West Coast and one person from the East coast, Pat Norman was on the steering committee -- a couple of other people on the West Coast, I don't know, most were East Coast
01:17:30Pam David:
or Midwest -- she asked me if I'd go back, if I'd be interested in going back and being one of the original two staff people for the March on Washington. Cheryl and I had just gotten together, but we weren't living together. I said I'd like to do this, and she said, okay. I have my application that I had to write and I had to have references. Sally Gearhart was a reference and Roma was a reference, and
01:18:00Pam David:
maybe Reggie Bush who was a [inaudible]. I can't remember who my references were, but it was an assortment. Next thing I know, they said, "You're hired. Come to Washington." In the spring of 1987, I moved to Washington, DC. I had been in Washington like once or twice in my life. Didn't know it well. I knew some
01:18:30Pam David:
people there. I'd never organized a national march. I'd organized contingents in gay pride and political marches and whatever, but this was totally new to me, but I knew people who had done it. Particularly Leslie Cagan in New York. If you have not interviewed Leslie Cagan, you need to interview Leslie Cagan. Leslie Cagan organized the million person march around nuclear disarmament,
01:19:00Pam David:
so she knew how to organize big things. The scaffolding for the March on Washington in DC was the national Lesbian Gay Task Force. It was Sue Hyde and Urvashi Vaid,, and folks like that. I moved to Washington. I kept waiting for the fog to come in
01:19:30Pam David:
because it was really hot
Mason Funk:
Let me just let you know, we're gonna need to move through a little more quickly if we're gonna finish.
Pam David:
Okay. Okay. So quickly, my first day in Washington -- Lee Bush was the other staff person.
01:20:00Pam David:
He's long gone, sadly. But he rented an office in a building in DC that held a lot of progressive stuff. We gave ourselves titles. I became the National Outreach Coordinator for the march, and part of my job, besides getting people to the march, was also making links to the civil rights community. Jesse Jackson had just opened his exploratory
01:20:30Pam David:
committee for the '88 campaign, down the hall. Same floor, just down the hall.
My first day in DC, so I'm gonna go get Reverend Jackson's endorsement for the
March on Washington
Pam David:
you write something as if you were Jesse Jackson and bring it to us and we'll get it to the reverend." And I said, okay. I walked down the hall to my IBM selectric. We did not have computers. We did not have cell phones. I mean, we organized this march with old technology. I sat down at the typewriter and said, "If I was Jesse Jackson, what would I say about the march on Washington?" So I wrote something,
01:21:30Pam David:
I write quickly, I write pretty easily. I knew his cadence. I brought it back down the hall. The next day, I got a call. Said, "Come down here. We've got something for you." He had made a few little notes and said, okay. That was our first endorsement from the Civil Rights community, which allowed us to get many broader endorsements, from Caesar Chavez to labor, to Coretta Scott King. I mean, everybody
01:22:00Pam David:
endorsed the march. There I was, organizing the march in Washington for lesbian and gay rights.
Mason Funk:
Did you work with Gil Gerald in this timeframe?
Pam David:
I met Gil in that timeframe. Yeah. I met a lot of the Washington policy folks in that timeframe.
Mason Funk:
He's just a recent interview that Kate and I did.
Pam David:
I mean, that's the thing, there's so many amazing people who have made all of what we have gotten happen and
01:22:30Pam David:
in different ways. I used the march to organize lesbians and gays for Jackson nationally with James Credle, who was co-chair, at the time, of Black and White Men Together. We were so successful, after the march, we hired our own staff who worked out of the Chicago office and raised money. But I wrote all of Jackson's policy pieces on lesbian gay rights, and I represented him to the press.
01:23:00Pam David:
When I came back to California eventually, and when the campaign was out here, I would travel with him. Probably the most important thing that I did, the day before the California Primary, I set up a visit for Reverend Jackson to go to Coming Home Hospice. And, again, you gotta remember context, AIDS is still -- There's still no word from the White House. It's gay men, it hits
01:23:30Pam David:
intravenous drug users and the African American, Latino community. We don't care about them. There was nothing happening. The quilt at the march I think was helpful. Nancy Pelosi made that happen, would not have happened, because the Park Service kept saying, "No, you can't do it. No, you can't do it." And their little kind of dance they did of unfolding it and twirling it, and every hour twirling it again,
01:24:00Pam David:
was because the Park Service was worried the quilt was gonna ruin the grass, and
that was the compromise Pelosi negotiated with them to let us lay out the quilt
on the lawn.
Pam David:
homophobes in the campaign. Not at the very top, but close enough that it kept disappearing off the schedule. I kept putting it back on. Disappeared off, came back on. We were gonna do a big rally on 19th Street in front of a hospice. After he did a visit, Jackson ran literally four or five hours late everywhere he went. Because he always had to stop and talk to people. I mean, it was crazy. He was
01:25:00Pam David:
four hours late, we're on a bus coming in. He finally gets there. Do you know where Coming Home Hospice is" It was one of the first hospices in San Francisco, a block off of Castro Street in an old nunnery or convent, I guess they call it. I don't know what the difference is, I'm Jewish. The press couldn't all come in. They had to be a press pool. I let Jackson in,
01:25:30Pam David:
we go upstairs, there's kind of a living room area, sofas and coffee tables and press guys come in behind us. One of the photographers jumps up onto the coffee table. Secret Service guy drags him down and says, "Get off the furniture. People live here. This is their home." It's not that I had a close relationship
01:26:00Pam David:
with the Secret Service, but they got it way more than the press got it. Then Reverend Jackson met with the folks who were ambulatory in the living room, then he went from room to room to room and talked to everybody and he hugged them, and if they wanted to, prayed with them and whatever, he was a reverend. It was the first time a legitimate presidential candidate,
01:26:30Pam David:
an important political figure, African-American, was touching, holding a person with HIV/AIDS. It sounds silly now, but in June of 1988, it was not silly at all. He was late getting to Los Angeles for his last debate, which I got blamed for.
01:27:00Pam David:
And I really didn't care. I didn't care. When we left, Coming Home, we'd had a
rally stage set up, and all of a sudden, every single San Francisco politician
who had been reluctant to support Jesse Jackson, including some of the gay,
lesbian politicians, all of a sudden they were all there
Pam David:
worked on a personal campaign. I'd never worked with somebody before. I'd never dealt with National press. I mean, a little bit during the March on Washington. But that wasn't my job, per se. It was a whole different experience.
Mason Funk:
You're one of the few people who's even invoked the name of Jesse Jackson, much less had this kind of in-depth personal experience
01:28:00Mason Funk:
with him and working with him. He's a little bit of a lost luminary, I feel like, right now. What lessons did you glean from him? And also maybe as part to that question, what do you think he accomplished setting the table for, for example, Barack Obama?
Pam David:
Oh, I think if there hadn't been an African American running before Barack, Barack would not have had the base that he did.
01:28:30Pam David:
But I think one of the most important conversations I had with Reverend Jackson, we were on the campaign plane and I'd arranged for, what's the guy's name? Mark Vanderway??. Does that sound familiar? He was a reporter for The Advocate, I think that was his name. And I'd arranged for The Advocate to have an exclusive interview with him, again, this was like in the spring of '88, to get published
01:29:00Pam David:
in the June issue of The Advocate. The way it goes it's like whoever's facilitating the interview that that staff person comes back with the reporter and sits through it. I actually have a picture of the three of us somewhere too. Mark's asking him, "Hey, you are a Baptist preacher. Why are you supporting lesbian and gay people?"
01:29:30Pam David:
And he had his generic response to that, which was, "I know oppression, all oppression is bad," whatever kind of things people say. But then he stopped and he said, my best friend is Reverend Willie Barrow. And she and her family lived down the street from me. Her kids all babysat my kids. And her son,
01:30:00Pam David:
who we all loved, could not tell us he was gay until he was dying of AIDS, and I don't want that to happen to anybody else. It was the most authentic and real and human story that he had shared of why this was important to him. Because he started talking about it in '84. He talked about the quilt. He used the L and G words
01:30:30Pam David:
at the Democratic Convention in 1984. He came and met with the lesbian, gay community in '84 in a community center on Valencia Street. Lesbian and gay people were very much involved in the Rainbow Coalition. When I organized lesbian and gays for Jackson, I never had so many people come up to me and say -- gay people, mostly gay men -- "I've always voted Republican, but I'm gonna vote for Reverend Jackson."
01:31:00Pam David:
Because he was there. He was at the March in Washington, almost not. I had to
literally sit in his office until I could talk to him for 10, 15 minutes and
tell him why it was really important, both for the gay community, but also for
him to be at the March in Washington. Because it was big event happening to
North Carolina that day for the Rainbow, and it was his birthday. I said, but
you gotta be there
Pam David:
in the cold in the rain to hear from him. I led the lesbian gay Jackson delegation in Atlanta at the Democratic Convention, afterwards, what he said to us, "Go get involved in local government, run for office, work in local government. We gotta build this from the ground up."
01:32:00Pam David:
So I did. I went back to California and I worked on a political campaign that was close to Mayor Agnos and all his top folks were working on it. He'd gotten elected in late '87, beat Diane Feinstein's handpicked candidate, and then
01:32:30Pam David:
he offered me a couple of different jobs in City Hall. One was in the mayor's office of Community Development. I didn't know what community development was. I didn't know what the federal Community Development Block Grant was. But I knew it worked across neighborhoods in San Francisco, particularly on issues impacting low income folks, and that was me. I mean, that was the work I wanted to do,
01:33:00Pam David:
was cross-sector work. Roma Guy said, "The women's building needs a new elevator
go work in community development."
Pam David:
to be honest, and I wanted out. Somebody called me and said, "I'm leaving this foundation, you should come run it." I knew the nonprofit sector. I did not know private philanthropy. If I'd known private philanthropy, I might not have done this job. But I threw my head in the ring, and next thing I know I'm running a private foundation for the descendants of Levi Strauss.
01:34:00Pam David:
I do that for 15 years
Mason Funk:
Let's pause. Because we've covered a lot of terrain, but I wanna do some digging in. First of all, if we could talk a bit more about your time at City Hall. I think you said you were the first out lesbian --
Pam David:
I was the first out ...
Mason Funk:
Start that [crosstalk].
Pam David:
Okay. When Art appointed me to the Mayor's Office of Community Development,
01:34:30Pam David:
to my surprise, because I knew lesbians in City Hall, turned out I was the first out lesbian appointed to a mayor's staff in the history of San Francisco. There was an article about me in the BAR that Scott Shaffer, who was the assistant press secretary at the time, did. The sad thing is that Art's sister is a lesbian and her wife
01:35:00Pam David:
was a deputy mayor to Art, but all under the carpet. Never acknowledged, because it would've been seen as nepotism, even though it was long before a gay marriage. But nobody talked about it. I'm sure there'd been others before me as well. But again, nobody talked about it. I started working for the city in January, 1990,
01:35:30Pam David:
which seems like there should have been many lesbians. There were many gay men. But there weren't a lot of out lesbians.
Mason Funk:
Why was it so difficult for lesbians to be out?
Pam David:
Well, to be out on a mayor's staff, you had to have political courage to hire a lesbian and allow them to be who they are and be known who they are.
Mason Funk:
Pam David:
I think gay men were a little more visible. I think there's always been more visibility of gay men than lesbians, generally. I think that was part of it. I don't know why it happened. It was a funny thing because I really went from being this kind of lefty activist demonstrating outside of City Hall to all of a sudden being this person
01:36:30Pam David:
inside of City Hall, who learned how to manage the politics to make good things happen. I mean, that was really the skillset that I had to learn when I went to City Hall.
Mason Funk:
It's a big deal.
Pam David:
It was a big deal. It was a big deal. I've always been about, okay, so my job here is to give access and good information to the people outside, where so many people in City Hall are like, "No, no.
01:37:00Pam David:
We wanna mystify this. We wanna hide this. We don't want you to know when you
could actually come and make a difference." "You come to the budget hearing."
Because by then the budget's already been set.
Pam David:
felt my role is to be a conduit of good and accurate and honest information. Not to bullshit. Not to lie. Not to hide behind it.
Mason Funk:
Yeah. That's another big deal.
Pam David:
I don't know.
Mason Funk:
Okay. Well, we'll come back to it. But let's talk, even though I feel like we gave it a little bit short shrift,
01:38:00Mason Funk:
but let's move on to the years ... Do you not want to mention the actual foundation?
Pam David:
We can talk about it.
Mason Funk:
Oh, okay. Because you've kind of referred to it obliquely so far. So tell us you got hired, kind of start fresh with that story and then maybe kind of go into that theme of like, private philanthropy can be like the castle on the hill, wealthy, white people determining how to help the poor, so forth.
Pam David:
You don't really want me to go
01:38:30Pam David:
into a big rant on philanthropy because I could, and that's a whole different topic and it's not very lesbian, gay based.
Mason Funk:
But important to our world right now.
Pam David:
Yeah.
Mason Funk:
You can go on maybe a little bit of a rant. Some of your observations and insights that you gleaned from those years.
Pam David:
I knew how to be a grant maker. I understood the nonprofit community. I had great respect for the nonprofit community. I always understood because community
01:39:00Pam David:
development essentially worked as a funder, right? We had about 40, $50 million, depending on where the dollars were. We would do, in a competitive process, to organizations serving low low income folks. In the African American community, in the Chinese community, in the Latino community, in the API community, and then --a little bit in the LGBT community,
01:39:30Pam David:
including the first grant community development dollars ever around HIV/AIDS that I made when I was a special assistant with Sandra Hernandez, who, at the time, was heading up the AIDS office to look at issues of race and class, in terms of accessing HIV/AIDS services.
01:40:00Pam David:
Then, it was in 2002 when I decided to leave, and this opportunity in private philanthropy came up. I thought of it as interesting, because less red tape, I should say. Less red tape, very well established, didn't have to raise money. Had an endowment. One of the things when you're in city hall and you're doing grant programs,
01:40:30Pam David:
people can protest when you make a decision. First, if you're the head of the department, they'll go to your commission. If they don't like what the commission says, they'll go to their supervisor. If they don't like what the supervisor says, they'll go to the mayor. There's like these infinite layers of appeal and public scrutiny and everything you do is right out there. You go to private philanthropy. I went to work for the
01:41:00Pam David:
Walter & Elise Haas Fund. Elise was the great niece of Levi Strauss. Levi Strauss was never married and had no kids. It was the first of the non-corporate foundations , the grandfather's foundation. Then succeeding generations all had wealth and created their own.
01:41:30Pam David:
The Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Foundation was Walter & Elise's son, who became CEO of Levi Strauss, made much money on their own, set up their own foundation. And they're the ones who, until last year, did a lot of work around lesbian and gay rights and particularly around marriage, and Matt Foreman, I think, is still there. I think --.
01:42:00Pam David:
Let me just kind of get my train of thought here. I go into philanthropy and I'm excited about it because I think there's more flexibility. What I find is there's some, because the trustees who hired me wanted a change, so I had an opportunity to bring some new issues and ways
01:42:30Pam David:
of doing things to the foundation, but then it stops. It's like within a certain thing, we can only do this. I got them to think about our grant making budget separate from our administrative budget because the way a lot of foundations, private foundations are set up, they're required to spend 5% of their corpus of the amount they have on foundation activities.
01:43:00Pam David:
They're not required to spend 5% on grants, so they can include all their admin costs, they can include rent and salaries and everything else. 5% was meant to be a floor, not a ceiling, but all of the numbers crunchers have said, well, if you look at inflation and you look at your payout, if you want this to live in perpetuity, don't spend more than 5%.
01:43:30Pam David:
Fact of the matter is you really can spend more than 5% and be around for a very long time. I'm somewhat agnostic on the issue of perpetuity versus let's spend it all while we're alive. But perpetuity, I think -- Well, that's not true. I think there should be an end to it. I think by the time you get into the third or fourth generation, you're so far away from how the money was made, there's a
01:44:00Pam David:
lack of connection. And if you personally have been wealthy for multi-generations, how do you really understand what we're trying to do, if the work we're doing is around public education, if it's around economic development in low income communities, if it's about arts equity?
01:44:30Pam David:
Private philanthropy is a contradiction in terms, and part of it is a contradiction from the onset because it's really set up by tax laws, not by rich people wanna do good things in life. It's set up by, if you put money into a donor advised fund or you set up a private foundation and you've had windfall profits of whatever, whatever, and you put that -- You don't have to pay tax on it. Now that money
01:45:00Pam David:
is supposed to be spent for the public good, but oh, you rich person, you get to define and determine what public good means to you. There's no accountability except some laws around not spending it on yourself, which get controverted all the time, but that's what they got Trump on in New York. There are some self-dealing laws,
01:45:30Pam David:
you have to spend the 5%, but if you've set up a foundation and you're supposed to spend 5%, you could take that 5% and put it into a different kind of fund and still not have to spend it. If you get the tax credit for putting it into a donor advised fund, again, you don't have to spend it in that year. And it gets no -- Don't have to go there.
01:46:00Pam David:
The bottom line is lack of accountability, lack of sense of urgency and a distance, often, not always ... I mean, there are some really good foundations and there's a lot of good people in the foundation world helping run foundations, being program officers trying to do the right thing. But there's so much going against them
01:46:30Pam David:
in terms of historical practice. But this is how we've always done things or a foundation of trustees saying, this is our money. It's not their money. That's the disconnect. They got the tax credit, that money should be going -- Personally, bunch of different ways to do that. I think there needs to be a requirement for
01:47:00Pam David:
independent members of a board of directors, of a board of trustees. I think there has to be some accountability in terms of community review as a best practice. I think the folks have to stop saying, what are you gonna do for my $25,000 to a $2 million organization? As opposed to saying, I'm gonna give you general operating because you're demonstrating good leadership and I believe in what you're doing.
01:47:30Pam David:
The way that Mackenzie Scott is modeling, which is nonprofit, we're interested in you. I'm gonna have these anonymous people collect a lot of information. We're gonna do a lot of research, and then you're gonna get a letter from us saying that we're gonna give you a big check that you can spend over 10 years, and you don't have
01:48:00Pam David:
to write detailed reports every year, and you can use it for whatever you need. Whether it's to build staff, build your technology infrastructure, expand what you're doing. We don't care. We know you're doing good work and we trust you. There's a small movement in philanthropy called trust-based philanthropy that I'm a big advocate for because I don't think philanthropists have any meaning in the world without the folks doing the work.
01:48:30Pam David:
If they don't trust the folks doing the work, then they shouldn't fund them. But they also shouldn't be calling themselves philanthropists. If you trust the people and you trust the organization, you give them sufficient resources, you band with others so there's a bigger bang for the buck, and you let them do their work. Yes, you keep track of it. They probably have to write an annual report for
01:49:00Pam David:
their 27,000 other funders,
Mason Funk:
Okay. That's great. I think it's just an important piece and you're the only person who've spoken to that so far. And as Kate mentioned, or maybe it was Jack during the prep interview, we don't just do LGBTQ history here,
01:49:30Mason Funk:
we do, hopefully, the whole gamut. And that's an important issue, so I wanted to spend a little time on that.
Pam David:
Yeah. you know I've been on all sides of it. Yeah. Trying to get money out of philanthropy, working for philanthropy, being on boards and now I get to be an outside observer and critic. But as I say, and it's hard because I think most, so many of the people have good hearts and they wanna do the right thing.
01:50:00Pam David:
But they've tied themselves up in knots and it's too much about the money becoming more important than what they're doing and really living their values.
Mason Funk:
Okay. We have about a half an hour to go and we need to give some time for Cheryl.
01:50:30Pam David:
Yes, we do.
Mason Funk:
We need to give a chunk of time for Cheryl. I'm gonna try to pace us. I want to leave some time for Kate, because I'm sure Kate has some follow up questions. And like I say, we need to wrap up in about a half an hour. So let's talk about Cheryl.
Pam David:
I tear up when I think about her because she was the love of my life and probably
01:51:00Pam David:
the most important thing that ever happened to me was meeting her. The second most important thing was losing her to cancer. When I think about watershed moments, I think about Appalachian and I think about Jackson and the March on Washington. But then I think about Cheryl dying and how my life has changed. We met
01:51:30Pam David:
in 1986 through a mutual friend. I walked into this bar and my friend, Judy, was sitting on a bar stool. I knew Judy because, I mean, everybody knew everybody back then, but we also played music together. She's an incredible professional player. I used to play electric bass, not well, but I had fun with it. And sometimes we played together like a little garage band. She introduced me to Cheryl, who she was with,
01:52:00Pam David:
and Cheryl I had known of because she had housesat for some good friends of mine the year previously, so I knew the name and I knew we had friends in common. We started talking and we just connected. We laughed. She made me laugh from the get-go. She was just funny. She was witty.
01:52:30Pam David:
She'd found humor in things, which was interesting because she was also a glass half full kind of gal, but she had an incredible sense of humor. We talked about family, we talked about exes. I don't know, we just hit it off. Then I got freaked out because I had just gotten out of a relationship and she'd been out of one for a while. She was a little
01:53:00Pam David:
more ready than I was. I did push-pull for a while until she threatened to start
seeing other people. Then I said, oh, I'm here
Pam David:
I was way too political. My friends thought she wasn't political enough. But there was something, and some of it had to do with values and family and how we thought about people. Some of it had to do with sense of humor. Some of it had to do with being Jewish.
01:54:00Pam David:
I hadn't really ever had a relationship with a Jewish woman. What I found is that there were times I always got accused of being too intense into this and to that. And I wasn't too much of anything for Cheryl. Sometimes she might have been a little too this for me, but I was never too this for her. She thought all my past girlfriends were boring and that I needed to have more spark in my life. In fact, people have
01:54:30Pam David:
described her as having spark. We moved in within -- Well, we got together, we did this push-pull. Then I moved to Washington to organize the March on Washington. When I came back is when we moved in together. We lived together for most of our 34 years,
01:55:00Pam David:
through four Welsh Springer Spaniels dogs, one mean cat, seven or eight houses or apartments. But it was a love story. We had different kinds of work. She was a teacher in New York, moved out here, ended up working in the plant industry, working for a
01:55:30Pam David:
plant store on Castro Street that everybody shopped at, which meant every date I got flowers. Left that and she went to work for a company that did exterior landscaping. She became the Christmas maven, so she was in charge of doing all the Christmas decor for all these office buildings and hotels. It was pretty funny because she had no history with Christmas. But I wouldn't see her from
01:56:00Pam David:
about Halloween for about a month, but in Halloween and Thanksgiving, because they would be designing and installing all this Christmas stuff everywhere in San Francisco. But she really was interested in real estate. She was just petrified of taking the test. We had a good friend who encouraged her to do it and she did it. She went into real estate and she got her first
01:56:30Pam David:
clients who sold and bought with her within a month. She was off. There had been tension in our lives about my having work that was deeply satisfying and her having work she didn't like, and didn't have people that she loved and just never felt satisfied. It created, also, economic inequality between us.
01:57:00Pam David:
There was always some tension. Even though I would tell her what's mine is yours. She didn't believe me. It didn't matter how many domestic partnership agreements, how many commitment ceremonies, marriages, whatever we had, there was something about it. It wasn't until I stepped down from the foundation and she was still working that she made more money than me
01:57:30Pam David:
and it made her really happy.
Pam David:
She watched the housewives of whatever on reality TV and was up to date on music and fashion and whatever. I did an event with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin for One Fair Wage, which is the organization trying, helping restaurant workers move from a tip based culture to like a decently paid culture. All she could talk about when she met Jane Fonda was
01:58:30Pam David:
who did her facelift. They talked about plastic surgeons and they talked about
her clothes and her workout regimen.
Pam David:
and a hundred people on every single night. I can't tell you how many people started by saying "Cheryl was my best friend." I kind of just had to sit there and expressionless because I knew who her best friends were and they were not her best friends, but it's how she made people feel. There was a warmth and a
01:59:30Pam David:
connectivity about her that made her brilliant at what she did. Made her a
brilliant teacher before that made her fun to be around. She turned 70 in 2018
Pam David:
through Medicare. I get a small pension from the city and now I can do consulting work and only work on issues that I care about for people that I like. I took a couple months off and then I had this really great gig with Northern California grant makers working on some leadership issues. But first we had to go to Venice for Cheryl's 70th birthday, because it was Cheryl, we invited 50 people,
02:00:30Pam David:
and we said to them, if you come to Venice, we're gonna have dinner at our friend, Dario's, restaurant. We'd been going to Venice together since 1992. Cheryl thought she had been in Venetian in an earlier life. Learned Italian, and as she did, I learned bad Italian. So we went to Venice. It was our place. We went every year since 1992. People called us quasi Venetian or the
02:01:00Pam David:
donne di San Francisco
Pam David:
A lot from San Francisco but from New York and from Geneva and from London and from Paris and all our Venetian friends. We took over the whole restaurant and Cheryl got roasted and toasted. Our godchildren were there. Was Marianne there? Yes. My oldest sister Maryanne was there with her husband.
02:02:00Pam David:
One of her nieces, Cheryl's biological niece. My other sister didn't come, my brother didn't come. It's okay. Anyway, we had family, we had friends, incredible time. One night Cheryl said, "My stomach hurts. I think I have --" What is that? "Reflux or maybe I have an ulcer." My first thing was,
02:02:30Pam David:
well, maybe you should stop drinking so much Prosecco
Pam David:
She'd say Okay, and she would never go. Not true to form, when we went back to San Francisco, I said, "You need to go see your doctor." And she made an appointment right away. She went and her pancreatic enzymes were elevated, which is something that usually means something else is wrong. Which her doctor knew but we didn't. Her doc said, stop drinking. We were going back to Europe. We were going back to Paris a month later.
02:03:30Pam David:
because I was playing tennis in the gay games. But she stopped drinking and eating rich food and she felt better. She looked fine and the blood test was fine, but the doc said, "When you come back from Paris, we should do a CT scan just in case." They did a CT scan and it didn't really show anything but there was this little shadow and he said it might be water, so
02:04:00Pam David:
no rush, but let's get an MRI. We got an MRI like another month later and it showed a tumor in her pancreas but they couldn't tell what kind of tumor. Then they did an endoscopic ultrasound and showed that it was cancer. But they still couldn't tell what kind of cancer until the pathology came back. And then they said, well,
02:04:30Pam David:
it's this kind of cancer and you have to go see the oncologist right away. Everything had been going kind of slow, and through all of this, she felt fine. She was healthier than me. I have asthma, I've got a congenital heart thing. I've had a billion orthopedic stuff because I've been a jock all my life. She was healthy as a horse. All of a sudden we see the oncologist,
02:05:00Pam David:
they use these words like neuroendocrine, aggressive, palliative, non-surgical, chemotherapy. The day after we see the oncologist, she's getting a port put in. Two days after the oncologist, she starts chemo. You know, and of course we're on WebMD, we have friends in the cancer world and we're talking to them. It turns out it's like
02:05:30Pam David:
one of the nastiest cancers you can have. I don't know why people get it and they don't know how to treat it. There's so few people who get it, there's no research. There are two kinds of neuroendocrine cancer. One of which is really treatable and manageable, and the other, which is not. She had the other, and most people die within six months. It was unreal. At the same time,
02:06:00Pam David:
Cheryl started chemo. My sister who had been in remission for six years with her pancreatic cancer had a recurrence, and my mom, who'd had something going on with her pancreas for a few years that she refused any diagnosis or treatment for, started to fade. All of a sudden I had the three most important women in my life with some sort of pancreatic cancer.
02:06:30Pam David:
Cheryl said she wanted to live. And I said, I want you to live and we're gonna do everything. We did everything. We did everything alternative. We got this consultant, this brilliant doc, doc house, the TV show ... He was the model for House, because he just thinks out of the box. He looked
02:07:00Pam David:
across the world for anybody who knew anything about this or could extrapolate from something else. We went to Chicago to this alternative cancer clinic. We did nutrition and acupuncture. I mean, we did everything. She was fucking healthy. She stayed healthy. She started chemo and we were convinced it wasn't working because
02:07:30Pam David:
not one side effect. She didn't get nauseous, she wasn't fatigued. She was
working out, I was making her eat super healthy to her regret
Pam David:
Then she had to get a wig
Pam David:
very long because it'll kill all your red blood cells and you'll die from that."
Pam David:
and lives and had all sorts of plans and we were supposed to grow all together. The first time we met with the oncologist, I said we need another 20 years. The oncologist and Cheryl both just looked at me because we were gonna be lucky to have six months. We had two years
02:09:30Pam David:
and we had two really, really good years. A therapist once told us ... When we were trying to decide if we were gonna have a baby and our sex life was a little rocky, we went to a therapist who said to us, when things get really bad in a relationship, when hard things happen, you either choose to turn towards each other or you turn away. And we turned towards each other.
02:10:00Pam David:
After 32 years, at that time, you do start to take each other for granted a little bit. We didn't take one thing for granted after that. The other thing, and I'm so grateful, is how people came and supported us and her and me, so many different ways. You build community ... I mean,
02:10:30Pam David:
I was an organizer. I worked in community development. I always thought about building community, but not for me. I didn't build community for me. I never thought about it that way. But friends pointed out, you've built this and Cheryl's built this and people showed up, unbelievable ways. Until Covid, she never went to chemo
02:11:00Pam David:
without company. We never went to a doctor's appointment without somebody coming along with us to take notes. We could both be fully present. First chemo stopped working, when we started a second chemo, we hoped she could get in a clinical trial, but the cancer moved to her liver. She still felt fine,
02:11:30Pam David:
but we started seeing this downhill thing and we couldn't get into the clinical trials, so our consultant arranged for her to get the same drugs from the doc in LA, who was like THE immunotherapy doctor. We would drive down to LA and a friend put us up in her little casita behind her house in Culver City. I know
02:12:00Pam David:
we were there for medical visits, but every six weeks to five weeks that we had to drive down, it was like this little mini vacation. It was so sweet. But then everything from the lab work and the scans and everything was trending bad. We had two really good years and we had two really hard weeks. When all of a sudden the last chemo they tried
02:12:30Pam David:
didn't just do nothing, it made her sick because the tumor was gone from her liver. We actually did this experimental thing that killed the tumor in her pancreas. But as the doc said, "It exploded in your liver." Thank you so much. That was such a nice way of putting it. Then when your liver goes, you can't metabolize anything. Can't metabolize immunotherapy, you can't metabolize chemo, nothing. And all of a sudden,
02:13:00Pam David:
literally almost from one day to the next, her energy level just dropped. She
kind of took to her bed, and she still was working. She worked
Pam David:
I mean, the doc had said two weeks before, "We have nothing more to offer. You're doing great. You can last a few more months, but I'm gonna engage hospice with you. Better sooner than later." Which she didn't do yet. She hadn't called. I mean, didn't feel any urgency.
02:14:00Pam David:
She got really weak, and we went back to the hospital and I could come in with her to see the doctor. I couldn't come in with her to the infusion unit. She went for blood work and the blood work came back and was terrible. Everything came to me first, I had
02:14:30Pam David:
every scan result. Every whatever came to me first. It was just the role I played. I told Cheryl, generally, what it was and I said, "We're not leaving here without you seeing the doctor." Doctor wasn't there, but her PA was there. I texted the doc and said, we have to see somebody now. And we went back
02:15:00Pam David:
to see the PA who took one look at her and said, "You need a transfusion." She'd never spent a night in the hospital. She'd never had a transfusion, which is really common. I'm walking with her down the hall back towards the transfusion unit and she starts to go down.
02:15:30Pam David:
I said, "Choops, what? Can I sit you here and I'll go get a wheelchair?" And she just said, "No." I helped her back to the waiting area and then I had to leave because the transfusion was gonna take forever because she'd never had one. They hadn't blood typed, so they didn't know they had to do that. She was there for like four hours. I came back and I got her. She was still really weak and
02:16:00Pam David:
it just was really clear this was it. What I didn't talk about was the rabbi. We couldn't have gotten through this without the rabbi, without Camille. Neither of us had ever had a rabbi before. Neither of us had ever belonged to a synagogue. But what I found out about Cheryl's tumor, when I was in Chicago with my mom
02:16:30Pam David:
who was failing, and I literally sank to the floor when I was on the phone and thought I need spiritual support. That had never been a strong part of my life. No idea, but I decided I needed a rabbi. I came back and I told Cheryl that and she went okay. I mean, she didn't know if she wanted one. We both had found therapists when she got sick. But the rabbi thing
02:17:00Pam David:
was new
Pam David:
"Rabbi, I need you." And she just turned to me and said, "I'm here." And she was, for me and for both of us, all the way through and still there for me. Cheryl was more scared of death than anybody I'd ever known. She had the sense she'd gotten from her parents that death was nothingness
02:18:00Pam David:
and she was scared of it. Rabbi talked to her about different Jewish lenses on death and dying and spirit.
Mason Funk:
Can I just have you say Rabbi Camille or give her full name?
Pam David:
Rabbi Camille spent a lot of time talking with her about different Jewish lenses on death and afterlife and spirit, and I think really
02:18:30Pam David:
made a difference and made us do some work together around what both of us
wanted when we were dying, where we wanted to be, who we wanted to be with.
Cheryl wouldn't have never, until then, signed her advanced care directive
because she was afraid I'd pull the plug too fast.
Pam David:
We finally did an advanced care directive. When I knew she was dying and I could see it in her eyes, and I had just, six months earlier, been with my mom when she died and helped her die. So I knew it, I saw it. I called our two nieces and I called the rabbi
02:19:30Pam David:
and they came and sat with me and with Cheryl for about a day and a half. Rabbi went home at night. My nieces stayed with me. We called them our kids. They both had come out and lived in the Bay Area. And they called us the lesbiaunts,
Mason Funk:
Pam David:
Cheryl had really helped raise Kira and both of us had just been there for our nieces
02:20:00Pam David:
as kind of surrogate moms for years and years. They'd lived with us at times and
we always told them that the price for this was, when we get old and needed,
you're gonna have to wipe our ass and take care of us.
Mason Funk:
Let me ask you, I know there's so much more to say but you mentioned a couple things. It sounds kind of
02:20:30Mason Funk:
[inaudible] even to ask, but how you've been changed.
Pam David:
So, my mantra through Cheryl's illness -- One thing I kept saying was I'm strong and I'm resilient and I'm completely overwhelmed because through much of it, I was dealing with these three women dying of cancer. But the other thing I really
02:21:00Pam David:
thought about, I just wanted to be present and I wanted to keep my heart open. I didn't wanna miss a minute. When this all started, I stepped down from my consulting job. I stopped working. I played a lot of tennis. Cheryl didn't stop working, but I did. I couldn't even --
02:21:30Pam David:
I think that that mantra around keeping my heart open and staying present has really stayed with me. People tell me I've changed. I feel like I'm softer. I feel like I do listen better. I feel like I'm gentler. I'm not as critical. I've always been in my head. I mean, I've been political and intellectual and a reader and this
02:22:00Pam David:
and that and I'm still that, but it's not dominant. I moved here out of the city so I could walk outside and see redwoods and Japanese maples and breathe. I've let people be there for me in ways that I couldn't have imagined letting people be there for me. I find myself being there for other people in ways
02:22:30Pam David:
I don't know if I would've known how to do if I hadn't been through this. You don't wanna learn about grief. But I have found myself unable to compartmentalize. So honestly, if you do ask me how I am, I'm going to tell you. It's been two and a half years
02:23:00Pam David:
and I am just now starting to reemerge. The trip that Robert and I took together was part of it. I now have things I'm looking forward to. I'm out in the world. I mean, partly, Covid coming in the middle of this,
02:23:30Pam David:
in some ways, protected me because I didn't have to be out in the world, and allowed me to be with my grief and experience. I've done a lot of writing about it. When Cheryl got sick, she really surprisingly let me do a CaringBridge piece, which I wrote a lot over the two years. But she didn't want me to put anything
02:24:00Pam David:
on Facebook or anything like that. But after Cheryl died, I did it on Facebook
and I didn't wanna pretend something huge hadn't happened in my life. I didn't
wanna pretend that I was the same person.
Pam David:
relationship that there were a lot of things we were different about and we had to give each other lots of space to do those things that we were different about. But we also knew when we had to -- We never let ourselves drift far enough away that we couldn't come back and connect. All of a sudden, she's not there. Everything in your life changes. There's not one thing in your life that doesn't change.
02:25:00Pam David:
One habit, one pattern. Having to be with Ruby and not having somebody to say, "Oh, I'll walk her tonight honey, you stay." Where we lived, we just had one sink, and we'd always play this little 'get out of the way.' It's the little things that just totally kill you and it will totally break you up. It's what you miss. I cooked for her for 34 years. We had a really good deal. I cooked, she did dishes.
02:25:30Pam David:
After she died, people cooked for me, more food than I knew what to do with. I finally had to say, stop, please. I have to get back to normal eating. But I'd go to the farmer's market every week. They all knew me. I'd been shopping there for, I don't know, 15 years and they all knew what was going on and they'd always send me home with food. The first time I went back after Cheryl died,
02:26:00Pam David:
this guy, I don't know what I bought from him, figs and fruit, and he said, "How much do you want?" And I just burst into tears because I had no idea how much to buy just for me. Everything changes. I honestly don't know how I moved here. I mean, I was flattened because a month after Cheryl, my sister died
02:26:30Pam David:
and she suffered much more than Cheryl did. Then I got here and still was covid,
I really couldn't meet people here. But Marcy came up every Sunday for dinner.
It worked for both of us because she doesn't cook,
Pam David:
It got me into cooking again a little bit. Other friends who came in, you know, but I could also just go outside and walk. And I really found a lot of solace in nature. Then my friendships with Robert and Al was really wonderful. He loved Cheryl, and Al and I had known each other, I don't know, 30 years. The connection from having grown up in the same
02:27:30Pam David:
suburb of Chicago and same kind of same generation of Jews, in terms of when our families came to this country. So I'm different. I'll always be different I'm having to learn how to be alone. It's not something I ever got to do. When Cheryl was sick, I did a really good job
02:28:00Pam David:
of staying in the present. I held the hope in our relationship for both of us. I didn't realize it until much later, but I think that's part of the role that I played. Then when she's gone -- She's here. She'd walk into this little place
02:28:30Pam David:
and she would feel at home because it's our dogs in the painting and all this artwork was ours, we picked it out ourselves, or after my mom died, I brought a couple pieces home that reminded me of her. It's our colors. Cheryl will know, oh, this is where Pam's living. She'd be
02:29:00Pam David:
totally pissed at me if I don't reengage with the world. But just two weeks ago was the first time I went to the Horizons Foundation Gala. First event I'd gone to. It was wonderful. It was overwhelming because I saw these people and most of them knew she had died, but they hadn't seen me since she had died because of Covid.
02:29:30Pam David:
So now I'm trying to figure out what do I do? I haven't worked for four years. Do I wanna work? Do I not wanna work? I don't wanna work for pay. I've always been engaged in something. What is it that I wanna engage in? I don't know. I don't know.
02:30:00Mason Funk:
Well --
Pam David:
I make people cry
Pam David:
The memoir that I wrote is called Big Love. It's not called cancer, it's not called dying. It's called Big Love because it's what we had, and it got even bigger over those two years that we had.
02:31:00Mason Funk:
Thank you. That's what I was gonna try to say. It's a lot to share and I can
only imagine how big it is in your life. It's a lot to cher, c-h-e-r
Pam David:
God, there's so much I didn't -- I didn't talk about our God kids. While Cheryl was dying, our
02:31:30Pam David:
youngest godchild had decided a year before to convert to Judaism. This Vietnamese orphan had been adopted by our good friends, one of who was Irish Catholic, the other who was Vietnamese Buddhist, but decided because she loved Cheryl and me, she was gonna convert to Judaism and her bat mitzvah was the day before she died. We were supposed to read these blessings that we'd written,
02:32:00Pam David:
and Cheryl couldn't talk by that time, so I read both of them. I had to console this 15 year old, 14 year old that while it was so hard that Cheryl died right at her bat mitzvah, what she had to know is that it meant Cheryl was gonna be her guardian for the rest of her life, was always gonna be
02:32:30Pam David:
looking after her. And she could always look to her.
Mason Funk:
Kate.
Kate Kunath
Yeah.
Mason Funk:
Kate Kunath
Well, I just wanted to say that
02:33:00Kate Kunath
I was watching you wonder about what you're gonna do next, and I really admire your openness to your next chapter and reinventing whatever it is that you're gonna be again.
Pam David:
I have no clue it'll come. And I'm writing, which has been super important.
02:33:30Pam David:
I've written a lot all my life, but mostly what I've had to write has been analytical and policy and talking points and all that. I've started to try to keep a journal at different points in my life, but I've never done a good job at it. But between Caring Bridge and Facebook and now just trying to write separate.
02:34:00Pam David:
I wanna write, but writing is too passive to just do writing.
Mason Funk:
Yeah.
Pam David:
I didn't even talk about tennis. I wouldn't have survived my adolescence without tennis and I wouldn't have survived Cheryl's illness and this grief without tennis, it's been hugely important. When I was 12, my parents gave me the choice of going to Sunday School or playing --
02:34:30Pam David:
Well, earlier, all the little boys got to go play Mighty Midget, Little League and I was better than all of them and I couldn't do it. But my parents were supportive enough that they found competitive sports I could do. They said, you can be on the swim team or you can play tennis. And I said tennis. So at the age of 10, I started playing tennis at 11, I played my first tournament. This coach came into my life, old Davis Cup player,
02:35:00Pam David:
wonderful, wonderful human being. Asked me to be part of a small group of his proteges that played with the Lake Forest men's varsity team on Sunday mornings during the winter, which meant missing Sunday school. My parents gave me the choice, do you wanna go play tennis with the men's varsity or do you wanna go to Sunday school? So what was any self-respecting jock gonna do?
02:35:30Pam David:
And George, name of my tennis coach, really, I think, helped me get through adolescence because I didn't fit in very well. I had started playing tennis again, after my softball years and blowing my knee out, I'd started playing tennis again. When Cheryl got sick, man, I couldn't organize myself out of a paperback.
02:36:00Pam David:
I had a guy that I hit with every week who was a Buddhist and he took it upon himself to work on my focus. He said, we're just gonna think about one thing. It meant when I got on that tennis court, the whole rest of the world went away. Then I had tennis buddies [inaudible]
02:36:30Pam David:
and the rule was if I was inside the tennis lines of the court, it was tennis, outside of the tennis lines before or after we played, you could ask me how I was or how Cheryl was, but otherwise you couldn't.
Mason Funk:
So you would step inside --
Pam David:
I stayed inside the lines. It was incredible because it was a physical release,
02:37:00Pam David:
it was an emotional release. I used to joke that tennis was my meditative practice, but it was really true. It really was. It has stayed that way. The only issue was that I played so much tennis that my bad knee that I hurt in the summer of 1977 decided to really -- I had been told I needed a new knee 20 years ago,
02:37:30Pam David:
but I finally realized -- And I couldn't do it while Cheryl was sick. I just lived on the Advil. I made a date with the surgeon for December of last year to get a new knee. Doing it without Cheryl was ... I have this picture that a friend took of us. We used to work out of the same gym together with the same guy, one right after the other. One day I was
02:38:00Pam David:
finishing up my workout and Cheryl came in and she was like right behind me. The guy took the picture and it's like Cheryl having my back. I took that picture in with me to surgery so she'd have my back. After she died, my niece, Kira, noticed a hummingbird on a tree outside of her apartment in San Francisco,
02:38:30Pam David:
and Hummingbird had never showed up before, but showed up every day after Cher
died. She decided that it was Cheryl and then her dog died. And after her dog
died, all of a sudden one day there were two hummingbirds.
Pam David:
you come back."
Mason Funk:
Pam David:
And they came back. They kept coming back. I've never had a tattoo. A little scared, I don't like pain, so I'm not really crazy about the idea, but I have thought about getting a little tattoo of a hummingbird right here, so she'd always have my back.
Mason Funk:
I'm gonna finish this up
02:39:30Mason Funk:
with four short questions. Because unfortunately we just, we have to finish. They're the same four questions we ask everybody. The first one is if you could tell 15 year old Pam anything, what would it be? And include my question in your answer, please. Oh, wait. Before we do these, Kate?
Kate Kunath
Yeah.
Mason Funk:
Do you have any other questions?
Kate Kunath
No, I'm good.
Mason Funk:
Okay. All right.
02:40:00Pam David:
What would I tell my 15 year old self, if I could? I'd say a couple of things. I would say, you're gonna have a great life. There's a great life ahead of you. But keep doing what you've been doing, which is taking risks, doing things you don't know how to do.
02:40:30Pam David:
There's people out there who do, that you can ask for help. Keep putting yourself in places that you don't even know how you got there, but you'll be grateful that you did and keep your heart open.
Mason Funk:
Great. Do you ascribe to the notion, some notion that there's like a kind of a queer superpower that links all of us, LGBTQIA2S+ people,
02:41:00Mason Funk:
something that you, that lives in our souls? And if so, how would you define it?
Pam David:
It's so funny because I just saw a picture of Harry Hayes. I knew Harry. Harry and I would argue because he believed in Third Spirit. He believed that gay people were a different kind of people. I would argue with him about it because I didn't.
02:41:30Pam David:
Part of it that I argued with him about because I've always had to struggle with the thing about Jews being special, and antisemitism being fed on that trope, "You're different." And I don't want us to be special in some ways, but I think the lived experience
02:42:00Pam David:
of being lesbian or gay or bisexual or transgender or any of the above, non-binary, I think that changes you. I think it gives you a window into not belonging, into not having a place, into having a place and having to find people who share something with you,
02:42:30Pam David:
of confronting oppression, in whatever form that it is, that changes you. In that sense, I believe that if you are open to it and you let yourself feel what that is, there's something special but not unique.
Mason Funk:
That's a great answer. Thank you for that. Why is it important to you to share your story?
02:43:00Pam David:
It hasn't been until --
Mason Funk:
Do me a favor, it hasn't been important.
Pam David:
I haven't felt that it was important for me to share my story until kind of recently when I realized, first, that I have lots of stories to tell. That I have been in crazy places in my life
02:43:30Pam David:
and done interesting things and met incredible people, and how that's enriched my life. I also realized that I got there by taking chances, by saying yes to things I didn't know how to do. I didn't know how it would turn out. Sometimes it, maybe it didn't.
02:44:00Pam David:
But mostly in my life, saying yes has meant new adventures, new people, new love, opened my eyes to things I can't. I come from a family in which nobody else was the same. They would say no. They would've said no, they wouldn't have done it. They wouldn't have taken that leap of faith, because ultimately it is a leap of faith because you don't know what's on the other side.
02:44:30Pam David:
I have been in groups with younger people who don't know our history who seem interested. I think there is something important about having come of age across this span of great social movements that I've gotten
02:45:00Pam David:
to be part of and learn from, and not wanting that history lost. I always thought it was gonna be me on your end, Mason, that I'd be the one asking the questions of people and getting that history down. I never thought I'd be on this end. Thank you for that opportunity.
Mason Funk:
You're very welcome. The last question is, it kind of dovetails on
02:45:30Mason Funk:
the previous question because, but it's a little bit of a shout out to OUTWORDS. What is the importance, you've kind of alluded to it, but the importance of OUTWORDS and if you could mention OUTWORDS in your answer being specifically LGBTQ elders and their stories.
Pam David:
Well, I didn't know about OUTWORDS until Al and Robert told me about it. And I knew that he would come and take an Al'S history and I was so happy for that. Because I think, particularly
02:46:00Pam David:
his coming to San Francisco in the sixties and just the generation that he was, I think there's so many stories and so many men didn't get to tell those stories. Because it didn't even get to be that age because they died too young. I heard about OUTWORDS, I saw what you did with Al's story. And then both Al and Robert said, well,
02:46:30Pam David:
they should do your story. And of course me being me, I go on the website and I
look at the work that you've done and who you guys are and as a nonprofit, how
you've organized yourself and how you've done a lot with a little bit. When you
came and asked, I said, okay. Then when I got your questionnaire, I'm like, oh
shit,
Pam David:
make me think about all these things. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. But that's part of the importance, because you made me remember things and think about things that I haven't thought about. I do know that, I forgot the Chicago seven, I will forget things. I will forget people's names. I will forget where was that? Who was I with then? It happened. So you better get these stories down. The other piece I talked to a little bit earlier on,
02:47:30Pam David:
I feel like, particularly lesbians, and I would say particularly lesbians of color, which I am not, but we do not get our stories heard. I wanna see me angry. I can get angry about all the times lesbians' contributions to lesbian, gay community, to the lesbian, gay rights struggle to community at large have been so ignored, not told, overshadowed.
02:48:00Pam David:
Totally pisses me off, and it's still happening.
Mason Funk:
Well, it's an honor that we're able to hopefully rectify a little bit of that, because it's certainly something that I noticed at the outset. I'm like, okay, if I just interview the people who people tell me to interview, it'll all be people who look like me. And that's gonna miss the point.
Pam David:
That's right. I've already said about some of the people who've gone who you haven't gotten to interview the Ken Jones and Pat Normans and Doug Yaranons,
02:48:30Pam David:
I mean, incredible, incredible people, all in their own right.
Mason Funk:
Yeah. Well, thank you. It's been nothing but an honor. Thank you, again, for sharing so openly.
Pam David:
I don't know how to do anything, but people keep telling me I'm courageous. I'm like --
Mason Funk:
Pam David:
Pam David:
It's not courage to talk about this stuff. This is who I am, this is where I am. If you really love me, this is what you get.
Mason Funk:
It's how you heal eventually.
