MASON FUNK:

Thank you again for making space for us.

BETH ELLIOTT:

You're welcome.

MASON FUNK:

Start off by telling us your first and last names, and spelling them.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Beth Elliott, B-E-T-H, short for Elizabeth, Elliott, E L L I O T T.

MASON FUNK:

And you go by Beth.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I go by Beth.

MASON FUNK:

No, We're not going to call you Elizabeth Elliott.

BETH ELLIOTT:

No, that's on formal documents. I prefer Beth and close friends call me Bethie Anne on occasion, and with an 'e'.

MASON FUNK:

Good to know. What is your place and date of birth?

BETH ELLIOTT:

Vallejo, California 26, November, 1950.

MASON FUNK:

26th, November of 1950. Okay.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Bay area, third generation Bay Area native.

MASON FUNK:

Awesome. That's good to know. Your grandparents came here?

BETH ELLIOTT:

My father's parents were immigrants from Northern Italy to the Napa Valley.

BETH ELLIOTT:

My mother's mother was born in Petaluma. My mother's father was born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and was discharged from the army signal Corps on Angel Island and went up to Tomales and found the oyster country there, because his family were oyster people. My maternal grandmother, they were Irish, she was born in Vermont, but her parents both fled the famine.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I found out last year that my great, great grandmother who fled the famine and had her family in Vermont came out to California on the train after she was widowed, which took some moxie. She lived up in Sonoma County, then in the house in San Rafael that I knew as my grandmother's house. The great grandfather, his people came from Ireland,

BETH ELLIOTT:

but they were originally French Huguenot. So, getting picked on and threatened with violence kind of runs in the family. Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Well, let me start-ish at the beginning-ish. My questions will be kind of a combination of the conversations you and I have had and the questionnaire you filled out. You did mention early awareness of your LGBTQ identity. What did that mean to you?

BETH ELLIOTT:

What it meant to me is well, what it means, objectively, early onset severe gender dysphoria. I knew from an early age, I felt I'm a girl. Why does nobody see this? Why are they trying to force me to be a boy? That really came down when I started grammar school, Catholic school, and we had the uniforms and everything,

BETH ELLIOTT:

and lining up on the playground after recess; boys here, girls here, and by height. I got into the girls' line and the nun was not amused. I started to realize I was being trapped, and that's when I started falling into my childhood depression.

MASON FUNK:

What did that feel like, that childhood depression?

BETH ELLIOTT:

It felt awful. I felt no one was paying attention to me. They had these plans for me that weren't my plans for myself. I actually, I think third grade, made play dates with girl classmates, and after that, my parents kind of nudged me in another direction and found these other friends for me, and all of that. I went through cycles where I'd have a belief in myself

BETH ELLIOTT:

and it made me happy, and then I'd get shut down and stifled, so I'd try to fit in. There were boys' things that I liked, and there was the interaction with the other kids in the neighborhood that I liked, but would never quite really fit in, and it never worked for me emotionally. I would just get depressed. I recall being seven years old and wishing I could die.

BETH ELLIOTT:

It was bad. I had another big wave around 11 and 12. Actually, one point I was not showing signs of puberty, which I didn't know about, didn't bother me at all. My mother took me to a specialist and they said, "You're not developing." And I actually asked, "Well, if I'm not developing as a boy, could I be a girl? I'd really rather?" And she said, don't be silly.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Again, the cycle of elation, getting shut down; try to fit in, fitting in somewhat but never fitting in, in the long run. Then one day, I was 19, it was sunny day and went out for a long walk, because I discovered on my own, long walks as a counter for depression because I didn't see a future for myself. I didn't feel good.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I wasn't happy. As much as, sometimes, I kinda, sorta, fit in, I was never comfortable. One day, it was like I came home and changed clothes into a lighter shirt. I looked down and said, you know, puffy little mini breasts. Hey, remember how you used to think that you're really a girl, wouldn't be a trip if that were true? And I was like, bam, a life flashing before my eyes experience,

BETH ELLIOTT:

all the way down. It's like, things made sense in that light. So, I thought, whoa. I sat with that for three days because that's a life changing experience and I don't want to believe something like that on a whim.

MASON FUNK:

Let me interrupt you just to say, was this when you were on your walk? You mentioned going on a walk.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I was on a walk. It was a hot day. I had a shirt on that was too tight, so I went home to change it into a t-shirt.

BETH ELLIOTT:

While I was doing that, bam, it's like finally, the penny dropped. The light bulb went off. I went back out and walked three miles the other end of town, and actually ran into some friends were driving by. They were going up to Davis in the central valley to see a friend. There was a band that was going to play on the lawn at campus, so I just kind of

BETH ELLIOTT:

sat in the backseat, and it kind of like, let me look at things from this new point of view. Not letting on, but it was really, really interesting. It was just part of the thing that convinced me, yeah, I was right. It's okay to believe that I was right. A lot of my school friends with whom I was still hanging out, the hippies, they were really supportive. As you know, it was kind of a free-flowing time.

MASON FUNK:

You called it a goddess vision in your questionnaire. Is that language that you feel comfortable using?

BETH ELLIOTT:

I do. I do.

MASON FUNK:

Why do you call it a goddess vision?

BETH ELLIOTT:

I was, even before that moment, kind of having these visions of the universe as a goddess, I could see a face and she was kind of like tan and green, like the colors of the earth.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I was brought up Catholic, so I had a goddess orientation to begin with, you know what I mean. I think you do. It was just seeming like a really good metaphor, and it was one to which I can really relate. Afterwards, it became more of a thing because the church was telling me I was bad, I was wrong,

BETH ELLIOTT:

but the sense of the universe was telling me I was right and I was loved and that I should move forward on this path.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Let me interrupt, because we're going to get back there, moving forward, but I'm going to go back and fill in a couple of questions. You mentioned that your friends were supportive, I definitely want to hear about that, but let's go back to your mom for a second, because you mentioned her. She sounds like she was a pretty cool.

BETH ELLIOTT:

She was a cool mom. My mom, Alice Jane, she was bright. She had a curiosity about life that would not quit. It was there with her till the day she died, 89 and a half. She was a teacher. She'd been a Camp Fire Girl counselor. She taught us how to read before we were in school. She took us around interesting places. The missions. When they made Jack London's

BETH ELLIOTT:

ranch in Glen Ellen into a state park, she took us there. She took us to explore up and down the coast. She was an English teacher. Her father, she told me once, had a passion for diction, vocabulary and grammar, which turned her into an English teacher. Under that influence, I became a writer. What I found out later in my life,

BETH ELLIOTT:

in my late forties, was that basically we had long generations. He was on his own as a teenager, in the late 19th century. He basically had to pass for not Southern because there was a lot of hostility then. When we get to the turn of the century, the old veterans from the war started making peace, because it was about time. The Spanish American war, in which he was in the signal Corps, was actually the first time

BETH ELLIOTT:

that they let southerners back into the US military. But he was basically on his own. Reinvented himself; early adopter, that moving to California thing.

MASON FUNK:

I'm gonna pull you forward because otherwise we'll get lost. So, your mom, you briefly highlighted, she was curious,

MASON FUNK:

bright and gave you ... Experiencing the dysphoria, you felt the depression. Did she still feel like somewhat of a backstop for you during those times?

BETH ELLIOTT:

She did. She was a role model and she interacted with me a lot because I loved her stuff. She had expectations of me, but I think during my coming out and starting to transition,

BETH ELLIOTT:

she was kind of pulled between my father and myself. Technically, I was the first-born son and there were high expectations of me because they'd had some financial reversals, and here was I, this bright kid and I was kind of expected to do well and restore the family fortunes. I get into my late teens. I go off on this tangent, which I couldn't help but doing.

MASON FUNK:

Gotcha. Okay. All right. You also mentioned an important music teacher. I don't want to miss the opportunity to hear about this person.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Okay. Father Nicholas Freund. Apparently, he got some renown, but I had what seemed like an escape to a minor seminary boarding school in the Sacramento Valley, kind of for all practical purpose,

BETH ELLIOTT:

minor-league Catholic prep school. He went from being all classical music, rock and roll is crap, until Leonard Bernstein did his television special on rock music, which helped make Janis Ian a star, then all of a sudden, he was all bought in. We could get KPFA, the Berkeley Pacifica radio station,

BETH ELLIOTT:

all the way out there, and he would tape all this stuff. He taped Arlo Guthrie doing Alice's Restaurant, before that was pressed as an LP and played it for us. Apparently, unbeknownst to us, he was going into the city and catching some of the shows at the Fillmore and stuff like that. So, we got permission to be hip, and we were. My junior year, when my class was down to 26,

BETH ELLIOTT:

there was an annual junior-senior party that the juniors put on for the seniors. We put it on by the swimming pool, which for some reason had a lack of treatment and was full of algae. But we did a loop of 16-millimeter film that we hand colored each cell, ran it as a loop for light show, acted out a poem as kind of performance art. Of course, we had, like when the Beatles had revolver, and then after

BETH ELLIOTT:

I graduated Sergeant Pepper, we were getting exposed to psychedelic music, and our music teacher was encouraging that.

MASON FUNK:

So, he was like a cool priest.

BETH ELLIOTT:

He was a cool priest. Eventually, he left the priesthood and married and lost track, long ago.

MASON FUNK:

At that stage of your life when you were still figuring things out, or not there yet, how did he help you? How did that help you?

BETH ELLIOTT:

That helped me in it nudged me toward the hippie path. That was actually something I experienced as free and open, the whole thing, boys wearing long hair. Oh my God! Is it a boy or is it a girl? And I'm thinking ...

BETH ELLIOTT:

I met a young woman in my one-year college at the university of San Francisco who had had a girlfriend in high school and she was going through her coming out. I was getting more exposed to that, and I wondered about myself. There was a time there where I thought I had an accommodation, oh, I can be this femme, bisexual, hippie boy,

BETH ELLIOTT:

which seemed to ease the pain and discomfort and alienation for a while, but not for long because I found myself, I was falling in love with straight men and gay women, which duh, but on the other hand was not going to be useful in my having a life. But the hippie thing was free flowing. Through that, one of my friends who was the one who eventually turned on me at the LA conference,

BETH ELLIOTT:

I met one of her first lesbian friends who was a passing woman because her parents abandoned her when she was a child, so she lived on the street, and was also a folk singer. I started making some lesbian friends who liked me because I played music. I had a bit of a support system when it occurred to me, oh,

BETH ELLIOTT:

I feel like I'm really a girl, but I like girls. Oh yes. That is possible.

MASON FUNK:

Like a piece falling into place.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Yeah. It was a piece falling. Oh, that's what it is. I met Suzan Cooke in my journey, who is the only other transsexual woman I knew who had come out as a lesbian. I think it was after her surgery.

BETH ELLIOTT:

But there were very few of us, and I probably invented that stuff because what else would I do? I mean, that told me who I was. All of a sudden, I had dealing with my body to do, but I felt comfortable being me. I knew who I was and I liked who I was.

MASON FUNK:

You mentioned that after you had your goddess vision,

MASON FUNK:

you mentioned you had friends who were supportive. What did that look like? Tell us about those friends. Did you have like classic kind of coming out moments to them when you said XYZ?

BETH ELLIOTT:

I did. Yeah. I said, "Hey, this thing happened" and blah, blah, blah. They were my hippie friends. They were my dope smoking friends. So, it was like, cool.

MASON FUNK:

Can I interrupt just to ask you, like you said, this thing happened, but you wouldn't just say this thing happened. You would tell them more than that. So, what did you tell? If you remember.

BETH ELLIOTT:

To the best of my recollection, I said, I had this experience where I had been feeling this all my life, I don't know if you noticed or not, but it occurs to me, this is cool and this is what I want to do with my life. I'm going to find out how to get a sex change operation. I'm going to live as a lesbian. And they liked me. Well, I was cool because I was one of the hippies

BETH ELLIOTT:

and we had long lasting friendships. I think it was partly just the times.

MASON FUNK:

They celebrated it. They like, oh, that's something that I've never heard of before.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Yeah. Which carried over because my friend, Sparkle, the passing woman, she kind of took me under her wing. She was doubtful at first,

BETH ELLIOTT:

but I was hanging out with her and some of her lesbian friends. At first, that was tinged with sadness because I had a feeling, though I hadn't realized that this was where I supposed to be, but all I can be as an ally will let me be the best ally I can. She was skeptical at first, but she came around and Bev, who had met her, was enthusiastic.

BETH ELLIOTT:

She was my biggest fan until she became a separatist and had to sell me out.

MASON FUNK:

Okay, we'll get to that.

BETH ELLIOTT:

We'll get to that. But I had people who were supportive probably because people were doing different things and I didn't look like I was crazy and they could see me just getting more comfortable with myself.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I had my lesbian friends who were supportive, and Bev, eventually, got me to a DOB party out in Walnut Creek.

MASON FUNK:

Just pause right there. Oh, wait one second.

[CROSSTALK]

MASON FUNK:

Sorry for the interruption. You are going to start to talk about the DOB, but we have two big topics to cover, which is

BETH ELLIOTT:

Okay. Yeah. Because I'm going through supportive friends, and Stanford actually came after this.

MASON FUNK:

That's what I was going to wonder about. So, let's do DOB first. Why don't you start telling us about being taken to the DOB meeting?

BETH ELLIOTT:

Well, it was a party.

MASON FUNK:

A party?

BETH ELLIOTT:

Yeah. This is kind of happening at the same time because I was also exploring resources,

BETH ELLIOTT:

and Bev was helping me find them. Nothing in the yellow pages said transsexual. Oh, the National Transsexual Counseling Unit in San Francisco, I didn't think to look under national. So, I started getting information, but by this time I'd been kind of like getting accepted in the lesbian community.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I went to this party, this woman said, well, you can crash at my place in San Francisco. She was a bit loaded and it got a bit messy. It was pretty traumatic for me. But the morning, when she was sober, she understood why, no, I wasn't going to jump into bed with her

BETH ELLIOTT:

because that would have been wrong. We talked and she went to the DOB chapter and said, I have this friend, who, is it okay if she hangs out? They said, yes. I made friends, and because I was a bright cookie, they give responsibilities. I began proving myself.

MASON FUNK:

What was the DOB?

BETH ELLIOTT:

DOB was Daughters of Bilitis. It was the first lesbian rights organization, formed in San Francisco in 1955. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, and four other couples started out thinking they'd have a social group that would be an alternative to the bar scene. After a while, they decided, we can do education. We can bring in other lesbians and help them get self-respect. And the thing was okay, we're sexual inverts,

BETH ELLIOTT:

so there's something wrong with us, but maybe we can work with psychologists and researchers to get a better understanding of ourselves, so we can present ourselves to society and get acceptance. Of course, as time went on, they realized there's nothing wrong with us. One of the first things, I think was 1957, Dr. Evelyn Hooker did a study of gay men, put their psychological profiles next to those of straight men,

BETH ELLIOTT:

and the psychologists could not tell them apart. That was a big step. Then around 1970, they worked with a woman researcher who was studying lesbian couples, her study showed lesbians as better adjusted than heterosexual women, which may have been the bias of not trying to balance one's own desire to have a life with the

BETH ELLIOTT:

conventional expectations that came out of the Eisenhower era. That gradually changed. Around '69-'70, there was a turnover around the original group because there was a woman, Rita LaPorte, who was big on pushing butch-femme relationships. That's the only natural thing, all lesbians should be in butch-femme relationships. Also, aside from DOB and private parties,

BETH ELLIOTT:

there were no alternatives to the bar scene. And the bar scene had a heavy butch-femme social code. Partly for self-protection, but if you weren't one or the other, you were suspect. There was this new wave of women, college students, they were early twenties college students, on their own, working, a different generation, who had Stonewall which told us,

BETH ELLIOTT:

no, we don't have to cower in the bars. We can go if we want to, but we can start other things. DOB had parties in people's homes, which it had always done, and now is expanding. The older crowd had their liquor bottles on the kitchen table, while the younger crowd was out on the back porch smoking reefer. It was just a compatible scene for me

BETH ELLIOTT:

because I was here in the Bay Area and here was all the psychedelic music, and the Haight-Ashbury had gotten overwhelmed by all the massive influx and crashed, but there was free-form radio, there were the music shows, there was a community, there was a scene in which I fit into and was very comfortable in.

MASON FUNK:

Let me ask you this, backtracking a little bit, when you said your friend took you to your first DOB meeting, you said that she said to the people there, I have this friend who ...

BETH ELLIOTT:

No, she left. She went back to where she was.

MASON FUNK:

Tell us the story about how you got taken to your first DOB meeting.

BETH ELLIOTT:

This was a friend who --

MASON FUNK:

[Inaudible].

BETH ELLIOTT:

Yeah. Sorry. My legs are dead. I've been painting.

MASON FUNK:

Oh dear, are you still comfortable?

BETH ELLIOTT:

I'm comfortable. Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

So, how did you go to that first DOB meeting?

BETH ELLIOTT:

It was a party. She took me to this party. And when she left ...

MASON FUNK:

Sorry, let me ask you who you're talking about.

BETH ELLIOTT:

My friend, Bev, from college, who became my nemesis.

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor again, just so we don't leap forward in time. Just say my friend, Bev, from college.

BETH ELLIOTT:

My friend, Bev, from college, took me to a DOB party out in the suburbs and she left, and this other woman, Beverly, took me home to crash at her place in San Francisco. She was loaded and she thought she was picking me up,

BETH ELLIOTT:

and no, I just wanted to crash. I said, no, no, no, no, we're not going there, trust me. In the morning, we had a long conversation. She went to her DOB chapter, Beverly went to her DOB chapter and said, I have this friend, who, this is her process, is it okay if she hangs out? And they said, yes, and I did. I got to prove myself.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Beverly was a sad story. She came from a really strict Catholic family and was on the fence about her sexuality, and was caught up in one of those bar raids in the 1960s when they hauled everyone off in Paddy wagons. She lost her job as a children's playground director, for which she was so suited. Dealing with sexuality in that, she became an alcoholic and she was neurotic. At the end of her life, she was just starting to see some daylight,

BETH ELLIOTT:

but she had a lot of compassion for me and helped mainstream me into the community. Again, it was the era, people were really open to new stuff and they saw I was an authentic person and I respected boundaries. I wouldn't use the women's locker room.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Though there was a small group, we went swimming at the YWCA, I'm ducking into this closed cubicle. And there was once we went up to women's land on the Mendocino coast and there was an older woman, in her forties, I laugh at that now, who had kind of a crush on me and was hoping I would share the nice comfy sleeping space in her van.

BETH ELLIOTT:

But she had also had a few drinks, and I said, no, no, no, no, no. I slept on the hard ground in a flimsy sleeping bag, in the fog, on the Mendocino coast, rather than crawl into the van with her, because that would have been wrong. Now, there was a range of sexual interest and sexual disinterest, and

BETH ELLIOTT:

I wasn't enthusiastic about sexual intimacy with the body I had before surgery, so it got kinda tricky. But I wasn't going to expect that of anyone, and I was being protective of my friend, was a little loaded and didn't know what she was doing. I heard later said, why didn't Beth sleep in the van with me? Beth was doing you a favor.

BETH ELLIOTT:

She said, oh, Beth is good. So, I had a good reputation because what's the matter with you? Show some respect. And that stood me in good stead. Do you have more questions before I go forward from here?

MASON FUNK:

I think that's really, really good. No, go forward.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Okay. The same time, I was finding transsexual resources and met a couple of women who directed me to the Center for Special Problems. This was a joint effort with the San Francisco Police Department Community Relations Unit, which had been started by Sergeant Elliott Blackstone, who was one of the few honorary SOBs

BETH ELLIOTT:

(Sons of Bilitis) because he was working to establish better relationships between the police department, the gay community and other sexual minorities. Because in the Tenderloin, you had some transsexuals, you had a lot of people who, today, would be called transgender, and those were separate terms. They were living as women, maybe taking some hormones, but had no interest in having surgery.

BETH ELLIOTT:

And there were the street queens, the street queens and prostitution, which still goes on because that's the only work some can get. They actually had ID cards, which said, leave this person alone, she's under a doctor's care. I got a referral to an internist; my 20th birthday present was a hormone prescription. So, my friends in DOB

BETH ELLIOTT:

were kind of tracking this and kind of cheering me on. They look forward to when I could get through the process and be free. Things at home were getting worse because my parents thought, especially my dad, I was seeing a doctor to cure me of this crazy notion. And I said, oh no, no. I'm taking this crazy notion and running with it. I had dropped out of college.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I had a blue-collar job. My dad was delivering laundry for a commercial laundry, and I was working there and starting to start to grow breasts, and things were getting weird. We had a big fight and I had to pack up and leave. I called my friend, Beverly, who said, you can stay with me for a while. That started a summer of couch surfing, and sharing an apartment with Sparkle for a while,

BETH ELLIOTT:

till she got a new young girlfriend who wanted to push everyone else out. Then in the fall, getting a clerical job because I had taken touch typing in summer school and went to a temp agency where they said, you want to learn ten key adding machine while you're at it? I said, sure. So, I got a job as a billing clerk at a costume jewelry wholesaler. But I packed up and left home on a Tuesday. On Friday,

BETH ELLIOTT:

I was in a car with a couple of my DOB friends driving down to Los Angeles, June '71 Gay Women's West Coast Conference. Met a bunch of the women there at that conference. That was where the seeds of the Lesbian Mothers Union were formed because there were women who had been married, who had kids and nobody thought to provide childcare. They're saying, "Some of us do have children,

BETH ELLIOTT:

could you provide childcare?" Del Martin got involved with that, because she had been married and had had a child. While I was there, one of our crazy San Francisco types, who had driven down in her pickup with a camper, got pulled over police for something, and mouthed off, and he found the marijuana in her pickup. So, I'm there with my San Francisco DOB friends,

BETH ELLIOTT:

what can we do about this, this nice woman from one of the Canyons, Chevy Chase Canyon. She came up and said, "Hi, my husband is an attorney. Can I help?" And so, she got that sorted out and both Beverly and I -- Well, Beverly, who was her age, just took an immediate interest in her.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Well, she took an immediate interest in me. This was Lee Hanson Sisson, who was a development child psychologist and helped build up the LA Gay Center, the one after the Gay Women's Services Center, which was the women's one. She was on the board of that, I believe, then moved to Hawaii.

MASON FUNK:

This conference. I don't want to skip over it. I have it in my notes, but it's literally like the first time I've heard of

MASON FUNK:

where is it? The first gay conference for women it's in the 1970s.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Yeah. DOB had had national conferences, but DOB was also part of a NACHO, North American Congress of Homophile Organizations, which in 1970, Del Martin blew off because it was the thing of you expect us to

BETH ELLIOTT:

type the letters and make the coffee, but you don't to us in terms of policy, which would become an ongoing thing, even as gay men and lesbian women did start working together, mostly on sexual law reform. So, this, this was the first, I don't know if it was the first lesbian conference, per se, if there had been something on the east coast, but I'm not sure that there had been.

BETH ELLIOTT:

But this was just a local thing, a California thing, or mostly LA/Orange County. And some of us came from elsewhere. It was the usual thing, different workshops, but getting to network and just kind of like a larger community, because we were interested in what we're doing. And it was so different from the bar scene.

BETH ELLIOTT:

It was organized by Los Angeles DOB, which soon after morphed into something else, it was lesbian activist, or what are we calling ourselves this week? But it was the first time we got together and I forget if it was that or the 73 conference where women of color kind of got together. And so, we needed to talk about our stuff too, which was encouraged. Let's see. Cool.

MASON FUNK:

You started talking about a lesbian mothers union. I've heard a lot of stories, but this is a new one for me. What was the lesbian mothers union? Use the name of the organization.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Lesbian Mothers Union, they were lesbians who had children, usually by a previous marriage. One,

BETH ELLIOTT:

they wanted us to have childcare at lesbian conferences for them, and we said, oh, duh, we didn't think, because the whole lesbian thing. One of the benefits, oh, you're lesbian, you don't even have to use birth control. How cool is that? They got involved with fighting child custody issues. I think it was 1974, or earlier, there was a case Jeanne Jullion,

BETH ELLIOTT:

a lesbian mother here in the East Bay, who was in a nasty custody fight with her ex-husband and was going to have her children taken away. Of course, because you're a lesbian, you're a pervert, you're an unfit mother. They successfully fought for her because that was a big deal. The father could have no interest in the children and was going to have them raised by a step-mother, but the courts routinely said you're unfit.

BETH ELLIOTT:

That may still be happening. I know it's probably still an issue, less of an issue than it was, but that started at that '71 conference. LA DOB was doing a magazine called the Lesbian Tide, which they eventually took independent. LADOB kind of folded,

BETH ELLIOTT:

but the same women were doing a lot of activist stuff. There was also another group, the Orange County Radical Lesbian Feminists, AKA the Orange County Dyke Patrol. They were fun and part of the spirit of the time. They had sayings: 'All work and no play makes Jane a dull dyke', 'If it's worth doing, it's worth doing with joy'. This was the antithesis

BETH ELLIOTT:

of the radical lesbians, the political lesbians, who would come in, not only having a focus of, what's the correct political line? How do we look? How do we dress? How do we speak? What do we do? How do we live? And try to force that on the rest of us. It was a bad thing, because here we were, we were the lotus eaters, just having a good time. There was a collective lesbian household in Hollywood, who the neighbors called the hippies.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Yeah. You used a phrase about the DOB in this era, which was empowering lesbians who came to us as frightened little rabbits. Describe that, that work of this organization, kind of like just being a space where people could come as terrified as they were, and you would bring them in and kind of get them on their feet. Talk about that.

BETH ELLIOTT:

We gave them positive feedback. We told them they were wonderful just as they were because you have to recall in the 50s and 60s, there's very little information. DOB, when people found it, it was a goddess send for them. If you went to the library, you had Radcliffe Hall's novel,

BETH ELLIOTT:

The Well of Loneliness, which was apologetic and dreary and depressing. There was a gay male journalist who did The Sixth Man, saying one in six men were homosexual, and that was a little more positive. But you had a book by a journalist, Jess Stearn, called The Grapevine.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Think of it as Bell, Book and Candle with lesbians--they have their own code, they can recognize each other. They have their own bars when they congregate. Before I left home, but after I'd come out, I'd saw a local theater production of Bell, Book and Candle, with which I was unfamiliar. When one character goes on about this secret world of witches, I had to stifle my laughter.

BETH ELLIOTT:

And this book was dreary because it was kind of like the "twilight lives" kind of theme, which was also reflected in the pulp lesbian novels. So, the 50s and 60s, it's like, there's alcoholism, there's self-loathing, the relationships don't last. If they're relationships that do last, women meet and then flee the bar scene. Everything that women

BETH ELLIOTT:

who were discovering feelings for other women had was telling them, this is a terrible life that will make you miserable. When they found us, well, they have this magazine by lesbians, The Ladder, and then sisters would add more positive stories and went into women's actual lives. So, without DOB we wouldn't have a chance to see there were these alternative narratives. Now, among the pulp fiction,

BETH ELLIOTT:

there were a few novels that were actually positive. Ann Bannon wrote the Beebo Brinker novels, Odd Girl Out and four others. It still had like, there was negative stuff, but it gave hope. Patricia Highsmith, writing under the name, Claire Morgan, wrote The Price of Salt, which was recently made into the movie Carol with Cate Blanchett, and was wonderful.

BETH ELLIOTT:

There was also someone else under a pseudonym, Desert of the Heart, which was made into Desert Hearts, about an academic from the east who takes a train out to Reno to wait out six weeks to get a divorce and meets this wild, young woman, and they fall in love. Also, something positive. Also, you get into the 70s, you start having lesbians writing positive novels.

BETH ELLIOTT:

There's one called A Place for Us, eventually reissued as Patience and Sarah, about two women in Connecticut, a well-known lesbian couple, one of whom was a painter, and about their life. But that was like a start. But all the stuff women had was: this is a dreary life, run away if you can. And DOB just empowered them, says no, you're good. You're okay.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Your feelings are normal, they're good. They're positive. Take them and run with them. We're here to tell you that you are good. And that was something, the political lesbian organizations were not doing, the radical lesbians. It's all critique of patriarchy, how do we change the world? When they decided they were going to take over San Francisco DOB, because we had this installed base, we had connections.

BETH ELLIOTT:

We'd been part of the dialogue with the city, with the police, with the clergy, going back to the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, we were doing something else. We weren't there to tell women how to change their lives, we were there to be a safe space to empower them. It was really a shame that they kind of blew that up. Maybe our time had come and gone, who knows?

MASON FUNK:

That's awesome. I'm going to look at my notes and then figure out where to pick up from here. I'm just trying to figure out ...

BETH ELLIOTT:

Yeah. Because the activism I got into through DOB, there's my connection in LA, which grew. So, it's bouncing back and forth, literally.

MASON FUNK:

The part about the Stanford program ...

BETH ELLIOTT:

The Stanford program. Oh yeah. Okay.

MASON FUNK:

Let's do that. Let's talk about when, separate from the DOB and everything that was happening there, when you had already started taking hormones, but when the Stanford program became like a reality. What it was and when you decided that this is something that you were going to do.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I was told about the Stanford program because they were the ones doing surgery, who were local. It was an experimental program, Don Laub, the surgeon,

BETH ELLIOTT:

Norman Fisk, the psychologist. It was experimental to see if sex reassignment surgery, which I still believe is the correct term, because that's what they do, they change your physical sex as best as can be done, was an answer. Also, they had to prove that this could be done and it was effective

BETH ELLIOTT:

and that it wasn't mayhem, which carries criminal penalties. Their premise, which they eventually did prove, was that psychology will not bring these people relief; surgery for carefully selected clients will bring relief and they will go on to live happy and productive lives.

BETH ELLIOTT:

They were picking people very carefully. They eventually loosened up, but they did a lot of gatekeeping. Now, some of it was necessary. Only 1 in 3 who applied to the program would get taken into the program, and there was a lot of psychological evaluation, the MMPI, you worked with Norman Fisk.

BETH ELLIOTT:

They wanted to eliminate the people who had other psychological problems for which this was a mask or who'd just latched onto it, for whom won't be realistic. So, 1 in 3 got into the program, and 1 in 10 of those got through surgery. When I came in, I think it was in the spring of '71, because I'd been seeing the internist for three months,

BETH ELLIOTT:

or maybe it was later, after I left home, but sometime that year, I applied. They took me in, they had what they called a grooming session, which started out telling you how to dress, how to lay things out in your dresser, drawers and closets, which people ... It turned into a rap session. This was the summer,

BETH ELLIOTT:

the first one I went to Janice Maxwell who ran the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, and Sue Cooke was helping her out. But Sue eventually moved to LA, hung out on the Sunset Strip, did folk photo documentation of that community till it got a bit too rough for her, and she said, screw this, I'm going to be a lesbian hippie and live with my girlfriend. Janice told me,

BETH ELLIOTT:

you were the topic of interest after you left the rap group. I said, I was? You're the topic of conversation. Everyone said, "Who's the dyke?" I had gone there dressed like a hippie because I dressed like a hippie because I was a hippie. She said, you've got to play straight for Stanford or you will never get surgery. They will give you postponement after postponement after postponement.

BETH ELLIOTT:

You've got to go into the closet. That started the chain of events. There was stuff I reported accurately, I had a job that I was doing. I made up a non-dating life to pass for straight, which that really got complicated after the stuff hit the fan at DOB,

BETH ELLIOTT:

at the second LA conference. But I was going through the process. There was about a year evaluation, establishing myself in life, got a job. I got a job near the end of 1971 because I been a bit too free-form,

BETH ELLIOTT:

Sparkle's new girlfriend blew up that hippie pad, and I just went to a temp agency and got the clerical work. I Found a job that had medical insurance. I thought I was set. Just kind of went through that. Meanwhile, I was bouncing back and forth between San Francisco and Los Angeles,

BETH ELLIOTT:

because Lee Sisson had taken a shine to me. Because she took a shine to me and Beverly had had an interest in her, Beverly kicked me out, so I started couch surfing, and moved in with Sparkle. I was becoming a part of the community in LA and Orange County. I brought my trusty guitar with me, because I was writing lesbian songs, as a number of us were before there was

BETH ELLIOTT:

"women's music". Because we were hippie folk singers, we wanted to write songs that were lesbian songs. In addition to just ones from scratch, it was cool to write versions of other types of music only with lesbian lyrics. I wrote a lesbian doo-wop song and a lesbian girl group sound song, among others.

MASON FUNK:

I'm gonna interrupt for one second. Because I feel like we should finish the Stanford story. We should kind of follow that thread.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Okay. That's the long thread. In the fall of '72, with the thing of people having engineered my being booted out of DOB,

BETH ELLIOTT:

Norman Fisk told me we're going to give you another 10-month evaluation because we don't know that you're really progressing enough in life in general. Multiple stuff hitting multiple fans. Then during that 10-month period, the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference blew up, and I was definitely on the blacklist. All my friends basically scattered.

BETH ELLIOTT:

All the organizers of the LA Conference had nervous breakdowns. I was still hanging out, but I was becoming more and more isolated. I had Stanford hanging over my head. After 10 months I went back with my friend, Karen Wells from DOB, who was the editor of Sisters magazine, who had quit when separatists broke the promise that they would give her free reign.

BETH ELLIOTT:

They started telling her what to publish, and she said up yours. She had been married, so she introduced herself to Dr. Fisk as this married friend, and spoke on my behalf in between that, and my saying, yeah, well, I realize now and her in doing I've been stable in this job, yada, yada, yada. I'm not dating because I'm not ready to follow through with sexual intimacy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

BETH ELLIOTT:

So, they approved me, '74, for surgery the next spring. To help out where I was working in their slow period and are those going to be spring '74? Then they wouldn't take my insurance, Blue Cross in Northern California, which refused to pay for it. A lesbian attorney basically gave me my first legal word processing gig.

BETH ELLIOTT:

She said, "If you will type all the paperwork, I will represent you." We finally got an arbitration hearing before the Santa Clara county medical association, Dr. Laub and Dr. Fisk came and talked, my lawyer made a good case, and I made a good case, and we won in arbitration, two to one. Blue Cross was going to pay for my surgery. After that, they slept on a specific exclusion,

BETH ELLIOTT:

which lasted for -- You get into the late 1980s, there were insurance companies that were loosening up because a friend of mine is working for Sony Broadcast, her boss did some nudging and they came through for her and eventually changed. Now, the fight is

BETH ELLIOTT:

there's a lot of insurance covered, but it got to be, insurance will cover you if you're serious about it and not going to just want to get hormones or something, and just hang out in the middle. Some people were grumbling about that. But Stanford came to a successful conclusion, three days after they let me out of the hospital, there was a little piece of skin graft that became necrotic,

BETH ELLIOTT:

and I had a hemorrhage that nearly took me out. I went back into the hospital for another couple of weeks. During the month of May, 1975, I went through 17 units of blood, so I am now a dedicated blood donor. Weak as a kitten when I finished, but I had gotten through. Then it's like, how do I live my life from here? How do I find community? Stuff like that. And it became a thing, how do I engage with the larger world

BETH ELLIOTT:

since I'm not likely going to be isolated in this little lesbian community anymore? Eventually, they did one-year, three-year, five-year follow ups. I think it was at the three-year where Marty Norberg, the civilian coordinator, told me that they'd gotten reports some of their clients said that after surgery they'd come out as bisexual or lesbian, I said, yeah, that's been coming to mind.

BETH ELLIOTT:

They eventually realized that the people who were the most successful at going on and living their lives and being happy were not the ones who thought, okay, this'll happen, I'll find Prince Charming, the traditional expectations of the era. In fact, one of the times they had me talk to the rap group

BETH ELLIOTT:

I talked about, listen, you have to be a feminist because you have to count on yourself to support yourself, to have a job. Nobody's going to do it for you. Even if you find someone who will do that for you, you need to be able to support yourself. You need to be independent. That's going to make you more attractive. So, Stanford started out with a very rigid expectation, but learned from the client base.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I think it was in the late 70s, the surgeons started allowing other therapists to evaluate people or the psychologists to evaluate people. There was Millie Brown, two of my friends went through her. It was more like a thing, yes, we know this works. Yes, we know there are some people for whom surgery

BETH ELLIOTT:

is the only thing that is going to save them and we're getting good outcomes. Yes, we've proven our point. Now, it's just the thing of making sure people really are gender dysphoric. This really is going on with them. They don't have other complicating psychological factors. And yes, if we give them surgery, they're not going to crash and burn and make us look bad. Because consequences for

BETH ELLIOTT:

their looking bad was bad for them and it was bad for us. There are people on the religious conservative side who say, no, all these people have regrets, they're still suicides and stuff like that. Yeah, the pendulum swung the other way. There's too much affirmation, not enough evaluation because this is serious stuff. And even so,

BETH ELLIOTT:

it doesn't necessarily make your life easy. Life is still hard. If you're out in the dating pool, anything that takes you off center, whether it's high intelligence, transsexual background, another disability, is going to make you attractive to fewer people. Because most people are average.

BETH ELLIOTT:

There is a bell curve, and if you're an outlier in any way, it's not going to be easy for you. It is a challenging life because you'll find people for whom it's no big deal, you find people who are kind of okay with it, but they still can't wrap their heads around it if you don't look like a stereotype. That's been a problem for me. I think there are people who I've blown their minds because I wasn't what they expected.

BETH ELLIOTT:

They felt like, how can you not be a freak? You're supposed to be a freak. You're not a freak. I can't handle this. I think there's still a post-Stanford Stanford clinic. But I managed to get through and succeed

BETH ELLIOTT:

and survive the 1 in 4 complication rate. Interesting story, if it's not TMI, when I was in the hospital the first time, they eventually changed it, but I had a super pubic catheter in, and my knees were spread, they had a bar across that, to immobilize my pelvic area. Then when they took that off and the first time

BETH ELLIOTT:

I could go use the toilet in my hospital room, it was like the Beavis and Butthead episode where Beavis forgot how to take a whiz. Wow. This is going to be so great. I had to pee and I couldn't. In my discomfort, started rocking back and forth, forward and backwards, and eventually it started. Oh, what a relief! It's been less than a week, and I forgot how to pee.

MASON FUNK:

That's important.

BETH ELLIOTT:

That's important. Later on, I said that Beavis and Butthead episode, and I brought it back. I got through and healed and started exploring my life again.

MASON FUNK:

Awesome! This is a great place I need to take a stretch break. And then we're going to go back and have to do all the Daughters of Bilitis stuff that happened.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Yeah. Because there's this whole activist history where I was both

BETH ELLIOTT:

doing cool stuff, because people had me picked as a smart cookie and gave me responsibilities and I was getting the crap kicked out of me.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's important too. Let's take a break.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Sure

[CROSSTALK]

BETH ELLIOTT:

Beverly, actually, they elected her to be president of the San Francisco chapter, even though there were some misgivings, and the longer that kind of precipitated some things, because she used to go to this retreat house up near Sacramento, Catholic retreat house. They were trying to

BETH ELLIOTT:

get her to come down on the heterosexual side of the fence. When, this was a moment of pride for her, she accepted herself in her sexuality, and the priests and the women religious she called "the nunnies" didn't like that. So, that was a falling out, but for her, it was a move forward. And she was eventually taken down by the ripples from a tragic event earlier in her life, which would be an aside.

MASON FUNK:

Then your friend, Bev.

BETH ELLIOTT:

My friend, Bev, we were still hanging out. She was one of my biggest supporters. When she decided, 'I'm a feminist, I'm not wearing a bra any longer. Here, you can have mine.' That kind of support. She helped me find resources, but we kind of went our separate ways. I remember visiting her in Berkeley once,

BETH ELLIOTT:

and she felt comfortable enough, she didn't undress in front of me, but she was taking a shower and there was the rippled glass, and I could see the outline of her body. She was comfortable with that. She, eventually, at the '73 conference, which I'll lead up to with the earlier activism, just help set up a major trashing. I'm in DOB,

BETH ELLIOTT:

it's the summer of '71, because things happen in sequence. They asked me to run for vice president of the chapter -- because they saw me as a bright cookie, and I'm responsible, if they asked me to do things, I will -- and I won. I was doing that, I was helping produce Sisters magazine. I had already been doing a lot of stuff like picking up the mail, opening the envelopes, going through it, just doing the grunt work that a lot of other people weren't doing.

BETH ELLIOTT:

One of the reasons for that was that I had this group that took me in and gave me a chance and I felt an intense and fierce loyalty to them. Part of the activism for me was that my coming out as a lesbian was a discovery that had set me free. I still had a long tricky path to walk,

BETH ELLIOTT:

but it was also the era when a lot of us were being crazy hippies, and just wearing our tie dye and dancing around, dancing in circles in Golden Gate Park and stuff like that, expressing ourselves. I was in that groove. I was bright. I was getting a grasp on what was going on. I was articulate. So, I kept getting called on to do stuff.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I wanted to help because some of those frightened rabbits came through the door at 1005 Market Street to the DOB office. I just felt for them so much because they were wonderful people and they'd been frightened half to death of their own feelings. One of the things that did was piss me off.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I was going to be a hard charging activist and they took advantage of that. One term as vice-president working on the magazine. This got me linked up with Jim Foster of the Society for Individual Rights. They were across the street, they had a hall at 88 6th Street. He really played the conventional political games well,

BETH ELLIOTT:

maybe too well, because there was, in other words, men's priorities, women's priorities, establishment, grassroots. But I think at that point, San Francisco had just gone to electing the County supervisors by district, instead of at large. San Francisco, 49 square miles, is a city and county. Instead of a City Council,

BETH ELLIOTT:

they have a Board of Supervisors. In that, there was a much more diverse group that got elected. We had straight white male politicians who were on our side because they were with the times and they wanted our votes. Backstory, Jose Saria, who was the first drag Empress, had actually run for supervisor and not won,

BETH ELLIOTT:

but gotten a respectable number of votes, which showed that there was a gay vote. Politicians are sensitive to that. We had good guys like George Moscone, who does not get the credit that Harvey Milk does. Jim Foster had the idea to start a Democratic club, the volunteer organization that supports Democratic candidates and all of that. One day, Del Martin calls me up and says, Jim Foster's putting together this Democratic club.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Why don't you go there and work with him on that? I duly trotted across 6th Street and we formed the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club. The name was definitely a counter-cultural reference to her famous brownies, which since 2018 in California, brownies are the way to go. I make excellent brownies.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I got involved with that and I was one of their delegates to the state Council of Democratic Clubs convention. I'm advocating for lesbians. I also got involved with the California Committee for Sexual Law reform, another Jim Foster idea. My LA friends and I

BETH ELLIOTT:

pushed to have the board be elected by the community, that's how I got on that board with Jeanne Cordova from LA, the late Reverend Frieda Smith from Sacramento, I think also Barb McLean from LA. I forget who it was from San Diego, but that was the organization that got California's sodomy laws repealed in the 1975 legislative process. George Moscone was a hero.

BETH ELLIOTT:

He was the President pro tem of the State Senate, and he kept the legislators in the building, debating, while Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally could fly up from Los Angeles and cast the tie-breaking vote, which decriminalized sex. Because we had been unapprehended felons. Even though it was only enforced against gay people and not straight people,

BETH ELLIOTT:

oral sex, anal sex, pretty much, I don't think it was literally anything but heterosexual intercourse in the missionary position, but damn near actual ... In fact, there was a Southern California assemblyman, last name was Robbins, who had hit on my friend Lee Sisson at a party and said he had this "specialty."

BETH ELLIOTT:

She said, "You bastard, you're hitting on me and you voted against the consensual sex bill." Well, next session, he voted for it. Part of that experience was trying to do community organizing and do voter registration. We went into bars, lesbian bars, where they did not want to hear from us because they didn't know who we were. You want us to sign something with our real names?

BETH ELLIOTT:

It was quite an education because we saw that because things were that bad, that happened. There was a black lesbian club called Club Carnation in East Oakland, and they weren't hostile to us, but they weren't getting involved. It was just interesting. One time, we went to a bar in West Sacramento and there's this butch at the door checking IDs. I walk in and

BETH ELLIOTT:

she looks me up and down. I didn't know what to make of that. So, there were those things. I was able to follow through the sexual law reform to completion. Even though my world was exploding.

MASON FUNK:

Tell us about that part.

BETH ELLIOTT:

It exploded in San Francisco and it really exploded in Los Angeles.

BETH ELLIOTT:

From the '71 conference and Lee Sisson taking a liking to me. We actually had this really, really sweet affair for a while. One day, she called me up in San Francisco and said, at the San Francisco airport, at the Pacific Southwest Airline counter. PSA had the flight attendants in the kind of popsicle-colored outfits.

BETH ELLIOTT:

"On such a day, flight such and such, there's a ticket with your name on it. I want you to go and pick up that ticket." So, that was one thing. I was hanging out with her and I was becoming part of the LA/Orange County activist scene too, bringing my guitar because friends and I were writing music. We're writing lesbian songs before the women's music thing. I mentioned my favorite, Popsicles and Icicles.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I wrote a girl group type song called, 'Lady on the Subway' from when I'd spent part of the summer in Chicago with my first woman lover, Mary, who Sparkle had dumped, but we took up a friendship and she moved to Chicago and I went out there and hung out. She was actually the one who ... I had to come back to the Bay Area for the resources, but she came up with a packet of the old Enovid birth control pills, one month's worth, which were really estrogen heavy.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I got back here and started going through those. Within a couple of days, it's like, my, I felt different. Like, this is how I'm supposed to feel. I had a little run of hormones before getting the actual prescription. But I wrote 'Lady on the Subway' with references to the El and Belmont Station, should people recognize those. All the doo-wop music at that time, really 70s was still ...

BETH ELLIOTT:

Those were oldies and they were still really popular, so I wrote a doo-wop song called 'Teen Love', about "what would they do if only they knew of our teen love?, I don't care what they say, I love anyway. They say we're stupid kids, but we'll show the world someday," stuff like that. A lot of humor involved because it was fun. It was fun writing this stuff. So, whenever they had a benefit for something

BETH ELLIOTT:

they'd have me come down and play. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, it's turning to 1972, the separatists are pushing to take over San Francisco DOB. They're actually coming in and harassing women who just came for the rap groups. Karen talked about one woman saying, I want to love women, but if this is what I have to put up with, I'm going back to men.

BETH ELLIOTT:

She was both sad and angry. I became a focal point because I was supposedly this intruder, even though everyone was cheering me on, and they loved hearing about the progress I was making with Stanford. Down in LA, there was a thing, we can't wait until Beth can get her surgery. We'll have a big party to celebrate. I had a supportive network. They loved me. I was cool, and I was making this music.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I was writing for the magazines, but August '72, they had an election. I ran for reelection as Vice-President, and got voted out. Then in the fall, they were getting more hardcore and they were pushing the radical conformity. Some of my friends and allies were leaving, like, Karen left because she wasn't going to be told what to publish in the magazine.

BETH ELLIOTT:

They had a vote. I did not just slink away. I said, I know you're going to kick me out, but I want you to own that. I'm not going to make it easy for you. You have to kick me out, and they did, the vote margin was about four to three percentage-wise. Then a couple of weeks after that, I got the notice from Stanford that they were putting me on a 10-month hold, and going to reevaluate me.

BETH ELLIOTT:

So, things sucked. All my friends in LA, they were stunned. They couldn't believe it. We were going ahead with organizing the conference at UCLA in April, 1973. Of course, the opening night, of course, I was going to play because that was something I did, and they loved my music. Unbeknownst to me,

BETH ELLIOTT:

at the urging of the poets, they had invited Robin Morgan of the women's liberationists from New York, editor of the Sisterhood is Powerful anthology, to be the keynote speaker because of her poetry. Mistake. Mistake number one. Barb McLean would say that was the organizers' first mistake. Unbeknownst to me,

BETH ELLIOTT:

my college friend, Bev, who had been my big supporter, had turned separatist, partly because her bisexual girlfriend would not give up her male lover and just have Bev. Because she was getting in this with the separatists, but had been my friend and supporter, she pretty much had to sell me out.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Little beknownst to me was that the New York women's liberation crowd and the Berkeley separatists were working behind our backs to disrupt the LA conference because it was a power-play. Robin Morgan has given two stories of that, in two different books she's written. One of them, she said that I basically kind of bullied my way onto the Friday night lineup. The other one said,

BETH ELLIOTT:

what were these women thinking when they put me on their Friday night lineup? But she said, the rumour was this conference was going to be the big one. Of course, that was her opportunity to make herself more of a star, and also to put us in our place and have the superstructure of the East Coast media center run everything because, as we all know, the sun shines out of their behinds.

BETH ELLIOTT:

We're preparing for this. I head down there, Friday night comes and as Barb McLean wrote in the conference issue of the Lesbian Tide: "Friday the 13th (another thing we hadn't thought about)." Bev and some of her supporters come up, grab the mic, and she concocts a story that I had once tried to rape her. It was completely untrue.

BETH ELLIOTT:

But she was shocked, shocked to see me on the lineup for the entertainment for this conference. Big brouhaha. Finally, they take a vote and a large majority votes to let me perform. As Barb says, she didn't know how I went through with it, but the show must go on. I was shaking. But this was my community,

BETH ELLIOTT:

these were my friends. I wasn't going to run and hide. Then the next day, Robin Morgan departs from the speech she'd given in advance, because the organizers wanted to approve it. She trashes me, not by name. She trashes all the organizers. She trashes about every lesbian who ever lived except for Del and Phyllis. She says she's a lesbian because she loves women with her life's blood, and her male partner is an "effeminist,"

BETH ELLIOTT:

and she's staying with him to raise their son. It was like, what could have been a defining moment to really build a movement that really was open and affirming in California, just smashed it. Just smashed it. After that, I could not work in this town, as it were, for 10 years. There was a case in the late 70s,

BETH ELLIOTT:

my then partner and I met the filmmaker Barbara Hammer, after a showing of her films. I talked with her about me working together on a project music for a film because by that time in '76 I had done an album length recording session, which I produced. I had help from a really good engineer, Oliver DiCicco, a studio in Noe Valley. It was good. It didn't get the time of day from Olivia

BETH ELLIOTT:

or anyone else, but I pressed a single from it, and had a chance to give a copy to Fred Catero, the famous engineer who was one of the founders of National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the Grammys people. He told me I did a great job. I had chops and Barbara Hammer was excited to have someone who could do recordings to work with her. I didn't hear from her, and when I called her back, she said,

BETH ELLIOTT:

"I'm sorry, someone told me who you are, and I can't afford to be seen working with you." This was someone who had an unshakable reputation, as it was, but it was that kind of thing. Meanwhile, after that, I had the year of 1974, all my friends are scattering. I was still hanging out in LA and Orange County from time to time, but I really had no day-to-day community.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I had to wonder what Stanford would do. Well, Stanford came through, but I had to wonder what was going to happen with the insurance. It's a terrible year. I had a second breakdown. If you can call a breakdown. I took my two weeks vacation, lay on my bed at home and went bee-buh-dee-buh-dee

[moving a finger up and down between her lips]. It was just awful.

MASON FUNK:

I'm just remembering that you were all of like 24 years old.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

It's unbelievable.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Say 23, during the conference. 23 and I was done. So, that went on. What broke that got into the 1980s. Well, after surgery, I did have a five-year relationship. I found the Neo-Pagan community. I was hanging out with that because there was cross fertilization with them and the Haight-Ashbury revival.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Met a lover. We became lovers for five years and she was just kind of collapsing emotionally and getting very clingy, and I couldn't handle that. We remained friends and she went on and eventually had a woman lover she was with over 30 years and eventually married down at Santa Fe. But it was like finding another community that was very hippy based, in which it was okay if I was a lesbian

MASON FUNK:

Exactly. As you want it to be, a lesbian.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Yeah. And things were getting better. I was reaching my late twenties. As part of this, I was spending time hanging out on Greenfield Ranch, which was a 5,000-acre Pagan land trust in Mendocino county. One defining moment was there were a couple of friends there,

BETH ELLIOTT:

a straight couple, who had made an early tech fortune in the 70s and moved up there from Scotts Valley and built themselves a little cabin. They were so proud that in their little cabin, to insulate it, between the studs, they put their collection of science-fiction paperbacks. Another friend of theirs who was faking being off mentally to get SDI, to get crazy pay.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I looked at that and saw, as much as I would like to live in the country and run around naked in the sunshine, who needs the Michigan Women's Music Festival? I got hippies. But, I realized that would be a very hand to mouth life, and I decided no, I needed to learn more about the mainstream so I could thrive there.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Also, during this period, the late 70s, I had discovered word processing, which was a new, highly technical field because it wasn't software. This was before PCs, even before the Apple II. You had all these different, very expensive machines. I learned on an IBM Memory Typewriter, graduated to the IBM Mag Card, the Mag-II.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Because I had the skills, the job I had, which had the insurance, was a dead-end job, so I left that. I started temping and doing freelance word processing, and eventually legal word processing, because that paid more, and that opened up a career path and I was having a fabulous time working part time. If I was on an assignment and they had some other word processing machine I asked, "Would you mind if I stayed behind on my own time

BETH ELLIOTT:

and borrowed this and read the manual and taught myself this?" And they said, yes. I became one of San Francisco's top word processing temps. Eventually, in the late 70s, I got an assignment at an ad agency and ended up working for them for a few years. Partly because I was mostly in their PR Department, I found out that what public relations was about was

BETH ELLIOTT:

all the things we had discovered in DOB, doing public outreach, know who your audience is, know what they're concerned about, talk with them in their own language about what we were presenting and help give them things that solve problems for them. It's like, oh, I know this stuff. I didn't know the phrase 'target audience',

BETH ELLIOTT:

but I found that was really cool. One day, they asked me if I played softball, would I play on the women's softball team because they need more women. I had an interest, but I had never been any good at it. But once I started getting coaching as a grown woman, it was over two years after surgery, which means I met the old Olympic standards, and I was never the best woman

BETH ELLIOTT:

on the diamond ever. But I got the hang of it, played well, had a lot of fun. There was the Advertising Softball World Series, which started out being San Francisco and Los Angeles alternating hosting, and I never made an all-star team in an odd numbered year, so I never got to go to LA when they hosted on Catalina island at the Cubs' Wrigley Field.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Then they expanded it, made it larger. So, they had tournaments with parties in all these fabulous places. It was great fun. It gave me a lot of confidence and it gave me a place. I started modifying the hippie thing. I was still a Deadhead, still making my own music, even though I had nowhere to play it, writing songs. Eventually, I cut my long hair,

BETH ELLIOTT:

which was all the way down to my waist, started shaving my underarms and legs, which my then lover was not happy with, but I was kind of like, now, I gotta fit in with this crowd a bit more. And over that career, my peers actually became more lesbian friendly. Some of my teammates started coming out and they started really liking them. So,

BETH ELLIOTT:

it wasn't like activism I was doing, but I was finding life beyond the lesbian community. For a while, I did start hanging out with the emerging bisexual community for a couple of reasons. One, it was going to be a friendly environment for me because nobody was going to give me shit. Two, among bi women,

BETH ELLIOTT:

there were probably women who would not have this thing ... Well, they definitely had the thing women-only, and they'd be more open to someone who was not a woman born woman. And three, as part of that, actually I had a friend, with close friends I knew, one of them, Rickje

[pronounced Rickie], had been a housemate in one of the lesbian households in the Inner Sunset near the Haight Ashbury,

BETH ELLIOTT:

she was divorcing her husband. We started having a relationship. She was 30 and she had a 16-year-old boyfriend named John. They and one of his John's friends, David, and I are still friends. John's a fabulous guitarist. I always say, if he could write songs, he'd be dangerous. Their friend David, I ended up having a thing with him. I started dating him, and it was partly

BETH ELLIOTT:

because someone was interested in me. Someone who didn't care, because he'd known me before, completely didn't care. Wow. For a straight man, that's pretty groovy. It was also an opportunity to broaden my experience and I did get to see, yeah, they are different, I'm a woman, there's something else.

BETH ELLIOTT:

And it was also in case I could never have a lesbian community or a lesbian lover again; a girl's got to keep her options open. And also, to help me lose my fear of the great big heterosexual world, which a lot of gay people never do. I can't blame the lesbians because you can't necessarily trust straight men.

BETH ELLIOTT:

It's always someone with a penis wanting to get into our pants and the line of jive, the threefold progression, sadly, there's a new version of it that we are experiencing with the transwomen who complained about a cotton ceiling and don't get the concept, Hey, lose a penis, I'll give you a shot. But no, we're not interested. We're lesbians. It's the same manipulative stuff,

BETH ELLIOTT:

which makes me sad that 50 years later I have to fight some of the same battles. Obviously, I was promoting transsexual women having a chance to be in lesbian community. But it's like I say, DOB, especially Del and Phyllis, gave me the greatest gift you can give someone: they took me in face value and let me stand or fall on my own merits.

BETH ELLIOTT:

How cool is that? I stood on my own merits and it's like in LA, when they heard about my getting bounced from DOB, they couldn't believe it, couldn't understand it, but so well, of course you're going to still play at our conference because you're cool and groovy and your sister. So, on it went.

MASON FUNK:

Let me pause for a second. Yeah. That was amazing. I mean, that's an incredible story

MASON FUNK:

you woven together so beautifully. I want to kind of do a little stock taking.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Okay. I will say one of the things about that is I had to make it up as I go along. I had no role models. There are parts, especially while I was still going through the program before surgery, that I was in over my head and ultimately scared out of my wits.

MASON FUNK:

I can only imagine. I'm glad you said that because that's really important for the record.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Yeah. I was overwhelmed. All I could do was just keep going forward. It was go forward or die. Those are my choices. I have two gears, one of them is forward.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. I am curious because in terms of resilience, do you know what it was that kept you going forward? As opposed to just choosing to give up?

BETH ELLIOTT:

There were a couple things. One was believing in myself because the self-discovery had really set me free. Another was, if I failed and committed suicide, which definitely was on the table, the narrative would have been some queen who killed herself.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I didn't want that. A third one was something that came into play much later that I wasn't aware of, in my late 40s, when a cousin tracked me down and told me my mother's father's origin story, about his grandfather herding sheep in the hills of Scotland, was bogus. That his father and grandfather had herded oysters in the Bay of Chesapeake, and they had lived on the Northern Neck of Virginia in the Tidewater,

BETH ELLIOTT:

on the Chesapeake Bay, for 200 years. I had not known I had that Southern heritage. And in the Tidewater, they were early adopters for emancipation. Even they're discussing and trying to make it happen before the Revolutionary War. After the Revolutionary War, they set a lot of folks free because 'Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,' what part of that don't we understand? But there's also that defiance,

BETH ELLIOTT:

you're not going to tell me I'm wrong. You can defeat me. And especially you Yankees who ran the Triangle Trade, trying to tell us who were setting people free and are discussing how do we transition people into freedom, especially when you won't let them go north or west. No, you're not going to be telling me I'm bad. You're not going to tell me I'm wrong. It was like, I had that without knowing that. Now I can look back

BETH ELLIOTT:

and say, no, I'm not giving into you Puritans, I'm standing up for myself. But in retrospect, it makes perfect sense. But that was part of this, no, I was not going to let them shame me. I was not going to buy into what they were saying about me. I was not going to tell them I didn't belong in DOB because I did, and they were going to have to kick me out. I was taken by surprise at the LA Conference,

BETH ELLIOTT:

but I was not going to slink away and not perform because I was there for my friends. I was playing for my friends and all these other additional 800-900 women. It was just something in me that later I would recognize that I don't know how you inherit this stuff. My mother never knew about this. I found out later that some of her vocabulary was Tidewater vocabulary.

BETH ELLIOTT:

When she talked to people, she would tell stories. She had a Southern manner about her, which we didn't know, and that made her gracious. There was also the thing, because she had a grandmother who had grown up around free people of color before the war, her grandmother, after her great-grandmother died, lived with them on an uncle's farm.

BETH ELLIOTT:

In the 1850 census, there are three families living on this one farm next to where my great-grandmother would live with my great-grandfather. It was one white family, uncle George and aunt Mary Ann, and there are two intact families of free people of color. One of whom, like George, was in the census as a farmer, the other head of household was in there as a laborer. My mother taught everyone. She wanted people to get good English skills

BETH ELLIOTT:

so they could succeed in life. When I was going through papers, cleaning up, here's an invitation to a black graduation at UC Berkeley. "Mom, what's this?" "Oh, that was one of my students. She invited me. I went." That was some of the stuff that she gave me, and what a blessing. Also, to take people at face value and not prejudge them, and that racism was wrong because people are people.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Her thing was if you're pursuing an education, you're a good person. That was her standard. Growing up in Vallejo, there was a Naval shipyard, it was one of the places where people from south had come to work at the shipyards during the war, black and white, and both of those folks brought their prejudices against each other with them. So, it was really tense. My mom was having none of that,

BETH ELLIOTT:

but it also meant that there was radio and television that catered to them. There were country music radio and television shows. There was soul music on the radio. I don't recall any television shows. My daddy, one thing he did, friends of his had bought this old dance hall between Napa and Vallejo, called the Dream Bowl, on the highway. It was one of the places you go to out of town and dance on Friday night and Saturday night.

BETH ELLIOTT:

It had been a big band place and they turned it into a Country-Western dance hall. My dad moonlighted there as a bouncer. And to tell you how seriously they took it, he was deputized as a Napa County Sheriff's Deputy. We never got to go there for any of the shows, but they had people like Buck Owens, Ray Price, and all these people. So,

BETH ELLIOTT:

the musical environment in which I grew up was the black and white music mixing from the South, which created rock and roll. But I was exposed to all kinds of stuff, which was such a cool thing, and that had an influence on me too.

MASON FUNK:

We're nearing the end, so I'm looking down to see what else I want to cover. I mean, I love all this.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I will tell you that, it involved buying the house. But in the early 80s, I was dating Nancy and she had a friend, Anne D'Arcy, who had this magazine, Telewoman. It was networking and literary. They had potlucks here, and it was like a DOB crowd, ordinary women. Anne wanted me to write for her, doing reviews. She actually had me do a column and everything I wanted because I'm a bright cookie and people ask me to do stuff.

BETH ELLIOTT:

At one point, Bev, my old college friend turned nemesis, who engineered my getting trashed at the LA Conference, she gets wind that I'm writing for Telewoman, she calls up Anne to say, how dare you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That point in the early 80s, I was playing bass and a new wave band called Satin Food Stamps. She knew me as a bass player, and Bev said "he plays guitar" and all of that.

BETH ELLIOTT:

It gave Anne just enough pause to realize what was going on. Say, no, no, no. You're thinking of someone else. She calls me up, "Beth, I just got the weirdest phone call." I said, "I'll be right over." She lived next door. "I'm giving you my resignation. I don't want you to go down with me." And she said, "Don't be silly." Of course, you're going to write for me. You're good. People love what you write. She wanted to do one of the spotlight features,

BETH ELLIOTT:

the first one that ran without photos and with an assumed name, because I wasn't going to expose myself any further. A publisher eventually expressed an interest in that, but her idea was I would write a guide to being a non-sexist man, that languished. Mirrors was eventually published in 1996. I did a re-issue in 2011. I redid it and expanded the part about the LA Conference, called Fear and Loathing in Westwood

BETH ELLIOTT:

because I was seeing the seven buck pulp paperback was selling for over $200, used, and I wanted a piece of that action. But by that time, the climate had changed. While there were people who had loved my stories and said, yeah, that's me. Nobody wanted to hear what I had to say about respecting boundaries and earning your way in, the climate had changed, and the climate is what it is

BETH ELLIOTT:

these days. But Anne pulled me off the blacklist after 10 years, and things were still rough. Then around 2005, Marcia Gallo was writing her thesis which became the book, Different Daughters, a History of DOB. Again, Phyllis Lyon called me up said I'm going to introduce you to Marcia Gallo. She's writing a history of DOB. Could you please help her any way you can? And of course, 'yes, ma'am.'

BETH ELLIOTT:

So, I pretty much had to break silence and come out to my community, in which, fortunately by that time, I had a good reputation and they didn't care. Even some of my friends, I wrote this thing to say, I'm sorry, this is really embarrassing. And it's not that I didn't trust you.

BETH ELLIOTT:

But I was a paranoid with real enemies. I called it, I Was a Teenage Lesbian Draft Dodger. Because technically speaking, I was. That's kind of the arc. Things are weird. All the communities are kind of weird. I regret that there's not more overlap between the lesbian community, the deadhead community. Because there's a small Facebook group called Lez Heads.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I would be in heaven if we're back to the counterculture roots. But what you gonna do? I'm trying to live my life, have fun. I've managed to have a career, pay off a house. Some hippie, I had a straight job.

MASON FUNK:

And you're still a hippie.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I'm still a hippie. Still a hippie.

MASON FUNK:

One of the things among your story is the statement, "If it's worth doing it's worth doing with joy." I love that. Did any people from the trashing era, any of those, either the people who took out direct hits on you or anybody else ever come back and say, you know what? That was fucked up.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Yeah. There were times I'd run into people who actually,

BETH ELLIOTT:

they were happy to talk about the old days and they did apologize. I'm so sorry. I didn't know any better. I was caught up. I was swept up with this. I say, yeah, I know the pressures you're under. And I'm sorry too. But those were hard times and sometimes people didn't have any choice. You could stand by me and lose a community or you could go with the crowd. But yes, there were people who did apologize.

BETH ELLIOTT:

There have also been people, oh, how wonderful to see you again. You were so cool. Then there are people from who I knew back in the day was kind of like, it was kind of odd because I don't know what they assume, because I went away and we went our separate paths, some of them is like, oh, you're still alive? Which was not necessarily a given. Sometimes that was really, really disappointing.

MASON FUNK:

To have them say like, you're still alive?

BETH ELLIOTT:

To rather than being really happy to see me, is like, oh, this is curious that you're still around. The late Terry Ryan, who wrote for Sisters and then Sapphire and she and Sylvia Moon Mallick had a one-panel comic in the San Francisco Chronicle Datebook,

BETH ELLIOTT:

T. O. Sylvester. She wrote a novel about her mother that got turned into a movie with Julianne Moore, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, because her mother had kept the family, large Catholic family, going by winning sweepstakes and submitting poetry and jokes to the Reader's Digest and coming up with little bits of money, because her husband, sadly, was useless at that.

BETH ELLIOTT:

She developed cancer and passed away. When they had a memorial for her, of course, I showed up and there were people there who were like -- Obviously, I had not reconnected with her crowd, though I'd hung out with Sylvia for a while. It was like, oh, here's someone from Terry's past. And oh, well, this is interesting, glad you made it. But really

BETH ELLIOTT:

not kind of appreciating my being someone from the old days or before the novel. That just kind of felt like, once again, because I didn't have the continuing friendship. I turned into a curiosity, even though obviously I was a survivor,

BETH ELLIOTT:

I had had a life. Even with all the crap that happened, that was a happy ending.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Sometimes, I'd done an independent CD release. I'd had a novel published. I'd had the biography published. Never really made a living creatively or haven't had any great fame, but I did stuff.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Do you have CDs of your music?

BETH ELLIOTT:

I would be happy to give you a CD and a copy of Mirrors. Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Speaking of which, you kind of glossed over Mirrors a little bit. I only picked up like, wait a minute, this is a book you wrote, is that correct?

BETH ELLIOTT:

It is.

MASON FUNK:

Tell me about what this book you're talking about?

BETH ELLIOTT:

It came out of that interview for Telewoman.

MASON FUNK:

Tell me what are you talking about, Mirrors?

BETH ELLIOTT:

Mirrors. There was a feminist publisher who read that profile and was interested in my doing a biography. It's a biography that I did under the conceit that it was this other woman as told to me, the Telewoman writer, because I had every reason to keep my head down. She expressed an interest, so I wrote it and then she lost interest in it because it was a biography

BETH ELLIOTT:

and she kind of thought my life would be an example of how to be a non-sexist man, which I wasn't. So, it languished. Eventually, I think in 1995, Spectrum Press of Chicago did it as an early ebook on a cassette, and then Rhinoceros Press, which was an erotica press, picked it up in '96 and released it as a pulp paperback.

BETH ELLIOTT:

At that time, it had the story and it had what were then current resources because tell people not only what I did, but here's how you do it. So, that languished, it did not earn out. I got $2,500 advance for it, which helped. But then around 2011, because I just keep an eye, used copies of that pulp paperback,

BETH ELLIOTT:

$7 paperback, were selling for under over $200. I decided I can do a re-issue print on demand. I want some of that action. This book has an audience because people are paying this much for it. So, I put it together, did a new cover. I took out all the old resources because they were out of date, and instead did a long essay about the LA Conference, and basically

BETH ELLIOTT:

what its role was that it was a power play, that there were lesbian communities in California that were not under the control of a movement, and there were some people who were upset with that and how that was disastrous because partly you get into the 80s, you have the AIDS epidemic and women did an awful lot of caretaking,

BETH ELLIOTT:

but there were there many gay men who were afraid that we wouldn't, or that we would go our own separate ways, especially there was a thing of trying to push the idea that everyone was at risk, out of fear that if it were mostly just gay men, they'd be abandoned. Then you had Anthony Fauci saying, this is going to take out 40% of the heterosexual community.

BETH ELLIOTT:

So, yeah, a nice track record. But part of it was the idea that, because lesbians said we have our unique sexuality because we're women and we have our own unique culture because of that, it was trying to push us back together to have one community under gay men's terms. One thing that helped with

BETH ELLIOTT:

Tom Waddell founded the Gay Olympics, and I worked with a law firm with Vaughan Walker, who as a judge ruled against the Gay Games using the name Gay Olympics and was gay himself.

MASON FUNK:

I'm going to actually redirect us because I have some people I want to ask you about.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Yeah. I'm just going to say that my community was scattered. I had the historical perspective, but I did not have an audience. So, things have kind of spiraled, and then one after the other, it was the co-sexual gay community, be sex radicals, be gender radicals, be queers.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Then for brief time, lesbian chic, then back to you're supposed to be queer, which means these days, some people mean you're supposed to be pansexual, which some lesbians are, but most aren't. The tragedy is, other people have always wanted to own lesbianism and direct it in a direction for their own good. If the LA Conference organizers had never scattered and that community had grown, there would have been a voice.

BETH ELLIOTT:

There could have been alternatives. So, that was part of Mirrors, that tragedy. Because I was out of touch with the new transgender stuff, now it didn't sell like hotcakes, like I expected to. It didn't make me rich. I'm glad you're memorializing my story because people will cite my experience in DOB and the LA conference say this is what TERFs do. Even though those so-called T

BETH ELLIOTT:

ERF lesbians were my friends and they say bad nasty things about them, you've got to be against women who have sexual boundaries, lesbians have sexual boundaries. Said, no, no, no, no, no, you have to earn your way to respect, you respect those boundaries. That's what I did and look how well it worked. And they'll cite my experience. It happened in the New Yorker, it happened with an NBC online presence, and I wrote and complained and they just blew me off.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Said, "Did you ask my permission to put this spin on my experience? No, you didn't. I'm around, you could have checked with me, WTF." And they still ignore me because they have a narrative they want to push. And I'm in the way of that narrative because I have my own narrative, which was the original. And so, it's like, yeah, I'm a dinosaur.

MASON FUNK:

Well, I pledged to you that we will never ... Anything we edit from this interview, you'll see it before it ever gets published. Including the full interview.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Well, I trust you to tell my story.

MASON FUNK:

Well, that's what we want to do.

BETH ELLIOTT:

That's what you want to do because you're doing living history.

MASON FUNK:

I don't need to make all this

BETH ELLIOTT:

Not propaganda. I don't need to

MASON FUNK:

[Crosstalk] make everybody agree with each other.

BETH ELLIOTT:

No, we never did. We never will

MASON FUNK:

I'm going to ask you about two people that you mentioned, who for the historical record, Rikki Streicher and Karen Ryer. But I have to ask you to keep it relatively short because I literally have, we just have a second interview to get to today.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Rikki Streicher was the owner of Maud's, also known as The Study, the beloved lesbian bar that ran from 1969 till 1991, and really became

BETH ELLIOTT:

a community center. They had a softball team, they had their annual Maud's reunions. They made a documentary about the closing, Last Night at Maud's, and there's a Facebook group. She had a later softball team on which I got to play, in the Gay Softball League. She was a pillar of the community, not a bar owner who was just out to make money, but she supported the community, did a lot of charity stuff. She's part of our history.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Karen Ryer, known then as Karen Wells, was the editor of Sisters magazine for San Francisco DOB. She's the friend who came and spoke on my behalf with Norman Fisk at Stanford that got me over the hump for approval. I say she should be known about. There was another thing she did, she and her then lover, Ruth, who went fundamentalist and disavowed it, they did a sex education film

BETH ELLIOTT:

called Holding. Basically, the idea was that lesbians can show like paraplegics and quadriplegics alternatives to heterosexual intercourse. You can still have a sex life. There are things you can do. She was bold enough to do that. That's a very good film I haven't seen in ages. I have to see if I can get a DVD of it

BETH ELLIOTT:

because also too, it was hot. And in Sisters, she did a lot of essays. She said, "Think about this. We have been told this, but what if this?" She did a lot of things to open up the dialogue and it was a brief period of time, but it was important. That was parallel in a way to Del and Phyllis writing Lesbian/Woman, which I think is still a definitive text. Their definition of lesbian is pre the political lesbian, I think it is still the one:

BETH ELLIOTT:

"Any woman whose primary physical, emotional, romantic, and spiritual attraction is to other women, whether or not that is overtly expressed." Because that's the inclusive one that captures the essence. Then later in the 70s, we got women only, which is bull crap because there are women who never get to express that, or the ones who are still in marriages because you can't blow them up.

BETH ELLIOTT:

But that's the essence. It's the female bonding. I've noticed in my life, my female friendships with straight women, the female bonding is big. Even if it doesn't go as deep with them, it's still an important stuff that means a lot to women, all women.

MASON FUNK:

Great. I have final four questions we ask all of our subjects the same final four. I call them four questions in four minutes, because they're supposed to be like off the cuff and short and sweet and to the point. The first one is

BETH ELLIOTT:

My final four, what are my brackets?

MASON FUNK:

Really. Exactly. I love that reference. Is it March again? Yay. And this one, for you, I feel like it's especially pertinent, but for all of our subjects, it is, which is, if you could tell your 15-year-old self anything, what would it be?

BETH ELLIOTT:

Hang in there. You will make it; your dreams will come true. It's going to be a rocky road. Not everything will happen, but will.

BETH ELLIOTT:

And actually, since retirement in the past three years, I've been actually kind of having interactions with my early twenties self. My subconscious mind has taken it upon itself to give her the expertise that life and the confidence I have now, and to heal her. It happened spontaneously. I call it NLP theater. Neuro-Linguistic Programming theater. It's been spontaneous. It's beautiful.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I've been able to see that scared young woman actually had a lot on the ball, did a lot of things and actually set things in motion that gave me the life I have now.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Great, great. Second question. I call this the queer superpower question. Do you think that for all people LGBTQIA+, that there's some common characteristic or trait that we all share that unites us and enables us to do good work in the world?

BETH ELLIOTT:

No. We're individuals, and I think it's a problem with so many people who think because they come out, they are special and especially creative. Now, there are a bunch of us, I think, because of being outsiders that we do want to do things to make things better for others because

BETH ELLIOTT:

we've experienced not being able to just live our lives fully as we wish, but we are no exception to the thing that most people are average. That's a bell curve. The biggest distribution is right there in the middle. We forget we get to be ordinary folks. We don't have to conform to queer or LGBT or gay and lesbian anything.

BETH ELLIOTT:

We don't have to be special. We can just live our lives. And a lot of times it's better if we just do that.

MASON FUNK:

I love that. That's a great answer. Thank you. Why is it important to you to tell your story?

BETH ELLIOTT:

The main reason is if I don't tell it, other people will, and not only will they get it all wrong, they will bend my story to fit their agendas. Many of which disagree with what I've always been about.

BETH ELLIOTT:

There is also the role model part, which, goddess forbid, I should be remembered as a role model instead of just being able to have my own life. But I had to make it up as I went along and I did so with honor and dignity and I did it right. I realized if I want it to be accepted by women as a woman, I had to be on women's side. I had to respect their boundaries.

BETH ELLIOTT:

There were some that would no longer apply after I had surgery, but there is so much these days where people are oppositional to women, oppositional to lesbians. You want to be one, you want acceptance, but you're fighting lesbians, you're fighting women. No, it's your job to blend in, to assimilate, to prove yourself. If my story can show that that works, that would be very much needed. If I have that effect on the world, that would be a good thing.

MASON FUNK:

Great. Excellent. Last question, OUTWORDS, the name of this organization, where we crisscross the country virtually or in person, recording the stories of the people we call LGBTQ pioneers and elders, what do you think is the value of a project like OUTWORDS? And if you could mention OUTWORDS in your answer, that'd be great.

BETH ELLIOTT:

One thing OUTWORDS does is something very necessary. It preserves our past. It preserves our people. It's our words going out, OUTWORDS. There, you have a tagline. There are people who acknowledged that they have not known gay, lesbian, et cetera, history. They think everything is cool and groovy as it is now. They think we can get married, but these people won't bake cakes for us

BETH ELLIOTT:

because they had their religious beliefs. That's awful. That's awful. But they don't know the shoulders on which they stand. They don't know what people went through for us to be free and have our lives, and to be able to fly a rainbow flag or to have friends who are happy for our relationships, they don't know that we were put in jail. They don't know that people were given electroshock therapy to try to de-gay them.

BETH ELLIOTT:

They don't know about people dying and family swooping in and treating a long-term partner as a stranger. They don't know the struggles, the legal struggles, the social struggles, the trying to make a place for ourselves and the early organizations who did that, who were speaking out, "We are people. We are worthy of respect.

BETH ELLIOTT:

We are willing to talk with you about our lives. We are not the stereotypes." That meant everything. If you don't have your history, if you don't know where you come from, you don't have anything and you don't have your freedom because people will take that away from you if you don't know what it took to have your freedom. Well, I like our freedom. I enjoy it every day.

BETH ELLIOTT:

I come from long lines of troublemakers. Well, myself. One quick story, by the Virginia line, I had a five greats grandmother, Abigail Minty Northen whose husband spent time away at his Brandy still would come home to get fed or something. She took him to court in colonial Virginia in 1773, for spousal support, and won.

BETH ELLIOTT:

She was a troublemaker. She was an early steel magnolia. I take more inspiration from women like her than I do the people who are androgynous or who say you have to be butch to be strong and courageous and capable. No, women are strong and courageous and capable, always have been. We've always proved it. And I have people in my family tree who proved that.

MASON FUNK:

Amazing. She's a good one. Five greats.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Five greats. Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Alrighty. It's a wrap.

BETH ELLIOTT:

Cool.

MASON FUNK:

Thank you so much.

BETH ELLIOTT:

You're welcome. It's been a pleasure.

MASON FUNK:

Good. I'm glad you've enjoyed it.