GIL GERALD:

I'm known as Gilberto -- Gil Gerald.

MASON FUNK:

Perfect. That'll be great. That way people can recognize you. Give us, please, the date and location of your birth.

GIL GERALD:

I was born on November 27th, 1950 in Panama City, Republic of Panama.

MASON FUNK:

Awesome. Paint a little picture. You are our first Panamanian American interviewee, paint a picture of your family, the culture that you grew up in,

MASON FUNK:

the location, the feeling.

GIL GERALD:

I think of myself as having been rather fortunate in life. My father was the first black Panamanian doctor born in Panama. He was well known. Panama was a small country when I was growing up, about a million people when I was nine years old, in the entire country. The family was well known. He had come to the United States and had

GIL GERALD:

gotten his medical education here in the US and had married my mother, an American citizen. She was born in Brooklyn and raised in Manhattan and they returned to Panama. They left for Panama when he returned to Panama as a young doctor. They had four sons. I'm the second of four.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. That's interesting. Four sons, four kids.

MASON FUNK:

Your father, obviously, was kind of a high achieving guy. What were some of the values that were either explicitly or implicitly kind of supported and celebrated in your family?

GIL GERALD:

Well, speaking the truth was one important value and sort of directive. Of course, my father had one thing that he always

GIL GERALD:

said, "Improvise. Improvise, son, improvise." If you didn't have a tool that you needed, he liked to work around the house. Even his father, my grandfather was a builder. They had moved into the middle class. Both sides of the family came from the Caribbean and my father's side moved to Panama during the construction of the Panama Canal at the turn of the century, my mother's parents moved to New York. So

GIL GERALD:

my heritage is also Caribbean in the sense that Trinidad & Tobago is where my mother's family came from, and Grenada, and Montserrat is where my grandparents on my father's side came from.

MASON FUNK:

Wow.

GIL GERALD:

I grew up speaking English and Spanish from the very beginning in a household that was bilingual. I lived in

GIL GERALD:

Panama, in Ghana, and Trinidad and Tobago. I finished high school here in the United States at age 17.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. How did you happen to come to the US for high school?

GIL GERALD:

Well, my father was an official with the World Health Organization. He was in charge of Zone 1 of WHO/PAHO (Pan American Health Organization), which encompassed most of the Caribbean and Venezuela and the Guyanas.

GIL GERALD:

He was going to be relocated from his assignment in Trinidad and Tobago to Caracas, Venezuela. My brothers and I were coming of college age, and they had to think of places that they would send us to school, and New York made sense. I had family in New York, my grandparents were there and my mother's family was there. It was an east coast city that was

GIL GERALD:

accessible by plane for my father who would be living overseas. Other options had been considered and the United States was selected by my parents as a place that we would move to and we would attend college here in the United States.

MASON FUNK:

Now, excuse my ignorance. But was Spanish spoken on your mom's side of the family or just your dad's side?

GIL GERALD:

My dad's side of the family spoke English

GIL GERALD:

and Spanish. And my mother's side spoke only English.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. I just wonder if you grew up hearing Spanish.

GIL GERALD:

I grew up teaching my mother how to speak Spanish. It was funny, actually correcting her and her --

MASON FUNK:

But she was in Panama,

GIL GERALD:

Right. Right.

MASON FUNK:

That's interesting. Kind of a role reversal. Immigrant parents, oftentimes, have an interesting relationship,

MASON FUNK:

they either want their kids or don't want their kids to speak the language that they grew up with. And here you are teaching your mom to speak Spanish.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah. Correcting her. I was a second child and I was born when she was just around 20 years old. 21.

MASON FUNK:

You, as compared to your three brothers, like who were you in the family hierarchy? In the set of

MASON FUNK:

four brothers?

GIL GERALD:

I was number two. And I would say that it is possible that my brother, in another era, would have been diagnosed with some learning disabilities. He was a little slower, not as well a performer at school as I was. I didn't have to study to get my A's and B's and blue ribbons, and it caused a little tension between me and my older brother.

GIL GERALD:

But I was number two. I would say that probably there was some sense that I was different, that maybe I wasn't a fighter. In other words, my mother would tease me, "You were in kindergarten and the kids beat you up with your own shoes," you know . I can talk

GIL GERALD:

about and recall some bullying that occurred in school and so forth--and I got called a sissy. Yes, definitely, at home --. Well, not so much in school, but at home. Yeah. And that was an issue.

MASON FUNK:

How so? What do you mean when you say it was an issue?

GIL GERALD:

Well, I just was different in some ways.

GIL GERALD:

I mean, one was I was just, well, a good performer, such that my motherwould say, on parents day she would say "I'm gonna skip going to going to your class because all I'm gonna hear is, oh Mrs. Gerald, your son's such a wonderful kid, he's doing so well, blah, blah, blah, blah,. I have gotta go attend to the others." that would be one example. I think because my brother was shyer

GIL GERALD:

my mother tended, and my parents tended to ask me to do things that I guess they might have asked the older brother to do, or at least I felt that way.

MASON FUNK:

Right. One more thing. I love the notion that your father would say to you improvise, improvise. I've never heard that from an interviewee that that was the advice that their parents gave them. Can you just expand on that a little bit?

GIL GERALD:

Well,

GIL GERALD:

in terms of improvisation, I think it applied a lot in my work later on in life. Because you don't always have everything that you would love to have, whether it's a tool or it's a set of resources or even experience in knowledge. You have to be somewhat quick and innovative to get the job done. I think that I really

GIL GERALD:

appreciated my father, you know, suggesting that if I didn't have a hammer or something, I needed to figure out how I improvised.

MASON FUNK:

This is probably a long shot, but after you had been successfully helping to build organizations and a movement, did you ever tell your father, like that improvisation advice you gave me, that came in really handy for building organizations?

GIL GERALD:

Unfortunately not, part of my story is that my father was extremely disappointed that I turned out to be gay. It was perhaps one of the biggest disappointments he ever vocalized to me. It was very painful and difficult. It wasn't until he was 91. Oh, sorry. He died at 91. It wasn't until about 89 that he invited Jeff and I to come home for Thanksgiving. He used the language

GIL GERALD:

"Could you and your family come for Thanksgiving?" I suspect that my mother, who was always very supportive, and my other brothers engineered this, and he sort of consented to it, but that's okay. In the end, my father turned out to be the kind of

GIL GERALD:

father that I hoped he would be regarding my being a gay man.

MASON FUNK:

Interesting. Okay. We'll probably end up back there again on the interview. That's a sweet story. Okay, the next thing I have in my notes, in the interest of kind of moving forward in time, is when you came out in 1972, feel free to touch on anything that would be important in the intervening years. Otherwise, I'd love to hear that story.

GIL GERALD:

My coming out.

MASON FUNK:

Yes, your coming out.

GIL GERALD:

Oh, my coming out. That's a really interesting -- I love the story. If I could say I love my own story. I was actually a student at Pratt Institute, studying architecture, which was my chosen profession. I had wanted to become an architect since I was six years old. My parents built -- here, we are in Palm Springs -- a mid-century modern

GIL GERALD:

structure when I was five years old and I watched them pour over the drawings and the construction, and I made a decision that I would become an architect. I was studying architecture at Pratt Institute and really hoping that any notion I had or any experience I'd had up to that point in time was some passing phase. I even had a girlfriend and all of that. I was, of all things, the president of

GIL GERALD:

the one surviving fraternity at an urban Institute like Pratt Institute. And there had been a rush party and invitations had gone out to everybody who had attended the rush party. Now during the rush party --

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, start that sentence again.

GIL GERALD:

Invitations had gone out to everybody who had attended the

GIL GERALD:

rush party. This is an art school, so a couple of men had been dancing and that was an innovation. I had never seen anybody dance in the chapter room of the fraternity at a rush party. I thought, perhaps, the vice president who was responsible for getting these invitations out, surely would not send that invitation out to these two guys. Well, they got

GIL GERALD:

the invitation and several nights later, a knock was heard late in the night at the front door. Somebody screamed at -- I was up three flights in a brownstone and they said, "Gil, you've got somebody who wants to see you." I was the president of the fraternity, I said, "Oh, sure, send him up." This art student came up to my room and he said,

GIL GERALD:

I want to thank you for having invited me to become a member of this organization, but I want to tell you that I'm declining the invitation. And I sort of coyly said, "Well, why?" And he said, "Because I'm gay." I had never heard a person simply comfortably say, "I'm gay." This was 1972, and we were in New York.

GIL GERALD:

Stonewall was only a few years earlier. I was at my architectural drafting table, on my stool, and I literally fell over onto my water bed. I mean, the stool gave way when he said that. The next thing that came out of his mouth was, and I want you to know that you aren't fooling anyone but yourself.

GIL GERALD:

So he was a lifesaver. He actually threw a lifesaver at me. I rushed and closed the door,, I could not imagine what would happen if other people would've heard or continued to hear this conversation. I got introduced to the gay world in the sense that he took me to the clubs in New York and,

GIL GERALD:

oh, I got introduced to everything, the bathhouses. It was 1972, it was an interesting time to come out. But I didn't come out publicly. I mean, that was the beginning of a process. I actually had a girlfriend and we were intimate and she was living in a dorm and I'd spend nights at the dorm sometimes. It's a co-ed dorm. It's interesting that that's what happened.

GIL GERALD:

I immediately informed my family what was going on. I also broke up and I said, this is the truth. My mother was very supportive, but the beautiful thing that happened is that my parents insisted that I needed to go to see a psychiatrist. Now, this is 1972. '73 was the year that it was taken off the list of mental illnesses,

GIL GERALD:

so I was so fortunate. I was really fortunate in that she basically diagnosed any needs I had for counseling and she said, "Gil, you've got problems, but being gay isn't one of them." I felt like this woman, she was a black psychiatrist, practicing in Harlem.

MASON FUNK:

Sorry. Who said that statement? Your mother said that to you.

GIL GERALD:

No,

GIL GERALD:

the psychiatrist.

MASON FUNK:

The psychiatrist. Okay. Start that again. Because I thought you were talking about your mother.

GIL GERALD:

No, my parents basically requested, they didn't direct me, but they basically strongly suggested that -- my father believed I was sick, my father believed I was sick -- I go see a psychiatrist. This psychiatrist was a colleague of my father. I mean, that same generation, and I willingly went

GIL GERALD:

and went through a number of sessions with her, where she diagnosed needs I had for counseling, but her diagnosis was that I had issues that I needed to address, but being gay was not one of them. That was another lifesaver, number two. I was very fortunate, at that time in history, to be assured by a professional

GIL GERALD:

that I was not ill.

MASON FUNK:

That's wonderful. You said she was a black psychiatrist?

GIL GERALD:

Yes, absolutely. Her name Pauline Edwards, Dr. Pauline Edwards. Interestingly enough, my father never accepted that. It was in the mid eighties now, he was still struggling with it and she was counseling my father, "Your son is not ill."

GIL GERALD:

He could not come to any other conclusion that I really was sick.

MASON FUNK:

Wow.

GIL GERALD:

I'm very proud of my father and his accomplishments in life. He is a man who had an accident in high school and overcame almost an severed arm, decided he wanted to come to the United States to get an education in medicine,

GIL GERALD:

actually dentistry, but changed his mind to medicine and arrived on a boat from Panama to Ellis Island. They said, "Where's your visa?" And he said "What's the visa?" But he had an uncle in New York who vouched for him and he got a student visa and was able to study here. He went all the way up to graduate education, in public health at Harvard university,

GIL GERALD:

and he didn't have a high school degree when he arrived. He had only a bicycle and the clothes he was wearing. So my father is extremely important to me in terms of my admiration for him as somebody who set an example of doing the impossible.

MASON FUNK:

Wow. so very, yes.

KATE KUNATH:

Can you say that sentence one more time? Because you were coughing over when you said my father.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Just say the last sentence, my father

MASON FUNK:

and finishing up with an example of someone who overcame the possible.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah. My father is someone who I admire and who set an example for me in terms of overcoming -- maybe the whole issue of improvising, overcoming difficulty and really dreaming and finding his way past obstacles that were in his way. I admired my father and

GIL GERALD:

I attribute some of my persistence in pursuing my own goals in life to my father's example.

MASON FUNK:

That's great. Perfect. Thank you so much.

KATE KUNATH:

Mason.

MASON FUNK:

Yes.

KATE KUNATH:

If I have a question on topic, should I save it to the end?

MASON FUNK:

Yeah, I think so. Just save them up if you can, and then we can circle back.

KATE KUNATH:

Okay.

MASON FUNK:

Thank you, Kate. All right. So we're gonna jump

MASON FUNK:

forward to 1978 when, according to, I think your questionnaire, you got involved mobilizing black lesbians and gays.

GIL GERALD:

Absolutely.

MASON FUNK:

So what happens?

GIL GERALD:

Well,

MASON FUNK:

And I would say, just by the way, just keep an eye on the clock.

GIL GERALD:

Yes, yes.

MASON FUNK:

Your answers are, I would say, just right and, or could be about 15 to 20% tighter.

GIL GERALD:

Okay.

MASON FUNK:

Just to bear in mind without hopefully making you anxious.

GIL GERALD:

I had moved into the district of Columbia or was about to move into the district of Columbia.

MASON FUNK:

Give me a date.

GIL GERALD:

In the summer of 1978, sorry. Excuse me. I moved into the summer in -- I'm sorry. Because I'm thinking --

MASON FUNK:

You're alright, no problem. So just start fresh and give us the date.

GIL GERALD:

I was scheduled and in process of buying a property to move into the district of Columbia in 1978,

GIL GERALD:

I was 27.

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, start over and just say "In 1978."

GIL GERALD:

In 1978, I was moving into the district of Columbia. It was an interesting year in the District because it was the first time the city would be electing a mayor. Every mayor had been appointed prior to that by the President of the United States. Gay activists were making the news big time in terms of the influence and the backing

GIL GERALD:

they were providing to the leading candidate or to the leading candidate, which was Marion Barry, who won the election. What was odd and felt different and not quite right for many of us, we didn't know each other, but we met each other and we had the same reaction. This was pretty much a white gay presence that was portrayed in the media and that was odd in

GIL GERALD:

a city that was 75% black. How come we were not visible in that? That really had to do with how the gay community was organized at that time and mostly represented white gay men. This kind of found an audience, this concern found an audience in a number

GIL GERALD:

of Black folk and the nucleus of that was six of us who then went on to found what became the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays. But it primarily started out with an organization locally in the region that would endorse, and did endorse, another candidate, Sterling Tucker, for mayor. I mean,

GIL GERALD:

the press had hardly any coverage -- I mean the gay press -- of Black gays and lesbians prior to what our action and then suddenly the front -- Sorry, then suddenly the headlines on the Washington Blade read "Black gays endorsed Tucker for mayor," and that shook things up.

GIL GERALD:

That made a constituency emerge politically, locally. This caught on fire over the next few years and we became an organization that had chapters in Baltimore, in Philadelphia, in New York, in Chicago, in Minneapolis, and growing. That's where it started. It basically was a reaction to wait a minute,

GIL GERALD:

there is more to the gay community, the word gay was the shorthand that was used at the time. There was more to that and it was important that we get organized and that our voice be part of the equation, particularly in Washington, DC.

MASON FUNK:

Absolutely. Were you met with or lemme ask this more openly, what kind of reactions, if any, did you get

MASON FUNK:

from sort of the white gay power structure or hierarchy to your decision to sort of start vocalizing who you were claiming some of the space?

GIL GERALD:

It was mixed. It was mixed.

MASON FUNK:

What were you talking about when you say ?

GIL GERALD:

Yeah. The reaction of the white gay community, the organized Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, and Gay Activist Alliance was mixed. I mean, there were definitely allies within the organization who

GIL GERALD:

welcomed this. There were others who felt that perhaps this was not fair, meaning, they were making efforts to reach out to the Black gay and lesbian community and had not been successful, so they felt defensive, I guess, about the coverage. But then the other important reaction is that then there was this great expectation

GIL GERALD:

of this new organization. Well, we have to have this huge meeting where we talk and start working together. We were challenged in the sense that there was this expectation that perhaps a small organization that was just getting going would not really be able to meet. We had to kind of develop a sense that we have our own agenda and we need

GIL GERALD:

to be in charge of our agenda. You can't really come and demand that we be at this meeting and at that meeting and at that meeting at that meeting, that you've now decided we need to be at. The word intersectional, today, is pretty much something that a whole lot of people understand, but it was something that we felt in our guts.

GIL GERALD:

We were organizing arout racism and sexism and classism and homophobia and transphobia, and those things were as important as protecting against discrimination based on sexual orientation.

MASON FUNK:

Interesting. Okay.

GIL GERALD:

We were discriminated at gay establishments. I mean, that's not all of it, but

GIL GERALD:

that's a glaring example of what one would experience to be a Black lesbian or gay person in a city that is mostly, predominantly Black -- to experience that kind of discrimination in their own hometown, in our own hometown.

MASON FUNK:

What forms did that discrimination take?

GIL GERALD:

Carding. Carding was one thing that was just -- It was just horrible.

MASON FUNK:

Tell me what you mean by carding.

GIL GERALD:

Carding

GIL GERALD:

was a practice that was not just practiced in Washington, DC where establishment owners, bar owners, disco owners would ask for more than one or far more than one or two or three forms of ID to control the number of Black lesbians or gays who accessed an establishment.

GIL GERALD:

There had to be, later, and we did successfully get anti-carding legislation in the District of Columbia to stop that, but one way that they controlled access to establishments was through this practice of carding and that was just really horrific.

MASON FUNK:

So they would literally, and I've definitely heard stories from one of our interviewees in New Orleans, very similar,

MASON FUNK:

black gay guy, growing up in New Orleans, but they would literally, it was almost like, we'll let a few in, but we're gonna control the flow. We're gonna use this like a little bit of like a --

GIL GERALD:

A valve.

MASON FUNK:

A valve.

GIL GERALD:

Absolutely. Yeah. Well that's just the way, well, Washington, actually, it was actually something that I think Washingtonians

GIL GERALD:

kind of understood, not meaning they excused it. Understood because Washington, DC had been a segregated city even though it was technically in the north.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Yeah. And even though it was 75% black.

GIL GERALD:

And 75% Black.

MASON FUNK:

The legislation, I've never heard of that route, that you'd actually get a law passed. Yeah. What was the law that was eventually passed?

GIL GERALD:

Well, essentially, it restricted the practice. I don't have the exact wording

GIL GERALD:

of it. By the time the law got in, I was not involved in the actual passage of the law, we had established a chapter and the local chapter of our organization was very -- There was a kind of division of labor that took place. They, along with white gay organizations, the Gay Activists Alliance in particular, created a partnership that crafted

GIL GERALD:

the legislation with the legislators and it got passed.

MASON FUNK:

What was the thought process in this era around the choice to try to infiltrate/gain access to white spaces, white owned spaces, as compared to 'screw those guys, we're gonna create our own spaces?'

GIL GERALD:

Well, I think that the analogy that I will try to make

GIL GERALD:

is that we also, in that period, had spaces that women were creating for just women, we had to work our own stuff out. We had to address issues that we understood that were of particular interest to us. That's one example of -- The very first speech I gave ever --

GIL GERALD:

well, not really ever, but early in my career as a leader of this organization -- was to a gathering, a national gathering of people of color from the Metropolitan Community Church. It was gathering in Washington, DC, in 1980. That was the first such meeting within the organization. Again, people of color are thinking we've gotta create space within an organization or outside of an organization,

GIL GERALD:

which is better. Because I came out of architecture, I crafted a speech that talked about building bridges and how when you have a great bridge, whether it's something like the Verrazano-Narrows bridge or the Golden Gate bridge. You might have sand on one side of the gap, the water,

GIL GERALD:

or you might have rock and the tools you need are different. But we are gonna get to building this thing that makes total sense. I use that sort of imagery to describe why you couldn't be over here dictating what Black folks were doing over here. I was a founding board member of the Human Rights Campaign,

GIL GERALD:

and I had to kind of prioritize where I was gonna spend my energy once I really began to become more fully involved as a Black gay activist. I remember that the first time that there was a determination about who we would allocate campaign funds to support races in Congress,

GIL GERALD:

I had an issue with the criteria because one of the candidates, and I don't recall who it was, that the campaign was about, and did decide, to support was someone who had a really good stand on gay LGBT issues. But I thought they had a poor record on civil rights issues and issues of concern to the

GIL GERALD:

Black community, and so I needed to spend time in an organization where we didn't have to make those kind of choices. We were looking at a broader set of issues that were important to us. One of the things that annoyed me early in my activist life was reading copies of the Advocate. I mean, there was this imagery that we were all wealthy white

GIL GERALD:

individuals, and that there was this market that just loved us. Thank goodness that we have a lot more information today. That's documented about need in our communities and the need of a Black lesbian, for example. I think we were on track in our notion that we needed to craft an organization

GIL GERALD:

that could, in fact, invite in to the movement and help the whole movement by organizing people who were left out at that point of the movement.

MASON FUNK:

That's great. One of the signature events, which I can't wait to hear about, is your role, the organization's role, in getting Audre Lorde to speak at the 20th anniversary

MASON FUNK:

of the March on Washington.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

First of all, Audre Lorde is pretty much at the top of the list of people that OUTWORDS would interview if she was still alive.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Her name to me is just, is in lights. Then you mentioned, in conjunction with that the Mrs. Martin Luther king Jr. endorsed, at that event, the notion of lesbian gay civil rights. I just want you to just paint me a picture and tell me that story it sounded monumental.

GIL GERALD:

I was at that point in time at acting --

MASON FUNK:

Tell me what point in time.

GIL GERALD:

I was at that point in time in early 1983, in the spring of '83, an acting executive director of the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays --

MASON FUNK:

Start by saying "In the spring of 1983,"

GIL GERALD:

In the spring of 1983, I was a newly elected acting executive director of the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays. There were

GIL GERALD:

ongoing plans being developed by something called the Coalition of Conscience led by Mrs. Coretta Scott King, Dr. King. It was to celebrate the 1963 March on Washington in which everybody knows King gave that eloquent speech, and everybody recalls as preceding the work

GIL GERALD:

that took place in '64 to pass the '64 Civil Rights Act. This was happening and we wanted to -- We proceeded as to be the first organization in the country, LGBT organization, to endorse this celebration, but there was a controversy there. One of the congressmen, the Congressman from the District of Columbia, the Delegate, made

GIL GERALD:

some remarks that were really uncalled for, comparing gay rights to penguin rights. So this struggle sort of grew from there because we endorsed the march, but then we were hearing from the rest of the community, particularly colleagues at the Gay Rights National Lobby who called me and others who basically

GIL GERALD:

said this statement has been made by one of the march organizers and they are not welcoming us. What that led to was an escalating set of events in demanding that the civil rights organizations and the Coalition of Conscience, which included a larger coalition of organizations, including the National Organization for Women,

GIL GERALD:

the American Friends (Service) Committee, the Nobel Peace prize folks, who were all endorsing this, in addition to all the churches, the churches in the Black community who were prominent civil rights promoters. In the end, we made a simple request

GIL GERALD:

that a person representing the LGBT communities be included in the program for that day.

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, just say that sentence again? You kind of bobbled.

GIL GERALD:

We made a simple request that a person representing the LGBT community be allowed -- Not 'be allowed,' that's not the right set of words, but be included in this program for

GIL GERALD:

that day. Essentially, there was a delaying action on delaying action on the delaying action until within days of the march, and there was no decision, and I had this famous phone call that I made to Donna Brazile, who was the March Coordinator. I said, "Donna," -- No, I didn't say it to "Donna," because she wasn't on the line. I said, "Will you tell Donna that I've gone to war with the Coalition of Conscience?

GIL GERALD:

I've declared war?" What proceeded to happen was a series of events that really precipitated the Coalition of Conscience to pay attention to this matter. It ended up with a conference call involving Mrs. King and all the other civil rights leaders, not all of them, but you know, Dr. Joseph Lowry,

GIL GERALD:

Reverend Cecil Williams, Benjamin Hooks. These are people that I grew up admiring in life, and now I'm on a phone lecturing them about civil rights, in a sense. I did that in collaboration with Ginny Apuzzo. Meantime, the local members

GIL GERALD:

of the coalition in DC had organized a sit-in in the Congressman's office who had made the remark about penguin rights and as citizens of the District of Columbia demanding to see him, then to speak with him and make an appeal to him. So you had a sit-in going on, now CNN and everybody else was involved. This was all over the media. The Washington Post, the

GIL GERALD:

Washington Times had major articles about the controversy, but now in the middle of the night, I was on the phone with Mrs. Coretta Scott King. The year I arrived here in the United States, it was the late '67, '68 was when Dr. King waskilled. I remember being glued to the TV when Dr. King died, and now I'm speaking to the widow of Dr. King, and I had

GIL GERALD:

also learned, for the first time, that spring, of the incidence of HIV in the Black community. The word hadn't really gotten out that this was a major problem and a major concern. The government didn't really know how to deal with this. I remember making that part of my presentation and conversation with the civil rights community of leaders. Anyway,

GIL GERALD:

they agreed to our demands. I had formulated a set of demands, worked with that list with Ginny Apuzzo and included having a speaker. It included not having a delegation of Black lesbians and gay, I mean of lesbians and gays, period, at the end of the march, but making sure that we were part of the march and not in the back of the bus in a sense. Anyway,

GIL GERALD:

they could not agree for logistical reasons to endorse this civil rights bill that was in Congress, that the Gay Rights National Lobby was responsible for, which, in a sense would amend the '64 civil rights bill to add the words sexual orientation to protections under that law.

GIL GERALD:

They could not do that because, logistically, they couldn't pull a meeting together that close to the march, but Mrs. King and other leaders said they would attend a press conference and they would endorse the bill, and that, I thought, was very important. Audre Lorde, on the other hand, had been assuring me on the phone all along, she was one of our board members, she said, "Gil, don't

GIL GERALD:

fret, don't fret. Just the fact that our organization's name is on the roster of organizations endorsing this march was a big accomplishment, Gil. You've done well." I was comforted with that, but it was important. Anyway, the press conference was

GIL GERALD:

organized, and they agreed and we agreed to the terms of our participation, and Audre Lorde being included in the program, and the press conference was held. I can never forget the words issued by the Reverend Cecil Williams, which were,

GIL GERALD:

"In 1963, we marched and in '64 we passed the civil rights bill. It is now time to amend that bill so that it extends protections to lesbians and gay men." Now, that was remarkable. Then Mrs. King stepped up and she also spoke for the community and for the march organization

GIL GERALD:

endorsed the civil rights bill. It was not before then that we really had any real, I mean, there was some involving NGLTF, some conversations that took place regarding collaboration on legislation, on the hill, between the civil rights community and Jeff Levy you could speak more adequately about that,

GIL GERALD:

but there really hadn't been a very public endorsement of this kind of legislation to protect us coming from the civil rights community prior to that.

MASON FUNK:

Wow. That's a major story. And do me a favor briefly, just say who was Audre Lorde, and why was it so valuable and important for her to be included in the roster of speakers at that march?

GIL GERALD:

Audre Lorde was the Poet Laureate of New York State. She was a recognized writer who had published, she was part of Kitchen Table: Woman of Color Press, which was a leading source of writing -- published writing for women of color in this country and

GIL GERALD:

particularly lesbians. Along with Audre, they modeled writing by gay men, from black gay men. I mean, the publishing of books by Essex Hemphill, and Joseph Beam, and others really came later, but they were forerunners. Audre Lorde was

GIL GERALD:

certainly someone who was appreciated and is appreciated historically by the entire LGBT community for her progressive politics, and for her example. She was one of several different people we floated, including Baldwin, James Baldwin, and others to speak, as a

GIL GERALD:

LGBT individual on our behalf at this-- But in the end, we had her commitment to do this as well.

MASON FUNK:

I feel like I might need you just to set the stage for the importance of this moment. I just feel like I might need you to just give us a little basic primer on the fact that the Black civil rights movement

MASON FUNK:

had never really openly, in any way, shape or form, integrated or made space for gay lesbian people to participate and to kind of link arms and support each other's, you know, have the larger movement, the umbrella movement include gays and lesbians. I think we just might need you to really just state the history up to this point.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah, they had,

MASON FUNK:

Don't say that, just start with who you're talking about.

GIL GERALD:

Okay.

MASON FUNK:

No, no, no. I was very blunt there. I apologize. No, but just let me know who you're talking about.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah. The civil rights community had always actually had

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, just start by saying the black civil rights community

GIL GERALD:

The Black civil rights community always had LGBT support and participation in the work that was engaged in during the 1960s. An example would be Bayard Rustin,

GIL GERALD:

who was the real mind behind the 1963 March, but there wasn't really an embrace of the issues that we faced in discrimination, it wasn't part of an agenda, an anti-discrimination agenda, that anybody spoke of. In fact, much of the civil rights community was made up of churches that really had concerns, if not outright

GIL GERALD:

problems, with homosexuality, from their understanding of Christian teaching. We always were in the churches and sang in the choir but it was a silent participation and we weren't there vocally involved as out LGBT, not in great numbers.

GIL GERALD:

Not in great numbers. At the sit-in at Congressman Fauntroy's office, there was an individual by the name of Gary Walker, who was married -- Who was a partner, excuse me, we weren't married in those days. He was the partner of Ray Melrose, the once president of the DC coalition, our chapter in DC, and Gary had been part of an active member,

GIL GERALD:

white member, of civil rights demonstrations. He actually was the one who said, let's do a sit-in, so I think there is a history, definitely, of our involvement in the community, but we weren't making demands of the organizations themselves to really take a stand on things like

GIL GERALD:

a gay civil rights bill.

MASON FUNK:

Right. So the mere fact, we had a similar story from a woman named Lani Kaʻahumanu, about having an openly bisexual person on the stage in 1993, so basically 10 years earlier, it was a big deal to have an openly gay or lesbian known black voice up on the stage at this event.

GIL GERALD:

The significance

GIL GERALD:

is it's really somehow really huge in some ways. I was approached by one of the then leading reporters of the Advocate, who said, "This is the moment. This is the moment." That we really need to really cement this relationship between -- Because this was a powerful force that made change in this country. The fact that

GIL GERALD:

the LGBT community and the movement, and a civil rights community had come together in a strong way was gonna be, and was in fact, powerful. Mm-Hmm

MASON FUNK:

That's great. That's great. Yeah, it's so fascinating. I think the other question I have for this moment is having watched the black civil rights movement come into existence and make past major

MASON FUNK:

pieces of legislation, now, 20 years later, of course, the work continues. On the part of you and your colleagues in the black LGBT community, was there a sense of like, learning from both the successes and maybe some of the failures of the mainstream black civil rights movement? Were they kind of like your parents or grandparents in organizing, in what they'd accomplished, in what they hadn't succeeded in? Did you ever kind of like look up to them and say,

MASON FUNK:

we're gonna both emulate and also learn from their mistakes?

GIL GERALD:

Absolutely, absolutely. I don't recall ever having a conversation or discussion in which I have other than my own personal kind of observations. One I think legislation is important in change and

GIL GERALD:

the history of that and the role of activism and demonstrations is something that I think provided a real good model for us. However, I tend to think that the cultural change that people in the country go through is as important.

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor. I'm gonna interrupt you for one second in order to have context for what you're saying.

GIL GERALD:

Sure.

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, start over and say "In comparing the successes and failures of the black civil rights movement and the gay and lesbian black civil rights movement," and just the gay lesbian movement, what are some of your observations? just throw you off there.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah, I think -- tell, ask the

KATE KUNATH:

Can I ask a question really quick?

MASON FUNK:

Absolutely.

KATE KUNATH:

So Mason keeps calling the black civil rights movement, but to my mind, the black civil rights movement is the civil rights movement. And that

KATE KUNATH:

the civil, the black community basically won civil rights. That then paved the way for everyone else in this country to get their civil rights. So to me, defining it further by saying the black right civil community to somehow it's like making it smaller than it is, but what is your sense of that? Because I hear him saying, can you say this, but I don't know if that's how you think of it in your head.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah. Maybe I need

GIL GERALD:

a little break.

MASON FUNK:

Sure. Take a break. We're actually right at the hour mark.

GIL GERALD:

Sure.

MASON FUNK:

So if you want to take a minute to kind of compose your thoughts,

GIL GERALD:

Right. Perfect. Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Let's cut or do you wanna keep going right now?

GIL GERALD:

No, I'm, I'm asking you if you would repeat the question so that I could really grasp it and my response to it. I mean, sure.

MASON FUNK:

So there's what Kate just mentioned, which is, is using black civil rights making it seem smaller, which you can

MASON FUNK:

basically incorporate that into your answer, however you want. My question was you with your black gay and lesbian colleagues, organizing, and having the civil rights movement as your predecessor, I just wondered, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether you kind of saw them as your predecessors and a force to be learned from

GIL GERALD:

Right.

MASON FUNK:

And I interrupted you cause I wanted to make sure people knew what you were talking about.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah. I have mixed feelings about this. What I'm struggling with as I listen to the question is that I recall that we had issues, meaning Black lesbians and gays, with comparisons, sometimes, with the

GIL GERALD:

civil rights movement, because there was the time we were all singing, "We shall overcome," but we were seeing racism in the gay community, or we were seeing a lack of inclusion among leading organizations or success in whatever efforts they may have made in inclusion at the time.

GIL GERALD:

So I'm careful about making comparisons because yes, a lot of inspiration was drawn from it, but maybe not enough lessons were learned. That would make it more of an imperative.

GIL GERALD:

I mean, I always thought that it was a marriage of convenience to bring them to -- I think what we did was very significant because I think that there is, and was, a reservoir of support for LGBT individuals among civil rights leaders,

GIL GERALD:

but I don't know that the same was true in the other way, in the other direction. The example is to what extent our organizations are gonna invest in supporting something that is being promoted by the civil rights community at that time. Of course, there was legislation all the time

GIL GERALD:

that the civil rights community was concerned about, but certainly the welfare of black folks is something that the urban league and others were and remain concerned about. I don't really feel that commitment is -- We want the support, we like coalition building as long as it's supporting what we're doing.

MASON FUNK:

Fascinating. Yeah. That's really what I wanted to get at was what was it like mm-hmm, in those years

MASON FUNK:

as black lesbians and gays, what was it like to be looking at them?

GIL GERALD:

Yeah. I'll try if I can speak. Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

You're already doing it.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah. Yeah. I'll try because also I'm taxed by memory right now. I'm trying to put myself in that time. I think it was universally recognized that this was an important development. And it was

GIL GERALD:

an opportunity to build from that point forward on this, on what had happened to really have a working coalition. I think people were committed to that, and I think that people continued that, but I think it took years before they would be more fruition in that way. Also, the issue here, for me, is that what I found as a Black gay man

GIL GERALD:

was that Black politicians saw gay community as white. So we were still basically not as important as the constituency because we didn't have the resources, in terms of the organization and size, to have an impact the way a white gay organization might.

GIL GERALD:

I often resented the access that white gays had to civil rights leaders. I mean, an example might be Mayor Barry, the newly elected mayor of the district of Columbia claiming -- and I think honestly do so, I don't think he was making it up -- that he didn't realize that there were these problems

GIL GERALD:

and issues that needed to be addressed, that we were bringing to the table. The conversation that was sought was not just a conversation between white gays and a civil rights community, but Black gays and the civil rights community. I think that became more helpful in

GIL GERALD:

later years during the HIV/AIDS crisis. Some of my tension with the civil rights community, I had tension with the civil rights committee as somebody involved in AIDS activism and because we had to be involved in the process of education. I remember, and I'll just make it very brief, going to a very first conference on

GIL GERALD:

AIDS in the black community, by the SCLC women, Southern Leadership Conference Women in Atlanta, in '86, in the spring of '86 or close to the summer of '86. There was a gathering after the meeting, in which mayor Andrew Young was speaking, and he was speaking in favor of HIV/AIDS research

GIL GERALD:

because it would help cancer research. I mean, what an avoidance of the problem. I mean, again, we have this tension because I'm admirer of Andrew Young, but that's the reality that I saw as a gay and HIV/AIDS activist, that many of our leaders in the civil rights or

GIL GERALD:

political sphere were actually not really conversant in what black lesbians and gays, the reality that we faced on the streets.

MASON FUNK:

Especially when you brought AIDS into the picture. It was already very complex, and then you bring in AIDS, and so people who might have, like, when you come to the black churches, for example, there might have been a kind of a tentative connection, linking arms until AIDS arrives and makes the reality of sexuality just much more vivid

MASON FUNK:

for many people for whom it was a little bit abstract.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah, absolutely.

MASON FUNK:

Let's take a little break. I think it'll be good. A little air conditioning. And we've reached a point like a hinging point.

GIL GERALD:

Okay. No problem. I hope you have enough material.

MASON FUNK:

Oh my gosh. I only wish. I mean,

GIL GERALD:

I mean, I'm writing about all this and I'm not afraid ... I mean, the more it gets out and through different media is better. I'm not even concerned about that.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. You've got such an interesting

MASON FUNK:

historical perspective. It really is incredible for me to be able to hear some of your stories. Mm-Hmm as a historian.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Just capture those stories and a kind of realities in given moments like you're describing.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah. Yeah. I know. We're not on right now.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah.

GIL GERALD:

Mrs King, for example.

MASON FUNK:

Well, I mean, actually, I would like to record whatever you're about to say.

GIL GERALD:

Oh, okay.

MASON FUNK:

Because you're gonna talk about Mrs. King and, again, we're just connecting ourselves to history here.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

If you're comfortable sharing.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah. I'm not sure that what I was gonna share was comfortable.

MASON FUNK:

Okay.

GIL GERALD:

And I was just gonna illustrate what I'm talking about. Mrs. King became accessible to the LGBT community, and I would go to places where I would be in audiences, white gay audiences for the most part, where Mrs. King was invited or whatever, but

GIL GERALD:

the black folks within that organization were not empowered.

MASON FUNK:

Mm-Hmm yeah.

GIL GERALD:

They weren't invited, they weren't part of the table.

MASON FUNK:

What's kind of part the same phenomenon you're describing of black leaders courting white gay organizations, because they had influence in money and essentially not courting, in the same fashion, the black lesbians and gays because they were

MASON FUNK:

seen as relatively powerless, which is just a harsh reality of how shit gets done.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah, sure. But for me, it was an indication of where I needed to put my energy.

MASON FUNK:

Which was where?

GIL GERALD:

Well, it's building greater visibility and involvement in our community, wherever people chose to become involved, and to continue to be an advocate for that.

GIL GERALD:

I think we can draw on those successes, but I think that sometimes there was this artificiality of the relationship, was artificial in my way--There was a level of artificiality, a convenience, with how do you live out those values that you really are embracing the civil rights community? How do each other really embrace

GIL GERALD:

what's going down?

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. You also cited in your interview that you played a role in what you called "engineering a black feminist women majority on the board of the NCBLG." That alone, to me, is a fascinating insight into you as a person. Tell us that story and why was that important to you?

GIL GERALD:

Well, the story is, and well, the way it went down was, at the founding convention of the organization, I was elected --

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, say what organization you're talking about.

GIL GERALD:

At the founding convention of the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays in Philadelphia in 1980,

GIL GERALD:

I was elected the organization's co-chair, along with a woman by the name of Renee McCoy, Reverend Renee McCoy. We had already, as a group, been committed to inclusion in our outlook, in our behavior, in our programming and all of that. But in fact,

GIL GERALD:

there were more men on the board than women. I also was convinced that women, particularly after 1979, in the first National Third World conference of lesbians and gays where Audre Lorde spoke, I was convinced that women had led the way, they had set out an example that Black men needed to engage in writing

GIL GERALD:

in a way that women had already cut a path for us. I thought it was important to build an organization in which women had far more of a voice than they had at that time. Women were included and we had a co-chair model. We had practical parity among the founders of the organization.

GIL GERALD:

But the fact of the matter is that I think women had put radical thought to paper, and they had really worked through some of the implications, political implications of what it meant to be a black lesbian and they were feminist

GIL GERALD:

and so in their outlook and thinking. I engineered an internal kind of coup d'etat, certainly, in the organization to displace the majority of males on the board of directors, when I became -- Two things happened, I promised the board that I would demonstrate that our organization would

GIL GERALD:

and could raise funds to have paid staff--and If I did so that I would seek to be the first paid executive director. The second thing is that I wanted to make sure that we were open and inviting and accepting and promoting

GIL GERALD:

black women, feminist, leadership in the organization, so that our agenda reflected that thinking. It was important to me to also counter sexism, period. Sexism exists. It's not a white thing, it's a black thing too. You see it throughout cultures

GIL GERALD:

in the world. I was committed to making a change within our organization that represented actual practice of being pro feminist. I did whatever politics I had to do within the organization to displace some of the men and to replace them with women on the board.

GIL GERALD:

There's no way to dress that up. I mean,

KATE KUNATH:

Thank you.

GIL GERALD:

Yes.

KATE KUNATH:

I just said, thank you.

MASON FUNK:

She said, thank you for what you just talked about.

GIL GERALD:

MASON FUNK:

By the way, let's pause for a second. Is the AC still running? .

KATE KUNATH:

Oh, yes, it is.

MASON FUNK:

Let's kill it.

GIL GERALD:

Jeff.

MASON FUNK:

Jeff.

JEFF:

Yes, please.

GIL GERALD:

Could you.

MASON FUNK:

And we don't have to do that. We don't want to redo that part of the story because it was genius.

MASON FUNK:

Off camera, I would love to continue talking this conversation because as a founder, board, lalala, I have so many questions about, and also I sit on another nonprofit board, it's a totally separate story, but anyway, I'm curious, you said there's no dressing that up.

GIL GERALD:

There's no dressing that up. The other part of this is that I actually admired these women. I mean, Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde, my goodness. To have them on our board

GIL GERALD:

was just a coup. I always considered that a personal accomplishment because it required me to identify the allies I had among men making this change and making sure the votes were there for this to happen.

MASON FUNK:

Great.

MASON FUNK:

I want to ask one more question then we'll have to move on, did change occur when you had managed to install this majority black feminist women board?

GIL GERALD:

Absolutely. First of all, the organization, in fact changed its name from National Coalition of Black Gays to National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays. We came up with a new motto. When we started the organization in '78, the

GIL GERALD:

motto was "As proud of our gayness as we are of our blackness." It was an affirmation. It was revolutionary for us to say that because there was this sense that you couldn't be black and gay. I mean, there's a contradiction there, that's a white thing, and it comes from the European, the white Europeans sort of introduced this in Africa and those sorts of myths

GIL GERALD:

sort of were part of the culture. So it was important. I lost my train of thought.

MASON FUNK:

Well, you began by saying that at the founding of the organization, the motto are as proud of our --

GIL GERALD:

Yes. Black women introduced a new motto. I'm trying to recall the motto now, but it was something that worked for us.

GIL GERALD:

Jeffrey?

SPEAKER:

Jeffrey, what's the motto?

GIL GERALD:

No, he has to bring the cover of my book and put it next to me right here. Okay.

SPEAKER:

What?

MASON FUNK:

The cover of of Gill's book.

GIL GERALD:

It's on the right hand side of my desk.

MASON FUNK:

It's literally gonna be there in print.

GIL GERALD:

The title incorporates the motto.

MASON FUNK:

Gotcha.

GIL GERALD:

It's not the permanent title.

GIL GERALD:

I don't know what the title of the book is gonna be.

MASON FUNK:

Thank you, Jeff. You are the world's best production assistant ever.

GIL GERALD:

It's called. Okay.

MASON FUNK:

Just set it down. Go ahead. Now, let's just take a step back. Let's start by saying something like when we installed or when we were able to have black feminist women majority on the board, I'm assuming this led to the change of motto. Is that correct?

GIL GERALD:

Yes. When we installed a black --

MASON FUNK:

One more time.

GIL GERALD:

When we installed a

GIL GERALD:

Black feminist majority on the board we actually went through what might be called some strategic planning today. We really rethought some of the purposes and mission of the organization, in a sense, revisited that. "Black pride and solidarity, the new movement of Black lesbians and gays" became our motto. I can tell you this,

GIL GERALD:

that it attracted more women to our organization Michelle Parkerson, who became a co-chair of our organization, she is a noted videographer, filmmaker and a writer, celebrated. I interviewed her because I'm writing a part of this history and she said, "Gil this made a big

GIL GERALD:

difference for women." Women responded to this call and this invitation to be part of this organization. We were in a part of history when we had organizations that had women organizing separately and men organizing separately. There's something cultural about that that I think we needed to kind of change. And not just in the

GIL GERALD:

Black community, but I mean, it's deeply embedded in the culture. We have Sunday schools with girls and boys in different parts of this, that kind of thing. Anyway, we made an affirmative statement that we wanted women to have the controlling vote on the board of directors.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah, that's great. That's great. We could spend more time there, but we have to move on because I do wanna circle back to when HIV/AIDS came into the picture. Because that obviously brought a whole new level of layering and complication to this this kind of growing integration between the black community, the gay and lesbian community, and then suddenly, we introduce an epidemic in which there's

MASON FUNK:

very little understanding at the outset about the epidemic and its presence in the black community. You said you played a role in bringing attention to HIV/AIDS in the black community.

GIL GERALD:

Absolutely. And a big commitment that we made. In fact,

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, start by telling us what 'we,' what you're talking about?

GIL GERALD:

Yeah. Great. sorry. When HIV and AIDS came into the picture, it became

GIL GERALD:

clear to me that this was an issue that the organization needed to take up big time. I recall that very board meeting where I was introducing motions to bring change to the organization, including change to the board of directors to make it more representative women. I also happened to have gotten

GIL GERALD:

my copy, in April of 1983, of the first, MMWR, that is the Weekly Morbidity and Mortality Report of the Centers for Disease Control. I'd never seen it before now. I grew up in a home where public health was spoken all about, but I did not become the doctor my father wanted me to become. I'm reading this first

GIL GERALD:

report about the incidence of HIV and AIDS in the Black community, and I'm reading it and understanding it, and I'm understanding the disparities. I'm understanding that it's Black gay men here that we're talking about, for the most part. I coincidentally was having that board meeting in Washington, DC, and I had a reception in my home to invite local members of the community

GIL GERALD:

to greet the board. I casually brought out the report and said, by the way, we need to change our lifestyles. I mean, talking about our sexual behavior, and this is what's happening. The reaction in the room included, which included individuals that are on in the history books, Melvin Boozer, others was dismissive,

GIL GERALD:

"This is a white gay disease. This is not something that concerns us." It was, only if you sleep with white men, is this a problem. I was confronted with that, but I didn't allow that to stop me there. I understood the reaction. The reaction of the room included, this is all part of a government plot to change our sexuality.

GIL GERALD:

Those sorts of things were coming out of people who actually were academics, who were in the room, James Tinney, Dr. James Tinney, professor of journalism at Howard university, I recall that. That immediately hinted that we have a problem here. We have a problem here. I have, now, a report from the Center for Disease Control that it's pretty clear about

GIL GERALD:

the statistics. I could see that doesn't take much; 20% of the cases in this country are black. We're only 13% of the population. What else do you need? You don't need to be a statistician to really get the picture here. And that was 1983. That meant that Gil as executive director of this organization had to make some changes. Some of the things

GIL GERALD:

that I did that were of consequence was to reach out to the Surgeon General of the United States, C. Everett Koop, during the Reagan administration. He was already in even hot water because he was developing the Surgeon General's report on HIV/AIDS. He wanted that in everybody's mailbox and in the country, so that people would be armed with, well, I arranged a meeting with

GIL GERALD:

the Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and it was attended, and I invited other member people of color to attend. I invited them to come to a meeting that I had organized with him. He met with us and he ended the meeting by saying, "This has been extremely informative, and I will meet with the most important person at the white house." "Tomorrow, I have a meeting

GIL GERALD:

with the most important White House and it isn't the president." I never got to ask Surgeon General Koop who was this person that was the most important person at the White House. But again, it was at a time when there wasn't much public information in the press or anywhere about what I had seen in April of '83. Now I'm talking about something that took place in '86. All along, there was a real challenge. In '86

GIL GERALD:

I secured some funds from, well, still Reagan in the White House. I secured some funds from HHS, just $20,000 and pulled off the very first conference on AIDS in the Black community, national conference, in the country. This was attended by over 400 people who had come in from the West Coast, from the Midwest, from the South, from the Northeast, from the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic.

GIL GERALD:

It was people who were now on board with this, and for the first time in major press, there was coverage about this conference and such a type of a conference. But what I find most significant is that the next -- The CDC was present. The people at the CDC were present. People from HHS were present at the conference, and we pulled this community conference together

GIL GERALD:

involving people who were living with HIV and people who were serving people with HIV, who were concerned about the lack of response to HIV and people of color communities and Black community, particularly. It was about Black at that time, that conference. I recall that I was now changing my role. I had resigned, shortly after that conference, from the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays,

GIL GERALD:

and was invited in to be a director of minority affairs with the National AIDS Network. Paul Kawata was the executive director of that organization at the time. And I spoke with the people at the CDC who I'd actually met and I said "NCBLG," meaning the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, "is not gonna be able to do the next conference. They're in the middle of a transition to a new executive director.

GIL GERALD:

How about the National AIDS Network?" I pulled the other one, that conference off, with the help of a coordinator I'd hired. The CDC said, "No, we'll do it next time." That was not a problem. I mean, there were issues with that. But the fact of the matter is that every up to this date, today, the CDC has annual conferences addressing HIV in minority

GIL GERALD:

communities that are modeled, or at least began as modeled after the one that this National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays pulled off. They didn't have a clue as to how they were gonna pull together and work with the community. That's one big example or two examples of how I worked as a leader of an organization that was concerned about the development of HIV and AIDS,

GIL GERALD:

it's just two of those examples that is, I think, of some consequence that the CDC, incidentally, had me on a flight to Atlanta once a week, for months, to plan the next conference as a consultant. We got and pulled together a group of people that were working with us

GIL GERALD:

to begin to help the CDC understand that working through the local health departments was not gonna reach the community. The health departments didn't have a relationship with the black lesbian and gay community, or the black gay men who were impacted by HIV. In many parts of the country, it was important to build capacity within HIV/AIDS organizations and

GIL GERALD:

within black gay initiated efforts to provide services that were related to HIV/AIDS services and prevention.

MASON FUNK:

In other words, the CDC might have thought, we'll go through the local county health organizations or whatever, but if those organizations didn't have the connections, then it made more sense to go through the existing AIDS organizations and help them build?

GIL GERALD:

They realized that

GIL GERALD:

the health departments didn't have that capacity and that there needed to be a different approach. The traditional way that the CDC worked with the states and localities is through the health department, state and local, distribute funds that way. Well, that was not going to work and did not work.

MASON FUNK:

They had to distribute through.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah, they had a program, for example, through the US

GIL GERALD:

Conference of Mayors where there were seed funds that the US Conference of Mayors was making to local organizations to build local HIV/AIDS services within community based organizations. I became extremely involved or very involved, I should say, in that process in the sense that when the first RFP, request for proposals, went out from the US Conference of Mayors, I picked up the phone and called them

GIL GERALD:

and said, you're not gonna get a good response from our community, because of the way you've developed these proposals, these are requests for proposals and developed a working relationship with that organization to make sure that those funds, which were intended to help build capacity in community based organizations that were based in the communities that were affected by-- and had access to those

GIL GERALD:

communities for those organizations to have some opportunity to get some funding, to get started and going.

MASON FUNK:

Gotcha. I'm reminded of your father's advice to improvise, improvise, improvise. it sounds like there was no roadmap.

GIL GERALD:

No.

MASON FUNK:

So can you just riff on that point a little bit? What did it feel like to be in the middle of a crisis, an epidemic that's spiraling and sound of control,

MASON FUNK:

and there being no roadmap, and you're trying to make sure that the services go where there most important, including the black community, which is being invisibilized, how did it feel to you in this era to be doing what you were doing? If that's not too broad and vague a question?

GIL GERALD:

Well, I felt definitely challenged, but I developed a sense of mission actually. This has to change.

GIL GERALD:

I became committed to the issue in a way that I thought even endangered my commitment to women's issues. In fact, when I resigned, I was really actually exhausted. I did resign in late '86 and continue to work more explicitly in the HIV/AIDS arena. I guess part of the answer is that I found the new venue because I don't think our organization

GIL GERALD:

was really ready to take on this issue in the way that needed to happen. Let me just say this, this conference took place, it was Saturday in Washington, DC, Sunday morning, I'm going through the newspaper vending machines and pulling out the different national papers, from LA and all, and I'm saying, oh, it's there, it's there, it's there, it's there.

GIL GERALD:

And then I had a board meeting that Sunday, and I come in with a stack of newspapers and I'm exhausted because an anecdote that will be dealt with in my book is that when the conference began that morning, I had actually raised enough money to pull off the conference from a variety of sources, but the money to pay for the luncheon hadn't arrived. I walked from my office

GIL GERALD:

to the DC convention center where the meeting was held. I made the welcoming remarks that an executive director would make and introduced the next speaker, which was a person living with HIV, a black individual from Baltimore. I was called aside and said, the caterers wanted to speak with you. I know what they wanted, they wanted a check. I said, "Wait a minute,

GIL GERALD:

I'll meet with them in about 15 to 20 minutes." I walked back to my office and guess what? The mail had arrived, the check was in the mail . Can you imagine what I was feeling? There were 400 people at a luncheon, and I didn't have the check for the luncheon they were gathered. That was all weighing on me as an individual. I walked to the bank and I put it in the ATM and deposited it and walked with a check and run out the check.

GIL GERALD:

And it was fine, but I was emotionally exhausted, really exhausted. I didn't sense that the board was capturing the moment. This was an important thing. We were in the press in a way that had not happened before on this issue. I got on a plane the next morning to go to

GIL GERALD:

Amherst, to go to a little course on popular economics that I was gonna take, that I did take, it was just a weekend course. I cried my heart out on the plane and wrote my resignation letter. I was just exhausted. I was just simply exhausted. I felt there really needed to be something else that had to happen, because I don't think the board got it because I think the conversations would've been different.

GIL GERALD:

I've spoken with board members who were there at that meeting and they don't read it that way. Well, that's the reality of what happened. I went and I got invited to be at the National AIDS Network and continued my commitment, but I also went on to be one of the founders of the National Minority AIDS Council, which you may be aware of. It was, and still remains, an organization

GIL GERALD:

that provides leadership around issues of HIV and AIDS in racial and ethnic minority communities in the United States. I'm the incorporating officer. That happened because at the HIV/AIDS, the international conference at the Hilton in Washington, DC, where George Bush represented the United States at the opening session, the senior George Bush.

GIL GERALD:

I mentioned George Bush because the mic was open and there had been some remark he made and there was a booing from the audience and he said, it must be the gays and . And it was. He didn't know that the microphone was open. That's why I introduced that was a memorable moment for me. But

GIL GERALD:

we did a workshop. I was at the National AIDS Network and they were scientists gathered all around from the world who were in the audience. We were speaking about HIV and AIDS. I don't remember what the particular subject matter I was addressing, but it was about HIV and AIDS in the Black community or the minority community in the United States. I remember that either

GIL GERALD:

doctors or scientists from India began to lecture us on the podium about what an ass was for, and it wasn't being to be fucked. I mean, excuse my language. I didn't mean to say that, I'm not having a conversation with you. And so we left that room and we made a commitment to start to organize the National Minority AIDS Council,

GIL GERALD:

which today still lives on and carries on those conferences is that we initiated as a National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays and in a different form, of course, in a broader audience.

MASON FUNK:

That's fantastic. That's a great slice of history, including the George Bush thing and the Indian guy. Those are just priceless pieces of history, honestly. So thank you for sharing those stories very openly.

GIL GERALD:

MASON FUNK:

We're gonna have to move on. It breaks my heart, but we are gonna move on. Let me check in with Kate. Kate, any burning questions on your mind? We've got about 45 minutes.

GIL GERALD:

I see. See that's okay.

MASON FUNK:

But I wanna make space for Kate right now. Anything on your mind?

KATE KUNATH:

I've got a few now.

MASON FUNK:

Well, yeah. And you'll answer me by the way. Sure. I would just say in the interest of time We're gonna wanna like, try to take --

GIL GERALD:

Okay. Fine.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. I mean, but I don't. Yeah,

GIL GERALD:

No, I get it. I get it. I get it.

KATE KUNATH:

So this is not in the order of my thinking, but I am wondering what you think about a couple things together, which is the persistence of racism in the gay movement because we were talking about it, like in your experience in the past, how does it feel to you now?

KATE KUNATH:

I'll link that question on its own actually.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Talk to me again.

GIL GERALD:

Yes. I think that I can express some acknowledgement that there's been some improvement or some change that's warranted, but that we have --

MASON FUNK:

Tell me what you're talking about.

GIL GERALD:

Oh, God, sorry. It's not natural

GIL GERALD:

yes. When it comes to racism and the LGBT community, and what's happened since I got involved in the late 1970s is that I think that there's been some important changes. The most significant ones have been with the national organization. I was very impressed with the Creating Change Conference in which I was a

GIL GERALD:

panelist a few years back, not too far back. I don't think that would've happened in the 70s. I think the fact that more people of color are involved in that process or in that forum is an important dimension. I'm not in a place where I can evaluate what's happened with people at the board level and the director's level. But I think

GIL GERALD:

so I'm skeptical to say that much has changed because as late as in the 2000s when I was living in San Francisco, we were having problems with discrimination at bars, in San Francisco, in the progressive city. I think that there

GIL GERALD:

has been some real, there have been, hopefully, some structural changes that persist and are still headed in the right direction. I think there still is, and remains a need for women, for Black individuals, people from the Black community, for people from the Latino community, to be organized as autonomous organizations

GIL GERALD:

in the movement to continue to address issues of racism and sexism and classism, and also issues that are particular to the community. I think in the Latino community, for example, immigration's a big issue. I think if you take that forum to some of the national gay organizations, that this is not our issue, I disagree. As an immigrant who had to fight for -- I disagree,

GIL GERALD:

but, of course, in the case of the Latino community, we are talking about our families, not just LGBT admission into the country. I just wouldn't.

MASON FUNK:

Great. Okay. Do you have a follow up or another question?

KATE KUNATH:

I have another question. In the 70s, in Brooklyn, in New York,

KATE KUNATH:

what were some of the gay affirming spaces or activities that you took part in?

GIL GERALD:

A 21 year old? The baths? No, I'm sorry. I don't need, you know, I went to a Pratt Institute, which is a primarily white organization.

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor again, set the stage.

GIL GERALD:

Okay. In the 1970s, when I came out in the early 1970s, I began the

GIL GERALD:

process of coming out on the campus of Pratt Institute and feeling my way. I got introduced by fellow white students to the gay community. I don't believe we had, I mean, there was a gay organization, which I never joined on campus. I know that it was a gay affirming, but I cannot say to what extent it would've been affirming to

GIL GERALD:

me personally. I think that, as a young man, I felt fortunate to have, as my first boyfriend, a young doctor who, well, actually a graduate from medical school who was an intern at Harlem hospital, who was actually, before

GIL GERALD:

HIV and AIDS, a volunteer at a gay men's health clinic down in the Village. In that sense, he was affirming and they were affirming in the sense that they were concerned about our health issues. But I ventured to the Firehouse in New York and it looked

GIL GERALD:

like a strange culture to me. It is not a criticism, IT just didn't feel like, I mean, I was a wallflower on the wall. I cannot say that I participated in enough other than maybe having an impression of a meeting or two to say, well, I guess, I'm not gonna continue here, but these are the days of the zaps and Mayor Lindsay and that sort of thing. I can't really speak to the affirming.

GIL GERALD:

I did not have the good fortune to go to some of the spaces that Black men and women participated in, which were mostly from my -- Well, there were organizations I would later learn like Salsa Soul Sisters and others. I can't tell you their history, but these were places obviously of firm affirmation

GIL GERALD:

in terms of cultural expression.

KATE KUNATH:

Can you be specific about some of the other ones?

MASON FUNK:

Like the spaces he did go to?

KATE KUNATH:

Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Like even bathhouses, even bars.

GIL GERALD:

Well, yeah, I was a young student and I --

MASON FUNK:

Talk to me again. Ignore Kate. Sorry.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah. In the early 70s, I was quickly introduced to the bathhouses and so the Continental Baths were Bette Midler, I happened to be there one night when Bette Midler

GIL GERALD:

was performing. I was introduced to 1970 styles gay sex. I mean, quite frankly, much of what was affirming about being a Black gay man or a gay man, period, came later in life. I think that right then and there, I was really just on a learning curve around the

GIL GERALD:

social aspects of what are the possibilities? So, yeah, as a young man, I hit Fire Island. I went to places like that, but I can't say that they're as affirming as I learned affirming to be when I was in the company of Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam and others, or Jewelle Gomez.

KATE KUNATH:

Can you talk about when you did experience affirmation and that kind of community?

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. You talked about the writing community.

GIL GERALD:

Yes.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. What did that specifically mean to you?

GIL GERALD:

Well, essentially, there was a movement in Washington, DC, basically in the early 80s, a key player was a

GIL GERALD:

gentleman by the name of Ray Melrose who put together something called The Clubhouse. It was a space where people who were writing, doing spoken word began, to gather on weekends and special nights to show their work and share their work. He would showcase people from other cities, like Barbara Smith and

GIL GERALD:

Audre Lorde and Jewelle Gomez. I can just go down a long list of, you know, it was a venue that was like a -- I mean, the closest thing to it was less speakeasy. It was in an alley in Washington, DC, on private property that had basically served apple cider, but it became, also, a political space.

GIL GERALD:

It was Enik Alley, the Enik Alley Arts Society was the name of the organization. He also worked at DC Space, which was a club and in downtown Washington, DC, where also these performances did take place. Cultural workers were what I consider to be

GIL GERALD:

key players that had really not fully understood their role in mobilizing our community or changing people's minds. I think that people were able to find each other in spaces where poetry was being performed, where music and film and writing was getting -- They were getting

GIL GERALD:

exposed to writing and new writing. I think that was when I really experienced affirmation. Our conferences were always that space when we had conferences, national conferences -- Jewelle Gomez basically who is actually, celebrated as you know. Jewell, I interviewed her for my memoir. I remember that occasion because I picked Jewelle at the airport.

GIL GERALD:

In 1985, we had a conference in St. Louis, a national conference, and I picked Jewelle up at the airport and her partner, Cheryl, at the time, they worked together. Cheryl's gonna forgive me for having a slip up on her last name right now, because that's just unforgivable. But Jewelle

GIL GERALD:

basically said to me that it had been the first conference that she had been to, of the Black gay co community, so she was somebody who was celebrated in New York, but at the same time the venues for us were limited, where we gathered and we introduced each other to each other, to those of us who were doing that kind of work.

MASON FUNK:

Wait. Kate, sorry. Can you expand

MASON FUNK:

or deepen a little bit the sense of why you feel like the spoken word, the music, what transpired through those avenues or channels of gathering and communicating that created such a sense of like community building?

GIL GERALD:

Well, I think the first thing is that as a gay man, what women had gotten,

GIL GERALD:

or I observed women to have received through or expressed through Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, there was no equivalent yet among Black gay men. I think that it inspired people to go publish--io themselves, go publish, self-publish. I think

GIL GERALD:

that, in itself, mobilized people and then people came to hear them and to experience their work, and they found themselves in those stories or in that poetry, and we found each other as well. I mean, the community grew and got connected across space in the sense, across cities. I think that that is how I would

GIL GERALD:

describe it, inspiration to do creative work, but also the message of affirming us as who we are, that we weren't alone. We were part of a larger group of people. I have one story that I can't avoid but tell you that when we had that third world conference

GIL GERALD:

in 1979, and we invited and got a gathering over 400 people, but this was more diverse, it included Asian Pacific Islanders, that I made the welcoming remarks at the first opening sort of session, orientation to the weekend conference. I just was getting up to do the thing that you do. You tell people where the restrooms are and you tell people

GIL GERALD:

welcome and you tell them blah, blah, blah, blah, this is what the schedule is like, these are the changes in the agenda. I was stopped in my tracks by one of the individuals in the audience who said, "Stop, please stop. We just need to take in the moment right now. I've never been in a room like this with other people like me." I was like, okay,

GIL GERALD:

but she was right. I mean, I should have anticipated that, perhaps, I should have, but I didn't realize the importance of what we were doing until something like -- I was jolted out of something like that and said we can't go on as business as usual here, or conference as usual, we have to take in -- This is a moment, I'm in a room with other women of color that look like me.

GIL GERALD:

I don't know where she was from in the country, but she'd come from some place where she wished she had that kind of experience.

MASON FUNK:

It kind of reminds me of a lot of conversations happening these days around the values of white supremacy culture, which are very much like set the agenda, set the timetable, move through the items, which was kind of the role you were in. You were the organizer, you were the stage set, and she brought a different set of values in a way, which was like,

MASON FUNK:

recognize the moment, stop and breathe. It's not exactly the values of white supremacy culture. It's a different set of values.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah, yeah. You're right. You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. Yeah, I take a deep breath and it happens. I remember the excitement that we had in St. Louis at this conference that we talk about. I remember the excitement.

GIL GERALD:

The most exciting parts of our gatherings were not necessarily the workshops, it was the cultural performances, the reading of poetry by people like Jewelle and others. It was actually that ...

MASON FUNK:

I love that her name is coming up so much. She's one of our interviewees, and she was part of our strategic planning committee a couple years ago. Just the joy every single time we communicate.

MASON FUNK:

We're gonna move on, Kate. Can we cut? How about if I give you like a few minutes at the end again? Does that work for you?

KATE KUNATH:

Sure. Okay.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. So one of the things I wanted to talk about was that you really set up as one of the themes of your life, it's kind of broadened abstract, but you use the phrase reconciling your revolving identities.

GIL GERALD:

Oh, yeah.

MASON FUNK:

I'm more interested in the identities. You've got a multiplicity of identities and you cycle through them, I would imagine. They navigate with each other, but only you can really describe what that's been like yeah. Kind of a looking back sort of way and up to the present.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah. It was a mystery to me when I first arrived in the United States in 1967 and within a year I was in college.

GIL GERALD:

I definitely identify as a Black individual, somebody in this country, particularly. But there are other identities that are important to me. I was born in Panama, so I'm a Panamanian national, in terms of my birth, and I spent a good part of my childhood there.

GIL GERALD:

I have a grandparentage on both sides who were from the Caribbean. I have that, Black Caribbean, African Caribbean background, but it has to do with what I had for lunch and dinner and breakfast. I mean, the food that I ate was Panamanian or what's prepared in Panama. But I have this history of the stuff that comes from the Caribbean.

GIL GERALD:

Then I have at least nine first cousins who were all born of American of parents, both sides, in the United States. And so a whole lot of family here, and I spent many, many of my school vacations as a child with my grandparents in Harlem, on Morningside avenue, in Morningside park. I'll give you an example. I'm in college now and

GIL GERALD:

there's a foreign students association, there's a Latino organization, there is a gay forming organization, there's a Black student union. I mean, and all are pulling at me, like pulling at me emotionally because I identified with all, but there's also this like, well, you belong over here, not over there kind of thing. I have this fortune,

GIL GERALD:

I guess, or unique, unique in this country perhaps. Not really unique, I think that more of us are coming out but because so many people actually are second generation immigrants or first generation immigrants or even third generation immigrants and not immigrants anymore, but by my count,

GIL GERALD:

who can have these cultural ties and it impacts on their identity. I mean, I can go to a Caribbean festival in New York and feel right part of it, or I can go to a Latino, Dominican, I can go to a Panamanian gathering. I certainly can go to a Black gathering and feel the connection and feel that it includes me. But I think it could be when you're speaking

GIL GERALD:

for a community or on behalf of a community, addressing issues in a community, I think that becomes an issue. To what extent are you one of us, are you really a woman, a feminist or are you really Black? I mean, you have all this sort of history that's different in that way. With what

GIL GERALD:

I mean, can you really identify with -- That was a challenge as an activist, but the thing that I'm comforted by is that I was so welcomed and supported by so many individuals that I love and some of them are gone, for whom this was not an issue, there is a

GIL GERALD:

'are you Black enough' kind of concern, I mean, it has some reality to it. Later on in life, when I worked in Los Angeles, was I really qualified to do what I did, which was to be an executive director of an AIDS organization, how can you relate to the individual

GIL GERALD:

who's in the park needing HIV prevention with needles and that sort of thing, or do you even know the colors of the gangs in South Los Angeles where; I've been challenged with that. But I think that what my personal history has provided me is a viewpoint that I think has been helpful and useful. I lived in Africa, I lived in

GIL GERALD:

the Caribbean, I lived in Panama and I lived in the United States. I see the connections, I see the struggles and from a faith standpoint, just certainly, I mean, Christian being one of the other identities that I have, I lived in Africa where I would get every morning

GIL GERALD:

I would see Muslim people, you know, and not every morning, I mean, several times a day, turn to Mecca and pray. But having been born in a Catholic country, I couldn't really buy the idea that some people were just simply not people of God.

GIL GERALD:

So perhaps I've answered your question, perhaps not.

MASON FUNK:

You have. You have, as best as you probably can in a relatively short amount of time. It's the kind of conversation I think that could unspool over a lot longer, especially getting into some of the nuances being not enough X, not enough Y so forth. But I'm gonna go back to Kate for a couple more questions, and then I'm gonna wrap up with four short questions that are kind of how we wrap up every single interview. Kate.

KATE KUNATH:

Okay. You've mentioned you've referenced some of your successes of gay black visibility, and I wonder if you could touch on some of this.

GIL GERALD:

Could you slightly repeat the question again?

KATE KUNATH:

What would you consider some of your successes in terms of gay black visibility, whether that's individual or as a community?

GIL GERALD:

Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Again, speak to me,

MASON FUNK:

try to just remember that it's as if I ask that question.

GIL GERALD:

Particularly during the HIV/AIDS crisis when I happened to really become a focal point, in terms of my position in the organization, as executive director, I had plenty of opportunities to speak publicly, and I appeared on TV. I also appeared in the press.

GIL GERALD:

I think that those were part of my contribution to raising the level of visibility, and maybe even empowering other people who were struggling with how to be more public about being aBblack gay or lesbian individual. I'll give you an example.

GIL GERALD:

Well, it was a reelection year for Marion Barry. I happened to have been at a conference in Las Vegas, the American Public health Association, in which there was a very famous taking over of the stage by black gay men. Craig Harris, who's no longer with us, is noted for having taken the stage, President Carter had been the keynote speaker at that conference, to bring attention to the issue

GIL GERALD:

of HIV/AIDS in the Black community. I rushed back to Washington, DC on an early flight, missed that, because I wanted to be at -- It might have been primary night or election night for Marion Barry, a new term. I got from the airport and went right directly to the hotel where the celebration was coming.

GIL GERALD:

I planned it that way. I wanted to get back in time for that. So I'm in the room and the election's been called, I don't recall whether it was a primary or not, I'd have to look at the date, and the press approached me. They began to ask for my reactions to this reelection of the mayor, which I supported at that point in time. I recall the local president

GIL GERALD:

of the DC chapter coming up to me saying, "Why is everybody always asking you to speak for the community?" I could understand, first of all, there was a jurisdiction issue there, and he was the president of the local chapter and he was not, and I was being, but I remember also wondering to myself, prior to that, I didn't think Lawrence was aggressive enough in approaching the press

GIL GERALD:

and in cultivating the press. I remember when he approached me like that, I turned right around, the reporter hadn't left and I reached the reporter and I said, "By the way, I think you need to meet someone." I said, "This is Lawrence Washington, he is the president of the DC Coalition of Black Gay Women and Men."

GIL GERALD:

I put him on the spot right there, like, there is room for so many of us. I'm not standing in the way of this at all. There is a real concrete way in which I kind of forced, or married the press to the idea that there were other voices other than my own, at this point in time in history, that they needed to speak with.

GIL GERALD:

But those are some of the examples. One of the first things I did as executive director is to summon a professor of journalism to teach me how to write a good press release and a press advisory. Now, the world's changed since then in this different media, but this was

GIL GERALD:

1984 -- '83, 1983. I also monitored the press, through the Black Press Association, to see to what extent the work that we were doing was covered by the Black press, and

GIL GERALD:

I would say that I was pleased at the fact that some of our work did get published. I don't know how much of it got read or what the reaction to it was, but it did get published. That, I think, was an achievement because discussion of HIV/AIDS or Black LGBT issues was missing in that press, as well as everywhere else. I mean, there's a good book done by an academic about

GIL GERALD:

the invisibility of Black gays in the press. It escapes me, the title, at this point, but there's an academic that did prepare a review of this, how we were covered.

MASON FUNK:

Right. And not covered

GIL GERALD:

Or not covered, invisible.

MASON FUNK:

Kate, one more short question, then we're gonna need to wrap up. Anything that comes to mind?

KATE KUNATH:

Maybe just a

KATE KUNATH:

quick thought on the importance of keeping LGBTQ organizations intact. I'm only thinking of this because now they're like, how do we find the gays with monkeypox? And they're like, where are they, how do we access them? I just think about how relationships with public health and organizations is so important, if you haven't thought about that because that's not a short question, but it brings up anything.

GIL GERALD:

Yes. I'm amazed

GIL GERALD:

at the absence of information at this point in time in light of what happened with HIV/AIDS. It's like, here we go again. I mean, of course, as far as we know, this is not the deadly disease that HIV/AIDS was particularly in the beginning when there was not even, there still isn't, a vaccine, but I think that it is critical that we

GIL GERALD:

look at the continuation and the viability of our organizations, because we're gonna continue to have challenges, health challenges, but also challenges to what progress we've made.

MASON FUNK:

Politically.

GIL GERALD:

Politically. Yeah, that's right. Again, if we're gonna draw a history from

GIL GERALD:

what's happened with the civil rights community and the civil rights movement and progress that was made under that. I mean, real attempts to reverse a lot of that right now. So we're not out of the clear. I don't think so. There were moments in history when there was a movement in Germany and other places that got squelched as well.

GIL GERALD:

So yeah, it's critical that we support our organizations and that we understand that there isn't gonna be one organization that's going to address all of our needs. We're gonna have to have a multiplicity of organizations that give voice to community need.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah, yeah. A multiplicity of organizations. We have to be ready

MASON FUNK:

to man the barricades and storm the barricades. Right now, we're not really, frankly, we don't, it's a whole separate conversation.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Four final questions. I'm just doing this in the interest of time.

GIL GERALD:

Of course.

MASON FUNK:

Did you wanna say something more?

GIL GERALD:

No. Absolutely not. Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

If you could say one thing to your 15 year old self, what would it be? And please incorporate my question into your answer.

GIL GERALD:

If I could say something to my 15

GIL GERALD:

year old self, it is that you're gonna be safe. You're gonna take risk in life, and you're not going to regret it, at all, that you're not going to regret it. That sometimes you have to make unpopular moves, unpopular actions

GIL GERALD:

that perhaps your family doesn't necessarily support or understand for that matter , and you might be alone in that sense, that you might have to get your support from elsewhere. I would say that to my 15 year old self and that you worried about the wrong things.

MASON FUNK:

Great. Do you identify with the notion of there being kind of like a queer superpower? I think you referenced with Jack, the queer is not a word that you're necessarily like

MASON FUNK:

fully embracing, so it could be an LGBTQ superpower, but something that on some level we all share, which enables us to contribute in unique ways of the world.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah. Could you repeat the question?

MASON FUNK:

What's our LGBTQ or queer superpower, if you identify with that notion.

GIL GERALD:

I don't.

MASON FUNK:

You don't

GIL GERALD:

. I mean,

the question is, is there a vision that I embrace for one organization that could speak for our community? Or maybe I'm not quite understanding.

MASON FUNK:

This is not an organization. This is more like some quality or a trait, internally, that we all share, LGBTQ people, that kind of sets us apart, not in some kind of supreme way or better-than way, but just that it links us via our shared struggles

MASON FUNK:

or via maybe just something that we were born with.

GIL GERALD:

I think we question things.

MASON FUNK:

Say that again, start fresh.

GIL GERALD:

I would say that something that we all share, I've believed this for quite a while, is that we question things, that we don't just simply accept doctrine or culture that has been

GIL GERALD:

handed down to us, that the fact that we found ourselves in a time and place when we had to affirm ourselves and that certain things that were held as true aren't really true. It allows us the freedom and the ability to be critical in looking at what is being in a way that I think allows us to then

GIL GERALD:

be agents of a positive change in the world.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. I think that's very true. When you question gender and basically questioning gender, you're pretty much questioning the whole underpinning of society, which I think is necessary. Why is it important to you to share your story? In other words, why did you agree to do this?

GIL GERALD:

Because the work must continue. I agreed to share the story and I'm involved in

GIL GERALD:

writing about it because the work must continue. It's important to support the emergence of new leadership, and I think leadership needs to be informed with history and the past so that you build on it so that you learn from it and from what worked, what didn't work and what makes sense

GIL GERALD:

and what might make a difference today or next year or the year after, or in terms of overcoming some other challenge, to us as a people, to us as individuals. I think that courage, the courage that many people had in our movement, going back to the 50s and before

GIL GERALD:

I even came on board needs to be continued, we need to be able to at least draw on that example and say change came about through those actions, through that leadership. Those of us who are now speaking about what happened in the 70s and the 80s, some of the things that have happened, they weren't on our agenda. They were

GIL GERALD:

unimagined. We had no idea that HIV and AIDS would be something we'd be facing. We became expert, for lack of a better term, on the whole issue of public health, we became involved in that, and promoters of that. I mean, I have argued that

GIL GERALD:

healthcare, as an issue, was not on a gay agenda until HIV/AIS took place. So access to care, for example,

MASON FUNK:

Super. Excellent. The last question is OUTWORDS being an organization that seeks to capture stories like yours and hundreds of other LGBTQ elders across the US,

MASON FUNK:

what do you see as the value of a project like OUTWORDS? And if you could mention OUTWORDS in your answer.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah. OUTWORDS is another very important medium for inspiring a new generation of leaders. I think that we don't always have a good grasp of what went before us,

GIL GERALD:

and it's important that we make that possible for people to understand what was before. That the experience or the opportunities that a young person who's part of the LGBTQ community today wasn't something that was always there. I can recall being on a

GIL GERALD:

gay pride celebration in New York, marching down Fifth Avenue and a young Black gay man then turning the corner and going past Stonewall, everybody's excited because we're walking past the Stonewall Inn, and he turned to me, beside wanting to cruise me and wanting to take a real interest in daddy. I don't supposed to whatever . He says "What's Stonewall?"

GIL GERALD:

I think it's important to understand what people experienced there and what was overcome so that there could be a time when you would have to ask "What was Stonewall?" But we need to be able to tell this story of Stonewall or the story in small town America that has not been told. I mean, as somebody who was involved in the movement in the 1980s

GIL GERALD:

and 90s with HIV/AIDS, I can tell you that I went to places in rural Vermont or in Vermont itself, which I consider rural , excuse me, you know, but anyway, North Carolina, and I invited in, in these times when I was executive director, I was once invited to Richmond, Virginia. It's just down the road from Washington, DC and to a

GIL GERALD:

gay Pride celebration indoors. I was simply an invited speaker, then they said "Gil the press is outside, could you go and represent the community in the press?" I mean, it was a different time. Even then, throughout this country, I participated in demonstrations in rural North Carolina,

GIL GERALD:

but those people were on the front lines, just like anybody was in New York City or in San Francisco or in Los Angeles.

MASON FUNK:

Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, we haven't got as many "rural" interviews as I would like. But Kate did a great job a couple years ago, going to some rural places, more rural. And as you say, in my mind, those people are on the front lines.

GIL GERALD:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

GIL GERALD:

Yeah.