MASON FUNK:

Thank you, Linda, for your patience with the postponement and everything else. It's a pleasure to be talking with you and let's have you start off by just telling us your first and last names and spelling them out.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Okay. My name is Linda Gryczan, L-I-N-D-A G-R-Y-C-Z-A-N.

MASON FUNK:

Fantastic. Where are you speaking to us from today?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

From Helena, Montana.

MASON FUNK:

Alrighty. What is your date of birth, please?

MASON FUNK:

And if you could state your answer in a full sentence,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

My birthday is September 23rd and I was born in 1953. I'm 68 years old.

MASON FUNK:

Okey dokey. All right. Well, again, thank you for participating in OUTWORDS and sharing your story with us. We like to start at the very beginning. I always like to ask people to share just a bit about their family of origin and

MASON FUNK:

what values were upheld and transmitted either through words or actions or otherwise.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I come from a really interesting family. My dad's family was just off the boat from Poland. My mother's family is from Montana, the small towns of Montana, and I have four younger sisters Growing up

LINDA GRYCZAN:

with all women, made a difference in that I didn't deal as much of the sexism that if I'd seen brothers getting benefits, which they would've have gotten, that would've been very obvious to me. I was clearly not the girl they were planning on, but they accepted me for who I was.

MASON FUNK:

Let me just clarify, you are the first born?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I'm the oldest.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. How do you know that you were not the girl that they were planning on?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Well, I didn't know at the time, but I was definitely a baby dyke and didn't fit in with the dresses and the barbies and all those things girls were supposed to be doing. And that was fine.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

So they sent me out and said, "Go mow the lawn, go ride your bicycle." That was fine. They completely supported me. I had incredible amount of freedom by being raised by two seventh children. Which meant they basically raised themselves. They had a very different idea of safety than most people did, so we were allowed to run.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Red table cloth went on the clothes line when it was time to come home. When I was 17, they were worried about me, but it was perfectly fine to take off in my bicycle.

MASON FUNK:

And this was where?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I grew up in the small towns in Western Colorado, but we later moved to Denver in middle school, high school, and a month after high school,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I rode my bicycle up here with my high school girlfriend.

MASON FUNK:

Let's back up a little bit, because I love the fact -- I wanna know how your father decided to come to the US from Poland and how he met your mom?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

His parents. He was the youngest, so he was born here along with most of his siblings. But my grandfather's mother saw World War I coming

LINDA GRYCZAN:

and said, "Boys get outta town." He had been recruited to fight in the Russo-Japanese war by the Russians. He got marched to Siberia and by the time he got there, the war was over. They marched them back and he didn't want to be fighting for the Russia again. That's what they would do, they would come into towns and say you're in our army. And so they immigrated

LINDA GRYCZAN:

and lived in Cleveland and dad decided to come, he wanted to be a forest ranger and this was -- Of course, in this kind of family, you grew up, you might be in the military, and then you marry the girl next door and you live next door. He went to the wilds of Montana because he wanted to be in the Forest Service. His generation was the first to go to school, to graduate from high school.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

He was to graduate from college through the efforts of ROTC and the rest of his family.

MASON FUNK:

That's great. You come a little bit from a line of people who kind of Pathfinders, trailbreakers

LINDA GRYCZAN:

A bit. He was the only one in his family who moved ...

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, say "My father."

LINDA GRYCZAN:

My father was

LINDA GRYCZAN:

the only one who moved. When they were hoping that he would go to college, it would be to Ohio State or something, and so this was a big deal, but yes, and my mother is somebody who very enthusiastic, will try anything, was always taking us out to do stuff. She was really wonderful that way.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I saw other mothers, they would sit around, the families had televisions. We had the outdoors and "Kids let's go do this," "Let's go hit the woods," "Let's go do something fun." That was a wonderful background to grow up in.

MASON FUNK:

Sounds wonderful. Tell us about encountering a very specific letter to Anne Landers [inaudible].

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh, when I was 11 years old, I read a lot and when I was 11, I remember this so clearly, the angle of the light coming in from the window, the newspaper in my hands, and she said the word 'bisexual'.

MASON FUNK:

I'm sorry, who are you talking about?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Ann Landers.

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, start over.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Ann Landers used the word 'bisexual' in a column. I thought,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

oh, I had no idea what that meant really, but I thought, I don't have to grow up and marry a man. There was such relief. I tucked that into my heart under my heart and carried that for another decade until the next positive thing that I read about myself.

MASON FUNK:

And what was that?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

The next positive thing I read about myself was The Front Runner by Patricia Nell Warren. Everything I read so far had either been uninformed, was negative or just wrong. Even though it was about men and the hero had to die at the end, it was about two gay men. I was with my

LINDA GRYCZAN:

first lover at the time, but it was so moving to me, I hit the last page. I moved to page one and read it again.

MASON FUNK:

Had you reached the point where you were 21? You're reading this novel, The Front Runner, but you have a lover -- Well actually I wanna circle back a little bit further before the lover even comes into the picture. You mentioned that in high school, you found a kind of a group of people that you felt at home with.

MASON FUNK:

Can you talk about that and the importance of it for you?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

In high school, I was severely ostracized at school. I did not fit in. I was not the girl that they were expecting or that the world expected of me, and kids knew that. I also had social skills that were pretty bad. So I went through school

LINDA GRYCZAN:

alone and unsupported and being the kid that a teacher would say, "You're gonna go out and play with her," because they could see the thing and nobody knew quite what to do, but I just knew that this was pretty awful. That social pressure, I've never faced since then. In high school, I started

LINDA GRYCZAN:

to find a group of folks who were different. There was a guy who liked to wear skirts, there was a woman who studied German grammar tables in seventh grade lunch while the rest of us were throwing peas on the ceiling, and we just found each other. We later learned, we were too. I need to know that we were all gay as geese, and then who

LINDA GRYCZAN:

we didn't know was a lesbian teacher took us under her wing and said, "Hey, let's all go skiing this weekend." Without ever saying the word, one of the young men, his brother came out, this would've been late sixties. His father said, "Come home and see a psychiatrist or I'll have you killed." We spoke intellectually about those people.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Can't really change. We were involved with the world and never heard of Stonewall. That would've made a world of difference. There was no one out there. We had to invent it.

MASON FUNK:

I started speaking and I forgot I was muted. We're in Montana now, right?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yes.

MASON FUNK:

Where specifically in Montana are we?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I was in the small town of Boulder, Montana, home to 1500 people. At the time, it was full of my mother, many of her older siblings and my grandparents. This would've been in 1971. I was trying to figure out, "Hmm. I wonder if I'm

LINDA GRYCZAN:

straight or gay."

MASON FUNK:

And you had some sensibility by this point that there was such a thing as straight or gay.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yes, I had the words. When I was 16, in my job, I worked with a pair of lesbians, a lesbian couple. Old style, and it was a violent relationship. It wasn't anything, but I was

LINDA GRYCZAN:

madly in love with one of them, had a huge crush on one of them and fantasized for months saying, I want to have a homosexual relationship with you. And fortunately, I never did say that. But they certainly knew. Those two would've picked me out. And of course, we never could talk about it.

MASON FUNK:

The outside world effectively,

MASON FUNK:

like you mentioned, you didn't hear Stonewall, you really didn't know that anything outside of your small town, that there was change happening, marches and riots.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

We had no idea, no, this was moving from Denver to Boulder, Montana, two different places, but I still didn't know. I mean, I was somebody who read, who paid attention to the news. I was involved politically,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

but had no idea.

MASON FUNK:

Wow. Wow. When did you find this first girlfriend I think you mentioned in high school?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

She worked with my sister. No, no. Oh, she was part of the group.

MASON FUNK:

Let me interrupt to have you say "My first girlfriend --"

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Okay. My first girlfriend, only she wasn't

LINDA GRYCZAN:

my girlfriend, she wasn't my lover. She was part of the high school group and, oh, I was so in love with her, but it was never spoken till years and years later.

MASON FUNK:

Tell us more about that, how it happened. I'm also curious to get to when it was spoken, but you were best friends.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yeah, she was a very dear friend. She was

LINDA GRYCZAN:

part of this group and we would spend Saturdays. We lived in Southwest Denver. She and I would walk downtown 10 miles together. I would spend all day walking with her just to be with her and we would go have a milkshake and somebody would give us a ride home. She was a person that I rode to Montana with on our bicycles. We were planned to go somewhere else,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

but she got sick in Billings, so we packed her up and sent her home. I kept coming to visit my grandma.

MASON FUNK:

I'm sorry. I'm kind of a stickler for details.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Of course,

MASON FUNK:

I'm trying to figure out like the [crosstalk]

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Okay, 1971, I was in Denver. Graduated from high school, excuse me,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

and right afterward my friend and I took our bike trip. This would've been 1971. I ended up in Boulder, Montana. She had left earlier and I found a job in that town. Wrote my parents and said, "Would you send up my blue jeans and hiking boots? I'm going to stay."

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I had family support. I had a cousin I lived with for a bit, but that's how I left home. It was a positive experience. I wasn't kicked out, but I was young. I was only 17.

MASON FUNK:

What was it that made you know that you wanted to get on a bicycle and ride to Montana from Colorado?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Well, I was an athlete always, but before Title IX. I wasn't allowed to do anything

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I could have been good at. We weren't allowed to run distances. Basketball was still half this ridiculous half court thing. PE class was scarf dances. The whole point was to be a young lady and I couldn't play football except on powder puff day, so I picked a bicycling because no one said I couldn't. When most kids were out driving around in their cars, I was climbing passes on my bicycle.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

My first bicycle tour was when I was 15, and my parents said, "We're going to the Western slope of Colorado to pick peaches, would you like to take your bike?" They would drive me to the bottom of the pass, pick me up on the other side or meet somewhere. And so I've been bicycle touring for 53 years now.

MASON FUNK:

Wow. Wow. And these bicycles, I'm imagining were not the sleek, lightweight.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh, heavens no. I had to make my own panniers. Yeah. because they weren't marketed yet.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Tell me about the bicycle or the bicycles themselves. What were they like?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh, they were 10 speeds. The 10 speeds with the Kansas gearing, and of course, they didn't fit women, at all, they're way too long.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I really wanted to be a bicycle mechanic, and of course, shops weren't hiring women at that point. I went on this bike trip and that's how I left home, moved to Boulder, Montana for some time. Left to go back to Colorado for school, continued riding my bike,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

and found friends, life started moving up.

MASON FUNK:

I know that at a certain point, you moved to Seattle and we'll get there eventually -- Well, see if you can just give a little bit of a beat by beat timeline with no details.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh, sure, sure. I was in Boulder, Montana, went back to school

LINDA GRYCZAN:

and I had an internship with the Colorado legislature. I moved to Denver again and that's when my sister's coworker came to stay. We realized we were really attracted to each other and became lovers. It was a pretty crazy relationship. I didn't know the term bipolar yet, but we would be heading off to any adventure

LINDA GRYCZAN:

if we had a quarter in our pocket and a tailwind, we would go. We ended up going back to Boulder, Montana, to work at the institution. She left me and I continued to live there for a while, then a different friend and I were going to bike to San Francisco, and instead we ended up in Alaska

LINDA GRYCZAN:

and then coming back down, caught a ferry down to Vancouver island, caught a ferry to Seattle. I hit Seattle on a sunny day and thought, oh, I wanna live here. Heard there was such a place as a Lesbian Resource Center and went down there and found a dozen collective households looking for roommates. I went around and met everybody at

LINDA GRYCZAN:

all these household interviews, one picked me and that's where I finished coming out, was in Seattle.

MASON FUNK:

Gotcha.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

And then re interrupt

MASON FUNK:

One quick question. When you say the institution in Boulder, what was it?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Was for people with cognitive disabilities.

MASON FUNK:

Do a favor, just say "the institution in Boulder."

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh yeah. The institution in Boulder was for people with cognitive disabilities. I first started working there at the time of huge institutionalization.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

People who had been slow in school were institutionalized. But I worked there and really started enjoying working with folks with profound mental disabilities and decided that's what I was going to get education in.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. So you get your schooling, you head to Seattle, you find a house.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Well, I get my schooling. I head back to Montana. Bike trip, Seattle, find the house, finish coming out. In the heady days when we lesbian feminists were creating a movement.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Tell us about that because this is one of my favorite eras that I never experienced myself, this flowering of like a movement.

MASON FUNK:

Try to kind of paint a picture.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh Seattle. It was very much a lesbian separatist time in many ways. Women were starting carpentry collective, a print shop. I started working with the Lesbian Mother's National Defense Fund. We were, and all these collective households, this is a time of defining ourselves.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Every social change movement goes through this. We get to a point where we separate and we define ourselves in reaction to the rest of the world, but who we want to be. We were trying everything out. We threw out all the rules, monogamy, marriage, talking to men, having friends, all these things, marches.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

We didn't use the word intersectionality yet, and we were not certainly at all as good at it as the young folks are now, but we were very much involved in various social change movements and medical drives for different countries, non-monogamy and all sorts of -- It was very ripe.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yeah, in and out of each other's houses and we were all twenties, thirties, I can't say we all were, but in this group we were twenties, thirties years old and creating a life for ourselves. That's where I first talked a bike shop into hiring the first woman.

MASON FUNK:

Hold that thought for one second. Astra just sent me a message via the chat function, asking you to make sure you don't hit the table

MASON FUNK:

with your hand because it's causing the tablet to vibrate a little bit.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh, okay. I don't think I did that actually. I'm making sure that I'm not hitting any. I'm gonna tuck the cords in under the couch.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Okay. Yeah. I did see the tablet jiggle a little bit. But anyway, as long as you're just aware, it should be fine.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Okay. Thank you.

MASON FUNK:

During this era we've interviewed, we've been honored and privileged, I've been honored and privileged to actually interview a few lesbian separatists who are now willing to talk to a man and tell them their stories. Back in the day, they would not have been, for example.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Right.

MASON FUNK:

Was there a part of you that, I mean, it sounds like within the city, you were kind of like a quasi-separatist movement. Is that accurate?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yeah, I would say

MASON FUNK:

[crosstalk] keeping to yourselves.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yes. We were keeping to ourselves because we were creating our work. Many of us were creating our work. We were moving into non-traditional jobs, what was considered nontraditional, which meant my lover worked for the city of Seattle driving truck,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

and supporting women doing that because of course the harassment was horrendous.

MASON FUNK:

Tell me more about the harassment, and start by saying [crosstalk]

LINDA GRYCZAN:

What I did wasn't something I wanted to do. When I got harassment at the bike shop, when I decided I had enough, I left and opened my own.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

That was very much the thinking: let's create what we want. But there are many women like working for Seattle city light, working for parks department, working all these kinds of jobs that were considered non-traditional and or working in carpentry, the stories they would tell of the banter, the racist, sexist banter that would just go on and on and on, and that was just considered life.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I had a roommate who worked in a furniture store, a furniture upholstery place, and just nonstop. And these were largely white women. I know certainly the women of color had it twice as bad.

MASON FUNK:

Was it part of a product of the era that the men mostly who were sending out the barbs and the so-called [inaudible]?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh, absolutely.

MASON FUNK:

But my question is, they could sense there was a little bit of a shift or a movement, and did that almost like exacerbate, would you say, were they reacting to something?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I can't speak to

LINDA GRYCZAN:

the harassment because I avoided it. Other women sued and I have absolute thanks for the women and all the people of color that sued to create a space for themselves. I left and opened my own bike shop.

MASON FUNK:

Now this is still in Seattle, right?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

This is still in Seattle.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Now let's go sideways a little bit, because I want to hear more about

MASON FUNK:

the Lesbian Mothers National Defense Fund. It's huge that such an organization had to exist in that era.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yes.

MASON FUNK:

What was its mission and what was it formed in response to?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

The lesbian mothers --

MASON FUNK:

Sorry, name it by name.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yes. The Lesbian Mothers National Defense Fund was started to support lesbians facing challenges to parenting their children. At that time,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

just about anybody was considered a better parent than a lesbian or a gay man. Custody, primary parenting was awarded to men who had done horrible things to their kids and to their wives. But once they heard the L word in a courtroom, they pretty much lost. This was formed as a fund

LINDA GRYCZAN:

to pay for attorneys. When I moved to Seattle, I didn't want to be in a Marxist study group or a -- I needed to be doing something, so I just checked out different groups. I called LMNDF and said, "Do you need help? Is there something I can do?" Then the three experienced people who had been running it for a while quit, so I had this organization

LINDA GRYCZAN:

with women calling on the phone, saying "They're coming for my kids, what do I do?" We would counsel women and we would send them information and we would try to help them with their court cases. We would have this little fund and every month we would send out $5 or $15 to pay the attorneys

MASON FUNK:

All over the country?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

All over the country. We got calls in the middle of the night. We got phone calls with women in just horrendous situations.

MASON FUNK:

Wow. I would guess you remember winning some cases and then probably losing a lot more?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yes. Schuster /Isaacson was one that was won

LINDA GRYCZAN:

in Washington. Of course, the kids are grandparents now, but they were told they couldn't ... Often, what would happen is a woman was able to see her children, but she couldn't see her wife, they would separate the families that way. Schuster and Isaacson were told that in a lower court decision, so they moved into an apartment building across the hall from each other, and then their husbands collectively sued and they won.

​​

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I believe it was a Washington state Supreme court decision. I would have to look it up to know, but that became a precedent, and there were others. Then there were some cities where women were more likely to win versus the rural hinterlands.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Right. But probably the tricky thing obviously is that if a woman lived in the rural hinterlands,

MASON FUNK:

she couldn't go to a big city to sue for custody, because her kids were gonna stay there.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Right.

MASON FUNK:

She'd be accused of leaving.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

There was no way she could win. There was no way. They were in pretty dire straits. People had to choose heartbreaking, losing their children, heartbreaking situations.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I remember one story where a woman lost in the court and the father took baby and proudly handed it to his new wife. Yeah, they were pretty dire times. Yeah. LMNDF, Lesbian Mothers National Defense Fund, later became the Lavender Family's Network

LINDA GRYCZAN:

with the lesbian baby boom, as lesbians were starting to have woman controlled conception. At one point, my lover and I lived with some nurses and one of the LMNDF members would go collect the sperm and bring it over and Linda would go do a project with the other children.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

There was a whole baby boom of little munchkins raised by lesbian moms.

MASON FUNK:

Now let's touch back in with your timeline. You're still in Seattle. I don't wanna jump forward too far, but what eventually caused you to move back to Montana? And fold my question into your answer.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yes. I ended up leaving Seattle because of a divorce. My lover and I broke up, and I had really had difficulty with the Seattle climate. I've always lived around sun and didn't know there were climates where the sun didn't shine all the time, so I was ready to look elsewhere.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I decided, when I was 30, to move back to Montana.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Where would you say you were at now? It's your thirties, so this is roughly like the early 80s. Where were you in your conception of yourself? If that's not too big of a question. How did you feel about what you'd accomplish,

MASON FUNK:

what you wanted to accomplish? How satisfied were you with the relationships you'd had?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh, well I have always loved life, and I'm often quite impulsive about changes in my life. It's, "Let's go there." I'm very much a jump off the cliff and build the parachute on the way down.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

When I came back to Montana, it was, I don't know what I'm doing here. Well I did, I knew I wanted to live rurally and that had been an issue in my relationship. The city was really getting to me. The climate was really getting to me and I was ready for a more rural area and more sunshine, and that's all I knew. I wasn't so sure

LINDA GRYCZAN:

about it. One of the first events I went to in Montana was a Halloween party and two women were in blackface. I thought, what have I done? I was new in the community, it's not the time to confront this Seattle style, but I had real questions about what I was doing.

MASON FUNK:

Now where in Montana was this?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I think we were from all over.

MASON FUNK:

But where were you?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

But I was near where I left, Boulder, Montana. There's a little town called Basin, Helena is nearby. It's about 30 miles away.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. This the infamous Basin, Montana.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

This is the infamous basin Montana. Yes. yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Paint us a little bit of a picture of Basin, because I know it's gonna come up. We're gonna interview --

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Basin, Montana has about 200 people, a former mining town. For a while it became hippies and ranchers, miners, all living in town. At one point in the 70s, I had

LINDA GRYCZAN:

a girlfriend who lived in a root cellar, up Basin Creek Road, and three women moved to town and had a band called Cheap Cologne, and lesbians started volunteering for the fire department and started doing their art, and created this whole community.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

It's a little mountain town in this area.

MASON FUNK:

And so that's where you basically pitched your tent, so to speak.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I wasn't actually living there, but I lived in Boulder. What I did is I found a cabin that needed occupying, so I fixed it up in exchange for rent.

MASON FUNK:

I see.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yeah. Lots of us were living in the hills and coming down to the hot springs for showers and this had been going on for years.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Now you mentioned the two women at a party in black face. But what else defines Montana culture apart from that kind of maybe [crosstalk]

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Hopefully, we're to that point, that people get it.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

But think of things maybe a few years behind others in terms of --

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, [inaudible] what are you talking about?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Okay. Thank you. How I would define Montana, in some ways we're very provincial. Whenever I travel and come back, I think, oh, we're so provincial, but we're also very much in touch with the rest of the world.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

For example, When HIV came to town, which was happening just as I was leaving Seattle in 1983, CDC didn't know anything about lesbians. When I went in for an HIV test, clearly they knew nothing about lesbian sexual practices or anything that might put us at risk? There wasn't even a slot on the form,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

so I thought, okay, as usual, we need to take care of things ourselves. I went off and learned safe sex. I went to a Seattle conference and found, oh, they're gonna have all this down. There was a Seattle lesbian conference and I started pulling out my safe sex stuff and it was new to them. And I thought, oh, we're not as provincial as I think.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I knew that I was going to be in a different kind of community. Which meant you count on your neighbors. Which means you are friends with your neighbors and your neighbors may be people very, very unlike you. Not that this is a hotbed of diversity, we are 93% white.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

But in terms of where people are politically, it's quite conservative with ebbs and flows, but it's quite a conservative place.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Your sort of typical Montana person, how do they sort of see the outside world so to speak?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I really can't speak to that. It's like, could you describe your typical LA person? How they just see the yeah. Only we're talking about more people. Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Fair enough. Okay, cool. Yeah. All right. Let me skip back to my questions here. I don't know exactly when you opened your brilliantly named Cyclery.

MASON FUNK:

But what did you do when you eventually got back to this area? How did you start constructing a life for yourself workwise and socially?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Okay. I considered working at the institution. I knew I could be hired in a minute. I'm somebody who doesn't spend a lot of money and so I had saved a lot, a fair amount enough to live on and living very simply, particularly since I wasn't paying rent at first.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I tried fixing some bikes. What I did is, in Seattle, it was really hard to be the first female mechanic. I left, opened my own Alice B. Toeclips Cyclery and what I was seeing, the shop I was working at taught classes and I saw that women in the classes learned how to watch men fix bicycles. I started teaching all women classes and that was a little threatening for them

LINDA GRYCZAN:

because that was discriminatory. I did that for a number of years in Seattle. That's how I made my living. Then when I moved here, I tried fixing some bikes. I worked in a daycare. Oh, what else did I do? I was also a calligrapher, I was trying to make money from that. This was way before time

LINDA GRYCZAN:

people put words on their walls, so I put them on t-shirts I learned how to dye clothing. I started doing a clothing business, going to Michigan's Womyn's Music Festival and other women's music festivals and selling my t-shirts. It's very seasonal up here. It's very often that people do one thing in the summer and one thing in the winter, and that's

LINDA GRYCZAN:

what I was doing was fixing bikes in the summer and selling my shirts and etcetera in the winter.

MASON FUNK:

What would the shirts be like? Like what were the designs like? Did they have slogans?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yes, they were a Lambda symbol, if you remember that, way back when, and we will survive. There was a Gertrude Stein quote, "Rose is a rose is a rose."

LINDA GRYCZAN:

There was the Audre Lorde quote, "Your silence will not protect you." I was also, as a calligrapher, doing the words of women from around the world and their own languages. I took some of those in Setswana, in Spanish, in Japanese.

MASON FUNK:

You would go to the Michigan Womyn's Festival, and then others as well. Would you kind of do the circuit?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

That was the main one,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

but yes, I would mostly go to Michigan. There was a West Coast Women's Music Festival I went to a few times. Montana had an annual women's festival.

MASON FUNK:

Where was that held?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh, various places. They would organize it off in the woods.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Tell us a bit -- This last year or year and a half, we finally began interviewing, we interviewed Holly Near and we interviewed some people who were

MASON FUNK:

part of that and the names are not gonna come to mind right away, but who are really instrumental in those festivals and in the creation of the whole women's music movement, what was it like in your experience to go to the Michigan festival and others?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Well, I remember the very first women's festival I went to, it was in Montana and it was like being in Seattle again

LINDA GRYCZAN:

only we were all here. I was meeting other lesbians which was very, very exciting, very exciting to me. I was very shy, so I didn't know how to approach women or, and so here they were all at this festival and yet again, they were creating a culture. We're gonna play music, we're gonna have women engineers, we're gonna have

LINDA GRYCZAN:

women cutting the records. We're gonna have women doing this and that. It was part of what we were creating along with the print collectives and the carpentry collectives and the bakeries. It was very much like that. Women running around in the woods and enjoying each other.

MASON FUNK:

When you went to Michigan for the first time, was it kind of like that

MASON FUNK:

only even sort of more expansive?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yes, but I was very focused on selling my wares, so I wasn't really experiencing the festival, but I was in the crafts area working on my feet all day selling my work. When it went well, I made enough to last me till spring, till bike season.

MASON FUNK:

This is my own ignorance speaking. But with these festivals,

MASON FUNK:

you mentioned that during the summer you would do your bicycle work, but then you would do the t-shirts in the winter. When would the festivals actually be held?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Well, August was Michigan.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. So you're making enough there to kind of last you through the winter.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Ideally, on a good year.

MASON FUNK:

How long did that little epoch, that little era last?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

There was a year that I quit Michigan, and what I was realizing is I didn't get -- In one year they were trying to rotate artists, and that was my income for the winter. Then the next year, I went back and realized this is really time to leave this. At Michigan, I sold my booth, sold all my stuff and decided I'm not doing that anymore. Came home and sold

LINDA GRYCZAN:

all the equipment in my dye studio, decided I was finished. When was that? This was before the Festival ... Oh, the festival was starting, in its height, there were 8,

000 women, then it was starting 4,

000 and it wasn't attracting the market anymore. I think what was happening, the culture was changing enough, so we didn't need those women-only spaces

LINDA GRYCZAN:

as badly as we did before.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Well, we're at the point where I feel like we should start talking about the lawsuit that has your name on it which we haven't gotten to yet. I think that lawsuit was filed in 1995.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yes.

MASON FUNK:

Introduce us to this lawsuit. I forget right now, Gryczan versus

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Montana

MASON FUNK:

Versus Montana. Okay. What was Gryczan versus Montana?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I guess I'd like to back up first, when I first move to town, one of the first meetings I went to was lesbians talking about the existence of the deviant sexual conduct law. Well, which was any sexual contact between any two persons of the same sex, or any form of intercourse with an animal was

LINDA GRYCZAN:

deviant sexual conduct to be punishable by up to $50,

000 fine and 10 years in prison.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

We talked about, but we didn't have the political expertise to know quite what we should do about that. But I started working with the Montana Women's Lobby and started testifying. What we did as in 1989, we went to

LINDA GRYCZAN:

the legislature and part of the problem was sexual assault statutes were very gender specific. If it was a sexual assault between two men, they went to the deviant sexual conduct law. Nobody knew that this is what we were doing, but this was the first step to make ... There would be no need for the deviant sexual conduct law, and we passed that in 1989.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

The Montana legislature meets every two years, so in '91, we went back and decided to try to throw it out and all hell broke loose. We had a holdover Senator who could not be voted down because she was voted out because she was carrying this bill. Her name was Vivian Brooke,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Senator Vivian Brooke from Missoula. And the chair, the democratic chair of Senate judiciary committee called the us slime. He said, this is nothing but slime oozing out from under closed doors. Senator Joe Mazurek was holding him by and we could see, and it was like, hold on. I mean, he was really losing it. This was a time when Democrats did not want to touch us,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

but so that went down and we tried to get in '93 and the same thing, horrible mischaracterizations of our lives, people's sexual fantasies about us that were just pretty horrible. Nobody had a sense of who we really were and very organized opposition. We were the wedge issue at that time

LINDA GRYCZAN:

as trans folk are now. In '95, some legal minds got together, Diane Sands, Holly Franz, among others who said, we're not getting anywhere here, let's sue. That's when they went with the Northwest Women's Law Center and they asked for plaintiffs and I agreed.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Well, we applied to be a plaintiff. They picked three men, three women, and they needed a woman's name first, and I don't know the reason, but I was chosen to be the lead plaintiff, which is why the lawsuit carries my name. Part of it was it could be filed in the Helena district court where we thought we would probably not get a bad judgment from no matter

LINDA GRYCZAN:

who the case was assigned to. And we won on the district court level The attorney general at the time appealed, which was the same guy who was holding down the Senator who was calling us names. We wanted him to appeal because we wanted a Supreme Court decision and it was literally unanimous and we became

LINDA GRYCZAN:

legal citizens. You're muted.

MASON FUNK:

My bad. Sometimes when someone's getting ready to say, go to the point of filing a lawsuit, other people are scared because they're concerned that if you lose, you're gonna be worse off than before.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Tell us about that.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I think the fear about filing the lawsuit

LINDA GRYCZAN:

wasn't about, could we lose? Because what else did we have to lose? It was, I'm out, I'm out in a state where I'm not a legal citizen, in a place where I'd known lesbians had been attacked both physically, mentally, emotionally. I was worried about people burning down our house.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

None of us knew what would happen. We jumped off a cliff and fortunately there was a parachute.

MASON FUNK:

What would you say were the reasons for deciding to jump off that cliff?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I decided to put my name forward because this is what I do. If I see an injustice, I want to do something about it.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

This seemed to be a way to do something. I had been testifying in the legislature to try to change the law. I saw what was happening there, I experienced all the abuse, that they were dishing out, that both the lawmakers, as well as our opponents were dishing out and I was ready for something different.

MASON FUNK:

What do you remember about the period leading up to that, the announcement of the Supreme court's decision? Was the word on the street that you were gonna lose? Did you feel fairly confident that you actually were gonna win? Where were you at emotionally and psychologically?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

We didn't know. A lot of this is, hurry up and wait. The Supreme Court hearing was done at the law school in Missoula,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

and we all paraded in. I found out later, none of the justices knew who we were. They didn't know that was us sitting in front. I watched this very fascinating process, and then we waited. So it's, go home and live your life the way you all always have until you hear something. They dropped the decision, July 3rd, when every dyke worth her salt was in a canoe

LINDA GRYCZAN:

or under a backpack. I'm sure this was deliberate. They knew this was going to be a controversial decision. They did it at a time when people were distracted, and yeah, so many people were outta town. You have to understand, in Montana where it is so seasonal, when summer comes, we do summer.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

We've had organizers move from outta state and say, oh yeah, I can help you in September. But until then, I'm backpacking here. I'm canoeing. So many of us are outside.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Yeah. Just out of curiosity, do you remember the makeup of the Supreme court? As in how many members and how many of those people were men and so forth? Do you have a picture?

MASON FUNK:

I'm just curious. I know I'm getting into the weeds here.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I would have to, because at this point I know these people or knew these people. So I can't think about who -- I'm trying to picture who was sitting at the table then? I would have to look at the list who was on the court at that time?

MASON FUNK:

Yes, that's okay.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

There was one, maybe two women.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Maybe we didn't have two women yet. I don't remember at what point who was --

MASON FUNK:

In the progression. Okay. What was your reaction? How did you hear the news?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Well, we were building a straw bale house and I was running a chainsaw trying to even out the outside of the bales and got this phone call from Holly Franz, our attorney, and she said,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

"I'm gonna read it. Don't talk to the press yet. But it looks like, oh, baby." I mean, she was so beside herself, excited, I still have the tape recordings of all the people who called. We were so excited. I took a recording of all the voicemail messages.

MASON FUNK:

Really? You still have those?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh, yes. It was very, very exciting.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Suddenly we are legal citizens. It was pretty exciting to know we had a district court decision. I remember after that, once Diane Sands asked me, "What's it like being a free woman?" knowing we weren't there yet. And when the Supreme court decisions happened, we have a right to be here.

MASON FUNK:

Were any of those messages from family members? I'm just curious.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yes.

MASON FUNK:

Tell me about that.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Not all of the plaintiffs were able to have their -- Well, some of us had been kicked out of our families. When I found out, the first person who called, I called my parents, and they were as thrilled as I was,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

and I feel very fortunate that I had that.

MASON FUNK:

Had this been a journey like for your parents to get to the point where they would be that thrilled?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Of course, of course.

MASON FUNK:

Tell me about that.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

When I first came out to my mother, her response was -- This was about 1975, she was visiting Boulder as my 25th birthday. I came out to her and her response was, well, everyone deserves a sex life.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

And I thought, well, why not me? She later became more comfortable with it. My father, his first response, this was much later. I was visiting my parents' house with a gay man who I think they must have assumed we were lovers,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

not knowing. I came out to him maybe then. First thing he said was, "I hate gay men." I said, "Well, you like him okay." The second thing, "Well, I must have been a really bad father." But he really mellowed when he figured out, and I was still his daughter. I wasn't going anywhere.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

They didn't have really strong religious prohibitions that they needed to work their way through, so it was pretty quick.

MASON FUNK:

Well, that's wonderful. I have to interrupt for one sec. I have to send a text and I apologize.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh, go ahead.

MASON FUNK:

It'll take me one sec. I'm gonna silence. I'm gonna mute my,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Thank you for that. Now comes the post-decision

MASON FUNK:

phase when the Supreme Court has said one thing, but the law is still on the books. And this is something that people who have not been part of this process might never contemplate, that the Supreme court says this law is unconstitutional, but the law can still be on the books. Can you kind of just walk us through that, like sort of how that could be possible?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

The deviant sexual conduct was declared unconstitutional by the Montana Supreme Court, but it was still on the books. What that did is invalidated.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

There were lots of laws on the books that are no longer valid, they haven't been cleaned up, so it really didn't matter. But it mattered to us and we wanted it off the books. Part of it was I realized we're not just changing the law, we're changing a culture. It matters less what's in the law books than what's happening

LINDA GRYCZAN:

in the world. We wrote bills and had sponsors to just try to take it off the books, but we got the same pushback from the same people. After a few sessions, we realized we're not making any headway here. We're giving them lots of oxygen, let's just quit doing this.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

We worked on other things trying to get non-discrimination in workplace, that sort of thing. We even tried for marriage, which, of course, we knew we would lose. But a lot of this is in creating a culture, we're in the press, and what this does is bring out the issue for people to talk about.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

That's what changes And what happens? People will come out. People come out because of this, and that's where the real change happens. It was a number of other years before we tried again. The person who was at our constitutional convention, who wrote the Montana's right to privacy,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

which according to our constitution is inviolable was really worried about us trying to take it off the books. He says, because they can go in and mess with their right to privacy, which matters and matters a lot. But what this decision did was make it even stronger and offered precedent for immigrants, for other

LINDA GRYCZAN:

people who could still use the right to privacy. But we eventually did, through a couple more sessions, get it taken off the books. When we became cool enough, the Democrats were willing to touch us. The Democrats were able to embrace us, three Republicans might vote with us, till a majority voted with us.

MASON FUNK:

Do you remember any touch points along the way when you began to see, you said, "We became cool enough for Democrats to want to even be in the same room with us." Do you remember things happening like milestones or mile markers along the way when you're like, oh my God, we're not so toxic as we used to be. That kind of shift.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

We had a Republican governor who did not support this law, because he didn't like bad law,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

who made an executive decision to remove discrimination in hiring to include sexual orientation in that list of groups that could not be discriminated against. And that was fought with a law. We overturned it or we defeated it,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

and a whole bunch of people showed up at the capital and our movement. Everyone took a step forward. That was one. But it's hard to say when the 200th person came out or the 201st, what was the tipping point? So much of that was one person at a time until we hit that tipping point.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

What happened is this: the law that would've taken it off the books was voted down, and we did what's called a blast motion and a gay man, Bryce Bennett carried it, which meant you need to take it, and it needs a super majority. On the floor, when they were

LINDA GRYCZAN:

debating this, a conservative Republican from Eastern Montana stood up and said, I have four sons, all were in the military, and they would die for their sister's right to live her life.

Note: Then Governor, Republican Marc Racicot issued an executive order prohibiting discrimination for sexual orientation for hiring in the executive branch of Montana state government. A lawmaker sponsored a bill, to rescind the order, which failed spectacularly.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

We had no idea this was coming, it was eloquent. We were in tears and I knew

LINDA GRYCZAN:

that with him standing up to speak, it was going to pass and we had a couple of other people got up and waved their Bible. I thought if he talks two more minutes, we're gonna get three more votes, and that's exactly what happened.

MASON FUNK:

Now, in the meantime, talk about what you endured by virtue of having your name on this lawsuit.

MASON FUNK:

I'm sorry, we jumped backwards in time.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Okay. By putting the name in the lawsuit, I was very afraid what would happen? I did not assume I would have any kind of police protection. But I knew I needed to depend on neighbors, so I went around with -- First of all, I went to the post office and said, "Please don't tell anybody where I live, if they ask." I went to the store

LINDA GRYCZAN:

and said, "Please don't tell anybody where I live, if they ask." Then I went around all the neighbors, made an artfully designed little bundle of kindling for their wood stoves for a holiday present. And just, "I'm in the news. Would you just keep your eye out?" And two of them started plowing our driveway.

MASON FUNK:

Bless you.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Do you need me to repeat that?

MASON FUNK:

Yes, please.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Okay. I knew that support would come from the neighbors, so I made a little holiday present, an artful bundle of kindling with a note and said, "My name is in the news,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

would you please just keep an eye out?" And two of them started plowing our driveway, which was as Montana as you can get to mean you're welcome here.

MASON FUNK:

Were there any conversations or is this the kind of stuff that just happens through implicit understanding and actions?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

It just happened through actions. Nobody said, you're welcome here. They just showed up.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

And that's what we do, we show up.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. When you say, "That's what we do," is that one of those things you would identify as a kind of a particular Montana thing.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

We support each other. Yes. Yes. I mean, we are there at the fundraisers for the person who's had an accident or some sort of medical event or when somebody's house burns down, we show up for each other.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Part of it is we all know each other. We are not strangers.

MASON FUNK:

Right, right.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

People talk about Montana as one long main street, and that there are only a million people and we would fit between Chicago and New York.

MASON FUNK:

Wow.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

There are places

LINDA GRYCZAN:

in Montana that have four people per square mile, is the population density.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. It's such a big place and that actually causes people to be closer in a weird way.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

We depend on each other. That's how it's always been. We've had some real challenges. COVID has been a real challenge to us because

LINDA GRYCZAN:

we have very different responses to it, and there has been some fractures and some towns are having a very difficult time, but it's very much something we show up for each other.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. And now you mentioned another -- Oh, I'm sorry.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I said, and people showed up for us in the lawsuit. Our allies and our

LINDA GRYCZAN:

not so allies showed up. The neighbors plowing the driveway, the folks at the Lambda group, and at the college sending a Christmas card. People just said we care. Of course, the queer folk knew exactly what we were putting ourselves out for, and knew that we were doing it for them.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

There was plenty of people praying for my soul too.

MASON FUNK:

Were you by yourself in terms of a romantic or a partner?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh, no. I've been married for 38 years. This was a joint decision that I would do this.

MASON FUNK:

How did you and Constance meet?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I met --

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, say her name.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yeah. Okay. Constance and I met

LINDA GRYCZAN:

back when I had moved to Seattle, but Montana was having annual women's festivals and I would come out every year. I would hop a freight or hitchhike or find a way to get to Montana and attend the festival. She was one of the women I met at the festival, back late 70s or 1980 or so. When I moved back, I was trying to connect with women that I knew,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

and I connected with her. It was actually at Halloween party where two women were in black face. We sat in the kitchen and I knew that she got it. We had a long discussion and I thought, oh, I'm liking her. And I came to really like her. Yeah. That was 38 years ago.

MASON FUNK:

But that was when you moved back. So then you weren't going back and forth to Seattle.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Right.

MASON FUNK:

Got you. When you were going through the lawsuit, Constance was part of your life during this phase.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh, absolutely.

MASON FUNK:

How do you think it would've been different or would you might have even made a different decision about joining the lawsuit and becoming the face of the lawsuit

MASON FUNK:

if you were on your own or would that not have been a factor, do you think?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I don't think it would've been a factor. It's something I would've done, but we do support each other in what we do. I always ask if it's okay to be out for her. I don't do much without writing a press release. But she lives her life very differently.

MASON FUNK:

It's interesting. Okay. Now, there was another lawsuit that I would like you to tell me the story of, because the consequences were so dire. The plaintiff benefits lawsuit that happened, I think shortly after [inaudible]

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yes. It may have been two or three years afterward employees of the university of Montana who wanted

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, I'm sorry to keep interrupting. Say, after what?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Two or three years after the Gryczan decision, employees at the university of Montana wanted to put their partners on their health benefits, so four women stood up to file that lawsuit. I sat in their living room one day and just

LINDA GRYCZAN:

told them, I can't tell you if this will be the same for you, but the lawsuit was overwhelmingly positive for the six plaintiffs in the previous lawsuit. Only three days later, somebody set their house on fire. Two of the women had their house set on fire, two others. This was back in the anthrax threats days,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

they sent them white powder with a note said, "Die dyke." Their experience was very different. Then the two women whose house had been torched, they had a young son and they were blamed in the press for starting the fire. We held an immediate rally, and law enforcement could not believe

LINDA GRYCZAN:

that we could have planned something so quickly. They had no idea of the effect of a hate crime like that. They bungled evidence and they questioned some of us, like the director of Pride at the time, as a person of interest. So, we, and Carla and Adrienne, were blamed for the fire.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

They were blamed in the legislature and they were blamed in the press.

MASON FUNK:

Literally blamed, as in, you set up this fire to whatever garner public --

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Who knows what the reasons were, but I heard it in the legislature, there are strong evidence, from our opposition. I'm pretty even keeled, but I was ready to

LINDA GRYCZAN:

knock people over for that one, that it was so unconscionable. Their experiences were very different than ours.

MASON FUNK:

What was the ultimate outcome of that case?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I got the first health insurance in my life.

MASON FUNK:

So they won.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

They won. The lawsuit won, but the plaintiffs really, really lost.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

They did their best to put it behind them. Two of the women adopted a child and are not as politically active and two of them left the state.

MASON FUNK:

Wow. Wow. The cost of victory can be very, very, very high.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yes. And that could have been any of us.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

We all knew that that's the effect of a hate crime. Yeah. The effect of a hate crime is an attack on one is an attack on all, and everybody knows it.

MASON FUNK:

Sorry, I mute myself. I just said, I'm very sorry to hear that for their sake and for yours.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yeah. Yeah.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

It was a very big deal. I mean, we immediately rallied, we raised money. We found them attorneys. We did lots of things, but we couldn't make it better.

MASON FUNK:

Right. Did you, by any chance, ever happen to meet a woman named Donna Red Wing?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh yeah. She came out at one of our events. I forget what she was talking about, but oh yes.

MASON FUNK:

Oh, I'm glad to hear that. I'm glad. I didn't know if your path would've crossed or not.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh yes.

MASON FUNK:

We were able to interview her six weeks before she passed back in 2018.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh.

MASON FUNK:

And that was a real honor for us.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yes.

MASON FUNK:

Being able to record her story.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh yes. I'm so glad you got that.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. When you talk about the hate, she told a memorable story about getting spat upon during the ballot measure nine battles, so just brought that back to mind.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. We're gonna switch topics a little bit. You mentioned in your questionnaire that you've also worked hard to advance protections for LGBTQ two spirit or indigenous people who are two-spirit. I know you don't wanna speak for them, regarding their journey, but what has it been like for you to be involved in the effort? How have you been involved

MASON FUNK:

in those efforts?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

The question is how have I been involved with two spirit civil rights? Well, part of it, it's all in a group, but part of it is indigenous folk have a very different way of looking at this, depending on their tribe and how Christianized their community is. I cannot speak for them.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

It is part of it. It is part of the work. What I see is that the young ones coming up are so much better than we were with working with all of us. They're much better. They have a much better analysis of race and they're much more inclusive of transgender folk and two spirit intersex,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

and who knows what else, we're gonna use up the whole alphabet before we're through, but in the LGTBQIA and Ts. As a civil rights lobbyist, I started lobbying through a number of sessions. One of my big issues was teaching the history and culture of indigenous people is part of the constitution

LINDA GRYCZAN:

so that all school children must learn, but they refuse to fund it. I lobbied for funding for American Association of University Women. That was my intersection. When we had civil rights issues, we would come up as friends. But I really need you to talk to indigenous folk to really describe this, to Steven and Denise and to whoever else.

MASON FUNK:

Yes. We will be doing that thanks to you. Getting connected and forming relationships and building the trust in order to have some of those stories shared with us.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I know you're in with Steven Barrios and David Herrera.

MASON FUNK:

Right.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

David and I were the first co-directors of Pride, a man I have great respect for, and Denise Juneau.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Now, all I did was I put a message on Facebook. I'm not sure that you've heard from her, but I think she's a very important person to talk with.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. I'm making a note to myself and we should keep on with the interview because we can do this kind of thing later on as well.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

J U N E A U.

MASON FUNK:

Yes, exactly, like the capital. I forget where we stand on Denise, but I remember you highlighting her name. But let's go back to your story for the time being.

MASON FUNK:

I wanted to ask, first of all, when you mentioned the name of your bicycle shop, you say it so quickly that someone might not actually hear.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh.

MASON FUNK:

I wanna just have you introduce us again and paint picture.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh.

MASON FUNK:

What was the name and what was the pun and all that gorgeous stuff.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

When I moved back to Montana, I realized there was not going to be the market and what I saw

LINDA GRYCZAN:

is in Helena, a new bike shop had come up every summer and go away in the winter, never to be seen again. I thought, I need much less overhead. I thought I'll put it in a van. I found out from my suppliers that this was the first mobile bike shop in the US. I called it Alice B. Toeclips Cyclery.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

It was quite amazing because most people did not get the reference. I would answer questions like, well, Mrs. Toeclips, what does your husband do? It was very handy to be doing all this political stuff under Linda Gryczan, and here was a nice lady who fixed your bikes was Alice. That split was quite interesting and useful.

MASON FUNK:

You never imagine people were gonna think you were Alice, right?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh, I still answer to Alice on the street, occasionally. People just called me Alice.

MASON FUNK:

I'm praying you have photographs of that van. Please tell me you have photo.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh, I'll send you a postcard.

MASON FUNK:

Okay, good.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I've got your address. I will send you a postcard.

MASON FUNK:

Okay, great. You were in a van and you would just go to people.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

People would call in the morning. I would take appointments and then head out in the afternoon and work till dark, and sometimes after. And because I was doing this in front of people, it was entertaining. I would be teaching them about their bike. I had something for each age of child to help and they would line up their lawn chairs and

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I had a blast. Here I was, this extrovert, I get to talk to people all day while I fixed their bikes. I did that for almost 25 years.

MASON FUNK:

Wow. Now it's funny. I just have to say you described yourself both as a shy person and just now as an extrovert, both can be true, but tell us how [crosstalk].

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh, I was a very shy extrovert, so that was completely covered, but I have, gradually,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

as I age and get more comfortable in my skin, become quite the extrovert. No one would call me shy now.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Okay. Great. Well, I love that image of you. Any particular, just anecdotes come to mind from your Alice B. Toeclips days like the lawn chairs and the people sitting around and you entertain them.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh, I remember I showed up once and somebody said, well, how's Gertrude.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh, this is great. I had a supplier who heard Al's big toeclips and they sent a 'dear sir' letter to me as a supplier. This was quite a while ago. I wrote them back and said, "there are no dear SIRS at Alice B. Toeclips."

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Somebody, oh, I would get, "Is that of Native American name?" Somebody thought toeclips, I was like clipping dog toenails.

MASON FUNK:

Wow.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

What I would do is shoot a new TV ad in the middle of summer and run it in February so that when the snow would melt and people would go in their garage and find

LINDA GRYCZAN:

two flat tires, they would call me.

MASON FUNK:

That's brilliant. It's one of the greatest entrepreneurial stories we've heard in the entire OUTWORDS archive. It might even be the best. It really is genius.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

It was very much fun. I had a blast.

MASON FUNK:

I can imagine. How far, and why would you actually go?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Well, Helena is really into sprawl, so we're quite spread out.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

We are a town in the size of a city, so I would have areas, I'll go in the valley on Wednesday. I'll go to East Helena on Thursday, so that they were connected.

MASON FUNK:

Gotcha. Okay. Well, I have some kind of semi wrap-up questions, but is there anything, events-wise,

MASON FUNK:

in your life, like key historical or anything else in the realm of like big topics we should talk about before I sort of segue into a little bit of [crosstalk] section?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Probably one of the most important things to me is what I did last summer. It's not at all queer related,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

but I trained for two years to race the Tour Divide, which is an annual race that goes from Banff to the Mexico border, crisscrossing the continental divide on dirt roads. I was hoping to set an over 65 women's record, there wasn't one. But I bombed when we hit Helena, only 4

00 miles in.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I realized I'd made some mistakes in training, gone from snow to a hundred degrees, and literally. Constance told me, "You really want to do this, don't you? Why don't you go try weekends?" After I did some recovery, I did that. Then she drove me down and I finished and going 2,7

00 miles in the back roads by myself

LINDA GRYCZAN:

was an absolutely amazing experience.

MASON FUNK:

That's wonderful. When you say you go weekends, you basically broke it up into weekends.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I did, for two weekends then realized, "Hey, my body's working again."

MASON FUNK:

Oh. I see.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

She drove me to a small town in Montana and I did the rest of the way.

MASON FUNK:

Oh my gosh.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yeah. And then I was raising money for

LINDA GRYCZAN:

three women's organizations to work and particularly getting young trans and Indigenous women and other women of color more involved in Montana Women's Triathlon and after girls school schoolgirls program, as well as the movie Expedition Reclamation, which was a group of women of color, made a movie to show we belong in the outdoors.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I was able to raise more than $2,5

00 for each of those groups by the generosity of donors.

MASON FUNK:

That's a really cool project.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yeah, it was. Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

That's really neat. Congratulations.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Thank you. It was pretty neat. There's a couple of Things I like to say. They're basically sound bites, but I really like them,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

and one is in LGBT+ civil rights movement. I'm in this until we use up the whole alphabet. And another one is --

MASON FUNK:

Well, let me ask you this. Yeah. Before we go on, where does that come from? Because I have that in my notes.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Where that comes from is I love seeing the young ones, that it is the job of the next generation in every civil rights movement

LINDA GRYCZAN:

to come up and say, the rest of you, never mind. Whatever you did, didn't matter, we're the first. We did that as 25 year olds and I see the young ones doing it. But the young ones have such a better analysis of racism and they're much more inclusive, and intersectionality is taken much more seriously. That just warms my heart.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I think y'all take it over, you're doing a great job. Carry on.

MASON FUNK:

I latched onto that with great joy because we have experienced in the course of creating this archive, we've certainly experienced elders like yourself, who are much less, for example, they won't use the word queer. They kind of hate the word queer and

MASON FUNK:

they they're mad at young people. They feel like young people don't give them the respect they deserve and, or I don't know, they're just mad. My question is not to diss them at all, but to ask you what brought you to this place where you're so willing to extend grace to the younger generation that wants to believe they created this from whole cloth? Like, where does that come from?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

That comes from

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I support the young people because I see what they're accomplishing. I see the holes in what we did by what they're pointing out to us, "Hey, you're racist as all get out, get over it." And watching them be much more inclusive. I know they are on the right path. Of course, they're gonna come up and think that they invented it because we

LINDA GRYCZAN:

did the same thing to the folks who came before us. I look back and think, oh, how could I have done that? But of course, I was 25 years old and this is what we do. Having a long view of thinking, okay, you're doing this, you will move, you will grow, and you will find another way that I've never heard of.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Bless you for that.

MASON FUNK:

You don't feel protective at all of the battles that you fought as a lesbian, people who don't really like the word gay or lesbian, they're calling themselves queer. You don't feel any desire to say, no, you have to call yourselves lesbian?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Heavens, no. I wrote something after the last pride, and Constance and I were in the way back.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Somebody took a picture of us and I thought it is so appropriate that we are in the back. The six plaintiffs once showed up at a Pride, our first parade in Montana. We had no idea if there would be anyone behind us, we rounded the corner and looked, and there were blocks of people. They may have been in costume because they weren't out yet, but they showed up.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

That really mattered. Now seeing the young ones, so many flags I had to look it up.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I find that just utterly delightful and I am less interested in being on the front lines now, but they I send care packages.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Yeah. That's wonderful.

MASON FUNK:

It's very refreshing. That's the ethos of OUTWORDS, but it's not everywhere in our community, so it's very refreshing.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

No and no it isn't. But this is the nature of social change. What were we working for? It was for change. Look what they're creating.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Now, you mentioned the alphabet was one of your favorite soundbites, which I also love. Were there other ones that

MASON FUNK:

you'd like to just make sure you have on the record?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yes. I've always thought what lesbians can learn from gay men is how to talk about sex. What gay men can learn from lesbians is there's other topics of conversation. I learned this in the HIV world.

MASON FUNK:

Tell me more about that.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

When HIV came to town,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

it was happening when I was in Seattle, as I was leaving Seattle, I heard about people, oh, his lover has that gay cancer. I watched it, paying attention, what's happening. It became GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency), and then when the guys started getting sick,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

when a woman got sick we started a Helena AIDS support group, and had a little auction where we all bought each other's stuff and supported people who were positive. At that time, there was no treatment, it was a death sentence. I'd go to events, and later find every guy there

LINDA GRYCZAN:

is no longer with us. I started working with it in terms of safe sex. Nobody's doing the research on women, what's new, so we have to take care of ourselves. This is how we could take care of ourselves, through safer sex. As it turns out, we don't transmit much of

LINDA GRYCZAN:

anything besides yeast infections. We escaped that one, but the guys didn't and we watched the horror. I lost 26 friends, 26 friends and acquaintances. Then I had the privilege that I could leave, that I could stop doing HIV work.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Six years ago I had the opportunity to work halftime for the state of Montana doing HIV prevention. That was a delightful experience because now it is a chronic illness, which is what we had hoped it would be someday.

MASON FUNK:

Great. Well, thank you so much for sharing that.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yeah. I have another thought, back when I first came out, there was a National Gay Task Force. It later became Gay and Lesbian Task Force or Lesbian Gay Task Force. Now they're the Task Force. There's too many letters. Much of what we dealt with was the sexism in the gay community,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

that gay men -- They're not sleeping with women who are saying, "Hey buddy change." Some of them took it like "I get my experience, this is yours, and I understand your oppression because of mine." Others were, particularly among white gay who had some income, it was when I get the privileges of other men like me,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

then the movement's over, and lesbians kept poking. Some of us were more active in that than others. It's not where my energy wanted to be, but like in our first pride organization, dealing with. It's like, come on guys, we've been carrying your water. We're not gonna do that.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I see the movement itself has changed within the queer and non queer community, that things that were new ideas about sexism in 1975 or even 1985, et cetera, are taken for granted. I remember when saying his or her was pretty radical. Now, it's his, her or they.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah, you've seen a lot of change. Thankfully it seems like it's even accelerating, not slowing down.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yes, Yes. The fact that people have been out and we are part of so many families. Many of us have been kicked out,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

but others have been embraced. I think the culture as a whole has embraced us. I hope we move on to the other civil rights movements and certainly Black Lives Matter and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. These are very important

LINDA GRYCZAN:

and we need to be focusing on those too.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah, for sure.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Another thought I've had is Constance and I got married after the day it was legal and we had decided we were going to do that. We were the first couple in our county. Of course, it's front page news. I'm very happy for that,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

for what it meant to us that I no longer had to carry a power of attorney with me in my wallet at all times. I wish our movement had chosen workplace protections because we don't all have to be married. We don't all have to be two by two by two.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

But most of us have jobs.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yeah. We should all be protected there. I wish that had happened and it needs to happen.

MASON FUNK:

Two questions. One, and then we have to start wrapping up, but why do you think marriage was chosen? And do you think that maybe part of why it was chosen was it was gonna be more emotionally appealing to a broader

MASON FUNK:

swath of the population?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I don't know. I wasn't part of those discussions. Yeah. But I know they were happening particularly on the coasts.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yeah. We weren't having those discussions here. The national decision that allowed us to get married. We had a domestic ... Oh what was it, what did we call it? Civil union, domestic partnership. When you talk to Stacey Haugland you'll hear about that one,

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Stacy and Mary. I can't really speak to that.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Do you think workplace protections are still conceptually possible that we would get that at a federal level?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I honestly don't know where we are with it right now.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I know in some places and it's a patchwork and what we did in Montana since we couldn't

LINDA GRYCZAN:

get it through the legislature, we did city by city to have, and we have three, I believe non-discrimination ordinances in the state.

MASON FUNK:

You mean in different cities?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yes.

MASON FUNK:

Well, let me begin wrapping up. We have four questions. We ask all of our interviewees. The first of those is if you could tell your 15 year old self anything, what would that be?

MASON FUNK:

And make sure you fold my question into your answer, please. Okay.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

What I had to tell my 15 year old self as a baby dyke, it would be, it's gonna be okay. And yes, you're here, you're queer, get used to it.

MASON FUNK:

I would think that would be very powerful for your 15 year old self,

MASON FUNK:

because of the way you described where you were in life at that time.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yeah. I really didn't know yet.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Yeah. Great. Secondly, and you alluded to this in your prep interview with Jack, I like to ask people, do you believe in the notion of a queer superpower? And if so, what is our queer superpower?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh,

MASON FUNK:

Give me the answer if you want me to because I have it in my notes.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

What I'm thinking right now, I'd like to hear my answer was then, our queer superpower is that by not having rules, we created something completely different. It wasn't against something. It was, let's throw all of that out. This is what we're going to come up with.

MASON FUNK:

Do you think that

MASON FUNK:

power has important and useful applications kind of in our road right now for not just our own selves in our own community.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

It's very creative. It's very creative. I think it allows us to envision more. I think of straight women's history of needing to fight the sexism in their relationships and the sexism from outside as well as their own internalized.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

This idea was so much less of that. When two women walk in the hardware store, they have to talk to one of us instead of going to the guy. And in our relationships, it operates on a completely different level. That's an amazing freedom that I feel so blessed to have. I think there was a one in 10 chance of winning the lottery and I won the prize.

MASON FUNK:

That's great. Why is it important to you to share your story? In other words, why did you agree to be interviewed today?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I agree to be interviewed partly to let the next generation know what went before. A lot of it had to do with the interviews I listened to on making gay history podcast. How much

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I learned from that before, also reading Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg taught me what people put up with, lived through, survived. That, to me, is unimaginable. We can take the next step and the next generations will take it to the next.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I can't wait to see what they come up with.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Yeah. Great. Last but not least, OUTWORDS being an archive of interviews with people like yourself all over the country and very intentionally reaching into the parts of the country or the parts of the population that tend to get forgotten or overlooked, whether that's people of color or people in smaller, more rural areas. What do you see as the value

MASON FUNK:

of a project like OUTWORDS? And if you could mention OUTWORDS in your answer.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I see the value of OUTWORDS is preserving these voices. You mentioned earlier in your question, somebody who died shortly after an interview, capturing these voices before we go away is valuable, is very valuable. I'm going to be interested to watch this 10 years from now

LINDA GRYCZAN:

to see how I've changed.

MASON FUNK:

Right. What do you think the value of that is to, say, the rest of the world? Maybe not just ourselves, is there a greater value?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Preserving history is valuable to everybody, whether it's our history, our personal history of our particular group or not.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I like reading, hearing people's stories about their history. It's a gift. To know someone's experience who was different than mine is a gift. It broadens my understanding of the world.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Well, great. I think

MASON FUNK:

we've covered everything that I had in mind to cover and I literally have a four o'clock meeting.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Okay. Oh, that is in seven minutes. I wanna hear your story, Mason. Are you recording?

MASON FUNK:

What was your question?

LINDA GRYCZAN:

I wanna hear your story. Oh, I mean, this has been one way and you've got seven minutes before you have to be someplace else, so we need to hang up.

MASON FUNK:

I'm happy to share my story with you. I don't think it's --

MASON FUNK:

Honestly, and I guess I'm not being modest, I don't think it's particularly interesting. Except for the founding of OUTWORDS, which is the most exciting thing I've ever done.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yes. Oh, the service of this, Mason, is going to be what it will provide long after we're both gone.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah, I hope so. I really do. Yeah. We spend a lot of time, Astra can attest to this, among other things at this archive,

MASON FUNK:

we have to think about making sure that our assets are properly protected. And like, what does that look like when it comes to things like hard drives and paper copies and multiple locations, it's all the nuts and bolts of actually building an archive and then making sure that it's properly preserved. And that's like, one of the things that I think is really fun to think about, but it's also a bit mind boggling at times. But we're all kind of learning as we go. We have conversations with people.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah, just like right now, everything is stored on two matching sets of hard drives, in two different locations, but that's not enough, that's not sustainable. Anyway, we think a lot about how to make sure these assets are preserved forever.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

It matters. It really matters. Thank you.

MASON FUNK:

[inaudible] for sharing and pushing our stories out into the world so that people can have access. It's a trope that young people don't care about their history, but all you gotta do is

MASON FUNK:

give it to them and in a way that they're ready to take it in, and they're just like, oh my God, I had no idea.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yeah, Yeah, yeah. That's exactly, that's exactly what happens. And that's been my experience too.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

But I don't wanna sit around and be talking about the good old days when they're moving forward.

MASON FUNK:

Right. Me neither, no. The very thing you've said, which is that it's every generation's natural inclination to believe they've created this from whole cloth.

MASON FUNK:

That's just normal youth. Yes. To complain about that, it's just so stitchy and fruitless. Yeah.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Oh, we did the very same thing. Come on.

MASON FUNK:

Right. Exactly. Well, I didn't because I was terrified and I wasn't even very active until much later in life, but a lot of you all did, you got out there and you just like raised hell basically. And I love those stories of just all of you women just getting together. We've interviewed,

MASON FUNK:

in fact, in Seattle, there's an incredible former lesbian separatist named Lamar Van Dyke. Her last name Van Dyke is because she and a bunch of other women and from Canada bought a bunch of fans and they dubbed themselves the van dykes and they just took off and they like barnstormed, but she's the only one who changed her name legally to Van Dyke, so her legal name was Lamar Van Dyke.

MASON FUNK:

But the stories of, she showed up in Seattle, she opened a tattoo shop. She's like, what the hell have I done? But she hung in there, and pretty soon her tattoo shop was a place where people came. And yeah. I mean, I just love these stories of all you women just saying, we're gonna figure this out. We're gonna do it ourselves. It's very inspiring.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Yeah. Well, thank you. Well, I'm going

LINDA GRYCZAN:

to look for your interview on the archive.

MASON FUNK:

10 years from now, if I'm still around, I'll sit down for an interview.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Do it now.

MASON FUNK:

I'm only 63 now. Maybe when I turn 70, I'll sit down.

LINDA GRYCZAN:

Mason, it's been a delight talking with you. Thank you so much. I'll let you get onto your four o'clock and I'm glad we figured out the -- Astra, thank you so much for making this work.