MASON FUNK:

Okay, thank you so much. Please start by stating and spelling your first and last names.

Lorri Jean:

My name is Lorri Jean, L-O-R-R-I last name Jean J-E-A-N. I always use my middle initial L. so people will know that Jean is my last name.

MASON FUNK:

. Okay. Could you tell us the date and place where you were born?

Lorri Jean:

I was born on March 7th, 1957 in Boise, Idaho.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. We're gonna start back at the beginning a little bit. You were the oldest child of a farm family, which is what I know. There's another chapter about the family losing the farm, but if you could just set the stage for us in terms of this family you were born into, who are your parents and what were kind of the values that they wanted to instill in their kids from day one?

Lorri Jean:

Okay. Well, both my folks were from homesteading families, their parents at

Lorri Jean:

homesteaded in the Idaho and Eastern Oregon areas, and basically built most of what existed in their area, because they were reclaiming sagebrush. I mean, there really weren't even many native communities in the areas where their family's homesteaded. That instilled in them, I think, not only a lot of optimism, but a lot of confidence that they could do anything because their families had built communities

Lorri Jean:

out of nothing. And they both had been married before and had other families and then they met each other. My dad was farming in Idaho in the summers, and in Arizona in the winters. About the time I got to be of school age, they had to make a choice and decide where they were gonna settle because they couldn't go back and forth anymore. And so they settled in Arizona and that's really where I grew up.

Lorri Jean:

One of the great things about growing up on a farm is that you have a lot of independence. You also have a lot of responsibility, especially when you're the oldest kid. Your folks need you to help out on the farm, so that can overcome things like gender expectations. While I don't think my mom had a lot of those, my dad certainly did, but he needed my help. From the time I was a little kid, I was helping to irrigate. I learned how to drive the tractor and feed the livestock.

Lorri Jean:

I helped him do veterinary work with the animals. I came to believe that I could do just about anything. Then I shouldn't be limited by my gender, even though I was conscious of the fact that many people were or that there were expectations about what girls could do and what we couldn't do. But I just didn't believe that because I saw what I was able to do, and

Lorri Jean:

of course when I went through puberty, my dad suddenly began to change and he didn't want me around the farm so much. I think it was more about didn't want me around the farm hands, but it was too late. They let the genie outta the bottle by then. I grew up with a work ethic that was very significant because you had to work a lot on the farm. My family was pretty happy and both parents were optimists.

Lorri Jean:

They believed in their kids and they raised us to think we could do anything. That has been really useful to me throughout my whole adult life, both that optimism, that confidence. The Cardinal sin in my family was lying. You could get away with petty larceny. I mean, we raided the orchards with impunity at times, and that was

Lorri Jean:

acceptable, but don't lie. Selfishness was the other. When I think about how those values have permeated my life, I mean, I've spent most of my life in the nonprofit world giving back, which I think is a very unselfish kind of thing to do -- our organizations are very unselfish, helping others -- and I've always

Lorri Jean:

believed that telling the truth is really important. That's why I didn't stay in the closet very long because I felt like I was lying to people. Those things are still important to me today.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. This notion of there's nothing you can't do, can you think of any like anecdotes or examples of a time when you'd say you were in your formative years when that belief was made real

MASON FUNK:

under specific circumstances?

Lorri Jean:

Hmm. Well, I can think of a couple. One was just sort of a courageous thing. I got this idea that I wanted to ride my horse out into the desert and camp on top of a mountain by myself. My folks were a little nervous about it and they said I could do it if I would take my little brother. I don't know why they thought he would be

Lorri Jean:

any protection. But we went out there and we did that and we were a little scared. I was probably in seventh grade at the time. We lit our own fire, we cooked our own meal when we got out there and we did it. That was a very adventuresome kind of thing. It wasn't long after that that I decided that I wanted to lead the drive for girls to be able to wear pants in

Lorri Jean:

my junior high school, which had Mormon administrators. In the rural area there, the Mormon sort of ran everything right. I was tired of wearing skirts and dresses and I wanted to wear pants. I organized a petition drive. This became quite controversial, ultimately resulted in a big meeting of parents and administrators. I asked my parents to come, and that's when I learned a very valuable lesson, do not presume what people's positions are unless

Lorri Jean:

you talk to them first because my father got there and opposed what I was wanting to do, I could have strangled him but we won and we got to wear pants and I learned the power of organizing. It just never occurred to me that I couldn't do something that I set my mind on. I guess I'd use those two examples.

MASON FUNK:

Then there was the chapter where the family, you said they lost the farm

MASON FUNK:

due to government negligence or irresponsibility. Could you tell us that story?

Lorri Jean:

Yeah. I mean, my father was always beset by disasters when he was farming, hail storms the size of golf balls in Idaho that destroyed the bean crop right before it was supposed to be harvested. Back then there was no relief for farmers and farmers didn't have insurance for that kind of thing. Finally, he got into the livestock business, raising pigs, and he had an angel investor who had married a good friend of his,

Lorri Jean:

Amanda Blake, who played Miss Kitty on Gun Smoke. She needed a tax shelter, so she invested in our operation and my dad built the largest pork producing operation west of the Mississippi. We had over 5,000 head of hogs and he was Cudahy Bar S's biggest supplier. We got cholera in the herd from a load of Weaner pigs that we shipped out from the Midwest to then feed and sell, which is sort of how

Lorri Jean:

most people did it. And back then it was during the Nixon administration and they wanted to eradicate cholera and their plan was they would kill every animal that had been exposed to it, pay the farmer the market price, and the feds and the state would split the cost. To make a long story short, the state didn't have the money to pay to kill the hogs. And dad said, well, then I'm not gonna let you kill my livestock if you're not gonna pay me for it.

Lorri Jean:

They then basically put a noose around our neck and said, okay, but you can't sell the meat to any place that's gonna go out of state, and you can't buy any more pigs until the last one that's been exposed is gone. That ultimately resulted in us losing everything. My dad had been leasing an 18 Wheeler to bring grain into the feed mills,

Lorri Jean:

to make food for all these pigs. He started driving that truck. But in the meantime we lost our home. We were homeless for a while. My dad somehow managed to convince some private guy to, on his word, sell him five acres of land out in the middle of the desert, and he convinced somebody else to let him buy, on payments, a double-wide mobile home. He put that

Lorri Jean:

trailer out there on the desert. We didn't have water or electricity for about six months. We lived out there. We went to a different school then. That was my very first year of high school. That was a galvanizing experience for me because the government did not do what it was supposed to do and people got hurt. That's when I decided that I wanted to become

Lorri Jean:

a lawyer because as far as I knew, lawyers were the ones who ran for public office and changed things. And I was gonna do that and make the laws better so that people wouldn't get hurt. That sort of set me on the path, even though after I came out, I diverged a little bit because when I came out, it wasn't possible to imagine that you could run for office and get elected

Lorri Jean:

unless you hid who you were, and I wasn't interested in hiding who I was. Also, I began to think that maybe politicians, that that wasn't really the place where you could make the biggest impact, so I decided I would become a civil rights lawyer and then other governmental changes impacted that.

MASON FUNK:

So you figured out that politics was not the way to make change.

MASON FUNK:

You still thought the law might be a way to make a change.

Lorri Jean :

Yes.

Mason Funk :

Okay. We'll circle back to that. I think before we move on to Georgetown, I just wanted to have you talk about your mom since you've already referred to her, but maybe the particular values and the encouragement that she gave you. It sounds like that had a long lasting impact.

Lorri Jean:

Yeah. My mom was really an extraordinary human being. She was the eldest of three

Lorri Jean:

on a farm family and probably the smartest of the three, but her folks only had money to send the boys to college. My mom was a little boy crazy. She got married at a very young age and was married twice, had two children, but when my father married her and they began to build a family, she was more settled and

Lorri Jean:

she was immensely talented. She was an artist, she was a seamstress who made beautiful clothing. She was completely courageous. At one point, she decided that we needed to build an addition on that trailer that I was telling you about, because it wasn't big enough and we didn't have the money. So she went to the library and she checked out books on how to do it. And she saved enough money to hire someone to build the foundation. But then

Lorri Jean:

she built the walls, she did the wiring, all by herself. I would never have the courage to do that, but I saw her doing it and she encouraged me to do whatever I wanted and suggested to me in numerous ways that I could be whoever I wanted to be, and that I didn't have to be limited as I think she felt limited in her life. Even though she was a happy person and loved her family.

Lorri Jean:

Watching her and feeling her encouragement was really crucial to me. She instilled in all of us kids a self-confidence that has been crucial to me and throughout my whole life. That self-confidence, that optimism. Both my parents were eternal optimists. I am too, and that has been so helpful. I really think about my mom and my dad

Lorri Jean:

often when I think about the success that I've been privileged to have.

MASON FUNK:

Did they get to witness some of your success?

Lorri Jean:

Oh, they did. They were both very proud of me. Although my father, when I came to work at the center, he was not a happy camper about that. He thought it was a big mistake. I was throwing away my career and my dad and I always talked about business and politics. For the first year or two, when I was at the center, he wouldn't talk to me

Lorri Jean:

about this work, and I would try to tell him about things I'd done and that I was proud of. He would occasionally even be derisive. I remember one time he said to me, "Well, but how does it feel to be begging for a living?" But finally, one day he and mom were driving over from Phoenix, coming across the desert to LA, and my mom tells the story that it had been quiet in the house. I mean, quiet in the car, for like

Lorri Jean:

an hour. They were just east of Palm Springs, and my dad suddenly said apropos of nothing, "Do you think it's a choice?" And my mom knew immediately that he was referencing my sexual orientation and she replied, "Well, honey, I don't think so. And if you think about Lorri from the time she was little, we had plenty of reason to know that she was a lesbian." My dad was quiet for about another hour

Lorri Jean:

and he was a big joker. And then he said, "Okay, well let me get this straight, is Gina" that's my wife, "is Gina my son-in-law or my daughter-in-law?" From that point forward, he was willing to come to the center. I brought him to our 25th anniversary gala, which was a huge affair. He was very impressed by all the gay men he met because of course they were all in tuxes. They were all accomplished. Before he died, my father said to me

Lorri Jean:

that he thought gay people were superior to straight people. I was blown away by that. I said, "Dad, I love you for saying that, but it's not true. You've been meeting my friends and they're wonderful people, but we have our share of bums just like everybody else." But he became my number one fan. My mother was always my number one fan. She occasionally advised me against things

Lorri Jean:

like when I left the center the first time and started a business and then venture capitals took that over. Then the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force came to me and they needed my help because they were about to close and they wanted me to come and run them and turn them around. My mother advised me against it. She thought that was the wrong move. And you know, she was probably right. But when I did it anyway, she was right there on my side, every step

Lorri Jean:

of the way.

MASON FUNK:

Why did she think it was the wrong move?

Lorri Jean:

She thought that it was gonna keep me on the road all the time, and that was not gonna be good for my family life, which was totally true. She felt that it was a step down to go from this Los Angeles LGBT center that I had built up to a huge organization to a small national organization that was floundering. I think she thought that I could do

Lorri Jean:

some other entrepreneurial ventures.

MASON FUNK:

Interesting. Yeah. Mother knows best.

Lorri Jean:

Yes .

Speaker 3 :

Mason.

MASON FUNK:

Yes.

Speaker 3 :

Just watch your body movement too because you're --

MASON FUNK:

In relation to the camera.

Speaker 3 :

Just even the floor.

MASON FUNK:

Even the floor. Thank you. Don't fall off the stage again..

Lorri Jean:

Yes, no problem.

MASON FUNK:

We're gonna skip a little bit, we're gonna jump to Georgetown. Okay. And including, I think I really want to just jump in with this really, really, really major and important

MASON FUNK:

lawsuit that you and two others launched, from my understanding, that lasted, I think, nine years it seems like that was a really another galvanizing experience for you.

Lorri Jean:

Absolutely. When I got to Georgetown law school in the summer of 1979 in my entering class I knew no other openly LGBT people.

Lorri Jean:

I only knew two other openly LGBT people in the whole law school. I knew more closeted ones. But one of them was a man named Clint Hockenberry. And I immediately got active in the women's rights collective and was hanging out with the lesbian and straight women who were involved there. But Clint wanted to start, as we said then, a gay and lesbian law students organization. The 'b' and the 't' weren't much in our consciousness

Lorri Jean:

in 1979. I said, "Clint, you know I'm very involved with the women's rights collective. I don't really have the time to take on something else." And he said, "Lorri, I can't do it by myself. I can't be just a man." "I need a woman, and you're the only one who can do it." So he persuaded me and then we decided we needed to recruit somebody from the undergraduate campus to join because we wanted to get a gay, lesbian group going there and a gay and lesbian group going at

Lorri Jean:

the law school. We went through all the procedures, getting the approval of the student bar association, getting the approval of the faculty senate, the Dean, and then it ultimately went up to the president of the university, the late Father Patrick Healy, who was a closeted gay man. He vetoed our right to exist, saying that we violated Catholic doctrine. This was such an example of how insidious being closeted is.

Lorri Jean:

I really believe that his biggest issue was that he felt that he would be exposed because he was pretty notorious back then. But we young, budding lawyers thought, oh, well this will never hold. We have a human rights act in Washington, DC. This is one of the strongest in the nation. We'll sue, they'll cave and we'll get our organizations. Well, did we ever misjudge the power of

Lorri Jean:

Catholic homophobia! So thus began a nine year battle. We lost at the trial court level, which was devastating, and then we had to decide, what are we gonna do? Because we don't wanna risk an appellate precedent that could set back our movement, but we also hated to leave that opinion to hold. We ultimately decided

Lorri Jean:

to appeal. Our solo practitioner lawyer, who had been totally overwhelmed by the huge law firm that Georgetown had hired--The president of their board was the named partner at Williams and Connolly, a very prestigious law firm. They harassed the hell out of us as plaintiffs. The behaviors that their lead attorney did in depositions were disgusting and appalling. The me too movement would've run him out of town.

Lorri Jean:

But we found a lawyer at a bigger firm who was willing to take on the case on appeal, a straight guy. We appealed and we went on appeal and in the meantime, the Georgetown administration was doing everything they could to turn the student body against us. As tuition was rising, they blamed us. They said that it was because of the lawsuit

Lorri Jean:

which was complete BS, that was completely untrue. But students were concerned about rising tuition and we started to get pushback and angry students coming at us. One day I was in the law school lobby upstairs and I saw Father Healy walking across the lobby. I had never personally met him, but I'd seen him speak. I knew who he was. I raced up

Lorri Jean:

to him and hailed him, "Father Healy, Father Healy, may I please speak with you?" And of course, he turned. He was friendly and nice until he knew who I was.

MASON FUNK:

Hold that thought, please carry on.

Lorri Jean:

When he realized who I was, he immediately sort of pushed me into this pillar with his finger in my chest, telling me that if I didn't stop this lawsuit, he would see that I never practiced law

Lorri Jean:

in Washington, DC. Well, here's where youthful naivete is helpful. I should have been afraid because he was a very powerful man and he could have hurt me. But instead I just got mad. And at one point, in fact, we found a couple of undergraduates and father Healy was known to spend time with undergraduate students and take them to

Lorri Jean:

the beautiful Caribbean homes of Georgetown donors and wine and dine them and then unceremoniously dump them when they returned. We found a couple who had a relationship with him and we said, look, we need you to come to us. This is after we lost at the lower court, we need you to come with us to a meeting with Father Healy. We don't want you to say anything. We just want you to sit there quietly, while

Lorri Jean:

we talk to him about the wisdom of settling this case. It took a lot of persuasion, but they finally agreed. The night before the meeting, the first of them backed out and the morning of the meeting, the second of them backed out. They were just too afraid to go against this very powerful man. We didn't get to ever do that,

Lorri Jean:

which I'm sorry about, but thank goodness we won at the appellate court level and then Georgetown appealed, we won en banc before the full court. They continued to appeal, we had motions practice before the United States Supreme court. And then finally they were willing to settle and someone an insider claims that father Healy actually was crucial.

MASON FUNK:

Sorry, hold that thought. Helicopter.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. You can back up a couple sentences.

Lorri Jean:

After winning at both appellate levels, Georgetown was filing motions before

Lorri Jean:

the United States Supreme court. Ultimately, that's when they came to us and were willing to settle and an insider at the time, many years later, told me that father Healy was instrumental in suggesting the settlement. I don't know whether I believe that or not. But by then, I believe, I can't remember if he had left Georgetown and had gone to Fordham or what, but in the meantime,

Lorri Jean:

we had put so much political pressure on Georgetown. They wanted to pass a huge 600 million bond measure in DC to help them build a new campus. By then I was president of the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance and we got the city council to deny them the ability to do that. They wanted to close the street where they were gonna build part of the new law center that required special dispensation. We got the city

Lorri Jean:

council to disallow that. We used our power as gay rights leaders and organizers to stop that. This cost them a bundle. Their bigotry cost them a bundle, but ultimately it ended nine years later with LGBT student organizations on both campuses being funded, just like the other student organizations were funded. Today, on the

Lorri Jean:

main campus, there is an LGBT student center. On the 25th anniversary of the lawsuit, I was invited to come back to Georgetown for a symposium at the school that was celebrating the lawsuit. Well, I couldn't believe it. I did not have good feelings about Georgetown given my experience. I decided to do it. I was invited to give a speech at the undergraduate campus as well, and much to my surprise,

Lorri Jean:

the head of the campus LGBT center, whom I knew from various meetings, asked if she could meet with me in advance, and she asked me not to divulge that father Healy was gay in my speech on the undergraduate campus. I couldn't believe she was asking me this question. She said, "They've asked me to ask you, they will make my life miserable if you do it."

Lorri Jean:

She hated to have to do that. But I thought to myself, okay, she's doing really vital work, this center is doing really vital work on the main campus. I said, "Okay, I'll agree to that with the undergraduate campus, but all bets are off at the law school." That was the compromise we struck. The president of the board at that time was the father of a gay son, and he was also, oh, gosh,

Lorri Jean:

Tagliabue. He was the former national sports league commissioner. It was either baseball or basketball, I've forgotten which. I'm a bad lesbian. He gave a 7 million gift to the university, a million dollars of which was directed to the campus LGBT center. He took me out to lunch. I never thought that anything like that would happen in the aftermath of all of this, but justice did prevail.

MASON FUNK:

Amazing. I mean, I could ask you a million questions about that story, but we have other things to cover, but I did note that you said in another article that if you knew at the time, all the backlash that would ensue, that you might not have had the courage. Is that how you feel?

Lorri Jean:

Because I was an eternal optimist and I'm an eternal optimist because I was young, I just felt like everything was gonna work out.

Lorri Jean:

I had no realization really about how powerful men who were homophobic, particularly in the Catholic church, could act and from the personal threats to fomenting the student body against us so that even our peers were not treating us well. I mean, that was not pleasant. Of course, then AIDS hit right in the middle

Lorri Jean:

of all of this and the lead plaintiff from the undergraduate campus didn't live to see our victory. Clint Hockenberry did live to see it. But I don't know if, I think I would've questioned whether I should do it and whether it made sense, because a lot of people might get hurt. But I used to jump off huge cliffs going into the river in Arizona.

Lorri Jean:

I wouldn't do that today either, but I feel the same way actually about the new Rosenstein campus. When I proposed that to the board, we'd done all of our homework about how much it was going to cost. And in between the time that the board approved it and the time we built it, costs skyrocketed. Also, the scope of the project increased. What we thought might be

Lorri Jean:

a 40 million project ended up being $143 million. If you had told me when we started that I was gonna have to raise, in private dollars, let alone the government dollars, but in private dollars, over 60 million, I would've thought I couldn't do it. It taught me a big lesson about even someone like me, who's an eternal optimist who has taken a lot of calculated risks that have

Lorri Jean:

paid off in my time, even I would've been hesitant to do that. So we often undersell ourselves and what we, in our community, can do if we set our minds to it.

MASON FUNK:

So there's no circumstances under which -- I'm trying to think of the question. You say, even you might have pulled back, have hesitated, if you knew on the first part of the journey what was gonna be required. But that also strikes me as how much, even within our own community, if I knew,

MASON FUNK:

then what I know now I might not have done it. But it's a good thing we didn't know.

Lorri Jean:

Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it also speaks to the power of vision. If you have a vision that inspires people, whether that's the fight for equality or to build a new campus that cares for the seniors and youth in our community, people get inspired and they will do things that you never thought were possible. I mean our whole lives, people of

Lorri Jean:

our generation, our whole lives have been about achieving things that nobody ever thought were possible. Did I ever think that I'd be married, legally recognized by the government? No. Now that might be taken away if the Supreme court if the right wing has their way, but still, the world has changed a tremendous amount and we still have a lot of work to do, but that vision, that optimism, that

Lorri Jean:

youthful naivete have all been very useful.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Okay. You already alluded to the fact that AIDS hit in the middle in the eighties, and you're in DC, you've graduated from law school, the lawsuit is still going on, but tell us about what it was, just what you witnessed in DC as AIDS began to proliferate.

Lorri Jean:

When I sort of remember reading, the first time, about AIDS, it was probably my last year of law school in 1982. Then I went to work as a lawyer and began to see it take its toll. I was starting to do more activism in the LGBT world rather than just the lesbian world, which is where I'd been mostly focused. I had become

Lorri Jean:

president of what was called the Gay Activists Alliance, then I changed the name to the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance. One of our primary functions was to figure out what to do with this pandemic that was now decimating our community. Funeral homes weren't being willing to care for the bodies of people who died of AIDS, families were sweeping in and

Lorri Jean:

basically taking all the belongings of partnerships and ignoring the partner who didn't have any legal authority to the home or the property. Doctors were refusing to care for people. Really one of the only bright lights at that time was Anthony Fauci, who did lift a finger and was trying to help, and ultimately, of course, did heroic work.

Lorri Jean:

But because of my visible role and as the head of GLAA, and the fact that people knew I was a lawyer, things would happen to me, like I would get a call at midnight saying "So and so's just been admitted to the hospital. We don't know how much time he has left, he hasn't done his paperwork. Can you come in?" I wasn't in private practice, I was working for the government, but there I'd go. I went to countless bedsides.

Lorri Jean:

I lost countless friends, men that I loved, that I presumed that I would grow old with. It was a horrific, horrific time. We were certainly under siege and had no idea that it would last as long as it did at the time, but we had to keep fighting. This was a time when the lesbians and the gay men

Lorri Jean:

in our community came together in a way that we hadn't before. Lesbians are often blamed for that because of separatism, but really, in my view, it was because of misogyny and sexism on the part of gay men who had very little interest, many, with having any women friends, but when AIDS hit, we had to rise to the occasion and help because our gay brothers couldn't do it. That was a great silver lining from

Lorri Jean:

the AIDS epidemic, that it brought the men and women of our community together. Again, it also brought many men of privilege who weren't really involved in the nascent gay rights movement, who weren't really giving, who weren't active, but because they were so privileged, they didn't need to worry about it as much. But they couldn't avoid AIDS, so it activated an entire group of men who had the ability to build the infrastructure, the financial ability to help

Lorri Jean:

build our infrastructure. That was another big silver lining, because all of our movement organizations grew during that time. It was dealing with all of that that made me decide that I wanted to go to work full time for our movement. I liked my job as a lawyer for FEMA. I was a lawyer for the federal government, but I liked my activism so much more. There was a vacancy at the Human Rights Campaign Fund, as it was called then, in 1989

Lorri Jean:

and I applied and it ended up being me and Tim McFeely as the two finalists and Tim was about 10 years older than me and the staff unanimously endorsed me, but they chose Tim and I thought to myself, why did they choose Tim? Yes, he was older. Yes, he had more financial resources. Gender certainly played a role, but I realized that I didn't have anything on my resume that

Lorri Jean:

distinguished me from Tim. We both had been lawyers managing relatively small groups of people. If I was gonna compete for one of these big jobs, and it had to be a big job because I had student loans from law school and I had to pay 'em back, I needed to make a decent living. Back then the salary scales were horrible in the nonprofit, in the queer nonprofit world especially. The head of my agency at the time was a

Lorri Jean:

Reagan Republican, the first black three star general in the army who liked me very much and had been one of my references. When I didn't get the job, he was shocked. He thought I was gonna get it. He said, "Well, what would it take to keep you?" And I very brazenly asked for the deputy regional director job in FEMA's largest and busiest region, region nine, which was headquartered in San Francisco. There'd never been a woman in that job in any of the

Lorri Jean:

10 regions, and there'd never been a man under the age of 55. I was a 32 year old open lesbian, and damned if he didn't give it to me. He sent me out to California and I promptly got immersed in that work. We had a presidentially declared disaster and average of every 30 days during my tenure, including the Loma Prieta earthquake. When I got a call from a woman named Deborah Johnson

Lorri Jean:

who had been on the center board in the old days and was helping, was an activist, was a consultant, actually. I was co-chair of the board of Lambda legal and we had hired her to help us with some stuff. She called me one day and she said, Lorri, there's a job in LA with your name written all over it. My first reaction is by then as San Franciscan was "LA?" Then she started telling me about the center. I hadn't forgotten

Lorri Jean:

my desire to work for the movement, so I came down to LA for the interviews and I interviewed in the old Highland facility, which was a dumpy renovated motel. I remember walking in there and thinking, oh, my parents would have a heart attack if I came to work in this place. It looked so horrible. They took me over to show me the new building that they were about to finish that is now called the McDonald/Wright building. In fact, you've interviewed John and Rob. I looked at that and I thought

Lorri Jean:

there is nothing like this in the world. I have gotta be a part of it. There were other activists who'd applied for this job who were much better known than I was, but none of them could compete with my resume, so it worked and I came to work at the center and thank goodness I did because this has been the job of a lifetime.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. We covered a lot of territory. I love that. And that happens

MASON FUNK:

because we've got like good overview. I want to go back to, first of all, back to when you mentioned women coming essentially to the aid of their gay brothers and that there was some tension around that. And I just wonder what, first of all, if you can just take us back into that timeframe and that moment when this epidemic is raging and no one knows what it is and no one has any idea if it'll ever be treatable,

MASON FUNK:

much less curable, but do you remember the decision making and the thought process on your part where you said, "No, we have to step in and help. This is a moment when we might have to do what once upon a time might not have felt like what we want to do." do you remember specifics or moments in there?

Lorri Jean:

Well, there are a couple that stand out. One was that

Lorri Jean:

a friend of mine that I was working closely with in GLAA, who I was in touch with every day because he handled the media, he disappeared. We couldn't find him. He didn't call me for like three days. I finally got somebody at his office who said, yeah, we haven't heard from Patrick for three or four days. That's so unusual. He's not responding to any calls. Of course, nobody had cell phones back then, but

Lorri Jean:

some of us did have answering machines. Another friend in GLAA and I divided up hospitals and we finally found him in one of the hospitals and he was already in sort of an induced or maybe it wasn't even induced coma from pneumocystis pneumonia. And we sort of began a vigil.

Lorri Jean:

When word got out about Patrick, another person stepped up, who was a notary, and said, "Patrick had asked me to prepare documents, Lorri, giving you his medical power of attorney." But he never told me, so I had no idea what he wanted and his father had just died a few months before. And his mother, who didn't

Lorri Jean:

know he was gay, came into town from rural Michigan. Oh, well not totally rural, but smaller town, Michigan. And she was beside herself with grief and blamed all the men who were there because somehow they had given this to her son, which none of those men were those men. But she left and went back to Michigan

Lorri Jean:

and I was left to make the decision to take Patrick off of life support. Throughout that process, I learned two things. One, I was close to Patrick, but I wasn't like a dear, close friend, but when he had to choose someone, he chose a woman. Secondly, the way the family, the mother, was reacting, having women around was gonna be crucial because if

Lorri Jean:

it had only been men, I don't know what she would've done. It would've been a horrible, horrible fight. I remember thinking, at that time, we've got to get more and more women involved, and already, many were. Somewhere, I can't remember, I think it was before that time, I was in a conversation with a group of women who were talking about, we were never hired to run

Lorri Jean:

the gay and lesbian organizations. It was always men, with like the exception of Ginny Apuzzo, and maybe by then, at least on the east coast, any of the nationals, it was always men. They were griping about how men often treated us. And I did, I shared that view. I experienced that same thing. Not from every gay man or every straight man, but from many because we were all a part of this sexist society. Just as racism was present

Lorri Jean:

in our movement. But we were under siege. And I remember talking to people and arguing, we used to get together and argue about issues right back when you could discuss differences of opinion, and I said, look it doesn't make a difference. Who's gonna do it? We need to step up. I think that if we do that will go a long way

Lorri Jean:

to getting rid of a lot of the sexism that exists in our movement. I remember both of those things were pretty, pretty crucial. Another important lesson from that is I ended up becoming very close friends with Patrick's mother. Even though I thought that she had been a monster, I was wrong. She was in grief. She didn't know how to deal with this news all at once. She just lost her husband. Now her son, her only child,

Lorri Jean:

who she didn't know was gay, was dying of AIDS. She needed love and tenderness and someone who had a connection with her son. That taught me to be more open-minded of people who I think are bigots because she was not a bigot. She had other issues that she was dealing with. So I digressed a little bit there.

MASON FUNK:

Wow. But that's a beautiful story though.

MASON FUNK:

you mentioned that Clint did make it, but I don't know if you mean that he's still alive today.

Lorri Jean:

No. Clint died of AIDS also.

MASON FUNK:

He did just later. He saw the

Lorri Jean:

He saw the victory.

MASON FUNK:

I see.

Lorri Jean:

But he did not live long enough for protease inhibitors. We all know many men who, if they had been able to hang on long enough, might have been snatched from the jaws of death by that advance in medication.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. You've probably met Steve Peters at some point here in Los Angeles. He's one of our interviewees. One of those men snatched from the jaws of death, over and over again. Okay. Now there's a security clearances piece in here that I've never -- I've only read references to it, but you somehow helped queer people to be able to get security clearances. But I have no idea.

Lorri Jean:

Well, it sort of started a little bit by accident.

Lorri Jean:

I went to work for FEMA and FEMA was responsible for continuity of government. Which a lot of people don't realize. It's FEMA who handles things when there's an inauguration, but there's one of the presidential successors isn't there, they're somewhere else in case there's a big bomb and we ought have somebody left over to run things and FEMA manages different areas that are where people can evacuate to and all that sort of thing.

Lorri Jean:

That required not only top secret, but special access clearances. To be a lawyer for FEMA in the area that I was, I had to get a clearance. I was worried because back then people who were gay were denied clearances. I talked to everybody who I thought they'd interview. I said, okay, look, you're gonna be interviewed, my neighbors, my family, anybody like that, friends, and don't

Lorri Jean:

volunteer any information and use your own definitions. If they ask you, if I suffer from any moral failings, you don't think homosexuality is a moral failing, use your definition, not what you think they might think. And frankly, I got my clearance. This didn't give me a lot of faith in the process because I'd been the lead plaintiff in the Georgetown suit and they didn't find out that I was a lesbian, so it never came up. Fast forward a few years

Lorri Jean:

in advance-- now I wasn't open, I wasn't out of the closet to everyone at the agency when I went there, I was to this one gay man who was in the closet there, but then I came out of the closet when I became the president of the Gay Activists Alliance. I was planning an orderly coming out, but then police raided a gay bar in masks and gloves, and then I was organizing a demonstration on the DC police department and was in all the papers and on TV. That's how everybody found out.

Lorri Jean:

Then I was out and there came a time when I needed to get upgrades to my clearance because I was moving into an area that was even more sensitive. The FBI was interviewing me and at the end of the interview, they said, was there anything else you'd like to say, any information you'd like to provide? And I said, "Yes. As a matter of fact, you haven't asked me about my sexual orientation." At which

Lorri Jean:

point both of these men blanched. I said, I'm a lesbian here's an article from the front page of the Sunday Metro section of the Washington post with my picture on it. You can see I'm out of the closet. I'm very active in the community. I'm not a security risk, because that was the rap back then. Any gay person was a risk to national security because we could be blackmailed. I ended up getting the clearance and then there was an incident that

Lorri Jean:

happened at FEMA that resulted in a congressional security practices review board that I was appointed to. I was the only gay person on it. We were looking at the issue of whether gay people did constitute a risk. This was a panel of luminaries. I was the nobody, but I was the lawyer who did a lot of the staff work, and I did tons of research.

Lorri Jean:

There'd been studies that showed that never in the history of America had there been a gay person who'd been blackmailed and revealed secrets. There'd been lots of straight people who'd done it but never had a gay person done it. Ultimately, we came up with a final paper that was a recommendation that sexual orientation no longer be used as a proxy for

Lorri Jean:

presuming somebody was a risk to national security. This panel ultimately issued a report that recommended that sexual orientation no longer be deemed an automatic disqualifier for security clearances because there was no evidence that homosexuals were more of a security risk and that basically they would need to talk to the individual and see. Most gay people I knew would've said, oh no,

Lorri Jean:

well, if I had to choose between revealing state secrets and coming out, I'd come out or have them come out and then they're no longer a risk. So they had that recommendation by this panel of luminaries. And this was right around the time that Clinton was elected. I passed that paperwork on to Roberta Achtenberg, when she was appointed as the highest ranking openly LGBT person ever

Lorri Jean:

in a presidential administration approved by the Senate, and the policy began to go away. That made a difference, not only to the millions of people who work for the federal government, but to contractors who work for the federal government and who often would deny gay people critical jobs, because they didn't think they would be able to get the clearances that were required. I just gave a speech a few weeks ago to Raytheon Technologies

Lorri Jean:

and met a 40 year employee there, a gay man who was closeted for much of his tenure, who lived through all of that time and the lavender scare and all of those things. It made a difference to a lot of people for important jobs. It was a very important reform and I'm proud to have played a role in it.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Terrific. Wonderful. It's 12:15. We could take a little break if you'd like,

Lorri Jean:

I'm happy to keep going. If you wanna keep going.

MASON FUNK:

Let's keep going. All right.

MASON FUNK:

Because we've basically gotten up to, as you told in your previous story, kind of your arrival at the center and there were these two monumental tenures. How do we jump in? Just tell us, again, what was it that made you decide this was a job you really wanted?

Lorri Jean:

Well, I didn't know anything about --

MASON FUNK:

And make sure to reference the center as you started.

Lorri Jean:

Yeah. When

Lorri Jean:

I was being courted to apply for the job at the Los Angeles -- Back then, it was the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center. They were courting a number of people to apply. I didn't know anything about this organization. I knew very little about the movement of LGBT centers because Washington DC had had a very tiny LGBT center, but it struggled constantly, it didn't have full-time staff. When I came down to LA and saw this center here,

Lorri Jean:

there was none in San Francisco, and here in LA there was this $8 million organization. They had 125 staff. I'd never heard of an LGBT organization having that many staff. I saw that they were doing not only lots of advocacy work, but service. They were making an immediate difference in people's lives with an AIDS medical clinic, with a shelter for homeless youth, with mental health services, legal services,

Lorri Jean:

employment. I mean, they were doing a wide range of stuff that I'd never known an LGBT organization to be doing. It was fascinating to me and what they had built here with the new building they were getting ready to open was unlike anything that existed anywhere in the country. I thought this community in Los Angeles has something really special going on and if I wanna be a part of this movement with a significant organization where I can achieve a lot,

Lorri Jean:

this is it. Thank goodness the board offered me the job.

MASON FUNK:

Do you have any notion of why LA?

Lorri Jean:

I do. I've thought a lot about it over the years.

MASON FUNK:

I've thought a lot about what?

Lorri Jean:

I have thought a lot over the years about why LA, why were so many firsts in LA, even though New York and San Francisco and DC didn't really even know about 'em very much.

Lorri Jean:

I think that it's because so many people came to Los Angeles, to California, to be free, whether they were escaping racism in the south escaping homophobia. Let me restate that. So many people came to LA from all over the country to California, the land of dreams, whether it was escaping racism in the south or homophobia in the Midwest or even

Lorri Jean:

just narrow views, people came to LA. It was because of Hollywood. It was an artistic community. The boundaries of what was acceptable or much wider. And any artistic community always attracts queer people, so lots of LGBT people were here. Because it was the west, there also were more opportunities for women. You had a lot of lesbians who ended up here, they could

Lorri Jean:

get jobs in the industry. Some of the very first organizing that happened in our movement happened here. The very first gay organization that lasted any amount of time was the Mattachine Society. It was founded right here in Los Angeles in 1951. The very first lesbian publication

Lorri Jean:

written by a woman named Edith Eyde, under the anagram, Lisa Ben, for lesbian. She typed this carbon copied newsletter that she did for several years, starting in the late forties. And when the very first center was getting started, which was ours, our founders began providing services in 1969, they were a bunch of social workers, and they knew that our community needed help.

Lorri Jean:

Particularly if we were gonna be strong enough to fight for our rightful place in society, so they started right outta the gate -- When other community centers were starting to crop up also being more than a meeting place, which is mostly what the other ones were doing. They did that, but they started providing services from the very beginning: shelter for homeless youth and adults, mental health, information about how to get out of the draft. Even transsexual services and a gay men's

Lorri Jean:

VD clinic, a lesbian gynecological clinic, with all volunteers. I think that this freedom in California, the freedom in LA is one of the reasons that things started here. There were some very influential entrepreneurs and lawyers who got involved with the center from the very earliest days who prompted philanthropy in a way that wasn't

Lorri Jean:

happening elsewhere. The very first major gifts program ever organized in an LGBT organization was done here by a guy named Duke Comegys, who's no longer alive. The very first planned giving program was started, again, by Duke, here at the Los Angeles LGBT center. So sustainability became an important part. The very first government grant ever gotten by an LGBT organization was gotten by the LA center from LA county. The very first federal grant

Lorri Jean:

was gotten by the LA center. That enabled us to build an infrastructure unlike existed anywhere else.

MASON FUNK:

Wow. Yay, LA. Makes me proud to be in Angelino.

Lorri Jean:

Yes, you should be.

MASON FUNK:

. No, thank you for that. That's really inspiring. So now, you come to the center and you loved the intersection between advocacy and service during your first tenure, just generally speaking, what were some of the things that surprised you

MASON FUNK:

that blew you back a little bit, perhaps?

Lorri Jean:

Well, there was no time to really have any rest from when I started. Part of my negotiation with the board when we were signing my contract was there had been a $300,000 plus deficit in about a year before, and part of the negotiation was how much time would it take me to pay that off?

Lorri Jean:

I used artistic license and hyperbole as much as I could and still feel like I had integrity about my fundraising abilities. I'd never fundraised full time, I'd been on boards, and suddenly now I was immersed and I had to find a way to do it. But then president Clinton, who had just been elected the very first president ever to expressly court the LGBT

Lorri Jean:

community, and that's another place where LA played a leadership role. We had the MECLA, the municipal election something, it was a gay and lesbian political organization, the first. Then ANGLE , organized a huge dinner when Clinton was running and his old friend David Mixner was here then, and that was heard around the world, this big gay dinner that raised seven figures for Clinton.

Lorri Jean:

But then right away, Clinton decided without consulting with any of his gay allies and advisors, to end the ban on gays in the military, but the way he went about it caused such a backlash that suddenly we were in the fight of our lives. I found myself not only dealing with this organization and all of its needs, but now dealing with a community that was fighting to try to get rid of this ban.

Lorri Jean:

Because once it was going, we had to fight, and that was a pivotal time for our whole movement. I think a lot of people don't think about it that way, but for six months you could not turn on the television or the radio, or pick up a paper or a magazine and not be reading about gay people. That was the first time in the history of our nation when it was no longer possible for a queer youth to think they were the only one,

Lorri Jean:

never in our history had that happened before. That was an exponential leap in terms of visibility, even though we lost the battle. In fact, while the disastrous Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy was a reversal, it was globally a winner for us in terms of visibility. I played a leadership role in that, and that helped me get to know all the other leaders here in Los Angeles, because we were all working together

Lorri Jean:

to try to help that cause. I remember also being surprised at the -- Sexism has sort of been a recurring theme. I met a lot of men in that early few years who, I don't know what they were thinking, but they would say things to me like, "Well, women can't raise money,"

Lorri Jean:

and they'd be saying it to me, when I'm raising tons of money. And it was like, they weren't even thinking they were just repeating beliefs somehow. And there were a few men who didn't wanna deal with me because they only wanted to deal with men. But by and large, that was so limited. And I found such a welcoming community of men and women here. And of course now people of

Lorri Jean:

all genders and no genders. But I also was surprised at how some people working in programs within the center thought that they had to accept what the government said. I had grown up in DC, cut my teeth as a young lesbian activist in DC, learning that you can push back against government

Lorri Jean:

and win, push back against government and get them to change their views. And so I was surprised that at the LA center, which had also cut its teeth fighting government, once it got larger and had this whole infrastructure of government grants, people didn't wanna push back against their grant monitors and change their definitions of success and things like that. That surprised me. But

Lorri Jean:

we turned that around pretty quickly.

MASON FUNK:

You said something in passing about how, during that first tenure, there was no limit on how many hours you would work, and you knew you were basically gonna just go into burnout. You're like, I'm gonna drive off the cliff, because there's so much conversation these days about burnout and work-life balance. You just had to choose in some ways just to say, I'm just gonna burn. I'm just gonna go as long as I can.

MASON FUNK:

Like drive into the desert and run outta gas when you run outta gas.

Lorri Jean:

Right. Well, I had a lot of discussions with my right hand Darrel Cummings, who I recruited to join me from Washington DC., when I first got this job. About how many hours we were working, because he and I were putting in 80 hour weeks, 80, 85 hour weeks, week in and week out. We were pretty good at vacations, but when we were back -- I mean, work-life balance, that wasn't even a conversation

Lorri Jean:

because this was a cause, this was a passion. When you're trying to change the world you don't do that on a 9-5 basis, in my personal opinion. I know that not everybody agrees with that, but if everybody who'd been working in our movement only worked from 9-5 or even less than that, we wouldn't be where we are today. Our theory at the time was that that was what was necessary. The average tenure of EDs of queer organizations when I started

Lorri Jean:

in January of 1993, at the center, the average tenure was two years. I knew that before I came, and I thought, well, I can make it longer than two years, but nobody ever retired from these jobs .

MASON FUNK:

They just died.

Lorri Jean:

Right. You quit and took a big break and then tried to find a job to make decent enough money to retire. He and I talked and we said, no, we think that we just need to work like this, achieve all that we can, then

Lorri Jean:

they'll find another great leader, and another great leaders, because it was more than us who was doing that and they'll take the organization to the next phase. We changed our mind about that afterwards, because we left after six years after achieving a great deal, we quadrupled the size of the organization's budget and tripled the number of staff, the numbers of people we were serving

Lorri Jean:

more than quadrupled. We were very proud of that, but we were tired and it was time to step down. The organization went through a national search that they conducted twice because they were looking for someone who had experience at, or above, this level. But then we were the biggest LGBT organization and they didn't find anybody like that. They ultimately chose someone

Lorri Jean:

who we all thought had the potential to be a leader. This person was in over her head. A lot of us get over our heads and luck falls our way. Luck didn't fall her way in a few ways; we had a market crash during her tenure and the split over the California AIDS ride that resulted in the center

Lorri Jean:

losing many millions of dollars. She stepped down as a result of that and that's when Darrel and I thought to ourselves, when the center came to us and actually asked us to come back, we thought, if we do come back, we're gonna do it differently. Work-life balance. No, there's not gonna be any balance, but it doesn't have to be pedal to the metal all the time.

Lorri Jean:

We agreed to help each other because by then we realized that stable, competent, long term leadership was much more important to an organization's stability and growth. That the risk of changing horses, going from leader to leader, when you don't know if the next one is gonna be up to the task, was too great.

Lorri Jean:

When we returned in 2003, after an absence of four and a half years, we decided to help each other try to have more balance, not balance, but more balance. For me, I couldn't ever, ever imagine having any job where it was just a 9-5 job for me. If I was gonna do that, I'd do something that would've made me a lot more money. But of course, I would have had to work more then too, but

Lorri Jean:

this is -- We're changing the world, that takes everything we can give. Not a huge personal sacrifice, but I believe in sacrificing on behalf of our community, I believe in sacrificing on behalf of the interests of our movement. It has repaid me many times fold for the sacrifices that I have made and the hard work I've done. I know that many of my colleagues feel the same way. But

Lorri Jean:

we were better when we got back.

MASON FUNK:

We're gonna continue on with the second tenure, but what was going on in your personal life during these years? Because for a lot of people, that's the thing that pulls on, you know, you can be a slave or a total devotee to your job, but sometimes there's a partner or a wife or a spouse or children who want some of you. Were you just single or was your wife or partner just willing?

MASON FUNK:

How did it all work on the personal side?

Lorri Jean:

Well, one of the challenges for me when I was applying for this job in the summer of 1992, is that I had just gotten involved with a woman who later became my wife. We had been together only like six months when I had to make the decision about, "Hey, am I gonna be serious about this job?" I said to Gina, "Look, if you wouldn't consider moving to LA,

Lorri Jean:

I need to back pedal. I need to put the brakes on a little bit because I'm starting to fall in love with this prospect." Her law firm was merging with another big firm, so it was gonna be different. She was willing to come to LA. When I started to get to know all of my colleagues, virtually everybody was single because nobody could find a partner who would tolerate what this work requires.

Lorri Jean:

People would be jealous of the work or of the celebrity that comes with it or that not enough time was being spent with them. And those are understandable feelings, but if you fall in love with someone who's an activist in this movement, you have to be prepared to support them because it's too hard to do on your own.

Lorri Jean:

Gina, for many years, she was viewed as a Saint by my colleagues because she was so supportive. She viewed her contribution to the movement, in large part, being helping to support me. Thankfully, all my colleagues who were single then are now all happily married to wonderful people who supported them in their work, but it took a while to find people who could accept it. There are pressures: you can't say certain things in public, you can't do certain things in public,

Lorri Jean:

in my opinion, when you're in these jobs, because you're always the center leader or the organization's leader and you're setting an example. And that applies to your spouse too, so I am very lucky. Gina and I did go through a tough period when I was running the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. My mother had worried that that would impact my family life, and it did. I also went through a midlife crisis

Lorri Jean:

at the time and I'm not proud of it, but I started a clandestine affair and Gina and I ultimately split up. We separated and I didn't think we would ever get back together. I thought I wanted something completely different, and we talk about this openly, because lots of people don't, they're embarrassed when these things happen. I'm certainly embarrassed of my behavior. I had never cheated on anybody before

Lorri Jean:

or since, but I did then. Ultimately, we found our way back to each other and that separation gave us the opportunity to break some patterns in the relationship that needed to be broken. We both say that while we wish we could have learned these lessons in an easier way, we were much stronger after we got back together. Gina didn't let any grass grow under her feet either after we'd split up,

Lorri Jean:

she had her own dalliances but neither of us were particularly jealous people and we found our way back. That was gosh, almost 20 years ago now, 19, 18 years ago, that we got back together and she has been my help mate every step of the way.

MASON FUNK:

Hmm. Great. Thank you for filling that piece.

MASON FUNK:

What made you decide to come back?

Lorri Jean:

Well, when I left the center the first time in early 1999, I didn't think I'd go to work again for the movement. There had finally been a little shift in the salary scales. There was a much bigger one that happened later. So at least you could have a decent wage. But

Lorri Jean:

it was hard to make a living and plan for retirement because we don't have a pension or anything like that. I thought I wanna be an entrepreneur. I wanna use my skills and build something. I saw lots of people making a lot of money who I didn't think were any smarter than me, so I thought that's what I wanted to do. I did a little bit of that but I missed the passion, the fulfillment of

Lorri Jean:

doing work that wasn't just for me and work that was for others, and I missed our movement. When the business that I and a couple of friends had created was taken over by venture capitalists and two of us didn't have a job as a result, then of course, it all ultimately didn't make it in the long run the way we'd hoped because of the dot.com crash and everything. But

Lorri Jean:

the task force, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, was in trouble and they asked me if I would come and help turn them around. I thought, okay, well they're in trouble, this is our nation's pioneering national civil rights organization, the most progressive one and I can help. Daryl and I went together and we did that. While we were there, we realized, at least I did, that doing queer work

Lorri Jean:

alone wasn't what floated my boat. What really inspired me was this seductive combination of the center's work of both advocacy and service. So civil rights advocacy is important that can take decades to pay off, and the center does some of that. But most of what the center does is make a difference in the lives of people who need us today; the homeless kid who's gonna be sleeping on the streets because they're transgender and their folks kicked them out, the

Lorri Jean:

senior who has no family to support them and who needs help, or pick somebody from our community that comes to the center. I mean, the numbers today are probably, COVID has changed things, but probably over 50,000 people a month come to the center for help, and you get to see the results of that work every day. I meet clients every day when I've been on the job at the center, I would see them walking around the campus. I would talk with them, I would have such a good

Lorri Jean:

connection with them.

MASON FUNK:

Pause one second, excuse me, carry on.

Lorri Jean:

So that combination of service and advocacy was really my passion. When the center said that they would wait for me to finish my commitment to the task force and return I jumped at the chance.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Everybody coughing in unison. And the second tenure was obviously longer than the first 19 years, if I'm not mistaken . What were some of the things you could not have foreseen when you came back that were difficult, that became like the toughest challenges you faced that you could never have foreseen?

Lorri Jean:

Let me think about that for a second.

Lorri Jean:

When I came back for my second tenure, I knew how to run this organization, I knew what the needs of the community were, and I don't think I could have anticipated that we would have the kind of reversals that we experienced first when George Bush, the second, was elected. But he seems mild in comparison now to Donald Trump.

Lorri Jean:

During the presidential election in 2016 I thought Hillary Clinton was going to be elected. Obama had been the most pro LGBT president that we'd ever had. A lot of progress had been made, even though he wasn't our full ally at the beginning. We made so much progress. With Hillary getting elected, I could see that we were going to embed

Lorri Jean:

in the fabric of our society, our people, our community, our progress, that there wouldn't be any turning back. And then Donald Trump got elected and he began immediately dramatic reversals in our progress, reimposing military bans, lifting protections for transgender youth in our schools, stopping funding, all kinds of things. It was horrible and unprecedented, and

Lorri Jean:

it showed me how precarious our gains are until we really do reach that stage where we are embedded in American society. I think, in many respects, we have achieved that, but with this new Supreme court, our legal rights are at risk again. Anytime you get to a stage in the nation where basic human rights, basic civil rights, are left up

Lorri Jean:

to majority vote, we're gonna be in trouble. I fear that this Supreme court is going to take away some of the rights that we've won. I think sodomy repeal is at risk. I think our freedom to marry is at risk. Once Trump was elected I never anticipated we'd have someone like him who would get to appoint 3 people to the Supreme court

Lorri Jean:

and pack the federal bench with right wing ideologues that will impact us for generations.

MASON FUNK:

That's certainly a massive one. Yeah. That, as you say, six years ago, when we were recording our first interview through OUTWORDS, it all just seemed like a kind of a bad dream that would eventually -- That was the summer of 2016. Although Karla Jay, an incredible activist in New York, said the Tiger's always at the gate

MASON FUNK:

and she was right. "You gotta watch out for the tiger at the gate." . How about here at the center? Like in just this exponential growth, but what were some of the growing pains that you might not have anticipated?

Lorri Jean:

During my second tenure at the Los Angeles LGBT Center, our greatest challenges really, aside from hostile presidential administrations,

Lorri Jean:

were challenges of success and growth. We went from being a smaller organization to growing exponentially. When I returned, we were a $32 million organization with a little over 250 staff -- I might have that number wrong, but in that range, 230. Now we're 150 million with 800 full-time staff.

Lorri Jean:

We expanded to locations all over town, and it wasn't the small intimate group of family anymore. Also, many more straight people were coming to work at the center, which is totally fine. My view has always been, everybody's welcome here, but you all have to have a passion for our movement and for our community . But when you start to get that big and you can't fit everybody

Lorri Jean:

in this theater for an all staff meeting it presents challenges. We also were very intentional in our diversification. When I started in 1993, about 25% of the staff were people of color and now it's completely reversed. So that brings changes. Some people feel like, oh, there's not room for me anymore. But when you do that in an environment of growth,

Lorri Jean:

and you're wanting your staff to represent your community, that's what's important in a place like LA . We are having a challenge with lesbians. We have more straight women working at the center than we do lesbians, and that's something that needs some attention. I feel that's some work I left undone when I retired. Also, as we began to expand, one of our areas of focus

Lorri Jean:

when we returned was transgender services. And I had gotten my consciousness raised about transgender stuff during the intervening years when I was gone, thanks in large part to trans leader named Marsha Botzer from Seattle. But before, I had always said, transgender people are welcome at the center. They've been a part of the center always, but our focus is sexual orientation and gender identity is different. I do believe that those things are different,

Lorri Jean:

but by the time I came back, I realized that if our gay and lesbian infrastructure wasn't going to help care for the transgender members of our community, many of whom had deep ties with our community and had been a part of our community forever, then their numbers were too small to build political power or too small to build the kind of organizational infrastructure that they need. So when we started doing that, we had

Lorri Jean:

to train our staff so we could build a culturally competent environment for trans people, even though we always had a lot of trans people working here, it hadn't been a conscious area of focus. Then we had some folks in the trans community who questioned whether this was legit, because they felt that we hadn't been there for them as much as we should have been in the past. But when you do good work that overcomes a lot of objections, people begin to see that there is a

Lorri Jean:

genuineness and a sincerity to the effort. But as we grew, we also needed to raise more money, and so that meant I had to spend more of my time doing that. We needed to really expand our fundraising operations and a lot of the events that were raising that money became inaccessible to people without financial resources. And that's the nature of the fundraising beast, but it's something

Lorri Jean:

I wish we could find a way to make better.

MASON FUNK:

Any thoughts on how you'd make it better?

Lorri Jean:

You know, I don't know how to make that piece better. One of the concerns, another challenge that was facing us from the outside really in the last 15 years has been, there's been a shift in our community to a lot less

Lorri Jean:

tolerance of differences of opinion. When I cut my teeth as a young dyke in Washington, DC., we would get together with other women and we would express very different political views about things, and we would hash it out. We'd argue, we'd have passionate conversations, but we didn't cancel each other. We didn't presume that that meant that the person was worthless or evil. I think

Lorri Jean:

there's way too much of that in our community now. And we're seeing it in the nation as a whole, frankly, but often there is so much ire that has turned inward, that we turn against each other, rather than focusing on the real enemies. I often talk about it like a Venn diagram. I'm gonna agree with almost anybody in our community, 80% of the time, probably even more than that, but

Lorri Jean:

there's gonna be some things we disagree on, but Donald Trump and the right wing Republicans who he holds sway over, I'm disagreeing with them on 99%. Let's focus there. Let's leverage our allyship, even if it's not a hundred percent. Hell, I don't agree with my wife on a hundred percent of the things. But we're afraid to have those conversations now. People are afraid to engage because they fear that they'll be trashed or

Lorri Jean:

shut down, or that there will be a bad backlash. I was very fortunate in my tenure. I never had a time when there was any kind of community uprising against me that has happened against other leaders in many places. I like to think that that's in part, because I have built relationships in all of these communities. If there was ever anybody who was wanting to try to take me down there were some people in their circles who said, "Hey, no,

Lorri Jean:

Lorri's not an enemy." But we've gotta figure this out in our community because we're gonna have to get stronger in these coming years, given what lies ahead on our horizon. We've got to learn to work with others, with whom we don't agree a hundred percent of the time, but about which we agree on most things because we've gotta join forces. As a nation, I worry about that because I don't wanna talk to people on the other side,

Lorri Jean:

but I know that's wrong. I know if we don't find a way to bridge the gap and to educate each other and to see each other more as humans, that paves the way for a buffoon like Donald Trump to play on people's prejudice.

MASON FUNK:

You probably met Donna Red Wing at some point along the way.

Lorri Jean:

Oh yes. I knew Donna very well.

MASON FUNK:

We interviewed her just six weeks before she passed. One of the stories that we put into a little video was her talking about the power of civility

MASON FUNK:

and the religious right with whom she clashed in Oregon in 1993, but how they found ways to actually start meeting and getting to know each other and figuring out that the things they thought about each other weren't true.

Lorri Jean:

And how do we do that on a large scale? That's -- somebody's gonna have to figure that out. It won't be me but I'll be cheering from the sidelines.

MASON FUNK:

Is it hard to walk away knowing that that particular work is really, in some ways, just beginning?

Lorri Jean:

It's both hard and a relief.

MASON FUNK:

Tell me what you're talking about.

Lorri Jean:

Retiring at this point when all of that really critical work is just beginning is both hard and a relief. There are times when I think, okay, it was the right time for me to retire because in some ways I don't have as much patience for things like that as I used to. In other ways, I have so much more patience for individual foibles.

Lorri Jean:

But it's gonna take a lot of energy and drive and passion, and I've still got a lot of that, but I'm not 35 anymore, and we need young people to take up the cause and join with oldsters and help us all figure out how we make our progress together and keep our

Lorri Jean:

community as whole as we can in the process.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the bike cycle, the AIDS bike cycle. I mean, I know I don't even really know, except I know there's been controversy and there was some ugly controversy at the time, but the notion of a bicycle ride, I don't even know if you were part of launching the very, very first one.

Lorri Jean:

I was.

MASON FUNK:

So tell us where that idea came from and the meaning of that particular ritual.

Lorri Jean:

Yeah. Well, when I started at the center in January of 1993 we were not the big dog in town. AIDS Project Los Angeles was the big dog in town. Yet, we were the one doing the AIDS medical care, they were not. I watched their fundraisers, they had Commitment to Life and they had Bruce Springsteen, Melissa Ethridge, Elizabeth Taylor, stars of phenomenal magnitude. I would say,

Lorri Jean:

"I'd give my right arm for just one of those to come to the center's benefit." But we had the G and L words in our name, that still played to homophobia. They also had the AIDS walk and they raised a fortune every year. We were facing a deluge of people who needed more services for HIV and AIDS and we didn't have enough money to serve

Lorri Jean:

all of them. So I started talking to everybody I knew who was out there in the fundraising world, every consultant. I want a pledge event. I want a pledge event that is for the center, like what the AIDS walk is for APLA. A few people came back with screwy ideas. I could just tell right away they didn't have any potential, but a young guy who'd been working for us out of his one bedroom apartment, doing some cleanup on the capital campaign

Lorri Jean:

that built what is now the McDonald/Wright building, was Dan Pallotta. He said, "I've got an idea, a bike ride between San Francisco and Los Angeles, to raise money." Dan had done a cross-country bike ride when he was in college to raise money, so he thought that this would work, but it was not a fleshed out idea. But I thought it had potential, and so did my development director at the time, Joel Safranek. Joel Safranek

Lorri Jean:

and Dan really worked to flesh out this idea, and I got involved near the end because I was the one who had to be sold on it, then I had to sell it to the board. This was at a time when money was really, really tight at the center. In fact, I think we just barely had ended the fiscal year without a deficit by the skin of our teeth, because when I had arrived in January, I had discovered the organization

Lorri Jean:

was headed for a significant deficit and it was hard to close that gap. But the board agreed and they said, "We'll agree to invest $50,000," which was a lot of money back then, "with some milestones. If you achieve the milestones, you can keep going" and we never looked back. That first year we raised a little over a million dollars. And what was created in that ride. This was pre-

Lorri Jean:

protease inhibitors; AIDS was the number one cause of death of adults in the United States of America. We had people training and riding who had full blown AIDS, some of whom couldn't finish because they had full blown AIDS, some of whom died during the training period because they had full blown AIDS. But we created a community and we built hope. The next year, I said to Dan, "Look, we have more room for others and this is a dire

Lorri Jean:

crisis in our community. We need to invite the San Francisco AIDS Foundation to join us." We flew up to invite them to join us. They did. And we created this phenomenal event. What we learned is this became much more than a fundraiser. It became a visibility organ for cities all throughout California and for the tens of thousands of people

Lorri Jean:

who donated to our riders every year. They were thinking about HIV. It became an HIV prevention event with all the participants because we were talking about it. We were educating communities all along from San Francisco to LA. On the ride itself, there's a unique dynamic that happens on this ride, unlike almost any others because it's seven days long. And there's a transformation that happens between day three and day four, where people become a community

Lorri Jean:

and they care for each other. All barriers are broken down by then because bodies are exhausted and everybody just looks out for one another. People call it such a loving environment, and it's true. It is. In fact, people have postpartum depression after the ride because they've been in this almost utopian space for a week while they've been working their fingers to the bone or

Lorri Jean:

pedaling themselves to exhaustion and raising incredible amounts of money. We did go through a controversial split, which was during the years I was gone, where the cost of fundraising was getting way too high. Dan had the perspective that that shouldn't matter because millions were still being raised. What I tried to explain to him, even though I wasn't at the helm then was, "Dan, that's the standard in the nonprofit world. You can't

Lorri Jean:

spend too much of people's money on producing the event or they don't wanna give. There's an ethical standard in this sector." Well, he thought that was wrong. He was working from a new paradigm and ultimately they had come to a parting of the ways and the center and the foundation decided to produce their own ride. A lawsuit ensued. Dan sued the organizations and they countersued. He did not win, but

Lorri Jean:

it was an ugly battle. When the ride continued instead of raising, then I think it was raising maybe $10 million -- I don't remember how much it was raising at that time -- it dropped to a couple million. Both organizations were hurt significantly. Dan's business imploded so he went out of business because this was the most successful ride. The other rides were constantly struggling, so it was not good news. When I came back to the center

Lorri Jean:

at the first board retreat, six months after I returned, the center wasn't raising much money from the event yet because LA was where Dan was based and we were hurt worse. People just stayed away and they wanted me to jettison the event. I said to them, "Look, I need that hundred thousand dollars," that's all we were getting from it then, "and unless you have a way for me to replace that, you need to give me a few

Lorri Jean:

years to turn it around. If I can't turn it around in two or three years, I'll be right here, back here saying we need to get out of it." And thank goodness they were willing to go along with that because, of course, the ride has come roaring back. Came roaring back pre COVID. Then we were out without it for a couple of years and that was almost disastrous. Then this year it came back and broke all fundraising records. So it's an event that you can't explain to people adequately until you participate in it, but

Lorri Jean:

it's something I've been along many times as crew. I've ridden it three times. And as I said back then, if a fat, middle aged lesbian like me can do it, anybody can do it. It's something that, if anybody aspires to do it and hasn't, they ought to. Our oldest rider every year is in their eighties.

MASON FUNK:

Great. I have a whole separate story for my own personal relationship which ended up being marathons instead of the ride cycle, but

MASON FUNK:

you never know, you might have just inspired me. Yeah. okay. So if it's possible, what would you say makes you most proud, looking back on your tenure at the center, both tenures?

Lorri Jean:

As I was running up to retirement, many people were asking me what was my greatest accomplishment? What made me the most proud in my tenure? And that

Lorri Jean:

is really hard because I have been blessed with great success and we've achieved a lot. If I were going to say only one specific thing, I would have to say the completion of the new Anita May Rosenstein Campus which was the dream of an intergenerational campus where seniors and youth could be together and help each other and live and learn

Lorri Jean:

and would be our new headquarters. We created all of that. It's an architectural beauty and we raised enough money to pay off the mortgage. When everybody finishes paying their pledges, there will be no debt on that building. I'm enormously proud of that, but writ large, what I'm most proud of is the transformation of the center.

Lorri Jean:

During the years that I've been at the helm, the enormous growth, the diversity of services. We now have 10 locations all over town. We're not just in west Hollywood or Hollywood. We have a staff of this majority people of color that sort of matches our client base, which is a majority people of color. We've created

Lorri Jean:

so many new programs and services to build the health and strength of our community, and we have done that. We have made a tremendous difference, not only in the individual lives of the people who've come to us for help over the years, but in the strength and health of our larger community. We're an example for our communities nationwide. We're a beacon of hope for people around the world. We created international programming that works primarily in China, and we could do that

Lorri Jean:

because of the diversity of our programs and our fiscal strength. I have left this organization as the most fiscally strong organization in the movement. I'm proud of all those things.

MASON FUNK:

Great. Thank you for that. Let's talk about Marsha Botzer. You mentioned her, but let's talk a bit more fully about her.

Lorri Jean:

When I started in this movement, there weren't many mentors.

Lorri Jean:

There were very few visible women leaders. There really even weren't that many visible gay leaders because our movement was new and there weren't ways to learn about who those people were. But over the years, over the decades, I have been privileged to meet people who have been extremely influential to me and to my own development. One of those people is Marsha Botzer. Marsha was born and raised in Seattle

Lorri Jean:

and she founded one of the very first transgender organizations that is, I think, today the oldest ongoing transgender service organization, called Ingersoll in Seattle. Marsha and I met when we both joined the board of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. I give Marsha credit for being willing to have conversations with me, where I asked stupid questions about transgender people and the

Lorri Jean:

transgender movement and why gender identity and sexual orientation, why our people should work together as a movement. She let me express ignorance and she educated me and she's done that for a lot of people, but she raised my consciousness. And so that when I and Darrel came back to the center the second time, we were determined to make the center a premier place for serving

Lorri Jean:

transgender members of our community.

MASON FUNK:

Great. Let me just make sure -- Hello.

Speaker 3 :

hi. Just checking in. You're doing okay?

MASON FUNK:

We're doing well. Thanks.

Speaker 3 :

Okay. All right.

MASON FUNK:

Thanks so much. I think that's Patricia. Thank you, Patricia.

Lorri Jean:

Yeah. Patricia was in the front. I don't know who the other person was.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Kevin Cathcart.

Lorri Jean:

I was on Kevin Cathcart's hiring committee when I was on the board of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Lorri Jean:

I was his first co-chair with my other cos. Then when I went to work for the movement, Kevin became one of my most important confidants. Kevin is not one of those flashy leaders that exists in some organizations, but he is all substance. I saw what he did at Lambda. The greatest gains in our

Lorri Jean:

movement have been achieved by Lambda Legal under Kevin Cathcart's tenure. No national organization, including the one I ran, can claim to have achieved as much as Lambda Legal did under his leadership. He's funny, he's sarcastic and cynical. He's got a heart the size of California. He's been there for me more times than I can count. He also has been

Lorri Jean:

a crucial player for me. Then there are two men who I met by virtue of their board service at the center, who've been very influential; one, for a short period of time, and that was the late Ed Gould. Ed was the co-chair of the board when I got this job. What I learned from Ed is that even though they weren't done collecting all the money for the first capital campaign that they'd done, which was

Lorri Jean:

the first capital campaign ever done in the LGBT world , he was dreaming of a place like the Village at Ed Gould Plaza. I couldn't believe he was setting his sights on something so big and so unique so soon, but he seduced me with that vision and he didn't live to see it. He died suddenly.

Lorri Jean:

It's now named after him because his estate left us money necessary to name it. I always think of Ed and his vision. And then when I started as the executive director in January of 1993, there was a new board member then named Loren Ostrow. Loren Ostrow was a successful businessman and

Lorri Jean:

he brought those skills to the board, but he and I became fast friends and we have now traveled together. He was on the board at the center. He came with me to join the board of the task force. And then when I went to run the task force, he joined the board. When I came back to the center, he came back to the center. He has been a supporter of me every step of the way. He's provided great

Lorri Jean:

guidance, including in my personal life. He has taken what he learned as a board member of these organizations and become a leader in the movement in that way in his professional life. He, now, is building, Living Out in Palm Springs, which is the new facility, sort of a luxury facility, for LGBTQ seniors, rental apartments. This is also gonna provide, ultimately, assisted living

Lorri Jean:

and it's quite a vision and he's building it and he's creating it. He's also been extremely influential in my success.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Rob Wright, Rob and John have said you have to interview Loren Ostrow. Just trying to get our schedules to align. Yeah. Super. Well, thank you for those three stories. Final four questions. If you could tell your 15 year old self anything, what would it be?

Lorri Jean:

Oh my gosh.

MASON FUNK:

And please

MASON FUNK:

weave my question into your answer.

Lorri Jean:

If I could tell my 15 year old self anything, what would it be? Well, first of all, I would say have the nerve to pursue those women you're interested in. I have always been the pursued, never the pursuer and people never presume that about me. But really I would say, "Have the confidence of your convictions. You always

Lorri Jean:

tend to be that way anyway, but stick with it. Find ways to always keep love and happiness in your life." I've been lucky and I've done that, but it's sort of been almost by accident and I would probably tell myself to put money away earlier for retirement.

Lorri Jean:

MASON FUNK:

Always good advice no one thinks about the age of 15. Do you ascribe to the notion that there's kind of some kind of a queer superpower that links all queer people that is kind of what we bring uniquely to the world? And if so, what would that be?

Lorri Jean:

I sort of subscribe to what you hear some people talk about as a

Lorri Jean:

queer superpower. I think there is something very unique that happens in a community of people who have the courage to live their lives openly and honestly, and who are motivated by love. Once you overcome that central core taboo,

Lorri Jean:

you begin to question all kinds of other things that we just accepted as truth, and you begin to understand that those things probably are no more true than were the homophobic lessons that you were taught as a child. And I think it opens up our eyes and our experiences to the possible. And when you believe

Lorri Jean:

in the possible, and you're not fettered by those restrictions, there's no end to the art you can create to the love you can build to the institutions you can build. And I do think it's one of the things that I worry about as we assimilate more and more in our society, will we lose that very special thing that was created almost by the fact that we were outlaws and not accepted. We bonded together

Lorri Jean:

in some very heady ways. I hope we don't lose some of those things. As I told the late Eric Rofes, it's one thing to fight for the right to be the same and treated equally, I'd much rather fight for the right to be different and be treated equally.

MASON FUNK:

Right. Why is it important to you to share your story?

Lorri Jean:

Well, it's important for me to share my story in part because I'm a little bit of a ham and that's been useful to me in this work, but if I had had the stories of successful people like me, when I was coming up the ranks, would've been so meaningful to me. And we've learned in our work with leaders, queer leaders in China, that one of the biggest things we can do for them is open up their eyes to

Lorri Jean:

what is possible. Because once you begin to envision things, you can begin to create them. And so I've had a blessed and privileged career as a movement leader. We've achieved a lot together and amidst a lot of challenge and I've survived and I'm happy and we've done a lot. I think if people can hear that story, they're gonna go on and create wonderful things

Lorri Jean:

for themselves.

MASON FUNK:

Great. The last question mirrors the previous one a little bit, but it's about OUTWORDS specifically, which is an effort to record the stories of queer elders all over the US. What do you see as the value of a project like OUTWORDS? And if you could mention OUTWORDS in your answer.

Lorri Jean:

OUTWORDS is so important because --

MASON FUNK:

Sorry, start over clean.

Lorri Jean:

OUTWORDS is so important because it is capturing the stories of both sort of public figures

Lorri Jean:

like me and just regular folks who've had the courage to live their lives and be who they were. And we are now losing so many of the folks who carry --

MASON FUNK:

Sorry, I just realized this siren. I'll just probably have you start this answer over again. Okay. It was short lived. You can go again.

Lorri Jean:

We are now losing so many of those in our community who were our

Lorri Jean:

pioneers, whether they were pioneers as leaders or just pioneers in their own lives, and their stories are inspiring. Their stories are our history. For too many decades, our history was never preserved. It was never written down. It was never captured because people had to hide to be safe. So you're doing an enormous service to the young'uns who are coming up and to the oldsters like me, who like to hear what

Lorri Jean:

others have been through, it's affirming, it's emotionally touching, especially when you share the stories of people surviving very difficult times, that is going to be crucial in these coming years ahead, because it's gonna get more difficult before it gets easier.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah.

Kate Kunath :

Can I ask a couple of questions?

MASON FUNK:

Sure. Kate. Has a couple questions. She's gonna ask the questions and you'll respond to me as if they were my questions.

Kate Kunath :

Mason and I haven't

Kate Kunath :

done an interview for a while, so he forgot that he would do this for me, where I get to ask a couple questions.

MASON FUNK:

If you can get your mask off your face .

Kate Kunath :

I think about a lot of -- I've kind of like draw connections between interviews because I've been on so many of them and I like to think about the themes that come up and one thing that comes up a lot and that I like was

Kate Kunath :

constantly thinking about is, and you've brought it up a little bit, but like this idea of everyone outside of the big cities. I think it's been a huge phenomenon in our country, and just all over the world, that people really have to, if they're gonna feel liberated, that they have to uproot themselves and they have to -- And you know this best because you're from a rural place.

Kate Kunath :

The center, I feel like, is a place that is like the receiver of all of that. You said it yourself that people come to California because of the freedom and what it represents. I wonder if you have thought about that much in your career of how the center is this great and glorious thing and you're serving 50,000 people, but do you

Kate Kunath :

think about like the void that's left behind and do you think, in some evolution, that maybe our next turn around the sun is about going back to that and sort of trying to fill in what has been lost in those places that have given up their queers because it's sort of like it's a brain drain, it's a heart drain. It's all these relationships that get lost and broken, not to mention like the whole religious

Kate Kunath :

landscape and how people feel like God is not for them and they have to leave their families. It's really heartbreaking. It's no wonder why the center has to serve all of that pain and trauma really.

MASON FUNK:

Because they're coming from somewhere.

Lorri Jean:

Yes.

Kate Kunath :

So you're just opine on that. ,

MASON FUNK:

Again, to me, as if I had asked that question.

Lorri Jean:

We're very lucky that we have built this amazing center in Los Angeles and it's been built somewhat by

Lorri Jean:

people who were native Angelinos, but it's been built mostly by people who came here from other places. There has been such a phenomenon of queer people, leaving the Heartland and rural areas and coming to the coasts where they felt they could be free. And we see it in the homeless youth who stream here from across the country and come to us for help and in many other clients as well. But we also know that where

Lorri Jean:

community centers exist, it's better for the people who live there. In 1994, I, and the heads of the community centers of New York; Dallas; Denver, Colorado; and Minneapolis, Minnesota got together. At the time there were about 70 centers nationwide, and we said, we need to promote the growth of centers in states and cities and towns all over the country, so people

Lorri Jean:

don't have to leave to come to the coast to be free. We created what has now become Centerlink, the National Association of LGBT Centers, with the whole goal of promoting the development of centers in other places. Today, we have full-time staff in that organization, and we now have more than 250 centers across the country. They are exploding everywhere in

Lorri Jean:

smaller cities and towns, and they're helping to change the dynamic in those places, because if we all leave and come to LA or New York or wherever you go, who's gonna fight our battles for the folks who stay there? Because there are plenty of queer people in rural areas across this country who've made their way, but we need to make all of those environments hospitable to us because those are our families

Lorri Jean:

and our friends and our colleagues and with the right effort, they're gonna come along.

MASON FUNK:

Great. Thank you. And another question

Kate Kunath :

You talked to a lot of people, you talked to everybody. Do you all talk about like a queer diaspora? Do you ever use that framework in talking about

Kate Kunath :

the movement and the migration of queer people?

Lorri Jean:

I do not hear people talking about a queer diaspora. Everybody talks about the phenomenon of people leaving more conservative states and rural areas and going to metropolitan areas, but they don't talk about it in that diaspora kind of way. But you know, when I think about it, it's fitting, and we probably ought to give some thought to that.

Lorri Jean:

There's something special about LGBT people, that's why we recognize each other everywhere we go. My first trip to China, I would've recognized those young Chinese dykes anywhere in the world because we know our own when we see them. I like the idea of thinking of our community as a diaspora and we still have many parts of that diaspora

Lorri Jean:

to care for in other parts of the world.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. I sometimes joke with my friends, I mean that, in some ways, all the queer people who have found our ways to big cities, we kind of need to go back out to small places and recolonize or colonize and reclaim like essentially if it's not the same people who came from Kansas, send other people to Kansas. But all the gay men will refuse to go.

Lorri Jean:

Well, it's amazing.

Lorri Jean:

There is some of that happening with expensive housing prices in places like LA and New York and San Francisco. People are going back to those communities now that you can work remotely and make a living. I think there's going to be some of that and people are gonna go back and they're not gonna wanna go back in the closet. And we know that that is the single most powerful act that we can take as individuals and as a community, to be open and honest about who we are, because then the myths that other people say about us

Lorri Jean:

no longer can hold any water.

MASON FUNK:

Exactly. Is there anything else that you want to talk about before we wrap?

Lorri Jean:

There's one more thing I wanna talk about. All of us, when we're young, have a lot of passion, and many of us keep that passion as we are old. Certainly, I have. But

Lorri Jean:

there's a lot of calling people out in our movement these days. If people make mistakes, they use the wrong word, if maybe they don't quite see eye to eye with someone on a hundred percent of the issues, we call them out. I want to encourage people to instead call others in. Let's call people in and talk. Let's give people the benefit

Lorri Jean:

of the doubt that they're not horrible simply because maybe they're not yet educated enough or they don't understand. Let's take the time to build more understanding with each other. We need to do that within our movement and within our community, if we're gonna continue to make the progress that we've made, and if we don't find a way to transfer that to our larger community, I fear that we're gonna be fighting our battles for a far longer time.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. I sense that the energy is so fraught these days that it's hard to sometimes know when to not fight that battle, but to instead invite in and listen. Yeah. Well, thank you for those words of wisdom. Thank you so much for your time.

Lorri Jean:

Thanks, you guys, for doing this and thank you dealing with the disruption of going from over there to over here.

MASON FUNK:

No problem. I think this worked out really, really well.