MASON FUNK: Well, let's start by having you state and spell your first and last name.

GEOFF KORS: Sure. Jeffrey Kors. G-e-o-f-f-r-e-y k-o-r-s.

MASON FUNK: Okay. And you're known as Geoff Kors?

GEOFF KORS: Yes.

MASON FUNK: If we're like identifying you on screen --

GEOFF KORS: Geoff.

MASON FUNK: Geoff Kors.

GEOFF KORS: Yeah.

MASON FUNK: Okay. And please tell us the date and place of your birth.

GEOFF KORS: I was born on April 30th, 1961 in New York City.

MASON FUNK: Okay. So just give us a little bit of a thumbnail sketch of the family you were born into.

GEOFF KORS: Sure. All my grandparents moved from Eastern Europe. Both my parents were the first in their families to go to college. I have an older brother who's two and a half years older than I am, he was born in 1958, and a sister who's eight years younger than I am. Grew up the first couple years in Forest Hills in Queens, New York. And then when I was four my parents moved us to Great Neck

MASON FUNK: To where?

GEOFF KORS: Great Neck on Long Island.

MASON FUNK: And what kind of community was Great Neck?

GEOFF KORS: Predominantly Jewish community.

MASON FUNK: Do me a favor, when I ask you a question, .

GEOFF KORS: Oh yes. Okay. Yeah. Great Neck was predominantly a Jewish community. A lot of the housing there was built as suburbs for people who worked in Manhattan. A lot of the development where we were was built in the 50s, early 1960s. I think we were the second family to be in that house when we bought it. My parents bought it in 1965.

MASON FUNK: And tell us a bit about your dad and

MASON FUNK: his law school training, and his law career.

GEOFF KORS: Sure. My dad went to NYU undergrad, was in the Navy, was fortunate, as he said, to be tall enough that he was on the basketball team, so he never got shipped off anywhere. When he came back, went to NYU Law School and graduated number three in his class at the time. After law school, being Jewish, there weren't openings at the big New York law firms, despite people

GEOFF KORS: lower than him in his class would get those jobs easily. Him and a friend of his opened their own law firm. They did a lot of medical malpractice, personal injury, product liability cases. Had a very diverse clientele. He had that one job his entire life.

MASON FUNK: Wow. And what were the most important values for your parents to instill in their children?

GEOFF KORS: I think the most important value, the one

GEOFF KORS: that was always present was education. It was just so important to them. I think both of them had successful careers. My mom stopped working after she had me but then stayed very active in politics and worked on campaigns and other things after. They just saw the change. They both grew up during the depression in small two room apartments where they shared bedrooms with brothers. They saw the

GEOFF KORS: value of education and what it could bring. I think that is the thing that always comes to my mind when I think about my parents. In fact, when I wanted to take a year off to work in the New York legislature after college, before law school, they were adamant that I continue because they worried I wouldn't do it. They wanted me to have the certainty of the degree, so it was just very important that you had the education so you could be self-sufficient and you never had to worry. That was a big part of who they were.

MASON FUNK: Right. You mentioned your parents, like, your mom volunteering

MASON FUNK: for political campaigns? Well, there's the soon-to-be-famous story of you being very upset when Nixon was elected, for example. Was this just in the air that your family breathed?

GEOFF KORS: It was. I mean, it was really interesting. I think my husband, James, the first time he met my parents, and he lived in New York for a couple years, but he said, "God, you guys fought all through dinner." I'm like, what are you talking about? We talked about the death penalty. We talked about legalizing drugs. And I had that with one other boyfriend before as well. Just weren't used to that kind of family.

GEOFF KORS: But that's what I grew up in. We discussed everything. We argued about everything and we didn't fight about those. They were issues and we discussed 'em. It was very political. We talked about campaigns. I remember when George Bush II was running and my brother was thinking about voting for him, and my dad, at the dinner table, we were all together, just said, "You have a gay brother, how could you possibly vote for him?" And I was like, wow, that's my dad and my brother who's, you know,

GEOFF KORS: not conservative. I was just so surprised by that conversation. But that's the kind of conversations we always had. We talked about issues, we talked about politics, we talked about our lives a lot.

MASON FUNK: You might've, or maybe were always more or less on the same side of the issue except when your brother was gonna vote for George Bush, but you would still have lots of back and forth and very animated.

GEOFF KORS: Yeah, it'd be very animated. Although I think we were generally of similar mindset, all of us, we definitely had different views on,

GEOFF KORS: I would say, my thought that we should legalize drugs as opposed to treating it criminally, but as a health issue, that did not go over with anyone in my family at first. So those were the kind of discussions. But we could have those and we didn't have people slamming their fist and leaving the table over that.

MASON FUNK: Right. Yeah. I went to a junior high / high school. It was probably, I don't know, 30 to 40% Jewish. And I'd go to my friend's houses and I would witness these conversations. I'd be so envious because my family

MASON FUNK: just didn't have that just mix it up.

GEOFF KORS: And it was good. I think it really prepared me for life, let alone my work, to be able to have those conversations and realize when you're taking something personally that maybe you shouldn't, and sometimes maybe you should. But having that experience growing up and seeing it throughout my life, I think was a great life lesson for me.

MASON FUNK: Tell us about your reaction when Nixon was elected in 1968.

GEOFF KORS: I mean, I was all of seven years old, but I

GEOFF KORS: remember that election, that's the first --

MASON FUNK: Tell me what you're talking about.

GEOFF KORS: Oh, so sorry. The 1968 presidential election, I remember my parents and their friends talking about it whenever they were at the house, like that Canada was probably the option if George Wallace was to get elected. That, as Jews, it would just be awful, and that Nixon would be awful, but not quite that awful. And of course, that was one of those elections where you sat at the TV because it was so,

GEOFF KORS: so close. I remember the next morning when my mom -- I think the phrase was the rat bastard won. I remember being on the steps, my brother and I lived on the second floor of the house, and crying. My mom said, "Why are you crying?" I said, "Well, we're gonna have to move." And she goes, no, but it's fine. But I remember that really vividly.

MASON FUNK: Had you heard people reference the idea that if Nixon was elected you'd have to leave the country.

GEOFF KORS: I remember that with Wallace,

GEOFF KORS: but that all in my brain merged. But it was very negative about Nixon. I mean, there weren't like, oh, six of one half a dozen of the other kind of election, for my parents. That was a really big deal election for my parents.

MASON FUNK: Wow. Yeah, it's interesting. Let me check and get a little sense of where I'm at.

MASON FUNK: Do you remember a moment when the interest in politics became personal or was there a moment when it kind of clicked for you that this could be something you would devote your life to?

GEOFF KORS: Probably during the Watergate hearings, I was 13, 12 and 13 then. But every day after school I would go home and watch 'em on television. I have specific memories of some members of Congress,

GEOFF KORS: Elizabeth Holtzman in particular, and some of the questioning, and just thinking, that's what I want to do. Like we have to stop this. There was that sense in the country at the time right, that things were just such a mess over Watergate, and that it was real and eventually, in a pretty bipartisan way, that it had to be addressed. But I was fascinated by that. I read the paper every day. I think that's

GEOFF KORS: when it really gelled. I was always interested in the news, my parents, the New York Times in the morning, the Newsday in the afternoon. My dad would bring home the Daily News and the New York Post on his way home from work. There were four newspapers a day. Different world then. But we always talked about special events. We always watched the news. We watched the news, the local news, we watched the national news. And then probably by the time I was in sixth or seventh grade, I'd watch the 11 o'clock news with my mom.

GEOFF KORS: Sometimes my dad would go to bed, sometimes he'd stay up, and then I'd watch Johnny Carson and then I'd get in trouble because I was always late for school. But that's where I got being a night owl, I think, with my mom. A lot of that was watching the news.

MASON FUNK: Yeah. When you sort of thought that -- Like Watergate hearings, what was it that was most attractive to you? How did you envision yourself potentially getting involved in that world?

GEOFF KORS: I think at the time it was more -

MASON FUNK: Do me a favor, say "At the time of Watergate."

GEOFF KORS: Oh sure. During the time of Watergate and as I was thinking about getting involved in politics, I think a lot of it was the sense that, wow, these people are really making a difference, like, they're holding people accountable, they're not afraid to say what they think. I think that was really inspiring for me. I mean, even in elementary school, I was organizing kids to do 'let's clean up the park' days. I was always involved and interested in doing that kind of work. I had a social justice sense from a young age.

GEOFF KORS: But that was the time it really gelled that, okay, there's a career in politics, potentially law, but it was more politics at the time. Because that's what I was seeing. Even though a lot of the folks were lawyers who were doing that kind of questioning on the judiciary committee. But I remember those judiciary committee hearings and I can picture some of them to this day.

MASON FUNK: Now, when in this whole process did you begin to have inklings that you were gay?

GEOFF KORS: I question when I

GEOFF KORS: first was aware, I definitely knew I had an attraction to guys by the time I was 13, 14 range. But I also had an attraction to girls in school at the time. Although I think as I got a little older, it definitely moved much more into the guy direction. So probably in that early teenage right after puberty time period. I wasn't quite sure what it was. I don't

GEOFF KORS: think at the time you could really put a finger on it the way I think if someone's growing up 13-14 now would know what it is. I mean, there was no such thing as a GSA or anything along those lines. Anything you heard about gay would be homosexual and deviant and it was very little that you heard back in late 60s, early 70s time period.

MASON FUNK: Right, right. You mentioned that as you read about Harvey Milk at some point.

GEOFF KORS: Mm-Hmm. . Yeah. I remember

GEOFF KORS: reading about Harvey Milk getting elected, the story -- I think it was the New York Times, or if I've just seen that picture of that since, well, I think it was that paper -- and at that point thinking I might be gay. But I wasn't sure I was gay even at that point. I was probably 17 years old or something. But just thinking, oh, wow, that's so cool. Like, any social justice issue, I would've thought that. But obviously that one felt personal to me. And of course, nine months later, he was assassinated.

GEOFF KORS: I remember just thinking, well, then, I can't be gay because I can't do politics if I'm gay. I mean, that was in my head. That was sort of like that time period. I don't remember much in the middle of course specifically, although I'm sure I thought about it during that time period. It was sort of the exact time I would've been thinking about it. I ran for school board when I was 17, I turned 18 a couple days before the election,

GEOFF KORS: in my senior year of high school, so I was already planning to do a political career. I had worked in paid positions on a campaign of our assembly member and our state senator and their campaigns. I had worked on campaigns doing organizing, primarily youth organizing, on those campaigns and some policy work as well. That was definitely in my mind by that age that I was gonna do something in politics.

MASON FUNK: Ah-Ha. Do you remember that moment you described just now when you said, well, Harvey Milk gets assassinated, but even beyond that is the notion that you can't be a gay politician because the two just don't go together. Do you remember?

GEOFF KORS: My best recollection of it is when he was assassinated.

MASON FUNK: Do me a favor. Your best recollection.

GEOFF KORS: Yeah. My best recollection of thinking I can't be gay and be in politics was when Harvey Milk was assassinated, when I was still a teenager before I went to college.

GEOFF KORS: That was just a very profound moment that I recall.

MASON FUNK: And what was that feeling like?

GEOFF KORS: The feeling that I couldn't be gay and go the career path I was. Was sort of a -- I don't know, slap in the face isn't the right term, but it really was a strong emotional reaction. I mean, there was a big reaction that some colleague killed someone over a gay rights bill, which is what led to so much of that. But

GEOFF KORS: it was definitely an awareness that this is just not compatible and that the hatred of gay people was just extreme. So it wasn't just, I can't do politics, it's: if it turns out I'm gay -- because I wasn't sure in that age, although I was pretty sure -- this is really gonna suck. I mean, this is gonna be really, really tough and it's nothing I can discuss with anyone, and hadn't discussed it with anyone at that point.

MASON FUNK: At that point you never

MASON FUNK: mentioned it to anybody.

GEOFF KORS: Not to a soul.

MASON FUNK: Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. So did you, as best as you can remember, if you made a decision in that moment, was it just, well, I still wanna do politics, but I'm gonna have to either not be gay or I'm gonna have to hide the fact that I'm gay. Or did you feel like that door just slammed shut?

GEOFF KORS: No, I mean, I think as I started college and continued to do political science and be involved in a lot of things, my general sense was

GEOFF KORS: I couldn't do that if I was openly gay. I went to a small liberal arts school in upstate New York, Union College. There was no GSA, and those were starting in the 80s in some places. But I mean, there was really nothing and it's just something I just felt I kept to myself.

MASON FUNK: Yeah. great. Okay. Thank you for your . Your answers are great. They're short, concise, to the point.

GEOFF KORS: Okay, good.

MASON FUNK: And that helps us to get through stuff.

MASON FUNK: What did it mean to you to get into Stanford Law School? How did that even come about?

GEOFF KORS: I'm just trying to think. Okay. My senior year of college, I started applying to law schools, and I remember it was March and they were just starting to get admissions letters. And I went out to get the mail, because we all checked it every day. Two of

GEOFF KORS: my housemates had applied to medical school, so we were all sort of waiting. I saw Stanford and it was a big envelope, which was a good sign. I was thrilled, that's really where I wanted to go. My brother graduated from Stanford Law School in 1982. I'd been out to visit him once during that time. But I was thrilled at that opportunity, one, just to be at such a great law school. But two, part of it was, wow, I'm just gonna go live in California.

GEOFF KORS: I visited a lot of law schools and that really solidified the decision to be out in April and people playing Frisbee and hanging out versus it's still sometimes snowing in Upstate New York. Was just a big feeling of difference. But also just being away, I think, was just an opportunity. Because it was really my senior year that I decided when I go to law school, I want to come out. I had some friends who were gay at that point. My close friends knew

GEOFF KORS: and I just thought there's no reason to come out in college at that point other than to the people I was close with. But when I go to law school, I want to do that. And how much easier that felt for me it would be at Stanford than if I went to Columbia, which I was thinking about and was where my family was. And just having a little more separation did feel a little more liberating to me.

MASON FUNK: Right. You also mentioned there was something different about how Stanford felt as a law school.

GEOFF KORS: Yeah. Well, it's interesting because at the time,

GEOFF KORS: Stanford University was known as being somewhat conservative as far as their faculty. Yet the law school was one of the most progressive and Berkeley was the opposite, very liberal school, but both had much more conservative faculty. It was really interesting. I didn't know that until I visited both. But what I really liked at Stanford versus the other law schools I visited is when I spoke to students, how they helped each other. There was no sense of competition. They all loved being there. They got to know their professors. They had lunch, sometimes dinner, at their professor's house,

GEOFF KORS: where each class was 170 people, not 5-600, for the entire year, not your course. So most of my classes were 30 people, some of 'em were much smaller. So it just felt like a great environment for me. I went to a small liberal arts college because I knew if I was in some big lecture hall where it didn't matter if I showed up or not, I'm not sure I would've showed up all the time. And being in that kind of environment where people felt, look, no matter where you graduate,

GEOFF KORS: you're gonna get a decent job, versus some of the bigger law schools where it just felt, yeah, you gotta watch the other students, that it had that Paper Chase kind of feel. And Stanford just felt the exact opposite of what I expected, and that just felt like, okay, this is perfect for me.

MASON FUNK: Then, in fact, did you come out once you got there?

GEOFF KORS: I did.

MASON FUNK: What was that like? I'm curious because I went to Stanford undergrad in the old Firehouse.

GEOFF KORS: The Firehouse. Yeah. I remember the first -- Two things: the first time the Firehouse

GEOFF KORS: was having an event and then --

MASON FUNK: Do me a favor, put yourself at Stanford.

GEOFF KORS: Yes. When I got to Stanford and because the law school was on a different system, it was earlier than the undergrads came back, who were on a quarter system. I remember walking by the Firehouse a couple times and thinking about going inside because that's where the LGBT student organization was. Then in my packet was various things at Stanford Law School, including a brunch for

GEOFF KORS: the Lesbian Gay Law Association. I think it was called GLASS at the time. I was so hesitant to go to these, but I did. And some of my closest friends were in lesbian and gay students in my class at Stanford Law School. Then I went to the first welcome back at the Firehouse Fire Station, and actually met my first boyfriend that night, who was in his first year of med school.

GEOFF KORS: That's sort of when he came out as well. We've had very similar backgrounds in that. That was about the only similarity in our backgrounds. We grew up so differently. But we both sort of were in small liberal arts colleges. He was at Kenyon in Ohio and just thought, okay, I'm going out to the San Francisco Bay area to this big university. I'm gonna live my authentic life. So it was very empowering to be with other folks. There are a lot more openly lesbian gays students in my class at Stanford

GEOFF KORS: than in the year before, so you had a critical mass as well. I felt very comfortable and generally welcoming. I had a group of friends who weren't through the lesbian, gay organization, who I met in classes. They sort of just found out I was gay very naturally because my boyfriend at the time, Rob and I would show up at dinner and that's how we'd introduce each other. Some of 'em definitely ended that being a friendship,

GEOFF KORS: it became more acquaintance. But there's never hostility. But I was aware of the people who were, "Oh, no issue. That's great." And others who, "Okay. Yeah." And that's fine. You don't want to hang out with those folks. But very welcoming environment overall, I felt.

MASON FUNK: Yeah.

GEOFF KORS: Especially compared to anything I'd ever experienced. Yeah.

MASON FUNK: Yeah. I was still too young when I was there as an undergrad to, I mean, I would walk by the other side of the street from the Firehouse. I'd be looking and terrified and that

MASON FUNK: all came later. So I'm glad you had a really positive experience. Let's do a quick thing. Let's just kind of go through the years from graduating from Stanford Law School up until you took the post at Equality California. And just almost like a timeline.

GEOFF KORS: Okay. So it's our job timeline? And where I lived?

MASON FUNK: Exactly. Just so we have that for the record.

GEOFF KORS: Sure, of course.

GEOFF KORS: I graduated Stanford Law School in 1986 and had been looking for a public interest job or a legislative job, and they were hard to come by, especially because I wanted to stay in the San Francisco Bay area. My partner at the time still had another year of medical school, so I really wanted to stay in the area and eventually as the end of the time you could possibly answer a law firm, I said yes to a law firm in San Francisco. I studied for the bar,

GEOFF KORS: then we went backpacking in Europe for six weeks. During that time I just thought, I can't go to a corporate law firm. I just can't do it. And I had an offer from a firm in DC which was a corporate law firm, but they happened to be representing Suffolk County, New York, trying to shut down a nuclear power plant that had not yet opened on Long Island, that I had protested at when I was a kid. I reached out to them and said, "I've rethought it, coming to DC. But if I come, can I work on this case?"

GEOFF KORS: And they said, "It's going to trial next year. Your whole first year could be that case." So I decided to do that. Relationship ended. But it was a great experience for me in that year. But I'm moving to DC at 1986 when it was the Reagan world. It was really clear, no one's out. I mean, no one at law firms was out. Most people working at the hill weren't out. Met tons of gay people

GEOFF KORS: because there's a huge social scene. And there was lots of gay politics and there was a lot of AIDS activism in DC at that time. But never discussed if there was another closeted LGBT person at the law firm I was at. And there were hundreds of attorneys. I don't know that there was. So very different environment. I did that for a year and then I moved back to the San Francisco Bay area. Again, looking for public interest. But I had a letter offering me a job from a firm

GEOFF KORS: saying, you'll come as a second year associate anytime in the next two years. We'll pay to move you back, come work. And I decided after a year I wanted to go back to California, so I asked if I could meet with some young attorneys there. And I updated my resume because I was co-chair of the Gay Lesbian Law Students Association in my third year. And they were all, don't tell us all, this is not a good environment. There are a couple gay attorneys,

GEOFF KORS: the associates are cool with it, but the partners, it would be real. People have lost their jobs. And a week later actually I got a letter telling me that the attorneys thought I wasn't a good fit, so they revoked my offer. Which was fine because I wasn't going there, but it's not fine. And I even told the law student recruiting office at Stanford because they had a policy in place. Not that anything ever happened with it. But just an awareness that actually I had no rights for something that blatant at the time in California

GEOFF KORS: was pretty shocking. And I finally, after four months of being next on the list to get a public defender job in San Francisco and the legislative job at Stanford University and a couple other things, had to pay rent and had to pay my student loans. So I went to another law firm where there were openly gay attorneys, who, that was totally fine, and continued looking for public interest. About a year later I got, a year and a half later, an offer as Assistant Regional Counsel

GEOFF KORS: of the United States Environmental Protection Agency in the San Francisco office. I spent five years there which was great. I loved it. I did litigation, I did Superfund cleanups. I really thrived there. Great group of friends. There were a lot of openly gay people there. But as I was five years in, I was like, I still want to be doing gay rights or environmental justice at a different level than what I was doing. I had taken some time off to work

GEOFF KORS: on a mayor's campaign. I was on the board of Harvey Milk Democratic Club and the League of Conservation Voters. I was doing a lot of stuff in my personal life, but due to federal Government Hatch Act, it couldn't be partisan politics. So it was somewhat limiting what I could do even in my spare time, given federal law. I had thought about maybe going back and getting a PhD in teaching and had actually done some applications. Then a friend of mine from law school who worked at the time,

GEOFF KORS: I don't know if she was at Lambda Legal or the GLAAD in Massachusetts, Massachusetts, who does New England litigation and legal issues, Amelia Craig, said, "The ACLU in Illinois is looking for new person to run their gay and lesbian rights and AIDS and civil liberties project and you'd be perfect. Can I introduce you?" So they introduced me and I went to Chicago for the first time and interviewed and got a job offer and moved to Chicago

GEOFF KORS: and did that job for about a year and a half. Again, I came back to visit friends in San Francisco. I'm like, okay, I'm a California guy now. It just is what it is. I mean, it was fine being open in Chicago at the time. I loved the work and I had some great friends, but I decided to come back. Did some great work when I was there. Got to sue the Chicago Police Department in federal court and get a victory to stop them from testing recruits for HIV

GEOFF KORS: and then not hiring them. The first co-parent adoption for a lesbian couple that I did with the attorney from Lambda and a bunch of other cases. I knew I wanted to stay in that milieu, but I wasn't sure that I wanted to be there. I came back, I was doing some legal work with a friend of mine, Leslie Katz. During that time she got appointed to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. I went over and worked to get her office set up and do her legislative stuff for a year. Then I joined

GEOFF KORS: Paul Wotman, who was a gay attorney who did some big private gay cases, including a really landmark case against Shell where a gay man was fired, in private practice, and became a partner there. Did that for four years. Then said I was gonna take a couple months off because my partner at the time was renovating a 1950s house in Palm Springs, and my parents were in Palm Desert for half the year at the

GEOFF KORS: time. And I said, "I'm gonna just go down for three months." And that lasted two years. I've lived here either part or full-time now for 23 years in Palm Springs. Equality California job came up.

MASON FUNK: What year is this now?

GEOFF KORS: Equality California.

MASON FUNK: Actually, let's take a breath. Because I wanna make that like a little bit of a sentence.

GEOFF KORS: Okay. Got it.

MASON FUNK: I want to go back. Thank you for giving ...

GEOFF KORS: So that was 2000, just 2000 was when I came down to Palm Springs

GEOFF KORS: and took what I thought was a short break from my law firm, which I never went back to.

MASON FUNK: The short break was to do interim, right? At EQCA?

GEOFF KORS: No, the short break from the law firm was to spend three months with my folks as an adult and my partner was here a lot more than he thought he would be. I said I could do a little work, but I did not want to work those three months. At the end of it, I remember it very specifically, New Year's Day with the sun coming up over the mountains, it took me three months to not feel like I have to argue with everyone when you've done

GEOFF KORS: litigation as your career for that many years. And I said, I don't wanna go back to litigation. I let my partners know that I wasn't gonna be doing that anymore and I was gonna take a little break and figure out what was next.

MASON FUNK: Ah, great. Okay. Let me see. You also mentioned while you were at the ACLU, you sued the Boy Scouts.

GEOFF KORS: Yeah.

MASON FUNK: Can you just tell us a little about that case?

GEOFF KORS: Sure. When I was at the ACLU in Chicago

GEOFF KORS: there was already a case that had been filed against the Boy Scouts by a gay person who was denied a job there. I worked with a law firm that was working pro bono with us, and we actually took that to trial in Chicago and we won at that level which was great. Of course, eventually the Supreme Court in five to four decisions said the Boy Scouts were allowed to discriminate. But there were a couple of those cases around the country that led eventually to the case that I think

GEOFF KORS: Lambda took to the Supreme Court.

MASON FUNK: Okay. It was a temporary victory, but ultimately --

GEOFF KORS: It was a temporary victory under Chicago's human rights ordinance.

MASON FUNK: Taking that one story as an example of political ups and downs, and wins and losses, can you walk us through not so much the nuts and bolts, although they're important, but like the emotional experience of taking a case like this that you're gonna believe in wholeheartedly, winning, and then eventually having to watch it go up. It wasn't your case --

GEOFF KORS: It wasn't our case.

GEOFF KORS: It was a Dale case in New Jersey,

MASON FUNK: But you watched the issue ...

GEOFF KORS: Well, I watched the issue of the Boy Scouts for many years, and in fact it was a friend of mine in law school who represented the Boy Scouts in that trial, which was an interesting dynamic, and it was a great victory. It just felt like there's a message, especially for kids, that it's okay. That there's nothing awful. Their whole thing was that gay men would be this terrible influence and all the pedophilia stuff that

GEOFF KORS: came out. I mean, it was pretty horrific some of the stuff that they had said at the time. But it was really heartwarming. We had the head of the board in Chicago was Mayor Daley, and we had him on record. It was great. Those victories are great. In fact, when I was in private practice at the law firm, I represented a gay man who was fired from the Boy Scouts when they found out he was gay. California had better law then, but not great law. But

GEOFF KORS: obviously the state laws weren't relevant as we learned in the Supreme Court, but we had a great victory enough that they agreed to settle the case quietly and he could live his life and get compensated for the years he couldn't work there. But then seeing the case go to the Supreme Court and that close a decision and you knew it was nothing more than homophobia. If you put other groups in the place of this gay guy, you would've had a different result.

GEOFF KORS: It was under New Jersey's public Accommodation law, which was clear. But they said this was sort of a First Amendment speech right, and who you want to associate with right. But here's an organization that gets government money, is chartered by the US Congress, and it was devastating. It's the same thing I remember feeling when the sodomy case came down in 1986, gay Pride weekend, the year I graduated law school. I was there and at the protest

GEOFF KORS: in the Castro. Just like, wow. I mean, it's illegal to love the person you love. It was sort of such a jolt to the heart. I think that's our whole movement, and it's all movements are rollercoasters. You just have to keep in your head that you're only gonna win if you keep on pushing and you're gonna have some awful losses. Of course, our community has had awful ones, and we're having awful ones in some places now, fortunately the opposite here in California.

GEOFF KORS: But the trajectory of those cases and being involved in some of those issues and the Boy Scouts is probably what led me to decide that the board I wanted to focus on in Palm Springs was Boys and Girls Club. Because it's so important, especially in California where we have our rights to work and other areas, but also for organizations for me that weren't LGBT focused. And in fact, it was a non-issue, but it

GEOFF KORS: wasn't to have openly LGBT people on the board. And there was one before me, and now, we have a transgender person on the board, we have a couple other folks on the board. It just is how we make connections with people, and especially for the kids. Because I make a point of being there and seeing the kids. And I just think everyone knows I'm openly gay, especially when you're in politics in a city like Palm Springs, and it's just great that the kids have that kind of experience,

GEOFF KORS: which no one my age had, and a lot of young people around the country still don't have. And to me some of that comes from the Boy Scouts cases, right? That feeling that they were so homophobic and what message that's sent to those kids and kids being kicked out if they thought they were gay. If you had a gay parent, you couldn't be in the Boy Scouts. And what that

GEOFF KORS: must have done to a young person? I mean, I couldn't even imagine that. So I think it's a great thing to think about because I've never really thought about it this way before, but it really ties in with what I'm doing now. The two boards that I'm on are totally youth focused right now. Do the Right Thing, which works with the police department and the school district to recognize children who do the right thing and build relationships with the police and honor kids who do the right thing. It's really this

GEOFF KORS: great organization. And the Boys and Girls Club. So I think a lot of my work and also what I experienced as a young person has led me to wanna focus on youth related boards.

MASON FUNK: Well, and it is the thing that gets recycled over and over and over again. Is this notion that somehow gay people are dating all the way back to Anita Bryant. Bring it right up to the present that somehow the rest of the population needs to save our children. I even heard recently the whole thing about, "Well gay people can't reproduce and they have to recruit."

MASON FUNK: I mean, it's still alive and well in our world.

GEOFF KORS: Yeah. It's shocking. Yeah. It really is shocking, especially for the gay parents who've reproduced and our kids. But the damage that does, I mean, been through enough political campaigns, just some of the stuff that's said and the impact that has on young people or people who are just coming out, it's just horrendous. It is one of the things you talk about when you know you're gonna have a ballot measure.

GEOFF KORS: People are aware of it now with trying to get Prop 8 outta the Constitution. But the awful things, especially in parts of the state of California, that kids had to hear during Prop 8, where it was all about the kids. We had to protect the kids. Even in California, that's what really hurt, is knowing the impact. It could really be devastating to LGBT youth.

MASON FUNK: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you for that. The other case you mentioned

MASON FUNK: that I wanted to spend a little more time on was because it's so relevant to those times, the suing of the Chicago Police Department. What were they doing and why did you sue them? Well, what they were doing is why you sued them. What were they doing?

GEOFF KORS: Right. So someone called the ACLU . Oh, sorry. Probably 1994, there was an intake person at the ACLU in Chicago, and it got routed to me. There was a guy who had applied to be a police officer

GEOFF KORS: and to go and be a cadet in the program, and he got a letter that he was rejected because he tested HIV positive in his physical. Now, one, he had no idea he was HIV positive. He had no idea he was tested secretly. I started doing the research, and at that time we were using the Rehabilitation Act. There was a federal law that a lot of the early HIV cases used

GEOFF KORS: as to make our case. And one of the things I learned in that job, especially as a lawyer and used in my private practice later was, the media needs to be your best friend because doing the education that comes from this kind of discrimination, but other people then hear about it. And so that resulted in a woman calling me, straight married, that she got a letter and was rejected and no idea she was HIV positive either.

GEOFF KORS: I filed a class action against the Chicago Police Department. They fought it, but it continued during the mayor's race. Daley was mayor, running for re-election. I worked closely with the two then LGBT political groups in Chicago as well. They finally agreed to a consent decree that they would stop testing, people with HIV were welcome to the police department

GEOFF KORS: and a bunch of other stuff. But the fact that they're secretly testing and then just opening a letter from the police department for the first time learning you're HIV positive and therefore you're not a candidate. One of 'em did not make it through, the guy. We settled and they both had opportunity and she became a police officer in Chicago. Those were rewarding cases. I mean, and of course they started with the typical arguments, "Well, they can get in a fight and blood --"

GEOFF KORS: and all that comes up.

MASON FUNK: That's the allegedly non-homophobic --

GEOFF KORS: That was a non-homophobic way. And it has nothing to do because she's a straight woman, so it has nothing to do with that, it's just HIV. But of course, it was a lot to do with homophobia, and that rule was one way to get there in Chicago, in that police department.

MASON FUNK: Was that their primary defense, this notion that a police officer could get injured and that could affect --

GEOFF KORS: That was a big part of it. They argued

GEOFF KORS: that they had the right basically to do it. That their job is protecting the public. So anything that could put anyone in the public at harm, they could take into account. A lot of the government cases was government has this superpower, that usually came up. I had that in private cases too, even with very progressive governments. They'd try and use the case law that they were immune from having to follow the law. But that became a front page story.

GEOFF KORS: The electeds sort of changed their tune because they were getting called out. But that was typical. I mean, you didn't get that as much other than the Boy Scouts and some of the other gay rights cases. And that changed over time, the arguments became different.

MASON FUNK: Okay. You get to Palm Springs

MASON FUNK: in 2000 for this three month hiatus kind of thing. I wasn't sure in the prep interview, I know that the decision -- How did it come about that you took the job at ?

GEOFF KORS: Sure.

MASON FUNK: Including the part that had to do with your partner and the whole --

GEOFF KORS: . The whole thing. The whole thing. Okay. I'll give you the abbreviated version. In the 80s and 90s there was a group called Life Lobby that did HIV/AIDS

GEOFF KORS: legislative work in Sacramento. Did an amazing job. I mean, there was representatives from every county, two from every county in California. And they passed some of the early cutting edge HIV laws in the country to protect people including consent for testing and education and various other things. That folded in probably the late 90s. They tried to morph it over to LGBT rights, but weren't able to keep going. And there were two groups,

GEOFF KORS: one in LA, one in San Francisco, in the late 1990s that decided we need an LGBT Rights Advocacy group in California. And the ones in San Francisco were a little bit ahead. And they created an organization known as CAPE [the California Alliance for Pride and Equality) in 1999, and they hired a contract lobbyist to help do some legislative work. Gray Davis had become governor. After a lot of

GEOFF KORS: anti LGBT governors in Deukmejian and in Wilson, who vetoed employment non-discrimination that he promised he'd sign when he ran, we had someone who was right in the middle, like he'd sign things if they weren't too much, kind of thing. But we also had Sheila Kuehl and Carole Migden, we actually had two open lesbians in the state assembly now. And that was, of course, something new and fabulous. That organization started,

GEOFF KORS: they briefly had an executive director. I don't know the whole story why she left. And then Jean Harris, who I had worked with, she was one of Harry Britt, who replaced Harvey Milk, aides, and she was president of the Harvey Milk Club. I was one of the people she called her children because I was probably 25 years younger, but her baby activists in our 20s who were on the Milk Club board and really pushing forward on a whole bunch of stuff and Queer Nation and a lot of those kind of issues.

GEOFF KORS: And we'd stay friends over the years and -- Sure.

MASON FUNK: Sorry.

GEOFF KORS: Jean Harris and I stayed in touch over the years and she was hired to become the executive director of CAPE at the time and had a part-time admin, and then this one lobbyist in Sacramento. She came out to Palm Springs and we got together for lunch and she said, "I wanna do an event, a fundraiser here." They did one in LA,

GEOFF KORS: one in San Francisco, we need to grow the organization. I said, "Happy to help you with it." I wasn't working at the time. I had some time on my hands, I didn't know a lot of people yet. And she said, I can introduce you to folks. And she introduced me to Ginny Foat, who later got elected to the city council in Palm Springs and is a very close friend. And we started pulling together this fundraiser for the organization. I was sitting next to Gray Davis at the LA Awards and asked him if he'd come speak at it, which he agreed to.

GEOFF KORS: Now we had a draw. During it, she said, "You really need to come on my board." I think I was the eighth board member, so it's a really new organization. I joined the board and I think the first board meeting was January of 2022, that I was at, maybe the end of '21 when I joined ...

MASON FUNK: You mean 2001?

GEOFF KORS: 2001. Oh, sorry. So I think the first board meeting actually was

GEOFF KORS: right after 9/11. It was in the fall of 2001. The second one was in Los Angeles in 2002, on Super Bowl Sunday, which annoyed me. I remember that so well, really, I mean, come on. A couple other board members got added, so we got up to 9 to 12, maybe John Duran and Diane Abbitt in West Hollywood. It was very San Francisco focused, so it was trying to extend. The co-chairs were Nicole Maria Ramirez in San Diego

GEOFF KORS: for Southern California, and Kathy Levinson for Northern California. I was on the board with them. Jean decided to step down and they asked if I would consider being an interim while they did a search, which I said yes to. I've worked a lot and long hours, but wow, was seven days a week. I mean, it was working and sleeping during that period to just keep this thing from going under.

GEOFF KORS: Really committed board. And during that period -- And I may be jumping ahead, so tell me.

MASON FUNK: No, it's okay.

GEOFF KORS: During that period, as the board now got up to about 14 people, I worked with Kathy and Nicole and said, "This organization needs a strategic plan because anyone who comes in needs to know what the board's direction is." The next board meeting, we did a two and a half day retreat in San Diego in a conference room in the basement of the US Grand Hotel,

GEOFF KORS: and literally laid out a plan for how we were gonna go from very little rights in California to full equality in about a decade. And of course, we knew there'd be very different things, but what were the first bills we wanted to bring? How did we want to expand the organization? Which partners did we need to really become really tight with? Because there weren't great relationships with some of the legal groups even at the time.

GEOFF KORS: Then went out and met with the folks at NCLR and Lambda and ACLU and some of the smaller organizations. By 2003, I think we all had a good sense of where we wanted to go. I rebranded and took the board through a rebranding from CAPE to Equality California. A lot of the groups were Garden State Equality, Equality Illinois. And I thought, let's just say what we are and be part of

GEOFF KORS: that network. So that's sort of how I got there. As far as the job, I was interim and they had been doing a search. They had a major search firm, who was pro bono, doing the search, and they had their finalists and they asked if I would be part of the interviews, because I said I wasn't ... They asked me if I was interested in applying. At first, I was. My partner at the time was, "If you want to do it, I'll support it 100%, but

GEOFF KORS: think what your life is like right now. I mean, you're working way more than you did at the law firm when you're in trial, I mean, think about what this really is." And I just went back and forth a bunch. Especially hard when you're in Palm Springs and not working for a little window there to think and then working really long hours, but on something you're incredibly passionate about. And we had some bills we were doing that year but I decided I wasn't gonna do it, so I sat in on the

GEOFF KORS: first day of interviews, and at the end of the day, two of the board members said, "You need to reconsider. We haven't found anyone. " I said, "You have three more candidates tomorrow." They said, "Reconsider. But you need to sit out of the interviews if you're gonna remotely reconsider." I said, "Of course." In that time period, Mark Leno called me, they had a whole push, and the next day I decided I was going to apply. My partner, Jeff, was like, "Yeah, I was pretty 90% sure you would do it.

GEOFF KORS: Not thrilled about it, but supportive." I mean which we often do in our relationships. I ended up taking the job and tried to manage it from here. I mean, we didn't have an office at the time. When Gene was working, she worked out of her house in Long Beach. The admin was her daughter who worked part-time from her house. And the lobbyist worked from his house. The first goal was making sure we,

GEOFF KORS: one, could get out of any deficit, we had and have enough money. I found office space in Sacramento. The legislative person left when Gene left, so we didn't have anyone. The first thing I did was find a lobbyist to hire, and I started looking for a development director. because without money, you can't run an organization. During that time, I realized there really wasn't anyone in Sacramento

GEOFF KORS: who was right for the kind of fundraising we needed to do if we were really gonna put in this 10 year plan, including winning marriage and transgender rights at a time when neither of those was thought possible in California. We really needed to do major fundraising and have a real staff and a real organization. I just realized I know those people in San Francisco. I lived there for 20 years. I worked with a lot of those folks. I've been on nonprofit boards

GEOFF KORS: and realized that may be the better place for our main office and just have an office for our lobbyist in Sacramento. I reached out to a friend of mine who was doing development at San Francisco AIDS Foundation. He came on, Timothy Cavanaugh, as our development director. And for the first couple years, we got from three to four to five to six. And then about 2006 it really started expanding, the organization. .

MASON FUNK: Gotcha. Okay. Good. That's a good overview. Well, simple question. First of all, what made you finally decide that -- You said something real quick that I noticed that you said Mark Leno called you, and then something like a push-pull.

GEOFF KORS: Oh, no, no. I got a call from a couple other folks in the community who the board had reached out to, to say, "Talk to Geoff."

GEOFF KORS: Like, "We think he's the right fit. He has the legal experience." I've written legislation, I'd written the equal benefits ordinance in San Francisco before then, and I wrote some bills that never got anywhere at the time, in Illinois. And they just felt, you know -- And ultimately I just thought why am I not doing this? I'm not doing it, one, because it's a big personal commitment and, two, am I really gonna be able to pull this together? The organization didn't

GEOFF KORS: have much funding. It was new. And I went back to my often personal and professional advice to myself, which is, well, if you don't do it, you know you failed. Don't let that be. I got over that. Like, if I fail at it, I fail at it, but if I don't do it, I've failed at it. And just like, this is what I wanted my life work to be. My frustration when I was at the Environmental Protection Agency, that I really

GEOFF KORS: couldn't do much in gay politics because of federal law and the Hatch Act. That this is really exactly what I want to do, that I love the legislative stuff. I love politics. And it was a way for me to do what I had wanted to do as a kid, just in a different way. The feeling I couldn't do it because I was gay, which by then, obviously, had gone away. 2002, our first two gay men were elected to the legislature. We already had the LGBT caucus with four lesbians in it.

GEOFF KORS: But this was a different way to do what I sort of said I didn't think I could ever do. Once I did it, I never questioned it. I never looked back and said, I mean, even thinking about it now, I'm like, how did I even think I shouldn't do this? Like, it's just exactly what I wanted to be doing and an opportunity that I would've jumped at it other times in my life.

MASON FUNK: I want to push that a little bit on the notion that if you don't decide to do something,

MASON FUNK: you fail just by not deciding.

GEOFF KORS: Sure.

MASON FUNK: But are there any decisions in your life where you said, you know what, that's not the right fit for me and you didn't take the job and that also turned out to be the right decision?

GEOFF KORS: That's a good question. I don't think there are jobs I've not done because I was worried I might not succeed. I remember at the ACLU

GEOFF KORS: more than anywhere, that's really where it first came up. It's like, how am I gonna run these two projects at the ACLU doing LGBT litigation when I've never done it? Like I just don't -- I'm gonna fail at this. I don't have the skillset. It took my friend, Amelia, who had worked at Lambda and then ran the executive director of GLAD, she said, "I didn't have it when I started. None of us have it when we started these jobs." And I was like, yeah, I can't let failure be the reason.

GEOFF KORS: I've used that in my personal life a lot. You don't let yourself become too vulnerable when you're dating someone because you can get hurt. Those aren't reasons not to do things. But not working at a homophobic law firm, yeah, that was a good decision. I mean, there've been times I've been asked to run for office, and if I thought I was the best person, even if it wasn't maybe the right time for me, I might still have done it if there was a reason.

GEOFF KORS: But if there's someone else who's ready to step up, who can do it and I can support them, that's great too, and there wasn't at the time, with CAPE and EQCA. And I think that was part of it as well. If there was someone else, I would've gone back on the board. I was chairing the legislative committee, which is what I loved and was working on writing and advocating on legislation. I wasn't gonna go away, I was just gonna do it in a different way.

MASON FUNK: Gotcha. But you really felt like this actually, I am the best person.

GEOFF KORS: I did feel it at the time. Yeah. I just felt like of the people who were applying, because you're going into an organization that was very new, that didn't have a steady funding source, that was trying to do work in a state the size of California, and at the time had won, one year out of college lobbyist

GEOFF KORS: and halftime admin person. That was the organization. And so I thought, who can build this? Like, we need someone who really can build it. And I just felt like when I went to the ACLU, the LGBT rights and AIDS projects didn't have their own fundraiser, and I created that like, okay, I have the pieces. I've written legislation. I know how to work with the LGBT media. I know a lot of them, I know enough donors to at least get this off the ground, which I did during the interim. Like, I started

GEOFF KORS: creating a steady funding base and just felt, okay, I am actually probably the best person for this job in this moment, so I need to do this. I really felt like I need to do this. And I was loving my life. It was nice having that break from intense work, but I have no doubt if I didn't take that job three months later, I would have regretted it.

MASON FUNK: What long-term effects did the job have on your relationship,

MASON FUNK: your personal relationship?

GEOFF KORS: I think that was one of the major reasons, I think there were others. Oh sure. I think my taking the job and moving back to San Francisco, because there's just no way to do that job from Palm Springs.

KATE KUNATH: One more time because you were moving.

MASON FUNK: Sorry.

GEOFF KORS: Oh, okay. No, that's okay. I think taking the job with CAPE, which later became Equality California was a major factor in that relationship ending. I think there were other factors, it was gonna go that way,

GEOFF KORS: but I didn't think that at the time. But me moving back to San Francisco realizing I couldn't do this in Palm Springs and him staying in Palm Springs made that relationship even more challenging.

MASON FUNK: Yeah. Yeah. Let's go back to that employment bill that Wilson killed. Can you tell us the story of that bill? That just feels like an important part of history.

GEOFF KORS: Sure. Pete Wilson had promised he'd sign a --

MASON FUNK: Do me a favor, tell us who Pete Wilson is.

GEOFF KORS: Pete Wilson, the former governor of California.

MASON FUNK: Start clean. I was talking.

GEOFF KORS: Okay. Pete Wilson, who was a two-term governor in California, Republican, former mayor, I think, from San Diego, when he was running the first time, said he would sign a bill banning sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace. And that bill was carried and it passed the legislature. He got a lot of pressure and he ended up vetoing that bill. And there was, of course, a lot of outrage in the community.

GEOFF KORS: People worked really hard to get the votes in the legislature to pass that bill. I mean, you're talking back 1990, 1991. A lot of legislators other than maybe in San Francisco were nervous if they voted for a bill like that, what would the repercussions be? And you always hear that, but our job was to make sure they all got reelected every time they voted for a bill. But immediately when that veto came out, I remember Jean Harris and I

GEOFF KORS: and a few others said, we need to go to the Castro, Castro and Market Street. And there were about 10 of us who started going that afternoon "Chanting outta the bars into the streets," and it turned into this big massive protest. We marched from there to the federal building. There was a group who actually threw rocks and fire at the federal building. I mean, the anger level was so intense. It was one of the more intense

GEOFF KORS: types of protests I had been at. And the group of us, a friend of mine who was a lawyer, said let's get a group of lawyers and put ourselves between the police and the protestors and slowly march away from the building. That was a scary moment. I just thought these police are not friendly. But we did that, and that veto happened, and I think that led to even heightened activism in the community when that veto happened.

GEOFF KORS: But it took another eight years for that bill to get passed again and signed into Law by Gray Davis.

MASON FUNK: Give me a little more detail about the lawyers and the group, you lawyers who formed like a . Paint that picture for me. Like, what did it look like and feel like visually? You were trying to basically march the protestors away from the cops.

GEOFF KORS: Just put a barrier so

GEOFF KORS: it didn't get into violence with police in the community. And there was Kevin McCarthy, of all people, who later became a judge in San Francisco, I think the first gay judge elected in San Francisco, grabbed me and said, "We're gonna group lawyers together." And we actually linked arms like that and said, "We're peaceful. This is a

GEOFF KORS: peaceful protest. Over and over again, "This is a peaceful protest and no one's breaking the law." Over and over. That was the advice, just say that. And we slowly marched back. The police sort of stopped and eventually it started to dissipate. It felt like a lot longer than probably the 15-20 minutes that it was, as that dissipated. There was a group who splinted off, who were doing some damage to the federal building, but the major protest, that had dissipated.

MASON FUNK: Playing devil's advocate for a second, we've seen incidents we have on the White Knight riot and so forth, when things did get very violent. What was the reasoning why you decided to help try to keep these two groups from actually physically engaging? Like, why not? Sorry, it sounds like I'm just like an anarchist, but what was the reasoning to just want to try to keep it peaceful?

GEOFF KORS: I can't speak for anyone else. For me,

GEOFF KORS: when I was asked to do that from a lawyer more experienced than me, I said, "Of course, I'm gonna go do that." But in the moment it's, 'we just can't have this people get hurt here.' Like, we're not gonna get anywhere if people get hurt. That's not how we're advancing anything. But I think that's more I thought of after the fact. I think in the moment it's like, I'm a lawyer, I'm an officer of the court. I have a responsibility to try and do something when asked,

GEOFF KORS: I wouldn't have thought to do that on my own. Like, it never entered my mind that someone would suggest that. Just asked and I said, of course. I didn't think I was even -- It's what you do. But I was very conscious that the police were 10 feet, 5 feet in front of me with their batons out and riot gear on, and that was a scary feeling.

MASON FUNK: And they for you all.

GEOFF KORS: And just that I think was the reasoning the advice was keep on saying "It's a peaceful protest, we're lawyer ..." It was just constantly saying, "We're here peacefully.

GEOFF KORS: We're gonna keep law and order here."

MASON FUNK: Did you have a different thought when you were gathering the people at the top of Market street and saying "Out of the bars and into the streets?" I mean, did you have a different vision of how it might play out at that point? Or were you just going on pure adrenaline?

GEOFF KORS: It was pure adrenaline. It's like, we need people to speak up. We can't just act like this is any other day. And people sitting around having drinks after work is great. I like to do that too. But we couldn't treat this like any other day.

GEOFF KORS: At first, it was pretty slow and I thought, well, if we get 50, 60 people, but it took the whole street over and took all the whole one way of Market Street over, marching down. I mean, everyone getting off work. It just grew on its own and several of the candidates running for mayor came, including the former police chief. I mean, it really turned into this big thing. I've never seen anything like that. It was that whole day was that, and I've had some other experiences

GEOFF KORS: in San Francisco where these marches just come from these small group and then it, some of the anti-war marches and things, there's just this energy that's so amazing of people who were like, we have to have our voices heard. It was good that the whole story on that wasn't the violence that a handful of people committed on the federal building, but was people being very angry, and the awareness that I don't think most people didn't have, that

GEOFF KORS: you can be fired from your job just for being gay. I think trying to get that message out was important, but having the venting way to show the anger was important too. But just trying to do it without people getting hurt.

MASON FUNK: Right. Let's see. I'm just checking our time. Okay. We're doing good. Do you wanna break it on ?

GEOFF KORS: No, I'm good. I'm good for right now. I have some water over there.

GEOFF KORS: I'll take a break.

MASON FUNK: Two more questions on that. Seven years ago when we were just starting, I interviewed a guy, he used to work for a group in San Francisco, called Communities United Against

GEOFF KORS: . Yeah, of course.

MASON FUNK: Marcus transgender guy. But he explained to me one of the basic lessons of change and activism is, in any fight for change, you have to have people, so to speak, inside the building and outside.

GEOFF KORS: Yep. Absolutely.

MASON FUNK: And I never heard that before because I'm really not a born activist or politician.

MASON FUNK: Can you talk a little about that theory and how you've witnessed that being kind of a truism? It's just a little bit more like a kind of a philosophical overview of how change happens.

GEOFF KORS: Yeah. I do think change happens through multifaceted avenues. And especially at Equality California doing legislative work, it was so important that I can maintain relationships with the decision makers when we had bills moving

GEOFF KORS: and had activists on the outside who were pushing much harder. And I remember a long debate I had with Rex Wockner, who was an LGBT journalist, when we passed the marriage bill in 2005, which no one was expecting. And Schwarzenegger immediately said he was gonna veto it. And we started a whole campaign, 12 days of Equality. He was just adamant in his posts and what he wrote, that I should chain myself to the desk in Schwarzenegger's office. And

GEOFF KORS: I had this whole conversation with him. I said, I think it's fine if people want to do that. If they wanna go in the building and sit on the floor in his office, that's great. We have 9 LGBT rights bills in 2005, I'm gonna get him to sign every other one of those bills. Because I met with him the day he announced the veto. He agreed to meet with me and our lobbyist, Steve Hanson, him and Maria Shriver. And he committed that he was gonna sign the rest of our bills and that he'd come out against any

GEOFF KORS: ballot measure against marriage equality. And I said, "So I'm not gonna screw that up." There's too much on the stake, but I do need other people pushing aggressively. And I do think that's so important. I mean, we saw that more than anywhere with Act Up, in our community, that what they did at the stock exchange, you say, oh, you're hurting your cause, you're inconveniencing people when you block the bridge. But that activism without it so many more

GEOFF KORS: people would've died at a time when government was absolutely ignoring a pandemic because of who was being killed. And so that is true in so many communities. You needed Martin Luther King's vision, you needed Malcolm X's vision. There needs to be different avenues. It can't always just all be nice and sweet and please give us our rights. But you can also do it without violence, I believe. And that wasn't always the case in any of the movements.

GEOFF KORS: But that inside/outside mentality is really important in the political arena. It's important in legislative process. If you sever a relationship with a governor who at the time, and when Arnold Schwarzenegger in his term, signed more LGBT rights bills than any governor in history at that time, any Democrat, Republican, anyone, what are you getting? You're hurting the cause. That doesn't mean

GEOFF KORS: you shouldn't have other people who go after him. And it doesn't mean we didn't send a mailer. It's payback time against ballot measures he was doing, attacking unions and trying to require parental notification for teenagers to have abortion care. We weren't always nice to him, but I wasn't gonna do something where he never talked to me again or where his office wouldn't work with us. And there's that balance that you have to play when you're doing this work.

GEOFF KORS: But it was great to have other organizations out there protesting. And I'd speak at protests, but you have to just think about how you're doing it, what the impacts are.

MASON FUNK: And something like somebody chaining themself to his desk isn't exactly violence, but it would've been embarrassing to him. It would've been a whole thing. And you just knew without probably even having to think about it, that's not gonna advance our cause.

GEOFF KORS: Right. And I didn't have a lot of issue with other people doing it, but

GEOFF KORS: here I am getting a commitment that he's gonna sign. I mean, that year we had a bill that required any healthcare provider and insurance provider to provide the exact same treatment to people regardless of gender. If you could have a breast removed due to cancer as a woman, you could have it as a transgender person. I mean, and we did it quietly and he was gonna sign it.

GEOFF KORS: And I sure wasn't gonna screw that up by me being someone he sees as embarrassing him or acting in that way. Now, did we do a commercial comparing him to George Wallace? Yes, we did. But where's that line, right?

MASON FUNK: Even from this point of view that he's willing to kind of give you a pass for that. He understand that's part of the game.

GEOFF KORS: Well, we only did that. So we launched 12 Days of Equality, which was letter writing, education. And he had promised, two days after we had met, that he would come out -- Because there was gonna be a ballot, anti-LGBT constitutional amendment, anti-Marriage equality, that there were signatures, he was gonna come out against it at a press conference in Fresno on education. He didn't do it. I called his legislative director. I said, "What happened?" He said, "Oh, it just wasn't the right time." I said, "Tomorrow?" He goes,

GEOFF KORS: "I promise, yes." Tomorrow didn't happen. It was about day six, day seven, I don't remember exactly. And I said, " If he doesn't do it tomorrow, it's going to not just be letters and emails. It's gonna be much stronger." He didn't. We had this commercial filmed and it basically talked about there are moments in civil rights history when there are heroes.

GEOFF KORS: And it featured Cesar Chavez and the two Kennedys, Maria Shriver's family. And there were people and it was George Wallace and Jesse Helms. And it said, "Governor Schwarzenegger, be a hero." And we launched it the day that we had a meeting with his office. We didn't know if he was gonna be there or not. Activists and elected LGBT folks from around the state had come up. The call I got from his legislative director. And when we walked in the meeting,

GEOFF KORS: I got talked down to that we can disagree, we have to be civil, that was above the pale, that was unacceptable. I responded very nicely, just with all due respect, when someone makes a commitment that they're gonna oppose a discriminatory constitutional amendment and then breaks it, there's nothing civil about that. When the rate of suicide among LGBT youth is four times higher

GEOFF KORS: than non LGBT youth, don't talk to me about what's civil. When people are losing their jobs and having their kids taken away, don't talk to me about civil. It's one of those moments you're like, just stay with it, stay calm and focused. I think that was the right message to send that we're upping it because this is how it's gonna go. You don't get a pass. But throwing bricks through his window or chaining yourself to his desk, that's not the most effective way

GEOFF KORS: to show actually influence. You get one story in a newspaper that you chain yourself to a desk or you send a message that we're gonna play hard. He still signed all those other bills. But if we'd let it go without a response when he didn't come out against it, and he finally did on Prop 8 after a while, but then you're sending a message that you are powerless, and that's a terrible thing.

GEOFF KORS: It's all nuanced, and you make decisions and you talk to a lot of people about things like that before you make those decisions. I mean Bruce Cohen was involved in making that ad. There were people, Hollywood people, who were involved in making that ad. And we ran it. We raised money to run it and we ran it repeatedly in the zip code he lived and the Hyatt where he lived in Sacramento. There was no news station he could have watched without seeing

GEOFF KORS: that ad for about 10 days, two weeks. It was just like, it's not okay. Well, it's just not gonna be okay. But he was generally fine to work with and supported most of the bills. In some election years he'd veto something only to do with the next year, like he vetoed a Harvey Milk Day bill, but then signed it the next year and was generally good about bills that he didn't under ... They'd come back and say, this bill doesn't seem to do much, why does he need to sign it? And those are the bills we put, and I worked closely with Shannon Minter, especially

GEOFF KORS: at NCLR, but also with Lambda, ACLU. We would write findings in bills that lesbian, gay people are equally good parents. Like all the findings we needed to set up the marriage case would be in some of these bills that ban discrimination and getting prescriptions or something really minor that probably was already covered in the law just because we needed to have findings that the Supreme Court could use if they decided they wanted a rule for us in that case, because that case was four years in the court. It was a long court battle. Yeah.

MASON FUNK: Why all these years later, do you feel like employment on discrimination has still not become the law of land, federal law?

GEOFF KORS: It's just appalling, right?

MASON FUNK: And tell me what's appalling.

GEOFF KORS: Yeah, I mean, it's appalling that we still live in a country where half the states you can be fired for being lesbian, gay, bisexual, and even more transgender. And that we can't pass the Equality Act. And we couldn't pass ENDA. And

GEOFF KORS: there was a big battle over whether ENDA should include gender identity at the time. I think learning from what California did, you need to include it. And in fact, federally, we first got rights because of the transgender community because it was federal law under Title VII. There was always the argument that it's how you present. If you don't present in the typical characteristics of the gender, then you're protected. It is tied together. And sometimes

GEOFF KORS: you have to explain why these are similar issues even though they're obviously very different in people's personal lives. But with, what, 85, 80% of the public may, I know our numbers are going down a little for the first time sadly, support laws that ban discrimination based on sexual orientation in the workplace especially. We had one house vote for it once, and it's just appalling.

GEOFF KORS: The fact that when we had the Senate, the House and Obama in the first two years, that all of that didn't get done right. And that's where you get into priorities. And there was no reason those three couldn't have been pushed through. Nancy Pelosi was masterful in how she got Don't Ask Don't Tell overturned after they had lost the house, but before they changed hands.

GEOFF KORS: But those bills should have gotten through. And the filibuster in the Senate, I think, is part of the problem. Because the House can pass the Equality Act, not now but before, but you don't have 60 votes in the Senate. Part of that is you just need to be able to hold people accountable. But it's hard to in Republican states with Republican elected officials who are, even if they're somewhat supportive,

GEOFF KORS: the fact that we had 10 who would support the respect for Marriage Act. I mean, that's a sea change in not that long. I mean, when you're living it, it feels like a long time for people in places that have discrimination. But that's a sea change, that there were over 60 votes to vote that the marriages and states that do them will have to be respected. When DOMA was in the 90s. I mean, so to get --

GEOFF KORS: It can happen, but it took Tammy Baldwin, it took a couple Republicans. Often it was Republicans who had gay kids or relatives that come around. And it just goes to the importance which Harvey Milk come out, come out, wherever you are, the Human Rights Campaign National Coming Out Day, that somebody, oh, it's a gimmick. I said, "That wasn't a gimmick." Coming out is how we change the world if people don't know us. I had so many friends who didn't talk to their families who ended up voting for Prop 8.

GEOFF KORS: Because even though they knew their kids were gay, but they didn't wanna have the hard conversation, who afterwards said, okay, that has to be ever present in my relationship with my family. Our being out, and it's so hard -- I mean, I feel like kids in some parts of this country, transgender people, it can be so hard to be out. But when you're in a safe enough place that you can do it or willing to take some of the risks that go with it and live your life authentically,

GEOFF KORS: you're changing hearts and minds. When we did canvassing on marriage, door to door, there's always that debate in the community, are we saying don't hate, you're haters or is there common ground here? And that's again, that in and out different activism, you needed people saying, this is hate. But a lot of people who are on the fence, if you tell them they're hateful, they're gonna just close the door on it.

MASON FUNK: It's like calling them racists.

GEOFF KORS: Right. So how do you have that conversation? We found a lot of the door-to-door work was talking about love thy neighbor as thyself. What are our common values? There's that group. And we still have it in this country, I don't think in California enough, fortunately still, but a decade ago who, they're not hating gay people, they don't want you to get fired, they probably didn't want kids taken away, but telling their kids

GEOFF KORS: that married, you could fall in love with a man, it's fine. And that protection kid thing, which psychologists explain is just this primitive part of your brain. How do you find common ground with 'em? Going back to the earlier discussion on the inside/outside, you need to do both. You need to figure out how you can talk to people who are movable. While it's fine to alienate the people who aren't movable and hope the people in the middle don't want to be with them, but wanna be with you.

MASON FUNK: This is all great stuff. Thank you very much.

GEOFF KORS: No, thank you.

MASON FUNK: I'm learning a lot and I think in a different life, I would've also been a politician or something because it just gets me all fired up.

GEOFF KORS: Well, think about all the young people who are gonna see what you've created and decide to do different things in their life because they see it's possible.

MASON FUNK: Well, thank you.

GEOFF KORS: Yeah. You see that got me too. But it's true. If I could have seen things like what you do, as a kid, that would've changed my life.

GEOFF KORS: I know now we can have our emotional moment.

MASON FUNK: Nice. Sorry.

GEOFF KORS: No. Okay. That's how I get when I talk about it because you think that impact you're having is amazing.

MASON FUNK: Well, I hope so.

MASON FUNK: That's the goal.

GEOFF KORS: I mean, I know this from young people. I mean, they search the internet now, they can find out about LGBT things. I mean, one, there wasn't an internet, you go to the library and try and find articles and if you read anything, it was horrific. The life you would have to lead. And now you're making this available to so many kids and people. That's amazing.

MASON FUNK: Just a couple weeks ago, we decided

MASON FUNK: to devote 50% of our interviews for the next three years to transgender and gender nonconforming stories for that very reason. Like those are the stories that people have to see the most right now.

GEOFF KORS: Yeah.

MASON FUNK: For all kinds of reasons, including what you're talking about when you're trying to change people who are changeable, oftentimes it's gonna be through the heart and not through the brain. It's not a list of rights. And stories are the way that we all moved.

GEOFF KORS: Yeah. And there's nothing, we started at Equality California when we were doing -- My first or second

GEOFF KORS: year in the first package of bills we were doing was to add gender identity to the employment housing the non-discrimination laws. And we started doing a transgender lobby day because when we did the interviews for our political action committee and we had a questionnaire and in 2004 after seeing what was happening in DC with people who would get endorsed by HRC, because they say they supported ENDA but weren't with us on anything else

GEOFF KORS: and never had to vote on ENDA. And understandable, they were starting from nothing. Just we decided if you weren't 100% on LGBT rights, you didn't get our endorsement. Now sometimes we did a no on the worst candidate, but we weren't gonna put our logo on mail for a candidate who didn't support our mission. The two issues were always marriage and transgender. And this amazing legislator, well-meaning, I mean,

GEOFF KORS: she just said I'm fine with employment, but when it was the healthcare bill, she said no one's paying for my plastic surgery. This was on -- Pre-Zoom, it's a conference call. And I said, "Would you be willing to meet with me and a member of the transgender community?" She said, "Of course." And at the end of that meeting, she goes, "I'm so sorry." Should be, right, because Theresa Sparks in San Francisco shared her life story with her and all

GEOFF KORS: three of us were crying. And that's all it took. You have someone who's open-minded who doesn't quite get it right. So it's just so important. I love that you're doing that. Yeah, that's great.

MASON FUNK: Thank you. One of the other things that you mentioned that I find really interesting is the pushback you receive for pushing marriage and essentially being blamed for getting George Bush reelected within the community and outside the community, if I understand it. That's broad .

GEOFF KORS: Oh yeah. Okay. So you know, 2004, right? Massachusetts Court ruled on marriage. I was very involved from the first meeting with Gavin Newsom in his office when he was gonna allow marriage licenses to be issued in San Francisco. And there were definitely, even some of my close friends in the movement were like, this is not a good idea. This is not a good idea.

GEOFF KORS: The pushback's gonna be awful. 2003, we passed AB 205, all the rights of marriage under state law which passed by one vote in the Senate, one vote in the assembly, and Governor Davis said he wouldn't initially, was unlikely to sign it. And a whole bunch of things, including his recall threat, all helped and it got signed. Then to go and do like -- That was just like, yeah, we shouldn't do it.

GEOFF KORS: And Gavin, to his credit was like, if we don't do it, who's gonna ever do it? And I've always so respected him that he'll take on issues that are very unpopular, career-wise, because he thinks it's the right thing and believes it, that's how we're gonna prove that it is popular. And so there was definite, but very few people, those very three or four people knew that was happening as that got planned. And then when that happened, it definitely

GEOFF KORS: moved people.

MASON FUNK: Do me a favor. Just start by saying,

GEOFF KORS: Okay. When the marriages started in San Francisco --

MASON FUNK: When Mayor Newsom.

GEOFF KORS: Yes. When then Mayor Newsom, decided that San Francisco would start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and Phyllis and Del, the first couple to get married. And that went on for a month, right? Being televised all over the world. You could see the polling, there was definitely pushback.

GEOFF KORS: But within a year the numbers had gotten better because people had real people. They saw people with their kids, they saw families, they put a face on it. I think that just was so important. And then Mark Leno, the same day, was introducing our first marriage bill. It was in a meeting of the Freedom to Marry coalition when I shared with the group that Mark was gonna be introducing that bill

GEOFF KORS: on Freedom to Marry Day, Valentine's Day, which turned out to be the same day of course, marriages started in San Francisco. So even before that piece. And there was a lot of, like, "that's great," and a lot of "that's stupid." It's understandable, right? There's fear. We just got full domestic partnership rights, are we pushing too aggressively? What's the pushback gonna be? And Mark knew I was doing that. It was in the newspaper

GEOFF KORS: probably the next morning. And once it was, people came around, but there was a lot of fear. When I shared with the board and sent out the press release that we were sponsoring the marriage bill, there was a group of board members from Equality California, we had an upcoming meeting in Palm Springs, who met early to figure out how to fire me and the two co-chairs of the organization, Leslie Katz and Diane Abbitt. That this was awful, it was gonna

GEOFF KORS: help elect Republicans on and on and on. Even within the own organization. Now, in the end, everyone voted to support the bill. And it took then Mayor, Ron Oden, in Palm Springs to give a lecture about civil rights. And that if we don't do this, what are we doing? Why are we here? Yes, are we gonna lose this first year? Yes, this isn't passing. But if we don't start that conversation, if we don't push forward,

GEOFF KORS: we're not gonna get there. And so yeah, it was definitely contentious. And what was interesting, I think, in the San Francisco marriages, was friends of mine who are fine with marriage equality but didn't think it was important. When people started getting married and some of them got married, they're like, wow. I was just actually so internalizing the fact that I never thought this would happen that I just didn't think it was important.

GEOFF KORS: And that was great. The impact it had on people in our own community and their friends and family I think was really powerful. Really powerful. Yeah.

MASON FUNK: Community building.

GEOFF KORS: Yeah.

MASON FUNK: At that point the decision was the gut check happened and the board voted in favor, then you were willing, basically willing, to face the storm. You were willing to face the consequences.

GEOFF KORS: We knew full well we weren't gonna pass it in the legislature

GEOFF KORS: in that first year. In 2004 that just wasn't gonna happen. But we could build support. There are definitely Democrats who felt they were in swing districts and really pushed, in fact pushed the Speaker not to allow the bill to move forward. And the speaker was supportive of the freedom to marry at the time. But the day it was going, the last day, the rules committee could vote it out, I got a call

GEOFF KORS: from a member of the legislature who said they're taking one of the Democrats off who supports the bill and assigning them to a different committee at the same time so there aren't enough votes to get this bill out of the rules committee. And that was one of the days I said, I'm so glad I'm in San Francisco. Because I called the TV news stations and we went up there and we got the person back and got the vote out of Rules committee, and got it through Judiciary committee.

GEOFF KORS: And then it got killed in finance under the claim that it would cost money. Even though I had Brad Sears in the Williams Institute saying it wouldn't. We wouldn't have had the votes on the floor, so that was all fine. The Speaker committed that he'd be a principal co-author with Mark the next year, and that's the year we got the marriage bill passed in California, and that was 2005. I think that shocked all of us.

MASON FUNK: They only took one more year.

GEOFF KORS: They took one more year and just

GEOFF KORS: sort of in the conversation about inside/outside just after it failed in the assembly the first time, people who said they'd vote for it just didn't vote or mysteriously had to be out of the legislature. And Steve Hansen, who was our lobbyist, said, "Let's just do a gut and amend where you take a bill that's died, but you can amend a new bill into it and let's try and get it through the Senate," which we did. And then we had to figure out how we

GEOFF KORS: pick up three votes in the assembly when it came back for reconciliation. And there was just a whole campaign we did. And each one was a different campaign. How were you gonna work with 'em? And who are we gonna get quoted in the press whose in the same area? Why they supported the bill in the Senate to try and push the assembly member too? Showing up at the Labor Day picnics before the bill was being voted on with labor allies. The United Farm Workers and the NAACP in California were

Geoff Kors :

early advocates with us. And we actually, Christine Chavez, Chavez's granddaughter, was a political director and she came to work with us for those three months to help get the votes, and we got votes in someone from Salinas, in Central Valley, who, in the end, said, "I can't vote for this. It's because I wanna run for county supervisor, but if you get 40 votes, I will give you your 41st." And did, and he got elected with 70% of the vote

Geoff Kors :

because we've shown over and over again this issue never -- I won't say never is too big a word, but doesn't hurt people at the ballot box. The people who are gonna vote against someone purely because of their supportive LGBT rights isn't voting for these people anyway. Because they voted for marriage equality when they already voted for other issues, they're never voting for them. You have that conversation and they, I get it, you're an elected official. You're concerned about this is your job,

Geoff Kors :

what's the ramifications gonna be? But then honoring those folks who did that vote, which we did regularly. We did it with someone here in the assembly who was told not to vote on something in 2009 when we did a resolution that Prop 8 was unconstitutional to the Supreme Court, and five Democrats were told not to vote for it. There were enough votes anyway, that was the other thing they used to do. And they were very upset we didn't give them a pass if they did that. But there were five and three of them voted for it anyway.

Geoff Kors :

And Manny Perez, who's now supervisor here is in the assembly, did, and we honored him here the next year and he was just blown away. When he won the primary, he hadn't taken a position yet and he ended up saying, "I'm gonna support what I believe." And there were billboards against him all through Imperial Valley, the county over, of two guys holding hands, and he got elected and he always

Geoff Kors :

voted with us. But you need to make sure you really recognize the people where they are. Tough votes, right? Prop 22 passed in this area, probably by 80%; Prop 8, overwhelmingly because the district goes all the way to the Arizona border. So when someone goes against two-thirds of their voters and feels it's their job to be that leader, it's important that we recognize 'em for it because it sends a message to the others as well.

MASON FUNK: Yeah. That's great. That's great stuff. Let me check where I'm at. I don't want to neglect to talk -- I think you mentioned your questionnaire, 70 bills during your tenure. I want to just kind of, we won't be able to go through every single one, but I do want to hear what you look back on as the moments that stay with you the most. If you could give us that overview of what you accomplished as an organization during your years there

MASON FUNK: and which of the accomplishments that mean the most to you?

GEOFF KORS: Yeah. It's the legislative accomplishments. We were --

MASON FUNK: Do me a favor, say, "During my years."

GEOFF KORS: Oh sure. During my tenure at Equality California, the 70 bills that we sponsored that passed and became law to me are the major accomplishment since we were the lead on those. Even though we had amazing partners and

GEOFF KORS: couldn't have done it without all the partners, especially at the legal organizations and other political organizations, and of course, without the elected officials who shared their lives to help get these bills passed. We're also the plaintiff in the lawsuit that tried to overturn the domestic partner bill and in the marriage litigation in California, which was great because that was not the usual way these cases work. They were always the individuals and the couples,

GEOFF KORS: but allowed us to strategize confidentially on legislation and the litigation, so it was great. I mean because to have the ACLU and Lambda and NCLR all be such major forces in California made passing legislation and having people who could make sure it was written with the right legal views and setting up things for cases really made it really exciting.Because you had long conversations, brainstorming ideas and coming up

GEOFF KORS: with bill ideas and really working that through. I mean, but the parts I remember the most that were just so meaningful when the full domestic partner rights passed. I was on the floor of the assembly, and there was just this long pause when we got to 40 before we got that 41st vote, and then the place erupted. I remember Chris Kehoe, who was then assembly member and later senator

GEOFF KORS: from San Diego, was chairing the meeting and she was, I forgot exactly what she said, but we showed it in a video for many years. She was just unbelievable. I mean, no one thought we would get to that 41st vote. Some of the legislators said, "You're being too aggressive with people in tough districts. They're Democrats, you don't do that." And I'm like, we're not partisan. I get where you're coming from but our job is to push 'em because we need those votes. For me,

GEOFF KORS: that was the big moment where I'm like, okay, if we do this and work with people throughout the state and get our supporters in the Central Valley to go meet with their legislator who would vote on some of the stuff and just not 'no' vote but just stay off, which is the same as a 'no' vote because you need 41 yes votes in the assembly to pass anything, we can do this. This really has potential. I remember that day being really amazing.

GEOFF KORS: It was the same on the marriage bill. Like when it came back and that passed and on the floor of the assembly, Dolores Huerta came up to really work on two of the Latino members and Alice Huffman from the NAACP was there working with us on a couple of the African American members who wanted to do it but were nervous. And just to see these icons like there for our community and then to have that pass and be outside with the six members of the LGBT caucus.

GEOFF KORS: There's a photo Karen Ocamb has, and I have somewhere, of Mark Leno and I right after that, just looking at each other, this far apart. I just remember like, wow, that was an amazing moment. He was such a great, you know, more than anyone of an ally to work with, because he would sit with members for three, four -- He would sit with them hours and hours in private, never share that they talked, to talk through their concerns and their issues and their religious issues, whatever they may be. And

GEOFF KORS: just going to rabbinical school and being an elected official, Mark just had a way about him that got things done that were amazing. The other one that was really an incredible moment was the one we did quietly, so there was no official sponsor, which was the bill in 2005 that basically required that transgender people get gender affirming care in California. We worked with Paul Koretz, who was an assembly member then from

GEOFF KORS: West Hollywood and we called it the Gender Non-Discrimination Healthcare bill, and quietly got that through without ever talking about it as an organization and just as just an easy non-discrimination bill, not authorizing any new procedures because that requires two years of study from the UC system and all this other stuff. And a couple legislators who are allies saying, "I don't think you can do this." And having to talk with Kate Kendell and I often with a few of them about it,

GEOFF KORS: and getting that passed. And then once it was passed, getting the California systems to all require this. I just remember thinking, wow, this is gonna have such a profound impact on people's lives. Because I had friends who were saving up to try and do some ... I mean, nothing was covered by insurance. And even when hormone therapy started being covered by some, it was really hard, let alone gender reassignment

GEOFF KORS: surgery. So to be able to creatively have come up with a way and just think about how many people that was gonna impact, in such a profound way, to live their lives. I remember, when that was signed, saying to Shannon Mentor, "We did what we think we did right." And he's like, yep, we did. This is gonna do exactly what we think we're gonna have to work like hell to get all the state agencies to understand this. But the language

GEOFF KORS: was written in a way to do exactly what we wanted to do. At the one hand you're like, hate that you have to not do that in a public way until after it passes. But inside/outside strategy, right? We didn't want an outside strategy there. We wanted this to just no one to really think about it. Those are some of them. I mean when we did youth lobby days, that was always for me you'd have high school kids from GSAs

GEOFF KORS: around the state who we helped bus up and come and lobby for their rights and meet with legislators and the experience they had and then come back and sharing what it was like for them. That was always one of the most amazing days for me, also. I mean, we did lots of different lobby days. We did family lobby days and marriage lobby day and every year we had one LGBT lobby day. But for years with the GSA network, we did a youth lobby day, LGBT youth GSA lobby day. And it was all kids who spoke at the capitol. I mean,

GEOFF KORS: it was just a great -- I hadn't thought about some of these things until we're talking today, but those were just days you would just leave and say, God, I love my life. I love my job. Yeah, great.

MASON FUNK: See all those bright shiny faces,

GEOFF KORS: Oh my god. And excited and feeling, wow, we got someone to sign up as a co-author on this bill. Because they got specific instructions, these are the bills we need, you're meeting with the people in your districts. If you can leave with them signing on and as a co-author, that means they're gonna vote for it.

GEOFF KORS: We got a bunch of 'em. For a high school student to come out and say, I got that. And then see the bill passed by one vote. I mean, how amazing. I just think the impact those kids are now having in the world is amazing. Yeah.

MASON FUNK: I'm just flashing back because Kate was there on OUTWORDS' first ever East Coast swing, and we interviewed Shannon and Kyle Broda

MASON FUNK: the same afternoon in DC at the end of a conference. You remember those? Mm-Hmm. , they were both so rung out, and Shannon cried more in that interview than any person we've ever interviewed.

GEOFF KORS: Oh, I feel better. Good. Yeah.

MASON FUNK: You may come in a second. Yeah. But it was so emotional, I think for him because went back to his Texas childhood and everything that he went through there. And so I love hearing you invoke his name. And to this day we're in touch.

GEOFF KORS: It was one of my and James and my favorite people. In fact, when Shannon moved to DC,

GEOFF KORS: he stayed with us in San Francisco. And I mean, I work more with -- When I think of the allies I work with, there's no two people I work more with, in the legal world, than Kate Kendell and Shannon Minter, both still dear friends. In fact, I spoke to Kate yesterday. And in the elected world, I mean, Mark Leno was just that guy. I mean, they all were great and did great bills, but just when you --

GEOFF KORS: The people you know are always thinking about how we get something done and they're there for the right reasons and will always have your back if you're on the ride with them. And really special people. Yeah. Really special people.

MASON FUNK: Okay, so we're gonna talk a little bit about California. We're gonna kind of start to head into the homestretch. So these are questions. Yeah, I think

MASON FUNK: so one would be, at this particular time, and this is something we talked about with Rick Zbur. for example, California, it's always been a beacon of hope since the 70s and probably before that, and now we're so far ahead of the large swaths of the nation in legal protections and it sometimes feels like we're like in the lifeboat and everybody else is still in the water. So what is California's

MASON FUNK: responsibility and what can California as a state do right now on behalf of the nation as a whole? Rick talked about, for example, passing California that can be exported, which I thought was fascinating, but what are some other roles and responsibilities that California has right now at this point in time?

GEOFF KORS: I think because California is so far in front of most of the country on LGBT rights,

GEOFF KORS: but also on other issues, reproductive justice, I mean many, many issues. We're also the biggest state and we're a very large economy, as governor Newsom is reminding people in other states, and I think we need to use the fact that people want to do business with us, which we've been doing since the equal benefits bill back in 1996 in San Francisco, and the state has used in many ways.

GEOFF KORS: We can use our economic power. I think that's one thing that we have done and we need to continue to do in more ways. And the good thing about those kind of bills is all California businesses already provide equal benefits. They already provide non-discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. All those things exist here. So when California says we're not gonna do business with companies that don't provide these things, and you're in states that don't allow them to be provided,

GEOFF KORS: it only helps California businesses. There's definitely the economic tools that we have been using in California, and I think Governor Newsom has taken onto other issues. The creative way he's trying to deal with gun control and using some of the same tactics that the right-wing used for abortion care. I think we can use our economic clout. I also think being California, our governor, our senators

GEOFF KORS: they have a voice and they need to be out front, and they are, but we need our elected officials to really be out front, both publicly, taking every opportunity to be on the Sunday talk shows and talk about the issues and the harms, and why it works so well in California. I think there's that whole piece there. I think our organizations have really stepped up. I don't think people get endorsed from any major LGBT organization if they're not a hundred percent with us.

GEOFF KORS: And being strategic and picking where you play. We've started giving more to organizations, PACS, than to individual candidates unless they're representing us specifically, because I don't know which races are gonna be close at the last minute. When Barbara Boxer had her PAC, she knew the polls every day, she would move funds for ads, because if this person's up 4%,

GEOFF KORS: this race is in a 1 or 2%. We need to be strategic. We need to be strategic with our funds to make sure we're trying to flip seats where we can. Yes. You wanna support someone who's running in a place where they have no chance of winning because it's a great message. But how can we be as strategic as we can, philanthropically, especially in the political arena, because the political arena that we're really battling right now,

GEOFF KORS: I am very sad to say, I think we could see a generation before we have a shot at having the courts go back to being rational and being at all supportive of LGBT rights as a fundamental right. I think that's true, unfortunately on reproductive justice and other issues. I think this week we may see, hopefully I'm wrong, I'll be wrong by the end of the week, affirmative action. There are so many issues,

GEOFF KORS: so we have to plan the political arena. I mean, in 2010, the Republican party was very clever, right? There was a lot of money raised to try and save Congress for the Democrats while Republicans played there. They also made sure they won as many state legislative seats as they could so they could do redistricting, and then you're crippled. There are people who work on this who are brilliant and I wanna support those folks doing that work. I think

GEOFF KORS: California is a great example. The conservative and the Republican party decided California should be a redistricting commission that's independent. While in places like Texas, they oppose that, where they're in control. And it passed here because it seems like a good idea, redistricting shouldn't be done by politicians. It only actually resulted in less Republicans getting elected. I think we just need to use our example that when you play

GEOFF KORS: by the rules and you play fair, you can do good things. I think that's important. I loved that under Rick Zbur's leadership at Equality California, they partnered with Nevada in helping them try and pass bills. And look, we have two swing states at our borders and lots of folks, we did phone calls into Nevada and Arizona, the Stonewall Democratic Club did that here. Like, I just think we all need to step up a little bit more. Because I have so many friends, "What can I do?

GEOFF KORS: What can I do other than giving money," if they can. And I'm like, you can phone bank from home. If you just take two hours once a week for 10 weeks, you'll leave messages for at least a hundred people. And if that could be four votes, you know something, that adds up and makes a difference. Our assembly seat here, Palm Springs being its own bastion right now, that it is of LGBT rights and had the first all LGBT

GEOFF KORS: government entity, we think, in the world. Christy Holsted ran for assembly. It had been a Republican seat, it was a Democratic leaning seat, and she lost by about 80 votes. I mean, it's a district that represents half a million people. And she's running again, she would be the first bisexual elected legislator in California. Well, I can think of at least 10, 15 people who just -- They didn't vote. So you just think that adds up.

GEOFF KORS: Races are decided by less than 1/10th of 1% of a vote, where you could have had our first openly bisexual member of the legislature who is so courageous and brave and will be when she gets elected this time, or someone who will do nothing and is I don't think anti our rights, but it's not gonna do anything for them either. If we all just carve out like what we can and commit to something

GEOFF KORS: and something we tried to get people to do in Equality California, canvass one day a month go door to door? If you won't go door to door, take a phone list, and you get people to do it now, not enough usually. But sometimes I think, and I'm guilty of it too, like we complain about things. How could I better use some of that time trying to move some people. I think

GEOFF KORS: we have a lot of people in the state, and I think that's the power of California.

MASON FUNK: So in a way it's almost like if we have all this population in California who are willing to go do the polling, knocking on doors, making phone calls, whatever, to create small changes here in California, that then has a kind of an expander effect.

GEOFF KORS: Of course.

MASON FUNK: Yeah. What we do in California matters a lot. If you're wondering what you can do, you can

MASON FUNK: work in California to these people elected.

GEOFF KORS: And that's the one thing you can work on the races here. But the Democratic headquarters here, Equality California, they're also gonna make calls into our neighboring states where the races are gonna be decided by really small margins as well. And that's where you look at some of the states how close it was in the presidential election. You don't have to do all of it. Pick one thing. If everyone picks one thing that they commit to doing,

GEOFF KORS: that's sort of how it all happens. So I think that's it.

MASON FUNK: Great. What do you look back on as the maybe two or three most important moments in California LGBTQ+ political history?

GEOFF KORS: Well, interestingly

GEOFF KORS: and maybe me more, personally, but I think one of the most important things that happened at a time when we had no rights in California was when we passed the Equal Benefits Ordinance in San Francisco. And that came about because the Salvation Army would be the lowest bidder to do the HIV/AIDS Thanksgiving and Christmas meals, when they were, at the time, openly, blatantly homophobic. But they always underbid the San Francisco AIDS Foundation,

GEOFF KORS: and it became a big story. I was chairing the legislative committee of the Harvey Milk Democratic Club at the time and came up with the idea, well, we can't legally, because of state preemption, prohibit them from doing this, but how about we say, because they say gay people are welcome to come, that's a lot of the people come into these meals, so we don't discriminate, therefore, it's fine. That if you don't give equal benefits to registered domestic partners of

GEOFF KORS: your employees that you give to spouses, you can't do business with the city. And it seemed like an easy thing, it wasn't so easy. But getting that passed and then realizing during the process that meant the airlines, car companies who sold to the police department, and in the end human rights campaign said probably 75% of the Fortune 500 changed their policies over that law. Mark Leno carried that for us in

GEOFF KORS: Sacramento. And we did a second bill where we added that you also had to provide the same benefits for healthcare for transgender people that we had in our state law that we passed in 2005. I think those had the most impact on people's day-to-day lives, because all of a sudden people had healthcare. They can get insurance with their partners, people could get gender affirming care.

GEOFF KORS: So to me, those were just huge moments because it also changed corporate America and small businesses. The Chamber of Commerce opposed us in San Francisco, but when it passed, and there was only Kaiser at the time providing the benefits, they created a small insurance pool and got more members. It just started the snowball effect that goes to the discussion about how California can use its economic clout to get more people to do the right thing because they wanna do business with us.

GEOFF KORS: I think winning the marriage case was transformational. Prop 8 was transformation -- Okay. Winning the marriage case in California was just an amazing moment because for the first time, given all the legislation that had been passed, we actually were the first place in the country where you had full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. I remember being in city hall under the dome

GEOFF KORS: speaking right after Shannon and talking about that and how profound that was, what that case gave us, that we could actually feel what that was like in our lives, knowing what was coming months away. I think Prop 8 was transformational. How many people just assumed we would win, even though the early poll showed us down, the LA Times poll after the case, only 37%

GEOFF KORS: were gonna support us. And that rollercoaster, what turned into this huge campaign when the Mormon church engaged the way they did, and that had -- Of course, it's really painful moments, right? Having your rights taken away and having people vote that way. But to see the community and allies step up and respond to that and stay engaged. It wasn't just like those protests after. People who really hadn't been engaged, even friends of mine who were very supportive, they wrote a

GEOFF KORS: check to EQCA, when I asked, they really engaged. That stung. They're like, they just could not believe. Because, of course, the people in their lives were supportive, in San Francisco or San Diego, they just could not believe that people actually voted that way. It just shocked them really, to some people, they said, to the core and they engaged in a way they'd never engaged before. I think that's very transformational for the community, because I think what

GEOFF KORS: came out of that was a lot more people being out, sharing their stories and really demanding our rights. I think those are all really momentous moments. There are many, but those are the ones that really first come to mind from a California specific point of view.

MASON FUNK: It goes to the idea that sometimes a massive setback can be actually an accelerator.

MASON FUNK: Does that resonate with you?

GEOFF KORS: Yeah, it does, of course. I think the reason big setbacks often turn into major accelerators is because it ignites the people who are impacted, whether it's you personally or friends. In this case, we're talking about marriage equality, but other social movements this applies to. It also brings an awareness

GEOFF KORS: to the public. I mean, there are a lot of people after Prop 8, when we were going door to door throughout the state, who just said, "I just never thought this really hurt someone." And that's really important. Like for people, it just led to people realizing, one, they knew more lesbian, gay people in relationships than they thought, who then would talk to them about it. And also realizing they were hurting people. I think most people, they don't want to intentionally hurt another human being.

GEOFF KORS: I'm not sure that's true of some people, but it's true of most people. When they realize they were doing that, a lot of people who were sort of, I just don't like this. I don't want to be a bigot. I'm not a bigot, but wow, I really hurt people. Okay. Like, it just made them stop and think. So I think the people it impacted and their friends and family, but also people whose hearts were and minds were opened because they realized, wow, people really care about this.

GEOFF KORS: This really hurt people. I do think that had a big impact. I mean, people talked in the workplace and maybe never did before. It also made their day-to-day lives better and more fulfilling. Because, yeah, people knew they were gay, but they never talked what they did over the weekend, the way other people do. And that started to change. So I think it did. I think that setback awful. One of the most awful nights probably I have ever had.

GEOFF KORS: But no one stopped, we didn't stop. I think the community really kept going and pushed even harder.

MASON FUNK: Kate, I always make space for Kate questions? Anything on your mind?

KATE KUNATH: Not yet.

MASON FUNK: Okay.

KATE KUNATH: I know it's almost over, but .

MASON FUNK: Yeah. I'll come back to you. I wondered, this is another one of the questions we're asking for this

California State library grant, you've given lots of guidance and wisdom for young activists already, but if you were gonna have the opportunity to sit down with someone who was trying to figure out, like, how am I gonna make a difference in the world? What advice would you give?

GEOFF KORS: Sure. And I've had that opportunity, which is really lovely, especially here in Palm Springs. I've had high school graduates going off to college, or one, not that long ago, going to law school, just asking me how

GEOFF KORS: I went on my path, and often it's an LGBT person, but not always. But I think it's: what is your passion? If you want to be part of making change in the world and you see that as something you wanna spend your life doing, what is it that's driving you? And connect with organizations that do that kind of work? Because I do think

GEOFF KORS: so many people working in the LGBT movement interned or volunteered with a social justice movement at some point, because those connections, the mentorship you can get in those organizations. And we worked really hard to be mentors at Equality California for people because you want to give people that connection and then be the reference for them. I didn't have that as a young person. I had it in politics. I had recommendations

GEOFF KORS: from elected officials who I had worked for. I had some environmental groups that I had done work for, but that didn't exist for me in LGBT, which is one of the areas I wanted to work. But I would say connect with people who are in those fields and think about how you're gonna wanna do this. My oldest niece just graduated law school and she's gonna be clerking for the next two, maybe three years

GEOFF KORS: for federal judges. But from high school, she volunteered on a youth suicide prevention. She volunteered at Equality California. She's been involved in a lot of organizations and it really has helped her just really think about how she wants her career to go. I think that is such an important thing to do because we learn the most from each other. And people who have done it or are doing the work that

GEOFF KORS: we're interested in are gonna be the best people to connect with, to learn from and to help mentor you. I think in all the social justice movements I've been a part of, even tangentially, we all want that. We want people to want to get into this work and make it part of their lives. I think there's a lot of support available for folks out there.

MASON FUNK: Great. Come back to you again, Kate. Anything on your mind now?

KATE KUNATH: I guess what would your advice be about sort of the battlefield fatigue? How do you keep going? What are your kind of tips?

GEOFF KORS: Sure. I think that's good because there are times, especially after a major loss, you just feel beat up, and to some degree you are emotionally drained. But I think it's:

GEOFF KORS: take care of yourself a little bit. I mean, in 2009 I took four weeks' vacation and went off by myself to Hawaii for a couple weeks, and my husband James met me for the last 10 days. I didn't talk to another person the whole time I was there. I swam and bodyboarded every day. I cooked, I went to the gym. Just like, sometimes you have to disconnect. But you also need to celebrate those victories. There are gonna be a lot of victories on the way, that's part of it too.

GEOFF KORS: I think the way you get through the hard ones is to make sure you're celebrating the victories and see the really tough defeats as the opportunity that they are. Because no one gets into this kind of work to give up because you lost something. These are long battles as we're seeing now. No one would've predicted five years ago we'd be facing the kind of backlash that is being targeted against our community, and particularly the transgender community.

GEOFF KORS: But it's not surprising because the bigots go for the most vulnerable people they can, transgender youth. I mean, you have to be just an awful human being to do that. And for me, the other thing, especially after Prop 8 and some of the marriage stuff, because we went around the state talking to LGBT folks, just remembering, like hearing from some of the teenagers how they felt when their neighbors and their parents or their parents' friends had "Yes On 8" signs. We were like, you can't let them down.

GEOFF KORS: I think that's the other piece that really guided me during some of the hard times, is I wish I had someone as a kid who was willing to fight and I knew about it. And there were. I mean, I didn't know about Stonewall. I didn't know about any of the people who were fighting for LGBT rights way before I was born. So you have to just say, try and be that person for someone else sometimes. And also know

GEOFF KORS: sometimes, okay, maybe I should stop doing this and do something else. And things in your life take you down those routes and other things open up. I think, enjoy the victories and take the defeats as an impetus to say we have to work harder and smarter, and clearly we have work to do. When the majority of people vote to take away your rights you know you have work to do to change that. You can't have the

GEOFF KORS: majority of people in your state not want you to have equality.

MASON FUNK: . Yeah. That's great. My dad said to me, just vis-a-vis couple things in my life, he said, "It's a marathon, not a sprint. It was kind of one of his favorite expressions. It really is. If you burn out at the first defeat then, maybe this isn't your best arena, but if you want to stay in the work, you're gonna have

MASON FUNK: to kind of base yourself.

GEOFF KORS: Yeah, yeah. This is what you want to do, and you want to be part of that change, you can't let a loss stop you. Because there are gonna be losses. There's no social movement that doesn't have lots of losses.

MASON FUNK: I think that's one of the things that maybe is most important for a young person to understand is: if loss is actually inevitable, do you think that there will always be losses? Is that part of change?

GEOFF KORS: Yeah. I don't think, even as the anti-choice organizations really started getting more traction, anyone thought we'd be at this moment when it comes to abortion care and reproductive rights and justice, I think none of us thought we'd be seeing the kind of hateful stuff we're seeing in a place like Florida. Which has such a big LGBT population. There are gonna be setbacks. I mean,

GEOFF KORS: I think the shock when the voters voted against allowing some affirmative action in California, again, right? There was a lot of repercussions when that first passed, and this time everyone was on board. The polling was good. And okay, that's still out there. I think one of the devastating things that Donald Trump did to this country was not only

GEOFF KORS: did he give permission for people to voice it, but he made it seem like you could be one of us if you voice it. He spread that kind of hatred in such a terrible way that I think we're seeing this across the board in social justice movements right now, and movements, personally, I think he could care less about. It's all about power. And so to see that backwards, right. The arc of justice always bends towards justice.

GEOFF KORS: But yeah, it's bending back and so you need to never let go of that. And always it's the motto of the ACLU. You always have to be vigilant. You always have to be vigilant, but you can move your energy sometimes to other things, but you have to be vigilant. You have to pay attention. And I think we're all paying attention in this country in a major way right now, and we really have to. My husband

GEOFF KORS: is finishing his second year as president of Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest, and just to see that up close, what they've done. And he spoke at their gala in San Diego. You could easily retrench in that moment, like, okay, we gotta keep doing what we're doing, instead, they just went full steam, like, okay, we have to create a fund for women from out of state, and we have to do this, we have to do this.

GEOFF KORS: They never thought they would have to do that. They're operating their health centers, they're doing great work. But that's what happened. And it's how you deal with those moments. The moment can never be to retreat as I know some people wanted to do when George Bush beat, I don't know what's his name anymore, John Kerry, who said he would support a constitutional amendment

GEOFF KORS: in Massachusetts. I mean, when your allies aren't with you, and of course they always wanna blame a small group for their loss, but when you looked at the results in the states. He did better than his predecessor, than Gore did in a lot of those states. So this wasn't why George W. won.

GEOFF KORS: This is how it is. Any group that's not a majority has to be vigilant on their rights. And women are the majority of our country, and we have to be vigilant on women's rights. Because the majority of people in power are still men.

MASON FUNK: Well, I think we're down to what we call the final four. This is like the lightning round.

GEOFF KORS: Oh, cool.

MASON FUNK: So a couple sentences. The first one is,

MASON FUNK: if you could tell 15 year old Geoff Kors anything, what would you tell your 15 year old self? If I could.

GEOFF KORS: Yeah. If I could tell my 15 year old self anything, it's not to be afraid to live your life authentically and go after what you want.

MASON FUNK: Great. Do you ascribe to the notion that there is some unique quality,

MASON FUNK: superpower maybe, or gift that all queer people share that kind of links us and also is what we are uniquely empowered to give to the world.

GEOFF KORS: I do think that queer people have a shared connection and power in that we all grew up knowing we were different and different in a way that we didn't know if we could talk about at some point.

GEOFF KORS: I think there's some exception with some youth now. I think when you grow up as part of any minority, you understand and feel the sting of discrimination and prejudice. I think that connects people. I think, hopefully, connects you with other people who are in similar situations so that you work together. Because when we're working together, we are the majority.

MASON FUNK: Great. Why is it important to you to share your story?

GEOFF KORS: It's important for me to share my story because I think through sharing stories you give people hope for themselves, if your story is one they can see themselves in, some way, as part of. And I think sharing our stories as LGBTQ+ people

GEOFF KORS: is how we change hearts and minds. Whenever I spoke at our events, I always felt I had a -- I say my parents, my siblings, my husband, then partner and husband, were sort of my props because if I'm not gonna share my story, how can I be asking tens of thousands of people in California to share their stories? But when we all share our stories and we live our lives authentically,

GEOFF KORS: it's the only way we ever can ever have people understand who we are and when they understand who we are and how we feel, we move them to accept us. I think Palm Springs for LGBT people just on those issues sort of proves it when you work together, socialize, volunteer, whatever it is, people don't care about sexual orientation or gender identity. For a transgender woman,

GEOFF KORS: the first to ever win political office in California, Lisa Middleton, to come in with the most votes, with support from some pretty conservative Republicans, her being transgender was just a non-issue. And that's because we're 40, 50% of the population. We're not the minority here. But sharing those stories is how you start moving people who might immediately just turn off to that until they know someone. One Republican friend,

GEOFF KORS: it came up, Lisa was transgender. They go, I never think of her as transgender. Like, she's Lisa. And I'm like, wow, that's exactly what we want to see happening.

MASON FUNK: Last but not least, you already gave such a beautiful shout out to OUTWORDS, but we like to ask people, at the end, what value you perceive in a project like OUTWORDS where we are traveling the country, recording the story of LGBTQ+ elders.

MASON FUNK: What value do you see in a project like that? If you could mention OUTWORDS in your answer? Of course.

GEOFF KORS: There's such a high value to the work OUTWORDS does. One, keeping oral histories of people from the LGBTQ+ community and just having that recorded is just an important part of history. I think for the people being interviewed, and I'll speak for myself and some people I know, it's a great way to remember

GEOFF KORS: things that we haven't thought about in a long time and reignite our passion for justice. I think most importantly, there are so many people in other parts of this country, parts of California, throughout the world of all ages, but especially young people who have access to hear stories and hear of people who have lived the most amazing fulfilling lives as openly LGBTQ people. I mean, that is a gift that I wish I had

GEOFF KORS: as a kid. I think OUTWORDS is giving that gift to more people than OUTWORDS will ever know.

MASON FUNK: Great. Well, thank you very much for that.

GEOFF KORS: Thank you.

MASON FUNK: Is there anything else that you -- I mean, there's so much else we could have talked about. But is there anything that you feel like, I wanna make sure I talk about that and you haven't had a chance?

GEOFF KORS: One thing that came into my mind a couple times when I was talking about other things as we talked

GEOFF KORS: about "What drives you," my mom's expression to me all the time was this isn't a dress rehearsal. James and I use that a bunch, and it applies to all parts of your life, of course, but it also applies to my activism. But this is your shot to do something important if that's what you want to do, or if you wanna do something else, do that. But make the most

GEOFF KORS: of this opportunity we have. We have this unique opportunity to be alive. And for me to have been alive during a time we've seen mostly advancements in so many areas and for the LGBT community, like, make the most of it.

MASON FUNK: Yeah. Reminds me, I love the line from the song cabaret. The final stanza says, "Start by admitting from cradle to tomb, it isn't that long a stay."

MASON FUNK: Like if you just bear that in mind and say, okay, let's go.

GEOFF KORS: And that can apply to having a great social life, whatever it may be. My husband, James, and I talk every morning when you get up, it's like, we're gonna have to have coffee and sit outside and look at the mountain and be so grateful. Like, have a little bit of that gratitude every day and remember how fortunate we are to have any opportunities to do anything and make the most of it.

MASON FUNK: Every single day

MASON FUNK: we just never know what's around the corner. Well, thank you so much.

GEOFF KORS: Thank you.

MASON FUNK: This has been a real pleasure.

GEOFF KORS: Yeah, this has been great. It's been really great.