Mason Funk Okay. So thank you for making time for us.

Sheila Kuehl My pleasure.

Mason Funk If you could start off by stating and spelling your first and last names.

Sheila Kuehl My name is Sheila Kuehl. S-H-E-I-L-A-K-U-E-H-L.

Mason Funk Okay. Can you tell us the date and place of your birth?

Sheila Kuehl I was born February 9th, 1941 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Mason Funk Woo. Tulsa. We got a Toledo gal this morning and a Tulsa gal Sheila Kuehl There. Well, I'm not really a Tulsa gal. 00:00:30We were only there for five months, but it was a birthplace.

Mason Funk A birthplace. We all have one. It is always nice to start off with just a little portrait, a family portrait. Who was in your family, how many kids, siblings, et cetera, and kind of what were the values and what did your parents like and emphasized to you?

Sheila Kuehl My mom and dad had met in St. Louis, 00:01:00and that's where they lived until I was two. My dad was working in an aircraft plant in Tulsa. That's why I was born there. But it was when the war broke out, they opened aircraft plants everywhere, and when I was two, they gave my dad an opportunity to move to California, and that's how we came to Los Angeles. My dad was from a German Catholic family, and my mother was from a Russian Jewish family. She was first generation. 00:01:30She had two sisters. He had a sister and a brother, and so there were many cousins, but there was no one in California but us. We moved to LA. My dad was very creative. He worked at Douglas until the end of World War II and then opened his own business, but it was just him making sort of props and decorating 00:02:00windows for independent shoe stores, dress shops, fabric stores where he would supply the things that you would drape it over or show it on. And he was, as I said, very creative, so he would rent it instead of selling it to the stores, and then he would change it every season. So they would have spring colors and a big winter Santa Claus in the window or whatever. 00:02:30My mother had been orphaned at the age of 11. She went to work in a garment factory with her two sisters when she was a kid. But she really liked working. She really liked school, but she left at the end of the eighth grade, and my dad did too. But she really valued education, as she understood it. Reading, being able to do math, being able 00:03:00to know your ABCs. They were honest in that kind of working class way that doesn't know why everyone isn't honest. I mean, it doesn't even occur to them, not to be honest. They were very loving. Though my dad was not very vocal, but my little sister was born four years after I was, and so my dad, 00:03:30having no sons, taught me to fish. We would go down to the ocean and fish early in the morning. He taught me how to change a tire, and what ran a car. My mother believed that everything was faded, that everything was meant to be Bashert. Though I was raised Catholic, there was plenty of Jewish culture in the house with her and her two sisters. 00:04:00My dad believed that you worked to get what you got. And also he taught me that everything in the world could be taken apart, understood, and put back together. He meant it physically, but it's a much bigger lesson than that, especially when you're trying to understand society, which served me in good stead in law school. 00:04:30Mason Funk Was it a big deal in any way, shape or form for your dad, from your dad's family's point of view or grandma's point of view, for them to have married someone who wasn't of their faith?

Sheila Kuehl I wondered whether there was a problem in my dad's family to be marrying a Jewish woman because were married in 1939. Okay. 1939. There was some problems in Europe, which actually America either didn't know about or didn't want to know about, 00:05:00between Germans and Jews. So I asked my dad's sister many, many years later and she said, "No, we loved Lil,” being just as conversational actually as my dad, one sentence you got. But my dad was 5'2", my mother was 4'11", and they both loved to dance. In St. Louis, there was a dance practically every weekend night on the 00:05:30Admiral Riverboat. And so my dad would go with his friends and my mom would go with her friends from the garment place where she was working, and my dad would look around and there was no one who was shorter than he was except this one woman, so he asked her to dance, and boy, they could dance. They could dance their whole lives. I think the family ... he was the runt in his family, the young one 00:06:00and the wanderlust one. And I think they were kind of happy to see him get married, and they just liked her in spite of themselves. She had not been brought up in the deep sort of religious study as a Jew. It was more like the superstitions in the house, but she did know about the celebrations and holidays, 00:06:30and she very much believed that at Yom Kippur, God would write your entire next year's fate in his book. And that was it. So it's a funny thing to grow up with one person thinking everything was fated and another person thinking you kind of made what you would get. And it brought me to think about the difference between predetermination and free will, believe it or not, going to Catholic study when you're seven years old, 00:07:00they talk about this stuff. And I drew a picture at one time, of myself as a stick figure under a rainbow, standing under a rainbow. And I felt like the rainbow was everything that was fixed, where you were born, who you were born to, talents that you might have, et cetera. But the space between you and the bottom of the rainbow were places that you could dance, you could jump up and down, you could make choices, and therefore some things were fixed and some things 00:07:30you could decide for yourself. So I think it was an early example of ways that I tried to mash two things that never seemed to be able to exist in the same breath together, which also helped in law school.

Mason Funk That's a great illustration. Yeah, those two competing notions, if we really go to the heart, we all grapple with that. Especially when we see people whose lives turn out 00:08:00so differently for better and for worse, and we wonder, how did I end up with such a good life or with a good life?

Sheila Kuehl Well, a lot of ending up with a good life is honestly luck, the luck of being loved by your parents, because that helped you get over a lot of trauma. You just are more confident because they loved you. You don't know it at the time that you're going to be, but it really, really helps. And for instance, 00:08:30in my twenties, I would wonder what's wrong with me? Like many 20 year olds, what's wrong with me? And then in my thirties, it was like, what's wrong with them? And that also helps.

Mason Funk Yeah. So what was your sense of yourself? Just who did you see yourself as when you were, say, an adolescent?

Sheila Kuehl Well, adolescence is a really, really crazy time. I mean, there's a new Pixar movie coming out where 00:09:00the child that was represented in Inside out by having all those different emotions in her brain gets a new emotion and it's anxiety, which takes over everything. So I think as an adolescent, I really wasn't at all sure of who I was or the kind of person I was because I was two years ahead in school. In middle school, you'd change for gym and they'd all be wearing brass 00:09:30and you'd be wearing an undershirt still. And so when I finally got there, they were 16, but I was 13, and so my friends were all older than me, and it was difficult to understand. I hadn't gone through the phases at the same time as they had, but I'd been working as an actress since I was nine. And so I was very confident because I was a professional and had been a professional as a child 00:10:00and then into my teens. So again, there's a kind of cacophony about trying to understand personal life, which never makes any sense, and work life, which you can kind of organize in a way.

Mason Funk So your work life, even at that early age was providing some structure that a lot of the adolescents don't have.

Sheila Kuehl It's funny because you don't think that acting is going to provide structure. You think it's going to provide confusion, 00:10:30but ... I mean, I was very happy at school. I loved school. I used to hate going home for summer vacation, not because I didn't like home, but because I loved school. I mean, you were always learning things. I was in plays. I was good at school, and so you love things you're good at. So I guess my sense of myself was I was smart. I was an actor. I was not good looking or 00:11:00popular in the same way that the mean girls were popular, and it didn't bother me. All of my friends were sort of the unusual people, which is kind of more interesting as you look back on it, but sometimes a little weird when you're in it.

Mason Funk Yeah. Yeah. We think nerds are cruel now, but not when you're a nerd. Okay. So just generally speaking, this is the fifties, 00:11:30heading towards the sixties. Did you have any notion at all of there being lesbian people in the world, gay people? Were you aware of them? Did you know they existed, and did you hear weird things? Any notion at all?

Sheila Kuehl I would say no. I had no notion that there were gay or lesbian people in the world. 00:12:00The only sense I had of it was that there were people who loved other people of the same gender, and it was a bad thing to do. I remember a song in ... it might've been probably in the fifties, in the early fifties, called April Love, and it was popular on the Hit Parade, which is where we knew what was popular 00:12:30at the time. There was kind of a different take on it that I remember very well hearing from some of the kids at school. And it went: "I found my April love in Portugal, it seems, for it was on a Thursday, we were wearing green." And when I've done research since then, it turns out that that was allegedly how you would know the gay people 00:13:00and how they would know each other, that they would wear green on Thursday, and you would know that was an invitation to hide out somewhere together because you certainly couldn't be public. That was it for me. And I had only a very vague sense of what that meant, but I was still in my teens when I was in college. I started college at 16, and when I was 18, 00:13:30I had been a counselor at uni camp at UCLA, which was just a fabulous experience for me and one that changed my life. But in the second summer, I was the head counselor at a diabetic session, and I met a woman and really fell for her. I had never really loved any of the boys that I had dated. I liked them very much, but I didn't know what it was supposed to feel like 00:14:00to be in love. And I was worried that we would be in trouble, but it never stopped me. We were together for 12 years and we lived together and no one knew. I mean, except there is a glass closet to many people that you find out later. But my first partner was a woman. She was four years older than I, 00:14:30and I really loved her. But in a way, it was a first marriage where you use it to get away from your home where you're a child, you want to be an adult, so you enter into a relationship and sometimes people get married. She was controlling. She had her own sort of issues. I didn't know what a relationship was supposed to be like, so it wasn't whether it was gay or straight, 00:15:00I thought that's the way it would be. She was not physically controlling or abusive or anything like that, but emotionally, and it wasn't until I worked in the battered women's movement that I realized, oh, I think that was some of that. And so after that relationship, after I left that relationship, but it was 12 years later, I was 30 and I started, I thought, I don't know really anything about men, and I 00:15:30really like them, so I should probably try some. When I was 30, it was 1971, and everyone was kind of very promiscuous and experimenting with being promiscuous in the straight community too, so I slept with a lot of men and I really, really like men, but I never fell in love with anybody. So that really was not going to be what took my heart. 00:16:00Mason Funk There wasn't just that gut punch.

Sheila Kuehl Well, you know ... I mean, I hope you know, it's really different from wanting to sleep with somebody, which is a lot easier and interestingly, a lot less intimate.

Mason Funk Interesting. You happen to mention Mean Girls. I don't know if you happen to, or it's in the zeitgeist right now, the sequel, but we're going to get to that because I want to talk about Dobie Gillis, 00:16:30obviously. And one of the things you said about Dobie Gillis was your character went after what she wanted, but not in a mean way. So we'll get to that because it is just one of these cultural tropes, the Mean Girls. But let's talk about Dobie Gillis as if no one ever knew what the show was.

Sheila Kuehl Okay. A Pulitzer Prize-winning author named Max Schulman wrote Slyly funny novels, 00:17:00and he used as his template people that he had known in college in the forties, but he updated a book that he wrote called The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis to be more modern, but in high school at the beginning and then in college. 20th Century Fox decided that they might make a good TV series, even though there had never been ever a TV series where the young people were the stars. It was always Father Knows Best, 00:17:30or the first series I did Trouble With Father, the parents had kids and the kids were the featured players or Leave It To Beaver. And so Dobie Gillis started in 1959 and went for four years. And it was so funny. I mean, people write me still about it because it's on me TV every night, I think. And Zelda especially, my character, was a very special character 00:18:00because she really wanted Dobie and he didn't want her. He wanted any good looking girl, but none of them wanted him. So it was kind of like Charlie Brown and Scooby-Doo, both of which came after, and were, in a sense, taken from Dobie Gillis where people would want things but they wouldn't get them. And that was the story of their lives. They would always want the wrong things, but they would 00:18:30want them over and over, like kicking the football if Lucy held it for you or whatever. And Max wrote very out there kinds of scripts where one of them called the Chicken from Outer Space or whatever, where we were always doing sort of outrageous things. But Zelda knew that she wanted Dobie, and she was absolutely sure that she would get him, and he would say, never, never is that going to happen. 00:19:00And that was the essential tension of the show. But it was funny.

Mason Funk And meantime, they were probably really good friends.

Sheila Kuehl Yes, Zelda and Maynard, the Beatnik and Dobie were very good friends and saved each other in so many episodes, or they would do something that was just not right that would hurt the other person or cause 00:19:30some trauma to them or whatever, but always confess at the end and always need to be friends again at the end. That was one of the sort of hallmarks of it for me.

Mason Funk So what have been some of the thoughts that have gone through your mind when you look at a character like Zelda and then these other manifestations like say mean girls? I wouldn't say they glorify being mean, but mean is center stage, 00:20:00and where does that come from, do you think, in the way women are portrayed in our culture? I know that's a huge question.

Sheila Kuehl Where did it come from? Misogyny. I mean, girls were never supposed to get along with each other because they were always fighting over boys, and it was all about boys. Dobie Gillis was all about boys too, but Max's characters two things: they were so smart in the way he drew them, 00:20:30and also he had written a book, and that was just the beginning. And he watched us all the time and wrote the consecutive shows that came after based a lot on what we were like. He filled out the characters with who we were. And so Zelda was aggressive but kind. She cared a lot about Dobie, and 00:21:00she even cared about Maynard who ... okay, I confess, I care about him. She was never a pushover. And the funny thing is that when the women's movement started in the seventies, the second wave, I started getting letters from women saying, thank you so much. You were the only smart girl on television, or you were the only girl allowed to be smart that I saw on television. Which was 00:21:30another aspect of misogyny, all the girls had to be dumber than the boys, or brainless. Zelda was the smartest person in every room that she ever went into. And she invented a record label so that Dobie could record a record. She built a race car so that he could drive and be fast. She could do anything, and yet he didn't want her, and all she wanted was him. 00:22:00So it was a really nice sort of set of circles, and I'm really proud of the work in that show.

Mason Funk Yeah. So what's your take, I mean, it could be as simple as plain old misogyny, end of story, but the fact that these mean girls movies, not only did they exist, but they're remaking them. And I haven't seen the remake, so I don't know. I imagine they're trying to spin the notion a little bit to make it less dated, 00:22:30but it still shocks me that they're still making movies called Mean Girls.

Sheila Kuehl Well, I think they're true to form some ways, because ...

Mason Funk Would you mind saying, "Movies like mean girls."

Sheila Kuehl Movies like Mean Girls, I think are true to form, real form, in some ways, because often women will live out the expectations that they see around them or the kind of signals that they get that the way to succeed, and this is something we learned from men, no offense, 00:23:00is to put someone down, to make someone less than. You see it in every kind of discrimination. That's what it's about. And so in order to avoid that, you allegedly, I think, try to be the person who does it before somebody does it to you. But I don't know. I never saw the first one, and I'm not seeing this one. But I mean, when you see a picture like American fiction where 00:23:30people exaggerate and make fun of the kinds of attitudes that are bred into us in case of American fiction race, and it's smart in its own way, the difference now I think is we are empowered. We are feminists. We do know that women are great, and so we can look a little more critically rather than how can they say that about me and say either there's more to this 00:24:00than I saw at first, or I'd rather watch Barbie, because look what Greta did with Barbie.

Mason Funk Right. For an example of taking the old storyline Sheila Kuehl And for men too.

Mason Funk A hundred percent.

Sheila Kuehl I mean, there's such a lesson in it, and you can make a movie with lessons in it. Seeing Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same weekend. It's like poof. 00:24:30Mason Funk I heard. I didn't see them on the same weekend, but I wish I had for that very experience.

Sheila Kuehl It was really fun.

Mason Funk So in college, is there anything more that talk ... I mean, we could spend a lot of time on Dobie. We have a lot of ground to cover. Is there anything else from that experience that ... you've been writing your autobiography and reflecting on what things meant to you.

Sheila Kuehl It's a different kind of collective to do a TV series for four years. You absolutely are a family. 00:25:00There's real love. Dwayne Hickman was the star of the show, he played Dobie Gillis. At Dwayne's Memorial, I realized even just as I was talking about him, that I loved him so much because it was doubled, Sheila loved Dwayne. We worked together for four years. He was most generous of actors, the kind of man who would stand downstage 00:25:30so that everybody could see your face not upstage, so as to turn away, a generous man. And I loved him, but Zelda loved Dobie. She loved him with her entire self for four years. So I loved him even more. You really sort of imbibe your character's feelings. You keep it separate, but it does influence. And we were a wonderful little family for four years. 00:26:00Mason Funk Later on. I have this little pet idea that I'd like to ask you about the comparisons between making a TV show and making laws, but we'll spend time on that later on.

Sheila Kuehl Okay.

Mason Funk It's like I say, it's my little pet ... this little notion popped into my head. In college, the cleaning staff at your sorority found, I'm putting this in quotation marks because I don't really know the story, but apparently, allegedly, they found 00:26:30love letters or some evidence of this relationship you were in. Can you tell us that story?

Sheila Kuehl Yeah. When I first went to UCLA, I rushed for sororities, and I got into a sorority that was not one of the top houses, but had a lot of wonderful different kinds of girls. We sang a lot. We had great friendships. We would sneak out in the middle of the night and go 00:27:00drive around Los Angeles and just be out. It was a time when the beatniks were making music on Sunset Boulevard, and we would go to the unicorn and wear all black and whatever, so it was great. But the second summer, as I indicated, I fell in love with a woman who was a counselor at UniCamp, and we became ... she lived in San Diego, and so 00:27:30we wrote letters back and forth to each other almost every day. And we were in a relationship, and I kept the letters, and it was the one year that I was living in the sorority house. Because we didn't live very far away, so I was a townie, except for one year. Some of the letters fell out the back of the drawer, I guess, and so when I cleaned out my dresser, I didn't get them all. I went home for the summer, came back. I was supposed 00:28:00to be the pledge trainer. I was an officer. I walked in the door and was asked to go into the den and meet with the alumni council. The alumni council had some of my letters spread out on the table, and they asked me to turn in my pen because a lesbian couldn't be a member. And I do have to say, however, and I hope this can be used, many years later, the sorority lost its charter 00:28:30because many, many of the sororities, their main headquarters in the South, this chapter at UCLA had pledged three African-American women. And so this headquarters took away their chapter and they had to close the house because if you don't have a charter, UCLA can't recognize you. So they couldn't be a sorority anymore. And I have to tell you, I felt just a little ... I feel 00:29:00bad for the girls that were there yet, I feel bad for the African-American girls, but I felt kind of vindicated, I don't know. Because here they had done the right thing and they got punished, and I had done the right thing, and they punished me. The other thing that happened was that one of my friends from UniCamp was the person who oversaw all the sororities about at the same time. And a lesbian sorority started at UCLA, guess what it was called? Lambda? Lambda. Lambda. Okay. 00:29:30And so Chris called me up and said, "Sam," which was my UniCamp name, "I have a proposal for you. You're an alum with no house. I've got a house with no alums. Interested?" I was their first honorary alum at the lesbian sorority. So things come around and around and around. But I did get kicked out of my sorority.

Mason Funk This lesbian sorority, I've never heard mentioned this before. This was an actual ... 00:30:00Sheila Kuehl I don't know if they had a house, and I don't know how long they lasted because I only knew them in the first year. But I'm sure a little research would show if they might be still there or in another avatar or something.

Mason Funk Right. Wow. Wow. So in my notes, it says that when you got kicked out, you moved back home. Is that true?

Sheila Kuehl Yes, but no. Yes and no. When I got kicked out, 00:30:30I was already living at home again. I had only lived in the sorority that one year. There was a summer, and I was going back, but not to live in the house. But every Monday night, there was a meeting of the members, and my parents knew that. So every Monday night, I would get in my Volkswagen and go to ship's restaurant in Westwood and sit there for about two hours drinking coffee and eating lemon pie. And then I would go home 00:31:00and make up stories for my parents about what had happened at the meetings. But I never told them that I was kicked out because I would've had to tell them why. And of course, I wasn't ready to do that yet.

Mason Funk Right, right. What was your thought at that time, the notion that your parents would find out or that you would tell them? What kind of reactions internally did that engender in you? Just sheer like, that's crazy, 00:31:30or horror or terror or something else?

Sheila Kuehl I was absolutely certain I couldn't tell my parents, because first of all, though I was in a relationship with a woman. It was my first relationship. I didn't know who I was or what I was. And in order to be sure of something, you're going to tell your parents, you ought to be sure of it, and I really wasn't. So I didn't want to lose them or have them be disappointed in me. I didn't want them 00:32:00to ever be disappointed in me. I just knew I couldn't tell them or anybody. It was very lonely because we used to eat all of our meals during the day at the house, and suddenly I didn't have a place to do that. But because of camp, I had some good friends on campus and we would meet for lunch. But it was the kind of thing that, it's sort of like when you're married and then you're not married anymore. You take for granted having lunch 00:32:30and breakfast and dinner with somebody, and then suddenly you have to make a lot of dates. So that's really the way it turned out for me. But I was very sad to lose the friendship of some of the girls in the house. And I used the word girls, not because I ever call anybody girls, but that's what we were at the time. Yeah.

Mason Funk Did you keep in touch with any of those so-called girls later in life?

Sheila Kuehl Oh, yeah. We've had reunions. They always invite me. I don't think they even remember I was kicked out, half of them. 00:33:00As a matter of fact, I just had brunch at the beach with two of them about two weeks ago.

Mason Funk That's fun. Wow.

Sheila Kuehl Yeah, everything passes.

Mason Funk Yeah. So then not too many years later, maybe even when Dobie Gillis was still on, there was talk of a Zelda series, and that was another instance of you crashing up against the realities of the day, basically. Can you tell us that story? 00:33:30Sheila Kuehl Yeah. The story of the Zelda pilot is actually even more serious than a story about getting kicked out of a sorority and losing half your friends, which sounds horrible in and of itself. I wanted to be an actress. That's all I wanted to be. And Dobie was doing very well, and they really liked Zelda's character. So Max Schulman wrote a pilot for a Zelda series, and it went really well. And I had never been a star 00:34:00of any kind before, but I was sitting in on script meetings. I was sitting in on casting sessions. It was kind of a whole new thing. I liked it because I liked being part of the planning. I liked being able to say, what if he's shorter than her instead of taller or something. And so we made the pilot, it was pretty good, I thought, kind of funny. Most people thought 00:34:30it was going to be picked up in the new season by somebody. And we went back to work on Dobie, and the next year, I didn't have a contract anymore, but I was still doing a few shows with them. The reason I didn't have a contract is because you have to sign a contract with the pilot in case it sells, and you can't promise to do both. So I was doing shows and the director, Rod Amateau, asked if we could just take a walk around the lot. 00:35:00He wanted to talk to me. So I said, sure. We went for a walk, and he was silent for a little while, and then he said, "Well, I just want to tell you the pilot is not being picked up." I said, "Really? Why?" He said, "Well, Jim Aubrey," who was the president of CBS at the time, "just thought Zelda was a little too butch." And I felt like a sheet of ice go through me because 00:35:30I thought, oh my God. Now everybody knows the sorority kicked me out. The word must've gotten out. Jim Aubrey knows, everybody knows, I'll never work again, and there'll be a story in the papers and all of this, none of which happened. But I did not do very many shows in the fourth year in Dobie, partly because they were in the army by that point, the characters. 00:36:00And then I hardly worked again after that. And for many years I thought it's because people thought I was gay and they wouldn't hire me. But I talked to Dwayne many years later and he said, nobody really knew. Nobody thought that. "I didn't work either," he would say, Bob got a great series and then never worked after that. "It was really about 00:36:30Norman Lear," he said, because comedy changed and we were not part of that anymore. I'm telling you, honestly, I thought, for years, it was because everybody thought I was gay and they wouldn't hire me. Now, the industry was homophobic. They didn't want to have to deal with the press, if anybody found out, they ... but there were plenty of gay and lesbian actors, but everybody was in the closet. 00:37:00When you go back and review your history, a lot of it doesn't turn out the way you thought or thought at the time. So maybe people didn't want me because they thought I was gay, and maybe we just weren't right for the times. I don't know.

Mason Funk When the director who took you on that walk said that the network head thinks you're too butch, 00:37:30was that the word that he actually used? The word 'butch'.

Sheila Kuehl Yes. He used the word butch.

Mason Funk Was it that the character was too butch or that they thought you might be gay or some mashup of those two things, or do you know?

Sheila Kuehl The truth is, I don't know what Jim Aubrey might've meant by it. I'm suspecting that he ... 00:38:00I mean, people tell me later, oh, come on, Kuehl, we all knew, I mean, the way you are, the way you move, the things you wore, it wasn't real obvious, but it was pretty obvious to us. So I think he watched that and thought, this woman acts a little too butch. Which I never thought, and most of my friends didn't either, but I think he also might have meant other people 00:38:30will see that, and that could be a problem for the show, and I don't know that we want to risk investing in it, but what he meant by it, actually, he took to the grave.

Mason Funk Right. Okay. We're going to jump forward.

Sheila Kuehl Okay.

Mason Funk My next question, which is boldface, which means don't make sure that you ... I want to ask this question is a very general one, and it's about the 00:39:00recognition, or lack of, thereof, of women and lesbians in all these different social change movements that we've been part of. I think I just from the conversation you and I had before, I took that down as a note. So it's not really sequential, but it's a topic that I knew I wanted to explore, and we're going to move on, obviously to your political career and so forth. And I don't really have a way into this question. I know that a lot of people have talked about, for example, when AIDS came along, 00:39:30that the women were the ones who taught their gay brothers, this is how you fight back, and that's only one example.

Sheila Kuehl Well, when you and I talked earlier, I opined to you that there were lesbians in every social movement. We just saw Rustin, for instance, and now the whole world knows that there was a key gay man 00:40:00in the Civil Rights movement. Much of it was never talked about, and some of it was hidden because the women's movement didn't want to be discredited by being identified with lesbians, which they were afraid would say, well, see, they all want to be men. So there's nothing to this women's movement. But in virtually every part of the women's movement, there were 00:40:30lesbian leaders and things that were part of women's empowerment, like women's music, which was not recognized because no one would play it on the radio. There were record companies like Holly Near's, Redwood Records, there was Olivia, there was Pleiades and women who were doing concerts all over, 00:41:00virtually the world and a lot in America, and millions of us buying albums and listening to these concerts, much of it, lesbian-run, not a lot of recognition about what this music did in terms of the empowerment of women in the way they took charge later in their own music. It was the same with social movements like anti-violence movements. Many of the shelters 00:41:30had lesbian staff, not all, but some, lesbian leadership, quite integrated in terms of helping battered women, helping victims of sexual violence, establishing services. Way before AIDS, actually. This kind of organizing went on, and much of it was learned by and passed forward by lesbians. 00:42:00One of the reasons I think is that when you're an outsider, you don't have to play by the rules. You don't have to agree with the general story about what's really going on. So as lesbians, we recognize that men were really hurting women in their homes, and that women needed to get away. Married women were afraid to kind of recognize that at first because it threatened their own belief that 00:42:30marriage was a good thing. Well, we weren't saying marriage wasn't a good thing, we were saying violence was a bad thing, and that some women needed to get away, and we wanted to help them. That recognition still, I think, has not been paid, although many of the people who helped start these services have been recognized as individuals. Mollie Lowery, for instance, in LA was one of the founders of the Sojourn Shelter for battered women. She went on to be 00:43:00a leader in the homeless services movement and spent her whole life doing that. So my point really, I think when we were talking was how much leadership and organizing had been provided by lesbians so that when AIDS did come around, the myth is so many men died, women had to take leadership. But that honestly, in my opinion, is a myth. 00:43:30Women were ready to take leadership, and frankly, much better at it, at the point, than gay men because gay men had been partying mostly, not only, some were wonderful organizers, but we knew how to do it, and it was needed in order to combat the kind of homophobia that was going on to get the government interested in AIDS services. The same way we had gotten the government interested in battered women's services 00:44:00or sexual assault services. We knew how to do it.

Mason Funk Do you remember from that era, specific moments or meetings when this kind of transfer of wisdom and experience and skill was happening in real time?

Sheila Kuehl The transfer of wisdom to?

Mason Funk From women to men?

Sheila Kuehl The truth is, I was not engaged in the gay community or the lesbian community 00:44:30at the time of AIDS. I knew them tangentially because Tori Osborne, my partner, was one of the leaders in that movement, and she was the first woman to run the Gay and Lesbian Center in Los Angeles. And before that, a group of lesbians when it said Gay Community Services Center, had gone in the middle of the night and taken a pen with them and just wrote in “and lesbian”. 00:45:00So I only know the stories, I was not engaged.

Mason Funk Gotcha. Okay. Well, it's really interesting to bring that in. Kate, I'm going to take one of my pauses right now and ask you if you have any follow up questions on this particular topic from your perspective?

Kate Kunath No, not yet.

Mason Funk Okay. Okay. Let's talk about that kind of period from graduating from college essentially 00:45:30to going to Harvard Law School. Paint a little picture of what you were ... because you went at 35, if I'm not mistaken. So what were you doing during that sort of 15 year period before you finally decided, look, I'm going to go to law school?

Sheila Kuehl Well, when I graduated from college, my TV career tanked and I didn't know what to do, I was an actress. I had been active in college, in student government, so I went back 00:46:00to the office that advised not only student government, but all student organizations, and got a job running freshman orientation, and then as an assistant dean in that office, advising student organizations. Unfortunately, for me, it was the late sixties and student organizations who were worth anything didn't want any advice, certainly not from a dean in an office. 00:46:30So I was assigned to advise the Women's Liberation Front, the Black Student Union, because there were no deans of color in the office, MEChA when it first started, the Asian radical students, when they first started, and they ended up really teaching me so much more than I ever could have shared with them. But I did try to just sit with them and kind of talk about 00:47:00effectiveness when they wanted support from other communities, when they wanted to stop fighting about who would lead things when they were going through the throes of organizing that everybody else had gone through, but they didn't know. So I just was very quiet and then added what I could. And so we ended up being friends. A lot of the leaders of those student groups when they first started, 00:47:30Reynaldo Macias; Carolyn Webb, who ended up getting married, and Carolyn, I think, is now chief of staff to the Mayor of Los Angeles; Casimiro Tolentino, who was a judge, who was one of the leaders, early leaders of the Asian Radical Movement. It was just a time when everything was changing, everything was fomenting. They fired Angela Davis, 00:48:00Chuck Young hired her back, the regents fired her again. The campus was just full of things happening and changing, and I just breathed it all in and learned as much as I could from what happened every day. And finally, one of the leaders of the Black Student Union said, some of us are going to law school because we need to learn the tools of the enemy. You ought do that. You like rules and things, 00:48:30and kind of making them, and no woman's ever going to be chancellor at UCLA, so no reason to stay here. And it sounded good to me because I kind of liked trying to understand how you could make life better for people on campus by what you passed in terms of services for them, or decisions were made that affected lives. That's kind of where I learned that. And 00:49:00it was the same time, though I didn't know, that Rand Schrader and Don Kilhefner, two major leaders in the gay community were both at UCLA. Rand was a law student, and Don was, I think, a social welfare graduate student, and they started the gay student group at UCLA. Things were happening. I thought, well, I'll just take the LSAT 00:49:30because Jerry Givens is right, and I did really, really well. I applied to UCLA and they turned me down, and I was stunned. I didn't really want to think about going anywhere else. And out of nowhere, this man appears, who I'm convinced is my guardian angel, I don't mean that metaphorically. I mean, I think he's my guardian angel, like Clarence, 00:50:00I mean, assigned. And he said, "I'm the statistician for the Chancellor's Commission on the status of women," which I was serving on. He said, "But I've done a study about grade inflation at UCLA, and I know that you were turned down for law school here." How he knew that, I don't know. And he said, "This study shows that during the Vietnam War, 00:50:30nobody wanted to flunk any students out because they would be drafted, so all the F's became D's, and the D'S became C's, and everything went up almost in a whole point." "So this study shows that your 2.9," which I graduated in the early sixties with a 2.9 and got honors, "is now worth a three eight," because by the time I applied for law school, a two nine looked like it was in the basement, 00:51:00and that's why UCLA turned me down. He said, "Here, take this study and go to apply to some other schools." So I did, and I got into Harvard, I got into Yale, I got into Berkeley, and I was turned down again at UCLA because they did not want to look at their own grade inflation, obviously.

Mason Funk Okay. So yeah, you were going to clarify the grade inflation thing.

Sheila Kuehl The thing about grade inflation is I graduated in 1962, but I didn't apply for law school until 1974, 00:51:30and by the time I applied, the grades had already gone up a whole point on average, so that if someone who graduated at my level in the class, if I was 53rd or 112th or whatever, that same person who was 53rd or 112th would've had a grade point average a whole point higher than mine. That's really what he meant. And it was recognized by virtually every university 00:52:00because everybody did it, and it doesn't matter, it's an ... Instead of giving one A, as most of my professors did, we used to take the guy that got the A out for a beer in my classes, they were giving more, but it was still, these people got the best grade, and then these people got the next. So it was recognized, as I said, and I got into all the law schools, but UCLA, 00:52:30so I had to go to Harvard.

Mason Funk Do you think of him as a guardian angel because he encouraged you ... or, not think of him, was he your guardian angel because he encouraged you to reapply or because by reapplying, you ended up going to Harvard or both?

Sheila Kuehl I think he's my guardian angel just giving me a tool to try again, out of nowhere. Then I remember seeing him only one more time, which was 00:53:00the day that I voted for myself the very first time in 1994, in a garage down the street, he was sitting behind the table signing people in, and he went.

Mason Funk That's amazing.

Sheila Kuehl I don't even know how much I've made up, if you know what I mean. If you try to remember your life and somebody says ... it's like that song, "You were wearing blue? No, it was green." My working title for 00:53:30my autobiography, which I'm just beginning to write, is probably a novel My life as I remember it.

Mason Funk I love that. I love that. Well, my husband's a psychotherapist, and at one point he basically said to me, the stories that people are telling you in these interviews, they don't necessarily correspond one-to-one with the truth. These are their stories. Just get used to it.

Sheila Kuehl Well, I wonder if, I don't know, some of my friends have had the 00:54:00same experience that I've had where we will have looked at a picture of something that happened in our childhood, and that becomes a memory. I don't have a memory, but I remember it as though it happened, but exactly the way it looks in the picture. So memory's tricky. It's very tricky, but in the long run, it doesn't matter. It's the stories that matter.

Mason Funk Yeah. So you 00:54:30apply to law school, you get into Harvard and of you go. And your life really takes a radical ... as a 20 something year old actor, you probably never imagined you were going to go learn the tools of the enemy, which I love. So what did you envision for yourself when you went to Harvard? What did you think you were going to do? Just give me Sure, sure. Thank you. In other words, why did you want to go to law school?

Sheila Kuehl Well, I wanted to go to law school because I got interested in 00:55:00issues about women. When I was at UCLA, it was the early seventies before I went to law school. We actually had a growing consciousness among the women's students that something was wrong in education about the equality, about who was leaders and who wasn't, who got called upon to speak in class and who didn't 00:55:30, who got to be TAs, how all the professors were men, except for maybe two. There was just a growing understanding of it. And I thought that that would be an interesting thing in the law. But I also had a sense, this could be something I decided later and have imposed on it, I don't know, but to me, it was, like I said before, 00:56:00the underpinning of rules, of policies, of decisions affected everybody over whom the rules were applied. It was like the skeleton of society where it was the bones that made everything work, no matter what the covering was. And it was curious to me. But the larger truth, I think, is I had no idea really what it was like to 00:56:30study law or work in the law. Never had I known an attorney or a judge or anybody like that. I was just interested in how rules were made and whether we could make 'em ourselves, Mason Funk Whether you could make them yourselves. Did you think of the law as "the tools of the enemy?" Go ahead.

Sheila Kuehl I did not think of the law as the tools of the enemy the way 00:57:00my students of color did. And they were right in many ways because the law was being applied to them. I did not think at the time about laws like where the cops would read the bars. When I was at law school, I'll jump ahead for just a minute and jump back, if you like, but when I was in law school, I fell in love again, and it was in my last year. 00:57:30And the woman who I was with for the next couple of years was an out lesbian, had been at Wellesley, brilliant. I'll talk more about her. But she took me to a place, quite famous in those days, called the Saints, in Boston. It was a lesbian bar, at night. During the day. It was a straight bar. And, though it never happened while I was there, the police would come every so often and unplug the jukebox so that the women would not dance with each other. That was 00:58:00against the law. And also, there was a law in Massachusetts that you had to wear three articles of clothing that were related to your own birth gender. Now, in a unisex dressing society anyway, in the late seventies, I don't know how anybody would say what article of clothing belongs to who, but it was those kinds of laws. 00:58:30That didn't occur to me when I went to law school. I wasn't thinking about how it was applied to our community.

Mason Funk And did you have a vision of what you wanted to do when you came out of law school?

Sheila Kuehl I had no vision of what I wanted to do when I came out. I mean, not came out, when I exited law school and came back to work.

Mason Funk Right. Huh?

Sheila Kuehl I didn't know what lawyers did, really. I just thought I would acquire this knowledge and something would turn up.

Mason Funk As it turns out, it did. 00:59:00Okay. I'm going to jump forward again. Well, not too fast. So you come out of law school probably in the late seventies?

Sheila Kuehl Yeah, '78.

Mason Funk '78. Okay. And so there's a good solid decade plus before you ... Well, especially before you decided to run for office in your fifties. So what would you call the eighties in terms of your professional life? There was a women's law center.

Sheila Kuehl The eighties was kind of scattered 00:59:30for me about profession ... It reminded me of my early twenties where you try this and you'd try this. I used to think of it as a giant game of statue maker where as a kid they would swing you around and then they'd let go and yell, freeze. So I was in the swinging around stage. I was hired from law school to work in a firm downtown that specialized in municipal law. I thought that was really interesting. Unfortunately, the first year that I was there, prop 13 01:00:00was passed in California, and property tax collection went like this. So municipalities had to decide, do you want to have police or do you want to have fire services? And probably nothing else because it just plummeted. So all that I thought I would do in municipal law kind of went away. I left that right away. And I worked with a feminist law firm, two women, Blanche Bersch and Karen Kaplowitz, 01:00:30along with my partner from law school who had moved to California with me, and we worked on women's constitutional law issues. To pay the bills, we worked on family law, which is a big source of women having to even do anything in the law, of going to court, I mean plaintiffs. So 01:01:00I learned family law from them and was there for probably only about a year, and then went out on my own practicing family law. And at the same time, I became deeply engaged with the sojourn shelter for battered women. Was recruited into a group of young attorneys who were trying to develop law, because there wasn't any, in California, about domestic violence, none. And ended up drafting 01:01:30a lot of new laws that related to domestic violence for people to carry in Sacramento, like Jackie Speier and Diane Watson, and many of the women who were there, which meant that I had to go up there and testify for these laws. What were we drafting them to do? What did they have in mind? And when you go up to Sacramento to testify, you sit there for hours waiting for your bill to come up, and you watch the committees operate, especially the Judiciary Committee, and you think, 01:02:00I could do this. Some of them are not right bright. Some of them are not getting it. This could be easier than I thought. It just occurred to me. And I had been on every elected body in every school since junior high. So I guess I wanted to be an elected person. I just hadn't really thought of it consciously. It wasn't on the front of my head. 01:02:30So I didn't like practicing law just on my own in my house. It was lonely. Although I did represent one lesbian mother, at the behest of the ACLU in LA, and that was an education about discrimination in and of itself. So I decided maybe I wanted to teach.

Mason Funk Tell us that story, if you wouldn't mind, that representing that one lesbian.

Sheila Kuehl Yeah. There was a woman at the ACLU who 01:03:00was bringing new cases for them about women. She was a lesbian and wanted to use some of the discrimination against lesbian mothers as part of what the ACLU would take on. So when they take on a project, they often don't represent all of the people themselves ,task lawyers, will you take this case and do it, and we'll help you develop the argument? This was a woman 01:03:30who'd been married to an Air Force colonel, and I went up to Lancaster. I lost, I mean, I could not get them to agree that she should have custody, but it was very telling to me. During the eighties, I worked in different ways and issues that were mostly affected women as family members, but also some employment discrimination kind of work. 01:04:00And when I was at Bersch & Kaplowitz, we did family law, but we also did, we'd take a case to try to develop the law in employment discrimination, et cetera. And so I was teaching then in the mid-eighties, mostly at Loyola Law School. I taught the first class, I think in Southern California on women and the law. I developed it myself. And then in '89, Abby Leibman and I 01:04:30opened the Southern California Women's Law Center, which then became the California Women's Law Center. Abby concentrated on childcare and cities that were saying, you can't have daycare in your house, which was against the law for the city to say I was concentrating on battered women's issues and continuing to go to Sacramento to testify.

Mason Funk Gotcha, gotcha. Do you remember the moment when ... I mean, you talked about being up there 01:05:00in Sacramento, watching these people working and just thinking, I could do this better, basically Sheila Kuehl It was more like, I think I want to do this. Jackie Speier, she was the head of the Women's Caucus one year, and there was a gathering of women elected to state legislatures from all over the country that was being held in San Diego on the island. And Jackie asked me if I would put together a panel 01:05:30to speak to many of the women, as one of the panels on domestic violence and what we thought needed to be done and what we were doing. So I'm down there with all of these women who are elected to state legislatures in every state in the country, and I had what I'll jokingly call Member Envy, because it was kind of like, oh, I really ... And there was a little collective that met, not a collective, a little group that met of women who were lesbians who had been elected to state office. 01:06:00And so I met a woman from Illinois from New York, and they had been elected, no gay person or lesbian had been elected to our legislature. And I thought, I really do want to run. I do want to run. So I checked up, and the man who was representing me in our assembly seat term limits had been put in the 1990 he would be termed out in '96, 01:06:30so I thought, I think I'm going to really seriously consider running for his seat in '96. And then in January of '94, the Northridge earthquake happened. I woke up, all my pictures were falling off the wall, broken glass everywhere, tiptoed over everything. Got my LA Times, opened it up and it said Terry Friedman will not be running for his last term. 01:07:00He wants to go home and be with his new baby daughter. That was January. The filing deadline was February 9th, my birthday. I thought, okay. I called three people I knew would say, go for it. And that was the beginning of running for office.

Mason Funk Wow. So you always remember the day that that happened because it was the earthquake.

Sheila Kuehl It was the earthquake, right.

Mason Funk That year, I remember it so well. 01:07:30It was the contract for America. It was . It was a terrible year for Democrats. But you managed to get elected, obviously. But I'd love for social history purposes. Paint us a picture of what was happening in 1994. Clinton's had been in for two years. He flubbed, don't ask, don't ... But basically this was a catastrophic year for the Democratic Party and you ran and won.

Sheila Kuehl Well, in 1994 when I ran, Newt Gingrich had developed the contract on America. We called it, he called it the Contract 01:08:00for America, and had convinced voters that this was the way the country should go. Nothing as bad as it is today, but still. And for the first time in 25 years, there was a Republican majority after the election in November in the state assembly. So I went into the state assembly as the first open gay or lesbian person ever elected to the 01:08:30legislature in California, with a Republican majority. But it was 41/39, so that's not a huge majority. Willie Brown was still speaker because we hadn't elected a new speaker. He got one of the Republicans to vote for him for speaker. So we had a 40 40 House, Willie and Jim Brulte, who thought he was going to be speaker, the Republican leader, put together a committee to design a house to make rules for an equally divided house, 01:09:00which didn't exist. I was one of the freshmen on that committee, thanks to Willie, and got to be friends with some of the Republicans because we just stayed up all night. I didn't drink, but they did a little bit, and it was fun. I mean, we sang Motown songs and country and Western and it was kind of crazy. And that helps because 01:09:30when you do that and you go onto the floor and you wander around ... When you do that and you're already kind of friends with them, and you're not at all what they expected, which would be a humorless dyke, it's easier because they don't know what to make of you. And so the worst moment really was just the very first day when I was sworn in because the Republican in front of me who was on his way to the Senate, thank goodness, didn't have to serve with him, 01:10:00turned to his wife, he was sitting in front of me and I was sitting with my dad, and said, "I wonder where that little dyke is." And I said, "Senator, right here." He was, to his credit, embarrassed. His wife was even more embarrassed. My dad being partially deaf hadn't even heard, so that was okay. But it was a very up and down time for the legislature 01:10:30in '95 and '96, and some crazy stuff. I mean, one guy came to the floor wearing leader Hosen, another Republican came to the floor wearing his Boy Scout uniform. I mean, they brought their bibles with them. There's a really good movie about what we went through in those years called Political Animals, which I really recommend to anyone watching this. 01:11:00Mason Funk You thought you knew what you were getting into because you had sat in a lot of committee meetings, but what surprised you?

Sheila Kuehl I was surprised at how great it was.

Mason Funk Do me a favor, set the stage, joining the legislature for the first time or whatever.

Sheila Kuehl I didn't know what to expect when I went into the assembly. I had watched it, but it's like anything else. You can watch a teacher, 01:11:30but the first time you teach a class, you go, oh my God, I had no idea. Kind of like that. But I was surprised really at how much I really enjoyed it. You make great friends. It's like being in a cast in a TV series, only with lots of people and you're going through the same things together. And the attitudes that people have about elected people that are negative, you could apply that to three people out of the 80 with whom I served. 01:12:00Everyone else honestly wanted to do what they thought was right. They were honest. Some of them were dumb and some were smart. Sort of like just your regular class at school. But I was surprised at how absolutely right it was for me, you stand up and speak every day, great for an actor. Because if you ask actors, are you faking it? They would say just the opposite. 01:12:30What you have to do is find the emotion in yourself and let it show. When I saw Jane Fonda speaking against the war, she wasn't faking it, but her instrument was so well tuned that she could show you how she felt and it was very moving. You can make a great speech on the floor, which is half of everything we had to do anyway. Then the law school 01:13:00training helped me think my way through getting from here, the problem, to here, a solution that could be solved by putting words in law. I loved it.

Mason Funk Like the proverbial fish to water, would you say, do you have a metaphor for what it felt like to you?

Sheila Kuehl I think it felt more like coming home to a place I'd never lived. 01:13:30Mason Funk That's a beautiful idea for something that people think of as mundane, bureaucratic, yeah. That's kind of comparable to what some people say the first time they walk into a lesbian or a gay bar. But this sounds like a singular experience for you.

Sheila Kuehl Well, I was afraid when I first walked into the assembly, but not nearly as afraid as I was when I first walked into a lesbian bar. I honestly 01:14:00didn't know what to expect at all. I signed up to shoot pool. I was pretty good at pool, and there were two women who I think would've been probably referred to as Bull Dykes at the time, owning the pool table. And so I signed my name up on the thing and shot pool, and I beat her. She came to me, rushed over to me, and I thought, oh my God, how am I going 01:14:30to explain the black eye at law school tomorrow? And gave me a big crunchy hug and said, good game. So yeah, it is kind of like the first time you go and you think, okay, we don't all look alike, but we are like, these are my people.

Mason Funk I love that story. Sorry, I'm making a note. That's great. Oh, I love that. I think I lost ... 171 bills, is that right? 01:15:00Did I get that number?

Sheila Kuehl No, no. I wrote probably 500 bills, but 171 got signed into law by three different governors.

Mason Funk Oh, I like that. Okay, so start that as a fresh thought and then go on to highlight ... in my notes, I have the first one you wrote that got passed, protecting queer youth, if I'm not mistaken. And then two others that you've highlighted, that seem so mundane, I have to say, paid family leave and nurse to patient ratios. So I wonder if you could just 01:15:30give us the summary of the number of bills, but the ones that you carry kind of closest to your heart.

Sheila Kuehl Well, the interesting thing about the state legislature compared to the Congress for instance, is that you put a bill across the desk, it gets a number with your name, and all the bills get hearings. It's not like a speaker says that bill? No. Which happens a lot in Congress. 01:16:00You're allowed to bring as many as 50 bills in a year in your term. I mean, it's a lot of bills. So we started out writing things I wanted to do, writing things that were suggested, writing things that my staff said, you should do some environmental laws because your district is really environmentally aware. 01:16:30And so we started writing a number of bills, but one of my staff who came was my assembly fellow, she wasn't really full staff yet, a lesbian, who helped me develop the bill that protected gay and lesbian students at school. It was my first gay bill, and it took five years and three terms to pass because it was so 01:17:00new and everybody was afraid, not everybody, but I couldn't get a majority because there were too many Democrats in swing districts who were afraid if they voted for a gay bill, it would hurt them in their next election. Although I thought they were a bunch of weenies, I did understand because it was better to have a Democrat than a Republican at that time in that district. But it was important, 01:17:30and it opened the door for many other bills that we put together as more gay members got elected that had to do with domestic partners. When Jackie Goldberg brought a bill, they put all of the benefits of marriage into the domestic partner law, but this is over five years, again. Political animals will show you that in the movie, but there were a lot of other issues that affected people. And the 01:18:00California Nurses Association really, really wanted somebody to carry the bill to require a specific ratio of nurses to patients in different kinds of acuity floors. They asked me if I would carry it. And I said, sure, but nurse to patient ratios, it was a hard sell. But I got the bill through both houses finally. But when it got to Gray Davis' desk, 01:18:30his staff told me he wasn't going to sign it. And then I think my guardian angel interfered again, though I didn't see him personally, but Gray Davis', chief of staff's father went in the hospital in San Diego. She went down to be with him and called Gray and said, there are not enough nurses, Gray. We need to have a required ratio. I think you should sign that bill. 01:19:00Not that I was happy that her father went in the hospital. But there were a number of environmental bills as well. And then in the Senate, because I was in the assembly six years and the Senate, state Senate, eight years. Well, I brought out, as I said, a lot of environmental bills, and I can't remember the one that you mentioned. 01:19:30Mason Funk Family leave.

Sheila Kuehl Oh, yeah. There was no paid family leave. This was a very important issue to women because you could get family leave, but you had to take it on your own dime and nobody could really afford to do that.

Mason Funk Define for us what family leave means.

Sheila Kuehl Well, let's say you need to take care of a sick child, and so you have to have days off work. You would maybe be required to use your own sick leave or vacation, or 01:20:00you wouldn't be allowed to go because you didn't have any sick leave or vacation. You would have to quit in order to take care of it. Or a sick parent, a grandparent, a sister. This is family leave. And it wasn't just women who needed it. I mean, one of our best witnesses was a firefighter who had to take care of his mother and just that wasn't allowed unless he took it on his own dime and nobody could afford to do that. 01:20:30The problem was really the administration of it. And the thing about legislating is the creativity of it. In California, we have one of the few systems, when you look at your paycheck, if you get a paycheck and it says SDI, that is State Disability Insurance. And it is required that everybody puts in a few pennies, a few bucks, whatever, into the state disability fund. And then whoever's disabled, 01:21:00if they're not covered by any other kind of disability at work, they get money from SDI. So the system was already set up to take money out of every paycheck. So we hooked it on, put paid family leave onto that. 15 cents more a month or something. And still it was hard to get through, but because the system was already set up, they couldn't say that it was going to cost a million bucks, 01:21:30because they were already doing it. And so it was fortuitous to live in a state where something was already there and you could just sort of add to it. But I remember you're asking me the question and saying they sound mundane, paid family leave or nurse to patient ratios. There's nothing mundane when you're a patient and you can't get your nurse to come. I don't mean that as a critique of you, but there's nothing mundane when you have to take care of 01:22:00your sick mother and you have to quit your job to do it, and then you're both sick. So I love the law. People always laugh when I refer to it as the majesty of the law, but it is. I mean, we're prosecuting a president, a former president. I think that's majestic. I don't know how it's going to turn out at this very moment that we're having this conversation, but 01:22:30I think the law ... that's the reason why I had such a good time for 14 years in the legislature. I loved being able to look and see how can the law do the right thing?

Mason Funk I love that as well. I many times have thought that if I didn't become a TV and film person, I could have been a happy lawyer. Actually, I enjoy it as well. Three people that were part of 01:23:00political animals portrayed in that same film with you. And I want to make sure we spend a moment on each one of them. Carole Migden, Jackie Goldberg and Kim Kehoe. So can we just start with Carol, you said to me on the phone, you can't do any of this if you don't interview Carol. But tell us from your point of view, what is it about what was singular? What is singular about Carole Migden?

Sheila Kuehl Well, if you look at the people who came out of San Francisco out of a particular time, Willie Brown, 01:23:30John Burton, who was the president of the Senate and had been in Congress and Carole Migden, Carole Migden. And of the three of them, she was the only gay or lesbian person. She was a real leader in San Francisco, a slight woman health problems that we didn't even know about at the time, and she was just fierce. When she first won her election, people here in Los Angeles said to me, you better watch your back. 01:24:00That was the impression they had of Migden that she would stab you in the back, kind of a mean girl's impression. My experience with her was a 180 from that, Carole Migden had my back. She was one of my best friends up there, still is. An extraordinary fierce fighter for queers, I'll say for women, but for men, too, 01:24:30for the environment. I mean, she brought bills to protect whole swaths of forest up in Northern California seashore, just a really extraordinary legislator. Jackie Goldberg ...

Mason Funk Before we move on ...

Sheila Kuehl Oh, sorry.

Mason Funk What defined her leadership, the effectiveness and the power for leadership? 01:25:00Sheila Kuehl Well, I guess what defines Carol's leadership is just you better not get in her way. I mean, she wasn't punishing. She was just a force of nature. She would just barrel right through everything and make it happen. And especially also, she would take power in a way that would guarantee that you needed to listen to her. Like she was appointed to chair the appropriations committee, so she controlled the money, 01:25:30and so perhaps she needed your vote and you were too chicken to give it, and it was a good bill, and she would say, well, let's see, your bill is on suspense, which means it costs a lot, and they're going to decide at the end. That's all she would say, but they would know maybe they ought to think twice. She never did that to anyone who would hurt from making a vote for one of our bills though. She was very sensitive to 01:26:00other people's dilemmas in central California or the eastern part of California. But she was a force of nature is still, but not in the legislature still. Right.

Mason Funk Okay, great. Excellent. Jackie Goldberg.

Sheila Kuehl Jackie Goldberg, another force of nature. Jackie Goldberg had been on the school board and on the council in LA City and then ran 01:26:30for a seat in the assembly. She didn't like it. She didn't like being away from Sharon. She didn't like how petty everybody was and how ... city councils and school boards are not partisan, and all of a sudden she's in the midst of a partisan fight every day. So she didn't really like it, but she actually was so extraordinary in the education field. And for us, she was the one ... 01:27:00Carole had started a registry for domestic partners. It was very limited, because that's all we could get through; hospital visits, maybe we could get it so that you would inherit if there was no will. We kept adding little things to it. Jackie Goldberg went whole hog. She took every right that married people had and put it in the domestic partner Bill. It was just a short step to marriage from there. It was a 01:27:30brilliant, brilliant move. And she was another one who was dead set on getting what you needed. It wasn't just what she needed. It was like, what does our community really need? But she did a lot of excellent work in education as well. I mean, that's the thing about the four of us. We were always working in areas that were not just confined to working for our queer community. Chris Kehoe had been 01:28:00the mayor of San Diego, I think, or on the council.

Mason Funk Sheila Kuehl Chris.

Mason Funk Oh, Good. I had Sheila Kuehl Yeah, Chris Kehoe Mason Funk Start over.

Sheila Kuehl Chris Kehoe had been on the city council in San Diego and followed Dede Alpert, a wonderful member into the assembly as the assembly member from that area. She was less bombastic. She was less noisy than Jackie or Carole or me. 01:28:30But she was crack whip smart and brought little by little things that would expand our rights. Take a bite here and a bite there. But it wasn't just the four of us. Antonio Villaraigosa, who was elected the same year I was and who I think people know ended up as the mayor of Los Angeles, he brought a bill that had to do with 01:29:00our ability to get housing, housing and employment to say that you couldn't do this kind of discrimination. That was a big bill. So we had our allies too.

Mason Funk The bill we're still waiting for nationally. Any other allies that come to mind? Villaraigosa ...

Sheila Kuehl Oh, there were a whole lot of allies. I mean, it was a wonderful time. When I first walked into the Democratic caucus, the very first day, I was the only queer there, and 01:29:30Antonio, John Vasconcellos, John Burton, Barbara Friedman, Kevin Murray, it was a pastiche of all the different kinds of people in the Democratic caucus, came over to me and said, we don't want you to have to eat lunch by yourself, we're the honorary gay and lesbian caucus. That was my first minute. Or when we would have three hour debates about my student bill on the floor, 01:30:00all these Republicans standing up and talking about how it was against God and against nature. One by one, many of the Democrats would get up and walk over to my desk and just stand there with their hand on my shoulder. They knew it was difficult. I was the only one and I felt really protected.

Mason Funk Wow, great. 01:30:30One thing that I notice, as exemplified, for example, by the fact that's so early on the TV show Get Used To It, you were talking about racism within the queer community.

Sheila Kuehl Say again?

Mason Funk You were talking about racism within the queer community. It feels like from what I've been able to observe, you've been aware of and paying attention to the discrimination within the LGBTQ+ community, 01:31:00and I wondered if you can talk about that and kind of how you come by that orientation.

Sheila Kuehl Well ...

Mason Funk And let us know what you're talking about.

Sheila Kuehl Speaking on MLK's birthday, I think the country became more and more aware of racism per se, watching fire hoses being turned on, people in Birmingham in 1963, black and white television, 01:31:30we couldn't deny it anymore, but I didn't think about the integration of races in work in the movements necessarily, because much of the leadership in our movement was provided by gay men who were sort of scrambling themselves 01:32:00to be able to have any kind of power, any kind of decision making even over their own lives. And the same with lesbians who were separate pretty much until the AIDS pandemic, but there were still people that worked together. My teacher really was Tori Osborne. Tori Osborne, my partner of 10 years, and my best friend in the universe of 41 01:32:30really had this concept and was insistent on there being recognition of racism, maybe not even by intent, in the movement, because many times, here's these white guys, they've got jobs. Some of them might've lost their jobs, but some of them have money. They were the ones that could start these institutions. They were the ones that could give the money. They didn't think, 01:33:00were their black and brown people that we could involve? It wasn't part of who they knew. Phil Wilson will tell you that he actually was discriminated against in the gay community for being black and in the black community for being gay. So he started the Black AIDS Institute, but Tori knew him, brought him in when they went to the White House to meet with Quentin, 01:33:30she had him sitting closest to the president. I remember the picture, which is, since she organized it, that's where you would've thought she would sit. She was very conscious of that, and it just became a part of what I understood. You don't always know where you get your education about things, but that's where I would credit it. What was going on at the center at the time. It became much, much more diverse while she 01:34:00was the executive director. And when I was doing Get used to It, which was 14 years of television shows that I hosted, like a talk show, for the city of West Hollywood, I always tried to make sure that everybody's voice was heard, not in tokenism, but because there was real leadership, real invention, real art, whatever it was that I couldn't 01:34:30just bring my friends on, that it had to be beyond that. And it wasn't just about race. It was about lots of different things, social status or transgender or all of the ways in which our community was varied. But I think it was Tori that gave me my first education.

Mason Funk That's a wonderful tribute. Let's talk about get used to it. We sort of skipped over, we got to go back. We didn't skip over it, 01:35:00but I want to spend some time on it. So what did the genesis of the idea for Get used to it come from?

Sheila Kuehl Came from West Hollywood. Jodi Curley was working there in social services.

Mason Funk Do me a favor, set the stage. "In 1990," whatever.

Sheila Kuehl Yeah, I wish I could remember the years Mason Funk 1992. I have 1992 to 2012, which would've been 20 years.

Sheila Kuehl Yeah, it was only 14 though.

Mason Funk Okay, well, let's say, Sheila Kuehl Oh, no, you know what? 01:35:30It was 14 altogether because I couldn't be on it when I was running for office.

Mason Funk Oh, I see.

Sheila Kuehl Because that would be giving me a platform that I shouldn't have when I'm a candidate. So it took some of the years off of it, but I know it was before I was elected. So in '92, West Hollywood decided they wanted to do a show that would be of interest to their queer constituents of whom there were lots. 01:36:00And Jodi said to them, I've got just the right person for you. I can't even remember who asked me to do it. But I started working with the crew in West Hollywood that was running their television station, and we actually did this and sent it out to many cities all around the country that have their own television stations for the city. And they would run this. 01:36:30I remember when I first met President Clinton, he said, oh, I know who you are. Me and Hillary watch your show all the time. And I thought, oh my God, it was on Washington DC TV at night or whatever. So my concept of it was: just ask people to talk about their lives and their work, and just ask everybody you can think about, ever heard of, and 01:37:00it'll be a one-on-one. In addition, I wanted to do issue shows. So there would be a group of three who would bring different perspectives on an issue like, oh, we're about to have a march on Washington. Why is that? Discuss. And I think it turned out to be, because of the excellent choice of guests, one of the most important shows that show the history of 01:37:30our movement, growing and changing and talking about it. It's like a long book analyzing the changes that we were going through. I'm really proud of it, and I was really despairing that no one could access it until I was told that UCLA was starting to collect them. And then they stopped for a while and then all of a sudden I got 01:38:00invited to do an introduction to the new collection that they had digitalized and had every show. I didn't even know that they were succeeding at it. So now it's available online.

Mason Funk What are some of the most memorable episodes for you that really affected you personally?

Sheila Kuehl I think probably the most affecting would be Paul Monette, 01:38:30as a writer, as a lyrical writer, and a man who affected so many people's lives by being honest about his, he was dying and I really wanted to interview him. I asked him, is it okay for me to ask you about the act of creating something, of writing something, of thinking what to say and why, and the fact that you're 01:39:00now facing your own death. And he said, just what I want to talk about. And so for an hour we did. I think it's quite extraordinary, my interview with Connie Norman, she was the first transgender person I had ever met, we didn't have the word, and asking her all about her life, and I was very pleased in the documentary that they made about her. They used much of my interview 01:39:30because there's no footage on so many of these people that I interviewed. I really also very much like the show about the March on Washington and why we do a march because no one ever says, why are we all going there walking in the streets? Who's watching? Sometimes the news doesn't even cover it. They under count us. Why are we doing this? What effect do we think it'll have? And the 01:40:00really interesting part of the discussion was the effect that people thought it had on the participants when they went home, how they felt so much more empowered, so much more clear that this was important, so much more in a community. But I mean, we did an awful lot of shows. It's really hard to pick out. Tori was in a number of the shows. I used her often as the third person on a panel because she's 01:40:30such a great analyst of history that she would bring that perspective sort of our own Heather Cox Richardson early on, about the gay community. And that was really fun. Then I got to interview all my colleagues too, Carole and Jackie and Chris and their backstories, how they got to be where they are. 01:41:00Elizabeth Birch, who was high up in Apple for a while and out, who also ran a national organization ... it's such a privilege. I watched Stephen Colbert and I think you can get anybody you ask for. And it was sort of like that in a much smaller arena for us, and it was really a privilege. 01:41:30Mason Funk Great. You mentioned, for example, Connie Norman and the queer community, first of all, you use the word queer. Not all of your peers do and some actively reject it.

Sheila Kuehl Even today? They reject it.

Mason Funk Yeah. Okay. And they don't, I know this because some of our interviewees have said this, they see things like the use of the word queer as, for example, erasing lesbians 01:42:00and the contributions of lesbians, I'm not saying many, but at least one or two have expressed this. And similarly, they don't necessarily like transgender women for a variety of reasons. And the bisexuals at one point had to fight like hell to get included in the march in Washington, for example. But you seem like you've had it taken a very inclusive approach towards our community. 01:42:30Sheila Kuehl For me, it was always important to have as many allies as possible. And exclusivity is just the opposite of that because you're not going to attract any allies if you say you're not part of my club. Also, I don't know where this comes from because I think it was before I was elected, but I have always been accused of being kind of generous about other people's thinking, 01:43:00not really evil people, but people who think they're doing the right thing, but it's not what we think is the right thing because in order to get 41 votes in the assembly or 21 in the Senate, you need to go to where people are and not stand here and wait for them to come to you. It will never happen. So understanding where people are coming from, I think, helped. 01:43:30My use of the word queer is a really, well, let's say I learned it from Humpty Dumpty who said, when I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to mean, nothing different. The question is: who's to be the master, you or the word? And so Humpty Dumpty, who would not be thought to be a queer icon, actually made me think, that's the word that I really like. First of all, 01:44:00I'm owning it. It was used as a pejorative and I don't like that, so I'm just going to throw it back in your face, whoever you are. And I think people in our community slice and dice a little too closely about who's in and who's not in, who's in this class and who's in that class. I don't think it helps us. I never criticize people to their face, and I don't name anyone, but I do 01:44:30try to say, this is what I believe, and I think it really works well for us. So I can see where people would not like something that I said or something that I called something, but I'm a member of this community, and for me, it's the queer community. I love the idea of queerness because it means I'm outside the norm. That is what has allowed me to make pioneering laws, 01:45:00to see things differently. I don't know if you ever had the privilege of knowing Ruth Bader Ginsburg's argument in the very first Supreme Court case that started the protection of women as being a protected class and being treated differently. She went outside the lines, and that is the only way you sometimes get 01:45:30these things done. So yeah, I understand. Some people are, they get upset. I mean, transgender women often seem like they're emphasizing things that we've tried to leave behind as women, the ultra feminism, the worried about clothes or the way we look on makeup or whatever. And yet, if we were going 01:46:00to be ourselves for the very first time, who knows what we would choose to do and be like, it's just so personal.

Mason Funk Thank you for that. Thank you for breaking that. That's interesting.

Sheila Kuehl Yeah, look at the clock.

Mason Funk We're good. You have a half an hour to go. Are you good? Do you want a little sip of water? Stretch your legs?

Sheila Kuehl No, I'm fine. Thank you. I'm good.

Mason Funk How are you, Kate?

Sheila Kuehl I'm good.

Mason Funk Okay. So I want to talk about this moment, Rick Zbur, 01:46:30whom we interviewed a few months ago, we talked at length about California's role at this particular moment in our nation, and he introduced me to the notion, that I was never aware before, that you can ride a law in California with your eye on other states, knowing that you can pave the way for other states to be able to use that law in their states. That was fascinating to me, and that's interesting in of itself, but what do you see as California's role 01:47:00right now given this chaotic, extremely divisive and regressive period we seem to be experiencing as a nation?

Sheila Kuehl I don't know what I would identify as California's role, because I don't think the rest of the country is paying that much attention to us. I think they're looking at the train wreck in Florida and in Texas in terms of the negatives 01:47:30that you shouldn't be. But I think the rest of the country doesn't give a whit about what California does because it's always seemed so different to them. For instance, what I described as already having a disability insurance in place, and therefore it was easier for us to have paid family leave, a Florida legislator asked me, how can we do it? And I said, you probably 01:48:00can't unless you put a whole lot of money in like we did early on with disability insurance, so we already had it. We are very, unlike many states, 40 million people makes us very unlike most other states. We have a lot in common with New York, and often New York has started a law that we copy. I think Rick as a new legislator is very happy with being in a state that is so progressive that 01:48:30can show the way, and maybe he's gotten inquiries about one of his laws from Ohio or South Dakota, but my own opinion is we need to think very carefully about our own house and making certain that we continue to elect people who have other people's welfare in mind, who really understand their communities, 01:49:00who know what might be needed. It wasn't until we listened to battered women's actual voices that we knew what was needed because we would get a great idea, we should have the doctor call the cops when they come into the emergency room. And then of course, their batterer thought they called the cops and it was worse for them. So as long as California continues to think very carefully about who it elects, 01:49:30which people don't too much, they just look at the two that are available and say, oh, I think I like him better. Most importantly, from my point of view, I think we need to keep generating really good people to run for office and making certain that they know or that they try it out. Because it's such a joy. It's just a joy. It's crap a lot of the time. But I just retired, 01:50:00I'm 82, and I left it all on the field. I did everything I could, and I feel really good about retiring because I got to do so much. And a lot of it was in the legislature on the board of supervisors, and I think that's where California can shine, is just in the collective work that they do. Everybody only really looks at the governor, but we have done an 01:50:30amazing amount of collective work in the legislature and the candidates, they're really important. They're uppermost on my mind at the moment.

Mason Funk Is that because you see the state not necessarily doing a great job of building its farm system for the state legislature?

Sheila Kuehl I don't think the state has ever done a good job of building a farm system for the legislature. It's all very accidental. You wait until you get your ballot or you maybe hear somebody's running, 01:51:00I don't mean you particularly, but yous guys, and you didn't get any choice in who ran. You're like, it's plan A or plan B. And you look at them and you think, I think I like this one better, this is a good person. It's all very accidental. People decide on their own to run. So I've been trying to encourage, and there are some places where it's like, don't be afraid to run, come in and we'll tell you what it's like, kind of training grounds like that. 01:51:30And good people do think, oh, I think I'll run. But the stories need to be out there about how great it is, not necessarily for your personal life, but how great it is to be part of this collective that tries to make lives better for 40 million people.

Mason Funk Wow. Let's go back to that idea of a cast 01:52:00of a TV show and comparing that experience, that collective experience to being part of this something called the state legislature. What similarities and differences do you see?

Sheila Kuehl I think the similarities between being in a cast of a TV show and being in the legislature are, you get to know each other very, very, very well. But because I was a teenager on Dobie Gillis and a grownup in the legislature, I actually experienced it much more deeply 01:52:30in the legislature. Three of our men in the state senate lost their sons while they were in the Senate, and we went through their grief with them, and we went through their healing with them. Temples were set on fire, so with our Jewish members, we went through grieving with them and helping rebuild. We are walking from Delano to the capitol with 01:53:00the farm workers, and you just form really deep bonds with people because nobody knows what it's like. Nobody else has that experience. It's just really a small club. The differences between being in a cast and being in the legislature is that you really get a lot more into your own values in the legislature, and you need to think what they are and clarify them 01:53:30for yourself. And you find allies, value allies, in the legislature, which is much more bonding than acting together.

It's just deeper and I think more important.

Mason Funk So not a lot of there, when it comes to the similarities.

Sheila Kuehl The similarities are the feeling of family, the feeling of support, the feeling of my car breaks down in the middle of the night, and I could call them, 01:54:00they would come pick me up. Bob Denver and I went to a ... he played Maynard on Dobie Gillis. Bob Denver and I were required by our sponsor to go to this gathering in San Diego, because they own us and we're supposed to show up and talk to them. And we were so bored, I said, "I've got to get out of here." Bob said, "Okay, let's go." And we got in his car and we drove back to LA and I got really car sick, and he stopped three times 01:54:30so that I could be car sick and took care of me, took me home. I mean, like a brother. So I think there's just a lot of love that is shared, and that is a similarity. Nobody thinks you're going to find love in the legislature, and maybe it's just me, and I certainly don't mean romantic love. I mean the deeper kind that somebody will just show up for you 25 years later and say, sure, I'll pick you up. You Carole Migdenean, 01:55:00I can't explain it, but it lasts.

Mason Funk Kate, any questions bubbling up for you?

Kate Kunath I mean, I guess my question is ... well, one comment, which is that I'm the partner of an ICU nurse and the nurse to patient ratio is everything.

Sheila Kuehl I know.

Kate Kunath It really is everything. It doesn't impact 01:55:30only the patient, but also the quality of the work that the nurses can do. And I can say 100% of the nurses in Lindsay's unit do the job that they do because of that law and the quality that they can deliver is because of that law.

Sheila Kuehl I know it. believe me, I know it. Because in my forties, I had a hysterectomy. We were talking 01:56:00about the nurse to patient ratios, and I don't want to say your word mundane is what you really meant, but it's kind of like a regular bill, not about being gay. And after the bill passed, I needed to have a hysterectomy, and I went into the hospital for it. And I was a Kaiser patient at the time. Two things happened that were interesting. One is: all the nurses came over and thanked me for the bill. Day nurses, 01:56:30night nurses, floor nurses, ICU nurses that weren't even on my floor came and thanked me for doing it. And of course it wasn't me because it was everybody, and the nurses were very central to it.

The other thing that happened to me while I was in that hospital is I was visited by several of the women on my board from the battered women's shelter, and they brought me a little glass house with a plant in it. So the nurses came and said, now, who were those women? And we heard you talking, blah, blah, blah, blah. 01:57:00And I said, oh, battered women. So it's like 2:30 in the morning, they wake you up anyway to, I don't know, take your temperature. But they came and woke me up. I was a little groggy, and they said, "We're really sorry. We're really sorry. But Janice, the other nurse that has worked with us, she's in the parking lot now and her boyfriend's beating her up. We don't know what to do." We didn't have, 01:57:30here's who you call, it was brand new stuff with battered women. And I said, 8004627090, whatever. That was the emergency line. So I felt like they were immense help to me. They were grateful for the bill, but I was help to them too.

Mason Funk That's great.

Kate Kunath My follow up question to that is 01:58:00where does the insight come from? Because I feel like as a little bit of ... there's the kind of alchemy to it is having feedback from your community, but also some kind of spooky sense of what people need. Could you have ever anticipated that the impact of the bills actually reaches as far as it does? So is it like, I don't know, is it your guardian angel?

Mason Funk And you said the California Nurse Association wanted to pass this bill, but ... 01:58:30Sheila Kuehl No, when I was talking about getting a bill through and having an idea on my own, I had a lot about women's issues and family law issues that I wanted to do, and eventually gay and lesbian issues, but many environmental issues, criminal law issues, et cetera, the people would ask me, where does the insight come from? Okay, maybe what needs to be done, but 01:59:00how do you know what needs to be done or how to do it? And honestly, that's the beauty of the democratic process. I mean, people compare it to making sausage, and I do understand that it looks like you sort of grind it up and put us mishmash together. Not really like that. The insight actually comes maybe from your witnesses, from your colleagues, from people who want to let you know what they think of the bill. 01:59:30You don't stick with your first idea. You kind of take it all in, and it's refined. Sometimes it is lessened because people are chickened to vote for really serious things, but it's the way the process kind of shapes a thing that actually makes it better in the long run. And we also have lawyers who drafted for us, although they always used to kid me because I used to do the first draft of all my bills. I wanted 02:00:00to make sure they got it right.

Mason Funk Why would you as a legislator, have a lawyer draft a bill for you?

Sheila Kuehl Well, you have to because there are rules for drafting California statutes the way they have to be phrased where they go in the code. Because, although in the east there's the of common law, some of which is not written down, but is historical, and through the courts, in California, we're a statutory based state. Everything has got to be written down, 02:00:30so the words count. So legislative council's office would have to draft all the bills. That's the rule.

Mason Funk I see. Okay. Never knew that, about how the sausage is made. I have in my notes that you and I talked about the domestic partner registry, and that was a really important story.

Sheila Kuehl I think we talked about that though.

Mason Funk I do think so because ...

Sheila Kuehl Do you want to go back to it?

Mason Funk That was the one where you were talking about Jackie Goldberg adding in all these ...

Sheila Kuehl Right. But Carole Migden started it off. 02:01:00Mason Funk Give us a little bit of an overview of that process alone, if you wouldn’t mind.

Sheila Kuehl I think that Carole Migden always had in mind that she wanted to start a domestic partner registry because there were no rights at all for our couples, none in the law. And so being an incrementalist, which is one of the best things that any of us were in the legislature, Carole decided to bring a bill just establishing a registry where you could sign up with your partner. 02:01:30You had to have shared bank account, you had to live in the same home, very minimal rules. And then you just got a few things on the first bill you could go visit your partner in the hospital, when only family could go. There were a couple of things, and then anything else where we kind of got our foot in the door. Same thing happened with domestic violence legislation. It's like, oh, let's make it a misdemeanor.

How about if we make it a felony? How about if we put people in jail? 02:02:00I mean, it just gets bigger. Carole did that. She would add some new rights that you would have. And then after Jackie was elected, the same thing went on. And then Jackie went whole hog by the end of it. So it just built and built. But I think that we were afraid to ask for marriage because it would fail or the governor would probably veto it. And so we took the incremental approach and Carole and Jackie 02:02:30were totally instrumental in that.

Mason Funk Where were you at in that era when people were afraid to go for full blown marriage? Because they were afraid, in the early days, if it made it all the way up to the Supreme Court and lost, they were terrified what a huge setback that would be. Where were your political calculations around marriage?

Sheila Kuehl My heart and my political calculations about marriage for our community were different. I always wanted it. I just 02:03:00thought that was the only way anybody was going to think of us as equal. So long as you keep people from marrying, it's a really major tool for discrimination: we are human, we can get married; you are not human, you can't get married. And how do I know you're not human because you can't get married. It was like that, but in a political calculation, you'd have to think about what it meant to fail. But I have to say, I was never very chicken about things. 02:03:30I mean, wasn't the first thing I thought of going for. But I thought if we built and built, familiarity ... I mean, I was in on the very first national coming out day when it was invented. I thought that was a really good idea because suddenly the nurse who took care of you in the hospital or the third grade teacher and you find out she was a lesbian, so maybe not so bad, and 02:04:00it was incremental. But as soon as the boys were elected, which was later than the girls were elected, Mark Leno came in, John Laird came in, they wanted marriage. We always were going to be for it, but we didn't think it was going to pass, so it was not ... I'm just going to say it this way, it was not a danger to be for it. It was not going to move too fast and suddenly end up in court. It wasn't like 02:04:30everybody was going to go, oh yeah, what a great idea, and boom. And Governor would just sign it happily. I mean, it took a really, really long time before Obama lit up the White House as a rainbow. I mean, that was a lot of years, but I was always for it, although women were a little ambivalent about marriage because it had always been very hierarchical in the straight community, and they didn't 02:05:00want there to be sort of a devolution into roles or power trips or whatever. And I said, you don't have to get married to have roles and power trips, you guys are already experiencing it. We should have the legitimacy. And it was interesting because when Tori actually participated in a wedding that I performed in the legislature for a number of lesbian couples who were our friends, 02:05:30when Tori came home, there were flowers on her doorstep from her neighbors, because you don't know how to congratulate somebody on a domestic partnership, but get married, oh, I know what to do. I get you a gift. I say, congratulations. I give you a card. There's a standard that we entered in that sort of land that I think just took one more discriminatory tool away. 02:06:00Mason Funk Right. Excellent. We are on the home stretch officially.

Sheila Kuehl Okay.

Mason Funk I have to ask you, with your TV background, do you watch TV? And what do you watch and what do you like?

Sheila Kuehl I watch TV all the time. I don't watch news except when I wake up in the middle of the night and then I watch CNN and M-S-N-B-C with no sound and just read the crawl. Because, for some reason, 02:06:30I can take it in then, but I can't fall asleep originally if I watch it before. I don't pay for anything because I'm a retired person and it's not a lot of money. I don't pay for Netflix. I don't pay for Max. I don't pay for any streaming services. I watch network television, but that means I watched Queen Latifah in The Equalizer. I mean, some shows I really love, and I've been watching old shows lately, 02:07:00because there are so many channels with old shows on them. I'm watching, currently ... Well, I watched a whole lot of episodes of Castle, which was a sort of a mystery ... He was a writer and had been brought in to consult with the police because he was a mystery writer and had a different take sometimes on things, one of those. Also, I've been watching 02:07:30past episodes of Bones, which is wonderful series about a forensic anthropologist who works with the police department trying to figure out what happened to murder victims simply by looking at their bones. I mean, it's a great series. And so I watch maybe one or two a night, it takes my mind away. But in the current series, 02:08:00pretty much like NCIS, wherever they go. And there's a bunch of them now, Hawaii, Australia, FBI, especially the International Series. I've never watched comedies that much.

Mason Funk That's funny. Maybe just like the meatier stuff.

Sheila Kuehl Yeah.

Mason Funk We have a final four questions. Oh, no. Before we get to that, there's one last thing I wrote. 02:08:30You said one of the ways you feel like you've been successful is you always think before you speak, and I've been accused by my husband of being someone who doesn't always think before he speaks. So that really kind of struck a nerve with me in a good way. What's the essence of that for you? Where did that come from? Why do you regard that as so important?

Sheila Kuehl Well, I think I told you that I think before I ...

Mason Funk Do me a favor, don't say I told you. Just jump right in. 02:09:00Sheila Kuehl I don't know when I started being aware of thinking before I speak, because in many avatars in my early life, it really didn't matter what I said. People think you have to be very careful when you're a TV celebrity, but you can tell from many of them, you know ... And I was never a big enough celebrity that I was being chased by paparazzi. I think that when I 02:09:30was advising the Student Legislative Council at UCLA when I was an assistant dean, I was trying to help them be effective. And one of the things I put into my ratos rules of order, which is what I called it, was taking a breath before you speak and making certain that you're saying what you really mean to say, you're not necessarily hurting someone when you say it, inadvertently, 02:10:00you don't sound like an idiot. Think of it. And also, I've been very fortunate that my brain works really fast. I've been thinking before I answer every one of your questions, but you can't see the gap. It just is a kind of way of phrasing that tells the truth, but isn't mean or 02:10:30foolish, I hope, anyway.

Mason Funk Or does it reveal more than you want to necessarily?

Sheila Kuehl Well, especially with the press where they wanted ... it just started when I was in the legislature, it wasn't as bad as it is now, where they do want to play gotcha. One time, the first woman was elected speaker in the assembly, and she'd been elected because we had this evenly divided house. One person 02:11:00was recalled and we knew there was going to be a Republican speaker, so the Democrats decided they would all vote for her. If she would vote for herself, she would win, but it would be with all Democrats, and she was a Republican, so all the Republicans voted against her. We voted with her, and she became speaker. All the press ran over to her and said, so why do you think all these guys didn't vote for you? And she made a reference 02:11:30to, I think, small penises. And the press ran over to me and said, what do you think about what Doris just said about the Republicans having small penises? And I said, "Guys, I'm a lesbian. What do I know about penises?" That, I actually said without thinking before, but it was one of my best quotes, I have to say.

Mason Funk That's awesome. Okay. On that note, we're going to go to the final four. If you could tell 02:12:0015-year-old Sheila anything, what would it be?

Sheila Kuehl Don't worry what other people think of you.

Mason Funk Sorry, preface .

Sheila Kuehl If I could tell my year old self something that I thought would be useful for her, I would tell her try not to worry what other people think of you. Simply follow your own heart and your own good sense and be who you are.

Mason Funk Great. Do you ascribe 02:12:30to the notion that there's some kind of so-called superpower that all queer people share? And if so, how would you define that superpower?

Sheila Kuehl I do not subscribe to the notion that all queer people share a superpower, except in the sense that superpowers stem in all of the tales from mutancy, that is one is a mutant, 02:13:00one is not the regular kind of thing. In our community, I think we have established a kind of resilience that allows us to support each other, that's a superpower; to be honest about ourselves, that's a superpower; to recognize discrimination when it happens to other people and work to end it. That kind 02:13:30of sharing is a superpower. And I just think the ability to laugh at ourselves to do things differently that you learn when you're outside the box, by other people's definition, that is very, very helpful to us.

Mason Funk Great. Why is it important to you to share your story?

Sheila Kuehl It's important to me to share my story for several reasons. One is, 02:14:00it's important to the people who ask me to share my story. They have an idea, I think, that it will last and it will be of help to people who want to watch it in the next 200 years or whatever they're going to be doing. Maybe it's going to be inserted right into their brains in a hundred years. I don't know. I like to tell it because it helps me to organize my thoughts about my life. 02:14:30I don't want to tell it because I want somebody to learn something, like I have something to teach. That's really up to the person watching or asking or thinking. But I learned something new from myself as I speak, and I like further understanding my own life.

Mason Funk Great. And 02:15:00OUTWORDS being a collection of interviews with LGBTQ+ elders across the United States, what do you see as the value of that? And if you can mention OUTWORDS in your answer?

Sheila Kuehl I think the value of OUTWORDS doing this work, collecting these stories and putting them out so that they're available helps people looking for community, looking for some explanation 02:15:30of why they feel what they feel, why they want to do what they want to do, or in some ways it's, if you can see it, you can be it. So that maybe someone will see, in a story, something they hadn't thought of being or doing or they had but they didn't think they could, and here's somebody who did it, who is saying, I'm not so very special, I just kept going. I think stories are the most important thing 02:16:00in human society. I think it's the way we share our lives, our feelings, try to help people understand. If I just give you a conclusory line, it doesn't land the same as if I come at it with a story. I think stories are the most powerful things ever.

Mason Funk Kate, any last questions?

Kate Kunath No, just thank you. 02:16:30Mason Funk I know it's been a lot, but anything that you feel like you just want to say or share?

Sheila Kuehl Well, nothing you can use because I want to thank you guys for doing it. I do think that it's really important, and I don't think everyone wakes up as a kid and says, I think what I want to do is collect stories, or maybe somebody does, and good on them too. 02:17:00These are the lessons of humanity. That's one thing I wanted to say. The other thing is, I am 82, and I have never been so content, and I think it really comes from doing work and living life in a way that helped me to find meaning in things. I'm not saying I 02:17:30made it happen so that I would have meaning, but I feel very content about what I have done, the people that I've known. I feel extraordinarily fortunate, and I feel fortunate to feel fortunate at this age. Somebody said, well, you left it all on the field, and I really think I kind of did what I wanted to do. Now I don't have to do it anymore. And it's just like Sunday every day 02:18:00or vacation.

Mason Funk You did leave it all on the field, and I can imagine the sense of satisfaction that you can now rest from your labors.

Sheila Kuehl Yeah, it's really good. I do feel sad about the shortness of life though.

Mason Funk Yeah, Sheila Kuehl Because it's fun.

Mason Funk Yeah, I know.

Kate Kunath Can I ask one more thing?

Mason Funk Absolutely.

Kate Kunath You were talking about the training grounds, and I know you left it all on the field, but can you identify 02:18:30a couple of those training grounds or are you doing any mentoring or are you doing any kind of continuation?

Mason Funk And answer me, please. Here, look at me.

Sheila Kuehl You know, I'm not doing any training or mentoring, and I think that there are several organizations now, whose names I don't even know anymore, who offer to train candidates. I think EMILYs List does a good job with some of their trainings for women. 02:19:00I think there's also EMERGE, which trains ... I just had breakfast the other day with Dave Fleischer who ran a training, I think he's still doing trainings, for the Gay and Lesbian Center for gay and lesbian candidates. Not only was the training great, but being with people, and this was very early, this was in the nineties, discussing what we would say or not say, 02:19:30how we would say it, the two minute elevator speech, which I had never heard of. I think that anyone thinking of being a candidate ... I mean Mr. Google is like a gift. You can just look up anything. And then you probably want to see who did they train. I mean, did it work? Did they learn good things? That kind of thing. But I think it's there. I also want to say that I am adamant that everyone needs to vote 02:20:00and needs to really think about it, and I don't mean just this year, I mean every single election, and really look at the candidates and really look at the initiatives and discuss it with people.

It's the most important right we have.

Mason Funk Yeah. Yeah. And people take it for granted, unfortunately. Yeah.