CAROL LEASE:

Okay. Carolyn T. Lease. C-A-R-O-L-Y-N Theresa Lease L-E-A-S-E.

MASON FUNK:

How do you want to be identified?

CAROL LEASE:

Carol.

MASON FUNK:

Carol Lease?

CAROL LEASE:

Right.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. When I ask you a question, you've probably done the drill before, if you can roll my question into your answer. If I say, "Where were you born," you'd say, "I was born in --" "And when you were --" "I was born in --" as opposed to just giving the location and the date. Where were you born? In what year?

CAROL LEASE:

I was born in Denver, Colorado in August 11th, 1948.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. You're a native.

CAROL LEASE:

Yeah. Yes.

MASON FUNK:

One of the first questions that I always like to ask people is what was your family like? Who raised you?

CAROL LEASE:

I was the third out of nine children in a Catholic family, seven brothers, one sister. Stay-at-home mom, a homemaker. My father was in the television business, and then the banking business, and then the water business. From Indianapolis, his people were from Alsace-Lorraine, France, and Ireland. 

CAROL LEASE:

Mom's people were from Sweden and Ireland. It was big families, lots of relatives, lots of activity all the time.

MASON FUNK:

Uh-huh (affirmative). Did your mom and dad have other siblings around as well, their cousins and aunts and uncles, that kind of thing?

CAROL LEASE:

Yes. Mom's people were from Denver. She came from a family of eight. We had uncles and aunts here 

CAROL LEASE:

and nephews and nieces. One of her sisters was a nun who died about a year ago. Her brothers went World War 2. All of them served in the Army or the Navy. They were a typical Irish Catholic family in Denver.

MASON FUNK:

Was there a pretty big Irish Catholic community here?

CAROL LEASE:

There is. There is.

MASON FUNK:

There is what?

CAROL LEASE:

Yes. There is a big Irish Catholic community in Denver. 

CAROL LEASE:

Every year we have the St. Patrick's Day parade. That's been going on for years and years and years. I went to it when I was a kid. Then, of course, when I was with the Community Center and I tried to get us into the parade, that caused a huge controversy. When I tried to get the Gay and Lesbian Community Center in the parade, that caused a huge controversy. It's like a full circle thing. "Why can't we go be in the St. Patrick's Day parade? That makes sense to me." Well, we couldn't. 

CAROL LEASE:

We were told that because there would be children there. They did not want the Gay and Lesbian Community Center marching in the parade.

MASON FUNK:

All right. Yup. We'll come back to that because as we go a little bit chronologically, then we'll inevitably, hopefully come back to that. What role did Catholicism play in your family life and your formation [inaudible]?

CAROL LEASE:

Very central. Very religious family. Mass every Sunday. Went to Catholic grade schools and Catholic high school in Denver. Wore uniforms. Got a great education, great speller. It's true. It's true. Both of my parents were very religious but at a pretty early age, I decided or found out that I did not believe in that, 

CAROL LEASE:

did not want to go there. It came through a realization that the sisters at the school I went to, the sisters at Assumption grade school treated some of the kids differently than they did others. Of course, if you're a little Catholic kid, a little girl and you're hearing this dogma and you believe it and then you see that difference. 

CAROL LEASE:

They were the Mexican kids in the school. That wasn't right. It weakened my belief in them. I think once you have a little crack that starts, especially if you're a little kid and you don't have a lot of experience, it widens and widens. There was some concepts I just didn't think were very nice, like if babies don't get baptized, they have to go to limbo. They can't go to heaven. Who said that?" "Oh, god did." That doesn't sound right to me.

MASON FUNK:

[inaudible] --

CAROL LEASE:

I think it was, when you have a lot of that religion and teaching and doesn't make sense. Then, I think questions arise. Early on, it was, "Carol, you just don't have any faith." "Oh, okay." I think when you start early -- Of course, I go along because I'm living in the family. You're at home. You're a kid but 

CAROL LEASE:

once I was in college and really have the freedom to really explore other things, that was clear. It was pretty clear to me that those values can help some people but they weren't helpful for me and the dogma especially.

MASON FUNK:

Right. But at that early age, some kids. I'm just curious if we're able to pinpoint why you noticed that, 

MASON FUNK:

these sisters treating some kids differently than others. Why you noticed that and why it mattered to you, when undoubtedly, other kids were on some level witnessing the same thing but it just went right over their heads.

CAROL LEASE:

My mother's bridesmaid was Latina. I think from a small age, because I can remember Ramona and her daughters coming over and playing together and learning ABCs and those kinds of things. The little ABC song and that. I always had people. I always was around people who weren't just white. 

CAROL LEASE:

I have no clue why that bothered me but it did. It was just the beginning of saying, "You know, something's not right here." I think that the church is so demanding in obedience. Remember, this is early, mid 50s. They were so rigid. If you were divorced -- One of my aunts, who is really nice,

CAROL LEASE:

my mother's sister, was divorced. That meant she could not go to communion or go -- I think she could go to mass but she couldn't participate in things. That didn't make any sense. It wasn't her fault she was divorced. I saw the way people were treated because of certain things that happened to them or they did. It just didn't make sense to me as a kid.

MASON FUNK:

How about actually going back to Mary Morton. She was raised in a very, very strong Catholic family as well, 

MASON FUNK:

Roman Catholic. One of the cracks for her was she told the story of riding home with her mom and saying, "Mom, this whole confession thing. Why do you have to tell some white dude what I did?" I just wonder if that was one of the things also where you just said, "I'm just not so sure about that." Did the whole confession thing, was that ever --

CAROL LEASE:

I had to make things up because --

MASON FUNK:

Tell them about one of the --

CAROL LEASE:

-- because I didn't have any sins to confess. Seriously. 

CAROL LEASE:

I wasn't an angel as a kid. I helped my mother a lot, taking care of my other brothers and keeping house clean and cooking and ironing and doing that kind of stuff. I did all the typical little girl activities and sex role stereotyping activities but I didn't act out, I think. My role was more -- I really strongly identified with my mother.

CAROL LEASE:

Later in life, later in college, I realized, it took a long time to realize I really didn't want to be like her. I did not want to have child after child after child. We were pretty poor. We didn't have a lot of resources but everybody else was, too, so you don't really know that until you see other people, the way other people live.

MASON FUNK:

Your mom didn't model for you. She modeled for you more what you didn't want to become than what you did want to become, would you say?

CAROL LEASE:

Right. I think the same awareness that I had about religion, I also could apply to the family, which was, I don't want to have a big family. I don't even know if I want to have a family. It was interesting because my sister never married and never had kids. I've never married, never had kids. Two of my brothers have never had children. The others have wonderful families and wonderful wives, 

CAROL LEASE:

wonderful women in their lives. I think it's real different, too, when you have nine kids in a family because you have quite an age range, too. I don't think the mores of because I came from a big family, I have to have a big family sticks anymore. I think it's a different time.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. For sure. Yeah, you rarely see people pumping out 9, 10, 11 kids.

CAROL LEASE:

Yeah. In some religious communities you will because that's the role of the woman. That's her duty. Her duty is to reproduce but I think that time in this country is far gone.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. What were you going to say?

CAROL LEASE:

I was going to say, "Not the stigma." I think the stigma of not being a parent stays sometimes but especially with those of us who choose not to have children but I think that's also changing, too.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Say, between the years of you being a girl, then going through junior high school and high school, then into college, when did you first start to have activist thoughts or maybe you're starting to think that you wanted -- Was there a time when you started to realize you wanted to, in some way, make a difference in the world?

CAROL LEASE:

As a senior in high school, there was another --

MASON FUNK:

[inaudible]. Okay.

CAROL LEASE:

Yeah. I think I started thinking about doing things differently or seeing things and wanting to make a change and do something, probably as a senior in high school. There was another student in school. Her name's Karla Jay. She lives in New York. She's an attorney.

MASON FUNK:

I'm interviewing her for this project.

CAROL LEASE:

Oh, wow!

MASON FUNK:

You and she were schoolmates?

CAROL LEASE:

Yeah. She was ahead of me, two or three years.

MASON FUNK:

Oh, my god! Okay, kidding.

CAROL LEASE:

Karla, she graduated from Mount Carmel High School and went to the South and was one of the Freedom Riders in the South. Then, she came back and came to our class and gave us a big speech about what she had done. I was just mesmerized. She came back. She had a black turtleneck sweater on, like, "Oh, gosh! This is neat." Of course, I couldn't do it because I was just still a kid. 

CAROL LEASE:

She might have been three years older than me. I felt, "Well, what is she talking about?" Then, I started reading more. I thought, "Well, this is wrong." We only had one African-American student at Mount Carmel, 300 students. Then you start putting things together and reading and thinking. Then, when I went to college at CU, that was 1966. Vietnam, the war. It was right there. I joined the Student Peace Union, which was a Quaker group.

CAROL LEASE:

We'd have these non-violent protests. I got this red, white, and blue little mohair suit. I'd wear my little heels in the suit because we wanted to look respectable. We didn't want to be the nasty-looking hippies. Most of us were not middle class. We didn't come from that. We'd stand around at the University Center and do silent vigils and all this stuff and get spit on.

CAROL LEASE:

I got involved in that. Then, when you just open your eyes up and you see it, you can't imagine. It's growing up. As a student teacher at school, at CU, I was assigned to a school in Jefferson County to be a student teacher. I'd been reading education stuff, and I wanted the kids to determine what topics they wanted to talk about. It was a social studies class. 

CAROL LEASE:

They wanted to talk about the Black Panthers, who were very much active in those days. I said, "Okay. I'll get a speaker who can come in," because I certainly couldn't talk about it. All hell broke loose because one of the kids went home and told his parents. One young woman said that I told her to go down to the Civic Center to recruit a Black Panther, which of course, isn't true. The next time I went down for student teaching, 

CAROL LEASE:

this student who told his parents came up and put a microphone in front of me and started asking me all these questions about the Black Panthers. It was a big scandal. The school, of course, they pulled me out of the assignment but I'm thinking, "Why don't you want to teach these kids about the real world and about African-American lives?" The other thing I did was, I did a session on propaganda, Vietnamese -- Remember the years this was, the Vietnamese war 

CAROL LEASE:

and the propaganda. I had access to lots of information from North Vietnam, books, magazines, really. We talked about what is propaganda? What does that word mean? It was real critical approach. Got in trouble because I said, "Well, where are we going to get some propaganda," because this isn't North Vietnamese propaganda. "Where would we get this propaganda? How about The American Legion?" Okay. You can just see, 

CAROL LEASE:

clearly. What a lot of my friends told me at the time is, "You need to go to New York City or some big city. There you would be comfortable because there's more people like you. You'd be able to teach there. They'd want you but they don't want you here."

MASON FUNK:

You're not welcome at these parts.

CAROL LEASE:

You're not welcome.

MASON FUNK:

Backtracking for one second. You just mentioned in passing, "Oh, yeah. No. We would get spit on." I don't know. I've never heard that before. Tell us, you would be doing what and who would spit on you? Just kind of --

CAROL LEASE:

We were protesting the war in Vietnam at the UMC in Boulder, University of Colorado in Boulder. The Student Peace Union, our approach was non-violence, that you get the word out, you talk. The men would wear suits and I dressed up in my little red, white, and blue mohair suit -- amazing -- and nylons, little heels because we did not want to be associated with the hippies or the people who were burning buildings 

CAROL LEASE:

or bombing. We didn't want that in the way of the conversation. We would be around the fountain. They had a fountain then. Silent vigil, holding signs. As peace students would be moving from class to class, some would come and spit on us because we were communists or we were troublemakers. That's really common. You always just have a certain part of a population that does something. 

CAROL LEASE:

Maybe a lot of people didn't like the war and eventually, of course, the American public opinion stopped the war, among other things, but it took years and years and years and the loss of, what, 55,000 American lives and millions of people in those countries. It works but it's a hard job to do.

MASON FUNK:

These people when they spat on you, would they say anything or they just casually walked --

CAROL LEASE:

I don't remember. "Communist!" We were communists because we opposed the war. "Traitors." I have a lot of that stuff. I've kept a lot of things but you just wipe it off. The attitude is this is ignorance. In a way, it reinforces what you do when you get the reaction. Most people ignored us. They didn't care. They're students, are going to school. That's their job. They're not going to get involved in world events.

MASON FUNK:

Was it in some ways even more frustrating, the ones who just walked by like they were just in a bubble as opposed to the ones who would spit at you?

CAROL LEASE:

Right. Yeah. At least you got a reaction from them, or they'd argue or they'd want to talk. Then, we'd debate. I didn't do a lot of that but other members who were much more articulate would sit and debate issues or talk about things or question things. It grew. The movement grew bigger and bigger. Then, 

CAROL LEASE:

Students for a Democratic Society came to campus. I briefly worked with them until I realized that the only women they really wanted were women who would also go to bed with them. I wasn't going to do that. I couldn't evolve, I couldn't contribute to the activities. I wasn't just going to make coffee. I pretty much didn't get that involved in SDS because it was real male-dominated leftist. 

CAROL LEASE:

"We know the answers. You girls can do whatever you do."

MASON FUNK:

I've heard that about SDS.

CAROL LEASE:

No. It's true.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. If we're going to go there, let's go there. [crosstalk] --

CAROL LEASE:

It's different chapters. Its different chapters are different, I'm sure. The one in Boulder was that way.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. State that for me because I feel like if we're going to say this about the SDS, then let's just say it real loud and clear. Maybe start off, "The SDS chapter in Boulder --"

CAROL LEASE:

Yeah. The SDS Chapter in Boulder that was active in the late 60s and early 70s was very dominated by men who wanted to run and control everything, who had their agendas, what they wanted. One thing that many of those men wanted, in order for a woman to get to a position of control or power, was to be sexually involved with the guys. I made that pretty clear for the very beginning that was not going to happen with me. Then, I started wondering

CAROL LEASE:

why I wasn't asked to speak. I pretty much stuck with the Student Peace Union. We did a march from Boulder to Denver capital, can you imagine walking, to bring attention to the issue of Vietnam. Yeah. It was very awful, in that sense. I didn't argue about it because I didn't want to. 

CAROL LEASE:

I'm trying to think where some of those folks are today. You had your academics in there, they didn't care, at SDS. The power and the leadership, yeah, if you were a woman and you wanted to speak or you wanted to be involved in it and do things, that was one of the requirements.

MASON FUNK:

Right. That was the price of admission.

CAROL LEASE:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

MASON FUNK:

Stepping sideways for a minute, how were, I guess your mom in particular, or your siblings, your dad, how are they reacting to your involvement with these types of activities?

CAROL LEASE:

Oh, they hated it. They absolutely hated it.

MASON FUNK:

Could you tell me, you were talking about and --

CAROL LEASE:

When I was involved in these anti-war activities, when I was at Boulder CU, my parents were very unhappy about that. I got involved pretty quickly when I went up so you enroll in August or September. I'd be out there in my little suit protesting. My sister was a student there, too, and she would see me. 

CAROL LEASE:

She called mom and dad. She tattled. They called me. I think my mother called me and said, "We don't want you to do this," and, "This is not okay," and, "You know, we don't want you to get involved." I, of course, being the smart aleck I was, said, "You can't do anything about it. I'm over 18. I can do what I choose to do." I was there on partially scholarship and work study. It's pretty independent.

CAROL LEASE:

To make my point, to drive my point home, I remember I didn't go home for Thanksgiving that year. It was an independence. It was individuation. "I am me. I will make my decisions." I stayed connected with my parents and my family but I made it clear that I was going to do what I needed to do. They said they would come and take me out of school. I said, "You can't do that. You don't have the authority." Can you imagine?

MASON FUNK:

I'm loving [crosstalk].

CAROL LEASE:

Me. We just agreed never to discuss politics. That's what happened when you went home. I didn't talk about it. I had a brother who was in Vietnam at the time, too. That was very difficult for them but they couldn't see the difference between disapproving the war and supporting the people who were in the war. We now know who a lot of those people in the war were under the draft. 

CAROL LEASE:

They were poor. They couldn't get the exception. They weren't in school, African-American. What they were exposed to, the trauma they were exposed to. My brother showed me photographs of some of the things that were done over there. It's unimaginable. We now know the effect that has on people, the post-traumatic stress syndrome, the trauma, what war does but at the time, we were fighting the enemy. You all better just shut up and do what we tell you. I didn't.

MASON FUNK:

Yes, sir.

EDWARD DONE:

Could we get, "I had a brother in Vietnam in the war." I had a [crosstalk] --

MASON FUNK:

Oh, okay. Yes, because I wanted to hear that story again, anyway. I think that's a really important, valuable, fascinating, poignant story to tell, just that you were getting spat on for being antiwar and you had a brother in the war.

CAROL LEASE:

Right.

MASON FUNK:

Could you just tell us that story and the turmoil that caused in your family for you? It just sounds quite complicated.

CAROL LEASE:

During the Vietnam era, the war and when I was a student and did not support the war and, in fact, opposed the war publicly in many ways, I had a brother who was serving in Vietnam as a Marine. That even caused more friction within the family a bit. "How can you do this? Your brother's over there. You're not supporting your brother." It was difficult for my family to understand 

CAROL LEASE:

that not supporting the war didn't mean I wasn't supporting my brother. Very different things. But the mood of the country then was really very hot. It was really unbelievable that the protests going on, the bombings of recruitment facilities. I don't remember a lot of that stuff that was happening, especially the coast. There was a lot of issues. Kent State, 

CAROL LEASE:

when the National Guard opened fire on students and killed many. It was awful. If you opposed the war, you were un-American. Doesn't that sound familiar with what we go through now? If we oppose something, another thing happening in this country or oppose an invasion of Iraq, we're un-American. It really continues year after year, generation after generation. You toe the line.

MASON FUNK:

What was going on for you sexually during these years?

CAROL LEASE:

Not a whole lot.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Answer, full my [crosstalk] --

CAROL LEASE:

Okay. Sorry.

MASON FUNK:

It's all right.

CAROL LEASE:

During those years, sexually, not a lot was going on for me at all. I didn't really have any interest. 

CAROL LEASE:

I certainly wasn't going to get involved with somebody for political reasons or to have a role in a political movement. What was that all about? I think that the Catholic upbringing, of course, has an influence on what you do. I remember girls at high school who would disappear. We wondered where they went. All of a sudden, then we'd hear noises that they had a baby. I'd go, "How did that happen?" 

CAROL LEASE:

I asked my mother once, "Well, how do you get pregnant?" She said, "Oh, that's only if you want to get pregnant." I thought, "Well, there you go." Seriously.

MASON FUNK:

Most effective birth control [crosstalk] --

CAROL LEASE:

There you go. There wasn't sex education then. Schools didn't, nobody talked about anything. It was truly your friends or whatever group you were in. I was always with the nerd group, the egghead group. 

CAROL LEASE:

All we wanted to do was study and get a good grade so we could go to college. Most of us wanted to, that education. It occurred to my nerdy male friends in the group. It never occurred to me.

MASON FUNK:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Did you ever hear talk of gays and lesbians? Was there any rumors or slurs or any awareness whatsoever?

CAROL LEASE:

Once, in another group -- I had a couple groups. I had the nerd group I'd hang out with and then I'd have some of the girls that were outlaws. They were troublemakers. They'd call in bomb threats at the school. Then, we all jump in someone's car and go up and get hamburgers and fries. Then, be surprised when the vice principal walks into the place, because when you're a kid, you're not thinking of the consequence.

CAROL LEASE:

But one of the women in that group once called me a fruit, and I didn't know what that meant. "You're such a fruit." I don't know if she meant that, how she meant that but I remember that clearly. "Well, that -- Gee, I wonder what does she mean by that." But it didn't stick. Girl scouts. I hated camping. You had to go camping, got dirty, bugs. These kind of things. I did not like them but I would really get really excited and attracted to some of the counselors. 

CAROL LEASE:

I remember that. That was probably early high school. I don't really know but I wasn't a real Girl Scout. I didn't like those things because you got dirty. I wasn't that active at all. I wasn't at all active.

MASON FUNK:

Then, when did you begin to have the beginnings of an awareness of feeling like real attraction?

CAROL LEASE:

A little during college and after, I did get involved with a guy who's an artist. We were pretty compatible. Lived together, moved to a commune. A bunch of us from school formed a commune in Boulder. Came to Denver. Rented a house for $80 a month. There were 10 of us so rent was -- You could live on nothing then. We were together for a while

CAROL LEASE:

and then I got bored with substitute teaching. I didn't have enough to do. I didn't like living in a little house with a lot of people because that's how I grew up. I remember seeing a flier, that Big Mama Rag, a feminist newspaper needed people on the staff. I loved to write. I've always been involved with newspapers. In high school, I was on the Eagle staff. 

CAROL LEASE:

It was a high school newspaper. When I was a little kid, I used to write, make little newspapers and hand them around the neighborhood. Who knows? In college, I did stuff with the newspaper there. I've forgotten its name right now. I thought -- And they were desperate. This poster, it was like, "We are desperate. We need help or we're going to have to close." I didn't know what Big Mama Rag was. I went to the meeting. I saw this woman there who's the chocolate waters, 

CAROL LEASE:

she's a poet, New York City but really gruff and really roar, roar, roar. They wanted help but they didn't want help. They wanted you but they didn't give you any authority. I just ignored that and did what I wanted to do, but I remember thinking, "I think she's probably a lesbian," because of course, by then, I'm thinking, "Is that what they look like?" Sure, and got involved in Big Mama Rag. Ended up writing. 

CAROL LEASE:

I think I was a co-editor for a few years. Met a wonderful woman there and fell in love with her. That was, gee, '75, '74, something like that. The years could be wrong. Worked with them for four, five years because I loved newspapers. Good collective. Then, we did a series of things at the same time. It was a fun part of my life.

CAROL LEASE:

Got involved. Went to the International Women's Conference in Mexico City. I wrote a grant and got a little bit of money from a religious group to fund our trip down there. While we were there, we met with some Mexican feminists and gays. Of course, at that time in Mexico, that was punished by death. Oh, yeah. Sodomy or any kind of sexual expression that wasn't condoned by the church.

CAROL LEASE:

We went to the NGO, non-government conference. That was fun. Took the train back, went to Joan Little's trial. Joan Little was an African-American woman who killed her jailer when he was raping her in, I think it was North Carolina. We had formed, so this was a story for Big Mama Rag but we also created the, what did we call it? International Lesbian Feminist Press Association, 

CAROL LEASE:

or something like that, and made little cards so we could get into the NGO conference in Mexico. It was an organization of two. You just kinda did what you needed to do to get what you needed. Formed, I think out of Mexico, came the idea for a national feminist organization to be a counterweight to what, at that time, was just the ERA. 

CAROL LEASE:

Get the ERA passed, the Equal Rights Amendment for women, and that's that. Our position was you have to go way beyond that. You have to go much farther than that. There's a conflict that we had, that I had, Linda had with other feminists in the state of Colorado. Colorado had a conference in Boulder the next year to pick delegates to the National Women's Conference that happened in Houston. I don't know, '75, '76.

CAROL LEASE:

It was really clear from the powers that be that they were going to pick essentially heterosexual women, whose goal was the ERA. That wasn't acceptable for us. We were told, "Wait till we get the ERA passed, Carol, and then we'll work on other issues." It was like, "Nah! I don't think so." We formed the Lavender -- I ran on the Lavender ticket. 

CAROL LEASE:

We had little lavender posters. "Vote for me, vote for me," because people elected their delegates. I was elected as a state delegate from Colorado, Linda was an alternate, and went to Houston. We did get passed, the Women's Conference that year passed a motion supporting diversity, supporting the rights of lesbian women. This wasn't just Colorado. It was a national effort to do this.

MASON FUNK:

Where was the National Organization for Women at this point?

CAROL LEASE:

NOW, its focus was ERA. That was pretty mainstream, valuable, important work but the chapter here was very much, pretty mainstream. They did not want to look at issues like lesbian rights. Heaven forbid. In the 70s, a man could rape his wife and get away with it. It wasn't considered a crime. Domestic violence? What was that?

CAROL LEASE:

That's private matter. You had these issues evolving nationally and in the state or some organizations and some chapters of NOW. They're all different but the Denver chapter of NOW, good women in it, good people, but they weren't embracing a whole lot of additional issues.

MASON FUNK:

I heard that for a period of time, maybe [inaudible] maybe not but that, in NOW, especially at the national level, that there was active resistance to including and welcoming lesbians.

CAROL LEASE:

Oh, yes. Definitely.

MASON FUNK:

Let's talk about that period.

CAROL LEASE:

I wasn't part of any national political ... It was pretty much state. It was the state. There was resistance. As I said, one of the delegates and a big leader in the state at that point said, "Wait. You have to wait." Second-class citizen, I thought. They formed what they called the relationships task force 

CAROL LEASE:

to accommodate us, so they put the lesbians on the relationship task force. I can't remember what we did but I've got all that stuff somewhere. We were tolerated. But in Houston, we had a huge banner and we got up into the balcony area of the convention center. This huge banner was New York, California, all of us in it and "Lesbian Rights Now." 

CAROL LEASE:

It passed. That was a surprise to many delegates because they felt it would derail the movement, that wasn't what it was all about and we shouldn't look at those issues, let alone issues like race or economics or class. That was that with Colorado.

MASON FUNK:

Hmm. Yeah. I think one of the fascinating things about Colorado that I definitely want to delve into is, 

MASON FUNK:

I feel like, as a state, it's had a unique history. I think it's a hybrid. I always feel like it's a little bit of a hybrid. Progressive but it's still Colorado. We'll come back to that. When did you first become aware of the formation of the Gay Coalition of Denver? And put that into your answer.

CAROL LEASE:

See, I think the Gay Coalition of Denver was something that I wasn't really aware of for quite a while. 

CAROL LEASE:

I think at that point because we were pretty separate. I never evolved into a separatist, much to the chagrin of many women who were very critical of me for that because I didn't think you could be very effective. By separatist, they meant any woman who ever was with a man sexually or any woman who had men friends or women who were married to men or their brothers. 

CAROL LEASE:

That's silly. To me, that didn't make any sense to me but the gay liberation group that started here pretty much were gay-identified women. In those days, if I said lesbian, many gay women would correct me and say, "No. I'm not a lesbian. I'm gay." Then, I had to learn that and say, "Okay, don't assume, Carol. Be respectful," because they saw it as sexualizing and they saw it almost as a word that was full of stigma.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. I'm going to break this down for me even further. That's fascinating. I never would have guessed that. So, these women would say, "I'm not lesbian. I'm gay"?

CAROL LEASE:

Right.

MASON FUNK:

What was the difference? Maybe just to these [crosstalk] --

CAROL LEASE:

For them, we did two conferences, '79 and '80 called Lesbians Colorado. A woman wrote me a letter, which I kept.

CAROL LEASE:

In fact, I saw it this morning when I was looking for some stuff. "Oh! What's this?" She was very polite. She said, "Thank you for doing the conference. Thank you for doing this. I know my suggestion will probably not be followed but I really think you should not use the word lesbian. You should just call it women's conference because that word lesbian, it --" She was afraid that it would put us all in danger because we did it at a public hotel. We could be in danger of being hurt. 

CAROL LEASE:

She felt that it made it all sexual, rather than all of the issues we were dealing with, so the conference was really a broad number of issues. Violence, drug addiction, mental illness, children. It was really a broad ... I think pretty progressive and this great committee put it on for 1979 and we just rented a whole floor in a hotel here. We'd have different workshops in different rooms.

CAROL LEASE:

We had one on sex toys, which some women were appalled. I said, "Well, don't go to it. If you don't like it, don't go." But this woman and she felt that it wasn't a good term to use. She referred to herself as gay, not lesbian. I had to be respectful of that, that just because I said it doesn't mean that everybody says that.

MASON FUNK:

Why was it better to call yourself gay? That's surprising. Sorry. Fold my question into your answer.

CAROL LEASE:

Yeah. I think why some women felt that it was better to be called gay was because the word lesbian was too sexual for them. It was too much of a definition. I don't know. I never pushed into that or did research on that, but I saw the difference and so you had gay-identified women in the gay liberation group here in Denver. 

CAROL LEASE:

Many women who were lesbian or lesbian feminists would not do that. We chose not to do it. I think it was because there were different goals of acceptance, maybe. I don't want to speak for the gay liberation group here, but probably more conservative, more acceptance, and ours was, "Phft! Acceptance!? We don't care if you accept us or not." It was more aggressive, more progressive in our issues. 

CAROL LEASE:

I saw that change when I started as a director of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center. I was encouraged to apply for that position in 1980. Phil Nash was the first director, he was there --

MASON FUNK:

Let me just restart you.

CAROL LEASE:

Sorry.

MASON FUNK:

In 1980, I was encouraged to apply for the position of --

CAROL LEASE:

Thank you. In 1980, I was encouraged to apply for the position of executive director. Actually, it was co-director of the Gay Community Center of Colorado.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Sorry I interrupted you.

CAROL LEASE:

I'll do it again. Do you want me to do it again?

MASON FUNK:

Yeah.

CAROL LEASE:

In 1980, I was encouraged to apply for the position of co-director of the Gay Community Center of Colorado. I did so, was selected. There was a woman co-director and a male co-director. He left after about three months. Part of the reason he left is I insisted that we have separate offices because I needed privacy to do what I needed to do. I think it hurt his feelings.

CAROL LEASE:

Anyway, it was the Gay Community Center then. A few months later, women who were at the Gay Community Center got the board of directors to include the word lesbian. People often think I was behind that. I supported it, but I was not behind it. I think you had this evolution of thinking in the community that you have to put the name there to attract people to the center. Now, it's the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, 

CAROL LEASE:

Transgender, Queer Community Center. It's pretty inclusive, I think. You see that evolution in the community, too, that more women identified as lesbian or lesbian feminist or however they wanted to and got involved in the center and did things.

MASON FUNK:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). In terms of this organization that I think had been formed originally in '72 [crosstalk] --

CAROL LEASE:

That could be a little early.

MASON FUNK:

A little early. Okay.

CAROL LEASE:

I think it was closer to '78.

MASON FUNK:

Oh, really?

CAROL LEASE:

Because Phil was only there a year. He was there one year and left. I think probably '77, '78.

MASON FUNK:

Oh, okay.

CAROL LEASE:

Okay. Now, there was another group before and, see, that's the history.

MASON FUNK:

Oh, I see.

CAROL LEASE:

I should know it and I do not.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. We don't probably need to get into such [crosstalk] --

CAROL LEASE:

Dignity, the Catholic gay group, was involved in it. They were involved in it.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. What would you say --

INTERCOM:

[inaudible].

MASON FUNK:

We're talking late 70s.

INTERCOM:

[inaudible]. Thank you.

CAROL LEASE:

I can't turn that off.

MASON FUNK:

That's all right. That's fine. It was perfect timing. The war's over. What's going on at the grass roots level in terms of gay rights in Colorado around this time? I remember the group I feel like was formed, and you might not know this history, on the impetus of some event that happened. 

MASON FUNK:

Does this ring a bell with you at all? Believe me, I'm not expecting you to know all this history like the back of your hand.

CAROL LEASE:

That's okay. An issue in Denver that I was aware of that started things happening, and organizing around gay issues in the 70s, was the harassment of the police, of gay men who were in Cheesman Park,

CAROL LEASE:

which is a park in Capitol Hill. Not only that but the targeting of some police officers of gay bars in Denver where they would wait until the bar closed at two o'clock and arrest people for jaywalking across the street to their car. Harassment issues were pretty clear. I think that there were efforts made by a group of gay men and some women to --

INTERCOM:

[inaudible]. Thank you.

MASON FUNK:

Their efforts.

CAROL LEASE:

Yeah. There were a lot of efforts by this committee to deal with the city, to talk to the city, to get the police to stop it. One person in particular, Jerry Gerash, an attorney who now lives in Santa Monica was big in that, in trying to get the city to stop that kind of harassment. In fact, Jerry Gerash, George Christie, who was a Methodist minister, 

CAROL LEASE:

and me, we formed a group called DATACALL. It was a confidential, you call us and tell us about problems you've had with anything but primarily, it was police officer problems. I still have all the records in the files. People would call us and tell us my landlord didn't rent to me because he said I was a queer. A lot of park harassment. Then, we would report it, 

CAROL LEASE:

we would take that information and loop it back to the city and encourage the person to step forward. A lot of these people aren't going to step forward. That's what kept things going, is being in the closet, and the fear. In many cases, the real fear, lose your family, lose your job, expose yourself to some pretty severe violence. As I recall, that was an impetus, at least for me,

CAROL LEASE:

 to work with Jerry and George to collect it. My job was, of course, not only the -- I took a lot of women callers but it was also, I took some men callers. I haven't reviewed those records to really look into that.

MASON FUNK:

What were women calling about? Was it more like being denied housing or maybe being harassed at their job for being [crosstalk] --

CAROL LEASE:

Yeah. It was employment-related but it could also be --

MASON FUNK:

[crosstalk] -- Sorry.

CAROL LEASE:

I'm sorry.

MASON FUNK:

What women were calling about would be --

CAROL LEASE:

What women would commonly call about would be harassment at work or harassment by the police at lesbian bars. There were two lesbian bars in the city. Some officers would take it upon themselves to help these women who obviously hadn't met the right man yet. Those were specifically issues that lesbians would bring up.

MASON FUNK:

Help them, how?

CAROL LEASE:

I'm sorry.

MASON FUNK:

"Help them how?"

CAROL LEASE:

Yeah. Making them a real woman. They'd help them become a real woman.

MASON FUNK:

What would they do? What would these officers do to help these women [crosstalk]?

CAROL LEASE:

I'm a little afraid to put this on tape because I don't want to say something -- But as I'm sitting here talking about this, I believe we had cases of lesbians claiming to have been raped by police officers. But if I could go back to my record, since I found the drawer that I had a lot of stuff in this morning and look, 

CAROL LEASE:

because I definitely would have kept that. That got me even more involved in working with women involved in prostitution. I think that started, now I had a task force but I want to do things. When I was at the Community Center in 1980, '81, I formed a group for young men who were working, what was then called Sodomy Circle,

CAROL LEASE:

which was to drive around the state capitol, where these kids would come out from suburbs. We're talking kids and young kids, runaways. That's where they could meet up with men who would take care of them in exchange for sex. What I didn't realize at the time was that I was interfering with business as usual with some gay bars and in the community. I was interrupting a process. I was a little naïve about that. We'd go down with sandwiches at night and we'd --

INTERCOM:

[inaudible]. Please conduct the front desk. Thank you.

CAROL LEASE:

We'd go down with sandwiches at night and give the kids sandwiches and tell them about the Center and the program. Before that, at the Community Center, there was a group for young gay men that was run by a couple of counselors. 

CAROL LEASE:

These were kids. These were kids who were questioning. I'd sit at my desk at the Center, face the street. I'd see the same kid walking back and forth. I didn't understand. I asked some staff. It was all volunteer, except for me, and they'd say, "Oh, Carol. He goes to Morey High School or he's a kid at the school and he's just afraid to come in." Then, I'd looked into that and talked to some of these kids 

CAROL LEASE:

who were questioning, or lived in suburb and came into Denver to figure out what it was all about. The support group gave those kids a place to go -- the facilitators were psychologists or mental health specialists -- and to talk. One morning, I come into the Center and all the bathroom tissue's gone. All the toilet paper's gone and the sink is a mess of something black. I called the facilitator and said, "What happened here last night?" He says, 

CAROL LEASE:

"Oh, don't worry about it. We had some new guys come to the group." These kids would come to the group, go to the bathroom. They'd get bras. They'd stuff the bras with toilet paper. They'd put on all this makeup and they'd put on women's clothes and come to the group because that's what they thought being gay was. I said, "Fascinating." Then, he said, "Oh." I said, "Well, what do you do?" "Oh, we don't do anything with them. I'll tell them to clean up the sink the next time." 

CAROL LEASE:

Then, he said, "But as the young people come more, they see they don't have to do that, that that is not what the stereotype is." There's nothing in school to help these kids. It's much better now. With the young lesbian group at the Center, they formed in the lesbian Colorado conference. The young women who went to those conferences and we had about three, 400 women twice in '79 and in '80. The young people wanted their own group, which is typical.

CAROL LEASE:

They formed a group. I forgot the name of it but when I went to work at the Community Center, they followed me. They wanted to be there at the center and have a group room. They did that and they all had little motor bikes, little Honda things, dressed in black leather. When I'd walk through their meeting room to get to my office, they'd be quiet, like, "We don't want her to hear what we're talking about."

CAROL LEASE:

It's good. It was real territorial but it was a healthy development for young lesbians to see other young girls talk about that, have that support. That's what the Center should be about.

[Break]

ROOM TONE

MASON FUNK:

Hmm. Where to pick this up? 

MASON FUNK:

The thing is, I think we've done the '70s. I think we might as well jump into AIDS and what your experience was, because really, this is mostly your story of your involvement and what you witnessed. When did you first become aware of AIDS, HIV AIDS? Of course, no one was calling it that then. How did you first hear about it and where did things go from there?

CAROL LEASE:

I first heard about AIDS when I was the director of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center and decided to publish a paper called the Colorado Gay and Lesbian News. I did that because I liked papers but also because there was no way of communicating. There was another publication in town but it was basically the bar rag and bar specials. Part of that was, at that time, we had a news service that would come over the news service, 

CAROL LEASE:

was information about this malady. They called it GRID, gay-related immuno deficiency. Sometimes, the gay cancer. Doctors were seeing young gay men coming into emergency rooms, deathly ill. They didn't know what was wrong. They were soon dying. They were wasting away. At the Center, we had what we called the VD Clinic, where we offered free testing and treatment 

CAROL LEASE:

for gay men connected with Denver Public Health. I talked to the nurse who was running it, Patrick Gourley and said, "What do you think this is?" He talked to the doctor. We worked with the Denver Health and we just looked into it, Dave Cohen. "What is this? What is this," and started, reading more and more about it. We put it in the newspaper and had the first press conference with a local CBS affiliate, 

CAROL LEASE:

sometime in '82, I think, and had it at the church. Tried to get the word out to people and to the community and to the general public. That's when a lot of anti-gay and fear, "afraids" is what we called it, afraid of AIDS, started in Denver. We had a few people who were positive and were out about it and public about it and would talk about it.

CAROL LEASE:

In fact, I think we had a couple of those people on the panel discussion. They would draw attention. One of them got into a car accident, told the firefighters he was positive, or somehow, perhaps they knew it, they put bleach on this whole intersection. People who were sick could not have their partners come to visit them in hospitals. We took care of those as they came up because we just called our connection at the hospital and say, 

CAROL LEASE:

"This is silly. They should be able to visit." At least in the Denver area, we did those kind of things. We also did a support group for the men, at a church. Just trying to figure out, what do we need to do here? How can we support this group? The first coordinator was the therapist and the second coordinator was Julian Rush, who was the Methodist minister who came out as gay 

CAROL LEASE:

and caused the Methodist church to really look at its policies. Julian did a very good job with that because he was a minister. I felt he would bring the respectful, a presence to the discussion. Very calm guy, really good guy. Did a wonderful job in getting it moving and making services, at least people talking about it. Other groups formed in the community. 

CAROL LEASE:

They had a harder time getting going because, again, there's a lot of cannibalism in our community sometimes. People who try to do things don't get supported or you're not the right person who's doing it. What we formed then, we called it the Colorado AIDS project, which lives now, does great work, is all over the state of Colorado. Went off on its own in 1984,

CAROL LEASE:

which was about three or four months before I was forced out of the Community Center, and is doing great work in the community now. That's part of the story about HIV and AIDS. Another part, when you get into the history that it was female nurses at San Francisco General who started seeing all this and started this whole, "What's going on with the community?" There was a wonderful meeting in, 

CAROL LEASE:

again, I think '83, '84, where the Denver Principles were put together. What AIDS did for treatment, not only of AIDS but for a lot of chronic illnesses, was it created a case management system that's community based. Up to that point, most case management was medical case management, in a hospital, done by a social worker primarily to help a patient transition back to their home.

CAROL LEASE:

I think what activists in San Francisco did, which is absolutely brilliant, they knew from the stigma, the gay stigma, the discrimination, the fear, that the issues coming out of this illness that not many people knew how do you get this, what does it mean, that there had to by community involvement, that we couldn't just rely on hospitals and doctors. Thus, you had case management services that were community-based 

CAROL LEASE:

and they live on today through the Ryan White CARE Act, called medical case management or case management services. We have them here at Empowerment to help women who have HIV or AIDS and need intensive help and services to keep things moving, especially if they have kids. That's a real legacy that HIV, the response of the community to HIV has given to just the health care system in general. 

CAROL LEASE:

I don't know that there's ever been a lot of acknowledgement of that, and the fact that it was some feminists and women who really pushed that agenda at the Denver meeting to get those principles, to talk about respect, no stigma, that the person or -- They would say, "The patient." We'd say, "Participant," makes the decision, that the case management is not driven by a social worker, but it's driven by the individual who's affected by the issue.

MASON FUNK:

Hmm. That's really interesting. As soon as that's finished, just -- Clarify for me, then, community case management basically just say, "Community case management means," and then fill in, finish the sentence.

CAROL LEASE:

Community case management means that those services are in the community, not in a medical setting. 

CAROL LEASE:

They're generally in what AIDS service organizations that are community-based, that have board members, that have people living with AIDS on it that are controlled by the people, not by a medical team or a medical establishment. They're more responsive. Culturally, they're more responsive and they're more effective. If somebody buys into their care and helps determine what their care is and is the engineer of that care and it's not a doctor, they're more likely to participate in that and get healthy.

MASON FUNK:

Hmm. Wow! That's really, really interesting. That's a brilliant insight. That's a part of this big story that I'm trying to tell which I really, really -- Especially the women's roles in many, many different ways that I gather that --

CAROL LEASE:

Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

-- initially women feel like their roles have been not fully documented and not fully told, whether it's nurses --

CAROL LEASE:

I recently saw something somewhere, read something, heard something that there is some work being done, there is some now finally some acknowledgement of the women who were involved in a lot of that. Again, I only know about the San Francisco. It could easily have happened in New York because you had the nurses who work with the patients and point this out. "Hey. There's a lot of gay men coming in here who are pretty sick and what's going on?"

MASON FUNK:

Did you ever hear -- I conducted some interviews earlier this year. One woman in particular said and I've never heard this validated by anybody else or verified, but she said, "Some women, having come out of the feminist movement, say the 60s and the 70s and the 80s, AIDS comes along and women take on a very active role as nurses, as caregivers, and there was some feeling of, 'Holy fuck. We've just ended up right back where we started.'" Do you remember any of that?

CAROL LEASE:

Do you mean because they --

MASON FUNK:

Because they were being back of the role of taking care of men. I know it sounds [crosstalk] --

CAROL LEASE:

It happened.

MASON FUNK:

Tell me about that.

CAROL LEASE:

I think it happened because I think --

MASON FUNK:

[crosstalk] what happened.

CAROL LEASE:

Women got into the roles of taking care of a lot of gay men because they needed it and because they were there. We know there are some professions that excel, that most of the people in that profession are women. Those tend to be teachers, nurses, caregivers. It's a role playing. By the way, those professions also are underpaid. 

CAROL LEASE:

For example, after World War Two in the Soviet Union, many men were killed, many doctors were killed, male, and so many women went into the profession, into med school to become doctors. Guess what happened. The salaries for those doctors nationwide dropped because it was mainly women. But what I know is, I know what I did in Denver when I saw that happening and it's to fix it, it's to make it better. How do you do that? 

CAROL LEASE:

You form a project, the Colorado AIDS Project. We survived on beer busts and the imperial court fundraising and giving us the little tiny bit of money we had. Then, when the Colorado AIDS Project went off on its own, that's how they survived for many years before the federal government woke up to the fact that they were going to need to put specific money into this disease, this illness.

MASON FUNK:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Great. Okay. Anything more that you feel like -- That was a good snapshot, I guess you say, of the AIDS, how it services developed here and also the Denver -- What did you call them? Denver rules, the Denver --

CAROL LEASE:

The Denver Principles.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Do me a favor. Tell me what were the Denver Principles?

CAROL LEASE:

You want me to recite the Denver Principles.

MASON FUNK:

Just like but --

CAROL LEASE:

I have a copy of them somewhere here. They essentially talk --

MASON FUNK:

Sorry. Start with the Denver Principles.

CAROL LEASE:

The Denver Principles essentially outline community case management, respect for people living with HIV, recognizing people's partners in the hospital, that that was really important for visiting purposes, having the person infected with HIV or living with HIV, having the person living with HIV be the one who makes the decisions, 

CAROL LEASE:

not anyone else, making that people call client-centered, looking at stigma. Stigma was huge. It's still around concerning HIV but it was huge in those days because there is so much fear in the community and outside of the gay community about AIDS. There was a move to shut down all the bathhouses in Denver. The Community Center didn't support that. We did not support it. 

CAROL LEASE:

Why? Bath houses are part of gay culture. That's silly. Plus, you have a place you can reach people to do education. Why do that? Things will just go underground. The center got involved in quite a few of those issues concerning HIV and AIDS. There's some pushback from some folks in the community who felt that a women shouldn't really be involved in that issue 

CAROL LEASE:

and especially a lesbian. Lesbians aren't at high risk for HIV unless they inject drugs.

MASON FUNK:

Let's make this a standalone story. This is prior to you getting pushed out?

CAROL LEASE:

Oh, yeah. All of it is. Almost from day one. Are you kidding?

MASON FUNK:

Okay.

CAROL LEASE:

I didn't explain the principles very well.

MASON FUNK:

No, no, no. You did. I realize that as you were explaining them, I realized you had kind of explained them in the context of community case management.

CAROL LEASE:

There's a lot more there but --

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. We could go right down that path. We won't because we are [crosstalk] --

CAROL LEASE:

I don't want to disrespect other people who made them but I'll send them to you.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. 3:42, I just want to keep track of time. Okay. Are we close to being done on this card?

EDWARD DONE:

20 minutes.

MASON FUNK:

Oh, we still have 20 minutes. Okay, because I'm probably going to spill over a little bit but that's all right. I just want to make the last thing you said a little bit of a standalone story.

MASON FUNK:

Some people didn't think it was appropriate or something for a woman to be running this AIDS service organization when it first started here, the Colorado AIDS Project. Break that down for me.

CAROL LEASE:

Yeah. The sad thing was that there was some people who felt that a woman should not be running or involved with or in a leadership positions with the beginnings of the Colorado AIDS Project. 

CAROL LEASE:

That also bled over into being the executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center. Sexism is alive and well, always has been. With HIV, I think, a lot of that had to do with the fear and upsetness that caused in the whole community and the fact that when that happens to people, they want to control things. They want something in their life that's real and they can answer and control it. 

CAROL LEASE:

There wasn't a lot of experience with the gay community in Denver working with lesbians, especially lesbian feminists. There wasn't a lot of history there where you could say, "Yeah," but we've worked with this group for years and they're great. A lot of it was just starting up there. A lot of the coalitions and a lot of that work, so I can understand that concern. But the stuff in terms of the Community Center was a resistance to move forward. 

CAROL LEASE:

I think that the center had started and essentially, a lot of what it did with its volunteers, it had 80 volunteers who answered the phones. There was a library. There was support groups. People bought a membership. You could pay as little as $5 a year. A lot of what they ended up doing was bar referrals. They had good groups and they helped people but there wasn't a solid core of services. It was pushed together.

CAROL LEASE:

When I got there, I wanted to do more in terms of support groups, especially with youth. DATACALL, which is the project that was formed to look at discrimination, which means you're going to have people angry with you. You're going to have the public or the police or people in authority unhappy when you bring up these problems. You're not the nice, sweet, little, be quiet, sit in the corner, be happy we invited you to the party and don't talk type of a person.

CAROL LEASE:

When those things came, because DATACALL became part of the Center so we trained the staff to take those complaints and we got more information. The mayor at the time, Bill McNichols, had been there many years. Nice guy but these issues, I'm sure were frightening to him. Then, we had Federico Peña, who's elected in 1983, '84, I think.

CAROL LEASE:

He was a good mayor. He did really good stuff but again, these are the beginning of these issues, gay issues and scary. Another thing is we formed what we called the Lavender University. We did that similar to what -- It was, at the time, Denver Free University where people would come and do classes. I called it the Lavender University, 

CAROL LEASE:

specifically targeted towards gays and lesbians who wanted to make friends, meet people over a topic, like a book, learning how to sew. All the people could do a class free. I think you paid $5 so we could pay for the printing. It was a way, again, to provide a place for people to socialize and meet each other that wasn't the bar scene, because the rates of alcoholism in the gay community,

CAROL LEASE:

outrageous because that's the only place people could go, have fun, meet and greet. It benefited, of course, those businesses. A lot of those businesses, the Denver Tavern Guild, did not like a lot of the stuff the Center was doing. They didn't appreciate it. When we started working with the young men who were on Sodomy Circle getting picked up by older gay men, there was a lot of pushback. An accusation 

CAROL LEASE:

that we'd all get thrown out of the center that I was contributing to the delinquency of a minor. I wasn't picking these boys up. I was giving them sandwiches but there was a culture that I was breaking into that I was affecting. I was not truly aware of that. That was a lot of the problems that I caused. Financially, we could never really -- 

CAROL LEASE:

I think my salary was $8,000 a year. Lots of money. The Center wasn't strong financially. We didn't have it. The concern was that people wouldn't support it because it was too controversial. I think when I applied for the Community Center to walk in the St. Patrick's Day parade in 1984, after Mayor Peña had been elected and said, "The city's here for everyone and everyone is welcome in the city."

CAROL LEASE:

 I foolishly thought this would apply to us. Applied and was turned down. The official reason that the committee gave us was, "There will be families and children at the parade." What? Gays and lesbian have families and children. I used to go to the St. Patrick's Day parade when I was a little, tiny girl in Denver. We go all the time. It was fun, so I thought this would be fun.

CAROL LEASE:

We appealed the decision and the chief of public safety at the time, John Simonet, had a meeting with the committee members, myself, and him in his office and the committee just went crazy. One woman said to me that I should not be there because there'll be young girls there. I thought, "What is she talking about?" 

CAROL LEASE:

I think when you get a lot of these things, they just fly past your head. John was furious. He said, "No personal attacks here. We're trying to solve a problem." They wouldn't let us in. The city wouldn't revoke their permit. We presented some good arguments. We didn't want them to revoke the permit. We just wanted to walk in the parade. The city did not revoke the permit and we could not be in the parade. That was it. I didn't want to pursue it with an injunction. 

CAROL LEASE:

The goal wasn't to cause trouble. It was just -- We got press on it. It raised an issue to the point where I'd walked down to the parade that day and there were lavender balloons people were selling. We made lavender shamrocks as a way to make money. It got the issue up and it got discussion out but there were a lot in the gay community, men who did not like that. They felt it was going too fast. "Don't do it. 

CAROL LEASE:

Be quiet. You're rocking the boat, Carol." Too bad. I was forced out. I was then forced out in August or in July of 1984.

MASON FUNK:

How do you look back on that now?

CAROL LEASE:

I think it was good. I think --

MASON FUNK:

Some of your [crosstalk] --

CAROL LEASE:

How I look back on it now is --

MASON FUNK:

Sorry. It being what?

CAROL LEASE:

How I look back on being forced out of the Center now was it was a really great thing for me 

CAROL LEASE:

because it freed me up to be able to be available for an organization like the Empowerment program, where I am now, where I have the freedom to do what I need to do and have the support of the board and support of a wonderful staff and we make a big difference in the lives of a lot of women. That's wonderful. It fits me because I can develop housing. We have seven apartment buildings now or six. Programs, research, 

CAROL LEASE:

we developed education, employment, housing, and health services here for women coming out of prison or homeless women or criminal justice. It wouldn't have happened if I got stuck in that quagmire of gay politics in Denver. It wouldn't happen. The Center's great now. Let me just tell you, they're wonderful. Good organization. Great staff. Beautiful volunteers. It took a few years to get over this, 

CAROL LEASE:

to get over some of the acrimony that some of the people had. One group was so angry, our last edition of the Colorado Gay and Lesbian News we did, it was in July of 1984. They went around to where we distributed and picked them all up and put them in the trash. I thought, "That's maturity." That was the level of hostility and anger,

CAROL LEASE:

just viciousness that was there. Being out of that was good for me. It took a while. I remember, that night, I went home and I watched the movie about the girl whose head turns around and she spits up green vomit.

MASON FUNK:

Carrie.

CAROL LEASE:

Not Carrie.

MASON FUNK:

Oh! The Exorcist.

CAROL LEASE:

The Exorcist. I'd never watched it before because I don't want to watch it. It was on TV 

CAROL LEASE:

and I watched it and I laughed through it. I thought, "This --" But I specifically remember doing that and thinking, "This is funny." It's not. It's a pretty awful movie but I guess compared to what I had walked away from, it was funny.

MASON FUNK:

That's awesome. In hindsight, because this is obviously really important part of our story as we look at the evolution of the gay and lesbian community, what lessons can we take from that story? 

MASON FUNK:

Not just you getting forced out, but from the rancor and the division and the territorialism, what could we all do better, based on what didn't go well at that time?" Even today, we could do better, probably.

CAROL LEASE:

I think what we could all do better in our community, men and women, trans individuals, queer, bisexual. 

CAROL LEASE:

Anyone who identifies with the community, is slow down, really listen to people. Understand people, see where they're coming from, understand why they're doing what they're doing. Somehow you're protecting yourself or there's fear at the bottom of it. After all these years of working in the field I'm working in now, 

CAROL LEASE:

you see a lot of human behavior. You get to understand a lot of that, that even if somebody intends it to be a personal attack, you don't have to accept it that way. It's more what their issue is than my issue. I think in those years, being young and excited and wanting to get things done and the giddiness of the day and the concern about people with HIV and discrimination, we forget that and I forget that,

CAROL LEASE:

 that what I was dealing with was a lot of people who were afraid of change. Our community isn't often good at that. We are good at, all communities are, scapegoating or, "You did this," or, "You're the problem." No. The problem isn't with us. It's how we work with each other, how we deal with each other. Do we see each other as threats or helpful? Then, just, if it doesn't work, 

CAROL LEASE:

to walk away and not name calling as you walk away but walking away and not being so invested in winning or invested in controlling and I think that's an issue. I think as you do more and as I do more and you fight more battles or you try to run this non-profit.

MASON FUNK:

The basic question and again, you could do it a little more short, a little shorter, is what are the lessons we can take away from that particular incident that was about fear, territoriality, 

MASON FUNK:

judgment. How can we do better as a community, even today, working together as opposed to accentuating our differences? Accept our point of view or points of view?

CAROL LEASE:

I think the way we can work today, the way we can work together, gays and lesbians, is not focusing on what we don't agree on, knowing what we don't agree on and going beyond that. 

CAROL LEASE:

Listening to each other, really listening and paying attention. Not assuming that someone is out to get you or that because they have a piece of the pie, you don't get it. What we don't need is, "We need three pies or four pies, not one pie." There's a lot of pie out there. Compassion. I think that gets lost a lot. Understanding what people go through, what people have gone through in their lives. 

CAROL LEASE:

Understanding how the divisions in this country over race, class, income, disability, how they affect our community, too and embracing that. Not saying we have to be excited about that and to understand where people are coming from and that it's not necessarily personal, even if it's intended to be a personal insult, 

CAROL LEASE:

just don't take it that way. See the bigger picture. I've always felt that we needed to see the big picture and how issues fit together and not how they're distinct. For example, one reason I think the gay community needs to embrace a pro-choice stand for a woman to be able to choose an abortion is because the forces that don't support that choice on her part are the same forces 

CAROL LEASE:

that don't support gay men having sex when they want to have it or gay men existing, because what you're doing with that and just get down to the bare -- a woman is saying, "I am pregnant and I don't want to have this child. I want to control what I'm going to do with this body." Gay men are saying, "I'm going to control what I'm going to do with my seed," because the expectation is that a man and a woman will have sex to make a baby. 

CAROL LEASE:

That's the expectation and when you're pregnant, you have to have that child. No, you don't. The expectation is that men will not have sex with men and I think the term is wasting the seed or barren land or something like that. Look at how those issues really do fit together but there's never been any great understanding of that. It doesn't mean you have to support abortion. It means you have to support a woman's right to choose that. 

CAROL LEASE:

That's the issue there. We've never been able to really, really good, really critical issues be able to sit down, the gay lesbian community and I include myself in that and to really not just give lip service to some other issues but to really understand Black Lives Matter, understand where people are coming from, understanding the history, the horrific history of slavery in this country, Japanese internment, 

CAROL LEASE:

the border issue, the immigration issue that's really silly in my mind because this whole place, we're only here because of immigration. That's where I think we can do better.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Do you, at times, this is a corollary to what you just said but do you, at times, feel like the gay community, the LGBTQ community can get a little bit insular and get really good, just focused on what's good for us?

CAROL LEASE:

Yes. Absolutely.

MASON FUNK:

Talk about that, please.

CAROL LEASE:

I think when you belong to a group of people who have been stigmatized, oppressed, treated very poorly, you want to see yourself circle the wagons. "Let's just look at what we need and our needs." That's a mistake because there are lots of other groups out there who's also circled their wagons. If we all got into one big circle with our wagons, 

CAROL LEASE:

which would mean everyone, we'd have a lot more power and a lot more understanding of everybody's lives. I think it get like that too much. Maybe the younger people coming out and taking pleasure and glory and being so excited about their sexuality. You see it at gay pride all the time. That's wonderful. It's a great stage. It's a wonderful thing but not continuing that down the road. 

CAROL LEASE:

Maturing socially and politically, that we're not in this alone. We've got to be in this together with other organizations and other people around the world.

MASON FUNK:

Great. Yeah. How would you say, this is where the state of Colorado or in the city of Denver, how would you say that something about just the culture of people in the city of Colorado, the city of Denver has made the history of the LGBTQ movement here kind of unique?

CAROL LEASE:

Let's see. The culture of the state of Colorado and the city of Denver has had an effect on the community here, the gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual community in that we come from that. Colorado's a strange state sometimes. We do terrible things here and we do great things but it's really very conservative on the western part,

CAROL LEASE:

 not many people, lots of land and front range is more liberal. More people coming in from other areas. More immigrants coming in all the time from other states and other countries. The community is a reflection of that and we aren't as big or as fancy or as flamboyant, I would say, as a lot of other communities around the country. 

CAROL LEASE:

I don't really know a lot of other communities but we're conservative, we're liberal. We come from this state, we come from this place which is a state that's done some pretty awful things here: Massacring native American people, mining, environmental issues. You have that diversity within the gay community, 

CAROL LEASE:

the log cabin republicans, the gay groups. Is that the right name? You have very conservative gay men who have no interest in other than what their interest and issues are. I think it's a mistake. Whether you're conservative or you're liberal or you're radical, doesn't really matter at the end of the day. It's how well can we get along together and not impose our particular opinion on someone else 

CAROL LEASE:

who doesn't choose to have it. I don't think I did a very good job answering that at all.

MASON FUNK:

I'll tell you what I was thinking and this may not resonate with you but I was thinking -- I don't know. I just think of Colorado as this place -- My sense is, from the little that I know of gay history here is that it's been both very progressive and also very reactionary. Amendment Two, for example, that whole story. If that maybe somehow ties into the nature of the people here 

MASON FUNK:

that there's a real push-pull between this kind of cowboy culture almost, like the West, macho but there's also liberal influences that have made their way into Denver and the state. I don't know. I just might be making this up [crosstalk] --

CAROL LEASE:

I think you can -- With the community as a reflection of this culture in this state because the culture in this state, we have focus in the family in Colorado Springs,

CAROL LEASE:

 nasty, mean-spirited, judgmental people. You have universities here that encourage criticism and creativity. You have a good arts culture here. What makes somebody very liberal and progressive and someone else very conservative and careful? Their family, how they're brought up, their fears, their issues. 

CAROL LEASE:

How do they connect with people or not? Are they protecting themselves? Are they angry all the time? Anger comes from fear, that's where anger comes from. You're afraid of something. You either deal with it or you live with it and --

INTERCOM:

[inaudible]. Ed, please call back the front desk. Thank you.

CAROL LEASE:

With anger, you either deal with it or you live with it. I think Amendment Two was anger. 

CAROL LEASE:

It was also a lot of ignorance on voters' part but it also got overturned because you had liberal people or people said, "This is not acceptable. This is not okay. This is not what I thought the vote was." I think that was a bunch of it, too, who overturned it. We're a reflection of that state and you see it more, I think, when you go out into the rural parts of the state more, much more conservative. You have to be. You have to be careful, really.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Great. I think I have three final questions, just my standard three. One is, to someone who is just coming out for the first time in some way, shape, or form, gay and lesbian, bisexual, transgender, whether he's just at the tipping point, just about ready, teenager, early 20s to take a deep breath and jump out of the plane. What advice or insight

MASON FUNK:

or wisdom, whatever we're going to choose, would you give to that young person?

CAROL LEASE:

I would tell that young person to --

MASON FUNK:

Why don't you [inaudible] --

CAROL LEASE:

Okay. The advice I give someone who's on the verge of coming out would be to see yourself as part of a community. Don't see yourself as isolated, don't think that your experiences are unique, and stay connected. Getting isolated, whether it's by yourself or in a couple, 

CAROL LEASE:

is never good. Celebrate and enjoy and have a great time.

MASON FUNK:

Great. That's wonderful. What is your hope for the future?

CAROL LEASE:

Just a second.

MASON FUNK:

Oh, someone's trying to ring you.

CAROL LEASE:

Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

I don't really actually define it for people. I just let you decide.

CAROL LEASE:

My hope for the future is that the gay and lesbian community, transgender, bisexual community becomes more open to forming good, effective, viable, real coalitions, political, social with other groups in this country. That's what I hope happens because I think when that happens, that's a force you can't break. 

CAROL LEASE:

That will also break down a lot of walls and barriers. We know many people who are somewhat homophobic or fearful often lose that when they get to know somebody who's gay or lesbian, they don't believe the stereotypes they brought up with. They said, "This person's like me, only they love men or they love women." Not all people will do that but I think the only way you do that is when you don't isolate or see yourself as unique or special. 

CAROL LEASE:

Who's more oppressed? Who cares who's more oppressed? Let's get rid of that word and talk about connecting.

MASON FUNK:

Great. Lastly, what do you see is the value of a project like OUTWORDS?

CAROL LEASE:

The value of this project, OUTWORDS, I don't think you can measure it. it's putting, taking the history of many people in this country who've been through it, lots of experiences and giving it some life, 

CAROL LEASE:

making it real. Hopefully, for younger people to read and to hear about, to understand what the history's about, to know what came before them. Often, young women, young girls don't understand what the feminist community and the feminist movement did for women in this country. They take it for granted. It's good to know your history. The same thing with young gays and lesbians. 

CAROL LEASE:

They often don't know what ... They think the whole history is AIDS. They do not understand our history in the 40s, in the 50s and 60s and even prior to that. I think it's really important to know the history, to know your history, and to know where you come from.

MASON FUNK:

Great, Thank You. I think we are done.