MASON FUNK:

Okay. Alrighty.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Hello. Hello.

MASON FUNK:

Tell us your name and spell it out for it. And you're going to just look at me.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Yep. Gotcha. It's Waiyde Palmer, W-A-I-Y-D-E, Palmer, P-A-L-M-E-R

MASON FUNK:

Okey-Dokey. And what is your birth date and where were you born?

WAIYDE PALMER:

October 17th, 1960 and Indianapolis, Indiana.

MASON FUNK:

Okey-Dokey. So paint me

MASON FUNK:

a little portrait of the family that you were born into. Who was there besides you, as you were growing up? What were the values? What were your parents like? What were they determined that you should be like?

WAIYDE PALMER:

My parents were Depression-era survivors,

WAIYDE PALMER:

World War II participants that met when they were young and popped out four kids in a row. And then there was a long period where they were unable to have children, and I came along a decade after the last one. So that was five kids. My dad was from farmer stock. My mother was from farmer stock. Her family's farms had failed during the depression

WAIYDE PALMER:

and they had come into central Indiana to find factory work. My father's people still had farm in Southern Indiana where he spent most of his youth while his mother worked to support the family because his father had buggered off . They were working class working poor.

WAIYDE PALMER:

I was raised with that kind of -- My dad was a union organizer at the oil refinery that he worked at. I remember being young and going to union protests. He had an odd sense of right and wrong. In other words, he believed in right and wrong. He believed you should always support the little guy, but he was also a man of his time and ...

[tech conversation]

MASON FUNK:

So you were saying he was a man of his time.

WAIYDE PALMER:

He was a man of his time, that means he was a racist and sexist and homophobic. He believed that people should be paid a fair wage no matter who they are. He was for workers' rights and all this stuff, but he wasn't quite open-minded, and those are the kinds of things that reverberate

WAIYDE PALMER:

through a child's mind, and you hold onto because you begin to look at the world with the two views that you're mostly around, and that was my mom and dad. My dad had very strong opinions and personality, and my mom was very quiet and entertained the children to the best of her ability. She was slightly disabled, she was blind. And so that also

WAIYDE PALMER:

skewed our view of the world because she was home, couldn't drive those kinds of things a lot. So we grew up in a working class neighborhood with other working class families that was separate but equal. There was a black neighborhood right next door. We grew up in the white neighborhood and I ran around with people of color from the time I was five

WAIYDE PALMER:

and my siblings and I had a very different view than my father's view of the world as a result.

MASON FUNK:

Your siblings being 10 and more years older?

WAIYDE PALMER:

Yeah. When I was eight, my next oldest brother was 18 and then 19 and then 20 and then 21. That was the height of the Vietnam war and the anti-war movement and the feminist movement, and all of that stuff's going on.

WAIYDE PALMER:

I was treated as an adult and spoken to as an adult and precocious and given books to read and things to learn that affected my vision of the world. Certainly, we were told that education was going to be the only way out of circumstances that we were born into. So all of my siblings went to college. Most of them on scholarships or partial scholarships and

WAIYDE PALMER:

then became educators at some point in their lives as well. One of my brothers is a professor, another taught engineering, another was a special-ed education teacher. My sister taught on indigenous people reservations, multi-language classes in Spanish, and went to school in Spain as well. I mean, not Spain, Mexico. Sorry.

MASON FUNK:

As a kid, did you feel like these older people were even siblings or were they just like other adults?

WAIYDE PALMER:

I don't think I felt they were on my side. I think they were ... It's a very odd circumstance to grow up in a large family and as an only child. I think they might've had some resentments that I was getting to benefit from my father's career, which was

WAIYDE PALMER:

on the upswing as they were beginning to leave the nest. I was the last child, so our financial situation became a little more stable and liquid. Like, suddenly we had two cars which the kids used. Before, it was like, the kids put their money together and bought a $50 rambler and spent all their time trying to make sure that it kept working.

WAIYDE PALMER:

It was good to grow up that way, but I didn't feel like I fit in a lot for multiple reasons, most of them being, I had recognized very early on, some of my earliest memories of being gay. And because of where I grew up, the vernacular around, it was very evident that was not going to be a good thing.

MASON FUNK:

You mentioned a story, in the questionnaire, of being

MASON FUNK:

a five-year-old ish and playing with some of the black kids in your neighborhood and somebody driving by and shouting stuff out the window.

WAIYDE PALMER:

When I was about five, that was like '66, that's Watts riots, that's racial unrest everywhere, all that stuff. But I was very innocent about it,

WAIYDE PALMER:

I certainly hadn't heard the N word in any kind of context of disparity. Some kids drove by, high school kids, rolled down their windows and screamed the N word at my friends, and then they called me an N lover. I didn't know what that was. My friends reacted very badly. One of them started to cry and ran inside.

WAIYDE PALMER:

The other one ran home. These kids were like literally sitting in the car, laughing at us. I was very confused, but I could see from how my friends reacted that this was like really bad, and I was really angry about it. When I asked my dad what it was, he said that's what ignorant white people called black people and friends of black people. The dichotomy of that is, two weeks later,

WAIYDE PALMER:

he used the same word while driving, because someone had cut him off or didn't behave in the way he thought they should, and use the word. It was confusing, to say the least.

MASON FUNK:

You wrote in your questionnaire, some about hot, like you felt like ...

WAIYDE PALMER:

Like I felt enraged. The first time as a child, I remember being really angry like that sea red, Irish up, pick up a stick and hit

WAIYDE PALMER:

somebody in the head with it angry. It's funny that that's kind of a memory that -- Like, I have memories of like first time I gardened and how cool the dirt was on my feet, and the first time you get hugged by your grandmother, that you remember, and how safe that feels. I remember my rage, like being powerless in that moment, watching people I care about having a visceral reaction of pain and sadness

WAIYDE PALMER:

over words, and feeling more identifiable with them than I felt with the people I then went and asked for direction about it. So, yeah.

MASON FUNK:

I'm loving the details, even though they're painful of your family, the picture you're painting. Another thing you wrote about, and then also talked to Michael about, was

MASON FUNK:

a few years later, you had a diary.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Yeah. I was an odd kid. I was not the son that my father expected and he certainly wasn't the dad I needed. Nurturing was just not in his bag of tricks. We had a little chasm between us, like this little thing,

WAIYDE PALMER:

and then it started to grow as I began to feel less a part of, because I was keeping secrets, and I think that's very common in almost every queer person I've ever met, of the varieties of queers, is that they started keeping secrets and you're putting on an act and a face for those around you, because it's unsafe for you to be the authentic you, the person you want to be, and to talk about the things you want to talk about.

WAIYDE PALMER:

You're constantly compartmentalizing and hiding things away. I found that very difficult to do. But my dad, unbeknownst to me, when he was growing up had a best friend in Southern Indiana who, when they went away to World War II, came out to him, and did not have a very good life as a result of that. My dad had in his mind,

WAIYDE PALMER:

what happened to gay people based upon this relationship with this friend who turned into an alcoholic. And I dunno, he was probably unemployable and miserable, as many people were that were gay and out, and projected by everybody, including my dad. I think he saw part of that in me and that probably added to the gap that we were feeling. What was your question? I'm sorry.

MASON FUNK:

About your diary. But before we got there,

MASON FUNK:

it just makes me wonder, like, I love that story about ... Again, when I say I love, it's a weird way of saying it, but that rage you felt, even at the age of five, because someone had said something that hurt your friends. I just wonder if there were other times, other things you witnessed as a small child where this kind of innate rage at injustice.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Well, I mean, that's the thing. Growing up in a working class, working poor neighborhood,

WAIYDE PALMER:

there is a level of distrust to authority figures. Cops would drive through and you would hear like starting a block away, you would hear 'cop' as they drove, and people would just repeat it. People would give them the eye, there was a very 'us and them' mentality which, again, in a class system that is as entrenched as the American class system is,

WAIYDE PALMER:

is no surprise. In a mixed working class neighborhood, it was not unimaginable that people were probably doing some things that they shouldn't be doing, so they were always on the lookout for cops. There was this kind of 'us and them' mentality. We were also clannish. It's like, this is my neighborhood. These are my friends. These are my people. We take care of each other. We had one of the smallest families in the neighborhood, with five kids.

WAIYDE PALMER:

We had neighbors with 16 children. We had neighbors with 10 children, so there were packs of these kids running around in the post-war baby boom generation. There were packs and packs of us. It was the late sixties, early seventies. So we were inundated on television with antiwar racial issues. We were being desegregated

WAIYDE PALMER:

from the school that we were going to and put into an all-white school. They were doing it based on zip codes and neighborhoods. We got bused into an area that hadn't seen very many black people. It was more effluent, but they needed the numbers. So that's where we went, even though we were a mile and a half from school that was more than 50% black. Our zip code got put in over here and that

WAIYDE PALMER:

created tension with my peer group and with me. When, again, I tried to talk to your parents about it, and my mother is not going to talk about it. My father is like, well, just stick with your own kind and everything will be fine. I never thought it was going to be fine because I didn't have my own kind because my own kind was a secret, and if I shared that with anybody, then I was going to be at risk because I'd already seen in middle school,

WAIYDE PALMER:

the result of being too feminine or too butch.

MASON FUNK:

What did you see?

WAIYDE PALMER:

There were kids that were like super Nelly that were picked on from the time we were in fifth grade on. And there was a couple girls who read super butch -- Tomboy was supposed to wear off by fifth grade. If you're in seventh grade and you're still like tromping around in overalls and like getting into fights and beating people up, I started to hear the words that would become a lifelong derogatory statements of dagger

WAIYDE PALMER:

and faggot and fairy and Nelly and sissy. Sissy was a big, popular word when I was a young kid, sissy boy. It felt like fire when you got called that, it felt like you've been stabbed, and you tried to figure out what you were doing. That's like giving away the clues so you could hide it, so you wouldn't be the object of the ridicule. Which is, again, why I hung out with people of color, because very few people of color

WAIYDE PALMER:

ever said any of that stuff to me, they were very welcoming and just cool about everything. They didn't think it was weird that I wanted to learn how to dance with them. They didn't think it was weird that I thought organized sports was stupid. I started keeping a diary, I needed someplace to siphon off these feelings. Again, working class neighborhoods with kids of large amounts

WAIYDE PALMER:

get very bored and we start drinking early and doing drugs early and smoking weed early. I was, by the time I was in seventh grade, experimenting with drugs and drinking, and had smoked weed and dropped acid by seventh grade. And yeah, I put everything in the diary. I also put in that I'd snuck behind the tennis courts with this guy named Kevin from a year above me and we'd made out.

WAIYDE PALMER:

I kept this from seventh grade to sophomore year. My parents began to notice a change in me. I was still smart and bright, but I wasn't exerting myself in any way. I just wanted to get through, I didn't want to do what they said. I didn't want to believe what they believed. I became very obstinate and contrarian, and not a lot of fun to be around, probably,

WAIYDE PALMER:

and became the focus of their life because my siblings were now into young adulthood, and I was the last kid that needed to be fixed. I was very broken in their eyes and they couldn't figure out what was wrong, and I couldn't really tell them. They took my diary and read my diary, which was a blow by blow description of sex with adults at the mall and dealing drugs and

WAIYDE PALMER:

being kind of a delinquent. Their answer to that revelation was to send me to therapy at a place called a social agency for social addiction, CASA, and I met with this guy who told me that it was a safe place -- I'd never been in a therapy situation. He made me pretty comfortable. After two sessions, I unloaded on him and told him that I was gay and the whole nine yards. He ended up

WAIYDE PALMER:

recounting every ounce of our conversation to my parents which changed our dynamic forever. That was 1976, so if you put it into historical context, that's seven years after Stonewall. Anita Bryant's in full rage and anti-juice ...

MASON FUNK:

Let me pause you there because we'll do a little more time here before we start getting into the next few years. I don't know if it's worth asking, but when you discovered your parents had gone in your room and found your diary, what actually ensued, what do you remember about the moment when you learned that they had found your diary? Like, how did that interaction go down?

WAIYDE PALMER:

Well, it's that cold pit you get in your stomach

WAIYDE PALMER:

when you've been discovered.

MASON FUNK:

Literally, was it in the kitchen, was it in the living room?

WAIYDE PALMER:

It was at dinner. My dad was about self-improvement. He would get us up and we would go outside and I'll do exercises, Air Force academy Calisthenic exercises, that was followed by book assignments. At the dinner table at night, we would have discussions about the books that we had read, and there would be

WAIYDE PALMER:

vibrant conversations. Usually him lording over us how we were not catching the drift of the book properly. He was the first person in his family to have gone to college on the GI bill, post-World war II, and that education opened up his mind. He was also into self-improvement and had discovered Eric Fromm paperback psychology became his go-to,

WAIYDE PALMER:

Born To Win, I'm Okay You're Okay, Games People Play. All of that stuff became something we had to learn how to speak about. Like, are you speaking to me in the parent state or the child state? We need to get into an adult and talk to each other. He was trying to bridge gaps with us, and really, it was just being an asshole, because

WAIYDE PALMER:

it was very selfish on his part. If he needed to unpack his childhood and his upbringing and his life, he didn't need to do it with his children, he needed to go find a therapist. But he didn't want to spend that kind of money, so he used these paperback psychology, so yeah. And then it's just manipulative. That was the context of which the discovery was laid out to me, dinner table,

WAIYDE PALMER:

mom, dad at the head of the table, me at the end, no other siblings, because they've all fled the coup because of his strict authoritarian behavior. They've all split. I am the last one there and in a full-blown proto punk mentality of like, fuck you, this is awful. Everything about you is awful. Being here is awful. Counting the days when I could escape.

MASON FUNK:

When he basically revealed to you, I assume he was the one who was doing the talking,

MASON FUNK:

your mom was there just as a bystander.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Yes.

MASON FUNK:

What was your reaction?

WAIYDE PALMER:

I was mad because he had violated my privacy, and I was told, again, that I had no right to privacy, I was basically a possession. Children are possessions until they're adults. At 18, you can do whatever you want, but till then you're under their roof, under their rules, under their financial ... I had been working

WAIYDE PALMER:

since I was 13 at that point, agricultural work. I'd pick green beans and detasseling corn and picked raspberries, you name it. I was trying to make money and put it into the bank, because the whole idea was to escape.

MASON FUNK:

So they sent you off to this CASA organization.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Yeah. I went twice. Once it was revealed that

WAIYDE PALMER:

things were not cool, I didn't feel safe there anymore. Backup was brought in, which is my sister. I have one sister. She and I were very close and she lived a pretty free life for a woman of that era. She swooped in and got me, and we went on a road trip, to

WAIYDE PALMER:

give my parents breathing room and to give me breathing room. We spent a couple of weeks, driving to the south, to visit some friends of hers. It probably saved my life in a way because it just relieved the tension at home. I mean, it didn't stop anything. The minute I got away from my parents and my sister was sworn

WAIYDE PALMER:

to keep an eye on me and all that stuff, but I was still banging the odd stranger and smoking weed.

MASON FUNK:

Did you ever see the movie, The Great Santini?

WAIYDE PALMER:

I did

MASON FUNK:

Is that kind of a little bit of what your dad was like?

WAIYDE PALMER:

That's very much like what my dad was like. He had a flat top and he was a gymnast in high school and college and then went into the Air Force. After the Air Force, ended up as a gym teacher and then

WAIYDE PALMER:

worked at this oil refinery, got involved with the union and became one of the leaders of the union. And then, because he was so effective, they moved him into management. He was a firefighter at the oil refinery, and then became head electrician, which I think there was like 1200 employees, 1300 employees. He had a lot of responsibility. My uncle worked there and my brothers worked there. I was going to work there, we all, kind of. It's a family business.

WAIYDE PALMER:

But I didn't do so well in those kinds of environments, so I was not invited to come and apply.

MASON FUNK:

Jay sometimes talks about this feeling, which is nothing that I can directly relate to, of just having been born, like, did I get switched at birth?

WAIYDE PALMER:

Well, I didn't feel like I got switched at birth because you pack all five of us together and we're spitting images of each other. But I felt like

WAIYDE PALMER:

I had been given a certain set of feelings that didn't seem to have been applied to anyone else. They said stuff like that when you were a kid, 'oh, he's super sensitive'. I cried too easy. I loved the Beach Blanket Bingo movies when I was a kid, and would beg them to take me to the drive-in to see the Beach Blanket Bingo movies, because

WAIYDE PALMER:

dude there was like super-hot motorcycle gang, all dressed really crazy. Then dudes running around in swimsuits, it was with cool music. I loved all of that stuff. I watched old black and white movies and I read nonstop. We'd go on vacations and I would take 60 books with me for a week. My dad was like, 'come on, let's go, you know, blah, blah, blah'. And I was like, 'no, I want to sit here and finish'. In third grade, I did the whole Hobbit

WAIYDE PALMER:

trilogy on holiday. I was just a weird kid.

MASON FUNK:

Apart from that one incident we talked about with the people driving by and yelling the N word. Like, I know in my case, it took me literally until, at least, in my twenties, before I was in touch with any anger inside myself. Were you kind of ...

WAIYDE PALMER:

No. I'm Irish, we're angry at birth. It's kind of the way it works. That's why we drink.

WAIYDE PALMER:

I always tell people, it's like we have to dampen our spirits because there are plenty of stories -- I have an entire lifetime now of sobriety -- since I quit drinking at 22, that rival any kind of story any drunk has ever said, because I've been able to do all of this with a clear mind and a clear choice, but still honor the spirit of who I am as a human being.

WAIYDE PALMER:

I had spirit as a kid and I tried to explore it at the same time, being fed a lot of information about what I should be doing. Like, get a trade, get something that's going to take care of you. Like, the depression era, people were very worried about food and housing and clothing, and working class people are very terrified of losing that semblance of safety.

WAIYDE PALMER:

That was what I was pointed to. But inside, I wanted to do arts and write and draw and go to theater classes, and be in plays. I wanted to be an actor. You don't get that, instead it gets squelched. If you let that out, you get made fun of. You get targeted. So I learned both those things by the time I was 15, and

WAIYDE PALMER:

had a rather sarcastic, comedic shell to keep people away from me, since I was rather small and fighting didn't work so well. I learned how to distract people with my biting wit.

MASON FUNK:

Let me ask you about someone you mentioned along the way. Well, let me ask you this question. You don't have to answer it if you don't want to, but something you either wrote or said to Michael that made me wonder whether your dad would beat you up.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Yes.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Is that something you're comfortable talking about?

WAIYDE PALMER:

My dad had a physical reaction to things, that's the way he was raised. He had that reaction. My dad was raised in a very physicality kind of environment, where children were disciplined strongly, so he did not put up with backtalk very much. My mother,

WAIYDE PALMER:

the poor woman was tasked with being physically challenged, five children and a very narcissistic husband who she was obsessed and adored. She was obsessed with him, like, dinner didn't start till he got home. Everything was built around his schedule and his needs and what he wanted. If you started to like ... But again, we're products of this person,

WAIYDE PALMER:

so everything negative he has, we kind of have similar characteristics. And so that's going to come to butting heads, and it started with my older brother. He was out when he was 18. And then my sister, when she went off to college, she did not come back afterwards, ever. Two of my brothers, one of my brothers, who I adore, but he was the apple of my dad's eyes because he got into a very good school

WAIYDE PALMER:

and was able to get his master's degree from an even better school. And literally live out one of my dad's fantasies about what life should look like as a successful adult; making lots of money and a great neighborhood and all that stuff. Then the brother that, we call them Irish twins, I don't know if you guys know what that is, but it's when you were separated by nine or 10 months and you look like twins. That's what those two brothers are.

WAIYDE PALMER:

The other brother also got a scholarship to the same university, but he was a radical and did not last long there, but ended up becoming severely involved in the anti-war movement and went to Montana and started a print shop collective with a bunch of lesbians. But again, they had physical fights. Every one of my siblings had an altercation with my dad. When it was my turn, I was not surprised that it happened

WAIYDE PALMER:

and it happened repeatedly. The last time it happened was on a Thursday. I was a senior in high school, just started my senior year in high school. And that was on a Thursday on Saturday. They did a household shopping and while they were gone, I packed up my shit and moved out, into my own apartment. Because, like I said, I'd been saving money since I was 13 to escape. I signed a lease and

WAIYDE PALMER:

finished out my senior year in my own apartment.

MASON FUNK:

All right. Now before we move out of high school, who was James Myers?

WAIYDE PALMER:

James Myers was the first openly gay man I ever met. He was my drama teacher in high school. I took drama kind of as an easy credit, my freshman year.

WAIYDE PALMER:

It was like drama one and two whatever they do. But it went into your English. My idea was to pack in as many credits as possible in a short amount of time, so I could get out because you can't go anywhere without a high school diploma. You can probably make it in the world without a college diploma, but at that time in the 70s, but you couldn't make it anywhere without a high school diploma. So I was trying to pack in all that stuff. Somebody said,

WAIYDE PALMER:

you should take drama. And in walked this very tan Jim kind of bodied person who had a feminine air to him but kept his chin up. He looked people straight in the eye, and his best friend was one of my favorite teachers, this woman named Patricia Bammer. Those two together fostered

WAIYDE PALMER:

a sense of safety in that school for outsiders. She taught me how to talk in public and be a speaker and taught speech classes and had me doing speeches about subjects I thought were funny, like how to be a pickpocket. He stuck me in musicals, even though I could not sing at all. I didn't think, but he was like,

WAIYDE PALMER:

'oh, you have great moves'. You should dance in this musical. I was like, you know, that's not what dudes do. And he's like, yeah, who cares what other people say, and literally opened up my eyes to the possibilities of being a creative, to be in a creative field, to be around creative people, and drama drew the weirdos. I mean, before that, it was like young life and Christian school and like, those kinds of, and the band, I was in the band,

WAIYDE PALMER:

but that was more physicality than anything, because you marched in the band. But yeah, he sparkled and made you feel like you could sparkle too, and do it safely. He never talked about a girl. He never pretended, and he lived not too far from where we all lived, in a little farmhouse right on the corner and Would put out

WAIYDE PALMER:

his chase lounge in the summer and a sprinkler and be out there like in his bikini, like just getting all like crispy tan and like what this like gin and tonic. We'd drive by and he'd wave at us. He was a really, like, little special animal in our world, he was.

MASON FUNK:

Oh, one second. Sorry. No, no, go lay down. No. Oh, the guilt. And they'll start talking to you so you could maybe take a sip of water since you're already.

WAIYDE PALMER:

I was in his classes for the next -- I took every class he offered, there were other secret gay people now in the classes, there were people that we were starting to recognize each other without saying the words, which later became cruising. But at the time it's just the gaydar that we have. Like, I was starting to be,

WAIYDE PALMER:

starting to recognize it. As all this was happening, I was still this blue collar, take care of yourself, kind of kid. I was dealing drugs, and a lot of the bullies and people were now having to come to me to get their weed and Quaaludes and hallucinogenics and things like that, because I had a big side thing. I was interacting with them and they were afraid of me

WAIYDE PALMER:

because of who I knew and who I got the stuff from, which was biker gangs and criminal elements from my old neighborhood. Other gay people were starting to get picked on really heavily all over my school. There were straight dudes that had effeminate mannerisms that were getting beat up. If you cross your legs funny, you got beat up. Just all kinds of things, because it was a rather large school

WAIYDE PALMER:

and there wasn't security. There wasn't any of that stuff. I was coming into myself as a queer person, and at the same time, having to protect myself by becoming this dichotomy. I was attacked when I was a sophomore, and my response to being attacked and harassed by this guy was to pull out

WAIYDE PALMER:

two number two pencils and stab him repeatedly in the chest. After that got out, I didn't get harassed anymore. I was still the same person. They still said the same things. The same slurs were there, the same crap graffiti in the bathrooms about I suck dick and all this other stuff, but nobody messed with me, and I liked that. I liked the fact that I had found some power in exhibiting the kind of response that they would, and that also made me feel good,

WAIYDE PALMER:

and empowered me and emboldened me to not be so shy.

MASON FUNK:

Is this when you're still living at home or ...

WAIYDE PALMER:

I was still living at home. I came out in high school in 1979, after I moved out of my parents' house. Again, with friends that were not sure what that meant or comfortable with it, but because I was the epicenter

WAIYDE PALMER:

of their partying supplier, a lot of people put up with things and I was also still exhibiting all of these characteristics that made them feel comfortable. Like, I would still, because I'm part of the group there's problems in the group, then one group goes against another group. I'm there shoulder to shoulder swinging blows with the next guy. So there was a lot of acceptance on that level. Again, I cannot emphasize enough how much no drama I ever got

WAIYDE PALMER:

from black people about this. The white kids were the ones who were uptight. Black kids, they were mad at you, they'd call you a punk, but nobody ever said like the F word to me, ever. But I was friends with some of the toughest black girls in school, super tough girls, like break-you-in-half girls. I admired so much of

WAIYDE PALMER:

their resilience and ability to stand up for themselves. The racism in Indiana is extraordinary. It's suffocating how awful it is. I was known as an anti-racist very early. Seventh grade, voted most liberal. Eighth grade, most liberal. Ninth grade, most liberal. Because here's a white guy hanging out with all these black kids. It's like, these are my neighbors or my friends, first of all.

WAIYDE PALMER:

I acknowledge they're black, but it's not the first word out of my mouth when I think about them. I just had a different mentality about it than a lot of people did.

MASON FUNK:

I wrote down a couple of things, I took notes and under the heading of moving out, I put, everything was scary, terrifying, [crosstalk] inspiration from people further out of the fringes, dealing drugs, being a mule,

MASON FUNK:

carrying gun, the high school people leave you alone and felt really good to establish.

WAIYDE PALMER:

It felt super-hot to step away, because this dude, they had this thing in the Midwest where seniors could wear overalls on Fridays, only seniors. I didn't know the rules, we were new to the school. How did we know? We didn't know that shit. We're poor. We wear overalls. That's what you wear because they're inexpensive.

WAIYDE PALMER:

It was kind of the look back then. And these guys cornered us, my friend Louie, and this girl named Sunshine. I don't really know her real name, we just called her Sunshine because she was always smiling. And it's the first time I ever saw her look terrified. I was really mad. Again, I have a really bad temper that I've learned to control, but back then I went from zero to beat you in like two seconds flat.

WAIYDE PALMER:

My dad had told me when I was small, very small, in seventh grade and getting bullied, that life wasn't fair, that I would never be able to fight back in a way that I would be able to win against larger people, so I would have to use whatever was at my advantage in the moment to survive. He said, "If somebody's beating up on you or a friend of yours, pick up a chair and hit them with it,

WAIYDE PALMER:

or whatever's available." That's why I grabbed the number two pencils, it was more instinctive than planned out. This guy was gonna hurt me and said he was going to hurt me, it was the only thing I had on me, but it did feel really good. Anytime I stood up for myself, it felt good because inside, I was afraid all the time, of exposure, of discovery, of rejection,

WAIYDE PALMER:

of being left out, being left out alone. Yeah, that was a lot. Moving into my own apartment with my friend who knew and didn't care, and we're still friends to this day, was a very empowering. I had someone to talk to about it because she was kind of the weird girl. Then I had my friend, Louie, who was black and listened to rock and roll,

WAIYDE PALMER:

which was at the time very kind of odd. The three of us had formed this tripod of protection for each other and business. We were able to cover a lot of area between the three of us and make a lot of money.

MASON FUNK:

Tell me about going back and forth.

WAIYDE PALMER:

I started hustling. Somebody told me that queers hung out in downtown Indianapolis, at

WAIYDE PALMER:

the main public library after dark, who were underage. I went down there, took the bus and another bus and another bus to get down there. And lo and behold, here's teenage drag hookers. We'd call them trans now, but then they were just like dudes who dressed up like girls and they were in drag and they were out, working the streets, and we'd hang out on the sidewalks. Not everybody

WAIYDE PALMER:

was a sex worker, but a lot of people were, and you could make some extra money that way. I did, on occasion, but only when I really liked somebody. If you like somebody and you're going to get paid, seemed like win-win, and they were so brave. To me they were the bravest people I'd ever met, because a few of them passed, very few of them, and the rest there was manly features about them. There wasn't plastic surgery back then.

WAIYDE PALMER:

You stole old people's clothes and you stole your makeup from the pharmacy. They wouldn't sell you stuff, they'd throw you out of the stores. They didn't bat an eye when I sat down next to them, and started to give me instructions on how to be a better queer. I immediately felt allied with them and safe with them. But again,

WAIYDE PALMER:

was keeping everything separate. My old friends from high school that are still around, I didn't bring them down. I started to make new friends and separate church and state, so to speak. I met this guy who had a booming business getting Owsley's purple haze from San Francisco, through FedEx, into Indianapolis. He would pay people to

WAIYDE PALMER:

fly it to other cities like Chicago and New York. I started flying to New York on this airline called People's Express. You would show up with like 40 bucks and you would pay the stewardess when you got on and they would fly you into Newark. Then you would take the path from Newark into Manhattan and meet your connection and drop off your thing. Spend whatever time you wanted to spend,

WAIYDE PALMER:

and then you'd come back. I started spending the weekend that turned into five days. It turned into two weeks that would sometimes turn into a month. I still kept a place in Indianapolis, was flying back and forth. I had a job in New York now, and then I was also hustling in New York because I was still under age. I was meeting punk rockers, which changed my life,

WAIYDE PALMER:

meeting the punk rockers.

MASON FUNK:

Tell us about punk.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Punk new wave at the time was the most inclusive cultural phenomena that I had been around. At the same time that punk is happening, disco is blowing up, hip hop has started. There was all these different scenes going on, and they were all kind of melding in big towns like New York and Chicago, not so much the smaller

WAIYDE PALMER:

satellite towns like Indianapolis, but there was a punk scene in Indianapolis. Once I got my feet wet in New York, and they were just like -- You would meet dudes that looked like they could break you in half and they would tell you, 'oh yeah, I've slept with guys. What's the big deal?' They were like bisexual or trisexual. They would say, 'I'd try anything sexual'. They weren't so judgy about it. I found that amazing and opening.

WAIYDE PALMER:

You could just be the oddest little creature in the world, and nobody batted an eye on it. Instead, they celebrated it and go into the mud club and the pyramid and CBGBs. Music became like a badge, it became a uniform.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Wherever you went, you could find family. If I go to Chicago, I had my leather coat on, my pins all over it, I've got like crazy haircut, punks would walk right up to you. 'Yo. Yeah, what's up? Where are you from?' 'Well, where's the shows?' And then they take you to a show and then you meet people. 'What do you do?' 'Oh, I sell dope.' 'Oh, well, we'll buy some.' And that's kinda how it jumped off.

MASON FUNK:

It sounds like the music was a good fit.

WAIYDE PALMER:

The music was a good fit because it was rebellious and explicit, sexually explicit. There was already a trans woman named Jane Country, who was really big in the scene. There was the New York dolls, who was the precursor to punk, that had dressed in women's clothes. There were people like bands, like the Germs whose lead singer Darby Crash was like known bisexual and hustler.

WAIYDE PALMER:

There were tons of people talking about all of the underground and bringing it into light. Suddenly, we weren't this small, little thing, there was hundreds of us and then thousands of us, and then you have a collective. The collective made you feel safe. Along the way, I met like out queers who were also political and working in different avenues to secure

WAIYDE PALMER:

our rights and our place in the world. We're telling you that you belong in this world and there were pictures out. There was the Anita Bryant like pie in the face thing, for a queer dude to, on TV, pie the leader of the anti-gay movement of America in the face, and then stand there and giggle about it was very empowering to anyone that saw it. We all saw it

WAIYDE PALMER:

because it was on the news, nonstop. The smaller things that have been happening in the main larger coastal towns were working their way to smaller towns. In the middle of punk. I also discovered that there were punks that didn't do drugs and didn't drink. They were called straight edge. I was very unhappy with my use and just miserable

WAIYDE PALMER:

because, by now, I wasn't using it to have fun, I was using it to maintain a certain lifestyle, and to not feel all the feelings that I was having. They were called straight edge and they said they didn't do drugs, they didn't drink, they didn't eat red meat and they didn't smoke cigarettes. I thought I could do two out of four of those. By the time I was 22, I had met a woman who was at punk rock dyke named Jenny Lush.

WAIYDE PALMER:

She took me to my first meeting, sobriety meeting. The people there were very welcoming. They didn't blink an eye at my green hair and disheveled look, at all. That started my sobriety that I continued to this day.

MASON FUNK:

[Inaudible] Go back as far as Jenny Lush.

WAIYDE PALMER:

I met a woman around the clubs at that time, who went by the name Jenny Lush. She disappeared for a couple months, and when she reappeared, she looked and acted completely different. She told me that she had quit drinking and doing drugs. I had just had an incident where I had OD'd and felt like I was at the end of my rope, which is a very odd feeling to have at 22.

WAIYDE PALMER:

She offered to take me to an AA meeting. I went along with her. At this meeting, I walked in and it was in the middle of the afternoon on the side of town that we usually stole from, not hung out in.

WAIYDE PALMER:

They had a greeter at this afternoon meeting that was obviously gay, black. I thought to myself, not knowing anything about how this works ...

[truck backing up]

WAIYDE PALMER:

The greeter was openly gay and black, on the wrong side of town, when I say wrong side of town, the Midwest is often divided up into a white side and everybody else. I lived on the everybody else's side of town. We were on the affluent side of town in the afternoon, and inside, it looked like the Noah's Ark version of AA with two ladies knitting and two guys that looked

WAIYDE PALMER:

like they had just gotten off work from the bank, and everything else. But they had chosen this person to be the representative of the group by greeting, because to me, whoever shakes your hand first should be the person that's most like what's happening inside. He ended up ushering me in and taking care of me. Jenny didn't stay sober, but I did. Now, 38 years later,

WAIYDE PALMER:

if it hadn't been for that chance encounter and meeting and a punk rock little dyke girl, who saw how hurt I was, taking me to a bunch of people who didn't want anything for me but to be happier, I wouldn't have been able to live the extraordinary life that I've been given. I always want to honor that and include that in anything, because without it, there is nothing else.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Because up to that point, it was circumstance. After that point, it's choice.

MASON FUNK:

Do you know where Jenny is today?

WAIYDE PALMER:

No, she's probably dead. In my neighborhood, in my world at the time, it was very common to hear that someone had passed or somebody had been shot or somebody had gone to jail and died there or

WAIYDE PALMER:

killed in a car accident, or OD'd. Very, very, very common. When the early eighties and people started becoming ill with HIV and AIDS, I was surprisingly well-prepared for the tragedy and drama of it, and knew how to compartmentalize it. I was able to move into action a lot sooner than a lot of

WAIYDE PALMER:

other people, because I'd already learned how to mourn and feel sad and miss people. There are people in my high school that had died very early, and it kind of just prepared you, in a sad, odd way, for this silent war that we were all about to join. I got sober in '83, AIDS had been discovered two years earlier. We had heard that people were getting sick. I was in the Midwest where it was like,

WAIYDE PALMER:

literally not talked about in any way whatsoever. I got involved with some sober, younger people, and we started doing things like putting on the first LGBTQ play with an all queer cast and crew for pride because pride had started in the Midwest. We still weren't a parade yet, we were just a little enclosed area, like

WAIYDE PALMER:

where all the bars were, but we did street closures, and it was a big deal. We did this play four times and I got to be in it. It was about how Stonewall came into be. It was actually educational and ended up moving to Cleveland where there was a much stronger punk queer movement there, and bands nonstop, and ended up becoming part of that sober scene,

WAIYDE PALMER:

which is where AA started, in Cleveland and Akron. They were very serious because they feel like they were like the birth of this worldwide movement, and took things very seriously. It was like the masters class of sobriety, and I'm really glad I did that. I lived there for a couple of years and started a business and bought a house with some people. But I still wasn't happy. Then I went to a blood drive and

WAIYDE PALMER:

found out that I was positive. I was 25, and we were doing activism by this point in Cleveland. I was very involved in the anti-apartheid movement and with anarchists, and had done the great peace march in '86, from LA to DC, about a denuclearization and trying to disarm the world. It was not having much effect, but it felt good to be involved in that.

MASON FUNK:

Tell us the story of

MASON FUNK:

this protest you went to [crosstalk].

WAIYDE PALMER:

Yeah. In Ohio, by '85, there had been maybe two other pride parades in Columbus, which is the state Capitol. What they were doing is they were holding it in different cities, but they were mostly holding pride, the big parade, in Columbus because it was the Capitol.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Everybody drove there and we were going to march with the sober contingent, which was the largest contingent at the time. I think there was like a couple hundred of us that had come from Cincinnati and Cleveland and Akron and Toledo and all over to march together as out queer sober people which was a big deal because AA had been the first organization, international organization in the world that ever had an out gay person on their

WAIYDE PALMER:

international board, like, in the early sixties. Before Stonewall, they had already done all that. That had already been sorted and taken care of. They weren't embracing us, but they weren't throwing us out either, so we decided to do that. We got there, there were 10,000 counter protestors and the Dykes on Bikes were our security, basically. They'd set up these barricades, here's the cops and here's the counter protesters,

WAIYDE PALMER:

here's the state Capitol, we come walking down, there had been smaller contingents, but we were the large contingent. We had this big, huge banner that said -- I don't remember -- clean and sober, LGBT clean and sober. I don't remember. Friends of Bill. My friend, Joe (Joanna), had a huge Mohawk and I had a huge Mohawk and we were carrying ... Because we were young, they wanted us standing up front because they wanted to show off young people,

WAIYDE PALMER:

that you didn't have to be an old geezer to get sober. That you could be a young person and look like this, everybody was welcome. We were like the inclusive children. We were about halfway through and some ministers jumped the barricade and came at us with their Bibles, these big, huge Bibles, screaming that they were going to strike the devil homosexual out of us

WAIYDE PALMER:

with these Bibles. I looked at Joe and she looked at me and we've turned around and looked at the monitors, because each contingent had monitors. The older lady that was with us looked very afraid. And that anger I have, Joanna had, and so did several other people that were right in front, we dropped the banner and started swinging on these guys. It happened to be the first

WAIYDE PALMER:

pride march of the season. It was really early in June. CNN was there for some reason, because I think it was like the third time they'd ever had a pride parade. This is how it cemented the notion with all my family and all my friends, because here I am on CNN, on national news, swinging on ministers and punch them in the face about I'm gay, and you're not going to stop me with your Bible.

WAIYDE PALMER:

That's kind of the final straw in my family's back, to seal the deal of, I was gay and this wasn't a phase, and it wasn't going to change anytime soon.

MASON FUNK:

Wow. Wow. Yeah, that's a good one.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Good times.

MASON FUNK:

Especially given the fact that, on some level, you are still in a relationship with your parents, but you clearly demarcated like ...

WAIYDE PALMER:

Yeah, I was not going to come home anymore and put up with my dad pulling out a magazine and pointing to ... That was, for me, in 1985, to participate in something like that, that was so outrageous, but freeing because, again, there were 3000 of us. It wasn't like I was doing this on my own. It was empowering, but at the same time,

WAIYDE PALMER:

that's the year I found out I was positive and started making plans to ... Because they literally told you over the phone, you got a phone call, they said, "Hey, you've tested positive for the HTLV 3." Which is AIDS, "And you should get your affairs in order because you're going to die." Over the phone.

WAIYDE PALMER:

There was no counseling, there was no any of that. They just screened your blood and went looking for it. Because the test had just come out, I waited a while and then I went and got another test that was run by queer people, and they confirmed. Then I went into denial because that's what you do. Because again, 25, who wants to die? Nobody. Around then,

WAIYDE PALMER:

I started reading Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. There was three books in the series at the time. I inhaled those books and decided I was going to move to San Francisco. Sold my share of the house and saved a bunch of money. Within 18 months, I packed up and I moved to San Francisco, arriving in September of '87.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Pause there for one sec. Just to pause on

MASON FUNK:

you discovering and then getting confirmation that you're now, I don't know, I guess it was prior to saying HIV positive, but that you were going to officially die of AIDS. You say you went into denial. Moving to a new city when you think you're on the cusp of death is kind of a form of denial, I guess, why would you move otherwise?

WAIYDE PALMER:

No, I was moving because if I was going to fight it, I needed to be someplace that was in the fight. Cleveland was not in the fight.

MASON FUNK:

Okay, perfect.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Cleveland was trying to survive it. Cleveland was putting together places to go get tested, places to get clothing, what we could do to help you stay in your apartment, like all the care services that were desperately needed. San Francisco was going to fight. I knew that San Francisco has got a fight. There had already been talk and stuff on the news,

WAIYDE PALMER:

there were rumblings that people were mad that the bath houses got closed. Bath houses weren't closed in Cleveland, bath houses weren't closed in Chicago, all of that was still going on, but they were trying to blame New York and San Francisco for everything. knowing what I knew then in my early twenties, and after what I'd already experienced, I knew that there was going to be an organization or organizing done that would fight, and in all likelihood,

WAIYDE PALMER:

if you're going to live, you're going to have to do it in a place where you're going to have the most support. Those books made San Francisco sound really fun. I didn't know anyone here. Then my coworker, who was a baker at the collective coffee house I worked at, he and his partner were moving out here. They had come out to check it out and then decided they were going to come.

WAIYDE PALMER:

They moved, and then three months later, I moved. I got an apartment. People rented me an apartment without even meeting me. I just sent the money along and moved into an apartment. Within a year had become pretty heavily involved in AIDS activism.

MASON FUNK:

What are some of the, and again, I have kind of like a series of notes, certainly the Golden Gate Bridge deserves a shoutout.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Yeah, well that was several years later. I mean, at the time, what was really going on here was ...

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, because people won't know where you are necessarily, so in San Francisco

WAIYDE PALMER:

In San Francisco, it was a death march. People were just struggling to keep people fed and find out about any meds. Anything you can imagine that has gone on about COVID,

WAIYDE PALMER:

it first started with the first pandemic that was going on, because by now we have a president that didn't say the words AIDS for five years. We have 45,000 dead. We have a city that has turned into a ghost town. The Castro is empty. There's hardly anything fun to do until the mid-eighties, when all these young queer kids started showing up from college,

WAIYDE PALMER:

and in New York as well. Any of the large epicenters, queers of a certain age started gravitating there because they were ready for a fight. We were not, the Stonewall era. They had started the fight. We were first-generation now, we were the babies of Stonewall. We had done anti-apartheid, we had done CISPES and fighting El Salvadorian and for Nicaraguan freedom,

WAIYDE PALMER:

and feminists, and clinic defense, and everything else. There were people that had done all that in college, now they were graduating college and they were like, where are we going to go? People were coming to San Francisco and New York and Chicago and Atlanta, and they were meeting up and finding nothing there for them. You had to invent it. We invented new clubs that were queer and punk and new wave and weirdo and like sex positive

WAIYDE PALMER:

and not apologetic, because our elders were just fighting to stay alive, and we knew we would have to soon, as well. We made as many inroads as we could in established organizations, but it became obvious that we would have to make new organizations, which is how in San Francisco, there was a thing called the AIDS action pledge. It was a pledge that people signed saying that they would fight government inaction, that

WAIYDE PALMER:

they would fight for meds, that they would fight for dignity and equality and for people living with AIDS, because that's how they began to refer to themselves, as people living with AIDS, not victims and not sad figures. They were going to become warriors with the time that they had left on the planet. I met two guys, Terry Beswick, who is the executive director of GLBT historical society of San Francisco, and the late Nick Shelby, who was his best friend,

WAIYDE PALMER:

who was this Russian dude with a shock of hair, and like to wear crazy white suits and skirts. Through happenstance, I wasn't feeling very well, and I had gone to health center one, and they had done a T-cell count for me. It was very low. It was like name them after the Brady Bunch kind of low. These guys said, "Hey, we're going to this new group, AIDS action pledge. You should come with us."

WAIYDE PALMER:

I did, and that morphed into Act Up San Francisco, the AIDS coalition, unleashed power, they changed from the AIDS action pledge to Act Up's name because New York had started Act Up and the elders of the group, and I'm talking about, I'm in my mid-twenties, these people are in their early thirties to early forties, elders of our group had decided if we were going to have

WAIYDE PALMER:

a national movement direct action, that we would need solidarity. The way you have solidarity is adopt each other's monikers and then start to spread out that information. You know who's who if everybody's under the same umbrella and wearing the same uniform. We've got images that are very similar, so

WAIYDE PALMER:

our ideology is going to be similar. That's what happened, we changed our name to Act Up. I became involved with them. One of my first actions, there was an experimental drug that they wouldn't release, there was no such thing as compassionate release then, and one of our elders, Terry Sutton, who was a school teacher, and a highly trained, self-trained, medical expert on HIV at the time,

WAIYDE PALMER:

had discovered there was a drug called Foscarnet in the pipeline that helped people with CMV, and there was a trial that had been set up at the San Francisco general hospital that was so narrow, it excluded everybody. There was just a handful of people on this med, but there was a real opportunity that these people who already were losing their eyesight wanted to try the med. Because what difference does it make whether it makes them sicker or not?

WAIYDE PALMER:

What mattered was, there was a chance that they could keep their vision and feel better, but they were denied by the FDA to participate. They were denied by the medical establishment because, at the time, patients were not viewed as anything else but commodities in which to be trusted by people who knew more than you. They were not prepared for the LGBT community to educate themselves and to become

WAIYDE PALMER:

their own best advocates. We went to San Francisco general and shut part of the pharmacy down, and did a sit in at the pharmacy and an attempt to sway people's minds and to make a stink and get on the news to see a bunch of poor AIDS victims lined up, begging for these medicines. The news came and we got our point across and other people got included.

WAIYDE PALMER:

They were denying women any chance of like use of any of these meds, they weren't including people of color in any of the studies. They weren't doing any of that until the AIDS coalition to unleash power on both coasts. Then in the 37 to 50 chapters that suddenly were springing up all over the world began to demand the right to be able to do that.

WAIYDE PALMER:

I suddenly went from somebody that bartended and waited tables and went to punk shows to somebody that did 80 hours of direct action AIDS organization activities per week, on top of working and trying to have fun and a life, because it became apparent that we were all drowning and we would have to be each other's lifeline.

WAIYDE PALMER:

That's what I did. I surrounded myself with other people who were equally committed, and along the way it branched out and we formed coalitions with the black coalition on AIDS and San Francisco AIDS foundation, and other organizations that were able to feed us information, where we would be able to be the ground forces in some issue that they

WAIYDE PALMER:

had to be the diplomat. It's always good to have a shock team to go out, to be a foot soldier, to be the ones that were be willing to be arrested, to do direct action, to shut down the production company that had come to San Francisco, to make a television show where the protagonist for the week was going to be a person purposely infecting people with AIDS, like midnight caller did, which was an NBC show that Gary Cole was the principal star.

WAIYDE PALMER:

We had people on the inside who sent us the script. Then we had somebody else that was a location scout, who'd been hired in San Francisco, who faxed us all the information. Every time they showed up to do shots, we were there to interrupt it. Those were the kinds of actions that I think formed a momentum that got people involved, and it was a ripple effect throughout the community.

WAIYDE PALMER:

It was an important factor in dealing with AIDS and HIV and all the ramifications. We needed caregivers, we needed the people that did shanti, and we needed the NAMES Project that Cleve Jones put together in order to memorialize people, because they were being ignored and people were dying, and being said that they died from lung cancer or pneumonia, but not AIDS. Then we needed the people that were willing to

WAIYDE PALMER:

advocate for the larger community, because it wasn't just the queer communities, since it was straight people that were getting sick and sex workers and drug users, we needed those people to focus on, how are we going to do this? In conjunction, together, they were able to form a model that did affect and impact politics on an international level that continues to reverberate today.

MASON FUNK:

At a given point in time, take May, 1989, how would those of you who were basically connected to the leadership or the most active members of Act Up, how would you decide on any given week or any given month, like, what are we going to do that's going to be the most impactful and effective.

WAIYDE PALMER:

First of all, we didn't have leaders in San Francisco. We worked by consensus, which is why New York hated us so much, because they did a hands up,

WAIYDE PALMER:

hands down kind of vote, majority rules. We worked on consensus, which was much slower and based in feminism, where we would like if we were all sitting around having a discussion about like what we'd like to do, and 80% of the people were for it, but 20% of the people weren't, we would try and find ways to work in the 20% opinion into the larger element in which to try and have the most representative action and formula

WAIYDE PALMER:

for going forward. So we started putting our flyers in Spanish. We started going and doing outreach in Oakland where the black community was being decimated. We copied the idea that if we're going to do safe sex for younger people, because they were getting HIV too, that we would have to go and hand out safe sex kits in front of high schools, because they weren't going to educate any of the kids. There was zero HIV education. We would have meetings,

WAIYDE PALMER:

we'd have topics of action points. There was also broken up into caucuses and groups. There was a person of color caucus, there was a piss caucus, people with immune system disorder, there was a women's caucus. There was also a local issues, state issues, international issues. Then people would bring whatever was hot at the moment to the group, the group would review it, we would decide how we were going to go forward. Position papers would get written.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Art would get made. The decision would be made, this is how we're going to protest it, then out we would go to protest. That's how Act Up worked. It was unwieldy at times, especially when you had a group of 150 to 300 people. There were smaller groups, affinity groups, that were birthed in the larger group and went off and did smaller actions, not smaller actions, who did actions on their own with smaller groups of people that

WAIYDE PALMER:

didn't have to be open to a public meeting, like Act Up was. Act Up public meeting, we were already starting to have infiltrators and the police check in on us because of different tactics that they found offensive, much like Black Lives Matter or any other leftist organization. And I say leftist because we were leftists. We had an issued anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist mentality because all of those issues,

WAIYDE PALMER:

and the colonialism, had helped create the roadblocks to getting healthcare. We believed healthcare should be on demand and a right. Housing should be on demand and a right. This was long before there was discussions on national level for public health care.

MASON FUNK:

You said, again, a note that I typed was 'moving out of comfort zone into fever pitch of battle'.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Yeah. In Act Up, part of the discussions were always about how can we frame this that is going to have the largest impact. Usually, that meant pushing the buttons of people in power and making them as uncomfortable as we are feeling on a daily basis as we go to Memorial after Memorial and funeral after funeral and people struggling just to get the simplest of needs met. Even though San Francisco was

WAIYDE PALMER:

really, well-prepared, not well-prepared ... Even though San Francisco invented everything, the first AIDS ward, the AIDS foundation, [inaudible] like helping support people with AIDS' pets, all of that was being invented here and coming to fruition, what wasn't being affected directly were the pillars of power. We thought if

WAIYDE PALMER:

we came and took part in the political positions in a way that they could understand, we would be granted access to behind the golden doors. But in truth, we weren't. We were fed a lot of blah, blah. When marginalized groups become fed up with waiting, they tend to start pushing buttons. That's what Act Up did. Again, San Francisco Act Up was

WAIYDE PALMER:

pretty small in the beginning. Up until the first couple of years, we were pretty small, maybe 100 people, 150. But by the late eighties, as things ramped up and the deaths were just mounting across the country, and Act Up chapters were coming up, we began to see the need was greater to raise the stakes and to start putting people on notice.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Not only did we do that, but other groups did, like a group called Stop AIDS Now or Else, and they were an affinity group that started from a bunch of different, smaller organizations that came together to plan actions. One at a time to rattle the windows and doors of people in power when their first protest was at the San Francisco

WAIYDE PALMER:

opening opera weekend. Most people don't know, but the San Francisco Opera, for Northern California, rivals like the Oscars. Everybody who's anybody in San Francisco comes and goes, there's a black and white ball. There's these big deals. Every debutante comes out and puts on the fancy dress. We thought, what better place to ask for attention than to disrupt

WAIYDE PALMER:

the opening night? So we decided to do that. It was very successful.

MASON FUNK:

What did you do?

WAIYDE PALMER:

We got standing room only tickets and dressed up and hid our banners inside our clothes and infiltrated the entire audience. As they were starting the overture, we took over the Isles and the balconies, we threw 10,000 pink triangles down, paper pink triangles, and showered the entire audience

WAIYDE PALMER:

including the mayor and the governor and every big wig that we could find. We handed out papers, telling them what we were doing and why we were doing it, and that they had the power to change the trajectory of California's HIV and AIDS treatment and how they were treating people and to stop. I mean, they were talking about quarantines and camps, and there was a lot of rambling.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Larussians had come out of the woodwork and there was a guy named Lou Sheldon who was advocating for tattoos and camps, and it was becoming quite scary. We disrupted their gala. The funny thing is they did exactly what the Republicans would have done, which was what we saw at every Trump rally, when Trump rallies got disrupted by Black Lives Matter, what did they do?

WAIYDE PALMER:

They sang the national Anthem and booed in people's face who were there to talk to them. The only way to get their attention was to disrupt, and that's what happened. They sang the national Anthem at the top of their lungs, and then we filed out and we were above the fold the next day. That started a lot of different, smaller group actions. The most infamous one being the

WAIYDE PALMER:

blocking of the Golden Gate Bridge on January 31st, 1989, the bridge had never been blocked by an activist group before, had never been disrupted, had never even been considered because it's 10 lanes of speeding traffic. There's nowhere to stop. A group of people came together and figured out a way to do it. In the morning, suddenly, there was

WAIYDE PALMER:

40 people stretched across the Golden Gate Bridge. Traffic was backed up for five miles in each direction. There was a banner displayed, that ran the width of the bridge, about stopping AIDS. It was national news and then international news. Everyone was arrested, there was like 42 arrests, which isn't very much when you think about how many people were involved.

WAIYDE PALMER:

It was the first time in San Francisco that an activist group had been able to create that much attention to the issue around HIV and AIDS, and what decimation was going on. By now, Bush was president and he is continuing to prop up the policies of the Reagan-Bush eight year era. There was 48,000 dead.

WAIYDE PALMER:

There was somebody dying every eight minutes. Again, it was just the gay disease, nobody was taking it very seriously. We had to up the ante. I mean, that's why we shut down the FDA. That's why we shut down Wall Street. That's why we took on the church. That's why we shut down Golden Gate Bridge and the opera. We had to go to the places that are going to have the largest bang for the buck, to begin to move the needle of opinion

WAIYDE PALMER:

and to get mom and dad and grandma and aunt Jane talking about it at the dinner table. The only way they do that is that they see it on the news or above the fold.

MASON FUNK:

Did people wonder, did you wonder, like these people, like you say at the opera, these are not necessarily people who are directly involved in any kind of research, they're not directly involved in coming up with solutions, they're sort of average,

MASON FUNK:

Uber wealthy, posh San Franciscans. So tell me a little bit more about, or the Golden Gate Bridge, a bunch of angry commuters, what positive result did you all envision happening from these disruptive events, publicity, and they would start calling their congress people?

WAIYDE PALMER:

I don't think any of us had unrealistic expectations about what or what they wouldn't do. What we were putting them on notice is that no one can

WAIYDE PALMER:

escape HIV and AIDS. Everyone had AIDS. Everyone had HIV, everyone should be affected. Everyone should be involved. Everyone should take notice. Every dollar counts, every tax dollar counts. What you do, how you vote, where you vote, what your opinion is about it, it all matters. You have to shake the tree. We weren't going to come with our hat in our hand anymore, and politely

WAIYDE PALMER:

ask to participate in our own well-beings and lives. While these wealthy, posh people may not be the ones making the policy, they're certainly funding the people that are making the policy. They certainly have the ability to go into the rooms where policies are made and talk to people. Now, if they talked in an angry voice, if they went in and said, "Oh, I can't believe my whole opera got ruined because of these AIDS activists."

WAIYDE PALMER:

That's still there talking about it. We're pushing the envelope in a way that has to be pushed. As the marches got larger, and the protests got larger and more people became involved, we began ...

[Break]

WAIYDE PALMER:

As the marches got larger and we began to see the effects of our protests having ripple effect, because now, we're four years in, let's say it's 1990, 1991, 5 years in.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Now we're involved, the FDA is meeting with us. We have experts in the field of drugs. We have the ability to go and meet with different doctors when they're setting up these protocols for testing new meds, we have become our own media company and how to spin it. We become our own production company because now we're making videos that we're sending to news organizations

WAIYDE PALMER:

so that they have the clips that they need to see, of everything. We're holding press conferences. We have our own propaganda. We have our own art. It's becoming part of the culture. It started out as a small thing, but as it grew, it became the dominant culture or at least a big part of our dominant queer culture, and that has an effect. Because when you get on a bus and you look down the row, and there's

WAIYDE PALMER:

six people there with an Act Up button on, even though you may not know them, they're amplifying the message that people with AIDS and HIV are alive and we're here. That silence equals death, and we're not going to be quiet anymore. I think from that perspective, Act Up, as a movement, had a big effect. We had borrowed a lot of our tactics from the civil rights African-American and

WAIYDE PALMER:

the women's rights movement and the older gay liberation front, all of that stuff. We had members of Act Up who had been part of those. There are people on the west coast, east coast that had been active members in those organizations and they brought the zaps and sit ins. And all of that knowledge that we then [inaudible] up a little bit with our unique era's mentality,

WAIYDE PALMER:

because we were a lot more splashy. We also were a lot more media savvy, and the internet was alive and well, and we were all using computers by this point. We had cell phones that were the size of Guatemala, and we had phone trees that we could get a thousand people at a protest in less than two hours. We became very organized. Those people, those kids, that had started out in 1987/88, that were

WAIYDE PALMER:

22, 23, were now 26 and 27. They were four years into activism. They were veterans, and some of them were leaving our organization and working in political organizations and established communities where that was starting to have effect. I mean, there are people that are currently named senators and everything else. Rachel Maddow was in Act Up.

WAIYDE PALMER:

All of that has an effect. That will continue to have effect as long as the history is kept alive, and the accurate history, not the history of the survivors, but the history that is collected, like this, with people that were small parts and big parts that formed the larger group, because the group did it, it wasn't individuals.

MASON FUNK:

Alright, awesome.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Yeah

MASON FUNK:

That's a lot. That's awesome.

MASON FUNK:

I don't think we're quite done yet, but I think we've done a good job with the core activism in those years, with Act Up. Thank you for your work in those years. From my list of notes -- Oh, you just sighed. Are you tiring out?

WAIYDE PALMER:

I'm weary, but no, I'm fine. I'm more on edge about the dogs and disruptions. Sorry.

MASON FUNK:

You said something that fucking was political.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Fucking was political. Oh, thanks for reminding me. As far back as you can go, to be queer was equated to sex.

WAIYDE PALMER:

As far back as I can remember,

WAIYDE PALMER:

as I came out as a baby gay and in all the different kinds of communities, and back then, there were a lot of little insular communities within the larger gay community, the Sweater Queens and the A-gays and the leather dudes and the sporty dykes and then the hippie dykes. There's all these little enclaves within the greater thing. All of them could agree on one thing and that's fucking, because everybody wanted to get laid and everybody wanted to fall in love, and to do it

WAIYDE PALMER:

openly, anywhere, without apology, was revolutionary. When I came out, again, on the steps of the Indianapolis public library, talking to these trans sex workers of color, who were making their money by having sex, and they were educating me about Johns and trade and who did what, what and who talked and who didn't. All of this stuff,

WAIYDE PALMER:

every ounce of that was part of our vernacular and our vocabulary of being a culture. Our culture started with the fact that we had to be secretive about who we loved and who we fucked. And so to neglect talking about sex, in any way, by anybody involved in this, is mind boggling to me. Having sex in public, the first time for me,

WAIYDE PALMER:

was so crazy, fearful and revolutionary all at the same time. It wasn't like, in the middle of the street or anything, it was in an alley with a bunch of other dudes, behind a gay bar, and there were actually two women, now that I think about it, making out not far from us. Afterwards, a drag queen brought some John out from inside. I was like 19 at this place called the Wanton, in downtown Indianapolis. It was owned by two lesbians who had drag shows,

WAIYDE PALMER:

very confusing. People were just making out in the alley because the bathrooms were full. Everybody was making out in the alley. I was getting really turned on by the whole situation of it. As I came back in with the guy I'd been making out with, who later became my very first boyfriend, Bill, he goes, "Well, the revolution continues." I was like, "What do you mean?" And he goes, "Anytime we hold hands,

WAIYDE PALMER:

anytime we make out, anytime we fall in love, anytime we have sex, no matter where it is, it is a revolution because they say we can't, we shouldn't, and we're going to burn in hell, and I say, 'we won't'." Now to a 19 year old, that was eye-opening. I continue, and still think that to this day, I talk to young people all the time. I have young friends. The first time they saw internet sex between two gay people,

WAIYDE PALMER:

the first time they saw gay people make out on TV, the first time they read about it, the first time they snuck around and went into like, I don't know, the bookstores and saw like, gay sex for gay men or whatever it is, or making love or whatever, those books where they literally teaching you positions, all of that, it's part of your evolution of revolution inside because you're becoming at ease with you as a full human being.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Because without sex ... I mean, you can choose not to have sex and you're still a human being, but you've made a choice, so it's part of your equation. We were told you didn't even get a choice, and we're still told that, we're still brought before people that think they can deprogram us, and told by religions that what we do is dirty and bad and unnatural. There's medical professionals that are still telling children that

WAIYDE PALMER:

the way they feel inside, even though their body is one way, and the way they feel inside is different, that there's something wrong with them. When there isn't anything wrong with them. They are a human being, have a human experience. Part of that gender needs to be adjusted to make them feel like they belong, and they do belong before and after the event, they belong. As a young queer, that was what was imparted to me

WAIYDE PALMER:

by those pre-Stonewall and Stonewall era queers, who wore their leather jackets with their [inaudible] rings on the epaulets proudly, and snorted poppers on the bus, or wave their bandanas in people's faces and said, yeah, we call them flags, and this is what they mean. We're not going to apologize for it because we have no other avenue to meet and greet, and try

WAIYDE PALMER:

and have that emotional connection. As with all things, there's always going to be some people that take it too far, one way or the other, but at the essence of who we were, and who we are and continue to be, to remove sex from the equation and to try and dumb down or to beige it up, like remove leather from pride parades to remove

WAIYDE PALMER:

drag or trans people from our movement is just the height of arrogance, and goes against every fiber of my being that I believe as a queer person that we bring to this world, because we celebrate our sexuality and our choices within that, and we can develop and define ourselves based on our beliefs as an individual, rather than what society says

WAIYDE PALMER:

we should or shouldn't do.

MASON FUNK:

Two things, in the course of doing OUTWORDS, we interviewed a guy in Texas, a small town in Texas, and his whole thing was like, oh, I don't like pride parades. We shouldn't be in people's face. I really got a taste of what it's like to live in a small town in Texas. I'm like, oh, I come out to the guy at the Trader Joe's, if he says, "You're cooking dinner for your wife?" I say, "Well, actually I'm cooking dinner for my husband." But he's like, oh no, that's too in your face.

MASON FUNK:

It was really interesting juxtaposition. But the other thing that I think is that everybody wants to be liberated, and we are the liberators. I feel like across the board, they're all living in boxes that are too small, I imagine. I feel like by us breaking the boxes, we're actually helping straight people, as well as queer people to, kind of, maybe my box doesn't need to be so small.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Well, I think that's absolutely true. The problem we're encountering in our growing pains

WAIYDE PALMER:

of literally the last, I don't know, 55, 60 years is that we're being co-opted and we're losing identity by being identity driven, that the need to see ourselves represented is real.

WAIYDE PALMER:

The reason I knew I was gay when I was six, is because I watched Jonny Quest cartoon. For those who don't know, Jonny Quest was this adventure cartoon that was a half hour long. It had Dr. Quest, his best friend, Race Bannon, his son, Jonny Quest, and Johnny's best friend, Hadji, and they had a dog that looks just like my dog. They never had a single female on any of those shows the entire time.

WAIYDE PALMER:

When I was little, I thought they were a couple, one was super butch and the other one was like the brainiac, and the super butch one was always taking off his shirt. To me, it made perfect sense. I told my brother, I asked him if they were married, and my brother was like, oh, two guys can't get married, it can't be. He just looked at me like I was insane for even asking it. But in my mind, I had already

WAIYDE PALMER:

gotten comfortable. In my like little five, six year old brain, it all worked out, and that was my seed. So I think we need to see representation. We need sexual representation. We need in your face, because without in your face that allows the people that are giving disinformation and disseminating hate and bigotry -- And I understand this guy from Texas. I bet he would change his mind

WAIYDE PALMER:

if he lived one year in San Francisco. And I would become, probably, more comfortable not having to do it by living in a small town in Texas, because I bet he's got these friends that have been lifelong friends that have loved him no matter what. And he doesn't want to make a ruckus, he just wants things to go along as they are, and that's fine. That's fine if it's his choice. I will support that as his choice, as long

WAIYDE PALMER:

as he's willing to support me making a different choice. Because the minute we tell somebody they should or shouldn't do what they should ... I don't think there should be gay Christians or gay Republicans, but that's my opinion, and they're going to do what they're going to do. My job is to figure out a workaround or work with, that's kind of my thing. There should be room in the world for everyone, because if we are going to be inclusive, if we are going to wrap ourselves in a rainbow flag

WAIYDE PALMER:

that stands for peace and tolerance and all these other things, we need to start in our own community. I don't have to agree with them. I don't have to support them, but I have to give them room to find their own way. Because a lot of these people, they come to an evolvement that leaves the bigotry behind. I don't think they're going to get there if I tell them that they are not welcome.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Okay.

MASON FUNK:

Three people, Hank Wilson.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Hank Wilson was one of the most driven queer organizers in San Francisco that there's ever been. When I moved to town, he was much older, like very mustache gay man, with this little salt and pepper on the side and hair part. I didn't know much about him, he worked with a group called mobilization against AIDS which was

WAIYDE PALMER:

an early, early stop AIDS kind of organization that was doing amazing work. Again, these were the, first, it would save our lives and figure out a way to like ... And then there was mobilization against AIDS and then the candlelight vigil. So mobilization against AIDS, by the time I arrived, had already been around for a few years, and they had done a lot of good work. He worked with them. But what he was also doing was getting homeless people with AIDS off the streets,

WAIYDE PALMER:

into residential housing. He was making sure that the most vulnerable of the marginalized were not being overlooked in our demands and all this stuff. He would always speak up for them. His point of view and education was invaluable to me. I really wish I'd spent more time with him

WAIYDE PALMER:

than I did. He lived at an SRO, and ran the SRO for the entire time I knew him. When he passed, he had no belongings. All of that stuff was immaterial to him. What was material to him was improving people's lives around him. That's all that mattered.

MASON FUNK:

Thank you for that. Terry Sutton, you've already talked about.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Yeah. Terry Sutton was

WAIYDE PALMER:

somebody, I probably would've never looked twice at, under any other circumstances. He was just kind of a hippie, and I don't know if you got it, but I didn't really hang out with hippies. I thought they were weird and kind of fruitless. But he was one of the first people I met who was like, 'yeah, I have AIDS, and this is what I do. This is what we should do.' He did it in such a gentle and calming manner that

WAIYDE PALMER:

you were like, 'yeah, let's do that.' I was not of the non-violent, non-aggressive group of people within Act Up. I was punk rocker. These people were coming from a place of non-violence. They had been anti-war activists. They had spent years learning how to do non-violence and I didn't get it at all, because I felt we were under assault. If you're at a war, you don't go in waving a flower.

WAIYDE PALMER:

I felt we should pipe back in a more aggressive way. But these older people, my elders who were very patient with my 'go, go, go' kind of mentality, taught me a lot. Terry was very smart, he learned how to send it in the shock groups. Perfect example of Terry, we found out that Dr. Anthony Fauci was going to be in town, he was the head of the FDA's

WAIYDE PALMER:

war on HIV AIDS. His words swayed every doctor doing research, and he had his finger in everything, as you still see today. But back then he was young and small, and he had become our target because they wouldn't meet with us. They wouldn't talk about compassionate use. We were using a double blind placebo to study medicine. In other words, you never knew if you were getting the good stuff or not,

WAIYDE PALMER:

and people were dying, they weren't listening to how it was affecting patients. The first AZT studies were doing 3000 milligrams. It was poisoning people and killing them. But when AZT finally became available, they only did 300 milligrams. 10 times was being prescribed in studies all over the country and queers were dying left and right. We knew that and we told them, and all of these doctors ignored us because we were just patients.

WAIYDE PALMER:

We realized we needed to start talking to the heads of everything. Anthony Fauci was coming to town for a seminar. He was going to be at the Marriott, it was in the basement. We, again, all dressed up, looked like we fit in, combed our mohawks down, wore hats, took out our earrings, put away all of our buttons and infiltrated it. Once Fauci started to speak, we disrupted the whole thing, just made a mockery of it. We made such a stink about it that they just decided not

WAIYDE PALMER:

to have the plenary anymore and stopped the meeting completely. Everybody was ushered out because we'd done our duty, but what they didn't know is behind was Terry and another guy who walked up to Fauci and said, this is what's going to happen every time you try and speak, every time you try and go anywhere, every time you try and do anything, let's sit down and talk about double-blind placebo studies and compassionate release.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Terry and Fauci met for several hours and continued to have conversations. Anthony Fauci says, over and over, that meeting with Terry Sutton completely changed his point of view about compassionate use. But none of that would have been possible if we hadn't disrupted it. That next step would not have been accomplished if there wasn't the shock troops first, and then the calming diplomacy of somebody coming in and being like, yeah, I sent the dogs,

WAIYDE PALMER:

talk to me. We did, over and over and over and over, because it was the only way. Because they just got tired of it, you have to wear them down. Sometimes, you have to be the wave that crashes against the rock. Eventually, the rock feels the wave.

MASON FUNK:

Great. Awesome. Last person, Crystal Mason.

WAIYDE PALMER:

I met Crystal Mason

WAIYDE PALMER:

in Act Up San Francisco, she'd moved from Virginia, African-American woman. We didn't have a lot of people of color involved in Act Up. You'll see, over and over, when people talk about Act Up, it's from a very white male perspective. Women, people of color, lesbians, bisexuals, straight women, transgender people, drug users, and sex workers, the super marginalized within the larger HIV community, were doing

WAIYDE PALMER:

a lion share of the work, but the voices and the pictures ... The media always went to the cute white guy. I love Peter Staley, but did they not have any other spokespeople in Act Up New York? Because there's Peter in everything. It's that cute former bond trader now turned activist, and he did amazing things. They all did amazing things, but it was so difficult to lead the media over to people of color who were doing the lion's share of work

WAIYDE PALMER:

and less. Unless they were like we really need a black woman with AIDS to speak to us, we would get requests like that. She came from a creative background and brought the creative politically sharp mind to Act Up San Francisco. She joined the women's caucus. She was a member of the people of color caucus. She also started working within the arts and brought all of Act Up into the arts community. She ran nonprofit,

WAIYDE PALMER:

and continues to run nonprofit, and became a very good friend. I'm immensely blessed to have had her critical mind and humor. The thing they seem to overlook a lot is that while all of this is going on, from Stonewall to now, our world is filled with laughter. We find the funny in the darkest, blackest,

WAIYDE PALMER:

most horrible graphically painful thing. We'll find the funny and then pick on each other with it. Crystal's laugh is this most infectious joyous thing. We were getting arrested once, when we were shutting down the INS, we had taken over the head of the INS's west coast office and we're faxing our demands from his fax machine in his office, and somebody is trying to bust through the door to get in to us.

WAIYDE PALMER:

I hear this giggle, like this billowing, bubbly giggle. I look over and Crystal is on the other side of the door, making faces like you do to a baby at the security, because it's just making them crazier because they weren't going to get through the door. Then she turned over, she goes, this is really fun. Yeah, because she just brought a perspective and a life to things that was sadly missing. Because again, there's such

WAIYDE PALMER:

distrust in all of these marginalized communities, bringing them together under the umbrella of Act Up was challenging and continues to be the challenge that our community faces to this very day. I mean, the groups that are supposed to speak for us are often the widest groups that you've ever seen. The fact that a few years ago, we were willing to throw trans people aside so we could get

WAIYDE PALMER:

a non-discrimination act passed through Congress, in the workplace. They said, "Yeah, we'll do it as long as you don't include trans people." And there were people advocating for that within the power structures of the movement. If there hadn't been a backlash from, what I call grassroots, direct action people, and people with voices who wrote opinion pieces, I think that would have probably gone forward. I think

WAIYDE PALMER:

it still would have failed in Congress, but the black mark it still leaves, the mar upon our character as a movement should be the 'leave no one behind'.

MASON FUNK:

I guess the last question I have, and then I have a final ... I always do a final four. Out of all this, I was somewhat surprised to hear that you, and I don't know

MASON FUNK:

how involved you were, but you worked for marriage equality. Is that true?

WAIYDE PALMER:

I was living in LA, I had moved to LA in a long-term relationship, and we had always thought that marriage was bullshit that is part of the patriarch, and an institution that is based on ownership and nothing more, it's a contract. Still believe

WAIYDE PALMER:

that firmly, but I also believe in people's right to make a choice for themselves. I also believe that two women that are bringing in children into a relationship should have the right to form a relationship and then raise those children together. I think that two men who've decided that they're going to form a life together should have the same tax benefits as a heterosexual couple.

WAIYDE PALMER:

If they choose to adopt or care for or foster, they should have that right. Again, just because it's not something I'm down with doesn't mean that I shouldn't for the rights of my brothers and sisters to pursue that act of happiness. Because that's life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness should apply to everyone, regardless. I did work extensively with marriage equality.

WAIYDE PALMER:

It was very interesting because it was not activists with whom I would usually mix, the exception to that being Cleve Jones. Cleve Jones and I have worked together off and on for 34 years. I count him as a good friend. Even though I used to say very disparaging things about his movement and what he was doing with the oodles of money that he was getting

WAIYDE PALMER:

in the middle of the AIDS crisis to make it a blanket, but we have remained friends, even though we have distinct opinions. He is a union man, so he'll always have my heart for that. But I worked with Cleve. I worked with several organizations in LA. I became friends with some young, like 20-something people, because by now

WAIYDE PALMER:

I'm in my early forties then and they were fresh faced and so excited. We were able to take that and approach a myriad of queer issues. We protested Rockstar, the energy drink because it's owned by the offspring of Michael Schmidt, who is one of the most horrific talk show, conservative anti-gay hosts, still on the radio. He sits on the board

WAIYDE PALMER:

and they were hawking Rockstar at all the gay clubs in LA. We plastered anti-Rockstar stickers everywhere, like took them on, face-to-face. Spent a whole summer, up to pride, educating people on the issue. We used marriage equality protests as a way to cross-educate people, because I think that's a really important factor to do, is to

WAIYDE PALMER:

broaden people's political opinion.

[Break]

WAIYDE PALMER:

Educating a wider community on a myriad of issues is important to do, and the best place to do that is at a protest.

WAIYDE PALMER:

That's why I always tell people if there's a protest around something and you want to get more people informed about your issue specific within the community, draw up simple, small sheets that people will take and fold up and put in their pockets. Stickers are always great because people will grab them, they'll put them on anything, and it's like litter in the ocean, you throw plastic in the ocean and it just woes everywhere. If you make

WAIYDE PALMER:

a stickers and you have a whole movement around the art, as long as you've got art and propaganda, your word is going to get out and it's going to have a ripple effect, because people put stuff up and you'll be sitting on the bus and you'll turn to your right and be Rockstar, boycott, Rockstar. Why should I do that? And then you look it up online and here's the whole reason about why you do, and then you start talking to your friends about it. Marriage equality was used, for me, as a stepping stone to get reconnected

WAIYDE PALMER:

with a younger activist group that was really hot for it. Now, again, our adults and have moved into so many other avenues, but they've taken that with them. There's a lot of organizations that have done that, taken the best of direct action, grassroots activists and brought them in. I mean, at one time

WAIYDE PALMER:

the guy that was in charge of Los Angeles department of AIDS and their response to AIDS was a gentlemen named Furred Eagan who was founding member of Act Up Chicago, and was one of the most radical people I ever met. He continued to be radical and do radical things while working within the mayor's office with all these really stodgy people. Getting things changed

WAIYDE PALMER:

around HIV and AIDS all over Los Angeles county, and still doing all this radical stuff on the side. I think we should just use every opportunity we can to educate each other because learning by osmosis or only learning on the internet is going to be problematic. We need to talk to each other. We've always been verbal. Our history has been verbal. We've passed everything down word of mouth. We've had little historical books

WAIYDE PALMER:

in which to turn to, there's more now than ever before, but we need to continue to press that out with the new people. The new kids.

MASON FUNK:

I like that phrase, press that out. It sounds like pressing [inaudible]. Final four questions. These answers can be really, really short. And as soon as you answer them, we're done. First one, if you could tell 15-year-old Waiyde Palmer anything,

MASON FUNK:

what would it be?

WAIYDE PALMER:

Some wounds never heal, toughen up, floss, everything's to be okay.

MASON FUNK:

Perfect. Second question. One of our interviewees, a couple of years ago, talked about what she saw as the queer superpower, her little theory that all of us, even the GOP queer people, even

MASON FUNK:

the whatevers all the way across the board, there's something that links us all, like a character or a trait, quality, that is our so-called superpower, that actually enables us to survive and actually do good in the world. Do you ascribe to that idea? Our last interviewee, for the record, said no, so you can say no.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Well, I will always be honest. I'm not shy about being blunt, so I would say those who are comfortable with themselves fully have a superpower,

WAIYDE PALMER:

those without that comfort are lost. So, no, I don't think it's factual. I think once you discover yourself and see your connection with those closest to you, you can then spread out and see your connection with more than just yourself. I don't think I would have the kind of relationships I have today if it hadn't been for the nurturing

WAIYDE PALMER:

that queers gave me when I was a baby gay, and I try and do the same to anybody I hang out with now who's young. I've had a lot of friends much younger than me, because I am super immature and still do all of the stuff that kids do, like go out and go to shows and skateboard and surf, and do all the stuff where you meet a lot of young people, but I never hold back of what I see or what I think or what I've experienced,

WAIYDE PALMER:

unless they ask me to shut up. I mean, if they tell me to shut the fuck up, then I shut the fuck up. But I think this dialogue is so necessary to keep evolving as a human being and a human doing in the world, and as a queer human doing. I'm doing my best, but if I only rely on the information I've been given and those who are directly around me, I'm going to run out of ideas really quickly.

WAIYDE PALMER:

So yeah, I don't really agree with it, but I can see it as a possibility.

MASON FUNK:

Why, and this is really proving your case, did you, in fact, decide to share your story? Why is it important to you to share your story as you did in this forum?

WAIYDE PALMER:

Well, there's two reasons. One. I love your husband. He's a good man. If he's a good man and you're a good man, and this is important to you ...

WAIYDE PALMER:

I was mentioning earlier how it always seems to be one point of view around issues of history. Since this is oral history, you could take 10 of us that were at the same event that were standing at 10 different locations, and you will get 10 different views of the same image. It's how it's delineated down that gives you the clearest image. I'm hoping that my little view gets added

WAIYDE PALMER:

to the collective and maybe turns the lens to sharper because I am a working class; blue collar, continue to be; leftist; out; living with AIDS. There's not a lot of us left, there just aren't. On top of it, I come from a very alternative world

WAIYDE PALMER:

and there's even fewer of them. To be given the opportunity and then to turn it down would be to thumb my nose at people who aren't here and would have taken the opportunity.

MASON FUNK:

Great. That's a great answer. Thank you. Last but not least, you've kind of said already, but this project is called OUTWORDS, and our goal is to collect as many stories. By the way, I'll give you one quick anecdote. You know the show Foundation, you've heard of the show, Foundation? They collected the stories of witnesses

MASON FUNK:

and survivors of the holocaust.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Oh, right. Yeah. Sorry.

MASON FUNK:

One thing they did was, for certain survivors that they thought were really, really, really good talkers and had tons of information they shot holograms of them.

WAIYDE PALMER:

Right, right. Now you can go and ask questions of them, right?

MASON FUNK:

You ask questions, and the person seems to answer you. In a way, what you just described is kind of like that, if we shoot where there's not enough different cameras, we'll get some kind of a composite that includes everything. So that's kind of random, but last question

MASON FUNK:

was going to be OUTWORDS, what do you see as the value of traveling the country and trying to delve into many communities and sub-communities and sub-sub-communities of the queer community as possible.

WAIYDE PALMER:

I think, first of all, quit using the word sub-communities and just call it community. I don't think there should be sub-communities. We are just a community with a lot of different points of view. I think the minute we start compartmentalizing our community, we're born to fail.

WAIYDE PALMER:

I used to work with some real assholes in Act Up, who were like stodgy, gay white men who just could not, we just want to work about meds. We just want to talk about meds. We don't have any time to talk about sexism and racism and classism and how it affects our ongoing struggle for freedom. We just don't have it. I had to sit with them. I got so sick of it and I pushed them away. In truth, I should have fought and stayed,

WAIYDE PALMER:

because other people did and they educated some of those and little by little, the needle began to turn due north. That's why we need this. We need to make sure that everybody can see all the different compartments so they don't feel alone. Feeling alone is an awful, awful, an isolation, and being queer, in the early days, no matter

WAIYDE PALMER:

how cool your parents are and how accepting your family is, the self-discovery -- If we woke up and we were a new color, like if I woke up and you're like, you're sleeping and you're sick, you have a dream about a boy and you wake up and you're purple and there's other purple people. Then I would have a sense of community right away, and I wouldn't feel so isolated, but we never do that. We never have that. We have a sense of isolation that is

WAIYDE PALMER:

measurable with all of us that we share. That's the point I try and think of when I'm meeting new people who I don't agree with. About how we can work together as a community, because I have to find the commonalities and start from there. I can't look only at the differences and I am a really pig-headed person who usually focuses on the difference. I think this project, especially if you link it in with

WAIYDE PALMER:

other history organizations, like if you're able to like almost put like an exhibit of this in each major city and in a couple smaller places where people can go and leave their story, almost like a hologram, maybe the questions can be the hologram and allow people to do that, and we have a library of these stories, then we're going to see our people in total for the very first time. Because we've never been able to,

WAIYDE PALMER:

we can't point to a country and say, this is where we're from, we're from everywhere. We should use that to our advantage because we're from everywhere. One of the ways to do that is to share our stories and look for the similarities and not the differences. Honor the differences, but also embrace what makes us all uniquely, clearly human