Mason Funk:

All right. Awesome. Well, thank you again for your patience and for agreeing to share your story with us. If you could start off by stating and spelling your first and last names.

Esther Rothblum:

It's Esther Rothblum, e-s-t-h-e-r r-o-t-h-b-l-u-m.

Mason Funk:

Okay. On what date and where were you born?

Esther Rothblum:

January 11th, 1955 in Vienna, Austria.

Mason Funk:

Okay. To the extent that you can, if I ask you a question,

Mason Funk:

if you can kind of like fold the question into your answer. So if I say, "Tell me about your mother," if you can start by saying, "My mother," as opposed to "She," then we'll know who you're talking about. Imagine we're never gonna hear my question. So one of the things that intrigued me right at the outset was that you were born stateless, which I don't really know, to be honest exactly what that means. So could you set up the conditions of your birth and what it means that you were born stateless?

Esther Rothblum:

To sort of describe how I was born stateless, my father, who grew up in Austria, came to the US during the Holocaust and joined the US military and then went back to Austria during the Marshall Plan and married my mother, who had converted to Judaism, and had been a ski racer. They were a really unusual couple. At the time, the law in the US about citizenship was that you had to have a parent

Esther Rothblum:

who had lived in the US for at least five years, and that was not true for either parent. In Austria, the law goes according to the father. My father was no longer an Austrian citizen, he was a US citizen. Consequently my brother and I were born stateless. I have these early passports that they're called Nansen passports. I guess after World War II there were a lot of displaced people.

The irony was, here was my father who was a US diplomat, he had diplomatic passports, and these

Esther Rothblum:

two stateless children. Initially, we had passports because we were dependents of a US father. Then when I was a teenager, the law changed that if your father had been in the US military, even abroad, you could be a US citizen. So we flew to California. My father's congressman had us swear an oath in his office and we were naturalized and we can consider ourselves citizens at birth. It's a

Esther Rothblum:

little unusual background.

Mason Funk:

Oh, so you can now say that you were citizens from birth even though for that period of time you actually were citizens of no nation?

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah, we always, again, had dependent US passports, but I would've had to immigrate when I became an adult. And we could even run for president, unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was not born in the US or all the questions about, was Obama born in the US? Technically, my brother and I could.

Mason Funk:

Yeah, you could be president.

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah. Yeah.

Mason Funk:

Okay. It's not too late.

Esther Rothblum:

Right, right. .

Mason Funk:

Okay. All right. Well, thank you for that background. You also said something that I thought was -- I love the phrasing of this. You said you were the first generation of lesbians to "survive dating" by coming out in the first grade. So set the scene, I think this happens on a bus in Madrid. Tell us about this kind of awareness that you gleaned at an early age, that you were a lesbian and so you didn't have to survive dating,

Mason Funk:

if I understood correctly.

Esther Rothblum:

So what happened because of my father's job doing foreign aid is we lived in Yugoslavia one year in the US, two years in Spain, one year in Brazil, four years in Nigeria, five years in Austria. Then I went to college in the US. When I was in first grade, I was on a school bus, which was miraculous because my parents were very overprotective. On this school bus, there were these two girls that sat on both sides of me. And I, at the time, thought they were grownups.

Esther Rothblum:

They're probably in fourth grade, and they would sort of cuddle and put their arms around me and I was really sexually turned on. So I date the time that I came out as a lesbian to first grade on the school bus, even though I wouldn't have known what the word was at the time.

Mason Funk:

Why do you use the phrase that you survived dating? Did I get that right?

Esther Rothblum:

I don't think so. Yeah.

Mason Funk:

Oh, okay. I must have misheard you.

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah, I think what I did say is I see myself as the

Esther Rothblum:

first generation of lesbians who survived in academia. In other words, who could be out and also make it without being crucified.

Mason Funk:

That we're gonna get to later. But I somehow connected that phrase with your coming with your first grade experience on the bus. Okay. So you didn't know you were a lesbian, in other words, only in retrospect do you realize what happened in that moment?

Esther Rothblum:

Well, it's not like I thought to myself, oh my goodness, I'm a lesbian in first grade. I mean, at that time

Esther Rothblum:

it was fine to be affectionate with girls, right? I think my parents would've been super alarmed if I were cuddling with boys, at that time. They were a pretty old fashioned, kind of a Victorian household. I think they had no concept of, certainly, lesbianism, I don't know about gay men. All the time I was growing up, I had a crush on some girl and she got to spend the night and we would write letters and whatever, hug and so on. I'm not saying

Esther Rothblum:

we did anything sexual in those days, but certainly my parents approved of that. And yeah. That was sort of what was going on at the time. When I was a teenager, I was afraid I might be a lesbian because it was the 1970s, late 1960s. In Austria, I would actually ride my bike to this hairdressing salon and for $1, at the time, they would undo my braids and

Esther Rothblum:

wash my hair and do them up again. In this hairdressing salon, they had these teen magazines I would never have been allowed to read at home. They had sort of a section where you could ask a psychologist a question. One of the questions one time that I was reading was a girl had written in and said she's attracted to other girls, might she be a lesbian? The psychologist wrote back and said, "Well, no, because you are 13 years old, but it would be a

Esther Rothblum:

problem if you were still doing this at 16." I remember telling myself, I might have been 12 or 13, okay, I have three more years and then I have to go underground. I sort of knew at a very core level that this was not gonna change, but I would have to really be careful because I might not get to go to college in the US. Who knows what my parents would think. I sort of always knew there was something about me that I had to be careful about.

Mason Funk:

Right, right. And we'll get to Smith College and you trying to pass as straight a little in a minute here. What would you say was the kind of the cumulative effect of you having that very peripatetic childhood living in all those sort of seemingly exotic countries, being uprooted? It's kind of a very unusual childhood.

Esther Rothblum:

You know the result of living in so many countries wasn't that unusual because all my classmates --

Esther Rothblum:

I'd always go to the local international school, which was either British or American, and everybody there was like this. In Nigeria, there were the oil company kids, and in Austria it was the UN kids and in whatever country we lived in. That was the norm. Eventually we were expected to go to college, possibly in our home country, possibly in the US but I wouldn't say it was difficult. I mean, the moves were kind of exciting.

Esther Rothblum:

A new country we'd get to go on a big ship. My brother was very close to me, so that part wasn't so bad. Yeah.

Mason Funk:

Would you say there was a part that, looking back on it, was really positive or that affected you in positive ways over the long term?

Esther Rothblum:

The most positive country for us was Nigeria. I was ages 8 to 12, and that's a good age. I mean, you're old enough, you're toilet trained, you're not yet in puberty. We actually lived on an island,

Esther Rothblum:

a big island, like Long Island or something. And because there were constant military coups, Nigeria is a big oil company country, we got a little motorboat, just in case. What often happened during a military coup is they would block all the bridges, so my parents got this little motorboat, so our whole social life was going to the beach and taking the dog and going fishing and taking the boat across to the mainland where there were beaches. We did ultimately have to leave

Esther Rothblum:

because in 1967 there was a very bloody civil war in Nigeria, the Biafra war. A lot of my classmates were Igbo, from the very ethnic group that was being murdered, in the eastern part of the country where the oil fields are. We left for Austria and we really missed being in Nigeria.

Mason Funk:

Ah-Huh , I remember because wasn't there a subsequent famine, a very bad famine?

Esther Rothblum:

There was a very bad famine. I mean, really, like a hundred thousand people,

Esther Rothblum:

maybe millions, I don't know the exact data, were murdered and left to starve.

Mason Funk:

Yeah. Right. I remember there being, vaguely from my own childhood, like concerts for Biafra . Somehow associated to Rolling Stones.

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah. Maybe. And a number of books have been written about the Biafra war and personal memoirs.

Mason Funk:

Yeah. Wow. Interesting. Okay. Now one thing I also thought was interesting, your mom was an elite athlete,

Mason Funk:

and I kind of tend to think to myself, when any child has a parent who's an elite, anything that can bring extra kind of pressure to bear on a child, was that the case in your case?

Esther Rothblum:

My mother was an elite athlete. She was a ski racer. In Austria, there is only one sport, and that's ski racing, downhill racing. It's the combination of the Super Bowl, the World Series, everything. I actually have a picture of her, I think it's behind me,

Esther Rothblum:

on the cover of a book where she's skiing and jumping. So you are right that being athletic, my mother was just a super athlete. No matter what sport you introduced her to, all of a sudden she was way ahead of us and everything. But my father was really the main parent and he was interested in academics. I mean, we did a lot of sports, but what was really important and really highlighted was academics. But to this day, I can have a

Esther Rothblum:

grant rejected, an article rejected, whatever, and it takes me an hour to recover. But when I do any sport, no matter how amateurish, it kills me if I don't do well or if I lose. I used to compete in the Gay Games and I would have an upset stomach and anxiety attacks. I mean, I was just playing racquetball. So I think that's my mother's legacy.

Mason Funk:

Ah-Huh in the sense that, I mean, I don't mean to be able to play like armchair psychologist, but do you feel like it's kind of like that

Mason Funk:

just wanting to be good at something that your mom would see you as being good at?

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah, I think my mother definitely admired people who were athletic and she wasn't at all interested in academics. I played on the high school varsity basketball team. Remember my high school only had 120 kids and half were boys, so it didn't take a lot. But you know, right away my mother showed me a photograph of her basketball years where she was the team captain, of course, holding the ball.

Esther Rothblum:

And so yeah, I think internally it's important to me to do well athletically. Yeah.

Mason Funk:

Yeah. What else do you remember? You mentioned your brother who you were close to. Did you have any other siblings?

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah, so my brother I was very close to, he was only a year and a half younger and he died very tragically eight years ago of like some cardiovascular event, we're not really sure. I went to college at Smith College and then he went to Amherst, which was only seven miles away.

Esther Rothblum:

I went to graduate school at Rutgers, and then he went to the Wharton School, which is UPenn, which is only an hour away. So we were always geographically close, but I also have a half-sister and my half-sisters, my mother's first marriage, my mother married another, Oscar Seindenglanz when she was very young, like 21 or so. He was Catholic, and my mother was raised Protestant. Then my sister was born,

Esther Rothblum:

and when my sister was about six years old or so, my mother got divorced from Oscar, which was a big scandal because they were Catholic. Then to make things kind of stranger, my mother actually was still living with Oscar in their house, converting to Judaism by studying the texts so she could marry my father. My sister was seven years older, and that's a big difference. It meant she was an adult when I was a child. Also, she didn't live with us, she lived with her father and his second wife.

Esther Rothblum:

Although, nowadays, we email every day she emails and I respond,

Mason Funk:

Huh. Yeah.

Esther Rothblum:

Wow. And I'm gonna visit her a week from today in Vienna.

Mason Funk:

Oh my gosh, how exciting.

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah, my first trip after Covid.

Mason Funk:

Oh, congratulations. That'll be fun. Okay, the last thing I want to ask about in light of your later devotion to fat studies, you mentioned in passing that your family was always putting you on diets. I come from a family with a particular history,

Mason Funk:

I was just telling Kate, my sister, was like a so-called overweight child, and I was telling Kate in the car on the way here, like when we were growing up when my parents decided that she was overweight, she had to now have non-fat milk on her cereal. She lives with that legacy to this day. Seeing herself as kind of like inappropriate wrong for just probably what? Like 5 or 10 extra pounds. I just wondered if that is part of the

Mason Funk:

personal history that later made you take a certain interest in fat studies.

Esther Rothblum:

Yes, absolutely. My family was standardly thin, not skinny, but sort of whatever the average weight is. And being a diplomat, I think appearances really mattered. If you think about the diplomatic court, it's all about symbolism or representing. My mother was this really tall blonde, gorgeous. I don't look at all like her at all. I look like my father. So from a

Esther Rothblum:

very young age, my father wrote these holiday letters, and even when I was four, already he was saying in his holiday letters, Esther seems to love sweets and we'll have to put the brakes on soon. And then yeah, he would always look and research various diets. Austria, after the war, nobody was on a diet. There had been so much malnutrition and scarcity in the war. From the rest of the family it was a mystery why anybody would worry about extra fat on a child. But he was

Esther Rothblum:

always worried about it. And yeah, so definitely I was made to feel that I was a chubby child. It was always a big part of that. The way I got into fat studies was at some point a woman I was in love with got involved with someone else who I thought looked a lot like me, same age, same sort of hair color, but she was average weight, I was -- I used the term fat. So I thought, well, let me look at the literature and see what I can do to lose weight, and I

Esther Rothblum:

was horrified to see that the dieting research is really ineffective. I mean, people can lose weight, but they put it right back on again. That was sort of when I became a fat activist. But definitely my family background had a lot to do with it.

Mason Funk:

Yeah. All right. Thank you. Thank you for sharing about that because, again, in my family I've seen my sister --

Esther Rothblum:

Every family. Yeah,

Mason Funk:

Yeah, I know.

Esther Rothblum:

But especially for girls.

Mason Funk:

Yeah. I was saying to Kate, especially for girls, the double standard is just brutal.

Mason Funk:

So you make your way -- Oh wait, one more thing I want. You mentioned also one of the things that made a lasting impression on you was your father's lifelong example of friendship. I just wanted to make sure that we made a little space for that, because it sounds like a beautiful friendship he had that maybe inspired you and your own friendships.

Esther Rothblum:

My father had a best friend, Uncle Heinzi, which was interesting because they met when my father was 12 and

Esther Rothblum:

Uncle Heinzi was six, I think. But their fathers were good friends, same neighborhood in Vienna, and they stayed friends and they both were in the US military, and at times, traveling together. This was still a time when US hotels would say no Jews, they were still limiting that. They would think about that as they traveled. They stayed very close friends. My father would write to Uncle Heinzi every week. Uncle Heinzi eventually became a college professor at Tufts and

Esther Rothblum:

had a sort of corporation that he owned. But until my father died, and very recently Uncle Heinzi died, that was a very close friendship. My father really modeled that friendships were important and he'd ask me who my friends were. I always really valued friendships. I'd write to people and stay in touch to this day.

Mason Funk:

I'm curious, what role did your family's Judaism play in your upbringing?

Mason Funk:

Was it religious, did you go to temple? Was it more of a cultural thing? Like how important was that in the family fabric?

Esther Rothblum:

We were Jewish, but first of all, my mother converted to Judaism. We had none of the Jewish culture that many US Jews are aware of. I mean, I had never seen a bagel or used any Yiddish expressions just wasn't there. We lived in countries where we were often the only Jews or us and the Israeli ambassador basically.

Esther Rothblum:

So high holidays might mean we'd go to the Israeli ambassador's home with maybe four other people. I grew up trying to explain to my friends what Jews were. I had no idea, so I would say, "Well, we just believe in one God." And they would say, "Well --" "So do we." I'd say, "Well, we don't believe in Jesus." That's about as far as it went. But my father, again, who was, in many ways, the primary parent, would teach us some of the main prayers. We had Hebrew lessons,

Esther Rothblum:

usually the wife of the Israeli ambassador who had no idea how to teach. To this day, I can only speak Hebrew to a three-year old. Basically, we'd always learn the same stuff in every country. When I came to Smith College, which everybody else said was very WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant], I had never met so many Jews. It was like 12% Jewish, which still is a lot more than the percentage of Jews in the US. But suddenly there were all these other Jewish students and Jewish food

Esther Rothblum:

and Jewish expressions. I would say I was religious enough, meaning, I certainly would pray to some degree, but when I officially sort of came out to myself as a lesbian, which I would say was more in graduate school, I also came out as an atheist. I mean, I just saw all the mainstream religions as very homophobic, obviously, but what I miss the most about being religious is, maybe this was sort of a form of politeness, but if I was

Esther Rothblum:

praying for something like, please let me get into Smith College, for two years, I felt it was only polite to thank God for two years. Thank you for getting me into Smith College. So what I miss now is the gratitude. Because of the way I was praying, there was so much focus on gratitude. I try very hard to keep that element of gratitude, which is so easy to forget.

Mason Funk:

You mean that even in the absence of any God figure that you're expressing gratitude too,

Mason Funk:

hat you want to maintain the practice of gratitude in your own life. Is that right?

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah, so Penny and I will often sort of do a ritual where we're just sort of looking out at our view and sort of thinking of all the things we're grateful for, our privilege, we haven't had covid so far, and our health, and just to remember that there are always things to worry about, but also it's important to feel gratitude for what has happened and what's happening.

Mason Funk:

Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great practice for sure. They say that it has all kinds of mental health

Mason Funk:

and physical health benefits. Okay. So you get to Smith where you do your darndest to be straight. Can you kind of walk us into some of those stories of what that was like and what that meant?

Esther Rothblum:

So I get to Smith College, and let me just say, many colleges try for geographic diversity. They like to say we have students from all 50 states and the following countries, they list all these countries. Well, Austria was really tiny

Esther Rothblum:

in population. It was not a pro-US country, it was neutral. It wasn't a NATO country. And so all of my classmates would get into all these elite colleges, and then they would either flunk out or they would drop out. This was the sixties when I was in high school. I was sure that I had gotten into Smith, as I call it, via affirmative action for Austrians, and that sooner or later I would flunk out. I loved it there. I mean, all these women, and everybody was a woman, the head of the student council

Esther Rothblum:

and the athletes, and I think our first woman president, when I was a junior, and there were women faculty, and I just loved it. It focused on academics, so I really worked hard because I thought it's only a matter of time before they realized. In fact, when the women on my dorm compared our SAT scores, I had the lowest SAT scores, not surprisingly, in this little school. But yeah. Some people had said to me, oh, it's a girl's school,

Esther Rothblum:

aren't there a lot of lesbians there? And this is before Smith became nationally known as a lesbian school. I had nothing to do with the fact that it did, shortly after I left. But at the time you never really heard about lesbian issues. I mean, I remember one rumor that a woman in my dorm was living in town with another woman, and I also heard from a classmate that a woman in one of my classes was a lesbian. But that's the extent of it. But I did try

Esther Rothblum:

hard to be straight. I thought, okay, I'm in college. I can no longer just pretend this is a phase. By the way, because I had skipped a grade in school, I kept thinking, well, the reason I'm not dating is I'm younger than my classmates. Sooner or later I might wanna date. I might wake up and want to date boys. What I would do at Smith is I would find a guy, any guy, and I would bring him to the dorm and I'd make sure everybody saw me with him. Then I would say, "Sorry, Rick, I've gotta go study," or something like that. One story

Esther Rothblum:

my classmates are very fond of reminding me about is that we had a very fancy dinner around Christmas when the Harvard Glee Club came to Smith. There was a Smith Harvard Glee Club that I had nothing to do with. But anyway, there were candles and we were all wearing long dresses. I had met this guy at a Hillel event in a sort of Jewish cultural group whose name happened to be Hillel also, by the way, he was the son of a rabbi at, I think, at Yale. He was gonna spend the weekend or visit.

Esther Rothblum:

I went out to look for him, and I saw this guy and I pulled him in and I said, "Oh, Hillel, this is Cheryl, and this is Sarah, and this is Jill." And I said, "And this is Hillel." And there was this pause, and the guy said, "What did you say my name was?" It turned out he wasn't Hillel at all. He was a member of the Harvard Glee Club who had been told somebody would meet him in the lobby. So I pushed him back to the lobby and there was the real Hillel looking, nothing like, I mean, nothing like this guy. And I brought him back in and I said,

Esther Rothblum:

"Oh, Hillel, this is Sarah, this is Jill." And the people thought it was hysterical that I could confuse these two. I mean, the only commonality was they were men and any guy would do. So that was my attempt to be straight .

Mason Funk:

So literally, the guy that you had met and you had actually met him in person, but when you went out to meet Hillel, you just grabbed the first guy?

Esther Rothblum:

Yes.

Mason Funk:

That's like all men are basically carbon copies of each other.

Esther Rothblum:

Right. I should add, I am somewhat face blind. I'm not one of these people who can recognize

Esther Rothblum:

somebody, on the street, that I knew in third grade, 60 years ago. But still, I mean, they were so different that it was clear I hadn't even looked at him when I met him.

Mason Funk:

Come on, you've got a job to do. You've got a role to play.

Esther Rothblum:

Right, right, right.

Mason Funk:

Oh, that's very cute. So there was another story I absolutely loved about a moment on campus when there was like a male intruder. The 'let's tackle him story.' Can you tell us that?

Esther Rothblum:

My very first week at Smith we had these small dorms called houses that had 70 women in it, and there was a house president, Lynn Kramer, and she stood at the top of the stairs, kind of like here, and she had us all introduce ourselves. Then she said, there's rules about when you can go into the dining room, and I don't know, we voted on this or that. Then she said, "Oh, and by the way, a man has been seen on the fifth floor." That was the top floor. I was sure she was gonna say, so

Esther Rothblum:

lock your doors and be careful when you go to the bathroom at night and whatever. But instead she said, "So if you see him, let's all tackle him." And I thought, wow, what a concept. I mean, there's 70 of us and one of him. I immediately became a feminist. I would say, I got it that women have rights and that there's safety in numbers. I also had a tremendous crush, then, on Lynn Kramer. She had a mom who was a judge, and I had never even met a mother who sort of worked outside the home,

Esther Rothblum:

let alone who was a judge. Lynn Kramer is now a judge herself.

Mason Funk:

Ah-Huh . Tell us a bit more about what that meant to you, this notion of rather than being afraid, this notion like, if we see someone, we're gonna tackle him. Like how did that -- Just say more about the impact that had on you if you can.

Esther Rothblum:

I think that we forget when people are members of an oppressed group

Esther Rothblum:

what it means when there is suddenly somebody who looks like them -- One of my friends who's African American said he'd always said he was American, but it wasn't until Obama was elected president that he felt like an American, just that amazing sense of, okay I too can feel like I'm here. That's sort of how I felt that even though I had been a good student, and certainly in my schools, I wouldn't say boys and girls were treated differently in terms of academics,

Esther Rothblum:

there was still constantly this background sense of after all doctors are men and attorneys are men, and you know, these things. The idea that women could, for example, tackle this guy and have that power just felt so empowering in that sense.

Mason Funk:

It reminds me of this -- I live in Los Angeles and I've been a lifelong Dodgers fan. But for the first time this summer, we went to like LGBT night at Dodgers Stadium, and it was

Mason Funk:

phenomenal because it was like, I mean, it's a common experience, I guess, to be like, oh my God, we're the majority here. We own Dodger stadium tonight. And so you're walking and holding hands and you're seeing all the young lesbians, like from the neighborhoods. They're kind of looking tough and butch and holding hands. And it was like, oh my God, we own Dodger stadium tonight. It was a totally different feeling.

Esther Rothblum:

I know what you mean. I also remember that during the early eighties there were very few out lesbians, and Martina Narvatilova, who I think identified as bisexual,

Esther Rothblum:

tennis star, was winning everything. I felt such pride when constantly you knew more or less that at the end of Wimbledon, at the end of the US Open there would be this lesbian just beating everybody. Just that sense of pride. Because a lot of the images of LGBTs in general was that we were shameful and we couldn't make it, and we weren't doing well, and all these things.

Mason Funk:

Right. That we were inherently

Mason Funk:

gonna fail at life. That we were gonna live sad, pathetic existences and so forth.

Esther Rothblum:

Right. Right.

Mason Funk:

Now, this really famous -- Famous in your own life, but I think it's such an interesting story about someone who -- I'm not sure what stage when they say you lacked the spark of creativity. When did that happen?

Esther Rothblum:

Oh, this is going forward many years. After Smith, I then went to graduate school at Rutgers in Clinical Psychology. The last year in

Esther Rothblum:

clinical psychology is a one-year internship, and you actually apply. I went to the University of Mississippi Medical Center where there were 13 of us interns. We were called residents. Two women walked in at our orientation, and I knew they were lesbians, even though I'd never met a lesbian knowingly. In fact, I was right. They were a couple, they were splitting the very tiny, I mean, we got paid $7,000 a year or something tiny, and they were splitting it.

Esther Rothblum:

That's also where I had my first actual sexual relationship with Charlene. Then I did a two-year postdoc at Yale and epidemiology department and started to come out. That's then when I was applying for jobs, for academic jobs, and I wasn't really getting any offers. And before my postdoc, I had turned down two tenure track offers to do this postdoc, so I knew there was something weird because after all, now I had the

Esther Rothblum:

Yale letterhead and so on. Luckily, one of the places I had applied for an academic job was Smith College, and my former honors thesis advisor called me up and said, there is a problem with one of your letters. I was sure it was my postdoc advisor who was freaked out by having this feminist under her but it wasn't her, it was a professor at Rutgers at my graduate school. For my letters of recommendation, I had my dissertation advisor, I had my postdoc advisor.

Esther Rothblum:

I had a woman I was editing a book with, and then her husband, Cyril Franks, who was a very well-known professor that I'd had a course with, offered to write me a letter. And I thought, great, I'll invite him to do a fourth letter. He's very well known. And he had said in this letter that, I wasn't aware of, "she lacks that spark of creativity that marks all true great leaders." I think what was happening was that he was threatened. I was editing a book with his wife who was a kind of an adjunct lecturer at Rutgers, not like him,

Esther Rothblum:

a serious scholar. Somehow, I think that was, I don't know what sparked it, but what I did then is I pulled his letters from the next batch of applications. I only used the other three and got interviews from almost every place. I knew the difference was his letter, but it really made a difference for me because I thought, well, if that's what Cyril thinks, let me be more creative. Often I'd get in trouble for being a feminist or doing something a little bit more

Esther Rothblum:

counterculture or hippie like, than most academic psychologists should be doing, and I would say to myself, well, at least Cyril can't say I lack that spark of creativity that marks all true great leaders. I did write to Cyril and his wife Violet, until they died, and Hanukkah cards.

Mason Funk:

So inadvertently, I mean, it could have been something where it felt like a slap or an insult, but in your case, it sounds like what you're saying is that

Mason Funk:

it prompted you to almost like, make a decision to try to be more audacious or creative, or take more risks.

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah. I tell my students that sometimes they should thank the people who got them into graduate school, because we had a grad program, but I also say to them, you also wanna thank the people who said to you, "You'll never make it. You're not grad school material." You should take the remedial courses or whatever, because sometimes there is this spark of, "You know what

Esther Rothblum:

I'm gonna show them, I'm gonna I'm gonna do this." I mean, at some level, I couldn't really believe that sentence from Cyril, because what did he know about creativity? He had me in a boring course, so it didn't sort of hit me like something really important. But it also did kind of let me, in some ways, be more counterculture. In many ways, I was a real conformist. So it helps to be more of a risk taker in some ways.

Mason Funk:

Gotcha. It reminds me of a story

Mason Funk:

from Michelle Obama's book. When she was growing up in Chicago, she wanted to apply to Princeton, and her high school college counselor said, you're not Princeton material. And she's like, I'll show you.

Esther Rothblum:

You know, every person of color has a story like that. It is unbelievable. Yeah.

Mason Funk:

. Yeah. Okay. Let's see where we're at. Let's go back to Jackson, Mississippi. That's a section, first of all, it's such a unique place to be,

Mason Funk:

such a homophobic place to be.

Esther Rothblum:

Have you been to Jackson?

Mason Funk:

We've interviewed people in Jackson for OUTWORDS, including an incredible guy, Jack Myers, who owned gay lesbian bars in Jackson for 50 years until kind of shutting his last one down a few years ago. But an incredible guy. But tell us more about what that was like. And you did mention, I have this in my notes here ... Well, first of all, you had your first lesbian relationship and it was illegal. It was literally illegal in Jackson at the time. Just what was that whole

Mason Funk:

experience like for you personally, as well as professionally?

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah. Well, while I was at Rutgers I was living with three roommates or housemates. I'd never actually had roommates. Even as a kid, I had a brother, so he had a separate bedroom. At Smith, I had a single room. Now, I had these housemates, and I had a real crush on my housemate or roommate, Nancy. She was the first person I came out to. I wrote her a letter when she already had her master's degree

Esther Rothblum:

and was back in Chicago. She reacted very badly. She was freaked out and I can sort of imagine it was 1975 or so. I still talk to her on the phone every Sunday. It's been almost 50 years, whatever. She married a man called Nestor, which I think is interesting, given my name Esther. Anyway, but as a result of that sort of negative experience, when I applied for internships, I applied everywhere but the east coast. I applied

Esther Rothblum:

to Minnesota, I applied to California, I applied to Mississippi, but just not around New Jersey. I wanted to get away. And yeah, Mississippi, I mean, it's the deep south. You can't get much further south except New Orleans, which is not really the deep south in many ways. It was very racially segregated. All the faculty were men, first of all, and they were all white. All the interns or residents were white. Among the secretaries, there was one African American secretary.

Esther Rothblum:

It was so racially segregated. It was very, very evangelical Christian. So when I first rented a place, when the phone person came or whatever, they'd say, well, you'll be going to church tomorrow, so we'll come on Monday. Or they even say, which church do you go to? So in this environment, I then met Kathy and Laura, this lesbian couple, and we sort of came out to each other very secretly. Then I got involved with my

Esther Rothblum:

first lover, Charlene. I always say, I think I got my PhD -- It was hard to know what would come first, my PhD or my first sexual relationship. That's how late I really had an official sexual relationship. Charlene had had 28 lovers before me, so I was her 29th. She was my first, but mostly with men, but some women. That was a really bad matchup because I was so inexperienced and she was so used to whatever, so it didn't last long, but

Esther Rothblum:

it was exciting. It was also scary because it was illegal. One of my clinical supervisors actually said to her once, he said, if he knew that there was a gay intern, now he was assuming it would be a man, that guy would have to be expelled. And so the message we got was, oh my goodness, if anybody finds out and I don't know what would've happened if I had been expelled, I mean, the rest of my life, what would I have done? I was in such a

Esther Rothblum:

trajectory for academic psychology and so on. So that was Mississippi.

Mason Funk:

Can you paint us a little bit more of a picture? I mean, my body knows the feeling of fear, but so what choices would you -- Like when you and Charlene were together, aware that this was, a, illegal; b, it could totally jeopardize your career, how did that then play out in like choices you made from minute to minute and day to day?

Esther Rothblum:

It's hard to say. I mean, obviously we didn't talk about it. It was unlikely that two women, even if I spent the night at her place, it was unlikely somebody would say, oh my goodness, she must be having a lesbian over. I was actually a little worried about Charlene because she was so kind of sexually such an explorer that I was worried she might blurt it out to somebody, because for her, she could hide behind her many male partners, right?

Esther Rothblum:

We even briefly talked about applying for academic jobs together. That would've been a real disaster. But when I got a job offer from Texas A&M University, that was my first tenure track offer. I didn't want to go to Texas A&M, but Charlene said to me, when she got her PhD in Wisconsin, she was living with two guys, having sex with both. And one of them had been a real Texas A&M guy. And so she said,

Esther Rothblum:

"Oh, I would've loved to go there." So I actually called their department and I said, I'm turning you down to do this postdoc, but by the way, there is somebody here who would love the job, and they actually hired her. Now, this would be illegal today, all these formal steps if you do an academic tenure track search. And then she was denied tenure. So I think by doing this two year postdoc, and this is why I think it's so important to put this in context, literally the year I started academia

Esther Rothblum:

was the first year any lesbian could survive, or any feminist, or any woman in academia. The other tenure track offer was an interview at University of Illinois. It was then called Chicago Circle, I think it's now called Chicago. Again, I turned them down, but I recommended one of my classmates from Rutgers, who had been the star student in my class, Audrey. And Audrey was doing an internship somewhere else. She took the job and they really derailed her. I mean,

Esther Rothblum:

they made her head of the clinic, which is usually something a grad student does. They forced her into early retirement. So I was just very lucky that by turning down these two offers in 1980 and doing this postdoc till 1982, by the time I got to Vermont, they had been put on probation for having no women. This is how things had changed, and suddenly they wanted me to teach courses on women, do research on women. So I just scraped into that first year when you could really make it

Esther Rothblum:

as a woman without being crucified.

Mason Funk:

So you're saying that there is literally a 1-2 year period when almost like generations of female academics coming up. Can you explain that just a bit more, how just a couple years could make such a massive difference in terms of women's trajectories and possibilities in academia?

Esther Rothblum:

I have this theory that there are three generations of women. So when a

Esther Rothblum:

department of all men, which was true up until the eighties, finally hires their first woman, that first woman is usually crucified. I mean, the first woman hired at the University of Vermont in my department was such a bad fit. First of all, she was older than the guys, which was kind of weird. She was junior, they were senior, but she was older. She did a very different kind of research from what they thought was good and very different training. She wasn't really a great fit herself.

Esther Rothblum:

I mean, she was always sort of putting her foot in her mouth. So I felt when I was hired, I had to kind of mentor her rather than the reverse. I came just a year later. I was hired as a couple with this other woman, Laura, which I can also get to. The second generation, which I see myself as part of, we were one of the boys. We went to the same schools as the guys did. We didn't have husbands. We didn't have children. And when you were a junior academic,

Esther Rothblum:

you were working summers, evenings, weekends, holidays, it didn't matter. We were always in the department like the guys were, very different from the first hire, Phyllis, who had four children. In a way, a lot of that generation, a lot of my generation were lesbians because we didn't have husbands, we didn't have children. Then just a few years after us, the next women hired were very different. They were mentored by women. None of us had women mentors. They wanted childcare.

Esther Rothblum:

They wanted partner benefits for same sex partners. It was a very different story. I really see this as three generations, but I'm only talking about a few years. What was happening all over campus was so there might be a woman in the nursing school who was at the third generation, because nursing had a lot of women. There might be me in psychology, second generation, there might be a woman who was hired in chemistry for the first year. And the woman in chemistry

Esther Rothblum:

was still in that first generation of being crucified. She would say to us, "This is a horrible campus." And I would say, "What do you mean everybody's really nice to me?" And so it made people like her feel crazy because here she was being crucified. Here I was saying, "Oh no." Which gives her the impression, it must be you, because why is Esther having an easier time? And still, I saw this also when the first people of color were hired, the first gay men were hired and whatever, there was still

Esther Rothblum:

this sense of the first person -- And, by the way, when West Point Academy went co-ed, that was a big deal. They were very careful. They made sure that the early women they accepted were daughters of West Point graduate men. They at least came from military families, and that first year they were crucified. I mean, apparently at West Point they can stop women or anybody and make them, I don't know, repeat all these phrases or things.

Esther Rothblum:

Then the very next year, they had an easier time. So it was the same kind of phenomenon.

Mason Funk:

When you say that the first generation of women to be hired at these universities were crucified, can you say a bit more about what that looked like? What would actually happen to them?

Esther Rothblum:

The first generation of women, I'm just trying to think. For example, of my colleague Phyllis, who was hired from a very different discipline. I wouldn't say that the male

Esther Rothblum:

faculty knew how to relate to her in any way. They certainly didn't know how to relate to a faculty woman with children. They had children, but somebody else was at home taking care of the children. I mean, it was hard for me to believe they would hire her, given her very different background. Then she was made to feel like her very different backdrop was a problem. I see this also with faculty of color who are hired and wanna study people of color and are told that's frivolous or that's outside of our area,

Esther Rothblum:

it's not real, whatever, not real psychology, it's not real political science or so on. And yeah, so in very subtle ways, she really wasn't given any kind of mentoring really.

Mason Funk:

Ah-Huh. . So it's almost like you're a sacrificial lamb in a way. Like somebody has to go first.

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah. I think very much -- I would really warn students if they were the first, in any situation, that you

Esther Rothblum:

are the sacrificial lamb. Yeah. You're diversified, whatever that might mean, that department or that unit or that job. And what comes with it often is a very hard time.

Mason Funk:

Yeah. I mean, we've seen it on boards like non-profit boards. OUTWORDS is a non-profit, I sit on another non-profit board, and these people diversifying the board oftentimes gonna be like, okay, we're gonna bring in a woman of color, just to show

Mason Funk:

that we're diverse. But then it's like death by a thousand cuts to basically marginalize this person, not include them. So I can imagine happening in academia as well.

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah. Another thing that happens with diversifying a unit or department is that person is often put on every committee which doesn't count for tenure or students of color, for example, if it's a person of color, want to meet with them and want them as their advisor, and they're doing all this extra work that

Esther Rothblum:

the other colleagues don't have to do.

Mason Funk:

Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Thank you for all that. Now, when you mentioned your boss, Myrna, at Yale, who was a tenured professor in Yale medical school, but it sounds like there were some overtones there about like -- Well, you said she was nervous about being associated with you,

Mason Funk:

for example, or other women who were like, specifically, it sounds like it's kind of been keeping with this same theme, like she's struggling to make it on her own. The last thing she can afford is to be associated with women that aren't gonna help her out in her career.

Esther Rothblum:

My postdoc boss, Myrna Weissman at the time, I think was the only woman who --

Mason Funk:

Do me a favor, say that this was at Yale.

Esther Rothblum:

When I was doing my postdoc at Yale, my postdoc advisor, Myrna Weissman, was the only tenured woman at the

Esther Rothblum:

Yale Medical School. And I think at the time, this was 1980 to 1982, Yale only had nine tenured women out of probably a couple of thousand faculty. By the way, Yale, even today, has lagged behind gender stuff. They're way ahead in LGBT stuff. They've had endowed chairs in LGBT stuff, but not so much gender. And so, yeah, first of all, I came there with a very deep Mississippi accent. In Mississippi, my internship, I was seeing clients

Esther Rothblum:

and if I didn't sound like them, they couldn't understand me. They were a little taken aback to have what looked like deep Southerner coming in. And I had sort of southern social skills, like, "How are you all doing?" Which didn't really work well at Yale. But I was a feminist and I was interested in looking at women and mental health, and I would give talks in the community on women and depression, which was my area, women's mental health. And Myrna always seemed to find out about these talks, this is long before the internet,

Esther Rothblum:

where she'd have a friend in the audience. And she was deeply disturbed, I think she was rightly afraid that if her unit was seen as feminist, who knows what could happen to her. Just one example, she had many grants, large NIH grants and multimillion dollar grants. And at one point, she got a grant that would help mentor Yale medical students to do research. One of her male colleagues decided he should have that grant,

Esther Rothblum:

and he went to the dean of the Yale Medical School and said I'd be better at this. The dean agreed, and they took the grant away from Myrna. You can see what it was like, I mean, for her being a woman. The same story happened with a friend of mine in San Diego who was in the UC San Diego Medical School, got a very large grant and somebody tried to take it away from her. She's an African American woman. This was, again, a white guy saying I think I do a better job. So

Esther Rothblum:

it's difficult to be in that token position as Myrna was.

Mason Funk:

Yeah, yeah. Interesting. I mean, it's just so important. I feel like part of OUTWORDS is we do just a lot of social history as well as LGBT, to understand what it was like for a woman in academia in this -- This is in the eighties. Anything more on that topic? We're gonna probably come back to it anyway, but just what it was like

Mason Funk:

in that environment to be kind of pressure cooker coming up in a place like that as a woman academic.

Esther Rothblum:

When I left Mississippi to go to New Haven to go do my postdoc at Yale, I did decide I wanted to be out. Mississippi, I wouldn't dare go to a gay bar, anything like that. But at Yale, I did go to my first lesbian bar and gay bars. There was a women's restaurant there, Bloodroot in Connecticut. There were women's bookstores, and I began to meet

Esther Rothblum:

other lesbians. That was a very exciting time. I wasn't at all out at work. I'm pretty sure they would've guessed, but I was sort of a nobody, it was a huge place with many senior faculty, and I was this postdoc, so it was really my time to sort of come out. Academically, Mississippi had really prepared me well. I mean, ironically, my clinical internship was very research focused and we were well mentored on how to publish

Esther Rothblum:

and how to get involved in research. Whereas a lot of the postdocs that Myrna took were actually physicians who have no research background, and she would suggest that they take courses or would teach them about research. In my case, I did have those skills. It was really a time of coming out.

Mason Funk:

Okay. Awesome. Now this is roughly 1980-ish.

Esther Rothblum:

My postdoc was

Esther Rothblum:

1980 to 1982. My first academic job was 1982 till I left to come to San Diego in 2005.

Mason Funk:

Gotcha. How radical was it to -- I wrote in my notes, to start writing and talking about women's health as an academic focus. This sounds like this was groundbreaking.

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah. One of my well-meaning mentors said, don't study women. It's too narrow.

Esther Rothblum:

And I tell my students he was absolutely right. What was happening in the early 1980s was that there was a journal called Psychology of Women Quarterly published by the American Psychological Association, but they had an editor who had accepted so many articles that there was a note saying, please do not submit anything to this journal for several years. And then there was a journal called Sex Roles, which was very, very quantitative. You have to do it like a real experiment with rats or

Esther Rothblum:

something like that. So it wasn't easy to submit something on women to a so-called mainstream journal. Now I'd been doing research on depression ever since graduate school, sort of different aspects of how to treat depression, how to evaluate it, various things. In my clinical internship, there was a time when -- So there were seven women interns and I think six men. One day, one of the women, Kathy,

Esther Rothblum:

said to us at a social event, she said she studies anxiety disorders. She said, "You know what? I think that 80% of my clients and research participants are women." And I said, I studied depression. And come to think of it, I would say, two thirds of my clients and research participants are women. It goes to show we had never in any of my grad courses, or in any part of my internship, ever discussed women or gender. This is in the late seventies.

Esther Rothblum:

It turns out another intern was studying eating disorders. Another one was studying stress management. Another one was studying assertiveness training. We thought, well, let's submit a panel to a psychology conference, a small regional conference, and focus on women's mental health and how our areas of research why women predominate in these areas. We did that and we needed a kind of a chair or discussant.

Esther Rothblum:

And in my graduate program there was Violet Franks, this adjunct lecturer who had taught a course called Women in Therapy, that I had actually never taken, but she was our discussant. We did this panel, and then Violet said to me, because I'd organized the panel, she is editing a book series through Springer Publishing Company, and why don't we edit a book on women's mental health and stereotypes? So we did that. As a grad student, I was starting to edit this book, and it came out in 1983.

Esther Rothblum:

That was sort of the beginning of my longtime interest in looking at gender and mental health. Luckily for me, when I applied to Vermont, I was applying for several jobs, and this, again, was when Cyril Franks had written the letter. I had applied to a whole bunch of places, and another intern from my program, Laura, was working at a consulting firm, and she had applied to only three places, but one happened to be Vermont.

Esther Rothblum:

We discovered we were both applying to Vermont. I said, "Oh, Laura, go ahead and I'll withdraw my application." And she said, "No, no, no. Let's both apply." What the heck? We'll see who they take. Well, interestingly, we both got called for an interview, and so Laura said, "Let's see if they'll take both of us." We weren't a couple or anything, so when I flew up for the interview, I sat next to a grad student from that program who told me the most important piece of information that nobody had mentioned, and

Esther Rothblum:

that is that that program had been put on probation by the American Psych Association for having no women faculty, so I knew that if they wanna get two of us, they could take both of us. Luckily, because of that, we were encouraged to study women. I was encouraged to teach psychology of women, when it was still a pretty new and risky and hippy kind of thing to do in a very formal clinical psychology program.

Mason Funk:

When you talk about

Mason Funk:

studying women in depression tell us more about that. Like, what does a study like that look like? I assume on some level you're looking at essentially what does depression look like in women that might be different from how it looks like in men? Is that?

Esther Rothblum:

There are probably several hundred official mental health diagnoses, and many of them have a gender difference. Some people have called it women hurt themselves, men hurt others.

Esther Rothblum:

If you look today at the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which didn't exist back then, or at least the very early version only existed, they actually tell you, for each mental health category, if there's a gender difference. Women tend to predominate in depression, anxiety disorders, sexual dysfunctions and things like that, and men tend to predominate in sort of substance use, drug use, anti-social behavior. So you have that kind of -- Now there's many others where

Esther Rothblum:

there's no gender difference. That's what really got me interested in like, why women in depression? But the kind of research I was doing so early on depression is an internal state, so it's not like, I don't know, a phobia where you can say, okay, you're afraid of spiders and after therapy's over, let's see if you can hold a spider. It's very internal. I was interested in, how do you assess or evaluate something that internal and I was doing research on that, not looking at gender.

Esther Rothblum:

I was also running treatment groups where I would change some of the elements and see what worked the best, but without any consciousness that most of the people in my groups were women, for example. But there have been, since then, thousands of studies on depression. I mean, all kinds of aspects of it including obviously men who get depressed or what some of the risk factors are. When I was doing my postdoc, it was at the Depression Research Unit

Esther Rothblum:

at Yale, and they were interested -- Epidemiology looks at large scale societal factors, and what puts people at risk for depression from a large scale perspective is having lots of little kids, that's stressful, it might be fun, but it's also stressful; breaking up a relationship through death or divorce; having a low income. Those are the kinds of risk factors. If you think about that, women do take care of children,

Esther Rothblum:

women tend to outlive husbands, for example. Women make lower incomes. And so you can see from a sort of societal level what the risk factors are.

Mason Funk:

And that they're gonna be higher for women.

Esther Rothblum:

Right.

Mason Funk:

Interesting. Okay. Awesome. Thank you for explaining that for the non-academic in the crowd. You said something interesting about academia as a field. You said one of the weird things

Mason Funk:

of academia is that what you're hired for is not what you do all day long. It's just a unique take on academia that I've never heard before. I wondered if you could just kind of talk about that, just weirdness of being an academic.

Esther Rothblum:

Here's the weird thing about academia, what you do Monday to Friday, nine to five, you're teaching, you're preparing to teach, you're grading, you're advising students, you're looking at grad school

Esther Rothblum:

applications, you're looking at faculty tenure track applications. You're sitting in meetings, faculty meetings, you're answering email, you're writing letters of recommendation. And really what you get hired for and promoted for and tenure for is research and writing, publications or doing research. I find that really the time to do those are summers, weekends, evenings, early mornings. It's very hard if you're writing an article even to be doing it

Esther Rothblum:

when you're constantly dealing with meetings. You have very little free time during the day. And that's what I think makes it very hard for people who have childcare responsibility or elder care responsibility, most of whom are women. I can't think of any other profession where the thing that you're really hired to do and promoted to do is done in your time off, so to speak. It's a very strange combination.

Mason Funk:

Yeah, I never thought about it, but my father, for example, was a newspaper man. So imagine he went to work every single day from 8-5 or whatever and just manage staff and maybe fill water, [inaudible] people, whatever the case might be, did paperwork. And then either before work or after work on the weekends, he had to actually publish the newspaper. It wouldn't make any sense at all.

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah. Now, interestingly, if you're a journalist, because that's your background, there might be times as a journalist, but you're spending all day

Esther Rothblum:

interviewing, but you still have to sometimes write up your story or probably in your off time as well. But it is strange in academia because really just about every four year college and university, it's really publications that count, nothing else. No matter how good a teacher you are. We actually teach relatively little compared to what people think we do. Because most people think of a professor when they were in college and they took courses. But really the focus is research and writing.

Mason Funk:

So how, if at all, is academia kind of like -- Is there any movement in this weirdness? Is there any kind of progress or sort of thinking about like -- We have to sort of try to change this dynamic that forces our professors to do their most important work essentially in their off hours? Is there any like, groundswell of movement? Like we need to kind of rewrite the rules?

Esther Rothblum:

As far as I know, I'm the only one who's ever pointed this out. I recently got an award and gave a talk about 40 years of editing and publishing, and it seems to be either so taken for granted or something that people don't mention it. I mean, theoretically you could go to your office, sit down, lock the door and write an article. It just doesn't happen that way. Yeah. But I think if anything, it's going more and more and more in that direction.

Esther Rothblum:

I would say that people have to publish more now than they did earlier. Even teaching universities, San Diego State University started as a teaching school, basically for tenure, again, it's all about publications and increasingly just to get into graduate schools, undergraduates are expected to have already published. I think many disciplines are also moving to be more and more scientific,

Esther Rothblum:

whatever that means. My psychology department in the University of Vermont has changed their name to psychological science. They wanna be like the engineering, math, chemistry, physics, biology, those fields. There's a lot of neuropsychology and MRI machines and it's not real if you can't measure it in a machine. I think it's really moving in that direction, unfortunately.

Mason Funk:

It reminds me, I'm a huge baseball fan, the emphasis on baseball

Mason Funk:

is more and more on like analytics. Like, it's incredible evaluating pitch counts. All these things that were never really quantified before, now they have these massive, like, data crunching machines. And it's basically like you should be able to pick a winner just by cat running numbers. It's strange.

Esther Rothblum:

It is. Yeah.

Mason Funk:

At some point, I don't have a time marker for this, but you did a study following same sex couples

Mason Funk:

through their first year of legal partnership. That was in Vermont, if I'm not mistaken. What was that study about?

Esther Rothblum:

In the year 2000, I think it was July 1st, 2000, Vermont became the first US state, and actually before any province of Canada to legalize same sex relationships. They called it civil unions. They made up a term and it was equivalent to marriage in the state. And Vermont is really tiny. I think it has half a million people. So couples came

Esther Rothblum:

from all over the US and other countries just to legalize their relationship, even though it wasn't legal when they got back to Idaho or whatever. Because I was at the University of Vermont, I decided -- In fact, it was Nanette Gartrell who recommended this idea that I study that first year of civil unions. I did it with two of my former graduate students Sondra Solomon and Kimberly Balsam. And because civil unions were public information, like marriage certificates,

Esther Rothblum:

we had access to every single certificate. I remember picking them up at the county house, I'm very non-spiritual, but I just put my hand on this box and thought, think about these lives. 2000+ couples who came to Vermont. I mean, every one of them has a story. What we decided to do was to compare couples who that first year had a civil union in Vermont, only 20% of whom were from Vermont, actually.

Esther Rothblum:

And compare them to a couple in their friendship circle who had not had a civil union because we wanted to see up until 2000, all the research on same sex couples was people who were not legally united. Then I also wanted to compare them to a heterosexual couple who was married. I chose to pick a sibling who was married because siblings are usually the same race and ethnicity. They're usually around the same age. They grew up in the same house, same religion, whatever.

Esther Rothblum:

But in adulthood, one is gay and one is straight, so it's a great comparison. On the certificates, we had their addresses. We didn't have any emails, so we wrote to these 20, whatever it was, 2,600 couples and asked if they wanted to participate. We were overwhelmed with interest. We only had funding through the Gil Foundation to survey 400 couples, 400 friendship couples, and 400 heterosexual siblings and spouse. And we had like 800,

Esther Rothblum:

we had twice as many people. There's nothing like the rage of same sex couples. When they cannot be in a study, people would say, what would it cost you to put an extra stamp on and send us a questionnaire? Luckily, I had a grad student who was doing her dissertation and used the other 400 couples. But so we then surveyed them, these three groups of couples and published those data and got a lot of media attention from that because it was so early. It was before California had domestic partnerships,

Esther Rothblum:

before Massachusetts had same sex marriage, before Canada had same sex marriage. Then we did a three year follow up and a 12 year follow up. They will always be the longest legal couples in North America.

Mason Funk:

Right. So when you say you surveyed them, what does that mean?

Esther Rothblum:

So that means in those days --

Mason Funk:

Do me a favor, start by saying --

Esther Rothblum:

The way that we surveyed them was we,

Mason Funk:

Sorry, I was still talking. So now start fresh.

Esther Rothblum:

The way that we did the study is we sent them a questionnaire in the mail. Remember, this is still 2000,

Esther Rothblum:

was certainly before you could add long attachments to an internet or email. We didn't have their emails. That also meant you had to attach two postage paid envelopes to get them back. Then when the questionnaires came back, you had to pay somebody to type all the answers into a data set for the computer to analyze. Now that's all very automatic, right? What we were interested in, I mean, I often ask people,

Esther Rothblum:

what would you study if you had the first generation of same-sex couples? We looked at a lot of demographic information. Who were these people? Often when you compare people who are same-sex couples to their heterosexual married siblings, they are very different. The heterosexual couples had been married longer. I mean, they'd been in the relationship longer. They had children, they were often living close to their family of origin. They were more religious.

Esther Rothblum:

The lesbian couples and the gay male couples lived further away from their parents, less likely to have children, had been together for a shorter period, less religious, very different demographically. Also same sex couples tend to share housework and childcare. Heterosexual couples, as you can imagine, women do the housework and childcare, men make more money. Let's see. When we followed them over time, we also were interested in who eventually got married.

Esther Rothblum:

What was so interesting about that era, you would have couples who, they'd go to Vermont for a civil union, then their home state would have domestic partnership, so they'd get that, then they'd get married in some state that had marriage, then all of a sudden they could get married in their own state. Then they'd have all these anniversaries, different places. And then if they wanted to break up, this is where the problem started. In Vermont, for example, you had to be living in Vermont for six months to get a divorce

Esther Rothblum:

or civil union break up. Well, 80% of these couples were not living in Vermont. They could not dissolve their civil union, which didn't matter if they were living in Mississippi. But if they ever traveled through Vermont, they were actually breaking the law if they had gotten married heterosexually, let's say, in Mississippi. There were cases where couples would break up and the biological mother would move to Virginia. And Virginia would say, yeah, you're the only mom, you get the kids and Vermont would say, no, no, no, you have a civil union.

Esther Rothblum:

You both get the kids. And this would be going back and forth. So it was an interesting time.

Mason Funk:

Then you recurved them 3 years and 12 years later

Esther Rothblum:

We resurveyed them 3 years later and 12 years later, we also interviewed people. By that time we had a large $1.2 million NIH grant, thanks to my former grad student who is now a professor, so we had money to actually interview some of them. We interviewed couples who had broken up to ask about that. We interviewed couples together who were still together.

Esther Rothblum:

We looked at all kinds of things. We were looking at the kids, some of whom were grown, things like that.

Mason Funk:

And you say you had the same sex couples who entered into civil unions. You had their straight siblings and the third set were friends of theirs who were also in same sex relationships, but chose not to enter into a civil union. What were some of the differences you noticed between the people who chose to take advantage of this new legal possibility and those who didn't?

Esther Rothblum:

Whereas there were a lot of differences between heterosexual siblings and spouse with the same sex couples, there were very few differences between couples who had a civil union and couples who didn't have a civil union. I think part of it was that some people would say, well we live in Louisiana, why would we go to Vermont and get a civil union? Our friends did. Okay, but it's not legal here. Also, the legislation hadn't been there that long, even at the three year follow up.

Esther Rothblum:

There weren't that many differences. By the 12 year follow up, a lot of the same sex couples from both groups had gotten married, so that really changed.

Mason Funk:

Ah-Huh. . Some essentially skipped the civil union step, but went to marriage when it became available. Then the ones who chose civil unions frequently or maybe always went on to marriage when it became available.

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah. A lot of the same sex couples did get married when it became available either in their home state or the national legislation. I wanna add that interestingly,

Esther Rothblum:

a lot of the civil union couples were telling us, they said, yeah, we went to Vermont from our home state, we got a civil union, we came back home. Amazingly, they accepted it. We got a mortgage, we got VA benefits or whatever. I mean, surprisingly, they found that though it wasn't perfectly legal, somehow their home state was kind of accepting it, which was interesting.

Mason Funk:

Oh, that is interesting. Yeah. Okay. Excellent. Very cool. Let me go back to my notes.

Esther Rothblum:

May I take a sip of water.

Mason Funk:

Sure, sure. Okay. I think your longest standing role in terms of being a publisher of a journal is the Journal of Lesbian Studies. 26 years, if I got that right. Tell us about this journal.

Esther Rothblum:

Just to backtrack about editing journals, there's been a real theme in my life that I go someplace looking for a lover

Esther Rothblum:

and I don't find a lover, but instead I get some major academic event as a result. To backtrack, about being a journal editor, I was doing my postdoc at Yale, and I thought I'd really like to have a lover. Charlene and I had broken up back in Mississippi, so I went to a regional, a very small conference in Boston, of the Association for Women in Psychology, just a kind of a Boston collective. To my disappointment, almost all the sessions were clinical, and I wasn't a clinician. There was one about

Esther Rothblum:

women in writing. I thought, okay, fine, I'll go to that. I went to this workshop, we went around the room and every woman said what she wants to write about. Then I said, well, you know what, there's a new journal starting called Women and Therapy and new journals are desperate for articles. I mean, think about it, you have a new journal, comes up four times a year, where are you gonna find all these authors? So I said, let's all do our writing piece and then let's submit. I'll contact the new editor and see if we can do a whole issue.

Esther Rothblum:

They were really taken aback because they were gonna write, they were never thinking of publishing. But sure enough, and I sort of held their hands and we all wrote something up and it came out as a special issue. The editor then asked me to be on the editorial board of this journal, Women and Therapy. Then later on, she asked me to be the editor. Again, I was trying to find a lover. No lover, but I became an editor of this journal when I was still in my twenties. Then I did edit Women and Therapy for about 12 years, I think

Esther Rothblum:

with a co-editor, Ellen Cole, and I loved it. This is, again, a time, it was so hard to publish on women. We had this monopoly. I mean, anybody who wanted to do anything would submit to our journal. One example was Ellen, my co-editor, wanted to do a special issue on refugee women's mental health, and I thought, yeah, right, we'll get three articles. Well, we had a triple issue. We had like 30 authors and many of them began their article by saying, we are the only place

Esther Rothblum:

in the country that works for refugee women, they didn't even know about each other, so I loved it. But actually, I wasn't a therapist. I felt like a bit of an imposter editing this. Then the publisher, Bill Cohen, was a gay man. He was the publisher of Haworth Press. They put out the Journal of Homosexuality. I think that was the only LGBT Journal at the time. He was a strange guy. He would call me up to tell me a joke or whatever, the middle of the night, and I'm a

Esther Rothblum:

morning person. One time he called me and he said Esther, we wanna start a Journal of Lesbian Studies and I have somebody in mind, but I think she's closeted. Do you think she'd be offended if I invited her? And I said, "Bill, the person who edits a Journal of Lesbian Studies has got to be out." And then the next day I thought, you know what? I'm gonna ask if I can do it. Because I'm not a therapist, I'm doing Women and Therapy. I am a lesbian, so I'll do Journal of Lesbian Studies. So I did do that. I rotated off Women and Therapy.

Esther Rothblum:

Journal of Lesbian Studies, I did do it for 26 years. I will end it, my tenure, in two months. We already have a new editor, I'm doing it with her this year. Yeah, we've been doing a lot of special issues on all kinds of topics. Lesbians and Islam, lesbians and sports, lesbians in Eastern Europe, and many, many, many topics.

Mason Funk:

Yeah. Say more about some of the topics. When you name one of those topics, does that end up being like the theme for an entire issue?

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah. When in the Journal of Lesbian Studies we get regular articles, people submit something and I send it out for review. But I also plan on having a whole issue on a theme. Usually, every summer, academics, that's when they have the most free time. That's when they're most likely to agree to do something. Don't ever ask them in November or December when they're grading. I would plan the next year and a half,

Esther Rothblum:

the next six issues. I would think to myself, what haven't I focused on? Over the years, there's been many, many topics. I mean, just about anything I can think of. I mean, everything. Polyamory, the intersection of lesbian and trans, native two-spirit women, I mean, lots and lots of topics. I would invite a potential guest editor and send them a detailed memo, then they would do a call for articles

Esther Rothblum:

and send them out for peer review. That takes most people a year and a half. I also guest edited some myself or edited some myself. Yeah. Well, there were two reasons I decided to stop after 26 years. One was they're now using web portals, submission portals, which are really horrible . And I'm not the only one who feels that, they're clunky. A lot of our authors haven't published before and they get lost.

Esther Rothblum:

The people who are in charge of the submission portal are very different from the people who then look at it when it's accepted. They can't seem to communicate with each other. They do it through me. The person who's the new editor she actually did a triple issue, three separate issues on the topic of "Is lesbian identity obsolete?" And she got 50 submissions. So she'll be taking over.

Mason Funk:

Interesting. So much to say from the point of view of some of our interviewees on both the topic of whether

Mason Funk:

lesbian identity is obsolete. I have one particular interviewee in New York who is on fire about the erasure of lesbian identity.

Esther Rothblum:

Is this Karla Jay by any chance?

Mason Funk:

No, we did interview Karla, but this is a woman named Michaela Griffo. She's given me several earfuls. And then secondarily, it's been fascinating interviewing lesbians and noting their different opinions and experiences in relation to trans women. Everything from, for example, like, I came into this as

Mason Funk:

a total newbie, so I'm learning as I go. I interviewed a woman in Houston, you probably know her, Arden Eversmeyer, she's created an organization called Old Lesbians Organizing for Change.

Esther Rothblum:

Oh, OLOC. Yeah.

Mason Funk:

OLOC. Exactly. Yeah. But she was telling a story about, I think it was Hurricane Harvey had come through the Houston area and done a lot of destruction and she and her lesbian friends had gotten together to try to repair somebody's house. And she said

Mason Funk:

yeah, a couple of trans women came along and they were totally useless. And I was like, oh, wow. And I've heard every opinion under the sun, it feels like, at this point. Yeah. Of course, not every, but many different gradations of how lesbians feel about trans women.

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah.

Mason Funk:

I mean, it's a kind of, I'm just asking you as just another person who has probably observed a lot of these gradations of opinions about inclusion versus exclusion? What have been some of your observations?

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah, the topic of lesbians and trans, I mean, there's many different perspectives. On the one hand you have a generation of lesbians who went through such extreme sexism and the idea of women only space was so powerful. The idea of somebody who was once a man or even if they never felt like a man, but biologically they were born a man, being part of

Esther Rothblum:

a group was a big issue. Like the Michigan Women's Music Festival, that was such a big issue. On the other hand, I mean, obviously there are so many people who feel that they are girls or women, and certainly they're attracted to other girls or women, identify as lesbian. What's happening more recently, I would say, among my students, is the proliferation of identifying as gender non-binary, which is also very interesting. In fact, that's another reason

Esther Rothblum:

that I think it's tricky, editing the Journal of Lesbian Studies now, not so much the issue of trans, we're very open to the intersection of lesbians and trans, but what do you do if somebody is doing a study of gender non-binary people? They're technically not women and in terms of their identity. That means that that fits well for a sexuality studies journal, but Journal of Lesbian Studies, it's tricky. Unless they happen to also say, I'm non-binary and lesbian or non-binary and

Esther Rothblum:

something like that.

Mason Funk:

Yeah. We interviewed another woman who is bisexual. She's quite an active bisexual spokesperson nationwide. But she was talking about how, in her early days, having first come out as lesbian and then coming out as bisexual, she coined the phrase lesbian identified bisexual as a way of like trying to not be completely rejected and ostracized by the lesbian community. But still be able to live her bisexual identity, which I thought was fascinating.

Esther Rothblum:

I did a qualitative interview study

Esther Rothblum:

of what does community mean? And a number of bisexual women would be pretty closeted about being bisexual, so they could be part of various lesbian community groups. I would say to them, "Well, why not start a bisexual group?" And some of them would say, "Well, I don't wanna be ostracized," or it sort of doesn't exist in that format. Kind of Interesting.

Mason Funk:

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Now let's move to the topic of fat studies, which you'll definitely be the first

Mason Funk:

person we've interviewed who has been in the world of fat studies. You said at some point, you were quoting someone, I'm sure, who described it as really flaky. Walk us into the world of fat studies. What does that world look like in academia? What are some of the themes? And of course, it is a newer field of endeavor, and so there's this kind of like, oh, that's flaky or difficulty gaining credibility. Can you just introduce us to the whole field?

Esther Rothblum:

I tell my students that I have two areas of research. One is mainstream and one is radical. Mainstream is lesbian studies. I just think this is amazing. It used to be that even women's studies were so flaky, but lesbian studies is how I got hired at San Diego State University. That was the actual search. It was for a lesbian studies scholar. It's what I did in my interview talk, the journal and so on. I certainly kept the fat studies more on the side.

Esther Rothblum:

When I do a study in lesbian -- The civil union study, where I compared couples who had civil unions, I had two journal editors vying with each other to publish it. That's how popular it was. When I do a study in weight stigma, as it used to be called, Fat Studies, I can go through one rejection after another. I certainly need the skin of a grapefruit. If I didn't have the so-called mainstream area of lesbian studies, I would think, I'm just not a researcher. I'm just not doing well. But you really see

Esther Rothblum:

the contrast. What got me started in Fat Studies, and I know you've interviewed Judith Masur recently, I think, I was at a conference in Seattle in 1983, Association for Women in Psychology. They had a performance of Fat Lip Readers Theater. I was blown away. Here were these very fat women, it was a reader's theater, reading pieces written by each other and other women about being fat in society. I went back to Vermont and I said, this is what I'm gonna do.

Esther Rothblum:

And my colleagues -- Typically, there's usually two reactions, "But aren't they unhealthy?" And "Why can't they just lose weight?" They didn't say to me, "Aren't you unhealthy?" Various students who were working with me who didn't have a project I'd suggest. So I would do research on things like sending therapists, part of the American Psych Association, a case study where I would ask them questions about how would you diagnose this? How serious? And unbeknownst to them,

Esther Rothblum:

they would either get a male or a female case, or a thin or a fat case. All I would do is change the weight and the gender, and not surprisingly, they would give a very different description if the person was fat versus thin. We'd have college students looking at job resumés of so-called graduating seniors and ask them, how viable is this person for a job? What starting salary would you recommend? And the only thing we change is the weight and the gender, things like that. I was pretty alone in this. I mean

Esther Rothblum:

there was a woman at Cincinnati Medical School, Susan Woolley, who was a very fat woman, and really publishing interesting articles in medicine, sort of critiquing some of the assumptions we have about health and weight or things like that. Anyway, many years later, Fat Lip Readers Theater came out with a VHS tape called Nothing to Lose, I think. They had a PO Box address. I sent them all my articles and I said, "Thank you. This is all thanks to you."

Esther Rothblum:

Then in 2007 or so, I was sitting at the bedside of a woman, Judy Freespirit, who was part of the Fat Underground. It was a group of very fat women in Los Angeles who were sort of protesting and talking about being fat and women. She was there for some medical procedure. The nurse came and there were two other women there visiting Judy. The nurse said, "You're gonna have to leave. I'm gonna have to catheterize her" or something. In the hallway,

Esther Rothblum:

the other woman, Sondra Solovay, said to me, "Do you wanna edit a book called The Fat Studies Reader?" So we did that. Sondra, who is unfortunately younger than your age group, was the woman. She's an attorney and she's the reason San Francisco has a height and weight non-discrimination policy. Very few places do in the world. We did the Fat Studies Reader, and it was cited in the New York Times, and Ms. Magazine and the New Yorker, and on and on and on. Then my publisher called me and said,

Esther Rothblum:

"Would you do a journal called Fat Studies?" I said, "You know what? It is such a small field, a journal you need to come out with --" I said, "Can I do one issue a year that would be like 8 to 10 articles?" And she said, "Actually, our minimum is two issues a year." So I said, "All right, I'll try." I said, what I'm gonna have to do then is contact this small group of, I don't know, three dozen researchers and ask them each to kind of rotate through and write something. Well, anyway, that journal is thriving. I've done it for 12 years.

Esther Rothblum:

We now come out three times a year. We could easily come out four times a year. I've done it for 12 years. Just today I get an email that there is a new journal out on like Fat Studies and Art or something like that, that they're looking for submissions. So it's yeah, it's been an interesting field.

Mason Funk:

Excuse me. Besides yourself, who were some of the other kind of luminaries?

Mason Funk:

You mentioned the woman at University of Cincinnati, I think you said.

Esther Rothblum:

Susan Woolley.

Mason Funk:

Who are some of the people who have kind of distinguished themselves in this relatively new field? Just so we get some names into the mix.

Esther Rothblum:

The early researchers in what's now called Fat Studies, but certainly wasn't called that then, interestingly, often came out of medicine. It's funny because there've been a lot of studies showing that physicians are often very fat phobic, but they were often these

Esther Rothblum:

early researchers who said, diets don't work. You know, we see our patients come in and they lose weight a little bit, and then they regain it. So why are you asking people to lose weight? We wouldn't recommend a medical procedure that had a 90% failure rate for anything else. They would also look at the health data and say that there are a lot of flaws in this, for example. Susan Woolley was one example. Now, Elana Dykewomon, who you also interviewed, is a

Esther Rothblum:

poet and a writer, and wrote some very early poetry about fat women. And was also a sort of an inspiration for me. But now, there's so many people, I'm trying to think of some of the early people that were role models for me. The problem for me was that there was nobody in the social sciences. They were either in health or medicine. Now it's a big field in popular culture. People are looking at, I mean, the submissions to my journal are everything

Esther Rothblum:

from Jamaican music lyrics have switched from being fat positive to being fat negative. This is a musician writing popular culture. I mean, everything, the Harry Potter books and weight, theater, film TV. I don't really watch a lot of TV, but all these shows. I mean, I'm even being asked to review articles for other journals like in geography or anthropology that have anything to do with fat studies. So yeah.

Esther Rothblum:

And fat studies too. Same submission portal, because it's the same publisher driving me crazy. I've already said I wanna step down the end of next year, so the deadline for looking for a new editor was this past September. Luckily for me, the publisher decides, not me. I don't wanna piss off the entire possible fat studies community. But I think whoever they pick will be, next year I'll be co-editing with them and then they'll take over.

Mason Funk:

Two questions, at least two more

Mason Funk:

on this topic. What are some of the more radical ideas kind of coming out of fat studies programs right now? Or the newer, I don't know, areas of investigation or research? I don't even know if this is a question you could answer, but what are some of the more sort of radical areas of research or just ideas kind of bubbling to the surface right now in this field?

Esther Rothblum:

There's so many intriguing aspects to so many disciplines. One of the main issues, this is from the medical perspective, is in many Western countries, especially the US, fat people tend to be poor, and rich people tend to be thin. Now, when I ask my students why that is, they always say something like, well, poor people can't afford organic vegetables. They eat macaroni and cheese, or poor people

Esther Rothblum:

can't join a health club, it's expensive. Or poor people might work two or three jobs, they can't exercise. What they're saying is, first you are poor, and because you're poor, you become fat, and they are all wrong. The actual data shows the opposite. And that is, first you are fat and thanks to societal discrimination, you drift into poverty. If I had a thinner sister and a fatter sister, the research shows that my thinner sister would get into a more elite college

Esther Rothblum:

than my fatter sister. My thinner sister, if she's straight, would marry a wealthier man. My thinner sister would have a higher income, would get health benefits. My poorer sister wouldn't get the job and so on. I mean, the employment area is very, very scary in that sense. But the reason I mentioned that is, so when people talk about weight and health risks, fat people are unhealthy, rich people are healthy, what they're ignoring is fat people are poorer, rich people are thinner.

Esther Rothblum:

And in this country, if you're richer, you have a lot more access to health insurance and health benefits. It's fascinating to me that so many studies ignore that. I mean, they don't realize that you're really comparing poor people and rich people when you're looking at fat and thin people. But there's many, many areas that are interesting around how fat is presented in media. It's sort of hard to even think about particular,

Esther Rothblum:

I mean, this year the journal published a special issue on fat public health, which is kind of interesting because public health, we often think about thinness, fat femmes, looking at femininity and fat. What else? Jews race and fatness was a special issue. There's an issue coming out next year on fat visual culture. So all kinds of different topics.

Mason Funk:

Yeah, of course. I'm an amateur Lizzo fan and I wonder if Lizzo,

Mason Funk:

the performing artist, has kind of had an impact. I mean, she's been very, very, very open. You know who Lizzo is?

Esther Rothblum:

No, I don't. I'm sorry.

Mason Funk:

Oh my goodness.

Esther Rothblum:

I really don't have any popular -- I don't even read fiction. I'm a real non-fiction person.

Mason Funk:

Okay. Well, I recommend --

Esther Rothblum:

Who is she?

Mason Funk:

I think she grew up in Minnesota, or maybe she grew up in Houston. She went to University of Houston and studied flute. She basically got a degree in music and sort of had her heart set on being a professional

Mason Funk:

flutist, however, you say that word. She's an African American woman, she's fat, she's very, very large. Then she suddenly started singing and performing and rapping and has really taken the popular music world by storm. In my husband's and my opinion, she had -- Well, no, he thinks Beyonce's song in the summer was the song of the summer. I think it was Lizzo's summer release, that was the song of the summer. It's called, It's About Damn Time.

Mason Funk:

But she's a big proponent of her body. She's very demonstrative, loves to show off her body, wears very skimpy clothing to public events all the time in her videos, she had an entire show on network television where she was training dancers for her tour, all of whom are fat women of color.

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah, that's great.

Mason Funk:

And she won an Emmy for this particular show. So she's

Mason Funk:

made a big impact as a fat woman in popular culture. What I don't know is how deep, whether she's kinda like a novelty, whether her embracing of her body exactly as it is would have an impact on other girls, young girls, young women, maybe even young boys and young men who have been taught to feel ashamed, embarrassed about their bodies, and here's Lizzo being very open and proud about her body exactly as it is.

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah. I think there has been a little bit of progress. I mean, I think that you hear more body positivity week at a university or Girl Scouts or things like that. I think that is good. I know Kaiser, our local clinic, tries hard to be fat positive in that regard. There's tiny shreds of progress. But you know, it's interesting, this idea of women taking up space. I read somewhere that there are two times when

Esther Rothblum:

women were fighting for their rights. So there was the suffragists fighting for the vote at the beginning of the last century in 1910s, and then there was the so-called second wave of the women's movement around 1968, 1972. And both those periods corresponded with very thin models. So there was the flapper, this sort of hyper energetic, flat chested, boyish kind of person. And then, I don't know if you heard of Twiggy, who was the beginning of these anorexic models. Twiggy looks pretty fat now,

Esther Rothblum:

compared to the models. People have said, isn't it interesting that when women are fighting for their rights, they are told to take up less space? Just like my college experience of, "let's all tackle him." The idea that actually, if you're a woman of some size like Lizzo, it's a lot safer in some ways to go through life. But women are really made to feel bad, including a lot of athletes who are tall, for example, who are somehow made to feel like freaks.

Esther Rothblum:

By the way, in the fat studies reader, one of the articles was by a trans person, Bear Bergman. In this article Bear says, "When people see me as a woman, I'm disgusting." "I'm too fat. When they see me as a man, I'm a big guy and they don't touch me." But it's the same person. I mean, that's what's so interesting. I wish there were more research interviewing trans people, especially people who've transitioned, who've had surgery

Esther Rothblum:

and asked them what was it like when you were a woman? What was it like when you're a man? There has been research by one of my students asking bisexual women. When you were in relationships with men, how is that different from when you were in relationships with women? And they did say, when I'm with women, I can wear more comfortable clothing, I feel there's less focus on my body or weight or things like that.

Mason Funk:

Yeah, we're heading into the home stretch. It's been really, really interesting,

Mason Funk:

I have to say. Thank you. I learned so much. Tell me about, of course, we interviewed Nanette, loved interviewing her, and Dee. I want to just get your take on the National Longitudinal Family study, what your involvement has been and what the importance is, and maybe what is it? Because it can never hurt to have as many people telling us what this study actually is as possible.

Esther Rothblum:

Nanette Gartrell studied in the mid 1980s, for the first time,

Esther Rothblum:

women who were not heterosexually married could get donor sperm through sperm clinics. The sperm clinic of California, I think California sperm clinic, I think, started in 1984 or 1982. Nanette Gartrell started a study where she placed flyers asking for lesbians who were planning to use sperm to have children, and started a study with something like 90 couples or some of the women were single.

Esther Rothblum:

She interviewed the women when they were pregnant, and then has done several more follow ups when the kids were 2 years old, 5, 10, 17, 25, and now in their early 30s. Over these in 33 years, she's had a 92% retention rate. Now, it says a lot for Nanette's clinical skills. She's a psychiatrist. She calls up the families, the offspring, the moms, as the moms

Esther Rothblum:

have split up, the new mom wants to be part of the study, but the ex-mom wants to stay part of the study. It's been really interesting. She invited me to join the study when the kids were 25, so wave six. We're now in wave seven. We also have a team where Audrey Koh is a lesbian obstetrician here in San Francisco; Henny Bos is a lesbian psychologist in Amsterdam and one of our statisticians; and Nicola Corone is a gay man in Italy and also one of our statisticians.

Esther Rothblum:

We have a lot of fun. We meet on Zoom and we are beginning to write up the articles. The last kid will be turning 30 at the end of November. We can't submit anything until his data points and his moms are there, but we can start writing it up because one data point is not gonna affect the data very much.

Mason Funk:

Right. It's so interesting. What was the timeframe over which you

Mason Funk:

brought women into the study? In other words, what is the age range of all those children like today? Are they like within a year of each other? Okay.

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah. So the study started when the moms -- I think in 1984 to 1985. This is before I was part of it, but, so the kids are all more or less the same group, right? Nanette would always send them the survey, like she would contact them when they had that birthday, whatever it was. But now in wave seven, we figured, okay, well,

Esther Rothblum:

rather than waiting three more years, till everybody is the same age, in your early thirties, it doesn't matter if one person is 30 and one is 32 and one is 33, so we're using pretty much the whole data set. But a few of the kids didn't turn 30 till this year, so we had to wait for them.

Mason Funk:

I see. Yeah. And is it possible to say, like, maybe from your perspective, some of the noteworthy observations you've been able to make over this very specific group of kids?

Mason Funk:

As they've now reached their early thirties?

Esther Rothblum:

Back in the 1980s, the assumption was that if lesbians had children, the kids would be mentally ill. They would become gay or lesbian, and they wouldn't have the correct gender presentation. That was the kind of literature. What Nanette was doing was outstanding, which was to have a sample of lesbians and follow them because if you just recruit people

Esther Rothblum:

who already have kids, then maybe the ones who are having kids with difficulty might not wanna join the study. But because everybody started when they were pregnant we didn't know what would happen to the kids. The wonderful finding has been these kids are really thriving. They're really, really great. The moms are very proud of their role as pioneers, really. Back then it was very unusual for lesbians to have kids with donor insemination. Usually, they had kids

Esther Rothblum:

with an ex-husband and they lost custody and things like that.

Mason Funk:

Right. Or they might like recruit a friend to donate sperm, that kind of thing. But would those people potentially be included in the study or did it have to be only with anonymous sperm donors?

Esther Rothblum:

That's a very good question. I'm pretty sure that it was through donor insemination, whether there were examples of women who used sperm of somebody they knew, I'm not positive.

Esther Rothblum:

It was also sort of at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, isn't that right? Donor clinics were beginning to screen out when they could to make sure that women wouldn't get HIV, for example.

Mason Funk:

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Just talk a bit more about the notion of developing a thick skin. What does that mean that you say the skin of the grapefruit versus a peach,

Mason Funk:

say, for someone who watches your interview, who is thinking about a career in academia?

Esther Rothblum:

I tell students that it's important in general, by the way, to have the skin of a grapefruit and not the skin of a peach, to have a thick skin. It helps in many situations. It doesn't have to be in academia and I think in many ways, boys are socialized to take more risks, both dangerous risks, skydiving or driving a motorcycle, but also what I call productive risks,

Esther Rothblum:

like asking somebody out if you're attracted to them or submitting an article, letter to the editor or whatever. I think women are often afraid that they might be turned down. There's some reality to that. I think women often do end up having more negative experiences. So academia comes from a very male model, really. Women are new to academia in many ways. Many universities didn't accept women until the 1960s, like

Esther Rothblum:

Yale and Princeton, for example. I think it's important to realize that what's the worst thing that can happen if you get a rejection letter from an article? I mean, mostly what I do is I submit it to the next journal. I read the comments, I make sure there aren't saying it's full of typos or she's missing a page or something obvious. But otherwise I will just keep submitting it. Even with the fat studies area. I once had an editor say,

Esther Rothblum:

of a journal, she said, well, I normally encourage people to continue doing research, in this case I would suggest you just stop doing this, or something like that. I thought it was funny and I just kept going. But I think it is important just to realize that all of us experience rejections and eventually you win some, you lose some, and hopefully you focus on the ones you've managed to win.

Mason Funk:

Yeah. Super. Okie-dokie. Now, three people that you mentioned.

Mason Funk:

Oh, first of all, let's talk about Penny. Yeah. Your illustrious -- Your sidekick, whatever you want to call her. How did you meet and what has been kind of the trajectory of your relationship?

Esther Rothblum:

Right. So Penny, my partner, the love of my life, I met three days before the millennium. I was carpooling to Stanford on a sabbatical with one of their history professors, Estelle Freedman, a great person to interview. She used to go swimming with the Aqua Dykes,

Esther Rothblum:

as she called it, so we had dim sum, and I was really smitten with Penny. What I decided to do is I was studying lesbians and their sisters at the time and looking for all kinds of sisters, and Penny's a twin, so I asked if I could interview her about being a twin. We actually met that way. I think I then sent her an email and said I was attracted to her. And she said, well, she really doesn't know. I said, don't worry, I'm really good at friendship.

Esther Rothblum:

Then a few weeks later, she said are you still interested in a relationship? Luckily, I didn't say no, no, no, that's okay. But we did become lovers. Our anniversary is Passover, whenever Passover falls, that's when we first got involved. That will be, well, it's been over 22 years now. Yeah. At the time I was a professor at the University of Vermont, so for five years we had a long-distance relationship. Then I got the job at San Diego State University

Esther Rothblum:

in women's studies so I could be closer to Penny. For the next 16 years, we had a short-distance relationship. I'd come here for summers and weekends and Christmas and so on. Then when Covid hit, I've been up here ever since, and I've been retired now. Penny is also a retired physical therapist at Kaiser, but her real passion is a martial art called Aikido. She has a fifth-degree black belt. She's been doing it for 40 years, and she's now 72 years old.

Esther Rothblum:

I joke with her that racquetball, which I've played for 40 years, is competitive and non-spiritual while Aikido is spiritual and non-competitive, so we get along very well.

Mason Funk:

That's cute. That's wonderful. Okay. Nanette Gartrell, you've spoken about her, but give us a little perspective on the importance of Nanette, would you say to both field of academia and the women's movement, the lesbian movement?

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah. Nanette is wonderful.

Mason Funk:

Do me a favor, say her full name.

Esther Rothblum:

Nanette Gartrell I consider my closest friend, and we joke that we are identical twins separated at birth. We don't look alike, but we have very similar personality traits, so we call each other my twin. I always wanted to be a twin, as a kid. Here I am with my identical twin, and yeah, she is a brilliant researcher and there's so many things about her that are just amazing. One is she's a full-time clinician, now retired, but she did her entire

Esther Rothblum:

over 30 years study, the National Lesbian Longitudinal Family study, while seeing clients all day long. She wasn't in an academic setting. She'd have an academic affiliation, but it's not the same thing. She's just a brilliant researcher and writer. We've collaborated on a number of things. We edited a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies on how lesbian activists fund their research, and we also collaborated on a special issue on how lesbians

Esther Rothblum:

deal with disability and illness or of their partner or themselves or things like that. Usually I talk to her every day, but right now she's in Portugal, so I text or email her.

Mason Funk:

Oh, I didn't know she was in Portugal. What was something else you just mentioned that made me want to do a follow up question?

Esther Rothblum:

Oh, lesbian's activist funding their research.

Mason Funk:

No, it was the very last. I'll come back to it. It'll pop up in my memory hopefully. But let's move on to Marny Hall.

Esther Rothblum:

Marny Hall is also a very close friend. We have breakfast here every two weeks. Now, when she comes into the city from the East Bay. I mean, early on there were so few lesbians that wrote or published, and she was one of them. She's also a full-time therapist, and very funny. I think I first met her at a feminist therapy institute conference. She gave a workshop on lesbian relationships, and every sentence was so quotable

Esther Rothblum:

that I was trying to write it down with quotation marks, just to get her exact words. She's really brilliant. Right now her brother Richard Hall was a very famous gay male writer. He wrote a number of books and actually one of his short stories has been made into a movie, Country People, and Marny is his literary executor. She deals with things about him as well. But yeah, she is very funny, very brilliant.

Mason Funk:

Ah-Huh awesome. I remember what -- You mentioned disability, when you were talking about Nanette, just to plant a seed, we are continually, at OUTWORDS, doing more outreach to the disabled queer community, so if you have anybody that you think we should interview

Esther Rothblum:

And what is your age cutoff?

Mason Funk:

We don't have a specific cutoff. We tend to interview people at least in their sixties and older. But certain communities

Mason Funk:

have shorter life expectancies, logically enough. So we do make exceptions and interview people in their fifties.

Esther Rothblum:

Because just yesterday -- I zoom once a month with a polyamorous trio. Sondra Solovay, who is the one who does the fat activism, she is on disability. She actually married two women. She didn't tell us which one she's legally married to, obviously, but they had a ceremony on Zoom with two rabbis, one rabbi that Lilia knew, and one rabbi that Brandie knew.

Esther Rothblum:

Brandie is visually impaired, but probably in her forties, I think, and currently pregnant actually. And Lilia, I think also is on disability. So they are a threesome. I would really, if you're looking at polyamorous disabled women.

Mason Funk:

We are also looking for polyamorous stories, but are all three of them essentially in that like younger aged tier?

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah. Oh, none of them are in their sixties as far as I know. That's the problem.

Mason Funk:

Okay. We would probably wait in their case then, until they've had more years of polyamorous --

Esther Rothblum:

That's what I said to them yesterday. I said I would mention your names, but you're so young.

Mason Funk:

Yeah. If anybody else comes up for you and we are also looking -- We have our eyes on a four-person polyamorous family in the Boston area that involves both men and women, but we're having a hard time wrangling them. It's like wrangling cats, basically. But yes, we're looking for polyamory stories, whether it's women, men, mixed genders, and also, again, disabled queer people, but

Mason Funk:

preferably with a certain age.

Esther Rothblum:

One other thing I wanna mention is I've been doing some early research on asexual identity. Partly because in my LGBT class, suddenly everybody was saying, oh yeah, I read your article. I guess I'm asexual. And again, I don't really know that many people who identify as asexual. Certainly not people who are older, but that's another interesting community.

Mason Funk:

We've got our eyes out, also, for someone older who identifies as asexual.

Esther Rothblum:

Oh, good. Yeah.

Mason Funk:

Yeah. Ironically, you probably won't know this,

Mason Funk:

but there's a TV show called Project Runway. One of the hosts was this guy named Tim Gunn, who has come out publicly. He's an older man that you would think was gay. He's probably in his sixties, but he's come out publicly as being asexual. Probably a celebrity. So [inaudible] get to, but anyway, if you hear of any older asexual folks, let us know. Lastly, if you could speak about Elana Dykewomon.

Esther Rothblum:

Elana Dykewomon was a very dear friend who died recently. The way we met was, she was editing at the time,

Esther Rothblum:

Sinister Wisdom, which is a lesbian magazine. I was editing the Journal of Lesbian Studies, and I love meeting editors because it is a funny hierarchical role, you get something submitted and you can just immediately reject it if it's poorly written or it doesn't fit. If you want to, you send it out for peer review, and then it's kind of a feminist process. Three people are telling you anonymously and for no cost, what they think of it, and then the author responds and so on.

Esther Rothblum:

Elana and I really connected over our roles as editors and would have dinner maybe six times a year, when I was in town or so on. She was just a wonderful fat activist, Jewish activist, lesbian activist, had a wide friendship circle. I actually went to her house to sit Shiva after she died. There were people there from so many different walks of life and yeah, she was really lovely and just suddenly got this diagnosis of esophageal cancer.

Esther Rothblum:

I don't know if you know, but she had gotten a play accepted, that she had written called How to Let Your Lover Die, and that was her wonderful lover, Susan Levinkind, of many years. She wrote this play and it was performed on Zoom very nicely with different boxes. The day they aired it, Elana was in hospice, and she died during the showing of the play, How to Let Your Lover Die. Yeah.

Mason Funk:

Wow. Yeah. Oh, that's very poignant. Yeah. I'm really glad we were able to interview her before she passed. Yeah.

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah.

Mason Funk:

Kate, questions?

Kate Kunath

Not right now.

Esther Rothblum:

You've been very patient back there.

Mason Funk:

. All right. Well, we have --

Esther Rothblum:

Thank you so much. You must be exhausted and starving. How many interviews did you do today?

Mason Funk:

Just two. Well, recently, I did three, which makes it an extremely long day, but typically it's a morning and afternoon. And then one more tomorrow, and then we'll go back to LA. Yeah.

Esther Rothblum:

Who are you interviewing tomorrow? I probably don't know about that.

Mason Funk:

A guy named Chuck Forrester, who lives in Sebastopol.

Mason Funk:

He's been a longtime activist here in the city. He's done a whole bunch of things, including being -- I'm not quite sure what role, but he raised a bunch of money for the Hormel Center. Like, I think he said 3.5 million, when they were basically creating the center. But he's done a whole lot of different things.

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah. I just thought of somebody with a, did you interview Carol Seajay? She was one of the people I listed in my original. She is pretty well close to deaf,

Esther Rothblum:

very hard of hearing. She used to publish Feminist Bookstore news back when there were feminist bookstores and her papers are in the Hormel Library. That's what made me --

Mason Funk:

Oh, interesting. We have not interviewed her yet.

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah. I worry that some of the people you might have contacted might either have thought it was spam or so I can suggest to her that I mentioned your name and she should look for an email.

Mason Funk:

That'd be great. And we might not have reached out. Because we sort of were in this constant process of like reaching out

Mason Funk:

and it's just --

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah. And she's over 70. Also, Estelle Freedman's partner, Susan Krieger, is blind and became blind with a very strange, it's something to do with arthritis of the eyeball. So she has a guide dog now, and she's written a number of books, actually. The Mirror Dance is my favorite from way back about lesbian community, and she's in her seventies. So anyway, I'll email that to you.

Mason Funk:

Super. Okay. Final four questions.

Speaker 3

Can I ask one question?

Mason Funk:

Yeah.

Speaker 3

I just wanted to know

Speaker 3

how to access all of the journals that you've edited and the archive of that.

Esther Rothblum:

If you go to Journal of Lesbian Studies, you'll notice it has all --

Mason Funk:

Actually, do me a favor, tell me. Pretend that I asked that question.

Esther Rothblum:

Okay. So if you wanna access articles from the Journal of Lesbian Studies, you can just get on the website, Journal of Lesbian Studies, and they will have all the issues from issue 1 to 26, but they just have the abstract,

Esther Rothblum:

the little paragraph. Then if you want to get the pdf, you'd have to do it through a library, but I can say, privately to you, if you just email me some of your favorite titles, I'll email you the PDFs. And same with Fat Studies. It's called Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, and all the same publisher, Taylor and Francis/ Routledge, all the past issues are online with just the abstracts. And again, I can access that PDFs.

Mason Funk:

Gotcha.

Speaker 3

Yeah. For it's mostly like you have to have like a JSTOR kind of subscription access. Like you can only really do it through a research mode, right?

Esther Rothblum:

The way that publishers are making money, it used to be, they would twist my arm to get universities to subscribe, because universities pay the really expensive copyright, meaning anybody can access it.

Esther Rothblum:

Now, the way they're making money is that if you look for an abstract and you wanna buy the article, it's like $30 or $40. That's how they're making money for downloads, because many universities around the world are realizing, rather than subscribe to a journal, which your colleagues may only use once in their lifetime, you might as well just pay the download fee. So yeah, if you're not connected to a university library, it gets really expensive. I usually tell people

Esther Rothblum:

that I'm happy to send them a few PDFs if they send me three or four that they want me to send.

Mason Funk:

Super. Do you have more questions, Kate?

Speaker 3

No, that's, that is it?

Mason Funk:

Okay, super. So we have a final four questions that we ask all of our interviewees. The first would be if you could tell your 15 year old self, I forget where you're living, were you in Austria?

Esther Rothblum:

Yes.

Mason Funk:

But if you could tell your 15 year old self anything, what would it be? And start with, "If I could tell my 15 year old self --"

Esther Rothblum:

When I was a kid and

Esther Rothblum:

I sort of didn't know where my life was going, I would actually pretend that the older Esther was standing next to me and reassuring me that all would be well, that I will grow up and I'll be okay. That's what I would tell my 15 year old self, "You know what? you're gonna be okay."

Mason Funk:

Ah-Huh . Excellent. Do you subscribe to the notion that there's something that kind of links all LGBTQIA2S+ people,

Mason Funk:

almost like a superpower that connects us as different as we are, as much as we might argue about this topic or that topic, but that all gay men, lesbians, trans people, gender nonconforming, et cetera, that there's something that links us all, sort of a superpower or a particular quality? If so, what do you think it is?

Esther Rothblum:

Back in the 1970s or 1980s anybody

Esther Rothblum:

who was different really bonded together. There's an article the journal published about West Texas where the author said that would be the one gay man, the one straight librarian who was a Democrat, the one lesbian, things like that. I really do think people felt the sense of connection. We are othered. We are others in some way. Now, because there are so many of us, you get these cliques and these divisiveness-es and who's more progressive than the other and so on.

Esther Rothblum:

But absolutely, I mean, I think there is gaydar of some sort for any member of an oppressed group, whatever that means, the sense that yeah. I get you, you're part of my tribe in a way.

Mason Funk:

Mm-Hmm I'm gonna introduce, I said the final four, but in our morning interview with this amazing woman, Pam David, she said the question she wished people asked her more often is, what has enabled you to sustain, in her case, it was "your activism." I don't know if you regard yourself as an activist.

Esther Rothblum:

It's hard to say.

Mason Funk:

Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Esther Rothblum:

Well,

Mason Funk:

What would you say has sustained you as an academic/activist?

Esther Rothblum:

Yeah, I think, first of all, I think my activism is encouraging women to publish. I mean, I think that the written word is there, long past our lifetime. It's very important that we publish. Doesn't even matter on what, just something, because if you look back on people even

Esther Rothblum:

who never learned to read or write in the past, like women or people of color, we will never have access to their thinking or their words. So it is really important to publish. What sustains me, I think, are my friendships. I call up Nanette every day and complain, you wouldn't believe what somebody said. I always say I'm sorry to kvetch. She says, oh, please, let's kvetch. Yeah, that helps a lot. It's just sharing the sense of, you know what, what happened and what people said. And having that sense of shared bondedness.

Mason Funk:

That's nice. That's great. Why is it important to you to share it? Why is it important to you to share your story?

Esther Rothblum:

I think it's important that people's lives and memories are there again, especially from members of underrepresented groups, because we are so often invisible or ignored. I don't know how long people will still be reading or writing with all these apps. So having oral histories is a wonderful source.

Mason Funk:

Mm-Hmm. . Excellent. And then looking at OUTWORDS as essentially a project to gather stories like yours, LGBTQIA2S+ elders across the US reaching into as many different communities and sub communities as you can, what do you see as the value of doing that? And if you could mention OUTWORDS in your answer.

Esther Rothblum:

Well, what's wonderful about OUTWORDS is focusing on elders, because this is a generation, people who are now in their sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties,

Esther Rothblum:

really came out at a time when it was a huge act of courage. And I'm sure many of interviewees may have been put in prison or had sexual reorientation therapy or lost their jobs or lost custody. Their stories are really important. I mean we are here because of them. We follow in their footsteps in a way. We were able to make a difference because of the risks they took. They were the very first generation, they were crucified, and

Esther Rothblum:

here we are to benefit from that trauma that they had.

Mason Funk:

Mm-Hmm. .