MASON FUNK:

Thank you so much, Diane, for being here. And would you start by stating and spelling your first and last names?

DIANE SANDS:

No, I will start by stating my full name, but not my first name. My full legal name is Haysel H-A-Y-S-E-L, named after my grandmother, Diane Sands, S-A-N-D-S, but I've always gone by just Diane Sands.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. And how is Diane spelled?

DIANE SANDS:

D-I-A-N-E S-A-N-D-S.

MASON FUNK:

Perfect. And can you tell us

MASON FUNK:

the date and place of your birth?

DIANE SANDS:

I was born March 23rd, 1947, and I was born, actually, in St. Ignatius, Montana, up on the Salish Kootenai reservation. Never lived in St Ignatius, but it was the only hospital within a hundred miles. I was born under the powerful mission mountains on that reservation.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. And this is Eastern Montana?

DIANE SANDS:

Nope. This was in Western Montana. I grew up in Eastern Montana,

DIANE SANDS:

but my parents were teaching in Western Montana when I was born.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. I think one of the fun things to touch on briefly is just talk about Montana. It's a vast state and there seems like there's a very kind of basic divide, if you want to call it that, between Western Montana and Eastern Montana. People think of Montana, they think of Yellowstone, they think of glaciers and so forth. That's all kind of Western Montana in my understanding. Can you talk about what it means

MASON FUNK:

to have grown up in Eastern Montana?

DIANE SANDS:

Well, I would say I grew up in Montana. I'm a westerner. When I was in graduate school in DC, one thing I was very aware of was that I am a westerner. I am not an east coast person. I am not a California person. I am a westerner in, kind of, the libertarian sense of the word. I think most of Montana is very much that. As a historian of the west and particularly of Montana history, I would say that traditionally and historically Montana

DIANE SANDS:

used to be a pretty strong democratic state, a strong union state both because of the mining industry here in Butte copper and gold and silver, and because the farm farmer and ranch community also was unionized and very powerful under the farmer's union, going back to the turn of the 19th century that has been lost. At this point, Eastern Montana is

DIANE SANDS:

considerably more rural and more conservative than some parts of Western Montana are. I think we like to think of ourself, at this point, as being more purple. We had 16 years of a democratic governor. Now we have an extremely conservative Republican governor for the first time in 16 years. And that changes the, you know, and it's that part of it's nationalized, it's the Trump effect at this point. But historically it's really been somewhat more of a libertarian

DIANE SANDS:

with some strong, progressive, and even socialist progressive threads to it. Missoula, itself, frequently known in its day as the Berkeley of the North, you'll be interested in new California people, a very progressive university town for the last 100 years with a strong writing and arts community and politically active community out of which some of our leading politicians and public figures have come out of Missoula.

MASON FUNK:

What does it

MASON FUNK:

mean to you to define yourself as a Westerner?

DIANE SANDS:

Again, I think partly goes back to that almost libertarian concept. I really, much more of a: live and let live; you help your neighbors out; you respect other people's opinions, even when they're dramatically different than yours; and you don't go around telling other people what to do with their lives. I'm heartened to see that most recently, a new poll that was done with all of Montanans around their support for the Montana constitution is that they strongly

DIANE SANDS:

support the constitution, which has this right to privacy in it, and all of these other strong provisions. Montana has one of the most progressive constitutions in the United States. We redid it in 1972 at the height of that whole political time. It has rights to privacy in it, has open government, it has a guarantee of a quality education, a clean and health law environment, et cetera. It's very progressive on a number of fronts.

DIANE SANDS:

I'm pleased to hear that the majority of Montanas do strongly support it. Although, in this day with the rising autocratic appeal of someone like Trump, that is the battles we're all fighting in this country, but I still have hopes that as a Westerner, that some of that libertarian it's too much government, too much intrusion into our lives, leave me alone and I'll leave you alone will in the end triumph. And also that, I think the state like

DIANE SANDS:

this is this country has been really committed to a democratic vision of how we govern ourselves in the sense of sort of almost the enlightenment philosophy around rational government and making decisions that are based in the needs of the people and not in some theoretical ideology that we now see in many ways trying to take over the country. And I also love this goddamn land.

DIANE SANDS:

I love the dirt of this state. I feel like I am part of this dirt. This earth literally is my body, and I will return to it that way. It's not the east coast. It's not the west coasts. It's here and largely Eastern Montana. I love the Prairie. I go over there and I feel like I flatten out. I have a minor in geology that 600 million years. I just see it with my eye. I can feel it. And it is

DIANE SANDS:

instinctual to my very being.

MASON FUNK:

I love that. I'm a Westerner only if you count California. But my folks were very -- My mom was kind of an amateur historian who loved the West. My parents lived for 30 years in Northern Nevada after they raised their kids, so I can relate somewhat to that sense of just that vastness. That's why my parents chose, where they chose to live. It also sounds like you love

MASON FUNK:

the dirt of Montana in ways that you don't, you know, you love Colorado and Wyoming's fine, but it's Montana that you love.

DIANE SANDS:

It's Montana I love, Yellowstone in particular, but I also love, not the traditional history of the state, which I've certainly taken and well aware of. The historical society last year gave me their lifetime award as a guardian of heritage. But the heritage, I feel, that I am the guardian of is not the traditional history that is often taught, and I've spent 50 years

DIANE SANDS:

working to redefine the history of the West, the history of women, the social history, so that people in this state and everywhere else come to understand the diversity of human experience and the importance people have played in actually making their own lives better and not being in the control of the traditional history, which is the Anaconda company and the military, and all of that. That certainly

DIANE SANDS:

also goes back to my growing up on reservation and understanding that history as well as my own genealogy on my mother's side, 17 lines back to the revolution, many of them slave owners in the south, my dad's side, they were immigrants to Montana in 1901, had an arranged marriage and came from Germany and spoke German at home. It's a very different background that I bring to my own identity, but also to my work,

DIANE SANDS:

as a historian and as a person who is an activist and tries to impact public policy.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Give us a little primer on Montana's tribes and reservations please.

DIANE SANDS:

Well, I'm not a Native person, but I am one of the people who help start Native American studies. I spend a lot of time in the reservation world. We are on Indian land. One of the things that's happened that I so appreciate

DIANE SANDS:

is that particularly in Missoula, there are no public meetings that don't open within acknowledgement, "We are on Indian land." I think that's important is just trying to raise the awareness of people of how diverse this state really is, and the people who are still here from the various tribal experiences. One of my favorite things about that, well, there's 12 tribes, basically 12 to 13 tribes, depending on how you count, seven reservations.

DIANE SANDS:

It's a significant population. About half of the Native community lives in urban areas, off reservation, and the legislature at this point, I think has 12 Native legislators, all reservations in some urban areas. There's quite a bit of diversity there. In fact, the very first legislator I ever met, Dolly Acre, in the fourth grade in Brockton, up on the Fort Peck reservation, was the first Native American legislator in the state. Back in the fifties,

DIANE SANDS:

she was very impressive and left a mark on me. They all tie together in that way, but you know why Montana's a pretty white state overall about 7 to 10% of Montana calls itself Native American, but it also has some other traditional smaller cultural diversity, is a strong Greek immigrant population in one place, Hispanics,

DIANE SANDS:

particularly related to the sugar bead industry, African American population related to the military and the railroads, Japanese, which I'm sort of an expert in because of my work at the museum on Japanese internment during World War II. There are other populations besides just run of the mill white people, but the majority of Montana's pretty darn white, which is why I think the inclusion in the Montana 1972 constitution in the education section

DIANE SANDS:

to say that all Montanans will learn about Indian people, their cultures, not just in the past, but in the contemporary, is one of the most innovative things in that constitution. We now call it "Indian education for all." I'm the one who added "for all," because there is traditional Indian education for Native students. That's a federal education program, but this is a commitment in the constitution that every Montanan will learn about Native peoples in the state, throughout the

DIANE SANDS:

educational structures of the state. I've spent a lot of time working on that, both within the office of public instruction and in various projects, because that is really a gift to the non-Native population to understand both the history of this state and what's going on, and what's still going on because so much of the legislation that we deal with in many ways has to do with sovereignty issues, jurisdictional issues, whether it's having to do with land issues, water issues, which are so important to everyone at this point,

DIANE SANDS:

who owns the water in this country. Well, I'm telling you for the most part, it's Native, because of tribes and because of treaties that they have reserved these water rights and they're theirs. There's so many areas in which even traditional culture still on reservations intersects with the non reservation world and with state government. Whether it's working in the correction system where the Native population constitutes about

DIANE SANDS:

40% of our prison population, even though they're less than 10% of the total population issues there to be addressed suicide rate, very high very high percentage of Native Americans serve in the military. There's strong connections related to the warrior cultures, going on economic development, tourism. If you're talking about glacier park, that's black feet country, that is their Homeland. And so we're really thrilled to have the new

DIANE SANDS:

secretary of interior be a Native American woman who is really dealing with the issues around Native land issues, and has convened an advisory group that's gonna work on renaming at various sites, because I spent a lot of time, one of my bills, which was to get rid of the S word, the squaw word is being sexist, racist, and pornographic. We spent 10 years changing about 86 place name sites in the state around that. There's just so many connections

DIANE SANDS:

to this still being Native land and the importance of recognizing that.

MASON FUNK:

Wow, thank you for that. I wish we could spend more time, but I'm gonna move on. But that's an excellent, excellent portrait.

DIANE SANDS:

Well, and it's related to the topics that you wanna talk about too, is the two-spirit community. That has always been a significantly different way that Native peoples look at queer issues than in the majority population.

DIANE SANDS:

In the work that I've done around this, there's always been a two-spirit component to that. In fact, when we started Pride and we can talk about this later, one of the first things David Herrera and I did just was decide that we would have a two-spirit group and that he was going to organize that, and that presence has been really strong and an important part of the community.

MASON FUNK:

Yes. And David and I have been in touch. I'm still working on reactivating

MASON FUNK:

our contact. He's talked to me about I'm gonna blank on the person's name, right? Steven Barrios mm-hmm . At OUTWORDS, we are putting a lot of time and energy right now into creating more contact and relationship with indigenous people across the country. That's an ongoing process and I have someone in the background who is too noisy, but I'm gonna hope that quiet down by the time I ask my next question, which is, tell me about the family you grew up in. The family of origin, the values.

MASON FUNK:

Also, you grew up on Fort Peck reservation. How did your family and that location kind of begin to shape who you are today?

DIANE SANDS:

Well, I grew up in a really rural area. I should say my dad's family, growing up, as homesteaders in small Montana towns. My dad served in World War II and had a row of bullet holes, was left to be dead. Instead of taking over the family farm, which he was never really interested in, he became a teacher, science, and the school

DIANE SANDS:

administrator and his sister was also an army nurse during War II. She has a strong influence on my life because she never married. She was not a lesbian, but she would not marry outside of her Catholic faith. She spent her life working in many parts of the world, whether it was in the Pacific during World War II in county health departments, starting nursing programs in Guam and various parts of the country in New York with Jonas Stock. I mean,

DIANE SANDS:

she traveled very widely in and outside of the country and she brought all those experiences to us as kids living in this very small town, which didn't have a newspaper. We didn't have TV till we were in high school in the sixties. She brought that breadth of experience, that interest in cultural diversity and interest in the wider world to all of us. That was a very important part of my life. She's the person that, if you were in reader's digest in those days and people would say, who's

DIANE SANDS:

the most interesting person, it would've been my Aunt Polly, that she really showed you there were other fabulous ways to be in the world and people would say, yeah, but it's just too bad she never married and had kids. And she would say, "Then I would never have done all the other things that I did." She was really the window into a broader world, saying, you don't have to get trapped getting married, having kids and living in one of these small towns, which I never, ever, ever wanted to do in any way, shape or form.

DIANE SANDS:

On my mother's and my grandmother and the farm was about 50 miles from the reservation. So because my dad's mother was widowed and elderly in the farm, he really felt a need to be close enough to her, to help out and do all of that. That was really why we were in that physical area, as it goes. My mom's family very much more middle class. As I said, many lines back to the American revolution,

DIANE SANDS:

my grandmother was very big in the DAR and every women's organization. She worked for Senator Mike Mansfield. He tried to convince her to run for the legislature one time. My grandfather, who was a mere postman, said, "Hazel, if you're gonna run for the legislature, you might as well move to the Baxter hotel, because you're never home anyway." So she didn't do that, but she was a strong democratic influence in my life, and college educated, as was my great-grandmother on that side. She wanted my mother to marry up to some

DIANE SANDS:

professional man. My mother wanted none of that. She was really a librarian, a book reader and very interested in the life of the mind as much as one could be in these small towns. She was a teacher as well. The two of them chose to live basically in smaller towns in Eastern Montana. Dad really liked the work on the reservation. I think he found it challenging. Mentally he was always trying to figure out okay, in these school systems on reservations, which were

DIANE SANDS:

horrible in every possible way, how do you help enhance kids' lives in a place where you really have very few resources and you have these really racist attitudes. Growing up in that space, Fraser, where I went to high school, really had about 300 people. You have a strong Indian community there. This is the Lakota and Dakota, it's Assiniboine boy in both, on this reservation, and

DIANE SANDS:

predominantly a Native population. Then you have the Norwegians who own all the land because they have bought it all from various tribal members over the years. The majority of the land at that point was being held by non-Natives, huge economic conflict there, and they're all related to each other, of course. A Mennonite, German Mennonite, community who also live a somewhat separatist life. I mean, they go to school, but they don't

DIANE SANDS:

go to dances or any of that sort of stuff. Then there's us, I mean our family and maybe one other teacher family, that's there temporarily who are not related to everybody, don't own land in the area, don't have an economic interest in the community. In that community, you really have to learn how to work together with people that you may not normally agree with or who share a common experience. I always found it pretty interesting because

DIANE SANDS:

I'm just interested in people who are different than I am, I guess, as much as anything. Our family overall really enjoyed being there, although my sisters and I have a very different point of view on what it was like to grow up as a non-Native on a reservation. I'm the oldest of five kids. I have sisters who are identical twins. My brother is the youngest. We all spent most of our years in reservation schools. I was not a particularly social person,

DIANE SANDS:

but my sisters, the twins, are very social, cheerleaders, everything you would think. They would always bring all of their friends would hang out at our school, both at our house, both the white kids and the Native kids and laugh. I mean, they were just a barrel of fun and these tiny little houses that we had and they in high school watch TV or they'd play games or just carry on like kids do. That became quite a problem at one point

DIANE SANDS:

because the white families in town did not let Indians into their house. Now, white kids were in Indians houses regularly, but Indians were not allowed into most white family's houses. When I was in high school, one of my sister's girlfriends and one of their boyfriends got together, got married. They've still been married now over 50 years. They lived across the street from each other. She and her dad was on the school board,

DIANE SANDS:

and his family lived across the street and she'd been in their house. When they decided to get married, the school board consisting of three white brothers-in-law basically did not renew my dad's teaching contract because this was "our fault." If we didn't let Indians in our house, this never would've happened. It was pretty vicious there for a while. Some of my high school classmates just saying nothing but a bunch of Indian lovers over there, and

DIANE SANDS:

my dad, being the strong union guy he is, called up the state superintendent instruction and called up the union. And they said, "No, they can't terminate you for that." They never apologized. They just kind of went on as they say, and that would come up regularly. My sister, who is married to a tribal member at this point, she brought him to our church, the Lutheran church, and one of the women who was actually the grandmother of this young woman,

DIANE SANDS:

who'd gotten married, said, "Well, we really don't want you here, Dick, why don't you go to your own church down the road?' I mean, living in the day-to-day, realities of racism was just a reality in that community. I was quite aware of it and conscious of it, my sisters really weren't. They thought everything, everybody got along great. They just have a different personality than I do. I'm always looking for those kinds of things, and was aware of the differences in

DIANE SANDS:

economics, quite aware of the fact next door neighbors, the big leggings didn't have water that was safe to drink, so Indian kids died at a lot higher rate. Kids dropped outta school because a number of the other teachers would beat 'em up, push 'em out. Plus you're teaching history that says basically Indian people were losers. Who would stay around in that. It was just a day to day reality, certain stores that Indians weren't allowed into, you knew which bar

DIANE SANDS:

was the Indian bar, which bar was a white bar. All of that. I mean, it's just like segregation in the south, except you're all living in a very tiny confined space, but that started to really change in those years.

MASON FUNK:

Let me jump in. Yeah, let me jump to kind of reground ourselves and then we'll move forward. What you mentioned was that even in the church setting -- I want to kind of touch briefly on that even in terms of your high school years, but you said you were quote "no end of trouble,

MASON FUNK:

even at church." And so I want to kind of complete our portrait of you of someone who is just interrogating everything and just talk briefly about that in the religious/spiritual context.

DIANE SANDS:

I recognize I had a lot of privilege, both being a white kid in that environment with educated parents, there was not alcoholism in our family or abuse of any kind. An expectation we would all have educations because even our great grandparents had had an education,

DIANE SANDS:

and so there were expectations, but not a lot of pressure, but particularly being the oldest child, my mother would say, "You make your decisions and do what you're going to do, but there may be prices to pay for it." In high school, when this one teacher said, "Well, girls just aren't as smart as boys." I challenge that in class and I would not put up with it. We had quite an argument and I left. Being the principal's

DIANE SANDS:

daughter, I got away with it too. I never went back to his class. He lived across the alley, you know, good friends. I told him many years later when I saw him, that was one of the first things that turned me into a feminist. Thank you very much. And relative to the church setting, I mean all of us, white people, basically either belonged to the Mormon church, the Catholic church or the Lutheran church, which were the only churches in town. I was very active in the Lutheran church,

DIANE SANDS:

sang in the choir. In the summer I would be one of the ones who would give sermons, because I was not a shy person about speaking, even at that point, when the pastor would go on vacation. I challenged, even, confirmation, which is a normal process you take when you're like a freshman in high school and you learn the theology of your church and they're pat answers, what is the nature of God, blah, blah, blah. I just had questions about all of it. I wasn't buying any of it.

DIANE SANDS:

I kind of got kicked out, left confirmation and met privately with our pastor, who was a wonderful man, very intellectually interesting, so I had private lessons in the theology, which worked that there's a right answer, but here's how we think about things. That encouragement to think and challenge fundamental value systems was in me and encouraged in me at a very young age. If it was up to me,

DIANE SANDS:

challenging the church, I was more than happy to do that, even from that age. By the time I was at the university and doing anti-war activity, for Christmas, I would take back a big poster saying, pray for peace. It ruined everybody's Christmas. How could you put up a poster that was anti-war saying 'in support of peace'. I mean, excuse me. I mean, churches are supposed to be about peace, but no, I could be quite irritating.

MASON FUNK:

I love it. Okay. We're gonna jump forward in 1971 and a conference you attended, which according to the notes or your prep interview was the first time you spotted lesbians.

DIANE SANDS:

Well, you can't just skip over here, Mason, that I went to the University of Montana in Missoula, my dad's graduate degrees were there, but it had a political reputation as the Berkeley of the North. There was all kinds of political activism here from

DIANE SANDS:

the first minute I walked in and there were faculty and other people standing vigil outside the university main hall about the war and the Lutheran center here, which I transferred to. That was one of the safe places that I had, that I could be myself and be with other people whose interest were aligned much with mine because the man who was a campus minister at the time, his father had been head of the national Luther church in America,

DIANE SANDS:

and his sister and brother were very active working in the black community with King and other people in Chicago. It was another outlet to a larger world. I very quickly got very involved in the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, starting the women's movement, starting the black studies program and all of those things. If it was a political activity of the day, because as we all know, all movements are always related to each other. Intersectionality,

DIANE SANDS:

back there, was as much a reality then as it is now. You work together on common issues, sometimes they overlap, sometimes they didn't. But I was involved in all of those. So yeah, the women's movement was really where my core and my base was and still is in many ways. While we had consciousness raising groups and we're talking a lot about women identified women and living really in a women's community,

DIANE SANDS:

it was not expressly lesbian, but it was really much more a women's separatist kind of world in terms of where we spent our time and who our friends were, and what activities we were engaged in. The first time I ever saw a lesbian was really at the international Indo-Chinese women's conference in Vancouver in '71. It was sponsored by the Black Panther, women's liberation and

DIANE SANDS:

women for peace. And at that, there were workshops. This is Vancouver, British Columbia, on lesbianism and all kinds of women's issues. But I remember actually seeing lesbians at that, which was kind of interesting since I already knew a lot about the context of all of this, there was nobody here who was out that I knew of, although I later found out several of the women, faculty were just terrified

DIANE SANDS:

of us young radicals because they feared we would out them, so they did not show up because I mean, they would occasionally show up at the outer edges of a program or something, but they really felt very endangered by all of our activism and our being as vocal as we were about our politics. And so they did not approach us.

MASON FUNK:

How? Explain, how did they think that you were going to "out" them?

DIANE SANDS:

Well, they were in the closet and we were not in the closet about anything . I mean, we were kind of blatantly in your face most of the time about whatever it is we were doing. I mean, I'm thinking particularly of one woman in the math department, African American, older woman, been around quite a while, which I later found out was, in fact, a lesbian. She wanted to approach, but she was afraid she would lose her job or her standing in the community or in that department, it would make her life more difficult.

DIANE SANDS:

She just really hung back on the periphery as I came to find out over time, smartly so. I mean, absolutely was at risk. No question about it.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah.

DIANE SANDS:

Yeah. What did I inter risk? I'm a privileged white kid and student with no real position or any kind of power. I got nothing to risk.

MASON FUNK:

Right. Interesting. Feel free to break in any time if you feel like I moved forward too quickly as you just did.

MASON FUNK:

But I want to get to a kind of an important chapter when you said you went to graduate school and you felt like you had to "get out of here for a while." I wonder what that was about and why that was important, but of course, ultimately you came back, but what was important about that at that time?

DIANE SANDS:

Well, when I came to the university of Montana in 1965, in that period of 1965 to the early 70s, all this activism was going on. We would start a new organization every week. We started

DIANE SANDS:

the women's center. I started in a referral service for women to get legal abortions out of state. Well, an illegal activity. We started the rape crisis program, started and taught the first women's studies classes. All these organizations that I really spent most of my time in, yes, I took classes at the university and most of the time they gave me a grade. I could get a B without doing anything other than showing up. I was doing political work through all of that. Then when the early seventies hit and you've got

DIANE SANDS:

Roe versus Wade happening and all these federal pieces of legislation, and it changed over to being more institutional, the war started to end. All of those drivers for change became more stabilized, and a lot of the people that I had been, or who were my age, had left the university and gone on with her lives and a very important woman, kind of my spiritual soulmate, moved to

DIANE SANDS:

Missoula from Austin, Texas. She had run all these programs down there. She already had a doctorate, so when she arrived, basically, I handed off a lot of these organizations to her and I just needed a break. I needed an intellectual break. I've always been interested in kind of theory, in 'how do societies change?' It's why my undergraduate degree is in anthropology, how society put together, how does society change? How do you change the norms in the society?

DIANE SANDS:

I felt like I really needed some time to think. The old theory and practice model of socialism, theory and practice. I've been doing a lot of practice and I needed some time to think about the theories of this. I mean, there were groups here in Missoula who were the socialist feminists and the socialist who thought this economics was the only focus to it. My friend who'd moved here from Texas called herself an anarchist feminist, whatever in God's name that means.

DIANE SANDS:

But she was a great organizer. She took over a lot of these. I consider myself to be a radical feminist with pink socialist tinges around the edges, but I really wasn't in the socialist school and I wasn't in the arnachist school. I looked around for graduate programs and ways to get outta here for a few years to spend some time really thinking. There were only three graduate programs in the country at that time in women's studies and primarily on the east coast. And I ended up going to

DIANE SANDS:

George Washington university in DC because I figured it'd be the most diverse. Little did I know it turned out to be a very privileged white university that had very few people of color attending it at that point. Nonetheless, it was a pretty engaging environment to be in because of all the national organizations there. It's where I became good friends with Charlotte Bunch, for example, whom we recruited to come teach a class in political theory, and our library was the library of Congress.

DIANE SANDS:

It was a stimulating and, again, a really a woman identified woman environment with a number of lesbians, but also just women who were really interested in making and had been making the same kinds of social justice change work that I was doing.

MASON FUNK:

You kind of knew that you were getting out of town, out of Montana, for a little while. Was your intention always to go back?

DIANE SANDS:

I'm not sure I ever thought about it, but probably yeah. No, my intention wasn't to get a job and stay back East, although there were plenty of people from my program, including our director, who were really trying to get me to stay there and take over one of these national organizations or do some of that kind of work or to get a doctorate in something. I knew I wasn't an academic. I knew I was an activist, but that I really saw history and those intellectual skills as being a political tool that

DIANE SANDS:

you would use. I had no idea what the hell I was gonna do with it. But I knew that I was not going to do it in DC, I'm not an Easterner, I'm not an urban person, and change happens everywhere. People think we were isolated back then. We really weren't. I mean, the people traveled everywhere. We thought nothing of jumping in a car and driving to San Francisco, six of us sleeping on various floors and attending a conference. I mean, we would travel extensively.

DIANE SANDS:

We got all kinds of newsletters and magazines from everywhere across the country, corresponded with different people. I think of the beginnings of the National Gay Lesbian Task Force. They were all kind of friends and people, they'd come out here and go camping with us and we would drive to somewhere and spend the weekend just hanging out. We created conferences and things so we could do that with each other. I mean, it was a very vibrant time across the country and internationally, really

DIANE SANDS:

for all these political movements, we were pretty well aware of what else was going on around the world, so you were still hooked in, you weren't really isolated.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Did you happen to ever cross paths with a guy named Gil Gerald?

DIANE SANDS:

No, but I mostly lived in the world of women, so Elizabeth Birch, Perry Jude, eventually Irving and those guys. I just didn't really spend much time with men.

DIANE SANDS:

I mean, they didn't interest me. Although I dealt with some of 'em relative to other civil rights issues, the Native American community in that, but that's not the world that I lived in. I mean, we go down here Sweet Honey in the Rock at the bar in the evenings and the women I lived with there all lived in that world too. So no, not particularly

MASON FUNK:

Great. I love that. Along the way, we've been privileged, OUTWORDS, to have some women who were

MASON FUNK:

former and current lesbian separatists, living in community, allow us to come interview them, which has been a huge blessing, especially given the fact that back in the day, that just would never have happened.

DIANE SANDS:

There were, yeah. I mean, so Charlotte Bunch was one of the Furies. We were certainly well-read on the Furies and what they did, and a really good friend in New York who was world champion women's judo champion or something like that who lived in an old

DIANE SANDS:

lesbian community. I'd go up to Boston and spend some time with some friends there that I'd met, who were filmmakers, who made pink triangles. While I was on the East coast, I was up and down in Boston and New York and DC, a little bit in those various women's and lesbian communities. Not so much on the West coast, sorry to say.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Now two questions on the horizon. We can pick whichever one we prefer first, but I just wanna make sure we get to them.

MASON FUNK:

One is the oral history work you did, especially around so-called illegal topics. The other one is the women's festivals that you helped organize in Montana. I don't really know what order we should approach them in. But I know that I wanna get to both of them.

DIANE SANDS:

Well, let's just say, I mean, in graduate school, my focus ended up being not anthropology, which I thought it would be. It was primarily in history, in women's history, which I had avoided history in Montana, because it was white men teaching about white men's history.

DIANE SANDS:

I just plain wasn't gonna put it in my head, but there I took a lot of women's history and political theory and those sorts of things, and I was trained by the Smithsonian and how to do oral history. As a tool, I found that really fascinating. One of the first things I did when I came back to Montana, and my attachment to the women's resource center, was create a women's history project. And I think the reason for that is so important, for those of you interested in history, one of the

DIANE SANDS:

first things political movements do is try to find their own history. I mean, when I was a sophomore at the university, spending my time at the Lutheran center and I was sort of head of the campus student ministries, the campus pastor said, what are you doing this summer? And I said, I don't know. And he said, well, why don't you go to Chicago and work in the black community there? They're running a summer program for 1500 kids, and my brother's a pastor there. Fine. Off I went. Looked like the reservation only with a ton of people crammed into a smaller space. But one of the things we were teaching

DIANE SANDS:

was black history, you know, back in 1967. And I went ding, ding, ding, this is what we need to be doing for Native Americans and for women. The recovering of those histories as a political tool was one that became very apparent to me. And I had that tool in my hand and was to do history. We started just collecting randomly diverse histories of women in Montana. And then

DIANE SANDS:

because I was doing that and that caught people's attention at the historical society and other places, a lot of the conference work that we've been doing in women's studies related to history, I guess I should say, as a person who had started women's studies and taught the first classes here at the university of Montana and the first one at Montana state university. And I was on the national board for the national women's studies association for its first six years, so I was doing a lot of conferences

DIANE SANDS:

and meetings around that, around the country, and attending many national Berkshire conferences and women historians and all that. So seeing the use of political history and what people were recording and what those tools were, that ended up intersecting with my background and interest in reproductive rights. And so I don't even know who had suggested it, but that since I knew many of the illegal abortionists

DIANE SANDS:

and I knew the women, all of my generation, who had had illegal abortions, a project began to emerge as part of the Montana women's history project. I got, at that point in the late seventies, $10,000, which was the largest grant the Montana committee for the humanities had ever given to anybody to do an oral history of the illegal abortion community in Montana. I spent a couple years doing that, and I'm still working on it, of course.

DIANE SANDS:

That propelled me in a lot of other directions. I mean, I started NARAL in the state, I did a lot of the lobbying on it, and as a legislator, carried many of the bills on it, still working on it. But that put me over in the outlaw world, as well as having been a civil rights person, people would come through here who are part of the weather underground, et cetera. I used to work in draft resistance. I took guys up to Canada,

DIANE SANDS:

other kinds of illegal activity, I lived with the biggest drug dealer in town. It was a whole community of us. He was a political SDS person, as I was. I was around all kinds of other illegal activity. It seemed pretty normal. In fact, the thing to do, be outside the establishment totally. So to do an oral history of illegal abortion was just an extension of using my historical skills and interest for that political purpose.

MASON FUNK:

Can you talk a bit more about the value and the importance of living as you were sort of at the margins of the law?

DIANE SANDS:

Well, back then it was pretty cheap to live was one thing too. It really just didn't take much money, and most of us live kind of semi collectively. I hardly ever remembering it living in a household it didn't include four to six people coming and going at any given time. We chose very consciously to be living to

DIANE SANDS:

some degree outside the law or on the edge of the law. I mean, almost everybody, one of us at one point or another, having led various marches, I led taking over the ROTC building on campus at one point. Some of us had been arrested. Some of us had certainly been maced in marches. Some of us went to prison for various reasons. And we were proud of it because it really showed that you're willing to pay some of the prices for standing up against the injustices of the

DIANE SANDS:

systems that were around us. Whether it was my friends who went to prison for refusing to even -- Who were draft resistors or drugs or whatever it might be. Just the life of people who lived on the fringe, consciously, but of course, as a white person with an education, I could step out of it at any time. I didn't have to remain in it, which is the difference.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Big difference. Thank you for that. Let's go to the other question I had, which was about the

MASON FUNK:

women's festivals and their importance, what role you played, kind of roughly when they took place and why?

DIANE SANDS:

Well, let me talk about that whole area because coming out of the women's resource center and sort of the community activism around all kinds of women's issues, we always had lesbian events as part of these conferences, whether we were doing ones on the new right, where we had Charlotte Bunch come in, who was my friend, and talk about the rise of the right wing. We would have Holly Near,

DIANE SANDS:

or we would have Meg Christian or someone saying, we always had the cultural parts of it. We always had different speakers speak about the socialist activists would have their perspective and radicals would have their perspective and we'd have lesbians and whatever. It was really in that context though, of feminism. Now there was out in Montana here, which was then emerging, which was a mixed group of gay men and some lesbians who weren't predominantly identified as feminists,

DIANE SANDS:

and we found the gay men to be quite irritating at times. In fact, we almost came to blows one time, out on the lawn once. I remember someone kinda saying, "Jesus Christ, can't you guys learn to work together?" Well, not at the moment, no. I mean, there were lots of tensions in those times between men in general and gay men being as very privileged as gay men tended to be and oblivious to the realities of other people's lives. There were quite a few tensions around that, but in that

DIANE SANDS:

broader lesbian community in Montana, what was formed was the Montana Lesbian Coalition. There was a lesbian women's music organization that produced music and brought in different musicians, et cetera, into Montana for all these events. It was that group in general that formed the women's festivals. I think there were four of 'em that we did in various mountain encampments of different kinds of long rivers.

DIANE SANDS:

We'd all go camp for four or five days and there'd be 500, in the end, to 1,000 women. That's when we decided it was too damn many people and we weren't gonna do it anymore. Too much work, but they'd be great fun because there were all kinds of music performances and there'd be little consciousness raising and training programs on politics or relationships or whatever it might be, and we just all camped out together and hung around naked half the time. It was great fun. And those women started coming

DIANE SANDS:

from all around the country, but music festivals then, like the national women's music festival, were really a big deal and a big way that women came together across multiple states and different perspectives just to be in a safe and encouraging and nurturing space with each other. They were very renewing and energizing.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Yeah. We've begun to capture some of that history as well. We interviewed Holly Near a year or two ago and Jenny Berson. We're beginning to kind

MASON FUNK:

of try to capture some of that history as well. Thank you for sharing that. Now, I have three kind of signature events. The Idaho campaign that you managed, the "No on One" campaign, you and Mary getting together, and the local democratic party going nuts, kind of as a big moment that I wanna talk about. Then the campaign to overturn Montana's sexual deviate conduct act. So three moments,

MASON FUNK:

big moments. I'm not even sure, chronologically, which came first, but we can go at them any way you want.

DIANE SANDS:

Well, let's talk about Idaho, 1993, the rise of the new right, basically, Newt Gingrich and all of them were in force and you started to get the very first anti-gay ballot campaigns across the country. I mean, Oregon had already had one. The conservative Christian groups in Idaho had proposed a ballot

DIANE SANDS:

measure to basically prohibit schools and libraries from having materials about -- Even mentioning homosexuality. Idaho is way more conservative than Montana and always has been. It formed a small campaign to oppose that certainly, and HRC basically decided, I think, to get involved. They approached them. That year there was a ballot measure both in Oregon and in Idaho.

DIANE SANDS:

The Idaho people HRC approached me about the possibility going over there and taking over and running that campaign. I went over for an interview, that was the first thing. It was kind of interesting because the newspaper in the end put up an article about, oh my God, they've hired a lesbian to run a gay campaign. It was like, yeah. But in the interview process, the Congressman, who was a democratic Congressman in Idaho at the time, and

DIANE SANDS:

he was one of the interview team and standard kind of questions about your experience. The very last question was, he said, "I have one last question. Is there any pictures of the wedding?" And I said, no. He said, "Good, you're hired because." This ties back to my partnership with Ann Mary is when we got together, and it was a huge -- We can talk about the scandal that caused among the democratic party, but it had even been all around DC. He had heard that we had gotten married,

DIANE SANDS:

so he was very concerned that that would be a disqualifying event. I think that's still quite amusing, but the Idaho chem with pain I thought was really important and interesting because what it really did is we won, number one is we won. Which I think is really significant. Which was in a year where, as we sat there on election night, horrified as the country swept to the right in every way, shape and form, with the rise of what we're now seeing and its fruition

DIANE SANDS:

of the radical right, in Idaho, we just barely managed to squeak by and defeat that initiative, partly with just enormous support from the national queer organizations. I mean, HRC was fabulous. I mean, Elizabeth and Tim and all of 'em put most of the money into this campaign. They provided us often with staff. I had the guy who had been the communications director for the gore presidential campaign,

DIANE SANDS:

doing much of our messaging. Linda Laken doing our polling. I mean we had tremendous support from the national organization. They helped with much of our fundraising. Martina Navratilova wrote letters for us and fundraising and even the gold water family and all of that. It certainly wasn't just a local campaign. My job was partly just manage bringing all of those local and state resources together with a lot of the national resources to do it

DIANE SANDS:

in the end. I think we had a million and a half dollars. We had three offices Boise up in Colene and in Moscow or somewhere and about 25 full time staff. It was a pretty significant campaign and I've run other ballot measures, so I know that's a lot of infrastructure and investment in the campaign. A lot of us sort of standard political organizing and primarily out of Boise, which is the liberal center of Idaho.

DIANE SANDS:

But what I think is most interesting about it is the importance of the faith community to that, because in Idaho, Mormonism is such an important issue. The faith community, non-Mormon faith community, really organized to rally around the moral and ethical issues, around queer issues, which they had never really done. The visibility that they provided I thought was so important. Then the importance, even within the LDS community,

DIANE SANDS:

I grew up, as you know, on a reservation where LDS is always a big presence on reservations, going back to their whole theology about lost tribes and all that business. I knew how to be a Gentile in Mormon country, too. I mean, you will not find in any of our files, any discussion about addressing directly the Mormon community, they will make their own decisions. It's kind of like sovereignty in the tribes. They will speak for themselves. They will decide what they're going to do. It's not your business to tell them

DIANE SANDS:

what to do, which is in some ways the fatal flaw in this Idaho campaign by the Christian right, is they said, oh, it won't cost anything to do this. We'll come over to Pocatello in these Mormon communities, we'll go through your libraries and look at all your books and we'll pick out what you can read and not read. You do not tell the LDS community what they can read and not read. Our messaging, which most of the queer community in Idaho initially had wanted to be around discrimination.

DIANE SANDS:

Yeah, it is discrimination, but it doesn't poll. It doesn't sell. People don't get it. What did poll really well was, 'it's too much government. It's not enough Idaho.' The last thing you want is the government coming in and telling you what you can read and what you can teach in your schools. That's where, as a westerner and the libertarian, I think, ties to this, is we get it. The East coast people who are involved in this campaign, that didn't make any sense to them at all. They did not get that. There is no Westerner on either any end

DIANE SANDS:

of the political spectrum who does not understand because we have so much government presence. So much land is government. So many of our agencies are government. We understand keeping the government out of our private lives and our decisions, and still do, it's still a powerful message. That message, in the end, won the campaign, and in regards to the LDS community, when we were organizing and like Boise or in Pocatello or Idaho falls, which are strongly LDS communities, when we had

DIANE SANDS:

someone who was speaking relative to the campaign, the church had decided officially to stay out of it. She was the president of the school board and he was the head of the bank. We also made sure she was the head of the women's relief society, and he is the Bishop of the stake and everyone knew it. When they were speaking, they were speaking in a dual language, I should say. What it really did that was also encouraging is so many people came out in Idaho. I think they all thought there were no queer people in Idaho,

DIANE SANDS:

and particularly not Mormons who were queer. Although this is the time of Sonia -- can't remember her last name -- who was excommunicated from the Mormon church because of being a lesbian. But in all those towns, kids came out, older people came out, and that was really life affirming, I think, for those people and really building a movement there that had not been there before. We were really committed to that campaign being a movement building campaign. It wasn't just about winning this

DIANE SANDS:

particular ballot measure, but it was about creating organization and infrastructure and a connection between people. I think we did that pretty successfully.

MASON FUNK:

It's so fascinating, I love it. But when you say "we were committed to this being a campaign that was bigger than just this campaign," who was that? Who were those people who saw the bigger picture, who saw this as one campaign that will be a stepping stone to other campaigns, part of a movement?

DIANE SANDS:

Well, I was thinking about this

DIANE SANDS:

the other day because of a ballot measure we're about to face in Montana around abortion. The Oregon people who run these campaigns before talked about this a lot. I used to work with Oregon Action and those groups. There's a group called BISC -- it's still around, the Ballot Initiative Strategic Center, I used to do some training for them after this -- who really go in and try to help states back then and even now, in running these campaigns and not having them be one shot kind of deals where the purpose isn't

DIANE SANDS:

just to win. The purpose is how do you use them to be movement building, community building, given you're investing all of these resources in there, how do you then, when you're done, have a stronger infrastructure in support of social change? Not just yeah, we did that and now let's just all go our separate ways. They were involved in helping us think that through and how we would do that. The creation of networks and organizations and people who knew each other was very important,

DIANE SANDS:

both local people and the national people. The funny story I should tell you about the Lesbian Avengers, God help me. Northern Idaho, I used to work for the forest service in Northern Idaho. I know Sandpoint in that area, which is where the Aryan Nation has a big stronghold and did then, while the Lesbian Avengers on their motorcycles came in and they were gonna go up there and drive through the compound and throw kisses and do all this. I said to them, no, you are not

DIANE SANDS:

going to do that. Number one, it's extremely dangerous, we had already had been threatened with pipe bombs and things of that sort. I had a full time highway patrol and security guards relative to everything. We told everyone they had to take bumper stickers off their car, et cetera, because of the fear of violence. You just weren't safe when you're on the roads. I just said to the Avengers, no, we don't want you to do this. Don't do it. Here's the dangers with it. While they didn't do it, but of course, they got pretty pissed off at me as the mean old lesbian

DIANE SANDS:

who told them they couldn't do it. I think they wrote some op-ed in the Nation or something about that, about what a mean lesbian I was, as if I could really stop 'em if they wanted to do it. But, you know, tales of the campaign.

MASON FUNK:

I love that. I wish we could delve more into these interlocking campaigns. We interviewed Donna Red Wing just before she passed, which was a huge honor, but we've also interviewed a lot of people in connection with the Briggs initiative, which was quite a bit earlier down in California. That's an incredible piece of history. I've never heard of BISC before,

MASON FUNK:

so I'm gonna do my research, but let's move on to either you and Mary getting together and the fury that caused in Montana and/or -- Sorry, back to my notes. Oh, the Montana's deviate sexual conduct act.

DIANE SANDS:

Kind of related --

MASON FUNK:

I'm gonna interrupt for one second before we go there. What I do wanna talk about with regard to these initiatives is the notion that you embark on some campaigns

MASON FUNK:

and you may have won, but you didn't know you were gonna win.

DIANE SANDS:

We won by less than one percentage point. We should have lost in that political environment in that year with Newt Gingrich out there, we should have lost.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. This is one of my favorite things about our community and the success we've had is that you embark on campaigns and efforts that you might not win,

MASON FUNK:

but you do it anyway. It's kind of this very Zen. Can you just riff on that a little bit?

DIANE SANDS:

Well, social change is a long term process, and it's where the value as a historian comes in, because I know the history of other times in history where political movements have arisen, whether you're looking at a whole abolition, early suffrage days, you're looking at union organizing or whatever, they take decades. You're looking at decades of work. It is not a one shot deal. It's not one year. It's not

DIANE SANDS:

one decade. It's a much longer period of time and those periods of time move because people push them in different directions. You really have to be constantly aware that you are creating a political future as well as a present for this issue and for equity in this country and in whatever area you're living in. You're trying to build resources into people. You're trying to build skills.

DIANE SANDS:

I mean, most of us who started these political movements, we didn't have a degree as they now can in non-profit management. Hell, we knew nothing about it. We learned grant writing from each other. We made it up. We tried to figure out how to run these organizations by a painful experience sometimes, and by creating new models of how to work together, whether it was assertiveness training, or how do you work collectively? Those were not the standard models, the standard models of

DIANE SANDS:

organizations at the time where you had a president and an officer, and you used Robert's rules order, and you got a degree in business administration. We wanted nothing to do with any of that. We had to learn, made this up on our own, and now those are institutionalized. You can get a degree in all of these kinds of things and your interns can apprentice themselves to your organization and see how you make decisions in a different model that is committed to social change and community building, not just,

DIANE SANDS:

'Well, it's just a job for three months, and then you go home and we'll get somebody else to do that job next time.' It isn't that. You're building a future and you're building it around a set of values, around a commitment to equity and opportunity and changing things. The world needs to change, always does. You have brief moments of exhilaration when you win, and you have a lot of painful moments when you don't,

DIANE SANDS:

but history gives you the lessons and the energy and the hope to keep moving forward.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you. Okay. Either overturning Montana sexual deviate conduct act or Ann Mary, whichever one kind of should come first.

DIANE SANDS:

Well, I don't know, they're kind of related. The only long term relationships I've been in since I really was never interested in spending my life around drugs, alcohol, or sexuality, just not that

DIANE SANDS:

kind of person. I've always wanted to change things and be in control. I was always very aware from the time I was young that for most women, they ended up (in my words here) getting trapped by marriage and children and having limited opportunities. I never wanted that. I didn't date, I didn't do any of that stuff. The only two significant relationships I've had in my adult life, the first one was with a woman who ended up going into the news business, but she and I had worked

DIANE SANDS:

together in the forest service as wilderness guards and doing environmental education. Through that entire time, I was constantly infatuated with this Ann Mary Dussault, who was an old Missoula family, she was a former nun and she came back and got involved in the legislature in the early seventies and was one of, I think at that time, five women in the legislature and was majority leader when the legislature was in

DIANE SANDS:

democratic hands. She was dark, cute, in my view. In fact, I was sort of informally in charge of the lesbian coalitions, is Ann Mary really a lesbian? Since she was not announcing herself in any direction whatsoever. When my other relationship had ended and Ann Mary and I got together, I was of course in Lala land over the whole thing. There was a democratic convention or something going on in town, I think I was running the

DIANE SANDS:

Montana women's lobby at the time. Of course, I'm not one to keep these relationships secret. I sort of blab all over town and pretty instantly the democratic world went sort of ballistic. They did not know what to do about this because she was kind of one of the leading political figures in the state, at one point looked at being governor, Lieutenant governor. As I said, she was majority leader. I was heading the women's lobby, which was a very politically

DIANE SANDS:

powerful organization coalition of 52 organizations as well. Instantly, it goes all the way to DC that we were getting married, instantly at the Washington grizzly football stadium by a deranged Jesuit priest, Father Dumay, being given away by Senator Max Baucus, who's an old friend of both of ours. That went everywhere, went all the way to DC, to Max's office and all of that. The only remnant we have of that from DC is the Senate staff sent us a Senate candy dish with

DIANE SANDS:

the emboss Senate emblem in the middle of it. But as I said, it came up at everything from my going to work in Idaho, running that campaign, to the local democratic party, which had a meeting about it because we were going to then lose all of our democratic seats and the governor's office was worried about its impact on their election. It was upcoming and all of that. It was quite the scandal in its way. They weren't automatically very comfortable with this

DIANE SANDS:

idea whatsoever, because I was quite out, she was not out at all, at the time. It was a good consciousness raising opportunity for all of them to get a grip and learn about it. One of the things that happened fairly immediately, and I have this letter, if you'd like to look at it, was she was county commissioner at the time, she had left the legislature and it was an all-women county commission, the first in the country. The county attorney, they had a meeting about it. We have this letter from

DIANE SANDS:

the county attorney, Dusty DeShaw, saying "Dear commissioner DeShaw, it has come to light that you have entered into this relationship and we have had a meeting about it and we have made several decisions." "We wanted you to know, number one, we will not prosecute you for deviate sexual conduct. Number two, we will not remove you from office or support anyone's attempt to remove you from office because of this." I mean those two points and then "Congratulations, we think it's great." But they were quite aware that

DIANE SANDS:

it was illegal and that she could be removed from office based on that alone. That, and then we had one of the first gay pride parades here when I started pride, and she was in that with me, and all those together, she was running for reelection for her office in county commissioner. Was a factor in her losing that campaign. Wasn't the only one, but it was one in that campaign.

MASON FUNK:

So it was literally illegal for you to publicly announce

MASON FUNK:

that you were in this relationship with each other.

DIANE SANDS:

Absolutely. Not that I ever, in my past, cared about the fact that I was doing things that were illegal, but it did have real consequences for her. Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Out of curiosity, if it's worth going into, why did it have real consequences for her as compared to you? If that's a fair question?

DIANE SANDS:

Well, again, I'm in the peripheral political power, running a very powerful women's

DIANE SANDS:

lobbying organization at the legislature. As I said, 56 groups. We had two full-time lobbyists. We moved a lot of legislation. We did a lot of work. We were very important. It's an organization that no longer exists, but it was very politically important and I was at the top of that. It's a nonprofit, they can't stop me from doing anything or saying whatever I wanted to say. She held elected office.

MASON FUNK:

Gotcha.

DIANE SANDS:

Not that there's much likelihood that someone would throw us in jail because in fact, the history of the deviate sexual conduct act is that, yeah, we vaguely all knew that it was illegal, but it wasn't really a functioning reality of anyone's life. Montana didn't charge people with being deviate sexual conduct and thrown in prison. I mean, we just didn't do that in those days. So how that issue first came

DIANE SANDS:

to my awareness.

MASON FUNK:

Let me interrupt for one second, technical question. I love that you're scooching closer. You're edging to your right. I know. I love that and yet I wanna hold onto our framing, so I'm gonna scooch you back to your left a little bit. Probably like an old school teacher and then I'm gonna have you tilt your at the top of your tablet again, again, down. I don't quite know why that keeps happening, but anyway. Okay. And scooch to your left one more inch, please. It's just about our framing. Thank you very much.

MASON FUNK:

So let's talk about this deviant sexual conduct act that was in the Montana constitution.

DIANE SANDS:

It's not in the constitution. Montana's deviate sexual conduct act, it is not a sodomy law. It is any form of sexual contact.

MASON FUNK:

Start clean because I was talking over you. So just start clean, please.

DIANE SANDS:

Montana's deviate sexual conduct act has been on the books for many, many, many years. It's not in the constitution, it's a statute, therefore, it can be overturned. It is not a sodomy law. It is very broad based and says any form of

DIANE SANDS:

sexual contact between people of the same sex, so it is quite broad. The next statute in that section was about bestiality, which also has fun story in it. First time I think any of us became aware of it, particularly as a statute, was when I was doing work for the health department, and the AIDS epidemic started. The health department was wanting men gay men to come in and get tested and do that. The director of the health department that I worked

DIANE SANDS:

with just said, they won't come in because it's a felony and they can be charged with it even though that really wasn't much of a real threat, but it was theoretical threat. We started looking at the statute for the first time. As the women's lobby, we then proposed to change that statute in the legislature. The first time we brought it up, we thought nobody gets charged with it, it's an archaic statute, who cares?

DIANE SANDS:

We proposed to eliminate that part of the statute and to get rid of the beastility section in the same one. Well, all hell broke loose in the legislature, of course, because they weren't about to do that. But the hearing was fascinating because it was less about the deviate sexual conduct section than they were all upset about the beastiality section. I mean, one of the senators, his dog, Ginger, had been sodomized and somebody got caught in the act. He was all upset that we would get rid of the statute because of that.

DIANE SANDS:

A county attorney in Ravalli county went on about, "You know there's a difference between using a feather in the whole chicken." It's like mind boggling. So we said, okay, fine. We'll leave the beastiality section. Let's deal with the other part of it. They, of course, were, all of the religious fanatics and others came out about it and we didn't really have a base buildup to deal with it. There wasn't a pride organization at that point, so for the first couple of sessions that

DIANE SANDS:

we went after that, we just did your basic legislative trying to repeal something, get people up to testify, do a little bit of organizing around it, and it was clear it was not going to go anywhere. It was the Montana women's lobby that carried that work. The lesbian coalition was part of the the women's lobby as an organizational member, and then a newly formed group in Montana, the Montana Human Rights Network, which really is around human rights on all kinds of levels, had

DIANE SANDS:

just formed. Christine Kaufman, who was their executive director, she and I then took on the work of doing that lobbying. She also became a Senator in Montana. She was in the Senate and she and I decided after looking at that, that this was not gonna work, that we needed to do some broader organizing around the queer community and see if we could create some political infrastructure out there. We decided to do two things. One is to create a pride organization, and the

DIANE SANDS:

faster route would be to just challenge it under the Montana constitution. We spent about a year doing that organizing. I was doing some work as well with the Montana community foundation. We formed, within the Montana community foundation, a separate Montana equality project to address this issue. As part of that, they provided funding for me to spend a year going across the state and meeting every queer that I could find, every

DIANE SANDS:

college group, anybody who'd been involved over the years, surveying them, talking to them about what they thought we needed. How could we go forward on this? Would they be willing to participate? We have this survey, which I still have copies of here collecting that information from people so that at the end of that year, when we met to form pride as an organization, we had the support of the entire community in the state and a pretty good awareness of what people and who was willing to step forward

DIANE SANDS:

and do that. And so David Herrera and I became the first co-chairs of the pride organization and we did it with the commitment that we would start with paid staff. Sandy Hale was then our first executive director, that this was not gonna be just a little volunteer kind of organization. That founding meeting and billings was pretty darn interesting. We almost got into a physical fight there because as people were going around talking about their interest in this, one of the gay men said gay men are the most depressed group in the country.

DIANE SANDS:

That did not go over well. One of the lesbians came across the room and about had this guy down on the floor. I had to break that fight up and tell the lesbian. Nope, you will go sit down and listen politely. And you, sir, will never say that again. I mean, Native Americans in the room and all this sort of thing. We just had to, at that point, I think some of us had matured enough that we were willing to deal with men and the realities of this. Hell, we were dealing with the legislature and why we can't deal with the political insensitivity of gay men who

DIANE SANDS:

just so self-centered, so many of 'em, that they didn't see beyond their personal circumstance. So we formed pride. As I said, I served as a co-chair and David Herrera, who's still doing this magnificent work. Within a year we also decided we needed to form a two-spirit group in there, which David has taken on. Sandra Hale really ran the organization for a while until -- As we did further legislative activity. The other half of that was our decision that

DIANE SANDS:

we needed to move forward with ... Well, and the pride organization, I always knew it was gonna end up being more social and community building than political. We're queers, what else can we say? We like to party and have fun. So parades and all of that, but very visible. All of those kind of social events are so important to people's sense of identity and being connected and feeling safe and all of that. That's very important and it still goes on in all of its ways as it does all over the country, but it was

DIANE SANDS:

also important to have a political voice around that issue as well. So we continued to try to repeal it legislatively and we didn't until after it had already been ruled unconstitutional, then eventually we got it taken off the books. Christine and I also worked on creating this challenge, constitutional challenge, to the case. We decided in fact to engage the law school and the women who were faculty at the law school, a couple of queers

DIANE SANDS:

who helped us engage the Northwest women's law center, which did the lawsuit along with the ACLU, but the primary one was the Northwest women's law center, Rosemary Nashowitz and all, and recruiting the plaintiffs for this case. There were six plaintiffs, three different couples and Linda Grayson being the named major plaintiff for this case. It went to the court. I've gotta say one of the most important and

DIANE SANDS:

thrilling and meaningful moments to me in my life, right now I have goosebumps again, is when chief justice Karla Gray, who was a dear friend of mine, called me April 11th, 1997, and said, "Diane, we have ruled unanimously that it is unconstitutional under Montana's right to privacy." I mean, I had no idea that I would feel the way I feel right at this minute, choked up with goosebumps.

DIANE SANDS:

To have your government say to you, "You are an equal citizen under the law." I had not known that I didn't feel that I wasn't in the way that I feel when they said to me, "Yes, we will stand with you. Your constitution and your government stands with you." That was such a powerful moment in my life. I can't even begin to imagine how important it was to other people. It came from the chief justice who was a dear friend of mine,

DIANE SANDS:

who had sworn me in as a legislator before that.

MASON FUNK:

Was that a little bit of like an ultimate affirmation of your love of Montana?

DIANE SANDS:

Totally. And commit to the constitution in realizing how powerful a political tool in our state that constitution is. Because right now, with the Dobbs ruling throwing out abortion and saying that women are second class citizens, the Montana constitutions expressed right to privacy in there is what is

DIANE SANDS:

holding us together in this state and a handful of others against the forces of darkness out there. It's a powerful tool and a legal tool and I'm not a lawyer, but it's also an affirmation of your values. You want your government to believe that you're an equal citizen. I mean, that's why I could no longer go to church. I mean, it hurt deeply in many ways to find out how both racist, sexist, and homophobic church institutions,

DIANE SANDS:

which ask you to give your heart to that institution, to your faith community, to have it tell you are not an equal person under our system. In fact, you're a criminal or a sinner or whatever, it might be the damage that has done to so many gay people is just phenomenal. In some cases, has never been repaired. I have never wanted to repair. It's like, no, I'm not even going to that vulnerability. But I did choose to go to the vulnerability of the law and the legislature and try to change that.

DIANE SANDS:

There's so many places to change this in building communities, among kids who are in school or in the mental health system or in prisons or in wherever you work, those affirmations and those structures have to be changed to affirm that all of us have a place in this society. I ended up choosing the legislature, but there are many places to do it.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. We could talk for hours about the -- There's no hurt like church hurt.

MASON FUNK:

That's a whole separate topic, which we could talk about on our own time.

DIANE SANDS:

Well, my favorite theme though, I must say, as part of the crew working on getting rid of the deviate sexual conduct act is we always have to have a sense of humor. One of the things that we had is we created these lovely buttons, which say "Not tonight, dear, it's a felony" . Then we'd have the former felons ball after we were now not criminals under the law anymore.

MASON FUNK:

I love it.

DIANE SANDS:

Deeply important.

MASON FUNK:

I'm keeping an eye on the clock as always, of course. I'm switching to some slightly more, I guess you could say theoretical questions before we head over to the interns in probably about 15 minutes or so. Politics as a Spiritual practice.

DIANE SANDS:

Yes.

MASON FUNK:

Having just been talking about spirituality and religion never the Twain shall meet, but what does it mean to you

MASON FUNK:

to think of politics as a spiritual practice?

DIANE SANDS:

Well, coming out in the sixties, like many of us left us toying with the radical edges of social change, the ones that involved -- Well, like the Panthers or the thinking about how revolution happens. In many places, revolution happens with incredible violence, with a gun. I had to consider that as a possibility, certainly was around plenty of people who thought that might be a legitimate

DIANE SANDS:

and fruitful way, that we needed a revolution in this country, and that that was gonna happen in a violent way. But in the sixties and seventies, certainly seeing, whether it was Kent state and Jackson state or the assassinations of Medgar Evers, King, Kennedy, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then when I was in Chicago in particular, having to think about in the working in this faith based community around social change and King was there, marching with King, thinking about and

DIANE SANDS:

studying about Gandhi and King and the political theories of social change there, as opposed to some of the other more radical forces of change, and realizing in my life that was a path I could at least be comfortable with, based in, even though I no longer consider myself Christian, but in the faith tradition that one must love one's enemies, and that social change happens in non-violent ways. As a student and a member of the women's history tradition,

DIANE SANDS:

change around suffrage did not come with violence in this country. One of the biggest social changes there happened without violence and in a rejection of violence. That is the path that I've chosen. It is a hard one I would say because we, as human beings so easily want to go to making other people be the enemy and hating them. I hate them. I hate them. Someone should shoot them, that kind of violent language, which in social movements,

DIANE SANDS:

leads to people ending up dead. Whether it's people shooting abortionists or people shooting people in the black community, just because they're black or I mean the whole Black Lives Matter movement. The role of violence in this American society is just so overwhelming and somebody else has got way more guns than you've got. You really think this is a path to creating social change? I don't. My experience tells me that doesn't work, and my intellectual thinking about it tells me that doesn't work.

DIANE SANDS:

My belief that politics needs to be a spiritual practice is that you have to be disciplined. It's like any other form of work you do, whether you're a lawyer or you're doing the work that you're doing, or an academic, it requires some rigor and discipline and thought and sophistication. I think politics requires that it's not something where you just get to yell and scream and call people names and change happens. It doesn't work that way.

DIANE SANDS:

For me, politics puts you in an environment with people structurally that you don't agree with it at all. That's what it is for; it is set up as a ritual environment, much like a church, it has separate rules. It has protocols, it has ethics. It has all of these things in place, clothing, the space, everything, that tells you you are in a ritual space for the reason of being able to have these differences and make decisions for the larger

DIANE SANDS:

community in a way that allows you to function without just 'Well, let's just all get together in the Senate and just see who gets to beat each other the most and the winner takes all'. That requires you to sit there and not roll your eyes. Not only not do that, but also to learn to love each other. My best friends in the Senate at this point are very conservative Republicans. I love them and they love me, and they tell me they love me. We don't agree on a whole hell of a lot of stuff, but I do anything for them.

DIANE SANDS:

They are very respectful of me as well. They acknowledge that this is a situation and in conflict, but I do believe in the end, it does change them. My being there as the first out gay legislator, change them by my being there and being the person that I am, that they dealt with me as a peer on a day to day basis, in terms of all kinds of issues that have nothing to do with being queer, that changed them because they had to deal with me as an equal. They had to then,

DIANE SANDS:

I think, however, they process it, consider that they might be wrong. But also that in order to work with people who are not like you you've gotta have relationships, that's what you learned in small towns. Yeah. The guy who owns the grocery store is a member of the militia, but you're still buying your groceries from him, and if you get stuck, he's probably gonna pull you out of the ditch. In the legislature, you have to consciously build those relationships with people, find

DIANE SANDS:

friendships, connections around whatever it is, hunting your love of music, whatever it might be so that you can work through the tough times. We all know in families, we have people who we really disagree with and we tend to avoid these topics because we tend to let each other push our buttons and get into screaming matches. When, in fact, I think we have to learn how to talk, and not avoid these topics, but learn how to talk with family members, political

DIANE SANDS:

companions and others and our community about really difficult topics. These are difficult, in Montana, desperately and successfully avoids talking about racism in general. It just does not wanna have that conversation because it's hard.

MASON FUNK:

It's still too hard, almost. Yeah. So you chose to go -- I remember I overheard you say, up until a certain point, you wouldn't have considered

MASON FUNK:

a career in politics for being a legislator, and then you chose, and now you espouse the value of that work, including being part of this ritual space. Speaking to young activists, young queer or otherwise activists who might be watching this interview, how would you help them to navigate that choice to go through the kind of methodical long game route of legislative politics or to go some other route? Not that there's a right or wrong answer, but what

MASON FUNK:

pointers would you put up for them?

DIANE SANDS:

Well, and there is no right route. My dad, one of the best things he did as a teacher was he really helped all of us as students and his kids understand that your life is long and you are not going to be doing the same thing when you're 20, as when you're 70, I'm not the same person, thank God. Who would wanna be the same person for 70 years? Hopefully, no one. You start where you start, with the passions that you have and run them as far as you can,

DIANE SANDS:

and as passionately as you can. When you need to move on, you move on to something else. You learn the lessons of that place in your life, and that time in history and different times in history have different opportunities. I mean, life was different in the sixties than it is now. Although I would say now we're entering into much of that same activist environment that perhaps existed to some degree in the sixties and seventies. I never wanted to be in the legislature because I viewed myself as an activist.

DIANE SANDS:

There's a place for just pure activism, people who organize street activity and whatever, and do community organizing. There's a place for spiritual leaders. There's a place for legislators. There's a place for everyone, for teachers, for academics, all of those need to come together. If you think that's not the case, look at what's happened with the right wing at this point. They spent the last 30 years building academic institutions, media institutions, think tanks and political structures to be where

DIANE SANDS:

they are today, which is shoving it up our ass. That is a factor of planning and having the long game in mind and people enter it at all kinds of different places. You enter it by who you study with and what you study when you're in college, you enter it by what internships you take, what organizations you volunteered for, what rallies and organizations you tend to wanna put your energy into, what profession to earn money, things you do there. Those change over time,

DIANE SANDS:

and there is no one right or wrong place. Some of the people who are in the legislature who are there really as only activists really have a hard time because it's not what we do in the legislature. It's not what a lawyer does. A lawyer sues people that is a great political tool and goes well together with all these other ways of changing the world. There are many ways to make political change and you should not just do one of 'em. Be prepared to think about yourself in a broader context,

DIANE SANDS:

think about yourself and having a lifelong commitment to social justice and social change. Then over the years you will do many different kinds of things. Hopefully, most of them fun and energizing. When you're tired and burned out, take a break, do something else. I mean, there is no right and wrong answer to this. The only right answer is being committed to equity and opportunity and loving other people and building the beloved community as it was discussed by King and all,

DIANE SANDS:

that we must find ways to live peacefully with each other. If we cannot do that, it's a Holocaust of many dimensions.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Wow. That's some of the most fantastic advice we've received for young activists. Thank you for that. I'm gonna open up the cameras to our interns. Ayla, what question do you have for Diane?

AYLA CONNOR-KIRSHBAUM:

First of all, that was so interesting to listen to.

AYLA CONNOR-KIRSHBAUM:

You have such an incredible life story. I really, really enjoyed listening to everything. My question is, you mentioned intersectionality earlier in the interview. Can you talk about your relationship with the concept of intersectionality and how looking at social justice issues through an intersectional lens can affect individual movements?

DIANE SANDS:

Well, we didn't call it intersectionality way back when,

DIANE SANDS:

but it still existed. I mean, certainly some people are so narrowly focused that they're really only thinking of themselves in their particular circumstances. When you work in general, you work in one place or another, you work in the environmental movement or you work in the Black Lives Matter movement or you work in whatever. But I think partly that's why we think and study is you learn the history of how these movements are connected together and these issues are connected together. I can't

DIANE SANDS:

remember if you you're the one taking economics or philosophy or political science, you learn beyond your own experience, how connected these various issues are so that when you are working in one and leaping to others, you make it a point to involve people of wider perspectives than yours and different perspectives than yours. If they're not at the table, you notice and you might wonder where the hell they are or what's wrong with what you're doing, that

DIANE SANDS:

you don't have those other perspectives there. So I mean, there's always been some degree of awareness so that, I mean, everyone has fallen short of doing what we really need to do around intersectionality. And new issues arise all the time. I mean, when we were doing all this early queer stuff, the transgender issue never came up. I mean, it just didn't come up. Binary didn't even know the word, all of the interest you all have in the intersectionality

DIANE SANDS:

around all these different sexual identities, totally news to me, not in my world and not particularly of, I mean, it's intellectually interesting to me, but it's something that really wasn't part of our functioning world. So you guys are already moving things forward in an intersectional way, in a way that is way beyond my time. So just keep doing it. If we old people don't get it, don't pay us a bit of attention. Just keep moving. Does that answer that question

DIANE SANDS:

in part, how do you view it? You're the one whose opinion matters here, not mine really. And I'm serious about that.

MASON FUNK:

I'm gonna move on for now to Helen.

DIANE SANDS:

Hi Helen.

HELEN TIAN:

Hello. Thank you so much for this interview. Your advice and stories are amazing. I was really curious, you mentioned throughout your activism and even like as early as high school, you seem to be very fearless about being open about your opinions, identities, things like that.

HELEN TIAN:

I was wondering at any point in your life in activism, have you ever had any fear about being so open about yourself and what advice would you have for people who are less comfortable being so open and can they still participate in effective activism without being quite so open about their ideas and who they are?

DIANE SANDS:

What a good question. You know, in part, I haven't ever been terribly worried about it, again, a lot of white middle class privilege in that sense.

DIANE SANDS:

But, oh, we got beat up all the time in high school. Somebody said, oh, is that because you are white? I said, no, everybody got beat up because reservations can be a pretty violent kind of place. Now we joke about it. And certainly when I was living in Chicago in the black community, they made us very aware. You needed to be hyper aware of where you were at in terms of potentials for violence. Like I said, in the campaign in Idaho, we had targets on our back. I mean, and I've known

DIANE SANDS:

since the anti-war movement that they would, the government would kill us if it needed to and wanted to at different times, that that was a real possibility. When the president of the university, when we took over a building, I told him we would not burn it down overnight, as many campuses had all over the country, but we would return it back to them basically undamaged. He promised he wouldn't bring the national guard in to shoot us. As I find out 20 years later, he had a sharp shooter up in the top of main hall,

DIANE SANDS:

but so we were aware of it, and sometimes it got fairly personal. I remember staying up all night a couple of times thinking that, yeah, in fact someone was gonna come knocking on the door and get us. As I get older, I get less concerned about that. Although both Ann Mary and I are quite aware at times when something happens, of high profile, in the state, for example, and my name is on it. I mean, the police and the sheriff know we're here, know if we called there's going to be a reaction. Somebody threw a rock

DIANE SANDS:

through a window? Instantly. We are more conscious about it, but mostly we live pretty open. I'm not willing to live behind bars. When I lived in DC, I lived in a house that had bars on the door, because someone took an ax and went through the door. I mean, it's another reason I choose to live here where that level of violence is a little less. But the other thing I would say is find some place that you do feel safe. I mean, my parents were very supportive of my political points of view, even if they didn't

DIANE SANDS:

agree with them. I knew that I had a safe place where I could express my point of view without being punished. I could say, I'm not staying in this classroom when somebody is telling me I'm stupid. I could do that. All those little experiences, I also took self-defense classes, of course, not that a 75 year old woman, who's overweight's gonna be able to protect myself should something happen, but you've gotta figure out how to find a safe

DIANE SANDS:

space for yourself and be aware of the dangers out there of being fired from jobs, physical violence. I mean, there's many kinds of violence that can happen to you, but find some place that's safe and then decide what level of risk at different times of your life you can take and take them. I think by pushing that edge, there's something you learn from being in that illegal world or in that risky world about who you are and about what it

DIANE SANDS:

takes to expand those margins, because it's really all about power. They have power; sometimes at the end of a gun, sometimes by making sure you don't get a job or firing you or giving you a bad grade or raping you or whatever it is, that's how they control us. I mean, you've gotta see those edges that are really maintained by all kinds of violence, economic, social, and political violence, and then push against those. There's a safe space in the middle. It's a lot of fun.

DIANE SANDS:

But it's by pushing those edges that things change. Does that help?

MASON FUNK:

Thank you so much, Diane. Next we're gonna go over to James. James.

JAMES LEONG HOLSTON:

Yeah, you mentioned in your questionnaire, I was looking at it, about the impact of the AIDS epidemic in the movements surrounding that. Can you talk about that? Like for you personally, but also on a political level as well?

DIANE SANDS:

Yeah, I mean, I got involved in it in a couple of ways. I mean, one

DIANE SANDS:

was through my work with the health department. I was building a community health center and so I spent a lot of -- I was kind of living in the health department when that issue first arose in terms of the public health response of trying to get people tested and into care. That's that side of it. But I also had a very close friend who died of AIDS and I spent a good deal of time with him. I was very personally aware of it at that point.

DIANE SANDS:

Then I was at the national marches on Washington, the quilt and all of those projects. We brought the quilt exhibit into Montana to do public awareness and educational programs and people making their own AIDS quilts for their friends. I was involved in that, in that particular way. I mean, I'm not a gay man, so I certainly didn't ever feel the impact of it as a fear to myself. But I

DIANE SANDS:

certainly among the gay men who were friends of mine at the time and the one very close friend that died, I certainly was involved in it, and getting the health department and the prison. Part of my political side of that was okay, what are we doing in the prison population where we know men are having sex? Are we handing out condoms? No, we're not gonna do that. Oh, come on. It's a crime to have sex in prison,

DIANE SANDS:

but people are having sex in prison. Trying to push on the correctional system, for example, to try to save men's lives in there by having condoms, there were some kind of, in the contraband part of that. There are interesting areas in which I sort of became involved in that AIDS effort, primarily through trying to get the state systems to acknowledge this health crisis for gay men.

MASON FUNK:

Thank you for that. And then last but not least over to Zoe.

ZOE TWEEDIE:

Hi. I think when I came into this interview, I was very surprised and also loved how open you were about your experiences with legal activity, illegality, all these kinds of things. Because coming into this, my consumption of you was a politician and of course, traditionally and correctly, these two things are supposed to be very opposite. How do you reconcile

ZOE TWEEDIE:

these two identities? Do you view it as a sort of civil disobedience, something that actually should be taking place in the government, or are some law's okay to break?

DIANE SANDS:

I would have to say around civil disobedience. Civil disobedience means breaking the law for a purpose. Intentionally, in many cases. And again, be smart about it, think about it, make it useful, make it productive, be willing to pay the price for it. Be willing to pay the price for it

DIANE SANDS:

because there is. No, I don't see any inconsistency actually. A lot of people who go into electoral politics have interesting backgrounds that are not what you traditionally think of, particularly in these states like ours, which is where serving in the legislature is basically a volunteer experience. We meet 90 days every two years, you get paid $11 an hour. I mean, the people who get elected are people who are activists in their communities. Christine Kaufman is a saying in Helena who was

DIANE SANDS:

an activist with the human rights network, plenty of people here who've been environmental activists or who have been in other kinds of not traditional in what you think of. They're not professional business people of any kind. Legislatures are made up of interesting conglomerations of pretty much ordinary people in a lot of states. California? Forget it. I mean, you're talking about big money and a system that's really beyond

DIANE SANDS:

my ability to even think about, but Montana and the US Senate, we have a farmer and he is a farmer and I served with him in the legislature and he is a farmer. He goes home on the weekends and plows his fields. That's what he does, and that's what we like to think Montana does. We now have an influx of rich people, mostly from outta state who are going into politics because they can buy their way into it. That's a problem we all have because money now has an impact in politics, but

DIANE SANDS:

that's not the way it should be. In a lot of places, it's still not the way it really is. I don't see a conflict between the two of them. My biggest decision going into electoral politics was how to dress and not look like a braless hippie. What shoes do you wear that makes you look straight enough that you can go to the legislature? Yeah. I had to learn to put on a bra I still don't shave my legs or pits and they

DIANE SANDS:

just have to live with it.

MASON FUNK:

Thank you for that. Thank you for interns for all those questions. So great to hear great questions. That's what was on your minds. Yeah. Thank you. We have about 15 minutes to go and I think I wanna circle back to a little bit of comparing ... Well, I have two questions on my mind. One is that I read that in your early days, you really did identify more with the political approach of the Black Panthers over,

MASON FUNK:

you could say the, the peaceful resistance approach. Just comparing, I mean, obviously this is a huge topic within the civil rights movement, but you identified initially, but it sounds like on some level you moved, is that true? Or could you just talk about that?

DIANE SANDS:

Well, I was theoretically interested in it and I was certainly interested in things like the Weather Underground and the building of a separate society that was outside of the mainstream of American society basically.

DIANE SANDS:

In the end I decided to take on American society, not live outside of it because practically it didn't seem like the other was really viable. Practically, it wasn't viable to me morally, in terms of a world that I could live with. I mean, I certainly have plenty of friends then, people that I knew at least peripherally, who were in the outlaw community, who were part of the Weather Underground, for example,

DIANE SANDS:

or those sorts of things. People who spend significant amounts of their time in jail, over various kinds of things. While I recognize those as being incredibly important, it didn't seem to me practical in my day-to-day life as a way to make change where I lived and with the skills and opportunities that I had to make change. That's why that intellectually thinking about it and thinking about political theory and a lot of people have written about political theory and

DIANE SANDS:

you should think about it yourself and how you construct in your own mind, what is worth spending your life to do. And while some of it that we did was just plain fun, didn't really accomplish a hell of a lot of anything. I mean, if you're gonna spend your blood and your life and your energy doing something, you make it wanna count for something. So how do you think that is? For some people, it's starting a business that's on a different model, or it can be being a fabulous teacher or being

DIANE SANDS:

a great parent. All of those are critically important. Being in politics is just one of 'em.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Do you remember any critical turning points or sort of just when you made this shift, when you realized that you wanted to invest in this system? I mean, do you remember any triggering events or just dark nights of the soul that kind of moved you in any kind of tangible way?

DIANE SANDS:

Well, I must say Chicago really had a huge impact

DIANE SANDS:

on me in that regard and summers of '67 and '68. Law enforcement was brutal. I watched a cop shoot a kid. It was deadly and it was real. That experience in watching that and in that era, of course, we all thought the cops, law enforcement were pigs.

DIANE SANDS:

I've had a hard time over the course of my life, not seeing law enforcement is totally an instrument of repression. And I still am very uneasy about that issue of how you have law enforcement that's not the instrument of oppression in our communities, but probably that instant as much as anything. I mean, they will kill you, and they

DIANE SANDS:

still are killing people regularly. The police shoot people as an instrument of our society and the military kills people, supposedly in our name. And legislatures, we have a death penalty. I remember the case, we were trying to get rid of the death penalty and the chief justice of the Supreme court held up. She said, this is a death certificate for someone we executed in Montana. It says, cause a death homicide by the state. That blood is on your hands.

DIANE SANDS:

We all play a part in that to the degree we tolerate military interventions, to the degree we tolerate police doing what they shouldn't be doing instead of doing what we need them to be doing. Turning away from violence and I certainly know my strong upbringing and serious thinking about Christianity as a philosophy and

DIANE SANDS:

an ethical system, and other religions as well, it's played a big part in that as a path that I could feel good about and live with and could justify that it had created change. Certainly, the history of the civil rights movement has always been an inspiration and a comfort and a home intellectually to say, look at what they accomplished. We have long ways to go, and look at the price they paid. Classmates of mine from the

DIANE SANDS:

reservation were involved in Wounded Knee and the takeover of Alcatraz and those kids who previously would've done -- Had been shut off from any opportunity in their lives because of that now run businesses. One of them is a master nurse running a health clinic, another one set up tribal colleges. Those are my classmates, life changed because of the activism in the seventies for them and their. So as lived experience, it has confirmed for me

DIANE SANDS:

that that path is one that is very productive and does create change. It doesn't mean that everything's changed. Nothing's perfect. Nothing ever will be. It shouldn't be. I think in a democratic society, if we want a community to be a way you have to reclaim it and relearn it, every generation, I can't just give it to you. Then everything's hunky dory. You have to make it happen. You have to make your community happen. You have to make your own life happen in

DIANE SANDS:

a way that's productive. It is something that in fact, we should welcome the political challenges of the moment, because it makes us both appreciate what we have been through and understand the difficulties of it. But it makes you make a commitment in your life to something bigger than yourself and something that is a great value.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. One of the things I wrote down and it's right on topic for what you just said, you talked about the year when you came of age as an organizer and activist, you said "It was

MASON FUNK:

such an exciting, energizing time to make things up and address the issues of the day." Do you think that same fertile field exists in the same way today in a different way today, or just doesn't exist today in the same way that it did say 50 years ago?

DIANE SANDS:

I think it totally exists. As a historic moment, at this point, it's different because we're in a historic time, but the theoretical pieces of it are still

DIANE SANDS:

the same. I think the opportunities are the same. Clearly, we live in a world where the social media and the way people are connected is community, and the way you communicate with each other are different, but we're still just human beings wanting to be free, wanting to have opportunity, wanting to connect deeply with other people in community in a safe, fair, loving kind of way, that still exists. Now, how a new generation is going to pick that up and do that. You have different tools. You have the internet,

DIANE SANDS:

you have social media as a way to connect in a way that we didn't. But the face-to-face talking to each other, sharing your life experience, deciding what needs to be changed and working with other people who have a common experience to do something about it, that's always been there and will continue to be there. You'll find different solutions to it than we found. You don't need to pass a law now that makes rape illegal, done that. But rape is still in existence.

DIANE SANDS:

How do you change the society's mind about why that happens? I will say one of the great things I've had to come to grips with in my life is to understand that all rapists shouldn't be thrown in jail and left there to rot in hell, that a lot of more people who were been victims themselves and that need mental help and can be rehabilitated and live safely in society, and we need to do that. We need not to throw people away regardless of the circumstance here.

DIANE SANDS:

I mean, there are challenges in terms of the tools that you have to changing society, but the need for that is as desperate as it has ever been.

MASON FUNK:

Do you think the face-to-face, that intimate contact that happens when you're in the same space as a room, like literally the same physical space, is that one of the things that we're grappling with that we've lost and kind of need to somehow kind of find how to regain?

DIANE SANDS:

I think one of the most basic

DIANE SANDS:

human needs is connection with other human beings and we tend to personalize that so much in terms of romantic or sexual partners, just as a part of it, but family, community the people you work with, the people you live with in a broader sense than the isolation of one person with another person, and it's physical. We are a mammal, we need physical contact with another person. I hug my fellow legislators a lot. I am a very physical person. I jokingly say, in fact,

DIANE SANDS:

I have lesbian privilege because all their wives know I'm a lesbian, so don't feel particularly threatened by the fact that I hug and kiss their husbands. But you know that to me, that physical contact is really important, but that intimacy of sharing your real thoughts, your real feelings with people around you and people who are not like you, I think is an important part of this. While I love talking on zoom, it's not the same as doing that. The fact that when we finally got automobiles, we could leave our

DIANE SANDS:

own community and go connect with someone somewhere else, our local community organization started to fall apart because people didn't feel like they needed to work together to improve their local community. They could just drive to the next town and go spend their time with somebody else. But the community, then the fabric that held a community together wasn't as strong. And that's true in terms of, I think, these organizations as well. Yeah, they do certain kinds of work, but they also need to have picnics together. They need to

DIANE SANDS:

have opportunities to share deeply what you're thinking, to open your mouth and talk. People have been afraid to say the word abortion or queer, talk one on one about that. One of the best tools I think was consciousness raising groups, which is really how we started in a small group in a sort of structured environment, a safe environment facilitated talk about who you really are, what has happened to you in your life and hear what somebody else's life has been like and learn empathy and learn to be supportive of other people and

DIANE SANDS:

to love yourself and by loving yourself and loving other people as well, and understanding yourself, that kind of intimate human contact is desperately needed by every human being. That is, in the end, the power, the spiritual power, of the organizations that will change the world.

MASON FUNK:

Awesome. Thank you. Four final questions and these are intended, just short. Ready?

DIANE SANDS:

How old am I? 75. What's my

DIANE SANDS:

favorite color? Purple

MASON FUNK:

of course. If you could tell 15 year old Diane Sands anything, what would it be?

DIANE SANDS:

It's gonna be okay.

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor. Start by rephrasing my question.

DIANE SANDS:

If there's anything I could tell my 15 year old self, it would be, it's gonna be okay. You're gonna be okay. And it'll be: you're gonna do some great things with your life.

MASON FUNK:

Awesome. Do you believe in the notion kind of a queer superpower that links all lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender nonconforming, and other people, something we just fundamentally share that is kind of the thing we can most powerfully give to the world. And again, please incorporate my question into your answer.

DIANE SANDS:

Well, that question of how we are all connected and is there something special about, this is

DIANE SANDS:

one that I have considered over time, in some other context. I even wrote a paper in graduate school about should we just do away with men altogether? Are they able to be rehabilitated and turned into a true human being or are they defective in their way? Because of their tendency to violence and their incapacity to truly love. I mean, I really thought about and it's why I spent a good deal

DIANE SANDS:

of my life in a primarily female world. But I had to decide either men are fully human, as women are and should be expected to meet every standard of human dignity, compassion, service as women. Or, again, that's an alternative if I were to say that men are just biologically incapable of acting like human beings and they should be off, I'm not willing to go there.

DIANE SANDS:

I would say that about queer people too. I mean, it challenges you to think about, are we special and are we different in a way that those people aren't, but I think any group coming from a history of oppression brings certain gifts to the larger community. I would say the queer community as a whole has done that. I mean, I, sort of, in some ways, think most people are somewhat bisexual at different points in their life and can love anyone depending on the circumstances of it.

DIANE SANDS:

I think the gift of sexuality is what the queer community, to a large degree is offered, to the larger community, the affirmation of being sex positive and the joy in that, because this is such a goddamn repressive society around sexuality. It's not the only one that's sexually repressive, but many are. That ability to form deep relationships with other people that is within the queer community as a whole.

DIANE SANDS:

I think those are gifts to offer to the larger -- And it's a lens by which the larger community can look at itself. It's one of the difficulties I have around the issue of marriage as a feminist, I've considered marriage to be a pretty oppressive institution as it has been constructed in the society, and not one I wanted to have anything to do with, but clearly the queer community has engaged in that idea of what it is to build those profound relationships with people of the same gender in a way

DIANE SANDS:

that requires a hell of a lot more work than heterosexual people just running down and getting married and divorced and marriage and divorced. It's offered a new lens to the larger community about what it means to be in relationship in creative and new ways. I think that's been invaluable.

MASON FUNK:

Hmm. Super. Why is it important to you to share your story?

DIANE SANDS:

Because I'm a blabber mouth. Why is it important to tell my story? Because I realize stories

DIANE SANDS:

are who we are. I mean, stories are how we change the world. I mean, as a child, by the time I could read, I was reading biography like crazy because I wanted to read the stories of other people who were like me and who weren't like me because they open up the world and show you other ways to be and what it's been like to live in other times and to live in other societies and other historic times, I mean, I can close my eyes and I can be growing up out on the Prairie

DIANE SANDS:

500 years ago and living in that life, I can close my eyes and be a suffrage leader, or I can close my eyes and be all kinds of things. And I think that's where the power of story and getting deeply immersed in other people's experiences helps you develop your own story, which is really about the power of your own life. That's what story is.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Great. Last but not least, related to that question, OUTWORDS being an

MASON FUNK:

archive of stories like yours, LGBTQ people across the country, elders, people we consider to be elders, what do you see as the value of a project like OUTWORDS? And if you could mention OUTWORDS in your answer.

DIANE SANDS:

I think the value of all queer history and particularly, I appreciate the work of OUTWORDS as a way of organizing that history, of actually intentionally reaching out and interviewing queer elders so that

DIANE SANDS:

both that history isn't lost, but also so that it can be used to inspire younger people now to see what their lives can be and gives them the tools to think of a future that is more inclusive than ours is, and understand that their lives are incredibly valuable and that we love them, we want them to be more than we are. We want them to live in a world that's better than the one we have left them. That's where

DIANE SANDS:

OUTWORDS work, in terms of education and using the information and history of us elders to move us forward, is one of the most valuable tools you can have.

MASON FUNK:

Awesome. I love that shout out. Thank you so much.

DIANE SANDS:

There you go.

MASON FUNK:

Is there anything else you wanna share with us? We're at three minutes past the hour. You're a great storyteller and we managed, I think, to really compress tons of information and inspiration and

MASON FUNK:

stories into two hours. Is there anything you feel like you wanna talk about that we haven't touched on?

DIANE SANDS:

Oh, you covered a lot. There's always more, but I think that's more than enough. And thank you to your interns, because I do think you are so lucky to be working in an organization like this and have the opportunity to meet the people you're meeting and develop the skills and the resume that you've got. I mean, it will change your

DIANE SANDS:

life when you look back on it in the future, you will understand how valuable it has been. So good for you guys. And thank you, Mason, and all of you for giving them that opportunity. It's really important.

MASON FUNK:

Well, it's absolutely our privilege and honor, and they've contributed so much to the organization in turn. I think we're done. You're gonna stay on with Juan or Rhyme.

DIANE SANDS:

You're gonna help me take all this apart.

MASON FUNK:

Exactly. But everybody else can just come on camera real quick

MASON FUNK:

and just say goodbye and thank you to Diane. There they all are. Thank you so much, Diane.

DIANE SANDS:

Thanks everybody. Yeah.