Mason Funk

Thank you so much, Sandy, for being here today. Could you start off by stating and spelling your first and last names?

Sandy Stone

My name is Allucquere Rosanne Stone and the spelling is A-L-L-U-C-Q-U-E-R-E R-O-S-A-N-N-E S-T-O-N-E. However few people can either spell or pronounce Allucquere. So I'm called Sandy, which is spelled

Sandy Stone

s-a-n-d-y.

Mason Funk

Perfect. And I know that you have a non-traditional understanding of things like birth dates. Normally at this stage I would say please give us the date and place of your birth. So I'm going to ask you that anyway, but please feel free to give us whatever version works best for you in this moment.

Sandy Stone

Okay. I was born in New York City on June 1st, 1954, and lived happily in New York

Sandy Stone

until I was old enough to leave for Santa Cruz, California where I've been ever since.

Mason Funk

Great. Super. I love your quote, "The past is an undiscovered country and you are an unreliable narrator." That's one of the things I had to learn along the way, that interviewees are, by definition, unreliable narrators. But what does that mean to you?

Sandy Stone

It means that

Sandy Stone

it may not mean bad stuff. It means that my particular storyline looks different to me than it does to anyone else. So an objective, if there were such a thing, observer looking at my life would see one thing, another objective observer would see something else, and I'm talking about something completely different from any of those.

Sandy Stone

And we're looking back at a time in which time has no meaning. I'm working currently with another person on an autobiography, and they keep saying, I have to have a linear timeline so I can understand what's going on here. And I say, and I'm being perfectly honest, there is no linear timeline. My life was not lived like that. You cannot

Sandy Stone

create a structure in which you go from point A to point B. Things overlap. They bleed into each other. They're blurry and porous and distorted in shape and sound. I want it to be that way because that version is the true version. So there you are.

Mason Funk

For a very linear person, that still makes a lot of sense to me. Speaking as a very linear person,

Mason Funk

speaking as a person who can tell you dates, places, and times for just about every significant event in my own life, it still makes sense to me and brings me joy to hear you describe it that way.

Sandy Stone

I'm glad it brings you joy. We're off on a good footing here.

Mason Funk

Great. I was intrigued by one of my takeaways from hearing a little bit about your childhood was that you grew up in an atmosphere of humor,

Mason Funk

and I wondered if you could take that as a starting point to tell us a little bit about the sort of familial environment in which you grew up.

Sandy Stone

Well, growing up immediately post World War II in a Jewish, more or less, lower class household, aspiring to middle classness, you can either scream or you can laugh. My family chose to laugh, which I thought was the right choice,

Sandy Stone

and that came up over and over again. I'll give you only one example. My parents fought a great deal because they were under a lot of stress. One day on their, I don't remember the exact anniversary, but my mother said, "Nat," and that always brings my dad to attention. Said "What?" And my mother said, "After our 50th anniversary, I want a divorce."

Sandy Stone

And dad leaned against the kitchen doorway and said, "Not yet, Mattie, not till the kids die." Which to me was a perfect way of encapsulating the whole thing. I could tell you a lot of stories like that. But that was essentially that when I came out to them as a trans person, I knew for years they had been running a rather low but constant anxiety level about me being gay.

Sandy Stone

So I came out to them by saying, "Mom, dad, I have wonderful news for you. I'm not gay." And then I dropped the bomb, but that was the way we went into the bomb. That was the way we lived our lives and with my own experience with it. When I did come out to them and the wheels came off our relationship, I turned it into a standup comedy act with them.

Sandy Stone

With them. And that's the way I managed the emotions that my family brought to my time of transition. They essentially did the same thing with everything. There you are.

Mason Funk

That's great. Along the way, I'm going to try to tease out some of the other ways that you have managed, processed, survived,

Mason Funk

because one of the things, one of my takeaways has been you've had various tools in your toolkit that have all helped you along the way, and I definitely want to tease those out. And humor, I think, is a great starting point for that. One of the things I also took away from hearing you talk about your dad was a certain sense of admiration and appreciation, and I wondered if you could talk about him. I'm sure it's more nuanced, it's not pure -- Nothing's pure anything, but maybe paint us a portrait of your dad and what he meant to you.

Sandy Stone

For me, essentially dad's history began when he was in rabbinical school. It was Shabbas, it was one of the holy days. Dad's father happened to be the chief rabbi at rabbinical school and dad smoked on the sly. He was the only member

Sandy Stone

of the family that smoked. He was high energy and he needed an outlet for it, and that was the way he chose. When he reached out his hands for the traditional anointing before they began that particular rabbinical class, his father noticed that there were tobacco stains on his fingers. And his father said, "You awful person. You smoked on Shabbas? Get out of here. You're no longer in the

Sandy Stone

rabbinical school." And that was the end of dad's formal initiation into being a rabbi. He went off and became, first, a mailman while he went to law school and he became an attorney. He worked as a mailman while he was an attorney, which becomes relevant later on. And then he met my mother who was in teaching school at that time,

Sandy Stone

Montclair Normal, it was called, which then became Montclair State Teachers College and is now New Jersey State University, Montclair, all of its evolutions. Dad went on and became a crusading attorney, which is to say he worked hard to get poor people out of jail, and he was very, very good at it. He got a lot of poor people out of jail, but because they were poor,

Sandy Stone

they couldn't pay him. So after a while, he kind of fell out of the bottom of attorneying because he really didn't want to go in for the kind of attorneying that would've been lucrative. He really wanted to help people. And he was also an artist and something of a designer, and he built furniture for our home, which was quite lovely.

Sandy Stone

Anyway, after he fell out of the bottom of being an attorney, he went to work as a salesman selling appliances. That didn't work out for him very well because he was not very good at lying to people, and he was not very good at taking orders from superiors to lie at people. So he fell out of the bottom of that. Eventually, through this declension,

Sandy Stone

he wound up selling janitorial supplies out of the back of his car because a friend of his had a janitorial supply business and was willing to take him on. That was the bottom of my father's narrative arc. After that, he thought, whatever am I going to do now. And he thought, how about if I don't do litigation,

Sandy Stone

what's out there that I could do that is more of a research thing? The thing I originally wanted to be in life was a librarian. I wanted to be surrounded by books. So it turned out that there was a perfect job in the IRS for this in which you needed to be an attorney and you could do nothing but study law all day and write opinions

Sandy Stone

about things that needed to be done, a research attorney. He applied for that job and it turned out that because he had been a mailman, he had a federal rating, so he actually had a leg up to apply for an IRS job, a government job, because it required a minimum rating, which he had. He tried very, very hard to get that job with the rest of us looking on, and

Sandy Stone

he got it with conditions. One of the conditions was that before he could be a full-fledged lawyer, he had to clerk again, and clerking is the lowest form of life. It's a terrible job in which you carry water for everybody else. And he was older at that point. I think he was in his fifties when he got to do this. And it was a terrible strain for him.

Sandy Stone

It was hard on him emotionally and hard on him physically. He had to work ridiculous hours. Then the IRS sent him to Camden, New Jersey for a year because his position in New York hadn't opened up yet. While he was out there, it was the first time he and mom had ever lived apart from each other since they were married. And dad pulled the moon trick.

Sandy Stone

He said, "Matty, at seven o'clock at night, you go out and you look at the moon and I'll go out and look at the moon and we'll be looking at the same moon." I did the same thing with Cynbe when we were living apart when I had to go back to Austin and Cynbe had to stay in Santa Cruz. Cynbe loved a horrible institution called Hometown Buffet,

Sandy Stone

of which there is one in Salinas, which was not far from where we were living. I was living in Austin where they were all over the place like little roaches, so I would go at -- Not 7:00 PM but at a time that matched, Cynbe was three time zones away, and we would phone each other from our tables at Hometown Buffet and we would have dinner together.

Sandy Stone

That was a way in which I learned from my dad how to deal with that. After a year, his job opened up in New York and he came back to the far east coast. At that point, my dad's and mom's life together really began because for the first time they had an enough money to be comfortable, and they did that

Sandy Stone

until dad retired and they immediately moved to Santa Monica, California and lived happily ever after until the end of their days living the life.

Mason Funk

So among many other talents, you actually know how to condense an entire life into about a four and a half minute story. I'm just guessing that number. That was really, really wonderful. Thank you for that. And there's so many things that touched my heart, including last night's blue moon,

Mason Funk

which, kind of, against all odds, I convinced my husband to walk up to a vantage point in Griffith Park where we would be able to see it rising with a healthy number of other Angelinos. But it's also funny because my parents, they also kind of got a new lease on life in their 50s when my dad was kind of forced into retirement and they got to move to a remote town in Nevada and kind of have the adventurous life they'd never had until that point.

Mason Funk

So I love these stories of couples finding a new lease on life later on.

Sandy Stone

I would like to say it inspired me, but it didn't. It worked my way into my unconscious and I have, in some ways, played out that scenario in my own life, but I don't think anyone's apple actually falls very far from the tree. My sister became a librarian

Sandy Stone

and spent her life surrounded by books, so we've all done it.

Mason Funk

Yeah. Tell us about this important letter you wrote to Leopold Stokowski and give us, as a young person who also wrote letters to strangers seeking encouragement and advice, I could relate to that, but tell us your version of that story.

Sandy Stone

I have no idea what I was doing

Sandy Stone

or how to get anywhere, "in the real world." I was a born geek, I was precocious, I was all those things and I could manifest stuff in the real world of a technical nature, but I didn't have the tools to connect that to anything real, say,

Sandy Stone

to go out and get a job as a technician or an engineer, anything like that, and be able to plug those skills or talents into a social network, other people or a business network or anything like that. And my family didn't have any skills to pass onto me how to do that either. So although I was having a lot of fun

Sandy Stone

manifesting and making, I was also feeling lost because I was reading accounts of other people who were plugged in that way. There was a part of me that longed for that. There was a part of me that just wanted to be alone, but there was a part of me that longed for that connection,

Sandy Stone

that nourishing that comes from doing that with other people. And I couldn't think of any way to make it happen. But I watched Fantasia and I looked up Leopold Stokowski in the library, which was our Google of the time, and I thought, why not? He seems to have similar ideas. He wants to

Sandy Stone

experiment with sound, with directionality, with sonic impact. I want to do all those things. And just for no reason why not, I sat down at my partly broken typewriter and banged out a letter to him and put a stamp on it and sent it off to his address at wherever he was at the time, care of New York Philharmonic

Sandy Stone

or wherever he was. And then I forgot about it because nobody ever answers those things. And he wrote back and he said he had great sympathy with my position and he didn't have any way to connect me immediately with anything in his organization, which looking back on it was perfectly reasonable, I was a kid. But he said,

Sandy Stone

"My advice to you is to keep working at it and never ever give up." And that struck me very strongly, never give up. Okay, I can do that. So that became a kind of mantra for me. Here was this totem object, a letter from

Sandy Stone

Leopold Stokowski. Physical. I could feel it, I could look at it, I could smell it, and I put it between the pages of one of my favorite books and I carried it around with me. And that's been in the back of my mind ever since.

Mason Funk

That's so wonderful, wonderful that you discovered him, came across him, reached out, that he replied. Kind of like one of those

Mason Funk

moments when it's like the universe is just humming along in harmony. My version of that was a book that I came across as a teenager, a very unhappy teenager, by a guy named Robin Lee Graham who had written a book about sailing around the world alone. And that became the letter that I wrote, and he wrote back also. I wish I still had the letter, which I don't, but I remember when it arrived, it was like there was somebody out there

Mason Funk

that related to what -- You know, he was just there and made a big difference. Now, in the spectrum of trans narratives, there's so many versions like I was born in the wrong body, just to kind of throw one out there. But you said something like you had an understanding of what it meant to be a girl or a woman from very early on, and it sounds different than maybe some of the

Mason Funk

traditional framings of that story that we might've heard. So can you take maybe my misquote or my semi accurate quote of what you've said in the past and share what that dawning understanding was like for you,

Sandy Stone

That understanding, if we could call it that started when I was --

Mason Funk

Do me a favor, start off by saying what understanding you're talking about.

Sandy Stone

Okay, transgender, we have a term for that now, but

Sandy Stone

when I was a kid, very small kid, we didn't have that term. I didn't have any term, I had no language of any kind to talk about what I was feeling. And even the word transgender does not really capture what it was, but I can talk about what it seemed like. For me, it took the form of

Sandy Stone

an imaginary, mythical place called Girl Island. Now what girl, girl in quotes, means to a four or five year old is hard to say because I'm not sure that we really have clearly formed ideas of gender or even very much of self. But at that time, Girl Island was a place to which in my imagination I went

Sandy Stone

and in which I lived because the actual world was not very conducive to comfort. Girl Island was a literal island in my imagination that was populated with other people who I identified as girls, and the girls and I went on adventures together.

Sandy Stone

This is the way we lived on the island. We swam swift rivers, we climbed mountains, we went through different kinds of weather and found out how to survive in them. We learned how to build shelters, we learned how to talk to animals, and we were all girls, including me. But these girls were not clearly -- Clearly, they were not acting like girls

Sandy Stone

in my real world acted. Girls in my real world were like stereotypical girls of that time. But these girls were more like something else, and I wouldn't describe them so much as being more like boys, as being a lot more adventurous, taking up more social room, being more intelligent, loquacious,

Sandy Stone

all of the things that girls stereotypically were not supposed to be, but they were still girls in whatever that meant to me and so was I. And that paradigm reappeared during my entire life. It reappeared at intervals and it keeps doing so even up to today. It reappeared probably in the strongest form

Sandy Stone

when I went to Olivia Records to join the collective, when I looked around and thought strong women articulate women, they're uniting in a common purpose, I'm back on Girl Island. And then when I moved back to Santa Cruz and I met the group of nine women who called themselves the Amazon nine, and we began climbing Half Dome and getting airdropped into remote

Sandy Stone

places in Alaska and kayaking down the rivers, I looked around and thought, oh, it's Girl Island again. So I've discovered that the boundaries between the imaginary Girl Island that existed only inside me, the boundaries of that world began to become porous and it began to leak over into the real world

Sandy Stone

and the real world began to leak over into Girl Island, sometimes in alarming ways, as when I joined a group of five women in a coven whose purpose was to give birth parthenogenetically, and we worked very seriously on that for a number of years. That's a different kind of Girl Island.

Mason Funk

So you'll have to tell me what parthenogenetically means.

Sandy Stone

Giving birth without the intervention of sperm. In other words, a world without men, which I don't think that's a state to be desired, but there was certainly a time in the history of spirituality and femininity on the West coast when that was

Sandy Stone

definitely an aim.

Mason Funk

Yeah, one of the greatest privileges I think we have received as an organization OUTWORDS is to have been allowed into the stories and the lives of some women who were part of this traditional lesbian separatist movement. As you know, they were all over the country, including rural Arkansas, which is where I interviewed one very memorable woman named Diana Rivers, who you would adore, and it's been an honor and a privilege

Mason Funk

that they would allow -- In that era, needless to say, I would not be walking in and either physically or virtually to interview them. But they were willing to let someone come in from the male world and hear their stories and so forth, which was incredibly gracious. I also want to reference a woman who we interviewed in Seattle, a woman named Lamar Van Dyke, and have you heard of Lamar?

Sandy Stone

Vaguely. Anyway, we're getting closer to ...

Mason Funk

She had a bunch of women, kind of like, almost like a girl island kind of scenario

Mason Funk

from upstate Michigan, right on the Canada border. They decided to just get vans and corrals around the US and down to Mexico, and they dubbed themselves the Van Dykes, but she's the only one who literally took that as her legal last name. Today she's Lamar Van Dyke. I love those stories of women just saying, we're just setting out and we're going to just make our own worlds. It's very exciting era.

Sandy Stone

We were in touch with some of them at Olivia.

Sandy Stone

I don't know how many Olivia women you've interviewed, but we experienced a little of that. I was fortunate to be part of that at the time. Anyway,

Mason Funk

Such an interesting chapter in your life that we're going to get to. We've interviewed Ginny Berson, we interviewed, of course, I'm going to blank on her name, Holly Near, and I don't know if we've interviewed any others, maybe one or two others who had some connection to Olivia.

Mason Funk

But I want to kind of go down a different path before we circle back there, namely, and I know we're going to jump forward in time somewhat substantially, but I want to hear about who is Janice Maxwell and what role, I guess you could say, did she play in your journey?

Sandy Stone

I'm going to say some things

Sandy Stone

that could easily be seen as unkind, and perhaps they are, but I have to do that in order to tell the story as I saw it. When I first arrived in San Francisco and got my engineering job at Wally Heider, I moved into a furnished room right down a few blocks from Heider's Studio, and my life

Sandy Stone

consisted entirely of sleeping on a kind of pallet in this furnished room, I had a telephone put in, and going down to Wally Heider, working my ass off long, long hours, going back to the apartment, falling asleep, maybe eating a little somewhere in between there. When I got out to the West Coast and got, what you could call, settled, if you could call a room

Sandy Stone

in the tenderloin settled, I immediately called my parents from the phone in my room and said, "Mom, dad, I've got great news for you. I'm not gay." And okay, I said, "I'm trans." And they said, "Oh good, what does that mean?" And I explained, and then they said something like, "That's good, dear. Have a good time." And we hung up. 30 seconds

Sandy Stone

went by, the phone rang again. Then we had a more difficult conversation once they had processed what was going on. So that meant I was in San Francisco, Google didn't exist, there was no internet. I was poking around quite hard trying to find out if there was anyone out there who could give me any kind of advice about

Sandy Stone

what was going on with me and where it might lead. I first tried the Mattachine Society. I found them eventually through the phone book. I don't remember how through the phone book, but I called them and they said, "No, we don't do anything like that. Try calling Daughters of Bilitis." Daughters of Bilitis was the female version

Sandy Stone

of Mattachine, and somewhat conservative, somewhat middle class in its values, said, "Well, no, we don't do anything like that. But have you tried calling the police?" And what do you mean calling the police? Well, it turned out that Elliot Blackstone was running a small organization called the Transsexual Counseling Unit.

Sandy Stone

I called them, I cold called the Transsexual Counseling Unit, and I got Jan who was their front desk person. Well, "their" is kind of a tricky word. I mean the unit, the Transsexual counseling unit consisted of Jan at the front desk and Elliot, and before you got to talk to Elliot, you talked to Jan. So I gave her the little talk I had rehearsed.

Sandy Stone

I think I'm transsexual. I want to explore that, and I'm looking for advice and information and counsel. So Jan said, and all I have at this point is a woman's voice on the other end of the phone, come down and we'll talk about it. So I go down there, I'm in my full Wally Heider, our engineering drag.

Sandy Stone

I have a bushy black beard, I have a little Jew fro. I am wearing a blue work shirt and denim pants and these big heavy black engineers boots. I walk in and there's Jan behind the desk, and Jan gives me the fish eye.

Sandy Stone

I sit down and we have a little conversation and I learn something about Jan. I will pause here to say that what I learn about Jan over a period of months is that Jan is a psychotic potential murderer. She's totally out of her bonnet crazy. And she's found this one thing that she can do, and she's clinging to it.

Sandy Stone

She's an ex-veteran. She's proficient at every way of killing, every kind of weaponry, and she's not afraid to demonstrate it. And she also is representing the transsexual counseling unit. Okay, here we go. So I'm getting information and putting my life in danger. It's an interesting package. After our first few minutes of talking,

Sandy Stone

Jan says, I am quoting this as carefully as I can, "So you think you're a transsexual." And I said, "Yeah, I think of a transsexual." Jan says, "Come with me." And Jan takes me out of the building and a few blocks away, and we go into one of the row houses in the tenderloin where the interior lights

Sandy Stone

are red light bulbs in the ceiling, and we go down, down several flights of stairs replicating as we go, Dante's journey to hell, and we come out into a room, basement room, in which there are people sitting on the floor. These are people who have, in the 1970s

Sandy Stone

or late 60s, in San Francisco, in the tenderloin, managed to start down the path of gender reassignment and or sex change, and somehow or other gotten stuck halfway and not progressed, the failure to progress. Some of them have started illegal electrolysis

Sandy Stone

with some off-book individual who has scarred them terribly and they ran out of money halfway through. So they now have kind of half beards, and the rest of their faces look like the surface of the moon, and they have no way to earn money. Then there are others who have done what we called at the time first staging, which is to say they've had

Sandy Stone

orchiectomy but not penectomy, so they still have penises but not balls, and then they ran out of money or energy or something else. They also have no way to do anything and have fallen at the bottom. Here they are, and here's Jan walking me through this hell hole. I'm getting very angry

Sandy Stone

after a while, Jan takes me to several of these things that are her version of Safe Houses. And then I say to her, "Why are you showing me? What are you doing to help these people?" And Jan says, "What?" And I say, "What are you doing to help them?" And Jan turns full around and looks at me, and her face is like concrete. And she says,

Sandy Stone

"I can't help them. Nobody can help them." And I said, "Well, what are we doing here?" And Jan says, "Because I want to show you who you're going to be." "Oh, thank you very much. Alright, what now?" And Jan, there's a pause and there's a little more interaction. And then Jan says, "So do you still want to do this?"

Sandy Stone

And I say, "Of course, I still want to do this. What do we do now?" And Jan introduces me to Elliot, who puts his arm around me and gives me this wonderful little father to son talk. Elliot is a cop, and he's kind of, in a way, an Irish cop, although not fully, so he is doing this whole on part Irish, part New York

Sandy Stone

kind of, even though we're in San Francisco, talk to me. It's very friendly. He says, "Well, these are my girls. This is what they do. They want various kinds of operations. They want operations on the hands, they want operations on the feet, and they want to look like something other than what they look like. And I just try to help them not die. And I don't think

Sandy Stone

this is a good place for you to be. I don't think you belong in the Tenderloin. So I'm going to send you to the Center for Special Problems, which is over on the other side of town." That's where I leave there. But my friendship, if you can call it that with Jan Maxwell, aka Jansy the transy, goes on in this odd kind of way of I stay friends

Sandy Stone

with Jan but I don't want to get close enough to her for her to be able to kill me. That encapsulates my story of me with Jan Maxwell. I met her for the last time many years later in the 1990s or early 2000s, she was living in a house in Marin.

Sandy Stone

It was unclear how she was financing it. And when I came in, she immediately wanted to demonstrate to me a wonderful new curved knife she had gotten. She was demonstrating it to me by making it move very fast in the air right in front of me. And I was close enough where if she reached out a little further, she could have cut me with it and you could hear it

Sandy Stone

whistle as it went by.

Mason Funk

You feel the air.

Sandy Stone

I backed away very quickly, and after a minute or two of this, I said, "Jan, stop it." And she stopped and we had a little kind of visit. That was the last time I saw Jan. After that I heard that Jan had died. I mentioned that on my Facebook page,

Sandy Stone

and several of my trans friends said things like, "Jan's dead, thank God." And I would like her to have a better epitaph than that. I did not say "Jan's dead, thank God. May she rot in hell." As several of them did. But I would like to say, Jan, I'm glad you're in a better place

Sandy Stone

and I don't have to worry about keeping a safe distance from you anymore.

Mason Funk

Right. Wow. Do you think, just to spend a minute more on Jan, what an iconic figure. Is there any part of you that thinks that this was just her basically showing you the worst as almost like a cautionary tale, even though she didn't frame it that way? I just want you to know

Mason Funk

a little bit of a gut check.

Sandy Stone

It was definitely partly that, there was a part of Jan that really wanted to help, but there was another very large part of Jan that was a sadist. I was not always able to separate them out, but I got far enough away quickly enough that it was not a dangerous issue for me.

Mason Funk

So you had an instinct

Mason Funk

for self-preservation?

Sandy Stone

Apparently I did. It was kind of the drowning rat version of self-preservation in that I was always getting very, very close to something that could be very, very dangerous. But then I always managed to somehow back away just in time. And I think a certain amount of that was just dumb luck.

Mason Funk

We'll take it. We'll take

Mason Funk

the dumb luck along with everything else. Yeah, I think I've got a little bit of dumb luck in my story as well. I mean, yeah, honestly, most of us do.

Sandy Stone

I would like to hear yours.

Mason Funk

I'll share sometime when I'm not in the interviewer's chair. Okay. We're going to jump forward. So very broadly speaking, think, lemme look at where I want to jump in.

Mason Funk

I'm going to jump all the way forward to a description of 1970s lesbian culture that you used, which is describing it as a rhizome. Which, for a non-scientific guy like me, is just delicious because I even knew what a rhizome means. But what I want to get at is what that world was like for women in that era. Not just lesbian separatists,

Mason Funk

but women taking back their lives on some level, beginning to take back their lives. I would love it if you'd use the image of the rhizome. I want to set the stage for what you eventually came up against when you went to work at Olivia, including the enormous backlash you experienced. And I feel like to do that, we just need to understand as best we can, what that era felt like for women. It's a huge topic,

Mason Funk

but we need a little bit of a grounding before we move on.

Sandy Stone

Okay. The 1970s felt like a time of enormous promise in which women were discovering things about themselves in the world that were largely absent before that. In the 1920s, there was one round of

Sandy Stone

self-empowerment. Then I would brush that all under the rug by saying, well, that went away. Then we got the 1940s, which were again, somewhat of a time of empowerment when the men were away fighting and killing themselves and each other, and the women were basically running the machinery of industry. After the war, the image that was put forward was

Sandy Stone

woman as housewife, meek, but very good with cooking and a very sharp dresser. We had to live through that one in which women were pushed out of the workplace and back into the home. So there is a whole generation of women who see themselves as completely disempowered, and that's okay. Then we get eventually

Sandy Stone

to the 60s and eventually to the 70s when there appears to be a tremendous reawakening and a connection with the idea that women have power, can take back that power, can find ways to express ourselves in the world. And part of that involved the idea of the rhizome,

Sandy Stone

which is a way of thinking about structure in a different way. Not hierarchical, not centered on any one individual or power nexus, decentralized, acephalous, and thought of as everyone moving in the same general direction. Well, that may have never been true,

Sandy Stone

but it felt true when you looked at it more closely. It was chaotic. There were individual groups that were definitely moving against whatever the current was of the times. There were all sorts of pockets, I don't even need to lay them out there. But the thing that was developing, more of, was intercommunication between not only

Sandy Stone

individual women, but also the groups of women. And we were beginning to understand not only that rising sense of empowerment, but the sense that there were other women out there and they were also doing it in their own way. We began to feel the importance of bringing them together through the rhizomatic network rather than

Sandy Stone

by establishing hierarchies of communication. The most important thing I think about -- I think there are a lot of people who think differently. I think there will be many people who think that the important thing that came out of that was the political gains that we made by pushing in one particular direction, thank God, long enough to maybe move

Sandy Stone

the overarching structure a little bit. We did move the needle on that. There's no question that laws got passed, if I could put that in a passive, and things began to happen. But for me, what was most important was the fact that we were reaching out to each other, that we were establishing networks, that there was a feeling on

Sandy Stone

other women's parts that other women were remembering, and other women were waking up and other women were reaching out. And that had to start here. But once you started there, you could make the inclusive gesture, and that a lot of people were doing that.

Mason Funk

Wow, that's so powerful.

Mason Funk

Against this backdrop, and I'm just going to gloss this over right now, you bring your professional expertise essentially as an audio creator and an engineer to Olivia Records. So what was Olivia Records? Just give us a brief sketch of just how did you get a job there, so to speak?

Sandy Stone

Okay. If you were to say, who is Olivia Records to me

Sandy Stone

in 1974, I would say, I have no idea. After I transitioned socially, I started a small business on the Santa Cruz Mall, which at that point was a lot easier financially to do. I had no idea what it was going to be. I just started doing it because I needed money somehow, I needed to support myself.

Sandy Stone

Over a period of months, this thing I was doing ramified and became something of a social spot for the local GLBT community -- Well, GLB community, I may have been the only T around, but people were beginning to hang out in the store. I made that easier. I put a couch in there. We are a business on the mall with a couch,

Sandy Stone

and people would come in and sit down and we'd talk, and other people would come in and we'd talk and maybe I'd sell something and then they'd talk. And one day I was behind the counter. I looked up and there were three women there looking at me. And I said something inane like, "Can I help you?" And they said, "We are from Olivia Records and we're looking for Sandy Stone." And I said, "I'm Sandy Stone.

Sandy Stone

What's Olivia Records?" We went out onto the mall and we went down the block to an ice cream shop, which had tables. We sat down and they told me about Olivia, and they said, we are a women's record company. And I said, "Oh, that's good." We talked a little more, and they explained that they were looking for a woman who was also an

Sandy Stone

audio engineer who would be interested in making women's music. Then we talked a little about lesbian separatism, which went totally over my head. I just going, yeah, yeah. Okay. They invited me to come to -- After we talked for a while, and they kind of tested me out, tested out my bonafides. I was not the first woman. They had

Sandy Stone

come through Leslie Ann Jones first up at San Francisco. Leslie was busy with her work and said she couldn't do it, but why didn't they go talk to Sandy Stone? And by the way, Leslie Ann Jones and I met for the very first time in our lives about a week ago. Here was me and the three women from Olivia.

Sandy Stone

It was Judy Dlugacz, Linda Tillery, and I think, alright, I'm not sure who the third person was, but we talked for quite a while and there was a mutual feeling out. And then they said, "Why don't you come down to the collective, take a look at what we do and see how that feels." I said, okay. So

Sandy Stone

I jumped into my VW bus, I drove down to LA, I went into the collective house and wow, it was Girl Island. Here's a bunch of women running a record company, living together. They actually had, at that point, two houses and were in the process of renting a third. At that time, there were

Sandy Stone

nine women in the collective, I believe. It was quite organized. Two women were doing the graphics for the albums. One woman was doing copy, we rotated opening the mail and being front person in the office and so on. I walked into this and we all ate together communally, they had a big table

Sandy Stone

in the dining room, and alternated cooking, which could have mixed results. Dinnertime was this happy chattery affair where everyone talked about what they were doing and who they were in love with at the time and on and on. I stayed there in one of the rooms in the collective house for a day or two, and my first day

Sandy Stone

didn't spook me. I didn't immediately drive away. I said, "This is fine. What do you want to do?" And they said, "We'd like to do an album to see how we work together with you." And that was the BeBe K'Roche album. I said, fine, and I essentially moved in. We did the BeBe K'Roche album in Oakland. The people who were

Sandy Stone

involved with the album moved to Oakland for the length of time that it took to do the album. We did it at Different Fur studios, which was a very well appointed studio up there. We had the usual timeframe, Linda Tillery produced. We had a number of conflicts because I still had -- once I

Sandy Stone

got into the studio, I wore my New York and San Francisco mainstream recording hat. That did not work very well with this group of women.

If you want an example, I can give you one of how we were quite far apart in our thoughts of how you do albums.

Mason Funk

I think I'm going to move us along just because we're almost done with an hour

Mason Funk

and we've got a lot of ground to cover. What I think I want to move towards is essentially the showdown. I think getting to the heart of that conflict is going to propel the story forward.

Sandy Stone

Okay. The showdown. Do you mean by that when Janice Raymond sent us our first chapter?

Mason Funk

From my notes I'm referring to, well, let's go backwards briefly and introduce that book you're referring to. What was this book? Tell us about the book, the Transsexual Empire. What was it?

Sandy Stone

The Transsexual Empire was a book written by a person named Janice Raymond,

Sandy Stone

who appeared to be writing it as a grudge match. She had some kind of chip on her shoulder about trans women, and her goal was to completely invalidate the idea of trans women to have us written out of history, written out of the world, written out of life. That was her specific stated goal. What she said in

Sandy Stone

that book was, we want transsexuality to be morally mandated out of existence. She was talking about me, it turned out, me. When the book came out, she named me by name in the chapter called Sappho by Surgery. In other words, here's this woman I've never heard of. I have no idea who she is. She's immensely powerful

Sandy Stone

in the world of academia, and she has the ear of a publisher, a very big publisher, and she's writing a book in which she names me and says, these people need to be morally mandated out of existence, and we're going to do it by passing laws against you. So I'm going,

Sandy Stone

first of all, why me and who are you and what makes you think you know anything about my life? Okay, here we are at Square One.

Mason Funk

So somehow the showdown or the meltdown, somehow her thinking

Mason Funk

penetrates the world of Olivia Records.

Sandy Stone

Okay. Jan sent us the --

Mason Funk

Let me know who you're talking about.

Sandy Stone

Jan sent the Olivia Collective, in which by that time I had joined, and had moved from Santa Cruz to LA, and was living with, very happily, for quite a while at that point. Then Janice Raymond sent us a draft of

Sandy Stone

one chapter of the forthcoming book, the Sappho by Surgery chapter, although it had not yet been named that. What we did at the Collective when stuff came in in the mail that looked like it should be brought to the attention of the entire collective was we passed it around. We put a paperclip on it with a yellow sheet on top, on when we wrote comments.

Sandy Stone

I was fairly late on that list. It went around, the manuscript went around. It took a while for it to go around because it was not the full completed chapter. It was like, I don't know, 40, 50 pages I think came in an 8x10 envelope. It was probably like 50 pages and typescript. We passed it around and people read it when they could.

Sandy Stone

Eventually it got to me and I read it, and my reaction was actually not fear and loathing. It was, wow, this doesn't relate to anything real I've ever heard of. Where is she getting this stuff from? So I wrote on my line on the yellow sheet, "I think there should be a book about this topic, but this is not that book."

Sandy Stone

And I just passed it on. I signed it and passed it on, and that was all I heard of it. Eventually it got back to Sandy Ramsey in the mailroom, who put it back in an envelope with our comments and some kind of cover letter, "Dear Janice Raymond, thank you for -- And here are our comments and we hope that this is helpful to you." The other comments I noticed when it got to me

Sandy Stone

were things like, who is writing this? This is ugly. This is really awful. Things like that. Does this react to somebody's reality" And on and on. I assume when Jan got it back, she was not terribly pleased. It seemed, in immediate retrospect, that her goal in sending us that was to out me

Sandy Stone

and get me thrown out of the collective. Neither of those things happened. First of all, the collective knew I was trans. There was no secret about my being trans. And secondly, we loved each other. There was no way they were going to kick me out because of this thing because it happened to say what an evil person I was and how awful transsexuality was.

Sandy Stone

We heard nothing back. Then we got the letter, which was a letter from a group of lesbian separatists headed by a woman named Boo Price. Barbara Price, who, it turned out, was the head of our competition women's record company, which was

Sandy Stone

named Ladyslipper Records. The letter was ugly. It was aimed at me, and it was meant to cast the idea of trans in the worst possible light, repeating all of those tropes that Janice Raymond had started with. Trans women are not women. They are really men. They may have raped women. Their purpose

Sandy Stone

is to divide the women's community. They will ultimately destroy Olivia records. We don't want them, on and on and on like that. And they published it in -- I think it was Lesbian Tide. I'm not quite sure, and it caused an uproar. We began getting hate mail.

Sandy Stone

After a while ... Well, the first thing that happened after they published the letter was our collective had a meeting. I don't think I said anything during the meeting. It wasn't really my place to, unless anybody asked me a direct question. But the outcome of that meeting was the rest of the collective decided to draft a letter to send back to publish

Sandy Stone

as an answer to that letter. And it said two things that stuck in my mind. One of them was,

Sandy Stone is a person, not an issue. We have worked with Sandy and we find her perfectly acceptable. She's a sister like any other sister, no more, no less. And we intend to go

Sandy Stone

on working with her. And then a line that didn't wind up in the final letter, we intend to wind up eventually rocking on the porch of the old dykes home together. I thought, oh, that's sweet. And they sent it off, or we sent it off, and then it just started to get worse. It started

Sandy Stone

to get a lot worse. We began to get hate mail that the mail room would no longer show to me. Then we began to get threats of a boycott. Then we had black Sunday, black Tuesday, it was black someday. It was a very ugly day where

Sandy Stone

we went to a meeting in a room in Oakland over a bookstore, in which a great many women, it was a great many women, like 30 or 40 other women, and the Olivia Collective, we sent a few members of the collective because we were under the impression that

Sandy Stone

we would have dialogue. We walk in, we had heard beforehand that there was going to be a group of women from Chicago there, and that these women were "notorious head breakers." I had no idea what that meant. None of us really did. We went in fully expecting that there would be some kind of dialogue. We all sat down and a woman from the Chicago group

Sandy Stone

got up and made the introductory speech. It was a rehash of all that stuff from the letter, well, we all know that trans women are really men. This is just the fact we start out with, and they're all going to divide the women's community, and they're all going to rape you eventually and on and on like that. I think I can speak with a collective,

Sandy Stone

we're all sitting there and our jaws are dropping, and eventually she winds down and finishes and I think, oh, now Ginny's going to say something, or Judy's going to make a response, and no one does. They all turn around and look at me. I never intended to talk at this thing, and quite frankly,

Sandy Stone

I thought every word out of this person's mouth was bullshit. When everyone turned around and looked at me, that's what I said. I just said, "Well, I think that's bullshit." And that was the bomb that exploded in the room. It was exactly the wrong thing to say. It was the male, natural male thing to say. It was so male.

Sandy Stone

And the room just erupted. There were women screaming. There were women standing on chairs and just screaming at us. Things like, now Olivia's shown its true colors. Now you've had this man in your midst. It was incredibly ugly. We couldn't get rational dialogue to come out of that.

Sandy Stone

The Chicago group said they wouldn't talk to us at all unless that man left pointing at me. I finally said something like, I think I'd rather eat glass than doing this, but if it will get us dialogue, alright, let's go. I'm going to leave and you figure this out. Figure out how to talk to these people, talk some

Sandy Stone

sense into them, and I left. There was no dialogue. There was never a conversation. It made no difference that I had left. And eventually Jennifer just tears -- Sweet Jennifer. Jennifer had a meltdown. And I think when Jennifer melted down, I think that

Sandy Stone

ended it. For Jennifer to be so damaged, I mean, for me, alright, I'm the object of hate. Okay, I'm going to deal with that. I can have my meltdown, but I'm not going to have it there. But Jennifer, who has stood up through so much and been so brave

Sandy Stone

and just such a force for good, to just get so hurt by this whole thing, that was a little too much. That was the end of that. And from there on, it was just straight downhill.

Mason Funk

Yeah, we're going to have to jump forward again.

Sandy Stone

Okay.

Mason Funk

It's an intense story. I don't know how it feels to recount it. It certainly feels intense to hear it. Thank you. And again, it sounds like a very intense story to share, so thank you for going down that path with us.

Sandy Stone

Well, the more that I can share that I think the better because there aren't too many accounts of when the lesbian separatist, transphobic rubber hits the road.

Mason Funk

Yeah, exactly.

Sandy Stone

That's one of them.

Mason Funk

Yeah.

Sandy Stone

Beth Elliot has another one I know.

Mason Funk

Yeah. We interviewed Beth. I was wondering, because she's come up in my mind as I've been preparing for your interview, but let's go one of the ways we always like to, as I mentioned earlier, see and reflect on the tools and the ways you kept going. One of them was to write a now famous essay called,

Mason Funk

I think it's The Empire Strikes Back, the aptly named. So I wondered if you could introduce us to that essay. We don't have time obviously to go to everything about it, but I want to have it in the record and hear from your perspective, what was the importance of writing that essay for you. And give us the essay by name, please.

Sandy Stone

Okay. Before we start, I have to ask you, do you want me to go back to when I met Donna or would you prefer --

Mason Funk

Oh, no.

Sandy Stone

Okay.

Mason Funk

I think I'd like to know that you wrote it in some way, shape, or form for Donna, but unfortunately, I don't think we have time to do the backstory. I just want to know who Donna is.

Sandy Stone

Okay. I wrote The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto when I was a first year graduate student at the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California Santa Cruz, which at the time

Sandy Stone

had 5,000 students, had quite a different atmosphere from what it has now. I was the student of Donna Haraway, who was one of the professors in that program. Donna had recently written a paper called A Manifesto for Cyborgs, which went off on its own track. So the word manifesto was rattling around in

Sandy Stone

my mind at that time. At the end of my first year there, Donna said, "Well, you should do a project to sum up your first year." And I said, "Well, what do you think I should do?" Donna said, "Well, you could do something like write a paper." And I said, "Okay, I will write a paper." And I went away and wrote that paper. I wrote a paper called The Empire Strikes Back. I wrote it

Sandy Stone

for a conference that the graduate students were holding that was called Other Voices, Other Worlds, which was a discussion of minority discourse. I wrote it deliberately with an embedded narrative arc. I wrote it because I wanted to make an academic statement. I wanted it to be a cool,

Sandy Stone

collected and rational academic statement, but I wanted it to end with what I was feeling at that meeting when Jennifer melted down, which was white hot anger. It begins quietly enough in a pastoral scene in Casablanca,

Sandy Stone

and it works its way through going to the Stanford Clinic, discussing the foundations of an actual location of the apparatus of the production of gender, and it goes on to talk about Janice Raymond and her paper and one interpretation of what that was about. Because it's an academic paper, and I really don't want to deconstruct Raymond's paper,

Sandy Stone

there's nothing to deconstruct really. Raymond's paper is a hate letter and you really can't spend a lot of time deconstructing it from an academic point of view because there's nothing there. It's not a work of intellectual effort. It's an emotional attack, which is disguised as an intellectual effort. Eventually I would like to go there,

Sandy Stone

but not at that moment. Eventually we get to a point where I'm talking about the purpose of the transsexual body, and at this point I'm delivering the paper to the conference. We get to the point where the climax of the paper is actually, when I say, "the transsexual body is a meaning machine

Sandy Stone

for the production of ideal type." From there on, the narrative line goes down and then up again at the end. The manifesto part is a call for action. It's a call for trans people in general, but in particular trans women, and in particular trans women who have

Sandy Stone

been exposed to the particular vituperativeness and violence, both verbal and physical, exemplified in Janice Raymond's book, but instantiated in the kind of hate that trans people are being exposed to today. I called for a particular kind of

Sandy Stone

rhizomatics, if you will, asking everyone, no matter where they were, no matter where they were situated, to do what I called reading themselves aloud, which is a kind of coming out in which you state who you are, you announce your stakes, and you explain how you fit into the world at large.

Sandy Stone

After that conference, the paper did a kind of spurlos versenkt. It just dropped out of sight and it didn't reappear until a couple of years later, and I went off to other adventures in San Diego and then to Austin,

Sandy Stone

and then Christina Straub and Julia Epstein asked if they could reprint that paper in an anthology they were publishing called Bodyguards. After that, the paper began to attract attention. There's your capsule version.

Mason Funk

I appreciate that. It's great. It's so good. It's so important to have that on the record, so thank you for that.

Mason Funk

Along the way, in the category of ways you got through, you told a story, I think it was to Zachary Drucker, about a particular eight story elevator. Eight story building in San Diego with an elevator riding up and down, and I think I found that

Mason Funk

very moving because it's a different side of your so-called coping strategies that one might not necessarily guess at. I wondered if you could tell us the story of that elevator, give us a context, a little bit of context, and then what you would do riding up and down.

Sandy Stone

Okay. We'll have to be careful about not having too much context, but we can start from if you want, I found myself in San Diego instead of talking about how I got there.

Sandy Stone

Well, no, I'm sorry. I have to talk a little about how I got there. I was sitting in Donna's office and we were talking about what I might do.

Mason Funk

Do me a favor, just say I was sitting in Donna Haraway's office.

Sandy Stone

Okay. I was sitting in Donna Haraway's office, Donna was my advisor in the History of Consciousness program, it was the end of my first year. I had just written the Empire Strikes Back, and we were talking

Sandy Stone

about what my second quarter would be like, and Donna said, "I have an idea. They're starting a very traditional science studies program at the University of California, San Diego." "Why don't you go down there, be a bridge student, go down. It's very traditional program they're starting. It's all the old white-haired guys. Why don't you go down, talk a little about

Sandy Stone

History of Consciousness and absorb some of the way they do science, show them something about the way we approach it up here and see if you can't get some students from down there to take history of consciousness for a quarter. We'll send some of our students down there." I said, "Fine. So how do you want me to do it?" And she said, "Well, you could try talking to the head of the science studies program."

Sandy Stone

I said, "Okay, can I use your phone?" She said, "Fine." I picked up the phone and got a phone book, looked up the number of the science studies program in San Diego, called them. I got the head of the program immediately on the phone. I said, "I'd like to speak to the head of the program." He said, "You've got him." I said, "Fine. My name is Sandy Stone. I'm in history of --" No, I didn't say that. I said, "I'm Sandy Stone. I'm at the UC of California Santa Cruz,

Sandy Stone

and I'd like to come be in your program for a quarter. Could we do that?" And he said, "What program are you in up there?" Donna said, "Not history of consciousness!" I said, "What program are you in?" He said, "Sociology." I said, "Oh, that's great. I'm in sociology too." And he said, "Oh, wonderful. Come on down and we'll talk." Essentially I packed some stuff in my car,

Sandy Stone

mostly books and some bookshelves in my Volkswagen bus, and I drove down there and they put me up in International House, which was a student dorm where I shared a common dorm with four other women, and I set up a little room and went to class. This moved rather quickly from

Sandy Stone

my being in the science studies program to the science studies program kicking me out unceremoniously and taking away my grant and my office and everything else, which caused me instantly to be rehired as an instructor. Now I'm faculty. I'm a second year grad student in a program in Santa Cruz, and now I'm faculty at San Diego and things are moving very fast.

Sandy Stone

This goes on for many quarters and I'm teaching. I don't understand fully what's going on and I don't understand it now. But what happened was people in virtually every department in the humanities or social sciences found out I was there and wanted me to teach a course in their department. I'm teaching in anthropology and sociology

Sandy Stone

and history and political science and English and an experimental program called the Making of the Modern World. I'm having the time of my life. It's San Diego. The weather is beautiful all the time. The trees sway in the breeze. I have enough money for a change and everyone seems to love me, and they're beginning to make noises about opening up a

Sandy Stone

tenure line. On the other hand, I'm desperately unhappy. I'm away from my home. I'm away from my kid, for God's sake. My partnership, my marriage, has fallen apart. I'm at wits end. I don't know what I'm doing. The fact that I'm teaching like this doesn't mean I know what I'm doing. I'm actually lost in the world and I'm terribly unhappy.

Sandy Stone

The way I get to sleep at night is I have a little hip flask sized thing of vodka, and at bedtime I take one capful, which is plenty for me because I don't drink and I lie down on the bed and I pass out. Eventually, it turns out I'm not alone. Several of the other women in my little dorm unit are also lost and terribly unhappy. But I don't know that

Sandy Stone

at that moment. All I know is: who am I? What am I doing? What am I doing here? And this sometimes manifests itself as just a feeling of utter sorrow and hopelessness, and I have to figure out a way to deal with this when I'm continually out there teaching and interacting with people who are real faculty, as I'm just this fake, I'm a graduate student. I don't know what the hell is going on.

Sandy Stone

I discovered that the humanities and social sciences building, which is eight stories tall, has an elevator and it's very, very slow. I find a strategy. I get into the elevator on the ground floor at a time of day when I know there's not much going on in the building, but I have something to do in the sociology department's offices,

Sandy Stone

which are on the eighth floor. I get in the elevator, the door is closed, I lean against the wall of the elevator and I cry, and I cry my heart out. I cry while the elevator goes up and it takes it quite a while. Eventually it gets to the eighth floor and the doors open and I'm on again, and I go out, okay, what are

Sandy Stone

we doing today? And that's it. Occasionally, I'll get back in the elevator and I'll be alone in the elevator and I'll get to cry on the way down. But that's about it. I can't cry alone in my room. That doesn't work. My room is, in a way, a sacred space of a different kind. There's one other factor in here that I didn't mention, that I will mention now,

Sandy Stone

which is part way through my first year there, my father died, which is a whole other thing that dropped on me, plus the fact that my family gently discouraged me from coming to the memorial.

Mason Funk

It's funny when you were telling that story, it's funny, somehow you had already evoked your father. I don't know quite why.

Sandy Stone

That's fascinating.

Mason Funk

Yeah.

Sandy Stone

Being surrounded by books? Not knowing what I was doing?

Mason Funk

Just something in the story, he just popped to mind for me. I don't know. I'm not going to make any meaning of that right now, but he had come up in my memory. Well, thank you for sharing that story. I think, in my personal opinion, speaking only as myself, it's good for us to know that we can give ourselves permission sometimes just to find whatever that

Mason Funk

sacred box might be, and just let the tears -- Just let them roll, let 'em roll for a little while, and then the door's open and it's like I'm on, ready to face the world again.

Sandy Stone

It seems to have worked because I'm still here. Anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

Mason Funk

No, that's okay. God knows I'm not here to talk. You invoked your daughter, and I do want to spend some time talking about your relationship with Cynbe

Mason Funk

and the birth of your daughter. I don't even know if there's necessarily overlap, I think there might be, but can you paint a semi-short version of the relationships? Those two relationships?

Sandy Stone

My daughter and Cynbe? Certainly. My daughter was probably the most planned birth you can imagine. Darcy and I had to invent all the

Sandy Stone

techniques at that time for doing donor insemination. Nobody would tell us.

Mason Funk

Sorry, but who's Darcy?

Sandy Stone

Okay. I had a number of lovers in Santa Cruz at that time. Eventually I ran across a woman named Darcy Thole. Well, I didn't run across her, she ran across me. She was outgoing, active, one of the Amazon nine, and

Sandy Stone

she swept me off my feet, if you will, or we swept each other off our feet. We became lovers, we became partners. We moved in together and we had a lot of adventures together with the Amazon nine, which was one of my first experiences with Girl Island leaking into the real world. And then

Sandy Stone

Darcy said, "What do you think about having a kid?" And I said, "Sure. That's another adventure. What do we do?" You'll have to find a guy. Darcy said, "No, I refuse to sleep with a man. I just won't do that." Okay, well then what do we do? So we had to invent how to do it. First, we went to sperm banks and sperm banks wouldn't talk to us because we were a lesbian couple

Sandy Stone

and it was 1980 whatever it was. We thought about how do you get sperm? So we talked to a mutual friend who at that point was a therapist in town, named Jerry Solomon, and he offered to be an intermediary for us to get sperm. In the first place,

Sandy Stone

at that time, in California, even if you use donor sperm, the donor person still had legal rights over the child. And we were both against the idea of having someone out there who could come in and take our kid away if they so desired by claiming that we were lesbian parents and therefore unfit. So we needed to work with a blind donor.

Sandy Stone

We decided on a scheme where Jerry would ask people in the gay community if they would donate sperm, and then they would bring the sperm to his office. I would drive over there, pick up the vial, put it in my armpit, drive back across down, put it in the syringe, and then inseminate Darcy. Well, we did this for almost a year and it didn't work. Then

Sandy Stone

"Darcy", I said, "Look, we're going to have to get people a little closer than across town. Clearly, my armpit is not a suitable, comfortable place for sperm to be." So Darcy said, okay. So we began inviting different men from the gay community. I mean, we were friends with a lot of men in the gay community. We began inviting them over for dinner,

Sandy Stone

candlelight wine and all that. At the end of dinner, they would go off in the other room with some magazines, and then they would come back with a vial, and then I would inseminate Darcy. Well, we couldn't do that directly at first. We didn't want to because then you still have a known donor, even though these men were willing to swear that they would never want to have anything to do with the child when we were still not,

Sandy Stone

you know -- You didn't know, there was no settled law. We were mixing sperm. We'd get people to come one after the other, and then we'd mix their sperm, so you couldn't know who the real father was. And then I would inseminate Darcy, nothing, didn't work. We tried over and over again and it didn't work. Finally, we decided that, well, we're going to have to try individual people. There may be something

Sandy Stone

antagonistic about the way their sperm mixes. We had people sign quasi-legal documents that said, I don't want to have anything to do with this. Eventually, it worked. We were using the sperm at that time

Sandy Stone

of one person in particular, and Darcy had asked him if we didn't want anyone involved at that time, but would he be interested possibly at some future time and being more of a father? And he said, well, he would at least be willing to think about it. On that basis, we used his sperm and it worked. We weren't sure it was Larry,

Sandy Stone

but Larry was in the pool, let's put it that way. Darcy became pregnant, and that's how we got Tani. It turned out that Darcy followed her family's tradition, which is she had to have a caesarean. So Darcy was not conscious when Tani was born. It fell upon me to introduce

Sandy Stone

Tani to the world. First of all, the fact that she was named Tani was due to the fact that she was a girl. We didn't want to know what her sex was, but if Tani had been a boy, her name would've been something else. The deal with Darcy was, if it's a boy, Darcy gets to choose the name. If it's a girl, I get to choose the name. I got to choose the name, so she

Sandy Stone

became Tani, and then we wound up adding on a few more names, because you do that. She became Tani Ashley Fisher Stone Thole, but Darcy didn't want hyphenation, so it's Stone Thole, occasionally abbreviated to Thole, which I didn't like, but you don't always get everything you want. So we got a kid.

Sandy Stone

I got to take her out of the Isolette and hold her like that and say "Hi." She looked at me and I said, "Okay, let's get some stuff out of the way. I'm one of your moms. My name is Sandy. Darcy's your other mom, she's asleep right now. Your name is Tani. This is California on the planet Earth and welcome." And Tani looked

Sandy Stone

back at me with those big blue baby eyes and kind of said, "Oh, okay." That was the beginning of our relationship. Then there came ... Alright, I don't know where you want it to go because -- You tell me where you want it to go. Yeah.

Mason Funk

Well, that's an amazing story. Not being a parent myself, I can only imagine the pitfalls

Mason Funk

of a question like the one I'm about to ask you. But you did mention her as one of the most significant people/experiences of your life. And again, now my eyes firmly on the clock, I wonder if you can relatively briefly sum up what Tani has meant to you or means to you?

Sandy Stone

Well, when Tani was born, it was the end of so much and the beginning of so much.

Sandy Stone

To enumerate would be to trivialize. I'm not going to enumerate any of that beyond saying that Darcy and I entered a universe of which we had no idea. It doesn't matter how much people tell you, it doesn't matter what they warn you about or even how much they want to help.

Sandy Stone

Suddenly, there's a new being in your life and the being gets to grow up and soak up a lot of your time and energy and attention and money, and then they become their own person. And then

Sandy Stone

you find yourself at some strange point where Tani is 40 years old and I'm having a conversation with her in which she says, "Mom, I need you to understand I'm 40 years old. I need you to treat me like an adult." And I say, "If I think of you as an adult, that means a lot of other things

Sandy Stone

kick in." Tani says "Like what?" And I say, "I start thinking you're 40 years old, you're going to be 50 someday and then you're going to be 60 and you're going to start to get sick and someday you'll die." And Tani says, "And you're just going to sit there and watch all of that, right?" That's kind of where we are now, except now she's 41. She lives with me, thank God.

Sandy Stone

She and her partner, Leslie, this wonderful guy and our grandson, my grandson, their kid, Naio, who is now 15 and a whole trip in his own right.

Sandy Stone

This is a family that I did not expect and it's quite wonderful. End of story. That's all.

Mason Funk

Perfect. It's wonderful. Let's talk about Cynbe.

Sandy Stone

Okay.

Mason Funk

Again, I mean it's tragic to be rushing through any of these stories.

Sandy Stone

That's okay. I could encapsulate my life with Cynbe by saying that we met

Sandy Stone

online in a time when meeting online had no history of evolving into anything. We were both geeks. We both knew how to write code. We wrote ourselves into each other's lives. I had no idea who Cynbe was. He lived in Seattle. We didn't meet for a year. We lived online in a virtual world that

Sandy Stone

Cynbe wrote for the two of us. In that world, our avatars were very happy with each other, and after a year, we both said, I've got to know, does this have a real world component? I wouldn't leave home. I was too, "I'm not going to let anything bad happen to me, no way. Cynbe, if you want to know more about this, you're going to have to come to my turf." And Cynbe said,

Sandy Stone

"Oh, okay." And the next thing I knew, we were in my living room. I was hiding behind the easy chair and Cynbe was sitting on the couch all scrunched up, and after an hour or so we were sitting next to each other and shortly thereafter, we were living together. Thus began 20 years

Sandy Stone

of the most incredible time of my life, 20 absolutely incredible, glorious, fantastic, wonderful years in which two geeks fell in love and lived the perfect geek life in Santa Cruz, California. Not that Seattle was that bad either, but we lived most of our lives in Santa Cruz. We had

Sandy Stone

painful partings and fantastic reunions, and basically we lived joyously and wonderfully together without ever raising our voices to each other for 20 years of just married bliss. We were only actually married for the last year of the relationship, and we only did it because it made legal stuff easier for when Cynbe died.

Sandy Stone

When it came time when we knew Cynbe was dying, we went down that road in the most creative way we could, and I followed him as Ursula Le Guin says, as far as it is permitted to go. And then he went on and I turned back and that was it. Cynbe died

Sandy Stone

in 2016 and my life ended. Sometime later I thought that it's time to just start showing up, and that's what I did. I just showed up and I showed up and showed up until something happened and now it's happening again.

Sandy Stone

But that time with Cynbe was it. That's the best time of our lives and I can speak authoritatively for both of us. Cynbe was as blown away by the fact that I was in his life as I was blown away by the fact that he was in mine. Good night.

Mason Funk

That's a wonderful, again, distillation, I would say, of what sounds like an absolutely magical relationship. Thank you for sharing that. In your questionnaire, you said that we should make sure to cover the nuances and differences between

Mason Funk

asexual, pansexual, lesbian and queer, and probably you could add in some other descriptors in there as well. But I really want to get into this because asexual and pansexual are becoming slightly more part of our daily vernacular, and I really am curious to hear about your take, especially to some extent also given the fact that you had this very important relationship with Darcy, you had this very important, those are just the tip of the iceberg,

Mason Funk

I would assume, on your perspective, on these different terms. So could you share a little bit of that?

Sandy Stone

Let me try to do this through personal experience, if I may. I want to explain or talk about different kinds of sexuality, pansexual, demisexual, asexual, bisexual, homosexual, transsexual.

Sandy Stone

Okay. We could start arbitrarily in New York when I was being a rock and roll engineer, I am having heterosexual sex as a man frequently as is everybody else. This is pre-AIDS. I am at a time and place where I am

Sandy Stone

in a situation of oversharing with everyone. So there's that. Then there's a really horrible time when not much sex is going on with anybody. Then that ends. Then I undergo gender reassignment. I come out the other side of it having no sense of what my

Sandy Stone

sexuality might be. I have lived for a number of years with a lesbian separatist collective. I have not permitted any kind of love affair to happen because there's a certain danger of being found out because at that point I'm preoperative in an environment which at any time could turn extremely hostile. So postoperatively,

Sandy Stone

a number of things happen. Number one, I have heterosexual penis and vagina sex with a person who is a trans hag, who it turns out was hanging around purely so that he could have sex with me postoperatively. And I discover, Ooh, this is fun. It works physically and it's just great.

Sandy Stone

So then there's that. Then immediately thereafter, I discover lesbian sex with women as a woman, and that's fantastic too. In fact, it's more fantastic. So I fall into a series of fantastic lesbian relationships and I would be a lesbian to this day if I hadn't met Cynbe.

Sandy Stone

And it's really hard to describe what my sexuality was with Cynbe in one way that was very important to both of us. When we met this odd magnetic thing happened where we clicked together into a very traditional heterosexual relationship, and it worked in

Sandy Stone

so many, what I would call traditional ways that it scares me. I mean, we would use the heterosexual power imbalance socially speaking to make us both very happy for a while, and then we would give it up and then we would equally take care of each other, and then one of us would take the lead, then the other would take the lead. That became very fluid. Cynbe himself

Sandy Stone

described himself as gender ambiguous. His avatar online in all the virtual communities he was in at that time, which were most of them, was a firefly. So his avatar was a firefly. It's hard to make a gender out of that.

Sandy Stone

And to me, Cynbe was one of the most gentle people I had ever met, and that was very important in our relationship. Subsequently after Cynbe's death, I became essentially asexual And then I

Sandy Stone

fell into a relationship with a person who presents as male, but who is actually quite gender fluid, who is also poly, and has male and female lovers, and who spoke to my multiplicity, which is not something we're going to get to here.

Sandy Stone

Through him or through them, we use both, he introduced me to a third person named Alistair, who when Ctein and Alistair became lovers, they got to the point where they wanted to be lovers with each other, but Ctein didn't really know what Alistair's physical equipment was, so he had to ask.

Sandy Stone

It turns out Alistair is a physical woman. Alistair loves penis and vagina sex, gets off on that, and other things, so they did that. One day Ctein said, I'd like you to meet this friend of mine named Alistair. They came down, stayed in the house in the guest room,

Sandy Stone

and then somehow later in the evening, they both appeared in my doorway stark naked. I said, oh, okay. The three of us went to bed. I discovered that, well, I had fun with Ctein, I had a lot of fun with Alistair, and I discovered that when I touch them, my sensorium leaves my body

Sandy Stone

and goes into Alistair's so I can experience them making love from Alistair's point of view. So there was that. Much later, I had the problem of how do I define that as a sexuality? Okay, let's just put that one aside for a moment because that's part of the ways in which we make love to this day. I didn't even have a word for what we were until

Sandy Stone

Sarah Esokoff described it as a thruple in her podcast. We are still together in that thruple. Our favorite pastimes are fucking like crazy and discussing our various book lists. That's the way we spend our time together first we fuck like crazy. We get that out of the way and then we talk about books.

Mason Funk

I thought for sure you were going to say you discuss the best chocolate you've had recently.

Sandy Stone

I have stopped doing that because very few people can actually produce the best chocolate. They come up with things that they think I'll like, but I'm very, very Catholic in my chocolate tastes, so that really doesn't work. What we do talk about, believe it or not, is tea because

Sandy Stone

Ctein is a tea lover and he's the kind of tea connoisseur who travels with a little satchel with different kinds of tea in it and a pot and the little image of the Tea God that you could pour the water over and on and on like that. So we do that, and I have learned to be a tea connoisseur myself now, and I can talk quasi-authoritatively about different kinds of tea, and

Sandy Stone

every once in a while they will draw me out about chocolate and I'll talk about vintage and terroir and all of the other stuff, but not that often. Mostly books.

Mason Funk

Books are the common thread.

Sandy Stone

Yeah. Books and tea.

Mason Funk

Yeah,

Sandy Stone

All of Ctein's published books have characters in them who are tea connoisseurs.

Mason Funk

Thank you. That was not only a

Mason Funk

wonderful "dissertation" on different forms of sexuality, but it was fleshed out in real relationships, so I appreciate that it was made real, it was made flesh. Okay, we're on to people that you wanted to make sure you talked about briefly. Kate Bornstein, Susan Stryker and Judy Dlugacz. We're going to spend about a minute, a minute and a half on each one of them, please. So you can start with Kate Bornstein.

Sandy Stone

Okay. Kate and I met in San Francisco.

Mason Funk

Give us her full name please.

Sandy Stone

Kate Bornstein and I met in San Francisco through a mutual friend who at the time was my lover. Kate was doing her first show called Hidden: A Gender. I went to that. I thought, wow, this is interesting. I want to get to talk to her. So Kate and I got to talk outside the venue. We immediately fell in love

Sandy Stone

with each other's minds, and we have been fast friends ever since. We've never been lovers. We have completely different ideas of how desire and passion work, but we've been close ever since then. I love Kate. Kate loves me. We have managed to get into each other's presence on any possible occasion

Sandy Stone

when we pass nearby on our various career paths, and it's wonderful hanging out with her. She is a fantastic intellectual, a brilliant teacher and a great heart, and she now lives in, or she is in upstate New York. Have you interviewed her yet? She has an autoimmune problem at the moment

Sandy Stone

that she's working on, but she's still perking along. We talked I think a month ago, and bless her, she has done so much good in the world with her books and her public appearances and her prime directive, which is do whatever you want to do to each other, but be kind, and

Sandy Stone

that's the one thing I want to take away. We're working on a film about me, we have Kate in it. We hope to have more of Kate and I just think the world of her, that's all.

Mason Funk

Awesome. Susan Stryker.

Sandy Stone

Susan Stryker is the mover and shaker behind transgender studies. I wrote a paper, great. That would've been the end of it, but Susan came along and read the paper. She read the paper and said,

Sandy Stone

"Oh, well, we can go somewhere with this." And Susan got the ears of the right people in the university structure, in the power structure, in the political game, in the financial world. Got the financing, got the staffing, got people to open up to the thought of having programs,

Sandy Stone

got staff, got people to give lines. If it weren't for Susan, there wouldn't be a transgender studies. Susan and I have known each other for longer than that, but it was really that. It was really Susan that made it happen. We're still friends. I care a lot about Susan.

Sandy Stone

She can do things in the real world that I can't, that absolutely cannot. If you were to think of us as the 1-800-HUCKSTERS on the late night TV show, I had one idea and Susan sold the cars and there you go. I think the world of her.

Mason Funk

Thank you. I love that. We have interviewed Susan, have had that honor. Kate's another story. I haven't been in touch with Kate for seven years since the launch of this project, but maybe if things come full circle, we'll have the opportunity to still interview her. And now post-pandemic, when I first contacted her seven years ago, everything was in person. Now we can drop an interview kit on her doorstep, so maybe that'll open something up.

Sandy Stone

I hope so.

Mason Funk

Last but not least for now, Judy.

Sandy Stone

Let me add,

Sandy Stone

if I may, one more sentence about Susan. She has a fantastic brain. I didn't mention that. She's brilliant and she does terrific work. That's all. Sorry, I forgot.

Mason Funk

She sure does. No, absolutely. Finally, for now, on this list, Judy, I've never gotten very good at saying her name.

Sandy Stone

Yeah, so what

Mason Funk

Is Judy Dlugacz?

Sandy Stone

Judy was --

Mason Funk

Sorry, start with her full name.

Sandy Stone

Okay. Judy Dlugacz is the head of Olivia Records. She's the power plant behind that whole thing. She's like a little nuclear power plant with a fissioning center of uranium. When I met her at the very beginning, she was this short, dark, intense Jewish, highly articulate woman. We looked at each other and we shared our life stories and it was like

Sandy Stone

we struck to each other's hearts. I had a crush on Judy back then. I never did anything about it, but it would be very hard not to have a crush on Judy. She just gives off that kind of energy that makes you want to bask in her light. And of course, I was highly motivated to deliver on the technical side, and we had what I think was a very honest relationship.

Sandy Stone

Judy was not afraid to call me on my shit and not afraid to read me the riot act when it was necessary, and her typical way of doing that would be to go, "Stone!" and I still remember that to this day. I would do something that wasn't right and she would go "Stone!" and then we would straighten it out.

Sandy Stone

Judy wanted to came up with the idea of remixing Chris Williamson's album, the Changer and the Changed, which was like bringing the heart's desire of my life and putting it in front of me. The first time I heard that album, I was in the depths of estrogen despair. I was preoperative, I was pre everything.

Sandy Stone

I was struggling to figure out my identity and a trans friend put the earphones on me and played the Changer and the Changed, and I said two things. One, oh my God, this is beautiful and two, but the mix is awful. Why did that happen? And that was not fair to Joan Lowe. They were absolutely doing the best work they knew how to do, but it was limited at the time with the

Sandy Stone

equipment they had and so on. When Judy said, you want to remix Changer and the Changed, it was like, do you have any idea how many women's hearts that album has touched? Do you know what an opportunity this is to touch so many more? Let's go. And we booked time. We got the inexpensive time. Usually our time started very late

Sandy Stone

at night at Sunset Sound where it was owned by a husband and wife pair and they were willing to leave us alone and Judy and I went in there alone and we remixed this album. Next to the birth of Tani, that was the highest time of my life, Judy and I in the dark control room remixing the Changer and the Changed.

Sandy Stone

I couldn't have prayed for anything better. That was the focus of my universe to be able to do that. Judy and I are still friends. Margie Vecchio, who is making the film of me, staged a wonderful scene in which

Sandy Stone

we went to DC and I went to Judy's home and we met again for the first time since the Olivia years. We saw each other in person. It was incredible. I think I'm going to stop there. Judy, my God, here we are. I love you so much. There.

Mason Funk

That's wonderful. Thank you.

Mason Funk

That's so evocative. She also, we've been in touch. Sorry, I'm just getting rid of some reminders that popped up. Go away, go away. Go away and go away. We've been in touch. We haven't coordinated an interview yet, but maybe that can also come to pass. I want to read back one thing that you said and have you reflect on a little bit and briefly, and then we're going to steam into what we call the final four, which are very short questions,

Mason Funk

but the quote I want to read back to you is you said, "My personal accomplishment is to have been granted the grace to bear witness." I found that very, very moving, and I just wondered if you could maybe expand on that briefly.

Sandy Stone

I talk about things I've done, but I could spend so much more time

Sandy Stone

talking about things I've been in the presence of, that I've been granted the grace really to bear witness to, that have been close to me when they unfolded, that, with many, I've had the privilege of actually being involved with or been a part of, but in that process I've seen what people are capable of. I've seen how they

Sandy Stone

can rise above circumstance, how they can find strengths in themselves that they didn't know they had, that they can find grace and beauty that they weren't aware of and that they can manifest it and actualize it in the world and that it can be incredibly powerful and I get to see that

Sandy Stone

and I get to watch them move through it, take it in, become it. There's a real grace in that. And as I said, there's a grace in it not happening to me, but in being able to see because in watching it happen with other people, something happens

Sandy Stone

which is much greater than what could happen if I just did it. That is a blessing. It's a moment of transcendence that I can't really describe, but that can really only be grateful for.

Mason Funk

Thank you for that. Yeah. I feel the same way. I've gotten the privilege of sitting in this chair, proverbially speaking, to hear the stories of some, through OUTWORDS, that would be unimaginable except that I've had the opportunity to have the experience.

Sandy Stone

I'll bet. I can only imagine what you must have seen and who you talked to.

Mason Funk

That feeling of being pinned

Mason Funk

to my chair. I'm just breathing. I'm just breathing or sometimes wondering who am I to be witnessing this story, but somebody saying that's all you had to do. You were just there as a witness.

Sandy Stone

That's a gift. That's an incredible gift.

Mason Funk

Yeah. We have what we call the final four.

Sandy Stone

Okay.

Mason Funk

The first one is if you could tell your 15 year old self anything, what would it be?

Sandy Stone

Just keep showing up. It's going to work out.

Mason Funk

Do me a favor. That was awesome, but could you just start by saying, if I could tell my.

Sandy Stone

Yes, sure.

Mason Funk

You've been through this before because they're making a film about you.

Sandy Stone

If I could tell my 15 year old self anything, what would I tell them? I would tell them, just keep showing up. It's going to be alright.

Mason Funk

Why is it important to you to share your story with the world?

Sandy Stone

I don't know that the world cares about my story, particularly. I enjoy telling stories, so I enjoy

Sandy Stone

sharing with the world in that way, but whether the world knows my story or not, it doesn't matter shit. What's important, if there is anything important, it's what I do. If I manage to touch someone's life and make them happier or make them feel more deeply than they did before, that's important to me,

Sandy Stone

but that doesn't need to be about me at all. That just needs to be about touching.

Mason Funk

Great. Thank you for clarifying. Thank you for that. Some people ascribe to the notion that all queer people, broadly speaking, have a kind of shared superpower, and I put that out there to see you laughed, which I love.

Mason Funk

Do you ascribe to that notion in any way, shape or form, and if you do, what might you think? It is not just a superpower, but a gift that we are given that we can give to the world? Not getting grandiose or anything?

Sandy Stone

No, no, because if there's a gift that's been given to the queer community to give, it's the

Sandy Stone

gift of being stepped on. And what do you do about that? If you can survive what the world does to you because you are queer, then you are practically compelled, I mean, you have a job and your job is to explain that wound to the world

Sandy Stone

and explain how that can be turned into a process of healing and how because someone stepped on you, you can now turn around and heal others. I think if there's anything the queer community has to teach or has to give, it's that. There's an expression in Ktahmet'i,

Sandy Stone

which is the language in my fantasy novel, in which there's a world very much like Girl Island, it's "'Ste Luti Luta", which, if you translated it, literally means, She wounding healing, which if you were to try to actually make it make sense in English, it would be: "may She who wounds, heal".

Sandy Stone

I think if I had any message there it is, including the fact that you have to translate it in your own way.

Mason Funk

Right. Last question, OUTWORDS is a project to record stories like yours across as wide a spectrum as we can possibly find of queer people

Mason Funk

and queerness, but elders, elders only. What do you see as the value of that, of a project like that, and if you could mention OUTWORDS in your answer?

Sandy Stone

Well, a thing that OUTWORDS does that I don't think can be done any other way is by concentrating on elders. You get people who have been in the ball mill for a considerable period of time, and

Sandy Stone

if you take them out and they're still articulate, they have very nuanced stories to tell, and it may be that in that nuance, people who are not elders can find a kind of information, a crack in the discursive facade through which they can see a different kind of knowledge that can be helpful for them.

Sandy Stone

A more rough way of putting it would be if you got to live long enough to be on tape, you can probably be useful to somebody.

Mason Funk

That's awesome. I couldn't have said it better myself. I'm going to say it. I'm going to steal your words or some version thereof. That's kind of what we're going for, so I'm glad to hear that reflected back.

Sandy Stone

I'm glad for that.

Mason Funk

Do you feel

Mason Funk

like there's anything more you want to share?

Sandy Stone

Be yourself. Don't be afraid of risk. Show up. Keep looking for good chocolate. Fuck your brains out.

Sandy Stone

There's my philosophy for life right there.

Mason Funk

Ryan just texted. I love that. That's amazing. Sandy, this has been so much fun for me.

Sandy Stone

I'm glad.

Mason Funk

Yeah, I hope it's been somewhere above . I'm sure it has been. I hope you've enjoyed.

Sandy Stone

Yeah, I had a good time speaking at you, I guess is the correct term.

Mason Funk

Well, thank you. I feel like it's been very much a conversation, even though you did most of the talking as should be, and no, this was really, really just fun, inspiring, and I really appreciate you sharing your time with us. Thank you.