MASON FUNK:

If you could start off by telling me and spelling out your first and last names.

DAVID WILSON:

David Wilson, D-A-V-I-D W-I-L-S-O-N.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. And please tell me your date of birth and your place.

DAVID WILSON:

3/25/44. I was born in Boston, Massachusetts.

MASON FUNK:

And you've probably, I don't know if anybody's ever asked you this before, but if I ask you a question,

MASON FUNK:

if you can try to find a way to sort of fold the question into your answer.

DAVID WILSON:

So repeat the question in some way. Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

So I say, "Tell me about your mom", rather than just start out by saying 'she', you say, 'my mom'. That way we know what you're talking about. I just always like to start at the beginning. So I'd love to hear about your parents, who they were, what kind of people they were, and how you happen to be born in Boston?

DAVID WILSON:

My parents are from Washington, Pennsylvania, which is a small mining town south of Pittsburgh. They met in high school, decided we need to get out of this little town. The night they got married, they moved to Boston. My dad had an uncle that he thought owned a trucking business in Boston. He soon found out that he was

DAVID WILSON:

just a mover for that company. Shortly after they arrived, dad realized, 'I don't really have a job because my uncle is not the owner'. So they looked around Boston and also found out that the same discrimination that they faced in Washington, Pennsylvania was across the city. They immediately became domestics, which is what they had been doing in Washington,

DAVID WILSON:

And began to work for white families around the perimeter of Boston. They basically did that for the next 30 years. There were no opportunities for them to do anything else. What that really meant is they worked for cash, no social security benefits, no vacation benefits. It also limited their credit opportunities.

DAVID WILSON:

I was born in public housing. My first 15 years were in public housing. I think dad and mom both felt like they were doing the best that they could, but always somewhat embarrassed that they could never do better, never owned anything. They bought a car, but it was through one of the people that they worked for. Finally, at about 15,

DAVID WILSON:

they moved back closer to the city And we moved into a three Decker in Boston. That was sort of the beginning of my feeling like I was more like everyone else because I wasn't living in a housing project. But they were very simple people. Both lived really very simple everyday lives. Kept their heads down, always looked to fit in,

DAVID WILSON:

never raised their voice in any way. My dad was the most gentle person you could ever meet. My mother would take on someone that might be challenging me because that was really the only, I felt, issue that she would really fight for, it was for me. So I grew up in a pretty normal way, but I always felt I was sort of in this very protected bubble as an only child.

MASON FUNK:

It just occurs to me to ask if your parents, that you know, have ever just when the Boston job didn't pan out, did they just think of just going back to Washington, Pennsylvania? If they didn't, why do you think they didn't?

DAVID WILSON:

I think my parents both felt that Washington, Pennsylvania experience was so limiting and the families that they left behind in Washington

DAVID WILSON:

all stayed in the same jobs, Basically domestic jobs, their entire lives. I think they thought Boston would offer a new opportunity for them. And in the mid-60s, when the civil rights acts were passed, they actually did get jobs. My dad worked for a small engineering company in the maintenance department, and my mother went to work for the Christian science church

DAVID WILSON:

in the mail departments. But in both cases, they now started to have social security quarters, vacations. And at 60 years old, they worked for 15 years just to get enough quarters. They retired at 75, but with enough quarters to have a social security payment and also a very small pension. I think it paid off in that sense,

DAVID WILSON:

because they never went back to Pennsylvania, But they finally did get into sort of the main mainstream job in the Boston area.

MASON FUNK:

That's so interesting because recently, for many reasons, there's been conversations about the 50th anniversary of the civil rights act and the voting rights act, all that. And you and your parents were people who lived right through the changes that occurred as a result of those pieces of legislation. Do you remember,

MASON FUNK:

so I'm doing the math, you were born in '44, So about 20 years, you were about 20, 21 years old, do you remember noticing these acts being passed and what you thought of them at the time?

DAVID WILSON:

It's going to feel even strange to say this, but I was living in such a condensed and narrowly defined environment,

DAVID WILSON:

nothing changed for me. I graduated from high school. I went to Northeastern University, which is a blue collar college in Boston, working class. I fit in easily because I was just like all the other kids. The difference was I was black, but the city around me, I wasn't involved and I didn't go anywhere outside of my own neighborhood.

DAVID WILSON:

I didn't live on the campus. I lived at home. I took the T to school every day. So nothing really changed for me. But in my college experience, I began to see and hear what was going on. Obviously, in all of my classes, we talked about what was going on in the south and what was going on in the north. But again, I was really taught to keep my head down and not make any waves. I had my high school sweetheart.

DAVID WILSON:

We were going through college together, so we had our own little world. I was on a path towards, get married, have kids, get a good job, raise your family and don't rock any boats. Through the 60s, I would clearly say there was no change for me. The most radical change happened when

DAVID WILSON:

I actually went to work my first job, Because now I'm in an environment where laws matter, policies and practice inside of a company matter. Now, I'm realizing that there's differences for me versus my white counterparts. That was the most noticeable change for me, when I actually moved outside of my college environment into the workspace.

MASON FUNK:

Tell me about that. Tell me about that first job you got,

MASON FUNK:

what kind of job was it? Tell me about some of those changes. It tells me it was a bit of an awakening for you, was it? Your identity as a black man?

DAVID WILSON:

Yes. Entering a major corporation, which was then New England telephone, which is today Verizon, I was in a management trainee program right out of college. I look around and I see there are 22 of us in this program. I'm the only black person, and I'm also realizing that

DAVID WILSON:

there were no women in the room. The program was all men and we're on a fast track for the next two years. If you survive the next two years, you basically had a job for life because you were working for "the phone company". But in that realization, I also began to think about why am I here? Why am I the only person here? How different am I? What am I going to do to find connections?

DAVID WILSON:

What do I need to learn? Because I'd never worked for a company that size before. Part of my first six months to a year was just learning the unwritten rules, the rules that people don't tell you about the conversations you need to have before the meeting starts so that you come into the meeting prepared to make a decision. All of those things were brand new to me, so I also began to figure out very quickly

DAVID WILSON:

I needed allies. I needed mentors. I need people to take me aside and say, "Hey, David, this is not how it works here. This is something you might do that will help with your career." That first year was really an important year for me. I learned a lot. I grew a lot. But I also began to think about if I'm going to stay in this company, how do I stand out? How do I become more than just a black man in this job?

DAVID WILSON:

Some of that helped me begin to define, sort of, how I was going to operate as a corporate person in a huge company.

MASON FUNK:

What were some of those unwritten rules that you remember that you had to decipher to make your way? Do you ever remember specific incidents or dawnings or like, oh, moments of revelation?

DAVID WILSON:

I know preparation for meetings was really important.

DAVID WILSON:

My first few meetings, I would just come to the meeting. It started at eight or nine o'clock. I would walk in and I would think this is where we start. The meeting actually started two or three days before there were side meetings. There might've been a cocktail party the night before, there was a breakfast meeting before the meeting. By the time you got to the meeting, the agenda was pretty much settled, and also the decisions were. The unwritten rules were, ask as many questions as you can,

DAVID WILSON:

as many days ahead of an important meeting And be prepared to go with the flow, if you agree. If you don't, disagree before the meeting. The meeting is not a time to discuss which way we're going to go.

What the decisions are going to change going forward. That all happened before. We got to the meeting, the meeting was one hour and we were done. Another unwritten rule for me was, once you have an ally and you build trust,

DAVID WILSON:

That's your working partner and often working partners are the person that makes the difference as to whether you succeed or not, it's not your boss. The projects you work on are often determined by your ally. For me, it just became clear that the structure that I was working in, which was a boss and a boss's boss is part of it, but the people you work with and trusting relationships you build,

DAVID WILSON:

make the difference as to whether you stay or not

MASON FUNK:

Interesting. These are interesting takeaways for anybody that works in the world. Along the way, you got married. Tell us about that. You mentioned your high school sweetheart, and I'm assuming that's who you mentioned about her and about your relationship and about getting married.

DAVID WILSON:

My high school sweetheart and I basically went through the rest of high school and college together. It was pretty much

DAVID WILSON:

determined when we were 15 years old. My mother certainly had a role in that. She loved my now former wife. She encouraged the relationship. We got engaged, seniors in college. We got married the next year, moved to a suburb of Boston, had our first child a year after that. For me, it was really programmed.

DAVID WILSON:

I looked around, my peer group was doing exactly the same. My peer group was generally white, based on high school and college, and then obviously my first job at, now, Verizon. There was not as much choice as you might think. It just felt like this is the way we go. Our second child was born two years later.

I was moved around

DAVID WILSON:

when my job, we actually moved out to Western Massachusetts for three years. We had two boys. We were very interested in having a daughter, couldn't guarantee that that was going to happen, so we adopted our third child in Western mass, girl. By the time I was 26, I had three children. At that point, it was, keep your head down, go to work every day,

DAVID WILSON:

build a career That will allow you to take care of your family. Eventually, they will hopefully grow up and go to college. So you really banking always on the future, and so we worked together. Most of our friends were in the exact same boat, so we all sort of went through that together. For me, a little bit, like I described earlier, my little bubble in my little world was really just

DAVID WILSON:

a group of young, Newly married folks, having kids working hard and building a future together

MASON FUNK:

Just for clarity, because it'll come up, I would assume, at some point, but was your wife African-American also?

DAVID WILSON:

Yes.

MASON FUNK:

When you said your mom approved, I thought, okay, she was probably black as well, but just wanted to clarify that. Could you just tell us that for the camera, just so that we have that as part of the record.

DAVID WILSON:

Just for a little history

DAVID WILSON:

on my former wife and myself, I grew up in the sort of a white project outside of Boston. At 15, my mother, because she has such a role in what's going to happen to this only child, me, decided we should move into the city. Part of that plan was to move into the city and meet at a black girl,

DAVID WILSON:

of which Sandy and her family was the perfect match. So yeah, Sandy and I met. Also, the church piece was important because we both went to a black church, so most of our friends then became her friends and my friends, but within the black community. Moving through high school and college, we took that group of friends with us, but we added, certainly, new friends because we were eventually going to move to a suburb.

DAVID WILSON:

But I think it was important for both of us to want to raise black children as close to the city as possible. That was really our goal from the early early days.

MASON FUNK:

Gotcha. Tell me more about the church part. You referenced it several times in the preparation, the church, the black church, what was the environment? What kind of role did that play in your life, both personally and also

MASON FUNK:

as an organization?

DAVID WILSON:

My former wife and I growing up in the black church was really, again, part of the very narrow structure that was placed around us. There wasn't a lot of room to explore new ways of behavior, living, even thinking about moving outside of the city. The church really kept you going

DAVID WILSON:

to the same place with the same people. The messaging was exactly the same. This is how you live your life, and these are the rules that you need to live by to be a good Christian. It was a black Baptist church. Sandy had a little bit different background, she was an Episcopalian, but together they were both black churches. I think the most restrictive part of it was

DAVID WILSON:

we didn't feel like we could grow outside of the church environment. We felt like we knew exactly what was expected of us and the messaging from everyone in the church, including the pastor was, this is your path, and this is the way you should live your life. For us, that was not bad for our early teens into our 20s. But once we moved out of the city, we began to think about what other

DAVID WILSON:

religious base would be helpful for us. We both became Methodists once we moved out of the city, and then we got a broader view of what religion is and what it offers, and it was in contrast to the way we had been raised, in a good way.

MASON FUNK:

Was that a black Methodist church or was this now a multiracial church?

DAVID WILSON:

This was a congregation that was mixed and

DAVID WILSON:

that's because we're living 20 miles out of the city. We had black families, we also had Asian families and we had single parent families. It was the right mixed culture for us. We wanted to raise our kids in that culture. For the next 15 years, we raised our family in a multicultural church that was Methodist outside of the city.

MASON FUNK:

I see. Okay. And the messaging there,

MASON FUNK:

how was it different from the messaging, [inaudible] use that term because it really is all about having a coherent message. That's how you keep the flock off in the same direction. So how is the messaging and the Methodist church different than the churches you and Sandy had grown up in?

DAVID WILSON:

I think the Methodist church really began to speak to us about inclusion, broadening the kinds of people

DAVID WILSON:

and friends that you have Issues that we talked about inside of the church were more global. They began to talk about a woman's right to choose. We began to talk about race. We began to talk about how you might alter your position in life, because you want to give back. We talked about volunteerism. Those were

DAVID WILSON:

basically issues that I had not even thought about when I was in high school and college. My focus then was just, again, keep your head down and survive. Where in the suburb we're living in, in the Methodist church, it was, how do we raise money for kids that might need a different opportunity? What are we going to do about kids with disabilities? We were fortunate to have three healthy kids. So there was really a much broader view

DAVID WILSON:

of how we as a family could reach outside of our own small sphere and give something back.

MASON FUNK:

Did that feel good to you and Sandy, was that positive for you?

DAVID WILSON:

That was absolutely, for both of us, as we thought about our lives, we had, from my perspective, been very blessed and now we're talking about figuring out a way to help others. That was really a good thing for us.

DAVID WILSON:

We had adopted a child, so we'd also realized that there were children that needed homes. I think for us, this was, sort of, some fresh air for us, something that we had not considered, but inspired us to do more. We both got involved more in the town looking for ways to build scholarships for kids, raise money for families that were homeless. I mean, just so many things that were not even part of our thinking

DAVID WILSON:

when we lived in the city, in the black community, inside of a black church,

MASON FUNK:

Now I have to imagine that at some point, this new reality comes out of left field. Tell me about that. Tell me about how you started to feel like, oh, something's not quite in order here.

DAVID WILSON:

The coming out process is sort of what we're moving into for me,

DAVID WILSON:

and it was about 15 years into my marriage. I began to question my sexuality, but I wasn't sure what that meant. I actually began to do some personal and individual counseling. I joined a couple of groups of mixed, both gay men and lesbians who were talking about sexuality. It was also mixed, race wise.

DAVID WILSON:

Over a year, I began to talk about my own feelings, maybe what I had suppressed as a kid. This path that was forged for me by my mother, didn't allow me to look outside of that inside of the church and the black community. There wasn't really any room to think about a different lifestyle for me. It took about a year and in that exploration, I really came to the decision that I'm gay.

DAVID WILSON:

In doing that, I now had to figure out, okay, what's my plan for my family. At that point, I'd been married 16 or 17 years. My kids were all early teens. My youngest was 12, my second son was 14 and my oldest son was 16, 15-16. My first conversation was with my former wife.

DAVID WILSON:

We sat down And I said, this is where I am, and this is how I got here. This was the whole year I've spent in therapy, both individual and group, and I'm gay. The response immediately was how do we work together? What can we do to work together, to continue raising our family? We took two more years living together, working with our kids,

DAVID WILSON:

getting my oldest son through high school and into college. Next two were in high school, but ready to go to college. Then we sat them down and said, this is where we are. Sandy participated in that conversation. We basically talked with our three together, And then we took questions. What are you concerned about? How do you think this is going to impact you?

DAVID WILSON:

We had a fairly detailed discussion. My oldest son's first question was, is this sketchy? Is this something you've passed along to me? Is this something I need to worry about? At that point, Mike was well into his heterosexual lifestyle, he had a girlfriend. I said, "Mike, first of all, I don't know the details of where this is

DAVID WILSON:

nurture, Environment, DNA, but you look like you're on your own track. What I would say to you is I need to make sure that you remain connected to me, and we have an understanding that I love you, you love me, and we're going to support each other, even though we you're going to be straight and I'm going to be gay."

DAVID WILSON:

My next two were really sort of Trying to explore what kinds of questions should I ask, after Mike's asked this question. My middle son, who's often the case when you have a middle child, just tried to figure out, okay, how do I sit in here? I have an older brother who's asked the question. I have a younger sister, and he just kind of came out fairly neutral, but supportive. My daughter was probably the most difficult. She thought

DAVID WILSON:

I didn't like girls anymore, And her special place in my life would change. I took about a year for me to convince her that that was not the case. She decided to become a theater major. So within a year, she had more gay friends that I would have my entire life. She went off to college as a theater major. So family-wise former wife, three kids, very supportive,

DAVID WILSON:

never really a bump in the road. That piece of it was, I would say, probably the best I could ever ask for.

MASON FUNK:

I wanted to ask, coming out as a gay man, was there anything that had ever been talked about between you and your wife? Was there anything that was even referenced within your family life prior to you discovering this about yourself

MASON FUNK:

and bringing it first to Sandy and then to your kids?

DAVID WILSON:

When I started the conversation with my former wife it was the first conversation that we had ever had. Across my extended family, which is my mom and dad and their entire family in Pennsylvania, no one had ever talked about gay people. Because after the conversation with my family, my immediate family,

DAVID WILSON:

my next conversation was with my mother. It was clear when I began the conversation that she knew what I was talking about, but she had an expectation. It was so different because in Pennsylvania, the gay people that she knew lived in Pittsburgh, which was 70 miles away, And in most cases, lived such a closeted, secluded life that she had no idea what actually happened to them.

DAVID WILSON:

They went to high school together. She knew of a man or a woman that moved to Pittsburgh and it was rumored that they were queer, but that was a very negative term. She never was able to find them. She felt that they either fell into drugs, Alcohol, Weren't able to work. She began to repeat that to me before I could even get two sentences out.

DAVID WILSON:

She began to call out the names of these people. It was her assumption that they were all dead. She had this one child, she raised me to move along this path, I'm now married with three kids and I'm Coming out as a gay man. In her view, and she said it, by the end of the first 20 minutes,

DAVID WILSON:

you're going to die. You can't live this lifestyle because the people I knew are gone. It was also in the middle of HIV, so she knew a little bit about HIV. Again, that was, in her mind, a death sentence. The combination of her history with gay men and Women in Pennsylvania, and we're in the middle of HIV/AIDS. As far as my mother is concerned, she's going to now

DAVID WILSON:

lose this one child that she had.

MASON FUNK:

How did she cope with that news? How did she respond?

DAVID WILSON:

She was obviously very emotional, which caused me to be very emotional because I was also afraid, I was going into an area that I knew nothing about. I didn't really have any gay friends. So she scared me.

DAVID WILSON:

I was scared. I began to sort of withdraw and second guess myself, am I doing the right thing? What am I doing to my family? Am I going to be able to live through this? I backed off going more public. We didn't talk to my dad at that point. I went back to my support group and began to talk about my own fears

DAVID WILSON:

and how this might impact my family. HIV was my concern. Am I going to contract HIV? For the next, I would say, at least year to two years, it became more of a dark period for me. I'd come out to my family, to my mother. I wasn't out at work. I was spread pretty thin emotionally.

DAVID WILSON:

But I sort of began to find myself in that I began to meet some people looking for a boyfriend. That became sort of my goal. Meeting people gave me some hope. I think the first set of experience I had with potentially Having a relationship, sort of, at least equal to what I might have had with my family

DAVID WILSON:

and with a wife. I think that was the beginning of, for me anyway, I can have life and I can live a life. I then began to talk to my mother about the people I was meeting. My first boyfriend I brought to meet my mother, she saw that he had a job. He had an apartment in Boston. He had a life. He wasn't living this dark life that she was aware of. Then we decided to obviously bring my dad in,

DAVID WILSON:

and my dad brought great insight. He was very hopeful. He knew gay men in the Boston area that were part of his crew of working people that were healthy, lived healthy lives. I remember dad saying to my mother, this is going to be okay. David is going to be okay. We need to support him. It took her about three years to get to a place where

DAVID WILSON:

she believed that I was going to have a healthy life, I was going to support my family, which is also part of that, "Are you going to stay connected to your kids and the extended family we have?" At about three years out, I think, my mother and father and immediate family thought this is going to work.

MASON FUNK:

Wow. It's really incredible. All you're describing, you being the only child and the ethos,

MASON FUNK:

work hard and methodically and carefully build your life and your future, and for them to have to then adjust, your mom in particular, is quite moving. Just that she is able to make that shift, rewriting a script she never would have imagined.

DAVID WILSON:

I think from my mother too, she had family in Pennsylvania that she now had to bring along. I had a first cousin who

DAVID WILSON:

immediately came to my rescue and said, I'm going to help you with your mom's sisters and brothers. My cousin, Granville, visited each aunt and uncle and basically said, we have a nephew in Boston that's just come out and we need to support him. When they come to visit us over the summer, or if they come for the holidays, we need to welcome him. That was a slow process

DAVID WILSON:

because they didn't know anyone either. They had the same history as my mother. So for me, it was important to also feel like my extended family in Pennsylvania was going to grow with this experience, and that happened, but that took probably another five years. It took my family, they had to see that my family was supporting me. It was an evolution within this black family

DAVID WILSON:

that had no out gay people. And for another generation, not one more gay person in the family.

MASON FUNK:

Your cousin Granville, he was gay or not.

DAVID WILSON:

My cousin Granville was not gay, but he was a jazz performer, played several instruments. I'm guessing he had gay people

DAVID WILSON:

in that circle of friends in Pittsburgh that love jazz. He never said this to me, but I'm sure he was relating to the people that he knew, and he felt that they had healthy, good lives, had families, maybe kids, maybe ex-wives or not. But I'm sure that was what he brought to the aunts and uncles, because he actually, I'm sure talked about that.

DAVID WILSON:

We just lost him about a year ago and for the rest of our lives together, he stood up for me. As it turned out, he had a daughter that was lesbian, and that happened 20 years later. I think he was meant to be sort of the ally for me, and in turn the family.

MASON FUNK:

That's wonderful. All right. Well, thank you for all of that. That's really wonderful.

MASON FUNK:

Fascinating. I just appreciate you giving me insight into this very specific culture and not just me, but of course, the people who will see this interview who are looking in kind of from the outside to just this incredibly rich, complex family spread out. And the piece about Pennsylvania and you all being in Boston is also just interesting, I can only imagine the highway between Boston and Pennsylvania, like how many times you've traveled over the course of your life.

Unknown speaker:

[Inaudible]

MASON FUNK:

Absolutely.

Unknown speaker:

There was a story you told me once about your parents' routine every day, when they were going to work. I don't know if you're comfortable sharing that on camera, but I found it very moving. Very disturbing [inaudible]. Are you talking about that?

DAVID WILSON:

I think a piece that is important for me to say about my parents and part of why their lives were often so closed and narrow, they weren't proud of the fact that they were domestics. In the morning, my dad would get dressed out. It looked to me like any other dad going off to work, but he was going to work for a family. My mother, the same. She would put a dress on

DAVID WILSON:

and a hat. Inside of her purse was her clothes that she was going to wear as a domestic, inside of a family. She had a collar that she wore, she had a little apron that she wore, but I never knew that that existed. My dad carried a briefcase and in that briefcase was basically his working clothes for when he got to this family's home. That happened over

DAVID WILSON:

at least a decade, maybe longer, where I just thought they went off to work like everyone else. They were not proud enough of the work that they were doing, which was honest work. They were paid for their work, but they just were ashamed. I think for me, they didn't want me to think that this was my destiny, that this was all that I could do. But my dad was basically a Butler and a handyman, and my mother was

DAVID WILSON:

a maid for the first 20 years of my life.

MASON FUNK:

How did you finally learn that what you thought they were going off to do was not what they were doing?

DAVID WILSON:

As a teenager, I began to ask my parents, what do you do? Because in school we talk about what our parents do, and I don't really know what you do. I mean, I think that you work for some company somewhere

DAVID WILSON:

or a family somewhere, and they both began to describe what they actually did, tearfully, because they felt like they were finally coming into an honest place with me. I was on my own road to certainly, hopefully, go off to college and be successful. They felt they could trust me, but it was a sad moment for them because they didn't feel like they had lived up to

DAVID WILSON:

what they should have as parents. But across Boston, most black families had the same experience. I found out in meeting other parents, they had a very similar experience, just probably not as secretive about it. My parents just didn't want to share, but eventually they did.

MASON FUNK:

Maybe they didn't want to limit your aspirations

DAVID WILSON:

For sure. They didn't. They felt like telling me that this is what we're doing, that that might limit what

DAVID WILSON:

I thought I could do going forward.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Amazing. Thank you. You separated from Sandy and you moved out and you formed a relationship. I know that this partner died very unexpectedly, and that had a profound effect on you.

MASON FUNK:

In the incident itself, you described, as a black man, this was a kind of a profound moment as well. Can you tell us that story?

DAVID WILSON:

My first boyfriend and I eventually decided, well, let's move in together. Let's get an apartment, which we did. That relationship probably was about five years in the making Before we decided we think we can go forward. We eventually bought a condo together and a house.

DAVID WILSON:

We really had about 13 or 14 years together, living, for me now, what I expected as a man and a woman would live. We were two men, both had jobs in Boston and basically investing in a home and friends. It all felt pretty normal to me. It was exactly what I was looking for. We were in a routine

DAVID WILSON:

and one day I came home from work and Ron was doing landscaping and raking leaves and he was laying across a bag of leaves. And I just thought, well, he's teasing me because I'm driving into the driveway, But he wasn't moving. When I got closer, I could see that he didn't really look like he was okay,

DAVID WILSON:

so I called my neighbors. We all gathered, they called the EMTs. When the EMTs arrived they called the police because it looked like there had been an altercation between me and him and we were in our own driveway, so my neighbors are all speaking on my behalf and I'm obviously not able to say much.

DAVID WILSON:

We had a conversation which basically cleared the way for them to remove Ron, take him to the nearest hospital, put me into a car and moved me to that hospital. But it was in that moment that I realized that this relationship that felt so normal for me, was not normal for anyone in that group, especially the EMTs and the police.

DAVID WILSON:

I moved through it pretty numb. Went to the hospital with the expectation that as soon as I get there, I'm going to find out what's going on, and if he's okay. That's when I found out really that the hospital staff saw no relationship between me and him. I was told to take a seat. Now, I'm still this pretty easy going, keep your head down, not rock the boat kind of guy,

DAVID WILSON:

so I just took a seat and waited. My neighbors were all with me and started asking questions. What's going on? How's Ron doing? We pushed hard, them more than me. Finally, after about three hours, we were told that he was dead on arrival. In that moment,

DAVID WILSON:

I began to think that maybe these flashbacks from my mother about what life was going to be like were coming true because for me, everything ended at that point. I really didn't know where I was going from there. My neighbors took me home. Then that process was really how do I take care of Ron and his family? He was from Vermont.

DAVID WILSON:

I had to talk with his family on the phone. He wasn't out to most of his family, that was also part of what I was trying to explain. He's not only gone, but we're in a relationship. It's not a blur anymore, because it's more clear to me, But I was definitely in a very difficult place. Off to Vermont we went,

DAVID WILSON:

my two sons went with me. We sat down at the family table and explained to Ron's mother what was going on. She wanted to defer to me, but she wasn't sure how to do that because she had never had a relationship described to her this way. I said, We need to work together because I'm not turning him or anything about him over to you. We've been together

DAVID WILSON:

almost 15 years and I'm going to be part of whatever we decide. I think it was at that point that his family rallied. They wanted to have something at the Catholic church, which he had not been inside of a Catholic church as an adult. We worked out a Memorial service arrangement. We worked out a cremation arrangement. All mean negotiating at a time when I wasn't sure I had the strength to do any of it,

DAVID WILSON:

but it was really important that I do it for Ron. I was there about a week, and at the end of it all I brought his ashes back home and began to realize what had happened, where I was in my life.

MASON FUNK:

I have two questions, one follows directly. One is about the moments you looked back,

MASON FUNK:

you used the phrase, 'angry black man'. You realized that you had grappled internally, with that whole issue in those moments and these critical moments in your life with Ron and him passing, but I'm also just struck -- because it comes up over and over again to your story -- your ability to have honest conversations, complicated, difficult. I just have to ask you at some point, not necessarily now,

MASON FUNK:

but how did you learn to have such complicated, honest conversations with people in this case Ron's mother? We'll get to that. I just have to highlight that, we won't go there necessarily right now, unless you want to jump right on that and say something about it.

DAVID WILSON:

I think the issue of having honest conversations really starts with, I always felt like I needed to negotiate a place, a place in this society I live in.

DAVID WILSON:

I needed to establish I'm here. I want to contribute. I feel like I'm an equal. I don't always get treated that way, so I've always felt like I needed to work towards that in every relationship, in every work project, Establish my sense of being an equal. Those conversations started just in that sense,

DAVID WILSON:

just as a black man wanting to fit into this white world that I live in, the conversations got more complicated when you add being a gay man and a black man having been married, having children, it became more complicated, but only as I grew and the story obviously became more difficult to live. What I would say to you, I never felt angry

DAVID WILSON:

through any of that until after Ron's death. When Ron died, I felt like some of this is a result of being gay and being black. The anger began to really grow in me as I began to look back because I described earlier a pretty normal life as a kid, growing up,

DAVID WILSON:

getting married and having kids, but it was the anger then became more clear to me in this middle adult age, feeling like some of this is part of being gay and being black

MASON FUNK:

Say more about that. I'm not quite sure,

MASON FUNK:

I don't think I understand yet.

DAVID WILSON:

I think for most of my early life, I felt like I was like everyone else. I felt like I fit in like everyone else.

DAVID WILSON:

But as I began to take apart, now I'm gay, I've always been black, there are certain things that are happening to me as a result of that. Some of that I can't change. I can continue to work on, but I can't change it. Some of it, I felt like it was intentional. When I began to think about intentional behaviors

DAVID WILSON:

to either restrict or discriminate against what I'm able to do, I began to feel more anger and disappointment, and in some ways, sadness, because I realized that now this is going to be how I have to operate the rest of my life.

MASON FUNK:

Did the anger have a target? Did you know who or what you were angry at?

DAVID WILSON:

I felt anger, but it was never directed at a person. It felt like it was always directed at the society I'm living in, the people around me, the restrictions that are being imposed upon me,

DAVID WILSON:

But it wasn't a person that I could direct it at, it was always like the situation, the hospital situation,

DAVID WILSON:

the EMT and police situation, the family that I had to work with in Vermont. It was broader than a person, but clearly it felt more like it's bigger and going to be more difficult for me because it's a culture I'm living in. It's the people I'm working with.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. And I can imagine when there's no specific person or institution

MASON FUNK:

that you can go to to get redress, it can be even more angering because it's almost like faceless.

[Break]

MASON FUNK:

When it is systemic, I can imagine, feeling like, I don't even know where to ... Like which tree in the forest do I go to, to get this fixed? The second piece of that, were you ever angry at God?

DAVID WILSON:

When I think about how did I process anger and how did I try to address it going forward,

DAVID WILSON:

I began to look at every institution that I belong to, whether it was the church or my university, my workplace, family, and I actually began to think about, okay, how do I address the kinds of aggressions that I'm feeling by institution? And that became more deliberate on my part. The most important one

DAVID WILSON:

was the workplace, because I was spending 10-12 hours a day at the workplace, now I'm going back to work after Ron's death and needing to come out because I was not out prior to that. I remember my very first meeting at work, I had 17 people on my team, we brought them all together

DAVID WILSON:

and I said I'm back to work. I had taken six weeks off, which I had never done.I said I'm back to work having lost my partner, and it was sort of a blank look on everyone's face. What does that mean? I said, it's not a golf partner, not a fishing partner, We were romantically involved. We lived together and we loved each other.

DAVID WILSON:

And about half the room asked for a break, and we broke. They came up to me and said, how could you have kept this secret? I was trying to explain how it felt to be A gay man, a black man in this all white business that I was working in, and

DAVID WILSON:

I couldn't hold it together. I had, at least, two people in the room that I had been in their weddings. They had come to my kids' births. We went outside of the room and we just held each other because I needed to go back in and try and move this conversation forward because I hadn't finished. I hadn't told my story.

DAVID WILSON:

I think in the end, I probably had about half of my team that wanted to leave, the trusting relationship that we had built -- I had been with this team almost 20 years -- was not repairable. We had one-on-one interviews Afterwards, and I was able to place about half of my team with someone else. The half that stayed with me

DAVID WILSON:

committed to work through this together, rebuild, be honest, be authentic. I had an administrative assistant, Barbara, who knew all along what was going on because Ron would call and I would talk to him. But we never talked about it. We sat down together and she's, I will do everything I can

DAVID WILSON:

to make this work. If there's anyone that has anything negative to say about you, I will talk to them. I will talk to you and we'll put that together because it needs to get resolved. We still have work projects to do. My first six months back to work was maybe the most difficult period in my life, other than telling my family that I was gay. Because my work was

DAVID WILSON:

how I was paying my bills, how I was going to put my kids through college, and I was very fearful that I was going to lose my job. I thought somebody was going to come to me and say this, you don't fit any longer, and we want to let you go.

MASON FUNK:

Did the people who might've had that authority or who might've been the ones who put such a move in motion, did they, at any point, come to you and say,

MASON FUNK:

we are going to support you? Did you ever have that certainty or confirmation that that wasn't going to happen or did you just wait it out?

DAVID WILSON:

At this point in time, we're in the mid-90s. Ron died in '94. I went back to work in early '95, because he died in November. I went back to her right after the first of the year, the president of the company called me while I was out and said, when you come back, I want to sit down and talk with you. I had a sense that it was going to be a supportive conversation, but I wasn't sure.

DAVID WILSON:

His question was really, how do you think you're going to be able to work with the teams that you have? How do you think being an out gay man is going to work? Because no one across middle to senior management was out. Now, I'm the only black man, I'm the only gay man in this 30,000 person company. I'm at the top of our management ranks. I said, I think

DAVID WILSON:

it's going to work, but I'm going to have to be careful about the people that are on my team. I need to know that I have support. So I felt I was supported by him, but then there was a sort of a COO that actually came to the funeral in Vermont, which was a great sign for me. I met with him as a second person, so I felt I had at least two people at the top of the organization that supported me.

DAVID WILSON:

But there were a lot of people in between and a lot of people across the peer group that needed to also be involved. I was pretty certain that I had a job, whether I was going to be able to do my job successfully going forward, because it was all dependent on how teams work together and how we got projects done together and whether we could trust each other through that.

DAVID WILSON:

That was really the rebuilding process for me. As I've thought about it, about half of the people that worked with me stayed and became a working team going forward.

MASON FUNK:

It's interesting because it hearkens back to what you said, one of those lessons you learned is that it's not always about the people above you, it's about your allies.

DAVID WILSON:

Yeah. The allies carried me through, there is no question. There was some pretty up and down days

DAVID WILSON:

because I was still in the grieving process and also trying to manage a workforce. I also had family and friends to manage. An earlier conversation about difficult and complicated conversations, that's all part of, now, this new way that I had to work with people because now I have exposed my entire life to them, there were no more secrets.

DAVID WILSON:

Language changed because people who were using language that was offensive, I could now call them on it. Now, we're coming into at least a phase in my life where I'm becoming more of an activist, in that I'm saying, that was not appropriate. Language around race was easily challenged. Now I am challenging language around being gay or lesbian.

DAVID WILSON:

I'm also finding that there are people inside of the company that are coming to me as a gay or lesbian person, asking for my help. Now we're building a network of support for gay and lesbian people as we had for black and brown people, because I was part of a management group of basically African-Americans and others,

DAVID WILSON:

and we were working across the management team to make sure that we had same benefits, same performance reviews, promotions, pay. Well, now we were building a very similar network for gay and lesbian people. We're also in the middle of AIDS, so I'm looking at insurance benefits. I'm making sure people are protected when they come to work. We had employees that were driving trucks out

DAVID WILSON:

in the neighborhoods. I wanted to make sure they were safe when they left the building, because people were beginning to question who's ill and who's well. I now became sort of the person that was watching out for a community of gay and lesbian people and a community of black and brown people, Along with the job that I had. In many ways, I felt like I had a new purpose.

DAVID WILSON:

I really felt like those early days of trying to figure out how to give back, I could take that to my work environment and I could figure out how to give back. So much of my work then became about human beings. How am I going to take care of the human beings that I work with?

MASON FUNK:

Wonderful. Thank you. Let me check and see [inaudible]. Okay.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. I'm also checking my questions. I realized this always happens, I have to start moving a little more quickly, especially because we haven't gotten to the, [inaudible] not really though, because all these stories are so important. OUTWORDS, we're collecting social history as well as LGBTQ history, but let's jump to meeting Rob, if it's okay with you,

MASON FUNK:

we won't spend a lot of time on the actual meeting. But at a certain point, there's a decision made in Massachusetts to mount a lawsuit and you are asked to become a plaintiff, one of seven plaintiff couples, if I remember correctly. The lawsuit minutia has obviously been written about a lot and we probably don't need to cover all of that. But maybe where do we jump in with this?

DAVID WILSON:

A place that works for me is part of my recovery was to join a group of men that were out and turned out to be a group of dads.

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, say part of your recovery from what?

DAVID WILSON:

Part of my recovery from Ron's passing was to join a grieving group, which I did, but an extension of that was to also join a more positive group, which was a group of gay dads.

DAVID WILSON:

And that was the Gay Fathers of Greater Boston. I joined that group the first year out of Ron's passing. There was another man in that group by the name of Rob Compton. He was also a gay dad, had moved to Massachusetts from Michigan and he came out as a result of being fired. He came out basically in his job,

DAVID WILSON:

he was a dentist. He went to the university of Michigan, he went to a alumni meeting, he announced that he was gay. Within a day, the organization had reported back to his dental organization that there was a gay dentist and they fired him 24 hours later. He was not out to his family, so he left work, packed up his few boxes and went home

DAVID WILSON:

and had to tell his wife and children that he was gay and that he had lost his job. He came to Boston carrying that burden of having come out, lost his family in many ways because he had to move away. We met at the gay dads group. I was telling my story about having lost my partner and Rob was telling his story about having lost his job.

DAVID WILSON:

We decided, let's have lunch, and lunch led to dinner. From there, we decided we had enough in common because we had kids and we had had these two experiences, and more importantly, we both had an expectation that because we had been married and we had the benefits and protections of marriage that we should have the same for ourselves. We had a commitment ceremony two years later, we had family and friends come

DAVID WILSON:

and it looked like a wedding. It felt like a wedding, but GLAAD, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders was putting together a lawsuit. They talked with us a few days after our commitment ceremony and said, would you be interested? And we said, "Yes, we would." It was about a six-month interviewing process. I think they interviewed about a hundred couples across the state of Massachusetts and they picked seven

DAVID WILSON:

and we were really fortunate enough to be selected to be one of those couples. We started the case in April of 2001 and it was a two and a half year process. We talked with families and churches and organizations across the state, building on our stories; our personal stories, my story and Rob's story, and our story together. We have one incident that we always told, and that was,

DAVID WILSON:

Rob moved into the house that I had lived in with Ron. Six months in, he wakes up in the middle of the night, excruciating pain, off to the same hospital, told the very same thing, "You have no relationship". Turns out it was a kidney stone, so nothing serious. I finally get back to see him. I take his hand and he's saying, now I understand what you've been telling me, and I'm saying, now

DAVID WILSON:

you understand exactly what we have to fight for. We actually left the hospital determined to find legal rights, to be there for each other. The case came along, it was perfect timing for us. I think at that point Rob and I thought this is just for us. This is not for the whole community, this is not for the whole nation, this is just for us. We just want

DAVID WILSON:

to build a life together, and that was the beginning of the marriage case.

MASON FUNK:

We're talking almost 20 years ago or maybe 20 years ago, why at that time, did it seem that other forms of legal protection weren't sufficient? You could have a civil union, for example, you could have a domestic partnership, you could have legal protections without having to have what is traditionally called a marriage. What was the reason for you personally,

MASON FUNK:

and maybe in the movement, towards this lawsuit, towards pushing for actual marriage?

[Break]

DAVID WILSON:

I'll generalize here, but he's white and he's male and he's

DAVID WILSON:

pretty confident in who he is. He didn't have the same lived experience that I have. He got fired, went home, took about two or three days to think about, what do I do next? Went upstairs to his office in the house and wrote a white paper on bacteria in the mouth.

DAVID WILSON:

Decided, well, I'm not going to be a chairside dentist anymore. Obviously, that doesn't work in this industry as a gay man. I'm gonna look into research, and research the mouth and how you get bacteria. I'm going to put a paper together and come up and sell it to Delta Dental. Took six months to write the paper. I don't know how many pages it was, Mason, but

DAVID WILSON:

it floored the president and the whole Delta industry, because it was about insurance, saving the costs. They hired him on the spot. It, again, taught me that when you come in with the sort of the right background and you're white and you're male, you kind of figure out I can do the next step.

MASON FUNK:

It's so true. It's something that, obviously,

MASON FUNK:

you grew up with it. It's that same thing that I oftentimes reference, I can walk into any room and know that I'm not going to be questioned, my presence there is not going to be, [crosstalk]. I walk in with confidence. I walk in like I own the place.

DAVID WILSON:

Yeah. He walked into Delta Dental exactly like he owned the place. He describes the first meeting was an hour, and the president of the company said, "Well, we want to get this project started today."

MASON FUNK:

Even starting OUTWORDS, this whole thing, if I had been a man of color

MASON FUNK:

or a woman of color, for that matter, we're going to totally [inaudible].

DAVID WILSON:

Rob doesn't talk much about his experience, other than, I got fired. I had to come out to my family. I had to move to Massachusetts, and I'm off and running. During our two and a half years of telling our story, his story became, he had to stretch it out a little bit

DAVID WILSON:

because you can't say in five minutes, it's all done. Got to add some pain to it. Especially when I'm pouring my story out. So he then began to talk about being separated from his family. His kids are 12 and 13. He couldn't see them because he had to work in Massachusetts. Then he began to really talk about the emotional piece of this for him, so we built him up to 15 minutes.

MASON FUNK:

Well, let me go back to the timeline. The marriage lawsuit was successful.

DAVID WILSON:

Right, right.

MASON FUNK:

I was asking you. What was the thinking about, why go for marriage?

DAVID WILSON:

One of the concerns for us joining a marriage lawsuit is what was the history.

DAVID WILSON:

We had just won civil unions in Vermont, and civil unions clearly gave us some benefits. But out of the roughly a thousand benefits that you get from marriage, civil unions gave us about 40% of those benefits, some the more important ones, which was insurance benefits, credit benefits, housing, being able to buy a house together, benefits protecting each person

DAVID WILSON:

without necessarily having the same legal documents, sort of brought us to the Massachusetts case, saying, we want full benefits. We want what everyone else has. We don't want 30% or 40%, which is what Vermont just granted gay and lesbian couples. We began to take apart those benefits and talk about the ones that were different from everyone else. And I would start by saying

DAVID WILSON:

straight audiences got it right away. Straight audience immediately said, yeah, that's what we have. We can go to a hospital together. We can have a baby together. We can do whatever we want to do together, and it's never questioned. The fact that you need either a legal document to carry, or you somehow are being told you can't do it at all. So our immediate base of support was straight people. Then we obviously had to

DAVID WILSON:

win over the LGBTQ community, and that was harder because for many, especially women, this was a patriarchal, handed down, men-in-charge, so there was a lot of pushback, until we began to talk about insurance benefits and employment benefits and the kinds of things that men and women both need in order to continue with their lives.

DAVID WILSON:

Then we built from there with gay men and obviously the trans community was concerned about how it fit for them. One of the things we spent a lot of time is talking with the trans community about there are more rights than marriage that we need to work on, so we're going to come back to you once we win this and we're going to support you. That was one of the ways that the trans community joined in the marriage lawsuit, as long as there was guarantees

DAVID WILSON:

that the national organizations and all of us are going to come back and support them. But the difference is, I guess, I would make more clear by saying that civil unions was our test. From civil unions we wanted full marriage.

MASON FUNK:

Gotcha. Great. Okay. Thank you for that. You mentioned that you were actually married on the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of education.

MASON FUNK:

Just talking about that aspect because that's kind of amazing.

DAVID WILSON:

The case was settled and we found out that we won chief justice, Margaret Marshall talked about the reasons that we should have all the rights. The language was perfect, but there needed to be a 6-month waiting period because all the documents

DAVID WILSON:

for marriage had 'husband and wife'. Everything had to be changed to partner one, partner two, spouse one, spouse two, however the various counties decided it. Chief justice Marshall picked the date that we would get married, and that was May 17th, 2004, which happened to be the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. The board of education. Margaret Marshall had grown up in South Africa.

DAVID WILSON:

She had experienced a lot of apartheid and the struggle for equality for black and white people in South Africa. We were convinced that the reason she picked that date and she was bringing together all of the civil rights movements around the country, especially hers in South Africa. She picked Brown vs board of education as the date to begin marriage equality

DAVID WILSON:

in Massachusetts, which would eventually be the country. We've met with her since, we've asked her directly, was that a date you picked? Oh, not really. I mean, I knew what that date meant, but she's never really said clearly that's it, but that was our guess all the way, along the way. It was very meaningful, obviously, to me as a black man, having this right granted to me.

MASON FUNK:

You referenced the seven minute video of the ceremony, which I wasn't able to find on YouTube, but I was able to find a compilation and it showed the moment when the officiant says, "by the power vested in me" ... Sorry. She says, "By the power vested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts," and then the crowd ...

DAVID WILSON:

Yeah. You're referencing our actual wedding day. There was a lot of, obviously, build up to when we're actually going to be standing at the altar. Kim Crawford Harvey, who was our pastor, she leans in and says, "We're ready to now pronounce you married, so lean back." We leaned back and she started

DAVID WILSON:

to speak and we were getting, obviously, the feeling that was building inside of her and us. When she said, "By the power vested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts," she was pausing to move on, and the entire church erupted, the gay men's chorus was there to sing,

DAVID WILSON:

so they were on the altar. We were looking at them and we were hearing them behind us. We now knew we were going to have words to say, and all I could think of is how are we going to do this? Kim said, later when she came outside the church, she said, I felt like God had just shaken the church, and there was this thunderous roar of people saying, 'yes'.

DAVID WILSON:

That's what we experienced, and it was palpable. You felt it in your whole body. We were all shaking and just hoping Kim would move forward. Quite a moment, quite a moment.

MASON FUNK:

I can only imagine. It was just amazing to watch. That spontaneous eruption. Pretty incredible. Another thing that

MASON FUNK:

I love that you shared was your father. The date, May 17th, was kind of a connect the dots, but your dad was also connecting the dots.

DAVID WILSON:

Yep. So I need to talk a little bit about my dad because I came to him when we joined the lawsuit and said, "Dad, we want to have the legal rights that come with marriage." And my dad was, "Absolutely, you should.

DAVID WILSON:

Tell me what those are." I went through some of what the laws are, would be for us. He was very supportive, but his comment at the time was, do you have to go public? Are you going to tell the whole world that you're gay? And I said, "Dad, that kind of goes with it. We can't be asking to get married without saying that we're a couple." That was an adjustment for him,

DAVID WILSON:

but he was clearly not going to let it get in the way of what we're planning to do. The other part, I think, for dad is, he had spent his whole life living under the restrictions of being a black man, being discriminated against, never picking his head up and speaking. I felt like he was giving me permission to speak for him also. He was 87 years old when we started the case,

DAVID WILSON:

so I began to be his voice and he would use my voice to talk with the people in his senior complex about my son is gay, he wants to get married to his partner, and these are the reasons why. So my dad became a spokesperson at that point in his life. My best experience with him is we were in the paper one day and it was the two of us, robbing me in

DAVID WILSON:

the centerfold of the paper. And somebody had thrown it into the common area, so as people were coming in, they saw it and they said, "Leonard, what's going on. And he said, oh, it's my son. He's going to get married. He wants the right to get married." There was a lot of pushback from these 80 and 90 year olds. Dad called a meeting, he went around and knocked on all the doors and he said, my son's coming over. He wants to talk to you

DAVID WILSON:

about why he wants to marry Rob. They came down with their bathrobes and curlers in their hair. We got there and there were probably 30 to 40 people sitting in a room, all sitting there because dad called them together. I walked in, Dad said, "Okay, tell them why you're here. Tell them why you want to get married." I said, "Well, dad, isn't there a lead-in from you?" He says, no, no, you take it.

DAVID WILSON:

So I just really described our personal story. I talked about losing my first partner and Rob losing his job and how important it was for us to live our life with the security of marriage and the safety of marriage.

I took questions and I gave a few more examples and people started raising their hands and saying, I didn't understand. I didn't know.

DAVID WILSON:

When you described going to the hospital, my kids or my grandkids go to the hospitals with their partners, and there's never a question. It became a sort of a love fest for my dad, especially. They went over to talk to him and said, "Leonard, I'm so sorry that we've said what we said." But it was a good moment for my dad because I was concerned that he was not always safe in this complex because

DAVID WILSON:

there were people that were angry about me asking for marriage. They were concerned about me being an out gay person, and I thought maybe that would spill over onto my dad. No question, after that evening, that he was going to be safe. All he then wanted was to be part of the ceremony. The last day, we made arrangements for a limo to pick up my dad. He'd never been on a limo before.

DAVID WILSON:

He had had a stroke a year earlier, so he was partially paralyzed on one side, but the limo came, helped him into it, brought him to the church, and as we started down the aisle, I looked and my dad was down at the first pew. The left side was the side that was paralyzed. He had his left hand up in the air and that was his symbol of I'm with you. I'm all the way

DAVID WILSON:

here with you. We got through at the end, obviously, we embraced. But dad, I think his victory was that his son had grown up, come out as a gay man, had the same rights as everyone else has, and he's now a spokesman for the community, which dad had never been able to do. He lived for another four years so he had a chance to see marriage

DAVID WILSON:

move across the country. Not all the way to full marriage across the United States, but he saw other states come on board, so he knew it was here to stay.

MASON FUNK:

I have a question. I wonder if you ever thought about, in that moment, the story you're telling of that meeting, dozens of people, they said they didn't understand. They didn't understand the reality that it wasn't part of their own life,

MASON FUNK:

but in a meeting, they were able to turn a pretty significant corner around sexuality and sexual orientation. Then we have race and it seems inherently much more ... They can sit in a room with someone who will describe that person's life as a black person or a person of color. It doesn't seem like those corners get turned as quickly or as easily or as definitively. Have you thought about ...

DAVID WILSON:

Yes.

DAVID WILSON:

I think one of the differences between race and sexuality, at least my experience, is, as I describe to people what it's like to be denied rights as a gay person, in most cases, there's someone in their family, that's gay or lesbian, that's coming out, maybe during this same period of time. So they have daughters, sisters, parents

DAVID WILSON:

that they love, that are in their family. They can carry my conversation back to that family member. With race, we live separately. For most white people, they don't generally have an intimate relationship with a person of color, so there's not someone you can go back to and carry my conversation. I think one of the differences between, sort of,

DAVID WILSON:

the acceleration of gay and lesbian rights is the fact that we are in every family. There's a story that supports what they're hearing from some of us that stepped up. It's also continued because many of those family members then want the same rights. Now we're talking about kids and marriages within families. I think that has made

DAVID WILSON:

a huge difference, as opposed to race, where we live separately. We go to churches separately, we socialize separately, and that's going to take time because I think for the races to better understand each other, we need to have intimate relationships that support where we want to go together.

MASON FUNK:

You think that's going to be kind of the way forward? And what do you mean by intimate relationships?

DAVID WILSON:

For me, when I talk about race, I always say, if you have a black or brown friend, and if you don't, you need one, because through that experience, you'll be able to find out, just in traveling with that person, what kind of obstacles they're facing. What does discrimination, what does a micro aggression look like? You're going to actually see it happen. I do encourage it in the workplace,

DAVID WILSON:

that's the easiest place to meet people, through your church, through your alumni and your schools. Through some of the volunteer organizations that you work in, but get to know someone that's of a different race than you are. When I describe intimacy, I describe it in dinners, breakfast, Meetings, church gatherings, volunteer work, where you actually get to know someone they describe and you actually

DAVID WILSON:

move with them through their life so you get a chance to see what's happening to them.

MASON FUNK:

It reminds me of a Palm Spring story. About a year ago, near the, say, when race was heightened for all of us as a nation, in the wake of George Floyd's murder, I was walking with a black friend of mine through Palm Springs, he and his partner, and me and my husband. We were walking through one of the nicer neighborhoods of Palm Springs, houses behind gates and walls and hedges. I was being a little bit of a ...

MASON FUNK:

You know, just a bit of punk. I would just like go up to the gates, and I would just jump up and look over the top just to look at the inside. I just turned around and I saw Kevin standing there and I said, you would not do that in a million years. And he's like, not in a million years.

DAVID WILSON:

Not in a million years. Yeah.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah, that was one of those little moments like, oh, wow. But it had to be the national conversation happening for me. So maybe the two things go hand in hand, if you're having a national conversation and then you have a friend, then you start to connect the dots. Forgive me for talking about myself.

DAVID WILSON:

No, that's helpful. That's helpful.

MASON FUNK:

It kind of follows on what you said, there was this ripple effect you talked to -- And I don't have the details here, but I wrote down your cousin and her grandson, that you, by embodying your story and bringing that to the world, that there was a real ripple effect in your own family. Can you talk about that a bit? And then up to the point of this family reunion where you're part of the planning committee.

DAVID WILSON:

As I think about family and certainly being the only out person in my family for at least a decade, I've been looking at the generations that have followed me. There are now three generations of family members. The first family member to actually come out is my third cousin who's the grandson of my first cousin.

DAVID WILSON:

We are having conversations, but they're carefully crafted. My first cousin doesn't refer to her grandson is gay, but different. He's off to college. He has a group of friends, but they're different. So I push on what is difference mean? Talk to me about that. She's never used the word gay, but she often says to me, I know you understand what I'm saying.

DAVID WILSON:

We're still using code words instead of the words that identify who we are, and that we're proud to use, whether it's, queer, gay, lesbian, bi, trans. I'm working on that with this first cousin, who's, by the way, 92 years old. It's a struggle for her to identify her grandson with any label at all, he wants her to use queer. Well,

DAVID WILSON:

that's a word that she was never able to use growing up. We have a family reunion coming up in about two weeks, and we want to talk about the family tree. We want to talk about ancestry. We want to talk about the parts of our family that were enslaved, and we want to have conversations that will help the generations move forward. One of the conversations I want to have is about sexuality.

DAVID WILSON:

We also want to talk about the black church. We're working through over the next two weeks, the kind of language that's going to be acceptable, but authentic, not code words, but words that we want to use, that we own. The relationship I'm working on is my first cousin and my third cousin, grandmother, and grandson. He's 18 and he's very out and he's going

DAVID WILSON:

to push the envelope, whether I support that or not. I absolutely do support it. It's a way, three generations later, to finally see this black family embrace difference, which we're going to call, for the moment, queer.

MASON FUNK:

It's so interesting. I still appreciate the willingness you're showing to talk us through this, to explain,

MASON FUNK:

of course, it's a work you're doing so I want to acknowledge that on behalf of the white people in the room, and that you're sharing so honestly and openly. I just want to acknowledge that and say thank you. When you mentioned the black church, that means so much, but we on the outside don't necessarily know what that means to you and the significance of what that means, to say 'the black church',

MASON FUNK:

all the ramifications and layers there. You can't explain it all, but can you talk to us a little bit about what you mean when you say 'the black church'?

DAVID WILSON:

When I talk about the black church, for me, as a kid, it was a safe place. I think coming out of slavery ... Well, during and coming out of slavery, it was a safe place. It was the one place that people could go to and sing songs

DAVID WILSON:

and tell each other that they love each other, and they're together for one day a week before they have to go back out into the fields and work. That has carried forward. The black church has been a culture that supports family, kids, grandparents, elders, but what has become a problem is it's so narrow. It has not allowed room for difference.

DAVID WILSON:

Part of the black church for me is trying to see a way to expand, to include those of us that are different, those of us that are queer, especially since we are in the church already, we're in the choir loft, we're actually pastors in all of the churches, but everyone's in the closet or on the down low. Part of the conversation within my family,

DAVID WILSON:

who's very religious, has deep Southern roots, is to begin to talk about it in a way that's healthy for us, so we still feel good about ourselves, but also allows them to talk about it in a way that doesn't diminish their faith and their faith in God. There has to be room to include faith in God, that includes people like me.

DAVID WILSON:

That's part of the conversation we're having. We're trying to take back the ownership of religion so that it includes us, but the black church has been difficult because it's been such a refuge for us. It's been such a safety net. We just want the safety net to be more inclusive.

MASON FUNK:

When you say that it has to include faith, is that the level of like say scriptural references

MASON FUNK:

that people know that would seem to indicate that you cannot be welcomed? What is the conflict there? What is the clash that gets set up between people's sense of their faith in God and these realities that they're being asked to make room for?

DAVID WILSON:

Part of the conversation within the churches, there are scriptures that clearly need to be removed

DAVID WILSON:

or not referred to because they are very negative, and in most cases, make it clear that we are not included and will not be included. The conversations we are having is for pastors to back off of those scriptures and find those scriptures that are inclusive, that talk about men and women being equal. Talk about the relationships between men and women

DAVID WILSON:

inside of the church, that are positive, and also encourage people within the church, whether they're deacons, in the choir or pastors to come out, to live their lives more openly. It's the combination of removing some of those scriptures that are negative and then positive role models inside of the church, part of the church structure, those are the personal stories that will help move us forward.

DAVID WILSON:

It will say to the congregation, it's okay, we are more welcoming. It's our pastor now. There are some churches that have actually become welcoming, decided it's time to be inclusive. LGBT people are honored, welcomed. The culture is welcomed. When we talk about foods, we talk about foods that includes, also, our culture.

DAVID WILSON:

It is happening more in the Northern churches than in the Southern churches, but there's progress forward.

MASON FUNK:

Well, I would love to talk more with you about this separately, because this is a big part of my husband and my personal story as well. I look forward to more conversation. It's one of my favorite topics ever, ongoing, in my life. Where are we at now? You mentioned

MASON FUNK:

we're going to start to, kind of, finish line. You put in your questionnaire, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd hate crimes acts. I wanted to make sure you had time to talk about the importance of those. Your involvement and what those pieces of legislation mean to you and to the community.

DAVID WILSON:

One of the important pieces

DAVID WILSON:

of my personal growth has been to get involved in legislation and laws to protect us as gay people, but also as black people. Part of my serving on boards was to push for both LGBT legislation and civil rights legislation. They came together for me with

DAVID WILSON:

the Matthew Shepard, James Byrd bill that came through Congress, was signed by president Obama. I had a chance to go to that signing because it was the first time in my adult out life, where I could be a gay man and a black man and see legislation that impacted both parts of who I am. There were black families there

DAVID WILSON:

speaking up for their kids and grandkids, and there were gay families there, speaking for the Matthew Shephards of the world, and we had a reception following and the conversations were so common, because we all cared about our kids, grandkids, our parents, whether we were black or we were gay That was a very meaningful period of time for me. My daughter-in-law lives in Laramie, Wyoming, which is where

DAVID WILSON:

Matthew Shepard was murdered. We've been back, Rob and I have been back to Laramie on several occasions. Jackie was actually married in Laramie. I married her, and Rob gave her away. We had a chance to actually see what it's like for a community to come together and support Jackie and her husband and her two gay dads in Laramie, Wyoming. That was full circle for us,

DAVID WILSON:

having lost Matthew over 20 years ago. Being a gay man and being a black man that Matthew Shepard, James Byrd act and bill was a momentous period of time.

MASON FUNK:

That's amazing. Thank you for sharing that story. Honestly, you made the pieces fit for me better than they have before. I didn't realize, full transparency, they were two separate acts. There were one act.

MASON FUNK:

And I see the significance. It makes sense that it came together. What else would you like to talk about, about the intersection, the reference earlier on to you having to guard against being perceived as an angry black man, the intersection from your race

MASON FUNK:

and your sexual orientation, is there anything that you feel like we haven't talked about? I just want to make sure we make full space for that.

DAVID WILSON:

As I think about where I am in my life now, I'm a pretty confident gay man. I'm very clear on what I expect and I can hold people to

DAVID WILSON:

how they respect me. I'm very careful to make sure that if there's language that's offensive, I can call them on it. I'm less confident around race, especially over the last 18 months because it can produce a conflict and the conflict can sometimes erupt into a situation that I'm not sure I can handle. One of the things I have been

DAVID WILSON:

working hard on is trying to address microaggressions in the moment. I'm at a barbecue and I'm helping make sure the food is in the right place because I'm on the residents association, and someone says to me, are you the maître d here? In that moment, I can say, no, I'm actually on the residents association. That's the reason I'm helping

DAVID WILSON:

address the food situation. But it allows me to take care of it in the moment and I can move on because if I let things store up in my head, I can become more angry than I want, and that has not been my behavior over my life. I described myself today as a very confident, comfortable gay man,

DAVID WILSON:

but less comfortable and less confident as a black man, because I face a challenge as a black man, every day, in everything that I do. I'm trying to manage that better. I'm trying to be more attentive to it in the moment, and then I'm trying to figure out how do I circle back and maybe educate, because what I actually did with that man is set up a time to sit down and talk about

DAVID WILSON:

why he made that assumption and what could we do together so that that doesn't happen to the next person. I'm figuring out a way to sort of take my earlier activism and use it more for education purposes.

MASON FUNK:

How does it feel to be playing that role with that individual and other individuals?

DAVID WILSON:

It is tiresome.

DAVID WILSON:

There are times when I just don't have the energy to do it. I'm now picking the battles that I wanted to fight. I'm also picking the communities I want to live in. I mentioned along the way, we've been trying to figure out how much time we want to spend in Provincetown and how much time we want to spend in Palm Springs. Part of the Palm Springs decision is there are more people of color. There are support organizations around people of color.

DAVID WILSON:

I see people managing stores and owning stores and businesses. I'm looking to be in an environment where there's less conflict and where I'm not challenged on a day-to-day basis to be who I am. I'm also thinking About how do I move forward and make my life more comfortable and more safe, because it is tiring

DAVID WILSON:

to have to sort of work through that every day, everywhere I go.

MASON FUNK:

Because if you don't, if you get tired and decide to pick your battles, it means the battles you don't pick, you [inaudible] to live with it.

DAVID WILSON:

Okay. I never defined myself as a black man, but it's become more of a definition for me, whether I want to do that or not. The way I'm seen,

DAVID WILSON:

the way people approach me, my race is first. Whatever their lived experience is, that's how they approach me. That's how the dialogue goes. That's how I need to figure out what do I now say? I'm trying to figure out an environment that has less of that.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah, totally makes sense. Excuse me.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Three individuals, Gary Bailey, George Gasty and Ingana Lithco. Let's talk about George Bailey.

DAVID WILSON:

It's Gary Bailey. Gary Bailey is one of my role models because

DAVID WILSON:

he's a social worker. He's been involved with a national social working organization. He works at a university in Boston. He's been involved with many of the organizations I have, but he brings a breadth of experience that I always feel I can draw on because he talks about mental health. He talks about physical health. He talks about how these microaggressions that we all face impact both us

DAVID WILSON:

mentally and physically. He talks about how we managed through it. He talks about being an angry black man and how he's worked through that. He's modeled for me, behaviors that I continue to work on, but they helped me stay healthy, helped me manage my life in a better way. I can always call Gary and ask a question, and as two black men, we can talk through it. It's the kind of person

DAVID WILSON:

that I will always continue to draw on. He's not just a role model, but he's become a really good friend, somebody that I can rely on.

MASON FUNK:

Wonderful. Thank you for that. Thank you for sharing his name. George Hasty.

DAVID WILSON:

George Hasty is a person that I also put in the category of role model. His father actually married Sandy and I,

DAVID WILSON:

and I didn't know that until George was here a couple of years ago, and we were talking about the church that he grew up in and his father was a priest. I said Episcopal priest, and he said, yes. I said, "What was his name?" And as it turns out, he was the Episcopal priest that married us. So George and I immediately connected at that point. Then we began to talk about his transition from

DAVID WILSON:

being a woman to being a man. He's a trans man, but he's a trans man who also has deep connections inside of the church, because he lived in Roxbury with black people. Now we're talking about faith and race, and we've shared a lot of how those intersections impact him because he's now seen as a white male privileged guy,

DAVID WILSON:

but he was a woman and he lived inside of the church because it was a house provided by the church.

He was protected as a kid, growing up, but now he's out in the world. I enjoy his stories because he always connects what the church has meant to him and what it means to him now and what it means to have grown up with black people

DAVID WILSON:

and how that informs his life. Now, he's a trans man. It's great for us to have that conversation. It's a different conversation for me. It's not one that I normally have. And then the thing that he always ends with is I'm treated now with the white male privilege that I never had my entire life, but I know how to handle it. I know how it works for me and how I can turn around and make it work for others.

DAVID WILSON:

So he's a great role model for me.

MASON FUNK:

Fascinating. We're great characters, man. These are the first two folks you talk about are kind of in the Boston area.

DAVID WILSON:

Yes, yes, yes.

MASON FUNK:

Interesting. Then lastly, Ingana Lithco.

DAVID WILSON:

Ingana Lithco is a friend here in Provincetown.

DAVID WILSON:

She's an African-American woman in a relationship over 40 years with another African-American woman.

DAVID WILSON:

She represents a role model group that I didn't know growing up, but I'm certainly getting to know here, two women who have had to face all of the discrimination as women, but then as black women. We have great conversations about what it's like for her and what it's like for me. She actually is surprised at some of the microaggressions that I'm facing,

DAVID WILSON:

but she realizes it's because I'm a man, and as a black man, I'm more threatening to people in town than she is. We share that, we've just done a Juneteenth event together. We're doing some follow-up work with the town, but I think for Engana and me, we bring sort of two pieces of this race challenge. She, as a black woman; me, as a black man. We're sharing that experience

DAVID WILSON:

as we go forward with people that are around us that may not know one side or the other, but they're getting a chance to see both. She's also been an educator and worked for some of the major universities in the country. She brings that experience with working with young people and how that's changing as we go forward, what our generations are expecting from us. As we think about ourselves as, now, elders in the community, we're sharing those experiences with

DAVID WILSON:

the generations, but clearly that connection for me is to have a black woman and a black man share experiences together.

MASON FUNK:

That's wonderful. Great. Thank you again for those three things. I appreciate that very, very much.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. We're actually down to what I call our final four questions. Before I jump into those,

MASON FUNK:

which are really short, pretty straightforward questions, is there anything else, in these broad categories of family and race, and of course you may remember it an hour from now, but anything, at the moment, that comes to mind that you want to talk about or share?

DAVID WILSON:

As I think about the family and race issues

DAVID WILSON:

that have been my priority, I feel like my family piece has come together well, we're working well together. It doesn't require as much attention because my kids and grandkids are growing up and they're coming into their own. But I feel like my focus on race has become more important. I feel like everything that I do requires

DAVID WILSON:

clear attention to what's going on around me and in front of me. As I think about what I'm going to be doing in this next chapter of my life, it's going to focus on race, which as a kid, I pretty much avoided because I kept my head down and just wanted to go forward. But now as an adult, and now as a senior, and now as an elder, it's a primary focus and that's clear for me, that's what I'm going to be doing, going forward.

MASON FUNK:

This part of your identity that has been with you since the day you were born, how does it feel to be a 77 year old man still coming into your own, vis-a-vis that identity, and still unpacking it? What's that like?

DAVID WILSON:

As I think about being my senior and being an elder,

DAVID WILSON:

it makes sense to me that I'm now narrowing my focus into a part of me that in many ways I buried or denied or didn't own up to, but the world saw me as a black man. Now I'm more clear that it doesn't really matter how I see myself, it's the way the world sees me and the world treats me.

DAVID WILSON:

I'm paying so much more attention and I've evolved to a point where I want to gain my confidence. I want to be able to speak out. I want to be able to use a voice that I didn't always have. I feel I have enough experience now to do that. I'm good with where I've come to, how I've evolved, what I'm heading into in the future.

MASON FUNK:

One other question before the final four,

MASON FUNK:

and I apologize, I do this all the time, it's a false summit. We shifted a little bit to focus on the things that helped our subjects get through. Where did your resiliency come from?

DAVID WILSON:

When I think about resiliency and where it came from, I guess I have to believe that it was part of my parents' model through life. I mean, they were domestics, but just plowed through, Even though they were ashamed and not confident or proud of what they did, but they did that job every single day

DAVID WILSON:

for their benefit and mostly mine. When I think about them as adults and finally coming to terms with me being a gay man, they plow through that also, and eventually, were able to tell other people in the family and their own peer group about their gay son. I think I learned perseverance and persistence and determination from them.

DAVID WILSON:

After my mother passed away, my dad lived for 11 more years. We had a chance to reconnect as father and son, and I got a chance to see how he was able to manage through macroaggressions. Not micro, macroaggressions, where doors were actually closed in his face, but he was able to go back home, figure out a way to come back in

DAVID WILSON:

and knock at that door again and say, I'm here for X or Y. I think I learned from my dad in those last 11 years again, how he was able to, born in 1914, move through his entire life until 2009 and manage the people around him, the circumstances around him. At the end, I felt like he was more confident,

DAVID WILSON:

much like I'm feeling for myself. So I'm going to say it, it was certainly the quiet perseverance of my parents.

MASON FUNK:

That's great. Yeah. It's amazing when we see our parents continuing to evolve as people into their later years. It's inspiring. Okay. Final four. If you could tell your 15 year old anything, what would it be?

DAVID WILSON:

I would say to my 15 year old self: have confidence in who you are, believe in who you are, take more risks. There will be consequences,

DAVID WILSON:

but stand up for who you are and just push forward. Because at 15,

DAVID WILSON:

the person I was inward, shy, not confident, not able to really voice who I was. That's what I would say to my 15 year old self, be more confident, take more risks, push forward.

MASON FUNK:

Great. I like that you referenced the word queer.

MASON FUNK:

One of our interview subjects introduced me to her notion of the queer superpower, her thesis is that there's something that lives in every single queer person that is a kind of a unique gift or capacity that is in turn our gift to the world. Do you relate to that notion at all? And if so, what do you think our superpower is? If you don't relate to that, totally fine too.

DAVID WILSON:

If I were looking for a queer

DAVID WILSON:

component of who I am and why that might work well, it's my ability to empathize with others. I certainly have a sense of understanding where people come from. I always look to try and sympathize with that person because I know my life experience is often close.

DAVID WILSON:

So my queer superpower is empathy. Understanding how to reach in and touch the person's strength or lack of strength and pull that out. That's what I would consider my strength and my strength as a queer person.

MASON FUNK:

Great. Thank you.

MASON FUNK:

Why is it important to you to share your story?

DAVID WILSON:

When I think about sharing my story, I know it's unique and I know that there are men of color who are struggling to find a role model. That was me. If I can tell a story that helps

DAVID WILSON:

connect the dots for someone, something that's relevant for someone, then I know I'm potentially helping somebody else's life, maybe saving a life. For me, I'm going to continue to tell my personal stories, all of them, which include race, the church, family, In the hopes that I will be able to connect with somebody else, which is what I was looking for most of my life.

MASON FUNK:

Great. And last but not least OUTWORDS is an organization that exists to collect the stories of queer elders all across the country. What do you see as the value? Do you see value in doing that? If so, what value do you see? And if you could mention OUTWORDS in your answer, that would be helpful.

DAVID WILSON:

So say that back to me, Mason. So I make sure I'm ...

MASON FUNK:

What do you see as the value of a project like OUTWORDS, which is gathering elders, LGBTQ elders,

MASON FUNK:

all across the country.

DAVID WILSON:

When I think about the value of OUTWORDS and the LGBT queer elder community, I think we need to preserve our stories. I think we need to figure out a way to pass on our stories. I know for many of us we've been pretty private throughout our lives, and this is a chance to actually elevate

DAVID WILSON:

and celebrate our stories because we are proud of them. I become more proud of the work that I've done when I look back and talk about it. So I think it's very important to share stories, share personal stories, but especially when you think about the years that it's taken to get here. I think archiving these stories through OUTWORDS is exactly what we should be doing.

DAVID WILSON:

I would hope that my sons and grandsons and all of my current family can look at me and see the growth that I've had and maybe that same growth will be part of their experience. I especially speak to the men in my family because we have not always stepped up. The women in my family have always been more outspoken and have stood up

DAVID WILSON:

for what they believe in, but the men in my family have not. As we become elders and especially as queer elders, I want to make sure that that is preserved for them, so they have a role model to think about going forward and it's someone in their family.

MASON FUNK:

Interesting. Great.

MASON FUNK:

I want to give you a chance to just ask any questions that you may, just as Fermin did regarding to David's background. Is there anything that comes to mind?

Speaker 5:

No, we have a lot of common experience. I was married to a woman, [inaudible] coming out, but I'm missing the black component. I'm full of privilege. Sometimes I realize that, but not often.

DAVID WILSON:

Yeah. I mean, Jay and Fermin are new in my life, but they feel like they've been part of my life because I've watched how they have moved through this town and the kinds of things they're involved in and how they built their business.

DAVID WILSON:

And it's an example to me that it's possible. I'm proud to be part of that because it's how I learn. It's how I figure out what I'm going to do next, because I look at their example, they moved to the neighborhood and within two weeks of being here, they had a potluck and everybody from the town came here and I said, I couldn't believe that.

DAVID WILSON:

I mean, they're just willing to take the kind of risk that I was never able to take. And I still am cautious. I'm still cautious in what I do. They've gotten involved with the Wampanoags. It's just so many things that are important that I want to be able to do myself. I mean, I need to be involved with the Jamaican community and I'm not,

DAVID WILSON:

to any degree, but I need to be. I can watch what they're doing and say, well, they can do that with the native community, I should be able to do that with the Caribbean community. I need to push myself.

MASON FUNK:

That's interesting. Well, I love how you can be inspiration to each other. I'm sure they find you a source of inspiration as well.

MASON FUNK:

That's how we all keep growing.