January 8, 2025 • 35 mins
Richard Burns has been a pillar of the American LGBTQ+ rights movement. He helped organize the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1979. Later, he became the executive director of the NYC LGBTQ Center when New York was the epicenter for AIDS. Here, he discusses his role in history and why that history must be protected and passed down to young people.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
The Outspoken podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
So when I think of you know my father who
you know? He was from bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and he
enlisted in the army when he was seventeen. For him,
World War Two was the I think the dominant shaping
experience of his life. It was what shaped him. And
for my generation, AIDS was our war, and we when
(00:29):
we were in it, that's how we thought of it.
We were in a war. I remember getting arrested blockading
in the White House one year on World Aide's Day.
We just sat down in front of the White House,
gates blockaded. We were all handcuffed, putting buses taken away.
We were just felt like, oh, this is part of
our job as warriors.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
As a gay kid, growing up religious and in the South,
I thought being gay was the worst thing I could
ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn
that by seeking out our history, and what I've found
are people and stories full of courage, perseverance and love.
In this episode, we'll meet Richard Burns, the board chair
(01:16):
of the American LGBTQ Plus Museum, opening in twenty twenty seven.
It will be the official home for the nation's vast
queer history. We'll learn how Richard survived some of the
bleakest moments of that history and why it became important
to him to preserve it. From my Heart podcasts, I'm
Jordan and Solves and this is what we loved. As
(02:03):
a journalist, I report on shame and how it impacts people,
and over and over again. What people tell me is
that the root of shame is isolation. Not just the
feeling of being alone, but the feeling of being lonely.
I relate to that a lot. Growing up. I don't
(02:24):
remember even a single person who was gay, And what
I was told about gay people from my church and
from the kids in my middle school health class was
that gay people were weak, they died of AIDS, and
they went to Hell. And one of the reasons I
stayed in the closet for so long was because I
(02:47):
didn't want that to be me. But when I came
out my senior year of college, I watched the movie
Milk for the first time years after it came out.
It's about Harvey Milk, the trail blazing gay activists in
the seventies, and I remember being astounded. He was strong
and magnetic and successful things I never associated with being gay,
(03:12):
and watching that movie gave me an image of how
fulfilling my life could be one day. My next guest,
Richard Burns, is passionate about putting more of those images
of queer strength in front of young people. He's the
board chair of the American LGBTQ Plus Museum, which will
(03:33):
open in New York in twenty twenty seven, and he
spent a lifetime in activism making queer history. But similar
to me, he didn't have very many role models growing
up either. So Richard, let's take it back to the
very beginning. When was the first moment that you knew
(03:57):
you were gay? Well?
Speaker 2 (03:59):
I was born in nineteen fifty five in Stuvensant Town
here in New York City, right above the Lower East Side,
and when I was probably six or seven, my earliest
memories are of being attracted to men. And at that age,
Westerns were very popular on TV, like Fury and things
(04:20):
like that. Also at the same time, Star Trek, Mission
Impossible TV shows that's where handsome men were, and that
awoke a consciousness in me of being attracted to men,
and I remember there was a singer named Ricky Nelson
who was on a TV show.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Very Handsome.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Yeah, And I remember having a big crush on Ricky
Nelson and mentioning it to my father, and you know,
I remember him being carfed and just saying, well, you know,
boys don't say that about other boys. And it was
like a revelation to me, like, oh my god, I
have exposed myself in a way that I made sure
not to do again for a very long time.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Did you have any role models growing up?
Speaker 2 (05:04):
I remember as an undergraduate at Hamilton College in upstate
New York, when Leonard Mattlevich was on the cover of
Time magazine.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
And for the listeners who don't know who that is.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
He was an openly gay serviceman in the US military.
I mean, I think he was expelled, but he was
like he came out as a proud gay man, and
he was a news sensation and being on the cover
of Time magazine that meant something in those days. So
he was a major news figure at that time. And
I remember grabbing the magazine in the school library and
(05:37):
it was a reflection back to me that we existed,
that I existed, and that you know, at that time,
each queer kid, lesbian, gay, whatever, you thought you were
the only one. You didn't know there were gay people
who led adult lives, happy lives, constructive lives. And so
(05:59):
if you think you're the only one and you don't
see a pathway to a future, it can fill you
with despair. So seeing the mirror of a gay man
on the cover of Time magazine was like, Oh, there
is someone out there. Even if he's being kicked out
of the military, he's alive. He's a grown up.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
And when did you actually end up coming out.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
I came out my sophomore year at Hamilton College, which
was probably late seventy four early nineteen seventy five. Before
coming out, i'd really struggled with I didn't see a
future for myself. I didn't care about my academics. I
was just in despair. And once I came out that
really changed and I was much more filled with energy
(06:44):
and possibility.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
What was the very first time that you felt a
sense of queer community.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
I think initially in college with some of the other
gay and lesbian kids.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
How did you find them?
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Well, one day I was this is really what helped
me come out. I was going into one of the
dining halls, and there was an eight and a half
by eleventh sign hanging on a wall the entrance to
the dining hall. All it says was Sapho, the words
Sapho and seven thirty pm in a room in one
of the dorms, a meeting room. And I thought, well,
you know, Sapho is a lesbian poet. Maybe this is
(07:21):
a lesbian writers group, or maybe it's a gay student union,
and so I thought, I'm going to go. I was
super nervous, and I walked into the little meeting room
and indeed it was a lesbian and gay caucus, if
you will. And again there were more lesbians and maybe
it's like you guys, oh yeah, very much so. But
(07:44):
it was very exciting. It made me feel exuberant and excited,
and you know, just bouncing up in the air, excited.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
And after college you kind of jump right into what
is now a decorated career of LGBT justice, But back
in those days that wasn't very popular to go into
queer work. In the late seventies, you start working at
the queer paper of Record is what we know of
(08:13):
it now, the Gay Community News. What had inspired you
to kind of go from college to LGBT activism.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Well, I think, in hindsight, again, I was very lucky.
By the time. I was a junior or senior, and
I had a younger friend, a young woman a couple
of years behind me, who is from Boston, and she said,
you know, there's a weekly newspaper in Boston called Gay
Community News. And I thought, I'm going to write and
get a copy of that, and I did so. The
(08:44):
weekly newspaper began coming to the library and I would
read it each week, and it said in the back
it said it was produced by a collective and that
people could join the collective. And I had a friend
from high school who was going to divinity school at
Harvard in Boston, and I thought, I could move to Boston,
become a waiter and start volunteering at this newspaper, and
(09:08):
I can live with my friend from high school, Peggy,
And so I sort of did so. Three bedroom, one
bathroom apartment. I remember the rent in nineteen seventy seven
was two hundred and twenty five.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Don't even tell me.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Each bedroom was seventy five dollars. I started volunteering at GCN,
which was indeed a collective and ultimately got a job
as the office manager, and then later I became the
managing editor in nineteen seventy one. I mean, there were
like I remember Harvey Milk calling up yelling at our
news editor on the phone, and we didn't It's not
(09:42):
like you. We didn't identify as a journalists. We identified
as gay activists, and we viewed the newspaper sort of
as a weapon of gay liberation, as an organizing tool.
We didn't talk about gay equality. We talked about lesbian
and gay liberation.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Well, what did that term mean liberation to you as
opposed to equality.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Well, it certainly meant wanting a gay rights bill, but
it didn't mean wanting gay marriage. It meant wanting to
dismantle the nuclear family. Wow, it didn't mean wanting to
join the military. It meant dismantling the military state. You know,
we've all evolved or changed because I'm married gay now,
(10:25):
But you know, it was a different approach that was
very widespread among young people at that time, in the
aftermath of the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
We need a whole new society, a new order. Well,
you participated in the nineteen seventy nine March on Washington
for gay and lesbian rights. Tell me about that march
and what was it for and what was your memory
of it.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Well, in the nineteen seventies there was not really a
truly national lesbian gay movement, was really regional movements. Remember
this is before email or texts. It was before fax machines.
Most people didn't have computers. If you had an electric typewriter,
(11:15):
you were fancy. And long distance calls were hugely expensive
and so different people. Some people credit Harvey Milk before
he was killed, some people credit others. We're having the
idea that we need a national march for lesbian gay
liberation and equality. I was probably twenty three, and here
(11:38):
I am in this friends meetinghouse where all these people
fromund the country are yelling at each other. You have
like the gay Democrats from San Diego and the radical
black lesbians from New York City, the Salsa Soul sisters,
and most of these people had never met. But we
had to come together to hammer out what was the
march going to before, what was it going to be called,
(11:58):
and what was our list of demands? And so the
march happened on October fourteenth in nineteen seventy nine and
at the Gay Community News we did a special edition,
a Guide to the March, And so my colleague Game
Hoffman and I rented a small U haul truck was
bright yellow, filled it up with all these newspapers, and
(12:20):
we drove it to DC to drop all of these
papers off. And all the gay bars in DC. So
all the gay people coming in from around the country,
where do they go to? Go to the gay bars
or the feminist bookstores and get the guide to the march.
But in any case, the march itself was very, very exciting.
There had really never been a gathering of so many
(12:41):
gay people together in the United States in one place.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
What did you all accomplish with the march?
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Well, the impact was all these regional movements were now
the beginning of a national movement because all of these
people now knew each other. They had gotten to know
each other fighting and cooperating and collaborating to create this march.
So there were relationships between leaders around the country in
ways that hadn't existed before. You know how when you're young,
(13:11):
you can feel invincible.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Oh, absolutely, when you're.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Twenty two or twenty three, And I felt like I'm invincible.
I'm gay and nobody's going to shut me up. But
all my friends I wasn't like I was the only one.
My friends were exactly the same.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
I want to skip ahead a little bit. When was
your first time hearing about AIDS. Take me to that moment.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Well, I think it was probably around the time that
the New York Times had the story about Grid gay
related immuno deficiency. This is fall of eighty one. I
was having a very active gay life in San Francisco.
I mean we would go out to bars every night,
hook up.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
It was you're talking about, like a sex list.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Yes, it was great, and it was before AIDS. I
remember sitting at dinner with some friends in San Francisco
and there were all these theories about how you got
AIDS because this is before the discovery of the HIV virus. Okay,
like no one knew anything. And there was one theory that, like, well,
(14:17):
if you have more than a thousand sex partners, your
immune system could collapse. Where that came from, or an
excessive use of poppers that could cause AIDS. I mean, no, people,
you know, we all believe that I stopped using poppers.
There was no science and you also have to remember,
in the minds of the government and the media, the
(14:39):
mainstream media and in corporate America, gay people were completely disposable.
And the fact that as it emerged that AIDS affected
intravenious drug users and gay men, there was a perception
that like, well, maybe we're better off without those people,
(15:01):
you know. I remember there was a state legislator in
California who got a lot of press for calling for
camps for people with AIDS, William Buckley in the New
York Times. He was the editor of the National Review,
and you know, one of the leaders of the right
in America, the intellectual right. He in an essay and
(15:22):
the Times said that people with age should be tattooed.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
And you remember how you felt when you read we were.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
So enraging, you know, And the fact that the Times
would publish that shows you how what they thought of us.
And remember newspapers and media have style guides, you know
that reporters and editors follow, and the style guides at
that time, for like the ap Associated Press, the Times,
the Wall Street Journal, you were not allowed to say
(15:53):
Jordan Comma a gay man. It would it literally was
Jordan Comma, an avowed homosexual. That was in the style
guide in that if you go back and look, that's
how we were referred to. So we really were despicable
and disposable, and the rage was really building.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
It's the mid eighties and AIDS has become the top
priority for many gay rights groups. By this point, Richard
was just entering his thirties. He had graduated from law
school and made a career out of fighting for gay rights,
and in nineteen eighty six he was hired as the
executive director of the New York City LGBT Community Center,
(16:45):
a hugely important hub for AIDS. Organizing the center was
so transformative because, for the first time, it brought together
queer people and their ideas from all over the city
in one dedicated space, and during the AIDS crisis, coming
together was critical. Initially, Were you scared for yourself?
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Sure? Every time you got a cold, you thought, this
is it. And I'm not kidding every gay man you knew,
every friend you had you got a cold. Oh God,
I wonder if this is it. And also there was
no HIV test. I don't think I was actually tested
for the first time, probably until early eighty seven.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Do you remember your first friend that was impacted by
AIDS the first time it felt like it was close
to home.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
I was the chair of a board in nineteen seventy
eight that created a queer legal organization for New England.
It's called GLAD Law. Now it was called Gay and
Lesbian Advocates and Defenders. Steven Salibahar was the guy when
AIDS happened who I asked if he would be the
volunteer lawyer who would lead our AIDS law project. And
(17:59):
so I worked with him a lot, and he was
a smart lawyer. And my then boyfriend Tom, we used
to go on vacation with Steve and his boyfriend Ralph,
and I remember the first time he was hospitalized and
I went with a friend to visit him and we
had to put on gowns and masks to go into
this isolation unit.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
This was the lawyer that you had hired to lead
the volunteer He was leading the aidsty and ironically, and yes,
it ultimately died well. In the mid eighties. You then
go to head up the New York City LGBT Center. Right,
tell me a little bit about what the role of
(18:41):
the center was in the AIDS movement.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
By the time that I came from Boston in December
December first, nineteen eighty six to be the executive director.
You know, there were three staff at the center. And
because of this is before the digital life. Everything was
through flyers, phone chains and the mail, and the center
published a monthly newsletter and calendar. And so you're organizing
(19:11):
lesbian gay journalists of New York and you want to
start attracting people, and so you book a room. We're
going to put that in our calendar, and then we're
going to mail that calendar for free to anyone who
wants it. And by at some point in the nineties,
there were like eighty thousand subscribers, and people would read
(19:35):
about your meeting, and people that you didn't know and
didn't know each other would come, and suddenly you would
have an organization and a network. And so very quickly
the number of queer organizations in New York multiplied dramatically.
Because you think, how was Gayman's Health Crisis founded, Well,
(19:58):
it was founded in Larry Kramer's living room by people
who Larry invited that he knew into his living room.
Suddenly you had a mechanism whereby you could meet in
a meeting room at the Center and attract all these
people who didn't know you and didn't know one another,
but liked your idea.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
This was radical in terms of expanding queer.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Networks and organizing and building a movement. So and this
would be everything from gay opera lovers, lesbian motorcycle riders,
gay softball or volleyball, bridge clubs. But it was also
how South Asian lesbian and gays got organized SALGA and
(20:46):
then decided to fight to march in the India Day Parade.
You know, all those people didn't know each other, but
you had a great idea. You put it in the
calendar and people came together.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
So tell me about the founding of act UP, because that,
for listeners, act UP was the incredibly effective organization that
was pushing the government to find effective AIDS treatments, and
it was founded at the Center while you were the
executive director. So tell us that story.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
The first cultural program of the Center was the program
that still exists today. It's called Second Tuesdays, and on
the second Tuesday of the month, a figure would be
invited to come speak, like John Waters or Audrey Lord,
or you could have written a novel or written a
(21:41):
Broadway play and you would come and we would charge
like three bucks in an auditorium and people would come
in and hear you talk. And in early nineteen eighty seven,
the person running Second Tuesdays had invited Nora Ephron, the
writer and filmmaker, to be the speaker. A lot of
(22:04):
the rom coms, the old rom coms, like with Diane Keaton,
she wrote, those who directed them and famous New Yorker
She got sick, got a cold, and canceled a couple
of days in advance, and so Diane Leo, who was
running the program, scrambled and called up Larry Kramer.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Larry Kramer was an American playwright deeply embedded in the
response to AIDS, and in the early eighties he co
founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis, one of the very
first organizations to respond to AIDS. But later he grew
fed up and furious at the indifference of the government
to what he described as a plague. Play forty million
(22:50):
infected people. He is a fucking plague, And on March tenth,
nineteen eighty seven, he gave a fiery speech at the
LGBT Community City Center calling for more to be done.
Two days later, he co founded act Up, a political
organization dedicated to bulldozing any policy, any person, or any
(23:13):
power structure that got in the way of ending AIDS.
Act UP was defined by its angry, confrontational protests that
were very successful in shifting the nation's health policies and
pushing for life saving treatments. Richard was there when it
was founded.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
So on the first floor auditorium on the second Tuesday
of the month in the spring of eighty seven, he
comes and gives this very powerful speech, very angry speech
to the gay people in the room, like you're killing yourselves,
that we weren't fighting, that we were just passively dying,
(23:54):
not demanding, not fighting for who we are. And he
really got people charged up. So people said, well, we
need to come back next week. And someone ran upstairs
to Robert Woodworth, who was the person in charge of
the scheduling, and said, can we come back next Tuesday?
And Robert said, well, no, Tuesday's booked, but you can
(24:16):
have Monday. And so that's why I act Up met
every Monday night at like seven o'clock or something. And
so they met in the first floor auditorium and act
Up really exploded, and suddenly activists from around the country
went and created act UP chapters in Chicago, San Francisco, Paris, Provincetown, Richard.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
At that time, the center was also the host of
many funerals aid funerals. And I think that you have
such a unique point of view as the leader of
the center. On the one hand, you are watching act
(25:03):
UP meet success with their actions and their demands. On
the other hand, you're literally seeing how people are still
continuing to die. I wonder what that felt like for you,
kind of to be in the middle of those two worlds.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Yeah, well, you're right. The whole experience of multiple laws
dramatically impacted our community. There were other people who you know,
in the nineties, late eighties, early nineties, who I would
visit in the hospital for like a last visit and
(25:42):
maybe in hospice or are just in the hospital, and
they would ask me. They would say, will you please
speak at my memorial? And sometimes these requests would come
from people that I didn't know well, but because of
my job as the head of the LGBT Center in
New York, I realized they were asking me not just
(26:04):
to speak about them, but to make a angry memorial
talk about aids and who they were in our queer movement.
Multiple people asked me in it, and it took me
a minute to realize, this is what they want. They
(26:26):
want their family and the world to know that they
had lives as activists and that they were killed, if
you will, by the indifference and hatred against us.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
That sounds pretty heavy for a young person to take on.
What were some of your responsibilities.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Even though, for example, I was not a caregiver primary
caregiver for anyone. Everybody was pulled into sort of some
degree of community. Karen and a guy named Ken Dawson,
really major leader in New York Square community in the eighties,
and he was sick and dying. I remember being asked
to go spend an evening with him so his boyfriend
(27:15):
could have the night off. And he was going blind
and so I was to read him as mail. And
before his boyfriend left, he said, oh, you know, you
need to change the IV drip and I was terrified.
I'd never changed an IV drip and I was like,
I was thinking, like, what if there's an air bubble
and I do it wrong, I could harm him. And
the boyfriend showed me how to do it and then left,
(27:37):
and you know, obviously it was under tremendous strain and
stress of caring for Ken, but that experience was very common,
like you'd be doing that also in a workplace like
the center at that time, where people on the staff
get sick and die, people on the board get sick
and die. So in a workplace suddenly there people are crying,
(28:02):
like in ways that might not work out in a
workplace today, then it was. It was normal. So when
I think of you know, my father who you know,
he was from Bayridge, Brooklyn, and he enlisted in the
Army when he was seventeen. For him, World War Two
was the I think the dominant shaping experience of his life.
(28:24):
It was what shaped him. And for my generation, AIDS
was our war, and we when we were in it,
that's how we thought of it.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
You could argue that New York City was ground zero
of the AIDS crisis in the eighties and nineties, and
you could also argue that the LGBT Community Center was
ground zero for New York's AIDS crisis. And during this time,
Richard was the executive director of the center. He witnessed
how the community was nearly destroyed by AIDS, but also
(29:09):
how it came together to survive. And in twenty sixteen
he played a major role in making sure that the
people who were lost to AIDS would never be forgotten.
You were very involved in the New York City AIDS memorial,
and I wonder what got you involved in that? And
(29:31):
tell us a little bit about it too.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
So around twenty twelve, these two then young guys, they
had each read a book called and the Band Played
On about AIDS in San Francisco, Randy Shild's book, And
as Chris tells the story, they both realized they knew
nothing about AIDS. They were young gay men and they
(29:55):
just knew nothing. No one had taught them told them,
and they were shocked. They both had urban planning backgrounds,
and Saint Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village had gone bankrupt
at Catholic Hospital and.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
That was sort of where all a great many AID
spatients which treated.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
It was the first AIDS ward in the city. And
the old tool building of the hospital was physically backed
up against the LGBT Center, like we shared a wall.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
So Chris and Paul said, you know this, this building
is being sold to developers and there's an opportunity for
us to have an AIDS memorial. And there was a
triangle of land that had been underground, a multi level
(30:48):
basement underground with an underground tunnel from the hospital buildings,
and so medical waste and people who had died bodies
all came in underground trucked out from this triangle, and
so Chris and Paul had the idea that, like, well,
let's make this an AIDS memorial. So they came to
(31:09):
see me for advice, and we began to meet and
talk regularly about how to organize to make this happen.
The architect who designed the World Trade Center memorial, he
chaired the design competition. It opened on World Dad's Day,
December first, twenty sixteen, and then the land was deeded
(31:30):
over to the city and is now an official New
York City park and produced tons and tons of cultural
programming around AIDS.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Richard, I want to ask about the American LGBTQ Museum,
which you're the chair of. It's going to open in
twenty twenty seven, the first of its kind. What is
the museum about?
Speaker 2 (31:53):
You know, we began organizing around this museum of queer
history in jail January of twenty seventeen. And there had
been multiple efforts before then to create a national museum
of Queer history, and you know they would falter and fail.
But this will be the you know, the one that
(32:14):
we hope will truly be our American museum. So we've
been working on it for eight years. And it's not
the kind of museum that's just going to have objects
that you say, oh, isn't that interesting when Harvey Milk
was alive. We very consciously want to be a school
for rising generations of activists. We not only want to
(32:36):
preserve our history celebrate it, but we want to look
at what did our movement do wrong? How do we
blow it? How can the next generation do better? If
you think again of the idea of culture as a
mirror who's been made invisible by our mainstream culture, who
stories have not been told, and how can we tell
them so that all of our queer people see themselves
(33:01):
as part of a tribe that is set aside them
is resilient and that will ultimately flourish.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
And even though this show is about queer history, it's
really about passing things down from one generation to the next.
And I wonder for you, what do you want young
queer people to know about this history?
Speaker 2 (33:31):
During the AIDS epidemic, our people were dying and our
government didn't care. Ronald Reagan laughed, ed kach Armeyer did nothing,
and our queer people came together and fought and took
care of our own and demanded more and got more
and developed tremendous progress, more progress than I ever imagined
(33:56):
would happen in my lifetime. And so what I hope
younger people will take away from our career history is
an understanding that not only have we been here before,
but we're a resilient bunch of people who can get
organized and fight back and win, and that it does
(34:20):
take every one of us. Every one of us has
an obligation, a duty, a responsibility to build our community
and to take care of those who can't. And like
I want every gay kid to know, that's their responsibility.
It's not an option, you know, get off your ass
(34:40):
and do it.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
But We Loved is hosted by me Jordan and Solve This.
New episodes drop every Wednesday. If you want to write
in to tell your story, email us at but We
Loved at gmail dot com, or you can send me
a message on Instagram or TikTok at your underscore gooin
solve this. We are a production of The Outspoken Podcast
(35:08):
Network and iHeart Podcasts, but We Loved was originally developed
with Pushkin Industries. Our producers are Joey pat Emily Meronoff,
and Christina Loranger. Our executive producers are me Maya Howard
and Katrina Norvil. Original music by Steve Boone. Special thanks
to Jay Bronson and Roquel Willis. If you loved this episode,
(35:31):
leave us a rating and follow us on Apple Podcasts
and Spotify, and thank you for listening. I'll see you
next week.
But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
The Outspoken podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
So when I think of you know my father who
you know? He was from bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and he
enlisted in the army when he was seventeen. For him,
World War Two was the I think the dominant shaping
experience of his life. It was what shaped him. And
for my generation, AIDS was our war, and we when
(00:29):
we were in it, that's how we thought of it.
We were in a war. I remember getting arrested blockading
in the White House one year on World Aide's Day.
We just sat down in front of the White House,
gates blockaded. We were all handcuffed, putting buses taken away.
We were just felt like, oh, this is part of
our job as warriors.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
As a gay kid, growing up religious and in the South,
I thought being gay was the worst thing I could
ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn
that by seeking out our history, and what I've found
are people and stories full of courage, perseverance and love.
In this episode, we'll meet Richard Burns, the board chair
(01:16):
of the American LGBTQ Plus Museum, opening in twenty twenty seven.
It will be the official home for the nation's vast
queer history. We'll learn how Richard survived some of the
bleakest moments of that history and why it became important
to him to preserve it. From my Heart podcasts, I'm
Jordan and Solves and this is what we loved. As
(02:03):
a journalist, I report on shame and how it impacts people,
and over and over again. What people tell me is
that the root of shame is isolation. Not just the
feeling of being alone, but the feeling of being lonely.
I relate to that a lot. Growing up. I don't
(02:24):
remember even a single person who was gay, And what
I was told about gay people from my church and
from the kids in my middle school health class was
that gay people were weak, they died of AIDS, and
they went to Hell. And one of the reasons I
stayed in the closet for so long was because I
(02:47):
didn't want that to be me. But when I came
out my senior year of college, I watched the movie
Milk for the first time years after it came out.
It's about Harvey Milk, the trail blazing gay activists in
the seventies, and I remember being astounded. He was strong
and magnetic and successful things I never associated with being gay,
(03:12):
and watching that movie gave me an image of how
fulfilling my life could be one day. My next guest,
Richard Burns, is passionate about putting more of those images
of queer strength in front of young people. He's the
board chair of the American LGBTQ Plus Museum, which will
(03:33):
open in New York in twenty twenty seven, and he
spent a lifetime in activism making queer history. But similar
to me, he didn't have very many role models growing
up either. So Richard, let's take it back to the
very beginning. When was the first moment that you knew
(03:57):
you were gay? Well?
Speaker 2 (03:59):
I was born in nineteen fifty five in Stuvensant Town
here in New York City, right above the Lower East Side,
and when I was probably six or seven, my earliest
memories are of being attracted to men. And at that age,
Westerns were very popular on TV, like Fury and things
(04:20):
like that. Also at the same time, Star Trek, Mission
Impossible TV shows that's where handsome men were, and that
awoke a consciousness in me of being attracted to men,
and I remember there was a singer named Ricky Nelson
who was on a TV show.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Very Handsome.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Yeah, And I remember having a big crush on Ricky
Nelson and mentioning it to my father, and you know,
I remember him being carfed and just saying, well, you know,
boys don't say that about other boys. And it was
like a revelation to me, like, oh my god, I
have exposed myself in a way that I made sure
not to do again for a very long time.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Did you have any role models growing up?
Speaker 2 (05:04):
I remember as an undergraduate at Hamilton College in upstate
New York, when Leonard Mattlevich was on the cover of
Time magazine.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
And for the listeners who don't know who that is.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
He was an openly gay serviceman in the US military.
I mean, I think he was expelled, but he was
like he came out as a proud gay man, and
he was a news sensation and being on the cover
of Time magazine that meant something in those days. So
he was a major news figure at that time. And
I remember grabbing the magazine in the school library and
(05:37):
it was a reflection back to me that we existed,
that I existed, and that you know, at that time,
each queer kid, lesbian, gay, whatever, you thought you were
the only one. You didn't know there were gay people
who led adult lives, happy lives, constructive lives. And so
(05:59):
if you think you're the only one and you don't
see a pathway to a future, it can fill you
with despair. So seeing the mirror of a gay man
on the cover of Time magazine was like, Oh, there
is someone out there. Even if he's being kicked out
of the military, he's alive. He's a grown up.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
And when did you actually end up coming out.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
I came out my sophomore year at Hamilton College, which
was probably late seventy four early nineteen seventy five. Before
coming out, i'd really struggled with I didn't see a
future for myself. I didn't care about my academics. I
was just in despair. And once I came out that
really changed and I was much more filled with energy
(06:44):
and possibility.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
What was the very first time that you felt a
sense of queer community.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
I think initially in college with some of the other
gay and lesbian kids.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
How did you find them?
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Well, one day I was this is really what helped
me come out. I was going into one of the
dining halls, and there was an eight and a half
by eleventh sign hanging on a wall the entrance to
the dining hall. All it says was Sapho, the words
Sapho and seven thirty pm in a room in one
of the dorms, a meeting room. And I thought, well,
you know, Sapho is a lesbian poet. Maybe this is
(07:21):
a lesbian writers group, or maybe it's a gay student union,
and so I thought, I'm going to go. I was
super nervous, and I walked into the little meeting room
and indeed it was a lesbian and gay caucus, if
you will. And again there were more lesbians and maybe
it's like you guys, oh yeah, very much so. But
(07:44):
it was very exciting. It made me feel exuberant and excited,
and you know, just bouncing up in the air, excited.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
And after college you kind of jump right into what
is now a decorated career of LGBT justice, But back
in those days that wasn't very popular to go into
queer work. In the late seventies, you start working at
the queer paper of Record is what we know of
(08:13):
it now, the Gay Community News. What had inspired you
to kind of go from college to LGBT activism.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Well, I think, in hindsight, again, I was very lucky.
By the time. I was a junior or senior, and
I had a younger friend, a young woman a couple
of years behind me, who is from Boston, and she said,
you know, there's a weekly newspaper in Boston called Gay
Community News. And I thought, I'm going to write and
get a copy of that, and I did so. The
(08:44):
weekly newspaper began coming to the library and I would
read it each week, and it said in the back
it said it was produced by a collective and that
people could join the collective. And I had a friend
from high school who was going to divinity school at
Harvard in Boston, and I thought, I could move to Boston,
become a waiter and start volunteering at this newspaper, and
(09:08):
I can live with my friend from high school, Peggy,
And so I sort of did so. Three bedroom, one
bathroom apartment. I remember the rent in nineteen seventy seven
was two hundred and twenty five.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Don't even tell me.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Each bedroom was seventy five dollars. I started volunteering at GCN,
which was indeed a collective and ultimately got a job
as the office manager, and then later I became the
managing editor in nineteen seventy one. I mean, there were
like I remember Harvey Milk calling up yelling at our
news editor on the phone, and we didn't It's not
(09:42):
like you. We didn't identify as a journalists. We identified
as gay activists, and we viewed the newspaper sort of
as a weapon of gay liberation, as an organizing tool.
We didn't talk about gay equality. We talked about lesbian
and gay liberation.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Well, what did that term mean liberation to you as
opposed to equality.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Well, it certainly meant wanting a gay rights bill, but
it didn't mean wanting gay marriage. It meant wanting to
dismantle the nuclear family. Wow, it didn't mean wanting to
join the military. It meant dismantling the military state. You know,
we've all evolved or changed because I'm married gay now,
(10:25):
But you know, it was a different approach that was
very widespread among young people at that time, in the
aftermath of the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
We need a whole new society, a new order. Well,
you participated in the nineteen seventy nine March on Washington
for gay and lesbian rights. Tell me about that march
and what was it for and what was your memory
of it.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Well, in the nineteen seventies there was not really a
truly national lesbian gay movement, was really regional movements. Remember
this is before email or texts. It was before fax machines.
Most people didn't have computers. If you had an electric typewriter,
(11:15):
you were fancy. And long distance calls were hugely expensive
and so different people. Some people credit Harvey Milk before
he was killed, some people credit others. We're having the
idea that we need a national march for lesbian gay
liberation and equality. I was probably twenty three, and here
(11:38):
I am in this friends meetinghouse where all these people
fromund the country are yelling at each other. You have
like the gay Democrats from San Diego and the radical
black lesbians from New York City, the Salsa Soul sisters,
and most of these people had never met. But we
had to come together to hammer out what was the
march going to before, what was it going to be called,
(11:58):
and what was our list of demands? And so the
march happened on October fourteenth in nineteen seventy nine and
at the Gay Community News we did a special edition,
a Guide to the March, And so my colleague Game
Hoffman and I rented a small U haul truck was
bright yellow, filled it up with all these newspapers, and
(12:20):
we drove it to DC to drop all of these
papers off. And all the gay bars in DC. So
all the gay people coming in from around the country,
where do they go to? Go to the gay bars
or the feminist bookstores and get the guide to the march.
But in any case, the march itself was very, very exciting.
There had really never been a gathering of so many
(12:41):
gay people together in the United States in one place.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
What did you all accomplish with the march?
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Well, the impact was all these regional movements were now
the beginning of a national movement because all of these
people now knew each other. They had gotten to know
each other fighting and cooperating and collaborating to create this march.
So there were relationships between leaders around the country in
ways that hadn't existed before. You know how when you're young,
(13:11):
you can feel invincible.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Oh, absolutely, when you're.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Twenty two or twenty three, And I felt like I'm invincible.
I'm gay and nobody's going to shut me up. But
all my friends I wasn't like I was the only one.
My friends were exactly the same.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
I want to skip ahead a little bit. When was
your first time hearing about AIDS. Take me to that moment.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Well, I think it was probably around the time that
the New York Times had the story about Grid gay
related immuno deficiency. This is fall of eighty one. I
was having a very active gay life in San Francisco.
I mean we would go out to bars every night,
hook up.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
It was you're talking about, like a sex list.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Yes, it was great, and it was before AIDS. I
remember sitting at dinner with some friends in San Francisco
and there were all these theories about how you got
AIDS because this is before the discovery of the HIV virus. Okay,
like no one knew anything. And there was one theory that, like, well,
(14:17):
if you have more than a thousand sex partners, your
immune system could collapse. Where that came from, or an
excessive use of poppers that could cause AIDS. I mean, no, people,
you know, we all believe that I stopped using poppers.
There was no science and you also have to remember,
in the minds of the government and the media, the
(14:39):
mainstream media and in corporate America, gay people were completely disposable.
And the fact that as it emerged that AIDS affected
intravenious drug users and gay men, there was a perception
that like, well, maybe we're better off without those people,
(15:01):
you know. I remember there was a state legislator in
California who got a lot of press for calling for
camps for people with AIDS, William Buckley in the New
York Times. He was the editor of the National Review,
and you know, one of the leaders of the right
in America, the intellectual right. He in an essay and
(15:22):
the Times said that people with age should be tattooed.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
And you remember how you felt when you read we were.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
So enraging, you know, And the fact that the Times
would publish that shows you how what they thought of us.
And remember newspapers and media have style guides, you know
that reporters and editors follow, and the style guides at
that time, for like the ap Associated Press, the Times,
the Wall Street Journal, you were not allowed to say
(15:53):
Jordan Comma a gay man. It would it literally was
Jordan Comma, an avowed homosexual. That was in the style
guide in that if you go back and look, that's
how we were referred to. So we really were despicable
and disposable, and the rage was really building.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
It's the mid eighties and AIDS has become the top
priority for many gay rights groups. By this point, Richard
was just entering his thirties. He had graduated from law
school and made a career out of fighting for gay rights,
and in nineteen eighty six he was hired as the
executive director of the New York City LGBT Community Center,
(16:45):
a hugely important hub for AIDS. Organizing the center was
so transformative because, for the first time, it brought together
queer people and their ideas from all over the city
in one dedicated space, and during the AIDS crisis, coming
together was critical. Initially, Were you scared for yourself?
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Sure? Every time you got a cold, you thought, this
is it. And I'm not kidding every gay man you knew,
every friend you had you got a cold. Oh God,
I wonder if this is it. And also there was
no HIV test. I don't think I was actually tested
for the first time, probably until early eighty seven.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Do you remember your first friend that was impacted by
AIDS the first time it felt like it was close
to home.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
I was the chair of a board in nineteen seventy
eight that created a queer legal organization for New England.
It's called GLAD Law. Now it was called Gay and
Lesbian Advocates and Defenders. Steven Salibahar was the guy when
AIDS happened who I asked if he would be the
volunteer lawyer who would lead our AIDS law project. And
(17:59):
so I worked with him a lot, and he was
a smart lawyer. And my then boyfriend Tom, we used
to go on vacation with Steve and his boyfriend Ralph,
and I remember the first time he was hospitalized and
I went with a friend to visit him and we
had to put on gowns and masks to go into
this isolation unit.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
This was the lawyer that you had hired to lead
the volunteer He was leading the aidsty and ironically, and yes,
it ultimately died well. In the mid eighties. You then
go to head up the New York City LGBT Center. Right,
tell me a little bit about what the role of
(18:41):
the center was in the AIDS movement.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
By the time that I came from Boston in December
December first, nineteen eighty six to be the executive director.
You know, there were three staff at the center. And
because of this is before the digital life. Everything was
through flyers, phone chains and the mail, and the center
published a monthly newsletter and calendar. And so you're organizing
(19:11):
lesbian gay journalists of New York and you want to
start attracting people, and so you book a room. We're
going to put that in our calendar, and then we're
going to mail that calendar for free to anyone who
wants it. And by at some point in the nineties,
there were like eighty thousand subscribers, and people would read
(19:35):
about your meeting, and people that you didn't know and
didn't know each other would come, and suddenly you would
have an organization and a network. And so very quickly
the number of queer organizations in New York multiplied dramatically.
Because you think, how was Gayman's Health Crisis founded, Well,
(19:58):
it was founded in Larry Kramer's living room by people
who Larry invited that he knew into his living room.
Suddenly you had a mechanism whereby you could meet in
a meeting room at the Center and attract all these
people who didn't know you and didn't know one another,
but liked your idea.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
This was radical in terms of expanding queer.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Networks and organizing and building a movement. So and this
would be everything from gay opera lovers, lesbian motorcycle riders,
gay softball or volleyball, bridge clubs. But it was also
how South Asian lesbian and gays got organized SALGA and
(20:46):
then decided to fight to march in the India Day Parade.
You know, all those people didn't know each other, but
you had a great idea. You put it in the
calendar and people came together.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
So tell me about the founding of act UP, because that,
for listeners, act UP was the incredibly effective organization that
was pushing the government to find effective AIDS treatments, and
it was founded at the Center while you were the
executive director. So tell us that story.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
The first cultural program of the Center was the program
that still exists today. It's called Second Tuesdays, and on
the second Tuesday of the month, a figure would be
invited to come speak, like John Waters or Audrey Lord,
or you could have written a novel or written a
(21:41):
Broadway play and you would come and we would charge
like three bucks in an auditorium and people would come
in and hear you talk. And in early nineteen eighty seven,
the person running Second Tuesdays had invited Nora Ephron, the
writer and filmmaker, to be the speaker. A lot of
(22:04):
the rom coms, the old rom coms, like with Diane Keaton,
she wrote, those who directed them and famous New Yorker
She got sick, got a cold, and canceled a couple
of days in advance, and so Diane Leo, who was
running the program, scrambled and called up Larry Kramer.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Larry Kramer was an American playwright deeply embedded in the
response to AIDS, and in the early eighties he co
founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis, one of the very
first organizations to respond to AIDS. But later he grew
fed up and furious at the indifference of the government
to what he described as a plague. Play forty million
(22:50):
infected people. He is a fucking plague, And on March tenth,
nineteen eighty seven, he gave a fiery speech at the
LGBT Community City Center calling for more to be done.
Two days later, he co founded act Up, a political
organization dedicated to bulldozing any policy, any person, or any
(23:13):
power structure that got in the way of ending AIDS.
Act UP was defined by its angry, confrontational protests that
were very successful in shifting the nation's health policies and
pushing for life saving treatments. Richard was there when it
was founded.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
So on the first floor auditorium on the second Tuesday
of the month in the spring of eighty seven, he
comes and gives this very powerful speech, very angry speech
to the gay people in the room, like you're killing yourselves,
that we weren't fighting, that we were just passively dying,
(23:54):
not demanding, not fighting for who we are. And he
really got people charged up. So people said, well, we
need to come back next week. And someone ran upstairs
to Robert Woodworth, who was the person in charge of
the scheduling, and said, can we come back next Tuesday?
And Robert said, well, no, Tuesday's booked, but you can
(24:16):
have Monday. And so that's why I act Up met
every Monday night at like seven o'clock or something. And
so they met in the first floor auditorium and act
Up really exploded, and suddenly activists from around the country
went and created act UP chapters in Chicago, San Francisco, Paris, Provincetown, Richard.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
At that time, the center was also the host of
many funerals aid funerals. And I think that you have
such a unique point of view as the leader of
the center. On the one hand, you are watching act
(25:03):
UP meet success with their actions and their demands. On
the other hand, you're literally seeing how people are still
continuing to die. I wonder what that felt like for you,
kind of to be in the middle of those two worlds.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Yeah, well, you're right. The whole experience of multiple laws
dramatically impacted our community. There were other people who you know,
in the nineties, late eighties, early nineties, who I would
visit in the hospital for like a last visit and
(25:42):
maybe in hospice or are just in the hospital, and
they would ask me. They would say, will you please
speak at my memorial? And sometimes these requests would come
from people that I didn't know well, but because of
my job as the head of the LGBT Center in
New York, I realized they were asking me not just
(26:04):
to speak about them, but to make a angry memorial
talk about aids and who they were in our queer movement.
Multiple people asked me in it, and it took me
a minute to realize, this is what they want. They
(26:26):
want their family and the world to know that they
had lives as activists and that they were killed, if
you will, by the indifference and hatred against us.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
That sounds pretty heavy for a young person to take on.
What were some of your responsibilities.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Even though, for example, I was not a caregiver primary
caregiver for anyone. Everybody was pulled into sort of some
degree of community. Karen and a guy named Ken Dawson,
really major leader in New York Square community in the eighties,
and he was sick and dying. I remember being asked
to go spend an evening with him so his boyfriend
(27:15):
could have the night off. And he was going blind
and so I was to read him as mail. And
before his boyfriend left, he said, oh, you know, you
need to change the IV drip and I was terrified.
I'd never changed an IV drip and I was like,
I was thinking, like, what if there's an air bubble
and I do it wrong, I could harm him. And
the boyfriend showed me how to do it and then left,
(27:37):
and you know, obviously it was under tremendous strain and
stress of caring for Ken, but that experience was very common,
like you'd be doing that also in a workplace like
the center at that time, where people on the staff
get sick and die, people on the board get sick
and die. So in a workplace suddenly there people are crying,
(28:02):
like in ways that might not work out in a
workplace today, then it was. It was normal. So when
I think of you know, my father who you know,
he was from Bayridge, Brooklyn, and he enlisted in the
Army when he was seventeen. For him, World War Two
was the I think the dominant shaping experience of his life.
(28:24):
It was what shaped him. And for my generation, AIDS
was our war, and we when we were in it,
that's how we thought of it.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
You could argue that New York City was ground zero
of the AIDS crisis in the eighties and nineties, and
you could also argue that the LGBT Community Center was
ground zero for New York's AIDS crisis. And during this time,
Richard was the executive director of the center. He witnessed
how the community was nearly destroyed by AIDS, but also
(29:09):
how it came together to survive. And in twenty sixteen
he played a major role in making sure that the
people who were lost to AIDS would never be forgotten.
You were very involved in the New York City AIDS memorial,
and I wonder what got you involved in that? And
(29:31):
tell us a little bit about it too.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
So around twenty twelve, these two then young guys, they
had each read a book called and the Band Played
On about AIDS in San Francisco, Randy Shild's book, And
as Chris tells the story, they both realized they knew
nothing about AIDS. They were young gay men and they
(29:55):
just knew nothing. No one had taught them told them,
and they were shocked. They both had urban planning backgrounds,
and Saint Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village had gone bankrupt
at Catholic Hospital and.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
That was sort of where all a great many AID
spatients which treated.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
It was the first AIDS ward in the city. And
the old tool building of the hospital was physically backed
up against the LGBT Center, like we shared a wall.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
So Chris and Paul said, you know this, this building
is being sold to developers and there's an opportunity for
us to have an AIDS memorial. And there was a
triangle of land that had been underground, a multi level
(30:48):
basement underground with an underground tunnel from the hospital buildings,
and so medical waste and people who had died bodies
all came in underground trucked out from this triangle, and
so Chris and Paul had the idea that, like, well,
let's make this an AIDS memorial. So they came to
(31:09):
see me for advice, and we began to meet and
talk regularly about how to organize to make this happen.
The architect who designed the World Trade Center memorial, he
chaired the design competition. It opened on World Dad's Day,
December first, twenty sixteen, and then the land was deeded
(31:30):
over to the city and is now an official New
York City park and produced tons and tons of cultural
programming around AIDS.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Richard, I want to ask about the American LGBTQ Museum,
which you're the chair of. It's going to open in
twenty twenty seven, the first of its kind. What is
the museum about?
Speaker 2 (31:53):
You know, we began organizing around this museum of queer
history in jail January of twenty seventeen. And there had
been multiple efforts before then to create a national museum
of Queer history, and you know they would falter and fail.
But this will be the you know, the one that
(32:14):
we hope will truly be our American museum. So we've
been working on it for eight years. And it's not
the kind of museum that's just going to have objects
that you say, oh, isn't that interesting when Harvey Milk
was alive. We very consciously want to be a school
for rising generations of activists. We not only want to
(32:36):
preserve our history celebrate it, but we want to look
at what did our movement do wrong? How do we
blow it? How can the next generation do better? If
you think again of the idea of culture as a
mirror who's been made invisible by our mainstream culture, who
stories have not been told, and how can we tell
them so that all of our queer people see themselves
(33:01):
as part of a tribe that is set aside them
is resilient and that will ultimately flourish.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
And even though this show is about queer history, it's
really about passing things down from one generation to the next.
And I wonder for you, what do you want young
queer people to know about this history?
Speaker 2 (33:31):
During the AIDS epidemic, our people were dying and our
government didn't care. Ronald Reagan laughed, ed kach Armeyer did nothing,
and our queer people came together and fought and took
care of our own and demanded more and got more
and developed tremendous progress, more progress than I ever imagined
(33:56):
would happen in my lifetime. And so what I hope
younger people will take away from our career history is
an understanding that not only have we been here before,
but we're a resilient bunch of people who can get
organized and fight back and win, and that it does
(34:20):
take every one of us. Every one of us has
an obligation, a duty, a responsibility to build our community
and to take care of those who can't. And like
I want every gay kid to know, that's their responsibility.
It's not an option, you know, get off your ass
(34:40):
and do it.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
But We Loved is hosted by me Jordan and Solve This.
New episodes drop every Wednesday. If you want to write
in to tell your story, email us at but We
Loved at gmail dot com, or you can send me
a message on Instagram or TikTok at your underscore gooin
solve this. We are a production of The Outspoken Podcast
(35:08):
Network and iHeart Podcasts, but We Loved was originally developed
with Pushkin Industries. Our producers are Joey pat Emily Meronoff,
and Christina Loranger. Our executive producers are me Maya Howard
and Katrina Norvil. Original music by Steve Boone. Special thanks
to Jay Bronson and Roquel Willis. If you loved this episode,
(35:31):
leave us a rating and follow us on Apple Podcasts
and Spotify, and thank you for listening. I'll see you
next week.
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