MAHER AMHAD, JOHN BOLIN, JEFF GRAUBART, THOM NICKELS, ALBERT WILLIAMS

NORTHWESTERN, IL GAY LIBERATION; LAWRENCE, KS GAY LIBERATION FRONT; CHAMPAIGN, IL GAY LIBERATION FRONT; BOSTON, MA AND BOULDER, CO GAY LIBERATION FRONT; CHICAGO, IL GAY LIBERATION

Ron and Maher Ahmad by unknown, 1970.

Following the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969, the Gay Liberation Revolution swept across the United States, igniting a wave of radical activism that redefined what it meant to live openly and freely. This oral history gathers the reflections of five individuals who were deeply involved in that movement, all of them rooted in communities often overlooked in mainstream accounts. Maher Amhad organized at Northwestern University in Illinois, challenging academic and cultural norms from within. In Lawrence, Kansas, John Bolin built local resistance in a conservative landscape, helping carve out space for queer expression. Jeff Graubart, one of the earliest openly gay political candidates in the country, organized in Champaign, Illinois, where he used his electoral campaign as a platform for radical visibility and change. They are joined by Thom Nickels, who brought his activism from Boston, Massachusetts, to Boulder, Colorado, bridging regional efforts in an evolving national movement, and Albert Williams, who was active in the dynamic and often theatrical organizing scene of Chicago, Illinois.

Together, their stories offer a vivid, ground-level view of a revolution driven by conviction, joy, and defiance. Looking back on their roles in one of the most transformative periods in LGBTQ+ history, they also look forward—imagining what the next chapters of liberation must hold. These testimonies are a reminder that queer resistance didn’t occur only in major coastal cities, and it certainly didn’t end there.

— August Bernadicou, The LGBTQ History Project

August Bernadicou: John, Lawrence, Kansas doesn't often appear on the national queer history map, but you were helping draw that map. What catalyzed the GLF there, and how did your group navigate being radical in a conservative state?

John Bolin: I was one of many people who started GLF in Lawrence during college, and it came rather organically. We talk about women's liberation. I was living in a mixed commune that included women who had become activists. I was at home with my boyfriend, and there were about ten people altogether. We were the two gay people in that house. After a bit, we were like, "Well, why aren't we doing this for ourselves as well? Why aren't we addressing the prejudice against gay people?" That was the start of it.

I think there's a benefit. I mean, it's a large school, but it's a relatively small community. I think that helped a lot, because it was always inclusive in terms of not being this separate gay neighborhood, but being just in the fabric of resistance, be it war protests, all of that. We all, everyone, lived very close to each other. It was easy to meet people and get support from them.

We had straight allies who always had our backs. I attended women's liberation meetings as the only male. There was, again, a lot of interconnection between the different groups, and often communes too. I went from the primarily straight commune to what was really a gay commune. It was all gay men called the Body Shop. It was a de facto organizing center for initial meetings for gay liberation.

The Body Shop was known as a house where gay men lived. We changed the name of it from Body Shop to Venus, because we felt Body Shop had negative connotations in terms of just gay men, just being about sex and bodies. We wanted to move away from that.

August: What did you learn from the Women's Liberation movement?

John: That's a big question. While I was growing up in Oklahoma, I was always drawn to the women in my family. They really ran the family. We had a—it's a matriarchy. I was very comfortable. I was always in the kitchen with the women, while the men were in the living room watching football. It was just that comfort of having female role models, friends, support. It led to my interest in their movement, and also childcare. I was drawn to art education. These are all overlapped, in my experience. This, again, relatively small town setting.

August: Maher, how did you connect radical politics to university organizing?

Maher Ahmad: Well, I was a lefty even when I was in high school. My background is Palestinian. From the early on, that was a fight still going on about finding truth and finding dignity among a group of oppressed people. I grew up with this in my home. My mother was a very progressive woman. I just ended up being a progressive person.

The initial entry for me into the gay liberation movement was an ad that appeared in the school newspaper, The Daily Northwestern. The ad simply said, "Anyone who's interested in starting gay liberation at Northwestern, call this number." I called it.

Before I went off to Northwestern, as a senior in high school, I kept a journal. I said to myself that, "As soon as I escaped this little town that I grew up in Forty Fort, Pennsylvania, I would look into joining the Mattachine Society” because I'd heard about it and read about it. I had that fire inside me of wanting to do something. Of course, I had to escape this town of 5,000 people where I grew up.

I attended a couple of the Mattachine Society meetings. I found the guys there quite brave, but also there was a reticence about them that didn't resonate with me. They all used pseudonyms even among themselves. Then, when I was, I think, a sophomore or junior, this ad appeared in The Northwestern newspaper. I called up the number because I thought, "Okay, great, here's a guy that wants to start doing this. I want to be a part of it."

As it turned out, this was Bill Dry, who passed away from AIDS a number of years ago. I knew Bill, but neither of us knew the other was gay. We ended up being the two that started the gay rights group at Northwestern. He had been going to meetings, taking the L down to the University of Chicago to attend.

They might have been the very second university gay rights group in the country. As I understand it—someone should fact check it—I think Columbia was the first. Then U of C was the second. Then, I think Northwestern was the fifth. Someone told me that.

He invited me to go with him and see how they were doing it. We went down there and learned a lot from them. Then we started it at Northwestern. And, just to add on to what John said, it was the women's movement that really helped us.

It helped us in two ways. It taught us something about organizing. I don't remember us ever meeting with them, and them giving us hints or anything, but we saw what they did. That helped us figure out what we were going to do. Also, and maybe more importantly, that inspired us. We saw, "Okay, they're doing this. This can work." Courage multiplies, fear multiplies, and courage multiplies. We saw these really brave women standing up for their rights. It was like, "Yes, we can do that too."

August: What gave you the audacity?

Maher: Anger. Anger gave me the audacity. It was also a burning sense of injustice, and what I saw amongst so many people who were driven into lives that were lives of torture. I remember when I first heard the word "homosexual." It was my older brother. He used the word. This was in 1962, when I had just reached my adolescence, when we had no role models. My brother informed me that homosexuals were one of three things: they were criminals, and they should be locked up; they were insane, and they should be locked up in an insane asylum; or they were an abomination under the Lord, and they should burn in Hell forever. I knew that this was bullshit, and I just decided I wasn't having any of it. In 1962, I knew there was nothing wrong with me. I don't know why I knew that. I think maybe it's genetic, something I got from my mother. Now, it took me two years at Northwestern before I felt comfortable enough to come out completely. I started telling my friends. I told my roommate and other friends in my first two years, but it was my junior year when Bill Dry put that ad in The Daily Northwestern, and that was like, "Okay, I'm ready to do this in a big way now." I just came out.

I remember when I was in high school, and my brother used the word "homosexual.” I said, "What is that?" He said, "It's a guy that likes having sex with men." This little light bulb went off. I knew that I had to keep it secret. We know that somehow. We don't know how we know that, but we know that. I went to the public library to read about myself. In the card catalog, I looked up homosexuality, and I wrote down the call numbers of a number of books. Then, I went to the stacks, and I couldn't find them.

I went to the librarian. I didn't write the names of the books. I wasn't—I knew better than to do that. I went to the librarian, and I said, "I can't find these books." She said, "They're in the locked stacks." I thought, "Okay, never mind." Like they were pornography or something, all right? I knew that the periodicals wouldn't be locked up. I looked up homosexuality in the periodicals, and I went to Life magazine and Time magazine. The articles were all just awful.

When I finally got to school, and when Bill Dry suggested that we do this, I was all in on it. We went down to the University of Chicago, and then we started our own group. We asked to be officially recognized by the university. By then, and later, a lot of universities would have nothing to do with it. They wouldn't sanction the gay groups as legitimate student groups.

We got approved immediately. I don't know why, but we were braced for a fight. They said, "Fine, you're an official student group." Oscar Wilde used the phrase for gay people, "The love that dared not speak its name." Some person came up with, "Now, it's the love that won't shut up." We were the love that won't shut up.

August: Albert, Chicago was a flashpoint for radical politics, Black Panthers, anti-war protests, the Democratic National Convention. How did Chicago's gay liberation intersect with the broader movement? What was your personal entry point?

Albert Williams: My personal entry point was when I first went to the University of Chicago Gay Liberation meetings in 1970. I'm a couple of years younger than Maher. I had dropped out of college in my sophomore year. I was going to Indiana University, but I lived in Chicago. When I dropped out of Indiana, I came back to Chicago. I had come out at college. I was looking for gay social activities, and I was too young to go to bars.

I found a copy of The Chicago Maroon, which was the University of Chicago newspaper. I lived on the north side. The University of Chicago is all the way down on the south side. They were advertising Chicago Gay Liberation, which is the group that Bill Dry was involved with. He was not yet a student at Northwestern, but then he moved to Northwestern, and started the GLF, and Maher joined him.

I met Maher and Bill Dry at the U of C Gay Liberation meetings in 1970. Gay Liberation started in Chicago, and I'm interested to hear Maher say that it was one of the first two university-based gay liberation groups in the country. It started because a grad student named Henry Wiemhoff placed an ad in the student newspaper, The Chicago Maroon, looking for, quote, "Gay roommate to share an unfurnished apartment."

He really was just looking for a roommate. He got a woman named Michal Brody, and they also started getting calls from people who didn't want a place to live but wanted to get together, wanted to meet, and wanted to talk about gay liberation. This was obviously the fall of 1969, right after the Stonewall riots of the previous summer. People were coming back to college, talking to each other, sharing ideas, and saying, "Let's move forward with this."

The University of Chicago—I would take the train down to U of C to go to their meetings. Then Northwestern started its gay liberation group, so I went to their events up in the North Shore suburb of Evanston. There were things happening both on the South Pole and the North Pole of Chicago at that time. As far as the idea of connection to larger radical politics, I read an article that made very clear to me, New York had Stonewall. We all know what Stonewall was.

Chicago did not have a gay event the way Stonewall was, an LGBT event. What we had was the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention riots, which fostered a great distrust towards the police. In Chicago, among everyone, anyone of any sort of liberal bent became very suspicious. It was OK to criticize authoritarianism, because of the way the police under the then-mayor, Richard J. Daley, had overreacted to the 1968 Democratic Convention anti-war protests.

That was sort of our Stonewall, in that it opened up our minds to the idea of more militant action. When gay liberation started as a response to the Stonewall riots of 1969, we moved forward very quickly with challenging militant actions that would challenge the status quo. We challenged the fact that the Chicago bars did not allow same-sex dancing.

It was not illegal, but they were afraid of getting harassed by the police, and also harassed by the Mob, who owned many of the bars, the organized crime. A group of us put together the first public dance, a same-sex LGBT dance in Chicago at a place called the Coliseum, which was a big convention center. It's where they had Republican conventions, and they had trade shows. They had livestock shows there, and they had rock concerts there.

We had a dance there in April of 1970. It was the first public LGBT dance that was not on a college campus, because college campuses had already had dances, but they were protected from the outside police, because they were insulated with their own police systems. We had our dance in April of 1970 at the Coliseum, and the police, although they came, and they considered whether they should shut it down, they decided it wasn't worth the effort, partly, because they saw a group of lawyers standing at the doorway with their legal notebooks all ready to take down the names of officers who were violating civil rights and civil liberties.

From there we went on. We were confronting militantly, but not aggressively. We were doing events that were challenging the status quo, but we're not exactly—we were not rioting the way they had in Stonewall. That paved the way for the gay liberation movement in Chicago, which also spread to Northwestern and was spreading around the country at college campuses initially.

I think it's important that these gay lib groups really started on college campuses, where you had a lot of college students who were responding to what was going on in the women's movement, were responding to what was going on in the civil rights movement, and saying, "We are also an oppressed minority, and we should participate in that activity." College campuses were where student radicalism was free to operate.

Thom Nickels (right) by unknown, 1968.

August: Jeff, can you talk about how you entered gay lib and then about running for mayor?

Jeff Graubart: I came to the University of Illinois in the fall of 1970. I went to registration as a freshman. Someone, a guy named Bill Stanley, who would ultimately become my mentor, was passing out these flyers for Gay Liberation. I grabbed one and said, "Wow." I was passing the flyers out at registration before I had even actually had a sexual encounter.

I was, like Maher, very angry at society for not seeing that their attitudes were complete bullshit. I also had a bit of anger towards the reticent gay community, because they were just so afraid. It was like, "We shouldn't be afraid. We can seize power." One of the first things I did—GLF was meeting at a coffee shop—one of my first actions was to get the group recognized by the university.

They said, “Yes,” right away. That was a little surprising. I think the first conflict between the radicals and the reticent people in gay liberation in Champaign happened on Halloween of 1971. The police raided a party and arrested the drag queens. I was, of course, outraged. Actually, so was everybody else.

We went to the police station and got them released. The next thing was, how do we deal with this? I said, "We've got to go to the City Council. We've got to demand that they repeal this cross-dressing law." The leftists, who think they're so progressive, said, "Oh, no, the City Council's fascist. We can't go to the City Council. That's going to their level of fascism." I said, "We've got to go to the City Council."

I went to the council by myself and asked them to repeal the law. They said they'd consider it. Then things got heated, because I decided I was going to sit in the City Council if they didn't repeal the law at their next meeting. They were not pleased, the conservative gays. You can't do that. That's horrible. Going was bad enough, but sitting in, you just can't do that. Then, I was just angry and decided to raise the stakes.

There was this big city politician, who we knew was gay, because he came to the gay bar, the Crystal Room at the Inman Hotel. I said, "Not only am I going to sit in, but I'm going to out Maury," that was his name, "if they don't repeal the law." Then, there was this big campaign to not talk to me, a silence campaign. It worked, because I was just going crazy.

Then, I get a message from Maury that if I even mentioned his name, I wouldn't live. I did end up at the hospital. Then, this friend of mine, Deanna, came to see me the night of the council meeting—I was having a nervous breakdown in the hospital. She said, “Jeff, there's some place you got to go." I said, "They won't let me out. They have my clothes and my shoes."

She said, "Well, I brought you some clothes." I said, "Okay." We go out and we take a cab. We go to the City Council meeting. When we walk in, and it's a small town, everybody knows what's going down. All of the councilmen know I'm in the hospital. I'm not going to do this. We walk in, they stop the meeting, whisper to each other, and then unanimously, they repealed the cross-dressing law.

Meanwhile, there was a teach-in going on at the university about how bad these tactics of going to the Council were. We take a cab back to the Illini Union, walk in, they turn around and groan when they see me. I said, "All I say is they repealed the law." There's silence. Then slowly someone starts applauding, and then everybody starts applauding. Then we just leave. Gay liberation changed that day. We became a good militant organization at the University of Illinois.

August: Albert, the gay liberation movement was never a monolith. There were debates about race, gender reform versus revolution. Can you talk about that friction?

Albert: Yes. As gay liberation in Chicago was doing more and more actions and attracting more and more people, there were conflicts developing within the group, which was, of course, problematic. It was a very loose-led organization, over the extent to which we should be a multi-cause group. The interconnection, the sectionality between, the intersectionality between LGBT issues, women's issues, Black issues, racial issues, religious issues. It started to become very fragmented.

What happened was that different groups of people formed caucuses. Within Chicago Gay Liberation, which was open to anyone, even though it was, basically, based at the University of Chicago, there was a women's caucus, there was a Black caucus, et cetera. Our focus during the first year of the group's existence was what we now would call the Gay Pride parades in June of 1970.

Then, we called them the Stonewall Anniversary March, or the Stonewall Rebellion Liberation Day, or something like that. It was in Chicago. All of us worked together on putting that march together, which happened on Saturday, June 27,1970. It was the first march in the country, partly because there was one in San Francisco, but it didn't start for three more hours, because of the time difference, but also because New York's was on Sunday, June 28, which was the day that New York wanted to have its parade.

It's the first Christopher Street Liberation Day march. We decided to have ours on Saturday, the day before, partly to be able to target shoppers in downtown Chicago. Our march was in downtown Chicago, rather than like, say, in an LGBT-centered neighborhood. After the success of that march, which was small, but very successful in that nobody got arrested, nobody got hurt, and we could do it, we could now go on to do other things.

That was when the splinters that had come up already within the group started to become more intense. Eventually, Chicago Gay Liberation disbanded and split into various different groups. There was the Chicago Women's Liberation, or Chicago Lesbian Liberation, which was started by a woman named Michal Brody, who was the co-founder of Chicago Gay Liberation.

There was the Third World Revolutionaries, which was a Black gay group led by a man named Ortez Alderson, who later was a prominent anti-war activist, and was arrested for burning draft records in Pontiac, Illinois. Then, people who wanted to focus more just on gay rights issues—as we would call them then—formed what was called the Chicago Gay Alliance.

Their driving force was, “We have a lot of issues on our plates that we're all sympathetic to, but what this group is going to do is only focus on LGBT civil rights issues,” which meant lobbying in City Council. I'm very struck by the story Jeff just told about the debate over whether to engage the system, the political system, or to resist it and attack it, or to disengage from it.

Homosexuality was already legal in Illinois. In fact, Illinois was the first state to decriminalize homosexual sodomy laws in the United States. Certainly, there was still discrimination. We introduced a bill in the Chicago City Council to add sexual orientation to the list of categories—gender, race, et cetera—against which it was illegal to discriminate. That was introduced in 1973 by a group of people who had differing political opinions on other issues, but were focused on gay civil rights. The bill didn't pass until 1988, but that was a long day.

August: We have Thom Nickels here now, a little bit of technical difficulties, but he was in the Boston and Boulder GLF. What did gay liberation look like in those two places, and how did your perspective shift between them?

Thom: In Boston, gay lib was extremely political. It was very serious. We met at MIT. I lived in Cambridge at the time. We made several road trips, one to a Black Panther convention in Washington, D.C., where we stayed at a gay lib collective. We then went to Manhattan. We went to the big anti-Vietnam War protest in the Boston Common. We marched with about 25 people with gay lib posters.

People were very, very—they looked at us in shock, because we were out with our gay lib posters, and they just parted like the Red Sea to let our contingent pass. I really recall that there were no chummy, or friendly remarks, just this shocked, delayed reaction. Of course, this was the time when, in the underground press, gay people were always referred to as faggots.

I mean, these were all like left-wing periodicals. The homophobia never stopped. It got a little gentler over time, but this always concerned me how the left could—they just didn't get it there. Boulder GLF, I guess because it was in Colorado, and Boulder is so beautiful, and there's the whole Rocky Mountain High element, it was much more of a party gay lib. Although we did do a couple of zaps in the Hill, which was the famous hippie section, then in Boulder.

We did a lot of dance zaps in straight bars. I remember they were mostly Apache Indian bars. It was great fun dancing to the Rolling Stones in these out-of-the-way Rocky Mountain bars. If I could sum it up that quickly, Boston was serious, Boulder was very much about the party, and having a good time.

August: Was one of those cities more liberal than the other, or were they pretty equal?

Thom: No. That's a good question. I used to hitchhike all the time there. When I was in Boston, I lived in Cambridge, I would go to Boston to the gay bars. I would go to Sporters, and the subway system shut down at, I think, midnight or 12:30. I wouldn't think twice about hitchhiking into Cambridge just like that. I just loved hitchhiking, because you never knew who you were going to meet.

When I went to Boulder, I tried hitchhiking and a policeman stopped me and said, "You can't hitchhike." The glitch was that you can hitchhike here, but you have to be on the curb, not off the curb. That amazed me, this attention to detail. I would say that, generally, Boulder was a lot more sensual than Boston. Boulder was a really Walt Whitman town. If you didn't have a boyfriend when you arrived in Boulder, you did within two weeks or less. It was that—the people were that friendly then. It was just conducive to a freewheeling sensuality that I don't think I've seen since.

August: John, with all the backlash happening, especially in Red states, what would you recommend to people who are on the street now?

John: I would say I'm amazed how many there are, and for me, it's taken years to understand, and empathize, and come to see what trans people are going through. My heterosexual friends, and a lot of my gay friends are still very baffled by it, actually. There seems to be a need for more education around that, rather than just reacting to the right wing focusing on that as a wedge issue.

I have been in lively arguments where people just don't get it that it's not a choice. All these things that once you know trans people, you begin to understand, and empathize more why it's not how they look, or whether they're successful at passing, all those things that people bring to this argument that surprises me. In Lawrence, we were midway, literally between each coast. We had a lot of groups from Gay Liberation in New York and Chicago, Texas, LA. They all came through, often staying with us. We had a trans woman staying at our house at one point.

It's been going on a long time, but it just really hit the fan over the last ten years or so. I just wanted to interject earlier. There was talk about the dances, and that seems trivial, but that was a great tool to bring more awareness in Lawrence into the campus about the gay people, and give everyone a non-threatening situation to go to and participate. That was a fun dance. We knew how to throw a big party. That was also a good fundraiser.

Back to mutual support, we could only get to utilize the university facility for the dance, because we were sponsored by the women's group. They were recognized. We could not be recognized. They were denying our recognition. We went through the women's group in order to have the dance. It continued to be a great community-building event for many years, long after I left. I left Lawrence when I moved to San Francisco.

August: Do you think the No King protests will make a difference?

John: Yes, I do. For one, it was very heartening here, at Civic Center, to see so many families, men, women, straight, gay, with their children. Children were carrying signs. Children were there in their strollers. It just brought a lot of people out, including, I’m sure, people who would not have come out if they weren’t so angry about this administration and what's been going on the last week or two. I think protests open people's minds. It radicalizes people to a degree to have these. The protest at Civic Center was an astounding success.

August: Maher, what would you say to student organizers today facing backlash from their schools? What can they learn about the early gay movement that would help them?

Maher: The movement toward justice, it was like Martin Luther King said, the movement for justice is not always this straight line. It's like this: there's peaks and valleys, and peaks and valleys, and peaks and valleys. What we all have to do now is to understand two things. First of all, it takes time. One of the things that is most instrumental in this notion of it taking time is generational changeover, okay? My nephews and nieces think nothing about people being gay. They grow up with me completely out. My partner, they called Uncle David. It's just like nothing to them.

I hate to say it, but it's our generation that has to die off, okay? Before we can begin to make—before the progress becomes more entrenched. There's always backlash. There's always backlash. That backlash, it can't make people discouraged. What I would say to young people now is have heart, stick with it. It's all going to turn out right, because justice will come out. I've always believed that justice will come out.

The other thing is that the right has always picked on the most marginalized and defenseless people they could find. Now, regular gay and lesbian people have got it pretty good. Our rights, they're always in danger, but our rights are pretty well established. Who knows, the Supreme Court may undo same-sex marriage. You know what? If it does undo it, that undoing will become undone.

This business of picking on trans people is really, deeply offensive, and very much a sign of just how awful these people are. They pick on the people who are most marginalized and least understood to demonize them, and to wreak as much havoc in their lives as possible. It's deeply offensive. They have to have heart also. They have to—they've got to go through it.

Again, if you're a member of more than one oppressed group, it makes it a lot easier to understand what oppression is about. I remember I had this boyfriend when I was working in North Carolina, which is a Southern state. He was a White boyfriend. One day he came over and he said, "Boy, I was in the supermarket today and it was Planet of the Apes." The reference was that there were a lot of Black people there.

I just lost it with him. I said, "You're gay. You know how gay people are talked about. How can you possibly say that?" I pointed out to him that they're just being dumped on the way you are being dumped on. He said, "Well, gee, I never thought about it that way,” which sounded preposterous to me until a friend of mine said, "Maybe he didn't ever think about it this way." If you're a member of two minority groups, it gives you a greater insight, and because I'm Palestinian, as well as gay, it gives me an insight that says, "Look, we are all in this together, and we can't fight with each other, we have to join with each other, and we have to fight these forces that are trying to keep us from our freedom."

August: Jeff, in your activism, and when you're running for politics, you've spoken about bringing labor and socialist politics into queer organizing. Was that welcome or resisted?

Jeff: It's difficult, because in the early '70s, it was very left, and I was seen as right, because I wanted to engage in the system. As my politics became more firm as a member of the Young Socialist Alliance, and the Socialist Workers Party, that was really resisted—not so much in Champaign. Actually, they were pretty good with it, because we had a very militant organization, and we were doing some great things at the City Council, and we had some great uprisings.

In Chicago, it was hated. They were just horrified. I was pulled into the Socialist Workers Party, not so much economically, but just because the Young Socialist Alliance at the University of Illinois was the most pro-gay rights organization down there. I just—everything for me was about gay liberation, and my mentor, Bill Stanley, who was in the YSA, pulled me in. When I came to Chicago, that really hurt.

Also, when we organized the March on Washington conference in Urbana, which was used around the country, because I was the organizer, they said, "No one should go. This is a communist plot." It was all about gays to me, and I just happened to be a socialist, and yet the whole conference was viewed, especially in Chicago, as a communist plot. Of course, the Socialist Workers Party didn't want to be seen as too close to gays, so they ordered all their comrades not to attend.

Therefore, we got 40 people, mostly from the small Midwestern towns, because no one from Chicago came. We got a lot of people from Iowa and Kansas, and they were really into it. In the big cities, they were opposed to the conference, because I was a member of the YSA.

August: Are you still a socialist?

Jeff: No, actually, I'm not. I do believe in economic justice, but I believe that socialism is theft. I actually developed my own system of free markets, and something called Georgism, land in the commons, where the rents on land are distributed equally to everyone, but there's complete free enterprise. I fought so much for our rights, and by the time we had won everything, I looked around and saw that everyone else had gone into the toilet.

It's like, we won, and yet things were much worse for everybody else. The average real wage of workers in this country is the same as it was in 1972. Look at all the progress, all the AI, how much wealth, and how much the GDP has gone up. It's all gone to the top, every last penny. Workers make nothing more. This is probably why Trump won, because the Democrats, as well as the Republicans, have done nothing to stop what's happening—the real cause of that economically.

August: The thing that's happening with history is it's being rewritten, and marginal figures, or alternative stories, are taking precedence over what actually happened, and the voices of pioneers who are active during this period of 1969 through the early '70s. Thom, what's one myth about the GLF era that you'd like to put to rest?

Thom: One myth? That's a tough question. I know, I used to take great delight in wearing my gay liberation button whenever I would come home from Boston, and ride the train into the Philadelphia suburbs, but then if the stares got too intense, I would take the button off. I think the myth was, you were associated with radicals. Of course, at that time, I was also a conscientious objector against the Vietnam War, so I did alternate service at Tufts Medical Center in New England.

That was a very hard road for me to travel on at that time. There was a lot of discrimination against COs, and even within my own family. That's why I delayed in telling my family that I was gay, because I had hit them with so many bomb blasts, as it were. I think that people didn't understand gay lib.

I remember going home with various boyfriends, one in particular for Thanksgiving, or Christmas. When the living room was empty, my friend would give me a quick peck on the cheek, and just at that moment, one of the young children would walk into the room. This became a major thing. How dare you do this in front of the children? It was not in front of the children. I don't know whether I've answered your question, but I think that, I do know that with gay lib, it struck us as very unfortunate when women declared themselves as separate, and as lesbians, because we really enjoyed the camaraderie of both forces working together.

It was after that point that the whole lesbian life became more and more remote, in a way. That had many different effects. I was on the staff of The Gay Alternative newspaper in Philadelphia when that occurred. I remember we had long, heated discussions about that. There were other things about gay lib that I think set us against gay marriage. I remember being told at 20 that monogamy was horrible.

It was nothing more than a capitalist system of ownership, and that nobody owns anybody. We don't want to become like them with a white picket fence. Marriage was a high sacrilege in the pure gay lib sense of things, and yet that has all turned around. I wonder how much that has affected me in terms of not being able to have a 20 year relationship. My things tend to go on for six or seven years, and then they die out. I'm just glad that there wasn't gay marriage when I was 20, though, because I would have been divorced many, many, many times.

August: It seems like there's this tremendous shift in the gay community toward assimilation, which is the opposite of gay liberation. What is lost when gay men assimilate?

Jeff: We don't really have the bars anymore. I noticed that. It's hard to meet people anymore because, really, gays are so assimilated. Of course, at my age, it doesn't matter that much, but it's hard to meet people, because there's really no gay places anymore, like there used to be.

Albert: I'm going to challenge August's theory there, and say that there is no wrong between gay liberation and gay assimilation. It is society that has assimilated gay liberation.

Thom: I like that.

Maher: If assimilation means loss of identity, and I think to a lot of people that's what it means, then I would hate to see us assimilated. If assimilation means becoming integrated with society, completely integrated, and yet allowing our own individual identities, and our own individual behaviors, then I think it's a good thing. I like the notion that if someone wants to get married in a traditional marriage they can, and I like the notion that I don't need to. I like the notion that other people, straight people, will recognize that and honor that, but I would hate to lose the identity of being gay and the distinct ethos that it is and the cultural identity it is because I find it to be something very, very valuable. One of the questions I used to get a lot when I—I would go speaking to different groups when I was in college, and there were two questions I would always get. One was, "If you could take a pill and become straight, would you?" I would say, "No, I like being gay, and that's my identity."

The other one was, "If you had a child, would you like your child to be gay or would you prefer your child to be straight? My answer would be, "Look, I want them to be whatever they are, and I want them to be able to be happy and not be oppressed."

August: I've done a lot of interviews with people in the gay liberation front, and I've never met someone who was in the gay liberation movement that was pro-gay marriage at the time. What caused the shift? I don't know if any of you are married, but maybe talk about the shift in you if it wasn't something you were fighting for in 1970.

Jeff: Actually, I was fighting for it in 1975, and that did cause a big problem. I was in Chicago at this time, and they were saying marriage is a patriarchal institution. Actually, the left was saying, "Marriage is a patriarchal institution," and the right was saying, "We don't want to upset the straights. If we go after their institutions, we'll upset them." They joined together and actually something called the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Metropolitan Chicago formed this big organization to attack us.

We were sitting in at the Marriage License Bureau, and they had this big press conference saying that we do not represent what gays really are, that we're just troublemakers and communists and whatever. It was two women and myself, three of us, and the two women actually went on ultimately to prison for a year just for sitting in, but they had to do about 20 sit-ins before that happened. Yes, it was pretty hard to fight for marriage equality back in 1975.

Thom: I had a brief throwback comment regarding assimilation. There was a great lesbian leader in Philadelphia by the name of Barbara Gittings, and one of her major contentions was that the gay movement's purpose is to make itself obsolete and that once we had all the rights and when gay marriage was approved, we could then disappear, as it were. There wouldn't be a need for a gay church or a gay this and a gay that. I'm just amazed at how that has not happened.

Maher: I don't recall ever even considering the issue of gay marriage. Again, it might be my memory playing tricks, but it certainly wasn't something that was really large. I remember I had a conversation with a fellow student who was completely closeted, that I was trying to get him to come out and join the group. I said to him, "I envision someday that two men can walk down the street and not be pointed at or beaten up or anything, and just be regarded as normal." He said, "Well, that's never going to happen." You know what? We've got gay marriage, but in the vast majority of places, two men cannot walk down the street holding hands and not either be pointed at or stared at, or beaten up. I don't know what that means, but there it is.

Thom: One of the big ironies—

Albert: Sorry, when I was a member of Gay Liberation as a college student, I used to say two of the best things about being gay are that you don't get married and you don't go into the army. That's all changed, of course. The priorities have changed. The right of LGBT people to serve in the military is a very forefront issue, and it's under attack again. Marriage is now taken for granted, but is again under attack.

August: John, maybe you can answer this question because you're in San Francisco, and then anyone else who wants to comment on it, of course, can as well. What do you think about Trump and his administration renaming the USNS Harvey Milk?

John: A lot of petty people is my reaction. It's horrible, and there are a lot of other people, too. They're renaming ships like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, they're taking her name off. It's just across the board; seemingly everyone but a white, straight man is under question in terms of having their names chosen for these vessels. It makes me quite angry, and it doesn't change his service.

I'm sure you all are reading all of this, in parks across America, they're being told not to have any information at the national parks that in any way alludes to historical strife or discrimination or Indians that were murdered or Black uprisings, the Underground Railroad. All of this is supposed to be removed from all the literature. I have to believe

e this will all change again, that we won't be under this cloud the rest of our lives.

August: How has your thinking about the queer community and queer politics changed over the decades of your life? Have you grown or changed?

Thom: I have, and I know that this may not be a popular opinion, but I know that a lot of gay men I know cannot relate to some aspects of the queer movement as it is now. They don't understand certain things. For instance, I think that we all believe this discrimination against transgender people is not right, but when you get into gray areas like transitioning children, I think then you have these problem areas when you get into the issue of the use of pronouns or the forced use of pronouns.

At the William Wade Community LGBT Center in Philadelphia, one is almost forced to select pronouns. I've known several people who have actually left their positions there because of this strange gender ideology, which seems to be—it has nothing to do with the gay movement per se, but it's related in an intersectional Michel Foucault sense, but the average gay person does not understand it. I think I've gotten a little more conservative as far as that goes. Let me tell you, once you've been a gay activist, it never goes away. It's there in your DNA and it's ready to be activated when need be. Anyway, those are my thoughts.

Maher: I can't remember who talked about the fact that the lesbians separated themselves from the gay men, and that was a loss. In some ways, it certainly was a loss. Also, I remember that when we started our Gay Liberation group, we men, we might be gay, but we're men, started putting women in women's roles. They'll make the coffee and stuff. It was really important for them to pull away from us, but still be with us so they could attend to their own particular difficulties and points of view that were different from gay men's views. Overall, they shared that umbrella of oppression.

I see the same thing with trans issues and with these other issues. I guess now “A” has joined that alphabet soup for asexual people. The fact of the matter is that oppression is indivisible. It is indivisible. It's like a bunch of Venn diagrams. They all join up in the middle. It's important important for us to like be separate about what our particular group needs and how we need to go about doing things, but also to be a part of the larger notion that we are all oppressed and we will get further by watching out for each other and working with each other than we will by simply pulling ourselves apart and trying to attend to our own problems only.

Albert: About transgender issues, my sensitivity to the use of pronouns and so forth, like Thom talked about, developed when I was a teacher at Columbia College in Chicago, where we were encouraged to start using pronouns, certainly to be aware of the students' pronouns. If the faculty declared our own pronouns, regardless of what they were, even if they were the obvious he/him, or whatever, that's a signal to everyone that you care and that you are open and that it's safe to say those things.

There was recently a report where the White House press secretary refused to answer emails from reporters who, at the bottom of their signature lines, said their pronouns, which were usually he/him, or she/her, which was actually something that they were asked to do by their news organizations. The press secretary refused to do it because she said they were not going to support gender ideology. That's bullshit. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Maher: I just think back to the—when was it? The late '70s, the early '80s, when the term “Ms.” was coming about. Ms. created this huge ruckus among the—oh my God, men are men and we should know who is married and who is Miss and who is Mrs. They fought against it. Now, nobody thinks twice about it. I predict that the same thing is going to happen with genders. Albert, what you said is very much on the button. It shows respect and empathy, and sympathy with people who are having to go through what we went through 50 years ago. It's a new thing now.

Albert: I also remember being told that, "You can't tell the boys from the girls." That was simply because we wore our hair long. It had nothing to do with our demeanor. Now that is something that really does trigger some people in a very intense way.

August: What's happening now is we're seeing the expansion of LGBTQ. You mentioned Alphabet Soup. Do you think it's possible that we could spread ourselves too thin? With asexuals, two parts, are they oppressed, and does it reduce LGBTQ to a sex act?

Albert: I don't think it reduces LGBTQ to a sex act. I'm one of those people who, by the way, does not like to use the Q because the word queer is so offensive to me. I accept, however, that it's an easy catch-all term. I'm okay with it, but I don't use it myself. I do think that one of the reasons transgender awareness has become more open, I'm not going to say transgenderism has expanded, but transgender awareness has grown in the past 20 years, is because of the increasing sexualization of our popular culture in advertising and in the movies and so forth.

I think that the younger generation is just starting to rethink sex, including people who identify as asexual. That may be a phase. That may really be their identity. I don't know, but I do think that empathy is the way to go. You always have to imagine, not what I think, but what are they feeling?

Thom: I think one should assume that in their everyday normal human dealings, one should respect everyone. You shouldn't have to spell it out under your name with a whole list of esoterica, because I don't think the use of pronouns is actually going to wash in the general society. I think that will die out, unlike the use of the term Ms., which became very, very popular, which is now part of the common lexicon. I think pronouns, it's just a very small segment of people who advocate it and who would die by it, as it were.

Albert: I must disagree with you, Thom, because for one thing, a lot of people have names that are not clearly identifiably gender specific. That's why a lot of those reporters were using it. Reporters who have names like Chris. I can't even think—.

Maher: I don't think so. Your roommate was called Michel, who was a woman, 50 years ago.

Jeff: In terms of the early gay liberation movement, there was a very strong anti-trans tendency because it was considered sexism to differentiate between the sexes. To differentiate yourself says that there's a difference between the sexes that shouldn't be respected. That's slowly disappeared, but I wonder, it seems that transsexualism, and let me say, it's outrageous what the right is doing towards them. Everybody deserves total respect. It seems like communities that have more discrimination against gays and have a greater differentiation between men and women—places where sexism is very strong—have the highest transsexual population. Iran, I think, probably has the highest in the world, from what I understand.

Albert: We understand that people we used to think of in our days in Chicago Gay Liberation as gay or lesbian were really, in fact, transgender, that people who were identifying as gay actually realized—Quentin Crisp, for example, finally said he realized that he identified as a woman, not as a gay man late in his life. We have to constantly be aware of rethinking these terms.

Thom: There's a school of thought that says very, very seriously that the trans movement, when you're talking about a child being trans, for instance, if a boy puts on his mom's high heels, the tendency now is not to say he's gay, but that he's a girl. You have people who are going the trans route instead of the gay route. There's a whole lot of gay people who insist that this form of thinking is actually anti-gay. I think that's a fascinating theory.

Albert Williams by unknown, 1973.

Maher: One has to also examine why on the right it is such a despicable thing to do for a man to dress up as a woman and play that. Drag has always been a style among gay people, and it also has been a strategy among gay people. Style, because it's just fun to do that, but the strategy is indicating just how much of a social construct appearing as a "woman" or as appearing as a “man” is. The right is so frightened about this because they want to make sure that they can put women in a particular category. They need to know who is male and who is female, because females are going to have to behave in a certain way, and males are going to have to behave in a certain way.

If you can't tell which one is which, how do you force people into a particular kind of behavior? There's no endpoint for these right-wing wackos. What happens when you outlaw drag? What is the next step? If men dressing in drag is bad, then women shouldn't be allowed to wear pants. They should wear skirts because then we know women are women or they're dressing like women. Before long, you've got women in burkas.

Thom: I don't think there's any so-called right-wing attack on drag queens, except when it comes to story hour for children. We've all been through that. I think drag queens in general, for adults, everybody is for that. Drag has always been a part of gay culture. Susan Sontag's camp, et cetera. I've never heard an attack on drag, per se, outside of drag queen story hour for children—back to children.

Jeff: We have to remember that, as mentioned earlier in this panel, one of the reasons the right wing is attacking drag queens is because they are so vulnerable. That's why we have to defend them. Although, I'm not so sure the right wing is as frightened of drag queens as they pretend to be.

Albert: President Trump called drag shows anti-American, and he wasn't talking about children's programming at the Kennedy Center.

Maher: Exactly. I don't know, Thom, where you're getting your statistics from, but I don't know that there have been studies done about that. If there have been, I would love to see them, where the only thing that upsets right-wing people is drag in front of children. Yes, I understand that particularly upsets them, but that's simply an entry point as far as I'm concerned, because you can get more people on the bandwagon if you start talking about saving the children.

John: Drag is never going to go away. There's a healthy drag king movement here in San Francisco, and I'm sure elsewhere, where women get dressed up as men. You don't hear that talked about, because a lot of, I think, straight people don't necessarily realize that what they're looking at is a woman, and drag as well, but I think no one is safe, ultimately. I think it's a lot more than just story hour.

August: I live in New York, John, you live in San Francisco, it's happening everywhere, but can we talk about rainbow capitalism and the effect it has on the community? With Pride coming up, we all know—Chase near my apartment has rainbow flags. What's everyone's thought on this?

John: I see no issue here. Small business owners, a lot of the money generated for Pride does go to AIDS organizations. Health care organizations as well. I'd rather support a business if they're providing a good product and a good service. There's been corporate sponsorships in our parades here since the beginning, local businesses, as well as the telephone company and everything else, and employees of telephone companies marching in the march. We have trash gay collectors that are pushing trash cans down the street, and it's participating—I don't know. I think the bigger the tent, the better.

Jeff: I have no problem with rainbow capitalism. I think it's a natural outcome of assimilation. I have a bigger problem with the entire debt-based capitalist organization of society, but I wouldn't single rainbow capitalism out. It's just natural that that would extend to gay people as well.

Maher: My opinion follows Jeff's very closely. I think that in terms of rainbow capitalism, when big companies sponsor floats or say it's all right, that only helps. That only helps. The discussion that needs to be had, and of course, there would be a wide range of views about this, is about capitalism generally, not just rainbow capitalism, but about the problems of capitalism generally and what that does, and how that influences and affects all people's lives.

Thom: Two comments, I guess. One, I don't believe that drag shows are un-American. I think President Trump is wrong there, obviously. Regarding rainbow capitalism, I can't comment on capitalism, but I want to know who redesigned the latest rainbow flag, I think it's terrible, and why they keep changing what was once a beautiful flag in its simplicity and harmonious colors. They've changed it into an incongruent angle-meets-horizontal line. It's just out of kilter.

Jeff: I wondered what that was.

Albert: I think they changed the rainbow flag to make it more inclusive.

Thom: In a design sense, I guess it doesn't work.

Maher: I agree. It's not well designed. I don't think it's well designed. However, I think the impulse and the notion are good.

August: If you were organizing today, where would you start? The ballot box, the streets, or somewhere else entirely?

Albert: That's a good question. That's a very good question, because we are certainly not just with LGBT, but with the general society, torn between street action and ballot box action. I would have always said the ballot box, but the problem is that on a national level, the ballot box is so corrupted in a country governed by the Electoral College and gerrymandered congressional districts that it's going to create more tendency for people to go to the streets. The streets can be very counterproductive, militant action. It's a great question, and I don't know the answer.

Jeff: I would always support the streets.

Maher: I would say it's situational. Nationally, locally, statewide, you've got to see what the problem is and then dive into it according to whatever the best solution for the individual situation is. Right now, the national government is owned by the right wing. I think this means what we saw yesterday, which is going out into the streets.

Thom: I think it's situational also. As a writer, I believe that it best works for me through columns and through books of the old Thomas Paine school of nailing the pamphlet to the tree. That's what I would propose.

August: John, what scares you most about 2025?

John: I really can't narrow it down. I guess just overriding fear of what's being done to so many people who haven't done anything. For instance, in the military, the issues around trying to get rid of, for example, trans soldiers, which is actually a very, very large number of people who serve well in the military. It's that constant barrage of inequality, and that seemingly, the President can be bought and is bought and is buying and selling. It's a degradation of our values as a democracy.

August: This question is for anyone. You were mostly involved with university activism. What would you do if you were 22 and queer today?

Maher: I don't know that I would do anything that would have been much different than I did 50 years ago. It all has to be done. It's still the same. We're farther down the road, but the battle is still there, and the techniques are the same. My greatest fear is that the House and the Senate will not turn with a good majority in this next election. If the Republicans keep them both, then I think we are very much going to slide into autocracy. Then it's going to be difficult, not just for queer people, but for just about everybody that isn't white and male.

Thom: I can't think of being 22 without being in the environmental and political landscape that I was in when I was actually 22. I could not say what I would be like today at 22.

Jeff: I would certainly be different than I was in the '70s. The '70s for me was at least nine straight years of extreme radicalism and anger at the horror of the way gay people were treated. That isn't true anymore. I would be much more involved generally in fights against genocide in Palestine, which is a big issue for me now, and against the economics where the wealthy—where all the money that's printed by the Federal Reserve ends up in the hands of a few.

That's what I would be doing. I think now, if the House and Senate—if we turn and they start going back on gay rights, then of course I would be very militant and fight for that.

August: What can the queer movement in red states teach us in 2025 that people on the coast might be missing?

Albert: I don't know the answer to that.

Thom: When you get to know conservatives, you find out that almost all of them know gay people and have gay friends, and that on a certain level of intimacy, they just don't give a damn. That's the high irony, the shocking irony that I've discovered.

August: Can you be a Republican and care about civil rights these days?

Maher: Define Republican.

John: Someone who voted for Trump.

Thom: Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.

Jeff: The MAGA movement has nothing to do with small business Republicans of 30 or 40 years ago, nothing.

Maher: The MAGA movement has nothing to do with Abraham Lincoln. They just like to quote that to try to paint themselves or disguise themselves as being righteous. Abraham Lincoln is turning over in his grave over what the Republicans are doing.

Albert: Doesn't have anything to do with Dwight Eisenhower, either, or even Ronald Reagan.

Maher: Oh, yes. It had to do with what Ronald Reagan started.

Albert: Yes.

Jeff: He was at the beginning.

Albert: I think that a person like Ronald Reagan always thought that there would be checks and balances.

Maher: What you said about a lot of these people that are anti-gay having close friends that are gay—that's been like that forever. That's been like that. Didn't Trump have a roommate or was roommates or something with a gay couple or something like that?

Thom: I think he hosted a gay wedding at Mar-a-Lago.

Maher: Right. There it is. That's been going on forever.

Thom: Jesse Helms. I had a friend who knew his family in North Carolina. This is when the whole world hated Jesse Helms. He said that he went to a dinner party with his daughter and Jesse, and his daughter had a best male gay friend that Jesse was in love with, and he couldn't understand it. It was so incongruent given the politics of the time.

Maher: Look at Ms. Lindsey Graham, who is protected and is as queer as a $3 bill. His right wing is crazy. He's being protected by all his right-wing buddies because he's throwing his lot in with them.

Jeff: I heard his roommate in Washington was a gay congressman.

August: You mentioned Reagan, and with Reagan, I always think of AIDS. Maher, or anyone, can you talk about your personal experience with AIDS?

Maher: My partner of 10 years, I met him in 1986, and he had HIV. All of us had been through the whole AIDS nightmare. I watched him disappear in front of me. I was his active caretaker for four months. I lived in New York at the time, and my friends were dropping left and right. All you heard was that, "Of course, this is happening to you. You're also promiscuous. Of course, this is happening to you. This is God's revenge on you. You're an abomination in the eyes of the Lord." That bastard Reagan wouldn't even mention the word.

Nobody cared. This was a great disease. It's like, "Wait a minute. This disease is killing faggots and it's killing Black people. Whoa, it's wonderful. We're not going to do anything." This is Donald Trump's dream.

Thom: A lot of good standard liberals, then, were very standoffish. Gone were the invites to dinner parties. I had one straight female friend who thought that the AIDS virus could be carried by mosquitoes. Suddenly, invitations dropped. These were all good Democrats, and everybody was petrified, to be fair. Gay people with other gay people were sometimes standoffish. A friend who had AIDS would come close to you eating an ice cream cone, and you might think for one second, you're standing too close to me. What if we didn't know how it was transmitted? There were a lot of unknowns that made it so tragic and so awful. I encountered that everywhere, everywhere.

Albert: My experience was really the opposite. Not with personal friends dying, wasting away, getting sick, et cetera. I had plenty of that, which was personal suffering and personal concern. In the world that I was in, which at that time was editor of Gay Life newspaper and then Windy City Times newspaper, the liberal mainstream non-gay population was, in fact, incredibly supportive. We feared that it would be a backlash from straight people and that AIDS funding issues would suck money away from other activist issues. In fact, it turned out to be quite the opposite.

Maher: There's good and bad in everything. AIDS was just a tremendous disaster. However, it also was a tremendous boon to gay people. Rock Hudson could no longer hide that he was gay. Among many people, that just elicited a huge amount of sympathy and understanding. For a lot of people who were suffering—on the one hand, I was saying nobody cared. That was an overstatement. On the other hand, there were a lot of people who had enormous sympathy for the suffering that we were going through. A lot of parents suddenly discovered that their children were gay, and it illuminated a lot of people.

Jeff: AIDS led to the 1987 March on Washington, which was probably our greatest moment. It also changed the dialogue on marriage equality from being a patriarchy, "Don't mess with straight institutions," to "Hey, we want it too." That was good that came out of it.

John: There was talk earlier about the divide that developed between lesbians and gay men, that turned into a major split. I just wanted to add that here, and I'm sure everywhere, lesbians were incredibly involved in helping with AIDS. They had friends, they were on the ground doing a lot to help gay men go through AIDS and help care for them. The joining together with in hardship brought us together in another way.

Jeff Graubart by unknown, 1972.

August: What gives you hope? Maybe we could start with Maher.

Maher: I can be a pessimist and a cynic in so many ways, but I just truly believe that justice is going to come out. I just truly believe that. It doesn't necessarily happen fast, and it doesn't happen in a straight line. I wish I knew that quote, Martin Luther King said about justice in the arc of the universe, whatever it is, but it's just true. I had hoped to see this whole Palestine issue settled before I left this earth. I don't think that's going to happen.

What's happening right now, genocide being committed by people that suffered genocide, and the country responsible for it, atoning for it by helping commit another genocide. However, this, like AIDS, is going to redound to the benefit of the Palestinian people.

It's an enormous tragedy, but it is waking people up. I just believe that no matter how dark or how bad things can get, ultimately, justice will prevail. I may not see it, but I think that's just the way humanity is, which maybe is blindly optimistic or stupidly optimistic, but it's what I believe.

Albert: The fact that I just recently retired as a teacher—I spent the last 40 years teaching college students at Columbia College in Chicago, and the kids are great and they are loving and they are passionate and they are creative and they are hopeful and they are also very vulnerable, especially the most recent cohort, the last kids who came through high school in the past few years, who came up through the COVID pandemic and very often are lacking in some of the interpersonal skills that we take for granted because they spent so much time at home, quarantined on Zoom, et cetera.

Now that they are interacting in person with each other, there's a real energy that I feel among the young people, the 21-year-olds, the people that we were when we were in Gay Lib. That does give me hope.

Jeff: I agree with Albert. The youth of today is a reason for hope, and I have seen their energy. I've worked with them a bit. I don't believe the economic system that we're in is going to get any better. I'm not a Marxist, but I believe in Marxist contradictions of capital, and I think that those contradictions are about to get worse and worse. My real hope, and this might be very narcissistic and even delusional, is that the system I've been working on and trying to reach people with for the last 14 years will take hold because I think it is a solution, the land-based solution to a lot of the problems that we have today. That's what I do until I die. I'm trying to promote the system.

Thom: I don't think I can answer that question sufficiently, but with me at this point, I don't put too much faith in governmental organizations, political parties, or the current administration in Washington, whatever that may be. They all change. For me, right now, it's much more personal and perhaps delusional and narcissistic, and it's much more of a spiritual thing, but that's a wholly different topic.