I wonder.

And I realize I was gay.

You know, that's a good question.

When did I become aware of being gay?

You know, I think I knew before I knew there was always some intuition I had about.

I know that there's something different here.

This is really weird.

But I remember watching National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and thinking Chevy Chase was so handsome, so handsome.

I knew I went to the movies on Friday nights and saw all the cowboy movies, and I remember thinking as they rode off into the sunset, I wanted to be on that horse with the cowboy.

I never thought I was unusual about that.

I thought maybe other people thought that, too.

I guess.

I knew at a very young age I enjoyed female playmate, female companionship.

And then at about fourth or fifth grade, I remember some people were calling me gay and I didn't know what they meant.

And then they said, You have a boyfriend somewhere.

And I was kind of like, Why would that be bad?

I can remember feeling differently about the girls in my class in kindergarten.

I didn't know what it was, but I didn't know that that was weird until research told me that it was.

And it was kind of that's when it clicked of like, God, this is not good.

Like, how I'm feeling right now is not appropriate.

It's something's wrong.

The fear I had was that someday someone would find out.

I definitely felt that way in high school.

I felt like if if people knew they would not love me anymore.

The stereotypes were universal with everybody.

One of the big words was fag or queer from other kids to anybody they suspected of being more effeminate or, you know, different.

So it was a struggle.

And, you know, you really didn't have any support with Teachers are definitely not churches and things like that.

Support where I grew up for the gay community was not there.

It was mind boggling to see the amount of support for queer people at the last Pride parade.

We estimate around 4000 people attended the festival that day based on cell phone data.

I'll never forget coming around the corner and seeing the crowd.

There were probably 5000 people in the streets and I would say 60 to 70% of these people were heterosexual people with their kids and they were watching drag performers in the street.

And I remember saying to my husband, we were standing there and I said, you know, if you had told me 40 years ago that I would be standing here watching this, I would have had your head examined.

Back in the 1960s, I always said the gay community was like a secret community.

You didn't want anybody to know, because back then people weren't normally very acceptable, like employers and things of that nature.

When I first found a good career here, the boss that hired me knew about my lifestyle and my partner, but no one else did was not spoken about.

Like most people in small towns at that time period, I literally thought my friend and I were the only gay people in the entire world.

There were no other people to see, although there were examples on television staff, they were often comedic.

For example, Paul Lind on Hollywood Squares would make terribly risque jokes, and it was very clear when you watch it now that he was just as gay as could could be.

But if you had asked him at that time, he would have said no.

Liberace would have said no.

You tried to hide yourself so that you wouldn't lose your job, so that your family wouldn't abandon you, so that your community wouldn't turn on you and expel you from your social life, from your professional life.

If you were out, you had very limited possibilities.

If you were a hairdresser, if you were a beautician, if you were a stylist, no, you could have a really solid following.

You know, people made a good living.

But if you were, you know, an executive with a company and you were married to a woman that had children, you cruised Sunset Park.

Sunset Park, of course, has been there for many years and for many years.

It was a cruising area, especially down on the levee.

You pull down the park and you could play tennis or you sat in the gazebo or you stayed in your car and people went up over the top levee at the time.

It's not that way today, but it was all trees and bushes with lots of past.

You could always go up on the levee and walk around or wait or meet people, so to speak.

That probably went on until they cut the trees.

As long as the brush was there where people could not be seen.

That was always a place when you want to find where history, you have to look up words that are really ugly you and then you can pass through there and see what was going on as you move through the late sixties.

You start seeing articles exposing Sunset Park and other parks as places where gay people congregated late at night.

It was illegal in the state of Indiana to be gay.

Until 1977, there was a law that was passed in the 19th century.

It basically outlawed any sex act that couldn't result in procreation.

Specifically named were sexual acts between men.

The first big sodomy case was 1922.

It didn't actually happen at Sunset Park, but it was right after that that you find people being arrested under those sodomy laws were almost exclusively at Sunset Park.

They were at the 1938 Greyhound bus station across from the Vendome Hotel.

There were arrests at the Vendome and at the Union train station.

I found something like 75 arrests of men, only one woman.

And that was in that 1922 case.

There was one woman that was arrested with five men.

They were having a really good time.

We used to have lots of places like that that we would go to because a lot of that was, again, undercover and out of sight alleyways, so to speak, and not literally could be.

The other place was Garvin Park.

I mean, we've heard about Garvin Park, we've heard about Metzger Park, the area around the old post office that was considered to C Corner, the gay cruising area of Evansville for many, many years.

There is a park that was behind the old post office that was sunken where the office buildings are now.

There was a basketball court down there and there was a dark side behind, no balls off it, and there was a little side over on the other side.

And you get one person, the park over on the left side and lean against their car and you you hang out.

I didn't really spend time.

I passed through occasionally, you know, just to see who was hanging out down there.

That was always so risky because, you know, me being a teacher, the police had some surveillance of such places until you had to be careful.

Just even meeting and talking to somebody were a lot of harassing back then.

There were people who were very hateful to gay people.

If they thought you were, they would, you know, make fun of you and blow you.

Even downtown.

You would always notice that people that block up, the block up, you saw the same car.

There's not that many cars going round at midnight or 11:00 at night.

They drive down Second Street first and Yellow Square, you know, then you don't know should you get in your car.

They're just driving through.

Are they going to stop and hop out?

You know, what are they going to do?

I've seen people come up and start fighting.

There have been many times some I got to bloody I lost all the glass and one of my cars down there.

We didn't see the people coming and they had crowbars inside their jackets.

So I ran and somebody was kind enough to stop the car, push the back door open and told me to jump in the car.

Some people did get harmed.

I mean, some people were very viciously attacking two people who they suspect in the sixties.

There were several men who were killed and their murderers were acquitted.

The fact that the murdered person was gay and had been had made sexual overtures to the person that killed them.

The jury acquitted them because they felt that that was justifiable homicide.

Andrew Reagan was 27.

He was murdered on September 22nd, 1954.

He was beaten to death with a tire iron and his body was dumped along Highway 60 on the farm of James C Ellis, who owned Dade Park, the racetrack.

But in his apartment, when you read the articles in late 54, they keep referring to a cache of letters that he had carefully kept.

It said they were from men all around the country, but the media never discussed what was in those letters.

There was this purposeful clouding of the publicity that kept people from knowing that he was a homosexual.

You know, if they'd come out and said, you know, hey, Eddie Reagan was gay, you know, who are the men that he knows here?

Who, you know, they could have tried to find people that might have known him.

It's still an unsolved murder.

1968, I started school at Lockyer's Business College, which was right next to the old YMCA.

And that was another place where gay men found one.

Another was the old YMCA downtown.

The YMCA was and every community back then was told, we get if you traveled and you wanted to go to Chicago for a weekend and go to the bars up there and things like that, you'd always stay.

That's why I had friends that were from Jasper and they had apartments in the YMCA building.

So one day I was with one of my friends and a man had been pushed out of the window of the YMCA, laddered all over the white walk.

Jack Burdette was 36 years old, had been a veteran of World War Two, and shortly after midnight on November 3rd, 1960, he checked in to the downtown YMCA.

About three in the morning, a man working at Indiana Bell across the street heard breaking glass and he looked out and he saw a man's body had fallen from the fourth floor window on Vine Street, and it was on the sidewalk and there was a streetlight right there.

And he could see that he was bloody.

He thought it was a suicide.

So he called the police.

Police came, retrieved the Jack Burdette, took him to Welborn Hospital, which was open then, and he died about an hour later.

They came in to interview my friend.

Why myself?

Because I was there too.

Now, if we heard anything, had seen anything or knew anything about the incident and we had not, and it turned out that there was a young man, 21 years old, that had a room across the hall.

Bolcom was his name.

And apparently he told the detectives that Burdette and invited him over for some drinks about two in the morning and that the two of them had engaged in sexual activity.

And he was trying to leave the room and he said Burdette was pressuring him to do something else and he felt like the only way he'd get out of the room was to knock Burdette out.

And when he fought with him, he said he fell out the window.

At the trial, Holcomb said that he'd put him in a choke hold, but he'd stuffed two large pieces of cloth down Burdette mouth into his throat so that he couldn't call out.

Holcomb told the jury said that there had been robberies in the building and he didn't want Burdette to yell because he people might think he was robbing them.

So Holcomb was acquitted because the defense attorney, Howard Sandusky, had made such a powerful defense that a man has the right to fend off a sexual attack from a pervert, just like a woman does.

And throwing him out the window was the only way he'd get away with him.

And they acquitted him.

I started off as deputy prosecutor January 1st, 1981 would have been my first day.

Hard to remember now because so many years ago, but I remember the name Zimmer and I remember people talking about the Zimmer case, how the evidence was just so overwhelming.

But the jury found him not guilty.

So to me, it was in the air.

You know, the feeling about gay people at that time would be such that you would know that that might be a problem for you if the victim were gay already.

ZIMMER Yes, He was very well known in Evansville and very well known to the entire community as a queer.

He'd been arrested several times for same sex activity, for sodomy.

But on the night of March the 12th, 1963, he was 56 years old.

He pulled his car into the old Kentucky barbecue or Kentucky Avenue and had gotten into some sort of a verbal altercation with a table full of guys that were from Fort Campbell on leave when Rudy went out to get in his car.

These two guys got him in his car and then another car followed them, had two girls in it.

And the fourth guy, these two that were in Zimmer's car beat him and strangled him with his necktie, took his wallet.

They'd left him there in his car and got back into the girl's car that were driving around.

And at last and a few minutes later, they realized that their fingerprints were all over this car.

So they actually drove back to where they left him, got back at his car with him, and then drove it to the levee.

The river was over flood stage and Weinbach Avenue was closed at the levee.

So they took his car down and pushed it into the flood waters, left the engine on and left the transmission in drive and shut Zimmer up in the car.

Harry, He was still alive, they said, and pushed it four feet into the flood.

It was two days later when they found Zimmer in his car and the waitress at the old Kentucky barbecue.

She said, Well, I know who did it.

It was those guys that he'd been fighting with because they got in his car with.

The three of them then were charged with his murder.

And it was about a year and a half later when the trial happened, the prosecution was able to establish a confession.

One of the guys confessed that he strangled him because he said he kept pawing him, making unnatural advances.

They had a trail of evidence in there.

Fingerprints were there, a confession, the body, the corpus, the car pushed into the floodwaters with the engine running and the transmission and drive.

And the jury acquitted all three.

The three were tried together.

They didn't each have their own trial.

Only one of the three signed a confession saying that he'd did violence to Zimmer and that he was the one that pushed the car in the floodwaters.

And the jury foreman said that since they were tried together, the jury felt they should all have the same verdict and so they didn't have to pay for that crime.

The value of LGBTQ lives at that point was nothing.

It it didn't matter.

Our lives didn't matter.

In the case of the 1966 murder of Ken Sanders.

AUCTIONEER It was a brutal killing.

The prosecutor, Kiley said in an article that he allowed the murderer of Ken Sanders to plead manslaughter because he said with a jury in Vanderburgh County, there's not a jury here.

They were convict the murderer of first degree murder, because he said that this man made a pass at him.

That's where we were in that sixties and seventies period, was that devaluation of those people's lives?

You know, Well, those lives don't really matter.

And it wasn't until you got to 1981 with the murder of a young lesbian woman here, Laura Louboutin, that a jury convicted the killer of a gay person.

I had a friend named Laura Lieberson, and she was a lesbian in this community who was murdered.

Laura was 28.

She's very pretty girl from Ferdinand.

She was an employee of the Evansville State Hospital.

She was a very kind, gentle person.

I don't remember ever hearing anybody say anything different.

She loved motorcycles and she loved animals.

We both loved VW and VW busses.

She had one man, I have one now.

She was just a bright, sunny young woman.

She was with a girl name.

I think Darlene had met Darlene through other people.

I didn't know her really well and I never met Laura.

I wish I had.

It was February 1981.

These two women lived together in a little house on East Tennessee.

The house is gone now.

There's a repair shop across the street, get a cat, And her cat had gotten out and she'd gone across the street and asked these guys that were working in the shop if they'd if they'd by chance seen her cat.

They all said, no, they hadn't seen the cat, but the one guy, Shiro, Thomas, Shiro, he watched what house.

She went back into it.

He was a convict.

He was at a halfway house.

He'd gone across the street and he knocked on her door and he said, Hey, I work across the street.

You know, you came over when you were looking for your cat.

My car's not running.

I need to call somebody to come get me.

Can I use your phone?

And she said, Yeah, if you use the phone.

And over the course of that night, he watched her and murdered her.

It was horrible what happened?

The trial was sent to Nashville, Indiana.

In this terrible trial, there was this line of defense that she had consensual sex with this man.

But Darlene testified that indeed it was a rape because Laura was a lesbian and she would not have had consensual sex.

Any man, let alone this guy.

It was one of the first times that this had ever come out in an actual trial publicly.

I mean, it was I think people were kind of shocked by it.

But at the end of the day, the jury convicted him of capital murder.

The legal ramifications of being a gay person, I think, ended in that 1981 murder of Laura after that, when a gay person was murdered, it didn't matter whether or not there was any sexuality involved, the jury would consider the murder, whether or not the person was gay or not.

I just think a certain part of our society, there are some that are just violent and the gays are just another one of those subgroups that just feeds that needs some people have to torture other people to bully other people.

It's part of the human condition.

I think part of the way that some people are wired is in order to feel good about themselves, they have to feel they're better than someone else.

I mean, you look at our politics of today, they're completely based on hatred of the other.

We change who the other is all the time.

We used to hate all kinds of different people.

We hated the Italians and then we didn't hate the Italians, but then we hated the Irish.

And then we didn't hate the Irish anymore.

We had to find new people to hate.

I think what makes people hateful is ignorance.

I blame most of it on ignorance.

They have had to learn it from somewhere.

They weren't born hating people.

Here nobody is goes with was race or religion or anything.

I mean, there's just too much of that that develops in people.

I did my reality show on CMT and so I had this national exposure and that was the only time in my life I ever had death threats for being gay.

And somebody that sent me a message on Facebook that apparently I went to school with, he'd seen that commercial on CMT and he threatened my life over that.

You know, there was nothing actually physical.

But you take back a second and have people that are threatening my life just for me being me.

That's the one thing I can understand, and that's people who can hate somebody just because of who they are are the scariest people in the world.

I'm not scared of monsters.

I'm not scared of demons or whatever fictional things, but I am scared of people who don't understand other people and don't accept that other people can exist because they're dangerous.

And I really think it was religion that has caused all this.

Eight Some of the most vicious hate I've ever got was from like religious people.

I grew up in a very conservative, fundamentalist Christian household.

My dad was a pastor.

We were raised very religious and we had to go to church every Sunday.

And usually the church would preach some things that were bit like bigoted.

That was something I think that has always been the hardest part for a lot of gay people is going to church.

You grow up, you go to church, you're sitting there and you're being told by the preacher that if you do this, you're going to hell.

Imagine what that's like, you know, knowing that you're the way you are inside and being told why you're going to hell every single Sunday.

I've seen a lot of people that have been tortured with that feeling like they're living in sin, people rejecting them.

A lot of kids, like at magazines are like things on the Internet.

And I was like, Is this me?

But then I was like, No.

I was like, No, that's not me because of my religion.

And I was Baptist growing up in a Southern Baptist church that was a fire and brimstone type of church where first times that I was ever hearing about homosexuality were in a negative context and it being a sin and something that people go to hell for.

When I unpacked or figured out what that definition really was, I knew that I did not need to tell anybody that I had feelings about my my girlfriends at school and that this was something I was never going to talk about take to my grave.

I definitely knew early on that I could not ask the questions that I needed to ask because I knew not only would be shot down, but it would probably lead to a really terrible outcome for me when I did when I talked to somebody in a church about being gay, I was shut down by an older minister.

We just don't talk about that.

You'll grow out of that blah blah.

I figured I just had to be what society said I had to be.

So that just pushed me further into the closet and pushed a lot of self-loathing and self-hatred onto myself.

And I grew up with a lot of shame, and there were a lot of nights of just crying brain.

You do lots of praying that please, please.

So please let me not be this way.

I don't want to like boys anymore.

I need to change.

And that was that was that was really tough.

Even as I came out, I still thought, you know what?

God still loves me.

I can still be active in the church.

The moment I realized that I probably couldn't reconcile it any longer was I had a friend who I've since made amends with and thought they were doing the good Christian thing by telling our pastor, who actually came to my house and said he wanted to talk to me, put me outside, and he started asking very pointed questions and I don't think I fully answered him.

But, you know, I was more of a K. I still feel like I can be active.

And I was I was pretty blatantly told, No, you can't.

In this church, we're a Bible believing church.

And so I was told, you have a week to tell your father or we will the elders of the church, we'll get together and we'll tell him and then we will pray over you publicly in front of everybody in the church.

And if this is a life choice you choose to continue with, then you're not welcome to worship here anymore.

So at that point, I'd come out to my mom.

It just kind of came out one day.

She caught me off guard talking about relationships, and I accidentally used a he pronoun instead of she, but I was more worried about telling Dad.

So I wanted to do that in my own time.

I ended up having to tell him during a commercial break in the middle of one of his favorite movies because we were on day six of seven, and if I didn't say anything the next day they were going to come to our house and tell him.

For me, he didn't take it very well at first.

It actually for a period of time, I came to a point where I said, If we can't have a constructive conversation about this without you getting upset about it or angry about it or saying hurtful things, then I won't come back.

I said, You know, I have friends in different states that have already offered couches for me to sleep on.

I'll figure something out.

Mother divorced my father when I was one, and he when I came out to him at the age of 20, he basically rejected me.

My coming out essentially ended my relationship with my family, my whole family.

The relationship was never the same because I can never be considered equal ever again to them.

My parents, they were distraught, they were embarrassed.

They were not supportive because what they knew of gay life and gay people were that they were deviants.

I never really came out to my parents.

I didn't really feel like I was able to come out whenever I was growing up.

Obviously not in high school, high school.

I remember I told someone, Hey, I think I'm gay.

I thought this person was my friend.

They ended up telling everyone the next day.

I mean, it was just so ostracizing to be at school and people are looking at you, whispering about you, telling anecdotes and narratives about me doing things.

And it was really dark and scary at some points.

I remember my junior year there was a girl who was 100% I had a crush on, and if she's watching this today, she will know I'm talking about her.

I did, but I didn't want to admit that, and I wasn't going to admit that I had a boyfriend.

I was not gay.

But she told everyone in our junior class that I was.

And I'll never forget sitting in the Panther parking lot, having this conversation with my boyfriend where he is like, Are you gay?

Just tell me.

And I'm like, No, no, I'm not at all.

And actually, yes, I was was a liar.

I you know, I had to have a girlfriend.

It was horrible.

And I didn't even ask for She just said, we are dating.

I was like, yeah, we're going to make you not gay.

This is your girlfriend now.

And I was like, my God.

Every week I had valentines came around.

I had to get her flowers and stuff emotionally feeling like I was in a relationship, but not like there was zero attraction there, which I feel like a lot of people can sort of relate to.

Once steady with this one boy, almost always through high school I knew and high school, but I didn't feel like I could do anything about it.

It was a very conservative time and I was brought up all of to Arkansas with him and that that was the same.

Growing up was like everybody did the same thing.

I got married pretty young.

I had children, you know, lived the traditional life that was expected of me.

You accept that is that's just the way it is.

I had gone to college and, you know, had really just one or two gay experiences, But I told myself I wasn't gay because, you know, that wasn't a normal thing by any means in the seventies.

And so I, you know, found a woman I fell in love with, and we got married.

And I was married for eight years and we had two children.

My ex-husband and I dated from sophomore, junior year all the way through.

We got married in 1983.

My little house one was a Southern Baptist lake, and my daughters, Jill and Kay, were Girl Scouts, and I was for later.

But I help.

And there was another mother helped and we got along really well one Sunday afternoon and she came to my house and we may go for a ride with her.

And she was telling Rick she was attracted to me and this, that and the other.

And I was not, I guess because I was raised a preacher's dog and this was right, not anything really.

Things happened in that encounter, but it was enough to make me, myself see the light.

I started realizing that I was attracted to men and, you know, finally accepted that I was gay.

I felt like I was living a lie.

And that wasn't fair to anyone.

I told them to suggest that we go to counseling.

I said I wouldn't be opposed to go to counseling first.

He said, Why can't we just stay married for the kids?

And you go your way and I'll go, my I realized that briefly.

We lived in an old farmhouse.

I had to go to town dry.

The clothes was found dry, the clothes owned by a friend of mine was a softball friend.

And we sat up and talked to like men, like, how am I going to home?

Is serving up waiting for me.

Where are your bed?

And I told him that this is what he meant by I go my way.

There you go.

Yes.

Then I wanted to divorce.

I told her that I was gay and we divorced.

So by 1988 we were separated.

In 89, the divorce was final.

It was very difficult.

We had two year old son at the time.

That made it difficult also.

But, you know, once I accepted it, it was such a relief to me when I look back and think, Did you really have a crush on that person in high school?

Yeah, I think I probably did, but I probably was too scared to say anything about it or do anything about it because it was just unheard of.

My friends who did come out in high school, they were often victims of like a lot of bullying.

It was very unwelcoming in school, just the everyday things that people throw at you in elementary school and middle school, derogatory terms, calling you a fagot and calling you x, y, z.

Of course, they're going to throw the things that they hear running around their house or their community or whatever at you.

Whenever they see something that's just a little bit different.

In like third grade, I had a classmate who had sharpened a stick and stabbed me in the way.

Then I had a classmate, like when I was in high school stab me in the face, screwdriver.

I had classmates like spitting on and dumping sodas on me.

Scratch the things in my car.

That was a day to day.

It could be hour by hour situation in high school.

I may have grown up in this sheltered place because I went to grade school and high school and some college with all the same people from 1965 on.

And I have never been faced face to face with somebody that wanted to abuse me because of who I am.

And I know that that's not a common thing.

I was the luckiest person, you know, being a white cisgendered male, I had a lot more privilege.

absolutely.

I totally agree.

Inherently.

So, yes, unfortunately, that's the world that we live in.

I feel like, you know, as a black transgender man, even if I was a black cis man, that my voice does not speak as much as in volumes.

The concept of intersectionality comes into play.

I think it is.

And how many layers of oppression you have, you know, if you're white, upper middle class, the likelihood of you being oppressed because of your sexuality depended on your family, where you were, where you worked, what your education was.

But if you were of a lower socioeconomic group and you were a person of color, or if you were even transgender, you know, you have all those intersectionality there of those different layers of oppression that were on top of you.

Yeah, like being gay and black is really hard for me as my sister.

She's like, I don't care, but don't force it on me.

Like, we still hang on to this day.

But my brother's just really strong black man and we don't deal with that.

There's a thing in the nice community of machismo where it's like the men have to be like really manly men.

And like, the women have to be like.

Like housewives.

Basically, I should be gay because I'm a strong black Lee and or I'm your brother, but don't do that around me.

Like, what are you doing?

Like, you should act this way.

You shouldn't be doing it way like you're supposed to be this certain type of person.

And it's like, but we're not.

How can I not do it around you?

It's me.

It's who I am.

I can't imagine being a cisgendered white male just as much as they probably wouldn't be able to put themselves in my shoes.

I would say it's so inherently different that you can do nothing but sympathize with what somebody else is experiencing.

On top of being from the LGBT community.

Living Diamond, Kentucky, we were the only non Caucasian people that lived in our town, or my other people who are persons of color were my brothers and sisters.

So it looked as though they had a to me a better experience.

But I know like their experience was similar to mine me being gay.

I just had another level on top of what they were experiencing.

We set up so many ways to differentiate ourselves in our society hair, color, religion.

There are lots of barriers.

I didn't have very many of the traditional, you know, I didn't grow up in an evangelical household that told me I was hated.

I grew up in a liberal Presbyterian household that told me I was slapped as far as religion.

Later on when I was in Columbus and I was raised in the family with my partner, we joined the Presbyterian Church, seemed to be more welcoming, you know, in my life as far as religion.

Now there's more accepting churches, lots of accepting churches.

Zion, United Church of Christ and Henderson was our first really out and open and welcoming Church.

River City Pride started meeting and First Presbyterian Church because they provided the space today.

We have so many choices here and having.

So when it comes to churches, I can probably think of five congregations that are opening, welcoming and more and more every day that I don't know the actual number anymore because I see the rainbow on their planes out front, like, I didn't know about that one.

When you do have a church that welcomes us, well, there are some people who do not feel comfortable.

They come in the church.

I distance myself from the church and eventually found my way completely out of church and would identify myself as an atheist.

Now, there's not a lot of love there for us, and so why would I want to be someplace that people don't want me?

It took a whole lot of what we call deconstruction to really begin to unpack everything that I've been taught, to believe about God, about life, about my humanity.

And it took finding First Presbyterian Church, a church who was progressive and open and affirming and inclusive of LGBTQ people, to begin to hear a message about God's love for everyone, including gay people.

My mentor and pastor Kevin Fleming say the first line of the Presbyterian confession of faith, which is in life and in death, We belong to God and there's no if and or but too that a few years ago I became an inquirer first with the full support of my church and my session in the presbytery.

And now I am a fourth year seminary student, hopefully gearing up for ordination next year.

I credit having my own faith with God for sustaining me and helping me to continue to consider that maybe there was still space for me in God's heart.

I still have my personal beliefs, but they're different now, and I keep them very close and personal on my own.

It's an it's my thing.

It's not anybody else's.

My dad didn't take it very well when I came out.

It took him a while to come to terms with it, but still, even when he wasn't happy about it, he still stopped going to the church.

He didn't like that there was an ultimatum issued, so he stopped doing children's church and eventually just stopped going.

And to this day he doesn't interact with that pastor.

Are there still things my dad and I don't see eye to eye on?

Absolutely.

But, you know, we went from not speaking to my dad, being one of my best friends and closest relationships that I had.

My mom and I are very close.

I talk to her almost every day.

My dad and I were very close to him almost every day before he died.

The health begged me for forgiveness for the way things happened.

And I never didn't forgive them.

I was the one who was always still showing up, taking listen to them to their house on the weekend so that he could visit, even though they only want me around.

I knew somewhere earlier if I kept being the one to show up and show them unconditional love, that eventually it would come full circle.

And it did.

I think the best thing that ever happened was my old physician who was retiring.

He had a appointment with my mom or my dad, but they were both there.

And as he was saying goodbye because it was going to be the last visit, they said, Hey, we're just curious if you're gay or you are you born that way?

And I don't know that he used this language, but he basically said, this is my last day at yes, you are born that way.

He's like, your son was born that way.

He's like, this is not something that he chooses to do.

I've had to tell this to a few people who who have asked me, well, it's a choice.

You're choosing a lifestyle.

Even as a little kid, you're indoctrinated of.

This is a choice you're doing this.

Why would I choose a lifestyle that is going to be harder for myself?

Why would I pick this?

Why would I pick a life where I have to worry about if I'm going to get jumped Walking out of a gay bar?

Hello, everybody.

Good evening.

I'm Tim Black, president and CEO of WNIN, and of course, joined by my good friend and partner in crime, as I usually always refer to him.

Mr. Scott Wylie.

Thanks so much for being here.

It's an absolute pleasure to be here tonight.

Well, we are super excited.

We hope that you are enjoying so far yet another local production local documentary here at WNIN.

And of course you are joining us for out and about a gay history of Evansville.

Both of us very personally proud of this particular production at WNIN, but it is yet one more example of the local content that we are striving to offer you here at the station on a regular basis.

It is one of several local documentaries that we have produced over the course of the last few months, and we want to continue doing more of that for you, but we need your help to do that and it's extremely important, is it not, Scott, that folks make a donation right now?

Well, and I think of all the local documentaries that we've been able to present that tell our story, right, our story of people in the tri state and history and events in the tri state.

And this is really the only outlet that has the ability not only to offer that for our viewership, but to actually produce that that programing content.

And it's only through gifts from viewers like you that provide us the ability to tell these stories of the history of Evansville in so many different ways and so many of the people that are part of the mosaic of this wonderful community.

And we will talk a little bit more in a moment, a little more specifically about some of the different topics that we have covered.

But since you brought up the fact that we are one of the only outlets that can do this and we do do it on a regular basis, we need your support.

So let's take a look.

We're going to be able to offer you some really nice thank you gifts this evening, if you will make a gift to us right now, all you have to do is give us a phone call, if you like, at eight.

One, two, four, two, three, five, six, seven, eight.

Of course, you can always find us online at WNIN.org.

There's always a big donate button right there.

You just have to click that and you'll get all the instructions.

And if you make a gift for us this evening, we're really happy to be able to say thank you in a variety of ways.

At our very basic $60 pledge level, we're going to give you access to passport.

Passport, of course, allows you to stream all of the programing that you enjoy on WNIN and PBS.

You'll be able to watch this program that you're enjoying right now on Passport.

You'll also get that subscription to Evansville Living magazine, which always includes our program guide, and that's either $60 as a one time gift or you can do it simply as $5 a month by becoming a sustainer at the $90 level, we're going to be able to say thank you.

In light of the particular program that we're showing you this evening.

A PBS pride mug for Gay Pride.

And so we certainly invite you to take a look at that at the $90 level that will give you access to Passport, the subscription to Evansville Living.

That also includes the WNIN discount membercard.

And at the $120 level or only $10 a month as a sustaining member, you're going to be able to enjoy your coffee or your tea or whatever you in that PBS pride mug.

And we're going to include a copy of a great local book that has been published very recently by local author Kelley Coures it is called out in Evansville, An LGBTQ History of River City.

And we're really happy to offer that to you as well.

You'll also get that passport access the subscription to Evansville Living and the WNIN discount membercard.

Once again, we invite you to help support the making of documentaries like this in the future.

Maybe you want to support the message this evening, and we would appreciate that as well.

812-423-5678 wnin.org.

Scott, in speaking specifically about the show tonight out and about again, history of Evansville, as we've already seen, at least to the extent that we've been into the show this far, you're interviewed several times within the documentary.

Talk a little bit about that.

Well, Joe Atkinson, who is the filmmaker for tonight, and he's done other films for WNIN as well, and his crew at the University of Evansville work very hard to do detailed research.

I was really quite amazed of how much time they spent, and in addition to that, required me to go back and find a whole bunch of photographs from when I was 19 or 20 years old, which is a long that long ago.

It's a long time ago, 40 plus years ago.

And it was a really interesting process to be part of telling a broader story.

You know, my story is just a little teeny part of what makes up this broader discussion of people who have grown up in and around the tri state area who happened to be part of the LGBT community.

But it's just part of the broader stories that we tell on WNIN so well on public radio and public television all the time.

Yeah.

And you know, we mentioned earlier when we first started chatting with you during this first break and we are going to get your back to the rest of the documentary in just a couple of minutes.

But we do want to continue chatting with you and encouraging you to make a gift to the station.

At the same time, You know, this is one in a long line of local documentaries that WNIN has been producing over the last several months.

We've told you the story about some of the more historical churches in the area.

Very recently we also told you the story very recently about the power and the ability of women in this community to make things happen and to get things done.

It's probably been a year or so ago that we produced a very popular local documentary about farms in the tri state.

And you go back a little further than that, and we have told you histories of Evansville during World War Two.

We produce the great beer doc.

At one point, Joe Atkinson was part of that as well, that we told you about the connection that Beer has in this German influenced community in Evansville.

All of those different topics.

I love the fact that you've been using the word mosaic because I think it's extremely appropriate.

We do live in a community that is a mosaic of a lot of different things and a lot of different people, and we're really happy here at WNIN in to continue to be able to tell some of those stories.

As Scott just said, you're not going to find that anywhere else in the market.

The other television stations in this market do a wonderful job with what they do.

But because of network constraints and commercial restraints, they're not going to be able to devote an hour or 2 hours to topics of this type that is left in the sole arena of public television.

WNIN And if you appreciate that and you want to see more of these kinds of stories, you need to get with us right now and make a gift to the station and we'll say thank you when you do it.

Eight one, two, four, two, three, five, six, seven, eight.

You can also make that gift at WNIN dot org at our $60 basic pledge level or only $5 a month as a sustainer will give you access to Passport, the WNIN and PBS streaming service.

A subscription to Evansville Living magazine at the $90 level because of the topic that we're exploring tonight out and about a gay history of Evansville, we're going to say thank you with a PBS's Pride mug, a gay pride mug.

You'll also get passport access.

You'll get that subscription to Evansville Living and you'll get the WNIN member discount card at the $120 level.

And folks, this is a very popular giving level because you can do that only $10 a month as a sustaining member, you're going to get that PBS's Pride mug.

We're going to include a copy of local author Kelley Coures's book on the very same topic out in Evansville and LGBTQ history of River City.

You'll also get that access to Passport.

You'll get the subscription to Evansville Living and that WNIN discount card.

As I said earlier, we're getting ready to take you back to our local documentary here at WNIN Out about a gay history of Evansville.

We certainly hope that you will stay with us and to continue to enjoy this wonderful piece of work that we've produced for you here at WNIN.

And and please keep in mind, as you're watching and hopefully learning something and enjoying the program, it does not happen without you.

And we certainly hope that you will keep that in mind as you continue watching with us for the next bit or so here, you can give us a phone call.

You see all the information at the bottom of your screen.

Scott Wylie and I are going to be back with you in just a little bit and talk to you some more about what you're looking at and what's going on.

But right now, you can give us a phone call at eight one, two, four two, three, five, six, seven, eight.

I think we've probably got a QR code there on the screen as well that if it's easier for you to snap, that with your phone, you can just do that or you can do that the old fashioned way and type in WNIN dot ORG any way you want to make the gift, please do.

We certainly appreciate the support.

We're happy you're joining us and we're very happy that you're able to enjoy this show this evening.

The internet sort of killed gay bars around the country when I was 25.

If I wanted to try and meet people, if I wanted to try and date, I had to go out.

This was before you couldn't Google a list and say, Hey, we're late.

No, we're very close now.

I had a friend tell me the first time he came to Evansville, I don't know, 1955.

He didn't know where to go to find other gay people.

And so he slid down a police car and asked the policeman, Hey, where two homosexuals go here?

And they told him a couple of different bars to, you know, go after midnight.

And that's where you'll find them.

One of them was a bar called the Blue Bar.

That's where he said to go.

So he said, that's where I went when I first came out because I was very young.

But I went to the blue bar down in the basement of the Lincoln Hotel, and I looked very young, but it didn't give me any trouble.

The front half was what we called straight.

The back half was gay.

But that fish oil, gay bar back when I came out was the Coral Room of the McCurdy and then the town room of the Vendome.

But the town room at the Vendome was where I went all the time.

It was a mixed bar, not totally gay, but a lot of gay people went there and we had piano bars there.

We sang and carry on, and that lasted quite a while until they tore the Vendome down.

And then there were separate gay places.

There was a bar at Third and Sycamore called the Hawaiian Village.

That was a queer space sort of on the Q.T.

Late at night.

Then there was a a restaurant called Grand Malls or something, and they were owned by gay people.

And we would go to those.

There were different, different places in town, but you had to be on the right wavelength.

You had to meet somebody who knew what it was.

But it wasn't until our steakhouse opened in 1968 that there was a defined queer space and everyone knew what it was.

That empty lot where the word expressway meets for them.

This was as a young teenager.

We used to go to Pete's Supper Club for dinner periodically, which was down the road and driving down divisions Street you would see drag queens standing outside of Pal's Steakhouse.

So I knew that that was a queer space.

But I mean, I was too young to go and I didn't fully understand the importance of of queer spaces at that time.

Queer spaces are important, and that's such a funny word.

I'm not overly comfortable with the word queer or lesbian yet, but I'm getting better.

Where was a slur?

Queer was a very bad thing to hear.

It took me a while to get accustomed to that word being reclaimed.

Only within the past.

Maybe a couple of years have I become comfortable myself saying it because I heard it as a slur yelled from cars.

Queer spaces are places where you're protected.

It was your space where you felt the most comfortable and that nobody is going to attack your talk against you while you're inside this space.

You can be you and you're seeing other people like you.

I think we all want to be around people that are like us.

I think that's just a human nature type thing.

Anthropology shows that animals need to be amongst our own kind to thrive, especially when you're new coming out, finding other people that are going through the same experience.

That's what the gay bar was.

It was a place where you could go, you could dance, could dance with other men.

You got to socialize with people just like you and just be who you want to be.

A drag queen for a night in drag, king for the night.

You can be the most popular person in the space for a while.

It's a place where you just feel safe and secure and you feel a part of.

Even though outside of that, I felt different, very different.

Gay bars and queer spaces like that, they were where you could gather to have, especially during the AIDS epidemic, you could have celebrations of life for people who passed away when their family wouldn't have a funeral for them.

This was a community center.

If the local gay organization and had an event going on.

I announced that, you know, on the stage we had a newsletter for many, many years.

You know, we'd bring the stacks and newsletters to the bar.

If I had somebody who asked me what was going on, I'd say, Here, that's how we got our message out in kind of form.

Some sort of organized queer life in your city is there are no queer spaces.

If there's no organization of gay life, where do they go to have community?

75 years ago, you just had to wander around aimlessly until you ran into somebody.

Today, you know, Pride has meetings.

In the old days, groups met at one in door or we met at someplace else.

My first bar that I went into was called The Cabaret.

The cabaret was just a beer and a wine, you know, club and they had drag shows.

And that's where I found my first drag show.

After the cabaret was a swinging door.

Swinging door.

The one we went to the most.

My gosh, that was like the place in the late seventies.

It was 1979.

A group of us that weren't 21 yet used to go over there on Saturday night and sit outside and listen to the music.

Someone that I knew drove up was going to be in a drag show that night and pulled up and said, Why are you sitting out here?

So I'm not 21.

I have an idea thing.

And he said, Come with me.

So he took me inside and introduced me to Norma Black, who was the wife and the owner.

She was sort of the quasi mother hen of the bar, and he introduced me and he said, He's 21.

He doesn't have his ID with him, but, you know, I'll vouch for him.

And so, you know, she called Jim Black over the owner and so told to my friend.

He said, Well, you're responsible for him if he causes any trouble.

And so then after that, I was in by 18, I was going into the into our local bars.

I was illegally I remember coming to one of the gay bars in Evansville.

I think the bar was called the Swinging Door.

And I wasn't 21 yet, but I got here and we were sitting there celebrating my 21st birthday, and Norma taps me and says, then we celebrate your 21st birthday last year.

And so my table says, And the year before, Jim says, Let me see your I.D..

So.

Well, gentlemen, 21 now, is it?

Thank goodness you can never ask for anybody who's more supportive than Jim and more and more black.

I just remember going in and it was dark and it reminds me so much of that way.

I thought of my life.

It retained that smallness.

The bar itself was small and you know how to dance.

Floor Lean Door had had a stage that when the drag queens weren't performing, the DJ was, you know, playing the disco.

We danced the deejay was a beautiful man named Mike Wilson, who was a very good friend of mine.

He would get the latest artists of the day, you know, Donna Summer Lipps, Inc, Cher.

He would get the club cuts, they call them.

And that's what young people wanted to hear.

I had friends that were straight, but on occasion they would come to the bar with me because that's where they're really good music was.

There were straight people that came there to for the music.

There were certain records back then that you just you didn't hear on the radio.

Radio around here was really pretty bad.

We're so close to Louisville and Saint Louis.

People wouldn't leave here.

They didn't want to be seen out, you know, because you could still get fired for just being, you know, seen in the wrong place at that point in time.

So people would go to St Louis, they go to Louisville, they'd hear songs, they'd come back, you'd hear about them.

So I made it West to find this music.

And and I would go to Indianapolis and go through the important record stores and Louisville.

I had a quest where I actually went to San Francisco to find a record called Boom, Boom, Boom.

Let's go back to my room by Paula Carcass.

And it was so much fun.

There was just a lot of dance and a lot of cheer, a lot of laughter and a lot of drinking.

I met my first partner there, you know, made a lot of friends there over the years to really meet people regularly.

The bar was the place, and particularly gay men went to the bar, but a lot of lesbians attended to.

Men seemed more comfortable being out For some reason, Women that were professional anyway, I think were more private about that.

A lot of people did not want to be out.

A lot of us were not during grocer bar people and we couldn't stay up till three in the morning anymore.

So if we wanted to get together outside of the bar, a lot of us were athletes, so we'd see each other, you know, in our athletic world.

But a lot of us would just start visiting in each other's homes.

Lesbian women got together in their homes all the time.

There would be little parties of 12 or 14 women.

A lot of people that were not exactly bar people made their own circles of friends, and we formed a group called the Homies.

We had meetings.

Each one of us would take our turn and we had a party every month and a different person was house and the furthest away somewhere pairing was from hunting.

We would go do a lot of things in groups and together there was a restaurant out on the West Side, a stucco house, and we used to all go from UCI out there and have drinks.

And there was a pool table.

We used to have bowling teams and I think you're still do Sundays were volleyball day at muscle wins park volleyball games those started just among individuals and some of us who hung out the bars won something to do on a Sunday afternoon because the bar was wasn't open or something and we'd get together at Wesleyan Park.

It probably started in 83, 84, and it kept growing.

And, you know, there would be times there would be 40 and 50 people out there.

Mostly it was gay men, but then several lesbians, you know, came.

It was just a casual thing.

It was it was if you weren't too hung over from the night before going out partying or you were under age, it was just a great place to get together and have fun for a couple of hours.

The group did get, you know, I would say fairly large.

You know, some were more flamboyant and others and I'm sure people who drove by or walked by and watched some of our, you know, realize that was a getting group like, well, I mean, you get the occasional harassment from somebody.

You know, they'd see a bunch of people, but there were women there, too, so probably had to be confusing.

It was just a fun time.

And you didn't have a whole lot of places for if you were underage to go and meet people swinging door closed three or four months after I turned 21 selling went there once or twice, then bars started sprouting up.

They would open and stay open a couple years and close out, changed names or something.

There was the other side on Morgan Avenue.

Whatever you want, call and change names.

Three or four times.

Club East, the other side.

The other side to the other side.

Three.

That was the bar that I started working at.

It was this great big old dumpy building I think had been called the Wagon Wheel before he had your your main front room.

And then there was a back room, which was the show bar where they did the drag shows and strip shows.

Johnny was the owner.

That again, a straight man, Jerry Lopez, still on them all the time.

Very seldom was ever there when the bar was actually open.

Huge space.

Charlie kept on adding on to it.

He keeps mysteriously having fires where he would build a new space.

My best friend was a doorman.

I remember 800 people coming through there in a Halloween.

I don't care what anybody says.

Halloween's been gay.

Holiday And the reason Halloween's being gay Holiday?

Yes, You can dress up whoever you want and nobody knows who you are.

And the club stayed until 93 or four, I think after club this there was a show bar, a show bar as well.

And we always talked about the mandala, you know, wrote on the wall there, too.

In 1991, we were filming a League of Their Own in Hummingbird, and then later Evansville Show Bar had opened up, and that was on East Franklin.

And we were right down from the Columbia office where they were doing some of the filming.

Madonna came in one night.

I worked on the film.

I actually had a scene with Madonna that day.

I am just anxious to get to the bar and tell all my friends like, you will not believe what happened to me today.

And I get in there and Jenny mixes, Hey, can you start deejaying?

I'm looking over and she's, yeah, Madonna here.

And Gillian was not always the easiest person in the world to get along with.

She was a bail bondsman.

She ran the doors, she charged Madonna cover and everybody in bars.

Like, how in the world could you charge Madonna?

You know, and most famous people world cover.

And she'd look at you and say, can she not afford it?

And as well, we got a point there.

So Madonna paid for her whole entourage to come in a little bit later on.

You know, Penny Marshall and a lot of the other peaches and crew came.

Penny Marshall hung out in the DJ booth with me.

Everybody came from the movies and our organizations made a lot of money.

Thanks to them.

There were other short term bars around the old Woody's at the corner of Main and the Lloyd Uniphase.

It had been 99 2000 that Scotty's opened at.

Gotti's was the first time that we had a gay bar that was actually owned by gay people.

There was a couple others that were a little bit more seedy.

I can't remember what it was called, but I know at one point they changed its name to the Slipper in mine, Kentucky Avenue.

I just remember that because everybody kind of said it's kind of a gross name.

When I was in college, there was the brick house.

The first place that I went to for a drag show.

I tipped my first drag king there someplace else, the longest staple someplace else, which is the only remaining gay bar in Evansville, someplace else back before it was a gay bar, was a popular eating lunch place.

I mean, judges and lawyers would go there so close to the courthouse.

And when Ellen made the decision to turn it into a gay bar, her day business just dropped a lot of backlash from the straight community.

The lawyers and the judges.

They they stopped, she doing lunges.

And it struggled the very beginning, but she stayed with it.

I love that we have a place that people can go and be free to dance and be who they are.

I never had any problems in any of those bars, but sometimes I think they did.

Maybe outside, not so much inside.

I do remember coming out of the bar a time or two and, you know, vehicles driving down Maryland Street would would yell at people coming out of the bar and Ales Fag and things like that.

Every so often you would have a pickup truck with boys, with baseball bats that would come in circle around the block.

We called them the beaters because they would come around, maybe have too much liquor, are just not like us.

And they would come around and they would find people to beat up.

Some people were reluctant to report it because they didn't want people to know of their lifestyle.

There was a small group of people got together and formed an organization called the Tri-State Alliance to try and combat this violence.

In 1982, I was delivering some fliers to the swinging door.

I took the man and started go back out, and I thought, That's not enough.

And I was talking to some people and they were about to leave and I was about to leave.

But I stepped back in and I laid the fliers on the bar.

And when I stepped out, the there were people that were attacking my friend.

A man had broken a beer bottle and went after my friend and he said, Suck on this.

And he cut his teeth out.

That's how we were treated for many years.

And that was, you know, to a large degree why I hit for so long.

I went to see about my friend in the hospital, and I just kept thinking, what can I do?

What can I do?

I talked to some folks and I said, we need to start a meeting.

And a few people did come forward.

The community was very angry.

The first meeting we actually had at the bar because that's where people went.

But I still didn't feel like that was enough.

I was telling my hairdresser and she said, You know, my brother is on the police force.

Lieutenant Larry Quarles.

I went to Larry and I met with him a few times and I brought him out to tri state alliance and he met with us at that particular point in time.

That was a godsend because people were actually taking us seriously and trying to help that situation.

So in the early eighties, gay people were on just the cusp of acceptance in places like Evansville.

It was about that time.

Joycelyn Winick He wrote a really long article in May of 1981, and it was called Gays Existing in a Straight World.

We were all anxious to read this article and I remember going to brunch.

There were about ten of us that all went to brunch and every one of us brought our Sunday paper so we could read this article by Joyce and Winick.

I think it opened a lot of people's eyes that weekend that, you know, your neighbors that are hiding from you, they're no threat to you.

They're just trying to live their life.

And it was only a month or so later when we started hearing about this gay cancer on the coasts.

I remember reading the paper about places like New York, San Francisco of Men, and they would talk about them being gay men, having these lesions on their legs, and then they were started to die.

I realized I was gay and came out as as gay to family.

In 1981, the first year that, you know, AIDS were diagnosed in the U.S.

Anyway, in New York City with 41 cancers they found in these men.

And it was in the gay community at first, we didn't even know what it was.

We were all wondering what you know, what this is.

Nobody knew how it worked.

This is like how covert when it first started, nobody knew how it worked.

And so, you know, if you touch somebody, if you get AIDS, if you eat with a fork or something that they had touched, you would get AIDS.

You were worried that if you touched a doorknob, you were worried if you sat on a toilet seat.

You were worried if you touched a gay person because they thought every gay man had this.

They didn't want to touch you.

They didn't want to hug you.

They didn't want to use the bathroom.

After you.

Of course, looking back, it's like, no, it's not the way it works at all.

As time went on, they knew more about it and they figured out the main form of transmission and all of that.

And then when they knew what it was, you became very uneasy about meeting people and having any sexual contact.

When that happened, a wall got built in me.

Okay, I'm making friends.

I'm not doing anything sexually because I didn't want to die that way.

There was some safety of being in a city like Evansville or Champaign-Urbana where I went to college because there was a very small gay community at that time.

Most gay people did what I did, which was as soon as you were done with college left.

And so there just weren't a lot of folks here and there was some safety with that.

It really didn't affect anyone that I knew in Evansville until about 85.

I think the first case was in 1985.

And then the first death was right around there, then sort of made its way through town.

You know, you'd go to the bar and you would hear to, you know, so-and-so, so-and-so, sick.

It was almost like every time you turned around, somebody you knew was going to be HIV positive people or close friends.

Well, I had probably 15 that were positive, and they were devastated because it was a death sentence at that time.

I was working at Welburn Baptist Hospital as an intensive care nurse.

As patients started to come in, they were probably the sickest individuals any of us had ever really, ever taken care of, simply because everybody system was affected at the beginning.

If you were diagnosed, you had about a year and a half to two years to live.

There was no drug treatments yet.

There wasn't anything you could do.

It was horrifying because you knew the guys that you loved and you were close to in the community were very high risk.

All of my friends are deceased.

The people that I used to work with that I hung out with, we were the same type of people, drag queens, you know, transsexuals, pretty much all of them were deceased one after another.

People that, you know, people that you knew, people that you would see at the bar, that one after another would die.

There were a few people I won't mention names, but you'd see them gorgeous guys, muscular, beefy, you know, just just gorgeous.

And I find out they had AIDS and six, seven months later, they'd be dead.

My brother was nine years younger than me.

He realized at an early age that he was gay and that he did not want to stay in southern Indiana and live.

Got an opportunity to go with JCPenney and go to Pompano Beach, Florida.

And so he lived in the Fort Lauderdale area for three or four years.

That's where he got infected with HIV.

He was diagnosed in 87 and a couple of good years, but then started getting worse.

And like he told me, he felt like he was losing his mind because some of the medicines that they were giving and they were just really had terrible side effects and such.

So in 89, he wanted to basically come home to die.

I was going to go down to visit him to talk about him coming back.

And the night before I arrived in Fort Lauderdale, he decided he would just end it all and be the best.

So he actually attempted suicide by overdosing.

So I, you know, got to his apartment and he was alive.

But he was you know, he had thrown up the medications and such, and he was just in a bad shape.

Luckily, he survived that.

But, you know, he just kind of went downhill quick in the next six months and passed away in January of 1990.

So it was hard for my family because some people in my family were not accepting of him or me for being gay.

I was the only one who really offered him a home to stay and add two or three siblings that came and helped and visited with him and such.

And Dad tried to be supportive, but he was also, I think, ashamed because he didn't want anyone to know that my brother Dennis had AIDS.

He would just told people he had cancer.

It was certainly, you know, that cancer, even some of the obituaries in the paper would not say that they had passed away from HIV.

I think it was just the mindset of society at that time that it was only affecting gay people at first and in great numbers.

There was a whole community of people in the Midwest that really believed it was a gay man disease.

They didn't believe that it was a health related issue that could happen to anybody.

They believed it was brought in by gays and it was spread by gays and all the hate that came from that.

I was 19 years old living in Dallas, Texas, with my aunt.

People would pull up in cars with baseball bats down there, Want to beat the hell out of the people at the bar?

The bar that I worked at got bar bombed, and that was the time I came back home because I was not going to die in Dallas, Texas.

It was a little bit better in Evansville because a lot of people didn't know a lot of the gay community here because everyone was closeted.

Not me, of course, not me.

I have a natural switch to my walk and I could be Jerry walking down the street and someone see me from behind and then they realize that I'm a man.

Well, I got called a lot of names.

They would say, I owe you AIDS.

You deserve what you get.

You're going to hell.

You know, this is God's punishment on you was God's retribution and the sinful behaviors that gay people engage in that were against biblical principles and that this was just the punishment that you got for being in Sodom and Gomorrah.

And it wasn't just gay people that were getting it.

You know, there were a lot of interviewees, drug users, a lot of people of color, a lot of other communities, but they weren't the face of the AIDS crisis.

We were the people that got hit hardest and hit first.

And I think a lot of people didn't care about mismatch because it affected what they thought was the other.

There was a lot of scare even in the health care industry back then and a lot of judgment.

Doctors didn't want to treat it.

Nurses didn't want to treat it.

And that's really when nurses that I worked with started saying, I don't want that assignment.

I don't want to take care of three.

Sadly, the hospital kind of tolerated it, I believe, because we didn't know very much about the virus and they were kind of scared as well of, well, what if we make these nurses take care of these folks and they get the virus?

There was also a great desire not to help people, not to invest, not to spend a lot of money.

Even Ronald Reagan, who was president for until 89, didn't even mention the word aids Ronald Reagan would not talk about.

And, you know, and that's a perfect example of why the speed was slowed, because there were just a lot of the leadership that could not bring themselves to acknowledge the problem or talk about the problem because it was an uncomfortable subject.

There was no help anywhere.

Hospice was still afraid to take care of them.

Nursing homes wouldn't take them as they declined.

Families didn't want to take care of them.

So.

So what do you do?

The government wasn't helping.

You had groups that had formed, like the AIDS research group that tried to find resources.

TSA had been meeting a while when the AIDS crisis hit, and I went to Millie Noble of the health department.

She came and she talked.

She made sure we were always kept up on the news.

Out of this first group came the AIDS resource group.

The AIDS research group started to try and make people as comfortable as possible and marshal resources to keep people housed, to keep people solvent, to maintain their lives in some fashion as they progressively got sicker and sicker.

Other times, you would lose an immense amount of weight with AIDS and you didn't have the money because if you were paying for a medication and your insurance didn't cover it, and you might go from a size large to say small and just a couple of months.

So there were clothing drives, there were food drives.

Zon United Church of Christ started a friendly visiting program to where members of the congregation I would train them on what we knew at the time about HIV and how to protect themselves, and we would go and visit.

We would help pay bills, we would go get groceries.

We would sometimes help them bathe whatever they needed as they deteriorated.

About the same time I became aware of the Internet to where I could really search out and find things.

I found out about the Ron White program, which was federal funding established for people with AIDS.

So I wrote a planning grant and we actually got the grant which gave me a salary to leave my job and throw myself into this work zone.

United Church of Christ had a garage building in the back that they used for storage, and we cleaned it all out.

And my dad was some volunteers.

We turned that garage into a one exam room clinic, and that's where Matthew 25, got its start.

IRG existed.

They provided case management services and prevention services.

And so, you know, Matthew 25 tried to with our federal funding, we brought in the medical care, you know, the laboratory, the ability to access medications and pay for them.

There was just a lot of needs.

And I think by us being able to join together with what resources we had here, we were able to create a nice patchwork quilt of everything that they needed.

I think there was a rallying together during that time, and I think the heterosexual community, the ones that advocated for inclusion, realized we have to start talking about sex.

That whole thing about safe sex and educating the gay community about safe sex, about condoms.

Safer sex was a thing that we promoted and we did seminars in the bars and such like that.

We started buying more condoms to pass out at that bars.

The bars eventually had tubs of condoms and safe sex kits to pass out.

A lot of the drag shows that we did were fundraisers, but there was a group called the Beehive, so they were the original benefit show Girl Troupe.

Maybe it would be Matthew 25 when we and then the next month maybe it would be a RG and they'd do a benefit show and all the entertainers that they had in the show, any tips that they got would be donated to the cause.

We are so indebted to that group of men that they no longer exist today.

There's a few of them.

They're still alive.

They were the ones who got us through AIDS because they would literally don on their dresses or whatever they wanted to wear that night and then the whole night raising money and whatever money they raised went straight to the emergency funds to help people.

And they it was in 1993 Sam Ryan passed away.

His parents were George and Martha.

They owned Ryan Oil, John Street.

And not only was he a brilliant director and museum, but he was a brilliant composer.

He'd written a whole book of music.

And so the Ryans underwrote or Urg, a fundraiser thing, compact disc album of John songs.

And John was able to convince Harry Gray and Tim Ewing and Bill McKinley, who were very well known singers, Tim Ewing was appearing on Broadway at the time to record this his music On this CD, John put together this premiere party for his CD.

I can remember Randy Dennison, myself and some of the board members.

We had a table set up at the museum.

We were unsure that anybody would come, you know, who's going to pay $50 a couple to come to the museum in this town for a fundraiser for AIDS.

We just didn't think it was going to do it.

So we were sitting there at this table and everybody everybody started coming in.

Lloyd Winick, Carol McLintock.

People my parents knew the place was packed.

my God.

There was probably a hundred people there at that time.

I couldn't believe what I saw so much support.

And I knew it was because the Ryans were behind it.

You had these gay people's parents.

Now, same with substance use disorders, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers.

When the mother gets up, she becomes a zealot and other people listen to her.

The Ryans were well known here, heterosexual, six kids, so people listened to them.

It was probably the first huge event done here in Evansville where the heterosexual community got involved.

It raised 16 or $17,000, which was a lot of money.

And then we started the AIDS walk in 93.

And the first year was really small.

April Mitchell, who was on Channel 14, her brother, had died and she attended an AIDS walk in another city.

And so she brought that concept here the second year, 1994.

Again, you know, you're unsure about who's going to show up, how many people would be there.

But that second AIDS walk, the downtown was jammed with people, fraternities, sororities, high school groups had worked to raise money through the year for this AIDS walk.

It raised 1/10 of our entire budget.

I think if you ask any social justice movement, the social justice movement will only often be successful when allies outside of the movement join.

Had a lot to do with the change in attitude.

Eventually, that helped a lot heterosexuals, too.

Elizabeth Taylor started coming out.

I give a lot of credit to people like Elizabeth Taylor and prominent folks in Hollywood and other places that put their credibility on the line to support the gay community in ways that were not helpful for their careers.

Elizabeth Taylor was very instrumental back in those days.

She raised a lot of money, as I remember.

Celebrities have a lot of influence When somebody like Rock Hudson, who was one of the first famous people who get it, Rock Hudson, of course, was the first celebrity that died of complications of AIDS, that he admitted that saltwater was.

And I think that informs law.

It also shocked a lot of people because they just couldn't believe that he was gay when intravenous drug user whose going to the gay bar down the street, people didn't care as much.

But when Rock Hudson or Liberace or Dark Rambo, who was on Dallas, Halston, Halston was somebody that lives here in Evansville.

He was somebody that left a mark on fashion and trends.

And then Ryan White, who was an innocent boy, you know, he went through so much.

Imagine being kid, a hemophiliac.

And that was how he got it through a blood transfusion when he was like in sixth or seventh grade.

I think when he first was diagnosed and in northern Indiana.

And his school district wouldn't allow him to attend school, even though doctors said it would have been safe.

Just imagine what that would have been like going to school and, you know, nobody wanting to sit near you or being teased.

I was fortunate enough to hear him speak about the topic.

He just advocated for people to talk about it and to be accepting and do what's right and treat it as any other disease and get away from the stigma and work to cure it.

Ryan White was very instrumental in and getting funding, people coming to the realization that this is something that we have to do.

If it wasn't for Ryan White, HIV care and AIDS care in this country would not be where it's at.

We have a lot to be thankful for that one.

Deana boy.

It was about ten years into the epidemic when the government and the stepped in to help in the early nineties, we had AZT, which was one of the first medications that we actually had.

People could do that and they might live six months longer than what they would have without it.

AZT caused lots of side effects and eventually over years killed people's kidneys.

But it wouldn't just be that, that they had to have every system they had was failing.

So they would be on so many medications, not just their HIV medicines.

Their CD4 counts were in the toilet, so they had to be on antibiotics many times, several antibiotics.

That was a bag of pills that they would carry on their.

Yep.

I mean, my friends, when we'd go out and do stuff or I'd go visit or whatever, they would always have a Merce column Amherst.

And it was just full of all these pills that would make them sick.

I think sometimes the AZT was worse than what they were going through with the AIDS.

People were throwing up.

They were having, you know, diarrhea.

But it got them through.

it's a lot better today because you can be undetected and, you know, go out in Liverpool like now.

Now, you know, people can come in the clinic and get to injections every two months and be good to go.

It's amazing to me to see somebody going from many times 30 prescriptions to now to injections.

I mean, that's just great.

Even today, it's normalized.

You don't have people running around saying, I'm gay and I have AIDS.

You know, I mean, it's it's not something anybody's, I guess, proud of, but it's just isn't what it was in the 1980s and 1980s.

You had a year to live.

We lost a lot of people in Evansville that aids the years.

As I think back to when we sat in that room and we wrote the bylaws.

A lot of those people were gone because of AIDS.

I can see them in the room.

I can see everyone that was sitting in that room back then.

I could name them.

I had an address book that I had started in 1983, and I counted up the other day that I have more than 40 names of friends that I knew during the eighties and early nineties, and they have died of AIDS.

And it's just unfortunate no one got got excited about it or really worried about it until it started affecting other than gay men for that whole period.

There was this amelioration maybe of how people looked at gay people.

The AIDS epidemic, you know, was a setback.

I think.

But that also was a catalyst to make people aware that there are so many LGBTQ people out there that otherwise they had been closeted and a lot of people just weren't aware.

I think it goes back to what Harvey Milk said, that if gay people want the rest of the world to recognize them as human and see their humanity, you have to come out.

Hello again, everyone.

I'm Tim Black, along with my friend Scott Wylie.

We're very, very happy to be joining you this evening with the premiere of Out and About a gay history of Evansville.

We certainly hope that you're learning something and that you're enjoying the show as you're watching it with us this evening.

We still have a ways to go and we promise we're going to get you back to the documentary.

But you probably know the drill by now.

These things don't happen without you helping us out or watching at home.

And we're certainly going to ask you to please take advantage of the opportunity of this little break to either give us a phone call or go online and make a gift.

And we ask this evening, because of the particular program, if you simply want to support the message that we're putting out there this evening where the LGBTQ community is concerned, we absolutely appreciate that.

I don't think you're going to see that or find that in a lot of other places in Evansville.

And WNIN is very proud to be able to bring that to you if you want to simply support local programing.

And we're going to be doing more of this for you on lots of different topics like we've already been doing.

We need your help to make that happen.

So give us a call at 912-423-5678. wnin.org.

There's a QR code there at the bottom of your screen.

Just snap that with your phone and they'll get your right to the website.

Any gift that you want to make to say thank you or to help support more of this in the future, we certainly would appreciate the support.

You know, Scott, I mentioned at the beginning of this, both you and I are very personally proud of this project, very happy to be able to bringing it to the folks in the tri state.

I think this is an opportunity for for you to talk just a little bit about that and why it's important.

Absolutely.

And I will also mention you can also send a check.

We have so aptly named David James wonderful show Two Main Street so that everyone in our community knows the address.

And it's 47708.

So if you want to just put a regular old fashioned check in the mail like I do, go right.

You can do that as well.

This programing when when this project came up and began to be formed, telling the stories of people in our community that are rarely told.

Yeah, I think almost anyone when the recent documentary on Women in Leadership in the community, a lot of history has left out a lot of parts of our community.

And this is a chance for not only those of us who grew up in Evansville, who happened to be part of this community, to tell our stories and be part of this.

But it's also ways for other people who've not been heard or not been listened to, to hear their voices in these as well.

And this type of programing that WNIN offers allows us to become educated on all of us so that we have a greater appreciation of the rich diversity that exists in our community.

And we want that diversity.

So many of the stories that you will hear in this program tonight are about people who temporarily went away.

That's right.

Left our community because they didn't feel welcomed.

And if we want to make E is for everyone our town motto actually functional in our community.

People have to know there's a place for them here.

And that's why you and I are here.

That's why you and I are here right now.

Because anyone who's watching, who's young and is considering whether they have a future here in town and can be successful and do interesting things, they can see they can run a media company and they can see they can be a lawyer.

They can see those things because they will see themselves in people telling their stories.

And that's something that Joe Atkinson in his work doing, documenting your storytelling is so important because he does it through the voices of people within those communities.

So I'm incredibly proud to have been part of this.

I hope this work is as important to people in the community as I know what these types of things have been to me in my life.

And I just hope that our listeners and our viewers that are watching, whether they're streaming, whether they're watching on 9.1, whatever they're doing, will support this work so that we have the opportunity not just to tell this story and rebroadcast this documentary, but that we can offer more documentaries that do similar things for other people who just aren't as heard.

That's right.

And that's very well said.

And I know you and I both believe very strongly that this community will support this effort because we've both been supported this this city is extremely welcoming.

And the key E is for everyone message is an important one.

And I think this is one example that goes along hand in hand with that.

So if you do want to support what we're doing this evening, folks, it is very easy to do is Scott just encourage you to do earlier if you want to write an old fashioned check and drop it in the mail, you can absolutely do that.

If you didn't quite get the address earlier, you can find that at the very bottom of the page on the website.

But we'll be more than happy to take that from you.

You can also give us a phone call at 812-423-5678.

You can go online at wnin dot org.

I should probably mention that if somebody wants to make a gift through one of their cash apps via Venmo or PayPal, you have the opportunity to do that as well.

Just search for @wnin.

So there are lots of ways in this modern world that we live in now that you can make a gift to WNIN and no amount is too small and certainly no amounts to large amounts be large.

And if you do make a gift with us this evening, we do want to be able to say thank you with some really neat gifts.

And here's an idea of what we can give back to you at our very basic $60 level, $5 a month as a sustainer, we'll give you access to our streaming service passport.

You'll get a subscription to Evansville Living magazine, which always contains our program guide.

At the $90 level, we're going to say a big thank you, particularly with the message that we're exploring in our documentary this evening with a PBS gay Pride mug.

You can enjoy your coffee, tea, whatever beverage there.

Passport access is included at the $90 level Evansville Living subscription and the WNIN Discount member card.

And finally, at the $120 level or only $10 a month as a sustainer, it's very popular, folks.

We're going to send along that PBS gay Pride mug.

We're going to give you access to Passport, the Evansville Living subscription, the WNIN member card.

And as a special bonus, you know, our local author here, Kelley Coures, just very recently published a book along the same lines as our documentary tonight called Out in Evansville in LGBTQ history of River City.

And we will include that at that $120 level as well.

Please consider making a gift.

And we do appreciate it.

You know, Scott, you you talked earlier about a lot of the folks who we're seeing in this documentary tonight at one point may have left here.

I think one of the things that's striking to me about this documentary that I so enjoy and I think is probably very edifying to those individuals.

You know, there are several people from whom we've either already heard or who you will hear from as this documentary goes along, who they are of of a senior age.

I will say at one time they simply could not be who they are.

And they didn't have an opportunity to talk and to tell stories.

They're being given that opportunity now.

And I'm really happy that this documentary is able to do that.

Absolutely.

By the way, we both qualify for AARP, so I know they're going to call too much longer than we are, but nonetheless, your math is always terrible.

But the reality is, is those are exactly the types of things that you and I did so well, which is telling those stories of people that have never been heard before and being able to share those stories with people who will benefit from the wisdom that comes from the the difficulties and challenges that those folks overcame and what you will notice is many of the folks in this documentary night aren't just people who happened to be gay and happen to have lived in Evansville, but happened to have been gay or lesbian and lived in Evansville and lead our communities.

That's right.

In many ways, yes.

That our active in our arts and social and business worlds all trying to make Evansville a better place.

So even when we couldn't tell our stories, we were still contributing to the success of this wonderful city, an area.

Very good.

And thanks so much for saying that, Scott.

Very, very true words.

All right, folks, we're going to get you back to the end of the program this evening.

Again, we're hope you're enjoying it, that you're learning something, that you're taking something away from it.

We want to do more local stories about other groups in the community, other segments of history, in the community.

But we need your support.

We have a lot of neat thank you gifts to offer you if you will make your gift this evening.

Our basic levels are $60, $90, $120.

All of those can be split over the course of a year at 12 month intervals or one month intervals within 12 months.

I won't do that math for you.

As Scott just said.

Give us a call at 812-423-5678.

WNIN.org.

Thank you when you make your gift.

We all know queer people, whether we like it or not.

And as we start realizing my brother's gay, my sister's a lesbian, my cousin is trans, How can I hate my brother?

How can I say that my sister is evil?

Or, you know, my cousin is mentally ill?

That's when the shift happens.

After a while, people started to slowly accepts the likes of and the internet helped with that because the Internet opened people's eyes to.

There's a whole wide variety of people out there.

I mean, you can Google anything now and find anything gay.

Of course, people love to say the media is trying to shove it down throats, but I like that over time, thanks to movies, thanks to TV shows, it did kind of start opening the door for that slow progression of acceptance before.

If there was a gay character in a movie or that character always died at the end, or the comic relief usually, or the tragic person who dies, I'm sure a lot of Hispanic folks hate seeing themselves portrayed only as gang members.

I imagine African-American folks are really tired of some of the portrayals until recently of that community.

I really got tired of seeing how many times it turned out the reason I was the murderer was because I was gay.

But I think as the eighties moved along, you had movies coming out that were like personal best partners.

Ryan O'Neal You had gay characters in movies.

It seemed like that became the thing to do.

We have to put a gay character in this.

The sitcom, or we got to put a gay character in this play.

I remember some of the important milestones when I was in college.

For example, Dynasty was a very big soap opera.

They had a gay character, but they kept making him not gay.

He'd be gay for like six episodes.

Then they'd kill his boyfriend and making marry one of the women on the show.

And they could just never commit to what, the poor guy be gay.

I remember they had a gay character on a show called Melrose Place in the nineties.

That show was nothing but all these young people hooking up anyone that never got a date.

He didn't kiss anybody.

He didn't get to have a date.

But, you know, Heather Locklear had a different boyfriend every week.

It was around that time.

Also, it was a one came out that started a conversation suit because I vividly remember sitting at someplace else when that happened the night that show came on, because we had a viewing party.

I mean, the bar was packed because Ellen's coming in.

What was coming up and then when?

2009, what RuPaul started to show and made drag and the gay community seen on national television.

You know, Will and Grace was a big help with that.

That show was so witty and so well-written.

And the characters were so richly drawn, achieved a certain level of social importance because of the fact that it put forth the lives of regular gay people and present them as successful and competent and witty and smart.

To have a show that successful based on gay characters was something that was very important, and I think it was why today, you know, you can turn on to Station 19, a procedural about a firehouse, and they have gay characters.

They have gay characters who get married, and they've got your characters that break up and they have gay characters fires out and they have gay characters that make the meal for the other fireman.

Normal characters who just happened to be gay or happened to be, by the way, black or Hispanic or Asian or women in positions of power.

Representation matters.

When you're seeing a person like me as seen on TV or something positive in the news other than the negative, people look at that and say, okay, well, you know, it's not that bad.

So I think that's where it got easier because it started getting more mainstream in the nineties in 2000, when I moved back to Evansville in 2005, I remember one of the first things I said to the realtor.

I asked her if she would be comfortable representing two gentlemen and she said, Is your money green?

And I thought I thought, well, that's some progress.

A lot of friends where you can be in New York, you can be in San Francisco, you can be in Chicago, Austin, you could be in Paris or London.

And they're right.

I could be.

But I want to be here in Evansville.

And a part of that is being gay.

Here is a radical act.

Being in New York and being queer walked on the street and everyone's queer.

You know, in Evansville, being queer is radical to show people that we exist.

We do exist in New York and San Francisco, but we also exist here.

I made a very specific decision when I moved back, and there are a lot of my colleagues that are also gay or lesbian.

We all make very specific decisions to lead our lives in ways that aren't just not hidden, but are in fact quite exposed.

I try to emcee any event I can do.

I try to do that because I want every young man and young woman in this community to see themselves and to see themselves.

Not the way I was taught that I would have to be a nurse or a florist, that there were no roles for me to be the head of a bank.

There was no way I could be a doctor or a lawyer.

In fact, that's why I left.

I moved to California for nearly 20 years because of the perception I had that there wouldn't be a place for me here.

I really thought, I am going to be the only gay person in Evansville.

No, that is not true.

There's many of us.

I don't think there are more gay people now than there were in the nineties.

I just think that there are more people who feel safe enough to be themselves or feel unapologetically about who they are.

I also think that being an out person who has been more vocal has helped embolden other people to say, I'm an ally.

I think you all are great.

You know, how can I be supportive?

So it's also empowered more people to come forward and to be more open about their support.

I think social media helps that they can find outside of their own world.

We really saw kind of a rise in the population of the gay culture here in Evansville.

Once like social media started coming into play, I want to say the shift was marriage equality, being able to get married.

my gosh.

In 2015, Supreme Court decision was Obergefell.

It was a shift and it felt huge.

It's been a long five years for this Kentucky couple.

Today is the day Ashley Burton and Christina Johnston say they've been waiting for a friend called with the news of the Supreme Court's decision this morning.

I started crying and I woke her up and I was like, we can actually get married now.

You know, we can be a married couple.

I remember that day.

I remember getting the rainbow flag down off the house and swinging it around like a limousine out in the front yard, just crying and yelling and cheering.

All I do remember is waking up, hearing the news and being dumbfounded.

I mean, completely and utterly just silent, because that was not something I ever expected to see happen in my lifetime.

That was the big thing that said, Hey, these people exist and they deserve human rights.

It changed my life because I got to be a part of society that was always allowed to do that because that's mainstream society, right?

Getting married, living alive, happily ever after, that kind of thing, which I didn't think I would ever have a happily ever after.

Some just want to get married right away.

Some people jumped on the bandwagon with that and got married too quick because a lot of them I've been divorced, a lot of people were going out and just getting married just because they could.

Or getting married because they were afraid they'd be taken away the next day.

And they wanted to at least say that they did.

And I remember posting something about like, let's take this very seriously.

This is a big step and this is not going on a date.

This is not saying, I love you.

This is a huge, huge step.

And, you know, queer culture in America is that we can get married Now.

I don't want to take that for granted.

I have not yet had an interest in a legal representation of my partnership that I've been with for 22 years.

It doesn't change anything for us, whether we have a piece of paper.

We we know what we are.

We don't feel a need to legalize it, but I like that we can if we want it to.

I have never been married, but I certainly would consider it.

That's kind of one of the goals in life that I have I've not really achieved.

My dad was to officiate his Jason's wedding sometime, and he's technically an ordained Southern Baptist minister, which is why I hope I can find somebody before he dies, because I would like him to do that.

The other goals they have would just be perks, and that's one that I have, is to find somebody, settle down, and I want my dad to officiate it just like he did my brother's wedding.

I definitely think marriage equality was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I mean, people people saw that the fabric of the world, you know, did not disappear.

The sky didn't fall.

And Baker sold more cakes and people got to buy more bad, cheap crystal.

All it proved is everybody just wants to do the same thing.

That shift was very prominent, especially thinking about getting into college in 2009 and thinking to myself, I have to be careful with who I tell I'm gay and then graduate school in 2017.

So it was like everyone was on the bandwagon of like gay people are okay.

They're cool in Evansville.

Maybe it took us a little bit longer than it did places like L.A. or New York to come to that realization that, you know, gay and lesbian people can be part of your community and you don't have to be afraid of them.

I think people just slowly, they've gotten so used to seeing it that over time it's just become more and more accepted.

Does that mean that the fight is over?

Hell no.

We still experience discrimination and persecution.

Absolutely.

Has our house been vandalized?

Three times?

Our pride flag flying the flag pole been ripped off of our house.

Yet I know somebody that six or seven years ago they were they were beat up coming out of a bar, not even a gay bar, but just because they were very effeminate.

I was of fireworks last night walking down the crowd.

Somebody said something real derogatory and I was like, really?

This is what you're teaching your children, the Colorado people, that are different.

There's the other people who like banned drag queens in a drag controversy over the library and reading to kids and sad, she generated a lot of press and controversy.

It was quite a show, actually.

The Evansville, Vanderburg Public Library wanted to host a drag queen story.

Our happens in multiple cities across the nation.

I know they do.

Drag queen story hour up in Indianapolis quite a bit, as opposed to Durham Pride Month and the community lost it.

I was approached by the Evansville Gannawarra Public Library.

One of my friends worked there and she asked me if I wanted to do it, and I said, Sure, I'll do it.

I'll just be in driving decals and dancing and interacting with the audience.

And there was backlash.

Obviously, we are not here to reject the LGBT community in any way, shape or form.

I am here to urge you to protect innocent little children over the desires of adult men dressed as women.

This it has been allowed under false pretenses and lies.

You have defrauded the public, the people of Evansville, and broken our trust.

We are here simply to reject the program.

Use your influence to cancel the drag Queen story.

Our I was at the first library board meeting where they discussed it, and I was one of seven people in the room who were supportive of Drag Queen story hour with 200 plus people in the room.

And I got up and I spoke and, you know, people booed.

And you go to any of the meetings at all or public events, for the most part, I was a silent at the beginning until the day of the event happened.

And then I did that then and there was protesters, but there was also a big group of support of gay people there to keep those protesters away.

I look out the window when I was painting just to see what was going on.

There was a bunch of protesters out there or website megaphones signs, seeing the crowd that turned out with signs, with words that kids should not be reading and having to escort kids from the parking lot covering their eyes with my sign of Florentin.

And then you've got a crowd on the other side of the door that have rainbow umbrellas and are wearing capes.

It was a stark contrast.

They did paint stuff on the windows for kids to look at and to not stare at the protesters.

They had children workshops inside the library for them to entertain themselves and not be outside.

General It was amazing because I had all people of different walks of life all come into that room and watch me.

The kids were read to by a very pretty drag queen, and they all had a really good time.

The world didn't stop spinning and they added time slots to drag Queen Story hour because it was so popular.

My understanding that I think it might have been 500 kids.

I think something like that.

I was very shocked, very surprised, because all of these parents, straight families, and I thought it was amazing to know that there are parents in this world that tell you that it's okay to be different.

Even the pastor that spoke against it at every board meeting I was at, he was there, too.

And at the end he came and he shook my hand.

And, you know, it was like it was a good day.

Sit, snaps.

I wish that it would happen again.

It was sad that the director of the library got moved to a different library.

She brought something that was, for my point of view, amazing.

The kings and queens have always been an important part of our community.

I understood that issue with people and drag queens.

People have been watching drag queens their whole life towards the Mets.

Dustin Hoffman, Robin Williams, Mrs. Doubtfire, Robin Williams, Tyler Perry, Patrick Swayze.

They all were some of the best drag queen.

With all your sit in the theater and watch this stuff and think it's all great and wonderful.

But then when you see it in your local bar, that's a sin.

What the hell's the difference?

We're actors.

We portray a character.

Drag is just a stage performance.

When I put on makeup, it's like a necklace and I'm this other person that it's very much just a performance.

And just like this character that I've created.

Yes, some people are trans and they live that character.

But me, I'm a character.

Rachel is a character.

I think there was always the stigma of to where they didn't understand that When you took that off of stage, you're not that character on stage anymore.

I never fully felt that I wanted to become a woman.

It's definitely a really big misconception.

I wouldn't want to become a woman.

I wouldn't want to be a woman for anything.

I like playing more, but I don't want to be one that was just not who I was.

I still enjoyed my life as a as a man.

For me, more so just like the gender expression, expressing my femininity that I wasn't like allowed to express when I was younger.

Even just small things like playing with Barbies, I wouldn't be allowed to do.

It was just like a whole bunch of built up femininity that I wasn't allowed to express that.

Now it's like losing out.

Truthfully, I started dragging like a super young age when my mom wasn't home.

Like I'd wear her red high heels and I wore a burgundy dress with daisies on it.

And I would always drive around on our family farm, riding four wheeler with a t shirt on my head.

And basically that would be my hair blowing in the wind.

I don't know what I was expressing, but I was just kind of like living naturally, and that's just what I wanted to do.

That's just basically what drag is to me, just self-expression.

It's who I can't be in real life or who I don't feel like I have the confidence to be.

Whenever a performer is on stage and they are in drag, it's a disguise, it's a costume.

But also whenever you see a performer on stage, they are creating what they believe is the most perfect version of themself or the most heightened version.

You can be as deep and raw and visible as you want.

If you want to hide behind a song, you can that I can be confident.

I could be who I am.

I don't have to hide anything from anyone.

Like if I'm having a bad day, I put all my emotions into my performance.

We've all wanted to express ourselves in the way that we are not judge for.

When people applaud that, it's like, this is wrong, or This is something that I should be ashamed of or something that I shouldn't try and hide.

Like this is what makes me a star and not what makes me less of a human, I guess.

And I think that freedom to feel accepted by a greater community is kind of what draws people to it, whether performing it or viewing it.

People get caught up in a lot of things, but we're people just like everybody else's, and that's just an outlet, whether that's like hitting the gym or you're just into music, writing, reading, whatever, it's just expression.

Because once I get out of makeup, I'm like, Well, I feel way better.

Not all gay people like Drag Queen said find that is an integral part of the gay society.

I don't think so.

I think that drag is a facet of our community that people focus on a lot.

I think that a lot of times people get hung up on that being the only thing that represents queer culture.

There are lots queer musicians, queer comedians, queer artists, queer authors.

And, you know, drag is is one art form in a plethora of queer representation that we have.

But I love drag and I love drag shows and I love drag bingo and brunch and all of the things.

And we have a great drag community here in Evansville.

And I think that drag is important because the representation and the kind of let your freak flag fly mentality that goes into drag just existing is rebellious.

Drag is an important part of the culture.

The drag gay culture goes back to like the thirties.

It was standard for a place for us to call like a home.

And what I find so important about that is it is a big point of our culture because it allowed us to develop a culture.

I think when you're a part of a community that is very often not heard or demonized and you really have no choice but to make your own, I think for a long time, just like whenever there were Speakeasy boys and things like that, it's the gay version of a speakeasy know.

When I started out doing drag, I was glamor drag.

It was beaded gowns, it was big hair.

It was full on what I would say, Dallas and Dynasty type styles and format.

And then you had the other side of drag, which was I can't drag, and that would be like a full beard, hairy chest.

But those were benefit groups.

They did things to help people, drag queens, did things to pay rent.

The younger ones, they have opened the doors and now there's really any kind of genre now in town.

There's not any limit to what you can do in drag or what you can be in drag.

There's no stipulations are no rules.

It is boundless, you know, when I first started doing drag, there was only two venues here that we could perform the brick house and someplace else.

Nowadays we have drag like RuPaul's Drag Race on TV.

It's more mainstream and people want that in their venue.

Now straight bars want gay venues or gay things to collaborate with them or take their entertainment and put them in their shows.

There's two places for sure that I perform at the Here Vocal Lounge, and most of the two venues are considered a heterosexual bar.

But yet they still give back to our community more than some other venues.

They want that to be a part of their culture and they truly invest in us.

They have been way more accepting than I ever even thought when I first started.

So one big difference that I've noticed is that gay bars are not full of gay people that much anymore.

I feel like there's a lot more straight people going to the gay bars now.

Oftentimes if you go there as a gay person, you may be the only gay person there because a lot of times it's, you know, groups of young women out for their bachelor party.

You know, it's not a secret clandestine place anymore.

And I'll have one here now.

And it's not busy like it used to be 30 years ago.

They used to be packed place on a good night.

It's got a lot of people downstairs in the show rooms for 12:00.

They're all going to different bars because you can now in the building still represents, to me in my heart, a safe place for gays to go to if they don't feel comfortable going to the straight bar.

But for the most part, there's a lot of gay people going out and venturing out other places like it's it's safe enough to do that.

Now, I don't know that there are any entertainment venues that are unsafe for people in Evansville.

There are lots of businesses in Evansville that are very supportive of our community.

A lot of businesses are not afraid to like places, LGBT friendly establishments.

There's like a whole coalition of businesses like in the nineties that would take Molotov cocktail thrown through your window.

I mean, yes, here and there you'll have your fire or something.

Go on.

I feel like that's a generational change big time, because back in the day I came here was your place and you stayed there to be safe and to do with your dad.

I definitely think that there's been a shift in humanity as a whole, being more accepting and I think that that's generationally, the younger generation is much more accepting.

I'm 70 years old now and people my age and older still don't want to talk about this.

They may not be discriminatory, but they would rather just go about your business and don't flaunt it.

Don't push your as they would call it, your gay religion.

I would say everyone is not accepting of an older generation because I have seen plenty of people in our older generation love and accept so many people.

I've met multiple LGBTQ plus members of our community.

They have the world's greatest grandparents ever and they have accepted them and have taken them in.

If I'm talking as a collective, I would say my generation, they're way more accepting now.

yeah, young people are always more tall.

If you look at any opinion poll of tolerance, of gay marriage, tolerance of anything, you'll see a real generational change.

They honestly don't care what your sexuality is, what your identity is.

You know, they just everybody they want to get along, find out the kids are gay and they're like, okay, whatever.

Like, let's go play.

Like, we don't care.

The reality is, people are 20 or 25 today have grown up in a world where being gay isn't even interesting.

It just is.

People are more comfortable coming out now and most people know a gay person.

It definitely is harder to judge when when there's a face to it.

I've encountered that I think I've been that face for some people.

I've heard some people make some kind of a comment using that gay as a slur.

My comment is always be careful who you say that around because you don't know exactly who you're saying it to.

You can almost see that light bulb moment of, sorry.

It's harder to hate somebody when you know their face.

It's harder to hate somebody when when they have a name.

And I think that's a big part of the shift.

We've made such progress that people are feeling comfortable expressing how they view themselves in ways that they never would have been allowed to.

It's in an area where we're able to evolve and see more variety and sexual orientation, sexual identification, and it's led to a whole bunch, You know, for someone my age, I'm really struggling now with pronouns, pronouns.

I don't always get them correct.

I'm still learning about the pronouns as a gay male, a gay black male, even I don't understand the pronouns.

I think it's really important to recognize other letters of the LGBTQ, and I think pronouns are also really important to address because people do to be called of how they feel.

There's this like experiment that I saw someone was calling a cisgender person by the wrong pronoun the entire time they were talking to them.

And after like 10 minutes like this, this person was like, Hey, like, don't call me that.

Like, I'm not a he.

Like I'm a she.

And it's like, C, like pronouns do matter, but I know that there are some pronouns that are really, like, hard to understand.

One time I was in a conversation with someone who is non-binary and they go by them and they're so I got a little confused with the story.

I was like, Who are you talking about?

And they obviously explained to me who they were talking about.

It's like, okay.

It's really more of a learning process nowadays, I would say approach it the same way you would if you're sitting in a math class and you don't know the answer to something, ask a question if you don't understand EFT, We have no problem with telling.

We know if you're trying to be respectful or trying to like, do better.

As long as we can see that, like you're trying to address this correctly, it's all good.

You know, as I get older, I see things that I don't always understand in our community.

And I think back to when I came out to my parents, how they understand.

So I see kind of a parallel where I just hope that the generation that's coming up now takes patience with people like me, people of my generation, as we try to understand all the ins and outs.

It's taken the older generation a lot to really, truly grasp and learn about all of this.

And they've been doing a pretty great job.

If it weren't that generation, then the younger generation wouldn't have the privileges that they have.

They've been on the forefront fighting for our rights, getting this community to where it is.

It did take a lot of work to get us to the point that we're at today from whenever I was a child till.

Now there has been progress to some degree.

I think that's slow progress, but any progress is progress.

I think that Evansville has changed a lot from growing up in the nineties, being here and knowing that it wasn't cool to be gay too.

Now where we've got River City Pride, we've got a large festival and parade and we do events throughout the year and the mayor participates and there are several organizations that have sprung up here under the LGBTQ identity.

There's Hudson and Reed.

They do a festival at Garvin Park in early June.

River City Pride will do their parade and their festival at Hayes Corner.

Five years ago, my pastor looked at me and said, We have to have a safe LGBTQ youth group.

So we had our first gathering for Greater Evansville Youth in September of 2019 to watch them grow together, develop these deep, beautiful friendships, to have this safe space where they can change their name every week if they want, or their pronouns every week if they want, and they get to just try themselves out and figure out who they are in a safe space.

I can't imagine what it would have been like for me as a as a 15 year old to have had that kind of environment around me.

The community has grown a lot.

I think when I first got here, a lot of LGBTQ people were kind of under the radar.

When I moved back, there was a very prominent gay community, a very engaged gay community.

Now I have noticed that LGBTQ people have prominent roles in the city.

That gay community has now moved into a lot of leadership positions.

You now have organizations and boards of directors and other folks actually seeking out diversity, actually wanting to include gay and lesbian individuals, people of color.

Sometimes it's nice to think about how much it's come, because sometimes it's easy to dwell on how much further we have to go, especially in a state like Indiana.

Every time you take a step, there's going to be a legislature that will beat that change back.

I am very fearful right now that what we're facing isn't so much the great progress we have left to go, but that it may go the other direction and move back for a while.

There are still all kinds of efforts to try to reverse marriage equality.

There are still efforts to limit the protections of sexual orientation, anti-discrimination laws and other things.

But I think about the movement right now.

I'm really more about putting my fingernails in the concrete and holding on.

We are not fully accepted by everyone yet, but it's better.

Yes, to more accepted.

Yes, we can get married.

Yes, you can walk down the street for the most part and show my public displays of affection.

But there's still some reservations.

There's still some.

Maybe I shouldn't hold your hand in this part of town.

You always got to prejudiced.

You always got the hatred.

You still have your places that will discriminate against gay and lesbian people.

But I think those people have given up trying to persecute and get people fired from their jobs because they're gay.

I think the new target or transgender people, they are definitely what people are going after right now.

The trans community still very unknown to the mainstream community.

And so it's easier to be hateful.

Like I said, everybody knows somebody who's gay, everybody knows their hairdresser is just the sweetest little thing.

So I think that they needed a new villain.

Typically, your villain is somebody you don't understand, and it's really tragic.

I have never met people who are more gentle and more easy to know as transgender people.

So actually when I was about seven, I have body dysmorphia and I know that what that is now, but I didn't know that then.

That's definitely whenever I started to realize that, hey, I don't feel like I'm in the right body.

I lived as a lesbian or a butch lesbian until I realized that there are other people like me and there are things that I can do this so that I can a more authentic and happier life.

And so I begin to transition about eight years ago.

So I've been me, Mimi, for eight years.

At the end of the day, that's who they are.

You can't take off being white.

I can't think of being black, being trans.

It's cruel.

I really hurt from that because people are bashing them for who they hate.

It's hard because a lot of the issues have to do with the two things that I am the most that I can't do anything about, which is being trans and being of color.

I'm so many things.

My eyes are brown, I'm short, but I'm here.

I'm five one.

I, you know, like all these things.

My shirt is pink, My my pants are gray.

It is that small.

And I don't think about it as much as other people think about it.

And the only time I have to think about it is because somebody else called attention to it.

Our society as a whole has taken the trans community and made a huge deal about bathrooms and a huge deal about dressing rooms that I had to pee.

I remember whenever that came out Nashville, it was very strange to me.

You were so worried about us creeping in the bathroom, but you're creeping on me.

Like, honestly, do you check people's genitalia in restrooms?

Like, I don't I don't know what else everybody else does in the bathroom, but I'm going in.

I'm washing my hands.

I'm coming out.

I have to show an ID.

Last year, the Indiana legislature passed a bill about trans girls competing in sports.

You know, like there's thousands of trans girls trying to compete in girls track and volleyball.

All of the states that are trying to pass these anti-transgender laws.

I definitely think that it is a great fear for people who are trans because of the constantly feels like if there's not one, it doesn't go through.

There's one right behind it, on top of it beside it.

Okay We're going to scoop this one over and table this.

Okay, The next bill.

And it's the same thing.

I feel like there are bigger issues in the world, way better than little me and what I'm doing.

I think that they just wanted a villain and they found one in something that they don't understand.

That's what we should be doing right now, is fighting for our friends who are trans to live their lives openly, publicly And again, I think that that's where the more people come out and the more people who are visible and the more representation we have is where that education comes in and where that change is on the horizon.

The same as in 2015.

Gay marriage not ending the world.

Eventually, we will get to the point in our society, in education that trans people aren't out to molest you in the bathroom.

They're just there to pee.

It's come a long way.

It's got a long way to go.

All of us have a long way to go.

There has been so much progress in the last ten years.

I would say 95% of the improvement has occurred in the last ten or 15 years.

And that 5% that set it up took an awful lot of work and a lot of time.

Of course, we want completely across the board equal rights for every human, not just queer people.

The biggest hurdles is just understanding how people want to live their lives.

If it doesn't affect you, what is the big worth?

For example, your life doesn't affect me from nothing to worry about.

Me being gay doesn't affect you with the worry.

If that's the worst thing that your child can be, or if that's the worst thing that your sister, your brother, or your dad can be, we need to reevaluate a lot of things.

What goes into making a person a decent human has nothing to do with who they are attracted to.

And I think as a society, when we get past that, all of us, you, me, straight, gay, we're all shopping at the same grocery store.

We're all going to the same restaurant.

We're all just trying to make it.

And I don't know why we can't make it cohesively Hello again, folks.

For the final time this evening, I'm Tim Black, president and CEO at WNIN, and Scott Wylie is with me tonight.

We are so happy to be able to join you for the premiere of this very important local documentary in Evansville out and about a gay history of Evansville.

And we're so happy that you've joined us as well this evening.

This documentary has been really interesting to watch.

And it is it's a very meaningful and wonderful piece of local history that I hope will live on for quite some time.

And you can make sure that happens.

And the really important thing this evening, I think, is that we want to tell more of these kinds of stories we mentioned in an earlier break some of the other topics that we've already covered, and we want to do more of those topics in the community.

Some of those at the suggestion of some of our viewers and our donors.

So certainly don't hesitate to let us know if you think there's something worthy of getting this kind of treatment in the community.

We've told the story of very influential women in the community.

Very recently we've told you about a number of historic churches in the community.

Within the last year we told you about the family farm in Evansville.

We've told you the history of this city during World War Two, the history of beer.

We brought a very moving educational and just a really, really great piece of local documentary work, probably two or three years ago now, all about the tragic plane crash that killed our basketball team in the 1970s.

Those are the kinds of stories that we want to continue to bring to you and to tell you.

And as we've said a couple of times already this evening, WNIN is the only place that you're going to find those stories.

You are not going to find them in other places and in other media outlets in the community.

So please support the effort if you're enjoying what you're seeing this evening or if you've enjoyed any of those other documentaries.

We certainly need to hear from you.

And we're going to say thank you with some great gifts.

If you do, just give us a call.912-423-5678.

You can find us online at WNIN dot org if you want to use one of those cash apps on your phone.

Venmo, PayPal.

Both are open for business.

Just search for WNIN as Scott mentioned earlier, will still take a good old fashioned check if you want to do things that way.

If you do make a gift to us though, we're really excited to be able to say thank you with some great premiums this evening at our very basic level of $60 or $5 a month.

As a sustainer, we're going to give you access to Passport.

That's our streaming service here at WNIN in and PBS.

You'll be able to stream all those documentaries that I just mentioned to you as well as see your favorite PBS programing there.

You'll get a subscription to Evansville Living magazine, which always contains our monthly program guide at the $90 level.

We've got a really neat thank you gift here, Considering that we're talking about the gay history of Evansville this evening, we're going to say thank you at that $90 level with a PBS gay pride mug.

It's really cool.

We'll also give you access to Passport, that Evansville Living subscription and the WNIN discount member card.

And finally, at the $120 level, only $10 a month.

If you become a sustaining member of the station, we'll send you that PBS pride mug.

We'll give you access to passport, the Evansville Living Subscription, the WNIN Discount Card.

And I'm really excited about this.

This is a neat little bonus here.

Kelley Coures, who many of you know is a local author here in town.

He's written a great book that was published just within the last few months, called out in Evansville in LGBTQ history of River City.

If any of you are fans of David James Two Main Street program on both radio and television here on WNIN, and you may have heard the interview with Kelley or seen that interview with Kelley at some point very recently.

So we encourage you to think about giving that gift at the $120 level.

We're really happy to be able to bring this program to you this evening.

It's great to be able to offer local content to the community and we do want to do more of it.

I don't think we can say enough, Scott, that we want to be able to produce the product.

We want to be able to bring it into people's homes and whatever way it gets there, whether it's over the air or if it's streaming or you're going on the website.

But all of those things cost money.

I'm really, really happy to say that this entire project at the very beginning, at least our upfront costs were covered by some generous donors in our community.

Well, we're asking for your help now is to help us do more of this in the future and help support the message that we're bringing you this evening.

We just simply can't do that without people's help.

And I think a perfect example when we talk about this being the only place in our community to offer this type of programing is you need only look at our annual auction or other things and look at all of the folks from the commercial stations that come to support W and I invite the the weather folks and the news folks.

They come here to participate and support and help raise money for a theoretically a competing media interest because they know we're the place where this type of documentary can land and live and be presented to the community.

And so I just say it speaks speaks of the community support of telling these local voices and local stories.

And we can only do that.

You know, I'm sure my appearance fee was really expensive, but the reality is, is it does cost a lot of money to produce material like this.

Yes.

You know, we're sitting in a studio right now.

We have camera people.

We've got folks in the in the booth that are telling us what to do.

All of those folks have to be paid.

All of these equipment have to be provided for.

And so that's what your money, when you donate to WNIN and does is it provides us the ability to produce these wonderful stories.

So stories are out there.

There are so many other local stories that need to be told that for the benefit of all of us need to be heard.

But the only be done here.

That's right.

Very well said.

And I'll even piggyback onto that and talk about some of our other local productions.

You know, we've spent most of this evening talk about local documentaries, and those are extremely expensive.

They take a lot of time to produce, they take a lot of people to produce.

But, you know, on a weekly basis here, Scott, we're producing local public affairs programing to tell you shorter stories of the community and talk about current events.

We're very, very pleased to be able to bring that kind of programing to you.

But all of it costs money.

So please go to your phone right now.

812-423-5678.

And we know you're sitting there with it in your hand.

You can go online from the very same device that you and I and our if you want to use Venmo or PayPal, just search at WNIN and you can write us a check.

All of those things will work.

The important thing is that you make a gift, and when you do, we're going to say thank you.

We've got some really neat thank you gifts to offer in return at our very basic $60 level or $5 a month as a sustainer passport to access.

That's our streaming service.

It's very popular and very inexpensive.

I might say at $5 a month.

You're not paying that for Netflix or Disney Plus or any of the other ones that I can name Evansville Living subscription for a year.

And of course, that always contains our program guide at $90 or your monthly gift there over the course of a year we will say thank you.

Because of the show that we're doing this evening, a PBS gay pride mug.

You'll also get access to the streaming service Passport Evansville Living WNIN discount member card.

And finally, at the $120 level, $10 a month as a sustainer, the PBS Pride mug Passport Evansville Living the WNIN member discount card and a really cool bonus here.

Local author Kelley Coures new book out in Evansville, an LGBTQ History of River City.

So the important thing, folks, is please support WNIN your public media station.

We do want to tell more of these stories.

We're very, very pleased to have been able to bring you this story of the history of gay Evansville.

It's a story that I don't think has been told before, and we're really happy to be able to bring that to you.

We've got just a few seconds left, Scott, but I want to make sure you get to say something before we say good night.

Well, I just hope that our viewers understand the importance of telling these stories in these voices and provide the support so we can do more of it.

Yep, absolutely.

Folks, you got all the information right there.

812-423-5678.

You can find us online at WNIN.org.

Write a check.

You can use Venmo, PayPal.

I think there's a QR code there at the bottom of your screen.

You can snap that with your phone.

It will take you right to where you need to be to be able to make a gift.

No gift is too small, and certainly no gift is too large.

Scott, thank you so much for being happy to be here.

Always happy to have you at my side.

Thank you for watching.