Video Interview, Tim Mains, April 11, 2012

TIM MAINS: I hope so.

Look good enough.

KEVIN INDOVINO: OK, once I get into this, Tim,

it's just going to be a conversation between you and I.

TIM MAINS: Right.

KEVIN INDOVINO: OK.

Ignore all this stuff.

TIM MAINS: Right.

KEVIN INDOVINO: You know, in the final piece,

people are not going to hear my questions to you,

so if you could try and kind of--

when I ask you something, repeat something back to me

in the form of answers.

Like if I asked you did you notice the color of the sky

today, Tim, your answer back to me would be,

you know, when I was driving around,

I noticed the color of the sky today.

It was blue.

TIM MAINS: So be sure to incorporate

the answer to the question--

KEVIN INDOVINO: Question--

TIM MAINS: --in the answer, yeah.

KEVIN INDOVINO: And when you're talking, and you kind of get

lost, and just--

you lose your train of thought or something,

just say let me start that again.

TIM MAINS: OK.

KEVIN INDOVINO: So we're on tape here, so it doesn't matter.

We're not live.

TIM MAINS: And we can edit anything.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Anything you want.

TIM MAINS: Anything.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Yep.

Are we rolling?

EVELYN BAILEY: Your eyebrows look wonderful.

TIM MAINS: Oh wow, thank you.

My fake eyebrows.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Well, the first thing

I want to start with you, because this seems

to be ingrained in you at a very early age,

is your political interests and your political aspirations.

Talk to me a little bit about how your interest in politics

began.

TIM MAINS: I grew up in a political family,

and so my interest in politics really

originates with my father.

My dad was a very active Democrat committeeman.

He raised funds and had fundraisers at our house

for Senator Birch Bayh and Senator Vance Hartke.

So I met folks who were active in politics

when I was a little boy.

My father actually ran for office twice.

He ran for district attorney, and he ran for a judgeship.

And in both instances, I was the only member

in the family who would go out and campaign with him.

My job was to keep the campaign literature wrapped up

in a newspaper so that it wouldn't get wet if it rained.

And I think he found that if he had a 10-year-old boy with him

that people were more likely to open the door.

So my job was to hand the literature.

I didn't say anything.

I just-- but I watched that process--

that person running for office interacting directly

with the public.

And I was raised to believe that public service--

that serving in public office.

Let me say that again.

I was raised to believe that serving in public office

was some of the highest public service

that one could provide to their community.

The attitude today may be a little different,

but that was the spirit in which I was raised.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Just touch upon-- for me just

briefly some of the more memorable political experiences

that you experienced as a younger person.

You know, your experience with Bobby Kennedy comes to mind.

TIM MAINS: My father never won political office.

He was trounced seriously in running in Indianapolis, which

was a fairly Republican dominated area,

but he fought the good fight.

And I also learned a bit about--

you know, you don't always win in politics,

that you have to-- that it is about fighting the good fight.

And I had the benefit when I was in college.

I'd gotten very active and was very much against the Vietnam

War and concerned about what President Nixon was

doing to the country.

In the 1968 Democratic presidential primary,

there were lots of options, and I was particularly

drawn to Bobby Kennedy.

I actually went out of my way to find out,

using contacts that my father had really established for me,

to reach out.

How do I get in touch with this campaign?

How do I work for this person that I

thought would have a chance to change

the direction of this country?

And I got that opportunity.

I worked for Bobby Kennedy and his presidential primary

in Indiana.

I organized speaking engagements for him

at different college campuses, and I

got a chance to meet him when he was at Ball State.

So it was just an inspiring opportunity.

I suppose that if they had-- well,

they did ask me to travel with him to California and do some

of the same kind of work there, and I knew that I couldn't.

But had I done that, because basically the kind of work

I did was advance work in setting up arrangements

for speaking engagements, then I probably

would have been in the Ambassador Hotel.

And the tragedy of Bobby Kennedy's assassination

was just more than I could bear three thousand miles away.

I don't know.

I can't imagine how I would have responded, had I been there.

But he was an inspiration to me.

And after his death, I had decided

that I was going to stay out of politics for a while.

And I did, until I came to Rochester.

KEVIN INDOVINO: And then what happened?

Take it from there.

You came to Rochester.

You started to get more involved in the local politics and such.

Why?

TIM MAINS: I can't stay away from it.

It was part of my blood.

It was part of how I was raised.

It was part of my belief system that public service

and the political process was critical to what

happens in this country.

And I was a social studies teacher.

And I was really big on government

and how things work--

inspired to travel to Washington DC

and see government in action, witness people

debating on the floor of the Senate or the House.

So politics and the political process,

since it had always been important to me,

as much as I tried to stay out of it or stay away from it,

I couldn't.

I really couldn't.

I was, shortly after arriving in Rochester, to come and take

my first job as a teacher.

I was walking down East Avenue and happened

to walk past the campaign headquarters for Better

Education Today.

Now, I was plugged in.

I read the newspapers.

I knew what was going on.

I knew that Better Education Today was a progressive slate

of school board candidates that were really

fighting to do progressive things in the city school

district, and that the people who

are running against them were very conservative,

anti-busing, didn't want anything to do with change.

And so I couldn't help but at least go in and check it out,

and see if maybe there's something that I could do.

And I met the man who was running their campaign

at the time, who I would later come to know as my county

legislator, Bill Benet.

And Bill sensed right away that I was the kind of person

that he wanted to reel in.

And in short order, I was active campaigning for the Better

Education Today slate.

Tom Frye was on that slate, who would later

become a state assemblyperson and later the county executive.

So it wasn't long after that that I

became a Democratic committeeman,

and then I was out off working on dozens of campaigns.

And so in the course of the next ten, twenty years,

I served as a Democratic committeeman

and worked on all kinds of local campaigns.

Midge Costanza's campaign was memorable,

helping her to become the first woman elected to the Rochester

city council.

Lots of progressive races.

Lots of exciting times.

KEVIN INDOVINO: I was going to ask this next question

a little later on, but it actually seems

like a good point to ask now.

As you started to get into gay activism

here in Rochester, your involvement with the Gay

Alliance and the Empty Closet and beyond that.

How does your political knowledge and your political

experience previously-- well, that you just talked about.

How does that all fit in within your gay activism

here in Rochester?

TIM MAINS: Well, certainly there came a time,

as I continued to be active in politics,

I would also be influenced by my own involvement-- engagement

with what we then called the Rochester Gay Task

Force, which was the political arm at the time

of our local movement.

And one of the issues that we had

was increasing the visibility of the gay, lesbian, bisexual

community.

And so getting politicians to pay attention to the fact

that there was another constituency out

there was important.

So certainly I wouldn't work for a candidate that didn't

have a progressive stance.

There were personal and private conversations

I would have with candidates, trying

to figure out what did they know about our community?

What connections do they have with our community?

How comfortable were they with our community?

And I made sure that they knew, because all of us at the time

were about making a political statement, small p,

by being visible, by being open.

And so when I would work on a campaign,

people obviously knew that I was gay.

They knew that I was active in the Rochester Gay Task Force,

and so that became an element.

And certainly we got to a point where

we were very pointed in terms of sending out questionnaires,

showing up at candidate's nights,

and peppering people with questions about where they

stood on equal rights for gay and lesbian people

that lived in Rochester.

We got a little nudgy, I guess you could say.

And so that clearly did influence the work that I did.

And when a candidate was particularly noxious

on our issues, regardless of what party

they might belong to, then we would spend

some time going after them.

And I had great energy for that.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Moving a few years ahead,

running for political office yourself, city council, elected

to city council, ran for mayor's office,

yet you kind of have to find a balance there

between your gay activism and your political aspirations

for just the local community as a whole.

How did you balance that out?

How did you--

Because you didn't really run as the gay candidate,

but there was probably a lot of people in this community

that were trying to put that title on you.

TIM MAINS: I guess the way that I frame it is then,

and to a certain extent now, as well--

gay issues, gay rights issues are really mostly

a state and federal level concern.

And civil rights, well, you can grant them at a local level,

and eventually we did, but those battles

are most importantly fought at the state and national level.

So running as a local candidate, there

aren't a lot of gay, quote unquote, gay issues

that present themselves.

And so I wasn't motivated to run for local office

because there was some gay agenda that, you know--

despite the fact that they said we had a gay agenda.

There wasn't one.

The agenda that we had was raising people's sensitivity

by refusing to be silent and refusing to be invisible.

And so I certainly didn't have a choice

but to acknowledge my activism in the gay community.

But I also--

That wasn't the reason that I ran.

The reason that I ran was because I

wanted to make Rochester a better place,

and I was concerned about things like low income housing

and lack of a very serious human relations training

in the police department, very poor actions on the city's part

to promote economic development.

Those were issues that were important to me,

and that's why I ran.

At the same time, I had to do so the same way

that I have lived my private and professional life--

making sure that people understood who

I was, what my background was.

So I did it as an out, as a visible gay man,

but not with an agenda or a platform

or a series of issues that were necessarily gay-related.

So constantly-- didn't come up in the mayor's race hardly

at all, but certainly when I first ran for city council,

it was a huge issue.

And I would constantly have to say yes, yes.

So people would get on television

and they go "Tim Mains gay."

And then I would get on and say yes,

and then I would talk about issues.

And if you turned off the volume and just watched

the TV, what you saw was these kind of crazy,

wacko people being all animated and agitated and angry.

And then I would come on, comfortable, and say, "Yes,

that's-- yes, I'm gay, but that's not why I'm running.

I'm running about these things."

And I would continue to talk about the issues.

So I would acknowledge my sexual orientation

and then talk about what I thought was important.

And that was pretty consistently how we

moved through the whole piece.

The problem was that there was a huge amount of homophobia then,

much more so then than now.

And so in the early to mid-eighties, that was still

a big deal, and sadly, some people

could just never stop talking about that.

So I inaccurately thought that at some point in the campaign,

it would just become passe-- that eventually people

would get over it and that it would be done,

but that never happened, that it remained

an issue because people made sure

that it was an issue, right up to the bitter end.

And I think as evidence that it was an issue,

the closeness of the race was an indication

that there were still a lot of people

who weren't quite sure that they wanted

to have a gay person on the Rochester city council.

I mean, I only won by eleven votes.

KEVIN INDOVINO: So let's change gears just a little bit.

TIM MAINS: Sure.

KEVIN INDOVINO: 1970s.

You arrived in Rochester.

What were you finding in Rochester in regards

to what the gay community was like

and how did you find yourself--

how did you start merging yourself

into the gay community?

TIM MAINS: You got to keep in mind where I came from.

For me to emerge into the gay community in Rochester

coming from Indiana, a state, Indianapolis, a city that

was probably twenty years behind where people were here--

coming from a city where I would not want to be visible.

I'd come out to my parents, but they

were very uncomfortable and unhappy with what they thought

was my choice at the time.

They got better educated along the way.

But I came here really with a sense of freedom

because I was away.

I was gone from the community where I grew up.

I was starting fresh.

I was someplace where nobody knew me.

I still came with the conservative baggage

that I carried with me from my college in Indiana,

so I did presume that I would need, as a public educator,

to keep my private life private.

And so I initially came here believing

that I'd be a teacher by day but at night, on the weekends,

I could do what I wanted to do, go where I wanted to go.

And so I explored Rochester and found Jim's.

And I actually was very fond of going

to the Riverview, which was a women's bar,

but they put up with me.

And I had a lot of women friends,

so I could go to the lesbian bar.

I could go to the gay bar.

I wasn't so fond of Dick's 43, but I

liked Jim's and I liked to dance and I liked music.

So it was a great outlet to go and meet people.

And to me, as a new arrival as a fairly conservative upbringing

in a conservative state, I was very happy.

I just found all this opportunity

that I had not seen before.

In Indianapolis, when I went to gay bars,

the only thing that I ever saw were drag shows.

And there were still drag shows at Jim's or at Dick's 43,

but they weren't constant.

Occasionally, there were drag shows.

The sense I had in Indiana was if I wanted to be gay,

I had to dress up as a woman.

And I found that very confusing because I didn't

want to dress up as a woman.

I'd spent all this time figuring out

how I wanted to be a man who loves other men.

And so I found that there was a broader expression for gay men

in Rochester, and gay women as well,

and enjoyed getting to know other gay people.

So it wasn't just my goal to hook up

or to score or to find somebody that I could go home with

but to meet people.

I mean, to genuinely meet people that could become friends.

And some of them have become lifelong friends.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Back in those days,

were the bars the only places that you were finding

to be able to socialize?

TIM MAINS: Mostly.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Can you talk to me a little about that?

TIM MAINS: Yeah, it was a pretty bar-oriented culture

at that point.

I would later discover that there was a small campus

group at the U of R that existed for gay men and women,

but other than that, there really was the bars.

I had been told that there were cruising spots in parks

and up at Durand Eastman Beach.

I never found that exciting or appealing.

So I never explored any of that.

That didn't interest me.

So it was pretty much bars.

And that was the case for a while.

Even after the Gay Alliance was formed,

and we tried to create alternative social

opportunities, they weren't numerous enough--

that the kind of events that we did

and meetings that we had that weren't widely publicized,

and they weren't numerous enough to really draw much of a crowd.

I mean, they were an alternative,

but it was just a fledgling beginning at that point.

As we succeeded in bringing more people out,

I think, and getting more people visible--

I mean, today you can meet people at Starbucks.

You can meet-- gay people meet everywhere.

And the bars are much less of an influence.

Thank goodness, because I'm not sure the bars were necessarily

the most positive approach.

I mean, I think if you look at the stats,

we've got an awful lot of gay people who

are alcoholic and drug addicted and people

who get into escaping the difficulties of their lives

through drugs and alcohol.

I think all that gets promoted if the bars are

the primary social venue.

But that's what it was then and--

KEVIN INDOVINO: Talk to me a little bit about--

there was also some harassment at the bars,

particularly by the police department, et cetera.

You had a particular incident.

TIM MAINS: I did.

I--

KEVIN INDOVINO: Tell me the story.

TIM MAINS: I did.

We had long believed that the police kept a homo file.

And when I worked on the Empty Closet,

Jay Baker was absolutely convinced,

and we got lots of reports from different gay men who

would claim that they were being harassed by the police

and that the police had actually taken down their license plate

number while they were parked in the parking lot

at Jim's or Dick's 43 or the Bachelor Forum.

And the police categorically denied this.

No, we don't keep any file.

But there was a strong belief, and we had enough anecdotal

information that was given to us by members of our own community

that we said that was probably true.

I came out of the Bachelor Forum one night.

It happened to be a weekend when Rochester

was hosting the New York State Coalition of Gay

Organizations, NYSCGO.

So NYSCGO was in town.

Lots of people were there.

We were having a good time.

We'd been out at the Bachelor Forum.

We were going to go someplace else, I don't remember,

but the next stop was going to be perhaps Jim's.

And as I walked to the parking lot,

I saw a police car parked with its lights out.

And I could tell that one of the officers--

there were two officers in the car.

One of the officers was turned and writing something down.

So I had a pretty strong hunch they were taking down

license plate numbers.

So I took a--

ever the good Empty Closet reporter,

I always had a notebook in my back pocket.

I took out my notebook and walked up

and looked at the front of the car

and pointedly wrote down the license number of the-- it's

not a regular license number, but the letter and code number

on the license plate of the police car and then

pointedly put it back in my pocket.

Immediately, the lights came on on the police car.

The men jumped out, grabbed me, both of them--

pretty much larger than I--

had me twisted like a pretzel on the hood

of a car nearby with my face ground into the hood.

They're demanding to see my license and registration.

And I asked them if I was being arrested for a moving traffic

violation.

They said, "No, smart ass.

We want to see your driver's license and your--" I'm sorry,

they didn't ask for my registration.

They asked my driver's license.

They said, "We want to see your driver's license."

I said, "Well, I don't need to show that

to you if I'm not being arrested or stopped for a moving traffic

violation.

I'm happy to give you my name and address.

My name is Tim Mains.

I live at--" I gave him my address at the time.

And they kept insisting that they wanted

to see my driver's license until finally one of our friends,

who had now gathered around and watched this, afraid

that I'd wind up in the police station in jail

over the weekend, because it was Labor Day weekend,

and probably I wouldn't get out until Tuesday morning,

fished my license out of my wallet, out of my back pocket,

and then handed the officer my license.

It was a really clear case of police overreacting,

and I actually filed a protest and filed a complaint

about the officers and about how I was treated.

Once they took down the information,

they told me that I shouldn't be seen hanging around

this area again, another indication to me of what

they were actually doing.

But when I filed a complaint, it took several months

before I got a response.

And the response was, oh, they had stopped me

because I looked like a suspect in a nearby burglary.

Lame excuse.

And I'll never know for sure what happened,

but I didn't get arrested.

I did call them on something I thought

that they shouldn't be doing.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Let's talk about the Gay Liberation Front

at the U of R. You'd mentioned that you had somehow

become aware of them.

At some point, you then asked them

to come and do some speaker bureau stuff at your school.

Kind of walk me through that a little bit.

TIM MAINS: Sure.

When I first came to teach here and in Rochester

and in the Greece central schools, first of all,

I loved teaching and found it a great outlet

in that my goal was--

other people who taught social studies

thought that social studies was about memorizing

dates and wars and generals and that kind of thing.

I thought that social studies is about helping

people be better citizens.

And so a lot of what I did in my class work

was to try and give kids experiences

where they were making sense of the world,

learning about government and history and sociology

and political science, but doing so

in a way that was useful to them as they would grow up

to be responsible citizens.

I had the opportunity to teach--

to create some individual ten week elective courses,

and I created a course called "The Future."

Everybody else was teaching the past.

I'll teach the future.

It was basically what at the time

we would have referred to in social sciences

as a social problems course--

that is, problems that exist in society that people

are trying to wrestle with and figure out and determine

how to resolve.

So issues like overpopulation.

At the time, it was called ecology.

Now the green movement or the environmental movement.

And at the time, the sexual revolution was a big deal.

This is the early seventies, so you have,

basically, the women's liberation movement

that had begun in the sixties and then,

in the very early seventies, the gay liberation movement.

In planning out the course, I had formed a team of students

to advise and to give me suggestions about things

that they might want to do.

So I put a whole bunch of topics out there

and let them decide if of these fifteen topics, if we

could only do seven or eight of them, what would

you like to do?

And so we kind of narrowed down the field.

And the sexual revolution was a big deal

that stayed on the table the whole time.

And they also had indicated to me

that one of the ways that they'd like

to learn about that is they'd like

to invite speakers to come in.

So that's actually the point where

I did enough research to find out, oh my god, there

is a group at the U of R.

And so we invited speakers.

I contacted the Speakers Bureau coordinator, Karen Hagberg

and Karen indicated to me that they'd been burned once

before when they had gone to a high school,

and so they wanted to make sure that this

was an official invitation and a proper invitation.

So I went to my vice principal at the time

and said, "Here's the deal.

I'm doing this class.

And here all the speakers I want to invite.

And the kids would like me to invite people from the National

Organization for Women for women's lib and people

from the Gay Liberation Front at the University of Rochester

for gay lib.

Will you write the letter?"

She said, "Well, you draft it for me,

and I'll fluff it up and do whoever."

But so the letter actually went out under her signature.

We tried to be careful.

I anticipated that there might be

a bit of a reaction from kids, so I selected two seniors,

who were eighteen years of age, who

were legal adults, so that they could

be their escort for the day.

So if anybody ever made any accusations,

I'd have had two independent witnesses who

would be able to kind of buffer my guest

speakers from any harassment or accusations that

might have come from people who are naysayers in the student

body.

The day came and U of R sent five speakers.

So I was expecting two.

I was expecting a man and a woman, a lesbian and a gay man,

and instead they decided, among themselves and the Speakers

Bureau, that it would be good if they

sent a lesbian couple, and a gay couple, and then

a single gay male.

So that's what I got.

The speakers were--

It was a very memorable day.

The speakers were like the Pied Piper.

Everywhere they walked, there was

a string of kids walking with about ten feet

between the string of kids and the speakers,

so they just followed and gawk at them all day long.

At lunchtime, the cafeteria ladies stopped serving food

and all lined up and watch them go

through the line of the cafeteria.

At the end of the lunch period, some students

had rolled folded up lunch tables

in front of the door of the faculty dining room,

so when we got ready to leave, we were actually

kind of barricaded in, and we needed to push our way out

to get them out.

At the end of the day, word of this, of course,

had spread throughout the school within the first thirty minutes

of their being there.

And in the last period of the day,

students were jammed in the back stairwell of the school trying

to get to the first floor because my classroom was

right there.

It was the first classroom next to the stairwell

in the back of the school.

And I had to stand there with the vice

principal and two members of the student leader

corps picking out--

that one's mine, that one's mine,

identifying who was actually legitimately my student

so that they could come into the classroom.

Now, I know you would think that if a teacher could

get three hundred kids to want to come to his class

that they weren't scheduled for, that probably I should get

a commendation or something.

I did not get a commendation.

Instead, I got a letter of reprimand.

So I was called on the carpet the next day,

and I had a meeting with the superintendent

and the principal.

And the superintendent never questioned

the instructional validity of what I-- never addressed

whether that was OK or not OK.

He addressed what I consider to be peripheral issues.

You know, clearly this had caused a controversy.

Clearly people had been upset.

Clearly people had called and complained

to school board members, to the police department,

that I had created such a stir that perhaps I

might have endangered this special elective program

that we were piloting.

In fact, I might have even endangered passing

of the school budget in May.

And worst of all, I had created a fire hazard, because there

were three hundred children jammed

in the back stairwell of the school

that if a fire had occurred, would not

have been able to escape in time.

So it was kind of like falling down the rabbit hole

and finding yourself trying to respond to things that you

hadn't ever anticipated.

It was a long, drawn out year.

It was only my second year as a teacher.

I did not have tenure.

I didn't have any protections at all.

The union jumped to my defense and actually brought

in a very high-powered lawyer from NEA

that came from the national board, who I would later

discover himself was gay, and was

highly motivated to defend me and to make sure

that I was not done in by this, and that I had played

by the rules, I'd done everything right,

the letter had been officially issued by the school,

that students hadn't done anything wrong,

I hadn't done anything wrong, and that the superintendent

really is not my direct supervisor

and has no right putting a letter of reprimand

in my folder.

It was a very long year of meeting with lawyers

and going to hearings and discussing

things along the way.

At the end, there was a negotiated agreement

that my principal would evaluate me at the end of the year,

and if that evaluation was positive,

then the superintendent's letter would be removed from my file,

and if the evaluation was negative,

then the superintendent would replace that letter

with a different letter that basically

emphasized the negative evaluation that I

got from my principal.

So it's kind of a weird kind of thing,

but my lawyer kept saying, "Don't worry.

This is what we have to do for them to save face,

and it will work."

And it did.

I got a positive evaluation from my principal

at the end of the year, the letter came out,

and we were done.

But one thing happened at the very end

of that whole process that was significant to me personally.

We had insisted, throughout this back and forth,

that because they claimed that there

were hundreds, perhaps thousands of people

who had called to complain.

And we had said we're being tried here

by a jury of invisible people.

So you're claiming that there are all these complaints,

but we want to know who complained

and what were their complaints.

you keep saying that there was this--

but it was always very amorphous.

Well, the board clerk or the board

switchboard operator, whoever was at the school district,

never recorded, they told us, any of the names

or addresses or anything.

They just took messages and forwarded them to board members

or to the superintendent.

However, the police department did

have a list of complaints that had come in to them.

And so, as part of the negotiated agreement

at the end of that whole process, because we'd

been demanding to see who these people were,

we were allowed to go in and sit and look

at the log that was maintained by the police department.

And we had to sign an affidavit that we would not

memorize the names, and we would not copy the names,

and we would not contact any of these people,

and we would never use any of this information

against any of the people whose names we saw in the--

All kinds of stuff like that.

So we went in, and first of all, I was shocked that it was--

I expected to be, like, twenty pages, and it was three pages.

It was very short.

It wasn't anywhere near the length

of what they made it sound like.

But more importantly, as I went down the names,

I didn't recognize any of them.

Well, I shouldn't say that.

I recognized a couple, but they were

names of parents of kids that were not in my class.

Not one, not one, not one name on that list

came from a family whose students were in my class.

And I just found that that meant something to me.

And I talked to the lawyer as we laughed

and said, "I don't get it.

I mean, I would have thought that some people who probably

had a problem didn't have the courage to say something to me

might have shown up here on the list to complain."

And he said "No, it's really easy."

See the people who saw the speakers

and who heard the speakers, they had reality to report.

So his take was they went home, and they

had a conversation with their parents about what they saw

and heard.

Their parents may not have liked it,

but they did see and hear things,

and they talked about what they saw and heard.

And I will say my students were phenomenal

in the insight and the sensitivity

that they showed in the questions that they asked.

I was very pleased with how they handled themselves.

The lawyer said to me, the people

who didn't see the speakers had nothing to report but fantasy.

So since they didn't have anything,

they didn't see anybody, didn't hear anybody, they went home,

and they reported what they thought gay people did.

So that's why there were all these crazy accusations

about how they were kissing at the drinking fountain,

and they were fondling people in the bathroom,

and they were exposing themselves in the cafeteria.

All of those wild and crazy things

are kind of the stereotypes of what

they think crazy gay people do.

And kids who didn't have any reality to report certainly

knew that there were speakers there.

So they wanted to be able to talk about something,

and they made it up.

And that sounded plausible to me.

I mean, that was a reasonable explanation,

but it was significant because what

it said to me was that visibility

made a huge difference.

It was a switch between whether or not people were

able to deal with it or not.

And it really was at that point that I

began to question my own personal resolve that I

was going to continue my career being invisible.

Would I continue to do to my students

what my teachers had done to me?

Would I want kids in my classroom

who were gay or lesbian to grow up and think that there

was nobody like them?

Because that's how I grew up.

And steadily, didn't happen overnight, but steadily,

from that point forward, I began to try and get to know

these speakers that I had met.

I went to the Gay Liberation Front

twice and didn't even have the courage to go in.

It wasn't until my third time that I finally

had the nerve to actually walk into the building,

to Todd Union, and to attend a meeting.

And even then, some of the other folks who were there

thought I was coming as that supportive social studies

teacher who had invited the speakers out.

It wasn't readily apparent, nor was I

forthcoming, that I was really there

for my own personal agenda, not just supporting their cause--

that their cause was really my cause.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Let's talk about that then, after the bells.

TIM MAINS: I bet that happens a lot.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Every half hour, I think.

Ten thirty?

CREW: No, it's eleven.

KEVIN INDOVINO: It's eleven already?

TIM MAINS: Oh, wow.

See how flime ties.

KEVIN INDOVINO: There we go.

CREW: Shut this off for a second.

TIM MAINS: Do you have another one coming at eleven?

KEVIN INDOVINO: Yeah, we got Patti coming in at eleven,

but Evelyn can keep her at bay for a little bit.

TIM MAINS: I apologize.

I was late.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Pardon?

TIM MAINS: Yeah, I was a little bit late.

KEVIN INDOVINO: OK.

TIM MAINS: I think it's louder as it goes on.

KEVIN INDOVINO: OK.

TIM MAINS: Moving on.

KEVIN INDOVINO: All right, so let's get into this

pretty quickly then.

TIM MAINS: Sure.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Your involvement with the Gay Liberation Front,

and how did you then--

you became involved with what became the Gay Alliance,

initially because you were actually

charged with drawing up the bylaws for them.

TIM MAINS: Right.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Right.

Talk to me about really your first initial involvement

with what eventually became the Gay Alliance.

TIM MAINS: Right.

The U of R realized that there are an awful lot of townies

coming to these meetings, and they basically

said to the officers of the Gay Liberation Front,

you're a student organization.

If you want to keep a mailbox in the student union

to be considered a student organization,

then you have to be a student organization,

and the non-student members have to go.

And so rather than jeopardize what

really was the founding effort for gay liberation in the city

of Rochester, those of us who were not students agreed, fine,

we'll go form our own organization.

At the time, there were already some other organizations

that had formed.

So, for example, there was a lesbian resource center.

So a number of lesbians were not just feminists but separatists.

They really believe that lesbians

were under-represented.

The minute you said gay, people thought of men and not women,

and it was very important to have a women's only entity.

And so the lesbian resource center had formed on its own

and probably deserves credit as the first independent gay

organization.

When we began to form what would become the alliance,

the name alliance comes from the sense

that we wanted to try and fold different organizations

together.

There was also a political-- at this point, the National Gay

Task Force-- today, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force

had formed and was very active on the national level.

So we had the Rochester Gay Task Force

as kind of a political embodiment of people who

were interested in politics.

And so we thought if we got the Rochester Gay Task Force,

and we got the Lesbian Resource Center,