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,
- and then we formed a men's organization
- to complement the Lesbian Resource Center, the Gay
- Brotherhood, that we'd have three organizations.
- And then the Empty Closet would become a fourth organization.
- So we didn't want jeopardize LRC's independence.
- So we didn't ask people to all come together
- in one organization.
- We decided to be an amalgam of what at the time
- was separate organizations.
- And that's really the concept that we approached people
- like myself, who grew up in the sixties.
- And I considered myself a feminist.
- I had been a longstanding member of NOW.
- But I also understood many women's need
- to be independent and separate, to have their own newspaper,
- to have their own organization.
- That's fine.
- No one wanted to tread on that territory,
- but we wanted to bring all of everybody
- together under one roof.
- And so I was one of the people who
- helped to write the bylaws on a little political government
- thing.
- And I was most proud of, actually,
- the preamble that I wrote, which I think
- has disappeared over the years.
- But it was a passionate plea and call
- for what we need to do in terms of standing up for ourselves,
- and that we can stand up in different ways,
- but at the end of the day, we do have something in common,
- and that is that we're only going
- to get people to understand who we are when we are visible.
- And so we wrote the bylaws, we elected a board,
- and we would have people from the different organizations
- on the board and then some at large people.
- And we first met over in Bull's Head, and eventually,
- as we continued to grow as an organization,
- looked to rent some space at the Genesee Co-op on Monroe Avenue,
- and gave people--
- gave the different officers a place to work.
- The only operation that didn't really
- work out of any of those centers was the Empty Closet,
- which for years was published out of Jay Baker's apartment
- on Alexander Street.
- And that had a fair amount of independence.
- Today the Gay Alliance considers the Empty Closet
- its informational arm, so it doesn't view it as independent,
- but back then we viewed it as an independent organization
- within the alliance.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Tell me about the early days
- of the Empty Closet, working as an editor.
- And so tell me of working in Jay's apartment.
- What was it like?
- What were you guys--
- the challenges and the fun of putting this thing together.
- TIM MAINS: It was a small group, but everybody
- was pretty dedicated.
- Jay is a great character and very--
- and he'd been doing it for a while.
- Larry Fine, I think, had first published the Empty Closet
- as a mimeograph sheet, and then Jay
- had really tried to turn it into a newspaper.
- But Jay didn't know anything about newspapers.
- He was a physics professor, I think, or science professor
- at MCC.
- And I came on board, and I was kind of appalled at how
- they put it all together.
- But there was a great spirit of capturing
- what was happening and letting people know what was happening.
- And if we didn't have something, we'd
- sit down and talk about what should be in the paper.
- And if we didn't have enough stuff, then we'd say, OK, well
- we have to make some news.
- We have to go and make some news.
- So let's go interview somebody, or let's go have a march,
- or let's go do something that we can create a story about.
- So we could have a news--
- He had this electric typewriter that he
- had a roll of paper that would go through, and he'd type,
- and when he ran across the line on the roll of paper that
- was too far, and so that's how he would type his column.
- Nothing was typeset back then.
- He'd kind of paste it up on a big pasteboard
- and give it to Bill Gerling, who would take it to the newspaper
- company that he and his brother ran in Webster,
- and they'd shoot it up or down to make it
- fit on a tabloid sized paper.
- I was fortunate that when I was in college,
- when I was at Ball State University,
- I'd been a student body president.
- And I was student body president when I was junior,
- and my vice president succeeded me
- as president of the student body.
- And Jerry, who lives in Rochester by the way,
- now, with his wife, Cheryl--
- and Jerry was a lot quieter than I was.
- I was a lot more outgoing, a lot more visible,
- and he was more reserved, more quiet.
- And even though he invited me to sit on his staff
- when he was student body president,
- I knew if I was there, I'd get in his way.
- But he really-- I mean, I had the good sense to say love you,
- love what you're doing.
- You're going to succeed more if I'm not around.
- But I had to have something else to do,
- so I got myself involved in the school newspaper.
- And Ball State had a daily newspaper.
- So for a year and a half, I worked on the Ball State Daily
- News, and I learned all about layout,
- and a whole lot about journalism.
- And so I, kind of with a hands on experience,
- came into the Empty Closet with a background
- that nobody else that was helping had.
- And so I convinced them that maybe we
- should use layout sheets and showed them
- how we could get things done-- eventually, how
- we could get our copy typeset.
- And slowly, the paper began to take
- on a more professional look.
- But never lost, even with the professional look,
- it didn't lose that kind of in your face,
- let's capture what's happening, and if not enough is happening,
- then how can we agitate to make something happen
- so that there'll be news.
- Over time, I eventually spent time, a couple of times,
- as the managing editor.
- But the paper, both under Jay's leadership, my leadership,
- Whitey's leadership, and a number of people
- have run it over the years before we were fortunate enough
- to find Susan Jordan--
- but no matter who was in charge, that whole spirit
- of this is a team effort, almost it's a collaborative,
- was really behind how things worked.
- And there were late nights, and there was lots of fun,
- and people who cared about each other
- and cared about getting the word out.
- We made the decision at one point,
- for example, that we would mail the paper
- to every elected official and every clergyperson in Monroe
- County.
- We got the lists, and we figured even if they never
- read the paper, even if they threw it in the trash,
- that from the time it took them to open the envelope
- and see what it was and throw it away,
- they were going to be reminded that there
- was a gay community in Rochester,
- and that that was valuable and important.
- And we targeted those two audiences, elected officials
- and clergy, for that reason.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Here, I'm going to wrap this up,
- so I just got one more question for you.
- CREW: Do you want to redo that last bit?
- KEVIN INDOVINO: No, I actually have it
- in my head where it happened, and I know how to edit it.
- CREW: OK.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: So no thanks, but thanks for asking.
- CREW: OK.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: You look over the past thirty-plus years
- to where we are today.
- What are your thoughts?
- What are your thoughts as to how we got here today,
- and more importantly, what are your thoughts
- in regard to where do we still need to go?
- TIM MAINS: I'm very convinced that we have gotten where
- we are today because many, many, many brave women and men chose,
- sometimes with a great personal sacrifice, to be visible
- and not to hide.
- And I think that the strength of this movement
- is a direct reflection of that visibility.
- In 1987, there was a war conference that
- was held for leaders all across the country,
- and one of the big things that came out of the war conference
- was National Coming Out Day.
- It was to have a day where people
- were encouraged to be visible.
- And I would say, even today, when
- people who have a national or an international standing
- come out, acknowledge their sexuality,
- and add to the broader sense of visibility,
- that that helps us as a community-- when people
- can see that who we love or how we love is a minor factor.
- Other than that, we're the same kinds
- of people that everybody else is.
- When people slowly let go of all of the--
- we used to call it homophobia.
- I'm not so sure that it was fear as it was ignorance.
- But the ignorance led to fear, and people--
- more afraid of themselves and their reactions
- than they are about us, but people have
- let go of a whole lot of that.
- And I think we've come a huge distance.
- I never would have predicted, thirty years ago,
- that today I could marry my long-term partner.
- I would not have imagined that.
- So I think we've made tremendous, tremendous gains.
- At the same time, there are people
- with such deep seated hatred.
- There are still people who are losing their lives because
- of their sexual orientation.
- That says to me we are not done.
- We are far from it.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: OK.
- It's a wrap.
- TIM MAINS: OK.