Audio Interview, Tim Mains, January 20, 2012

KEVIN INDOVINO: OK.

So let's start out briefly.

Are you a Rochester native?

TIM MAINS: No, no.

KEVIN INDOVINO: OK, so where--

TIM MAINS: Born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Actually back then I think we called it India-no-place

or the neon cornfield.

One of four kids, and my dad was an attorney.

And my mom was a stay-at-home mom who never--

I don't know if she even finished high school.

She was a secretary and met my dad in the service.

KEVIN INDOVINO: We might move this closer to him.

TIM MAINS: My dad was very liberal.

I mean very-- he ran for office twice, so my politics part.

My dad discovered that if he took a blond haired smiling

ten-year-old with him to hand out literature,

more people would open the door.

So my job would be to walk door to door with my dad

and keep the literature in a newspaper

to keep it dry if it rained.

And I'd go out with him, and we'd hand out key cards.

He ran for district attorney once,

and he ran for a judgeship once.

He never won either time.

In fact, when he ran for district attorney,

his opponent labeled him a hemophiliac liberal,

a badge which he is quite proud-- he came home and said,

"Do you know what my opponent called me?"

Almost like he was bragging.

EVELYN BAILEY: Wow, what party?

TIM MAINS: Democrat.

He was Democrat.

And back then at least in Indiana even

though it was mostly a Republican state,

there were enough Democrats that--

I mean there were two Democratic senators.

Birch Bayh and Vance Hartke were both Democrats.

Vance Hartke was a staunch anti-war senator.

Birch Bayh authored the Equal Rights Amendment.

And so I mean I grew up--

I remember in high school my father actually ripping me--

coming up and taking me off the bus

that was going to Washington for the March

on Washington in 1964.

Like no, you're not doing that.

EVELYN BAILEY: Wow.

TIM MAINS: Because he didn't think I'd be safe.

I grew up-- my mother is from the South.

So I didn't know or understand all the stuff that

was going on there, but we would go

to visit my mom's family in the summertime.

And I would say, "Why are there signs?

Why are these signs here--

white and colored?"

My father would simply say, "We don't know about that here.

This is mom's home, and we don't talk about that."

So no one ever explained it to me.

I didn't know what was going on.

And I got beat up once because I had

made some comment about the--

I think we were at the movie theater,

and I saw a bunch of people disappearing

in this door in the side of the building.

And I'm like, we're waiting in this big long line,

but these other kids are like coming up

to the side of the window and then disappearing at this door.

Where are they going?

Like, they're going to sit in the balcony.

I'm like, oh.

What are we doing waiting here?

The balcony, that sounded really cool to me.

Let's go sit in the balcony.

And my cousin grabbed me by the shoulder,

and spun me, and said, "Asshole, that's where the niggers sit."

And I didn't notice that everybody happened to be black

going because I just saw kids.

All I said was, "So," and I got the shit kicked out of me.

EVELYN BAILEY: Wow.

TIM MAINS: I mean so badly that my dad sent me

home on the train and decided that I

wouldn't be going on summer trips to South Carolina

anymore.

So I think that I'm guessing--

we never talked about it because I never

talked with hardly anything with my dad.

But my belief is that that episode bothered him.

He didn't think I was able to manage myself

and wasn't about to let me going on some Civil Rights march.

Now my father was actually appointed to the Civil Rights

Commission in Indianapolis when they

formed one, which I think was around that same time,

'64, '65, maybe '66.

When Indianapolis formed the Civil Rights Commission,

he was appointed to it.

He served on it.

So I just grew up in this household

with a anti-war, liberal leaning political dad who

thought that politics was a very high form of public service.

And that was just in my--

I worked on Bobby Kennedy's campaign in college.

I helped coordinate his for school campus tour.

In fact was invited to be part of the advanced team

in California, which if I had accepted,

I would have been in the Ambassador Hotel.

But I knew if I accepted, that meant

I would have had to drop all my classes that quarter

of college, and knew my father would kill me.

So I said, I can't.

No, I can't do that.

And then when Bobby Kennedy was killed, I was devastated.

I didn't think I'd ever do anything in politics again.

EVELYN BAILEY: Where was college?

TIM MAINS: Ball State University.

Actually, I started college at Indiana University

because I wanted to be a music teacher.

I really was a nerd, and I was incredibly naive.

I mean my father was right to be worried because there were

things I didn't know, and so I just kind of blundered ahead

with stuff.

I went to school to be a music major,

but I was a percussionist, so I could not read a note of music

in either clef, nor could I play the piano.

Two skills that I'd learned were pretty essential to someone who

might want to major in music.

And Indiana University is one of the top music

schools in the country.

So I go down there this eager beaver.

I was admitted to this program called Foundations for College,

so I was basically--

it was a competitive program for advanced kids

that they brought in on the summer

before your freshman year.

And what they were really doing was grooming future leaders

at the college, so I mean we took

advanced placement English, a couple of other courses.

And then on Wednesday nights we would have dinner

at the president's house.

We would meet the deans of the different schools.

We would meet all the student members of the student board

that ran the student union.

And so they were kind of like introducing us

to all these things, and people, and aspects of the college.

I was rushed for fraternities then,

but my music gig was not going well.

I went to my piano audition, and they told me

they didn't have a piano class on my level,

but they'd put me in the slowest one they had.

I took a theory test.

And later I would learn in college

that it was normal when you take a test to post

the scores on little sheets of paper

and that the scores would be organized by your student

number, so it's kind of a code.

So it'd be in chronological order by student number.

When I took the theory test, the scores

were posted in chronological order

by score with your name next to it vertically.

So if you were at the top, you literally

had to be boosted on the shoulders of your friends

to see your score.

And if you were like me, fourth from the bottom,

you were on your hands and knees to look at your score.

I mean I later figured out that this was

like an intentional kind of--

EVELYN BAILEY: Kind of.

TIM MAINS: --process.

So I took remedial theory, showed up for my piano class,

and found out that everybody else was reading music

and playing with both hands.

Dropped that.

Took a dance class in it's place.

Managed to pass remedial theory.

Managed to pass my voice audition,

which I showed up to without an accompanist.

Who knew?

Like where is your accompanist?

I'm supposed to bring an accompanist.

OK, didn't know.

Didn't have anything prepared.

The only thing I'd ever auditioned for

were school plays.

So in there you went, and someone played--

you played a number from the show, and you sang that number.

And that's all I'd ever auditioned for.

I didn't understand the big--

and I actually passed my vocal--

actually, my drill instructor from my remedial theory class

was in the room.

Looked out and saw the panicked look on my face,

came out and rescued me, told me she would be my accompanist.

Took me to the music library.

Asked me what I'd sung in solo and ensemble contests

for the last couple years.

Found some of that music.

So I auditioned on two of those pieces

and "God Bless America," which I did a cappella.

EVELYN BAILEY: Wow.

TIM MAINS: But it wasn't going well.

I was beginning to think I couldn't pursue my dream.

Up with People came to the college and sang on the campus.

And Up with People performers stayed

in fraternity and sorority houses,

so I had an Up with People person bunking in my room

at the fraternity that my brother belonged to

and had rushed me to join--

Kappa Delta Rho.

And I just saw Up with People as my escape from I

don't know what I'm doing here.

This isn't working.

I also, while I was there that fall semester,

was invited to a fraternity brother's apartment

and basically date raped at the--

but I was so drunk I--

like did that really happen or I don't--

so I was having major questions about who am I, and what am I,

and what is all this about.

So I joined Up with People and dropped out of college

and said, "OK, I'll escape."

And then I found out that Up with People

was really not what it looked like on stage.

My father was very upset.

By this point, he was working as the chief attorney

for the Veterans Administration, the regional office

in Indianapolis.

So he used his contacts and presented me

with an executive summary of the FBI report

on the organization that ran Up with People, which

was named Moral Re-Armament.

He was like, "What are you doing?"

EVELYN BAILEY: I'm being the renegade.

TIM MAINS: So I'm like, well, I'm

singing about justice, and equality,

and our all getting along, and patriotism.

But Moral Re-Armament actually was

kind of this cultish group that wanted

you to talk a certain way and think a certain way.

And in my journal--

yet, you were supposed to a guidance book,

which is when God talks to you.

And since God-- I'd never--

I kept waiting.

So when God wasn't saying anything,

I just decided to write down my thoughts.

So I really basically kept a diary,

which I had never done before in my life

because part of the drill was you were all supposed

to keep this guidance book to write down

the inspirational things, the messages that you heard

from God that would help guide your life.

And I eventually remember writing that this--

I thought this was must be what communism

was like because everyone was expected to think the same way

and be the same way.

And despite what we were singing about on stage,

there wasn't a whole lot of tolerance

for differences in this group.

I also developed an enormous crush on one of the guys

in the show, and so not that we ever acted or did anything

about that, but found myself questioning more deeply who

I am and what I am sexually.

EVELYN BAILEY: Wow.

So where did Up with People bring you?

TIM MAINS: Well, I stayed with Up

with People for only about half of the year.

And we were about to go to South America, and the people in MRA,

in Moral Re-Armament, believed that when you were on stage

you were exuding Moral Re-Armament

and that this message would penetrate people.

So when you went to bill it in people's homes,

you were supposed to talk to them

about some of the principles, and some of the ideals,

and stuff.

And I really wasn't getting into that so much.

But when we were in the states, I could really sing the show

and believe in the show.

And I really believed in the messages, and all the songs,

and enjoyed the performance, and was learning a lot,

and traveling in a way that I've never done before.

But we were going to go to South America

and take the show to South America.

And I felt like, OK, well, now I'm

learning the show in Spanish, and now it's really

just going to be about MRA.

And I can't do that.

So I told them that this wasn't working for me,

and I was going to be leaving and going to New York.

And they said, "No, you're not.

If you're leaving us, you're going home,

and if you're leaving us, you're not

interacting with anybody else in the cast from now

until you leave."

And so I was basically sequestered

in a motel room in Miami, Florida

until they could get a standby ticket for me

to go back to Indianapolis, which took four days where I

was kind of under house arrest.

That's what I wrote in my journal.

And then went back to Indiana.

So now I had failed at college, and I

had failed at Up with People.

I mean how can you be a failure at

Up with People for God's sakes?

So I decided I really do want to be a music teacher,

and Ball State specializes in teachers.

And IU, boy, they looked down their nose at music educators.

They were a performance school.

So I thought, well, maybe the problem

was the kind of music school I went to.

Maybe if I went to a teaching school,

they'd understand that I need to learn these things so I

can be a music teacher.

So I also by that point was frankly scared to death

to go back to the fraternity house,

face the fraternity brother that I'd had the little thing with.

The girl that I was dating--

a woman at the time--

and I discovered that she had hooked up with somebody else

and was having sex with him.

And that the reason that she broke up with me

and wanted to go with him is because I

wouldn't have sex with her, but he would have sex with her.

And I'm like, OK, well, nothing was working there.

So there was lots of good reasons to transfer.

The interpersonal relationship I had with the world then--

who am I question, the it's not working in this school

and not wanting to go back to the fraternity,

so I transferred to Ball State.

And once again discovered that if you can't read music

and you can't play the piano, you really

can't be a music teacher.

And maybe if I wanted to drop out of school and study

piano for three, four years, five years,

I could learn how to read music, and learn

how to play the piano, and then I could try it again.

I'm like, OK.

So in the meantime, I had taken this dance class.

Oh, oh, I guess I forgot to tell you that.

Between the summer and the fall, I had been admitted on--

I don't know.

I don't know what they called it.

It was basically a conditional admittance to the music school,

meaning we'll let you in because you passed the voice audition.

You passed your major instrument.

But before you can begin your junior year,

you have to take the piano audition and the theory test

again.

And if you don't pass it, you're not in.

And everyone was telling me you will not

learn how to play piano well enough in two years

to pass that piano audition.

So although I was technically a music major on paper,

I had decided in that fall semester I'd better start

looking for other options.

And so because I took this modern dance

class in the summer that I really love, and it was great.

And I had a great time in it, and I did really well,

and I got great pats on the back from the professor.

Thought, well, maybe I could be a dance teacher.

So I explored that and talked to my dance professor,

and she told me what I had to take.

And she said, however, if you're going

to wind up doing that, we really should figure that out sometime

in this freshman year.

And you can't just take regular phys ed class.

You have to take PE for majors.

So in PE for majors, there are all of these football players,

and basketball players, and soccer players.

And they were all taller, bigger,

and then there was the little twink me, the dancer.

And I'm like, that wasn't working out either.

But I did like the dance part.

So at Ball State, I decided, well,

what I'm going to do is I'm-- because it was on the quarter

system kind of like RIT used to be.

So I just decided I'm just going to explore,

and I'm going to take things until I find what works.

So I took sociology, and I took journalism, and I took dance,

and I took all these things, just kind of experimented.

And I kind of fell into sociology,

which I liked the most because I had a horrible crush

on the professor.

One of the students from my high school,

who was a year younger than I was, was at Ball State

and was a music major.

And he was the one who basically told me

you would just have to drop out of school and do this.

And he was gay and knew who he was.

And so we wound up having a thing.

And then I was confused about well am I gay or am I not gay.

So basically the whole coming out thing for me

began happening during college.

I didn't like the idea.

I ran away from it like many people did at that time.

I mean I was socialized that you don't do that.

My father's attitude was that gays

were people who had sex in the bathrooms at the bus station,

and that the judges in Indianapolis

wouldn't send them to jail.

That they would give them a one-way ticket to Cincinnati.

So you try and ship them out.

So that was my father's perception

of what gay people were.

And I didn't know anything think about gay people.

And my friend actually suggested that I read some books

and got me some books from the library

because I was too embarrassed to go and check them out myself.

In the meantime, I'm having an academic life.

And I'm having a political life.

I ran for student senate.

Was-- served on student senate.

Quickly decided that the dorms were a little too intimidating,

so I moved off campus.

So I became a representative from off campus housing.

And in my junior year, ran for student body president.

EVELYN BAILEY: Wow.

You were coming up in the world.

TIM MAINS: So I'm doing all this stuff,

and we had kind of settled into the sociology.

But Bernard Murphy, who was the sociology professor

that I just thought was to die for, his girlfriend was

Marcia--

god, what was her last name?

Anyway, she taught world history.

So I took all the world history from her

that I could or somebody else, and I wound up

majoring in sociology and world history really based

on my attraction to one of the professors

and that the other got me closer to him.

I mean sublimated you know--

how's that for a queer?

KEVIN INDOVINO: And yet you were questioning.

TIM MAINS: Eventually I--

during the campaign for--

in fact, my vice president, the person

that was on my ticket for vice president of the student body,

was Jerry Williams, who today lives in Rochester.

Jerry and his wife, Cheryl Williams, live in Rochester.

EVELYN BAILEY: Wow.

TIM MAINS: And he succeeded me as student body president.

In those days, most often what happened

was the Greek organization kind of ran everything,

so if you were from a fraternity or sorority

and you ran for student body president well

you had the whole Greek system pitching for you,

I ran as an independent.

EVELYN BAILEY: Always.

TIM MAINS: So it was an uphill battle and kind

of like my election to city council, it was a--

not as narrow, but it was by a few hundred.

I think 300 vote margin that we won.

But it was very exciting.

We did some very innovative things in student government,

but now I'm a junior.

Vietnam War is in full swing.

My dear friend Mary Munchell was head of the Vietnam War

Moratorium Committee.

Some other friends-- there were a group of right wing students

would had formed an organization called Project Faith.

We're going to have faith in the president.

We're going to have faith in President Nixon.

And so they would pass out all these things

about Project Faith, and we would

dub them Project Blind Faith.

So I got kind of caught up in helping Mary

with her founding of the Vietnam War Moratorium Committee.

I mean I did stuff with them.

In fact, Mary and I, the day that Bobby Kennedy came

to speak on our campus because I'd helped

arranged all the stuff, we sat with him in the restaurant.

The night that he spoke was the same day

that Dr. Martin Luther King had been murdered.

And he had gotten the news, and so he wasn't going

to stay in the hotel remote.

They were going to drive him back to Indianapolis,

and he was going to give a major address the next day.

And Bobby Kennedy was so cute.

I was just like--

(laughter).

And Mary kept saying, "Close your mouth, close your mouth."

(Laughter)

And he had a piece of peach pie, which he hardly

touched and talked about what is going on in the world.

I mean it was just, it was--

he was kind of in his own little space and reflective.

He'd given a knockout speech in the gym

to a standing room only crowd and was thanking us

for our work.

And we got our little special Secret Service pins

that allowed us to be near him and spent maybe an hour talking

to him in the restaurant.

And he left, and then onto Indianapolis

to give the speech.

And I never saw him again.

But in the course of--

there was just a lot of turmoil then.

So I was doing student government

and there was the stuff against the war.

And I'd read enough books to know

all the things I was supposed to do,

so I was starting to experiment.

But I was still having horrible angst and guilt.

And so in the midst of my year as student body president,

I tried to kill myself and went to the campus clinic

psychologist people.

And they said, "You really need an intensive--

you need to be hospitalized."

In retrospect, I don't think that--

I think they overreacted.

Now as an adult in looking back on that time,

I understand, oh shit, it's the student body president.

If he offs himself on our watch, we're going to be in trouble.

Let's get him out of our hands.

But again, being naive and saying,

well, if he says that's what I should do,

then I guess that's what I should do.

So I tell my parents who are like freaked out.

I have a press conference and tell the campus community that

I'm--

not why.

I didn't tell them I tried to kill myself.

I didn't tell them I thought I was gay.

I just said, I'm having a really hard time.

Lots of people have hard times.

I'm going to take the recommendation that I received

to spend on a voluntary period of time

in a mental hospital in Indianapolis.

And while I'm gone, Jerry is going to run the show.

And I want you to know--

and I'm choosing to tell you that because there

are a whole lot of other people like me

who struggle with things, and you should know that.

So I left and went into a mental hospital in Indianapolis,

which was horrific.

And I quickly figured out what I had

to do to get myself out of there because I didn't belong there.

I didn't.

But back then no one knew what to do with us.

EVELYN BAILEY: No.

TIM MAINS: It was 1960--

I don't know-- '68 or '69.

And so I quickly realized that this wasn't working,

and it was finally in the hospital where I'm like,

there is nothing wrong with me, where I finally

could come to that conclusion.

And more because I had to figure something out

because it was awful.

I mean there were people who were crazy in this place.

EVELYN BAILEY: And you knew you weren't.

TIM MAINS: And they were dangerous.

And they were living in the room with me.

And the staff was brutal.

I mean brutal.

So luckily I am a fast learner, and I figured out

what I needed to do and what I needed

to say to get my little body checked out, so I did.

My father during this period--

the doctor in the hospital told him

that it was probably his fault. So it was great.

He already thought that.

Now he has an authority figure that he respects telling him

it's true.

Like oh great.

So dad-- you can't tell your mother it will destroy her.

My mother-- you can't tell your father he'll

have a heart attack.

So I came to terms with it, and my parents never did.

Never did.

They couldn't-- I mean because they felt it was their fault,

and no amount of my saying, "No, it's not.

No, it really isn't."

And it's OK.

And so I got more and more OK with it

in this accelerated way to get myself some freedom.

And that's what happened.

And I went back to college, finished the year.

The following year Jerry was going to be president.

He offered me a position in his cabinet.

I knew that Jerry was very quiet, and very methodical,

and very purposeful.

And I knew that if I stayed in student government,

I would overshadow him.

And so I thanked him for the offer, and said,

"What you really need is you need

me to be out of your hair."

So I didn't run for my seat--

because I would have had to have run again

to continue on to be in the student senate,

to be an officer within the student senate.

Because he could have appointed me to any place in his cabinet.

And I decided to do something totally different

and remembered a journalism class that I'd enjoyed taking,

so I signed up to work on the Ball State Daily News, which

is how I got my training that I would later

use on The Empty Closet.

So I went to work on the Ball State Daily News,

and I started as just a reporter.

And they liked my writing, and so right away I was--

in the summer, I was made an associate news editor.

So I was helping the editor in chief on the news section,

and then in the coming year I was made communicative arts

editor.

Although I didn't think I was so obvious,

it must have been really obvious to them,

so I got to do on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays was--

the two center pages for the paper

were the feature section of the paper.

And on Monday, Wednesday and Friday,

they focused on the arts.

They focused on theater, film, whatever.

So I learned about how to do layout,

and how to justify print, and about fonts, and just

tons of stuff about printing that I never would have known.

EVELYN BAILEY: It was your music background, you know.

TIM MAINS: Oh, must've been.

So I finally finished-- oh.

In the summer between my junior and senior year,

I was supposed to work in a summer school in East St.

Louis.

That didn't work out so well either.

So every time I'd go into an urban environment or every time

I went to a racially mixed environment,

I didn't fair well.

So I got jumped in a gang initiation on my first day

there.

I mean I hadn't even been fully moved into the apartment.

EVELYN BAILEY: Wow.

TIM MAINS: And the principal of the school

said, "I don't want him here.

He's not-- he's going to be--" I was the only white person

working in the summer school.

EVELYN BAILEY: Oh wow.

TIM MAINS: If you know anything about East St. Louis, it's--

I would later learn--

I didn't know.

I just thought, oh, it's an urban--

that's really pretty raw.

EVELYN BAILEY: It's bad.

Very bad.

TIM MAINS: So because of that, I was

supposed to student teach in Gary, Indiana.

They wouldn't let me student teach in Gary, Indiana.

The college, again, was nervous about--

great, we can't have this kid that

has this high of profile going to Gary, Indiana

and getting stabbed, or killed, or beaten up, or whatever.

So they would not approve this.

I had made all the arrangements.

I'd gone and visited.

I'd picked the school.

I had a sponsor teacher.

I had a sponsor school.

No, nixed.

So I had to student teach at a small rural high school

near Muncie in Albany, Indiana, and did my student teaching

there.

Finished in the winter quarter.

And while I was basically all done

and was going to take some kind of graduate courses

in the spring quarter, people from Greece Central Schools

were on campus recruiting.

Now Ball State is like one of the top teacher training

institutes in the country.

So for people who were big recruiters, that

was a frequent--

80% of the graduates in Ball State University

go into teaching.

Of course probably 30% of them are nuns.

But at any rate, a recruiter was on campus.

They happened to have a vacancy in their district,

and it was teaching world history.

And I had a teaching major in world history.

I had a teaching major in sociology.

It was perfect.

It was a chance to get away from India-no-place, escape,

and it looked really attractive.

And it was Rochester, which I thought was a city.

Because in Greece, the address was Rochester.

So I took this job, and put everything I owned into my car,

and drove out to Rochester, New York at the beginning of March

after the third or fourth major blizzard of the season.

Discovered that the schools had been closed

on Thursday and Friday, and probably

would not open again on Monday.

When I drove down Ridge Road, the snow

was piled so high it was up to the speed limit signs.

It was like driving through a tunnel

that someone had scraped the top off of.

I'm like, oh my god, what have I done?

KEVIN INDOVINO: What year was this?

TIM MAINS: 1971.

KEVIN INDOVINO: '71, OK.

TIM MAINS: So I should also tell you that in my senior year--

because Mary Munchell-- the Vietnam War Moratorium

Committee kind of disbanded.

But all of us peaceniks and all of us

people who had decided that we just

love tweaking the people in the Panhellenic council.

And in the--

I can't remember what they called the Greek council

for the men.

So we decided we were going to form a campus organization.

And we were going to form something

that had both men and women in it because all of us

also were little budding feminists.

And so we wanted to have a Greek organization that

had men and women.

So it was going to be a fraternity and a sorority.

We were going to call it a Serenity.

And the Greek letters were going to be rho, alpha, chi.

So if you know the Greek letters, that's Pax.

So we formed this, and we filed for simultaneous membership

in the Greek Council and the Panhellenic council.

Forced them to give us a mailbox in the Student Activities

Center.

We had officers.

We got pins made, and we'd have Serenity meetings.

It was just a hoot, something that we have lots of fun doing.

So I came here from a anti-war feminist background,

found myself in Greece, Greece.

Greece.

OK, not exactly the city.

EVELYN BAILEY: But close.

TIM MAINS: I lived on Lake Avenue.

I had got an apartment on Lake Avenue,

and had a pretty rough beginning because I took over

for someone who had resigned so he

could install swimming pools.

And I discovered hit kids, and never told his non-regent kids

he was leaving.

And his regents kids loved him because he would always

tell them what was going to be on the test,

and then they got mister innovative

me, who comes from this university that's

taught me how to teach using the inquiry method.

And I walk into a profession and a department

where most people who taught social studies

thought that social studies was memorizing facts and people.

So it's you have to know about people, and dates, and wars.

And I thought, no, it's about making sense of the world

and learning what you know about sociology,

and political science, and economics, and history

so that you can be a good productive citizen.

So I would ask them essay questions

that didn't have one right answer, and that they had--

they hadn't written essays before.

So the regent's kids hated me because I didn't give it

to them cut and dry.

The non-regents kids hated me basically

because they hated him.

And they never got a chance to take it out on him, so they

were taking it out on me.

So at the end of my first three months in March, April, May,

June, I'm like I just had this fabulous student teaching

experience where everyone loved me

and everything had gone so swimmingly,

and then I came in taking over a job mid-year.

I later learned that it's very difficult for anyone

to ever step into a school and take over a job from somebody

else in the middle of the year, but I

didn't know that because I'm so stupid and naive.

And naivete is a real theme in my life.

And my department chair congratulated me for surviving

and assured me that my next year would be better.

So the next year I spent one full year

teaching world history or was that the year that I got

moved--

no, I think the next year I got moved to American history.

Like I got hired here because I have a background in world

history, but he wanted to shake up the American history team.

And I was obviously doing lots of good-- the kinds of things

that you were supposed to be doing,

but not enough people were.

So we taught American history, and we discovered that year

that if you--

the Board of Regents used to have a ruling

that you couldn't sit for a regents

unless you had so much seat time.

So they took away the seat time rule

and said, "No, it's when you're ready."

So I'm like, hey, if we get all of our people

to take the regents in January and they pass it,

then we can teach whatever we want.

Like we can teach electives.

And the district says that they would

like to do a pilot of selective elective.

Well, let's give them their pilot.

So all of us--

the other two members of my eleventh grade social studies

team were just about as crazy as I was,

and they agreed that we could do that.

And so we pumped people as close as we could to getting through

and almost 90%--

89% of our kids--

some got nervous and chickened out at the last minute.

But we agreed that in the electives that we offered,

we could offer the normal American studies units

in the third and fourth quarter, but we

could offer other things too.

So since so many people passed, that

meant we had lots of options that we could create.

So to get back at all my people who were so hung up on history

and wanting me to talk about the past,

I would just say I would teach the future, which was basically

a social problems class.

But we would explore all the contemporary issues of the day.

So we would explore overpopulation.

We get people from ZPG to come and talk to us,

and we would talk about ecology we called it then

and what were we doing to the environment.

And we'd talk about the revolution in mechanics,

and genetics, and things that were possible, and making

robots, and clones, and what were

the moral implications of that.

And we would say the sexual revolution

as it was called then.

EVELYN BAILEY: There you go.

TIM MAINS: So we wrote all these--

I mean I wrote a course in criminology.

I wrote a race relations course.

I did a race relations course called Sunshine.

I did a course called Economics by Simulation,

and I did a course on the future.

So I cooked up four brand new ten-week courses

that dealt with exciting things that kids were actually

interested in, and learned something from,

and got really into.

And for the future class, I formed a little band

of student advisors because I gave them this menu of here's

all the things we could do, but we

can't do all this in ten weeks.

So you got to pick and choose.

So they help pick what the topics were going to be.

And they help decide--

because I said, so we're going to do a mixture.

We're going to do some reading.

We're going to invite guest speakers in,

and we're going to have people prepare and do

discussions and debates.

And the sexual revolution-- they specifically--

they're the ones who suggested, well,

we should invite representatives from women's lib and gay lib.

And I'm like, I don't know about that.

OK.

Now keep in mind I'm arriving on the scene thinking

that gay and teacher do not belong in the same sentence,

let alone in the same classroom.

So I mean my personal resolution about my sexuality was--

I mean I came from Indiana, which

is at least fifty years behind.

The Midwest wasn't where the East Coast was.

There was no Stonewall in Chicago.

It happened in New York for a reason.

So I just presumed that I would have my professional life

and then I would have my private life.

So I kind of had that boxed in my head

and just assumed that that's how I

was going to live for the rest of my life.

By that point I was very comfortable.

I knew who I was, but I was the farthest thing from out

you could think of.

So I thought, OK, I'll take this to my boss,

and then she'll take it to her boss.

And he'll say, are you out of your mind?

So I took it to my boss-- was the only female administrator

in the high schools at that time--

Dee Eisenhart.

And she's like, oh sure.

That sounds like a great idea.

I said, well, don't you think you should take it to Paul?

I'll handle it.

And I don't know if she told him and he didn't get it

or if she never quite fully explained it to him or not,

but she wrote the letter because she--

I called Karen Hagberg, who was the speaker's representative,