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,
- and said, I'm a high school teacher at Arcadia High School,
- and we're doing a unit on the sexual revolution.
- And we would like to have some speakers from the Gay
- Liberation Front, and if I could,
- I'd really like to have a man and a woman.
- I'd like to have both a man and a woman.
- Well, we can do that, but we have
- to have a letter of invitation from your school.
- So I went back to Dorothy and said, "Dee, they
- need a letter."
- And she said, "Well, you draft it for me and I'll send it."
- So I drafted the letter.
- And it's getting closer to the day, and I'm thinking,
- you know, this could get out of hand.
- EVELYN BAILEY: No.
- TIM MAINS: I think I'm going to take two of the kids
- that I had last year who are now seniors, who are eighteen.
- They're of legal age.
- They're considered legal adults, and I
- will have them be the escorts for our speakers.
- So if anybody ever says that something happened,
- there will be two witnesses--
- independent witnesses that will be able to--
- so thinking that I'm at my conservative best,
- we proceed with the speakers.
- Well at the end of the day, I thought
- I was getting one man and one woman.
- Because it wasn't as simple as Karen just picks
- people and sends them, she would talk
- to the group of people who were doing speaking engagements.
- They said, "Oh no, we should send couples
- because that's more representative."
- So on the day before, I get a call
- saying there will be four people coming.
- Well, five people came.
- So there was two lesbians, Liz Bell and Marge David.
- And there were two gay men, Danny Scipioni
- and his boyfriend, whose name I still
- don't remember-- he was just a pretty blond boy that
- didn't say a whole lot during the thing--
- and a single gay man, RJ Alcala.
- So I was expecting four, but I got five
- because Danny said, "Well, RJ and I aren't a couple."
- You need-- we had a male couple.
- He had, on his own, independently
- invited his boyfriend.
- So I greeted them at the front door, introduced them
- to their escorts.
- I had five classes that day.
- The kids knew that they were coming.
- We'd anticipated this.
- I thought the kids asked very thoughtful questions.
- When we went to lunch, we went through the cafeteria line
- and all of the women behind the counter stopped serving
- and all kind of lined up and just gawked at them
- as they went through the line.
- We went into the faculty lounge, and the woman
- who was the health teacher was like, "Oh my god, I
- didn't know this was going on.
- Oh, could you come and talk to my health class?"
- I'm like, I didn't plan on that, And of course they
- were quite willing, and it fit within between the classes
- that I was teaching.
- So when we tried to leave the faculty lounge,
- kids have taken folded cafeteria tables.
- Cafeteria tables that were extra tables that were
- folded together and had been up against the wall
- and rolled them in front of the door to the faculty lounge,
- creating a barricade.
- When we opened the door, we have to kind of push our way out
- to get out.
- Basically, what had happened was within minutes of the speakers
- being there, everyone in the school
- knew that there were queers in the building.
- So everywhere they walked there'd
- be like this parade of kids kind of wandering behind them,
- but it'd be a distance of about five to ten feet.
- That they'd be looking at them, gawking at them,
- just fascinated that these people were in their school.
- And my classroom at the time was on the first floor
- near the back stairwell by the cafeteria.
- And as I went to retrieve them from the health class
- that they had done, the advanced health class,
- and approached my classroom, I was
- greeted by the vice principal and two or three members
- of the Student Leader Corp because
- the whole back stairwell of the school
- was jammed with kids, who were all telling them
- that they were in my class, and they wanted
- to come and hear the speakers.
- So I had to stand there and say, that one is, and that--
- so I had to be able to point out to them who--
- EVELYN BAILEY: Who was.
- TIM MAINS: --legitimately was so that they
- could be let through the crowd to come in
- to hear the speakers.
- And I'm like, wow.
- I just was--
- EVELYN BAILEY: Overwhelmed.
- TIM MAINS: I was quite stunned, but there were no incidents
- throughout the day.
- I think I heard them called a name once or twice.
- It wasn't like-- I mean there was
- more fascination and curiosity.
- There were indirect signs of meanness, putting the things
- in front of the door.
- But people weren't really mean to them or to me.
- I know you're probably thinking that someone who
- could get 300 kids who voluntarily would want
- to come to their class surely they're
- going to get an award, right?
- I was going to get a citation.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: That's going to be my question.
- After this day is done and over with,
- what was the administration's reaction, or the community's
- reaction, parents' reaction?
- TIM MAINS: The next morning I was called into the principal's
- office and told that the superintendent was
- waiting to meet with me.
- I'd never met with the superintendent.
- I certainly knew who he was.
- He gave a presentation on the first day of the school
- to everybody in the Olympia Auditorium,
- so they all heard him speak, but I'd never
- had a private meeting with him.
- So I came in and he began asking me
- if I understood the consequences of the event
- that I had held the day before.
- So I go into, well, I think kids understand
- a lot more about human sexuality,
- and I think they understand a lot more about--
- he's like, "No, no, no.
- I'm asking if you understand the impact
- that this program is having on our school and our district.:
- I said, :I bet you're going to tell me," and he did.
- And he proceeded to suggest to me that I had--
- that there was a tremendous community outcry,
- and that his assumption was that most members of the community
- who expressed concern did not understand this issue perhaps
- the way I did or my students did.
- They simply knew that people who were very different--
- that their kids were allowed to be exposed to people who
- were very different, and they may not want their children
- to turn out that way.
- And because of those feelings, that I
- may have jeopardized our being able to pass the school
- budget this year.
- I may have jeopardized the very elective program that I
- had been so anxious to promote.
- In order to earn tenure in this district,
- you have to perform in a way that
- supports not just your class, but your school.
- So following that meeting, I was given at the end of the day
- by my principal a letter of reprimand
- from the superintendent.
- And it included all these things like bad planning, jeopardized
- the school budget, but the one that I really loved
- was that I had created a fire hazard because it took a vice
- principal and two members of the Student Leader Corps
- to clear a jammed stairwell in the back of the school.
- And had a fire occurred at that time,
- there could have been serious injuries.
- EVELYN BAILEY: Of course.
- TIM MAINS: So I didn't know.
- And what did I know?
- I was a second year teacher.
- So what did I know?
- So I call my union rep and said, "What's a reprimand?"
- "Well, we're going to have one of our lawyers
- come and explain it to you."
- So long story short--
- we went through this battle with them about this.
- And I think what's interesting--
- Dave-- what was his last name?
- The superintendent was actually a very progressive guy.
- In fact, he's one of the people who founded the Aesthetic
- Institute later.
- And in retrospect, when I talked to the attorneys,
- he never questioned the instructional validity
- of what I did.
- They never said-- they really were
- trying to hang their hat on all these potential ramifications,
- but no one ever suggested that I made
- a bad instructional decision.
- EVELYN BAILEY: Right.
- TIM MAINS: And so the union decided
- that we were going to fight this battle on the basis
- that I had received a reprimand from someone who is not
- my direct supervisor, and that the contract was very clear.
- I'm not supervised by the superintendent.
- So he has no right to supervise, to reprimand me,
- to do anything like that.
- So there was just back and forth negotiations,
- and we filed this grievance.
- And we're going through this stuff.
- And I thought, well, now it's over,
- and just I'm completely exposed.
- And just oh well, it's over.
- But no, people didn't immediately
- respond that way because I think people go to great lengths
- to ignore things that make them feel uncomfortable.
- So I continued teaching.
- The budget did pass.
- EVELYN BAILEY: And there was no fire.
- TIM MAINS: And there was no fire.
- I would later learn--
- because I became good friends with Cathy and Jerry Faylen,
- and Jerry was the police chief at the time.
- What Jerry told me was that the police department got
- a whole lot of calls, and that board members
- got a whole lot of calls.
- And basically the board members after they got annoyed
- with too many calls, took their phone off the hook,
- but not before they called the superintendent and said,
- "You better deal with this tomorrow."
- His calls were all about, well, they
- were kissing at the drinking fountain.
- They were exposing themselves to people in the bathrooms.
- And he said, "What we did was take the complaints.
- We called the school.
- We were told that there were two students who
- had been with them at all times," and they were--
- Cathy Dial and, who's the other girl?
- Anyway, there were two young women.
- And he said, "We invited them to the station.
- We interviewed them in a typical investigatory way.
- We didn't ask them pointed questions.
- We asked them what unusual did you see,
- and the only thing they reported to us is the speakers
- were barricaded in the faculty room by--"
- because they didn't come into the faculty room.
- They had sat outside, and so they saw all of the activity.
- The only thing that they reported
- was that the speakers had been harassed
- by students who tried to barricade them into the faculty
- lunchroom.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Good for them.
- TIM MAINS: So he said, we never did anything.
- And as I would later learn, Jerry and Cathy had a gay son.
- So he at least was astute enough to imagine
- that most of these things probably didn't happen.
- But at the end of the whole negotiation thing,
- we worked out this weird thing about how my principal is
- going to evaluate me.
- And if the evaluation was positive,
- then the letter of reprimand would
- be removed from my personnel folder,
- and I would have to surrender my copy
- and all copies would be destroyed.
- And if the evaluation was negative,
- that it was found that I was not functioning instructionally
- the way I was supposed to perform,
- then the reprimand would remain.
- And at the end of the year, I got a positive recommendation
- or positive evaluation, and it was found to be--
- continuing to do very effective--
- my kids were getting the highest scores
- of anybody in the school.
- It's kind of hard to say you're doing a bad job when
- 89% of the kids passed the regents half
- way through the school year.
- But one of the things we had asked for was that--
- throughout this whole thing on several occasions,
- there had been references to the many complaints that
- had been made, and we had asked to see the complaints
- because we suspected that they weren't valid,
- but no one would ever articulate them.
- It wasn't until quite some time later--
- many years later when Cathy Faylen was on my Teacher Center
- Board, and I was the Teacher Center director.
- That I was having dinner with them one night at their house,
- and I said, "Jerry, can we play a little history game here?
- Can you tell me about--" he told me
- how that came down, but no one told us.
- Just there are all these complaints.
- So part of the deal that the lawyer from NEA had negotiated
- was that we would be allowed to see the complaints,
- and they were all kept at the police department.
- Some were gathered by the police department.
- Some were gathered by the district office
- and sent to the police department.
- They were all at the police department.
- So I went to the Greece Police Department.
- And I had to sign an affidavit that I would not
- attempt to memorize any of the names of the people
- on this list, and that if I ever tried
- to contact any people on this list,
- that I could be prosecuted.
- Just all kinds of--
- I'm looking at the lawyer.
- This is really like Nazi-esque.
- He said, "Just sign it," so I signed it.
- We went in.
- We sat down.
- They let us have as much time as we wanted.
- I think we were there for almost an hour looking at the stuff.
- And on the whole list, there were some of the things
- that Jerry told me about.
- Some of them didn't have complaints.
- They just had names of people of why are you letting queers
- into Arcadia High School, and not every complaint
- had a name to it.
- But of the names that were on the list, none of them
- were parents of my students.
- Zero.
- And that was profound to me.
- It was like wow.
- The people-- and I finally--
- it took awhile.
- I didn't come to this like right away,
- but over time I came to the conclusion
- that the kids who saw the speakers
- and asked questions of the speakers, they went home
- and they reported reality.
- And the people who didn't get to see the speakers, who
- were dying to see the speakers, and curious,
- and anxious to want to get in a room and really
- find out what this was all about, because they didn't
- have any reality, they went home and they
- reported their fantasies.
- They reported the things they think that we do.
- That we make out at the drinking--
- we grope people in the bathrooms.
- And we-- all this stuff was all because they didn't
- have any dose of reality.
- And that for me was the transformational shift
- from visibility makes a difference.
- I need to be visible.
- I should not live my life the way someone might--
- I should not have ever grown up thinking
- when I began to think I might be queer
- that I was only person like this in the world,
- and surely there were high school teachers,
- and surely there were other people in my life
- that I just didn't know about.
- And I only could grow up with that tortured, awful feeling
- like there's something wrong with me
- because everybody else was invisible.
- So I made a personal-- it was a personal, political decision
- in 1972 or 1973, it was the summer of '72,
- that I was not going to be invisible.
- So I still was scared shitless to walk into my first Gay
- Liberation Front meeting.
- I mean I drove to--
- what's the name of the hall?
- EVELYN BAILEY: Todd.
- TIM MAINS: Todd Union.
- I went to Todd Union and sat and stood there.
- And I couldn't go in.
- I could not go in.
- Twice-- I went twice.
- And then the third time I went someone recognized me.
- And even though I was mortified, at least I had a personal--
- I think it was Danny.
- Said, "Oh my god!"
- I wanted to turn around and run.
- It's like could you be a little more discreet here?
- So I started going to the Gay Liberation Front stuff
- and of course the university wanted
- to kick all of the townies out because it was a student
- organization after all.
- So those of us who moved off campus said, OK, fine.
- We'll form our own organization, so I
- became part of helping to write the bylaws for The Gay
- Alliance.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: OK, but let's step back though.
- First, it was The Gay Brotherhood, right,
- when you moved off campus?
- TIM MAINS: There was the Gay Brotherhood--
- actually no, it wasn't anything at first.
- We just met.
- And actually, no, the women's group was first.
- There was a women's group that had already formed.
- EVELYN BAILEY: GROW.
- TIM MAINS: Yeah, right.
- That's it.
- GROW.
- Gay Revolution of Women.
- EVELYN BAILEY: Yes.
- TIM MAINS: And they actually had formed spontaneously
- before anybody was asked to be kicked off.
- So because there was GROW, then there was The Gay Broth--
- then, OK, so we kind of like said,
- alright, we'll form a companion.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: So was The Gay Brotherhood formulated
- while you were still on campus?
- TIM MAINS: No, no.
- EVELYN BAILEY: No.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: OK, because you were off campus.
- TIM MAINS: Right, so we got on off campus.
- And there were actually a few women
- that were meeting with us, but we're like, OK,
- so we wanted to form just one organization,
- but there was this other organization.
- And so we said, OK, we'll form The Gay Brotherhood, so
- a complement.
- Well, some of us in The Gay Brotherhood
- were basically feminists.
- My whole sense of gay civil rights
- was we should have control of our bodies, which
- was what the whole feminist movements initially was about
- was we don't belong to anybody.
- We're in charge of our bodies, and we
- should be able to decide for ourselves who we
- are, what we are, how we live.
- So in a lot of ways, I always felt that the gay rights
- movement was spawned by the feminist movement,
- was an offshoot of it in some ways.
- But I didn't like this whole Gay Brotherhood and GROW.
- And there were women who were very separatist in GROW,
- but there were other women who weren't and who
- felt like we did that there's more power
- and there's more punch if we've got one thing.
- So eventually we formed The Gay Alliance
- as a melding of four organizations--
- GROW, The Gay Brotherhood, The Rochester Gay Task Force,
- which was a kind of a political activist group,
- and The Empty Closet.
- So back then The Empty Closet was really
- treated as independent of any organization.
- It was just-- and my model--
- when I started working in The Empty Closet,
- Jay Baker was the editor.
- We did it in his apartment on Alexander Street.
- He used to have a Selectric typewriter
- and put thin spools of paper in and typed stories on it,
- and know that you have to return when you ran out
- of room on the paper.
- And then he would paste these up.
- And they'd always be different sizes,
- and the printer would have to shoot it up or shoot it down
- to make it fit on a tabloid sized paper.
- And mister neatnik me thought, oh my god, this is awful.
- So I finally persuaded him to--
- would you let me-- what if we used layout pages?
- What if I introduced you to the concept of a grid?
- So I brought my background and my experience
- working on the Ball State Daily News,
- which I did five days a week for a year
- to play on The Empty Closet and help to move that to a more
- professional looking paper.
- Got very caught up with--
- at that time, there were a number of gay newspapers.
- Had a brief affair with the cartoonist
- for The Body Politic, which was Toronto's gay newspaper, which
- was actually run as a collective.
- And got really inspired by some great gay journalists
- in Philadelphia, and San Francisco, and Boston,
- and tried to push us to be more of a newspaper.
- But back then there was hardly-- and there's so few of us,
- and people wouldn't want to publish
- their names in the paper.
- They'd publish under a pseudonym or they would publish
- with just their first name.
- And if we didn't have things happening,
- then we would make things happen.
- We'd go make things happen.
- It's like, we have to have some news for this month.
- What can we do?
- So it was in some ways exciting.
- I was getting really hippie-esque.
- My nerdy little horn-rimmed glasses, short cropped hair,
- student body president started letting his hair grow.
- So in a couple of years I had really long hair.
- Walt Delaney was a phenomenal photographer,
- and Walt lived in Whitey LeBlanc's house.
- He was a tenant in an apartment in Whitey LeBlanc's house.
- Whitey was one of the people who helped found The Gay Alliance,
- and Walt had been a photography student at RIT
- and just took these incredible beautiful photographs.
- So I tried to get more quality in the writing,
- and more quality in the pictures,
- and more quality in all of this, and yet
- still keep that edge of we're a movement paper.
- This is not the D&C.
- And eventually spent some time--
- I don't even know when.
- We all took our turns doing stuff.
- So people would take their turn being president of The Gay
- Alliance, and sometimes it would come around
- and you had to do it again because they're
- just weren't enough people.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Yeah.
- At this time, I want to get a sense
- of the social, cultural, political environment of what
- was going on with the paper and with The Gay
- Alliance, and the people that you
- are working with like Whitey, and Jay, and RJ,
- and all those people.
- Did you get a sense of the impact you were going
- to have in this community?
- Did anything kind of linger in your mind?
- It's like you know what?
- We might be able make a difference here.
- TIM MAINS: No.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: No.
- TIM MAINS: No.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: So why do it?
- What was the main mission of what
- you thought you were doing?
- TIM MAINS: It was about visibility.
- It was about making sure that people knew that there
- were gay people here.
- I convinced them, for example, that we
- should send The Empty Closet to every politician
- and every member of the clergy that we could get.
- So we got lists, and I said, "Even
- if they throw in the fucking trash,
- from the time that they have to pick up that envelope
- to throw away, they have been reminded that we're here."
- And it was all about increasing visibility.
- It was all about making the statement that we are--
- what we could do to increase our visibility,
- and it wasn't about my visibility.
- In fact, interestingly after I started getting active,
- and I made a conscious--
- I sat down with my friends, Donna Cichan,
- who had been a social studies teacher with me
- when that whole future class thing happened.
- I was not allowed to teach the future class again.
- I was allowed to teach all my other electives,
- but that class didn't stay in the curriculum.
- But it used to be that Donna and I were best friends,
- and she knew I was gay.
- But we were both single, and we were good friends,
- and so we'd go to things together.
- And I had said to her after going to The Alliance,
- or not The Alliance, the Gay Liberation Front
- thing throughout that summer and into the following fall
- and next school year, I said, "We can't do this--
- I can't do this with you anymore.
- You can't be my--
- We can't go to things together because it
- makes it too easy for people to assume we're a couple.
- So I mean I love you and you're my good friend,
- but I need to go to events either by myself
- or with a male escort."
- And so that was part of what I thought
- I was making a statement.
- But again, people will ignore stuff that--
- it wasn't until 1975--
- by this point, I mean I'm completely
- immersed in The Gay Alliance, and The Empty Closet, and all
- this other stuff, that I had taken time off from school
- to work on my master's degree.
- I had taken a leave of absence for a semester
- because I had to do an internship.
- I was getting my master's degree in counseling,
- and I'd gotten my master's degree in counseling by
- and large because I was doing so much of it with kids
- that the counselors in the school
- confronted me about why do you keep sending kids to us.
- They have a counselor.
- They picked you.
- So if you somehow don't feel confident about that,
- then go get whatever training you
- need to do because they obviously
- come to you for a reason.
- They're comfortable with you, and then just
- at the point where they think that you trust them,
- you shove them off to somebody else.
- That's not the way counselors treat their clients.
- So I went to get my degree in counseling,
- not because I wanted to become a counselor,
- but because I had been doing so much of it as a teacher.
- Because kids wanted to come and explore all kinds of stuff,
- and I would get nervous about that
- and wanted to send them to the pros.
- While I was on that leave, there was an event--
- we were protesting an episode of Marcus Welby.
- It was about this seventh or eighth grade biology teacher
- who takes his kids on a field trip
- and rapes one of his students.
- Of course, the National Gay Ta-- then it wasn't that NGLTF.
- It was just NG, National Gay Task or NGTF.
- And then there was also a media monitoring group pre GLAAD.
- I don't remember the name of it, but we'd
- gotten alerted by the media watch group about this
- and by the NGTF.
- So we were all over channel 13 about you can't air this.
- This is defamatory.
- It's promoting stereotypes.
- Pedophilia and homosexuality are not one in the same,
- and this is just promoting really awful stereotypes that--
- and so there was a whole protest about that.
- And I was called by the D&C and asked--
- because at the time I was still on--
- I don't think I was president.
- I was just on the board of The Alliance.
- But I was very active with the Rochester Gay Task Force,
- the political group.
- And we were organizing a picket at channel 13.
- So I get a call from the D&C asking me to comment on it,
- and I remember thinking only--
- I never anticipated that I'd be called by the press.
- We hadn't role played this.
- And I was just like, oh, the press.
- What I do with that?
- And I remember thinking briefly, OK, what
- could happen if I give a statement to the press?
- And I'm like, I have no idea.
- Whatever it is I will deal with it.
- So I did it.
- Gave the interview.
- And I was quoted in the paper--
- Tim Mains, a member of the board of The Gay Alliance.
- And I remember thinking at the time
- because there was a man on the board whose son was gay
- who was a physician at Kodak.
- Worked for Kodak, and he was in the clinics,
- or the medical stuff, the services they provided.
- And the only reason he was on the board is his son was gay,
- and he had real passion about wanting to help.
- And I remember thinking, well, just because I
- say I'm a member of the board of The Gay
- Alliance doesn't mean I'm gay.
- How we fool ourselves.
- But it's that.
- It finally was when it was in black and white
- that people at school then said, oh.
- And then the treatment at school changed completely.
- So I had been gone.
- The kids who I'd had as juniors while I was gone
- had become seniors and graduated.
- When I came back from my leave, they put me in ninth grade.
- I never taught ninth grade.
- I had great fun doing that too.
- But I walked into the school, and no one knew me.
- So I didn't have a direct relationship
- with any student in the school.
- So now I come back, and I'm not Mr. Mains
- that great social studies teacher.
- I'm a teacher with a label.
- And the harassment was merciless.
- I mean I could not walk through the hall.
- Every public second that I was in the hall it was faggot,
- faggot constantly.
- Most of it was behind my back.
- Most of it was I couldn't see who it was.
- It was the typical kind of bullying
- that kids do to each other, but I was a convenient target.
- I remember coming into class that fall
- and putting my hand on someone's shoulder.
- He pulled away.
- I used to be very touchy with my kids.
- And everyone pulled away.
- Eventually, my class, the kids that I had, got over it.
- It took a few weeks.
- It wasn't immediate, but they got over it.
- And eventually we got to learning, and doing
- social studies, and being a class,
- and they would let it go.
- But three quarters of the rest of the school--
- actually more than that because there were still
- a lot of freshmen who weren't in my classes
- who I continued to hear from.
- I had the air let out of my tires.
- I would get prank phone calls at home.
- I got very weary, distressed.
- I could never have imagined.
- And Donna, my good friend Donna Cichan,
- said, "Wow, this is worse than when you first came,"
- remembering the first three months that I was there
- in the spring of 1971.
- And a few of the teachers would try to stand up for me,
- but not many.
- So I finally decided that I was not going to be the victim.
- And so when I could see- so I decided I was going to try
- and figure out who the primary culprit,
- who was doing it the most because I knew--
- I had been teaching long enough by then.
- There were ring leaders.
- That there were people who would set the tone,
- and then other people would copy them,
- and that my goal was to figure out who those folks were.
- And I asked other teachers to help.
- I said, I don't want to hurt them.
- And I don't want to get them in trouble.
- I want them to stop.
- If I ever saw someone--
- if we were passing in the hall and you were walking by me
- and said it, I would immediately stop and grab you by the arm.
- Say, "Excuse me.
- I have never called you a name in my life.
- I don't know what makes you think you have the right
- to do that to me."
- Let them go and walk on.
- So I began slowly trying to edge away at it.
- And as I did that, more of my colleagues began to do that.
- Alan Cusio was the librarian.
- And Alan would say to kids, "I don't
- know what Mr. Mains is, but I do know he is my friend,
- and I don't appreciate your talking about him that way."
- So other people would attempt to--
- so it began to tap down and over time my kids, in my class,
- eventually got to a point where they would stand up for me,
- and say, "Leave him alone.
- He's my teacher and he's a good teacher."
- And I had decided when they made me a freshmen teacher,
- to teach freshman social studies.
- I knew I was coming in to the school
- and not having an anchor because the last class I'd had
- was gone.
- So I had volunteered to be class advisor to that class.
- And so what happened was, the counselor--
- in Greece, counselors move with the kids.
- So the counselor for that class, Joan Mars,
- I approached and talked her into being my co-advisor
- because I knew that she would be an anchor
- to help me work with them.
- And originally I just thought to work
- with these new batch of kids.
- I mean, when I asked her to do it,
- it was before school had even started.
- So I didn't know that this crap was
- going to hit me in the face.
- And over time as those kids kept growing up
- and I kept getting new kids, eventually there
- were enough kids in the school that I did have a relationship
- with who would stand up for me, that the kind of nastiness
- at least got tapped down so it was not constant.
- But I will say it did not go away the entire time I
- was in the classroom.
- For the remainder of the time that I
- was a teacher, it never--
- it did not evaporate.
- It was always there at some level.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: You were an easy target.
- TIM MAINS: Yeah.
- But I, at least understood that it wasn't me.
- It was them.
- And I also understood, hey, you set yourself up for this.
- You said you wanted to be visible.
- This is part of what comes with visible.
- So I mean, I came to terms with it-- not right away.
- I spent nights crying.
- Sometimes I would-- go, I don't want to go to school today.
- I do not want to go to school today.
- I do not want to go to school today.
- I just, I dreaded it.
- So I would go through periods of being very weak and very--<