Oral History Program Connell O’Donovan Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Jim Miles 1 November 2022 – 21 December 2022 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Connell O’Donovan Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Jim Miles 1 November 2022-21 December 2022 Copyright © 2025 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description Queering the Archives oral history project is a series of oral histories from the LGBTQ+ communities of Weber, Davis and Morgan Counties of Northern Utah. Each interview is a life interview, documenting the interviewee’s unique experiences growing up queer. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: O’Donovan, Connell, an oral history by Lorrie Rands and Jim Miles, 1 November 2022 thru 21 December 2022, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections & University Archives (SCUA), Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Connell O’Donovan, conducted in November and December 2022 by Lorrie Rands and Jim Miles. The interview takes place over Zoom. Connell talks about his experience growing up queer in Northern Utah and coming to terms with his sexuality. He discusses his activism at the forefront of Utah’s queer movements in the ‘80s, finding his own belief system outside of the predominant religion of the area, and his struggles with mental health and queer relationships over his lifetime. JM: The date is November 1 at approximately 1 p.m. We are across Zoom; we are all in our respective areas. I am the interviewer today, Jim Miles. I will be conducting the interview and recording it. My personal pronouns are he/him and I identify as just queer, as the umbrella term. With me on the interviewing side is Lorrie Rands. Do you want to introduce yourself? LR: Yep. I'm Lorrie Rands, oral historian for Queering the Archives Project in the Stewart Library. My pronouns are she/her and I identify as lesbian. JM: And then we are interviewing today.... CO: Connell O'Donovan. And it's 2022. You missed the year. JM: Oh, did I miss the year? We've got the historian on the mic. Would you mind giving us your pronouns for the record and sexual orientation? CO: I identify as gay, queer and non-binary, although I sit uncomfortably with non-binary. I've got to figure something else out. But I use he/him pronouns. LR: I'm just going to pick up quickly with—so you were born at the Hill Air Force Base Hospital? CO: Yes. LR: On the 14 of September, 1961. CO: Correct. LR: So is that where your dad was stationed at the time? 1 CO: Yes and no. My understanding is that he was a civilian, but he worked for the Air Force as a helicopter instructor. So at some point or other, he was in like the Air National Guard or something. I'm unclear on those details as to when he was National Guard and when he was just a civilian. My father, his name is Claude O'Donovan. He's from Paso Robles, San Luis Obispo County, California. And in the late ‘50s, after graduating high school, he decided to come to Weber State, actually, because they had one of the only engineering programs in the country at the time. So he came here. He went to a sock hop that my mother was at, and they met at this 1958, ‘59 sock hop. LR: Interesting. CO: He came from a rambunctious Roman Catholic Irish family in California and met my very Mormon mother. Her name's Patsy Beazer, B-E-A-Z-E-R. They got married, actually, on Halloween 1960. LR: Oh, wow, okay. And had you soon thereafter? CO: Yeah. LR: About 11 months later. CO: Right. LR: Okay. Go ahead. CO: Well, and then I was an only child for 10 years, and then my little sister was born. But that's later. LR: Okay. So you have one sibling? CO: Yes, who no longer talks to me. LR: Did you grow up in and around Hill Air Force Base? CO: Syracuse, I mean, for the first four years, yes. Then my father's employment—I usually refer to him as either the sperm donor or the paternal unit, because… I think he's still alive. I haven't checked for three years. Last I heard, he was in South 2 Carolina, but we haven't spoken since 1992. He's to the right of Donald Trump and extremely anti-gay. Extremely anti-Muslim. Extremely anti-immigrant. Extremely sexist. I think he's on wife number eight now. He's not a polygamist. He's a serial monogamist. But anyway, his employment took him to the base that's near Mineral Wells, Texas. I can't remember what the base is called, the air force base. You're there for a little bit, for like a year or so. Then we moved to Mobile, Alabama, to the base there, and we were there for a few months. It was there that I met Glenn, who was my age. We're both five or six years old. We lived in a predominantly black mobile home park. Right? Glenn was another of the white kids that were in my neighborhood, and he and I fell in love. We married each other when we were five years old. We had a full-on ceremony and everything, so Glenn is my first husband. Then soon after that, my father left that whole military-adjacent business and we moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, to work on the oil pipeline that was being installed. My father eventually bought—or he was the silent partner in a business that did bush flights. So they had small airplanes and helicopters that took people all over the Alaskan Bush to deliver mail, to deliver food, to move hippie ornithologists and ichthyologists to different areas or, you know, get them settled into camp and stuff. So we lived in Fairbanks from, oh, first grade till eighth grade. So I consider that I grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska. That's where I spent the most of my childhood. LR: Okay. Quick question. CO: Yes. LR: So you talked about—was it in Alabama or Texas, with the first husband? CO: That was in Alabama. Mobile, Alabama is where Glenn and I got married. LR: Okay. So you mentioned you were about five years old. CO: Yes. 3 LR: I want to just start with a couple of basic questions here. I don't have my list of questions with me because I wasn't going to do the interview. JM: I can help you with that one. So I assume you're asking what they were taught about sexuality growing up? LR: And gender roles. JM: And gender roles? LR: Yes. CO: I can't think of much about gender roles, but I remember hearing the word ‘homosexual’ being used. This was again about when I was five and I asked my mother what that meant. I kind of got it, but I asked her. She, on a five-year-old level, you know, told me, “You know how your father and I love each other and we're married. Sometimes men love men and sometimes women love women, and that's called being homosexual.” I was just like, "Oh, that's what I am." In my memory, I said that to her. "That's what I am." She was totally fine. I don't remember her clasping her pearls and fainting or anything. I don't remember any judgment at all for three years. And then something happened where I went into the closet. As far as gender roles, my mother is—was. She passed away 10 years ago. She was extremely butch. I can only remember her wearing a skirt two or three times. She might have worn them a lot to church, but her father and then her brother were her bishops. They, as I recall, let her wear pantsuits to church, even though the dress code was a dress. I mean, I dress like her. She loved plaid and always had cowboy boots on or moccasins or hiking boots. She did not own any high heels or anything like that. So my understanding of gender roles is very different, I think, than most people, because my mother is extremely competent and she can do anything a man could do, but twice as good and twice as fast. She was 4 an incredible auto mechanic. She was a hunter and a fisher. She worked for the U.S. Forest Service out of Ogden. Oh, gosh. I mean, from when I was in eighth grade till she retired decades later. She was a forest ranger, a cartographer specifically. She drew the maps for the Forest Service of all the trails and campgrounds and everything like that. My father was also very butch, so I feel like I was raised by two butch men, in a way, gay butch parents. My mother came out to me. When I re-came out to her when I was 18, she was like, "Oh, I was a lesbian in high school." I was like, "Oh, what?" She claimed that once she married my father, it changed her and she magically became heterosexual. Therefore I could do that too; that was within my power because she had. In the meantime, she was sleeping with women in her ward. You know? My parents were divorced by this time. That's why we moved from Alaska when I was in eighth grade, because my parents divorced. Father stayed there and me and my mother and sister moved back to Syracuse. So she was messing around with her gal pals but claiming to be heterosexual. I was like, "Oh, okay. Very interesting." LR: So you talked about how three years after you had that conversation with your mom about that you were gay, that you identified that way, something happened that closeted you. Are you willing to talk about that? CO: Oh, sure. My life is an open book. If you dare ask, I dare answer. LR: Well, I dare ask. CO: Okay. So we were back in Texas, living in Mineral Wells again. We owned a show horse, an Appaloosa named Chief Knockout. We were always going to rodeos and stuff, showing him at these... I don't have the vocabulary for it because I was too young. To me, they're like beauty pageants for horses, you know? You just show off 5 your horse and, and our horse was, if I recall right—well, Chief Knockout was the number one horse in Texas in one of these years. We called Chief Knockout K.O., short for knockout. K.O. had a trainer. Gosh, his name now skips my mind. But anyway, the horse trainer had a son named Bobby who—I was eight and he was 10, 11. At one point we were at a rodeo. My parents were down dealing with the horse, and Bobby and I were sitting in the bleachers watching the show and stuff. We had crushes on each other and were rather physical with each other. But I just laid down on the bleacher and put my head in Bobby's lap. He was stroking my hair, and my mother caught us and she grabbed me and took me down, pulled me down off the bleachers, and we went down behind the bleachers and she just screamed at me, "You're never, ever to do that with a boy again. Don't be physical. Don't touch. This is wrong. You can't do this." And so that's it. I was shocked. I had no idea that society and some religions were really disapproving of this. That's when I went in the closet was I went, "Oh. I can't have these feelings and act on them like I want to." LR: Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate it. I'm doing like figures in my head. So your sister was born when you were in Fairbanks. Is that correct? CO: Yes, in 1970. LR: Okay. So as you're grappling with just—a question I would like to ask is during this time when you've closeted yourself, you're still in elementary school trying to just— because not a lot of—well, I shouldn't say that. Let me just restart the question. As you're going through this time, did you have—like I said, you've closeted yourself. Was there anyone you felt like you could talk to about what you were feeling, about the attractions you were having that all of a sudden are bad, according to your mom? What were some of the things that you did to help yourself during that time? 6 CO: I'm just going to answer it kind of in a broad way. The school system in Fairbanks in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, was astoundingly wonderful. I had a really, really good experience in Fairbanks. The teachers were amazing. They were mostly hippies who were attracted to Fairbanks because it was a boom town through the oil pipeline. You know, everybody was just making a lot of money, spending a lot of money, so the quality of education I got was really great. I mean, I never felt super, like, supported or anything. Well, I do remember one Halloween—not telling my mother, but I had forgotten that we're supposed to wear costumes, or I didn't want to wear the costume that I had for Halloween night. I didn't want to wear it to school, because there was kind of a trick-or-treat day when everybody can wear costumes. Instead, I got my mother's one-piece bathing suit, and I put on long johns under it because I was really cold, and then put on my mother's one-piece black and white houndstooth swimsuit, and it had, you know, really solid cups in it. So I had breasts and showed up at school in this outfit. I want to say it was third grade because I think it was Mrs. Avery, and Mrs. Avery was not pleased. I mean, I didn't have a wig on or anything like that. It was my boots, long underwear, and then this swimsuit. It was just like, just totally ridiculous. She called my mom, and my mom was horrified and brought my regular costume to school, I think, and had me change. So there was kind of that negative reaction to me cross-dressing. But otherwise, I was intelligent and oh, it was—everything was really racially diverse. All of my classes were really racially diverse. A lot of Latino kids, a lot of African-American kids, and a lot of Inupiaq and local indigenous Alaskan kids. It was very multiculty at that point, so I was getting this amazing cultural diversity, and we did a lot around that. 7 But as far as sexuality, nothing at all. There was some bullying. Well, I have a chipped tooth here and nine stitches here, and that was from about... Oh, I think I was in fourth grade. There was a bully who just was taunting me mercilessly about being gay and calling me all, you know, ‘fag’ and ‘sissy’ and all this stuff. And I had a crush on him. He was two years older, I want to say. He was in sixth grade and I was in fourth grade, and during recess he just started wailing on me and he picked me up and threw me into a dumpster. I struck my eyebrow on the edge of the dumpster, and I broke my tooth. So I had to go to the hospital, and the paternal unit shows up really angry, like, "What's going on?" I told them, "Well, you know"—I think his name is David or whatever—"David was teasing me and calling me names and he beat the crap out of me." Then my father was just… He was angry at me, you know? "Well, if you wouldn't be..." My parents called it ‘squirrely’. Acting squirrely was acting faggy, so he was like, "If you wouldn't be so goddamn squirrely," you know? My own father was brutally homophobic and very verbally dismissive and hurtful and sometimes physically, he crossed the line a few times on physicality. Nothing I could do satisfied him. I could never live up to his expectations of manhood and manliness. In one of our conversations after I came out to him, he said, "Oh, I knew you were gay when you were three." Then he said, "And I did everything I could in my power to stop it, to change it." I told him, “Well, yeah, I know. I was at the end of I was at the other end of that. I remember well everything that you did to me to try and butchify me and etc.,” you know. It’s just really painful to think about how you get beat up so severely, and then you get berated when you go home and humiliated all over again. You're not safe. There's just no safe place for you. 8 I think that's one way that the queer experience differs from, like, racism. If you're an African-American kid and you're getting beat up because you're black, you go home to a black family and they embrace you and commiserate with you and give you coping skills or whatever, you know? And we don't get that. We do now; parents seem to be doing much better now these days. But back then, absolutely. There was no respite for me. There was no refuge at all, and it was so difficult. It was so isolating and alienating on so many levels. I just never felt close with my parents because of that. Neither. My mother was also fairly verbally abusive of me and dismissive because she was so butch herself and she couldn't figure out how could these two butch people have this fairytale look, this little fae magical being who talked to the police and smelled the flowers whenever he got a chance to? They didn't have a clue how to raise me. LR: I really appreciate your comment about the—I normally don't interject like this, but your comment about what it's like to go home and how that differs when you're queer. I really appreciate that, so thank you for sharing that. CO: Sure. LR: So unless—do you have questions, Jim? JM: Yeah, I do have kind of a couple of cultural questions. You said you grew up in a kind of a multicultural area where you're experiencing a lot of different cultures and stuff like that. And you mentioned that your father, I believe, was Roman Catholic and your mother is Mormon. Is that correct? CO: Well, he—so, to marry my mother, he promised to become LDS. So he did get baptized LDS around the time that they married, and then when I was three years old, we were sealed in the Salt Lake Temple. I remember that very clearly. I was horrified to see my father in drag. You know the LDS temple garb and stuff, and what men wear is very feminine. They have feminine names. Men wear a bonnet 9 and an apron and a robe and slippers. In a binary system, those are more of a feminine nature. I just remember being in the waiting room in the Salt Lake Temple, waiting. They were going through the endowment ceremony and all that, and then I was ushered into the ceiling room. Oh, but right before that, they said, "Okay, you're going to see your parents wearing special white clothing and you can't ever tell anybody about it. It's sacred, so don't ever describe what they wear to anybody." I go in and I see my father in what to me looked like a chiffon dress because it's very pleated and goes down mid-ankle. I just like, "Whoa." I was like, “There's no problem. I will never, ever tell anybody that my dad wears a dress in the temple.” So that's about the Mormon. Yes, so he became LDS. JM: So he becomes LDS and then obviously you guys get sealed, which is a religious— CO: Ceremony. JM: Ceremony. Thank you. I was blanking on the word. Does your family continue— because you mentioned that post-divorce, your mother is messing with women in the ward. Do you go to church in ward meetings regularly? Is that a big part of your upbringing? CO: In Fairbanks, Alaska, we went maybe once a year, if that. Then when the divorce happened and we moved back to Syracuse—though, you know, we went socially; we went every Sunday, but that's just because that's what you did. My mother was not a believer, really, and I wasn't either at that point. Later on, I did have a conversion experience and really threw myself into Mormonism. But at that point, no, we were just social Mormons. If we didn't want to go to church, there wasn't a lot of pressure to do that. We snuck meals in on Fast Sunday instead of fasting and things like that. 10 JM: So would you feel that your family was particularly religious? Was that a part of your—no. So not even— CO: Socially, yeah. When we moved back to Syracuse, we moved onto the road where there were three of my mother's siblings living all within a block. When they would have family home evening on Monday nights, I would usually go over there and participate, and I'd go to Mutual on Tuesday nights, which is the meetings for youth. But we didn't, our family, when we were alone, we didn't have family prayer. We didn't have family scripture study. We didn't do family home evening just amongst the three of us. So no, we weren't really observant. JM: Okay. That's very interesting. That's definitely a different perspective than a lot of queer people we interview, especially who have remained in the Ogden area. Obviously there's a lot of homophobia you're experiencing in Fairbanks, Alaska and throughout your childhood. How do you feel that differs from the stereotypical kind of northern Utah upbringing? CO: It was much worse in Syracuse than it was in Fairbanks. In Fairbanks, I mean, there was only just a couple or two or three of the school kids that were really bad. In Syracuse, every male from the age of 11 to 20 was what I would call a redneck. There was so much homophobia being skewed by all the boys constantly. This is mid to late ‘70s, too, so all kinds of mullets and big trucks with big tires and just that whole culture of, you know, redneck-ery. If you didn't hunt and if you didn't fish, you really stuck out, and I hated both of those things. Of course, my mother was constantly trying to get me to be more butch and to go hunting and stuff. She would buy me rifles and shotguns and handguns and hunting vests and fishing poles. I was just like, “What am I going to do with this stuff?” Eventually, she would always end up using it, so they were basically just for herself. She would give them to me, but then. 11 In one particular instance, she had just gotten me a shotgun and a new vest. I can't remember... There's a special name for it, but it holds the ducks and stuff and pheasants that you kill. I can't remember what it's called. JM: Shooting vest, generally. CO: Yeah, no, it's—anyway. I was just like, "What am I...? Okay.” My birthday's in September, and fall is the duck hunting and pheasant hunting and all that. This one, it was pheasant hunting, and I was made to go out with a bunch of guys. I had put a book inside my vest and took my shotgun and my new vest and wandered off and then just sat under a tree and read all day long. But then as I was coming back, I found two pheasants in the ditch that had been shot. So I showed up with these two pheasants, and my mother was so proud of me because nobody else had two. I was the only person that had gotten two pheasants that day. But then I told her, oh, and she was so angry with me. Then she took the shotgun away. I think probably the best one. Then she used them, of course. LR: Okay. I want to go back a little bit to Fairbanks. CO: Okay. LR: You've talked a little bit about your elementary experience and a lot of things that happened during that time. CO: Yeah. LR: Are there any other memories surrounding elementary school that you'd like to share that seem relevant? CO: No, I can't think of really anything. LR: So as you're moving into junior high, this is about the time that your sister is born. Well, your sister is born when you're still in elementary school. I'm making you older than you were. I apologize. CO: No, that's right. 12 LR: Being 10 years old when she's born, what was that like for you? All of a sudden you're not an only child. You now have a sister. Were you excited? CO: Oh, I loved it. Especially after the divorce, I was her primary caregiver because my mother was working. I was a pretty good cook, and I pretty much changed all of her diapers. I don't think—my mother probably did a few, but my father never, ever would change a diaper. That was very much women's work in his eyes. LR: Okay. So you were really excited when she was born and enjoyed being an older brother? CO: Yes. Everybody loved my sister, Tracy. She was the golden child of the family. Both my parents adored her. I adored her. You know? LR: That's awesome. So you started junior high in Fairbanks. Where did you go to— actually, first of all, where did you go to elementary school in Fairbanks? CO: Nordale Elementary. LR: Okay. Where did you go to junior high in Fairbanks? CO: It was called Main Junior High. LR: Main? CO: Main, like Main Street. My last year there was the year that it closed. It was really dilapidated, and they were constructing a new middle school or junior high. But it wasn't completed yet, so our class was the last class to use Main. I don't know what the new one is called, but anyway. LR: So how did your junior high experience differ from elementary? Because you said you were really bullied in elementary school. Did that change at all in junior high in Alaska? CO: I don't remember any bullying in junior high in Alaska. When I moved to Utah, yes. Then I transferred to North Davis Junior High. They're in Clearfield and there was Coach Clayton who taught. No, or was he in high school? No, I think he was in 13 junior high. He was the most sexist, racist, homophobic pig you can imagine on the face of the earth. He was horrible and he taught—you know, he was the football coach and he taught health sciences. Of course. So, yeah, we learned about the birds and the bees from this horrible little man who just… Oh, God, he drove me crazy. He humiliated me a lot in class and stuff and made fun of me. I don't remember specifically any of the students really bullying me until high school, and then when I got into high school, there were two or three that were really nasty. LR: Okay. You mentioned that you moved to, or came to Syracuse because your parents got divorced. CO: Yes. LR: About what year was that, that you moved to Syracuse? CO: I want to say 1972, ‘73, somewhere around there. LR: Okay. What was that like for you to go from this diverse area that you were living in in Fairbanks to Syracuse, Utah? CO: The homogenous Syracuse where everyone's white and Mormon and we're all related because of polygamy. I mean, in some ways, I was super happy to be away from my father. That brought a lot of deep joy to my life. And my extended cousins—my mother was super close with her siblings and so their kids felt almost like siblings to me. This was a return to that large extended family that I was really close to, and I loved that. Also, oh, my mother's mother. Oh, bless her heart. I love Grandma Beazer. Her name is Minnie Blanche Baker Beazer. She had nine kids and I think there's probably 45 grandkids on the Beazer side. I always knew that I was her favorite. I just knew it. I was kind of the middle-lower end of the kids because my mother was one of the youngest, so I was kind of towards the younger group in the cousins. But I just always knew I was Grandma's favorite. 14 So returning to Syracuse meant going back to one place that I always felt like I was—the only person in my family that I felt offered refuge to me. I know she knew I was a magical fairy child and she embraced that and sustained and supported me in all of that. That was a big deal. I have nothing but the fondest memories of her. Her cooking her bread, she made the most amazing homemade bread. I actually remember being bathed in her kitchen sink—which, of course, everybody got to bathe in her sink when we were little kids. But I definitely have memories of that, even though I couldn't have been one years old and I don't know how I know that. She was just a hugely important figure to me as well, kind of spiritually because I never understood the patriarchal God, you know? He—that was my father, who was a horrible person, whereas Grandma to me was divine love. So when I look into my understanding of divinity, it's through my grandmother's eyes—or through my eyes, looking at my grandmother—is how I understand what is divine, if that makes sense. LR: Yes, it does. Very much so. I like to go linearly, so forgive me for coming back to the parts where we're kind of focusing on. When you were in North Davis—because you were only there for one year, correct? CO: I was there for—it was part of eighth and all of ninth. LR: Okay, so a year and a half, roughly. CO: Year and a half. LR: Okay. You've kind of mentioned how it was different from the Main Junior High in Fairbanks. CO: Right. LR: I'm going to ask the favorite memory thing. Do you have a favorite memory that just stands out to you of your time in junior high? 15 CO: Well, back at Main, I felt like I was really popular and had a lot of friends. Then there were two teachers, the German teacher and the French teacher. The French teacher was a man who was German and the German teacher was a woman who was French. Go figure. Then they got married; they were engaged to marry. But I just remember them being such amazing people, and I was probably teacher's pet for most of that. That can be a negative role for some in some ways, but I think I was pretty mature about it. I hope I was, because there are those sickly sweet teacher's pets that everybody behind their backs is just kind of, "Ew, gross." But like I said, I feel like I was pretty popular and people really liked me. But those two teachers, I just adored them both. Yeah, I kept up the French. Oh, that’s right—going to North Davis Junior High. My French teacher there, Mr. Miller, Monsieur Miller, he was amazing, too. He was LDS and married but I suspect something about him. I was definitely his teacher's pet there and probably more in a negative way. But I didn't care. I was not popular in North Davis like I was in Main. I had a few friends, but it just wasn't the same. I didn't feel the community dynamics that I felt in Alaska. But I felt safe with Mr. Miller, and pursuing French was a lot of fun there and I really enjoyed that. That’s a really good memory for me is French class. LR: Moving to high school. I think you've kind of hinted that in high school, you experienced bullying from some of the students. CO: Two or three guys. LR: But first off, where did you go to high school? CO: Clearfield High School. LR: And besides the bullying—let me get my question right. Being in high school in a very conservative place like you were at Clearfield, and even though you've closeted yourself, you know that you're gay—you know that you're queer. Let's use 16 that term instead. I guess I'm asking what your high school experience was like being closeted, but also knowing, “This is who I am and I can't be myself.” What was that experience like for you? CO: It was horrible. I hated it. I hated my body. I had extreme dysmorphia around my body. I just thought I was the ugliest kid to walk the face of the earth, and part of that came because I started really examining what the LDS church thought about gay folks—what they were saying, and also going to the library and reading a lot about it and exploring it quietly and only finding super negative, horrendous misinformation everywhere. One of the earliest books I read was… Oh, it has that really long name. It's like a paragraph-line. Something, Whatever To Do With Sex. My gosh, and it was made into a Woody Allen movie. Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex... LR: But Were Afraid to Ask? I'm not sure. CO: But Were Afraid to Ask. Something, yeah. I read it. That actually is a book and there's a whole chapter on homosexuality in that book. It is absolutely revolting. So I read the chapter about homosexuality in that and it just… I was like, "Oh, my God. If this is me, I am doomed to be a really horrible person who's going to be a pedophile and I'm going to sleep with 10,000 men," because that’s what this author's statistics were: every gay man slept with 10,000 men. I just took that all in and I internalized it. I internalized all the anti-gay rhetoric that was being taught at church and Sunday school and in priesthood meeting and sacrament meeting, that we were the abominable crime against nature. I just took that all in. And I'm six foot five, but I slumped and slouched because I didn't want anybody to notice me. I would just, in my high school, “How can I get to my locker, to my class, and back to my locker with the least amount of resistance, the least 17 amount of contact, the least amount of being noticed by anyone?" I just folded in on myself as much as I possibly could. It was really so depressing. I was profoundly suicidal, I would say, starting in high school and all through junior high and all through high school. Not necessarily having a fixated idea of, “I'm going to take my shotgun and go shoot myself,” but just, "I don't want to exist." And praying, saying that prayer out loud, over and over and over. "God stop me from being—don't let me continue this existence." Then seminary started, too, in high school, and my junior year, I came out to my seminary teacher, Bob Woods, and that started a really horrible journey through the belly of the beast of Mormonism. Because he, well, he told my bishop. I confided to my seminary teacher, and he called my bishop and told me. So then the bishop called me in, and we started going through all the reasons why I shouldn't be gay and how to stop this, with the putting a rubber band around my wrist and every time I have a gay thought to pull it, snap it so it hurts. Sing a hymn every time you have a thought. I got a calendar from him, and every day that I had an impure thought, I had to draw the flames of hell in orange and yellow marker on that day. But when I had a good day and didn't, I could put a gold star on that day. Every three months I had to turn that calendar into him, and there was stuff about masturbation and all that that I have to note. It was just humiliating. I was the only youth that I knew of that was having these almost monthly interviews with the bishop. He's asking really intimate—I'm 14, 15, 16 years old, and he's asking me all these details about my sexual thoughts. I mean, it's just criminal. No adult male should be alone in a room with a child asking these questions. I wish I'd had the gumption to even think about that, to say, "You're a pervert for even wanting to do [this], thinking that this is appropriate, you know? Bring a parent in 18 with me and now ask me your stupid-ass questions about, you know, am I fantasizing about sex with animals? No.” It was just—ugh. It was a really, really bad scene until my senior year, and then my senior year was kind of okay. I found the drama club and started to make friends and kind of got into this fun circle of friends that we did a lot of stuff together. It was very Mormon, very, very super Molly Mormon stuff, but, you know, it helped me out a little bit. LR: Go ahead, Jim. JM: I've got a couple of questions. CO: Yes. JM: You say you joined seminary in high school. Is that again kind of that social thing? Like that's what everyone your age is doing and that's where— CO: Yeah. Well, I did it actually more because it was an hour off. You know, release time. And I excelled at it, even though I was not a believer and didn't really care on some level. I was always the best at scripture chase and scripture memorization; I can still say all the names of the books of the Bible in order. JM: Wow. CO: You had to do that under a minute, so I got really fast and we were really competitive and so we would compete. Our seminary would compete against other seminaries, and we were always number one because of me. JM: So you mentioned a little earlier on in the interview you do have another conversion point—or you have a conversion moment, you called it. Is that during this high school seminary period or is that going to come in later? CO: It's right at the end of my high school career, yes. Well, actually, it's the summer after that I graduate. [Interview ends.] 19 Part 2: November 9, 2022 LR: Today is November 9, 2022, and we are here with Connell O'Donovan continuing his oral history interview for Queering the Archives. Jim Miles is also on the call. I'm Lorrie Rands. So, Connell, when we finished last time we were talking about your high school experience. You had mentioned that you had come out to your seminary teacher and that didn't end well? CO: No, it didn't. LR: And that he had talked to your bishop, and it turned into this whole thing. That's kind of where we left it. CO: Part of that was my bishop then went to the stake president, Duffy Palmer, and Duffy wanted me to go to BYU for the summer and participate in vomiting aversion therapy there. I'm a puke-aphobe, so I didn't know that that's what it was going to be. So they arranged first for me to go to the... Oh, well, now we have to get into genealogy really quickly. I lived across the street from my aunt, my uncle's wife, and she was a rabid genealogist and often went to the genealogy library. I started going with her on Saturdays. I started taking genealogy classes from the stake when I was 12, and so now I'm like 15, 16, 17 and going almost weekly to the genealogy library with my aunt Helen Beazer, Helen Spencer Beazer. How they were going to frame it was that I would go... There used to be a several days long conference at BYU every summer called the World Conference on Records, and it was for genealogists all over the world to come together and learn new tips and techniques and tricks about doing genealogy. I was to go there and do this World Conference on records, but then stay for a summer program in English writing or something. I remember getting to BYU and being in Desert Towers and then, I—just there's so much, I think, I don't know. My young brain 20 couldn't handle it, so I've tuned out a lot of the memory, although I was actually very much attracted to the guy that they put me in Desert Towers with. My bunkmate in the dorms at BYU, I found him quite attractive. But then when I found out that they wanted to do vomiting aversion therapy, I was just like, "Absolutely not!" Because I'm a puke-aphobe. I have a true phobia around vomiting. For example, I have not vomited since July of 1987. That was the last time, and I just refuse to allow my body to do that. So I was just like, "No, I'm not going to do that." Anyway, Duffy Palmer was a little disappointed that I wouldn't go through with this messed-up therapy, but something else came. I did therapy later and we'll get into that. But yeah, that's part of what happened, and I already talked about the calendar, right? That I had to do the calendar and turn it into my bishop? That was really awful. LR: Okay. Let's finish up with high school. When did you graduate? CO: I graduated in June of '79 from Clearfield High, but that April... So a few months before, I actually got a job working at the genealogy library. It was April 3, 1979. I remember it because that was the day that I met the love of my life. His name's Aubyn, A-U-B-Y-N. I think it's okay for me to share his name. I'll just tell him, but I'll let him know right after this: "Hey, you. I talked about you." His last name is Gwinn, G-W-I-N-N. Aubyn Gwinn, who also worked at the genealogy library. We were both working. At the genealogy library, there were these Xerox counters where, if you wanted to Xerox sheets from a book or Xerox pedigree charts or family group records, you would hand them to us and we would Xerox them for you and then hand them back to you. We called ourselves the copycats. Yeah, so I met Aubyn and we fell madly in love with each other that spring and summer. And it was really intense and really beautiful, but very platonic. We 21 were not sexual with each other because we were both very much getting... Well, he was leaving on his mission. He was going to that the end of June or early July, he went into the MTC to go to Finland on his mission. So we just had that short little period where we had this very intense ‘romantic friendship’ is what I would call it. We ‘couched,’ in Christian terms, and we would give each other a peck on the cheek or sometimes on the lips, but we would say, “As Paul says in the letter to the Corinthians, I give you the kiss of peace.” So it's just like this torturous, delicious, yummy, horrible desire and yearning. It was magical. We had such a magical summer together. We would write ten-page love letters to each other, like, almost daily. We were just constantly writing these really intense letters back and forth to each other. I just sort of became completely engrossed in his life and kind of just became attached to his hip. Everywhere he went, I would go with him, unless I was in school, but on the weekends because— well, we worked Saturdays. It was closed on Sunday of course, the genealogy library. But I had to work Friday nights, so I would get on the bus, go to Salt Lake for Friday night work, and then go home with him. He lived in a boarding house in the Avenues. And then he left on his mission. Like a week or two before he left, we went camping up somewhere in the mountains. There was this beautiful lake. We kind of had to hike into where this lake was, and it was only the two of us at this lake. I just remember all; we slept together in the same sleeping bag and it was a mummy bag, so very tight quarters. We were both very much aroused. But while we're clinging to each other in this mummy bag, we were saying prayers for the devil to stop filling us with temptation to do anything sexual with each other. It was just, oh. I just remember all night long, just waking up and being in Aubyn's arms and then feeling the sexual desire, and then, of course, breaking into silent prayer that God would 22 take this temptation away from me so that we could keep our love pure and holy in His eyes. It's just so messed up. And then he left, and I moved into the boarding house, so I moved into his ward. It was this weird imitation of his life, you know? I tried to fill in where he had been. So he went into the MTC. I snuck onto the campus of the MTC a couple of times to go see him, which is totally forbidden. But you know, I was just 18, and I was six foot three. I'm six [foot] five now, but I was like six foot three then, still growing. I just put on a suit and I borrowed a friend's name tag, so I would just walk on to campus and wander around until I found him, you know? It was just really crazy. And then at the end of June, beginning of July, I became suicidal because I felt like what I had wanted my whole entire life I finally had found. This man that I could love purely and wholly with my soul and heart, and God punished me by taking him away from me, by sending him on a mission. I was like, "Why would God do that? Here's this love that's so pure and holy. Why would God want that to end?" I fell into a deep, deep abyss of depression and suicidal thought and ideation. This is tough to remember, but on the 4th of July weekend that year, there was a big family reunion in Idaho for my mother's family, and I drove up there alone. But I had in the trunk of my car my sleeping bag, my Bible, and my shotgun, and that first night, rather than staying with everybody else at the campground, I took off in the car and went off into a field by myself and said, "Okay God, this is it. What's going on? If you exist, let me know. If not, I'm going to kill myself." I had a very intense and profound spiritual experience, and I'm not going to go into detail about that. It's well-written in my journal; there's a lot in there about it. But that night, I had a profound sense of not being alone in the universe, that there 23 actually was a God, some sort of divine essence. I heard a voice, kind of a femalesounding voice actually saying, "You're not alone. Hang in there." So that was it, and for some reason, I interpreted that as, "Oh, there is a God. The Book of Mormon is true. Joseph Smith was a prophet. The LDS Church is the only true church on the face of the earth." So that became sort of my conversion experience to Mormonism, where I really became a deep believer. But that wasn't what the experience was at all. It was just, "You're not alone, and there is a divinity to this whole thing. Somehow there is something sacred going on and you're not alone." But I completely ran with it and went "Woo! Yeah! Mormonism!" So I became just like a super mega convert from hell that was just virtue signaling left and right at every given possibility. Anywhere I went, I had my scriptures with me. If I was at school or if I was riding the bus to school, I'd be sitting on the bus reading my Bible or the Book of Mormon or whatever, you know, because I wanted to be that light that everybody saw and was like, "Oh, yeah. Look at that cool kid there. He's reading the scriptures on the bus. How wonderful is that?" It was so hypocritical because I was just doing it to be seen, not because of any actually true desire to be reading scripture. I was reading it to be seen by people. I look back now and it's just so embarrassing. Just weeks after graduating from Clearfield High, I moved to the big city. I hated Syracuse so badly; it was such a good thing for me to get away from it. So I moved into Aubyn's boarding house: 870 Second Avenue, the home of Leila T. Ethington. E-T-H-I-N-G-T-O-N. Oh, and her first name, Leila, is L-E-I-L-A. We jokingly called her house the Leila T. Ethington Home for Wayward Boys and Cats. She had two or three stray cats that she also took in. Leila was in her eighties at this point, and she had been what I would call a ‘fag hag’ her entire life. She always loved her gay men, and she had wonderful 24 stories about some early men that she knew in the 1920s and '30s who are gay, including Evan Stevens, who was the director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir from the 1890s to the 1920s. She sang in the choir and knew him personally and he was gay. She claimed he came out to her, and so she told me the story, although she said, "I know you're that way and he's that way, too." That was her term, "that way". Leila and I just bonded deeply. I mean, she had deep roots in Utah's history. The T stands for Trumbo. Her grandfather, Isaac Trumbo, was a senator from Utah and all this stuff. Her house was a living church history museum. She had first editions of the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price, every issue of every LDS publication ever, photographs of Brigham Young that were signed. She had just the most amazing stories and I would just sit for hours with her, enthralled with her. We were kindred spirits, you know? One thing that I really loved about her was she was so dynamically spiritual. She was a visionary, and so in that sense, she was kind of the old-school female Mormon visionary, because Mormon women used to have a lot of authority and power and were giving each other blessings and things like that that are now very much frowned on and very much controlled by the priesthood. But she came from this old school of Mormon women who can pretty much do anything. I just really loved being with her and I lived with her off-and-on for a good 10 years. She was always kind of another big refuge for me, like my maternal grandmother but still alive and present. LR: Quick question. Besides your aunt, what drew you to genealogy? CO: I just have always loved history. Part of it was my maternal grandmother who was also the family genealogist. She would tell me all the family stories and give me all the family records, which I still have in my closet. I have Grandma's box of genealogical records that she hand-filled out and went over with me and told me 25 stories about each person on the pedigree chart. Yeah, I just felt like I inherited from her to be the family historian, and I've always loved genealogy. LR: Okay. So you mentioned that Aubyn went on a mission. Did you ever contemplate doing that? CO: Oh, I did, yes. LR: So did you go on a mission? CO: Yeah, a year later. In October of 1980 I got my call for Brazil and I left early midNovember, so I was in the MTC for both Thanksgiving and Christmas learning Portuguese. Then got to Brazil January 3rd or 4th, 1981. That was a weird thing, too. What we were not really told was at that point, and I think still to this day— Brazil does not allow proselytizing missionaries to come into their country from other countries, and so what we were on was student visas. Literally the night before we left, we had a meeting with the MTC leaders, and they said, “When you get to Lima, Peru, change your clothes out of your missionary garb and put on your muggle clothes. Put on your Levi's and your regular shirt so that when you land in Brazil and customs officials start dealing with you, here's the phrase that you say: ‘Estou aqui para aprender a língua e a cultura do Brasil.’ I'm here to learn the language and culture of Brazil." LR: All right, I guess it's technically not a lie. CO: No. I was not there to learn the Brazilian Portuguese language and culture. I was there to convert those heathen Catholics to Mormonism. That was a means to an end, learning the language. That's not why I was there. That was not the purpose of my visit, and the customs officer that I was dealing with, he knew exactly why I was there, and I still looked him in the eyes and lied to him. Today, in fact, I just did a Facebook post about it two or three weeks ago about how the LDS Church taught me to lie. I just think that's so disgusting, and to 26 make me compromise my own integrity and my own morality by saying, “The church needs you to be dishonest. You need to look this guy in the eye and lie to him.” You know, he badgered me back and forth, and I was just like, "No. Estou aqui para aprender-" and I did my little sentence that I could barely say. But he finally just gave up and let me in. I got my six-month visa, my student visa, so every six months I had to go out of the country and get it renewed to come back into the country. That just sticks in my craw. [But] I love Brazil. I really did love it. Beautiful men. Oh, my gosh. Not wearing many clothes, ever. Amazing food, amazing music, culture, Brazilian samba and bossa nova. Just makes me curl my toes every time I hear it. I loved Brazil. I hated the mission. We had a native Brazilian mission president, and he had been a born-again Christian fundamentalist preacher, and he still had that fire-and-brimstone way of preaching and just banging on his podium and screaming. He was about half my height. I don't think he was 4’11”, very short guy. He had a lot of overcompensation that he liked to do. But to be quite frank, he was a dishonest person. He embezzled church funds for himself, and a lot of the money that was sent for the mission and for the missionaries ended up in his pocket because he didn't have a career. He'd been a Baptist preacher, so what was he going to do after the mission? What's he qualified for? One of the things that he did... So we would get our payments in American dollars. Each missionary got $1,000 a month or something, and we would sign our checks over to him. He would take the American dollars and exchange them on the black market, which was a much higher price than what the bank exchange rate was, and he would pocket the difference. So, I mean, we weren't getting cheated 27 out of what our thousand dollars was worth, but he was skimming that black market value off the top and keeping it. I became good friends with the mission clerk, and he was made to just do all kinds of financial improprieties to hide what the mission president was doing. Oddly enough, he was also gay, and we're willing to remain friends. But Brazil was just... Oh, the mission president hated me. There were about 100 missionaries, none of whom were sister missionaries. This mission president said that, “Menstruating women had no right preaching the gospel,” so when he came into the mission presidency, he had all the sister missionaries reassigned to different missions in Brazil because he only wanted men preaching the gospel. I was just like, "Oh! You're a sexist pig too on top of everything." He and I just butted heads the whole mission. I was briefly a senior companion, maybe like three months, and then he demoted me back to junior companion. So I was a junior companion on my mission 90% of the time. He kept me as far away from the mission home as possible because he didn't want to deal with me. He was so statistics-driven. It was all about numbers, numbers, numbers, and not about people. Here I am with this amazingly strong brand-new testimony about the church and everything, and I'm just [like], "I'm here to serve God! And all you care about is numbers." I was so self-righteous. No wonder he couldn't stand me. He was a lying hypocrite and I was a self-righteous little brat. We didn't get along. LR: You mentioned that getting into the mission, you changed your clothes and all of that. So when you got to your actual area, would you go back and get back into your missionary garb? CO: Oh, yeah. The mission president knew. The mission president picked me up at the airport. He knew the rules, and that's what we were doing. 28 LR: So that was just to get into Brazil. Once you were there, you just started proselyting? CO: Yeah, we just started proselyting. LR: Okay. Interesting. Is there a specific memory that stands out to you from your mission that you'd like to share? CO: I did fall in love with one of my companions, but that was fraught with a lot of problems. His name was Ernani Ichi: E-R-N-A-N-I, last name, Ichi, I-C-H-I. São Paulo, Brazil has the largest community of Japanese people outside of Japan, and he was a part of that Japanese Brazilian community and just beautiful. He was such a beautiful guy, oh my gosh. He fought Brazilian jiu jitsu, so he was really muscly and everything. We kind of... Well, I'm just going to leave it at, I started falling for him and it got to a point where we were pretty close to being sexual with each other, and I stopped it and I was like, "Yeah, I can't go through with this." So what he did was he went... In Brazil at that time, the only places you could make phone calls were you'd go to the phone company. They had booths of phone banks and you could make a call that way. So he called the mission president and said that there was a girl in the area who was stalking him and he needed to leave the area. The mission president said, "Okay. You go home, pack, and get on the next train out of there and get your butt to the mission home. Leave Elder O'Donovan there in the apartment and we'll reassign him a new companion." So Elder Ichi leaves, and I mean, you can't leave and go out on your own. We always had maids. We paid poor Brazilian women like $10 a month to cook two meals a day and do all of our laundry and clean the house—well, I use the [word] house. It was more of a shack. I was being fed and stuff, but I didn't leave. I just sat there alone, and they didn't reassign me anyone for like, five days. So I sat there 29 marinating in my guilt for five days. My self-loathing hit an all-time high. It was so painful, and I became kind of catatonic. By the time Elder Afonso arrived, my new companion, I was nonverbal. He was awesome. He could have really freaked out, and he just let me heal at my own speed. He'd make me go out and we'd go visit families, but he wouldn't make me speak to anybody. He wouldn't make me give a discussion. He wouldn't make me give a prayer. I would just silently sit with him and eventually, it took about four or five more days before I could start speaking again. It was just really super, super painful. But yeah, that's about the only thing on my mission I want to talk about. LR: So two questions. Going to Brazil, having lived in Utah your whole life: what was that like, the culture shock of that? CO: It was days of culture shock. I arrived and then the mission president didn't assign me to an area for, I think 10 days. So I'm at the mission home for 10 days, just sitting there with nothing to do, kind of exploring the city and trying my very poor verbal skills. But it's just this crazy new food I've never had. Black beans and rice are served at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and thank God the black beans were absolutely phenomenally delicious, and I could still eat them breakfast, lunch, and dinner if I could figure out how they made them. But yeah, I grew to love that cuisine. At first I was just like, "What?" And they do weird things, like they put green peas on their cheeseburgers. Sometimes they put corn in them too, but it was usually green peas. So it's just getting used to a whole new... Especially the food was really, really intense. But I loved the language, and getting to learn to speak Portuguese fluently was just a sheer delight. I still think it's such a beautiful, sexy, sexy language. I get to hear it, I speak it, I sing in it, which is really great. But yeah, it was a big transition from Mormon funeral potatoes and root beer to white rice and black beans. 30 LR: Yeah. The other question is, as you're going along, did you have any sort of a way of communicating with someone, talking to anyone about what you were feeling? Or were you kind of stuck in your own…? CO: When I showed up at the mission home and was there for 10, 11 days, there was another elder there from Kaysville who was stuck at the mission home because he had kidney stones, so he was there just suffering immensely. Elder Scadlock; S-CA-D-L-O-C-K. Kent is his first name. I think it's okay to talk about him. I have some emails I need to do. Kent Scadlock is also a gay man, and he's excruciatingly funny, and we just hit it off. He had been working in the church office building and he actually remembered me. The genealogy library used to be in the west wing of the church office building downtown, and he was in custodial services, but he remembers seeing me in the elevators and stuff like that. We became mission besties and we wrote to each other back and forth all the time. We never really admitted to each other that we were gay until afterwards, but we both knew. We would just write these really funny, bitchy letters to each other with a lot of inside humor that we shared with each other. He was a complete joy and I'm so glad he was there because he really helped me get through really difficult times. In the meantime, like you know... Oh, I'm not going to, can't share his story. This is about me. Never mind. LR: Okay. That's awesome. So you spent two years in Brazil? CO: It was closer to 18 months. I was in that weird, funky time period where missions had been two years, and then they cut them back to 18 months, so I was given the choice: "You can leave in two months or you can stay the full time." I said, "Oh, I'm going to stay the full two years," but I got four months into that and then I was just like, "You know what? I want to go home. Send me home. I'm 31 done. I'm so over this place. Get me out of here." So I did not serve the full two years, but it was closer to like 19 or 20 months. LR: Okay. When you returned home, did you go back to Salt Lake or did you go to Syracuse? CO: Oh, no, I never went back to Syracuse. I hated it. So, no, I moved back in with Leila T. Ethington. Started working again at the genealogy library and other places. LR: Okay. So did you ever connect with Aubyn again? CO: Yeah. We're really good friends, and he was just here a few months ago. He stayed here with me. He's out, and he lives in New York City. He did get married and have kids, but they have divorced. LR: Okay. You're working at the genealogy library. Do you have a course that you were... That's the wrong word, but that's all that's coming into my mind. CO: A plan for my life? LR: Yeah, a plan. Did you kind of know where you were going? CO: Kind of. One of the things that I wanted to figure out was, how did biblical scripture become so homophobic? What's the origin of these scriptures about the Lavitical law of, you know, ‘man should not lie with a man like he lies with a woman’ and all this other stuff. Being so obsessed with history like I was, I decided when I got back to going to the University of Utah, I wanted to be a biblical archeologist so that I could figure this stuff [out]. My secret homosexual agenda was to figure this out, so I was going to examine all of biblical history and languages. I started taking classical Greek at the U because the Christian scriptures are written in Greek, and Paul's letters that are homophobic are written in Greek. I learned biblical Hebrew and then Aramaic at the U. But I knew that if I was going to really pursue this as an archeologist, I needed to learn to speak Arabic because 32 most of the workers at the excavation sites all over the Middle East are Arab workers. Now I'm in love with this other guy. His name is Scott, and he signs up for the military, for the army, to learn to speak Russian at DLI, the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. He's talking about all this, and I'm like "Hmm..." so I looked into it, and they teach Arabic there at the Defense Language Institute. So I joined the army. I'm kind of following Scott now, like I had earlier followed Aubyn, and now I'm like, "Oh, Scott, oh!" Scott was straight, and he still is. So I actually enrolled... This is a year and a half after my mission, maybe, so it must have been end of '83. I went to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, for my basic training, and then I went to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, which is outside of Tucson, for my advanced training. To be a linguist, you have to figure out what kind of linguist in the military you're going to be. I signed up for the prisoner of war interrogation unit within military intelligence, so that's what I went to Fort Huachuca to learn, was how to interrogate prisoners of war. I was at Fort Huachuca for two or three months. Oh, and by the way, this is through the Utah National Guard. I was not U.S. Army, I was Utah National Guard. But for these language training units that take much longer than a year, you are considered full-time army. So I was sent to a DLI in Monterey, California to learn... I did, I think, nine months of modern standard Arabic, and then I had Egyptian dialect for six months or something like that. I don't remember the exact amounts of time. I step on the campus there at DLI, and although it's run by the Army, all four branches send their intelligence personnel there to learn languages. So it's Navy, Army, Marines, and Air Force, and we're all headquartered in different places on campus—all the armies together, all the navies together. But then in the classroom units, we're all mixed together. I would say, half my Arabic class—there's 20 33 students, 18 [maybe]—half of us were gay men. Two or three lesbians. There was this Marine Corps couple, Sergeant McPherson and Sergeant... I can't remember his partner's name. They were in a pretty open relationship together and had been for like, 12 years in the Marine Corps. LR: Wow. CO: They were both hot, hot sexy men. I was just like, "Oh, my God." But somehow they had figured out how to... When one would get transferred to a place, his partner was transferred too, so they'd been on the same assignments for years, and here they are in my Arabic class. I'm just like, "Oh my gosh!" One of my Navy buddies was a drag queen who performed at the local— there was a gay bar in Monterey called "The After Hours," and that was the first gay bar I ever went to. I went alone, of all things, and just stood in the corner and went, "Oh my gosh! This is crazy!" Oh, before I left, I had been dating this young woman. I'm just going to give her first name: Carolyn. Before I left, I think it was like the Christmas Eve before I left, I proposed marriage to her. But before I did, I came out to her and I said, "You should know I'm bisexual." She was like, "Oh, I am too, I think." I was, "Oh, okay. Interesting." But so I get to DLI in Monterey and I'm just surrounded by all these queer folks. I'm a speed typist, and the company's CO, the captain—I can't remember his name—he found out I could type really fast, so I became one of his clerks. One of the things that I got to type up was, the military had realized there were a lot of queer folks at DLI and in military intelligence in general, so they did this massive survey of not everybody, but you know, a significant percentage of the people at DLI about their sex and sexual acts and sexual preferences and sexual orientation, 34 gender identity. What I had the privilege of doing was typing up the Army's portion of that because each of the four branches—I think they [used] the same survey, but they just surveyed their own people, so the Army surveyed its own. So I'm typing up this thing and they're like, "73% of every soldier in the Army here at DLI reported that they have had sex to orgasm with a member of the same sex within the past six months." I'm typing this going, "Holy shit. There are a lot of us queer folks. Interesting." I also discovered that just north of Carmel, up the coast, there's a gay male nude beach called Guanapato Beach. I had a little scooter. I'd hop on my scooter and drive up the coast to the beach and just go and observe, like, "Oh, my God, there's like 200 naked Marines and soldiers and Air Force people out here. All these really beautiful men, and they're all naked and they're playing Frisbee." Occasionally a couple of them would go off into a little alcove out of the way. I was blown away. I didn't participate. I was strictly doing an anthropological observation for sociological purposes and anthropological studies later. But it really stoked the fires, you know, and I came really close to being sexual with someone there one day. I immediately got back to the base, called up Carolyn and said, "I know we agreed we wouldn't get married until after I got out of my military obligation. I can't wait that long. Can we get married in June instead?" She was like, "Sure." So we got married in June of '84 to keep me from wandering from the flock, so to speak. LR: Okay. I have two questions about the survey. Was it an anonymous survey? CO: Yes, as far as I recall. I never saw the survey or took it myself. I'm just typing up the results. But I'm pretty sure it was anonymous... Yes, it had to have been because they wanted people to be honest. 35 LR: Okay. That makes more sense. And then during that time, it's the beginning of... It wasn't called AIDS then. CO: No. It was gay cancer. LR: Yeah. Or what was it? Was it GRID? That was the other term? CO: GRID. Yeah. LR: Were you seeing any of that happening? CO: Yes. I mean, I'm not seeing it, but hearing about it, certainly. And you know, Monterey's two hours drive south of San Francisco. I'm on the periphery of ground zero. There was a lot of talk, a lot of extremely homophobic jokes going on at the time from our drill sergeants and stuff, and just a lot of making fun of people dying from this horrible disease that was just coming into the scene. The very first one I remember was... Because it was affecting gay men and black men from Haiti, I think that was? Haitians? The joke was something about having to tell your mom... The worst thing about "GRIDS," as they called it, the worst thing about it is having to tell your mom that you're Haitian. LR: Wow. Okay. CO: But there was absolutely... There was no information whatsoever about it, just rumors and rumors about how deadly and horrific it was. JM: Right, because Reagan doesn't give his first address until, like, '85, right? If I remember correctly? CO: I didn't think he ever even said the word AIDS in public. JM: I believe he did, but it was— CO: It must have been right at the end of his— LR: At the end of his presidency. There were more jokes about it with this press corps than anything. 36 CO: I voted for Reagan in 1980. I did not vote for him in '84. In '84 I'm in the military now and I identified as a Republican, but I considered myself a social liberal but a fiscally conservative Republican. Carolyn and I talked about abortion, and we were both very much pro-choice, and so we didn't follow the Republican Party on that. So Carol and I get married in the Salt Lake Temple, and then our honeymoon was horrible because I was not sexually attracted to her and it was just miserable. It was three nights before we actually had sex after we married. Not fun at all about that. Then after we got married, I went back to California, and then she moved about a week or two later. In our ward in Monterey, there was this other young, really hip, cool couple. Carol and I bonded over music: new wave, punk, ska. We were going to all the fun clubs back in the day here in Salt Lake, listening to the Cure and the B-52's and Devo and the Go-Go's, all these amazing bands and having so much fun. That was what our life revolved around was the music scene and dancing, going out dancing. So in Monterey, there was this married couple who are young and hip and they're also into the new wave scene, but they're LDS. He had an older brother who was gay who lived in San Francisco, and we would go with this couple up to San Francisco and stay at this gay man's apartment in the city and he would take us to all gay dance clubs. So I was on Folsom Street with my wife, going to the Oasis and going to just all these really fun, some of them quite underground clubs, and all these men are hitting on poor Carolyn. It was crazy. Crazy, crazy, really fun. But still, I was really trying to be a very good boy, but my eye was certainly wandering a lot. I was not very faithful to her towards the end. I actually started dating this guy that I met at the library, of all things, and we had a couple of dates. We were a little sexual with each other. I feel so horrible, especially with AIDS going on and all that, the fact that I was careless, since we did not know. “If he has it and I 37 kiss him, am I going to get it?” We didn't know that. Of course, now we know that's not how it's transmitted, but I still took that risk, you know? I put her at risk, and I feel so shitty about that, that I couldn't keep it buttoned down. I couldn't keep it under control. I was not super risky, but still, I crossed the line of what fidelity is. I had made a promise to her to be faithful and I was not. So my schooling ended and I came out to the captain and said, "I'm gay." He got me a discharge; he gave me an honorable discharge and just put in my records that I was having family problems. LR: Oh, wow. He was kind. CO: Bless his heart. But I think because there were so many gays and lesbians there at DLI, he was pretty used to dealing with this and that he had a pretty standard [procedure] on what he should do. So, we decided to go back to Salt Lake. I could have continued in the military capacity, but I was like, "Nah. We'll go to Salt Lake City because there are no gay people there, and if there are no gay people in Salt Lake, the temptation will be removed from me." This guy that I was dating, Carolynn didn't know. I told her that he was an inactive member of the church and I was his home teacher, so that's why I was visiting him at strange hours, going to movies and dinner and stuff because I was trying to reactivate him. He was not LDS, couldn't have cared, so there was this lie too. He worked at Macy's in Monterrey, and I just remember, literally the morning we're about to leave, I took the car and drove over to Macy's and took him out into the parking lot and said goodbye to him. We each said, “I love you,” and we cried and kissed goodbye. It was just really, really painful. I actually just recently googled him and found him. I know where he lives and everything. I don't know that I could 38 ever contact him, but it was just like, "Oh, okay. I'm not imagining him. He really does exist." But it was really bittersweet, you know? But we drove back to Salt Lake City and got a beautiful little adobe house on South Temple and about Eighth East. Moved into it, just renting it. Within 10 days I knew where all the gay bars were. I knew about Affirmation, the support group for gay Mormons. I knew where some of the cruising places were: Liberty Park and Sugarhouse Park. So much for there not being any gay people to tempt me here because we are everywhere. I think we moved back around the first of June of '85, and our marriage was just deteriorating. There were a lot of problems, not just me being gay, but there were some other things with our marriage. Around July 2, we went up to Park City to the Tears for Fears concert that was up there—one of our favorite bands—and we just fought all night long, before, during and after the concert. It just got really, really bad and toxic. I started trying to convince her that we needed to split. I told her, "I've got to come out of the closet. I can't handle this anymore." She was negotiating with me, you know: "Well, just do what you need to do, but come back home to me." I was like, "No, I can't do that to you." Now, she has a different memory of this than I do. She claims she never said that to me, but I very distinctly remember that happening, so I don't know. But I do remember, on the night of the Fourth of July, 1985, we got into another big fight. I stormed out of the house. I told her, “I'm going to go get drunk and get fucked tonight,” and stormed out of the house. I'd never drank alcohol in my life, and I didn't want to. I didn't want to get drunk, so I just went off and got a mini of rum or something and went up to the Salt Lake City Cemetery, and I sat in the 39 cemetery watching the fireworks. That's what I always remember: it was the Fourth of July, Independence Day, and I just sat there crying and crying and crying and bawling because I was like, “My life has to change. I can't live this lie anymore.” And then I drove home, just down the hill, parked the car, got out the mini, splashed it around on me, swished my mouth, and then stumbled into the house pretending to be drunk and singing loudly "Book of Mormon Stories," the children's song, loudly and drunkenly. Because I wanted to offend Carolyn. I wanted to offend her enough to get her to leave, and that worked. That was the end. We separated and divorced soon thereafter. So I consider my true final coming out date is Fourth of July, 1985. Am I boring you? JM: Having grown up very religious and having to learn about queer history, myself being very frustrated at the lack thereof, especially with the post AIDS epidemic, this is... To hear stories and be able to be part of bringing those stories into the public consciousness is a massive thing. So please, anything you have, especially during this time period, is fantastic. LR: It really is. It's amazing. So you've finally come out officially. You and Carolyn eventually get divorced, I'm assuming? CO: Yes. LR: Do you continue to live in Salt Lake or do you...? CO: No, I stayed there in the adobe house. She moved out. A gay Navajo student from BYU named Dale moved in. We became just housemates. Then he became sort of a lifeline to gay life at BYU. Before BYU came down hard on its living arrangements and who could live where and in what apartment buildings, it was kind of a free-forall. Dale's friend Stewart owned this large house. Stewart was a fellow BYU student, and he and, like, four other gay men lived in this house, four gay BYU students, and they threw these massive sex parties for BYU students. So Dale would take me. I 40 went to two of the parties at Stewart's house and was just like, "Oh, my God. This is crazy!" I had no idea that there was such a huge gay underground at BYU at the time. Then I'd heard about Affirmation, and I think the summer of '86 at the Pride, that was the first Pride Festival I ever went to. It was at Pioneer Park, and I remember just walking up to the Affirmation booth, and I was looking at the literature and I totally freaked out. I thought that it was a gay Mormon church. I wasn't really understanding that it was a support group for gay Mormons. I thought that they had started their own church. I think that was about the time that the Restoration Church of Jesus Christ had been organized by Tony Felice, who was the gay ex-bishop who started the Restoration Church, which was a gay Mormon church. I think they had a booth right next to Affirmation, and so I think that's why I was conflating the two, but I just remember freaking out and running away. I left the festival because the idea of a gay Mormon church freaked me out so badly. I started going to the Sun. I practically lived at the Sun—the gay bar, the Sun Tavern. It used to be where the Vivint Center is now, and then in '78, I think, is when it moved to Fifth West and Third or Fourth South. I loved [it]; that was the funnest gay bar I've ever been to in my life. If you talk to any of us old-timers that used to go to the Sun, we all say that. The Sun was just so much fun. It was huge. There were different areas. There were like three bar areas, one large indoor dance floor, and then there was a huge patio that also had kind of another dance floor on it. I was there like Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, sometimes midweek. They played fantastic music. I had a lot of fun and met a lot of really good folks. It was just a blast. 41 Then I think around... I wanted to say it was '87 that I started actually attending Affirmation. Back then, there are two chapters of Affirmation in Salt Lake City. There was the Salt Lake chapter, which was very non-Mormon, almost antiMormon, and then there was the Wasatch chapter of Affirmation, which was very pro-Mormon. I was attending the Wasatch chapter because I felt like I really wanted the LDS Church to embrace us. This being the conservative chapter, we wore ties to meetings and stuff like that. We were totally imitating a very heteronormative Mormon experience, but couching it still within this queer context. I soon became a leader. I was on the board of the Wasatch chapter. Keith McBride was the president of the chapter and Dave Malmstrom, M-A-L-M-S-T-R-OM, was really involved. Russell Lane, L-A-N-E, and his boyfriend Chuck Thomas were really involved, and we all became really tight. We were a really, really closeknit group. I was the editor of the Wasatch Chapter newsletter, and really had a fun time doing that. That was about a year that that goes on. You know, back then I was not political at all. I had not stepped into any political arena. There started to be these weird AIDS bills come up before the legislature. There was one that was just proposed that some rep wanted to designate Antelope Island as a concentration camp for gay men so that we would all get AIDS there and die there in that secluded area. It was so ironic because Syracuse, where I grew up—to get to Antelope Island, you have to drive through Syracuse. I grew up playing on that island, just bicycling all over it and swimming. So it was just like “What? You want it to be this barbed wire-d concentration camp for gay men so that we all just die there?” Oh, it was just horrid, you know? So I started kind of getting a little bit of political interest. A couple of things happened around the same time. The first was that Westminster College put on a play called Bent, which has been made into a movie. 42 Bent is about the Nazi persecution of gay men. In the play, a gay man gets arrested by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp, and when he arrives there, there's another gay man there, and on the stage are two huge piles of rocks. Ninety percent of the play is these two men picking up rocks and switching them in piles, because once they fill up one pile, then the guard says, "Okay, now move it back to where those were." Then they have to pick up those stones one by one and put them back. They're technically not allowed to talk to each other, but as they pass each other, each time they're carrying, they whisper words to each other, and they fall in love. It's just this really intensely beautiful, horrifying play that traumatized me so deeply. I was so shook up by it that I had to go to get tickets again, to see it again, to sort of desensitize myself from the horror of it. The play does not end well. It does not have a happy ending, of course, and so that's sitting in my brain with the sense of, "This cannot ever happen again. We cannot let this happen again." Then the Anne Frank exhibit was supposed to come to City Hall, to the City County building. It was in several panels with photos and information, and one of the panels talked about the homosexuals that were incarcerated in concentration camps by the Nazis. They had just discovered that the actual transcript of Anne Frank's diaries became known, and in those diaries, she confesses that she's in love with other girls. Right? So there was a panel about that, that Anne Frank had lesbian feelings. Well, the city council was going to say, "We'll take the exhibit, but those two panels will not be displayed. We don't want to educate anybody [about that]. Yes, the Jews were persecuted, but no, we don't want to let anybody know that homosexuals were too." 43 My friend Robert Austin was getting things... He was going to stage a protest about it and I participated. That was my first political action, was going and handing out fliers about how this was replicating what the Nazis had wanted to do. By eliminating this history, we were eradicating queer people from history as well, and the Nazis had won. The city council was going to let the Nazis win. We won that battle because they did finally allow the two panels to be included, but it's only because there was three or four days of news stories about it that told everybody. So now that it's out, now that there are newspaper articles saying the Nazis persecuted all these gay men and Anne Frank had lesbian feelings, why not have it in the display now because it's already been in the newspaper three times? So that's when I became an activist. At first I was doing AIDS activism, and I went through training with the AIDS Project Utah. The executive director of the AIDS Project Utah at the time was Ben Barr, Roseanne Barr's little brother. You know who Roseanne Barr is, the comedian? Because I was such a good typist, he asked me to come in part-time and sort of be his executive secretary to help organize his office and stuff. I probably had been working there for three days, and I came into the office and my keys didn't work. So I called Ben and he was like, “Well, I'm going to be there in 15 minutes, so can you hold on?” I was like, “Sure." And he came; his key didn't work. Come to find out, the board of AIDS Project Utah had decided to let Ben go. I think part of it was antiSemitism because Ben was Jewish. The vast majority of the board were Episcopalians. They were also very anti-Mormon and they didn't like that I still identified as a Mormon, so I think they wanted us out of there. That's just my theory. I don't know what happened, actually. It was really messy. It stunned Ben to no end, hurt him deeply. He was just livid. We're still friends. He lives in California now. It'd 44 be really interesting to get his story. I don't know the machinations of what happened, I just know the results, and that is we were not allowed to continue working for AIDS Project Utah. So there were two back then: there was AIDS Project Utah and the Salt Lake AIDS Foundation. The Salt Lake AIDS Foundation was strictly educational, and that was headed by Dr. Patty Reagan from the U of U. She taught health and women's studies. She is an out lesbian who taught there for many, many years. Patty Reagan and I are great friends. I love her dearly. But it was the AIDS Project Utah that we got kicked out of, and I think getting burned by that... and being HIVnegative, I was kind of looked down as well. Like, to really be doing the AIDS support stuff, it's probably better if you have HIV so that you understand the experience, etc., etc. You know, I kind of get that, so I kind of stepped away from AIDS activism. I had kind of been hiding my queer activism within the AIDS movement, and this supported me with the opportunity to just go, "Oh, I can just now focus on queer issues for everyone, not just people with AIDS." [Interview ends.] Part 3: November 16, 2022 LR: Today is November 16th. We're all on Zoom again with Connell, continuing the oral history interview. Jim Miles is on the call as well. I'm Lorrie Rands again; I haven't changed. We're going to talk about where we left off, but you're going to go back a little bit. So we left off talking about your political activism working with a lot of AIDS foundations and whatnot. However, you mentioned as we started that you wanted to revisit 1980. CO: Yes. LR: So what events happened in that year? 45 CO: Well—and then in prep for that, I talked about especially in high school, I was so not wanting to exist, and I would just kind of fold myself up. I was not very social. I didn't have a big circle of friends or have a circle of friends, really. There were neighbors and there were cousins, but friends? And then I found Drama Club, and that senior year in 1979, I was in Bye Bye Birdie, the musical, just a backup dancer and stuff. But I really loved it, even though I had no experience with any of that stuff. I just remember the high school teacher, Mr. Maxwell, who turned out to be not only gay, but kind of… He liked the high school boys and would film some of us secretly in our underwear and stuff in the dressing rooms. He got fired, unfortunately, later. He was nothing but wonderful to me and a gentleman. But I remember, Mr. Maxwell—we called him Max. Max would stop rehearsals and say, "Look at what Connell's doing. Do that. He's really good." I was like, "Wow, I've got this natural ability somehow." So that was a lot of fun. But that was my only experience with theater—well, beyond, in a word, roadshows in the ‘70s. Somehow in 1980, I became friends with this young woman named Melody. I can't remember her last name, but she was involved with Promise Valley Playhouse, which was the—the facade of it is still there. It's no longer a theater, but it was. It's on State Street. I think it's between First and Second South. 1980 was the Sesquicentennial Celebration of the LDS Church, so it was 150 years old. That whole year, the church had planned all these big festivities and things, and I got involved in two of them. The first one was, a play was written specifically for the Sesquicentennial. Margaret Smoot wrote a play, a musical called Within These Walls, and Melody was in the cast of that musical. Without auditioning, somehow I got cast as one of the backup dancers in the crowd scenes and stuff. I was in the chorus, which—I crumble in auditions. I can't sing. I can't dance to save my life. So without having to audition, somehow I got into this huge 46 musical and it was put on at the University of Utah's Special Events Center in June of '80. I don't know if that's the Huntsman Center now. Well, it's a huge… JM: The big dome is the Huntsman Center. CO: Yeah, yeah, that's where it was. We had so much fun and I really enjoyed it. I would say half the male cast, we were all gay men and doing this big Mormon play. It helped me come out of my shell and sort of come into being able to find friends and have a social group to do things with, which was very new for me and really exciting. Then again, without auditioning, most of the cast from Within These Walls also then participated in another musical that had been done annually for decades at Promise Valley Playhouse, which was the musical Promised Valley. It's a musical about the Mormons getting expelled from Illinois and then going to winter quarters and then finally coming to Zion, the Promised Valley. We reenacted the seagulls and the crickets moment, which actually is pretty false historically. It didn't happen anything like what we portrayed in the musical. Yeah, so there was this musical going on and I hadn't auditioned for it. I was just really sad to see all my friends go off and participate in this new musical. And then Pat Davis, who was the director of the play, she put out a call because several of their background dancers and chorus members dropped out and she didn't want to rehold more auditions. She just said, "Hey, if you know anybody that wants to join." I was like, "Me, me!" and so I got to be in Promise Valley that whole summer. I think there were three shows. There are two full casts. I think I was in Cast B. Or maybe it was four shows a week, and the two casts would do two shows each, like Friday and Saturday. Well, they wouldn't have done anything on Sunday anyway. There was a matinee and a night show, and so we would just alternate the cast 47 between the two all summer long, and that was really fantastic. We really became super close, all of us. Then, in fact, that fall when I left on my mission, at my missionary farewell in the Avenues, I invited the entire cast from Promise Valley to come and sing at my farewell. Because if you're going to do it, I mean, go big or go home, right? So I had an entire choir singing at my farewell, and it was just really lovely. Fortunately, I still maintain contact with two of the cast, two of the gay men that we were in the shows together: Walter Larrabee and Douglas Brinker. Those experiences really helped me become more social and come out of my shell because I didn't want anybody to notice me. I just didn't want to be seen or known, and then here I am performing on stage. So that was very helpful. LR: Okay. CO: Jim, you had a question about 1980? JM: I thought it was broader ‘80s, so we'll roll back to like '84. CO: Okay. JM: Lorrie and I met and we were just talking after the interview last week about how unique your experiences of being so close to the AIDS epidemic, but not being a part of it, like not getting AIDS itself. We kind of were thinking to ourselves, do you think that part of what honestly maybe even saved you, but what prevented you from getting AIDS was that religious aspect of your life at the time? CO: Well, I mean, it certainly made me phobic about gay sex. The religious aspect really, that freaked me out. Over the years, past 1984, I know that I was sexual with men who were HIV-positive. In fact, the first big scare was in the late ‘80s. This guy that I was dating, and we were sexual a week later, came to me and said, "I have it." 48 I was like, "Oh, shit. Okay." I went and got tested, and I was negative and stuff. But I felt like I have been infected with HIV. I don't know how accurate this is, but I know in the late ‘90s there was this research about—so the idea is that the AIDS virus does the same thing basically to your bodies that the bubonic plague did. But the bubonic plague was bacterial and not viral, but the body's response is similar. There was a lot of research done that said if you had an ancestor who had bubonic plague and survived it, your body, their bodies created this… I don't know what. Genome? I'm not a scientist, but it created this genome, I'm going to call it, that would prevent you from getting the AIDS virus because you inherited that process already from your ancestor who survived it. I am a professional genealogist, and I can actually point to an ancestor of mine who did have bubonic plague in the late 1400s and survived it. I've always thought, well, maybe that's how I actually survived was because I got this genetic inheritance about that. But I have not pursued that officially in any way to see if that theory from several years ago still holds water. But anyway, I mean, at first I was super careful. Then it got to a point where we just didn't know a lot and there was so much death going on. It was so horrible. I just assumed it would happen. I felt like I was The Walking Dead, you know, that sooner or later, I would die from it. This is actually part of—I mentioned before we started the tape that I've kind of been feeling depressed. Part of that depression is around the fact I'm not prepared for retirement financially, and a huge part of that has just been this whole mental attitude, since my late twenties, that I'm going to die early, so why be prepared for retirement? Why have an IRA? Why have a savings account when you're just going to die, and your family is going to take the money, because after they ignore you your whole life they're going to rob you blind when you're dead. It 49 just makes me really upset that I never prepared myself for reaching this age, and I don't know how to do it. I don't have a lot of—what's the word I'm looking for?—models for how to age as a gay man. I'm right at the cusp of those who died and those who survived, right, and so the elders of the tribe that I should have had, I didn't get. My only elders have really been lesbians. Bless their hearts, you know. I've learned incredibly wonderful things from the lesbian elders in our tribe, but I didn't have gay men, and I wish I'd had a lot more gay men. I mean, there's a few that survived, obviously, but there's just not a large body of men who are gay men that much older than me that I can kind of look to and go "Oh, this is how you age as a gay man." It just kills me that I don't have that. I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I'm not aging gracefully. My mortality is scaring the shit out of me. Intense stuff. LR: It actually makes sense. As a side note, I was processing a collection. His name was Don something. He was a teacher in Florida, a professor there, who was fired because he was HIV-positive back in the eighties. He was one of the oldest surviving men with AIDS. He died in 2010, I think. CO: Okay. LR: So he survived and watched all of his friends die, and he's like, "Why am I still alive? I shouldn't be." CO: Survivor's guilt. LR: He definitely was not prepared, but it's interesting. That's who I thought of as you were talking, this individual that I had never met. I had just read his diaries. CO: Wow. LR: It was very interesting, so I'm really glad you shared that. Thank you for sharing. CO: You're welcome. So is he from Utah? LR: He was. 50 CO: Oh, okay. LR: I think it was Florida, yeah. He ended up moving to California and was in California at the height of like 1979, 1980 and eventually moved to Florida. But it's just interesting that that's who I thought of as you were talking, and so I appreciate your vulnerability and willingness to share because it's not an easy thing. CO: No, it's not. But pretty cool. LR: So as we were kind of ending up last time, we'd gotten to about 1989. You were on the board of the AIDS Project Utah, the Salt Lake AIDS Foundation. CO: No, no, no. I wasn't on their boards. I was Ben Barr's secretary at AIDS Project Utah. LR: Okay. I have his name down. CO: No, I was—they didn't like me. LR: They didn't let you on the board? CO: I would not have been on the board. No, no. I was brand new to the whole AIDS activism scene, and they chopped that bud really quickly. LR: So you're in your late twenties, early thirties at that time as we're heading into the 1990s. You had mentioned that watching that play at Westminster College, that it kind of really got you into that whole mindset of doing more. CO: Yes. LR: How did that progress? CO: Well, this is something I love to talk about. There used to be this umbrella organization. We jokingly called it the Gay Senate, but it was called Gay and Lesbian Community Council of Utah, the GLCCU. It was a democratic representative organization. Every queer group in the state, I think this is how it was set up, got three votes. Then if you were an individual not affiliated with a queer group, but you still wanted to participate, I think you paid a small fee, like $25 a 51 year, and you got a single vote. We would meet monthly. As my understanding is, it started out more about coordinating calendars because there was, in the mid- to the late eighties, there was the sudden blossoming of all of these groups. The long-time groups were, like, The Royal Court of the Golden Spike Empire, the court system that had been around since the mid-seventies here in Salt Lake, and Affirmation was a long-timer as well, the support group for gay Mormons. There was a group for lesbians called Older, Wiser Lesbians or OWLs for short. They'd been around. But all of a sudden, in the mid- to late eighties, there was just like the Utah Gay Rodeo Association, and there were tons of bars. There were gay hiking groups and lesbian literary groups and a salon, kind of a literary salon that was going on, the Bohemian Club, which was meeting up in the Avenues— just all these different things. So to avoid planning major events on the same night and dividing the participants, the Community Council was set up to avoid that. But it actually started to become much more about that. It tried to be nonpolitical for a while, and finally we just gave up and it's like, "No, we're going to be a political organization." So it was formally organized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and we started looking at developing plans for a community center, which did happen. The first iteration was the Utah Stonewall Center. We'd have these monthly meetings and there'd be 60, 70 folks there all representing these different groups. We had an agenda, and some of the time it was political. Often we were dealing with police harassment or police noninvolvement. The Salt Lake City Police Department, one of the things they did was they selected this guy named Dave... Oh, police officer. I think it was Dave Thomas, but that's also the name of the owner of Wendy's restaurant. But I just remember he was Officer Dave, and he was just this teddy bear of a guy who started showing up to be a liaison between the police department and the LGBT community. He was terrified. He just 52 looked like a deer in the headlights for like the first three months. But then he's there witnessing all this stuff that we're doing and the things that we're dealing with, and the light went on for him. He was like, "Oh. These folks are having a real rough time, and the police department really is not helping. In fact, sometimes the police are the cause of problems." So he became a huge... I think he was the only straight person to attend. There would be 70, 80 queer folks and then Dave the police officer. But he became a huge ally and really stepped up his game and went back to the police and said, "Okay, here's what we're going to do." He laid out this program of sensitivity trainings and other stuff, which is great. It was just marvelous. I miss that so much. So much now is like, the director of the Pride Center issues a mandate from on high. If there is a problem and the newspapers want a response or a quote, they'll go to Troy Williams from Equality Utah or whoever the current director of the Pride Center is and get a quote. Well, back then it was, no, you came to Community Council, and Community Council would issue a statement that was backed up. We used Robert's Rules of Orders to vote on something, and if a statement came from us, that meant it had been vetted by the entire community, not just one or two voices who were being paid $50,000 a year. This was all volunteer. We became a family, and it was just really a magnificent time to be queer here in Salt Lake. I mean, we'd fight like a family, but we also always came back together and went, "Okay, we are in this together." It was just extraordinary. So as a board member for the Wasatch Chapter of Affirmation, I think that's how I started attending Community Council was because of my involvement with Affirmation. Then it got to be where the Community Council Committee was public relations and education, and I got elected to that position to be the chair of public relations. I took 53 the ball and ran with that. I felt public relations in a very expansive way, probably not a textbook definition. We'd had Pride festivals since 1974, I think, was the first time a Pride festival was celebrated here in Utah. So now, this is 15 years later—and the Pride festivals were never affiliated with Stonewall at the end of June. The Pride festivals are usually in August or September when it had cooled off, and we go to the park in Murray—or is that Pioneer Park downtown and stuff? I'm starting to get educated and learning about Stonewall and the significance of that, and I was like, "Why don't we do anything on the day of Stonewall?" Everybody, all the others were like, "Because everybody goes to San Francisco or LA to be in the Big Stonewall marches there." I was like, "No, not everybody. The white, wealthy men go to San Francisco and Los Angeles and party on Stonewall weekend. But the rest of us that don't have money or are of color or women, etc., we're still here in Salt Lake. Why don't we do something to honor Stonewall?" So I started floating the idea of the Pride March, having a pride march on June 27th or June 28th to celebrate and honor Stonewall. Oh, my gosh, the backlash was just, "Don't do this. Don't rock the boat. Well, it's okay. Just don't have any drag queens. No, no trans folks. It's okay as long as everybody keeps all their clothes on." And, you know, "The women should dress feminine and the guys, maybe we should wear suits and dresses." I mean, it was just all this crazy homophobic shit. Everybody was just so terrified of doing something this public, and I'm like, "Well, this is public relations, and I'm the head of it, and I'm going to call it." So out of my pocket, I paid for all the licenses and for the insurance and stuff. Dave, bless his heart, he got the police department to say, "We will provide police security at where you start your march and where you end the march. You 54 have to provide your own internal security during the march. We'll probably have a car or two to kind of follow along in case there are problems. We'll do that for free." I got the city police department to say that they would do that for free. So on June 27, 1990, we had our first Pride March here in Salt Lake. You know, this is a march, not a parade. This was an angry, political, but not celebratory parade. We started up at the Capitol building, and my homosexual agenda was to say “fuck you" to the Mormon Church. So we planned the route to go down State Street from the capital, hang a right on North Temple, go over to the temple and kind of go around the temple and then on to South Temple. Then we ended up at— there is kind of this art gallery with an outdoor amphitheater next to Abravanel Hall downtown on West Temple. That's where we ended up, was at this outdoor amphitheater. We had about 250 people. I'm carrying my bullhorn at the front. We're doing chants and stuff, you know: "Two, four, six, eight. How do you know your bishop's straight?" "We're here. We're queer. We're fabulous. Get used to us." Well, that was the second year because ‘queer’ still wasn't quite in our vocabulary yet. ‘Queer’ was still coming up. It was in 1990 that ‘queer’ started to be used. But anyway. We had a lot of support from several groups, but there were several important groups that did not participate, such as the Royal Court of Golden Spike Empire. They refused to participate, which I was like, "No, we want drag queens. Give us some drag queens, please." But the Unitarian Church sent a huge contingent, which was awesome. Another big group was UGLY, the Utah Gay and Lesbian Youth, so it was the youth group; they were very present. Affirmation and the Lesbian and Gay Student Union up at the U of U were some of the big groups that I remember specifically that participated. 55 Everything was going fine. There's 250 of us marching down the street. There's no one lining the sides of the street. Today there's, you know, 40,000 people or whatever. Some cars honked, and we got some, "F- you, fags and "Oh, you dykes," you know, some homophobic crap. But nothing serious. We got down to South Temple, and as we're going past the south gate of Temple Square, that's where they had the station for the horse and buggies that carry tourists around town. All of a sudden, here come 250 homos waving flags and banners and signs, and it freaked the horses out, of course, and they started bucking. Oh, my god, the drivers were really upset at us, and so I had to stand kind of in front of them and push people towards the south and away from the carriage stand and was like, “Shh! Calm down for a minute till we get past the horses.” Later the police said, “Oh, yeah, we did approve your route, but we forgot about the horse station there. If you do this again next year, you can't go by the south gate of Temple Square.” I was like, “Gotcha. I agree. That was poorly planned and executed. We should have done our homework." We could have just gone to North Temple and then down West Temple. So the next year, 1991, when I did it again, I organized and led the march from the State Capitol down to the City-County Building in Washington Square. That was the first time there was ever a big queer event at the City-County Building was when we ended up there on that march of 1991. Now that's the annual site of both the parades, and the festival itself is there at Washington Square, so I paved the way for that. I'm really proud of that. That second year was really scary too. We get to Washington Square. I had gotten a permit for us to meet at the east side of the City-County Building and to use the steps as a platform where speakers could go up at the top of the steps and then speak to everybody gathered there. Well, we are approaching there and there 56 is a group of a dozen neo-Nazis already at the top of the steps. They've got Nazi flags and big signs that say, “Die Fags,” “Die from AIDS,” and they're chanting "Sieg Heil, die from AIDS." Just horrible, horrible stuff. And I'm the one with the bullhorn and I'm just like, "Oh, shit, what do we do?" I'm terrified because if one of them's angry enough and has a weapon, who are they going to shoot? They're going to shoot the fag with the bullhorn, and that's me. But I was just like, "I can't let them see my fear. I can't." So I just stopped everybody short, and we paused the march. I went over to the police officers that were there, and I said, "They're in my space." They were like, "No, sorry. The Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of assembly." I pulled out my permit and I said, "I paid $150 for this permit, and it says eastern stairs, etc., you know. Where is their permit for this?" They're like, "Well, they don't have one. They can just show up and do it." I was like, "Whoa. How is this even vaguely just?" I'm out $150 for getting a permit that I actually didn't really need, apparently not. I was just so angry, but I was like, "Okay, we've got to deal with it." So we formed a barrier and then turned our backs to them, and I stood on the other side of the group with everybody who spoke. Those of us who spoke were facing the Nazis, but everybody else had their backs turned to them, and we just tried to yell over them. We'd give our speeches and stuff, and it was so difficult to try and give words of inspiration and hope when you have people chanting for you to die. That was just a mess. But I think in a way, too, it was really good for us to go, "Oh, yeah. These enemies we have are real. This isn't some nebulous church leadership or whatever; these 12 people right here despise us enough to show up 57 and show their true colors." So I think that was an important lesson for a lot of us that were there, like, "Oh, okay, yeah. We're not making this shit up. Homophobia is real." Then later that fall when there was the festival... Oh, well, we need to talk about Queer Nation first, so remind me to come back to the 1991 festival. There is a guy named Ben Williams. He's a couple of years older than I here in our community, and he went back to New York for Pride of 1990, I want to say. He came back from that trip with all this literature from this new wave that was sweeping through our community called Queer Nation, which was a nonviolent direct action group dedicated to queer visibility. I think it started in New York, but it really took off in San Francisco as well. It was huge. So Dan brought back all this literature: fliers and pamphlets and the newsletter and stuff with Queer Nation, and just really, really radical liberation language and ideas that just... I mean, I'm reading this stuff and my heart is just... The rockets are going off, the mental fireworks. I was like, "Oh, my God, this is extraordinary." It was inspired by ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, that had started in, I think, '88. ACT UP was doing all these really radical political acts around HIV/AIDS, going into St. John's Cathedral and having [a protest] during Mass, which provoked a huge amount of dialogue and anger about it, like, "Oh, how dare those filthy queers enter into sacred space and do something so horrific?" But people were talking about it, and so that's what Queer Nation aimed to do—although around all queer issues, not just HIV/AIDS. So I was just like, "This is incredible." Around January 2 of 1991, I flew to San Francisco for a weekend so I could attend the San Francisco Chapter of Queer Nation that was held at the Women's Building in the Mission District. I walked into this huge—I want to say it's probably 58 like the cafeteria for the women's building. It was just this huge space, and it was jam-packed. There had to have been 2000 queer folks there. Angry, angry queer folks. The thing about Queer Nation was everything was done by consensus. You had to have a 100% consensus to do anything. How do you get 2000 angry radicals to agree to something? And I watched it happen. I'm going to get really emotional. It was magical, how it was just like... I was absolutely blown away how they were able to get so many people with such different ideas to come together and say, "Yes, let's support this action at this shopping mall. We're all going to go to the shopping mall and do a dine-in in front of the Orange Julius," or whatever, and it worked. Somehow they were able to do this. So I got all the literature I could and took copious notes about how to do this. Now, part of my journey up to this point was, in '88, '89, I had become a Quaker. I'd left Mormonism and I converted to Quakerism, and it was such a good fit for me. I love being a Quaker so much, and they do everything by consensus as well, like 100% consensus. So I got to witness it happen in a much quieter, gentler way. But still, I had some understanding of how consensus went, so when I came back with all this material, I'm still just thinking about all this stuff, and I started just kind of doing Queer Nation actions on my own. I created these fliers that said, in big, bold letters at the top, "Queers Read This,” and then I had this statement about, "Come on, folks, let's get our shit together. Stop being in abusive relationships with your jobs, with your church, with your family. If you need to end it, get out of there. Start embracing your queerness. Learn to love it. Learn to be free and liberate yourself from patriarchal language, from colonization." That was a big part of Queer Nation's language, was how to decolonize ourselves. This is 30 years ago; we're still talking about colonization and decolonization. I felt really glad that I was on that 59 first wave of really looking at that in the queer community and going, "Okay, what can we do?" But so I was working at the U of U and kind of would sneak in to the copier and make a hundred copies of this radical little statement, "Queers Read This,” and then I would just plaster all of campus with it. I did like three or four of these little mini zaps, and people were just kind of starting to talk about it, like, "Who's this Queer Nation? What's going on?" So it's like, "Oh!" I started talking more with Ben, but he kind of didn't really want to participate. But there started to be this group of me and Curtis Jensen and Melanie Bailey—I think was her name. It was Melanie something—and Jared Brown and Rene Rinaldi. They're all just like, "Queer Nation, Queer Nation, Queer Nation. Let's start it. Let's start it." I was like, "Okay." So we decided on a time and a place to have our first meeting. I made up another little flier and we plastered that all over town, and we got 20 people at the first meeting and we just started. Then we invited this woman named Diane Hirschi, H-I-R-S-C-H-I, I think, who was a Quaker woman and very much an ally. We had her come and we did a day-long training on Quaker consensus process. How do you present something and how do you come to consensus about it? What happens if there's someone who is super opposed to a proposal, how do you work with that? What do you do? Ultimately it was, if you value the voice of that one person enough, you don't do it. If they really are strong in their conviction that this shouldn't be done, then we wouldn't do it. We would honor the power of that one voice. Sometimes that would mean having what the Quakers call a Clearness Committee, so that you would have a smaller committee of maybe three other folks meet with that person and just sit with them and witness with them what their concerns are and kind of, "Can we 60 come up with alternatives so that you can maybe come around and change your no vote to maybe an abstention, to stand aside?" It was just really beautiful. Everybody got it, like, "Oh, okay, yeah, this totally makes sense." So we started doing everything by consensus. The stuff that we started doing was phenomenal and life-changing. One of our first big political actions was to do a protest during General Conference at the South Gate of Temple Square Park—where the horses were—to return to the scene to protest against the LDS Church, the excommunications, the electric shock therapy at BYU, the constant denigration of queer folk by LDS authorities, especially Boyd K. Packer and Spencer Kimball. Just really holding them responsible for all of that. I mean, I could do five hours on Queer Nation alone. How are you holding up there, Lorrie? LR: I'm good. I actually have two questions around this. CO: Sure. LR: First of all, did going to San Francisco and then seeing this happen, how Queer Nation was organized and their consensus, did that have any impact on how you came back and then organized the 1991 festival? CO: You mean march? LR: Yes. That's what I meant. March, not festival. CO: No, no, no. The march, I mean—so Queer Nation Utah had a huge contingency in the 1991 march. It did impact what happened at the festival, I think. I'm sorry, what's your other question? LR: My other question is... So you basically organized Queer Nation here in Salt Lake and got it going? CO: Yeah, me and Curtis Jensen and Melanie Bailey. We were the original three. LR: Okay. Did it become the political activism thing that you envisioned? 61 CO: Absolutely. 100%, yeah. One of the things that I learned at San Francisco was—so the umbrella group was Queer Nation, but it had different… Oh, shoot. What's the...? JM: Chapters? CO: Well, no. Within one chapter, there was kind of the overarching Queer Nation, but there were… focus groups. We had different focus groups. Women of color had a focus group. But the whole thing was to come up with an acronym for your focus group that also was humorous, so I'm trying to think of what's a good example of that. JM: Well, I'm looking at one on the Wikipedia page right now called Queer Fuckers Magazine? CO: Yeah, I was the editor. Curtis Jensen was the one who published the magazine, but yeah, I did a lot of the writing for Queer Fuckers, QFM for short. But no. QAMP was one of them, but it was spelled with a Q. QAMP was Queers at the Mall Project, so this one of the focus groups would do visibility actions at the mall. One of the things about Queer Nation was there was a uniform that everybody wore. It was usually a black flight jacket or a black leather jacket, like a motorcycle jacket, covered in queer stickers that were really raunchy: "Queer Boys Make Me Hard," "Queer Girls Make Me Wet," "I Suck Dick," "Queers Revolt." Just really angry and really sexual stickers in bright dayglo colors: reds, greens, yellows, blues. "Queer as Fuck" was another fun sticker that you would put somewhere on your clothing. Levi shorts with a turned-up bottom at the knee and either black combat boots or Doc Martens. Really short hair brushed forward—we called it the Caesar because of how Julius Caesar's hair is kind of pushed forward. Pearls: we all wore pearls or Mardi Gras beads. That was vintage. We preferred pearls, but Mardi Gras beads were acceptable. So we had this kind of uniform that we wore, 62 but it was mainly about the stickers, and that was how we would do these visibility actions. Thirty of us would go shopping at ZCMI, which was the Mormon department store that no longer exists, or if there was some sort of a homophobic incident, we would show up there and protest. There was a homophobic incident at the Dee's on Sixth South and West Temple, I think. A gay couple had gone there. That was a big queer hangout after the bars, you know, two or three in the morning. People would go to Dee's for breakfast, and there was a young gay couple that kissed each other at Dee's and they were kicked out. So we had 50 of us show up in our uniforms and we did a kiss-in at Dee's. We sat there for two hours ordering water and crackers, not spending any money, just taking up tables, and then every 10 minutes we'd go, "Okay, everybody kiss!" and so we'd all kiss. We got a formal apology from the management. They said they will never, ever kick out anybody again for kissing in their restaurant. So, you know, things like that. My favorite focus group was the campus group at the U of U campus. Queer Nation started putting fliers up on campus and stuff, and there was this columnist with the Daily Utah Chronicle, which is the university's campus paper. His name was Josh, and I can't remember his last name now. He took it as his own private mission to publicly harass Queer Nation through columns, so he would do a column about, "Oh, those radical queers invaded campus again and they did all this zany stuff." But instead of calling us Queer Nation Utah, in one of his first columns, he called us the Faggot Ass Queer and Lesbo Institute. We were like, "That's the perfect name for our campus focus group." So the University of U campus focus group of Queer Nation Salt Lake was called Faggot Ass Queer and Lesbo Institute. We made an official logo for it and everything, and we made a poster using his photograph and it said, "He is actual proof that no 63 straight man has ever read a book, brought to you by Faggot Ass Queer and Lesbo Institute," and we plastered it all over campus. Then he'd come back with his witty retort. Come to find out, actually, Josh was not homophobic at all. He was just playing with us. I went into the office to file a complaint about him and he met with me and he's like, "Dude, you guys are great." He said, "Please play with me. I love what you're doing. I fully support you, but I want my readers to think that I'm really antagonistic." He played the devil's advocate, basically, so we just had a heyday going back and forth with all these things, and it was just really a lot of fun. Do you have any questions? I feel like I'm going off on all these crazy tangents. LR: No. This is amazing. I've been googling as you've been talking. I didn't do any research before we started this interview, so I couldn't have told you anything about you—which, part of me, I really like doing that so that I don't have any preconceived ideas. CO: Yeah. You're a blank slate. LR: Yeah. So I'm listening to you talk, and, "Oh, my God. Did he actually start the very first gay march here in Utah?" So I googled it, and sure enough, there's your name. CO: Yeah. LR: I really wanted you to talk about that neo-Nazi incident, because it was on the web page I was reading about, and you did. So it's just interesting to listen to you talk about having an idea of "I'm going to do this" and then doing it. CO: Yeah. My philosophy always was, "If I don't do it, who will?" Going to see Bent, the motto was “Never again,” and then the corollary to that was, "Okay, if I don't do this, who will?" So it was a big call for me to step up and really make my mark because I don't want youth to ever have to go through what I went through again. That's my 64 number one goal, is like, "Let's get over this. Let's move past this.” Because it was so, so soul-crushing to me to have all this homophobic crap in my life, to have no role models, to have no education or understanding about myself, so I'm going to do this. I want to be that role model. I will invent the wheel so that you don't have to reinvent it, you know? LR: I appreciate everything that you have done now, as I am living out. I appreciate everything that you've done to create a safe space for the youth of today. CO: You're welcome. It has to be done. LR: Yeah, and I am truly appreciative of that. So as I was looking at this article that I've been reading, you left Salt Lake in '92? CO: Yeah. LR: Okay. So did Queer Nation stop when you left or did it continue? CO: It stopped before I left or right around the same time. LR: Okay. So it only lasted for a year? CO: A year and a half. LR: Okay. What was the...? CO: Well, let's go back to the... We need to deal with the Pride Festival of '91 and what happened there. So by [that] time, we were pretty seasoned activists and were a pretty cohesive group. We were pretty large. I would say there were maybe 150 people loosely affiliated with Queer Nation, and about 20 of us, 25 of us that were really hardcore central movers and shakers. It's Queer Pride Festival at Murray Park. Lynn Lavender, who was a Jewish lesbian singer-songwriter, was on stage performing and off to the side, and kind of around the corner comes a half a dozen neo-Nazis again with Nazi flags, and they're chanting. Someone runs up to me and says, "The Nazis are here,” and I'm just like, "Oh, shit." So I run and grab every Queer Nation member I can see and spread the 65 word out, and we immediately get into a phalanx to go and stand in front of them and prevent them from coming further into the festival because they wanted to. Then as more and more people heard, non-Queer Nation folks started filling in behind us. But there's probably a row three-deep right at the front of Queer Nation folks who are standing firmly in the half circle in front of these neo-Nazis. Carla Groden, bless her heart, who's been, I think, wheelchair-bound most or all of her life, she's in her electric wheelchair and she starts ramming into the group of Nazis physically with her wheelchair. I grabbed her and was like, "Carla, you cannot physically assault them. They have not assaulted us. You've got to stop. Pull back a little bit." And she does, she pulls back, and I'm just like, "Carla, dammit," you know? We're all just kind of standing there. It's a face-off and the tension's just growing: anger and anger and anger. I can feel people just seething and boiling behind me, and I'm just like, "Ah!" Nancy Perez is next to me, and Nancy's like, "What are we going to do?" I'm not afraid for us. I'm afraid for them, because should violence break out we are going to kill them. There's six of them. There are now 300 of us packed up against them, and I was just like, "We've got to turn the energy around. You've got to flip it around." I think she was the one who said, "Well, let's turn around. Let's put our backs to them so that we're not giving them any of our energy." So that first row of us, we all just kind of simultaneously turned around and then it just kind of took a ripple effect. The next three or four rows of people also turned around, and we all linked arms, and this profound sense of unity came up. I have never experienced anything like it before or since. It was spiritual in nature, I have to say. It was love. At a point when we should have just been filled with hatred and we were feeling hatred from 66 behind us, we chose not to do that. We chose to embrace the sense of unity and love within our own community. I mean, almost simultaneously, people just started bawling, crying everybody's eyes out. People started doing "I love you" in sign language. The power of unity and community, of just intense love and respect for each other, just swept through us. We didn't even care what was going on. We were all just like having this love fest. It was so amazing and beautiful. Within a minute or two, the official security and the police showed up and escorted the Nazis off the grounds. They were not allowed there. They were officially trespassing, so they could be kicked off. It was such a powerful experience. Every six months or so, somebody writes to me or I meet them in the street or whatever, and they go, "Remember that time where the Nazis came to the festival and that powerful experience of unity just inundated us all with deliciousness?" I go, "Yeah, it was incredibly powerful." Now, unfortunately, Lynn Lavender, who was still on stage and singing, later on found out what happened and she wrote a really nasty article about it, saying "Only in Utah do people turn their backs on neo-Nazis." I was like, "Well, yeah, we did physically turn our backs, but that wasn't the point. We were not being cowards on any level whatsoever, and we were not not defending you as a Jewish lesbian. We were ultimately supremely respecting you and holding you in that." So that kind of left a bad taste with me, certainly. It got misinterpreted. But that still will never negate my own memories of how powerful that was. LR: So Queer Nation had a profound effect in that '91 Pride march. 67 CO: Yeah, and the thing about Queer Nation: we were pushing the boundaries. We were the edge walkers. We were out there going, "Hmm, can we do this, can we do that?" For so long, the gay and lesbian community of Salt Lake had tiptoed around and been really super cautious about everything, and we were like, "Fuck that. We are going to see how far we can go and what we can do and what the limits are. Then we're going to push back against those limits anyway. We're just going to embrace liberation and stop trying to live by other people's rules." It was super successful in that as far as we pushed out, then the more mainstream folks could fill in behind us and be moved into more radical positions without having to be that bulwark at the front. I think we were super successful in allowing the politics here in Salt Lake and all of Utah to really flourish and to move forward several steps, whereas before, it was just always so guarded, so cautious, pretty much stagnant and entropic. So I think we really pushed that. Unfortunately, it took a huge amount of energy to keep up that level of anger and indignation and self-righteousness, and I started to notice we were kind of provoking things, like something minor would happen and we would blow it really out of proportion and way overreact. That wasn't good for any of us mentally, psychologically. We were creating events of hate so that we could respond and say, "See? They're hateful!" The beginning of the end for me was really the Andrew Dice Clay concert. He was a popular comedian at the time. He was kinda racist, very sexist, very homophobic, very popular amongst white frat boys, university level. He came to Abravanel Hall to do a comedy show and we went there to protest against him. We've made up a flier: “Andrew Dice Clay is racist, homophobic, and sexist,” and it had some quotes and stuff from him. I would say there were 40 of us there at the protest. They hadn't opened the doors to Abravanel Hall, so the line to get in was 68 four or five deep and extended a full block and a half. We were kind of towards the front of the line, but off to the side. The police had promised us protection, and Andrew Dice Clay's production company had said, "No, we'll have security there, too, so you should be fine." Well, it's still a good 45 minutes before the show, and we're being physically harassed by folks. People are throwing cans at us, empty cans and water bottles, just garbage thrown around us. People are yelling and calling us names. Then we notice, for some reason, all the security, all the police, just melted away, leaving us alone with these folks. Suddenly, guys started darting from the line to come over and punch us and hit us and pummel us. One of the tactics that we learned from the Quakers was when you're being physically assaulted, men have a really hard time hitting women. So the lesbians formed a circle linking arms with the men inside the circle because we were really, truly dedicated to nonviolence. We didn't want to provoke violence. We didn't want to be violent ourselves, and we certainly didn't want others to be violent towards us, so we did that. The lesbians linked arms in a circle and we were inside. But then all hell broke loose, and several folks came over and just started yanking the women apart to get into the center and were punching us, and it was just super crazy. Then security shows up and police show up, and all the attackers suddenly run back in the line and they're just, "La-di-da, I didn't do anything." The police were absolutely freakin' horrible to us. The man who had been hitting me was standing in line 20 feet from me. The cop that was interviewing me stood in between us, so the cop's facing me with his back to the guy who hit me, and he was like, "So tell me what happened." I explained, and he was like, "Can you describe the guy?" 69 I kind of looked around the cop and I say, "Oh, he's about six-one, 180 pounds, light brown hair. That's him standing right there." The guy says, "What color is he?" I was like, "Oh, he's white." I'm like, "Officer, that's him right there." The officer refused to turn around and look at who I was pointing at. He said, "How old do you think he is?" I'd look around him and ask "Hey, how old are you?" and the guy would go, "I'm 24," and I say "24, Officer." I was just so exasperated. We were just treated so poorly by the police. Then the newspaper account was that there was a brief skirmish at the Andrew Dice Clay concert between folks from Queer Nation. Couple of us had to go to the hospital, so they went away in ambulances. I wouldn't call that a ‘skirmish’. But yeah, it was so discouraging. We'd never been physically assaulted before and to have that happen really broke our spirit in a way and made us very leery to continue on. But that was towards the end for me. Things just kind of started winding down. That would have been like in October of '91. Simultaneously that fall, I took a class through the University of Utah called Ethnobotany. That class took us to Moab, where I'd been but not since I was like four years old. It was learning how indigenous folks around the Moab area foraged for food, the different plants that were edible and useful for other things, for survival. It was just a three-day class. There was one day of class instruction here in Salt Lake, and then for two days we went to Moab. The first day we went all over and learned about all these plants, and the next day we had to fix a meal. We had to go out and forage and fix a big feast for all of us, and we had to use only primitive tools, so we had to make our own flints and stuff and go and cut things with flint 70 knives. And I just absolutely fell in love with Moab. I was just like, “Oh, my God, this place is gorgeous and I want to live here.” One of the prominent Quaker women in Utah, her name was Annette Green, and Annette lived in Moab. She would come up to Salt Lake for meetings quite often, for Quaker meetings. That spring I had heard through the grapevine that Annette needed an assistant. She worked for the school district in special education. So I called Annette up and said... This is spring of '92. I was like, "Hey, I would really love to move to Moab. Would you hire me to be your assistant?" She was like, “Oh, absolutely,” so she pretty much hired me on the spot. So around May of 1992, I left Salt Lake and moved to Moab. [Interview ends.] Part 4: November 30, 2022 LR: Today is November 30, 2022. We are continuing our interview with Connell over Zoom. Jim is on the call again. We're just going to pick up where we left off with you moving to Moab in the spring of 1992—you said it was May?—working with Annette. Let’s pick that up from there. CO: Okay. Did I talk about the class that I took? LR: You did. You went down there. CO: And I fell in love and went, "Oh, my gosh. Why am I not living here?" LR: Yes. CO: So Queer Nation was winding down after the one where we were violently attacked at the Andrew Dice Clay concert. Like I said, I felt like we were almost trying to generate instances of homophobia so we could be angry about it, and it was really unhealthy for me. I gained a lot of weight and I was so sedentary and everything and so I packed everything up and headed to Moab. 71 I didn't have a place to live, so I bought a $35 tent from Kmart, just the cheapest little thing I could find. That tent ended up being the most sturdy, trustworthy tent you could imagine. It was really small, about five feet tall in the middle. I'm 6'5", so I wasn't quite able to stand up, but I could hunch over. I put some of my stuff into a storage unit in Moab and then I lived in my tent through all that first summer, just alone out in the wilderness, either along Potash Road or up in the La Sal Mountains. If it got too hot, I would go up into the mountains to cool off for a few days. I just lived along the Colorado River or along Mill Creek that flows kind of into Moab. But outside of Moab, Mill Creek has this beautiful waterfall that falls into this giant swimming pool-sized pool, and I camped along the creek up there. I had a bookshelf, a small bookshelf, and then two shelves of books inside my tent because I'm a voracious reader. I would go into town every couple/three days to get fresh milk or to turn in library books and get new ones, have a meal at a restaurant or something. But otherwise, I was just cooking at a little camp stove and had a little kitchen setup and stuff in my tent. I was pretty much naked every day, playing in the streams or hiking around. I had a mountain bike, so I would go off on these long mountain bikes, and then sometimes I'd stop on my bike and then hike from there and then come back to my bike. Getting into the rhythms of nature was extraordinary, living by the phases of the moon. Because down there, there's no light pollution from any city, so when there was a full moon, you can almost literally read by the light of the moon because it would be so bright. Those were my favorite nights, those around the full moon because then I could do more nighttime activities. I could extend my hiking and stuff further into the night. 72 I had always been so dysmorphic about my body. I've always really hated my body. I hated being a redhead. I hated having freckles. And then seeing all this red and orange sandstone everywhere, I was like, "Oh my God, that's my body color, and it's beautiful. I love the color of this red and orange sandstone. Oh, my gosh. That's my body color. What's wrong with being a redhead?” It was, oh, a lot of deep healing about my body issues. And camping full time—camping as a child had been so traumatic because it was so involved with hunting and fishing and therefore violence, you know, killing animals, stuff that I just did not want to do. So it was just deeply healing, deeply, deeply healing. Then in the fall, at first, I couldn't find a place to live, so I still lived in my tent but in someone's backyard downtown. They let me stay in their backyard until I could find a place and then I got some housing. I was working for Annette Greenberg at the Sundwall Center, S-U-N-D-W-AL-L. That was both our offices. Annette was the director of all special ed services K12, and I was her assistant and secretary. So our two offices were in that building, but it was also the special ed preschool for the school district. We had this amazing program where when kids were one and two years old, if it was recognized that the child might have developmental delays or any kind of disability, they were identified so that they could start attending this preschool. The idea was to give them really intensive special education services to help them be more mainstreamed when they reached kindergarten, so they wouldn't feel so different or set apart in their school experience, and it was super successful. I think there were like 30 preschool kids in this school, and I had no training in special education whatsoever. I was just an office drone. But I loved these kids so much and we got along so well. One of the treats for the kids when they did well or completed an assignment or something was they got to come into my office and 73 hang out with me for 10 minutes. So I got to be a treat for the kids and I just loved that. They were amazing. About six months in, we got a new school superintendent for the whole school district who was LDS. A white, cisgendered, heterosexual male, and now he's hearing about this big gay special ed staff person who's interacting with preschool kids. Oh, and there was one more office in our building, and that was for the school district's main psychologist and counselor. Her name was Christine Swenson or Swanson, I can't remember, and the school superintendent approached her and started to question her about me. She figured out immediately where this was going, and she said, "Richard, I just want to stop you right there. Anything you might think is inappropriate or whatever, you're absolutely dead wrong. Just stop. Let him do his job. He's fantastic. He's not a pedophile." I mean, she didn't say pedophile, but what she was saying was, "Just leave him alone." And he did, thank goodness. He was super respectful of me and everything and very supportive, which I thought was really good. I was like, "Oh, really? Did he have to go through that first full step, though?" But anyway, I felt completely free to be me and to be out and everything. No parents ever had any problem. I struggled with Annette and her manic episodes. I've always had female bosses my whole life. I just flourish better. But she was the one that really challenged me the most. Everything was a crisis for her and she would just get into these really manic crisis modes, and I had to clean that up. A lot of my job was calming her down and saying, “Look, this is not the end of the world. You don't have to catastrophize everything. Let's move forward. Here's steps on how we can handle the situation.” 74 I'd get off at noon on Fridays every week, and so I would often take that opportunity to go out and go camping over the weekend or mountain bike. I'd mountain bike my ass off all over that area. I remember one day I'd had a really shitty week at work, and I was just really upset by Friday. I just needed to get the hell out of Dodge. So as soon as I was free, I ran home, packed up my camping gear, and then got on my mountain bike. I had like a 75-pound pack full of all my stuff, got on my mountain bike, rode up Canyon Creek Road to what's called Back of Beyond—there's an area southwest of Moab called Back of Beyond. I just took my bike into one of the slot canyons and left it there and stupidly didn't tell anybody what I was doing, where I was going, where I might be. Hid my bike in the slot canyon and then just hiked further back in and went and went and went. And then stopped, camped overnight, got up the next day, and then started on this day hike. One of the lessons I learned when you're hiking in the desert is never think that you're going to do a loop and come back to where you started. If you go from A to B, come back B to A. Even if it looks super clear that, "Oh, yeah, I can get around this rock and go up this," that's not going to happen. So I am on this really long hike. I had my fanny pack with two bottles of water, and I had some peanuts and a ramen package in there. Not much. I was not well prepared. I did this big loop and thought, "Oh, I can come back down over here and then just drop back into my campsite." Well, I got pretty close, and then all of a sudden, my only way to get back down was either to go back the way I had come, which was a really long route, or there was a chimney, you know—two walls that are really close to each other. I could chimney down with my back against one wall and my feet against the other wall and just kind of slide myself down. It's probably 150 feet. I'm a good rock climber. I boulder all the time. I'm really good at it. I knew what I was doing. 75 I get, oh, three-quarters of the way down. I'm still like 20, 30 feet up, and the chimney started to kind of go into an hourglass shape. So it's really narrow here and then opened up again below it, and just as I'm getting there, my left foot... There's a little bit of a lip, an edge of rock that I'm kind of resting on, and it crumbled and I slid down into that narrowing part with my left foot in front of me and my right leg up behind me. I'm in shorts, so that whole right leg is just scraping against the rock wall as I'm going down. And I get stuck. I'm stuck in there; I can feel the blood just pouring out of my leg and dripping down below me. I'm in immense pain from scraping that whole side of my leg up, and I'm stuck in this narrowing. I'm just like, "Oh my gosh." After I'd been in there about two hours trying to figure out a way to get out and slowly kind of surrendering to the inevitable and literally thinking, “Okay, I'm going to die here. It's going to be a long time before they figure out where I am and find my bones. But I'm going to die doing something I really love and in a place that I absolutely adore, heart and soul, and I'm okay with that.” So I was just kind of okay. I just kind of surrendered to it. Then I realized if I could kind of push myself up a little and then let my weight drop as heavily as I could, I could start to slide down. Of course, my leg is simultaneously numb because it's asleep, but it also is scraping even deeper into the rock, and I know I've lost quite a bit of blood. Every time I do that, the pain is excruciating. I just inched myself down through that narrowing until it opens back up. It opens up pretty wide, so I actually drop through onto the ground. It's still about another 10 feet down, so I land pretty hard. It's now evening of that second day, and I'm really close to my campsite. I hobble over to it, and I was like, “Okay, well, I don't have time to get out tonight in the dark.” So I bandaged up my leg as best I could with bandanas that I had, 76 cleaned it out, and tried to sleep. But I was in so much pain and I was like, "Okay, I'm not sleeping.” So I found a branch so that I could kind of make a crutch out of, packed up all my shit—so again, 75-pound pack on my back—and I hobble out. It probably took me four hours to get out, just using my flashlight. As I recall, it was a fairly light night. It wasn't a full moon. But I was able to make it, got to my bike, rode home. I survived to tell the tale, but it was crazy. Another time I went hiking, I was up—it's now called Grandstaff Canyon. It used to be called Negro Bill Canyon. We jokingly referred to it as ‘African-American William Canyon’. Negro Bill was an early black settler in the Moab area who was there in the 1860s before the Mormons got there, and he lived in a one room cabin with Frenchie, the fur trapper. I think they were lovers. I get a very strong feeling that Frenchie and Bill were lovers for quite a while, and then they had a spat, and Frenchy moved away. But William stayed there. William Grandstaff stayed in the Moab area, and the Grandstaff Canyon is where he took his cattle because it had a year-round creek that ran year round, so there was always fresh water for his cattle there. So I was hiking up there, and in that geology, there's what's called ‘fins’. In the ancient ocean beds, sediment is laid horizontally, but after some seismological upheaval, sometimes the geological strata are now vertical and as other stuff washes away, it leaves a really narrow, tall wall. They're called fins. One of the fins, I could actually climb up to and get on top of. They're about 12 to 15 feet wide, and you can just walk along the top of them as long as they are. I was up on top of this fin, messing around, and started to slide off the edge. I started to fall and all I could do was—I fell onto my back and tried to make my surface area as big as possible. The cloth of my shorts and my t-shirt clung to the sandstone, cause my shoes were just sliding on it, and I could not get a grip. My feet are literally, like, six inches 77 dangling off the edge of this 200-foot wall. I'm just lying on my back just going, "Oh, my god." Again, it was just sort of doing the inchworm on my back up this curved level to get to the top. How I didn't die, I don't know. The angels came down and pinned me to the stone so I wouldn't fall. It was just crazy, crazy stuff. I loved living in Moab. Edward Abbey is a famous resident of Moab. He was a desert writer who wrote these love letters to the desert, and he was the one who came up with the idea of the... Oh, gosh. What's the radical environmental group? Not Greenpeace, shoot. Anyway, he came up with the idea of this radical environmental group all formed out of Moab citizens. It's kind of a top-secret group. Oh, what's it called? There's even a book about, The Something and Something Gang Rides Again? He wrote that. I'm going to look it up because I'm going to go crazy. JM: The book is "The Monkey Wrench Gang." CO: The Monkey Wrench Gang! Yeah. So the Monkey Wrench Gang was actually a group of Moab citizens who protested all of the new construction and stuff that was going on in Moab. They wanted to keep the wilderness as pristine as possible, so they do things like put sugar in the tanks of the road graders and stuff like that. This was an Edward Abbey idea. There is actually a Monkey Wrench Gang; at least there was still one. It started in the ‘70s. I was there in the early ‘90s and it was still going, and I actually got an invitation to join it. North of town, McDonald's kept putting out this big highway sign that said, “Visit the Other Arches: McDonald's,” and it was the job of the Monkey Wrench Gang to vandalize or destroy that sign at every opportunity. How you got invited to join the gang, from what I understood and this is what happened to me, was that a piece of the McDonald's sign would end up on your front door. That's how you knew if you had been invited to join the gang. I woke up one morning and there was the M 78 arch on my front door, and I was like, "Oh, okay." I knew someone who was in the gang, so I let him know that I wasn't interested. My heart was with them, but I didn't want to formally join. JM: “Earth First” is another movement that pulled up from the Monkey Wrench Group. CO: Right. Let me think, what else about Moab? So now we need to talk about the Radical Faeries. In 1989, here in Salt Lake City, the Salt Lake Queer Community hosted this annual conference. It used to be called the Desert and Mountain States' Lesbian and Gay Conference, and every year, one big city in the five-state area of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, would hold this annual conference in a different city, and this year it happened to be in Salt Lake City. It was in 1989. So I went to it, and they had book vendors there, and I was walking past this book vendor's stall and just looking at some of the queer titles that were out. I saw this book called Gay Spirit, edited by Mark Thompson. I was blown away by just the title alone. I was like, "What? Gay and spirit together in a title? What the fuck?" My whole life, gay was antithetical to spirituality. We were the anti-Christ, so to see the juxtaposition of these two antithetical terms to me, I was just like, "Wait, what?" Then I picked up the book and on the cover is this photo of, oh, 25 men who are all naked. They're covered in mud and they're all in a big huddle together, and they've got their arms raised to the heavens. It's a black and white photo, and it was so powerful to me, and I thought, "Oh, my God. What are all those naked men doing covered in mud? This is extraordinary and beautiful." I just bought the book, went home, read it all overnight. Like, boom. It's an anthology, like I said, and it's multiple essays on different aspects of queer male spirituality—seeing the leather community as having an element of spirituality to it. Well, one of the chapters in the main one was on the Radical Faeries, which I had never heard of. I was just like, "What?" It's basically queer paganism. It's a 79 pagan-adjacent spiritual movement started by gay men for gay men. It is now broadly open to everyone of genders and sexual orientations and whatever, which I love. So I read this article about this spiritual movement, and there is a quite a bit of information about who the Faeries are and what they do. Another friend, Ben Williams, again, he had also recently read something about the Radical Faeries. He and I and Bobby Smith got together—again, this is late '89, early 1990—and we wanted to start a Salt Lake chapter of the Radical Faeries. A part of what the Faeries do is called sex magic, and Ben was kind of reticent to think about sex magic. You use sexual energy and sexual actions as a way to connect with the divine. So the Radical Faeries were too radical for Ben, and he insisted that rather than being called a Radical Faerie tribe, we were Sacred Faeries, which I thought was super sanitized. But I was also very used to Quaker ways of consensus, and he was very adamant that we not be called Radical Faeries, that we'd be Sacred Fairies. So we'd start at the Sacred Fairies in Salt Lake, and we had done monthly full moon rituals or new moon rituals. Then on the Sabbaths, which are the fall equinox, the winter solstice, you know, those eight important days, we would have big rituals and stuff. It had been really lovely. But from the beginning, Ben and I always locked horns on everything, and eventually, right towards the end of my time in Salt Lake, I stopped participating in the Sacred Faeries. I always felt like I was a Radical Faerie, and I wanted to pursue that. So when I was in Moab, a lot of people there go to Rainbow Gatherings, and so I went to Paonia, Colorado for the Rainbow Gathering that was there. The Rainbow Gathering is an annual hippie gathering, for lack of a better description. It takes place always in a national forest, and thousands of hippies descend on one area. It's similar to Burning Man, only it's in the forest rather than in the desert. But it 80 has a similar ethos. Low impact. We clean up after ourselves so that when we've left, a year later, you cannot tell that several thousand hippies were all focused and concentrated into this one area. It's divided up into kitchens, so like Pony Kitchen, they were really heavily meat eaters, so they were the ones who always had roasting pigs and stuff like that going. I heard, "Oh, there's a Faerie Kitchen, there's a Faerie camp." I was like, "Like Radical Faerie?" “Yeah, it's like Radical Faerie.” So I abandoned my Moab group and went and stayed with the Radical Faerie camp, and it was just such an extraordinary experience. Oh, my God. It was life-affirming and life-changing. I would say there were 150 Radical Faeries all camped together. It was so delightful and playful. It was like being seven years old again and just embracing the wonders of all of the world around you, coupled with really fun sex. One of my favorite memories is this beautiful young hippie girl walks into camp and says, "Hi, my name's Flower, and this guy just asked me to marry him and I said yes. So we're getting married here. Do any of you have a wedding gown?" You have to understand, the parking lot is like four miles away, and so you've had to have backpacked in everything at least four miles up a really steep mountain to get to where we were all camped. So you only bring essentials, right? The Faeries had not one wedding gown, not two wedding gowns, but three wedding gowns had been backpacked into [camp], so she got her choice of which of the three. Then there were like 20 of us. It was so like a Disney movie. The fairy godmother is flying around, the birds singing and bringing ribbons. I was in charge of making the garland for her hair, so I went picking wildflowers and weaving this 81 beautiful garland, and people were doing her makeup and her nails, and others were fitting the gown to her because she was quite smaller than the big drag queen that had the gown that she wanted to use. We just did the most amazing makeover. She was absolutely stunningly gorgeous. It was just extraordinary. It was so much fun. I couldn't believe three people had brought wedding gowns in their backpacks. Who'd have thought? There was a really negative thing that happened at that particular one, and that was a woman was raped. As word went around, everybody was just shocked because that was just so not part of the ethos of what happens at a Rainbow Gathering, which should be about love and unity and community. On this one particular evening, the Faeries decided to hold a parade against rape. We made a giant banner that said “Faeries Against Rape,” and we all dressed up in really somber drag and we were in two lines. Each line was about 75 Faeries long, and we just did a procession through the whole Rainbow Gathering in utter silence. There was one guy who was drumming a slow, like, heartbeat. Otherwise, it was just utter silence from us. As we proceeded, as part of our protest against rape through all of the whole gathering, going from kitchen to kitchen, camp to camp, the response was extraordinary. People were falling down in front of us crying and weeping, because we were just so full of this righteous indignation and power and it made people tremble, you know? Just to see gay men be treated with such respect and having our power recognized was again just mind-blowing to me. I will never forget that experience of just our utter silence, the solemnity of it, and then having all of the heterosexuals around just freaking out with respect. It's hard to even describe it. Really, really powerful experience. 82 Halfway through my stint in Moab, I returned to Salt Lake to see my best friend, Jason Dimick, D-I-M-I-C-K. He was a friend from Queer Nation and we were ski buddies and stuff in Salt Lake. I returned to Salt Lake to spend the weekend with him and hang out, and on either Friday or Saturday night, I can't remember, I wanted to go to the Sun and go dancing. Jason didn't want to go, so I went by myself, and while I was at the Sun, I had this kind of vision, which was really weird. I was like, "Okay, I'm in a gay bar." The Head Shop Boys had just come out with their new cover of the Village People's classic disco hit called "Go West." The original Village People's "Go West" was about the gay flight to California that took place in the '70s. Now, here it is, the age of AIDS. So when the Pet Shop Boys, who are a queer pop group, covered it, it was about the irony of the fact that all these gay men fled to California in the '70s to create a refuge and now they're all dying. So it was a really intense song. But it plays, and I'm out on the dance floor, and I have a shamanic journey while I'm out there. That's all I can to describe it as. I kept hearing this female voice saying, “Connell, it's time to go west. You need to go west. Go west.” I was just like, “What? I don't want to move to California. I don't want to move to San Francisco, but that's the only place I'd really want to go.” The voice said, “Santa Cruz.” And I was like, “Oh, okay. Huh.” When I came out of this experience—there was a lot more to it that's too personal to really describe fully. When I came out of the experience, there was this circle of people around me staring at me. So I don't know what had happened while I was gone, but I quickly left the bar and went back to Jason's place, and I told him about the experience that I'd just had. I said, “So, I think I'm moving to Santa Cruz, California.” He was like, “Great. When do we leave?” 83 I was like, “Whoa, what? Oh, okay.” So we sat down that night and made a plan and basically followed through with it. The plan was he would buy a VW bus, move to Moab for a few months, hang out with me and hang out in Moab, and then we'd pack up the bus and we'd move to Santa Cruz, California. And that's basically what happened. He found this beautiful teal 1978, I think, microbus. We named her the HMS Pernicious. I had this thing where I was naming all my vehicles after words that Spencer W. Kimball called gay people, so words like heinous and abomination and pernicious were in his vocabulary. I was reclaiming those as words of positive power rather than negative power, so our bus was the HMS Pernicious. He moved down with me. We hung out a lot. We both worked part-time at a coffee shop, an espresso shop downtown. Boudin's, I think it was called? It's no longer there. And then [we] just camped and hiked a lot together and just really had a great time. The second summer I was there again and camped outside, and then in July he and I went to the next Rainbow Gathering, which was another extraordinary experience. That time, one of the kitchen camps set the forest on fire, so everyone had to evacuate. There's thousands of hippies who are all high on mushrooms and brownies. I was very high on mushrooms when it started. Jason was nowhere to be found. We had separate tents, but they were right next to each other. He was not returning. I just remember I packed up all my gear as fast as I could because the fire was coming towards the Faerie camp. Trying to pack while you're high on mushrooms is not fun. Escaping from a forest fire when you're playing mushrooms is really not fun. And then he still wasn't around, so I was like, "Fuck it." So I just pulled the stakes out of his tent and just drug his tent with all of its stuff inside behind me, down the mountain, the four miles down to the parking lot. 84 I get to the freakin’ parking lot and he's having sex in our bus with this guy. I was like, “Oh. Yeah, we're leaving because of the mass exodus from the forest fire.” Then we decided to take a three or four-week tour of the Western United States in our bus. We'd just drive like 40, 50 miles, pull over someplace and hang out for a day or two, and then we continue. We went up through Idaho and across Washington over into Oregon. There is a Radical Faerie commune called—not Short Mountain, that's the one in Tennessee. Wolf Creek, Oregon. It's just north of Grant's Pass, Oregon. The Radical Faeries own 180 acres in this beautiful valley with the Wolf Creek running through it, and we just show up out of the blue. There's actually an activity going on when we get there, and that is Harry Hay is leading the Daisy Chain Sex Magic Workshop. That's where, I think it's like 40 people come for a week-long event where they learn how to do sex magic under the tutelage of Harry Hay. Harry Hay is the grandfather of the gay liberation movement. Harry Hay founded the first gay liberation group in Los Angeles in 1949, and it was called The Mattachine Society. M-A-T-T-A-C-H-I-N-E. There still is a Mattachine Society; I think Washington, D.C. has the only active branch of the Mattachine still. But it became really a huge gay liberation organization in the ‘50s and ‘60s. He had been a communist and had been kicked out of the Communist Party for being homosexual, but he still had some communist ideas and organizational skills that he used to work with the Mattachine society. As the Mattachine Society became much more conservative, they kicked him out because it's the '40s and '50s with all the communist witch hunts going on, and they didn't want the Mattachine associated with communism. So they kicked out the founder, as they do. So he and his partner, John Burnside, they were together like 50 years—they moved off into the desert somewhere and lived a while. Then it was 85 Harry Hay and John Burnside and a couple of other folks from San Francisco and Los Angeles who started the Radical Faeries in 1979. I had found them in 1989 in that book. So Harry Hay was the founder of the Radical Faeries, and now he's here doing this workshop, and we're like, "Oh my gosh, the founder of the gay liberation movement in the United States is here." We hadn't registered for it, and there was only room for 40 people, so we couldn't participate. But when they were done with their day's activities and stuff, we were allowed to hang out with them and stuff. So I got to hang out with Harry Hay, who by now is in his seventies—late seventies, early eighties, maybe. We became quite close. He and I really bonded. Went skinny dipping once together and just had a really intense moment together. I've written an essay about it called "Bathing Harry" because it was such a profound experience for me. Harry, although he was born in England, he was raised in eastern Nevada, very close to the Utah border. So he was very deeply educated on the LDS church and LDS practices and stuff and knew that was the tradition that I was coming from. The morning that we left, Harry called me to his cabin where he was staying, and he was like, "I have something I want to give you before you leave." I was like, "Yeah? What?" He said, “Come here,” and he sat on the edge of his bed and had me sat in between his legs with my back to him. He put his hands on my head and gave me a blessing. I was just like, "Wow." Thank goodness I did write about it in my journals, so I have a good account of what he said to me and stuff. But I've asked many other folks, "Did Harry ever give you a blessing, like where he put his hands on you and recited blessing words?" 86 They're like, "No, what are you talking about?" I was like, "Oh, okay." I mean, I want to feel special about it, and I do. But, you know, at the same time, I don't want to be real arrogant about it, but I'm still stunned that I got a blessing from Harry Hay. That was really extraordinary. So we left and headed to the coast of Oregon and then down one, basically, again just traveling a few miles every day and then stopping. Sometimes we stayed at youth hostels and sometimes we just stayed in our van. Sometimes we camped. We pulled into Santa Cruz, California, on July 24th, which is Pioneer Day. Jason and I always celebrate PioQueer Day, the day that we were liberated from Utah and moved into Santa Cruz and then began our journey in Santa Cruz. Initially I hooked up with the Radical Faeries in Santa Cruz, which come to find out was a huge group there of really, very settled and healthy people that I was just like, “Oh. Wow. These are really accomplished, educated folks and they're Radical Faeries and they're really into this." They were just really good mentors for me to be around and to grow into more of a spirituality that really suited me rather than trying to make my spirituality fit someone else's strictures. I would say like three days after Jason and I got there, the Radical Faeries said, "Hey, we're going to hold a heart circle on the beach to formally welcome you to our community." So we show up at the beach at night and they have this giant bonfire going and everybody rips their clothes off. We'd come to find out public nudity is legal in all of Santa Cruz County, so it was like, whatever. That was the first time I went into the ocean that night. That's the first time I had swum naked in the ocean, and it was at night. But it's on the Monterey Bay, which is the site of lots of great white sharks. They love that cold water. So I'm out there with my dangly bits swimming with great white sharks, but I felt kind of fearless. Like, Judy Garland 87 will protect me. We just had this lovely bonfire, and they did this little ritual to welcome us to the community. My first year or so, I worked for SCO, Santa Cruz Operations. It was a software company that, I think they were the founders of Oracle or something. I can't remember. They had some big software things going on. I worked in their warehouse assembling software packages, and I would say three-quarters of our work group were Latinos and Latinas. There were several of us that were queer, and that was like the first time I had a job where I was just fully embraced for who I was. They loved that I was gay. Nobody had an issue. There were several other pagans also in our group, so when I was talking about the Radical Faeries, they were like, "Oh, yeah, I love them!" They all knew who the Faeries were, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is really great." Then I got a job working at UC Santa Cruz for the summer session office, so I ended up managing the summer session program and doing all their marketing. I created the first website for UC Santa Cruz summer session. This is the early ‘90s, you know. Al Gore had just invented the Internet. So my boss sent me to take HTML hand-coding classes, and I hand-coded the very first summer session website, so that was a lot of fun. LR: So what year was this that you moved to Santa Cruz? CO: I got there July 24, 1994. LR: Okay. CO: Started working at the UC... Is that right, or am I two years off and it was '96? No, it was '94, so like '95 or '96, I started working for UC Santa Cruz. I was living two blocks from the most holy site in the world to me. My favorite movie in the entire world is “Harold and Maude.” Have you both seen it? [Lorrie shakes her head.] Jim, have you seen it? 88 JM: Yes. I have. I own it. CO: You own it? I have the movie poster hanging in my kitchen. Jason and I both, that's our favorite movie, and so on our various trips, we would go and find locations where various scenes from "Harold and Maude" were shot. There's a scene in the movie, for Lorrie's benefit. Maude is a 79-year-old woman who... Was she Jewish? I know she was in the Holocaust because she had that tattoo on her arm. I think it was because she was Jewish, right? But she'd lived in Austria. JM: Sounds familiar. Let me see. I'll fact check you quietly, you just keep going. CO: Okay. So this woman has experienced the worst of humanity, right? She survived the Holocaust, although she's tattooed with the number on her arm. Harold is a young man who's 18 or 19, who is obsessed with death. He's super wealthy, and he lives with his single mother in this huge mansion in northern California. He creates suicide vignettes in which he kills himself, but not really. So he hangs himself from the rafters in their huge dining room. He slits his throat. He sets himself on fire. But he's actually never doing this, it's all fake. But he's begging for attention from his very distant, unemotional mother who is also micromanaging, but not warm at all with him. So he's obsessed with death and dying, and he meets Maude, who embraces life and death. I have this whole theory about how she's actually the mother goddess, but that's for another time. So they meet and Harold falls in love with her, even though he's a teenager and she's 79 years old, so there's a 60-year difference between them. They go to the Santa Cruz boardwalk one evening, and there's a machine there that makes plastic strips with lettering on it. It's an old-school lettering machine where you'd put letters that got stamped into this plastic strip that said, like, “Envelopes,” and you put that over your envelope file drawer or whatever. You know what I'm talking about, Lorrie? 89 LR: Yes. CO: Okay. So Harold makes a plastic strip that says “Harold Loves Maude,” but he doesn't show it to her yet. They go up onto the cliffside above the ocean with the Santa Cruz boardwalk in the background, and Harold presents her with this strip that says “Harold loves Maude.” She grasps it to her bosom and says, "Oh, and Maude loves Harold,” and then she throws the strip off the cliff, into the ocean. Harold's like, "Why did you do that?" She says, "So I'll always know where it is." To me, that's my favorite line. That's the culmination of the movie, in a way. The site where she throws that plastic strip into the ocean is a very sacred site to me, and I lived two blocks from the shore. So at 4:00 in the morning when I couldn't sleep, I'd walk down there and I would just sit on that cliff with my feet dangling over the edge, just crying my eyes out and whatever I needed to process. My whole 20 years that I lived there, I would visit there frequently and just remember, it's where Maude threw that in so that she'll always know where it is. I just love that. Anyway, that was a long story about something really trivial but important to me. JM: I couldn't find a definite answer, but it heavily implied that Maude is Jewish. CO: Okay. That's what I thought. I know she was Austrian. She lived in Vienna, right? JM: Yeah. Lots of people say it's an analogy for closeted homosexuality as you read through, because she's closeted-ly Jewish. CO: Interesting. I hadn't thought of that. I mean, just Santa Cruz was just an amazing experience for me. How do I summarize the next, basically, 18 years living there, all of the crazy stuff that happened to me? I'm trying to think of where to go. Do you have any questions that might help? 90 LR: Okay. Sorry, my big problem is I start googling all the stuff you're talking about and I get lost in that. I gotta stop doing that. You said that in 1995 or '96 you started working at UC Santa Cruz? CO: Yes. LR: Is that where you worked for the majority of your time? CO: Yes, for 18 years. LR: Okay. All right. Were you with Jason that whole time? CO: We were just friends. We were never partners. But no, about halfway into that, about 10 years in, he moved to San Francisco, and he's still there in San Francisco. We just talked yesterday; we're still really close. LR: Oh, cool. So something that Jim and I were talking about before we started was during the early '90s, “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” became a policy of the military. I know you weren't in the military at the time, but how did you feel about that? CO: I was so angry at Clinton because his campaign promises had been, “I'm going to let gays and lesbians participate in the military.” Then he totally not only backpedaled, but came out with this horrible, nonsensical policy. I was so angry. I felt really betrayed by Clinton for that. He really could have pushed LGBT liberation 10 years further forward than he did, and he caved and it just... Yeah, I'm still fuming about it after all these years. LR: That makes sense. CO: Yeah. LR: Okay. Going back to Santa Cruz, I was noticing that the Radical Faerie movement, it's still something that's going on today. CO: Oh, yes. Very much so. LR: Have you remained a part of that? 91 CO: Yes. I have tried a couple of times now to start a Radical Faerie circle here in Salt Lake City. The first iteration went really well and then fell apart because one of the participants was actually really mentally ill and exhibited some really strong violent behaviors towards the group at first. Then I stepped in to take the heat off the group, and so he started attacking me and accusing me of raping them and stuff. So the 50 or so people that wanted to participate no longer wanted to any longer because of negative feelings about this one person. So no. But for May Day this year, I called a circle, a Faerie circle, and we had about 30 or 40 people come and it was... What had just happened? It had to do with trans kids. The legislature, what had happened in April with trans kids? LR: The Utah legislature passed a bill basically stating that... CO: Sports. It was about sports. LR: There's the sports, and then there's also that they're trying to pass a bill stating that no doctor can give care to a trans kid under the age of 18. CO: Okay, right. So as a result of that, in April, I was so angry at our legislature. One evening I did a ritual, going, "Okay. What should I do? What can I do about this?" I had this idea of doing a public ritual to support trans kids, and so I just sent out a call. We had a small committee meet to set up the prep, and then on May Day, we went up to a park up City Creek Canyon. We created an altar with trans flags and flowers and rainbow flags and stuff, and then we did a circle ritual together that was incredibly beautiful, incredibly powerful. We had 11 trans kids show up with parents and guardians, which was really awesome—under the age of 12, we had 11 show up. That was kind of the first Radical Faerie thing I've done in quite a while, a public thing that I've done. But I'm on Radical Faerie Facebook pages and stuff, and I'm still really connected to the Santa Cruz Faeries. There's an email list that we have that I'm really involved in. 92 LR: Okay. So your time at UC Santa Cruz: is there a time or memory that stands out? CO: Yeah. I think it was in 1998... Well, starting in '97, I had this idea of putting together an immersion program for queer studies, and I passed it by my boss, the director of summer session, and she was like, "Yeah, that's great. Let's do it." What we envisioned was a two-track educational immersion program. It was four weeks long, and you could either take—there was a political track and then more of a literary track. There were classes in queer literature and queer art, or there were classes in queer political science and queer law and things like that. We had, I think it was 25 students from all over the world, people from Japan and Germany and England, all over the United States, came together. We had lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and heterosexual students who participated in this queer immersion program. They have their own dormitory on campus and would have to take these queer studies classes. For one weekend, they were supposed to go up into the Sierras and do a river rafting trip together, their very first weekend together, because we wanted to kind of have a bonding experience for them right up front so that for the rest of the three-and-a-half weeks they were together, they would be really consolidated. This guy named Todd Bowser, B-O-W-S-E-R, he was the residential director for this program. He's a gay man and a good friend of mine, I thought. The day before he was supposed to leave and take them on this rafting trip, he contacts me and he said, “Oh, something's come up and I can't emotionally do this. Is there any way that you can take over and take all these students up to the Sierras and do this rafting trip?” When I lived in Moab, I had rafted the Colorado a lot, so I had a lot of rafting experience. I was like, "Yeah, sure. I know how to camp." So at the last minute, I'm 93 thrown in there and we had an amazing time. We had so much fun and we really all just bonded immensely. Particularly there was a young Jewish transgender man named Solomon from New York City who came as part of the group. He was the first trans man that I ever knew of that I really interacted with. He'd actually just finished having top surgery just a few months before, and he was still kind of sore from it and stuff, and here he's supposed to be paddling. Not real good for scar tissue to heal and stuff. But we really had a great time. Unfortunately, that night around the bonfire... Todd's assistant, who is a lesbian, came with us as well. She and I were alone sitting on the bonfire, and I said, in a moment of real vulnerability and kind of stupidity on my part, I was just like, “I'm in love with all of them.” When we got back, I then found out that it had actually been Todd's birthday, and he had forgotten about taking the students on this trip and had planned a huge birthday party for himself. Rather than telling me that, he lied to me. He and I had been having problems all along to begin with. He wouldn't show up for meetings, or if he did, he'd be really late. I just got really tired of it, and when I found out that he had lied to me about this, I pulled my boss aside and said, "This is bullshit. I'm sorry. We need to figure out how to get Todd on board for everything because he's not showing up." So she contacts his dean to meet with our dean and us. We have this meeting scheduled, and Todd is 30 minutes late to the meeting, which just totally proved my point. He was so embarrassed and humiliated, he went on attack, and he grilled the lesbian on any misstep I might have taken during that whole weekend. The only thing that she could come up with was that I had said around the campfire that I had fallen in love with all the students. So suddenly—is it Title IX? Is that the 94 sexual harassment office? I have the Title IX office contacting me and my boss, stating that I had been inappropriate with the students. There was this huge investigation. I had to go before this committee, tell them what had happened, and I said, "Yeah. I said I was in love with them all." The lesbian—and I can't remember her name. I want to say it was Karen. But she was like, "It actually didn't really bother me." The only thing that bothered her was that she felt like I might have been including her in it, and that made her feel a little bit uncomfortable. I was like, "Well, I'm a gay man and you're a lesbian." Yeah, it was really bad. My boss said, "Sorry. Even though this was a super successful first year, we can't have this again. We can't do it." I was really sad about that. It was such a great idea. I think about, well, 20 years later, where could this be now at this point if that program had continued every year? How much it could have grown and how many people's lives could have really been affected by it? Because it really had a huge impact on those 25 students that we did have that one year. I'm still in contact with three of them. We're lifelong friends. I'm still in love with all of them. Haven't had sex with any of them. So that was something I'm both really proud of and really sad about. I was overqualified for my position. It was pretty boring for me. I fucked around a lot on the job. I did a lot of queer historical research on my computer while I was at work because I could do my job in my sleep, you know? I took full advantage of it, a little white-collar crime, I guess. But I did a lot of research on Utah's queer history during those years of me just sitting in front of my computer. I had downtime, so I would just keep myself busy with my own projects. Basically I was just making money so that on my weekends and holidays and stuff, I could go 95 play, go do my own thing. It wasn't a job that was really meaningful to me, and that's kind of sad. It's really weird because I still have dreams in which I'm back at the office and I wake up feeling guilty because I didn't because I didn't do my job a lot of the time. I was too busy working on queer liberation and bringing down the patriarchy for me to worry about it. So yeah, strange. [Interview ends.] Part 5: December 8, 2022 LR: Today is December 8, 2022. We are continuing the oral history interview with Connell and Jim is on the call again. We're over Zoom. Let's just pick up where we left off. The one thing you did mention was... Well, do we need to talk about the end of UC Santa Cruz, or can we just kind of jump into Farmer John? CO: We'll get to Farmer John later. LR: Okay. CO: I'll just start with... So when I first moved to Santa Cruz, I basically was homeless for several months and just lived out of our VW bus, Pernicious. Then I found a queer communal household. The address was 234 Santa Cruz Street, and it was just two very short blocks to the ocean, so I lived really, really close to the beach there. One of the other Radical Faeries in town, Terry Cavanaugh, he had an extra wetsuit. The water there is so cold that you have to wear wetsuits to swim and to surf, so all those surfers wear wetsuits. He had a spare wetsuit that I could use and also a spare surfboard, so I learned to surf, which was really fun. Right there, I would just get home and walk the two short blocks with the board and jump into the ocean and surf. I was never very good, but it was so much fun and really magical. There was a pod of dolphins that migrate through that area twice a year, and I remember being out on my surfboard once and the pod came up and just hung out with me for like 15 minutes. Like within six feet of my surfboard, there were three or 96 four dolphins just chillin' with me. They were really curious and I was just talking to them and they seemed attentive. That was really magical. So I lived there for a couple of years. The household I was living in then was queer in that there were bisexual, lesbian, and gay men that all lived together. It changed and permutated and stuff over time. But there was a household of just gay men who lived on King Street, and once a year, that household would hold what was called the Big Gay Easter Party. So on Easter Sunday, there was a house party at their house and, you know, there'd be like 50, 60, 70 people that would show up. I went to one of those the second year I lived there, and that's when I met Todd Phillips, who owned the house, and then all of his housemates were there. Eventually, a few months after that, I actually moved into that house. There was a room that came open, and then that's where I lived for the next 18 years, was in that bedroom in Todd Phillips's house. It was so much fun living communally with other gay men. We had so much fun. I had found the Big Gay Easter Party that I attended a little bit boring, so when we were planning the next Big Gay Easter Party, where I would actually be one of the tenants there at the house, I said, "Hey, let's do a theme." Then that started 18 years of doing a themed gay Easter party. One year, it was the Nightmare Before Easter, which was basically a Halloween party on Easter. We would go all-out in decorating the house. That year, in one corner of the living room, I did this giant black web out of crepe paper and then made a giant black spider out of paper maché and then got all these little Easter bunnies, stuffed bunnies, and wrapped them with their ears sticking out of the spider web and stuff. It was really fun. Another year we did the Playboy Easter Bunnies. Todd was Hugh Hefner and the rest of us were his Playboy bunnies. One year was the Resurrection and that was... I used to have really long, beautiful, reddish-brown hair and a big red beard. I 97 looked very much like the Nazi Aryan Jesus, and so I played Jesus. I got the white and blue robes. One of my Radical Faerie friends from San Francisco, his name is Griffin Cloudwalker, he is a professional magician, and I got him to come down for the Big Gay Easter Party that year. The house on King Street was Spanish colonial from the 1920s, really beautiful Spanish architecture, and it had an inner courtyard in the front yard . You got into the courtyard with this big arched door that was just like the door that Jesus is knocking on the really famous painting. During Griffin's magic show, which he was doing inside in the courtyard, I was standing outside the courtyard and had changed into my Jesus garb. He did his show, and then for the climax of his magic show, he said, “Okay, I'm going to make Jesus appear,” and he did this great big poof of purple smoke. Then I threw open the door and walked into the courtyard dressed as Jesus. This is really blasphemous, I know. Do you know what a CamelBak is? For drinking water if you're like a biker? LR: Yeah. CO: So I had a CamelBak on underneath my robes filled with sangria mix, with two tubes coming out to my wrist that were attached by rubber bands. I did this kind of magic thing over a pitcher of water. It was actually vodka, a big pitcher of vodka. Then as I was doing the things over with my hands, I unclipped the tubes to the camelback and started squirting sangria mix into the vodka. So it was a play on turning water into wine, right? It was turning vodka into sangria. Brought the house down. People were dying. That was fun. What else? Well, there was this one year that we did this whole thing about the prophecies of Nostradamus that prophesied this year's Big Gay Easter Party. Oh, we did one that was Roman Empire-themed, so people came dressed as barbarians or Roman emperors or just all this crazy stuff. That was fine. We did a 98 cowboy one. The year that Brokeback Mountain came out, we did Brokeback Easter, so everybody came in cowboy gear. Oh, we did a Mexican Day of the Dead. Two of our housemates that lived there were... Well, one was Brazilian and one was Mexican, so we did this sort of Latino Days of the Dead-themed Easter Party. That was a lot of fun. Like a year or two after I got there, Quilliam, who was one of the Faeries, met this guy named John Kinder, a.k.a. Farmer John. Farmer John was a wealthy person who lived in Carmel Valley, actually on the ridge looking down on Carmel Valley. He had 80 acres of ridgetop property, and he started to invite the Santa Cruz Radical Faeries to come up on weekends and do rituals and gatherings there. So we started spending a lot of time there. He had gardens that fed a local Buddhist monastery. There's a Buddhist monastery up there that were neighbors of his called Tassajara, T-A-S-S-A-J-A-R-A, and so his gardens fed the Buddhist monks there. So we would help with harvesting his fruits and vegetables and things like that. He also... This was before it was legal, but he was growing a lot of marijuana up there, so we might help him with the marijuana harvest and stuff. John is a really interesting person. He has passed away from a brain tumor. He grew up being really close to... It's Joanne Woodward, the actress, and her husband was... Not Steve McQueen? LR: No. CO: Paul... LR: Paul Newman. CO: Paul Newman. Nell Newman, you know, Newman's Organic? Nell runs that. John and Nell have known each other since elementary school, and John and Nell went to senior prom together and stuff like that. So he grew up with the Newmans and the Woodwards. He's a gay man and he moved to LA in the early '80s and made 99 bank on selling cocaine, which he later regretted deeply. That's why he spent a lot of his time and energy giving back to really good causes, because he was trying to bring some balance to the bad that he had done in the world. He renovated several of the buildings on his property so that we could have places to sleep or we could just camp outdoors and stuff during our gatherings. That just became a really super important focal point for the Santa Cruz Faeries to participate in communal projects together and communal rituals as well. Then I sent you... In replying to my email. Can you open that up? LR: Yeah, I sure can. Let me share my screen. CO: I sent you two or three photos that show a big project I did on John's property. I'm a designer of labyrinths. LR: Okay. [Pulls up picture] Can you see this one? CO: Yeah. This is a labyrinth that I designed and helped install. Click the next one. This is how you get to something you want. There's a road along the ridge, right? LR: [Pointing on picture] This right here? CO: Yeah. Then it kind of winds up to that very flat space up top there, and that's where the labyrinth is. This is a distant view of the labyrinth. [Picture changes] Now, this is another labyrinth that I designed for the Radical Faerie commune at Wolf Creek, Oregon. I just wanted you to have a visual understanding of this big project. So in 1998, I went to the Radical Faerie commune at Zuni Mountain, which is in New Mexico. There was a queer shaman's weeklong gathering, and as part of that weeklong gathering, this man named Donald Engstrom had come from Iowa, and he taught us how to construct labyrinths. Together, we all constructed a labyrinth there at Zuni. That's where I got my chops in to learn how to do these large, massive labyrinths using rock and wildflowers. You dig a harrow that creates the design of the labyrinth, and then you put manure in it, and then seeds, and then 100 rocks on top of the seeds so that the wildflowers grow up around the rocks, and that defines the lines of both of the labyrinths. A labyrinth is a space for meditation. There are mazes and there are labyrinths. Mazes are meant to confuse and confound you and make you come out, whereas a labyrinth, there's only one way in and one way out of a labyrinth. You will never get lost. There's just one pathway. It looks super confusing, but it's not, and that gives you an opportunity for meditation and going inward because you don't have to worry about the path you're on. You just follow it. It winds around, it goes into the center, and then winds around back out without ever crossing another path. Like in Scandinavia, in really large ones there, people run them. They'll start at the beginning and run into the center and run back out. They'll do it over and over and over as sort of, again, this kind of meditative experience. I have done that on these, I've run them and stuff, but just solo. I haven't done it with a group of people. But we did rituals, like we held handkerchiefs and wound our way through the labyrinth together, 40 of us all in one long line, going all the way around and out and through. As you can see from those photos, it's a stunning landscape, especially that center one, where you can see the flat top hill and then all the mountains behind it. It's just extraordinary and beautiful. I felt really honored that I got to create that space for people. People are still going there all the time, even though Farmer John has passed away. His brother took over and he's completely welcoming of the Faeries even though he's straight. He's just like, “Yeah, come up anytime and use the land and walk the labyrinth, do whatever you want.” So I know the Faeries are still going up there, which is great. We talked about meeting Harry Hay? LR: You did. 101 CO: Yeah. Now, about '96, '98, Harry and his partner John Burnside had been living in Los Angeles, and the Faeries in Los Angeles just weren't equipped to be taking care of them because now they're in their late eighties and getting ready to die, and the LA Faeries just weren't able to handle it, so one of the Faeries in San Francisco donated his house. It's called the Purple Mansion. It's in the Mission, and it's this kind of brownstone... I think it's pre-earthquake, but I'm not sure, it could be a postearthquake house. But it's just purple. The whole thing is painted purple, so everybody calls it the Purple Mansion, and he gave it to Harry and John for them to live in for their last few years. Sometimes, even though I didn't have a car, I would still often make a trip up to the city using public transportation, which involved taking seven different buses and two trains to get from Santa Cruz over the hill to San Jose and then from San Jose up to the city. But I would do it if I didn't have a car. The car trip, it's 76 miles, so a car would take less than two hours, but by train, it took about four hours to get there. But I would still go up for the weekend and play, and I would always go and visit John and Harry at the Purple Mansion and hang out with them. Harry was a brilliant intellectual, and their front room was three solid walls of books, shelving from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, just books. Harry had read every single one of them and could recall... His mind, even though in his late eighties, was just sharp as could be. People say, "Don't meet your heroes, because they're going to disappoint you." Harry never disappointed. He was very opinionated and very obstinate, but still just loving and kind and sweet and gentle. And then John, his partner, was just the most loving being I have ever met in my life. He just exuded love and compassion and gentleness. I would just go and sit in their living room with them and bask in that warmth and love from them. I would always try to bring some cute Faerie with me so that they could get all tickled by the attention, and introduce 102 other people to Harry and John because they were so foundational in starting the gay liberation movement in LA in the '50s. So I thought it was important for the youngsters to meet these elders in our tribe. Around 2000, the end of 2000, Harry started getting really sick and really struggling. I think 2001 was the year that he and John were grand marshals of the San Francisco LGBT Freedom Parade. I'm not a trained masseur, but I've had hundreds of hours of experience and I had a table, too. I knew they were going to be in the parade, and I knew that this was going to be really hard on Harry physically, so I took my table up to the Purple Palace on the Saturday before the parade and just spent a good deal of the weekend giving Harry massages, just to help him relieve his pain and calm him down and stuff. Then when people saw that that was something that I could offer—the Faeries organized a care circle for Harry, kind of a hospice situation to help take care of him before he passed away, and so they asked me to join his care circle. So I would at least weekly go up to the Purple Palace during that last year before Harry died in 2002, and just give him a nice long massage just to help ease his pain. Then when he did pass away, they asked me—I got to be one of the ushers at his funeral. There was a huge funeral at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. I got to be one of the ushers for that. That was really a beautiful experience, watching hundreds of people show up and pay tribute to this lovely person who meant so much to all of us. But to me, individually, especially. John survived for a couple more years, I think, and then he too passed away. But I keep a photo. My favorite photo of the two of them is on my altar, which is in my living room, so they're there with me. I feel so fortunate and blessed to have become so close to them. [To Lorrie] How are you holding up? LR: I'm good. Thank you for asking. 103 CO: I'm going to take a look at my notes here. JM: Before you move on, I do have one question. I'm pretty sure of the answer, but the Todd Phillips you moved in with is not director/producer Todd Phillips, right? CO: No, no. JM: Okay. I was 99% sure on that one, but… CO: Yeah. I don't know who that is, but no, it's not him. He and his husband now live in Mexico. They still own the house in Santa Cruz, but rent it out, and they bought a house in Mexico and we still keep up. In fact, I just was talking to him on Facebook yesterday. LR: Okay. Looking at your notes, is there any other story that you want to talk about during your time in Santa Cruz? CO: Well, I had a partner named Jim Brown for quite a while. We haven't really spoken about any of my partners. LR: No, you really haven't, except for your first real crush before your mission. CO: Yeah, right. LR: You talked about him, but that's about it. CO: Well, I mean, this is going to go backwards in time, but I have to talk about Robert Erichsen, E-R-I-C-H-S-E-N. His middle name is Conrad, C-O-N-R-A-D. He now prefers to go by Conrad, so I'm going to try to remember to call him Conrad, but when we were together, he was Robert. We met at Affirmation. I scared the hell out of him because I was so outgoing and bouncy when he showed up and he was just a frightened deer-in-the-headlights kind of guy. He was super shy, super shy, and I was just this outrageous activist. But we just hit it off the bat right away and fell deeply in love and moved in. We were together, I want to say, four years? This would have been '88, I think, is when we met and became lovers. He and I were both on our way out of the LDS church. 104 Oh—and I don't think I talked about this Quakerism, but on the way out of the LDS Church, I was like, “Well, I still would like to participate in something that's spiritually-oriented. What about the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints?” So I went to the phonebook, the Yellow Pages, and was looking under churches to look for the Reorganized Church, and right above it, it said Religious Society of Friends, and then in parentheses, (Quakers). I went, "What? Quakers? I thought they were all dead. Didn't that religion die out?" “No, that's the Shakers, so here's this phone number.” So I call the phone number, and this woman named Robin answers the phone, and she's the clerk of the local Quaker meeting at the time. The Quakers have no hierarchy, but they have to be organized, so the clerk kind of makes sure that things are done according to proper Quaker procedure. So if there's a leader, Robin would have been the leader, like the bishop of the local Quakers. So I'm talking to her, and I was like, "How do you feel about gay people?" They were like, “Oh, the Quakers have welcomed gays and lesbians since the early ‘70s. Some of our Quaker meetings have done same-sex marriages. Our particular meeting—” When I say meeting, in the Utah context, that sort of means stake. It's a fully organized, fully functional religious unit within Quakerism. It's called a monthly meeting, and even though it meets weekly, it's still called monthly meeting. She said, "Our monthly meeting has not yet passed a minute about samesex marriage, but maybe that's something you'd want to do." I was like, "Wait, I haven't even attended a service yet." So Robert and I went to service and we absolutely loved it. Just sitting in silence for an hour was really lovely, and over the space of about a year, we both converted to Quakerism. Then we were kind of looking at same sex marriage... 105 Oh, so we talked about Annette Greenberg, the Quaker woman who became my boss. Her daughter Jessica, actually, who was only like 16 at the time, stood up in one of the Quaker meetings in the middle of the silence and said, "I feel like God wants our meeting to pass a minute on same-sex marriage. I've had this revelation and I think we need to proceed with this." We're all like, "Oh, okay." When someone makes a proposition like that, the Quakers take it very seriously. A Clearness Committee was formed to meet with Jessica to make sure that she was indeed clear about how she felt about this topic. Soon after that, then Robert and I filed a petition for a minute, adjoining Jessica's minute, stating that we would like to be married. So it went through the whole Quaker process, which takes months and months and lots of committees to come to real true consensus, where everyone says, "Yes, I support this. We believe that this is God's will for our meeting." They all raised their hand and said, "Yes, we want same-sex marriage. Yes." So the minute passed, and then in September of—I want to say either '89 and '90, I can't remember—we went up into the campground up City Creek Canyon and we got married there. We had a huge, lovely Quaker wedding with 200 people. In Quakerism, since there's no ministers or anything, a minister does not perform the marriage. The entire gathered group that is there is actually the authority for performing the marriage, and so everyone signs the marriage certificate because everyone there married you, which I love that idea. I still have our huge marriage certificate with 200 signatures under it for everybody that married us. We had done so well together until we got married, and then the second we got married, all these weird expectations came up and it was kind of bordering on, "Oh, which of you is the husband and which one of you is the wife now?" kind of 106 thing. I was kind of seen as being the husband because I was two inches taller and a year older, I guess. I don't know. People would ask me, "Can you and Robert come over for dinner?" I said, "Well, I can come over for dinner. If you want to invite Robert, you do that. I'm not the head of our family. We're equals in this." It was just weird. The power dynamics changed. After a year and a half, we separated. Robert moved to San Diego and the Quakers divorced us, and I became really anti-marriage because of that—and I still, theoretically I guess I am. I know that marriage as a political and legal act in the U.S. is significant and that needs to happen. Same-sex couples need to have those protections and rights and privileges and everything else. But getting married a second time and having it be seen as so heteronormative was not a good experience for me. I'm real cautious about marriage because of that. LR: So did you see the news today, then? CO: About the House? LR: Yeah, the House passed the Marriage Equality Act, or bill. CO: I'm not impressed with the bill. I mean, basically it says "When the Supreme Court overturns same-sex marriage, then the states where it is no longer legal has to recognize marriages that are performed in other states where it is legal." I mean, that's basically what it's saying. I hope not, but I believe that if the Supreme Court does strike down Obergefell, the Utah legislature will make same-sex marriage illegal again here. Then that's going to put an additional financial burden on samesex couples because we're going to have to now go and get married out of state, so we will have to travel to someplace where it is legal for Utah to recognize it. That's unjust. That's unfair, and it really bothers me. But I would still rather have some protection and at least a venue for it to happen. 107 I had other lovers here and there. None lasted very long, or more than a couple of years. Then there's a gay beach in Santa Cruz called Boy Beach, and I was hanging out there one day, and this beautiful, long-haired, tall, lanky guy, he had been surfing. Then he came out of the surf and got out of his wetsuit and he was just lying on his side, sunning on his blanket. I was like, “Damn, he is really handsome,” so I just went over and I was like, "Hey, do you want to smoke a joint?" He was like, "Sure." We started talking and his name was Jim Brown, and he's an ex-Mormon from Provo, Utah. Boy, I know how to find them. So we became good friends, and then a month or so later, we started dating, and then we were together for, I'd say three years. He was also a Radical Faerie, or I think I introduced him to the Radical Faeries and then he totally was just like, "Yes! This is what I was looking for." Gosh, we just had a really lovely time together. He is such an amazing person. We're still in contact as well. Yesterday was his birthday, so I sent him a message on Facebook and haven't heard back from him. I hope he's okay. He's now happily married and he and his husband, they've adopted three kids. They're an adorable family; I just totally love all of them. They're amazing. But we had a really strong relationship until January 2, and I wish I could remember the year, and I can't. The night of January 1, so New Year's Day Eve, James was like, "I'm going to go over the hill to San Jose and hang out with my old friend there at this gay bar on Alameda." I was like, "Okay, let's go." We went over, and it's a pool bar; it wasn't like a disco or anything. We just had some drinks and played pool and stuff like that. We go to leave the bar. We're almost to Jim's car, and three young Latino men step out of the shadows. One of them has gloves on and is carrying a lead pipe, a metal pipe, and he's bouncing the pipe against the palm of his hand threateningly. 108 They're like, "Hey, faggots, what are you guys doing?" We're like, "We're just getting in the car," and we're trying to just... Both Jim and I are hippies and deep pacifists. We don't want violence, and we certainly don't want to be beat up, so we're trying to just deflect this really negative energy that's coming at us, but it didn't work. They started getting real pushy with us and they took a swing at Jim. They missed Jim, and he ducked out and was able to get to the car. I got pushed against a chain link fence, and then they started pummeling me. The guy with the pipe just stood there. I mean, thank God he wasn't swinging the pipe at me because it would have done some damage, but the other two were just punching me. Jim pulled his car over to the front door of the bar and shouted, "Hey, help!" and the entire bar emptied out and came and surrounded the three guys. There's 200 gay men surrounding these three guys. Obviously someone called 911. Oddly, the police response was like one minute, and I just thought, "Were you just around the corner? How did you get here so damn fast?" I had such a bad feeling about the officer in charge there. It was him and one other guy. Then I think later on, another cop car pulled up but didn't really do anything, so I was dealing with just mainly the one cop, and he was being real sketchy. Red flags were going up. I was like, "So, what are these guys going to be arrested for?" He [had] handcuffed them and the other guy; his partner was tagging evidence because the guy with the gloves and the pipe, he had taken off the gloves and then thrown the pipe down. But they were easily found, and so they got out the evidence tags and they're tagging the stuff. So I'm like, "So what are the charges going to be?" "Oh, I don't know." 109 I was like, "Well, you need to make sure, whatever it is, that there's a hate crime enhancement, because as they're pummeling me, they're calling me ‘faggot’ and ‘cocksucker’. I just want to make sure that it's assault with a hate crime enhancement." "Oh, we'll determine that later on, whatever." I was just like, “Something's not right,” so I got up right in his face and I looked at his shield and I said—I'm going to say his name is McDonald. It was a Scottish/Irish name. I was like, "Well, Officer McDonald, Badge 60731." I wanted him to know that I knew who he was. I was like, "You need to tell me what they're being arrested for." He just was not going to commit, and I was just like, "What is wrong with this?" It must have been Saturday night, and I had to wait till Monday. Monday morning I get into work, and I called up the San Jose Police Department and I said, "I want to find out what happened with this case that happened Saturday night at the gay bar on Alameda." The woman I'm talking to on the phone, she's like, "I have no idea what you're talking about. There's nothing in the logs." I was like, "What? No, Officer McDonald, badge number 60731. He was the responding officer. Here's what happened. Evidence was tagged. Where's the evidence?" She's like, "I'm sorry, I see that Officer McDonald was in that area, but he never filed a report about anything." I was like, "So where are the three men that he arrested?" She goes, "No one was arrested." I was just like, "Are you fucking kidding me?" I was just horrified. She said, "Well, hold on a minute. I got your phone number. I'll call you back." She calls back in an hour, and she said, "I finally found his report. He 110 misfiled it under the previous year's reports, and all it says is that he responded to a scuffle between you two groups. He says that they got really angry because you and Jim propositioned them for sex, and they didn't like that. They did not appreciate it. A little scuffle broke out. He broke it up. Everybody went home fine. You didn't file a complaint." I was just like, "Oh, my God." In my office at UC Santa Cruz, a woman that I worked with in the office, her husband was the mayor of Santa Cruz, who I knew quite well. So Madeleine, she's hearing all this as I'm talking on the phone, and she's livid. She went home and told her husband, the mayor, and he contacted me and he's like, "How does a milliondollar lawsuit against the city of San Jose and the police department and Officer McDonald, how does that sound to you?" I was like, "That sounds awesome." Then I talked to Jim, and Jim's not out of the closet yet. He was not out to his very Mormon mother and his very Mormon grandparents, and he was like, "Connell, I can't. I cannot go and testify in court about this." I was just like, "There's not going to be a case if I don't testify, and you're an integral part of this." So we didn't file the lawsuit, and Officer McDonald got away scot-free with whatever he did. I'm assuming... The way that the woman who called me from dispatch, how horrified she was, I'm pretty sure she did something behind the scenes, but still. I wasn't upset with Jim. I knew his situation and stuff, but it still hurt, and it really was important that there be justice done. I mean, I would have loved to have won a million-dollar settlement, of course, but it wasn't really about the money. It was about justice. I really wanted justice to be done, and justice was not done. Years later, Jim finally said to me, "God, I wish we had sued them." 111 I was like, "I know, right? We both could use that money, huh?" It wasn't even two weeks after that Jim and I broke up, and I just remember reading some statistics that I found from the Anti-Violence Project. You know what AVP is? AVP is a nationwide group for gays and for the LGBT community that keeps track of hate crimes committed against our community. I looked up some of the AVP statistics and I found that when a couple is attacked together in a homophobic attack, a vast majority of those couples split up soon afterwards because of survivor’s guilt. “I wasn't able to protect my partner. I didn't do enough. Why didn't my partner protect me?” The dynamics of that are not conducive to continuing a relationship. So we are just another one of those stupid statistics of a couple that got attacked and we broke up. I've always been really good about maintaining solid, loving relationships with my exes. That's really important to me. I did not get that with my wife, Carolyn. We tried, but she remarried and her current husband despises me and threatened to kill me. He told me if I ever spoke to her or about her publicly, he would shoot me with a shotgun. So I've been really careful about when I do talk about her, I usually don't use her name, or I certainly don't use her last name. He lives in Sandy, and I don't need him showing up on my doorstep angry. But otherwise, all my relationships, I've always had really good, strong friendships. So that's Jim. Then Jim became the manager of this space in downtown Santa Cruz called the 418 Project because the address was 418... Oh, I can't remember the street now. It's not Pacific Mall, which is kind of the main street, but that's one road over. 418 River Street? I can't remember. Anyway, it's the 418 Project, which was basically a small cafe to one side, a large kind of dressing room, green room, and then a huge space with a wooden floor and mirrors and ballet bars. It was a dance space, but it was used for yoga and for African drumming and for some dance 112 classes and just various community projects. If they needed a meeting space, they would go to the 418 Project and hold these large events there. One of the things that Jim started doing was having punk bands play there on the weekends, and it was an all-ages venue, and he needed a main bouncer. So Jim hired me to be the main bouncer for these punk shows at the 418. At that time, I had a hot pink mohawk and I was wearing leather and jump boots and stuff like that. I was very involved in the local punk scene anyway, punk and oi! and ska. Those are my music genres that I've always loved since the ‘70s, late ‘70s. I always made sure that on my leather jacket or my flight jacket, I had a rainbow patch on my shoulder to be out. I loved that job. I loved being the big gay daddy for all of the young punks that came to these shows and stuff. It was a lot of fun. One of my duties was to make sure the place was cleaned up after the punk bands performed, which meant dismantling the stage and putting away chairs and tables and stuff like that. So the second that the punk show was over, I would get onto the P.A. system and start playing the Muppets singing, "Why are there so many songs about rainbows?" You know Kermit singing that song? It would just take this really aggressive, semi violent, testosteronic, crazy ambiance and just totally mellow it out immediately. It was just like turning off a switch and all these hot, sweaty punk kids, all of a sudden they were just giggling and laughing and they were singing along with Kermit. I loved performing that magic on them to kind of mellow them out. I did that for several years. That was really great. Until one evening after a show, I was moving a huge metal bench by myself, and stupidly I needed to turn left. With this bench across my arms, rather than turning my whole body left, I twisted left and I herniated a disc really badly. I ended up having to go to the hospital. I used to weigh 210 pounds and I was a muscle 113 daddy, and then with this severe back injury that I had, I didn't walk for two months. Then I started walking with a cane. I'd been a surfer and a mountain climber and a mountain biker and a boulderer and skier, and suddenly I couldn't do anything. I gained 100 pounds in six months and I still haven't been able to take it off. I'm slowly slimming down. I've lost 60 pounds over the last year, just incrementally getting it off. But yeah, that was really devastating. I had back surgery that went horribly wrong and really messed me up because... Well, I'm a redhead, and I didn't know this. Redheads and anesthesia often don't mix, and science has no answer for that. But if you Google redheads and anesthesia, it'll say "No." So I'm a redhead; I did the anesthesia. I didn't know I had sleep apnea, and because I was so tall and big, they gave me extra anesthesia. So the surgery went fine. I was supposed to be in and out in one day. I got semiconscious; I was sitting in a chair and then I just blacked out. I came to about 28 hours later and I was in the IC unit, hooked up to every machine possible. I felt like RoboCop, just tubes everywhere. Come to find out, I had had an episode of apnea, and generally, when that happens, like at night, when you're sleeping and you stop breathing, your body gives you a jolt of adrenaline and that wakes you up, so you start breathing again. But I was so heavily sedated that the adrenaline didn't do anything, so I remained not breathing, and the nurse didn't notice right off the bat. Then they finally went, "Oh, he's not breathing. Shit." Boy, it did a lot of brain damage. I have memory loss. It ruined my kidneys; it ruined my liver. It fucked up my heart, just all kinds of internal damage. So I spent, I think, four days in ICU and then another two or three weeks in the regular hospital unit. This is the only time I've ever been to the hospital. I've never had a broken bone or anything. It completely changed my life. Then finally, when I'm kind of 114 starting to feel better... Oh, my parents. We need to talk about my parents here. Did I talk about my paternal unit at all? My father? LR: A little bit, yes. CO: Did I talk about why we don't talk at all or anything? LR: You made a comment that kind of stuck with me in the very first interview we did, about a conversation you had with him. CO: Oh right, when I was 30, that I was gay. LR: And that he “did everything he could.” I was on the receiving end of all that. CO: Okay. So in '92, I think it was '92, Colorado passed a law stating that you could discriminate against gays and lesbians in employment and housing. It was the first time ever in the U.S. that this had happened, and it was spearheaded by a group where the shooting just happened, Colorado Springs. I think it's Families in Action or something like that, some family group that's super homophobic. They're the ones who spearheaded that, and they won the legal case, and people voted for that and said, "Yeah, let's discriminate against gays and lesbians and housing." I knew my father... We were still kind of talking at that point, and I knew he was vaguely involved with something in Colorado. After that happened, he calls me on the phone, and he's asking me how things are going and I'm like, "Oh, I'm kind of bummed right now." This was when I was living in Moab, and because of what's happened in Colorado, we're supposed to boycott Colorado. But Moab, where I lived, even though it's in Utah, it gets all of its groceries and stuff from Colorado. That's where they get their groceries. I was like, "How do I support this boycott?" As I'm talking, I could tell he's being very quiet, and the light goes on. Just out of the blue, I said, "So how much money did you donate to Colorado's Family and Action Project?" Dead silence. 115 I was like, "Oh shit,” and I said, "I just want to know, did you donate more or less than $10,000 to it?" Silence. And I said, "Oh, I take it that means you've donated more than $10,000 to ensure that if I ever move to Colorado, I can lose my job. I can lose my housing at the whim of a landlord or a boss who just doesn't want me. You really did that. Thank you very much. I'm never speaking to you again." Hung up the phone and we haven't spoken. That was the last time we spoke. I think he's still alive. The last time I checked was about three years ago. I used to, like, annually just Google his name just to see what he was up to. He was living in South Carolina, and he and his wife had just been arrested at their city council meeting because they had proposed that the town where they live in South Carolina—I want to say it was Aiken, but I'm not sure—they had proposed that the town of Aiken be a Muslim-free city. No Muslims could work or live within the city limits of their town. Well, of course, the town council voted no, thank goodness, and so they did a civil disobedience during the city council meeting and they were arrested. That was the last time I saw him, was the photo of them in handcuffs on the front page of the local newspaper. I guess I exist to maintain balance. I'm very pro-Muslim, so my homophobic, racist, father is the other end of that spectrum, so we're holding balance here. I haven't talked to Claude since, I guess it was '94 when we had the conversation. When Robert and I got married, that previous Thanksgiving, I had contacted my mom about Thanksgiving dinner and I'd said, "I'm bringing Robert." She's like, "Okay, that's great. I can't wait to meet him." Then three days later, she calls me up and says, "It's my house, my rules. Robert's not welcome to come to Thanksgiving dinner." 116 I was like, "What? Well, if you're not going to welcome Robert, you're not going to welcome me. I'm not coming." So she and I, we didn't talk for a good 12 or 14 years after that, but somehow we got in contact with each other again. I don't recall honestly how that happened, but our bonding took place over the show Survivor. We were both really into it. This was the first year of Survivor that was on TV, and I just remember, like every Thursday night, right after the show was over, either I'd call her or she called me. All we would do is chat for 30 minutes about that episode of Survivor. "What would you have done" and "What I would have done" and "I can't believe Richard did that." That was our friendship and relationship for years. That's all we can talk about. Anytime I would bring up the g-word, I could literally hear her eyes roll into the back of her head, and she would not engage. She just would not talk to me about it. She wouldn't ask questions. She wouldn't respond. So I just learned we don't talk about me being gay. If we're going to talk, we're just not going to talk about this huge aspect of my life. LR: So can I ask a quick question with that? When you would talk about that first season, would she talk about Richard at all in the sense that he was gay? CO: No. LR: Because he was very openly gay in that first... CO: Yes, he was. LR: I just recently watched it for the first time. CO: Oh, you did? You're catching up. LR: Yeah, I'm very slowly catching up. That's interesting to me that you're connecting over Survivor, and yet she doesn't talk about one of the biggest characters. He wins the whole thing. 117 CO: Yeah. I mean, we talked about him, but nothing about him being gay. I don't even know that she knew. There was no acknowledgement on her part. LR: Interesting. All right. CO: Yeah. What year was that, that that happened? LR: I think it was 2001, actually. It was 2000 or 2001. CO: Yeah. I need to look up something here. When did my mother die? LR: May 31, 2000 was the first episode of Survivor. CO: 2000, yeah. JM: Brief pause here. The name of the group that your father is probably supporting was the Colorado for Family Values Group. CO: Yes. That makes sense. JM: It took a lot of Googling for some reason, but I found it. CO: Okay. Now we're at 2011, fall. Well, even before that. Around 2006 or so, my mother, who had always lived in Syracuse, decided she was going to move to Mesa, Arizona, where her older brother, Duane Beazer—D-U-A-N-E B-E-A-Z-E-R— lived. He had been the Mesa, Arizona, North Stake president for decades, and he proudly was the Mormon stake president who excommunicated more people than anyone else in history. He was very proud of that. He was definitely a defender of the faith and super, super right-wing. But she wanted to move to Mesa, I think, for the better weather and then to be near her older brother, Duane. So she did. She got there. She hated it. But then also her health deteriorated rapidly, and she had a massive heart attack and had to have a quintuple bypass. I did fly to Mesa and hung out with her for two or three days in the hospital, and that was the first time we'd seen each other since 1989 or '90. I remember walking into the hospital room and seeing her lying in the bed. I thought she was dead. She just looked so horrible. She was motionless. Her skin was sallow and sunken. She just 118 looked horrible. Then she did move and I went, "Oh, thank God, she's alive." But she barely pulled through that, and as soon as she could, she moved back to Syracuse, Utah. She really did not like Mesa. Then fall of 2011, things started getting much worse. I think it was either on my birthday or the day after my birthday, which is September 14, she calls me and she's like, "You know, your little sister lives outside of Phoenix, and her and her husband have a house and they've got dogs. I can't ask her this, so I have to ask you. Can you move here and help take care of me?" I was just like, "Are you kidding me? You treated me badly throughout my childhood. Then you treated me even worse, and now you want me to come and take care of you?" Dammit, I said "Yes, of course." So two or three weeks before Christmas of 2011, I flew into Salt Lake. I signed a lease for an apartment in Rose Park. My mother is still living in Syracuse, and I did not want to move to Syracuse, so I thought, "Well, I'll get something close to the freeway so I could just hop on the freeway and be in Syracuse if she needs me in 20, 30 minutes." I remember decorating her hospital room. She was staying in a care facility— not a hospital, but a care facility. I went to the store and bought all these decorations and stuff and decorated her room so it looked festive for Christmas. I remember the last serious conversation we had. I was telling her how much I was struggling with my self-esteem, and I just remember her looking at me and saying, "Self-esteem? What is that?" It just hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought she was relatively content in her life, and when she said that, I went, "Oh, my God. She's never had self-esteem." It really shocked me right to my core. It brought up so much stuff. There's a really popular saying, "Wounded people wound people," and she was definitely wounded 119 and she wounded me. Boy, it just... To have someone be pushing 70 say that they never experienced self-esteem in their life was really disheartening and painful. I struggle myself so much, especially with my body, having so much body dysmorphia. For five good years in Santa Cruz, I had an amazing body, and I felt like I was good-looking and I loved my body. Then to have this accident and to lose all that… Still, every night, here alone in my apartment, I go, "Oh, my God, I wish I weren't this fat. I wish I were in better condition. I wish I were more attractive." I'm 61 and I'm never going to have a partner again. It's just not in the stars for me any longer. It's just been rough. That's a long conversation, because that's about how I ended up here in Utah. LR: You don't move back here till 2016? CO: No, no, it's 2011. Well, I mean, I arrived in Salt Lake on January 2, 2012. LR: Okay, and you've been here ever since? CO: Yes. I was in Santa Cruz for 18 years, 16 of which I worked seven boards. [Interview ends.] Part 6: December 14, 2022 LR: Today is December 14, 2022. We are on part six with Connell and his oral history interview. Jim is on that call with me as well. Like I mentioned, we just finished talking about your mother and why you moved back to Utah. Were there other things you wanted to talk about [with] Santa Cruz before we come back to Utah? CO: Well, yeah. The first is my name. When I was born, I was named after my father, Claude O'Donovan, and I hated the name as a kid, but also everybody else in my family did. My mom hated the name. She wanted to name me Sean Patrick O'Donovan, but they made an agreement when I was born that if I was a girl, she could name me, and if I was a boy, Claude could name me. I was a boy, I was assigned male at birth, and so he made me Claude after him. So I was born Claude 120 Hill O'Donovan II, not Jr. He wanted ‘II’ because he thought that sounded more sophisticated and classy. I think the family story is—and I checked this with my aunt and she can't remember, but my understanding is—so in the '50s, my mother's family, the Beazers, got a child through the Lamanite Placement Program off the Navajo/Diné reservation. I would give his name, but the Navajo/Diné people do not refer to dead people. They think that that's very negative and invites evil spirits, so I won't give his name out of respect for that. But when I was born, my Navajo uncle didn't like the name Claude either, so he immediately started calling me Rocky. My grandfather Beazer, Mark Beazar—his nickname was Sandy, and I think it was a play off of his nickname being Sandy, so I became Rocky O'Donovan and that's what I went by all of my life. I started to hate it after the Rocky movies started coming out. I just got so tired of everybody going, "Adrian! Adrian!" every time they heard my name. I was just like, "Ugh!" Moving to Santa Cruz, I had the opportunity to become whoever I wanted to be because nobody knew me there. So when I got to Santa Cruz, one of the first things I did was—at that point, you could legally change your name as DBA, "Doing Business As," I think is what it was called. It cost $45 in California and they changed the name on my Social Security card and on my driver's license. I decided I wanted a different name that started with C because I had been signing my name as Claude for a long time. I have this kind of big, loopy, indiscernible signature, but I wanted to keep it as a C because it would just make it easier, and I wanted it to be significant to my family. I have a great-grandmother on my father's side, and her name was Jane Hodges Connell, and so I was like, "I want to be Connell O'Donovan." So I went in and paid the $45, got my new Social Security card and driver's license with the name Connell. 121 It did not change my birth certificate, so upon moving back here to Utah, once my California driver's license expired, they would not renew it with the name Connell on it because post-9/11, they were being super tight about your name and making sure your ID forms all matched legally across all platforms. So they insisted that I would have to have a driver's license with that other name on it. I hate that name. For me, as with transgender folk who've changed their names, I considered that name to be a deadname. I hate it. I don't use it. I hate it when I'm called that. So I refused to do that, and once my Connell driver's license expired like five years ago or something, I haven't had a driver's license because I don't want that name on my driver's license. A month ago, I finally got a lawyer to help me out pro bono, Chris Wharton, who is a gay lawyer here in Salt Lake City, and he's on the city council and he's a friend of mine. He helped me put together the legal package to change my name legally to Connell. It finally happened last month. I was so excited. I've gone by Connell for 30 years, almost, and to finally have that be my legal name… I bawled for two days, it was just so exciting. But yeah, it was in Santa Cruz that I first started going by Connell, and everybody there knows me as Connell. I still go by Rocky. I love my childhood nickname, and now that the Rocky movies aren't so prominent in pop culture anymore, that's fine. Something else that I wanted to talk about was my religious and spiritual beliefs, because we've touched on that quite a bit, but it was really in Santa Cruz that things really flourished. Before I moved, as I explained, I became a Quaker back in the late '80s here in Salt Lake City, and Quakerism really influenced my spiritual practice very deeply. But at the same time, I was kind of exploring a New Age approach, and then as I got to understand the New Age movement more, it 122 didn't really work for me. But paganism was and remains very attractive to me. I call myself Christo-Pagan. That's kind of how I identify. That means that I love Jesus. I love his work. I love his words. I think he lived a really amazing life and set a really good example about how to live an ethical, moral life. I like his example and I try to follow it. All the other stuff, all the mythology around it, the angels and the birth in Bethlehem and all that, I think, is bullshit. I don't believe that's historical. I do believe Jesus was a historical person. Whether his name was Hashoah or not, I don't know, probably. But I don't believe he was born in Bethlehem. I believe he was born in Nazareth, grew up in Nazareth. All the rest is just mythology. I don't believe in the resurrection. I don't believe in Paul. You know, half of the Christian scriptures are the letters of Paul, and I often make the comparison that using Paul to understand Christianity is like 2000 years from now, someone finding 20 emails from a Mormon bishop to his congregation and trying to reconstruct Mormonism from those 20 random emails that they found. You can't. That wouldn't be Mormonism. That wouldn't encompass it all. Using these letters that Paul wrote to a few congregations—or even allegedly wrote, most of them probably weren't even written by him... So I reject all the letters, all the Paul letters. That's kind of where I am with Christianity. But then with paganism, I have a very deep connection to the Divine Feminine, and I always have. I got a patriarchal blessing from T. Joseph Steed when I was 12 years old—so that would have been like ‘73, ‘74—and in it he talks a lot about Heavenly Mother. Because the Mormons have this idea that there's a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother, or many Heavenly Mothers, as the case might be, so this patriarchal blessing was sort of a confirmation of this closeness that I have with the Divine Feminine. I've always felt very connected to the story of 123 Mary, whereas in Mormonism, Mary is not a significant person, really. She is in Catholicism. I think part of my rejection of a lot of this stuff, especially patriarchy, is because I've had such a shitty father. For me to think of the divine as being masculine or male in any way, I just like, "Ick." Whereas my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, whom I had such a deep connection with, I can relate to divinity through the lens of my grandmother. So I've really embraced the Pagan sense of the mother goddess. For me to embrace something, I have to do a lot of really intense academic research around something first and have it make sense academically, intellectually, empirically. Then once I have this framework, from within that framework, I can start to really decorate and orient everything, and I've really embraced paganism in that way, as a way to channel the spirituality that I have. Mormonism wasn't a good vehicle for my spirituality. I thought as a child that it kind of would be and it just never really worked for me. But within paganism, I really found this medium for me to understand a better sense of myself and my place in the universe. I kind of feel like I'm a pretty hardcore pagan, but I'm also really open to whatever. Also, European paganism works for me because that's my heritage and my ancestry as well. A lot of people in California, the white people who are doing yoga and sort of embracing Hindu spirituality with chakras and all that stuff: it interested me, but it didn't really speak to me. So paganism has answered that too, about how can I embrace my heritage and my ancestry through a spiritual practice? European paganism—the flipside of that is that some European paganism is overtly white supremacist and deeply racist. So I've had to be really careful when exploring European paganism that I don't fall into those spaces that put other people down for stupid reasons like race, ethnicity, skin color. 124 LR: Quick question with that. You say European paganism is what you're most drawn to? I can honestly say I don't know a lot about paganism beyond my son's belief in Norse paganism. So is that similar? CO: Yeah, but the modern version of Norse paganism stems mainly from the 900s, 1100s period. To me, it feels very influenced by Christianity still, because there was Christian influence going on in the Norse countries, in Sweden and Denmark and Norway. It made, for example Thor, more like Jesus, so Thor is heavily influenced by Jesus. So academically I went and I explored an earlier time period. Mine is proto-Germanic, and that's the German area. That's from about 400 A.D. to about 400 C.E., so the paganism that I've embraced is about 500 or 600 years earlier than the Norse paganism. LR: Okay. Thank you. CO: The main thing that comes out of that is runes. I'm a rune caster, and Jim Brown actually is the one who introduced me to the runes. It was a big part of his spiritual practice, and I started looking at it, and of course, I spent like 10 years looking at it academically first, looking at the runes. Where did they come from? And then based my spirituality upon my academic understanding after that. I have the runes tattooed across my back. I have 11 tattoos. Ten of those are ritual tattoos; one of those tattoos is the runic alphabet across my back. The only thing that's not ritual is I have the O'Donovan coat of arms on my left arm here. So yeah, the runes, and I use what's called the Elder Futhark. 'Futhark' is just the runic word for ‘alphabet’. I use the Elder Futhark, so that means the Germanic. The younger futhark is the Norse. That's what the Norwegians and Swedes used many centuries later. Jim, do you know about the runes? JM: I do a little bit, but most of them... I study white supremacism and neo-Nazis and stuff like that, so I am more aware of that connotation than the Aryan aspect of it. 125 Not so much as a religious aspect of it, but I am aware of that tangentially because of the importance that's pulled from white supremacism. CO: Okay. I use them. It's similar to reading tarot cards. There's 24 letters in the runic alphabet. Each letter stands for a concept. The first letter of the alphabet is 'Fehu,' and that means personal wealth. We get the word fee in English from Fehu. So if you draw the 'F' rune, then that has something to do with personal wealth, and it just goes on from there. The runes have become a really important part of my spiritual practice, and then walking the labyrinth. We talked about the labyrinths earlier. Those two are sort of my main cornerstones. I have come up with my own religion, if you will. I just call it the Good Rainbow Road, and it's just personal to me. I've written up a lot about it extensively in my own notes and stuff, about what it means. Basically there are four canonical aspects to the Good Rainbow Road, and that's love, beauty, balance, and delight. Any time I have a big decision to make, I weigh them against those four principles of love, balance, beauty, and delight. If I don't hit at least three of the four, then I'm kind of like, "Oh, maybe I shouldn't do that." But if it touches somewhere upon three or hopefully all four of those, then I'm like, "Okay, that's something that I'm going to do." LR: Okay. Thank you. JM: Really quickly, just a clarification—I study white supremacist and Nazism in hopes of preventing its spread. I did want to clarify that for [readers] and Connell, just in case. Number two, though, I was curious if you could give us your weighing against those four why you decided to be interviewed. How did that play out in your decision? I forget how you referred to them specifically, but your love...? CO: Love, beauty, balance, and delight. That's a mantra that I chant a lot, or I've turned it into a song and I'll sing it. I have a big shaman's drum, you know, a big round 126 shaman's drum—and I hate to use that word because I know that's cultural appropriation, but I don't have a better word yet for it. But I have a big drum, and I'll drum and chant “love, beauty, balance and delight.” I did not weigh those about this. This was an easy decision to make. I'm talking about something that's really significant, like, should I move to Utah? Where do these four aspects, four principles come into play? Will it bring me an increase of love? Will it bring more balance to my life? Will there be beauty? And will it be a delight? There was no delight moving back to Utah, but my mother was calling. Anyway, also when I was in Santa Cruz, I was doing a lot of historical research and writing... Oh, I've got to tell you about this thing. Back when I was in Queer Nation in 1991, I wrote this brief article called "Reclaiming Sodom." I had been thinking a lot about the lesbian experience and how lesbians had this idyllic island called Lesbos that they could look to and dream about and help internally recreate this beautiful Greek island, and looking at the gay male experience and thinking, "Wow, we don't have in our mythology this beautiful Grecian island. All we have is Sodom from the biblical story,” and it's a horrible tale that's extremely violent. It's based on this idea that gay men rape angels, because that's what the story is, is that angels visit Sodom and [the] men tell Lot, "Bring your angelic visitors out because we want to rape them," and he refuses. Then God strikes them blind so that they can't find the angels to rape them. This becomes this Christian tale where gay men who want to be in loving relationships are related to this story about raping angels. It's not even mixing apples and oranges. I don't understand how that story came to apply to gay men. There's nothing about it that's about us. But I wrote that story "Reclaiming Sodom," saying, "Hey, this is what we've been given. It's an arid wasteland that's been salted by God." Because that's part of the tale, is that Lot's wife turns around to look at Sodom being destroyed, and she's 127 turned into a pillar of salt. If you go to that area around the Dead Sea, it's all salty. It's a completely arid, infertile, barren landscape. I was like, "Let's do what gay men always do. We take these deserts and we make them blossom. We take found objects and make beauty out of them in art and poetry and literature. So let's do that. Let's fertilize it with our blood and sweat and tears and our cum and try to make a beautiful garden. The lie that we're told from the Judeo-Christian mythology is that we were kicked out of the garden. We weren't. We are in the garden. This earth is our garden. We're still there. It's just the patriarchy has tried to make it seem like we are in scarcity. We are in a barren landscape where we shouldn't be. That's a punishment. And it's not; it's this beautiful... The Earth is gorgeous, and we need to embrace it and its fertility." That was part of what I learned in Moab, being in this really barren desert, was that there was so much life there. So I wrote this short story called "Reclaiming Sodom." I think it's around 1997. I'm in Bookshop Santa Cruz, which is a large independent bookstore there, and the shop had a huge queer studies section, so I was always in there looking for new books and sometimes just sitting there. They had comfy couches and stuff around the store so you could just read. You didn't have to buy the material, you just read it right there. I'm thumbing through the new queer titles, and here's this book called Reclaiming Sodom, and I went, "What? That's the title of this short little story that I wrote six years ago." I opened it up and there's my essay in the middle of this book, and it's kind of the fulcrum, pretty much literally in the middle of this book: "Reclaiming Sodom" by Rocky O'Donovan. I'm like, "What?" With Queer Nation and Queer Fuckers Magazine, the QFM that we talked about already—in Queer Nation, all the zines were part of this anarchic project that refused to acknowledge copyright. We were saying anything that was published by 128 Queer Nation all across the country, there was no copyright to anything. We wanted people to be encouraged to copy them and distribute them widely. So Dr. Jonathan Goldberg—oh, gosh, I can't remember what university he's from. I want to say Johns Hopkins—he saw my essay in an issue of QFM, and it got him thinking. Then he built this whole anthology around "Reclaiming Sodom" and titled his book after my essay. I was just like, "What? Oh, my God." Of course, I bought it, and I still have that copy. But then what happened from there was that it became really popular in Europe, his book and my essay. There were, I think, at least four books written by others in response to my essay and Jonathan Goldberg's book. I know I'm a very minor character in all this, but somehow my little essay... I dropped this pebble into a pool and the ripples went all over the place, including these books written mainly in French and Italian. There were responses to the book and to my essay, a lot of people really hating my essay, saying, "Oh, how dare you want to reclaim Sodom? That's a horrible thing." But I like that I kind of participated in this larger exploration of queer theory a little bit. In 1994, Signature Books published my Abominable and Detestable Crime Against Nature, my history of homosexuality and Mormonism. It was published in an anthology. Then a couple of years later, D. Michael Quinn wrote, based a lot on my research, "Same-Sex Dynamics: A Mormon Example." Have we talked about Mike Quinn? Have you heard that name? He was arguably the greatest historian of Mormonism in the last 40 years. I was in his ward in the Avenues when I moved there in '79, and he was in the circle that ordained me an Elder. But he was a gay BYU professor of history who started writing authentically and honestly about the LDS Church's history, and they didn't like it, so he was excommunicated. Then after 129 he was excommunicated, he then came out of the closet. I was one of the first people he told. I was his first gay kiss. Then he wrote "Same-Sex Dynamics," like I said, based partially on a lot of the research that I had done, and he submitted the manuscript originally to Signature Books. They sent it to me in California and said, "Hey, would you review this and tell us if we should publish it?" I read it and it was so dull and so dry and super repetitive and just not wellwritten. He's always been a really good writer, and I was really surprised, but I kind of wrote a scathing review saying, "Mike, what are you doing? This is so dispassionate. It's so boring. You've taken this really exciting queer history of Utah and you've made it very dry." I actually signed my name to the review. You're not supposed to. They're sort of supposed to be anonymous. But I recommended to Signature Books that they not publish it, and they didn't. Then Mike read my review and he was really hurt by that. But all the other reviewers told him the same thing, basically: this is so dry, and queer history should be really interesting, and you made it not. He went elsewhere. He did kind of fix it up a little bit; I can't remember who did publish it, but it wasn't Signature. Our friendship took a deep dive because of that, but eventually he did forgive me and we became really good friends again. He died last year, April of 2021, and I miss him greatly. While I was in Santa Cruz, I was online one day at work, just kind of messing around, and I came across this collection of letters from the Wisconsin State Historical Society. It just had a description of them, and it said “Augusta Cobb's correspondence with Brigham Young, her husband,” and it was two microfilms. I was like, "What? Huh? Two microfilms of Augusta Cobb's correspondence with her husband, Brigham Young? What the hell is that?" 130 I contacted them. They made copies of the microfilm, sent them to me. So Augusta Cobbs ended up being Brigham Young's third wife, his second plural wife. She and Brigham, soon after they married, started hating each other. She wanted a divorce from him, and several of her letters are requesting divorce, but he constantly refused. Things got so bad. She was living in the Lion House or the Beehive House—the one that's the dormitory for his wives—and things got so bad between them, he kicked her off the premises and made her live in a tiny little cabin a half a block away on State Street, just down the hill from the Young family compound. She was forbidden to come onto the family compound, so the only way to communicate with her husband, Brigham, was to write him letters. She wrote him letters almost every damn day of her life. How they got to Wisconsin is a whole long story. Be that as it may, we know of 12 letters that Brigham Young's wives sent to him other than Augusta's letters. Twelve! He had 50-something wives, and we only have 12 letters from them. Then you get to Augusta: there are over 300 letters that she wrote to Brigham Young because she was not allowed to go onto his property. I was completely fascinated by this. I spent years in Santa Cruz transcribing all of these letters that she had written. They're in horrible condition. They're written in pencil, which has faded over the past 150 years, but I was successful in transcribing them all. I then twice flew to Boston. She was from Boston originally, the Boston area. I did two one-week trips to Boston to do research in Boston about her and her life. I wrote her biography and was going to publish it. I had turned in the manuscript to the University of Utah Press for publication. They had accepted it. They sent back notes for me to change some stuff. 131 Then the November 2015 anti-gay policy came out by the LDS Church, banning the heterosexual children of gay parents from getting baptized or going on missions unless they repudiated their parents. I was just horrified by that policy. I've been really involved in the Mormon historical community for many, many years. I went on nearly yearly to the Mormon History Association's annual conferences, wherever they were around the country. I spoke a lot, I gave lectures on Black Mormon history and gay Mormon history and Augusta Cobb and other topics, on William Smith, Joseph Smith's younger brother. I was on committees for the Mormon History Association and other things, and I got so suicidal after that policy came out. I was so angry and so hurt and just nonfunctioning, almost. The only way I could respond was to... I angrily sent letters to all my Mormon friends and to the Mormon History Association, basically saying, "Fuck you all. If you support your church in doing this, you're disgusting human beings and I want nothing to do with you or Mormon history, other than queer Mormon history. I'm still interested in that, but otherwise I'm not doing anything ever again that's about heterosexual Mormonism." So I stopped working on the Augusta biography, and it never got published. I have sent it to several of her direct descendants. If she's an ancestor, then I will give you a copy of my book [about] her to them. But otherwise, I'm not doing that anymore and I'm just focusing on queer history now, which I totally love. Back to moving back to Utah. I'd gone back to Utah, decorated [my mom's] room. I signed a lease for a house in Rose Park. Moved back to California. Right as all this is happening, the state of California was in a financial mess, and the universities of California, that whole system was just floundering in financial problems. I was the manager of summer session, and summer session was a cash cow for the university. Our little program made $4 million a year for the university, 132 and we were giving all that money back to the university for all their other programs and stuff like that. But they came to our department because they were making huge cuts in personnel and stuff, and said, "We're firing all of you but one person, and Connell, you're not it." So I was out of a job anyway. I was forced to retire and they gave me my retirement,and then of course, the government took half of that. I was just kind of whittling away at my money. I was so angry. I was like, "You're jeopardizing a program that brings $4 million because you can't afford a $30,000 salary for me? In what universe does that make sense?" And what I predicted would happen happened. The next year, instead of $4 million, they didn't even make a half a million dollars from the summer program because they cut all of us away. So that was a smooth move on the University of California's part. I had really loved working there. How I was treated as they were forcing me to retire was really horrible. I was shocked by the callousness that I was treated with. It was just such a bad scene and they wouldn't listen to me. I was just like, "I guess I'm moving to Utah for sure." I told Todd, the owner of the house where I lived on King Street, that I'd be out. I did take some of my retirement money... I'd never had a nice car in my life, and I bought a 20 year old BMW because I've always wanted a BMW. I named him Biff. He was this black sexy little four-door sedan, and I loved Biff. I miss him. He is now dead, unfortunately, but before that Biff the Beemer and I just became really good friends. I installed a hitch on the back of his bumper and then rented a U-Haul trailer and filled it with all my worldly goods, and I was ready to leave in two days. Then I got a call from my uncle, my mom's brother, Boyd Beazer, saying that she had passed away, so I was like, "Oh, shit. Okay, well, I don't have housing. I don't have a job. I have housing in Rose Park. Damn, I really want to stay in Santa 133 Cruz, but I can't. I just can’t." So I still packed up and I left on New Year's Day, 2012. Drove back to Zion and moved into my little apartment on Ninth West. I loved the neighborhood. It was very racially diverse. We were all just really good neighbors. I got to know a lot of my neighbors. It was really a lot of fun. I was living in an apartment complex. I was there about six months or so, and there was this really cute guy who used to... He had two little kids, one that could walk and one that was in a stroller, and next door to my apartment complex was a little mini market. It wasn't a 7-Eleven or anything; it was privately owned. But he was always walking back and forth from his place to the market to get stuff for his kids or whatever, and whenever he'd see me outside, he'd wave and say hi. I was just like, "Damn, he is so handsome, and he's really tall." Finally one day I'm out there, and I'm working on the car, and on the back of Biff, I had two stickers. I had a rainbow flag, and then I had The Cure. The Cure is my favorite band, and he came over with his two kids and he's like, "Hey, I really like your sticker." I was like, "Okay, he's either into the rainbow flag or he loves The Cure,” and I went with The Cure. I was like, "Oh, you really like The Cure, huh?" He goes, "Oh, that too, but I really like your rainbow sticker more." I went, "Oh, okay. Hi." So I stuck my hand [and said], "Hi, I'm Connell." He said, "Hi, I'm Jeff." This is the infamous Jeff that we ended with last week. Jeff was a single dad raising these two kids. His baby mama was still in the picture, but pretty non involved. We started dating. Jeff was bisexual; he identified as bi. He was just gorgeous and of course, shallow me, I was like, "Oh, you're pretty, so you're good." He was pretty. He was not good. At first he was. For several months, things were really great. I loved his two little boys. The older one was autistic, and I had experience working with autistic 134 children, and so we got along great. But... Oh, gosh, I'm going to start crying. I had gone from being single for quite a while now, to all of a sudden I had this instant family. I had a boyfriend and two little kids, and oh gosh, we just had so much fun. The summer of 2012 was just delicious. We did a lot of stuff together, drives through the countryside, and we didn't go camping, but we would go hiking. Even with the little kids, we'd just take them with us. Jeff loved PDA. He was so into holding hands in public and kissing and stuff in the parking lot. I was like, "Aren't you afraid?" He goes, "Connell, we're both over six feet tall. Who's going to mess with us?" I was like, "That's a good point." I'd always wanted a boyfriend that I could do that with here. In California was fine. Here in Utah, it was a little sketchier. Then he moved over by the baseball stadium into this basement apartment. He was renting from this gay guy that I knew. One day, I was supposed to go pick up Jeff and we were going to go do something, and I went over and pounded on the door. Nothing happened. He didn't answer. I pounded and pounded. No answer. I knew he was home. Got in my car, left, came back a couple hours later. Same response. Came back three hours later, same response. Two days went by and I hadn't heard from him and I'm worried sick. Finally I hear from him, and I go over, and his apartment is completely trashed and I'm just like, "What the hell happened here?" He tells me this tale. Now, he'd been a sober addict, and I knew that. But he said a friend had contacted him and needed a place to crash overnight, and at some point during that evening, his friend gave him drugs unknowingly, and then that turned into two days of binging on, I think, meth, because that ended up being 135 what he was addicted to. That just started a spiral down that... I can't even tell you the horrors of what happened and Jeff's fall from grace over his addiction. Part of that included, he started being a drug runner for an Asian drug gang over in the Rose Park area, and he disappears one day. Two days go by and I get a text through his number, and it says, "We have your little Jeffy. He is naked, curled up in a corner. We've been beating him with a broom for four hours now because he lost a drug shipment. He was supposed to take drugs from point A to point B. He claims he was robbed. We want our drugs back." I was like, "Well, what the hell am I supposed to do?" They said, “He owes us $2,000. If you can pay it, you can have—” they kept calling him ‘your little Jeffy,’ “—you can have your little Jeffy back." I was just like, "Oh, shit, are you kidding me?" They had him for over a week up in Layton at this house, and it got really scary because they were having me followed and I was like, "Leave me alone." They're like, "We know where you live. We know you drive a black BMW. This is the license plate number. We know you're at home right now because we have someone outside and your porch light is on and your kitchen light is on." That was true. I was like, "Oh, shit. Okay,” so I ended up paying $2,000 in ransom for Jeff. I had to go pick him up at the park in Sandy, and he was so freakin’ high, it was horrible. He was so paranoid. He wouldn't tell me where he was at and I had to kind of figure it out, and I had to keep reassuring him that I wasn't with the FBI and I wasn't being followed, I was not wired, the cops aren't listening in. He finally got in my car, and we only got like four miles away, and he was like, "Stop." He made me stop at a McDonald's, and he got out and he goes, "I know you're with the FBI. There's helicopters that are following us." 136 I was like, "Oh my God, Jeff, no, no." We ended up breaking up. I was just like, “I have had it. I'm done.” Then it was around Thanksgiving of 2012. There was a huge snowstorm and it dumped like two feet of snow on the city, and it's 9:00 at night. There's this knocking on my door. I answer it, and it's Jeff, and he's like, "I have nowhere to stay. I've been kicked out of my apartment. Crystal's taken the kids. It's snowing horribly. I can't sleep outside. Can I please crash here?" I was like, "Oh, fuck. Yeah, sure." I made him sleep on the couch. Then that night, as I'm going to bed, I'm a little distrustful, so I kept my bedroom door cracked so I could hear what was going on. He crawled under the covers and, I thought, went to sleep. Then I woke up about one in the morning and had to pee, and as I opened my bedroom door wider, I saw him pull the covers up to his chin really fast. I was like, "Oop, I walked in on him playing with himself. Okay, whatever." Then I did my business, went back to bed, and I was just nodding off and I heard my front door click. I was like, "What is that?" I kind of didn't think about it for a minute or two. Then I thought, “I should check,” and I got up. Jeff was gone. My bicycle was gone. All of my camping gear was gone. He had found my wallet. He had taken my debit card and my credit card. He thought he knew my debit pin. He didn't, thank goodness. I had told him something erroneous. And he'd emptied the wallet; there was like $200 in the wallet. So he just cleaned me out and took off. I have seen him once since, at a Dee's restaurant. He was there. But that whole experience just messed with my head, messed with my heart. I've tried dating since then and I can't do it. I don't trust. All I can think of is... I guess had PTSD from what happened with Jeff and I just can't. The thought of it just terrifies me, having someone that you trusted so deeply and that you loved so much take advantage of your vulnerabilities. 137 LR: A quick question. You really didn't get to spend a lot of time with your mom before she died, it sounds like? CO: Just those few days when I flew in to get ready, and our conversation about selfesteem, and she was like, "What is that? I've never had any. I don't even know what you're talking about." LR: Okay. Not being able to say goodbye or anything, do you think that impacted you a little bit or shaped [you] moving forward? CO: I mean, because we still weren't that close and we hadn't really reconciled, it didn't have that big of an impact on me. That's honest. I kind of want to feel guilty about that, but I don't. There was also, I have to say, some relief in that I was like, "Oh, I'm going to have to wipe her ass and stuff like that, and I don't want to do that. I hate vomiting, and if she's going to be vomiting around me, that's going to be really tough." So there was a little bit of relief, like, "Oh, God, I don't have to deal with all that personal body stuff." I was devastated because I had really hoped that we could have some good conversations before she passed, where we could have some sort of good reconciliation and some moving forward, and that didn't get to happen. I got here in time to plan her funeral. Very oddly for an LDS woman, she wanted to be cremated. I knew some of that was, she knew to buy a coffin and all that stuff and a grave plot in the Syracuse City Cemetery would cost us a lot of money, me and my sister, so I think [that was] part of her deciding to do that. But she donated her body to science to the University of Utah Medical Center, so they got her body. In her Syracuse ward, we did a celebration of life. My sister Tracy and I, we refused to have it be called a funeral. I made a YouTube video using Mom's favorite songs and then a ton of photographs from throughout her life, and we played that 138 on the big screen. Then we just had an open mic. We didn't have an opening or closing prayer. My sister and I are both nonbelievers and people respected that. We asked that people not bear their testimonies, but, of course, three of my mom's brothers had to get up and bear their testimony about how true the gospel was and how their sister Pat was with Heavenly Father now, and I was just like, "Ugh. Yuck." So [the University of Utah] had her body for a year, and then I got a notification from the University saying, "Okay, we'll be shipping her ashes to you here in a couple of weeks." So I let my sister know, Tracy in Phoenix. Her married name is Lavenant, L-A-V-E-N-A-N-T, and her husband's name is Ted. I don't know if that's [short for] Theodore or not. I think it is Theodore. So I let Tracy know, and we planned a family ritual with whoever could make it. We would give cups of ashes to people, and they could take those home. But we also drove around to her various favorite spots in Syracuse, Utah, and put ashes there. There's ashes in front of the house where she grew up, ashes in front of the first house where we lived as a family. We went up into the canyon, up Weber Canyon, and left ashes there. I said goodbye to my little sister. She went back to Arizona and I've never heard from her since. She won't talk to me. She won't answer my calls. She won't answer emails. She's not on Facebook or any social media that I know of. She just refuses to talk to me, and I have no clue what that's about. It hurts me really deeply. Her birthday was just on November 30th, and I thought of her on that day. I keep thinking, "Well, should I try another email yet again?" But I don't want to experience the rejection. She has my number, she has my email. I know she's in contact with our Aunt Linda in Colorado, and so if she needs to get a hold of me, she can. I don't know. She was fine. We had a great time when she was here, spreading the ashes. I don't know. I'm not going to get into that. That hurts a lot. 139 Well, and back to sort Jeff: Jeff's name is Jeffrey Leato, L-E-A-T-O. He now has prison records. He's on mugshots.com [laughs]. Oh, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. Oh, how the handsome have fallen. He's still really good-looking, though, even though he's a horrible human being. LR: So out of curiosity, when you came back to Utah, what did you do for work? What did you start doing? CO: For a year I did nothing. I was at the LDS Church History Library almost daily doing research on Augusta Cobb, working on the book, because I had this huge savings account from my retirement. That's all gone now. But yeah, I lived off of my savings and just worked on Augusta Cobb. [After] about a year and a half, I was like, "Oh, I kind of need to find a job,” so I got into genealogy. I've been doing genealogy since I was 12, my own family's genealogy. I've helped other people with theirs every once in a while. I started just doing independent work for Ancestry.com and I learned from them how to write research reports and put together a research journal and all that stuff. Then I applied for a full-time job with Ancestry. Their genealogical research arm is called ProGenealogy.com, but it's part of Ancestry. I had applied for this full time position with them and did an interview on Wednesday. I interviewed with the full team. I passed the initial interview and did the second interview with this whole team, headed up by this woman named Lisa, and Lisa said, "Okay, I will let you know by Friday whether you've got the job or not." Friday at midnight, I still haven't heard from Lisa, and I stupidly went onto Facebook and posted a thing saying, "Well, I was supposed to have heard it by today about whether I got the job or not. I guess not.” “I find this rather unprofessional,” I think was what I said. Well, come to find out, they were lurking. Lisa was lurking on my Facebook page, read the comment. I did not know this, but she was going to give me the job until she read that I had called her unprofessional. 140 So on Monday morning, I get a call from her and she told me, "Yeah, we've been looking at your Facebook page now for a couple of weeks. What you said about me and my unprofessionalism, I did not like that at all, so no. You were going to get the job, but now you're not." I was like, "Oh, holy shit." She goes, "Yeah, at 2 a.m. Saturday morning, I was going to send you an email and then I saw your comment." I was like, "Well, that's Saturday. You said you'd contact me on Friday." Anyway, I didn't get the job. Then I applied with this other company called Universal Genealogy. Their offices are in the Avenues. The owner is actually someone I grew up with in Syracuse. He is three years older than I am. Mick Stanger, S-T-A-N-G-E-R. His mother, Nedra, is the woman who taught me genealogy in the Syracuse Stake back in the mid-‘70s. Her name was Nedra Florence. I just loved her. Mick was a troublemaker when he was a teenager. He was a stoner and liked to drink and carouse and stuff. But now he's got a big family. It's a big family enterprise. I love working with him. He treats me so well, is an awesome boss—although he's not really my boss because I'm an independent contractor, but he's the person that I work with at Universal. I work about 30 hours a week for Universal, and it just varies. Kinda to go back to Jeff and all that—I don't have much of an addictive personality, but I am a love and romance addict and always have been. I'm a hyperromantic. With what happened to Jeff, I actually attended Al-Anon for a year afterwards. I was going to weekly meetings, learning about addiction and all that stuff, and that's what I learned, "Oh, I'm a love and romance addict." I smoke pot, too. I'm not addicted to it. I can go for months without smoking it easily and then I'll smoke again. If there's an addiction to it, it's just slightly psychological, but it's not a 141 big deal to me at all. But romance? Oh, my gosh. I love sappy movies. I love sappy storylines. Anything to do with romance, I just start bawling. With Al-Anon, I really started to see how false romanticism is. It's not an authentic picture, so I need to be really careful about romantic feelings because I am so superficial in that. Even once I'm in a romantic situation, I feed off of the hyper-romanticism, and if the romanticism is dying down, then I start looking for it elsewhere. I'm like, "Oh, well, this partner isn't working for me. Who else can give me that jolt of romanticism that I need?" Not pretty. [Interview ends.] Part 7: December 21, 2022 LR: Today is December 21, 2022. Happy Yule. We are continuing the oral history interview with Connell O'Donovan. I am Lorrie Rands, and Jim Miles is on as well. When we stopped last time, you were going over why genealogy was important to you, that it's something you've been doing since you were 12. You had kind of finished up talking about your family, your mom and your sister. That's kind of where we left off. I'm not quite sure about what year that was. CO: Mom died in... Well, we had her memorial service in 2013, I think it was springtime 2013. That's when we spread her ashes all over. About that, getting the ashes—so I knew from the University of Utah. They sent me a letter saying, “When we're done, we'll send you the ashes and stuff,” and then I didn't hear anything. More than a year goes by, and then I got this notice in the mail to come pick a package up at the post office. They wouldn't deliver it. I had to go to the post office to pick it up, and I didn't know what it was. So I go there and stand in line for 10 minutes and get up to the front counter and turn in the tag, and then the guy brings back this box and plops it down in front of me. I was like, "What is this?" because I just had no clue. I didn't get a warning letter or anything. Then all of a sudden, "Oh!" 142 The guy goes, "Oh, do you know what it is now?" I said, “Yeah, it's my mom,” and I just burst out into tears. So I'm standing there having this crisis, this little grieving moment, in the middle of the public post office in downtown Salt Lake City, and everybody’s just staring at me. I wish I'd gotten some notification from the university saying, "Hey, this is on its way.” So that was really both funny and very painful at the same time. Then we spread her ashes that following spring. I have to say, probably my first six years back here, I just hated every moment I was here. Previously, like when I was living in Santa Cruz, I didn't return to Utah except for one time, and that was in 1997. We did a drag hike. Did we talk about that? The Drag Hike to Delicate Arch? LR: No, I don't think so. CO: Okay. Me and Jason, my best friend who lived with me in Moab, and then another gay man who lived there—it's his birthday today, Keith Randall. The three of us went back to Moab in 1997, and we dressed in high drag, and we hiked in drag to Delicate Arch and back. I hiked, what is that, five miles in three-inch white satin pumps, all the way there and back. That was hysterical. The guards at the gate to Arches National Park were telling the tourists, "Drag queens at Delicate Arch. Get there now." So we had to stay at Delicate Arch for at least two hours while busloads of German and Japanese tourists came and took our photos of us in drag standing under Delicate Arch. That was hysterical. Other than that, that was the only time I came to Utah. I actually think I flew into Las Vegas and then drove from... How did I get to Moab? Anyway, I always tried to avoid landing in Salt Lake City, and if I did land in the airplane and I was just at the airport, I was physically ill the entire time I was at the airport. I would just be shaking. It was total PTSD, total PTSD. Then I move here and I'm like, “Oh my 143 God,” and just those first five or six years, I just despised every moment I was here. I was angry at my mother because she had me move back for no apparent reason other than to plan her funeral. It was so hard trying to fit who I became in Santa Cruz back into this whole environment. Santa Cruz is probably the most liberal, progressive, left-wing city in the entire world. Then to move to one of the most... I finally learned after a while, Salt Lake City is pretty progressive and open-minded and accepting. You leave Salt Lake County, and then that just takes a nosedive into the abyss. I was struggling being here and didn't want to be here, but just felt completely stuck. I think I was in that place at Rose Park for just a year. I don't think it was two years. I had to move, and I got this shitty little dive of an apartment because I was still trying to find a job and I was running out of money. My savings were almost gone, so I had to find a really cheap apartment. I found this tiny little hole. It was on Third West and like 460 North or something like that. That whole area was just really bad news for me. There were a lot of halfway houses for addicts and stuff in the area. There was prostitution going on in our front yard constantly. There was a lot of drugs, a lot of meth happening within a block. A lot of street fights. I would hear gunshots every once in a while. I did not feel safe. I would be awakened—I mean, this happened at least three times, where someone in the middle of the night just started pounding on my door, thinking that they were at someone else's house, but they were so messed up on drugs, they didn't know where they were. I'm just in my little apartment, going, "Oh my God, I'm going to die." Yeah, it was not a good place. Then I moved actually just two blocks away, but up the hill, closer to the Capitol, at 501 North Main Street, and was there several years before I moved here. But I just wasn't finding community here, and I didn't really want to. 144 Then I started hanging out at the Pride Center when it was north across the street from the public library and kind of getting involved. In 2015, Equality Utah gave me an icon award at their big annual gala affair at the Salt Palace. That was a way for me to start feeling more embraced by the community here, getting the recognition for the early activism that I had done and planning and directing the two Pride marches and things like that. There are actually two YouTube videos for that night. There was the preparatory video that's kind of biographical, where they interview a bunch of friends and stuff, and they interviewed me and they played that before I got on the stage. Then there's a second YouTube video of me that's 10 minutes long, and that's my speech that I gave. In that speech, I kind of came out as being on the trans spectrum, and I didn't really have a term for it. Later, I started using non-binary to describe myself, and now that's not feeling... I just realized, like, six months ago, I was like, "It's close. Non-binary is a close fit for me, but I'm something else." Right now I'm just saying my gender is, I'm a Radical Faerie. That's my gender. It's so complicated. I'm fine with my male body and all the parts, but I've never felt like a man. I never have. I don't particularly feel female, so it's not that I would want to change. I'm just somewhere in between or beyond. I'm a work in progress, as far as my gender identity goes. A couple of years later, the Pride Center moved from Fourth South to where it is now on Main Street and 13th South. I really started hanging out there then. Carol Gnade, G-N-A-D-E, was the director pro-tem at the time, and I just fell in love with her. She and I created a wall exhibit in the main room there. It was queer Utah ancestors. They were really beautiful portraits of queer people from history from the 1860s up to the 1950s. We had about a dozen people with their photos, and it was like a museum exhibit. It was really finely done because Carol paid for it. I did all the design work and the research and the writing for it and stuff, but she paid for it. 145 There was a photo of each person and then a little biography on a little card next to them, and that was on the main wall. That just became a huge selling point at the Pride Center because that was often the first thing that people would see and everybody loved it. They had no idea that Utah had such a rich queer history and that these amazing people from 100 years ago had done all of these beautiful things and were very powerful and helped move our community along. As a result of that, I got an award from the Pride Center. It was me and Senator Steve Urquhart, who was the Republican senator from St. George who had made a complete switcharound. He'd been very homophobic and then became very pro-queer and had done a lot in the state legislature over advancing the homosexual agenda, so to speak. The morning of the Pride Parade is when Steve and I finally met. We both had gotten awards from the Pride Center, and they wanted us to ride in the parade in our own cars and stuff like that. Steve and I have become fabulous friends, and he's no longer Republican, he's Democrat, Independent. He's become very progressive. He's the one who started the Divine Assembly. He left the LDS church, and he started his own religion based on psychedelic mushrooms. It's called the Divine Assembly. I'm not big into mushrooms. I did some in Santa Cruz, but I'm too afraid because I have diabetes and just because of my health issues, I don't want to trip. If I had a medical problem, you know, that would just not be cool. Around that same time that I got the award, myself and Ben Williams and Randy Hoffman and Cristi Herbert—-Cristi is spelled C-R-I-S-T-I Herbert. With a couple other folks, we founded the Utah Queer Historical Society, and it was a formal program of the Utah Pride Center. They gave us a really nice funding package, as well as Carol Gnade also donated a huge lump sum to the Historical Society. We met right up until COVID. I started a program through the Historical 146 Society called Oratory, and it was basically an oral history project modified. I would invite someone once a month who was an important queer historical figure, still living, of course. They would come to the Pride Center and give their oral history in public in front of an audience while we videotaped it. We usually gave them about an hour and a half to condense their life and do that brief frame. But that became really messy—and actually, when we're done with this, I would like to talk with you two about how to finish up with that project, because I think there's at least 10 out there, and there are some legal issues that I need to deal with. Maybe you can help me with that. Anyway, that was really well-attended. We would have anywhere from 30 to 60 people every month come and listen to a queer elder give their story. We had people from the Royal Court. We had Kate Kendall, who's now the director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. She argued Obergefell at the Supreme Court. She's from Salt Lake. LR: Yes. We interviewed her. CO: Oh, okay. LR: Not for this project, but for another one. It was awesome. CO: She is so fantastic. I love her. I knew her from back when I was getting the University of Utah to add sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination policy. I mentioned that the local ACLU head was also the university's counsel, and he opposed adding sexual orientation to the nondiscrimination policy. Do you remember me talking about that? Anyway, I was so angry with him for not helping and in fact being against it, I went to their office, and Kate was an intern, and she helped me out with the legal process. So I had known her for a long time, but we hadn't really kept in contact. 147 We had Kate Kendall; we had Patrick Califia come. Patrick is a transgender man who, when he was lesbian-identified, he worked for the Advocate newsmagazine and he ran their sex advice column and is a Mormon from the Ogden area, I think, and lives in Oregon. I paid for him and his partner to come to Salt Lake City for three days and come and give his oratory. It was just really, really fun and I really loved doing that project. Then COVID hit, and I was furious with the way that the Pride Center fired their staff over COVID. No warning, no emails. The employees of the Pride Center were literally showing up at the door and they had changed the locks on them so they couldn't get in and they were just given instructions: "Turn your keys in, turn your ID card, you're done." So for two days, I literally had four people come to my apartment on Capitol Hill to talk with me and cry on my shoulder about how horribly they'd been treated by the Pride Center. We all knew that COVID was going to shut it down, but it was just handled so poorly and so unethically and without any compassion or thoughtfulness about it whatsoever. So I started a big stink about it, and I wrote a long letter of resignation saying, "I'm done with the Pride Center. I'm done with the Historical Society. I love the Historical Society, but if it's going to be a program of this really messy, dysfunctional organization, I'm not going to participate." Oh, my gosh, did we all cause a huge storm in the gay community. I lost friends. People that I thought were my advocates came out and said, "How dare you call yourself a leader of the community? You should always think first about trying to keep us unified, and you're being really divisive." It was really painful for about a year. At the same time, I'm dealing with COVID and the lockdown. I don't have a car, so I'm very much just stuck in my apartment on Capitol Hill, learning how to 148 figure out getting grocery deliveries and doing online banking and stuff that I didn't know how to do. Just trying to get by, and then dealing with all this. Half the community was saying, "Good for you! Thanks for standing up for the underdog!” and the other half was like, "Oh, my gosh, how dare you tear our community apart?" I was just like, "You're killing the messenger, and I'm just one of several messengers." That's one thing I've noticed with pride centers and queer resource centers: every single one I've ever been officially affiliated with has always been so challenging. I don't know what it is, but when queer people start getting paid to be queer, they just screw it up. Back when everything was volunteer and we all put our sweat, blood and tears into our organizations rather than drawing a salary, when we were paying for everything ourselves out of our pockets, we were terrific and organized. Then we get a million-dollar budget, and it just seems like we don't know how to handle it. I saw it in San Jose. I saw it in San Francisco. I saw it in Santa Cruz. I've seen it time and time again here in Salt Lake City with every iteration of the Pride Center. It started out as the Utah Stonewall Center. There is embezzlement and there is mismanagement and there's favoritism, and it's really disheartening. The Pride Center's building... Have you been there, to the Pride Center here in Salt Lake?. LR: Not in Salt Lake, no. CO: Jim, have you? JM: Yes. CO: Oh, okay. It's gorgeous. It's huge. There's tons of space and rooms and two kitchens. It's such a fabulous space. It seems to kind of be recovering now a little bit, but I don't know. LR: It makes sense. I have two questions. It's kind of going back a little bit. I realized we didn't want to talk about [it], but Prop VIII in California: you were living in Santa Cruz 149 at the time. What were your feelings about that and how were you involved with that? CO: Well, there was an earlier proposition a few years before that. It was Prop XII or something. It was similarly backed by the LDS Church in California. I remember in that original proposition before the vote, I was going around saying, "Hey, we really need to be conscious of the fact that this is coming from the Latter-day Saint Church. We need to understand that so that we can better prepare any kind of response to that." I was told repeatedly, "Oh, you're just being anti-Mormon. Shut up. This isn't about any one religion. How dare you say that?" I was just like, "You guys don't know what you're talking about. Trust me on this." Then Prop VIII came out, and then everybody was like, "Oh, the Mormons. Connell, you were right." I was like, "See? I told you." I got really involved in Santa Cruz County. The Santa Cruz Stake, there were several high-ranking stake members that I was good friends with. Oh, boy, they really struggled with what to do. I think the Santa Cruz Stake was the lowestcontributing stake in the state as far as money goes because people just were not supporting the church's movement to have Prop VIII passed. One of the people who's on the Stake High Council, his name's Bob Reese. Bob Reese has been speaking as an advocate for the queer community for decades now, and he was on the Stake High Council. In the midst of all this, you know, the members of the church were told they couldn't wear anything to church that visibly showed support for the queer community. He had on a tie and a tie pin that was the pride flag, but it was on backwards, so the pin was hiding behind his 150 tie. But someone saw it, like he bent over and someone saw the back of his tie with the rainbow flag on it, and they reported it to the stake president. He was released from his position in the High Council because he had worn a rainbow pin to church. He was devastated. It just knocked his socks off. I would say, and I'm speaking—what's the word?—just by hearsay. They lost a third of their members, the Santa Cruz Stake did, because of Prop VIII. They almost folded the stake and had it merge with a stake in San Jose because they couldn't even fill the Stake High Council quorum with enough high priests because so many had left. Personally, I know at least a dozen LDS folks who left the church in Santa Cruz after Prop VIII because it was just so egregious, what they were doing, lying that they weren't contributing money and then… It was just really painful. But I then sort of became one of the... I was a speaker. I would go around and give talks about why the LDS church was doing this and the history of it and all that stuff. LR: That leads into my next question about the... I cannot say the first part. CO: Obergefell? LR: Thank you, and the Hodges decision in 2015, because now you're back in Utah, and that's a lot more celebratory in the sense that it's a good thing. How did you feel about that? What were your feelings about it? CO: Well I'm still kind of torn about the whole idea of marriage equality. In a patriarchal sense and from a patriarchal perspective, marriage is horrible. It's heteronormative and hasn't really worked well for the straight community, and for us to try and fit into that mold... But I get the need to have recognition of your relationship for insurance and taxes and hospital visitation and important life decisions. There needs to be that legal recognition. But honestly, I think same-sex marriage caught 95% of the queer community by surprise. It really wasn't on any of our radars. Any activist that I 151 knew did not have same-sex marriage on the top 10 of their list of what we were going for. Military, sure, and domestic partnership rights, some marriage-like rights, but marriage itself—it blindsided me personally. I was like, "What?" I'd never really thought about it, and so all of a sudden, here I am having to think about all this stuff and how we can do it. I had married Robert, and that had been such a disaster, and I didn't like the dynamics that it had put in our relationship. It was all very problematic and remains so. It was in December 2015, right, that this happened? I'm a minister through the Universal Church of Life or whatever it is, so I went down to the City-County building to offer my services to officiate. But there were already like 800 officiants there, and I just basked in all the love and joy and festive love bombs that were happening. The 9000 people in lines wound all the way around the building multiple times and up and down staircases, and every five minutes as each marriage got certified, the cheers that would go up… It was such an exciting and lovely and beautiful, magical time to be there in that building with all these beautiful queer folks finally getting married. It helped soften my understanding of what marriage could be and how to do it. JM: Just for reference, Obergefell was decided on June 26 of 2015. CO: But something happened in December where marriages could start happening. We're right around the anniversary of it. A Utah judge said something that made... Wasn't he a gay judge? Marcus something. It was when marriages were finally legal to have them. There was a brief window of about two weeks where you could get married, and then after that, they weren't sure about how things were going to continue. LR: Oh, yeah. In Utah, it became legal October 6, 2014. But the state began issuing marriage licenses on December 20, 2013, so two years before. 152 CO: Okay, that's when I was at the City-County building was 2013. I was thinking 2015. LR: That's the difference right there. Then until the Supreme Court ruling, it was on hold again. CO: That's what it was, okay. You know, ever since the back surgery where I nearly died, I have lost some of my memory and things are all mushy. LR: It's all good. Okay, that makes more sense. Well, thank you for sharing that. I'm just grateful that you shared your perspective on that. So it was during COVID that you moved to where you are right now? CO: Yes, yes. I've been here a little over a year now. LR: All right. So we've covered a lot over the last seven interviews. Is there any other story or memory that you want to share before we start asking our final questions? CO: I do want to review my big projects that I'm working on right now that I'm hoping to complete before I die. For about three years now, I've been working on a film documentary called "Ruth and Sarah." It's about a young lesbian LDS couple in 1926. They're both, I think, 23 years old, and their family was going to split them apart, make one move to Washington and the other to Los Angeles. Rather than do that, they committed suicide on Beck Street in 1926. It was a huge news story for weeks. So I did a ton of research on these two women and found love letters and their diaries and got interviews with neighbors and landlords and employers and their friends and got a ton of photos of the two women. My favorite is a photograph of Ruth and Sarah on Ruth's brand new motorcycle, and the license plate says U263. Ruth had the third license plate for a motorcycle in the state of Utah, and this was in 1926. They almost look like World War I soldiers, because they've got the joppers and the big poofy pants that puff out by the hips and military kind of coats on, and the two of them are sitting astride Ruth's motorcycle. I freaking love that photograph. It's amazing. 153 I'm working on that with Erik Hutchins, who's out of Park City. He's a straight guy who's a huge ally for the community. He does all the video work for Equality Utah and the Pride Center. Erik is E-R-I-K H-U-T-C-H-I-N-S. We're about two-thirds of the way through getting the documentary ready. We hope to debut it at a Sundance Film Festival soon. I'm working on a biography of Don Sullivitch, who was a queer man originally born in Serbia, migrated to Los Angeles, where he became the butler for Charlie Chaplin, the famous Hollywood movie director and star. Don was an out gay man and a drag queen. He had a kind of boyfriend, maybe, named Sheldon Clark, who was from Manti, Utah. Don and Sheldon decided to come to Utah in 1928, and they got as far as Gunnison, just shy of Manti. Sheldon ended up murdering Don on the side of the road in January 1928. So I'm working on that whole story, which is really long, and it could be book-length. I'm going to see if I can whittle it down to be just an article, but it might end up being a book. I'm under contract now, just recently with Signature Books, to publish a history of drag in Utah—150 years of drag, from 1871 to 2021. I'm really excited about that. We just had a lunch date yesterday: a local drag queen named Gia Bianca Stephens, and Barbara Jones Brown, who's the director of Signature Books, and then Alice Birch, who's on Signature's board. We had lunch and talked about how we want to proceed with this and what we're doing, and I'm really excited about that. Then the last big-ticket item is a book-length queer history of Utah, starting with Native American two-spirit folks and the 1826 rendezvous that happened near the Utah-Wyoming border, where a gay man from Scotland brought all these drag costumes and dressed all of the Native Americans and the white fur trappers up in drag. It was almost a drag show/ren-faire, but in 1826 Utah territory. The story of 154 that whole rendezvous is just a hoot. Then moving forward up to the present. Those are a few of my many projects that I'm working on. Those are some of the bigger ones. LR: You're staying busy. CO: Yes. Never a dull moment here at Casa O'Donovan. LR: Okay, so moving on to the final questions I wanted to ask, I'm going to start with: how do you think it's different today for the LGBTQ community, the youth growing up, as it was for you when you were growing up? CO: It's so radically different, and generally speaking, completely superior now. The sense of utter isolation I felt as a kid... I was talking with Alice, who's on the Signature Board. I had lunch with her yesterday. Alice is African-American, and I was telling her that one of the main differences between being gay and being of color is that if you're at school and you're bullied and you're beat up and harassed and then your teacher joins in, too, sometimes, and then you go home, and it's, “Connell, why do you have a bloody lip and a black eye?” “Oh, Timmy beat me up,” and then you get beat by your father because you're such a sissy. So there was no safe space for me anywhere, other than Grandma's lap. My Grandma Beazer was my refuge and my safe spot. Whereas a Black kid goes to school, gets bullied for being Black, gets beat up, comes home. Mom and Dad are there, embrace them, hold them, help give them skills to deal with that and to prepare for maybe another time that that might happen. We didn't have that. That sense of isolation is just overwhelming when you're a kid, and that hopefully isn't happening. There's so much online, there's so much on the television. There's rainbow flags everywhere and safe space posters up in schools. Not all of them, but it's happening. There are places where you can be safe and be 155 11 years old and have these feelings and have these thoughts and have these questions and someone there to maybe help guide you. There's literature. There's just so much. I've spent a huge part of my life working to make sure that we have a better experience as queer kids growing up. LR: Along with that, what challenges do you think are faced today by the LGBTQ+ community that perhaps you didn't have to deal with, that's a little bit different than what you went through? CO: Well, there certainly is a lot more violent rhetoric going around from adults especially, and that's horrible. I certainly wouldn't want to be a trans kid in a conservative school here in Utah, with Utah's gun laws as loose and fancy-free as they are. I'm honestly really terrified about where we are as a nation with the gun violence that's happening, seeing it being directed at the queer community, as it is with communities of color and the Jewish community and at women. I wish I had an answer for that. How do we move past this? I have a suspicion it's going to get worse before it gets any better, before we start to wake up and go, “You know what? Maybe we need to do something about [this].” I'm totally a Second Amendment advocate. I'm totally good with guns. I actually own one. I haven't shot it in a while, but I do occasionally take it out and go target practice. But the fact that people are so willing right now to respond with murder: “Oh, things are bad at home, so I'm going to kill my wife and kids. Oh, someone looked at me wrong at work, so I'm going to mow down 30 of my fellow employees. Oh, I don't like queer people, so I'm going to go to the local queer bar and just slaughter everybody.” Rather than doing the hard work of healing, people are just spewing violence everywhere, and I'm really worried about queer youth on that level. 156 LR: Okay. How have you seen Northern Utah evolve in its relationship with the queer community throughout your lifetime? CO: It has radically changed as well. I remember in the ‘80s—we talked about Officer Dave, the police officer, you know? It took us forever to get the police to even hear us, and then they finally send us this puffy little straight policeman to our meetings, and he's like a deer in the headlights. Watching him slowly get, “Oh, yeah. The police have not treated you well.” Now there are so many openly queer police officers, I know, in Salt Lake City. I don't know about Ogden or elsewhere, but I know we have quite a few here in the valley. The city council, there's several queer folks on it. I can think of at least three and there might be four. You pretty much can't be elected as mayor unless you get the vote from the queer community. We've become a powerful political force since the ‘80s, and that's made a huge difference in everything. I watch, especially Troy Williams with Equality Utah, the inroads he's made with the leadership of the LDS Church. I'm really impressed with that. I have such a love-hate relationship with LDS leadership, and it's mostly hate. But I see they've made strides, and sometimes it's three steps forward and two steps back, but that's still a total of a one step gain. LR: Okay. Finally, if you had the opportunity to talk to your younger self, and at the same time talk with the young generation of today, what advice would you give them? CO: Oh, boy. The one for myself, geez. I would want to just give myself a huge hug and just hold me and say, "Hang on. I know things look horrible right now, but they're not just going to get better. Your life is going to explode and blossom. You're gonna find so much magic in life. I know you can't see it right now and you're completely 157 overwhelmed, but trust. Have hope. Keep hope in sight that you can live a full and vibrant and delightful life." For other queer youth, I'm reminded of something that Harry Hay often told me, or I heard him say: “Don't be merely queer. Be extraordinary.” I've really tried to live my life with that in mind. It's pretty easy to be queer because that just comes naturally. Pump that up. Nudge that forward into being extraordinary. Instead of just different, be extraordinary. Above all, love is the law. Learn about love. Learn to love. Always keep love at your center and move from that. Don't move out of fear. Don't move out of hatred. Move from a space of love and you'll always do the right thing. That's what has always happened with me. LR: Well, thank you. That's a tremendous way to end this interview with those last parting words. I appreciate your willingness to be open and share. You have such a unique and vibrant history, so I appreciate you sharing it with us. 158