Oral History Program Jane Marquardt Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 21 January 2025 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Jane Marquardt Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 21 January 2025 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: Marquardt, Jane, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 21 January 2025, 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 Jane Marquardt conducted on January 21, 2025 over Zoom with Lorrie Rands. Jane talks about growing up in Ogden, Utah, her time at the University of Utah, and beginning law career. She shares her coming out story in the early 90’s and navigating her career until she came out publicly. She also talks about her marriage and the different programs she has been involved with in the LGBTQ+ community. Also present is Raegan Baird. Note: Active listening, transitions in dialogue (such as “um,” “so” “you know,” etc.), and false starts in conversations are not included in transcription for ease of reading. All additions to transcript noted with brackets. LR: Today is January 21, 2025. We are in an oral history interview with Jane Marquardt. I’m here with Raegan Baird, the second for this interview. We are doing this interview for our Queering the Archives Project at the Stewart Library at Weber State University in Special Collections and University Archives. That was a mouthful. My name is Lorrie Rands conducting. JM: Good morning. LR: I just wanted to say thank Jane for your willingness to share your story with this project. Just as kind of a fun little tidbit, the Queering the Archives project was recently recognized by the Utah Historical Society. JM: Good, congratulations. LR: Yeah, it made me really happy to hear that. So anyway, with all of that said, let’s just start with when and where you were born? 1 JM: I was born in June 1952, in Dayton, Ohio. Then my family moved to Utah when I was almost eight in 1960. It was around the time of spring in the second grade. LR: Do you remember a lot from Dayton? JM: Probably I remember a lot because I’ve always gone back frequently. I have many cousins there. My father had four older siblings, and they all have lots of kids. We used to visit in the summers, so I’m not sure if my memories are from before I left or just from all the visits, but I do have a lot of memories of family in Ohio. LR: Okay. Do you recall at all going to elementary school in Dayton? JM: I do. I can’t say I have a lot of memories from kindergarten, first, and second grade. My only memory is that when we moved to Utah, I was farther ahead than the second-grade class here, and the teacher was not happy with me. I was writing cursive and doing more advanced math, and she didn’t know what to do with me. LR: That’s interesting. When you came to Utah, where did you move to? JM: Right next to Weber State, where I lived until I graduated from high school. So, right across from what is now the LDS Seminary building. We lived on the corner of 36th, no, 37th and Tyler. My childhood friends were in what is now that parking lot. LR: I am just realizing that I forgot to do—It’s been a minute since we’ve done interviews for Queering the Archives. One thing that we have always done initially—I’m going to apologize quick fast for doing this, ‘cause I didn’t do it 2 initially, and I’m going to leave this entirely up to you, but to kind of help everyone feel comfortable we would share how we identify. JM: Oh sure, and my pronouns? LR: Yep. I apologize that I forgot about that. I will start. My pronouns are she/her and I identify as lesbian. JM: All right. My answer is the same, she/her, and I identify as a lesbian. I’m also of a generation that barely understands other pronouns. I have tried to learn them as other people have, but even when people use the word cisgender, I sometimes have to Google it. I try not to be too stupid about it, but it just wasn’t part of the lexicon as I came out. LR: Right, I can totally appreciate that. JM: I had my education in pronouns when we established the Peace and Possibility Lecture series at Weber State a few years ago. I came up and, after the lecture, met with a group of LGBTQ students. We went around and introduced ourselves, sharing our genders and preferred pronouns. I said, “Look at how uneducated I am.” So, I’ve tried to bring myself into the modern century, but I did not grow up with that. LR: Right, and I’ll actually ask a question about that, but Raegan would you like to go? RB: I use she/her and I’m straight. LR: Thank you for that, I appreciate it. Actually, that leads into one of my questions of what were you taught about gender roles growing up? 3 JM: You know, I don’t remember specific conversations of girls had to be one way, boys had to be another way. There were certainly no conversations about anybody that didn’t neatly fit into a category of girls or boys. So, I would say that my education was simply by the example of anybody I knew. I didn’t have examples of girls going into the workforce much. My examples of the women I knew, if they worked at all, they were teachers or nurses. But beyond that, I didn’t have examples of professional women, and boys grew up to become the breadwinners. That wasn’t anything my parents said, “You have to do this way,” it was just the examples in my world. LR: What was your family dynamic? JM: Raised by my two natural living parents and my little brother. So, there were four of us in our house until I graduated from high school. LR: Okay, and kind of another follow up question of what were you taught about sexuality growing up? JM: Was I taught anything? You know, I think at some point the girls had to go to menstruation class towards the end of grade school. I suppose we talked about something, and then in the seventh or eighth grade Mount Ogden Junior High was pioneering a new health class where we had this very hip young teacher who taught us all sorts of words and things about sexuality. But that’s the first time I ever remember hearing it from any sort of professional. So, not a lot, other than those couple of classes. LR: I’m curious, and I don’t know if you know the answer to this, but were there any parents upset at the class? 4 JM: Yeah, I think I do recall it was controversial. You know, as a school kid, I can’t say I followed the controversy, but yes, I’m sure. In fact, the class probably wouldn’t even be allowed in today’s curriculum by some of the parents who are vocal of not wanting schools to discuss sexuality. We were, as I say, seventh or eighth grade and talking about all the specifics of sex and difference between girls and boys and how they physically matured. So, I think it was a groundbreaking class at the time, and I don’t know how long it lasted. LR: Really fascinating, something to research. What was your first exposure to queerness as you were growing up, or did you have any? JM: No, I definitely remember it. I was a freshman in college at the University of Utah. I attended a panel featuring gay and lesbian speakers in our dorm. I didn’t really seek it out; I just happened to be hanging around the dorm living room that night, and there was this panel of speakers. I thought it was interesting, and I listened not with any degree of recognition of like, “Oh, this is me.” I didn’t at all think that was me at that point. I thought it was kind of strange that girls were holding girls’ hands and boys were holding boys’ hands. I didn’t dislike them, I just thought, “Wow, that’s really different.” That was my first exposure, and it was a few years later before it even sunk in that perhaps I was a lesbian. So, it was not like any sort of immediate recognition, but it was just a reaction of “Wow, I’ve never seen anything like this before.” LR: Right. Up until that point, had you ever felt any sort of difference, or did you just—? 5 JM: No, I just figured I was just like everyone else. I dated boys. I wasn’t particularly interested in them, but it was a way to attend the parties. I’ve always been fairly social, so I had various boyfriends. I figured that how I felt about them was how everyone felt about their boyfriends. It wasn’t until I really fell in love with a woman, which was years later, that I went, “Oh, that’s what I was missing.” So, I didn’t know at that point. LR: Right. So, you went to Mount Ford Junior High, where did you go to— JM: Mount Ogden. LR: Mount Ogden, I’m sorry. JM: They’re both in Ogden, so you’re right. But it’s that building that’s on Harrison Boulevard around 32nd Street. It’s still there, Mount Ogden. LR: Yeah. For some reason I always thought that was Mount Ford Junior High, but I could be entirely wrong. Where did you go to high school? JM: Ogden High. LR: What are some of the activities that you would do in high school? JM: I was very involved in the ski team. I was a ski racer growing up from the time I was about 10 years old or 11 until, well, right into college. I was on Snowbasin’s ski team, which had nothing to do with Ogden High, but it was an activity in which I was very active. You know, I was also active in riding horses. I did, they used to call it Junior Posse, from the time I was little through high school, where you would ride horses in barrel racing, and pole bending kinds of contests. So, skiing, horses, and then did you ask me what I was doing in high school or what other activities? 6 LR: Yes. JM: I was one of the associate editors of the Ogden High school newspaper, so I had fun doing that. I’ve always liked to write, so I helped produce the school newspaper, and I was in the pep club. Probably other organizations also. I’ve always been fairly active in joining things. Those are the ones that I think I spent the most time with. LR: Okay. I’m curious how you got involved with the Junior Posse? JM: When my family moved to Utah, none of us wanted to come here. My dad got transferred, so he promised us things. He promised my mom a piano, me a horse, and my brother was too young to care. He was only two, so I don’t think he had to be promised anything. But when we got here, my dad got me a horse to fulfill—well, he got himself a horse, too. We got horses right around the summer of 1960, so I grew up taking care of horses and being around horses. It was really a fun pastime. LR: Where would you house the horse? JM: Initially, at the top of 29th Street in Ogden, there was a place called Malan Stables, and then we later moved them to a pasture called Glassmans’ Farm. I don’t know if part of it’s still there, but it was located on 42nd Street, just below Harrison. LR: Would you go there every day and take care of your horse? JM: Not daily, but yes, often. I was there a lot. 7 LR: I know it was something your father promised you and gave you, but what about being active with the horse and in the Junior Posse was fulfilling for you? I’m just curious. JM: I guess I was good at it. You know, as kids, you always like to do something you’re good at. It was fairly easy to learn how to take care of the horse and ride the horse. I had a fast horse, so I did well in Junior Posse events, and success repeats. It grows on itself. So, I didn’t have any trouble learning to ride and just enjoyed being around the horses. I also had several other friends, kids my age who had horses and I bonded with them. It was just fun to be around them. LR: How long were you involved with the Junior Posse? JM: I think you had to quit at age 16. At 16, you aged out. After that, I still had horses until I went to college. After that, one horse died and the other one, I think we sold him because I didn’t have time to take care of him anymore. LR: Okay. That’s kind of sad. JM: Well, they don’t live forever. Just like your dogs and cats, you get attached and you tend to outlive them. LR: That is true. When you were finishing up high school, were you encouraged to go into higher education? JM: Yes. Most everybody in my family went to college, so it was never a question of, “Do we go to college” or “Do girls go to college?” It’s like, “Of course you go to college.” My parents weren’t really spending a lot of time saying, what was I going to do after college? I think there was an assumption that you’ll probably do something in education for a while and get married and have kids, just like all of 8 the other women in the family, and be active in a lot of community activities, civic volunteering. But there wasn’t any expectation of having a career. LR: Did you know where you wanted to go to college? I mean, with Weber State right on your doorstep… JM: Yes, I didn’t want to go that close to home. I pretty much limited it to schools with a ski team. I think I applied to a Colorado school that I didn’t get into, and so I said, “Well okay, University of Utah’s great.” My parents, especially my mother, were interested in my attending the school they had attended, which was Denison University in Granville, Ohio. I have lots of family members who went there, so my mom took me for a tour of it, but I didn’t show any interest. I was like, “Do they have a ski team here? No? Then I’m not coming.” It was pretty much the University of Utah. They had a women’s ski team, to the extent that there were any sort of organized women’s athletics at the time. I started college in 1970, so that was before Title IX. They didn’t have a lot to offer for women in athletics, but they at least had something. LR: Were you able to get on the ski team when you started going? JM: Yes. I was on the University of Utah ski team probably in ‘70-‘71 and ‘71-‘72. It was a great experience. It was odd compared to what the University of Utah ski team is today, which is known nationwide and they have fantastic resources. At the time, what the girls got was sweaters, and then we had to pay our own way to everything, and we got a coach, but he didn’t travel with us. He trained us on our home slopes, but then we were off on our own to go to races around the Intermountain West. 9 LR: Is there a reason he didn’t travel with you? JM: Probably because the school wouldn’t pay for it. LR: Okay. You had to pay for your own travel? JM: We had to pay our own travel, yeah. LR: Wow. But the men’s team didn’t have to do that, right? JM: I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure they were way more organized and got way more attention. But, you know, looking back, it wasn’t all bad to be 18 and off on your own to races in other states with the bunch of other good skiers and no adult supervision. My mom had a big station wagon she let us use, and so we got ourselves there and got to the races and did fine. LR: That actually sounds kind of fun. JM: Yeah, it was. There were no coaches to say you can’t drink beer the night before a race. LR: That’s true. What was your goal academically? What was your major? JM: Starting out, it was elementary education, because that was the example I had. There were several teachers in my family, and I thought, “Well, I’ll be a teacher.” I took one year of elementary ed, and then the summer after my first year of college, I had a teaching internship. I had a job at a—back then it was called the Indian school, now you would call it a Native American school—in Roswell, New Mexico, where members of various tribes came to live and study. There was vocational education for the parents and they were able to get their high school diploma if they didn’t have it, and then there was a school for the children. I was a teacher’s aide in the school, and it was an interesting summer. But that coupled 10 with the fact that I had taken a class called Art in the Elementary School, which I hated, made me start thinking, “I need a different major. I’m not doing this.” I rotated through a few different majors before I ended up going to law school. It was a great example that college is all about the chance to discover who you want to be. You don’t have to know going in. You're exposed to a wide range of professors, students, and ways of thinking, which was beneficial for me. I think I cycled through, after I left elementary education, I changed to philosophy as a major, and then a couple semesters later I went to psychology, and then I ended up graduating in political science. It wasn’t until the beginning of my senior year that I started considering law school. I met a woman who was our advisor for an organization called Mortar Board, which, as I recall, was an organization for women with high grade points or something similar. I can’t remember. We participated in a couple of service projects, but our advisor was a woman named Shauna, who had attended law school for two years before dropping out to care for her family. I thought, “Well, how interesting. She went to law school. I’ll go to law school,” and I thought, “I don’t even need to graduate because, look, she didn’t, she has a great life here.” I just thought I would apply, and I took the LSAT without studying for it much, and I did really well on it. All of a sudden, law school was an option. I have no great story of having always wanted to be a lawyer. I just fell into it because I didn’t know what else I was going to do with my bachelor’s in political science. LR: Did you get any pushback from your family? 11 JM: No, they were happy to see me do that. My dad had actually done withdrawals from his paychecks from the time I was born. Back then, you would get U.S. savings bonds and they would mature after a period of years, and I was able to use those to pay for my law school tuition. I had the great advantage of going through law school and not going into debt, and I also went through college without going into debt. They were supportive. They didn’t say, “Don’t go have a career,” they were just like, “Well, you know, if that’s what you want to do.” But it wasn’t like a tremendous pressure of, “You have to go succeed as a lawyer.” It’s like, “Well, that’s interesting. She’s going to be a lawyer.” I think they were proud of me for doing it, but it wasn’t something that anyone ever said, “You need to go do that.” LR: Okay. So, how was law school for you? JM: I liked it a lot. Didn’t like the first year. Nobody likes the first year. It’s hard to figure out what you’re doing, and everybody there is used to being the top of their class and all of a sudden, we’re not all the top of our class anymore. I was just a middle-of-the-road student in that class, but I really enjoyed the people that I met, and I liked the challenge, and I did not have to have a job on top of it. So, I really got to throw myself into law school life. I actually had married a man right before law school started. Law school kept me from ever having to spend too much time with him, which, in hindsight, is like, “Oh yeah, ‘cause I probably never should have married him.” He was a nice guy, but it was just lacking that actually falling in love with him element, because I didn’t yet know I was gay. 12 Once I got through the first year of law school and figured out that I really could pass and got over the terror that they seemed to inflict on first year law students, I enjoyed it. I discovered that I had a talent for oral advocacy, and I was very active in the moot court program and advanced to the finals of a contest that we had in our second year of law school. I was good at writing the brief, and I was good at oral arguments, so I was finding success there, and I found a lot of friends there. It was a good experience, which I think, though, was a little unusual. A lot of people I have met over my lawyer life have not liked law school and were just glad to be out of it. I have to say I enjoyed it. But I still didn’t know anybody gay. I was still oblivious about that. LR: Okay. You were still not recognizing that anything was off because—? JM: No. In hindsight, of course, I married this guy. He was very gentle and didn’t put any demands on me. If I was busy with my law school friends and life most every waking hour, he didn’t complain. What we had in common was that he was an excellent skier also. So, we had skiing in common, but that was about it. [Fixing Zoom connection] [Interview resumes] LR: We were talking about law school and getting married. Let’s just kind of keep going on this. I’m curious also, because I know that during this time you’re— when did your father start his business? JM: 1981, 1980. I was already a young lawyer practicing in Ogden by then. LR: All right. I guess we can wait till we get to that point. So, when did you graduate from law school? 13 JM: 1977. My first job was with Utah Legal Services, and I was a lawyer for people that could not afford them. So, civil cases, and I actually got assigned to the Ogden office. LR: Had you started a family by that point? JM: Had I started a family? No, not at all. In 1977, I still didn’t know I was gay. It’s about to happen, but not yet. I was still married to Doug, the man, the nice skier guy, with whom I didn’t have much else in common. LR: I guess what I’m asking is, did you have any inclination to have children? JM: Never. I just think I was born to be a step-parent, you know, and I didn’t ever think that was odd. But growing up, my friends would talk about wanting to have kids. I was like, “Eh.” I didn’t actively think no, but I was just never drawn to thinking like, “Whoa, I can’t wait till that happens.” So, when I was married to the man, we didn’t talk about having kids, oddly. I don’t know what he thought about it. I was married to him for six years, you’d think we might have had that conversation, but if we did, I don’t remember it. We were both focused on skiing and backpacking and our careers. LR: As you look back, it was more of a marriage of friendship? JM: Yes. It was a marriage of skiers, that was about it. LR: Okay, you’re starting your career. How long are you with Utah Legal Services? JM: Two years. I actually worked for them under a program called the Reggie Fellowships, which Howard University gave. They used to provide 100 fellowships each year to recent law school graduates who had expressed an interest in working for legal services. We handled civil actions on behalf of people 14 below the poverty line, people who couldn’t afford lawyers. That very much appealed to me, and so I was lucky to get that fellowship. Kind of astonishing that they placed me in Ogden, the town I grew up in. Usually, they would send you to some other part of the country, but maybe nobody wanted to go to Ogden. I said, “I’ll go there. I like Ogden.” But yes, so they paid my salary to work at Legal Services the first two years, and while I was there, I met two gentlemen who actually were my seniors, who were my bosses, who we ended up going into private practice together later. But yeah, I began at Legal Services. I remember my starting salary was $13,000 a year, and I thought it was excellent. LR: Was that with the Legal Services, or was that moving—? JM: It was Legal Services, but I think Howard University paid for us through this fellowship program. LR: And then did you go into private practice with those two gentlemen? JM: Yes. One of them, Jim Hasenyager, and I went into private practice with another more established lawyer, who brought us into his practice two years later. Probably the end of 1979. A few years later, the two of us brought in Marty Custen, who had been both of our bosses at Legal Services, and we practiced for a long time together in Ogden. It was about that time I also was realizing that I was not straight. I finally got exposed to a broader group of people in the world, and I was like, “Oh, I’ve been missing something.” LR: So, that happened as you were working…? JM: At Legal Services. 15 LR: Okay, now I’m confused. You started meeting all of these different people at Legal Services, and you’re like something might not be right with the way you’re presenting? JM: Yeah. I don’t think it was the people I specifically met at Legal Services, but rather that period of my life when I was out of school and probably had more time to think about my personal desires and who I am in the world. Because up to then I’d been a very devoted student. I didn’t spend much time thinking about who I was, other than being a good student. LR: I’m trying to remember from the last time we spoke, but you and your family were not a part of the major religion in Utah, is that correct? JM: Correct. We moved to Utah in 1960, didn’t know anything about the Mormon Church. Certainly, I had friends growing up who were part of the LDS church, but I can’t say I ever paid a lot of attention to their beliefs. We were members of the First Presbyterian Church in Ogden. My mother was extremely active, I was soso active. I didn’t think a lot about what the LDS church thought ever. Like I was just sort of oblivious. Later on, as an adult, when I started reading a few books, I remembered Jon Krakauer’s book, Under the Banner of Heaven, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, they were believing all of this? All these people I grew up with? That’s just nuts.” But later in my life, as I’ve been an open lesbian and involved in the LGBTQ community, I have seen lots of people suffering from the rejection they felt through their Mormon families and their Mormon upbringing and not being accepted. I have seen the damage that it causes to people. I skated by it 16 because I never cared what that church thought anyway. So, it was like, “Well, you’re accepting, not accepting. What is that to me? Other than, I don’t like that you’re hurting my friends.” LR: Did you ever feel any of that within your own religion, or was it just…? JM: A little bit, but my identity wasn’t invested in what my religion thought of me anyway. But probably in the 1980s, the Presbyterian Church started having internal debates over accepting gay people as leaders in the church and gay ministers. My mom was an activist in bringing those speakers in and inviting me to participate in panels. I wasn’t really active in that church anymore, but my mom would draw me in to be involved. I was part of that discussion as they wrestled with those issues and finally came to fully accept gay ministers and lesbian leaders, etcetera. LR: Okay. That answered my question. As you’re in private practice now, what are you practicing? What type of law? JM: Well, in 1979, when we opened our private practice, it was Warner, Marquardt, and Hasenyager. Those are the three partners. I used to say my practice is “anyone with a retainer. That’s my specialty. If you can pay me to do something, I will figure out how to do it.” So, it was very much a general practice. I couldn’t afford to be choosy; I just needed clients. I ended up, interestingly, doing a lot of divorce and custody cases where men seeking custody would hire me, because they had this idea that having a female sit with them at the counsel table would somehow make an impression on the judge that they were all right. I thought, “Well, whatever. I don’t know that I’m 17 helping you any because I’m a female, but I’m helping you because I’m a good lawyer.” I just seemed to keep attracting men who were seeking custody of their children. We didn’t win very often. There was still definitely a gender stereotype of men couldn’t possibly provide the same care as women. However, I did a lot of that and a lot of family law when I started out, along with other miscellaneous tasks that came in. My main practice when I started it throughout the 80s was in family law. I also spent a long time being the guardian ad litem appointed by the state for abused children in the juvenile court. I ran a group of volunteers who would go out and actually meet the kids, interview the families, the teachers, find out what’s going on and give recommendations to me. Then I would make the appearances in juvenile court on behalf of the children. So, I did that for maybe five years at some point in the 80s. That wasn’t a full-time job, it was just in addition to my private practice. LR: Was that something that you were appointed to do or you volunteered to do? JM: Well, I got paid for it, but I forget how I got the job. I guess I applied for it. The State of Utah paid me to do that work. LR: Okay. When during this time in the 80s did the reality of who you were sink in? JM: It was really the end of the 70s. I fell head over heels in love with the first woman, I thought, “Oh, this is what everyone’s talking about.” That same experience that I think many people have, I didn’t have it till I was toward my late 20s. But finally, when it happened, I like, “Of course,” no wonder I was so interested in everything my sorority did. I loved to hang out with all those girls. Not in a sexual way, just I 18 enjoyed their friendship. Didn’t dawn on me. Then in later years, as I have run into some of those people and discovered that a few of them, not many, but a few were also lesbians, we just laugh, because like OMG, we were clueless. We were together in college. I was in college and very active in my sorority from ‘70 to ‘74. But we just didn’t know anything about gay people. Or if anyone knew anything about it, no one told me. LR: So, with that experience, were you able to then make that shift and begin to just live the way you wanted, or did you still feel like…? JM: Oh, no. It’s a long process. I mean, I don’t even think, when you first discover that, you know how you want to live. I knew I didn’t want to be married anymore, so I got divorced at the beginning or right in the middle of 1980. I think I started living with the first woman maybe in ‘81. It was not easy to. I mean, the process of coming out took at least a decade. I came out very, very slowly. By then, I was building up an outstanding, solid legal career and didn’t want to jeopardize myself and my community support by just announcing to the world that I was gay. So, it was a very tentative, long, slow path. What did you ask me there Lorrie? I think I lost the train of what you asked me. LR: I honestly don’t remember, because it’s not the question I have written down, but I like what you said. We’ll just leave it at that. I know you have to be, you know, need to be mindful of your career, but did you ever feel the need to come out publicly? JM: Not until the 90s, but if we’re still at the beginning of the 80s, not at all. Eventually it just got—I mean, I think that one of my highest values is integrity, so after a 19 decade of being very guarded about who knows who I really am, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I said, “I don’t care what effect this has, I’m going to be public about the fact that I’m gay.” That wasn’t until the early 90s. So, I had a decade of threading the needle on who do you tell, and how do you act? I mean, I was in court a lot back in those days, in the 80s, and I had friendships with lots of judges, and they were always trying to line me up with their, you know, nephew who is just back from a mission or this or that. Like, “You’re just such a nice girl Jane, I don’t understand why you’re not married.” I would think, “I can’t tell you that,” so it was walking a narrow path for many years. That is just damaging to your soul, to your psyche. It’s as if you’re constantly giving yourself this message that you can’t be who you are, that it’s not okay for you to be who you are. I suppose going through that has helped me develop empathy for young people, or for anyone of any age who is going through it today. I know what that feels like. It doesn’t feel good. LR: Wow. I get so caught up in listening, I forget to write down the questions when they come to me. Oh, thank goodness I remember. Were you able to be honest with your family during that time? JM: It was a slow process. Not at first. I very much value the opinion of my parents and my brother, and I didn’t want to risk support from any of the three of them. So, I came out to my mother first, because she was definitely the liberal in the family. I always joke about the first fight I ever remember watching my parents have was in 1960 during the Nixon-Kennedy debates, and they were on totally opposite sides of that. It went downhill from there, and they got divorced around 20 the early 1970s, when I started college. But my mom was very much a social liberal. The finest moment of her life is when she met Eleanor Roosevelt back in the, I don’t know, 40s or something. What’s the question? LR: Coming out to your family. JM: Oh, yes. Anyway, she was more prone to be accepting, I figured. So, I told her at some point toward the end of the 80s. She had a very interesting response. She wasn’t critical, but she said, "I’m just so sad. You’ll never experience what it's like to be in love." I responded, "You don’t get it. I am experiencing love, which’s why I’m sharing this with you, because I have now experienced it myself. It’s a whole different thing." So, she finally seemed to understand, but she was always supportive. That was my mom. My dad was a couple of years later, and I was very nervous about telling him, because he’s more old school, you know, who’s prone to say negative things about gay people. I’d heard him say things like that. However, he was also my biggest fan, always. So, I thought, “How do I navigate that?” Eventually I told my brother, and he was supportive. He didn’t care. He’s six years younger. Then, I had arranged to go to lunch sometime in the early 90s, maybe it was the late 80s, with my dad and my brother. I was going to tell my dad I was gay, and my brother was going to be there to support me. But by then, my dad had started MTC, and my brother was working there, and they were busy at work, so they couldn’t go to lunch that day. My dad called me and said, “I can’t go 21 to lunch, I’ve got to work, but your brother told me what you wanted to tell me and it's okay, I don’t care, but just don’t tell anybody else.” It's this very sort of weird message that I then navigated for a couple of years with him, where he was just sure I would lose my legal practice and my community standing if I told anybody. He probably thought, “Oh,” you know, he was perhaps embarrassed for himself if anyone knew he had a lesbian daughter. But he was never not personally supportive of me; it was just like, “Jane, you’re just ruining everything you’ve built if you let anybody know that.” So, you know, that’s my dad telling me that. It probably slowed me down a couple more years in being willing to go to any public conference and talk about being gay. LR: You were actually getting mixed messages from both of your parents in different ways? JM: Yes, and they were long divorced by then, so it was different households. Well, my mom wasn’t yelling, cheerleading for me to go out and march on the street, either. I mean, she was also protective, but I was very concerned about my father’s support. He eventually came around. In 2000, Tami and I had our first marriage. It wasn’t a legal marriage yet, but it was a ceremony that we had at the River Horse Restaurant in Park City. We had our Unitarian minister perform a commitment ceremony, and we had a couple of hundred of our family and friends. That was really a very fun wedding party, even though it didn’t bring any legal rights. My dad spoke during the ceremony and gave a toast. He was always known for writing these funny, hokey poems. So, he had written us a poem, and it 22 had some funny line in it about hoping that someday George Bush would come around and realize that it was okay to be gay. He hoped that George Bush would have a gay daughter himself. Dad worked that into a funny poem. Yeah, he was definitely supportive by then, but it took him several years. LR: When did you start working with your dad? JM: Well, not until I retired after 30 years of law practice did I ever work with Dad fulltime. I was on the board of MTC since the time the company started in 1981, because I was a young lawyer and I did a little initial legal work for them. He asked me to join the board along with three other men who had actually started the business with him. It was an excellent opportunity for me to serve on that board for all those years, but I didn’t work there full-time until 2007. LR: Okay. What other avenues of law did you practice during your career? JM: Until the end of the 80s, I had a general civil practice where I did a lot of family law. I was the part time—well, I was the prosecutor in the Justice of the Peace Court in Riverdale. That was a one-morning-a-week job. I prosecuted misdemeanors in Riverdale, cases that weren’t serious enough to be handled by the district attorney’s office. That was interesting. I did the guardian ad litem program and some basic business law things. At the end of the 80s, I was sick of doing family law. I didn’t want to be involved in another custody dispute, so I went back to school for a year and earned my master’s degree in tax law. I went to the University of San Diego in '89-’90, then refocused my law practice to doing business planning and wills and trusts in estate planning and charitable planning. I did that until 2007. 23 LR: Okay. You ended up doing the tax law for the majority of your career, then? JM: Maybe half. LR: Half? Okay, I'm getting my timeline— JM: A little more than half, ‘77 to ‘90 was the more general practice, and then ‘91 to 2007 was the more specific tax-focused practice. LR: Which one did you enjoy more? JM: I always enjoy interacting with people, so I liked all of it. I also found out something about myself: if I really figure out how to do something well, I get bored with it. So, I always like new challenges. It was good for me to be able to change and pivot and do different things. Yeah, I don’t know if I have a favorite. By the end of my tax law practice, I was tired of reading tax regulations and writing those kind of tax heavy documents. I would find that I would love it if you came into my office as a client and we’d sit down and talk about your assets and your goals and your family and what are the needs of your relatives. I love planning that. But then you’d leave me with a stack of your business documents and your tax returns, and I was like, “Ugh, no, I have to drink five cups of coffee to get through this.” I figured it was time to retire. I’d practiced 30 years. Today I am still an active member of the state bar, but I retired from my practice in 2007. My law partner, Doug Fidel at the time, who was my partner in the estate planning practice, took it over and is still running it today. But then after retiring for a couple of months, I realized, “Wait a minute, why am I retired? I’m 55 and I can’t 24 really afford to retire anyway.” My dad and brother offered me the opportunity to go back to work and I started full time at MTC later in 2007. LR: I don’t know if this happened before you went into tax law or after, but you said you came out publicly in the early 90s. How did that affect your law practice, your career? JM: You know, barely at all. I know of a couple of clients who stopped coming, but other clients were drawn to an honest lawyer, like, “Oh, look at that, a lawyer who is authentic.” I don’t think it hurt me, but I was very worried that it would. I experienced some public adventures as a result of being publicly gay in the 90s in Ogden, Utah. The most memorable one was in the mid-90s, when a law journal called Voir Dire, published by the litigation section of the state bar, received a letter complaining about me. They had done a very positive full-page feature on me. By then, I’d been practicing for about 17, 18 years, and I was active in a lot of different kinds of bar committees. They just did a feature on Jane Marquardt, and they got a response that said, “How dare you feature this person who’s an open lesbian.” The article barely referred to it; there was just one line about, “She and her partner like to travel.” That was all it said. But it’s like, uh oh, cat’s out of the bag there. The editors of that magazine called me and said, “You know, we got this letter and we hate to do this, but we feel like we have to publish it.” I said, “Well, I kind of hate that you have to publish it too, but I'm not that upset. I mean, I am gay, so go ahead.” But then the response to that was just all 25 this amazing support. I had people that I barely knew coming out and starting a petition about how we support Jane Marquardt, and I thought, “I didn't even know that all these people knew me.” Then they published their response in the State Bar Journal, which had a much bigger readership than where the first article had been published. That story got picked up by the AP, and so it was on wires around the country and I was getting all this feedback. This, of course, was before social media. However, I received a lot of positive feedback. So, then I was really out. Whatever little path I’d been threading from the beginning of the 80s to the mid-90s was now over, and if anyone didn’t know that I was a lesbian, that’s because they were not paying attention. LR: How did that affect your overall just well-being? JM: I think it helped it. It was a powerful feeling of, “Oh, good, I can just be me.” I no longer have to hide things. I got a lot of positive feedback from other gay and lesbian lawyers who felt that my experience gave them permission to be out. They just watched me go through the public fire here, and I came out fine. I think it allowed me to be an unintentional, unplanned, but very good role model. Like, you know what? You can survive this. LR: When did you meet your wife? JM: 1998, I think. I’d had a 15-year relationship with a woman that ended in the spring of ‘98, and that August I had gone to the Unitarian Church in Ogden. I really had been incredibly depressed. I was 20 pounds lighter than I am right now. I was just sort of not a happy camper. But I hadn’t even been going places other than to 26 work because I was so sad about that breakup. I met Tami that morning as she had come to church. She didn’t usually attend that church, but she had come to hear her friend Gary Dohr speak. He was a Weber State professor with whom she was friends. I had actually met Tami once before, as I had prepared a will for her a couple of years prior, but I didn’t know her socially. Just like, “Oh yeah, Tami. Hi.” Anyway, we ended up going out to dinner a couple of weeks later, and the relationship started. LR: The relationship that ended that spring, was that kind of one of your first longterm relationships that you've had? JM: Yeah. I was married to Doug, the man, for six years, but I don't know if you count that. I was with her for 15 years and helped her raise three children. The difficulty that I navigated in the 80s was a lot, having to be like this secret co-parent. She had an ex-husband who was just very negative about her being a lesbian. She had a shared custody agreement with him that definitely did not involve any of my being around. I was essentially in the background, yet I developed very close relationships and helped raise those kids, including putting them through college. You know, I was definitely part of it, but it was just difficult to always be in the background. For example, I would attend their high school graduations. They went to Weber High in Ogden, and people I knew would come up to me and say, “Oh, hi Jane, why are you here?” I would say, “Well, you know, my friend's son is graduating today.” I thought, “Yeah, this is the kid I just helped raise for over 10 years.” It is not a good place to be. It certainly gave me empathy with other people who have to 27 hide relationships and are still trying to have a normal family life and you can’t tell anybody about it. It’s just—it’s not a pleasant place to be. LR: Yeah. When you came out publicly, how did that affect your relationship? JM: It was difficult. She was not a fan of that. She was not ready to be public, so that was hard. But not being out also affected our relationship because, you know, living with somebody for that long where you're both going to your jobs and pretending to be somebody else is just crazy making. LR: You meet Tami in spring of ‘98, and get…? JM: Yeah. August of ‘98 is when I met her. LR: Sorry, August. I knew that. JM: Yeah. I didn’t move in the next day, didn’t have the lesbian U-Haul, but I did move into her place by May of ‘99. So, you know, it was less than a year before I moved in with her. LR: And then a year later, you're getting married? JM: Yes. We got married the first time in July of 2000. LR: Okay. You got married the second time, when? JM: You mean the second time to Tami? LR: Yeah. JM: So many weddings to Tami. That's a whole other interview, Lorrie. I think I told you maybe in our last interview about the Huffington Post article I wrote, “Why I've Been Married Eight Times.” There was marriage one to Doug the man. Then I had sort of a private commitment ceremony in the mountains with the second woman that I was with for 15 years. Just us, but, you know, we had rings and 28 considered ourselves committed to one another. By the time I met Tami, marriage was becoming a possibility on the national scene. I was active in lots of organizations that were supporting that. We actually went through six different ceremonies before obtaining our final Utah legal license in 2013. So, there you have eight. LR: Yeah. I was actually assuming that the second one would have been the legal marriage. JM: I know. The first one was actually July 2020. Vermont had just legalized civil unions. We thought, “Wow, there's a state in United States that gives you something,” so we went there and got a civil union. But did that give us any rights in Utah? No. In August of 2000, we had our big religious friend and family celebration at the River Horse in Park City. We had actually asked the Catholic priest in Park City, who was known to be quite liberal, if we could hold the ceremony in their church, and they said no. He was apologetic and said, “No, we’re not allowed to sanction this kind of ceremony. You can’t even rent the church for that.” So, we had it in the restaurant. Then, I remember in the Winter of Love in San Francisco, when Gavin Newsom allowed San Francisco to issue marriage licenses, we flew to San Francisco in February of 2004 and got married. That was a whole story unto itself of standing in line all day and getting in finally, just before they were closing the clerk’s office. About a month later, the California court set aside all those marriages. 29 Our fourth marriage was in Vancouver, Canada that next year, just because we happened to be up there for a straight friend’s wedding and we thought, “Hey, you know what? You can get married in Canada.” So, we ran down to the clerk’s office the day before the wedding. We went there and got a license, but that wasn’t recognized in United States. We still didn’t have any Utah license. Our next one, when the state of New York allowed marriages between people of the same gender, we went there and got a legitimate United States marriage license and we were married at the city clerk’s office. We thought we were done, but in December 2013, when Judge Shelby struck down the ban on marriage in Utah, we thought, “We don’t need to get married again because we have a valid United States state marriage license.” But there was an article in the paper where the attorney general was saying, “Well, we’ll recognize these Utah marriages for now, but we’re not recognizing them from other states.” We went, “Ugh, that’s wrong, but we’ll just go get a Utah license.” So, we were married in Farmington by the clerk in December of 2013. That’s the last one. LR: Well, that’s impressive. JM: Well, both of us had been active in the marriage movement, and I had an official role in the campaign against Amendment 3 in 2004 when Utah changed our Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. I was the chair of the Oversight Committee, so we were very involved in that campaign. As a lawyer, I knew the 30 benefits of being married, so we’ve always been proponents of the ability to choose to be married. LR: You kind of answered the question that I’m going to ask, but I’m going to ask it anyway. JM: Okay. LR: Was it just the activism and wanting to be involved that led you to do those actions and seek out these different marriages, or was there another component to it? JM: Very much an emotional, psychological component. As Tami would describe it if you asked her, she said, “We’re married and we mean it, we mean it, we mean it, and we’re going to just keep doing it until you believe us and we actually have the legal rights.” But apart from all of the thousand legal rights that come with being married and financial benefits, there’s just a psychological component. When you can tell your friends and family, this is my wife, this is my spouse, people get that. People don’t get it when you say this is my friend, or this is my partner. Especially if you’re a lawyer, they think, “Yeah, your partner. What’s that mean?” It definitely has a huge impact on the people in your immediate circle when they accept you, and then that trickles into your own soul. You start realizing, “Hey, we really are committed to each other,” and so it was a big thing for us personally. Then, you know, Social Security benefits come with it and health insurance benefits, and not having a tax on what you leave your spouse if you die, the ability to be recognized if you’re in the hospital, and letting your spouse make decisions. All sorts of legal benefits come through it. But the 31 most important to us was just the emotional benefit of declaring that we are just as committed as any other married couple, and we expect to be treated that way. LR: What were some other avenues that you were active in within the LGBTQ+ community? JM: I was on a national board called the Rainbow Endowment Board. When was that? Let’s see, end of the 90s, early 2000s. At the time there was something called the Rainbow Visa Card that you could get. Martina Navratilova had started the idea, and so money earned on that card was given to our foundation, or the foundation that the Visa card set up. We met in Philadelphia about three times a year to give out the money to national organizations. That was a fun exposure of what was going on around the country. Doug Fidel and I also gave a lot of presentations on LGBT estate planning. So, before marriage, what can gay couples do to protect their rights? We had designed a lot of forms and powers of attorney, as well as other documents that people could use before marriage was an option. Doug and I wrote numerous papers and traveled some around the country, presenting seminars on those issues. Tami served on the board of the Utah Pride Center for a while and eventually became the interim executive director for one summer. I don’t know, there’s hardly a gay organization around here that we haven’t been involved in one way or another. Tami was on the National Board of Governors of the Human Rights Campaign for a while, and I was one of the early founders of Equality Utah and was on their board for a long time, including serving as chair. 32 LR: What is Equality Utah? JM: It’s the state’s LGBTQ political action committee. It was started in 2000 as Unity Utah, and it was simply a political action committee. In those early days, the only people that even wanted to meet with us were people running for Salt Lake City Council. This is the most liberal place in Utah, here in Salt Lake. We were like, “Oh my, they’ll meet with gay people and talk to us? Here’s some money. Here’s $100.” We didn’t have much money to give, but we were thrilled. So, that was our start. It’s become quite an organization now. I was the lawyer in 2004 who helped us transition from Unity Utah to Equality Utah, establishing a C3, a C4, and a PAC component. I set that up and helped organize it. They’re still going strong today. LR: That’s really cool. As you have navigated your time over the last few years, how do you think being out in Northern Utah has changed from when you first came out in the early 90s to today? JM: How was it changed for our community? LR: Yes. JM: I mean, there’s just lots more opportunity for young people to know a gay person. Makes a huge difference if you have a personal interaction with somebody who’s gay and you can say, “You know, they’re not bad people like they’ve been telling me in church,” or wherever they’ve been telling you. It’s like, “This person has the same problems I do. Their dog gets sick and their ice forms in their gutters and all the same stuff I’m concerned about. They’re just trying to live life.” I think there’s a giant difference now. 33 There’s also a big backlash. I mean, the country’s just inaugurated a new president who is issuing executive orders, saying that only two genders exist, and let’s cut out lots of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. We’re going through a backlash right now. But I think that there’s more strength in the community for gay people to weather this storm because there are just so many LGBTQ people out there. I remember when the Ellen Show happened where she announced that she was gay, you know, supposedly accidentally into a microphone. But that was huge, we all watched it. It was in the days of VCRs, when you’d say, “Oh did you record that? Can I come over and watch it again?” Because there was this person who was a cultural phenomenon who said that she was gay. I was like, “Look at that.” I don’t know when that was, probably back in maybe the mid-90s, but that made a difference. Will and Grace made a difference. Now if you went to a movie and saw gay characters, would it even be an issue? It’s not. It’s easy to find gay role models in pop culture. LR: I’m curious, what do you think the challenges are for the LGBTQ+ community today in Northern Utah? JM: There are a lot of cultural challenges. I think that we need to realize that we have to be politically active. We can’t just say, “I hate the dominant politicians in this state right now and they don’t understand me, so I’m just not going to be involved in politics.” I think too many young people are making that decision, so I think we have a challenge. My generation, people in their 70s, must still be active and say, “You know what? You don’t have the option of just saying, I don’t like it, so I’m 34 not going to be involved.” I think the challenge is keeping people from getting demoralized by the very conservative national tone and things that are happening in the Utah legislature, and say, “You know what, in the long run, we’re right. We have every bit as much right to exist and be ourselves as anyone else. We contribute to society just as much as anyone else.” We have to encourage one another to stand up and make sure that we’re heard. But I think it’s a difficult time right now. I don’t have all the answers, other than to say we have to keep being visible and keep being involved. LR: Do you think or feel that there are places in Utah that are not safe for members of the community? JM: Probably. I’m sure I live my isolated life because I’ve been this way a long time, and I have friends and family who accept me. In my day-to-day life, I’m not even aware of any discrimination. But I think lots of families are still kicking gay kids out. Not all schoolteachers are supportive, and even if they are supportive, we have a Utah legislature that doesn’t want them to be openly supportive. I think there are lots of unsafe places. We need to continue to invest in our universities to have centers where people can gather, even if they can’t call themselves the gay center anymore. We need to have gay people who are open on campus so the kids can see, look, there’s someone like me. We need that all through all of the communities, and probably more so when you get out of Salt Lake City. I live in the avenues in Salt Lake City, so I’m in sort of the bluest of the blue zones of this state. But the farther out you get, the neighborhoods are less supportive. So, we have to keep reaching out and supporting people. 35 LR: Is there any other story or memory you’d like to share before I finish and ask the final question? JM: I don’t think so. Nothing occurs to me right now, Lorrie. But it’s just a life journey to continue to be out, and it wouldn’t just pertain to people who are gay. It pertains to whoever you are. It’s like, “You know what? You deserve a life that will support your interests and talents, whatever they are.” Many people lack this, either because of limited economic opportunities or because their parents or culture dictate that they should be something other than who they are. So, lots of work still to do. But I think every gay person who stands up as their authentic selves makes a difference, not just for other gay people, but for the world. They’re like “Oh look, that’s a happy, successful person who’s being true to themselves.” That’s a pretty good role model. LR: The final question is—it’s interesting because you’ve kind of already answered it a little bit. But if you had an opportunity to talk to your younger self, or talk to the younger generation today, what would you tell them? JM: For me, my younger self, I’d say, “Don’t marry Doug the man.” That was not fair to him. He didn’t deserve to be married to somebody who was going through this traumatic coming-out journey that didn’t involve him. I would have skipped that relationship in my life. It’s no criticism of him; it wasn’t his fault. Along with that, I would say, dare to be yourself sooner than you did. You didn’t. I took 10-plus years to come out once I realized I was gay, and that was long and torturous. To other young people today, I would just encourage them to seek out role models. There are lots of people out there who can understand 36 your situation, whether your situation is you don’t have supportive parents, or you’re dealing with an unsupportive church, or you’re struggling financially because you’d like to go to college but you don’t have an option to do that. Keep reaching out in the community; there are a lot of people who would be willing to talk to you and help you through it. LR: I really appreciate your willingness to share your story. 37