Abstract

Brian Dewitt, associate editor for the Gay People's Chronicle, discusses being homosexual in Cleveland, coming out, and his experiences and interactions with the local gay community. With a wealth of knowledge pertaining to so many facets of the gay and lesbian community, Dewitt is an important source for material on this segment of society from his coming out in the 1970s through the present. His various roles behind the scenes are explored. He also reflects on how AIDS impacted the gay and lesbian community.

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Interviewee

Dewitt, Brian (interviewee)

Interviewer

Miller, Emily (interviewer)

Project

History 695

Date

3-3-2008

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

87 minutes

Transcript

Emily Miller [00:00:01] Today is March 3rd, 2008, and I'm here with Brian Dewitt, the associate editor of the Gay People's Chronicle. Welcome, Brian.

Brian Dewitt [00:00:10] Well, thank you.

Emily Miller [00:00:13] I've read, we've talked through e-mail and have a little bit about you, but I just wondering if maybe you can give me some background as far as your involvement in Cleveland. Were you born here?

Brian Dewitt [00:00:25] Yes, I was born in Cleveland in University Hospitals McDonald Hospital in 1955, grew up in Cleveland Heights. I've lived here all my life, with the exception of about three months spent in my grandparents house in St. Augustine, Florida, as a teenager. Let's see. So, grew up in Cleveland Heights, attending the two Roxboro schools there and Cleveland Heights High School. Came out in 1976, pretty much in February of 1976. Prior to that, as far as gay and lesbian community memories in Cleveland, I don't have very many. I mean, I know what I've heard. I have a dim memory of, in 1969, at the end of 1969--my parents took... my mother took Life magazine--and seeing a year-end issue of Life magazine that recapped the year of 1969, along with the moon shot and everything else that was in there, was the Stonewall riots, just a little thing and thinking, what? And that was, I think, the first I'd heard of the Stonewall riots that year-end Life magazine issue.

Emily Miller [00:01:50] So when you came out, when did you become aware of the gay community in Cleveland as it is, or as it was?

Brian Dewitt [00:01:56] Almost immediately. Okay. Coming out is a process that continues lifelong. Knowing, knowing that, you know, the first coming out is coming out to yourself. And I think I was unusual for my time in that I did that at puberty. I think a lot of, a lot of people did do that in my time. I just don't I have an older friend who was in denial from puberty, and I guess a lot of folks are in denial until into their 20s or 30s or, and some folks I met, 50s. This is back in the '70s, back prior, I mean, Stonewall had happened four years prior. I mean, people that grew up in the '30s and '40s and '50s definitely had a different, different view of life. And you can speak to them about that. [inaudible] a great Pride thing on Wednesday nights. There's, there's too, I mean, if you really want to find out what went on way before, because I started in 1975 or '76, there is a gay lesbian senior group that meets the Cleveland Lesbian Gay Center. There's also another group called Gray Pride that has monthly potlucks on the second Wednesday night of the month, which would be the 12th at the Lakewood Senior Center at six o'clock. The Senior Center West, which is on Madison. I can get you an address, but it's like Madison, just west of Hilliard, or whatever the diagonal street is. I think that's Hilliard. But, and you can, my partner runs those so we can contact him. Doug. You've, you've spoken with him?

Emily Miller [00:03:49] No, you tell me about him and then I kind of looked him up, so I know about, he's involved in Equality Ohio?

Brian Dewitt [00:03:56] Equality Ohio, and very much so. Right now, Election Day being tomorrow, they're doing this huge project. Have you signed one of their fired cards? OK. Good. OK. Well, they're trying to get 100 of those for every Ohio House district. And so some of the ones that are harder to get, like Ashtabula, you know, Darke County, they're working those on Election Day because that's a very fertile group of these people really are voters. They're motivated, they're at the polls in a primary election. So that's what he's very busy with. In fact, I have a bag over there of materials for one of his volunteers to take to a polling place for him.

Emily Miller [00:04:36] OK, so.

Brian Dewitt [00:04:38] Oh, I was just saying. Well, coming out in the '70s, you know, the long, drawn-out process. So I was out with myself from puberty onward, although immediately got the message from my peers that this is not to be talked about. So, I didn't talk about it all, probably 19 or 20. I was 19 in a vacation spot that my parents went to every year in the mountains of North Carolina and chatted with a man there that I'd known before. We'd seen them every year, another vacation or there. And he came out to me, and I'd made this little rule when I'd silenced myself at age 13, that if anyone came out to me, I had to come out to them. And so I live by the rules. So I came out to him. But, you know, coming out to friends and family and anything like that, well, family much came later, but coming out to friends happened in pretty much in February. I had a girlfriend in high school. And she and I, she had, I came out to her and she'd wonder, well, that's why I had to throw myself at you. And then she came back to me with this... The Scene, it was the Scene, the same Cleveland Scene that's publishing today, it was back then it was more of a bar rag. But they did have classified ads at the back of the paper. You know, it's rock and roll paper. And she said, here's a gay rap group, it's meeting at the Free Clinic on Friday nights. And you're going, oh, no, that's not what she said. And you and Glenn are going because I told her about my sister's friend. Oh, for Sherry? One moment.

Emily Miller [00:06:32] You talked about the rap groups?

Brian Dewitt [00:06:33] Yeah. I'd come out to a friend of my older sister's and so like in January or February of 1976, which his response was, what was it, it was in his house and he stands up and says, well, I'm pretty much coming from the same place. And he walks up to the kitchen and says, I'm going to make tea now. It's like, okay, what did he say just then? So you and Glenn are going. These were at the old Free Clinic--which was torn down in like 2000, they built the new one--every Friday night, and so I pretty much came out into the community. The first--we went to the rap group, sat down... Is that term quaint? Rap group? Is that used anymore?

Emily Miller [00:07:24] Well, I was thinking, is that similar to the feminist consciousness raising group? What exactly happened?

Brian Dewitt [00:07:30] Well, there were two levels of this. There is an internal personal growth, one that we got involved with later that I think was just organized by one of the guys there. This was kind of a coming out group. I think if I went to the center looking for a group very similar to this one, it would be the coming out group. And it was just a way to chat with people. For many people it was a way to chat with people that wasn't the bars, which was the only other outlet at the time. So you know you could actually sit in a well-lit room and no alcohol, no loud music and just talk to people.

Emily Miller [00:08:06] Did you find it helpful?

[00:08:06] Oh, yeah. It was like, OK, meet people. This is the first. my first exposure to the community was this group, about 20 people sitting in overstuffed, old, overstuffed furniture in a circle and a guy walks in and starts handing out issues of High Gear, which I never knew existed. And I'm looking at this thing going, there's a newspaper in Cleveland?! You know, I'm thinking this is that the organized gay and lesbian community was pretty much a New York and maybe San Francisco thing. I don't know, I think I was aware of San Francisco then. My sister lived in San Francisco. My sister lived three blocks from the Castro. So like that following year, we went to visit my sister in the Castro! It's like, OK, this is... We stayed at Beck's Motor Lodge, which is 2222 Market Street, which was like one block east of Castro and Market, so I think it's actually still there, Beck's Motor Lodge. So it's OK.

Emily Miller [00:09:06] I want to talk about maybe the differences that you'ven see between Cleveland, a Midwestern industrial city, versus New York and San Francisco.

Brian Dewitt [00:09:13] I've not been to New York by then and San Francisco... My exposure then was basically visiting my sister. You know, I wasn't actually going out in the community, are going to the bars or anything. I was like 20 and not into bars at all. Kind of walked up and down Castro Street a couple of times and thought it was fascinating that, you know, there are guys walking up and down the street holding hands and it wasn't a problem. But this was very nice. And then all the bars had plate glass windows and you could look in and bars here don't. To this day they don't with some very rare exceptions. Twist is the rare exception that comes to mind.

Emily Miller [00:10:00] Okay, well let's keep going chronologically. So when did you become active in this community because I notice you are very active in the community, so when was that transition when you got more involved?

Brian Dewitt [00:10:12] Oh, the rap group? I kept coming back to that. And there was movement. There was talk in the rap group. Oh, we're gonna get a lesbian gay center started actually they didn't say, gay, lesbian, gay. They just said, we're gonna get a gay community center started. The folks around the rap group were kind of very closely related to the core organizational... How would I describe that? I called back then I called them movement-oriented gays as opposed to bar-oriented gays. But that was just my own term. And this was, this group was entirely male, I think was entirely male, if not almost entirely. It was an entirely male group. I have very little interaction with the women's community back then, although I did discover very quickly that there was something called the women's community and women in that usage was a synonym for lesbian. No, you're right. I don't know how pausing while you're writing. Going back through audio recordings is a pain. So take notes.

Emily Miller [00:11:32] When you became active in the community...

Brian Dewitt [00:11:33] When I became active in the community. I'm trying to figure when that first started, but it was almost right away. I mean, the people I was running around with were the activist group and that I felt very much at home. That's where I wanted to be. They were the ones who were going to start the gay community center. They were the folks from the GEAR Foundation. I don't think I met John Nosek and Leon Stevens right away. They were the publishers of High Gear. Did I ever give you their current... I only have an address for them.

Emily Miller [00:12:05] Yeah. You told me about it, but I never got it, so we can...

Brian Dewitt [00:12:08] Dig that up. They live around here in Ohio City somewhere. And you know, it was just talk. Well, first thing we're gonna do is get a hotline going. That, that was something, before the Internet, that was a vital link, was to just publish a number, gay hotline written in the phone book. And I think there was an issue with getting that written that way in the phone book, but it did get into the phone book. And start operating a hotline, but they had started the GEAR Foundation. Now this I don't know if this is true. So I don't know if I should repeat this on the record.

Emily Miller [00:12:45] Well, we don't know if this is true!

Brian Dewitt [00:12:46] But I heard that the reason why it was called the Gay Education and Awareness Resources Foundation was because the original organization had been the Gay Activist Alliance of Case Western Reserve University. And at the end of some school year, that organization had owed the university two thousand dollars and they walked away from the debt. And so they needed to change their name to something that was very much not like that. So the university wouldn't have to come back after them from the debt. This is what I was told. Whether. But that's why they came up with such an odd sounding name. And there was a Gay Activist Alliance. In fact, I remember prior to coming out officially, but of course, being out to myself like in 1973, driving up Cornell Road or riding with somebody up Cornell Road and seeing wheat pasted to all the steel light posts, "Gay Dance." And of course, they had to wheat paste 'em on because if they did anything else, they'd get torn down.

Emily Miller [00:13:48] So were you involved? Did you volunteer for the hotline?

Brian Dewitt [00:13:54] I volunteered for a hotline much later on, I didn't volunteer at first because you had to answer it at home. And I was living with my mom and I would not with her. Not until I started doing Gay Waves in the 1980s did I come out to my mom because I'm not going to deny my mother knowing your son's on the radio every week. I'm going to hide that from you? That's not something you hide from your mom. She can be proud of that. So and she was glad that I told her and everything was like, yeah, the early 1980s when I got involved with... Gay Waves is actually still on the air, but it's different now than what it was then. When we did it, it was a new show. I was early on involved with John Vogel, who did the predecessor of Gay Waves, Radio Free Lambda, is what it was called, and he and Wade Tolleson, and here's someone else to talk to. Wade Tolleson's been involved with WRUW for 30 years and he was very important to that station. But as a gay man, he was also behind the scenes doing Radio Free Lambda, but he did it himself when WRUW was a 10-watt station and could only be heard on the Case campus and near portions of Cleveland and Cleveland Heights because he was a teacher at Chagrin Falls Middle School and High School and couldn't be out as a teacher. The minute the wattage went up to a thousand watts, Wade had to stop, and that was in 1978 that the wattage went up. It's now, I think, 15 kilowatts and you can hear it throughout the region. Yeah, going to the rap group, going to the Shaker Club afterward was always, and I was 20 and not quite old enough to get into the bars, but managed to get in anyway. You walk in with a big crowd and while someone else is being crowded, carded, yes, just go in. And oddly, they never really challenged you on that. Dick Deutsch was the owner of the Shaker Club. I don't know if you want to know the history of the bars or anything. It was. What is that space now at Shaker Square? It's. Was a National City Bank. I think it's still a bank building. I would just park next to it on South More.... Are you familiar with Shaker Square? Well, there there's Shaker Boulevard goes east-west through it. Moreland Road goes north-south through it. And on the southern arm of Moreland Road across from what I believe is Dave's grocery store is a building separate from the Square buildings that I... There's a gas station on the corner of Drexmore. Then there's the Shaker Square building on the corner of Shaker Square. And in between was another building that I'm wanting to say National City Bank. But I don't. Yes, that bank is still in operation. That's what's in there. Well, under, next door to that was when I was a kid was Caminati's Restaurant. But by this time, Caminati's had closed and had been turned into a gay bar called the Shaker Club, which was probably the only successful gay bar on the East Side ever. They're all either downtown or west, or south for lesbian bars. Patty Harris here, owns the Five Cent Decision. Yeah, while she wants to say it's mixed, it's open to men. Tony's a bartender there. And Doug and I go there, they have free pasta dinner, or not free, take that back, two dollar and fifty cent--might as well be free--pasta dinners on Wednesday nights.

Emily Miller [00:17:50] OK, so we talked about, what you did do when you were on Gay Waves?

Brian Dewitt [00:17:54] On Gay Waves. That was in the early 1980s. There was a group of six of us myself, Glenn Gunderson is my friend that, my sister's older friend that I came out to before I started going to the rap group. I was involved very late a little bit with High Gear when they were pasting up in the upper top floor of the Call and Post building at 105th and Chester, I went to those paste ups a couple of times. It was at the time that John and Leon decided they were going to leave the paper and no longer be involved with it, and some other people were coming in to take it over, to keep it going. It was a monthly paper and not all of those other... I was one of those other people, only I didn't know it. I was just, oh I'll help out with the paper. And at that moment when I walked in was the moment when they decided to leave and so they had been doing 99 percent of the work and now it was a bunch of other people going to do it and none of us knew what we we're doing.

Emily Miller [00:18:54] It was a transition time where it just kind of fizzled out and then...

Brian Dewitt [00:18:57] There were several of those transitions. This was one of them. I think it was 1978 or '77. Yeah. Cause I had an apartment by that time and they were one of the meetings was was at my apartment and I was so rude to Archie Rothman who lit up a cigarette in my apartment and I freaked out. He had a radio show on WMMS or WNCR at the time of all these and came to this thing and I was so rude to him. Sorry, Archie.

Emily Miller [00:19:33] OK and then, so, you were kind of involved in High Gear and then it fizzled out.

Brian Dewitt [00:19:38] I can't. Why did I stop being involved? I worked with it through a summer and it was the summer after the first, first ever in Ohio, Gay Pride March, which wait a minute let me get this going here... Because I believe that was 1978, and I should print this out for you. Just a history of the gay pride marches. Very. Not for public consumption here! Eventually will print below. Cough it up!

Emily Miller [00:20:23] Yeah I have been going through the, I read through a lot of the High Gear interviews, and I noticed that was confusion that it was the first parade. So were you involved in that?

Brian Dewitt [00:20:34] No, not at all. Actually there were two parades, and when I pull this up, I'll tell you what it was. But one of them, I don't think it was reported in High Gear. But I don't think it was really a gay parade. It was Youth Against War and Fascism. I may have thought other things, but the memory that comes to my... that I remember now was I thought it was going to be a huge bust and I didn't want to be involved in a huge bust that, "No one's gonna show up for this?" I'm not going down there and I sort of regret that now. But that's that's the way it was. Let's see. Yeah. 1977 June 25, 1977. Youth Against War and Fascism March, which I don't think was truly a gay march. And then the MCC March, 200 people at Public Square and I remember seeing a photo of that one. Francis Dostle.

Emily Miller [00:21:59] Speaking of MCC, were you involved in any religious affiliated, open and affirming churches at all?

Brian Dewitt [00:22:18] Let's see what I'm giving you here? Yeah. Oh, look, blank sheets of paper. Okay, well. Yeah. Cause I have an issue of some stuff in there. Columbus, I think inflates their counts a lot. I do the parade counts. There's no way to count a festival. Actually, if you have controlled entry, there is a way to count a festival. But, so there's some of me yakking in there about counting the porta potties as a way to count the real festival number. And it's true. That's, you know, if they say they have 100,000 people and they buy enough toilets for 20,000 and the last three and the line never even get used, they're inflating their figures. Anyways, I'm not real religious and, not religious at all, in fact, and so I had no attraction toward any of the religious groups. I was very marginally involved in Dignity for a very short period of time early on when they were meeting at St. Francis, which is no longer existing. It used to be on Woodland, next to the YMCA, next to the Boy Scout headquarters. Between actually, Tri-C's built a new building in that location, but it was next to the Boy Scout headquarters. Old German church had burned burned in the 1980s and then was torn down by the diocese. But they used to meet in the friary behind there for a while. It was right about the time when they got kicked out by the church. Why was I go... I must've been dating somebody that was going to Dignity or something like that. But I don't recall how I was going to Dignity. I think that's what it was.

Emily Miller [00:24:07] Anything specific that you were there that may be memorable about what the meeting entailed? Was it just kind of more like [inaudible]?

Brian Dewitt [00:24:17] It was very similar to just... That was what I was getting out of it was the meeting that, I didn't then and don't now, meeting people in bars was just not something I could do. So I was attracted to any of these other alternative, usually billed as an alternative to the bars type of thing. I mean, now we have this huge array of sports groups. I'm not really attracted to sports either. And similar groups. And I would probably be doing that if I wasn't doing this. But that was how I met people was going to these groups because bars didn't work at all. I mean, they went to the bars. Bars were nice for drinking and dancing, but attempting to meet someone in a bar was just... not successful. And then I used to subscribe to the old idea that if you meet people in bars, the people you're meeting are bar people. But.

Emily Miller [00:25:17] All right. Sorry we kind of got off track here but the, your mom and Gay Waves in the early '80s next week. Did you actually speak on the radio?

Brian Dewitt [00:25:28] Very little. I was the board controller and it's sort of my life. I've always sort of been in the background of everything. When I was in high school, I was on stage crew and very involved in drama there. Today, I'm involved with the North Coast Men's Chorus on their stage crew. So it's you know, I'm associate editor of the paper. I, I, it's just me. I just tend to like to stand in the background and pull the ropes, but not actually show my face.

Emily Miller [00:26:03] Do you remember any of the topics that they talked out?

Brian Dewitt [00:26:07] By the way, the entire set of Gay Waves recordings that I made is sitting in the Western Reserve Historical Society, and they've digitized a bunch of them. So they're quite available.

Emily Miller [00:26:21] They may not be processed yet because they're not available on the website, but you can look at their search engine.

Brian Dewitt [00:26:27] Ask, ask, ask 'em about it, because they had some they had a gathering there last spring and they had some of the Gay... I was so surprised to see some of the Gay Waves programs where they had laptop computers playing them. So they have some of them are digitized, maybe only two. Maybe only the two they had playing and they were not sequential. They were like one from '82 and one from '85 or something like that. I think I did that from somewhere in the early... I was involved with Radio Free Lambda very briefly and then it went off the air. Wade Tolleson was in the background doing... Dan Schaefer, my boyfriend at the time, and I did it for a very short period of time. None of those tapes exist like 1981. Gay Waves. I got involved myself. Glenn Gunderson. Ken Stoli. Who else was involved? There were six of us. Drew Cari, how could I forget, not that Drew Carey, you're familiar, with an "I". Yes, OK. He definitely Drew Cari and Bob Laycock and Michael Anderson. Bob Laycock and Michael Anderson were a couple at the time. Both of them still live in town, by the way.

Emily Miller [00:27:58] Sounds like a lot of the people that were involved in creating Cleveland Pride.

Brian Dewitt [00:28:01] Yeah, it's the same group, you know, Martha Pontone and Drew Cari founded Cleveland Pride. Yes.

Emily Miller [00:28:11] We'll talk about that later.

Brian Dewitt [00:28:11] Yeah. That's later. That's 1989. Except for the 1977 or whatever year it was. And we decide, well, OK, we're gonna get this going. And we had this got on WRUW's schedule, which is actually easy to do because of all Wade is sort of the the parental figure at WRUW 'cause he's been there for so long. Most of the... A lot of the, what they call community programmers as opposed to student programmers. And they also had a great need for, to keep up their license. They had to have X number of hours a week of public affairs programing locally produced. They couldn't just buy tapes from somewhere and run 'em. So we were a locally produced public affairs program. They loved us. We would pick a topic for the week, which would often be from the news, but a lot of, a lot of what we did was we would read about, it would be somebody in other cities. We have called them up on the air. We never did the show live. We were always scared to do it like we'd call them up on tape. And then I would manually edit the tapes--this is cutting quarter-inch tape and splicing it back together--into about a 15-minute segment of an interview with somebody, usually over a telephone from another city. The first 10, 7 or 10 minutes of the show was National Gay News with Tom Post in San Francisco. His real name was Timothy John O'Malley, and he decided he was going to run a national gay news show from from actually Oakland. He pretty much did it as a hobby singlehandedly and then put it out over phone lines to various stations. He was trying to get the stations to pay him for it, but we didn't have any budget for it and he was letting us do it anyway. That went on for a couple of, about three, couple or three years that we were getting NGN news from San... from Tom Post in San Francisco. Remember, we broke the silence. That was his tagline. But that was the beginning of each Gay Waves show, and then we'd have an interview with somebody, or we'd have a segment of, a segment of a speech and we would get a huge amount of this material from Case. Case Western Reserve University used to have an annual gay and lesbian conference in the spring in March or April. This is a weekend-long thing. It took took over most of Thwing Center, and they would have speaker... national speakers come in, you know, using student activity fee budget that they would get. And you know the school paid for this, I mean, the school has because the school has a whole effort toward bringing in national speakers for lectures and stuff. And so these were you know, we had Valerie Terrigno, the first lesbian mayor of West Hollywood, California. Who else? Oh, I think we had Patricia Nell Warren, who wrote The Front Runner. She, she came in and spoke once. One of the better, of course, because he's a preacher, Troy Perry, the founder of MCC, came and I have a memory of. And we would tape these speeches and I would edit them down into 20 minute segments to run on... And Troy Perry was one of the best ones because he's... He spoke like, like a standup comedian. He had segments and you... I could almost. OK. OK. Cut there. And I cut his speech up, a recording of it of two speeches up into segments, put them all back together into a little 20 minute pieces. And we have Troy Perry and he would go on and you would be standing and applauding, listening to the tape at the end of that 20 minute segment.

Emily Miller [00:32:18] Did you ever interview anyone locally?

Brian Dewitt [00:32:22] Oh, yes. Linus Harrell, who founded Body Language. We interviewed him. We tried to keep it as local as we could. Win Weizer, who was recently a University Heights Council member, she was very active in Dignity back then. We had a few... There was a couple of issues with Dignity that came up. Bob Davis was, he's still living in Cleveland. A musician. He. Bob Davis is, don't let me get this wrong, either the music director or the artistic director of Cleveland Near West Theater. That's what he's doing today. Then he was our music instructor at Erieview Catholic High School, and he had wanted to have a commitment ceremony with his partner, either in the school or somehow involving the school. And they said no. And somehow that blew up and he ended up getting fired. And. There was a big dispute with Dignity on whether or not Dignity was gonna go after the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland for firing him. The Gay People's Chronicle, which I was not involved with then, it was being run by our founder Charlie Callender, basically as a hobby publication out of his Edgehill Road house in Cleveland Heights. I can point out the house. I don't know the address, it's the second house up from Kenilworth. Second house east of Kenilworth. On the west side of the street. No, that's the Bieber's house. Third house east of Kenilworth. He, you know, he had taken one point and Dignity ought to go after the Catholic Diocese for this. Dignity had taken the point that we're kind of small and they're kind of big. It wouldn't amount to a whole lot. It's... and I stayed out of it. Gay Waves was praised by both sides for being very evenhanded in everything else, which pretty much stayed out of it. My personal opinion was like, that's like telling the mafia not to kill people. I mean, it's like, you know, going after this, going after Nazi Germany for being homophobic. Wait a minute, I don't. Whoops. Take that out of the tape. I don't want anybody on. I compare the Catholic Church to Nazi Germany.

Emily Miller [00:34:59] OK, so so those are some of the issues you talked about. The Gay Waves. But was there? What was your next jump, what was the next thing you were involved in?

Brian Dewitt [00:35:12] This paper. I'm pretty sure it was this paper. Did Gay Waves through much of the '70s or, excuse me, through much of the '80s and got involved in fall of 1988. Because in the spring of 1988, I got very involved with the NAMES Project quilt that came to town, Dale Melsness and Rick, his partner--and I forget Rick's last name, I think it began with an R--were very instrumental in bringing the NAMES Project quilt to the Cleveland Convention Center. The city basically donated the use of the convention center. It spread out that whole quilt in there. And I was became, there was a call for volunteers of, what were they called, not docents. I mean, I would say docents, but you wore all white and you were basically guides to the thing to people that came in, many of whom had lost family members to AIDS. It was another one of the early interviews we did with Gay Waves was Dr. Leonard Calabrese us at the very beginning. And that one would almost be interesting to hear at the very beginning of the AIDS epidemic before it had really hit Cleveland. This is back in the early '80s. We interviewed Dr. Calabrese at the Cleveland Clinic and it was that interview and actually a discussion before then where I suddenly got this could be something really big. We know it is. It was at the time it was like news from the coasts of gay men dying of some mysterious disease. I was at the time involved with the Case Western Reserve, involved with, I was attending the meetings of, because Case Western Reserve Lesbian Gay Bisexual Union, which I believe is now called Spectrum, but it's... And Charlie Callender was... Charlie Callender, Jerry Bores. And why am I not remembering the third guy's name? We're kind of the faculty advisors, [inaudible], Jerry Boras worked in the student finance office, Charlie Callender was head of the anthropology department, and a third man whose name I can't remember a

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