Steven Russell

Former music teacher and retired church musical director Steven Russell has learned a lot about how to advocate for himself over his lifetime. His involvement with the Male Survivors of Sexual Violence group at the Center for Empowerment has helped him cope with sexual assault that happened over thirty years ago.

“But when I am able to talk, and when I am able to talk about myself and share parts of myself that might have been uncomfortable and primitive at some point, that, I think, it’s made me a different listener. A more comfortable listener.”
— Steven Russell

ANNOTATIONS

1. Advanced Parental Age - Emerging science has shown that older parents have children with greater intelligence and success in education. Researchers from both the U.K and U.S. examined data of 15,000 sets of twins and found that kids born to older dads are more likely to have a high IQ and a stronger ability to focus on their interests. According to Live Science at the University of California San Francisco, researches conducted a small study that set out to establish an “optimal” age for parenting. Most participants believed being an “older” parent was more advantageous than being a younger parent because they were more “emotionally prepared.” Parents of both genders in the study overwhelmingly said their 30s would’ve been the ideal parenting era. Other advantages of being an older parent were more career success, financial security and stronger relationships with their partners.
2. Coming Out - The process of declaring a homosexual identity is often referred to as "coming out." It can start with homosexual fantasies or dreams, with the realization that one is attracted to people of the same gender, with a feeling that one is different from one’s peers, or even with a sexual experience. The person may experience identity confusion at this point, being aware of same-sex attractions but in turmoil about it. This confusion is influenced by the stigma attached to homosexuality, inaccurate knowledge, lack of role models, and minimal opportunity to socialize with other people who are having similar feelings. Further confusion may result if the person also experiences some opposite-sex attractions. The person may not acknowledge their orientation, avoid thinking about it, or come up with an alternate explanation for their feelings. Because of this, the challenge for gay and lesbian youth is to develop a healthy and integrated identity in the context of negative stereotypes and prejudice, often without family or societal support.
3. Bullying in Physical Education - Bullying can be defined as a prolonged behavior of verbal insults, social rejection, psychological intimidation, and/or physical aggression by some students towards others, where the victim is repeatedly exposed to negative actions carried out by one or more aggressor students in a situation of defenselessness. Many students quietly struggle navigating the masculinized spaces of gym classes and changing rooms. The daily competitions, the posturing to fit in, and the fear of being perceived as unmasculine weighs heavily for many boys in school. A study researching physical education programs in Texas public schools found that the daily mandate of physical education didn’t have any positive impact on kids’ health or educational outcome. On the contrary, they found that the programs, which ran from 2007 to 2011, actually had detrimental effects, and correlated with an uptick in discipline and absence rates. Bullying as one potential reason was pointed out as to why this particular P.E program was counter productive.
4. Title IX - In 2019, the Association of American Universities surveyed thirty-three prominent research universities and found 13% of all students experienced a form of sexual assault and 41.8% experienced sexual harassment. One of the few analyses on sexual harassment across various work environments found that academia (58%) was second only to the military (69%). Among graduate and professional students, 24% of the sexual harassment incidents experienced by women (18.2% for men) were perpetrated by a faculty member or instructor Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is a Federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs and activities. A school has a responsibility to respond promptly and effectively. If a school knows or reasonably should know about sexual harassment or sexual violence that creates a hostile environment, the school must take immediate action to eliminate the sexual harassment or sexual violence, prevent its recurrence, and address its effects. Even if a student or his or her parent does not want to file a complaint, or does not request that the school take any action on the student’s behalf, if a school knows or reasonably should know about possible sexual harassment or sexual violence it must promptly investigate to determine what occurred and then take appropriate steps to resolve the situation. A criminal investigation into allegations of sexual harassment or sexual violence does not relieve the school of its duty under Title IX to resolve complaints promptly and equitably.
5. Sexual Assault Reporting Hesitancy, Homosexual Youth - According to a National Intimate and Sexual Violence Survey, 26% of gay men, 37% of bisexual men, and 29% of heterosexual men experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner at some point in their lifetime. Four in ten gay men (40%), nearly half of bisexual men (47%), and one in five heterosexual men (21%) have experienced sexual violence other than rape in their lifetime. For LGBTQ survivors of sexual assault, their identities, and the discrimination they face surrounding those identities, often make them hesitant to seek help. According to an article published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, more men are now reporting sexual harassment, and more research is needed in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities.
6. Sexual Assault Reporting Hesitancy in Children - An analysis found that, after having been sexually abused, most children feel responsible for the abuse or are too ashamed to reveal it. The sexually-abused child may experience feelings of self-blame, anger, fear, confusion, shame, and depression. Sexual abuse often occurs where there is a relationship based on trust and authority.
7. Sexual Assault Reporting Hesitancy - According to an article publlished by Psych Central, normalization, minimization, shame, fear, isolation, and lack of support where some of the reasons why people stay silent and hide their abusive experience. According to the article, so much of what should be openly considered abuse is normalized. Minimization is closely related to normalization, where the abuse is only partially recognized. Many victims of abuse internalize the blame and responsibility for the abuse and consciously or unconsciously think its their fault that it happened. Many abuse victims do not talk about being abused because they do not have anyone who would listen to them, and are often either lonely and isolated or dependent on their abusers.
8. Child Traumatic Stress - Many former victims of child sexual abuse are confused as to whether they were, in fact, sexually abused. This can be due to a lack of understanding as to what constitutes sexual abuse, because many people are misinformed as to what child sexual abuse actually is. Acknowledging past abuse can be an important step for victims because it breaks the secrecy and shame that are so often part of the abuse legacy. Talking to a sympathetic listener can be an important first step to begin the healing process.
9. Homosexuality, Catholic Church - The Roman Catholic Church will not bless same-sex marriages, no matter how stable or positive the couples' relationships are. The message underlines the church's insistence that marriage should be limited to a union between a man and a woman. Because of the Vatican's stance on marriage, critics have accused the church of treating LGBTQ people as lesser members of its congregation. In an apparent response to those concerns, the Vatican said that its declaration is not meant to be an "unjust discrimination."

TRANSCRIPT

Interview conducted by John Keller

Interview conducted remotely

September 1, 2020

Transcription by Allison Baldwin

Annotations by Kristine Amarante

00:00

Okay, we’re recording now. This is John Keller from coLAB Arts, um, it is Tuesday, September 1st at 10:07. I am located in my office in New Brunswick, New Jersey and today we are interviewing–

Steven Russell.

Great. And where are you located right now Steven? Just the town or in general.

Matawan, New Jersey.

Great. You’re in your home. And, um, uh, um, why don’t we– we’ll just start from the beginning. [awkward laughter] If you don’t mind sharing your birthdate and where you were born.

I was born on July 11, 1960 in Lorain, Ohio.

And when you were born, what was your family structure like?

My mother and father lived in Avon Lake, Ohio, which is twelve years older. I still have that one sister. My parents are no longer living.

And, I’m sorry, I think you froze just for a moment. You said you have one older sister?

I have one sister, two years older than me. She is still living in our home town.

Great. And what are some of your earliest childhood memories growing up?

Earliest childhood memories– um, I guess, you know, living at home, playing in the living room on the floor. Playing with my sister. We had a dog that I vaguely remember. They got rid of the dog when I was about a year old because they thought I was allergic to it, but it turns out I wasn’t. So, yeah, so that– knowing I remember the dog somewhat is probably one of my earliest memories. Because I don’t remember having the dog; I just remember the dog. [laughter] And they told me they got rid of it, oh yeah, it was probably when I was a year or a year and a half old, if you can have memories at that old. Eh, they’re vague.

What was your, so you lived in a house? Do you–

We lived in a house. The house is still there. My sister lives across the street from the house [awkward laughter], which is weird. Visiting my sister and looking across the street to the house I grew up in.

How did your parents meet each other? How did they connect?

I believe my mother’s twin brother introduced my mother to my father. My father was a teacher and actually at the time my father was teaching in the school that my mother went to, but my mother was not living in the town. She had left. But would come back to visit, so I think my uncle introduced her to him.

Were you parents contemporaries? Were they around the same age, or–

They were three years apart. 

Okay.

But they were older when they had me. My mother was 33. My father was 36. But, yeah, they were always older.

As a kid you have memories of them being the parents that were a little bit more mature from the group, or–

Yeah 

In comparison. 

Yeah. I guess I didn’t really notice it at the time, but then, you know, growing up and meeting people’s parents who were ten years younger than mine. Actually, my husband– my husband’s grandparents were only a few years older than my parents. Which, he’s a generation, a generation down from me.

[Annotation 1]

Huh, yeah.

And then meeting his grandparents and going, well, these people are my parents' generation.

Yeah.

His parents were like 20 when he was born, so, and then my parent’s parents were older when they had them so my grandparents were significantly older.

When you, uh, did you have a close relationship with your grandparents when you were growing up? Were they nearby?

I had a grandmother. My mother’s father was dead. I never knew him, but my grandmother lived about a hundred miles away as did most of my relatives on her side. So, I– I knew my cousins, I wasn’t around them all the time. We had to go there. It was a three hour drive, so–

Still in Ohio? [digital froze up and cut out]

And my grandmother, I can’t say I had a close relationship with her. She was a stern woman. But she was the closest in distance. The other grandparents I would say I was much closer to, but they lived in Florida so I only saw them once a year. But I would say I was closer to them.

5:49

Where in Florida? Had they always been from Florida? Or had they retired?

No, no. They were from Western Ohio. My mother and father grew up near each other. Their towns were very close. The centers of those two families were close. But then my father’s family often moved down to Florida for retirement. And his parents moved to Florida in the ‘30s or ‘40s. You know, my dad was just out of high school, I think they moved.

What were your parents like?

What were they like? um– we’re WASPs and WASPs don’t talk. I never grew up feeling like– feeling comfortable talking about personal things and my parents were very odd about sharing personal things. I wouldn’t say they were unfriendly, but, you know, it made me– it made me think that talking wasn’t something we did. And I asked my sister once, I was talking to my sister about me being gay and I was 36 and I had never talked to her about me being gay. And, of course, she knew. And my parents knew. But I asked my sister if she ever talked to my parents about me being gay and she said, “Are you kidding? I don’t talk to them about me.” [laughter] But they knew. And I knew they knew, but I never told them. I never sat down and said, “Mom, I’m gay. Dad, I’m gay.” But then I invited them to my wedding, so they obviously knew. [laughter] So, yeah, I mean that’s– part of the way I am is because I grew up thinking we talked about other people, but we didn’t talk to people about us. It would have been very uncomfortable for me to sit down with my parents– to, to talk about things like wanting to move. I went to school, my first college was in Minnesota. That was a thousand miles away. It was very difficult to tell my parents that’s where I wanted to go. And then after two years I wanted to move colleges and that was very difficult for me to say, “I don’t want to go here anymore.” And it was difficult for them. Yeah, so, what were they like? They were [cuts out] and I am coming to know them as the age they were when they had me and the age that they were when I was growing up and a teenager and a young adult. I came to learn that it would have been very easy to talk to them about myself. But knowing the family nature of their parents, it probably would have been very difficult for them to talk to their parents. So, they just didn’t instill in me any kind of ease. And then my husband is Italian and they scream at each other constantly. Whatever is on their mind comes out at full volume. And that is, it was very strange for me, and very hard for me to get used to. But they’re Brooklyn Italian and they tell you what’s on their mind. Without thinking about it. And then sit down and hug each other and have dinner. And for me that’s like, ahhhh, and I think that’s why it’s so easy for me not to talk. And not to share.

10:00

Thank you for sharing that. When you were a young kid, growing up, did you and your sister play together or did you have other friends in the neighborhood or [cuts out]–

She and I would play together. And then we had common friends in the neighborhood that would all play together. It wasn’t really until– I guess in junior high school I started having more of my own friends. And doing things with them, but I would say through elementary school I pretty much played with my sister and the friends that we had in common.

Did you go to neighborhood public schools?

My parents worked in the public school system. My father worked, was a principal, in the same public school system that we went to. That was difficult. [laughter] Yeah. It was close. It was a small town and there were only so many schools and everybody knew everybody else.

When you were younger did your mom work outside of the home or was she–

My mom worked up until my sister was born. And then she never went back to that profession. But when we were in elementary school, maybe fourth or fifth grade, she started working in the school system, but not in the profession she was in before.

What was she in before?

She was a hospital dietician. And then my sister was born, she quit that and started doing– she started– she started running a volunteer program for volunteers who wanted to work in the classroom. She coordinated that. So, she was in the school system that I went to. My father was in the school system that I went to. There’s only one high school.

12:00

Great. So, what are some of your– do you kind of remember starting to go to school or starting at school? Did you like school at the beginning?

I liked school. I did well in school. I was kind of a nerd. And a band geek and a choir geek. I don’t know if those terms work today, but–

I’m pretty sure they do.

So, I was smart and I was musical, so I had– I was very– more or less accepted in that, um, circle. The people involved in music in the school I went to. And there were people involved in music who were involved in the sports program. That was not unusual, but I was not athletic. So, gym class was difficult.

How so?

I just didn’t know how to play basketball. I didn’t know how to play baseball. I hated it. We would go to gym class and play softball and I would just go, “I hate this. I hate it.” And they would never teach you how to play. They never taught us how to play basketball. They just threw us out on the court and they made us torture ourselves. And all the kids who knew how to play, played, and then looked at us like, “What’s wrong with you?” I don’t like basketball. I don’t know how to play basketball. I mean, I was a music teacher in the schools and then I was a church musician and I hope that I would never make a kid, at any time, who was not naturally musical, feel the way I did in gym class. Make them feel like there was something wrong with them. That I was not the way humans were supposed to be. And what was supposed to happen was that we were supposed to be ridiculed because we couldn’t play basketball. So, to have kids who couldn’t sing in my group, I was– I was careful not to convey to them that I thought there was something wrong with them and that other kids should make fun of them because they weren’t as naturally musical. So, yeah, that, I think that helped me. Having survived twelve years of gym class helped me to become a better teacher and to say I don’t want anyone to feel the way I did [in gym class].

[Annotation 3]

Did you, do you have any memories, you know, that’s kind of an example of saying that’s not how I want to do that. Do you have any other examples of, like, mentors or teachers at the time who, like, oh, that’s the kind of person I emulate?

Yeah, yeah, I had–I liked teaching. I went to school to be a teacher. I ended up teaching for five years. Before I got into full time church work, which is still teaching. I did all the things that I was trained to do in church work in schools, but, um, yeah, I had some really good teachers. The school system was very good. The music department was very good, and I had some very good “across the board” teachers. But since I spent so much time in music, I would say I had some really good role models. With how to convey passion and love of art. To people who may not go into it professionally. Or they might, but that we can all be passionate about this. And I think that’s what you would want to do in any subject.

16:02

I was good in math, but I didn’t have a passion for it, but the people I took math class with did. And they understood that I didn’t have this passion, but I did well in it. So– so to say yes, you can enjoy something without passion, but you can convey passion and you can help people to learn and enjoy something even though they may not devote their life to it. I think that’s what any teacher would do at any age. I enjoyed French. I had a great French teacher. But I didn’t really use it [laughter] Right? I don’t use it. I sing in French, but I don’t converse with anyone in French, but I had a great time. So– it’s– what I can convey to people is that they may come to a church service or a concert and enjoy that and see my passion and share in it but may not have the same level of passion for it that I do for what I do.

In your town or, like, school district, did you go to, like,one school for elementary and then a different school for, like, middle school and then high school?

I went to one school for kindergarten through fifth grade and then a junior high school for sixth through nine and then high school for ten through twelve. And there were four elementary schools, two junior high schools, and one high school so we all kind of converged into one.

What was kinda, like, the transition like for you into middle school? Into that middle school experience?

Kinda smooth. I mean, yeah. There was nothing grandiose. I mean, today I see people with kindergarten graduation ceremonies and parties and gowns and renting halls for kindergarten graduation and eighth grade graduation and I didn’t have any graduation until high school. So, the transition for elementary to middle school was like, yeah, it was a new building, nothing like “Oh my god!” I didn’t get certificates and presents. Yeah, so, you know, that, I think, made it very smooth. It wasn’t a big deal, leaving one building and going to another, and meeting new kids, which isn’t a big deal. Going to high school was no big deal. We just went and now half the school was kids I didn’t go to school with before, but so what? And we were encouraged, as I said, these were kids that lived in town. The weird thing about that was half of the kids in my high school had my father as a principal. In junior high school. So, for some kids that had trouble with him, they might have tried to take it out on me [laughter]. Not physically. But I would get comments and it was weird because I knew kids who got taunted for being gay in high school. I got taunted because of who my dad was not because they perceived me. I mean, nobody was gay in my high school. They may– in 1978 in Ohio nobody was gay. It didn’t exist. But you could be perceived to be gayish. And I think the combination of me being a nerd and a music person and nonathletic was probably more of a thing than they perceived me to be gay so– I knew I was gay in high school. I didn’t have any friends who I thought were, you know, who I knew who were gay. Coming out was not an option. Nobody came out.

20:16

Did you have, like, language to put to that? Were you using terminology? For yourself, were you using terminology like gay or coming out or what was the– how did you– what was the vocabulary you were using to understand that experience at the time?

I think we knew the word gay and you could refer to something as gay, but not, not kind of the way we do now.

Yeah.

I think it wasn’t something that I pondered a lot. I knew I was attracted to men. I kind of assumed until junior high school that all the boys were. And they got married to women because they had to, it's what everyone did. But then it was during junior high school that I figured I have something that not everybody else has. And that there were a lot of boys that don’t feel the way about other boys that I do. And then in high school I was like, okay, I know there is a certain segment of the population that feels the way I do. There was enough in the media in the ‘70s about homosexuality that I thought, okay, I’m not alone here. But it’s not something I freely talk about and profess and identify with. It wasn’t really until college when I met other gay people and said, “Yeah, I’m one of you.”

[Annotation 2]

When was your, kind of, earliest,–when did you hit that realization that I have these feelings, like, how old were you when you had the differentiation or you understood that you were going on one path versus some of your peers?

I mean, I knew early on that there was a sexual attraction. I think first or second grade and I didn’t think that mine was any different. By maybe later in elementary school, third, fourth, fifth grade I kind of thought gee do other people feel this way? I don’t sense that other boys are attracted like I am to boys. And I said, I’m not attracted to girls and I didn’t feel the need to put on that I was attracted to girls. Like it seemed like other boys did. So, either they’re putting it on or they’re really attracted to girls. I’m not.

Yeah.

Right? That passion thing. I didn’t have that passion. And I couldn’t make it up. I couldn’t pretend to have the passion they have. So, yeah, later in elementary school I started to doubt that everybody was like me. Then by junior high school I was like, okay, this is a subset and then by high school, yeah, okay.

Yeah. Did you ever have any romantic connections during your early time?

There were boys that I was fond of. I knew that that was a romantic kind of attraction. It was nothing I expressed. I did have sexual relations with another boy. Starting around when I was in fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade with one boy and it was just sex. It wasn’t anything romantic. But I think he ended up pretty much being straight. It was kind of just like a let’s play with each other kind of thing. And at the time, I didn’t understand that that’s not uncommon for men, straight and gay, to have physical, sexual relationships with other boys and men and not have it be a romantic thing, um, but yeah, so for me it was, yeah, for me it was like “Oh wow. Cool. This is great,” and for him it was like, “Okay, let’s just get off.” [laughter] You know, and I think I kind of realized that early on and that was only three or four years.

Okay. In your family was it kind of a foregone conclusion that you would go to college or was it an assumed thing?

Yeah. Both my parents had advanced degrees. Both were involved in education. My father was particularly in education and it was just assumed. And it was because I did well in school and, yeah, we never talked about it. It was just like, you’re going to college. You’re going. Where do you want to go? What do you want to study?

Was there any kind of leaning or gentle nudge in a particular direction of a major or what you would do?

No. They let me decide, um, I think when I first said that I wanted to study music they said, you know, do you want to make money? [laughter] Are you planning to make money? They wanted me to make sure that it was a career that I was after, not just a passion. Not that that’s bad, to have passion in your career, but they both encouraged me to be practical and that’s when I said I wanted to go into education and that was, well, okay. You can teach. You can get a job. If I had said I wanted to be a performer, I think they probably would have sat me down and said, “We don’t want to support you until you’re 30.” [laughter] I think they would have been very practical about it and said, “What’s your plan? You’re going to have to make money. And we’re not going to support you.” They were educators. They didn’t have oodles of money. They would have. They wouldn’t have kicked me out of the house, but they would have said, “What’s your career path? How are you going to make money?” Yeah, but with education it was like, yeah, that’s, that’s solid.

27:00

And I taught. I taught for five years. And, yeah, I did well enough in other subjects that I could have changed my major if it seemed like it wasn’t going to work out either. I could have found something else.

What was the reason that you wanted to switch colleges?

Now we will get into the nitty gritty. Um, at the time– at the time, the college was a thousand miles from where I grew up. It was very near the city of Fargo, North Dakota in the middle of nowhere. The nearest city of any size was Minneapolis. That was a five hour drive. It was a great music school. I went there because it was a fantastic music school. I got a great education for two years, but it was so far and, yeah, in ‘78, ‘80, in the Midwest, I knew people were gay, but it was not something that you wanted to tell people. I had the same roommate for two years who was also a music student–

He told me toward the end of the second year of living in the same room with him that he never wanted to meet a homosexual. I didn’t have it in my heart to tell him that he had been sleeping in the same room with one and that I could name several of his friends that were also gay. I didn’t feel like it was my place to break that to him. There were people on that campus who knew– who knew, who would tell you there were not gay people at that college and would tell you how we don’t have those here. And this was Minnesota, a rather liberal state and Scandinavians, who tend to be rather liberal. Now, it’s very different, but at the time it was like, “Oh, we don’t have that here.” Not that my roommate had anything against them, but why bring that into your life? Why bring that trouble into your life? And because there were a lot of people on campus who didn’t really worry about that because we didn’t have that here. So, that was one reason. It was very limiting and artistically it was very limiting. This is the way we do music and all of the other ways are wrong and why would you want to do this any other– any different way. This is the way life is here. Don’t change it. If you want to grow as a musician, you have to, you have to at least investigate lots of different ways of interpreting, lots of different ways of performing, and choose to do one thing rather than “Listen, this is the right way and everything else is wrong. Don’t listen to that performance, that’s wrong. That’s the wrong way to do it. Don’t ever listen to that.” And although it was a great school, it was a great education, I learned a lot, it was like I need diversity, both in my personal life and my artistic life. um– so, I heard things in New Jersey were much different. That there were people who were openly gay and were proud of it. You know, so I decided to come here. The choirs that I ended up performing with performed in New York City, with– with diverging opinions about how music should be done. Yeah, yeah, and at the time that was why I made the change. But there are more reasons that I have come to accept.

Okay. Would you like to express any of those? What some of those reasons are/were?

Yeah. Yeah. Yes, I would. Let’s see, where did that story start? Um– in the sumer before I went to my first year of school, my parents drove me to Minnesota for, like, an orientation to see where I’d be living, to, you know, kinda investigate which classes you are going to take and I sat down with this man who said, “Okay, we need to sign you up for these music classes,” because I was a music major and he said, “I will be your piano teacher.” And I’m like, “Oh, okay.” I come to find out when I get there that he only took one student every year. And that he was the head of the department, he could only have so much teaching responsibility. He was the teacher of two of my most intense, important music classes. The two classes, it’s like, what’s the one that makes a doctor decide not to become a doctor? Organic chemistry.

Yeah.

It’s the organic chemistry of music school. If you don’t do well in this class, drop out. Don’t be a music major, drop out. And he was the teacher of those two classes that I was in. He was my piano teacher. I was his chosen. Of all the incoming freshmen, he picked me to be his student and we were supposed to have two half hour lessons every week with our– our main instrument teacher. And I ended up having two two-and-a-half to three hour lessons with him. Twice a week. He and I were the only two in this small room. I would be playing the piano. He would be coaching me. And I thought something was unusual about that because none of my friends had more than the two half hours. Half hour and they were gone. And I thought why, well why? I had my lessons for two and a half hours. [audio cuts out] Freshman year, I could feel him getting closer and closer and then he would be next to me. He would be sitting on the bench with me. Then his hand would be on my leg. And saying anything? It never occurred to me that I could say, don’t do that. That even though I thought it was unusual, because of who he was, because of the control he had of my happiness, that he could make life difficult for me, that he was an important person in my success there. It never occurred to me that I shouldn’t allow it to happen. And that was the entire freshmen year.

[Annotation 4]

34:28

I went home for the summer and came back and it got sexual. He would grope me. He would fondle me. He would invite me to his house. I never went. Nothing left, nothing progressed any farther than in that room, in his office, but it was, and again, even when that happened it was because, “Well, this is because I’m gay. This is what happens between a gay student and a teacher because I’m part of a subset. This isn’t happening to any of my other friends in their private lessons because they’re straight.” That because I was gay it was unusual, it was unique, it was a small group. That this is what normal life would have to be with people in power. You let them do this. But I knew that there was something wrong about it. But, I think back on it and it never occurred to me that I could say anything. So, I have come to realize that that was a significant factor in why I left there. But I couldn’t admit it to myself at the time and these other things were safe enough to say. I’m not happy here because– I’m not happy here because I want to do this, I want to go there. That element could just stay in the background. And I never told anyone. He was the only person that knew anything that happened in that room. The things I think back on now, he was not an attractive man. He was a nasty man. He was not a nice man. He smoked constantly. He smoked constantly during my lessons, which I found vile. It stunk and he would douse himself in cologne, this bad cologne to try to cover up the cigarette smell, which was the worst so the whole experience was disgusting. And I try to think, well, what if he had been attractive? [laughter]. He was also fifty, I was eighteen. What if he was younger? What if he was attractive? I mean, things would have been different if it weren’t disgusting.

[Annotation 5]

37:00

But it was. It was disgusting and it was something, “All right, I have to put up with this.” So that was– that was an important part of why I left there and moved 1500 miles away to New Jersey where things were different, where I could be gay and I could say I was gay and I had friends that said, “Yes, we’re gay. It’s okay.” So, um, I needed that change. Mentally and artistically and to take myself out of that power situation. To say I am not going to do this with anyone else. This is not going to happen. Um– when I was in high school, I had a sexual relationship with one of my teachers, um, which it was consensual, but I was seventeen, he was thirty-four. And I went into it with eyes wide open. I look back on it now and think, well, what kind of judgement would he have to make as a thirty-four-year-old teacher having a sexual relationship with one of his students who was seventeen, right. I see that. But, at the time it was like I want to do this, so having sex wasn’t something unusual. It wasn’t like I had never had sex before. Never had that kind of power. This was one of my teachers. He was married. He had a kid. He’s teaching in the same school system as my parents, right, so that I think, having that experience, um, at least my eyes weren’t shut. I can’t say that I was innocent and that my eyes were shut and I didn’t know what was going on. I knew what was going on. Of course I knew what was going on, but the difference in the situations became intolerable because it’s like, all right, I can’t understand this not happening, but I don’t want to be in this, so the only way to get out of it is to remove myself rather than say, “Don’t do this. This is not right. You have no place doing this.” And what was he going to do? Make my life difficult? And have me come out and say, “This is what he’s doing to me in my lessons.” That would have, I don’t know what would have happened if I would have said that. He would have lost his job. You know, nor did I want to do that. I don’t want to be that person. I, you know, at that time I was eighteen, nineteen years old. I don’t want to be the whistleblower. I just want to go to school. I want to play the piano. It was too much. It was too much for me to handle and the only way that I saw to get out was to say, hey, I have reason enough to leave here and this doesn’t have to be [unintelligible].

[Annotation 6]

40:12

The question I have is, I guess the question I have is more of a technical one, what your reason was– like, you’ve articulated the reasons why you didn’t want to say something or why– you had perfectly legitimate other reasons to remove yourself from the situation. My question I guess is, and part of it might be– it’s also a generational conversation. Do you have any concept of who you would have gone to or how you would have said–

At the time, at the time, no. It didn’t even occur to me. The way I think back on it now, it never occurred to me. I never even entertained the idea of it even being wrong. Maybe I wanted to convince myself that this was just the way things were going to be.

Yeah.

Or that it was the way I had to play the game as a gay man. But no, I don’t even remember thinking, “Wow, I should go to somebody. I should say something to him.” You know, it was hard enough for me to talk to my parents. How could I talk to this guy? This stranger? Who’s really influencing my life. And I– I need to be on his good side.

[Annotation 7]

Yeah.

Or not be here at all. It was an either or, yeah, and I think back now, what would I have done? Who would I have gone to? I can’t– I– I don’t know. We must have more in place now than we did then. I would hope so. I would hope that some kid in my situation, and I don’t think it’s un– I don’t think it’s rare that people get fondled. Men, women. I don’t think it’s a gay thing. I think that, at least what I’ve come to hear is that that’s not too rare. For that in a private music lesson, there’s something a little bit too physical going on. Even if it’s slight. But I would hope now that a kid– nineteen-year-old kid would say, “Yeah, that’s not going to happen.” Or they could say, “You do that again and I go to your boss, whoever.” You know, I didn’t know the chain of command to say, who do I go to who I know is going to believe me, and who do I go to that is not going to take his side? And how do I know that he’s not going to go to and preempt and say, you know, there’s something wrong with this kid. He hit me. Or make up some story that makes me look like an idiot and have me thrown out of school. I mean, that’s I think what I didn’t even want to think about. This couldn’t end up good for me.

Hmm. When do you think that those kinds of conversations did start to come up for you? You know, when do you think those kinds of realizations or that kind of need to talk about it did come up for you?

To talk about this specific incident?

Yeah.

Um– I can’t say I didn’t think about it. I didn’t forget about it. It was always something I knew happened. But I didn’t give it a lot of thought. Until–I was in counseling. It was 2016. How many years is that? Thirty, thirty-seven years later. I was in counseling for another issue and it came up. We were talking about something else and then I said, “Oh, and when I was in college,” and I had said it out loud and it was the first time I had said it out loud. And it was the first time I had told another– anyone. Of what happened, and, you know, that was thirty-seven years later. Um. I think it came up because I needed to figure it out. I needed to figure out what happened. I needed to figure out why did I do what I did. I needed to– why didn’t I do what and did, and that’s when I sought out the center. I said, you know what, there’s gotta be something to this, let me figure this out. There was a need and I can’t say there was a need up until then. It brought itself out. I wasn’t talking about anything, about anything that had any relationship to that situation, but it came out and I thought, “Okay, I gotta do something.” That’s when I found the support group, the Male Survivors of Sexual Violence support group at the center, this center. I called them. I went in for an interview and I think what I didn’t, I didn’t know was like, I wasn’t a kid. I wasn’t a minor, you know. It wasn’t– I wasn’t raped. But, and I remember saying to the woman who interviewed me, I said, “Does this count? Is this bad enough?” [laughter] You know?

[Annotation 8]

What was their response?

Yeah. She said yeah. I was sexually assaulted. It’s sexual assault. It’s illegal. It’s wrong. And I had never considered it wrong. I knew I didn’t want it, but I needed someone to tell me that was wrong. It was wrong of him to do that. He was wrong. And it wasn’t something I had to do because I was gay. It wasn’t something that was expected. It wasn’t something that I should have needed to allow. And I had never considered that before.

Hmm. Yeah.

So, I went to the group and, you know, to hear other stories– and they’re not the same, not the same situations, but the things that we went through are very similar– it was nice to hear from other people who had pain, who had suffered pain because of a situation and I could express my pain and say, “Yes, this hurt me. Yes, he was wrong. I feel bad because I didn’t do this. I feel bad because I didn’t do that. And I don’t need to feel bad anymore.” To hear that other people had gone through what I would consider worse situations, more violent situations, say to me, “You don’t need to feel bad about that. You don’t need to be ashamed of that. You don’t need to feel bad because you didn’t say anything.” And to, to see that– the power structure in the relationship and to see myself as helpless at the time and not knowing what to do and say, “Okay. Stop feeling bad about that. Stop beating yourself up. Stop pushing this into the back of your head as just a minor part of growing up and say, look, bring it out, talk about it, figure it out, and move on.” And, it allowed me to move on and say, you know what? It happened. It’s not something I am going to live under. For it to fall on me. I am going to say, “No. Move it off to the side. I’m not under it. It’s not going to fall down on me.” And to tell other people, to say, “This happened. It’s not a secret.” I did look him up. He’s dead. That didn’t give me– that didn’t give me any comfort. Knowing that he was dead. But it did give me comfort in knowing, all right, he’s not going to come after me. If I say something to somebody. My piano teacher in college sexually assaulted me, I only had one. I ended up having another one [piano teacher] when I went to the other college, but if I say this happened to me in 1979, I only had one piano teacher in 1979.

Yeah.

So, to say, all right, well, he’s still alive and, you know. It’s funny because the teacher that I had sex with in high school is still alive and still active and is friends with quite a few of my friends that I went to high school with. I haven’t spoken to him since, and our mutual friends, the kids I went to high school with, who know him, are like, “Oh, how come you don’t, you know, why don’t you call him?” Again, I don’t– I don’t feel the need to have to– to settle anything there. Again, that was consensual. I went into it willingly. I went out of it willingly. It didn’t come out of me that way this other thing did because I hadn’t hidden, I want to say I had hidden it, but I didn’t just, you know, put it over here.

50:36

And it had come out. In fact, the other situation doesn’t– you know.

Um– so you, you made this decision to move to New Jersey. What school did you end up– where did you land in New Jersey? How did you wind up in New Jersey?

I came here because of Westminster Choir College. It was, at the time, a small, independent music college. I was always a singer. I was always interested in being a director. A conductor. Choir. Band. All of that. That’s really what I wanted to do. I went to the first college to teach, but when you teach, you are a director. A choir director, a band director. I wanted to do that, but this was a school that was all about choir directing and singing, so it was kind of a way of honing in on what I wanted to do, and I, um, I couldn’t see myself staying in Minnesota. I could have easily gotten a teaching job in Minnesota– the school was very connected to the community– but I didn’t want to stay in Minnesota. I wanted to be in a place where I could come out and do more than just teach high school in rural Minnesota. Not that I couldn’t have moved, but staying where I was could have set me up easily for that. And being in metropolitan New York would have set me up for a lot more options. [laughter] Shall we say a lot more options. But it was a way of saying, that’s what I want to do. I want to be a better conductor. I want to conduct choir. I want to learn to sing better. I want to be a musician that is open to a lot of ideas and a school that really puts itself in the middle of a lot of ideas. And saying, “We are open to all of this.” Rather than saying, “No, this is the way you are going to do it and when you leave here this is the way you are going to stay.” And, you know, so, yeah.

And, how was your time there?

Um– I had a good time. I did some great things. I was in the touring choir. We toured the country, we toured Italy, we were in residence at a music festival in Italy for a whole summer. I went to Alaska. On a singing tour. It was weird because being sort of cloistered and confined at one place and then going to the other and that– having so many gay guys. It’s a music school in suburban New Jersey. There were a lot of gay guys. I was kind of overwhelmed, so I can’t say I had a smooth sexual history there. It was kind of turbulent at times, but that’s not unusual for someone who is 20, 21. To have kind of like, a sexually turbulent time, but at least it was like, you know, this is what I want to do. I want to have sex with men, and I’m okay everybody knowing that, yeah, I’m seeing him. Everybody knows. Okay. Nobody cares. That’s nice. Oh, you’re not seeing him anymore. Oh, you’re seeing him now? Actually, I’m seeing both. Okay. Rather than having to be terrified of who might find out, well, I slept with him. Or, like, when my roommate up in Minnesota said it he didn’t want to meet a homosexual, I’m like, well, you know him, and him and him, and him and her and him. They’re all gay.

Yeah.

I mean, I don’t know what would have happened if I would have told him that. He might have broken. His head would have exploded. Or he might just have said, “You’re crazy. You’re lying.” You know.

Yeah.

It wouldn’t have been– so it was– he wouldn’t have believed me. So, it was– if you say how was my time there? It was what you would expect from being a college student in your twenties. Early 20s in the early ‘80s. Pre-AIDS.

55:15

What was your– did you start developing a plan for yourself of what was going to happen after college or kind of next steps. What you were gonna– where you were gonna go?

I still wanted to teach. I wanted to get into teaching, probably high school. And, yeah, that’s kind of what I went after. I have to run to the bathroom.

Sure. Go for it. I’ll pause and we’ll just take a break. Yeah, I meant to say at the beginning, and I’m sorry, that feel free, we can take a pause whenever you– whenever we need, so great.

So, I think that, one of the things that, you know, that transition time, coming out of your educational experience and then making– what happens after that college phase, right? So, how did you start making decisions, or how did you, like, orient yourself, like, I’m moving here and I’m gonna go after this kind of job? You know, what was that– what was that process for you? Did you have a game plan or were you kind of just waiting for things to happen?

As soon as I graduated, I– it was mid-year because I transferred and I lost a semester so I graduated in December. Most teaching jobs become available in the Fall. I worked as a security guard at a local place, got a job, and then applied for a teaching job. I got a job teaching high school. I taught high school for three years. It was a Catholic high school. They eliminated the position.

It was in New Jersey?

It was in New Jersey, yeah. I taught Catholic high school. Vocal Instrumental Music for three years, um, they eliminated the position. I then taught grammar school music for one year, um, and then I taught middle school vocal and instrumental music for one year and then I went to grad school. And when I was in grad school, I got a job in a church and found that I could do a lot of the things that I loved about teaching, but it was for a wider range of ages. It wasn’t confined to the age range of the school. It was pre-school to ninety years old and I was doing choral music, I was playing. I was performing a lot more in church. I was playing all the time. Teaching, you’re not playing as much. You’re accompanying sometimes. You’re directing. You’re talking. This was doing a lot of that teaching stuff, but also performing. I love to perform. I was singing all the time, I was playing all the time, so yeah, that was fun.

What did you do your grad work in? Where did you do your grad work?

Mason Gross. Rutgers. My Master’s is choral conducting, which I– what I am most passionate about.

And then, when you started working in churches, did you work for a couple of different churches or did you kind of settle in one place or–

Um– I had been working part time in churches while I was teaching and then when I was in grad school a job came open at a very large catholic church. It was full-time. I didn’t have to teach and work in the church. I could just work in the church. It was benefits and a salary, so I was like, yeah. I didn’t envision working full-time in church when I was growing up or in college. I knew I– I had always been involved in church and I had always done church music, but I didn’t think it was something I could do full-time and this came open and it was like, “Okay. I know church. I can do this. It’s a full-time salary with benefits.” I ended up doing it at three different, very large Catholic churches. For 28 years, Full-time.

1:00:04

It became less and less enjoyable the more political churches got. It became. They knew I was gay, everyone knew I was gay, but, you know, constantly being told that the two worst things in life were abortion and gay marriage? I don’t need to subject myself to being told that I’m wrong, that there’s something wrong with me. You know? You can be gay. Being gay is okay. Don’t have sex. Don’t talk about sex. Don’t talk about marriage. Don’t talk about relationships. Go ahead and be gay. You know, I was tolerated. I didn’t want to be tolerated. It’s different. And once I retired, I officially retired from that full-time career, I started subbing. And I mostly subbed in churches who are very gay friendly and consider me being gay as a plus, like, wow, that’s great. They love that I’m gay. They celebrate that I’m gay. They love that I have a husband and we’ve been together and, yeah, it’s different. It’s different being tolerated than it is being celebrated.

[Annotation 9]

Are those churches that you’re subbing in predominantly Catholic or are they also Protestant or–

Not Catholic. [laughter] Not at all. I rarely ever get called to play in Catholic churches. I am playing this Sunday in a Catholic church, but, I guess, I don’t know, they just don’t call me. I think what is, is that when I was playing in Catholic churches, I had assistants because the churches were so large that we needed more than one organist. So, when I went away on vacation, the other organists covered for me. I didn’t need to hire somebody from the outside.

Yeah.

But I think a lot of the bigger catholic churches, it’s all in house. And I’m not in house anymore. Occasionally I get called to do something, but most of the time it’s Methodists, Presbyterian, Lutheran. Congregational. I did my first two, um, I did my first Shabbat service. On a Friday night and I did another service for a Synagogue. That was nice. But, yeah, it’s fun. You walk in, they give you the music, you play it, and you go home. You take your check and you go home. And you pick it. If you can’t find me the music, I can’t play it. You know, I don’t have to do all the leg work and all the worry and sit at staff meetings and– you want it faster? I’ll play faster. You want it slower? Too loud? Okay.

How did you meet your husband?

In church. [laughter] We met twenty-eight years ago. In my first full-time Catholic church position. One of the people– two of the people in the choir sang in a community group and knew a couple of guys that could come and help out. And one of the guys that came was my husband. So, he came and sang for a week. I became totally enamored with him. He ended up getting married to a woman. I was in a relationship with– another story– at the time I was in a relationship with a Catholic priest, who I ended up being a relationship with for eleven years. He and I and my husband and his wife became friends. We were friends for about four years and neither of us really wanted to be in the relationships we were in. Um– my husband was with a woman and I was with, you know, a man committed to the Church. He couldn’t be public. You know, that whole situation again. I need to be me. Gee, do you hear a theme? But, yeah, we were both, I don’t know, we– I had accepted the fact that I was very fond of him and very attracted to him, but that nothing was going to happen and then one day something happened and then it was like, “Okay, now what are we going to do?” And we both said we wanted to be together.

1:05:07

He didn’t want to be with his wife. I didn’t want to be with the priest. So, it happened. And we’ve been together ever since. That was twenty-four years ago. We’ve been together twenty-four.

You had mentioned that one of the things that was difficult about being in the Catholic environment was when things started getting political. Do you specifically mean that advocacy around gay marriage and that whole–

Yeah. When gay marriage started to become a reality there was a lot of– from the pulpit– “This can’t happen. We need to stop this. This is evil. This is wrong. And you, as faithful Christians, faithful catholic Christians, need to stop this.” And I, during that time, got married. To my husband. On a Sunday. [laughter] Not in Church. So it was that. It was, we were told, from the pulpit, that there was only one choice of who to vote for in 2016 and it was the choice that would end abortion. We weren’t given a name, but we were told as Catholic Christians that we only had one choice to vote for in November of 2016 and it was the choice that would eliminate abortion. Do what you have to do. I think that crossed the line of what a church can say politically, but it was pretty obvious. They skirted without saying a name, but I think it was– I don’t think it was legal. It went beyond what churches are allowed to do politically. Which is nothing.

When did you– did you retire?

2017. I actually had been prepared to be fired. I got married in 2016 and I knew I wanted to get out of working full-time for the catholic church. I said, okay, this is it. They're going to fire me for this. Because I had friends that were fired from Catholic church music jobs when they got married. One the day after his wedding. He got fired. So, I said, okay, it’s coming, I don’t have to quit now. They’ll fire me. Took all of my personal stuff out of my office, waited for it to happen, and it never happened. I know, so a year went by and I said, I’m going to have to do this myself. So, I talked to my husband. I said, “I’m still going to work, I can teach yoga, I have my license to be a massage therapist. I’m not retiring. I’m just going to work for myself. I’ll sub in churches. I’ll sub every Sunday if I have to and we made it work.” I put in my resignation that I am retiring. I’ve taken my pension and bye bye. And I thought because of my vast experience in Catholic liturgy, which is unique. Not a lot of organists know Catholic liturgy well, and I had been doing it full-time for twenty-eight years. I thought I would be subbing all the time in Catholic churches and I’m never– hardly ever got called. I just found my home elsewhere. And very happily when you see a pride flag on your way into church. It’s like, hey, I never thought this would happen.

1:09:00

So, you and your husband have known each other for twenty-nine years, you’ve been together for twenty-four, you got married in 2016–

We got a domestic partnership in 2004. We got a civil union in 2007. And we got legally married in 2016. So, we let the law catch up to us [corrected].

Gotcha. So, of those kind of like, three benchmark events, which was– did you at any time ever have like a family celebration or like a party or a–

We had–

The civil union in 2007 was on a boat. At Liberty State Park with the Statue of Liberty behind us. We got married on the deck and then took a four hour cruise around Manhattan with 160 of our friends. Ninety-five of which were choral musicians, so after I said my vows, I turned around, raised up my hands, and everybody sang.

Oh. That’s great.

It was a great party. And then we got married in 2016. Another couple that we’re close with, another gay couple, who had been together longer than we have said, “Well, if you’re going to get married, we’ll get married,” and we have a lot of friends in common so we had a double wedding. I became an ordained minister and I married them. And one of them already was an ordained minister and he married us. We got married on the deck here in Matawan at a restaurant. Same situation. After we said the vows, I turned around and [laughter]. And that was on a Sunday too.

You had mentioned at one point that you had never actually spoken the words “I’m gay” to your parents but you had invited them to your wedding. Which event was– which events were they at?

In 2007, for the civil union, both my parents came. My mother died in 2011 and my father came to our wedding in 2016. Although he had, he had dementia. He was starting to have more severe dementia at the time. But he was totally aware of what was happening. Actually, my mother had Alzheimer’s at the time of our first wedding, but she was aware of what it was, totally aware, so, so–

Yeah.

And my dad said the word gay to me once. You know, we had never talked about anything, but he– us, my sister and me, and the family, family meaning, family, extended family to go on a cruise and he said, “Why don’t we go to Key West.” He had never been to Key West. He wanted to go on this cruise to Key West and he had said, “There are gay things there.” [laughter] Trying to convince me to go with him to Key West. Like, oh really? But what’s weird about that is, we found out in 2000 that my dad had a first wife. That my sister and I didn’t know about. And we were both terrified to bring it up to him. And it came out somehow to my sister and they talked about and he said, “Oh, I should talk to your brother,” and we never did. He never brought it up to me and I never brought it up to him. And I thought, okay.

Was there something concerning to you about the information where you thought you needed to have a conversation?

No. And he assured my sister that he didn’t have any kids. That we didn’t have any half siblings out there. It was just something that happened that he didn’t want to talk about. And my mother knew. But it wasn’t something he felt– he didn’t feel that we needed to know. My mother thought we did and my mother tried to convince him to tell us, but he wouldn’t. But it came out. My sister found out. She told me and he knew that we knew. But it wasn’t something he was comfortable talking about. Yeah.

Then he was– he started seeing a woman after my mother died. He started seeing a woman who lived in the senior complex. And he asked me if it was okay. If I was okay with him seeing this woman. Because my mother had died. And I was like, “Dad?” I mean, with my history? [laughter] I didn’t go into it, but that’s what I thought. I was like, if you knew, if you knew my dating, I never dated, we didn’t date, you know, that’s something I don’t know how to do. I don’t know how to date. I never did. You hooked up. You had sex. And you ended up together or you didn’t. And people knew or they didn’t. You definitely didn’t date anybody. But, yeah, he was like, are you okay with me dating this woman? Have at it. Who am I to judge, right? But it’s weird. It’s weird to have him ask my permission. Wow.

If you were to go back and offer yourself advice at any specific point in your life, what would the advice be and where would you kind of, like, insert yourself? With what you know now, when would you want to go back?

Learn to say no. Saying no is part of the greater struggle of talking. That there’s nothing wrong with talking. It’s not so much that my parents– I don’t think my parents wanted to teach me not to talk, they just didn’t teach me how to. Nor was it something that we sat down as a family and did other than where we were going to go on vacation. My mother had breast cancer. She told me and my sister when we were both in high school the night before she went in for surgery. “By the way, tomorrow I’m having cancer surgery.”

1:16:00

“Um– all right– glad you could finally bring it up. Were you gonna tell us?” So, it was something that they struggled with and I see that now. They struggled with it and didn’t know how to fully teach us how to do it and that’s the example I have [laughter], right? Oh, by the way, guess what I’m doing tomorrow. So, I would say, learn to say no. Learn to– I’m expressive– I was taught to be expressive musically, to lay out in a song or in a piano piece, my bare soul. And I was rewarded for that and praised for that– but, I’m okay with it now, but for so long of my life it was, I couldn’t think of how to do that. Why am I so uncomfortable? I was nervous, still today, about talking today, but I’m not terrified now, I’m not, I don’t think it’s wrong. But for so much of my life, it was just, it was hard for me to say how I felt. It was hard for me to bring up a conversation that I might find challenging. And that I’ve done it and I could have done it so–

I could have talked to my parents. I could have talked to my grandparents. I could have talked to my sister. There’s so much I could have done. And I could have said no. I could have, what’s neat now is being a sub, being a sub in churches? When I was working in churches it was pretty much someone wanted me to do something. “All right. Play this. This is the music we want. These are the hymns. Play this. Do this. Provide music for this hour. Play now.” You know, I was a servant. And now it’s like, “How much, what time, what kind of organ? No. I’m sorry. I can’t. No.” To say no is so nice. “No, that’s not enough money. I need more money to do that job.” It’s thrilling. [laughter] To say no. And to say, “This is what I need. You want me to do this? Um– I need this much and I need this much time and no I’m not going to do that. I can do it if I do this, but not that. That’s fine.” I should have learned to do that when I was five. I would have said to me as a five year old, “This is how to say what you feel. This is how to say what you want. This is how to express what you need. And this is how to say no.” I think that would have been the time. As a five year old. But I’m not saying I didn’t do things that I wanted, right? I haven’t had trouble doing things that I wanted, but I have, throughout my life, done things that I didn’t really want to do. So, I still kind of have the– I still kind of have the habit of saying, “Well, just do it. Just do it and get it done with.” You know, that’s kind of ingrained in me. And I don’t want it to be. I want to be in the habit of saying, “What do you want me to do? What are you going to do? And what am I going to get out of it?” First, rather than saying, “Oh, just do it. Do it and get it done with.” And my husband has been good about that. He’ll say, “Do you want to do that? Do you want to take that job? Are they paying you? Are they not paying you? Do you want to volunteer to do that job? Say no.”

1:20:00

And it is, it’s very– I think the fear is that if I say no, no one is ever going to ask me to do anything again. I won’t work again. How fatalistic. If I don’t do this job, I will never get hired again. I will get blacklisted and never work again. And that’s not true. So, that’s another thing I would say: All those voices in your head that are telling you this, don’t believe them all. Some of them you can believe, but don’t believe them all. Everything you hear inside your head is not true. Whatever the little voices are. I don’t mean voices, but you know.

Yeah. Was there anything–

But, yeah, no go ahead.

I was just gonna, my next question was, was there anything walking into this interview that you assumed you were going to be asked that– that I haven’t asked yet? Or is there a question you would ask you if you were conducting the interview?

I guess not knowing what you need in order to do what you are going to do, is there more that I can provide that will serve that? And I don’t say that because I am trying to hold back anything, just there may be something that I could talk about that might be helpful.

I appreciate that question. I would say that you’ve been incredibly kind of forthright and also reflective throughout the entire time, so there’s nothing, there’s nothing that I would say in terms of kind of needing to go back and, you know something that’s missing. There’s no– it’s also, it’s your reflection. It’s your recollection so it’s–

Yeah. So you’re, you’re partnered with The Center. Is there more about that experience that would be helpful?

Um, uh, uh, you know so– the answer to your question is there’s no answer to your question. It’s– at the end of the day it’s– it’s– it’s what is most accessible to you. It’s most what is kind of like– it’s what you driving the interview is about then great, that’s what the content is, right? It’s not us searching for anything specific.

Yeah. Yeah, okay.

Um– you know I think that, yeah. So it’s not really us probing for anything specific.

Yeah. And my experience there was with a support group so it’s not like I can talk about what happened there.

Sure.

But I think what I can say is, and this opinion has no direct connection to the Center, so I would want to not engage in that part of the conversation, but to be able to talk makes me a better listener. I’m not saying I was never a good listener, because I did spend a lot of my life listening and not talking. But when I am able to talk, and when I am able to talk about myself and share parts of myself that might have been uncomfortable and primitive at some point, that I think it’s made me a different listener. A more comfortable listener. Often when people would talk about their personal– would make me uncomfortable so now that I’m– and my connection’s unstable– can you still hear me?

I did. It came back. I heard your voice. Your video [cuts out]

But, um, in 2008 I was diagnosed with cancer. It’s a very dangerous cancer. It still is a very dangerous cancer. It’s eye cancer. It’s very rare. It’s very dangerous. A lot of the times, more than half of the times, it ends up in death. Um– my particular cancer was the more dangerous kind and almost always results in death but it has now been twelve years so now I have survived twelve years when I was only really expected to survive for two. So, before that I would have been very uncomfortable or probably would have pushed away from someone talking about, talking to me about a serious illness, about death.

1:25:04

About cancer. I would have been, don’t talk to me. Or I probably just would have been, “Okay, gotta go.” And now it’s like, someone can come up to me and say my brother just committed suicide and I would say, “Tell me more. You need to talk about this.” I would be like, yeah, “I’ve been there. Talk to me. What are you afraid of?” What’s– you know, rather than back off. So, this is kind of similar in that when you’re willing to share and start sharing, it’s so much easier to be the listener and say “Wow, yeah. How did that feel?” You know? I want to know how it felt. And ask me a question. You want to know. When I talk about my cancer, people stop me. Don’t say that. No, I almost died, okay? So, to see someone else feel uncomfortable, I have a lot more compassion and empathy to say, “I understand you feel uncomfortable. Anytime you want to talk about it, it’s okay, but you won’t have to talk about it.” So, yeah, it’s neat being, I guess, a sharer. And not being annoyed by other people sharing.

But, yeah, counseling has helped. Being in a support group has helped. Listening to other people talk about being uncomfortable and get emotional about life is– I wish I had done it sooner. And again, I’m an artist. I’m a musician. I express. I get emotional. I need the music to be emotional. And I play– I must have played and sung at three thousand funerals. In my professional life. That’s a lot of grief. That’s a lot of tears. That’s a lot of people at the bottom of their emotional spectrum. And I have to sing Ave Maria. Right? I have to sing, you know, something about resurrection and they’re there bawling their eyes out. So, I think what made that easy for me is my ability to not be expressive allows me to kind of put up a curtain and say I am going to do my music job, ignore that fact that you’re convulsing in grief, do that job, take my check go home and say, I’m glad I could do that job. I hope it helped.

But then to look out at the group and say, wow, that’s grief, um, that ability may not have made me as professional. But it might have made me a better musician as well as a better person– to be able to deal with emotion and, you know, deal with grief, and understand my parents when my mother couldn’t tell me that she was going in for surgery. That it was so incredibly difficult for her that she had to wait until the absolute last minute. That now I can look at that and say, “Okay, now I understand that and I’m not going to make her wrong for that.”

1:29:00

It’s just, it’s her. It’s her journey. I wonder what, if– I often suspect that my family might have been more– what’s the word? When you’re pre-disposed? Receptive. I have a feeling my family might have been more receptive if I had been the one to be more out there. If I had understood that they’re uncomfortable. It’s not me. It’s– the situation isn’t wrong. It’s not wrong for me to say, “Mom, I’m gay.” Right? Wanting to tell her that is not wrong. Understanding that she’s uncomfortable with it. Not me being gay, but me talking about it. I think they knew. I, I suspect, and I would love to ask them, I suspect that my mother knew I was gay when I was in elementary school. I think they knew. And again, I don’t think they thought it was wrong, they just weren’t used to talking about it or bringing it up for me to talk about so I, and I’m often– I’m pretty sure she knew when I was in high school. She gave a couple of hints that I could have been and I didn’t– maybe that was her way of getting me to talk about it and that’s as far as she went, was to drop a hint. And I didn’t pick up on it. I was too scared.

I wonder what it would have been like if I had said, “Yeah, yeah, I am.” Yeah, okay, so now we can be open with this, right? Not too open but, you know. I know you know, so it’s out there. Maybe it would have made them different people, but you know [laughter].

Your question to me was, if I could go back, I would have just pushed me, not them, I think pushing me to be a little bit more open would have allowed them to be a more expressive family. But then, and living with Italians having, you know, Brooklyn-Italian in-laws is like, “Oh, wow, you can say that kind of thing?” Wow. And then it’s kiss, kiss, hug, hug, let’s have pasta.

You just called me stupid. That’s the stupidest thing. I mean, Judge Judy? “You’re an idiot!” “Oh, do you want more, do you need more salt? All right, you need to put more salt on your–yeah, I know I should have put more salt on it.” I just go. But then the level of volume– and my family– it’s kind of like, wow. But I think– I think– I think I could have been more a part of that. If I had had practice. I think it’s practice. You have to have practice telling someone that’s stupid. You’re wrong. That’s not the way you do that. You need practice at that. I’m not saying I want to be rude, but to be able to just say, “That’s not right. This isn’t right. If you’re going to do that, I’m going to do this.”

1:32:52

To be that. You need practice at doing that. It’s not that I didn’t want to say things like that. You always want to say, stop it, but you need practice saying it. And I didn’t get practice saying it until way late in my life. So practice and going back and making sure that there are ways for people to say no. In general, not just sexually, but in general. We were never taught to say no. We were taught to say yes, to take a job. Go out, interview, make yourself look good, and when they offer you the job, say yes. Give me the job. Rather than, “What are you going to give me?” I was never taught to negotiate a job, to go into an interview and say, “This is what I need.” I was always taught, ask them what they’re going to give you. They’re going to give me the job, oh good, but say this is what I need. “That’s not enough salary. I need more benefits. I need more equipment. I can’t do my job if unless I have more.” To ask for things, to say what you need and to say no, that’s not acceptable. To teach kids. To teach, especially when you start getting into college and you have to start getting a job: know what you want, know how to present yourself, but know how to say this is what I need. Tactfully.

Don’t teach people to be rude and self-centered. That’s my fear, my fear is people are going to think of me as being rude and self-centered if I say what I’m thinking or what I need. They’ll go, “Don’t talk to me like that.” When I’m at a family dinner and somebody says “You’re an idiot.” “Don’t talk to me like that. You can talk to your Italian friends but as a midwestern WASP, don’t talk to me like that– it’s offensive.”

In my Brooklyn-Italian family, it’s not offensive to be called an idiot. This is the worst cheesecake I’ve ever eaten. To the person who made it. That’s not offensive. And I’d be like, “Don’t talk to me that way. I made this dinner. You don’t like it, then don’t eat it.” Yeah, practice.

Practice. You need to practice. But like I practice music this is how I’m going to say, “You’re not paying me? I can’t do it.” It’s too much work for me to volunteer. They asked me to do something, to bring a keyboard, a big heavy keyboard, and an amp, wires, extension cord, to a job and I’m like, “Is this volunteer?” “Um, well, we, we–” “I can bring the keyboard if I’m paid.”

And they said, “Okay, we can pay you,” but I think if I hadn’t have said that I would have been volunteering dragging a 500 pound keyboard, setting it up, dragging it home, and not getting paid at all. And then going home and being like, “Why did I  do that?”

Yeah.

[laughter] Yeah. You volunteer, you volunteer because you want to, not because you’re too afraid to say no.

Well, thank you for your time. I don’t have any other follow-up questions or anything like that. I think what I’ll do now is I’ll just pause the recording.

1:36:47