UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
MADISON’S LGBT COMMUNITY, 1960s-PRESENT

Interview #904
WAGNER, R. RICHARD “DICK”

Wagner, R. Richard “Dick” (1943- )
UW Graduate Student (History), Dane County elected official, Wisconsin State employee
At UW: 1965-1971
						
Interviewed: 2008 (1/25 & 2/14)	
Length: 150 minutes 
Interviewer: Troy Reeves/Vicki Tobias (Tobias solo interviewer on 2nd interview)
Index by: Troy Reeves/Vicki Tobias
Series: Madison’s LGBT Community 1960’s-present

00:00:00 	Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction

TR:  	All right, today is, what is the date, 25th of January, 2008.  This is the first interview with Dick Wagner.  We're here in 306B in the Memorial Library on the campus of UW-Madison.  This interview is being conducted for what we are currently calling the LGBT, Madison's LGBT Community 1960s to the Present, and it's a fluid title.  I'm sure it will change as we progress through this project.  The interviewers are Troy Reeves and Vicki Tobias.  All right, Dick, the first question is actually two questions but they're fairly simple, at least in the number of words.  

00:00:52

TR:	Why Madison?  Why 1965?

DW:  	Okay, the 1965 is easier because I finished my undergraduate education, which was at the University of Dayton, and I had a major in history and was interested in continuing history studies.  It was also the period of the Vietnam War, so graduate school was a sensible choice to make at that point.  And I looked at Chicago, the University of Chicago and here, generally inclined to stay in the Midwest.  And my undergraduate professors recommended here over Chicago.  I actually came up and visited in the spring both Chicago and Madison campuses. Clearly, Madison had a more attractive, less stressful situation than the University of Chicago.  Additionally, they offered sort of nonresident tuition, which was a little bonus, and so I decided on Madison.  So I took the summer off, spent three and a half months traveling around Europe, and came back and started graduate school here.

VT:  	What was your first impression of the campus?

DW: 	 The campus, you know, was just frankly overwhelming.  I came from, it wasn't a small school, but compared to Madison it was, you know, medium small.  And so I was a bit overwhelmed. And I had gotten good grades, which was at least one of the things that got me in here. And again, the history program here was one of the top five in the nation, so that was one of the things that attracted me a lot to it, and which is why my undergraduate professors recommended it.  But I immediately sort of felt sort of a stiff competition here in terms of the academic kinds of criteria and the kind of backgrounds that people were bringing.  So, but I plunged on ahead and got involved.One of the things that a friend of mine back at Dayton had talked about was that this campus had two socialist groups, so that insofar as I already was involved in Democratic liberal politics, you know, that from a distance seemed an attraction.  When I actually got here and got involved in some of the campus things, I realized they were trots and socialist workers, folks like that who I really had no sympathies with in the end, but was involved in many discussions about various anti-war coalitions with them, as it turned out.  And so, I was very lucky.  My first major professor was Merle Curti, and he made a very welcoming situation for me here.  So that was great. 

00:04:00

TR:  So your politics were shaped before you came here?

DW:  	Before to a degree, but much more while I was here.  My father had always been sort of involved at the margins of Democratic politics in Dayton, and he had been a political party appointee to the Montgomery County Fair Board was the extent of his actual involvement.  But Lucy Baines Johnson came through town on a campaign visit in '64 and we went to the barbecue the party hosted for her and had, you know, had Texas kind of food that they put out. I heard him speak on the courthouse steps of Montgomery County in downtown Dayton, and he was the first President to do that since Abraham Lincoln had spoken on those steps during the Civil War.  So, I mean, you know, it's sort of, I got involved in stuff.  I had done radio programs for some of our local radio stations.  One wanted a sort of two, or two students.  One was from the University of Dayton and one was from Antioch.  And we were talking about like with China's admission to the UN, and I was arguing strongly for it.  This was, would have been apparently late '63 or '64. And, you know, somebody called in, it was one of those call-in shows, assuming that it was the Antioch student who was taking such a radical position, not the good boy from the Catholic university.  So they had it all wrong.

VT:  Interesting.

TR:  	So, and you talk about getting involved in political stuff here.  What was the, do you recall the first thing or maybe what the major thing you sort of jumped in and did when you got here?

DW:  	I don't know that I recall the first thing, because the first couple of years I was mainly involved in the academic program.  You know, there was the anti-war stuff going on, but I was not in any organizational way linked to that initially.  You know, I was up on Bascom Hill during the Dow demonstration.	When my recent book club read They Marched Into Sunlight, Maraniss' book about that, recalling it, it turns out three of us were up on Bascom Hill.  One was inside the building . . . two of us were outside, one of us more a supporter than the other.  It was more of an observer but, you know, it was a significant event here on campus. And so I went off to the '67 March on Washington with some friends from graduate school.  You know, so I had some personal links to anti-war, you know, events that were happening on campus, but I didn't have organizational links.  Those came slightly later, and they came during the McCarthy run for President in late '67. So we, I had a friend who happened to know Don Peterson, and Don was at that time the 10th District Congressional Democratic Chair.  There were ten congressional districts in the state, and he chaired one of them within the party. And Al Lowenstein and some other folks who were trying to boost McCarthy had somehow connected with him and brought him to New York.  And at the time when he was doing this in the fall of '67, he was the highest ranked Democratic party official in the country, you know, he held a congressional chair, you know, who was not supporting Lyndon Johnson and was willing to support Gene McCarthy.  So, you know, they'd trot him around ripple circles in New York and say, here, you know, this is a Democratic official from Wisconsin and stuff.
Anyway, through the connection with him, I sort of got involved in the McCarthy campaign, as did, you know, hundreds of students in that spring of '68.  Got to know Midge Miller, who was running the office for the McCarthy campaign.  And so, you know, we then proceeded to have what we thought was a pretty good victory.  We actually didn't win the primary but everybody thought we did, because Johnson was withdrawn right before the actual vote.

00:08:50

DW:	So that led to further involvement with some of the post-McCarthy things, including an organization called the New Democratic Coalition, which was people who were trying to reshape the Democratic Party after the experience.  And so because I knew a lot of folks in the McCarthy campaign who were organizing this, I went off and joined it, and there was sort of a campus group of that. And we got involved in a lot of the coalitions that were being built around the anti-war movement on campus then, '68, and that's where I went to lots of meetings with the various socialist and other anti-war groups and, you know, you'd talk and sit around, what was the right slogan to chant at the particular rally that we were going to have and things like that, you know.  It just was driving me crazy because, you know, for them all the more symbolic stuff was significant than me, you know.  I just wanted to get lots of people out, you know, show strength about ending the war. And the huge campus demonstrations and the moratorium were, you know, very significant in terms of linking the community, and also having the campus.  So part of that began a whole lot of sort of local revolution in politics in the community.  The sort of liberal element took over the local Democratic Party, which had sort of been moribund.  And Mike Bleacher was a professor here at the university who got elected chair of the party, and that led to Don Peterson's campaign for governor in the 1970 Democratic primary. And I was very involved in that, became sort of the field director for that and traveled around the state in trying to organize local groups where there were anti-war folks, McCarthy folks in communities around the state, and spent a lot of time over in Milwaukee helping them organize.  So that really sort of threw me into state politics big time.  

VT:  	How are you able to balance that incredible amount of activity with your graduate studies?  I'm just blown away that you could handle . . . 

DW:  	Well, it was amazing to me that I got through.  And I remember Mr. Curti would keep saying, well, you know, the process is simply they keep throwing up hurdles, and you keep jumping over them and finally at the end of it, they give you a degree.  So while I was doing all that, I was still continuing to do, you know, study, take classes, do research.  Mr. Curti retired after three years, and I finished my degree, mainly the dissertation work with Dave Cronin, who also at that point had become director of the Institute for the Humanities. And so I had sort of started on my course of research, and he sort of took it over and guided it through to that end.  So, you know, I've always led a full life with lots of things happening and lots of sort of multidirectional things happening, so it was part of what I was doing during that period, too. So, does that give you some sense?

TR:  	A couple of things just to clarify.  So you were on Bascom Hill for the October '67, the Dow demonstrations?

DW:  	Yes.  Yes.

TR:  	Okay.  And those are the ones that are featured in Maraniss' book?

DW:  	Maraniss'.

TR:  	Maraniss', excuse me.

DW:  	Right, that's right.  He was a local kid, so we all know how to pronounce his name.  Yes, I was, and I had been at other demonstrations, you know.  I can recall one time I had flown home and coming back in a taxi and was trying to get to downtown, and the taxi was saying, well, we ain't going to get all the way there because the streets had been barricaded and, you know, the police were out.  
And so, I mean, it was a very heady time here, you know.  People talked as if the revolution was coming tomorrow and, you know, how it would occur.  So some of us were out for less dramatic changes, but the war was a very defining issue and compelled a lot of people into politics. 

00:13:20

VT:  	What was the climate like on campus?  I mean, on a day-to-day basis, were students afraid, was there, what kind of an energy was there?

DW:  	Oh, the energy level was huge.  And part of it was that, you know, campuses were viewed in part as places where you could have the intellectual discussion and critique of what the society was doing. You know, there were numerous teach-ins, you know, various professors were known to be sympathetic and, you know, would make references to, you know, the American empire and, you know, sort of the nature of imperial wars and things like that as part of their classroom.  And people were, you know, consuming that kind of thing. There was a lot of sort of, as I said, the Socialist Marxist-Leninist theories floating around and some professors were known to, you know, have sympathetic views to that.  At least nobody was calling them actual CP members.  But, you know, there was a sense that if we couldn't do it here on campus, it couldn't be done out in the larger society.  And then there was a sense that, you know, the campus as an institution ought to be mobilized against the society that was carrying out this disastrous policy.  And so that's when you got a sense that, you know, this institution had to change itself. Now interestingly enough, we were trying to think about change internal.  You know, there was a History Students Association trying to urge that students should have more of a voice in sort of how history was taught or looked at and structured around here.  You know, the Port Huron Statement for the Students for a Democratic Society was, you know, widely distributed and discussed. There was local SDS chapters on campus, as well as sort of the other long-time Marxist-Leninist things.  In some sense, the SDS folks were not the Marxist-Leninist folks who were much more rigid and all-time ideological than the sort of new affirmant that was going on. So I mean, you had all this vast boiling cauldron of intellectual stuff and activity.  And then as you started to have demonstrations about the university cooperating with the military machine, particularly Dow, which was of course the Agent Orange producer, you started to have the university not being able to cope with its sort of own existing mechanisms for how discourse and how activity was regulated. And so the university then started to bring in the outside political force and police force, and then that was seen as a betrayal of the university's own independence, that they would bring in police against their own students.  And there were other interesting sort of political things happening at that time.  The Madison bus drivers were on strike at one point, and some of the students tried to be supportive of the bus strike.  And then the firefighters were doing labor action, I think it might have been a strike, I'm not sure. But anyway, you started to get some alliances formed between some radical students.  And I remember Ed Durkin, who was the head of the firefighters, helped to bail out some of the students on one of the occasions.  So you started to get, which fit the intellectual mold of, you know, student activist and labor, you know, workers kind of joining together.  And so that became part of how, a local vision of how you built a Progressive coalition was occurring here. And so, you know, for many people it did seem like the future was being done, and in some ways it was.  But you also had then the university linking up with sort of the police state, as it would be described.  And, you know, the Dane County Sheriff and the Madison police at that point were particularly brutal to some of the students.  And so then you started to get, you know, Paul Soglin elected and then some other students, and you started to sort of change the local dynamic.  So you started to see that local political power could give you a chance to affect those things. There were also some other things that were occurring.  Father Groppi was doing his civil rights marches for open housing in Milwaukee, and I was part of a religious ecumenical group that went over and marched with Father Groppi for a while on housing stuff. And there was some welfare marchers, also organized basically out of Milwaukee, who did a march from Milwaukee to Madison, and I joined them sort of on the outskirts of town and walked with them for a while.  And then they actually went in and actually took over the Assembly chambers and occupied the State Capitol for a while. And again, I was on the outside.  You know, I was active to a point and then not to a point, so, I mean, you know, and we all made those decisions about which level of activism you were willing to do.  And so again, the need for change in state politics, because again the university in calling in the police forces, it was seen was succumbing to a lot of pressure from Republican legislative leaders. And so, you know, that became a big impetus to try and, one, to elect a Democratic governor when you got to 1970, and also for support for other changes.  And there was a big fight within the Democratic Party during the anti-war period for Progressives and those kinds of folks taking over again from some of the old-line folks. And again, links were made to some of the good, better union folks, though there certainly were some who were conservative, too.  And sort of that coalition takes over the Democratic Party, and even though Peterson was the more liberal probably perceived in the primary in 1970 doesn't win to Lucey.  
Lucey himself was not a conservative by any means, and so he then began an interesting balance of sort of, you know, bringing those Progressives more into the Democratic Party mainstream and becoming part of the governing coalition.  So, you know, I haven't thought about some of this in a long while.

TR:  Well, that's what we're here for, to . . . 

DW:  I know, I know.

TR:  . . . try to get you to think about these things.

DW:  Right, right, right.

00:20:26

TR:  	And maybe just even a little bit more of what I'd call a civics lesson.  And so Wisconsin in 1968 and 1970, is it Republican controlled or . . . 

DW:  	It's Republican controlled in the Senate, and in the governorship, you know, you had a conservative mayor, Bill Dyke, and, you know, he was, you know, eager to take the, you know, Madison police force in and bash student heads, as were plenty of the cops at that time too. And, you know, you might or might not, I couldn't recall right off with you if we had a Democratic sheriff or a Republican then, but basically the sheriff in those days was rotated because you could only do one term between the undersheriff and the sheriff, and one was a Democratic and one was a Republican.  But they were hardly indistinguishable.  There was not a link to sort of a Progressive kind of.  He was an old courthouse kind of a Democratic. So, you know, in some ways when they called in the National Guard finally for some of the demonstrations, it was a little bit better because the cops and the sheriffs had built up such an antagonism that when the National Guard came in, they didn't quite have that same kind of sense of, you know, having been in the trenches against each other in demonstration after demonstration.  So, but there was a lot of teargas thrown around.  You got used to its smell and . . . 

VT:  Really.
DW:  	Yeah.  You learned sort of a wet handkerchief over your mouth helped a little bit and, you know, not to rub your eyes.  I mean, there were all these sort of how to do things when you were in a demonstration or if you were going out in this sort of stuff.  So, I mean, there were additional skills besides reading monographs and historical works that you picked up on campus in those days.

TR:  	Was the Union sort of a hub for . . .
 
DW:  	Yeah, the Union was sort of the place, and, you know, some of the teach-ins happened there. Some of them would occur in some of the other buildings around campus, but the Rathskeller in particular was, you know, where a lot of the radical students hung out.
And so, and there was the sense sort of which started then a sort of building alternative institutions, which becomes a little later theme that becomes, I think, significant is that you couldn't always trust the mainline institutions so you started to find other structures to either parallel them or change them, you know. The new Democratic Coalition that I was involved in was that kind of a structure, not as it is within the Democratic party but very much wanted to change sort of the way that the old party bosses had forced Humphrey into the nomination, in our view, even though the primaries were being won by Kennedy and McCarthy on an anti-war platform.  So, you know, something seemed out of joint and how to change that.  Reflect more true Democratic principles was part of the theory and impetus behind it.

00:23:30

TR: 	 I don't mean to completely switch gears, and I don't think this is, but during our pre-interview you mentioned that this was a time in your life, too, the '60s when, for lack of a better word, you came out.

DW:  	True, I did. 

TR:  	So I'm wondering if you could discuss that.

DW: 	 Sure.

TR:  	And Ron McCrea called coming out an event and a process, so I'm wondering if for you it was that as well.

DW:  	Yes, it certainly was.  One, it was sort of trying to sort out for myself.  Raised in a very Catholic context in Dayton, and basically had repressed all sexuality for the most part as sort of, you know, not consistent with the kind of teachings and upbringings they were trying to tell you. There's a book called The Best Little Boy in the World which describes growing up gay and, you know, where you try to sort of be a super achiever and show that you're good in so many ways, because you have this secret that either you're not acknowledging or you don't want other people to know, and so you sort of try and compensate in that way. And when I read it, I thought, oh, yeah, this strikes a light.  I read it much later.  So, you know, I came here and I started to sort of see a more ferment in freedom that you didn't have in a Catholic grade school, high school, and university that I had gone to, and so I started to sort of think about.  Now I ended up doing my dissertation on a group of reformers at the end of the Progressive period who tried to end prostitution.  That took me into the stacks here in Memorial into the area of social deviance.  And if you just walked a little bit down the stacks, you could read the stuff about homosexuality, which was, of course, in the same area of sexual deviance in the catalog and the stacks, without actually taking them out and sort of, you know.
So, you know, I began to sort of read and, you know, understand, and then actually met somebody and had a sexual experience.  And so, you know, in that sense, this became a totally transformative experience here on campus for me.  And so, you know, mine may have been more dramatic than some others, but, you know, it became a significant milestone in sort of restructuring.

00:26:09	

VT:  	What was the climate like at that time for gay and lesbian individuals on campus?  Were there organizations or were there any sort of community?

DW:  	This would have been pre-Stonewall.  There was early activity after Stonewall here, but I wasn't involved in that.  I mean, you know, you said Ron said it's a process.  You know, you come to sort of your first realization, but it took me a while, considerable while, to actually get involved in activism and other things. And sort of the first sort of step I would have taken that way was in '73.  I ran for alder in a special election in the 4th District for the city.  Dennis McGilligan had been one of the student alders following Paul Soglin and Gene Parks.  Actually, Dennis and Gene got elected at the same time.  And I had helped Dennis in his campaigns and other things. And so when he decided to leave midterm, he encouraged me to run.  And so I was devising the platform at that point and literature and things like that.  And so particularly came out for a city nondiscrimination law based on sexual, I think we used preference actually at that point, which was borrowing the San Francisco language. So, you know, started to inch into sort of political gay activism, but it was in a much larger context, and certainly in the district that I lived in, it was something that, you know, was probably more supportive than not.  But it was still not personally identifying me in a public kind of a sense. In terms of actually coming out, I started to do fundraising for the Gay Center in the late '70s.  They were doing, mainly surviving by coat checks, donations they would get at the bars, gay bars during coat check time.  And so some of us who had done some political fundraising said, you can do better than that if you'd throw some house parties and charge people and, you know, throw a fabulous party, which of course we were used to doing by then. So we started to throw a number of fundraisers for the Gay Center, and so I had done a number of those.  And then I actually ran for office in 1980 for the County Board, which was successful this time.  I didn't win in that '73 time.  And, you know, at that point was known publicly for doing these things but had not sort of still, you know, said in any newspaper of record which I'll consider the official way of coming out.
And in that first term on the County Board, there was another woman who was lesbian or bisexual, and she and I were asked to do a community forum at the Wil-Mar Center, which was in my district, about some gay rights issues for the United was the chief sponsor, which was the local gay organization at that point.  And we simply ended up referring to ourselves as members of the community in the discussions that we were having with people.  Hadn't really realized that there was a newspaper reporter for the Cardinal there . . . 

VT:  Interesting.

DW: 	 . . . who picked up the story and talked about how, you know, we had identified ourselves.  And then I got a call from a Cap Times reporter who had read the Cardinal story and realized that there was news here, because two elected officials had identified themselves as members of the gay community.  And so they did a big story on sort of our coming out and sort of, you know, was officially recorded at that point.  But, you know, the process of being comfortable with having that kind of a public discussion was okay for me by that time.  But . . . 

VT:  And this was in 1980?

DW:  	This would have been in 1981 or '2.  I actually have the clippings, of course, still in a huge box, a jungle, but, because it was before the '82 elections because in the '82 elections we were joined by Kathleen Nichols, another lesbian who ran for the County Board. So I got elected sort of being known but not officially out, and then got reelected in '82.  Actually, I had no opponent in '82, so.  And one of the interesting things was I had no opponent in '82 or '84, but in '86 it was the first campaign where the voters in the district had a choice between an out gay man and a lesbian activist, because I was, being campaigned against as not being active enough for the community.

VT:  How interesting.

DW: 	 And so, you know, I think it was the first time that had occurred, certainly here in Wisconsin or in the city, so, and I won that election, so.

TR: 	 Yeah.  I don't think that could have occurred too many times anywhere in the country.
DW:  	No, not too, because in general the gay community, one, tried to avoid that, but there have been some contests where gay men and lesbians have been in the same primaries with folks, but certainly that would have been a very early incidence of it.  So if you were straight and absolutely opposed to gay folks, you had no choice in that election . . . 

TR:  	Ron McCrea has talked about these early panels, which I'm not sure you were a part of or not, in the early '70s, and talking about . . . 

DW: 	 I was not, and so he was.

TR:  	Talking about sort of how anecdotally they would try to . . . 

DW:  	Right.

TR: 	 . . . put a human face on the gay and lesbian community.

DW:  	Right, right, right.

00:32:17

TR:  	And you mentioned your coming out story.  My sort of, not sort of, my follow-up to that is did you, when did you, or did you, express your sexual preference, whatever the language you want to use, to your family, and then how did they deal with it?

DW:  	I actually didn't have that experience, and I know it's in a lot of discussions.  But my mother died very early, and my father died before I came out in any way that he might have known.  So I never had that discussion.  And with my sisters, it's just never been said, but it's been known.  So, you know, so I haven't had those same kinds of things that people have gone through.  It's just the way it worked for me.  So I don't have the, to me, coming out has always been, in my experience, more of a political process than it was a personal process after I first sort of sorted it out for myself.  So it wasn't sort of that revelatory kind of discussion I had to have with folks.  Because once you're out in the press, pfft, you know. But again, you assume everybody reads that and knows, and it's not true.  Because, I mean, still the number of people, well, you know, do you have a wife?  Sorry, don't have a wife, you know, so, you know.  People are still, one of McCray's other great lines is that it's telling the obvious to the oblivious, so, you know.

VT:  That's fantastic.

DW:  	Many people don't really ever figure it out, so, but, you know.  In '83 when Governor Earl got elected governor, he asked Kathleen and I to go on a little tour and make some recommendations to him, that's Kathleen Nichols who had gotten elected to the Dane County Board.  So she would have been elected to the Dane County Board in spring of '82, and I would have been reelected. And I had helped his campaign during that '82 election. And so he asked us to sort of do a little circuit and make some recommendations, and we did.  We went out and visited the gay communities in Stevens Point and Racine, Milwaukee, and came back and recommended that he create what became the Governor's Council on Lesbian and Gay Issues, and I actually drafted the executive order that his office issued to create that council, which was the first of its kind in the country. Pennsylvania had prior to that a commission appointed by its governor on sexual minorities, but it had not actually used the words gay and lesbian.  So he was the first executive in the country to create such a commission based on recommendations.  The precedent for it here in Wisconsin was that Governor Lucey had created the Governor's Commission on the Status of Women in the '70s, and Kay Clarenbach and others had been very involved from the feminist side in that commission and the work that it had done. So, you know, again that political involvement and drawing on that, I knew of Kay's work, because she was also involved in the anti-war movement and I knew her son David, who became very instrumental in gay politics in this state and was the sponsor of the state gay rights bill.  And so, you know, drawing on that rich sort of political knowledge and structuring how to do things for the community going forward was part of the experience I was able to bring to that.

TR: 	 I want to back up a little bit.
DW:  	Sure.

00:36:15

TR:  	So as all this is, you know, as your political activism is going on and sort of burgeoning sexual identity is going on, my guess is you're also trying to figure out how to put food on the table, so to speak.

DW:  Yes, so to speak.
	
TR:  	So as you are progressing through and you get your master's and get your Ph.D., what sort of occupational things are you looking at?

DW:  	You know, the usual track for a Ph.D. is you assume you're going to go off and teach at various universities.  And I, you know, at that period in the very early '70s was, you know, looking at the historical conventions and went to a number of them, and looking at the kinds of openings that there were for, you know, beginning instructors.
And, you know, there seemed to be things, like at Cape Girardeau, Southeastern Missouri State and stuff like that.  And by that time, knowing that I was a gay man, I didn't think that was going to be a great environment.  So I sort of made the decision I wanted to say in Madison, you know. At that point I was involved in the community political structures.  I also had gotten involved in some of the Landmarks Commission work here locally which had created a citizen advisory commission.  So I started to really have connections here and, you know, feeling safe here.  And as a gay man, I knew I wouldn't feel safe in lots of places in this country. So, you know, thinking those things through today, I don't know that I ever actually vocalized that equation but I realize that I was calculating that way.  So I started to look for what kinds of things, you know, you could use historical work around here, and also maybe use some of the political interests that I had, and came across that the United States government at that point was beginning to make plans for the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission.  And their desire was to have a 50-state celebration rather than just the 13-state celebration, shall we say. And, you know, that's probably some of the ways of congressional appropriations, that if you were appropriating money for a bicentennial that was only going to be in 13 original states versus all 50, you know, how do you get it through Congress and get significant dollars.  But, if you make it for all 50 states, then you're, you know, on the bandwagon.  And I don't, you know, I've never researched whether that it was it, but my political instincts tell me that was probably the case. So, anyway, I knew they were urging each state to set up an American Revolution Bicentennial Commission, and so the governor was interested in doing that.  I worked at that point with Carol Skornicka, who was in the Governor's Office, and expressed my interest in employment with such an entity, should it be created. And since after the gubernatorial primary between Lucey and Peterson in 1970, the Lucey people, one of the things that happened in that was that while Lucey won the state two‑to‑one, Peterson won Dane County two-to-one.  So they wanted some support from the Peterson people here in this political active place, and this was Lucey's home county, you know, duh. So, you know, they came to a couple of us in the Peterson campaign and said would we help them, and we said yes . . . because we were going to help them, and so we did.  So I think they felt, you know, these are okay kinds of guys.  And so it came around that the state was going to create a commission and it would need an executive director, and the governor was willing to have myself appointed as executive director for that commission. So that's how I began my employment for the State of Wisconsin, and that began in '72, because the federal government wanted to get well prepared for this, and actually we weren't the first state to do it then.  And so I ended up heading a very small state agency at a very young age, and ended up making appearances before Joint Finance on budget and all kinds of stuff that I never would have guessed. But anyway, I'd go out and talk about history and we, you know, published a newsletter, and we ended up getting grants from the federal government.  So tried to steer those in ways that were more inclusive.  I mean, a lot of people for the bicentennial were painting fireplugs and doing dumb stuff, shall I say. You know, we, instead, tried to steer some of the money to the Stockbridge-Munsee Tribe so that they could do something with their history.  They were an interesting tribe in Wisconsin because they had come from Upstate New York and Massachusetts, and they had actually supported, as had the Oneidas, another tribe in the state, the American side.  So, you know, they retraced their history and their migration here to Wisconsin and stuff like that. We also encouraged some research into the early rural black communities in the state that had existed out in Lancaster and Vernon counties.  And, you know, we did some sort of other museum and things.  We helped support the original Old World Wisconsin establishment as a folk architecture museum and, you know, lots of other things. But I mean, there was a purpose and some historicity in administering this program.  We also got involved in medals and other kinds of things and kiddy art and, you know.  You do a lot of things when you get involved in that.  Anyway, that led me from that sort of history relationship to the first three years of the Commission's work.  It was chaired by a professor who was in classics from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, who also had been very active in Democratic politics.

00:42:38
	
DW:	But for the last three years, Jean decided that she was done with that, and many other states had had their lieutenant governor chair, so Marty Schreiber, who was the lieutenant governor, became chair of the Bicentennial Commission, and so I worked closely with him during that.  And then Governor Lucey, towards the end of his term, got appointed as ambassador to Mexico and Lieutenant Governor Schreiber became Governor Schreiber. And so he asked me, one, to work on his transition team, because we had a good working relationship, and actually plan his inauguration, and then to run the governor's mansion for him for a year and a half while he was governor.  And the mansion hadn't really been used by the Luceys.  They had their own house up on Farwell Drive, and so it was sort of like reopening that, and he wanted to use it in a very public manner. And so, you know, we would have dinners for the Board of Regents.  We had to reconstitute tour groups, talk about its history, talk about the antiques and things like that.  So I loved some of that work.  I had a beautiful office overlooking Lake Mendota at the residence so, you know.

VT:   Sweet.

DW:  	Right.  The staff always kept the coffee pot going in the kitchen and, you know.  But, you know, it was a crazy time.  We'd have Mrs. Carter, the President's mother, come for a breakfast with seniors.  And Marty was also on a very tight budget, and so I would get up at 5:00, go by the railroad tracks in early summer in daylight and harvest a lot of wild flowers and make bouquets for the breakfast for all the little senior tables and stuff like that, so we had lots of fun doing things and stuff. So anyway, I made money and was able to begin to buy a house, and then I actually ended up buying two more houses, so I started to get a little bit into Madison real estate on the side, too, but in terms of old houses, because I had been involved in the preservation activities that I mentioned.  And Mayor Soglin got me on the early Landmarks Commission, and so I ended up owning an 1873 house. And then I consider I upgraded it 15 years later when I moved across the street and got an 1857 house, so it was older.  Of course, more work and difficult, but, you know, it was more historic.

00:45:13

TR:  	So this stuff is all really, typically the bicentennial stuff is fascinating to me, just because what I know what happened in Idaho at the same time, but I'd like to again try to link this now to, you know, your involvement in the gay and lesbian community in the early '70s.  And Vicki mentioned earlier, you know, asked earlier what kind of community there was in the late '60s.  What kind of community is there in the early '70s?

DW:  	There had started to be some.  I was still not part and active in it, you know.  The renaissance community, which was one of the early organizations that I think transmogrified into the Gay Center, and I do have some notes on some of this stuff that other folks who have been more involved have talked about. There was very early activity right after Stonewall.  The Stonewall would have occurred in June, and the next year there was already activity here on campus.  And some of that was people who had been involved in the anti-war and civil rights stuff.  And so . . . 

VT:  What types of activity?

DW:  	You're asking me because I wasn't involved in it, but I sort of knew that it was out there.  So early organizational efforts, you know, some of it would have been coming out support for people who were coming out.  Some of it would have begun to be visibility kinds of things. You know, it was put very much in a civil rights context here, community organizing kind of context, because it was sort of campus-based for people who had been involved in campus things.  One of the early locations for activities were over in the campus religious centers, St. Francis House and the Methodist Center particularly were supportive, and again, I think they saw it as part of a civil rights commitment on their part to do that.

VT: 	 My brother lived in St. Francis House.

DW: 	 Oh, he did?

VT:  	Yeah.

DW:  	Okay.

VT:  	In grad school, cool.

DW:  	Yeah, well.  You know, there was an early religious organization, Integrity/Dignity, which was a combination of both Catholic and Episcopalian kinds of folks who got formed here.  They used to meet at St. Francis House and worship there.  So, you know, there started to be sort of some structural things begin to be there.  Started to be some press mentions that you would see.  But again, I hadn't been involved in that, so, I mean, I came much later than some early activists. So I mean, Ron would have been there.  There was, you know, a couple social places, 10 Langdon was one that became a social place.  And there was a little cafe, the Daisy Cafe, that bloomed for a while on West Washington Avenue. So, you know, again at that point, I would have still been thinking, well, you know, if I want to be in politics and have any future there, you know, as an out person, you know, that wouldn't have seemed possible in the '70s.  And so if that was still part of my mind, which it probably was, you know, I didn't necessarily want to go get involved in that stuff. And again, they tended to be more activist, and while I certainly was involved from an active point of view, it had been less of that activist kind of impulse than other kinds of impulses in terms of my structure as to where I ended up being.

TR:	 I was going to ask you about that, because, I mean, you're involved in activities, and I was going to ask you if you thought it was, reflecting on if it was calculating, that, you know, you saw yourself progressing on this arc and where, even in a community as becoming liberal as Madison, and being an out gay may might have been political suicide.

DW: 	 It certainly was not viewed as a plus, and I probably viewed it that way myself.  You know, as I said, in that '73 election I knew I had to do something on that for that district that I was representing, which was right downtown and had a lot of students in it.  But did I think actually being out would have helped and did I, you know, run the campaign in '73 on that basis, no. So, you know, the climate between then and the later '70s and 1980 when I first ran changes, because when I ran in '80 I, you know, could be known for having hosted gay fundraisers and being, you know, on the advisory board of the Gay Center and stuff like that. So, and actually the first term on the County Board we passed county nondiscrimination language that had actually been introduced before but hadn't been passed, and so that was one of my first term activities was helping the county pass nondiscrimination language based on sexual, or actually sexual preference that the clarity of the terms was still willing to give us at that point.

00:50:46

DW:	And so, you know, that's when I really sort of began sort of the more public profile of political gay activities during that first term.  The Reagan Administration was doing things like, which had come in in '80 at the same time which had been a shock to many of us as well, you know, sort of the family defense kinds of things that they were doing.  And they had a national bill that, you know, would have prohibited any teaching about homosexuality and stuff like that. And one of the more activist members of the community called me up and said, you know, shouldn't the county take a position against this kind of thing.  And the county government had done some things like that, but not as much as the City Council was known for even at that stage.  But I said sure, and so myself and a couple of other people introduced this resolution opposing this federal legislation that the Reagan Administration was introducing. That actually led to the forum at Wil-Mar where we talked about being members of the community came officially out.  So, you know, my sort of community involvement has always had that political side to it rather than the active side to it.  You know, if you'd ever asked me was I an activist back then, I probably wouldn't have thought of myself as an activist in that sense now.  I think other people might have differed in that, but I never, because I mean to me those were the real lefties, the real radicals over there, and I was always working within the context of what you could do.

VT:  	In search of the government?

DW: 	 Right.  

VT:  	Yeah.

DW:  	Right.

TR:  	And I keep mentioning Ron McCrea.

DW:  	That's fine.  Yes, no, Ron's, right, sure.

TR:  	. . . a couple times said he is . . . 

DW:  	He has a much . . . interview of all that stuff.

TR:  	He said something somewhat similar, though.  He says that the rise of the gay and lesbian community or gay and lesbian rights is, you didn't need a march because you worked inside the political community as opposed to being outside of it.

DW:  	Right, but . . . 

TR:  	So I think in that sense . . . 

DW: 	 I think that's very much true here, because we had a lot of access to it because the political system here was incredibly open compared to many other places.  And that's why later on we had more gay and lesbian elected officials here than anywhere else, because the power access was so open compared to New York where you had to work in ward politics and Democratic clubs for years and years, or Chicago where, you know, you had to have a mega war chest as an alderman to run because, you know, all this, liquor license and other stuff they were doing.So, yes, very quickly.  But there were a lot of activist marches and organizations out there, you know.  That's what I'm saying is that, you know, when I had my '86 contested election, it was a lesbian activist who had been out organizing demonstrations during the '70s, you know, who ran against me in part on the critique that I wasn't activist enough, even though I had done a number of, you know, things like the county's gay rights ordinance opposing the federal legislation and other kinds of things.So, you know, you still had those two strains.  But because there was enough access and we were able to change things, most of it happened, you know, within rather than outside the structures.

TR: 	 I have one more thing, and then I don't know if Vicki has anything after that.  I'm interested, we're talking about, you know, your activism or lack thereof in the early '70s in the gay community.  But how you as a gay man, socially, how are you, what sort of avenues are you using to, you know, meet people?

DW:  	Sure.  Built up a circle of friends, and so we started to do a number of parties and entertainments, and sort of those private social networks.  I mean, there were bars and one could go out to them, which I occasionally did.  You know, there are bar people and there are sort of people who occasionally go, and I was one of those who occasionally went. But there started to be sort of a cohort of a number of us in town who were sort of establishing themselves.  You know, we're not sort of on the margins of either society or their careers but we're building things, you know, buying houses, you know, hooking up, in some cases we're partners and sort of.  So we got to know each other and sort of would socialize with each other.  Part of my doing that was sort of also around political causes.  I mentioned I did these fundraisers for the Gay Center.  And so we ended up with a group of us who could help pull those off. We had one guy who was a great green grocer produce manager and there was another guy who was a butcher at that time, and a number of us were sort of, you know, party folks.  I even then had started to haunt St. Vinny's as a regular kind of thing and buy up lots of party things, so we had real plates and real glasses, things like that.  I mean, we were doing tony(?) kinds of parties when we were doing this kind of stuff. And, you know, then I had this lovely old historic home and, you know, started to throw kinds of, you know, social things there that were both, some of these public fundraising events and some were, you know, more private kinds of social events.  And so there became a whole group of us. And it becomes a factor later on when we sort of start thinking about how to do fundraising in the community when we get to New Harvest Foundation, as to sort of these were people who had pretty much sorted out their lives.  They weren't using gay social services or gay organizations for the most part, because they were sort of self-directed kinds of folks. And they weren't running into barriers that caused them to be activists, they were just going ahead.  But they were the folks in the community who had resources, and so how do you help build community institutions for folks who we knew did need them and, you know, transfer some resources from these folks who were starting to have a little extra that they could do that, help build community institutions. So that became one of the exercises that we ended up doing with the New Harvest Foundation.  But by that time there was a whole group of us.  Now my social circle was mainly gay men, but there was sort of a companion process happening with the lesbians in town too.  New Harvest was one of the first places we ended up joining sort of those two circles in a community purpose.

VT: 	 Prior to that, was there any crossover in the organizations or social activities?

DW:  	There was crossover in the organizations.  They always had some gay and lesbian components and activities in them.  There was never a real radical separation.  There were some feminists who were definitely, you know, not into cooperating with men on some things, but it wasn't so hard that the community organizations have been totally split that way, you know. The Gay Center, yes, was more men, and there were sort of, you know, traditional lesbian potluck circles in town that had organized, and there was sort of a group of Jewish lesbians who were also organized.  And so, you know, they were the sort of social networks that got built up through house parties around town, and that was an important social structure for the community, as well as the bars for a number of folks, and then political organizations. You know, thinking about sort of some of the contrast between Milwaukee and here, Milwaukee has always been much more of a bar town than Madison, and Madison has always been much more of a political town, which is the nature of the two larger towns as well.  But the communities reflected that kind of thing as well.

00:59:17

VT:  	Do you think Madison at that point, or at what point did Madison become an attractive destination for perhaps students or professionals because of the existence of a gay and lesbian community, or the knowledge that there was a gay and lesbian, something going on.

DW: 	 Sure.  Right.  It had clearly happened by the '70s because, you know, Madison of course had a reputation for being more easy and open than many places.  I mean, some of the friends that we had formed were folks who came from La Crosse or other places around the state, McFarland even outside of Madison, who realized that being gay in their communities was a lot more difficult than sort of being gay and coming out here and finding folks. And so it happened by then.  It probably was not, you know, as, quote, official as it became sort of later when you sort of had more formal institutions and organizations and stuff like that.  Madison gets written up in some of the gay press . . . 

VT: 	 . . . magazine says . . . 
DW: 	 . . . and stuff like that, but . . . 
VT: 	 . . . this is the greatest . . . 
DW:  	Right, right, right, right. 
VT:  	Yeah.
DW: 	 Right, right, right.  So, you know, I think it happened significantly after we passed the state gay rights law and became the first state with a gay rights law.  I mean, that then establishes a national kind of reputation.

VT:  	What year was that again?

DW:  	1982, you know, and I was involved in some of that as well, so that might be a conversation to have.  But, I mean, the first thing is, I mean, you read some of the early Harvey Milk stuff and he talks about how, you know, if you're gay growing up, you think you have to go to New York or San Francisco originally.  And, you know, he starts to want to say that you can have alternatives. Well, initially if you were in Wisconsin, if you couldn't go to San Francisco or New York, you could go to Madison.  So, you know, or some probably also went to Milwaukee as well.  But I mean, it became a while before you could have folks in other communities out around the state.  You know, when we did that '82 tour, we went to places where we knew there had been sort of active, relatively visible gay communities that we could locate and have a sit‑down discussion with, and that was basically Stevens Point, Milwaukee, and Racine at that point.

VT: 	 Did they tend to be focused around a college or university?

DW: 	 Stevens Point was focused around the university.  Racine was focused around the Congregational Church there.  Milwaukee was focused on the east side of the city, but again, it was more of a bar kind of community, starting to have early on some business kinds of folks, professional folks who were trying to link up. You know, Milwaukee has always had a different view of itself in the state gay white community, so when we had the discussions about sort of how the membership ought to be on the Governor's Council, they thought, well, we're about a third of the gay community in the state, we ought to have a third of the membership.  And, you know, in general Milwaukee itself didn't represent that big a share of the state, but, you know, their view was they were the leading place.  And, you know, governors don't take that same kind of view necessarily.
That was a tension that I've lived with over these many decades between having a fair Wisconsin campaign again between tension between Madison and sort of statewide efforts, mainly focused here in Madison, but so it's been interesting thing over the years.
VT:  	I imagine.  I have one other question.  Do we have a little more time?

DW:  	Oh, yeah.

01:03:00	

VT:  	Okay.  One of the things that you talked about that I thought was particularly interesting, and I think it is similar in other sort of activist environments, is that that tension between, you know, what does it mean to be a true activist, what does it mean if you attempt to change within the system and work within the government structure?  How did that play out, if you could talk a little bit more about that for the gay-lesbian community and some of the issues that you were working on.

DW:  	Okay.  Initially, you know, everything was outside.  Jim Yaden(?) was actually sort of the first gay man who was an alderman who was known as a gay man on the City Council in the late '70s.  But he served I think only one term and then didn't really sort of continue as an activist. The real change happens with the '80s and moving into things.  The city had a gay rights ordinance enacted, mainly by just good liberals, and then there was an effort to repeal it led by a Baptist pastor, and that caused the forming of the United, which sort of was the first highly visible community organization.  I mean, before that you had some smaller organizations I think around campus, but the United was the first one that really had a community profile. And it had a lot of long-time liberal political figures involved in it, straight figures.  And so from that point on, you begin to get more of a mainstream political access that wanted to one, defend the gains that had been made, and then take it further as well. And so you still had some of the old outside activists, but once you started to get sort of the seats at the table, you didn't need that.  In fact, when we had our first national conferences of lesbian and gay officials, which some of us formed, one of the comments was that after they got elected, they saw some withering of the activist organizations because people assumed, oh, you're there, you're going to take care of it, you know. And we all said, no, we can't take care of all of it.  I mean, yes, we have great abilities to deal with issues, to introduce things, and to lobby and bargain with colleagues, but that doesn't mean, you know, community organizations should go away.  And in all cases, that was a very temporary sort of phenomenon that you saw that kind of thing occur, in that people realized that there was still roles for the community organizations. But it didn't have to be so much political activism after that point because of the access.  But in some cases, it was still useful as a way to have sort of both outside and inside voices for political factors. You know, when the AIDS crisis starts to occur, you know, in New York you get a huge activist response.  Here in Wisconsin, we immediately asked the governor to create again some AIDS task force kinds of things.  We got the State Medical Society very early involved, again because we were able to use things like the Governor's Office and like the Secretary of Health.

VT: 	 You had access.

DW: 	 We had access. And so we avoided that whole crisis mentality in terms of the public policy structures. And David Clarenbach was in the Legislature, was able to get a bill through.  Again, you had the governor who would sign it for nondiscrimination on the basis of, you know, your HIV status and things like that.So we early on started to get the Department of Health and epidemiology folks, you know, dealing with the issue, you know, so that we were able by that time to avoid some of the outsider trauma that other folks had to go through.  And, you know, thinking back on it, it's remarkable, but it resulted from all those earlier things that we had built.

VT:  	Sure.  You were able to skip that whole phase.

DW: 	 Right, right, right.  And so, you know, it gave us a real leg up in dealing with some of those issues that came along and impacted the community.  And for the most part, you know, having the early nondiscrimination bill, you know, there have been certainly some cases where the Equal Rights Division has had to go in and look at employment discrimination but there haven't been broad issues, they were able to raise in that.
Again, the AIDS thing came up at the county.  By then I had become County Board chair.  I appointed Tammy, then a county supervisor, to chair a county task force on that.  We got the corp counsel to indicate in an opinion that the county nursing home couldn't discriminate because there was some talk that nursing homes might discriminate against AIDS victims. And so, you know, when you're sitting there dealing with the budget of these guys and when they're right next to you, you know, for three or four hours on a meeting about a whole bunch of county issues, you know, when you call them up and say, hey, what's our county policy on, you know, AIDS victims at the county hospital, they're going to come up with something that's pretty good, and they're inclined to.  It was good law, but it was also a good immediate policy response that they understand who they're being asked by.

VT:  Yeah, yeah.

DW: 	 So, you know, again able to use those kinds of levers of power.  And, you know, then the fact that you can get the Dane County Corporation Counsel to issue that opinion, you can have other folks, you know, use it, other nursing homes.  So I mean, you use a leadership position here locally to help establish policies that had some impact statewide as well.  So it was an interesting exercise as I think back on it.

VT:  	Yeah.

DW:  	And we were just wildly doing it at the time, because it seemed the right thing to do, and it was.

01:09:24
	
TR:  	Dick, is there anything you would like to, is anything on your mind you might be afraid if we don't get out or at least mention so we can do a, when we do the follow-ups we can discuss?

DW:  	No, I think we're covering a lot of things.  You know, as you can tell from sort of the discussion from me, it's always been more of a political/social structure building process than an activist personal kind of thing.  And, I mean, there's a lots of other folks who have that other experience, but that's not been my context in it. There's one other piece of it that I've always thought of is that when I was growing up, my father had attended the local, the same Catholic university I went to.  And there was a predominant sort of Protestant top society kind of structure in that community in Dayton, Ohio. And so he and some of his friends at the university had sort of formed parallel Catholic institutions.  My mother was involved in the fundraising for the Loreto(?), an institution that helped young women who came to the community who needed housing and things like that.
And sort of the example that they had of building sort of sub-institutions that paralleled mainline institutions became, in a way, a model that the gay community did for a while, because some of those mainline things weren't always available to it.  So in some ways, you know, you started to have sort of gay police networks and other kinds of things.  
And you see it all around the country.  Here in some ways, because of the access and openness of the liberal society and the political structure that we're working in, there's a little less of it.  You know, there was never a gay ghetto here.  There were distinct areas in town, you know, Dykites(?) and Boys by the Bay and stuff like that around town, but you never had a Castro or things like that pop up in this community.

VT: 	 Those are great names for a brochure for the city, by the way.

DW:  	Right, right.

VT:  	. . . advertising campaign.

DW: 	 Right, right, right, right.

TR:  	Well, Dick, I want to thank you for the time you've given us today and we'll be in touch about setting up a follow-up interview.

DW:  Okay.

VT:  Fantastic.

01:11:48 End of First Interview Session

Second Interview Session (February 14, 2008): Digital File

00:00:00	Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction

VT:  	This is Vicki Tobias, second oral history interview with Dick Wagner, February 14, 2008.  We're in Memorial Library.  And I think, in reviewing our notes from our last interview, and one of the things that I was thinking about since we talked last that I think is really interesting and intriguing, and perhaps a good way to kind of segue from our last interview to today's talk, you talked a lot about activism and activism in Madison.  

00:01:01

VT:	And for the LGBT community, how critical it was that you had already established some inroads into local government, and because of that, the experience was very different in Madison.  And perhaps you could maybe elaborate on that a bit more.

DW:  	Okay.  Part of it was that through the anti-war movement, so many people got involved in local politics in Wisconsin.  There were people who were early on running for local elected officials, Paul Soglin for the City Council, then two other students got elected to the City Council, Dennis McGilligan and Gene Parks.  And then there was an effort to not only sort of change the student wards, but to change the kind of people who were on the City Council in the outlying areas as well. Madison has always been known as a Democratic town and relatively, quote, progressive, but it was not radical in the sense that the anti-war movement sort of changed it.  So some of the old-time Dems were, you know, good labor union Dems, nothing wrong, but they didn't have the sort of same we're trying to change society in sort of some fundamental ways. And then Midge Miller out of the McCarthy campaign ran for the State Legislature, got elected, and then other people started to also replace other people.  Back then, actually Madison's west side had a Republican legislator, which was remarkable when you think of sort of that area today.

VT:  	Demographics.

DW: 	 Right, but demographics change a whole, whole lot.  And again, I remember one of my friends in '79 was sort of moving to the east side across the Yahara.  He ended up replacing one of those longtime labor type Dems and bringing, you know, a different, more activist, kind of progressive agenda to things. So part of it was a natural sort of cycling, part of it was the openness of the local systems and the state system, you know.  I mean, basically back then an Assembly race was about $10,000.  You know, you could raise that relatively easily in this town.  Today, they're probably hundreds of thousands and big contested seats. So a number of us decided that, you know, we could run for a local office.  My first try was that aldermanic race when McGilligan left, and which I didn't win but came close.  So I moved to the more promising area of what I thought and sort of put that behind me, and then ran for the 6th District where I got elected and, actually in the end, in an uncontested election, and that was sort of part of the gay mafia at work. It was going to be an open seat.  Some friends of mine from the Historical Society had sort of persuaded me to get involved in their local political machine.  They had at that point elected, Mike Christopher was the alder and Mike Nowakowski, who was the county supervisor, and they were heavily involved in the Marquette Neighborhood Association, which was the big neighborhood in the district, and so they got me involved in the neighborhood association. I became vice president and then president of the neighborhood association.  So, but they were grooming me for this potential race.  And then Mike Nowakowski decided he wasn't going to run again for the County Board.  They persuaded me that that's what I ought to run for, and so I said yes and did and decided to.And I was getting the nomination papers.  And David Clarenbach, who had been on the County Board, who had been a roommate of mine briefly in the Mansion Hill area, went out with nomination papers all around the address of this one potential opponent who had surfaced.  So when this guy decided he was going to run, everybody said, well, they already signed papers for Dick Wagner.  So he in the end decided not to run.

VT:  	Sure.  That's very clever.
DW: 	 Right.  So again, you were using skills and networks to help build this, which later we would call more formally, or jokingly, the Homintern.  And, you know, sort of after the, quote, Comintern for the Communist International, this was sort of the homosexual international, and it was sort of a way of encouraging folks within the gay and lesbian community to run for office and be supportive of them while they were there.

VT:  	It seems to me, though, as I listen to you talk, you were already very skilled in political strategy . . . 

DW:  	Oh, yes.
00:06:15
	
VT: 	 . . . and, you know, two or three steps ahead of perhaps other communities that hadn't, didn't have a community of folks who were already well versed in those strategies and tactics to get people elected to office.  And like you talked about working from within the system.

DW:  	Right.  And, you know, my, as I said, I came from a mildly Democratic family in terms of my father being, you know, marginally involved in politics.  But most of, and this is when I got involved with helping form the National Association for Gay and Lesbian Elected Officials. Many of them came from a slightly more activist background, but they were never the biggest activists who always tended to have slightly more of an outsider point of view.  And so like one of the people who I was able to encourage to join me on the County Board was Kathleen Nichols, and she had been involved in a lot of activist things earlier in the '70s, but at that point was living in another east side district over in the Tenney-Lapham area. And so she ran.  She had a contested race, and the campaign literature distributed against her was really sort of a smear, do you really want a lesbian representing you.

VT: 	 Interesting.

DW: 	 So this is '82, and so somebody thought that would still have purchase in '82.

VT:  	Did it?

DW:  	It didn't.  She got elected with a very substantial margin.  So and then Kathleen and I both were involved in future County Board elections, and when a group of Progressives from labor and ourselves sort of representing the gay and lesbian community, or parts of it, by any means, there were certainly other folks, met to sort of talk about those upcoming elections is where I first met Tammy, who came and joined . . . 

VT:  	Tammy Baldwin.

DW:  	Tammy Baldwin, yes, excuse me.

VT:  	Okay.  Everyone refers to her as . . . 

DW:  	. . . Tammy . . . 

VT: 	 . . . Cher, you know, and Charo.

DW:  	Yes, like Cher, right, right.

VT:   	It's Tammy.
DW:  	Tammy, right.  Where, you know, after we had sort of the initial general meeting, then we talked about strategies for getting Progressives elected to the spring offices.  She came, and we broke into caucuses.  And so Kathleen and I were sort of like the gay and lesbian caucus, and here comes Tammy to join us.  We hadn't met her before.  She had just sort of come to this Progressive meeting with sort of her background, and so, you know, that was sort of a way for her to meet us and sort of us to sort of, of course, encourage her to run later on.

VT:  	Right.  What was she doing at that time?

DW: 	 I think she had finished her schoolwork and was back here and was in a law practice.  And so, you know, she, yes, because when she was on the County Board she was in her law practice.

VT:  	Right.  Okay.  Interesting.

DW:  	So, you know, sort of, that was sort of her sort of political coming out.  And so then in '86 we got her elected to the board, too.  And so it was, you know, that's kind of a process of encouraging and recruiting folks, and the City Council had a whole range of folks too, and as I said, at one point we had more than any other place in the country in this one little community.

VT:  	In our one little . . . 

DW:  	Right.

00:09:56

VT: 	 How would you characterize the environment for LGBT in the early '80s?

DW: 	 It was actually pretty open.  You know, Madison back then certainly had a liberal political establishment, you know.  I mean, in the late '60s and early '70s, those fights had occurred and basically it was over by then within the city.  The county was a little more tenuous, but pretty clearly established and trendy.

VT: 	You talked a little bit about the smear campaign against Kathleen Nichols.

DW:  	Right.

VT:  	Were there other incidents like that still occurring in the early '80s or had there ever been?

DW:  	Well, I mean, I got various hate mail, you know, in my early stages from folks.  And, you know, I can remember even later when the Hotel Washington burned down and there was a prayer service vigil at the Methodist Campus Center, and a whole bunch of the local Phelps types, Fred Phelps, the minister and stuff like that, were there and shouting at us for, you know, sort of trying to have a prayer service for the loss of this institution in our community. And it was just really incredible to sort of hear people shouting out that I was damned and things like that.  So I mean, it didn't all go away.  It's largely not visible today in any extent, but it still was, and that would have been in the '90s.

VT:  	I wonder if that has any impact, even if it is visible today?  I mean, occasionally you see those folks on campus.  I'm getting ahead of myself.

DW:  Sure, go ahead.

VT:  	You know, the younger generation on campus today I think has a different perspective.

DW:  	Oh, yes, right.

VT:  	You know, I don't see people engaging that person or those folks when they come.  I see people just kind of going about their business and ignoring it, and it's interesting to me.  You know, are we jaded, are we so acclimated to it, or do we just not give it any attention because we don't think it's important?

DW:  	I think we feel secure enough that we can ignore it.  It was interesting to me, and this is jumping sort of way ahead, on the constitutional amendment fight this past year, was the ability in this community to get business folks, such as downtown Madison and the Chamber of Commerce, to come out against the constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage. And we tried to get some of those business folks in Milwaukee, just could not do it.  And, you know, so I mean it was a sign of where we were in standing in the community and where we were seated at tables that we could engage that discussion and that people would respect it and understand that it was an important thing for us who were part of their community. You know, not true elsewhere around the state.  I mean, the vote reflected that, too, but in terms of the institutional response.  And yet, I tried to get sort of Republicans for Fair Wisconsin, see if I could get a statement organized.  I had been involved in getting the Wisconsin former governors to make a statement, and got through Tony Earl four of the former governors to come out against the amendment.
But when I tried to knock on doors of Republicans who I had known and worked with, they listened politely, but none of them really came through.  And, you know, not that I think many of them might not have voted against the amendment in the end, but for them, they couldn't do that public community acceptance that the business community could.  So I mean, it was still a gradation even at that point.

VT:  	It's an interesting distinction.
	
DW:  	Right.  Now, you know, they're tied in sort of a political marriage, so to speak, with the, you know, religious group, but for the most part they weren't that so tied here in Madison, but their statewide associations would have . . . that.

VT:   	Yeah, the business owners were completely comfortable, or more comfortable.

DW: 	 More comfortable.  And, you know, they didn't really have something to lose and they had something to gain, and they might have lost if they hadn't done the endorsement.  But the political folks just couldn't go there publicly.  So that was an interesting, it showed me how far the light had moved and yet where it had not moved at the same time.

VT:  	Right, in many ways it's moved quite a bit, in some ways not at all.

DW:  	Right, right.  Right, right, right.  And then, you know, obviously the votes here were overwhelming, but they were still votes for the amendment.

VT:  	Yeah, it wasn't 100%.

DW:  	No, no.

VT:  	Let's back up.  

DW: 	 Sure.

00:15:15

VT: 	 One of the things that I wanted to talk a little bit more today was the New Harvest Foundation.

DW:  	Sure.

VT: 	 If you want to maybe back up and revisit that.

DW:  	Okay.

VT:  	And talk a little bit about how that was formed, what your involvement was, and what impact that organization has had in the community.

DW:  	Sure.  I had been approached back in the late '70s to be on the board for the Gay Center, and it was an advisory board.  There was sort of a real formal board for the Center, but this was sort of an advisory board.  They were trying to reach out to some folks, and I said yes.  I hadn't really been particularly involved with the Center beforehand.  And when we were looking at their budget, I was just amazed at their lack of revenue, shall we say.  Their biggest revenue was from operating the coat check at the gay bar, which needless to say was not a gold mine. So myself and a friend of mine named Curd ended up throwing, we first threw a Key West party in the late '70s, and then later we threw a Castro Street party.  I mean, you know, we were just borrowing gay themes for fundraisers and house parties.  But we had printed invites, we had great food, we, you know, did some decorations and stuff like that. And, you know, I think we raised significant amounts, and whether it was, you know, a couple thousand, it was more than they had seen at any one time before.  But it sort of began to reveal to me the tenuous nature of funding for community organizations.  The other source of the funding that the Center had, because they did sort of the gay hotline, was city money, which was often threatened by people who wanted to cut frivolities out of the budget.
And so we knew that there was a need.  The other thing is that I got involved in, you know, just sort of people would start knocking on my door.  They were bringing a gay playwright to town and they couldn't quite pay for his plane ticket, and would I throw a cocktail party to raise some money for this.  And I said, sure, so I, you know, I ended up throwing a cocktail party. But the haphazard nature of this sort of impressed me, and so a number of us started to talk.  And then we, and there happened to be a fundraiser in town who was gay, but professional experience, Jerry Dahlke, and so he and a number of us started to sit down. We spent about six months of meetings in my living room about once a month or so, and tried to think about the issues of how we would do fundraising and create a gay nonprofit foundation.  And Karla Dobinski, who went off and worked in the Justice Department and was an attorney, was very involved in that, and a whole bunch of other people.  And part of the questions, and there were some other examples that we knew of gay fundraising in town.  One of them was the Magic Picnic, which was a big summer picnic.

VT:  	At Brittingham.

DW:  	At Brittingham Park.  And organizations would commit to so many volunteer hours, and then they got so much of the proceeds.  Again, the dollars weren't much.  It was a little haphazard.  There was always sort of a sense, well, this group needs it more than that group, and this sort of stuff, and why should you do it. Now some other experiences that I had, meanwhilst, was that I had been on the Wisconsin Arts Board.  I had been involved in the Common Cultural Affairs Commission, and so I had begun to see how organizations actually asked for money, more substantial money, rather than sort of, you know, we are more entitled than you and, therefore, we need the money, I mean, some of the rationales for divvying up money within the community or why people ought to contribute, which is off-putting to say rather than contributing. So one of them was, well, you know, isn't it about the time the community would grow up and learn to ask for money like everybody else and then we could ask for some of that same kind of money, rather than assume we had to get from coat checks or picnics. So part of the discussions that we had was how do we enhance both the fundraising ability of the community and enhance their professionalism at the same time, and try and make the connection into some of the straight funding streams.  And one of the other things that we talked a lot about, and this is just in like '83-'84, was would people feel comfortable writing a check to something that said Gay Foundation.  And basically a lot of people said no. 

VT:  	Really?

DW: 	 They didn't think people would.

VT: 	 Interesting.  Even in Madison?

DW:  	Even in Madison.  And most of the, there were a couple other gay foundations around the country, and Milwaukee had recently formed the Cream City Foundation, which was related to its Cream City Business Association.  But again, they had used a name Cream City that was non-gay specific, and that was true of most of the foundations around.  So we also came to the conclusion that it ought to be not specifically denominated gay.  We ended up, after struggling long and hard, on the name New Harvest.

VT:  	Which is a bakery.

DW:  	Well, we were actually playing like with the Dome Foundation or the Capitol . . . you know, something that was related to Madison.

VT:  	Right.

DW:  	And then we looked at the state seal and there's this cornucopia of stuff coming out, and so I'm sure it was Karla Dobinski who came up, well, why not New Harvest.  I mean, you know, we're talking about trying to create a new kind of climate for ourselves in this community. And so in lieu of anybody coming up with anything better in the end, that's what we settled on.  And it was very funny, because when we applied to the IRS for our tax exemption, we had people who had experience in that, they did all these documents, the IRS made it clear we could not make any pretense that we were doing agricultural pursuits, that they did not want to have anybody misled.  Now this was in the Reagan days.  We didn't even know if we would get a tax exempt.

VT:  	Right.  And they more worried about your misleading farmers and . . . 

DW: 	 Right, right.

VT:  	Yeah.

DW:  	And actually when you think of Troy's question about Will Fellows' book on farm boys, it wouldn't have been misleading at all.  Anyway, after all this time, the other thing that we needed in addition to sort of not having a specific gay name was that we also wanted to have what we termed OS's, or ostensible straights, on the board of the foundation so that people wouldn't feel that if they were part of it, that they were automatically identifying themselves as gay or lesbian.
	
VT: 	 How interesting.

DW:  	So, by having a mixed board, we could let people join the board without having to say that they were gay or lesbian.

VT:  	Right.  Provide that sort of cover of . . . 

DW:  	Cover, right.

VT: 	 . . . anonymity for those that weren't quite comfortable yet.

DW:  	Right.  And again, the way we got the cover was that we asked people from the political community, who we knew and who owed us some things, like Mary Louise Simon who had been County Board chair, and James Doyle, Jr., who was then the district attorney and now governor, to be on our board. Additionally, Jerry Dahlke, as I said, was a professional fundraiser, he had helped Joe Sensenbrenner do fundraising, so he got Joe Sensenbrenner for our kickoff event which we held at the old Civic Center Marquis Room, you know, because we were saying, hey, we're mainline, we're going, you know, in a public place, uptown kind of a thing rather than sort of, you know, in a back . . . bar or something.

VT:  	Hiding somewhere.

DW:  	Right, right, you know, where people say the password and you come in.
VT: 	 Right, right.

DW: 	 Not the . . . anyway, but we were, you know, we were trying to put a very different presence.  We had also discussed, and we knew that in other gay communities around the state, they sort of had big community dinners where . . . people in the community came.  And Madison didn't have any of that at that point.  And, you know, we had an Urban League dinner or NAACP dinner, but there was nothing for the community.
And so again, that was one of the things that we wanted to do, a place where, in part, the community could be validated by itself coming together and by getting recognition from other folks in the community by coming to, quote, our annual event, the way they go to any other . . . 

VT:  	Right, a large public . . . 

DW:  	Right.

VT:  	. . . fancy event or a ball . . . 

DW: 	 Right, right, right, right.
VT:  	. . . or gala.
DW:  	And now it's sort of like at Monona Terrace like everything else, it's rubber chicken and 	all that stuff.  But, yeah, it's good rubber chicken . . . 

VT: 	 It's mainstream.
DW: 	 Right, right, it is.  But I mean, the first time we did it, we actually rented the whole Fess and had the whole Fess.  You know, we were doing it a little bit slightly more offbeat, fabulous . . . 

VT:  	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DW: 	 So, but we were, you know, trying to fill a couple of those voids.  The other thing, and I may have mentioned this last time, was that we knew most of us who were in the meetings didn't really use the services of most of the community institutions, but that we were sort of the middleclass folks who had a little bit more resources who could give to that, and could give in a more structured way. And if we knew it wasn't just somebody at the last minute calling up and say, oh, gosh, we don't have a plane ticket for a gay playwright who's coming, but somebody who was being disciplined enough to write an application to justify it, would give us an evaluation, that it was a better way to talk to donors that what we were doing, and it was a better way to train the organizations so that they could not only go after our money but after other money as well.

VT: 	 Yeah.

DW:  	You know, and today the New Harvest just transferred its corpus of its endowment to the Madison Community Foundation.

VT: 	 Wow.
DW:  	So it's part of, it still keeps, it makes the decisions, but it doesn't have to manage that stuff.  

VT:  	That's nice.

DW:  	So again, an example of kind of mainstreaming that has occurred.

VT:  	Yeah, progress.

DW: 	 Right.  And again, relatively short time, comparatively . . . 
		
VT: 	 Yeah, it's 20 years really. 

DW:  	. . . for these things to have happen.  Right.

00:26:10

VT:  	What sorts of initiatives did you fund or sort of coordinate early on?

DW:  	We started to do some early AIDS things, because it was starting back then, unfortunately.  

VT:  	When did that first really impact Madison?

DW: 	 The first statewide case, as I recall, occurred in either late '83 or early '84, because we had formed the Governor's Council in '83.  And it wasn't the first thing that we dealt with, but we knew we would have to.  And then the first case came out of Appleton that was publicized and . . . 

VT: 	 In '83?

DW: 	 Either '83 or '84.  It's either late '83 or early '84.  It wasn't, as I said, the very first thing that we were doing, but very quickly it became one that we did.

VT: 	 It became a focus?
DW: 	 Yeah.  And I have all those records piled in boxes.  But, so and there were some early counseling efforts being done here for folks.  Initially, some of the folks that we had were people who were returning here, and this was true of many other sort of communities, is that because the disease had struck more on the coast or people who had been on the coast, sometimes there were people returning here after they had become infected rather than necessarily initially infections coming here locally.

VT:  	How interesting.

DW:  	And so some people had begun to do counseling and some then testing of glucose and other things.  And so those were sort of the very first things that were happening.  They were sort of projects of other folks initially until the AIDS Network was formed, and then that became more the focus for it. But there was I think early on the Gay Chorus, it might have changed names over those years, was one of the things.  Kissing Girls Productions was still around and they were doing their things at that point.  And, you know, a couple hundred dollars for them or a thousand, you know, might help them keep equipment that they could really use . . . 

VT: 	 Oh, yeah, that's huge.

DW: 	 . . . to, you know.  So, you know, it was very early things.  You know, today they've gotten into sort of helping the GLSEN folks and all kinds of other things.  So, you know, it was a lot of community nurturing is what it was, sort of very fledgling institutions then.

VT:  And I might be getting a little bit . . .
 
DW:  	Go ahead.
VT:  	. . . ahead of myself as well.  But you’re thinking about some of those early efforts and the New Harvest Foundation and everything that kind of grew out of it, how would you contrast that kind of community organization in the '80s to what you see today on campus or in the Madison community?  How has that sort of grassroots or sort of, and it may not even be fledgling anymore.  How has that sort of community participation changed over the years?

DW: 	 Boy, it's a whole lot.  Let me, one more thing for the beginning of New Harvest.

VT:  	Okay.

DW:  	When we were trying to sell the idea, we had originally sort of had a group of folks who had been meeting, we had an initial board, and then we went out to people like Rodney Scheel who had the new bar, you know, was one of the most successful gay entrepreneurs in town.  And he was extremely dubious that we could pull this off.

VT:  	Why is that?

DW: 	 He thought, well, you never get the gay professionals in town, the lawyers and doctors and those kinds of folks to serve on the board.

VT: 	 Interesting.
DW:  	That they just didn't think, you know, you would get them to do that.  Rodney could get them all to go party down at his bars or take them on bus trips to Chicago for, you know . . . sort of weekends and stuff like that.  But thinking of them as responsible citizens, no, he couldn't do that. And other people were dubious, too, but I remember Rodney particularly because we had special lunch to try and court him . . . 

VT: 	 Yeah.

DW:  .	 . . get him involved because we figured he's making money, he ought to be a contributor.

VT: 	 Exactly.

DW:  	But in the end today, there's no question that people are willing to do that.  I mean, for a while we were sort of cycling within a circle of folks who were related to, you know, us who had found it, and so, you know, we would serve sort of two terms and then get one of our friends to serve, you know.  But today it's a much broader kind of a group, you know.  You go to its dinners, there's folks I hardly know.  And when we had the first thing at the Fess, I knew almost everybody.  So, you know, it's just sort of beyond that small circle of folks.  And folks . . . 

VT:  	Is it as effective, do you think?

DW: 	 They're still raising money.  They haven't quite kicked to the, you know, next mega level.  I mean, some of the organizations in the community, you know, have grown, in part because they've needed to, whereas others are established but, you know, there's no mega kind of status for some things.  The AIDS Network is probably one, which isn't technically, you know, it's a related but not specifically a community one.  So, but part of the question is, is, you know, how much perceived need is there today still in that regard.

VT:  	That's a good question.

DW:  	You know, the people sort of theorize about sort of a post-gay world that, you know, in some ways the integration to a larger community is so much easier that the identity questions that we had to deal with, the fact that you needed separate support systems may not be there.  I don't know the answer to that . . . 

VT: 	 No, but I've heard the same argument with women's issues as well.

DW:  	Right.  Right.  And I don't think it's true in either case myself, but it could be argued.

VT:  	It's false complacency, on the one hand . . . 

DW:  	Yes, right, there certainly, certainly is a lot of that.  So, you know, today I'm involved with a group at the University Foundation trying to raise money for gay studies in the Campus Center.  And so, you know, clearly, the people that we're aiming at who have some resources again are the kind of people who went through very identifying experiences coming out and being part of a community.  And so, you know, we're creating some name scholarships and other kinds of things as a part of that effort.
But do the kids today?  I don't know.  I mean, they have a different sense.  I mean, I talked to the students who went on this bus trip re-creating this whole early gay civil rights era.  And there was a panel, a couple of us who spoke to them before they went, and then I saw a little video they put together after their trip.  It's just remarkable.  It's not anything we could have imagined in our day.

VT:  	Why is that?

DW: 	 One, the bus trip was both gay and straight students talking about a gay topic.  I mean, you were lucky if you could talk about a gay topic with gay people, much less really have discussions about it in any depth. They actually had resources, like books, and then they did some oral history interviews and things like that.  You know, people weren't afraid to be on video and stuff like that.  And so, I mean, it clearly was a different world now.  That doesn't necessarily mean it's not still questions of identity that they're dealing with, but it's a much different world. After the Governor's Council on Gay and Lesbian Issues was appointed, I got invited to go speak to the Wisconsin Press Association.  They were having their annual meeting, I believe up at Stevens Point, and, you know, they were asking, well, you know, how do we deal with gay news?  I mean, because it was relatively new to them in the state of how to deal with this, and this was after the controversy that occurred with Ron McCrea where the Milwaukee Sentinel had announced his appointment with, you know, Governor Earl appoints avowed homosexual as a big headline.

VT:	  Right.

DW: 	 And, you know, they got badly trounced for that by journalists for sort of, you know, making this kind of a . . . 

VT: 	 It's inflamed.

DW:  	Right.

VT: 	 Yeah.

DW: 	 And so, you know, the journalists wanted to know how, you know, should they deal with issues, how do they find sources, and this sort of stuff.  And, you know, so trying to sort of give them some information about how to do that, how to sort of approach folks, and, you know, it was new and they didn't know how to do it.

VT:  	Right.
DW:  	And, you know, now you wouldn't presume that at all.  You would figure that, you know, if . . . 

VT: 	It's not gay news, it's news.

DW:  	Well, none of that, but that if you're a reporter and you want to cover gay news, one, you know how to do it and, two, you can find sources, because you can pull out the book and usually find something or you can ask somebody about, you know, who do I call to get something on this, you know. They didn't know at that point.  I mean, you know, originally they thought all the gay people were in San Francisco and New York, you know.  Then they discovered there were some of us in Madison and Milwaukee, but if you're in Stevens Point or Eau Claire, I mean, how do you handle something and how do you begin to understand it and this sort of stuff. So, you know, it changed a world.  I mean, if you look at the coverage that existed on the Fair Wisconsin, on the amendment and campaign, you know, they all had developed local sources.  They all knew how to run stories, this sort of thing.  But it wasn't that world back in the '80s.

00:36:07

VT:  	No.  Let's talk a little bit about that, because it's very interesting to me.  When you talked about, you know, AIDS being a defining issue in the '80s, you know, in the '90s there's still that.  You know, what I see as sort of the defining issue of this decade is probably the marriage amendment.  What else has been sort of the forefront, at least in Madison or in your involvement with the community besides those two issues?

DW:  	In some ways, there was sort of the, the first thing was really the repeal of the city gay rights law.  That was the first big battle, nondiscrimination.  And then there was the push for the state law, which was passed, and then sort of its enforcement.  And then after that, sort of things settled down.  In Madison there was community building, but there wasn't a lot of controversial issues that I'm thinking about, until sort of Tammy's election.

VT: 	 Really.

DW:  	And, you know, and again I live in a political world and Madison is a political town.  So that to elect for Congress somebody who is, you know, openly gay was remarkable.  And Tammy was very clear about emphasizing about making history.  And so, you know, I think that was important.  I mean, David ran for Congress, but David had so muddled issues about his own identity that, you know, people were very split about how to deal with David and identity questions.  So . . . 

VT: 	 It wasn't quite as cut and dried as Tammy.

DW: 	 It wasn't cut and dried at all.

VT:  	Yeah.
DW:  	He was married at the time and, you know, and many people were afraid of him for that.  I mean, I had maintained my friendship with David through all of his changes in his life, but many people had sort of broken bridges and all kinds of stuff.

VT: 	 Sure.

DW: 	 So his run for Congress where he didn't even win the primary, you know, was not seen that same way, whereas Tammy had been so solid and clear about . . . 

VT:  	Unwavering.

DW:  	Right, she was.  And involved with things in the community in terms of the county AIDS efforts and things like that, that it really was historic.  And, you know, to think of that here in this town we had passed the first gay rights law in the early '80s, and we had then elected the first out lesbian and first, frankly, out gay person who was elected without being elected first and then coming out, you know, it's sort of a remarkable place.  
And so it speaks to sort of part of what we were able to do in terms of building political institutions and support.  One of the other things on the New Harvest Foundation was that, you know, I mean, I don't divorce one side of my brain from the other, in that I knew for political campaigns fundraising was an important part.

VT:  	Huge.

DW:  	And you had to train people to give.

VT: 	 Right.

DW: 	 And the New Harvest Foundation was another way to train people to give, to build a cadre of people who would be skilled in asking.  And you could take those same people from a New Harvest milieu and put them instead into a political campaign, and you had another asset for a political campaign.

VT:  	And be just as effective.

DW:  	Right.
	
VT: 	 So New Harvest Foundation really served so many purposes for the community.

DW: 	 It did.  It did.

VT:  	You know, and that education, I think, was critical in being able to achieve some of the successes that the community can claim, which I think is fair to say.  You know, Tammy owes a lot of her success probably to that organizing unit.

DW:  	Sure.  And there were a lot of people who were her key fundraisers who had been involved in New Harvest in its various stages.  So, you know, so these things do link, and some of us were purposeful about the potential links if not . . . 

VT: 	 It wasn't just serendipitous.

DW: 	 No.  No.

VT:  	There was a plan.

DW:  	There was a plan.  I mean, the whole thing about the Homintern and, you know, making sure that we all supported one another and that those kinds of links were there and things like that, too.  So it was about building community and building political power, which in this community made sense and which was possible to do.  You know, I mean, Milwaukee finally has some out gay people, but it took them decades to follow us.

VT:  	And, you know, I still think Madison is Madison.  I mean, there are places outside of our city, within the state or in the country that aren't quite as far along as we are.

DW: 	 Oh, without a doubt.

VT:  	Without a doubt.  I keep thinking as we're talking, and I kind of touched on this already, you know, it's so different, the experience for young people today is so different for so many reasons.  The climate is different, but people are also connected in very different ways.

00:41:38	

VT:	I mean, we live in a very global, globally connected world.  How do you get, or what are your thoughts on how community building has grown or evolved and changed because of that sort of differently connected nature of communication?  You know, kids aren't as connected perhaps with their own peers on campus as they are with somebody in Great Britain or Australia, and how do you envision sort of community building changing or evolving because of that?	

DW: 	 I'm not sure, but I know it's a reality.  You know, I'm an historian so I do know that sort of local institutions were a lot more important in the past than they are today.  You know, today LOGO channel on cable probably has as much influence, or magazines.  I mean, when I was first in the early '80s trying to find media sources, I mean mainly it was the Advocate which still had its infamous pink pages back then.  It was a separate pullout that you could get rid of if you wanted. And so, you know, the fact that you could have sort of mainstream sources and lots of magazine choices and, you know, most of them not even caring about the politics of stuff, but is, you know, more about fashion and travel and all kinds of other things that generate more advertising revenue for folks.

VT:  	Right, right.

DW:  	And that as you're thinking about sort of even local gay media, which Madison has had a fitful experience with off and on, and then sort of the folks who did The Wisconsin Light out of Milwaukee which they tried to keep statewide.  Last year I went to the funeral for Jerry Johnson, or Terry Boughner really.  He was Jerry Johnson to other people.  He did The Wisconsin Light.  Is that those local things are breaking down but they're not gone.  There's still local cultures, there's still some local media.  The Cap Times going away is another example.

VT:  	Yeah, so . . . 

DW:  	You know, again having a paper like the Cap Times that was interested in covering gay issues was an important thing.  You know, today the State Journal will, but back then hardly ever would cover things.  So, you know, each of the local TV stations is known to have a gay person on their staff, but I don't think TV covers as much gay news just because of the nature of what they do.  You know, if there are celebrity hosts for gay drag bingo, maybe they do a little story on that, but I don't think they cover much otherwise. So in some ways how you build and keep identity in a community is a little more challenging when, one, you don't have the outside pressures to sort of isolate you, and some of the institutional support that used to be there goes away.  There is a change just in the very nature of sort of our public discourse and public dialogue and public space today because of the absorption and media and how you access it.  So it's going to affect our community as well.

VT:  	Yeah, and for better or for worse.
DW:	 Right.

VT:  	I mean, I think there are very positive aspects in that and also . . . 

DW:  Sure, absolutely.  Because, I mean, if you're in some isolated place . . . 

VT:  	You have something.

DW: 	 . . . you have something you can read about.  I mean, you know, Harvey Milks' famous speech about, you know, he got a call from the young kid in Altoona and, you know, the kid had nowhere to go except to call somebody in San Francisco.  Well, now I'm sure there must be a GLSEN teen thing in Altoona, at least, if not, you know, four or five other places.

VT:  . . . websites are, you know.

DW:  	Right, right, he can get on the computer and go find them.

VT: 	 Right.

DW: 	 So a different world and more resources available.  So it's just, you know, it's not better or worse, it's just different.

00:46:08
VT: 	 Yeah.  So when you look back on all these experiences, and each decade has been very different for you, you know, what stands out in your mind as perhaps, and this is kind of a loaded question, but perhaps maybe your proudest accomplishments or the thing that maybe at the time didn't seem like it was going to be such a big deal but it's turned out to be, you know, something that's really changed your experience in the community for better?

DW: 	I think by being an out public official, that that's still one of the more significant things that I did, because I think it did pave the way for other folks to come along, that broader network of, quote, the Homintern, and for eventually Tammy to come along.And that also encouraged a whole bunch of other folks in town to do things and stand up and sort of, you know, find that, you know, the sky wasn't going to collapse if they did.  So, you know, we were able to do, as a result, New Harvest we were able to get other people to do.  I mean, you know, just the fact that you could do that in this town in the early '80s I think was, and, you know, it enabled Governor Earl then to appoint Kathleen and I as his co-chairs of the Governor's Council, and it wasn't seen as sort of that extreme that he could appoint two elected officials to do this effort.  So I still think that was probably the single-most significant thing for all of this other work that I've been engaged in.

VT: 	 Where do you see yourself contributing, participating, moving forward, looking ahead?  You touched on a couple of the things that you've been involved in, the marriage amendment most recently, but . . . 

DW: 	 Right.  If I can discipline myself to write my work on Wisconsin gay history, you know, I think that could be . . . I mean, I lived through a lot of it so I could write some of the more recent parts which, you know, you got to get detachment, but I still have some good sources for some of the most recent.  But I also think I can frame some of it in ways that are interesting.

VT:  	How so?

DW: 	 I've done most of the research for the Oscar Wilde trial coverage in the Wisconsin press at this point, and so it's almost all negative, to say the least.  The ones that aren't negative are maybe neutral, at best. And so from it you can draw the themes that I can imagine not only what this says about the attitudes of the white male editors who were writing the headlines and who were writing the editorials, but you can think about it that if you happened to be somebody who might have been gay or homosexual reading these things, you know, what do you draw from it. I mean, one, you're going to get public shame, you're going to be involved in the criminal justice system, you're going to be financially harmed, you know, the actual penalties are going to be severe.  I mean, there's all these things that they choose to cover out of the trial and which they report.  They encouraged censorship, that is, books and plays ought to be banned and all these things. And yet several of them, not all of them by any means, but several of them chose to publish the final statement that Wilde makes at the trial.  He basically writes it out on a couple paragraphs after he's been convicted and sentenced and before they sort of take him away. And I call it Oscar's anecdote.  And in it, he shifts the experience away from the criminal justice thing, away from sex, and he talks about it as I'm still a matter of beauty, so he's in his own tradition of, you know, what is aesthetic, and he still is talking about it as a positive kind of thing.  So that if you have to go and read all this negative thing, read all the characterizations, you still hear, have Oscar himself saying, no, you all got it wrong. 

VT: 	 Wrong, yeah.

DW:  	It's not about those things.  It's really about beauty and love and relation, and, you know.  So maybe you can reach out for that little bit of hope if you read, if you happen to be in a town that publishes that part of this story.

VT:  	Right.  And why do you think those few editors did choose to publish that . . . 

DW:  	Well, I mean, it was news, it was a statement, you know.

VT:  	Right.

DW:  	I mean, I don't think they were thinking of it in the same way that I'm thinking of it.
VT: 	 Perhaps.  It was the end of the story.

DW:  	Right, right, and then the stories themselves come from London.  So the editors can truncate it, that they don't make it up.  Headlines they make up, so the headlines are clear and more reflective of their attitudes.

VT:  	Interesting.

DW:  	So for someone who might think it's simply a matter of journalism that this is what they got from London, it was sort of, you know, part of the reportage that the . . . 

VT:  	News feed.  

DW:  	Right, right, that they did edit out, thank goodness.  So anyway, I mean, you know, those kinds of constructions that you can bring to it, I think, are an interesting kind of . . . 

VT:  	Sure.

DW: 	 . . . way to view it.

VT:  	So your own personal history of LGBT in Wisconsin then.

DW: 	 Right, and I, you know, just because of the nature of it, I picked up some sources.  The house that I live in was inhabited by two gay men in the 1950s and '60s.
VT:  	Really.

DW:  	And it was sort of the gay social center of Madison back in that day.  And one of them was a newspaper reporter for a small weekly journal, the Rio Journal.  But he was a writer.  He went off and studied briefly at Taliesin.

VT:  	Interesting.

DW:  	So I mean he has this connection to all kinds of stuff.  But the niece of his partner dropped off a bunch of his writings from the presumably '20s and '30s, so I have a wonderful source of material of his sort of . . . 

VT:  	Oh, that's fantastic.

DW:  	. . . gay stories and kinds of things like that from that period, and poems.  He only published one little poem called Two Venetian Goblets.  But when you think of sort of the slightly underground life that they were having to live, but they were pretty above ground for being underground.

VT:  	Yeah.

DW:  	But still, he describes in the Two Venetian Goblets the kind of fragileness of the glass, and if you take that as a metaphor for the fragileness of their lives that they were living in the 1950s Wisconsin at the time of the McCarthy era.

VT:  	Oh, sure.

DW:  	You know, it's like wonderful kind of, revelatory kind of poem.

VT:  	So it's another project for you.

DW:  	Huh?

VT: 	 It's another project for you.

DW: 	 Well, yes, this is all part of this project, you know, which I'm still trying to do while trying to do commuter rail and being on boards here and there, and, you know.  But it's very interesting and, you know, just having some of this sort of, and I have a 1911 book of physical culture that one of the neighbors on my block have that I picked up in a neighborhood block sale.

VT:  	Oh, fantastic.

DW:  	So, I mean, just my own life I've come across some very interesting sources, and I know there's going to be more out around the state as well, so gathering those and trying to weave those in a story so that some of that gets told.

VT:  	Yeah.  What will you do with those interviews when you're done?

DW:	  I  hope it's a book in the end.  So materials, I'm sure, I mean, I started donating papers already to the Historical Society.

VT: 	 Oh, good.

DW: 	 But presumably I'll give them all the rest.  It's a garage full of stuff.  Or if you guys want to . . . 

VT:  	Well, you know, it's an interesting aside, though.  You know, we're doing the project with Michael Doylan at UW-Milwaukee and he's got, you know, a groundswell of material, you know, documenting community and activism there.

DW:  	Right, right, I know the . . . stuff exists.

VT:  	You know, and we're going to digitize it and we're going to make it available online.  Who knows?

DW: 	Oh, wow.  So you're going to take the step, too, and make it available?

VT:  	We are.

DW: 	 Oh.

VT:  	We are.  So we'll see how that goes.

DW:  	Okay.

VT: 	 It's a lot of oral histories, too.

DW:  	Right.  Well, in my Fair Wisconsin work I ran across somebody who knows somebody who's working on a history of the Main Club up in Superior, which has been the chief institution for that community for years.  And Troy connected me with this guy in La Crosse who has copies of all of their publications and things like that.
So, you know, so there are sources out there.  And, you know, in a way, and this is something I don't know if I could pull off but it's sort of what I'm thinking, is that, one, there's just a story of the community and its people to be told.  But, two, there's something about, you know, the first gay rights state, the first out lesbian elected, plus we had Gunderson come out when he was in office, so, you know, the first out Republican congressperson. And can you say something about the interaction of that community and its political culture that explains some of that in ways that draw on sort of that uniqueness of what this state was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and how it does provide for this to happen.

VT:  	I would think so.

DW: 	 I would think so, too, at least I'd love to speculate on it.  So that's . . . 

VT:  	I'd love to read it.

DW: 	 Right, right, right, right, right.

VT:  	But I know where you're going.  It's a tough thing to bring all that together.

DW: 	 Right, it is.

00:56:49	

VT:  	What haven't we touched on?  Is there anything that, you know, we've . . . 

DW:  	Sure.

VT:  	We've covered a lot of your experiences with different organizations on campus.

DW:  	Right.

VT:  	And we didn't talk much about the historic Madison, preservation work.

DW:  	No, right.

VT:  	Is there anything that you would like to share about that organization and your 
	participation?

DW:  	Again, it sort of represented where I lived when I was in graduate school, because I lived in the Mansion Hill area.  And I got engaged in that work while living in the neighborhood.  And since doing that, I learned a lot about Madison history and served on the Landmarks Commission and all that stuff. I founded the, I didn't publish it but when I was president of Historic Madison, I pushed that we would publish the journal of historic Madison, and actually contributed one article on the sort of loss of public buildings in Madison, that we used to have a lot more that were publicly functional . . . fire stations and things like that that were just sort of thrown away.

VT:  	Gas stations.

DW:  	And so that kept me involved in local history in a way.  So when the Madison sesquicentennial as a city came along, the mayor tapped me to be on that and then asked me to head it up as well.  And so, you know, I've continued to sort of have a play in local history, though I don't have the depth that certainly a David Moff(?) or anybody like that does, but some people come and talk to me about that stuff. But the preservation stuff really led me into sort of planning issues, which led me into a lot of the issues with the city and how it's planned.  So that, in part, got me involved in doing the conferences on John Nolen and the new urbanism, which we did three of with Mark Eisen being the chief instigator behind that, but I brought some organizational skills and other issues to that as well. So I've been involved, and still am, because I'm on the Urban Design Commission issue in planning issues and sort of the development of the city and how that fits.  And so those are, again, some very interesting issues and related to transportation and the other stuff we're doing.  So that's been another focus of a lot of my public activity and involvement. We didn't talk much about the gay alum association, and Tammy and I were both involved in the early days of founding that.  And I think we were one of the first in the Big 10 with one of the most ongoing ones, but I think some have come and gone in other parts of the Big 10.

VT:  	Really?
DW:  	And so, you know, Paula Bonner was a big credit helping get that going and sustaining that.  And, you know, again, I think that helps build issues.  I've certainly known people on campus who have been involved in some of the issues.  Oh, there was another issue on campus, which was the ROTC issue, which I forgot about it, which I wasn't involved in directly.

VT:  	What is that?

DW: 	 This was when they were trying to get ROTC off campus because of the military policy against gay and lesbians serving in the military.  So there was a big effort, particularly by a number of faculty members, Joe Elder was one, Mike Olenick(?), whose wedding I was in, was another.  And so that was supported by people in the community, but it was really a campus issue and various votes in the faculty senate on the issue and stuff like that.

VT: 	 Were they successful?

DW:  	No, I see it's still here.  But, you know, they pushed very strongly against the military policy and, you know, continue to, I think, lay the groundwork which other people have done on other campuses so that, you know, at some point don't ask, don't tell is going to go away.  But again, you ended up with the federal issue more than what you could manage in this state arena and in the local campus arena.  But certainly that was a significant issue on campus for a while.

VT:  	Was that in the '90s, late '80s, early '90s?

DW: 	 '90 something.

VT:  	That . . . Clinton . . . right?

DW: 	 No, actually it was before Clinton, as far as I can recall.  Because when Clinton got in, he knew he wanted to try and do something about it, and that's what led to don't ask, don't tell.  But the campus pressure was occurring in the late '80s.
VT:  	Right.
DW:  	So the other issue, which was sort of the city domestic partner issue, I was not on the City Council but certainly a number of my friends were, and so they turned to me to try and help see if I could mediate sort of something that would get a Council majority between some of the folks who were most insistent.And I don't remember the particulars any more, but I can remember meeting with a number of the straight alders and trying helping sort out some of the issues for them and get them to a place where the city could do something on domestic partners.  And they did and they do have a domestic partner policy for the city.

VT:  	Is it the same policy that's still in place now?
DW:  	Probably.  It may have been strengthened a little bit over the years, but that was an issue during the '80s when I was on the County Board that I was able to help the other side of the house, so to speak.  Some of my friends who were on the City Council used to refer to the County Board as the House of Lords, so they were the House of Commons if that was the case.
VT:  	That's pretty nice.
DW:  	Well, you know, you live in the political world and you're able to deal with it, even if it's not your own direct kind of way of doing it.

01:02:43
	
VT:  	Do you feel like Madison is still kind of ahead of the curve . . . 

DW:  	Oh, yeah, definitely.

VT:  . . . in many ways?

DW: 	 Definitely.

VT:  	Compared to sort of peer cities around the country?

DW:  	Yeah, I would think so.  I mean, you know, one of the issues here has been, and this is sort of one of the perplexing things in thinking about sort of the history of the state and this place, is that you don't need to ghettoize or build separate community institutions.  You can, you know, and certainly there are a few areas, you know, in the city, Dykites and Boys by the Bay and stuff like that, where people have congregated, but it hasn't been necessary the way it occurred in some other places.  

VT: 	 Yeah.

DW: 	So there's much more flowing back and forth, you know.  Even the new gay bars supposedly floating around town are having various issues and, you know, someday they'll either sort it out or they won't, but it's more of an entrepreneur issue than a community issue.

VT:  	Why is that, do you think, in Madison that there's less into sort of ghettoize?

DW:  	Well, part of it is because I think, one, the straight community is more open, and that there's more self-assurance that you can go there.  You know, most of my circle of friends are gay, but I have a number of gay friends most of their circle are not gay.  So, you know, they feel very comfortable with that, you know.

VT:  	It's a much more fluid environment, isn't it?

DW: 	Right, it is.  And, you know, theoretically that's how we always wanted it to be.

VT:  	Right.  And now it is.

DW:  It is.

VT:  Yeah, yeah.

DW:  	And so, you know, it's actually not bad as it turns out.  But it doesn't lend yourself as 
much for, you know, cutting-edge kind of internal-focused kinds of efforts.  You know, that's why the political stuff probably has been more valuable and achievable here, because it is both externally focused and engages those allies that you have, rather than relying on community power to do it.Anybody who was elected, of the gay officials I'm talking to you, none of them had a gay majority district, whereas in other places around the country, you start getting not quite gay majority but substantial gay, you know, communities that are electing the openly gay people.

VT:  	Right.

DW:  	It wasn't the experience here.  They were elected from, you know, ostensibly straight districts . . . 

VT:  	Yeah, yeah, yeah.

DW: 	.. . to use that other term.  So, you know, it's a different kind of experience.
VT:  	Do you think, one thing that I've been thinking about a lot since we started this interview and the first interview, you know, were you to share, and you probably have, your experience, your coming out experience, your community involvement experience with young people today, do you think they really have an appreciation for all the experiences that have occurred over the past several decades to allow them to have the experience that they're having today?  Do you think they have a cognizance of the environment for you compared to the environment for them?

DW:  	Nobody does.  Nobody does, and it's not just gay things.  You know, I hang around antique stores with friends and, you know, I come across things from World War 2, and I was born in '43, so it's the end of the war.  And like there's patriotic songbooks, you know, that are just part of sort of the culture of that period.  I come across ration books.  You know, those things fascinate me, because they speak to a very different world than the one I grew up starting later in the '50s and '60s new.
So I don't think, you know, they can.  You just can't track back to that stuff.  I'm fascinated by old atlases, particularly I have a number that come from World War 2 era, and so you see how they're depicting the world, and then how the world looks, you know, in 2008.  It's, you know, very different.

VT:  	We're really talking about engaging kids in history.

DW: 	 Right.
VT:  	And personalizing their own history so that they have a greater appreciation for that experience, whatever it is.

DW:  	Right.  And some of them will like history and have an ability to understand it, and some of them won't care and don't want to.

VT:  	Don't I know.

DW: 	 So, you know, that's part of the reality of where they are.

VT:  	Sure.  Sure.

DW:  	But for those who want to, to be able to preserve the resources and to sort of have them available and let them know about them is the important thing.

VT:  	Well, it's why we do what we do, right?

DW: 	 Right.

VT: 	 It's critical.

DW: 	Right.

VT:  	Well, that's, I don't really have any other specific questions today . . . 

DW:  	Okay, that's fine.

VT:  	. . . if there's anything else that you wanted to talk about.  I think what I'll do is . . . 

DW: 	 Sure.

VT:  	. . . sit down with Troy and kind of go over what we talked about today, and there are other follow-up questions that he might have . . . 

DW: 	 Sure, that's fine.

VT: 	 . . . we might do another quick.

DW:  	Okay.  If you feel, think, but I mean, we've covered a lot.

VT:  	We have covered a lot.  I'm going to stop now.

01:08:06    
[End of Tape 2 and Oral History #904]