UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

Interview #1051
CZYSCON, JANICE

CZYSCON, Janice (1953-)
Senior Editor for Engineering Professional Development in the College of Engineering
At UW: 1984-present

Interviewed: 	2009 (2 sessions) 
Interviewer: 	Linda Lenzke
Index by: 	Kelly Rupp
Length: 	1 hour, 43 minutes
Series: 	Madison’s LGBT Community, 1960s to present

00:00:00     	Start of First Interview Session/Interviewer’s Introduction
LL:       Today is July 20. And my name is Linda Lenzke. And today, I have the honor of interviewing Janice Czyscon. 
LL:	 Hi, Janice. 
JC: 	Hi, Linda. 
00:00:14 
LL: 	So, Janice, do you want to start out by telling us a little bit about your family of origin, where you were born, a little bit about the details of where you fit into your family, and a little bit about your early growing-up years? 
JC: 	My name is Janice Czyscon. I'm 56 years old. I was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, where I lived up until I was, I believe, 19, when I left Chicago. I'm 100% Polish, so I have some very strong tradition that guided my upbringing in Chicago. I have two brothers, one older, by five years older, and one younger, four years younger than me. I've always said it's a really tough place to be, the only girl in the middle of two brothers. But I'm not sure I really believe that. I just always used it. My dad worked for the railroad, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe, in Chicago. He died when I was 18. He died fairly young. I believe he was 53. One of the big memories I have of my dad is how he loved to sing. And he sang well. I love to sing, but I can't claim that I sing as well as he did. But there was a lot of singing in the household, a lot of whistling, a lot of dancing. Another memory of my dad is standing on his feet and dancing with him, so I really didn't have to know how to dance, although I did learn how to later. And then another really strong memory of my dad is every summer when he was on vacation, he would take me to the railroad yard down on the South Side of Chicago, the claim being he had to go to pick up his paycheck. And I think it was more to give me insight into his workplace, which I always felt was pretty cool. So it was a long bus ride down from the Near North Side of Chicago to the South Side. So a long bus ride with dad, which was one-on-one time. And then when we got there, of course, all of the workers paid a lot of attention to me. And I always ended up with a big bag of stuff, freight. It was actually samples of the freight they were dealing with for the day. So bags of cereal, paper, just a whole bunch of-- bag of junk. And I go into the memory of my dad because I often wonder if I had come out to him what his reaction would've been. Because I really always thought of him as a very tolerant person, a very kind person, a very generous person. So I often wonder. And I've never thought about this before, actually, till now. It might be something I want to ask my mom as to what her opinion is regarding that. I can ask her before she passes on-- she's 87-- how she thinks my dad may have reacted to my coming out. 
00:03:59
JC:	Coming out to my mom came about in around 1981. And I had already been active in the lesbian community for many years but never really thought about coming out to my family. And it was at this point in time, 1981-ish, I was in a relationship with Crystal, my partner of 29 years. And we talked about, hey, now's the time. We've got to come out. We cannot let our families find out about our sexual orientation because they see us on the Sally Jessy Raphael Show. So we decided it was time to come out, at least to our parents. And I remember making the phone call to my mom to let her know. And it was a pretty, like, oh, really? And if I remember correctly, she was more concerned about what life would be like for Carmen and Miranda, Crystal's biological daughters, the two daughters I was helping to parent. So that's what I remember about coming out to my mom. I think eventually I just assumed my younger brother knew I was a lesbian. And not even sure when I really had the coming-out talk with him. My older brother, who is a born-again Christian, I came out to maybe in '94, '93 or '94, and I did it via email. And we had a little exchange that went back and forth. And oh, he said, I don't agree with your lifestyle, but I'm going to try not to let it get in the way of us continuing to have a relationship. So that's jumping ahead in the family history. But early days, I was a tomboy. Tried to play ball and whatever other sports I could with the boys on the block, wrangled a couple of girlfriends into the group so that we did integrate, at least the baseball team. I guess that's it for family for now. 
00:06:45
LL: 	Usually before we come out to our family, we have sometimes an awareness at a very young age that we're different or that something is not what we expected. Do you want to talk about your early years? You just mentioned that you were a tomboy. Did you get a sense early on in your life that you may have been different, what that was like? Did you have early crushes when you were in school? Was that a difficult period for you? Or once you made that realization, did it feel like one of those moments of, oh yeah, now it all makes sense? 
JC:	 I think I can remember back to about age eight or nine just feeling like I liked girls. There was an attraction of some sort, more of a connection. I just wanted to hang with the girls more than I was interested in boys. And probably at that age, it's probably not that unusual. I would say that definitely the emotional, physical attraction that I became aware of was like sophomore year in high school, where I definitely began to realize that I did have feelings that were not supposed to be. And at that point, I remember finding a book. I really don't know where I found it. I don't know if it was in our home library or if I went to the public library. But I think it was by some sex therapist guy, Havelock Ellis. And I remember reading that fairly early on, where he identified homosexuality and did it in a way that I thought, well, hey, nothing wrong with this. And I really never felt horrible about having the feelings that I had. Now, I tried doing some of the dating. I tried having a couple of boyfriends in high school. And I just didn't work on making that work, because it just didn't feel right. Crushes, yeah, I had plenty of crushes in high school, but I never did anything about it, other than probably bothering my girlfriends, the girls that I had the crushes on, probably being maybe in their face a little more than they had hoped I would be, maybe too many phone calls, that kind of thing. 
00:09:54 
LL: 	Do you want to talk a little bit about your early relationships, when you did start spending time with women in a relationship where it was a mutual and what challenges you may have had? And maybe you could tell us a little bit about what age you were and whether you were in college or what the setting was and perhaps the city where that was happening for you? 
JC: 	So you're asking about a definite same-sex relationship? 
LL:	 Uh-huh. 
JC: 	OK. Of which I've had two in my life. And the first one was kind of like, go with the headiness of it all and being young and silly and crazy. And there really was no challenge other than in the late '70s, not being out, but having a fairly positive relationship. Although over time, a distance developed, and the emotional connection, bond, fell apart. So it was a mutual agreement to enter into the same-sex relationship. 
LL: 	Were you living in Madison at this time, or did this happen someplace else? Give us a little benchmark of where you were and how you got to Madison. Because for those people who don't know you, you've been here most of your life with your same partner. And you're going to be talking about that, I'm sure, but get us to where we are. Get us to Madison. 
JC: 	So my first relationship started in maybe '73, about '73 in Western Illinois. I in fact had moved from Chicago to Western Illinois with this person, with this woman. And we were living there as friends, and then the relationship turned into a romantic, emotional relationship. Then we moved around a bit from Western Illinois to Michigan, around Kalamazoo, and then down to Southern Illinois, Carbondale area. And then at that time, when we were in Carbondale, we were pretty active with the Equal Rights Amendment at that time and with NOW down in Carbondale. In fact, I think we revitalized a NOW chapter that had fallen apart, because the women at the university were feeling very threatened. Some historical perspective there about being feminist in the early '70s was a threat to professional women. So the NOW chapter that had existed went defunct, and then we hooked up with a bunch of women down there and got another chapter going. And it was that point in time, that's when I met Molly Yard, an early organizer for national NOW. I actually worked with her. She was down in Carbondale. Met Ellie Smeal at that point in time. Trying to think if there are any other-- well, Judy Goldsmith from Wisconsin I somehow met while we were down in Southern Illinois. And then I guess we had heard about what a wonderful community Madison was, and we just decided, OK, we spent enough time here in Carbondale, and we moved up to Madison. But interesting, I had formed quite a few really cool relationships with women down in Carbondale, so I had gone back. After we moved up here, I went back, spent a few weeks living down there before I got established up here, finishing up some organizing. I can't remember specifically what it was for, but some NOW work. And then actually, I did come out to women down there, because one of the women I was staying with came out to me, which was like-- that was actually an experience I haven't thought about for a while, but this, again, is '77-- this is '78, 1978. And again, doing a little bit more reading, finding the correct literature somewhere down in Carbondale, and then having this woman who I'd stayed with for a few weeks coming out to me. 
00:15:14 
JC:	So that, I'm sure, got things going in my head in terms of, OK, Madison, I'm going to a good place, so hopefully pretty soon, I will be starting my coming-out process officially. So that's how I got to Madison. Arrived here-- I think it was fall of '78-- and immediately hooked up with the Madison Coalition for the ERA, who was pretty active here in town at that time. And got hooked up with them and started doing activist work around ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and, again, making some really good friendships, a lot of really good friendships during that time. So then after arriving in Madison in spring of '78 and getting hooked up with the Madison Coalition for the ERA, I was still very, very, very gung-ho on getting the ERA ratified, so I put all of my political energy into that organization. And we met often. Without going back into the records, I think there may have been even weekly meetings at one point in time, strategy meetings, fundraising meetings, political action meetings, going-down-to-Illinois meetings, going-to-DC meetings. So we had a lot of meetings, and most of them were at Lysistrata Restaurant at that point in time, in the big meeting room, which had a very large table that I think sat close to 20, 25 people. And it was at one of those meetings that I met Crystal. And so it would've been, I think, fall of maybe the following year-- well, yeah, maybe fall of '79 when we first met. Yeah. That makes sense. And she likes to tell the story that I was chairing the meeting and shuffling a lot of papers, because that's what I did. I shuffled my papers, keep everything on track. But it was my turn to chair the meeting, because we did have a rotating chair, politically correct organization. 
And I just remember being smitten. I could not keep my eyes off the new woman at the table. And so from there on, I just found excuses to make phone calls to Crystal and to plan more meetings, one-on-one meetings. I remember slipping her some literature, "The Woman-Identified Woman" manifesto by-- was it the Radicalesbians? Again, I have to go back into-- I really should know this by memory, but that was-- I thought, well, I'm going to give this to her, and if it's meant to be, this will make it work, and this'll make it happen. And Crystal thought the piece made a lot of sense. And-- well, I wouldn't say weeks later. It would be months, a few months later, in the spring of 1980, that we were out for a Friday afternoon get-together, which we had made our time to get together. And I think I made the first move by asking how her injured hamstring or quadricep muscle was. So that I remember being the first touch. And then shortly after that, we were on the softball team, Women for Equality. And after a practice, we got together and went swimming. We must have been at Olbrich Park at that time to find a lake that we could go and enjoy a swim together. 
00:20:02 
JC:	And from there, that's the beginning of our history. So Madison Coalition for the ERA brought us together and kept us working together for a long time. Crystal came with two children who were-- oh, man-- 1980, Nanda was almost two in May 1980. And then we moved in together in December of 1980, so Miranda had just turned two when we started all living together. And Carmen would have just turned five. Talk about terror. Whoa. These kids were great, they were just beautiful children, but I just-- I had some background with kids. I was working in a day-care center for a while actually looking to perhaps get a degree in early childhood education. But still, I remember the first evening that I was left alone with the baby, and I was just so worried about not doing something wrong. But it all worked out. We had our challenges with the kids, of course. But the one thing I do want to say is-- that I don't think I often say or I'm really not sure I never even told Crystal how much I appreciated her trusting me with those children and giving me that opportunity to parent those two children, especially when they were so tiny. But I learned quickly. And Crystal actually pretty much left me on my own to figure things out. I'm sure she was watching but not really interfering. I remember the one time she did get pretty angry with me was we had a tire swing in the backyard, and Nanda was on it. She was about six, and I was pushing her. And of course, the kid's saying, higher, and I'm like, sure, whatever, higher. And I pushed her so hard that she went over the neighbor's fence and then came back and hit the fence and was pinned between the tire and the fence. And I was just-- I almost lost it that time. Crystal came out, what are you doing? Are you crazy? The little kids says, don't yell at her. She didn't mean anything. So I think that was a wake-up call for me about really thinking about what you're doing before you do anything with the kids, being really careful. And that was-- we were already four years into-- but just a freaky thing that happened. We'd been on that swing many times, and it was just very odd. But another story to go with that is the time Crystal let me do this. She let me take Carmen out to unbend the frame of our car. We'd been on ice, and we hit a tree. And it smashed-- nobody got hurt, and it smashed the front end of the car in. And we were poor at the We really didn't have a lot of money. So we were trying to fix the car on our own. So we had this idea of getting a big, industrial-strength chain and putting it on the frame of the car, and then taking the chain and wrapping it around a huge tree in the neighborhood and throwing the car in reverse. Well, I got to take Carmen to do this. And I'm pretty sure she'll remember that. So we we've had our memory-makers, and those are the funny things or the scary things. But I had active involvement in parenting-- really, really active. I wasn't restricted in any way. I went to all parent-teacher conferences. I took the kids to doctor's appointments, which was not the way it was with a lot of our friends. So when there would be conversations with the lesbian moms group about limits for some of the women in terms of what they could do, it just didn't seem right to me, didn't seem fair. And I just couldn't see how it could work, really, that way. But I guess everybody made it work for themselves. But I was always equally involved in parenting the kids, still am, to the extent that you do when they're in their 30s. 
00:25:26 
LL: 	You started touching upon a group in Madison, the lesbian moms group, and you and Crystal and the girls have been very active in family issues. And as a family, you all really paved the way for a lot of lesbian families and blended families where early on, a lot of couples who were raising children were raising children that were born perhaps in a marriage, and then the biological mother came out and got partnered with someone. And yet, as you mentioned, you became an equal parent in that relationship, which was not always the case. Do you want to talk more about some of your activities as an activist when it came to being a parent and when it came to being part of a lesbian family? 
JC:	 Yeah. I think primarily, like they say, the personal is political. So I think by our everyday actions and the fact that I did take the kids to school, I did take them to the doctor's appointments, the professionals did have to acknowledge me. Because we were out. I was not the maid or the-- what do you call them-- governess. We were out. I was Crystal's partner and co-parent to Carmen and Nanda. And so I think, first and foremost, just by our everyday actions, we made pretty political statements. We were out Girl Scout leaders. And Crystal probably mentioned this-- I'm not sure-- but after we had done it for a few years and we were trying to retire from it, the parents were asking us to please continue on. So, well, yeah, why are you asking us? Do you think we're so good, or you just can't find anybody else? But I really think we did have some influence in-- they say that if you don't know a gay person, you need to meet a gay person, and then your whole perspective could possibly and hopefully change for the better. And I think that's the impact that by being the Girl Scout leaders, we did have a far-ranging impact on parents in the mid-1980s and their attitudes toward gay people. It seems to me that we started going to lesbian parents meetings pretty early, maybe '80, '81, right away, I would think. I think maybe Crystal found the group very early in our relationship, and I'm pretty sure she went to one or two meetings on her own, and then we started going together, and then the family. When we had the kids and we could, they would go. And so that social support network was very important to all of us, just being able to get together with people who were like us, doing the same thing we were doing, raising children in a straight world. And the kids loved it, too. They got together with kids who were just like they, kids with two moms. Later on, we did a little bit with the gay dads group, but not a lot. We had a few joint activities, but basically we got what we needed from the lesbian moms group. And like I said, I think that was probably '81. And I don't know how long it went. 
00:29:18
JC:	 And then around that time, 1983, started working on the city ordinance, the alternative families ordinance. And we're founders of the Madison Institute for Social Legislation. We got together with-- I'm trying to remember all the players. I know the key players were Kate Nolan, Barb Lightner, Susan Green. I know there were other women who were involved with it, but those were the key players. And we worked hard to get the ordinance introduced. And eventually it did. I won't take credit for the actual passage of it, but it did somehow stay alive through the Equal Opportunities Commission hearings. And I think at that time, we were a little bit more working on our family and not quite as activist. And we were doing Girl Scouts at that time, probably. But I also remember going to a regional NOW meeting in Milwaukee and doing a presentation on our alternative family ordinance work. So activism, family, pretty much around those organizations, the lesbian moms group and then MISL. After that, we branched out into working with United on issues. I remember somewhere in the '80s just being struck by the horror of AIDS and getting very interested in educating myself about it and did more like the AIDS walks. Because my activism at that point was fundraising and visibility actions, like at the marches in Milwaukee, the walks in Milwaukee, having the quilt come here or a portion of the quilt come here, tying that into our pride activities one year. Then I would say the next big spurt in activism came in maybe '93, when we first became aware that there was a group of lesbian parents network who were trying to get-- our kids were already almost out of high school, but there were some women with kids in grade school, specifically Sunshine Jones and Joane Kelly, who were raising Sol and getting her through the school system. And they had made some harmless request of the Madison superintendent of schools-- at that time, I believe it was Cheryl Wilhoyte-- and they were just denied. And I remember being outraged and thinking, OK, now-- your kids have gone through fairly unscathed-- now it's time to go and help and try to make some change in the MMSD, Madison Metropolitan School District. So that was our early involvement in GLADE-- Gays, Lesbians, and Allies for Diversity in Education-- and got onboard and started going full, full, full speed ahead. We started out by having some meetings with some people who worked in the district to see how to approach the policymakers and then just branching out to having the School Board Candidates Forum, sponsoring that, getting a position, which was Crystal, on the Superintendent's Human Relations Advisory Committee, and then just continuing to make demands. There's a law, we said. You're not following the state law for nondiscrimination based on sexual orientation in education. You need to follow it. And then just making a series of demands. And you know how things go. You have to remake those demands, and basically for about three years, that's what we did. We made the demands, restated them, tried to embarrass them for not meeting the demands. At one point, they had promised us a brochure, which they never followed up on. So we just wrote a grant, got money, made a brochure, printed it, and got the list of all of the teachers and staff in the school district and sent it to them. So I consider that a pretty good action. What else did we do? Oh, we worked to create GLSEN, because we realized GLADE was pretty much grassroots, and if we were really going to have a lasting impact, we needed to have a organization that could be sustained, that was part of a national movement. So we worked in conjunction with-- well, we actually helped to found the regional GLSEN chapter and let GLADE retire, but certainly not without having achieved quite a bit, and then incorporating a lot of what we learned from that experience into our GLSEN chapter. And I would say one of the big things we did as GLSEN, GLADE was bringing the premiere of the movie It's Elementary to Madison. Teachers from Hawthorne School and their students were featured in that movie. It had created a brouhaha at the time with Cheryl Wilhoyte and her principal at that school at that time, but they ended up being kept in the movie. And it was really a very good film, It's Elementary, talking about gay and lesbian issues in school. And we got 700 people to attend. It made a lot of money and I think raised a lot of consciousness. I guess in terms of family and changing school, it was those organizations that we did it through. And for a while, it was a pretty full-time endeavour. So you're working full-time, and then you come home and you're doing your full-time volunteer activist work. And as I said before, the kids were already older, so that gave us the luxury of being able to do that. But still you burn out. And I think after serving for a few more years on the GLSEN board, we just decided again, all right, now it's time for vacation from that kind of activism. 
00:36:50
LL:	 Before we move on to another subject, I was just wondering if you wanted to talk a little bit about, on a personal level, how your daughters were involved in some of these activities, if they were, how that affected you as a family, whether it created issues for them in their high school years or after high school that they had two lesbian moms or if that continued not to be an issue for them? Do you want to talk a little bit about, you're doing this political work, but at the same time, you're still a family, you're still partnered, you have a marriage, in essence, with Crystal, and you are parents of two girls who, at that time, were and continue to define themselves as being straight girls being raised by two lesbian moms? 
JC: 	I think that we probably-- I think the girls did not let us know how often they may have suffered negative backlash. I think it's more than-- I would hope it's not-- I think they were protecting us. I remember only one time where Nanda-- and she was probably in-- was she in middle school and Carmen in high school? But we were written up in Isthmus, a big article on alternative families. And we were in it, and Carmen wanted to take it to school to show. It must've been they were both still in middle school at the same school, sixth grade and eighth grade. And Carmen wanted to take it, and Nanda was like, oh no, please don't. And it made sense with the ages, that the sixth grader would not want that plastered all over the place. So Carmen didn't take it. But even in Girl Scouts, they never displayed-- to me, anyway-- embarrassment or not wanting to be with us or not wanting to be in our troop, not wanting to have us come along as chaperones, knowing that we were out. I really don't remember but that one occasion. Now, I do remember hearing Carmen's stories about how she dealt with it in high school. She said, I would just beat the jerks to it and say, yes, I have two lesbian moms, before they could taunt her about. But I also know she had friends in high school with gay dads, two gay dads. She had other friends with two lesbian moms. But that's the one thing I need to talk with them about is really how bad was it for you? And maybe we'll do that soon. They did help us with stuff, stuffing envelopes, putting labels on envelopes. So they got involved that way. I don't think we ever took them to a hearing where we made them testify or anything, but they did help behind the scenes. 
00:40:42 
LL:	 So you've talked a little bit about your involvement in lesbian parents and moms groups, your involvement in the schools, representing and fighting for issues to protect children and to further issues relating to gay families. Do you want to talk about how your personal families accepted you at that time? And that was also a time when you were coming out to your families. And were they supportive? Did they play a role in supporting you as an extended family or not? And maybe talk a little bit about the differences or the different reactions that may have existed in your family. You may also want to address the fact that you have a working life too in addition to this and maybe talk a little bit about while you were being an activist and while you were being a mom and raising a family and launching those girls into their own lives what was happening in your work life and what was happening in your extended family life. 
JC:	 Before I forget to mention this, though, in terms of being a parent-- and I had just been calling myself co-mom until I was at some hearing, a legislative hearing, and I was giving my testimony. And I introduced myself as a co-mom, and I just remember being so struck by one of the dads, one of the gay dads saying to me, you are not a co-mom. You are a mom. And I'm just like, OK, all right, we're moving one step further in the right direction. And I just remember thinking, boy, his wheels were turning, and he's got some pretty strong feelings on parenting and what his partner is doing. And I really appreciated him making that point at that time. My family is very odd. Crystal cannot believe how odd my family is. And probably because I've known them my whole life, they strike me as odd, but it doesn't upset me to the extent it upsets Crystal. But they don't share anything about their feelings. They do not get into-- you've got to pull it out of them. I don't want to say that they're not really-- that they're not honest. They're just not willing to open up. And I've tried. I've tried to get them to. But I remember that when I introduced my mom to Crystal, my mom seemed to really like Crystal. And my aunts-- well, my mom had three sisters, one who's passed away, so she's got two, and a brother who's also passed away. But the two living sisters, they've known Crystal as long as my mom has known Crystal, because those sisters are like an entity. One doesn't know something that the other two don't know. So they've all known Crystal, and they've all known the girls, Carmen and Nanda, for 29 years. And from the beginning, they seemed to be pretty cool about it. They would recognize everybody's birthdays. They treated the girls just as they would the biological children of their nieces or nephews. My mom treated-- Crystal used to say she treats the kids better than their own grandmother does. But it's odd that when they got older, then the family dynamics shifted, which just makes me crazy. Because what was that all about? Did you just felt an obligation to be nice to children, and now you don't feel the need to be that way to adults? Not that they've done anything-- except for one time, and I don't even know the specifics, because Nanda won't share it. But they apparently said something loud enough for Nanda to hear that was hurtful. And that's the only thing I can remember having happened. So I don't understand what that's about, and I've tried to get to that too, but they just don't want to go there. They really need therapy. I think they'd be a lot happier people if they could do this. So I wrote down in my notes here, what bothers me is after 29 years, after all the social change that we've seen, gay marriage, not only in six states in our country, but in how many countries internationally? Knowing us, knowing the girls-- the girls have done stuff for all of those people, gone out of their way-- why could they not be more supportive and willing to just say, we love you, you're family? But you don't get that. So that's where things are with my family. And with my born-again brother, it's like, OK, he said what he said, which was, OK, I don't believe that you can't change yourself. I believe this is morally wrong, but I'm hoping it won't get between us. OK. To complicate that matter, his youngest child is gay, and he came out nine years ago, which created great grief not only for my nephew but for us, because we were told not to talk to anybody in my brother's family ever again. He has since realized that that was wrong and called me and made amends. But my own coming out wasn't as hurtful and harmful to us, I don't think, as what we had to go through when John came out. Because they tried to reprogram him. They put him through all of that. So there's that family in Minnesota that's arm's length away. And two of the children, the gay man and his brother, who is an ally, are growing up. John's older brother is 30, 31, and he's just started talking with us about, I don't understand. I was kept from knowing you fully. Now I'm just starting to get to know you. And so we're having a re-acquainting with the children in their adult years-- two of them, anyway. And so we met my nephew's partner recently, and we have spent a couple of really nice events with the brother and his wife and three kids. So I'm hoping that nothing comes in the way to harm that so that we do have some connection with that part of the family. My younger brother in Chicago, he's OK. We can get together, and our differences just basically come from other differences-- interests, politics, a little bit, not really-- but at least we can be in the same room together. And I know he doesn't think I'm damned to hell like my other brother does. So very strange, very strange family of origin, which is also why I think-- getting back to what I started with-- is I'm wondering how my dad would have dealt with my lesbianism and my family. Yeah, I don't know why my brother couldn't have joined PFLAG or just sported a PFLAG button for me every now and then. 
00:49:38 
LL:	 I want to ask you a question that's a random question, but it just crossed my mind. You talked about how your dad would take you to his workplace, which is the kind of thing that a father typically does with his son. Did your dad do that with your brothers too, or was there some way that maybe your dad felt a connection or a kinship with you? Without reading into it that he knew you were going to be a tomboy that turned into a little dyke that became a lesbian mom, but do you think there was a connection that he made with you that was like, this is the child that I feel close to, this is the child that I want to share my personal life with in a way that maybe he didn't with his sons? 
JC: 	I don't remember either of my other brothers going, but that doesn't-- I can't say for sure that they didn't. I just remember many summers doing it. It wasn't just once. I did it more than once. I don't know. I liked my dad a lot. And I don't know if it's so much that he wanted to do it with me more than anybody else or if he recognized my interests and wasn't going to squelch it. Like my mom was like, oh, get the dresses out, we got to put her in the dress. Because not only did he take me to work, but he got me my own fishing pole. He loved to fish, and we all fished, but there was no way he was going to say fishing wasn't for me. Girls can fish. And, I don't know, back in the '60s, were girls fishing? I don't think so. And I had my own equipment, and he encouraged it. He got me my bike. So I think maybe that was what it was. He knew that I really wasn't interested in the dolls at that point in time yet, and maybe he could see what I was. Because he did play ball with me. When we went out, he played ball. So he saw my interests and just let 
LL:	 Thank you. I have a very nice sense of that time that you shared with your dad and that whatever he was thinking, there was a lot of acceptance of you. And he was going to let you follow your own path, which is really a gift. When parents can do that, they're honoring the essence of their child. That's really sweet. 
00:52:22 
LL:	Do you want to talk a little bit about your work life, perhaps, and whether you were out at work, how your political activism affected your work, if it did or not, and a little bit about those relationships as well? 
JC: 	Yeah. I think I came out at work the day I interviewed for the job. And that would've been in March 1980. And they haven't gotten rid of me. And the way I came out at work was when I was showing my writing samples. Because I was applying for an editing job, editing-writing job with the College of Engineering in 1980. And so I was showing my writing samples, and most of my published writing was activist-oriented. It was Take Back the Night march coverage for The Feminist Connection. There was definitely something about lesbianism that was in there. I can't remember what the piece was about. So I just showed them my portfolio, and there it was. And I found out later that there was a man on the hiring committee and a woman who interviewed me. And I found out not from either of them but from one of my references that one of the questions the woman asked one of my references was can she get along with men? So apparently, he gave the right answer, because I got the job. But yeah, my department, a bunch of engineers, I don't think we had a-- we had women working in the department, but as support staff, clerical. We hired our first female engineer a couple years after I started, and now we have two female engineers in the department. So it's a predominantly male-hierarchy department, but they've figured out how to work with me. So yeah, I came out very early through my writing samples and then by putting my family photos on my desk and talking about my family, bringing the children in, because they were still pretty young. Let's see, '78 and '75. So again, they were-- well, I started this job in-- oh, I started the job in '84, I'm sorry, so nine and whatever, six. So they were still young, and they'd come to my office. Sometimes after school, they'd come on the bus and stop off in my office, and then we'd go home together. So I sold Girl Scout cookies there. The kids got lots of the badges, because we sold a lot of cookies. So attitude of the male engineers or anybody in the department, for that matter, nobody ever really gave me any trouble. Nobody ever did. And again, I think it was educational. I think we pushed the envelope again. We raised more consciousness as people got to know Crystal and the kids. What could they say? These are nice people. How can we not like them? I think some of the more difficult conversations I had at work were on the gender front in terms of females in engineering. Because I became really involved with doing the Expand Your Horizons conference to get girls into alternative careers, male-dominated careers, very involved with the retooling strategies for the Future conference to get adult women who are thinking of changing jobs or getting into the job market after being homemakers for many years. So I think I ran into more sexism on my job than homophobia, very, very odd. Those people who had problems with me, I really can't-- because we're a pretty stable group. You go start in my department, you stay for quite a while. And what we're having now is a graying of the department, so we're going to have a lot of retirements. So what I do find out from the people who did leave for one reason or another is they remember the kids' names. They'll ask me how Crystal is. So there was an impact. And we share family stories, just like anybody else. And they ask about my family just like they would about my coworkers' family. I've always asked for their support when I've done my fundraising for AIDS rides, for AIDS walks, for-- what other fund-- for the amendment, when we did fundraising to defeat the amendment. I've always gotten support from my department, people in my department. That's where I've gotten most of my support, actually. When we did the fundraiser here at our house for Fair Wisconsin, the chair of my department came and attended the event, gave a big donation. And then found out, because I was out, found out that a few of my coworkers had siblings who were gay who died of AIDS. So we made those connections. Even the dean of the College of Engineering sponsored me for the AIDS ride one year. So I've always been out, and I think I've been very, very fortunate to have the support I've had all these years in the workplace and beyond. Beyond the immediate workplace, I've served on committees, helped move domestic partner benefits through the university system to get it to the point where we are today. And because of the committees I worked on, made a lot of allies and good friends who helped move that issue along, straight and gay. 
00:59:13
LL: 	We've talked a little bit about-- well, quite a bit about family. We've talked about your work life. We've talked about your relationship with Crystal. Do you want to talk a little bit about-- besides your activism in the community, you've alluded to the fact that there came a point where the girls started living their own separate lives as young adults. Did you and Crystal have a life that had a component of recreation to it or activities? Where did you make friends and meet friends and share in your years when you weren't actively working in feminist and lesbian and parenting causes? 
JC: 	Well, we started out with softball. So softball was the basis, when we were younger, for our extracurricular, maintain-your-health activity and meet a lot of good women. So we did softball, we did basketball, we did volleyball. I think that's it for organized sports with the lesbian community. And that goes way back to '79, '80, and continued. I think into the early '90s we played softball, anyway. I think we didn't do volleyball or basketball. We were not very good at anything, really. So we did that. And we've always had a little core of friends. They've changed, but there's one who's been there all the time, Donna Miller and her partner, when Mary Kaye came into their relationship. So our children refer to them as the aunties. I think of them as I know if I need somebody, they're going to be there, no matter what. Whenever I need somebody, that's who I'll call. So they've been constant. And then the little group has changed. People have moved away, but I think the current friends we have now have either-- we've either made through the political activist work, mostly Fair Wisconsin, or the university domestic partner benefits. And then also through the AIDS rights that we've done, we've made a few friends that way. What do we do for fun now that we're not playing softball? Well, we were riding our bikes a lot when we started back in-- I'd watched the second from the last Pallotta AIDSRide come through campus in 2000. I was there on Lakeshore Path to cheer them in, because John Quinlan had either emailed or done something on radio. John, who's now doing Forward Forum on radio, I don't know what he was doing at that time, but I heard something about they were going to come through campus. So I went down to cheer them in, and I was so impressed, I was so inspired by them. So I came home, and I said, hey, honey, want to do the AIDS ride? Wouldn't it be great, six days, 500 miles, Minneapolis to Chicago? And she said, go for it. So she wasn't very interested. And so I just, OK, yeah, nice idea. And that would've been July. And then six months later, she calls me at work and says, you want to do the AIDS ride? And I said, what? She says, yeah, I just heard a commercial, or I just saw something about it, and it sounds pretty good. So I was like, wow, OK. So I had ridden my bike all through my life, but I hadn't been riding for a few years already. And Crystal hadn't been on for even longer than that. So the first thing we had to do was go get bikes. And we did all that, and we trained like crazy, because we knew we were going to have 100-mile days. And we didn't know what to expect, but we did it. We did the very last one in 2001. And so I think that got us into biking. We did a few more AIDS rides and MS ride and Spokes for Kids or something. Whatever fundraiser involved a bike, we were doing it. And I just really like biking, so we do that now, and we still get to meet people that way. But yesterday we were playing badminton out in the yard, something we haven't done. It was a perfect evening, no wind, no bugs. I like to swim. Crystal likes to golf. Neither one of us does enough of what we'd like. We like to bowl. We bought new bowling balls this year, so-- it's like this summer, it's just flying, and I don't really know how much we've done for fun. We've done a lot of connecting with people, family, friends, but not a lot for fun. So we've got to focus on that. And I think this winter, we're going to do a lot of indoor badminton over at the university. So we like to play together. 
01:05:02
LL: 	I'm going to switch the subject a little bit. And I want to have you talk a little bit about Fair Wisconsin and about you and Crystal still represent-- not that you're some sort of symbol, but you've lived your life as committed, married people. But you've not been able to take advantage of the benefits of marriage, because they're not legally offered to lesbian couples. And I know that you've been involved in Fair Wisconsin and in efforts following that. Do you want to talk a little bit about your thoughts and beliefs and your commitment and where you might even land in your personal life in terms of marriage for lesbians and gays? 
JC: 	Well, we're going to go and register as domestic partners so that we can get 43 of the 1,700 or so benefits that are given to married folks. So we will register, because there's a lot at stake. Life insurance policies, our savings accounts, anything we have our names on jointly can be challenged without the protection that you get from, in this case, the domestic partner registry for some of those responsibilities and benefits, but certainly that marriage affords. So especially now, as we face our older years, how horrible it would be for one of us to pass away and then not be able to get the survivor benefits because somebody decides you're not entitled to it, and you don't have any legal rights to it. In fact, that happened to a woman at the university, and it happened when the budget this time included domestic partner health insurance benefits for state employees and the domestic partner registry. I got an email from someone who said, congratulations on a job long in the works. I just wish I could take advantage of my partner's accrued sick time, which you can convert to health insurance premiums. So just a few months too late. So you get hit with that, the reality of the inequity with how relationships are treated. So definitely. We were going to go to California, and then they put the injunction on it like the week that we were heading out that way. We headed out there anyway, and we still went to city hall and got a picture of us in San Francisco. But we didn't do that. And as we research things right now, we were going to go to Iowa too. And there's still some doubt whether or not we could do it cleanly without having some problems down the road, such as if we ever have legal gay marriage in Wisconsin, would we have to go to Iowa to get divorced because we were married there? And in order to get a divorce in Iowa, you have to reside there for a year. There's these crazy legal technicalities. So we've decided we're just going to wait till we either move and decide to live somewhere that has gay marriage or till Wisconsin passes it. But for the time being, we will protect our relationship with the domestic partner registry. And I think the upcoming march in DC in October on Coming Out Day is very significant, because it's looking at a strategy to just get all of the states to legalize gay marriage. So the pressure is on the governor and the state legislatures, and they're trying to form organizations in each state to work toward that end. So I hope this happens sooner than later. Because I've always said this, with the disparity, I've said, you're not just discriminating against me while I'm employed here. It continues into retirement. Married couples get more benefits in retirement than lesbian domestic partners do, gay domestic partners. And the argument about cost is just a red herring. They've never proved that, and they still can't prove it. 
LL:	 Well, I know like in the Madison schools and other areas where they've extended benefits to partners, it's still taxed differently. It's taxed as income. And so in essence, it really, at the end of the day, is not truly a benefit, because there's a high cost associated with it that's different than it would be if it was a married family. So there's still a lot of shadow play about these benefits that some people will argue that we're already getting. 

JC: 	That's exactly true. The tax on it can be incredibly high, making the benefit unaffordable to a lot of domestic partners. So marriage is the answer. 
LL: 	Well, it feels like we're at a end point for our first interview. And we will be reconvening, and next week we'll finish this with part two. Is there anything that you did want to cover before we stop for tonight? And then we'll pick it up next week and we'll talk about some of the more contemporary activist things that you've been doing and a little bit about-- you've already referenced a little bit about retirement and your life ahead. So we've got some things like that to talk about. Is there something you want to talk about before we end today? 
01:12:00
JC: 	Well, we've talked about activism quite a bit. And I think the one thing I wanted to point out was-- it's not nice, but it's true, and I hope that anybody who might listen to this could benefit from it-- but we really, really, really need to put our egos aside during our activist work and not compete with each other. It just seems that it happens so often that we don't work 100% for the common good of the cause. There's got to be some infighting. And we're human, and I know that's always going to happen, but I think it's just I just put that out there as a caution, that that's something we need to continue to work on to really reduce as much as possible. Because I've seen it happen in just about every group I've worked in, and it just makes the work much less fun, much less rewarding, and certainly it's counterproductive. 
LL: 	Well, Janice, it's been a real pleasure having the opportunity to interview you and hear more of your story, and we'll pick this up again next week with part two with Janice Czyscon. Thank you very much.