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

Interview #943
NICHOLS, KATHLEEN

Kathleen Nichols (1957 - )
Campaign Worker/Activist, Founder of The United, Dane County elected official, Wisconsin State employee
						
Interviewed: April 30, 2009	
Length:  46 minutes 
Interviewer: Jason Orne 
Index by: Jason Orne
Series: Madison’s LGBT Community 1960’s-present
00:00:00 	Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction
KN:	 Today's Isthmus, the picture is all of us standing by the-- 
JO:	 No, I didn't look at it. 
KN:	 Yeah, the 20 years ago today. 
JO:	 I'll go home and look at the website and see and look at it. 
KN:	 20 years ago today it's all of us standing at the statue. 
JO:	 That's so great. I'll have to go home and look at it online. 
KN:	 This handmade Moroccan chocolate in orange sauce. It kills. 
JO:	 Oh my god, it's so delicious. I'm in a little sugar coma over here while you're talking. 
00:00:54 
KN:	 Starting in the middle [UNINTELLIGIBLE] there was a very strong, chiefly lesbian, but feminist effort to change the legal status of the judgment of pornography. Andrea Dworkin, the writer-- and such an unpleasant one-- and Catharine MacKinnon who was-- she had diamantine mind. And a personality to match. And she had argued the first sex discrimination case in front of the Supreme Court and established sex discrimination as an offense category and protected status. She's something else as a legal mind. And the two of them had been working together to come up with a posteriori definition of what was obscene. What would be the combination of sexual explicitness and violence, rather than-- No, a prioriy. Because of the Miller test, the standard test, for "I know it when I see it" is a posteriori because you have to see it. Some authority has to judge to be obscene. So much sexual imagery that's just sexual imagery is considered obscene but non-sexually explicit violent images in a sexualized context are banned. So they came up with this whole new legal approach, brilliant legal approach. MacKinnon saw it as a way to extend her successful case for sexual harassment as a sub-class of sex discrimination. They were working on this. And they're working on it mostly in Cambridge, out East. And I saw a news article about it. I thought, damn, this might really be the reason I was elected. I could do this because I love sex. But I hate sexualized violence, both in its imagery and what the imagery then inculcates, but also in that so many of the participants in those images are not volunteers and are not giving informed consent. I hooked up with Annie Laurie Gaylor, and we put together a conference. And we brought MacKinnon and Dworkin here to Madison and Iris Christenson. She had been with [? Battered ?] Women, I think. She's an attorney now [UNINTELLIGIBLE] I guess she'd been just entering law school at that time. They were working with her and her group, the group against violence against women. 
00:05:04
KN:	 I was really working the political fields to get other sponsors, because this was quite divisive. For instance, Dick Wagner and I were super tight. I was his lieutenant. He's chair of county board, and he did not support this. And it was really the first time I was ever a part of a fission between lesbian activism and gay male activism, because I've never based on a sexual separatist. But there were a whole lot of men who were very angry with me. And a lot of gay men saying, in these days of the plague, the safest sex we would have may very well be images, blah, blah, blah. So it was a hot time. I was going ahead and I was working with the bill, and it was in drafting for a city ordinance. And Nightline got wind of it, wind of the conference, and so they sent out Deborah Leff. She was the second string interviewer for Nightline. Jeb Whomever was the first string, I can't recall his name. They sent her out and obviously the expectation was that the interviews for Nightline would be with the exciting principals, Dworkin and MacKinnon. But Leff really, to the extent a newsperson can be in favor of something, Leff was really quite intrigued with us and wanted to give it a positive face. And Dworkin and MacKinnon are not positive faces. And there I am, little cutie. So she glommed onto me, and that's how I came to be the feature of Nightline. Nightline is being broadcast. 

00:07:36 
KN:	I got a phone call and Dick Wagner, though he didn't like what I was doing, was nonetheless at my house night because we were close to see the broadcast because it isn't every day that some chick from Madison is the star of Nightline. And the phone rings and my girlfriend at the time answered the phone, saying hey, were're watching Nightline. The caller says, in the dulcet upper class English tones, I know. We're watching it here over seas. I'm so-and-so and I'm a don at Cambridge and I would really like to talk to her. Becky said, OK, I think this one you should take. And for the next three months, my life was Alice down the rabbit hole. Various people called and purported to be people they were not. All of the people they purported to be were important persons. Kathy Wittburn, the female mayor of Houston. I got a phone call from a person who purported to be her chief aide, saying they were very interested in this legal approach. Could they schedule an appointment and the mayor would like to talk to me on that appointment. By this time, I'm really freaking out and I say, well, I'm sorry, I know this is going to sound a little strange, but I really need to call you back to be sure you are who you say you are. I call back and I get someone saying mayor's office, City of Houston. I set up a whole meeting with a lot of prominent people in this town to meet this woman who purported to be a don at law and I had done due diligence to establish, indeed, there was a female don of laws in the college in England, and that she was in fact famous for her civil and feminist-based legal writings. And so I set up a whole meeting for people to meet her and talk with her. And of course, she never showed up. 
00:10:27 
KN:	Then my mail started going missing. And then they assigned an agent, an FBI agent, Neil Purtell to me because he had been the lead agent-- looked just Columbo, just a cartoon character-- but he had been the lead agent the big pornography, the capo of pornographic publication, in the Ohio case. He'd cracked the case on mail frauds and there's this guy, was the capo, was in jail. There had been a bombing, a car bombing. Let me tell you. When an FBI agent says to you, kind of car do you drive? And you say, I don't drive. And they say, good. That will make your sphincter clutch up. And I came home one day, my girlfriend-- the youngest girlfriend I've ever been involved in, poor thing. It was just way too much for her. This was so scary. I cannot emphasize how disorienting, how frightening, how much damage it was going it did to me politically because people thought I was nuts. Because I had a sheriff's deputy assigned to guard me. Because it's the sheriff's office's responsibility to make sure the county officeholders are reasonably safe. And Sharon [? Levinski ?] was a lesbian deputy sheriff and my friend, and so she was fine with the assignment to follow me around. And then I've got an FBI agent named Neil Purtell. My post is going missing.  [SIDE CONVERSATION] 
00:12:32 
KN:	My post was going missing and I came in one day and the work I had been doing, the drafting of work and research work I had been doing on the legal position, was in a path. It had been moved off my desk and laid in small piles along the floor to make it amply clear that that's how easy it was to get into my house. And then just about the same time, the Feminist Women's Legal Clinic in St. Paul was fire on. There was a drive-by shooting into the office. No one was injured but it was definitely the office. They were working on the same thing because St. Paul had just passed this ordinance. I was so scared and so freaked out. I had been invited-- I didn't know it because my post was stolen-- I'd been invited to speak at the Woman in the Law Conference, the position on this. I didn't know it. And I saw a good friend, who was quite on the fence, a lesbian feminist who's quite on the fence on this position, not ACLU. Most of the time when I did show up to debate and there was somebody there to debate, it was a feminist from Cullen, Weston, Pines & Bach. It was Cheryl Weston. And so I never got the invitation. So I just got reamed out for failing to show up at what was then-- the Women in the Law conference used to be the big feminist law event of each year. I didn't know I was invited, obviously. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] the panel. 
 00:14:36
KN:	It was getting more and more surreal, because there's somebody who purported to be a professor at Harvard. Kathy Whitman in Texas is the mayor. This woman claiming, whose name was for real, but it wasn't her. I called England. I finally got through after explaining myself a thousand times, I got through and she said, I'm sorry. I have no idea what you're talking about. I would not be interested in American civil law because American civil law and English civil law are really quite different, and the whole legal approach in tortious law is really not very comparable. Just on that basis, no one from England would ever really be interested in this. Then one day somebody from MNI Newspapers showed up on my doorstep with a box of stuff and they wanted me to read it and tell them whether I thought that the stuff that was in the box would be covered by the ordinance I was drafting. It's like, fuck you very much. Some of the phone calls-- I mean I cannot tell you how detailed they were. When someone called and said they were calling for the Justice Department, they knew Karla Dobinski. Karla had been my friend in the earliest days in the early '70s, and she was indeed at DOJ. But Karla's name hadn't gone out of my lips in 10 years. But this was someone absolutely giving Karla's name as a bona fides for me to believe that I should talk to them. 
00:16:27 
KN:	Then the Indianapolis City Council passed a bastardization that conflated current Miller test obscenity with this legal approach, completely vitiating the legal approach because Indianapolis City Council is quite conservative and the woman who was the sponsor there is some kind of pew jumper. And the ACLU rushed that result into the circuit court. And Indianapolis is in the same circuit we're in. The circuit court-- I think we're in the Seventh-- the circuit court said it was not legal and overturned the Indianapolis law. And that took the stuffing out of me. Because it had been hard enough for me to get anybody who's willing to sponsor. For instance Stu Levitan was willing to be a sponsor. Once we realized that now we'd be going against a ruling in the binding circuit, the legal cost-- because surely that was going to go on appeal as well-- the legal costs were really significant. And I was so frightened. I never really went any further with it. And what they believe was that the guy who was in prison from the Ohio pornography ring case was the many times removed through dummy corporation, shell corporations, owner of Red Letter News. And Red Letter News was on the last corner of the last street in my district. And that's how they were keeping an eye on me. And if you want to verify parts and pieces of this, you can talk to Rebecca Burns, who's the senior social worker at Waisman Center. She was my girlfriend then. And Dick Wagner, even though he opposed what I was doing, was in the house on the day I got a phone call from this woman convincingly purporting to be a don at law. 
JO:	 That's just crazy. 
KN:	 Yeah. It went on for months. 
JO:	 When you eventually dropped, when you stopped pursuing this then did it stop? 
KN:	 I got some communiques about, I better not think about it again. I got untraceable mail. And as I said, I had an FBI agent watch out for me. Nice guy. Holy crap. Maximum holy crap. So that took the stuffing out of me for a few months. 
JO:	 It's a testament to you that it didn't take all of stuffing out forever. 
KN:	 And really, Jason, this is the short version. I not even going in to details of what happened. It was surreal. It was living in Dali's melted clock world. I go somewhere where I thought I was supposed to speak because I've gotten an invitation. It would be a closed hall. And a car would come shooting out of the dark in the parking lot and turn the lights on just as it got up on me. It was absolutely a murder mystery quality life for quite a few months. And again, you can verify most of this. 
00:20:52 
KN:	I was single at this point because my partner, when I was first elected, had left me because I didn't have any time for her. She apologized for that years later. I was nattering earlier socially about the women who were trying to make partner in their law firm, trying to make partner in their accounting firm and they thought of themselves as being out, but there I am on Nightline, and in the New York Times and various pictures all over the place. So I've been single for quite a while. Jonathan Becker took over Jim Amundson term of office for the County Board. And both Dick Wagner and I thought he was a gay man. Dick told me to take him under my wing because Jonathan is a very brilliant lawyer and an excellent Roberts Rules of Order-- very skillful in the orders of the house. And you really can, if you're really good. You can really control the movement of bills and activity in an elective house, if you're really good with rules of order. So Jonathan and I hung out all the time together because we were such good friends. You get into this world where there's not very many people who care about what happens at the County Board, and you're up until one o'clock in the morning, every first and third Thursday, for God's sake. And so we'd go back to Jon's, we'd drag other people from the liberal caucus and go back to Jonathan's apartment and make everybody dinner in the middle of the morning. We're making dinner at midnight and 1:00 AM for a bunch of grown-ups. So we were very, very, very good friends. At some point I thought to myself, if he was a girl, I would have jumped him a year ago. And so we're driving along on Mineral Point. And I said, would you like to have sex with me? He went through the red light. He started to make these whimpering sounds. I don't think about you that way. I mean, you're a famous lawyer! I thought that was very dear. It's like, OK. That's fine. It was just an idea. So some months roll by and he comes back and said, I've turned it over in my mind. I think it couldn't be a bad thing. OK. I used to be good at it. Fine. 
00:24:17 
KN:	He-- I don't think I should tell you this part. Because he's a public figure. He would not consent to me telling the next part. OK. So I'll skip over the next part. Somebody catches-- it's not unlike the story I was telling you earlier socially, about Donna. As in, I don't know who concluded that because we hung out together all the time, we having sex. But we really weren't. But I've got reporters everywhere. I literally had a reporter staking out my apartment on North Patterson Street. I lived in the house with Will Handy, the founder of Madison AIDS Support Network. And Will and I had been friends since we were way younger than you and so we're living in this house. It's like queer central for the unfashionable side of the isthmus. I do breakfast. I do breakfast as just an open. Every Sunday I did an open breakfast for anybody who wanted to come in and talk to us. So we had wonderful Sunday breakfasts. 
JO:	 That sounds great. 
KN:	 It was just delightful. We also had a kangaroo. Actually, a wallaby, we did. We had a wallaby in a lavender cat harness. I used to take it for hops in Reynold's Park. And we had a reporter, staked out in front of my house, trying to prove that I was not sleeping in my district. And this hit me on my same last nerve that got me to say to Nurse Squaretits when I was 19 years old, well, I guess I am a lesbian then. If the answer is, you're going to fire me if I tell you I am, well then I guess I am. For me it was on my same last nerve. Only in Madison could be a scandal for a single man and a single woman to be involved with each other. I'm thinking, oh, crap, I really need to tell Dick Wagner because I'm his lieutenant and I'm loyal to him and so after a County Board meeting-- because by this time, Jonathan and I decided we were going to have a kid-- and I certainly love him even though I'm furiously mad at him about our son at this point, I do love him. I thinking, I've got to come clean to Wagner. He needs to know what's going on. I don't want him caught up short. It's not good politically. I say, Dick, after Board, come over to my house. There's something I need to tell you. And Jonathan came over as well. I tell Wagner and he dropped me like a rock. From that moment on, I was persona non grata. That just got my back up even more. It's been my home, god damn, I'm bleeding out of my eye teeth for the movement, that the whole point is tolerance and you love who you love. Jonathan and I did decide that we wanted to have a kid, and Jonathan had been looking into single-parent adoption. I never expected to be anybody's mother. We conclude, OK. We're going to have a kid and, yeah, we get married. Jonathan's a lawyer. We should get married and that'll set up a legal structure for the kid. And the newspapers were all us. And this isn't voicemail. This is the days of phone recorders and I would come home every night-- to my district, I'll have you know-- and my phone messages would be filled up the tape and there were just so many vile, we never thought you were a real lesbian. You never looked like a real lesbian. How can you do this? Don't you know this is fodder for all the people who think this is a phase? People were are almost all women. But the lesbians who left of their names, I'd go back and look at my campaign contribution list, and say, bitch, did you ever give me a dime? Don't remember you dropping any lip for me. 
[00:29:12.63] 
KN:	I promised Marv Balousek who was then the lead reporter for the State Journal, and a really good guy. He'd given me a lot of good and kind of important political things, particularly in disabilities, for I am justifiably highly regarded. He'd given me a lot of ink. I went to Balousek and said, OK, I'll give you an exclusive if you can keep everybody else off us. Because we're going to go and we're going to get married at the temple. And I don't want reporters there. We did this way-too-cute interview. I was about six months pregnant when we got married. One of the very few times ever we had intercourse, I did manage to get pregnant. It was the evening of the day I was leaving for the National Association of Counties Conference. I know was July 14th at 6 PM. 
JO:	 I'm sure future people would love to know exactly the moment. 
KN:	 Bastille Day. That's why I always drink champagne on Bastille Day. One of us, since I did want to live together once we had the kid, one of us needed to move because we had district issues. And I had cashiered my political base by having at least one visible evidence of having at least one incident of intercourse with a man. It was tough because I was short-listed. I was the first or second name on everybody's lips to be the state assembly person for that district. By cashiering my political base, that was the end of it. So I figured, what the hell. I had four turns on the Board and Jonathan had two. He was he hadn't done anything. It hadn't negatively affected his political base. And it worked. He went on to become the County Board chairman in the next term. Then we bought a house a of couple blocks away from where we're speaking today. It was one of the high ironies of my life, that I was sent to Coventry for having a sexual relationship with a man that was not sexual. I've never liked being home for a sheep when as yet a lamb. Essentially we concluded that this just didn't work for him. He wasn't in to me in any way. I went and I did good research and met with a family therapist, who looked at the developmental stages, when it would be least damaging to my son for us to break up households. There's not a lot of research, certainly was not 10 years ago, on what the developmental issues are when one parent is gay. It seemed to be largely they concluded that if you get past six months of infancy then just developmentally, you have to get to an age when the kid understands time enough to know, today I'm with Mom. Two days, I'll be with Dad. Then on the gay and lesbian issue, you really should dissolve the relationship before the kids are really start to think of themselves in terms of attraction and partnering. So that was the plan. I'm the president of the PTA for the racially paired school Midvale-Lincoln. So here I am, president of the PTA. 
00:33:40 
KN:	I was sent in-- the school board member who lived close to Midvale, Deborah Lawson, had had a lackluster first term, and the teachers union was concerned about whether they should back her again. So I got a phone call asking me since I lived in the district and was president of the PTA, would I go to her campaign meeting and see if she could be improved upon. Part of the concern was that her sister was running her campaign. So I went over to her house. And her sister came around the corner, and it was a coup de foudre. But I'm an old political war horse. So I threw myself, main force, into the campaign but I did not go after the sister during the campaign. 
JO:	 I commend your restraint. 
KN:	 Yes, well. I'm nothing if not an excellent political wife. After the campaign was over and the campaign was going successful, then I went after the sister. Went after Melissa big time. Though again, it's like, what do you mean you're not a lesbian? It's like saying, you're not a spotted cow, girl. But she'd never been out. She hadn't had a relationship in eight years because she didn't think her sister would approve. Another one of those Madison liberals that have issues when it's in their family. It was a passionate and extraordinarily rocky relationship. Through me, Melissa started to meet all the A-list political lesbians. Melissa is quite successful now as a political consultant. She runs Kathleen Falk's campaign. We finally broke up and did something I'd never-- no one else. Usually I will just absolutely struggle to the end and then when it's over, it's just over. But with her, I can't tell you how many times we broke up and we got back together. It was not pretty. 
 00:36:36 
KN:	Then I went back into hiding. I was working-- obviously I was working campaigns. I can't have myself-- I'm a true junkie. Somebody persuaded Alix Olson, the cop-- I assume you'll be interviewing Alix and Martha. Somebody persuaded Alix to run for School Board. Alix is a gold shield detective. The people who persuaded her to do it were not-- none of them were gay. They just really didn't know how to do that campaign and so, at some point, somebody called me and said, will you come in and really take over Alix's campaign? We did. I mean, we lost but we were running against a fairly entrenched, closeted lesbian, and we got a good percentage. That put things back on a different political landscape and it really got me back in the fray. And then Nikki Baumblatt, who was staff at OutReach, was told, go and find Kathleen Nichols. It was like, seek out Yoda. Because she can tell you about the founding of the United, 30 years ago. She might have clippings. Nikki materialized, and I guess I treated her a great deal like I treat you. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and talk to her. So they said, Nikki and her partner, Chris, said oh my god, Kathleen's got to give this speech about this. So I give a very funny speech on the 30th, and then I got back on the OutReach Board. And then the nation's first gay rights law, our 25th anniversary is coming up. So we did a big event. It was really wonderful, because Jonathan Barry, the first County executive of Dane County, who was in the state assembly when our law passed. And David [? Berg ?] and Tom Loftus, he's in the ambassadorial corps now. He was master I think under Carter and Clinton. Midge Miller, may her memory be a blessing. So all these people who had been in the Senate or the Assembly when we passed the nation's first gay rights law all showed up. It was really a night of stars and one after another, they said things like, I know I voted on a lot of things. And I know a lot of them are fairly important at the time. But I can remember voting on this. I know that by voting in favor of the nation's first gay rights law I was voting to begin the energy that has changed this country. And these are all straight guys saying this, one right after the other. 
JO:	 That must have been so great. 
KN:	 And David Clarenbach, of course, got the lion's share of the attention. As he should get, because he too got sent to Coventry because he got involved with Heidi Nass ironically, Steve's Nass, the asshole right-winger's sister. David got sent to Coventry. That's why he did poorly in his congressional race. That night everybody suddenly realized it was a great mental unity, great emotional unity of, we did here. And we did it 25 years ago. And all these people now in their 60s and 70s, who voted yes on the nation's first gay rights law, and many who have gone on too far greater political office, they all remember with a flossy haired, glossy eyed sensibility of what they felt like in voting for it. 
00:41:51
JO:	 I wish I had a tape of that night for everything. 
KN:	 Somebody did. 
JO:	 Well, then maybe I'll have Troy see if he could get in contact with-- 
KN:	 I do believe we videoed it. 
JO:	 Because that should certainly going in. 
KN:	 It's marvelous. And it was well-covered. Kenosha News covered it. It was a fairly big deal. NPR talked about it. We got goo-gobs of press swing. We were on every morning talk show serving South Central Wisconsin. Great radio play. What can I say? I remain a political junkie. I'm not on the Outreach Board now. I stepped off for personal reasons. I may again be part of a first-time event. 
JO:	 I have a feeling you will be. 
KN:	 So that's my story, dear. 
00:43:22 
JO:	 Thank you for sharing it. Because yesterday and today I was going over your old-- our last talk and that interview in and of itself is such a time line of stuff that's went on here. 
KN:	 I'm trying to think of what else. Because I told you about the getting arrested, right? 
JO:	 Yeah. 
KN:	 I told you about getting arrested. 
JO:	 You certainly told me about getting arrested. 
KN:	 Yeah, because I showed you the stuff in the hall. Obviously there's all kinds of small things, we put through domestic partner recognition in the County. We got AIDS programming support by the County. And there's no subtracting. There's no substitute for a seat at the table. There's no question that Kyle Richmond, the present holder of the out seat, as it were. He now stands in a long tradition and he served that tradition very well by getting the domestic partners insurance. I was nattering earlier about the today's Isthmus has a picture of 20 years ago today. It's the picture of Dick and Jim McFarland, and Ricky Gonzalez, and me, and Tammy, and Earl Bricker with the George Segal statue. Ron McCrae had written the caption for the picture that at that time, over 38,000 Madisonians were represented by an out gay elective. Almost one-quarter of the city population at the time was represented by someone who was out and gay. 
JO:	 Almost matching the population here. 
KN:	 I mean, really. That's pretty remarkable. And nearly 40,000 were represented by someone who was out and gay. 
00:46:06 
KN:	That's why all this nattering and chittering about, oh my god, Iowa passed gay marriage. Why are you people so worked up about that? We have here the nation's first gay rights law, you damned Coasties. We live in the world of practical fat people. We're good.