Back in the 60s and 70s, it was very decadent in the gay community.

For instance, there was the baths.

We never had those here in Evansville, but St. Louis, Chicago, Nashville, places like that, they had what they called the baths, where you would go, and they had steam rooms and individual rooms and things like that.

They were just sex palaces is all they were.

You go to New York or the big cities, they have what they call Paradise Rooms, where there'd be maybe a gay bar, and then when they'd have this big open room.

It'd be totally black.

It was just nothing but pure sex.

That's all it was.

And if that's what you wanted, that's what you did.

And it was rampant.

But back then, I always said the only thing you'd had to worry about, a penicillin shot would take care of it ... until AIDS came, and then everything changed.

I realized I was gay and came out as gay to family in 1981, the first year that AIDS was diagnosed in the US, in New York City, The 41 cancers they found in these men, and it was in the gay community.

At first, we didn't even know what it was.

We were all wondering what this is.

Nobody knew how it worked.

It was like, how COVID when it first started, nobody knew how it worked.

And so if you touch somebody, you'd get AIDS; if you ate with a fork or something that they had touched, you would get AIDS.

You were worried that if you touched a doorknob, you were worried if you sat on a toilet seat, you were worried if you touched a gay person.

Because they thought every gay man had this.

They didn't want to touch you.

They didn't want to hug you.

They didn't want to use the bathroom after you.

Of course, looking back, it's like, “No, it's not the way it works at all.” As time went on, they knew more about it, and they figured out the main form of transmission and all of that.

Then when they knew what it was, you became very uneasy about meeting people and having any sexual contact.

When that happened, a wall got built in me.

"Okay, I'm making friends.

I'm not doing anything sexually."

Because I didn't want to die that way.

There was some safety of being in a city like Evansville or Champagne-Urbana, where I went to college, because there was a very small gay community at that tim Most gay people did what I did, which was as soon as you were done with college, left.

And so there just weren't a lot of folks here, and there was some safety with that.

It really didn't affect anyone that I knew in Evansville until about '85.

I think the first case was 1985, and then the first death was right around there.

Then sort of made its way through town.

You'd go to the bar, and you would hear, "Oh, so and so and so is sick."

It was almost like every time you turned around, somebody you knew was going to be HIV positive.

People I were close friends with, I had probably 15 that were positive, and they were devastated because it was a death sentence.

At that time, I was working at Welborn Baptist hospital as an intensive care nurse.

As patients started to come in, they were probably the sickest individuals any of us had ever really ever taken care of, simply because every body system was affected.

At the beginning, if you were diagnosed, you had about a year and a half to two years to live.

There was no drug treatments yet.

There wasn't anything you could do.

It was horrifying because you knew the guys that you loved and you were close to in the community were very high risk.

All of my friends are deceased.

The people that I used to work with, that I hung out with, we were the same type of people - drag queens, transsexuals.

Pretty much all of them are deceased.

One after another, people that you know, people that you knew, people that you would see at the bar they one after another would die.

There were a few people, I won't mention names, but you'd see them gorgeous guys, muscular, beefy, just gorgeous, and find out they had AIDS, and six, seven months later, they'd be dead.

My brother was nine years younger than me.

He realized at an early age that he was gay and that he did not want to stay in Southern Indiana and live.

He got an opportunity to go with J.C. Penney and go to Pompano Beach, Florida.

And so he lived in the Fort Lauderdale area for three or four years.

That's apparently where he got infected with HIV.

He was diagnosed in 87, had a couple of good years, but then started getting worse.

And like he told me, he felt like he was losing his mind because some of the medicines that they were giving and then just really had terrible side effects and such.

So in 89, he wanted to basically come home to die.

I was going to go down to visit him to talk about him coming back, and the night before I arrived in Fort Lauderdale, he decided he would just end it all, and that would be the best thing.

So he actually attempted suicide by overdosing.

So I got to his apartment and he was alive, but he had thrown up the medications and such, and he was just in a bad shape.

Luckily, he survived that, but he just kind of went downhill quick in the next six months and passed away in January of 1990.

It was hard for my family because some people in my family were not accepting of him or me for being gay.

I was the only one who really offered him a home to stay in.

I had two or three siblings that came and helped and visited with him and such, and dad tried to be supportive, but he was also, I think, ashamed because he didn't want anyone to know that my brother Dennis had, you know, just told people he had cancer.

It was "cancer."

You know, "They have cancer."

Even some of the obituaries in the paper would not say that they had passed away from HIV.

I think it was just the mindset of society at that time that it was only affecting gay people at first in great numbers.

There was a whole community of people in the Midwest that really believed it was a gay man's disease.

They didn't believe that it was a health related issue that could happen to anybody; they believed it was brought in by gays, and it was spread by gays.

And all the hate that came from that ...

I was 19 years old, living in Dallas, Texas, with my aunt.

People would pull up in cars with baseball bats down there and want to beat the hell out of people at the bar.

The bar that I worked at got firebombed, and that was the time I came back home, because I was not going to die in Dallas, Texas.

It was a little bit better in Evansville because a lot of people didn't know a lot of the gay community here because everyone was closeted.

Not me, of course.

Not me.

I have a natural swish to my walk, and I could be Jerry, walking down the street, and someone see me from behind, and then they realize that I'm a man.

Well, I got called a lot of names.

They would say, "Oh, you AIDS ______.

You deserve what you get.

You're going to hell.

This is god's punishment on you."

It was god's retribution of the sinful behaviors that gay people engaged in that were against Biblical principle.

And that this was just the punishment that you got for being in Sodom and Gomorrah.

And it wasn't just gay people that were getting it.

There were a lot of intravenous drug users, a lot of people of color, a lot of other communities, but they weren't the face of the AIDS crisis.

We were the people that got hit hardest and hit first, and I think a lot of people didn't care about them as much because it affected what they thought was the other.

There was a lot of scare even in the healthcare industry back then, and a lot of judgment.

Doctors didn't want to treat it.

Nurses didn't want to treat it.

That's really when nurses that I worked with started saying, "I don't want that assignment.

I don't want to take care of three."

Sadly, the hospital kind of tolerated it, I believe, because we didn't know very much about the virus, and they were kind of scared as well of, well, "What if we make these nurses take care of these folks and they get the virus?"

There was also a great desire not to help people, not to invest, not to spend a lot of money.

Even Ronald Reagan, who was president until 89, didn't even mention the word AIDS.

Ronald Reagan would not talk about it, and that's a perfect example of why the speed was slowed, because there were just a lot of leadership that could not bring themselves to acknowledge the problem or talk about the problem because it was an uncomfortable subject.

There was no help anywhere.

Hospice was still afraid to take care of them.

Nursing homes wouldn't take them as they declined.

Families didn't want to take care of them.

So what do you do?

The government wasn't helping.

You had groups that had formed, like the AIDS Resource Group, that tried to find resources.

TSA had been meeting a while when the AIDS crisis hit.

And I went to Millie Canola of the health department.

She came and she talked.

She made sure we were always kept up on the news.

Out of this first group came the AIDS Resource Group.

The AIDS Resource Group started to try and make people as comfortable as possible and marshal resources to keep people housed, to keep people solvent, to maintain their life in some fashion as they progressively got sicker and sicker.

A lot of times you would lose an immense amount of weight with AIDS, and you didn't have the money because if you were paying for a medication, your insurance didn't cover it.

And you might go from a size large to a size small in just a couple of months.

There were clothing drives, there were food drives.

Zion United Church of Christ started a friendly visiting program to where members of the congregation, I would train them on what we knew at the time about HIV and how to protect themselves.

And we would go and visit.

We would help pay bills, we would go get groceries.

We would sometimes help them bathe, whatever they needed as they deteriorated.

About the same time, I became aware of the Internet to where I could really search out and find things.

I found out about the Ryan White program, which was federal funding established for people with AIDS.

So I wrote a planning grant, and we actually got the grant, which gave me a salary to leave my job and throw myself into this work.

Zion United Church of Christ had a garage building in the back that they used for storage.

And we cleaned it all out, and my dad, with some volunteers, we turned that garage into a one exam room clinic.

And that's where Matthew 25 got its start.

ARG existed.

They provided case management services and prevention services.

And so Matthew 25 tried to, with our federal funding, we brought in the medical care, the laboratory, the ability to access medications and pay for them.

There was just a lot of needs.

And I think by us being able to join together with what resources we had here, we were able to create a nice patchwork quilt of everythin that they needed.

I think there was a rallying together during that time, and I think the heterosexual community, the ones that advocated for inclusion, realized we have to start talking about sex.

That whole thing about safe sex and educating the gay community about safe sex, about condoms.

Safer sex was a thing that we promoted.

And we did seminars in the bars and such like that.

We started buying more condoms to pass out at bars.

The bars eventually had tubs of condoms and safe sex kits to pass out.

A lot of the drag shows that we did were fundraisers.

There was a group called the Beehives.

They were the original benefit show girl troupe.

Maybe it would be Matthew 25 one weekend, and then the next month, maybe it would be ARG.

And they'd do a benefit show, and all the entertainers that they had in the show, any tips that they got, will be donated to the cause.

We are so indebted to that group of men.

They no longer exist today.

There's a few of them that are still alive.

They were the ones who got us through AIDS because they would literally don on their dresses or whatever they wanted to wear that night and spend the whole night raising money.

And whatever money they raised went straight to the emergency funds to help people in need.

It was in 1993 Sam Ryan passed away.

His parents were George and Martha; they owned Ryan Oil.

John Streetman - not only was he a brilliant director of the museum, but he was a brilliant composer.

He'd written a whole book of music.

And so the Ryans underwrote for ARG, a fundraising compact disc album of John's songs.

And John was able to convince Harry Gray and Tim Ewing and Bill McKinley, who were very well-known singers - Tim Ewing was appearing on Broadway at the time - to record his music on this CD.

John put together this premiere party for his CD.

I can remember Randy Dennison, myself, and some of the board members, we had a table set up at the museum.

We were unsure that anybody would come.

Who's going to pay $50 a couple to come to the museum in this town for a fundraiser for AIDS?

We didn't think anybody was going to do it.

So we were sitting there at this table and everybody, everybody started coming in.

Lloyd Winnecke, Carol McClintock, people my parents knew ...

The place was packed.

Oh, my God, there was probably a hundred people there at that time.

I couldn't believe what I saw.

So much support.

And I knew it was because the Ryans were behind it.

You had these gay people's parents now; same with substance use disorders - Mothers Against Drunk Drivers - when the mother gets up, she becomes a zealot, and other people listen to her.

The Ryans were well known here, heterosexual, six kids, so people listened to them.

It was probably the first huge event done here.

In Evansville, where the heterosexual community got involved, it raised $16 or $17,000, which was a lot of money.

And then we started the AIDS Walk in '93, and the first year was really small.

April Mitchell, who was on Channel 14, her brother had died and she attended an AIDS Walk in another city.

And so she brought that concept here.

The second year, 1994, again, you're unsure about who's going to show up, how many people would be there.

But that second AIDS Walk, the downtown was jammed with people.

Fraternities, sororities, high school groups had worked to raise money through the year for this AIDS Walk.

It raised one 10th of our entire budget.

I think if you ask any social justice movement, the social justice movement will only often be successful when allies outside of the movement join.

That had a lot to do with the change in attitude eventually.

That helped a lot.

Heterosexuals too, Elizabeth Taylor started coming out.

I give a lot of credit to people like Elizabeth Taylor and prominent folks in Hollywood and other places that put their credibility on the line to support the gay community in ways that were not helpful for their careers.

Elizabeth Taylor was very instrumental back in those days.

She raised a lot of money as I remember.

Celebrities have a lot of influence.

When somebody like Rock Hudson, who was one of the first famous people to get it ... Rock Hudson of course, was the first celebrity that died of complications of AIDS, that he admitted that that's what it was, and I think that influenced a lot.

It also shocked a lot of people because they just couldn't believe that he was gay.

When it's an intravenous drug user who's going to the gay bar down the street, people didn't care as much.

But when Rock Hudson or Liberace or Dak Rambo, who was on Dallas ... Halston.

Halston was somebody that lived here in Evansville, he was somebody that left a mark on fashion and trends.

And then Ryan White, who was an innocent boy.

He went through so much.

Imagine being a kid, a hemophiliac, and that was how he got it through a blood transfusion.

He was like in 6th or 7th grade, I think, when he first was diagnosed in Northern Indiana, and his school district wouldn't allow him to attend school, even though doctors said it would have been safe.

Just imagine what that would have been like, going to school and nobody wanting to sit near you or being teased.

I was fortunate enough to hear him speak about the topic.

He just advocated for people to talk about it and to be accepting and do what's right and treat it as any other disease and get away from the stigma and work to cure it.

Ryan White was very instrumental in getting funding - people coming to the realization that this is something that we have to do.

If it wasn't for Ryan White, HIV care and AIDS care in this country would not be where it's at, so we have a lot to be thankful for that little Indiana boy.

It was about ten years into the epidemic w the government kind of stepped in to help.

In the early 90s, we had AZT, which was one of the first medications that we actually had.

People could do that, and they might live six months longer than what they would have without it.

AZT caused lots of side effects.

It eventually, over years, killed people's kidneys.

But it wouldn't just be that that they had to have.

Every system they had was failing.

So they would be on so many medications, not just their HIV medicines, their CD4 counts were in the toilet, so they had to be on antibiotics - many times, several antibiotics.

That was a bag of pills that they would carry on their hip.

I mean, my friends, when we'd go out and do stuff or I'd go visit or whatever, they would always have a murse, call them a murse, and it was just full of all these pills that would make them sick.

Bloat up.

I think sometimes the AZT was worse than what they were going through with the AIDS.

People were throwing up, they were having diarrhea.

But it got them through.

Oh, it's a lot better today, because you can be undetected and go out and live a full life now.

Now people can come in the clinic and get two injections every two months and be good to go.

It's amazing to me to see somebody going from many times 30 prescriptions to now two injections.

That's just great.

Even today, it's not normalized.

You don't have people running around saying, oh, I'm gay and I have AIDS.

It's not something anybody's, I guess, proud of, but it just isn't what it was in the 1980s.

In the 1980s, you had a year to live.

We lost a lot of people in Evansville to AIDS through the years.

As I think back to when we sat in that room and we wrote the bylaws, a lot of those people were gone because of AIDS.

I can see them in the room.

I can see everyone that was sitting in that room back then.

I could name them.

I had an address book that I had started in 1983, and I counted up the other day that I have more than 40 names of friends that I knew during the early '90s, and they have died of AIDS.

And it's just unfortunate no one got excited about it or really worried about it until it started affecting other than gay men.

That whole period, there was this amelioration, maybe, of how people looked at gay people.

The AIDS epidemic was a setback, I think, but that also was a catalyst to make people aware that there are so many LGBTQ people out there, otherwise, they had been closeted and a lot of people just weren't aware.

I think it goes back to what Harvey Milk said, that if gay people want the rest of the world to recognize them as human and see their humanity, you have to come out.

We all know queer people whether we like it or not.

And as we start realizing, my brother's gay, my sister is a lesbian, my cousin is trans ... How can I hate my brother?

How can I say that my sister is evil, or my cousin is mentally ill?

That's when the shift happens.

Yeah, after a while, people started to slowly accept.

Slowly accept.

And the Internet helped with that.

That's because the Internet opened people's eyes to there's a whole wide variety of people out there.

I mean, you could Google anything now and find anything gay.

Of course, people love to say the media is trying to shove it down your throats, but I like that, over time, thanks to movies, thanks to TV shows, it did kind of start opening that door for that slow progression of acceptance.

Before, if there was a gay character in a movie, well, that character always died at the end.

They're the comic relief, usually, or the tragic person who dies.

I'm sure a lot of Hispanic folks hate seeing themselves portrayed only as gang members.

I imagine African American folks are really tired of some of the portrayals until recently, of that community.

I really got tired of seeing how many times it turned out the reason I was the murderer because I was gay.

But I think as the 80s moved along, you had movies coming out that were like Personal Best, Partners - Ryan O'Neill.

You had gay characters in movies.

It seemed like that became the thing to do.

We have to put a gay character in this sitcom or we got to put a gay character in this play.

I remember some of the important milestones.

When I was in college, for example, Dynasty was a very big soap opera.

They had a gay character, but they kept making him not gay.

He'd be gay for, like, six episodes, then they'd kill his boyfriend and make him marry one of the women on the show.

And they could just never commit to let the poor guy be gay.

I remember they had a gay character on a show called Melrose Place in the 90s.

That show was nothing but all these young people hooking up.

He was the only one that never got a date.

He didn't kiss anybody.

He didn't get to have a date.

But, you know, Heather Locklear had a different boyfriend every week.

It was around that time also, wasn't it, that Ellen came out?

That started conversations, too, because I vividly remember sitting at Someplace Else when that happened, the night that show came on, because we had a viewing party.

I mean, the bar was packed because Ellen's coming out, Ellen's coming out.

And then in 2009, when RuPaul started his show and made drag and the gay community seen on national television.

Will and Grace was a big help with that.

That show was so witty and so well written and the characters were so richly drawn.

It achieved a certain level of social importance because of the fact that it put forth the lives of regular gay people and presented them as successful and competent and witty and smart.

To have a show that successful based on gay characters was something that was very important, and I think it was why today you can turn on a Station 19, a procedural about a firehouse, and they have gay characters.

They have gay characters who get married, and they have gay characters that break up, and they have gay characters that put fires out, and they have gay characters that make the meal for the other firemen.

Normal characters who just happen to be gay or happen to be, by the way, black or Hispanic or Asian or women in positions of power.

Representation matters.

When you're seen - a person like me is seen on TV or something positive in the news, other than the negative, - people look at that and say, okay, well, it's not that bad.

So I think that's where it got easier because it started getting more mainstream in the '90s and 2000s.

When I moved back to Evansville in 2005, I remember one of the first things I said to the realtor, I asked her if she would be comfortable representing two gentlemen, and she said, “Is your money green?” And I thought - I thought, "Well, that's some progress."

A lot of friends were, "You could be in New York, you could be in San Francisco, you could be in Chicago, Austin, you could be in Paris or London."

And they're right.

I could be.

But I want to be here in Evansville.

And a part of that is being gay here is a radical act.

Being in New York and being queer ... You walk down the street and everyone's queer.

You know in Evansville, being queer is radical.

To show people that we exist.

We do exist in New York and San Francisco, but we also exist here.

I made a very specific decision when I moved back, and there are a lot of my colleagues that are also gay or lesbian ... We all make very specific decisions to lead our lives in ways that aren't just not hidden, but are, in fact, quite exposed.

I try to emcee any event I can do.

I try to do that because I want every young man and young woman in this community to see themselves, and to see themselves not the way I was taught that I would have to be a nurse or a florist, that there were no roles for me to be the head of a bank; there was no way I could be a doctor or a lawyer.

In fact, that's why I left.

I moved to California for nearly 20 years because of the perception I had that there wouldn't be a place for me here.

I really thought I am going to be the only gay person in Evansville.

No, that is not true.

There's many of us.

I don't think there are more gay people now than there were in the '90s.

I just think that there are more people who feel safe enough to be themselves or feel unapologetically about who they are.

I also think that being an out person who's been more vocal has helped embolden other people to say, "I'm an ally.

I think y'all are great.

How can I be supportive?"

So it's also empowered more people to come forward and to be more open about their support.

I think social media helps that they can find outside of their own world.

We really saw kind of a rise in the population of the gay culture here in Evansville once social media started coming into play.

I want to say the shift was marriage equality.

Being able to get married.

Oh, my gosh.

In 2015 Supreme Court decision with Obergefell - it was a shift, and it felt huge.

It's been a long five years for this Kentucky couple.

Today is the day Ashley Burton and Christina Johnston say they've been waiting for.

A friend called with the news of the Supreme Court's decision this morning.

I started crying and I woke her up and I was like, we can actually get married know, we can be a married couple.

I remember that day.

I remember getting the rainbow flag down off the house and swinging it around like a Les Miz scene out in the front yard, just crying and yelling and cheering.

All I do remember is waking up, hearing the news and being dumbfounded.

I mean, completely and utterly just silent.

Because that was not something I ever expected to see happen in my lifetime.

That was the big thing that said, hey, these people exist and they deserve human rights.

It changed my life because I got to be a part of society that was always allowed to do that.

Because that's mainstream society, right?

Getting married, living a life, happily ever after, that kind of thing, which I didn't think I would ever have a happily ever after.

Some just went and got married right away.

Some people jumped on the bandwagon with that and got married too quick because a lot of them have been divorced.

A lot of people were going out and just getting married just because they could or getting married because they were afraid they'd be taken away the next day and they wanted to at least say that they did.

And I remember posting something about, like, let's take this very seriously.

This is a big step.

This is not going on a date.

This is not saying I love you.

This is a huge step in queer culture in America is that we can get married now.

I don't want to take that for granted.

I have not yet had an interest in a legal representation of my partnership that I've been with for 22 years.

It doesn't change anything for us whether we have a piece of paper.

We know what we are.

We don't feel a need to legalize it.

But I like that we can if we want it to.

I have never been married, but I certainly would consider it.

That's kind of one of the goals in life that I have that I've not really achieved.

My dad must have officiate his gay son's wedding sometime.

And he's technically an ordained Southern Baptist minister, which is why I hope I can find somebody before he dies, because I would like him to do that.

The other goals they have would just be perks, and that's one that I have is to find somebody, settle down, and I want my dad to officiate it just like he did my brother's wedding.

I definitely think marriage equality was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I mean, people people saw that the fabric of the world did not disappear.

The sky didn't fall, and bakers sold more cakes, and people got to buy more bad, cheap crystal.

All it proved is everybody just wants to do the same thing.

That shift was very prominent, especially thinking about getting into college in 2009 and thinking to myself, "I have to be careful with who I tell I'm gay."

And then graduate school in 2017 ... "Who gives a __?"

It was like everyone was on the bandwagon of, like, "Gay people are okay.

They're cool."

In Evansville, maybe it took us a little bit longer than it did places like LA or New York to come to that realization that, you know, gay and lesbian people can be part of your community, and you don't have to be afraid of them.

I think people just slowly they've gotten so used to seeing it that over time it's just become more and more accepted.

Does that mean that the fight is over?

Hell no.

Do we still experience discrimination and persecution?

Absolutely.

Has our house been vandalized three times?

Our PRIDE flagged and flagpole been ripped off of our house?

Yep.

I know somebody that six or seven years ago they were beat up coming out of a bar - not even a gay bar, but just because they were very effeminate.

I was at fireworks last night, walking down the crowd, somebody said something real derogatory, and it was like, "Really?

This is what you're teaching your children to holler out at people that are different."

There's the other people who are like, "Ban drag queens!"

The drag controversy over the library and reading to kids and such generated a lot of press and controversy.

That was quite a __show, actually.

The Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library wanted to host a Drag Queen Story Hour.

It happens in multiple cities across the nation.

I know they do drag Queen Story Hour up in Indianapolis quite a bit, especially during Pride Month.

And the community lost its__.

I was approached by the Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library.

One of my friends worked there, and she asked me if I wanted to do it, and I said, “Sure, I'll do it.” I would just be in drag reading to kids and dancing and interacting with the audience.

There was backlash, obviously.

We are not here to reject the LGBT community in any way, shape or form.

I am here to urge you to protect innocent little children over the desires of adult men dressed as women.

This event has been allowed under false pretenses and lies.

You have defrauded the people of Evansville and broken our trust.

We are here simply to reject a program.

Use your influence to cancel the Drag Queen Story Hour.

I was at the first library board meeting where they discussed it, and I was one of seven people in the room who were supportive of Drag Queen Story Hour with 200 plus people in the room.

And I got up and I spoke, and people booed.

I didn't go to any of the meetings at all, or public events for the most part.

I was just silent at the beginning until the day that that happened, and then I did that then.

And there was protesters, but there was also a big group of support of gay people there to keep those protesters away.

I looked out the window when I was painting, just to see what was going on.

There was a bunch of protesters out there with megaphones.

signs ...

Seeing the crowd that turned out with signs with words that kids should not be reading and having to escort kids from the parking lot, covering their eyes with my sign of Florentine.

And then you've got a crowd on the other side of the door that have rainbow umbrellas and are wearing capes.

It was a stark contrast.

They did paint stuff on the windows for kids to look at and to not stare at the protesters.

They had children workshops inside the library for them to entertain themselves and not be outside.

In general, it was all amazing because I had all people of different walks of life all come into that room and watch me.

The kids were read to by a very pretty drag queen, and they all had a really good time.

The world didn't stop spinning, and they added time slots to Drag Queen Story Hour because it was so popular.

My understanding, I think it might have been 500 kids, I think something like that.

I was very shocked, very surprised, becaus these parents, straight families, and I thought it was amazing to know that there are parents in this world that say that it's okay to be different.

Even the pastor that spoke against it, every board meeting I was at, he was there too.

At the end, he came and he shook my hand, and it was a good day.

It was nuts.

I wish that it would happen again.

It was sad that the director of the library got moved to a different library.

She brought something that was, from my point of view, amazing.

The kings and queens have always been an important part of our community.

I don't understand the issue with people and drag queens.

People have been watching drag queens their whole life.

Tootsie.

That's Dustin Hoffman.

Robin Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire.

Robin Williams, Tyler Perry, Patrick Swayze.

They all were some of the best drag queens.

Oh, you'll sit in a theater and watch this stuff and think it's all great and wonderful, but then when you see it in your local bar, that's a sin.

What the hell's the difference?

We're actors.

We portray a character.

Drag is just a stage performance.

When I put on makeup, it's like, I'm not Chris.

I'm this other person that ... don't care.

It's very much just a performance.

And just like this character that I've created.

Yes, some people are trans, and they live that character.

But me, I'm a character.

Rachel is a character.

I think there was always the stigma of where they didn't understand that when you took that off of stage, you're not that character on stage anymore.

I never fully felt that I wanted to become a woman.

It's definitely a really big misconception.

I wouldn't want to become a woman.

I wouldn't want to be a woman for anything.

I like playing one, but I don't want to be one.

That was just not who I was.

I still enjoyed my life as a man.

For me, it's more so just like the gender expression, expressing my femininity that I wasn't allowed to express when I was younger.

Even just small things like playing with Barbies, I wouldn't be allowed to do.

So it was just like a whole bunch of built up femininity that I wasn't allowed to express that now it's like, oozing out.

Truthfully, I started drag at, like, a super young age.

When my mom wasn't home, like, I'd wear her red high heels, and I wore a burgundy dress with daisies on it.

And I would always drive around on our family farm riding a four-wheeler with a T shirt on my head, and basically that would be my hair blowing in the wind.

I don't know what I was expressing, but I was just kind of, like, living naturally, and that's just what I wanted to do.

That's just basically what drag is to me, just self expression.

It's who I can't be in real life or who I don't feel like I have the confidence to be.

Whenever a performer is on stage and they are in drag, it's a disguise, it's a costume.

But also, whenever you see a performer on stage, they are creating what they believe is the most perfect version of themselves, or the most heightened version.

You can be as deep and raw and visible as you want.

If you want to hide behind a song, you can do that.

I could be confident.

I could be who I am.

I don't have to hide anything from anyone.

Like if I'm having a bad day, I put all my emotions into my performance.

We've all wanted to express ourselves in the way that we are not judged for.

When people applaud that, it's like, “Oh, this isn't wrong, or this isn't something that I should be ashamed of, or something that I should try and hide.

This is what makes me a star and not what makes me less of a human,” I guess.

And I think that freedom to feel accepted by a greater community is kind of what draws people to it, whether performing it or viewing it.

People get caught up in a lot of things, but we're people just like everybody else is, and that's just an outlet.

Whether that's like hitting the gym or you're just into music, writing, reading, whatever - it's just expression.

Because once I get out of makeup, I'm like, "I feel way better."

Not all gay people like drag queens and find that as an integral part of the gay society, I don't think.

I think that drag is a facet of our community that people focus on a lot.

I think that a lot of times people get hung up on that being the only thing that represents queer culture.

There are lots of queer musicians, queer comedians, queer artists, queer authors, and drag is one art form in a plethora of queer representation that we have.

But I love drag and I love drag shows and I love drag bingo and brunch and all of the things.

And we have a great drag community here in Evansville.

And I think that drag is important because the representation and the kind of let your freak flag fly mentality that goes into drag just existing is rebellious.

Drag is an important part of the culture.

The drag gay culture goes back to like the 30s.

It was founded for a place for us to call like a home.

And what I find so important about that is it is a big point of our culture because it allowed us to develop a culture.

I think when you're a part of a community that is very often not heard or demonized, you really have no choice but to make your own.

I think for a long time, just like whenever there were speakeasies and things like that, it's a gay version of a speakeasy.

When I started out doing drag, I was glamour drag.

It was beaded gowns, it was big hair, it was full on what I would say Dallas and Dynasty type styles and format.

And then you had the other side of drag, which was a camp drag, and that would be like a full beard, hairy chest.

But those were benefit groups.

They did things to help people.

Drag queens did things to pay rent.

The younger ones, they have opened the doors.

And now there's really any kind of genre now in town there's not any limit to what you can do in drag or what you can be in drag.

There's no stipulations.

There are no rules.

It is boundless.

When I first started doing drag, there was only two venues here that we could perform: the Brick House and Someplace Else.

Nowadays we have drag like RuPaul's Drag Race on TV.

It's more mainstream, and people want that in their venue.

Now, straight bars want gay venues or gay things to collaborate with them or take their entertainment and put them in their shows.

There's two places for sure that I perform at here Boca Lounge and Mo's House.

The two venues are considered a heterosexual bar, but yet they still give back to our community more than some other venues.

They want that to be a part of their culture, and they truly invest in us.

They have been way more accepting than I ever even thought when I first started.

So one big difference that I've noticed is that gay bars are not full of gay people that much anymore.

I feel like there's a lot more straight people going to the gay bars now.

Oftentimes if you go there as a gay person, you may be the only gay person there because a lot of times it's groups of young women out for their Bachelorette party.

It's not a secret, clandestine place anymore.

They only have one here now, and it's not busy like it used to be 30 years ago.

It used to be a packed place.

On a good night.

It's got a lot of people downstairs, and the showroom is full.

But by 12:00, they're all going to different bars because you can now.

And the building still represents to me in my heart a safe place for gays to go to if they don't feel comfortable going to the straight bar.

But for the most part, there's a lot of gay people going out and venturing out other places.

Like, it's safe enough to do that now.

I don't know that there are any entertainment venues that are unsafe for queer people in Evansville.

There are lots of businesses in Evansville that are very supportive of our community.

A lot of businesses are not afraid to post this is an LGBT friendly establishment.

There's, like a whole coalition of businesses, like in the 90s that would have got a Molotov Cocktail thrown through your window.

I mean, yes, here and there you'll have your fight or something go on.

But I feel like that's a generational change big time, because back in the day, that gay bar was your place and you stayed there to be safe and to do what you did.

I definitely think that there's been a shift in humanity as a whole being more accepting, and I think that that's generationally.

The younger generation, is much more accepting.

I'm 70 years old now, and people my age and older still don't want to talk about it.

They may not be discriminatory, but they still would rather just go ahead about your business and don't flaunt it.

Don't push your, as they would call it, your gay religion on us.

I wouldn't say everyone is not accepting of an older generation, because I have seen plenty of people in an older generation love and accept so many people.

I've met multiple LGBTQ plus members of our community that have the world's greatest grandparents ever, and they've accepted them and have taken them in.

If I'm talking as a collective, I would say my generation, they're way more accepting now.

Oh, yeah.

Young people are always more tolerant.

If you look at any opinion poll of tolerance of gay marriage, tolerance of anything, you'll see a real generational change.

They honestly don't care what your sexuality is, what your identity is.

Everybody ... they want to get along.

Kids find out that kids are gay, and they're like, "Okay, whatever, let's go play.

We don't care."

The reality is, people who are 20 or 25 today have grown up in a world where being gay isn't even interesting.

It just is.

People are more comfortable coming out now, and most people know a gay person.

It definitely is harder to judge when there's a face to it.

I've encountered that.

I think I've been that face for some people.

I've heard some people make some kind of a comment using "That's gay" as a slur.

My comment is always "Be careful who you say that around, because you don't know exactly who you're saying it to."

You can almost do that light bulb moment of, "Oh, sorry."

It's harder to hate somebody when you know their face.

It's harder to hate somebody when they have a name.

And I think that's a big part of the shift.

We've made such progress that people are feeling comfortable expressing how they view themselves in ways that they never would have been allowed to.

It's in an area where we're able to evolve and see more variety in sexual orientation, sexual identification, and it's led to a whole bunch of ... you know, for someone my age, I'm really struggling now with pronouns.

Pronouns, I don't always get them correct.

I'm still learning about the pronouns.

As a gay male - a gay black male - even I don't understand the pronouns.

I think it's really important to recognize all the letters of the LGBTQIA, and I think pronouns are also really important to address, because people do like to be called of how they feel.

There's this experiment that I saw.

Someone was calling a cisgendered person by the wrong pronoun the entire time they were talking to them.

And after, like, ten minutes, the cis person was like, "Hey, don't call me that.

I'm not a he.

Like, I'm a she."

And it's like, "See, pronouns do matter."

But I know that there are some pronouns that are really hard to understand.

One time I was in a conversation with someone who's non binary, and they go by It/Them.

And there so I got a little confused with the story.

I was like, who are you talking about?

And they obviously explained to me who they were talking about.

I was like, "Oh, okay."

It's really more of a learning process nowadays.

I would say approach it the same way you would if you're sitting in a math class and you don't know the answer to something: Ask a question.

If you don't understand, ask.

We have no problem with telling.

We know if you're trying to be respectful or trying to do better, as long as we can see that you're trying to address us correctly, it's all good.

As I get older, I see things that I don't always understand in our community.

And I think back to when I came out to my parents, how they didn't understand.

So I see kind of a parallel there.

I just hope that the generation that's coming up now takes patience with people like me and people of my generation as we try to understand all the ins and outs.

It's taken the older generation a lot to really grasp and learn about all of this, and they've been doing a pretty great job.

If it weren't for that generation, then the younger generation wouldn't have the privileges that they have.

They've been on the forefront fighting for our rights, getting this community to where it is.

It did take a lot of work to get us to the point that we're at today.

From whenever I was a child till now, there has been progress to some degree.

I think that slow progress, but any progress is progress.

I think that Evansville has changed a lot from growing up in the '90s, being here, knowing that it wasn't cool to be gay, to now, where we've got River City Pride, we've got a large festival and parade, and we do events throughout the year, and the mayor participates.

There are several organizations that have sprung up here under the LGBTQ identity.

There's Hudson and Reed.

They do a festival at Garvin Park in early June.

River City Pride will do their parade and their festival at Haynie's Corner.

Five years ago, my pastor looked at me and said, "We have to have a safe LGBTQ youth group."

So we had our first gathering for Greater Evansville Youth in September of 2019.

To watch them grow together, develop these deep, beautiful friendships - to have this safe space where they can change their name every week if they want, or their pronouns every week if they want.

And they get to just try themselves out and figure out who they are in a safe space.

I can't imagine what it would have been like for me as a 15-year-old to have had that kind of environment around me.

The community has grown a lot.

I think when I first got here, a lot of LGBTQ people were kind of under the radar.

When I moved back, there was a very prominent gay community, a very engaged gay community.

Now, I have noticed that LGBTQ people have prominent roles in the city.

That gay community has now moved into a lot of leadership positions.

You now have organizations and boards of directors and other folks actually seeking out diversity, actually wanting to include gay and lesbian individuals, people of color.

Sometimes it's nice to think about how much it's come, because sometimes it's easy to dwell on how much further we have to go, especially in a state like Indiana.

Every time you take a step, there's going to be a legislature that will try and beat that change back.

I am very fearful right now that what we're facing isn't so much the great progress we have left to go, but that it may go the other direction and move back for a while.

There are still all kinds of efforts to try to reverse marriage equality.

There are still efforts to limit the protections of sexual orientation, antidiscrimination laws and other things.

When I think about the movement right now, I'm really more about putting my fingernails in the concrete and holding on.

We are not fully accepted by everyone yet, but it's better.

Yes, it's more accepted.

Yes, we can get married.

Yes, I can walk down the street, for the most part, and show my public displays of affection.

But there's still some reservations.

There's still some maybe I shouldn't hold your hand in this part of town."

You've always got the prejudice.

You've always got the hatred.

You still have your places that will discriminate against gay and lesbian people, but I think those people have given up trying to persecute and get people fired from their jobs because they're gay.

I think the new target are transgender people.

They are definitely what people are going after right now.

The trans community is still very unknown to the mainstream community, and so it's easier to be hateful.

Like I said, everybody knows somebody who's gay.

Everybody knows their hairdresser is just the sweetest little thing.

So I think that they needed a new villain.

Typically your villain is somebody you don't understand.

And it's really tragic.

I have never met people who are more gentle and more easy to know as transgender people.

So actually, when I was about 7, I had body dysmorphia.

And I know that what that now, but I didn't know that then.

That's definitely whenever I started to realize that, "Hey, I don't feel like I'm in the right body."

I lived as a stud lesbian or a butch lesbian until I realized that there are other people like me and there are things that I can do so that I can live a more authentic and happier life.

And so I began to transition about eight years ago.

So I've been me - me-me - for eight years.

At the end of the day, that's who they are.

You can't take off being white.

I can't take off being black.

Being trans is who they are.

I really hurt for them because people are bashing them for who they can't change.

It's hard because a lot of issues have to do with the two things that I am the most that I can't do anything about, which is being trans and being of color.

I'm so many things.

My eyes are brown, I'm short, but I'm here.

I'm five one.

All these things.

My shirt is pink, my pants are gray.

It is that small.

And I don't think about it as much as other people think about it.

And the only time I have to think about is because somebody else called attention to it.

Our society as a whole has taken the trans community and made a huge deal about bathrooms and a huge deal about dressing rooms.

The ID to pee.

I remember whenever that came out, Nashville, it was very strange to me.

You were so worried about us creeping in the bathroom, but you're creeping on me.

Like, honestly, do you check people's genitalia in restrooms?

Because, like, I don't.

I don't know what else everybody else does in the bathroom, but I'm going in, I'm washing my hands, I'm coming out.

I have to show an ID?

Last year, the Indiana legislature passed a bill about trans girls competing in sports.

You know, like, there's thousands of trans girls trying to compete in girls track and volleyball.

All of the states that are trying to pass these anti transgender laws - I definitely think that it is a great fear for people who are trans because it constantly feels like if there's not one, it doesn't go through, there's one right behind it, on top of it, beside it.

"Okay, we're going to scoot this one over and table this.

Okay.

The next bill."

And it's the same thing.

I feel like there are bigger issues in the world, way bigger than little old me and what I'm doing.

I think that they just wanted a villain and they found one in something that they don't understand.

That's what we should be doing right now is fighting for our friends who are trans to live their lives openly, publicly.

And again, I think that that's where the more people come out and the more people who are visible and the more representation we have, is where that education comes in and where that change is on the horizon.

The same as in 2015.

Gay marriage not ending the world.

Eventually we will get to the point in our society and education that trans people aren't out to molest you in the bathroom.

They're just there to pee.

It's come a long way.

It's got a long way to go.

All of us have a long way to go.

There has been so much progress in the last ten years.

I would say 95% of the improvement has occurred in the last 10 or 15 years, and that 5% that set it up took an awful lot of work and a lot of time.

Of course, we want completely across the board, equal rights for every human, not just queer people.

The biggest hurdle is just understanding how people want to live their lives.

If it doesn't affect you, what is the big worry?

For example, your life doesn't affect me, so I'm not going to worry about it.

Me being gay doesn't affect you, what's the worry?

If that's the worst thing that your child can be, or if that's the worst thing that your sister, your brother or your dad can be?

We need to reevaluate a lot of things.

What goes into making a person a decent human has nothing to do with who they are attracted to.

And I think as a society, when we get past that, all of us, you, me, straight, gay, we're all shopping at the same grocery store, we're all going to the same restaurant.

We're all just trying to make it.

And I don't know why we can't make it cohesively.