Mary Czyzewski: Alright, here we go. Alright, would you tell me your name?

Dr. Annabel Stephens: Annabel Kirkendall Stephens, Kirkendall was my mother’s maiden name.

MC: Fabulous. Okay, now where did you grow up?

AS: New Albany Mississippi, which is a very small town close to Tupelo, Mississippi and it’s the birthplace of not only me, but William Faulkner the writer.

MC: Okay, could you tell me about your family, like about your parents, did you have any siblings?

AS: I had my mother and my father, who were Presbyterian, as I am, and met at the University of Mississippi, which is about 45 miles from there. And I have a brother John who is 10 years younger, which means he’s 62, and I had another brother that was born with the cord around his neck, and he lived to be 12, and died when he was 12 and I was 14.

And then I had, you know, uncles and aunts. I had an uncle who was gay that was with the same man for over 50 years and we had Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner with him every year and I knew his partner very well. And then I have another uncle who had five children that are my first cousins and then those were my daddy’s two brothers and they were in business together, the three of them. Then my mother’s family, I had—she had three brothers and sisters so I have lots of first cousins and the ones in my mother’s family were all born, not all but about four of them were born in the same year I was born or the next year. We were all real close and everybody’s still alive so far—

MC: Knock on wood!

AS: Well, the cousins, not the aunts and uncles, they’re all gone, but when you’re 72, you don’t have many left from the other generation.

MC: That is fair, that is fair.

AS: But lots of cousins, and we’re close and it’s wonderful.

MC: Okay, so you said you were raised Presbyterian, so like what kind of, like how religious was your family growing up, like what role did—

AS: Ask me again?

MC: What role did religion play in your life growing up?

AS: Well, I went to church every Sunday with my family, it was a much more conservative Presbyterian Church type of denomination or sub denomination, I guess. I mean, Presbyterians have a lot of different types of Presbyterians. It was the Associate Reformed Presbyterian church and they still don’t have women elders or deacons much less preachers. I mean they were—my daddy told me that they didn’t start singing hymns until 1947.

MC: Oh my gosh.

AS: They just sang the psalms, I mean it was very conservative. It was in like, it started in I think North Carolina, South Carolina and then came across the tip of Alabama to Mississippi. The only three churches in Mississippi that are part of that are right around the little town where I’m from, and then I don’t know but I think in Tennessee. But anyway, so it was a very conservative Church, and a lot of our ministers really have been Baptist ministers and I’m not sure how they decided to be Presbyterian but they really I think were more Baptist-like than Presbyterian and they would say things about homosexuality and you know, how horrible it was and how anyone that’s homosexual was gonna go to hell. I don’t know literally what they said but what I mean is they were very much against it and talking against it. So when I graduated from college, I mean when I would go home to visit, I would go to church with my parents, but I didn’t belong to a church anymore. I didn’t even go to church.

MC: And where did you go to college?

AS: Uh, Mississippi State College in Columbus, and then my masters was at Peabody, George Peabody in Nashville in Library Science and then at Columbia University Library Science; my doctorate’s from there. And so I didn’t go to church for many, many, many years because I didn’t feel welcome. I didn’t feel like God loved me and accepted me and although I believe that I have been made the way I was, I don’t believe it was a choice, because I actually dated boys some. Not men, but boys, some when I was in college and I didn’t dislike them but my heart was always—if I loved somebody it was a woman. It wasn’t the physical, sexual aspect of it, it was the emotional more and you know, I didn’t feel like I had chosen that so I felt like God made me as I was but you know, most churches at that time did not think that way and anyway.  So I had lived in Alabama and was at the University for quite a few years and there was a man you may have heard of, that y’all probably talked about in the gay in the south thing, Billy Jack Gaither. He was killed, he was killed in a gay-bashing. He was from Gadsden, Alabama I believe, and he was killed, and the Metropolitan Community Church in Birmingham had a memorial service for him and invited people from other churches to come and talk and the minister of the small Presbyterian Church that I eventually joined’s son is gay and she came over to Birmingham and she spoke at that memorial service and talked about how her son had been gay-bashed and I went up afterwards and met her and spoke to her and I kept thinking I need, you know, I really want to send that minister a letter thanking her for coming to Birmingham to this memorial service and for talking about her son so openly and I never got around to it. So I finally thought you know, well, I just, I’m probably not going to get around to doing this and it’s been so long now it’s almost embarrassing so I’ll just go to her church and thank her in person. So I went to the church and I walked in the door and I just felt like I’d come home. I loved it and I can remember that church—Pat had really been an agnostic, if not an atheist, maybe a little bit of an atheist for years. I mean, she went to Southwestern in Memphis, Tennessee, Southwestern which is now a Rhodes College and they made them go to Chapel once a week, and she went to the president and told the president that there were Jewish people and Muslim people, students, that didn’t have to go to Chapel, and she was an agnostic or whatever (I don’t know whether she said agnostic or atheist) and she didn’t think she should have to go. So he let her quit going. But anyway, she had not really attended church, her parents hadn’t taken her; I think they would take her and dump her at Vacation Bible Schools, but I don’t think she had really been to church much and didn’t have any religious background. But she all of a sudden just started going, coming to the church with me and she joined that church and I became an elder, which in the Presbyterian church is the governing body, and she became a deacon and she started the food pantry there at the little church that we belonged to. Gosh, she said it was 19 years ago. She told me today it was 19 years ago; I’ve been saying 11, but she said 19 years ago. And then we ended up merging that church with the church that’s here, which was Covenant Presbyterian, and creating a brand-new church. That was about three years ago, I think. Anyways, so we love this church, but I thought it was something; we went from being not involved in church to being very involved in church and having, you know, pretty important roles in the church, and it’s made me a much happier person, and her too, I think.

MC: Okay, I actually did have a question about something you said at the very beginning of that which—when you were talking about your family—so you did have an uncle who was gay—

AS: Uncle Edgar.

MC: —and that had a committed partner. How did that, like did you always know that that man was his partner or?

AS: I did from the time that I was aware of myself so I don’t really remember. I mean, I think I knew by the time I was in high school; I was sure. I think, I mean I can remember falling in love with a little girl when I was in like the third or fourth grade. So I think I had always known from very early age, but you know, probably I don’t know when I said an early age, I don’t mean two or three or four, but more like maybe 7 or something like that, 8. I mean, I didn’t have the words for it, but I knew that I loved little girls, you know, this little girl had long, blonde hair and was so sweet, and I had friends that were boys, and I dated a little in high school, made out and everything, but it just was not where my heart was, and I knew that, and so I certainly knew by the time I was 13 or 14. I had crushes, I had really, really strong crushes on my Phys. Ed. teacher and the girl that was the student body president. I think there was maybe one other one, that were all a little bit older than me, but you know, just crushes and I had a best friend that I was the maid of honor in her wedding, and I was sort of in love with her and anyway.

[Unknown person opens door to interview room]

AS: Hey, come on in!

Unknown: Do you know, is Kathy here?

AS: She was earlier.

U: Do you know where she is?

AS: I don’t know where she is now, sorry.

[Unknown person shuts door]

AS: That’s our church secretary. But let’s see…oh, so Uncle Edgar. So as soon as I was, probably soon as I could put a name to it, had a word for it and it could put a name to it and knew that there were other people in the world, that I wasn’t the only one, which is what everybody always thinks, you know, when they first realize it. I picked up that, you know, that they’d been together for so long and it’s funny because they traveled all over the world. My uncle was an attorney and he was a member of the state legislature in Mississippi, and they bought a house then in Jackson, Mississippi where the legislature would meet at the state capitol, but he lived with my grandmother in our county because he had and I’m sorry, but I shut my eyes when I’m trying to remember that.

MC: You’re fine!

AS: He lived with my grandmother when the legislature was not in session, but when it was in session, he would live in their house then in Jackson, of course, he visited his partner a lot back and forth. The partner was always there for Christmas and Thanksgiving and many other weekends. He was younger than my uncle, and he and I talked about the fact that they were a couple; my uncle never…he was very dignified, and his partner told me that my uncle didn’t think of himself as gay. He wasn’t gay in the sense that you know, politically but he just loved this man and they were together and they shared their life over I don’t know how many years it was, but I know it was over 50. I remember when it was 50. But so yeah that kind of gave me a sense because he was very active in the Presbyterian Church. He was the church organist, and he didn’t talk about religion a lot, but I knew that he had a strong faith.

And so that sort of let me know that a person could be a good person and you know, be homosexual. And you know, I know it was hard on him to sit there in church and hear the minister say the things the minister said, but he didn’t…he didn’t consider himself gay politically, in that sense. I mean, he was my father’s age, and my father died in ‘95 and so did, I think my uncle died in ‘93, so I mean we’re talking about, you know, a long, long time ago that he grew up.

MC: So you said that your Uncle Edgar’s partner would come to Thanksgiving and holidays. So would you say that your family was pretty accepting of it or?

AS: Okay, in the South—you probably have heard this in classes and other places and it’s really true—it was like as long as you don’t talk about it, you know, it wasn’t…Oh, that’s something I was going to tell you. So when I would see my uncle and his name is Richard or Dick, they traveled together all over the world; Australia, all the European, well not all over the world but a lot of the European countries, and my father referred to my uncle’s partner as “your uncle’s friend that he travels with.” Then I would laugh and say “yes, they were fellow travelers,” you know, which is what they called the Communists. I mean when people in this country, when they would suspect somebody of being a member of the Communist party or something, they would refer to them as fellow travelers, I guess which is kind of like saying birds…what’s that thing about birds?

MC: Birds of a feather?

AS: Yeah, flock together. So we all loved him, and knew him very well, and appreciated very much that Uncle Edgar had this friend that he cared about it as much as he did, but whether other members of the family put a name to it, I do not know. I know that I thought my father must have known and must have known about me, but after my father died my brother, no I’m sorry, my uncle died, and he was the oldest, so he was my daddy’s big brother and daddy looked up to him all these years and everything.

Once my uncle died, John said something to Daddy about Uncle Edgar being gay and Daddy just wouldn’t believe it. I think he just—it was hard for him to think of his older brother that way or something, I don’t know. But he accepted Dick as a person and a friend, but it wasn’t a matter of accepting them as a couple because nobody ever thought, you know. I never came out to them, and I know my mother and daddy knew and I’d had several partners that would come and be in my home and visit with me and my mother and daddy, but Pat, they didn’t much think a lot of some of the others and Pat they really cared about and could tell that she was really good to me. And so they never…you know I never used the words with them, but I never, I mean I was a feminist and I’d talk about feminism and gay rights and all that but I didn’t just sit them down and say I’m a lesbian, because I really felt like it wasn’t necessary. I felt like they probably knew.

But then they were always so good to Pat and everything and my mother was in the hospital dying. She said that Pat was the kind of person that she wasn’t worried about what would happen to me if she was gone. I think it was not in those words maybe, but that was the gist of it, because she knew that I had Pat and that Pat and I, you know would take care of each other and that Pat was the kind of friend that she always hoped I would have but that was the extent of it and she didn’t use the words. But we didn’t talk about stuff like y’all, like we all do nowadays.

MC: And how did you and Pat meet?

AS: I worked, I was a librarian for the Memphis Public Library, and was a branch head of a couple of different branches at different times. I was up there from ‘70 to ‘79 and I was with another woman named Pat that I was with for about 7 years and she was going to a community college and had plans to be a social worker. And so she had an interest in psychology, I think either to be a psychologist or social worker, and the mental health centers in Memphis had a network of information referral systems where, it was interesting because each catchments area, which was the division of the town that these different Mental Health Centers were under the city, anyway they had these different catchment areas and the one that was close to where I live had this information referral service that they did for the City of Memphis and it was kind of twofold. It was to be the backup for the psychiatrist at that mental health center, but also just to be for the general public. And so since she thought that was what she wanted to do, she took…did she get paid? I think she took a job and got paid a little bit, but I’m not even positive that she got paid, I think she did but she may not have spent that long, it was back in the 70s. Anyway, so she worked 2 nights a week at this Mental Health Center answering the telephone all night, but I was interested in it too. And then at one time I thought I might want to be a social worker and I would have either been a librarian or a social worker. But I chose the right one, I wouldn’t have been a good social worker, because it bothered me too much when they wouldn’t, when people don’t do what you suggest that they should do, and of course you know what’s best for them.  I mean, we had a lot of alcoholics that would call—my father ended up being an alcoholic after he got older—but we had these guys that would call us drunk, usually guys, sometimes women, call us drunk and you know, they would swear they were never going to drink again. They’d call and they’d want to talk to you for hours and hours, and you’d spend hours talking to them and oh, you know they were going to do what they could to quit drinking and next time you were there working they’d call back just as drunk. So I wouldn’t have been good at that, but what was I going to say? So anyway, so I would work, would go over and spend the night with her, you had to spend the night there and I would go over there. It’s just a few blocks from my house, but I would go over there and spend the night and I would work half the night and she would work the other half. I think it was just volunteer, but I can’t swear it. But anyway, so then the gay, it was a gay group and it was a formal organization but I’ve forgot the name of it in Memphis that a lot of gay people belonged to and Pat was active in that and they started a gay switchboard and she was part of that and my INR service or my switchboard at the mental health center that we worked for which was called Help Now did the training for the gay one, and she came to that and that was how I met her and I was with the other woman named Pat, and so this Pat that I’m with now and I became friendly, and we were just friends, not extremely close friends, but friends when we’d run into each other. I’ll tell you we were friendly rather than friends, and then many years later when I went off to Columbia, Pat and I broke up and that was kind of part of why.  I mean when I went I knew that we needed to break up kind of, because I realized I really was not in love with her. I cared about her, she was, is a good person, but we were just very different and had maybe different goals in life and you know, she thought she wanted…I mean, I put her through college, and she thought she wanted to be a professional of some sort, but she just never could quite get herself into that, the working like she needed to do get that then. Anyway, we just had different goals. She’s a good person. But so we broke up and this Pat that I had been friendly with sent me a Christmas card and I sent her a Christmas card back, and because I hadn’t seen or heard from her in some time because I’d been up living in New York City, and she said we should get together sometime. She had been living in Washington DC for a while. I was in New York with a partner up there and they broke up and I mean, I always liked her so she said well, let’s get together sometime and so I would go up. By that time. I was living with my mother and daddy and running a little library in New Albany for a year. So just as an acting director and taking care of my mother during her last year or two of life, so I would go up and spend the weekend with my brother who lived up in Memphis, and so I’d let Pat know I was coming up there and we agreed to go to Shoney’s and talk some and get reacquainted because I hadn’t seen you in some years and we ended up sitting there and talking for hours and hours and hours and hours. And we’ve been together ever since, and that was about 38 years ago; it’ll be 39 years in December.

40 is coming up, and we’ll have something here at the church. We won’t have a remarriage kind of thing because we’re already married, but we’ll get up and do something, you know, the church is wonderful. When we got married, we got married the first year that Canada would marry gay people and went to Victoria to be married. There was a couple that—straight couple—that were members of our church who were also elders. I was an elder, Pat was a deacon, and they were leaving to go to Nebraska to live and the Church was giving them a going-away luncheon and during their luncheon, Cherie, the woman, stood up and said, “I don’t know if you all know it, but Annabel and Pat are going to be married in Victoria this week and we would like to send flowers and if anybody wants to contribute, you’re welcome to do it.” They said people just started pulling money out of their pockets and purses and giving it to her.

MC: Oh that’s so nice!

AS: I mean it was a lot of money I guess, because the floral arrangement was this big (gestures with hands). So we were married in…this would have been the first cathedral in British Columbia that is now the State Department of Education  for the province of British Columbia in Victoria. It’s a beautiful old cathedral that it was going to be in. Well, being Catholic, you’d know that that’s where the bishop was and evidently that’s always  how it is with cathedrals, and it was the first cathedral in British Columbia and it’s still beautiful, and it went from being a cathedral to being part of a woman’s college, to being the Department of Education. I mean not just that the cathedral or the church, but the whole area that side of the campus and so we went there and we were married by a woman that was a…not Unitarian. Yeah. Yeah, Unitarian, Unitarian Chaplain and…no that’s not right, a lay chaplain a Unitarian lay chaplain, and they’re allowed to marry people, even though she actually was not a minister but she was like a lay chaplain, and in Canada they have the right to marry people. She did the service but she had them sent, she and Pat and I had met together and she wrote the service and then she let us send a copy to our minister, Sandy, in Tuscaloosa and Sandy put some Presbyterian things and it made a little bit more Presbyterian, which was totally against all the rules of the church, and she could have got in trouble for doing that but she did. Anyway, we walked in this beautiful cathedral, and I looked at the altar and there was this floral arrangement that was fatter than I am, it was just enormous and I walked over to it because I thought “oh how pretty, that’s so nice of the cathedral, the people here, to do that for us to use” and I really thought it might not be—I thought it might be artificial. So I thought maybe something that they just use for all the weddings and I walked over there and of course I could tell it was not artificial and it had a card on it that said—the church was University Presbyterian Church and we called it UPC so it’s the card said from your UPC family and I of course started bawling, it was beautiful.

MC: Aw!

AS: But now what in the world did you ask me that I got into all that I with you? Oh, how we met.

MC: I asked you how you met, and I was going to ask about how you got married, so that works out well! So when did, did you guys move down to Tuscaloosa together? Like how did you end up at UA?

AS: No, well I came here to be a faculty member at the university after I got my doctorate. She was working with her father, she’d come back from Washington because her mother was in her last years too, and her mother actually died before we met, the October before, he went in December, the 28th. I said [we hadn’t]  met because we’d met before, before we got together, but I didn’t meet her mother before when we just were friendly, because we were mostly just friendly when we’d bump into each other somewhere. I think we went out to eat a couple of times maybe but anyway, I had met her mother but she and her mother were very close and she was with this woman in Washington DC and her mother, she was out with her family, her mother came up to Washington when her partner left her and stayed with her and went to a gay restaurant with her. It was just extremely supportive. They were very close. Anyway, her mother was in her last years and Pat left Washington and came down back down to Memphis to live with her, and what was the question? (laughs)

MC: It was how she wound up at UA here with you.

AS: Oh yes, thank you. So Pat came back to Memphis to live, to help take care of her mother and was working with her daddy. Her daddy owned a sheet metal company and so he was the president and Pat was the vice president.  She worked with him for quite a few years so when I left to come over here to live, she was still working with him and she knew eventually he would sell the business and retire because he was getting older, but I think she commuted for nine years. She’d come over every weekend. Every now and then I’d go to Memphis, which was about 5 hours away, but I hadn’t finished my dissertation, so I was working on it. So a lot of times I would stay and work on it or I would be writing something in and just be so worn out from teaching full-time and doing that that she made the commute. She’d come over on Friday night and go back on Sunday night, and it was really hard on her. I can’t imagine, looking back, how she managed to do that, because she was also going to State Tech, working on computer programming degree there. So she’d gone to Southwestern at Memphis, and then later on thought she wanted to be a programmer and went out to State Tech and got that degree, a two-year degree, there. But she was going to school, she was working full-time and driving all the way over here every weekend. There was a time, during that first semester I think, that the airlines had a really cheap flight between Memphis and Birmingham and so she’d fly to Birmingham on Friday and I’d go get her and then take her back Sunday or Monday I think. And she’d fly back so we commuted, she commuted mostly, I’d do it every once in a blue moon, for 9 years.

And then after her daddy decided to let the business go, she left, because she promised him when she came back that she would work with him as long as—he’d been the vice president and the man that had been president retired and sold it to him and I think she agreed. I think the timing was that she agreed that she would come and help him with that as long as he had the business, so once the business was gone, she was free to come over here. So she drove over here and lived here. It’s interesting going from seeing somebody every weekend to living with them full-time, and it’s been wonderful, but it was quite a change because like I would go out and eat and do things with my friends during the week. And then when she’d come in the weekend, I would just be with her every minute of the weekend and you know, you go from that to somebody living with you and it’s like well, it’s a little bit of an adjustment, but it worked fine, and we’ve been doing that for a long time.

MC: So when you first came to UA had the, I guess the queer movement or the GSU started yet, like how long after you came did you kind of hear about it?

AS: I can’t remember what year it started, I came in ’85 but I can’t remember.

MC: I think the very first one was in like ‘83 or something, so it was just like a little baby.

AS: So it had just gotten started, yeah, I’m sure…I’m pretty sure I knew about it. We had another group. This was not at the University, but we had a group that had a lot of University faculty called Tuscaloosa Lesbian Coalition, TLC, that Rose Gladney, you’ve probably heard of her; she was a wonderful teacher, faculty member in American studies and she was a good friend and she and some other women started this group and it was kind of a mixture, maybe about half university faculty and half women that worked in town, and it was nice because it gave us a chance to get to know some people we wouldn’t have gotten to know otherwise. It started really for the purpose of like bringing women, feminists, lesbian mostly, I think or maybe all lesbian, singers and performers to Tuscaloosa, and we did bring a couple of them, but we also would meet together once a month on a Friday night at each other’s houses. And it was, it was very nice. I mean, there was a bar here at the time that was Michael’s, which was here for a long time, but that was really the only way that you know, you had your own friends, but that was about the only way that you would see a lot of lesbians out in a social situation. And I said we’d eat dinner, but I don’t think it was dinner, I think it was more drinks and knick-knacks kind of, but we had a big basement, we’d bought a house out on the lake by then and we had this big basement and so we would have, you know, people would come out there and we’d have dances down in the basement, and that was fun. Then when I became the faculty sponsor for the group they would come out and have dances.

So, I don’t know, I was very fortunate in that the dean that hired me was a gay man, and he became a very close friend, and was a close friend until his death.

MC: What was his name?

AS: Jim Reimer, or James, James Raymer. He was the founding dean of the School of Library and Information Studies. Of course, he retired like a year after I got hired, so he hired me and then he retired but he was gay, there’s another, a Book Arts faculty member that was gay and then another one came that—we had a lot in the Library Science and Book Arts program, the MFA in the Book Arts is a 3-year program but back then I think it was just a year, maybe two. I think it went 1 to 2 to 3, but Steve Miller came and he was president of the Faculty Senate a couple times. He was, is, a gay man.

They weren’t any other women, there had been a woman, the woman that’s place I took, who’d been lesbian and very out. I knew that that school was the safe place to be, and I was out with all the faculty; I was not necessarily out with students, although I think that at least all my gay students were aware and sometimes we would talk, so I’m pretty sure, I don’t really know for sure if I acknowledged to them that I was a lesbian. I think I did but I never like came out in class and didn't want that so I didn’t worry about who knew and who didn’t but I wasn’t…well there was some reasons like I taught collection development and I wanted to be able to talk of public libraries. I want to be able to talk about the fact that you know, you needed to have materials for people of all different ethnicities and sexual preferences or whatever. I wanted to be able to talk about things like that in my collection development class and in my public library management class without students thinking, “well, yeah she says that because she’s lesbian.” I wanted to be, I never wanted to be seen as lesbian first, I really preferred for people, even people who were my equals and age and whatever, that weren’t students I’d rather them know me as a person first and then know that about me. Nowadays I don’t care that I don’t care. You know, there are some nice things about being old, you just don’t worry about stuff like you did when you were younger you know? What are they going to do, fire me? [both laugh] I mean, I don’t have the job anymore. Joining that Presbyterian church, and I became a governing member of it, I mean became an elder. Somehow it gave me some confidence and maybe more of a feeling that I am a good person and that people see me as a good person that I hadn’t always had. I mean everybody in the church knew I was lesbian and knew Pat and honored us as a couple, and even though at that time the Presbyterian church had not voted to marry gay people yet, or actually I was an Elder when it wasn’t really legal for me to be an elder in the church, but that church did do that, and I wasn’t the only one. But I think that helped me feel better about myself, and better about the fact that you know, God did love me and accept me. It let me, I think not worry as much about, “is somebody at the University going to get upset about this” or whatever, and once I got tenure then I didn’t have to worry about that anymore, so I think probably having tenure and belonging to that church made just a tremendous difference in my willingness to be out with people. But I still…I knew some faculty that would announce it to their students, and I didn’t care if they knew, but I didn’t really think it was appropriate to make a formal announcement about it. I might feel differently now, I don’t know. I’d really rather people just…I would say things that I’m sure people could tell I was lesbian, but I wouldn’t just come on out and say “Hey, I’m Annabel, I’m a lesbian!”

MC: So it sounds like you know, in a lot of people’s experiences religion and their queerness or sexuality kind of don’t really mesh, but it sounds like for you it really does, and it got you here.

AS: Yes, it didn’t all the time, like when I was growing up as a teenager in that church, listening to how I was going to go to hell because of it, but after I joined University Presbyterian Church, it did. It did come together, it did mesh, yeah.

MC: That’s amazing.

AS: Oh yeah, that’s what acceptance can do for you.

MC: Could you tell me a little bit about, kind of the process for you becoming the, I think you said it was the GSU, advisor?

AS: I don’t really remember, I know who she was, I mean there was a student in the Library school, a graduate student, who happens to be from the town in Mississippi that my mother grew up in, and her father was a judge there for years. Kathy was her first name and she was, I don’t know where she is now, but she was working at the Mississippi Library Commission. I don’t know where she is now, she may still be there, but she was real active in that group and she would ask me to be the head of it, and you know, I said when I get tenure, I will, and I did become the faculty sponsor, and I was the faculty sponsor for a long time. I don’t know what you really would like to know when you say the process though, I’m not sure…

MC: I was just wondering if it was kind of where she asked you multiple times or?

AS: I think so, I think she first just asked me if I would have any interest in it or something like that. And I said that, you know, yes I certainly would, but not until I get tenure. And so what if she came back and asked me again before I got tenure and said yes, I can’t remember but you know, but I certainly didn’t say “yes, I’ll do it” the first time she asked. For one thing. I was working to get tenure, which meant a lot of publishing and stuff. And yeah, I knew it would take a lot of time, and it did take a lot of time, and so I wouldn’t have agreed to it even if I weren’t concerned about the tenure issue of somebody outing me. But so once I had tenure I thought “well heck yeah I’ll do it.”

MC: You mentioned the tenure issue. So was that a question of like job security or just people making life more difficult for you?

AS: Tenure was job security. Now why I was worried about that at the time, I don’t know. I’m thinking this was a long time ago, and I was much younger, I guess I was in my 30s or something, and, you know, I wasn’t real sure, you know, even though the university had given permission to have such a group I wasn’t real sure if that could in any way affect my tenure, which was silly looking back, but at the time, that was something you worried about because there were people, not here necessarily, fired because of it, but all over the country that you’d hear about people losing their job because of it. I never lost a job. I never lost a friend. I don’t know of any way it hurt me, except maybe being away from the church for all those years, losing all these years of being part of a church. And then you see, I wasn’t just not being part of the church, but I wasn’t paying much attention to God. That’s when I turned my back on God because I really thought maybe I wasn’t accepted. I didn’t know for sure whether what they said about going to hell because of it might be true. But the tenure thing I think mostly had to do with, I mean I can remember things I did like, I was a member of the pilot club in New Albany, it’s one of the Women’s Service organizations like the Rotary or something like that, which is not just women, but women belong to it. Now it’s viewed as a service like a Lions, or you know that kind of thing and real active in it and then when I came to Tuscaloosa, I joined the one here, and most of the members were old, much older than me although there were some that were younger and some around my age. But anyway, they seemed to be very proper and this that and the other and I was not open with them about being lesbian and I knew that when I would become the faculty sponsor, I would sometimes be quoted in the newspaper and be on TV, and everybody would know and so I resigned from the pilot club before I started being the faculty sponsor, or around the same time. I don’t remember which, and I remember I had forgotten that, I do hospice volunteer work now, and there was a woman that had been the president of the pilot club the year I resigned, and she ended up coming up to the hospice and died eventually, but I remember when I was visiting her, her telling me that she remembered my telling her when I resigned why, because I didn’t want to just quit and have her not know why; I didn’t tell the whole club, but you know telling her, and damn if she didn’t have a lesbian daughter. She didn’t tell me that, but this woman and her partner that I was just sure were a couple, I’m sure she was her partner, came to visit her mother at hospice. And I thought well, that’s why she was so understanding, but she said, you know I told her that that was why I felt like I shouldn’t be part of it, because I knew I’d be on TV which I was; there was a lot of controversy through the years that I had when I would be on television speaking for it or something like that, or in the news quoted in the newspaper and I didn’t want to…at the time it felt like shame. I didn’t want to shame the organization. I mean, it’s not just me. It’s like our whole way of looking at our status and where we belong, what people thought about us and all that is so different nowadays from what it was like back in it would have been the 80s, 80s and early 90s. I guess. I think marriage equality the fact that it’s now legal has made a tremendous…it’s freed us in so many ways. Not just because we can actually get married, but because I think a lot of people maybe see us as being more substantial or more. I don’t know and I might be wrong, but in my opinion and way of thinking about it, I think we are accepted by an awful lot more people because of the fact that we can marry and do marry and you know live what seems to be just a regular life, which is what we’ve always known, but I think it makes people realize that. Also y’all, your generation is so much more accepting, more open and everything that’s helped a tremendous amount. I think a lot of us that are my age have changed our way of thinking about ourselves a tremendous amount because of that acceptance. I mean, acceptance from a church, or from a generation or it just, it can make such a difference.

MC: We were talking about how you had to speak on TV after a couple of controversies. Do you remember what any of those were?

AS: Oh gosh, one of them was, and you’ve probably heard of this, we had the first conference of student groups, gay and lesbian student groups, I think in the South, not the country, but in the South. I think it was here at the University of Alabama and the governor got involved with it, there’s a legislator from out of Cottondale that is very conservative and he got the governor and the legislature all stirred up against it, and they actually told the university not to have that conference, but we had it anyway, and there’s this wonderful woman, Martha Morgan, that was a law professor that’s done a lot of civil rights work, and she came and talked with us and told us, you know, kind of how to deal with it and everything, and I know a lot of the faculty that were going to be speakers for the conference dropped out because they were afraid they would get in trouble or something or that names would’ve been in the newspapers, a lot of the gay faculty. But this one man is not gay, and maybe that’s why he was able to go on and do it. Brian Fair who is a law professor still, was one of the few that actually ended up speaking and we had to find all the speakers and all that and it was real controversial. So that was in the newspaper that the governor, I don’t remember whether they threatened to take or cut the state funding for the University. I don’t think so, but I think there was a lot of fear that that would happen.

So that was I guess the main time and then it seems like there was another time that there was some controversy over something. I don’t remember. We did things that really kind of shock me now at the Hillel Center, which is the Jewish Student Center for the University somehow we used that for a dance at one time; I can’t believe that. I mean it’s one thing to have a dance in my basement, but I can remember going to a dance over at the Hillel Center where this guy came up to me and didn’t realize I was lesbian and was just talking about how impressed he was that you know, I was willing to let the group have this dance at the Hillel, and I can’t remember, I think I said “Oh, well I’m lesbian.” I really can’t remember what the other controversial thing was. I will tell you that one of the things and this was not that same type of thing, wasn’t a controversial thing, but something that I did do this for being faculty sponsor.

We did have an office in the Ferguson Student Center for several years, and they had a telephone there and people could call during the day and talk to people during office hours and get advice and suggestions, this that and the other. Well, at night there was nobody in the office. It was not a 24-hour thing, and so I would roll the telephone number over to my home number and people would call me all night long, some nights, not every night. But every now and then, particularly if something had been in the paper about gay rights or something like that, these drunk fraternity boys would call and offer to do all kind of awful things to me and that kind of thing, because that number wasn’t my home number, I didn’t ever have to post my home number. But if they called that office number they would get my house so things like that was so hard.

MC: Yeah, was that scary, or did anyone ever do anything beyond calling?

AS: Well they didn’t know where I lived, you know nowadays you can find out where people live, but you see back in those days it was harder. My address is in the phone book, but I live way out on the lake and it’s hard to find anyway so I didn’t worry about it a lot, but it was uncomfortable.

MC: Okay, because you had said that you had like dances in your basement, so how were those kind of publicized was it not very?

AS: Word of mouth.

MC: Word of mouth?

AS: Yeah. Now I would do maps, because we lived way, way out there on the lake so I would draw a map, so give out copies of a map so people could find their way out there, because at the time we bought the house, it was the last house on the road and that Grandview that I live on is a long, long street, but then you get to a dead end about two houses down from my house, although those houses weren’t there then, and you can’t go through, there’s a barrier. So at the time I bought the house there was not a house for like 2 miles in this direction, so people would come down Grandview and run out of houses and turn to go back to town. So, you know, I would make a real good map that they can find where they’re at, and somebody could have been picked up a copy of that map somewhere but usually, you know, people are protective, and so a lot of it I think is word of mouth and somebody would have some fliers and give them to people they knew and that kind of thing.

MC: So there were never any incidents with uninvited people or incidents at these dances you would have at your house?

AS: I don’t think so. I don’t have any memory of it, so probably not.

MC: Well that’s good!

AS: I do think that there were people that came to some of the meetings sometimes. We met on campus in different places and I think that was listed by the Ferguson, I think a person can, you know, call and find out where the meeting was going to be? We didn’t publicize it really big or anything, but you could find out and seems like there was some people that showed up that didn’t cause trouble but somehow you kind of wondered when they walked in if they were gay, from the way they were acting or looking or whatever, but I don’t really think there was ever a real problem about it that I can remember. And this was a long time ago. It would have been about 20 years ago or something I guess. This is 2019, so yeah, it would’ve probably been about 25 years ago or maybe even 30, that I quit being the faculty sponsor. But I loved it, I mean it was…it gave me a chance to give back. It was—I love students. I love being a faculty member and teaching, and that was the thing I liked the most about my teaching. I mean I’d, you know, publish my books and publish my articles, but the interaction with the students was the most important part to me, and this gave me a chance to talk to younger people and try to let them know that, and I know this is going to sound so silly now, but at the time it seemed very important to let them know that yes, you can be homosexual and have a happy life.

MC: That doesn’t seem silly at all.

AS: Well back in those days, it’s like most of the books that you read, and there weren’t that many of them, somebody always ends up killing themselves at the end of the book and stuff like that. And so it was really nice, and I can remember, counseling is not the right word, but I would talk with the kids, you know kids that age break up a lot, and I would talk with people and try to, you know, I remember these two girls that were sorority girls that were going together and one of them got involved with another woman, and I can remember talking with them about it. It gave me a chance to kind of be helpful to some of the gay students in the same way that I was, and we had gay students in the Library School, too, so they were always sort of my favorites. I loved all my students. Love’s not the right word, but I cared for all my students, but felt closer to the to the ones that were gay and lesbian. I taught up there for 22 years, I think full time and then another nine years after that. But things have changed an awful lot, because I started in ’85, left in 2007, and the one time of the year that I taught it was mostly online, so I didn’t get to have the same interaction with students that I had before and I was mostly doing it from my house. First I’d come into school and sit in the Library School to do it, and then I finally decided why am I doing this, you know? Because there was nobody around much at night and I thought I might as well just be at home, and so that’s what I started doing but it did make me feel less of a feeling of interaction, but there weren’t any students around anyway, and most of the faculty, now you go over there and there’s hardly anybody there because they sit at home teaching or there in their office teaching online with the door shut, and we do still have face-to-face classes, but a lot of the teaching is online, but I did that for about 9 years.

MC: Did you notice, when you were having more face-to-face interaction when you were the faculty advisor, like were there more of a certain kind of person in the group, like was it kind of an even mix between men and women or?

AS: Oh, there were always more guys, and what I didn’t tell you is that I actually got permission toward the end of the time to use a room there at the Library School, so the group would meet on the 5th floor, the Library School is on the 5th floor of Gorgas Library, so they would come and we’d have our meetings there in a classroom there at the Library School, and that was nice, because being a librarian, they knew all these books, and by then there were quite a few gay books, sorry one of my eyes are running.

MC: Could you use a tissue?

AS: No thank you, I’ll just use my fingers; I’m not getting much, but it’s just like all of the sudden I feel like my eye’s going to close. I mean, I used to be allergic to library dust, and maybe I am still. But did I notice…there were always more guys, probably twice to three times as many more. And most of them were undergraduate but I did have a few, there was a guy named John Howard that’s written some books, some gay books and published them and he was the graduate student council, whatever student association president at one time, and he would come to the meetings but most of them were undergraduates and so they were pretty young 18 or 19 or 20 or something.

MC: Was it mostly like white or was there a mix?

AS: I think it would have been mostly white. And I’m trying to think when I first started, like in the mid-80s, I doubt they were all that many black students on campus, but there were some, was just very much a smaller number. Of course it’s grown a lot, but I’m pretty sure that I remember that we did have a few black students, but most of most of them were white just like the Library School most of our students there, and that’s changed a lot too. There have been a lot of good changes. Alabama has made some wonderful changes from what it used to be. It’s not there yet, but it’s a lot better, and Mississippi where I grow up.

MC: And do you feel like as a faculty member like your kind of experience as a gay or queer person was a bit different from your students, like I know you mentioned you would go to like Michael’s. Did you run into students when you were doing things like that?

AS: Yeah, once or twice, I did run into students then. It was quite a shock at first, I have to admit, and then I thought well you know, they’ve got as much right to be here as I am. But I remember being embarrassed the first time that I ran into one of my students; it was a guy, a boy, so. Yeah, but in my life, I never had a bad experience. I was very fortunate. So like I said, I never lost a friend, never lost a job. So I didn’t lose my family and I wasn’t really totally out, but I’m sure they knew. They were not, Presbyterians are not as, well we’re not fundamentalist for sure. And we usually more… we’re not as hard on it and I think that I think if I had been at this church in the more popular type of Presbyterian Church is Presbyterian Church USA PCUSA, and it’s a lot more progressive, liberal, whatever Church than that one I belonged to when I was growing up, so probably if I had been a member of that kind of church, I wouldn’t have hurt as much although back in the earlier days, I think maybe it wasn’t as different  as it got to be over time, but my life really, it was different in some ways from the life  my students were living and they were able to be more out but it really wasn’t… And I was real fortunate, when I lived in Memphis, I was a public librarian there for years, I knew a lot of gay people that worked for the library system. There were a lot of gay bars in Memphis that I would go from time to time because that was about the only way that you knew to meet people back in those days. Now there are churches and all kind of organizations and everything and we did, we actually did have that gay organization that Pat’s part of where we train the gay switchboard, and I ended up working on the gay switchboard too. But it wasn’t, you know, I was real fortunate because a lot of people my age had much harder times than I did. I really didn’t have a hard time with it. I didn’t like myself. I wasn’t sure that you know, that I was a good person. I mean that the words, I did have some negative feelings about myself because of it when I was in high school and maybe when I was in college a little bit but by the time I came over here, even though I was sort of cautious about it I didn’t have the bad feelings too, particularly after I got involved in the church. That did make a big difference, it really did.

MC: You kind of were here during the 80s, so the AIDS crisis, did any of your friends or students like did that really affect you much down here?

AS: I didn’t have any students that had it that I know of. There were a couple people that have been active in the group that I became the faculty sponsor of that did get sick and eventually died but I think it was right before me. I don’t really remember knowing for sure that any of the ones that attended the meetings when I was the faculty sponsor had AIDS. They may have but I think I didn’t have any. I did get on the, I’ve been on the board of what was the WAAO, West Alabama Aids Outreach, it is now Five Horizons Health Services. I’ve been on the board of that for probably 30 years or something, and so very early on really, early in the days that we had WAAO in town, they didn’t even really have an office. There was a group that would meet at Canterbury Episcopal that was sort of planning, getting it all started, and then we did have a director and then it grew and it grew and it grew and it grew. So it’s really meant a lot to me to be on that board for a long time, and I’ve forgotten what your question was exactly.

MC: Oh, my question was about if anyone you knew I had it or died from it, and kind of do you feel like it affected I guess the attitude of gay events at that time or being queer at that time.

AS: I don’t know. I mean, there was a guy named Elliot that had been a member of the group—

MC: Yes, he was one of the founders, I believe.

AS: —that he was gone. I think I’m pretty sure I remember meeting him, but he I think passed away really before, I mean he wasn’t active in it when I was sponsoring, I think he was probably already pretty sick, I think. And there was a woman that was on the board with me with WAAO that’s son passed away from it? But I really have not known that many people that had it or that I knew had it, and I don’t think I’ve ever known anybody that close; I’ve known names of people, I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t have any close friends and it very well could be that some of those people that I would see in bars and sit and talk to probably ended up dying of it, but I didn’t… I was probably down here by then and didn’t know you know, what happened.

I think I do remember hearing about a couple of people that I had known in Memphis that’d passed away from it.

MC: And was it quite as, I guess big of a deal down here?

AS: I’m sorry, what?

MC: I said was it quite as, I guess, as big of a deal down here because you know, you always hear about you know, it being kind of a panic in other parts of the country.

AS:  Oh yeah, more so, because again in those days, people didn’t talk about the gay things like they do now. In the earlier days, people didn’t talk about things like that as much as they do nowadays. What time is it, because I think I’m okay, but I know it’s going to be over at 2 so in just a few minutes I’m going to have to go help Pat get packed up but I’ve got a few, because we’ve got an hour, and they’re still letting people in, I bet. Well, I’m sure it was as hard here as it was everywhere else and maybe in some ways harder just because I bet there were more people in the South—I’m just guessing—but I’m betting there were more people in the South who were not out with their parents until they got AIDS, and then they had to say I’m gay and I’ve got AIDS and am going to die. But I’ve read a lot of it and I bet you probably have too for your schoolwork, I read a lot of books about people that that you know that the first time they ever mentioned it to their parents that they were gay was because they had AIDS that, they had to come out because they had AIDS and they knew that would be sick, and back then, back in those days, if you had it you died for the most part. I’ve known people now that who had AIDS for you know, for years and years and years and years because they have medicine now that keeps you alive. But back in the earlier days that was not the case.

MC: And then just kind of I’m also just curious because you said you did your PhD at Columbia. What made you decide to leave the South to go there for school and then come back?

AS: I wanted to live in New York City. I had gone with my first partner; my first partner was a faculty member at the UNA, University of North Alabama, in education. She wasn’t but 3 years older than me but she’d gotten through school pretty young, had gotten her master’s pretty young, and back then you could get a job  in a smaller school like that without having the PhD and so she was she was on the faculty of UNA for years and then got her PhD, and I lived over there and worked in a public library. That was my first job, full-time job, as anything more than a lifeguard or making snow cones, which I used to do; my daddy had an ice plant and I’d make the snow cone stuff, but my first real job was for that library up in Florence, but…oh heck, what did you ask me?

MC: I asked why you left the South to go to Columbia and why you came back.

AS: So she and I were together for 3 years, Janice and I. When I left her, I mean I didn’t leave her, I left that library and went to get my master’s at Peabody, and then we ended up not staying together after that. And because I wasn’t as sure of sure myself then and thought maybe I had made a mistake and I was just seeing this guy and we ended up breaking up and stayed friends for years and years. But we’d had a really fun to trip up to New York City and I’d really enjoyed it and had always thought I’d like to live out there for a little while. So I think part of it was that I liked her life as a faculty member living there, me working at this library 8 hours a day every day.

And seeing what she would do is go off and teach a class or two and sometimes come back home and sometimes stay there and have, sometimes the students would come over to the house and it just looked like a really nice life. And see, in schools like that, it’s a university now, but at the time I think it was still a college, and they didn’t put the pressure on writing and publishing that we had at UA and they do now I think probably, but they didn’t then and so she didn’t have to publish, so it was just teaching and enjoying being with the students interacting with the students and all that and I really liked the life so that I started thinking maybe I would like to be a college faculty member, so I decided after she and I broke up, after I got my Master’s, I worked in Memphis for 9 years for the public library there and was a branch head and I told you a couple of different branches and so then I got to thinking more and more that I might like to get a doctorate and then to have the option of being a faculty member,  and I went to the doctorate program all the way to the dissertation stage, not really positive about whether I would become a full-time faculty member or whether I’d remain just working and being a librarian, but once I got the job here and found that I really did like doing research and publishing and liked being a faculty member and then realized I could have a lot more influence doing that then I could working for some library. But I loved being a librarian, and I loved being here too as a faculty member, but that was why I wanted to go to New York partly. I wanted to go to New York to be in the city and get to go to the theater and museums and fun places to eat in all that, and part of it was I read a lot of books about gay people living in New York and I knew it was a much freer life, that you can walk down the street holding hands with somebody and somebody might yell at you but it wasn’t as much of a shock and at Columbia, actually, it was neat because I heard one of the women singers. I think it was Holly Near, but I’m not sure in a concert there and they had a gay student group and so that was realized before I came here as the faculty sponsor. So that was kind of the first time, you know, that I had lived somewhere where I actually saw two people, two women holding hands or could go to a meeting on campus or a dance. They had a dance, I remember, and so they had a concert, and they had a dance, and it was a brave new world, kind of, and a feeling of freedom I’d never had before you know, and there’d been lots of other gay people around but that weren’t having to hide, you know, that weren’t in the closet that were out and about and the idea of having a concert where the auditorium is absolutely packed with gaypeople on the college campus. It was just amazing. So that means that would have been, oh shit I thought I knew. I went up there and I graduated from with my Master’s in ‘79. I went to New York to live in ‘79. So that was the late 70s, early early 80s. So that was a real revelation that summer, and I had lived in Memphis, which is a good-sized city, and I had gone to a lot of bars and things, and there were gay organizations there, but it, I don’t know, like I can remember going down to the village and there was a woman’s bar down there and the subway would stop just right by it and I would get down there and the Stonewall Inn was like a block away and just walked into the village. A lot of gay people lived in the village, and they’d be out in the street holding hands; it was just very freeing.

MC: So then after kind of experiencing that freedom what made you decide to come back down here?

AS: My family was here, I am a Southerner, I mean I’m Southern born and bred. I mean my heart, I guess is pretty much in the South and I knew I didn’t want to be all that far away from home and there’s a lot of things about the South I don’t like but there are other things that I do like.

MC: Like what? What were some of the bits that you do like?

AS: Well, somebody gets sick or dies and everybody comes and takes care of you, and you know brings you food and all that. I like our friendliness, the fact that it seems easier sometimes to get to know people or to talk to people some of it’s superficial and some of it’s real, but it feels, you know, I just like the way that Southerners are, you know, that you meet somebody walking down the street and smile and wave and again, some of it’s real sincere and some of it’s not. I loved living in New York, but whether I would have been as happy just going instead to be on the faculty at another school in the north or the east, I might have been, I don’t know, thoughts travel, but I like to be in other parts of the country, but I think a lot of it had to do with my mother and daddy was still alive when when I left there to come back here. And my family, most of my family, I guess all my family is from the South.

MC: And that feeling of freedom or just like the ease it sounds like you felt when you were in New York. Do you kind of feel that down here now, just with how much everything’s changed?

AS: I do now, because things have changed. Again, I think that gay marriage, being a member of a church and having just a stronger feeling that I’m okay, and things are very different. I mean, it’s been an amazing difference. I mean I never would have thought, Pat and I both said that we never ever would have thought that we could be legally married in our lifetime. I figured it would happen someday, but not in my lifetime. I read a book the other day about Edie Windsor, you know, the one that when they passed the marriage, the law that we could be married—

MC: Yes!

AS: —a biography of her that was really interesting that I really enjoyed. She had an interesting life. Anyway, I guess I’m going to, do you have 1 or 2 more. I’m sorry to hurry you but…

MC: I do have 1 or 2 more, yes. No worries at all. Okay, so do you have something that was maybe your favorite thing that you did while you were the faculty advisor and maybe something that you wish now could have been different or changed?

AS: Oh wow. I really enjoyed interacting with the students. The meetings were okay, but I really enjoyed, you know being able to just be with them one-on-one or a small group, where we could really talk and to feel like maybe I could be helpful to somebody, that was probably the high point, the best point. There were, it was kind of hard because it was always a thing of there would be some students that really wanted it to be just totally social and other students that really wanted it to be political. I don’t ever feel like I was able to really handle that extremely well.

MC: Which one did you kind of fall under?

AS: I wasn’t real political ever probably. I have never, I mean now with Trump I feel threatened as a Democrat, and I’m a Democrat, but I didn’t get involved in politics an awful lot, I was always doing some kind of academic something or another or I don’t know, but what I wanted was for it to be a mixture of both and it was a mixture of both, but it would be but there was always some students that felt like it wasn’t political enough and other students at the same time that felt like it was too political, so that’s probably the part I wish I could’ve handled better. And something I wish I had done differently, that I’m ashamed of. Right after I got to be the sponsor, there was an election that the students had because some of them really wanted it and there was some controversy and I don’t even remember what it was about but there was somebody that that the ones that had been actually coming and being part of the group wanted to have be president, and the night of the election all these people showed up that had not been there for months and maybe had been once during that year and I didn’t handle that well because there were all these people showed up to vote for somebody and they hadn’t been coming and I didn’t like that and so I lectured them about that. And I don’t know, I read something recently that referred back to that, but I probably, and I took the side of the students that had been part of the group and been active in the group and made them have the election over and we had some rules about you have to attend a meeting at least twice a year to be able to come vote or something; that was probably wrong, I guess. I don’t remember if that’s exactly what it was, some kind of rule like that that we came up with but I think probably I didn’t handle that too well. Well, it was the first time I’d ever been the head of an organization, you know the sponsor of an organization, and I really never knew what my responsibilities were and how much freedom they should have. You know, I don’t know that I was a very good sponsor. I think there were ways I was and maybe ways I wasn’t. (Phone chimes) Let me see if that’s Pat saying “I need you.” It probably is, because her health is not great. Okay, I can do one more and then I have to go.

MC: Okay, and then the very last question: is there anyone else you can think of that would be good for either me or someone else in my class to talk to?

AS: Rose Gladney, she’s not in town, she lives in Florida now, but Rose Gladney was probably one of the most active faculty members, and she actually became the sponsor after I quit, I’m pretty sure. She’d be a wonderful person to talk to; she was one of the founders of that TLC, but I’ve got to run.

MC: Of course, thank you for talking with me!