'The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle' Book Talk, "Question and Answer: Part 12 of 16", Lillian Faderman, 2015/10/18
[caption: Lillian Faderman, Historian and Author of The Gay Revolution, Q & A 12]
Audience member: Hi, thanks so much for the book. I love it. Your work is amazing. I wanted to know–what did you leave out? Like, what did you really want to include that you couldn’t?
Faderman: That’s a good question. I left a lot out. The book–it’s 816 pages [laughs], including the index and the notes, so–if you’re reading it, you only have to read about 600 pages. The rest are notes and index. I had several other chapters that ended up on the cutting room floor because it, they, it was much too long. One was a chapter on the churches, and I traced that from the beginning. I have some of it still left. For instance, there was a wonderful group in San Francisco called the Council on Religion and the Homosexual that started in 1964, and that was the first time that an organized group of clergymen came out in favor of, gay rights. So I do have that, but then I traced the evolution of the churches, how some churches and synagogues, Jewish denominations, have come out in favor of us. I interviewed some wonderful people, such as Sister Jeannine Gramick, who has been a real spitfire in the Catholic church. Way back in the 1970s she started something called New Ways Ministry, and she really took on the pope. Really took on the church. She was kicked out of her first order, but another order accepted her. She was brought into another order. She still is officially a nun, and the New Ways Ministry is still going. So, I wanted to trace that. I had written, very optimistically in that chapter about the development in the Catholic church because Pope Francis had just said, “who am I to judge?” and I thought that was so promising, but things have been a little less promising since then. But anyway, that was one chapter that I left out. I spent much more time tracing developments in the media than I realized I had time for so I left that chapter out. Of course, I mention Ellen DeGeneres and the revolutionary things that she’s done and I briefly mention things like Modern Family, but, there just, there wasn’t time to talk at great length–or wasn’t space, I should say–to talk at great length about all of the media. And of course, I mention, as I talked about today, National Gay Task Force and the 1974 media committee that, changed everything. We have some friends who are really into sports and they told me that I absolutely had to have a chapter on sports. And it was when Michael Sam–remember, the football player–had just come out, and I thought, of course they’re right, I needed to do that. So I wrote a whole chapter on sports that I really loved, with Billie Jean King, and of course Martina Navratilova, and Renée Richards, who was a transgender tennis player years ago. And then I realized that I just, I didn’t have the luxury to talk about that in such great length if I was trying to keep the book from being less than a hundred pages–a thousand pages, rather.
[END OF VIDEO]
Interviewee: Lillian Faderman
Interviewer: Audience member
Transcriber: Caitlin M.
Formatter: Serena R.
Recording Date: October 18, 2015
Release Date: October 25, 2015
Location: City Council Chambers in West Hollywood, California
Interview Length: 00:03:55