Communication for sponsoring this venue, faderman is appearing as a result of senior pride. [applause] were pretty thrilled about that. And ms. Nutt by the tucson medical center. [applause]. And jim is here on his own, i guess. Evidently. The preparation will last an hour, including questions and answers and we want to ask you to hold your questions until the end, and we hope to allow plenty of time for questions. Immediately following the session, the authors will be autographing books in the sales and signing area in the ua bookstore tent on the mall. It says booth 141. Books are available for purchase at this location, but miss faderman will be 20 minutes late since shes going to be interviewed by cspan. We hope youre enjoying the festival and invite you to become a friend of the festival today. You can text friend to 520214 book. Or 5202142665. Our visit to friend of the festival booth number 1110 on the mall. Your gift makes a difference in keeping the festival programming free of charge and supporting critical literary programs in the community. I want to remind you to turn off your cell phones and i want to encourage you to check out the Southern Arizona friends senior pride booth, look for the rainbow flag. Amy ellis nutt is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, she worked for several years as a Sports Writer for Sports Illustrated and currently covers science and health for the washington post. She specializes in the brain. She coauthored a best selling book on the teenage brain and has written shadows bright as glass, the journey of a man with brain trauma. Nicole, the story of a transgender child and the journey she took together. And they break down walls and i think this story will advance the understanding, that gender identity is in the brain, not anatomy. And the lead plaintiff in the case that we all celebrated, the outcome of, on june 25th june 26th, 2015. With deb by, who is also a Pulitzer Prize winner with, its a love story and its soon to be a motion picture. [applause]. Guest william faderman has the distinction of having won lamda literary awards in more categories than any other author. She has won in several categories, fiction, memoir, immigrant history, of course, gay history, and its not possible to underestimate how important the books shes written on lesbian history are to our community. [applause]. She took lesbians out of the footnotes and gave us a way of identifying with some of the most important and successful women in everyones history. Lillian, i understand that during the mid century, i remember that gays and lesbians could be arrested just for wearing the wrong clothes. How did we get from where were sitting today to there . Its a good question and its what my whole book is about. My book is 800 pages long, so im going to condense in ten minutes my 800 pages. [laughter] and i need to say, first of all, that the acronym lbgtq gets longer, qqiiaapp, i think it is now. That, of course, is recent. When i came out in the 1950s, we were all gay, whether we were l or g or b or t or whatever, we all called ourselves gay in the underground and straight people didnt know that term. In fact, if you were interested in somebody and you suspected they might be gay, you could say to her, so, are you gay . And if she said, well, im a little depressed today or something, then you know that that was not for you. [laughter] so, i explain in my book the gay revolution, that i call it the gay revolution even though its about lbgtq, et cetera people because that was the word that we used to describe ourselves through much of the 20th century. So, question, i think that we made the progress that we made for several reasons. One is that we learned how to organize and it was a very long road before we got it right. Another reason is that more and more of us came out and more of us came out because we organized better and we made it safer for people to come out, and so straight people realized that gays, and ill use the word that was used through much of the 20th century, gay people were not these pariahs lurking in the shadows ready to pounce on some 14yearold, but theyre brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and neighbors and good friends. And i think another reason things got so much better for us, is that we were very lucky for eight years to have a real ally in the white house. [applaus [applause] and, of course, we dont have that ally anymore in the white house, needless to say. But i have to say that im optimistic about the future. I think were going to go through some hard times, but we know how to fight back. We have organized. We have powerful organizations that will help us fight as individuals and as a group. We have straight allies because so many of us came out. I was so pleased to see just yesterday, in boston, theres an annual st. Patricks day parade and out vets, lbgt veterans had been marching for the last couple of years and this time, the board in charge of the parade decided that they would not let out vets march because supposedly they registered late and last year they carried a rainbow flag and they werent supposed to do that. Well, the governor of massachusetts said that he would not march in the parade. The mayor of boston said that he would not march in the parade because they they will not condone discrimination. The vote to ban outfits had been 94. Yesterday, the board met again and considered the boycott and 110 [applause] so, the progress we have made is really phenomenal and the fact that we do have these wonderful allies that we can count on, i think, is phenomenal. So, let me, in the five minutes i have left, let me just give you a very quick sketch of how we learn to organize. In 1948, Albert Kinsey pub published a book, sexuality and the american male and a man by the name of harry hay in los angeles read the book because kinsey said so many adult men had homosexual experiences and he thought he would get the men together and organize and see if they could stop Police Entrapment and other terrible things that were happening to homosexuals. For two years, he had no luckment he couldnt get anyone to join his group. Finally, he had a brainstorm. In 1950, the United States entered the korean war. Harry hay had been a member of the communist party and he took a communist Party Sponsored petition to a group in los angeles beach, a gay beach, to people at the gay beach and he went from blanket to blanket on the gay beach and he said, would you be interested in signing this petition to get us out of career . In no time at all, he got 500 signatures. Right after somebody signed, he would always say, and would you also be interested in joining the group to talk about sexual devian deviancesy . He got zilch interest. It was obviously less dangerous to be associated with a communist Party Petition than in any way be associated with homosexuality. But harry hay kept going and finally did find four other men who would join him and grew to a couple of women and the numbers grew a little bit and he called the group a society and told them something interesting, nobody had ever defined lbgt people or gay people that way before. He said we are an oppressed cultural minority. That was really revolutionary to think of gay people as an oppressed cultural minority. Well, the group went for a while and other groups like formed groups for lesbians. They never grew very big and a split immediately developed within those groups. There were some who really liked harry hays formulation that we are an oppressed cultural minority and there were others who said, yes, were all oppressed, but were not a cultural minority. Theres so much diversity within us, among gay people, and except for the fact, the insignificant fact of hour sexual preference, they said in those days, they didnt talk about gender identification, but they said except for the insignificant fact of our sexual preference, were just like all other americans and we want the rights that all other americans have. And that sort of formed the twostrands of our movement. Are we an oppressed cultural minorities or are we simply oppressed, but just like other americans and we should have the rights that all other americans enjoy . Groups like it went on through the 1950s and into the 1960s and they did do some important things. I wont go into detail now, but you can read my book to find the details. But they never became huge. What made a difference in our numbers was, as im sure you all know, what happened, happened the first night on june 28th, 1969, at the stonewall inn, gay bars had been raided, ever since there were gay bars, all through the 20th century. Finally, because it was the 1960s, and this was a radical decade of rebellion and protests, finally on this hot night in Greenwich Village at the stallwall inn, the young people who had been stopped by the police and ordered into the patty wagon or said, okay, you can go. You have your i. D. , but dont come back here, they stood around and eventually somebody, we dont know who, threw the first rock and that was the beginning of a riot that lasted for four days. What was important about that riot is the aftermath of the riot. Immediately radical groups began to form, such as the Gay Liberation front and a little later, the gay activist alliance, and because of their tactics, they sort of put gay on the map. As i said before, gay was an underground word that only we knew. Straight people didnt know that word. They made all the difference. We were no longer the love that dared not speak its name because newspapers and magazines and Television Programs began to deal with us. But as i said, the movement was very radical. Many of the lbgt people who joined it, they joined, for instance, the Gay Liberation front were not interested, and the whole time and we needed to reform things all over again and form coalitions with other minorities and not just worry about assimilating and becoming just like everyone else. But as i said, they sort of made it safer for mainstream gay people to come out. People who werent radical because they were in the newspapers all the time and so, these mainstream organizations began to form and groups such as lamda Legal Defense and Education Fund formed in 1973, and they said that they would fight issues, such as the right of young gay boys to be in the boy scouts, really, sort of assimilationist kinds of issues. A group that was the predecessor of the Human Rights Campaign formed in the 1970s. And they began lobbying washington d. C. For our rights. So, i think that there were these two strands going all the time. But what was so important, it seems to me, for the history of how we got our rights, is that radicals began at all. Radicals were the brave ones. They were the ones that said that we have to fight and once they made it a little safer to fight mainstreaming organizations formed and demanded our rights. And of course, as i said earlier, more and more of us came out and that made a huge difference. And the people, and practically every, i dont know anybody w who slowly started to come out in the 1990s according to the gallup poll, 20 of the population said they had a close friend or a relative who was gay or lesbian. It wasnt enough to make a huge difference. In 1990s, dont askdont tell passed and the marriage act passed, but by 2010, 50 of the population said they had a relative or friend that was gay and that could mean that we could get rid of dont askdont tell and president obama noticed there was enough support to pass the marriage and doma. I think my ten minutes are up. Thank you. [applause] i guess we are going to Flash Forward to present and ask jim, how do you feel after the Supreme Court case . Youve called yourself an accidental activist. Whats your life been like since then . My life has been nothing like it was before. I called myself an accidental activist because in my life and in my life with my late husband john, we were together almost 21 years we were never activists. Our brand of activism was signing a check and it took us being put in a situation we could have never dreamt of, could have never imagined for me to discover my internal activist and that situation was, number one, john being diagnosed with als, lou gehrigs disease and anyone who knows anything about that, its a death sentence within two to five years of diagnosis and we were dealing with that, and in 2013, john was completely bedridden in an at home hospice care. And i was his care giver with the exception of hospice comes several times a week. That was what you do for the person you love. We never married and wanted it to be symbolic. We only wanted to marry if it carried legal wait so we went through our life together. As john was dying of als. June 26th of 2013 were watching the news together when the defense of marriage act was struck down by the windsor decision. And in that moment, i just spontaneously asked john to marry me and im like millions of other people in the state of ohio or across the country who could simply go to the local courthouse and get a marriage certificate, or marriage license we couldnt do that. I had to figure out how to get a dying man to another state simply to do something that others take for granted. Through the generosity of family and friends, and we got a private jet and went to maryland. We wanted to live out johns remaining days as husband and husband and the universe seemed to have Something Else in mind. That was on a thursday when we got married and our story came out on saturday, online, our local newspaper did a story and friends were at a party and ran into a local, a friend of theirs, a local civil rights attorney in cincinnati and our story came up in conversation. And al, the attorney said, well, do you think john and jim might be willing to talk to me . And they called us, john and i talked about it and we said, well, we dont really know what he wants to talk about, but sure. And this is where the accidental activist was born. As al came to our home, he pulled out a blank ohio death certificate do you understand that when john dies, his last official record will be wrong and hell die as a Single Person and your name will not be there as surviving spouse. It broke our hearts and made us angry. We knew that ohio wouldnt recognize our marriage, but this piece of paper, this vital piece of information, the last record of the man i loved and our relationship for 21 years would be wrong. Al asked if we want today do something about it and we said sure and that started our battle with the state of ohio which took us to the sixth Circuit Court. We won in federal court and the state of ohio appealed and we ended up in the 6th Circuit Court of appeals along with cases from ohio, kentucky, tennessee and michigan. And even though the case is known v hodges. It wasnt just about me and john, it was about another widower, parents, children. The youngest plaintiff was twoyearold cooper. The parents adopted him in ohio and they wanted a birth certificate. So, to end up in that Supreme Court on june 26th, 2013, i have to tell you, its not something i ever thought would happen to me, not something i could have imagined in my wildest dreams, but to sit in that courtroom and to hear Justice Kennedy read his decision and you know, the initial, oh, we won, followed by, well, this is legal writing so im not really sure. [laughter] and once it became clear that we did actually win, you know, my first thought was, john, i wish you were here, wish you could experience this and know that we won and know that we do exist, and that followed closely by the realization in my life as an out gay man, i felt like an equal american. [applause] and for me, i loved the fact that, you know, this fight, becoming an accidental activist and then a purposeful activist, it all happened just because i loved john. And i wanted to live up to my promises and commitments to him. And if you havent read Justice Kennedys decision, if not else read the last page, its a beautiful piece of writing, and ive had the pleasure and the honor of reading that in a few marriages, and i actually went online and clicked the ordain me button so i could marry people as well. And i hear over and over how people use part of his decision as part of their marriage ceremonies. What a wonderful gift Justice Kennedy gave us. And its simply because i loved john and parents loved their kids and couples loved each other and they simply want to say, we matter, we exist. To go from somebody who wrote a check, and become the name ab the face of the Supreme Court case, its been absolutely amazing and unexpected and unbelievable experience. And when you buy my book, i will tell you, you know, my coauthor debby and i made a decision from the start that the book had to be more than me and john, and i was one of more than 30 plaintiffs so in the book youll learn about outside, and joe and coon cooper, pat and nicole, and two sons, graden and oryan. And federal judges who did sit and talk to us during the writing of this book and you get to learn about an amazing man, one of amazing attorneys on our case, al, who represented us in cincinnati, this incredible, brilliant man who dedicated his life to civil rights and that experience changed who i am as a person and i cant turn my back, and ive become too much of a part of it and i understood the value and the joy of being something bigger than i am. So, thats how my life has changed and i give john credit. He made me a better man in so many ways, he gave me something so worth fighting for. [applaus [applause] amy, i know you spent a long time writing this book, about four years, as i understand. Could you tell me something about the process of how you got to know the family and then how you saw them evolve . Sure. First of all, i want to say its an honor to be on this panel about lillian and jim. And thank you all for coming, its an incredible audience. The story of becoming nicole really fell in my lap and its been a privilege to write that book, but when the story did fall in my lap five years ago, that was at a time in the beginning of 2012 when i actually said to my agent, this is a fascinating story about identical twin boys, one of whom w