Interview with James "Jim" Steakley

Steakley: Another phone call's going to come.

Tortorice: I know. Well, we can turn it off if a phone call comes in. And so, I'm here in Madison, Wisconsin, with emeritus professor James Steakley. And it is June eleventh--

Steakley: July eleventh.

Tortorice: (laughs) I'm sorry. We already are making mistakes. July 11, 2019. And this interview is an addendum to an extensive interview that Jim did right after he retired from UW in 2011. That interview, that's number 1088, can be found in the UW Archives Oral History Project, their digital archive. Well, thank you, Jim, for doing this interview at a busy time. And I know your time here in Madison is limited and quite occupied. So, in reading over the transcript, or not transcript, but summary of your interview, it's obvious that you covered a great deal of material in your initial, in your original interview that we don't need to cover again. So I recommend that anyone who's interested in Jim's career, life and career, make sure to make use of both resources. But so before we talk about you and George Mosse, I thought it would be good to just go back a bit and discuss your engagement with Germany. In particular with the gay liberation movement there. So, it seems to me that you were really in the 00:02:00center of what was going on in those years. That you were a figure of importance and relevance to this nascent movement. And at a time of social ferment and change in Germany, of course. And that your book, really which is in the English title, Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany, is a key text in documenting the earlier movement for gay rights in Germany. So, this came out of what I would assume was an interest that was piqued both by reaction to your family, to your understanding of your identity, your engagement in Germany and your, well, realization of the need for this documentation. So, tell me a bit more about how that came about, how you decided to become a scholar of this movement that you had already started to engage with.

Steakley: It really came out of a PhD dissertation project. Because when I went 00:04:00to Berlin in '71, '72, I had already gotten very involved in the gay movement in the States, at Cornell University. I was in the Student Homophile League when I went to Cornell. Which we changed the name to Gay Liberation Front. That was '69. And with the other members of that organization, the Gay Liberation Front at Cornell, we put out a little newspaper, which they have in the archives there. Brenda Marston has the human sexuality archives at Cornell. And with Bob Roth, who was the president of the Gay Liberation Front, we went down to the first, I want to say Stonewall March at Christopher Street. They marched in the summer of '69.

Tortorice: So this didn't come out of, this was something that your initial engagement with gay rights in Germany stimulated what you decided to focus on as a scholar and graduate student.

Steakley: Yeah.

Tortorice: You connected the two.

Steakley: Yeah. I was already, you know, a gay activist, and that was a really big part of my identity. I'd already as an undergraduate got involved with Mattachine. And so then I kept going with the Gay Liberation Front at Cornell. And when I first spent a year in Germany, '68-'69, there was no gay movement yet there. It didn't exist. That was the year homosexuality was decriminalized in Germany. First in East Germany in '68, and then in West Germany in '69. So that was what was going on, movement from the top. But, you know. But when I went to Germany for a school year for the second time, '71-'72, that is exactly when the gay movement in Germany kicked off. The Rosa von Praunheim film, It's Not the Homosexual Who's Perverse, But the Situation He Lives In, that's often regarded as kind of the clarion call which got the German gay movement going, the gay liberation movement. And he was influenced by the developments in the United States. So I arrived right there, just in time when the gay movement was getting going, and was very engaged with the gay movement there. And I arrived initially with the idea in '71-'72 that I would conduct research 00:06:00for a PhD dissertation on Goethe, of all things.

Tortorice: Yes.

Steakley: That's a very conservative topic. But I wanted to work on Goethe's small plays. And when I arrived in Germany that year, I went to the library and found that someone had just completed a PhD dissertation on the very topic that I wanted to do. So I kind of abandoned that and cast about, what can I do now? And I got really bold and decided that I would work on German gay literature. And it was kind of a coincidence that when I was there that year, '71-'72, involved with the Berlin gay movement, it was Homosexual Action West Berlin was the name of the group, which was a very, let's face it, Marxist group. A lot of the gay Marxists that I knew were, you know, also university students. The whole problem with the group was that it was too student-y and not enough people who weren't students.

Tortorice: So you had Rosa von Praunheim, who was still involved with the gay museum in Berlin. And then there was Manfred Herzer and there was Egmont Fassbender. These all became lifelong friends.

Steakley: Right. Right.

Tortorice: And who are some of the other names?

Steakley: Friedhelm Krey, who became my boyfriend that year and continued to be my boyfriend through '75, '76, I think. And Wilfried Eissler, who now lives in Stuttgart, who did a book about gays in the Communist Party in the Weimar Republic. And gays in the left wing party, social Democrats and Communists in the Weimar Republic. Basically all the members of the gay movement in West Berlin who went on to found the gay museum. For example, Manfred Baumgardt. And I knew Hans Gunther Klein, a librarian. Very important. All of these guys. And I was a member of, the group might have had a membership of about a hundred. And we broke into groups of about ten to connect with each other. And my particular little group, those were some of the key guys. Manfred Herzer and Friedhelm Krey.

Tortorice: So I think the interesting thing, or one aspect of this that I think is quite unique, is how many of you then went on to be significant scholars of this history and of gay, what we would call gay studies at one point--

Steakley: Yeah. Yeah.

Tortorice: --God knows what we call it now. But I think that's really quite amazing. And that you all made significant contributions that also, that it was international. It was not only in Germany but also in the US.

Steakley: Well, you know, I think a key reason for that is, I would cite two reasons. First of all, there was just a treasure trove of material there waiting to be discovered, which people hadn't known about. And it had sort of been buried in the post-World War Two silence about everything. And you know, the 00:10:00vicissitudes of German history. And just in the way that, for example, the Holocaust was treated differently in the United States in the 1950s and in the 1990s. You know, there was this silence about things. Hannah Arendt says people didn't want to talk about the past in the Fifties. There was a great cover-up of things.

Tortorice: Yes. Well, and it was only twenty years since the end of the war, right?

Steakley: People didn't know that gays had been in concentration camps. It was not talked about. It was simply; it never came up. It was unknown. And so there was a treasure trove of material there waiting to be discovered. And by the time we got going on it, in some ways it was already getting to be a little bit late. Because a lot of the people who'd been in camps were already dying of old age and everything else. So ultimately, very few survivors ever got interviewed. You know, pink triangle survivors. That's one aspect. There was a treasure trove of material waiting to be discovered. And once people started looking for it, there was just this abundance. Like it opened up. It was a gold mine.

Secondly, and this had to do with my studies at the university and the other people who were in the gay movement tended to be also students at the Freie University of West Berlin, and tended to be Marxist-oriented and taking courses that were taught, they sought out the left-wing professors. And I remember I was very influenced by attending a course by Professor Gareth Matenklott, now deceased, who later became a dean at the Free University of Berlin as German comp lit, and later dean. Very important guy. And he wrote, he was known at that time as the author of a book on Aubrey Beardsley and the German gay poet, Stefan George. A very gay book of literary studies.

So I took a course with him. And it was team taught with Klaus Scherpe, who later became a very close friend of various Madisonians, such as Jost Hermand and George Mosse. And Klaus (Scherpe, straight, and Gert Mattenklott, was bisexual, married to a woman, but a guy who went to the gay bathhouses where I, you know, ran into him. He taught us, they taught us, the Marxist literature professors, I remember this maxim hit me really hard at the time. Everyone said, Karl Marx said, [German] 12:59 "Our first area of study is history." And the whole way that they approached the study of literary text was to see the context, see the big context.

So for me, that meant something like if you're going to study gay literature as your dissertation topic, like "Death in Venice," that means you have to understand the historical situation of gay people in the year 1913, when the thing was written. And you have to get the big picture. And once you begin to poke into that, you find out that Thomas Mann signed a petition against the gay law. Knew about Magnus Hirschfeld and commented on him. Didn't like him. Thought he was unsympathetic. Unsimpatico, you know. And like was totally aware of what was going on with the gay movement at that time.

And so, you know, like once you begin to go into it, I went to the library. There were books and books and books already at the time Magnus Hirschfeld had written, say, in 1910. There's an explosion of gay publications 00:14:00going on. It went from zero to a hundred miles an hour in a matter of a couple of decades in Germany. All these books, all these materials in the library. And the most mind-boggling thing was, Hirschfeld put out this journal from 1898 to 1923 when the inflation killed it; it had a twenty-five year span. The yearbook of his organization. And you know, sometimes it was a slim volume only having 250 pages. But other times, it was a thousand pages. So when you look at it in the library, this yearbook has a stretch like four feet wide, you know what I mean?

So it was only in one library in West Berlin. It was in the medical library. So I went to the library and started flipping through it. And in each year of the yearbook, it says, "Here's the year's gay events. This is what our organization has done." Here's a chronicle of what's happened in this year for gay people with excerpts from newspaper article. You know, like fifty pages in each year. So I like Xeroxed that. And I like made this discovery virtually in the last month that I was there for a year in Berlin on a scholarship. I had to return to Cornell. And I brought back this stack of Xeroxes--which I still have, they're getting paler and paler with time--you know, I brought back a stack like two feet high of photocopies in my suitcase. And it's like on the basis of that that I began to work on this gay dissertation topic.

Incidentally, that was when I had to change dissertation directors from the Goethe guy, [unclear] 15:53 closeted bisexual, gay, married Eric Blackhall. He's the one who said, he was brought from England but apparently was quite cranky 00:16:00with the other faculty members. And they said to him, "You are such a prima donna!"

And he said, "I did not come to Cornell to sing in the chorus." (laughter)

Tortorice: I'd say he's probably had that line in his suitcase.

Steakley: Yeah. Yeah. So I switched from him, the Goethe guy, to Sander Gilman to do the gay dissertation topic.

Tortorice: That's G-i-l-m-a-n, Sander Gilman.

Steakley: Read the Wikipedia article.

Tortorice: Yes. So that's so interesting, because Mattenklott and Scherpe and of course Sander, these are three people that George Mosse knew well. And I recall that the last time I was in Berlin with George, he met with Mattenklott and with Scherpe. So did you, were you involved in introducing him to that scene? I bet you were.

Steakley: Yes. Yes. Yes. I think he met Mattenklott for the first time to shake hands and talk to him at the Amsterdam conference "Among Men and Among Women." I can't quite recover the date.

Tortorice: Nineteen eighty-two, I think it was.

Steakley: Somebody like that. So, it might have been a few years later. I'm not sure. But like I just uploaded to Wikimedia within the past month a picture of George together with Gert Mattenklott--

Tortorice: Really?

Steakley: -- talking in Berlin on the Kurfurstendam] (17:31) sitting at a café. It's not a very good photo. But it's good enough that I uploaded it to Wikipedia. So you can see that if you look at the George Mosse page in Wikipedia.

Tortorice: Okay. I will let them know.

Steakley: So, yeah, he got to know him through that conference in Amsterdam, and then continued from there. Because at that time, Mattenklott was making a big shift in his own area of research and getting more interested in German Jewish history.

Tortorice: Oh, okay.

Steakley: He got very interested in Ratheneau now and--

Tortorice: Who George's family knew very well.

Steakley: So I got involved in this because the materials that I extracted from the medical library there and brought back to the States to work on this gay dissertation topic. And you know, Sander said, "Okay, you can do it. But you have to realize you're going to face a lot of discrimination if you do that." And I also got, well--

Tortorice: Well, we'll talk about that also, you know, as when you came to UW. I wanted to ask you, though, so you found all this material, this kind of blossoming of gay culture, gay rights. And then there was of course this huge reaction. And that blossoming--

Steakley: You mean the Nazi period.

Tortorice: Yes. The reaction, in some ways, was--

Steakley: The backlash.

Tortorice: The backlash. And so that all went away. There was intense, a period of intense persecution, really, throughout the western world. And you experienced that. Because if you think of, you came from a military background and in your original interview certainly the military aspect of your own background, your family history. Your father doesn't come across as a terribly sympathetic or open-minded person. (laughs) So did you, this in a sense was part of a personal liberation, this kind of search for your own identity. But also 00:20:00connecting it to a larger issue at a time of what was really, I suppose you could say the tail end of a period of intense persecution and repression of homosexuality, which was, which continued after the war. And affected you. So you were right in the middle of this reaction to that initial period. Would you say that was the case, in a way?

Steakley: Yeah. Yeah. Because, you know, I think everyone knows that the Cold War period was marked by a McCarthyite homophobia very strongly. And you know, when I went to college at the University of Chicago, I somehow quickly became aware of the fact that Illinois was the only one of the fifty states that had decriminalized homosexuality. The other forty-nine, it was still illegal.

Tortorice: And that made a difference for you to go there.

Steakley: Here comes a call. You may want to pause.

Tortorice: Okay. Let me turn that off. We're going to pause for--

Tortorice: Jim had a phone call, so we had a little break. But we were talking about the repression that occurred in the twentieth century, mid-twentieth century, which brings up Mosse's work. So he viewed this in simplistic terms, he ties his analysis of gender essentially to nationalists. And in the case of the centrality of homosexuality, well, it could be, in simplistic terms again, the need for cannon fodder in mass mobilized war, mass mobilized politics and 00:22:00culture. So that you had to create both the counter type and then the military man. So it kind of ties in closely with his analysis of what was happening in the twentieth century and the fact that this was not just a reaction in Germany. It was a reaction throughout Europe and the US. Well, really, throughout the world through colonialism and other forces. But, do you agree with that analysis, that very simplistic analysis of the German, of George's take on all of this?

Steakley: Oh, yeah, I think that, yeah, sure. I think that like the othering of the homosexual is a form of disciplining of the heterosexuals to get them into this authoritarian mindset to go ahead and be cannon fodder. Yeah. You know, George was, on the one hand, a historian. But also interested in a lot of contemporary history, which means right now. And he was interested in politics today.

Tortorice: Yes, exactly.

Steakley: And taking a historical approach to politics today.

Tortorice: Yeah. I mean, I think this is an exaggeration, but I would say in a way, George wasn't that interested in the past in and of itself, which he called antiquarianism. He was interested in how history lives now.

Steakley: I agree.

Tortorice: And that it is most effective in its teaching and its transmission, really.

Steakley: Right. Yeah.

Tortorice: But, so I would, my assumption is that you had a major effect on moving George in this direction of more gendered history.

Steakley: Yeah.

Tortorice: Can you explain that a little bit? So you came to Madison in '77. And the first, one of the first openly gay faculty members hired at American University, certainly--

Steakley: I think the first.

Tortorice: The first. Because Evie Beck was somewhat of your mentor. But she was married at that time.

Steakley: To Anatole, yeah. You know, she came out after she was already promoted to tenure. And there was actually an event on campus, kind of a gay event on campus where she was on a panel in front. And the question was posed, this must have been about 1980. I came here in '77. It must have been about '79, '80. And she said that she would advise gay graduate students who were on the job market and whatnot to not be out during their job interview. And get the job and get your foot in the door and get established and then later you could come out. So she was urging in a way caution and closeting. I wonder whether she would still subscribe to that. You know, given the situation in the US at that time, it was quite sensible. But I was an exception. Because I got hired, I think it because, you know, the German department was so liberal.

Tortorice: Well, yes. I may have some insight into that, too. Well, as you know, 00:26:00George left funds for LGBT history in his estate, $500,000. Which we then, initially you had written a report saying it should go towards hiring a faculty member. In the end, we ended up using it for the first, probably the first LGBT history graduate fellowship. And so we've had a number of students that have come through the fellowship program. And so that question of whether they should, well, emphasize this or not, is somewhat moot. And yet on the other hand, I think it does have an effect. Because you have to have a broad approach to history now. You can't be so segmented. Because everyone's looking for someone that can teach practically everything, you know. So it's kind of, we're back to square one, in a sense.

But when you were hired, I think they were looking for someone like you. Because and I think it was to an extent and advantage. Because Sander, your advisor, was on the forefront of this history. You were one of his first students, I would assume, because I don't think he's that much older--

Steakley: He's eighteen months older than me. Or fourteen months.

Tortorice: But you know, I think in the end, I think George had something to do with this, too.

Steakley: Okay.

Tortorice: So they were looking, I think they were looking for, because you know, you did have Evie Beck. You did have this upsurge of interest in this 00:28:00subject. And George was gay.

Steakley: Yeah.

Tortorice: And he had influence in the department.

Steakley: Yeah.

Tortorice: I bet Jost was involved in that. I mean, I have no evidence, but I think it helped in your case.

Steakley: Yeah. I think that the people who strongly backed me in the department were Jost, I mean, at the time I was hired, Klaus Berghahn, David Bathrick and I think Walters Nollendorf must have strongly been in my favor. And you know, Evie apologized and said that she had voted for the other candidate, my rival, Dorothy Rosenberg. She said she was torn between whether to support a gay person, since she was a lesbian, or whether to support the woman candidate. And she finally came down in favor of voting, reluctantly, for the woman candidate, Dorothy Rosenberg. But like I didn't, you know, think ill of her on account of that. I could well understand the issues that she was--

She was one of the organizers of that group called Women in German. And I actually joined the organization and became, for a time, the treasurer, during my first years here. But they had the annual meetings of women in German, where about thirty to forty to fifty professors of German from around the country would get together in different campuses here and there around the country. And I said I'd never attend a meeting of Women in German because I think it should be women's space, you know what I mean? (Tortorice laughs) Let women have their space--

Tortorice: Yes, right.

Steakley: --because it will change the chemistry of the thing if there's a man around. That was the time of the women's music festival in Michigan, and the question of whether men should be there and whether women could even bring their boy children. You know what I mean? Is women's space violated by having four-year-old boys there?

Tortorice: All their attention would be focused on the four-year-old boys.

Steakley: Yeah, well, don't want to have penises around, period.

Tortorice: Well, indeed.

Steakley: So, well, I think that George was very involved with my hire. Because 00:30:00for me, it came as a complete surprise. When I was here for the job interview, I only got introduced to, say, members of the German department and the kind of quick meeting that has to take place with the dean. Which was the associate dean for the humanities was Mulvihill, that closet case.

Tortorice: God, he was notorious!

Steakley: Notorious closet case.

Tortorice: Oh, dear, we better be careful.

Steakley: Mulvihill, he interviewed me about, during the interview, which only lasted about five minutes, he brought up Anita Bryant, the pie-throwing thing. It had just happened in the preceding weeks there at the time. And then of course about a one-minute meeting with Dean David Cronon. So they signed off on this hiring of this gay person who had a book out, a publication already. The articles. They thought it was cool. And enough people in the German department thought it was cool. It was a mixed bag in the German department, but enough thought it was cool.

And when I came to campus, I had never, you know, during the interview process, met George Mosse. But boom, as soon as I arrived here in town, he called me up. He somehow got my phone number through the German department. He called me up and said, "Oh, we've got to get together. I'm so glad you're here," and so on. And so, the word was out.

Tortorice: Yes. Oh, yes.

Steakley: The grapevine was working.

Tortorice: And in those years, he had a huge influence in the German department, both because he was close friends with that whole circle, but he was involved in the German Workshop, in training a lot of the students that he worked--

Steakley: Absolutely.

Tortorice: --closely with Jost--

Steakley: German department graduate students would typically take his courses. Yeah.

Tortorice: So in some ways, he was an honorary member of the department, it seems to me.

Steakley: He absolutely was. He absolutely was. He liked that. He wanted to cultivate that connection very much.

Tortorice: He did.

Steakley: So as soon as I met him, you know, he was well aware of what I had 00:32:00published, it was gay work and everything. And I tried to think about this. I think that prior to coming to Madison, I had read his, you know, help me with the title. The one that has Hitler on the cover.

Tortorice: Oh, The Crisis of German Ideology. So you knew about his work, to some extent?

Steakley: Yeah, I think I'd read, I think I'd read The Crisis.

Tortorice: And Sander Gilman must have known George, to some--

Steakley: I have about three copies of it. And one of them is underlined. And I think those underlines were done when I was a graduate student at Cornell. So, yeah. I was aware of George Mosse here and his work. And I also was alert enough to pick up, even when I first read it, to kind of read between the lines. It seemed to me that the author was gay. Because, you know, there was enough in there about homoerotic, blah, you know, it's all kind of hinted at, adumbrated, suggestive. It kind of sniffs around the edges and I think the word "homoerotic" is in the book. I'm not entirely sure. You know, it's present there. For that kind of thing to even be mentioned is--

Tortorice: In those years.

Steakley: In those years.

Tortorice: And of course, even in his courses in those years, he always brought up this homoerotic culture, homosocial culture. I mean, it was always there. And I think at Wisconsin in those years, this was probably very unique.

Steakley: Yeah.

Tortorice: So I think that, you know, we don't have, I mean, we can't ask George. But I would think that he knew of your work, he knew, so he was very pleased when you were hired, I would imagine.

Steakley: Yeah. He definitely was. And I can no longer really mentally reconstruct very much about how our friendship, what moments in it were in sequence. But you know, I would go visit him in his place--

Tortorice: His house?

Steakley: --with some frequency. Yeah.

Tortorice: Yes. I remember you and George when I, well, you were the one that introduced me to George, which was great, a wonderful thing.

Steakley: Well, he would invite me out to dinner, which I was very glad to do. He always paid.

Tortorice: Yes, he was very generous.

Steakley: Being an impoverished assistant professor and initially a lecturer, I was happy to have him pay for it. You know, if we would go out to these steakhouses or whatever. And you know, talk about the German department and German studies and gay studies, you know.

Tortorice: He loved gossip, of course, about the department.

Steakley: Sure.

Tortorice: And I know that you and me, we both have a wonderful appreciation of verbal excesses, perhaps. (laughs) But you know, I think that he always wanted to know what was going on in the German department with the students and in your scholarship with other people in your field.

Steakley: And I think also I was able to tell him stuff about what was going on with the gay movement here in Madison.

Tortorice: Yes. Yes.

Steakley: You know, I remember, of course a person who was always a topic of conversation was Harvey Goldberg, who was interviewed like for that TV gay thing.

Tortorice: Oh, yes.

Steakley: Very soon after I arrived here. Maybe my first year.

Tortorice: Yes, '77.

Steakley: Something that George didn't do at that time, you know?

Tortorice: That's right. Yes, it's true.

Steakley: So it was like Harvey was out there in a way that George wasn't yet.

Tortorice: That's right, in '77 or something.

Steakley: And you know, I was living with Ron McCrea, who was editor of the Press Connection at the time, and that big strike against the Capital Times.

Tortorice: Yes. And he did the interview with Harvey, I believe, on this show, right?

Steakley: Yeah, yeah, I think so. So I knew Ron. And then I was with Jake Stockinger, who was also, already had published on gay studies, you know? He did the thing on masks, homosexual masks.

Tortorice: Well, Stambolian, George Stambolian. Did you know him, also, somewhat?

Steakley: Yes. I knew him through, not the Madison connection. I only figured that out later, I think. I knew him through our, I was heavily involved in the MLA gay section, the gay caucus, which got going at about this time. And the big director, the biggest, most important person, was Michael Lynch, in Toronto, who died of AIDS a few years later. And also heavily involved, George Stambolian, who died of AIDS a few years later. And so, you know, okay, I arrived here in '77. And you know what, the kickoff of AIDS is '81. So that was a big, it was a huge thing. I was already involved with the MLA gay caucus. And you know, the American Historical Association created a gay committee.

Tortorice: Yes. Mm hmm.

Steakley: I am not 100 percent sure of what the founding year of it was. I have all their newsletters. And their newsletters are all in Memorial Library. So the date of that is easy to see when the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History got going in the AHA. I was involved in that from day one.

Tortorice: Well I know George always appreciated both your role in networking with gay scholarship and also the fact that you assisted so many people in developing their work, that you were a great resource for all of these people around the country. And then he, that he benefited from that, because you told him about specific work, and individuals, and would comment on whether you thought they were, this was worthwhile work, or was not. And you know, he really appreciated that, because you were his kind of source. And then you introduced him to these fellows, such as Gert Hekma, and Harry Oosterhuis and Theo van der Meer and that group of young gay scholars.

Steakley: The Amsterdam, the Amsterdam guys. And Rüdiger Lautmann, I got connected with, Rüdiger Lautmann was kind of at the epicenter of gay studies at the German universities at that time.

Tortorice: Oh, interesting.

Steakley: So, yeah. That was all, those were all connections. And at that time, people did not have email. I believe I started doing email in '90, '91. So everything was letters. And I have all those letters. It's like there was networking among gay scholars, and it was all done in the form of letters.

Tortorice: Well, I hope that you will donate those to the university.

Steakley: [unclear]

Tortorice: Because I looked at your archive here at the university, and it's all about committees you were on. It's very boring.

Steakley: It's all official stuff. Yeah, it's very boring. Yeah.

Tortorice: But I think all of that other stuff needs to be preserved.

Steakley: You're right. I have all these letters from Jonathan Katz or Richard Plant or whatever, you know.

Tortorice: We really do need to make sure--

Steakley: Those two individuals that I mentioned, Katz and Plant, donated their stuff to the New York Public Library. So if you look online, Jonathan Katz correspondence, New York Public Library, includes letters with, boom, James Steakley. Same thing with the Richard Plant papers at the New York Public Library. And I've got the ones they sent to me.

Tortorice: It's good that they be together, in a sense.

Steakley: So you know, it's kind of a match.

Tortorice: Yes. Yes. So you're now in Madison. We already talked about, well, we didn't mention Elaine Marks, but she was kind of the force in the--

Steakley: Oh my gosh.

Tortorice: --in the French department--

Steakley: Of course.

Tortorice: --who had been the mentor and advisor for George Stambolian and Jacob 00:40:00Stockinger and that group that in a sense preceded your arrival and George's interest in this subject.

Steakley: That's right.

Tortorice: So she was already active.

Steakley: And I kept hearing about this woman, Germaine Brée, whom I think I may have never even met once. But she had been kind of a key figure, lesbian figure, here in the French Dept.

Tortorice: Yes. She knew George very well. And I met her. Because I met her at the Edgewater when I worked there. She used to come in there practically every week.

Steakley: Oh, for heaven's sake. Oh, neat.

Tortorice: And be treated as a princess. You know, David Martineau would cook things specially for her. And she was the grand dame who would come in, you know. Yeah. So I met her a few times. And then I saw her at a party once at Frank Horlbeck's house, of all people, with George.

Steakley: Oh, yeah.

Tortorice: So they were old friends. And I remember George mentioning that when they were on the divisional committee, they were tough as nails. (laughs) They wouldn't let anybody through.

Steakley: I remember. George was, you know, tough as nails.

Tortorice: He was.

Steakley: And there was a graduate student in the German department named Becky Bruley. Or, no, was she a graduate student in the history department who took German courses? She's now a professor. So it would be easy to look up Rebecca Bruley. I don't know if she's a historian or a German professor. I think she's a historian. The point is, what I want to say is, George flunked her prelims. (laughs)

Tortorice: Oh, dear.

Steakley: It's like, that doesn't happen very often. Or at least in the German department. I think in my whole career here, we flunked one person, I believe, in thirty-five years. We had about five prelims per year. So we're looking at 150 people, one person flunked. You know.

Tortorice: Good lord.

Steakley: So I could see it coming, in that case. But this Becky Bruley, George 00:42:00didn't hesitate to give her an F, you know what I mean?

Tortorice: Good heavens.

Steakley: Or a failing thing. He was tough!

Tortorice: George was very tough. And you know, this was because for him, of course, history was a passion, but also given his own experiences and those of his family, he thought that this was the closest we could get to any kind of bright future is to, I mean, he really did believe that history was the only route to understanding the future direction of society. I mean, what he once said was the closest to truth that we could get. So for him, like the historian, this was a crucial role that you played. But I think this brings up this issue with George and women. Which is something that he's accused of being very sexist towards women students.

Steakley: Oh, I didn't know that.

Tortorice: Well, yes. And probably--

Steakley: Becky Bruley [unclear]

Tortorice: Yes, as a case in point. Although he flunked plenty of men, too.

Steakley: But he had women students that were his protégée, didn't he?

Tortorice: Yes, he did.

Steakley: He mentored some.

Tortorice: Yeah, I think it's, you know what I think it comes from is that this German toughness, and Gerda had the same thing, Gerda Lerner, the professor of women's history at UW. And I think she would have women running out of her seminars crying, too. (laughs) Because Linda Gordon said they would come crying into Linda's office. Because these were people who, they had this kind of--well, I guess you could even call it elitist idea about education. It's an immersion. And the only way to get you to think is to really challenge you. Fundamentally. And I think that this was not a style of teaching that resonated well with some people. And in particular, women, I shouldn't say that as a blanket, because of course there were some women that really flourished under George's and Gerda's direction. But I think it was not necessarily something that they thrived in this atmosphere. I think partially George lived in a kind of Mannerbund until he came to, most of his schooling was all male schooling. And he went to elite schools. And he stopped taking graduate students in '72, which is a long time, you know. It was a different time. But then also--

Steakley: Was Michael Berkowitz one of his students?

Tortorice: He was the last one. He kind of snuck in. Yeah. At the end.

Steakley: Maybe it was his topic that appealed to George so much, Michael's.

Tortorice: Yes. He kind of put a lot of pressure on George, also. Because that was after, it was actually Beth Irwin Lewis that really was the one that did dissertation on that whole visual aspect of George's work.

Steakley: Yes.

Tortorice: That really was a part of his work that isn't as well explored. But then I think also he had a couple of women early in his career who he said were his best students ever. And he even went out of his way to get them positions. And then they both didn't take the positions because they had to take care of 00:46:00their mothers or family obligations and this kind of thing. So I think this was a disappointment to him. Not to justify his somewhat abrasive approach when it came to women graduate students. Because I think there was something there. On the other hand--

Steakley: You are teaching me so much more about this than I knew before. Is this a topic that you've been discussing in Berlin?

Tortorice: Yes. Well, I've been discussing it over the years with people who would come up to me and say, "Well, George was very rude to graduate students, to females. And he didn't have any graduate students who were women." Well, he did. He had six. Between UW and the Hebrew University. And of course, he was a great mentor to many young historians, such as Isabelle Hull and Joanna Bourke and Laura Engelstein.

Steakley: You did the bibliography of his works. Does it include a list of his dissertators?

Tortorice: No. No.

Steakley: Is there a list somewhere?

Tortorice: There is a list. Yeah.

Steakley: Where is that?

Tortorice: Well, we have it at the Mosse Program.

Steakley: It ought to be published or something. I would love to see the list. You know, because in Jost's case there's a list of his dissertators.

Tortorice: Really? I think that's a really great idea. And their topics.

Steakley: Yes. It gives the title of their dissertation.

Tortorice: Yeah. We have a list.

Steakley: It should be put online, please.

Tortorice: Okay. We'll see if we can do that. Do you recall whether George was involved with the founding of women's studies here? I recall that Elaine Marks asked him to participate in a seminar or something, and he gave a paper on women's history, that he was brought in to kind of help make the case for women's studies.

Steakley: I do not know.

Tortorice: He certainly didn't object to it. He thought it was very important. He and Gerda, of course, became very good friends in their later years.

Steakley: Well, I think, that, I don't know about that. And the founding of the women's studies department. I actually don't know the date that the women's studies department was founded here. Is it the case that it didn't exist when I arrived on campus and got established very shortly after I arrived here? Because I remember how Biddy Martin was so involved with it. She was a graduate student during my first years here. She was a teacher of Women's Studies 101 and whatnot. So it must have existed as a course teaching unit, whether it was a department or a program at that time.

Tortorice: She would be someone that would know. Probably she'd be the person--and she's, of course, a great fan of George's. But anyway.

Steakley: Hmm. No, I don't know whether he was involved in the founding of the women's studies department.

Tortorice: Okay. Well it must have been very challenging and taken a certain amount of courage to come to Madison and to be under pressure, you know, in terms of tenure. But also to be an open gay man on the faculty. Did you get much opposition? Did you feel challenge by--

Steakley: Yeah, because while I had my backers in the German department, I've already named their names, Berghahn, Hermand, Bathrick primarily Beck, that wing of the German department, there was this other wing that was sort of on the way out due to age and retirement approaching that was phobic. And that included in particular, I think I talked about this in the other interview with Troy, Professor Smoky Seifert, the linguist, who was kind of Christian, opposed it. Professor Ian [Lorim?], the one who said about how, "We don't want one of 00:50:00those," with a flipped wrist. You know, "We don't want one of those flip wrists at the executive committee meeting." (Tortorice laughs) I heard this from Klaus Berghahn because he's a great gossip. (Tortorice laughs) All confidential details.

Then I was subject, as junior people are, to annual review. And Klaus would come and tell me who had said what, exactly each year.

Tortorice: Oh, gosh! (laughs) Klaus!

Steakley: And so there were people who were out to get me. You know, another one who was ambiguous was Frank Gentry, who went warm and cold on me, you know. Hot and cold. Sometimes in favor. Sometimes Catholic nasty. And another one who was strange was Charlotte Broncaforte, which was a hot and cold thing. Sometimes nice and sometimes Catholic nasty about it.

Tortorice: She was kind of that way, though, as a person. I got that feeling.

Steakley: Well, she was, one thing, which I got from Klaus Berghahn and heard about her, was that she criticized me for, when it was a contract renewal thing when I was very junior, annual thing. She said she had overheard me saying to a student in the corridors of Van Hise, standing in front of the elevator, that I liked the shirt he was wearing. I thought he was wearing an attractive shirt. And when this was reported to me by Berghahn, I thought that is so preposterous. That is so fucked up on her part. But, this year, reading Facebook entries by friends of mine on Facebook who are teachers at other colleges, one woman wrote about, a woman I respect very much who teaches in Ann Arbor, Michigan, wrote about the problem of a colleague commenting to a student about the clothes the student was wearing. And said it's entirely inappropriate for a professor ever to comment on the clothes which a student is wearing. You are not that person's mother, you know, so back off. And a lot of people chimed in from colleges across the country, saying yes, exactly. Professors should never comment on what a student is wearing. So this has made me revisit that scenario.

Tortorice: Mentally what, mm hmm--

Steakley: That scenario from the early 1980s. Maybe Charlotte was right. Maybe it was a form of sexual aggression to comment--

Tortorice: Well, it could be a form of proper behavior that she had learned in Germany or as, you know, coming from a kind of bourgeois milieu that you didn't comment on other people's clothes. I don't know.

Steakley: It certainly depends on which student I was talking to. Because I was out to virtually everybody. And there were certain gay graduate students in the German department, like Jim Jones and Matt Gilbert.

Tortorice: Oh, yes.

Steakley: If I complimented them on their clothes, it was different from, you know, going after some straight person. But then again, maybe not. Maybe precisely going after a gay guy for wearing a nice shirt and commenting on his clothes is a way of buttering him up to get him in bed. I'm not sure. You know, it's a very fraught political issue.

Tortorice: Yeah. And it's a different issue now, certainly. Everything is much more politicized. Oh, yeah.

Steakley: The boundaries are more, you know, you have to, I was always told if you had students in for your office hours, keep the door open.

Tortorice: Oh, yes. For sure.

Steakley: I was aware of that.

Tortorice: So can I get back to, like before we talk about your students--

Steakley: One more thing I want to say about George. Like I said I couldn't remember things that happened very well, I couldn't reconstruct it mentally, what exactly happened. But of course I did take that trip with him to Israel.

Tortorice: Oh, yes. Right.

Steakley: And I'm a little vague on what year that was in exactly. I could look it up and tell you. But we spent two weeks over there, you know, at David Berkhoff's in Jerusalem and then we went to Tel Aviv and I met those two guys who were florists, Yoshe and I can't, I can't temporarily remember the name of the other guy, that got introduced by him. Yeah, that was another, you know, moment that cemented us and brought us more together, traveling around together for part of the time during the two weeks. Not the whole time. But being there, because of his Israel connection. So I liked that a lot.

Tortorice: And that's a question that I don't think has ever been looked at was George's role in gay Israel. He knew a lot of those people that were involved in gay rights in Israel and that movement. And was involved in that circle in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and would tell me stories about all of his experiences there. So that's another part of his life. Because, of course, his sexual life was really lived outside of Madison for most of his life. In Europe and Israel.

Steakley: Yeah, yeah, that's right. New York.

Tortorice: Yes. Yes. For good reason, of course. Because he would have been fired if, you know, anything happened here. So in terms of like your relationship with George, did you talk to him about those issues of what it was like to be a closeted gay scholar professor and, you know, coming to America as 00:56:00an exiled Jewish gay, being fingered by the House Un-American Activities Committee. You know, all of that period of deep repression that was still in place during most of his career.

Steakley: Well, I talked to him about it, but I didn't probe very much. Because I felt like I didn't want to violate his boundaries of privacy. And it would have been wonderful to interview him the way you're interviewing me now, to really get him to talk in detail and at length about all these things. But I never grilled him or interviewed him. Instead, it was more over the course of our friendship over the years. From time to time, he would say something that was news to me about his history, you know, his sexual past and his friendships in Europe and in New York and so on and so forth. And as far as the professional part of it, it was sort of totally obvious to me that everybody in his generation had to be in the closet. So I didn't get any particulars. For instance, I never found out whether he had any particular enemies or allies during the time when he was trying to negotiate this being a single man at Iowa or something like that. It would be very interesting to know, you know, how it went in Iowa. There must have been a certain in crowd, but I don't know about it.

Tortorice: Yes. And also his time at Cambridge. Because, for example, Eric Hobsbawm was a student at the same time that George was there. George was involved in left wing issues. I would assume Hobsbawm was, too. And that was a very important period, right before the war and a lot of political unrest. So we 00:58:00don't really know much about what George was up to in Cambridge, either. I mean, there is a lot more to explore his career.

Steakley: Yeah. I think he would have been willing to talk about it. But I just never--

Tortorice: I know. I didn't, either.

Steakley: --wanted to push. I didn't want to push his buttons. I was afraid of violating his space. And I felt honored when he shared with me those kind of intimate, the few intimate details that he did.

Tortorice: Yes. It's true.

Steakley: You know, but like he didn't reveal everything. He was discreet, too.

Tortorice: He was very discreet, yeah.

Steakley: You've told me things about George and others that I never heard from George. And I'm sure he was keeping it quiet because he didn't want to violate those people's trust or privacy.

Tortorice: Well, and, yes. George was very aware of that. He was, of course he came from a respectable, he always had that kind of overlay of bourgeois respectability that he couldn't get away from. Because that's what really shaped him. He came from an extremely respectable family, German Jewish family, that lived by those rules for obvious reasons. But he was also quite subversive and quite, you know--(laughs)

Steakley: Well, here's the thing. Yesterday I had a little flash, because I knew this interview was coming. And I was thinking, what can I say about George? Because I read those things that were, those statements that were published online by Paul. And who else wrote? You know, those were good statements about George. You know the ones I mean on the website?

Tortorice: Yes. Yes. Yes.

Steakley: I thought those were smart. They had many insights. Do I have insights? I came up with one yesterday.

Tortorice: Oh, good.

Steakley: Because you know who, you know what deserves attention? Peter Gay and George Mosse. Because they were simultaneously working on sex, and bourgeois sex. And Peter Gay got invited during George's years here to come and give that whole series--

Tortorice: Yes, right. I remember that.

Steakley: --of about four or five lectures. I attended most of them. I may have had some scheduling conflicts and couldn't attend them all. But, if you look at the work those two guys did, this is kind of like a view from space looking at the continents or something. This is not getting into any, getting into the weeds with it. I just want to say that what Gay did was show that there was a seamy underground to the bourgeois stuff. George focused on the respectability. He focused on the taboo breakers.

Tortorice: Interesting, yeah.

Steakley: You know what I mean? George was interested in the taboos, and he was interested in the taboo breaking. And of course George himself lived a life of simultaneously hewing to the respectability to all public appearances, and breaking the taboo when he got away.

Tortorice: Mm hmm. Whenever he got a chance. (laughs)

Steakley: But, it's like what is more important for social formations? It is the respectability. That is the thing that creates cannon fodder. You see what I mean?

Tortorice: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Steakley: Whereas this other stuff, the seamy Victorian underside, what does that prove?

Tortorice: Not much.

Steakley: People always cat around. You know what I mean?

Tortorice: It's the ideology. Yeah.

Steakley: So you can say that George was raised in a very respectable family and that's what he explored in his scholarship. True enough. But there was sure a lot of wife switching and divorces and mistresses going on in that. You know 01:02:00what I mean? It was simultaneously respectable and, on a certain level, breaking all the rules.

Tortorice: Well, and George's grandmother was non-Jewish. She was a house servant at the home of Rudolph Mosse, George's grandfather. And at this conference, there was a paper by Darcy Buerkle--this is the conference that we just had in Berlin--about how George's memoir left out the fact that he thought his mother was a lesbian. And she had gone into his archive and found that George initially had written in his memoir that this was the case. And then it was eliminated by the editor for legal reasons, mostly threats of suing and whatever. But one of the things that came up in the questions and answers, well, why wasn't George more interested in his real grandmother? I mean, why didn't he make any effort to find out who she was, what her fate was under National Socialism? So he had no interest in her. And I think that's very telling. Because now, with everybody even trying to find out whose sperm was responsible for you and whatever. And I think it was just, it just was not something that interested him, you know? (laughs) And I think it really is part of that whole respectability business. But anyway, that's an aside.

Well, we could probably go on talking forever. But we should--

Steakley: Well, I want to do one more thing. There was another big moment in my friendship with George over the years. And that was when I published the Eulenburg scandal essay.

Tortorice: Oh, yes. Right.

Steakley: And I'm kind of blanking on the date. I could look it up. I'm going to say it was maybe, I don't know, '82 or something. That might be too early. I think it was closer when I got promoted to tenure, which was more like '85, '86. Anyway, and how does that fit in with George's publication record? When did he do his--

Tortorice: Nationalism Sexuality was about that same time, '82, '83. And Foucault had published his book just before that.

Steakley: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I gave that offprint of that immediately to George. You know, it was published in the Journal in Studies of Visual Communication, out of the Annenberg School at Pennsylvania, headed by Larry Gross, who was going to all these gay studies conferences. I mean, he was a gay scholar himself. And is. So, point is, George really was crazy wild about that essay. Because it hit a lot of the issues that he was interested in. Especially, I'm thinking, the parallel between homophobia and antisemitism. You know, it's so pronounced in the Eulenburg scandal because so many of the major actors in it were German Jews. And it kind of went into politics, the bigger picture. The influence on swinging German politics in a more conservative direction. And it got into micro-level of sexual practices between people from different classes, 01:06:00between the aristocrats and the lower orders, you know. So this kind of thing about violating class boundaries and German Jews and everything, it really hit a lot of the topics that resonated for him. That was such a key interest of his was trying to explore the parallels between antisemitism and homophobia.

Tortorice: Mm hmm. And racism and, yes. Yeah. I mean--

Steakley: You know, prior to my arrival here at Madison, George would have been acquainted with the visiting professor Hans Mayer who taught here in Milwaukee. And that must have been in the mid-'70s. That was also a big moment for Jost Hermand, because this Hans Mayer was a big, big gun in German literature. Jewish, gay, from, at that time, the University of Hanover. He had been for many years in East Germany, and then gone to the west. And he published a book, Outsiders. And it's got a chapter on Blacks, gays and Jews in German culture. So I think that like a big influence on George was undoubtedly the presence of Hans Mayer here in Madison as a visiting professor.

Tortorice: Really? I'd never of that.

Steakley: That book has been translated into English. Outsiders. I probably have a copy upstairs. I have the German original and I think I have the English translation. That was a big influence on George's work early on.

Tortorice: And then your Eulenburg work would also resonate with the whole idea of the Mannerbund and this kind of male, very homosocial culture. And how 01:08:00obvious it all is, and yet how unacknowledged.

Steakley: Yeah.

Tortorice: So, but, so let's talk a little bit before--I guess we're going an hour and a half, two hours now. But let's talk a little bit about this 19, I guess it was a 1982 conference in Amsterdam that George always said was his coming out event. And were you at that event in Amsterdam? I assume you were there.

Steakley: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Tortorice: And this is where George met a lot of these people in the field of gay history, gender history, that he then went on to know very well and cultivate. And then he became the first visiting professor of gay history at the University of Amsterdam.

Steakley: Right.

Tortorice: Left them money in his estate planning.

Steakley: Right.

Tortorice: So, tell me about that event a little bit. Was it one of these real formative events in the field? Not only for him, but for anyone working in that field?

Steakley: Yeah. There were a number of gay studies conferences around that time in like the United States. There was the Gay Academic Union that was created in New York City in, I want to say, the late 1970s. It held a few conferences in Toronto around the group of people that did The Body Politic. They organized conferences, a couple of them that I attended. And so, Amsterdam was not the first such conference.

Tortorice: Yes.

Steakley: But, it was the first one, I believe, that George attended. Because he had just been sort of developing in that direction. Ripening, you could say. Moving in that direction. And the, I think I was the crucial link that got him 01:10:00engaged in the conference. Because when I was in Raymond, in 1982, I think it was, Rüdiger Lautmann had organized a scholarship for me, summer support. I went to and gave a talk in Amsterdam and met Harry Oosterhuis and Gert Hekma and they were organizing the conference. And so I said, "Well, I know this guy in Madison who has like got this interest. And he is a big gun." And they said, okay. And then they looked up George Mosse and saw his works and everything, and were gaga about getting him engaged and involved in the thing. And he was happy to do it. And he was, really, you could say definitely the biggest gun, the most prestigious speaker at that conference.

And the way it was organized, the conference, was it was supposed to be not presentation of papers that you would deliver, but instead, discussion about them. Because everyone was obliged to send in their paper ahead of time when they were publishing the book, that green book, "Among Men, Among Women" people were supposed to read it and then come and discuss the papers.

Tortorice: It's a great idea.

Steakley: And so the whole thing was, you know, they're supposed to be brief. So people were engaged in that way. That was really his first debut on the gay stage, you could say. It was a premier for him. And you can see how fruitful it was in terms of him getting an appointment at Amsterdam later.

Tortorice: Yes. Yes.

Steakley: But like when the press covered the conference, the organizers made sure to direct them to George Mosse and to cite his presence and his words and 01:12:00his wisdom and everything as the main, so to speak, shining light of [unclear]

Tortorice: Well Gert; when George died, in his obit, said George was the only senior scholar of his generation to embrace gay history. And I think that's really true.

Steakley: Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Tortorice: And you were part of that, which is great. You know, you got him--

Steakley: Well, to be able to mediate it, yeah, it was nice.

Tortorice: Well I assume in your other interview, you talked about your teaching and your students--

Steakley: Yes.

Tortorice: --Mr. Borneman and Jim Jones and all of that. But let's finish up. I don't want to take up too much more of your time. Perhaps we could talk again, if you'd like. So you played, I think, a very important role in legitimizing gay studies in the US. Both behind the scenes with networking. But then also I think you were a really out figure, you know. You were an example to younger scholars. And I think that's a great contribution that you made. So, when you look back, what do you feel was your main contribution? We didn't talk about how you helped shape the collections at UW, for example, this extensive collection of German gay publications. But what would you say would you like to be a legacy as a scholar and a teacher?

Steakley: Well, one thing that comes to mind right away is the Holocaust, the gays in the Third Reich. Like again, it was already something I'd published on prior to coming to the UW, Madison. It's in that '75 book. And that was preceded by the journal, the series in The Body Politic in Toronto. So, you know, 01:14:00homosexuals in the Third Reich, that kind of thing is now present, let's say, in the discourse about the Holocaust at the US Holocaust Museum. It's not like I created something for people to discover. It's just that I was the first person to write about it and talk about it. So it's kind of early, kind of a pioneer in that way. Because the US Holocaust Memorial Museum would have ended up working on the topic of gays in concentration camps whether I'd brought it up or not, you know. They would have, dealing with different categories of prisoners that exist in camps, it has to be dealt with. I mean, it was passed over in silence for decades. And I was just the first person to kind of break the silence about it.

Tortorice: Well, that's a great--

Steakley: So, I'm glad to have been a pioneer. That, I would say, is the key thing. Is kind of pioneering. Do you know what changed at all and made it much more mainstream was not the work I was doing, not the gay work, and not the GLBT work. It was the queer turn in gay studies. That was the breakthrough point where it really became, so to speak--

Tortorice: Theory, queer theory.

Steakley: --the mainstream. Mainstream, you know? That's when a lot of people like Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, you know, her important work in English literature. That was a breakthrough moment where people said, "The importance of this work cannot be denied. It's out there. It's big."

Tortorice: Interesting. Yeah.

Steakley: So that was, I was sort of pre, you know, mainstream. It became mainstream with queer studies. And I witnessed all that, I observed it. And I'm like a lot of old cranky pioneers, curmudgeons that I know. I don't object to 01:16:00the term "queer," and I don't object to queer studies. I think it's fine, you know? Let a thousand flowers bloom. But like it's a different take on it. Because it's not based so much around identity. I'm guilty of identity politics in a big way. I kind of embraced it because I thought that gay studies was important for creating gay pride. Getting out of, getting out of gay, you know, self-oppression. We still have it. It's still very much with us.

Tortorice: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

Steakley: Despite the queer turn, we know that the suicide rate among gay teenagers is huge. And I would venture to say that the gay alcoholism rate, the alcoholism rate among gay adults is higher than it is among straight people. And other self-destructive behaviors. You know what I mean?

Tortorice: Although the way this culture's going, it's hard to say who's in worse shape.

Steakley: (laughs) Right. You mean the opioid crisis. It is bad. It's really terrible. But just look at what teenagers go through at school still today.

Tortorice: Mm hmm. Oh, yes, the bullying.

Steakley: So, you know, there's been social progress. But like people still struggle with issues of just self-acceptance and pride.

Tortorice: Oh, yes.

Steakley: So for me, the whole thing has always been around identity and creating kind of a viable history for gay people so that you're not isolated. You know what I mean?

Tortorice: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Steakley: So that like there is something to find out about. There is a past. There is a heritage, so to speak.

Tortorice: Well, thank you, Jim. That was wonderful.