Jim Andris, Facebook

Interview of Jim Thomas by Lisa Kohn, Dec. 1, 2003

[Webmaster's note: Some time ago, I found this interview on the internet, and realizing its significance for GLTB St. Louis history, I downloaded it to my computer. I can no longer find the link to it, and would appreciate it if someone would send it to me. This is a relevant portion of the more complete interview.]

Homosexual Community in St. Louis

LK: Okay. So before we get further ahead in the story, I wanted to get your take on what you think your experience at Oberlin, both within your organizing of the student group and just your experience at Oberlin, how that contributed to your later work, both in the newspaper and activism?

JDT: Can you ask your question again? I just slurped at my coffee and lost my train of thought.

LK: No problem. So, how you kind of consider your experiences at Oberlin, both in the classroom and outside in your organizing, how that played a role in your later experiences? In your later decisions in life?

JDT: It was very significant, although not necessarily in specifically applicable ways. I think the big significance was that I really had this large group of people who I loved and who I felt loved by. And you know, were I to have that exact community today, I don’t know how I’d perceive it, but certainly, in the context of the times, I could not have imagined a more loving, supportive community in which to be. And so, it was a real shock when I graduated and came home to St. Louis, because at that point I knew I wanted to live in St. Louis. Actually, I had a job offer in New York and their grant fell through, and I’m so glad it did because that was right before we knew anything about AIDS, but certainly AIDS was going on in New York, and I might well be dead had I gone to New York. But I didn’t; the grant fell through and so here I am in St. Louis. And so, I knew I wanted that same kind of healthy, loving community, and it simply did not exist here. And so, you know, I set about trying to re-create it in some St. Louis version.

LK: So can you talk a little bit about what you found here once you moved?

JDT: Well, there had been some activity in the seventies. I graduated in 1979. Until I found a job, I lived over in Alton with my folks. So I really moved to St. Louis sometime in either late 1979 or probably early 1980. And so, you know, I don’t want to say that there had never been anything, because that’s simply untrue. But when I got here, there were basically three organizations as I remember it. There was Metropolitan Community Church, Dignity, which was the Catholic group, and Gay Academic Union. Although I was raised Christian, by that time I no longer identified as Christian, so I didn’t want to join a church. So Gay Academic Union was where I ended up. But that was pretty much the community. And these groups didn’t know each other. They didn’t work together. It wasn’t like even, you know, you’d think, oh it’s just a few groups; they must have all, you know, worked together closely. Exactly the opposite. They didn’t know who each other were. They did not work together. They had very different agendas.

LK: Okay. We’re going to stop the tape so I can’

***Tape 2, Side A***

LK: This is a continuation of an interview with Jim Thomas being conducted by Lisa Kohn on December 1st, 2003. This is tape two, side one.

JDT: Well, very quickly, as we were saying while you changed the tape, I am just coming off the flu, so my voice is a little weaker than usual. I just somehow want to say that since I’m being recorded for posterity here.

LK: So, in talking about your getting involved in St. Louis, what was the Gay Academic Union like when you came into joining it?

JDT: Well, they were primarily a group of people connected in somehow with teaching at Washington University. And to be honest with you, I’m not really sure, in today’s language I think what I would say is they were probably all kind of adjunct professors. I think Washington University was a more conservative community than Oberlin was, and probably, I don’t know, the tenured professors would have more protection. But I think they also perceived they had something to lose in the way of reputation. Its primary activity at that point was the hotline. There had been a group earlier called, initially, Metropolitan Life Services Corporation, and then Metropolitan Life Insurance threatened to sue them, so they became Midcontinent Life Services Corporation so that they could keep the same name, or same initials rather. It ran the hotline, and they imploded over some internal’whatever, I was not involved in it, so I certainly heard things but can’t speak to them firsthand. They had actually had a physical property as a community center, and that was all lost. It was down on McPherson, between Euclid and Kingshighway. But the one thing that was salvaged out of that was the hotline, and the Gay Academic Union ran that for a short time. And then there was a group of people who were either professional or student, sort of therapist/psychology types, who decided to split off and run the hotline independently. Gay Academic Union lost its main tangible project at that point and pretty quickly faded. I don’t remember when it actually died, but without that to do, it lost impetus.

LK: When did the hotline leave the Gay Academic Union’s control?

JDT: I’m going to say maybe early 1980, but that’s a foggy timeline.
The Celebration Committee

LK: Thats okay. So, during this time, what action did you take? Was the Gay Academic Union what you were looking for in a gay community in St. Louis?

JDT: Well, it was an entry point, but no, it wasnt. And you know, I felt the groups were very fragmented. Its not my way to walk into any place or community and say here I am to save the day. I know how everything should happen. And so, you know, unless there is a crisis to be dealt with, generally my pattern is to sort of spend some time looking around me, assessing kind of whos who, what the situation is, trying to learn history, that kind of thing. But eventually I came to the conclusion a pride festival would be a good idea. So I set about trying to create that. And the original conception was that the committee would be representatives from whatever groups wanted to participate. And so for instance, one of those groups was the National Organization for Women, as well as, I think by that time we probably had an Integrity chapter, which is the Episcopalians, although I dont know that for sure. Anyway, the idea was representatives from the individual organizations plus whatever individuals were interested. They would be an organizing committee that would handle overall PR for whatever happened, would organize an opening event for the week, and then a closing event, probably a march and rally. The original idea was to do this in June. There was a real conscious strategy that in the middle of those two events, those bookend events, the individual organizations would each do their individual activity. So the idea was to try to create a situation in which they would try to begin to work together but didnt have to give up their identity in order to do it. They could still preserve their own individual identity, and so it wasnt quite so threatening to get involved. Now, unbeknownst to me, there was a separate group also organizing at that time called the Magnolia Committee, which was so called because they met for the first time in an apartment on Magnolia, down by Tower Grove Park. Their concept was to organize a walk for charity. Remember this is pre-AIDS. So, in order to be seen as good guys, they were going to do something for one of the major disease foundations, the American Cancer Society, or Multiple Sclerosis, something like that. They wanted to do this in February, which I found astounding, I have to say, that you would want to organize any kind of major outdoor event in February, but thats what they wanted to do. I think a lot of their reason for that was they had a heavy involvement of some students, and to do a June event, they were all going to fly off to somewhere else, wherever they lived in the summer or their summer studies or whatever. So they wouldnt be around in June to do anything. And so it was kind of felt by all concerned, once we found out about each other, that to try to do two major such public events in a community that had never done anything like it before was too much. And so we decided to join forces in what became known as the Celebration Committee and hold an event in April, April 20th-27th, is my memory of the dates. And that

LK: This was in 1980?

JDT: This was 1980. And our perception was that we were organizing the first pride event for St. Louis. Now probably some of the people in the group knew this, but I didntthere had been activities on the Washington University campus in 1979. The Pride Committee, now they just present it as, this is how we do it, but there was a conscious decision made along the way that instead of tracing their history to 1980, they would trace it to 1979, so that they could have a nice alignment with the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall events. So you know, I have to admit it kind of rankles with me a little bit, because I feel like we did the hard work of getting it going in 1980. But you know, thats what their decision has been, and it makes a certain kind of marketing sense, I have to admit when I can be honest about it. But I certainly was not aware of those events as I was organizing things in 1980, and you know, I think that the perception at the time was that the 1979 events were Wash U activities. When I talked to people after the fact about, you know, well, did you know something was going on? They were like, yeah, but it was Wash U events. For me at the time, I had no perception of the time because I didnt know that the events had occurred, so that is retrospective thinking in conversation with people who were aware of those activities.

Homosexual Group Organization

LK: And you talked about how Magnolia Club and your group. Can you talk a little bit about who your group was and how the two organizations didn’t have any understanding of each other and when that changed?

JDT: Well, now you’re getting into stuff that I feel foggy about. I’ll talk about it, but I need to qualify it beforehand. Certainly what I did was call a meeting of representatives of groups. That’s not foggy. That is what I actually did and can speak to personally. And you know, I sort of remember we maybe had eight or ten people.

LK: Coming from the different’MCC, Dignity, Gay Academic Union?

JDT: Yeah, and some individuals. Yeah, National Organization for Women. The groups I remember are MCC, Dignity, Gay Academic Union, National Organization for Women. I’m not going to say there wasn’t somebody else. That’s what I remember though. And there were also some individuals who didn’t really have any organizational affiliation. And you know, it’s like any sort of starting up, a lot of this sort of floundering around of well, what are we going to do and how are we going to do it? I knew what my intentions were when I called the group together, and I assumed, I ended up being chair of the whole thing, so that tells you the role that I assumed in it. But you know, it’s been so long, and there’s been so much that happened in the intervening years. You know, it’s like, if you asked me what the meetings were like, I actually have stronger memories of what meetings at Oberlin were like than what these meetings were like, except that, you know, the meetings here were testier, I think, because people were, you know, getting to know each other and had turf and that kind of stuff.

LK: It seems like there was a stronger coherence in the community at Oberlin.

JDT: Yeah, I think so. In terms of the Magnolia Committee, you know, I’m just trying to think about when I first heard about them. And I honestly can’t tell you. You know, at some point very early in the process. You know, I can tell you there was a march on Washington in 1979. I was a regional organizer for that. It’s probably important to get in there, just historically. I got involved with that while I was still at Oberlin. When I graduated I continued that involvement working from here in St. Louis. That was in October. My guess is that, you know, we began organizing out of that, after that. But you know, obviously we were able’the Magnolia Committee, you know, just kind of reconstructing here, they were going to have a February event. They weren’t far enough along that they were willing to change it to April, so it was probably November of 1979 when all of this was happening.

LK: And what involvement did the people on the Magnolia Committee have in other organizations for gays and lesbians in St. Louis? How were they connected is what I’m asking?

JDT: I think it was more just individual association. I’m not really sure. I know we talked about a man named Mark [inaudible], and he is still in St. Louis, if you can track him down. He actually came out of the Magnolia group, and so he would be a good source for that. But I can’t really say for sure, I just know they were’I really enjoyed working with the group. They came in and were fully engaged and were an integral part. There was no sense of separation that I was aware of, at least. They just became, you know, we all worked together.

LK: So can you talk a bit about the planning process leading up to that first event, if you remember?

JDT: Well, the main thing was doing’excuse me, I need to take a drink of coffee’I think the main thing was the logistics of just figuring out what permits were needed and what our logical route was, and who was going to speak. I mean, it’s just the nuts and bolts of organizing events. It’s stuff that at the time, I think, we perceived as being fairly intimidating. Today, I wouldn’t at all. But who was going to speak, and making sure that the individual organizations were on track with their events, and figuring out how to do effective publicity.

The Hopes and Results of the First Pride Celebration

LK: And so, what were your expectations of this event, if you remember, at the time?

JDT: Well, I just wanted a bigger community. I wanted a place where people could identify with, rather than’they could identify with something larger, rather than a specific organization and its agenda. And I don’t think that I really knew quite what to expect out of it. I know that I was very pleased afterwards. The week began in a very worrisome fashion. We had a picnic in Forest Park, which started out well enough, and then the temperature really began to drop, and I do remember nobody wanted to leave. We were all hanging out around the fires where we were cooking things. That came to an end, and that night we had seven inches of snow. But you know, it was April and that all melted away very quickly. The rest of the week went fine. We had a very successful conclusion on the second weekend. We had our gathering point in Maryland Plaza around the fountain, marched to Euclid, down Euclid to Lindell, and up Lindell to the Wash U quadrangle, where we had our rally, and it was a bright, sunny, beautiful day. I counted people along the march route, and we had right around a thousand people.

LK: Do you remember if you were expecting more or less.

JDT: I don’t remember anything about that, which tells me probably I didn’t have expectations on that, which would not have been an unreasonable thing. First-time event and a community trying to get a sense of itself; it probably would have been pretty foolish of me to think we’re going to get fifteen hundred people and then I’m disappointed at a thousand or’there was no way to know. And had I thought there was a way to know, I would have been foolish.

LK: Were you at all concerned about the overall community’s response to a gay pride parade in St. Louis?

JDT: Yeah, I think there was concern. A lot of people marched in heavy makeup, like clown make-up kind of stuff. We’re not talking rouge here. Some people marched with paper bags with eye slits. I myself had an experience. I guess I hadn’t really thought through what all of this might mean for me, in that at that point I was working for the Division of Employment Security for the State of Missouri, and I was walking along in the march, just doing my thing, making sure that everything’s going okay, and all of the sudden I heard people calling, ‘Where’s Jim Thomas? Get Jim Thomas,’ and I had visions of something horrible has happened, you know. We certainly worried about harassment and counter protests, whatever. So I went running up and was confronted with a television camera and microphone and had to give an impromptu media interview, which I did. But I was not out at work. You know, I worked for the State of Missouri, and in Missouri, up until this year’s Supreme Court ruling, I was a criminal. And you know, so I was not out. It was pretty nerve wracking on Monday morning to go in, and I remember that I ran in and made a mad dash to the break room, and on the way I pulled with me the employee that I most felt good about and said, this situation, what am I going to do, you know. And it’s probably, thinking back on it, it’s probably my most fearful experience of, am I going to face discrimination, harassment? What’s going to happen? It’s probably the worst experience that I can think of in my life around that, beyond coming out to my parents. But certainly, in anything outside of my family, it was. And she was like, well, let’s develop a little plan of action here. She was great and all. Nobody said a word. And I found out later on that they had all seen me. They had actually talked about it before I got there and had decided they were just going to act like it’s a normal day. So you know, I think that speaks well of them, because I’m sure some of them had real problems with it. But that was pretty, I have to say I hadn’t thought about that for years now, but now that I’ve dredged that up and told it to you, it’s probably the most horrifying experience I’ve had in terms of facing what are people going to think? How are they going to respond?

LK: So there were some personal ramifications to your involvement. Did you sense’

JDT: You see, I hadn’t even thought about it until suddenly, oh my God, here I’m doing a media interview, and I had the presence of mind to do it. I’ve always been good at media stuff. I’ve always been comfortable doing radio and television, that kind of thing. So you know, I don’t know that I knew or felt as confident about that talent than I do now, but I remember the interview going fine and then like being, oh my God, afterwards. And we got a little bit of coverage. Obviously, we got that coverage. You know, I remember us maybe being covered by two of the three network stations and that the Globe and the Post both did something. I don’t remember if KMOX radio did anything. That would have been the other place we really would have wanted PR. I think they did.

LK: And so, from what you remember, do you’you said there were some people there who were disguising themselves and weren’t comfortable’would you say that there were a good amount of supporters who felt comfortable just walking?

JDT: Yes. It didn’t look like a bizarre parade going down the street.

LK: Okay, and would you say there was, of the people there, was it a representative group in terms of women and men, minorities? How would you, if you can remember?

JDT: I remember it as being representative, but that is not something that I thought a whole lot about at the time. I was more concerned about raw numbers and how the event was going, so I don’t know how accurate that perception really is. And I probably need to remind you of the time. It’s 2:40.

LK: That’s okay. I can stay on for a few more minutes.

JDT: Okay.

LK: I guess I want to find out then’you talked about your expectations of bringing the community together. What role do you think this event played? Did it change things to create a more coherent community?

JDT: Yeah, I think it did. There were some other things happening. I don’t want to pretend that I somehow was the single catalyst. I think that, had I not done it, somebody else would have, some how, some way. I mean, obviously, the Magnolia Committee was trying to do something. So I was not some Goliath striding across the community or anything. I think I did a good job, but’so there was a newspaper called No Bad News that had formed right around that time that was kind of a mix of feature and news, probably leaning more towards feature stuff. So I think things were happening. I certainly think this was a key event and is the forerunner of what has become an enormous event, the largest event of a several state region outside of Chicago. So, certainly we were setting something important in motion, but I think psychologically for the community as well. And it’s the kind of thing you don’t always realize at the time. I’ve had people over the years when I’ve done things who will come up to me and say, I saw you on TV, or, I picked up a copy of your newspaper four years ago and it saved my life, you know. I knew of nothing out there. I was suicidal. Whatever. And when I saw you, when I read your newspaper, or when I just saw coverage of the event, you know, it turned my life around. I felt that there was something there for me. That actually, that sense is what’s motivated virtually everything that I’ve done, whether it’s Oberlin or this, the pride event we’re talking about, or the newspaper, is that sense of creating that there’s something larger out there where you can be. So, I’m sorry, I lost track of the question.

LK: No, I think that’s a pretty thorough answer, and I think it’s a good place to stop.

JDT: Okay.