Candace Bushnell Exclusive

Candace Bushnell visited the University of Minnesota on April 26, 2005. I was there with my friend Vanja and I transcribed the entire event on my laptop while Candace spoke. I came home, cleaned up all of my little mistakes, and now I've posted her speech and the question and answer session below. I hope you enjoy it.

HOT PEOPLE LIVE IN MINNEAPOLIS

My husband is from Minneapolis. In New York we think that everybody here [in Minneapolis] is really good looking. People who live in New York come back from Minneapolis and they’re like, “People are really good looking even on the bus.” Because in New York you never see good-looking people on the bus. They’re all in limos.

The first story I did for the New York Observer, I came to Minneapolis. Minneapolis is known to New Yorkers for good-looking people and rehab places. I did a story about these crazy New Yorkers who went to rehab but then came back to New York and they fell into bad habits and had to come back here and live. Some of them stayed here and opened restaurants and things, but the thing about good-looking Minneapolitans is true. I once saw this guy on the bus and he was like a movie star. I got off the bus and followed him and got lost in one of the Habitrails—what do you call them?—skyways. You feel like a hamster in these skyways.

THE MAKING OF A WRITER

Anyway, Sex and the City really grew out of my own experiences and my friends’ experiences, but I started writing about people I knew back when I was four years old. I didn’t write them, because I couldn’t write that well, but my sister and I shared a room together and in those days, which was like a hundred years ago, you had to share a room with a sibling and there was only one bathroom. Now people are like, if I don’t have my own room forget about it. Most New Yorkers are like, “I’d like to have a bathroom, or have an apartment the size of a bathroom.”

Every night before bed we would take turns telling stories and our favorite stories were about people in the neighborhood. We’d tell a story about a neighbor like, She sat on the toilet, gut flushed and sucked down into the sewer and came out of the system into somebody else’s toilet. We thought that was hilarious.

I got this idea that I wanted to be a writer and say mean things about people I knew. I had no brothers—I have two younger sisters—and I grew up in a very female-oriented family. It was four women and my father. My father actually had a male dog to try and even out the odds, but he had a poodle. So it didn’t really count.

I was really like a little feminist, like a little Gloria Steinem, and I was very sort of strong-minded and I had this idea that I didn’t know why men existed. And when I got older and I had sex with them I knew why they existed. But until then I was just like, Boys are gross. Still, to this day, I have this fantasy about writing a sci-fi book called “A World Without Men.” We would just let a few of them live—like the good-looking ones. Can you imagine if a man said that?

CANDACE GROWS UP

I didn’t go on dates in high school but I had lots of girlfriends and I was that girl who knew everything going on with my girlfriends and I was always giving advice and I was very interested in other people’s relationships. I went to college in 1976 and feminist had made it to Connecticut, which is where I was from, but I went to Rice University in Texas and feminism hadn’t made it to Texas.

--I’m just wearing these spiky Manolo Blahnik shoes. The shoes get more applause then I do. I met Manolo Blahnik at a gala and I went over and said “hi” and he said, “Oh, you should be shoed for life.” He said to his assistant, “Arrange for the shoes.” And I was so embarrassed. I did go to England for a Manolo Blahnik thing and he said, “I want to give you some shoes.” And I was like, how many shoes is that? I wanted to get tons of pairs, but I knew I couldn’t because it would end up on Page Six [a gossip column] or something—“Writer Takes Shoes for Free.” So I didn’t want to take just one pair because that would be insulting, so I took two. But I took the two most expensive pairs in the store. And these were one of them. I think of them as princess shoes.

Anyway, I arrived in Houston Texas and I met my roommates and I was like, “Okay, meet your dorm mates.” I was like, “Let’s go out drinking.” You could drink then at 18. They looked at me like I was insane. They said, “We don’t go out without men.”

And the other one was like, “In fact, I’m going to sit in my room and cry because I don’t have a date for Friday or Saturday night.” So I thought, Well, if there’s one thing I can do in my life for women, I want to show them that they can go out with their girlfriends on a weekend and they don’t need men. And I think I’ve done a pretty good job with that. Some people do object to those cosmos—“Those girls drink too much and spend too much on shoes and clothes.”

I actually did that thing when Carrie thought she spent $4,000 on shoes and she actually spent $40,000.

When I was in Texas I realized that I wanted to be a writer and to me the only place to go was New York City because that’s where the writers went. But I got this idea that I was going to support myself as a writer by being an actress. Support myself being a writer by being an actress—which is every parent’s nightmare, and also a really stupid plan.

A WRITER AND AN ACTRESS—THE EARLY DAYS

I did go to acting school, and I was really terrible, and everybody would sit around drinking coffee and talking about The Work. And I was like, okay, what work? We’re sitting drinking coffee.

They had this idea that if they didn’t act they were going to die. But I actually felt that way about writing and I was dying to be a writer. And I thought, “If I can’t be a writer, I don’t know what will happen.”

For some weird reason I was going to job interviews and this is embarrassing to say, but I went and interviewed at Penthouse magazine for a job because they paid $250 a week and everything else paid $200. I met this guy and I had collected all my little stories and put it in a portfolio and this guy was like, “A writer with a portfolio? I’ve never seen such a thing.” I was like, “Do you have writers here? It’s Penthouse.”

So I got a job at Ladies’ Home Journal after that. Yes, Ladies’ Home Journal. And my first task of every day was sharpening pencils.

My girlfriends and I talk about this all the time—what did you do at your first job? One of the things that is true, no matter what the task is, it doesn’t really matter what you do, it just matters how well you do it. My jobs were sharpening pencils and faxing, and my boss said I was the best pencil sharpener that he’s ever had.

CAREER GIRLS

Back in those days, the early 1980s, change was taking place in women’s lives. It was one of the first times in women’s lives that women were encouraged to go to college and have careers afterward. Before that it was okay for women to go to college but you were going to college to get your Mrs. Degree. And you guys know some girls like that. There are probably some here. In this school.

And on top of being told for the first time that we were supposed to have careers, in the late 70s and early 80s, every cover of Cosmo was about The Big ‘O.’ Orgasms? People I swear discovered them in the 70s. Before that I don’t know what people did, but I think before that you were supposed to lie there in bed. Which is kind of basically what I still do, but you know, whatever.

So on top of being able to have a career, women were allowed to have sex before marriage. And the combination of these two factors really caused kind of a huge amount of confusion in society. Basically there were all these young women who were moving into the big cities and working in offices and nobody knew what to do or think about young women in the workplace and young women who were maybe also having sex.

They really tried to restrain women. We had to “dress for success” which was very rigid. And then you go to work everyday and you bring along running shoes for the subway. Women were always wearing running shoes so we could run if we had to. I always say, if you can’t run in them, don’t wear them.

You would go to work and carry your shoes and if you had a date that night you would carry a change of clothing because chances were you were going to spend the night at the guy’s house, if you got lucky and the guy knew what he was doing, you would have an orgasm.

One of the things that women did a lot and that I don’t think people do anymore because women have gotten smarter, but after three dates you’d start moving in with this guy. Do you guys do that? You start leaving a few things at his house and before you know it, you’ve got clothes there and shoes there. All that stuff. We had no role models of how to behave as single young women. Most of our mothers had been married by the time they were in their early twenties.

One of the things our mother would say to us was “Why would he buy the cow when he can have the milk for free?” And I was always like, “Mom, I’m not a cow.”

SOCIETY AND THE SINGLE WOMAN

Society doesn’t know how to deal with single women and one example is Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction.” It’s like, if the woman has sex with a man she’s going to go insane and boil a bunny. In those days people really did not think that women could have casual sex. And I don’t know if one agrees with that or if you want to, but it was just the idea that society said women can’t have casual sex and that bugged me. Even though I had to admit that I fell into the category of women that probably couldn’t have casual sex.

I did everything wrong. I would move in with the guy, I would sit by the phone. Now you must have text messages. We just used to do that thing where you call that girlfriend just to make sure your phone is working. Then I would call the guy, but it took until I was 40 to realize, I’m not going to call guys anymore. I had made a big step forward.

We got to this age where you couldn’t rely on men and all the things society had been telling us about finding the right man and he’s going to take care of you—that really wasn’t tare. We realized we were going to have to make it on our own and take care of ourselves and each other.

What happened was that in the early 1990s all these women who had been in their 20s in the 1980s and had struggled and had these romantic escapades and everything—they started to make money and they started to become successful and own their own apartments and cars and they really didn’t need men like they used to. And guess what? Women started having sex like men.

There was a cover of Newsweek that said a single woman’s chance of getting married over the age of 30 were the same as being blown up in a bombing. So all the women were turning around like, “Aaaaah!” and the biological clock and all of that. Meanwhile, all my girlfriends and I were pretty happy to be single.

CANDACE AND HER SEX AND THE CITY GIRLFRIENDS

People always ask me if I had three girlfriends like on Sex and the City. And the truth is that I had tons of girlfriends but most of them were really like Samantha. Which kind of goes back to, like, I was the really conservative one. The only thing I did that was really bad is that I once interviewed a Calvin Klein model in his bed, but that’s because it was the only furniture he had in his apartment.

My Miranda was quite a bit like Samantha. Her favorite expression to guys was, “Listen, buddy, let me ‘splain something to ya.” And usually what she had to ‘splain to them was that it was all about her and they better be good in bed.

Anyway, I started writing Sex and the City and even before that I would go out pretty much every night in New York and I figured out that I stayed home a total of I think 18 nights out of a whole year. So on one of those 18 nights I was home at, like, eleven o’clock and she called and said, “Guess where I am?” She’s at this really rich guy’s house in the Upper East Side and she said, “You won’t believe what I just did.” And I was like “Uh-oh.” And she was like, “I just had sex with a professional football player in a cedar closet. Have you ever had sex in a cedar closet?” She said, “Get here now.” She was like, “The smell of the cedar is amazing.”

I had this other friend who was really very Samantha-like and I was kind of in awe of her because she was like, “Oh, darling, this whole getting married thing—the man doesn’t marry you, you marry him. You pick him and better be alone than be badly accompanied, darling.” She was kind of a legend. And she introduced me to Manolo Blahnik. She was a clothing freak.

Any time I went to a department store I could hear her voice coming from the changing room. Like, “Darling, you have to buy the whole line of Dolce & Gabbana.” I have no idea how she got the money to get those clothes.

In those days Manolo Blahnik was known only to fashion insiders, and she was a fashion insider. She called me up and she said, “You’ve got to come to Barney’s with me and get these boots.” Back in those days I was like, “I have a credit card—I can buy anything in the store.” Back then I couldn’t afford a pair of shoes.

I met her in the shoe department and she said, “You have to get these boots.” They were black patent leather and I saw them a few days ago in my closet, and the heel wasn’t quite as high as I remembered, but they were black patent leather with a pointy toe and a spike heel and I tried them on. She was like, “Darling, you have to get those boots.” She was one of those girlfriends who I was a little afraid of.

People always say men are afraid of successful, beautiful career women, and I’m like, “I’m afraid of them and I’m friends with them.”

Anyway, I got these boots and they were $400 and I was like, “God, I’m never going to do that again.” And of course, I have actually done that since. I went to Dior and it was winter and I saw these boots and I was like, “That’s perfect for New York City in the winter and it’s high fashion” so I put my credit card down and I didn’t look at it.

The boots were $1,800.

I try not to do that anymore.

CANDACE’S SAMANTHA

So anyway, this friend of mine who was like Samantha, she was known for being good in bed and it’s like that episode of Sex in the City “How Do You Know if You’re Good in Bed?”

I don’t know. I just kind of assume I’m not.

But this girl, she knew that she was and she would say, “I’m the best in bed.” She had that Samantha confidence. One time she ended up going out with this guy who we all knew was really bad in bed because a couple of my girlfriends had gone out with him and had remarked about it. We thought, well, if anybody can make him good in bed, it’s her because she’s the best.

So she went to his apartment and she spent the night and the next day I’m calling her, but of course she doesn’t get out of bed until noon. When I got her on the phone she was like, “Darling, it was bad.” So then two nights later she goes back to his apartment and she slept with him again.

I was like, “Sweetie, why did you do that?” And she said, “Darling it was so bad that I had to go back just to make sure.”

QUESTION: What’s your handbag?

Oh God, this handbag. If you become successful you, too, can have this bulletproof handbag. [The bag really does look bulletproof.] It’s Louis Vuitton and I saw it a while ago in SoHo and I was just like, “God that’s going to be so expensive.” Then I went to Aspen and I saw it and nobody else was in the store and I screwed up my courage and bought it. I only buy two handbags a year—maybe one. It’s kind of an indulgence, but whatever.

QUESTION: What was your favorite thing of moving to New York when you moved there?

My favorite thing was this incredible excitement of living in the city. I actually arrived in the city on a bus from Connecticut and I was wearing a straw hat because it was summer and I wanted to be really stylish and I thought the hat was really stylish even though I bought it at Marshall’s for $5.

But New York was different then and it wasn’t safe. You learned pretty quickly that New Yorkers never looked at skyscrapers because there was dog poop everywhere. There was no pooper-scooper law then. In those days they had boom boxes and they would play them everywhere, even the subway, and they would be dancing in the streets. The city was kind of bankrupt.

When I first moved there I used to see Donald Trump at Studio 54—him and Ivana—and he was very good-looking. He was. It was right at the time with Donald was taking over the city, but when I first moved there it was so much art and culture and being a writer and being a novelist was like, “Wow.”

What happens when you move to New York is that you get this idea that you can’t live anywhere else and if I did leave I would only wear black and I would talk really fast to everybody and I was like, “Can you hurry up this line, please?” But now I wear colors and when Carrie was in the country I was like, “She shouldn’t be afraid of squirrels; I’m not.” I spend a lot of time in the country now writing and I don’t go out as much as I used to. My husband and I went out last night and stayed out past midnight.

My husband is Mr. Bigger because he’s 6’4”.

QUESTION: Are you pretty much Carrie Bradshaw?

Yeah, Carrie was my alter ego. Yeah. Not everything that happened to her happened to me, but there similarities.

QUESTION: Who’s your favorite character?

My favorite girl is Carrie because she’s, like, the Every Girl. The interesting thing is that a lot of men suddenly started finding Miranda really sexy. Every place I go women say “I’m Samantha,” so I think she must be a pretty universal kind of character.

QUESTION: What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

Don’t do it! We already have enough writers. No, the reality is that being a writer—I kind of feel that writers are born and not made. I know I joke about it and sound sort of casual and that’s probably not a good idea on my part because it might make people take me less seriously as a novelist, but it’s something that I had such a passion for since the age of eight that I felt I had to be a novelist or I was going to die. I really didn’t know why I should live if I wasn’t going to be a writer. Because it’s such a difficult business, you have to feel that way.

You really have to be willing to give things up. You can be a writer if you’re willing to give up men, money, marriage and children. I know it might sound bleak, but if you’re willing to give up some of those things, you could do anything, right?

You have to be willing to give things up to be successful, to get there. When I first moved to New York and wanted to be a writer nobody believed me and people would always say, “You’ll never be a writer.” I just didn’t listen and I kept doing it and it really took a while. I got the Sex and the City column when I was 34 and that was my big break, but I was 34. And before that, writing for women’s magazines, there was no chick lit and people did not want to hear from women and hear what women, especially young women, had to say. Writing for women’s magazines was really like a ghetto and as a writer it was very hard to be taken seriously enough to write anything else.

So I really struggled and my feeling is that if you’re going to be a writer, there’s no advice anybody can give you because you’ll just figure it out. Believe me, I did all of it—I wrote stories, I got “Writer’s Market” and I would send out mass mailings and then two weeks later start getting notices back and the whole thing.

Anything in the entertainment or creative business—they’re designed to knock people out of the game. They’re designed to make people give up. In some ways it’s just a contest of not giving up.

QUESTION: What was writing a column like?

Writing the column was really exciting. For the very first column I actually posed on a pile of garbage with my Manolo Blahnik boots and a towel around me. The column was a big deal and it was an instant hit. I would go out and kind of say, “I write Sex and the City” just the way Carrie does in Sex and the City and I would get into clubs.

I went everywhere with my notebook. I wrote down things that people said. I used to go to Bowery Bar and I would drink cosmos. Sometimes I would get out of bed at three or four [in the afternoon] because I had to see everything that was going on. It was really fun. It was a great gig.

QUESTION: How did you marry a man from Minneapolis?

My husband’s a principal dancer with the New York City ballet. I was writing “Trading UP” in the country and I was there every night for some reason that movie “Center Stage” was on all the time. It’s a cheesy movie, but it’s so good.

Anyway, I was like, “God, ballet. I should check this out.” So I bought a ticket to the gala for the New York Ballet and it was really, really expensive. I just thought, “Okay, I’m going to do it because I love the ballet.” I went to a party where this woman worked for Harry Winston and she said, “I’m going to lend you a diamond” and Roberto Cavalli lent me a dress. The diamond was 25 carats and it came with its own security guard.

We went in a taxi and the guard was like, “I’ve never gone to a gala in a taxi before when the client was wearing a 25 carat diamond, but okay.” Even though I didn’t have a date, my diamond did.

At the ballet I ran into this guy who I hadn’t seen in years and he said, “I know one of the principal dancers and he’s single—do you want to meet him?” People say that when you meet the love of your life you’ll know and you say “How?” But really, it was one of those things where I remember looking at each other and it was this flash of recognition or something. He sat at my table and we went out dancing and then we were kind of together every day after that.

We got married after like two months. But I’m so glad—if you get married, that’s the way to do it. If you’re going to do a wedding, do it quickly. But it’s not a good thing to do if you’re 23. That’s kind of like Britney Spears, isn’t it?

QUESTION: Did you have anything to do with the casting of Sex and the City?

The producer, Darren Star, talked to me a lot about casting and there were some women he was thinking of for Carrie—and I don’t want to name them because they’re on other show son TV—but I was like, “No way, I don’t want her on my show.” And then he would send me tapes of all these actresses and the problem was that there were a lot of actresses who wanted to be Carrie but wanted them to be Miranda. That was a little tricky.

But when Kim Catrall went for her audition I was actually there and spend a half an hour talking with her about the character and I gave her a little pep talk and she got the part.

I met Chris Noth [who plays Big] back when I was writing the column. It was at Bowery Bar and this friend who was a publicist introduced me to him. He was on “Law and Order” and I had never seen it. She introduced me and I was like, “I write Sex and the City” and he was like, “I’ve never read it” and I was like “Well, I’ve never seen your show.” And that was it.

And then on the first day of shooting I was like, “Hi, remember me?” Anyway [Chris Noth] is a great guy. We’re friends and I love him, but you know, he really can’t walk down the street without people being like, “Hey Big.”

QUESTION: What are your thoughts on long distance relationships? Can they work out?

Obviously you have a long-distance relationship. I mean, you’re really young, so it really doesn’t matter that much. I mean, you kind of know what’s going to happen, right? One of those weekends when you visit him it’s going to be kind of weird and you’re going to be like “What’s wrong” and you’re going to suspect that he’s seeing somebody else and then two months later…

No, I’m sorry. I think that they really can work. But the thing that makes relationships work is commitment, which is the word nobody wants to hear. I think it’s a pretty serious and adult thing, commitment. And I don’t think you can do it until you get to be a little bit older and you know yourself. I think you have to know yourself really well to make a commitment.

A lot of people get caught up in love and they think it’s going to solve all of their problems, but they don’t solve your problems, and usually they make them worse.

You have to be able to make an adult decision about commitment and when you do that you don’t need to ask questions like, “What do you think of long distance relationships” because then you know already. Because I questioned relationships so much and I had a bunch of lousy ones, it wasn’t until I got older and really understood that the only way a relationship can work is commitment. And for some people that does mean marriage.

I think young women spend too much time worrying about relationships and not about their career. I know that you think your career is boring right now, but when people ask me about my biggest regret, it was that in my 20s I wish I would have spent more time thinking about my career than my relationships and about making money and getting ahead.

We don’t tell women enough how important it is to be successful because success gives you self-actualization and a sense of achievement. And when you’re successful it’s easy to find a man and a relationship. It’s hard to find a decent man and a relationship when you’re needy and you’re unsure and you hate your job and you hate your life. That’s probably one of the worst times to meet a man. It’s kind of like a Band-Aid.

My advice is to really concentrate on you and be a whole person and a whole person who makes a contribution to the world. Everything else will follow, including a great relationship.

Josh H. can be reached at joshcentral@hotmail.com with questions or comments. You may also reach him through the comments feature on the Josh and Josh blog at http://joshandjosh.blogspot.com.

Judy Shepard Speaks Out

Last week Judy Shepard, the mother of hate crime victim Matthew Shepard, came to the U of M to speak out about hate, intolerance, and hope for the future. I covered the story for a local magazine. The following are excerpts from her touching, funny, eloquent, heartbreaking speech.

Phone Calls in the Night

It was 5 a.m. on Thursday, October 8, [1998], when the call came. Every time we get a call at such an hour it’s a silent prayer that, “Please God, let Matt be alright.” This time, he was not.

What kept going through my head was the image of Matt alone on the prairie for eighteen hours.

At the Hospital

[At the hospital] we heard the machine helping him breathe, we saw the screen monitoring his signs, his face swollen. His right ear had been reattached. I was not sure this was even Matt. But when I approached the bed I saw it was my precious son. I could see the color of his blue eyes, but the twinkle of life was not there anymore.

We kissed his face, stroked his arms, and we so desperately wanted him to know we were there. He began to shake and became rigid and we hoped it was a sign, but it was just an involuntary response to the touching.

I was thinking, “How could anyone feel so threatened by this tiny sweet child that they would want to do this to him? Such an act is incomprehensible.

Logan, Matt’s younger brother, refused to go into the room. He didn’t want that to be the last image he had of Matt. He wanted the smiling, bright-eyed, handsome face to come to mind. But he soon realized it was the last opportunity to say goodbye and I love you.

I’ll never forget that look of terror when he first saw Matt. [Logan] was trembling, tears streaming down his face. He put his hand to Matt’s cheek. He asked if they could be alone.

We kept an eye on him using the monitors at the nurse’s station. We could see him talking, holding Matt’s hand.

We were painfully aware that Matt would never wake up.

We spent the next few days with him. Sunday night, after leaving the hospital, they told us we needed to return immediately. We were joined by friends and family and we surrounded the bed, touching him and trying to keep him with us, thinking, “We need more time.”

At 12:53 a.m., Monday, October 12, [1998], Matt was no longer with us.

Matthew’s Coming Out

Matt came out to me at 18. He was in college then in North Carolina, and he called at all times of the night in Saudi [Arabia, where Judy and Dennis had been living for Dennis’s job]. To Matt there’s no such thing as time zones.

[Audience laughs.]

It was the middle of the night and he said, “Mom, there’s something about me that I need to share.” And I said, “Matt, what would that be?” He said, “I’m gay,” and then I said, “What took you so long to tell me?”

He said, “I don’t understand, how did you know before I knew?”

They tell me it’s a “mom thing.” It’s a mom thing. He was nine when I began to question. If you would have asked me why, I couldn’t answer that. I don’t know. Instinct, intuition, I’m a mom. I don’t know. I just felt there was something unique about him. Unique in a good way.

I tried to educate myself what his life might be like, but it was not an easy thing to do in Wyoming and in Saudi Arabia. In San Francisco maybe I could have gone to the neighborhood GLBT bookstore, but we don’t have those in Saudi Arabia or Wyoming. Yeah, we don’t have those.

[Audience laughs again.]

What I did discover was fear and hate and violence and nothing positive. I had no idea you could fall in love and stay in love with somebody forever in the gay community. It shows my ignorance then. It was the deepest, darkest fog. There was nobody around to tell me different.

Matt told me not to tell his dad he was gay because that was part of his coming out process and he would tell him himself. But I told him anyway. [Audience laughs.] I don’t know that that’s the parentally correct thing to do, but my husband babbles his heart out and has a tendency to blurt and speak before he thinks, and I was afraid he would say something he could not take back. I was afraid he might say something without knowledge. So I told him and he said, “Matt just hasn’t met the right girl.”

This was the expected blurt. [Audience laughs.]

So I said, no, you’re not getting it here. This is not about the right girl. This is about Matt finding the right man. And he looked at me and he looked and me and looked some more and said, “You know, I get that. It’s going to take a little while to get used to that idea, but I get that.”

Please don’t think for a minute that anybody in my family rejected Matt when he came out to them. What we did know was that Matt was gay and it was part of who he was. We loved him. We loved him as our son, brother, friend, family, who happened to be gay. It certainly did not define him. In fact, it explained a lot of things.

Logan said, “I finally understand why there is this anger that comes from nowhere or anxiety, this aloneness that Matt expresses, this sadness. I totally get that now because society tells him he’s wrong, but he’s not.” You are who you are, you love who you love. God willing you get the opportunity to love somebody and be with them.

You are who you are and you love who you love, and that’s the way it is. Isn’t that the most important thing? That you love and are loved in return? Isn’t success in our lives based on being loved and loved in return, not in material possessions and the trappings of life, but that we loved people and they loved us in return, regardless?

I always thought that’s what life was about.

Judy on Same-Sex Marriage

So, let’s just cut to the chase. Same-sex marriage. Why not.

[Audience applauds enthusiastically.]

Hate is rampant. We’ve done very little to contain it. In particular in the GLBT community it’s on the rise because we’re making positive progress. We really are. I know it may not feel like that, but same-sex marriage is going to happen. It’s just a matter of time. We have won the war, but it makes every battle that much more important.

You can go get married in Las Vegas and get married by Elvis and it’s okay. [Audience laughs.] And it’s not even really Elvis. That’s a civil union. It’s a marriage. It’s a document. It’s a binding contract that says you will take responsibility and care for this person that you love.

Well, okay, why can’t we do that with a member of the same sex that we love? If you can go with a perfect stranger to the courthouse and you don’t take their name and you’ll never see them again and get married, does that make sense to you? It makes no sense to me. You’ve been together thirty years and you can’t get a marriage license? That’s just not right.

You are who you are, you love who you love, and I just don’t really want you messing with my Constitution. It’s my understanding that the Constitution is based on the idea that it protects the minority from the majority. So now we’re going to write a clause into the constitution that will protect the majority from the minority? And protect them from what?

My husband is not going to suddenly say, “You mean I could have married a man?” [Audience laughs.] It’s just the most basic civil right and it’s being denied to a huge portion of our population. The right to be with a person you love.

People say gay people are not monogamous, so then why not give them the opportunity to get married?

Massachusetts didn’t fall into the ocean, so I guess it’s okay. The world continues to rotate. It’s okay.

And adoption? Absolutely. [Applause.] I don’t want foster children going from foster home to foster home.

‘The Laramie Project’

Even though I have never seen the play myself [which is about the reaction in Laramie, Wyoming, to Matthew’s death] I support it one hundred percent. Moisés [Kaufman, the author of "The Laramie Project"] has become a very good friend of mine and when I tried to explain to him why I didn’t see the play I said, “I lived the show. I’m really not sure that I could survive that again.”

It’s now one of the most performed plays today in high schools, which I think is brilliant. Can you imagine subject matter like that ten years ago being in high schools? It’s got to be one of the best tools that teaches about gay and lesbian issues. Not about Matt or his family, but the community of Laramie and how it all happened.

Laramie exists everywhere. It exists in Minneapolis. It’s a microcosm of the whole world. Those people [portrayed in the play] are everywhere.

On Speaking Out

I’m not a professional speaker. I’m a mom—a mom with a story, with lessons to share. I would not have chosen [this career] in a million years. But as long as we remember what happened to our loved ones, they stay with us and they live on. This is part of my grieving process.

I do this because I don’t want this to happen ever again. Hate is a learned behavior. We are not born knowing how to hate. We learn how to love and hate in the media, newspaper, movies, and we learn it in our communities, in the backyard, on daddy’s knee, in church.

Hate has no purpose, no good. I think the purpose of our lives is to bring each other up, not to tear each other down.

Matthew

Matthew Shepard, the year before his death.

There aren’t enough words to describe how much I love and miss him. We shared so much; late night talks, a love of politics, movies, of books and good food and conversation. He was my son, my first-born. He was my friend, my confidante, my constant reminder of how good life can be and ultimately how hurtful. I will never understand why anyone would want to hurt Matt and to act with such complete disregard for another human being.

I could never have spoken again [publicly], but that would be unfair to Matt. This message is too important to stay quiet. I am his mom and I need to take care of him. Still.

What We Can Do

You all have to register to vote. You still do. You need to know what your candidates are doing for you or want to do to you. You need to be an educated voter and there are ways to find out and work through the double speak.

This is one of the most important things. Are your officials doing what you thought they would? Or did they move to D.C. and become influenced by the party? I know this is shocking, but it happens. [Audience laughs.] If you don’t like what they’re doing, let them know. I’m on the Hill [and legislators] say, “My constituents don’t contact me and so I don’t think it’s wrong.”

You have a very powerful voice and you need to let them know where you stand. They work for you, you don’t work for them, even if they like to think that. And if you don’t tell them, they’ll do what they want to do. You must talk to them.

Lastly, you have to come out and be out all the time.

You might say, “Oh, I’m not gay, I don’t have anything to come out about.” If you’re Jewish, you need to talk about discrimination; if you’re a person of color, you need to talk about it. If you’re Muslim, you need to talk about it. And not just you, but your families and friends. They need to know your story and they need to tell your story. Because nobody will know or care if that doesn’t happen.

No white politician who is straight and white and over 65 will ever know what it’s like to be GLBT unless you talk to them and tell them what your story is, the discrimination you face and fear everyday because we don’t protect you.

And when our leader comes on the TV and says gay people can’t get married, people think you’re second class citizens and they hurt you because they think you don’t matter. Only you have the power to change that by telling your stories. And voting. Talk and vote. You can’t make the changes except from the inside.

We’re facing a very hostile legislature and a not-very-friendly national leader, so we have to do this from the ground up. I don’t want to be here ten years from now when you know what the right thing is, and that’s equality for everybody.

You have to be one hundred percent you—not you living two lives—but you being you all the time.

It’s a catch-22. You’re fearful to be out because you don’t have rights but you don’t have rights because you don’t come out. People tell me that they don’t know any gay people, but please, you know gay people. You need to come out so all people see isn’t the first four rows of the gay pride parade or the Village People. And God love them and they are a part of the community and without them we wouldn’t be talking about gay rights at all because they are out.

It’s the boring people at the end of the [pride] parade that we need to talk about. It’s the boring people like me, like PFLAG parents and couples raising children and committed couples who blend, which is not always a good thing. That’s who America needs to see because America needs to see that they look like everybody else.

You have a voice and you’ve been silent too long. You have power you can’t even imagine.

Let’s say 10% of people begin to self-identify. Questioning and intersex, too. Let’s give each of them four allies. Think how many people that is. We would be the most powerful [lobby] group. We would be more powerful than AARP, which is the largest and most popular lobby group in the country, and we would be bigger and better and do more. But we don’t stand together enough. We’re all afraid of something, of physical retribution or something.

But you know what? Get over it. [Silence, then loud applause.] Get over it. It is what it is, you are who you are. Own it.

You all need to be out as individuals, allies, parents, siblings. You all need to be out and talk about it. You have to. We won’t survive unless we do.

* * *

Josh H., 22, is a Minneapolis-based writer. He can be reached at joshcentral@hotmail.com with questions or comments or through the comments feature on the Josh & Josh homepage.

AIDS Action Day

Rep. Rick Hansen, DFL-South St. Paul, watches as Sen. Scott Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis, addresses the audience at AIDS Action Day, organized by the Minnesota Aids Project on Tuesday at the Capitol.

Eight years ago, Minneapolis resident Bill Johnson’s immune system crashed, nearly killing him.

“My doctor looked at me one day and said, ‘Get ready,’” Johnson said.

Johnson, 44, developed full-blown AIDS in 1995, the year a new generation of HIV/AIDS medications became available.

Luckily for Johnson, the medications worked and his health improved steadily, but not without an expensive price tag. The cost of Johnson’s HIV/AIDS medications exceeded $3,000 a month, and two-thirds of his monthly paycheck went toward medical expenses.

Yesterday, Johnson joined about 100 other concerned citizens at the Minnesota State Capitol for AIDS Action Day. The lobby day, organized by the Minnesota AIDS Project, gave them a chance to discuss with legislators the bill that could ease the costs of prescription medication for low-income HIV/AIDS patients.

The HIV Prevention and Health Care Access Bill will be introduced this week in the Minnesota legislature.

“Nobody deserves to go through that hell of deciding if they can afford to [pay rent] and eat food, or die because they cannot afford their meds,” Johnson said.

Dilemmas such as Johnson’s encouraged Sen. John Hottinger to co-author the HIV Prevention and Health Care Access Bill.

“With HIV, the loss of health care can be a death sentence,” Hottinger said. “It’s an issue of social justice.”

Hundreds of Minnesotans with HIV/AIDS are in danger of losing their medications because of their inability to pay the state mandated co-pays, said Amy Weiss, communications director for the Minnesota AIDS Project.

“If people miss even one dose of their medication, there are consequences,” Weiss said. “Their bodies begin to build resistance to their medication.”

Currently, patients who cannot afford their co-pay would be removed from the existing medical-assistance program altogether, said Bob Tracy, director of development for the Minnesota AIDS Project.

Providing access to drug treatments and health care for people living with HIV/AIDS allows patients to live longer, he explained.

“Not only do [patients] live longer, but you also reduce the amount of viral activity in their bodies, so they become less infectious,” he said.

Tracy added that once HIV/AIDS treatment is started, it must continue uninterrupted in order to avoid creating a new public health problem with a drug-resistant strain of the HIV virus.

Elizabeth Dickinson, manager of community affairs for the Minnesota AIDS Project, agrees with Hottinger.

“No one living with any kind of medical condition should be discouraged from seeking treatment because of inability to pay,” Dickenson said. “Health care access is a basic human right.”

Dave Dorman, Boynton health educator, agrees that state HIV policy should focus on access to health care and on prevention of new infections, both of which are addressed by the current bill.

“This bill makes sense from a public health point of view,” Dorman said.

Rep. Ron Abrams said he is worried about the bill’s $12.4-million price tag, considering difficulties in balancing the state budget.

“I’m just concerned about the cost,” he said.

* * *

Josh H., 22, is a Minneapolis-based freelance writer.

He will be moving to Manhatttan in September 2005 to pursue a career as a magazine writer.

A local newspaper commissioned Josh to write this story.