Larry Neff Interview Part 1, October 26, 2021

So this is the October 26th, 2021 interview of Larry Neff by Audrey Barnett for the Humanities Truck community archive recorded in Larry Neff's home. So first I'd like to ask, do I have permission to record this interview?

Yes, you do.

Thank you. So the first question I would like to ask is, how long have you lived in DC?

I was born in DC and my father was born in DC. I grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, but I've lived in DC continuously basically, since December 1974. So, a long time.

At age did you move here then?

I guess I had just turned 23.

Okay. And what was your reason for moving to DC?

I wanted to live downtown where it was exciting and things were going on.

That makes sense. As a child what was your exposure then, to the city? I know Silver Spring it's fairly close but...

Right, it's just over the DC line, uh, we came into the city a lot. We used to come downtown and go to the museums all the time and um, whenever relatives came to town, we, of course, took them sightseeing to the monuments and museums. We used to go to the zoo and to Rock Creek Park all the time.

We used to come downtown for concerts before the Kennedy Center was built, the Philadelphia Orchestra used to play at Constitution Hall and we had a subscription series to that. And then the Watergate steps by the Lincoln Memorial there was a barge at the bottom and in the summer, almost seven nights a week, there were concerts by the National Symphony by the Marine Corps band, the Navy Band, the Army Band, the Air Force Band, they would all play concerts, and we would drive down from Silver Spring through Rock Creek Park, and then sit outside and listen to the music. So we came downtown a lot.

Nice. Yeah, that sounds really pleasant. So at 24 years old when you moved to DC, what neighborhood did you move to?

I moved to Foggy Bottom, to 25th and K, and I lived there for a little less than a year and I had saved money and then I went backpacking in Europe for seven months, in Western and Eastern Europe, and also a month in Israel. And then when I came back, I moved back into Foggy Bottom at 24th and New Hampshire and lived there for eight years, and then in 1984 I moved to Dupont Circle, to 18th and Q, and I've lived in Dupont Circle ever since.

Oh wow. So you've remained then in the same neighborhood pretty much.

Right.

Would you be able to paint a picture for us of what life in Foggy Bottom Circa 1974 looked like?

It was more residential than it is now. There was a local grocery store. It was very convenient to get to. The Kennedy Center had opened recently and you could walk to Georgetown, you could walk to downtown, you could walk to Dupont Circle. So it was very central.

Gradually Foggy Bottom became less residential and more transient because apartment buildings, some converted to condos like mine, but others became hotels and then George Washington University, sort of surreptitiously, bought buildings and turned them into dormitories. And a lot of the apartments and condos became rented and owned by students. So it became kind of less of a neighborhood over time, which is one of the reasons I wanted to move to DuPont.

Yeah, and would you similarly kind of paint a picture of what Dupont looked like then when you moved in 1984?

It was the absolute heart of the gay neighborhood. There were a bunch of gay bars here. There were gay people on the streets all the time. Dupont Circle — people would hang out in the circle all the time, day and night. It was lively. There were restaurants. It was the most European of any of the neighborhoods in Washington. Wonderful architecture, townhouses, and mansions, a lot of which have become embassies. And it was lively and just lots of fun and the place to be.

Hmm, I'm curious then how your relationship with DC changed living here as an adult versus when you visited as a child.

When I visited as a child, it was usually just for a day or an afternoon and it was to go someplace, to do something particular, to go to the National Gallery. And in those days, when you went to the museums, they were pretty much empty, you had them to yourselves. It was great. We got very spoiled in Washington also, because they were all free, unlike most other cities.

So, so that was usually just temporary, for a specific purpose, as opposed to living here walking on the streets. Some of the time I had a car, sometimes I didn't have a car, but generally ran all my errands, you know, the grocery store or the drugstore, the dry cleaner, people who live in the neighborhood do all of that on foot. So it's in a way. It's kind of like, living in a small town. You see people on the street. You recognize people. You say hello, even if you don't know them. So it had a real community feel and then plus, at that point, I had come out and being the center of the gay neighborhood made it feel very welcoming.

Yeah, would you mind elaborating further on how Dupont served as kind of like a community center for the LGBTQ DC population?

Well, Dupont Circle had been sort of the hippie center in the late 60s, and early 70s, and then, I think, I think Mr. P's was probably the first bar that opened. Before that, there were some bars downtown and some bars in Georgetown. But in the mid-1970s, maybe, bars started opening in Dupont, and Metro opened in '76 I think, and it just became the place to be.

There were a whole bunch of bars. There were... you'd go into restaurants and you'd see other gay people. There was the Lambda Rising bookstore, which was in several different locations, ended up on Connecticut Avenue. The Dignity, the gay Catholic group, met in a church on Connecticut Avenue. So, it just felt very like the, like home, like the place to be, place where people could be themselves.

Yeah, thank you. You just listed a bunch of spaces that painted a really nice visual picture. I'm curious if there was like one particular space that served as a community, like, focal point for you, in particular.

For me in particular, I would say probably Lambda Rising bookstore which started on 20th Street and then moved to S Street and then moved to Connecticut Avenue and was in a big, bright, high ceiling space and it was very visible. Connecticut Avenue, there were a lot of tourists and it was right... and Connecticut Avenue in the old days, was a fancy shopping street. So, it was a real statement to be there.

And people would go in and just browse for books and magazines and they sold lots of fun things in there. The uh... and it was also a real gathering place for people who are just coming out, who maybe heard about it, who that would be their first, you know, putting their toe in the water in the gay community would be to go to Lambda rising and buy a book and feel, oh, I'm not the only one here.

Another place that also helped serve that purpose was Kramer books. Which was gay owned and was a book store and cafe and Kramer books was open Friday and Saturday night, all night. They had music at night. You can go in and browse around. That you could go in and get the Sunday New York Times at midnight on Saturday night.

And then I guess the other place that comes to mind is Annie's restaurant here on 17th Street, which is, I think, been here for seventy years in two different locations on 17th Street. And has always been very welcoming to the gay community. The first time someone took me there was 1975 and it also was open Friday and Saturday night 24 hours, until COVID.

Yeah, that's so interesting. I really like your answer of the bookstore. One, I love Kramer books. So that's really cool. But two, that's not an answer I've received often and so I'm curious if you could explain that more. Like how a bookstore served as like, a gay community center, like what kind of events, I know you mentioned Kramer books had 24 or all night, like live music or all night events and stuff. Would you be able to tell us more about those events?

It was a place you could go hang out and you could go hang out there almost, you know, any time. It was only open all night on Friday and Saturday night.

Got it.

Not the rest of the week, but it was comfortable to hang out and spend an hour browsing around the books and they had a gay section that was labeled, you know, gay books, or LGBTQ books or whatever the latest name was at the time. So and it just, it felt urban, it felt intellectual. You would go there and feel like you were with your own kind of people. —

Yeah, and who are the people, or the types of gay people who you would most often find within those spaces? Because I know you noted it was intellectual. It's located in Dupont, like who are the types of people that are coming into the bookstores? —

Well, you know DC is a very weird city in terms of its demographics. We've never had any heavy industry here. So there's never been any blue-collar immigrant neighborhoods, which means we never had any good cheap food. So, you have this little swath of middle-class educated, I mean, DC is very highly educated, you know, people who work for the government or work for a contractor who works for the government, or who are lawyers, or who are working in advocacy organizations associations and things, some of them social justice, some of them not. that —

So you had people who were aware of the world, were knowledgeable about how things work, who traveled a lot, a lot of times government employees, and I did this too when I was a government employee, travel. A lot of times, a lot of places around the country. So people knew the country well. A lot of people in the neighborhood traveled overseas a lot. You have all the foreign embassies here. So you would have people speaking different languages, you would have people from different cultures, and it was a very cosmopolitan kind of place. that

Yeah, that's helpful. Thank you. I'm curious then to kind of build off of that what ways do you think race and class have shaped the LGBTQ community? Maybe specifically in this era of the 70s and 80s.

Well, DC has always been a very segregated city and continues to be, socially, a very segregated city. People encounter each other at work and in, you know, public places, but it's rare that I go to a party where there are African-Americans there. I do have some friends who have African-American friends or boyfriends, and so over the years, I've gotten to know them. We see each other every year at the New Year's Eve party or whatever, but it's still a very separated kind of city.

And then you have the also the socio-economic separation because you have, you know, the middle class and upper middle class people who are all doing, certain kinds of things and going to restaurants and hanging out and things. And then you have another very poor population in the city. Who you just don't see very much in this area. So it's really very divided still.

Yeah, that's certainly been my experience as well, and I'm really curious how race and class have also shaped the way that AIDS has affected the DC LGBTQ population. And so, I want to ask first before we get into that, how did you gain consciousness of AIDS?

Well, we started to see reports in the Washington Blade, the local gay newspaper, which under its first owner was the best gay newspaper in the country, by far. It was just superb. It was hard news, it was very well written. And so that was probably the first place. And then there's the first time it showed up in the Washington Post articles. And then I started having friends get sick. And so we were all very aware of it.

The Whitman Walker Clinic, which started off as the gay VD clinic, and then broadened into becoming AIDS services. That did a lot of work and made real efforts to make the community aware. And then I think as time went on, that was one of the bridges between the different communities because Whitman Walker provided services to everybody, whether you could afford to pay or not, whether you were in this neighborhood or that neighborhood.

They actually set up satellites at one point. I don't know if they still exist in Anacostia, and maybe one in the suburbs. I don't quite remember. So that was one of the crossover points, I think, was treatment for people with AIDS.

And then in the rallies to protest government inaction. The fact that President Reagan didn't say the word for seven years, you know. There were a lot of AIDS protests. When the quilt came to town that really brought all kinds of people together, including straight people because people had lost their sons and brothers and uncles and fathers. And so that, that the quilt, I think really brought a lot of people together.

Do you remember when you first started to really care about HIV? Because I do think there's a distinction between first hearing about it and maybe the first time it feels close to home or really pertinent to your own life. Would you agree that there was a distinction between the two and if so, would you mind explaining?

I think there was a distinction, but I think it was fairly short-term.

That makes sense.

Because rather quickly once it started to be in the news, and at first it was like, oh something weird is happening in New York and San Francisco, and then all of a sudden it's happening here and then before long, you know somebody.

My first boyfriend, after we split up many years later, died of AIDS, but he was the first person to allow his full name to be used in The Washington Post, to be reported because people wouldn't let their names be used because they thought they would get fired. Their families would ostracize them. They would kick them out and put them on the street if they were living at home. So he was the first person to do that and that was in maybe 1984 or so, 83, 84 something like that.

Were you guys still together or was this after your breakup?

No, we dated in 1975-76. It was a long time after but we were still friends.

What was that like seeing his name in The Washington Post?

It was shocking and I was very proud of him for being willing to do that. And because at first, you know, AIDS was like cancer in the 50s and 60s, you know, people didn't talk about it. It was hush-hush. No one wanted to hear about it. And the example I give for that is my father died of cancer in 1960. And if you look at his obituary from The Washington Post, it says he died of a long illness at the National Institutes of Health. It does not say the word cancer.

Oh, interesting.

Because it was not considered polite to say the word cancer in public. So when AIDS first happened, it was the same thing, I think.

Yeah, would you mind explaining a little bit more? Because I think sometimes people of my generation don't always understand that stigma. And so you describe feeling really proud of your ex-boyfriend for having like publicly shared his name? Like why was that such a big deal that he chose to share his name?

Because no one had done it, up to that point. Because people were still afraid that if their boss found out they were gay they would get fired. There were no protections then, just as there are very few protections now in employment. When I first started working for the government, you could be fired. You can still be fired for being gay.

And you could also even after that ended, you could lose your security clearance for being gay and a lot of people's jobs depended on having a security clearance. If you couldn't get a clearance, you lost your job. So, there were a lot of people who were really, very scared.

I've been involved since 1977 in the gay synagogue and for at least the first 20, maybe 30 years, when we mailed out our newsletters it was in a plain envelope with no return address and no name on it. Because people did not want their neighbors to see that they got something from Bet Mishpachah.

So there's this long history going back to the 50s and early, earlier, especially in Washington with the government. There were, you know, witch hunts against homosexuals. A lot of people lost their jobs. I mean that's Frank Kameny's whole story. And so it was a double whammy. It was the American stigma about being sick and we have sort of this Puritan legacy that if you're sick, it's punishment from God. A lot of people said that. And plus the added stigma of, oh, you're gay too. So, it was, that was a big hurdle to overcome.

Yeah, I can imagine. Remind me what was your job at the time?

I started working in 1979 for the US Department of Transportation.

Okay.

Okay. So yeah, you mention the stigma present within the government. How, how is that felt within your own life? Like how did that affect your experiences at work?

Well, gradually over time, people I was friendly with at work knew about my life, but it was not something I mentioned otherwise to anybody. There was one more thing about people not willing to have their names used and that is that people's insurance used to be canceled. So you had health insurance, and if they found out you had AIDS, they would cancel your policy. And there was no recourse. It meant you had no health care.

Woah and that obviously has dire consequences for someone who is diagnosed with AIDS.

Right and AIDS was, you know, AIDS was a timing game, the people who were able to stay alive until there was treatment, some of them survived. I have my best friend from college who's had AIDS for probably 40 years.

But he managed to survive until there were initial treatments and the initial treatments worked for him. They didn't for everybody. Now, of course, they have much better treatments and even preventative care, but you know, in the beginning, people were dying within months and awful deaths, awful, awful illnesses and deaths.

How did you feel about that like happening around you? Especially as you're immersed within this thriving gay community in DC. Like how did that feel to watch that all unfold around you?

It felt like everything that we were trying to build and develop was threatened. And could be taken away. The... It also, I mean, I think I probably went to 50 funerals of my contemporaries in my 30s. That's not a normal thing in America.

Not at all.

You know, if people are, if we're at war and you have soldiers in their 20s who were all dying, you know, that would be maybe an equivalent thing. But in your 30s in America, you didn't have a whole bunch of people you know die. It just did not happen. So it was, there was general trauma in the community. And people reacted to it in very different ways. I've heard some people say that, you know, a generation was lost. Some of the best and the brightest were lost. Some people expressed it in terms of my opportunities for finding a partner were severely diminished because people died.

Yeah, you mentioned that people reacted in all different ways. What were some of the ways that your peers reacted versus maybe how you reacted?

I think some people became very cautious and withdrawn. Stopped going out to bars. Stopped having casual sex. Some people had the opposite reaction and said, well if I'm going to die, I may as well have some fun before I die. Some people I think maybe focused on their career, to the exclusion of their social life or their emotional life. And I think other people had the opposite reaction and said, well, why should I bother to work? I'm not going to be here in three years anyway. So why should I build a career that I'm never going to have?

And I think a lot of people were separated from their families. We had a member of the congregation who died and he and his partner live together, but they were, there was no legal marriage then, and his partner's name was not on the lease of their house, I forget if it was owned or leased, and his partner came back from the funeral and all his belongings were on the sidewalk.

Wow.

That was not unique. So it was really traumatic for a lot of people, whether you know, it was you being sick or your partner being sick, or some, or a lot of people, you know, being sick. It was kind of like communal PTSD.

Yeah, that's so interesting, you kind of label it communal PTSD. I'm curious then, in which ways did you collectively grief with people?

So because I was involved in the gay synagogue.

Yes. Would you mind saying what year you got involved? Was it 1977?

Right 1977. I first got involved with the gay synagogue.

And would you mind contextualizing it for us? How did you become involved? Is there a story there?

There is a story. I had gone several times to a sort of an in-town, lefty, social justice group called, Fabrangen, which still exists. They now meet on upper 16th Street, but they used to meet here in DuPont Circle. And someone there who is straight took me aside once and had heard that I was gay and said, there's a place for you and he took me to services at the gay synagogue. Which is kind of amazing.

His father was a rabbi in Baltimore, a prominent Rabbi in Baltimore, and I went to the service and I just hated it. It was very...

Why?

Well, it was 1976. It was very apologetic. It was like, well, and it was very very sort of old-fashioned, the high church reform and I was coming at Judaism from participatory communal, havurah style

Okay.

So it was a very different style and then my best friend from college and I finally came out to each other. He was at my first apartment on K Street, and he went through my records, and he saw Gloria Gaynor's "Never Can Say Goodbye" and that's when he knew for sure.

That's hilarious.

And he had also gone once and didn't like it. So we went again and we thought, well maybe we'll take it over, because we both had been active in Hillel at University of Maryland, and we both said no it was beyond redemption. But at that second time when we went together, they announced that there's going to be a big conference of gay and lesbian Jews in New York City, in April 1977. And we went to that. So to see 350 people for a whole weekend with services and classes and a big dance Saturday night and stuff was just transformative.

Would you mind talking a little bit more about that? I'm so curious.

It was by the gay synagogue in New York, which still exists, Congregation Bet Simchat Torah (CBST). And it was in Greenwich Village and it was just so affirming and so positive and so wonderful to be in a room. Growing up thinking that I'm the only Jew who's gay or I'm the only person in the world who's gay kind of thing, as everybody does in isolation, to see this huge group of people and the community they were building and the joyousness with which they were celebrating Shabbat and meeting people was just absolutely transformative. So we came back and we took over the synagogue.

Nice.

I started leading services. We got rid of the old book they were using from 1941 and we made our own new book. Services became participatory, more Hebrew, more egalitarian. We got women involved in the group. And so it really, as a result of that New York conference, it really changed DC.

Cool. Yeah, how did you guys take it over exactly? Who was running it beforehand and how were you able to take charge?

It was a volunteer organization.

Ah.

All volunteers. They had services once a month. So I had lead services in college. So I volunteered to lead services and it took them a while to accept my offer. And then once they did, I started leading services. And I led services more and more and more and people came to expect what I was doing.

And then we went from once a week — uh once a month to twice a month to every week and I led services every Friday night for three and a half years and that's when the community really grew.

Wow. That's a big deal.

And then I realize the error of my ways and started to invite other people to lead services and co-lead and train other people, and we've developed a cadre of service leaders, but it was all in that sort of, mode, where everyone participates, everyone is involved. You don't have to be a rabbi or have a, you know, a master's degree in Hebrew literature in order to stand up and give a sermon or to co-lead a service.

And what three and a half years? Like was it 1977 that you started doing that or?

Yeah, in the fall of 77 or beginning of 78 I started that.

And so it went to about 1980, 1981?

Yes, 78-81, probably. Through most of 1981.

Cool. And you said that you realized the error of your ways? What does that mean exactly?

Well, because I was not willing to keep doing that every Friday night so.

It was a big commitment then or?

Yeah, and it was also, it was not good for the congregation. You really need a wider group of people who are gonna do these things and provide leadership.

Rather than just one person?

Yes, right. So we ended up with a cadre of half a dozen, a dozen, people who could lead or co-lead services. Some people could do both sides of it. Some people would just do one side. Some people would just give a sermon. Some people would just sing. So.

Cool. Well, I'm really curious then, in what ways the AIDS epidemic impacted the emergence of this community and also its practices as a collective.

So in, I'm trying to think what year it was. 1989, 1991? Something like that, one of our past presidents, David Green, passed away. I can give you that date afterwards.

Yeah, no worries.

And um, he actually, he went to my high school. He was a year behind me. I knew his sister, she was my age, and he worked at the Library of Congress. And he and his partner, and they later got married religiously, this was before there was civil marriage, had both been presidents of the congregation and David became sick with AIDS and passed away and at that point, we were still completely lay-led. We didn't have a rabbi. And so Dr. Al Munzer and I, co-led David's funeral, and his parents were members at Washington Hebrew Congregation on Mass Avenue and so we did it there.

That's right by where I live actually.

Right yeah, and so, and it was rare then for funerals to be in synagogues, but, you know some Jewish funeral homes wouldn't do funerals of people who died of AIDS. Some rabbis wouldn't do funerals of people who died of AIDS. So Al and I conducted the funeral and, you know, we were not trained in pastoral care. We could, I think, we did a beautiful funeral for him, but it just knocked us out. We were like, oh my goodness we can't keep doing this and we knew there were going to be more.

Was that the first time you had done that or?

That was the first time I had done that. Right. So at that point, the synagogue stepped back and said we need to hire a part-time Rabbi to help us, mostly with pastoral care and to teach and, you know, maybe occasionally to lead a service. That wasn't really what we hired a rabbi for.

And the person we ended up hiring who worked with us for 18 years and is now Rabbi Emeritus, was Rabbi Bob Saks who had been the Hillel director at University of Maryland. So I had sort of brought him into the community.

Oh, wow.

Because I had worked with him. Yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah so as I say, he was our rabbi for 18 years and is now Emeritus.

Yeah, I have a few questions from those remarks. I'm curious then in what other ways that death affected the community. Like maybe on a more emotional level. Was that the first death from AIDS that the community experienced or the first leader maybe?

It was the first leader. Yeah. It may not have been the first death, but it was I would say the first most important because of his role in the congregation. And there was a time after that when a woman who was an international AIDS educator and also a therapist her name was Dace Stone — D-A-C-E Stone — she looked at the congregation and said we need a bereavement support committee.

And she established that for the congregation and they prepared a brochure saying here is what we'll do: we will provide a Shiva service, we will help you make funeral arrangements, we will provide a meal of consolation in the home and she organized that in response to the AIDS crisis, the effect of the AIDS crisis on the congregation.

Wow, okay.

And then some years later we actually bought two rows with an option on a third in one of the old cemeteries in Southeast Washington and we have a big Bet Mish section marker there.

Yeah, that's interesting and totally answers, or I guess, partly answers questions I have about just how as a community you cared for one another especially as young people dealing with kind of unimaginable grief. So this grievance support community seems like one way.

Were there any other ways in which you guys cared for one another or supported one another as people got sick, or, or were also dealing with the mental, like, not only the physical strain but, like, just the mental strain of living during an epidemic such as this one?

I think there was a lot of, you know, groups of friends would, (coughs) pardon me, band together to bring in meals, to take people to doctor's appointments. There was a real sense that we needed to be there for each other because, in a lot of cases, there was nobody else. The Washington community, is mostly people from other places, so their families aren't here. So, people really relied on their friendships, and the bonds I think in the synagogue grew closer as a result because we did things for each other.

And that carried over into other things. We had one of our past presidents who ended up having cancer, and I remember driving him to radiation treatments at GW. You know, people did a lot of that stuff for each other, and people... there's an older generation in the synagogue that sort of went through that together. And I think that's part of the really strong bond that we have with each other. And I don't think, I don't think the younger people who show up really, are that aware of where that comes from, or what we did.

Yeah, I can imagine. I'm really interested then in caregiving and also the toll that caregiving has on those giving and also seeking care. What support, maybe, then do you wish like you had during that time that maybe you didn't? Or do you feel like the community did a good job of of supporting one another?

I think the community did a good job of supporting one another and trying to be helpful in every way we could and, and strengthen the bonds among people. And we were all going through it together. So, anyone you talk to when you said oh I'm really, I can't believe such and such has happened, or so and so is sick, you know, people really understood on a deep experiential level. It was not an abstract to them.

Yeah.

And people knew that about each other, you know, oh you know, I'm so sorry — do you want me to go to the funeral with you? Do you want me to come to Shiva with you? And we had... and it carried over as we entered the phase where people were the age group where their parents were passing away. —

your friend your congregation, I know you're suffering and I want you to know that we support you.

I remember when my mother passed away in 1998. We had like 65 people in my house for a Shiva and I had already had a Shiva with family, you know, separate from that, but the Bet Mish community. And I was surprised some of the people who showed up. People I did not know well.

That's quite powerful.

It was powerful. It was quite powerful. Yeah.

I'm really interested then in this intersection between your spiritual practices and beliefs and your ability to care for one another, which I completely see as a form of activism. I think care is integral to activism. Yeah, how did your like spiritual practices and beliefs like inform, inform your caregiving, and your activism and your ability to go on in the face of such, you know, intense political and like social... Sorry, I'm struggling to find the words but.

Turmoil.

Turmoil. Perfect. Yeah, exactly. Political and social turmoil.

Well, I think we adopted some practices at the synagogue which we might not have done otherwise. For example, we have a standard Mi Shebeirach prayer, and someone maintains a list and it's read every week of people in the congregation who are ill and we usually sing Debbie Friedman's Mi Shebeirach prayer or some other prayer for that. And I think that started off as a response to AIDS when people were sick.

And then we sort of amped up our Kaddish observances. So we would announce any recent deaths. We now have a practice we've had for, I don't know, maybe 10 years or more. We read the name of everyone who has died in the last year. We read that every week for a whole year. So, for example, one of my cousins died almost a year ago and every week they read his name, Dr. Steven Allen cousin of Larry Neff, and we read the relationship.

And then when we read the Yortzeits, we don't just say the name, we say Leo Stern, Uncle of Larry Neff, so people know who it is and they know the relationships and I think that's something that most synagogues where they have so many names, they just read the names, but I think reading the relationships sort of emphasizes and acknowledges the loss that people have and the memories that people have.

We developed a special prayer book. We're now on version 2 for Shiva services in the home. And we — Dace Stone organized this trained group of six or eight people to lead a Shiva service in the home with special readings in it that we pull together, some of which we wrote, and we all have a Shiva kit, which is the big clunky thing they would carry that has you know, 50 copies of the service in it.

It's got the brochure which we've updated several times and it's a trifold brochure, you know in the event of a death and pre-planning and what we'll do and how we can help. And it's got information about the cemetery in it. It's got, usually, it would have a couple candles. So you could light a candle at a Shiva service. It would have little thank-you cards we would leave with people and yarmulkes, you know, kippot. So, those were some of the ways in which I think we modified or adjusted our ritual practices to accommodate people's needs.

Hmm. Yeah. I'm curious how these religious practices, then had a direct effect on your life during this era.

Well, unfortunately, you get used to leading Shiva services. I have some very specific memories of chanting El Maleh Rahamim at a service, or something for specific people, kind of things. We've had two burials in our cemetery so far. So large groups of people showed up for that.

I'd become sort of the go-to person in my family to conduct unveiling ceremonies instead of having a rabbi. Someone will come, you know, they'll say oh would you do this and I usually put together a little eight-page brochure with some readings and things like that and send it to people and say, what do you think about this? Do you like this? Do you not like that? And we would negotiate and eventually end up with something that they want so.

What is an unveiling ceremony?

So it's this pure custom. Sometime after the burial, usually six months to a year, there will be a little ceremony to unveil the grave marker, whether it's a stone or a bronze plaque in the ground, depending on the cemetery. And it's a... it usually sort of marks the end of the year of mourning kind of thing. So people use it as that function and it's a chance for family and friends to regather and speak again about the person.

How does it feel for these practices to be normalized within your life?

I'm grateful to them and I think in general Jewish funeral practices are really humanistic and really support people in wonderful ways and they kind of pull you through the most difficult time.

And I think a lot of people don't realize that all of the time, people think of them as you know, oh you have to do this for 7 days and this for 30 days. Those are all maximums. Those are all you cannot do this for more than seven days. You can not do this for more than 30 days. You can't say Kaddish every day for more than 11 months because the whole effort is to turn people back to life. So I think, I think all that is is really strong.

I just want to mention like the opposite side of the coin there.

Yep.

Because we also, we had a couple, Ronny and Jerry, who wanted to get married. This is in the mid-80s before there was legal gay marriage. A lesbian couple. And so they came to the synagogue and said we want to get married and the synagogue had a committee for a year look at the policy and come up with a policy. And we were afraid that we would become a marriage factory, which was kind of silly.

But so I co-officiated at the wedding for them and then I co-officiated at a bunch of other, mostly lesbian, weddings. Later on, some gay male weddings, before it was legal. But people wanted a religious ceremony to mark their relationship and to celebrate and with family and friends. And so that was a really positive and wonderful thing to do and to come up with ceremonies for that and practices for that.

And when one of my sisters remarried, neither she nor her second husband were very interested in religion, and she called me up and she said, would you do just a short little wedding ceremony for us? And I said, well, I've only ever done it for lesbians, but how different could it be, right? So I conducted her ceremony and she had, someone there had, a court order saying she could sign the marriage certificate so.

Awesome. Thank you for sharing. I think it's important also to spotlight really positive moments, and like moments of celebration and joy, I'm curious if there's any particular ceremony that you officiated that really like stands out in your memory.

Maybe it was my friends, Sarah and Ellen. And they've been married for a long time now. Their kids, their older kid is in college. They moved, oh maybe, I don't know, 12, 15 years ago to Berkeley, but I'm still in touch with them. I still visit them when I go to the San Francisco Bay area and they had a lovely ceremony. Ellen is an artist and worked at the National Gallery and she made a chuppah that she designed and made herself.

What is that exactly?

A chuppah is the canopy under which a couple gets married. A traditional Jewish canopy symbolizing the home. And it was just a very joyous celebration. It was at, oh at 11th and Mass there's a little inn, a hotel inn, that we had, that's where the ceremony was. I can't think of the name of it offhand.

That's okay. Another thing that I'm really interested in is overlaps between Bet Mish and then also your work, your college — I mean you've noted there seems to be a few connections between UMD and Bet Mish. And then also, you're like gay community in DC at large. Were there any overlaps between those spheres or were they all pretty separate in your life?

Definitely overlaps in the social groups. So a group of friends at Bet Mish has definitely been the core group of friends for my whole life, for the last 40 some years. And over time, you get to meet your friends and your friends friends and so there's some other people.

For example, a friend of mine for at least 20 years would have on the afternoon of the first day of Rosh Hashanah would have a dinner at his house and he would invite — he and I also have another group of non-Jewish friends, people who all work or used to work at NIH in research — and so that group, the two groups would sort of mingle in those kind of things. So you get to know each other. So my friend, Vittorio, knows my friends Diane and Georgia, for example, and we still celebrate birthdays together and things like that. So there was definitely overlap there.

Nice.

With work a little bit. I'm thinking for my 60th birthday, my friend, Vittorio, hosted a dinner at his home and had a couple friends from the synagogue and a couple friends from work and a couple friends from other places. And so there's been some overlap.

So I'm also... because I recognize, I think we've been talking for about...

We can go, that's We can

that's Hm? We can continue, that's fine.

Okay. Yeah, I wanted to transition a little bit more into present day. So I'm curious — I want to ask you first — how your relationship with Bet Mish has changed over the years and what are the reasons for this change, in your mind?

Well, I still lead services for them. I still served on the liturgy committee for years and years and years and years. And we've had two major publications. We had the second edition of our high holiday prayer book. In August we published 650 Pages hardcover.

Wow.

And then four years ago, we published a prayer book for Friday night and other holidays and Saturday morning. That's 450 pages hardcover, and that was also a second edition. First edition was also hardcover.

Oh, that's amazing.

So, I worked on liturgy for a long time, and we've done that by committee, compiling, editing, selecting, adapting, translating, organizing. So that's been a really positive thing for me and that's continued, I don't know if it's going to continue in the future now that we've done the last two big books. Maybe we're done, I'm not sure. I still lead services occasionally, I try to avoid serving on the board. I did serve on the board for three years up until several years ago.

Why avoid that?

Well just because it's, you know, the usual organizational stuff. And not my focus. I would rather lead a service than do that stuff so.

That's fair. And does it still remain volunteer-run?

Yeah. We have a half-time rabbi and I chaired the rabbi search committee three years ago. We hired somebody wonderful. I'm very very pleased and I hope he will continue. The um... I'm sorry... what was the rest of the...?

I was just curious the ways in which your relationship has changed or remained constant over the years, but I was also interested if there's been any changes in the way that Bet Mish has been run or the way that it operates.

Well, we do have, we have a very very very part-time administrator who does things. Helps with sending out emails and things like that, helps with membership forms. We have a very part-time paid bookkeeper, who is actually a congregant. But the congregation is now thinking about hiring, like, I think a half-time executive director to help because a lot of the volunteers, we're all aging.

We've all, the core group, has done it for years and years and we're tired and we don't want to do it anymore. And it's hard to find younger people. We keep trying in various ways to get younger people involved, but their relationship to organizations in the age of the internet is very different than it was 30 or 40 years ago. So I think we're going to have to start paying more for services that we need.

And that's not something you've done previously much?

Not much. It's been mostly volunteer-led but we're beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel with volunteers. It's just there's no more left there to give, people have done it, they're over it. I think one of the things I've always wished the congregation would do more, as I think, we're much, too much focused inside the community as opposed to looking outside the community.

There was a big Jewish demographic study about four years ago, and huge increase in the Jewish population in the DC area over the previous 13 years. It was like, I don't know, a 37 percent increase. And of the number of adults who responded to the survey, and they figured out the numbers, seven percent of them self-identified as LGBTQ. So I did the math, it's 17,000 people. Well, we have 200 members, so clearly we are not meeting their needs. Whatever their needs are, we're not doing it. So I think we really need to look outward more.

Well, on that note, I'm really curious, during the height of the AIDS epidemic we've obviously talked about ways in which you cared for one another inside the Bet Mish community, were there any actions or programs that you guys had that was actively trying to serve LGBTQ community outside of Bet Mish? Specifically Jewish or not.

Well, we in the Jewish Community, starting in the early 1980s, we had a speaker's bureau. We would send a couple people out to talk to synagogues in the area, mainstream synagogues, often to like a confirmation class or something like that or even two groups of adults and tell them about our synagogue and our community, that stopped for a while.

We — there was one point where we were proposed for membership in the Jewish community relations council. And a bunch of us sat in the back of the room while they debated whether or not to let us in and eventually the Orthodox acquiesced and allowed us to join. Our rabbi has always served on the board of rabbis. That was our entree to the local board of rabbis.

I think we have not done a good job in recent years, in terms of advertising. I think there was an attempt to, oh, it's getting expensive let's cut back on spending money on this. And as a result, I think there's a chunk of people out there who don't even know we exist after all these years.

Yeah, well, I'm really interested on that note to also talk about this relationship between younger and older people within like the queer Jewish community. Would you be able to talk more about that tension like currently within Bet Mish. Do you guys have younger queer Jewish people who come to the synagogue, regularly? What are your connections to this younger Jewish community?

There has been a very conscious effort to reach out to younger people and try to get them involved. And for a while, we were doing better with it with some younger people on the board, younger people leading services. I think COVID, kind of, was a big interruption in that. But just recently, we have a young, very active in the community, gay Jew who's starting a young professionals outreach Shabbat.

We had a women's outreach program for years and years and years on the first Friday of every month where they would meet for a potluck or discussion before services. And, and what that did was it meant that if a woman came to services on the first Friday she knew that there were going to be other women there. As opposed to being the only one so, and then that sort of fell off, and then that was restarted. And so we're trying to do that now with young professionals and that just started in October for the first time and we're hoping that that will be growth for the future.

Cool.

Because, you know, right now if someone who was 25 years old walked into the room on a Friday night — and of course, COVID we're back in live, in-person again, but all of our services are live-streamed and the majority of our people are at home — but if they were there in the room, they would walk in and they would see oh a bunch of people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and think, ugh I don't want to be here. So we thought that would be the same thing if we had a young person's outreach, that if they all came on that Friday, they would at least see each other and begin to build a connection to the community.

Yeah, because I was, I was really struck by something you said earlier in our conversation about this sense of togetherness that you think maybe is lacking within the younger people who go to the synagogue and if I'm understanding you correctly, the AIDS epidemic and the support you guys showed for one another during that era has influenced or impacted the sense of really strong sense of togetherness you guys have.

Would you mind talking more about that again, maybe, distance? Like why is it that there's not this strong sense of community within the younger people at the synagogue?

Well, I think this is true across the gay community. I mean, I remember in the early 1980s when you open the Blade and they had listings of gay organizations. There'd be 250 gay organizations in Washington. There was cultural organizations, there were all the sports organizations, there were the religious organizations. There are the social organizations. I mean it was just phenomenal.

And that's diminished diminished diminished. And I think part of it is that a lot of young LGBTQ people feel like, well, I don't have to go to a gay bar. I can go to a straight bar and I'm accepted there so, why should I go to a gay bar? Part of the challenge for Bet Mish is that we're a victim of our own success. Now almost every synagogue, except for the really Orthodox ones, you know, say, oh, we welcome you and your partner and your kids and we treat you as a family unit.

And so there's that and then plus I think people's relationship to organizations has changed just because of the internet, everybody spends half their life on their phone, and I do it now too. And their relationships to people are through texting and through Facebook, and through everything else. And so, as a result, people don't feel the same need to get out of the house and go be someplace with people in person and I think COVID has only made that worse. A lot of people, several friends of mine have said, you know, I forgot how to talk to people. You've heard that also.

Yeah.

So I think it's, it's very challenging right now. People don't need to go to... I mean we have a lot of couples who met each other at the gay synagogue and have been partners or married now for 35 years. No one expects to do that at the gay synagogue anymore. They expect to do that online.

Yeah, I completely agree with everything you've just said. I find like your perspective really fascinating actually on that question. I'm interested in how Bet Mish remains distinct despite other synagogues kind of more recently, maybe becoming more like welcome or opening spaces. Like what makes Bet Mish different? Like, what's the appeal of Bet Mish despite this newfound acceptance?

Even though we've always had a couple of straight members and a couple of bi(sexual) members, not too many, but you definitely feel like when you walk in the room, you're with your own people. And if I go to services at Adas Israel — again pre-COVID days where there's a huge group of people there — and even if I'm there with a gay friend, I'm not going to feel like the whole room is my people. Yes, everybody's Jewish, or most everybody's Jewish, but it's not the same. So, and I don't think — I think it would take much longer for me to build the same sense of community there.

And there's also, there's also the sense with, what I'm going to say is less so for gay couples or lesbian couples who have children. Their lives I think are closer to mainstream Jewish couples, lives of people who have kids and are running to soccer practice and you know carpooling and all this other sort of stuff, but for gay men and lesbians who don't have children. I think our lives are really substantively different. And how we spend our time and what we do and where we go is just different than when you have kids and they and their schedules completely run your whole life. So I think we've...