Oral History with Jean Elliott, October 27, 2014 (Ms2015-007)

Interview with Jean Elliott Date of Interview: October 27, 2014 Interviewer: Tom Seabrook Place of Interview: Elliott’s office, 217 Wallace Hall, Virginia Tech Length: 49:54 Transcriber: Bryanna Tramontana

Tom Seabrook: Hello, this is Tom Seabrook, I’m here with Jean Elliot, it is October 27th, 2014, just after 2 O’clock in the afternoon. Jean, can you tell me your name, and the date of birth and where you were born?

Jean Elliott: Jean Elliott. It’s E-l-l-i-o-t-t. Double L double T, and I was born in Hagerstown Maryland.

SEABROOK: So please tell me a little bit about your family and where you were raised. Did you stay in Hagerstown? Is that where you grew up?

ELLIOTT: Yes, yes. I grew up in a little town right outside Hagerstown called Maugansville. I had two older brothers ten and twelve years older than I am. They both sort of seemed more like uncles for a while than brothers and I actually lived there until I went to college.

SEABROOK: Oh wow.

ELLIOTT: A little sedentary I guess.

SEABROOK: And what were your parents like?

ELLIOTT: My mother was a stay at home mom. After the war my dad, is still living today he is ninety-one, and he was in World War II. They got married right after the war. And so, my mother who had worked very much through the war and everything settled down, stayed at home and made sure the guys got through boy scouts and cub scouts and I had music lessons and played on all kinds of sports teams and that kind of thing; but she was very generous with her time and did a great job with that. And my dad was a machinist at Fairchild, so he ran a tool and jig kind of thing for making airplanes. He worked very hard to support everyone.

SEABROOK: You have a very good relationship with your father just from what I saw from the show this 2:00past weekend.

ELLIOTT: Yes dad has lived with me the last eleven or twelve years I guess. My mother passed away in the end of November in 2002 and he moved in with us about six or seven months later. They had moved up to the Blacksburg area in March of ’99, I got here in January ’99 and I was like—really? [laughter] You’re coming really in two months? Because they had been in Florida for fifteen years retired. So I was a little surprised when they decided to come up here, cause I came out here intending to be a very out and open person and I figured I would be more out and open and living that course without my parents returning to the same town, but that didn’t happen and so I sort of remained low. I came out right away at work so that wasn’t an issue, but my parents knew, I mean, we just never really talked about it. But they were always very open and accepting of my partners along the way, I’ll just make that plural, cause 3:00it was. But I think when my mom died and we got through all the funerals and dad moved in and dad was the more liberal of the two. And I think, I don’t know if my mom were still living, I hate to say this, I don’t know if I could have been as open and done as many things with the community, for the community. It might have felt a little awkward.

SEABROOK: So how do you identity yourself? With what community or communities?

ELLIOTT: I identify, since this is for an LGBTQ history right? So I identify sort of , mostly as a lesbian- gay woman. I just sort of like to say ‘gay’ that just works for me. I don’t think it really has the male connotation so much for me. So the community, I like to hang out with everybody. I mean, there’s a gay 4:00community, but I am a master naturalist, I like to play with environmentalists. I like to go to plays and that kind of thing. So I feel I fit into the community on various levels, I mean I was a piano player and a choir director at Glade Church for, oh, eleven, twelve years. So I feel like I fit in so many different places. If people are so interested about how one, it would probably be way down on the list, but let’s just say I’m a lesbian. But I’m so many other things.

SEABROOK: Has that changed over time?

ELLIOTT: Hmm, no. I mean if you go back earlier, if you’re talking about—I dated guys and stuff in high school. The struggle for me was in high school and trying to— I knew at a very young age. I probably 5:00knew in third grade. I was deeply in love with my third grade teacher, and she was wonderful. And I knew then that something was not quite the same. She married a guy the next year. There was a part of our school that was under construction and she ended up marrying a guy who was in on the construction crew. I remember coming by the windows and looking in and seeing them talking after school and I was distressed. We had a bet, she had actually grown up in that town too, it was North Hagerstown Highschool and South Hagerstown Highschool, I was part of the North. We were hubs, whatever that is, and they were rebels on the other side of town. And so, the big game of the year was the north/south football game, it was the ending, and this may not seem pertinent right now but let me finish this story here. North High always lost and I was just so excited she bet me a candy bar. So I went 6:00into the store and bought the biggest candy bar I could find, because I was so excited about being able to give this woman a candy bar showing my love as a third grader. It was the best I could do. And that was the year of course that the other team won and I stayed home from school for about a week. I was really heartbroken. My mother- I don’t think they understood, I don’t think they ever put it all together, they just probably thought I was sick, but I was really really quite depressed. And my mom said “look you can still give her this candy bar, it can be a consolation prize.” I learned a new word, had no idea what consolation meant until then. So, that got me over the hump; and we swapped big candy bars. She had gotten me a big candy bar too, but I knew from then. So that’s teacher love, but I mean, it was something different, that’s what I knew from then on that I was just a little bit different, I mean, I just 7:00looked at the world in different ways, I think.

I experimented back and forth in high school, you know. I met a couple of people along the way. You don’t know who else is out there. You meet people along the way that seem to have the same feelings. Then in college I met a remarkable man, his name was Ira Zep [sp]. He was actually a religion and culture professor where I went to school at Western Maryland College. It’s now called McDaniel College. He was an incredible guy. Finally, I just was struggling so much and he just said “you know it’s just all about love. It doesn’t matter God is love, God is love!” I was like that’s what I needed to hear, cause I was struggling with that church fight too. But I remember distinctly having, coming across the quad in the evenings or having visited someone where I was just falling in love, head over heels with a woman and just being 8:00just so sick to my stomach I would just have to stop and wretch because I was just so torn up about it. But I got over that pretty quickly, [laughs] well maybe not quickly, but it took a while, but it tore me up for a while. But I just knew that I was gay, I was a lesbian and how do I operate in this world in the early eighties as that kind of a person. Well, I had to stay under a lot or people’s radar screens and did for probably a couple decades.

SEABROOK: Did you come out to anybody at that time?

ELLIOTT: Not really. I mean just people that you were with. And maybe we would make those little trips to the clandestine gay bars in D.C. There was a big event at the time called Sister Fire, and so I went to five or six different Sister Fire events, I guess, over the years. Then the Gay Pride Parade started. So you would go in en masse to these and these huge rallies and that kind of thing and find yourself in a sea of people and just go “wow!” They would just stretch up and down the streets of D.C. and that was 9:00amazing. So other than the bars there really wasn’t a place where we had community.

SEABROOK: So when you told me that you moved to Virginia Tech and determined to be out and open, when did that change between early 1980s when you’re kind of keeping it under wraps up until that point in the late 1990s?

ELLIOTT: I guess I’d grown to a comfort level. And I had been previously at William and Mary and I’d been working in athletics. And athletics is—I probably would have become a coach, but I knew that I didn’t want to have to deal with women in locker rooms and people confronting me and that kind of thing, so I was in sports information. I was probably one of the first sports information directors at division one schools. I was at Brown. One of seven women in the country at the time that we were doing this kind of work and I did it for twelve years at William and Mary. And it was good and I had a small 10:00circle of friends at William and Mary. There was a group that had formed called Lavender Light, but I still felt oppressed there by the people that I worked with in the Department of Athletics and that kind of thing. I just didn’t feel like I could be myself, so I was looking to not have so many— [referring to a noise] I am picking up a hum over here I don’t know. I totally lost my train of thought; I was talking about William and Mary—help me.

SEABROOK: You were talking about William and Mary. You still felt a little oppressed by your colleagues—

ELLIOTT: I did and I wanted to be able to lead a more open lifestyle. Sports information is you work 11:00weekends and evenings and nights because you are working when the games are. So I didn’t have weekends off for about nineteen years. Some in the summer, but it just became quite a consuming job. And so I wanted to get into university relations because I loved being on a college campus. I liked working around young people, I liked the opportunities, the culture, the theater and so I finally got into university relations at Virginia Tech. And just as soon as I interviewed here and when I came in to accept the position, after I’d spent a day interviewing and came back, I said “Look, my partner—I want to bring my partner, what do you have here? I mean, I know it’s the state of Virginia, so do you at least have a gym pass?” Actually, the person that hired me, his name was Dave Nutter and he ended up being, about a few years after that, a very conservative Republican member of our House of Representatives State 12:00Legislature here. I would constantly send him notes saying, “Dave, but you hired me and you knew. Why are you voting like this?” He’s a good guy though. And the Dean of this college— I report two ways, I report to University Relations and I report to the Dean of the college. And the Dean here was great at the time, Janet Johnson [sp], and the next Dean, Jerry Niles [sp], is the one that empowered me to do so many different things. He allowed me to be me, he sent me to leadership school at Virginia Commonwealth, called Higher Ground. And I developed some skills that I brought home and the next year I started Gay in Appalachia. So that was very empowering for me, to have someone who’s so supportive.

SEABROOK: Tell me about how you came to start Gay in Appalachia.

ELLIOTT: I’d been here five or six years I guess at that point. We had a caucus meeting and the same six, 13:00ten, twelve people would show up, and that was fine. And we’d have lunch, our monthly lunch, but we didn’t really do anything else. So we started—I knew Jeff Mann in the Department of English. And he was a very open gay poet, submitted lots of poems and won awards and I knew a woman over in Architecture, her name’s Carol Burch-Brown. Carol had done an oral history I had learned, but never seen it. Actually I think she had some slides or a little video too. The audio wasn’t great, but it was about a gay bar in Bluefield, a little neighboring West Virginia town, that was run as sort of a Appalachian town luncheonette during the day and ruled by this matriarch at night that had a baseball bat behind the counter. And I understand she packed a little bit more under her apron kind of attire, and they had drag shows and that kind of thing. So I knew these folks and I thought what an entertaining night that would 14:00be—wouldn’t it be neat. I talked to a few people in the caucus and they were like “well sure.” So I got the Women’s Center to pony up some money for a reception and we met in the Torgersen Museum and I said “let’s just call it Gay in Appalachia Celebration.” And a hundred and fifty people walked through the door that night. And it was just like the community was starving for something to do, for a rallying point, a place to see other people. And I couldn’t let it go, I couldn’t let it be one and done.

I talked with Jeff, and that was when Jeff had actually worked with Kerry and Michael Cline [sp], and he said [Jeff] “You know, they did this great play and it was about West Virginians and gay Appalachians there and they made a play out of it.” And I thought well that sounds really cool, so the next year I asked more people for money to bring the Clines here. And It’s just sort of grown ever since then. No one’s really ever turned me down for money; it’s been sort of—I mean when you ask they either, I don’t know whether they’re afraid to say no. “No I’m not gonna support gay pride!” But they’ve been very 15:00supportive all across campus. And each year I think we’ve always put a thoughtful element into it to too, as far as they speak to two or three different classes while they’re here, if they’re a performer or film or whatever. Depending on the topic—the year we brought in Daniel Carslick [sp] with For the Bible Tells Me So, we packed the lyric. We had to turn about a hundred people away and we also made sure, and he was so good with us, we had a dozen people at a clergy breakfast to discuss it. So we weren’t just talking to the regular members of the choir, we had voices at this table that really weren’t on board, but it was such a wonderful place to get to know each other and at least understand, there were a lot of different people in the room. It was good. So through the years it ebbed and flowed with people that could talk about politics or more poetry or other films, and here it is ten years later. And wow, the whole 16:00state’s different.

SEABROOK: Back tracking real quick, you mentioned the caucus is that the GLBT caucus?

ELLIOTT: LGBT. And we added the ‘T’ I guess in 2002. Caucus, yes it’s the faculty/ staff caucus and sometimes graduate students come. Our meetings are very open and we still just meet once a month for lunch at different places, but the couple of events that we really work with are Gay in Appalachia and now we have a Lavender Ceremony too.

SEABROOK: So let me ask you, what are your thoughts on the changes we’re seeing right now towards LGBTQ issues in our country, specifically Virginia?

ELLIOTT: I’m just stunned, really. I don’t think ten years ago when we started this little event, or as a 17:00person here in the middle of western Virginia, I didn’t think we’d ever have gay marriage. I didn’t think we’d ever have domestic partnerships even. That seemed the way to go. In fact, I was almost horrified when it started, when you started hearing that the push was for marriage. And I was just like oh they’re trying to take too much too soon. I was more of the baby steps trying to fall in line; and I was just aghast, and yet, wow, it made a difference. And Proposition 8 in California, I mean all the protests that came around that. But Massachusetts and New England states stepped up with the Civil Ceremonies and Civil Unions. I was just amazed, but I still didn’t think Virginia would ever come around and here we are. And I’m just still stunned, I really am. I mean it’s what, been three weeks since it’s passed and gone through, but it’s really hard to believe. And the other major victory that we just had this past month was 18:00the fact that they had the courage to add gender identity and gender expression to policy 1025 here. And I credit a lot of years of work from the commission, a lady that’s not here anymore that used to work in our HR department, her name was Maggie Sloan [sp]. I think she’s in North Carolina somewhere now, she retired. But she really really pushed this for many years. I remember the University Council meeting where it got booted down. I remember the people that stood up in the aisle and made a—I shouldn’t go there, that’s alright— that shot it down. And I’ve seen it come back and rise and thanks to Chad Mandala’s [sp] work and Christian Mattheis, a graduate student and our LGBT caucus chair. They’ve just helped push that policy through this year.

SEABROOK: That’s the university non-discrimination policy?

ELLIOTT: Mhmm.

SEABROOK: Can you tell me about how the changes in Virginia may affect you and your partner, if they 19:00will?

ELLIOTT: You know we’re actually exploring that over the next couple of months. It sort of tumbled in pretty quickly. When the court refused to hear it, all of the sudden that meant, that’s what triggered it. And I don’t think anybody was really totally prepared for that—I wasn’t. But we need to examine—I’m a practical, my partner Sharon has been married in the past she had a couple children that are now grown kids of course, but we need to make sure that—she can get social security, I think, from one of her marriages, she was married over ten years. So, you know, how does it affect us financially? I think there are certain things we just need to be smart about. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the golden key for us. I appreciate having that opportunity, we may, I’m not sure, but we’re examining all the options 20:00for that right now. Because retirement benefits are a big thing to, so we have a lot to consider.

SEABROOK: How did you and Sharon meet?

ELLIOTT: At a Halloween party [laughs]. Friends of ours, it was at an architect’s house in town. And I’d not been there really before and I’d only been in town, oh, two years maybe. And I decided I would be a bag of M&Ms and I met this gypsy. And actually it was the first time Sharon had been out; her partner had died a year before of cancer. And I have a gay man by the name of Steve Pickford to thank for our meeting because apparently went in and said “Sharon, you are getting out of the house. It’s time, lets go to this party.” So he got out his little make up bag and went through it and pulled things out of her 21:00closet, so she says, here and there, and turned her into a gypsy. And we met and went on a little walk where all the gay boys carved such great jack-o-lanterns you wouldn’t believe it, they were gorgeous! And we went along this little sidewalk and walked and talked. And then we emailed for several months and it was a great meeting, great party.

SEABROOK: Sounds fun [laughter]. Lets see. So we’ve touched on your work here at Virginia Tech, can we go through that a little more in depth? Tell me about your diversity work on campus and your involvement with LGTBQ organizations here.

ELLIOTT: Well, diversity work is very important on many fronts. I mean, I think we need to honor—and diversity’s such a weird word. I mean, there’s diversity —we have the most diverse college in the whole 22:00university. And I’ve always appreciated diversity of thought, diversity of scholarship. I take the broad based approached to it and I take a multicultural approach to it with study abroads and that kind of thing. I pride myself in being pretty much the PR person for this college. The communications director for the college and being able to show that we’re involved in so many different things and we have so much to offer. So I approach my job in that manner. And for me personally, I need to be authentic. And so for me it was always natural to join the diversity committees and add my voice to the conversation as an out woman and also for whatever underrepresented groups that didn’t seem to be having a voice at the table. Because, you know golly, we’re all unique and everybody deserves to have their voice heard. 23:00And I think for the most part on the university campuses we can hear individual voices, but it’s the bigger social institutional areas or churches that tend to squelch the individual voices. So that’s what we have to be aware of. But anyway, I feel like it’s been a pretty good fit for me to be able to communicate those messages and be able to participate on diversity committees in the college, starting several rallies, whether it’s the rally when Dean DePauw’s partner was not allowed, they denied her her job when her partner came to campus back in 2002. Then they decided to try and get affirmative action, stripped that out of our hiring plan in 2003. There have been moments, the ‘It Gets Better’ rally a few years ago. I 24:00mean, unfortunately we tend to be a reactive group, or have been, rather than proactive, but at least we respond. And in the case of gender identity and expression, we’re actually ahead of the curve. It’s not something we’re reacting to, we’re actually out in front of many other universities on that. So does that answer the question?

SEABROOK: I think so. So who have been some of your major allies here at Tech?

ELLIOTT: Well I have to start with the Women’s Center, since they were the first ones to sponsor us and I sort of drifted to the Women’s Center and Ellen Plumber [sp] and some of the other folks that have been in charge, Anna LoMascolo, have been great directors. And they’ve been very helpful and friendly in helping us put some events on. Jerry Niles [sp] again, the Dean of the college that had been here, was 25:00very empowering. I think Mark McNamee as Provost, he’s attended several Gay in Appalachia’s and I was always surprised that he would put the time into it, but I think he’s a pretty thoughtful guy and I think he’s been a supporter too. But even more recently, we’ve got Patty Perillo and Hal Irvin in Human Resources has been, even though he came from Georgia which is a very conservative state, I remember he met with Ken Belcher [sp] and I, Ken and I were co chairs of the caucus at the time, right here in Wallace Atrium. And we were discussing sort of the dismal bleak political scene of Virginia at the time. No way did we think we’d be getting health benefits or anything, but he said that he would try and he would attend a caucus meeting here and there and, by golly, he’s really come through. I mean, he’s helped push, he’s helped sponsor things, he was at Gay in Appalachia this weekend, he asked us to do a 26:00webinar last week, that was for the community, for faculty and staff employees on LGBTQ issues. He’s just been terrific too, so it’s not hard to find allies, they’re out there. Really, I think on the university campus there’s a lot of support.

SEABROOK: How about some of the more challenges that you may personally have faced since you’ve been working here?

ELLIOTT: Hmm challenges—

SEABROOK: Maybe any negative reactions to you working at the university as an out and open gay woman?

ELLIOTT: You know, I think there’s been subtle things and I think there’ve been things behind my back, and I think I probably have not advanced beyond the position I came in at a little bit because of that, but 27:00that’s okay, because I feel like it’s a good fit here. Yeah, there’s certainly some. I don’t want to name them by name, but I feel like there’s been some people that certainly aren’t or haven’t been in my fan club [laughs] and people in higher positions and that’s fine, we’ll just leave it at that.

SEABROOK: Okay. And how has Virginia Tech been different, I know you touched on this briefly, but I’m interested in hearing a little more about—you worked at Brown and William and Mary before this, before coming to Virginia Tech, and I was just wondering if you could elaborate on how things were different there. And I know it was an earlier time as well.

ELLIOTT: It was, and I was a younger person. I mean, I think Brown in Rhode Island, I think that was [pause] that was at a time when I was just getting into my first job so I was more about the work force 28:00and that was what was important for that, but I think New England is a refreshing atmosphere. When I came back south of the Mason Dixon line to take the job at William and Mary, I sort of felt like I was digging my heels into the soil and going backwards again a little bit politically, socially. But William and Mary, you know, you had your pocket of friends, but again, when you move you have a chance to recreate yourself and I took advantage of that opportunity because I’d become of an age where I either didn’t care or decided it was pertinent. I’m a big fan of honesty and if I can’t be honest with everybody of who I am, then I’m just a big phony myself. So, it’s just so freeing to not have that garbage and carry that around. That everybody knows and that’s fine, you know, we start from there.

But, this is just sort of a tangent I guess, but, once you come out, you don’t stop coming out. It’s a process. You come out again and again and again and I mean, it can be a bit tedious and you figure ok, they’ll eventually find out or maybe I should tell them. Then you’re sort of always thinking to yourself what do I need to do in this occasion again, as you meet new people along the way. But, each time usually you get another refresh. I know it’s not always like that. I know there have been lots of people on campus, in fact, just this past week, one of the people that was in Revelations, a play that we did last week for the tenth annual Gay in Appalachia, one of the people came out to all the people he worked with on campus in his office and he was not received very well. So, that’s something we still battle with 30:00very much. I mean, people that he’d been very close to just sort of looked up and shook their head because he had invited them to this and said he was in the play and he was so excited, so excited and a joy to have in this play. And it was very disappointing. He said another person that he was very close to and talks to a lot just totally averted eyes and walked past him in the hallway. So, we have a lot of ground that we still need to gain here. And we need not just gay marriage we need plus one benefits. Anybody that works here that is able to provide insurance to somebody else in their family, it should just be plus one. It should be domestic partner or plus one. It shouldn’t have to be marriage. So yeah, there are many challenges yet. Personally, I guess I see the challenges through a lot of other people.

SEABROOK: Do you involve yourself in politics beyond the university level at all?

ELLIOTT: Well I vote [laughter]. I guess Equality Virginia, I attend some of their events and am an advocate. They are a chosen tax deduction for me because I think their advocacy voice and legal state voice in our capital is very important, but beyond that I stay pretty local.

SEABROOK: And they gave you an award right?

ELLIOTT: Yeah they did, a couple years ago, I was a ‘Outstanding Virginian,’ OUTstanding Virginian. That was very humbling and I was surprised.

SEABROOK: I would actually like to back track a little further even and talk more about your childhood in 32:00western Maryland and as someone who was maybe struggling with coming to grips with your sexuality, what was that like coming up in the sixties, seventies border state?

ELLIOTT: You know, I don’t remember much beyond, I knew I was different and I struggled but, I mean I really had pretty much an idyllic childhood. I felt that I was surrounded by love and very loving parents. I had a very good family. And I knew that, I recognized that at the time. I knew growing up that my family was special, it seemed like. My mother was one of nine, my dad was one of five, we had lots of family reunions. There just seemed to be a lot of love. And it didn’t really, you know, growing up wasn’t actively- sexuality wasn’t really kicking in, and so I had a good childhood. It was the mental anguish and I 33:00struggled with that more, probably most, in college.

SEABROOK: Were you aware of changes going on in other parts of the country having to do with gay rights?

ELLIOTT: No. Until I got to college, I probably, that’s when, you know, you turn eighteen and then you could do a lot of things that you couldn’t do before. And then you had your wheels and you could get to some of these other places and you could get to bars. At that time, actually, the drinking age, and you could go to bars as an eighteen year old. I was grandfathered in I think, a couple years after I graduated, thank goodness! [laughter] So it wasn’t in my young days, I just knew I was different, but I couldn’t pin 34:00point any anxieties over it, I just lived with it.

SEABROOK: And you mentioned your struggles with religion as well. Did you grow up in the church?

ELLIOTT: Very much so. We were Methodists. I was in the choir and I was in the, what was it? The MYF, Methodist Youth Fellowship, I guess. And hand bells, and I was very active, I was always in leadership roles and doing all kinds of things, and that was fine. I mean, I had good friends in church and yet, to this day, the Methodists still are not an affirming, open and affirming church. And so, I haven’t really gone back to the church here in Blacksburg. I’ve been to several other churches. I started accompanying choirs and directing choirs when I was still in Williamsburg at a Methodist church. And the preacher said they’re still— he didn’t support me. I came out to him and I didn’t get a very good response and that 35:00was very dissapointing. So I shopped around here and found Glade, which is an open affirming United Church of Christ church here in town. And I really adored the pastor there, Kelly Sisin [sp], she’s not there anymore, but we had a great rapport. And I worked with her a couple times a week as the choir director, we had to go back and forth. It was great, and my mom came up and they would come to some services and because it was an open and affirming church I think she, their eyes were turned and opened a little bit too. That was a good way to communicate with them about everything. So, that’s good.

SEABROOK: So church here sounds like it’s been a good social space. Are there other spaces? I know you’ve mentioned being a member of several communities and not wanting to pigeonhole yourself. But, 36:00what are the spaces for LGBTQ expression in Blacksburg, or at the university that you’ve either taken a part in or recognized over the years?

ELLIOTT: Well over the years, the caucus was sort of the group. I have a large circle of women friends and we tend to get down, have a place at the river, and we have parties at the river quite a bit. And there was quite a bit of time when we had monthly dinners somewhere in town with a group of women. And back in the day we had great basketball, it was called ‘Bonnie Ball,’ the coach’s name was Bonnie Hendrickson [sp] and we’d all meet at this place called Boggins, which is now 6/11 or some other, and they had great crabs, like $4.99 for crab legs and you go and have beer and Bonnie Ball. So that was a great group that we’d get together for that. Beyond that, pockets of LGBT, I don’t know. Like I said, I’ve 37:00operated in lots of other circles and I’m very active in a canoe group and that kind of thing, but they’re not specifically LGBT. They’re very accepting.

SEABROOK: How have you noticed the student body changing since you’ve been here, since you’ve been in an administrative position?

ELLIOTT: That’s a very good question because that, I think is where I’ve seen the most change. We have students coming in now, some are still very very closeted and shy, but there are many who come in very out and open and just really willing to “Whoa I’m at college and here we go!” They’re just so excited and they have such great programming now. Over the last ten years, like I said, when Gay in Appalachia started, no one, even the students then, didn’t have a whole lot of active programing that I knew or 38:00heard about, but since then, I mean they’ve got drag shows, and they’ve got, you know, LGBT history month has come into vogue in the last three to four years, and we also have, I guess in the fourth year of an LGBT coordinator that we helped get into place. So we’ve come a long way and the students, I think, have been a refreshing rallying cry in both programming and support groups. I know Monday they have a support group that meets, so they’ve really come a long long way.

SEABROOK: Has it been the case at all that students seek you out as a support or resource?

ELLIOTT: Yeah, we partnered with the students when we tried, when we wanted to start a Lavender Ceremony. And we worked with the students and yeah, they were interested, and by golly, we had the first Lavender Ceremony. We had five or six people, I guess, that actually came forward and got their 39:00little rainbow cord to wear with their academic regalia and were recognized as LGBT students. So that was a good partnership, and off and on along the way, you find someone that really wants to talk. I’m getting a little bit older than a lot of them now so I think really, they really connect with this LGBT Coordinator person. They work out of Multicultural Programs and Services and they’re really close to their age. I think the first person who had that job was well appointed and she did it for two years, her name was Catherine Cotrupi, and she was fabulous and really got everything started and in a good direction. So I think that’s where a lot of the change elements came, was when. The two years prior to that, she had been a graduate student and I think that’s when things really started picking up with the students and they started the Queer and Professional Graduate thing, so they had a graduate 40:00organization too.

SEABROOK: When were those programs starting?

ELLIOTT: That started about five years ago, when Catherine Cotrupi was in her second year of her masters degree, and then she took this other job as coordinator. But I think she started out as a graduate student, so she was a real leader.

SEABROOK: Is there anything else that you would like to add that I haven’t asked you yet?

ELLIOTT: I can’t think of anything. I’ve rambled on. I mean, it doesn’t take much to trigger me and I try to not just give you yes and no answers. So I’ve really elaborated, I think. I can’t think of anything else.

SEABROOK: Can I ask you maybe what, if there were any major surprises of being here at Virginia Tech in your life? What were the most surprising moments that you’ve experienced in relationship to your 41:00sexuality?

ELLIOTT: Surprising—

SEABROOK: Or just unexpected?

ELLIOTT: Yeah. You know to me, starting Gay in Appalachia, I was just so surprised at the response of the first one, and then I continued to be surprised at how many people, because after that we went to two hundred people and filled up a room in Torgersen for the second one and then Revelations and I think that was our peak as far as attendance. But I guess I’m always surprised. There’s always somebody that comes up to me and says something, like this past one, “this really helped me,” “this has been the best week I’ve ever had.” We had a student after the first one, somebody, he wasn’t a student here he came 42:00from Wytheville and he’d just been kicked out of his church. He had been their youth leader and helper and was so devoted and dedicated and yet he was struggling with his sexuality and I think they got wind of it and they [clapping sound] kicked him out of his church. And we had a ninety minute discussion after the first Revelations partly because this young man came out and we had all these Glade Church people there and everybody was supportive and saying “I thought I was so alone and I see all these people.” So it’s those kind of things that surprise me. It’s not been bad surprises, they’ve been pleasant surprises. And, frankly, deeper, bigger. This gentleman went on to seminary thanks to the support he got that night and he is now in Arizona and he’s a pastor. He’s a great guy, he met his partner in Engineering and 43:00they live out there together. So I mean, it’s been pleasant surprises along the way of the impact of some of these things that you just turn around and you think it’s about over and somebody says that and you go I guess I still need to keep going on.

SEABROOK: So where do you see Gay in Appalachia going over the next few years? What’s your hope for that?

ELLIOTT: I’m hoping, I’m looking at succession planning. I wrestled with having it this year and I thought well, no we’ll go ahead and we’ll go for ten and then we’ll see. And you know, in a couple of weeks I’m meeting with a group of students and graduate students and Mark Smiley, who is the new coordinator, and we’re gonna talk. Because we have an awful lot of programming now, and we’re not siloed so much, but we are. There’s a lot of students, there is Queer People Of Color, there is Outstem. So hopefully we 44:00don’t splinter too much, we’re a small enough group, we don’t need to splinter, but hopefully this is adopted by another couple people, it’s adopted by the student organization and it’ll go on and go forth that way. I don’t know, sometimes I think it has played itself out, because we have so many other resources for people to go to now. So I don’t know, I am mulling that over this very moment, the weekend after Gay in Appalachia.

SEABROOK: Well I think that’s about all I had, so thank you very much.

ELLIOTT: Okay. Thank you Tom, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time.

SEABROOK: Thank you.

[Jean Elliot Part 3 interview]

ELLIOTT: Just taking a moment to talk about LGBT scholarship. For a long time, the caucus tried to have an account with the Virginia Tech Foundation, and really we couldn’t get at the money and we weren’t 45:00raising enough money and they didn’t want to have anything to do with us, so we decided that we would take our own bank account back. And we decided that we really needed to honor an LGBT student, someone that was a leader in the community, and as a student had done some research or just was an activist in their own right. And so when we started the Lavender Ceremony, we decided we would start an LGBT scholarship. So the caucus would do the bake sale route, usually through Gay in Appalachia. We would ask for money or donations as people came in the door and for every year, we had a five hundred dollar scholarship. And actually I think one year we had two and that’s because the Reverend Phelps [sp] came to town and you wouldn’t think that that would be the same name that you would hear with LGBT issues in a positive manner, but we had a wonderful student that went around and collected money on behalf of an LGBT scholarship and worked the crowd as this guy worked a 46:00corner in town, and so, by golly, we had two five hundred dollar scholarships that year, thanks to that industrious young man.

And the other thing with the scholarship, we’ve decided that it needs to become endowed, because if Gay in Appalachia goes away, we need a mechanism that this will continue. So we’ve decided to partner with Community Foundation of the New River Valley, rather than our own Virginia Tech foundation. And that’s because the Community Foundation is out in the community in Pulaski County, they’re out in rural Giles County, they’re out in Floyd, where they have all these other scholarships. So students at these high schools get to see a list of the scholarships and they get to see an LGBT scholarship. So we think that maybe it just might give them hope. They may not have counselors that are willing to talk about it, but they see that wow, they’re actually honoring someone who is LGBT. So we wanted to be able to give people that hope in a high school in these areas. So we’re close, we start getting endowment funds 47:00when we reach ten thousand, and we’re about sixty five hundred. So we’ve got a little ways to go, but we just started that last year. It was important to our community to be noted in this fashion, where we recognize academia the way people recognize academics.

SEABROOK: And who is Reverend Phelps, who you mentioned?

ELLIOTT: Oh. He’s like Voldemort [laughter]. ‘The name that must not be named!’ He’s with the Baptist Church. I can’t even think of the real name of their church from out in the Midwest, but he comes and—

SEABROOK: Westboro?

ELLIOTT: Westboro Baptist Church, yes, absolutely that’s it. And they come and petition in the most awful places. They’ll go to people’s funerals, or they’ll go to public places that had just had a horrific event and then say “God hates fags” and have their little children hold up awful posters and banners on 48:00the street. So our crowd overcame this however, and had a better offering.

SEABROOK: Good. Well thank you for that addition.

ELLIOTT: Yeah thanks for Westboro [laughter]. Ok, that’s good. We also have an Ally of the Year Award too, that we started this year. Let me just give you a little bit of background on the Ally of the Year.

SEABROOK: Please do.

ELLIOTT: We started that the same year we started the Lavender Ceremony. And this year was particularly special, because a woman by the name of Joanne Underwood was in the audience. We’d asked her to be there because we were presenting her the Ally of the Year Award. She had worked here in the seventies, eighties, nineties. And it was because of her that the student organization finally got to take off, because she was a faculty person, she actually worked in the health center. They called her ‘the condom lady,’ because she was great! She handed out condoms, she was very approachable. It was the 49:00onslaught of AIDS in the early eighties and she was a person of information and she had no fear. She was wonderful, she was approachable and she said “I would be happy to be your faculty advisor.” So here’s this wonderful straight woman and her husband and that’s how the Gay Student Alliance, which was what it was called at the time, became an official student organization. And so we have decided not only to give her the Ally of the Year award, but we decided to call it the Underwood Ally of the Year. And this lady, who is now eighty-five, was just so delighted and so— she just put both hands up to her neck and she nods her head and she’s just so cute and she was just so well received too. I’m very glad that we were able to do that. [pause] I promise that’s it.