Archambeau - Pride & Joy: LGBTQ Artists, Icons and Everyday Heroes

Pride & Joy:

LGBTQ Artists, Icons and Everyday Heroes

Kathleen Archambeau

Copyright 2017 Kathleen Archambeau.

Published by Mango Publishing Group, a division of Mango Media Inc.

Cover Design: Laura Meja

Layout & Design: Laura Meja

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Pride & Joy: LGBTQ Artists, Icons and Everyday Heroes

Library of Congress Cataloging
Name: Kathleen Archambeau
Title: Pride & Joy: LGBT Artists, Icons and Everyday Heroes
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017906349

ISBN: (paperback) 978-1-63353-550-3, (ebook) 978-1-63353-551-0

BISAC category code BIO031000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / LGBT

Printed in the United States of America

As a producer and literary rep, I have long been committed to inclusion and diversity regarding gender, race, and sexual orientation. My co-authored book, Dating Your Character, focuses on helping writers create multi-dimensional, non-stereotypical characters as Kathleen has shown in real-life stories in this extraordinary book. Im delighted to endorse Pride & Joy: LGBTQ Artists, Icons and Everyday Heroes,
as it spotlights queer luminaries living open, fulfilling,
happy and successful livesa departure from many
LGBTQ portrayals.

Marilyn R. Atlas
Sundance Film Festival Award-Winning Co-Producer,
Real Women Have Curves (HBO)
Co-Author of Dating Your Character (Stairway Press, 2016)

Kathleen Archambeau wrote a regular column of inspiring profiles for one of the longest-running and largest LGBTQ newspapers in the country, the San Francisco Bay Times. Were proud to have been her first public forum. Her book, Pride & Joy: LGBTQ Artists, Icons and Everyday Heroes, tells the in-depth stories of 30 global queer icons and is sure to embolden the next generation and give hope to those still struggling with their sexual and gender identity.

Betty Sullivan, PhD
Publisher, San Francisco Bay Times (Founded in 1978)
First LGBT newspaper in California and one of the first in the world

Pride & Joy: LGBTQ Artists, Icons and Everyday Heroes not only highlights the contributions of LGBT citizens to world culture, but shows young queer students that being openly gay can bring you happiness, fulfillment and success. The impact it will have on our next generation, as well as on all those who care about social justice, will be significant.

Mark Leno
First Openly Gay Man Elected to the
California State Senate
Author, SB48, the Fair, Accurate,
Inclusive and Respectful (F.A.I.R.) Education Act (2011):
(Ensures LGBT people and persons
with disabilities are integrated into Education textbooks
and social studies curricula in California public schools)
California State Senator (2008-2016)
California State Assembly (2002-2008)

Table of Contents

Foreword by
Dustin Lance Black

Academy Award, Best Original Screenplay, Milk, 2009

Writer : J. Edgar, 2011 ; 8 the Play, 2013

ABC TV mini-series creator: When We Rise, 2017

Growing up in a conservative, Mormon, military home in San Antonio, Texas, some would say the deck was stacked against me. I knew I was gay from around six years old and was certain that meant I was going to hell. If anyone ever found out, Id be shunned by my peers and bring great shame to my family. In a massive turn of luck, my mom fell in love with an Army soldier who had orders to ship out to California. We packed up our yellow Malibu Classic and headed West. It was there I first heard the true story of Harvey Milk, an openly gay leader who won at the ballot box by extinguishing fear with hope. Hearing his story literally saved my life.

As a filmmaker working behind the scenes in Hollywood, I could be openly gay and mostly avoid homophobia. So when my screenplay for Milk won the Academy Award, I followed my forefathers and foremothers examples and shared my own story on the Oscars massive stage in hopes of sending yet another message of hope to LGBTQ viewers who had been shunned, marginalized, turned out by their families, or condemned by their churches. I ended my speech that night with a wish of my ownthat perhaps one day Id fall in love and get married, too. After half a decade of work as an activist and organizer fighting for marriage equality, I am now engaged to a professional athlete with even greater passion and discipline (not to mention abs) than I will ever have, and we live happily in London together today. My dream has come true. But even with marriage equality won in the US, our larger, global dreams of LGBTQ equality for all are still far from realized.

For too long our stories have been robbed from us, buried in fear and shame. Until recently, we would have been labeled mentally ill or criminal for even claiming our stories as our own. In many countries that is still the case. So diving back into an excavation of our long buried LGBTQ history with ABCs miniseries, When We Rise , I gathered a group of diverse artists to help tell more of our stories in an even more inclusive fashion. But even this effort only scratches the surface. Far more light must be shed on who we are and where we come from. It is our combined histories, efforts, and stories that help define us as a people, pull us out of isolation, bring us together in community, and inspire us to rise up by reminding us that we have risen before, fought back before, faced backlash before, and won. Sharing our stories and our histories is not an exercise in nostalgia. Our history laid manifest is the foundation of our power.

Tom Daley, British Olympic diver and his fianc, Dustin Lance Black, in London, UK

This book, Pride & Joy: LGBTQ Artists, Icons and Everyday Heroes, by longtime LGBTQ activist Kathleen Archambeau, empowers queer youth to do more than survive, but to thrive, whatever the challenges, whatever the losses, whatever the risks, wherever you find yourself. It encourages LGBTQ citizens of the world to live open, happy, fulfilling, strong and successful lives, and utilizes the power of true stories to demonstrate that a brighter, freer future is possible even in what feel like impossible circumstances. The stories told in this book are not simply reflections. Combined and shared, they have the power to help us recognize and fortify our own tremendous strength.

I dont want LGBTQ youth coming out to their parents to experience what I did when my liberal, native San Franciscan, Irish-American Catholic mother responded, Id love all my children even if they were murderers, drug addicts, or prostitutes. She sincerely thought she was being broad-minded, to which I replied, Do you realize, Mom, that youre comparing being gay to being criminal, mentally ill, or dissolute? Redemption came that next Mothers Day when she asked for the book, Love, Ellen: A Mother Daughter Journey, by Betty DeGeneres, instead of flowers . Identifying with a celebrity mother reconciled my mother to the fact that her firstborn was a lesbian and it wasnt the end of the world. I dont want LGBTQ young professionals to experience what I did as a closeted lesbian in a corporation where it was literally dangerous to come out in the early 1980s. In one of my Persuasive Speaking classes at a Silicon Valley high-technology company, one of my students, an educated male American engineer, delivered a speech justifying murder for only five crimes, one of which was homosexuality. At another tech company, I was outed by a former friend and colleague and subsequently fired by a cracker CEO. A labor lawyer advised that I had no recourse since I was not out and couldnt prove that this was a targeted layoff. The next corporate job, I was out to my department, but not to the salespeople I was training around the world. When the secretary outed me to the entire building at corporate headquarters, I had recourse with my boss and HR because I was out and was, subsequently, promoted, and the secretary moved to another building with a stern warning. One night during Pride week in San Franciscos Castro District, I was walking with my partner and a group of teenagers taunted us, threatening to attack us when, fortunately, a phalanx of gay men from a nearby bar came out and surrounded us, protecting us from what was sure to become yet another hate crime. When I first met my Kiwi wife, she was not a citizen and we couldnt marry in the US. This caused us to make all kinds of jujitsu moves; from becoming Civil Union partners in New Zealand to carrying Power of Attorney papers everywhere we went to paying extraordinary taxes and tax preparation fees because we could not marry. That was not that long ago: Marriage Equality was just won in the US Supreme Court on June 26, 2015.