Dave Isay - Ties That Bind: Stories of Love and Gratitude from the First Ten Years of StoryCorps

O n October 23, 2003, the legendary oral historian Studs Terkel, ninety-one years old at the time, stood in front of a small sound studio aglow in the middle of Grand Central Terminal. Today we shall begin celebrating the lives of the uncelebrated! he said, pointing at our first recording booth. Were in Grand Central Terminal. We know there was an architect, but who hung the iron? Who were the brick masons? Who swept the floors? These are the noncelebrated people of our country. In this kiosk, those anonymous peoplethe noncelebratedwill speak of their lives!

Ten years and more than fifty thousand interviews later, StoryCorps stands as the largest collection of noncelebrated voices ever gathered in historyindeed, it stands as the largest collection of any voices ever gathered in history: almost one hundred thousand participants, recorded in more than a thousand locations and in all fifty states; eighteen terabytes of data, with hundreds of stories broadcast across the nation and around the world.

StoryCorps started out as a simple, if somewhat crazy, idea: build a soundproof booth where you can interview the most important person in your life with the help of a trained facilitator. The interview is structured to encourage people to dig deepmany think of it as If I had forty minutes left to live what would I ask this person who means so much to me? At the end of each session, the participants walk away with a CD copy of their interview, and StoryCorps sends another copy to the Library of Congress, where it becomes part of Americas history. Someday, the great-great-great-grandchildren of StoryCorps participants will get the chance to meet their ancestors through this recording.

StoryCorps was built on a series of basic ideas Id come to embrace in my twenties and thirties while working as a documentary radio producer: that a microphone gives people the license to ask questions of others that they wouldnt normally ask, and that being listened to reminds people how much their lives matter. StoryCorps is based on the belief that we can discover the most profound and exquisite poetry in the words and stories of the noncelebrated people around us, if we just have the courage to ask meaningful questions and the patience to listen closely to the answers.

Many of these ideas began taking shape for me twenty-five years ago, just after Id graduated from college. In 1988, I was twenty-two years old and about to start medical school, when I was lucky enough to fall into public radio completely by accident. One afternoon I walked into a small shop on New Yorks Lower East Side owned by a married coupleboth recovering heroin addicts with HIVwho told me about their dream of building a full-scale museum dedicated to stories of addiction before they died. While their task was clearly impossible, their spirits were remarkable. When I got home, I called every TV and radio station in the yellow pages to try to convince them to do a story about the pair. No one was the least bit interesteduntil I got to the news director of a local community radio station, a woman named Amy Goodman. She told me that it sounded like a good idea, but that she didnt have anyone available at the station to cover it. Why dont you do it yourself? she asked. So I took a recorder and interviewed the couple at their shop. When the story was aired on the station the next evening, a producer from NPR in Washington, DC, happened to be driving through town, heard the piece, and picked it up for national broadcast. I promptly withdrew from medical school to start down this new path. I had found my calling.

A few months before recording that story, I had also accidentally discovered that my father was gay. He and my mother had been marriedextremely happily, I thoughtfor twenty-five years, and the revelation came as a shock. I was having a tough time dealing with the newsand with my dad. Once I started working in public radio, though, I thought I might be able to begin making sense of it all with a microphone and tape recorder. I wanted to understand more about my father and what his life had been like, but I wasnt ready to hear it from him.

One day my dad mentioned the Stonewall riots. Id never heard of them, but I was intrigued and decided to learn more. I found out that on June 28, 1969, the police raided Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Manhattans Greenwich Village, and, with billy clubs drawn, they tried to shut it down. This was a common occurrence in gay bars all across New York City at that timebut on a series of nights that June, the patrons fought back. Nothing like it had ever happened before, and it sparked the modern gay rights movement in this country.

I decided to set off with a tape recorder to track down everyone I could find who might help me understand the riots, and what life was like for gay people in the years before. The microphone gave me the freedom to go places, meet people, and ask questions that otherwise would have felt completely out of bounds.

In New Yorks East Village, I found an elderly gay woman named Jheri living in senior housing just a few blocks from my apartment, who helped me understand the soul-numbing shame, fear, and abuse that ran rampant in the years before Stonewall. I met tough old Irish bartenders who exploded all of my preconceived notions of gay men. And I met Sylvia Rivera, who, as an eighteen-year-old drag queen and street kid, fought valiantly and viciously on the nights of the riots. No matter how many times she was clobbered with batons, she kept coming back for more. She was heroic and historictoday many consider her the Rosa Parks of the gay rights movement. Sylvia was the bravest and toughest person I had ever met.