events we will be covering this week. monday where i politics and prose bookstore in washington d.c. to hear journalist joe - talk about a drug cartel for the following day back in the nation's capital when historian john chandler will become the life of patrick henry at an event hosted by the smithsonian institution. thursday we will be at busboys and poets in washington for formal radio personality -- on his time in the music industry. and in baltimore photographer allen talks about the uprising following the death of freddie gray. those are some of the events will be covering this week. many of these are open to the public.look for them to aaron the new preacher on booktv on c-span2.

>> thank you all for joining us this evening. it is nice to see all of you and some new faces in the crowd.if this is your first time visiting we welcome you. we are the oldest society and the country and we are inviting people for 226 years. we are an independent nonprofit organization. we offer training for educators, and material for researchers. looking back at how we planned this evening's program i can say that there has been about a year in the making.last august brenda lawson our head of collection services mentioned that papers of gerry studds was processed and ready for researchers. she also mentioned that mark robert schneider, was because even he had been using this to research a book.

on august 2016 he agreed to speak here so we are ready to go! it has been quite some time in the making. this is often the source of our public programs. this is worth acknowledging that the collection of papers was donated to us by dean harris the widower of studds. we thank him for the contribution. a selection material from this collection has also been on display in the library upstairs if he did not have a chance to see it peter has offered to make it available after the program for a few minutes. as an independent nonprofit institution papers like this and making them available to researchers is all done through the support of all members and donors.if you support this work and enjoy public programs such as this evening we hope

that you will become a member or supporter of massachusetts historical society.gerry studds was the first openly gay congressman. he is known for finding aids research and marriage equality. he was a champion of the coastal and environmental issues and help protect the american fishing industry. he was among the leading congress congressional opponents of president reagan's - in central america. he had a long and distinguished career. and our speaker mark robert schneider has written the first full biography of gerry studds. he teaches at college and university also the author of several books. -- and fossen confronts jim crow among others. please let me in welcoming mark robert schneider. a plasma >> i would like to thank the

massachusetts historical society for inviting me and for hosting and chairing the meeting. this is a magnificent place for historians to work in a real pleasure for me to work on the book here at massachusetts historical society.i would like to thank all of you for coming. and there is no music without you. without an audience i think we would just give up if we didn't get a chance to speak. so, there are three major themes in this book. the way that ideas gerry studds was, i never met him personally but i knew of him during the 1980s because i was an activist on central america issues. and he was the great national

champion of peace and central america. and so one of the themes i will be talking about tonight is that. he was most known in his district of course were being a champion of environmental issues in a voice for fishermen. especially in the early part of this career. finally after he came out the reason for writing the book, is that he is america's first openly gay congressman. and he after coming out, he spoke out on the important issues at the time. working his way through all of those is also informed by his life. early on in the process of writing the book, my first interaction with it was when i met dean. the encouragements read the book. very early gave me gary's memoir.

gerry studds with a terrific writer. his memoir was never published. my guess is that he felt uncomfortable writing about people who either were still in the closet or with him he had interacted and he did not quite know how to work out how to identify them and had a kind of just reticence about things. but he is quite frank about life. a very unusual for a politician. typical politician's memoirs are you know how we make the sausage in the background kind of thing. and very little thought the private life. gary's book does a terrific job with that. so gerry studds came from - i took him to be a yankee from a long-established family. especially with a name like gerry studds. it turned out he is not.

it is to no fault of his own on his mother's side, he is a catholic from new york and his father side are southerners. while he looked like a person of wealth, actually, his family moved there sometime after the war and he never quite felt like he fit in with the people in his upper class surroundings.the happiest time of his early life was when he went to school. there, he blossomed academically and developed his love for language as he learned german and french. while he was there and really advanced work for a high school student. i'm going to let this stand in for his next part of his academic career which was at yale.

by the time he was 17 or 18 he really began to come to grips with his sexual identity. this was very painful and difficult for him. this was the 1950s.he was born in 1937. and i would guess that of, the 50s for a time of relative oppression on this issue as well as on others. while he was at yale, he dated woman. nobody, i interviewed people with him he went to school and both places and none of them had any idea. and he was gay. and of course the word that was homosexual. grappling with this issue, he began to try to find out what this meant. and he went to the library one night to get a book on sex and turned to the pages on

homosexuality only to find they had been ripped out. this was a clue that there were other people who were wrestling with the same issues privately. during the 1950s, this is a poster from the - society. most of you may remember this was the homosexual civil rights organization. during the 1950s gays and lesbians sexual activity is criminalized. virtually everywhere. they were condemned by the church as a they believe that there was a mental condition that might be cured by talking or maybe by electric shock. and he was considered to be a traitor and therefore barred from civil service. so that is the atmosphere in which he had to work his way

through his own identity. after college he got a job at the department of state. he had a strong inclination to work on public policy. he had done things like that when he was in college. and he was strong in languages. he is french skills got him what would have been an assignment in in a french - contribute he became disillusioned with state fairly early on. although it was it kennedy ministration this was the bay of pigs and the beginning of the war in vietnam. and studds was opposed to both of those things. he was never able to get anywhere in raising these issues. he was an extremely junior person. so he took a side job temporary leaving his position with an

interagency group that was actually planning volunteers and service to america.when he was done with the assignment which was quite successful, he then had to reapply for his position at state. the process dragged on and on. his friends were interviewed, he has assumed he would get this job back. it did not happen. he couldn't quite figure out why but in his memoir he said it was beginning to dawn on me that they had suspicions about my sexual identity. which he had very much shut down and was living very much in the closet. sure enough, after he kept pushing to find out what had happened, he was led into an office with a psychiatrist. and he realized that they were not going to let him back. so now here he is, a young

adult driven out of his first job he had for reasons that are mysterious to him. and he now gets a job through a fraternity brother at yale at in new hampshire and saint - now it is 1965. he's a great teacher widely liked by his students. he taught history and what was becoming the emerging field of american studies in which he gradually acquired a masters while he was teaching at st. paul's. now he was popular with the students but he was unpopular with the faculty and administration.this is the. of the vietnam and probably some of you like me were participants in the antiwar

movement. studds became the advisor to the antiwar students and the dorm counselor to the offbeat young people. this got him in trouble with the conservative administration. this was also new hampshire. so some of you, also probably remember in 1968 this was - wait, hold on. okay we have the order backwards there. so in 1968 it was a period of the mccarthy campaign. mccarthy was making noise about running in late november 1967. he - the early stage he did not contemplate that he would run for president and win. he hesitated he would run for president and raise the issue

of the word vietnam and challenge the president and the democratic primary.therefore, he limited his scope and he had not decided to run in new hampshire. so gerry studds was with a colleague -- persuaded mccarthy that he actually could do quite well. studds, i found this in the gerry studds paper. had papers, he had them written down in longhand. this long before computers. every town, every vote and he noted that the state was becoming increasingly liberal and the working class people from massachusetts were migrating into new hampshire. and so mccarthy decided that he would run in the election and

studds worked very hard in the campaign. and as a result of it, gain political confidence and self. he was the one, not anyone in the campaign who had convinced mccarthy that he could win or at least do well which we know he did. so what happened next is really rather bizarre. the faculty basically for the administration drove him out. they told him that they would pay for a year of further study at harvard. so he went to get another masters degree at harvard. not really knowing where his life was going. he now had two jobs and was driven out of both of them. back at cambridge he gets the idea that he can run for congress. his friend david did that also in 1970 and studs began to convince himself that he could

do the same thing. i think i wrote in the book of all the is it - of all these campaigns in the history of american politics, none was more destined to fail this one. answer heresy gerry studds at 30 something with his parents. heading off to knock on doors. you have to remind yourself, here is a person who has not really lived in the district as an adult. he does not even know where all of the - are. he has had zero conflict with working-class people in the working class base. he has no machine, no money and he is a gay man riding a secret. so how is this going to go? it turned out because he was such a forceful - and did -- he

captured the democratic primary.most elected democrats said that there was no use running against him they would lose so no state senators entered on the democratic side and he won the nomination. then to everyone's surprise, he almost won the election billing by only 1000 votes. so this convinced us that he would run again for the hope of winning. now this time, next time around he had the support of ted kennedy. by 1970, kennedy could be a very little hope to studds. by 1972, kennedy himself won a victory in 1977 he became a spokesperson for gerry studds.

and he got a difficult victory the incumbent had stepped down. he ran against a different person. the crucial thing in this story is that he promised and did not to speak portuguese. which was spoken by many people in new bedford at the time. at this got him a huge vote in new bedford. and won him the respect of the fisherman and of the portuguese speakers and the working class in new bedford. this was a guy who despite the limitations of an education at yale, the unfortunate circumstances of his seemingly upper-class birth, was able to connect with working people. the next, what he did in office was he, for the first time of any congressman anywhere, conducted a vigorous campaign. two meetings per year and every

town in the district. there were 45 of them. so he worked very hard while he was in congress and when he came back he wasn't working, he was going around meeting with people. so we see him here talking to fishermen. what this does is show you how they were being sucked out of the sea, only ships from other

countries that have government backing could build these big vehicles. mostly the concern is about the preservation conservationist aspect of this, so he worked to pass a 200-mile limit with this man who is congressman still in the congressmen today. he's from alaska republican, and there were similar issues facing the fleet. they got a bill passed out of the american waters. they worked together throughout their careers and had a softball team can you guess what they called it, young studs. [laughter]

in 1976 off nantucket this catastrophe threatened to spoil the beaches in nantucket if they go in the opposite direction, but it was impossible under existing law to hold them responsible so he worked on this issue. it wasn't until 1989 that they were able to enact the change for the laws regulating the

shipping. you may recall no experience ran the ship grounded to the sea and their were no double holes on the ship so we now have legislation that actually since this time we have not had a big catastrophe with the ship, certainly not in american waters. let me go back to the image for drilling regulations as well. it was a disaster in the gulf of mexico. the kelly arabi's lead them into the aspect we" is quite odd in

1974 there was a revolution in portugal and it was an uprising in the colonies and became a global issue. they were the only speaker with a portuguese base. they asked him to join the committee and advocated strongly for the independence of the united states in the maintenance of the portuguese empire in africa. while he was on the committee, a revolution broke out in nicaragua and central america in 1979 and 1980. this became a highly contentious during the reagan administrati

administration. reagan attempted to overthrow the government and nedra pasqua and maintain the fierce military dictatorship in el salvador. you see the archbishop romero was assassinated in march of 1980. everybody knew who did this with impunity he received in december of 1980 the people who did this did it because they knew they could get away with it because ronald reagan had just been elected and that was a celebration and el salvador. i'm going to skip ahead they worked on this issue and went to central america very early on in january just before ronald reagan was sworn in and he wrote a report for the liberal critique.

they had some colleagues giving the orders to do this. gary studs went to the speaker of the house and said we have to investigate all this and get this right. the office was next to his is the right person for the job now

to turn to the third major aspect of the career. this was his role as the spokesperson i jokingly say i get somgive some consideration o calling this america's first portuguese speaking congressman. in july of 1982, two patriots came forward and said that they were being held a sexually harassed by members of congress.

they are empowering the committee to investigate this and the ethics committee hired the former cabinet officer. this put the committee and the congress into a difficult position because it would look like the democratic house was persecuting a republican, so they continued to dig and they discovered that somebody said somebody ten years earlier had

done something with the page and they might have gone to portugal. ultimately they found that the person who was identified in the testimony so they did go to portugal. what happened was they asked him if he said no. and thethen they said we are goo swear you in if we found you committed perjury. but it was consensual and i had no problems with it. he was now faced with a dilemma he could re-sign. this happened before they were under this pressure. he could have fought this.

the lawyers said you've broken no law and have done nothing wrong. if you fight this, you will regret it. the staffer said that's probably true back into the public eye so they start a defiant speech. everything i've told you so far is not news. all of this was public. in the course of the reading of the memoir and interviewing people that knew him at the time, what happened next, he decided to run for congress again despite getting a lot of negative blowback from the conservative constituents and of

the same page volunteered to work on the campaign and became his driver and then later beca resumed their relationship. it lasted briefly and they went their separate ways after words. it's not possible for him to do that. he didn't have that kind of thing and he never brought that out in the public. that is the news in this book. during the campaign, he had one opponent in the primary who fiercely attacked him and only had one issue which was we want to be represented by a man with such low character and contentious debate.

in general election, the opponent was somebody that lifted the neighborhood and had dinner at his house numerous occasions. one of his staffers told me it would really get scary. so this is the year of the landslide i'd remind you. very few people noticed this, but it was a revolution. having been censored by the congress they ran for congress and won and indicated they changed the atmosphere. they were lost to the general public they had two major issues

they were going to talk about in his career in congress now. he had received the surgeon general that wrote the report. it was quite good to say we have to tell everybody if you have sex wear a condom if you don't want to get a. this report was buried by the reagan administration and conservative advisers who suppressed the report. he mailed out the report and had his staff do it. it convinced some other congresspeople to do this and ultimately the administration after the death of hud and did

the same thing as also it helped to a certain extent. the other issue was the question of people in the military. there was a band before there was don't ask don't tell. there were some courageous people that said i've been in the military a long time and have a good service record. so ultimately, he and anyone else that was our kids were expelled from the military. he spoke publicly and worked with his aide to convince people in the military that it you had been outed in some fashion you could fight back.

there were a lot of gray area issues and later when they were sworn in as officers they had to answer truthfully whether or not with the orientation was and the military said you have to give us your money back. those cases were mostly one. it was in awe of the figure in the story. he actually helped on this issue oddly enough. during the administration be ife

issue you the military served more because clinton promised he would end the ban in the military to basically people in private. he became a champion of this issue advocating further than and the march had been planned before clinton won the election and that raised the centrality among the activists. there was no antidiscrimination issue. this issue changes the culture a

little bit. now the activist assumed we'd want the right to serve your patriotic and brave just like you are. so this became a central issue but now we don't have that picture. he gave the equivalent of the speech. this is the only person to make this claim but this was the big part was the equivalent.

this was the right to serve in the military and is a brilliant and funny moving speech. he didn't live to see she said after he left congress at the end of the policy is inevitable we don't know how it will happen but it will happen. he thought over long periods of time you don't win every fight when you are in a fight but over time you change the atmosphere and sometimes ten, 15, 20 years later just collapses. the one he did live to see his marriage and so when

massachusetts allowed people of the same gender to marry, he said you couldn't imagine being married. but some people did imagine it and it happened. i want to conclude by saying this is about a man that lived to be happy and free. he told his aides, this is july, it's bastille day. he kept asking what do they mean by that, were they going to take them out and cut off his head? one of his friends said no, he was going to be released from the bastille.

that is what happened. the last thing i want to say is the story suggests human beings are capable of great change and even in places of the world where it seems it will never end, if well. thank you all for coming. [applause] does the number go up or down? >> i think i saw seven. after that nobody paid attention because nobody cares which is a

good thing. >> [inaudible] >> this book raises questions i can't answer. he had an aneurysm but then he fell and suffered a hematoma.

it was a ten-day period in between and it passed. his father died at age and he had a sense that his wife would be shorter. of course everyone is outraged but to me most ran away from it into the military leaders feel like nobody can predict where any of this is going but it seems unlikely to me that this

could be a long-term band on gay people, not transgender people. this is complicated. there was never clinton's signature issue. but it seemed that way because after he got elected the issue came forward to the front and moved the issue forward. bob dole was already campaigning for 1996 and wanted what he perceived as a losing issue tickets to the floor.

it wasn't a bad move so there is a little story i tell. david was an activist very close to clinton and did push this forward in constant communication and they would end the policy but at the same time they have to deal with the generals that were in a weak position to ask these people to go into battle.

they made the analogy to the segregation of the armed services and the truman administration and he hoped that colin powell would get this and they never did. this was a tough defeat. >> i love the way that you've told thyou toldthe story of poly on these issues through the le

lens. you made reference to his memoir talking about others who were not out over the years. the [inaudible] they were typically in washington and he would use the first names of people. you could tell he didn't know what it was going to do. i think that's part of the story

was harder to tell. there's nothing about how we sealed the deal in the committ committee. it's mostly about how hard it was to grow up in the 50s. so i think that he's lost touch with these people and felt like mia betraying a personal secret is someone going to feel hurt that i told -- later he had a circle of friends that came out and the community was greatly sustaining for it.

>> they were very supportive. his father never found out. his mother told his father and he kind of ran out of the room and said no, it can't be. and i think that this is the biggest issue for gay people that grew up in this time period and it probably still is. i am not gay. i don't know. he had a brother and a sister who were quite supportive and he had a sister-in-law who was quite supportive in the 1984 campaign and he had a husband later. >> thank you very much. [applause]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]