Oral History with Tom Brobson, November 6, 2014 (Ms2015-007)

Interview with Tom Brobson

Date of Interview: November 6, 2014 Interviewer: Sara Evenson Assistant: Laura Keith Place of Interview: Major Williams Hall Rm. 329, Virginia Tech Length: 1:07:04 Transcriber: David Atkins

Sara Evenson: This is Sara Evenson, and I’m with Laura Keith doing an oral history interview with Mr. Tom Brobson. We are in room 329 of Major Williams Hall at the Virginia Tech campus and it is Thursday November 6th just after 4:10 PM. Could you please say your name and birth date for us?

Tom Brobson: My name’s Tom Brobson and I was born April 8th, 1960.

EVENSON: Could you tell us a little bit about where you were born and what growing up was like?

BROBSON: That’s a curious question. I was born in the state of New York but I didn’t live there. It is a long story, but for various reasons my mother was in New York and I was born in New York. I grew up in Virginia, particularly up in Alexandria, Virginia.

EVENSON: I’m also from New York, so that’s interesting.

BROBSON: There was a polio outbreak and my uncle was a doctor and he didn’t want my mother traveling. It’s a long and interesting story but, functionally born one place but really raised and grew up here in Virginia.

EVENSON: So how long were you in Alexandria?

BROBSON: Well, really until I came down here as a student in 1978, so for 18 years. Then, came here as a student in 1978, graduated from Tech in 1982, went back to Alexandria and lived there and worked on Capitol Hill until 1989, and then shifted down here again. I actually came 2:00and worked here at the University for 16 years, and with my partner bought a Christmas tree farm out in Giles County. We bought a farm and started a Christmas tree business so we grow Christmas trees there.

EVENSON: Okay. How would you identify yourself?

BROBSON: That’s a really interesting question too.

EVENSON: Well, I’ll give you a bit of background. We’ve been talking about different communities and different ways that individuals identify themselves. Looking at that as a class we have developed how we as individuals self-identify.

BROBSON: I guess you know, you just took me through a contextual narrative so on the biggest level I would say I’m an American. On the second level I would say native Virginian. I have spent more time living in southern Appalachian than I have up in northern Virginia, and even when I lived in northern Virginia I spent time down here. So would describe myself as being a 3:00Virginia Tech student or graduate, alum. And I would describe myself also as being a gay man who has lived through all those different pieces, as well. I’m also a farmer, and I have Type 1 Diabetes, so I do lots of things that I can identify as being part of my life.

EVENSON: So I guess for the purposes of this interview we’ll kind of be focusing more on

BROBSON: On the gay community.

EVENSON: That was going to be my next question. What community do you most feel a part of?

BROBSON: That’s an interesting question [laughs]. So I’m definitely part of the gay community. I can’t help but be, right, it’s part of who I am. I identify strongly with and have always been an active part of the gay community since I was able to be, and am very much a part 4:00of my community here in Giles County and here in Blacksburg. I identify as much with being a rural person living in southern Appalachia as I do with being a gay person, as with being a person with Type 1 Diabetes. All of which I strongly identify with cause that’s what I, it is right? I think I would describe myself as being fairly balanced in that. Is everything gay for me? No. Is it a big piece of what I am? Absolutely.

EVENSON: That’s great. So, jumping around a little bit. When you were here at Virginia Tech were there any specific communities that you were a part of, or any specific organizations that 5:00you were a part of, as a student, and as a staff member?

BROBSON: So then this becomes the bigger part of the oral history, so I will do my best to answer that question, though it will be a long answer.

EVENSON: Feel free.

BROBSON: [pause] So when I came to Virginia Tech in 1978, there was no identified gay community. At that point we were just ten years after Stonewall and being gay was something that most people weren’t comfortable with and most people didn’t openly live with. I would say the vast majority of the gay community was closeted and in hiding. I, for whatever reason, being precocious, had come out younger than maybe many. So I had come out, and coming out is a process. It’s a journey. It never ends. I probably came out first 6:00to myself in 1974, and then sort of to other people in ’76, and then by the time I came down here there were some people who knew. My family didn’t know, but there were people who knew. And I was trying to find a way to connect with what I perceived to be my community. I had had the opportunity to go out in the gay neighborhoods of Washington D.C., and other places, New York City, Roanoke, and meet people at gay bars, and so had realized there was, in fact, a community. Because, otherwise, living in suburbia or urbia, living in the urban areas you don’t necessarily realize, certainly then, you didn’t realize that there was a community. It was a growing awareness that there was in fact a community that I very much felt like I was a part of even though I hadn’t actually been in it, which is a curious thing. And an incredibly freeing and 7:00wonderful thing when you finally get to connect with it and realize, oh my gosh, I’ve found people that are like me. There’s all these guys here and they’re all thinking the same thing I am, [laughing] which is just fantastic, right? So I came down here as a student and there were many of my friends who said you’re crazy ‘cause you’re going to Virginia Tech and there can’t be anything down there. And they were right, there wasn’t. There was an attempt to form a student group in 1978 and ’79. I was not one of the organizers, I was just a freshman and 18, but I connected with it. There was a gentleman who actually still lives in Blacksburg, Steve Knowles, who had gone to Tech and who was involved with it. There was a decision to try and do something to raise awareness that there 8:00was in fact a gay community here in Blacksburg. So they, and you may have heard about this before, but there was a decision to try to have what we called a denim day. And this one day out of the week, in your support of the gay community, which I can honestly say was not described as LGBT or anything like that back then, none of those acronyms existed, support of the gay community you would wear denim to campus. Tech in 1978 was pretty much a sea of denim, that’s all anybody wore. It was the 1970’s and everybody wore denim. You didn’t get caught dead wearing khakis and being preppy that was UVA. Virginia tech was sort of blue jeans and T-shirts. I, in retrospect, look at that and think we thought we were doing something that would be easy, but in fact we were probably doing 9:00something that was really challenging to the straight community. And so it was, these things become all confused in terms of sequencing, but I want to say that it was the winter quarter. So we used to do quarters back then and I think it was winter quarter not spring quarter. So I am going to say it was in February or March. The day dawned, and I think I have my year right, I think it was 1979, the day dawned and went on to campus and nobody was wearing denim. We had put the signs up around campus on bulletin boards and it almost had the reverse effect. Instead of creating the sense that there’s support for a community, it was the no, you are not supported and you are not welcome. That was pretty much the response. It was a rare person that you saw wearing denim that day, which was intimidating, frankly, very, very intimidating. And 10:00people asking me, why are you wearing denim? I’m like well because, and then that was always an interesting moment. There was a couple, a man and a woman, over at Dietrick and they were both wearing jeans and they had t-shirts that said “nothing wrong with my genes,” of course spelled g-e-n-e-s. So you got a very powerful message there, that this was not an accepting community and that this was not something you should feel comfortable with. At the same time, the Tech administration and university prohibited, they shut us down, they said that not only could we not exist but they prohibited us from ever meeting on campus. So we were thrown off of campus. The net effect was we had tried to do something and not only did we get shut down, but we actually took ourselves back what seemed to be several steps. 11:00Although, sometimes I think being, we, you know your oppressed, but when you see overt oppression, my instinct is to push back a lot harder. So it may have consolidated the will of many of us to try to do something still. So we ended up having to shift meetings to the basement of the Presbyterian Church, which allowed us to meet. And not much happened, not much happened, and so for the next four years, nothing that I can recall happened on the campus. But, through that and other mechanisms, going out and meeting people, we used to, there’s a Marriott over towards University Mall, it’s not there anymore, but we used to go dancing pretty much Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night with friends. And there were always a couple of gay guys there and we would 12:00always see each other. We could never dance with each other, but there are tons of memories. And we should make a side note that I tell the story of when I did dance with a man on the dance floor in Blacksburg.

EVENSON: I’m making a note.

BROBSON: But yeah, so you got to know people. And as you got to know people you had a chance to start to develop a community, albeit secret, and there were people in fraternities, and the German Club, and university faculty, it was, as we know, everywhere. But all hidden, all, I used to say we were members of the club, but we knew who the members were and other people didn’t. And you spent a lot of time trying to figure out who might be a member of the club, so it was an interesting time. And through those four years as an undergraduate at Tech I did develop 13:00a good group of friends who were gay. But I always, I had straight roommates who were incredibly supportive, and we, I, I touched all pieces, right? It never solely defined me, it was just a part of who I was. So then there’s like side journeys we can take here. Some of us wanted to still have some sort of a presence on campus, and for a number of different reasons that have to do with my personal life and my family, I had...I needed a constructive outlet. The basic line was that my family had disowned me for being gay when I was about 20, 19...20, and I needed to be doing something that I felt was constructive as opposed to being pounded on from great heights. So I, 14:00again through a friend, was put in contact with faculty that were teaching sociology classes and psychology classes, human sexuality classes, where they were looking for a member of the gay community that would be willing to speak to students. And I decided after conferring with my straight roommates, asking them whether they felt this was okay with them because I didn’t want to imperil their lives, whether they felt this would be a good idea. And this really was something that did then mean, you know, you might end up being beat up or physically abused or killed. And all those things happened. But they said yeah, we’ll support you and we’ll even come to the classroom and sit in the back. So that was, that was an incredibly affirming moment. So I started speaking to those classes in my Junior year, and I want to say this would have 15:00been 1980 I think, and I talked to a lot of classes. Sat at the front up on the podium at McBryde 100 in front of a giant human sexuality class and over in what we then called the Animal Science Building which is the Litton-Reeves, and the big auditorium in front of classes, and it was curious because sometimes there were classes like, I can’t remember if they were sociology or psych classes, but the sections, one of them was deviant subcultures. And I just remember thinking ‘oh, here I am, a deviant subculture.’ So, you know, I would strive to go up onto that stage and look like exactly what I was – a student. I’d have my Virginia Tech t-shirt on and a pair of jeans, and here’s this, I’m just this guy, and this is just who I am. And got a lot of, the 16:00faculty were fairly supportive but again, secretively because again they knew that they could get in trouble. There were definite parts of the University that weren’t very comfortable with the idea that we were having these kinds of talks, even if it was built into class work, even it was described as being part of deviant subcultures. And then came the reality of the classes, and for the most part, people were indifferent, or they didn’t actively hate. But there were moments when people asked very harsh questions and people would become abusive after the class. So it was an immensely difficult thing to do and I’m pretty sure I lost weight just sweating it, but managed to do it and better for it. And felt like I 17:00was at least trying to make it clear that on the campus there were people who just were living their lives and who didn’t all fit into this one particular view of the world. So, that kind of happened. And that was about it if I think in terms of formal Virginia Tech interactions. There were all the things happening over in social life. You know I referenced dancing, so there was a place that was the old Kroger downtown became, is now the bookstore, the Tech bookstore, but it was a dance place called After Sundown, sometimes called After Scumdown, that was pretty dark. You could get nickel beers on the right night and quarter pitchers, it was beer and dancing. Drinking age was much lower then, and we’d go there with friends and with girls and we would go dancing. And one time the girls we had gone with were out dancing and I 18:00was with a friend of mine who was a native of Blacksburg and one of our favorite pieces of music came on. And we thought, damn there’s no one to dance with and we want to dance. So After Sundown had multiple level dance floor. It was stainless it was [white?] you’d just have to have seen it to understand it. It was a different era. And this was up on the raised section and there was a full dance floor, and we, Kenny and I, he just looked at me and said “You want to dance?” and I was like “yes” so we decided to dance. So we stepped out on the dance floor, and amazingly, the dance floor emptied. Everyone left the dance floor. It was just people were shocked to see two men dancing together which seems so bizarre, but that’s the way it was. One of my dear friends, Sherry Sandler, she actually, 19:00worrying that we were about to see something really bad happen, there were football players there, and there were all sorts of bad vibe and Kenny and I were trying to finish the song, and you don’t want to hang your head and leave until the song ends, she actually came out and started dancing with us to try to sort of change it into a there’s three people here and one of them is of a sex that is non-threatening. And the song ended and the manager came and we were asked to leave, and they called the Blacksburg Police Department. So I wondered whether we were going to get arrested. The police kind of left us alone. They just said “why don’t you guys just stop doing stuff like that,” and kind of berated us about our morality but didn’t arrest us – thank goodness. So there were those moments, right? And I’m making this all sound terribly negative, this is a story that, of course, lives forever in our memories because we’re like, “remember that time 20:00when we all did that?” but you couldn’t ever let go of the fact that there was open and real hostility. I can’t for the life of me remember, I was trying to think of the name as I was driving over here his sister works in the College of Architecture now, there was another local young man who was out, and this would’ve been I think the spring of ’82 but it might’ve been the spring of ’81, I just can’t recall, and he was very visible. He was very in your face, whereas I was just walking around in blue jeans and a Tech t-shirt he kind of had a punk look going and he didn’t pretend that he wasn’t a member of a deviant subculture. And he was found killed. He’d been castrated and his genitalia had been stuffed in his mouth. So we all knew that this was a harsh 21:00reality that there was violence. I was attacked, I guess several times, and got away each time without physical injury, but knew too that there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t go to the Tech administration or to the Virginia Tech police because I had already been told we weren’t supposed to be on campus. So it was, ‘hey, you know, you made your own problems here kid so get out of here.’ But there were also moments of amazing kindness. I had a faculty member who really reached out. He was in the College of Agriculture, and he and his wife really reached out and supported me. I had a guy who was a football player who actually saw a group of guys from the Corp of Cadets, sort of, had stopped me and slashed the tires on my bike, believe it or not, and he 22:00stepped up and said “Tom anything wrong?” He knew me from, we were in class together, and I said “no, nothing wrong” and he basically stayed with me until they decided to fade away and then he walked with me to a place where I could kind of be safe. So you saw moments of what I would call true courage and great compassion. So, and it didn’t hurt that he was very handsome, so it was a, in retrospect, it was a brutal time, but I was in my teens and early twenties and it was just the life I was living and this was pretty much how it was everywhere in America. You didn’t, there wasn’t any place, you could go to Greenwich Village, or you could go to Dupont Circle, San Francisco, and find places and you could maybe feel comfortable but even 23:00there it was hidden and it was secretive. Gay bars were always in the worst possible neighborhoods because nobody wanted to be seen by, you know, their neighbors going in to that kind of a place. So you would be in the absolute worst neighborhoods with knifings and muggings, and yet having a great time because you were going to go dancing and hang out with other people that were like yourself. So that was, I feel like that was super harsh and negative and the overall experience of being at Virginia Tech was actually positive and I met amazing people that are friends to this day. And I guess built the muscle that sort of took me through the rest of my life. But it was not easy. And it was not fun. It would be really interesting to find that history of- my friend who knew that person who was killed sadly had a stroke last April or I could just ask him his name, but I’m sure we can 24:00find it. We should go looking. And his sister, he was native, and his sister, was it Epperly? His sister worked at the College of Architecture. I was also in the Collegiate Times. In the early 90’s I wrote a letter or an article about it and she wrote in. So I know it’s out there we can find it. I just can’t for the life of me remember the name anymore.

EVENSON: Do you remember about what year that was?

BROBSON: I want to say it was the spring of ’82; it could’ve been the spring of ’81. I know it was spring and he was found downtown behind the dumpster. I don’t know, I think it was eventually considered solved, but it was certainly not prosecuted as a hate crime, it was simply prosecuted as a murder, which is just crazy. But it puts it all in context, right? So everybody was aware but everybody knew that you had to be careful and that you couldn’t be yourself. And 25:00that’s unfortunate. The community as a whole suffers when people can’t be who they are.

EVENSON: So did the Presbyterian Church know about what your group was?

BROBSON: Oh, absolutely!

EVENSON: And were they supportive?

BROBSON: Yes, they were. Catherine- yes there weren’t many churches but the Presbyterian Church here in Blacksburg was supportive and definitely allowed us to use their facility. We did not meet regularly after that first year, that I can recall. There could be other people that met but I simply fell out of it. After that it was, the university was pretty effective at shutting things down. So, if we fast forward, then, to 1989 when I came back to work on campus. We had a new President, Dr. McComas, who was a lovely man, and his Special Assistant to the President was a 26:00woman named Carol Nickerson, she’s still here, lives in this area, she is a lovely person and we began a move to change the Virginia Tech Equal Opportunity Statement to include sexual orientation, and he supported it, as did Carol. And with their support and lots of maneuvering, that was added. And It had some opposition but did surprisingly well. And again, these are things that would have been written up in things like the CT [Collegiate Times], but so we got it done and previous to that, while I had been gone, a gay student group had started to develop. Lambda Horizons, I believe? But it was still not officially sanctioned. It was not a University sanctioned 27:00student organization. So with the addition of the sexual orientation clause, then I and a few others could go to the administration and say “okay, you don’t discriminate against anybody on the basis of sexual orientation, it’s time to allow this student group to become official.” And, again with the support of the President, we were able to do that. It’s not an overstatement to say that we would not have been able to do that if he had not supported us. If the President hadn’t said, “yes, go do this,” there would have been, there were plenty of sites around campus and in student life that would have opposed the idea. So we formed this student group, and at the same time, along with another woman named Sarah Richardson, who lives in Richmond now I think, she was a graduate student here at tech at the time, we formed the LGBT Caucus, to create something for 28:00the faculty and staff. And again it was mostly young people that were willing to come to that older faculty, at first, didn’t, I don’t think, feel very comfortable. We knew who they were, but they didn’t feel that they could afford to be visible without jeopardizing their status in their departments. So it tended to be the younger faculty and graduate students, and myself, and other staff. And even us, even we were running a risk. But we formed that group, and, in order to form the student group, we had to have a faculty member who was willing to be the faculty advisor. And we couldn’t find anyone. Even the gay men and women on campus that were tenured faculty, they were too fearful of the implications or unwilling to take it on. 29:00 And I was at that time a staff not a faculty appointment, later I had a faculty appointment and was able to become an advisor but we knew that Jo Ann Underwood, whose name you may have heard, worked, was the Head of Student Health, she had been willing to support us in a number of circumstances, particularly with AIDS awareness, and was clearly a champion for the gay community. So I went to her, with I think a couple others, and asked her if I did all of the work, she was way overworked, if I did all the work and support with the student group would you put your name down as being the advisor? And she said “absolutely.” So that allowed us then to formally create the student group and the first president was a guy named Brian McConnell. He was from San Francisco. He, I think he was the president at that moment, I’m 30:00pretty sure, and that allowed us for the first time to go to the student budget board and actually get some dollars to spend on something for the gay community. Our idea was to have a dance, and it was like at Halloween. Anyway, we did it, but these were huge victories. We felt like we had come a bazillion miles just because we were able to get a student group on the campus and actually get some dollars allocated from the student fee and use them to support this. We still had to be super careful. We had to host it in a place where we could, sort of, control who was seeing what and not have to worry about violence. We had the first National Coming Out Day on the Tech campus, and that was a big effort. It was in October and I want to say that this was 1990? It might be ’91. Again, it would be in the Collegiate Times. We were 31:00given permission to do it on the lawn near Henderson, which didn’t look like the way it does right now. So we did it, and we actually rented a number of video/cassette recorders, which were huge back then, and had key people positioned to record what was happening both for posterity, and I have no idea where those tapes are, as well as a security precaution so we could document anything that happened. And as fate had it, a group of guys from the Corps of Cadets came and decided to heckle and harass the group and make life difficult. As a result of that tape, however, the Commandant said the next year “no more of that.” And never that I know of had any more 32:00issues with the Corps coming in and deciding to heckle us. In retrospect it’s astonishing to think that anybody is threatened by another person’s stated sexual preference. It’s kind of silly that you would, out of all the things going on on the Virginia Tech campus, that a group of guys would want to come over and purposely heckle a group of students celebrating National Coming Out Day. It’s kind of silly but that’s the reality. That was the reality. So, we started to see what I would call progress and then we started, beginning, I don’t, there was no comprehensive business plan here, There was no comprehensive strategic plan for how are we going to shift the world into a better place. I had immediately picked up and started to do the talks again, on campus, in the classrooms. And we were still 33:00having to work hard to find people, enough people, to meet the need. I would say the tone had changed. There were more faculty wanting to use those kinds of speakers. But we didn’t have a master plan that was building out of how are we going to try to get Virginia Tech to go places, right. We tried to go and talk to HR and say why can’t the spouses and children of same-sex couples have insurance and so on, and they would say it’s because it’s not lawful at the state level. And they did not blow us off. There’s a wonderfully generous man, Doug Martin, who worked there, he’s retired now, who...he was always open to us. He was always willing to talk even though he didn’t have a way to fix it. We, one of the early projects, we would have various meetings and we would try to think of things and one of those was the Safe Zones project, which proved to be quite an impact. Carol Lahass is a faculty member in 34:00Forestry and there was a graduate student – Sandra, Sandy? – who was from the University of Maine, she was lovely. We, a number of us, we started to build out and we went to the various departments and offices and said, “We want to be able to put this sign up so that a member of the gay community would know that this is a safe place if something bad is happening, or if they needed to talk to somebody, or they...” and slowly, it was a limited enrollment to begin with, but slowly, over a number of years, we were able to grow that program and gain more and more allies across the campus. National Coming Out Days became much more robust and had more activities going on. I guess on some level, I say this often in what I do, that you should never underestimate the value of leadership. You don’t know it when you’re doing it, it just feels scary, but you’ve taken a step and you’re starting to lead and before you know it other people are 35:00willing to come and then suddenly, it’s a whole ‘nother world. So we had, by this time, listservs had started to arrive and we could start to communicate regularly and put blasts out. And so it felt like there were real triumphs but there were also setbacks. I worked in the Office of University Development, so it was a fundraiser for Tech, and that office also has the Office of University Relations, and we had been trying to get Tech to do, so I should also say I have worked closely on many occasions with members of other minority communities on the Tech campus, so the women’s groups, the women’s center, with the African American community. I grew up in a community that was 30% African American and I came to Virginia Tech and you wouldn’t have thought there was another African American anywhere in the state. 36:00So Beth Watford was a tremendous ally. She’s Dean in the College of Architecture and Engineering. And we had been trying to get the Tech magazine to do an article on diversity which, again, to our ears right this minute seems like “duh, no brainer,” and at that time was incredibly controversial. The idea that we would do something that focused on women, that focused on the African American community, that focused on Hispanics, that was really not something people were comfortable with. And when we touched the gay community they really got uncomfortable. But the writer and editor, David Watts, said “I want to do this and I want to include you guys.” Now we had just had a murder up on the Appalachian trail of a Tech student, 37:00a lesbian, who was there with her partner, and we wanted to have her sister, who is also a lesbian, be interviewed. And then I agreed to be interviewed. So they wrote the article. And it all seemed to go fine until they reached the review process and it got to the President’s office and suddenly I got a phone call from the editor saying “we have a problem.” “Are you okay if we have a problem?” I’m like, “I don’t know if I’m okay if we have a problem, what’s the problem?” “Well, the problem is they are okay talking about a woman who’s a lesbian but they don’t want to have you, a gay male, in the article.” And so I said, “Gee, I think there’s a problem here” because technically we don’t discriminate but I feel like I’m really crunched here. And oh yeah, by the way, this is of course my boss. So, it was 38:00actually at the Vice President’s level, and I’m not using any names, but I could, and in the end the article ran without me, so I was, in fact, pulled. It was a reminder that we had a long ways to go. And that fundamentally, the Tech community was not comfortable with the idea of people openly... it was now, at this point, I would say we had started to reach a point of ‘oh, okay, it’s okay if you’re a student but if you are a professional adult, this should just be invisible.’ And this is, of course, at a moment when the gay rights movement was trying to grow very, very powerfully and one of the big, biggest things was NOT being invisible. That we needed to be visible. And being visible was what would get people to realize that this community was all around them, they just had no clue. So a lot of 39:00effort then went into trying to do that. I still don’t know if they ever did a feature article on the Virginia Tech gay community, it would be interesting to take this oral history and turn it into a history and put it into the Tech magazine. It also shows you how risk-adverse administrators are. It’s not that these people were bad people or that they were unwilling to support things, they have to administer a large university and have an alumni base that by definition is older and they are worried about what the impact will be for fundraising, for loyalty of the alumni base, of people who might want to come here. Right, they weren’t bad people, they just, had to be inherently conservative in their approach and they might tell you that in person, you know, “I support you” but, but, but, but, there would always be buts. And so not much fun, it was not 40:00much fun. The story goes on and on and on. I was, and this was actually documented, I’m on film somewhere that I was, HR used to use for a new orientation video and we’ll see if you guys can find it, for many years I was a featured speaker because- on that tape- because I related a story of having a boss who one time came in to me and he said, “You know, there’s this other employee and I’m a little worried about him.” “And, “well what do you mean you’re worried about him?” “Well, you know, he seems like he’s a little light in the loafers.” So here’s a boss talking to an openly gay man. He’s new to the university. He doesn’t know much about me. He assumes 41:00because I have a pickup truck and a farm, I guess, that maybe I’m not gay, I don’t know. And he’s come to talk to me about another employee who isn’t gay, or ostensibly isn’t gay and he’s worried about him. “I’m not sure we want to have this person in front of people and doing the kinds of work that we do.” So, I basically stood there and looked at him and said “I’m not sure you really understand who you’re talking to or what you’re doing here,” but he still never really heard me. Curiously, it was his support person, Donna, who really- she kinda went in there and just let him have it, like “You have no clue what you just did and what that sounded like.” And again, this person was not a bad person. I still know him to this day, but this gives you sense of it was okay in the workplace to talk about these sorts of things and to express a willingness, or to 42:00discriminate against somebody based on sexual orientation. So all of this is mixed in there, and it was my boss’s worst nightmare that one of our older alumni would find out that I was gay and yet I would be in the Collegiate Times. And so one time, a rather malicious person, made sure that that happened and sure enough, the older alum that I knew had got very upset. There were also older alums that were thrilled. That’s not the point. The point is that either we believe in something as a community or we don’t, and Tech was having trouble, and probably still to this day has trouble, deciding whether it believes in something or not. The State of Virginia has something like 19-20% African American population, but that is not what you see on this campus. There’s lots of reasons for that, not an easy [BROBSON’s phone chimes] thing to fix. But, point being, [BROBSON turns down his 43:00phone volume] (I’ll do that so it doesn’t clink again at us) growth and advancement does not come hand in hand and you do things and see some things come together on one side, but there’s inertia and people with varying agendas, not malicious, not attempting to be hurtful, although sometimes meaning to be hurtful, trying to do what they perceive to be their right thing in the social norms of that moment. And, not having any clue what that really looked like or felt like to live with. Part of this then, to tell you the happy part of it and the part of me, then, that began to realize “wow, screw all these older people because this is going to fix itself.” So I had started talking to classes, as I say back in, let’s see, it was 1980, and by the mid 44:0090’s, I noticed that things were changing. I could be talking to a classroom of young people and I would actually get a question or two as opposed to sort of stoic silence, we’re uncomfortable talking about this topic. Again, like, this is a strange topic, right, I’m just talking about the fact that I prefer to date men. I have a husband and we have a farm. You know, why should that be threatening, but it was. But I started to get questions and that was kind of interesting, realizing people’s comfort level had reached a point where they can ask questions and they’re not, you know, “Have you read the Bible? Are you going to burn in hell?” questions or one person asked me back in the 80’s “Have you ever considered committing suicide, and if not, why not?” So those kinds of harsh questions. The questions had shifted to “How was it as a person, what’s it 45:00like to come out?” “Was it hard to meet other people?” “Do you think things are getting better?” Questions that actually indicated that the students were interested in me as a person, and in the community that I represented. And then I’d say, another year or two later, I noticed as class would end, at first it was young women, it would be the young women, obviously least threatened, who would stay after class to ask me a couple questions or share a couple stories. “I have a brother who’s gay” “I have an uncle who we don’t talk about it in the family, but he’s and his partner...” and I thought this was wonderful, right? This just felt like, whoa, this is huge progress. And then Buffy the Vampire Slayer started to be broadcast, which for some reason in my mind is always the moment 46:00that I started to say things really shifted, because there was a lesbian love in there with Willow and Tara. And then I started to see, so now you’re into the middle ‘90s, 96, I don’t know what year that show began, but I found that young men and young women asked questions. And young men and young women would stay after. Or there would be gay people in the classroom who would actually raise their hands and say “thank you I’m also a member of this community.” And the visibility factor started to grow and the comfort level started to grow. So this was wonderful, right? This is the, in my mind and in my life history I have tracked from this American youth that are hostile to American youth that are totally getting this and making me realize that OK, someday this will be not a big deal. And that was a wonderful thing. And by the 47:00turn of the century it felt like, wow, we’re gonna get somewhere. Sadly, shortly after the turn of the century, we had a Board of Visitors and a particular individual on the Board of Visitors that decided that Tech should not be going down this road. And so, I don’t know if you’ve heard any of this history, but if you talk to Dean Depauw and Shelly Fowler you’ll hear about it, but we had a spousal hire essentially that was done and it led to a move to remove sexual orientation from, and that was, in fact, struck off. So after having been there for more than a decade they removed, and we had no state protections. There is no, there is at this point no, now only the Supreme Court action has finally brought us what I would call protections and civil rights. Virginia, for all that it led in the American Revolution, does not 48:00like to lead when it comes to civil rights issues or liberty issues. So we actually had a move on the Board of Visitors and they actually reversed a decade’s plus worth of precedent and tried to take us back to a place and prevent that hire and making life incredibly uncomfortable for all people involved. It, frankly, became a crucible and it was a moment where people had to , you couldn’t get away from it, you had to either stand up and say “this is what we believe or we don’t” and so the President of the University, Dr. Steger, whom I worked for for many, many years, finally had to say “this is wrong, this is what we believe in.” And others did that and eventually a majority of the Board of Visitors also did that, and it was reversed. Not without having done a lot of damage. Not without having created a heck of a lot of stress and very, very 49:00difficult moments. But it just showed you that once again the youth were leading and the elders were laying way, way, way, way, way behind. So, I think I’ve sketched out a whole lot there for you guys and you’ve been good to just let me sort of go on. And I’ve tried to do it sort of chronologically but there’s tons of more pieces I could touch on but hopefully that gave you a good sense of what this journey has been like.

EVENSON: Yeah, definitely. That was great. Going through all of your stories it sounds like...

BROBSON: There’s a lot and that’s only a few of them.

EVENSON: Well it sounds like you were actively engaged in activism. Would you call yourself an activist?

BROBSON: [Laughs, then a long pause] Yes, I guess I would. I didn’t tend to think of myself particularly as an activist but clearly my actions demonstrate that I’m an activist, right? My goal 50:00in being an activist was never to make other people’s lives miserable. But it had everything to do with my right to liberty and the pursuit of my happiness and to be left alone to do those things. So, you know, there are many schools of thought in the world of activism and one of those is – activism is to provoke a response. Gandhi certainly believed this. And had I studied things like that? No. Was I trying to provoke a response? Yes. Though maybe not the response that people thought. I wasn’t...I was not particularly interested in, this was not a moment of saying “this is all 51:00about me, look at me, pay attention to me,” this was a moment of saying “leave me alone, just, bloody, leave me alone. I want to live my life and you are seriously in the way of me living my life. And you don’t even realize it, you’re not even thinking about it, but you are.” You know, every moment of my adult career, until I left Tech, I had to be careful. I had to think about is this going to impact my ability to be promoted and actually to be fairly certain that it definitely had an impact. To know that people were looking at me through that lens and judging me through that lens, that was clearly a piece that was going on. I couldn’t help but be...so, yes, I was an activist. But my activism was motivated around the idea that I would describe as letting a community...valuing a community for what it has to contribute and what it offers, that it’s already doing and is doing secretly. 52:00 So there wonderful gay couples and individuals in theater arts and in music and in engineering and in every field and endeavor within the New River Valley community, and they were all valued. And it was like, “oh, he’s that creative gay guy.” But it wasn’t just simply he’s a member of the community and this is just the rich tapestry that is a diverse community and why this should be valued. Yes, again I’ve gone off on a soapbox again.

EVENSON: No, that’s fine. We’re almost out of time.

BROBSON: Yep.

EVENSON: Is there anything else that you’d like to add?

BROBSON: Well, it was lovely. So...then as you know the State of Virginia passed a constitutional amendment prohibiting rights for the gay community. And, I actually don’t have my ring on. My partner 53:00and I had gotten married in 2004. We had flown out to San Francisco. Actually one of the students, Brian McConnell, the one I had mentioned early was the Student Board President of the student group, was actually working out in San Francisco in the City Hall when Mayor Newsome opened up and said “I’m going to allow gay marriage.” Which was a remarkable watershed moment and mostly just people from California went and got married but there were some people, like myself and my partner, we’d been together twenty years, and we, independently, just both thinking on our own, decided you know it’s our twentieth anniversary we should fly out and get married. And we did. And that was actually celebrated. My office held a little party for me and my bosses were, this is, congratulations, but again, it was all down 54:00low. And it’s not exactly marriage but I didn’t honestly believe that I needed to be married. I always, sort of, marriage is this whole straight thing and I wish I had the legal protections. But once I was married, I realized “Holy crap” I really need this affirmation, this support, all that this represents. And then I really focused on this and realized that separate but equal is not acceptable. We as a nation we’ve proven that we don’t do well with that. So I began to really then believe in the whole gay marriage idea and happily we’ve just seen here in the last 60 days that the Supreme Court has allowed that to happen. So now here in the State of Virginia I am lawfully married and my partner and I, we actually, that first marriage eleven years ago was set aside by the Supreme Court, and so we went 55:00back this last March and got married again in California, which was lawful. The Supreme Court had already okayed that. And we were wondering how long it would take in Virginia, and had thought that it might take fifteen years. That’s what many of us had thought. We actually had talked to the ACLU about being the litigants in the court case, and they said you need to anticipate that this will be a seven to fifteen year process, at least a seven year process. And then, boom, right we see how fast things are changing. I think this becomes a non issue now. I don’t find that many [BROBSON’s phone chimes again “It’s people I’m meeting for dinner.”] that people care anymore. This is going out with a whimper, not with a bang. I once asked my father what it was like when prohibition ended and he said by the time prohibition ended nobody cared 56:00because everybody knew it was stupid law. And I think that by the time gay marriage is fully legalized and all this is history people will realize it never really mattered. That’s a lot of history. There’s lots of other stories to tell but I think that gives you a strong sense of my piece in there and my perspectives of it. There were a lot of remarkable moments that should be captured. I’m trying to think of other people that you should talk to. I think there are people I know whose oral histories could be amazing to get, if you could get them. There were people who were, say in, who were not open, who were not activists while they were students at Tech, who came out afterwards, and their view of what it was like to be on the Virginia Tech campus at that time. It’s not always a pretty picture. It’s not always very pleasant. But it was, I think there’s probably, I could certainly reach out to some people and see 57:00if they are willing to talk to you guys. There were faculty who, from the sixties, and the seventies, and the fifties, who had to lead truly closeted lives. And yet, would still be a resource to us as young people who were trying to come out. They were never comfortable with the fact that we were trying to be more visible. And in some ways I find myself never as [BROBSON’s phone chimes “Sorry, what are you going to do, confirming which place we are meeting at.” He replies to the message.] I forgot my thread. It...I forgot the thread, anyway, you guys will come back to it. As you hear all of that what does it make you guys want to ask?

EVENSON: All of the questions that we’d thought about beforehand you talked about. The questions that I mainly have are, you know, hearing about these hate crimes that happened in Blacksburg, do you feel that the community has changed now? Do you feel safer and more welcome in the greater Blacksburg community now?

BROBSON: [Lengthy pause] Marginally, but not fully.

EVENSON: No?

BROBSON: Marginally, but not fully. I mean I, now I live in a rural area and I have my farm and my partner and I are very open about who and what we are and we have always been well received and supported as being members of a community. But then we are very active in our community. We try to give back to it in many ways. And that helps, but I don’t kid myself that there are not lots of hate-filled people out there who are unwilling to accept change. I will tell 59:00you there’s a book I will write someday called Confessions of a White Man, which will be all about the things that people have told me because they assume as a white man I would be in sympathy with them. So I can recall, well into the nineties, sitting in a chair getting my hair cut and having a person tell me “well I don’t care if they let black people come to Virginia Tech but I would never let one in my house.” Let one? Like, one? What the hell is that? So you can’t ever pretend that everybody moves at the same pace. What you can hope is that these things fade with time. When I was growing up the “n” word was not an unfamiliar word and it was used way, way too often and now you don’t hear it very often, and we’re shocked to hear it. Nobody thinks 60:00twice about women in the workplace and women, I mean, I remember when it was a big deal for women to wear slacks. So things change but not all at once. So, yes I feel much safer in this community but I don’t feel as safe as, probably, I ultimately would like to be one day.

EVENSON: So, are you still active as an activist, not on the Virginia Tech campus? In your community you said you were active as an individual?

BROBSON: I’ve always been active wherever I’ve worked. And I’m still, my partner and I are active and are activists in trying to protect our piece of rural Appalachia from giant pipelines that are going to try to be built or power lines that were threatened. We successfully fought off, even bigger than the pipeline right now, in the nineties we took very prominent leads in doing that. So 61:00I’m very much- I think once you...some people are born to be activists or are willing to become activists, it’s hard to say “No.” Although it’s very exhausting and there’s moments when you have to say no. I have Type I Diabetes and now I work for JDRF, which is the group that’s working to cure Type I Diabetes. If you guys want to have fun you can Google me, or put in YouTube, just type my name and you’ll see me talking...have you already done that?

EVENSON: We’ve done that, yeah.

BROBSON: So, yeah, I guess I’m an activist. I don’t think of myself as an activist but I’m an activist [laughs]. I am not as active in the gay community here locally as I wish I could be because my work with JDRF consumes so much of my time. But I certainly give it my support whenever I can. And that’s probably why I ended up here talking to you guys.

EVENSON: Well we definitely appreciate you coming in. And...

BROBSON: So you guys have done your research on me. It’s scary if you Google my name, it’s like whoa this guy’s like seriously here. It used to also be that you could find a lot of the old 62:00articles and stuff from the Collegiate Times and even email threads from, there was, I don’t know, I think Google may now help to thin this down, but in the pre-web world and pre-email world we had a system called PROFS, which was on the mainframes, it’s ancient technology, and we could – I could send a note to a colleague across the university or to a friend at the University of Syracuse or Syracuse University because all of these academic institutions were on this main system. It’s what actually is the backbone that has become the World Wide Web. But at that time we were on a dummy terminal connected to a mainframe and it was that old clunky, think 1970’s technology, and you’d kinda type a message with this very, you had to know this 63:00address, and you could send a note. It was all like pixel, to create a triangle, there was no graphic that was a triangle, you had to like put a bunch of lines across and then the next line down shrink it by a few and shrink it by a few to create a visual that would look like a pink triangle. And then maybe put a phrase below it that would somehow convey to people what your belief was. So what we now think of as signature blocks. And the university those all got put off into memory somewhere and when the mainframes went away and it all got migrated into the web these, Tech, with its emphasis on being a digital campus and archiving and creating, storing these histories hung on to a lot of that. So I was actually years ago was Googling and found like these emails of me and other people debating some of the topics around gay rights and visibility and things like 64:00that. So it’s interesting, I don’t know, I’m sure it can still be found, but it’s interesting to see, what things that I would never have thought would get pulled up into the digital world are now in the digital world, so...pretty cool.

EVENSON: That is interesting. We’ll have to take another look. And thanks for letting us know about the Collegiate Times, I’m sure there’s...

BROBSON: Over the years they’ve covered a lot of different things and there’d probably be some interesting articles to pick out. I’m sure that they would’ve had an article on the murder. I’m embarrassed that I can’t remember the guys name. I know him, I can see him across from Gillie’s on College Avenue, but for the life of me I can’t pull the name out of my head right now.

EVENSON: Well, we’ll take a look.

BROBSON: And I’m certainly available and accessible. There’s tons of other stories, there’s lots of other sub pieces of this, people that I would suggest, you know I talked about, it’d be interesting to collect oral histories of people who were not out. That might be interesting. And I 65:00know people who I could refer you to on that front. There also were people like Sarah Richardson who was the woman with me tried to, well we did successfully found the faculty caucus, which became a big deal. Brian McConnell, first president of the student group that was a fully sanctioned student group. And there’s people who have some really important moments of history in their heads. And going before me, I know you’ve got some people from before me, and hopefully I’m sure somebody is collecting some of the retired faculty’s memories.

EVENSON: Yeah, we do have some students doing that.

BROBSON: Luther Brice and Dean O’Donnell and other people, but the students from earlier periods are thin on the ground. I overlap with Tom-what’s his name, he’s involved with the Ex 66:00Lapide, not Tillus or Tiller it’s, shoot, anyway it’ll come to me. But Steve Knowles, the gentleman I mentioned, he was on campus in the late sixties, the early seventies. He lives still here in town. He might be an interesting person for someone of that period that really, really predates things, the Vietnam War era.

EVENSON: Well we will let Dr. Cline know.

BROBSON: Okay.

EVENSON: Thank you so much.

BROBSON: This was lots of fun. Obviously, I had lots of stories to tell.

EVENSON: That’s a good thing. It helps our project.

BROBSON: And again if there’s anything that doesn’t make sense or you’re reviewing it and need clarification just reach out to me.