Let me start by saying “thank you” for the book, it is a lovely read. I am so glad that you have taken the time to write it, so we all know the story and have it down on paper. Thankfully, we’ve reached a point where we have a solid history to look back on. Michael: A part of this whole thing, is that we just donated our personal papers, records


and artifacts to the Trettor Collection [The Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection] at the University of Minnesota. It’s a collection GLBT materials, now numbering over six million pages in 50+ languages. Our own contribution to that was about 60,000 pages and artifacts including photos, audio and DVD interviews and all kinds of stuff. Once you reach that stage, the important thing is to tell your history. In order to tell


your history, it has to be preserved. That’s why things like the Trettor Collection, the ONE Institute’s collection in L.A. and the Hormel Collection in San Francisco and other collections across the country are important. Those are the places that people are going to go to find our history: to find those letters that people wrote about their feelings and all of that, which is really important. Jack:We wanted to wait until everything was settled. When we first applied for a marriage license, we were attacked by friends for being lunatics and told we were crazy. Shortly thereafter, the very people that called us names and I’m talking five years later, they realized, “Wait a minute, they are really on to something.” They started to try to take credit for everything that they didn’t do. (Laughs) So, there has been this movement afoot from a lot of people who are trying to take credit for starting it and being the source for where it began. We just decided to let them have their say and after all was said and done and the Supreme Court does what is inevitable... That we would then have the final word by putting our story out. To say where it actually began and why, to tell the story that only we can tell. It’s kind of a challenge to get people to look back at all, especially beyond the AIDS crisis and there is so much more shared history than just that. Another reason why I’m happy about books like yours, stories that are recorded for posterity and will hope- fully, encourage others to do the same. Michael: That was our hope. That was one of our reasons for putting it forward. I also


think that another part of the reason you don’t hear all those other voices too, is that AIDS took many of them. Those people are no longer there to stand and testify. The other reason that we wrote this book was that we wanted to speak to the younger generation. It is written for a young adult audience, it’s readable for adults but it’s written specifically for a younger audience. Each year, there is a new crop of 14-year-olds, who are curious and want to know about their own history. Jack: They all ask the same question. Even the letters we received after theLOOK magazine article appeared [“The Homosexual Couple,”LOOK magazine, Jan. 26, 1971, p. 69]. We received letters from around the world, not every country, mostly from teenag- ers and the question was always the same. “How do I find Mr. or Ms. Right? Somebody who I can love and somebody who will love me?” That’s the kind of question asked then and they continue to ask now and are what the book attempts to address: “How can teenagers address that kind of issue?” We actually still get such questions from people in their 40’s, “How did you stay together so long? How did you find each other?” Did you have a sense of the enormity of those early moments? Michael:We had a clear vision from the beginning, when Jack proposed to me


and I told him that I would only commit to him, if we could find a way to be legally married. That was 1967 and even then we had a pretty clear idea of what we were going to be. We didn’t have shame, guilt or fear, or any of those things and we knew we were going to move forward and live openly. We had a family that supported us and felt confident that one way or another, we could do it. We knew that being out and living a free, open life was transformative. We certainly didn’t have a


clear understanding of what the impact would be of having so many others model on that. As FEBRUARY 2016 | RAGE monthly 23


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