When I graduated from high school in 1974, I knew I needed to leave Racine, Wisconsin, to come out. I had positive associations with the Twin Cities. My mother–who worked for Johnson Wax–came to trade shows here and loved it. The 1970s was also the heyday of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. I’m sure I’m not the only woman who thought they were “gonna make it after all” in Minneapolis. —Ann Marie DeGroot

Working-class Racine Wisconsin Roots

Racine was a manufacturing town on Lake Michigan, between Milwaukee and Chicago. Rust belt. In addition to Johnson Wax there was American Motors, Case Construction, and Western Publishing, manufacturer of Golden Books. After World War I, Blacks, Whites and Mexicans migrated north, joining people from rural Wisconsin like my grandparents who had come to Racine for the work.

Not all of my grandparents had high school diplomas. My dad was functionally illiterate. Mom graduated from high school. They all had livable wage jobs in Racine. Now the city is depressed, the population has fallen, and new industries do not pay union wages. A lot of people in my generation left because there weren’t jobs and/or because they found it too politically conservative.

DeGroot is a common name in Holland and Eastern Wisconsin. Lots of DeGroots in Green Bay today are related to me. In Racine, European Americans were ethnically identified. You knew their background by the church they attended: Czech Catholic, German Lutheran. We went to the Danish Catholic Church. Those denominations don’t exist anymore.

I went to Catholic Schools. Some of the nuns who taught me were strong, smart — feminist role models. At a young age I wanted to be an altar boy and thought it was ridiculous that I wasn’t allowed. My mother encouraged me. She gave me space and she spoke up herself. When I was in fifth grade, she went to the Catholic school and insisted they teach us about our bodies. She won. They wanted to do it, but needed a parent to push for it.

In the 1950s there were war widows who became career women. My Aunt was one. She had gone to college and studied Social Work. Her professors came from that generation of older White wealthy women who created the field of social work. I think she might have even had Jane Addams as a teacher. She worked for General Assistance. When she began, social work was an all woman field. When men began to work in the welfare department she noticed the way they separated everyone out. This Aunt was a role model. She gave me a copy of The Feminine Mystique and the 1928 lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness.

When I was in high school there was a convent across the street from the school that was being torn down. The city announced plans to turn it into a boys athletic field. I wrote an article about how it needed to be for girls too. The coach at the school was really angry at me, blaming me for ruining the chance for a resource for the school. In the end, they didn’t do anything with it. That land is still an empty lot.

Women’s Center, University of Minnesota

I felt free in Minneapolis because I was young. I moved into a sorority in Dinkytown. It was a good place to live — near campus. I studied Sociology and Women’s Studies.

After college I worked at the Minnesota Women’s Center on Campus. We wanted free childcare for parents so they could go to school. We did a report on how not having childcare affected college retention for women. It didn’t go anywhere. It is hard to implement changes on Campus. It is so big and fragmented. Our work remained an academic argument.

Student government at U of M had filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against intercollegiate athletics. We did an investigation of facilities and scholarships to bolster the lawsuit that had been filed in 1973-74, but didn’t get anywhere until the Office of Civil Rights–centered in Chicago–took the case. Then we won.

In the 1960s there were no resources for women or children who were raped. The movement of the 1970s created institutions where women could go, but sexual abuse was still something you didn’t talk about it. The Take Back the Night Marches were a global movement, starting in Germany in the mid-1970s, to attack the secrecy.

During the period I worked at the Women’s Center there was no Sexual Violence Center so we were the place for women on campus dealing with sexual assault. It was through that advocacy that I became involved in Take Back the Night. The original group of women who organized TBTN from 1978-81 had gotten tired. Marge Schneider and I realized we need to do something to keep them going.

It was around that time Minneapolis activists organized and won the so-called pornography ordinance, a ban on the sale of pornographic material in convenience stores. Andria Dworkin and Kathryn McKinnon came to the city to support that campaign. (I recently worked on a similar ordinance to remove flavored cigarettes from convenience stores. It’s funny — we received the same blowback.)

Marge and I started to put together a coalition made up of women we knew. We decided we needed more than a march. We organized a whole day of workshops that ended with a March from Loring Park, down Hennepin Avenue and back to the Park for a rally. Ann Reed often sang. People testified —like the MeToo Movement.

The power of the Take Back the Night March was in the numbers. When 5-7,000 people walk through downtown with sashes and signs saying, I survived a rape, I survived incest, I survived an assault, women–and men– knew they weren’t alone. We invited men to join us, but stipulated that women would march in front. There was pushback from men about that.

Today MPIRG sponsors TBTN annually. It has been institutionalized and as a result it is no longer radical. That happened with the Pride March. The MeToo movement is a regeneration of the radical roots of Take Back the Night.

OutFront Minnesota

In 1978 Anita Bryant traveled from city to city trying to get municipalities to pass anti-gay ordinances. She lost in Minneapolis, but was successful in St. Paul, removing gay rights jurisdiction from the new St. Paul Human Rights Commission. The commission fought back by creating a Gay Task force. People knew who I was from my work with Take Back the Night so I got invited to be on the task force. The work soon spread to state-wide. In 1984-5 I was asked to meet with Governor Perpich. Around that time United Way and Hennepin County were funding Lesbian and Gay Community Services , an organization that offered mental health counseling, and a health line. They also trained new therapists to work with Gay and Lesbian patients. The people they trained got jobs in Family and Children’s Services and Luther Social Services so people didn’t have to go to a Gay-identified group anymore to get mental health services, making GLS less essential.

When Gay and Lesbian Services folded, the funders held onto the money, looking for another gay group to support. That pot funded the launch of OutFront Minnesota. That would not happen today. United Way and Hennepin County were on the planning committee for Out Front then. You want to think that money doesn’t matter, but it does. You have to pay for rent and phones and salaries. You want to make sure that your workers are paid well and have health insurance and other benefits. You can’t just say, our work is so important that we are going to do it no matter what. It’s not practical.

In the 1980s the stories of our lives were being told by Evangelical ministers and hateful politicians. We needed to tell our own stories. We knew that our ability to thrive and organize as a community was related to being out, and people’s willingness to be out was dependent on their ability to feel safe. We created material and workshops on how to come out and how to deal with harassment and non-supportive reactions. We built institutions at workplaces, schools, and the city government, including the police. We started the Gay/Straight Alliances in high schools. The first ones were at South High in Minneapolis and Central in St Paul. We created similar workplace alliances. Many of those were led by straight people who wanted to support their gay co-workers.

The AIDs Crisis and Adding L,B,T,and Q to the G.

In the 1980s we focused on building awareness and understanding of A AIDS and HIV. You need to realize that when the AIDS crisis hit the Gay movement was still very young. Stonewall was 1969! In the 1970s men and women did not work together. There were separate Gay and Lesbian movements, and little acceptance of bisexuality and Transgender issues within gay and lesbian organizations. In fact, the movement began as a men’s movement. In the 70s we asked: What about Lesbians? In the 1980s it was bisexuals, and then eventually transgender people and other Queer identities.

It was the AIDS crisis that brought men and women together. By the end of the 1980s those gay men who survived said, “We would all be dead if it weren’t for the lesbians. They showed up and took care of us, and fought for our rights.”

Bridging the Urban/ Rural Divide

OutFront sought to help communities outside of the Twin Cities create informal and formal alliances. I hired a guy in 1994 and told him, “Your job is to find gay people in communities and connect them.” As a result of his work, some rural organizations were started that still exist today.

What I learned about bridging the Urban/ rural divide.

It is essential to go where people live. You don’t make them come to you. A conference in the Cities is fine, but otherwise, you go to them. When you go, you need to remember that you are a visitor in their world. Don’t do things that they would not do. Understand how and why people in rural areas are not out in parts of their lives. So if you visit someone in, let’s say Brainard, and you know they are LGBTQ but they are not out yet, you do not out them! Give them the tools, but let them decide how to use them. Respect people. People in rural areas are mostly smart and engaged people. You have to get rid of your stereotypes about what it means to live in a small town. LGBTQ people choose to live in small towns for a variety of reasons. They are not “stuck there.” And their communities are not necessarily backwards. We found pockets in rural areas where there was a lot of acceptance. Many straight people in rural areas have LGBTQ family members.

It is much harder to work in the suburbs. There is no there there. If you go to Brainard you know where the downtown is, you can find people at a central hang out. There is no downtown in the suburbs, so it is hard to find a central place to meet. Also, many people who live there spend their time in the city, so you have to get them at work.

We had a campaign in Anoka. Our legal advocate worked for years with LGBTQ students and their parents at Anoka Hennepin Public Schools. Finding support among the parents was difficult. People were afraid to speak out, even if they agreed. It was awful. They went to the school board, but got nowhere, so they brought a lawsuit against the school board. Doug Wardlow, who ran for Attorney General in 2018, was the school board’s lawyer.

The closer suburbs are easier, St Louis Park, Roseville, Bloomington, Richfield, — they are more metro, but the second-ring suburbs are the hardest.

The suburbs are changing quickly in terms of racial diversity. There are reactionary attempts to stop the changes, keep people from encroaching. Many White, straight, suburban people don’t want people of color, immigrants, and openly LGBTQ people moving in and asserting their needs.

Having an open mind goes a long way. One time during the Marriage Amendment campaign, Scott Fearing and Monica Meyer, (now OutFront Director) were in a small town. They stopped at a small restaurant/bar before going to their event. A couple of men asked them what they were doing there. They swallowed and said, “We are here to talk to people about the Marriage Amendment.”

The men said they didn’t think gays should get married. But after talking for a while, they realized that they didn’t really think gays shouldn’t get married, what they thought was that you shouldn’t force people to be gay. They ended up having a good conversation and the guys walked away saying, “I get it now.” The organizers ended up with two new friends.

Marriage Equality

In the 1980s, we tried to get Minneapolis to allow same-sex couples working for the city to get married. We lobbied the City Council for two years, working with Council Member Brian Coyle. They agreed to offer domestic partner benefits in 1991, just before Bryan Coyle died of AIDS. It was a good campaign. Sandra Hillary, who represented North Minneapolis, knocked on doors and asked people what they thought. She reported hearing, “I don’t understand it but, why shouldn’t they?” She voted for it– a vote we didn’t expect.

After we got it passed the Minneapolis Family Council filed a lawsuit, using an obscure law that said cities can’t allow benefits that the state doesn’t. We lost the lawsuit.

So then we focused on the private and non-profit sectors. MPR came on board right away. I started meeting with the Vice Presidents of Twin Cities corporations—Honeywell, Excel, St Paul Companies, the Star Tribune. They didn’t care if it was the right thing to do. I had to convince them it wouldn’t hurt the bottom line. The workplace alliances lobbied their bosses. By 2001 there were 200 companies that offered benefits for same-sex couples. Some offered benefits for all domestic partners, other’s only for same-sex couples. When it was available to heterosexual couples they were the ones who used it the most.

In 1998—2000 Hawaii started talking about same-sex marriage and right-wing groups started organizing to pass laws pronouncing that marriage was for one man and one woman in perpetuity.

I was never a big proponent of focusing our movement on marriage. I didn’t think it would happen, but when people began pushing for anti-gay marriage laws—then it was an equal rights cause we had to take up.

Marriage took all the air in the room. I worried that when it passed, people would think we had equality. And that did happen to some extent. On the other hand, now that we have it, it can be leveraged, used to fight for other issues. Today OutFront is working on expanding rights and acceptance of transgender people, and organizing young people.

I did get married in 2013. We were the first same-sex couple to get married in Ramsey County. It was important to my partner, and she was dying. We had a service at her bedside.

Minneapolis Youth Coordinating Board.

Today I work for the Minneapolis Youth Coordinating Board, a body that brings together the City of Minneapolis, Hennepin County, the Parks and Schools to encourage collaborative action to benefit Minneapolis children and youth. It is a great job for a sociologist. You have to understand how these municipal systems work and how they relate to each other and how to overcome roadblocks to getting them all to work together.

We work with a group of youth advisors and engage in research to figure out the factors that make it difficult for young people to thrive. The children who have the most trouble are dealing with different kinds of instability: homelessness, food insecurity, undiagnosed mental illness of adults, the proximity to gun shots, and the instability created by historic and current racism. There are layers to these instability factors. For example, we have found that it is not enough to find housing for a family who is homeless. People who have lived without housing need help with skills that will keep them from losing an apartment. Middle class people misunderstand the depth of peoples’ trauma and our children suffer because of it.

The youth board is powerful. The adults shut up when they come in the room. The kids have been trained to introduce themselves, and their testimony blows the adults way.

The Power of Organizing: Historical Lessons

When things get institutionalized, people often forget the grassroots radical activists responsible for that success. I wanted to scream at the TV commentators when we got Gay Marriage. They erased 45 years of struggle.

A bunch of desperate people wishing for change who aren’t talking together, working on a strategy, won’t create change. It is critical that there are people who can bring those connections together and help people with the language and the support they need. We got Marriage Equality in 2012 in large part because OutFront did the groundwork, traveling to all corners of Minnesota, starting in 1992. Scott Fearing did most of that. He did a great job. He is warm and personable and was great at providing trainings. We did 33,000 miles in 2005. And such organizing isn’t free. We paid those organizers. We stayed in hotels, we brought materials, we had to rent cars. It requires somebody with professional ability because you are interacting with people’s lives. You can’t screw up. If you do it well, it is powerful.

Young people will say to me, “I don’t know what you were doing all those years.” I don’t blame them. They are like me when was their age.

Our history is not being passed on to young LGBTQ people. Recently I told a young group about how Gay men used to get arrested for dancing with each other. They couldn’t believe it. Older LGBTQ people are still overcoming that feeling of being suspect all the time.

At this point in my life, my job is to remind younger generations how we struggled to win in the past. On Coming Out Day, 2018, I spoke at a Queer Studies class at the U of M. I brought some old buttons, and shared our history.

Minneapolis Interview Project