Sure, well, I'm on the board of the largest LGBT support and lobbying organization in the state, and it's an organization that has been around for 30 years. And it's a tremendous support for the entire LGBT community, and so I'm very honored to be on the board and a part of that community. I am also on the board of one of the largest historical archives of LGBTQ materials in the world. And it's absolutely fascinating for me, for us to see our stories, and to see the materials that has been collected over the years, and see how our lives and our history has progressed. I have done a few documentaries for the local pride group, and I spend an awful lot of time doing historical research. And I'm absolutely impressed and blown away by the courage of some of our predecessors in this community to have done what they did, to have stood up to the hatred that they experienced back in the late 60s, early 70s, and helped pave the way for the rest of us to be who we are. When you look at the history of the pride movement, we have gone from a set of protest marches to celebratory parades, and we've changed in how people view us. One of the people that I interviewed for a documentary I did said that we have gone from movement to market. And she was talking about how we have gone from a political statement in being out, and being proud, and being visible, to now being part of the market of the country, of the world, that when you look at pride festivals, there's probably as many people there selling granite countertops as there are signing you up to be an activist. So our history has changed dramatically, and it's fun to actually be able to research that and study that. I'm also working on a master's degree in human development, with a concentration on LGBTQ studies, and it's a program that you write yourself. And so all the courses that I've been working on, the bulk of them have all been independent studies of my own design. And so right now, I've been studying about the German penal code paragraph 175, in particular, how the Nazis enforced it between the 1930s and 1945, when World War II ended. And so it's fascinating for me to, again, see our history, to see where we've been, the issues that we've faced in the past. And hopefully, we can learn from those parts of our past as we go forward. >> Would you, just out of curiosity, characterize yourself as a history buff? [LAUGH] >> Well, I'm beginning to think that I am a bit of a history buff, and I never used to think about it. I mean, I always enjoyed history classes, and I thought that was interesting. But I think the more I get into our history, I feel like I've found a focus for this interest in history that I never had before. And everything was generic history before, and I was like, okay, so what, but now I'm finding that I want to study the history of the LGBTQ people. And I want to study our past, and I want to study our previous experiences in a way that I've never wanted to study history before. Joan of Arc, who was burned at the stake, primarily because she refused to start wearing women's clothing again after leading men into battle dressed in male battle dress. And much of the suffering that she had was because she said, no, I'm going to be who I am, so she certainly is a hero. I think there's a lot of people that transitioned long before there was an awareness of it. I think of Christine Jorgensen, and Christine Jorgensen was amazingly courageous to do what she did. The film The Danish Girl is about somebody in Denmark, obviously, who transitioned before World War II, between the two wars. And when I look at people like Magnus Hirschfeld, he had people that were transgender and gender nonconforming, working for him in his library. There was a reporter that went with Edmund Hillary to Mount Everest, who transitioned later in life. And I just think about all of the people that had the courage, years and years and years ago, to declare who they were, and to do that in an era when there was far less understanding and far less willingness to understand than we have today. And a lot of those people, I think, could be classified as my heroes.
