to just make sure we have a backup recording.
And I thought we might just start,
let me just thank you again for sitting down
with us
and talking about your memories of Morales v. Texas
and some of your other activism.
We're really appreciative of you doing that.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
I'm just gonna say thank you for the invite.
Oh, sure.
You were a dedicated activist for a variety of causes
before you became a plaintiff in Morales v. Texas.
So could you talk about some of your earlier activism
and what inspired you to do some of that?
Well, I think what inspired me were injustices,
discrimination that I or someone that I loved
was the recipient of,
and I just kind of felt compelled to act.
I'll give you a couple of examples.
One of them was when it was the opening of the Hemisphere,
a huge entertainment park in San Antonio in the
early 70s.
I was a child and the lady next to us told her friend,
don't get too close to them, they're Miscons.
I was about six years old and I thought,
well, I don't know what she's talking about,
but I'm pretty proud of who I am.
My mom is a senior,
was discriminated at the nursing home that she
worked for.
They wanted to make her work environment
unpleasant so that she would quit.
She didn't quit.
She didn't have a union, but she called me.
I became her union steward
and I wasn't even in a union at that time.
I think as a lesbian activist, as a woman, as a Latina,
your family's important to you.
And so at a young age, when I saw these things,
kind of thrown at my mom and also my dad,
I felt compelled to act.
And I think I've always had that streak
of being a fighter in me.
And I got that from my mom.
My mom was a very strong woman.
My father, I always say he was a feminist
because he did the cooking, did the cleaning.
My mom had to work.
And so he was our weekend mom.
And he was a very kind man.
And he always respected women and women's rights.
And so my early childhood bringing
was what inspired me to become an activist.
So you had this example from your parents.
You had some events that kind of sparked
that activist fire within you.
And this was in San Antonio.
You grew up in San Antonio.
Is that correct?
No, I grew up in Uvalde, Texas.
And the weekends, that's where we would go.
San Antonio is the big city.
And so we would go to San Antonio
and that's where I experienced that early spark
of racism.
But Uvalde was also, Uvalde was a farm
and a ranch in town.
Right now it's a lot in the news
due to what happened to the children at Robb Elementary.
I went to Robb Elementary many years ago.
Just in our town, it was majority Anglo.
They have the good jobs.
You know, the Latinos, we were the workers, so
to speak.
Over time it changed.
You know, a lot of us went to college
and came back and tried to change it.
I stayed there two years
after I graduated from high school.
I took advantage that we had a junior college there.
But I knew that there was something,
there were inequities in Uvalde.
Lots of inequities.
There were no Latino teachers, no Hispanic teachers
at the time that I was going to school.
Finally, I think I had the experience of,
there was a mayor that became a Latino male
that became a mayor.
There was a county commissioner.
And actually that county commissioner
left an impression on me about voting
because he came, we didn't live outside of Uvalde.
We lived inside Uvalde,
but we were the only house on the block at that time.
And he came knocking on our door.
And we have a pretty big property.
It's about an acre of land and house.
And he came asking my parents for his support.
And that just left an impression on him.
He said, wow, he thinks we're important enough
that he came to knock on our door.
And my parents weren't there at that time,
but I just had fun telling them,
look, this man came, y'all better vote for him.
Because he walked all the way over here
to ask for our vote, for your vote and support.
So that left a lasting impression.
And both of my parents were voters, right?
They loved to vote and they always voted.
And obviously that instilled something in me too
to make sure that that's how you get things done.
You vote. Yeah.
And so when you left Uvalde, where did you go
to college?
I went to UT, University of Texas at Austin.
I was there two years.
Radio, TV and film was what I studied.
I moved to Houston in 78,
worked at UT Health Science Center in medical television.
And I had a lot of fun working in medical television.
I got to meet a lot of, you know, famous,
famous, you know, Dr. Cooley, famous medical folks,
Dr. Cooley, just a whole bunch of,
and see what was going on and be part of a witness
of what was happening in the field of medicine.
Actually that job, I was there for about 16 years
and I really loved it.
So these were sort of like educational films in medicine
or what kind of films were you making?
What we did is we would,
a lot of the doctors wanted their programs recorded.
So I was responsible for taking all the
equipment out
and doing it and recording their grand rounds.
And then at the end of it,
we would package it right there on the spot.
And at the end of their presentation,
we would hand them a three fourths inch video
of their presentation.
Back then that was a long time ago.
Now they have everything so different now. Right.
But, and then I also did children's videos
because where we were, the UT Health Science Center,
our TV unit was, our TV program was called
Medical Community Television System.
And we were responsible,
I think that where we were 51 mile radius
of the medical center,
a lot of the children were in the hospitals.
So we had a special channel for the children
and we would produce programs for the children there.
And then we had a new program called Midday
and we had a host kind of like, you know, live
at five,
had a host and mostly talk about what medical breakthroughs,
but also kind of made it fun, you know,
what spotlight different people
that worked in the medical center.
Oh, great.
And at what point did your sexual orientation,
at what point did you become aware
that perhaps you were a lesbian?
Well, you may or may not believe this,
but probably when I was six years old.
I knew that I had an attraction for women
and I just knew I was different.
This knew I was different.
Of course, there wasn't anything around me that
affirmed it,
but I knew that I had a liking for women.
And it wasn't until I guess I moved to Houston
that, you know, I acted on it.
Well, no, I can't say that, Austin, I acted on it.
I had a partner in Houston and we were together for,
I think about five years.
That didn't last, but there was always something
that I knew that, you know, I was fond of women.
And obviously there was a reason
because that was what I was attracted to.
Was there a gay and lesbian community in Houston
when you moved there?
Did you connect with them?
Oh, yes, yes.
There was a big one.
I think at that time I connected mostly
with the feminist community
because I felt that the feminist community was
grounded me.
There was a lot of higher consciousness teachings
and I belonged to the women's group here in Houston.
As a matter of fact,
that women's group is still going strong.
I connected with them because I just appreciated
the intellect of that group.
It was always about feminism.
There was a lot of women who were PhDs.
We talked about everything and I enjoyed that.
I enjoyed the learning, but then that wasn't
totally me.
I felt I was missing my Hispanic part.
And most of the women in the women's group
were white women who were very wonderful
and very intelligent and I love that,
but I was missing the Latino part in me.
And I discovered that there was
a gay and lesbian Hispanic group.
And I started going to the meetings
and they would have dances during Pride Week.
They would have these big old bailes during
Pride Week
and they would have the top performers
in the Tejano industry come and play live.
And I thought, wow, this is something wonderful.
I can dance with a woman or back home,
I couldn't dance with a woman.
And I thought, man, this is exciting.
And I got real involved and I ran for the presidency
and I won and there were a lot of programs.
It was also a time that political landscape of Texas
was a little bit, even in the Gay community,
we had, I've always identified as a Democrat.
We had a lot of Republicans who in our gay
lesbian group
that didn't want some of the programs
that we were bringing in.
And those programs were just poets, Chicana poets,
and they just didn't understand what that meant,
why we would want Chicana poets to come and
read to us.
And so it was a different way of thinking.
And, but at the end, they did appreciate it
and we would have different kinds of programs,
different kinds of cultural programs.
And most of those folks didn't see the benefit
of it,
but they supported it in their own way.
And then an incident happened
that caused me to resign as presidency.
There was an article in one of the Gay lesbian publications
in Houston, it was called the Montrose Voice,
where they were advertising during the Cinco De Mayo,
an event at one of the local bars.
For those of you that may not know,
but Montrose is identified,
it's always been identified kind of like the
Gay neighborhood
of Houston, Texas, even though now we're everywhere.
But it was an article, an ad that ran promoting
an event
that one of the bars was having,
and it called for a best wet back contest.
And in that, they were offering $100
for the best wet back costume.
They were offering one year of free swimming lessons
and also Englisch, E-N-G-L-I-C-H lessons,
and they were gonna have green cards
made available at this event.
When I saw the ad, I was appalled, I was angry.
How could my brothers and sisters of the
community do this
to a significant member of the community?
Because this was a gay bar that was hosting
this, right?
This was a gay bar, yeah, it was a gay bar.
It was a bar that had been a long time institution
here in Houston.
It no longer exists, but it had been here for years.
And so I went to my feminist friends
and they said, oh, we gotta call them out.
So we organized a protest.
We were in front of the bar protesting and
holding up signs.
And the folks that were inside the bar came out
and they shouted us, go back to Mexico.
And the newspaper defended,
we called on the newspaper as well,
and the newspaper defended it saying that it
was satire.
And of course we knew differently.
We knew that it was racism.
So a dear friend of mine who was a professor
of one of the colleges here in Houston,
Texas Southern University, he taught law
and he called me up and he says,
Linda, it's blatant racism.
He said, and he wrote letters to the publisher
and there was a lot of activity going on.
My name was Mud for a couple of months in our community.
But I also had a lot of people who defended,
not me, but defended that it was racism.
And at the end, as I said,
I resigned from Gay, lesbian, Hispanic.
So any of those in some way or the other,
the newspaper editor never really apologized,
but said, finally, she got it.
You know, that, you know, why I would think it
was racist.
But, you know, it was a big, big, big to do for us
because we just quite didn't understand.
We escalated it.
We took it to at that particular bar during
Pride Week
at the top of the bar was when one of our radio stations
would have the radio station broadcast,
broadcast is what I'm trying to think of,
broadcast the Pride Week, Pride celebration
because the parade would go right in front of
the bar.
So we had gone and we made a motion that we
wanted them,
we wanted the radio station not to broadcast
from the top of that radio station, the motion passed.
And, you know, I did those things
just to kind of escalate the issue, to escalate
the issue.
You know, at the end, I think from what I recall
from reading some of the letters to the editor,
I think people eventually got it, that it was racism,
that if somebody had done something to gay men
or lesbians,
you know, non-Hispanic that, you know,
in a negative way that they would have under,
they would have been upset as I was too.
And so my friend, Gene Harrington,
it's kind of like, how did I become a plaintiff
in the lawsuit, 2106?
My friend, Gene Harrington called me up
and he was a board member
of the Texas Human Rights Foundation.
And he said, Linda, I think you've been tested
after the issue with the newspaper.
He said, I'd like to ask you to consider being
a plaintiff
in the lawsuit challenging homosexual conduct
law 2106.
You know, I asked him what was involved.
And he said, you know, going out, educating the community
about 2106, because a lot of members of our community
didn't even know that the law was in the books.
They knew that we were not legal,
but they didn't understand why we were,
that there was actually a law on the books
that forbade the homosexual conduct.
And so I agreed to do it.
I agreed to be a plaintiff.
When the foundation and its attorney got together,
they asked if I would be willing
to be the lead plaintiff in the case.
I said, well, I'm willing to be in the case,
lead or not.
So that's kind of how I became the lead plaintiff
of the lawsuit 2106.
Well, going back to your raising the issue
about this event during Pride Month,
some of that pushback against you,
where was that coming from?
Was that gays and Lesbians saying,
oh, you shouldn't bring up the race issue
because it's divisive?
Or what was the pushback?
That was exactly it.
That was it.
The pushback was that we were being,
that I was being divisive.
And I thought divisive?
Truthfully, we've never been united.
That's why there's been one organization here,
one organization there.
There's never been any effort to bring Latinos in.
My brothers, my Latino brothers,
I was really ashamed of them, shocked by their,
because when their failure to act
by even making a resolution,
because that's what I took to them.
I said, let's do a resolution and decry
and issue a strong statement
that we're not gonna take this,
that they're gonna either have to issue an apology
or do something and they wouldn't and they didn't.
And so that's why I resigned
because of their failure to act
and to at least send some kind of message
that it was discrimination.
And that if you discriminate against one
important segment
of our community, you're just opening up for discrimination
to other segments of our community.
And they just quite didn't get in
and I didn't understand that.
It wasn't until the end, and this is many years later
that one of the guys said to me, you were right,
but I didn't have support to support you
in what you were trying to do.
And I said, well, that's why I resigned
and that's why I said, well, after this incident,
I'm not gonna devote myself
to Latino, gay and lesbian issues.
I'm gonna devote my time to Latina lesbian issues.
And that's what I did.
I formed a group called Amigas, all for the acronym,
all who head is interested in getting active.
And what we did is we worked on us.
We felt that in order to create space,
we've got to take our space.
And that's exactly what we did.
I'm assuming that's not the only instance
of racism you confronted in the gay
and lesbian community in Houston.
Well, that one was probably the biggest one.
The gay lesbian community,
it's a microcosm of the larger society.
We're just a little bit, we're a little of the bigger,
we're a microcosm of the larger society.
So there's gonna be racists in our community.
There's gonna be all kinds of people in our community.
At that time, I didn't know that.
At that time, I didn't think that.
But now over the years I've thought,
yeah, we're not pure, we're not,
just because we're gay and Lesbian
doesn't make us any better.
There's all kinds of people in our community.
That's the beauty of it too, right?
But when you hurt one member of your community,
then what does that say for you?
And that's what I didn't, I couldn't even,
that's why I couldn't even understand
when the publisher and the editor of the newspaper
couldn't get it, didn't see it.
But it's also the way people are raised.
Maybe they were raised that way
where they felt that's what they truly felt
and that's why they put it in and they allowed it
to be put in, placed in an ad
or allowed the ad to be published rather.
But I never, we've never really got an apology
from the newspaper saying something like,
we should have never published it.
We shouldn't have done it.
They kept publishing articles of people
that were mad at me, calling me,
saying I was divisive.
And every time one came out,
then someone would come out with another article,
defended me and defended what I did, which was good.
But I didn't want it, I didn't want to continue
doing it
over and over and over.
But it just kind of, the issue just kind of
slowly died
and then I became plaintiff
and then everybody was like hailing me as a hero
because at that time,
the political landscape of Texas was so different.
It wasn't easy to follow a lawsuit against the
state of Texas
on the homosexual conduct law.
It wasn't easy in the sense that Texas is very,
I don't know if you're from Texas,
but Texas is very Texas.
Lesbians and gays, the climate right now
for us is pretty bad.
And at that time it wasn't any better,
but sometimes you just have to do what you have
to do
to see where all this is going.
And I think the Texas Human Rights Foundation,
they were the group that conceived the lawsuit.
They looked for the plaintiffs, they retained
the attorney,
Patrick Wiseman, who's now deceased,
but he was a brilliant and kind man.
The board of Texas Human Rights Foundation
was very involved.
I knew many of them because they were involved
in local politics in Houston.
And I felt safe and I felt comfortable being a plaintiff
because I knew the people that were part
of the foundation in Houston.
Okay, so Jean Harrington approaches you to be a plaintiff.
This is in what, 88 or 89?
About that time, yes.
Really need to do a chronology on my...
Yeah, well, was it clear what was gonna be expected
of you as a plaintiff?
What I was told was my role would be
to help educate the community,
because as I said, a lot of people didn't know
that there was a law on the books.
I think the lawsuit in itself served a lot of purposes.
We educated the community, we helped raise funds.
A lot of activists were born as a result,
I believe as a result of our taking
the 2106 lawsuit to court.
A lot of people saw it as an opportunity
to speak out against 2106.
So I think it helped a lot.
And also, they could unify their community.
We needed that.
After the fiasco of the Montrose voice,
we needed something to bring this together.
And I think that was the conduit that brought
us together.
So you and the other plaintiffs were gonna be
the public face of this, and you were gonna do...
The public face of the lawsuit, yeah.
And do outreach to kind of educate people
about the harmful effects.
Can you talk about some of those harmful
effects of 2106?
How did it affect your life?
Well, I've always felt, I've always been...
I guess, being a lesbian, I never understood
why people...
I never understood why the law was off the books.
I never understood why people didn't get it.
That women love...
There's some women that love the law,
and there's some women that don't.
There's some women that love women,
there's some men that love men.
I just didn't get that.
But what I could see was that there was a lot of...
There was discrimination,
there was underlying discrimination against us.
But I guess what I did is I tried to put myself
into safe situations.
I mean, I wasn't gonna go and be around people
that I knew didn't care for us or would look
upon me
and say, oh, she's one of them, kind of stuff.
But for a lot of people that wanted to express
their love
for someone else...
I remember one time I was at a restaurant in Montrose
where this restaurant was heavily patronized
by gays and Lesbians.
There was a couple that kissed,
and the owner who I knew because I had helped them
on a situation at this restaurant,
called me and he says, Linda, you gotta help me.
And I said, help you what?
He says, there was a couple kissing in my restaurant,
and this is a family restaurant and blah, blah, blah.
And I said, first of all, we're family too.
You know, however you define your family
is the way you define your family.
But a lot of people that patronize your restaurant
said those people are lesbian and Gay,
and that's our family too.
He said to me, I wouldn't even let a man and a woman
kiss Linda.
And it just bothered me that two women were kissing.
And I said to him that, you know,
talked to him about, you know, being a family
and having to respect people.
And when he said that about, you know,
not letting men and women kiss,
I guess I understood that, right?
I understood it a little bit.
And I knew the couple he was talking about
because they later on came, it was kind of funny.
He called me because they were saying bad things
about him in the community.
And the couple called me because they knew
that I was an activist in the community.
So what I did is I got them both together
and he apologized to them, the owner.
He said, I apologize to them.
He said, I want this place to be safe
for gay and lesbian folks.
And it was, I think the caucus gave the restaurant
an award at the time, got the name of the award,
but it was like a hate pre-zone or something
like that.
Some recognition that he was willing to work
with our community and to treat members of our community
the same that he was willing to treat all members
of the community.
Because he knew that there was a huge gay
lesbian community
that patronized him.
His restaurant was right in the heart of Montrose.
And to call this couple out for what he felt
was wrong
was wrong on his part.
So he did, he apologized to the lesbian couple
and he asked them to come back.
And I think they went back
and probably had dinner on or something.
But anything that came up in our community,
yeah, I do get a lot of calls about it too.
And we try to resolve it by talking and by communicating
so that everything's cleared.
Well, so being a public figure like that,
where you're kind of seen as a person
who can help out with these problems,
you must've seen a lot of ways that 2106 could
be used
as a justification for discrimination.
Yes, yes.
You know, because people weren't really being arrested
in their bedrooms, although John Lawrence
and Tyrone Garner would be later in 1998.
But for the most part, that's not really
how the law operated.
It was really just a justification for discriminating.
Right, right.
It's like even just in housing,
people were discriminated.
There were certain areas that didn't like having
two men living together, two women living together.
During the AIDS crisis, there was redlining in housing.
So a lot of that, the 2106, like you say,
weren't arrested for the act,
but there were other ways that people found ways
to discriminate against gays and lesbians, yes. Yeah.
So did you get to know the other plaintiffs
during this case?
Oh, yes, absolutely, yes, I knew them all very well.
Did you have any moments that kind of stand out
while that case was being pursued?
Because I think you traveled around the state
some, right?
I traveled around the state some,
but because we had two from Austin,
two from Dallas, I believe.
Yeah, two from Austin, two from Dallas.
I joined them at certain times at events,
but, you know, I didn't want to be in their,
you know, kind of territory, for lack of a
better word.
I felt that if they were from Houston, I mean, Dallas,
that, you know, they would cover the Dallas community.
I didn't want to come in and do, you know,
anything that would be perceived as me going to
their territory.
But, you know, Houston obviously is big.
There was a lot of education, educating to do
in Houston.
And so Houston and Austin, I think,
got called a couple of times to do some speeches
at the marches on Austin and that kind of stuff.
Yeah, I think what I was just going to add
is that, you know, the fact that the law 2106
is still on the books here, you know,
and I know during each legislative session,
we've had, you know, good Democrats
that have tried to repeal it, but, you know,
either it stays in committee or never makes it
out of committee.
And just having the law on the books
gives those right-winger extremists,
you know, more to fill up their agenda with
and, you know, just serves to, you know,
be more hate at us and discriminate against us.
But we've made some strides, right?
We just had this, it seems like the fight never ends.
Yeah, well, and the law is still there on the books.
Should Lawrence v.
Texas ever be overturned, I assume the state of Texas
will happily continue prosecuting that law
should that Supreme Court decision ever be reversed.
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
Did you see your participation in this case
the way you saw your other activism,
which is you weren't just representing gay
and lesbian people in Texas,
but you were also representing Latina lesbians?
The fact that I was a Latina and lesbian and plaintiff,
lead plaintiff, I took it very serious.
I took it very seriously because I wanted to
make sure
that, you know, wherever I was,
whether it was a speaking engagement that,
or a fundraising that I would reach out to
those communities
because all that is important to me.
You know, I'm bilingual, so I was able to,
you know, wherever I was doing speeches,
I was able to, you know, connect with Latinos
in that manner.
And so I took that, I took being Latina
and being the lead plaintiff very, very seriously.
I wanted to make my community proud.
So what was it like then to achieve these two
big victories,
one at the district court level
and later at the appellate court level,
and then have all of that overturned
at the Texas State Supreme Court?
What was that experience like?
Well, it was nice being affirmed by all the
other courts.
A lot of people probably don't know,
and I know that they were mad at Dan Morales
for appealing the case,
but there were about 20 of us Lesbian Gay
leaders in Houston
and actually throughout the state that met with Dan,
and Dan said, what do you want me to do?
And we said, we want you to appeal the case
because we want a Texas Supreme Court ruling
out of this.
And I think a lot of people didn't realize that.
And, you know, maybe we didn't do a good enough job
of explaining it to our community
because some people were mad at him,
I think when he ran the second time for
attorney general,
and they were blaming him for, you know,
the Supreme Court not hearing our case.
But, you know, I mean, I guess as attorney general,
he, you know, he had to do his job.
He said he would, he said, I'm going to challenge,
I'm going to do what you're asking me to do.
Now, whether he did it because we told him
or he was planning to do it already as the
attorney general,
but he did it, and he said,
I'm going to challenge it on its merits.
I'm not going to.
What he was telling us, I think, was, look, I'm
a Democrat.
I'm not a Republican. I'm not going to do anything.
And at that time, I guess he could have done
something dirty against us, but he said
or gotten some of his men to do something dirty
against the, but he said, I'm just going to
challenge it
on its merits and its merits of law.
I'm not going to do anything to, to make you
all mad at me,
you know, and, and he did challenged it on its merits
and, and that's what he did.
So he sort of, I consider Dan,
I consider him a friend.
Okay. So yeah.
So you and a group of others approached him and said,
the best thing for our case would be for you to
repeal this.
So we can get a statewide decision
instead of just a district court.
Right. Right.
And so he sort of agreed that he would,
and he would not attack gay and lesbian people.
Yeah, he wouldn't. Right.
Right. Exactly.
What was their criticism at the time of that decision
to, to, to try to persuade him to appeal the case?
No, I thought we went in pretty unified,
you know, we had, we, from what I remember,
we had a good chunk of the leadership from each
city that,
you know, that carried a lot of weight,
for lack of a better word, that, you know,
some people from the different caucuses,
gay, lesbian caucuses that,
that wanted a Texas Supreme Court ruling.
And that's why we, we wanted him to appeal it.
And so, you know, amongst the group that went,
no, we went in unified.
So maybe there were some others
in the wider gay and lesbian community
who didn't understand that in the Southern Nats way.
Yeah. And they were upset with, with Morales
for doing that.
Right. And then we even joked when we met with Dan,
he said, well, you know,
because my name is, last name is Morales,
his last name is Morales.
He said, hey, maybe we can get it through
like a divorce case, Kramer versus Kramer.
Yeah. Cause for a time it was Morales be
Morales, right? Yeah.
So when that Texas Supreme Court decision came down,
which basically ruled that you had filed
in the wrong court, right?
They dismissed it saying you didn't have standing
to file it in a civil court.
What was that like for you and the other plaintiffs?
Well, when we went through the court of
criminal appeals,
that's when they said that we had, we hadn't been,
that there was no act to go through
that court of criminal appeals.
And, you know, I'm assuming the attorney
Patrick Wiseman
and the board went back and, you know,
that's when we filed it in the other court.
I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know all these courts,
but that was the case with the criminal court
of criminal appeals.
We didn't have any legal standing there
because we hadn't been charged with an act.
Right, no one had been arrested.
And so then when we went to the other court,
you know,
it turned out that, you know, I forgot that Davis,
Davis was the judge and that's where we got
the lower court ruling that was favorable.
And then that's where we thought that, you know,
maybe we have a chance that we'd go
to the Texas Supreme Court.
How do you think the Texas Human Rights Foundation
handled the case?
Were you satisfied with that?
Oh yes, yes.
Yes, Patrick Wiseman, the attorney,
they were, he also had a couple of cases,
he had different cases around the state of Texas.
Texas A&M was trying to form a gay and lesbian club
organization and the university wouldn't let them.
And Patrick was the attorney on that case
and I believe they won.
Patrick was a, he was an easygoing guy.
He was, and I liked him, I mean, I think we all
liked him.
We felt he was smart.
We felt he knew what he was doing.
And yes, I was very satisfied with the work
that they did,
that he did and that the Human Rights
Foundation did.
This might seem like a weird question,
but was Patrick Wiseman Gay?
No, no, he was not.
What was his interest in Texas Human Rights Foundation
in these cases?
I think it may have been his area of law,
constitutional law.
And I think that was,
I don't know if he had children that were gay,
but like I said, he was very easygoing
and he was like at the right spot at the right time.
And I think it was the constitutional law mostly,
his area, his field of law.
I see.
Looking back on this case, Morales v. Texas,
why was this significant?
Or was it a significant case in the struggle
for gay and lesbian equality in Texas?
What did the case mean for that longer struggle?
Well, I think it definitely helped uplift our struggle.
It was significant that it laid the foundation
for other cases that came up.
It served at that time to unite and to educate
our community.
It served to get people out in the streets,
to rally in support of their rights.
As I said earlier, I think there were many activists
that were born as a result of this fight.
People didn't understand that there was
a homosexual conduct law in the books.
And when they would find out, it motivated them.
It inspired them to do something.
They couldn't believe it.
And I saw it firsthand because I was at
different events,
talking about the lawsuit.
And I just think it helped make our community stronger.
That's great.
Sarah, do you have any other questions
you think we should ask Linda?
Linda, is there anything you think we should
talk about
that we didn't touch on in the interview?
No, I think your question's got it.
No, I can't think of anything.
Okay, great.
And we have an interview with you
that was done by the Civil Rights
and Black and Brown Project.
You did that a few years ago.
We might contact you to see if you'll give us permission
to use a couple of clips from that episode too.
So I think between that one and what we got today,
we got some really great material for the podcast.
Thank you.
Okay, good, good, yeah, it's okay to use it.
If I said it, then you said it.
Okay, great.
Yeah, I think I was Googling some stuff
and I think I found it.
And I was gonna go back and listen to it too
to see what I'd say.
I think it's a great interview.
And I love that project.
The director of that project, Todd Moy,
is actually, his office is right next door to mine
here at UNT.
Oh, cool, cool.
Yeah, so that's a great project and a great interview.
I assume you've seen the book.
No, I haven't seen the book.
Oh, I'll send you a link.
It's wonderful.
It's such a great resource.
And all of those interviews,
historians are gonna be using those interviews
for decades
writing about civil rights in Texas.
Right, right.
So tell me, so you're doing a podcast
on the different states where there's a sodomy law?
No, I'm doing a podcast where we're gonna talk about
no, I'm doing a podcast where we're gonna take
10 episodes
to look at 10 cases in Texas.
10 cases in Texas, okay.
Yeah, so episode nine.
Around 2106.
Yes, and the predecessor, article 524 before 2106,
we have one case, Buchanan v. Batchelor against that.
So yeah, episode nine will be focused
totally on Morales v. Texas.
Are you doing Micah England?
Yes, yeah, we will be doing an episode
on England v. City of Dallas.
Yeah, is she still around?
Do you know anything about her?
She is, yeah.
She just opened a little cafe in Florida a few
years ago. Wow.
And yeah, she seems to be doing great.
Okay, so my plaintiffs, Charlotte is still around.
Yeah, we talked to Charlotte Taft a few weeks ago.
That was fantastic.
John Thomas?
John Thomas has passed.
Okay, Pat from Austin?
I have not been able to find Pat Kramer.
Yeah, Pat Kramer.
Yeah, I'm not sure where she ended up.
But I haven't been able to find her.
And the other gentleman, the other brother.
And Tom Doyle, I believe he also passed.
Yeah, we couldn't find him.
Yeah, I think he did.
I think of anyone I knew he had passed. Yeah.
And Tom Thomas. Yeah.
Yeah, but the interview with you
and the interview with Charlotte have been so good.
I think we got so much good material.
Oh, good. Good.
Anything to help.
And Charlotte, you know, is out of New Mexico.
Oh, is she? Yeah.
Oh my God, wow. Yeah.
That's good to know. Yeah.
Okay, well, we'll go ahead and stop recording.
Oh yeah, absolutely.