hankycode magazine is a print and digital publication dedicated to sharing queer stories.

Today, I am sharing my conversation with Catharine Clarenbach, who was involved in two different AIDS service organizations and was also integral in LGBTQ+ activism on the Penn State campus during the 1990s. I hope you come away from this conversation with a deeper understanding of LGBTQ+ history, and that you’re inspired to use your voice and your talents to stand up for what you believe in.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Q: Could you talk about your experience being part of AIDS service organizations and how you got involved?

A: I worked for two. One around Penn State in Pennsylvania in the early 90s, from late 1990 until 1995/6, right when the cocktails came out in the middle of the decade. And then I worked for another one in Morgantown, West Virginia, in a college town in a rural environment.

I got involved with the AIDS project in Center County, where Penn State is, because I went to an event at which the director of the organization was announcing that she had fired herself because there wasn’t enough funding to support the entire staff. I liked the people, and I was surrounded by queer men; I sometimes joke that I was raised by queer men. I am close to my actual biological family, but in terms of my coming of age, I was definitely surrounded by queer people, men in particular.

Q: What did being involved in these organizations look like for you?

A: A lot of times, it looked like going to the office, hanging out, and talking to awesome people. Then, eventually, I became a safer sex and sexuality educator and started doing ‘train the trainer’ exercises. I did a women’s health symposium. I became a legislative educator, which meant that I looked up pertinent bills coming up and wrote to people.Since we couldn’t lobby as a nonprofit, we had to be careful how we engaged with politics. I worked with people in Harrisburg, the capital, and went to DC on behalf of the AIDS project.

The other thing I think was really important about AIDS service organizations at that time was that you had the government on one side and ACT UP on the other, and ACT UP made AIDS service organizations look reasonable. That kind of respectability politics calculation really bothered me, but it was true. I really value the radical politics and action of ACT UP and Queer Nation, and I followed a lot in their footsteps in my not-at-work activism.

Q: You mentioned not-at-work activism, can you talk about that a bit as well?

A: I had sort of two arms of the activism that I did while I was between the ages of 18 and 25. One was that I was very active with the lesbian, gay, and bisexual student alliance. At that time, we didn’t have the T, nor the Q, the I, or the A [in the acronym]. I was first the chair of the political committee, then the political co-director, and then the social education co-director, so I had lots of roles. We always had Pride Week, and the first event I remember going to was the National Coming Out Day two months before I came out. Everybody who was on the steps of the classroom building where the event was being held had shirts on that said ‘nobody knows I’m gay.’ I just remember being in the rain with this kind of wistful feeling, even though it was 2 months or a month and a half before I came out, I was still not entirely figured out.As soon as I got myself figured out, I came out.

I belonged to an organization called DIVA, which was direct impact via action, which I really think was kind of a stretch; it was just called DIVA, let’s be real. At that time, this may not seem relevant, but we used to talk about scaring the horses. By which we meant being really out in our style and our fashion, so I wore a black leather jacket (a biker jacket) with a cockring on one side and handcuffs on the other. My head was shaved, I wore big earrings and lipstick, and I smoked Marlboro Reds out of a silver cigarette extender.

It was 1991 and 1992. And people have since said, “ Well, Generation X didn’t really have a defining political event.” And I’m like Hello? Were you there?’ We had the AIDS crisis and queer activism. Yes, of course, it pertained to particular populations, but that’s always true.

We had Lesbians and Bisexual Women in Action, and we had Lesbian Avengers. We were making street theatre, and it was when we were trying to get ROTC off campus, working on getting sexual orientation included in the university’s nondiscrimination policy, and getting an equal opportunity housing ordinance passed in the borough.

Also, we had the first Pride Parade that State College had ever had when I was there. There were like three dozen of us walking around on the sidewalk; it was amazing, it felt so good.

In 1993, the Names Project Quilt was presented in DC at the March on Washington. A bunch of us went to that and were really inspired, and so people at the university brought a presentation of the quilt to the university. Obviously, not the whole quilt, and eventually, the whole quilt couldn’t be shown anywhere. I was the assistant volunteer coordinator for the Names Project presentation, and there were hundreds of people; it brought so many straight allies because it changed people’s lives to see the quilt, to see these coffin-sized quilt squares. I remember so vividly one that said, ‘for those who died before AIDS had a name.’ I remember when it was GRID.

I was in school, I did homework sometimes, but music, activism, and parties were the three central aspects of my life at that point.

Q: I am curious about more details about the quilt presentation that you did. What did that look like? How did you go about showing it and educating people?

A: They brought some hundred pieces of the quilt, and they were laid out inside the large gymnasium at the university, so they were hung on the walls and laid out on the floor. There were people whose job it was to fold and unfold the quilt; you had to do it a certain way. One of our volunteers was sitting on the floor next to one of Freddy Mercury’s quilt rectangles and just sobbing. At these smaller presentations of the quilt, it’s silent except for the sound of people reading names and sobbing. It was very powerful.

For a while, there was an organized allies group at Penn State; they all wore red shirts that said ‘ally’ in the corner.

Q: How did you go about pushing for the policy change at the university?

A: We worked with our faculty advisors, and some of the group were on something similar to a student advisory board. We had some access to the administration, so we used that angle. And we made a nuisance of ourselves. We did fax zaps; we would send flowers to the admins in the office because we knew they were the front line that were going to suffer from this, and there would be fax after fax after fax.

At one point, I helped to design a piece of theatre where we went into the administration building and occupied the lobby and the stairs. It was one of the most magical experiences I had as a young activist. We spontaneously started chanting ‘where’s the clause?’ We just never let up on the public pressure.

Then, something really important happened in the faculty senate. I had had a teacher who was very fond of me. I did well in his class; he was one of my first-year music history teachers. I was a musician and went to school on a piano performance scholarship. Then, I was out in the paper and he wrote me a letter and put it in my undergraduate mailbox that said “you’re one of the best students I ever had” and then “Leviticus 17, Romans 1, God is the law giver. I am concerned for your soul.” The next time I saw him, he was all smiles and put his arm around me in this totally skeevy straight man kind of way. He spoke at the faculty senate meeting, explaining why sexual orientation must not be included in the nondiscrimination policy, which made people realize it needed to be there. That was super important, people told my father, who was on the faculty at the time, ‘I voted for it because of that.’ That was early 1991.

Q: Can you talk about whether the rural nature of where you were located impacted the activism and work you were doing?

A: For the AIDS service organizations, it did. We had to work with churches, and we used the church basements of progressive churches to train our volunteers. We had three counties, and the county to the north of us had more deer than people, and so that really affected our work at the project. We had to be thinking about that when we were looking for funding, and how we presented ourselves, and when we worked with high school students, we had the student AIDS educator, and could only say certain things and talk about certain stuff. Pennsylvania is a purple state. Right around the university, it was generally very liberal/progressive, and outside of that, it was not.

In terms of other activism, what’s interesting is that I was young enough and maybe naive enough to just not care. It meant that we were in danger sometimes. It’s an alcohol town with a football problem, so weekend nights are very dangerous because of sexual assault, and dangerous for queer people who are out and out at night.

Q: What are the things that you learned during this time that have really stuck with you?

A: Listen to young people, strategize with old people. Basically, work together across generations. I was really out and really active, and I said this at the time, it was because I could be. My family and the people who were important in my life all supported me, and not everybody can, and still not everybody can. The other thing I learned is that creativity in activism is essential, and so is persistence. Also, fuck respectability politics.

One of the things I learned at both of the AIDS service organization jobs was about the experience of queer men who had HIV infection and were living in super rural areas, and how isolating that was for them.

Q: What do you wish that people knew about this era?

A: So much blossomed out of AIDS activism. Queer Nation happened, and it was called QUEER NATION, which was a new thing. Now we have ‘queer theory’ and ‘queer studies,’ even though it’s still not a word that some people aren’t entirely comfortable with.

What I wish people knew is that it happened for my age group, that we existed, and that some of what younger people enjoy now was made possible by the people who went before them. There was a lot of politics then and activism that has become really problematic and terfy, and essentialist white feminism that excluded and denied the participation of trans women and later of trans masculine people.

Q: Are there any other stories that you wanted to share?

A: I learned something I didn’t know. Someone told me about a gay man who was really insulted by the idea that lesbians came to the rescue during the AIDS crisis because gay men weren’t doing anything. That is not true. Gay men were dying is what they were doing.

Larry Mitchell wrote ‘The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions,’ which was published in 1977, and it was one of the early books that had queer men and queer women together in the story. There’s this whole part about the street theatre of the dykelettes and faggetinas, who now we would call the queerlings. There are sections in the book about the strong women and the women who loved women, and then there are the fairies, the faggots, the queer men, and the men.

It wasn’t because gay men weren’t helping each other; it’s because they were dying or being terribly sick and being abandoned by other people. I think there was a sense of solidarity that was only really possible because of earlier connections that were made [like with the book] during earlier movements.

Q: If you could give advice and encouragement to queer people and allies today, what would you want to tell them?

A: The thing I was saying about respectability politics, taking the ‘dykes on bikes’ out of the Pride Parade doesn’t save you. Audre Lorde said, “Your silence will not protect you.” And also that you cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.

My advice is to make the calculations you have to make and be brave. Find your people, come together with your people, and be brave and persistent.