Interview with Jeff Mack | Ep #26
Profiles in LGBTQ+ Courage
In October 1998, Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old student at the University of Wyoming, was brutally attacked and tied to a fence outside of Laramie, Wyoming. Five days later he died of deep wounds inflicted in one of the most vicious anti-gay attacks in American history. In this wide-ranging interview with PFLAG Cape Cod’s Rick Koonce, Jeff Mack, a personal friend of Matt’s and today the Executive Vice President of the Matthew Shepard Foundation, talks movingly about Matt, his life, and the Foundation started by his parents, Judy and Dennis Shepard, just months after Matt’s gruesome...
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Interview with Alex Hagler | Ep #25
Profiles in LGBTQ+ Courage
Alex Hagler is a Latin and history teacher at a prestigious private school outside Boston. They’re also the recent co-founder of their school’s first Gay Straight Alliance. GSA’s (also known as Genders & Sexualities Alliances) operate in many school systems across the country today. As clubs, they’re intended to serve as safe spaces for LGBTQ+ youth in middle schools and high schools. Increasingly, however, they’re also serving as catalysts for social, racial, and gender justice. In this interview, conducted just after they founded their school’s GSA Chapter, Alex talks with...
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Interview with Kimberly Brooks Mazella | Ep #24
Profiles in LGBTQ+ Courage
Imagine being in a traditional heterosexual marriage for many years and then discovering that your husband or wife is gay or lesbian. What would you think? How would you react? What would you do? And where would you go to get help and find understanding in dealing with your situation? In the late 1980s, Kimberly Brooks Mazella found herself in this very situation, after being married to her husband Rob for less than three years. Today, she is a McLean, VA-based counselor and therapist who specializes in working with individuals and couples who find themselves in “mixed sexual...
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Interview with Lady Di | Ep #23
Profiles in LGBTQ+ Courage
“Vernon Diannah Porter” is probably not a name you readily recognize. But that’s because he’s much better known by his stage name and alter ego, “Lady Di”, host of the popular Friday evening radio show, Leggs Up and Dancing, on WOMR-FM in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Lady Di has been a popular fixture at WOMR for the last 22 years. Each week, she hosts her show from her home in Sandwich, MA, playing music -- mostly from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, -- all the while presiding over a one-person house party that she enthusiastically invites all her listeners to attend. And her fans?...
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Interview with Jane Martin & Helen Malone | Ep #22
Profiles in LGBTQ+ Courage
Some life partners first spot each other from across a crowded room. But not Helen Malone. With a piece of birthday cake in hand, she literally bumped into her future wife, Jane Martin from behind, at a birthday party for a mutual friend back in 2002. From the moment they met, the lives of both women changed rapidly. And while their lives today on Cape Cod -- with three dogs – seems like the picture of domestic bliss, their back stories include marriages by both women to former husbands... three kids of Helen’s – one by artificial insemination... Jane’s journey to becoming a parent,...
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Interview with Rev. Dr. Joan Beilstein | Ep #21
Profiles in LGBTQ+ Courage
Dr. Joan Beilstein is a Lesbian Episcopal Priest, and Rector of the Church of the Ascension in Silver Spring MD. Today, though a senior, well-respected pastor in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, DC, there was a time when Joan was rejected by her own priest for being gay. And even after being ordained a priest herself in 1994, Joan struggled to find employment, because no one wanted to hire an openly lesbian priest. In this revealing interview with PFLAG Cape Cod’s Rick Koonce, Joan looks back on a storied career that has spanned nearly 30 years. And she talks movingly about how, for...
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Hollis L. | Ep #20
Profiles in LGBTQ+ Courage
Hollis L. is a 25-year-old individual who identifies as both non-binary and transmasculine. In this fascinating interview with PFLAG Cape Cod’s Rick Koonce, the two explore the issue of gender identity in detail.
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Interview with David Bermudez & Bob Isadore | Ep #19
Profiles in LGBTQ+ Courage
David Bermudez and Bob Isadore are a same-sex couple who've been together for 47 years. In this interview with PFLAG Cape Cod's Rick Koonce, they talk about how they met, and share their secrets for sustaining a happy relationship over many decades.
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David Bermudez: Letter from President Barack Obama | Ep #18
Profiles in LGBTQ+ Courage
David Bermudez's work on behalf of gay rights has continued since the days of the Stonewall uprising. Listen as he tells about the letter he received in the mail one day, acknowledging his decades of work on behalf of all gay and lesbian Americans.
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Interview with David Bermudez | Ep #17
Profiles in LGBTQ+ Courage
David Bermudez is one of the few remaining veterans of the 1969 Stonewall rebellion in New York City. As Bermudez tells PFLAG Cape Cod's Rick Koonce, this uprising in a smoky, crowded gay bar helped light the spark of the American gay rights movement.
info_outlineNell Fields is a born-again Christian, social justice advocate, and a happily married lesbian who’s been with her wife Sarah, a lawyer, for over 20 years. She’s also the minister of Waquoit Congregational church in East Falmouth, MA.
The youngest of five daughters whose father was a career Army officer, Nell initially pursued a career in business and journalism. But, at a pivotal point in her early professional life, when living in the closet was exacting a heavy personal toll, Nell says she felt God’s call to enter the ministry.
As she tells PFLAG Cape Cod’s Rick Koonce in this compelling interview, her coming out story wasn’t easy. In fact, she and a partner were once told by a minister at their church in California not to share with other members of the congregation that they were lesbian.
For Nell, it was a moment of shock, hurt, and deep disappointment. Yet, in retrospect, that moment of exclusion -- of being the other, the outsider -- proved a key turning point in Nell’s pastoral career. In fact, it has shaped her progressive pastoral vision and inclusive ministry to people of all kinds ever since.
“God gives all of us the gift to be who we are -- be it straight or LGBTQ+,” says Nell.
She goes on to say, “God loves diversity. There’s so much diversity and variety in nature, why wouldn’t there be diversity in humanity as well?”
For more information, visit the PFLAG Cape Cod website: https://www.pflagcapecod.org/podcasts.html
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