Yes, there—I will give you one example which is political in a sense,
but not—In 1984 when Hunt and Helms were running for Helms' Senate seat
there was a higher level of political homophobia than usual in North
Carolina. And one day I got a call from my friend, Lightning Brown he
was walking to work, dental school, or where ever he worked at then. He
was working for a program dealing with autistic children. And this woman
he knew in the library science school had stopped him in a parking lot
somewhere on campus and shown him this letter, it was an anonymous
letter that was sent to about 25 or 30 members of the faculty. They were
not named. The letter was sent. Obviously the envelopes had somebody's
name on them. But the Xeroxed letter that was inside, it had a list of
things like, "Assistant Professor of Romance Languages," "Full Professor
of Physics," you know things like that, "Assistant Dean of this,"
"Associate Professor of that." These people who were identified only by
their rank, were presumed all to be gay. And they were told to resign
before they were exposed. And this woman in library science told
Lightning that the man in library science, who had received this letter
and given it to her, was frightened by this letter. So, Lightning said
he couldn't do anything about it, he had a busy day to work, he said,
"do something about it." Well, I don't really respond very well to
things like that, I was in bed when he called, it took me a while to get
up. So, what was I going to do? In the
Page 42meantime, he
had brought a copy of this letter to my house, so that afternoon, I went
down to Bill Friday's office. He was still the president at the
university system. I don't know who was the chancellor, but I didn't
know the chancellor, I did know Bill Friday, he was a voter in my
precinct. And so I got there and his secretary, Azona Norwood, was
somebody that I also knew, she was on the Carrboro Board of Aldermen,
and I told her that I had this really important thing, I just wanted to
talk to him for a few minutes. And she sort of, I think I was really
nervous about this. I had never talked to Bill Friday about anything gay
before in my life. I mean, he knew I was gay, but that was a private
matter. I think that she could tell that I was a little anxious about
this. So, she went into see him and she said, "He'll be finished with
what he is doing in about 10 minutes and then he will see you." So, I
went in and I showed him the letter. He had already seen it, he was
almost shaking with anger about this letter. Because, what he saw was an
effort to threaten his faculty.