Top of Page Interview Information--Different Title

Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

The Freedom to Marry Oral History Project

Thalia Zepatos

Thalia Zepatos on Research and Messaging in Freedom to Marry

Interviews conducted by Martin Meeker in 2016

Since 1954 the Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library, formerly the Regional Oral History Office, has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

*********************************

All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Thalia Zepatos dated September 6, 2016. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Excerpts up to 1000 words from this interview may be quoted for publication without seeking permission as long as the use is non-commercial and properly cited.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to The Bancroft Library, Head of Public Services, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should follow instructions available online at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/libraries/bancroft-library/rights-and-permissions

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Thalia Zepatos. “Thalia Zepatos on Research and Messaging in Freedom to Marry: The Freedom to Marry Oral History Project” conducted by Martin Meeker in 2016, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2017.

iii

Thalia Zepatos, 2016 Photo courtesy Barbara Gundle

Thalia Zepatos was the Director of Research and Messaging for Freedom to Marry. Zepatos was born in New York City and raised in Yonkers, New York. Zepatos earned her undergraduate degree from American University in Washington DC while at the same began working as an activist, particularly on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment. Zepatos continued her political work once moving to Portland, Oregon. While in Oregon, she first became involved in LGBT rights work, especially by joining the campaign opposing Oregon’s Ballot Measure 9 in 1992. She then fought against Ballot Measure 36 in 2004, which, when passed, limited marriage to heterosexual couples. Zepatos moved to California work on the “Let California Ring” public education campaign in advance of the anti-gay Proposition 8, which passed in 2008. She joined Freedom to Marry in 2010 as Director of Research and Messaging. In this interview, Zepatos discusses her many years working on behalf of LGBT rights, in particular the freedom to marry movement. She details the extensive, multi-year effort to conduct research on what American’s thought about marriage in general and why they opposed extending marriage to same-sex couples. Furthermore, she explains how she and her colleagues were able to “crack the code” and develop a new set of messages that resonated with voters and changed their minds to be in favor of marriage rights for same-sex couples. v

Table of Contents—Thalia Zepatos

Freedom to Marry Project History by Martin Meeker ix

Freedom to Marry Oral History Project Interviews xi

Interview 1: February 18, 2016

Hour 1 1

Birth in 1955 in New York City to first generation Greek family — Family’s deep involvement with the Greek Orthodox Church — Childhood in multi-ethnic Yonkers — More on church as a connection to Greek community and identity — Father’s work in insurance, role in the Greek community — Mother’s work at Macy’s and later as co-owner of a women’s clothing shop — Graduation from Roosevelt High School in Yonkers in 1973 — Parent’s conservative politics — Interest in international affairs, attending American University in Washington, D.C. — Growing awareness of Vietnam War, feminist issues, South African divestment, and pro-choice movement — Political and activist atmosphere in D.C. in the 1970s — Campaigning for the ERA in Tampa, Florida — Awareness of anti-gay campaigns and Anita Bryant — Door to door campaign in Florida targeting, educating women — Organizing mentor Barry Greever — Saul Alinsky and the difference between a problem and an issue — The appeal of single-issue activism — River Network — Graduation, community activism in Adams Morgan neighborhood in DC — Work with Maryland Action to fight Ohio Electric & Power from flooding Poor Valley in Virginia — Success in Poor Valley case and realization that activism would be life’s work — Decision to move to Portland, Oregon: “...a place where life could actually get better through citizen involvement.” — Work as staff organizer for Oregon National Abortion Rights Action League — House meeting program strategy — Recruiting and grooming more activists and political leaders — Working with other western states to replicate model — 1988 work on Beverly Stein’s campaign, beginning interest in organizing on behalf of LGBT rights — Beverly Stein’s relationship with and support from LGBT community — The anti-gay Oregon Citizens Alliance, presence in a neighborhood church — Activism to fight Ballot Measure 9 in 1992, brought by Oregon Citizens Alliance

Hour 2 21

Death threats, meeting with police and FBI, fears of skinhead violence at election night gathering — Educating canvassers to educate voters — Support, debriefing for canvassers — More on training and coaching canvassers to gently educate voters — Criticisms from ACT-UP — Women for Change, published in 1996 — Two years of solo travel in India and Nepal after end of first marriage — Teaching “Long-term Travel for Women” workshop at the Portland YWCA — Writing a solo travel book — Learning from the emotional toll of the No on 9 campaign — Trainings for LGBT candidates with the National Gay and Lesbian vi

Task Force — First encounter with marriage for same-sex couples as a political strategy, skepticism that it was too soon — 2001 wedding to husband Mike, reflecting on the heterosexual privilege of marriage — Feminist and LGBT misgivings about the institution of marriage — 2004 loss in Oregon ballot measure, work with NGLTF and move to Los Angeles — The “Let California Ring” campaign, working with Evan Wolfson — NGLTF and starting to generate very early conversations about marriage as a political goal

Hour 3 39

Highlights of power summit trainings for canvassers — Challenges of organizing in California, working with Margaret Conway, hiring an advertising firm to help with messaging — Developing the television ads, choosing the “Garden Wedding” ad, appealing emotionally to straight people — Let California Ring coalition structure — Organizational difficulties leading up to the Prop 8 vote, legal distinctions between Let California Ring and the No on 8 campaign — Conflicting interpretations of polling data, learning to gather better data — Deal with Evan Wolfson to launch Freedom to Marry 2.0 from scratch, letting the data inform the message — Devastating passage of Prop 8 in 2008 — The decentralized nature of campaigning in California, the Yes on 8 “Princess ad” — Off message moves and public relations blows — Return to Oregon immediately after the 2008 election — The 10-10-10-20 paper by Matt Coles — Call from Patrick Guerriero to be lead consultant to the National Collaborative — Awareness of the need for a single campaign organization — Choosing Freedom to Marry as the single organization — Evan Wolfson’s efforts to assemble the best possible team

Interview 2: February 19, 2016

Hour 1 55

Discussions with Evan Wolfson about joining Freedom to Marry — Starting from scratch on messaging, emphasizing emotional rather than practical aspects of marriage — Conversations with funding partners — The fight for the freedom to marry in Maine in 2009 — Starting with Freedom to Marry in January 2010, immediately starting to gather data — Organizing the Marriage Research Consortium — Distilling two main questions: how to talk proactively about marriage, how to respond to attacks like the “princess ad” — Funding from the Civil Marriage Collaborative — Gaining access to psychological research, beginning to understand the root fears and issues preventing people from supporting the freedom to marry — Lisa Grove and Melissa Chernaik analyze 85 datasets — Teasing out the primary subjects for focus groups: meaning of marriage, values of fairness — Observing focus groups grappling with their values and homophobia — Choosing participants and organizing groups to allow for greatest comfort — The delicate task of exposing homophobia in focus groups — Sharing data through Marriage Research Consortium — Polling using focus data — The crux: straight people claimed to marry for love, but believed gay vii

people married for political or legal gain — Gathering data about families and child rearing — Adapting the message to best appeal to straight people — Implementing the message campaign: Why Marriage Matters — Testing the ads, seeing success of the journey narrative — Customizing the messenger to the demographic: religious people, military, straight men, “moving the center point so it might include them” — Creating the Oregon ads in 2010 — Choosing the featured couples, working with an advertising firm to hone the message and bring out the love story — Derek and Kate ad — Testing ad success — Segmentation, strategy for targeting a particular demographic — “Conversation campaign” and the political work of coming out, talking about marriage — 2011 campaign in New York — Using the Why Marriage Matters messaging

Hour 2 73

Creating Familia es Familia, support from Latino Catholics — Successful use of Familia framework in New Mexico — Bipartisan work targeting potential Republican allies — 2012 Minnesota proposed anti-marriage constitutional amendment — Facing an older, more conservative electorate in Minnesota — Corporal Andrew Wilfahrt and the persuasive language of freedom — Minnesotans United campaign — Freedom to Marry begins to define the campaign language — Opposition research and preparing rebuttals in advance — Fact checking and preventing some false ads from airing — Countering the “princess ad” by addressing underlying parental fears over values — Addressing worries of small businesses compelled to do business against their faith — Beginnings of the religious freedom discourse as early as 2004

Hour 3 90

More on the Minnesota campaign, churches and devoted volunteers — 2012-2013 Minnesota double play — President Obama’s support for freedom to marry boosts support with African Americans in Maryland — Perry and Windsor cases (2013) in the Supreme Court, messaging for the Court, showing that Americans were ready for marriage — The importance of phrasing, choosing “freedom to marry” over “marriage equality” — Targeting Justice Anthony Kennedy, emphasis on children and families — Criticisms over wealthy white Edie Windsor as the face of LGBT couples in court — 2014 momentum for freedom to marry increases rapidly: “the waves start coming faster and faster and faster, and you start swimming faster and faster and faster” — Messaging in Utah, where public support lagged behind court rulings — Oregon evangelical community led by Kevin Palau declines to support religious freedom ballot measure in 2014 — Attempts at evangelical rebranding

Hour 4 109

Advising the Ireland Yes Equality campaign — Travel to Ireland — Adapting strategy to Irish campaigns — “Call Your Granny” conversation campaign — Fund raising challenges — Impact on the US of Ireland’s granting the freedom to viii marry in 2015 — Obergefell (2015) decision comes down — A week in line to get tickets to attend Supreme Court arguments — A transformative experience for a professional linesitter — Work still to be done: transphobia ix

Freedom to Marry Oral History Project

In the historically swift span of roughly twenty years, support for the freedom to marry for same- sex couples went from an idea a small portion of Americans agreed with to a cause supported by virtually all segments of the population. In 1996, when Gallup conducted its first poll on the question, a seemingly insurmountable 68% of Americans opposed the freedom to marry. In a historic reversal, fewer than twenty years later several polls found that over 60% of Americans had come to support the freedom to marry nationwide. The rapid increase in support mirrored the progress in securing the right to marry coast to coast. Before 2004, no state issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples. By spring 2015, thirty-seven states affirmed the freedom to marry for same-sex couples. The discriminatory federal Defense of Marriage Act, passed in 1996, denied legally married same-sex couples the federal protections and responsibilities afforded married different-sex couples—a double-standard cured when a core portion of the act was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013. Full victory came in June 2015 when, in Obergefell v. Hodges, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution’s guarantee of the fundamental right to marry applies equally to same-sex couples.

At the very center of the effort to change hearts and minds, prevail in the courts and legislatures, win at the ballot, and triumph at the Supreme Court was Freedom to Marry, the “sustained and affirmative” national campaign launched by Evan Wolfson in 2003. Freedom to Marry’s national strategy focused from the beginning on setting the stage for a nationwide victory at the Supreme Court. Working with national and state organizations and allied individuals and organizations, Freedom to Marry succeeded in building a critical mass of states where same-sex couples could marry and a critical mass of public support in favor of the freedom to marry.

This oral history project focuses on the pivotal role played by Freedom to Marry and their closest state and national organizational partners, as they drove the winning strategy and inspired, grew, and leveraged the work of a multitudinous movement.

The Oral History Center (OHC) of The Bancroft Library at the University of California Berkeley first engaged in conversations with Freedom to Marry in early 2015, anticipating the possible victory in the Supreme Court by June. Conversations with Freedom to Marry, represented by founder and president Evan Wolfson and chief operating officer Scott Davenport, resulted in a proposal by OHC to conduct a major oral history project documenting the work performed by, and the institutional history of, Freedom to Marry. From the beginning, all parties agreed the Freedom to Marry Oral History Project should document the specific history of Freedom to Marry placed within the larger, decades-long marriage movement. Some interviews delve back as far as the 1970s, when a few gay activists first went to court seeking the freedom to marry, and the 1980s, when Evan Wolfson wrote a path-breaking thesis on the freedom to marry, and “domestic partner” legislation first was introduced in a handful of American cities. Many interviews trace the beginnings of the modern freedom to marry movement to the 1990s. In 1993, the Supreme Court of Hawaii responded seriously to an ad hoc marriage lawsuit for the first time ever and suggested the potential validity of the lawsuit, arguing that the denial of marriage to same-sex couples might be sex discrimination. The world’s first-ever trial on the freedom to marry followed in 1996, with Wolfson as co-counsel, and culminated in the first-ever victory affirming same-sex couples’ freedom to marry. While Wolfson rallied the movement to work for x the freedom to marry, anti-gay forces in Washington, D.C. successfully enacted the so-called Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. The vast majority of the interviews, however, focus on the post-2003 era and the work specific to Freedom to Marry. Moreover, OHC and Freedom to Marry agreed that the essential work undertaken by individual and institutional partners of Freedom to Marry (such as the ACLU, GLAD, Lambda Legal, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the Haas, Jr. Fund, and the Gill Foundation) should also be covered in the project. Once the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell in June 2015, the proposal was accepted and work began on the project.

After an initial period of further planning and discussions regarding who should be interviewed and for roughly how long, an initial list of interviewees was drafted and agreed upon. By December 2016, 23 interviews had been completed, totaling roughly 95 hours of recordings. Interviews lasted from two hours up to fourteen hours each. All interviews were recorded on video (except for one, which was audio-only) and all were transcribed in their entirety. Draft transcripts were reviewed first by OHC staff and then given to the interviewees for their review and approval. Most interviewees made only minimal edits to their transcripts and just a few seals or deletions of sensitive information were requested. Interviewee-approved transcripts were then reviewed by former Freedom to Marry staff to ensure that no sensitive information (about personnel matters or anonymous donors, for example) was revealed inadvertently. OHC next prepared final transcripts. Approved interview transcripts along with audio/video files have been cataloged and placed on deposit with The Bancroft Library. In addition, raw audio-files and completed transcripts have been placed on deposit with the Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives, the official repository for the Freedom to Marry organizational records.

The collected interviews tell a remarkable story of social change, the rate of which was rapid (although spanning more than four decades), and the reach profound. Historians of social justice and social movements, politics and policy, and law and jurisprudence will surely pore over the freedom to marry movement and Freedom to Marry’s role in that for explanations of how and why this change occurred, and how it could happen so rapidly and completely. Future generations will ask: What explains such a profound transformation of public opinion and law, particularly in an era where opinions seem more calcified than malleable? What strategies and mechanisms, people and organizations played the most important roles in changing the minds of so many people so profoundly in the span of less than a generation? Having witnessed and participated in this change, we—our generation—had an obligation to record the thoughts, ideas, debates, actions, strategies, setbacks, and successes of this movement in the most complete, thoughtful, and serious manner possible. Alongside the archived written documents and the media of the freedom to marry movement, this oral history project preserves those personal accounts so that future generations might gain insight into the true nature of change.

Martin Meeker Charles B. Faulhaber Director Oral History Center The Bancroft Library

December 2016

Freedom to Marry Oral History Project Interviews

Richard Carlbom, “Richard Carlbom on the Minnesota Campaign and Field Organizing at Freedom to Marry.”

Barbara Cox, “Barbara Cox on Marriage Law and the Governance of Freedom to Marry.”

Michael Crawford, “Michael Crawford on the Digital Campaign at Freedom to Marry.”

Scott Davenport, “Scott Davenport on Administration and Operations at Freedom to Marry.”

Tyler Deaton, “Tyler Deaton on the New Hampshire Campaign and Securing Republican Support for the Freedom to Marry.”

Jo Deutsch, “Jo Deutsch and the Federal Campaign.”

Sean Eldridge, “Sean Eldridge on Politics, Communications, and the Freedom to Marry.”

James Esseks, “James Esseks on the Legal Strategy, the ACLU, and LGBT Legal Organizations.”

Kate Kendell, “Kate Kendell on the Legal Strategy, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and LGBT Legal Organizations.”

Harry Knox, “Harry Knox on the Early Years of Freedom to Marry.”

Amanda McLain-Snipes, “Amanda McLain-Snipes on Bringing the Freedom to Marry to Oklahoma, Texas, and the Deep South.”

Matt McTighe, “Matt McTighe on the Marriage Campaigns in Massachusetts and Maine.”

Amy Mello, “Amy Mello and Field Organizing in Freedom to Marry.”

John Newsome, “John Newsome on And Marriage for All.”

Kevin Nix, “Kevin Nix on Media and Public Relations in the Freedom to Marry Movement.”

Bill Smith, “Bill Smith on Political Operations in the Fight to Win the Freedom to Marry.”

Marc Solomon, “Marc Solomon on Politics and Political Organizing in the Freedom to Marry Movement.”

Anne Stanback, “Anne Stanback on the Connecticut Campaign and Freedom to Marry’s Board of Directors.”

Tim Sweeney, “Tim Sweeney on Foundations and the Freedom to Marry Movement.”

xii

Cameron Tolle, “Cameron Tolle on the Digital Campaign at Freedom to Marry.”

Thomas Wheatley, “Thomas Wheatley on Field Organizing with Freedom to Marry.”

Evan Wolfson, “Evan Wolfson on the Leadership of the Freedom to Marry Movement.”

Thalia Zepatos, “Thalia Zepatos on Research and Messaging in Freedom to Marry.”

Interview 1: February 18, 2016

01-00:00:25 Meeker: This is Martin Meeker interviewing Thalia Zepatos. Today is Thursday, February 18, 2016. This is the Freedom to Marry Oral History Project, and this is interview session number one. I should add, we are at Thalia’s home in Portland.

01-00:00:45 Zepatos: Yes, welcome.

01-00:00:47 Meeker: Thank you very much, it’s good to be here. Thank you for agreeing to speak with me, and I’m looking forward to our conversation today and tomorrow. We begin these interviews the same for every person, and that is, tell me when and where you were born.

01-00:01:02 Zepatos: I was born on April 30, 1955, in New York City, at Women’s Hospital.

01-00:01:13 Meeker: Tell me a little bit about the circumstances into which you were born.

01-00:01:20 Zepatos: I’m a second generation Greek American. All of my four grandparents immigrated from Greece, to New York City. Both of my grandfathers ran small restaurants or a luncheonette, as they were called at the time, so my family very much is kind of a classic American immigrant story. I was raised in the Greek Orthodox church, my parents were both very involved in the church, which for us was as much a connection to our Greek culture as it was a religious affiliation. I sort of teased my dad for a time growing up, when I became a community organizer, that I learned about organizing through church and their church activities. You know, we were the last ones to leave church and my dad was the one who was counting the collection plate and my mom was involved in all of the activities and very much keeping the community together

01-00:02:20 Meeker: What borough were you raised in?

01-00:02:23 Zepatos: I was raised in Yonkers, New York, which is just north of the Bronx.

01-00:02:27 Meeker: Was it a fairly heavily Greek community?

01-00:02:32 Zepatos: The Greek community was dispersed—I didn’t grow up in a Greek neighborhood the way my parents did. It was an ethnic, multiethnic, sort of Italian, Irish, Greek community, the neighborhood where I grew up.

A-00:002:50 Meeker: What was your parish?

01-00:02:52 Zepatos: Prophet Elias Greek Orthodox Church in Yonkers, New York.

01-00:02:57 Meeker: And you said that your parents did a lot of work in the church. What was the extent of it?

01-00:03:02 Zepatos: Well, for several years, my father was the president of the congregation, my mother was the president of the women’s, you could say auxiliary organization, which was called the Ladies Philoptochos Society. So, they helped organize Greek dances, where all of the community came together, they were very involved in the religious calendar and big events around Easter time. They helped found the first big Greek festival in Yonkers, that you know, many Greek churches across the country have been doing as well. So, you know, going to church every week and being part of that was a big part of our family life.

01-00:03:43 Meeker: You had mentioned that culture was perhaps the main draw for participating in the religious life of the church, but were there other values that came with that?

01-00:3:55 Zepatos: Well, certainly the value of family, the value of supporting one another no matter what. My mom always has spoken about how kind of clannish Greek people are, you know, even to this day we’re looking for who are the Greek people that have made certain achievements or something. So that was something we very much grew up with, and hard work, your path to the future was working hard.

01-00:04:30 Meeker: Tell me a little bit more about the work that your parents did outside of the church.

01-00:04:35 Zepatos: My dad, for most of his life, was in the insurance business, and I think that came out of their generation being the first generation raised to speak English. So for many years, it was just part of our family life that my dad would help Greek business owners who were primarily Greek-speaking, and he would help translate documents for them. He would help them figure out the responsibilities around taxes or insurance. He would help them file papers or be the executor of their estate. He was a very trusted member of the community, someone of very high integrity, and so that kind of led into his life in the insurance business.

My mom, as a young woman growing up in Manhattan, in the Chelsea neighborhood, she kind of resisted getting married at a very young age, and even though her mother was a matchmaker. And so my mom always said she didn’t go to college, she went to Macy’s. She got a job at Macy’s, at Herald Square, and she felt that she learned a tremendous amount working there, about how people lived outside the immigrant community. So after she got married, she and my dad had four children, I’m the third out of the four and after some period of staying home and raising children, she went back to work at a ladies shop that she later purchased with another one of the saleswomen who worked there. She became a co-owner of a business and she worked very, very hard for very many years, running that store.

01-00:06:18 Meeker: Was that in Yonkers?

01-00:06:19 Zepatos: That was in Bronxville, New York, which is a little kind of enclave town on the railroad, going down towards Manhattan.

01-00:06:29 Meeker: When you were raised in this Greek church and although it sounds like you were raised in a multiethnic community, not a homogeneous neighborhood, did you get a sense of hierarchies amongst the different ethnic groups that you were engaged with? Was there any sense about if there was a pecking order and where your people fit within it?

01-00:06:52 Zepatos: It wasn’t so much a pecking order, although I’ll say the Greeks always have had a lot of pride, but it was more like the identification, you know. So whenever you told a story it was well, you know, the Irish kid said so and so, or the Italian family did this or that, or that was like your prime identifier of everybody and who they were and what was going on.

01-00:07:18 Meeker: Did you attend a public school?

01-00:07:21 Zepatos: Yeah.

01-00:07:22 Meeker: Can you tell me about your high school that you attended.

01-00:07:24 Zepatos: I attended Roosevelt High School in Yonkers, New York, on Central ave near Tuckahoe Road. My parents made us walk to school and it was a very long way, so I feel like I’m one of the last generations that can talk about that very long trek to school. I don’t know what else to say about it.

01-00:07:45 Meeker: Was it like your neighborhood, fairly mixed as far as the kind of kids who were there?

01-00:07:49 Zepatos: Oh yeah, very much mixed ethnically, and more racially mixed as well, I think. As I went to high school, I just had a lot more interaction with Latino kids and African American students also.

01-00:08:02 Meeker: Did your high school friendship cross those boundaries much?

01-00:08:07 Zepatos: Yeah, I used to hang out with a pretty multiethnic group of kids, and of course you know, that was the late sixties and so there were a lot of politics going on, and I was just becoming aware of opposition to the Vietnam War and sit-ins at college campuses. I was younger than that generation but very much taking it all in and paying attention.

01-00:08:33 Meeker: What years did you go to high school?

01-00:08:36 Zepatos: I graduated in 1973.

01-00:008:39 Meeker: Okay, so ’69 to ’73.

01-00:08:41 Zepatos: Sixty-nine to ’73.

01-00:08:43 Meeker: Right, so the eruptions at Columbia [University] happen in 1968, before you even entered high school. Did your family have a clear politics when you were growing up? Did they teach you about electoral politics and were there good guys and bad guys?

01-00:09:02 Zepatos: We weren’t very involved, but my parents were conservative, and I think it came from that small business owner, you know sort of living the American dream and trying to better your life and that of your family. I can only remember once that we ever met the mayor of our city, and it was because of a Greek Independence Day celebration that we were involved in. So we weren’t very involved in electoral politics. It was more like you know, whether the government was helping or hindering what anybody might be trying to do.

01-00:09:46 Meeker: Were you aware of where they stood in the national elections in ’68 or ’72?

01-00:09:53 Zepatos: Oh, I think they voted pretty consistently Republican, and they were a little concerned. I mean, I think they were a little worried. I was the only one of my generation to go to college and graduate from college, and I think my parents were a little concerned that I would go away to school and become very liberal or radical, and that’s indeed exactly what happened.

01-00:10:16 Meeker: Well, tell me a little bit about going to college and your decision to leave New York.

01-00:10:25 Zepatos: Well in high school, I was an exchange student, I went to Spain, and that was a very formative experience for me, and so I set a goal of becoming a diplomat, and I wanted to enter the United States Diplomatic Corps. I applied to schools in Washington, D.C., with the idea of going into international service. I was accepted, with a pretty healthy scholarship, at American University in D.C., and in my freshman year there, also took an intro to economics class, and that was the first class, I think, that really helped me see a kind of different political perspective about what was going on. Of course, I was taking U.S. Government courses and at the same time, watching what was happening overseas with the war in Vietnam. And so I became very jaded about actually getting involved with the United States Government and realized that that was probably something I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to represent the United States Government abroad after all, and so it was in college that I started searching for what else would it be that I could do in my life, and so I became an organizer, a community organizer.

01-00:11:44 Meeker: Was Vietnam the main political issue that captured your attention? Were you also paying attention to civil rights, feminism really starts to become prominent publicly in the late sixties, early seventies as well.

01-00:11:58 Zepatos: Yeah, I definitely was reading a lot and thinking a lot about feminist issues and I also got very involved in the divestment movement, divestment from South Africa. So it was in college that I became involved with that, and of course there were a lot of campus efforts to get their schools to divest from investments that were South Africa related. I got involved in that as well and then after college, when I started doing political work, the first big movement that I really started working with was the pro-choice movement, and that was very much aligned with my feminist thinking.

01-00:12:35 Meeker: So, you attended American University from 1973 to 1977.

01-00:12:41 Zepatos: Seventy-seven.

01-00:12:43 Meeker: Can you recall anything for me, about what D.C. was like during the mid- 1970s? Did it also go through kind of a difficult period like New York City was going through? What was it like being a young woman making her way around a city at that point in time?

01-00:13:03 Zepatos: Well, there was always a feeling that there was activity in D.C., around every issue, and then you know, by ’77, in my mind it wasn’t quite so much as affiliated with politics around the Vietnam War as it was, you know, many, many other issues that were coming up. So the South African Embassy, for example, was in D.C., and there were very frequent protests at the embassy, just as we were having protests on our campus. It was whatever issue you were involved in, there were actions and activities around D.C. that you could very much get involved in. So it was a really political atmosphere.

01-00:13:47 Meeker: What other actions did you attend, what other protests do you recall attending during that period of time?

01-00:13:55 Zepatos: Let’s see. I know there were a lot of actions around the Supreme Court, around the annual anniversary of Roe v. Wade. I think I attended those for a couple of years, you know the decision came down in 1973, and so that was very present for me as well, in my lifetime. Although abortion wasn’t personally an issue in my life, I didn’t have to make that choice, but I saw it very much as a fundamental women’s issue. And then the women’s wage gap. I remember the first time hearing about that, it was fifty-nine cents to every dollar, so that number has crept up over time, but it was very, very stark for me at the time, thinking about that and wanting to make my way in life and start working.

01-00:14:42 Meeker: And the Equal Rights Amendment was certainly a possibility at this point in time too.

01-00:14:47 Zepatos: In fact, that was, I think one of the very first campaign activities I ever had. It was sort of at the end of the fight for the ERA, it was a last gasp effort. I think Florida was one of the final states that was going to be voting on the ERA, and so I don’t remember what organization— There was an organization that kind of went around Washington, D.C., and collected up a lot of women, young women organizers, and I became part of that group. They flew, it seemed like an entire planeload, of young women, to Florida, to help out on the campaign, and at that time I had never really been involved in a referendum or an election campaign, you know as a staff person. So we all went, I remember this, and we went into a training, and we were divided into different groups and we were all given assignments for what we would be working on.

I was put with the team that was going to be going to Tampa, Florida, and I was told that my particular assignment was to be in charge of GOTV in Tampa. I remember that very well, because I was sitting there in the room the whole time, for several hours, thinking, I don’t know what GOTV meant, and I thought it might mean get on TV. So I waited and kind of bided my time until finally, we were again put on different planes, and now flown around different portions of Florida, and finally, on the plane trip there I said to someone, you know, who was leading the team, “What does GOTV actually mean?” And she said it means get out the vote. I used to tell that story when I did trainings on political activity and campaigns, because there’s a lot of jargon in campaigns, and I always feel like it’s off-putting to people who are new, who may not want to admit, like I did that time, that they didn’t know what the jargon stood for.

01-00:16:50 Meeker: That’s a good lesson. Do you remember the name of the organization that you were working with?

01-00:16:55 Zepatos: I think it was Women’s Equity Action League, WEAL, it was called. So we went to Florida and the big development of the campaign was that Burt Reynolds, the actor, had come out in favor of the ERA. But of course it was also, you know, Phyllis Schlafly was very involved against it. It was a very hard fought campaign and we lost.

01-00:17:17 Meeker: What year was this, do you recall?

01-00:17:20 Zepatos: I don’t, but I imagine it was right around 1978, I might guess, something like that.

01-00:17:27 Meeker: You know, you talk about Florida in 1977, ’78, were you aware of any of the anti-gay campaigns that were happening at that point in time?

01-00:17:36 Zepatos: I was definitely aware of Anita Bryant and the beginning of her anti-gay crusade, let’s say, and just I was becoming aware of the rise of the right wing, and feeling very concerned and upset at what they were doing. Then when I moved here, to Oregon, in 1979, I started working with NARAL, the pro- choice organization, and Oregon and Massachusetts were their two test states for a big new organizing drive that they were doing. I had been doing community organizing of other kinds, that wasn’t as related, and through NARAL was my first chance to really get involved in electoral politics, and I found it really exciting and frankly, not that hard to try and win elections, if you knew how to do good organizing. So the idea that we would gather pro- choice women together, kind of educate them about the fact that they had to do more and get more involved to protect the right to choose, and then try to,

you know, recruit and promote some of them as either candidates or campaign managers or as lead volunteers for campaigns, was a big part of my work for several years.

01-00:18:55 Meeker: So that was beginning in ’79, about.

01-00:18:58 Zepatos: Yeah.

01-00:19:00 Meeker: You know, going back to your visit to Florida and this first effort to get out the vote, were you doing field work, were you going door to door?

01-00:19:09 Zepatos: Yeah, I was going door to door and organizing other people. We were doing visibility, as well as door-knocking, just really trying to make sure that people, especially women, knew what was at stake in that election.

01-00:19:25 Meeker: When you were doing this field work, going door to door, what was the agenda? Was there like a particular script that you were working on, were there particular kinds of people who you were trying to engage with?

01-00:19:41 Zepatos: I think we were primarily reaching out to women. I think we were trying to identify women and talk with them from a perspective of their self-interests, what they had to gain. But it was interesting and it was challenging, because people had all these preconceived notions about what the ERA stood for, and so we were often trying to kind of re-educate them or inform them that some of the information they had maybe really wasn’t that accurate and in fact, they could vote in their own self-interests and support the ERA.

01-00:20:14 Meeker: Do you recall some of these misconceptions?

01-00:20:17 Zepatos: Well, I think it was, you know, women’s liberation or what it meant to be a feminist or a man-hater or you know, there was a lot of other stuff, kind of cultural stuff, that was getting wrapped up in it, and so it was just kind of trying to calm people down essentially and help them think through, what the ERA was all about.

01-00:20:42 Meeker: Did you start to develop your own methodology for doing that, your own approach?

01-00:20:47 Zepatos: Not at that time. I think I was just really a student, learning from other people. I was learning what campaign organizing was all about and I was sort of comparing it to other kinds of community organizing that I had done.

01-00:21:02 Meeker: Do you recall any people, either in this instance or related instances, who were influential to you at this point in time?

01-00:21:09 Zepatos: Well, I had found a sort of mentor through an internship at my college, and he was a man named Barry Greever, who came from the South and who had been an organizer in the Saul Alinsky methodology of organizing, and at the time, he was working with a group in Maryland called the Maryland Action Coalition, and they were doing what was called pocketbook organizing, so organizing people around issues that financially concerned them. In those days, there was a tremendous amount of upset around public utilities, electric utilities and gas utilities, who were in a mode of growing and growing, and building a lot of power plants, including nuclear power plants, really increasing their investment as a way to increase the amount of money that they could collect from people.

So I was exposed to a lot of ideas around how to identify what people’s self- interest is and how to help them think through what would support or be against their self-interests, and how to help people find ways to take action on their self-interests, or fight back against what seemed like very entrenched monopoly interests, like regulated utility companies. So that was kind of where I learned my basic organizing, and Barry was a terrific mentor, and I got to really see him in action and learn a lot from him.

01-00:22:48 Meeker: Did you read Saul Alinsky?

01-00:22:50 Zepatos: Oh yeah.

01-00:22:51 Meeker: Were there particular parts of his teachings that you thought were especially useful in the work that you were going to do, you wanted to do?

01-00:23:03 Zepatos: Well, yeah, there are some things that I think I quote all the time, you know that the difference between a problem and an issue. A lot of people can express problems, but an issue is something that has a solution that is specific, immediate, and realizable. So when you crystallize an issue, it’s something that can be resolved by taking action, and the process in working with a community is often trying to focus and crystallize on what is the problem that we can solve.

There was another idea about taking on attainable, or as they said, achievable goals, so that even if it was, I mean the classic example was people needed a stop sign at the corner so that kids wouldn’t get hit by a car any more, you know that gathering people together and winning the stop sign was a very important part of just proving that people working together can win something. Then you can set your goal, you know, at a bigger, at a higher level.

01-00:24:12 Meeker: You know it’s interesting, I mean that really hints at, I think, a broader issue that comes up in the work that you did particularly around Freedom to Marry, and one might argue that it’s one of the reasons that the Freedom to Marry movement was so successful, in the sense that it was a single issue movement or a single issue campaign, I guess maybe is a better way to talk about it. I mean, going back to the 1960s and 1970s, there is this tension amongst activities, of whether you’re going to have a “movement,” which can be, you know very broad, no end ever in sight, potential for revolutionary change in multiple areas of life, seeing everything related to everything else.

01-00:25:05 Zepatos: Yes.

01-00:25:06 Meeker: So you know, you can’t talk about anti-capitalism without talking about anti- racism, without talking about, you know, the exploitation of women, without talking about the exploitation of the environment, all that kind of stuff. And then on the other hand, other extreme rather, you have organizations that are single issue. I mean these debates happen time and again. Were you engaged in this kind of conversation? Did you have your own perspective developing at this time?

01-00:25:35 Zepatos: Well I think what I found myself feeling was I didn’t want to be engaged in a vague, sort of multi-issue analysis that didn’t seem like it had a chance of moving forward and winning anything specific for anyone. So I think that’s partially why I was interested in, on the first hand, pocketbook organizing and actually trying to win lower electric rates for people who really didn’t deserve to be the patsies of these utility companies. Or later on, you know women who wanted to vote and take action to protect their own constitutional right to decide whether or not to bring a pregnancy to term. So it just seemed like the single issue organizations or even the identity politics, as it was called after a while, just became options for things that actually could be achieved. By being more specific, there was a chance to win on something, as opposed to being sort of all-encompassing.

01-00:26:46 Meeker: I read somewhere, a reference to some work that you were doing around cleaning up the Hudson River. Can you tell me a little bit about that work and what drew you into that.

01-00:27:00 Zepatos: Well, I’m not sure if you’re talking about a quote from Pete Seeger?

01-00:27:05 Meeker: Well, you interviewed Pete Seeger.

01-00:27:07 Zepatos: I was actually doing some work generally, on rivers. One of the organizations I worked with here in Oregon was called River Network. It was based in Oregon, but the idea of River Network was that every river and watershed needed a sort of community group to adopt it. So you might have the Friends of the Columbia River or the Friends of the Willamette, or the Willamette River Keeper, for example, and that by forming these organizations of people who cared about the rivers, they would be a counterweight to polluters who had just released toxins into the river, or other interests that just saw the river as a resource basically, to be exploited. And so in the course of helping people find ways to organize around their rivers, I was a communications director for this group River Network, and I interviewed Pete Seeger, I called him on the phone. I had a wonderful conversation with him, and of course he had been doing this work on the Hudson that included a boat on the Hudson that they regularly brought people to and they traveled up and down the Hudson, and of course he was a very well-known folk musician and they played music and so on. He said something in the course of that interview that really stuck with me. He said that all political work, in his mind, should be one third advocacy, one third education and one third celebration. It really jumped out at me because we certainly didn’t do the one third celebration part very well in most of the movements that I had been involved with. We worked really hard, we won something, and the next day we woke up and we started on the next big challenge. And he basically suggested, and I think in a very smart way, that in order to keep people involved in the long haul, we needed those social aspects of the work, the community building aspects of the work that were also really important.

01-00:29:20 Meeker: Tell me about moving out to Portland.

01-00:29:24 Zepatos: Well, after I graduated from American University, I was continuing to live in Washington, D.C. I was working at the consumer group in Maryland, I did some work at another group in Virginia, so I was organizing around the edges of D.C. I was living in a neighborhood called Adams Morgan. At the time, it was a mixed low income neighborhood, there were a lot of apartment buildings where people rented, and it was the beginning of a big condo conversion boom in the neighborhood. Also, there was a little vacant lot on the corner of our block that was kind of littered with broken glass, where the kids used to play, kids who lived in the apartment buildings used to play. There was a rumor going on around the neighborhood that the owners of that lot were about to sell and the property was going to be also developed, so the

only kind of open space there was going to disappear. So a bunch of people, we were starting to organize in some of these apartments buildings, actually trying to fight this condo conversation, and the question of this vacant lot came up and we thought, well why don’t we just get the District of Columbia to buy the lot and actually turn it into a small park. It really was needed for that neighborhood, to have a place for children to play.

So we started reaching out and trying to find out and go to the District of Columbia government and they said well, you know, the budget for the district is actually controlled by the District Committee of the U.S. Congress. So it turned out that in order to get this little empty vacant lot in our neighborhood appropriated for a budget, we had to start lobbying Senators from Kansas and members of Congress from other states who, you know, have never been to that neighborhood, had no idea. And it just kind of reinforced for me that D.C. was a city for people who really cared about national political work, in a way that at the time, I was not interested in.

I felt like I was not on a trajectory, as people said, to work for or against Congress, I didn’t really want to do that, so I thought I should find a place where I really wanted to live, and I felt that I was going to be doing political work my whole life if I wanted to be a community organizer. I wanted to live somewhere where I might have a hope of having an okay life, even at whatever salary I might make working in nonprofits. So I took my little old, broken down Volvo and drove across country. I had some friends from D.C. from college, who had moved to Seattle the summer before and I went to visit them in Seattle and actually came to Portland at the tail end of that visit and also knew some folks here who did similar kind of Alinsky style organizing here, at a group called Oregon Fair Share.

So I came to Portland and it seemed like I’d have an opportunity to get some work here as an organizer, so I decided to move out here. I also was very attracted because of the land use planning in Oregon, they had just—the neighborhoods in Southeast Portland had just defeated an idea called the Mount Hood Freeway, that was going to tear out a bunch of neighborhoods and put in a new road. They were adopting a long-term plan for infrastructure and light rail and streetcars, all the things we have now, were just under discussion.

01-00:33:10 Meeker: Can I actually ask you to pause. We can certainly pick up there, but I’d love for you to go back and tell me if there was like an epiphany moment or something that you decided that this was going to be your life’s path. You know there are definitely instances where people in college are idealistic and the first thing they want to do is get out and do something of social consequence. But you talk about it as this was your life’s path. When did that become apparent to you?

01-00:33:48 Zepatos: I’m not exactly sure. I think it was when I was working at Maryland Action and this other group in Virginia. I had this incredible experience with my mentor, Barry Greever, when we went into Southwest Virginia and we organized people in an area called Poor Valley, who were fighting this giant power company that wanted to block off both ends of their valley and flood it, and create this utility project called the pumped storage facility. You know, it was the Ohio Electric and Power Company, which was a huge company, they had a lot of resources behind them, and we literally had gotten this call from these folks who said, “Hey, do you all fight power companies? Because we need to fight the power company and we need some help down here.” And my mentor was from Appalachia and he basically said I’m going down there to help these folks, if you’d like to come, I think it would be great for you. So we drove down there together and I remember when we got there, the name of the valley where they lived was called Poor Valley and we had these instructions for how to find the turnoff on the road. It was the tip of Southwest Virginia, right where it butts up against West Virginia, and after we turned off the main road, we were on this little two-lane road, and there was a sort of broken down pickup truck across the road, and we stopped and there were a couple of guys leaning over the truck, the hood was up, they’re looking in the engine and they said, “You need something, where are you going?” And Barry, my boss said, “We came to help fight the power company,” and they said, “Okay, move it out of the way.” They were actually using this pickup truck as a sort of blockade, to keep the utility people from coming into the valley.

01-00:35:46 Zepatos: And there was another guy who was sitting in the woods with a gun, because they had decided that the only way they could stop the power company at that point was to shoot out the tires of these engineers. These civil engineers were coming in to take core samples and they just wanted to stop them from doing that, because they knew inevitably, that their valley was going to get flooded if they got chosen as the site. So they rolled the truck out of the way and they said go, you know, drive all the way down the valley and stop at the last house at the right, they’re waiting for you there.

We drove down and I’d never been in Appalachia before, and these were really poor people and their houses looked like to me, something out of a movie, I mean I grew up in New York. They showed us around and there was this big back porch, I remember, that was kind of right over this rushing little river below, and the man of the family was actually fishing off the porch, into the river, to catch trout that we were going to eat for lunch. We sat down and they explained that their family had been in this valley for generations. All their relatives were buried there, in this little cemetery off the side of the road, and that what they heard was that this power company, because the valley was nice and steep, wanted to put a dam and block it at either end and just flood the whole place, and they were all going to be forced to move out by eminent domain and they’d get a little bit of money. They didn’t want the money, they

14 wanted their valley. And they said that they just found it very hard to figure out how to stop this power company.

The Ohio Electric Power Company was actually comparing two valleys and so, so far, these two valleys, they were both filled with poor people, Appalachian people, were kind of trying to push the company off on each other and just make their valley less receptive to even the analysis. And so we tried to convince them that by banding together and working together, we might be able to help stop the whole project. So that evening, there was going to be a community meeting at this little hunting club building in the valley, and my boss, Barry, turned to me and said, “I want you to stand up and explain to people what this pumped storage facility is going to do,” because I was kind of a research assistant and I was looking at the data and the information and I was researching it myself, and he said, “Just stand up and in plain English, as best as you can, explain to everybody what this thing is.”

So I was studying the information and one of the reasons they wanted to build this pumped storage facility was that they had put in a lot of nuclear power plants and unlike coal or other plants, where you can increase the power and decrease it, once you got a nuclear power plant running, you had to run it at a high level of power all the time, and to financially justify and make nuclear power look better, they would install these pumped storage facilities and use the nuclear power at night, when the demand was very low, and they would pump water uphill so that during the day, during peak demand, they could rush the water back down over a turbine and generate a few more kilowatts of electricity. So they’d pump it up hill and then rush it downhill.

So I was studying my notes and when it came time for us, we went to this hunting club and everybody from the valley was there and we were introduced as the people who were going to help fight the power company, and I was asked to explain the pump storage facility and I said basically, what they’re constructing here, if you can think of this valley when they fill it up, as like the upper level of a toilet tank. And they’re going to fill up the tank at night and during the day when they need more power they’re going to flush all the water back downhill. I didn’t say it in order to be really inflammatory, it was an example, but people got so incensed, I mean this was just another thing, that now they wanted to turn our beloved valley, where our ancestors were born, into a toilet tank. And so when then, from there, the next day went and met with the leaders of the other valley and we actually helped them band together. It was kind of an epic fight and the women were sewing quilts and out on the side of the highway selling quilts. That ended up in, I think TIME Magazine.

In the end, we made the case that there was no real power justification, there wasn’t a need for these few additional kilowatts of power, and we helped build the case for that and then with all the opposition to the two locations, the Ohio Electric and Power Company dropped the idea. So it was a huge victory

and it really saved people’s lives and saved their homes and saved their way of life that they held very, very dear. For me, as a young organizer, it felt like this is something that really does make a difference in the world. So I think that was very motivating and maybe the moment where I thought, this is what I want to do with my life.

01-00:41:22 Meeker: Thanks for that, I’m glad that I asked for that slight digression.

[Pause in Recording]

01-00:41:40 Meeker: Let’s go back to Oregon and Portland. You were telling me about this freeway fight and land issues that were happening, that you found interesting and were interested in plugging into.

01-00:41:55 Zepatos: Yeah. Portland seemed like a town where community organizing was very, very present, and where people, as a community, were thinking about the future of their city. I think part of what I was looking for was the idea of a place where life could actually get better through citizen involvement, and that it wasn’t just things kind of going downhill all the time. And so the idea of a statewide land use plan, of an urban growth boundary, were kind of the building blocks of what seemed like, you know Portland really could be a great city, and yet it was still an affordable place where someone like me eventually could maybe hope to own a home. So that combination, I think was very appealing.

01-00:42:51 Meeker: Did Portland still kind of feel like a lumber town? What did it feel like at that point in time?

01-00:42:57 Zepatos: It was kind of a little, kind of a gritty working class town. I mean the state of Oregon was about lumber and resource extraction. I mean, we didn't have a big Nike or other identification at the time, so it was more like this is a river city where there’s a lot of commerce going on along the river, and people were very connected to timber and the river, and of course Eastern Oregon being agriculture. That was the ethos, I think, of the place at the time.

01-00:43:36 Meeker: Where did you first move to?

01-00:43:38 Zepatos: I moved to Northeast Portland. I shared a house with some other folks, actually somebody I was working with at Oregon NARAL.

01-00:43:47 Meeker: What was your actual employment at this time?

01-00:43:51 Zepatos: I joined NARAL, the pro-choice organization, as a staff organizer, and then I sort of worked my way up as a lead organizer. But the idea, the strategy of the organization here in Oregon, and it was also in Massachusetts, was to build a much more active constituency of pro-choice supporters through a house meeting program that we would network, almost like Tupperware parties, but we’d be talking about politics. So we’d find someone to host a meeting at her home and she would invite friends and family and neighbors, and we’d try to get ten to fifteen people there, which meant they had to invite thirty to forty, and in order to get that many. And then we had a carousel projector which we’d take from meeting to meeting, and we had charts that were on the oak tag paper, so we’d come with our charts and our little slideshow.

The essence of the whole meeting was, first of all, just to get women to tell stories amongst themselves, in the safe space of someone’s home and inevitably, in a group of eight or ten or twelve or fifteen women, either someone had had an abortion, someone had supported someone else in making that choice or someone had, you know, a tough story about it. And so talking about the difference between legal abortion and not legal abortion, and between having a choice and not having a choice was a motivating conversation. And then essentially, we were talking about the rise of the anti- choice movement, and we had that poster where we showed these two bar charts, and the number of pro-choice people was much higher than the number of anti-choice people, on public opinion polling, but there were so many more active anti-choice activists and the pro-choice activists were so fewer, that if you compared the level of activism, they were out there talking and organizing and winning, you know restrictions on abortion at the state level. So the whole program was really to get more of the pro-choice women to identify as voters. There was a bumper sticker at the time, “I’m pro-choice and I vote.” Just identify to your elected official that this is important to you when you choose candidates for public office.

For us, there was a leadership development component, which was someone who was outspoken and very interested in the meeting, we would ask to host the next meeting. Well after they hosted the next meeting, we would invite them to become one of our speakers and we would send them out speaking at meetings. I mean there were women, I remember, from those early days, who came to some of these meetings, that later went on, and we encouraged them, to run for political office, and they became political leaders here in the state of Oregon.

01-00:46:50 Meeker: Are there any people you’d mention?

01-00:46:52 Zepatos: Kitty Piercy, who is the mayor of Eugene, Oregon. I remember very much, from a first meeting that she attended at NARAL, when she didn’t consider herself an activist in any way. I mean I think she’s one of several folks like

17 that. So, also by doing this program, we would ask for donations, and we were building the staff of Oregon NARAL. So I think when I came onboard, there were maybe two or three organizers. As I became a lead organizer, we eventually built up to having eight organizers in the state, and it was because each of these organizers was helping to raise their own payroll by doing these meetings. We had really specific goals, I mean it was a very specific plan that worked really well.

So from there, while I still lived in Portland, I became a national staff member of the NARAL pro-choice organization, and started working with other states, because we were trying to replicate this model. So I primarily worked in other western states and then we also got into fighting anti-choice ballot measures, which was something that was very prominent at the time. The opposition would either try to make abortion illegal, try to pass some kind of informed consent or a waiting period or any of the many restrictions. So, actually through that work, I also developed a little bit of an expertise in helping to support women candidates for public office. There were particular challenges and concerns that women candidates had and at one time the Speaker of the House of Oregon, a woman named Vera Katz, who later went on to become a very prominent mayor of the city of Portland, hired me to travel around the state and recruit women candidates to run for the state legislature, who were pro-choice.

So, in working with women candidates, I helped a friend of mine who was a very progressive woman named Beverly Stein, who decided to run for state representative right here in this district of Southeast Portland, it’s a very progressive district. She and I worked together for about a year, on her campaign, in 1988, and in the course of that campaign, I started to meet a lot of volunteers, residents of the neighborhoods who were lesbian and gay, and it was really the first time that I started to meet and work with a lot of gay people. So we had volunteers on the campaign, in a very heavily democratic district, the primary election in May was kind of the whole race. I mean whoever won the primary on the democratic side was going to coast to the finish line in November, and so right after we won the primary, we won very big, it was the first appearance of a group called the Oregon Citizens Alliance, that was just forming here. They formed around collecting signatures, to put on the ballot, the executive order of our then governor of Oregon, Neil Goldschmidt, he had simply signed an executive order that said no state employee will be fired simply for being gay or lesbian. This group formed around repealing that question. They placed it, very quickly, on the ballot for the fall, for November of 1988, and people who I had gotten to know in the course of Beverly’s campaign, and started to work with a little bit more, basically asked for some more help. I actually recruited a very good friend of mine, Liz Kaufman, to run the campaign, because I was still technically running Beverly’s campaign, and I worked to help on that campaign, and that was the very first statewide anti-LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender]

measure. I think they had gotten confidence from a previous measure that had passed in Eugene, you mentioned earlier.

And so to me it was this same group of ultra right-wing, Christian conservatives, that had been targeting women around the question of abortion, and now they sort of shifted their sights and were coming after the LGBT community, and I just felt like some of us that had been fighting them for quite a while and having some success, we should help out and sign on for that fight.

01-00:51:24 Meeker: It’s interesting, your many years of involvement in feminism, yet it wasn’t until the late 1980s, that it sounds like you really started to engage with gay and lesbian people involved in political movements that you were engaged with as well. Was it just that people weren’t out or was it that the work that you were doing wasn’t necessarily attracting gay and lesbian people before?

01-00:51:53 Zepatos: I think the work I was doing was not really bringing me into contact with gay and lesbian people. I think I was aware that there were some groups that had started here in Portland, some groups that had been in existence for a while, but those groups were not primarily organized around fighting at the ballot, and I was becoming much more specialized and focused on politics and elections. And so those groups had other political goals and maybe I didn’t come into contact with them quite as much.

01-00:52:30 Meeker: You know, also during this period of time, I’m thinking certainly in the early 1980s, I think by the late 1980s, the landscape starts to change a little bit, but there are historians would describe different varieties of feminism. Maybe not as prominent in the early 1980s as the early 1970, but you would have a more separatist or lesbian feminist. Maybe on the other end of the spectrum you’d have something more like NOW [National Organization for Women] people, who are involved in legislative change and opening up the halls of power to women. And then there were strands of cultural feminism as well as third world feminism. Did you identify with any of these particular strands or did it kind of all seem relatively cohesive to you?

01-00:53:27 Zepatos: Well, I think I, I mean I was reading books, Betty Friedan and Shulamith Firestone, and a lot of books, and following all of that, but I wasn’t organizationally involved, like I was never a member of NOW or any of the feminist organizations actually. I just read things and agreed with them and was sort of carrying them out in my own life. I didn’t feel like I was ever involved in some of these debates, as much as reading Ms. Magazine and watching them all go by. And then it seemed to me, through my organizing work, that where I could be useful or where I could engage was around abortion rights, and in the electoral arena, which I really got into through my

work at NARAL, and then specifically the idea of starting to elect more women who are pro-choice or just generally elect more pro-choice candidates. So I kind of saw those debates and read about some of them, but I didn’t feel like I was so actively engaged in choosing one versus the other, I guess.

01-00:54:42 Meeker: You had mentioned Beverly Stein, was that her name?

01-00:54:44 Zepatos: Yeah.

01-00:54:46 Meeker: Did you get a sense of why it was that lesbian and gay residents here were advocating her candidacy as opposed to her opponent?

01-00:54:54 Zepatos: She was the more progressive person in the race. It was an empty seat. She had some friends. In fact, she had been an early ally. One of the kind of funny things about her campaign was that for about a year, we went everywhere together. We attended a lot of events together, and she was not in a relationship at the time and neither was I, and so a rumor started going around that Beverly was a lesbian and I was her partner. It was kind of funny, because this is probably one of the few districts in the state of Oregon where that could actually be seen as a plus, but we didn’t want to have misinformation out there either. So there was a community organization called the Lesbian Community Project, and we finally decided that I would seek out a meeting with the director of the Lesbian Community Project and just clarify. It wasn’t like coming out in a sort of anti-gay way and wanting to put anybody down, but just say to people who were in the know, who might be asked questions, by the way, Beverly is straight and she’s not a lesbian candidate and we just want people to know, if she was a lesbian candidate, she would be out, but she’s not. And what came out was that there was a gay man in the community who had seen Beverly every year, had purchased a table at this gay rights organization dinner called, the Right to Privacy PAC and Beverly had long been an ally and she’d always organized a table, and they just assumed, because she had a table every year, that she was a lesbian, so that was the source of the rumor. But I think people saw her very much as a strong ally, when there weren’t so many allies available.

01-00:56:47 Meeker: That’s a tricky thing to do though, I mean to go to the lesbian or gay community and say by the way, I’m not gay.

01-00:56:56 Zepatos: Just to clarify, because we don’t want to run on misinformation or have people think that she was closeted, you know.

01-00:57:02 Meeker: Yeah. How did they respond?

01-00:57:05 Zepatos: Well people, everyone thought it was just a funny situation, and it turned out that the man, who was a very strong supporter of her, there was one particular person who was going around and telling everyone that she was in fact a lesbian. So once we figured out, kind of the source of the misinformation, we were able to sort of correct it. People were laughing mainly at the idea that this was a district where being an out lesbian could have helped her, and that she had enough integrity to come forward and just clarify that before the election.

01-00:57:38 Meeker: You referred to the Oregon Citizens Alliance. Were they active in this district?

01-00:57:42 Zepatos: Well they were active all over Portland, as well as throughout the state. They organized primarily through evangelical churches. And where my previous home was, in the next neighborhood over, from my front porch, you could throw a tennis ball at one of the churches. I mean, we saw them actively collecting signatures on the sidewalks, right outside in front of the churches, before going in. So they were active throughout the city of Portland.

01-00:58:12 Meeker: How did you respond to that?

01-00:58:15 Zepatos: Well, it was painful in our neighborhood, just to see that, and our feeling from the neighbors was that people, people drove there to church. They weren’t people from the neighborhood, walking over into that church. People drove into the neighborhood with all kinds of anti-gay bumper stickers and hate stuff on their cars, they parked in front of our houses, they walked over to the church, they were signing these signature sheets, these petitions, right in front of all of us, and eventually, over a period of time, we actually had a neighborhood meeting with the pastor of the church and said what a horrible, kind of negative experience it was. You know, we had gay neighbors, we had neighbors who were fighting AIDS, that all of us were trying to help support in their medical needs, trying to keep them alive, and it was just this nasty feeling that every Sunday, these hateful people would come into the neighborhood. And so we actually had a meeting with the pastor and we made a big deal out of the point that they didn’t seem to live around our neighborhood, they just came here every week to do their bad deeds, and so their reaction was to have the assistant pastor buy a house in the neighborhood and move in, and get involved in the neighborhood association. Then, all of a sudden in the neighborhood association people kept saying, “Well pastor so and so, he’s just a really nice guy and you know, he’s just kind of friendly and he’s surprisingly nice and he wants to get involved in the neighborhood garden, you know?” And I just kept reminding people, “Yeah he’s the nicest homophobe you could ever meet and you know, he’s the nicest hater that we’ve ever had in the neighborhood but guess what? He’s still a homophobe

and he’s still a hater.” They were trying to do a little bit of PR, but I didn’t feel like they should get away with it.

01-01:00:21 Meeker: What was the Oregon Citizens Alliance’s immediate end goal, as far as you could tell?

01-01:00:27 Zepatos: Well, I thought it was vilifying and attacking LGBT people in order to build their organization, and they won, they won that first six-week campaign. It was very short, they scored a victory, and a couple of leaders involved with the organization were sort of, one of them was a failed carpet salesman, the other one had run a nursing home that had sort of gone out of business. They were kind of ne’er-do-well folks and my belief was that it was an employment, future self-employment practice, that every time they launched one of these ballot measures, they would collect a lot of money, they would put more people on their staff. They opened a printing business and they printed all their literature and they made profits off of the printing. The founder, Lon Mabon’s wife was on the payroll, they were paying the childcare for their child. I mean if you really looked at how they spent their money, it was just kind of keeping them going. But over and over and over again, every two years or ever four years, they would put another anti-gay measure on the ballot that would open up the whole state to a kind of opportunity for hate speech and hate activity and a lot more misinformation and lies, you know being spread, and you know just really kind of tearing apart the fabric of our state.

01-01:02:00 Meeker: To what extent were you getting involved in these campaigns at this point?

01-01:02:06 Zepatos: I was pretty involved in the first one, the ’88 campaign, in 1988. I was sort of coming over every day and trying to help, but we were all trying to figure out what was going on and how to fight it. The really big one that’s sort of gone down in the history of our state is this Ballot Measure 9, in 1992. There was actually a documentary film made about it, because it was a constitutional amendment that said that homosexuality was abnormal and perverse, and that no state funds should be used to support homosexuality. That was in the text of the measure.

01-01:02:48 Meeker: And this was another Oregon Citizens Alliance initiative.

01-01:02:50 Zepatos: This was Oregon Citizens Alliance behind it, it was a statewide ballot measure, and it just turned into a huge campaign, but the pitch of the campaign got more and more vile, and it sort of unleashed hate speech and hate activity all over the state. I was trying to help run the campaign, I sort of was taking over in a way, because it was so big. I mean there were international press, there

were film crews from France and Germany and Holland in the campaign office every day, because the campaign office had been attacked and the files had been destroyed at one point, you know somebody’s brake lines were cut on their car. There was a particular priest out in Hillsboro, who was saying things that were supportive, and the entire church was spray-painted with KKK [Ku Klux Klan] and you know, something, kill queers, and the parsonage was hit by a Molotov cocktail. So there were these kind of unending series of attacks being made on the campaign and its supporters, so that things were kind of reaching a fever pitch. There were constant stories about people who had a “No on 9” bumper sticker, which was our side of the campaign, of their car forced off the highway or a two-land road by, you know it seemed like it was always a pickup truck.

So, in the campaign office, there was a lot of fear and intimidation and it was just, you know, I just remember no matter how many phone lines we had, that the phones were just always, every line was constantly ringing and blinking, and we could never keep up. I noticed, you know, that pretty much every single day we got death threats over the phone, and so I finally called the chief of police, who was Tom Potter, he would later become mayor of Portland, but he was the chief. I called and said you know, “Chief, I’m not sure what we should be doing about these death threats, but I want you to know, they’re coming in now on a daily basis,” and he said, “We’ve been thinking about you and talking about you, we have some concerns. I’d like to come tomorrow and meet with a few of you who are the leaders of the campaign.”

So we set a time and he came the next day and it was not only the chief of police in his uniform, but someone from the state police with their different uniform, and then they introduced someone from the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] and a fourth officer, who was from the skinhead taskforce, and there was a group of organized skinheads here in Portland. They had killed an Ethiopian man, you know a couple of years before that, so there was a pretty active skinhead presence here. So they took sort of four of us that were top people in the campaign, into a conference room. They came in, closed the door, they sat us down and they said, “We’ve been monitoring these skinheads. The two leaders just came back from a meeting in Germany, where they announced or they were talking about killing one of you and we don’t know which one of you it is.” All of a sudden, you know we’re looking around, and now they’re talking about murder, and they said, “You know we have some recommendations for you, for the safety of the campaign and of your staff, and these are the things we think you should do.” The first one was to put one of those chain-link construction fences all around the building where our campaign headquarters was, so that if someone threw a Molotov cocktail, it would bounce off the fence. The second was to hire security guards twenty- four hours a day, so that when we left, especially late at night, they could ensure that no one had planted a bomb under our car. But we got the feeling, as they’re talking about these specific items that, you know these are things that somebody’s been talking about. They’re very specifically giving us

instruction, and if packages come in and how we should examine the packages to make sure they’re not bombs.

01-01:07:28 Meeker: And this is also all on you.

01-01:07:30 Zepatos: Yeah. They’re going to send an officer every day, to come into the office and check on us, and they were going to increase patrols coming by the office. But we also have people all over the state that are driving around in cars that are filled with lawn signs, and having been in one of those cars and having driven to Southern Oregon, I mean you get down an empty road and late at night and there’s a pickup truck behind you and you can’t quite tell, but it looks like there’s a gun on the gun rack. It was a very frightening series of events. And then you hear, you know one day, this church has been firebombed, and in fact, there were two people who were murdered during this time period. They were not directly affiliated with the campaign, but there was a lesbian woman who was roommates with a gay man, in Salem, Oregon. They lived in a basement apartment and someone threw a Molotov cocktail through their window and they were unable to get out quickly enough and they died in that fire. So it was this kind of increasing feeling of terror, even as we were trying to finish out the campaign and we were taping duct tape on the windows of the campaign offices so that if someone threw something in, that the window wouldn’t shatter and hurt someone. And obviously, you know, they’re trying to scare us. Even a lot of my gay friends, at that point said to me, “Just quit the campaign, I mean it’s not worth dying over.” I had just finished writing my first book, it was actually about to come out. I hadn’t even seen it in print yet and they said, “You haven’t even seen your book, just leave the campaign, live to fight another day,” and I just felt like this is what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to scare us and intimidate us and chase us away from fighting this campaign and we cannot stop.

01-01:09:24 Meeker: Was this campaign of terror, in essence, widely known? Did it become an issue in the campaign more broadly?

01-01:09:34 Zepatos: I don’t think so. I mean, everyone who was working on the campaign knew about it but I think we had talked about it and there was a discussion about whether we should make the opposition part of the reason we were fighting, but so many people agreed with what they were saying that it felt like, by attacking the opposition, we were criticizing the general public. You know, they would print these tabloids that said that gay men used feces in certain ways and use gerbils in certain ways and golden showers. I mean, the materials that they shared—they would leave them at night, on people’s doorsteps. You never saw who they were. It was creepy, but they were spreading a lot of misinformation that turned people off. So everything was just getting more and more intense during this campaign.

I remember one day, I was just actually driving up this street, it used to be called 39th Avenue, and I stopped at a stop light and I had campaign stuff all over my car and right next to me looked like a pickup truck of construction workers, and they rolled the windows down and they started screaming at me and calling me a dyke. I started screaming back at them and they started making motions with their hands that were really nasty and saying what I really need, you know to cure me… I threw open the door of my car and I got out and I was standing on the pavement I was just like, “Come out here right now and I will…” And I was like, you know, about to fight with them. I was inviting four construction guys into a fistfight, I mean that was the level of upset and frustration and anger. Luckily, the guy driving the truck, the light changed and he took off. But it just got to the point where we were just, nobody was thinking clearly, we were all at our wits end.

Then when it came down to it on election day, the police came back, the FBI came back and they said we’re just worried, at your election night party, that they might try to bomb, bomb the event, plant a bomb at your event. So we had this particular facility called Montgomery Park, where we were doing the election night, and the big open space we were using was accessible by two escalators that went up from the entry floor, and they said that they would lock and control all the other entrances and that they would have two unmarked members of the skinhead taskforce on each side of the escalators, because they knew what these guys looked like and that they would spot them if they tried to come in. And so not to worry, they weren’t going to let any bombs into the facility. So even on election night, when we found out that we had won, it was like until the last possible moment, when we got out of the building, you know we just really didn’t know if we were going to make it out unscathed.

I think the impact of the whole thing on me was that I think for the first time in my life, I just felt like this is what it means to be the other, you know to be hated and reviled, that someone who really didn’t know very much about me just wanted to hate me or kill me or do something to me, because of who they thought I was or what they thought I wanted in life. And the idea that, you know, I’m straight, you know I’m white, I’m straight, I can walk away from that and go back into my nice life in Portland. I was writing a travel book and there was a lot of nice things I could do, but the idea that I could walk away from that but everyone else couldn’t, everyone else in there, that’s who they were and that’s why they were being attacked. That just impacted me in a really big way and so I think that’s really what’s motivated me all the time in this fight.

01-01:14:02 Meeker: Clearly there’s such a core part of that particular campaign that’s just visceral.

01-01:14:13 Zepatos: The memory of every night, coming out of the office and getting into the car and there was a security guard somewhere, who was kind of standing back, and you just had to put your key in the car every night. And we just somehow, I just thought they were going to put a bomb under somebody’s car, and so every night, just putting that key and turning the key and thinking okay it’s not tonight, I’m going to make it home tonight, tomorrow’s another day.

01-01:14:40 Meeker: How did you manage to actually run the campaign in the midst of all this? I mean, you still have to manage people, you still have to create budgets, you still have to pay the bills.

01-01:14:52 Zepatos: It was very chaotic. It was very chaotic, it was very frightening. Officially, I mean someone else was technically the campaign manager, but I had said to her, just deal with the international press. I was kind of dealing with everything else.

01-01:15:11 Meeker: Can you talk me through like how you dealt with messaging, responding to the opposition and then creating your own message, because clearly, that’s something that you develop a real expertise in over the years. What was your role in messaging in that campaign?

01-01:15:28 Zepatos: Well, a lot of the messaging work had been done earlier on. I actually got involved mid to late campaign, because I was off writing a book. A lot of the messaging work had been developed before that, but I think that was a campaign where I really—you know, I had come out of a field organizing, which was if you got enough people and you knocked on enough doors and you called enough people on the phone and you talked to enough people, you could sway the election. And that’s really true if you’re in a close campaign, but in that case, on Ballot Measure 9, it became really clear that this war of words and this messaging war, was really what it was all about. I mean, we had hundreds and hundreds and thousands actually, of people who went and knocked on doors, in some pretty tough neighborhoods and had some pretty hard conversations. I remember thinking at the time, I think one of the light bulbs went off, was that you know, people have questions in their minds, and whatever the official thing is we’re supposed to say at the door—we’d send people out in pairs, because we felt, for a safety perspective, everyone needed a buddy to be with. And very often, if it worked out, people felt comfortable, we’d have one straight person and one gay person canvassing together. I’d suggest to them, if you feel comfortable and you’re having a good conversation with someone, go ahead and offer and just ask them if there’s any questions that they’d like to ask you, either of you, and very often people would say something like you know, why did you choose to be gay or how did you know that you were gay, like they had this underlying question. The

campaign literature didn’t really deal with that, but if we could find out what the real question was that people had and they could answer it. And sometimes, I know when I was door-knocking, we would have two people and we’d say well, for example, one of us is gay and the other one is not. But that’s now always obvious and people would be like, “Oh, gee, well I just assumed you both were gay. Well no, hmm, I don’t know if I could guess which one of you are.”

One of the aspects of this ballot measure was that if you were gay or even perceived to be gay, you know all kinds of actions could be taken against you. People shouldn’t have to prove that. And so it just, I think it was just a little glimpse of kind of principle that I’ve always held close to, which is you have to answer the questions in the mind of the voter. Very often, when we get into ballot measures, the pollster will say, “Well here’s the questions we should ask on the poll and the most people agree with this point.” You can always find high agreement in these, like you know, we shouldn’t put this language into our constitution. A lot of people agree to that but it turns out that that’s not really the point that they’re voting on when they’re voting on this particular ballot measure. It’s not whether the words abnormal or perverse should be in our state constitution, even though it seems kind of weird to put them in there, but for some of these people it was how does somebody become gay? And that’s really the question they never got the answer to and once they got the answer, they felt like they could make a more informed decision.

01-01:19:14 Meeker: Were you involved in talking through responses to these kinds of questions that the canvassers were getting?

01-01:19:22 Zepatos: Oh yeah, yeah.

01-01:19:24 Meeker: Can you tell me a little bit about that?

01-01:19:25 Zepatos: Well, one thing that we did every single day, I mean I remember we’d have canvassing on Saturday afternoon, there’d be just hundreds of people. We couldn’t do it in the campaign office any more because there were way too many people. So we’d find these warehouse locations where we could just have hundreds of people in this warehouse, and we’d do the canvass training, and then we’d ask everyone to come back, so we could debrief together, because we felt it was very important, when people came back from canvassing, the first thing we’d do is we ask what were the toughest conversations that they had, because we didn’t want people to carry those things with them, and especially LGBT people, who might face, you know, really derogatory statements from people. So we felt like airing that and getting people to just say what it was and then we’d ask, you know what were

the best conversations that they have, and so some of those stories were just incredible and they were really motivating and they lifted everyone, and even if only a few people had those conversations, someone who came back. We basically instructed people that if there was a “Yes on 9” sign, just skip the house, don’t even knock on the door, don’t subject yourself, you know that’s not a person that we think we can persuade. We had some canvassers who came back and said we saw the Yes on 9 sign and we just decided to knock on their door anyway, and we had this really long conversation with people. I don’t remember exactly, but the canvasser would say, “I came out and I told them how I knew I was gay and what my family life was like and what it was like growing up as a small child and knowing I was different. That they might have kids or grandkids and maybe some of them would be gay later on and who knows,” and by the end of the conversation the voter came off their porch and pulled the Yes on 9 sign out and threw it into the trashcan. Well, you know, everybody can really appreciate and celebrate that moment of being able to change somebody’s mind like that, even if it was just that one conversation that one day, that it could keep everyone going. And conversely, as I said, we just would really try to share the hardest conversations, and sometimes troubleshoot or debrief. What else? Is there something you thought of later that you could have said or is there any way you would have handled it differently or does someone else have an idea about how you would respond.

01-01:21:54 Meeker: Was this sui generis, I mean was this just happening in response to things on the ground or was this based on kind of experiences, you know, organizing and running campaigns in the past, that you had done or that other people had been involved in?

01-01:22:15 Zepatos: I mean, I’d been involved in other campaigns before. I will say, I think the debriefing that we did, we had much more of a focus on it because these issues were so personal and so difficult. It wasn’t talking about whether or not Oregon should vote for self-service gas stations, you know, and people said yes or they said no. It just, it was loaded in a way that was personal for people. And the other thing that, I mean at the time now, this, I’m talking about 1992, people would show up for the canvass and somebody was making buttons that said “Fuck the OCA,” and we’d talk about that in the canvass training and we said you know, these voters who may be torn, they’re looking at us and they’re looking at the OCA and they’re trying to see which side they can sort of affiliate with, and if we go up to the door with a button that says Fuck the OCA, even though in this room we may all feel that way, we’re automatically alienating someone from even wanting to have a conversation with us, because of the choice of language on that button. You know, we would talk about it and it’s like it’s your button, you could wear it. People would take it off and put it in their pocket or some people would pin it on the inside of their jacket so they had it on but it wasn’t visible. But just the idea that we needed

to be open and present for a conversation that could really change somebody’s mind, but we didn’t want to alienate them in the very first moment. So those are things that I felt like, through our many, many battles against these anti- gay ballot measures here in Oregon, we were really able to contribute to the national movement.

01-01:24:06 Meeker: You know, this was during the period, right, of ascendancy of ACT UP [AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power] and Queer Nation, who would have been more inclined to endorse messages like “Fuck the OCA.” I’m wondering if you, as a heterosexual woman, ever kind of got stuck, right? If you know, sort of the more sort of farther out wing of the gay movement ever saw you as not allowing them to express their anger or something like that.

01-01:24:40 Zepatos: Well yeah, actually when our side lost Ballot Measure 8 in 1988, someone from ACT UP said that—named me and my friend Liz, who I had convinced to run the campaign, that we were homophobic and we were the cause of the campaign losing, because we didn’t want to make the campaign just, you know, we’re here, we’re queer, and get used to it. And so at the time I thought okay, well that’s all right, I’m not going to work with the gay community any more, maybe I shouldn’t. Until 1992, and then over and over again apparently.

01-01:25:26 Meeker: Do you see that attitude persisted or do you think it has changed over the decades?

01-01:25:32 Zepatos: Well, I think in any social movement you’ve got a range of people. By definition, electoral politics is about talking to a lot of people and convincing them of something. So it’s not necessarily the place where the strongest activists who are taking a more extreme position who listen; ACT UP and President Reagan and funding for AIDS. It was a really important strategy, it was the right strategy, it was the right movement, but I’m not sure that ACT UP is the group that you would want to have lead an electoral campaign to win a ballot measure in the state of California or Oregon or anywhere else. So it’s the right tactics, the right strategy, I think, for, for the task ahead. So I always felt like there is a place for talking with mainstream voters and hopefully, conducting public education in a way that lessons their degree of homophobia over time.

01-01:26:39 Meeker: Tell me about your work in the latter part of the 1990s. Actually, one thing I did want to ask you about, apropos of that, you did come out with a book in 1996, Women for Change, is that the year it was published?

01-01:26:56 Zepatos: That sounds right.

01-01:26:57 Meeker: Yeah. Can you tell me about that and what you hoped to accomplish with that?

01-01:27:00 Zepatos: Well, there was a period of time where I was doing a lot of work and training of women candidates, women running for political office, and also encouraging women just generally, to get more involved in politics. So, I had taken a trip around the world and a long break from politics, and actually wrote a travel book for women, that encouraged women to travel more independently and adventurously. I had an agent who was working with me on my books and she was very interested in my political work with women especially, and I was leading a lot of trainings and traveling around the country, especially in the West. And so she kept promoting the idea that there’s a great niche for this book about women in politics, and she actually found a buyer who wanted to publish the book.

So my idea for the book was that a woman could have one hour a week or one week a month or twenty hours a week, or want to get into politics full-time, but that there was a place and a role for everyone, if you could sort of help them identify the way in. Part of that is demystifying how nonprofits work and how political campaigns work, part of it is showing that there’s a kind of path that you can follow, and for a lot of people I think it’s maybe not knowing as much, that there’s a whole realm of nonprofit organizations that do social justice work or social change work or even social service work. So the idea that women were grossly underrepresented and still are, in state legislatures and in the U.S. Congress, and that what women bring to the table as decision makers is an asset and that women tend to really undervalue what they’re bringing to the table, you know that a woman who’s volunteered and been a chair of a nonprofit organization for twelve or fifteen or twenty years, somehow doesn’t think she’s ready to run for political office? But very often a man, who has done something for two years, you know, and has a nice suit and thinks he’s ready to go and ready to announce his candidacy. And so to really help women evaluate whether they were ready and how to prepare. So that book was used a lot in women’s studies classes for several years. I run into some readers occasionally, so that’s been fun.

01-01:29:34 Meeker: Did you ever run into anyone who in fact used it for that purpose and who ran for office or had some sort of public role?

01-01:29:44 Zepatos: Yeah, there’s a chapter in the book that so far, I think is kind of unique in the sense that “how do we evaluate whether you’re one year away or three years away from actually running a political campaign, announcing your candidacy?” And so I’d had quite a few requests to reproduce that chapter, to copy that chapter. Eventually, NDI, which is an international organization, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, asked if they could translate the

chapter into Tajiki, to use in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and several other countries. So anyway, portions of it have been used kind of as a primer for women candidates, which is great.

01-01:30:34 Meeker: So you said that you’d taken some time off politics and done some traveling in the 1990s. Is there anything about that period of time that you’d like to talk about?

01-01:30:47 Zepatos: Well there’s a lot of adventures and a lot of stories.

01-01:30:48 Meeker: I mean was it like sort of regrouping?

01-01:30:52 Zepatos: I ended a marriage, I was married earlier and got a divorce, and I’d had this longtime dream of traveling and a big question for myself was whether I could or should travel alone. So I spent the first three months traveling with another friend, a woman who was a friend, and then she had to return to the U.S., and then it was kind of like could I keep going on my own. I had just incredible adventures. Eventually, I was away from Portland for twenty-two months, and so I stayed away much longer than I thought. I just put my stuff in storage and kind of closed up my life and worked in the rice paddies in India, I mean just kind of working alongside people, not to make money, but you know, on a fishing boat or in the northern triangle of Thailand, you know I had a lot of amazing experiences in India and Nepal. I just learned a tremendous amount as a human being really, from that time.

01-01:32:02 Meeker: And then you came back to Portland.

01-01:32:04 Zepatos: I came back to Portland and I got culture shock. I wasn’t sure what to do next. I started getting a lot of requests from especially friends of friends, like oh, you spent a lot of time in India and how as that as a woman traveler, and can you talk to my friend or my cousin or my sister in-law. So I started making notes and then I decided I had a lot of background doing training. I offered a training at the YWCA in Portland: “Long-term Travel for Women,” and a second training on how to organize a trip around the world, like how do you kind of organize your finances, and just the logistics of all that. And in the course of doing these trainings, I felt that telling stories about things that happened, difficult things that happened and how I got through them, motivated some people who were there, and then other people seemed to be really interested in you know, this is the packing list or this is the safety list, you know the kind of factual information. Someone suggested that there were a lot of potential women travelers who were not going to travel by themselves, because they were held back by certain fears and concerns, and that this kind of information could be really helpful for them. So the idea of writing a book

that had stories of travels, interspersed with the advice, seemed like something that could be helpful. So I went to Mexico and I worked on the book for a while and that was really fun.

01-01:33:47 Meeker: Did you ever get any male readers, because I imagine a lot of male readers would have similar concerns.

01-01:33:52 Zepatos: Quite a few. I mean just the idea, the decision for traveling alone versus traveling with another person.

01-01:34:00 Meeker: And for a long term travel too.

01-01:34:01 Zepatos: Yeah, and the long term trip and how to organize that. Oh, I had plenty of men who read my book and came to my readings and wrote me notes. I mean, I got a lot of mail from people… “Every one of my friends and family said that it was not a good idea for me to take this trip and reading your book was the only thing that was encouraging me, and so I quit my job and I sold my car and now I bought a motorcycle and I’m going to Patagonia.” I'd just think well, I hope you’ll send me a note when you get back because now I’m going to worry about you! I got postcards from all over the world, from people who had read the book. Eventually, it sold like 85,000 copies, so it was very successful travel book.

01-01:34:50 Meeker: That is a hugely successful book, wow. Eventually, you do come back to Portland for more permanence. Tell me about your process of doing that and how you got started back up again professionally.

01-01:35:07 Zepatos: Well, after I wrote the book I wanted to try and become a travel writer, so I spent a couple of years sort of working on that. I mean it’s, any kind of writing career is hard to pull off, but what I found really worked well for me was working on political campaigns for some period of time, a campaign being six or eight or ten months long, during which you work almost seven days a week, so it’s easy to save your money. And then I’d go traveling for three or four months a year. So I had a few years where I worked freelance, doing political work, and worked on campaigns, and then I traveled in- between.

In the meantime, the sort of ratio between my work on working with women candidates and pro-choice work, and then work on LGBT issues just kept sort of increasing. I mean here in Oregon, the attacks were just unrelenting for a number of years. And then it turned out that what we were learning here in Oregon was very helpful and informative to national organizations and people in other states. So I became a trainer for the National Gay and Lesbian Victory

Fund, training LGBT candidates to run for political office, just on an occasional basis.

01-01:36:23 Meeker: What were some of the key lessons that you had learned in Oregon, that you felt were applicable more nationally?

01-01:36:35 Zepatos: Part of it was, I think, the tone of the campaign. And for one thing, I think one of the lessons we learned out of Ballot Measure 9, was that the tone had gotten so strident on both sides that it kind of, this atmosphere got worse and worse and it was difficult. You know, we won strongly, we defeated Ballot Measure 9, but people in the LGBT community here, I mean there were more people going to therapy and overwrought and upset, and it was like the emotional toll on everyone was very, very high. So we were trying to find ways to recalibrate that a little bit, to care for people in a way that they didn’t feel quite so exposed. I think we saw that in Prop 8 in California as well, some of that is inevitable with the turf.

Finding a way to undermine arguments of the opposition that wasn’t directly attacking the opposition. Our base wanted us to say that these people were bigots and they were homophobes and they were nasty, and we really couldn’t win that way, so we had to speak to the middle and speak to the issues that were at hand. I think of it now as these kind of tiny baby steps that we were learning, step-by-step, that eventually contributed to all of the work and the victories on marriage as well.

01-01:38:11 Meeker: When you were first coming up with these learnings or these lessons I guess, how did that actually happen? Were you kind of reviewing things? Was this based on experience and you were taking notes? Were you starting to do some more quantitative work as well? How is that actually becoming apparent to you over this period of time?

01-01:38:40 Zepatos: Well, I guess I did so much training then, that it was really taking very much what we had just experienced and learned and turning it into a training program or a lesson plan. When I think about it now, I probably have stuff in my files upstairs, but it wasn’t so much systematically writing things down the way you would if you were writing a book as it was, well we have to change this piece of training and we have to change that piece of the training and we have to figure out the most impactful way to engage people. How do we work with our own base and share enough of the strategy with our base so that people buy into the idea that we have to do certain things. There are all these different aspects to it. For me it was mostly doing training, and then I became a sort of guest trainer with the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce, at the time National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce, now it’s LGBTQ Taskforce.

I sort of was a regular part of a training team before I was ever employed with them, of just contributing to these trainings. Most of my focus was organizing the field campaign and engaging people through canvassing, you know the voter conversation. Over time, I think what I really realized and really crystallized around the marriage issue was I needed to or I wanted to really get much more engaged around the messaging. Here in Oregon, we were one of the many states—we had Ballot Measure 36 on the ballot in 2004—and so there were eleven states on the ballot for that November, this was the national strategy of the Bush reelection campaign, to make marriage a referendum and turn out their base supporters who might not otherwise be as motivated.

01-01:40:35 Meeker: Before we get to this, November of 2004 and Ballot Measure 36, obviously this is about marriage on the ballot, and this is following up on a lot of stuff that really starts to come to head beginning in the 1990s with Hawaii. Then there’s Vermont and Massachusetts, and of course it’s a national issue as well. There was a statewide campaign in California a few years before this that was a loss. Do you recall when you first encountered the sort of idea of what was called then, gay marriage, and what you thought of it, as part of, you know, as part of the political strategy?

01-01:41:24 Zepatos: Yeah. I guess someone showed me or shared with me, a television ad from Hawaii, the opposition ad from Hawaii, which had this—it was kind of modeled after some TV commercial at the time, but a sort of bride and groom in full wedding garb, running towards each other on the beach in Hawaii, and then running past each other, and one of them, I think embraced a same-sex partner, I believe is what happens. I guess I thought of it in two ways. One was wow, you know, it’s been challenging just trying to get the idea across that we should not discriminate in a very basic way, against LGBT people here in our state, but also hearing people from the community talking about it. I had so many great interactions and learned so much from local leaders, and they were basically saying we don’t want marriage and we don’t care about marriage. So what I heard from them was marriage was this kind of side issue and now it’s the latest thing that the opposition can grab onto and make hay out of, and just when we’re trying to calm everybody down about basically allowing gay people to exist or be a teacher in public school and not fired or be a librarian and not be fired or be mentioned in history books in any place or have their books in the library. Just when it seemed like we were turning a corner on that, this seemed like it was upping the ante quite a bit.

01-01:43:11 Meeker: Right, because in 1996, around the time that Hawaii is entering into public consciousness, you have won the Supreme Court decision, which actually overturns what happened in Colorado and presumably would have overturned the Measure 9, if that had passed in Oregon. But then you also have the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act. So, I can just imagine like, you sort

of feel like you’re finally getting your head above water, now just like a tidal wave that comes.

01-01:43:45 Zepatos: Yeah, and for me, I think my focus had always been on the sort of evangelical Christian right, that was kind of taking advantage of these opportunities to build their base and get people inflamed and create more opportunities to spread homophobia, and so it just felt like oh my gosh, this is going to be bad.

01-01:44:10 Meeker: Did you have any of your own thoughts about the institution of marriage at this point?

01-01:44:16 Zepatos: Well this was a really interesting thing, but it came up after that actually, in 2001, when I had gotten into a relationship with my now husband, Mike, and we were very much in love, but I remember thinking at the time, I mean marriage was enough on my consciousness that I said, I don’t think we should get married until everybody can. So we were, even then, in the very late nineties, around 2000, kind of holding off, because it felt like okay now, it’s really clear, this is heterosexual privilege, so we’d better think about that for a while. Then we reached a point, quickly after that, where his mom was diagnosed, terminally ill, with cancer, my dad had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and was really failing, and I think we realized for ourselves, that we wanted our parents to witness. My parents loved him, his parents loved me, they just wanted to see us together and we wanted to do that with them, together.

So in 2001, we decided to get married, and we had a kind of small wedding because of the medical issues around both of our parents, but just going around town, you know. I was going to buy a pair of shoes to wear on my wedding day and was in the little shop and oh, it was closing time, and when one of the salespeople said, “Oh, but she’s getting married, we’ll keep the store open until you get your shoes, don’t worry about it.” And everywhere I went, and I was having these conversations about the fact that this was for my wedding and I was getting married, people sort of responded in a certain way. Everyone could relate to it, everyone wanted to help me find the thing I needed that would be part of that wedding, and it really got me thinking, it really made me realize what an incredible bonding institution this was, how important it was to my parents, and how important it was for me that they would be there. So that really affected me a lot, in thinking about marriage as an issue and as this kind of universal language. I mean, what Evan [Wolfson] was talking about was absolutely right. It was this point of commonality that went throughout society, that was a real touchstone.

I think when we came to the ballot around it here, I could see how challenging it was. It was a missed opportunity. I mean, we were doing the best we can, but we were on the rights and benefits language. We were telling some stories,

but I remember just thinking that it was this kind of fundamental conversation and if we could find the way to have this conversation, it sort of could be the key to really, really unlocking this whole long discussion about homophobia and were gay people really different and what did everybody really want, that it really, you know, it really was a big thing that was worth fighting for.

01-01:47:51 Meeker: You mentioned when this issue first comes about around Hawaii, and you were talking to your gay and lesbian friends in Portland and they were saying, “Oh, this isn’t something that we’re really interested in, we don’t want this anyway,” did you, yourself, sort of think about that, and I don’t know that this is the right terminology, but develop an analysis of where that was coming from? Or maybe even have conversation, like deeper conversations about it.

01-01:48:27 Zepatos: Well, for a lot of my—I mean, a lot of my lesbian friends are feminists, and so there’s a whole feminist analysis around marriage and patriarchy. I struggled with that myself, because I realized that I’m also the product of a culture and a family and marriage did mean something special, and it was a kind of commitment that didn’t seem the same. So kind of working that through for myself as well and my coming to the analysis that well, I can get married, and it doesn’t mean that I’m giving all my power over to someone else or all my property over to someone else or all the control. I don’t think that’s how my marriage is going to be and in fact it’s not. But I could see how other people had a political analysis around marriage that just made it very unattractive. And then there’s a whole sense of “heterosexuality is not the model for LGBT people, and there are ways of creating family in a different way and creating relationships in a different way.” That progress for LGBT people is not necessarily following a path into a straight, married paradigm. I totally agreed with that. So I could see how people could come out on different sides of the analysis.

The other thing I’ll say that I think has been very interesting is that there are so many people, gay people, LGBT people, early on, who took a strong political stand and thought marriage was not the fight worth having, who later have basically said, either privately or publicly, you know, this really is a great conversation we had with America and by the way, when I stood up and got married myself, it meant the world to me in a way that I didn’t think. I also heard from a lot of people who felt like maybe they restricted their thinking around marriage, because they just always assumed it was not attainable or not an option for them, and when the sort of blinders went down around that, they actually had a different feeling, but that’s not true for everyone. So I have kind of felt like politically it seemed funny, you know, that here I was, a strong feminist, and I ended up spending a huge amount of my career working on the issue of marriage and making it okay for more people to get married.

[Pause in Recording]

01-01:51:26 Meeker: So where were we?

01-01:51:27 Zepatos: We were just coming up until I think 2004 and here in Oregon.

01-01:51:36 Meeker: So this work that you were doing with NGLTF, in your bio you’re listed as director of organizing and training. Was this like a full-time gig, were you hired, and was that your job description?

01-01:51:56 Zepatos: What happened was when the marriage issue really came on the radar screen here in Oregon, I was involved in the campaign. I wasn’t running it, but I was watching it pretty closely, I was giving advice. That’s where I really fundamentally felt like we were kind of off base on message, and that’s where I also really bought into the idea that marriage was this really important conversation, and to me it felt like it’s the anti-homophobia conversation, that even talking about employment discrimination was talking about an individual who was gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender, but that when you talk about the essence of a same-sex couple, their love for each other, and whether their relationship and love for one another was as valid and equal as the heterosexual relationship had. That was to me, sort of came down to this kind of core question, and if we could win people over on that, it was a huge opportunity to break down homophobia.

So we kind of struggled with it in our own way here in Oregon. We were considered the state that had the best chance out of any of the eleven on the ballot that November. When we went down in flames, it wasn’t, you know like 70 percent, like some other states, but it was a tough loss here, because we had been defeating a lot of these other anti-gay measures in-between. I just, I got really fired up on this idea that if we could figure this out, it would be really big. So, it was right around that time, I took a job with the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce and actually agreed to move to Los Angeles. It was right after that campaign, my husband and I, we sold our house in Southeast Portland and we moved to L.A.

01-01:54:04 Meeker: So after the 2004 loss.

01-01:54:07 Zepatos: Yes. Or wait, I might have said that wrong. Maybe we moved first and then I came back and I was working on the campaign. It was right around the same time. I was working with the taskforce and made the commitment to go to California.

01-01:54:24 Meeker: How much work did you actually do on that campaign in 2004?

01-01:54:30 Zepatos: We had a big team from the taskforce that was here, basically running the field campaign in Multnomah County. So I was pretty involved at the field level and I was kind of getting engaged a lot more on the messaging level as well.

01-01:54:46 Meeker: What did you think about the decision to issue marriage licenses in Multnomah County?

01-01:54:56 Zepatos: I respected that it was a bold move, but I felt like the strategy around it, which was basically to have a secret vote and do this in secret, gave the opposition this extra power, which was to talk about the process, you know that they had done it in a really underhanded way. I have mixed feelings about it. It was exciting, it showed couples, I mean that’s a way to get couples on television is there they are, and the first couple that got married were this amazing, exemplary couple who were wonderful and their story was great, but it was painful how much the reaction against the political move did work against us.

01-01:55:45 Meeker: That’s spring of 2004, then that election happens in November of 2004. Freedom to Marry had been in existence for a few years by that point, kind of a public launch, I think in 2003. Were you familiar with the organization or the work, or Evan in particular?

01-01:56:04 Zepatos: The way I really got to meet Evan was after I moved to California, I was a big proponent, that we should try to start doing this public education work, and that through public education, we could figure out the messaging, we could test our conversations. We could start to debunk some of the opposition arguments and kind of lay the groundwork. So, I was part of an effort, representing the taskforce, for this public education campaign, I actually ran it, called “Let California Ring.” It would be a research and messaging campaign, so it was kind of a first opportunity to really start digging in on what were the conversations that we could have. And also through our work at the taskforce, we had an L.A. office and we wanted to organize a lot of grassroots activists to get involved in the conversations. There was another piece for me, which was starting to work within organized communities of color, leaders of color, who wanted to engage Latino, African American, Asian, Pacific Islander communities, around this issues of marriage as well. Evan was, I think the chair of the steering committee of Let California Ring, so I started working with him very closely, along with Matt Foreman and a number of other folks.

01-01:57:36 Meeker: This may be a misperception on my part and actually it’s kind of borne out by the evidence, but my perception for a long time was that NGLTF was not fully onboard with marriage being an issue. Maybe I’m getting this because people like John D’Emilio, the historian, he was an advisor and he was strongly opposed to it, probably still is. Did you feel like the organization was very much onboard with this or do you feel like that they were kind of reluctantly going along because the issue was leading?

01-01:58:10 Zepatos: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think the taskforce is the most kind of left progressive of the LGBT groups, and had their own analysis about marriage not being the sort of ultimate goal of the movement. However, this organizing and training team, which was really led by Dave Fleischer, and I came in as the deputy director initially, that team was all about helping LGBT people become more effective campaigning essentially, at running ballot measure campaigns; whether it’s a municipal campaign to pass a nondiscrimination law or a statewide ballot measure which, more and more because the marriage measures. So it kind of got really engaged because the taskforce was focused at the time, really strongly, on helping build skills in the movement around grassroots campaigning.

01-01:59:15 Meeker: What was it that attracted you to make a big move like that?

01-01:59:27 Zepatos: Well the idea was that it seemed almost inevitable that marriage would come to the ballot in California, that would be a huge campaign.

01-01:59:36 Meeker: Because of Gavin Newsom marriages?

01-01:59:38 Zepatos: Because of the Gavin Newsom marriages, the focus on California, the enormity of the state. In my mind it was, if we could win marriage in California, defend marriage in California, it would be the turning point for the whole marriage movement, you know California would be so big, it would be the first giant domino in a series of dominos, and it could be the place where we could figure this out, because it’s sort of hard to engage the public in a conversation if it’s totally not even on their radar screen. I remember even some of the first house parties we had, we were trying to get people talking about marriage in California and the kind of analysis was well, you know, there’s going to be this case that’s going to go up to the court and the opposition is going to challenge it, and then there was going to be a ballot measure. [People kind of sounded like, you know, we were playing three hands ahead in bridge and they were asking, "Really? Because aren’t people already getting married?”] You know, it was sort of so disconnected. We were almost starting, in that sense too early, for most people to follow what all these strategic stops along the way were going to be. It was kind of like

ringing the alarm and there’s no smoke and there’s no fire, it’s like this is going to happen and the whole state of California is going to vote on marriage. Really? Because it doesn’t seem like that’s heading that way. So we were trying very, very early, to generate conversations, that was one of the challenges, and we were also, at the same time, trying to figure out how to have these conversations.

The taskforce had, particularly through Dave, a real expertise around canvassing, door-to-door canvassing, and I had trained with Dave before for years, at the Victory Fund and at the taskforce, he’d brought me on as a trainer. We were kind of honing together, or as a group, these ideas around how to be really effective at canvassing, how to train people, the debriefing of people, all of these pieces in place.

01-02:01:50 Meeker: I’m not going to ask you to give me a whole training, but can you maybe outline for me, what your training process was, what some of the key things were when you were teaching people about canvassing, in this context perhaps, of Los Angeles.

01-02:02:06 Zepatos: Sure, yeah, well we did these trainings for the taskforce called power summit trainings, and the idea was if a whole community had to fight a ballot measure, you needed a whole lot more people who were able and capable of kind of training other people and dispatching them, either on the phones or at the doors. So just effective recruitment for example. Out of the hierarchy of volunteer activities, door-to-door canvassing is the most difficult thing to get people to do. Everybody is willing to stuff envelopes, some people are willing to make phone calls, some people are willing to speak at a small group meeting. Fewer people still, want to go door-to-door and talk to a stranger by knocking on their door and standing on their front porch, especially when you’re talking about gay stuff. So even talking about how to recruit people and convince them to come to the training. And then at the training, what are the systematic ways we know that make it easier, that build people’s confidence, that make them more effective, that make it okay for them to let go of an extreme opponent, because they’re not going to persuade that person, and move on to the next conversation that might be more useful or productive. So there’s a lot about that and then in these power summit trainings, we also training people how to ask for money, because all these campaigns needed a lot of money. And so the idea that volunteers could ask other volunteers, or that if you found a supporter at the door and they enthusiastically said that yeah, they’re voting with us, then you ask them to write a check. So there are a lot of different components that we train people on, and some of it was just basic organizing; how to get beyond a no and to a yes.

01-02:03:59 Meeker: Right. Then tell me about the work that you were doing at NGLTF, in this context and in the broader context of the changing politics as we move closer to Prop 8 going on the ballot in 2008.

01-02:04:16 Zepatos: There are a lot of interesting and engaging and very challenging things about working in California, I mean it’s a huge state and everybody in Northern California doesn’t like people in Southern California, and the gay groups don’t work well together, and there were all these turf battles and then there were all these issues about race between the mainstream LGBT groups and the community of color LGBT people. So there were a lot of dynamics to navigate and to try to start healing and to try to start knitting together. That was one aspect of what was going on and the other was, through this Let California Ring project, here’s a chance to actually try to figure out some more about the messaging.

We worked with a great woman named Margaret Conway, who does a lot of messaging and research work. We had an ad firm and the idea was let’s just try to come up with some really new ideas and test them out. So who would be—you know, what would the campaign look like and would it be a sort of interesting ad, where you didn’t quite know what was going on, or would it be a family member? One of the theories I think, at the time, and it’s certainly easy to see why, was that up until that time, we really didn’t have a lot of gay people directly addressing the issue; it was always other people talking about gay people. That was a direct result of polling and testing and focus groups, which showed that generally, straight people are more comfortable hearing from other straight people. But I very much had kind of gotten on the bandwagon of look, if we’re going to raise and spend millions of dollars and one of our basic challenges is people are not comfortable hearing from LGBT people, why don’t we spend our money hearing from LGBT people directly and maybe we can lower that anxiety a little bit, especially in this kind of public education mode.

So we did the first round of testing and we got ideas from the ad firm on Let California Ring, and there were three concepts that they presented based on the research. One was this idea for what became the garden wedding ad and the idea of the ad was that this bride was trying to walk down the aisle, and she had all these encumbrances and hindrances and barriers along the way, because we wanted to sort of get, especially straight women, to connect in an emotional way and say what if you couldn’t marry the person you love? But she’s walking up the aisle towards a groom, I mean it is a straight wedding.

A second concept was a family member talking about gay or lesbian niece of nephew. I think it was a niece and she was talking about tio José, I believe was the name. The idea was that you know, her uncle always stood by her in life, even in her difficult moments of coming out, and that now that she was

going to get married, her uncle was going to stand by her at the wedding. And so we had this lesbian messenger with a family member, because I think it was at that time, it was one of the things we found in the focus groups, just by chance, we were actually showing photos of some of the couples that were outside city hall and that were getting married, and we showed a couple, a photo of a same-sex couple, a gay male couple, smiling, their moment of wedding, and somebody in the focus group said, “I just think that’s so sad.” We said, “Really, because they’re smiling in the picture.” “But you see, you never see them with their family members, they’re always isolated, by themselves.” In other words, when we were trying to show couples, this person read into it like a Rorschach blot, well gay people have been rejected by their families and there’s no one in their family who’s even willing to stand next to them when they get married. That was kind of like another light bulb going off. So we had this lesbian, Latina lesbian with tio José, a second concept, the family member.

The third concept was something that was like animated with creatures, I don’t know, animals, or it was totally a not real people thing, and there had previously, not long before that, been this kind of disastrous attempt, in my mind, of doing a kind of anti-homophobia ad, in Colorado I think it was, where they were showing a bunch of little puppy dogs and one dog, when it opened its mouth, its bark was totally different and there was something about the dog not being okay because its bark was different. It was sort of universally panned, it didn’t go over, it didn’t have its intended effect. And so anything that was too kind of mediated, that wasn’t like real people, I just thought was off the table.

So we did this test and the garden wedding ad came out the best, and I was really arguing against it and I said you know, people are homophobic and so they always respond better to the one that doesn’t have gay people, but we should really try very hard and we should test this again, because we should be doing the ad that has a gay person in it; the lesbian and her uncle, I mean that’s where we should spend our money. So I kind of pushed for this extra round of testing, to the annoyance of other people, because I was very focused on the idea that the breakthrough would be by having more LGBT messengers. But in fact, the breakthrough really was creating emotional resonance with the voters, and for the first time, getting them to, as I think of it, getting them in the same circle, right? It’s not like what is this about gay people? Now it’s like how would it feel? Ooh, that would feel badly. And now I have something in common with someone who I thought was maybe not just like me, because now I realize it must feel badly for them too, and do I want to be the person who makes somebody else feel badly? That was kind of a breakthrough moment, just understanding that creating this emotional connection was one key to where we needed to go and what we needed to do.

Well, the challenge in a big, giant state like California is when you’re doing testing there, everything costs a lot of money and everything is so huge, the

number of voters in the state and what it would take to really conduct public education, and by the time we had done all this work. And it was funny, because the funders, when we kept reporting back to them on the tests, they were like, “Well what are you going to do about the business community,” and it was like we’re not actually designing the whole campaign, we’re just trying to solve this one problem. Anyway, we didn’t meet everybody’s goals for everything, so things plodded along until it became obvious that Prop 8 would go on the ballot, and then we actually had very, very little time.

01-02:11:47 Meeker: So these three concepts had not been shot yet? They were circulating.

01-02:11:55 Zepatos: First they were presented. I think there is a way to present ad concepts where you basically see storyboards.

01-02:12:03 Meeker: Yeah, storyboarding.

01-02:12:06 Zepatos: I think we tested a couple of them, I’m not sure, I think my memory is right on that, and then we went back and did it a second time because I was worried that maybe the uncle Jose one wasn’t clear enough or didn’t come off well, and we did an extra round of testing. But then eventually, we did settle on the garden wedding ad and we produced that ad. Time was going on, money was short, the funders weren’t completely onboard, even though we felt like we were discovering some things. By then, when it became obvious that Prop 8 would go on the ballot, there was a very short window of opportunity to actually put this ad on the air, and then we got a whole bunch of money to do that. But in order to do that and keep it as a [501] c3 ad, there was a lot of concern about not crossing the line, the final screen, I think it said, “What if you could not marry the person you love?”

01-02:13:05 Meeker: As opposed to vote no on Prop 8?

01-02:13:10 Zepatos: It never said vote no on Prop 8, or maybe it said support marriage for all people or something, support marriage for gay and lesbian couples, I think it said. That was removed from the ad because it was considered too political, even though it never said anything about Prop 8. So by the time it really rolled out further, it was a little bit less clear about what it was actually all about, although I think some people got it. We had kind of run out of time, but we were able to do this test in two counties, a side-by-side comparison test, I think you probably are aware of that.

We ran the ad in Santa Barbara County and we actually had grassroots engagement of volunteers who were leading conversations around the timing of the ad, so that we could kind of take advantage. It was kind of a water-

cooler ad, where it kind of got people thinking and talking. And so we had people out of the Santa Barbara LGBT Center trying to engage conversations and lead a conversation campaign right around that same time.

01-02:14:16 Meeker: How was that done?

01-02:14:18 Zepatos: Organizing people for, I think small house parties, where they’d show the ad and then talk about it or ask if they’d seen the ad. So there was this huge upswing in volunteer engagement at the center around that time, and they actually got a lot more money coming in as well. Then there was a second county where we had polled before and polled after, but we did not run the ad through cable television zone buying. You can actually literally only buy cable time in a single county and not, you know, in the adjacent county. So we showed, with the pre and post-polling, that support for marriage indeed went up, and there was a second question around kind of understanding the impact it would have, essentially that yes, it would hurt people. Especially women voters, resonated very well with that. And then it wasn’t until at the end of the campaign, when we had lost Prop 8, that Santa Barbara County became the only county in Southern California that we actually won, and everyone knew that that’s where the battleground was in Southern California. The only thing that had been different during the entire time was that we had done this test with a garden wedding ad, and it became very clear that that actually had been significant and it had made a difference.

01-02:15:43 Meeker: I want to continue with this line, but I actually have a sort of question about Let California Ring. What was this organization institutionally? I’ve been reading on it and I’ve been trying to figure out, what it like a sponsored project of another organization?

01-02:16:02 Zepatos: It was a c3 project that was a coalition project, so Equality California had a staffer, the Task Force was there, Freedom to Marry was there. I think, I’m pretty sure a couple of the legal groups might have been present as well, and then we had grassroots organizations like the Bayard Rustin Coalition, which was a brand new organization in L.A. that was reaching out to African American community. We had a group called API Equality that was based out of San Francisco and we had API Equality/LA, that was a new kind of API [Asian/Pacific Islander] organizing group. So there were a whole range of grassroots groups that we were trying to bring in as let’s go out and lead this conversation in all of our communities.

01-02:17:00 Meeker: Was there like a centralized office where you and your staff would gather, or was it more decentralized?

01-02:17:07 Zepatos: It was more like decentralized and I was the convener of everybody.

01-02:17:12 Meeker: So who did you report to?

01-02:17:13 Zepatos: This board, that included Evan, this kind of steering committee is what it was, it wasn’t a formal board.

01-02:17:19 Meeker: Did Marc Solomon work on this project too?

01-02:17:22 Zepatos: No.

01-02:17:23 Meeker: He was involved later, with Equality California.

01-02:17:24 Zepatos: He was in Massachusetts that whole time. Marc came to California right after I left. He kind of came just before the election on Prop 8, to help out, and then led efforts in the aftermath of California, because right after Prop 8, I came back too, to Portland. I left the Task Force then.

01-02:17:42 Meeker: As you’re leading up to the vote on Prop 8, November, 2008, what were you thinking?

01-02:17:57 Zepatos: Well here’s the thing that was very tough for me. There’s funding from nonprofits and foundations to do 501c3 nonprofit work, public education, and then the campaign is a separate entity.

01-02:18:11 Meeker: Right. The campaign was called just no on Prop 8, or did it have a…?

01-02:18:17 Zepatos: It had a name as well. I’ll try to think about what that was, but let’s say the no on Prop 8 campaign.

01-02:18:27 Meeker: Okay. They were doing the [501] c4 work.

01-02:18:28 Zepatos: They were doing the c4 work and there was a lot of concern about the c3 not being inappropriately involved with the c4. So I was, let’s say behind the firewall, and our funders were very concerned about that, so at one point they essentially said none of the pollsters, the ad firm, the researchers, nobody who worked on Let California Ring is allowed to work on the Prop 8 campaign. So I was devastated by that, because I had felt like we were learning this body of

knowledge that we would carry into the campaign, essentially just informally as individuals, and while eventually, I did—Let California Ring ended. I went into the campaign as a staff person; there were all new political consultants who had been brought on, who hadn’t just been through this incredible learning experience that all of us had had and essentially, were not very open to hearing about it. So I was very upset and kind of trying to get people’s attention, I felt like. I felt like my whole time on the Prop 8 campaign, I was trying to tug on people’s sleeves and saying, for example to the pollster, we learned all this incredible stuff in Let California Ring and I’d love to share it with you, and she basically said I don’t learn anything unless somebody pays me to learn it, meaning unless I do my own research and I find out in my research, I’m not drawing any conclusions and I’m not taking your advice. So it’s like it was Groundhog Day all over again and the polling was asking the same questions about whether this should be on the constitution, and all these things that I felt like we had left behind in our joint thinking somehow came to the top again through Prop 8 and it was very, very hard to kind of break through on that. And of course these campaigns, it’s like one long emergency and it’s very intense and there’s a lot of pressure and you can’t have too many people in the decision-making room and all of that was going on.

01-02:20:37 Meeker: Let California Ring ends when, in August or something like that? Because I understand there’s a stop date for c3 work, otherwise it is seen as political work, right?

01-02:20:50 Zepatos: Right. We got some late money in to Let California Ring. We actually did a series of print ads that are wonderful, that showed Latino, African American, Asian families who were conveying and welcoming new sons in-law and daughters in-law into their families, of same-sex marriage. It was a wonderful part of the project that were run in print ads in community newspapers, and after that, we had to shut down the project.

01-02:21:24 Meeker: And that was roughly September or something like that?

01-02:21:26 Zepatos: I think that was maybe September.

01-02:21:29 Meeker: And so then you actually moved over to the campaign itself.

01-02:21:32 Zepatos: Yes, and I started going to the focus groups for the campaign and I was kind a little kind of inserting myself into the messaging project of the campaign. I remember being at one focus group and the pollster said afterwards, “Well it’s obvious that people are worried about this, this, and that,” and I said, “Well, but didn’t you hear how many times they were talking about love?” And I had been putting hash-marks when people were talking about love and marriage,

because I felt like that’s something we were finding, you know in Let California Ring, that love is really an emotion we should be talking about. And she’s like, “Absolutely not, no that’s not”—you know, and it was like we had both witnessed the same focus group and I had this completely different takeaway.

01-02:22:17 Meeker: That is an interesting thing about research that I’d like to hear more about, and that is you know, a scholar can be presented with the same data and a good scholar will come up with an entirely different conclusion as a scholar that’s not as skilled at interpreting the material. What was your process of learning that methodology?

01-02:22:46 Zepatos: Essentially, I was a client, I was a repeat client of polling and focus groups, and I felt like because we worked with many different pollsters and different researchers at different times, we kept getting the beginning of a learning curve. I’ll skip around, but the first time I went to Iowa, we worked with a very prominent Iowa based researcher there, and we wanted to do some focus groups on marriage because Iowa had won marriage through a court case and our support was below 50 percent and we needed to do public education. And I said to her going in, “The key thing here is, people are going to say that they’re really comfortable with something called domestic partnership or even civil union, and gay people can have all the rights and benefits, as long as they don’t call it marriage. That’s where we’ve gotten so far, but what we need to do is push past that and find out, what are their particular objections around marriage.” So we had this big conversation, I showed her a lot of materials and so on, and we paid her like $35,000 and she did these focus groups and she wrote this report and she came back and said, “Well it turns out, people are very comfortable with the idea of domestic partnership or civil unions, but they’re really uncomfortable with calling this marriage.” And it’s like we knew that already, that’s exactly what I thought we said going in. So they were all kind of going over this same territory over and over and over again, and what we needed was to get the next level of learning. And so, I wasn’t a pollster, I’m not a professional researcher, but I became, let’s say a professional client, in the sense that I knew what we had learned, I was tracking it very carefully, I saw where the kernels were. I saw it and other people too, I’m not the only one, but we kind of were gleaning our lessons here and we knew where we needed to probe and where we needed to go next. There’s an art to it as well as a science, because especially when you’re doing qualitative research, you’ve got a bunch of people behind a window, listening to people talk for an hour and a half, thousands of words are said, a lot of phrases are put out there, people are nodding or squinting or making faces at different things, and what each one of the observers even takes out of that identical experience is somewhere different, but what I learned was we all go in with certain biases and we’re all looking to reinforce certain things, and what our movement was suffering from was a kind of limitation of so many of

the researchers that we had been working with. They were movement people and everyone kind of had the same lingo that came out of the legal struggle, right? Not only Evan Wolfson, but we had a lot of lawyers fighting a lot of legal cases that were talking about rights and talking about the constitution and talking about legal benefits and equal access and even discrimination. But it turned out that those really were not the words and phrases, but one of the things they say about polling, sort of garbage in and garbage out. So if you ask thirty questions on a poll and none of the questions talks about love or commitment, you’re never going to get a good testing message that includes that because you’ve already created a bias by the questions you’ve included on your polling.

So, we had a lot of kind of tunnel vision in operation and that kind of spread across even people who didn’t work with each other, were like well this is an equal rights fight and this is about legal access to benefits, and everybody knew that. So you know, that was the kind of Groundhog Day analogy, is we kept doing the same thing and paying new people to go over and over, and it was very frustrating to have a glimmer. It’s not that I had the answer, I had a question that wasn’t properly being explored at that point.

01-02:27:08 Meeker: How do you break out of this tunnel vision then, I mean how do you get to the point of starting to ask the questions that are actually going to move you to that next level?

01-02:27:21 Zepatos: Well, my method was to say to Evan Wolfson eventually, I will come and work for you at Freedom to Marry if you let me lead this project where we wipe the slate clean, we don’t have any assumptions about what the messaging is, and we start all over and we do a new messaging project. And because Evan was trying to shape this Freedom to Marry 2.0, he was a legal expert, he was an advocate, he had the bully pulpit, but I was the ballot measure expert, I mean I had real, on the ground skills that I could bring to this new version of Freedom to Marry. So he kind of needed me in a way. I felt like I was the ballot measure expert and Mark was really the legislative, how do you get something through a legislature expert, and so we each brought these areas of expertise. I felt like I could make a deal, I could raise the ante for my coming in, which was—and I said this to Evan and he agreed—no matter what the research is, we’re going to use it. You can’t make up messaging, I can’t make up messaging, it’s not working, and so we’ve really got to go back to the drawing board. That was the agreement, and so we would know, not just a few weeks going into a ballot measure campaign, but we caught a really lucky break. In 2010, we had no marriage on the ballot in any state in the U.S. We got a pass and that was when we started doing that serious work. So we essentially had two years to figure this all out.

01-02:29:20 Meeker: This is a good transition and maybe we should think about stopping for today in a few minutes, but before we do, I want to kind of follow up on a few things. First of all, did you have a response or kind of a thought, in November of 2008, when [Barack] Obama wins and Prop 8 passes?

01-02:30:09 Zepatos: Oh, I mean I was crushed, I was devastated, because everyone was devastated, and also because I felt like we really had a chance to do something different and we didn’t. I also really agonized over my own, my own role in it, because when I went from Oregon to California, everything I heard every turn along the way is “California is different, California is huge.” We’ve got twenty-five million voters, we do things differently here. So, essentially, the Prop 8 campaign hired the team of consultants who had defeated the anti-choice, parental notification or consent measure. I mean, they had worked with Planned Parenthood and defeated a very, very hard to defeat measure, so they had a winning team that we had brought on. But there was no centralized campaign office. There was a consultant working there and a consultant working there, and there were field offices where people were volunteering, but I kept thinking there’s no central office where the campaign manager, the communications director, the finance. Every campaign I’ve ever worked on in my life has a centralized place where everyone works together and people were saying well, we don’t do things that way, in California everything is dispersed and we do it different here, and everybody can run, you know. And I just, I just kept having these doubts, but also knowing that I was not a California political expert, I shouldn’t necessarily be questioning what other people were doing, and what I was questioning was all around the messaging, and that really wasn’t having an impact either. It was a horrible loss, it was an incredible amount of pain, and it was just very upsetting to me because I felt like I’m not sure we could have won, but we could have done much better than we did I think, from the inside.

01-02:32:26 Meeker: I mean not from the vantage point of recrimination or Monday morning quarterbacking, but from the point of lessons learned, it sounds to me like what you’re saying is that perhaps the campaign would have been more effective if there was a centralized office, if the top leadership was in fact engaging on a regular basis.

01-02:32:48 Zepatos: Yes. For example, our chief consultant: We had a general consultant and remember, after the summer of love and the weddings had taken place, there was polling, I think it showed 55 percent support, something like that, for same-sex marriage in California, and the general consultant said he’d never gone into a ballot campaign with that high support at the beginning and there was no way we could lose. I mean there was just a level of thinking, and so on the one hand you’ve got this is how California works, there was a lot of that going on, but I felt like what I was learning and had been learning over a long

period of time is these are how LGBT campaigns work and guess what, we’ve got some learning there too. There are very effective attacks that can take us down very quickly and we know what kind of attacks they are, and they always come around children. I mean, I had literally, when I first met this consultants, I’d show them ads from Oregon, from other races. I mean there was an ad that showed a little boy looking very nervous and kind of cowering in a shadowy place, and this woman who is maybe, you know, a social worker says, “Okay, Johnny, get ready, now you’re going to meet your new parents,” and this horrible door sound opens and you see the silhouettes of these two men, that are coming to get this little boy, and he looks up like it’s going to be the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or something. You know, there’s always been attacks around children, and I try to prepare, but there was just an overconfidence in some ways. Then of course, it was very, very hard to respond to the princess ad, and in fact, we probably couldn’t have done it adequately at the time, so maybe there was no way to win, I don’t know. It just felt like too many things from the inside that were not going well, were not adding up well, were not in sync in terms of the overall statewide campaign.

01-02:35:02 Meeker: What was your initial thought when you saw the princess ad? Did you know this was coming down the pike? Was it a surprise when it first hit the airways?

01-02:35:09 Zepatos: Well I just, it was like the “Oh shit” moment, like not only do they have a line of attack, but they’ve executed it very, very well. Normally in a campaign, we would anticipate what the attacks would be and we would even have ads written, drafted, scripted, sometimes shot, but we had nothing, you know we had nothing to push back, and it was a devastating ad. The initial response made total sense. We’ll get the California superintendent of public education, in an ad, to say we’re not changing the curriculum, this is nothing in the curriculum. It turned out, we found out later on, through our extensive testing, that that really wasn’t helpful at all, but it was a good try in the heat of the moment. To me, the bigger issue was, we didn’t have an entire messaging arc that was effective and was the best thing that we could do.

01-02:36:13 Meeker: Well then also, just shortly after you have those first graders going to the lesbian wedding in San Francisco.

01-02:36:19 Zepatos: That was the nail in the coffin, you know.

01-02:36:22 Meeker: As somebody dealing with messaging, I mean how do you deal with these off message moves amongst allies?

01-02:36:37 Zepatos: The final two or three weeks of the campaign were, from my perspective, and this is part of what I was doing, was throwing ourselves in front of our folks from our side, who wanted to do horrible things. There was someone in Hollywood who was hanging an effigy of somebody from the opposition, like from their house, from their porch, and the press were on their way there and I was asked to get on the phone with the homeowner and talk them into taking the effigy down before the media got there. There was somebody else who had a van with lawn signs, that parked in front of the opposition house, I mean these were the news stories, the daily news stories. People were going crazy, ape-shit, like all over the state, and we were literally trying to talk our people down off of doing these things. At the same time that we’re responding to the princess ad, you’ve got the teacher who brings the kindergarten class or the first grade class, to city hall, to witness her wedding, and nobody knew about it. I guess she had called city hall and told someone, but they didn’t think to call the campaign.

01-02:37:58 Meeker: But the media was there.

01-02:38:00 Zepatos: Oh yeah, the media had been informed and invited, and that was just, I mean that was it, that was kind of the moment it was like there is no coming back from it, that was pretty clear. So it was, yeah, it’s very painful. It’s very painful to put everything you have into it and work seven days a week, and reassure people who are looking to you because you’re a leader on the campaign, and every day are asking do you think we’re going to win and can we still win and what do you think about this and that, and try to keep everybody’s spirits up at the time, when your own are really sinking.

01-00:38:42 Meeker: You left then, shortly after.

01-02:38:44 Zepatos: I think the day or the second day after.

01-02:38:47 Meeker: Wow. So the move to California was never thought to be a permanent kind of thing?

01-02:38:53 Zepatos: No, well, there were two things going on. I mean it was like I had a chance to do this political work that I was very invested in. My parents had been living in another state, my dad had passed away from Alzheimer’s, and my mom had decided to move to Southern California at that time. So it was a way to also be supportive of my mom. I tried to get her to move to Portland but she wouldn’t. So my husband, being incredibly amazing, agreed that we would move down there for a couple of years. It was during the course of that time, however, where we decided we should really start thinking about moving back to

Portland. I was living in a temporary housing, furnished place, and Mike was back here, and I remember I was so upset and devastated, that I actually called and asked him to fly to California, just to help me pack my stuff and get to the airport. I just felt immobilized.

01-02:40:00 Meeker: Were you paying attention to the national campaign, to Obama’s election? Did that have any sort of meaning for you at this time?

01-02:40:12 Zepatos: Oh, yeah.

01-02:40:11 Meeker: Did it feel like there was going to be a, you know, maybe this would signal a change of temper?

01-02:40:18 Zepatos: It was very inspiring. I was donating to the Obama campaign, I was watching everything that was going on. It seemed uniting people in a way that was very hopeful, I mean hope and change. It was very, very exciting, to be thinking about that, and it was just so stark on election night, you know literally to be crying and seeing the results around Obama being elected, our first black president, and at the same time, crying over the results of Proposition 8. It was yeah, I felt really torn.

01-02:41:00 Meeker: So you come back to Portland and I guess, well, you start at Freedom to Marry in 2010. You were doing other consulting work for the next year and a half, two years, right?

01-02:41:15 Zepatos: For two years, I actually did a very specific project which was marriage related.

01-02:41:30 Meeker: Why don’t we talk about that and then we’ll wrap up today. And that was the National Collaborative?

01-02:41:25 Zepatos: The National Collaborative.

01-02:41:27 Meeker: Can you tell me what that was?

01-02:41:30 Zepatos: Yeah. So, as you know, there had been some meetings of national LGBT organizational leaders. Matt Coles had written a paper that now everybody calls the 10/10/10/20 paper, it actually had a different name, a more formal name, but it was the strategy for winning marriage and it was a coalition effort. So the idea was that the first state was going to be Massachusetts, and then

52 there were other states that were on the list and we would win marriage in some states and civil union in some other states, in Connecticut and other New England states and so on, and that through this coalition effort, HRC [Human Rights Campaign] would focus some efforts into those states, Freedom to Marry would do some work, the Task Force would do some work, the legal groups would all coordinate their cases, so that they would be lined up according to this agreement.

Right after I came back from California, I actually wasn’t sure what I would be doing next, and I got a call from Patrick Guerriero, who at the time was the head of Gill Action, and he said, “Thalia, we would like you to take over as the lead consultant for the National Collaborative.” When it was formed, the collaborative was a three-year project, everyone agreed, a three-year commitment, to try and win some marriage states jointly, and then at the end of that project there would be an evaluation. And so having been so involved and knowing all of the players and so on, I agreed, and it became, I think a big question when we had been beaten so badly in California, what we saw was NOM [National Organization for Marriage] was this new organization that was a single organization, that was organized raising money. Frank Schubert was their consultant, who had learned and done some very smart things that had taken us down, like the princess ad, and they were now moving a strategy that they seemed to be very well organized and very nimble, and the discussion for the collaborative, even as we were trying to move together and Maine immediately decided to move forward, they really pushed to go to the ballot in 2009. Some of the national folks were not quite ready and didn’t think we were ready.

The real question was, could a coalition effort like this—with a kind of clunky decision-making process, difficult funding streams—could we be efficient and nimble enough to actually move forward and start to put some victories on the map? The discussion quickly turned to, actually not, you know, we have a structural problem. We have a messaging problem, agreed. We also have a structural problem, and so I was part of a, we called it a futures committee, that I convened, and this group talked together and worked together and basically came back to the group and said we think we need a single campaign style organization to actually move forward on marriage, this coalition effort is not going to be good enough. We’re getting beat and we need to do something different.

One of the challenges was that Evan thought Freedom to Marry was the natural heir apparent. It’s a single issue organization; it’s solely focused on marriage. I think some of the other leaders felt like, “Well yeah, but Evan’s a lawyer, he’s a public speaker, he’s got the bully pulpit, but who and how is Freedom to Marry going to be this campaign?” So that was a sort of key component to Evan being able to assemble the team to kind of say, “Okay, I’m going to get these campaign folks.” Marc was one of them, I was the other one, Michael Crawford, who had won in D.C., who was brilliant on the social

media piece. So, to kind of assemble the folks where Evan basically said that he’s not going to be the one that necessarily can do all of these pieces but that he will put the team together that will do it.

01-02:45:53 Meeker: So, basically it sounds like what you’re saying is this National Collaborative group is where it was decided that Freedom to Marry 2.0 would be re- launched, not only what it had been in the past, but also having this national campaign component, managing and assistant statewide campaigns as well, including a c4 component, which it had never had before. So, kind of building out a full capacity. It was that decision to kind of allow the organization to move in that direction.

01-02:46:25 Zepatos: Yes, and with the key words, I think, a campaign style organization, you know that it had a particular campaign focus. It would be organized as a campaign in the sense that it wouldn’t start having an annual dinner and replicating the activities of permanent organizations, that it pledged to go out of business when the campaign was won. But also that we would do targeting and be proactive and nimble, and move in a way that we didn’t have loyalties to any particular states or any particular promises made, but rather we would be opportunistic and find the places we could win and move quickly to win; whether it was at the legislature, eventually on the ballot, through court cases, et cetera. And so yeah, that we would form this campaign style organization and assemble essentially, a campaign team. I think another big piece that really came out of the Let California Ring was we needed a sort of national public education campaign, and that would be once we had done this new research and analysis and come up with this new messaging, that would be the work that I would engage in.

01-02:47:50 Meeker: Through the National Collaborative, was there more or less consensus amongst the people who were part of that collaborative, that this was the right path to go?

01-02:48:01 Zepatos: I think there was a recognition that it was the right path to go. I think there was some anxiety about it, partially because well, you’ve got a lot of organizations that just all want to put themselves forward and all want to be seen as leaders on key issues. So you’ve got the typical sort of turf, you could say, turf battles of national groups that are working in the same space. I think there was also anxiety about, honestly, whether Evan would put together the kind of team that was needed.

01-02:48:40 Meeker: Was that attributable to Evan and his personality or more, are there in fact people that are qualified, who could actually do this work and would be interested in doing the work.

01-02:48:54 Zepatos: Well I think it was maybe more about Evan and where he came from, from a sort of legal perspective, maybe something about his personality as well, but the idea that we needed a team that would come up with new strategies, new ways of working, new ways of winning, and that I think Evan really showed to everyone that he was open and willing to do that, that he didn’t have all the answers, that he wasn’t going to prescribe what it was going to be and how it was going to win, except we needed to find the talent and put together the talent that could figure that out.

01-02:49:30 Meeker: I mean this is actually something that I find to be rather remarkable, and that is that you know, Evan had been on the issue since the eighties and was basically a prophetic leader, I mean he really did have a vision. He certainly has an ego.

01-02:49:50 Zepatos: Yes.

01-02:49:51 Meeker: He’ll read this and I don’t think that he would disagree, but you know when the time came, it does seem like he was able to reign that in by bringing people like you and Marc in, and Michael Crawford and other people, Sean Eldridge, you know, who would bring in something unique as well. That to me says a lot. I think it’s pretty remarkable, I mean I can’t wait to ask him about that moment.

01-02:50:21 Zepatos: I think it speaks very well of Evan, because he knew what his expertise was and he knew what his expertise was not. He knew that essentially, we needed like the A-team, or we needed each person to be the best in their realm of activity, and that he had to assemble that team. So to his credit, I mean that he did it, and frankly, I think if any of the organizations; HRC or the Task Force, or anyone that stepped forward, I don’t know that it could have taken off in the same way, because there’s just too much multi-issue maneuvering and baggage constantly going on, which that’s the space that they operate in. So it was clean to have Freedom to Marry take it on.

Interview 2: February 19, 2016

02-00:00:01 Meeker: Today is February 19, 2016. This is Martin Meeker, interviewing Thalia Zepatos, for the Freedom to Marry Oral History Project. We are at Thalia’s home in Portland and this is interview session number two. So, we left off yesterday when you were just about to accept a position at Freedom to Marry. Please tell me the account of the conversations that you had with the leadership of Freedom to Marry, about what you required of them for you to join their organization, their campaign.

02-00:00:48 Zepatos: Right. We were at this moment of transition from this National Collaborative—which was a coalition of national groups that wanted to win marriage really coming to the conclusion that that structure was inadequate to the task—that we needed a single movement-leading organization, essentially, to run what would be a national campaign, and Evan stepped forward and wrote a fabulous paper about why Freedom to Marry should take that position and be that leading organization. So from Evan’s perspective, I think he was looking for real campaigners, people who knew how to go fight and win, and win campaigns. I had a lot of experience in that realm and of course, I had been very involved already, on the marriage issue now for several years, and had really come to the conclusion that we were just off base on messaging. I certainly wasn’t the only person to have that insight after we lost on Prop 8.

So my conversation with Evan was just one where I just really wanted to be assured that he shared with me, the understanding of the fundamental challenge that we faced around messaging. The way I put it to him was that we would wipe the slate clean, that we would carry no assumptions about the way we should talk about this issue any further, but that rather we would start fresh and we would look at everything that had been done, but we would start anew, and that we would abide, and for me it was important that he agreed that he would abide with the outcome of that research. He totally agreed to that, that that would be my main project going in, and then based on our work together at Let California Ring, we both knew that where we were heading was a really large national public education effort essentially, an ongoing effort to change the way Americans will think about marriage. That would be punctuated by particular states and legislative campaigns and ballot campaigns and court cases as they developed. That was the vision for my role as I came on to Freedom to Marry.

02-00:03:06 Meeker: You know, while you talk about you wanting there to be a blank slate and have basically evidence-based messaging going forward, you must have already had a sense based on the work that you had done in California and Oregon, about where the message needed to go. It’s also my understanding, based on where Evan had been for many years, I mean if you look at his law school paper, that paper does talk about love and commitment, I think as

much if not more than rights, although not with the kind of data that would support it. Did you and Evan have conversations of suspecting that this is where the direction needed to head at that point in time?

02-00:03:57 Zepatos: I think where we had that conversation was probably at the table of Let California Ring, as we were struggling with what kind of communications opened people’s minds and what just let them stay shut down. The way I thought about it was the key seemed to be emotion, that we needed to connect more in an emotional way to people and not let them have a sort of, I know who this is and I know what these people want, et cetera, and that certainly, love, you know. What came for me out of California Ring was love was a crucial story and a piece of that story. And indeed, when I look back now, at Evan’s writings and his early thinking, he was incredibly prescient. The name of the organization is Freedom to Marry. It took us a while to figure out how important freedom, as a value would play out in bringing mainstream conservatives, Republicans, older democratic men, I mean I had no idea how much we would turn back to freedom as a key value later on. And the name of his book was Why Marriage Matters (2004), which became, through research, a proven name of our public education campaign. So he was, it was there, it was all there, but I think we needed to kind of reorganize the elements, because there were also other elements that were not helping us, that were in the mix at the time.

02-00:05:33 Meeker: I also understand, and I think this comes from pre-interviews that I’ve done with people particularly in the foundation world, that they weren’t necessarily convinced of this other message early on and they really needed this research in order to convince them. Do you remember having conversations with people in the funding community about this shift before it was made and how they responded?

02-00:05:59 Zepatos: Absolutely. We really saw them, I mean they were key partners, and we saw them as partners sort of going on a journey with us, which was, piece by piece, kind of uncovering. It was like putting down a paving stone and stepping on it and then planting the next stone and planting the next stone, and we were all kind of walking down this path together. There were a lot of assumptions that were present in the funder community, I mean one of them was we can’t win at the ballot, we just can’t and we never will, we will never win through a popular vote. That was very, very difficult to overcome and we had funders pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into huge campaigns that lost. We had lost thirty-one states in a row before we won a single one, so there was a lot of experience there. So, you know, one of the conclusions people draw from that is that it’s the ballot process that we just can’t win, or is it the way we were talking about this issue over and over again was wrong and that we need to try something different.

One of the great things that developed in our work with the funder community was the fact that we could experiment. They would help fund very specific experiments and we would come back to them with the data, and we were completely transparent about what was working and what was not working, and therefore building their trust along the way in terms of kind of following the path of what seemed to be more productive.

02-00:07:35 Meeker: You join Freedom to Marry, January of 2010. This is just a little over a year after the heartbreaking Prop 8 loss, and as you mentioned, thirty-one states had voted against marriage. Where did your optimism come from? I mean, that’s kind of a remarkable thing.

02-00:07:52 Zepatos: Well, I guess there were just enough little kernels along the way, enough little data points. Maine went to the ballot in 2009 and it was kind of the reaction to Prop 8, and they wanted to solve it quickly and there was a lot of concern. In fact, the national players didn’t necessarily agree. Maine more or less went out ahead and everyone followed them on that. I remember very well, that they had a lot of messaging about fairness and equality, fairness and equality for all Maine families. I remember seeing their ads and thinking, okay some of this— you know, they had the whole family of same-sex couple with kids and they had grandma, and some of the elements that we were all talking about and sort of thinking about, but it almost felt to me, in my conversations with them, that they always pushed a little too far. I remember with their pollster having a conversation about the fact that they kept using the phrase fairness and equality, and I said, “Well, I see that as kind of a continuum, and I think part of what we’re seeing is people don’t actually want to grant equality to a group of people that they don’t think are worthy of it, and when somebody is stigmatized and different, they actually, in the minds of some voters, don’t deserve equality. But what about fairness, you know can we get somewhere on fairness?” So the fact that they had just linked these two words together into a phrase, fairness and equality, it’s like why can’t we just try fairness, like let’s start with what we can get. So there were little glimmers here and there that okay, that’s kind of like overcorrecting, but there was something, some really good things, that came out of that campaign as well.

02-00:09:52 Meeker: And can you remind me, the 2009 campaign in Maine. I know that the Maine path to full marriage kind of goes back and forth, right?

02-00:10:03 Zepatos: Yeah.

02-00:10:04 Meeker: So, 2009, what was the result of that?

02-00:10:07 Zepatos: Our side lost, we lost at the ballot. They had actually won a vote in the legislature, that was then petitioned to the ballot and then the referral, we lost on the statewide vote.

02-00:10:17 Meeker: And then it was in 2012 that you won again.

02-00:10:20 Zepatos: Maine went back, yeah.

02-00:10:24 Meeker: So you accept this position, you start in January of 2010. How do you get started up?

02-00:10:33 Zepatos: Well my idea was to do something that actually had, to that point never been done. I think I mentioned to you the sort of Groundhog Day experience, which was every state started their own campaign, they hired a pollster, they hired consultants, they did data, they did research, and all of that existed somewhere in a disorganized way. So my first task was really to collect everything. The funders of the movement were very helpful, because they basically started putting the word out that all grants from here on out will be contingent on the idea that all the data will be shared immediately with the other movement partner. So this was very, very helpful to us. I collected over eighty-five datasets, every poll, every focus group report, it was just a massive amount of material, with the idea that well, maybe the top testing messages in some of these cases led us astray, but there might be other really important material in there, and that we could look across so many different focus groups in different parts of the country, different polls, and kind of see if there were some promising leads that really hadn’t been followed up on. So, since I was based here in Oregon, actually knew a pollster in Oregon, Lisa Grove, who had been working with Basic Rights Oregon over many years. And of course we had all been in communication, ever since we had lost Measure 36 here in Oregon. So over a period of years, there was an ongoing conversation and a great deal of interest on the part of Basic Rights Oregon, to solve this issue.

One of the first things I realized when I came to Freedom to Marry is you know, I’m one of the people in the country, but there’s lots of other people who want to solve this very important question too. So we had organizations like Third Way, the Movement Advancement Project, which was a research and messaging arm of the movement, GLAD, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders out of Boston, which was Mary Bonauto’s office, they had communications. There were so many people that all kind of wanted to do this work, so I immediately realized that I couldn’t go on this task by myself, but that the best thing to do would be to organize everyone. So I formed this confidential research pool called the Marriage Research Consortium, the MRC, and I essentially organized, and the requirement for membership was your

organization was willing to invest resources to solve or work on the challenges of marriage messaging, and broadly we had two huge challenges. We had how do we talk proactively about marriage and then secondly, how do we solve attacks like the princess ad. I didn’t plan it so much at the outset but essentially, 2010 became solving problem number one; how do we talk about marriage, what is our new message frame, and 2011 became solving problem number two. So by organizing all of these partners with the support of our funders, they basically said everybody’s got to play nice together now, which was really important. We started sharing and collecting all of this data. I hired Lisa Grove, she had a colleague, a woman who worked for her named Melissa Chernaik. Their office was here in Portland, and so Portland became sort of our laboratory state.

02-00:14:09 Meeker: The funders, who are the key players in this that are basically making certain that all the organizations play fair together?

02-00:14:21 Zepatos: The Gill Foundation and the Haas, Jr. Fund were two really important leaders. We had an anonymous funder that was very much involved in the Civil Marriage Collaborative, you know they were kind of primary players.

02-00:14:34 Meeker: So the Civil Marriage Collaborative.

02-00:14:37 Zepatos: As a group, was the place where we talked about this and where they made agreements that would essentially support us, because they were not only the funders of our marriage work, they were the primary funders of this movement. So they literally discussed, I believe it was at a Civil Marriage Collaborative meeting, the new language that would go into every grant agreement, that required the sharing of research and data.

02-00:15:02 Meeker: So some of the key people would have been like Tim Sweeney and Matt Foreman?

02-00:15:06 Zepatos: Absolutely, and Paul Di Donato, who was the convener and the paid consultant who organized the Civil Marriage Collaborative or key players there. There were many other players at the table who were also very important thought partners, maybe not as large in terms of ultimate giving, but that were following and thinking with us and contributing ideas and bringing information from the outside. So for example, a group like Third Way, which is a multi-issue think tank based on Washington, D.C. They had received really significant funding in fact, from the Gill Foundation, to do some of this work, and it was a little bit of before Freedom to Marry 2.0 and before I got on the scene and kind of made myself a new sheriff in town, they were kind of working down that path. And so they shared, for example, some

psychographic research, which is a very expensive kind of research. I had never heard of it before and many people who do political work don’t engage in it because it’s the kind of research that actually corporations used a lot in their marketing. The methodology usually is one-on-one interviews with people like psychologists or psychiatrists talking to people for one or two hours at a time, pretty in-depth, and sometimes they have them engage in some activities. So what they were looking at was the underlying, kind of root emotions, causes, fears, reactions, to LGBT people in general and to the marriage issue in particular.

The way it was described to me was, the example was that there was a corporation that marketed motor oil, the kind of can you buy off the shelf when you’re going to change the oil in your own car, and the primary consumers of that are men, who change their motor oil in their car or their family cars. For a long time they had been marketing motor oil as something that was good for your engine and good for your car. After doing the psychographic research, they realized that many of these men had underlying, deep underlying fears and concerns about the safety of their wives and their children out on the road driving the family car, and that changing the oil in the car was kind of a task that they could do to somehow, somehow in their mind, in an emotional way, whether or not it was really logical to somehow make the car a little bit more safer for their family members who are out there on the road. And so getting at this underlying concern actually changed the marketing for this company, in which they started talking about making your car safe for your family and so on. So in the same way, we were looking for these underlying issues.

I remember when I shared with Evan some of the psychographic research, one of the activities they had people do was to sit at a table with a lot of magazines and to cut pictures out of magazines and to paste them on a cardboard and make a sort of collage about how they felt about gay marriage. Evan was kind of, “Really? Who’s paying money, our funders are spending money for this and why is this going to help us?” I was like, “I’m not even sure but we should do it.” I remember one of the collages, which was presented and explained to us, and it was people in a ship, on a really rocky sea, and then there was a deep dark forest, and then there was a rainbow and a kind of sunshine and people had to work through their fears. I mean, there was just a lot of material in this person cutting these things out and talking it through was a way to surface a lot of underlying fear that people had, and a distrust. I think the biggest thing I learned from that research was people distrusted the reasons why same-sex couples might want to get married, and they felt that gay people were pushy and kind of militant, and they just wanted to have something that they couldn’t have, just for the sake of having it. And there was a lot of kind of emotion about it, including the emotion that well, I may be a straight white man and I don’t have that much any more but we’ve got marriage, you know it’s still a privilege that we have and we’re not sure that we’re ready to share that yet. So really kind of interesting insights, and at the

time it was again, like I’m not sure how we take advantage and we use this, but okay now we’re hearing more and we’re learning more. So we had this psychographic research that was done.

We collected these eighty-five datasets. Lisa Grove and Melissa Cherniak pored through them all, I mean I went over to their office and there were just piles of paper everywhere and we were marking things, and I remember looking at themes and threads. They presented a report to us and at the same time, offered to do some focus groups here in Portland that would prove to be very revelatory. Things that were said there that are forever kind of burned into my memory.

02-00:20:44 Meeker: When you were poring over these reports, sorry to interrupt, but were you doing this in a qualitative or a quantitative fashion? Sorry, I’m a researcher.

02-00:20:51 Zepatos: Well there were two things. There was all the focus group reports where you had words and phrases that seemed to come up over and over and over again, and then you had quantitative data from just the different wording of questions and responses that came, and kind of an interesting point here and then it was phrased there. So there was just a tremendous amount of material that everyone, we were all kind of going over. But before they concluded that report, we decided they would do these focus groups here in Oregon, and Lisa, her suggestion was a very simple one, and I’ll say in many cases in this message journey, afterwards, things seemed so incredibly simple, you know when they’re right, but before you get there, they don’t seem that clear. So what she said was, let’s just start these groups, we’re not even going to mention gay people. Let’s just talk about marriage and see how people feel about marriage, what’s the language and the words that they use to describe marriage, their experience in their life. There are a lot of people who are divorced and so on, people live together and so on. And then she said, “Let’s also start looking at values,” and from the psychographic research, just everything was reinforcing this, “let’s dig deeper on values. And let’s start asking people what values they live their own life by and see what words come out and partway through the focus group then we’ll start talking about same-sex couples and marriage.”

So she introduced the idea or the question about what marriage meant to them, and you know, these were several groups over a couple of nights, but you get people saying “the ball and chain,” and kind of funny responses and everybody laughs. But I remember just having a legal pad there behind the glass, and these different words and kind of writing hash marks next to the words. “Responsibility,” “love,” “commitment”—that came up a lot, “love and commitment.” “Forever, taking care of one another.” And it was interesting, because you start to get a lot of the language that you think of as for richer or poorer, for better, for worse, I mean those kind of phrases came

62 out. One of the really interesting things about it was that even people who had been divorced or were unmarried or didn’t want to get married, there was this real common idea about what marriage meant, and it seemed to me, as Lisa said later, kind of aspirational, like we’re still kind of holding it up in this way. Whether or not the reality was quite that, these people felt there was a common vision of what marriage meant.

So then the focus groups moved into: “What are some of the values you live your life by?” And, “What do you teach your kids?” And the Golden Rule came up: “I treat others the way I would want to be treated,” whether they said the phrase the Golden Rule. In some groups we had later, in an African American community, it was, “We’re all God’s children.” You know there were different versions of this, but this kind of basic value of fairness, when people would say even people you don’t like that much or even someone you don’t agree with deserves a basic level of fairness in America.

So, okay, we’ve got what marriage means, we’re talking about these values of fairness, and then the moderator brings up, well now let’s talk about same-sex couples. They have this thing called domestic partnership, some of them want to get married. And I remember there, and in other groups subsequently too, I mean in these early years, and this was something that came up in Prop 8 too, people just thinking about like, “I don’t understand, why do gay people want to get married? Why would they want to get married?” You know, like you’d ask, “Why would a Martian want to get married? That’s someone who is so different from me, I just can’t even imagine it.”

So from the back we’re behind the wall, you know, I remember scribbling a note with Lisa and we decided to send it in to the moderator and the moderator said, “Well, why did you decide to get married?” “Well, I mean we fell in love and then we decided we wanted to have kids and we wanted to make a life together, so for us it was only natural to do that... You mean gay people might think that same thing, they might want to get married for that same reason?” I mean, in that kind of suspicious way, really wondering what the motives were. So you know very quickly, people come around to—this is the thing that kind of lets them off the hook—well, “They can have a domestic partnership or they can have a civil union, and that’s fine for them and it leaves marriage to us and everything is okay.” “Right, but you said a little while ago, that the Golden Rule was the most important value in your life; treating other people the way you would want to be treated, and now what you’re saying is marriage is good enough for you but it’s not good enough for them. So how does that work with the Golden Rule?” And then we got people kind of like looking up at the ceiling, putting their head in their hands, like their mouth is dropping open, what the researchers call cognitive dissonance. Now they’re realizing they’ve got a problem, right? What they said was really important to them as marriage, they say they practice the Golden Rule, but they don’t want to share marriage with this other group of people because they think they are too different in some way, et cetera. So, hmm, now they’ve got

to think about that a little bit more. So, from that experience, we figured out any number of things and that was just one example of it, but people had this deep inner conflict about whether other people could join in marriage. They were pretty clear that marriage was an important thing no matter what happened in their life.

I think in one of the groups here on Oregon, someone, after they’d gone around the room and someone said, “Well, my second and wife and I, we’re on our third marriage, someone noted that there’d been like twenty-eight marriages between the ten people in the room and yet, marriage was still this very, very special thing, right?” So there were these conflicts and this sort of turmoil, but that in a way it was kind of important to have this turmoil, that we needed to raise for people, a value based conflict, that we needed to get them thinking about their own values as a way to revisit, “Well I heard about gay marriage five years ago and I was against it then and why should I even think about it anymore it’s just wrong.” So the values piece was the way to kind of get them to bring this up in a new light and think again about the issue.

The other piece that became absolutely clear was there were just so many stereotypes and misinformation and outdated ideas about who gay and lesbian people are, that it was very easy for them to discount why same-sex couples would want to get married. I later came to think of it as this sort of giant pool of homophobia that’s kind of under the surface of everything, everywhere, and the opposition just has to kind of plant a flag deep enough into the ground, and that spurts out and reminds everybody of why gay people shouldn’t have anything. We have to actually kind of surface these outdated ideas and replace them with new ideas.

Another interesting thing that came up in that focus group was a man who said, “Well, I work with two lesbians,” and we thought, “Okay, he’s going to make the case now” and he said they’ve never once talked about marriage being important to them, so if it’s not important to them it’s not important to me and therefore, “I’m against it. So the lesbians I know don’t care about it, why should I care about it.” So we started kind of uncovering these sort of puzzle pieces really, that seemed to point us to a new direction. We had to help define what marriage was, and of course the opposition was constantly talking about as redefining marriage. So one of the things I had sort of hit on really early on was let’s come up with a definition of marriage that includes a lot of people. It’s not one man and one woman, it’s love and commitment and family. So we came up with this definition of marriage and then all of a sudden, well there’s lots of people that qualify under that definition, let’s talk about it and let’s talk about these values. So we reported back from these focus groups, Lisa Grove made this big report, we shared it with all of these partners in the Marriage Research Consortium, and then we sort of figured out a lot of subsidiary problems and questions that we needed to answer and solve, and we divided up the work because the key thing for me was whoever was there and ready to invest in some research, we didn’t want everybody working

on just the very same question. We had lots of questions that we were going to try and resolve and lots of things that we experimented with. We hadn’t shared it as much or it’s not covered as much, but we had some real dead ends that we went down that just really didn’t pan out at all.

02-00:31:13 Meeker: I wanted you to talk about those subsidiary questions and maybe some of the dead ends, but just a little bit more about these focus groups. How many roughly did you host?

02-00:31:24 Zepatos: We did four of them here.

02-00:31:25 Meeker: Four of them here. How did you find the participants and what kind of qualifications were you looking for?

02-00:31:32 Zepatos: This was pretty standard for the focus group methodology that we’ve used on campaigns. People would get a call that would sound like a polling question, they answered a number of questions and essentially what we sorted for was if they were against same-sex marriage but for domestic partnership, you know we felt like that was sort of the definition and it became very much our definition of our movable voters; people who might know someone who’s gay, they feel it enough, you know fair enough that gay people should have some recognition of their relationship, but marriage was not the answer. So that was the group we were looking for and people were then offered money to come and participate for an hour and a half. Some of the groups would be all men, some would be women. We’d sometimes segregate by age or marital status, you know we had other issues as well, but a fairly homogeneous group with a moderator who feels like they fit into that group, usually elicits a lot of good feedback.

02-00:32:40 Meeker: So it was all mostly the Portland area?

02-00:32:42 Zepatos: Yes.

02-00:32:43 Meeker: And when you say homogeneous, do you mean race and class and age?

02-00:32:46 Zepatos: Yeah, we would have separate groups for African Americans for example, separate groups for Latinos and separate groups for white voters, just to make the comfort level higher, so that people could feel like they could have the conversation, and the moderator would match the group. So that’s pretty standard and over time we did many focus groups in many different states and we drilled down into more and more ethnic and racial groups, to check the messaging and see how it needed to be adjusted. We also had a concern over

time, that even in a room full of ten strangers that you would only spend an hour and a half with and likely never see again, that people may not reveal kind of depth of their homophobia, that in polite company, they’re just really not going to get down to it. So by the time we were really looking at how to respond to the attacks against us, we shifted to online focus groups and some other methodologies that were also very interesting. That was a big concern that we shared with our funders, and they were also concerned that you know, what if people won’t even admit just how homophobic they are. I have to say, even in 2010, of course I’ve been in focus groups here in Oregon going back to 1988, on LGBT issues and people have said some really nasty things, so some people don’t hold back, but as the culture changed a little bit, we felt like they would feel that it was more and more socially inappropriate to share certain things. So that was a concern that we attended to as well.

02-00:34:38 Meeker: Similarly, I imagine that as the focus group goes on, the subjects have a pretty good idea of what’s happening there. I wonder if they sort of modulate their opinions to suit the sponsor of the focus group.

02-00:34:47 Zepatos: Yes, there’s a kind of, I think they call that social desirability bias, where they feel like they’re trying to please the group. We did some very interesting groups and we had some volunteer researchers and some folks, some really powerful political players who said I want you to work with so and so and do some groups with this particular moderator because she’s the best person in the whole country. I worked on some groups in Iowa that were very fascinating, because the moderator literally would split the time fifty-fifty on our arguments and opposition arguments, to the point where by the end of the group people were saying, “Wait, who’s paying for you? Are you with the pro-gay people or the anti-gay people? Wait, we can’t tell, which side are you on?” It was pretty interesting, because they were working very, very hard to kind of keep everyone and all of these arguments in a balance.

02-00:35:45 Meeker: Was there ever sort of agent provocateurs used in these, I mean to put somebody in the focus group and have them say homophobic things, to kind of allow others to speak?

02-00:36:00 Zepatos: We didn’t really have to. Someone will make a comment, there will be a little laughing, a little tittering and you know, that kind of gives everybody else permission to say something else. No, I mean sometimes with the moderator, of course we had a very detailed guide that the moderator used, that we worked very hard on in advance, because we wanted to kind of lead the conversation in certain ways, but we also wanted to give openings for anything to happen essentially. So, we sometimes provided opportunities for people to just say what they thought. That’s interesting.

02-00:36:40 Meeker: You mentioned there were some subsidiary questions and dead ends. Can you talk about that process?

02-00:36:46 Zepatos: One that really comes to mind was there was a huge correlation in the data, in a lot of polling, wherever the question had been asked, do you think people choose to be gay or are born gay. One of the ideas that came up was look, there’s a huge correlation of people who believe that being gay is a choice, are uniformly against gay rights, LGBT rights, because they feel like people can just choose to go back to being a heterosexual and therefore, don’t deserve any recognition of that status, or marriage or anything else. Well what if we just did a big education campaign and got the science and got the data and testimonials and stories and you know, while there is a continuum and there always is a story of someone who says, “Oh yeah, well I remember, you know. I thought I was bisexual and I decided I was just going to be X.” The great majority of people felt that they were born with their sexuality. So what if we just educate people about that and won’t that just naturally resolve this other issue? So we kind of went down this thread for a while.

The interesting thing that came out of it and that helped us later on was, especially parents of young children, are very anxious about their kids and their sexual orientation. The parents, it turned out, and this came out in the research for the princess ad as well, their six year-old, he loves his best friend and all he talks about is wanting to be with his best friend and spend time with his best friend, and if that child, at the wrong moment somehow, learns what homosexuality is, he will mistakenly believe erroneously, that he’s gay, when he’s not gay, and he’ll kind of grab onto that idea and go on the wrong path for the rest of his life or something. So what it came down to was even if people believe that 99 percent of the time someone’s sexual orientation, you know they were born with, that 1 percent chance, that slight chance that it might be a choice kind of negated their thinking on this issue. So we spent some time, we looked into it, and it turned out that it really wasn’t an answer for us. I mean it was an interesting exploration but that was one that really comes to mind as just okay, we’re just completely dropping that to the side. It was also in tune with something else, which was the opposition promotes a lot of fear and factual based arguments and scientific studies and academic research, actually don’t help resolve that, when people are in that mindset. That’s not really the best way for us to go.

So from the focus groups we got a lot of information and ideas and then we started putting those on polls.

02-00:40:12 Meeker: Once these original focused, initial focus groups were done, you said Lisa Grove had written a report, correct?

02-00:40:19 Zepatos: Yes, yes.

02-00:40:20 Meeker: Was this circulated widely or did you feel like before this goes out and starts to get torn apart or implemented, that there is the next level, which is polling. When does the broader movement community learn about this?

02-00:40:38 Zepatos: For me, there were two sort of inner circles. The inner circle was the Marriage Research Consortium and I had convinced everyone else to pledge, to share all the information immediately and we were going to share as well. We met every single month by phone, we had a conference call every month, and we would present findings. There would be a PowerPoint presentation and the pollster would be on there and presenting the findings and everyone could ask questions and think about data, and then maybe Lanae Hatalsky Erickson, who was from Third Way and had done this psychographic research. Well there is a really interesting thing that came up and did you see that there? You know, this is like a group of really smart people that are all tracking the same questions, kind of talking to one another, so that was a very productive conversation. And then we also shared it essentially, with our funders. Now, I don’t remember if we shared with the funders—I know I shared the report, but I don’t know if that was just after the focus groups or after we did focus groups and polling. Because of the qualitative nature of the work in focus groups, we won’t share that too far and wide, as a really important conclusion, until we get it really verified on polling.

So it seemed like one of the really interesting questions that came up during the focus groups was why did you and your spouse get married, and people had their story and their reason. And then we tried to get them to think about why same-sex couples might want to get married and you know, they seemed a lot more unclear and a lot more unsure about that. So we basically put that on the poll, we had a split sample. We asked half of the respondents “why did you choose to get married or couples like you,” and then “why do you believe same-sex couples would choose to get married?” We had a lot of questions, we asked a lot of data, but this was the slide on the PowerPoint, this was the bar chart that I thought about when I went to sleep at night and first thing when I woke up in the morning, and it seemed to me to be kind of the key to a lot. The key was that straight people got married for love and commitment, but when you asked why same-sex couples got married, well the biggest answer was for rights and benefits, you know the second response was love and commitment, and 22 percent said I don’t know.

02-00:43:13 Meeker: And so these were sort of predetermined responses that they could select.

02-00:43:17 Zepatos: These were the choices on the poll, you know A, B, or C basically. Love and commitment, rights and benefits, or I don’t know. And so one of the things that we realized through that is well, rights and benefits, that’s what we’ve been talking about for a long time, our movement, and essentially, all these fights for domestic partnership were enumerating rights. The Measure 36 campaign, I remember we were preparing the handout materials, printed material that the canvassers would take out, and everyone was talking about 1,136, you know that the Government Accounting Office had done this study and there were 1,136 rights and benefits of marriage. When we started talking to voters about it, people’s eyes kind of glaze over and we came back and thought you know, that’s a really big number and that’s a really long list, let’s just pick a hundred. Let’s just pick a hundred really interesting ones that people may not realize and let’s print those on a piece of literature, and people kind of scanned it. It was again, this situation where I felt like we were talking like this and they were talking like that, and they were kind of like, “Well, oh, so you can’t share a burial plot with someone unless you’re actually married to them, hmm, interesting.” We tried to get people to focus on something that would somehow make a difference to them and it didn’t connect in that way. But we had been driving the message of rights and benefits and there it was in the poll, people thought gay people wanted to get married for rights, for legal rights.

02-00:44:53 Meeker: So that message worked insofar as convincing people that was why gay people wanted to get married.

02-00:44:58 Zepatos: Yes, but it was a different reason than why they thought anybody should get married, and so this was the crux of the whole thing, which was marriage was kind of this, let’s say club, that you had to say and do the right things to get in, and the reason to get married was because you love someone and wanted to make that commitment. Whether it lasted a long time or not, you were willing to, at the door. And the idea that people would make it a political issue, that the gay community, who was already maybe too militant or too pushy or wanted everything right now, or didn’t seem to be wanting and having the same goals as straight people. So there’s a combination of all this misperception that they had. Often, they knew someone and it was tremendous, during the course of these one and a half hour conversations, almost everybody in that room either had a friend or a relative who was gay, and it’s painful to hear people say, “You know my brother in-law is gay and he’s a really nice guy, but I’d never say this at the family table, but I don’t think he should have the right to get married.” It’s like gee, that is too bad, that is sad. People who really had someone close to them and they just still had a very hard and fast view about who that person was, or this other phase of you know, kind of what happens with stigma, which is, “Well, the lesbians I know they’re just the greatest couple but they’re not like all the other ones. They bought the house down the street and they painted it and they keep their

yard nice and they take the trash can out for that elderly lady next door. They are the greatest neighbors. Well, they’re basically like a married couple; they act like they’re married. They stay home and they watch movies and they got to pot lucks and they’re not wild. You know, you hear how people talk about, but they’re not like the rest of them.” So here’s this other kind of clue we have, right, which is so many people know someone close to themselves but (A) they haven’t had a conversation, they’re not talking about it, or (B) they think the gay or lesbian person they know is different from the rest. So these are problems that we can start to approach and try to solve now, showing couples and talking about their longevity together.

02-00:48:12 Meeker: How did you deal with the issue of childbirth and child raising? In a survey for instance, in the polling, when you were asking heterosexual couples about why they got married, was that an option, you know, was sort of having or raising kids an option, and would that have been parallel to the same-sex couples?

02-00:48:36 Zepatos: Well, early on, in 2010—and things changed dramatically, you know, really quickly, but early on, it was a little more touchy to talk about same-sex couples raising children. People were worried about gay couples as role models. They were very concerned about how the children themselves would be treated. You know very often, what we’d hear in focus groups was well, it may not have been their choice to be raised in this kind of family, but they’re going to go to school and they’re going to be bullied and they’re going to hear it from other kids on the block and kids who aren’t nice and aren’t friendly and sensitive to the issue. So initially, even from the focus group research we did, we quickly saw for example, that there was a lot more concern and a lot more sensitivity around gay men raising children than there was around lesbians raising children. There was a lot more sensitivity, in the early days, when we showed pictures of couples, and we were just kind of testing images. I mentioned one of those yesterday, about how people responded, saying that they assumed that the family was alienated from them. But we had a picture of two women that we were using in a piece of campaign literature, and they were both kind of leaning on a kitchen counter, counter island, side-by-side, and there was about an inch of their shoulders, where their shoulders met, just leaning forward, smiling, pleasant expressions. A woman in the focus group looked at it and said, “You know, that’s the thing about gay people, they’re always all over each other.” And it’s like a Rorschach blot, I mean her thinking is gay people are over-sexualized or you know it’s clear that when they think about gay people, all they think about is sex. Because here’s two women, I mean you actually can’t tell if they’re sisters or lovers or what, there’s nothing overtly sexual about their pose at all, and yet people feel that way. And so we thought well, we have to be a little cautious about what kinds of affection we’re even showing in some of our photographs and the ads in the

early days. Now the great thing was, in our work, as we continued on, we could see that changing really rapidly, within a few years time anyway.

Another example of that was when we did the polling and we tested. I tested one of the messages that came out of the ads from Maine, where same-sex couples said we’re just like you and we got married for the very same reason you got married, and what we found in the research was a little bit of pushing back from that. Well it came back: “They’re not just like us. They may be nice people, they may be okay, but….” So when we started out with our Why Marriage Matters and we came with this sort of one page of message points that was the basis of our new messaging, we started out by saying gay and lesbian couples get married for similar reasons as anyone else; to take care of one another, make a life together, et cetera, et cetera. And so after a few years, we could actually test it and we could say the same reasons, but in 2010, we couldn’t even say the same reason. We had to say similar reasons because that’s where people were at.

02-00:52:07 Meeker: My question around kids is actually a little more like this (and this is probably a long question so forgive me in advance): Let’s say you have these kind of different options for, if you’re asking heterosexual couples why they got married, and the vast majority would clearly say love and commitment, followed by rights and benefits would probably be very low. And then you see how it’s sort of reversed for their thoughts about same-sex couples. And so then your charge is much simpler, which is well, what we need to do is talk more about love and commitment and de-emphasize the rights, but what if one of the options for heterosexual couples was to have and raise a family. That wouldn’t be so easily translatable to same-sex couples, I would guess. Was that sort of an option for heterosexual couples to talk about why they got married?

02-00:53:20 Zepatos: The way it came up, as I recall it, was much more as a sort of a phase, like first you fall in love and you make a commitment, then after a while you have kids and you raise a family. I mean we sometimes heard stories when people have said, “Well, we lived together for six years but when we decided to have a child, that’s the moment we got married.” For most people, it was a sort of next phase of their life together, but not necessarily the reason for getting married.

02-00:53:52 Meeker: Maybe that’s how heterosexual marriage has changed over the last fifty years, right? Yeah, so children would not typically have come across as the exclusive or most important reason for a straight couple to get married.

02-00:54:05 Zepatos: Interestingly not, because early on, we were just tallying many, many responses, and that certainly came up in terms of raising kids. Once in a while

you get a heterosexual couple saying, “My husband had insurance coverage at his work and I didn’t, so we needed that coverage and then we got married, very rarely.” But yeah, that was more of something that came up after they were married and was the next phase of their life, let’s say.

02-00:54:36 Meeker: You know, in another question, this is also slightly speculative, but I think about sort of modulating the advertisement and message to be aware and wary of people thinking that gay people are overly sexualized or always all over each other and that kind of thing, and therefore, then making recommendations probably in ads, or something like that, to be careful about that, right? But there’s also a real part of the gay movement that I know from being a historian, like you know, they would be aghast and upset at it. They’d say, “No, we need to go out there and make out and sort of be queer, we’re in your face kind of thing.” Did you ever encounter that kind of pushback from people in the movement, when you would caution against representations of gay people that would be overtly physical?

02-00:55:52 Zepatos: A big part of our work was communicating with the movement about what we needed to do and the path to victory essentially. A really important piece of that, I think it’s kind of basic, I don’t know, education or communication in a way, which is by definition, “these middle voters are not like us,” people in the movement, and they’re not politicized in the same way, they don’t have the same values, they’re coming from a very, very different place. But what we’ve learned is, you know if we talk about it the way we want to talk about it, which in fact rights and benefits, you know, for people who are denied rights, it’s really very, very apparent and in their face, exactly what rights they’ve been denied. When a same-sex couple gets in a car accident and they’re rushed to the hospital and one person is critically injured and whipped behind the closed doors, into the operating theater, and their spouse, their partner of a decade is left outside and saying sorry, you’re not a family member, I mean that’s a very harsh experience that is not to be forgotten. So, one of the challenges is always talking with the movement about the fact that what sells us, what motivates us, what makes a difference to us, is very, very different than what’s motivating this other group of people, and that what we have to do if we want to win is find a way to talk to them, and kind of lessen this gap. I mean now on polling, straight average Americans will say that LGBT people have been discriminated against, but back then, that wasn’t even a recognition, I mean it’s somebody who’s so different from me doesn’t even quality for that term. So there was a lot of engagement and there’s pushback as well, I mean town hall meetings and organizational meetings and a lot of pushback around initially, not always showing couples with children, just showing couples who didn’t have children, and why can’t we do that, and this is really important. There’s a whole branch of the movement around family equality that also has goals of education. The wonderful thing for us was that how quickly, when we started taking these steps, we were able to kind of help shift the national

perception and the dialogue, certainly helped by television shows and other mediated images, and things that were going on in the culture for sure.

02-00:58:39 Meeker: How did you go then, from these focus groups and polling, to in fact implementing the message campaign?

02-00:58:50 Zepatos: Well, the work of the Marriage Research Consortium, we did a lot of pieces of work together and what we tried to do were you know— For me it was important to—boil it down into a single piece of paper, one sheet of messaging, and that included the definition of marriage, love and commitment, the idea that gay couples want to marry for similar reasons and talk about some of those reasons, the introduction of, initially the Golden Rule, means treating other people the way you would want to be treated and reminding people that essentially, if you wouldn’t trade your marriage for a domestic partnership, it’s not fair to ask someone else to do that either. So this concept of sort of agency, and making individual people feel a little more responsible, like well this is kind of on me, it’s not just everybody else, but how do I really feel about it.

So we created this page of talking points and we actually were going to call the campaign marriage matters. The Oregon test version of it was marriage matters, and it turns out that there is a right-wing Christian organization based in Iowa called Marriage Matters, that holds counseling couples, retreats, and that’s also politically active, and they had word-marked the phrase marriage matters and they owned it and they actually sent us a cease and desist letter. It was very early on, we didn’t have a lot of material, but they had found it and they sent us a letter and told us to desist using the phrase marriage matters. And so luckily, we had the title of Evan’s book, Why Marriage Matters, and we just adopted that and we word-marked Why Marriage Matters. So we initially came up with this one page of talking points, the logo, Why Marriage Matters; Love, Family and Commitment, and then we talked through values like the Golden Rule and essentially tried to push this out as far as we could amongst the movement, and that was really interesting too, because we’re sort of inventing a national public education campaign, and Evan said what did we need and I said well, like $10 million to start putting ads on national cable news. Absolutely not, we don’t have that money and we can’t raise it, that’s three times our annual budget so forget that idea. Okay, so how can we push it out?

We essentially created this branded campaign with a separate website. We started to find initially, some videos of couples telling their stories. We found some from California that we were able to use, and we basically invited state LGBT rights organizations to become partners, and the national groups; Third Way, HRC, GLAD, GLAAD, to sign on as partners, and that was really, the first campaign was the internal campaign to get our movement to adopt this

language. So it was giving a lot of presentations and doing PowerPoints and having conference calls and webinars and sharing some of the data and showing some of the slides and talking about these focus groups and how people responded. Part of what was very persuasive was that you know, we made some initial television ads right here in Oregon and we did a test where you do a poll and then we showed the ads and then we did polling again, and you could see the impact. We had two different ads. One was really driving home the love and commitment message. In fact, that ad was called Love and Marriage, and it showed two straight couples interspersed with two same-sex couples; a gay male couple and a lesbian couple, just talking about how they met and how long they had been together. One of the things we learned through this was kind of the value of showing versus telling. We never said look at these four couples are just the same, they all love one another, but when you watch that ad, you sort of came to this conclusion that one of the straight women says at the end, which is love is love. It’s really kind of the same story you’re hearing over and over again, even though there’s differences about these four couples. And the gay male couple in that ad said, in their interview, they had been together for fifty-seven years. And when we tested it and showed it to middle voters, I mean they were just blown away. They were kind of like, “Wow, that’s longer than my first and second and third marriage combined and God bless them, and if they can stick together for fifty-seven years, I guess they really do deserve to be called married, I mean what else can you say about a commitment like that?” So it really shook people’s assumptions about same-sex relationships and it kind of drew this image I’m always having, just kind of make a circle that includes a lot of people, you know this new expanded version of what marriage was like.

The other ad we tested was called “Neighbors,” and it was about the Golden Rule, and it was interesting because in part of the ad, this couple has their two young kids on their laps, and people really commented in the focus group, “Well they’re not even afraid to talk about that in front of their children, isn’t that amazing?” And we kind of learned a little bit more, just how powerful that was.

02-01:04:33 Meeker: This is Derek and Kate?

02-01:04:35 Zepatos: Yeah, Kate and Derek.

02-01:04:42 Meeker: Did that work, with the kids?

02-01:04:44 Zepatos: Oh yeah, it was very powerful, it was very powerful. What we realized was each ad—we were kind of comparing them too, but what we realized is each ad was driving a different point. One was driving the love and commitment and one was driving the Golden Rule and that the combination of them was

really powerful. The combination of showing why some same-sex couples want to get married, and then showing straight people—and this was kind of the beginning of this journey story, which was people really responding to the idea that wow, he even says in the beginning, “You know I didn’t grow up knowing gay people and frankly, this idea, I wasn’t so sure about it, but when I thought about it some more….” So we kind of, step-by-step, started to discover these pieces that seemed to really work, and so aside from sending out the talking points of why marriage matters, we started making suggestions for messengers, and really talking about and using the idea of the journey story. Find people who have changed their mind and get them on camera talking about why and how they changed their minds.

And then the idea of these unlikely messengers, and that came from, at first I think what I was operating under was this idea was that there are certain assumptions, you know who is for gay marriage and who’s against it. Well, every religious person has got to be against it, so the first unlikely messengers we really tried to find were religious leaders, so that we could say at least it’s a subject of discussion in the religious community, actually there’s people on both sides. That kind of neutralizes that one. Then, well, heterosexual men, who are some of the most macho. How about some military people? And you know, we were very lucky at the time that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was rescinded, because all of a sudden we had this explosion of military stories and military messengers. Michael Crawford led this joint effort with Service Members Legal Defense Network, and they were finding all these stories and telling all these stories, and we were testing them and they were like going through the roof in terms of people responding and it’s like wow, okay, military. And then just this sort of macho guys. You know, in the Maine campaign, later in 2012, did an ad with four firefighters and three of them are straight and one of them is gay. We later did another ad with military veterans. So we kind of, one by one, would discover the kind of messengers that really made people sit up and pay attention, because now we’re breaking down their idea that well, most people I know are on the anti-gay marriage side, and there’s only a few flaming liberals and gay people and maybe some Unitarians on the other side, who knows? So we just kept trying to break down that boundary, because what we were trying to do was create this safe, comfortable place for these conflicted people in the middle who are basically looking at a ping-pong match and saying these people over here and they’re fighting with these people over here and let’s see, which side do I feel like I could fit in with. And so we had to keep kind of moving the center point so that it might include them.

02-01:08:14 Meeker: I’m curious, just in sort of a specific moment. Were you involved in the production of those two ads here in Oregon?

02-01:08:22 Zepatos: Mm-hmm.

02-01:08:23 Meeker: Could you take me behind the scenes and tell me how those ads come out, and like how you find the people, and what is the process of helping them tell their story?

02-01:08:34 Zepatos: It was interesting, the ad team who shot the ads, I remember Dawn Laguens saying we’re going to do it like a casting call, and Basic Rights Oregon, because it’s a long existing organization with very deep roots in the community, they were able to find a lot of people who were willing to come and be on camera; same-sex couples as well as straight couples who were allies. So the idea was they were going to bring twenty-five or thirty different couples through, and we would shoot a short interview with each of them, and just kind of see how they played out on camera. And then on that one, we kind of realized four of these, if we picked four of these stories and put them back to back, that in itself was a wonderful ad. But we also, at the time, we shot other stuff that we tested, that really didn’t work very well, like a voiceover that showed lots of images and lots of pictures. There was a song about falling in love and you know, we just, we were experimenting with a lot of things. That particular one, I always think of it as the casting call, but it was four of the interviews that just really resonated, that showed four different couples, turned out to be really powerful.

02-01:09:57 Meeker: And those interviews were just sort of open-ended or they were scripted? How was it done?

02-01:10:02 Zepatos: Well it was, the important thing for us in working with these ad firms, when you shoot real people, is not to give them a script and try to have them speak to the script. It’s really important to have someone who could ask them questions and engage them a little bit in a back and forth, natural, naturalistic conversation, even if you’re leaning them towards a little bit of a framing around the conversation. So we basically had some questions that were asked, but the beginning of it was, “How long have you been together, how did you meet? Tell us about when you fell in love.” And you get really wonderful, natural moments of people together. You might ask, “What was one of the hardest things you ever faced together in your life together?” Some of it ends up on the cutting room floor, but what we were trying to do was get that love story essentially, get that moment, a moment, of spark between each of these couples, and kind of make the point that people meet, they fall in love, that’s kind of what happens. So that one was really great.

And then the shoot for the Derek and Kate, that was a big of a search, because we wanted to find a couple that looked very mainstream, very Oregon, meaning not necessarily just Portland but anywhere in Oregon, and someone knew someone and they approached this couple and they were willing to do it and the shoot was at a friend’s house, in their kitchen. We really, that was a

conversation that went back and forth and as you might imagine, some of these shoots last for several hours, and you’re just trying to get a certain combination and a certain moment. The thing I love about that is, you know, the final take that we used was a husband saying, “We believe in treating other people the way we would want to be treated, and we would never want to tell someone else that they couldn’t get married and we wouldn’t want to have them tell us either,” and the wife goes “tsk,” like she just, with her body language and this little “tsk,” kind of encapsulates the whole thing, like, “Yes, we don’t want to be that kind of person, and we’re teaching our kids and here we are, sitting with our kids.” It was a very beautifully done piece that had a great impact.

We shot several other things that we tested. This was the period of experimentation and testing, and nothing went forward unless it was thoroughly tested. So we were able to show our funders as well. Well, we shot five ads and three of them flopped and two of them are great, and now we’re putting two of them into the field and we’re going to take a poll before, and we’re going to show them in different cable zones and then we’re going to poll again afterwards and then we’ll report back again. They were sort of following the research and investing in the research along with us.

02-01:13:10 Meeker: When did this happen, was this 2010 or 2011?

02-01:13:13 Zepatos: That was really early in 2010, we started the focus groups actually in 2009, before I officially came onboard. We were sort of moving in this direction, it was November, December, 2009. And then we did the testing and Thomas Wheatley worked at Basic Rights Oregon, so he was the partner that I was working with very, very closely, before he came onboard at Freedom to Marry.

02-01:13:38 Meeker: How was the testing done? How was it determined that these two of the five ads were the most successful?

02-01:13:47 Zepatos: We did a dial test and I’m trying to remember if that was online or in a room, you know there’s a couple of methodologies or that, but it’s like a focus group and then you start to show people ads, and they either have a controller, and at the parts that they like, they sort of dial up, and the words and sentences they don’t like as much, they dial back on. When people are at home, watching on their computer, they actually use their computer mouse like that same dial. Then, when you see the ad later, because of the dial testing technology, as you’re watching the ad, you see these lines go up and down, and it’s like women are responding this way or men are responding this way, I mean you can break it down. Older voters like this, younger people like that. So you can

really see where people are responding, and you can also track people who have certain concerns and whether the ad is responding to their concern.

02-01:14:43 Meeker: What do you do when you get some conflicting data, where some groups that you really want to appeal to are convinced, but then maybe a broader group is unconvinced, or does that not happen? Is there a lot of consistently through the results?

02-01:14:58 Zepatos: Well, no you—I mean, that’s what segmentation is all about. In a political campaign, we could send different pieces of mail to different people. You can buy ads during the day, you know when a soap opera is on TV, if you want to show it to one demographic, and you can buy an ad next to the nightly news, to show it to another demographic. It’s very easy to place advertising in front of certain audiences, you can do that now by buying pre-roll on Hulu or online. You can purchase the audience that you want to put messages in front of. But initially, what we were looking for, was a kind of one size fits all. I mean we did more segmentation later on, but we’re sort of trying to solve the big problem first.

02-01:15:47 Meeker: So, maybe walk me through the process, now that you’ve got these initial commercials done and vetted, tested in Oregon, seem to have done a good job. How then do you take that to nationally or how do you take it to other state markets?

02-01:16:04 Zepatos: A really big question for us was how regional are these values, how regional are these messages, or could they potentially be almost universal in America. And so what was working in one place, we really needed to test in other locations, and in fact, it’s a part of doing national political work, that every state you go into, the state leaders feel that their state is unique and what works somewhere else isn’t going to work here and we’d better start all over and so on. But the truth is, in America, marriage is mostly marriage, and in fact homophobia is homophobia. And so there were very few variations that were needed, but what people really wanted were ads that were authentic to their own place. So when we initially did the Why Marriage Matters website, we put the talking points and we put these ads up there and said, you can link to them from your own website, you can make Why Marriage Matters Iowa website, and just remake it, we’re giving you this freely, start using it please. Most of the state leaders were hesitant to actually use ads that weren’t produced in their own state, just because they want the voice and the tone and the cowboy hat instead of the gimme cap, or you know whatever it was, that there were signals. And so what they really became were models that were kind of replicated over and over and over, and with a slight variation in different places. So we started to suggest to people well, if you’re going to make some videos or make some ads, and very often we were helping to make

the videos, we were partnering with them, so we kind of knew what we were looking for by then.

People started producing their own videos and sometimes their own television ads, but based on these ideas that it’s really powerful to have straight couples as well as same-sex couples. The journey story is really important. Here are some messengers that are the unlikely messengers, that might open some new voter demographic groups for you. So people started kind of grabbing onto that and implementing it in their own way, in their own area.

I think the other piece we should really talk about was the research that showed how important these conversations would be. So, in talking with our base and going out and trying to get folks onboard, there is this deep ethos or kind of long-learned lesson, I guess you might say, in the LGBT community, that is the Harvey Milk quote that you have to come out. Coming out is your political work, to come out at home to your family, you have to come out at work, you come out to your friends and neighbors, that’s what you’ve got to do in order to help the movement forward. But what was showing up in the research—it was funny, because early on, in some of the polling that we were studying when we had gathered it all together, there were pollsters were kind of playing with this idea that there was a kind of tipping point from straight people who became more pro-gay, and what was the tipping point? For a while it was very common that they’d say, “Well, do you know anybody who is gay or lesbian?” “Yes I do.” “Is it one to three people or four to six people or seven to nine people,” and they were asking numerically, for some subset. Well, it seems to be that when you get to four to six and that’s kind of your tipping pint, well that’s not really actionable, because how can we get every American to somehow meet four to six gay people, I’m not sure. But it turned out that that was kind of the wrong question. So, because of that focus group and this man who said, “I work with two lesbians, and they never talked about this marriage,” I actually suggested we should put on a poll, “do you know anyone who’s gay or lesbian?” And then, “Have you had a conversation with them about this topic?” And what we came out with was again, a kind of mind-blowing research result, which was amongst the people who knew someone who was gay or lesbian, if they had had a conversation about marriage for gay couples, they were two-to-one supportive, 66 percent for it. Among people who knew someone who was gay, if they had not had a conversation about same-sex marriage, they were two-to-one against it, they were only 30 percent for us. So just knowing someone who’s gay was not good enough, so we had to go out in this sort of interior, internal to the movement campaign, and say you’ve got to bring the subject up and talk to people about it. It’s not enough to be out to aunt Tilley. You actually have to say, have you thought about this same-sex marriage thing, to the people, you know, we got a big response initially, early on, which was, “I don’t want to get married, so why should I—” My point was at least be pro-choice about it and encourage your family members or the people you know that whether or not you personally want to choose to get married, this is an important concept

for everyone in the community and that you’re supportive of it, whether or not you make that choice or not. So we had to go on a sort of mini campaign, to get people to realize that they actually had the power and that talking to the people they knew the best. Don’t talk to the person that you feel is going to be the most antithetical and that one horrible person at work who you think is really rabidly anti-gay, you don’t have to talk to them. Talk to the people you eat lunch with a lot and bring it up. So it was kind of astounding that right here, you know was almost like the key to victory was in our hands, which was if we could get everyone on our side to actually talk to the people they knew, that would be enough people and enough conversations to bring us pretty close to victory.

So to help with that, we started pushing material out, and this was kind of the incredible brilliance of the social media team at Freedom to Marry. Here’s a video, here’s a blog post with the most adorable story. On Valentines Day, we’re going to show you the stories of fourteen couples and their love stories. Tweet it, put it on, post it on Facebook, send it on to your friends, and we just created these materials that made it easy for people to just pass things along and bring up the conversation, and kind of start to get their head around why it’s important for everybody to be able to get married. That really kind of contributed to this social movement, you know, this really huge increase in momentum that we had, which was everybody started talking about it and thinking about it and kind of making the case to other people that they knew. So it became not, you know, the one person I know doesn’t really care but oh, you know, they brought it up at Thanksgiving or on a walk or at lunch over work, or any time, any place. That was a big piece for us, were these, what we called these conversation campaigns.

02-01:23:38 Meeker: You mentioned yesterday about 2010 being the year the movement got the break, because there were no anti-gay initiatives or referendums on ballots. I guess in 2009, there were some victories; Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, D.C., adding to Connecticut and Massachusetts, I think.

02-01:24:06 Zepatos: That sounds right.

02-01:24:07 Meeker: Okay. I have a little note here and I could be wrong, but at the end of 2009 you had what many people experienced as a devastating defeat in the New York State Legislature, because there was anticipation that might happen. And then 2010, nothing happens, nothing comes to a vote.

02-01:24:30 Zepatos: We weren’t on the defensive on the ballots, that’s just a particular thing. I mean every year, we were targeting several states for victory, so we internally had a kind of analysis that said here are the states where we think we can move on the legislature, here are the states where court cases are making their

way forward, and then we had a kind of pass on the ballot column for 2010, because up until then, we had been on the defensive on every one of these ballot measures and we were trying to defeat them.

02-01:25:03 Meeker: I misspoke and said that certainly things were happening but nothing came to the ballot. Then, you know, I guess it was in June of 2011, that was when New York comes back and you have this great victory in New York. Can you maybe describe the work that you were doing in messaging and its relationship to perhaps New York, I think we can start there.

02-01:25:31 Zepatos: Sure. New York is a good example of many of the legislative campaigns during this period of time, because public education, we’re trying to arm our whole movement to go out and have a whole lot of conversations, but now, in these legislative campaigns, we’ve got a very particular audience, elected officials. I think a bit of a breakthrough around messaging there was, there was a tendency, inside the legislatures, to still really talk—I mean there you’re talking about legal rights, I mean you’re changing laws, but you know, my kind of catch phrase at the time was legislators are people too and they’re subject to the same misinformation, they’re stuck in the same outdated ideas and guess what? They have their own feelings that are underlying, I mean the same stuff we saw in the focus groups and the psychographic research, they’re subject to that as well.

So my biggest role in the legislative fight in New York, which was a limited role, was I went to Albany and to a meeting of the lobbyists and the leaders of all of the organizations and essentially this team that was going to move forward together, to try to win marriage in the legislature. I shared the Why Marriage Matters messaging, I talked about love and commitment, and the fact that it was these underlying modes of thinking that gay people were different and didn’t deserve the same things, that really was a part of the opposition. Now, in New York State there was a lot of politics at play as well, and that was very complex, but I think some portion—there’s many, many things that were different between 2009 and 2011, Fight Back New York was a crucially important part of that, but there is some element to it which is just that we did also change our messaging and we tried to kind of win hearts and minds. Actually, in partnership with SKD, which was the consulting firm that was kind of working very closely with the governor and the whole team, we made some ads in New York State that were shown in some of the legislative districts, and that was partially to show we’re really serious about this and so we’re going to run ads in your district, but also partially to get people talking in those districts, because even in 2009 in New York State, we have legislators who said I don’t really have any gay people in my district, I mean it was amazing how blanket those kind of statements and how common they were.

02-01:28:18 Meeker: Who were you hearing that from?

02-01:28:21 Zepatos: I can’t name names, but just you know, I was hearing from the sort of folks who were closely working with lobbyists, and lobbyists coming back and reporting from their meetings with legislators. Well, New York City is where the gays are, but not in Rochester or not in—I mean, I’m just giving examples of other city names. People really didn’t think it fit, especially in rural districts. So yeah, that was my key role in a lot of these legislative fights was every time we went into a new state, there would be a new team of lobbyists who would come together, because one of the many elements you want, I mean you want the grassroots activists there, the statewide partners, the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] and our closest allies. But very often, we were working with lobbyists who work on any number of issues and they didn’t have any background on our issue, and it was my job to brief them. They’re kind of the tough, you know just the facts and figures and give me a fact sheet and a one-pager, and show the financial impact of this and that. I basically had to kind of train them a little bit in that a lot of our messaging wasn’t just going to be the rights and benefits piece, even though that may be what the legislation is about. We really have to change people’s minds in a different way.

From state to state, for example in Illinois, there was a large number of African American legislators who were hearing from ministers who had some concerns and so being able to share that there’s some language that especially resonates with African American people of faith, and talking about the fact that we’re all God’s children, and sort of being able to share with them and also kind of shore up their confidence that you know, we’ve engaged with the black community, we’ve done polling, we’ve done our research. We know that this conversation is a path to support, that you can go ahead and have it and you’ll be okay. So that was very, very important as well.

02-01:30:21 Meeker: What was the process by which you did diversify your message work?

02-01:30:27 Zepatos: We first had this, what I call the “do no harm” message frame, and when we went into states people said well, you haven’t tested this in my state or we have this particular constituency or you haven’t done research with the Somali community, or you know, everybody’s got communities that are particular. However, I was just generally able to reassure people that if you use the Why Marriage Matters messaging, any time, anywhere, you will not alienate anybody. And people came back and said, “Actually, it’s a great conversation and it’s a wonderful way to talk to people and they really engage in a wonderful way,” so that was neat. But we knew also it was our responsibility to start drilling down, and we were working with partners who were very interested and engaged. So, luckily for us, the Gill Foundation had paid for a

big research effort that the Movement Advancement Project had led, with Latino Americans, and what they were doing were both in Spanish and English, focus groups, and amongst Puerto Rican, people of Puerto Rican origin versus Cuban origin versus Mexican origin, because there are slight language variations and cultural variations. So there was a pretty comprehensive research project that was how to talk to Latinos about same- sex marriage, and when the research was done, I sort of looked around at the funders and at MAP and said, what’s going to happen to this next and they said well, it’s done. I said well, can we use it and take it and let’s create this new project, which is another public education framework called Familia es Familia, and you know, by creating a brochure and showing pictures of families, and using the research. The polling was so surprisingly high that it was the first time we actually quoted the polling in the public education material. So we said 60 percent of Latino Catholics support marriage for same-sex couples.

One of our issues in the Latino community was everybody felt like, “inside our house we’re okay with it, but we’re not going to talk about it because we’re not so sure.” But the number of people who were okay with it inside their house was more than the majority of people, it’s just that nobody knew. So it was time to get that conversation going.

02-01:32:49 Meeker: When was this polling done?

02-01:32:51 Zepatos: That was done, I think that was done in 2011, I’d have to double check, but the numbers were strikingly high, and that was a real clue for me, which was we really have not had a big problem with Catholics. I often said, when I was speaking in public, Catholics believe in marriage. They don’t care if it’s their straight kids or their gay kids, they want them to get married.

02-01:33:15 Meeker: It’s a sacrament.

02-01:33:16 Zepatos: Yeah. So we had this incredible support amongst Latino families, and the job for us was to get people to recognize it and talk about it, and sort of get it out of the closet a little bit. So we created this Familia es Familia messaging frame and some particular materials, and we shared those and people just responded to them really well. We launched the campaign at the National Council of La Raza, they have an annual convention, and we had a booth there and tons of these brochures and wristbands and other materials, and people were picking up handfuls and saying, “Would it be okay if we sent them to some of our family members in Mexico, because we’ve got a cousin in Mexico who’s gay, and I think his family is struggling.” “Send them anywhere, it’s okay!” I mean people just really grabbed onto them.

02-01:34:06 Meeker: How was the messaging different from, for instance what you were developing here in Oregon.

02-01:34:13 Zepatos: The key there and the research, the pollster, Sergio Bendixen, shared this when he did a briefing with us and he said, “You know the average American, if you ask them the size of their family it’s…” I can’t remember, 2.4 or 3.4 people. If you ask the average Latino, how big is their family, the number is twenty-two, because the definition of family is very expansive and what we would call an extended family.

02-01:34:45 Meeker: Aunts and uncles, grandparents.

02-01:34:47 Zepatos: That’s the family, and amongst every family of twenty-two people, the likelihood that you’ve got a gay family member is exponentially higher. So it turns out that the concept of family was really the core, Familia es Familia, family is family, and we don’t turn our backs on family. The program was actually not only about marriage, but it was a multi-issue focus, which was if someone in the family is lesbian or gay, they are not to be turned out of the house, you know we keep our family together. That no one should be bullied in school, no matter who they are. And so it was kind of almost like a life cycle, like when a child is in school, they shouldn’t be bullied for any reason, including if they’re gay. If they come out as they’re growing up, keep them in the family, because the family needs to protect our family members, and if they decide to get married, yes we should support and celebrate that marriage as well. So it was all around this kind of family centered focus, and that was a framing that in fact, we kind of borrowed as we went into some other communities as well. It was just extremely conducive to conversation and really rang very, very true for people.

02-01:36:09 Meeker: Earlier you had mentioned that the location where you really activated this message, particularly around Latino families, was in New Mexico. Can you describe the campaign? I know it was a short campaign, because the courts jump in pretty quickly.

02-01:36:27 Zepatos: That was a really interesting state for a number of reasons. The court case by the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the ACLU, moved much more quickly, as a lot of things started moving kind of exponentially quickly, and it turned out that the court decision came down about a year faster than we had anticipated. So all of the very slow kind of base building work we were starting to do, to build a coalition, all of a sudden had to be expanded very quickly.

When we first went into New Mexico and shared the Familia framework, they asked a really interesting question, which is in New Mexico, there are two major constituencies; Hispanics, who are multigenerational families, many of them from the north of New Mexico, that count very far back in statehood of New Mexico, and Latinos, who are the more recent immigrants into the state, many recently from Mexico. And so they asked a question of whether this language and framing would kind of span both Hispanic and Latino community. It was a fair question and deserved to be answered, and so we actually did some testing of that very same framework and in fact, it worked extremely well. But it was nice to be able to reassure people that in fact, the responses were so great.

So then we set about to actually make some television ads using the Familia framework, and the thread in New Mexico was that after the decision came from the supreme court, there was a period of time where it might have been possible that the legislature would actually refer a constitutional amendment to their ballot, because the supreme court of any state is actually interpreting the state constitution, and you could try, they could try to trump that essentially, by rewriting the constitution of the state. So it was a bit of a legislative focus to just calm everyone down and make everyone feel like the court had done the right thing and this was very conducive with, or consistent with New Mexico values. So we shot three ads, with Latino and Hispanic families, that one that I like very much shows the family together in the kitchen, all cooking, and the father and mother talking about you know, “We keep families together and in New Mexico, that’s a very important theme for all of us, to support our gay son,” and so on. It was a huge benefit, the fact that in that particular ad, the mom of the family is a very well-known woman, who had worked in the New Mexico Roundhouse, which is their legislative capital, for like twenty or thirty years, everyone knew her. And so we were constantly bombarding this ad in the region around the capital, and the legislators were seeing that not only is it Familia es Familia, but look at the mom, she’s so- and-so who works right here in our building and we’ve all known here and we’ve had coffee and lunch with her for so many years, and she has a gay son. So it was kind of hitting on all cylinders, I felt like, on that particular one.

The online ad buy that we made, you know you can actually, for people’s cell phones and computers, you can purchase like the cell towers in a particular area. So within like a two mile radius of the New Mexico capital, every time somebody tried to go online or on YouTube or any other website, they constantly kept seeing that ad, and it looked like we must have had like a massive ad buy in the whole state, but we were just kind of bombarding the capital at that time, where all the legislators were. So what was really important there were a number of more conservative Democrats who were Catholics, Hispanic Catholics. Another terrific outcome of the lobbying effort and the many, many years of relationships and leaders in the state, was that the head lobbyist of the Catholic Archdiocese basically said we’re not going

to take a position on this. They decided not to weigh in and not to ask the Catholic legislators to do anything.

02-01:40:56 Meeker: Did you ever get a sense of why they made that decision?

02-01:41:02 Zepatos: Well it’s interesting, how relationships are important in so many ways, and I got the impression that the lobbyists work so closely with the ACLU and all the other organizations that were part of our coalition. They worked on many, many issues, of homelessness and hunger and housing together, and this was a one issue where that lobbyist was kind of a little bit apart and the Catholic Church was separated. But in a sense, the people who were around us and moving on marriage were their closest allies on everything else that they wanted to do, and I think it’s a small enough state where everyone knows everyone, that that helped quite a bit. And so even with a Republican governor, Susana Martinez, who initially, when the court came out, said, “I think the people should have a right to say what they think are New Mexico values,” and she was kind of fomenting and leaning a little bit towards the idea of a ballot referendum. I think she also took a second thought at kind of where the political winds were moving and that the fact that the state seemed supportive, we had people from every rural part of the state speaking up and writing to their legislators and calling their legislators. She said in another press conference about a month or two later, “The court has spoken and I think the issue is resolved for our state,” and it was like that was it, we didn’t have to fight any more in New Mexico.

02-01:42:33 Meeker: Did you get a sense of how it is that she arrived at that opinion?

02-01:42:38 Zepatos: Well, you know, I think a brilliant aspect of our movement, and I credit my colleagues with this, was early on, really starting to move in a more bipartisan manner, and so really starting to identify Republican legislators who were supportive, high profile Republican donors at the national level who were supportive. I think for someone like Susana Martinez, who had national aspirations to perhaps move up in the Republican Party, I think she may have gotten a sense that this was not something that she wanted to kind of take a stand on, that it just really wasn’t necessary for her or for the state of New Mexico at that time. I think that’s really what made the difference.

[Pause in Recording]

02-01:43:36 Meeker: All right, we are back on. All right, we left off just a second ago, talking a little bit about the Familia es Familia campaign in New Mexico, and that was actually kind of moving forward a little bit in the timeline. Let’s go back to 2011, 2012, when it’s apparent that the issue is going to return to the ballot in

at least four states and those four states were Maine, Washington, Maryland, and Minnesota. Minnesota seems an interesting state for a variety of reasons. This was an effort to not pass marriage but to turn back a state constitutional amendment that would have banned marriage. Why don’t we start out there and talk about what the scene was like in Minnesota when you and Freedom to Marry first came in and started work with statewide groups in order to run this campaign.

02-01:44:51 Zepatos: Right. As I mentioned, we had 2010 and 2011 to do a tremendous amount of research, both how to talk about marriage, which became the Why Marriage Matters campaign, Familia es Familia, all the public education partners we were creating around the country. In 2011, we were secretly testing and creating ads, to try to find the pushback, the ad to resolve the issues of the harms children argument, which was the princess ad, which had taken us down so badly in Proposition 8. Everything was moving towards this inevitable moment, which was we knew eventually, we would go back to the ballot, and after thirty-one losses, we would try to get our first statewide win. In fact, our opposition was taunting us, you know, you can win in—first they said you can only win in court. Then, when we won some legislative votes, they’d say well you can only win in Democratic-controlled legislatures but you’ll never get any Republicans. And then New York was the big breakthrough, with a bipartisan legislative victory. Well, now we were winning with Republicans. Well, you’ll never win a statewide popular vote on marriage, the people are against this. And so that was kind of the line in the sand, and we had to show that we could win.

So as we approached the ballot in 2012, there were some states that were shaping up as you know, we could win in a legislature, and ultimately, that would turn into a people’s referral, to try and take that away from us. But in Minnesota it was, the Republicans had taken control of both houses of the Minnesota Legislature, and they had taken a number of actions and one was this very divisive discussion, to refer a “one man, one woman” marriage amendment to the Minnesota ballot, as a constitutional amendment.

When I first went to Minnesota, the referral had taken place. There were a number of Republican legislators who were on our side, who had voted against the referral, who joined the campaign committee. This large coalition had been assembled. There were actually two statewide LGBT organizations, one of them was Marriage focused, they were involved, and I went initially, to sort of talk to the members of this coalition and to represent Freedom to Marry. From my own perspective, I thought Minnesota would be the most difficult state to win. It was the most conservative state, they had had the least conversation about marriage, and so it was kind of bringing along with me, everything we had learned, and trying to now convince people to start taking a look at it.

What I found, when I arrived at the first meeting, it was really stark because there was a very prominent constitutional law professor, there were Republican legislators who were all basically saying, “Look, we know how to win this thing. We have to talk about not putting this language into the constitution of Minnesota. This is the path to winning. People in Minnesota are not used to talking about same-sex marriage, we can’t make this about gay people. We’re not trying to win marriage here, we’re just trying to keep this out of the constitution.” After hearing a lot of that conversation around the table, just trying to be respectful, I’m the new person in the room, I did finally speak up and say, “You know, I totally hear where you’re coming from, I understand your thinking and your analysis on this, but it is literally this thinking and this analysis that has led us to defeat thirty-one times in every other state, and what I’ve been doing and the whole movement has been doing since Proposition 8, has been trying to find a path to win, but the only way that we can win is if we actually talk about marriage and make the case for marriage.” That’s a bit of a dicey proposition because a no vote, winning a no vote on a referendum is always about poking holes in what the opposition is trying to do. You find the Achilles heel and you kind of focus on that, but essentially, what I was proposing was that we would have to make the case for marriage in order to convince people to vote against the constitutional amendment, and that was a pretty big lift. They were willing to consider it and think about it and I made many, many repeated trips to Minnesota. I think I went there twelve or fourteen times in the course of a year, in the ramp-up and in the campaign.

02-01:49:27 Meeker: This group of people you were engaged with, were there gay groups involved or was it mostly sort of a broader coalition?

02-01:49:36 Zepatos: The two statewide gay organizations were at the table. The national gay groups, including HRC, which had a lot of members in the state, was there. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force was involved, Freedom to Marry, and then many other coalition partners from Minnesota, many Minnesota based organizations. So it was a pretty big table that would later become the campaign committee. I was on the hiring committee that hired Richard Carlbom to become the campaign manager, and together we worked on the campaign plan, but a really important part of what was going on was they made a decision to choose to hire Lisa Grove and Grove Insight as the pollster. So essentially, they hired the pollster that we had been working with for two years, who was bringing all of this knowledge forward, which was extremely helpful. Some of the other states had hired Amy Simon, who was the second pollster, who was also doing a tremendous amount of work on marriage and especially on some of the religious objections around marriage, she was very focused on that. She ended up working in Maine and with Washington State.

It was literally through doing new research in Minnesota, that we realized that the Golden Rule messaging, the love and commitment, that would get us all a certain distance, but there was a group of Republican voters, older voters, conservative Democrats, especially men, that we just were not bringing with us. Part of it was just this whole conversation was so new in Minnesota.

02-01:51:12 Meeker: Can I ask you about those kinds of meeting with that demographic group, in the sense that when you described those conversations happening early on in Oregon, you said that you were able to create this cognitive dissonance moment whereby, you know, “Yes I believe in the Golden Rule, yes marriage is about love and commitment,” so if people are committed and love each other, then there’s this moment of cognitive dissonance, if you want to maintain the Golden Rule. Off camera, you said that this group wasn’t responding to that. How did they walk themselves around that sort of contradiction?

02-01:52:02 Zepatos: Well, this was again, a focus group, where we were not only talking with them but we were showing them. Now we had ads, we had materials from Oregon and other states and we were showing the materials and film clips and video clips. In a sense, part of what we’re doing here is we’re approaching tougher and tougher audiences. So when we started out, we started with okay, folks who are for domestic partnership but just not comfortable with marriage, but in Minnesota, that group isn’t big enough to win the no campaign; we need to add other voter groups. We had a very steep challenge there. So as we continued the research into these, let’s say additional, harder to convince groups, yeah they believe in the Golden Rule, and you know, I mean it wasn’t that they argued against it so much, but they were resistant, they were holding back, they weren’t coming around.

02-01:53:00 Meeker: Were they coming up with other ideas or justifications that allowed them to hold a contradictory stance?

02-01:53:06 Zepatos: Well the terrific out for everyone is domestic partnership. “They can have some kind of legal partnership, they can have their rights. I’m not anti-gay, I’m not a bigot. I understand people want to care for their person in their relationship, sure.” But that becomes such a default that it’s very hard to sort of get someone to close that door; okay, domestic partnership is not on the table here. What we’re talking about is taking marriage away. So finally, we ended up showing a video clip of an elected official, a state representative from Minnesota Legislature, Representative John Kriesel. He was, I believe, an Iraq War veteran, who had come back from service, his legs had been blown off by an IED [improvised explosive device] and he told, in a very emotional way, on the floor of the statehouse, the story of when he had been blown apart by this bomb. As he lay bleeding, he thought, at the moment of

his death, thinking about his own family, and that would be his last kind of comforting thought. He also was passing around the legislature, the picture of another Minnesota native who had served in Afghanistan and who had died in combat, and he was a gay service member who had died for his country, died protecting everyone else’s freedom, and yet was serving, even though he didn’t even have the freedom to come home and marry the person he loved. That was Corporal Andrew Wilfahrt. In telling that story, showing the video to this group of much more conservative older men, you could just see them kind of sitting back and thinking about it and kind of agonizing and realizing that this conversation about freedom was very compelling to them and that this was another value we could bring into the conversation. It wasn’t just the Golden Rule, but that freedom spoke to another group of people. It was really interesting and wonderful, to see how you know, speaking to different people in the values language that really connects to them, really can be very transformative in this kind of conversation.

02-01:55:31 Meeker: You had the video ready to go, so you must have known that this was something you were interested in testing out, right?

02-01:55:37 Zepatos: We had been thinking about asking that legislator to make a television ad for the campaign, and so we just had the video of his speech, which essentially became the ad, it was edited into an ad. It was so powerful and we actually kept it as the closing ad of the campaign.

02-01:55:53 Meeker: How did these people talk about it after seeing that?

02-01:55:57 Zepatos: Well, it was more like, “Oh, gee, you know military service and freedom.” It’s not that they had a huge conversation. It was kind of like nodding their head and realizing, yeah, well if you’re for freedom then you’ve got to be for this too. You know, kind of a recognition of that, putting those pieces together.

The other piece I think that’s so interesting is that some of the folks who had joined the campaign committee and who were very convinced that we should talk about the constitution or about legal rights, they were there behind the glass also, watching the focus groups, and they saw the power of the messaging that we were using and in fact developing together there. They realized that this initial thought was just really not going to be persuasive at all. So it was a very challenging and amazing campaign in any number of ways. When I went the first time, I spoke to a very large coalition meeting and it was in a church and I think almost a hundred people showed up. They were representatives of organizations that were going to get involved in the campaign, and I said, “What we have to do in Minnesota is going to be a very difficult thing. We have to have a conversation with almost every person in the state and we have to talk about a subject that combines politics, sex, and

90 religion,” which most people have been trained are not polite conversation points to bring up at the dinner table, and we’re going to have to talk about this all over the state of Minnesota. People were kind of like, “Yeah, we’re going to go out and talk about gay marriage all over Minnesota, yes we are,” and wow, they built a massive campaign, the Minnesotans United campaign, it was a social movement, I mean it just grew and reached every corner of the state. I had incredible experiences in just seeing, you know coming into the campaign office on my repeated trips and seeing the offices get more and more crowded.

One of the wonderful things they did there was when every volunteer came in for the first time, they had hearts cut out of different colors of construction paper, and they had people write on the heart, kind of why they were working on the campaign: It’s for my sister or it’s because it’s the right thing to do or love will win! The campaign office became plastered with these hearts all over every surface in every single room, and people got on the phone and part of what we did that was very different in these campaigns was to say if you can get someone to have a conversation at the door or on the phone, just talk to them, have a lengthy, involved conversation. Most campaigns will say read the statement, it’s two sentences long, ask the voter if they agree or disagree. If they push back and say no, if it’s objection A, read sentence A, if it’s objection B, read B, ask them again, thank them and leave, and just mark on your sheet whether they’re a supporter or not. What we were suggesting was pretty radical, which is talk for ten, twenty, thirty minutes, I mean when you find that voter who’s really conflicted, help them work through the conflict. The way we did it and a lot of people at the grassroots and the field campaign level were working on this in multiple states, like Amy Mello, who really pioneered this in Maine. The Gay and Lesbian Center Leadership Lab was doing this work in L.A., asking people questions, not just giving them a little statement, not reading them a rap, as we would call it, but saying what role has marriage played in your life, and hearing people talk about that and then saying, “Do you know anybody who’s gay or lesbian, do you think they might want to get married some day?” And letting people talk this through or say, “Well, I’m a straight ally but let me just say that not having a chance to marry my husband would have been devastating for me and I can’t imagine me saying that to someone else. I don’t want to be the person that denies that to someone else, how about you?”

So you’d come in the campaign office and people would be on these incredible phone conversations, sometimes you know, on the verge of tears, because they’re kind of pouring their heart out, and on the other end of the phone, somebody else is sticking with them for twenty minutes or thirty minutes. The conversation might end with, “I know you’re really struggling with this but I would just ask you to keep thinking about it and keep talking to people and keep reading and watch for our ads on TV.” It’s not that they clinched the deal with every single person, but they sort of got them on a path of thinking about it in a different way.

02-02:00:58 Meeker: I suspect one of the reasons that other campaigns don’t engage in this kind of long, in-depth conversation, is out of concern that their volunteers will screw it up and maybe turn somebody away instead of bring them over to their side. How did you train these volunteers?

02-02:01:28 Zepatos: Well the messaging goes down to every level and so eventually, the training has to reflect it as well, but the way I thought of it was, it’s not just read these three sentences off of our talking points, but we were kind of creating a lane, and I thought of it as a pretty wide lane. We’re talking about love and commitment, we’re telling personal stories, we’re telling journey stories. We’re talking about real people in real ways. We’re not just repeating a bumper-sticker slogan over and over again and trying to hammer people with it. So yes, you know everything we were doing was modeling for people. The ads that went on TV, one was this incredible grandparents who talked about their love, so people started talking about their own grandparents. Some people came into the campaign, especially straight allies, and said I don’t think I have a story, but everybody has a story if you let yourself really think about your life and who you know. Even the person you meet in the next chair at the campaign, you know talking about someone who really wants to get married and their story about that. So it became very, very powerful, and the campaign replicated this all over the state, I mean there were literally thousands of people knocking on doors and having these conversations.

One moment that was kind of fun for me was when the opposition first put their website up in Minnesota, the first banner, sentence they had is, marriage is about more than just love and commitment, and I thought this is one of the moments when we’re controlling the dialogue to the point, that the opposition feels like they have to now debunk. We have defined marriage. We’re not talking about marriage as one man and one woman, they’re saying it’s not just love and commitment, that’s our messaging. So we were gaining in traction because they felt that they had to respond. That was just a super great moment for me to recognize that and see that, when they put their site up like that.

02-02:03:40 Meeker: You were setting the terms of the debate, which is exactly opposite of what happened in Prop 8.

02-02:03:44 Zepatos: Yeah, I mean there’s kind of a campaign truism, which whoever defines the campaign will win it. If you get to people first to say this is what this is really about, yes you’re setting the terms of the debate.

02-02:03:56 Meeker: Because I imagine there are a lot of heterosexual couples who say actually marriage is about love and commitment, right?

02-02:04:03 Zepatos: It was looking for that statement that a lot of people could nod their head to, and it was not about who is participating in the marriage, it’s about what it really stands for, and we were trying to elevate that conversation.

02-02:04:15 Meeker: Can you tell me more about opposition and the degree to which Freedom to Marry and the statewide campaign engaged in, I guess, opposition research, or trying to figure out what messages they were doing and how those messages were playing.

02-02:04:32 Zepatos: Heading into the 2012 campaigns, there were four states that eventually would be on the ballot, and we were in constant communication with all four of the campaign managers. One of the things we tried to do as a kind of central service, was to provide a sort of opposition message response book, it was just this huge collection of data. Now, classic opposition research, when you think of it in a candidate campaign, is sort of what can we uncover as the personal foibles. Have they declared bankruptcy or they’re running for political office and they only voted once in the last twelve years, or things about individuals. But we’ve pretty much consistently known and had decided that we would not go after individuals on the opposition, it was their ideas that we really had to rebut. So by then, we had a pretty solid collection of all of their arguments; marriage is bad for children in multiple ways, that marriage will be taught in schools to children, at a very young age. The princess ad was something we had worked on very hard. There were newer arguments coming forward, about small business people who would be forced to deal with or do business with same sex couples who demanded flowers or cakes, or whatever it was. So we were compiling every possible opposition message that we could think of, and one of the things we felt we should do centrally, in a more efficient way, was just kind of get the facts. So if the opposition used a story, well there was a church whose gazebo was used for a wedding, and they denied a same- sex couple the chance—and so the church has been sued, and that’s a violation of the separation of church and state. Well actually, that particular Methodist camp organization in New Jersey had received public funding for a public park, and that gazebo was under public land, and so it wasn’t an internal church property. So we tried to just get the facts out for all four campaigns, and then we created this rapid response sort of capability, and what we saw was that if the opposition put an ad up against us in Washington State, that maybe twenty-four or thirty-six hours later, they would do a version of the ad in Maine. But we had the Washington ad to the folks in Maine within half an hour, and they were already queuing up a response. Essentially, everybody had ads made, pre-made, anticipation what the opposition attacks would be. Sometimes those had to be retooled a little bit, but our ad firms that we work with are very accustomed to doing that in the late stages of a political campaign.

For example, in Washington State, Mary Breslauer, who is a fabulous communications veteran, she had created a website that was called, I think, Fact Check and they would post on the website and drive media, you know check the facts here. At that point in 2012, it was very common to have these kind of fact-checker columns in newspapers, and they’d have the truth and lies or “pants on fire” rating, and so we would be supplying those people with all the fact-checking data to show that this ad from this guy who claims he was fired from his job, well there’s a little bit more to the story and it’s a lot more complicated than that and actually, you know, et cetera. Even to the point where we challenged, we went to some of the television stations and said that ad is a lie, we can show you why it’s a lie and it should never be shown on TV, and we actually kept some of their ads from being shown on television, which is a great coup during a campaign.

02-02:08:27 Meeker: I didn’t know that television stations would care.

02-02:08:32 Zepatos: Even they respond to that, yeah, yeah. They don’t want to get sued, as it turns out, by anybody. So we had this very sophisticated rapid response and we actually, you know, we didn’t keep the campaign managers, too much of their time, but we created opportunities for them to just talk quickly to one another and convene over messaging challenges and over opposition messaging, and that was something that in fact helped us tremendously. I mean, we had a great response by then, we had figured out how to respond to the concern about children being taught in school and in fact, when the opposition brought it up, their ads in 2012 combined so many different disparate reasons, that people who were not tracking really well kind of had almost a hard time thinking, like what is the problem exactly? Something, somebody’s getting fired, and somebody in a store and then there’s a florist and there’s a kid in school. It was almost a little bit of a kitchen sink messaging situation where they overstated what was going on. So we had a tremendous response that really kind of laid bare what they were trying to do and made their ads very ineffective.

02-02:09:52 Meeker: What was the response that was developed counter to the princess ad?

02-02:09:57 Zepatos: What we found was the underlying concern actually. The underlying fear was that parents would not be in control of teaching values to their own children, that they would lose control of that values conversation. So it turned out that there wasn’t any ad that took place in school that would help us. There was not a teacher, there was no a superintendent. Any interior school debate was not really—where the resolution came was parents sitting at home with their child and saying we teach values to our kids at home and we’re teaching them the Golden Rule, which is to treat other people the way you would want to be

treated. So it looped right back into our core messaging, so it both responded to the opposition and reinforced our own message in a very, very strong way.

02-02:10:49 Meeker: Can you give me an example of how that was communicated in a convincing manner? I mean were there particular ads that were shown?

02-02:10:57 Zepatos: There’s one in Minnesota, there’s a great ad with a couple who are in the kitchen, they’ve got kids, they’re cooking, and they basically say that, you know, we’re not worried about our kids, in fact they’re kind of ahead of us. They have one teenager. They’re kind of ahead of us in how they talk about these issues and by the way, we’ve met some great neighbors and they’re lesbians and they’re raising a child too. So you know, we’ve really come a long way in our little suburban life, in how we think about this. And they were Catholic, Republican couple, identified that way in the ad, basically saying, “This is okay, we’re all going to be fine.” That was a big part of, I think also, calibrating, which was just keeping people from getting overwrought or overly worried. Keeping a level of fear and just kind of reminding them that you know this is okay and we’re going to be fine right here in Minnesota.

02-02:11:54 Meeker: What about the response to the small business owners line of argument?

02-02:12:01 Zepatos: Well, that was again, something where having another business owner say, “Look, I’m in business to do business and I’m a person of faith and I have strong beliefs, but part of my belief is anybody who walks through that door is somebody I can do business with,” et cetera, et cetera. So just showing a very reasonable response. The attack makes it sound like okay, these militant gay couples are going to come around and try to pick on everybody, and all you need is a business person who says, “Sure, come on in, I’ll take your money.” People say, “Well yeah, that’s kind of a smart idea isn’t it?”

02-02:12:41 Meeker: Were you starting to see the discourse around religious freedom at this point in time?

02-02:12:46 Zepatos: Oh yeah, it was bubbling up already. That had been on the table in Measure 36, here in Oregon in 2004. The opposition had radio ads that said ministers who refuse to marry same-sex couples will be arrested and put in jail. They just said that as a matter of fact. So that had been out there. Now, it was a little more sophisticated in their use of it, but for us the most important thing, we’re showing a huge coalition of church people who are on our side, who wanted the freedom to marry the couples in their congregations actually.

I have to tell you one more story from Minnesota, one of my favorite stories. Every time I went back to Minnesota, the campaign was bigger and bigger,

and there were more and more people, you know people just spontaneously doing things that the campaign wasn’t necessarily organizing. So there was a guy who I guess wanted to put a lawn sign up, but he lived in an apartment and he wanted to put it in his apartment window, and the manager came and said you’re not allowed to have signs in our apartment complex. I guess he worked at a car dealership and he knew about something called wrapping cars, where you just put a plastic layer around your car that has advertising on it. So he turned his car into a Minnesotans United, you know vote no, traveling sign, so when he parked in his parking space, everybody could see that. He got other people talking to him and asking him about it. So he turned into this guy who just started selling other people on the idea of wrapping their cars, and he would charge them so much money, pay for the cost and then give the extra money to the campaign. They would drive in convoys, up and down the highway and around, just to kind of do visibility for the campaign.

Probably the greatest moment for me was in the final few days of the campaign. The campaign manager, Richard Carlbom, and a few of the senior staff were getting in an RV and traveling around the state, and they were going to these remote phone bank locations and kind of cheering on people who had been working for weeks and months and having tons of very difficult phone calls, and everybody was worn out and everybody was anxious. They were going out to kind of pep everybody up and get them through the finish line, and I was invited to go along and help out. We went to towns like Hibbing, and of course I hadn’t been much, to anywhere in greater Minnesota, outside of the Twin Cities, in all these trips, and Hibbing, which is a small town with a storefront Minnesotans United campaign office, and there were volunteers there who said that they drove two hours to volunteer on the phone bank, you know each way, I mean they came several nights a week and they were driving from a very distant location.

Then we went to Duluth and the area of Minnesota called the Iron Range, which is considered one of the most conservative parts of the state, and when we got there the actual headquarters for the phone bank location was in a church. We came in on a Sunday and it was after the services had been over and there was a church supper, a spaghetti supper they were serving to everyone, a big plate of spaghetti and a big glass of milk. I was kind of going around and just chatting with people and most of the people there were going to eat and then get on the phone bank and make calls for the campaign. As I was wandering around just saying hi to people, there was a table full of elderly, kind of white-haired ladies sitting and talking, and I stopped by and said hi and said, “Are you involved in the campaign in any way?” And they said, “Yes, oh yeah, well we’re the Wednesday night quilters club and we meet here at the church every Wednesday and we do quilting, but when we’re quilting, we talk about the conversations we’ve been having that week with our neighbors and our family members, and we tell each other the objections that have been raised, and then we help each other think of answers.” So it kind of blew my mind that when we were in the most conservative part of

Minnesota, in this church with these elderly ladies in the quilting group, that even the quilters in the Iron Range were having weekly conversations about how to persuade people on same-sex marriage. And I thought, you know, when we started the campaign in Minnesota and we said that people all over the state are going to have to have all of these uncomfortable conversations and here they were, they had done it, they had really achieved that and it was a fantastic experience.

02-02:18:11 Meeker: Did you find out, from these ladies in particular, about why the issue was important to them?

02-02:18:17 Zepatos: I didn’t ask them personally, but it was clear that their whole church was onboard. When we came into the parking lot, I remember there was a guy out there who was kind of helping the cars and greeting people and sending them the right way into the doorway of the church, and it was cold out. He was wearing a jacket and a hat and I said, “Wow, I’ll be you’ll be glad when this campaign is over, it’s been a long, hard bit of work for everyone,” and he said, “You know, I really, I’m not looking forward to it being over.” He said, “This has been the best experience of my life.” So, you know, it changed people’s lives and it’s a beautiful thing.

02-02:19:04 Meeker: Great story. One thing that’s interesting about the Minnesota campaign is that this was in essence a campaign against a Prop 8-type ballot measure or constitutional amendment. It was not to make marriage for same-sex couples legal, yet that happens very quickly. From your vantage point during this campaign, how many steps ahead was the Freedom to Marry campaign thinking? Were they thinking that a vote against this amendment would very quickly translate into passage for marriage?

02-02:19:55 Zepatos: Well, my hope and what I talked about internally to our funders and at Freedom to Marry, was what I called the Minnesota double play, and this was like the dream scenario, which was not only would the messaging of the campaign on the No side educate and build enough support for marriage, but that the turnout for the election could potentially impact the makeup of the Minnesota Legislature. So in fact, the Republicans lost control of the legislature because of the overwhelming voter turnout on this election, on the amendment, and in fact the Democrats regained enough control, that then, we could start talking about introducing the marriage bill at the legislative level. So it was a dream scenario, I mean it was something that we only barely thought about—if everything went right, might be possible, and indeed everything went right, I mean they had a massive campaign, they raised enough money, and they engaged a lot of young people to come out and vote. There were more people voting on marriage than anything else on the ballot in 2012, in Minnesota. That’s pretty extraordinary.

02-02:21:22 Meeker: Like actually the number of votes cast on that particular measure?

02-02:21:24 Zepatos: Yeah, were more for marriage than they were on the presidential election. That’s remarkable.

02-02:21:32 Meeker: Speaking of the presidential election: in any of these statewide campaigns, did you get a sense that Obama’s coming out in favor of marriage was at all impactful on the ground?

02-02:21:47 Zepatos: Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, the big one I think was Maryland, because in Maryland, we had tried, we had attempted a previous—I think it was the year before, to pass legislatively, to win the marriage bill. There had been a tremendous amount of opposition, particularly led by ministers in the black community, and so a number of African American legislators felt like it was just, the cost was too high to vote on marriage. And so we had stepped back from that situation and actually, with the national sort of coalition partners, we had all agreed that a pretty substantial investment needed to be made, that we actually had to raise money and find the money and go back and do a public education campaign and kind of get better organized in Maryland, and that in fact we weren’t ready. We weren’t ready to get out and win there with the dynamics of the voters in Maryland. So, according to a criteria that we had set up at Freedom to Marry, and we felt that the groundwork had not been laid properly, we were not excited about engaging in Maryland going back to the ballot. Our biggest concern was not losing anywhere, and we felt that Maryland was maybe too risky at that time.

I think really two things happened. One was that Governor [Martin] O’Malley really got involved in the campaign, but the big one was that our long-term effort to really engage the White House and President Obama came to fruition, you know not long before the election and President Obama made his statement in support of same-sex marriage, and within twenty-four hours, polling support for marriage among black voters in Maryland went up by twenty points. I mean, it was the biggest single day increase I’ve ever seen anywhere and I think it contributed just in a very great way. All along, the Maryland campaign had done terrific work in 2012. They had pastors who were supportive on our side and Julian Bond, the NAACP. I felt like that what was really important was to show, just like we had previously in the faith community, that the subject is up for discussion in every community and that there are people on both sides, which gives everyone permission to make up their own mind and not feel like all of the leaders of any community were overwhelmingly against the idea. President Obama coming out for marriage was just such an incredible level of leadership and support, and made a huge impact and gave a big boost to what was a terrific campaign on the ground there, absolutely.

02-02:24:38 Meeker: Was Freedom to Marry criticized at all, sort of on racial terms, for not going into Maryland in 2012?

02-02:24:46 Zepatos: I don’t know that it was so much racial terms as it was, you know, “Why aren’t we doing more in Maryland?” We were trying to talk about the four states in a holistic way, that all these four states were on the ballot, and at some levels, I mean we had given all of our polling and all of our research to Maryland and their team, we were in communication. We were raising money for three other states and not Maryland. So we were trying to hold a clear line about what we were doing or not doing in Maryland, but it was more like, I think activists and leaders who felt like Freedom to Marry says that you’re helping Maryland and you’re really not. Well, it was a much lower level of support and we thought we were being clear about that, but in the heat of the campaign, everybody’s emotions were high and frankly, on election day in 2012, we had prepared, you know, we usually prepare different statements. We thought if we won one out of the four states or two out of the four states, or I’m not even sure if we had a statement for three but I don’t think we ever drafted a win statement for winning, the clean sweep that we would win all four of the states, I mean it was absolutely almost beyond our imagination. You know, it was an incredible vindication, not only of the messaging, which was working beautifully and it was the trial by fire that we needed to prove that, but the work of the four individual campaigns, which was just stupendous, and this kind of movement that was rising up everywhere, where people wanted to get involved and they wanted to help. Everything I’d ever learned about organizing a campaign, you’ve got to get forty people to say yes to the phone bank if you want twenty people to show up. We’d get forty people who said yes and then fifty-five people would show up and there wouldn’t be chairs for all of them. I mean it really was now, tapping into a level of energy and momentum that just was fantastic, and we had the campaigns that were capable of absorbing that energy and really utilizing it in a great way.

02-02:26:55 Meeker: Well, and then we move into 2013, which is also a transformative year, not at the ballot box but at the Supreme Court. Can you tell me about leading up to the Windsor and the Perry cases in the Supreme Court, how you contributed to the message, I mean you must have taken maybe a sigh of relief after 2012, knowing that there was certainly possible campaigns in 2014, but was the Supreme Court cases looming at the top of your agenda?

02-02:27:38 Zepatos: There was a lot going on there. I mean, in 2012, as you said, we anticipated that these were the trial runs and that we would go back to the ballot many more times, and in fact we never did return to the ballot again after that, and that’s an interesting lesson about momentum and how the pace of the upswing just increased sort of exponentially.

02-02:28:04 Meeker: I didn’t really even think about that, so in 2012 was the last time it was on the ballot. Wow.

02-02:28:08 Zepatos: We didn’t have to go back any more. Also, we had the Perry case and the Windsor case going to the Supreme Court, and so we had a sort of joint communications war room that was called the joint project, and a really important piece of that was both crafting the messages for the whole country, to think about what these cases meant, and also thinking about messaging specifically around the Court. For me it was very interesting because I’d never done so much work kind of focused on the Supreme Court before, and it’s I guess you sort of learn in civics or whatever, that the Court is unassailable and you don’t lobby them in some way, you’re not sending them postcards and letters like we would to legislators. But there’s obviously an inside the beltway ethos and they read certain things and they see certain things, and they talk to people and there’s a conversation going on, and you just kind of keep throwing little pebbles into that really big pond, knowing that you don’t know which one, but some of these ripples are going to affect the Court in some way.

One of our biggest concerns, I think at that point, was that support for marriage was rising so quickly that we wanted to make sure the justices understood that. We were hearing messages, I mean the justices go out and they speak in public in different forums and they say interesting things. It was interesting now, because Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the one making statements, but I think she was kind of channeling maybe the concerns that she was hearing inside the Court from other justices, but she said that we don’t want another Roe v. Wade, where the Court gets way out ahead of the American people and then we’ve got years and years of protracted debate and division amongst the American people. So one of the pieces that I thought was really important for my work, was to try and show that essentially there was just, there was a one-way arc and it was moving upwards. I used the example, when I trained people sometimes, that when we get them on the message for the marriage conversation, we put them on the moving sidewalk like you have at the airport, and it doesn’t always move really quickly but it just moves continuously in that one directly. So as Americans get onboard with the idea of marriage, there’s no backlash, they don’t drop off, they only get stronger and stronger in their beliefs.

So, one of the pieces we did, and now I’m not sure about if it was the timing for 2013 or 2014, but at some point I realized, it’s clear that the support for marriage is picking up exponentially in the places that have had it the longest. In New England, the support is going up and up and they’re kind of pulling like a train, the rest of the country behind them, and every state where marriage becomes legal, support grows. But I decided to actually commission a poll in the non-marriage states, because I wanted a little bit of a realistic

100

look of just like the worst case scenario, where are we at right now in the states that don’t have legal marriage. The shocking thing was, in that combination of states, even there we were at 51 percent. That meant we weren’t at 51 percent in every single state, but in the combination of those states where marriage was not legal, we had just tipped over the majority point. So, unlike what we did with the general public, we were starting to inject some messages about the level of polling support, you know that the time had come. These are messages that are aimed at the Court, you know “America is ready for the freedom to marry.”

One of the things about working in a coalition, just like the messaging work before, is that everyone at the table is not necessarily completely in sync on all of the language, and one of the roles I had, you know people referred to me as the message cop of the movement. One of the little points of division that came out frequently was that some organizations we worked with liked to use the phrase marriage equality, because we had all dropped gay marriage or even same-sex marriage, and the language we used was a little more convoluted, you know “marriage for same-sex couples.” We were trying to distinguish that this wasn’t a different kind of marriage and we very early on dropped same-sex marriage and gay marriage. From there, we went to, when we saw the power of freedom, we really were talking a lot about the freedom to marry, and that happened to be the name of our organization as well.

There were some other big organizations that really didn’t want to use the freedom to marry phrase as much and they used marriage equality, and that was a little point of contention because in testing and in focus groups, I knew that marriage equality was not a phrase that appealed to middle voters at all. In fact, a lot of regular people were confused by it and when we asked people in focus groups what marriage equality meant, they said they thought it meant equality between husbands and wives. So it was completely off message and not really helpful, but that was a phrase that was used a lot in the movement and so we had a little bit of back and forth about language and phraseology.

02-02:33:43 Meeker: How did you convince others in other competing or potentially competing organizations, that “freedom to marry,” although it was the name of your organization, was the property and most effective way to talk about the issue?

02-02:33:57 Zepatos: Well, I mean you share the data, the proof is in the data really and it’s not just somebody’s opinion, it’s really what’s working out there. There are some organizations who might be a little more neutral at the table, who are like sure, we’ll call it the freedom to marry, that’s okay with us. There were others who, I think it’s a little bit more of an organizational turf thing and just really didn’t want to go there, but at least it’s like let’s all agree that we’re not going to use gay marriage or same-sex marriage, and so again, we tried to establish the boundaries and find a way for everybody to work together. I frequently

101

provided data and research and we often put several identifying phrases on a poll and just tested with people.

02-02:34:46 Meeker: You know, also thinking about the Supreme Court cases, both 2013 cases, Windsor and Perry, but also Obergefell in 2015. Arguably, it wasn’t the Supreme Court as a whole you would have to address, it was one member of the Supreme Court, Anthony Kennedy. If you go back to say ’96, but certainly going to the sodomy decision in 2003 [Lawrence v. Texas], he keeps talking about dignity, individual dignity, human dignity, and I don’t know when he starts talking about it, but maybe it was in questioning or something like that, but he also shows concern for wait a minute, there are a lot of gay couples who have children, and how is this going to affect the kids, not in the princess way but in, you know.

02-02:35:44 Zepatos: Yes, these children, mm-hmm.

02-02:35:46 Meeker: These children deserve the protection of marriage as well. Were you, you know being sort of the message cop, were you aware of and talking with your colleagues about this one person and developing messages that he might see?

02-02:36:06 Zepatos: Certainly, we talked a lot about Justice Kennedy, and I think there were concerns. I know in the briefs that were being written and the arguments that were being prepared for the Court, a lot of thinking about particular points and who would make those points. There was a huge brief done by the family groups, family equality and all the other groups that work with children, that provided a tremendous amount of data. The opposition had commissioned a kind of fake study called the Regnerus study, where they were paying a researcher in Texas to examine a large amount of data and his findings were that children raised by same-sex couples had a much higher correlation to sexual abuse and suicide. I mean, it was a terrible study that was debunked and pretty much disavowed by all of social science, because he just took a very wide sample of people and what he defined as same-sex parents were people that had ever in their life had a same sex attraction or experience, and no matter who they lived with. So he was comparing these sort of intact two family households, mostly with children who had been raised by divorced and people in more challenging circumstances. So there was a tremendous outcry and we were working very, very hard to push back on that particular study, because the question of the outcomes around children was becoming raised very much in the context of the Supreme Court as well.

We were also on a continuum where we were finding over time, that we were making more ads with multigenerational families and kids who were being raised by same-sex couples, and by 2013, we were showing things that we didn’t start out with in 2010. So it was really nice to be able to try and speak

102

to that in some ways and really just to try to kind of populate the ethos around Justice Kennedy and all of the justices, because you don’t know who’s showing something to someone or passing something, or a clerk who brings something in or points to a website. It’s just, we don’t know what’s going on inside that building, but we’re providing plenty of material, let’s say, that they could check into or refer to, whether it’s facts and figures or data, or whether it’s individual stories. It was tremendous to have marriage legal in the District of Columbia already for a couple years by the time that case came up, and so that was lived experience in the district already by then.

02-02:39:00 Meeker: Tell me about what you thought and maybe where you were when those two decisions come down in June of 2013.

02-02:39:13 Zepatos: I was here in my home office. I know that a lot of people were disappointed about Perry not being a broader decision. I think we were not too surprised, because our evaluation was that we were not ready and the Court was not quite ready, but just having Prop 8 struck down, I mean was a tremendous relief and it kind of felt like a chance to let go of a very, very painful experience for so many people, including the 18,000 couples who got married in California, everyone since then who wanted to get married. It was just kind of like the pressure release valve after the whole Prop 8 debacle really, so that just felt incredibly good.

02-02:40:05 Meeker: Yeah, it was like removing a cancer or something.

02-02:40:07 Zepatos: Yeah, it was a very, very powerful moment. The Windsor case, I mean it was so wonderful to see Edie Windsor, who became such an incredible embodiment and a storyteller, that all of America seemed to be so interested in and embrace, and to see her personally too, I mean I don’t know her personally, but just to see her evolution from this long-term sort of closeted relationship early in her life, to being the caretaker for her wife, Thea [Spyer] and then becoming this advocate and activist and spokesperson, and stepping up and stepping forward and taking it on in People Magazine and everywhere else, you know the story of Edie Windsor went far and wide and that’s one of those compelling stories of love and commitment that only moves people in one direction.

02-02:41:11 Meeker: It’s interesting, the story about Edie, Edie Windsor. I agree, I think it’s a compelling story and she was, I think in the end, a good choice, but there was a lot of hand-wringing in the movement, that the person that was selected to be the case was a wealthy person, and this was about taxes. I think that there were kind of a lot of people more on the left side of the gay movement that were upset about that. They didn’t want a wealthy white woman to be the face

103

of same-sex marriage or marriage rights for same-sex people. From a message point of view, was this ever a problem for you? Do you think that those kinds of critiques had any validity?

02-02:42:08 Zepatos: Well, I mean I was never in the room where the plaintiffs were chosen, and I know that that is a very difficult and hard-wrought process. Mary Bonauto’s strategy essentially, of chopping DOMA down, you know sort of piece by piece, incrementally, I thought from the start, was a brilliant strategy. Once I heard Edie’s story and learned about it, I mean one of the things I thought was well, you know, sort of death and taxes are, as people say, inevitable, and something that everybody can relate to. Who wants to pay more taxes than they’re supposed to?

02-02:42:53 Meeker: Right.

02-02:42:55 Zepatos: So it kind of harkened back to some of our early focus groups, when people used the ‘til death do us part and for richer or poorer, or better or worse, and it just seemed like such a glaring and clear-cut example that, “Yeah, well that’s more taxes than I could ever imagine paying.” I just think that it was something that a lot of people actually could relate to as being fundamentally unfair. So I guess I don’t think of it as me getting to choose or people do the messaging, we don’t choose who the plaintiffs are. I think our colleagues in the legal groups are very, very aware of the options and they do the best that they can, so I just always respected them for that and appreciated their side of the work.

02-02:43:46 Meeker: But it was nothing you felt like you had to compensate for in your message work.

02-02:43:50 Zepatos: No. I mean the wonderful thing about our approach and adopting our storytelling approach, was that there were thousands of stories. There are couples of every racial group, there are couples from every demographic groups, there are socioeconomic couples who are very poor. There was, I think a point in the marriage movement, where there was a sort of analysis, you know this is for kind of middle class, white gay people who care, but in fact if you looked at the data from the Williams Institute, the largest majority of same-sex couples raising children are in the South and there are couples of color who have lower incomes, and the real specific benefits of marriage are needed more desperately by those families. So I think for us, I found a little bit of responsibility around also telling those stories and making that clear. It’s not people just playing around and want to plan their own wedding. It’s really, you know: Is a child going to be getting the nutrition that they need or the healthcare that they need, and is a spouse who’s been diagnosed with cancer

104

able to be covered, or a military person who dies, you know, in service to our country, is their spouse going to be cared for or even be the first one to get the phone call? So you know, I love the fact that we were able to tell everyone’s story, and maybe in that sense it wasn’t quite as important to me who Edie Windsor was in particular, because I felt like everybody was part of the story and part of the movement.

02-02:45:35 Meeker: And there were some amazingly effective ads, I thought, produced through the Southerners Project, like two African American women who were well integrated into their church, I think. There was another ad, I think with two service members, maybe from Tennessee or something like that?

02-02:45:57 Zepatos: Yeah, mm-hmm, Jesse Ehrenfeld, yeah.

02-02:45:58 Meeker: Yeah. Were you involved in those specific messages?

02-02:46:02 Zepatos: I was involved more in the Tennessee one. The Southerners was a video, it’s just a kind of funny aspect of how we split our work at Freedom to Marry, but I made more of the ads were originally shown for television. Michael was in charge on the videos that appeared more online. But that particular video from Southerners was so fantastic that it was recut into a television ad as well. So you know, finding people and meeting people, and of course we had staff going from state to state, and there are all of the statewide groups, and there are stories constantly sort of bubbling up and trying to find stories that made the compelling case. Part of what we were trying to do with the Court was make the case that the time is now, because we knew that they could wait and they could wait and they could delay and they could put things off and eventually, they’d feel like America might be ready, but we wanted to create that sense of urgency. Older people are dying, their spouses are not collecting Social Security, they’re being forced out of their home because they’re losing that benefits, like this is wrong, and it is happening every day, there is a sense of urgency here. So that was part of what we tried to convey to the Court as well.

02-02:47:17 Meeker: So this decision comes down, you go into work the next day, you know I think that there is still a potential anticipation of 2014 in Oregon at this point, but you know DOMA is gone.

02-02:47:32 Zepatos: Section 3 of DOMA anyway, yeah.

02-02:47:35 Meeker: Section 3 of DOMA, right, is gone, Prop 8 is basically struck down. It’s within a very short period of time, clear that district and state courts are going

105

to issue decisions that are following the Supreme Court, as they should. How did this change your work in messaging?

02-02:48:07 Zepatos: Well, I guess it’s like I don’t know what the analogy is. You’re sitting on your surfboard and the waves start coming faster and faster and faster, and you start swimming faster and faster and faster. I underestimated, and I don’t think any of us at Freedom to Marry actually anticipated right after the Perry and Windsor decisions, how quickly the momentum of the courts would start picking up. I mean, I just remember all of a sudden, I mean I had to find that map of the U.S. Circuit Courts and put a link on my bookmarks, because I constantly had to start tracking cases that were moving much more quickly and decisions that were being expedited, and we had a sort of plan for certain states and a timeline of when we would start public education, and as I gave the example in New Mexico, the decision came down over a year ahead of what was anticipated. So, and then there were lawyers who started bringing cases in other states, you know, I’ll just say individual lawyers who weren’t connected to any of the LGBT legal groups and who basically said hey, well, here’s an opportunity, I’m going to file a case here and I’m going to file a case there. There was a tremendous sort of amount of uncoordinated activity that was all of a sudden taking place in lots of lots of places, so the legal groups had to step up and try to affiliate and kind of match themselves up with these independent lawyers in many cases. They had done analysis about which circuits they wanted to move things and what kind of cases they wanted to move. I don’t want to say it became a free for all but things started moving very quickly. I used to say, in some of my work here, that the definition of a movement is spontaneous action on many fronts at the same time. In other words, we weren’t calling the shots, the legal groups weren’t calling the shots, everybody was calling the shots. All of a sudden there were cases being filed everywhere.

Our experience in Oregon, I think was pretty interesting, because originally, Oregon had been the laboratory state, it had considered going to the ballot in 2012 and decided to hold back. That was a time when the movement, we still had a belief that we should be healthily above a 50 percent polling mark before we initiated a ballot campaign. We later learned that we can indeed persuade plenty of people in the course of the campaign.

02-02:50:57 Meeker: Where was Oregon opinion in 2012.

02-02:51:03 Zepatos: Oh. It was hovering just at around 50, 51, I believe is where it was, but it was a little bit of a plateau, which we were kind of analyzing. I think what our pollster said later was the difference between Washington and Oregon, for example, was that our state was a little bit more older, it skewed a little older,

106

a little bit more rural. We didn’t have quite as much kind of momentum driving the polling up. So, there had been this long preparation towards building a giant campaign for Oregon to go back to the ballot and we had raised a lot of money and we had started early. We had decided to collect the signatures by volunteer, rather than paid petitioner, so there was a big volunteer effort that was already ramped up. The signatures, the full number of signatures had been gathered, and meanwhile, a court case was filed here in Oregon as well and it was literally kind of watching now, in a whole new paradigm, what was going to move forward more quickly. So that was a really interesting period of time. For example, legal action in Utah, and as I mentioned earlier, we go from state to state and pretty much have to convince people that their state is similar enough, that we’ve done enough research, that we know, with confidence, what the messaging is. But when you come to a state that’s predominantly LDS church members, yeah we felt like we really needed to do some new research, and it was pretty fascinating because there’s a whole different culture and a unique language, language around marriage and around family, you know that was a little bit different there.

02-02:52:51 Meeker: Did you start to do that research?

02-02:52:53 Zepatos: Yeah, we commissioned some research there.

02-02:52:56 Meeker: What was the outcome of that?

02-02:53:00 Zepatos: Not surprisingly, it was a little tough for people to move quickly on the idea of marriage, but the commitment to family was something that resonated very, very strongly, and the idea of keeping families together was something that I think had also, a lot of power in Utah. And so one of the most interesting days of my time at Freedom to Marry, was going to Utah on a day when we shot several television ads with Mormons, you know Mormon families, and talking about what it meant for their family member to come out and how they wanted to support them. The one elderly couple that spoke had spent most of their life leading Mormon missions in China and Japan, and they were very dedicated and active members of the Mormon church, but the father was also a university professor who, when their son came out as gay, did a lot of reading and did a lot of analysis and research and decided that it was okay to have a gay son. And so they really were still within the church but really challenging some of the ideas of the church. So to show, you know to have television ads and show a portrait of a family that looked like dozens and dozens of kids and grandkids, I mean these huge families, and to be able to talk about family as a key construct there was a really important part of supporting Utah and the court decision there, and just trying to help make it okay for people to just accept some of these decisions that were coming down, and that’s really what a lot of our work was. Instead of preceding the decision

107

by a year or so, we were now kind of jumping in and trying to do some cleanup and say well, the decision came down, the polling shows where maybe not quite a majority support, let’s try and find the messengers, try to tell the stories, and try to make it okay for people to sort of complete their own journey and make their own journey to support.

02-02:55:16 Meeker: So what did that look like, I mean how were these messages, how were these ads noticeably different, if you will, than the ads that were sort of trying to get people to that place?

02-02:55:32 Zepatos: It’s not so much that the ads were that different, except we talked about accepting the decision and being okay with it. It was more trying to reassure people a little bit more, that Utah is still Utah and our values are still strong here, and more couples getting married, it will be okay essentially. That’s kind of paraphrasing, but just a calming, accepting tone and again, the choice of messengers being very, very important, sort of signaling that different elements of society are okay, okay with the decision.

02-02:56:15 Meeker: The Oregon decision comes down in 2014, is that right?

02-02:56:17 Zepatos: Yeah.

02-02:56:19 Meeker: Can you tell me about your experience of that? You’ve been working on this issue for a good number of years by that point in time.

02-02:56:27 Zepatos: It was pretty incredible because I had been part of building the campaign here and as I said, we’d raised a lot of money, we had a big campaign structure. We had a lot of staff already on the ground very early in the campaign, and meanwhile, this case started moving pretty quickly. So there was a bit of a, you know, who’s on first and who’s on second base here, a little bit of coordination that we had to do around the legal case, and then clearly signaling that everyone who was concerned about the ballot would be totally supportive of getting a decision, and then thinking through. The other factor here was that the opposition had filed a sort of parallel ballot measure that was going to be a “religious freedom” measure, that would actually insulate some business people from having to do business, bakers and florists and so on, but essentially giving people permission to not support same-sex couples through their weddings. We were pretty concerned about that going to the ballot. I think a bit of our concern at the time was that voters might vote to support same-sex marriage and feel like they were giving something to the Christian community by also supporting this religious freedom measure.

108

A really fantastic development during that time, in our outreach to faith communities, was that after years and literally decades here, of a small reliable group of evangelical churches who had always collected the signatures for those anti-LGBT ballot measures, a leader from the Palau family, Kevin Palau, actually had been meeting with other evangelical leaders and announced in the press that they were not going to collect signatures and they were not going to support this particular ballot measure. That, and a few other things that happened, I think that was kind of the key blow that sort of took the wind out of the sails, and the Oregon Family Council that was behind it just dropped, just dropped the effort to do it. And that again, was one of those moments of I think we’re done, I think we’re done now in Oregon, with this long series of anti-LGBT ballot measures, I hope.

02-02:58:57 Meeker: What did you know about the Palau family decision to not support this, and maybe foreground it by describing their role in the Christian community in Oregon?

02-02:59:11 Zepatos: Well, they have a very big evangelical presence. They actually have a presence nationally and internationally, so they’re very well respected and they’re kind of a big player here in Oregon. But what I hadn’t realized, until I met with Kevin Palau and talked more with him, was that he was one of a large group of leaders that they had been doing their own polling and their own research, and in fact, a researcher who was very trusted nationally by evangelical leaders essentially wrote a book that said that their brand was very tarnished and that the number one thing that most people thought of when they thought about evangelical Christians, was that they were anti-gay, and that they were losing their own young people and that they were losing their ability to evangelize, to bring new people to their congregations, because they had this overwhelming aura of being anti-LGBT. And so they were actually trying to move forward in a new way, which was to let go of being anti- somebody, and think about what they could be for and what would be positive, that they could work on behalf of the environment or to end homelessness, or to help aid and rescue young women who had been put into sexual slavery, and they were actually trying to move forward on any number of issues with the city and had been meeting with our former mayor, Sam Adams, who was gay, and he had kind of cautioned them, “If you want to get involved in these volunteer activities, you can’t be proselytizing,” and they said, “No, no, no, we don’t want to do that, we just want to do good work.” I hadn’t realized all of this background, except that they felt very much now, that they were getting kind of caught in the crossfire a little bit, by an expectation that they would once again collect signatures and provide foot soldiers to this ballot effort. So it was just a tremendous moment in time. It felt a little bit like turning a page, to hear them announce proactively, that a large group of their leaders had decided that they would not participate in that effort.

109

02-03:01:37 Meeker: While this is all happening in the United States, there’s obviously a lot going on beyond our borders. I know that you worked as an advisor to the Ireland Yes Equality campaign, and this vote came down, I think what, in May of 2015? So just shortly before the Obergefell decision comes down in June. Can you tell me about how you got brought into this campaign and the role that you played in it?

02-03:02:11 Zepatos: Yes. There had been a grassroots organization, kind of not an affiliate but parallel to Freedom to Marry, called Marriage Equality Ireland, and they had been in communication with Evan and later with me. Over the course of several years, we had been communicating with them, we shared all of our messaging, we shared our materials, they checked our website, we spoke to them occasionally on the phone. As their campaign started shaping up, they were one of the three core partners that would be behind the Yes Equality national referendum in Ireland. The timing became very interesting, because it was literally the midpoint between oral arguments in the Obergefell case, which was in April, the decision in June, and halfway in-between, in mid-May, there would be this nationwide referendum in Ireland. So I had been in communication with them and then asked to help them a bit more, and so I did that in a couple of ways, and others in the organization as well.

I made two trips to Ireland during that period of time. The September before, I made a trip. There’s actually a colleague here in Oregon who’s a very experienced campaign manager, named Aisling Coghlan, and she’s Irish as well, and she timed a trip home along with me, so we went there together and we met with the Marriage Equality Ireland folks and I met some of the partners of the other two groups; the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network, which is the kind of omnibus, multi-issue gay group, and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, the ICCL. It’s the Irish equivalent of the ACLU. So those were the three lead groups, and I’ve started conversations with them there. One of the first things I said to them in fact was, “You know the attack is all going to come around children and how this is going to be very bad for children,” and they said, “No that’s not going to happen in Ireland, because we knew that might happen and so we’ve separated out and we have this separate bill about children and families, and that’s going to move separately through the parliament and the marriage bill is only going to be about marriage of adults, and so in that way, we’re not going to have to talk about children at all.” I thought okay, I hope that’s true. Later on of course, the entire opposition campaign would be mothers and fathers matter, and the whole thing was about the impact of marriage on children. But they tried.

So after that trip in September, we then invited the leaders of all three of the groups to send a couple of folks to come to our Freedom to Marry office in New York City. My colleague, Holly Pruett, who works quite a lot with me, we organized a sort of multi-day visit in January, where we had two and a half

110

days of meetings, and we sat them down with Michael Crawford and Cameron Tolle from our online team, to talk particularly about online engagement. We had a specific conversation about polling and research and messaging. They met with our development director and shared ideas around fundraising. So we tried to really provide as much information and help as we could, in a relatively short period of time, sort of intensively, in our office in New York. And then probably the most important piece was that in April of that next year, I made another trip to Ireland, and by the time I returned now, the campaign was in full swing. There were dozens of people sitting at very crowded tables at the campaign headquarters, rolling out the campaign, and I was asked to meet with leaders from all across the country, who were going to start leading efforts and canvassing in each of their areas. I met with some of the key advisors to the campaign and it was very fascinating, to see on the one hand, campaigning is very different in Ireland. The first thing I learned was there’s no television ads allowed. That was one of our biggest tools in our toolbox, so that was a little bit disappointing to hear. Secondly, because of equal fairness and equal time rules, essentially every interview with one side of the campaign would be turned into a debate, and that there would literally be dozens of debates that would be held on television over and over and over again. Now, here in the U.S., we would never really agree to a debate. Very rarely would we have Evan go side to side with NOM, Brian Brown. But normally, we don’t feel that that’s a good persuasion opportunity for us. So it was really for me rethinking how do we use a debate format to get our message points across, and that was a very interesting engagement with them. But, at the core, Irish people do a lot of door-to-door campaigning, the political parties are very involved, so the idea of having conversations and going door-knocking, was something that was very familiar to them.

So my role particularly was to help look at messaging and to sort of offer up everything we had learned with the understanding that Irish culture is different and Irish political context is different, and their membership in the European Union and the human rights framework, and in fact the idea of equality plays in a very, very different way. On the other hand, having family members and the journey stories and the unexpected messengers, were key components that they adopted, to very, very great effect. So one of the most fun aspects of the campaign was that I showed them a lot of our ads and videos.

[short pause in recording]

I showed them some of our best messengers on ads and videos and we talked about what would be an Irish version of that. So for example, what I call the band of brothers, which would always be the military veterans or the firefighters, and they said, “Oh, well military in our country, that doesn’t go over well at all.” That’s the one big difference. But they said Gaelic football players, now that’s the most macho guys, and if you get the Gaelic football players, that will be you know, our version of a video that could really play well with men for example. Then we talked about multigenerational families,

111

and I showed them some footage, and they thought about who they knew. You know, just sharing for example, the learning, that when we show a picture of a same-sex couple, that a voter who doesn’t know much about them will assume that they’re alienated from their family, and the importance of surrounding people with their families. So they started kind of lighting onto ideas for videos that flew far and wide, and they had a great grassroots effort of individuals making their own videos and people just telling wonderful stories, that were circulating.

02-03:09:54 Meeker: So they did this by hosting websites and I imagine posting them to YouTube or something.

02-03:10:00 Zepatos: A lot of posting on YouTube. They had an effort called Call Your Granny, where they had young people, mostly LGBT people, who called their grandmothers and talked to them on the phone and asked them if they would vote for them in the referendum, and there were some very charming and wonderful conversations.

One of the interesting things that I discussed with them was for them debating was a very serious undertaking and almost like you would have a debate champ from high school or college, who knew how to just eviscerate the arguments of their opponent and make debating points essentially. I really tried to argue them against that approach and said, “Look, there are voters who are conflicted, are looking at the two sides in the debate and really trying to identify emotionally with which side do they feel comfortable with, and even if the gay people arguing are equally met at the level of criticism as their opponents, the gay people are always going to come off worse, and we can’t be that messenger. We have to be the storyteller, we have to be the parent who wants to raise their kids or the person who wants to get married, and we have to let go of winning the debating points and we have to win, not the person who’s in the next chair, who is the opponent, we have to win the people at home, on the other side of the television.” It was a big conversation, because that was kind of like them feeling like they were letting go of winning these debates. They pointed out that the opposition kept talking about children, and mothers and fathers, and I said, “Well, we have adult children,” which you know, that was another wonderful messenger, the Zach Wahls type. “You’ve got some great young adults here, somebody in their twenties, put him on the debate. Instead of talking about what happens to kids raised by same-sex parents, just put them on TV and let people see, there’s a very nice young man there and he looks pretty good and by the way, he’s got a girlfriend, you know that will teach you something as well.” So I tried to impact what they did around debating.

02-03:12:28 Meeker: Did you feel like it had an impact?

112

02-03:12:31 Zepatos: Oh yeah, they made some changes in their strategy around that, I think they really listened to that. I talked with them a lot about the tone of the campaign and they really grabbed onto that, especially in the end of the campaign. I said the final two weeks, we just have to calm everyone down. Everything is reaching a feverish pitch and we have to be the ones that calm people down, and they really adopted that idea. And the other thing, they had a very hard time raising money and it’s not so typical in Ireland, for people to give money to campaigns. The political parties usually fund those. But when I was there in April, I said I feel that it’s imperative that every voter get a piece of literature from us at home, and it has to be storytelling, and there have to be pictures of different families and pictures of different messengers, and there has to be an elderly Catholic grandmother who says she goes to mass every week and she’s going to vote yes, and there have to be the Gaelic football guys, you know like let’s think about this. We have to have this closing pieces so that one of the last things people can look at, at home, in the day or the weekend before they vote, is this piece of literature. And they said well, that’s going to cost, I don’t remember, 100,000 euros, and we don’t have that money, and I just said you have to find it, we have to do it. So they actually went up on a Go Fund Me site and they raised the money very, very quickly

It turns out that it’s not much of a culture to give money to political campaigns in Ireland, but it’s not much of a culture to ask either, and when they started asking, they actually raised a tremendous amount of money. A fun other little detail that’s not as important is that I really encouraged them to start selling their buttons and t-shirts, because one of the reasons the campaign was so broke was they kept giving stuff away and they couldn’t afford to produce it. So they opened a little popup shop and they made a tremendous amount of money. Everybody wanted a “Yes” button or the “Tá” button, which is yes in Gaelic, or the t-shirt or the canvas bag or the bicycling vest. They had all these different items they started developing in their product line and they actually financed quite a bit of the campaign doing that. So they were very open to taking some ideas that were a bit unusual, and I tried to be very respectful of their campaign culture, and I think it was really interesting and beneficial on both sides. They were very well prepared for responding to the opposition around the children issue, and we certainly shared a tremendous amount of information and research with them, that they probably would not have been able to afford to conduct on their own.

02-03:15:20 Meeker: Was there a successful response to that issue, similar to the message that was developed in the United States?

02-03:15:27 Zepatos: Yeah, it was pretty similar and I think for them, showing same-sex couples that were raising children was also just a very, very important piece of that. They did a video called “The Kids Are All Right,” we were using that as a kind of theme and they used it as the title for a video and it’s, these kids are

113

coming out just fine, you know. So it was a very interesting moment for Ireland as a nation, you know their history with the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church is very embedded even, in their constitution and in their public school system. So it was also, I think a chance for Catholics in Ireland to say you know, we’re a little bit further away from the control of the church, and that was something that the campaign had to think about, you know when the church was making statements and the church was sort of being a little bit more aggressive towards them at the end, they didn’t take the bait, they didn’t respond overly harshly. They maintained a very good tone around that and I think that was important as well. They ran a fabulous campaign.

02-03:16:41 Meeker: So they win quite decisively in May. You know, when you heard about this win—this is totally speculative—did it feel like a good harbinger for the Supreme Court of the United States?

02-03:16:55 Zepatos: Oh, yeah. I realized that our American view of Ireland and the Irish people is probably a little bit dated. We think they’re more conservative than they really are as a nation and there is a number of Catholic justices on the Court, and I thought that they would take note as well as—I mean, I just thought that it would be a part of our momentum. We were all about building momentum, up until that Supreme Court decision, and not taking our foot off the gas. I mean every single day, we did something for building momentum, even though we knew they were drafting the opinion and just proofreading it probably at that point, but we never quit, and I thought that the victory in Ireland, the stories that came out, I mean the distances that people traveled, I mean anybody who was online couldn’t help but getting drawn into what an incredible moment that was for the people of Ireland. It really was fantastic and the stories around it were great.

02-03:17:57 Meeker: I shed a few tears.

02-03:17:59 Zepatos: Yeah. I mean, some of the videos that they had, every time I see them I still cry. It’s pretty wonderful stuff.

02-03:18:07 Meeker: We’re getting very close to wrapping up, but one question that I’m always asking people, or I think I am, in almost all interviews, is you know, where were you when the Obergefell decision came down and tell me about your experience of that.

02-03:18:25 Zepatos: I had sort of debated whether to go to New York or to be here in my home office and, you know, in a sense I’m alone, but I’m also here in Oregon, with all the people I’ve been fighting with for all this time. So I was literally upstairs in my office alone when the decision came down and everyone is

114

reading it and interpreting it and understanding it, and crying and talking and texting and everything else. We had a brief staff call, I think about an hour afterwards, just to all hear each other’s voices and kind of take it in, and then I quickly went downtown. In Portland, there was a rally right here in Oregon, and with Basic Rights Oregon, and so many of my colleagues that I had worked with over many, many years. I saw people that go back to the first campaigns we worked together on, 1992 and 1988, and they were there and we were all together. The first couple that ever got married here in Oregon, Mary Li and Beckie Kennedy, were there with their kids, who were now getting pretty big. So it was kind of a full circle moment, a very, very happy and relieved moment and incredible really, just to think about what we were able to achieve.

02-03:19:48 Meeker: After the decision comes down, are you thinking about the messaging work that still needs to be done?

02-03:19:57 Zepatos: Well, I mean there’s a tremendous amount of work to do in the movement. I should say one more thing. I was in the Supreme Court and I heard the argument.

02-03:20:03 Meeker: Oh, I didn’t know that. Could you tell me about that experience?

02-03:20:10 Zepatos: I didn’t have access to an advance ticket, of course that’s very, very hard to obtain. There was an activist from Marriage Equality USA, who I had been talking to. She was going to drive up from North Carolina, to the Court, and I actually asked an old friend of mine, who lived in northern Virginia, to just try and suss out kind of well, you know. The argument would be on—I’m blanking out now, I think it was on a Tuesday, and we thought that the line would start on Sunday, that was all, the prediction, but this activist happened to have posted on Facebook, and I happened to have seen, that on Friday morning, the Friday before, days before, the line was already forming outside the Court. I texted and said, “You mean you’re already in line already?” And she said, “Yes, I’m number nineteen, and if you want, I can hold spot number twenty-two for just a couple of hours for you.” So my plan, I’d been talking with this other friend about starting on Sunday, I would be coming down from New York City, we were having a board meeting, there was a whole series of events leading up to oral arguments, that I had staff responsibilities to attending, and my friend was going to bring a lawn chair and a sleeping bag, and we were going to try and trade off, but this other colleague, Tracy, said well there are people there who you can pay to hold your place in line. And I certainly could not pay someone for the days that it would take to lead up to the Court, but she said I can pay someone for three hours for you, while you talk to your friend and figure out what you can do. So that bought me my spot for three hours, she texted me, my name was like on the list now, because

115

someone was keeping this list. And I very quickly tried to get my friend Kathy, who agreed to drive up there and bring the lawn chair, and I didn’t really know how we were going to get from Sunday to Monday, you know, to Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, all the way, but at least we had a spot. And I posted on Facebook and some friends who were in D.C. came and took my spot for a while, and there was a sort of combination of friends dropping in, and there was an informal agreement with people on the line, that any chair could be empty for maybe up to three hours, because people needed to go use the restroom, get some food, maybe take a walk, maybe find a shower. So my friend in number nineteen could come and sit in my chair for a while and then go back to number nineteen.

I did pay a guy who was kind of a semi-professional line sitter. He also worked as a security guard in D.C., but he had gotten into this line sitting activity to make extra money. I paid him for a couple of nights, to stay overnight, and it turned out that when he first sat down in the line, he didn’t know what the case was all about. His name was Michael. This one colleague was saying well this is the big case on gay marriage and this is the argument in front of the Supreme Court, and he was a little surprised, taken aback by that, and you know, when people sit in this line for hours and days together conversation comes up and a lot of discussion happens, and it turned out that he started to share his story there and in fact, he said that a few years before, several years before, his son had come out to him as being gay, and that he had quoted Bible versus to his son and thrown him out of the house. So now he was having this experience of sitting on the line and meeting all these gay people and their friends and allies, and I was coming and meeting with him and talking with him, and then he was going away and coming back. Not only that, he was sitting on the line with mostly gay people, and the Westboro Baptist Church was coming down, saying hateful things in their megaphone and he was listening to that.

So as the days went on and it got closer, the final night I said, you know, “I’ll sleep out here tonight,” and he said, “No, you know, I don’t care if you pay me any more. I’m going to stay here overnight because I want you to get in that courtroom tomorrow morning and you should have a chance to sleep, you’ve done a lot of work, you deserve to be in there.” So I said, “Well I know you’ve been through a lot on this line and you had an experience with your son.” He turned out to be the person as the opposition, the Westboro Baptist Church, was coming through, he started spontaneously leading a song that was saying, “All we are saying is give love a chance.” (chokes up) So, he had quite a journey of his own on that line, and I asked him if he was planning to get in touch with his son and he said, “Well I think my son moved to another state and he’s changed his name, so I’m not sure that I can find him.” And he said, “I’m not sure if, even if I sent him a letter, if he would even read it.” So I gave him my card and I said that if he ever did find his son’s address, that I would love to write him a letter and tell him what his father had done for me while I was waiting on the line.

116

So before I ever went into the Supreme Court, I had just yet again, an incredible experience. You know, there were people all up and down that line having conversations and meeting each other, and there was a lot going on outside, before we ever got in. And then the last thing I’ll say is that when the lawyer for the opposition in the Obergefell case got up, he very close to the start of his argument, said, “You know marriage is about more than love and commitment.” (laughs) And it was like that moment in Minnesota where I thought well, you know, “I think our job is done here. If they feel that in the Supreme Court of the United States, they have to speak back to our definition of marriage, I think, I think we’ve done pretty well.” So that was just a very wonderful kind of moment of closure for me.

I mean, there is a tremendous amount of work to be done and transphobia is very deep and very harsh, and requires a tremendous amount of attention and work from everybody in the movement. So, you know, the big picture work is not done and there’s plenty of more skirmishes, I think, but I do feel like it’s wonderful to take a brief amount of time to just celebrate an incredible accomplishment. I do feel like my personal goal, which was to try and break down homophobia, really has made a lot of progress, you know through our work on marriage certainly. It’s an unending job that has to be done, but I feel like the marriage conversation really helped illuminate the question for people and answer, answer their concerns and just brought, you know, affirmation and acceptance and happiness. I’ve never had a job where the end result was so many people got to be more happy, so that was nice.

02-03:28:27 Meeker: You know, I don’t think I have any more questions. I think that’s a good spot to end on.

02-03:28:30 Zepatos: That’s good, because I’m crying too much now.

02-03:28:36 Meeker: Thank you very much, Thalia, that was a really great interview.

02-03:28:39 Zepatos: Thank you, Martin.

02-03:28:40 Meeker: I learned a lot and I think we covered a huge amount of ground, so thank you very much.

02-03:28:47 Zepatos: Thank you for asking me and inviting me.

[End of Interview]