Remembering the Culture Wars of the ’90s

-The Arts Fuse

Because libraries and school curricula are currently under assault regarding the appropriateness of diverse representations and gender expression, it seems like a good time to look at the homophobia and Culture Wars of the ’90s, a time when conservative forces organized, successfully, to destabilize arts funding

I was curator of Performing Arts at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 1988 through 1996. Our mission was to be “a catalyst for the creative expression of artists and the active engagement of audiences.” We presented 100 performances each season in theaters ranging from 100 to 4,800 seats. Given the mission, I at times produced identity-based performance work, some of which became entangled in the Culture Wars of the ’90s.

First some context: in 1989, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) awarded $8.4 million in artists’ fellowships. This represented the apex of these awards. It was also the year photographer Robert Mapplethorpe died of AIDS and Senator Jesse Helms eliminated New York Gay Men’s Health Crisis’ grant of $600,000, objecting to queer content in sex education material.

In 1989, two NEA grants came under political fire. The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania used a NEA grant to mount a retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work, entitled The Perfect Moment, that included homoerotic photographs that some in Congress deemed pornographic. The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC canceled this exhibition, anticipating that the content would generate a political storm on Capitol Hill. Some politicians also objected to The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Arts in Winston-Salem re-granting NEA dollars to Andres Serrano because of his Piss Christ photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine.

Cultural Infidels
To mark the start of the ‘90s, the Walker put together a multidisciplinary festival, Cultural Infidels. Historical films by iconoclasts Andy Warhol and Jack Smith were juxtaposed with John Greyson’s Urinal and Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston. Kathy Acker read from her latest writing, and we exhibited one of David Wojnarowicz’s lithographs. Art and culture were politicized; this is nothing new, and we were eager to support the present-day provocateurs.

Karen Finley performed her profoundly moving We Keep Our Victims Ready. The first night was sold out. Two plainclothes police officers introduced themselves, telling me they were sent to determine if the performance should be closed down. Since this was the first night, I wondered why someone had complained to the police without having seen the work. The vice squad left midway through; there was nothing pornographic.

Critical and audience reaction was rapturous. However, syndicated columnists Evans and Novak wrote about the vice squad visit in The Washington Post, which caught the attention of Senator Helms’ staff. No mention was made of the quality of the performance, only that the vice squad visited the museum in Minneapolis.

Two months later, Holly Hughes made her Walker debut reading an excerpt of Raw Meat as part of P.S. 122’s Field Trips. She returned twice more to perform World Without End and No Trace of the Blonde.

Later that year, still in 1990, choreographer Bill T. Jones spoke to me about a new dance he wanted to create. His partner Arnie Zane had given the piece its title on his deathbed: Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I invited Bill to be in residence in partnership with the University of Minnesota.

Still grieving Arnie’s death from AIDS, Jones wanted to find hope as a gay Black man in America. He envisioned a final resolving tableau of fifty-two nude bodies of all shapes, sizes, ethnicities, ages, and genders. Local dancers, including students from the University of Minnesota’s dance department, augmented his company.

Before the performance at Northrop Auditorium, word came down that the university did not want students to be nude. Despite the warning, they all danced nude.

Some months later, Rev. Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church crowd protested Last Supper At Uncle Tom’s Cabin when it was performed in their home state at the University of Kansas.

Also in 1990: Keith Haring, who designed Bill T. Jones’ Secret Pastures, died of AIDS, and Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center’s Dennis Barrie was charged with obscenity for exhibiting Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs — though after a ten-day trial, all charges were dropped.

Senator Helms pressured the NEA, and individual artist grants to Karen Finley, John Fleck, Tim Miller, and Holly Hughes were denied after being recommended by a peer panel. In a lawsuit, the defendants alleged that the NEA and its Chairperson John E. Frohnmayer violated their constitutional rights by wrongly turning down their applications for grants. (The Supreme Court eventually ruled against the artists in 1998.)

In 1990, “Decency Amendment” language was added to reauthorization language for the agency. All NEA recipients were required to sign a “decency” form. The Walker signed it. There was nothing “indecent” in what we presented.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival, New York’s Public Theater, Bella Lewitzky, Elisabeth Streb, and a few other artists refused. I spoke to Bella about it later. During the McCarthy hearings in the ‘50s, she was subpoenaed to appear before the committee, but slammed the door on the agent telling him, “My dear, I am a dancer, not an opera singer.” She was not going to capitulate forty years later.

The following year, 1991, on Easter Sunday, I presented Diamanda Galás’ Plague Mass at The Guthrie Theatre. The Goth kids loved their high priestess’ depiction of unbearable grief from the AIDS pandemic.

1992 saw Walker presentations of Ron Vawter’s brilliant Roy Cohn/Jack Smith juxtaposing the closet conservative lawyer with the flamboyant performance artist as well as Reza Abdoh’s visceral treatise on serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, The Law of Remains. Abdoh’s piece was performed in an empty warehouse. The audiences followed deconstructed tableaus of violence, madness, and mayhem, moving through the building, and sitting on the raw floor.

Tim Miller performed My Queer Body that spring. On World AIDS Day, Will Parker sang from the AIDS Quilt Songbook; it was his last concert before he died of AIDS. Two years later, the Minnesota Composers Forum, Arts Over AIDS, and the Walker produced a Minnesota AIDS Quilt Songbook entitled Heartbeats.

Ben Cameron, then head of the NEA’s Theater Program, asked me to be on the Individual Artists panel that year. Given whom I had presented, I wondered if he knew who I was. “Of course, I do, that’s why I want you on the panel,” he assured me. Holly Hughes and Tim Miller received grants.

David Wojnarowicz died of AIDS at age thirty-seven in 1992, two years after he won a historic Supreme Court Case against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association, who had distorted his visual art in a conservative fund-raising campaign.

In 1993, Huck Snyder, designer for Bill T. Jones’ Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin, died of AIDS. The Walker showed Derek Jarman’s film Blue. The screen was filled with Yves Klein blue, devoid of moving images, with voice-over narration from Jarman’s diaries. This blue was the color Jarman experienced while being administered eye drops to fend off blindness from AIDS. A year later, Jarman was dead.

Actor Ron Vawter died of AIDS in 1994, as did the fierce Marlon Riggs, who became another flashpoint in the NEA funding controversy when his Tongues Untied was broadcast on the PBS series P.O.V. His black queer ‘reel-ness’ became a lightning rod for malicious conservative outrage.

Bill T. Jones brought Still/Here to Northrop Auditorium in 1994. To develop the piece, he held workshops across the country with people facing terminal illnesses. Newsweek called it “a work so original and profound that its place among the landmarks of twentieth-century dance seems ensured.” Arlene Croce refused to see it, but wrote about the performance in The New Yorker anyway, dismissing it as “victim art.”

Ron Athey
In 1994, I presented Ron Athey’s Four Scenes in a Harsh Life. The work opened with a campy burlesque dance by a Black man, Divinity Fudge, covered in balloons. Ron burst the balloons with a cigar. There was a transition to a scene in which he raised the tattoos on Divinity’s back by cutting stylized marks, patting with paper towels, and sending these blood-marked prints along pulleys toward the audience. Operative words to note: blood-marked prints and toward the audience.

In another section, Ron inserted needles into his own arm as he talked about overcoming addiction and suicide attempts. The iconography of Jesus’ Passion was then evoked with a crown of thorns pierced into Ron’s scalp with acupuncture-like needles. The evening culminated with two performers, Julie Tolentino and Pigpen, being pierced, and ecstatically dancing in a queer wedding ceremony officiated by Ron, now clothed in a business suit, exhorting in a booming revivalist voice, “There are so many ways to say ‘Hallelujah!”

The sold-out performance was well received by an audience of about 100. Post-show discussions with the artist, attended by eighty people, were thoughtful and engaging. Theater and dance critics had been invited — none chose to attend.

Three weeks after the event, a visual art critic from the Minneapolis StarTribune called, wanting to verify someone’s distorted, fantastical version of the performance. She did not want to meet in person and then warned me to look for her lead story on the front page the next morning. Here are some quotes from that initial article: “Knife-wielding performer is known to be HIV-positive” and that the audience “knocked over the chairs to get out from under the clotheslines.”

This was the first of more than twenty articles the newspaper published about a performance its critic had not seen. Vituperative arguments about Athey’s work escalated into fodder for that summer’s NEA’s reappropriation battle because the Walker had received a grant to subsidize the full season of performances, including Athey’s.

When Jane Alexander, the head of the NEA at that time, defended the Walker from the “erroneously reported” and “inaccurate coverage,” the disgruntled local critic fueled the fires by writing directly to Alexander and to Congress, “Your attempts to blame the press for criticism of your agency merely trivializes the issue and obscures the facts.” By advocating directly to Congress, she inserted herself into the narrative; still the newspaper let her continue her coverage.

That local critic also wrote an op-ed piece. While admitting “State health officials agreed there was little risk of audience members contracting the AIDS virus from the performance,” she fired off that presenting this work was “akin to adding blowfish to the buffet of a Japanese restaurant without warning the clientele…potentially poisonous fish whose flesh is said to deliver a peculiar high.”

Walker Director Kathy Halbreich was quoted, “I find the negative responses to this troubling, not because of the artistic issues, but because they’re suggestive of the fear we have of people with AIDS.” The critic’s response was, “Given the complexity of the issues that’s a disturbingly facile response. Somewhere in the background I hear an echo of Clarence Thomas accusing his critics of racism.” Even after this incendiary commentary, the writer continued her reporting for the Minneapolis StarTribune.

Senator Helms called Athey “a cockroach” on the Senate floor. Representative Bob Dornan termed him a “porno jerk” and Senator Clifford Stearns ranted about how Athey endangered the audience’s life by the “slopping around of AIDS-infected blood.”

Minnesota’s Senator Paul Wellstone supported the Walker, as did Congressman Martin Sabo in the House, and Senator David Durenberger criticized the “highly inflammatory reporting…less to do with the Walker — or any single performance — than with the fundamental differences over whether and how the Federal Government should be funding the arts.”

Televangelist Pat Robertson went about tarnishing the Walker’s good name while the American Family Association raised funds by exploiting Athey’s performance. But the strangest solicitation came from the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression. It asked for contributions to defend artists such as Athey. But, to my amazement, the organization used the same decontextualized and demonized descriptions of the artist’s work that the right was using — perpetuating lies and misrepresentations. Good intentions can have unintended consequences.

My mother telephoned after watching Rush Limbaugh. “Buckets of AIDS-tainted blood were intentionally thrown at the audience,” he snidely commented and “the audience ran for their lives.” When I told my mother Limbaugh was a liar, she responded, “But it was on television.”

The amount of hate mail and hostile phone messages I received was astounding. Example: “We got the abortion doctor, you’re next.” Blood-red graffiti was painted on the glass doors of the Walker. The police included my house in their regular drive-bys. Any time I left my home, I would hesitate and look out the windows.

Through it all, Walker director Kathy Halbreich was extraordinary. Leaders do not always get to choose their battles. Halbreich was gracious and supportive under intense pressure, as were the Walker board and staff. Colleagues from the National Performance Network, Dance USA, and Association of Performing Arts Presenters defended the Walker and buoyed my resolve. Local artists, too, rallied. One, Malka Michelson, created a campaign button: “Safe Sex, Not Art — Be a John.”

In 1995, Reza Abdoh, the Artaud of our day, died of AIDS. This was the last year grants to individual artists were awarded by the NEA, except for literature fellowships and honorifics in jazz and folk arts. Art, love, and politics collapsed — an extraordinary epoch was over.

For many artists, validation had not come (at least initially) from the marketplace. The federal government, often leveraging other local and regional support, was crucial. Ending these fellowships had dire consequences, signaling artists were no longer valued on a national level. Many state agencies followed suit. We have been living with the detrimental impact ever since.

Reflections
During the entire summer of the Athey media whirl, not one museum director called Kathy Halbreich to offer support. Peter Zeisler, then head of Theatre Communications Group, called me irresponsible for presenting Ron Athey, although he had never seen him perform.

Other arts organizations facing controversy experienced the same. Few museums supported each other against the vicious, dishonest polemics generated by Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, Joel-Peter Witkin, and Chris Ofili. Directors and boards ran for cover when colleagues came under fire. They buried their heads in the sand until they, too, were challenged.

Regional theatres didn’t support performance artists under fire — Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck, and Tim Miller — until the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Corpus Christi firestorm or the various protests accompanying Angels in America and The Laramie Project sprung up across the country.

The art world failed to defend its own. The lesson: freedom of expression is a more precious commodity than taste. Conservative critics were very clear about their moral imperative; they confidently vilified artists and terrorized institutions. No one won the culture wars — we lost them.

Angelo Madsen Minax’ Surreal Documentaries

-The Gay & Lesbian Review

ANGELO MADSEN MINAX creates audacious experimental films of trans embodiment by discordantly juxtaposing present-day footage with Super 8 home movies, animation, staged rituals, and ethereal voice-overs. Chaos and anarchy are embedded in his hybrid cinema of survival, acceptance, and transcendence.

His work has been screened throughout the United States, Europe, Canada, and Mexico—winning awards at many prestigious festivals. His “North by Current” was screened nationally on PBS’ POV series in November 2021. In this feature, shot over five years in an auto-ethnographic style, he returns to his family of origin and grapples with the death of a niece, addiction, incarceration, misguided religious fervor, and rejection of his gender transition.

His experimental shorts are equally compelling. Gorgeous landscapes, queer rituals, and cinema-vérité ruminations provide kaleidoscopic glimpses of his artistic and personal explorations. Some are rooted in the particularity of location—utilizing archival news clips from a television station in Dallas or exploring Memphis’ geographic and sexual underground. His surrealist short “Two Sons & a River of Blood” (2021) is a poignant meditation on pregnancy and desire with a self-made family of “two dykes and a trans man.”

 This past spring he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Minax is also an educator, currently an associate professor of media studies at the University of Vermont. He was doing pre-production work on his next project when he took time out to speak with me on the phone.

John Killacky: Please talk about your process in making these extraordinary films.

Angelo Madsen Minax: Working within vérité documentary, you can’t make predictions. You adjust your expectations and goals, and you’re in a constant state of revision—shooting, shooting, shooting and lots of looking at things. I don’t separate out the process between production and post-production. I begin editing right away, otherwise I can’t get a shape of what the story will be. When I shoot again, the process dictates how and what I shoot in the future. In my films, you will find trails of information I find interesting rather than attempts to entertain the audience. I hope the audience will overlap with what I find interesting.

JK: You describe your projects as spanning “documentary filmmaking, narrative cinema, essay film, media installation, sound and music, performance, text and collective practices.” However, you’ve also said: “I don’t tell stories. I explore ideas and concepts.” What do you mean by this?

AMM: Content is more interesting to me than narrative. The narrative is what allows anyone to access it, which I think is important, but the content is doing the heavy lifting in terms of making people ask questions about the world around them, which is the difference between art and entertainment.

JK: You’ve changed your name twice. Can you share this journey with readers?

AMM: I changed my name to Madsen in 2005. It felt like the right thing to do. I came of age in punk, feminist, and BDSM cultures. It was a different world—throwing parties and working multiple jobs to pay for our surgeries. We had to go to therapists to tell us we weren’t crazy to get hormones. A few years ago, I added Angelo to my first name. It feels like some reconciliation with my childhood, and I like that. As I get older, I have more of a need for reconciliation than differentiation.

JK: Your films have been shown in festivals and you co-curated a “Cinema of Gender Transgression: Trans Film” series at Anthology Film Archives in New York. Is there a distinctive queer/trans æsthetic?

AMM: I don’t know, but lots of people think so. I know that I am not interested in one-dimensional content, and work about identity can be one-dimensional. Work where identity is one of many nuanced layers in a conversation is better. Unfortunately, queer film festivals are usually not interested in formal rigor or in people leaving the theater with questions. They assume people want to leave feeling fulfilled. My goal is not to tell you that everything will be okay. I don’t think that’s fair to people, and I don’t think it fulfills their deeper need to question their humanness.

JK: With your recent Guggenheim Fellowship, you are developing a documentary on Fakir Musafar, an icon of body modification and what was called “The Modern Primitives Movement.” What interests you about him?

AMM: During the last ten years of his life, I was part of his community. There was a Radical Faeries gathering in the late ’80s where a group of leathermen attended and were thrown a lot of shade for their S/M practices. The next year, that group developed their own collective, which I got introduced to in 2004 and started participating in. Fakir and his partner were largely active in that community. It’s all about this desire to stretch the limits of the body in both its physical and spiritual dimensions and find meaning in community. When he passed, his wife and I started talking about the archives. I was blown away by what was there.

JK: By creating such raw intimate works, do you see them as political as well?

AMM: I am not of the camp that believes visibility is equal to politics. You have to be more than alive in the body. The personal will always be political. Resistance to various forms of oppression is important. My politics work best if I can generate empathy or compassion or insight—this is where I do my best work.

Boston’s “Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide” — Still Going Strong After Three Decades

-The Arts Fuse

Despite the demise of print publications, Boston’s own Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide(G&LR) just published its 159th issue. The magazine began in 1994 as the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review. In 2000, “Harvard” was dropped from its name and “Worldwide” added. In its early years, the G&LR was printed in black and white, gradually evolving to full color in 2011.

The glossy bimonthly journal features erudite essays from queer historians, scholars, writers, and political figures investigating relevant history, politics, and culture as well as artist interviews and reviews of books, exhibitions, movies, and plays. Organized as a nonprofit, G&LR currently has a print run of 11,000 per issue and is supported by 8,000 subscribers and 750 donors.

Driving the vision is editor-in-chief and founder Richard Schneider. He received a PhD in sociology from Harvard in the early ’80s and founded the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review (first as a volunteer in 1994, full-time since 1999), and continues as editor today.

Originally, he was recruited to produce a newsletter for the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus alumni organization, where he learned editing and desktop publishing. Almost immediately they realized it could be a national magazine. As the enterprise developed, it became independent of Harvard in 2000.

In a 1998 feature in the New York Times, Schneider spoke about his initial aspirations: “In 1993 there was nothing in the gay world corresponding to the New York Review of Books or the Times Book Reviewor Atlantic Monthly or the New Yorker that featured intelligent essays,” he said. “There was a huge niche or vacuum in gay and lesbian letters which I hope we somewhat filled.”

From its inception, trenchant writing, and interviews from such literati as Edmund White, Barney Frank, Jill Johnston, and Jewelle Gomez differentiated the magazine with its focus on high culture. “It is our intellectual journal.… If you want to deal with scholarly intelligent arguments, there’s really no place else we can publish,” writer/activist Larry Kramer was quoted as saying in that same New York Times article from 1998.

Over the years, astute analysis of literary icons has been a hallmark. The work of Thom Gunn, Hart Crane, Truman Capote, and Oscar Wilde as well as Susan Sontag, Eileen Myles, Leslie Feinberg, and Willa Cather has been featured.

In a recent phone conversation, Schneider filled me in on the history, philosophy, and plans for the journal. Currently, donations and subscriptions each account for about 40 percent of the income, while advertising fills in the last 20 percent. Readership is predominately male, 70 percent are over 60 years old with 66 percent holding an advanced degree. The renewal rate is very high.

Part of its continuing success, he feels is that the “somewhat older readership is still committed to hard copy. We have very loyal readers; many have been with us since the beginning. Some save every issue. The look of the magazine is still similar to what it was a long time ago — typeface, layout, design,” so it remains “favorite comfort food” for intellectually engaged readers. As well, much of the content online is behind a paywall, further encouraging print subscriptions.

Issues are organized thematically, sometimes intentionally and other times organically given what material is in house. An upcoming issue will focus on the 50th anniversary of the American Psychiatric Association delisting homosexuality as a mental illness.

More than 1,400 writers have been featured in G&LR’s uninterrupted run over the last three decades. As an editor, Schneider finds “working with every writer is different. Every story that we run is in itself a story in its own way.” He tries to be as “not heavy handed as possible to make a piece work. I run everything by the author, and we will negotiate a little bit.”’

One steadfast presence has been Andrew Holleran, who is having a critical resurgence at the age of 80 with his latest acclaimed novel, The Kingdom of Sand, a melancholic depiction of isolation, despair, and desire in older gay men. His first essay in G&LR (1994) was taken from a speech he gave at Harvard detailing his coming of sexual age in Greenwich Village in the ’70s. Since then, Holleran has written over 100 articles.

Celebrating the magazine’s 25th anniversary in 2019, Holleran wrote: “We’ve all seen many of our favorite mainstream magazines shrink if not disappear, which makes me all the more grateful for the G&LR. A writer has one basic dream: to see his or her words in print.… And I’m always thrilled when someone mentions a piece I’ve written because one forgets that one does reach people, people we may never hear from, but who are out there — in the dark. Quite literally, being published in the G&LRhas been a reward in itself — it’s kept this writer going in the horror vacui of the digital age.”

Schneider loves working with the author on features: “He writes very quickly, producing 2,500-3,000 words. He likes to work (on editing) over the telephone, so I get to talk with Andrew Holleran for an hour or two every couple of months.”

Another favorite writer is Laurence Senelick, theater artist and professor at Tufts University. Schneider calls him “a fabulous scholar and historian who does extensive research on odd little social customs.” In a 2021 essay, he elucidates the slang catchphrase, “Whoops, M’dear” as code words for men cruising other men in the early 20th century.

I too am fortunate to be supported by G&LR; my published pieces include commentaries on John Cage, Keith Haring, Peter Hujar, and Sarah Schulman, along with interviews with Alison Bechdel, Janis Ian, Bill T. Jones, and Tim Miller. Most recently, I profiled trans filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax. As an editor, Schneider is always open to ideas and he wields an appreciated editing scalpel that cuts for focus and clarity.

Drawing upon its treasure trove of queer writing, G&LR published two compilations of past articles. The first, In Search of Stonewall (2019), coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, explicating historical precedents, realities, and the impact of the protests. First-person eyewitness reports detail the 1969 events often credited as the beginning of the LGBTQ civil rights movement.

As well, foundational essays from 1995 featured Harry Hay alongside Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, founders of Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis respectively — two West Coast groups organized in the ’50s to support safe spaces and political action on behalf of queer people. Telling, and clarifying, forgotten histories remains central to the magazine decades later.

The second book, Casual Outings, (2021) celebrated Charles Hefling’s illustrated portraits accompanying profiles on 27 artists such as Marcel Proust, Vita Sackville-West, Frida Kahlo, Yukio Mishima, Lorraine Hansberry, Leonard Bernstein, and Langston Hughes. In his introduction to the collection, Schneider writes, “Casual Outing thus refers to the fact that we are in some sense “outing” people who tried to hide their sexuality at least some of the time.” This is essential truth-telling, especially when families, estates, and biographers so often obfuscate complex truths.

One reprint in development is with historian Martin Duberman, now in his 90s, revisiting 14 of his pieces for the G&LR (starting in 1999) with three additional essays on his customary exploration of the intersection of LGBTQ and leftist politics. Schneider is also hoping to work with Holleran on a compendium of profiles of pre-Stonewall writers from his prodigious contributions.

Collaborating with Schneider on the operational side of the publishing endeavor is his partner of 23 years, Stephen Hemrick, who is the publisher. After recent Supreme Court decisions, they are planning a civil ceremony wedding later this month.

Arts Appreciation: Long Overdue — Homage to Julius Eastman, Fierce Black Queen Iconoclast

-The Arts Fuse

Scorned and consigned to oblivion in his day, Julius Eastman is finally being celebrated for his unabashed talent and the sheer audacity of his inimitable genius. Brava diva!

In ’70s New York, Julius Eastman was an outrageous presence in the avant-garde performance scene as a composer, singer, and pianist. Black and openly gay, he was an outsider. He died homeless and forgotten in 1990. As the music world grapples with righting the canon, there is resurgent interest in this sui generis maverick.

He was nominated for a Grammy for his recording of Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King(1974) and was as easily at home performing with Meredith Monk on Dolmen Music (1979). Monk fondly recalled Eastman in a recent conversation, saying he was “full of contradictions, but so intelligent with an essential love and devotion to music itself. He taught me a lot about theory and harmony.”

His own compositions challenged prevailing aesthetic norms that were very straight, very white, and very male. All so not him. Eastman told The Buffalo Times in 1976 he aspired: “To be what I am to the fullest: Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, and a homosexual to the fullest.”

While classically trained in voice and composition at Curtis Institute of Music, structurally he was a proto-minimalist, frequently utilizing multiple grand pianos awash in overtones. He called it “organic music.” His titles were, at times, provocative — Crazy Nigger (1978), Gay Guerilla (1979), and Nigger Faggot (1978) — while the music was transcendently spiritual. He conducted his 1974 symphony, Femenine, wearing a dress. Vocal and piano scores as well as disco recordings round out his genre-fluid oeuvre.

Whether on stage at Carnegie Hall or in gay clubs, his outsized persona captured the public’s gaze. However, Eastman became increasingly erratic, struggling economically as well as with addiction. Evicted for nonpayment of rent in 1981, sheriffs threw his scores, papers, and belongings into the trash. He lived in homeless shelters and outdoors in a city park in addition to couch surfing with friends, while still sporadically performing and composing.

Monk said Eastman would occasionally show up at her loft at odd hours, and she would feed him. “Afterward we would play four-handed piano pieces and one night sang the Henry Purcell songbook,” she reminisced. Monk loaned her upstate cottage to him for three months. “He was not of this earth, just needed someone to take care of him.”

In 1986, choreographer Molissa Fenley commissioned Eastman to create a score for two sections of her Geologic Moments performed at Brooklyn Academy of Music. She told me, “Working with Julius was always surprising. I often had to telephone his brother to find him for rehearsals.” Backstage he would fall fast asleep in his dressing room: “He was very sick at the time, but once on stage, he’d be unbelievable, brilliant, completely obsessed. People loved him.”

He eventually disappeared from Manhattan and died destitute in obscurity in a Buffalo hospital in 1990 at the age of 49. An obituary was not published in The Village Voice until eight months later, so unsure people were whether he was dead or alive.

Eastman’s legacy languished in limbo until composer Mary Jane Leach and other colleagues published a book of essays, Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music (2015). Fragments of scores were reconstructed aided by tapes of early performances and that jump-started a resurgence, first in alternative performance spaces and then going mainstream with Los Angeles Philharmonic and Orchestra of St. Luke’s. In June, the American Modern Opera Company guest curated some of his music at the Ojai Music Festival.

The contemporary music collective, Wild Up, has also been championing Eastman’s compositions, committing to a seven-part anthology on New Amsterdam Records. Last year they released Julius Eastman Vol.1: Femenine. The album was hailed “a masterpiece” by The New York Times and NPR placed it among its top 10 records of 2021. The propulsive 70-minute symphony, built on circular phrasing and expanding repetitions, generates an ecstatically immersive experience of cascading lyricism.

Last month, Wild Up released Julius Eastman Vol. 2: Joy Boy. His idiosyncratic compositional style — open-ended scores that interweave multiple genres and whose instrumentation is not always specified — is lovingly realized by an ensemble whose background encompasses classical, jazz, and improvisational music.

Exuberance abounds throughout this recording. The title (and first) track features the never-before-recorded Joy Boy,  a buoyantly discordant stepping stone to the trippy undulations of Buddha (Field). Two radically different versions of Touch Him When showcase Wild Up’s virtuosic musicians veering from placid minimalism to metallic drones. The record culminates with Stay On It, a dance-inflected work of harmonic convergence that induces incantatory rapture through a cacophony of chaotic sounds.

Artistic Director of Wild Up, Christopher Rountree writes in the recording’s press material that he wants listeners “to find themselves in these pieces. And in their multiple iterations. We want this work to be quintessentially queer. Every moment full of choice.”

Julius Eastman: the fierce black queen iconoclast, scorned and consigned to oblivion in his day, is finally being celebrated for his unabashed talent and the sheer audacity of his inimitable genius. Brava diva!

1960s Fluxus Artist Nye Ffarrabas Celebrated at Brattleboro’s C.X. Silver Gallery

-Seven Days

She went to happenings with Allan Kaprow and on mushroom treks with John Cage. She was in a Yoko Ono film, performed in avant-garde festivals and dined with Marcel Duchamp. Nye Ffarrabas, aka Bici (Forbes) Hendricks, was a central figure in the Fluxus art movement of the 1960s. She and others created intermedia events that pushed the boundaries of prevailing norms in painting, sculpture, poetry, music and theater. They erased distinctions between art and life as they celebrated daily activities. Their radical aesthetics influenced subsequent postmodern performance and visual art.

Ffarrabas' works are in museum collections around the country, including at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. But several factors conspired to blur art history, leaving far too few who remember Ffarrabas' legacy. After divorcing her husband, Geoff Hendricks, she left New York, had multiple careers while still making art and changed her name.

In 1982, she moved permanently to Brattleboro, where she has created art and worked as a psychotherapist ever since. There, at C.X. Silver Gallery, her legacy is known and celebrated. In 2014, the gallery hosted "Nye Ffarrabas: A Walk on the Inside," a 50-year retrospective. Many of Ffarrabas' works are still on exhibit at the gallery, which serves as the repository of her archives.

This fall, C.X. Silver Gallery will publish Friday Book of White Noise (1964-1969), Ffarrabas' early journals of ideas and concepts that often led to art pieces and performances. The book was "originally a shared effort between her and her former husband," gallery co-owner Adam Silver said, but "she took ownership of it over time and is annotating it for publication."

In March, over lunch in the gallery with Silver and photographer Dona Ann McAdams, Ffarrabas talked about her life as an artist. Then she took the group on a tour of her works.

Ffarrabas' early pieces were revelatory, particularly her "Egg/Time Event" sculpture — a simple, everyday object reconfigured. A real egg is encased and hidden in an irregularly shaped plaster block with rubber-stamped red text: "February 22 [19]66" and "DO NOT OPEN FOR 100 YEARS."

McAdams was wowed by "Dinner Service" (1966), a table setting for four with hubcaps as plates and pliers, hammers and screwdrivers as silverware. "The most amazing thing was when she sat down at her table installation," McAdams enthused, "and she did an impromptu performance with the hubcaps. Fluxus is always a part of it."

Ffarrabas spoke about the art zeitgeist of the '60s. Growing up in the Boston area, she first met Hendricks while attending Vermont's Putney School. (Her name at the time was Bici Forbes.) He invited her to attend "A Spring Happening," a performance art event organized by Allan Kaprow in 1961. She was enchanted: "walking around, the sound of bacon frying, someone singing in the shower," she said. It was unlike anything she had ever experienced. From there, she "kind of oozed into Fluxus and loved it."

She joined Hendricks in Manhattan. They married in 1961 and had two children, Tyche and Bracken. The couple participated in events together, but Ffarrabas, known then as Bici Hendricks, continued creating her own work. It was a fertile time for them both as they became stars in the burgeoning Fluxus movement.

"I work with what I find around me, either objects or words, and I go from there," Ffarrabas said of her artistic practice.

Her husband's brother Jon Hendricks was an artist and curator. At dinner one evening, he looked through her notebooks. "I started showing him a few things I was fiddling with," Ffarrabas said. He invited her to put on a solo show at New York's Judson Gallery.

Village Voice reviewer John Perreault didn't quite know what to make of that 1966 Judson exhibition, titled "Word Work." It was composed of "flags, messages, wall poems, signs, changing displays, meditations, irreverent icons, emblems, eggs, tea parties, field trips and giveaways all by Bici Hendricks who presides pleasantly over this intermedia mélange of tricks, jokes, art, and party favors," Perreault wrote. "All of these hijinks are delightful, even the slide projectors of poems or instructions, and some of it is definitely art."

Judson continued to exhibit Ffarrabas' work. She recounted how her 1969 Fluxus piece "Terminal Reading" came about. "I had wanted to write a novel, and I was writing this stuff and it was bad. So I thought, I'll burn it."

She set up four music stands with a hibachi in the middle. Each stand held a black folder containing a quarter of what she had written. "The idea was to start reading, and then somebody else would read," she said. "Somebody else might come in on top, and soon it sounded like the beginning of a fugue. After each page was read, the pages had to be crumpled and thrown in the fire until there were no pages left."

A common practice in this period was mail art — artists sending small-scale works through the postal service to friends. Ffarrabas founded Black Thumb Press, "a pipe dream that did a little more than dream," she recalled. She and her husband created words and/or pictures to mail to others, along with other artists, including Robert Watts and Ono. One of Ffarrabas' cards was a conceptual invitation that read, "Imagine that today's newspaper is a book of mythology."

Ono's 1967 six-minute film "No. 4" included Ffarrabas in its montage of buttocks of famous artists. As colleagues, she and Ono would visit playgrounds with their children. "We were mothers in the park at times, and we were just friends talking about our work," Ffarrabas recalled. "We were doing similar stuff. We would talk about art and money and this and that."

Ffarrabas participated in Charlotte Moorman's Annual Avant Garde Festivals from 1966 to 1978. For these outdoor extravaganzas, she crafted two large calligraphic banners for a parade, offered people Reiki on a park bench and performed "Universal Laundry" (1966), in which she washed clean diapers in a pond in New York's Central Park and hung up four or five to dry. One was dyed light blue and painted with the United Nations insignia.

Unfortunately, Ffarrabas' husband received more notice within the art world than she did. At the Happening & Fluxus festival in Cologne, Germany, in 1970, "He had his cubicle, and I had my cubicle," she recalled. "People would come up to me and say, 'Oh, wasn't it nice that you could come, too.' And I would say, 'That's mine!'" as she pointed at her art.

In 1971, her husband asked what they should do for their 10th anniversary. "'Let's get a divorce, a Flux Divorce,'" she recalled saying, "and we were off and running." Friends Ono, John Lennon, Kate Millett and other art world luminaries attended the party at the couple's brownstone. Cultural critic Jill Johnston played the piano and wrote about it later in her weekly column in the Village Voice.

The couple's daughter, Tyche, spoke about the divorce celebration for the 2018 New York Times obituary of her father:

It was a public art ritual they created to symbolize an end of their marriage as it had been and the beginning of a new chapter that would include a non-monogamous, open relationship that made space for same-sex partners. They strung barbed wire through the kitchen. They sawed their bed in half. They donned a pair of overcoats, sewed together back to back; then the women pulled my mother and the men pulled my father until the coats tore asunder.

After the divorce, Ffarrabas dropped her married surname, Hendricks, and continued creating under her given name, Bici Forbes. She and her children moved to a sixth-floor loft in the nascent SoHo arts district in lower Manhattan. But "I didn't have any marketable skills, and the kids were going crosstown to school," she said. "It was complicated, so we moved to Cambridge, [Mass.], to live with one of my sisters."

Life changes ensued: "There I wasn't trying to put myself forward as an artist; they weren't ready for this stuff." She went back to school to become a psychotherapist and practiced for a few years, "but it was hard being near my family. I'd been in New York too long for a conservative Boston family!"

Ffarrabas had attended the Putney School as a teen and loved that part of Vermont. Her ex-husband's family, whom she also loved, lived in Putney. (His father, Walter Hendricks, founded Marlboro College.) She didn't want to be "in their backyard," so in 1982 she moved to Brattleboro.

There, she continued writing poetry, creating calligraphic drawings and found-object sculptures, and repurposing wooden chairs with agitprop messaging. She worked for Child Protective Services in the Vermont Department for Children and Families, and she volunteered in AIDS hospice work.

In 1993, she changed her name to Nye Ffarrabas. "I wanted to be me," she recalled. "I spent the first 60 years with somebody else's idea of me, and the next 60 is mine." Through genealogy research, she had discovered that Ffarrabas was a variant of Forbes and that Nye was a wonderfully complementary Welsh first name.

C.X. Silver wasn't the first Vermont gallery to take notice of her art. Windham Art Gallery in Windham and the Michael S. Currier Center at the Putney School exhibited a group of her repurposed political chairs in 2008 and 2010, respectively. She called them "an abbreviated history of our country, told in rocking chairs."

In 2011, Dartmouth College's Hood Museum of Art presented "Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life," an exhibit of works organized into 14 themes. The press release described one of Ffarrabas' pieces, grouped under the "Happiness?" theme, this way:

Stress Formula proposes that we need more jokes than drugs. A vitamin bottle whose label is inscribed with the suggested dosage, "Take one capsule every four hours, for laughs," Stress Formulacontains clear capsules with little rolled pieces of paper, presumably printed with humorous messages. Fluxus artists seem to agree that happiness is something we make for ourselves, not the result of something that happens to us.

Dartmouth's Fluxus exhibition caught the attention of Cai Xi Silver and her husband, Adam. Cai Xi contacted Ffarrabas for a paper she was writing on Fluxus for the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

A few years later, C.X. Silver Gallery mounted Ffarrabas' 50-year retrospective. Its catalog is replete with essays, anecdotes and exaltations. In it, Ffarrabas' first curator, Jon Hendricks, reminds readers that "careers have been made on the backs of her pioneering artwork." A 1968 quote from the artist herself particularly resonates: "Art has no obligation to be pretty. It does have an obligation to be relevant in its time."

In 2019, Ffarrabas completed a Möbius strip installation of text on paper for the gallery, and her writing is featured in the Brattleboro Words Trail. She made her most recent piece, "When All the Water Is Gone" (2022), a calligraphy and oxtail bone installation, in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe over the Dakota Access Pipeline.

On June 21, Ffarrabas turns 90. She is "in the midst of several new Fluxus projects," she said, including working with the gallery on Friday Book of White Noise.

When asked whether she had any advice for her 20-year-old self, without hesitating she smiled and said, "Forget the 1950s."

That's a wrap - legislative session in review

Here’s a snapshot of what we accomplished in the General, Housing, and Military Affairs Committee.

Expanding Safe and Affordable Housing

Given Vermont’s critical housing needs, bolstering our housing stock is a top priority. Through federal COVID relief funds, over $42 million was earmarked this year in S.210 and S. 226 to help Vermont renters and homeowners. With this funding, we were able to:

●  Dedicate $20 million toward forgivable loans to property owners to bring rental properties not up to code back online, plus incentivize the construction of new Accessory Dwelling Units to expand Vermont’s rental housing stock.

●  Direct $22 million to subsidize new construction to lower costs for middle-income homebuyers, plus $1 million to the Vermont Housing Finance Agency (VHFA) for down payment grants for first-generation homebuyers. Repair and improvement grants will also be available for manufactured homes.

●  Reform zoning laws, expand tax credits, and create pilot projects to encourage denser development and more vibrant town centers.

●  Create an Advisory Land Access Board, composed of representatives of groups that have faced historic discrimination in land and home ownership. The new board will work with the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board and its partners to reduce current disparities as a result of that discrimination.

●  Extend additional protections from discrimination and harassment for renters and homebuyers.

●  Create a statewide contractor registry to protect against consumer fraud in residential construction projects with a value of over $10,000.

●  Use federal relief money to increase the capacity of the Department of Fire Safety to conduct rental inspections.

Establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission

In May 2021, the legislature passed J.R.H.2, apologizing and expressing sorrow and regret to all Vermonters and their families and descendants who were harmed because of state-sanctioned eugenics policies and practices. As a follow-up,H.96 creates a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to research and investigate systemic discrimination caused or permitted by state laws and policies, and to propose action to the Legislature or governor to remedy the impacts on affected communities.

The charge is to listen, research, learn, acknowledge and propose remedies. The work is expected to take three years, delivering detailed findings and recommendations for actions to eliminate and to address harm caused or permitted by state laws. Public input is integral to the entire process.

Supporting our National Guard and Military Members

Vermont is the only state that elects its National Guard’s Adjutant and Inspector General. After many years of debate in the General Assembly, H.517 defined the eligibility criteria for candidates. To enhance recruitment and better support our military families, we also developed several programs, including enhanced tuition benefits for Guard members seeking additional academic training, allowing remote registration of student for families being relocated to Vermont under military orders, and securing in-state students will not lose these benefits if a family member is transferred on military orders or retires. Also, the Agency of Education may now designate a school district as a “Purple Star Campus” to support military-connected students and connect them to resources.

Expanding Burial Options

To provide Vermonters another option to burial and cremation, H. 244 allows for the natural organic reduction of human remains, a method in which an unembalmed body is broken down with organic materials like wood chips and straw for several weeks inside of an enclosure until it becomes soil. Washington, Oregon, and Colorado permit these kinds of processing facilities.

Expanding Worker Protections

S.81 streamlined the arbitration process for employees of the Vermont judiciary and H.477 extended unpaid leave to the family members of crime victims.

Ready-to-Drink (RTD) Beverages

The General Assembly passed H.730, which defines Ready-to-Drink Beverages as a specific category of alcoholic beverage and moves the sale and distribution of RTDs under 12% Alcohol by Volume (ABV) from the Department of Liquor and Lottery to the private sector. It also doubled the tax on RTDs from 55 cents to $1.10 per gallon. Fortified wines will remain in DLL/802 Outlets. The bill also added a refined definition of cider, with a tax adjustment scheduled to take effect in the next fiscal year.

I have learned so much in the People's House

In the final days of this legislative session, I am filled with gratitude for the opportunity to serve in the Vermont House of Representatives these past four years. 

I will not be seeking reelection as it is now time for me (turning 70 next month) to focus on other aspects of my life, including new artistic projects.

Most powerfully, I learned from so many as they shared lived experiences and traumas of surviving poverty, incarceration, addiction and discrimination. Visiting with women involved in the criminal justice system and folks living in homeless encampments was profound, life-changing indeed, as I worked with fellow legislators to create more equitable policies.  

My committee work had a diverse portfolio. In any given month, we grappled with amending alcoholic beverage laws and updating statutes to reflect the current roles and duties of the Vermont National Guard to allocating tens of millions of dollars expanding affordable housing for unhoused and low-income Vermonters.

Emotional victories included renaming Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day and working on a eugenics apology to all Vermonters and their families who were harmed because of state-sanctioned policies and practices. Apologies are insufficient, so a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was proposed to investigate systemic discrimination caused or permitted by state laws and policies and to propose legislative or administrative actions to remedy the effects on affected communities.

My regrets include the Legislature failing to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour and not overriding governor’s veto on paid family and medical leave in my first biennium. 

The biggest disappointment was being unable to get a bill passed to improve the quality and increase the number of recovery beds throughout the state. Advocates worked at cross-purposes, and we could not come to consensus on a path forward despite overdose deaths at an all-time high.  

My tenure coincided with the infusion of billions of dollars of federal Covid-relief funds to rebuild our social, economic and civic lives, including business and creative sector recovery; schools and universities; extended unemployment; keeping people housed with rental, mortgage,and property tax arrearages subsidies; and providing food to our communities as well as sheltering the homeless in hotels. 

I am proud to be part of the deliberate process to support workforce development, child care, broadband buildout and infrastructure needs, climate policies, and resolving pension liabilities for educators and state workers. Balanced budgets providing tax relief and addressing the fraying societal safety net were delivered.

Some actions seem prescient in hindsight. Four years ago, we initiated the process of amending the state Constitution guaranteeing women’s reproductive freedom. Vermont voters will now decide in November on this very timely issue. As well, a bill banning the LGBTQ panic defense in court cases, passed in May 2021, came into high relief with the tragic murder of transwoman Fern Feather last month.

As my public service ends, I offer some reflections for the General Assembly. Current compensation of approximately $20,000 is not sustainable for diverse representation, skewing the demographics. Term limits would further expand participation. 

Legislative protocols and hierarchies are moribund with tradition and need to evolve to reflect current-day realities. And to my colleagues in both the House and Senate, I urge all to listen without telling, question without judgment, believe without doubt, and speak with humility. 

Often when visitors are acknowledged during floor sessions, we ask the Speaker to welcome guests to the “People’s House.” As we invite the public into the “People’s House,” remember it’s theirs, not ours. Maddeningly, people who use wheelchairs cannot access public seating in the balcony or at the back of the well of the House. I have more than once flinched when hearing the invocation to welcome all while excluding some.

And representation matters. Museums curate and contextualize collections, as should the Statehouse. Although we formally apologized last year for the Eugenics 1931 bill, “An Act for Human Betterment for Voluntary Sterilization,” the portrait of Governor Wilson, who signed this bill into law, still hangs on the wall. 

Furthermore, look more closely at the art exhibited throughout the building. All Vermonters do not see their lived histories portrayed in the corridors. Laudably, a newly commissioned portrait of Alexander Twilight, Vermont’s first state legislator of African descent, was unveiled last week.

Finally, serving as a part-time citizen legislator has been indeed an honor and privilege. As someone whose professional career had been in the arts, these four years have been transformational. I learned so much and tried to contribute as best I could. 

Working on behalf of neighbors has been such a gift. I appreciate my constituents’ belief and support. Thank you.

State establishes truth, reconciliation commission to address past wrongs

My work in this last month of the legislative session will focus on two Senate bills that proactively address Vermont’s affordable housing crisis. I will report details as they are finalized in my next column. However, this week I wanted to share with you the work my committee did on establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that is now in the Senate.

In May 2021, the Legislature passed J.R.H.2 apologizing and expressing sorrow and regret to all Vermonters and their families and descendants who were harmed because of state-sanctioned eugenics policies and practices. The original eugenics bill was signed in 1931 and impacted generations of Vermonters. The General Assembly recognized an apology was insufficient and further legislative action should be taken.

As a follow-up to the apology, H.96 establishes a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to research and investigate systemic discrimination caused or permitted by state laws and policies and to propose legislative or administrative action to the Legislature or governor as appropriate to remedy the effects on affected communities.

Over the past year my committee took extensive testimony from myriad advocates and those affected and broadened the framework beyond eugenics. The committee’s work was further informed by ongoing consultation from the International Center for Transitional Justice that works worldwide with countries and communities developing truth, justice, reconciliation and reparation programs.

We learned there have been approximately 40 over the years, each different from the next. From South Africa to Tunisia, from Canada to Maine, North Carolina and Maryland, each focused on distinct communities and organized differently. We heard from participants in processes from Maine, Canada and Maryland. Working with legislative counsel, we adapted elements from these preexisting commissions.

The charge is to listen, research, learn, acknowledge and propose remedies. Three commissioners will be appointed through an iterative process and then hire administrative staff. Commissioners, in consultation with impacted populations, will establish committees to examine institutional, structural and systemic discrimination and work with commissioners to identify potential programs and activities to create and improve opportunities to eliminate existing disparities.

Commissioners should be appointed by March 2023. The work is expected to take three years, with annual reports to the Legislature and a final report due by June 2026 detailing findings and recommendations for actions to eliminate and to address the harm caused or permitted by state laws.

Public input is integral to the entire process. Committees will invite extensive testimony as they examine long-standing discrimination in Vermont. Recommendations will also be further vetted by the affected communities.

To not address ongoing institutional, structural and systemic discrimination only perpetuates harm and disparities. The goal of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is to truly bring all Vermonters together.

Important bills face crossover deadline: Legislature tackles consumer protection, social justice

This week and next are the two most crucial times in the legislative calendar as all bills voted in the House and Senate must make crossover so that the other body has sufficient time to deliberate and iterate with further amendments.

Investing federal stimulus funds has been a central focus to undergird the economy. Workforce development, child care and housing shortages are being addressed. Pension liability fair to teachers, state employees and taxpayers was proposed, and strategies to combat our climate crisis outlined. Broadband buildout was implemented. Balancing budgets, both in the mid-year January adjustment and the proposed fiscal year 2023 budget is a priority.

In my committee, the House Committee on General, Housing and Military Affairs, we are making progress on Vermont’s housing shortage and are focused on multiple issues relating to housing Vermonters. A few statistics:

• Federal relief funds totaling more than $57 million have helped Vermont renters stay in their homes and helped make landlords whole.

• Federal relief and general Fund dollars have enabled the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board to develop 475 new units of rental housing and to bring several projects online that will result in over 1,100 new rental units by 2023.

• Federal dollars allowed 1,300 households to exit homelessness in 2021, with continued work to be appropriated in the months ahead.

This year in the annual budget adjustment, the House included $50 million to support more mixed-income units, multi-family rentals and to increase shelter capacity, with priority given to populations who may be displaced from the motel voucher program or are currently without housing.

Between now and the end of the session in May, we expect to allocate up to $25 million to rehabilitate 400 existing units that are offline because of code violations as well as a pilot for middle-income buyers.

Consumer, worker protections

Other committee bills focused on consumer and worker protections. H.157 created a “light-touch” registry for construction contractors, along with requiring a contract for work over $3,500. The governor vetoed this bill, but we hope to find a compromise.

Worker protection bills included S.78, streamlining the arbitration process for employees of the Vermont judiciary; H.320, prohibiting agreements that prevent an employee from working for an employer following the settlement of a discrimination case; and H.477, enabling employees to take crime victim leave and expanding to family members who also qualify for this leave from work.

National Guard, liquor laws, human remains

The committee also worked on various bills concerning the Vermont National Guard, the Department of Liquor and Lottery and an alternative method for the final disposition of human remains.

H. 571 extends the National Guard tuition benefit program as an enhanced recruitment tool supporting members seeking a master’s degree, a second baccalaureate degree or appropriate certificate training.

H.244 allows a new method of organic reduction giving Vermonters another option for their permanent disposition choices.

The commissioner of liquor and lottery requested technical corrections and updates of statutes which will be developed along with other liquor bills.

These are expected to pass out of committee and onto to the House floor this week.

Racial and social justice

As I mentioned in last month’s column, the committee also took extensive testimony on H.96, which establishes a truth and reconciliation process, and H.273, which promotes equity in land and home ownership. Details are still in development, but hopefully these two important bills will also make cross-over in the next two weeks.

In committee, from reparations to human composting

I sit on the House Committee on General, Housing and Military Affairs. There are over 80 bills currently on our wall for consideration. I want to share some of the myriad issues currently under discussion to give readers a scope of the portfolio. Not included are National Guard and housing bills, among many other concerns for upcoming agendas.

Most proposed bills stay on the wall in each of the 11 House committees. Legislating is an iterative process, and bills change dramatically while in committee. What I am sharing are the initial proposals prior to vetting and amending. If taken up in the full House and passed, bills are then sent to the Senate for consideration. Bills originating in the Senate follow a similar process.

The crossover deadline is March 11 to allow adequate time for each chamber’s deliberations. Finally, when both House and Senate agree, final bills are sent to the governor to sign or veto. Only a fraction of bills introduced each session become law. Here’s just a sampling of some of my committee considerations:

Human composting

H.244 allows for the natural organic reduction of human remains, a method in which an un-embalmed body is broken down with organic materials like wood chips and straw for several weeks inside of an enclosure until it becomes soil. Washington, Oregon and Colorado permit these kinds of processing facilities. This would provide Vermonters another option to burial and cremation for their permanent disposition choices.

Liquor licensing

The committee looked at several bills that recommend changes in liquor licensing, reflecting the ever-evolving business environment:

• H.591 and H.638 allow in-state manufacturers to mail products directly to consumers.

• H.613 legally defines “on farm” malt or vinous beverages as products in which 51 percent of ingredients (other than water) are grown on the farm that sells them.

• H.684 allows food trucks to hold first- and third-class alcoholic beverage licenses.

Worker protections

H.329 amends current laws prohibiting discrimination by establishing a uniform six-year statute of limitations to file claims; reiterates that a claim is viable regardless of whether an employee filed a complaint through the employer’s internal grievance process; adds harassment as an unlawful employment practice; and lowers the severe and pervasive burden for establishing a claim of harassment or discrimination.

H.477 clarifies a statute enacted in 2018 that enables employees eligible to take crime victim leave and expands family members who also qualify for leave from work.

Truth, reconciliation, reparations

Over the past several weeks, the House Committee on General, Housing and Military Affairs has taken extensive testimony from advocates, scholars and community members on several bills related to racial and social justice: H.96 establishes a truth and reconciliation process; H.387 establishes a task force to study and develop reparation proposals for the institution of chattel slavery; and H.273 promotes racial and social equity in land and home ownership.

We also reviewed several bills related to Indigenous land rights: affirming access to state lands for hunting, trapping, farming and sacred rituals (H.618); identifying, protecting access to and exempting historic and sacred Indigenous sites from taxation (H.668); and creating a study committee to examine possible mechanisms for the repatriation of traditional Abenaki lands to the tribes.

To follow issues being discussed, visit the Vermont General Assembly website and search both House and Senate committees to see agendas and pertinent documents for each day’s discussions. Links are provided to livestream every committee meeting.

House back in session, ready to tackle Vermont’s big issues

We begin again. Last week the Legislature reconvened in person in Montpelier and passed a resolution to meet virtually for at least two weeks, hoping then to return full-time in person for this second year in this biennium. In the meantime, we will be meeting on Zoom — not preferred but essential while the contagion continues to escalate.

In the coming months, there is a lot at stake for the future of Vermont. With enormous federal dollars still coming in to help redress the economic impact of the pandemic, we will focus in on how to utilize these funds prudently. These one-time funds cannot be used to undergird ongoing programs but are already game changing for our state’s housing shortage, broadband buildout and infrastructure needs.

Many momentous decisions are on our legislative agenda, including the unfunded pension liability in a way that’s fair to teachers, state employees and taxpayers; equitable education financing; and amending the Vermont Constitution to guarantee personal reproductive liberty to all Vermonters. If passed, this amendment would then be on the statewide ballot in November for voters to have the ultimate decision.

The Vermont Climate Council’s report needs to be operationalized to assure the state’s environmental and economic resiliency in the years ahead. Increasing access to child care, health care and mental health services are also desperately needed. This year, the state undertook its 10-year reapportionment of legislative districts. With population growth in South Burlington, it looks like we will have gained an additional fifth representative in the Vermont House.

Here are some of the issues I worked on over the summer and fall off-session. Last month I wrote about the need to focus on workforce development, but not leave the worker behind by modernizing Vermont’s outdated wage laws and increasing the minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025. Another issue I have worked on for three years is expanding the Recovery Home Network statewide, which is so desperately needed with overdose deaths at an all-time high for a second year in a row.

I also introduced legislation to better understand the health effects associated with mold and mycotoxins in water damaged buildings and enhancing food allergy awareness in restaurants. I am also asking the state to repeal the taxing of performing arts admissions for nonprofit theaters and performing arts organizations.

It’s crucial that Vermont invest in its workers

Media pundits are talking about 2021 being the year of the “Great Resignation” and QuitToks are trending on social media. 

I am not convinced people are leaving jobs to find more meaningful ones. People are burned out and lives remain upended by the continual disruptions of the pandemic, but wage disparities seem as relevant a determining factor. 

Here in Vermont, as we focus on workforce development, let’s not leave the worker behind.

Currently there are several bills regarding wages and worker protections pending in the upcoming legislative session. Many complex issues need further examination in committee as we learn from experts and those impacted. Legislation is indeed iterative.

Vermont’s current wage laws are not in sync with federal regulations, including some minimum wage exemptions that were written into the original 1938 federal legislation — for farm workers, domestic workers, tipped workers, nonprofit employees, newspaper delivery people, and other categories. 

Some of these exemptions have not been revisited in over 20 years by Vermont lawmakers and are no longer relevant. Overtime exemptions for retail and service establishments, as well as administrators, also need to be examined considering today’s economic realities.

By current statute, tipped workers in hotels, motels, tourist places and restaurants are eligible for only 50% of the minimum wage as their base, but this standard is in flux, as some Vermont restaurants now pay both front of house and kitchen staff the same full hourly wage and tips are aggregated and shared with all. 

There are many perspectives on this, and committees will take further testimony during the session. This is also a gender issue — 81% of tipped wage workers in Vermont are women, according to the National Women’s Law Center.

As important, increasing the minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025 no longer seems like an undue burden on small employers, as current worker shortages spurred increases in hourly wages. However, post-pandemic, the 2022 hourly rate of $12.55 is truly inadequate — far below a living wage.

Securing a base of $15 per hour would do much to improve the earning power of over a third of Vermont’s workers, according to a 2019 study by the Public Assets Institute. At that time, 34% of Vermont men and 39% of Vermont women who worked full-time earned less than $11 an hour. 

However, increasing the minimum wage cannot be done in isolation. To raise wages for home health and personal care organizations, for example, will require increasing Medicaid reimbursements for them to remain financially viable. And state benefits need to be examined so as not to cause workers to lose essential supports by pushing wages just over income eligibility levels.

Other wage-related bills look to improve the stability of all Vermont workers by requiring reliable work schedules, expense reimbursements for remote workers, wage transparency, and prohibiting employers from firing employees without “just cause.” 

Paid family leave remains an important issue, as well as health insurance and subsidized child care for employee recruitment and retention.

Focusing on improving workers’ financial health is essential as Vermont recalibrates itself post-Covid. As living costs continue to escalate, more and more families cannot meet basic needs. Adequately compensating workers needs to be prioritized to ensure a vital economic future for our state. There can be no workforce development without workers. 

Legislative work continues; artist inaugurates city art gallery

I was laid up with a fractured fibula for the last eight weeks, so spent most of the summer rather immobile, but worked on legislative issues regarding Recovery Homes expansion, updating Vermont’s wage laws, and analyzing admissions’ tax issues. These fall under the purview of my General, Housing and Military Affairs Committee.

Overdose deaths spiked to all time levels during the pandemic, demonstrating the desperate need for more help for those with substance use disorders. I continue working on a bill with advocates and hope to move something forward in the new legislative session in January.

As well, wage disparities were magnified and need to be redressed. Vermont’s compensation laws need updating, and minimum wage should move up to $15 per hour. Currently many businesses are paying this rate for workers to return, so it seems right to equalize this for all Vermonters. I reintroduced legislation moving minimum wages up to this level over a three-year period.

Vermont’s entertainment industry was also devastated by Covid, being the first to close and last to open and will take years to recover. Many of our neighboring states do not tax admissions and I have been studying what the fiscal impact of this would be, both for our venues as well as state coffers. 

While I missed the grand opening celebrations of our new Library and City Hall, I did make it to photographer Todd E. Lockwood’s exhibition, One Degree of Separation, which inaugurated the gallery in the main entrance of the new building last Saturday. Lockwood’s high-resolution black and white digital portraits are technically virtuosic and poignantly intimate, inviting the viewer into relationship with his subjects. Every well-earned wrinkle and blemish are magnified and gloriously rendered in large scale formats. 

He photographs friends, thus the title, One Degree of Separation, and many of the subjects might be familiar to visitors: Governor Madeleine Kunin, VPR’s Robert Resnick, filmmaker Jay Craven, visual artist dug nap, and poet Claude Mumbere. Yet these are not celebrity airbrushed photos, but elegant portraiture of their profound humanity. I am honored to also be included in the exhibition.  

Lockwood’s extraordinary work has been exhibited at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (2011), Burlington City Hall (2014), and Champlain College (2016). As he is a South Burlington resident, how fitting that his unique photographic vision opens our new gallery space. One Degree of Separation runs through October 14 and can be viewed whenever the Public Library, City Hall, or Senior Center are open, Monday-Thursday 8 am-7 pm, Friday 8 am-5 pm., and Saturday 10 am–2pm. You can also view Lockwood’s work online at this website: www.toddrlockwoodphotography.com.

If my healing fibula is up to it, I plan to join your other state representatives and senators at this week’s SoBu Nite Out in Veterans Memorial Park. Look for our “Ask your Legislators” sign and stop by and have a chat.

Covid lessons point to housing as health care

Vermont did so many things right responding to Covid, including taking care of our homeless.  Past “point in time” annual surveys estimated the unhoused population to be just over 1,000 statewide. However, during the pandemic, double that number were supported in 76 hotels throughout the state with federal dollars. 

As the emergency period ends, myriad issues are at play as we continue supporting our most vulnerable.  

Last month, 2,051 adults and 373 children were provided shelter in 1,742 hotel rooms statewide. In Chittenden County, 608 adults and 90 children were housed in 523 rooms, including 66 adults in South Burlington’s Holiday Inn. In addition to housing, with collaborative support from many community partners, food and other services were also provided. Vermont was nationally recognized for our efforts. 

However, none of this is sustainable without significant federal subsidy that is winding down.

As of July 1, many hotels returned to serving tourists and travelers and no longer provide rooms for the homeless. Eligibility criteria also changed this month, narrowing the parameters on who could still qualify for emergency housing. Still broader than pre-pandemic times, those who are age 60-plus, families with children up to age 18, women who are pregnant, and people with disabilities were granted stays for an additional 84 days.

With these changes, numbers decreased dramatically. Currently, 1,163 adults and 345 children are sheltered in 994 rooms statewide, including Chittenden County, where 352 adults and 89 children live in 300 rooms. The Department for Children and Families estimates these numbers will further decrease by the fall to approximately 650 rooms — still double the number the state supported pre-Covid.

Emergency short-term stays in hotel rooms were never intended to end homelessness, but to be another component in safety net provisions that also included congregate shelters throughout the state. Many of those have now reopened but renovated with less capacity and increased social distancing to mitigate future contagion issues.

This transitional period has been fraught with uncertainty and increased anxiety as residents tried to understand if they qualified to remain under new criteria or, if not, could they access federal relief dollars to help those leaving? Available is $2,500 with flexible parameters. Anecdotally, some have used this money to return to families and supportive environments out of state; others are sharing rooms and couch-surfing once again. Tents also qualify for this support, although encampments in Burlington and other cities have not seen as dramatic an increase in populations as feared.

And, for those who can find housing, up to $8,000 can assist with security deposits, first and last months’ rents, and moving expenses. However, entry-level housing remains a daunting barrier. Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity approved 410 housing vouchers for Chittenden, Addison, Franklin and Grand Isle counties, although only 210 have been rehoused. Burlington’s Committee on Temporary Shelter (COTS) was able to rehouse 79 folks. Herculean efforts against formidable odds — still far short of what is needed.

And once the pandemic-mandated moratorium on evictions is relaxed at the end of this month, housing insecurity will only escalate, sadly increasing those unhoused in Vermont. Although this year’s state budget contains substantial investments to increase shelters and affordable housing units, these will not be realized for two to three years. 

In the interim, we have a humanitarian crisis here in Vermont. So many Covid lessons pointed to the importance of “Housing as Health Care.” Continued collaboration between community providers, state agencies, and the Legislature will be essential in the months ahead.

Legislature undertakes steps to fix women’s prison crisis

Despite the challenges of legislating over Zoom, the session was extremely productive. With the additional $1.052 billion in COVID federal support, major one-time investments will have a long-lasting impact on Vermonters. Approximately half the money was allocated, as we have three years to spend these funds.

Included was $109 million targeted to economic, workforce and community revitalization, $99 million for affordable housing plus $51 million to rental assistance, $150 million for broadband build-out, and $52 million for technology modernization, in addition to $50 million for climate action and $115 million for clean water investments

My committee, House General, Housing, and Military Affairs, developed the resolution adopted by both the House and Senate that acknowledged and apologized for our state’s eugenics policies and practices that led to forced family separation, sterilization, incarceration and institutionalization for hundreds of Vermonters in the first half of the 20th century.

Unions, the National Guard, alcohol and sports betting were also on our agenda. School employees gained bargaining rights to consider different out-of-pocket health insurance premium shares for support staff, teachers and administrators. Statutes were updated to reflect the current roles of the Vermont National Guard and alcoholic beverage laws were amended to support businesses trying to rebound from the pandemic.

The Department of Liquor and Lottery will study how other states have been impacted by sports betting and report back to my committee for consideration.

Sadly, two consumer protection bills did not make it across the finish line. However, this is the first year in the biennium, and hopefully both will be addressed when we return in January. One establishes a registry of rental housing to support housing safety and the other bill is a contractor registry to protect against fraud, deception, breach of contract and violations of law.

Throughout the session, I worked with the women’s caucus to address sexual misconduct and systemic issues in the women’s prison in South Burlington. Both an independent corrections monitoring commission and an investigative unit were set up, and state law expanded to criminalize sexual contact between department of corrections employees and anyone under the department’s supervision. And, training and certification standards for correctional officers will be developed. As well, $1.5 million was allocated for planning and program design for a much-needed new women’s correctional and reentry facility.

Over the summer hiatus, I will be working on several issues that came into high relief during the pandemic. These include paid family and medical leave, modernizing Vermont’s wage laws and increasing the minimum wage to $15, expanding recovery homes to help those dealing with substance use disorders and establishing a homeless bill of rights.

While we suspend the monthly legislative forums with the South Burlington Library until January, I do look forward to speaking with constituents at summer events at Veterans Memorial Park and at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for our new South Burlington Library library in July.

I was part of the library foundation’s capital campaign and helped raise money to equip the new rooms, expand technology and diversify the collection.

The light ahead after COVID

Legislating through Covid over the past twelve months has been challenging as we balanced the state’s ongoing needs while serving impacted Vermonters during the implosion of our economic, civic, and personal lives. The pandemic underscored the already existing fissures and inequities in our society and a moral imperative lies ahead. As infections decline and vaccinations increase, a precarious horizon emerges as we strive toward a new normal.

Federal dollars supported so many sectors, including business recovery, schools and universities, extended unemployment, keeping people housed with rental and mortgage arrearages, and providing food to our communities as well as sheltering the homeless in hotels. Thankfully there is continued near-term federal subsidy, but the transition ahead is fraught for our most vulnerable.

I serve on the General, Housing, and Military Affairs Committee, and my focus has been on housing issues. One exemplar program moved the homeless out of congregate shelters into hotels in order to mitigate contagion during the pandemic. Federal dollars supported these efforts. Currently there are 76 lodging establishments providing almost 1,900 rooms. As the emergency period winds down, safely and humanely sheltering this population will be complex given the drought of low-income housing options. 

South Burlington’s Holiday Inn, currently providing 150 rooms for the homeless and two hotels in Middlebury housing 100 have given notice to the state that rooms will no longer be available as of July 1. Hotel capacity state-wide will further decline between April and October as others return to serving tourists and travelers. By the fall, capacity is projected to be approximately 650 rooms, which is a dramatic decrease from numbers currently served.

Households already in Covid emergency housing will continue to be eligible until June 30. New criteria will be instituted for some to remain for up to 84 additional days. Vermont’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) estimates that only two-thirds of those now housed will be eligible. Adding to the dilemma, households currently in emergency housing have the option of receiving meals. Food will no longer be provided as of July; community meal sites should reopen by then.

So, where will ineligible people currently in motels go? DCF worked with a group of community service providers across the state on near-term solutions. Emergency shelters re-opening this summer will provide temporary shelter for some, but not all. Federal rental assistance can help lease an apartment if one can be found. As well, rapid resolution funds can incentivize other safe housing options, including with family or friends. 

With the infusion of a $1 billion from the federal American Rescue Plan Act, there are many one-time opportunities for our state. The Governor proposed $249 million to add 5,000 homes by the end of 2024. This plan includes $12 million to increase 150 shelter units and $90 million to create an additional 600 affordable rental units. Other components include $90 million to expedite the existing pipeline of 2,400 affordable housing projects, $15 million to bring derelict properties back online to add 680 affordable rental units, and $42 million to develop a new program for moderate-income homebuyers in the “missing middle” of our housing market.  

This proposal could be game changing for our housing shortage. However, since these federal funds can be spent over the next three years, all components may not be appropriated in this legislative session scheduled to recess later this month. It is a two-year biennium, and when we return in January these housing issues will be top priority in my committee’s work.  

Mother’s Day elegy — ‘You gave me so much’

We didn’t know if you would live long enough to celebrate your 82nd birthday. My brother warned me not to be startled. You commanded, “No tears.” 

Even with tubes pumping fluids in and out of your tobacco-scarred body, you were beautiful, your skin translucent. You joked about ending up like a newly born with “no teeth, baby skin, and diapers.”

After the grandchildren sang “Happy Birthday,” they went to a barbecued rib fest, on you of course. I stayed behind to tell you how much I admired you. Your five kids, disparate though we were, you celebrated each of us distinctly. I remembered your reaction to my tattoo. You laughed and said, “I thought the surprises were over.”

As we reminisced, I thanked you for your unfettered support. You were shocked when I told you how proud I was to be your son. You hated your job as a park attendant, but kept at it long after you needed to, so as not to be a burden. Your whole life provided a future for your children, often at a high personal sacrifice.

I wanted to tell you how easy it is to let go. Years ago, paralyzed and hemorrhaging from spinal surgery gone wrong; my spirit, heart and mind imploded as morphine, fear and pain colluded. Past and future collapsed as I drifted off into a seductive, dissolving vagueness. But I awoke to Larry’s pleading, “Don’t die on me,” and returned through his voice, eyes and breath.

I wish I could carry you safely into the void. I am well practiced: cleaning morgue bodies when I was an orderly, witnessing vultures descend upon the Himalayan sky burials, tending hungry ghosts amidst the AIDS carnage, and living through my own death. 

My relation to life remains porous, elusive. I fear the waiting more than dying.

Saying goodbye, I had no solace to give you. All I had were tears and my own sorrow. I realized I would never see you again. 

You cared for so many. Who will be there when you call out like Daddy did for you? I’m sorry I can’t be there. You gave me so much. I wish you clarity and courage for a safe journey, Mom. Carry my love forward. May you find peace.

This commentary is excerpted from my voice-over for my collaborative video short broadcast on VT PBS.

Horses offer a solid outline for rebuilding into a better normal

Early mornings find me at Windswept Farm in Williston, where I board my Shetland pony, along with 24 horses. Social distancing requires tight scheduling so that only two or three mask-wearing boarders are there at any one time and no visitors are allowed.

Currently, the equines aren’t getting exercised as much and pastures are still too wet because of mud season but otherwise, the animals are happy to see us and appreciate the attention. I continue to learn from my pony, as well as from barn mates.

As we do chores and groom animals, passing conversations focus on how to rebuild our social, economic and civic lives post-Covid-19 with a disparate crew of discombobulated college students, working-from-home adults and a woman in her 90s. One of the owners of the barn, Tina Mauss, suggests reentry will be a lot like having an injured horse coming out of stall rest.

Horses are athletes, and sometimes bone fractures, ligament strains, wounds and other serious injuries require stall rest in order to heal. This is frustrating to horses who like to frolic with their herd buddies in the field and are accustomed to being worked strenuously by their owners. But stall rest is necessary to limit activity and encourage healing.

With veterinarian guidance, injured horses can slowly return to work. It may take weeks and sometimes months before they are in condition to play and be worked again. Dressage, jumping, eventing and carriage driving are endurance sports that require meticulous training. Leaving stall rest prematurely or shortcutting fitness often results in reinjury, a debilitating cycle for the animal and owner. Some never return to form.

Stall rest requires developing new relationships between equestrians and their steeds, breaking old habits to work more deliberately and creatively — oftentimes to nurturing and beneficial effects long-term. 

This is not unlike what we are experiencing, working and learning online while sheltering at home. Perhaps, we, too, can rebuild into a better normal.

Claustrophobia from the pandemic has us humans all itching to get back into our fields of life. Horse sense indicates to plan on an incremental transition with a strict rehab schedule. As at the barn, “too soon, too much” could have dire consequences. 

While Gov. Phil Scott continues to open the societal spigot ever so slowly, patience and discipline must guide our graduated activities without risking and causing injury to ourselves and others. Our social, economic and civic lives depend on it.

Mid-term report

I serve on the House General, Housing, and Military Affairs Committee with a diverse array of issues in our policy portfolio. Here are a few bills emanating out of our work that passed on the House floor and are now in the Senate.

H.149 updates statutes to reflect the current roles and duties of the Vermont National Guard. The bill addresses outdated language dating back to the Civil War as well as court martial protocols under the Articles of War that were replaced in 1951. 

H.313 amends alcoholic beverages laws to support businesses trying to rebound from the State of Emergency. In part, the bill authorizes a continuation of pandemic policies that allows delivery and curbside pickup of alcoholic beverages so long as the alcoholic beverages are accompanied by a food order and the alcohol is in a container that has a tamper evident seal, is labeled as alcohol, and lists the ingredients and serving size of the beverage. This would sunset after two years. 

Eugenics Apology Resolution, JRH2, apologizes for the General Assembly’s role and expresses sorrow and regret to all individual Vermonters and their families and descendants who were harmed as a result of state-sanctioned eugenics policies and practices. The resolution passed on the House floor with a vote of 146-0. Sadly a few legislators that were present in the floor session, ‘walked’ rather than having their vote recorded in our 150-member assembly. 

Action should also have been taken on H.157, a Consumer protection bill requiring registration, proof of insurance, and written contracts for residential contractors. The bill is intended to protect against fraud, deception, breach of contract, and violations of law, but not to establish professional qualifications or standards of workmanship, merely a listing of contractors in good standing. The bill is expected to be presented on the House Floor on April 6th, so check the legislative website to see if it passed.

The Committee was also introduced to a raft of bills related to worker protections, the impact of the eviction moratorium that was enacted last May, and S.79, an act to improve rental housing and health. Much work lies ahead on some of these this month, while others will wait until we return in January in the second part of the biennium.

I’ve heard from many constituents with concerns and questions about the sustainability of the pension system for our teachers and state employees. On Friday, Speaker of the House, Rep. Jill Krowinski, called for a task force with all stakeholders including the Governor’s office to meet over the summer to discuss possible revenue sources and plan and benefit changes to ensure the long-term viability of the retirement system.

In the short-term, the House’s Government Operations Committee will investigate how to strengthen the governance structure. The Speaker reminded us, “The legislature doesn’t make investment decisions, but we can change the board structure to make it more transparent, independent, and get more expertise at the table.” Stay tuned as this develops in the next month.

Eugenics in Vermont

Ninety years ago on March 31, 1931, Vermont signed into law “An Act for Human Betterment by Voluntary Sterilization” for the purpose of eliminating from the future genetic pool, persons deemed “unfit” to procreate. Vermont joined over 30 other states that enacted Eugenics-inspired legislature targeting people by race, national origin, gender, poverty, and disability.  

Here’s the language from the bill: “Henceforth, it shall be the policy of the state to prevent procreation of idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded or insane persons, when the public welfare, and the welfare of the idiots, feeble-minded or insane persons likely to procreate, can be improved by voluntary sterilization as herein provided.”

The bill was the culmination of UVM zoology professor Henry Perkins’ research. In 1925, he established and directed a Eugenics Survey to measure “delinquency, dependency, and mental deficiencies” in order to preserve “old pioneer stock.” 

Perkins and his team compiled files on thousands of Vermonters, collaborating with state and municipal officials and the Vermont Department of Welfare, sharing confidential information resulting in children being removed, individuals institutionalized and incarcerated, family connections severed, and hundreds being sterilized. 

His surveys targeted Abenaki bands and other indigenous people, Vermonters of mixed race or French-Canadian heritage, the poor, and persons with disabilities, among others. Records are incomplete, but at least 253 people were sterilized as a result of this legislation. This practice shamefully continued until 1957. 

In 2019, UVM apologized for its “unethical and regrettable” eugenics role of supporting Henry Perkins’ research and stripped his family’s name from a building on campus. It was a powerful ceremony about truth and reconciliation.

This session, I re-introduced Joint Resolution JRH2 for both the House and Senate. It “apologizes and expresses sorrow and regret to all individual Vermonters and their families and descendants who were harmed as a result of State-sanctioned eugenics policies and practices.” A similar resolution was first introduced ten years ago. The time is long overdue for public acknowledgement of the state’s role in this dark chapter of our history. The resolution is co-sponsored by forty three other House members. 

As we worked on the resolution in committee, heart wrenching testimony was received from impacted individuals sharing stories of finding hundreds of pages from the surveys about their families, mothers changing their names and moving continually to avoid being targeted, and relatives desperate to assimilate and giving up all traditional cultural practices and languages. 

Nancy Gallagher’s book, “Breeding Better Vermonters” details the history within our state, illustrating the familial carnage. In Pondville, VT, the Doless family’s seven children were taken away from the parents in 1928 and sent to the Vermont Industrial School and the Brandon School for the Feebleminded as it was called then. Three of the four oldest children were subsequently sterilized prior to discharge.

One woman described to our committee what it was like to be isolated and segregated in the Brandon School, and another shared a letter found in her relative’s attic from Brandon’s superintendent in 1932 telling him that due to the “mental retardation” of his two children, it would be inadvisable to return them home. 

Merely an apology from the legislature acknowledging the state’s role in this travesty is inadequate. The resolution recognizes that further legislative action should be taken to address the continuing impacts of eugenics policies and the related practices of disenfranchisement, ethnocide, and genocide.