Social Reform and Advocacy

Joseph W. Burns
October 15, 2014

Joseph "Joe" W. Burns is an LGBT activist who actively participated in LGBT organizations, marches, and protests especially throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s. In this interview, Joe discusses his involvement in several of those LGBT and women’s...

Kathy Fillman
February 10, 2015

Kathy Fillman was born in Coatesville, Pennsylvania to an Irish family that had their own business. Although she describes her childhood as idyllic, Kathy lived with her grandparents and three cousins due to her mother’s alcoholism and attended a...

Collection: LGBT Oral History

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View Item: PDF icon Transcription of LGBT Oral History 033: Kathy Fillman

LGBT History Project Logo
February 24, 2015

Mary Nancarrow grew up in a suburb of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in the 1950s and 1960s with divorced parents and two siblings. After graduating from Shippensburg University, she became prominent in the women’s movement and the LGBT movement in...

David Walker
March 19, 2015

David Walker was born in 1946 in Lancaster County, where he grew up in a strict Presbyterian family and always knew that he was different. He studied to be a teacher at Lebanon Valley College when the school was more fundamentalist, but after...

Paul Foltz
March 20, 2015

Paul Foltz grew up in Steelton in a very Catholic household, a background to which he attributes his unawareness of his sexuality until later in his college years. It wasn’t until he went to England to complete his graduate-level theatre studies...

Delma Welch
March 22, 2015

Delma Welch was born in Washington D.C. and grew up in Cardiff, Maryland as a Catholic with her three brothers and one sister. Delma began going to NOW [National Organization for Women] meetings in 1975 after becoming interested in feminism from...

Peg Welch
March 22, 2015

Peg Welch was born in December of 1951 near in Chester County, Pennsylvania to her father, a carpenter, and her mother, a candy maker. A young mother to two children, Peg did not graduate from high school, but received her GED and worked at...

Philip ''Phil'' Wenger
March 23, 2015

The interview performed on March 23, 2015 is with Oral History project volunteer, Michele Metcalf and long-time LGBT activist and self-identified gay man, Phil Wenger. Wenger was born and raised in Ethiopia in a large Mennonite missionary family...

LGBT History Project Logo
March 27, 2015

Walter Heiliger was born in 1944 and grew up in rural Carroll County, Maryland, the second of three children. Walter, who describes himself as “severely hearing-impaired,” encountered difficulties in school and in connecting...

Cindy Lou Mitzel
March 29, 2015

Cindy Lou Mitzel was born in April of 1942 in York County, Pennsylvania as the youngest in a big family. Growing up, Cindy knew that she felt attraction towards women but married a man just after graduating from high school and had three children...

Eva O'Diam
April 6, 2015

Eva O’Diam was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1953 to her mother, a school teacher, and her father, an engineer. Growing up in conservative, rural Ohio, Eva lost her father at the age of 12 and moved to Covington, Ohio where she graduated from high...

Eric Selvey
April 9, 2015

Dr. Eric Selvey was born and raised in Harrisburg, PA. He attended optometry school in Philadelphia, but returned to the Harrisburg area after graduating. In his interview he discusses his relationship with his mother and grandmother — and coming...

Joy (Ufema) Counsel
April 29, 2015

Joy (Ufema) Counsel was raised in Altoona, Pennsylvania. After completing high school, Joy began studies to become a nurse at the Altoona Hospital, and later completed a nursing program at Harrisburg Area Community College. Joy worked in numerous...

Dan Maneval
July 24, 2015

Daniel Maneval was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania on October 3, 1947. In this interview, Daniel speaks frankly about his experiences growing up as an only child, about the homophobic violence he has experienced, and the gay organizations he...

Lorraine Kujawa
October 28, 2015

Lorraine Kujawa was one of the co-founders of the Lavender Letter in Harrisburg during the late seventies and eighties. The Lavender Letter was created to provide events for the lesbian community to attend in Pennsylvania. She started the...

Collection: LGBT Oral History

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View Item: PDF icon Transcription of LGBT Oral History 061: Lorraine Kujawa

Cathy Nelson
November 11, 2015

Cathy Nelson was born in Brooklyn, New York, and moved to Staten Island, New York, at the age of two with her strict Italian-Swedish family. As a child, Cathy loved music and did well in school. She also participated in Catholic youth group...

Collection: LGBT Oral History

Topics: Coming Out

Organizations: Central PA Womyn's Chorus

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Gretchen Little
November 19, 2015

Gretchen Little was born on October 26, 1958 in Elmira, New York. As a child, Gretchen was interested in sports and experimented with wearing women’s clothing in the home. While studying Media Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas,...

Benjamin Dunlap
November 23, 2015

Benjamin Dunlap was born in Lancaster County Pennsylvania on December 23, 1957. He was born to a family with a mother, father, and sister ten years older than him. Throughout his life he was highly involved with LGBT community life and in...

Amy Skillman
May 5, 2016

Amy Skillman talks about her childhood growing up in Michigan in a large Episcopalian family and the influence of spirituality in her life, both as a teenager and an adult. Amy went to an all-girls school where rumors circulated about certain...

LGBT History Project Logo
July 20, 2016

Mark Segal is a gay rights activist, author, and journalist for the Philadelphia Gay News. In this interview, Mark discusses his political involvement in the gay rights movement in Pennsylvania in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Particularly, he focuses...

Collection: LGBT Oral History

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View Item: PDF icon Transcription of LGBT Oral History 103: Mark Segal

LGBT Activism Pins
1978 - 2012

The bulk of the collection consists of buttons, ribbons, and t-shirts from LGBT events. It also contains documentation of the Gay and Lesbian Switchboard of Harrisburg and Dignity of Central PA. Several of the items in this collection relate the...

Anthony Silvestre
September 21, 2016

Anthony Silvestre was born in 1946 in the Bronx in New York. He grew up in a working-class, Italian neighborhood and is familiar with stigma. He began identifying as gay in the sixth grade, but went through school still in the closet. After high...

Nikki Knerr
October 9, 2016

Nikki Knerr was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1945 and attended York College and Pennsylvania State University where she studied mass communications. In 1967, Nikki opened her first graphic design business which ran for 25 years in Camp...

Hannah Smith-Brubaker
October 27, 2016

Hannah-Smith Brubaker was born in Tioga County, Pennsylvania, and spent most of her childhood in Port Allegany, McKean County. She began to identify as a lesbian at the start of college, and she entered the political sphere for the first time...

Joanne Carroll
November 18, 2016

Joanne Carroll was born in Alberta, Canada in 1940 as John Carroll. She spent the first 60 years of her life as a man, marrying twice and having two children. She worked a number of jobs throughout the country, primarily in the Air Force but also...

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