Deborah Abbott
In 2003, Abbott was chosen by Assemblyman John Laird
as “Woman of the Year” in the 27th Assembly
District.—Editor.
Brashear:
Deb, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and
your family background?
Abbott: Sure. I
always laugh and tell people that I was born at the
south end of Monterey Bay, and I did a major migration
to Santa Cruz, to the northern part of Monterey Bay. For
most of my life, I’ve lived on the bay. As I was born,
my parents were building a little adobe house in a rural
area of Monterey, literally around my bassinet. They
still live in that home.
I was born in 1953. I grew up in a neighborhood of girls
and we were out playing in the woods all of the time. I
got polio when I was two, and spent a considerable
amount of time over the years at Shriner’s Hospital in a
ward of girls. I had these incredibly romantic
relationships with a series of girlfriends when I was
little, and then through my high school years. So when I
was seventeen and came to UCSC, I had really tight
girlfriends. I had not connected the dots for myself yet
and figured out that I was a lesbian, although I look
back with amusement, because my very best friend who was
still a high school senior in Monterey would come to
visit me and we would sleep together. We would shower
together; we wrote little tender notes in the mail back
and forth. I’m sure there were lots of folks who had
connected the dots [laughter] but I always say the
writing was on the wall but it was in invisible ink to
me. I hadn’t figured it out.
I come from a working-class family. My dad worked for
the phone company, and that’s where he met my mom. She
was an operator and he was out climbing the poles. So
there was not an abundance of resources, but there was
really some good solid steadiness to having a home that
was ours and a neighborhood that was safe. My dad worked
a lot of overtime. We had enough. I went to the public
schools in Monterey and then, when I got through high
school, I didn’t know what was next.
My parents’ ambition for me was that I would be a
secretary. I had an inkling that I wanted something more
than that, but I had no idea how to apply for college.
But I happened to have a friend who had an older brother
who was going to UC Santa Cruz, and so I came and
visited him a couple times and it literally gave me an
image of what college could be. It was also not far from
home. My family had not ever traveled much. Our
vacations were always about visiting my grandmother and
aunts and uncles, most of whom lived in California, so I
hadn’t ventured very far away. Not only was college a
foreign concept, but the idea of going to college far
away was inconceivable. So I applied to only one
university, and that was UCSC, because that was the one
I had seen. I came here when I was seventeen.
Brashear: What year
was that?
Abbott: That was in
the fall of 1971. I don’t think I realized when I was
here how young UCSC was. It’s in retrospect that I
think, oh my gosh, it was such a new campus! When I was
here I was at what was called College Five, which is now
Porter College.
I lived on campus. Campus life was really different. I
lived in the dorms, but after the first month, my dorm
mate, who came from a wealthy family, got a boyfriend
and decided she wanted a single room. This was in the
days before there was such a crowd in the dorms, so I
got a double room all to myself. I painted it and moved
in a refrigerator and a hotplate which, of course, is
verboten now. I had three kittens that I had found, and
a big long plank with a carpet stapled to it that went
down to the outside meadow. I have really fond memories
of living at Porter and being a maverick in my own way,
having my cats, cooking, and baking bread, and having
lots of friends over.
I still have wonderful memories of being an
undergraduate at UCSC, mostly because I got stretched in
incredible ways that weren’t possible within my family
and in the little community I had grown up in. My
parents weren’t readers. We had Reader’s Digest and a
few magazines, but they didn’t have many books on the
shelves. I felt like a kid in a candy store, because I
had always been smart and I had always been really
curious, but I hadn’t had a lot of opportunities to have
my mind and my psyche expanded and challenged.
For awhile, I was a music major, and studied clarinet. I
decided not to continue majoring in that, but it was
wonderful to get to explore myself as a musician. I took
a lot of creative writing classes. I had known from
early on that I was a writer, but it was really exciting
to be around people who were professional writers, and
to develop myself as a writer. Then amazingly I ended up
being a biology major, because my curiosity was such
that I was fascinated by how things work. Not mechanical
things. My partner is an engineer; she’s really
fascinated by how mechanical things work. But I have
always been fascinated by what makes people tick, and
how the natural world works. And so I moved towards
being a biology major, and loved studying physiology,
and physical anthropology. Animal Morphology was one of
my favorite classes. I loved being here and immersing
myself in all kinds of different courses that stretched
me. My one regret was that I was here just as the
women’s studies department was being founded and
developed. I really wish that I had discovered that when
I was here, even though it was in a fledgling state.
Brashear: Do you
remember there being a women’s community, or even the
beginning of a queer, gay/lesbian community?
Abbott: I did
gravitate to women friends, but I didn’t have a sense
yet of there being a women’s community. I was here
before the Women’s Center was here. I’m sad. If there
had been a women’s community on campus, and a more
visible queer community, I would have figured myself out
sooner. It would have been another rich layer for me to
explore when I was here.
I talk to a lot of alumni who were aware that they were
gay or lesbian when they attended UCSC, but felt really
adrift when they were here. They felt like they were the
only ones, and that there were no other gay people to
connect with. That wasn’t my experience, even though
behaviorally, in a sense, I was being a lesbian, albeit
a romantically but not yet sexually inclined one. I was
really content, being here as I was.
Brashear: Can you
talk a little more about your coming out process?
Abbott: Throughout
my time at UCSC, I still had a very romantic friendship
with my high school friend who came and studied here.
What ended up happening is she broke up with me even
though we never called it that; she found another best
friend. I was heartbroken though I couldn’t figure out
why. This was after all, “just a friend.”
In my sophomore year I was living off campus in a little
cottage down by the boardwalk. The thing that makes me
chuckle is that when my romantic friend broke up with
me, within a week I was cultivating a very close
friendship with my neighbor. Within a couple of weeks,
we were leaving little Easter baskets on each other’s
doorsteps and spending all our free time together. It
was with her that I finally figured out that I was a
lesbian.
So my neighbor and I became intimate, but not sexual
friends, and ended up living in Santa Cruz together in
my junior and senior years. She ultimately introduced me
to the man who would be my husband. I moved up to San
Francisco with him for a year, had my first child, then
moved back to Santa Cruz. I returned because I missed my
friend terribly. It was after I moved back to Santa Cruz
that we sexualized our relationship. We literally fell
into each other’s arms one afternoon and I had an
epiphany. I finally connected the dots.
When I moved back to Santa Cruz in the winter of 1977, I
became involved in the Santa Cruz Women’s Health
Collective. For the first time, I was hanging out with
out lesbians.
Brashear: Really, so
when you were at school here that wasn’t the case?
Abbott: I am sure I
was hanging out with some lesbians at UCSC, but people
were much more closeted. At the Women’s Health
Collective, women weren’t closeted. Lesbians were
putting together a book called Lesbian Health Matters! ,
and they were out and proud.
As an aside, I have a lesbian aunt, who lives in San
Francisco. I had known she was lesbian. I had known her
partner for years. But she was of such a different
generation that I didn’t feel like her, and so it didn’t
make sense that I could be lesbian.
Anyway, here I was back in Santa Cruz with a newborn
child. I fell more deeply in love with my woman friend.
My husband and I had an open relationship, so we started
talking a lot about what this new development meant. I
actually stayed with him for a while longer because he
was someone that I really cared about, and I had a new
baby. I got pregnant again. I had a second child. So
there I was, living with a man and two young boys. I
also realized that my strongest nature was to be with
women. Over the years I had divvied up my life. I had my
sexual life with men and most of the rest with women.
But as soon as I fell into my friend’s arms, I
realized—oh my gosh. I remember laughing, thinking, oh
my God, I can have my cake and eat it too. [laughter] I
can have my intimate partners be women. That’s
absolutely the best fit for me.
Brashear: How were
your parents when you came out?
Abbott: It took me a
while to come out to them. After a couple of years, I
separated from my husband. My girlfriend was married;
she had a young child. She lived in Los Angeles. She
enjoyed our sexual involvement, but realized that she
wasn’t a lesbian. So we sort of reverted back into our
friendship and I started exploring relationships with
other women at that point. My husband and I separated.
It took me awhile to come out to my parents, because I
was terrified. When I finally did, my father was mostly
okay. He had grown up with his lesbian sister, who had
come out back in the forties. So he had more familiarity
with what lesbianism is about. My mother was just
enraged, and suicidal, and had a strong negative
response. It was really painful, mostly because I had
two little kids, and I was a single parent. She was very
rejecting. I would say it took her easily ten years to
get to a place where she could sign a Christmas card to
me. It’s not that we had no contact, because she did
want to continue a relationship with the kids, but it
was difficult for many years.
I’ve been out now for more than twenty years and my mom
is now relaxed enough that she can be comfortable around
my partner and come to our house, and has come out to a
few people herself. It’s been a long, long journey for
her and for me.
Brashear: How did
your experience in dealing with your disability when you
were young [affect] your coming out?
Abbott: That’s a
great question. As hard as it was growing up with a
disability, the piece of it that made it easier for me
to be a lesbian was that I had, from my earliest
memories, always been visibly different, and I knew I
wasn’t going to fit in, ever, no matter what. So I
didn’t have the issue that a lot of folks have when they
come out. If they have fit in, in various ways, they
have to reckon with what’ll it be like to be a deviant,
what’ll it be like to be a misfit.
Interestingly, my mother had been a fierce defender of
me, as a kid with a disability. When people would stare
at me or say mean things to me, she would… She’s a
powerful woman and she’d put her hand on her hip. And I
have an image of her with her big red purse dangling off
of her hip. She would just look at people and say, “Next
time why don’t you bring a camera, goddammit!” Then she
would turn to me and say, “Those people are really
stupid, Deborah. Those people are really stupid and
ignorant and don’t pay any attention to them!” She’d
grab me and we’d storm off. So not only had I gotten
that I was different, but that my difference was okay.
If other people couldn’t deal with it that was their
problem. That was a gift my mother gave me that
ironically backfired on her, because she helped me come
out as a lesbian.
My coming out process was in Santa Cruz, which is a
progressive community. As soon as I came out, I realized
how many gay and lesbian, queer folks there were in
town. I was at the health collective, where quite
honestly, to be queer was cool. I had a lot of support
in that circle. I developed lots of friends and whether
they were straight or queer, they were really
supportive. So my coming out, except for my family’s
response, was actually pretty easy.
You could make the case that if I already had two
stigmatized identities: one as a woman with a
disability, and two as a woman, that it could of
potentially been a struggle for me to add to the stigma.
But for me it worked the other way around. I didn’t have
issues with kissing in public or holding hands in
public. Santa Cruz is a pretty safe place to do that in.
I probably wouldn’t if I lived in some little town with
a lot of homophobic folks. But I think it was also about
that as someone with a disability, I’ve never been able
to hide who I am. I’m not about hiding. I don’t know
about hiding. I don’t want to do that.
Brashear: Can you
talk about the Santa Cruz Women’s Health Collective, and
what was going on there?
Abbott: It was
exciting. It was just a few years old when I joined.
When I look back now, I just think, oh my God, what a
phenomenal thing. It was mostly women in their young
twenties. A few people were in their mid-twenties, and
an occasional person was older than that. We built an
amazing health center. There were no abortions in Santa
Cruz County happening at that time, mostly because
Dominican Hospital was the main hospital and it was a
Catholic organization. The Women’s Health Collective was
a way to empower women who needed and wanted abortions,
so we did abortion counseling, pregnancy testing, and
drove women over the hill to Choice Medical Clinic that
was in San Jose at the time. We were self-taught. I wore
every hat there. Over the five or six years that I was
there I did everything from clean the carpets, to being
the main bookkeeper, to working the hotline and training
new volunteers to work the hotline, to doing anti-racism
trainings. I taught fertility awareness classes and
became the national chair of a fertility awareness group
for a while. I helped build their library. I learned
about collective process and group dynamics, ad nauseam
sometimes. [laughter] It was wonderful and it was
terrible!
You know, those old jokes about how many feminists it
takes to screw in a light bulb always crack me up,
because there we would be at midnight trying to figure
out what color we wanted to paint the room. But we also
were there until midnight making really important
decisions—hiring medical doctors who would allow us to
do half of the exams and run the lab. I gained so much
confidence.
When I think about what has helped bring to me to where
I am, UCSC was really instrumental in just giving me
permission to explore my creative self and to recognize
all the potential that I had. But I think most people
figure out when they get a bachelor’s that it’s not
exactly professional training. You have to go on. One of
my major critiques of UCSC was that there was really
poor advising at that time. Even though I had completed
a pre-med major, I had never been given any counsel
about how to apply to medical school, and so I didn’t. I
didn’t know how to take that step. I didn’t have any
money and my family certainly didn’t. Had I gotten help
with applications and scholarships it might have made
medical school possible for me.
My instinct though was to go into the health field and
so that’s how I landed at the Women’s Health Collective.
What the Women’s Health Collective gave me was the
practical piece. I had developed lots of skills at UCSC,
and then I got to roll up my sleeves and practice being
a health practitioner; I got to practice being a
teacher; I got to practice being an activist and an
organizer. We had a newsletter, so my journalist self
got to research and write articles, and publish them. I
developed the broadest range of skills in the six years
or so that I was there, and developed friendships that
are my closest still.
Brashear: What years
were you involved with the Women’s Health Collective?
Abbott: 1977, until
1983 or 1984, when I left. It is not called the Women’s
Health Collective anymore. It’s [now] called the Women’s
Health Center, because it has a director and a board of
directors, and a more traditional style. Decisions are
not made collectively, but it’s alive and well and
flourishing. I’m really proud. The thing that’s
wonderful about living in the same community all these
years is that I can look at that. It’s still in the same
building. I can go in there, see how it’s flourished,
and feel thrilled that I was one of the early founding
mothers that helped that still vital organization.
Brashear: What did
you do when you left there?
Abbott: When I left,
I worked at another non-profit in town called Food and
Nutrition Services, in the child care food program,
helping women who were daycare providers -- either in
their homes or in facilities -- with nutrition. They got
reimbursed by the federal government for being part of
the program. So I was once again staying under that
health umbrella, doing nutritional counseling and
helping providers with some child-care related, but
mostly health-related issues.
I continued to volunteer in the community. I started
volunteering for the Parent Center, co-leading parenting
classes. I was doing a lot of volunteer work. I was
being a single parent, co-parenting. My ex-husband had
the kids half the week; I had the kids half the week,
which worked very well in terms of me being able to be a
mom, but also having half the week to explore other
things. During this time, I was also having
relationships with women and learning about myself as a
lesbian.
I started volunteering for Environmental Travel
Companions, an organization that took a variety of folks
on outdoor adventures, mostly people with disabilities,
and inner city kids. So I learned to be a river guide,
and sea kayak. On the weekends when I didn’t have my
kids, I would go off to the river and row my brains out,
have great sex with a fellow guide, then come back late
Sunday and show up for work on Monday morning.
I finally got a big tap on the shoulder around this
time. I had a variety of friends who were putting the
pieces together for me. Once again there was the writing
on the wall that I wasn’t reading for myself. My friends
were basically saying, “Deb, you are volunteering in all
of these organizations, and you are working at your
little non-profit job and struggling so hard. (For
probably ten years I had less than twenty dollars to my
name at one time.) Why don’t you consider going off and
being a counselor?” But I didn’t come from a family that
had gone to college. It was kind of a fluke that I had
gone to UCSC. I didn’t know how to make the next step.
But once again there was a local school, a local
graduate program. I knew someone who was affiliated with
it and it didn’t seem so big and scary. I knew that I
couldn’t go away to school because I had my kids here.
So, with a lot of encouragement from friends and lovers,
I ended up being part of a graduate program that trained
marriage and family therapists.
There were several years when I worked and raised my
kids and went to graduate classes and got my master’s
degree. And then more years of accumulating clinic
master’s training hours towards my license. When I look
back on it, I am just amazed. My kids tease me. My one
son is a gourmet cook. He says, “Mom, thank you. I‘m a
chef because [laughter] of all those grilled cheese
sandwiches I had to endure. I had to learn to cook to
save myself.” I finished graduate school and once again
was working in the non-profit world. I had a part-time
private practice. One of my lovers had been volunteering
at the Women’s Cancer Resource Center up in Berkeley,
and I also had a young friend who had cancer. There were
no resources for her. I was aware of the Santa Cruz AIDS
Project in town and all of the incredible resources for
someone with HIV. If you had HIV, your dog could get a
walk; you got food delivered, and you got rides to
doctor’s appointments—there was a whole range of
services. If you were a woman or a lesbian with cancer,
there was nothing. I was struck by how many lesbians
were involved with the Santa Cruz AIDS Project, and at
that time were primarily caring for gay men with HIV. I
just thought, oh my gosh, we have nothing for ourselves
if we have a cancer diagnosis. I was motivated out of a
variety of those factors to bring a women’s cancer
resource center to Santa Cruz.
The first meetings were up here at the University. There
were a number of staff members who had had breast cancer
and they did a forum. I literally brought a clipboard
and a piece of paper and passed it around and said, “Any
woman who’s interested in building a resource center for
women with cancer here in Santa Cruz sign up.” When the
forum was over, I had a page full of names. Three or
four of us launched the first meeting ten years ago, in
the spring of 1992. There I was, using all of those
skills I had used in my non-profit work over the years.
I became the first executive director of the
organization. I plugged in the phone and set it on a
card table in one of the bedrooms in my little
apartment. I was very dedicated to WomenCARE. This was
WomenCARE’s home for its first couple of years. It was
my life for about five years. I worked with a great
group of women to launch it. I’m really pleased that ten
years later it is alive and well and flourishing. I feel
like a proud mama.
I ended my work at WomenCARE and began teaching in a
graduate psychology program at John F. Kennedy
University over the hill, training students how to be
therapists, working in the clinic as a supervisor. Then
someone tapped me on the shoulder again and said, “Deb
there is an opening at UCSC for the first director of
the GLBT Center and I think you’d be fabulous for the
job.” I thought, how amazing it would be for me to come
full circle back to campus. When I’d been here as an
undergrad I didn’t have much of an inkling that I was a
lesbian. To come back, with all of the gifts UCSC gave
me, and with all of the great experiences I had had in
the meantime, and bring those back to the University,
and provide young queer and questioning students [with]
what hadn’t been here for me, was a really thrilling
prospect.
My other motivation in coming back to UCSC was that I
had spent many years working in nonprofit health care
organizations, but ironically, had no health insurance.
One of the personal appeals about working at the
University was that I would finally have health
insurance. As a woman with a disability who was getting
older, I realized I really needed to take care of myself
in that way. So honestly, part of the motivation was not
only the challenge of the job, but saying it’s time for
me… I’d been taking care of so many women out there in
the world. But it was time for me to be taken care of,
and to make enough money so that I could save some and
to have benefits so that if something happened around my
disability I would be covered.
Brashear: Can you
talk about the history of the GLBT Center?
Abbott: I was hired
a little over four years ago. I stepped into this space
and thought, oh my God, what a beautiful building!
Cathedral ceilings, floor-to-ceiling glass windows
looking out over the redwoods. I was also struck by how
shabby all the furnishings were. It seemed like
everything was duct-taped. There had been no paid staff
and no budget to speak of. Under these circumstances,
students had done a remarkable job of running the Center
by themselves.
Brashear: How long
had they been doing that?
Abbott: For around
seven years before I arrived, there were student
leaders; the space was here for them to use. It was
dedicated to GLBT students and they were here for, I
would say around five years, passing a torch of
leadership. They would come, and then graduate. There
were several student organizations that did everything
from activism, to staffing the center, having meetings,
doing the very best they could with networking and
welcoming queer students into the campus.
Brashear: Do you
know how the space was given for this purpose?
Abbott: Yes, a staff
member here at Merrill College gave the space to GLBT
students. She who was, interestingly, a woman I had
worked with years ago at the Women’s Health Collective.
At that time she identified as a lesbian. When she
worked on campus she was married to a man. She was a
strong ally for queer students, and supported their need
for a dedicated space. In 1990, there was not such a
huge space crunch on campus. This space has a colorful
history. It had been a recreation room, the Kosher
Co-op. It’s been a pottery studio and a dance studio.
When I was a student here in the 1970s there was a
fireplace in the middle of the room. I came here for
poetry readings.
When I arrived four years ago, I had a sense that there
was a lot of affection for the place. But it was also
sorely neglected and very shabby. I had my work cut out
for me. I had a three-quarter time position, a very
small budget and no staff. But because I had done all
sorts of start-ups—I had built WomenCARE from the ground
up and was involved very early with the Women’s Health
Collective—I was not daunted. Plus, I came from a good
working-class family, who taught me about squeezing
blood out of the proverbial turnip. I have an aunt who
literally still hangs her tea bags on the line to dry to
re-use them. I believe they hired the right person. I
had done start-ups and I was extremely thrifty. One of
my great sources of pride in the last four years is how
much we’ve done with the very few financial resources we
have had.
The University system is so vast. So many offices. The
first year was about building relationships with the
different campus units and the colleges, and of course
all the great students. My early role was about being
watchful and learning, discovering how I could best be
of use.
It was really clear that we needed to have a space that
was accessible, and had resources that were readily
available. So I worked on nuts-and-bolts things like
going down to the Surplus Barn on campus and upgrading
our furniture slowly but surely. I’m also a thrift store
maven. I would go to garage sales and ditch the really
bad couch for a slightly better one. One thing that
makes me proud is that when people walk in they are
struck by the beauty of the place, even though our
furnishings are still somewhat funky. People nonetheless
see how colorful it is, that we have plants growing and
the tea kettle is on, and they say, ”Oh, it feels like
home.” It has felt really important to me to create a
feeling of home, of welcome, for queer students, who
don’t often have a home they can go back to, who get cut
off from their families, either partially or completely.
When I arrived, students gave me a lot of feedback that
it had been fairly cliquey at the Center. I worked to
change this right away, so that students who were really
strong and out in their queer identities would feel
welcome, but also students who were tentative, who
weren’t sure, could come in here and not feel
intimidated. A huge ongoing task has been making sure
that the whole campus is a safe and welcoming
environment. I didn’t want queer students to feel that
they had to be here under this roof to feel comfortable
and safe. And I wanted non-queer students to come into
the Center to hang out and learn about queer culture. I
especially wanted to make sure that queer students of
color, who can often feel betwixt and between, felt that
this was their home. From the beginning, we began
collaborating with the other ethnic resource centers on
campus and did co-programming, so that queer students of
color would see a queer presence at more ethnically
focused events and could also feel completely at home at
queer-focused events.
Brashear: Have you
seen that grow stronger over the years?
Abbott: Absolutely.
The thing that’s a blessing on this campus is that there
are not only a lot of queer students, but there are also
a lot of out queer staff and faculty. There is a broad
range of ethnicities represented among those staff and
faculty. So there are diverse models and mentors for
students. I have so many queer colleagues on this campus
who are helping. The good news is that the Center is by
no means the only player as far as educating around
queer issues.
Brashear: What do
you feel are some of the challenges you face as the
director of the Center?
Abbott: Well, I
think one of the biggest struggles, which I’ve already
alluded to, is that as soon as we started hanging out
our shingle, as soon as we started developing
relationships with various campus units, and got a group
email lists going, we got too big for our britches
almost immediately. One of the biggest challenges,
personally, is how to keep from getting overwhelmed and
burned out by the volume of demands. It’s been a
struggle to add more staff. Our budget is painfully
small. Now we’re in the midst of a University-wide
freeze and cutbacks. It’s really hard on us, because
there is so much work to do, and our budget is so small.
We are constantly prioritizing, because we can’t get to
everything. All of these fabulous ideas get generated
but we’ve got to pace ourselves, do a good job with what
we can, and not expand beyond our capacity. I would say
that the biggest frustration and challenge has been
having adequate financial and staff resources for us to
be able to do our job.
The other part that has been a challenge is that I
fiercely see this as being a Center that’s not only
queer-focused, but that’s a multicultural Center where
people of all genders, and sexual orientations, and
ethnicities feel absolutely welcome and supported, and
get appropriate referrals and resources. Because our
budget is so small, we’re not able to do all of the
programming that we’d like to do. We do a lot of
collaborating. But it’s kind of like having a bake sale
to do every event. We’re getting $25 from this place and
$100 from that place. It’s very labor-intensive to have
to do programs in that way. Now I am full-time and we
finally have a three-quarter time program coordinator.
We were able to hire a few work study students. It
concerns me that because our staff is so small (the
professional staff is not even quite two of us), it’s
hard to have a representative staff. I feel that the
best way to have a Center that draws the broadest group
of students, serves staff and faculty on this campus,
and reaches out into the community, which we do a lot
of, is to have that kind of diversity represented in the
staff. We just simply can’t do that. That’s an ongoing
source of frustration for me. We need to triple the size
of our staff. We could easily keep everyone busy if we
had half a dozen people working here. And we would also
have a more representative staff that would make the
Center be even more responsive to the various folks on
campus.
Brashear: Can you
talk about the different groups that meet here?
Abbott: There are so
many student organizations that meet here. I think we
have almost a dozen. Some of the oldest ones are: the
GLBT Network; Sappho, which is the queer women’s group;
Stonewall, the group for queer men; and Bi the Way, for
bisexually focused folks. Queers of Color has been a
fantastic group for forever, too. They are one of the
most dynamic, and they do amazing programming. There is
a group that’s at a low ebb now, called Genderation X,
which is for folks questioning gender. We have a group
of queer graduate students. We have a fantastic student
organization called CLUH. They do a great job of helping
to educate the campus community, not only about
heterosexism and how it works, but about how the other
isms link with heterosexism. We have a group called
Queer Geeks. We have a new group which I am really
pleased about, which is called Kids of Queers. It’s
students who have grown up with queer parents or queer
family members, who may or may not identify as queer
themselves, but have felt really identified with the
queer community. They may have been in their strollers
in Gay Pride marches. We have a group called OyGayValt!
which is for Jewish students.
Brashear: Do most of
those groups meet here in this space?
Abbott: Almost all
of them meet here. They love meeting here in this space,
although I encourage the student organizations to meet
in various places around campus, and collaborate with
non-queer student groups, and they do.
Let me tell you about some of the other services. We
have a library. When I got here, we had a very small
collection of books that were in pretty poor condition,
although we had a few valuable items that went over to
Special Collections. Now, I’m proud to say we have more
than a thousand books in our collection, ninety-five
percent of which have been donated. We have the
collection cataloged on a database. It’s a circulating
collection with a very high circulation. We have local
and regional magazines, journals, and newspapers. We
have our group email lists. We have several hundred
people who are either on the undergraduate list, the
graduate student list, the staff list, the faculty list,
or the news list. That’s one of the best ways that we
network. A college will sponsor a queer-related event
and they know we’ll get the word out. We partner with
folks in helping to publicize queer-related events. We
have a great website, and a fabulous new webmaster.
The Center is a safety net for students. I can’t tell
you how many times we have students who literally come
in in tears and say, “I’m not sure why I’m here, but
could I talk to you?” I close my door and we spend the
next half hour with the Kleenex box close at hand, and a
student beginning to put voice to their sexual
orientation or gender issues. We don’t function as
therapists exactly, but students trust us as a safe
place to get help. We do make referrals to Counseling
and Psychological Services, so that students can get
ongoing support.
Students will sometimes say, “What do you do here?” It’s
amazing. Over the course of a day, I’ll be writing a
letter of recommendation for a student who wants to go
to graduate school; I’ll be counseling a student who is
in tears over the breakup of his first relationship; and
I’ll be providing supervision for the field placement of
a student intern who is a working with a community
organization. We go around campus and into the community
and give lectures on GLBT-related issues. Our programs
coordinator just went to a class and did a lecture on
domestic violence within the queer community, which
happens to be a specialty of his. A couple of weeks ago
we went to the Cowell Health Center, and gave the new
psychology interns a lecture on clinical issues in
working with young queer clients. We do trainings for
the health center staff, for the doctors and nurses,
helping sensitize them to medical and health-related
issues for queer students.
Every fall quarter we train hundreds of residential
assistants who oversee the dorms on campus. We also have
a safe space program, so every fall we distribute
thousands of very visible pink triangle cards that say
“Safe Person, Safe Space,” and convey that there is not
a tolerance for homophobia at UCSC. Queer frosh come to
UCSC, see all of the pink triangles all over campus and
know that they are welcome.
When a hate incident occurs on campus, if it’s GLBT-related,
we become involved. We serve on a variety of committees
that are related to hate bias. We have an art gallery.
We sponsor art exhibits and receptions. We have a number
of programs throughout the year, [such as] celebrating
African American history month. In our gallery right now
you will see a beautiful multimedia display that our
students put together that features famous queer African
Americans. We’ll do a film night and serve sweet potato
pie for dessert.
We do Rainbow Graduation. This will be the fourth annual
Rainbow Graduation. That’s a beautiful event down at the
Women’s Center, where we honor all of the queer students
who are graduating. We’ve had an amazing outreach
program into the high schools in the area and gotten
UCSC students to be involved. We’ve sponsored high
school proms. We have high school seniors come up and
take part in the Rainbow Graduation.
We’re also an HIV test site, so people are able to come
here and have an HIV test done. We were very
instrumental in launching a high school project for GLBT
and questioning youth, and we work with the Queer Youth
Task Force in the community. We partner with the
Diversity Center, which is the community’s GLBT center.
I’m really proud of our community involvement. UCSC’s
had a reputation of having a pretty big town-gown split,
and I’ve worked really hard to make sure that we’re in
the community. Many of our students live in the
community, and graduate and continue to live in the
community. I’ve really wanted to cultivate that
relationship.
We advise faculty members. Faculty members will often
call and we’ll either be guest lecturers in their
courses, or we’ll provide them with links to videos and
to different materials that would be useful to them in
their courses. We work with graduate students similarly
in their research.
We are working with alumni. We’re launching a GLBT
alumni affinity group. We have got our work cut out for
us there, because there was never a database that
captured queer alums. We’re starting from scratch in
terms of being able to locate and identify queer alumni,
and build a core group of queer alums. We just got a
little grant to create an addition to our website that
allows GLBT alum to find us more easily, and network
with each other. So that’s an area we’re growing in.
We’re also about to launch a Friends of the GLBT Center
group, whose mission will be to help us financially.
We’ve had fabulous volunteers, but what we need is a
group of dedicated volunteers who will recognize that we
need to build our funding base in order to really move
and grow. We want to be able to offer emergency
scholarships to queer students who come out to their
parents and get cut off. We want to provide mentoring
opportunities between older queer folk, including
alumni, and current students. We have all kinds of
ideas, but we really need an organized volunteer base
and funding to do that. That’s a project very much in
the works.
Brashear: Have you
encountered any resistance along the way that you’ve
felt was coming from a homophobic place?
Abbott: Quite
honestly, the entire time that I’ve been on campus I’ve
been astonished at the absence of homophobic responses
directed at me or at our program. I know that homophobia
exists on campus. Part of our work is addressing it.
There’s harassment. Our flyers get torn down on a
regular basis. But I would say overall there has not
been resistance to our work. I have developed great
working relationships with administrators and other
staff in the colleges, at the health center, at Family
Student Housing.
I think that’s testimony to the quality of staff who get
hired at the University, the fact that there are a lot
of queer people on the staff and in the administration,
who in their own ways help educate and challenge the
homophobia that exists. There certainly were staff and
faculty who came before me on campus who had done a lot
of that work already. It feels really good to work in an
environment where we don’t feel just tolerated. I know
that there are Centers around the country at different
universities that are tolerated, at best.
Brashear: Do you
think that that has something to do with Santa Cruz,
with the town itself having a large queer population?
Abbott: I do. Santa
Cruz is well known for being a progressive community.
UCSC has been considered the maverick within the UC
system, so it has drawn people who are more progressive.
It’s certainly drawn queer people. We have a kind of
critical mass. We’re considered one of the top-ten
universities in the country in terms of queer
friendliness. The more we’re out with that reputation,
the more we draw faculty, staff, and students. We’re
also close to San Francisco, so the appeal for a lot of
queer folks coming here is that they don’t have to live
in the city, but it’s easy to be able to bop up to San
Francisco and take advantage of all of the queer stuff
that happens there.
Brashear: Why do you
think you were picked to be the first director of the
GLBT Center?
Abbott: Well, I’m
not exactly sure what the hiring committee had in mind,
but I think folks recognized that I had really varied
experience. I had the experience of being a student at
UCSC. I had been in town ever since, so I knew the
community of Santa Cruz. I had been out for a lot of
years, so I was well-established in my lesbian identity.
I knew a lot of folks on campus, even though I hadn’t
worked on campus before. The fact that I had been
involved in the Women’s Health Collective and at
WomenCARE in their early years, meant I knew how to take
a very low-funded organization and build it from the
ground up, I think that had appeal. I also think there
was a recognition, an it’s accurate, that I was a Jill
of all trades. I had worked with everyone from kids to
adolescents to college-aged folks. I had counseled them.
I had taken them river rafting. I had taught in a
college setting before, so I knew what it was like to be
faculty. They recognized that if someone fell apart in
my office I had the tools to help do some triaging. And
I think I convinced them I could build a Center without
having a million dollar budget.
I look back on these first four years, it was a really
good match, both for me personally, and for the
University, because I’m a stable person, I’ve been very
dedicated, shown up and provided the kind of foundation
that I think the Center needed. It used to be that
people would come and the Center would sometimes be open
and sometimes closed. I’ve made it a priority to keep
the doors open, to be a dependable presence. I’m also an
idea person. The Center is perpetually exciting to me
because we can bring different speakers; we can start
new programs. It’s dynamic. The Center is really
dynamic. I think that students would probably say that
we’re pretty responsive to their ideas and we do the
best we can within our budget restrictions to capitalize
on the great ideas and energy that they bring.
What I haven’t talked about is being a writer, that part
of my coming out process was elaborated through being a
writer, writing and publishing my own work. I put out an
anthology about women who had been heterosexually
married and then came out of their heterosexual
marriages into their lesbianism or bisexuality. My
writing has helped me in my coming out process, in my
developmental process. I think it’s also been a very
positive influence at the Center in so much as I’ve
really supported ‘zine projects. We’ve worked with
journalists at the various student newspapers. I really
understand the power of the word and the power of
getting the word out. So we’ve had a column called
“Homos on the Hill” that’s in the community’s queer
paper called Manifesto , and we’ve also made sure that
we regularly are visible in campus papers, not only
student papers, but papers that go out to alums as well.
I think my writer’s sensibility in knowing how the
printed word and when broadcast can make an impact has
been helpful.
Brashear: When you
look back to when you first came here as a student, and
then think about where things are today, what kinds of
thoughts come up for you?
Abbott: It’s been
thrilling for me to be here. Every time I step out of my
vehicle in the morning and I smell that wonderful woodsy
smell, it brings me back to thirty-one years ago, when I
was a student here. That’s a good chunk of my life. I’ve
come full circle. It’s really wonderful to see how my
personal development has also paralleled the development
of the Center. Queer folks have always been on campus,
but for so long they were invisible. I was queer when I
was here, although I was invisible even to myself. It’s
wonderful to see how we are flourishing and providing a
lot of valuable resources, that we’re actually seen as
one of the best places in the whole country for queer
students to come and matriculate. That’s thrilling. I
don’t even have words for how exciting it is for me to
have gotten the opportunity to be instrumental in
process. We have established a good foundation and a
good home and our basic program is set.1
-
The Princeton Review rated UCSC
as the number one public university in the United
States in terms of acceptance of GLBT students.
According to the SERU [Student Experiences in the
Research University] 2001 UC-wide survey, UCSC is
the number one campus in the UC system for GLBTI
student enrollment; in fact UCSC has more than twice
the GLBTI students of other UC campuses.
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