Aejaie Franciscus’s story starts with a letter to Santa Claus at five years old, “I asked Santa, to make me a little girl for Christmas, as I was born a boy. To say the least, that present wasn’t under the tree, but it did set me on my life’s journey,” she recalled.
She endured bullying throughout high school and, with the support of her family, finished her transition before heading off to college in 1982. She moved to San Jose in 2004 and met her husband, Tony. The couple married during the “Summer of Love” in 2008.
“Other than the drag queens, people did not see much of this community. It was an underground community. It wasn’t until the last ten years that folks were seeing transgender folks in the LGBTQ community even,” Aejaie remembered, “I think it was about three years ago that the community saw representation at Pride events.”
Aejaie worked in the nonprofit arena for 20 years before being hired as the first transgender executive director of the Billy DeFrank Center. In an article from the Bay Area reporter, Aejaie mentioned that she was excited to start working, “This job offered me an opportunity to bring my personal life and professional life together. It’s like a coming out party.” This was the first job where she was able to speak about being transgender safely. She served as director from 2005 to 2008, during which time she spearheaded a HIV rapid testing program and worked with local schools to support kids dealing with homophobia.
Aejaie now owns the Carla’s Social Club, a space for transgender people to find resources for transitioning and get support among other transgender people.
“It will be interesting to see what happens once we come out of the pandemic, because the work we do is so social and interactive. We had events and discussion groups activities at Carla’s Salon that are online, but are more effective in person,” she explained about the local impact of the global COVID-19 crisis. “Other than discussion groups online, and anything else we can move online, there’s only so much social activity you can do. It’s hard to help girls pick out clothes online, you need to see someone in person to help them put together outfits. You need to see someone in person to give them a hug for support.”
In 1985, it was unsafe to be trans in public. As a response, private salons were opened for people in the community to dress as their true selves. Carla’s Salon opened in 1985 by Carla Blair, a heterosexual woman. Those who attended would have a private place to explore their gender identity. It was a combination tearoom, beauty salon, boutique, and social center that became popular worldwide within the transgender community.
“In 1985, the word ‘transgender’ had not gotten into the lexicon yet. Honestly, we use that word loosely now, but it was the transsexual community at the time,” Aejaie Franciscus remembered about the time Carla’s Salon was founded. “This was happening in the middle of the AIDS epidemic, yet people didn’t understand the gay community or the AIDS epidemic. When you introduce the idea of someone wanting to change their sex, they really didn’t understand that.”
In 2010, Aejaie Franciscus and her husband took over the Carla’s Salon from founder Carla Blair. Carla approached Aejaie one day and suggested the idea, and after some convincing Aejaie accepted. The name changed from Carla’s Salon to Carla’s Social Club.
Aejaie has noticed a change in clientele over the years. As people have become more comfortable with presenting in public, there’s less need for haircuts and make up, and more need for socialization and support. Carla’s is a great resource for finding doctors as well. People participating in the salon need help at every level of transition.
“I have been on the fringes of cross-dressing for a number of years now,” said one reviewer about Carla’s on their website. “Recently I decided to go deeper. I decided to have a makeover to see what I would look like as a woman. Aejaie could not have been more patient, supportive as well as doing an excellent job making me up and describing what she was doing and why. It is so comforting to know that I am not on this journey alone. Thank you so much Aejaie.”
Membership at Carla’s is around 200 people, including 70 active locker members and people who come from all over the world to attend events. “There are a lot of people you could talk to from over the years that would say Carla’s was a life saver; it was a great resource. Whether it be through me, or someone else, that that’s where they found their family and place,” Aejaie said.
As of 2020, Carla’s is still in operation, continuing to offer members locker rentals and a safe space for those to spend the day en femme. The services and memberships are listed on their website, Carlas.com.
Jules Chyten-Brennan is the medical director of the Gender Health Center, where they are building a medical center for trans, non-binary, gender expansive people. Before moving to the Bay Area, they worked in New York City reforming health care for people incarcerated in jails.
Sera Fernando was born and raised in San Jose, and now works as a senior management analyst in Santa Clara County’s Office of LGBTQ affairs. As a transgender Filipino woman, she focuses on economic empowerment for people who are transgender, non-binary, gender non-conforming and gender diverse.
Ken had come to San Jose when he was 18 to start a new life away from conservative Riverside, where he knew he could not be openly gay. He graduated from San Jose State University with a degree in political science and held numerous jobs working on public policies to improve his adopted city.
It was in early 1984 when he picked up the Sunday San Jose Mercury News and read an opinion piece by a local state Assembly member Alister McAlister stating that homosexuals should have no legal, social, or political standing in society.
It was a remarkable statement. The Assemblyman, Alister McAlister, was urging then-Governor George Deukmejian (R) to veto Assembly Bill 1, the law passed by the Legislature that would make it illegal to discriminate based on sexual orientation. If such laws were passed, he argued, LGBTQ people would become a legitimate class deserving of legal protection. (Deukmejian did, in fact, veto the bill.)
Ken was well aware of the hatred and persecution that gay people faced but this was the first time someone had phrased it so bluntly: You are undeserving of the benefits provided by society. Putting the paper down, he said to himself: “Ken, if you don’t fight for your rights to be a part of this community then no one else will.” He came out publicly a week later in a Mercury News opinion piece denouncing McAlister and arguing for acceptance of gays and lesbians (the term that was used then) as full participants in society.
Thereafter, Ken co-founded BAYMEC—the Bay Area Municipal Elections Committee—with Wiggsy Sivertsen. This political experience and work allowed Ken to run for San Jose/Evergreen Community College Board in 1992 and become the first openly gay elected official in Santa Clara County. In 2000, Ken ran for San Jose City Council and was elected. After winning reelection in 2004, he ran for Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors in 2006 and won. He was reelected in 2010 and 2014.
During his time on the Board of Supervisors, Ken would create the Office of LGBTQ Affairs, the first such county office in the nation. With a staff of 7, the office has taken on a wide spectrum of issues to improve services to the LGBTQ community. After reaching term-limits, Ken has turned his attention back to BAYMEC through its Community Foundation.
In 1979, Kathy Wolfe saw the powerful documentary Word is Out at the Frameline Film Festival. After presenting the stories of a group of diverse lesbians and gays, the filmmakers challenged the viewers to make a difference of their own.
“I was completely inspired by seeing that film,” remembers Kathy. “I immediately grasped the importance of bringing our stories to the public.”
Her first approach was to get involved in new emerging video technology. In 1981, Kathy Wolfe produced and directed a twelve-part video series, Fix it Now, featuring women contractors (mostly lesbians) demonstrating the basics of home repair. The series was shown on local public access television in Cupertino, CA, but later was shared throughout the country.
For the next several years, Kathy honed her skills in producing, directing and editing lesbian documentaries, including The Changer and the Changed, an early history of Olivia Records.
But even as Kathy worked on these projects, she realized that there were limited outlets to actually showcase her work – or that of other like minded filmmakers. She decided to shift her focus from making movies to the distribution of them.
Gays and lesbians around the country, in those days often completely closeted, were just realizing that they could watch – and rewatch – gay-themed movies in the privacy of their own home. Thus, in 1985, Kathy launched Wolfe Video, her mail order business to distribute movies to the gay community. Her very first mailer was a modest 8.5 x 14 flyer with ten titles. But over the years the catalogs grew to feature several hundred titles per catalog.
From the outset, however, Kathy’s ultimate goal was wider than mail order. She wanted to spur acceptance of our community by getting these titles seen by both gay and straight audiences.
She began acquiring rights to films, handling everything from the manufacture of the VHS tapes to promoting the titles into the educational market, and developing wholesale distribution to LGBTQ Bookstores.
The obstacles Kathy faced were daunting. Besides the usual hurdles starting a business (financing, etc), there were challenges that arose from homophobia in the business world. Manufacturers refused to replicate the tapes; printing companies didn’t want to print the catalog. Mainstream wholesale distributors were initially reluctant to consider Wolfe titles which they automatically assumed were pornography.
Matchbook Example
Even as late as 2003, a merchandising company refused to manufacture matchbooks featuring two lesbian vintage “pulp” films, because management objected to the just barely evocative cover art featuring two women.
Initially, Kathy actually faced threats, as the business, located at first in the basement of her home, drew virulent opposition and hate mail. “I worried for the safety of myself and our employees,” she remembers, “but the neighborhood and our local post office stuck by us.”
In spite of the obstacles, Kathy persisted; over time, she found great vendors, most of whom still work with her today. She also started hiring staff; in 1992, she hired Maria Lynn, who for the next 22 years would work beside Kathy to form the core of the executive team. In 2015, Maria would be succeeded by Jim Stephens.
Wolfe Video quickly developed a large group of loyal mail order customers. This was the golden era of lesbian and gay bookstores, who were happy to carry Wolfe titles. Music festivals, pride festivals, gay community centers – all were growing rapidly during the eighties and nineties, and provided a way to spread the word about gay movies and docs.
A key early filmmaker who contributed to Wolfe Video’s success was Nicole Conn, whose lesbian romances Claire of the Moon, Cynara, Elena Undone, and A Perfect Ending, were immediate hits and remain popular to this day.
As distribution grew in LGBTQ spaces, Kathy became more determined to break into the mainstream film rental market.
Key to her success in doing this was her friendship and working relationship with Lily Tomlin. In 1992 Wolfe became the distributor for the VHS of Lily’s play The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. This created a huge breakthrough into mainstream distribution and gave Wolfe Video access to the giant players of the time: Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, Tower Records as well as the 27,000 neighborhood video stores. Now, Wolfe had the ability to distribute LGBTQ movies nationally via mainstream channels.
In 2002 Wolfe Video authored their first title on DVD, Big Eden, the biggest commercial hit to date (and the first gay double DVD). Kathy applied to have the film rated PG by the MPAA – a first for a gay film – which brought Big Eden into many more mainstream outlets and prompted fan mail from community members excited to see gay content in their local video store.
Soon, Wolfe Video was releasing 12-16 titles a year on the Wolfe label, plus selling the best of the rest via their mail order arm. The company continued to grow exponentially throughout the 1990s. Another big break came in the early 2000s, when Wolfe inked a deal with Showtime to distribute Queer as Folk, and a few years later, The L Word. “When Queer as Folk came out on VHS and DVD, we were shipping them out as fast as they arrived on our dock. There were days when I took multiple truckloads to the local post office. We were spending thousands of dollars in postage and ultimately saved our historic neighborhood post office.” Kathy remembers.
Kathy developed relationships with U.S. and foreign distribution companies and began offering selected films to other countries. She also brought great foreign films to the U.S. including Oscar submissions Undertow (Peru 2010), Reaching for the Moon (Brazil 2014), and The Circle (Switzerland 2015).
NEW CHALLENGES FOR WOLFE VIDEO
Wolfe Video started six years before the unheralded launching of the World Wide Web (1991), eight years before email seeped into the mainstream (1993), and 12 years before Netflix was founded (1998). Those three developments would completely change the world of film, offering both new avenues to advertise to the gay audience and a whole new way to experience film – streaming.
The web gave Wolfe Video another way to find customers; early on, Kathy started WolfeVideo.com and began an email newsletter. She also started WolfeReleasing.com, a resource for filmmakers, as well as a way to showcase Wolfe films available for festival and theatrical screenings.
Soon after Netflix launched, they became a Wolfe Video customer; first of DVDs and later, when they launched their streaming service, Netflix licensed a large number of Wolfe titles for the channel. To this day, Netflix remains one of Wolfe’s largest customers.
In 2012, Wolfe Video pioneered global access to LGBTQ cinema by launching the first digital LGBTQ platform, WolfeOnDemand.com. Kathy also developed partnerships with a large number of other streaming platforms, including Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Showtime, Peacock, Tubi, Kanopy, Vudu, Fandango NOW, Mubi and more.
Kathy is philosophical about the state of the business. “These days our films can be streamed all over the world or purchased on DVD for guaranteed rewatching. I take pride in knowing we helped make a difference for our community. We now see ourselves – and are seen – in a much truer light.”
WOLFE’S HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE
To really get a feel for how revolutionary Wolfe Video is, and the impact Kathy had on bringing out the gay community, consider this: Megahit Philadelphia wasn’t released in theaters until 1993. When Wolfe started shipping LGBTQ titles, television (even the supposedly more open cable channels) had barely dipped their toes into gay programming, Queer as Folk did not air on cable until 2000; The L Word wouldn’t air until 2004.
It is undeniable that Kathy’s determination and vision contributed to making those mainstream titles possible by developing the audience for them. Over the years, the Wolfe Video executive team spent countless hours watching screeners and visiting film festivals around the world to find quality, diverse, representational films – and then many more hours promoting them to as many outlets as possible.
It’s an especially impressive feat given Wolfe Video is located, not in Hollywood or New York City, but in relatively rural, historic New Almaden, CA. In 2018, Kathy added an L.A. office, but basically she still works from home.
Both the LGBTQ and mainstream community recognize her impact and Kathy has received multiple awards over the years including: Cinequest’s “Maverick Spirit Award;” NCLR’s “Community Partner Award;” the San Francisco Board of Supervisors “Certificate of Honor,” and the National Organization of Women’s “Excellence in Media Award.”
Kathy Wolfe – a Game Changer
As early as 1999 Forbes Magazine recognized Kathy as an “Up and Comer,” and in 2019, her biography was chosen for the Indie Book Award WinnerGame Changers, by Robin Lowey.
But perhaps Kathy’s greatest reward was a touching interaction with a young lesbian on the occasion of Wolfe Video’s 25th anniversary in Miami. “You’re the creator of Fix it Now?” the woman asked. “That show saved me when I was a gay teenager. I watched it over and over. THANK YOU.”
Rosalie Nichols, who went by Nikki, was born in Sacramento and came to San Jose after attending Sacramento and San Francisco State Universities.
In 1975, she and her partner Johnie Staggs opened Ms. Atlas Press, a bookstore and publisher, on West San Fernando Street near downtown San Jose. It carried books and magazines by LGBTQ authors, and focused on the LGBTQ community. It also served as a social hub for the community at a time when there were not a lot of public gathering places for LGBTQ people in the South Bay besides bars.
Ms. Atlas Press also published the literary quarterly Lesbian Voices, which contained short stories, poetry, and essays. It had readers both across the United States as well as overseas.
Nikki became more active in LGBTQ politics in 1977 when she served as treasurer for the effort to defeat Proposition 6, otherwise known as the Briggs Initiative. In 1979, she was one of the founding members of San Jose’s Susan B. Anthony Democratic Club. As co-chair of that club she addressed the meeting of the California Democratic Party’s Executive Committee that was held in San Jose in July 1979.
Nikki and Johnie were also contributors to the pioneering South Bay LGBTQ newspaper Lambda News. Following disagreements with the paper’s publisher, she, Johnie and several others founded Our Paper in 1982. Lambda News would fold in 1983 but Our Paper continued regular publication until 1995.
She received a commendation from Santa Clara County’s Human Relations Commission in 1984. That same year she would become one of the first board members of BAYMEC.
Rich spent his childhood on the Peninsula before moving to Orange County for high school. He stayed in Southern California for college, at USC, before moving to the Midwest to attend divinity school at Northwestern. He was ordained as a Methodist minister and began working with homeless youth in inner city Chicago. He left the ministry rather than accept a transfer to a church near San Diego County’s massive Marine base at Camp Pendleton where he would mostly minister to suburban military families.
By this time, Rich knew his passion lay in helping those most in need, especially young people. He found a job doing social work through the YMCA, first in Orange County and then back on the Peninsula in Redwood City. He eventually formed a nonprofit group in San Mateo County—Youth and Family Assistance—that grew to have 60 employees and a $5 million annual budget.
Rich dated girls in high school and women in college. He would get married in 1974 to a woman he had met at a Methodist church in Southern California and who he had lived with for two years before marriage. However, by the time he was in his mid-30s he was ready to accept who he was. He undertook the difficult process of ending his marriage and coming out in 1982.
Rich had an early interest in politics. He was elected student body president in high school. His work with the YMCA and in the nonprofit sphere had already exposed him to public policy at the local level. Then, he began to get involved with the nascent LGBTQ political movement on the Peninsula. He became very active with the Peninsula Business Guild, a gay business group, and in late August 1984 Doug De Young introduced him at one of the founding meetings of the BAYMEC board. In September, he was elected to the board, and in 1985 he became BAYMEC’s president.
In 1992, Rich would run for San Mateo County Board of Education and win. Later in 1997, Rich was elected to the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors and in 2010 to the State Assembly, representing the heart of Silicon Valley – including parts of both San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. In the Assembly, he would spend more than four years as chair of the influential Rules Committee. In 2012, he was chosen to chair the full Legislature’s LGBTQ caucus, which would include two successive Assembly speakers during his tenure: John Perez and Toni Atkins. He would remain caucus chair until term limits forced him out of the Assembly.
In July 2017, Rich was named President and CEO of the California Forestry Association.
Today, the tech industry is hailed as a model of inclusiveness. It is considered to be one of the most LGBTQ-friendly industries in the U.S. The CEO of the world’s most valuable tech company, Apple, is gay.
This reputation did not happen naturally or overnight. It took years of struggle by LGBTQ engineers, programmers, and other tech workers. The late Rick Rudy played a key role in that struggle.
Rick was born and raised in New York City. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering from MIT and afterwards began a career in the tech industry that brought him to San Jose in the early 1970s.
In June 1982, more than two years before BAYMEC was founded, Rick was one of a handful of tech industry workers who met in San Jose to form a South Bay chapter of the San Francisco-based Lesbian and Gay Associated Engineers and Scientists. By the following February, the organization had separated from San Francisco and was renamed High Tech Gays. Rick would be its first president and help write its by-laws.
Rick was a board member of BAYMEC from the very beginning. He hosted some of the earliest meetings at his house, helped write their by-laws, and provided them with early publicity in the High Tech Gays newsletter. Rick made the time for BAYMEC when he was busier than ever. He had gotten involved in gay rights at a national level, joining the board of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in 1985. This led to interviews both locally in the Mercury News and nationally in the Advocate and the Wall Street Journal.
Sadly, Rick was one of the more than 2,000 Santa Clara County victims of the AIDS epidemic. His life was tragically cut short in 1990 at age 44.
Ron Taylor was motivated to become active in LGBTQ issues for reasons that are familiar to so many of us. In 1973, his partner died and the family wanted nothing to do with Ron. They swept into their house and took everything that had ever been purchased on his partner’s credit cards. For Ron, it was a dehumanizing moment. “This can’t go on,” Ron remembers thinking. “I need to get more politically involved.”
Part of that activism included getting involved in the anti-Briggs Initiative in 1978. Briggs had collected signatures to place an item on the California ballot to prohibit gays from teaching in public schools. The initiative was defeated, which was a great triumph. But optimism about the future of the gay movement was short lived with the rise of the Moral Majority and referenda in San Jose and Santa Clara County that overturned local gay rights ordinances in 1980. Even though he found the backlash demoralizing, he knew he couldn’t give up. “I just had to keep on fighting,” he said.
Ron became active with DIGNITY, the outreach and support group for gay Catholics. He also advised the diocese of San Jose on how to minister to the LGBTQ community, as well as to how to respond to health issues like AIDS. Ron had been strongly influenced by Vatican II and devoted much of his spare time trying to reconcile his Catholic faith with his life as a gay man.
Ron met Rick Rudy when High Tech Gays was just forming. He was active with HTG and often hosted the monthly Sunday potluck meetings at his house, before membership became so large that it needed to move to the Billy DeFrank Center. It was around this time that Ken Yeager attended one of these meetings at Ron’s house. The size of the crowd gave him the confidence that there were enough politically active gays and lesbians in San Jose to make an organization like BAYMEC successful.
By the mid-1980s, the AIDS epidemic began to consume much of Ron’s time. He became a training coordinator for ARIS, a support group for AIDS patients and their families. He served as one of the original members of the county’s AIDS Task Force.
Ron worked for the California Youth Authority for many years as a parole agent until his retirement.
