Notables

Rick Rudy

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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.

BAYMEC HIV/AIDS

Ron Taylor

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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.

Wiggsy Sivertsen

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By Ken Yeager

Born Aimee Devereaux Sivertsen in Southern California, she has gone by Wiggsy since early childhood, after her sister mispronounced “wiggles” to describe her rambunctiousness. She graduated from San Jose State University in 1962, and later received a master’s degree in social work from Tulane University in New Orleans.

Wiggsy’s career as an activist and community leader began after she was outed and then fired while working as a counselor at the Peninsula Children’s Center in Palo Alto. This traumatizing event would later push her to get involved with community organizing.She had already been working part-time at San Jose State’s counseling center so she was able to join the university’s staff full time in 1968. She was SJSU’s first openly gay employee.

While Wiggsy was out at San Jose State, she was not active politically until 1977 when State Senator John Briggs authored an initiative that would have banned gays and lesbians from teaching in California public schools. She took an active part in the campaign to defeat the Briggs Initiative, which was on the November 1978 ballot as Proposition 6, making appearances on both radio and television.

As a result of the Briggs Initiative, Wiggsy’s public profile began to steadily rise. Over the next two decades she would become one of the most visible members of the Silicon Valley’s LGBTQ community.

One night in the summer of 1984 at the Toyon bar in San Jose, Wiggsy and Ken Yeager talked about the need for an LGBTQ political group. The two of them devised the outlines of a regional LGBTQ political action committee focused on Santa Clara, San Mateo, and Santa Cruz counties. The committee would eventually be known as the Bay Area Municipal Elections Committee (BAYMEC), modeled after a similar organization in Southern California known as the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles (MECLA).

Wiggsy heavily shaped how BAYMEC operated. She helped prepare their initial budget, was one of the signers of the first checks, and the architect of their endorsement policy for political candidates.

As a professor and counselor at San Jose State University, she campaigned against ROTC programs on campus because of the Defense Department’s discriminatory policies toward lesbians and gays. She was active in other ways on campus, too, including as a faculty advisor to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance and the Women’s Center. It was in these roles she counseled hundreds of students in the coming out process.

Wiggsy has been a tireless advocate, teaching classes to San Jose police officers about LGBTQ lifestyles, fighting for more programs for those who experienced domestic violence, advocating for LGBTQ seniors, being president of the California Faculty Union, and serving on the county’s Commission on the Status of Women, the Senior Commission, and the Human Rights Commission, to name a few. In 1988, she began teaching a sociology class at SJSU on gay and lesbian issues. In 1994, the university would establish a scholarship in her honor that focused on students who worked to support LGBTQ rights.

In short, there hasn’t been a single human rights issue that she hasn’t been involved in for the last half century.

BAYMEC

Amy Caffrey

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Amy Caffrey’s father was in the military so she grew up moving around the country, but eventually settled in Virginia. She remembers growing up in Virginia as “a terrible place to come out. They’re still fighting the Civil War. I was dating a black woman and that really didn’t go well.” After doing research to find safer areas to live as a lesbian, she landed on moving to California and moved to San Jose in 1982.

A strong lesbian and women community existed at this time but they needed somewhere to meet. Amy had been collaborating with students at SJSU around the time that Sisterspirit was being born. “One of the reasons why Mary contacted me was due to my work at the San Jose State radio program, which I worked on with Kathy Carter. We played women’s music, which was a different type of music in the world at that time.” From there she met the other women and formed Sisterspirit alongside them.

Amy works in counseling, focusing on the LGBTQ community, and teaches at SJSU now. She advocates to have more conversations about same sex domestic violence and works with LGBTQ youth at SJSU to help them find community. Noticing that students come to her to try to find community, that it is not easy to get into groups, or it feels exclusive and not as open to everyone as it was previously. Amy does what she can to help guide them into the organizations she knows are still operating.

Reflecting on her time in San Jose, Amy said in a recent interview, “I’ve been here 37 years, which is cool because I’ve been with my partner for 36 of those, and it’s very cool that we still like each other. What’s interesting to me is that it’s a long time, but I’m not sure how much actually happened during that time in terms of progress. We have a lot further to go but how do you really get people interested again in fighting for rights when they think they already have them?”

Sisterspirit

Peter Johnson

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Days after the 1993 Walk for AIDS in downtown San Jose, the Mercury News ran an article that illustrated just how devastating the epidemic was in those years.

“As the fourth annual Walk for AIDS drew near, every visitor to the bedside of Peter Johnson had to make a pledge. “He was dying and he was asking people to sponsor him,” said his mother, Helen Johnson. “On Monday, Peter Johnson—down to 100 pounds from his normal 150, 6-foot-1—confided to his friend Bob Clayton: “It’ll be a chair-athon for me (Sunday).” I said, ‘Fine. We’ll all push.’”

Regrettably, Peter Johnson didn’t make it to the annual fund-raising walk for the disease. He died of AIDS on October 13, 1993, just under two months after his 30th birthday.

Throughout his illness, Johnson drew strength from the support of his family. His mother, Helen, volunteered at Aris alongside him and walked in the AIDS Walk with him every year. She continued to walk for many years after Johnson’s death.

Johnson had graduated from Overfelt High School in 1981. He was diagnosed with HIV at the end of the 80s and shortly afterwards began volunteering with Aris. By early 1991, he was a member of the Aris board with the group’s executive
director Bob Sorenson telling the Mercury News that Peter was “one of our best interpersonal ambassadors.”

In 1992, he was appointed to the County AIDS Commission. He attended every commission meeting, even those where there was not a quorum present. Sadly, his time on the commission was too short.