Jim Andris, Facebook

Interview of Jim Andris by Charles Koehler of Lambda Reports

Koehler: I’m Charles Koehler and this is Lambda Reports. Our guest today is a professor and a songwriter. He served on the board of St. Louis’s Metropolitan Community Church and was president of the Gay Academic Union. He helped to found the St. Louis chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays and was former host of GayTalk, the predecessor to this program, Lambda Reports, nearly a decade ago. We welcome to Lambda Reports this morning, Jim Andris.

Andris: Good morning, good morning Charles; it’s nice to meet you — nice to be here, I mean. [Laughter.] I met you before.

Koehler: You've done so many different things in the lesbian and gay community; what accomplishment are you happiest about.

Andris: Well I think that ot a general level I’m happiest about the fact that I just had the courage to speak out wherever I was in the 70s at my work at the university and also take an active role in the gay politics at that time.

Koehler: Now the university we are talking about is Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville?

Andris: Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. I suppose the one thing that I really enjoyed the most, it was a real challenge, was that I organized single-handedly National Gay Blue Jeans Day in 1978 at SIUE.

Koehler: Wow! Tell us a little bit of more about that.

Andris: Well I first tried to get some interest; I couldn’t find any faculty who were willing to do it with me, and the student groups at that time were sort of falling apart. So I decided I would do it myself, and I put ads in the newspaper that said things like "Take a gay professor to lunch." And then on Friday, which was National Gay Blue Jeans Day, I went across the campus and announced that I was their gay professor on campus that was coming out, and I was celebrating National Gay Blue Jeans Day. And that was quite an eye-opener for me, because I said that to maybe 50 people and I got a lot of interesting reactions.

Koehleer: For some of our listeners who might have been in a crib at the time of the 1970s, they might not know what National Gay Blue Jeans Day is all about. Can you tell us just a little bit about it?

Andris: I wish I could remember who dreamed this up, but the idea is that gay people are expected to go around pretending that they’re straight, and people constantly assume that people are straight unless they announce it. And people who are straight perhaps don’t appreciate what it’s like to so to speak be walled in like that by social assumptions. So in National Gay Blue Jeans Day it’s announced previously that the gay people will wear blue jeans. So then if someone comes up to a straight person says "Oh, you are wearing blue jeans; are you gay?" it gives them the feeling that an assumption is being made about them and maybe raises their consciousness a little bit. [Laughter.]

Koehler: So you were saying before I interrupted you about going around campus announcing that you’re the gay professor on campus and this is National Gay Blue Jeans Day. What was the response of the folks you talked to?

It was a spectrum. I got some overt hostility from three guys carrying, uh, waving a Bible over their head, and they were reading to me from Leviticus and telling me that it says in the Bible that homosexuality is against God‘s will. But by and large, the responses ranged from boredom and yawning, to lack of interest, to titterring. But the then president, Kenneth Shaw, was very hospitable and talked to me about the problem. And I noticed the other day that he was on TV, he’s now the chancellor at the university of Wisconsin, and the professors there have voted to take ROTC off of the campus because the military discriminates against gay peoplem and he was still speaking out favorably in favor of gay rights. So I wonder if he remembered what I had to say 10 years before.

Koehler: I wonder, you never know what effect what you might say today might have in future years. One of the things that I mentioned earlier is that you were a former host of GayTalk, which is a predecessor. How long ago was that?

Andris: It was in 1979.

Koehler: Can you can you tell us what the St. Louis lesbian and gay scene was like when you were hosting GayTalk?

Andris: It was an exciting time to be in the gay community because we weren’t yet dealing with the AIDS problem, and so we had just come through a decade where we felt we made made a lot of strides and gains in gay rights. And the next year would be the first pride week so the pressure in 79 was mounting for the gay community to feel the sense of organization and and pride. It was really a nice time to be alive. And it still is, I mean,

Kohler: But it is an even more exciting time in some ways.

Andris: Well, no, it’s different. I’m just saying … it was … we didn’t have to deal, we could deal a lot with our pride, and we didn’t have the very difficult issue of what does AIDS mean for us to deal with at the time.

Koehler: Can you give us an idea of some of the guest that you had on; what were some of the topics?

Andris: I had Don Clark on once. He wrote the book Loving Someone Gay. I tried to ask various people who supposedly would have a knowledge base, a sociologist of education, and then I had a man on who had been kicked out of the Navy after 14 years because it was discovered that he was gay. And I just tried to do a range of of interesting [topics]. And also I must mention that the other person who did this show with me was Byron Davidson Byron Davidson. And Byron Davidson died on August 9 last of this last year. And he had a lot of interesting people on on the show too. So I just tried to get either experts talking about it, or gay people who had a story to tell—something either positive or negative. I had a lesbian couple on who talked about what it was like living together in their situation.

Koehler: What do you feel have been some of the biggest changes since that time, aside from AIDS?

Andris: Well, I think that’s a good question I think almost everything that has happened to us, as I told you earlier,, I’m not so in touch with the politics right now, but I think we’ve lost something. I remember that The Advocate in the 70s had lots of articles about gay history, and I read them avidly: who this and that person was that contributed to this and that. People were really interested in finding out what their roots were, but I think that in the 80s we were so busy dealing with the problem of our change in our sexual ethics and so forth, or how we’re going to deal with AIDS, that we we haven’t had time to think about our roots and as much. So I think I see that as a big change. I wanted to mention one more show that I had on. I met peoole by that radio show. I talked about the Arthur Evans' book Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, in which he tries to trace historically the roots of prejudice against gays in Western Civilization, and shows that in fact, it was a case of discrimination and not something that was built in to nature. And I had someone that called me up and said, "You don’t know me, but I heard your show, and it was the most interesting thing I ever heard, the idea that the Catholic church in the Middle Ages systematically suppressed the Celtic tribes which had a different form of religion in which homosexuality wasn’t denigrated. And he said I’d like to get together with you sometime. We became very good friends, and so I met people through the radio show too, that was a nice.

Koehler: Something that our listeners might not know about you that I just briefly is quite a musician composer and songwriter. I was wondering what you can tell us about how you got started in the whole area of songwriting.

Andris: I’m told that I crawled up on the piano bench when I was three years old and started playing the piano, and I’ve been doing stuff every since. About 25 years ago I discovered that I could express my experiences, and if I had an emotion to deal with, I could express it in a song.

Koehler: And where do you get the inspiration for your songs?

Andris: I don’t know. It comes to me often times. I just think of a melody if I’m thinking about something, and the song comes out.

Koehler: There’s one particular song that you wrote that I particularly like is a song about computers. Can you briefly tell us about that?

Andris: Well in 1980 I got interested in microcomputers and after about three years I wrote a song called the MicroComputer Blues that talks about this frustrated hacker that — and this, of course, I am permitted poetic license of sometimes writing songs about straight people, I try not to discriminate — this is about a married man whose family becomes pale and gaunt because he spends all of his time in front of a computer. It always gets a laugh wherever I play it.

Koehler: I understand that you even had an occasion to talk to Apple's founder, Jobs about it.

Andris: Steve Jobs, yeah. I gave him a copy of my tape, but so far he hasn’t called me back. [Laughter.]

Koehler: Oh, well. We have a few minutes now; I understand you brought your guitar. Would you care to do a quick number for us?

Andris: For sure, I’ll do my best. I wrote a song called New Age Fairy. Let’s see if I can do a couple of verses from that. I should’ve brought the words, and I didn’t.

Koehler: Great. We'll wing it.

Andris: I am a New Age fairy; it helps me to explain
the puzzles that have been floating around in my poor brain.
In youth, I was effeminate, and though it made me blue,
I now know that I was a queen in ancient Egypt, too.

I am a New Age fairy; androgyny is in.
These macho males are skating on some ice that’s mighty thin.
It used to be us bottom men, the public did deride,
But now they say we're more in touch with our receptive side.

And all those gaudy rhinesones that I strung around my arm
Were just my love for crystals in embryonic form.
Those nasty boys that labled me a sissy and a wife
Now lack the sensitivity that I've had all my life.

I am a new fairy, and I hope the label sticks.
My life is quite exciting, even though reviews are mixed.
I've even got a lover just as macho as they come,
But he’s a New Age fairy too, so I ain't quite so dumb

Andris: And of course "Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah." Well, that's one verse.

Koehler: Well, we have time for more of the same or another song.

Andris: Well, let's see. Could I remember another one?

I am a new fairy. I love the harp and flute.
I dance in dreamy moonlight, pan-like, in my birthday suit,
And if you’re dancing with me, and we touch our private parts,
Well that's just another way the goddess sends love to our hearts.

And let me tell you, I’ve been dealt some cards that were in spades.
I’ve lost some of my best friends, and still others live with AIDS.
But I believe that even here, holistic health is best.
When we first heal our spirits, we can handle all the rest.

I am a new fairy, and have I got news for you.
It won't be long before you 'll be a New Age fairy, too.
'Cause what was once bizarre will soon become the standard way
And everyone will dance in moonlight 'til the break of day.

Andris: I guess that makes me think of something. I think a lot of us carry around at a deeper level some kind of guilt. I know I’ve had to deal with it: like the liberation that we felt in the 70s was somehow connected with the AIDS that that came about, you know. A lot of people have to deal with that. But I prefer to think that being open to lifestyle exploration should not be squelched. I’m saying something that probably is controversial. But I don’t think that we should just squelch our lifestyle exploration just because we’re dealing with the disease. it’s certainly nothing that God sent to us. it’s something that just has to be dealt with.

Koehler: Well, what advice would you have in the 30 seconds we have left for aspiring songwriters out there that there might be out and around.

Andris: I can tell them unless they’re ready to write formula songs that the people who run the studios want to hear, that they better give it up, because basically you can’t sell music unless it sounds commercial. That’s my advice. if you’re gonna write songs, and you want to be famous, then you have to go commercial. Otherwise just write songs for your own enjoyment, and enjoy them, and if people listen to them more, then you’re lucky.

Koehler: Fortunately, we’ve had a chance to listen to you and the work that you’ve done. Unfortunately, that’s all the time we have for today. It’s been a pleasure having you with us on our program, and I hope that your songwriting and teaching career continues to blossom and and grow.

Andris: Thanks, Charles.

Koehler: And thanks for visiting with us today.