ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WITH: ROBERT SCHWARTZ
CLASS OF 1980 JUNE 21, 2024
PRESENTED BY: UVA LAW SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
Addie Patrick: All right. Hello, today is Friday, June 21, 2024.
My name is Addison Patrick. I'm the curatorial specialist here
at the University of Virginia School of Law. And today we're
doing an oral history interview to celebrate the fortieth
anniversary of Lambda Law Alliance here at UVA Law. So,
would you please introduce yourself? Give us your name and
when you graduated from the Law School.
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: I'm Robert Schwartz. People call me
Bob. Class of 1980. And my nickname at law school was
"Elmo." That's a nickname I—came from the commune out in Nelson
County. And there's a story behind that, but people here
know me as Elmo.
Addie Patrick: Okay, I'm very curious about the story. But
I'll get started with the first question, which is, why did you
decide to attend UVA Law?
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: Well, I actually—I wanted to get
involved in communal living. I spent the summer of '73, in a
Jewish sort-of hippie commune out in Texas, and I liked the
communal living, but Texas was not my turf. And I retreated
back east. In fact, all the people there went to different
places. This one went back to Wisconsin, and these two went to
San Francisco, and I came back east. But a group of people that
we'd met were looking—that I had known from the previous
summer—were looking for land, and they found this gorgeous 490
acre plot in the Blue Ridge Mountains right across the
street from the National Forest. And we all met here in the
spring of 1973. And plans were made to buy it and we had to
come up with a $52,500 downpayment, and everybody, you
know, this is fifty years ago, everybody pouring a little bit
in and we got it done. We got it done. And, at first, there were
two houses on the land. So a lot of people were living in town,
or they were living near Afton. I was on JPA [Jefferson Park
Avenue]. I was in Zion Crossroads for a while. But
eventually we built additional housing and I moved out onto the
land.
And I was working at the University Hospital. I had been
a hospital ward clerk in college, full-time job at night.
And I'm good on medical terminology. I became a medical
transcriber at the University Hospital. I lived behind the
Corner. And I came in with a key whenever I wanted to. And I
would do all the overflow work, so I could go swimming during
the day, show up at 6:00 p.m., work till two in the morning.
And I loved that job. I was making very good money because
they were paying me piece work. And at night I'd go back out to
the commune and hang out with all my, you know, and we do all
the stuff. We had therapists, we had doctors, we had woodworkers,
we had computer people. We didn't have a lawyer in the
community. And we got into this big dust up with VEPCO [Virginia
Electric and Power Co.], right? They wanted to run 55,000 volt
power lines through our pasture and we didn't really have the
power, the political power, to do anything about it. I said,
I'm going to law school. I bet I could do more with a law degree
than a creative writing major. And so I said okay, I'm going to
go to law school.
But I was a shitty college student, you know, I was top 1
percent in high school and never got an 'A' during five years of
college. I was a confused little gay boy who'd lost his—basically
his teenage years, you know. And I sort of figured all of that
out after college. And I just—I was going to get my—I was going
to get my law degree, and be—and hang out my shingle in
Lovingston, [VA,] right? I was going to be the fifth little
lawyer in Lovingston. But with my crappy grades in college, I
said, I've got to really murder the boards. And I said, If I
don't score 760 or above, I probably won't even apply. That
was when the—when it was 800. And 760 came from a Doonesbury
cartoon, if you are familiar with Doonesbury, the Joanie
Caucus character, she had the same thing and she took the law
boards and she scored 760. And everybody was so amazed. I said,
All right, that will be my target. So I'm looking for—and I
got to 773. So I said, All right, I'll give it a shot. And
I applied to the three schools here in the state, because I
didn't want to move if I didn't have to. Washington and Lee
rejected me immediately. William & Mary accepted me immediately,
took my deposit, refundable if I got into my first choice, which
was here. And all other five—the other schools, all the other
schools put me on the waiting list. So, I was on the waiting
lists for Antioch [University] and American [University] and BU
[Boston University] and Northeastern [University] and
here. And then I got this letter. In fact, it was on the
first day of summer, June 21, 1977, I got this letter that
said, We're happy to invite you. Son of a gun, exactly this day,
it was the first day of summer. And I said, Hallelujah, I didn't
have to move!
And that's, I mean, I didn't know it was a school of the
caliber that it is. I mean, I had already taken automotive—I
wanted to learn how to change oil and put, you know, I had
done that at Piedmont Community College, I said, Well, I can go
to the local community college here for law school and it
turned out to be that they let me in. I went undergraduate to
Brown [University]. The editor-in-chief of the
[Virginia] Law Review that year was a Brown alumnus. The
editor-in-chief for the next year was a Brown alumnus. And
between my boards, my Brown, my in-state, I had been here for
three years, and three wonderful recommendations from professors,
teachers at Brown, with whom I'd stayed in very close personal
touch over the years. And they basically said he was a fucked
up kid in college, but he's hungry now and ready to go. And
they, you know, took a chance on me. And that's how I ended up
here.
Addie Patrick: So, when you got here—well, okay, so I guess the
next part of this. So—
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: You can't ask me, what did I think about
Charlottesville, I'd been living here for three years.
Addie Patrick: That's true. Well, my next question was going
to be whether or not, so, you provided a thorough response for
why you decided to go here. But did your identity have any role
in that decision?
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: No.
Addie Patrick: No?
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: No, my identity was solid by then, I
knew who I was and I was out to everybody. And it was not like I
was coming here to prove a point. And it wasn't like I was
coming here to hide anything. I just was coming to law school
as—I was twenty-eight years old, and I'd hit my stride. So, that
was it. I said, I know how to do this stuff. I must know how to
think like a lawyer, I did well on the boards. It just wasn't an
issue. And I came here. And my god, they had a softball league,
I didn't know they had a softball league! Every small
section was putting a team in the softball league. And I got
involved in that. And the guys would, after the game, you'd go
over to Cafe North, I don't know if it's still there. But it
was—you'd get your—a Coke or a sandwich or something. And they
want to talk about which girls were the cutest and this, that,
and the other, and they'd say, Well, what about you? And I'd
say, you know, I think Martha Ellett (class of 1980) is, you
know, and Martha Schoonover (class of 1980). We just had
these beautiful—and they said, So you want to date her? I said,
No, no. They said, Well, who would you like to date? I said,
I don't want to embarrass anyone around the table, but there's a
lot of good looking fellas in this class. And they'd go, Oh.
So. I said, Yes, I mean, I—when I came out to myself, I was so
fortunate, first person I came out to was my girlfriend. And
she says, Oh, my gay friends at Harvard told me about—she had
gay friends at Harvard. And she gives me this book, Society and
the Healthy Homosexual[, by George Weinberg, (New York:
Anchor, 1973). [phone rings]
Addie Patrick: So, you were describing how you would, after
softball games you would—
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: Yes! And, you see, once Barbara gave me
that book, and I read it, and then I went to the public
library, I was going to see what they had. Son of a bitch. I grew
up in Larchmont and Mamaroneck, New York. These enlightened
library books had every single book that was positive, post
Stonewall, about gay rights. This was in 1973. But they
already had gay American history. And they already had
Dennis Altman's book [Homosexual: Oppression and
Liberation (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1972)] and they—and
I'm reading and it rang—It was the gay version of everything we
saw in the late '60s with African American students. You
don't have to be ashamed of the curly hair and the flat nose and
the this, and the that, and the color of your skin and dark
isn't worse than light and all—and Frantz Fanon, right,
whites, you know that? An African thinker, F-R-A-N-T-Z,
Frantz Fanon. His book was called Black Skin, White Masks,
[(New York: Grove Press, 1967)] something like that. And we
don't—and I said, Yes, I get it. We're just a statistical
minority that pops up at random in the world, forced into a
corner by standards that we didn't agree to and probably are
wrong. And the best thing we can do is just be right out there
where people can see us. And then there's going to be a—like
Harvey Milk said, some fourteen-year-old kid in Iowa is
going to feel like there's a glimmer of hope in the world.
And that was the way I decided to live my life, starting in
around 1974.
So when I got here, you know, like even back then, every time
you came out new to somebody, it was not the easiest thing. But
it got habitual, and I just did it. And so I was this big
loudmouth. And then the first grades that came out were from
our small section, and I had an 'A' in Civil Procedure. There
were two 'A's' out of 30 of us. The first 'A' I'd had in any
course since high school, and that's a true story, never got
an 'A' in anything in college. And people knew that it was me.
The way that they made—the way that they made your grades
anonymous, right, was they had you listed alphabetically, but
they sliced it up, okay? And they blacked out the names, they
redacted the names, but they put like three together, they didn't
put 30 individual lines up there at random. They—and so if you
knew your social security number, you knew where you were.
And once you knew who you were, you knew who were the two people
alphabetically in the section who were above you, or below
you, or on either side of you. And somebody said, Elmo got an
'A.' So here it is, like, January of '78. And I'm getting,
well I guess we finished up in January, maybe it was February,
whenever the grades came out, all of a sudden, you know, I was
one of the stars who'd gotten an 'A' in Civil Procedure, which
was a, people thought, a pretty abstruse type of a thing. So
now, I'd spoken up in class, I'd always been very active in
class. I had good personality, gregarious personality, my
grades were good. And I was on the softball field out there
with everybody. And it was like, I was cruising, you know, and, I
mean, I'm not somebody who's inconspicuous, so I was somebody
that everybody knew who Elmo was. Anyway. So, but that—I'd
already been that before I got here. I was that at the hospital
when I was working as a transcriber. I was that when I
was playing intramural softball here with the undergraduates and
grad students, so, it just—by that time, it was second nature.
Addie Patrick: Did you feel like [construction noise] did you
feel like [construction noise]. Yes, okay. So the impressions—so
you had, it sounds like, a good rapport with your classmates
based off of your—
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
Addie Patrick: —your activities. But did you feel like there were
maybe varying impressions of LGBTQ people?
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: Of course! Of course there were in
1977 and '78. But there also were straight people who got it.
There was a—there was a guy a year or two ahead of me named
John Copacino (class of 1979), C-O-P-A-C-I-N-O. John had
earrings. He was a straight guy, but he had earrings, he was
wearing earrings! I wouldn't, I wasn't doing that. And you knew
there was a community of people, eight years after Stonewall and
nine years after Stonewall who got it and who understand. And
these were bright kids, they'd gone to good schools, they'd had
friends who'd come out, you know, the tide was growing.
Maybe we didn't have the critical mass yet. And yes,
there were people who'd gone to frat schools and Rugby Road and
this and that, who didn't quite get it. But I was sort of hard
to deny. Because I was not—I didn't strike out in any aspect
of law school. You know, my grades were good. My sports were
good. My friendliness with people was good. I was the one
that didn't join an outline group, isn't that what they call
them? Outline groups. I didn't do that. We had people, we had—I
had a classmate who played pro hockey in Switzerland, came—flew
back for one week of class, did his outline for the week and
graduated law school on everybody else's class notes. I
didn't miss a class, I think I missed one class my first year
and I went home every night and I typed up my—typed up my class
notes. Because I learned in college, if I scribbled my class
notes, I had no idea when it was time to study for exam what is
written and why—this symbol meant that.
My best friend was my roommate in college and my valedictorian,
our valedictorian in high school. Paul went and typed up
his class notes every night all during college, I said, I'm
going to do the same thing and I did! So at the end of the
semester, people would loan me their outlines, which, they
didn't help me, but I would trade them for Xerox
copies—photocopies of my class notes which everybody loved! You
know, and that story about look to the right, look to the left,
one of you won't be here. That was not how it was. We expected
every one of the 360 to graduate. We thought—and we'd be
locked in arm. And we mostly were, and everybody was rooting
for everybody else. And nobody was hiding reference materials.
And I said, if you left a stack, if you left $10,000 bills, and a
gold ring, a diamond watch or something on the library table
and left for a week, it'd be there when you got back, unless
somebody had handed it off to Mrs. [Virginia] Haigh, Mrs.
Haigh, the librarian, who would be holding it, waiting for you
to come back because it was, that's how it was here. And I
was a visible guy, you know, which I was okay about that. But
I mean, I love the people that are here. I made great friends.
I think this is the loveliest group of people I ever spent
three years, best three years of my life were here. Because it
was the first thing that I did, after I figured myself out, that
involved being surrounded by a community of people that I could
talk about anything to who were bright, who were smart, the same
type of people that I gravitated to in high school and college.
So I mean, to me, it was heaven to be here.
Addie Patrick: So I want to, I want to talk now, let's see.
Well, okay, so we, I think still on the same thread, because I
want to get into your involvement with the gay—the
undergraduate gay student union, too. But before we get there, I
think while we're still in a little bit more general space, I
want to ask if there were any conversations about national
issues related to LGBTQ rights, or whether you saw that material
come up in your coursework or lectures at all.
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: It was not a topic of conversation
among the majority straight classmates you had, that was not
on their agenda. It wasn't even enough in the public agenda for
anybody to be vigorously opposed to it. And I made friends with
all the different constituencies here, you know. The Black
students, we played softball together, I knew each other, we
knew each other. The Christian group that met at 7:30 for
prayers every morning, I was friends with them all,
especially the ones that played softball. And, in fact, I broke
down in tears. The very first semester exam period, I was
thirty-two out of thirty-five days, from the last day of class
to the last day of exams, I was in the library at least, at
least ten hours. And the pressure on me and I just—we
were at the U-Hall, we were watching UVA play against UNC,
North Carolina men's basketball. And I don't know, the pressure
got to me, it was a Saturday night and I just broke down in
tears. And it was the loneliness hitting me of being here all by
myself. The only gay person I knew here, but also just, you
know, and I just started crying in the middle of this basketball
game. And I happened to be sitting with the Christians, the
Christian prayer group, Barb Ryan, I think she's Barb Ryan
Dixon (class of 1980) now, and some of the Dale Ditto (class of
1978), and some of those folks, and they just put their arms
around me and they just, you know, I felt like I had a family
and a community here. But gay rights was not on the agenda. It
was like sort of people were starting to figure it out. And,
and they were getting to know me. And I'm sitting here
thinking, you know, I'm my little stealth queen here.
Because I got 360 classmates, and they're going to have kids,
and a lot of them are going to have a kid coming out to them in
fifteen years. And it won't be the first time they had to meet
somebody. So, but it wasn't on the national agenda. It was for
somebody like me, because I was reading the publications and
donating to the causes, but not here yet. Not yet.
Addie Patrick: So, how did you get involved with undergraduate
[gay student union]?
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: Well, I knew there was a gay student
union before I was here, you know, I was—you'd see stuff for
them and dances and events when I was working at the hospital.
And so, hell, I would go to a dance on Saturday night hoping
to get lucky. And I met a lot of wonderful people, made a lot of
good friends. One of my friends, very close friends, was Law
School Class of '76. He says meeting me is what helped him
come out and of course, we're very, very close friends today.
We're on speed dial with each other. And I just met a
wonderful bunch of people. So I got involved in the gay student
union as a person who went to events. Now I'm here in school.
And so now I'm in, in a different capacity. I'm a
student member. And this freshman kid who was out and
became the president of the gay student union, his folks cut him
off when he cut out—he came out to them. And he basically
emptied the group's treasury to pay his tuition and make it
through his first year. And here we were at—because we were
having these dances, is it, I forget. What's the main library
on, Carpenter? I forget, it starts with a 'C.'
Addie Patrick: Clemons?
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: No, you walk up the thing, and it's on
the right, you walk into the Grounds off of University
Avenue, and it's off on the right, whatever it is.
Addie Patrick: It used to be Alderman Library.
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: Maybe it was—that was it, Alderman
Library. So it didn't have a 'C.' All right. Anyway, there'd
be a keg of beer, and food services would bill you. So
here, it's the end of the ser—end of the semester, and
they get this bill from food services for, I don't know, $700
of refreshments and beer and stuff that hasn't been paid for,
and there's no money in the treasury. Holy hell. So John
Curtin, Class of '81, and I, we said, We're going to, we're
going to do this. And so I think John became the president, and I
became the treasurer or the other way around. And what are
we going to do? Well, we're going to have a dance every
Saturday night at whatever the place was. And we did. Three
bucks, all the beer you can drink, and a DJ, and we had a
disco DJ, and it was absolutely great. And the kids from
University of Richmond would come, and the ladies from Sweet
Briar [College] would come, and boys from Virginia Military
Institute would come up, and the kids from Harrisonburg would
come down and, and it was, it was great. And I would go home,
I must, yes, of course, I was the treasurer, because I would
go home at the end of the dance every Saturday night, with like,
$1,000 or $1,100 in small bills, ones and fives. And back then,
the Virginia National Bank branch over at Barracks Road,
they opened at eight in the morning. So I would be there
Monday at eight with this stack of bills. And I mean, we built
the treasury up like that [snaps fingers], because we had this
dance every week, we paid off the bills. And all of a sudden,
we had money to do other stuff. You know, wear blue jeans if
you're in favor of gay rights, right? You remember that? And
all—nobody wore blue jeans that day, right? Because they didn't
want anyone to think that, you know, this is the late '70s. And
so many different things that we had. We painted Beta Bridge, we
had speakers, we had a Gay Pride Week. And we had the money to do
it, because John and I, and then we handed the reins off to the
next crowd. But that's how I got involved officially. I'd gotten
involved originally just as a gay guy in town looking for a
place to go dancing and meet people.
Addie Patrick: Did you find that there were other law students
that were involved?
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: I did, I did. Very cautiously. But one of
my classmates, I told you about my room—my friend from Class of
'76, he and I and another one of my classmates, the three of us
rented a house together off of—not Barracks Road, what's the
next one up there, Aviation or Hydraulic or some such thing, in
that area. And we took a house, and we rented it for two years.
And we were roommates. And so I knew Joe and I knew Gordie. And
Lawrence [O.] Snead [III (class of 1979)]. Joe knew—Joe and
Lawrence had both been at Princeton together. They were
classmates so they knew each other. And eventually, somebody
might feel sufficiently comfortable to sort of come out
to me privately. And so there was some and there were women.
But you know, there were a number of women that I got to
know, one of whom became I think a statewide public—got elected
to office in California, and sort of went underground for a
little while. She wasn't ready to be out in politics in the
'80s, or whenever the hell it was. But yes, some of us found
each other.
And somebody told me, you know, there's this professor named
Charles Whitebread. And so I went and introduced myself to
him. And he said, Yes, he said, we just talked about what
courses are you going to take? And he says, You want to learn
something that'll help you, learn tax law. He says, Don't
think you're going to go out there and win the Supreme Court
case on gay rights. But we could talk to each other. And he loved
California. And he spent his summers in Santa Monica, and
eventually visited at USC and eventually joined the faculty at
USC [Gould School of Law]. And Richard and I, after we met, it
was the first time we were together, we took jobs in LA.
And Charlie invited us—he taught us about sushi. He said it was
the one great athletic thing that he could do is he could
work chopsticks better than anybody he knew. But so, Charlie
Whitebread was a great friend. And we sort of, there were other
people openly closeted, you know, naming names. I don't
think anybody's surprised to know that Professor [John C.]
Jeffries [Jr. (class of 1973)] was gay. But that was not
anything he spoke about. And in many ways, you know, he clerked
for Justice Lewis Powell, on the Supreme Court. I know at least
two people who clerked for Justice Powell who are gay, who
were never out to him, and he reluctantly cast the fifth vote
against gay rights in Bowers v. Hardwick [(478 US 186)] in 1986.
And you're sitting here thinking, what we got in
Lawrence v. Texas [(539 US 558 (2003))] nineteen years—we could
have gotten five to four, nineteen years earlier. But
anyway. But yes, people, that's—sometimes you run into
somebody at a dance and you were surprised to see them there.
That's, you know. There wasn't a—if we had 360, let's say there
were forty gay or bi people, queers in the class. Believe me,
I didn't find that—I didn't meet them all.
Addie Patrick: So, can you tell me more about some of the
specific activities, aside from the dances, that you did through
GSU?
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: Well, like I said, speakers, Gay Pride
Week. Writing to the Cavalier Daily if an issue came up. It
was—it wasn't like we had an office anywhere and an agenda.
We just were folks that had created a space that was safe
for us. So, I can't really think of much. But the night we
decided to paint Beta Bridge, that was fun. That was fun.
Addie Patrick: Can you talk more about that?
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: Well, yes. We got out there with about
six of us. And we had all the buckets and the paint brushes
and everything. Richard was there. My partner, my husband,
you weren't allowed to have husbands back then. And we
painted it all blue and orange. And, of course, the words: We
come from old Virginia, were all is bright and—in huge
letters—gay! So, we finished and we were delighted. And within
thirty seconds, half the fraternities on Rugby Road were
out there and totally covered it all up. And we were a little bit
angry, but we were also, you know, we'd been heard, we'd been
seen, and we're going to keep coming back until we wear you
out, you know? So, but that was—that's how that happened. We
just decided to do it as part of Gay Pride Week that year. I
think it was probably the same week that Franklin Kameny came
and spoke, you know who Franklin Kameny was? He was fired from
his, I think, State Department job for being a homosexual. And
so he became sort of a really a hero of those days when gay
people walked around, equal rights for homosexuals, wearing
coats and ties and, and dresses with crinoline under skirts and
stuff. So anyway, that's about all I remember about that.
Addie Patrick: Do you recall, so I think it was '78 or '79, the
[National] March on Washington [for Gay and Lesbian Rights]?
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: Oh my God, do I remember it. God, do I
remember that. Yes. Of course, we were so close to Washington.
It was in October [1979]. Richard was in college. He was
in West Georgia College, about fifty miles west of Atlanta.
They had a whole group that came up and chartered a bus from West
Georgia. And so I got to see him there. And I sent you that
wonderful picture of him with his curly hair and everything.
He would have been twenty-two. He probably looks like he's
seventeen. But he was twenty-two. And I was thirty.
And it was so exhilarating. I think, I think we felt like we'd
gotten a hundred thousand marchers. A hundred thousand
people was so much in '79. And then the next one was '87. And I
think we were close to half a million and the next one was
'93, the first year of Bill Clinton's presidency, and it was
even huger than that. But it was a very heady thing in '79. Just
to be there, to see so many people walking like that, and
just in your face. We're here and we're not going anywhere.
You know, and you can't—we're not—you can't put us in, you
know, it's not like the Holocaust. We don't—you could
get rid of the last one of us, we keep popping up like weeds in
other people's families, you know. People ask how do you
know? How do you know? I say, think of yourself—think about a
bunch of tulip bulbs, right? If you had a bunch of tulip bulbs,
could you tell what color they were going to come up as? I
don't think you could. They don't say red and yellow and—you
don't know till they bloom, then you know what flavor you got.
And I said, That's how it is with us. Nobody knows. And then
you find out. So, is the environment going to be
welcoming to you if you come up that flavor or that variation?
And we wanted to make sure that it would be.
And so. And this, you know, by that time, there was already
enough of a movement, Howard Brown, who was the health
commissioner of the city of New York had come out real early
like, like '71 or two. Leonard Matlovich, who was in the
military, I think he was on the cover of Time Magazine in around
'71—"I am a homosexual"—and he was a marine or soldier,
whatever he was, They gave me a medal for killing a man and
kicked me out of the army for loving one. And so people were
slowly, slowly, slowly coming out. And it was this celebrity,
and it was that celebrity and it was, you know. And then like a
Tennessee Williams might sort of—we talked about people being
openly closeted, you know, and Barney Frank in the [US]
Congress, or Fred [Frederick C. Langone] before that in the
Boston City Council, and it was just slow, it was a slow thing.
And each person must have had his or her own particular
threshold that was, for them, enough is enough. And I'm ready
to be out there. And I'm ready for my family and friends to
know. And I'm ready to live a life where I get to seek the
things I really want and not the things that I'm hoping I'll grow
into which it turns out, I've learned I never will. That's a
phase that's not going to—it's not a phase you're going
through. As somebody said, You don't—you don't choose what
attracts you. What—you don't choose what arouses you, that's
it. You don't choose what arouses you, you discover it.
And then, what are you going to do about it? And that's—it was a
tide that was growing.
And I mean, you know what it's like now, we're forty years
later. And I mean, you talk to people about now it's this, May
I touch you, all this consent stuff, right? When I was in high
school in 1963, we'll say '64. If you were going out with a
girl, you put your arm around her in the movies, and you'd
move your hand a little bit closer on her. And if she wasn't
interested, she told you to go away and you go away. But if you
didn't try to cop a feel, quote, right, then you weren't going to
get anywhere because no girl was going to be open about that.
It's like you had to convince everybody. You couldn't do that
today. You couldn't do that today. But if you wanted to have
any kind of a necking or thing, you had to make a move and be
ready if you didn't get pushed away. What boy could put an arm
around another boy's shoulder in high school in '64? Because
maintaining deniability was the thing. So that's where I said
about losing a whole decade of your life. All these other folks
are learning how to flirt and meet and do and this. And we're
off in the corner, scared that somebody will find out, you
know, who we are and what we like. And thank god for the
queens that did Stonewall, because they got shit started.
And then I saw it. I saw it early enough that in 1973, at
the age of twenty-four, I was ready to look in the mirror and
say what I'd been saying behind closed doors to myself for a few
years, Bob, this isn't going away. You know, you need to
get—in fact, I didn't come out into gay pride, I came into gay
resignation and sadness. This is like, I don't know, diabetes or
asthma, something I'm going to have to live with. And then when
I started reading all that positive literature, I came to
say, Oh, no, I'm not living with this horrible condition that I
was cursed with. I'm living with this additional blessing. I was
given a sexuality and an ability to love and hurray, and
that—everybody came along on their own pace at their own time
and they knew when it was time to open the door and step out.
Some people still haven't. Like, I won't say, but the state fruit
of South Carolina. Anyway, we'll just leave it at that.
Addie Patrick: I want to get back really quickly to the march
again. So do you recall some of the specifics about how you got
or how that group was assembled to go out to Charlotte—or up to
DC together?
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: I don't know. I think by that time,
there was the National Gay Task Force, which then became the
National Lesbian Gay Task Force. But I think they were one of the
organizers. I don't think Human Rights Campaign had come along
yet. The Radical Fairies I think, had started. Gay
Community News was a huge gay community paper out of Boston
that was very politically in your face. And I don't know who
the gay activists were. And in this coast, and that coast, and
in the Chicago, somebody put the damn thing together and the word
got out. And people came who were ready to come. That's what
I remember. I wasn't an organizer, I just showed up,
knew what time to be in which corner and, and we marched.
Addie Patrick: Let's see, I think, I want to move now
because you talked about, you know, the importance of being
visible at the Law School and how that's a decision you made
before your time at the Law School. And you mentioned a
little bit softball, too, so I want to move to that now.
How—well so you said—it sounds like you were involved with
softball prior to getting to [into Law School]—
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: I fell in love with baseball when I was
six years old, listening to Dodger games on a transistor
radio, you know, by the beach. And all I ever wanted to do was
play baseball. And I did. We lived—we were the eighth house
from the school yard. And we didn't have a set dinner time at
05:30 [p.m]. My dad worked downtown, he was his own
independent insurance broker. He took the train home when the day
was done. So, we could have dinner at 8:00 and we could have
dinner at 9:00, we could have dinner at 6:30. I was always the
last kid leaving the school yard. I was always the kid who
in the last ray of sunshine. And then like I said, it was a block
and a half to my house. It's not like I had to go anywhere. And
that's all I ever wanted to do. And so I got into the Cub Scouts
softball league and the Little League. And it turned out my dad
was a catcher, and he had played catch with me and I learned how
to throw and catch. I learned how to field and throw and catch
before I knew how to hit worth a damn. And because of that, I
made the all-star team of Cub Scouts each of my three years.
The catcher, then the first baseman, and then the pitcher.
And I—just anything I could do that would play baseball. Dad
took me to a Yankees-Red Sox game in '56. I was seven years
old. We sat in the—we sat in the bleachers so we could see Mickey
Mantle and Ted Williams. '57 he took me to the last
Dodger-Giants series at Ebbets Field before the two teams moved
west. So and then we had nothing but Yankee Stadium. And then the
Mets came along, so we had National League ball again. So,
I'm going to games at the Polo Grounds when the Mets were still
playing there.
One of their players was Joe Hicks, a graduate of Lane High
School here. And when I moved here, Joe Hicks had retired from
baseball and he was the head of the recreation committee, the
sports and recreation—parks and recreation department for the
city of Charlottesville. And I'm playing—everywhere I went, I had
my New York Mets cap. He says, I used to play for the Mets, we
got to talking, and he said, Have you ever thought about
umpiring? You seem to know what's going on. So Joe Hicks
got me into umpiring. And I—everywhere I went I wanted to
play. I was on the—I was on a team that won the intramural
championship one year at Brown. The pitcher was the
men's—captain of the men's softball team, our shortstop was
his wife, the captain of the women's—not softball team.
Captain of the men's ice hockey team and his wife, the captain
of the women's ice hockey team, was our shortstop. You know,
it's all I ever wanted to do was play ball. That's—I wanted to
play ball. I wanted to enjoy my school. And I mean, when I got
here, I played—I played in leagues. We put a team together
in the commune, our name was Unconditional Amnesty. That will
you know, that was the big issue for the Vietnam veteran. And it
just I never stopped playing, I never wanted to stop playing. I
stopped playing last year because of diabetic neuropathy
in my right ankle, and I simply don't have the stability. So at
age seventy-four, I had to stop playing softball. And so then
when I came here, I didn't know they were going to have a
softball league but they did. You know, hello, fish out of
water, fish in water. So.
Addie Patrick: So, you said earlier that when you got here
all the sections were in softball teams or how—
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L. Yes.
Addie Patrick: Was that like a mandatory thing or—
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: No, it's just everybody did. Anyone who
wanted to play softball played. And the people that you most got
to know your first year, were the thirty people in your small
section, I assume they still do it that way. Our criminal
procedure—our Criminal Law was scheduled sections A, E, I, you
know, K and L. Torts would have been B, D, F and L. And that's
how it went. And so you, you were meeting just about all of
your classmates, if you—if they weren't in your Contracts class,
they were in your Torts class. If they weren't in your Torts
class, they were in your Property class. And then you
know, who wants to put a softball team together? So there
were enough people and that's just how it happened. It just
happened. We were Section L, our first year name was 'L and
Damnation.' But the guys didn't like that. And we changed it to
the Statue of Frogs—Statute of frauds, right? Statue of Frogs,
and we had this t-shirt that had the statue, it's all frogs. And
we won a couple of champion—we won the—we won twice. We won the
regular league twice.
Addie Patrick: So, you were at the Law School when I think the
softball league was fairly new—
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: Very new, very new.
Addie Patrick: —do you have recollections of—did you know
folks that got it started or?
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: I didn't. They had a twentieth anniversary
of the softball league article in the alumni magazine, and
there was a picture of the team that won the first championship.
One of the guys on the team was Gary Goldberger (class of 1979).
Gary was a year ahead of me. So I had played against him. One of
the guys on the team was Will Shortz, who was the crossword
puzzle dude. And he graduated in '77 so I never met him. But when
I got on the Sunday puzzle, right, like, they pulled my name
out of the hat. He said, You got any questions for Will Shortz? I
said, Do you still play softball? He said, No, I don't,
just table tennis now. But we just meet—we met people. I never
saw Bobby [Robert F.] Kennedy Jr. (class of 1982), who was a
year behind me, on the field. I never saw Thurgood Marshall Jr.
(class of 1981) on the field. I played against Lewis [F.] Powell
III (class of 1978), one of the handsomest guys in the league,
and one of the nicest, nicest people you would ever meet. He
was on Law Review and he was smart. But he was. I mean, all
the sportsmanship was always great. But I remember some of
the celebrity players, or the people whose parents were
celebrities, I think, Anne Kleindienst (class of 1979). And
you knew who was playing softball. And it was—it was the
thing that people talked about it and it was—and they looked
forward to it, and who's going to win the championships, and
who could come up with the cleverest team name—the Soiled
Briefs, the Meretricious Act Persons, the Tortfeasors—that
kind of stuff.
Addie Patrick: So I had—
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: It was the number one thing, I'd say
two-thirds through, you know, half, 50 to 60 to 65 percent of
the students were out on the ball field one time or another,
it was a way to blow off steam. You didn't have to go anywhere,
you just had to walk across the street.
Addie Patrick: One thing I see that's like a connection between
your activism in the gay student union, and you're involvement in
softball was that you wrote about both in the paper. So how
did—how did you get into writing and publishing in the local
papers?
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: Ed[ward R.] Koch (class of 1980) was one
of my classmates and he was the commissioner of the softball
league. And I think Ed asked me would I write a softball column
for the [Virginia] Law Weekly, I said, That would be fun. So I
got to spend a lot of time and I became familiar with the teams
that were playing that I didn't know very well, because I wanted
to be able to report accurately. And I got all the scores. And I
knew a lot of the players. And I tried to come up with a
lighthearted sort of thing and kept using like, I started—the
'Elmo' thing from the commune. Well, there was Jake the Snake,
one of the kids at the commune and Jeff the Peth, Kristen the
Piston and I became—they called me Elmo the Pelmo, all the, you
know, the six and eight year old kids growing up on the commune,
so I was E.T. Pelmo. So that's where I got my byline. And then
I decided I was going to create a like a drag persona. And I
became Elma von Pelma, Her Royal Highness the Grand Duchess of
Mecklenburg-Strelitz, because that—I pulled that out of some
gay novel that was very popular at the time. And it was just
like how much more in my face—in your face could I be, and I'd
throw in these little sexual puns and innuendos in there. The
not-so-straight—there was a team called themselves the Straight
A's. I kept calling them the Not-So-Straight A's. And I don't
know. And people liked it. People liked it, it was
lighthearted. And I could get away with it, because it was me.
And people knew who I was. And I felt like, why not? Let's have
some fun here. That's how that happened. Ed Koch asked me if I
would do that. Ed Koch was a good commissioner for the
league, really.
Addie Patrick: I had—So we have just a few minutes left. But I
wanted to go back, before we get into sort of some larger
reflections, which I feel like you've already started to do. I
wanted to go back with a follow-up question about GSU
stuff for one moment. You talked about—so you were living on the
commune and then at some point you purchase, or you were
renting a house off of Hydraulic, and I recall seeing
in the clippings that I sent you, like, mention of a meeting
to potentially form a gay student group through—at that
house or—
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: No.
Addie Patrick: No?
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: No.
Addie Patrick: Can you talk more about—this is an in-the-weeds
question, but.
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: But I don't remember, what did I say?
Addie Patrick: There was just a small snippet in the Law Weekly
about, like, potentially having a meeting, maybe through the gay
student union and the address location was, I think, this
Hydraulic Road home, but—
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: It would have been on Solomon Road. 1724A
Solomon Road. I don't remember having had a meeting there. I
just don't recall that. There was no chance that we were going
to have a pride group here at the Law School, that wasn't
going to happen. And we may have gotten together to plan Gay
Pride Week on—now that's possible. We had, you know,
three of us living in one house. And that would have been a good
place for the officers to get together one evening and plan
who we're going to invite as a speaker, and what events were we
going to do. But I don't have a recollection of that.
Addie Patrick: Why do you say that you don't think the Law
School would have formed a—
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: It wasn't ready yet. I don't think we had
more than three or four people that were willing to be openly
gay to all of their classmates, there was half a dozen that were
willing to be openly gay to me. And I don't even mention the
names now, because I have no idea what these folks are doing.
You know?
Addie Patrick: Well, I think from there, I want to take a
step back now and my next question for you is a broad one.
But how do you reflect upon your time at UVA Law?
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: Best three years of my life. Because
it's when I became an adult again, really. I mean, I'd done
my homework I, I got here, and all of a sudden it was, Yes, you
really can. You are the person capable of achieving that you
always were going to be back when you thought you wanted to
be a pediatrician. And before you ran into organic chemistry,
and came eventually to realize that you were a humanities
person and not a science person. Because I had always taken you
know, it always meant so much to me that I was smart and that I
was at the top of my class. My best friend who was the
valedictorian in high school lost the spelling bee in seventh
grade to me, because he got a word that no one in the room
could have spelled. And he still is not happy about that. But I
mean, I loved that about myself. And we started doing the New
York Times crossword puzzle in like ninth or tenth grade in
ink. And it was like, I lost confidence in college. And I had
to build it back.
And a lot of it was coming to terms with being gay and feeling
good about it. I remember climbing into the trunk of my
shitty little Chevy Vega, and installing by myself a radio in
the trunk, a radio tape deck thing, and I was like, I can do
this and running the wires to speakers that I put in and
learning how to do an oil change and learning how to pack the
bearings and you know and learning how to—and then I got
here and I was scared to death. I didn't I—the reason I didn't
miss a class was I was scared to death if I missed the class I
was going to fall behind. And I mean, I like I said I put my, I
put my nose to the grindstone and I missed one class that year
and I spent all those long hours in the library during exam
period, and then I saw all these grades, you know, I think I had
two 'A's' and three 'A-'s'. So. And I was so in everybody's face
that when I got invited to the Law Review, I got my letter in
the summer. Emerson Spies, who was the dean, and what happened
was, he was shocked to see me. He was like, Oh, my God, I
thought he was just—all I can think of is he thought that some
windbag and look at this kid. He's—and he gave me an 'A,' he
gave me an 'A' in Property. So anyway.
I was—it was like I was a grown up again, it was like I really
was who I'd always thought I could be. And I interviewed for
one job my senior year, and got it. Richard and I were going to
travel. We weren't even going to take jobs. And this legal aid
thing popped up in March of my senior year in Norfolk, [VA,]
and Richard and I had met in Norfolk. And he said, What do
you say, we got friends down there. All right, let's do it.
So I applied, I drove down to Norfolk, they interviewed me.
And I think I had the gay student union stuff on my
resume. And the managing attorney calls me the next
morning, Well, we want to offer you the job, he said, Well, I
and the other gay attorneys here at legal aid are going to be so
thrilled to have you join us. So, you know. But I, and from
there, I just, I had a job. I was playing softball, I was
umpiring. And I had a boyfriend. Those are the three things I
wanted: baseball, a boyfriend, and a job. Because I am a very
humble guy, I was living in a commune, you know, typing
medical records, and that I made all the money, it was nice to
know that, that was my backup. If absolutely worse came to
shove, I could always keep a roof over my head transcribing
medical records. But to feel like I was—it wasn't that I was
a professional. It was that I was—my life was good and I was
moving on all eight cylinders. That's the way I feel about the
three years here. I guess I had it the first day I got here, but
I didn't know it. And it solidified. And the confidence
that I built up doing that just was enormous, enormous. It just
set the stage for me here.
Addie Patrick: So now that Lambda—Lambda which didn't exist
when you were here—
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: —and was started by two straight boys,
who I assume had gay friends who weren't ready to come out and do
it. Isn't that something?
Addie Patrick: Yes [laughs].
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: Well, Lambda.
Addie Patrick: So now that they just celebrated their fortieth,
what do you hope for the future of a group like this?
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: I'm still trying to wrap my head around
the fact that it's not an insult to say 'queer,' okay? We do that
all the time. I didn't think it would come to that. I don't know
what the group is. You don't want to say, yes, it'd be nice
cliche to say, Oh, live for the day when we don't need it.
That's no, that's, it's not that. All I ever wanted was to—I
would like to have—I'd like to see a world where two gay people
can go to the senior prom together in high school, and
start dating each other in eighth grade, if that's what
they want to do. And and there's self awareness, and there's
meaningful adult sex education. [phone rings]
I don't know, I want the path to be easy for the youngsters. And
the rest will take care of itself. If there's a gay student
union, if there's not a gay student union. If there is a
Jewish community center, if there's not. The people that
want that to happen, they'll be there. They won't be ashamed.
You don't have to change your name, or get your nose done. You
get to be, you know, two generations ago, if you were
Jules Garfinkel, you became John Garfield. And if you were Melvin
Kaminsky, you became Mel Brooks. And now if you're Barbra
Streisand, you get to be Barbra Streisand. And it's the same
thing. I just want a world—if there's a group, if there's not
a group, that's not the point. We had a mission then, there's
still probably is a mission. When I saw that there's some
openly trans graduate here who's got a job and was able to get
the job that she wanted. And it not that not be an impediment to
her. That's what it was about. It wasn't about the having a
group. Although it's nice to have social clubs. I mean, you
want to hang out with friends of yours, but most of my friends
are straight people, you know, my community. We had a bunch of
queer Jews in Atlanta, who met for Passover Seders and
Hanukkah, lighting the candles. And then it turned out we had
three or four people in this social group that wanted a place
where they could actually do worship services. So the group
changed into a synagogue. We actually became a congregation
in 1985. And we were a very hip, in-town congregation. And a lot
of liberal straight Jews raising kids found that our congregation
resonated with them more than any of the others. This one
said, My car didn't feel like it belonged in that parking lot. Or
I, you know, that was a place where you had to have a tennis
bracelet or something. So they started coming to our synagogue,
and now we're probably about 75 percent nongay. And we've got, I
joke about it, I say, it's the synagogue I grew up in, it's the
synagogue I wanted to be in. It's just a synagogue. We've got
multi generations, we've got straight, we've got gay. I
didn't want to be in a gay synagogue. I wanted to be gay,
in a synagogue. And that's how it is.
That's—I didn't want to be in a gay group. I wanted to be gay
wherever I went and get away with it, you know. And by the
way, I'm six feet tall, and I got broad shoulders, and I'm
good at sports, and I'm smart. I could get away with a lot of
shit that a lot of people couldn't get away with. And so
in that sense, it almost was my duty. I could do stuff that
other people weren't free to do. Nobody was gonna beat me up in a
corner for being a sissy. Although I like to tell, I like
to say, you know, Are you cisgender? I say no, I'm sissy
gender, you know, but whatever. I don't know that's, that's
about the best I can do for you here.
Addie Patrick: And do you have—
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: Elmo! I had a friend who speaks Spanish.
And she used to call me boy. She'd call me 'el muchacho.' El
muchacho. She'd go, 'el muchacho!' So then she started,
she'd make these person-to-person calls to 'Elmo
Chacho' when she wanted to talk to me. So, we had three guys at
the commune with the first name Bob. Bob Schwartz, Bob Elcox,
Bob West. On the bulletin board was Bob S, Bob W, Bob E. I said,
it looks too much like Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm
getting myself a name that no one else around here is going to
have. And I took Elmo from my friend Marilyn. So I started
being Elmo in like 1976. And, in fact, when—I was the first
person called upon in my very first class, [Professor] Stanley
[D.] Henderson's contract class, and I raised my hand, he says,
And you are mister? You are? And I didn't know what to say. "Bob
Schwartz." And one of my classmates said, That surprised
me. The first question he got asked was what his name was, and
he stumbled over it. But that's where that came from. Stan
Henderson. Everybody loved him. If Stan Henderson, if Professor
Henderson hadn't met, hadn't seen you in ten or fifteen
years, and you bumped into him, he would greet you by name. And
every—he—beloved, beloved professor. I was so happy to see
his picture down on the wall in the library. I don't know, I
felt, I felt like I was here where I supposed to be. I was at
a high level school, as bright as everybody else, where I could
do the work and was ready to be there, which I was not at
seventeen years old. I had no business in college. But I had,
I belonged here at age twenty-eight.
Addie Patrick: I have one more question, but Randi do you—So my
last question for you then, is what advice do you have for
current and future LGBTQ students?
Robert "Bob" Schwartz: Be thankful that you found your
path. For ones who are still in the closet, you have nothing to
be scared of. I'm telling you that the best thing you will
ever do for yourself is come out and live your true life. I have
so many friends my age, who like older men. And so in the course
of my life, I've met so many older men who came out after the
last kid had graduated high school, and they're starting
their life at age fifty-two and age fifty-three. And I would say
don't let that happen to you. If you're openly gay, and they
don't want you at that firm, there's another firm. When I
moved to Atlanta, excuse me, when I was interviewing for jobs
in Atlanta, with my grades they had to—if I wanted an interview
with that firm, they had to talk to me. But nobody was hiring
Jews, forget gays. They weren't hiring Jews, maybe there were
one or two firms that would hire, that were hiring Jews and
they were majority Jewish firms. That's how it was in 1980, in
1978, '79.
I would say, the only way you're going to be happy is, and to
thine own self be true, and it shall follow the night the day
shall never, thou never shall be false to any man. It's it—that's
it, be yourself don't lose your time, don't lose your years, and
be supportive of those around you. Honor the ones who came
before and clear the way for the kids that are going to come
behind you. Who knows what issues they're going to have,
that you don't even think about now. Nobody thought about trans
rights back then, nobody—at my synagogue has got a dozen trans
kids growing up at it. Who knew? Who knew? You know, Beth became
Leo, Sam became Scarlett. We didn't know in 1980 that that
was going to be—and a lot of people said they wanted to, like
sell the trans kids down the river to get the equal rights
for gay and lesbian people. And so I'd say be open, because
something's gonna come up that looks weird to you. And a
generation later, it's going to be like bread and butter. And so
that would be my advice. Be open minded. Let yourself be
yourself. Honor the ones who came before and clear the path
for the people coming behind you. And vote.
Oh, okay. Okay, one more thing I give—when I mentor kids, there's
two pieces of advice I give everybody. You are not allowed
to commit suicide. Lawyers apparently are the second
highest suicide rate of any profession. I don't know why, I
think a lot of it is we think we're all going to become
millionaires. And when we don't, and we can't live to the
lifestyle we thought we were going to get, it's like we have
failed. And I mean, the lawyer who closed my first house killed
himself. I taught him bankruptcy in a seminar when I was doing a
CLE [Continuing Legal Education]. They'd asked me to
put a CLE together. And it was just heartbreaking. I tell them,
You're not allowed to do that. You're not allowed to do that.
And the other thing I say is diligently read the disciplinary
reports in the bar publications. Because what you're going to—I
thought everybody who got disbarred, got disbarred because
they embezzled funds from escrow. And there's a lot of
that. But what I've seen is that what really happens to a lot of
people, they get disbarred for not being attentive to their
clients and their cases. The rent's coming due, and here's
somebody willing to pay me a $2,500 retainer, I make up these
numbers. And so you take it, but it's one case more than you
really have the time and energy for. And so you put it off, and
you put it off, and you put it off. Now you're lying to your
client, I'm waiting for discovery to come back. I'm
doing depositions. And all of a sudden, you get found out. You
accepted fees, and you haven't done the work, and you've missed
the deadline or your client—it surprised me how many people got
disciplined for that. And so I those are the two things I tell
every kid that I am helping along in the path: no suicide,
don't lose your bar license, and read up and find out what it
is—what's the stuff that people do. I couldn't resist saying
that. It has nothing to do with gay rights. But it is—I've had
classmates who suicided you know, that's, I can think of two
or three or four in my class who died by suicide. Bright, lovely
people. And it's absolutely heartbreaking, right? A
permanent solution to a temporary problem. That's my
advice.