Interview with Sally Jackson
SL Ziegler interviews Jamie Wright.
Sally is a trans woman and uses she/her pronouns. We talk about growing up in Fort Worth in the 1950s and 60s, moving to New Orleans, PFLAG New Orleans, and her show on WHIV-LV FM.
Interviewee: Sally Jackson
Interviewer: S.L. Ziegler
Transcriber: Dre Tarleton
February 23, 2021
S.L. ZIEGLER: So, this meeting is being recorded. Sally, I'm just going to do my little script here. So, this is S.L. Ziegler sitting down remotely with Sally Jackson. Sally is a trans woman and uses she/her pronouns. Today is February 23, 2021, and we're meeting remotely using Zoom because the COVID-19 pandemic is still going. My goodness. Sally, as we discussed before, this interview is part of the Louisiana Trans Oral History Project, the goal of which is to gather real world examples of what it means to be trans in Louisiana, here in the early 21st century, and to share these with our trans community and also to the world. And we do so by posting transcriptions and interviews, in part or in whole, on the project's website and through our social media accounts, as well as through other initiatives, such as zines and podcasts. You will have the opportunity, if you wish, to donate your interview to the T Harry Williams Center for Oral History at LSU for long term preservation and access. And please know that you can stop this interview at any time. And if you have any questions about this, or anything else, you can always reach out to me at any time. And please know that these interviews are a joint project between the two of us, so you'll have a chance to review the transcripts, and any portion of them can be de-identified or restricted as you deem necessary. So at this point, I'll just ask for a verbal confirmation that this is, in fact, what you knew you were doing today.
SALLY JACKSON: Yes, this is what I signed up for. So, okay.
ZIEGLER: [00:01:29] Fantastic. Thank you so much for that. And I neglected to say it before, and I apologize, but let me say now, speaking of this being a joint project between us, Sally, if we start talking about anything that you don't want to talk about, I do hope that you feel empowered to say so, and we'll move on and we can even take it out of the transcripts or whatever.
JACKSON: Okay.
ZIEGLER: Well, with all that being said, Sally, I wonder if we could just start at the beginning. Can you tell us where you were born?
JACKSON: I was born in Fort Worth, Texas. And this is where I usually start throwing in jokes and say at the hospital, because I wanted to be close to my mother, but I'm not going to do that today.
ZIEGLER: It's good to know that you did want to be close to her at that time. How long did you live in Fort Worth?
JACKSON: 58 years. And I do have to say right off the bat, I was born in 1951. So there wasn't just a whole lot of movement in anything on the LGBT front. It was still very, very much closeted. They were still extremely busy with McCarthyism, hunting for communists in every closet. So, they didn't have time to do any information or anything about anybody else at that point.
ZIEGLER: [00:03:00] So, am I correct in understanding that you were in Fort Worth all the way up until the point that you came to New Orleans?
JACKSON: Yes. That's right.
ZIEGLER: And I wonder, and so before we get to the New Orleans part, maybe you could just tell us a little bit more about what it was like growing up in Fort Worth. So, had your family been there for long?
JACKSON: Oh, yes. They were both born in Fort Worth. So, they'd been there a long time. And we lived in the same house that they bought when they got married. And they let it go about three years after I had already moved down here, when they decided they couldn't take care of themselves anymore. Because they were both approaching 90. But it was a little rougher growing up in that era, knowing that you weren't what everybody expected you to be. And I had little hints that I didn't view the world quite from what was considered the masculine viewpoint at that time. I started school just a little bit early. I started kindergarten before my fifth birthday, because of my September birthday. But school was where I learned that I was just totally out of step. Because that was during the era where, when they went from one place to another like to the lunchroom or anything, they lined up the boys in one line and the girls in another, and recess was divided and all. And I was just sitting there doing the stuff the guys were supposed to be doing, trying to do it well enough to fit in, and watching the girls over in another area wishing I could be doing that instead.
[00:05:01] So, that was where it was drummed into me, the old go along to get along sort of thing. Just pretend to be who they want you to be. And we weren't really hearing anything positive about anybody in the LGBT community at that point. You heard every slur there was about them. They were the butt of all the jokes, if they were mentioned at all. And that was mostly the gays and lesbians that were talked about. They didn't really talk about bi at all. They didn't know what that was. And trans didn't creep into the conversation for anything besides jokes until about mid-60s, when Dr. Renee Richards transitioned, and kept playing professional tennis.
And this is the one I always like to point out to people that say that the trans women shouldn't be allowed to compete in women’s sports. She didn't do any better on the women's tour than she had on the men's tour. So, it didn't really make any difference. But she was the butt of a number of jokes. Johnny Carson made a few, that's the time frame. Johnny Carson still had The Tonight Show. So anything you heard about, anybody in the community was the basic freaks and pervert stories. They're all just horrible people. So, you really didn't want to join that community. If you found them, you didn't want to be a part of it, because obviously, they're all horrible people. That's what you're taught from the beginning. And it's harder and harder to admit to yourself, "Well, I guess I'm one of those horrible people," at the time.
It's not until I just decided I couldn't go any longer. There was actually a suicide attempt involved. I was never one that had a gun handy, and I didn't have a bunch of pills. So, I just went out to my garage and started my car. It wasn't planned in advance. I just was getting ready to reach up to open the garage door and I decided not to press the button. I just sat there listening to some classical music, waiting to go to sleep and not wake up. And then for some reason, I decided to stop. And I went back into the house, and went to the back, and opened the window, and got online.
[00:07:44] I had been talking to some people online that I had found through my therapist. I'd started checking on the possibility of transitioning because I couldn't go on anymore. And so I talked to the people online, and they'd become good friends. I realized right away, after talking to a few trans people, they're not a bunch of freaks and weirdos. We have our share because we are a cross section of society. So, you can say, "Well, there's never been a murderer in the trans community." Yeah, there probably has. There's probably been one of just about everybody. We have a lot of scientists. We know that because some of them are rather famous.
But the thing is, being a cross section means that you're going to run across people you really like and would love to be closer friends with, and you'll run across some people that you just as soon never see again. It's like everywhere else in society. So, once I got that into my head and decided, "They're not all just going to be terrible," that made it a little easier for me to accept myself as being part of that group. But then there was the problem of being in Cow Town, Fort Worth, Texas, which is mostly made up, not real cowboys anymore, but the drugstore type cowboys that want to pose around wearing shirts that they used to call gay and their fancy boots and all of that, and being tough and macho. And that's not a good environment. In Fort Worth, they didn't really have any pride organizations or anything until well after I'd left, and that's about 11 years ago now. So, they were running way behind.
[00:09:41] I had to go to Dallas to find a therapist that would talk to me about it. Nobody in Fort Worth admitted that they did anything about gender identity disorder, was what it was called at the time. You'd leave a message on their answering machine. They never called back. There was nothing. Research was a little harder then. There's a lot more stuff available now. But a lot of stuff you get on the internet, if you just enter trans at the beginning of it, you wouldn’t get transgender because transsexual was the term at that time, and when that little three letter word shows up in the middle of anything, you get the most disgusting websites you can possibly imagine popping up.
[00:10:31] So, I decided, for the purpose of research, I contacted doctors that did the GRS procedures. And there's a bunch of different names for that. It used to be called sexual reassignment surgery. There is gender reassignment surgery. Then it became gender alignment surgery, and there's hundreds of names, but that's the basic thing. And I found a list of therapists that worked with various doctors and had sent numerous people to them, listed on the doctors' websites. And it was on Dr. Bauer's website that I actually became friends with one of her assistants, and we emailed back and forth for a while. But that was where I found my therapist. She was listed there. She was in Dallas. I had to drive 50 miles each way every time I went to a therapy session. And that's not 50 in the country, nice, easy driving, that's 50 through the heart of the so-called Metroplex, taking you right past the DFW International Airport and all of that traffic. So that was not a fun trip.
But I did that for about the six or eight months that I was with her. And things were falling apart at home. I was married at the time, and that was falling apart. Mostly because of her family. But anyway, that's a whole nother story that doesn't really deal with all of this. But she had left. I was going to be losing the house, and my friends I was talking to, it was a website. It's kind of changed now. I think it's still around, but it was called Laura's Transgender Playground, which was an odd title, I thought. Playground. But actually, it was the forum for an online transgender suicide prevention site. It was running for years, and I was on that. And I would sit up late at night talking to people who were still on, while I was married, because I couldn't go to sleep before about two o'clock anyway. So, she'd go to bed, and I'd go to my computer room.
[00:13:11] And eventually, it was just me and a couple of my very good friends from that site kept talking to me. They were the ones that I talked to right after I thought about doing away with myself. And one of them lived in Ohio, the other one lived in Louisiana. And the one from Louisiana contacted me one day. We'd been talking over the phone and Skype, everything else at this point. We'd gotten to be pretty good friends. We even got together in Memphis, where we actually stayed in West Memphis. The three of us got together just to meet and spend a week as ourselves, and that was wonderful. Because you always heard people say, "Well, you don't want to hang around with other trans people because they'll spot you easier." And nobody seemed to care about us.
And I will tell you, none of the three of us really looked all that great at the time. We were learning, but we were busy talking to each other and concerned about those friendships. We weren't really noticing if anybody else was looking or noticing, and so they didn't. If you just be yourself, most people don't care. That was an amazing discovery. But one of them, her wife, had actually called the sheriff to remove her from their house. And she contacted me when she got into a hotel and said, "I've been looking around for apartments in the New Orleans area. I was wondering, you're having problems up there. Want to come down and split the rent?"
And I decided to take that opportunity and do that. So, I moved down here. And on July 1, 2010, is when I first got here. So, I got down here and got settled into that apartment. And the girl from Ohio ended up coming down in December, left her job and home and came down. And the three of us shared an apartment for a while. They later got married, and the church I go to actually was the one that had the service for them, because it's a Unitarian Universalist Church, and they're very accepting of everybody. They did the service there, that was really nice. And they were both really good friends.
[00:15:56] One of them has since died, but the other one of my former roommates and I get together periodically. Up until COVID started, we were getting together and having lunch every week. And now it's much more sporadic, but we still do get together. And a couple of weeks ago, I took her for her second COVID shot, and she took me to lunch that day. And it doesn't help my dieting, but it was great. We had a nice, long visit that day.
But that's how I ended up coming down here. I had somewhere to go. And I had been running a photography business, but that was during a time of economic depression as well. We've had a lot of those. And people were having people photograph their weddings on their iPhones instead of paying a photographer, so it wasn't a great business to be trying to promote during that time. And I take my part in it. I spent all my time that I could have been advertising online and instead spent it researching trans issues. So, I can't blame it on the economy. Part of it was me. But it just seemed like as good a time to leave as it had ever been.
I had taken a part time job when things got slower. I was working at Sears selling appliances. I was one month short of having been there for a year, which is what you have to do before you can transfer. But my boss and the store manager were both so pleased with all the work I'd done, they said, "Well, we'll make it work." And I transferred down to work at Sears. They didn't have any openings in appliances. And that's when I became a mattress salesperson. And I found out it was much better at Sears to be a mattress salesperson than in appliances. It was possible to make more money in appliances, but it's also possible to go for a full pay period without really selling enough to bring you up to minimum wage. So, they gave you a draw against it and pulled it out of the next check. They had some dry periods between sales.
[00:18:21] But with mattresses, you were guaranteed minimum wage. You had a base pay, and since they knew you weren't going to sell mattresses at the same clip you can sell washing machines and ovens, they had higher percentages on the commissions, and I had one of the people that worked there just wouldn't sell anything that didn't have a 12% Commission. They were all over $1,000, and that was just where she started people. So, I made my money off of having seen the other end of that spectrum. And I sold them the best mattress they could afford. I'd aim them to one in their price range and let them try it.
And I made a very good living. I was usually the one or two salesperson in the department. And then I decided it was time to go ahead and do the transition. That was why I came to New Orleans, so I could break away from the 58 year history there in Fort Worth, also with the narrow view of the community there. So, I came down here and I no longer felt like the only one in the world. It was nice. My roommates were among the founders of the Louisiana Trans Advocates. I wasn't able to be in at the beginning of that because I was working retail. So I worked Saturdays and Sundays, and I couldn't go to Baton Rouge to sit in on those meetings.
I heard all about them because they were discussing them and asked me what I thought of this and that. I felt like I knew a lot about what was happening, I just couldn't go. And then they started the support group chapters. It was six months before I got to the point where I could get off to go to them. So, I joined the group about a year after they'd started. But it was a great thing, because then, not only did you know that you weren't alone in the world, you weren't alone in your area. Because we had meetings that had up to 30 people in them at a time. And go to the Baton Rouge meeting with them, and there'd be 30, 35 people there. And you just go like...
There is a great community of people with extremely varied interests. And as a friend of mine always said about his son, the least interesting thing about him was the fact that he was trans. And that's true. For most of us, that's the least interesting thing about us, because we all have other things on our minds. And when you first realize that you're trans, if I can just transition all my problems will go away. No, they won't. They'll transition with you. You have to get rid of them one at a time also. Your bills don't go away because there's a record of the name change. They will find you.
[00:21:36] I told them, so it wasn't a problem. But all of those things that you had, low self esteem sort of things and all of those questions, you have to break through them one at a time. I'll admit that some of them are much smaller hurdles than the transition itself, but some of them are actually bigger. Learning to really accept yourself is probably the hardest thing you have to do because that has to be done alone. Other people can say, "No, you're right, this is great." But their acceptance doesn't equal your self acceptance. You have to do that alone.
And that's the hardest thing because we get so much help along the way from other people. Now, I didn't get the support from my family. A lot of it is because, well, my father was already exhibiting a lot of signs of dementia. So, I never even got around to telling him, and my mother just wasn't willing to accept it. She just said, "No, you're not," and that was that. She'd never use the proper name or pronouns when she talked to me and she refused to see me any way except the way I used to be. So we drifted apart for the last four or five years of her life.
My sister, however, is very accepting. She just lives in an area where she can't be openly accepting. Because they might burn her house down just for being accepting. She's in the heart of East Texas. There was a girl that greeted them, when her husband went to work at one of the universities, wearing a T-shirt that said, "Welcome to East Texas. Set your calendars back 150 years." And that's pretty much the attitudes there. So, I've been up to visit her several times and she just introduces me as her friend Sally from New Orleans, and everybody's fine with it.
ZIEGLER: [00:23:41] Are you fine with it?
JACKSON: I'm okay with it because I know she doesn't care. It's fine with her. She said she remembers having a brother for so long, but she buys me stuff now, sends me clothing that she thinks I'll like. When she bought some jewelry, there's a company she buys jewelry from that you snap different pieces onto. I think it's called Gingersnaps. But anyway, she sent me a bracelet in a larger size that had a rainbow pattern on it. She says, "I thought you'd like this. I've always loved rainbows, and I know it's the flag for you." And she's gotten me matching earrings now. So, she's more than just accepting and she says when this is pandemic's over, she finally retired, and her plan is, as soon as we get to where we can travel again, she wants to go on long, driving vacations again, like we used to as a family. And she wants just the two of us to go off and go back up to Colorado and places where we haven’t been before. And I think that's great. We'll have a good time.
ZIEGLER: That sounds lovely. Thank you for sharing all of this. I wonder if I could just jump in because I wanted to ask you a couple of follow up questions. And the first place I'd love to start is your week as yourself with your friends in West Memphis. So, West Memphis is, for everyone, for future listeners who might not be familiar, is actually on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River, across from Memphis, TN. Could you just sort of walk us through how you chose that and the types of things y'all did for your week? Because that just sounds amazing.
JACKSON: [00:25:27] Well, originally, we were going to go to St. Louis, which was not as good for two of us in Louisiana, but there were originally going to be five of us going. And two of them decided that they couldn't. And one of them was the one around the Oregon area. So, we shifted it a little further east. And then the next one to cancel out was from Florida. So, we moved it to Memphis because it was closer to Louisiana. It wasn't as hard to get to from Ohio as some of these others. You didn't have to go through the worst of the traffic. So, we decided on Memphis, and our budgets decided on West Memphis because hotels are a lot cheaper in Arkansas. Stay on Beale Street, it'll be cheap. So that was how we selected it.
And the funny thing was, I refer to myself as being a petite,5'15". I'm 6'3" and one of my other friends was 6'2", and then there was the one that fit in better at only 5'7". But we thought this was going to be a problem and it wasn't. We noticed the first time we went to get anything to eat, we had a choice. We could have stayed in the motel room and ordered in every night and just stayed there. But we wanted to go out and do stuff. So, our first meal, we went to a pizza restaurant, and we got our food and sat down. My 6'2" friend decided (I'm not using names, not because they'd be ashamed, but because I don't have their permission)
ZIEGLER: Yeah, I understand.
JACKSON: So, she stood up to go to the bathroom. And I noticed a kid at the table across from us. I'd been hearing their conversations, and they'd all been talking about basketball. And he wasn't very tall. He looked at her when she stood up and he said, "Now that's the height I could use." He didn't say anything about, "Man, that woman's tall." Or, "There's something strange about that person." It was just like, "I can use that kind of height." And we decided, "Well, we don't need to stay in the room, hiding." We decided to go do the stuff we wanted to do.
[00:28:11] And the very strange thing to me was we just did normal stuff that anybody would do. My friend from Ohio had car trouble on the way down and was in a rental car. And she had a couple of items that she had left in her car that she needed. So, we went to a Walmart. That's a place nobody's going to notice you anyway, right? And we noticed the thing about it was that we'd always complained about those little ladies that are fumbling around in their purse for stuff at the checkout line. And we made fun of her after we got outside about now she had become one of those. But nobody ever said anything to us about anything.
And then we decided, we were in Memphis. Let's go get some barbecue and wander over to Graceland. Now, we were late in the day, so it was closed and I couldn't have afforded to go through it anyway, but we took pictures of us by the gates and all that we could see from outside. Then we wandered around. There's a little park area and two of us were tall enough to stand on a picnic table and take a picture of Elvis's airplanes over the fence. And they went over to do something else. They were going around the other side, and I was still taking some pictures.
This Englishman comes walking up to me, and I didn't know what he wanted. He was asking me questions about the camera because I used to be a professional photographer, so I had a pretty good setup with me. And he was asking photography questions, and I discovered, as the conversation was going on, as the Brits would say, he was trying to chat me up. And he went so far as to tell me what hotel he was staying in and what room it was. And I'm going, "Okay, that was weird." But I thanked him, he was very nice. And he thanked me for the information I'd given him about stuff in the area. 30:20 And then I had a little oriental couple come over to ask about how to get some of these places. I gave him directions and it seemed like nobody seemed to notice anything. I was thinking, "If I had known that, I wouldn't have waited 58 years.” But I think if I had tried to do this back in the late 50s, early 60s, it would have been completely different.
ZIEGLER: [00:30:51] I'm sorry to interrupt. What year would that have been? Would that have been 2008?
JACKSON: Yeah. It was either 2008 or 2009. I could go back in and check to be sure. But it was already in the 21st century. But it was a great experience, and we did stuff as our true selves. I know it was for him to get a bigger tip, but we went to an Italian restaurant for dinner. They were ordering wine, and I didn't drink, so I was not ordering wine. Their tips were going to be larger, just based off the bar tab. So he flirted with me the whole time. But I'm going like, "Yeah, good move. Flirt with the one with the smallest bill to get the bigger tip.” Now, that was a good bit. But it did make me feel good.
So, I had this great feeling of acceptance. And also when I got down here, I was always kind of sorry that I didn't arrange to arrive here as Sally, and transfer, but I couldn't figure out how to transfer at Sears under a different name. So, I didn't get around to that for about a year and a half. And it was another case of it going much better than I expected. This was before Sears started all their big cutbacks. They started very shortly after I got here, but at that point they had an HR director in every store. So, I went to her and talked to her about it, and she admitted that she'd never had anyone make a transition in their store. She says, "I think we've had some trans people work here before, but I don't think we've ever had a transition."
So she says, "I'll talk to the manager and HR department and all. We'll find out what we need to do, and I'll get back with you." And so we set it all up and I met with the store manager and her. And they told me I needed to get the name change officially done, and my social security number under my name before they'd be able to pay me as Sally. So, let's hold the showing up at work transitioned until we can actually pay. So, I started all that process. And in the meantime, the store manager held our diversity meetings again, for everybody, as reminders of the new refreshers. And he started with the people up in appliances and mattresses that work in the same area. He had them redo it. And also they already knew. And they were doing all this, and he reminded them that if there were any problems that we have, if they get reported, Sears is behind her. And if you have a problem with that, maybe you don't share the same values that everybody at Sears does. So, remember, be respectful.
[00:34:10] And I found out later on, that there were three women that weren't really happy with the idea of sharing the restroom with a trans person, that whole deal. And my HR director talked to them. They went to talk to her. And she just said, "Oh, that's fine. There's a public restroom in the mall." They said, "Oh, she's going to use that?" "No, you can use that. Because you're the one that has the problem. So, if you want to go down there... Of course, there's no telling who's going to be in the stall next to you down there. And at least you know that Sally's a nice person."
And over time, that all changed. But my experiences with that transition were so odd compared to most people's that I heard about, the horror stories I had with things that happened. One of the girls, after it had been made official, says, "I can't wait for you to get here as Sally. We need to go shopping." She wanted to help me with clothes shopping. I was going, "Well, that's different from what I'd heard." The big disappointment was the first day on the job as Sally. I had my new name tag and everything, and I was finally not wearing a loose hanging knit shirt. I used to wear baggy clothes to hide developments, and I was dressed in a little bit more form fitting clothing, and dangling earrings and all, and I took down the ponytail. Guys had to wear their long hair in a ponytail because most of the guys were in shipping, and they didn't want to have any accidents there, so it was just a dress code for the guys, if you’ve got long hair, wear a ponytail. And the girls didn't have that restriction. So I had my hair down for the first time there.
[00:36:07] And this fella comes up the escalator, and one of the girls says, "I think that's your customer from last week." And I turned around as he came walking towards me. No change in expression or anything. He glances down and says, "Well, it's Sally now, right?" And I said, "Yes." And he pulls out the business card with the old name on it and says, "I looked at this mattress last week. I'm ready to buy it." And I almost asked him to go downstairs and come back up and raise a big stink or something because I'd been fretting about this for over 50 years. And it was nothing. The people I worked with were fine with it, the customers didn't care. I was giving them straight information on the mattresses. They liked the way I presented them, so they bought them.
And that was the only thing my boss had warned me about. He says, "We can control the people here. And if anybody wants to cause any trouble, we will take care of it. We can't control the customers. You will have to deal with them. So, I hope you have thick skin in case they don't accept." I said, "I'll deal with it." And it was very easy. I was very happy. But I'm sure it would have been quite a bit different in a lot of other places, a lot of other places around the state of Louisiana, in Texas and other places in the south because Louisiana has a rather conservative reputation when you move outside of New Orleans, and that makes a huge difference.
ZIEGLER: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Yeah, I love these stories. And it's so uplifting to hear that you didn't have any of the things that you were so terrified for 50 years.
JACKSON: [00:37:56] Oh yeah, I was sure that it was gonna be a disaster. And at the very least, I was afraid they were going to move me off of the sales floor and into the back room, which would be minimum wage instead of the commissions I was getting. Then I was afraid the commissions were going to drop off, and it was going to be a terrible expense. Plus, I had to buy a whole new wardrobe. And I needed those commissions to do that.
ZIEGLER: And your time in New Orleans. One of the things that I want to be sure that I ask you about is your radio show. So, you come to New Orleans, you're situated with your friends. You are able to have the job that you transfer with, which is all fantastic. Can you sort of walk us through how it is that you got to the radio show, and also tell us what it is and what you do?
JACKSON: Okay. The radio show came about through the other organization I've been with since I got down here. It was PFLAG, the PFLAG New Orleans branch. I feel obliged to say this every time I talk about PFLAG. This is the chapter that brought the T into the PFLAG National. Part of their commitment and all to the trans people was because of this chapter. And it was because of the work of a couple of people who are not trans. Someone they knew was trans. One of them isn't even gay. She's just been in charge around here for a long time because her gay son got her involved in the movement and she's stayed on. She says she has four bisexual grandchildren and one that's come out as trans, so that's just spreading around everywhere. And she's said, "If you ever have questions or need support, you know where to go. Call me."
I was working with PFLAG, volunteering for everything I was off to do. And I'd been with them. Like I said, at that time I was about three or four years into it. And an organization here in New Orleans that's known as NOSIDA, it's New Orleans Society of Infectious Disease Awareness. And they have a chapter and one of the ranking officials in it is a man named Dr. Mark Alain Dery. He is an infectious disease specialist. He's worked with the World Health Organization. He heard on a trip he was making back from somewhere, he'd gone to a symposium, and he heard an announcement on one of those little news channel things on the airplane that all of the clear channels for radio are gone. They've all been assigned, but they were opening up four LP stations in the New Orleans area. That's the low power broadcasting. So, we were limited to how much power we can send out. And we share a channel with somebody that's off the other way, far enough away that we can't bleed into each other. That's the theory.
[00:41:22] But anyway, they had one available and he had a friend that taught radio at NOU. And he helped him write the proposal, and his idea was to have a radio station that would be for social justice, equal rights, and he had health was in there at the beginning, but he figured that's really covered. When you get social justice and equal rights, the health stuff kind of falls into that. But he still does a show himself on that and does a daily show with him and another doctor, keeping updates on the coronavirus pandemic. But that's not through the radio station. That's a Zoom thing on YouTube.
But they were doing a thing for some fundraising to get the station started. They needed equipment and stuff like that. And I don't know for sure what pieces of equipment, the people at PFLAG think that the money they gave paid for the board in the control room. So, whichever part we paid for. Didn't matter if it was just chairs. It got the stuff going. And a lot of volunteer work went into setting it up and doing all that. And they had started onto the air, and were getting more fundraising. And they were looking for more shows, and they came up with the board. One of the members of the board is one of my co hosts. But he very much wanted to do a radio show for PFLAG, to get our voice heard.
[00:43:11] The funny story is that they sent out a list of call letters that were available and everybody was fighting over them. And Dr. Dery took one. They asked him if he was sure he wanted that one. Our call letters are WHIV. Now, obvious, for an infectious disease specialist, HIV is what brought him to New Orleans to help with that epidemic that was going on when he first moved here. And the clinics he opened were all infectious diseases, basically HIV. So, it made perfect sense to him. And he and his wife came up with a wonderful acronym for it. It's "We Honor Independent Voices." And we do. We've got everybody on there with basically any point of view that they want to discuss, it's fine. So PFLAG said we'd be interested and they said, "Well, we'll give you a trial run. We'll give you a 30 minute show for six months, and then we'll decide what we're going to do about it later."
And the board member that wanted to do it said, "I can do that no problem." They wanted to have a little balance on the show. And that's why we had two people because he was a younger, not trans, gay man, who was in a serious relationship and ended up getting married as soon as that was legal. And so he was that viewpoint. I'm an older, single trans woman. So, we had a little bit of a balance there for points of view when we're discussing things, and better questions. Because he doesn't, didn't I should say, because he's getting much better at it now. But he didn't really understand transitions very much. He knew a lot of trans people and liked them. He met them through PFLAG. They were cool people. So, he was more than willing to learn more.
And so he would come in and he asked questions that I wouldn't think to ask, because I already knew it. But our listeners don't all know it. Because it's not aimed at just gay men. It's not aimed just at lesbians, bisexuals, trans people, genderfluid and nonconforming. It's not aimed at anyone. It's the whole community. And the show got the title, Expanding the Rainbow, because we're trying to reach out beyond our community. And I have always felt that the best way to reach out beyond your community for support is to also support the people who aren't in your community. And we've had some people who aren't members of our community come in. They're working with social issues and getting money or food or music lessons, even, to underprivileged kids. That's great. That's social justice. We're into that. The best way to be accepted into their community is to accept them into yours.
[00:46:28] I know that some people don't feel comfortable talking in private about some issues, so support groups quite often have to exclude them. But I like to do as much stuff as I can, including the allies. Because allies are what make things happen. And if you look back to 1965, in the big Civil Rights Movement, when you watch the pictures particularly of Dr. King crossing the bridge into Selma, you will notice some faces that are not part of his community. There was a Jewish lawyer, there was a rabbi, there were several Catholic priests, who were very, very white, and they had a lot of Latinos in there. It was a cross section. It was people who thought, "It's time to put an end to this foolishness." We haven't managed to do it yet, but we have to take time. It's basically not quite 50 years ago. That's the bad thing about when you've been around long enough, you start noticing the same movements starting up again. And you go, "Why did we lose what we gained?" And that's why the importance of the radio show is that we remind people that we have to keep working, or we could lose all that and start over again.
But my particular way I got to the radio station was I was called that night after the board meeting. And she called me up and asked me if I would be one of the co-hosts. I said, "Sure. Okay." Sounded like fun. And she says, "It's going to be on at 8am on Thursdays." And I'm like, "Morning radio?" Like I said, I go to bed around two. Because I've been a jazz musician most of my life. And I've always been geared to being up late, but I had to get up early to go do the radio show. Now, we record at night, because that's when the guests are available, and we're not going into the studios yet, because Dr. Dery will not allow more than one person in the studio at a time. And with two co-hosts, one of us would have to sit there and hope that all the Wi-Fi stuff worked. And you're familiar with how Zoom sometimes doesn't want to work on your equipment. And just get down there and have that happen.
[00:49:16] I have done an hour by myself in a monologue, due to an accident, but we had an author that was going to be on and he had it down as 8pm rather than 8am. And my co-host at the time, I only had one, he got stuck at work. He works at a job where they just say, "Hey, you can't go home. We've got this to do." So, he was stuck and I was there by myself. And I called the lady who was running the show for us, getting our guests on. There's nobody here but me. What do you want me to do? And she goes, "Talk about your books. I'll be listening." Okay, so I did an hour.
ZIEGLER: Well, you know, that's a wonderful segue because I did want to also ask you about your book. Did you say books? Do you have more than one?
JAKSON: Yeah, I've got six right now. No, wait a minute. Maybe it's eight. Yeah, I've got six novels that are already published, a book of poetry and a book of short stories. Yeah, it's eight.
ZIEGLER: Oh, wow. Yeah.
JACKSON: Or nine. I can't keep track of them.
ZIEGLER: [00:50:41] I'm a librarian. I can get to the bottom of this, Sally.
JACKSON: Somebody always asks me to tell them something about my work in progress. And I go, "Which one?" I've got three in progress.
ZIEGLER: Actually, I had in mind the poetry, the Poems from A Transgender Heart, I believe. But actually, I'm very curious about the fiction. I haven't had a chance to look into it. Your characters, does it tend to be trans characters or themes?
JACKSON: Well, I wasn't sure how big that would go over at first. Two of the novels are series, and there were no openly trans or gay people in it, as far as you as you knew. It's possible. Volume Two is where they start showing up as visible characters and central to the stories. And like I said being trans is the least interesting thing about their characters. But there's a series and I'm in the middle of writing the fifth book in the series. There are going to be six. I've planned it from the beginning for six. So there are little easter eggs through them that will lead you to, when you finally get to the sixth book, there'll be an aha moment, where you realize where it's all been pointing.
But the other one originally was just going to be a single novel. That was my original intention. And it was more autobiographical than most of the others. A lot of stuff was changed about it, but I was in a very lonely place at the time. I wrote it 14 years before it was published. It got stuck in a computer that died. And it wasn't till after I got down here that my best friend actually works on computer hardware and software, and she helped me get it out of that computer, and I re-edited it.
[00:52:59] So, the book that I published in 2014, was written right at 2000, so I didn't go through and bring it up to date to today's date. I kept it starting there, as a recent period piece, so I didn't have to change every reference, because we had a segment that took place on The Tonight Show, and it was Jay Leno's show at that time. Well, I would have had to have brought it up to Jimmy Fallon at that point, and all, and too much stuff was going to have to change. So, I left it as a period piece.
And then I brought those characters, and this sounds like I've got best sellers out there. I'm an indie author. I self publish. But one of my friends read that book, and her review of it on Amazon says it's one of the best books she's ever read. I liked that. And then she contacted me and said she wanted to know what happened next. So, I wrote a second book, and there's a third book. It's ending up as a trilogy. But it was a story. I lived most of my life in dreams. Really, I had dreamed about what my life could have been while I was busy living the life everybody else wanted me to live. We all do that. But I decided I could make this into a story that even people who weren't part of the community could understand. Just a lonely guy dreaming about a rich, famous lady, and finds out somewhere along the way they're sharing their dreams.
So, it ended with they weren't sure if they got together or not, whether it really happened or was just more dreaming. So, that's where the second volume comes in. But it's the sort of thing where I didn't want to preach at people about when you do accept everybody, and these people aren't. That's why the characters that come in are introduced organically through the story. And then you find out more about them. And we go to the fact that they can be anything that they want to be. They can be computer specialists. A lot of trans people, before they were out, were doing service in the military. A lot of women that are female to male transitioning wanted to go there because it was a place where they could be more masculine, without even having to tell anybody, and you do this. That's great.
[00:55:59] And then the transgender bans came up. That was wonderful, but they've gone away again, so they can serve. Because there's a lot of people that want to do that. They don't want to just be like, "Well, I get to be a guy, great." They want to be a guy with a purpose. And they feel like the military is a good place to serve people, and then after their military careers, a lot of them stay in, to the reserves and all, the National Guard. And they stay with that because they help. Like I had friends that were helping after Katrina, and they were still in the military at that point. But it's just the sort of thing where we have the same things we want to do with our lives that other people do. And they have to get past that one first obstacle for them, is accepting that a trans person is, number one, a person, and number two, trans. And if you treat everybody that way, it works much better.
ZIEGLER: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And Sally, I want to be conscious of your time. So, let me just ask you this last question that we normally ask in closing. And it takes this preamble. So, this project, again, is meant to gather stories together, perspectives together, so that we have some sort of record for ourselves and for people to come, about what it means to be us here and now, right? And at its core, there's an optimism that people will be around to listen and/or read these interviews. And I wonder if you can imagine somebody, in a couple of decades, say 30 years out, who's reading this interview transcript or listening to this audio, is there any final message, anything that we haven't covered yet, anything that you'd like to leave them with, about what it means to be trans here and now?
JACKSON: [00:58:06] Well, I'd like to leave them with, I hope that it's not an issue 30 years from now. That you can just be trans and it's fine, that people can be themselves. But even when you're facing problems with that, if they're still having trouble with trans acceptance, remember what I had just said about you're a person first and trans second or third. It doesn't matter. The type of person you are, to me, is a great deal more important than what category somebody labeled you as. If you take labels away, I once said, and I may even have put it in one of my books, I don't remember, but I said labels are a convenient way to know who to hate. It's a nice shortcut. Rather than actually talking to a person and finding out who they are.
Because if you go in with a label, you know I'm not going to agree with this person. It works politically, too. "I'm not going to talk to them. They're conservative." Well, nothing's ever going to change if conservatives and liberals and moderates don't all talk to each other. They're just going to end up with three camps going like, "Well, that's it." We can't make progress until we stop pigeonholing people. We've made huge strides with that with the nongender conforming, gender fluid, genderqueer, all the different subgroups. We call it the alphabet. You know when you get into LGBTQAI, all these things. It gets too long. We kind of go to LGBTQ+ to cover everybody, because we don't want to leave anybody out. But sometimes it takes too long to mention all of it.
But we've made huge strides about showing that there is a spectrum of genders, rather than one or the other. Now, some of us are more decidedly male or decidedly female, but just for all of the people that read this later that might want to say, "Yeah, well, that's fine. But what about the cisgender community?" There's no way it's 100% male or 100% female in that group, either. There are little variations, traits that you picked up from along the way through your DNA, through your environment, and things like that. No one is really 100% in either one of those boxes, and that's fine.
[01:00:59] Like people who made fun of him for a long time, a professional athlete, a lineman in the NFL, because he took up knitting to relax. And people were saying, "Well, that's a sissy thing to do." And he was going like, "Just because you can't do it doesn't make it sissy." He had a whole different take on it. But it's that sort of thing. If you have an interest, there's nothing wrong with a woman that wants to race motorcycles and rebuild them. That's fine. Who said she couldn't?
And a lot of people said, "Well, I gave up this and this when I transitioned." I still watch football because I enjoyed watching football. I don't watch every game. Now, I watch teams that I like, but there's enough going on that you can watch a little football. I love basketball. I used to play. But that was my extreme effort to try and fit in, and I ended up being good at it. So, that was great. But it was just like, I haven't given up a whole lot of stuff that I used to do because I did so much of the other...
My collection of stuffed animals will attest to the fact that I did stuff against gender for a long time. Because some of these guys have been with me 30 years or more. I brought them back as souvenirs from trips. I actually have a family of penguins here that I picked up when I went to Antarctica. I bought them in Ushuaia, Argentina, which is at the very tip of Argentina. And so, I've got those. I bought those in '99, I think. '98 is when I was down there. And I have stuff that goes back further than that, that I bought in Canada and in all my world travels.
I did a lot of traveling on my own. I got paid to travel when I was playing on cruise ships. So, that was cool. But I did a lot of traveling, and it doesn't really work because I was traveling to kind of get away from myself. And everywhere I went, I don't know how, but that guy was always there. It's one of those things you can't run away from. So, eventually, you learn to accept and change what you can change. That's the biggest advice I can give anybody. Don't stress about things you can't change. Change the things you can change. And as you start with that, it has to start with loving the person you are and being confident that this is who you are and who you were meant to be. Then that starts to spread out, and you'll find that, sooner or later, along the way, it's changing some of the things you couldn't change. But if you just went up to change them and butted your head up against a brick wall, you're going to give out before the wall does. So, start inward and work out.
[01:04:14] There's one story I have to tell. A friend of mine, I tried several churches before I found the Unitarians, and they all, on the surface, seemed to be fine, but don't use their bathrooms sort of thing. It's like we'll tolerate you rather than accept you. And I was waiting outside for my friend. I was sitting on a little bench, and this woman came up and was talking to me, and I introduced myself. We're having a wonderful conversation. And the girl that's my friend comes out and she goes, "Oh, I see y'all have already met." She took her mom inside, and after the service she told me, "My mother is very transphobic. I was surprised she was talking to you. And I told her that you were a trans woman." She said, "Oh, well, I guess I need to change my opinion of trans people." I'm going like, "It was that easy." She was transphobic, so she'd never talked to anybody before. She didn't know upfront. She recognized the name and knew that I was a friend to her daughter, so she talked to me. That's all it takes really. Just a little communication. You learn a lot about people just from talking to them for a few minutes.
ZIEGLER: Well, I think that's a wonderful place, Sally, for us to go ahead and call it. Yes, this project is all about learning from talking to people. And I'm very, very appreciative of you taking the time and adding your voice to this project. Thank you so much.
JACKSON: Glad to do it, and thank you for inviting me.