Part of: Dianne Duncan oral history (2 objects)
Dianne Duncan oral history - Dianne Duncan oral history
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- Carson Wright: Ready to get started? Michelle Lopez: Mm-hmm (affirmative),
- everyone ready? Okay, good. Yeah,
- so my name's Michelle Lopez. CW: I am Carson Wright and we are here with ...
- Dianne Duncan: Dianne Duncan. CW: ... in her office in Austin,
- Texas. We are conducting an interview for the Austin Women's Activism Oral History project.
- It's March 28, 2019. ML: Yeah, all right, so you said previously
- you were at UT from 1966 to 1983? Okay. DD: Yes, off and on.
- ML: Off and on? Okay. DD: Some of that time, I didn't even live here.
- ML: Okay, yeah, so I remember previously when we talked in our preliminary interview that you said
- you were raised in South Texas, correct? DD: Correct.
- ML: Yeah, where specifically in South Texas? DD: McAllen.
- ML: McAllen? Okay. DD: Back when the border was quite porous.
- ML: Ah, okay. Yeah, I remember you also said that living in South Texas, being raised in South Texas
- influenced a lot of your political views. DD: I think so. I don't know that it was
- my ... I come from a family of Republicans back when there was what they called Yellow
- Dog Democrats that became Republicans. My family were always Republicans, but in today's world,
- you'd probably call them a Bush Republican, they were more business people.
- CW: Okay. DD: But my mother was the
- kind of woman that did a lot of ... it certainly wasn't protests, but she did a lot of public
- civics stuff, so she was always the precinct chairman and I was raised to think that voting was
- not only my right, but my responsibility and my family talked about politics at the dinner table.
- And she would have me do certain things, a lot of volunteer work and the school that I went to,
- the middle class was on one side of town and my side of town was closer to the border
- and it was where ... I don't want to say my family was rich, but
- what wealth there was was around us. DD: People had horses and bigger houses
- and people had ranches and so, I was exposed to the wealth that there was around there
- and the political people who were politically connected, so I got exposed at an early
- age that if you had money, you got certain things. But I also went to school with the
- migrant farm worker kids, both Anglos and Mexicans and the Mexican kids, if they were more affluent,
- they would come across and go to school. DD: And in fact, the term "wet back"
- back then simply meant that somebody crossed back and forth from the border.
- CW: Right. DD: Right? And so, I remember one time
- I watched this boy, I remember his name was Jaime and he was writing so small and I said, "Jaime,
- what are you doing?" And he said, "Well, paper's very expensive," he's from Reynosa and it's like,
- both sides. So, I was exposed to that kind of discrepancy
- and I would say that that's ... I never liked it, it never felt like.
- My father probably didn't care, but I don't think my mother liked it either and I don't know if
- she ... she didn't really approve of my choices as an adult, but she helped create the person that
- did not think that was right or fair. CW: Okay.
- DD: So, I appreciate that from her. ML: Do you feel like your views ... like
- you were individual in your views or was it a widespread sentiment that there was injustice?
- DD: No, I mean I was around ... I lived in a family with three Bentsen families,
- that's Senator Lloyd Bentsen, so no. I was the kid that was looking around going,
- "What is ... this is a weird place, weird things are happening." I stopped having
- birthdays at nine years old, because they would not allow me to invite one of my Mexican friends.
- ML: Oh, wow. DD: I said, "Okay, well if I can't
- invite who I want, I just won't have them." ML: Yeah.
- DD: But I've always been ... I'm not that kind of person that needs other people to tell me
- I'm okay. So, I can't say that I really stood out in any particular way, didn't feel that way, but
- I was just a child kind of collecting information.
- ML: Yeah, yeah, okay. When you came to UT, 1966 right?
- DD: 1966, that was sort of interesting, because my family moved to San Antonio when I started
- high school and let's just forget those four years. And so then, I started UT and
- I think the interesting thing about this is how quickly the culture changed, because
- when I started UT, girls were not allowed-- if you were a good girl, whatever that was,
- and I would've considered myself a "good girl"-- to wear pants. You had to wear skirts and dresses.
- CW: Was that an enforced rule or was that a social ... ?
- DD: Social, that was the social norms for "good girls," whatever that was.
- But everybody, of course, wanted to be a good girl and I pledged in a sorority and
- the purpose of pledging in a sorority's so you can go to
- fraternity parties and get drunk. That's what it seemed like it was ... it was a party thing
- and my grades reflected that. DD: And so, by the second semester,
- I had pretty much ... I didn't flunk out of UT, I was smart enough to drop out and then I got a job
- and then, kind of later in the semester, I had a weekend party with three of my other pledges
- and it lasted all weekend and all I know is by the end of that weekend, I had ... all of
- us had been kicked out of our apartment and I already was out of UT and lost my job, because
- I fell asleep at the job, because I was hungover. DD: I think you get the picture. So, that was the
- scene and when I went to high school it was sock hops. You ever see a TV show called "Happy Days"?
- CW: I've heard of it. ML: I've heard of it.
- DD: Okay, let me just tell you that's how it was.
- And I remember there was no Internet, people had TIME Magazine, they had Reader's Digest, you would
- watch ... your family would watch together on Sunday night and watch the Ed Sullivan Show
- where I saw the Beatles and I heard Bob Dylan when I was, I think a junior and all I knew was
- there are people out there who are not like these people and what can I do to meet these people?
- DD: There was the coast, there was no third coast. There was the West Coast, there was the East Coast
- and all of us in between, that's all we ... there was no way to get any information.
- It was on TV, it was just none of us knew anything, right? So, I think I entered UT
- hungry for stuff and just not knowing what to do and I think I just, like a lot of kids, because
- I didn't know what to do and I was just trying to fit in, just drank and partied for the first year.
- DD: Now, fast forward. That's what UT was like, I wasn't different than anyone else.
- That was 1966, so I went to Texas Tech for a year to get my grades up, that didn't work out either,
- but doesn't matter. Then, I went back to San Antonio Junior College and worked to get my
- grades up to get back into UT, so when I came back to UT, it was the winter, it was January of 1969.
- So, that's what, two and a half years from when I started in '66.
- At that point, everything was different. DD: It was like somebody turned a light bulb on.
- Students were protesting, everybody was dressing informally,
- everything was different. I went to the Chuck Wagon, I ran into a girl that was at the Student
- Union. There was no coffee houses, you'd go there and have coffee and hang out and I ran into a girl
- that I had known, she was a couple of years older than me at a boarding house. And she took me over
- to a co-op with some friends that she knew who were students and this was the Plan 2 House.
- DD: And that boy, who was a student, sold me my first marijuana and gave me LSD,
- some LSD, and off I went. And then, I started protesting. So, I'm just telling you it's like a
- light bulb went on. There was no gradual anything. When it hit, I don't know exactly when it hit, but
- for me, it was when I came back to Austin, so it was not sudden, it was like ... I'm not thinking
- a lot of the way in which I was raised was that different than somebody 10, 20, 30,
- 40, it just really wasn't that much different. DD: Women were expected to be married. My family
- didn't even give me a middle name, because you would just lose it when you got married.
- Nice girls go to college to get their MRS. My mother didn't work outside the home,
- that was what I thought was the normal thing to do and my attitude from day one
- was I never want to get married. I didn't know how to interpret it any other way other than
- this doesn't look like something I want. DD: There was no exposure to any other culture,
- I was never exposed to any gay culture. Every once in a while,
- I'd be around a man or a woman that felt different, I didn't have the words for it
- or the understanding of it, but I could ... it was butch and femme days, so the men were really,
- really drag queens and really flippant and the women were I don't know, they were the type of,
- I call them an old-fashioned bull dyke. DD: They had rolled-up sleeves with the
- cigarette pack here or here. That was the scene that I came out into, but if you saw that, I just
- didn't have the words for it. I just knew that these people were different. I didn't identify
- with them, you understand, but then I didn't understand with where I was, so I like a lot
- of kids, was trying to find my tribe, my people. CW: Was that scene present in Austin in 1966 or
- was it just when you came back? DD: When I came back. So, 1966,
- if it was, it was such a small part. They were off doing their own thing, but your average student
- was my experience. We lived in dorms, we went to parties, kids have always
- gone to parties and drank too much and got alcohol. I lost track,
- they kept changing the date when you could or you couldn't, but it didn't block any of us.
- DD: Back then, if girls got pregnant, abortion was not legal. Girls disappeared, nobody talked
- about it. I didn't find even out until I was an adult woman, a middle-aged woman that a
- lot of women I knew had had children and given them up for adoption. You didn't talk about it.
- It was not spoken. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but it was not spoken about. Good girls
- and good families don't talk about these things. DD: So, everything that was kind of undercover,
- there was this sheen of cultural norms and you could do it,
- because the world was a simpler place. Remember, a single channel of information:
- network TV. Walter Cronkite would tell us what was happening in the world and we would watch
- the Ed Sullivan Show for entertainment and here's your TIME Magazine with the pictures
- and your Reader's Digest and you would go to the church of whatever your family went to.
- DD: It was ... the information was controlled, so if there dissent in the people that were living
- like that, which we've always had, those people were in one of those coastal areas,
- right? They were not here or they were holed up closeted in their little whatever, so you didn't
- really ... you were minimally exposed to it. Let me go pull her needles. She can paint another
- time, just going to pull her needles. CW: Okay.