I'm Eric Marcus and this is Making Gay History. Joyce Hunter had every reason to fail. In a moment she's going to tell you why the odds

were stacked against her, how her involvement in the

gay rights movement in the early 1970s saved her life and how an anti-gay

attack set her on a path to help LGBTQ young people. But I don't want to get in the way of Joyce telling you herself how her life unfolded, so I'll let

her fill in the rest. It's a short trip from my Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan to Joyce Hunter's Sunnyside

neighborhood in Queens, New York.

After a quick ride on the elevated 7 train, I find myself walking down a tree-lined street with stout six-story apartment buildings, a lot like the Queen's apartment house where I grew up.

Joyce's English Tudor style building was built in the late 1930s around the same time she was born.

Joyce lives on the second floor so I take the stairs.

I ring the bell and she greets me at the door with a smile.

Joyce is just shy of 50 with close cropped curly dark hair and wears large wire rim glasses.

She's dressed in slacks in a button-down shirt.

Her voice reminds me of home because she speaks with the same New York accent as my mother and father.

She leads me into her bright living room, we take our seats and I attach the microphone to her collar.

I press record.

Interview with Joyce Hunter of the Hetrick Martin Institute on December 9th Friday, 1988.

Location Sunnyside Queens. Interviewer is Eric Marcus.

Tape one, side one.

I was born in Staten Island, 1939.

I was born in a home for Staten Island, 1939.

I was born in a home for unwed mothers.

My mother and father were not married.

...