BackCAST Cape Ann: LGBTQ Community on Cape Ann

Episode 2: Jack Vondras 

This transcript was edited for clarity and length. 

Listen to the full episode: Episode 2: Jack Vondras 

The stories you hear as part of BackCAST Cape Ann’s series on the LGBTQ community highlights their contribution, care, and activism. It’s a look back at experiences, significant moments and persistent memories. 

For this episode in our series on the LGBTQ community, I interview Jack Vondras, now retired project director at Education Development Center in Waltham, Massachusetts, where he addressed substance misuse and prevention. He is board chair of North Shore Community Health that has centers in Gloucester, Salem, and Peabody. He’s responsible for opening the health center in Gloucester, known as Gloucester Family Health. He is the former health director for the City of Gloucester during 2003 to 2011.

Maureen Aylward (MA): Welcome to the podcast.

Jack Vondras (JV): Thanks, Maureen. I want to say that of all the jobs I’ve had in my career, which has been a few, the one that I had with the City of Gloucester as the health director was my most favorite. I always think of the awesome time I had here because I did take a firm community response approach to my job and I’ll talk about some of that. Thinking back on my time in Gloucester always gives me a good, warm, fuzzy feeling. Driving up 128 from Wakefield today, where I live, gave me a great feeling of returning home. When I come over the bridge, it is just the most relaxing feeling.

MA: Being a gay man, tell me about that and what your experience has been.

JV: Sure. I need to go back because I want to talk about coming out. I came out as a teenager when I was about 15. The circumstances weren’t good. I was a homeless teenager in the state of New Jersey and was pretty much a throwaway. But, I did do one thing at that point. I realized that I needed to get away from the drugs, the homelessness, the issues that I was dealing with, so I left the state when I graduated from high school. Surprised I graduated. I used graduation as an entrée to go to Maine, and then I ended up getting a degree, and actually multiple sets of degrees on my own. 

One of the things about being gay is that I always wanted to be a parent and I couldn’t figure that out because gay men weren’t usually parents. In the ’80s, when I was coming into my 30s, I teamed up with Debra Delman, and she and I decided to have a child together. Adoption and foster care was illegal[for gays in Massachusetts so we had no models to work from. We drafted a custody agreement, which was a huge endeavor at that point, and decided that we would go ahead and have a child. Peter was born in 1987. We co-parented through all those years: a week on, week off, and that was all predetermined, such as we needed to live in the same community. No one we knew had done this before, so I just want to say that this was setting the tone of my life. I felt that gay men could be positive role models of parenting. I love being a parent. It’s my most favorite achievement because I just love it.

My son now is 32, but I want to share a funny story about him when he was a teenager. We were at a family event and he decided to come out as a straight kid. His mother and I looked at each other said, “Yeah. Sure.” I have other members of my family who are gay. My father was gay, closeted gay. I just thought of course my son is going to be gay. He’s biologically mine. My comeback at that point was “We don’t care what sexual orientation you are. We’re open to diversity and we’ll figure this out.” Honestly, I had no clue how to be the father of a straight young male.

We thought it was a phase. We thought he’ll do this for a couple of years, and he’ll find his way and he’ll become gay. It just didn’t work that way. He totally does gravitate towards females, because when he walks down the street, his head always turns their way and my turns the other way. We’ve learned to adapt and accept. It was a lot of laughs. We still joke about it.

I was hired by the Gloucester Board of Health, not by the mayor, even though I worked with John Bell, the mayor at the time. One of the missions of coming here to Gloucester as the health director was to open a health center. At that point, Hepatitis C was off the charts here in Gloucester. Opiates were just coming on the scene. It’s a fishing community. Fishing is hard manual labor and any hard manual labor position like that will get injuries, hence the impact of opiates. Knowing that, I approached opening a health center here. We had lots of discussions about it.

The Gloucester Board of Health was very involved with the health center. I’ll say that it was important for us to not develop it as part of a city budget. I struggled over that because, of course, you want to create your own positions, but I realized that as city budgets get cut back, this would impact my budget at the health center. I would have to lay off doctors and staff. 

Instead, I looked around for a partner, which I found in North Shore Community Health, an organization that creates local nonprofit federally qualified health centers. Gloucester Family Health is a fully federally qualified health center. I did that. All the documentation, all the applications were from my title as the health director. I feel very proud. Very few health directors get to open health centers. It’s a great accomplishment. 

I met my to-be husband right around the time I was coming to Gloucester. We decided in 2008 that we were going to get married. It was legal in the state. I wanted to experience setting up a life with a partner just as any other person would want to do. You can do that in this state, and it set up a whole different change in our relationship, to look at permanence and how we co-parent a child. I had a couple of friends who got married within days of the state overturning the rule banning gay marriage. We wanted to take our time, so we chose a wedding date in June 2008.

I bring that up because during the last few days before our wedding the Gloucester teen pregnancy pact was in Time. “Teen Pregnancy Pact Gloucester” was everywhere. It was picked up by the AP on a very slow Friday afternoon and it went international. 

I remember Mayor Carolyn Kirk, the second mayor I worked with, asking me, “Can you move your wedding? We’re in the middle of turmoil!” I looked at the mayor and I said, “Well, no. I really can’t move the wedding. We’ve been in preparation for a year now. It’s set.” I thought to myself, would she have asked a straight woman or a straight man to move their wedding? It reminded me that gay partners and gay weddings were not looked at as very serious. For me, that was totally unacceptable. Of course I can’t move my wedding! However, I told the mayor that as soon as I returned from my honeymoon I would turn this situation around. I drafted a plan before I left of how I would do that. 

Dave and I got married, and we went to Montreal for our honeymoon, which is a French speaking city. The goal was to not answer the phone, not look at the press, not be anywhere where I could be exposed to the teen pregnancy issue for at least a few days. Every single newspaper we saw in French had the word Gloucester on the front page. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get away from it. I’d walk into a bookstore or a bar or wherever and there would be Gloucester spread across the front page. I thought that it was going to be a disaster. 

When I came back, I did a blue ribbon panel on teen pregnancy issues. It was like a movie with cameras everywhere at Gloucester City Hall. I remember the night. I have a picture of me at the front of the podium and Mayor Kirk and the school committee and city officials and cameras. The blue ribbon panel was spectacular. They did a great job and made recommendations for how we could move forward on this very complicated issue. I felt very proud of that. I remember Mayor Kirk giving me a thumbs up during the presentation because we were moving her away from the crisis at hand.

As I said, I loved being the health director here in Gloucester. Fred Cowan was instrumental in me being successful. He was one of my board members on the Board of Health. He and I knew each other from the work I did for the AIDS Action Committee in the late ’80s and early ’90s. He was one of my volunteers for the hotline. He believed that I could be successful in that job, which was really helpful. The Board of Health is always complicated because it’s a political board; it’s appointed with lots of issues like tobacco regulations, septic system planning, all that stuff.

MA: How did you get involved that AIDS work? What propelled you into that work? Tell me a little bit more about how that brought the gay community together.

JV: When I was the state nutritionist for WIC (Women, Infants and Children), I did some workshops on AIDS in the early ’80s. That introduced me to more information about HIV and AIDS in the early stages. This was before the gay community started to come together to rally about the steps needed to take it on. Public health did not embrace AIDS and HIV. It was created outside of the public health system. It’s the only disease entity that ever did that. It was considered to be very political because Ronald Reagan was the US President, and he was not going to acknowledge condom distribution or needle exchange or anything that was needed for turning this epidemic around. I think if we were more proactive in those early stages, we could have turned it around. 

My husband, before we were married, was an AIDS buddy, and I did prevention and lots of things around policy work. I wrote the first policies around public sex outreach because we needed to look at the different indicators around HIV. We came together as a community to help take care of our brothers and our sisters who were dying. I want to acknowledge my lesbian sisters because while they were not impacted at the same level as gay men because of the risk factors, they were the fabric of people who helped take care of us.

Still, to this day, some of my most precious friends are those I met during that era. We could have been stuffing envelopes. We could have been doing condom runs at bars. We could have been working with AIDS buddies. My husband and his buddy friends still get together, even though their clients have all died and the program is gone. They get together every month for a dinner at California Pizza Kitchen in Boston. We talk about it, that even though the issue has shifted and changed, it’s still our community. 

Coming to Gloucester, I felt the community was encompassing and warm and myself as an out gay man was never an issue. I never felt that anyone ever gave me a hard time about anything.

At this point in my life, I’m two months out from my retirement. I have a new appreciation of our ability as a couple working together to get ready for this next stage. I’m appreciative that, one, I can be married, and two, I can deal with benefits. I love the fact that I get to spend the rest of my life with someone I really care about. 

Peter, my son, was recently over at the house helping me repair a sink. We were talking about our last wishes and how we want to be taken care of. He was very clear that he wants to take care of both me and Dave to the end, and his mother and her husband. He has four on his side and his wife’s parents. I was just like, “Wow, that’s a lot of responsibility.” He says, “But, you’re all part of my life.” That’s the magic. We really wanted to become parents, and we have worked hard at being co-parents even though we were not in the same house. I’m so proud of my son who recently finished his Master’s Degree. He has a great job at startup as an IT software expert, has a beautiful wife, and they’re going to have a child, my first grandchild.

MA: That’s so exciting.

JV: I’m so excited about being a grandfather. 

MA: That’s great. Congratulations! Well, Jack Vondras, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

JV: Thank you. I appreciate it.

BackCAST Cape Ann is a production of 1623 Studios. This show was produced by Maureen Aylward with technical assistance from Becky Tober.