Oral History Interview with Loree Cook-Daniels, January 30, 2011

Loree Cook-Daniels has been an active member in the Milwaukee LGBT community, affiliated with FORGE, Diverse and Resilient, the Milwaukee LGBT Community Center, SAGE Milwaukee, and the Lesbian Alliance of Metro Milwaukee. Cook-Daniels discusses her marriage to her partner, Marcelle, in the mid-1980s; Marcelle's transition to a man while Loree remained a lesbian; and the lesbian community's rejection of them as a couple. She also recounts her frustration with the transgender community as it existed in the mid-1990s, and her role in advocating for the importance of Significant Others, Friends, Families, and Allies (SOFFAs) to transgender people. Cook-Daniels describes her involvement with FORGE, a Milwaukee-based organization formed to provide to provide peer support primarily to those on the female-to-male (FTM) gender spectrum and SOFFAs. She identifies two important moments in the recent history of Milwaukee's transgender community: the 2007 FORGE Forward conference, which was the first national FTM/SOFFA conference to be held in the Midwest, and the 2010 murder of Dana A. "Chanel" Larkin, which focused local attention on violence against transgender people.Milwaukee Transgender Oral History Project University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries Milwaukee, Wisconsin Loree Cook-Daniels Interviewed by Brice Smith January 30, 2011 at Cook-Daniels’ home Transcribed by Matt Eidem Copyright © 2011 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. All rights reserved. Brice Smith – BS Loree Cook-Daniels – CD BS: All right, if you could please state your name, first and last. CD: Loree Cook-Daniels. BS: All right, it looks like we’re good for the sound. Okay, alright Loree, thanks for agreeing to participate in the Milwaukee Transgender Oral History Project. If we could first start just with some general biographical information. Well for starters how is it that you identify? CD: (laughs) Oh, start with the hard one! BS: (laughs) CD: I no longer claim a sexual-orientation label. I gave that up many years ago when my first partner transitioned, and I continued at that point to call myself a lesbian and a number o