Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • Noncommercial reposting and
reproduction encouraged, otherwise all rights reserved
On July 26,
Johnathan Hale, publisher of San Diego Gay & Lesbian News, Pic magazine and various other Queer-themed publications
in San Diego, released a “Letter to the Community” vigorously defending his
partner, San Diego City Councilmember and mayoral candidate Carl DeMaio,
against the people who booed them in this year’s San Diego Pride Parade July
21. It’s a remarkable document that expresses the peculiar tunnel vision of
both Mr. and Mrs. DeMaio and accuses the organizers and participants in the
“Turn Your Back on DeMaio” campaign of violating the spirit of Pride and
serving the interests of labor unions over those of the Queer community.
“First, let us
recall how Pride came to be,” Hale writes. “The LGBT [Queer] community was
tired of living closeted lives and we developed Pride events to show that we
were, indeed, proud of who we are.” That’s true as far as it goes, but it
ignores the centuries of oppression directed against Queer people at all levels
of society, and the peculiar heady combination of political radicalism and
sexual freedom of the late 1960’s that gave birth to the Queer movement and to
Pride as its principal expressive event.
The late 1960’s
were a time of inspiring struggles and intense frustrations. African-Americans
had started a mass movement to demand that the promise of equality made to them
in the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution
be honored after nearly a century of continued oppression. Their example
inspired other communities of color, women and, eventually, Queer people to
rise up as well. In addition, the U.S. got involved in an endless and pointless
war in Viet Nam, and millions of Americans of all ages, races, genders and
orientations joined together in the streets to stop the senseless waste of
young lives and social resources in that war.
The myth that
the entire Queer movement was started by a riot of drag queens and Transgender
people at the Stonewall Inn in New York City in June 1969 has obscured the fact
that Queer organizing occurred in the U.S. at least two decades before that.
What’s more, most of the people who started the Queer movement were members of
the political Left, from Harry Hay and the other ex-Communists who founded the
Mattachine Society in 1950 to closeted Queer anti-war activists like Leo
Laurence in San Francisco and Morris Kight in Los Angeles, who came out to join
the new Queer movement. Though the Queer movement in general has moved away
from its radical-Left origins and become more mainstream over time, most
politically active Queers are at least liberal and associate themselves with
the Democratic Party and a pro-civil rights, pro-labor, pro-social welfare
agenda that favors the 99 percent over the 1 percent.
Carl DeMaio has
chosen a different path. A Republican by voter registration and a Libertarian
at heart, he has articulated a “roadmap to recovery” for San Diego that focuses
on freezing city workers’ salaries, eliminating their pensions and outsourcing
their jobs so that instead of the city’s work being done by unionized workers
making middle-class wages, it will be done by private contractors hiring people
at minimum wage. (I know this is Carl DeMaio’s economic plan because I’ve heard
him speak about it.) He prides himself on his aggressive opposition to any new
taxes, thereby keeping alive the mass delusion of San Diego’s voters that they
can have a city with world-class services while paying the taxes of a dirt-road
village. His whole political tendency is one that will increase economic
inequality and keep the local, state and national economy stuck in what’s been
called a “crisis of overproduction,” in which employers have done such a good
job driving down wages that they stop investing because no one has the money to
buy what they produce.
But with the
tunnel vision that afflicts the DeMaio household, the only reason Hale can
think of why people would boo him and his partner in the Pride Parade is that
they were “putting their allegiance to labor union politics above what is right
for the LGBT community and our efforts to achieve full equality.” What neither
DeMaio nor Hale want San Diego’s Queer community to know is that DeMaio’s own
campaign has shown an appalling willingness to put his own short-term political
gain above what is right for the Queer community and our efforts to achieve
full equality. It’s DeMaio’s hypocrisy and his willingness to suck up to the
homophobes in the Republican Party to advance his campaign for mayor, not “labor union politics,” that is the reason he was
booed in the Pride Parade and he has so little political support in the Queer
community.
Let’s look at
the record. Carl DeMaio won the endorsement of the San Diego County Republican
Central Committee largely by pledging to abandon current San Diego Mayor Jerry
Sanders’ public support of the Queer community in general and marriage equality
in particular. He assured them that he doesn’t think it’s the job of the mayor
of San Diego to be involved in “social issues” — thereby setting their
stone-cold homophobic hearts at ease that just because he’s a Gay man he won’t
be using the mayoralty as a bully pulpit for Queer rights the way Sanders has
done. What’s more, he attacked primary opponent Nathan Fletcher for voting for
SB 48, the bill that would require California public schools to teach about the
contributions of Queer people to American and Californian history — ironic in
someone who’s promoting his mayoral candidacy as an epoch-making first for the
Queer community.
And it’s even
more ironic that Johnathan Hale should proclaim that Pride started because we
were “tired of living closeted lives” when his own partner pushed him into the
closet for political advantage. In order to get the endorsement of the San
Diego Union-Tribune — whose publisher is
the notorious homophobe Doug Manchester, who put up much of the seed capital
that got the anti-marriage Proposition 8 on the ballot in the first place —
Carl DeMaio represented to the U-T’s
editorial board that he was “single.” If my husband were running for elective
office, I know that he would want me at his side and he would acknowledge me
publicly. He wouldn’t shove me back in the closet just to pick up a major
endorsement.
What’s really
unfortunate about Carl DeMaio’s hypocrisy and opportunism — his willingness to
represent himself (or let his partner represent him) as part of “the LGBT
community and our efforts to achieve full equality” when so many of his
supporters are out and proud homophobes — is that DeMaio was uniquely
positioned to make the case that just because you’re an economic and fiscal
conservative, you don’t necessarily have to be against Queer equality as well.
He could have taken the path of Mayor Sanders, who courageously spoke out for
marriage equality and testified in the trial of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, aimed at declaring Proposition 8 unconstitutional.
He could have
taken the path of attorney Ted Olson, a thoroughgoing conservative who
represented George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore, served as Bush’s solicitor general (his
administration’s lawyer before the Supreme Court) — and took up the challenge
of suing the state to have Proposition 8 thrown out as the assault on equal
protection and civil liberties it is. Or he could have taken the path of his
primary opponent Bonnie Dumanis, who didn’t “disappear” her partner for
campaign purposes. She legally married her during the 4 ½-month “window”
between the California Supreme Court’s pro-marriage decision and the passage of
Proposition 8, and called her out from the audience at the Center’s mayoral
candidates’ forum to make clear her pride in her wife and their relationship.
Instead, Carl
DeMaio has sucked up to the rankest homophobes in the Republican Party and has
turned his back on the Queer community to do so. If he wins the mayoral
election, it will be in spite of his
being a Gay man. It will be because he will have persuaded enough of the voters
who hate us that they don’t have to worry about him actually doing anything to help San Diego’s Queer community just
because he’s at least behaviorally a member of it. There are plenty of other
reasons to vote against Carl DeMaio besides his blaming city employees and
their unions for all of San Diego’s economic woes, and the main one that got
him booed at the Pride Parade was his willingness and, indeed, eagerness to
sacrifice the rights of the Queer community to appease the Queer-haters he’s
counting on to support, endorse and finance his campaign.
Johnathan
Hale’s letter, to which this article is a response, can be read online at http://sdgln.com/commentary/2012/07/26/letter-community-real-lgbt-leaders-don-t-put-politics-above-pride-0
