It’s More than Nuclear Issues, Native Americans Tell Activists

U.S.-Indian Conflict about Concepts of Property, Christian Supremacism

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Photos, top to bottom: Ian Zabarte, Steven Newcomb

The August 29 “Matters of Controversy” program sponsored by the Peace and Democracy Action Group at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church in Hillcrest was billed as about Native American activism against nuclear weapons testing and waste disposal on Native American lands in Nevada. But speakers Ian Zabarte, foreign minister of the legally independent Western Shoshone nation whose territory covers much of the state of Nevada, and professor Steven Newcomb, author of a provocative new book called Pagans in the Promised Land, turned the meeting into a history lesson, tracing the U.S. oppression of so-called “Indians” back over 500 years to Columbus’s explorations and the papal bulls issued by the pope at the time, Alexander VI, who argued that both the people and the land of the western hemisphere were fair game for exploitation by the Christians of western Europe.

Zabarte began by explaining the Shoshones’ concept of land ownership, which is that land belongs to the tribe as a whole and not to individual property owners. “We cannot sell our land out from under our brothers and sisters and cousins,” he explained. “Nuclear weapons test sites have been created on our lands by force and trespass.” According to Zabarte, the U.S. claims ownership of the Shoshones’ land by virtue of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the 1846-1848 Mexican war — but, he said, all this treaty did was fix the new boundary between the U.S. and Mexico after the U.S. conquered and occupied nearly half of Mexico’s territory (the current states of California, Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado and Texas). Zabarte pointed out that the treaty itself provided that neither the U.S. nor Mexico could keep Indians off their traditional tribal lands.

According to Zabarte, the cataclysmic events that affected the U.S. between 1848 and 1863 shaped U.S. relations with the Shoshone and enabled his tribe to get — at least on paper — the best deal any Native Americans ever got from the U.S. government. In 1857 the Comstock Lode was discovered in Nevada, keeping the western gold rush going after it had started petering out in California. In 1861 Abraham Lincoln took office as president and the U.S. Civil War started. The same year, Congress organized the Nevada Territory, but its founding document “specified that it would not include or infringe on the rights of Indians until the tribes themselves should signify their assent.”

Because of its need for money and resources to fight the Civil War, the U.S. was actually in a highly weak position when it dealt with the Shoshones in the early 1860’s, Zabarte said. At the start of the war, gold from California and Nevada had to be sent to San Francisco and from there shipped down the Pacific coast to Panama, carried over land through the Panamanian jungle (the Panama Canal wasn’t opened until 1914), then shipped again up the Atlantic coast to Washington, D.C., New York and other eastern cities. When one such ship, the U.S.S. Central America, sank 200 miles off the Carolina coast in 1857 and took down $100 million in gold (which wasn’t recovered until the wreck was discovered in 1989), it “caused the first stock-market crash in U.S. history,” Zabarte said.

Therefore, he said, when the U.S. government and the Shoshone Nation negotiated the Treaty of Ruby Valley in 1863, it was the Shoshone who had the U.S. over a barrel — not the other way around — Zabarte explained. The U.S. needed the gold from the Comstock Lode and a way to send it to the east over land instead of the roundabout and dangerous sea route. Zabarte described the 1863 treaty as an alliance, not a sign of conquest as most other U.S. “treaties” with Native American tribes were. The treaty, he said, “does not cede land to the U.S.” Instead, it gives the U.S. the right to use Shoshone land and provided “that the U.S. pay us $5,000 per year for 20 years” — payments, Zabarte added, that were never made. What’s more, after the war the U.S. acted as if it now owned the Shoshone land, moving its people there and extracting its resources.

Things got worse for the Shoshone in the 1950’s, when the U.S. chose Nevada as the site of nuclear weapons tests. Now the American government’s actions were not only taking away the Shoshones’ lands but directly threatening their survival, Zabarte said. “The U.S. has conducted 154 nuclear tests on Shoshone land,” he explained. “Sub-critical weapons tests continue. Every underground test leaks radioactivity. … Since I was 18 I have been dealing with nuclear issues. I saw my family dying. Nuclear weapons testing was killing my people, and they didn’t know how to deal with it. They were in denial. I started hearing the stories and I was mad. Something had to be done, and the first thing we had to do was change ourselves from victims to fighters.”

At least part of the problem for the Shoshone was that their population was too small to conduct the usual scientific tests “to prove a causal relationship between radiation and disease,” Zabarte explained. Instead, he said, “we talked about the things our people saw: the flash, the mushroom clouds, and several hours later the fallout. Our lifestyle forces us to eat the food in our garden, wild food, the game that we hunt. We burn deadwood for our homes and sweats, and [by doing so] we create an exposure pattern unique to our people. When we kill a deer we eat the whole animal, including the thyroid where radioactive iodine-131 concentrates.” Zabarte said the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) used a “sheepherder’s model” to estimate the extent to which the Shoshone were being exposed to radiation from the tests, “and we had to create our own model,” under which the iodine-131 exposure of adults was seven to 15 times greater than DoE estimates, while for youths it was 15 to 30 times greater and for fetuses in utero it was 30 to 60 times greater.

As if living on ground zero for the U.S.’s nuclear weapons tests wasn’t bad enough, in the 1970’s the U.S. government began to look at Yucca Mountain, located on Shoshone land, as one of the sites to dump all America’s high-level nuclear waste. In 1987 the U.S. Congress officially fixed Yucca Mountain as the site for the nuclear waste dump in the U.S. — and Zabarte got involved in the campaign against it. What incensed him the most was the so-called “cultural resources” studies commissioned by the Department of Energy and carried out by the University of Michigan under a concept called “cultural triage.”

The word “triage” was first coined by the French military in World War I to decide which wounded soldiers should be treated by medical units. They divided the wounded into three groups: those who would survive even if they weren’t treated, those who would die even if they were treated, and those for whom treatment might make the difference. The term is still used in medicine — virtually all hospitals have “triage units” and “triage nurses” to staff them and make those to-treat-or-not-to-treat decisions — but, as Zabarte noted, it’s been extended to the cultural field as well.

“The U.S. is acting as broker for the commercial nuclear industry and determining which parts of my culture can and can’t be saved for the needs of the nuclear industry,” Zabarte said. “This is genocide, and it’s being conducted by the U.S. I have an obligation to explain this issue so you can confront your government. What nation signs treaties with smaller nations, violates their borders and conducts itself this way? I’m addressing this to Americans first because our futures are inextricably linked. I don’t want the U.S. out of my country.” Zabarte concluded his presentation by saying that, rather than wiping out traditional Native American culture, the U.S. should be looking towards it as a model for the “more sustainable ways of living” we need to adopt to avoid future energy and environmental crises.

Newcomb’s talk was largely an attempt to answer Zabarte’s question — why would the United States systematically break its treaties with its indigenous people and treat them as second-class citizens? He found his answer in 10 years of extensive research into a surprising source: the laws and decrees promulgated by the Vatican and the empires of Spain and Portugal in the early years after Christopher Columbus (whose last name, he noted, came from the same Latin root as the word “colonize”) made his so-called “discovery” of America in 1492. Indeed, he traced it even farther back than that, to the Old Testament and in particular those notorious passages (particularly in the Book of Deuteronomy) in which God actually orders the Israelites to commit genocide against the Philistines, Canaanites and other indigenous people of the Middle East who were in the way of their colonial ambitions.

“The [U.S.] federal Indian system finds much of its basis in the 1493 Papal Bull of Pope Alexander VI, which divided the world between Spain and Portugal and invited the monarchs of Aragon and Castile [the Christian kingdoms in northern Spain who drove out the Muslim Moors and created the modern Spanish nation] to ‘seek dominion over any lands, discovered and undiscovered,’ that were ‘not in temporal possession of Christian rulers.’” Discussing the meaning of the world “dominion” in this context, Newcomb explained, “It meant to subjugate, to force to pay tribute, to force into submission; to tame, to break the spirit of; to cultivate, colonize and filter out impunities. The fundamental focus is mining everything: people, land, resources, anything that will create more wealth for the principalities that govern the world. The Bull says, ‘All good things proceed from Him’” — a claim of divine sanction for imperialism and genocide — “and the Latin word for ‘government’ used in the document is ‘dominaciones.’”

What this meant in practice is that anyone who wasn’t a duly baptized Christian was not in fact human at all — and therefore their persons, their lands, their resources and anything else they had was fair game for their properly “Christian” conquerors. Newcomb cited the writings of Francis Lieber, a scholar who researched the legal bases for Christian imperialism and discussed a doctrine called terra nulles. “The term,” Newcomb explained, “means ‘null and void’ and refers to people who are pagan, heathen or unbaptized, and therefore they did not have legal existence under the laws of Christendom.”

According to Newcomb, this doctrine that non-Christians were not really “persons” and therefore their rights did not have to be respected got written into American law by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1823 decision of Johnson & Graham’s Lessee v. M’Intosh. Native Americans weren’t parties on either side of this case, which turned on which white landowners were entitled to thousands of acres of land in Illinois: the ones who had purchased it from the Indian tribes who were occupying it when Illinois was “discovered” or the ones who had bought it from the U.S. government after Illinois became a state in 1818. Actually, as Newcomb points out in his book, the case was a sham — the parties’ landholdings weren’t anywhere near each other and the attorneys for one side hired the attorneys for the other — but the decision, written by the great Chief Justice John Marshall, was a sweeping declaration that Indians had no property rights that Christian whites were obliged to respect.

“On the discovery of this immense continent,” Marshall wrote for a unanimous Court in his Johnson opinion, “the great nations of Europe were eager to appropriate to themselves so much of it as they could respectively acquire. Its vast extent offered an ample field to the ambition and enterprise of all; and the character and religion of its inhabitants afforded an apology for considering them [the Indians] as a people over whom the superior genius of Europe might claim an ascendancy.” According to Newcomb, Marshall didn’t specifically claim the Papal Bull of 1493 as a precedent for his decision, but he did cite a decree of English King Henry VII to the explorer John Cabot in 1496 “to discover countries then unknown to Christian people, and to take possession of them in the name of the king of England … thus asserting a right to take possession, not-withstanding the occupancy of the natives, who were heathens, and at the same time, admitting the prior title of any Christian people who may have made a previous discovery.”

According to Newcomb, the doctrine that, because they weren’t Christians, native Americans weren’t really people and therefore had no rights Christian whites were required to respect has been the guiding principle of all American law about Indians ever since. “The U.S. entered into a treaty with the Shoshone in 1863,” Newcomb explained, “but under the Johnson decision of 1823 they assume these are simply open public lands and the U.S. can stage nuclear tests and dump nuclear waste there with impunity.” Newcomb added that as recently as August 2001, at the United Nations Commission on the Elimination of Racial Discord hearings in South Africa, “certain committee members asked U.S. representatives how they interpreted the 1863 treaty. They said they interpreted it in the light of Johnson v. M’Intosh.”

Newcomb cited one particularly convoluted ruling by the Indian Claims Commission, a quasi-judicial U.S. government agency, in 1923 that is claimed as the basis for the idea that the U.S. government “owns” Yucca Mountain and therefore can dump nuclear waste there without the Shoshone having any say in the matter. “It is clearly on Shoshone land,” he explained, “but the Indian Claims Commission ruled it had been taken by ‘gradual encroachment.’ One of the most interesting things about that is that ‘encroachment’ means ‘trespassing.’ When assistant U.S. attorney general John O’Connell made his argument before the U.S. Supreme Court, he was asked how the Shoshone lost their land, He answered that they had never had ‘fee title’ but just the right to ‘roam and wander,’ and [they lost those rights] once mines, ranches, telegraph lines and railroads were established. But all these were explicitly permitted in the 1863 treaty, and the commissioners made a corrupt ‘decision’ and now it’s called ‘the law.’”

The bottom line for both Zabarte and Newcomb is that not only are non-native Americans the beneficiaries of genocide against the Indians, the genocide is still going on — and until the American people face up to it, use their rights as citizens of a republic to demand that it stop, and make amends, in Newcomb’s words, “this will not be corrected and will always be out of balance.”

Compass’s Troilus and Cressida: Flawed but Worth Seeing

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Whatever has made Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida one of his most neglected plays — according to the program, the current production (running through October 5 at Compass Theatre, 3704 Sixth Avenue in Hillcrest) is the first in San Diego in 34 years — it certainly isn’t any flaw in the writing. The intense, poetic language of Troilus and Cressida is every bit as good as that in Shakespeare’s well-known plays, and the characterizations are just as rich and multi-dimensional. Ironically, in Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare did to a work by a classic author — Homer’s The Iliad — the same thing Tom Stoppard did to Shakespeare in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: he re-imagined an acknowledged masterwork of another era by telling its story from the point of view of two of its minor characters.

Troilus and Cressida begins and ends where The Iliad does: it begins with the Greek hero Achilles (Gerard Maxwell) withdrawing from active participation in the Trojan War in a jealous hissy-fit over blows to his imagined “honor” and ends with him returning to the fray and killing the Trojan prince Hector (Scott Amiotte). But the title characters are vastly inflated from their relatively minor roles in the original story. Troilus (Michael Zlotnik) is one of the youngest of Trojan king Priam’s 19 children and, in the 1960’s slogan, would rather make love than war. The person he’d rather make love to than fight is Cressida (Brenna Foley), daughter of a Trojan nobleman, who’s initially resistant to his charms and makes it clear she’d rather have Hector. (Hector’s wife Andromache doesn’t appear in Shakespeare’s script.) Eventually, prodded by her uncle Pandarus (George Weinberg-Harter), the two get together, but even though they’re on the same side in the war the events around them screw up their relationship much the way they did for Shakespeare’s far better-known pair of star-crossed teenage lovers, Romeo and Juliet.

Along with the sheer beauty of the language, Troilus and Cressida bears another of Shakespeare’s hallmarks: his decided skepticism towards “honor” and all the martial virtues. The Greek siege of Troy was supposed to be a quick little war and instead it morphed into a 10-year quagmire (sound familiar?), and Shakespeare seems far more moved by the carnage and waste on both sides than the heroic virtues the Greeks and their cultural descendants, the Romans, found in this story. Troilus and Cressida is a quirky play, utterly fascinating and best enjoyed if you go in knowing the basic outlines of the story but not the specifics of Shakespeare’s “spin” on it.

Compass’s production is directed by Welton Jones, who until his retirement in 2001 was the theatre critic for the San Diego Union-Tribune for 35 years. (He still writes online reviews for www.sandiego.com.) Given the old adage that those who can’t do, teach, and those who can’t do or teach become critics, no doubt there’s a certain curiosity factor about how a man who spent most of his adult life telling other San Diego theatre people what they were doing right or wrong with their productions would handle one of his own. The answer: mostly quite well, though with a few failings that make the production less enjoyable than it might have been otherwise.

Aided by a genuinely talented cast, Jones certainly solves the biggest problem any modern company has when doing Shakespeare: getting us to believe that the actors really talk like that all the time. Aided by two of his cast members, Amiotte and Michael Nieto — who are credited with fight choreography — Jones stages effective action sequences and, even in the romantic portions of the story, he keeps the actors moving and doesn’t allow the production to become dull. On the down side is the overacting he lets some of the supporting players get away with; Adam Parker, in the role of the all-purpose Greek sidekick Thersites, cackles all the way through as if he’s auditioning to take over the role of the Joker in the next Batman movie, and Weinberg-Harter — who mostly plays Pandarus as an ancient forerunner of the befuddled Polonius in Hamlet — also starts cackling towards the end.

But the main problem with this production lies in the limited size of the cast available to Compass and the resulting need of every actor in it except Brenna Foley to double. Quite a few of the cast members play both Greeks and Trojans, and one really has to listen carefully to the dialogue to figure out which they’re supposed to be in any given scene. Zlotnik, playing both Troilus and Achilles’ boy-toy Patroclus (and it’s a measure of Shakespeare’s sophistication that he doesn’t beat around the Gay bush; he makes it clear exactly what their relationship is), has it the easiest because as Troilus he wears a tunic and cloak, while as Patroclus he’s naked above the waist. (This is also quite entertaining for the straight women and Gay men in the audience!) The other actors — especially Amiotte, who in terms of star charisma is probably the strongest cast member — sometimes confuse us when they’re obliged to make quick changes in their identity without time to change costumes or otherwise differentiate between the characters they’re playing.

Even when the two parts an actor is playing are the same nationality, conflicts sometime arise. Heavy-set “bear” type Gerard Maxwell plays both Achilles and Ajax, a half-Greek, half-Trojan who signed on with the Greek army as a mercenary. He plays them both in the same dirty grey tunic and the only differentiation is that as Ajax he wears an eye patch and speaks in a slower voice that suggests that Ajax has a lower I.Q. Maxwell is really too old to be playing Achilles — it would probably have been better if he had played Ulysses and younger, hunkier Michael Nieto (who acquits himself well, if somewhat indistinguishably, as Ulysses and Aeneas, the voices of reason on both sides) had been the prima donna hero — and as Ajax he’s better but can’t hold a candle to Lawrence Brown’s force-of-nature reading of the same character in a different play (by Sophocles) at the same theatre, in its former “6th @ Penn” identity, nearly three years ago.

Among the performers, Brenna Foley stands out. She plays Cressida as neither ardent lover nor wanton slut, but a sort of vapid Valley Girl willing to adapt herself to whatever situation she finds herself in while maintaining at least a little independence in an age that treated women as possessions of their men. The only other woman is Laura Kaplan, who plays both the Trojan princess Cassandra and Helen, wife of King Menelaus (Edward Eigner) of Greece, who left him for the Trojan prince Paris (Adam Parker, who’s a good deal more tolerable in this role than he is as Thersites but still seems miscast) and thereby started the war. Though wearing the same dress for each role, she manages to change her posture and voice, doing a far better job at distinguishing between her two characters than most of the men.

Besides being fun to look at (especially as the bare-chested Patroclus), Zlotnik is fine as Troilus, especially strong in the final scene when his character has to undergo a wrenching transformation. Eigner plays both rival kings, Menelaus and Priam, as well as narrating the prologue (one of Shakespeare’s odd little apologias for the play he’s about to present). Weinberg-Harter plays both Pandarus (as whom he’s mostly amusing if a bit too fussbudgety) and Greek commander Agamemnon (an underwritten character who’s vastly more important in most tellings of the story).

The physical production is surprisingly impressive for Compass, with solid and reasonably convincing set designs by Christian Lopez and convincing arms and armor by Mexican artist Armando Muñoz-Garcia. (The swords are made of metal instead of wood, and they clank against each other satisfyingly in the climactic battle scene even though the racket makes it hard to hear the dialogue.) Shelly Williams’ costumes are convincing and Roger Henderson’s lighting design is effective even if it tends a bit too much towards the dark side. Hollace Jones is credited as “musical coordinator,” but the music, such as it is, is just a lot of banging on kettledrums, blowing on a conch shell to simulate a trumpet, and a few shakes of a tambourine when the script mentions one — the sort of scoring for a classical drama hilariously ridiculed in the 1953 film The Band Wagon.

Despite its flaws, the Compass production of Troilus and Cressida is well worth seeing — and not just because you might have to wait 34 more years before any San Diego company does it again. Even on a community-theatre budget with too few actors to fill out the cast, the play is effective and deals with issues all too meaningful today — war, sex, egomaniacal politicians and the problems the military’s so-called “code of honor” causes for the rest of us (especially relevant in a Presidential election year in which one of the major-party nominees is a fourth-generation military man). Overall it’s a well-done staging that lets Shakespeare’s script, convincingly edited by Welton Jones and George Weinberg-Harter, make its points.

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, by William Shakespeare, Aug. 28-Oct. 5 at Compass Theatre (formerly 6th @ Penn), 3704 Sixth Avenue in Hillcrest. Performances Thurs., Fri. & Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. Tickets/info: (619) 688-9210 or www.compasstheatre.com

PHIL JOHNSON and MIKE SEARS:

The Brains (?) Behind Nemesis Speak

interview by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

If you were lucky enough to get down to Compass Theatre at 6th and Pennsylvania in Hillcrest between August 8 and 24, you would have seen an hilarious show called Nemesis, written by Phil Johnson and Mike Sears and starring — you guessed it — Phil Johnson and Mike Sears. They played two men, Peazel Hunnicutt (Johnson) and Mickey Sticke (Sears), who meet on what their creators describe as the worst job in the world — gluing salt crystals to the outsides of pretzels — at Mother Pickel’s Decent Pretzels in Appalachia. When one of them does the other out of a promotion, they form a life-long hatred that endures even as one of them becomes an Enron-style CEO and then President of the U.S., while the other commands a space station and wrestles with a recalcitrant wheelchair.

There’s a third performer in the piece, Terri Park, who appears as all the women they exploit financially and sexually; and for the Compass production they got a first-rate director, Cynthia Stokes, who usually stages operas old (she’s scheduled to do Madama Butterfly in Philadelphia and Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette in San Diego) and new (Margaret Garner for Opera Carolina, Murder at the Opera — which she co-wrote — in Houston and a long-term collaboration with composer Richard Danielpour). But Johnson and Sears are the prime focus, and when they sat for a Zenger’s interview after their August 22 performance they revealed the same streak of madcap humor off-stage as they’d shown on-stage.

Zenger’s: Why don’t you just start with a little of your background, and how you got into theatre?

Phil Johnson: I’m Phil Johnson. I’m the funny one. And this one over here is Mike Sears.

Mike Sears: Yes.

Johnson: He’s very talkative. Mike is a New York actor. I’ve done stuff all over, some in New York. But I’ve been in San Diego about 10 years.

Sears: I’ve been here about four, four and a half.

Johnson: He’s loving it.

Sears: I’m loving it.

Johnson: We met while doing a play — not a very good play — but we thought, “We could write a better play!” So we decided to do this.

Sears: We started about two years ago. We did it at the Actors’ Alliance festival.

Johnson: We did? We did very well at the festival.

Sears: But it was just the first scene, the pretzel scene.

Johnson: We kind of won that festival, which was nice, so we decided to flesh it out and finish it.

Sears: We did two readings over about a year, and Cynthia Stokes, who’s our wonderful director and dramaturge —

Johnson: Yes, we have a very fancy director. She’s with the San Diego Opera and the La Jolla Playhouse right now, and she’s very, very smart. We don’t know why she’s doing our show, but we have a great time, the three of us all together.

Sears: And Terri.

Johnson: And Terri, who’s a brilliant actress. We’re very lucky.

Zenger’s: How did you get the idea for the show?

Johnson: How did we get the idea?

Sears: I don’t know. I think you called me and said you had an idea about two men who —

Johnson: — hunt each other down through the years, and hate each other forever. We just started writing scenes that worked off our chemistry, which is very 12-year-old boy-like. Then the plot just kind of came up. We thought of the worst job possible: gluing salt on pretzels in a pretzel factory in Appalachia. Then it just got bigger, like the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote.

Zenger’s: Why did you call it Nemesis?

Johnson: Nemesis — what else could it be?

Sears: Why did we call it that — was it going to be anything else? I don’t think so.

Johnson: The name came pretty early, because we kept realizing that in all of the scenes we kept having this back-and-forth attitude, like we were constantly picking at each other. Nemesis seemed the perfect word to make it sound operatic, to overdramatize something that was really ridiculous and childish.

Zenger’s: So where does it go from here?

Johnson: Well, we hope to do it —

Sears: Broadway!

Johnson: Broadway, baby! Don’t forget it!

Sears: Our intention is to take it to L.A. This whole experience here really is an extended preview of sorts. Once we finish, we’ll go back and do some rewrites. There are things we’ll cut, there are some moments we’ll revamp, but in terms of props, costumes, set, lights, sound, we really needed to see if it worked, if there was an audience for the show or if it was just poo.

Johnson: Yeah, poo. That explains it.

Sears: But if there was indeed an audience, which we found that there is, then our intention is, like I said, to do rewrites, to take the changes that we learned from doing it for an audience, and then we’d like to do it in L.A. in the spring, spring or winter.

Johnson: Right. We even did this set, thinking about future productions, so the whole thing folds down and packs up. But, like Mike said, we had to see if it would work. The parts of it, those sections which we call the montage sections, where we quickly go all over the world very quickly, they were only ideas on paper and we had no idea if they would work. And they seemed to work.

Sears: And the Jazzy [electric wheelchair], the thing with the Jazzy.

Johnson: We didn’t know if the thing with the wheelchair would work. But it’s coming along. I’m coaching Mike. I’m hoping his performance will get better, but he doesn’t listen to me.

Sears: Yeah, I don’t listen to him.

Zenger’s: I was trying to trace your influences. Some of it reminded me of the “Mama’s Family” skits on the Carol Burnett Show. Some of it of Mel Brooks. Some of it — particularly the bloody rag around your head — of Monty Python.

Sears: I would say the Carol Burnett Show, Monty Python —

Johnson: The Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote.

Sears: Urinetown, that musical. We were interested, too, in wordplay. We paid a lot of attention to the words that we chose, trying to actually use language within a skit, rather than just throwing words around.

Johnson: The whole world was fantastic. It was just an outrageous world, everything about it.

Sears: And we wanted to heighten the language. Because the physical world was heightened, the situations were heightened, we wanted to choose heightened language as well. We also talked about Zoolander, Ben Stiller movies, Will Ferrell. The Hudsucker Proxy was a big influence.

CHRIS BRICKER:

Activist Works to Pass Proposition 7 for His Family’s Future

interview by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Two rival initiatives to encourage the use of renewable energy will appear on the November 4 election ballot in California. One, Proposition 10, would require California to spend at least $5 billion on direct subsidies to renewable-energy businesses and consumers. The other, Proposition 7, is an attempt to strengthen existing requirements under California law for utilities to start providing power from renewable energy sources by a particular date.

According to the language of the initiative itself, Proposition 7 “will put California on the path to energy independence by requiring all electric utilities to purchase 50 percent of their electricity from clean energy sources like solar and wind by 2025. Right now, over 22 percent of California’s greenhouse gases comes from electricity generation but around 10 percent of California’s electricity comes from solar and clean energy sources, leaving Californians vulnerable to high energy costs, to political instability in the Middle East, and to being held hostage by big oil companies.”

Chris Bricker is a local activist and organizer for Proposition 7. He requested an interview with Zenger’s and discussed the virtues of Proposition 7, the role of large utility companies in a renewable-energy future, and the folly of the Right’s current “Drill Here, Drill Now” campaign to prioritize maximum exploitation of America’s remaining fossil-fuel reserves as an alternative both to foreign oil and renewable energy.

Zenger’s: Could you tell me what Proposition 7 is, what it would do, and why you think it’s a good idea?

Bricker: First, I think I should tell you a quick story about why I got involved with it. About two years ago, I was talking to my stepson. When he was growing up, I was working as a representative for the hospitality union. I had odd hours, which was a good thing and a bad thing. I could be hanging out for his water polo games and his soccer games and all the rest of that stuff. But I wasn’t home at night all that much, and of course on the weekends I had to work at night because that’s where I made my money.

Recently, my stepson — coincidentally, his name is Chris — and I had an opportunity for a one-on-one conversation. I said, “You know, Chris, sometimes I feel really bad that I wasn’t able to spend normal parts of the week with you, like other dads did.” He said, “Dad, I’ve got to tell you something, and I want you to remember this. I wouldn’t be who I am today, what I am today, if it hadn’t been for what you had exposed me to, and the new things that you had introduced me to, and helping me to think outside the box.” I was floored. That was the most wonderful compliment, I think, that a father could ever have from his son or his daughter.

Now he’s a teacher, and his wife is a teacher, and they have two kids. They teach at the high school up in Bishop, California, and when I go up there to visit them — in fact, I was up there about three or four weeks ago, right around the time of the fires up in Yosemite — I look at their two kids, and say to myself, “He’s going to be a good dad. They’re going to be great parents of these kids, and they’re going to introduce them to a lot of things that are sort of handed down by tradition, so to speak.” But one of the things that they’re going to need to do is to make sure that the environment in which they live is survivable, as if it were a legacy that we were all leaving for the generations to come. So when I had an opportunity to organize for Proposition 7, that really stuck in my mind.

What Proposition 7 does is put pressure on the big utility providers to reach a 50 percent alternative energy capacity by 2025. Right now, there’s legislation on the books for 33 percent by 2020. But it has too many loopholes. The utilities could ignore the renewable requirements and instead accept the penalty fines as just a cost of doing business. There’s no teeth in the current law, nothing that enables us to be able to put pressure on utilities to be able to meet those benchmarks. All we’re asking is for the utilities to take half of what we pay for energy and make it alternative energy sources: biomass, ocean and water, solar, and wind.

In order to do this, there has to be a climate for people to be able to invest in these projects. There are approximately 25 million acres of desert land in California that have an average of 300 days out of the year where this precious and free energy source comes to us by sunlight. We would propose energy conservation zones in the desert, where these hybrid alternative-energy complexes could be built; and, in order to encourage investment from bankers and other people who are interested in investing in these projects, we would not only put the permit process on the fast track, we would also have the contracts be long-term 20-year contracts.

The estimate is that this initiative will create around 371, 000 jobs throughout the state, and that doesn’t count the jobs that are created in order to maintain these facilities once they’re built. This initiative also provides that environmental concerns must be met before any project moves forward. That’s not part of the fast-track process.

In the 1880’s we were putting about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Currently there’s about 380 parts per million going into the atmosphere, and we’re reaching the tipping point. If we continue at that rate for the next 10 years, we’ll reach the point of no return. We have an opportunity to reverse that, just by doing this, to bring that back to 350 parts per million. California is the 17th largest polluter in the world, and there’s no reason why we can’t be leaders not only to other states, but also to the rest of the world, in solving that problem and becoming 100 percent alternative-energy dependent.

We’re faced with opposition, I have to tell you. About three weeks ago, the big utilities poured approximately $21 to $22 million into a campaign to defeat this proposition. They had an ad campaign that was ready to start. However, we took them to court because there were four issues that we sued them on, that we considered to be false information. Three of the issues, the court agreed that that was true. And on the remaining issue, which had to do with whether or not energy providers of 30,000 megawatts or less would be included in the mandate, even though we had a preponderance of evidence, the judge decided he would leave it up to vigorous debate.

Zenger’s: One question that immediately occurs to me is that isn’t this an approach that is really locking us into the idea of getting our power from large utility companies, whether or not that’s the most efficient way of using alternative energy? The people I’ve talked to who are pushing alternative energy say that the great thing about it is that, to a large extent, individuals could own their own power and wouldn’t need utility companies, which is why they’re putting so much money into fighting this. Your approach seems to be an attempt to reconcile the utility companies to the alternative energy future by leaving them a key role in delivering power.

Bricker: The utilities are the big elephants in the room. They are there. They exist. Their motives and their future need to be addressed. They’re just not going to go off into the sunset. You have to have a means of transmitting power once it’s produced. It’s great for people that can afford it to be able to be self-sustaining in their homes, whether it be rooftop solar or all the rest of that stuff. But what about all of us who might live in an apartment?

When you stop to think about it, it takes about 14 years in the permitting process to bring a nuclear power plant on line, and almost as long for a fossil-fuel plant. But it takes five years to bring one of these hybrid alternative-energy resources on line. And if takes 300,000 years for nuclear waste to dissipate, what was the longest civilization that ever existed? What are we supposed to do, leave a note for the next civilization, right?

Zenger’s: Could you explain the difference between Proposition 7 and Proposition 10? I mean, just this morning I downloaded both of them and I’m not sure myself which one of these is which.

Bricker: Ours, the “Solar and Clean Energy Act,” doesn’t cost the taxpayer anything, This [Proposition 10] looks to me like it would be in the form of a bond issue of some sort. With Proposition 7, you’re looking at 42 pages of science and art, state of the art, future thinking. A lot of what the big utilities will address has already been legislated. It’s not something that we put into the act. We’re putting in six or seven pages of changes that actually put teeth into the process. And it’s important for people to know that.

Zenger’s: Getting back to the utilities, I remember for the last issue just before the primary election, I had to look up material relating to the Sunrise Powerlink proposed by SDG&E. It was a frustrating experience because on their Web site, you went through pages and pages of all this stuff about how it was going to be wonderful for alternative energy, it was going to bring all this alternative energy into SDG&E’s service area, and it took a lot of plowing through their site just to find the basics of where it starts, where it stops and how long is it, which is what I needed for my article. Isn’t an initiative like this just going to encourage more boondoggles like that?

Bricker: No, because, first of all, a lot of what was going to come through that Sunrise Powerlink, aside from the debate as to where it was going to be laid out, was going to come from dirty power in Mexico. Anything having to do with transmission lines, or plans that are in the works, have already been budgeted by the big utilities and are in the permitting process. The question is what kind of energy are you going to be sending across those lines, not whether or not they’re going to exist, because they are going to exist.

The Sunrise Powerlink fiasco was a whole other thing. There was a genuine effort to disseminate misinformation in order to win a public mandate or public pressure to put this Sunrise Powerlink where they wanted to put it.

Zenger’s: So what in your initiative would prevent either a project like the Sunrise Powerlink or the “this is going to be great for alternative energy” propaganda used to sell it?

Bricker: You’ve got to realize that the big utility companies are purchasing this power. They’re not building it. Any existing power plant has a shelf life before it has to be either torn down, redesigned or refurbished. So the whole idea is ultimately to rid ourselves of our dependency on anything having to do with fossil-fuel production or nuclear production.

Zenger’s: In other words, as the existing coal and gas and nuke plants wear out, the idea behind your initiative is it would either encourage or compel the power producers to build alternative, renewable sources.

Bricker: Sure, and if you’re just looking at it from a sheer market point of view, the market will follow. Twenty years from now, the big utilities will be hopping on [the renewables bandwagon] just in order to sell their service. Also, in the initiative there’s a cap on what the utilities would be allowed to charge the consumer [to finance the changeover], and it’s around 3 percent. That could be an additional cost to the consumer, but it’s likely that it won’t, because the state of the art in this field is changing every six months. Amazing discoveries. And all this is going to do — in addition to everything else — is fuel that R&D, fuel that investment and discovery even more, and accelerate it. But we have to address the big elephant in the room, in addition to everything else. And it’s not being done.

Zenger’s: One thing that I’ve noticed is that we’re in the middle of a really incredible propaganda campaign away from environmental restrictions, away from alternative energy. You have just about every program on talk radio, the entire Right-wing media infrastructure, saying, “The reason gasoline is at $4 a gallon is those pesky environmentalists won’t let us drill the petroleum we have in the United States. We have to take out all of our oil, we have to take out all our gas, we have to take out all our coal, we have to develop nuclear power to the max. This is the only way we can get energy costs again, and it’s all these pesky environmentalists who are keeping us from doing that.” Given that political climate, what do you think are the chances of something like this passing?

Bricker: Let me tell you what happened. Our people did a poll in which ixty-eight percent of the population of California favors what we’re doing. They even did a poll when they beat up on themselves on purpose, in the form in which they asked the questions, and it only changed the point margin by one to five points, depending on the issue discussed and the issue that was asked. So right now — and one of the reasons why Big Power is really paranoid about this, and they’ve dumped so much money into this and come up with so many falsities and half-truths — is that they want to try as best they can to change the thinking of the public in terms of what the public really, inherently knows what must be done.

You know as well as I do how long it would take to get an insignificant amount of oil [from domestic sources] on line, and how much that would really ultimately effect the cost at the gas tank. The answer is getting Detroit off its ass — like it should have done after the last gas crisis in the 1970’s — and come up with some meaningful solutions to transportation.

Zenger’s: That certainly doesn’t sound like the polls I’m reading, which say that 70-plus percent of Americans — and, at this point, for the first time in years, a majority of Californians — are telling pollsters that they want to see offshore drilling, and they don’t care whether or not it’s in environmentally sensitive areas. It sounds very much to me like this country is really on a gasoline “jones,” and they’re going to their pushers. They’re not saying, “Cut us back.” They’re saying, “Get us more.”

Bricker: However, I would venture to say that if you were to ask them what would be better — if you were to ask them what they thought about coming up with a plan that would make them independent of fossil fuel you would see that 68 percent margin going in that direction. Offshore drilling, opening the oil reserves in Alaska, and all the rest of that stuff is not the answer. That isn’t where we should be putting our energy or our direction. In the amount of time for all of that fuel to come on line, and with the comparably insignificant difference as to what it would make in terms of what something would cost, it’s better for us to take that energy and to take the direction so we would take the same amount of effort it would take to drill, and put it into solutions for our future and for our kids’ future.

The difference between biomass and fossil fuel is that biomass balances itself out because it’s putting oxygen into the atmosphere, and when it decays it’s providing energy. But with fossil fuel, you’re taking stuff that never did that. It’s sitting in the belly of our earth, and it’s stuff that, once it’s burned, has no countervailing effect whatsoever. It just burns and dumps crap into the atmosphere. What more can I say?

Zenger’s: Well, there’s the other argument that I’ve heard that’s part of this propaganda campaign that says, “You want electric cars? You’ve got to build nukes to produce the electricity to make the cars go.”

Bricker: Why should that be an argument? There’s a fallacy there. I’m not getting the logic. Building a nuclear power plant in order to provide the energy it takes to power a car. We’re still going to have to be able to produce something. Eleven square miles of alternative energy-producing lands in the desert would provide our energy needs for the entire state. Plus, under these conditions, create over 371,000 additional jobs — at prevailing wages, I must add, because that’s in the initiative as well — plus all of the staff that it takes in order to maintain these things over their lifetime. That’s in addition to those 371,000 jobs. And the citizen doesn’t pay anything in taxes to do this.

Zenger’s: It seems like a lot of alternative-energy proposals get twisted in rather intriguing ways before they’re seriously considered. We were told for decades that you could extract ethanol from just about any form of plant material, and what’s the big proposal to do it? Take corn out of the food market and turn that into ethanol.

Bricker: Right, when you’ve got things like algae and switchgrass, that are prolific beyond imagination, that can be used in biomass.

Zenger’s: I mean, the original promise of ethanol was that farmers were going to be able to take the stuff they threw away at the harvest and turn that into energy.

Bricker: Right, or even thinking in terms of sugar cane husks, corn husks and all of that stuff as a source. But still, we don’t have to invade our food supply in order to make this happen. And in my own opinion, I think it’s criminal to speculate on our food supply.

Zenger’s: We live in a free-market age in which we speculate on everything. In fact, one columnist in the Los Angeles Times admitted that authorizing offshore drilling throughout both coasts wouldn’t bring more gas on the market for 10 to 20 years. But he argued that the speculators in oil futures would see that as a sign that we were getting serious about increasing energy, and they would bid the price down. Therefore it would lower the price of gasoline immediately even though none of the gas from the oil so drilled would reach the market in decades, and that that’s why we should do it.

Bricker: There’s some reasoning, huh?

Zenger’s: If people want to help, whom do they contact?

Bricker: The first thing they do is go to the Web site, www.yeson7.net. They can contact me directly at cbricker@yeson7.net. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens over a period of time over this.

Handicapped Senior Citizen Bicycles Cross-Country … on Oxygen

story and photo by LEO E. LAURENCE

Copyright © 2008 by Leo E. Laurence • All rights reserved

Frequently, seniors with emphysema from smoking, who constantly need oxygen, hobble around town dragging an oxygen tank and with tubes in their nose, acting like they have one foot in the grave.

But a 65-year-old Wyoming retired historian/photographer who regularly needs oxygen is proving that morbid scene is not necessary.

Mark Junge of Cheyenne has white hair, but on August 12 he appeared as fit as a teenager in San Diego’s Embarcadero Park behind the Convention Center with his specially equipped $6,000 bicycle.

Junge had just completed a 650-mile ride from San Francisco to the Tijuana border, clocking nearly 7,200 miles on four, long-distance trips in four years.

“I went from San Francisco to New York City, a 3,500 mile trip in 2004.

“The next ride we (including his wife, Ardath) went from Times Square, followed the New England coast into the maritime provinces and ended at Cape Spear, Newfoundland; the furthest point east on the North American continent for 1,785 miles,” he explained in an interview.

His wife drives a support vehicle, but doesn’t accompany Junge on the road. She arranges motels, publicity, does laundry, etc.

“Last year, we went from San Francisco to Vancouver for 1,250 miles under the same idea, to bring awareness to COPD” (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, frequently brought on by smoking). The American Lung Association (ALA) says 21 million Americans have chronic lung diseases (COPD), with 34 million expected in five years, according to updated figures from Ross Porter, the ALA’s Director of Communications in San Diego.

“This year, we went 650 miles from San Francisco to Tijuana,” he reported.

The trip cost about $6,000 and was sponsored by SeQual Technologies of San Diego. They pro-vided the senior-citizen bicyclist with a portable “concentrator” device, which was strapped to the rear luggage carrier of his bicycle.

Unlike tanks of oxygen that have a limited life and have to be replaced, the SeQual “concentrator” chemically takes in air (79 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen) and converts it into a supply of en-riched oxygen using a small portable battery.

The “concentrator” can be taken aboard airplanes, but oxygen tanks cannot. Depending on a doctor’s prescription, the SeQual “concentrator” is covered by Medicare, according to the company’s founding principal, Jim Bixby.

The San Diego-manufactured SeQual concentrator “is portable and allows people to remove themselves from their assisted-living quarters and get out and reclaim their lives,” Junge explained.

“I met so many of the most interesting people (on his four rides), and that makes these trips so fantastic. For example, at the beach in Santa Barbara, I talked with one homeless man who is an ex-CBS news correspondent who had worked with Dan Rather. He was making money by (artistically) burning designs onto logs (found on the beach) with a powerful magnifying glass and the sun and welder’s goggles. He was very articulate,” the retired Wyoming historian with five published books on Wyoming history and photography said.

He rides a “Trek” touring bike made out of steel to go long distances, with specialized “Arma-dillo” tires that are extra tough. “I’ve gone 3,500 miles on those,” he said.

He is disabled because of blood clots in his lungs, which prevent them from taking oxygen from the air and putting it into his bloodstream. That’s why he needs to breathe pure oxygen.

But he rides his bicycle to stay lively.

“If you give your heart and lungs a workout, the rest of your body – including your brain – are going to function much better,” he explained.

He thinks assisted-living homes should add rigorous workouts to their facilities.

“If you had an assisted-living facility with real workout equipment, including weight training, a pool, a hot tub and a sauna they could tell their residents, ‘We will give you a break on your rent each month if you simply take our exercise program.’

“The retirement home benefits because they have permanent residents for a longer period of time. There’s such a large turnover (as inactive seniors rapidly die off). One of the reasons they die is be-cause they are not active,” he added.

More information about COPD is available at www.californialung.org or by calling (619) 549-2793. World cyclist Junge can be reached at junges@bresnan.net.

For comment, contact Leo Laurence at leopowerhere@msn.com, or at (619) 757-4909. Additional material by Leo E. Laurence is available online at http://blogbythelion.blogspot.com/

Community Leader Accused of Practicing Law Without a License

Leo Wilson at Center of Hillcrest Business Association Controversy

story and photos by LEO E. LAURENCE

Copyright © 2008 by Leo E. Laurence • All rights reserved

Photos, top to bottom: Scott Crowder and Nancy Moors.

Popular community activist Leo Wilson is being accused of practicing law without a license, involving a heated controversy over the balloting on by-laws revisions for the Hillcrest Business Association (HBA).

Wilson has long been a major part of community life in the Hillcrest and Park West/Banker’s Hill communities. Many believe him to be an attorney.

The controversy involves the balloting on proposed changes to the by-laws of the HBA, an organiza-tion with an annual budget of nearly a third of a million dollars, according to its financial records.

The HBA has long operated with a board of directors of 15 members, as required by its by-laws. Written in 1983, those by-laws state that they may be amended only by a majority vote of its full membership.

Back in 1990, the board voted to increase its size to 20. After it was pointed out to them that only the members could increase the size of the board, the board nonetheless took three more votes on its own in 2007 to authorize the increase from 15 to 20 board members. Those last three votes occurred when the HBA was under investigation by the district attorney’s office for alleged state Brown Act violations.

John Stump, then the HBA’s attorney, convinced them that their action was appropriate.

“That’s when I decided we were going to shop for a new corporate counsel, which we (now) have,” said long-time HBA board member Scott Crowder (Mondo Condo Corp.).

The current controversy involving balloting is that the HBA has 1250 members, according to Simon. However, they rarely get more than two or three people to attend board meetings, other than board members.

The board then asked popular community activist Leo Wilson to advise them.

They decided to conduct the balloting by mail because the organization didn’t expect to get the required 626 members to an annual membership meeting. They also hired people to take the ballots around to HBA members in person.

However, the HBA may again be violating the state’s Brown Act. The California Attorney Gen-eral’s office says, “This office has long disapproved secret ballots in open meetings and the casting of mail ballots (emphasis added).”

Who Can Vote?

Additionally, just who is a member for purposes of voting?

“It’s a big organization,” says Crowder. “When you have a vote, you have to set a ‘record date’ to determine who is eligible to vote as of a certain date. That date is critical to the vote (under the state’s Corporation’s Code).

“They (the HBA board) didn’t establish a record date,” Crowder explained.

When Crowder tried to raise these important issues of law at the HBA’s August 19 board meeting, vice president Nancy Moors, who was chairing the meeting, cut him off. Crowder challenged the chair’s ruling.

Moors didn’t know Robert’s Rules of Parliamentary Procedure and asked for a second on the challenge, even though none is required. The challenge failed, and Crowder’s questions on his nu-merous legal challenges involving the disputed balloting were silenced.

“This is all petty junior high school stuff,” Crowder said during an interview. “All this would have been caught if we had the advice of legitimate legal counsel.”

Even Wilson seemed confused about the ‘record date’ issue at the August 19 board meeting.

“First he (Wilson) said it was June 30,” Crowder reported. “Then he said it was May 1. Finally, he said June 30.”

“They (the board and Wilson) are using an official list (of members) from the city that is dated two weeks after the ballots were mailed. They mailed out ballots before they knew who was eligible to vote,” Crowder argued.

“They crossed off people who have gone out of business, but were in business as of the ‘record date’ (and are therefore eligible to vote). They are also giving ballots to businesses that have joined after the ‘record date.’

“The ‘record date’ (required by state law) means nothing to them,” Crowder added. “They are just trying to get as many ballots as then can.

“They are going to count them at a board meeting (in September), not a membership meeting. That is invalid because they are again violating their own by-laws,” Crowder explained.

The one-page ballot lists three basic changes to the HBA’s by-laws.

One changes the number of directors “shall be not less than 15 or more than 21. The Board of Directors shall fix the exact number of Directors, within these limits.”

A second item on the ballot involves the quorum at annual meetings, changing it from a majority of the membership to “three percent … present or in person or by written or electronic proxy.”

A third change says the HBA’s by-laws may be “amended or repealed” upon a 2/3 vote of the Board of Directors, with subsequent approval by three percent of the membership.” It doesn’t say when that approval must be provided.

“Also, the state’s Corporations Code says (a member) should be able to vote aye or nay on each item (on a ballot), separately. These three (ballot) items are not inter-related or interdependent. This is absolutely against (state law),” Crowder said.

The ballot says “members who have not submitted a mail ballot by (September 9) may vote in per-son at the meeting,” which is only a board meeting.

“This is not true,” Crowder says. “It is not a membership meeting,” as required by the by-laws. “How can a member vote at a board meeting? (The September 9 board meeting) is not a regular or spe-cial, noticed, membership meeting.

“I was told (by board member Robert Grinchuk, a member of the By-laws Committee who de-posed Crowder as chair) that I should direct my legal objections to Leo Wilson, which I cannot do, by law,” Crowder added.

“Board members need to review fiduciary responsibility and reliance on professionals,” Crowder wrote in a recent e-mail.

If the HBA’s balloting proceeds as planned, any member could file a lawsuit challenging the results.

Wilson’s Predicament

Leo Wilson is caught in the middle of these growing controversies involving the HBA’s challenged balloting.

“I understand these people (the HBA directors) don’t like each other, but I’ve known everybody. But I got caught in the bad politics of that board and it angers me,” Wilson said.

Many people have long believed that Wilson is a practicing attorney.

HBA executive director “Warren (Simon) argued with me (recently) and said, ‘He is an attorney. I said he is not’,” Crowder reported.

“He (Wilson) is taking money (for legal advice). I’ve seen it on the monthly ledgers, so I know he’s getting paid something. $400 (so far) this year,” Crowder explained.

It is also reported that Wilson received payments for consulting fees from the Maintenance Assess-ment District in Hillcrest.

Wilson explained that he is not practicing law because he has AIDS and is a long-time survivor.

Records of the State Bar of California, however, reveal a “resignation with charges pending” on December 25, 1992.

Wilson had also been “ordered inactive” on May 5, 1992.

“My intentions are directed at the (HBA) board, not Leo Wilson,” said Crowder. “I like him. They (HBA board) continue to do stupid stuff, like holding committee meetings without notifying the public or even other board members.

“There are (HBA) committees with delegated authority of the board, so they are subject to Brown Act requirements. They have to publish an agenda and their minutes. Some do neither.

“You don’t even know who the committee members are. The standard is, anybody who shows up at a committee meeting is a voting member of that committee. There’s no accountability,” Crowder charged.

“Why is it that the members don’t rise up in indignation and throw these rascals out and properly change their by-laws?”

Treasurer’s Authority

If all these HBA problems were not enough, it has been learned that the organization’s treasurer, Cecilia Moreno, owner of the Crest Café, now has single-signature authority to spend HBA money. The organization had $329,646.72 of tax money in the bank as of June 30, according to its records.

Normally, checks of an organization of this size require two signatures to be valid.

Banking regulations have changed in the past few years with the advent of Internet banking. That gave Moreno single-signature rights to the HBA’s internet accounts.

A representative of California Bank & Trust, where some HBA money is located, said “there is no verification done beyond providing the pertinent account numbers” when using single-signature authority transactions.

As a result, assistant executive director Harrison reportedly refused to follow the instructions of two HBA board members to set up internet banking, though it was done anyway.

For comment, contact Leo Laurence at (619) 757-4909 or at leopowerhere@msn.com. Additional material by Leo E. Laurence is available online at http://blogbythelion.blogspot.com/

Brian Anderson: Farewell to a Friend

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

I’ve known Brian Anderson so long I literally can’t remember when I first met him. I do know that for over a decade he’s been a key member of H.E.A.L. [Health, Education, AIDS Liaison]-San Diego, the alternative AIDS group I co-founded in 1996. He helped get our public-access cable TV show going (it now appears every Wednesday at 11 p.m. on Cox Cable channel 23) and he served on the H.E.A.L. board from the time we organized it until he died August 27 from complications from heart disease. Brian and his partner Robert Turner were also long-term sponsors of Zenger’s Newsmagazine.

But Brian was a good deal more than a fellow activist in the service of a controversial cause — advancing the point of view that AIDS is a long-term breakdown of the human immune system caused mostly by lifestyle and toxic factors, not infection with the so-called “HIV” [“Human Immunodeficiency Virus”] or any other single microbe. He was also a long, dear and valued friend.

At least once he drove me up to Los Angeles to attend a meeting of our allied organization there, Alive and Well, and on the way up he told me that he shared my admiration for composer Richard Wagner and thought Wagner’s four-opera cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung, was the greatest work of art ever created in any medium. The next time we saw each other I gave him a cassette of Anna Russell’s marvelous spoof of Wagner’s Ring — and after he listened to it Brian told me how much he’d enjoyed the lampoon.

Brian was like that. Though soft-spoken, he was definitely a man of strong opinions. You always knew where you stood with him. When he first attended H.E.A.L. meetings he was of the opinion that the federal government had created HIV as part of a conspiracy to depopulate the Gay male community, though as he kept coming he gradually came around to the, in some ways, even more radical idea that HIV isn’t the cause of AIDS and may not even exist at all. Indeed, he spent a few months touring the country with German virologist Stefan Lanka, whose theories about AIDS and diseases in general are so radical even some alternative AIDS activists aren’t comfortable with them.

Brian’s roots were in Minnesota — where a long and destructive family feud, mostly over money, absorbed way too much of his time in the last two years of his life and stressed him out so much it may have hastened his end — but he spent most of his adult life in Washington, D.C., from where he and Robert had relocated not long before we met. He had some interesting anecdotes about life in our nation’s capital but he really didn’t like to talk about it much.

About two months before his death, Brian buttonholed me after a H.E.A.L. meeting and told me he was going into the hospital for an aortic valve replacement — and it was typical of his stoicism that he made this rather serious heart operation sound about as risky as having his car tuned. So when Robert called me with the news on the morning of August 21, I knew as soon as he told me who was calling what had happened even before Robert said so. As things turned out, Brian’s heart had failed a little less than a week and a half before his operation was scheduled.

I felt devastated by the news and at the same time I couldn’t help feeling for Robert, who not only had been Brian’s partner for 34 years but was notoriously misanthropic. (At least that’s what Brian called him; since Brian’s death Robert has told me that was an overstatement.) Having lived through the death of a partner myself, I can readily relate to how hard it is to make those phone calls while you’re still reeling under the whammy of your own grief — and for Robert it was no doubt even harder than it was for me or it would have been for Brian if Robert had been the one to go first.

The last time I saw Brian was at a H.E.A.L. meeting where he and Robert stopped in briefly on their way to another engagement — and Brian, being Brian, apologized that he was not able to stay. But perhaps the most important time I saw Brian was the time before that, when he came to the Joyce Beers Community Center in Hillcrest on July 4 to attend the legal wedding of myself and my husband, Charles Nelson. It’s his photo of us during the ceremony that illustrates Leo Laurence’s story of our wedding on the Zenger’s Web site, and the fact that our last extended interaction took place at such an occasion of joy for us helps ease the pain of losing him … a little.

LARRY TOWNSEND

October 27, 1930 — July 29, 2008

A veteran Queer and Leather community activist best known for writing the two-volume Leatherman’s Handbook and a regular column on Leather issues for several Queer publications, Larry Townsend passed away on July 29, 2008, less than five months after he made a rare public appearance in San Diego March 13 at a titleholder’s appreciation dinner to honor former Mr. San Diego Leather Lee Butler.

“I look at the community, and what I see with these young guys scares me,” Townsend said in San Diego March 13. “I hope you let them know, because I’ve watched too many guys die.” Asked to elaborate, Townsend said he thought older men in the community have an obligation to “work with [younger men] and try to convince them they’re not immortal. One day they have AIDS or are using crystal, which is almost as bad. People try to pull me into [drug scenes], and I’m afraid of losing control. I don’t use drugs and I don’t drink more than two drinks a night,” he added — offering his own self-control as an example for young people. He boasted that in the 27 years he wrote his Leather column, he always had two consistent pieces of advice: “no drugs, and no glass in the dungeon.”

Jack Fritscher memorialized his longtime friend, Larry Townsend, in the following obituary:

“Townsend was the pseudonymous author of dozens of books, including Run Little Leather Boy (1970) and the first, single-volume edition of The Leatherman’s Handbook (1972), at pioneer erotic presses such as Greenleaf Classics and the Other Traveler imprint of Olympia Press.

“Growing up as a teenager of Swiss-German extraction in Los Angeles a few houses from Noël Coward and Irene Dunne, he ate cookies with his neighbor Laura Hope Crews, who played Aunt Pittypat in Gone with the Wind.

“He attended the prestigious Peddie School, and was stationed as Staff Sergeant in charge of NCOIC Operations of Air Intelligence Squadrons for nearly five years with the U.S. Air Force in Germany (1950-1954). Completing his tour of duty, he entered into the 1950’s underground of the L.A. Leather scene, where he and actor Montgomery Clift shared a lover. With his degree in industrial psychology from UCLA (1957), he worked in the private sector and as a probation officer with the Forestry Service.

“Townsend began his pioneering activism in the politics of Queer liberation in the early 1960’s. In 1972, as president of the Homophile Effort for Legal Protection (HELP) — which had been founded in 1969, before the Stonewall Inn riots in New York city which supposedly launched the Queer liberation movement, to defend Gays during and after arrests — he led a group in founding the H.E.L.P. Newsletter, the forebear of Drummer (1975). As a writer and photographer, he was an essential eyewitness of the drama and salon around Drummer in which his novels were often excerpted.

“His signature ‘Leather Notebook’ column appeared in Drummer for twelve years beginning in 1980, and continued in Honcho to Spring 2008. His last novel, TimeMasters, was published April 2008. The Leather heritage book Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer, published June 20, 2008, contains the biographical sketch from which most of the above was taken and also includes Larry’s ‘Eyewitness Introduction,‘ his last published writing.“

NOTICE: The entire post above, except for the photo and the first two paragraphs, is copyright © 2008 www.JackFritscher.com. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

“Since when is it racist to resist invasion?”

RE: “There’s No Such Thing as an ‘Illegal Immigrant,’” Zenger’s, August 2008:

Your assertion that nobody can be illegal requires a response. While it’s true that our federal Constitution states that all persons are considered innocent until proven guilty, the word “proven” cannot be verified if that person has entered the country carrying fradulent papers. Such documents as a driver’s I.D. or Social Security card can be purchased from crooked vendors and used as a valid I.D. just as the government-issued document. These forged documents are not easily distinguished from genuine ones. To attempt to use the term “undocumented immigrants” in reference to such persons, therefore, becomes inaccurate since few can tell which is what. We are only left with the term “illegal alien” since, if the person were legally here, why, then, do they carry bogus documents?

The media or the Minutemen tell the truth when using “illegal alien” and are not being racist. Furthermore, Rep. Duncan Hunter is owed an apology for being called a “crude racist” simply because he is responding to his constituents demands he do something about the steady stream of border jumpers invading the United States by building a fence to keep these unwanted trouble makers out. Since when is it racist to resist invasion? Was President Madison a racist for driving the British out of New Orleans in 1814? Are the Georgians being racist to resist the Russian hordes? Maybe the media should call Putin’s army party crashers? Get real.

Finally, I think such Thought Police as Leo Laurence should consult the First Amendment of our Constitution before they pose as experts on the law. In it persons are guaranteed free speech to say what they think or print. His attempt to censor words just because he finds them offensive is corrupt and heavy handed. Better yet, he should join La Raza and write propaganda for them, as it appears this is where his true sympathies lie.

John Primavera

North Park

•••••

“I must support any war that keeps Sharia law from taking over … ”

An open letter to Senator Barack Obama:

Senator Obama, it could be that you have a conflict within your supporters over what may be the most important issue, national security.

And it could be that you are only hearing, for instance, the “Gay” view from a small, elitist, professional “Gays” crowd that do not represent the vast majority of homosexual voters.

I am a homosexual, liberal Democrat, and I have common sense. I may only know what I read in the newspapers, but what I know is that where Islam controls, they are killing homosexuals.

Therefore, it is clear to me that I must support any war that keeps Sharia law from taking over, any place. I think too many “Gays” only read the slick Gay publications that ignore our issues and try to sell us expensive cars, clothing and cover only “Gay” “entertainment”, most of which is by non-Gays. I see little on the “Gay’ network (LOGO) that helps our community/movement — what I see are old movies.

I’m not saying you should not use these resources, but don’t think you have reached the vast majority of homosexual voters, or our friends, neighbors, families, allies by reading The Advocate.

It is good to get same-sex marriage, but that will be of no value if we allow Muslims to take over our government and impose Sharia law. (Obviously that is true of extremist “Christians” too, including the “religious” preacher person from New Orleans that just lost a lawsuit in Wisconsin where he suggested, in some way, that listeners should shoot homosexuals.) But homosexuals, I say again, are being killed in Islamic countries.

To quibble over whether or not Iraq is worse off now than before is nonsense when we should not be bringing the troops home — the “heterosexual” troops (since our nation still fears homosexuals as much as Islamists so we are, in theory, not allowed to fight for our country even when we would suffer more under Islamic control than heterosexuals, although women would also) — but sending them to Afghanistan actually to fight the people who attacked us and are still in control makes discussion of when to withdraw, etc, irrelevant.

How to stop sending our money to enemies like Saudi Arabia (for oil) I can’t help you with. But I tell you security may hurt you if you only listen to those who want you to be an idealist and ignore reality.

Something these young “Gays,” making lots of money running Gay organizations don’t know is that our community/movement has succeeded beyond our wildest imagination, because our pioneers did NOT work for money or power, but for their beliefs in change within the system and from one secret organization we grew each decade. What these young people-as young people in all civil rights struggles-need to remember is they started from where we brought them, taking risks they don’t have to. Which, come to think of it, is true of all Americans, who benefit from what the founders of this nation, and subsequent citizens have done to bring us to where we are today as we celebrate another 4th of July.

Billy Glover

Bossier City, Louisiana

Fouling Our Own Nest

By MARK GABRISH CONLAN, Editor

Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Who ever would have thought that the rapid rise in the price of gasoline to $4 a gallon and up would be a winning political issue for the Republicans — you know, the party of President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, all of whom were deeply involved in the oil business when they weren’t in public office? Nonetheless, that’s how it’s breaking, thanks largely to a relentless propaganda campaign from the Right-wing media machine and its political wing that has successfully persuaded millions of Americans that the skyrocketing gas prices are due, not to the machinations of oil companies, financial speculators, Middle Eastern sheikhs or the fact that oil is a nonrenewable resource that the world is running out of, but to those pesky environmentalists who won’t let the wonderful, noble folks from the oil industry drill off the U.S. coast.

The success of this campaign is readily apparent in the sweeping poll results. A nationwide poll released July 30 by CNN and Opinion Research Corporation showed 69 percent in favor of offshore drilling, while only 30 percent opposed it. A later poll by Rasmussen Associates tweaked the question a bit to eliminate any implication that more offshore drilling would necessarily bring gas prices down, but still revealed 62 percent in favor of more drilling now and only 27 percent against it. What made it an even more ominous issue for Democrats is that Rasmussen’s poll identified the presidential candidates by name with their positions on the issue: John McCain as pro-drilling and Barack Obama as against it. Even in California, where the world’s first offshore oil well was drilled and the first severe oil spill at one happened (in Santa Barbara in 1969), a Public Policy Institute poll released July 30 revealed 51 percent in favor of offshore drilling and 45 percent against it — a 10-percent jump in support for drilling since the same pollsters asked the same question a year before.

The Right’s propaganda victory is also vividly on display in how quickly the Democratic Party — which frankly ought to change its name to the Wimpocratic Party, given how readily and how totally it continually forsakes the interests and demands of its core constituents to chase the will-o’-the-wisp of so-called “swing voters” — has abandoned any shred of principle on this issue. Not long after John McCain reversed his own long-standing opposition to offshore drilling, Barack Obama did too, putting the environment on the long list of issues (ranging from the war in Iraq to “faith-based initiatives”) on which he’s signed on to the GOP’s positions and alienated the “change” voters who locked up the nomination for him. More recently, even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — who’d previously stood courageously against the environmental wreckers in the Republican Party who want to trash America’s quality of life so their big-business sponsors can make quick profits — signaled her willingness to allow a Congressional vote on a bill to repeal the ban on offshore drilling in the outer continental shelf passed in 1982.

The prairie fires in support of offshore drilling — and the scared responses of politicians from both parties, particularly the Wimpocrats — stand in sharp contrast to the lack of evidence that allowing offshore drilling will actually do anything to lower current gas prices. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the United States has only two percent of the world’s proven oil reserves. What’s more, even offshore drilling supporters like Sara Banaszak of the American Petroleum Reserve admit that, especially in areas that haven’t been drilled offshore before and no industry infrastructure exists, it could take up to 15 years between the start of operations and any actual oil production — and the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), a government agency, estimates that it would take 20 years for increased offshore drilling to bring down the price of gas. What’s more, according to NRDC, the amount of oil estimated to be recoverable from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) — which President Bush has been after from Day One in office — “would likely produce less fuel than what our country now consumes in just six months.”

Allowing offshore drilling now wouldn’t necessarily mean that the drilling itself would start immediately. If the 1982 ban were lifted tomorrow, the Department of the Interior would start offering permits to oil companies to drill on federally protected lands — but there wouldn’t be any deadline on the companies requiring them to start drilling at once. Indeed, according to “The Truth About America’s Energy,” a June 2008 report by the majority staff of the House Committee on Natural Resources, oil companies aren’t using the permits they already have. “In the last four years,” says the report, “the Bureau of Land Management has issued 28,776 permits to drill on public land; yet, in that same time, 18,954 wells were actually drilled.”

That’s a difference of nearly 10,000 permits that aren’t being used — and, according to the report, of the 44 million acres of offshore federal lands currently being leased to oil and natural gas companies, only 10.5 million are currently producing oil or gas. The statistics for onshore federal lands are similar; 47.5 million acres under lease, of which only 13 million acres are producing. The report argues that if oil and gas companies would just use the federal leases they already have, “that would nearly double total U.S. oil production, and increase natural gas production by 75 percent. It would also cut U.S. oil imports by more than a third, and be more than six times the estimated peak production from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).”

Nonetheless, the facts don’t seem able to stem the drill-o-mania. The same CNN poll that showed 69 percent of Americans supporting offshore drilling also indicated (based on a separate sample) that only 51 percent of it actually believed authorizing drilling would reduce gas prices within one year. The analyses above have been pooh-poohed by the Right-wing drill-o-maniacs, who claim that the U.S. has significant unproven oil reserves (in a country that’s been more picked over than a porcupine over the last 160 years? I don’t think so!) and that oil companies wouldn’t do anything so seemingly stupid as to withhold lease land from production when crude prices are at near-record highs. (Yes, they would; a highly cartelized industry like oil, dominated by a handful of multinational corporations, can get away with responding to high prices by keeping production low so prices can rise even higher.)

At this rate, we’re heading for an election season in which the word “environmentalist” will be almost as toxic politically as the word “terrorist,” and once again the Republicans will sweep to a Presidential election victory by proclaiming themselves the party of the common people and the Democrats as hopeless elitists helplessly in thrall to Brie-eating, French-speaking upper-class environmentalist scum. Needless to say, neither party’s pandering politicians will dare speak the obvious home truth about energy, which is that, despite the intense short-term pain and damage to many Americans (particularly the working-class and working-poor people who can least afford it), in the long term $4 per gallon gas is a good thing. Not only does it discourage consumption of an environmentally wasteful product, it also encourages the use of alternative energy. Contrary to popular belief, practical renewable energy technologies exist now — indeed, they have since the 1970’s — and what’s holding back their adoption is that they’re still too expensive for most consumers. Anything that lowers that cost difference — whether it makes renewables cheaper or non-renewables costlier — is positive.

What’s most interesting is that not only do the drill-o-maniacs ignore the environmental carnage that their strategy would ensure — not only the direct damage from oil spills but the increased pollution and greenhouse gas emissions — they positively seem to revel in it. Maybe they believe the late Ayn Rand’s secular heresy that taking regulatory fetters off the super-entrepreneurs of her dreams and letting “the market” work its magic will automatically bring forth technological solutions to technology’s problems. Or maybe a lot of these people are also fundamentalist Christians who aren’t worried about the world surviving the next century or two because they believe God is going to destroy it anyway in the Last Judgment and doom the rest of us sinners to a living hell while they, the Right-wing Righteous, will be “enraptured” up to heaven.

Be that as it may, the Right has zeroed in on all the most environmentally destructive energy sources they can think of, and while they pay lip service to the eventual development of renewable alternatives they insist that the immediate priority should be non-renewable energy sources that destroy every conceivable basis for human survival. These are the people who support blowing up entire mountaintops to extract the coal beneath. They are pointing to the development of oil shale in Jordan and arguing that as a solution for the U.S., even though extracting oil from shale means literally destroying so much of the earth that by comparison coal mining looks like a garden party.

And, of course, they’re madly in love with nuclear power, the dirtiest, foulest, most heavily polluting energy source ever conceived by the mindlessness of man. When they’re not busy denying that global warming is happening at all, the Right and the energy industry are hailing “safe, clean, efficient” nuclear power as the solution to it. Nonsense: when you count the entire cycle of mining uranium ore, refining it, enriching it and putting it in reactors, nuclear energy heavily contributes to carbon generation. Nuclear plants not only have the potential for dangerous accidents — do the names “Three Mile Island” and “Chernobyl” mean anything to you? — but they’re also inviting targets for terrorists; had Osama bin Laden sent his hijacked planes into a working nuclear power reactor instead of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the death toll from 9/11 would have likely been in the millions instead of in the thousands. Nuclear waste remains highly toxic for over 100,000 years — 1,000 times longer than any single human civilization has ever existed — reason enough to send this technology into the oblivion of bad ideas.

The simple truth is that the world can no longer afford Big Energy in all its forms. Over the last 170 years — since the U.S. invented oil drilling in 1839 — energy production has become increasingly centralized. A nation whose individual households used to be energy-sufficient — when “energy” meant hewing firewood for heat, making candles out of tallow for light and feeding hay to horses for transportation — soon came under the thumb of giant corporations developing new energy technologies and selling them for high profits. The U.S. ran so far ahead of the rest of the world in switching from individual to corporate energy that today our country, which contains six percent of the world’s population, consumes 25 to 33 percent of its resources. And as the world’s two largest nations, China and India, develop larger middle classes (thanks largely to U.S. corporations “outsourcing” industrial production to China and customer service and computer work to India), they too are clamoring to join the wasteful party and hastening the coming energy apocalypse.

What makes renewable energy virtuous is that not only does it offer a way out of the sickening spiral of resource exhaustion, pollution and global warming that threatens all human life, it also promises a return to individual self-reliance and self-sufficiency in energy. Many renewable sources, particularly solar energy, don’t have economies of scale; instead of setting up huge arrays of solar panels in the desert and bringing the power in on long lines, losing a lot of it along the way, it makes more sense, especially in a climate like San Diego’s, for each home to have its own solar collectors and produce all or most of its own power. One would think this would appeal to conservatives who are continually brandishing the rhetoric of “individualism” and “self-reliance,” but in practice the Right is so in thrall to the giant corporations that provide both its ideology and its funding that they can’t support anything that threatens their continued profits as energy providers.

When I did needle exchange as a volunteer for ACT UP San Diego in the early 1990’s, I met addicts who were so old and had been shooting drugs for so long that they had burned out all the veins in their arms and were reduced to injecting in their legs. I even met a few who had done it so long they had burned out all the veins in their legs, too, and had to slash their feet open to provide a pathway in which to inject. If the U.S. follows the energy strategy of the drill-o-maniacs, we will be like those poor, pathetic drug addicts, butchering the earth for a last few bits of our precious “high.” And instead of leadership from our politicians, we’re getting the siren song of the pushers: a promise that if we just pay more money and do more long-term damage to ourselves and our environment, we can keep our gasoline “jones” going indefinitely.

A species that fouls its own nest — which is what the drill-o-maniacs are demanding we do — cannot and does not deserve to survive. It’s not clear how long the world can sustain its current pattern of energy exploitation and usage, but given all the factors against it — the gradual exhaustion of petroleum and other non-renewable resources, the immediate pollution, the lowering of the “energy profit” from non-renewable sources (the difference between the amount of energy needed to extract a fuel and the amount released by using it) and the overhanging threat from global warming — it’s readily apparent to reality-based analysts that the status quo can’t last more than a century or two. Some “peak oil” theorists argue that we’ve already passed the point of no return where we could have managed a seamless transition to renewable energy without drastic reductions in either the size of the human population or its overall standard of living. But whether that’s the case, it’s self-evident that the longer we attempt to keep the fossil-fuel party going, the greater the risk that the human race will render itself extinct.

Bisexual Forum Holds Second Sexuality Conference

Speakers Discuss Klein Grid, Moving Beyond Categories

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

PHOTOS, top to bottom: Dr. Regina Reinhardt, Kamala Devi

Two months after the Bisexual Forum of San Diego hosted their first conference on sexuality, they returned to the same space — the gallery at the Rubber Rose store on Ray Street just south of University — July 29 for “Clearly in the Grey Area,” a second conference exploring the nature of bisexuality and sexuality in general. Both speakers, Bisexual Forum co-founder Dr. Regina Reinhardt and self-described “bliss coach” and author Kamala Devi, had also appeared at the earlier event, but their presentations were dramatically different. Dr. Reinhardt talked about the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid, developed by the late Dr. Fritz Klein as an extension of pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey’s zero-to-six scale. Devi spoke about the difficulty of categorizing sexual orientation at all, especially with people (including herself) who live lives quite different from the normal meanings of “Gay,” “Lesbian,” “straight” or even “Bi.”

The basic difference between Klein’s grid and Kinsey’s scale, Dr. Reinhardt explained, is that instead of merely asking you to rate yourself from zero to six — zero being exclusively heterosexual and six being exclusively homosexual — based on your current sexual behavior, Klein’s also asked for rankings based on your past (i.e., up to one year ago) behavior and your ideals for the future, as well as what you’re doing now. The result is a table of seven rows and three columns asking who you’re attracted to, who you actually have sex with, who you fantasize about, your emotional and social preferences (whether you “hang” mostly with men or women), your “lifestyle” as straight or Gay, and your own identification.

“Dr. Klein wanted to show you the differences between your scores and allow you to learn about yourself,” Dr. Reinhardt explained. “He has the past, present and ideal because it always changes. You fall in love with a person of your own sex and call yourself Lesbian or Gay, and 10 years later you fall in love with a person of the opposite sex and call yourself heterosexual.” She asked people in attendance to fill out Klein-grid forms and “read” two of them, interpreting the results and coming up with insights about the people quite different from what those in the room who knew them would have thought.

Dr. Reinhardt also discussed a study of her own in which she recruited 26 heterosexual men who are married to Bisexual women. (Later she introduced her husband of 30 years, thereby suggesting she had a personal reason for choosing this as a research topic.) She said that even though these men weren’t actively Bisexual themselves, when they filled out the Klein grid “their ideals were Bi.” Her analysis was that “they were already Bi-friendly because they were married to Bi women, and they wouldn’t mind having sex with guys if society and religion weren’t so strongly against it.”

One criticism frequently made of the Klein grid is that, like Kinsey’s scale, it focuses only on sexual orientation and not on gender identity. It doesn’t provide a comfortable “fit” for Transgender people or the so-called “genderqueer” people (mostly youths) who deliberately carry and dress themselves as androgynously as possible, whatever their biological gender, and leave themselves open to romantic and sexual relationships with people of either gender without calling themselves “Bisexual.” Dr. Reinhardt conceded that Dr. Klein hadn’t had a chance to extend his research to cover Transgender people before he died.

Devi mentioned a researcher named Sandra Bem, who had done a rewrite on the Kinsey scale to accommodate gender identity. She suggested that that person’s work could be combined with Kinsey’s and Klein’s to construct a three-dimensional scale that would allow people even more opportunities to understand their sexuality, gender identity and the interaction between the two. Devi also offered her own life as an example of how one’s perception of one’s own sexual orientation — or even one’s gender identity — changes over time and circumstances.

“Labels talk more about categories and identities than actual experiences,” Devi said. “I came out at 16 and went through seven years of very exclusive political involvement with the Lesbian community. When I discovered my attraction to men, I found there was heavy political pressure from the Lesbian community not to act on it. I met a man who was androgynous; when I met him he was so totally comfortable with his inner femininity and his inner masculinity that I fell in love with his inner feminine and still thought of myself as a ‘Lesbian’ because I was in love with his feminine side. It wasn’t until after I left that relationship that it became O.K. for me to say, ‘I’m Bisexual.’”

According to Devi, “sexual and spiritual identity are the same for me” — a lesson she learned while she was with that man and he helped her get in touch with what she calls her “spiritual identity.” She said, “A lot of my healing was reclaiming my feminine side from my ‘masculine’ identity as a butch Lesbian. My awakening taught me that it’s really the kundalini, the life force inside. … I came into the tantric community, the polyamory community and the Queer community at the same time. We come and talk about bisexuality, but we don’t often talk about our spiritual energy or where it overlaps with our sexual energy. There’s a taboo in society about talking about sex, and a similar taboo about talking about our spiritual path because that’s considered ‘private.’”

In response to a comment from an audience member who said he didn’t really start loving himself until he stopped lying to himself and came out as Bisexual at age 68 — and then, in essence, had to re-live his adolescent conflicts and uncertainties about dating and seeking partners — Devi said, “I don’t want to define spirituality. It’s a cosmic essence that can’t be expressed in words. At the heart, it’s experiencing the truth as it arises and being honest and making a decision about it.”