City Attorney Backs Out of Equality Nine Prosecution

 

SAN DIEGO — Six members of the “Equality Nine,” marriage equality activists arrested on August 19, 2010 for enacting a “sit-in” at San Diego County Clerk’s office and demanding that marriage licenses be issued to same-sex couples, have been vindicated. The legal proceedings against them ended after two years and a “motion to dismiss” by the city attorney today. The activists see the end of this case as a victory in the struggle against restrictions on free speech, the inequality of Queer marriage rights, and an overzealous San Diego City Attorney.

The action that began with nine activists and their supporters peacefully asking the county clerks to follow their oath and the constitution to grant same-sex marriage licenses, ended not with an effort to find resolution or with respect for freedom of speech and assembly, but with nearly fifty riot-clad county sheriffs arresting the nine where they sat on public property. The Equality Nine and their dedicated legal team have spent the last two years and four days organizing and preparing to defeat the city’s two misdemeanor charges. “Too often prosecutors bully innocent defendants into taking bad plea deals,” said Zakiya Khabir, an Equality Nine member. “I’m in awe of the support we received from the community and our legal team: Gerald Blank, Todd Moore, Alex Landon, Michael Hernandez, Dan Greene, Michael Crowley and others. Without them it would have been easier to give in to Goldsmith’s intimidation.”

In the years since California was stripped of marriage equality, some have fought to overturn Proposition 8 at the ballot box; some have raised federal civil cases against the state to overturn the marriage ban; others, like the Equality Nine, have pursued direct action against the institution that oversees this state sanctioned discrimination. “We were right to be in the county clerk’s office on August 19, 2010, we are still right to be dissatisfied with any form of discrimination in society and we encourage people to organize and take a stand when they recognize it, ” said Sean Bohac, one of the former defendants and a member of San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality (S.A.M.E.). “Though we still don’t have equal marriage rights in California, I know from first-hand accounts that our efforts have provided encouragement to those working for justice. I think the City Attorney finally recognized the trend of public opinion on marriage equality, and softened his stand against freedom of speech when he backed out of this expensive legal ego battle.”

While the legal case against them has ended, the nine recognize that the work is not done. “The victory for the Equality Nine is only a victory against our criminalization for speaking out.” said fellow Equality Nine member Cecile Veillard True victory is not ours until Tony & Tyler Dylan-Hyde, Claire Manley & Ditchi Davila, and other couples who had appointments to be married that day are finally allowed to exercise their full equal civil rights in this state, as Federal Judge Walker demanded they be allowed to do when he overturned Proposition 8 in his decision over two years ago, on August 4, 2010.”

Members of the Equality Nine, and S.A.M.E., will join the event host Canvass for a Cause (CFAC) for “Pussy Riot Solidarity Concert” Saturday, August 25, 7 p.m. at the CFAC Headquarters Building, 3705 10th Avenue in Hillcrest. The event will be a combination community performance and social which will give people a chance to meet the Equality Nine and learn about and support current political prisoners like Pussy Riot in Russia. “We are so proud of our colleagues who refused to surrender their civil rights and admit to false guilt just to make these charges go away. Today the charges were dropped, and although this belated justice does not erase the wrongs done to the Equality Nine and all LGBT people daily, it does mark one more victory on the side of equality. Canvass for a Cause is honored to work tirelessly in coalition with San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality, the Equality Nine, and the community to educate the public and work against oppression.” said Sarah Parish, spokesperson for Canvass for a Cause.

Members of the community are encouraged to attend the next S.A.M.E. meeting held the second and fourth Tuesdays at the San Diego Pride Office at 6:30 pm. See www.samealliance.com for more information.

Cindy Sheehan Speaks at Reception in San Diego

Anti-War Activist Is Peace & Freedom Vice-Presidential Candidate

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Cindy Sheehan

“For four years, half the country thought I was smart and half the country thought I was stupid,” Cindy Sheehan, anti-war activist turned socialist and vice-presidential candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party in the 2012 Presidential election, told a small but committed audience at a private reception in Ocean Beach August 19. “Now more than 99 percent think I’m stupid.”

Sheehan’s backstory is well known. On April 4, 2004 her son Casey, a U.S. Army mechanic, was killed in action in Sadr City, Iraq. Cindy joined other family members of deceased servicemembers in a group meeting with then-President George W. Bush in June 2004 but came away, according to an interview she gave soon afterwards, with the impression that “the President has changed his reasons for being over there every time a reason is proven false or an objective reached.” Over time, she became more militant in her opposition to the Iraq war and her conviction that her son had died in a meaningless conflict.

In August 2005, Cindy Sheehan became a national figure when she camped outside the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas, and demanded another meeting with the President to ask him just what was the “noble cause” for which her son had given his life. She became a hero to Bush’s political opponents — until 2008, when she moved from Dixon, California to San Francisco to run for Congress against Democratic Congressmember Nancy Pelosi. Though her original motive for taking on a major Democrat was disgust at how both major parties had voted funding for the war, Sheehan broadened her critique to domestic issues like health care and attacks on what she called the “robber class” of wealthy individuals and corporations that, she said, controlled the country.

“Nancy Pelosi is erroneously regarded as a far-Leftist,” Sheehan said at her Ocean Beach appearance. “She’s actually Right-wing and pro-corporate, like a lot of Democrats in the upper echelon.” Sheehan ran her Congressional campaign largely on issues the leaders of both major U.S. parties have regarded as beyond the pale and excluded from political debate, including free education and health care for all Americans. “I believe society means taking care of people from the day they’re born until the day they die,” Sheehan said. “It’s not making our elders work until they die. It’s not making mothers go back to work six months after their babies are born.”

Rather than affiliate herself with either of the Left parties on the California ballot — Peace and Freedom or the Green Party — Sheehan ran against Pelosi as an independent. The down side was that she had to collect a huge number of petition signatures just to get on the ballot, though the up side was that anyone — not just someone registered in an alternative party — could sign them. Sheehan said she got 50,000 votes against Pelosi — 17 percent, “more than anyone else against her, before or since” — and her campaign volunteers and supporters were Peace and Freedom and Green Party members, Libertarian Party members and “a lot of Republicans who said, ‘We don’t like you, but we don’t like her even worse.’”

Following her 2008 campaign, she decided to join the openly socialist Peace and Freedom Party because, as she explained, “My platform was very socialist and I didn’t know it.” She was particularly incensed “when the government gave $800 billion as a bailout to Wall Street. We thought they should have bailed out the people instead of Wall Street. People are still losing their homes, their retirement savings and their jobs. In a revolutionary social situation, the money would have been funneled to the homeowners so they could stay in their homes, the banks would have been nationalized and housing [would have been declared] a human right. We have between two and seven million homeless people in the U.S. and 18 million empty housing units.”

Though Sheehan didn’t — and usually still doesn’t — use the rhetoric of the Occupy movement, her views are clearly similar in their class analysis. What she calls the “robber class” Occupy calls “the 1 percent” — though she says it’s more like the 0.1 percent that have the real power in the U.S. She expressed these views in a book she published in 2009 called Myth America: The 20 Greatest Myths of the Robber Class and the Need for Revolution. In Ocean Beach, she summed up the book’s message: “It’s not about the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, or about your religious affiliation or sexual preference. The robber class uses these as wedge issues.”

Sheehan knew her uncompromising anti-war and anti-1 percent position would cost her the support of Democrats who had backed her peace campaign against President Bush, but she didn’t care. “I never supported Obama,” she said. “I was not surprised that he ordered his first drone bombing just three days after his inauguration. I sent out an e-mail saying, ‘It didn’t take him long to become a war criminal.’ Even if you voted for him, you can’t say, ‘Just give him a chance.’ Thirty-six people died that day in that first drone bombing, and he’s increased the drone program 500 percent over the Bush administration.”

Like many American socialists, Sheehan points to the experience of other countries to counter the charge that the programs she favors — free access to education and health care, public ownership of the banking and energy industries, an end to the “war on drugs” and the “tough on crime” programs that have put a greater percentage of Americans in prison than any other country in the world — are unaffordable and unworthy of consideration. She pointed out that in Sweden, a new mother gets two years’ paid leave from her job; in the U.S., at best she gets six months, unpaid.

“We believe we’re better than anyone else,” she said, taking on the whole doctrine of “American exceptionalism” by which we’re propagandized to believe that we’re the greatest country in the world, we have a God-given right to export our system worldwide, and we have nothing to learn from other nations. “I’ve just written a book called Revolution: A Love Story, about socialist revolutions in Latin America, especially Cuba and Venezuela,” she said, expressing her view that the U.S. can learn from other countries’ experiences as well as from its own past.

“I grew up in Los Angeles in 1975, when education was still good and the university was still free for residents,” Sheehan recalled. “My grown daughter graduated from UC Davis and got her masters’ at San Francisco State, and she owes $50,000 in student loans. When I was going to school, corporations paid 35 percent in taxes. Now they pay at most 13 percent. And what does the establishment say? ‘If we raise their taxes, they’ll leave.’ What I would say is, ‘Goodbye. You may go, but your company and all of your assets belong to the people of the state of California. We’ll put your company under the democratic control of its workers, and we’ll use your assets and your profits to help the people of California.’”

Sheehan, who’s considering running for the Peace and Freedom nomination for governor of California in 2014, was particularly scathing against another Democrat who, like Pelosi, she feels is a Right-winger with an undeserved reputation as a Leftist: current governor Jerry Brown. “We had a $26 billion budget deficit last year,” Sheehan said, “and I heard Jerry Brown say, ‘We really don’t want to have to do this, but we’re going to have to balance the budget on the backs of the people who are already poor and vulnerable.’ Well, that’s bullshit. How much more are they going to take away? They’re cutting mental health care, education, aid for mothers and food stamps, when we have one of the largest economies in the world. There’s no reason why every Californian shouldn’t have a right to health care, education and a home.”

According to Sheehan, one of the reasons her ideas haven’t caught on with the American people is the sheer size of the United States. “We can’t get a groundswell, a movement, going because we live so far apart from each other,” she said. “The United States is over 3,000 miles wide, so here we are on the best side, but the government is on the other side. So it’s really hard for us to get anything going. But if we can get something going in California, California can lead the way, and not just in human rights. We believe [full employment, free education and free health care] are human rights, not just privileges for the robber class or the 1 percent. We believe in full employment, a 30-hour work week for 40-hour pay — and good pay, not minimum wage.”

Sheehan also spoke about the history of the Peace and Freedom Party — it was founded in 1967 after Los Angeles police violently suppressed a demonstration against then-President Lyndon Johnson over the Viet Nam war — and defended the party’s Presidential nominee, comedienne Roseanne Barr. They met when Barr came to San Francisco in 2008 to support Sheehan’s campaign for Congress, and Sheehan said she ended up on the ticket because “Roseanne just called me and asked me to be on the ticket.” While Barr’s Presidential candidacy has been ridiculed by many — including members of the Green Party, who rejected her bid for their nomination before she won Peace and Freedom’s — Sheehan argued that Barr’s successful 1990’s TV show Roseanne expressed progressive values because it showed working-class people in a sympathetic, non-judgmental way that avoided the usual classist stereotypes of the U.S. mainstream media.

For Sheehan, the big issue of this year’s campaign is the domination of American politics by wealthy individuals and corporations. As she pointed out, corporate control of American politics didn’t begin with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision but over a century earlier — in 1886, when, dismissing an attempt by a California county to regulate the Southern Pacific Railroad, the Supreme Court first ruled that corporations were “persons” and therefore, as Sheehan put it, “had all the rights of real people and none of the responsibilities.” As one might expect from a person whose latest book is called Revolution: A Love Story, her dream is that ordinary people will awaken to the power of their numbers and get the corporate beasts off their backs.

“We outnumber them, and they know it,” Sheehan said. “That’s why they’ve been building up their armies, police and hired goons. We’re in the end days of empire, and they’re trying to prop it up. We can organize now to be able to thrive after the collapse, or we can be scared and get crushed. We need to work on building both politically and socially before the collapse of the empire.”

Though Sheehan admitted her movement will “probably not” be able to win power before the collapse, she’s working to get the Peace and Freedom ticket on the ballot in as many states as possible. They’re already qualified in the so-called “swing states” of Colorado and Florida, and are currently targeting Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Michigan, Louisiana, Hawai’i, Utah and Mississippi. By 2016 Sheehan wants to see “a unified socialist party” with a presidential ticket on the ballot in all 50 states.

For information on how to get involved in the Barr-Sheehan Presidential campaign, visit the official Web site at http://roseanneforpresident2012.org/ or e-mail admin@barrsheehan2012.com

Queer Democrats Make Defeating Anti-Labor Prop. 32 a Priority

Club Also Hears Presentations on History of Women’s Rights Struggle

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Brian Polejes

L to R: Carla Kirkwood, Dr. Sue Gonda

The predominantly Queer San Diego Democrats for Equality voted overwhelmingly at their August 23 meeting to make defeating Proposition 32, an attack on labor unions’ ability to raise money for political action, one of their priority races in the November 6 election. The club’s board had picked out four local races as the club’s top priorities — Bob Filner for Mayor of San Diego; Sherri Lightner for San Diego City Council District 1; Dave Roberts for San Diego County Board of Supervisors District 3; and Scott Peters for Congress against Republican incumbent Brian Bilbray — but the club added Proposition 32 after hearing a presentation by longtime member and union official Brian Polejes on just how devastating its passage would be not only to organized labor but all progressive causes, including Queer rights.

“It’s a game that’s been tried before by two of our not-so-favorite governors, Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Polejes explained. “It’s back, and now it’s been dressed up as ‘campaign finance reform.’ The proponents are calling it the ‘Stop Special Interests Now Initiative.’ We’re calling it the ‘Special Exemptions Act.’” According to Polejes, the initiative’s sponsors made it look even-handed by banning both corporations and labor unions from asking employees and members to fund political action committees (PAC’s) through automatic deductions from their paychecks — but corporate PAC’s get less than 1 percent of the money from automatic payroll deductions, while such payments raise over 95 percent of labor’s political funding.

What’s more, Polejes said, Proposition 32 is full of pro-corporate loopholes. “It exempts super-PAC’s, ‘independent expenditures’ and independent campaigns,” he explained. “It has key exemptions for Wall Street investment firms, hedge funds, real-estate developers, insurance companies and corporate-funded front groups. Meanwhile, teachers, nurses and firefighters would be effectively limited by this initiative. What that would mean to the Democratic party, women’s equality, the environmental community and the LGBT [Queer] community would not be pretty.”

In a column in the August 19 Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik listed the principal funders of Proposition 32: Hollywood mogul A. Jerrold Perenchio, the second-largest individual political donor in California in the last 10 years ($16.9 million, “mostly to Republican and conservative interests,” including $2 million to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads super-PAC); Silicon Valley billionaire Thomas Siebel (who gave $250,000 to American Crossroads and once called Sarah Palin “the embodiment of pure, unadulterated good”); Public Storage founder and CEO B. Wayne Hughes (who has given $3.5 million to American Crossroads and $2.3 million to Republicans in California, and zero to Democrats); and Charles Munger, Jr. (third-largest individual donor in California in the last 10 years: $14.1 million, mostly to Republicans).

“The backers of this are the same ones who helped Governors Wilson and Schwarzenegger: Wall Street executives, anti-union activists, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers’ Association and the Lincoln Club of Orange County, the group that helped get Citizens’ United [the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision that essentially ended all attempts to reduce the influence of big money in U.S. politics] through,” Polejes said. Among the opponents, he added, are the League of Women Voters, Common Cause and various newspapers, including the ordinarily conservative Orange County Register as well as the Los Angeles Times, Sacramento Bee and Long Beach Press-Register. The California Democratic Party is also opposed because, as Polejes said, “Without [funding from] labor unions, this state could go back to being a Republican state, as it was in presidential elections before 1992.” He also warned club members that so far the Yes on 32 stealth strategy is working — early polls show it leading 55 to 35 percent — and said it’s important to get the word out to voters that 32 is a pro-corporate wolf in “reform” sheep’s clothing.

Polejes reminded his audience that organized labor had been a major donor to the campaign against Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure that banned marriage equality in California. His employer, the Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU), put $2 million into the No on 8 campaign, and the California Teachers’ Association (CTA) gave $1 million to No on 8. Polejes didn’t have any trouble getting the club to endorse No on 32 — that took place as part of an omnibus motion in which the club adopted the California Democratic Party’s positions on virtually all the propositions on the November ballot — but the motion from a club member to make No on 32 a priority race proved unexpectedly controversial.

Craig Roberts, the club’s vice-president for political action, strongly opposed adding No on 32 to the priority list. He cited the warnings from club president Doug Case that fewer members are volunteering for the club’s endorsed campaigns than ever before and said the club would stretch itself too thin if it added another priority campaign. “We’ve never had more than four priority races in one election, and we have to be selective,” Roberts said. “Our efforts will do the most good in the [local] races.”

“This is not just a labor issue,” said Evan McLaughlin. If Proposition 32 passes, McLaughlin warned, anti-labor and anti-Queer U-T San Diego publisher Doug Manchester “will have special exemptions in every election, and your allies in organized labor will have nothing. There will be absolutely no money [available to labor] that can be construed as ‘political.’ The labor movement is the piggy bank of the progressive program, and California raises 25 percent of the labor movement’s political funding. Every group I work with — the Environmental Health Coalition, the ACLU, Equality Alliance — is putting No on 32 prominently on their campaign material.”

Allan Acevedo, the club’s mobilization chair, said he agreed with Roberts that No on 32 shouldn’t be designated a priority race. “A ‘priority’ doesn’t just mean it’s important,” Acevedo explained. “It means we’re going to work on it. This list is already a lot, and we need to get back to the grass roots. I think everything is important, but we need to set priorities.”

San Diego County Democratic Party chair and former club president Jess Durfee said that as a club board member, he had intended to make the motion to add No on 32 to the priority list during the board’s meeting but had let the opportunity slip by him. “It’s been said very eloquently that money for the progressive movement in California will dry up if Proposition 32 passes,” Durfee said. “None of these other races will matter if 32 passes. If nothing else, if we designate No on 32 as a priority our materials will say it’s important.” Eventually both the motion to add No on 32 as a priority race and the overall motion to designate it and the four local candidates passed overwhelmingly on voice votes.

Women and Queers: Linked Struggles

The club’s two speakers on women’s issues — scheduled in connection with August 26, Women’s Equality Day — both had strong academic as well as activist backgrounds. Dr. Sue Gonda teaches at both San Diego State University (SDSU) and Grossmont College and has published extensively on the history of women in the U.S., including the so-called “crime of seduction” for which women were prosecuted in early American history and the roles women have played in America’s wars. Carla Kirkwood co-founded the first women’s studies program in the U.S. at SDSU in 1970. She also worked in blue-collar jobs at Solar Turbines in San Diego and Inland Steel in Chicago, and was active in unions on both jobs. A member of the California Teachers’ Association since 1989, she is currently coordinator for international programs at Southwest College.

Dr. Gonda began her talk with a joke that “it’s really easy with people like Todd Akin around” to establish the link between anti-women attitudes and other forms of oppression. She also said that Akin, the Missouri Congressmember and U.S. Senate candidate who made headlines recently with his statement that women don’t have to worry about becoming pregnant from being raped because “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down,” was expressing a mainstream opinion … from the 17^th century. “Among the things they believed then was that if a woman didn’t have orgasm, she couldn’t get pregnant,” Dr. Gonda explained.

The history Dr. Gonda told was one all too familiar to long-term women’s equality activists and scholars. “Before 1848, women’s bodies belonged either to their fathers or to their husbands,” she said. “In 1848 New York passed the first Women’s Property Act that allowed women to earn money and own property on their own. By 1900 all U.S. states had those laws. In 1848, the first women’s convention took place in Seneca Falls, New York. Most of the attendees were abolitionists who looked at how they were being discriminated against in anti-slavery organizations.” She said that the organizers of the Seneca Falls convention expected about 50 people and got 300, and passed a wide variety of resolutions unanimously on issues ranging from property rights to children’s custody.

But the one issue that split the Seneca Falls convention was whether women should demand and receive the right to vote, Dr. Gonda said. Though women didn’t win the right to vote nationwide until 1920, a few states and territories enfranchised women before that — among them Wyoming and Utah — partly to attract more settlers and partly “because they thought women would be the conservative vote,” she explained. California gave women the right to vote in 1911, nine years before the 19^th Amendment was ratified and made women’s suffrage nationwide. (Dr. Gonda didn’t discuss the peculiar connection between women’s suffrage and Prohibition. Many of the pioneering feminists were also strong prohibitionists — largely in the hope that banning alcohol would stop domestic violence — and much of the funding to keep women from getting the vote came from beer and liquor companies.)

Another milestone year Dr. Gonda discussed was 1872, the first year a woman ran for the U.S. presidency and also the year feminist pioneer Susan B. Anthony was arrested for voting. She also mentioned a much less well-known feminist of the period, Victoria Woodhull, an outspoken opponent of marriage whose argument that marriage was essentially prostitution — that “in marriage women were chattel; it was essentially money for sex” — was echoed by radical feminists in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Dr. Gonda also discussed the ways feminists were caricatured in the popular media in the 1870’s and compared it to the drawings that circulated during Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008 of her riding a broomstick. (Actually Hillary Clinton had been caricatured as a witch by the Right-wing Weekly Standard magazine while Bill Clinton was President, well before she ran herself.)

Among less well-known feminist icons Dr. Gonda mentioned were African-American anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells; Latina activist Jovita Idar, whose family newspaper La Crónica (“The Chronicles”) attacked anti-Latino lynchings and other violations of Latinos’ civil rights; and women’s education pioneer Mary Emma Woolley, president of Mount Holyoke College from 1901 to 1937 who lived surprisingly openly with Jeannette Marks, head of Mount Holyoke’s English department and editor of Woolley’s papers after her death. She cited the partnership of Woolley and Marks as an example of what was then called a “Boston marriage,” two women (usually academics or independently wealthy people) living together in what a writer in the late 19^th century said was “by all appearances a true union.”

Dr. Gonda also mentioned Margaret Burbidge, an internationally known astrophysicist who for many years couldn’t get laboratory or observatory time unless a man co-signed the application with her and got credit for her research; Madge Bradley, the first female judge in San Diego County, who for years wasn’t permitted to attend meetings and luncheons with her male colleagues; and Rev. Dr. Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray, the first African-American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest, who said she enrolled in Harvard as a “race woman” and left as a feminist, and whom Dr. Gonda said “would today be described as Transgender.”

The conclusion of Dr. Gonda’s presentation was a bit depressing. She noted that the jobs most readily available to women in the U.S. economy today are the same ones as in 1910: elementary- and middle-school teaching, nursing, secretarial and domestic. “There’s still so much we have to do,” she said ruefully. “While so much has changed, and you’re in the middle of a struggle over Gay marriage, just remember there’s a reason to embrace women’s rights.”

Carla Kirkwood, who said she prefers the late 1960’s/early 1970’s term “women’s liberation” to “women’s studies” because “it’s about taking stands,” set herself the uneasy task of reconciling the often bitterly anti-marriage stand of the women’s movement in the 1970’s to its support of marriage equality for same-sex couples today. What changed, she said, is the definition of marriage itself; largely due to pressure from feminist activists, she argued, marriage between men and women has changed from a male-dominated institution to a more equal partnership. “We fought for independent property rights for women,” said Kirkwood, who recalled that when she applied for a loan in the 1950’s her husband had to co-sign the papers. Thanks to the work of feminist activists, Kirkwood argued, “marriage is [no longer] an institution based on gender inequality and subjugation.”

Not that the task has been easy — or that the progress couldn’t be reversed. Kirkwood sees the position of anti-woman politicians like Todd Akin and his allies on the radical Right as “the idea that my body is public property and it has to be managed by men. Some of the most fearsome regulations are about my womb” — and she added a joke that if government is going to regulate her womb, “it should be declared a state park and I shouldn’t have to pay taxes on it.”

Kirkwood talked about the standards men impose on women in general and their sexuality in particular, noting that despite legal reforms “it’s still very difficult to find a man responsible for raping his wife. In some analyses, we are by nature ‘tempting sexual creatures.’ It’s like the so-called ‘choice’ between the virgin and the slut.” She also analyzed homophobia as an extension of sexism, saying that since according to the patriarchy the worst thing you can be is a woman, the patriarchy comes down especially hard on men who “reject the role of masculinity” and sexually submit to other men. “The Gay community stretches the bonds of patriarchial culture and society,” she explained.

My Mother’s Jewish, My Father’s Irish, and I Think Steve Solomon Is Funny as Hell!

 by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

All right, Doctor. I’ve got a confession to make. Oh, that’s right, you’re not a priest, are you? Even though you sit all day and listen to other people talk about all the ways they’re screwing up their lives, right? Anyway, I’m really ashamed to admit it, but last year when comedian Steve Solomon came to town with his one-person play called My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish and I’m in Therapy!, I didn’t get to see it. No, I don’t have an excuse. It played for months at the Lyceum in Horton Plaza downtown, and it got extended several times, so I could have seen it. But I didn’t, and I’m ashamed of myself.

Why am I bringing this up, Doctor? Because I just got to see his sequel, My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish and I’m Still in Therapy!, and guess what? It’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever been to! All right, so Steve Solomon is a balding, dumpy-looking Jewish guy, and he seems to have channeled just about every Jewish comedian who ever lived, from Larry David to Woody Allen to Mel Brooks to Lenny Bruce to Henny Youngman to those guys who played in the Catskills, and probably some guy before that who had them rolling in the aisles, or whatever they had back then, in Abraham’s time. He also says his mom’s Italian, but the dialect voice he does for her doesn’t sound all that different from the one he does for his Jewish father. It’s just higher-pitched and whinier.

But none of that matters, because, Doctor, Steve Solomon is funny. His new show takes place at a retirement home in Florida where he’s waiting for his family to arrive so he can throw a surprise birthday party for his dad. He’s even got a table full of gifts in packages, along with some bits of something that looks like food, and he’s got a banner on the wall above the table that says, “HAPPY BIRTDAY, LOUIE!” That’s “birtday,” without the “h.” Only he decides while he’s waiting to make a call on his cell phone to see if he can settle a $10,000 mistake on his bill. Yeah, you had that happen too, Doctor?

Well, the moment he makes the call he has to go through voicemail hell. Not only is his call answered with one of those Goddamned recordings, it’s in Spanish, and he has to figure out how to go through all those stupid menus. Remember when a menu was a list of foods you could eat at a restaurant? Yeah, me too. And when he finally punches the button to get connected to someone who speaks English, the person who answers is a guy from India who sounds like the casting director of Slumdog Millionaire rejected him because nobody in the U.S. or England could possibly understand him.

It’s like I’ve always said: for all too many people, and especially for all too many corporations, the “communications revolution” has been all about finding more and more creative ways not to communicate. I remember reading an obituary for the guy who invented voicemail and wishing there’s a hell so he can be in the nastiest, worst possible part of it — what Dante called the “ninth circle” — so he can suffer for all eternity the tortures of the damned he’s made us suffer all these years. Doctor? You can wake up now. I’m done with my tirade.

But I was talking about Steve Solomon, wasn’t I? Anyway, his show — no, don’t worry, it doesn’t have any nasty jokes about therapy — it’s all about his crazy family, including his sister, whom he calls “The Smoker” because she’s been smoking so long she can barely get three words out without falling into these wracking coughs. Yeah, just like my Jewish mom before she finally gave it up in her 80’s. And he got married and then he and his wife divorced when he was in his 50’s, so he can do jokes about his marriage and about suddenly being thrown back into the dating world when he’s middle-aged.

What’s really remarkable about Steve Solomon is he can tell the raunchiest jokes and do some really sick material and still have you laughing. The tale of how his first child got born by C-section is grotesque, but it’s also side-splitting. He even does fart jokes, and oh, how I hate fart jokes — and his fart jokes are funny! They’re the funniest fart jokes I’ve heard since I saw Blazing Saddles! And he talks about people “doing it” — young people, old people, people next to him on a ship whom he can hear through paper-thin walls, with this woman’s voice calling out “Marvin!” and he figures the guy’s last name is “Moore” because she keeps going, “Marvin! Moore! Marvin! Moore!” Yeah, that show with the long and awkward title — oh, yeah, My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish and I’m Still in Therapy! — it’s hilarious!

Oh, Doctor, you want to know how to go see it? It’s playing through Sunday, September 9 at the Lyceum Space — that’s not the Stage, that’s the Space, you know, that crazy theatre down there where the seats aren’t even bolted to the floor. No, I’m not kidding. The performances are Wednesdays at 2 and 7 p.m., Thursdays and Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. The tickets are $45 to $55 — yeah, I know that’s a bit steep, but it’s worth it — and you can get them at the Lyceum Theatre box office at (619) 544-1000 or online at www.lyceumevents.org. And if you’ve got 12 or more people crazy enough to go to this show with you, you can call 1-(888) 264-1788 and ask for a group discount. Believe me, Doctor, you’ll want to see this show!

Mark Gabrish Conlan really does have an Irish father and a Jewish mother, and “My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish and I’m Still in Therapy!” reminded him a lot of his mom and her Jewish relatives.

CHRIS HASSETT:

Queer Activist, Teacher Tells His Stories in Music

interview by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Chris Hassett is one of those people whom I’ve known so long I can’t say for certain just when, where or how we met. I’ve long identified him with the predominantly Queer San Diego Democratic Club (now known as San Diego Democrats for Equality) but he’s been active in San Diego’s Queer community almost as long as I have. His career was teaching but he’s long pursued music as an avocation and has got good enough to play live and build a local following. He’s basically a folk singer but his music also shades off into pop, rock and jazz, and with other local folksingers he started the “Friends and Lovers” concerts in 1987 to raise money for local AIDS service organizations. Hassett and several of his friends gave a concert July 20 on the eve of Pride to celebrate the 25^th anniversary of “Friends and Lovers” and highlight the continuing need to help people with or at risk for AIDS.

Hassett’s latest CD, This I Promise You, came out last May. It’s his first studio recording of original songs (his previous releases were a 2009 live album called Bring Love Home and a CD of holiday standards released in late 2011). Zenger’s interviewed Hassett in late June and talked about his family, his musical roots, and the wide and varied inspirations for his songs. We also shared opinions of other musicians, ranging from 1920’s singer-songwriter Willard Robison to Lady Gaga.

Zenger’s: I’d like some background on you, your life, your history, and how you got interested in music.

Chris Hassett: I was an unlikely candidate to become a singer. I came out of an Air Force family, had four brothers. Sports were a big part of our life. But my dad, even though he was a career soldier, was very artistic, very musical, and he sang around the house all the time. So I think all of us boys developed a love for music, from classical to Broadway to pop to rock to country, throughout our formative years.

I guess it took the deepest with me. I was the first one to love the Beatles, the first one to love Elvis, the first one to love the Mamas and the Papas, the first one to love Lady Gaga. I never did music as part of my studies, but from college on I always got into pick-up groups and sang, and became known as the guy who would sing; if you knew how to play a guitar, I’d join in. When I was having a career in teaching, coaching and a variety of other things, singing was always something I did on the side, and it was what gave me the most pleasure.

Coming to San Diego 30 years ago, I had a chance to collaborate with some very talented musicians. I started writing songs, putting on benefit concerts, singing at community events. My reputation as a community-based singer, a local star, grew. And that’s fine with me. I love entertaining. I love sharing my music with other people. I love interpreting other people’s music, and I am especially enjoying writing more of my own music now, and performing.

Zenger’s: Also I’d like to get your story as a Gay man.

Hassett: I’m the only Gay man in my family of five boys. I’m lucky enough that, even though coming out was a wrenching experience in my late 20’s and early 30’s, I’m very lucky that, even though I certainly had some apprehension, I never had anything but full support from my family. Maybe it’s the comfort I got from having four best friends, my brothers, who I always knew would fiercely defend me against any and all criticisms or bullying. And they often did. I know that made it far easier for me than for so many of my friends and other people, whose lives really take a blow when they come out to family and friends.

Coming to San Diego was part of my coming out. I chose to go back to school after teaching and coaching, and immediately started showing up at Gay bars and dating men whom I found attractive and interesting. I joined as many Gay clubs as I could identify, everything from running to politics to swimming to religion. I got very involved in the community and found it a wonderful way to participate in a community unlike any community I’d known before, where I felt I could bring my full self to the table and engage people on every level: intellectual, physical, sexual, emotional and everything else. So that was a new experience for me, and a gratifying experience, and I felt that’s when I really came of age, even though I was in my late 20’s and early 30’s.

Zenger’s: I noticed one of the songs on your album, “Never Once,” was, as you put in your liner notes, about your “troubled” relationships.

Hassett: Yes, it’s funny. I wrote a whole suite of songs in one fell swoop. I couldn’t get them through the guitar and onto the paper quick enough. But what I realized after I created them, “Never Once” being the kingpin of those songs, is that they were a catharsis of all the kinds of emotional growing and ups and downs I’d experienced decades ago. I was recalling difficult relationships and emotional funks, and all those other aspects of relationships that I think had obviously still resided in me, and they became grist for this musical mill. I love every one of those songs.

I love them because, even though they might talk about a troubled relationship, I know how much I’ve grown from those relationships and from being able to express them. “Never Once” is a very fun song for me to sing, because it can be a little tongue-in-cheek but it also has a lot of anger. It has a lot of movement, a lot of rhythm, and it’s got this just stinging guitar solo that I pleaded with my friend John Katchur to provide, that succeeded well beyond anything I was imagining in my head.

I was never a great guitarist, but I certainly love playing my guitar when I’m writing music. And that’s where I kind of get the rhythm and the feel, and the rest of the arrangement, in my head.

Zenger’s: I understand this is actually your third CD.

Hassett: It is. It’s my third CD after many decades of singing, performing, recording concert tapes and all that kind of stuff. But it wasn’t until I was turning 60 that I got serious about doing a recording project where I laid down my music, and also interpretations of Broadway show tunes, ballads, jazz. I really love it all. In the last 30 months I’ve put out three CD’s. Obviously there was just a ton of stuff that was waiting to burst forth, and I’m lucky to work with a number of talented, helpful, collaborative people who help me bring these CD projects to life.

I did a first CD [Bring Love Home], which was a live concert with a lot of my favorite songs and original songs. I did a second CD of Christmas music [December], which even though I grew up in a very liberal religious household, I’ve always been a nut for Christmas music. And then a third CD [This I Promise You], which I just came out with, which is originals, love songs, newer songs for me, although some of them date back a few years. But I’m very proud of it. I feel it’s the best work to date. And I’ve got more CD’s coming!

Zenger’s: One thing I noticed about your songs is that none of them are explicitly Gay. You take care to avoid any specific pronouns. I found it amusing that the song “Two Hearts,” for example, which you explain in the liner notes was about a Lesbian couple, but hearing a guy singing, “All my life/You’re my wife,” a lot of people are just going to think, “Oh, he’s a straight guy singing about his wife.”

Hassett: [Laughs.] Well, it’s not that I did these things because I’m embarrassed about being a Gay man. I think that anyone who’s going to take more than a few minutes to get interested in my music or my life is going to come face to face with the fact that I’m Gay, I’m proud, I’m out. I live my life, I don’t shy away from confrontation or controversy. I’ve never hid behind silence. You can take me off the soapbox any time you want, but the music speaks for itself.

I can also tell you that when I do concerts, I never try to attract just a Gay audience. In fact, it’s much more of a success if I have a very mixed audience: old, young, Gay, straight, skeptical, believers. That’s what I think community is all about: willing to try to bridge differences with music, not just try to solidify commonality. That’s what community is all about in my mind, and I think that shows up in my politics, in my music, in my writing.

In the book I wrote with my friend Tom on Gay/straight dialogue, we confronted the male issues head-on: Gay, straight, old, young, relationships, love odysseys, sexual expression. So it’s funny. I think I might have had the same observation you did when I was coming up with some of the songs and I put them all together and I said, “Boy, there’s nothing really raunchy here; nothing really fun; nothing really ostensibly Gay” — unless you look for it.

For instance, in “Roscoe’s Lullaby,” I’m singing my dog to sleep and I say, “Your dads are sleepy too.” Well, you can only have two dads, you know, if they’re Gay partners with a dog as their “child.” And that’s the case with my life. Or in “I Wanna Feel the Heat,” the sequel to my biggest song, “El Centro,” about two Gay cowboys who are in a dance troupe. They’re not in a rodeo; they’re in a dance troupe that’s touring the country, and it starts out, “Eighteen months on the road with Earl, and I’m feeling every mile. My two-step’s lame, my boots won’t slide, and I think I’ve lost my smile.”

I have fun singing it. It gets into very fun storytelling that would only have special meaning for the Gay audience, referring to “drag queen Miss Pearl” who dresses in chiffon and high heels, and cowboys trying to come between me and my man, that kind of stuff. So it’s in there.

I do want to call attention to “Two Hearts,” which is a song I’m extremely proud of. One of the ministers of my church was getting married, and she asked me if I’d be willing to sing at their ceremony. I said, “Of course,” and even though I only had a few weeks I said, “Boy, I want to do more than that. I want to write a song. These ceremonies are so special, these marriages are so emblematic of our time, that I’ve got it in me to write a love song for these two women who were joining their lives together.”

“Two Hearts” emerged from that, and I’m very proud of it. I actually wrote it so they could sing it to each other, and that’s why there’s two choruses that say, “You’re my wife,” and they can say it to each other. They can sing it to each other.

Zenger’s: Were you hoping when you wrote the title track, “This I Promise You,” that it would become a traditional song for same-sex weddings?

Hassett: No, but I would be delighted if that happened. “This I Promise You” is a track that was inspired by a book that a friend of mine wrote. He had challenged me to start thinking about writing some music about what might end up being a movie based on his book. I was especially taken by the relationship between two men in the book, one of them a career prostitute, male prostitute, and the other one, the Gay closeted son of a powerful man in the community.

Somehow they find each other, and they never expected to fall in love or have anything more tender than just a quick night together. But in fact they develop great feelings for each other, and yearn to have a life of dignity and openness and passion and love with each other. I wrote it for that, but I think it’s about the yearning that anyone has to find a partnership, that we do want to make the most ultimate promise we possibly can, because our love is that strong. We feel that deeply about this other person. It’s my favorite song, because I know how deep I reached to bring it out. But if you ask me, every song is my favorite, so — !

Zenger’s: I think I remember one musician who was asked, “What’s your favorite song?,” and he said, “The one I just finished.”

Hassett: That’s about right! And sometimes it’s the one I just listened to! I have favorite songs that are written by friends of mine, and I fall in love — I was just joking with my friend Peggy Watson some time ago, because we used to do concerts together. And I said, “Oh, my God, Peggy, we just have the heart of teenage girls. I fall in love with every song I hear, and I immediately bring it into my life until the next one bumps it out. And then I move with that one.” It’s like my life pulses forward song by song.

Zenger’s: This morning I was listening to your CD, and then I listened to a private-label reissue I got of the 1920’s singer-songwriter Willard Robison. He was from a family of ministers, and though he didn’t become a minister himself, he tapped a lot of religious imagery in his songs. And this was in the 1920’s, at a time when you had all these people writing these articles about “jazz, the music of the devil,” they way they would write later about “rock, the music of the devil.” Some of Robison’s songs have titles like “The Devil Is Afraid of Music” and “There’s Religion in Rhythm” that seem to be his consciously writing answers to all these attacks, saying, “No, this is not sinful. This is holy. This is beautiful. I’m in tune with God when I write these songs.”

Hassett: I’m curious about his work and I actually look forward to looking that up, Wikipedia, hearing some tracks. But like I said, I had to reach pretty deep to come up with “This I Promise You.” It might come off as a simple little love song, but the extent to which you are willing to reach deep is really what creates a good song. And it’s also what makes music forceful in your life as a songwriter. I don’t want to just be cranking out little pop songs with a catchy rhythm. I love some songs that really don’t go more than surface deep, but that’s not what I want to do as an artist.

Zenger’s: It’s one of those things that I noticed when I heard Lady Gaga. As someone who doesn’t generally like that kind of music, I was impressed that she knows how to write a song. They have beginnings, middles and endings. She’s not just barking a few lyrics out over a dance groove and calling it a song.

Hassett: I actually am a fan of Lady Gaga. She’s a phenomenon, and who knows what combinations of tricks and happenstance and look and image and style makes those kinds of things happen, because there’s a tremendous population of people who all, whether they admit it or not, would like to have the level of fame and fortune that Lady Gaga has. But she’s a remarkable talent, and I think she’s representative of a lot of tremendous energy, good energy, that’s going into songwriting and music these days. I would never want to discount newer music just by pointing to the obvious examples that might be a little too ridiculous, frivolous, junky or formulaic. There’s always that. I listen for the good stuff. I enjoy it.

Zenger’s: In fact, she’s on the opening track of the Tony Bennett Duets II album, doing “The Lady Is a Tramp.” My first thought was, “Given that her own music is in such strict dance tempi, how is she going to loosen up enough to sing a song like ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’?” And she did it beautifully.

Hassett: She’s far more than a so-called “dance diva.” You can’t put a quick boundary around her and say that’s all she is. She’s got far more dimension than that. I’m not surprised at all. In fact, it’s her more “unplugged” versions of her hits that I find more interesting musically. So I’m not surprised that she could hold her own with Tony Bennett.

Zenger’s: It occurred to me when Donna Summer died that I always loved the slow introductions of her songs, where she could sing out of tempo, she could phrase, she could show what a beautiful voice she had. And then the drum machines kicked in, the tempo sped up and I tended to lose interest.

Hassett: Well, I like it! I like the expression that comes from singers. I’ll take a ballad and some free tempo and some phrasing over just some throbbing beat anyday. Although I’m a big fan of ABBA and the Pointer Sisters, and that dates back.

Zenger’s: I remember when I was watching one of these “Music Mania” shows, where there were these young bands trying to appeal to the young audience, and in my comments on one of them I said, “They sound like ABBA, and I mean that as a compliment.”

Hassett: [Laughs.] It would be.

Zenger’s: It was like, “How nice to have dance music that actually invites you to dance, instead of making you feel like you’re being ordered to.”

Hassett: [Laughs.] That’s a nice distinction! I think you’re right. It’s got that sound where the expectation is set, “Oh, my God, I have to get up and dance to this boing-boing music.”

Zenger’s: I really liked the song “Each Day of the Week.” When I heard that I thought, “Wow, this is a very jazzy song.” I could see you doing that with a Dixieland band, actually.

Hassett: It could be done. There are a number of genres it would fit in to. I wrote it with the idea of the songs that I grew up loving when I first — just in my early, early adolescent years — realized some of the language of songwriting. And I feel like I rediscovered some of that language when I was writing it. I wanted to write it in a kind of formulaic way that would tell a story, which would have a kind of a gimmick to it, but I knew that I was coming up with something strong enough musically to do a three-part harmony, and have some interesting chord changes and kind of a nice groove to it.

I’m really pleased that you liked it. I have in mind to try to do it in concert with two other male singers, and we would dress up in plaid jackets and look like the Crew Cuts or the Coasters, or one of those “Sh-Boom” groups.

Zenger’s: On the record, are all the voices yours?

Hassett: Yes. That’s the case on all of the songs that have some double-tracking. There’s one song on there that actually has about seven tracks. It’s “We Are the Village,” which is probably the biggest anthem-type song supporting the idea of embracing a global village and the human family and, again, reaching across borders.

Zenger’s: In your liner notes on that one you mention two people that it’s dedicated to, Bill and Nancy Bamberger. I was wondering who they were, and if they actually did live and work in Third World villages.

Hassett: I’ve known Bill and Nancy the entire time I’ve been in San Diego. In their retirement they said, “Hey, life’s not over. We’re going to start a fund to build schools in poor Cambodian villages.” In a few short years they’ve managed to do that. They started the Cambodian Village Fund. They’ve just had a ceremony where they were honored for the brand-new classroom building in a small village in Cambodia. And they’re still going strong. I was so taken by that.

They asked me to do a benefit concert for them, and I was pleased to do that. We’ve done it for a couple of years now, and we’ve raised some money. They’ve had a couple of other fundraising activities, and I am so impressed with what they’ve managed to do with their lives, and just how generous they are. It inspired me. It’s really central to how I want to live my life, in service to good causes, to people who need the help.

Zenger’s: You’ve briefly touched on your involvement with the Unitarian-Universalist Church. I wanted to just ask you what you do for them.

Hassett: I was raised Unitarian, even though my mom came out of a Baptist background and my dad was Christian Scientist. When they got married and the war was over, and they were raising a young family, my mom went on a search to find a faith that she would feel comfortable raising a family in. She took that on, and at some point I think she decided if Unitarianism was good enough for Adlai Stevenson, it’s good enough for the Hassetts.

So we became a member of the church in Orlando, Florida, and every time we moved to another air base they either started or became integral to the fellowship or the church that we were closest to. When I came down to San Diego to go back to school and realized there was a big, beautiful church here, the First Unitarian-Universalist Church of San Diego, I became involved, took part in a lot of committees, was on the board for a while. I’ve always been a featured soloist there but I’ve never been on staff. But I’ve certainly been a prominent member of the community there. And I enjoy my affiliation with that church tremendously. I have tremendous respect for the leadership, the congregation, the social justice programs that they support, and the benefit concerts we’ve done there go to support some of those social-justice programs.

Zenger’s: Any anecdote behind the song “Not a Game to Win”?

Hassett: Sure. “Not a Game to Win” was kind of a reaction to “Each Day of the Week,” the song we talked about a little earlier, which is almost this fairy tale: you meet the person of your dreams on a Monday and by the time Sunday rolls around, or a Sunday rolls around, you’re getting married and launching the rest of your life in an environment of just extreme happiness and bliss.

Well, my first love was not that experience at all. It was in fact not a game to win. I tell the story — although there might be some pronouns missing — of my straight roommate, whom I fell in love with. I had not really come out to myself, much less to the world. And I just found it a very confusing thing that I should yearn to partner with this person in my life who really had no interest, and yet it was just gut-wrenching and difficult to understand.

It’s an uptempo song, again with a great guitar solo woven in there to kind of reflect some of the emotions that I was feeling. You come out the other side, and many years later you find that you are able to put together a life that makes a little more sense, and choose partners that can be more available to you and accept love and give it back, and friends and family, and have comfort in your life. But for me, first love was not a game to win. It’s just something I had to get through. That first man-crush.

Zenger’s: I once said that straight guys who are just entering puberty and looking for dates have to worry about being rejected. Gay guys have to worry about being rejected and being beaten up.

Hassett: Exactly. I didn’t choose that poorly, even though it took many years before it finally came to a head, where we just had to sort things out and move on in our separate directions. It never came to that, even though I put up with a little bit of roughness and some bullying during my school years, I never had to be subjected to that as an adult, or as a Gay man trying to figure out what the hell was going on. And I was probably an easy target.

Zenger’s: Well, maybe not with four highly supportive straight brothers from an Air Force family.

Hassett: Yeah, as long as they were around, I was safe! They’re still my best friend. They’re great guys, just great guys.

Zenger’s: I noticed the song, “I Cried for You,” where you said it was inspired by Patsy Cline. I wrote in my notes, “I wish she were still around to sing it.”

Hassett: [Laughs.] I actually imagine a female voice behind that song, but it was fun for me to sing. Patsy Cline had a huge impact on me growing up. The first time I heard that clarity and that just absolute accuracy and expressiveness at the same time. had it all. What a gift. And it was so expressive that I just knew that that’s what I wanted to do as a singer and songwriter down the road. Decades later that woman is still inspiring people, and always will. That’s the amazing thing about music in this recorded age.

Zenger’s: As you look ahead, what do you think you’re going to do in the future? You said you had more material, more recordings, more local stuff.

Hassett: I’m curious to see how it rolls out. I’ve got about four projects I’m balancing in my heart right now, and I’m just going to have to pick one and run with it. But, regardless of which recording project I do, I am taking time to create some new songs. So when it’s time to do another album of originals, I’ll have the material for it.

I love doing the American songbook, and I’m thinking of doing a series of concerts or recordings around that. Of course that would include the giants: Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and others. But maybe some newer composers as well, like Stephen SondheimI think I have my own unique “take” on interpreting some of those songs. It’s fun for me. It’s challenging for me. It’s a wonderful way to interact with other musicians to interpret music, especially music that has the power of already being in the heads and hearts of the American public, and certainly anyone who would be coming to our concerts or buying our CD’s or downloading our songs. So there’s another CD.

I’m also pulling together a more theatrical event, where the songs that I’ve written create a musical narrative for my life, or it’s woven together with a narrative and it contributes to that narrative. I think it would be a nice way to combine my love for storytelling, my love for music, and my love for performing. That’s something I’d actually like to go on the road doing, as a one-man show. I can’t talk too much about it! There are a lot of directions I could go, and I’m still busy doing some free-lance marketing, and part-time work here and there, and being a family man.

Zenger’s: Yes, as you said on the last song of your album, you have a husband and a dog to come home to.

Hassett: [Laughs.] That’s right! Which I’m very happy about.

Chris Hassett’s CD’s, including This I Promise You, are available from his Web site, http://www.chrishassett.com/

Chris’s friends Bill and Nancy Bamberger can be reached on the Web at http://travelswithbillandnancy.com/. The Cambodian Village Fund is accessible online at http://cambodianvillagefund.org/index.html

The CD of Willard Robison’s pioneering recordings of his own songs in the 1920’s is available on the Web at http://www.squidoo.com/SUPERBATONE. Additional Robison recordings, including his performances of songs by other writers, can be downloaded free at http://www.archive.org

Letter to the Community: Real Queer Leaders Aren’t Hypocrites

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • Noncommercial reposting and reproduction encouraged, otherwise all rights reserved

On July 26, Johnathan Hale, publisher of San Diego Gay & Lesbian News, Pic magazine and various other Queer-themed publications in San Diego, released a “Letter to the Community” vigorously defending his partner, San Diego City Councilmember and mayoral candidate Carl DeMaio, against the people who booed them in this year’s San Diego Pride Parade July 21. It’s a remarkable document that expresses the peculiar tunnel vision of both Mr. and Mrs. DeMaio and accuses the organizers and participants in the “Turn Your Back on DeMaio” campaign of violating the spirit of Pride and serving the interests of labor unions over those of the Queer community.

“First, let us recall how Pride came to be,” Hale writes. “The LGBT [Queer] community was tired of living closeted lives and we developed Pride events to show that we were, indeed, proud of who we are.” That’s true as far as it goes, but it ignores the centuries of oppression directed against Queer people at all levels of society, and the peculiar heady combination of political radicalism and sexual freedom of the late 1960’s that gave birth to the Queer movement and to Pride as its principal expressive event.

The late 1960’s were a time of inspiring struggles and intense frustrations. African-Americans had started a mass movement to demand that the promise of equality made to them in the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution be honored after nearly a century of continued oppression. Their example inspired other communities of color, women and, eventually, Queer people to rise up as well. In addition, the U.S. got involved in an endless and pointless war in Viet Nam, and millions of Americans of all ages, races, genders and orientations joined together in the streets to stop the senseless waste of young lives and social resources in that war.

The myth that the entire Queer movement was started by a riot of drag queens and Transgender people at the Stonewall Inn in New York City in June 1969 has obscured the fact that Queer organizing occurred in the U.S. at least two decades before that. What’s more, most of the people who started the Queer movement were members of the political Left, from Harry Hay and the other ex-Communists who founded the Mattachine Society in 1950 to closeted Queer anti-war activists like Leo Laurence in San Francisco and Morris Kight in Los Angeles, who came out to join the new Queer movement. Though the Queer movement in general has moved away from its radical-Left origins and become more mainstream over time, most politically active Queers are at least liberal and associate themselves with the Democratic Party and a pro-civil rights, pro-labor, pro-social welfare agenda that favors the 99 percent over the 1 percent.

Carl DeMaio has chosen a different path. A Republican by voter registration and a Libertarian at heart, he has articulated a “roadmap to recovery” for San Diego that focuses on freezing city workers’ salaries, eliminating their pensions and outsourcing their jobs so that instead of the city’s work being done by unionized workers making middle-class wages, it will be done by private contractors hiring people at minimum wage. (I know this is Carl DeMaio’s economic plan because I’ve heard him speak about it.) He prides himself on his aggressive opposition to any new taxes, thereby keeping alive the mass delusion of San Diego’s voters that they can have a city with world-class services while paying the taxes of a dirt-road village. His whole political tendency is one that will increase economic inequality and keep the local, state and national economy stuck in what’s been called a “crisis of overproduction,” in which employers have done such a good job driving down wages that they stop investing because no one has the money to buy what they produce.

But with the tunnel vision that afflicts the DeMaio household, the only reason Hale can think of why people would boo him and his partner in the Pride Parade is that they were “putting their allegiance to labor union politics above what is right for the LGBT community and our efforts to achieve full equality.” What neither DeMaio nor Hale want San Diego’s Queer community to know is that DeMaio’s own campaign has shown an appalling willingness to put his own short-term political gain above what is right for the Queer community and our efforts to achieve full equality. It’s DeMaio’s hypocrisy and his willingness to suck up to the homophobes in the Republican Party to advance his campaign for mayor, not “labor union politics,” that is the reason he was booed in the Pride Parade and he has so little political support in the Queer community.

Let’s look at the record. Carl DeMaio won the endorsement of the San Diego County Republican Central Committee largely by pledging to abandon current San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders’ public support of the Queer community in general and marriage equality in particular. He assured them that he doesn’t think it’s the job of the mayor of San Diego to be involved in “social issues” — thereby setting their stone-cold homophobic hearts at ease that just because he’s a Gay man he won’t be using the mayoralty as a bully pulpit for Queer rights the way Sanders has done. What’s more, he attacked primary opponent Nathan Fletcher for voting for SB 48, the bill that would require California public schools to teach about the contributions of Queer people to American and Californian history — ironic in someone who’s promoting his mayoral candidacy as an epoch-making first for the Queer community.

And it’s even more ironic that Johnathan Hale should proclaim that Pride started because we were “tired of living closeted lives” when his own partner pushed him into the closet for political advantage. In order to get the endorsement of the San Diego Union-Tribune — whose publisher is the notorious homophobe Doug Manchester, who put up much of the seed capital that got the anti-marriage Proposition 8 on the ballot in the first place — Carl DeMaio represented to the U-T’s editorial board that he was “single.” If my husband were running for elective office, I know that he would want me at his side and he would acknowledge me publicly. He wouldn’t shove me back in the closet just to pick up a major endorsement.

What’s really unfortunate about Carl DeMaio’s hypocrisy and opportunism — his willingness to represent himself (or let his partner represent him) as part of “the LGBT community and our efforts to achieve full equality” when so many of his supporters are out and proud homophobes — is that DeMaio was uniquely positioned to make the case that just because you’re an economic and fiscal conservative, you don’t necessarily have to be against Queer equality as well. He could have taken the path of Mayor Sanders, who courageously spoke out for marriage equality and testified in the trial of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, aimed at declaring Proposition 8 unconstitutional.

He could have taken the path of attorney Ted Olson, a thoroughgoing conservative who represented George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore, served as Bush’s solicitor general (his administration’s lawyer before the Supreme Court) — and took up the challenge of suing the state to have Proposition 8 thrown out as the assault on equal protection and civil liberties it is. Or he could have taken the path of his primary opponent Bonnie Dumanis, who didn’t “disappear” her partner for campaign purposes. She legally married her during the 4 ½-month “window” between the California Supreme Court’s pro-marriage decision and the passage of Proposition 8, and called her out from the audience at the Center’s mayoral candidates’ forum to make clear her pride in her wife and their relationship.

Instead, Carl DeMaio has sucked up to the rankest homophobes in the Republican Party and has turned his back on the Queer community to do so. If he wins the mayoral election, it will be in spite of his being a Gay man. It will be because he will have persuaded enough of the voters who hate us that they don’t have to worry about him actually doing anything to help San Diego’s Queer community just because he’s at least behaviorally a member of it. There are plenty of other reasons to vote against Carl DeMaio besides his blaming city employees and their unions for all of San Diego’s economic woes, and the main one that got him booed at the Pride Parade was his willingness and, indeed, eagerness to sacrifice the rights of the Queer community to appease the Queer-haters he’s counting on to support, endorse and finance his campaign.

Johnathan Hale’s letter, to which this article is a response, can be read online at http://sdgln.com/commentary/2012/07/26/letter-community-real-lgbt-leaders-don-t-put-politics-above-pride-0

Queer Democrats Hear “Paradise Plundered” Author

City Residents Want Government Services but Don’t Want to Pay for Them

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

San Diego’s residents want their city government to provide a wide array of services — but they don’t want to pay the taxes needed to finance them. That’s the bottom line Vladimir Kogan, co-author of Paradise Plundered, brought to the predominantly Queer San Diego Democrats for Equality at their regular meeting July 26. Kogan, who recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) and is leaving town to take a teaching job at Ohio State University, and co-authors Steven P. Erie of UCSD and Scott A. MacKenzie of UC Davis, published Paradise Plundered last year. The book tells a story of a city governed by a tightly-knit downtown elite that has resisted all efforts at genuine reform, and in his talk Kogan focused on the city’s 20-years-in-the-making pension crisis and how the city’s elites have managed to preserve their power by scapegoating city workers and their unions for San Diego’s financial problems.

“We have been cutting hours at recreation centers, and yet we’re talking about building a new football stadium,” Kogan said. “We’ve been cutting hours at branch libraries and yet we’re building a new $200 million downtown library. We don’t have money to maintain Balboa Park, but we’re building a Convention Center expansion.” Those seemingly contradictory policies, said Kogan, are evidence that San Diego doesn’t have one city government, but two: “a big government that provides benefits for a handful of people, and small government for everyone else.” Kogan said that the explanations for San Diego’s fiscal crises from both the Right and Left — City Councilmember Carl DeMaio’s blaming them on “greedy union workers and labor bosses” and former City Councilmember Donna Frye and former City Attorney Mike Aguirre attributing them to “corrupt or stupid public officials” — are both overly simplistic.

Instead, Kogan and his co-authors attribute San Diego’s fiscal dysfunction to three much broader and more enduring traits. First, Kogan said, is “political culture at the mass level.” While San Diegans are relatively liberal culturally, much like people in the state’s other major coastal cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco, “fiscally we have a very conservative electorate,” Kogan said. “In the last 20 years we have not passed any tax increases and have approved only one bond measure.” Second is the fact that San Diego is what Kogan calls “a quintessential branch-plant town.” While many major corporations have offices in the city, only a few are headquartered here — so many businesspeople don’t take an interest in civic affairs because they’re hoping to be promoted and move somewhere else. Third is the city’s decision to base its economy largely on tourism instead of manufacturing, which means the elites “only invest in infrastructure for people coming in from out of town.”

Kogan also identified two complicating factors in San Diego’s politics: California’s tradition of direct democracy — particularly the initiative process, which allows both grass-roots voter organizations and well-heeled special interests to bypass elected officials and make laws themselves — and the city’s shift to district-only City Council elections in the 1980’s. He blamed the “gridlock” that has afflicted San Diego’s politics largely on initiatives and the uneasy combination of district-elected Councilmembers and a citywide-elected Mayor. “With these constraints, it doesn’t matter so much who the officials are,” Kogan said.

San Diego’s fiscal problems, like the rest of California’s, really began in June 1978, when the state’s voters approved Proposition 13, Kogan said. Sold to voters as a way to keep property taxes from rising so they weren’t forced out of their homes due to paper increases in the homes’ value, Proposition 13 also made it much more difficult to raise taxes in California. It required voter approval for new local taxes and said that tax increases aimed at a specific purpose — say, police, fire or other public-safety programs — needed a two-thirds vote. It also transferred property-tax revenue from cities, counties and other local agencies to the state, which worked out a formula for distributing them to local governments based on what they had been spending in the past. This discriminated against San Diego, Kogan explained, because its budget was already so low relative to its population that “when we had to make cuts, they were especially painful because we had very little fat.”

When Proposition 13 passed, Pete Wilson was Mayor of San Diego, and one of the first things he did in response was to persuade city employees to end their participation in Social Security and Medicare, Kogan said. “In order to make the deal sweeter, he said the city would give [its employees] free health care for life,” Kogan explained. “The employees voted for this, but the city never set aside any money to fund the employees’ health care. Instead, they took the money from the pension funds.”

Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, according to Kogan, this pattern continued: a mayor, city council and city manager would find that the city’s budget was dangerously out of balance, and they’d raid the workers’ pension funds to cover the shortfall. When Susan Golding became mayor in 1993, she was committed to expanding the Convention Center to accommodate the 1996 Republican National Convention and building a new downtown ballpark for the San Diego Padres, which just added to the city’s financial burden and the temptation to cover the deficits with pension money. Twice, in 1996 and 2002, the city passed proposals to reduce its contributions to the pension funds — and got city workers and their unions to agree by promising them higher benefits the city wasn’t paying for and, as it turned out, couldn’t pay for.

These proposals were based on the hope that investment income from the pension fund would rise fast enough to cover the debts — but the recession in the early 2000’s put an end to that. According to Kogan, the city actually started losing money on the pension fund’s investments in 2001. His figures indicate that pension costs for San Diego have risen from five percent of the city’s budget in 1997 to over 20 percent today, and that the city owes $2.2 billion more in pensions than it can afford. Kogan also said that the overpayments to city workers — the extra pension money the city promised and couldn’t or wouldn’t supply — accounts for only $350 million, less than 15 percent of the total. The remainder is due to the city underfunding the pension system and the pension fund’s investment losses in the last two recessions.

In the June 2012 mayoral primary, Councilmember DeMaio made a pension “reform” initiative a major focus of his campaign and got city voters to approve it by a 2-1 margin. The initiative eliminates guaranteed-benefit pensions for all new city employees except police officers and shifts them into a plan similar to the 401(k) individual investment accounts all too familiar to most private-sector workers who get offered retirement plans at all. It also imposes a five-year freeze on so-called “pensionable” pay for all city workers — after they’ve already gone five years without a raise. Kogan argued that DeMaio’s “reform” would actually cost the city more money than the deal Mayor Jerry Sanders negotiated with the city workers’ unions in 2007, and it won’t do anything to reduce the $2.2 billion pension shortfall because it comes from current employees.

What it’s going to do, Kogan argued, is make it harder for the city to attract and retain qualified employees. “We’re going to be competing against other cities for skilled employees — cops, firefighters, engineers — and we’ll probably be paying for them with non-pensionable ‘bonuses,’” Kogan said. “It’s not clear this measure will solve the problems we have.”

Who deserves the blame for San Diego’s ongoing financial problems? “Public officials and public employees,” said Kogan, “but mostly the voters who for a long time believed they could get the services people get in San Francisco and Long Beach without paying comparable taxes. In order to be a viable political candidate in San Diego, you had to go along with this something-for-nothing fantasy, and the way they got away with it was to use the pension system as a piggybank.” Kogan also said that now that that’s not a viable option, the city is creating the illusion of a “balanced” budget by cutting back on infrastructure — adding to San Diego’s sorry reputation as a city of potholes. “If you have a candidate who says they have a magic solution — and both [general-election mayoral candidates, DeMaio and Bob Filner] do — they’re wrong,” Kogan summed up. “It’s going to be higher taxes, lower services or both.”