by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Christine Kehoe at
her farewell to public life: the San Diego Democrats for Equality’s Freedom
Awards in Hillcrest, November 17, 2012
Christine Kehoe has been a name to conjure with in San Diego
activism, journalism and politics for over three decades now. And soon
Christine Kehoe may be the name of a school. On Wednesday, October 8, 7 p.m. at
Florence Elementary School, 3914 First Avenue between University and Robinson
on the cusp of Hillcrest and Mission Hills, the San Diego Unified School
District will hold a community meeting to discuss renaming the school after San
Diego’s first openly Queer elected official.
I first heard of Christine Kehoe in 1982 when the San Diego
Public Library started distributing a little newspaper she was editing called The
Longest Revolution, about the feminist
movement. Her articles in that scraggly little paper were always fascinating
and inspiring reading. But I didn’t get to know and work with her regularly
until 1984, by which time she’d come out as a Lesbian and taken a job as editor
of the Gayzette. The Gayzette was a marvelously named publication that had been
launched two years earlier by renegade staff members from San Diego’s pioneering
Queer paper, Update, but I didn’t
know that then.
What I did know was
that the Gayzette started
surfacing at the Ken Cinema in Kensington and it was a beacon light to quite a
few San Diegans struggling with their sexual orientation … including me.
Certainly it was the first outlet for the Queer press in San Diego I can
remember reading, and in 1984, a year after my own coming-out, I started
writing for it after Christine Kehoe graciously interviewed me, decided she
liked my writing and brought me on as a contributor. There wasn’t much money in
it — there never is in community journalism — but there was enough exposure,
challenge and sheer fun to make it worth doing for the next two years.
Christine left the Gayzette two issues before it ceased publication, and during the rest of the
1980’s went to work for the San Diego County AIDS Assistance Fund and the
campaign to defeat political crazy Lyndon LaRouche’s first looney-tunes
anti-AIDS initiative, which would have treated AIDS as a casually communicable
disease and could have required quarantine of people testing HIV positive.
Kehoe also worked as executive director of the Hillcrest Business Association —
a welcome and ironic hire because during our time together at the Gayzette she’d had me do an article over whether the
Hillcrest Business Association and its closely allied community planning group
were pursuing strategies designed to slow or reverse Hillcrest’s evolution into
the home base of San Diego’s Queer community. (I found they really hadn’t cared
about it one way or the other.)
By 1993 I was writing for San Diego’s Gay & Lesbian
Times and Christine Kehoe was putting
together a campaign to run for the San Diego City Council. Two other openly
Queer candidates, Al Best in 1979 and Neil Good in 1987, had tried Council
races before — and neither had worked their way out of the district primaries.
Kehoe’s path to the Council had been paved by two important developments:
first, San Diego voters finally approved district elections — which meant that
Council candidates only had to get the support of voters in their communities
and didn’t have to run in citywide general-election campaigns.
Second, thanks to a lot of volunteer work on the part of
members of the San Diego Democratic Club (now the San Diego Democrats for
Equality) and others, the neighborhoods containing the greatest proportions of
San Diego’s Queer population, Hillcrest and North Park, had been combined into
a single City Council district. At the time, that district was represented by Queer-friendly
straight Councilmember John Hartley, but his decision not to seek re-election
in 1993 left the field open for a Queer challenger — and Kehoe, who’d had
on-the-job training as a staffer in Hartley’s office, decided to make the run.
She wasn’t without opposition, even within the Queer
community. Evonne Schulze, a long-time community activist and a straight woman
with a Queer-friendly reputation, had sought a City Council seat unsuccessfully
three times from the College-area District 7. She decided to carpetbag into the
new District 3 and capitalize on her long-standing relationships with Queer
leaders like Nicole Murray-Ramirez to take on Kehoe. But there were enough
Queer voters in District 3 who had had enough of being represented by straight
Councilmembers, no matter how sympathetic, and wanted instead to have one of
our own in office.
The Gay & Lesbian Times and its publisher, the late Michael Portantino, practically made
Kehoe’s election a staff project. So did the San Diego Democratic Club and most
of the organized activists in the Queer community. By the time the election was
over, Christine Kehoe had become the new District 3 City Councilmember, the
glass ceiling had been broken and the way had been paved for otherwise
qualified Queer candidates to run for, and win, elective office in San Diego. Since Kehoe’s
election the District 3 seat has always been held by an openly Queer Councilmember: she was succeeded by her
friend and former aide Toni Atkins, and then by current City Council President
Todd Gloria.
Indeed, a measure of Kehoe’s triumph has been that being
Queer is no longer a political issue in San Diego. In the 2012 Mayoral election
there were two openly Queer candidates out of the four major contenders, and
both of them were Republicans — City
Councilmember Carl DeMaio (now running for Congress against Queer-friendly
straight incumbent Scott Peters) and San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie
Dumanis. After they were forced off the Council by term limits, both Kehoe and
Atkins ran for the state legislature, and while Kehoe retired from public life
after being termed out of her State Senate seat in 2012, Atkins was recently
chosen Speaker of the California State Assembly — the second open Queer, and
the first open Lesbian, to hold that job.
No matter how far or high she’s risen, Christine Kehoe has
remained a plain-spoken, down-to-earth person. She’s always said hello to me
when we’ve run into each other grocery-shopping or running errands. She also
hasn’t just been a one-issue politician for Queer rights. According to her
Wikipedia page, “Kehoe has been an ardent supporter of increased environmental
protection for the state’s resources in her appointed position on the
California Coastal Commission. Kehoe is a member of the Sierra Club, the
National Organization for Women (NOW), National Women’s Political Caucus,
Uptown Democratic Club, and California Women in Government, the San Diego
Democratic Club, and the Women’s Transportation Seminar. She is also a member
of the Board of Directors of the California Elected Women’s Association for
Education and Research (CEWAER).”
I can’t think of a living San Diegan who would be a more
appropriate person to name a school after than Christine Kehoe. So I’m going to
be there on Wednesday, October 8, 7 p.m. at Florence Elementary School, 3914
First Avenue, to urge the San Diego Unified School District to rename Florence
Elementary after Christine Kehoe. And I want you to be there, too. The effort
is being pushed by openly Queer San Diego Unified School District board member
Kevin Beiser, and more information is available on https://www.facebook.com/events/344157679077681/?ref=6&ref_notif_type=plan_user_invited
