Kamalamania!

The Enthusiasm Is Infectious, but Can It Last Until November 5?

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Boy, did I get it wrong when I publicly predicted on this blog that the political pressure on President Joe Biden to withdraw from his 2024 re-election campaign would sink the Democratic Party’s already slim chances of retaining the Presidency in the November 5, 2024 election.

I thought that the public pressure from various Congressional Democrats on Biden to give up his campaign would fatally destroy his odds of beating Donald Trump in 2024 as he beat him in 2020. Instead, once Biden actually withdrew in a letter (two letters, actually, one announcing his own step-down and a later missive endorsing Vice-President Kamala Harris as his replacement) on July 21, nearly a month after his bizarre and woefully weak performance in a televised debate with Trump, Biden’s withdrawal seemed to release a torrent of energy and support among grass-roots Democrats.

I had expected a fratricidal civil war within the party as various candidates jockeyed to replace Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket. I also worried about Kamala Harris’s five big weaknesses as a Presidential candidate: she’s a woman (and we all know what happened the last time Trump ran against a woman), she’s part-Black, she’s part-Asian, her 2020 Presidential campaign flamed out quickly, and through most of Biden’s term her favorability/unfavorability ratings have been even worse than his. Instead the party quickly coalesced behind Harris and she’s closed the so-called “excitement gap” that was previously favoring Trump.

She’s closed more than that. The New York Times/Siena College poll has Harris leading Trump by four points in three of the key “battleground states” that will decide the 2024 election – Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – though other polls have the races closer than that. She’s invigorated the Democratic Party and convinced many skeptical Democrats that they now have a chance not only to keep the White House but to preserve their Senate majority (important because if the Republicans control the Senate, it’s unlikely that any Democratic appointees will be confirmed to anything) and win back the House of Representatives.

I’m writing this on Saturday, August 17, two days before the Democratic National Convention is scheduled to begin in Chicago. At this time, the convention is essentially going to give President Biden his gold watch and send him off into retirement – even though he’s still going to be President for five more months. Then it will be time to celebrate new nominee Kamala Harris and her anointed running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who’s everything Harris isn’t: a white guy, affable and nonthreatening, who looks like he just stepped out of the world of Leave It to Beaver; a 24-year National Guard veteran; a high-school teacher and football coach.

Walz seems to have got the vice-presidential nomination ahead of the two previous favorites, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. While Minnesota isn’t considered a “battleground state” – the last time a Republican Presidential candidate carried it was 1972 – the way Pennsylvania and Arizona are, Walz’s affable middle-class values are expected to help Harris win over skeptical Midwesterners. Walz also got the nod after Shapiro’s hard-line stance for Israel in the genocidal war in Gaza, and against college students who protested it, alienated Arab-Americans and other voters crucial to Biden’s 2020 win, especially in Michigan.

Also, Harris asked Walz point-blank if he ever wanted to be President, and Walz answered, “No” – just what Harris wanted to hear, given Shapiro’s naked ambition and record of throwing his political allies under the bus to advance his own career. (For more on this read Chris Lehmann’s commentary in the August 2 The Nation at https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/josh-shapiro-vp-kamala-harris-wrong/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%208.2.2024&utm_term=daily). But one of the biggest things that got Walz the nod to be Harris’s running mate is the word “weird.” He’d been posting on the Internet about Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator and Hillbilly Elegy author J. D. Vance (who for some reason likes to refer to himself as “JD Vance”), and their “weird” ideas about the country’s future, especially about how it should treat women. The word “weird” stuck and became an Internet meme.

And both Trump and Vance seem perversely to work hard to live up to the “weird” name. Trump’s odd perorations at his rallies about electric boats and sharks, his seemingly approving mentions of Hannibal Lecter (which as far as I can tell are part of his argument that other countries are flooding the U.S. with mental patients; he seems to be saying that at least some of these immigrants are cannibals), his ongoing insistence that windmills slaughter birds and his invocation of Sarah Palin’s old slogan “Drill, baby, drill” as his solution to virtually every problem certainly sound “weird,” especially to people not locked into the Right-wing media bubble.

Vance, in turn, is on record as saying the Democratic Party is run by “childless cat ladies” and that people with children should have more votes in elections than people without. He’s on record as calling for a nationwide ban on abortion – which even Trump, who boasts about having packed the U.S. Supreme Court with Right-wing justices who reversed Roe v. Wade, realizes is a political loser – and said the only reason for post-menopausal women to exist is to help raise and take care of their grandchildren. (Vance himself was raised by his grandmother, whom he called by the oddly infantilizing name “Mamaw” – pronounced “Ma’am-awe.”)

“Project 2025”: The Right’s Apocalyptic Blueprint for America’s Future

It also doesn’t help that, while Trump is trying to distance himself from “Project 2025,” a 900-plus page white paper the ultra-Right Heritage Foundation prepared as a guidebook for the next Republican Presidency (much the way they wrote a similar document in the late 1970’s that was largely adopted as a playbook by Ronald Reagan when he took office in 1981), its executive director, Kevin Roberts, wrote a book about it called Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America. The original subtitle was Burning Down Washington to Save America. Dawn’s Early Light was scheduled to be published on September 24, but it’s been put off until after the November 5 election. As much as Trump tries to edge away from Project 2025, at least 200 people who worked on it were former members of the Trump administration – and the foreword to Dawn’s Early Light was written by J. D. Vance.

The full Project 2025 report – called Mandate for Leadership, the same title the Heritage Foundation used for the set of recommendations they gave Reagan in 1981 – is available online at https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf. It begins with a preface that explicitly links it to the Reagan agenda: “Today, America and the conservative [sic] movement are enduring an era of division and danger akin to the late 1970’s. Now, as then, our political class has been discredited by wholesale dishonesty and corruption. Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of Transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.

“Overseas, a totalitarian Communist dictatorship in Beijing is engaged in a strategic, cultural, and economic Cold War against America’s interests, values and people – all while globalist elites in Washington awaken only slowly to that growing threat,” the preface continues. “Moreover, low-income communities are drowning in addiction and government dependence. Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970’s ‘radical chic’ to build the totalitarian cult known today as ‘The Great Awokening.’ [No actual Leftist or liberal I know calls it that. - M.G.C.] And now, as then, the Republican Party seems to have little understanding about what to do. Most alarming at all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril.”

Among the most alarming parts of Project 2025 are its calls for the legal redefinition of the American family to include only traditional heterosexual families: a married man and woman, and their children. “The next conservative [sic] President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” Project 2025 reads. “This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI), diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

The document then goes on to attack pornography. “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of Transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare,” the report reads. “It has no claim to First Amendment protection.” It calls for revival of the 19th century Comstock Act, which has not been used for decades but is still on the books, not only to ban pornography but to abolish medication abortion altogether through its clause forbidding the mailing of any substance or device usable for abortion or contraception. Project 2025 also calls for abolishing the Department of Education and replacing the Department of Homeland Security with an agency more single-mindedly focused on securing the border.

One key part of the Project 2025 agenda – the blandly named “Schedule F” – was already enacted by President Donald Trump in an executive order in October 2020. This called for the removal of civil service protection for 50,000 top-level federal government employees and their reclassification as “at-will” employees whom the President could fire at any time. Trump and the architects of Project 2025 that served in his administration were frequently stymied by career bureaucrats in the federal government who were loyal to the country and the ideals of good government, not to Trump personally. (Richard Nixon had much the same problem during Watergate.) Trump’s solution was to unilaterally abolish civil-service protection for 50,000 federal workers, returning us to the so-called “spoils system” by which administrations were filled with people who owed their jobs to the party in power, and knew it.

The “spoils system” lasted until the 1880’s, when President James A. Garfield was assassinated by a man who had volunteered for his campaign in hopes of getting a job out of it, then turned bitter and angry when he didn’t. In 1883, two years after Garfield’s assassination, Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service act, which according to Google “required government jobs to be awarded to individuals based upon merit and not political affiliation.” Because he was busy first campaigning for re-election and then, after he lost, plotting illegal means to stay in power regardless of his defeat, Trump never had the chance to implement “Schedule F,” and on January 22, 2021, two days after he took office, President Biden rescinded Trump’s executive order. But turning the apolitical federal bureaucracy into an instrument of his political will has remained a major priority of Donald Trump’s – and we can expect him to do just that if and when he returns to the White House.

Harris, Walz and “The Politics of Joy”

When Vice-President Harris announced Tim Walz as her running mate, she said at a joint campaign rally in Philadelphia, “We both believe in lifting people up, not knocking them down. Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? We both know the vast majority of people in our country have so much more in common than what separates them.”

And Walz added, “Thank you for bringing back the joy.”

By contrast, Trump recently told a rally audience in Manchester, New Hampshire, “We are a nation in decline, we are a failing nation. We are a nation that has lost its confidence, its willpower and its strength. We are a nation that has lost its way.” And on his social-media site, Truth Social, he posted this screed against Governor Walz: “TIM WALZ WILL UNLEASH HELL ON EARTH! He’s already pulling in MILLIONS to WIPE MAGA OUT.”

Ordinarily, Americans like candidates who feed them a message of hope and optimism. In 1980 and especially in 1984, when he won a landslide victory and carried 49 states, Ronald Reagan’s campaign proclaimed “Morning in America” and managed to make Right-wing politics seem cool. Taking office in the middle of the Great Depression in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt said in his first inaugural address, “[T]he only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

But, according to CNN political analyst Stephen Collinson on August 7 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/07/politics/harris-walz-happy-warriors-analysis/index.html), “Running a campaign rooted in hopefulness and good cheer at a time when many Americans feel demoralized and tired could backfire. After all, years of decaying economic security exacerbated by high inflation and elevated grocery prices during the Biden administration created the kind of conditions in which Trump’s populist demagoguery can prosper. If the vice president misjudges the national mood, her campaign could come across as oblivious to the concerns of many voters. It was noticeable, for instance, that while Harris pledged to bring down prices and fight for the middle class, her speech on Tuesday [August 6] was light on details of exactly how she would alleviate the economic stress that many people are feeling.”

That’s exactly what happened to the Democrats in 1968, the last time an incumbent Democratic President withdrew from his re-election campaign and installed his vice-president as the party’s new nominee. After a galvanic year marked by the assassinations of civil-rights leader Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Democratic Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, and a convention in Chicago (also where it’s going to be this year) that literally turned into a bloodbath in the streets, Hubert Humphrey emerged from the convention and proclaimed the “Politics of Joy.” Later he realized how out of touch that sounded and changed it to the “Politics of Hope,” but he lost anyway as Richard Nixon and George Wallace between them got 57 percent of the vote to Humphrey’s 43 percent (a dramatic reversal from Lyndon Johnson’s liberal landslide just four years earlier) and set the stage for a Right-wing political and economic ascendancy that has continued, with only minor interruptions, ever since.

So I’m torn about Kamala Harris, not in terms of whether to vote for her – I’ve already voted for her in every election in which I could (for California Attorney General and U.S. Senator) – but in terms of whether she can win. My heart is with her, while my head thinks it’s preposterous to believe that a part-Black, part-Asian woman who bombed badly in her first Presidential campaign (though, then again, Biden bombed in his first two) and has been generally less popular than Biden can get elected President could actually get elected President in 2024. It’s comparable to believing in Santa Claus.

So far the Right in general and Donald Trump and J. D. Vance in particular have not been able to settle on a strategy to attack Harris. Trump made a big to-do when he addressed the National Association of Black Journalists and acted – or pretended to be – surprised that Harris is now identifying as African-American. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said. “So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

For once, Trump had said something with which I could identify. I certainly knew Kamala Harris was [East] Indian-American – that first name alone gave it away – but I didn’t realize she was Black as well until she said so in an early debate in the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary campaign. At the same time I think it’s preposterous that Donald Trump is saying, “Is she Indian or is she Black?,” without considering the possibility that she could be both. I even posted on my Facebook page, “How can Kamala Harris be both Black and Indian? The same way Donald Trump can be both German and Scottish.”

But the attacks on both Harris and Walz are surely coming. Already J. D. Vance has criticized Walz for retiring from the Minnesota National Guard months before his unit was deployed to Iraq. Walz served 24 years in the National Guard and Vance served six months in the Marines, though neither of them saw combat. Walz was stationed in Italy and trained soldiers to use weapons of war, including AR-15 style rifles, while Vance did his tour of duty in a comfortable, air-conditioned office in Baghdad’s Green Zone (the ultra-exclusive American enclave which Iraqis were not allowed to enter) writing press releases.

It’s not surprising that Trump’s campaign resorted to attacking Walz’s service record given that one of his campaign managers, Chris LaCivita, was behind the heinous “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” effort in 2004 that tarnished John Kerry’s service record in the Viet Nam war and made it at best useless and at worst counterproductive. They even trotted out the old military insult, “stolen valor,” to denounce Walz. It’s also not surprising that Walz didn’t make Kerry’s mistake of waiting three weeks to respond. Instead he was on it almost immediately, saying it was wrong for either himself or Vance to attack the other’s service record and thanking Vance “for your service and your sacrifice.”

More to the point are the attacks coming from the Trump camp against Harris for having once advocated for a single-payer “Medicare for All” health care system and a ban on fracking during her 2020 Presidential campaign. Trump’s people have claimed that these “radical” stands prove that Harris is a closet Leftist who will destroy American values and undermine our aspirations for energy independence. Only in the topsy-turvy world of American politics could supporting a guarantee of health care for all Americans (something every other advanced industrial country in the world does for its citizens) and stopping a uniquely environmentally destructive means of fossil-fuel production when we should be moving away from fossil fuels be considered negatives.

But the attacks on Harris from the Trump campaign serve a double purpose for Trump and the Republicans. At once they make her seem like a dangerous stealth radical to large numbers of Americans who have been conditioned to believe national health insurance is “socialism” and a fracking ban is a dangerous sellout to environmental extremists, and a hypocrite to progressive voters (like me) who supported her old positions and resent how she’s pulled back from them.

We can expect a nasty campaign from Donald Trump, just like the ones we got in 2016 and 2020. The more Republicans like former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy; Brendan Buck, former aide to two previous Republican Speakers (John Boehner and Paul Ryan); Republican pollster Frank Luntz; and his own former aide, Kellyanne Conway, try to tell Trump that he can win on the issues of the economy, immigration and crime, the more he launches personal insults. So far he’s questioned her racial identity, denounced her laugh as “insane,” claimed that footage of a Harris rally at a Detroit airport showing 12,000 people was faked with artificial intelligence while his own rallies are drawing the biggest crowds anybody’s ever seen (they aren’t), and even proclaimed himself “better looking” than Harris.

Antics like this, which remind many voters of why they voted for Biden over Trump in 2020, led The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser to dub Trump Harris’s most effective campaign surrogate, “Donald Trump talks about Joe Biden constantly,” Glasser said August 16 on the PBS-TV show Washington Week. “He is also almost frenetic with the shifting of the media's attention and the public's attention, the excitement and crowds that Kamala Harris has generated. He has demanded, basically, pull the spotlight back to me, me, me. And, of course, when Donald Trump then talks and talks and talks, as he did just yesterday, he gave another press conference at his home in Bedminster, and, you know, this is the opposite of a disciplined, focused message about Harris. He's making the campaign about himself in a way that is very likely to benefit the Democrats.”

Some Things to Look Forward to About Harris

From my point of view it will be really nice to see Kamala Harris, not Donald Trump, take the oath of office as President of the United States on January 20, 2025. After Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 (a race I called correctly, largely on the basis that thanks to three decades of Republican propaganda attacks on her, Hillary Clinton was one of the most hated women in America) I didn’t think there’d be a serious chance of a woman getting elected President in my lifetime. Now there is. It’s also nice that Kamala Harris is a decade younger than I am. I thought I’d reached a generational milestone when Obama got elected – the first President who was younger than me (I was born in 1953, Obama in 1961) – but since then Trump (born 1946) broke Ronald Reagan’s record as the oldest elected President and Biden (born 1942) broke Trump’s.

It will also be nice to see a genuinely liberal President from California, the state where I’ve lived all my life. So far the only California-born or California-resident Presidents have been Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan: not exactly a record to be proud of. And it’ll be nice to see a part-Asian, part-Black woman be the one who denies Trump his long-hoped-for second term. In fact, Kamala Harris unwittingly personifies everything about the new, struggling-to-be-born America that Donald Trump loathes: a mixed-race woman who’s professionally competent, and who can legitimately proclaim that she once prosecuted criminals while Trump is one.

In fact, one of the things I love about what’s happening to Trump is that the charge to hold him accountable is being led largely by strong, capable, powerful Black women. New York Attorney General Letitia James brought a case against his business, the Trump Organization, and won a judgment that the entire company was a fraud. Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis is heading a prosecution against him for leading a “racketeer influenced and corrupt organization” in his attempt to steal the 2020 election. Washington, D.C. district court judge Tanya Chutkan is presiding over special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump for interfering with the 2020 election results nationwide. And now Kamala Harris has emerged as his principal opponent in the 2024 Presidential election.

In 1927 Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was a member of the New York branch of the Ku Klux Klan and got arrested at one of their rallies. Donald has never let us forget that he is the son of a Klansman both literally and spiritually. I love the karmic debt Donald Trump is currently having to pay for his decades of racism, sexism, moral rot, narcissism and corruption. There’s always a chance that he’ll be able to weasel out of it once again, as he’s done so many times before, aided by a large slice of the American voting population that has virtually accepted him as a new Messiah. (After the attempted assassination on July 13, both Trump himself and a lot of Republican supporters claim he had been spared literally by divine intervention.)

But for now, it’s Harris who’s riding high, gaining in the polls and looking more and more like a winner. And that’s a good thing, too, because while Trump looks to take America backwards (his slogan remains “Make America Great Again,” or “MAGA” for short, which led Hillary Clinton in 2016 to ask rhetorically, “Just when Donald Trump think America was ‘great’ and when does he want to return us to?”), Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to take America forward to a multi-racial, multi-cultural, environmentally responsible, economically healthy future in which every American has a shot at the dream. And isn’t that what America is supposed to be about?

Myth-Busting 2021 Documentary on Queer Activism in Los Angeles Airs on PBS

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, July 31) my husband Charles and I watched “Protests and Parades,” the second half of the two-part 2021 PBS program L.A.: A Queer History. Charles and I had already seen the first half, “Culture and Criminalization,” over the week we were staying with his mother Edi in Martinez, California. She’d recorded it on her digital video recorder (a piece of technology I’ve avoided because it would only add to our already astronomical cable bill) and we watched the first half there, then streamed the second half on our own computer last night. L.A.: A Queer History was at least an indirect challenge to what’s become the “print the legend” version of the history of U.S. Queer activism, which that it all began overnight when New York police raided an unlicensed dive bar called the Stonewall Inn in June 1969 and, instead of meekly submitting to police abuse, fought back. Only this wasn’t the first time Queers had fought back against a police raid on a Gay bar; it had happened in Los Angeles at the Black Cat on Sunset Boulevard on New Year’s 1966/1967.

One of my pet peeves over the years has been the way in which New York City has arrogantly and entirely falsely proclaimed itself as the epicenter of the Queer rights movement, when as I once testily pointed out in a leaflet, virtually every milestone in American Queer history happened in California. California was the site of the first ongoing Gay rights organization, the Mattachine Society, founded by Harry Hay and four others (including Dale Jennings and future fashion designer Rudi Gernreich) in L.A. in 1950. California was the site of the first ongoing Lesblan organization as well: the Daughters of Bilitis, founded by Lesbian couple Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon in San Francisco in 1955. California was the founding ground for the first ongoing Gay publication, One (which won a key court case in 1954 against the U.S. Post Office, which had banned the publication as “obscene” because it presented Gay life and culture positively), and the first ongoing Lesbian publication, The Ladder. And something I hadn’t known about until I watched this program was that the use of the word “PRIDE” in connection with Queer activism in the U.S. was also from California. “PRIDE” was originally an acronym for “Personal Rights In Defense and Education,” a Queer resistance organization founded in L.A. in 1966, which came into its own as a support group for the Black Cat rioters when they were prosecuted by the police. Even before that, California could claim some other major “firsts” in the history of American Queer activism, including the first openly Queer candidate for elective office in U.S. history. His name was José Saria, and in 1963 he was a drag performer and MC at a Gay bar in San Francisco that, like its L.A. namesake, was called the Black Cat. When the Black Cat was targeted for police raids, Saria not only organized his patrons to fight back, he announced his candidacy for the Board of Supervisors (San Francisco’s equivalent to a city council) and somehow got enough people to sign his petition to be on the ballot, despite the fact that merely signing your name and address would get you targeted for enforcement and potential arrest by the police. Saria lost, but along the way he founded the Imperial Court (a sort of Gay equivalent of a charitable lodge) and made his mark on the history of Queer activism.

Indeed, I would argue that virtually all the most important historical milestones for Queer community activism in American history came from California. The only ones that didn’t were the very first Gay rights organization in U.S. history, the Society for Human Rights, founded in Chicago in 1924 by German immigrant Henry Gerber; Frank Kameny’s pickets against the federal government for anti-Queer discrimination starting in 1965 in Washington, D.C.; and the Stonewall riots themselves. San Francisco also saw the first pickets against a private employer for anti-Queer discrimination when my late friend and associate Leo Laurence and his friend (not his partner, though that was widely reported then) Gale Whittington, organized protests against the States Steamship Lines when they fired Whittington for appearing with Laurence in a photo illustrating an article about Gay militancy. The analysis of Gay history presented in L.A.: A Queer History, directed by Gregorio Davila, argues that a number of factors combined to make L.A. a Gay hotbed in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Among them were the prominence of the movie industry, which attracted many more or less openly Gay men including costume designers Gilbert Adrian and Orry-Kelly; and the U.S. involvement in World War II, which pulled a lot of young Gay men out of their repressive small towns and plunged them into a big city where there were plenty of available partners for Gay sex. Starting in 1943, the U.S. government, deciding that the war was pretty much won, gradually became less tolerant of Gays in the ranks, and after the war there was a full-blown campaign of repression against not only “Communists” (defined as anyone markedly Left in their politics, whether they had any use for the Communists’ insane levels of discipline or not) but Queers. Articles about the “Lavender Menace” began to appear, and thousands of Gay men were dishonorably discharged from the military and thereby given “bad papers” that made it harder for them to find civilian jobs as well.

By far the most important and influential Gay leader that emerged from this period was Harry Hay, one of my personal heroes (when I launched my own Queer paper, Zenger’s Newsmagazine, in 1994 Harry Hay was my first cover boy). He was the son of a mining engineer who’d spent a lot of his boyhood with his father in Chile, and in the late 1940’s he joined the Henry Wallace Presidential campaign (Wallace was an independent candidate who had been Franklin Roosevelt’s designated successor, but he turned against the Democratic Party over the Cold War and ran for President, ostensibly as the candidate of the Progressive Party but with a lot of support from the Communists). Hay organized a support committee called “Bachelors for Wallace” and ultimately got kicked out of the Communist Party for being Gay. (At the time the Communists regarded homosexuality as a form of “bourgeois social decadence” that would automatically disappear when the Communists won the world revolution.) In 1950 Hay and four others organized the Mattachine Society, named after a sect of medieval court jesters whom Hay believed had been Gay, only three years later he was thrown out of the group by more conservative members because, in order to protect the group against law-enforcement infiltration, he’d adopted the secretive organizational structure of the Communist Party. For the rest of his life – he lived until 2002 – Hay hung around on the outskirts of the Queer movement, at times resurfacing, as he did in the late 1980’s (when I first met him). Reacting to the way Pride organizations were barring the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) from marching in Pride parades, Hay started showing up at parades carrying triangle-shaped signs saying, “I march with NAMBLA.”

If San Francisco Gay politician and martyr Harvey Milk was the Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Queer movement, Hay was its Frederick Douglass. It was Hay who first conceived of the idea of Gays and Lesbians as an oppressed minority, at a time when most Queer activists bought into the idea that being Queer was “a sickness” and tried to frame the movement as comparable to the one to counter discrimination against people with disabilities. It was also the early Mattachine Society which organized the first successful resistance to a police arrest of one of its founding members, Dale Jennings (extensively interviewed in this film), for “lewd conduct.” Hay and others were able to fundraise to hire him an attorney, who caught the arresting officer in a lie on the witness stand and led the judge to dismiss the case, calling it the worst-presented case on anything he’d ever heard. The second half of L.A.: A Queer History tells a more familiar part of the story, including an extensive set of interviews and profiles with Rev. Troy Perry. After he was excommunicated from the Baptist Church as a minister for being Gay, he decided to start his own, the Metropolitan Community Church, as an outreach for people who identified both as Christian and Gay and wanted a space to worship where they would not be shunned for being Queer. Rev. Perry was also instrumental in planning the first Christopher Street West parade – whose organizers named it after the Greenwich Village location of the Stonewall Inn and thus helped perpetuate the myth that the Queer movement had started in New York City – and making sure it was a parade rather than a protest march. He and the other organizers had the predictable trouble getting permits for the event after Ed Davis, then the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, denounced them and their plans for a parade before the L.A. City Council. (Two decades later, as an elected official in California, Davis did an abrupt about-face on the issue and became one of the few Queer-friendly politicians in the Republican Party.)

The show also zips through controversies that emerged as the movement grew and matured in the 1970’s, including the insistence of women activists on being called “Lesbian” instead of “Gay” (which ignores the fact that a number of women at the time actually disliked the term “Lesbian” and preferred to be called “Gay women”); the racism that afflicted prime Gay bars and discos against people of color, including the requirement that Gay men who looked Black or Latino show two or three ID’s while white-presenting Gay men could get in with just one; and the galvanic shock of the advent of AIDS in 1981. Suddenly huge numbers of Gay and Bisexual men were coming down with unusual cancers and other diseases and rapidly dying from them. Rev. Perry recalled that the number of funerals he was officiating at swelled from one a week to one a day to tens a day, and the obituaries in Gay papers grew until they covered several pages in each issue. Ironically, one effect of AIDS on the Queer community was it broke down the institutionalized sexism that had hampered Lesbians within the movement; all of a sudden organizations began hiring women for key leadership positions because they were likely to be around quite a while longer than their male counterparts. L.A.: A Queer History ends with the formation of ACT UP (the “AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power”) in 1987 and the quickly dashed hopes of many Queer activists that the replacement of Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush with Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992 would end federal hostility against Queers and promote an aggressive response to the AIDS epidemic. Instead, as more than one interviewee on this program pointed out, it was Clinton who signed the two most openly anti-Queer laws ever passed by Congress, the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” “compromise” restricting Queers in the military in 1993 and the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” of 1996 which defined marriage, for purposes of federal law, as only between one man and one woman. Though there’s a certain “print the legend” aspect to L.A.: A Queer History (including its use of the terms “HIV” and “AIDS” interchangeably), for the most part it’s not only a necessary correction to the “Stonewall” myth that the Queer movement started in New York City in 1969 but a compelling history in its own right.