California Apocalypse

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN, Editor

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The people of California — or at least 24 percent of its eligible voters — sent a nihilistic message on Tuesday, May 19, when they voted down five measures that, for all their complexity and stopgap nature, were desperately needed to stanch the bleeding of red ink from California’s state budget. Not everybody who voted down the slate of ballot measures necessary to implement a desperately negotiated budget deal between Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and party leaders in the legislature did so to send a message against all proposals for new taxes. But that’s the message that got sent, and it’s the message the governor and the legislative Republicans who, thanks to the California constitution’s two-thirds vote requirement to pass a stage budget, hold the balance of power are going to implement.

“The people told Sacramento, ‘Go and do your work yourself. Don’t come to us with your problems,’” Schwarzenegger told reporters in Washington. D.C. — where he’d gone for a photo-op with President Obama on pollution controls on cars — when the word that the initiatives had lost big came through. “So now we have to recognize that and move forward and make all the changes through [spending] cuts.”

Those are words California’s Republicans — or at least the far-Right contingent that has dominated their party for the last two generations — have been waiting to hear for 43 years, ever since they elected Ronald Reagan governor in 1966. They have been on a long trek to convert California from a generous welfare state (first begun in the 1940’s by another Republican who prided himself on being able to cross party lines, then-Governor Earl Warren) into a Libertarian utopia in which government gets out of the business of taking care of the poor and working people, and devotes all its efforts to facilitating wealth creation by the private sector and punishing crime.

Well before Grover Norquist of the American Tax Reform Association coined the phrase “starve the beast,” meaning to cut taxes to such an extent that government could no longer afford the education, health care and social welfare programs Norquist and his arch-conservative confrères abhorred on ideological grounds, California’s Right was already pursuing that strategy. From the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978 — which not only slashed California’s property taxes but undercut the ability of local governments to raise money on their own and thereby transformed them into permanent mendicants on the state’s dole — to the successful recall of Governor Gray Davis in 2003 and his replacement with Schwarzenegger, whose fulfillment of his campaign pledge to cut vehicle registration fees created California’s current budget deficit almost by itself — California’s Right has systematically fought to make the state financially broke and unable to fund much of anything.

It’s taken them a long time, but now they’ve got their wish. Among the proposals Schwarzenegger is going to make to the legislature is abolition of the CalWorks state welfare program, which serves more than 500,000 poor families with children; abolition of the Healthy Families program to fund health-care coverage for 928,000 children; phasing out the CalGrants program of student aid to 77,000 new students per year; cutting $600 million from state universities and $750 million from state prisons, most of that from programs to rehabilitate inmates; cutting K-12 education funding by $5.3 billion over the next 13 months; eliminating a $96 million program to help 35,000 people with AIDS and HIV buy medications; dismantling the state’s office that evaluates the health risks of chemicals in consumer products and the environment; eliminating 11,000 government jobs; and ultimately slashing the state’s general-fund budget to three-fourths of its current size, from $95.5 billion to $71.5 billion.

The final step in the fulfillment of the Right-wing Libertarian dream of California came about with some surprising allies. The Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU) and most other public employee unions opposed the ballot measures even though their defeat will cost tens of thousands of their members their jobs. They did so in the delusion that somehow the defeat of these initiatives would create a political climate for more far-reaching and progressive tax increases; instead, of course, the opposite has happened, as any rational observer of California politics would have been able to conclude before the election. At the Activist San Diego meeting the day before the election, virtually everyone in this nominally progressive organization was committed to voting no on the slate of ballot measures — and one person there said people needed to vote no to “send them a message,” the kind of nihilistic B.S. I’m used to hearing from talk-radio devotees and other Right-wingers, not from ordinarily thoughtful progressives concerned about protecting and expanding the welfare state.

California’s political crisis has been a long time coming, and the culprits get mentioned in just about every article about it: the insane two-thirds vote requirement to pass a budget, which gives the minority party all of the power and none of the responsibility; the draconian term limits passed into law in the 1990’s, which force legislators out of their jobs just when they’ve begun to learn them; the rotten redistricting plans which protect incumbents and favor the election of extremists from both parties over moderates; a state tax system that relies too heavily on income taxes and other levies that fluctuate dramatically with the health of the overall economy; and the voters themselves, who not only keep sending these contradictory “messages” to their elected officials — don’t cut our services and don’t raise our taxes — but pass ballot measures which put great chunks of the state budget out of the hands of the legislature and require spending on the initiative sponsors’ pet programs whether that’s the wisest use of the state’s resources or not.

The basic problem with California’s fiscal politics is that everyone involved is behaving like a spoiled child. Democrats and liberals regard their pet programs as sacrosanct and feel that a simple common-sense measure like a “rainy-day fund,” to bank larger-than-anticipated revenues from economic boom times to have a reserve left over for busts, is somehow an imposition on their tax-and-spend goals. Republicans and conservatives not only use their legislative veto power to forbid tax increases but to demand tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations — as they did, successfully, in the most recent budget negotiations. (Before this year’s budget deal, the wealthiest 1 percent of Californians paid 7.4 percent of their income in taxes, while the poorest Californians — those earning $20,000 or less per year — paid 10.2 percent. After the deal, the share of the wealthiest went up to 7.8 percent — but the share of the poorest went up to 11.1 percent.)

The spoiled babies in California include the voters themselves. They keep voting to expand state services and against new taxes. They’ve been given several chances to lower the 2/3 threshold for passing a budget and to ease the draconian term limits on legislators — and they’ve turned down every one of them. With their votes on the ballot measures last Tuesday, the voters have answered the question posed by former California legislative leader John Burton — “People are going to have to figure out: Do they want schools, do they want roads, do they want public safety, do they want to take care of the less fortunate?” — with a resounding “NO!”

That “NO” will continue to resound throughout the nation. As President Obama leads the rest of the United States in a profoundly different direction — towards more government spending, reversal of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, more regulation and more direct government stimulus of the economy — California will become a laboratory experiment in the Right-wing alternative: evisceration of the public sector; massive cutbacks in education, health care and other social programs; ultimately, perhaps, the dismantling of almost all government agencies and their replacement by private contractors delivering inferior services and paying lower wages. What’s likely to come of this, based on the experiences of other countries where it’s been tried — usually at the behest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and its notorious “structural adjustment programs” imposed on countries that, like California, borrowed far more than they can ever hope to repay — is permanent mass poverty, economic un-development and reducing the people to a state of dependent hopelessness.

California has become a squabbling classroom of spoiled brats without a teacher to keep them in line and actually get them to learn something. The political system has almost totally failed to generate anything remotely resembling leadership. The money to sustain the state’s current level of spending simply does not exist. Every avenue for additional revenue is closed — tax increases are a political impossibility; the giant Wall Street financial institutions (which President Obama is racking up trillions of dollars in unpayable future debt to keep whole and prevent them from suffering from their mistakes — though that’s a subject for another editorial) no longer trust California’s ability to pay back the loans it’s already taken out; and the federal government has made it clear that they’re not willing to guarantee California’s loans or do anything else to bail out the state.

What California really needs, quite frankly, is a benevolent dictator: someone who can lay down the law to its reality-oblivious electorate and squabbling politicians and interest groups and impose the hard choices of budget-balancing and revenue-raising by decree. That may seem impossible in a part of a nation whose federal constitution guarantees each state “a republican form of government” — a privilege Californians have relentlessly abused — but there’s an institution that actually has the power to impose something like it on this fractious, ungovernable state.

It’s called federal bankruptcy court. Though there’s no exact precedent because no U.S. state has ever actually declared bankruptcy, judging from the Chapter 11 reorganizations of large private corporations, a bankruptcy judge has virtually unlimited power to void union contracts, order asset sales and do whatever he or she feels is necessary to get the bankrupt corporation on track to pay its creditors and restore itself to economic health. The California political system has proven itself utterly incapable of governing this state in anything approaching a responsible manner — and the electorate, rather than providing a solution, have themselves been part of the problem. Maybe what is needed is a tough bankruptcy judge who, being a federal appointee and therefore assured of lifetime tenure, will be able to impose the necessary solutions on a political system unable to come up with them itself without having to worry about the voters throwing another destructive temper tantrum like they did on May 19.

boy ron & boy ryan:

San Diego Leatherboys Keep Swinging!

interview by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The term “boy” is one of the most confusing in the Leather community. Though it denotes either submission or service, “boy” doesn’t mean the total 24/7 surrender of one person’s will to another the way the term “slave” does. A person can be a boy in one relationship and a Daddy — a dominant but, again, not totally controlling partner — in another. A boy doesn’t even have to be biologically male — though females usually change the spelling to “boi” to denote the gender difference.

The San Diego Leatherboys are one of the fastest-growing groups in San Diego’s Leather community. As their president, boy ron, and vice-president, boy ryan, explain below, they grew out of a previous attempt at a boy organization called the San Diego Boys of Leather but got off to a faster and bigger start. The 2009 Mr. San Diego Leather, Bryan Teague, is a boy and was a founding member of San Diego Leatherboys Russ Mortenson, the 2009 Knight of Leather (the Leather community’s liaison to the Imperial Court), is treasurer of San Diego Leatherboys. Many of San Diego’s most influential Leatherpeople either are involved with the Leatherboys or regularly attend their meetings and work with them.

The Leatherboys host a monthly barbecue every third Sunday afternoon, 3 p.m., at the Eagle bar, 3040 North Park Way (one block south of University Avenue, one block east of 30th Street), as a fundraiser for various community causes and events. They also were instrumental in raising money to buy toys for needy children in the Imperial Court’s recent Easter Egg hunt, and host a wide variety of other fundraisers, parties and events. Zenger’s interviewed boy ron and boy ryan shortly before ron’s partner, Mr. Mike, was scheduled to compete for International Mr. Leather (IML) in Chicago in late May.

Zenger’s: What is San Diego Leatherboys?

boy ron: San Diego Leatherboys is a group of self-identified boys.

boy ryan: Anyone who identifies as a boy — not necessarily biologically, because we do have bois [women] as well as boys.

Zenger’s: And for our readers who know absolutely nothing about the mores and folkways of the Leather community, what does “identify as a boy” actually mean?

boy ryan: Well, for everybody it’s different.

boy ron: A boy can be a submissive. A boy can also become a Daddy at some point. In relation to the San Diego Leatherboys, we’re boys of service. And when I say “service,” I mean whatever the community needs, be it the Leather community, the Imperial Court, the Transgender, the cowboys, whatever. When they want something done, we’re there for them.

I’ll give you an example: in the last contest we had, for Mr. San Diego Leather, we, the San Diego Leatherboys, were judges’ boys. We were backstage people. At the event I did for the Baskets ’n’ Bulges [boy ron’s personal production to raise money for the Easter egg hunt], the San Diego Leatherboys sold raffle tickets for me. Wherever there’s a Leather event going on, you’re going to see the San Diego Leatherboys.

Mine and ryan’s goal for the club this year is to break out of that box and reach out to other communities, which we have done so far. As an example, we donated the food from our Naughty Santa back in December to the Imperial Court food drive.

boy ryan: But, as I was saying, the Leather journey is different for everybody. Just because you’re a boy, that doesn’t put stipulations on you. Everybody lives their lives a different way. Everybody has a different perception, and we all coexist. We all come together in our love and our service to the community as boys, but in the bedroom and in private we all have very different relationships, and not necessarily of a subservient nature.

boy ron: This is very true. Some boys go on to become Daddies. Some boys remain boys for the rest of their lives.

Zenger’s: Would you like to tell me about yourselves, your journeys as individuals? You first, ron, and then ryan.

boy ron: My Leather journey started back in the 1980’s. I was not really thinking about being a boy or anything. I started going to Leather bars, mostly Wolf’s, and I just liked the look of leather. I met a gentleman by the name of Ricky Alves, and he introduced me to the Leather scene. I don’t mean that he “introduced” me by taking me home with him; he introduced me to what Leather meant. Then I got involved in a 12-year relationship where leather was not permitted.

Approximately six years ago I did get back into the Leather community. I became a collared boy to my current husband and Daddy, Mr. Mike, and my Leather journey has expanded a lot in those years. I’ve held the title of Knight of Leather 2006. I’ve held the position of San Diego Leatherboys president going on two years now. I was a member of the original San Diego Boys of Leather; I was a pledge in that organization in the year 2004 and stayed with it until 2005. The San Diego Leatherboys will be celebrating our fourth anniversary on September 15 of this year.

Zenger’s: And, ryan, your journey?

boy ryan: My journey began in San Antonio, Texas, when I went to my first Leather bar. I found it very intriguing. I had always been interested but had never really got involved in the community or in any group until I moved to San Diego and I was exposed to the Palm Springs Boys of Leather. T. C. and Henry were ultimately my mentors. They basically took me in under their wing. I became a member of Palm Springs Boys of Leather, and after a brief duration there — I was there for about a year — I took a hiatus out of the Leather community for about two years, came back and rejoined the San Diego Leatherboys, because I was living in San Diego even when I was with the Palm Springs groups. San Diego was a more feasible area to join a club, since I already lived here.

Zenger’s: You mentioned the San Diego Boys of Leather. What’s the status of that group, and how does it differ from San Diego Leatherboys?

boy ron: The San Diego Boys of Leather basically disbanded. Some of the boys went on to become Daddies. Some of them went on to other things in their lives, went on to become titleholders. When the San Diego Boys of Leather disbanded, Bryan Teague, another gentleman by the name of Chris, who’s no longer in San Diego, and I got together and decided that we would form the San Diego Leatherboys, because there was a new group of boys out there that were yearning still to have the camaraderie and the brotherhood.

Zenger’s: So the other club disbanded and then you guys started yours.

boy ron: We started ours, but not as a replacement for it. We were a whole different organization. Our ways of doing things were different from the old club.

Zenger’s: How so? What do you do differently, and how do you think that works in terms of attracting members?

boy ron: The way that the old club worked, in my opinion, was not attracting new members. I cannot say what the reason was. When we started our new club, the opening night at the Lumberjack Grille, we had people like slut-bottom chris. We had boy spence, Officer Wes, myself, Michelle Jackson, Keith Roberts, Dan Woodie, Tom Dickerson. We had the whole back area filled. When we were the San Diego Boys of Leather we never filled that room for our meetings.

The community opened up their arms to us, and we showed the community that yes, we can still continue to do what we did as the Boys of Leather, but now as the San Diego Leatherboys. We’ve done nothing but thrive, from conception to current.

Zenger’s: So what do you think you guys are doing right?

boy ron: We’ve got a core group of people that are dedicated to this club, and dedicated to this community. When Bryan was involved in the club, he was the one that started the Naughty Santa night, where we had Santa Claus come in dressed in leather, and we took all these pictures.

One of the things that’s not part of the San Diego Leatherboys, but the San Diego Leatherboys do it, is we alternate doing the clothes check for the Eagle’s wet underwear contests. We are now hosting a monthly beverage bust and barbecue on the third Sunday at the Eagle. This is something that that hasn’t been done in a long time in the club, and it’s getting people out there. We now have our friendship pins, which we didn’t have for a long time. We’ve renewed ourselves.

boy ryan: When I took over as vice-president, I believed that there needed to be a new perception and a new methodology of going about how to recruit people and how to expose ourselves to the Gay community in general. The Leather community in San Diego has always been a quiet thing that the rest of the Gay community has never really accepted or known much about.

I thought it was about time that we make ourselves known; not only make ourselves known, but also be proactive and show our faces and our presence in the community, and exactly what we do. I think that, in itself, has been what has made us what we’ve become to this day, and hopefully something better in the future.

boy ron: The one thing we did, just recently in February, is we went to Palm Springs and had a boys’ weekend retreat. I can honestly say that the people who went there on that retreat came back different boys than they were when they left San Diego. We were also given the honor of having their bar name us as their home-away-from-home bar. So if we ever go to Palm Springs, we have a home to go to. Vice versa: when the Palm Springs Boys of Leather come to San Diego, this is their home. We now have a brotherhood between Palm Springs and San Diego, a very tight brotherhood, which never existed before.

boy ryan: Not only that, but there’s never been a trip, an outreach, as we did, to another boy community before. So it was quite a significant thing for the Southern California’s Leather boys’ movement.

Zenger’s: How do you resolve the contradiction of having an organization of boys? The assumption — although you said earlier that this is not necessarily true — is that boys are submissive, boys are serving others, boys don’t assert themselves in the ways that one usually thinks that you have to do in order to lead an organization and keep it going. How does that work in practice?

boy ryan: We tread very carefully! Fortunately for the San Diego Leatherboys, I am one of those who is more verbal and I put my thoughts out there more than most of the boys would. I’m just a little more aggressive, I suppose. Boy ron and I are both very outspoken people. There are some of our members, on the other hand, that are very subservient, very service-oriented, and that’s their goal: to be in service to their Sirs or their Daddies, or whatever their situation may be.

boy ron: We have a boy in the club that’s considered a pup. That’s fine. That’s fine. We have one that’s considered a very dominant slave. That’s fine as well.

Zenger’s: What is a “dominant slave”? You didn’t think I’d let that one go!

boy ryan: You said it! You put this one out!

boy ron: When I say he’s a “dominant slave,” what I mean is he’s a very submissive slave. He had been with a Master for quite some time, and now that he’s trying to come out of that mode and become a boy, but there’s still that little bit of slave in him. But it’s the heart — to me, what makes a boy is the heart and spirit. And we’ve got two new pledges that, to look at these two, you would not consider them your typical Leather boys. But their heart and their soul is that of a boy. Not every boy has to walk around with a white T-shirt on, and a ball cap, and a leather vest.

boy ryan: People in the old guard may say that that’s what they would like, but I’m making this statement very clear and very loud now, that the San Diego Leatherboys are the new guard. We are here to re-create an organization and maybe re-establish a new mind-set.

boy ron: The one thing I can say about the club is that the boys’ club, any boys’ club, is run, is administered, by the boys themselves. We will take guidance from other people, from dominants outside the community, a Sir, a Master, whomever. But they do not direct to us how we operate our club, because when you start allowing that to happen, then you’ve lost the fact of it being a boys’ club. The Los Angeles Boys of Leather, the San Francisco Boys of Leather, the Dallas Boys of Leather, are all run by boys.

boy ryan: The boy values, simply put, are love, respect and trust.

Zenger’s: Those sound like good values for any sort of relationship.

boy ryan: I agree.

boy ron: To give an example of what a boys’ club can do, we had a situation with a boy in another club in D.C. many years ago. The reason the boys’ club was formed was to have a place where a boy can come to feel safe. If somebody’s in the club and they’re being abused by their Sir or their Daddy or whatever, and they come and tell us, as the brotherhood we are, we’re there to protect them.

It hasn’t happened in San Diego, but I know of other places where things like this have happened with other boys, and these boys have gone over and physically moved the boy out of the house, and have protected him. We’re a brotherhood, and we look out for each other.

Zenger’s: How would you know if a relationship had reached that situation? How could someone outside tell when it’s stopped being consensual S/M and started being domestic violence?

boy ron: It would be up to the individual to come and tell the person.

boy ryan: Which in many cases doesn’t happen. But by the same token, what we need is the cry for help. We need the cry for help. We cannot act on something that we simply assume — we may be ending a relationship, or a multitude of things. God only knows.

boy ron: It’s like this weekend. We have a brother that’s going to be moving. We put out a call for volunteers, and we got a landslide of volunteers to come help this boy move.

Zenger’s: What’s the difference between a boy and a slave?

boy ron: That’s the $64 question a boy just can’t answer! I have no perception of what that is.

boy ryan: Because neither ron nor I are slaves, we have no perception of what that really is. I mean, the thing is, we can expound. We can try to explain what a slave is.

boy ron: There are different values, different ways you can be a slave. Some slaves have a contract with their Master where they turn everything in their life over to this person.

boy ryan: There are situations like that, where slaves turn their whole lives. Their bank accounts and everything are managed by their Daddy, their Sir, their boyfriend, their husband, whatever you want to call him. Boys, on the other hand, are a little more independent. It was a movement that was started by the D. C. Boys of Leather.

boy ron: boy keith.

boy ryan: It was basically this happy medium between a Sir and a slave, I suppose. I guess we’re a mixture of those two.

boy ron: Some of the old guard — not necessarily San Diego, but some of the old guard back East — will consider a boy as a slave that’s not ready to be a slave yet.

boy ryan: Or a Sir in waiting.

boy ron: Or a Sir in waiting, yes. I mean, the perfect example, we had a boy in the old club who was known as boy tipper, who went on to become Daddy Tipper, San Diego Leather Daddy, and then went on to become Sister Mary Drama in the Sisters [of Perpetual Indulgence].

We’ve got one boy that’s very new to Leather. He’s part of the rodeo. He wants to be part of us. Just like we have boys in our club that want to be part of the rodeo. We love the cowboys, and they love us. We have to plug the rodeo!

boy ryan: That turns on Ron!

Zenger’s: You mentioned the word “pledging” a couple of times. What is that process?

boy ryan: The pledging process involves, first, a person filling out an application to become a San Diego Leatherboy. Secondly, there’s a time frame, an undisclosed amount of time, in which the boy, or the aspiring boy, the pledge, is put through a series of tasks. We do not believe in hazing. But, on the other hand, we do believe in earning the San Diego Leatherboy back patch. We have them put on parties, functions, to see how well they will be doing in the Leather community; to see how well they will perform as a full-fledged Leatherboy.

boy ron: Their first order of business is to sell raffle tickets at fundraisers.

boy ryan: There are quite a few steps, and for every pledge there is a different process, depending on their personality. We’re also retrofitting our two new pledges with uniforms, and they’ll be wearing those uniforms until they receive their leather vests with San Diego Leatherboys back patches.

boy ron: And when they earn that vest, it’s a ceremony that is very memorable not only to them, but to anybody that’s watching it.

boy ryan: Just as you asked us where our Leather journeys started, you may be asking them — or someone may be asking them — where their Leather journeys started, and they can say, “San Diego Leatherboys.”

boy ron: We had one pledge that was very, very green. He went out and did his first Leather event. He bought his own jeans, the T-shirt and the boots, just so he could come up to us. We all went, like, “Wow. You’re great.” And the look on his face, and the smile on his face, of just knowing that he was part of something, and coming us and asking us, “When’s the next event?” That’s the enthusiasm that I like.

boy ryan: That’s the enthusiasm that we need.

boy ron: Yes. And it’s not all about service work. We went to Palm Springs, and we’re planning other social outings, pool parties and things like that.

boy ryan: We’re planning a few more trips outside of San Diego as well, to meet up with boys of other various large cities.

boy ron: Our club will go to Palm Springs and L.A. and San Francisco. We’re going to be doing hospitality for the upcoming California Leather/SIR contest in Long Beach in August. This will be the first time that all these clubs have got together to be in charge of hospitality. Which means that if they want to get drunk, they have to come and see us!

Zenger’s: What kinds of groups are you raising money for, and what do you hope to do in terms of fundraising in the future?

boy ron: We did a fundraiser just recently for Sir Magnum; when he became Mr. San Diego Eagle 2009, we donated the proceeds from our first official barbecue to Sir Magnum and the Leather Foundation. At our next barbecue, we donated part of the proceeds to Mr. Mike for IML.

In the past we did the Naughty Santa, for which the proceeds went to San Diego Hospice. That was in the name of one of our boys whom we lost this past year, Javier Spence. Spence was a former San Diego Boy of Leather that came over to our side and passed away. We made a donation in his honor. And then I’d like us to get together and do something to help out Leather Realm, the Leather Realm at Pride.

boy ryan: Which actually we were just part of the pie-in-the-face contest for. We were pie-ees in the pie-in-the-face contest.

boy ron: Ryan and I were pie-ees for the Reddi-Whipped and Pied, or something to that effect. We got up there and both got pies thrown in our faces.

boy ryan: And what about the slave auction at Urban Mo’s?

boy ron: Oh, yeah. Boy ryan was in a slave auction at Urban Mo’s. He had on a pair of chaps and actually got out and had a pair of white underwear with our boy logo on the right side, which we thought was really cute. He actually had those on Saturday at the pie-toss thing.

boy ryan: When I was being hosed down.

Zenger’s: Overall, where do you see the future of the Leatherboys?

boy ryan: I would like to work closely with Mama’s Kitchen. I would definitely like to help them. I would like to branch out a little bit more into the community and do a bit more work for them, either through volunteer service or financial backing and fundraisers.

boy ron: I’d like to see us try to do something with Being Alive.

boy ryan: Oh, Being Alive would be a great one.

boy ron: There’s an event that I would like to plan, coming up in August, that would involve helping schoolkids, which I can’t go into details about yet but that would be another arc in itself. This was the first year that the San Diego Leatherboys got involved with the Easter Egg Hunt, and we had a great time doing that, In fact, two of our pledges cried during the whole time. I’ve got a picture of Sean wiping tears from his face!

Being a member of the Imperial Court and on the board of directors, it did my heart good to see the boys reach out and do that work with the Imperial Court. And this past weekend we spent the evening with the rodeo.

boy ryan: I’d also say we wouldn’t be where we are without the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence as well. They have been an incredible help.

boy ron: They want to give us a blessing, but they have to get us all together at one time!

boy ryan: That’s harder than it seems!

boy ron: We’re also going to have our own truck in the Pride parade, right behind the Leather Pride float, that will be decorated in boys’ colors, and it will have the boys’ clubs of Palm Springs, San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

boy ryan: Yes, any boy group is invited to join in our float.

boy ron: And this will be a first for San Diego.

boy ryan: As a matter of fact, for this publication we’re making this an official announcement to all the boys’ groups in the United States and Canada — and Mexico, if there are any —

boy ron: — to come ride in our float, our truck.

boy ryan: We’d be more than happy to have you.

boy ron: There is another person that is not a boy, but we consider him our Daddy. This year, the San Diego Leatherboys did something that they’ve never, ever done: they sponsored a contestant for Mr. San Diego Leather. They sponsored Sir V, and that gentleman has been nothing but a great inspiration for us.

boy ryan: He’s been another wonderful asset to the San Diego Leatherboys.

Zenger’s: How do people get in touch with you?

boy ron: They can reach me at boyronsd@yahoo.com

boy ryan: They can reach me, boy ryan, at ryanito30@gmail.com

boy ron: And if they’d like to have more information, they can e-mail us and we can send them information. We also have a Yahoo group that they can sign up for. It’s sdleatherboys@yahoogroups.com. We have a Web site, too: it’s www.sdleatherboys.com, and on that you’ll see pictures of events that we’ve had. It hasn’t been updated in a while because our Web boy’s up in L.A. now, but it’s got the bylaws of the club on it, pictures of past events. It’s got pictures of our very first meeting, the Veterans’ Day event we did in the very beginning. And then we’ll have to get some more pictures up on that thing.

boy ryan: Next year we also may be having a large party, inviting all of California’s Leather entities, to a camp-out. We haven’t decided where quite yet, but California, get ready!

Need for Dental Tech Students Increases

story and photo by LEO E. LAURENCE

Copyright © 2009 by Leo E. Laurence • All rights reserved

PHOTO: Local dentist E. Preston Kaenel, D.D.S., says the needs for trained dental technicians, often community-college graduates, will soon dramatically increase. He’s holding teeth processed in new computerized lab equipment.

“Rapidly expanding career opportunities for community college graduates are opening up in the field of dental technicians, as a result of new, state-of-the-art lab equipment,” says dentist Dr. E. Preston Kaenel, 37. A native Californian, he earned his B.S. degree from U.C.S.D., and graduated from the U.S.C. School of Dentistry.

That new computerized equipment is the advanced Chairside Economical Restorations of Es-thetic Ceramic lab system — “CEREC,” for short. It makes one-visit appointments possible for common dental procedures like crowns and large fillings.

Many people fear their semi-yearly visit to the dentist. The prospects of a cavity or need for a crown can be daunting. It usually means making several appointments with your dentist, but no longer.

The $130,000 CEREC process allows a dentist to treat patients in just one visit.

Most dentists send their crown replacements to a lab to have the actual crown constructed. Now, with CEREC, dentists have their state-of-the-art lab in their offices.

The result is that more dental technicians, who are often community-college graduates, are needed to operate that equipment.

To make a crown (which normally takes at least two visits to your dentist) using CEREC, the dentist first uses a tiny camera to make a digital image of the tooth in the patient’s mouth, according to Dr. Kaenel.

That digital image is then fed into a computer, which does the modeling that will eventually become the new restoration or crown.

“As much as two-thirds of a tooth can be restored” with this new, high-tech equipment, says the young dentist.

The digitalized image of the modeled tooth is then fed into a computer, which does the modeling that will eventually become the new restoration or crown.

“As much as two-thirds of a tooth can be restored” with this new high-tech equipment, says Dr. Kaenel. “Or I can restore as little as the smallest filling.”

The digitalized image of the modeled tooth then goes to a mill, where the new crown is ground from tiny polychromatic blocks.

“Some dentists don’t want to do this lab work, and that means more jobs for trained dental technicians,” Dr. Kaenel said.

When some extreme dental problems are involved, and only the facilities of a large commercial lab can do the work, Dr. Kaenel says the equipment also allows him to quickly send a digitalized image of a tooth to the lab, speeding up the process for the patient.

This new dental equipment is especially important to dentists practicing in small towns where the nearest lab may be in a big city many miles away.

“I was in a small town in Minnesota, population no more than 20,000. There were no dental labs there. All the lab work for the local dentist had to be shipped to Minneapolis. With this new equipment, that dentist could have his own lab on premises,” Dr. Kaenel explained.

After the crown (restoration, etc.) comes out of the grinder, it goes into a small high-tech oven. It looks like a macro-version of a ceramic potter’s oven.

The oven can cook the crown at temperatures that shoot up to 1,200 degrees Celsius. “We usually fire at around 850° C. (about 1,600° F.),” Dr. Kaenel said.

Being a younger dentist, he likes having professional “toys” to work with, and uses the com-plex CEREC computer equipment about three days of the week, and sometimes three times a day. So far, he has provided patients with crowns in only one appointment for 52 times, since acquiring the advanced equipment just two months ago.

“Typically, we’re a very conservative profession,” Dr. Kaenel added. “Dentists personally often don’t take to new computerized advances in equipment. But our office is ‘ahead of the curve’. …

“Beginning in 2010, there will be some dramatic changes in the role of dental technicians or assistants in dentist’s offices,” he reported.

They will be authorized to do many of the procedures in a patient’s mouth that traditionally only a dentist was allowed to do, under state law.

“This state-of-the-art technology will result in the need for more highly trained dental technicians,” Dr. Kaenel said.

Outrage: Exposing Hypocrisy or Perpetrating It?

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

PHOTOS, top to bottom: Congressmember Barney Frank, former Senator Larry Craig (mug shot), former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey, former Human Rights Campaign executive director Elizabeth Birch, author/activist Larry Kramer. Courtesy Magnolia Pictures.

One wonders if director Kirby Dick — 50-something and straight, at least by his own account — picks such sexually provocative subjects for his documentaries because of his last name. So far he’s made Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, in which the title character was a man with cystic fibrosis who responded to being in constant pain by ramping up his discomfort level through having his wife subject him to extreme S/M; Twist of Faith, which showed a man dealing with the long-term trauma of having been sexually abused in his boyhood by a Roman Catholic priest; and This Film Is Not Yet Rated, about the motion-picture rating system and how it reflects America’s hypocrisy on matters sexual. His latest, Outrage, is an old-fashioned morality play in which you know from the get-go who the good guys are and who the bad guys are: the good guys are the independent reporters and activists who “out” closeted Queer politicians and the bad guys are the politicians themselves and most of the mainstream media, who actively and passively collude with them to maintain their secrets.

If this sounds like a movie based on a conspiracy theory, it’s because it is; in his written prologue — after a dizzying series of credits that makes it look like the projectionist is still fiddling with his lens to get the film in focus — Dick actually uses the C-word to describe the tacit (and, he alleges, sometimes not so tacit) alliance between homosexually active but heterosexually identified politicians and the media who cover them. He makes the point that hetero sex scandals involving politicians get debated endlessly and become fodder for tabloids and ostensibly “serious” news outlets alike (does the name “Bill Clinton” mean anything to you?), while homo ones mostly get swept under the carpet unless the homoactive politician gets caught in a police sting in a cruisy restroom like former Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) or soliciting teenage staffers for sex like Congressmember Mark Foley (R-Florida).

Outrage is a film carefully constructed to give the illusion that it’s more fearless than it is. It’s done in a dead-serious fashion; anyone who enjoyed the Michael Mooreisms of This Film Is Not Yet Rated — particularly the whole plotline of Dick and the two women private eyes (a Lesbian couple) he hired to break the omertà of the movie ratings board and find out its members’ secret identities — and was hoping for more of the same this time will be sorely disappointed. What’s more, Dick himself doesn’t “out” anyone, nor are there any new revelations in the film. Everyone named as a closeted Gay in the film — including Craig, Florida Governor Charlie Crist, California Congressmember Dave Dreier, former Louisiana Congressmember Jim McCrery and former New York Mayor Ed Koch (all men, and all Republicans except Koch) — has been publicized as such either by reporters for alternative newspapers or by Michael Rogers, the film’s principal “hero,” on his blog, blogactive.com.

The most blatant aspect of the morality-play nature of Outrage is that Dick adopts as his own the self-proclaimed agenda of “outers” Rogers, Michaelangelo Signorile (who along with Gabriel Rotello, his editor at the short-lived Queer publication OutWeek in New York from 1989 to 1991, invented “outing” in the first place) and Larry Kramer (founder of ACT UP and a close associate of Signorile and Rotello “in the day”). They insist that in seeking to expose certain politicians as Queer, they’re not punishing them for their homosexuality, but rather for their hypocrisy: for working, speaking and voting against the interests of the Queer community. The advertising copy for Outrage calls the film “a searing indictment of the hypocrisy of closeted politicians with appalling Gay rights voting records who actively campaign against the LGBT [Queer] community they secretly belong to.”

But what’s presented in the film as holding closeted Queer politicians to a standard of supporting Queer issues and rights can also be read as an ideological enforcement action, insisting that all Queers in public life adopt a liberal-Left policy agenda not only on Queer issues but everything else as well. The litmus-test issues on which the film bases its definition of who’s pro-Queer and who’s anti-Queer in public life are anti-discrimination legislation, anti-hate crimes legislation, “HIV/AIDS” funding and marriage equality for same-sex couples. The message of both Dick’s “outer” heroes and Dick himself is that unless you support that entire agenda — one associated far more with the Democratic than the Republican party — you’re “anti-Gay” and therefore your private sexual orientation is fair game for public scrutiny, whereas if you do support it your right to sexual privacy should be, and will be, respected.

All those items can be subject to legitimate question. You could be staunchly in favor of people’s right to be Queer and express their sexuality with members of their own gender and still oppose private-sector anti-discrimination laws as a violation of the rights of employers and employees to associate freely. You could oppose hate-crimes legislation on the ground that if you add years to the sentence of a person convicted of murder, robbery or some other felony on the ground that it was motivated by the victim’s homosexuality, the additional punishment is essentially one for anti-Queer thoughtcrime. You could oppose “HIV/AIDS” funding if you believe (as I do) that there are serious problems both with the mainstream explanation for AIDS and the drug-centered “therapy” approach that has become the standard of care, especially since most so-called “AIDS funding” goes to pay inflated prices for AIDS medications and therefore is really corporate welfare for Big Pharma. And you could even question whether same-sex relationships really ought to be called “marriages” and be put on the same legal basis as the opposite-sex relationships which actually produce children and propagate the species.

Now, most of those putative positions bear no relationship to my politics at all. I think it’s outrageous that in 31 states you can legally be denied employment for being Lesbian, Gay or Bisexual and in 39 states you can legally be denied employment for being Transgender. It’s also outrageous that the rights of committed Gay and Lesbian partners to marry each other is still a live-wire controversy in this country, and that the opponents of same-sex marriage openly and proudly boast that their aim is to write their understanding of the Bible and the Judeo-Christian tradition into this country’s secular law — and that they keep sounding off on the “marriage is for procreation” line when plenty of heterosexual couples don’t reproduce and many Queer couples are raising kids — either ones they’ve adopted (except in Florida, where there’s an outright ban on adoptions by same-sex couples which the putatively Gay Governor Crist fully supports), ones they’ve conceived with third-party help or ones they had normally in previous heterosexual relationships.

I’m a lot more conflicted about “HIV/AIDS” funding and a bit uneasy about hate-crimes legislation as well. Overall, it’s a good thing to add sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of characteristics like race, religion and gender that qualify for hate-crimes enhancements — but the mainstream Queer community’s defense of hate-crime legislation is uncomfortably close to the one Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia offered for sodomy laws in his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas: that even if we can’t enforce a law targeting certain people’s behavior, we ought to be able to have it on the books anyway just to express social disapproval of what they do. But the point isn’t to take one side or another on the debate over these issues; rather, it’s to say that reasonable people — including reasonable Queer people — can debate them and take different sides, and it’s troublesome to declare one side the “enemy” because they adopt a view on marriage or discrimination legislation or hate crime law or AIDS funding different from the liberal-Left consensus of the mainstream Queer establishment.

What’s more, the idea of declaring certain people “enemies” of the Queer community for opposing anti-discrimination, hate-crimes or marriage-equality legislation runs into another profoundly disturbing possibility: what do we do with Queer people who believe in a strong national defense, aggressive pursuit of the “war on terror,” a lassiez-faire economy with little or no government interference with the market and the private sector, and an approach to civil rights that involves protecting individuals rather than groups? All those beliefs would lead them to be far more comfortable with the Republican than the Democratic party — yet the Republicans, over the last 30 years (ever since the rise of the evangelical Christian Right and its emergence as a key part of the Republican voter base), have also embraced an aggressive challenge to the policy agenda of the Queer community and the very existence of what they refer to as “so-called ‘Gay rights.’”

Should a person with that mix of issue positions — actively Queer and concerned with the equal rights of his or her peers, but also conservative or Right-wing on most non-Queer issues — be expected to compromise everything else he or she believes in for the sake of his or her sexual orientation? Kirby Dick and his “heroes” obviously believe that. Yet in some ways there’s a certain poignancy to the lives of some of the people Dick and company place on the “villain” side of their ledger, a sad reality that they can’t work for the conservative causes they believe in without having to fear exposure and disgrace if their homosexual activities are revealed, either accidentally by circumstances or deliberately by “outers.” In that sense, it’s ironic that the promotional campaign for Outrage is using the slogan, “Do ask, do tell,” because Queer conservatives frequently find themselves in the same position as Queer servicemembers under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy: able to serve their country in the way they choose but only if they continually lie about themselves, and constantly fearful that their real orientation will come out anyway, ruin their careers and deprive them of that ability to serve.

What’s more, Outrage takes an uncomfortably essentialist view of sexual orientation that divides the human race into two groups: “straight” and “Gay.” The word “Bisexual” appears in the film exactly twice: once when former Human Rights Campaign executive director Elizabeth Birch is rattling off the litany by which the Queer community defines itself these days — “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender” — and once when Senator Craig, shown in a film clip from a TV interview, says, “I’m not homosexual” and in the same breath quickly adds, “I’m not Bisexual.” Just as Barack Obama is almost universally referred to as “America’s first African-American president” when he is in fact mixed-race and his white parent had far more of a role in his upbringing than his Black one, so the people the movie purports to “out” are described throughout as “Gay” even though many of them are (or have been) married to women and have fathered children. Why should one assume that the feelings of a so-called “Gay politician” for his wife and children are automatically less important to him emotionally — or even physically — than whatever he’s getting out of his clandestine male-on-male trysts? And why do so many Queer people automatically call such people “Gay” when, at least by their behavior, they’re clearly Bisexual?

Not only does Outrage avoid these issues, it stacks the deck against any consideration of them. Dick goes out of his way to tell us that not only does Larry Craig deny being Bisexual, but the three children Craig was raising weren’t his — they were his wife’s by a previous marriage. Dick also brings on a former college classmate of Louisiana Congressmember McCrery who claims that McCrery was a liberal Democrat when in school, and it was only when he decided to run for Congress in a conservative district that he did a political 180°, re-registering as Republican, joining a Right-wing evangelical church and adopting a hard-Right stance against Queer rights and on other issues as well. Dick’s agenda is not to present the dilemma faced by his subjects in its real complexity; rather, under the guise of exposing “hypocrisy,” it’s to demonize them and get his audience not to understand them, but to hate them as much as he does.

That’s why the film contains some extraordinary scenes, including one in which a Queer interviewee asks how the wives of the homosexually active politicians handle being married to them and why they stay with them. (Probably for many of the same reasons Hillary Clinton has stayed with her husband despite his multiple adulteries with women.) This person then goes on to suggest that the wives should be getting regular STD screenings — a surprising endorsement of the homophobic idea that male-to-male sex is somehow dirtier than male-to-female sex and more likely to lead to infection. Actually it’s not that surprising when you realize that two of the people Dick presents as “heroes,” Signorile and Kramer, were strong supporters of an anti-sex movement in the New York Queer community in the mid-1990’s that, ostensibly to prevent the spread of AIDS, sought to close all public sex locations and actively lobbied the police department to shut down bathhouses and public cruising areas, either by undercover entrapments or open raids.

Dick’s choices of “good guys” among Queer politicians and activists are equally troublesome. He presents former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey, Massachusetts Congressmember Barney Frank and former Arizona Congressmember Jim Kolbe on the “good” side of his moral ledger and totally ignores the fact that both Frank and McGreevey were dragged out of the closet by scandals. Frank was forced out after one of his boyfriends was caught running a rent-boy business out of the Congressmember’s office and using a taxpayer-funded phone line to do so. McGreevey was driven both out of the closet and out of office after a young man he was trying to seduce revealed that the governor had bribed him with a government job to have sex with him. In forgiving his “good guys” like Frank and McGreevey despite their clearly improper, and likely illegal, behavior, while lambasting his “bad guys” (though, of all his “outing” victims, Craig is the only one who openly broke the law), Dick, under the guise of exposing hypocrisy, is really perpetrating hypocrisy.

Another one of the film’s “good guys” is Dan Gurley, former North Carolina field director for the Republican National Committee (in which capacity he once mailed a postcard to churchgoers in Southern states saying that Democrats would take away their Bibles and turn their states over to homosexuals) and now active with Equality California. One person that’s missing from the movie is former Congressmember Mark Foley (R-Florida), despite the national scandal surrounding his exposure in 2006 for sexually harassing male Congressional pages and sending them disgustingly lubricious e-mails. Dick told an interviewer for the Evening Spot blog that the reason he left out Foley was, “Mark Foley initially had some anti-Gay votes he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, like three quarters of the Congress, but very soon after that, even though he was quasi-closeted, he had a very good pro-Gay voting record.” Dick’s attitude towards Gurley and Foley is a grim indication of the film’s (and the filmmaker’s) ideological agenda. He wants closeted Gay Republicans not only to stop being closeted but to stop being Republicans — or at least stop being conservatives.

He may not get his wish. One person he briefly interviewed is self-proclaimed Gay conservative and former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan, who’s become a role model for a new generation of Queer Rightists, some of whom have gone farther towards Right-wing orthodoxy than he has. San Diego is the home of City Councilmember Carl DeMaio, who instead of hiding in the closet has said, basically, “I’m Gay. So what? I really want to talk about the city budget and all the cuts I want to make to balance it.” It’s also the base of openly Gay Right-wing talk-show host Steve Yuhas, who was driven from the local Queer press for his inconvenient politics and now holds forth every Sunday night with a show expressing why he doesn’t think he should be expected to toe a liberal-Left line on both Queer and non-Queer issues just because his romantic and sexual interests lie with men. The American Right has long fought charges of racism and sexism by actively recruiting women and people of color to join its ranks — Phyllis Schlafly, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Armstrong Williams, Alan Keyes — and now it’s fighting back against accusations of homophobia by recruiting Right-wing Queers and giving them political and media exposure.

Whatever can be said against Outrage, the fact is that Kirby Dick is a master documentarian who has made a compelling movie. He’s done a good enough job of making his case that most of the reviewers have accepted his film at face value and not raised the questions I have above — namely, to what extent is “outing” carefully selected Right-wing Queer politicians driven by an ideological agenda that says Queers in public life have to believe, and work for, a strong set of liberal-Left values, including ideas with which they may not be comfortable? Also, to what extent does “outing” buy into the negative image of homosexuality its advocates say they’re trying to fight? As much as they say (in the film and elsewhere) that they’re not seeking to punish the “outed” for their homosexuality — only their “hypocrisy”— it’s a distinction that will be lost on many straight viewers of this movie who will see the “outers” as a group of unsmiling fanatics imposing ideological conformity on Queer politicians by threatening to embarrass them publicly over their sexual orientation if they don’t comply.

As much as I ordinarily can’t stand Andrew Sullivan, he really spoke for me when he said in this film that above all the Queer community should be a place where its members can feel protected and where their privacy can be respected. The film includes an archival clip of the late Harvey Milk urging Queer people to come out — but I really doubt that Milk meant that they should be dragged out forcibly; rather, he wanted to make people aware that both their community and they as individuals would be better off if they did so voluntarily. “Outing” strikes at the heart of our community; instead of watching each other’s backs and protecting each other against law-enforcement abuses and both Queer and straight predators, the vision of “outing” is one of a self-appointed group of ideological commissars imposing intellectual discipline on Queer public figures and saying, “Do what we want — or else.” You should definitely go see Dick’s film — but you should watch it with a critical eye and debate these issues on your way out of the theatre instead of uncritically accepting his black-and-white vision of them.

Outrage is tentatively scheduled to open Friday, June 5 at the Landmark Cinemas Hillcrest, 3965 Fifth Avenue in Hillcrest. Please call (619) 819-0236 for showtimes and other information.

Health Advocate McGuire Speaks Out for Single-Payer

Even Some Progressives Skeptical It’ll Be “Just Another HMO”

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Judging from the questions he got from audience members listening to his presentation at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church in Hillcrest May 7, Andrew McGuire is going to have his work cut out for him in persuading Californians to support single-payer financing for health care. He was already aware of some of the pitfalls, including a well-funded health insurance industry with excellent political connections willing to spend billions to make sure that single-payer — which would essentially replace them with a government agency — never sees the light of day anywhere in the U.S. What he probably wasn’t expecting, though, was that even in a progressive audience there would still be people highly skeptical that single-payer would work and fearful that the plan would simply turn the state’s health care system into a gigantic government-run health maintenance organization (HMO).

Not that McGuire hasn’t faced challenges before. He’s currently a professor of sociology at Sonoma State University north of Marin County in the San Francisco Bay Area, and also serves as executive director of the Trauma Foundation at San Francisco General Hospital. His 36-year career in health activism started in Boston in 1973, when he organized Action Against Burns and successfully lobbied for government standards requiring that sleepware for children be flame-resistant. In 1978, he began a national campaign to require that cigarettes be made to burn out if they’re dropped on bedding or furniture, leading to mandatory fire-safety standards for cigarettes in seven U.S. states and Canada.

McGuire’s most famous project was Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). He helped Candy Lightner found this group after her daughter was killed by a drunk driver, served on its board of directors from 1981 to 1983, was acting executive director and helped secure MADD’s first major funding. In 1990 he chaired an unsuccessful campaign to pass a “nickel a drink” alcohol tax in California. McGuire led the statewide campaign to ban cheap, unreliable “Saturday Night Special” guns in California and organized the first nationwide grass-roots campaign for gun control in 1998. Originally called the Bell Campaign, it was later renamed the Million Mom March — and McGuire directed it until 2001 and organized a protest in Washington attended by 700,000 people.

As if that weren’t enough, McGuire is a documentary filmmaker with 10 movies under his belt, mostly about ethical issues involving health care. He won an Emmy Award for his first film, Here’s Looking at You, Kid — about the rehabilitation of a seven-year-old boy who had suffered burns over 75 percent of his body — and has won the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s prize fellowship (the so-called “genius-grant” award) and the Kellogg National Fellowship. In the early 1980’s he ran the Mill Valley Film Festival. “That was embarrassing,” McGuire said after Tanja Winter, head of the church’s Peace and Democracy Action Group (which was sponsoring the program) finished reading his résumé. “That was all an apprenticeship for bringing single-payer health care to California.”

McGuire spoke on behalf of the California OneCare Campaign, established by an organization called Health Care for All — California, which he said was one of only two groups in the state, along with the California Physicians’ Alliance, whose only mission is to bring the single-payer system to this state. (There are other organizations that have single-payer as part of their mission, but do other things as well, McGuire explained.) Before he opened the meeting to audience questions, McGuire focused on the political arguments for single-payer and outlined his group’s strategy for achieving it in the face of the ferocious and well-funded opposition of the health insurance industry.

According to McGuire, none of the other health care reform plans — including the one President Obama’s administration is developing and the one former Democratic Party chair Howard Dean is putting together privately — will achieve the benefits of single-payer because they keep the current health insurance industry in place. “Though it is admirable that the President is taking steps to insure everyone,” McGuire said, “his plan has been tried before at the state level — and has failed every time. As long as insurance companies are involved, they will take profits out of the system, there won’t be cost controls, and they will defile the reform year after year through their crushing amendments on appropriations bills, and by trying to have funding cuts enacted by the legislators that are in their pockets.”

McGuire said that even the much-discussed “public option” in Obama’s plan — setting up a government-run insurance system that people can pick as an alternative to private insurance — won’t work because legislators, dependent on insurance companies’ campaign contributions, will gut the public plan’s budget and wreck it. Indeed, he admitted that even a single-payer system isn’t invulnerable to ideologically driven political tampering. He pointed out that in Canada, when a Conservative government is elected, it cuts the budget for the health-care system — “and that’s when you get those long waits for elective surgeries,” he added, referring to one of the most frequent arguments made against single-payer in the U.S. “When the Liberals return to power, they restore the cuts.”

According to McGuire, America’s current health care system is “immoral, demeaning and lethal. It’s immoral that an infant, child or adult cannot afford, and therefore cannot receive, health care. It is demeaning to all of us that we stand alone among industrialized, and many non-industrialized, nations that we allow at least 50 million people to go uninsured while private insurance companies reap robust profits as they make insurance unaffordable to millions, or deny insurance to those with ‘pre-existing conditions.’ Also, there are millions of Americans who are under-insured. Seventy-five percent of those who file for personal bankruptcy because of medical expenses are insured, but, to their horror, are inadequately insured to cover their medical expenses. And, according to the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine, each year over 20,000 U.S. residents die because they bear the diagnosis, ‘Uninsured.’”

The single-payer plan McGuire was pushing is SB 810, a bill introduced in the California legislature by openly Gay State Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco). It’s the same proposal as the former SB 840, which former State Senator Sheila Kuehl (also openly Queer) pushed through the state legislature twice, only to see it vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Unwittingly proving the old adage that the devil is in the details — the full bill is 80 pages long — McGuire found himself having to field audience questions about just what the plan would or wouldn’t cover, and in particular whether it would set up a government agency that in practice would act like a private HMO.

“The specifics,” McGuire explained, “are that you have a primary health care provider — a doctor or a nurse-practitioner — and that’s your access to the system. Whatever that provider thinks you need is prescribed and paid for 100 percent. Corporations like Kaiser can bid to provide care on a capitation basis [i.e., a certain specified amount per patient], and they will bill the system rather than individual patients.” Fielding a question about whether the system would allow someone to have a “medical home,” McGuire joked that that was a euphemism for “a primary provider that you really like,” and said that the plan’s exact coverage will be decided by a medical board “based on input from health care providers and consumers.”

One audience member took exception to the use of a primary care provider as a gatekeeper, and said he couldn’t support the plan if it didn’t allow people to make their own appointments with specialists without having to have it approved by their primary care provider first. “Then it’s just like an HMO,” he said. Another man, family-practice doctor John Gordon, said that health care systems in which patients are allowed to see specialists on their own generally have worse patient outcomes than ones in which they have to go to a primary provider first. McGuire said that one difference between a single-payer plan and an HMO is that if you don’t like the decisions your primary provider makes about your care, you can fire them and hire any qualified person you want.

Another audience member asked if alternative treatments — acupuncture, chiropractic, homeopathy and herbal therapies — would be covered. McGuire said the bill definitely covered acupuncture and chiropractic, and the others would be available based on approval from your primary care provider. The person who raised this issue said that would be a problem because many Western-style allopathic doctors know nothing about alternative treatments, regard them all as quackery, and therefore wouldn’t allow patients to use them if the choice was theirs.

McGuire also took questions about the politics of single-payer and why his organization is aiming at California rather than the federal government. Part of the reason, he said, is they’re following the Canadian model; single-payer was first introduced in the province of Saskatchewan and gradually spread to other provinces before being adopted nationwide. But his main concern, he said, was the sheer power of entrenched financial interests over the Washington system and their ability to use politicians’ dependence on large campaign contributors to kill all meaningful reform, not only on health care but everything else as well.

“When Hillary Clinton formed her health care task force in 1993,” McGuire recalled, “there was no one in the room, aside from some union people, who wasn’t part of the health insurance or health care industries. It’s the same today with Obama’s group. Whenever people are polled directly, single-payer is their number one choice for how to reform health care. But Washington isn’t a place where change happens; it’s a place where change doesn’t happen, and that’s why I long ago lost interest in tracking what’s going on in Washington.” Indeed, McGuire said that he advised every grass-roots health group he helped start not to set up an office in Washington or in any state capitals, precisely because he feels lobbying politicians through such an office is just a distraction from the need to build grass-roots community support throughout the state and nation.

Responding to an audience member who expressed his frustration that the current collapse of America’s financial system isn’t inspiring more Americans to question the workability of capitalism and the wisdom of its bankers, McGuire said, “The insurance industry is just as powerful as the banks. Senator Max Baucus (D-Montana) [chair of the Senate Finance Committee and considered the number one Senator in shaping health care policy] got $600,000 from the insurance industry in the last two years. It’s a putrid system. We’re gong to construct a grass-roots movement and we have a chance to get something through.” McGuire said he had “no hope for the national level,” especially after the staff which put together the panel of experts to speak to Baucus’s committee deliberately excluded anyone who supported single-payer.

“When it comes to banks or health issues,” McGuire said, “there’s little or no difference between Republicans and Democrats. The only solution is real campaign finance reform.” He didn’t elaborate what he meant by “real campaign finance reform,” though in most progressive circles that’s become code for plans like those operating in Maine and Arizona. These allow candidates who get a certain number of petition signatures and nominal contributions from ordinary individuals to have their campaigns fully financed with public money — as long as they agree to take no further private contributions at all.

McGuire explained his political strategy for organizing grass-roots support for single-payer in California and getting it past the two-thirds vote requirement in the legislature needed to adopt a plan to finance it. (A bill to establish a single-payer system in principle only needs a majority vote of the legislature and the governor’s signature, so SB 810 is written without any specifics on how to pay for it. Instead, the bill calls for setting up a blue-ribbon panel to come up with the financing plan.) The plan also includes a way to respond when the health insurance industry puts the issue up for a vote and tries to scare Californians into voting against single-payer with “Harry and Louise”-style fear propaganda.

“If I have to leave all of you with one point, it is this: we’re going to do it in California, and then in another 10 to 15 years we’ll have it nationally,” McGuire said. “There’s light at the end of the tunnel in California. We have to create a database of supporters so that, when the commercials against single-payer come on the air, we’ll have an educated public that will be inoculated against them.”

Yes on 1A Through 1F May 19

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN, Editor

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The word “compromise” has been jokingly defined as “a mutually disagreeable solution to a problem.” It’s in that spirit that Zenger’s endorses a “yes” vote on Propositions 1A through 1F on the May 19 California special election ballot.

Not that this is in any way an enthusiastic endorsement. The very need for this election underscores just how crazy and dysfunctional California’s government in general, and its budget process in particular, have become. The combination of a highly volatile tax system whose revenues fluctuate wildly depending on the health of the overall economy (and we all know how that’s been lately!), inexperienced legislators hamstrung by a strict term-limit law that forces them out of office just at the point when they’ve started learning their jobs, voter initiatives that have put great chunks of the state budget out of legislative control, an increasingly ideological Republican party that has elevated “no new taxes!” even above the Ten Commandments, and — worst of all — an insane requirement for a two-thirds vote in both houses of the legislature to pass a budget, have converged to make California virtually ungovernable.

No one is saying this compromise budget plan is a long-term solution to California’s government woes. Almost six years after Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for governor and promised to “cut up California’s credit cards” once and for all, the state is still borrowing billions of dollars each year to maintain paper compliance with the constitutional mandate to balance its budget. These ballot measures appear before the voters because California’s last cut-and-paste budget, passed 81 days late last summer because it took that long to cherry-pick the Republican caucus for the votes needed to meet the two-thirds requirement, collapsed under the gun of smaller-than-expected tax receipts due to the nationwide recession and the bursting of California’s housing-market bubble. A handful of Republicans finally signed on to badly needed new taxes — albeit regressive ones like sales taxes and vehicle license fees — as part of an overall deal that needs the support of the voters on May 19 to take effect.

The ballot measures are confusing, but in essence the flagship proposition is 1A, which would extend this year’s temporary tax increases from two years to four in exchange for establishing a so-called “rainy-day fund,” a mechanism to force the government to save tax money in good economic times in order to have it available to tide the state over in bad times. Proposition 1B is a companion measure that would start to undo the damage that has been done to California’s school funding as monies supposedly set aside for education have been raided again and again during California’s seemingly perpetual budget crisis since 2003. Proposition 1C authorizes borrowing against future receipts from the California state lottery and makes vague promises of “modernizing” the lottery to increase the state’s income from it.

Propositions 1D and 1E are necessary because California voters have routinely indulged in what’s called “ballot-box budgeting,” setting aside great chunks of state revenue for emotionally appealing programs like children’s health programs and mental health services. These propositions also enacted special taxes to pay for them — a tax on tobacco for the children’s health programs and a surcharge on wealthy taxpayers for mental health — with the result that these programs are flush with cash at a time when the rest of the state budget is starving and other, equally worthy programs are facing massive cutbacks because the voters never froze those priorities into law at the ballot box. The last proposition in the package, 1F, is a modest (too modest, if you ask me) attempt to make legislators suffer personally, in their pocketbooks, every time they’re late passing a state budget.

Opposition to these propositions has come largely from the usual suspects — the radical-Right goon squad on talk radio and the Republican caucus in the state legislature — people who not only don’t fear but actively support the destruction of large parts of the state government, especially public education, health care and anything else that helps working-class and low-income people. A while back the Los Angeles Times ran an op-ed column called “Sweden or Mississippi,” lamenting the fact that California voters seem to want a level of government service equivalent to Sweden’s but are only willing to pay Mississippi-sized taxes for it. Not the Proposition 1A opponents, who regard Mississippi as a positive role model for what they think a state government should be and aren’t ashamed to say so.

What’s amazing is how many progressives have been willing to play into the hands of the radical Right and the talk-radiocracy on this one. The Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU), after dithering about 1A for months, finally came out against it. So did the San Diego Democratic Club, which argued the issue at their March 26 meeting and repudiated the good-sense position of one of their favorite elected officials, openly Lesbian State Senator Christine Kehoe, in a debate whose lack of contact with political reality approached the delusional.

Kehoe urged the club to approve the propositions because, as a veteran state legislator (she’s served in either the State Assembly or State Senate since she was termed out of her seat on the San Diego City Council in 2000), she knows all too well the difficulty of getting any new revenue out of a dysfunctional budget process that gives a maniacal minority party veto control. “This is the first state budget in 18 years to include new revenues,” she said. “Some people will argue that the spending caps [the ‘rainy-day fund’] will hurt the disabled and elderly, but if we are not able to get the additional revenues we will have much harder gaps to close. This is the best budget we can get with Republican votes. If they don’t pass, future budgets will mean more borrowing and more cuts.”

Unfortunately, because of a schedule conflict Kehoe had to leave the meeting before the club debated the propositions. When the debate actually happened the club members were swayed by the emotional but irrational arguments of Queer labor activist Carlos Marquez and others who focused on the fear that the “rainy-day fund” will force future cuts in education, health care and social programs — and ignored the even deeper cuts in precisely those programs that will happen if the propositions fail. Many club members voted against 1A in the delusion that its defeat will somehow send the legislative Republicans back to the negotiating table to agree to more tax increases to salvage state programs important to Democratic constituencies but not to Republican ones.

Nonsense. The only people who will benefit politically from the defeat of the May 19 ballot measures, 1A in particular, will be the anti-tax zealots in the California Republican party and on talk radio. They will be able to crow that they “protected the California taxpayers” against the threat of actually being required to pay for a decent state government that looks out for its less fortunate citizens — and they will largely have achieved their long-term goal of “starving the beast” and forcing California’s level of government services down to, or even below, Mississippi’s.

It’s a profound comment on the political dilemmas facing progressive voters in this state that we have to choose between a flawed budget reform proposal and an even worse future if it doesn’t pass. But the current state of the California constitution, and especially the two-thirds requirement to pass a state budget (only two other states, Arkansas and Rhode Island, have this insane provision in their state constitutions), gives the Republican party the best of both worlds: the power to control the state budget process without having to accept responsibility for its failures. There’s little point in pretending that Propositions 1A through 1F on the May 19 ballot represent anything more than yet another stopgap “solution” to California’s budget crisis — but they’re a stopgap that’s needed desperately, and needed now.

DARREL WOOD, JR. of THE ELEPHANT PROJECT:

17-Year Old Gay Man Leads North Park Festival Headliners

interview by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Darrel Wood, Jr. is only 17 years old and a high-school senior, and he grew up in the notoriously redneck San Diego suburb of Santee, but he’s already been in a band called Cain Street that’s recorded two CD’s and is about to release a CD EP with his current group, the Elephant Project. The Elephant Project’s instrumentation is typical rock-band — two guitars, bass and drums — but the personnel aren’t; they’re two women, guitarist Ashley Castillo and drummer Valerie Lozano; and two men, Wood on lead vocals and guitar and Marc Pattee on bass.

What’s more, Wood is not only openly Gay — or, as he prefers to call himself, “homosexual” — but he’s written songs directly dealing with issues affecting the Queer community. When he performed at the final Say What! open mike at Filter coffeehouse April 1, he played a piece about older Gay men who approach younger ones offering to mentor them — and the younger ones thinking they’re making sexual advances and telling them to get lost.

The Elephant Project is scheduled to headline the North Park Arts Festival Sunday, May 17 at 5 p.m. on University Avenue east of 30th Street. On their MySpace page, myspacecom/elephantproject/music, they describe a wide range of influences including Billy, TOOL, The Mars Volta, Incubus, Muse, Led Zeppelin, Blind Melon, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Arcade Fire, Captain Squeegee, Ella Fitzgerald and “imaginations.” He did his Zenger’s interview at Filter on 30th and Polk April 8, and his mother Valerie came along and added her own comments.

Zenger’s: Why don’t you give me a little background about yourself and how you got into music?

Darrel Wood, Jr.: I guess I started getting into music when I was 10 years old. My parents bought me a small keyboard, and I took keyboard lessons but I hated them. I hated learning “Mary Had a Little Lamb” over and over again. Then my dad, who’s been a drummer in a classic-rock band since before I was born, started teaching me guitar. I was very inspired by him and the music he played. It was a lot of fun. When I started on guitar, immediately I found my life’s purpose. Music was for me. Ever since then I’ve been practicing three hours a day, and I love it.

Valerie Wood [Darrell’s mother]: Or more.

Zenger’s: How did you form your current band, The Elephant Project?

Darrel Wood, Jr.: My current band was formed because my previous band, Cain Street, was having our second CD release party. I had these songs that I had written. I asked the lead singer of Cain Street if we could perform at their CD release party before them. So he said, “Of course.”

I talked to my best friend Valerie [Lozano], who said she played drums. She’d never played with anyone before. I got her over to my house, and all of a sudden it was like beautiful magic, and I couldn’t believe she’d never played with anyone. She’s absolutely incredible. I started teaching her songs, and I also talked to one of my best friends, Marc [Pattee] and started teaching him songs on the bass, because he’d been playing guitar forever and I said, “Well, I need someone.” He was very talented. So I immediately started teaching him, and at our first performance at the CD release party we performed for 400 people, at least. It was an incredible performance, awesome.

Zenger’s: That’s a great way to start. So where was this?

Valerie Wood: It was in Jamul.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: This was in Jamul, on August 4, 2007.

Valerie Wood: It was at a private residence.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: It was a really big property, so we just got everyone we could out there, and it just turned out great.

Zenger’s: How has the band developed since?

Darrel Wood, Jr.: We have acquired one new member, named Ashley [Castillo], who is an incredible guitarist. I started realizing after a while that I couldn’t play and sing all the time; I needed some extra backing on guitar, and some extra fill. And she’s perfect. She’s an incredible guitarist.

Valerie Wood: And you all go to school together.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Ashley and Valerie have actually known each other since kindergarten. We like to say, “We were all best friends who happened to play instruments very well, so then we started a band.” And we’ve been writing more songs. Last summer, we recorded an EP that we’re calling Bones, and that should be released in mid-June this year.

Zenger’s: You said you’d already had two albums out with the band before this, Cain Street. How close would you say the sounds of the two bands are?

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Not very close at all!

Zenger’s: How have you evolved?

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Well, Cain Street itself has evolved as well. The first album was very acoustic — I wouldn’t say pop, but much more easygoing. The second album was more inspired by Rage Against the Machine and Tool, bands like that. And in the Elephant Project, I’m very jazz-influenced, so it’s a very —

Valerie Wood: A combination of all of those.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Yes, progressive, jazz, punk, reggae, high energy, really fast. Ashley and Valerie both got started playing music off of punk rock, so we’re putting punk rock in with jazz; and my bassist really likes indie music. Combining indie music and this melting pot of genres really turns out well. It’s something very different.

Zenger’s: Yes, I saw the “Influences” list on your Web site, and I hadn’t thought I’d ever see Ella Fitzgerald and Tool mentioned as influences on the same band!

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Those are both huge influences on me as well as my band. Each of us has very eclectic tastes in music, and we’re all very different. I like that; I think it all comes together perfectly. We like writing songs that have a lot of movements in them, not just verse-chorus-verse-chorus. We really like putting in rextended bridges and making our songs five to six minutes long, making them pieces of art, not just songs you’d hear on the radio.

Zenger’s: To someone like me, who has living memories of the 1960’s, it sounds like a 1960’s band.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Yes. A lot of my current lyrics — not so much the ones being released on Bones — are very inspired by Beat poetry. We take what we can from different eras, the best part of everything.

Zenger’s: It’s a pretty major achievement — two albums with one band, a forthcoming EP with another — for someone who’s just 17.

Valerie Wood: Well, by the time he was 11 he was playing in coffeehouses throughout the county. That was a lot of fun, going to different coffeehouses. Sometimes it was just him, sometimes it was him and Dad together.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: My dad definitely got me started performing. I wrote a couple of songs and he said, “Let’s put you on a stage! Let’s do it!” He was so avid to see me performing, especially with vocals, because back when I was younger, I really didn’t like my voice. I didn’t like singing at all, and he was the one who said, “You have to sing your songs! Who else is going to sing your songs?”

Zenger’s: You’ve mentioned your dad. How many other musicians are in your family?

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Well, he’s the only musician that directly influenced me — and him bringing musicians around — in my family. I guess there are family friends who’ve been with us so long that they are family now, you know, that play music, like the lead singer of Cain Street, Anthony Sanchez. He’s pretty much taught me everything I know. He’s a very big influence in my life as far as music is concerned..

Valerie Wood: And his dad plays with your dad.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Yes, his dad is the guitarist with my dad’s band, so it’s a big family fest of music. Dad’s bass player’s son used to play with Anthony, and now he’s off doing the funk thing. It’s interesting how we’ve all branched off from our fathers, and my mom’s dad played mariachi music, very Mexican influence and everything. On my dad’s side of the family, we’re finding that a lot of people from the Midwest play country music. So it’s kind of interesting how it all ends up. It’s very cool.

Zenger’s: When I saw you here at Say What! you did two songs. One was “Sunny Afternoon” by the Kinks — another 1960’s connection —

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Yes, yes. I love the Kinks.

Zenger’s: How did you first encounter that kind of music? Was it your parents’ record collection, or what?

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Going to my dad’s band practices. His band covers Led Zeppelin, the Doors,Z.Z. Top and old Tom Petty. My mother still listens to a lot of old R&B and soul, as well as all the rock and everything.

Valerie Wood: Jazz.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Jazz and stuff. My dad listens to all of the hard-rock stuff, like Black Sabbath. I remember some of the first songs I learned were Black Sabbath songs and Led Zeppelin songs, and I loved it.

Zenger’s: Were you at all influenced by the Grateful Dead?

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Actually, no. I’ve always heard the Grateful Dead and I liked them, but they were never integrated into my childhood.

Zenger’s: Even though, in some ways, the way you’re describing your band is something like a Dead of today. They drew on a lot of jazz influences and incorporated them into rock. They played very long songs, with complicated structures, and drew on a lot of different kinds of music.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Yes, the Grateful Dead, them and the Beatles — the Beatles is another band that I didn’t necessarily grow up with, but I appreciate them a lot for their innovation, because for their time they came up with so many new things that no other band was doing. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. We feel that, aside from a few artists that really make a difference, music is kind of stuck in a rut, and everyone’s kind of waiting for something new, or until then just replaying what they’ve always been playing.

A lot of artists are going back to their roots in the — and others are going back to the 1980’s, which is interesting. I’m not a particular 1980’s fan. We’re trying to be as innovative and creative as possible, without creating music that people are turned off by. There’s a band we’re very influenced by called the Mars Volta, and I love the Mars Volta, but sometimes their songs are so complex and so innovative that it’s too much to listen to.

Valerie Wood: It’s probably what people thought of Jimi Hendrix when he came out.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Yes, exactly. So I guess what we’re trying to do is let people connect to new, innovative, artistic music.

Valerie Wood: You guys were covering Janis Joplin there for a little while, too.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Yes, we did a cover of a Janis Joplin song, “Move Over.” It’s a very hard song to sing, so we don’t play it much anymore!

Zenger’s: Isn’t it unusual that your band is evenly split by gender: two women and two men?

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Yes, that’s interesting.

Valerie Wood: They’re very proud of that.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: We call ourselves “a group of rock ’n’ roll minorities,” because the two girls in the band are Latina, and then we have — I’m the only right-handed person in my band, and I’m a homosexual. And Mark, who’s the bassist, the straight white male, seems to be the only one who fits into the rock ’n’ roll stereotype. So we very much appreciate our roots and our diversity, and that’s what we try to talk about.

Zenger’s: I wanted to ask you about the inspiration for the other song I heard you do, this piece about older people in the Gay community reaching out to younger people, and the younger people thinking, “Oh, this geezer is just trying to get at me,” when he might be offering something else.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: I watched a documentary on the Logo channel, and it was specifically about that. In San Francisco, it’s really hard on the seniors in the Gay community there when they don’t have their rights, when they’ve been with their partner forever, and then their partner dies and they have to go back to a really hard way of living, when they were so comfortable before. There are so many paths that have been made for the younger Gay generation, but we don’t know that because we’re not educated about that. No one tells us.

My parents are completely supportive about my homosexuality, but I was never taught about Harvey Milk until the movie came out, which is kind of sad for me to say as a homosexual. Those political figureheads —

Valerie Wood: We’re learning the history of the community together.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: I think it would be helpful if more kids learned about those role models, because we really have none. None are taught to us. If the older Gay generation were to be able to speak in peace to the younger Gay generation, they would know those role models and maybe have some hope for the future.

Valerie Wood: Oh, the incredible stories that have come from that, their lives and their struggles. Even the good things that have come their way because of [struggle]. That would be incredible.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Exactly. I think that a lot of the younger Gay generation feel that it’s so much so a “fight” or a “rebellion” for their rights, for being who they are. I don’t think it’s a fight, necessarily, to go into it with love and acceptance and everything.

Valerie Wood: And just be who you are.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: It’s teaching people, more than fighting against people. If you start a “war,” quote-unquote, you’re just creating more opposition. It’s really about teaching people how to accept everyone.

Valerie Wood: I just think more people need to be aware of the people that paved the way for where we are today and to have some appreciation for all of those “veterans,” we’ll call them.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: “Mavericks,” can we be so bold?

Valerie Wood: And, at times, silent sufferers in those days.

Zenger’s: I was particularly interested in this because one of those unsung pioneers is my associate editor, Leo Laurence, who’s 70 years old, and who started the first Gay liberation organization in San Francisco in March 1969 and led the first Gay-rights demonstration four months before Stonewall. He’s quite naturally upset that virtually nobody, even in the Gay community, seems to know that.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Yes.

Valerie Wood: That is upsetting. That’s extremely upsetting.

Zenger’s: So when I heard your song, he was one of the people I thought of.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Very definitely, and I guess he was one of the people I was writing about.

Valerie Wood: And there are so many people out there with this history and this knowledge, and because of the stigma that they lived with for so long, they’re out there in this position where they’re just not comfortable, or haven’t been allowed to come and get together with the youth and form some type of place where everybody can get together and share all this knowledge with. That would be an incredible thing to be part of. I would be extremely excited for my son and for myself to learn, because history is history, regardless of where it comes from and what it’s about.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Exactly.

Zenger’s: One thing I’ve heard from a lot of young people is that the boundaries between “Gay” and “straight” are really disappearing. Younger people are much more willing to try things, to date and love and have sex with whomever they find where there’s mutual attraction, rather than feeling, “Oh, I have to declare myself either ‘straight’ or ‘Gay.’”

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Right, very much so. In high school, especially in a place as conservative as Santee, it’s been very hard in the sense of finding other homosexuals to relate to completely. But at the same time, the number of straight friends I have that are completely supportive of me and my cause, and come to the No on Prop. 8 rallies with me, wear the pins and everything with me, that’s very encouraging.

Valerie Wood: And just love you. They just love you.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Yes, people with love in their hearts. I think it’s very important, and definitely the younger generation is advocating for that more. But I feel that it’s important for us to keep that going for the generations under us, because we’re so close to just having it be all right, having it be accepted. It doesn’t matter if you like men or women, or what you do in the privacy of your bedroom. It’s about loving —

Valerie Wood: — who you are, integrity.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: And knowing that being a homosexual doesn’t define who you are. I am a homosexual and I’m proud of that, but at the same time that doesn’t define me as a person, because it’s strictly a sexuality. It’s just who I care to be attracted to.

Zenger’s: It’s interesting that you use the word “homosexual,” because for the Gays of my generation that’s exactly the kind of clinical, pathological image that we were trying to get away from.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: Yes, that’s very interesting, actually.

Valerie Wood: And now these guys are embracing it.

Zenger’s: In my magazine, the collective term I use is “Queer,” which a lot of people my generation or older have a problem with, but I like it because it’s the last all-inclusive word we have left, and I hate “LGBT” with a passion. “The LGBT People” — it sounds like we just beamed in from Andromeda.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: I think I use “homosexual” because, throughout my life, the words “faggot,” “queer,” “gay” have all been very negative in kids speaking that to me, kids speaking that to other children.

Valerie Wood: Condescending.

Darrel Wood, Jr.: It’s very condescending. Even “gay” now is this slang term for “stupid” — “oh, goodness, that’s so gay,” “this is so gay.” Does it really like men? I feel that “homosexual,” even if it is a somewhat clinical term, is more universal in that aspect.