Zenger's Newsmagazine

Friday, January 20, 2012

FABIO A. ROJAS:

Immigrant Musician, Producer, Activist in San Diego

interview by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Fabio A. Rojas has certainly packed a lot of living in his 20-something years. He’s been making music ever since he was four or five years old, when he formed a family singing group with his older sisters in his native Colombia. His parents brought the family to Miami to get away from Colombia’s unrest, particularly the threat of kidnapping, and after studying music in Minnesota he ended up in San Diego. At present he’s the owner of Refugio Roots Music, a combination recording studio, performance space and art gallery at 906 21^st Street in Golden Hill (it’s a corner building and the entrance is on “E” Street). He’s also recording progressive events for Activist San Diego’s under-construction radio station, KNSJ 89.5 FM in Descanso, and he recently returned from a tour with the popular, long-lived (17 years) Latino rock band the B-Side Players. Rojas can be reached online through Facebook at Facebook.com/Fabioalejo, or via e-mail at pentafabio@hotmail.com

Zenger’s: Why don’t you tell me a little bit about your background, your history, and how you got into music?

Fabio A. Rojas: I was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia for the first 15 years of my life. My family raised me with the tradition, culture, values and style of living of a typical Latino. My dad was very passionate about music. He had sung as a very young man, but because of money-related issues and stuff like that, he couldn’t really pursue the dream. He owned his own company — not too big, not too small, a very medium way of living. So we struggled at the beginning, but by the end of the day he always got us into school, into some music classes here and there.

I started singing when I was a baby. I’ve sung all my life, ever since I have been conscious. My dad took us to the churches and the local spots to perform with my sisters. He would train us to do harmonizing and play the guitar a little bit, like a couple of chords. And he would get us a teacher. We couldn’t stand it. We wouldn’t have a teacher for more than two or three months because we would somehow find a way to get them fired. I guess, because We wanted a way to play our own stuff, or we just couldn’t stand to have a teacher.

My sisters and I ended up doing an album of traditional Christmas songs, ones we all liked, like “Feliz Navidad” and stuff like that. We were 8 or 9 when we recorded that. We went around the country, did a couple of tours there, and a famous producer who was in charge of the project said he wanted to do a TV special showing us recording an album. We ended up recording in the best studio Colombia has, working with top-of-the-line recording equipment in a million-dollar studio.

So you really get impressed. You’re a kid, you see how everything’s getting recorded. It’s got pots [volume controls] and buttons and clicks and ProTools technology. You’re in an amazing booth, comfortable, perfect temperature, everything’s fine. You feel like you want to pursue that. You feel like this is music, it’s capturing music, so this is an art.

I started out doing my own recording when I was 10, since I had some kind of knowledge with a computer. I still remember Windows 95 really well, which was my beginning, really. I definitely started recording with little microphones and doing stuff like that when I was 13. Through all those times, in school I was always the top student in music, because it was like my favorite class. And when you put passion into something, you become the best you can get. When I was 12 I started playing in programs, in commercials, in TV, whatever I could get myself into. My sisters would back me up sometimes, and I would back them up sometimes.

We finally left Colombia for two reasons. One was we thought there would be more opportunities in music in Miami. The other was the bullshit, if I may say this in an interview, all the terrible things that happened in our country sometimes. Colombia is a beautiful, amazing country with wonderful values and people. But my father’s company was becoming bigger, so he was making a little more money, and so we started receiving letters and people threatened our lives.

My dad felt like, “My family’s in jeopardy, because for some reason we travel a little bit with our kids, and they know that they’re singing and we have a little bit of money, so they want to do something to us.” All that social struggle over the 60 years of guerrillas, of wars, of false leaders, caught up to us, to the point where my family would watch TV, and all you would hear in the news was 10 more killed, 20 more killed. We were especially afraid of being kidnapped, because they were talking about kidnapping and doing something to us.

So my dad took a decision for both the music and for our lives, and we decided to move to Miami to start a new life. That’s true. That’s why people come to this country. This is a beautiful land of opportunities. It started with immigrants. I didn’t understand that back then, but of course I didn’t want to because I was 15. I had my friends and all my people there, but when you’re 15 you still don’t have much to say. You still have to go with your parents. You might have a lot of things in your mind, but you still have to be with your family.

We ended up moving to a retirement village called Cape Coral, two hours away from Miami, which was very cool. My father fell in love with it. He’s a very laid-back guy. He works a lot. He taught me a lot in life, but we still have a little bit of problems with each other because we both have that passion, that revolution inside, of like saying what we have in our minds. And if he’s right, we go for it. So I ended up moving out of my house when I was 17. I started looking for opportunities, went to Miami and recorded a couple of tracks with different people there. I started working with a radio station there, doing the jingles, cutting up tracks. Sometimes the radio station needed a short clip, so I would edit it or do something with it or try to find a way to get involved.

Zenger’s: So you were both performing and doing engineering and technical?

Rojas: Yes. Yes, sir. When that started happening, I found that my voice was changing late. Most people’s voices start changing when they’re 14 or 13. I started it when I was 16 or 17 because I took good care of it, so that made me stop a little bit as an artist, as a singer and stuff. But I kept developing the keyboard and the piano, and the guitar, and other instruments like percussion. I always had my hands around because in Colombia it’s always like you’ll never miss a plate of food or an instrument in the house. There’s always an instrument and there’s always a family member or somebody that comes from out of town.

I started developing more on guitar and piano, and music overall. I graduated from high school in a music school. It’s called Cypress Lake Center for the Arts High School, located in Fort Myers, and I’m a 2005 graduate with honors in music. I was a tenor in the choir. I did some jazz and some Latin. Definitely I was in charge of the Latin section. I remember there weren’t too many Latinos, but we kind of took over with the band.

Zenger’s: In Florida? That’s a bit of a surprise.

Rojas: Well, it’s just that it was two hours from Miami. It was a retirement community, and most of the people were in their 60’s and 70’s, retired people, American people, people that had lived here all their lives, U.S. citizens, not too many Spanish speakers. But I would travel to Miami constantly, I would have to say every month. It was so close. It was just an hour and 45 minutes.

Then I started developing a lot of contacts with Puerto Ricans and Jamaicans. My accent is very Colombian, but sometimes if I am talking to a Dominican or Cuban or Puerto Rican, I could pretty much pass as a Puerto Rican or a Dominican because there’s so much unity.

I started doing and listening to music that was very real. I mean, saying things about social and political stuff. They don’t just stay quiet about it. They don’t just go pop and whatever is hot, whatever is cool, but when people actually want to say what needs to be said through the songs and through music.

The local newspaper had a Spanish section, and I would write little things like how Dominicans thought about the new law that the government was putting in, or how Puerto Ricans have approached that since they’re part of the U.S. They’re a colony of the U.S., and so how does that relate to them?

As soon as I graduated from high school, I went to a college of music called McNally’s College of Music. Back then it was called Music Tech. These days, they changed the name to McNally’s. Very popular, one of the top 10 recording schools in the country. Very nice, because it had a lot of free time to record, so I happened to be in amazing studios for a long time.

Zenger’s: Where is that?

Rojas: This is in Minnesota, in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul. I would perform every Friday and Saturday. Of course, Minneapolis and St. Paul don’t have too many Latin people concentrated in the areas. You actually have to find the clubs and where they go.

There were two clubs, two very popular clubs, in downtown Minneapolis. Conga Bistro was one of them. I used to play there with a band that would just come together every Friday or Saturday. That’s how we got our money to survive. I started producing a little bit, of course, just right away, because the first months that you start going to a school of production you don’t know very much, if anything, about the art of recording.

But since I already had my ideas since I was 13, working with my computer, that gave me a little bit of extra kick. So that way I was able to start recording from my very first semester, start making myself noticeable. The course was usually three years; I ended up finishing it in two. I took a full-time schedule, 8 in the morning until 12 at night, very constant and very focused on that.

I took an extra month of broadcasting, and I took a little bit of contracts and stuff like that because I wanted to be a little more into the business side, and understand how to make a living out of it. I also had to show clear results that will produce and will make sense, as far as putting yourself out there. My dad was very strict on that all my life, because he was a businessman. He was a salesman. He would take me around the country, selling and showing me how to make things run, as far as his business.

So he would always say something to me, “Not everything in life is music, mi’jo. Not everything is music. Remember that.” And that always sticks in my mind, because it’s true. Not everything is music. I always wanted to make it in music. I wasn’t having fun if I wasn’t making music. Sometimes I wouldn’t even think about anything but just music. And, you know, you’ve got shirts to do. You’ve got to clean your room, and you’ve got to go to where you can help the family, especially when we came to the U.S.

When we came to the U.S., I remember working construction, working in restaurants, cleaning bathrooms. I put in a tile floor. I did air conditioning. I mean, we all had to hustle when we came for the first time, because when we came for the first time, all the money we had, of course, those were thousands of dollars, of course, to bring five people to the U.S., and to make — try to find a way to make them [documented] residents and go through the whole bullshit and scam that it is. There’s a lot of money involved.

I went to college to get my degree, came back to Florida, lived in Tampa for about six months, graduated with a diploma in business and stuff like that — it was a short program, five or six months — and that gave me the idea of going to Colombia and starting a recording studio, because it made sense to make it a business. So I said I’m going to take this to the next level, hopefully.

I went to Colombia. I didn’t find what I was expecting, obviously — a lot of closing doors — but thank God that I already had the language. In those five or six years that I was already here, I learned most of the English I’m speaking right now. Knowing English in Colombia — or any Latin country — is very important, because we do a lot of business in the international language, which is English. They wanted teachers that could teach in both languages.

So I started working in a very popular pre-school over there that has a lot of kids that are from people that are in good and in bad positions. It’s a big school that’s funded by the government, so I was able to get into teaching English through music. I was a teacher for about two years. But then I started receiving letters from the U.S. again, and it was like if you want to be able to be in the U.S. and stuff like that, you need to be here. You need to report yourself every three months from now on. Then it became every three weeks, and it became terrible. I didn’t want to take the chance of not being able to see my family for years, so because I didn’t want to take that chance, I decided to come back to the U.S.

A wonderful thing happened to me. As soon as I came back, a recording deal happened in L.A. Somebody that I knew had won a recording contract, and he included me in the recording deal. They flew me to Miami. I recorded with Sony Music some tracks of this up-and-coming artist, and I was part of the production, ready to go back to Miami when they had closed for 15 days. Then I went to a concert featuring the B-Side Players. I met them and we talked. They liked the way I played and we had a good energy going. So I ended up in San Diego, and I’m now in my 13^th or 14^th month here.

I know I have a lot of things ahead of me to learn. But now I can see a little bit more clearly as, for example, this beautiful place we are in right now, in the Activist San Diego movement and Occupy San Diego, and all these amazing things that are happening lately, are because I think this is the real deal. These days people want to stay real. People want the truth, and they’re trying to look for that truth.

I think this is the time to say what we need to say, at all cost, because then if we allow the next thing to happen — the revolution to stop at this point — then how much more time are we going to have to wait before we have some open channels? We’re getting to the point where we need to take the little channels that the people in power, the people in the government and the people who call themselves “leaders” and stuff like that, haven’t yet closed. This is the time to strike hard. And I think the media are the most effective way of making a statement of what’s happening out there.

Zenger’s: So what are you doing now?

Rojas: When I first came to San Diego, it was rough. I’m talking about anybody who starts somewhere new, sleeping in the car, sleeping on couches, trying to find myself in a stable position, trying to stable myself. Finally, I started working with different bands around San Diego, so that it gave me a little bit of extra income so that I could pay for my rent and stuff like that.

One of the most beautiful things that has happened to me lately to me is opening Refugio Roots Music, which is something I started with in Colombia. We have an idea: Unidos produciamiento arte. That is, “United producing art.” I wanted to find something that included my passion for music, which I know how to do, and which has given me my living for the last year at least.

Refugio Roots Music has been able to stay open because I work with three non-profit organizations, not only providing some of the furniture and equipment, but also some of that inner power, that thing that says, “Yes, we can do it. Let’s open a recording studio that’s community-based.” My passion about the recording studio is not just, oh, I want to make money, and I just want to make it for me and to make my music, or to just make profit out of it.

My main passion about the studio is how to work with the community, how to work with the nonprofits and people who have a real and clear message, such as Activist San Diego I want to use the media and what I know how to do, which is produce and record jingles, tracks, record live events, even graphic design. you have a computer with good software — ProTools, Prism, Flash, Photoshop and stuff like that — you have a powerful machine. Now you have a way of saying something to the masses.

We have done graphic design at Refugio Roots Music. We have done art gallery events, because I have a space for them. We have done live recordings. We have bands that have come there, recorded on the spot, and then they play them back so that people can get involved. Everybody in the room is recording at the same time, with a laugh, with a clap, with a joke, with movement — because everything you do in the room is getting recorded. It’s kind of like a concert that I’m putting together, just like recording whatever is happening with a band, so everybody can get together and record right away, on the spot.

The second part of my life that is really amazing lately is Activist San Diego and the Occupy movement. I think we’re right in the middle of la oja, like where you cook food. It’s like a pot. We’re right inside of the pot, and we either find a way to bring the heat down from the pot, so we can have some good-tasting food — or we just stay quiet and don’t do anything. And of course that’s not the option I took. I’ve taken the option of saying it, because of everything we have spoken about.

Zenger’s: You mentioned earlier the kind of music that’s popular today versus what you’re trying to do, trying to write songs about social issues and raise people’s consciousness. Were you ever tempted to go after being a pop star and making a lot of money?

Rojas: Not at all, not at all. I’ve realized if I’m going to sacrifice my art, I’d rather not even do it. It makes me actually mad that people have such an amazing talent and they’re talking bullshit. They sell their souls. They sell their souls. They sell their lives. They’d sell their mama trying to get to a status and to a position of, “Oh, we got money and we got the jewelry and we’ve got the cars.” That’s terrible. That really makes me understand how bad a condition we are in, how people sell themselves.

I know there are so many people who want to do good, but they took a decision earlier in their lives, so these days they don’t even have a way back. They got into the craziness that comes when they try to make it very successful, and they decided to sell their soul, sell their art. There’s all kinds of private organizations that are behind the media that are trying to corrupt you, because that’s how they get in the minds of the youth. And if the children and the youth learn bullshit, what are they going to become in the future? They’re going to become a bunch of shit. They’re going to grow up to be a bunch of people talking nonsense.

I prefer not to sell one album but to be heard, to have something to say, than to sell millions and have nonsense in my music. That’s something I have not even questioned, ever.. I really don’t care what car you drive or what you’re doing with it. I want to see what you’re actually doing with people that are coming right behind you. What are you leaving? What are you saying? How are you putting this out there so that people learn something? You don’t have to be a teacher or a revolutionary messenger, or a “souljah,” as they say. Just be real.

I’m hoping to release my album in 2012, sometime in June or July, and I think I’m very close to that. Somewhere between June or July or something like that. That’s when people are going to hear the music, and as we all know, music speaks so much more than a regular conversation. You can say so much more through a tune, through a song. Then probably it will make more sense to find me as a musician, as a composer, as an artist, as an activist, whatever you want to call it.

Monday, January 02, 2012

It Didn't All Start at Stonewall!

Meet Two of the REAL Pioneers of Gay Liberation

Monday, January 16 • 7 p.m.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Location of this meeting has been changed!

Pleasures & Treasures Store, 2525 University Avenue, North Park (across the street from University and Arizona)

Three months before the Stonewall Inn riots in New York city in June 1969 which are commonly — but wrongly — thought to be the start of the Gay liberation movement, a group of Gay activists in San Francisco started the nation’s first Gay Liberation Front. After one of their members was fired from his job for being Gay and “outing” himself via a photo in the Bay Area’s legendary underground newspaper, the Berkeley Barb, the San Francisco Gay Liberation Front mounted the first Gay-rights demonstration against a private employer in U.S. history in March 1969. Later on the San Francisco Gay Liberation Front built a coalition with other radical groups in the Bay Area and ultimately got the Black Panther Party to endorse the Gay rights movement. Two participants in this history live in San Diego today and will be speaking to Activist San Diego at its January 16, 2012 general meeting. They are:

• Leo E. Laurence, co-founder of the San Francisco Gay Liberation Front and its predecessor organization, the Committee for Homosexual Freedom, and currently associate editor of Zenger’s Newsmagazine and activist with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (L.E.A.P.), supporting an end to laws against marijuana; and

• Pat Brown, a participant in the early actions of the Gay Liberation Front who is currently active in the anti-circumcision and alternative AIDS movements.

Come to Activist San Diego's January 16 general meeting and hear a slice of Gay movement history that has been ignored or swept under the rug by East Coast-centric historians who have a hard time accepting that the roots of the Gay movement are in California. Hear from two of the pioneers who are both still active in human rights struggles. For more information on the history of San Francisco’s Gay liberation pioneers, visit http://www.galechesterwhittington.com/beyondnormal.html, the Web site of Gale Whittington, the man who appeared with Leo Laurence in the Barb photo and whose firing by the States Steamship Lines sparked the first Gay-rights demonstration ever against a discriminatory private employer in the U.S.

Arrested for Voter Registration

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN, Editor

When I wrote “America’s Unequal Heritage,” my column in this space in last month’s Zenger’s, I had no idea that the San Diego Police Department would so quickly prove my point! But that’s just what they did on the morning of November 29, when they arrested Occupy San Diego media spokesperson and former Congressional candidate Ray Lutz for setting up a table at Civic Center Plaza in order to register voters.

In my earlier piece, I noted that while the Tea Party movement has come up with some real howlers in their attempts to link their points of view with those of the Founding Fathers — notably their preposterous claims that the original 1789 version of the U.S. Constitution was “divinely inspired” (if we could bring them back, the Deists who wrote it would either be angry at that or find it hilarious) and the First Amendment really didn’t provide for the separation of church and state — there was one aspect of their thought that was shared by the authors of the original Constitution.

It was the idea that the U.S. should be, not a democracy, but a republic — and one in which the right to vote should be restricted to a carefully selected few. James Madison, the principal author of the U.S. Constitution and the only President besides George Washington who actually was at the convention that wrote it, made the point very clear in #10 of the Federalist Papers, when he argued that a representative republic would be a healthier system than a true democracy because a republic would “refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.”

What this meant in practice was a system in which no office higher than a member of the House of Representatives would be directly elected — Senators would be elected by state legislatures, and the President would be chosen by electors picked however the state legislatures decided — and the vote would be limited to people with “property,” i.e., white male landowners. Though activists from the 1820’s through the 1960’s challenged this elitist system and eventually expanded the franchise (first to all white men, then to people of color, then to women and then to young people) and amended the Constitution to allow people to vote directly for Senators, the Tea Party openly has called for a return to a more restricted franchise and for returning Senate elections to state legislatures.

Republican state governors and legislators have aggressively been pushing for measures to make voting harder. In Maine, a Republican governor and legislature repealed same-day voter registration — though Maine voters were able to pass a referendum to restore it. In Wisconsin, Republican Governor Scott Walker has also ended same-day voter registration and, according to Elisabeth Pearson of the Democratic Governors’ Association, “said students could only vote with a college ID that meets certain criteria — criteria that almost no schools meet. Now they’re saying technical college ID’s don’t count. And in the six months since he’s passed his voter suppression laws, they still haven’t updated the online forms that say to get a voter ID you need a birth certificate, which you can’t get without a photo ID.”

In my earlier article, I quoted Florida State Senator Michael Bennett (R-Bradenton) as calling voting “a hard-fought privilege” — not a right, but a favor government giveth and government taketh away. And at Civic Center Plaza the idea that voting is a “privilege” has been enforced by the San Diego Police Department and used as an excuse to put Ray Lutz in jail.

Not that that’s what they said they were doing. In the two-minute video of Lutz’s arrest, one of the cops taking him into custody said that they had no objection to him registering people to vote, merely to setting up a table so he could do so. That’s one of the many mind-numbingly absurd regulations the police have subjected the Occupiers to from day one, often seemingly made up on the spot and all based on the idea that the police and the city government “own” the square and allow anybody else to use it or not at their whim. Since the Occupation started October 7, the law in Civic Center Plaza has been essentially whatever the police say it is at any given moment — and when the police are allowed to make up their own laws on the fly, it means you’re living in a police state.

What’s more, the city government had already made it clear that they considered the Occupiers as a group apart from the “legitimate” citizens of San Diego. A reporter for San Diego CityBeat wrote that when he had taken a group of people from the Occupation into the Mayor’s office to fulfill their legal right to inspect city records, a security person told them that “Occupy people” were not welcome into the Mayor’s office. In other words, because they had congregated in Civic Center Plaza to fulfill their First Amendment right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” they were not allowed into the Mayor’s office to petition the government for a redress of their grievances.

The arrest of Ray Lutz wasn’t simply the enforcement of the arbitrary will of a handful of police officers. It was a clear class statement on the part of the rulers of San Diego that they don’t want the “wrong” people, the “Occupy people,” to be able to vote at all. Ironically, the Occupiers themselves are divided on the issue of voting; some believe that republican institutions are inherently corrupt and only direct democracy is a legitimate form of governance (the exact opposite of James Madison’s position), while others understand that political power in a republic goes to whoever is on top when the votes are counted (accurately or otherwise), and therefore people seeking social change not only should but must involve themselves in some manner with the electoral system.

That, no doubt, was the point Ray Lutz — whose other social-change project besides Occupy San Diego is a Web site, www.citizensoversight.org, that aims to make it easier for San Diego residents to hold their elected officials accountable — was trying to make. His table was intended as a message to the Occupiers themselves that, despite their legitimate criticisms of the electoral system as too dominated by corporate money and power, they should still exercise their right to vote. An Occupy movement that rejects electoral politics altogether is one the powers that be don’t have any reason to fear; an Occupy movement that uses both direct street action and electoral politics is one that can move the center of gravity in American politics Leftward, the way progressive activists in the U.S. did in the 1910’s, 1930’s and 1960’s — and Right-wing activists moved it Rightward in the 1980’s and the last three years of the Tea Party.

Whatever the police or the city authorities say, Ray Lutz was arrested on November 29 because he wanted to help the “wrong” people vote. A once-popular slogan of the anti-electoral U.S. Left said, “If voting could change things, they would make it illegal.” Between the attempts of Republican governors and legislators to shrink the electorate and make it more difficult for younger, poorer and darker people to vote, and arrests like Ray Lutz’s, maybe that’s just what the 1 percent that runs this country is trying to do!

Occupy Activist Recalls Being Maced by Police

Michelle “Jersey” Deutsch Tells Story at S.A.M.E. Fundraiser

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

The San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality (S.A.M.E.) held its second annual fundraiser Friday, December 9 at the Bamboo Lounge sushi bar in Hillcrest, with a full program of entertainers and a short speech by Michelle “Jersey” Deutsch of Canvass for a Cause and Occupy San Diego. Deutsch was arrested and sprayed with chemical Mace in Civic Center Plaza by San Diego police on October 14, a week after Occupy San Diego started occupying the plaza, and S.A.M.E. decided to give half the fundraiser’s proceeds to Deutsch to pay for her medical bills from the attack.

The other half went to the defense fund for the Equality 9, nine S.A.M.E. members and supporters who were arrested at the San Diego County Clerk’s office August 19, 2010 to protest the county’s continued refusal to give same-sex couples marriage licenses despite a federal judge’s ruling that Proposition 8, which banned legal recognition of same-sex marriages in California, is unconstitutional.

“LGBT [Queer] grassroots groups like Canvass for a Cause and S.A.M.E. should not be overshadowed by $40 million corporate-sponsored campaigns, but we are,” Deutsch told the people who attended the fundraiser. “In 38 states Transgender people can still be fired from their jobs for being Trans, and in 29 states Gay people can be fired from their jobs for being Gay. … We don’t have marriage rights in California. In several states across the country, we don’t have adoption rights and hospital visitation rights. … As individuals, we’re denied housing, employment benefits, employment in general. This is a summary of the reasons why groups like Canvass for a Cause and S.A.M.E. need to be involved in the Occupation.”

Deutsch faulted not only anti-Queer groups but less radical Queer organizations who are themselves funded by major corporations. “We don’t have $10,000 coming from Target,” she said. “In fact, we’re trying to sue them. So we do want to protest down there [at Civic Center Plaza and wherever else Occupy stages demonstrations]. We are protesting down there. We cannot depend on a lot of the groups that fought with us [against] Prop. 8, because a lot of those groups are corporate-sponsored.”

According to Deutsch, the incident that led the police to attack her began when she and her friends at Occupy, including S.A.M.E. president Cecile Veillard (one of the Equality 9), witnessed police attacking other Occupiers in an attempt to clear out the tents members of Occupy had set up in the plaza. “We were peacefully protesting,” she said. “I could look to my left and right and see people’s arms being twisted … [The police] were kicking people in the groins and grabbing people by the backs of their hands, and pulling people to the ground so they could choke them.”

Deutsch said that there were news cameras from two local TV stations, the NBC and Fox affiliates, and therefore a lot of the police assaults on Occupiers took place low to the ground so the cameras couldn’t photograph them. So she started yelling “Brutality!” at the camera operators, trying to get their attention so they would photograph what she was seeing. “I saw my friends getting the crap beat out of them next to me,” Deutsch said. “And there’s nothing you can do. You can’t fight back against the police. None of us did that. None of us put our arms up against them.”

According to Deutsch, the police Maced her to shut her up and keep her from directing the camera operators toward the assaults on her friends. “I was Maced really close to my face, like within three inches of my face, for a good five seconds at least,” she recalled. “It was so close to my face that you really can’t catch it on camera, because the officer was bigger than me.” After the attack, she said, “I was literally blinded for about two hours. I was laying on the ground, everybody else was still protesting, and I couldn’t see anything.”

Deutsch said she returned home a few hours later, only she still felt symptoms from being Maced — complicated by her chronic asthma, since the Mace had triggered an asthma attack. “I woke up in the middle of the night with a bloody nose,” she said. Her partner Lauren and Megan, a nurse who lives next door, convinced Deutsch to go to the emergency room at Scripps Hospital — where her ordeal continued.

The doctors and nurses at Scripps, Deutsch said, “were being really nice and treating me really well until they said, ‘What do you mean, you got Maced?’ The second they heard I had been Maced by the police, they were not very helpful. It really turned around how the doctors and nurses were treating me, to the point where we called our neighbor, nurse Megan, and we said, ‘What should we do? They’re not treating me right. What should they actually be doing?’ And she helped us tell them what I needed.”

Local singer-songwriter Joshua Napier performed one of his intense, powerful sets, including the Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and several of his politically themed originals. The program also featured the debut performance by the San Diego People’s Revolutionary Choir, which included three members of the Equality 9 — Cecile Veillard, Sean Bohac and Chuck Stemke — singing classic working people’s songs, including one called “We’re Bound for San Diego” that comes from the 1912 Free Speech Fight. This was a year-long action staged by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the radical anarchist union nicknamed the “Wobblies,” who set up soapboxes in San Diego’s traditional free speech zone at Fifth and E Streets downtown and were met with police-sanctioned violence and a city ordinance prohibiting free speech in the area.

Set to the melody of “The Wearing of the Green” — itself an old song of the Irish revolutionary struggle against British colonialism — “We’re Bound for San Diego” was published by the IWW and used as a recruiting tool to bring members and supporters to San Diego. Those who attempted to answer the call were met by vigilante groups on the outskirts of town, where they were beaten and sometimes killed. In the context of the S.A.M.E. event, the last line of the song — “We’ll whip old San Diego if it takes 100 years” (“if it takes us 20 years” in the original published lyric) — seemed almost unbearably ironic given the way the police had treated Deutsch and other Occupy protesters.

Privatized Police

Representatives from Valley View Casino & Hotel presented San Diego Police Chief William Lansdowne and his team with a giant replica of a San Diego Police badge made from 44 pounds of pure chocolate.

The chocolate badge, sculpted by Valley View Casino & Hotel Executive Pastry Chef Daniel Sampson and his talented team, was originally created for and displayed at the San Diego Police Foundation’s 11th Annual Friends of the Badge Luncheon September 21, 2011 at the Valley View Casino Center. Chef Daniel and his team spent a total of five days creating the solid 26 inch by 17 inch chocolate masterpiece. Chef Daniel used over 44 pounds of white couverture chocolate to create the badge and its accompanying stand. Then, Valley View Casino Chef Sammy Chatluang spent two days hand-carving the badge’s exquisite details. The chocolate was then airbrushed with aureolin yellow cocoa butter and dusted with real gold.

by STEVEN REED

I’ve been listening to a lot of the various Occupation protests that have been going on across the country. I’ve been listening to the complaints of the protesters and recognizing the obvious threat they are to the establishment and to their many corporate overlords. So I’m not shocked by the brutal response by the police in many cities across the country. As we have seen in New York, it’s not hard to buy a mayor and a police force. Before he was the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg was an entrepreneur that sold the Bloomberg terminal to Wall Street. That’s how he made and continues to make billions from Wall Street. So it’s not hard to guess were his priorities are going to lie.

And as for the New York Police Department (NYPD), they have a private and independent foundation whose main goal is to gather private and public donations and funds for the NYPD. Who are the foundation’s main contributors? JP Morgan donated $4.6 million. Other companies that donated over $100,000 were Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Jeffries and Co. (bank), Carl Icahn, the Renco group, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. So in essence, their police force is now privatized.

Brutal police crackdowns against Occupy protests, have been occurring all over the country, but I didn’t have to look farther then my own town of San Diego. The SDPD have performed multiple raids and arrests even though courts have ruled that occupations and tents are forms of free speech. Are you starting to see a pattern here? I decided to see if San Diego has its own foundation for raising private funds for the police — and lo and behold, it does.

“Formed in 1998, the San Diego Police Foundation helps insure that programs critical to ‘public interest’ receive funding that is not available through the City’s budget,” explains the Foundation on its own Web site, http://www.sdpolicefoundation.org/. “Whether it’s an evidence management system, advanced video streaming and recording, or other ‘life-saving’ equipment and training, the SDPF ensures that donations to the police department impact all of San Diego.” I think their words had more meaning than they intended.

It’s also not surprising that Mayor Jerry Sanders, a former cop who rose through the ranks to become San Diego’s chief of police, is currently the board chair of the SDPD foundation. So who bought San Diego’s finest, you might ask? Well, the Irving group (run by former board chair Craig Irving) donated $20,000. The Irving group deals with commercial real estate and investments. Also on the list was Ted Fogliani, the CEO and founder of Outsource Manufacturing Inc. Among the corporate donors are Walmart, Verizon, Wells Fargo, Pfizer, Bell Management (real estate investor), AT&T and Qualcomm who donated $1 million.

Other major contributors are Dan Shea, an investment banker who used to be a managing director for Fortune 500 companies; and Ron Fowler, an investment banker and agency owner at Farmers Insurance Group dealing mainly with foreclosure claims. For those of you who don’t know, Farmers Insurance Group is a subsidiary of ZURN, Great Britain’s second biggest commercial property insurer and a very shoddy company indeed. Another SDPD Foundation contributor is Art Barter, president and CEO of Datron World communications (a division of Titan Corporation). Datron produces military communications equipment which is particularly used to suppress and control demonstrations in third world countries like Zimbabwe. That company is now equipping the SDPD with the same equipment.

Upon doing more research I discovered that the CEO of the foundation is Wilensky Napoli, also part of a huge marketing firm based out of California whose extensive list of clients span the private and public sector with ease.

How could it be that foundations like these aren’t regulated at all? Who oversees these practices?

The only even remotely effective check on the power of the San Diego Police Department is the Citizens Review Board (CRB). This board is responsible for reviewing serious citizen complaints against San Diego police officers, officer-involved shootings, and in-custody deaths. The CRB also oversees the administration of discipline in situations where the officer has been found to have disobeyed proper policy and procedure. Also, the CRB makes policy and procedure recommendations to the Chief of Police. It’s the only group that I can see that could have any oversight into the foundation’s activities.

Apparently, anyone can get on this board. The only problem is recommendations for membership are then sent to the Mayor for appointment. Members have too undergo training and will be appointed to the CRB when there’s an opening. Board members may serve for up to eight, one-year terms and serve at the pleasure of the Mayor. Don McEvoy and Barbara Schutze were once members of this board but back in 1988, but since they were critical of the SDPD, they were replaced. Apparently every term they rotate and are forced to drop five people. Seems like a convenient way to get rid of dissenters to me.

Well, I think it’s easy to see a conflict of interest here. I urge everyone to do similar research in there own town where police brutality and raids are occurring. It’s not hard and with only a little digging the occasional breaks for uncontrolled vomiting, the overwhelming evidence will appear. Local Occupations are correct in their assumption of the corruption within the establishment. But they need to focus on their own town first. There’s more then enough corruption in our fine city to keep the Occupation busy for years to come.

Nine Days with Mother

A Christmas Story, Subtitled “How to Say I’m Gay”

by LEO E. LAURENCE

Originally published in the December 1968 issue of the pioneering San Francisco Gay magazine Vector.

“MOM’S COMING TO VISIT … OH, MY GOD, NO!”

Frantic feelings of horror often hit Gay kids about to be visited by their mothers. Lovers suddenly become just roommates. Physique magazines are hidden. Lesbian “dates” are lined up to add to the heterosexual illusion.

The whole affair becomes a phantasy “to keep Mom happy.” Tell her the truth? God, no, I couldn’t do that. Telling Mom I’m a homosexual would be “just too much.” From the day we first come out, Gay kids (male and female) manufacture dozens of reasons why their homosexuality “must” be kept a secret. But can there be real love in such a phantasy?

“If my Mother cannot accept me as Gay, then she couldn’t really love me,” a tall, blond, blue-eyed go-go boy in San Francisco told me recently.

Gay males typically have a very close relationship with their mothers. As youngsters, Mom seemed to always care, always worried about us, and provided comfort when things got rough. But as we matured, the scene changed. We started grooving on guys rather than girls. Secretly, we were “coming out.”

The “double-life” living pattern gradually developed. We started to live our private Gay life, while simultaneously maintaining straight appearances on the job and in our family home.

We fooled everyone but our own consciences. The guilt began to bug us with disturbed sleep, nightmares, and some even started the slow process of drowning in booze or drugs.

Christmastime only intensified the troubles. ’Tis the season to be jolly, yet for many Gay kids, it’s the bluest time of the year. We see love all over … except inside our own hearts. Those living the double life may sing, laugh, and be merry (Mary?), yet the tinsel and bright lights silently intensify the loneliness.

“There’s three ways of handling a disturbing situation such as this,” says the Rev. A. Cecil Williams, minister of Glide United Methodist Church in downtown San Francisco. “You can (1) run away from it, (2) leave it as is and live with the pain, or (3) you can change the situation.”

We’ve all tried running away. Most of the quarter-million Gay people in the greater San Francisco Bay Area come from other states. Some have run just by moving across town. But it’s all the same; we soon learn that the problems go with us … unsolved.

The second method of coping with our homosexuality is by avoiding any direct discussion with our families. Teenagers “coming out” can dream up the wildest stories explaining to Mom or Dad why they spend so much time with their male “buddies.” And it becomes a full-time job to somehow dodge all those probing questions at home from suspicious parents asking about girls, girls, girls.

Facing the issue head on and changing distorted parental ideas on homosexuality is a proven successful method of dealing with parents, but it’s also the most difficult. “It’s tough, baby, to look at ourselves honestly,” Rev. Williams said. “It takes guts, and you can expect some resistance, especially at first.”

The toughest part is making the initial decision to tell Mom like-it-is. Most parents know very little about their own heterosexuality, less or nothing about homosexuality, and never heard of bisexuality, says Ted McIlvenna, director of the National Sex and Drug forum at Glide United Methodist Church in San Francisco.

That’s why I honestly expected my “Nine Days with Mom” during her vacation to be pure hell for me.

About ten years ago, my homosexual activities were “discovered” by my university. I was suddenly exposed. My parents were shocked. Obviously, I couldn’t run away from it then, ignoring it was impossible, so I was forced to face my family head-on. Still, I tried copping out.

Regular psychiatric counseling satisfied another college, and my parents. But I adopted the double life, since I stayed Gay. Life soon became shallow. I was restricting any open expression of the most important emotion in life … love. I wanted to give my love to another male, but it had to be kept secret from my family.

Remember how hard it was when you were a kid to keep a secret from your mother? It’s the same when you become a teenager, or reach 35. Mothers have a way of knowing, of sensing the truth … or lack of it.

This year, I decided things would be different. I wasn’t ashamed to be Gay, so during Mom’s visit, she was going to see her son as-is. I expected the worst.

During her first vacation days, she graciously met my Gay boyfriends, and seemingly went along approvingly as we toured the San Francisco Gay scene … shows, restaurants, and dances. She even saw me smoke and get high.

After two days of this, she became saturated and could take no more. She blew her stack and thoroughly “read me out.” She bitched about everything.

I just let her blow off the steam, then I had my say.

“If you came to spy on me,” I told her calmly, but with determination, “then your visit was a mistake. If, however, you came out to have a good time with your son, then try to understand my life, don’t try to change it.”

That statement was like a bombshell. Distorting its meaning and intent, she cried, sobbing that I didn’t want her here, that I didn’t love her, and she started packing.

Reminding her that I loved her very much, I simply repeated my original statement. She tried everything … crying, pouting, and packing. Difficult as it was, I ignored her carrying on, and said I’d drive her to the airport when she was ready. I meant business. I also meant my original statement.

An incoming phone call broke the suspense. I managed to stretch out that phone call to gain time, time for both of us to “cool” off … time for emotions to return to normal. It worked.

We were both hungry, so we headed for Señor Pico’s for dinner. Hardly a word about the confrontation was spoken. Mom soon became fascinated by the Mexican-American dinner, and the Gay waiter’s detailed explanation of it. Sitting at a neighboring table, I recognized a Gay bartender and his lover, both looking dapper in business suits. It all had quite an effect on Mom.

“I’m now convinced that all men have some homosexual in them” she said, as if just uncovering a deep mystery, instead of a basic, fundamental fact of life.

“I’m beginning to realize that there’s a whole lot I don’t understand about this [Gay life],” she said. Progress was finally being made. It was progress through truth, by facing reality head-on … difficult, but beautiful.

Three days of her vacation had passed, and our fun was just beginning. Saturday night, I “dated” a handsome young man named Kim. We went to the theatre, then the S.I.R. [Society for Individual Rights] dance.

Several hundred people were there dancing. Mom was surprised to see so many Gay “types.” I felt very strange at first dancing with Kim right in front of my mother.

The shock came a little later during an intermission. “It’s good to see you having such a good time,” Mom whispered in my ear. That comment I didn’t expect, but it felt so good I almost cried with joy.

Hallowe’en was the following week. Explaining that it was “the” night for drags coast-to-coast, I took her on a tour. Her eyes popped. “I can hardly believe it. They’re positively fascinating,” she said, watching the “girls” parade into the Fantasy in San Francisco.

I suddenly realized something profound had happened in our relationship. I was beginning to be proud to be alive … totally … for the first time in my life. She commented on this.

“I think a Mother and son should get together after the kid grows into manhood. You have to educate your Mother, just as the Mother once educated the son as a child.

“I’ve seen kids in Hippieland that would never try talking this way to their mothers. If the kid was scared as a child, he (or she) will be scared as an adult. Some kids run away even though they live in the same house.

“Kids should try to think of their Mothers as human beings, not as dictators … regardless of what happened in childhood. It’s not easy, though.

“I don’t think you Gay kids respect your Mothers’ intelligence. You can’t talk to your Mother as a grown-up. You think of Mom only as before, as a growing kid. Gay kids never allow their Mothers to grow up WITH them,” Mom continued talking.

“Mothers should be sent material about homosexuality: books, folders, the story as seen from the Gay life, not a psychiatrist’s couch. If she’s really loving, she’ll read them.

“I can remember when homosexuality was never mentioned in the newspapers, but times are changing. I can even remember when a pregnant woman was ashamed to appear on the streets.

“You Gay kids should give your parents a chance to be friendly. It may not work with all families, but if there’s love in the family, they will gradually understand … and accept.

“There’s only two lines in some dictionaries about homosexuality, and that’s all some parents know about it. An understanding of Gay life cannot be accomplished by reading the dictionary,” my Mother said. “It’s too diversified, too different, there’s too much to it.”

Inside my closet now sits a Christmas package. Mom carried it all the way from the East Coast to personally present it to me. Somehow, I already knew what’s wrapped up inside … a gift of love.

Copyright Hypocrisy and the Assault on the Internet

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

On November 27, Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik reported a story that exposed the hypocrisy behind the claim from major media corporations that their hard line on copyrights is designed to “protect the artists.” In 2001, Laura Dick Coelho and her half-sister Isa Dick Hackett, heirs and executors of the estate of their father, legendary science-fiction author Philip K. Dick, sold writer-director George Nolfi an option on the film rights to a Philip K. Dick story called “Adjustment Team” for $25,000. After spending years trying to place the project, Nolfi assigned the rights to a company called Media Rights Capital, which financed the movie and paid the Dick sisters $1.4 million to exercise the option. The deal also called for Media Rights Capital to pay the Dick sisters an additional $500,000 once the film made back its cost.

The film, retitled The Adjustment Bureau, was filmed for a total estimated budget of $50 million and featured a major star, Matt Damon. Released early in 2011, it was a major hit both in theatres (where it grossed $128 million) and on DVD. But instead of paying the $500,000 they still owed the Dick sisters, Media Rights Capital not only stiffed them but sued them to recover the original $1.4 million rights payment. The grounds? Though Dick had written “Adjustment Team” in 1953, he hadn’t released it for publication until 1973, when he copyrighted it and sold it to a publisher for an anthology. But the attorneys for Media Rights Capital found that “Adjustment Team” had actually been published in 1954, in a short-lived pulp magazine called Orbit Science Fiction — and since Orbit Science Fiction’s copyright had expired in 1982, “Adjustment Team” was in the public domain and therefore anybody could make a film of it without any rights payment at all.

Dick’s daughters counter-argued that Dick had neither authorized the Orbit publication nor been paid for it. According to Hiltzik, they also pointed out “that Nolfi and the producers had plenty of time to verify the copyright before making the picture, and that in signing the original deal they effectively acknowledged that the rights were authentic.” Certainly it’s preposterous to imagine that a media company would have spent $50 million on a film based on an obscure story by a “name” author without a guarantee that some other studio couldn’t beat them to the marketplace with a quick, cheap adaptation of the same work. More likely Media Rights Capital simply had their lawyers go looking for a loophole to save themselves some major rights payments — and found one, stiffing the heirs of the story’s original creator in the process.

So don’t swallow the propaganda line from the big media industry that a hard line on copyright protection does anything to protect “the artists” who create your favorite movies, stories, novels and songs. By aggressively extending the length of copyrights, shrinking the allowable “fair use” of excerpts from copyrighted material, and through other legal changes the media industry is buying from their paid-for politicians through the system of legalized bribery known as campaign finance (in which it’s perfectly legal to buy “access” to politicians by donating to their campaigns, and it only becomes illegal when there’s a direct quid pro quo — “I’ll give you $50,000 if you vote yes on bill X and no on bill Y”), media companies are protecting their own rights while simultaneously treating the actual creators of copyrighted material the same way they always have. They exploit the desperation of chronically poor artists and the lure of fame and big bucks to sign them to one-sided contracts that give the companies, not the creators, all or most of the income from the creations.

The story of how Media Rights Capital is trying to screw the daughters of Philip K. Dick out of their rightful share of the proceeds from a hit movie based on one of their dad’s stories happened to break while Congress is considering two bills that would vastly extend the policing power of media companies (and pharmaceutical companies too) over the Internet. The version in the House of Representatives is called the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA (its bill number, in case you want to write or call your Congressmember about it, is H.R. 3261), while the Senate version has the mouth-busting title “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act,” or “PROTECT IP Act” for short. (It’s the same naming strategy that gave us the “USA PATRIOT Act.”) The bills are supposedly designed to keep American movies, recordings, books and other creative properties from being pirated by overseas Web sites — but their agenda is much more far-reaching than that.

Under SOPA, the more extreme of the two bills, media companies would be able to go after not only the Web sites that used their copyrighted content without authorization, but everyone else on the Internet food chain who wittingly or unwittingly helped them. The companies could go after the Internet service providers (ISP’s) through whom you access the Web, and also online advertisers and the payment services (like Visa, MasterCard or PayPal) through which you pay for anything you buy online. Indeed, if a media company noticed their content being posted online by a Web site without authorization, they could demand that ISP’s cut off all U.S. access to that site, advertisers stop buying ads on it, and payment services refuse to channel money to it. They could do that without having to go to court first, just on the say-so of the media company’s lawyers that the site is “dedicated to the theft of U.S. property” — and the targets would have to respond within five days, a blink of an eye in terms of how litigation usually proceeds.

What’s more, the media company could target not only the Web site that posted their content without authorization, but every other site on the Web that links to it, or every site that links to a site that links to it, and so forth until just about every site in the world would be touched by the tainted links. Media companies already have the right to send so-called “cease and desist” letters to sites like Facebook and YouTube, stating that their copyrighted material is on a user’s Facebook or YouTube post and demanding that it be removed. Under SOPA, the companies could sue Facebook or YouTube — and could also sue the users who put the material on their site, or users who merely linked to another site that had unauthorized copyrighted material on it. And, as the American Center for Law and Justice (a Right-wing alternative to the American Civil Liberties Union) points out in their excellent fact sheet on SOPA, “SOPA’s private causes of action would allow anyone asserting a copyright or trademark right to effectively attack and silence both foreign and domestic speakers and viewpoints they may find objectionable.”

In that regard, SOPA would require ISP’s and payment services to do what they’ve already done voluntarily to put WikiLeaks out of business. The governments of the U.S., Great Britain and Sweden all looked for ways to stop WikiLeaks, from arresting the alleged source of much of its information (U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning) and holding him under unspeakably barbaric conditions, to pushing rape and sexual harassment charges against site founder Julian Assange, and couldn’t get the site offline. Then, as part of their “patriotic duty,” Visa, MasterCard and PayPal announced that they wouldn’t send any more money to WikiLeaks from users who wanted to contribute to it — and Assange eventually ran out of money to maintain the site and announced he would have to shut it down. The WikiLeaks story should be a warning that the supposed “freedom” of the Internet is a myth: the Internet is really run by private mega-corporations who can effectively censor its content even if governments can’t.

The reason is that, unlike telephone companies, Internet service providers were never legally declared “common carriers.” What that means is that if I phone the San Diego City Hall and tell the person who answers that I have planted a bomb in the building, I have committed a crime. Even if I haven’t actually planted a bomb, I have still committed a crime. But the phone company is not legally responsible in any way for my crime, even though I could not have committed it without their equipment and network infrastructure. It also means that I can call a friend of mine with similar politics, and the phone company can’t censor our conversation even though the people who own and run it may not like what we have to say to each other about the need to get rid of capitalism.

An ISP is different. By not being common carriers, ISP’s have every right to censor messages with which they disagree — a right the former CEO of Comcast asserted publicly when he stated that he didn’t see any reason why “my pipes” should be used to communicate political views he didn’t approve of. They also have legal liability if their services are used for allegedly criminal activity. So far, ISP’s have treaded gently on the paths of political or legal censorship because of an informal principle called “Net neutrality,” which has meant that every piece of data on the Net gets treated the same as every other piece of data. “Net neutrality” has given Internet users an illusion of freedom because it’s prevented huge media outlets like Fox News from cutting sweetheart deals with ISP’s to move their content through the Internet faster than that from smaller, less wealthy and less politically influential site owners.

But the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has already compromised the “Net neutrality” principle in a set of regulations that basically said it applied to desktop and laptop computers but not to smartphones, tablets and the other wireless portable devices through which more and more people are using the Internet. And even those weak “Net neutrality” regulations were nearly overturned by a big money-dominated U.S. Congress that wants to turn the Internet into yet another wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate media giants. This will mean that, as with all other corporate media outlets, the Internet will systematically push Right-wing points of view and censor Left-wing ones. In a worst-case scenario, the loss of “Net neutrality” and the passage of bills like SOPA could make the organization of Occupy-style movements impossible by giving ISP’s the power to censor all anti-corporate messages and keep them off the Web.

In addition to broadening the censorship of the Web — both by ISP’s themselves and by media companies sending out five-day notices willy-nilly and making ISP’s and sites like Facebook and YouTube into content police — SOPA is also a direct attack by the U.S. pharmaceutical industry to make sure that Americans keep paying the highest prices for prescription drugs of any country in the world. Remember when you used to get e-mails advertising lower-priced drugs from Canada? You don’t get them anymore because, responding to lobbying from Big Pharma, Congress made such sales illegal — and SOPA would strengthen those prohibitions by giving drug companies the same tools as media companies to punish any Web site that dared to offer cheaper drugs.

The most bizarre thing about SOPA is it’s an attempt to pump up a system of copyrights, trademarks and patents that no longer serves artistic or scientific advancement — if anything, it retards it — and, at least in the case of copyright, is no longer technologically sustainable. Historically, copyright worked by giving the copyright holder the right to prohibit the manufacture of physical copies of a copyrighted work. Such copies did get made — I remember my shock when a street peddler offered me a bootleg copy of the third Matrix movie, The Matrix Revolutions, in front of Horton Plaza while the film was still playing in the movie theatres inside — but they required an elaborate physical infrastructure that was relatively easy to find and shut down. With the digital revolution, a book, a record or a movie is no longer necessarily a physical object: it’s a series of zeroes and ones that can be moved anywhere around the world literally at the speed of light. (The same thing has happened to money, which is how hedge-fund operators and “flash” investors can make — or lose — millions of dollars in seconds.)

If I could write a copyright law for the digital age, the first thing it would say is that no copyright would last for longer than 50 years. Period. Ever. That common-sense policy — which was the law in Europe until recently, when the European Union parliament was lobbied by the big media companies to extend it to 70 years — seems to me to strike the right balance between the purpose of copyrights and patents (which is not to benefit media and pharmaceutical corporations in perpetuity, but is, according to the U.S. Constitution, “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”) and the principle that ultimately humanity’s artistic and scientific legacy should belong equally to all.

Second, I would base the new copyright law on a principle known as compulsory licensing. That would mean that copyright holders would no longer have the power to prevent the physical or digital reproduction and redistribution of their works. What they would have is the right to demand that end users pay them. Instead of trying to put Web sites out of business by sending cease-and-desist letters as they do now — or threatening them and their users with criminal prosecution and damages, as SOPA would let them do — they would simply send them bills. Some forms of artistic endeavor already use compulsory licensing: anyone can perform a copyrighted song in person or play a record of one on terrestrial radio, and long-established laws allow them to know in advance how much that will cost them. Compulsory licensing would solve the problem of so-called “derivative works” — like hip-hop songs that “sample” bits of previous records, or Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster — by allowing reuse as long as royalties were paid. I would set up special “copyright courts” to resolve disputes over how much copyrighted content was used and how much royalty should be charged for it, modeled on the arbitration panels the Writers Guild uses to apportion writing credits for movies.

Compulsory licensing and royalty requirements would also be more effective in putting out of business the so-called “rogue Web sites” SOPA is ostensibly aimed at than SOPA would be. The lawsuits against Napster and other peer-to-peer music sharing sites didn’t end this type of copyright violation. What did was the advent of iTunes and its competitors, which allowed people to purchase online music downloads of consistent quality for a reasonable price. Once people get used to the idea that media companies can charge them for copyrighted content regardless of where they got it from, they’ll be more likely to buy it from the companies themselves — so long as the companies don’t get greedy and try to gouge them with unsustainably high prices.

In copyright, and in intellectual property law in general, the old order is dying and the new one is not yet ready to be born. Media companies are spending huge amounts of money to lobby Congress for punitive bills like SOPA in order to maintain a copyright regime that has been rendered obsolete and unenforceable by technological advances. Internet companies like Google are saying that they too are against “piracy,” buying into the central assumption underlying SOPA even as they try to defeat the bill because it would cost them money. Once again we have corporate elephants fighting each other over business models that need to change — and the stake for the rest of us is whether the Internet will be allowed to be the totally free channel of communication we were promised, or it will become just another organ of a dying corporate oligopoly.

SEAN WHERLEY:

From Activist to Comedian, “Laughing Out Proud”

interview by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

When the people who started the Martinis Above Fourth restaurant and bar at 3940 Fourth Avenue, #200, between University and Washington in Hillcrest, gave it that name, they weren’t kidding. The front door is the entrance to an elevator — there’s no other way, at least none visible from the street, to get in — and when the elevator lets you out on the second floor you’re right in a narrow little lobby that leads to the main dining area. And if you go there the second Thursday of every month and stay from 8 to about 9:30 p.m., prepare to laugh your head off.

That’s because that’s when Martinis Above Fourth’s management turns over the space to local Queer comedian Sean Wherley for his monthly “Laugh Out Proud” shows. They started in January 2011 and have snowballed to the point where it’s standing-room only — if you haven’t made a reservation for dinner before the show, which you can do by calling (619) 400-4500 or visiting www.martinisabovefourth.com on the Web, good luck finding a place to sit until the room clears out a bit — and they’ve attracted a mix of male and female, Queer and straight, San Diego-based and out-of-town performers who are genuinely funny.

Wherley spoke to Zenger’s about his unusual background — for a comedian, anyway — and how he’s built up the show. Originally it was largely about giving himself and his producing partner, Lesbian comedienne Sarah Burford, guaranteed stage time to perform each month. It’s grown to become a show featuring major, or at least semi-major, talents in the stand-up world — on December 8 the headliner was Shann Carr, a Lesbian who performed for 10 years before Gay male audiences on the Atlantis holiday cruises and who ruefully told about how the breakup of a 15-year relationship seven years ago plunged her into the nightmare world of Internet dating.

Laugh Out Proud is a comfortable, amusing way to spend a Thursday evening. The comedians occasionally hurl F-bombs but mostly they talk quietly and reasonably about the absurdities of their lives and avoid the tasteless raunch that afflicts all too many straight comedy shows today. Wherley, a tall, thin, rather gangly but attractive man, focused his own performance December 8 on how Gay men tend to be shorter than straight men and how hard it’s been for him to find partners he won’t literally be looking down on (my joke, not his, so don’t blame him if you didn’t laugh).

Zenger’s: Sean, just tell me a little about yourself and your background, and how you got into comedy.

Sean Wherley: I grew up in Wisconsin. I was the sixth of eight kids, Catholic family, went to public schools, always wanted attention. There was never enough. It’s almost to be expected with that many kids, I think. Eventually I made my way to Minnesota to go to college, majored in political science, and spent my last year of college studying overseas in East Africa, in Tanzania. That was an opportunity to understand another culture, another country, and avoid the work world for at least a year.

When I came back, I made my way to Washington, D.C. because I’d always wanted to work on Capitol Hill. I was there for three years. I worked for two of those with members of Congress, a U.S. Representative from Michigan and a U.S. Senator from Iowa. But I got kind of tired of D.C., came back to the Midwest — Minneapolis, where I’d gone to college — and lived there for about five years. I was very involved in politics, running political campaigns. I worked for an environmental organization.

But then I started thinking about the opportunity to come to a warmer place. I came to San Diego on Martin Luther King weekend in 2006 with a friend who had once lived here. Seventy degrees, I’m wearing a T-shirt, and the vibe of the city reminded me a lot of Minneapolis: very laid-back, very easy to get around. On the flight back I decided I would quit my job. I gave my two-weeks’ notice the next day and moved out here a month later.

I’ve continued to do public-policy work since I’ve been here. It’s been five years. But the comedy piece was something I’d always thought about. People said, “Oh, you’re so funny. Have you thought about comedy?” I would always say, “No,” when in fact I had thought about it in 1997. I was living in Minneapolis and started going to comedy clubs just to watch, just to observe. But then I moved to D.C. and lost track of it, never thought to consider it again.

It wasn’t until three years ago that, working with my therapist, I discovered that comedy is something I want to do, but I’d always been too afraid to pursue it. I started slowly by watching DVD’s of various comedians. Then I went to watch live shows here in San Diego, and I eventually enrolled in an improv class at the National Comedy Theatre. In that class I met a guy named Chris, who was also interested in doing stand-up. Chris and I started writing together, and eventually we went up for the first time in April 2009.

Zenger’s: Who would say are the comedians who have most influenced you?

Wherley: The one that I always enjoyed most as a kid was Steven Wright, a very deadpan one-liner. If you remember him, very plain in appearance, frizzy hair, would never break from that kind of sober appearance, which is really clever, really thoughtful. He always stood out. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve really come to like Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, Bill Maher. What I like about them is they’re smart and they’re clever, they’re bringing up different premises, and even if the premise itself might be one we’ve heard before, their “take” is unusual. They just really seem to be having a good time when they’re up there. Eddie Izzard, too, I forgot. I really enjoy him.

Zenger’s: How did the Laugh Out Proud series come about?

Wherley: I co-produce the show with a Lesbian comedienne. Her name is Sarah Burford, and the two of us started about the same time and got to know each other in the spring of 2010. We discovered that we were both struggling to get stage time. It wasn’t really clear why, but we thought rather than just lament our situation, why don’t we create an opportunity for ourselves?

We wanted to do something that was different from all the other shows that were going on in the city, whether it be at bars or restaurants or clubs. We thought let’s do it in a space that’s welcoming to the LGBT community, one that they’re familiar with, one that they would come to. I had struggled to get a lot of my Gay friends to come to my shows, and I was never sure whether that was because they weren’t familiar with some of these bars or restaurants, or they didn’t feel comfortable coming into these neighborhoods, whether it be Ocean Beach or Clairemont Mesa.

So I thought, well, let’s give them an opportunity to come to a place that’s for them. We started working with the owners of Martinis Above Fourth in January of this year. There hadn’t really been anything that had been done like it on a regular basis. There would be the random show out of various bars or restaurants, but we wanted to do it on a monthly basis and we wanted to have LGBT comedians, as many as possible, in each show. We also wanted to bring headliners down from L.A., people that most San Diegans would not have seen.

Zenger’s: What’s been the experience like finding the talent? Has it been difficult to get the kind of people you wanted and do the shows you envisioned?

Wherley: Well, locally there are only so many LGBT comedians. I think we have one, two, three, four others besides Sarah and me. That’s pretty much it as far as I’m aware. So then we’ve had to look to L.A., and that’s been good. It’s a long drive for them, but there are eager to find a new space, a new city. I think they’re discovering that we’ve got a good thing going. The turnout has been excellent. Martinis seats roughly 130, and we’ve averaged over 100 over the first six shows.

We’ll also occasionally have a straight allied comedian, usually from San Diego but we’ve had some from L.A. too. And that’s nice. It’s good to mix it up, and I think some of them have been really surprised, too, with the experience. The audience is welcoming and eager to support them, to see them do well.

Zenger’s: So you’re not trying for the kind of atmosphere of some comedy shows, where everybody’s out there thinking, “Oh, my God, I’ve got to get my big break tonight, and if anybody else does well that’s just going to get in my way.” That’s kind of the stereotype of a comedy show. You’ve got all these different people, and especially if it’s a place like L.A. where there are industry people in the audience, they’re thinking, “Oh, my God, I’ve got to get my big break, and if anybody else looks good, that’s going to kill me.”

Wherley: The big break is probably not going to happen at our show! There typically aren’t industry people there. It’s too far away. But I think for that L.A.-based comedian, it’s a different vibe. First of all, there are only so many LGBT shows in southern California. There are a couple in Long Beach, one or two in L.A. What we’re really marketing is something unique to San Diego and only a handful in southern California: LGBT bar, LGBT audience, mostly LGBT comedians.

It’s an intimate setting. It’s a classy setting. It’s not a club, but a restaurant. And with the new owners kind of making investments in the property — they’ve built a stage, they’re putting in a better sound system, better lighting — I think the people who come down from L.A. will be really impressed.

Zenger’s: Maybe it’s a relief for them to have an audience where there aren’t a lot of industry people, and there isn’t this “my career is hanging in the balance” thing, and they can just relax and be funny.

Wherley: Yes, and I think the competition up there is much fiercer than here. Just the sheer number of people who gravitate there to do comedy. But a lot of people who do comedy up there use it as a launching point for acting, whereas if you’re doing it here in San Diego that’s probably not your motivation. You really do just want to hone your craft.

We’ve been really happy with the comedians who have wanted to come down. I mean, that’s asking a lot. That’s four hours, probably at least, on the road. We pay our headliners up front, so at least there is some guarantee, but for everyone else they’re working off the tips we collect.

Zenger’s: What do you think distinguishes Gay comedy from anything else? Is it just your typical stand-up act with Gays — “Take my boyfriend, please!” — or is there a Gay sensibility that you see in your own work and in some of the performers you’ve hosted?

Wherley: There is an experience that is unique to LGBT people, and historically we haven’t been onstage. One of the first “out” comedians to perform — I think he appeared on the Tonight show with Johnny Carson, I can’t remember his name now — it was maybe in the 1980’s. We’ve been hidden, like Hollywood in general. For me it’s an opportunity to bring a perspective to the stage that I’m not necessarily hearing at other shows in San Diego. And I don’t think the audience is, either. Just like other minority groups: people of color, women. For them to get up there, they stand out immediately, visually.

For us, we may not stand out visually, but if we choose to come out in our set, our material, our jokes, it’s something new for the audience to hear, to respond to. And I think it makes for a richer experience for the audience. I’ve been to shows where it’s one 25-year-old white straight guy after another, all kind of the same appearance and almost the same perspective, and at the end of the night you’re kind of numb because you can’t remember who’s who. The stories and the “take” are so similar.

I think what we’re doing with our show is an opportunity to connect with our audience. While there are obviously some well-known LGBT comedians out there, they’re not typically the ones getting their own shows or specials on Comedy Central. And so this is a chance to hear their stories, in effect, affirmed through the LGBT comedians on stage. And it’s safe. The audience doesn’t feel that they’re being laughed at, like maybe how we felt in the past. It’s an opportunity to look at ourselves and poke fun at the reality of what it may mean to be LGBT.

Zenger’s: You’ve used that ghastly set of initials, “LGBT,” throughout this interview. Have you had any Bisexual or Transgender performers?

Wherley: Bisexual, yes. Not Transgender. We are aware of some in L.A. that we are interested in having. I’ve said to Sarah I’d love to have someone Trans: one, to mix up our show; but also I’d really like to bring Transgender people into the audience, because I don’t really think we’ve had many, if any, Transgender people at our shows. I think that would be exhilarating, because again, that’s a perspective I’m not even hearing. Some people might call Eddie Izzard Transgender, but that’s not really how he identifies. So it would be something altogether different.

Zenger’s: What would you say is different about a Gay comedian? What separates you from the indistinguishable 20-something straight guys you talked about at this putative show you attended? How would you say Queer people look at the world differently, in terms of what inspires them to joke about it and what they would find funny?

Wherley: I think we’re used to being a minority. We’re used to being isolated. And as a result, our stories aren’t always shared. Our perspective isn’t necessarily understood. So when I get up there, I think I am talking about things that people may be aware of, but haven’t heard on stage. And so I’m basically giving them the invite to laugh. I definitely poke fun at myself and other Queer people in front of what are majority straight audiences. And I enjoy it! And I’ll tell the same jokes when I go to a Queer audience. (I’m mixing up the lexicon for your sake.)

What’s different is that by being a minority, you are used to seeing things differently. It’s really powerful to use that identity, and yet connect with the majority, for instance a straight audience. Sometimes I’ve held back and not told any jokes that indicate I’m Gay, but I’ve come to realize that that’s what makes me stand out when I’m up there. And I’ll mix it up. It’s not all stuff that’s Gay-related. I’ll talk politics and current events and observational humor. I’ll talk about my family, about having grown up in the Midwest, and how life is different in California. And those things are understood by people regardless of their orientation.

Zenger’s: I remember in the 1960’s when African-American comedians started performing and getting major club dates, first there was Dick Gregory, who was politically radical and made being Black and the civil-rights struggle the center of his act; and then that paved the way for Bill Cosby, who became famous as the first Black comedian whose jokes were not dependent on his being Black. Do you think Gay comedy is going to evolve in the same way? You’ll have someone who is out there and is Gay, is generally known as Gay, but is not telling Gay jokes?

Wherley: I think it’s already happening. There’s one comedian I know who’s Gay — not local — and I watched one of his DVD’s. It was a one-hour special, and he never referenced being Gay. Now, is that progress or is that him just choosing not to come out? I’m not sure. I mean, I think there’s definitely a desire on the part of Queer comedians to broaden their base, and so some may feel compelled to talk less about being Queer. But I think we can’t help it. Whoever’s booking shows knows who we are. And that may help us or hurt us, and so you might as well accept it and incorporate it into your act.

Zenger’s: One of the most brilliant things I ever saw was not from a Gay comedian, although it twisted the knife in somewhat the same way. It was a panel about marriage equality. It was at the Malcolm X Library. Most of the speakers were Black, and there was this one African-American minister of a storefront church in San Diego — actually part of a national movement to create a Queer-friendly Black church. One of the other Black people on the panel used the line, “Well, being Gay is not like being Black. Everyone sees me and knows that I’m Black. They don’t necessarily know that you’re Gay.” And this Black Gay minister, in the queeniest voice you could imagine, said, “Well, actually the moment anybody sees me they know I’m Gay, too.”

Wherley: Nice. There was a guy who performed at Bourbon Street. He did not reference that he was Gay. In fact, some of his jokes talked about girlfriends. And then I later discovered that he is Gay. So I guess we do have that luxury, if we quote-unquote “pass.”

Zenger’s: That baffles me. Why would he want to stay closeted in a Gay establishment?

Wherley: I don’t know if he was aware what that place was. He was from L.A. It was peculiar. That’s why, when I later discovered it, I thought, “This is really odd.” Why wouldn’t he have tried to connect with his audience and switched the joke? Maybe he does usually say “girlfriend.” He could have said “boyfriend” and it would have worked just as well. But he didn’t tweak any of it, so I was led to think he was straight.

Zenger’s: Was he afraid of one of his L.A. friends catching him in San Diego, Tweeting back and saying, “This guy’s a Queer”? Word gets back to the industry and his career chances are finished?

Wherley: He’s out on line. Justin Martindale is his name. We’re looking to try to get him to one of our shows. So he is Gay, identifies as such [on his Web site], but he chose not to, and it was unusual.

Zenger’s: Of course, maybe he’s Bi and he has girlfriends and boyfriends.

Wherley: It’s possible, but I found the word “Gay” attached to him. Now maybe that’s for those who don’t know what “Bi” means.

Zenger’s: In fact, I could imagine a Bisexual comedian having a great time with this. I remember in the 1970’s a woman named Lindsay Maracotta, who wrote for Playboy, published a book about the singles scene, and there was this marvelous line in it, where she quotes one of her girlfriends as telling her, “I’m dating a guy who’s Bisexual. And I don’t mind him being Bisexual. It’s just twice as many people to be jealous of.”

Wherley: A friend of mine who does comedy — she started here, now she’s in L.A. — she’s the one on our show who identifies as Bi, and she did a show in L.A. and actually came out on stage to her mother and aunt and cousins, who were in the audience. That’s something straight comedians can’t do. I told her, “I think there are better ways to come out!” I came out by letter. It may be considered old-fashioned, but a little more discreet, I guess.

Zenger’s: How did your family react?

Wherley: I wasn’t there, but not well. I think they would have preferred it be shared in private. Understandable. I did have the pleasure of performing in Madison, Wisconsin in September. It was the first time I had performed in front of my parents and two of my siblings. That was a lot of fun, because I do tell a couple of jokes about my mom, so it was nice to have her there, and then I could kind of tweak them a little and acknowledge that she was in the audience, and have some high-school classmates. It was really fun. It was the second-largest audience I’ve had, and that was 250. Cold, rainy night, late September, and everyone came out. It was just a lot of fun to perform in front of them. It’s really a rare opportunity to perform out of the area, and that was really special. It reminded me why I enjoy doing comedy. It was thrilling.

Zenger’s: What have you got coming up for January 12?

Wherley: The headliner is a straight woman. Her name is Vicki Barbolak. She’s kind of in the mold of almost Roseanne Barr. She presents herself as someone trashy. I think it may be more of a persona than reality, but really just kind of sassy in an overweight 1980’s kind of way. It’s this whole schtick, but it works, and I think Gay men in particular will really like her.

Who else is on that show? Sarah and myself, we perform at every show. Another straight comedian, Kyle Ray, who has a Gay brother and does a lot of Gay-related material, really clever stuff. I’m really looking forward to having him on the show.

Zenger’s: Where do you think Laugh Out Proud is going in the future?

Wherley: We just had our first show with the new owners of Martinis, Jim Simpson, and they are invested in their operation. They just built a new stage. There was no stage before, so that was a big improvement. It helps the audience see the comedians, and whatever other entertainment they may have, much better. The sound system, as they have described, is going to be a huge improvement, allowing people farther away to hear it better. The lighting system that they’ve described is going to be a huge enhancement, too.

We really are eager to continue putting on a good show, and that means a mix of men and women, people of color and Queer and straight and San Diego and L.A.; that we fill the place — that it seats up to 130, getting close to that — and having people come back because they really had a good time: enjoyed the comedians, felt comfortable.

It’s a free show, and there aren’t a lot of free comedy shows of that caliber in San Diego. And I think it’s really special. The headliner we had last month, Steve Hasley from L.A., really enjoyed it. And he’s already told people up there, because they’ve contacted us, asking if they can get on. So our hope is that we can keep bringing people from L.A. who are interested, Queer or straight.