DENNIS WYMBS:

Retired Teacher Finds New Career as Leather Artist

interview by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

“Stunning.” That’s the word I used in the July 2011 issue of Zenger’s to describe the Leather-themed artwork of Dennis Wymbs, some of which he had donated to the California LeatherSIR/Leatherboy contest last June for a fundraising auction. “Isn’t that a little press release-y?” said my husband Charles when he was proofreading the piece. “I’ve seen the work,” I said. “It is stunning.”

You’ll have a chance to see Dennis Wymbs’ work for yourself through July 31 at the new location of Pleasures & Treasures, 2525 University Avenue in North Park. After five years in a bungalow near a former bathhouse that’s now a veterinary hospital, the store moved into a larger space with a second floor owners Bill Freyer and Tim Melodick plan to use for art exhibits as well as a community meeting space. Wymbs showed five or six times at their old location and was happy to be invited to be the first artist whose works are exhibited at their new one — and that the show will be up during Pride Weekend. The store can be reached at (619) 822-4280 or online at http://pleasuresandtreasures.biz

Wymbs, who got into art after retiring as a teacher, works in a wide variety of media, included molded leather, stained glass, metal engraving and painting. Much of his art is specifically Gay-themed, but veiled and sensual instead of sexual. In his interview, we discussed his community involvements, what he hopes people will get out of his work, and the difficulties of being an artist in these trying economic times.

Zenger’s: Why don’t you just tell me a little bit about yourself, how you got into art and also how you got into Leather?

Dennis Wymbs: This is Chapter 2. I had a previous career as an educator, and when I retired, there was a huge gap. I have no artistic training as such, but I started futzing around with stained glass, and from stained glass I started playing around doing some leather sculptures. I started making leather harnesses for Pleasures & Treasures, and in playing with the leather it seemed that sculpture was the next extension.

Shortly after Bill and Tim opened the doors to their original store [in 2006], there was an advertisement in one of the local newspapers looking for artists. I can remember: I was driving around with my partner, and we debated, do I dare disturb the universe? And so, with some encouragement, he said, “What do you have to lose? Get out of the car, go in and say, ‘I’m a new artist, and I saw you were looking for some work. Would you be interested?’” They said, “Bring in some samples,” and so I did. And I was booked for my very first show, which was absolutely amazing, sheer excitement, the whole idea, panic.

As people saw my work, more and more requests came in for donations. One of the ways that I have attempted to contribute to the Gay community is through my artwork. So I thought, “O.K., that sounds really cool.” I started giving lots of work away, and it’s almost like what the universe says, what you give out, you get back. The support began to grow, and one of the main supporters that I had in the Leather community was Mike Russell. Mike kind of appointed me, in many respects, as the artist to go to if there was an event.

I began doing a number of different events for the Leather community. I did Leather Realm [the Leather area within the Pride Festival] for a couple of years. I joined a group called Art of Pride that shows our artwork during the Pride Festival, and shows started being offered to me. I’ve been doing art now for five years, and I tend to be somewhat manic when I create. And if I’m doing a show, it’s like I’ve got to do tons [of work so] that there might be something that connects with a person.

I’m blown away by the fact that people are attracted enough to even consider taking some of their hard-earned money and buying something. It sounds hokey, but it’s true. As the market began to dry up in San Diego, I began exploring other venues outside of San Diego. I started showing up in Hollywood, over in Palm Springs. The problem with showing out of town is having to haul everything, and it’s extremely exhausting. I wasn’t really looking for a second career, and the more I’m at this the more it’s turning out to be just that.

What I find really interesting is that this exhibit has been up now for under two weeks, and there have been five pieces sold, five engravings sold. I wasn’t here to say anything to anybody physically, but I was able to communicate with somebody sufficiently for them to purchase those pieces. And given that Bill and Tim have asked the artwork to stay up until the end of July, I have no idea who else I’ll be able to communicate with.

Zenger’s: One thing I’ve noticed is you seem to work in a lot of different media. Why is that, and what do you get out of each one?

Wymbs: There’s a saying by Mark Twain that goes, you’ll see in a picture “whatever you bring, if you will stand between it and the mirror of your imagination.” What you see in my artwork is me. Sometimes I scream and shout, sometimes I whisper. Sometimes I sing and dance, and different media allow me to do the same things. It’s just expressions of me.

I had the opportunity of having a couple of conversations with Edward Albee, the playwright who wrote Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In one of our brief discussions, I asked him what was his definition on art. And his response really had a major impact on me. He said that art wasn’t the product that was produced; it was the process of how the viewer interpreted the intentions of the artist.

So if you look at an object, that’s not art. Art takes place between your ears. What you see as art is that communication. One of the reasons why I produce so frenetically is that I want that conversation to go on. I learned in the classroom very early on that you must be able to speak in very many languages. Artistically, I’ve taken different media to do that.

I love glass because it changes: because there’s a certain degree of danger to it. Some of the paintings I do are done in beeswax. The medium is called encaustics, and it’s a medium in which you have limited control. I love the medium because, again, there’s that sense of letting something come out that may have been kept quiet for a very long time.

Engravings I love because it’s a black canvas. I do a lot of stuff on black canvases, whether it be painting or engraving. It’s interesting; there’s an edge. I use a knife to do the engraving. It’s sharp, just like stained glass. It plays with light, just like stained glass does. Everything I do, every medium I used, is a light play, suggesting that there’s this ever-changing possibility that’s there.

The leather sculpture that I do, there’s this very spiritual thing that says that leather is sensual, it’s very sensual to work with. Leather is sensual, and the idea of taking a hide that has been flattened — that is no longer discernible as having been a living being — can be transformed. There’s a partnership that exists between the artist and the medium. Often the leather will not let me do what my mind’s eye says I need to do. It’s almost a surrender when I work in leather. It’s a surrender to a medium that, pretty much like encaustics, I have limited control over.

Somebody had made an observation not too long ago that a lot of my work has windows and doors. I never really noticed that before. Sometimes the main character is looking out, and sometimes outside looking in. One of the truisms that I’ve found about myself is that in many ways throughout my life I’ve been the insider/outsider, and I don’t think that’s unique. I think people can identify with that.

Zenger’s: I don’t think I’ve ever interviewed a Gay person who didn’t think he or she was the outsider.

Wymbs: What you see here is primarily bedroom art. But I also do living-room art, and it’s that same ability to try to communicate with someone else. It’s almost to pluck the string that produces the music that says you and I are similar. And it really doesn’t matter if you’re Gay or straight. If you belong to a particular community group or whatever, it’s just that ability to speak a common language.

Something I used to tell my students was don’t judge. Do a mental shift from “right” and “wrong,” that something’s neither “right” nor “wrong.” Something’s different. And in the differences, we should celebrate.

Zenger’s: Well, that’s something fascinating. You hear so much political rhetoric these days: who are the “real” Americans? “These people” are not part of “the community.” Gays aren’t; immigrants aren’t; people who are concerned about global warming aren’t. You’ve got all this “we are the real Americans; the rest of you are outside the community,” and it seems like the idea of celebrating difference has become extremely unfashionable in our country right now.

Wymbs: We are extremely egocentric. I was just asked to be a board member for a foundation that deals with teen suicide, and my first life was spent working with kids, with teenagers. I saw enough heartache with the kids, and one of the things the foundation is struggling with is whether or not it should focus on Gay teens or all teens. As a group that’s been marginalized, Gay teens have some problems that are strictly theirs. But teens in general have problems of acceptance, and they deal with that concept of suicide a lot. I think that one of the reasons that thought is so prevalent is they see themselves as different. And if nothing else, if people could recognize that it is actually the differences that unite us, not divide us.

When I began doing work in other media, those people who were “in the know” told me you shouldn’t do that, you can’t do that. I don’t want to name a medium, but I will: watercolors. Oh, my gosh. You can’t be a legitimate watercolorist if you — dot, dot, dot. Why not? Why can’t you go where your voice says to go? If what you’re doing, what you’re shooting to do is pluck that string in somebody else’s heart, or somebody else’s head, where that artistic process takes place — which is how I think — why should you be locked into “this is what you must do”? Why do we have to do that?

Zenger’s: It occurs to me that every artist from the past you’ve actually heard of — the Leonardos, the Michelangelos, the Van Goghs, the Matisses and Monets and Picassos — were the ones who did what the experts of their time were telling them shouldn’t be done.

Wymbs: The thing that I find that’s difficult is that when you go to a gallery, and there’s a gallery curator or owner there, and that person says, “Give me a list of your credentials” and all the fah-fah stuff, I just leave. I’m not interested — I’m not going to play that game with you. My work speaks for what my work says. I don’t need to jump through your hoops.

Zenger’s: I remember when I first met you, you talked about some of the problems you’ve had with donations submitted to different events, where you thought the art was undervalued.

Wymbs: The community was looking for lots of donations. And, again, it didn’t matter if it was the Bears, the Leather community, country/western, it didn’t matter. People were just looking for some way to raise funds. The sad part about it was that they were going for flea-market values in the artistic world. And to be honest, I thought that was an affront. There were several occasions where I donated pieces, where I actually bought them back.

A classic example: California LeatherSIR. There were a number of things that were put up for silent auction, and the amount that was actually bid on those pieces to raise funds, in many instances, would not have even covered the cost of the materials. You don’t raise funds that way. What you are doing is you’re going bargain-hunting, and you’re using that event to get your treasures.

I sometimes question the way that funds are raised. If what you’re trying to do is forward a cause, there’s got to be something more than Jell-O shots. What’s going to happen when you can’t raise funds at a bar because there aren’t enough of them left anymore? Then what do you do? There’s got to be another way of doing things.

One of the best fundraisers I’ve seen has been the way the Tool Shed in Palm Springs raises money for the Desert AIDS Project. They have an art show at the Tool Shed, a bar. You donate a piece of art, and there’s a silent auction. People write their bids in a book that’s kept behind the bar. The artists are invited to a meet-and-greet, and they can also bring in additional pieces for sale.

The pieces I’ve donated have sold for more than what I valued them. I think last year, last November, they had over 30 artists vying to participate. They raised close to $5,000. The year before that, I think they raised over $3,000. And the artwork is hung at the Tool Shed. I’m blown away by the fact that it unites an artistic community. It raises funds, and it celebrates the artistic talents and the legacy of the Gay community.

I’ve knocked on doors in San Diego, to see if we can do the same thing. After a year and a half, my knuckles are a little bit bloodied, and we do not have an event. And I think we’ve got more than enough potential venues.

MOXIE’s Poster Boys at Diversionary: Funny … and More

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

You wouldn’t know it from the press materials on Poster Boys, the current U.S. premiere co-production of Diversionary and MOXIE at the Diversionary space, 4545 Park Boulevard in University Heights, but the play is inspired by a true story. In 2003 Vancity, a credit union based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, mounted an ad campaign that tried to build business by highlighting — or shamelessly exploiting, depending on your point of view — Vancity’s Queer members. The ads featured photos of same-sex couples and bore the slogan, “I want to bank with people who value all partnerships.” The Vancouver archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church responded by pulling out of a school program sponsored by Vancity.

Playwright Michele Riml was working at Grey Global Group, the advertising agency that had created Vancity’s “value all partnerships” campaign, and she saw a great idea for a play about the controversy. Only it took her a while to write it, she told interviewers before Poster Boys had its world premiere in Vancouver in March 2008, because she first had to work through her anger at the incident. “For me, anger is not a good place to write from,” she said. As she began to work out her plot, she created the central character of Caroline, a 40-something ad executive at the Zenspiration agency who’s angling for a promotion to vice-president even though her personal life is a mess.

Caroline sees the chance for a career breakthrough when the executives at the Clearwater Credit Union in Orlando, Florida decide to do a series of ads promoting “cultural diversity” — which, it soon develops, is code for “Gay.” She instructs her ambitious assistant and out-of-office boy-toy, Brad (Justin Lang), to come up with the perfect Gay poster boy for Clearwater’s campaign. Brad brings back an unprepossessing middle-aged man named Jack (John Anderson), who shows up at Zenspiration in the sweat shirt and blue bike shorts he was wearing when Brad ran into him. Caroline is unexpectedly (at least if you haven’t read the promotional material for the play) on edge about getting involved with Jack professionally — because, it turns out, 13 years previously she was involved with Jack personally, not only as his lover but as his fiancée. The two had actually got as far as setting a wedding date before Jack decided he’d had enough and came out as Gay — “He wanted to wear a purple cummerbund,” Caroline grimly jokes; “that should have been the giveaway” — and Caroline has been gun-shy about anything resembling a serious relationship ever since.

The plot thickens when Caroline and Brad realize that a photo layout of one man really doesn’t say “Gay.” They decide they need two men in a committed relationship and rather nervously ask if Jack has a partner. He does: Carson (Charles Maze), a rising young architect who’s been with Jack for five years. Carson is also a hard-core Roman Catholic who insists on saying grace before every meal he and Jack share, and given his church’s belief (stated 27 years ago by the current Pope) that homosexuality is “an objective moral disorder” and their extensive donations to anti-Queer political candidates and ballot measures, being a Queer Catholic is close to the mother of all cognitive dissonances. The plot of Poster Boys turns on Jack’s and Carson’s discomfort with the process by which they’re made over into images for Queer equality and both their appearances and backgrounds are remodeled into commodities that will sell a product.

The promotion line for the Diversionary/MOXIE production — “An advertising executive’s ‘diversity’ campaign runs afoul of the Catholic Church. She can handle that. What she can’t handle is that one of the poster boys is her ex-fiancé” — suggests that Poster Boys will either be a sitcom or a farce, and that it will turn into a romantic triangle (or a romantic quadrilateral) as Caroline and Jack find themselves re-attracted to each other and Carson gets jealous. Nothing of the sort happens; though Poster Boys is quite funny it’s also a much richer drama than the ads for it suggest. Riml clearly regards Jack as definitively Gay — whatever drew him to Caroline in the first place, which is kept ambiguous, it’s clear he’s committed not only to Carson but to a Gay identity and, if anything is going to break them up, doubt about Jack’s sexual orientation is not going to be it.

Riml’s great gift as a playwright is a kind of sly subtlety that enables her to say quite a lot — about advertising, capitalism in general, the social creation of “reality,” emotional relationships and how people react differently to them as they age — without hammering the audience over the head with it. In one scene we see Jack and Carson at dinner — and then, in a staging maneuver director Delicia Turner Sonnenberg makes look more like a quick cut in a film than anything we’d expect in live theatre — Caroline is in Carson’s place and the scene becomes a dream of the marriage they could have had. Riml’s gag is that Jack and Carson are behaving like a typical straight couple — the issues in their relationship aren’t sex but money and careers (indeed, we get the distinct impression that whatever sexual fires brought them together are pretty well banked by now) — while Caroline is behaving like a stereotypical middle-aged Gay man, reliving her youth by seeking a much younger male partner for frenzied, emotionless sex.

Throughout the play, Caroline is bedeviled by two authoritative voices coaxing her, sometimes to the point of browbeating her. One comes from her boss at Zenspiration, Marty (who was an unseen voice in the Vancouver production but, in an inspired touch from director Turner Sonnenberg, is seen here as an image as well as a voice, supposedly in wireless communication with Caroline via computer, though the program doesn’t credit the actor who plays him), who’s hectoring her to come up with the “branding” for the Clearwater account that will turn it from a one-shot ad to something that will make people what Caroline calls “brand believers” in Clearwater. The other is a character identified only as “The Woman,” whom Riml stipulates must be played in drag by the same actor who plays Carson, who materializes in Caroline’s consciousness (usually accompanied by memories of airplane flights — Caroline is chronically airsick but her job requires her to fly a lot) and gives her a ragbag of advice, some good (like “be yourself”) and some bad (like “take Botox”).

Poster Boys is an engaging script that builds to a riveting climax in which the whole task of pushing Jack and Carson as the ideal Gay couple flashes back to Caroline’s own trauma when Jack left her and declared himself Gay, while Jack and Carson both rebel against the whole idea of going through a wedding ceremony sponsored by a corporation. It seemed to be leading up to an ending in which Jack and Carson would have realized that, like it or not, in today’s hyper-capitalist age virtually the only way to get a political or social message out to an audience large enough to matter is to get a corporation or a rich person to sponsor it — and so they would go through the showcase wedding, Clearwater would get their branding (and the boost to their business they were hoping for) and Caroline her promotion — or maybe younger, cuter, more energetic Brad would have back-stabbed her out of it and got the vice-presidency himself. Instead Riml resorted to a clichéd finish straight out of the 1945 novel The Hucksters (and the 1947 film based on it) and quite a few other stories since that have dealt with advertising and how one can’t succeed in it and still maintain a conscience.

But the disappointing conclusion doesn’t invalidate what’s gone before — or the marvelous work MOXIE’s and Diversionary’s people have done bringing Riml’s finely honed play to life. Director Turner Sonnenberg has staged it with such precision that, as noted above, at times it seems more like a movie than a play, and she and lighting director Michelle Caron have worked out a series of cues that allows us to follow multiple planes of action without ever having to wonder which we’re supposed to think is more important. Turner Sonnenberg has also cast the play perfectly — indeed, if the reviews of the Vancouver premiere online are to be believed, she cast at least one part better than they did. Vancouver critic Colin Thomas said Carson was “as camp as a row of tents” — but fortunately that’s not how he’s played here. Charles Maze delivers a rich characterization that projects Carson as proud of his career and also his homemaking skills, accepting himself as Gay while still being burdened by the clash between his sincere belief in the faith of his fathers and the nasty things it has to say about him as a Gay man. He’s equally good — and non-campy — as “The Woman,” delivering his lines matter-of-factly and without a hint of flounce.

The other cast members are equally fine. Julie Anderson Sachs nails both Caroline’s assertiveness and her underlying vulnerability. She’s a genuinely attractive woman but, thanks to Caron’s merciless lighting and a minimal makeup job (oddly, here as in the past MOXIE doesn’t credit a makeup artist), we see her crow’s feet and the lines on her face and feel for her fears about advancing age. John Anderson is good in a befuddled, what-have-I-got-myself-into? mode as Jack, and he achieves pathos when he has to admit that he too shaded his background (representing himself as co-owner of an independent bookstore when in fact he’s just the store manager), though Riml rather underwrote the character and didn’t make him strong enough for us to see what attracted either Caroline or Carson to him. Justin Lang is genuinely hot and nails Brad’s irrepressible energy while keeping us guessing whether he’s really attracted to Caroline or just screwing her to boost his own career.

The action of Poster Boys is punctuated by a series of pop songs played over the theatre’s sound system, and sometimes sung by the cast (the scene in which Caroline and Jack perform “I Got You, Babe” at a karaoke bar, with Caroline taking Sonny’s part and Jack taking Cher’s, is especially precious). Some of the records are by k. d. lang, who’s actually mentioned in the script, while others are genuinely surprising — Eric Carmen’s tacky 1970’s power-pop ballad “All By Myself” becomes the center of one of the play’s most powerful scenes. Sound designer Tom Jones proves effective at D.J.’ing all this music and also supplying effects like the airplane noises that accompany “The Woman”’s appearances. The play takes place on a simple set — or rather a pair of sets, one for Caroline’s office and one for Jack’s and Conrad’s dining room, which the action cuts back and forth between — ably rendered by Matt Scott with aid from “media designer” Luke Olsen’s back-wall projections. Costume designer Jeannie Galioto has outfitted Caroline with convincing simulacra of the designer dresses she boasts of wearing, and David Medina’s props are convincing if not especially challenging.

Poster Boys is a must-see, a typical MOXIE production — a powerful script that takes aim at some of our most cherished stereotypes of sexual orientation (in general artists have been a lot more flexible than the Queer community’s political leaders about how people can change from opposite-sex to same-sex relationships — or, more controversially, the other way around), religious belief, capitalism, personal integrity and authenticity. Riml’s play is expertly realized by director Turner Sonnenberg and an excellent cast and crew, though there’s one irony she probably didn’t intend: on the inside front cover of the program is a paid ad from Wells Fargo Bank with a photo of two men (considerably hotter-looking than John Anderson and Charles Maze!) in the street, leaning into each other in an unmistakable “we’re together” pose, with copy boasting that Wells Fargo has “made significant contributions to LGBT organizations over the past 20 years.” In other words, they’re using the program to sell themselves in the same preposterous ways the play itself so hilariously and devastatingly ridicules!

Poster Boys runs through Sunday, July 31 at Diversionary Theatre, 4545 Park Boulevard in University Heights. A MOXIE Theatre co-production. Performances are 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays, with special performances Monday, July 18 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, July 31 at 7 p.m. For tickets and other information, call (619) 220-0097 or visit www.diversionary.org

Leather History Meeting Relives the Wounds of AIDS

The Crisis Dominates the Reminiscences of Four Local Leatherfolk

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

PHOTOS, top to bottom: Wendy Sue Biegeleisen, Mark Holmes, Wayne Dietz, Luke Owens

The San Diego League of Gentlemen (SD-LOG) meeting July 1 at the Joyce Beers Community Center in Hillcrest was advertised as a Leather history panel, but the most intense memories the three men and one women on the panel had to offer were from the AIDS crisis of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Co-sponsored by SD-LOG and the San Diego Leather History Project, and moderated by Leather History Project facilitator Caryl — who brought extensive scrapbooks of San Diego Leather history that were displayed on tables throughout the event — the panel featured Lesbian activist, longtime Leather community organizer and former Pride official Wendy Sue Biegeleisen; Mark Holmes, Mr. San Diego Leather 1984 and founder of the first leather goods store in San Diego specifically servicing the Leather/BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadomasochism) community; Luke Owens, former staff member of Update and contributor to The Leather Journal; and former Imperial Court Empress and Emperor and Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence member (as “Chlamydia Burns”) Wayne Dietz.

Though the panelists addressed other issues, including the changing nature of the bar scene in San Diego and their backgrounds in the military (all three male panelists were veterans; Holmes served in the Air Force and Owens and Dietz in the Navy), the discussion kept coming back to AIDS. When they weren’t talking about how it had traumatized them personally — Holmes was diagnosed with AIDS in 1991 and nearly died from it five years later, and Owens vividly recalled being the staff member at Update who had to type all the obituaries that ran in every issue of the paper at the height of the death toll (that was “one of the hardest times of my life,” he said) — they were talking about its impact on the community and it changed the mores of the Leather scene.

Wendy Sue discussed how AIDS affected her; she became a caregiver for many people with AIDS, had to fight doctors and other medical personnel to get them decent treatment, and was also part of the generation of Lesbians that had to step into leadership positions in the Queer community because so many of its men were dying or desperately ill. “I was a caregiver for people with AIDS, and I saw them treated horribly,” she recalled. “Doctors and nurses would come into their rooms in full scrubs and masks, or just leave their meals at the door. I’d been near Gay men since I was 15, and I would eat off the same trays as my friends. Many men died in my arms. I consider myself a survivor of the AIDS crisis.”

Though she became an AIDS activist — Wendy Sue was one of the original founders of ACT UP San Diego and was present at the creation of several other AIDS organizations — it took its toll on her personally. “I’ve tended to isolate,” she said. “I don’t remember people’s names. I stopped going to funerals when I was going to one or two a week. I share this with the younger people in the room because I would not wish this on anyone, and I hope the younger folk here hear our life stories and pass on to other folk how important it is to value our lives in a society that trashes our lives at every turn.”

“AIDS has killed more people than all of America’s wars, and in the first few years no one was paying attention,” said Holmes. “No one [in the mainstream media] talked about it at all until Newsweek in 1983.” After a decade in San Diego Holmes had moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career — “I was one of the pirates in Hook,” he recalled — only he got diagnosed with AIDS in 1991, shortly after he relocated. In 1995, he said, he “moved back to San Diego to die. Fortunately, protease inhibitors came out in time to save me, though not in time for a lot of my friends.”

Holmes said he met Wendy Sue in the early 1980’s, when he was given the business of selling leather goods inside the Loading Zone, then San Diego’s only Leather bar. He didn’t know the first thing about how to sew. Fortunately, she did. The business grew into a free-standing leather store called Hard Labor Leather, located on Washington Street in Hillcrest where Ashley Medical is now. Unfortunately, the source of Wendy’s sewing knowledge was her training in theatre designs and costumes — which put her at ground zero for the AIDS crisis. “The first person I knew who died of AIDS passed away in 1982,” she recalled. “By 1987 I had lost 60 friends and I had to stop counting. … I had a lot of friends in the theatre, and that’s how I knew so many people who passed away.”

Wendy Sue boasted that she was one of the first Lesbian activists to warn her community that AIDS wasn’t just a Gay male problem; that her people needed to deal with it, too. As a founding member of S.D. LINK (San Diego Lesbians in Kink) and San Diego LASH (Leather and Sisterhood), she said, “I was the first Leather dyke to volunteer at the Center and one of the first people who said Lesbians needed to practice safer sex, too.” Wendy Sue came to the cause from her personal experience. “I was with a woman from 1984 to 1986, and one year after we broke up I got a call from her in which she said, ‘While we were together, I was shooting up and sharing needles with Gay men,’” she recalled. “In 1987 I tested, and by the grace of the Goddess I tested negative. I don’t know where she is or what she’s up to, but that’s what motivated me to talk to women and say, ‘You don’t know where your partner’s been or where your partner’s partners have been.’ Since then I’ve treated every woman I’ve had sex with as if we were both positive.”

“AIDS certainly has to be the defining moment of my Gay life,” said Dietz. “It changed everything for many of us.” Curiously, like a lot of other Gay men of his generation who have survived, Dietz doesn’t regard the impact of AIDS on the community as entirely negative. “When we interact with each other now, it’s with a lot more honesty and we intermingle a lot more,” he said. “We’re all in this together and we all share in the benefits from when we work together collectively. We don’t have dueling benefits anymore (two fundraisers in different bars the same night). Since 1999-2000 we’ve become more of a community, and San Diego is now being noticed because it’s a strong [Leather] community. We’ve grown a lot in 20 years.”

Though it nearly killed him personally and did kill many of his friends, Holmes also sees a silver lining in the dark cloud of AIDS. “AIDS not only brought us together, it made us human for the first time instead of those ‘others’ out there,” he said. “That has made the most difference in bringing about the progress that has ended ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ and created the possibility that we will be allowed to marry nationwide.” According to Holmes, AIDS forever changed mainstream America’s perception of the Queer community as made up of people who loved, felt pain and suffered loss instead of just cruising each other and having casual sex. As a result, he said, “In 50 years a Gay Pride parade will be no more looked down upon than a St. Patrick’s Day parade.”

“In 1977 a lot of men would walk into a bar and walk out with a complete stranger,” said Owens. “Since AIDS hit, a lot of men have been willing to take more time, form a lasting relationship and build more of an emotional tie between couples. I hate condoms but I still use them, and for someone who’s been sexually active since 1977, I’m still negative — and I consider that a miracle.” Owens also thanked Lesbians for stepping up to the plate and keeping the community going as AIDS was killing off so many highly active and visible Gay men. “It was because of the Lesbian community and people like Wendy and [veteran Leather activist] Jo Blas that a lot of us didn’t die and are here now,” he said.

“It was clear to us by 1983 that this was happening from anal sex, fisting and mixing the two,” said Holmes. “Before the Centers for Disease Control and the American Medical Association got involved, we were putting up safer-sex posters. I put one up at my spot at the Loading Zone, and the owners ripped it down and tore it up because it was a sexual arena.”

Dietz remembered those years at the Loading Zone and the casual sex scene. “It was a much freer time — and I was much younger,” he said. “You could be at the Loading Zone, go home after 20 minutes and then come back. … I remember a much hotter, more sexually charged time.” Dietz said he dropped out of the bar scene in 1984 when he became part of a couple, then returned to the community after his partner died in 1994. Dietz 2.0 was much less of a bar cruiser and more of a community activist than Dietz 1.0; he got heavily involved in the Imperial Court and co-founded Bears San Diego, though he still feels more comfortable with the Leather community than anywhere else.

Confronting Law Enforcement

Though AIDS was the topic the panelists kept returning to, other issues were raised, including the often hostile attitude of local law enforcement towards the Leather community in general and Leather bars in particular. Wendy Sue recalled her experiences working at the Club, which at the time was “the Lesbian bar” in San Diego. “It attracted interesting women, women who liked motorcycles, and that brought women together in the BDSM scene,” she said. Unfortunately, the Club also attracted a lot of unwanted attention both from the San Diego Police Department and the state Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) board.

“The Vice Squad was trying to close it down,” Wendy Sue recalled. “I’d been working there for two months when two police officers came in in their polyester suits. When I asked for ID, they said they were police officers. When I asked to see their badges, they told me to step outside and said I would be arrested if I kept asking them for ID. They went into the bar, turned on all the lights, shut off the music and watched the bartenders as they poured drinks. They were looking for any violation of the state alcohol law they could use as an excuse to shut the Club down, but they didn’t find anything. That happened in a lot of the bars back then.” ABC eventually did close the Club in 1984 and its owners turned it into a men’s bar called BULC — where, thanks to her friendship with Mark Holmes, Wendy was one of the few women welcome.

Wendy Sue also mentioned a more recent event that had a quite different outcome: the arrest of the San Diego Six in October 1999. Club X sponsored a private play party Hallowe’en weekend and a squad of police officers from the vice unit raided it and arrested six attendees for the crimes of “public nudity” and/or “lewd conduct in public.” Rallying to their defense, Club X raised $20,000 for legal expenses and brought in attorney Andy Zmurkiewicz, who represented five of the six defendants and handled the first court trial. After the first defendant was acquitted — and the foreman of the jury told the prosecutor the trial was a “waste of time” and never should have taken place — all charges against the other five were dropped.

“That turned around the police and the vice community,” said Wendy Sue. “It changed how we as a BDSM/Leather community were seen. That started communication between law enforcement and the kink community. It was unfortunate that six Club X members were arrested — including three women with red hair, because one of the cops said, ‘Get the one with red hair.’” Wendy Sue recalled that the Club X members who testified were able to establish that, even though the play party was in a technically “public” venue, admission was restricted to people who bought tickets in advance and both the building itself and its parking lot were so remote there was no chance anyone not wanting to be at the event could have stumbled into it. “That was a really transitional event for us in our community,” Wendy Sue said.

“That was the point,” Holmes added, “at which this community put its foot down and started saying, ‘This is not domestic violence. This is consensual S/M. This is something we’re doing for fun and excitement.’ We started educating the law enforcement community.”

Coming Out Into Leather

Other topics covered included the effect of the Internet on the Leather community, the old-guard concept of “earning your leathers,” and the different ways men and women come to an awareness of their Leather identity and interest in BDSM sex. While the three men on the panel emphasized the importance of their military backgrounds and the bars as the arena in which they came out, Wendy Sue described a somewhat more complicated process by which women became Leatherpeople. While some Leatherwomen, like many Leathermen, came out of motorcycle clubs, Wendy Sue said a lot of women got into Leather and BDSM as a result of the Lesbian feminist movement of the 1970’s.

“There was a gathering of women in 1978-79 and they created Califia,” Wendy Sue recalled. “They got some land out in the boonies and were doing a lot of meeting and consciousness-raising. Out of Califia came a group of Lesbians interested in exploring about sexuality, that had a closed group doing a lot of dialogue and exploring BDSM. That opened up in 1981-82” and, she added, set the stage for groups like San Diego LINK and San Diego LASH which she was involved with in 1984-86.

Wendy Sue also mentioned another 1980’s institution that helped Lesbians explore their sexuality and got many of them interested in Leather and kink: women’s musical festivals. “I put together a scrapbook from 1984-86 that includes pictures from the West Coast Women’s Music Festival, at which the group Leather and Lace did workshops and the organizers allowed a BDSM area,” she said. “That has been part of a number of women’s music festivals and part of our herstory, which is different from that of the men’s community.”

Though Caryl had announced at the beginning of the panel that she didn’t want to spark a debate about the so-called “old guard” of the Leather community versus younger members less versed in — and sometimes simply less interested in — older Leather traditions, she cracked the door open on that topic when she asked Owens about a comment he’d made earlier about “earning your leathers.” Owens, who said he’d entered the Leather community in the first place as an “owned slave,” said, “I was not allowed to wear anything [leather] except boots and a belt until my Master said I could get a vest and chaps.”

Holmes said he couldn’t recall any tradition that you had to “earn your leathers” and said he’d have to ask people who came out during the 1960’s — before he did — about that. Wendy Sue recalled the Leatherwomen’s group Leather and Lace and its elaborate initiation ceremony. ‘You had to go to a certain number of meetings, be sponsored by two members of the group and do a certain number of volunteer hours before you could go to a play party,” she said. “The excitement of initiation dates back to the Navy and to biker clubs.” She added that she never actually “earned” any leathers except for a wristband Holmes gave her. “I didn’t have to do anything for it,” she said, “ but because it came from Mark, it represented acceptance from a Leatherman, a Leather Master and the Leathermen’s community in general.”

“The two worst things that happened to the Leather community,” Owens said, “were the sexual revolution and The Leatherman’s Handbook” — the pioneering how-to manual (later in two volumes and innumerable editions) by author and long-standing Leather advice columnist Larry Townsend. Originally published in 1972 and frequently reissued — the last edition came out just months before Townsend’s death in July 2008, shortly after he made a rare public appearance at a Titleholder’s Appreciation Dinner as part of San Diego Leather Pride — The Leatherman’s Handbook, according to Owens, “didn’t mention anything about earning your leathers or living the lifestyle. It presented Leather as pure fantasy.”

The Net and the Future

Regarding the Internet — which some Leatherpeople have said has led to the closure of many Leather bars and organizations because it gives people a quicker and supposedly easier way to meet and hook up — Holmes said, “You get out of the Internet what you want. I’ve met some of my very best friends there. I’d get to know them online for six to eight years and then I’d meet them face to face and I’d find them exactly how I’d got to know them on the Net. You can get sex, friendship and brotherhood online. You can use it for something quick and tawdry, or you can use it to get to know somebody as a friend at the other end of the country.”

Cruising online, said Dietz, “is no different from meeting someone at the Loading Zone and going home with them in two minutes. It’s sometimes easier than going to a bar.”

Asked about the future of the Leather community, Holmes said, “I think the future is right here. This town is showing the rest of the country how to do it right. I think we’re showing the rest of the Leather community what we can do when we get together.”

“Jo [Blas] knows this, Adam [Latham, Mr. San Diego Leather 2004] learned this and Anthony [Rollar, Mr. San Diego Leather 2010 and second runner-up at International Mr. Leather this year] is starting to learn this,” said Owens. “Whatever you do for the community, the community doesn’t owe you anything. What you do, you do because you want it.”

Article on an earlier Leather history panel at the San Diego League of Gentlemen in 2004: http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2004/06/104738.shtml

Club X co-founder Madoc Pope’s recollection of the San Diego Six case: http://www.madoc.us/sd6.shtml

For the record: The version of the article above incorporates some minor corrections to the original post sent to me by Caryl via E-mail. Thank you!

What’s a Young Bear to Do? Go to Cub Club!

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

PHOTO: L to R: Ned Cato, Jr.; Dangilo Brian

What do you do if you’re a 20-something or 30-something Gay man who isn’t a smooth-chested twink with a chest as flat — and an overall body as thin — as a washboard? Where do you go out for dancing and fun at night? Ned Cato, Jr. and Dangilo Brian (his first name is pronounced “D’Angelo” and his business card describes him as “Uberglitterati”) came up with an answer two years ago when they started Cub Club and worked with local bars and other venues to come up with theme events like the June 26 “Fuzz” show at Rich’s, 1051 University Avenue in Hillcrest, and a weekly “Club Relapse” tea dance at the Brass Rail, 3796 Fifth Avenue in Hillcrest, every Sunday from 5 to 10 p.m.

In fact, the sheer number of events Cub Club is involved in is so large it’s a wonder Cato and Brian themselves can keep track of them all. They do a party at Pecs, 2046 University Avenue in North Park, the third Thursday of every month, and the next one July 21 will have a “Freaks and Geeks” theme to tie it in with San Diego’s Comic-Con. As part of the tie-in to Comic-Con week they’re also doing a “Superfresh” event Monday, July 18 at the Brass Rail; an fetish event called Belt at Bourbon Street Tuesday, July 19; a “sneak preview” with personality Mr. Bianca Wednesday, July 20 at Rich’s; and a “Heroes vs. Villains” party on Friday. Before that, in connection with Pride weekend, they’re hosting the Bears on the Bay cruise Friday, July 15; a party Sunday, July 17, 2 p.m., at Eden, 1202 University in Hillcrest with go-go dancers and comic-book logos; and an after-fest party that evening at the Brass Rail.

Cato launched Cub Club in 2009. “I noticed there were a lot of Bear events in San Diego,” Cato explained, “but nothing for the young guys who identify with the Bear community. This is a market other communities have taken advantage of, but not in this area.” According to Cato, the older Bears San Diego group didn’t actively try to excluse younger people, but they didn’t go out of their way to make them feel welcome either. So he and Brian launched their group with an event at the Flame on Park Boulevard.

When he lost the Flame as a host in 2010, Rich’s — where Cato works, and which was already doing a weekly L. L. Bear dance (“L. L.” stands for “Levi and Leather”) — took them on. “They were very open to having our boys dance there,” Cato said. “For the first year we had the upstairs VIP area, and now we have integrated ourselves into L. L. Bear. We consider ourselves L. L. Bear’s dirty younger brother. We have a really solid presence there.”

Brian joined Cub Club in March of 2011. “I’ve been in San Diego two years,” he said. “My background is in the Midwest and New York City, where I did parties and special events. I have a nine-to-five job, but when this came around, and I met the group and saw what they were about, I liked it. It’s on a growth path. People are in the right position.” Brian encountered the Cubs at one of the L. L. Bear nights and approached Max, the go-go boy who’s entertained at several of their events, for an introduction “because we’re similar in body types,” he said. “The ball just kept rolling. The interest has swelled and people want to know who we are and how they can get involved.”

In the two years Cub Club has been putting on their parties, Cato and Brian been proudest of the sheer range of people they’ve drawn. “I wanted our events to feel all-inclusive,” said Cato. “We’re not a type, we’re a culture. I’m hoping to attract the 21-year-old who’s a little stocky, who doesn’t feel at home at Rich’s and is not ready for Pecs.”

“It’s surprising to see the girls and drag queens who come because the smooth guy with the six-pack isn’t the main attraction,” added Brian. “You see people mingle with each other.”

“You see Lesbians, straight people, Daddies, chasers, Asians, scenesters and chubby kids,” said Cato. “With us, all are welcome. We don’t want anybody to feel like they don’t belong. Our events are doing really well. We’re seeing a mix of people you really don’t see that much. Right now our main home is at Pecs. We did two events last month [June] and we did really well.”

Cato and Brian present themselves as not only party hosts but facilitators as well. “We’re a party in a box,” Brian explained. “We can do door, technical, promotion. We can land ourselves in any venue, spark it up with our people, and then pull out” — leaving the venue owner with new customers who’ve discovered their place and will keep coming back.

“We make our own flyers and do our own photo shoots,” Cato said. “All you have to tell us is when and where.”

Another thing Cato and Brian pride themselves on is their contacts with well-respected disc jockeys so they don’t play the same songs you hear everywhere else. “Our music is not Britney or Gaga,” Cato boasted. “You’re going to hear progressive house, 1980’s and 1990’s, more than today’s top-40 electronic sounds. Our musical taste is a little more progressive than that.”

One thing Cub Club is increasingly doing is reaching out to the fetish and Leather communities. They promoted the June 26 “Fuzz” event by passing out glossy four-color postcard-sized flyers at that day’s opening of the new Pleasures & Treasures location, 2525 University Avenue in Hillcrest, thereby getting their message to a good chunk of San Diego’s Leather crowd. What they’re trying to do, Brian explained, is reach the young man who may be interested in exploring fetish or kink but is still too scared to plunge directly into the Leather scene. “If you are into a fetish, we want to be your first stop into it,” said Cato.

“Later on we can educate you about the hankie codes and the differences between a bear, a cub and an otter,” Brian added. “We have a bright, fun logo and can take ourselves into different areas. We have go-go boys and muscle guys, cowboys and Leathermen, and drag queen Grace Towers. What’s nice is our event is not the sort of full-out fetish party which would scare away young people.”

“We’re going to be doing an Otter Party,” added Cato, who tried explaining the almost bewildering variety of subgroups within the Bear scene. “You have Bears, Wolves, Cubs and Otters,” he said. “Otters are kind of in-between, a little more muscular, 25- to 35-year-old Daddy types. We want to bring to our events a little something other than the obvious.”

Cato also said his group might be the link the Leather community is looking for to the younger generation. “Working at Rich’s and seeing the Bear and Leather events, I’m struck by the lack of young people,” he explained. “A lot of young people are into Leather but they’re afraid. We’re giving them the bravery to walk into these events with their heads held high. I have a friend in our group who’s into Leather and bondage, and he wants to enter the Leather contests. No one is talking to him.”

Cub Club doesn’t yet have its own Web site, but they’re on Facebook at Cub Club SD and Twitter @ cubclubusa. “On Facebook, we cross-reference other Gay communities, including the Center, Pleasures & Treasures, ManKind and brands like Nasty Pig that carry entry gear into fetish and Leather,” Brian said. “We’re using the Facebook page to tell people what we’re looking at, and on Twitter we’re talking to Bears and Otters in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and New York City.”

More than anything else, they’d like the Cub Club logo on an event to be a guarantee of a good time. “You’ll know it will encompass everything,” Brian said. “If you don’t like one party, there’ll be another one you probably will like.”

Congratulations to California LeatherSIR/Leatherboy Winners!

Congratulations to Sam of Lancaster, winner of California LeatherSIR; zachary of Long Beach, winner of California Leatherboy; and San Diego's own SlutBottom Chris, winner of California Puppy, at the LeatherSIR/Leatherboy contest held at Queen Bee's Recreation Center in North Park Saturday, June 18.

PHOTOS, top to bottom:

LeatherSIR contest winner Sam

Sam with the winning Leatherboy, Zachary

Winning puppy Chris with Ms. San Diego Leather

2010 LeatherSIR contest winner Miles with the winning Leatherboy from that year

Anthony Rollar, contest judge and 2010 Mr. San Diego Leather

Entertainer GlitzGlam with two Malashock company dancers

2011 Mr. San Diego Leather Kurt Wendelborg (top) with "Leather Journal" publisher Dave Rhodes

Queer Democrats Warned About Threats to Reproductive Choice

Also Hear Presentation on Likely Strike by Grocery Workers

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

PHOTOS, top to bottom:

Left to right: Vince Hall, Jenn Kish, Matt Stephens

Evan McLaughlin and Herman Ramirez

Vince Hall

Matt Stephens

Jenn Kish

The predominantly Queer San Diego Democratic Club heard two presentations at its June 23 meeting: a report on the likely strike by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) against southern California’s three largest grocery chains — Ralph’s, Albertson’s and Vons — and a warning about the potentially devastating effects of Republican and radical-Right policies against women’s rights to reproductive choice. Though the struggles of women to maintain safe and legal access to contraception and abortion may seem to have little in common with those of workers for decent pay, access to health care and other benefits, speakers on both issues noted how the radical Right has effectively linked them in the service of a paternalistic agenda that regards workers as mere cogs in a capitalist economy, and women as mere vessels for giving birth to the next generation.

The panel on reproductive choice was introduced by Jacqueline Palmer, the club’s membership chair, who said that the Republican majority in the House of Representatives “rejected the idea that people have the right to control their own bodies” when they voted overwhelmingly last February to bar all federal funding for Planned Parenthood. “In their attempts to gut Title X funding [the basic federal funding for women’s health clinics, ironically signed into law by Republican President Richard Nixon in 1970], House Republicans voted to let more people die of breast and cervical cancer and AIDS. Right-wing attacks on collective bargaining rights, same-sex marriage and reproductive choice are part of a united campaign.”

Palmer’s arguments were seconded by the three speakers on her panel, who linked all those issues to the Right’s vision of America’s future and explained how they are connected. The speakers were former Assembly candidate Vince Hall, vice-president of public affairs and communications for Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest; Matt Stephens, partner in the Progressive Law Group, former chair of the City of San Diego’s Human Relations Commission and board member of the San Diego Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center and the San Diego chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU); and Jenn Kish, a recent graduate of the Thomas Jefferson School of Law who founded a chapter of Law Students for Reproductive Justice while she studied there.

Hall recalled that when he started working for Planned Parenthood in 2004, the organization was facing the first of three initiatives in California that would have required girls under 18 to notify their parents before having an abortion. All of these were sponsored and largely bankrolled by San Diego Reader publisher Jim Holman, and though Planned Parenthood and other pro-choice activists were able to defeat them at the polls, they sucked up millions of dollars these groups would otherwise have been able to spend on women’s health services. “With the election of Obama, I thought I might get an opportunity to play offense,” Hall said. “That was fleeting because 2011 has been the most challenging year in the history of our organization. The attacks have been on multiple fronts, and the attackers have been all too familiar.”

Citing three areas in which the pro-choice movement has had to struggle — “political, social and legal” — Hall said that the votes on the parental notification initiatives did not necessarily follow partisan lines. Heavily Democratic districts were as likely to support them as heavily Republican ones, Hall said — and, he added, that was equally true of the anti-marriage initiative Proposition 8. Reproductive choice and marriage equality did best, according to Hall, in “more moderate areas where people were more educated and there were more decline-to-states” — California election-speak for voters who don’t affiliate with a political party. “The elected officials from Democratic precincts are generally for marriage equality and reproductive choice, but when there’s an initiative on the ballot the dynamics change,” Hall warned.

According to Hall, the central value of the movements for both reproductive choice and Queer rights — and the principal reason the radical Right opposes both — is the concept of privacy. “We believe the government has no role in our churches and doctors’ offices,” Hall said. “The people who think they should are attempting to arrest social progress and hold us to a time when their superstitions and mantras governed our civil rights. People in this country fought very hard for abortion rights and women’s health care, including family planning and contraception. The people who are against marriage equality are also waging an all-out war against contraception in general and Planned Parenthood in particular.” Hall joked that there are now three litmus tests by which Republicans judge the fitness of their potential Presidential candidates: whether they reject the idea of evolution, how many guns they have and their commitment to defunding Planned Parenthood.

Aside from contradicting the Republicans’ repeated insistence that they believe in “limited government,” Hall argued, attacks on Planned Parenthood and women’s health care in general actually go against their stated goals of saving the government money and limiting the number of abortions. He cited a report by the Guttmacher Institute, whose Web site states its mission as “advancing sexual and reproductive health worldwide through research, policy analysis and public education,” that eliminating Title X funding for family planning clinics would result in a 34 percent increase in the number of abortions and a 37 percent increase in teenage pregnancies.

“The only way to reduce abortions is to reduce unwanted pregnancies,” Hall said. “Once there were Republicans who actually understood that, but now the Republican Party has become a suspension of the application of logic and reason. The consequences of the 2012 election are enormous. We must re-elect President Obama and [preserve] a Democratic blockade in the Senate.” Hall praised Obama for refusing to compromise when Republican House Speaker John Boehner demanded cutbacks in family planning funding, and warned that, unable to end Planned Parenthood’s federal funding, the Republicans are instead working through the states and, in states with Republican governors and legislative majorities, are pushing an agenda “ to defund Planned Parenthood, eliminate the tax deductibility of health insurance plans that cover abortions, and impose onerous new building requirements on Planned Parenthood’s facilities.”

As a result, Hall said, Planned Parenthood clinics in Indiana are already turning away patients, and unless a federal judge halts the state’s new laws by June 30, they will likely have to close down altogether. “This is the most substantial dismantling of women’s health in history,” Hall said. “We provide cancer screenings and STD testing and treatment. We will never shrink from our commitment to women’s health care.” He described the Republicans and the radical Right as having an agenda not only to “end legal and safe abortion” in the U.S. but to eliminate women’s access to health care and family planning that might help them avert the unwanted pregnancies that can lead to abortions.

Civil Right or “Undue Burden”?

Many Americans believe that the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973 guaranteed women an absolute right to reproductive choice. Not true, said Matt Stephens, who in an impassioned presentation demonstrated just how limited women’s rights over their own bodies are even now, with Planned Parenthood still in existence and family planning services other than abortion still federally funded. Under Roe, Stephens explained, “Women only have the right to terminate pregnancies in the first trimester. In the second trimester it’s a ‘shared choice’ between women and the state, and in the third trimester it’s not her choice at all. This is how far we’ve come from [Planned Parenthood founder] Margaret Sanger, who said in 1916 that a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy should be absolute.”

Since Roe, Stephens said, the courts have steadily chipped away at the whole idea of women’s right to reproductive choice. The key decision, he explained, was the Planned Parenthood v. Casey case of 1992, which challenged five restrictions the Pennsylvania legislature had put on women’s access to abortion. They were a so-called “informed consent” law requiring doctors to lecture women about the health risks and possible complications of an abortion; notification requirements that minors had to tell their parents before they could have an abortion, and married women had to tell their husbands; a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion could be performed; and reporting requirements for hospital and clinics performing abortions.

Though the court in Casey split wildly and no one opinion commanded a majority of the nine justices, the opinion that ultimately became settled law was written by the Court’s first female justice, Sandra Day O’Connor. It held that state restrictions on abortion were unconstitutional only if they imposed an “undue burden” on women. The opinion defined “undue burden” as “the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus.” According to Stephens, O’Connor’s opinion upheld four of the five restrictions in Pennsylvania’s law as not constituting an “undue burden.” The only one she invalidated was the one that married women notify their husbands — and that, she said, was an “undue burden” because of the possibility that men might beat up their wives if they heard their wives say they wanted an abortion.

In other words, said Stephens, the current Supreme Court has held that the government may do anything it wants to restrict abortion as long as the restrictions don’t put women seeking abortion at risk of being victims of physical violence. In the Court’s most recent major decision on abortion, Gonzalez v. Carhart (2007), Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion upheld a law making third-trimester dilation-and-extraction abortions — referred to in radical-Right propaganda as “partial-birth abortions” — illegal on the ground that the ban did not impose an “undue burden” on women. In that ruling, Stephens said, “Congress was given the right to decide what is medically necessary for a woman.”

Stephens also talked about how the Supreme Court’s abortion decisions potentially affect Queer rights in general and marriage equality in particular. He said that the entire legal argument for Queer rights rests on the assumption that the U.S. Constitution guarantees an individual right to privacy. Even though there’s nothing specific in the Constitution that says that, the Supreme Court in the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut — which ruled that married heterosexuals had a constitutional right to access to birth control — said the Constitution’s guarantees of individual freedom created a “penumbral” right to privacy, a holding that was later cited as a basis for Roe v. Wade. The radical Right has consistently rejected the whole idea of a legal right to privacy as liberal “judicial activism” — and, Stephens argued, Justice Kennedy’s Carhart opinion has given the Court a precedent by which they could also limit Queer rights based on an “undue burden” test.

What’s more, Stephens said, attacks on women’s access to abortion are also attacks on women’s equality in general. “It is now accepted that women have autonomy to determine their life’s choice and their equal status, and that autonomy is dependent on her ability to control her reproduction,” he argued. “The attack on reproductive choice is not just an attack on women’s health but an attack on women’s ability to participate in society and in the workforce. When are we going to start saying this is an attack on women workers, on women’s citizenship? The legal fight only gets us so far. We have to put ourselves out and want the whole right and nothing but the right. What can you do to make sure that women get their full rights as citizens in the U.S.? That requires you to talk to your representatives, support Planned Parenthood and write letters to the editor to support women’s rights. All of us in the LGBT [Queer] community will benefit because it’s about our equal right to privacy and liberty, and it’s up to you to protect that.”

The Demographic Time Bomb

After a short presentation by Kish that was mostly a list of pro-choice organizations with which people can work on the issue, the club then opened the floor to audience questions — mostly centered around the polls showing that the younger Americans are, the more likely they are to support government restrictions on abortion rights. This has troubled a lot of pro-choice activists, not only because it suggests it’s only a matter of time before the U.S. has a stable anti-choice majority but also because it’s the opposite of the message from similar polls about marriage equality. Why would young people be more progressive than older ones about same-sex marriage but less so about women’s rights? The panelists came up with several answers to that question.

“Younger people have grown up in a different media culture in which homophobia makes no sense,” said Hall. “But they also don’t know what went on before Roe v. Wade. They don’t know that before 1973 each major big-city hospital had a special ward just for women suffering from the effects of botched illegal abortions. Voters who support marriage equality are not morally conflicted about it, but everyone has complex feelings about abortion. Younger people are more likely to say abortion should be regulated because they don’t have enough information to separate those public policy issues from their personal confusion about abortion.”

Stephens had a different explanation: he blamed the radical Right’s success in virtually eliminating fact-based sex education from schools and imposing “abstinence-only” programs. Young people, he said, “don’t have a base of information” on which to base sound public policy judgments on how to deal with sex and its consequences. “Also, we’ve lost the legal high ground, and those students don’t have the perspective that [women’s reproductive] rights should be absolute,” he added. “We also don’t educate students, including medical students, about this. Medical students don’t have access to training that includes reproductive health care, including abortion, and they need it.”

One audience member raised the point that not only do polls show young people less likely to support reproductive choice than older ones, but young women are less likely to support it than young men. Hall said that it’s precisely because the issue is more personal for young women that they’re less able to consider it as a public-policy question than young men. “We need to make young people understand that it is not about what they would decide, but it’s about what public policy should be,” Hall explained — to which long-time club activist and former San Diego County Democratic Party chair Maureen Steiner grimly joked that young men may be more likely to be pro-choice than young women simply because they think they’ll get more sex if women’s reproductive choice is guaranteed.

Hall also critiqued media coverage of the issue, particularly the annual Gallup poll, taken in May, which asks people whether they consider themselves “pro-choice” or “pro-life” on abortion. “This is a debate between two terms that no longer have any meaning, except to political activists,” he said. Hall recalled that when one reporter asked him for an interview on the Gallup poll, he asked her if she’d read the other question on the report — the one that asked, “Do you think abortions should be legal under all circumstances, legal only under certain circumstances, or illegal under all circumstances?” She admitted she hadn’t, and so Hall read the results to her. In May 2011 27 percent of Gallup’s respondents answered “always legal,” 50 percent “sometimes legal” and only 22 percent said “always illegal” — so, he argued, less than a quarter of Gallup’s sample endorsed the bottom-line position of the anti-abortion movement.

Club members asked questions on a number of other aspects of the issue, including the economic stimulus effect of family-planning funding and the insulting attitude towards women underlying many anti-abortion laws — the assumption that women are too immature to make decisions about their bodies and their pregnancies without help from a paternalistic state. Jenn Kish reported that the radical-Right legislative majority in Texas is already considering bills to outlaw legal access to birth control, and longtime club member Elaine Graybill said that young people who can’t imagine what it was like when abortion was illegal also can’t conceive of a time when they wouldn’t have birth control available.

“What is at stake is privacy rights,” said Stephens. “We’ve already had specific debates on the ‘morning-after pill.’ We have to change the terms of debate. Our youth are not familiar with where we have come from. There have to be ‘Take Back the Night’ marches where women 50 and older come forward and say they terminated a pregnancy. We have to take away the moral shame we’ve been put in about sex in general and pregnancy in particular.”

The Grocery Strike Situation

The club also heard from Herman Ramirez of Local 135 of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), the largest private-sector labor union in San Diego County, and Evan McLaughlin, political director of the San Diego-Imperial Counties Central Labor Council, on the situation between the union and the three largest supermarket chains in southern California: Kroger, which owns Ralph’s; Supervalu, which owns Albertson’s; and Safeway, which owns Vons. In 2003 the three chains forced a labor confrontation that resulted in a 5 1/2-month strike widely regarded as a crushing defeat for the union. They had to agree to a “two-tier” wage structure so newly hired workers would be paid less than previous employees, and were hit with major cuts in health care and pension benefits.

“The core issues” of the 2003-2004 strike “were fabricated” by the chains, Ramirez said. “They were just trying to get givebacks from us on health care and pensions. This year the economic issues are real, and the companies have decided to deal with health care by just taking it away. It’s a cost shift of 80 percent to the members. We are on the road to a strike, maybe at the end of June, maybe in mid-July.” Noting that the grocery chains are nationwide companies and therefore “they’re not afraid of a strike,” Ramirez said the only real weapon the union has is to get people not to shop at the stores — and to that end he brought packets containing a list of unionized stores where people who want to support the strike can shop. Unfortunately, though the list includes drugstore chains like Rite Aid and CVS, it does not contain any major food outlets in the Hillcrest, North Park or Normal Heights areas, making it virtually impossible for people without cars to support the union.

Ramirez urged shoppers to go to the managers of local Ralph’s, Albertson’s and Vons stores and explain to them that they won’t be shopping there during a strike — or even after that if the final contract isn’t fair to workers. He said messages like that will get relayed to corporate headquarters and may have an effect on the stores’ negotiating strategies. Asked about the overall profitability of the stores, Ramirez said, “Yes, they are [making a lot of money]. The only store that’s not doing well is Albertson’s. They’ve never been able to recapture the market share” they had before the 2003-04 strike.

McLaughlin also talked about the 900-pound gorilla in the marketing world: Wal-Mart. In 2003 the grocery chains said that one of the major reasons they needed wage and benefit concessions from their workers was the threat of competition from aggressively anti-union Wal-Mart and the giant “Supercenters” they wanted to build throughout San Diego County and anywhere else that would have them. The San Diego City Council passed a bill to require an economic impact statement before Wal-Mart or any other company could build a giant store, but rescinded it after Wal-Mart successfully got enough signatures to repeal it in a referendum and the Council decided not to spend the $3 million it would cost for a special election to defend the ordinance.

Nonetheless, unionists, activists and Wal-Mart foes pushed the issue at the state level through SB 469, sponsored by San Diego-area State Senator Juan Vargas. McLaughlin announced that the State Senate has already passed the bill and it just survived its first committee test in the Assembly. McLaughlin urged club members to write their Assemblymembers and lobby in support of SB 469.

Both Ramirez and McLaughlin commented on the media coverage. In 2003-04, the grocery chains ran an effective P.R. campaign that got a majority of San Diegans to see the issues their way. Ramirez argued that labor will always be at a disadvantage with the media because “we don’t buy media time; the companies do. So it’s really difficult to get our message out. We have done interviews with the TV channels, and they’ll always edit them to put in the negative hit. When there’s a big problem with pensions, they attack the people receiving them.”

McLaughlin said that in order to win the P.R. battle, the union needs to focus on one message: health care. “A lot of people don’t have health care, or they’re losing access to it through higher co-pays or premiums,” he said. “These are 10,000 workers standing up for your access to health care.”

Eventually the club voted unanimously to “adopt” the three grocery-chain outlets in their core area — the Ralph’s in Hillcrest in the Uptown District mall (the same center where the club meets), the Albertson’s on University and Mississippi and the Vons on 30th and Howard — which means club members will join picket lines at those stores in case of a strike and the club will also educate its members and supporters about the issues and urge them not to shop there. The club also gave President Obama a “friendly incumbent” re-election endorsement and amended its platform to drop all references to supporting domestic partnerships or civil unions as alternatives to marriage equality.

UFCW Local 135 Union Stores Not Facing a Strike

The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 135 has prepared this list of stores in San Diego County represented by their union that are not facing the strike the union has already authorized against the three major grocery chains: Kroger, which owns Ralph’s; Supervalu, which owns Albertson’s; and Safeway, which owns Vons, so people wishing to support the strike (if it occurs) will know where they can shop without either crossing a picket line or supporting a non-union store. Unfortunately, virtually all the grocery stores and supermarkets (as opposed to major drugstore chains like Rite Aid and CVS) on this list are in remote locations inaccessible to public transportation from San Diego’s most progressive areas, including Hillcrest, North Park and Normal Heights. What’s more, at this time this list is not available on Local 135’s Web site, www.ufcw135.org; nor is the companion list of all the Ralph’s, Albertson’s and Vons outlets in the county that Local 135 included in their information packet.

CVS, 318 W. El Norte Parkway, Escondido, CA 92026
CVS, 1656 Garnet Avenue, San Diego, CA 92109
CVS, 7393 Jackson Drive, San Diego, CA 92119
CVS, 555 Broadway, Suite #1054, Chula Vista, CA 91910
CVS, 3151 University Avenue, San Diego, CA 92104
CVS, 3327 Rosecrans Boulevard, San Diego, CA 92110
CVS, 683 Lomas Santa Fe Drive, Solana Beach, CA 92075
Food 4 Less, 500 Hacienda Drive, Vista, CA 92081
Food 4 Less, 7420 Broadway, Lemon Grove, CA 92045
Food 4 Less, 7730 Hazard Center Drive, San Diego, CA 92108
Food 4 Less, 644 N. Broadway, Escondido, CA 92025
Food 4 Less, 1320 E. 30th Street, National City, CA 91950
Food 4 Less, 4995 Shawline Street, San Diego, CA 92111
Food 4 Less, 9430 Cuyamaca, Santee, CA 92071
Food 4 Less, 5975 University Avenue, San Diego, CA 92115
Food 4 Less, 444 Broadway, El Cajon, CA 92021
Food 4 Less, 312 Euclid Avenue, San Diego, CA 92114
Food 4 Less, 2420 N. Cottonwood Drive, El Centro, CA 92243
Food 4 Less, 660 Palomar Street, Chula Vista, CA 91911
Food 4 Less, 109 W. Birch, Calexico, CA 92231
Keil Market, 3015 Clairemont Drive, San Diego, CA 92117
Keil Market, 7403 Jackson Drive, San Diego, CA 92119
Lucky, 351 Wake Avenue, El Centro, CA 92244
Lucky, 350 W. San Ysidro Boulevard, San Ysidro, CA 92173
Rite Aid, 4348 Bonita Road, Bonita, CA 92002
Rite Aid, 740 Otay Lakes Road, #907, Chula Vista, CA 91910
Rite Aid, 507 Telegraph Canyon Road, Chula Vista, CA 91910
Rite Aid, 2230 Otay Lakes Road, Chula Vista, CA 91910
Rite Aid, 7224 Broadway, Lemon Grove, CA 91945
Rite Aid, 661 Sweetwater Road, Spring Valley, CA 91977
Rite Aid, 995 Tamarack Avenue, Carlsbad, CA 92008
Rite Aid, 7100 Avenida Encinas, Carlsbad, CA 92009
Rite Aid, 2516 Jamacha Road, El Cajon, CA 92019
Rite Aid, 1135 Avocado Boulevard, El Cajon, CA 92020
Rite Aid, 400 N. 2nd Street, El Cajon, CA 92020
Rite Aid, 415 Santa Fe Drive, Encinitas, CA 92024
Rite Aid, 315 West Washington, Escondido, CA 92025
Rite Aid, 1855 Centre City Parkway S., Escondido, CA 92025
Rite Aid, 1331 South Mission Road, Fallbrook, CA 92028
Rite Aid, 9532 Winter Gardens Boulevard, Lakeside, CA 92040
Rite Aid, 1201 South Coast Highway, Oceanside, CA 92054
Rite Aid, 3813 Plaza Drive, Oceanside, CA 92056
Rite Aid, 463 College Boulevard, Oceanside, CA 92057
Rite Aid, 12666 Poway Road, Poway, CA 92064
Rite Aid, 1670 Main Street, Ramona, CA 92065
Rite Aid, 121 S. Rancho Santa Fe, San Marcos, CA 92069
Rite Aid, 9759 Mission Gorge Road, Santee, CA 92071
Rite Aid, 1363 E. Vista Way, Vista, CA 92082
Rite Aid, 427 “C” Street, San Diego, CA 92101
Rite Aid, 535 Robinson Avenue, San Diego, CA 92103
Rite Aid, 1735 Euclid Avenue, San Diego, CA 92105
Rite Aid, 4840 Niagara Avenue, San Diego, CA 92107
Rite Aid, 6939 Linda Vista Road, San Diego, CA 92111
Rite Aid, 6405 El Cajon Boulevard, San Diego, CA 92115
Rite Aid, 3650 Adams Avenue, San Diego, CA 92116
Rite Aid, 5270 Balboa Avenue, San Diego, CA 92117
Rite Aid, 3081-B Clairemont Drive, San Diego, CA 92117
Rite Aid, 836 Orange Avenue, Coronado, CA 92118
Rite Aid, 8694 Lake Murray Boulevard, San Diego, CA 92119
Rite Aid, 6505 Mission Gorge, San Diego, CA 92120
Rite Aid, 4077 Governor Drive, San Diego, CA 92122
Rite Aid, 10631 Tierrasanta Boulevard, San Diego, CA 92124
Rite Aid, 8985 Mira Mesa Boulevard, San Diego, CA 92126
Rite Aid, 11845 Carmel Mountain Road, San Diego, CA 92128
Rite Aid, 13167 Black Mountain Road, San Diego, CA 92129
Rite Aid, 3515 Del Mar Heights Road, San Diego, CA 92130
Rite Aid, 1854 Coronado Avenue, San Diego, CA 92154
Rite Aid, 165 Alpine Boulevard, Alpine, CA 91901
Rite Aid, 4455 Manchester Avenue, Encinitas, CA 92024
Rite Aid, 1411 Kettner Boulevard, San Diego, CA 92101
Stater Brothers, 635 N. Broadway, Escondido, CA 92025
Stater Brothers, 3770 Mission Avenue, Oceanside, CA 92054
Stater Brothers, 2170 Vista Way, Oceanside, CA 92054
Stater Brothers, 1330 E. Mission Road, San Marcos, CA 92069
Stater Brothers, 780 Sycamore Avenue, Vista, CA 92083
Stater Brothers, 1451 N. Santa Fe Avenue, Vista, CA 92085
Stater Brothers, 1048 N. El Camino Real, Encinitas, CA 92024
Stater Brothers, 13589 Poway Road, Poway, CA 92064
Stater Brothers, 1674 Main Street, Ramona, CA 92065
Stater Brothers, 9909 Carmel Mountain Road, San Diego, CA 92129
Stater Brothers, 2687 Gateway Drive, Carlsbad, CA 92009

Contact information for news on the negotiations:
Hotline number: (619) 298-7772 x171
Web site: www.ufcw135.org
Facebook page: UFCWLocal135
Text messaging: Text ufcw135 to the number 37398

Big Brother Is Testing You

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN, Editor

Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

LISTEN TO THIS EVENT!

Reading of this article with Dr. Little’s recorded quotes available for download: https://rapidshare.com/files/3813969296/01_Dr._Susan_Little__HTC_radio_edit.mp3

Dr. Susan Little’s complete presentation available for download: https://rapidshare.com/files/3248424568/Dr._Susan_Little___HTC__5_10_11.wav

On May 10 I attended a meeting of the Hillcrest Town Council (HTC) to hear a discussion of the current redistricting process for the San Diego City Council — only that wasn’t the main event of the evening. The main event was a presentation so dramatic and shocking I am still reeling under the outrageousness of it all. It was 22 minutes long and was delivered by Dr. Susan Little of the Antiviral Research Center (ARC) at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) Medical Center, and dealt with a new, stunningly intrusive and threatening program called “Lead the Way” designed essentially to force everyone between the ages of 18 and 64 in the 92103 and 92104 Zip codes — Hillcrest and North Park, the parts of San Diego with the greatest concentration of Queer residents — to take the HIV antibody test and go on immediate “treatment” with anti-HIV medications if they test “positive.”

The program Dr. Little outlined was so broad, and its scope so sweeping, that even before she was finished I had renamed it in my head, “Big Brother Is Testing You.” It uses most of the familiar tactics of the AIDS establishment — engendering guilt, shame and fear in people who don’t “go with the program,” aggressive propaganda and unscrupulous marketing — along with some new wrinkles. The first step in the program was a series of “teaser” ads on bus shelters (why do these people always target bus shelters? Are they just available and cheap, or do they figure people who take buses in the U.S. are poor and therefore less educated and more gullible?) asking the question, “I would — would you?,” and encouraging people to visit a Web site called leadthewaysd.org.

The second step was to set up a testing office at the corner of Park and University, which opened the day after Dr. Little spoke at the HTC. The third step was to post, both on the bus shelters and on the Web site, the photos of what Dr. Little called “representatives from all walks of life” who live in Hillcrest or North Park and are “leader[s] in this community,” answering the initial “teaser” question with the refrain, “I would — would you?” In an example of surrealistically bad marketing, the first person ARC picked as their community role model to encourage HIV antibody testing was … Father Joe Carroll, a venerable Roman Catholic priest who’s achieved both fame and controversy as the proprietor of a series of tough-love programs for homeless people based on the principle that what they need to get off the streets is quasi-militaristic discipline and regimentation.

But it’s the fourth step in the program that takes it beyond just another annoying self-promotion from the AIDS establishment and puts it in the realm of Big Brother. Dr. Little and her staff will be sending out mobile testing vans and having people go door-to-door in randomly selected census tracts in Hillcrest and North Park to offer on-the-spot tests. “People always kind of recoil at that,” Dr. Little admitted to the HTC, but “if we [just] put banners up everywhere and advertise, and bring people in to test, we will, I think predictably, being in people who are already believers in the importance of HIV [antibody] testing. We’re actually very interested in getting feedback from people who don’t want to test. … The goal is to walk around the census block and try to approach every residential household in that region, and simply ask people to answer our questions; and then, if they want, they can have the HIV test.”

There’s a cheery little button called “say hi” on the leadthewaysd.org Web site promoting the mobile test program. They’ve already set up a testing area in Old Town and at press time are scheduled for two others: in Normal Heights between El Cajon Boulevard and Meade Avenue east-west, and Wilson Avenue and 36th Street north-south; and in the heart of Hillcrest between Robinson and Pennsylvania east-west, and 6th and 7th Avenues north-south. “We will be trying to visit everyone in this area to ask you to Lead The Way!,” says their Web site, in that annoying combination of infantilism and chipperness with which medical marketers usually address their target audiences.

And Dr. Little’s objective for the program shows the kind of megalomania often associated with the AIDS establishment in particular. “The goal is that we would identify people who are infected [sic] and link them into care, so that we can (a) reduce transmission in this community, and (b) we’re trying to make this part of a multi-year project,” she told HTC — even though at present their funding, from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), is for only one year. “There is at least theoretically the possibility that if we could test an entire community, and provide access to treatment for those who were infected [sic], we could reduce the rate of new transmissions potentially to zero.”

The biggest problem with “Lead the Way” is that it’s based on lies. Some of them are the standard lies the AIDS establishment has been putting out for years, including the basis of the test itself. The standard test does not measure live, infectious virus; instead, it tests for antibody reactions to the nine proteins that, together, are presumed to make up HIV — though they’re also found in normal human bodies. That’s why I put [sic] above next to the statements by Dr. Little that say a positive antibody test means you are “infected.” It doesn’t. For virtually all viral infections, antibodies mean immunity. They mean you’ve been exposed to the germ and, lucky you, have developed resistance against it. That’s why doctors urge you to vaccinate: by giving you something similar to the germ they’re vaccinating against, vaccines are supposed to teach your immune system to make antibodies that will protect you if you then encounter the real deal.

For some viruses — notably herpes-class viruses — antibodies don’t always mean permanent immunity. Age, stress or other factors can weaken the immune response antibodies provide — which is why there’s currently a campaign to get older people to vaccinate against shingles, which are caused by the same herpes-class virus that causes chickenpox. But there is no virus other than HIV for which the medical establishment says, not only that antibodies don’t always mean immunity, but quite the opposite. Once you test (antibody)-positive, you’re told it’s only a matter of time before you will get AIDS and will die prematurely — unless you start highly toxic drug regimens that in the real world (as opposed to the fantasies of the AIDS establishment) are likely as not to speed your death by trashing your liver and/or screwing up your digestive system.

What’s more, there are over 60 documented causes of false-positive results on the HIV antibody test, including hepatitis, herpes, lupus, malaria and flu. (In Britain they warn you not to take the HIV antibody test for a week after having had a flu shot, lest the flu antibodies cross-react with the test and create a false positive. Alas, they don’t tell people that here.) You can also test false-positive if you’re pregnant, and the more often you’ve been pregnant before the more likely a new pregnancy is to trigger the test and make it read “positive.” And the “early” and “rapid” tests UCSD is using in Lead the Way so they can hand out results immediately are, according to their manufacturer’s Web site, 10 times as likely to generate false-positives as the tests for which you have to wait a week for the results.

Dr. Little told HTC that they’re going to guard against the possibility of a false-positive antibody test by offering them what, in the AIDS world of cutesy-poo acronyms, they call “NAT,” or Nucleic Acid Test. “That detects virus,” she said. Another lie: the NAT detects exactly what its name says it detects, the nucleic acids — either RNA or DNA — that supposedly make up HIV’s genetic core. There’s no way of knowing whether those nucleic acids are part of intact, infectious HIV, or whether they’re genetic flotsam and jetsam floating around in the bloodstream. What’s more, if you “pass” the NAT and they find what they think is HIV genetic material, they’re going to measure the “progress” of your infection with something called the viral load test, based on a technology called polymerase chain reaction (PCR). That’s supposed to tell you how many HIV’s are swimming around in your blood — but Kary Mullis, Ph.D., who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for inventing the PCR, says it can’t do any such thing.

There are still more lies behind “Lead the Way.” Dr. Little told the HTC that there was no intention to target the Queer community by picking the 92103 and 92104 Zip codes for her study area. “We are not targeting anyone,” she said. “We are specifically not even asking about risk.” She said the reason they picked the parts of San Diego with the biggest Queer populations was “if you’re going to try and demonstrate an effect, prove a principle, many people would start with that group that stands to benefit the most. … What we’re trying to do is engage a community that is affected by HIV — Gay, straight, injection drug [users], I don’t care — and get everybody to come together and say, ‘If we have the opportunity to reduce HIV in our community, we want to show that it can be done without a vaccine.’” But they’re not targeting anybody. Yeah, right.

Dr. Little also made a big deal about the confidentiality of the tests. She said that both the questionnaires administered on the Lead the Way Web site (as part of the door-to-door campaign they’ll be loaning people iPads on which to fill them out) and the tests themselves will be “encrypted and locked,” and that blood draws from the test won’t be labeled with people’s names, just identifying numbers. But according to Matt Potter of the San Diego Reader, that’s the same promise she made the last time ARC did a major testing study — and she broke it.

According to Potter’s “Under the Radar” column in the June 2 Reader, Dr. Little announced a study in November 2007 offering “free and confidential HIV testing” to people who might have recently been exposed to the virus. It may have been free, but it certainly wasn’t confidential. Both the federal government and Dr. Little’s bosses at UCSD investigated and found that every single sample from that study sent out to a private lab for testing went out with the patient’s name and address attached. There was, said UCSD’s internal audit, “100 percent noncompliance” with Dr. Little’s promise of test confidentiality. As a result, UCSD essentially put her on probation, stating that for the next two years they would “conduct random audits of all active research protocols” she was running “for compliance with approved procedures and all aspects of managing patient confidentiality.”

So “Lead the Way” is revealed as the brainchild of a megalomaniacal researcher with a history of breaking patient confidentiality, who’s asking us to trust her as she sends out staff members with test kits in vans to go door-to-door to shame people into taking a test for which a “positive” result, accurate or not, can stigmatize them forever and screw up their chances of employment, relationships and proper health care. Would I take an HIV antibody test offered by Dr. Susan Little and her minions? I sure as hell wouldn’t — and I hope everybody reading this decides that they wouldn’t either!