Poll: For many, Golden State no longer shines
(Sacramento, Calif.) The California dream has faded since the 1970s for many in the Golden State, according to a new Field Poll.
Just 41 percent of registered voters agree the state is “one of the best places to live,” a sharp drop from the 76 percent who thought so 30 years …
Tags: 1970s, Best Places, California Dream, Field Poll, Golden State, Registered VotersChanges in San Diego reflected in San Diego’s Pride Parade, Festival
The hundreds of San Diegans who marched for gay rights in the mid-1970s walked through a city largely indifferent, even antagonistic, to the cause.
What strides they have made.
Today, up to 9,000 people will take part in the San Diego Pride Parade, including the mayor, police chief and seven of the eight City Council members. Organizers are expecting 175,000 spectators from across the country and as far away as Australia, Germany and Britain.
While San Diego’s parade may never be as big as those in San Francisco or Los Angeles, there are many signs of how San Diego has changed into a city in the forefront of the campaign for gay rights.
In November, in the days after California voted to ban same-sex marriage, the largest protest in the nation occurred in San Diego. More than 20,000 people marched, double any other city’s turnout.
The size of San Diego’s crowd came as a surprise to many, including Cleve Jones, the gay rights activist and lecturer who founded the AIDS Memorial Quilt and was an intern for slain San Francisco supervisor and gay icon Harvey Milk. Jones is the grand marshal of today’s parade and several others around the country.
See Changes in San Diego reflected in today’s Pride Parade, Festival
San Diego Union Tribune
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How long has Seattle supported gay rights?
Seattle: 1st in gay rights
Seattle has been at the vanguard of gay rights for at least three decades. Remember Anita Bryant? While she was getting cities across the county to repeal gay rights ordinances in the 1970s, Seattle voters held the line — the first city in America to vote in favor of gay rights. The City of Seattle adopted a fair employment ordinance in 1973 which specifically prohibited discrimination against gay people in the workplace, followed by a fair housing ordinance in 1975. But in 1978, Initiative 13 attempted to repeal the ordinances. It went down in defeat, and Seattle voters successful stopped the national movement to turn back the clock of gay rights. Since then, the cities of Tacoma, Spokane, and others followed suit; Seattle has elected openly gay city council members for decades and is considered to have one of the largest gay populations in the nation.
– Leonard Garfield
Sunday’s gay pride parade marks the event’s 32nd year. See photos from the event here.
Learn more about Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry at seattlehistory.org.
See How long has Seattle supported gay rights?
Seattle Post Intelligencer
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Gay seniors embrace a newfound openness
Marvin Levin was speaking to his psychiatrist in November 2003. The conversation halted briefly as Levin looked away, collecting a thought that had waited decades to surface.
“You know what?” he said, looking up at his doctor. “I’m gay.”
At age 61, married more than 30 years, this was an unlikely admission.
“It was the first time I’d ever put words to that,” Levin said. “It was like an epiphany. And then I looked back on my life and said, ‘You dummy, of course you are.’ ” Levin, now 67, grew up in Chicago, part of a conventional Jewish family. He found himself interested in the gay lifestyle — still highly taboo at the time — but resolved that he was “straight but curious.”
Conforming to the social mores of the time, he married in his mid-20s. “I can’t really say I was madly in love. This was a woman I knew and we had the same sets of values and beliefs. It seemed a good fit.”
Together they had two sons, were active in their synagogue, entertained regularly and worked through the ups and downs of marriage.
“I was Mr. Straight,” Levin said. “There were certain things in life that you do, and I would just go ahead and do them. I was fascinated by this other world. The gay world had this attraction. But I just never did anything with it. It was just there.”
In the 1970s, Levin began suffering from depression. He went into counseling and got on medication but could never identify the source of his unhappiness. Until that day in 2003, in his psychiatrist’s chair.
“My wife at first was shocked,” he said. “But she was also glad I’d finally figured out why at times I was non-functional. She’s a wonderful woman and was very supportive of me through all of this.”
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Uproar in DC as Same-Sex Marriage Gains Washington Post
After the vote, enraged African American ministers stormed the hallway outside the council chambers and vowed that they will work to oust the members who supported the bill, which was sponsored by Phil Mendelson (D-At Large). They caused such an uproar that security officers and D.C. police were called in to clear the hallway.
Yesterday’s action could be a precursor to a debate later this year over whether to legalize same-sex marriage in the city. “There is no turning back,” said Catania, who plans to introduce a broader gay marriage bill in a few months.
Barry, who said he supports gay rights and civil unions, warned after the vote that the District could erupt if the council does not proceed slowly on same-sex marriage.
“All hell is going to break lose,” Barry said. “We may have a civil war. The black community is just adamant against this.”
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) has said he will sign the bill recognizing same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. The council’s action puts the matter before Congress, which under the Home Rule Charter has 30 days to review District legislation. The bill could present the House and Senate with their biggest test on the same-sex marriage issue since Congress approved the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. …
“I am representing my constituents,” said Barry, who later told reporters that “98 percent of my constituents are black, and we don’t have but a handful of openly gay residents.”
Civic activist Philip Pannell, who is openly gay and lives in Ward 8, called Barry’s remarks offensive. “He of all people, coming out of the civil rights movement, should understand the need to fight for the rights of all minorities to be protected,” Pannell said.
Catania and Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) are the two openly gay members of the council, and Catania made it clear that he took offense at Barry’s stance.
“This issue is whether or not our colleagues, on a personal level, view me and Jim Graham as your equals,” Catania said, “if we are permitted the same rights and responsibilities and obligations as our colleagues. So this is personal. This is acknowledging our families as much as we acknowledge yours.”
Barry, visibly upset, fired back that he has been a supporter of gay rights since the 1970s.
“I understand this is personal to you and Mr. Graham. I understand because I have been discriminated against,” Barry said. “. . . I resent Mr. Catania saying either you are a bigot or against bigotry, as though this particular legislation represents all of that.”
Catania replied: “Your position is bigoted. I don’t think you are.”
Video: D.C. Votes to Recognize Gay Marriage
See Uproar in DC as Same-Sex Marriage Gains
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Is ‘Wolverine’ the most homoerotic superhero movie ever?
True confession: I see the gay in everything. It’s a gift and a curse, much like Haley Joel Osment’s ability to chat with the dead in The Sixth Sense. After sitting through Wolverine this past weekend, I believe this flick to be the gayest comic book movie ever. It felt like an issue of Men’s Health come to life, albeit with more adamantium. First, the gorgeous Hugh Jackman is shirtless for a good portion of the film — he even has a naked fight scene! And he squares off against a shirtless (and similarly ripped) Ryan Reynolds at one point. Secondly, Wolverine’s job as a lumberjack allows him to wear some very 1970s gay-friendly tight jeans, leather jackets, and flannel shirts, unbuttoned to reveal more than a hint of chest hair. Thirdly, the big sparring between Wolverine and Sabretooth really comes down to two hot guys basically clawing each other with their fingernails. Catfight!
To me, this felt waaay gayer than Joel Schumacher’s codpiece- and nipple-enhanced Batman and Robin. What do you think PopWatchers? Anyone else catch a whiff of homoeroticism from all the male eye candy, or am I blowing things out of proportion?
See Is ‘Wolverine’ the most homoerotic superhero movie ever?
Entertainment Weekly
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“Miss California” Nailed on Countdown
Countdown’s Keith Olbermann has reported that Miss California, a Christian college student named Carrie Prejean, had a boob job paid for by the Miss California Competition. Talk about performance enhancing additives! And we thought she was such a good, church going gal.
In a move reminiscent of beauty queen Anita Bryant’s 1970s crusade against gay rights, Prejean has joined in a television ad campaign against gay marriage this week. Her move upset homosexual rights advocates, including a head of the Miss California pageant.
In the 1970s, another beauty queen named Anita Bryant, a former Miss Oklahoma, became a voice against homosexuality after leading a campaign to repeal a Miami-area gay rights ordinance. She was famously quoted as saying, “If gays are granted rights, next we’ll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail-biters.”
Keith Lewis, the co-executive director of the Miss California pageant, said Prejean was attended to by gay beauty experts before the Miss USA contest, and that he always knew her to be friendly to gays like himself.
Maybe it is time to take away her Miss California “crown?”
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Another seismic shift emanates from California — this time on gay …
The ground trembled again last week, another aftershock of one of the wrenching seismic shifts that always seem to start in California and skitter across the nation’s political and cultural plates. This time it was same-sex marriage, as the state Supreme Court took up the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the November ballot initiative that outlawed such unions.
The court hearing was the latest chapter in a saga that has enmeshed California, off and on, for nine years. In 2000, voters banned same-sex marriage. Last year, acting after San Francisco became the first city in the state to marry gay couples, the Supreme Court cleared the way for such unions. Opponents returned fire with Proposition 8, which put the ban into the Constitution. Statements of some justices during Thursday’s court hearing indicated that the proposition probably will stand — at least for now.
There was an odd familiarity to it all. As with the modern conservative movement, the antitax rebellion of the 1970s and a host of other less important, if useful, things — the hula hoop comes to mind — California was first in the mix.
Despite our conceit that the sun shines brighter on California’s golden denizens, residents here are really not so different from people everywhere else. Ponder surveys of voters taken last November in California and nationally, and the surprising conclusion is how similar we are. We are less white and more Latino, slightly richer and more educated, and we go to church a bit less. But we resemble the rest of the nation on many other measures — our age range, the number of kids living in our homes, and even our views on whether government, rather than businesses and individuals, should solve problems in a pinch.
The state does differ from the other 49, though, in its quest for change.
“California is the magnet for people from all the states who come here to dream, hope, or fit in,” said Bob Mulholland, who since landing here via Philadelphia and Vietnam 39 years ago has been a Democratic party advisor and unofficial electoral historian.
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Gay marriage on trial
California’s long, tortuous war over same-sex marriage enters its next phase on Thursday, when the state Supreme Court hears oral arguments on three lawsuits challenging Proposition 8, the controversial constitutional amendment that bans gay marriage.
The easy way to think about these cases — and the way most non-lawyers are likely to do it — is to decide which side of the issue you’re on and root for that side to win. In other words, if you support marriage between same-sex couples, you’ll want the cases to succeed so that Proposition 8 will be overturned. If you believe men and women should only be allowed to marry each other, you’ll hope the lawsuits fail.
That’s fine. It’s outcome-based. But frankly, it has very little to do with what the Supreme Court is going to consider in the oral arguments.
Instead, the argument in the courtroom will be broader and more abstract. Who makes law in a democracy? What should we do when laws contradict one another? Who is the ultimate sovereign in the state of California — the people at the polls or their written Constitution or their appointed judges or their elected legislators? Can fundamental constitutional rights — inalienable rights — be withdrawn from one group but not another?
These are big, thorny questions with implications that go well beyond whether gays are allowed to marry. What follows is a cheater’s guide to the issues at hand.
Remind us: How did we get here?
The battle over same-sex marriage sometimes seems endless. Gay couples have been trying to get married in California since the late 1970s, and their opponents have been working just as hard since then to ensure that it does not happen.
Here are some highlights @ Gay marriage on trial
Los Angeles Times - CA,USA
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Black gay men seek community space in SF
Isolated not only from the larger LGBT community, but also from each other, the city’s black gay male population is seeking a place to call home.
Unlike other ethnic groups, the approximately 4,500 gay black men who reside in San Francisco do not have a central gathering place to meet, socialize and create a sense of community. The Castro is seen as a neighborhood for white gay men, and with the shuttering of the Pendulum bar several years ago, black gay men lost the last remaining gay space that catered to them.
“There is no place to socialize. It is very limited for us,” said Norman Tanner, an outreach worker with the San Francisco AIDS Foundation’s Black Brothers Esteem program who has lived in the Tenderloin since the mid-1970s. “The nightlife is not what it used to be.”
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Bay Area Reporter, CA
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