City Hall

Tale of the city

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If last week’s extensive Guardian coverage didn’t convince you, here’s my two cents: see Milk. Not that you may have needed convincing; seems like everyone in San Francisco is stoked to see Gus Van Sant’s political biopic, with Sean Penn starring as the first openly gay man elected to public office in America. If you live here, it’s impossible to separate yourself completely from the story — even if you’re too young to remember the history firsthand –- since so much of it is already familiar. There’s City Hall, Milk’s "theater" and the site of his 1978 assassination, along with Mayor George Moscone, by fellow supe Dan White; the Castro District, meticulously made over to mimic Milk’s 1970s; a dog-poopy moment in Duboce Park; and references to everything from district elections to this very newspaper.

Still, even out-of-towners, except bigoted ones, will be moved by Milk. Milk’s experiences allow the film to take a personal look at the struggle for LGBT civil rights in America, with a particular focus on Anita Bryant’s cross-country hate crusade. Scenes showing the triumphant defeat of Prop. 6 — a 1978 proposal to fire all gay teachers and those who supported them — are bittersweet in the wake of the passage of Prop. 8. At times, Van Sant’s film feels eerily timely, down to the spontaneously assembled protests on Castro at Market, and its focus on a politico who believed in hope despite the odds.

But Milk is more than its message — despite its many sober moments, it also manages to be an entertaining film. Thank Van Sant’s steady direction, which (mostly) avoids melodrama and integrates archival footage with seamless ease, and a Penn performance that feels remarkably natural even though he clearly obsessed over perfecting Milk’s voice and mannerisms. Among the supporting players, Emile Hirsch (funny and energetic as activist Cleve Jones) and Josh Brolin (fumbling and creepy as killer White) are standouts. Less successful is Diego Luna as Milk’s needy lover Jack Lira, though it’s not really Luna’s fault; the Lira subplot comes across as distracting, adding unnecessary drama to a story already brimming with compelling conflict. Look for Penn to scoop up mad awards-season praise, all the more deserved if his inspiring turn fires up a new generation to follow in Milk’s footsteps.

Milk opens Wed/26 at the Castro Theatre.

Fueling change

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EDITORIAL As a lame duck Board of Supervisors winds down, and the economic crisis and bloody budget cuts absorb most of the political focus at City Hall, there’s a major environmental issue creeping toward a January deadline — and city officials need to present a united front.

At issue is the Mirant power plant in Potrero Hill, an aging fossil fuel dinosaur that has been belching pollution into the southeastern part of the city for years. It’s been hard to shut down — the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), the regulatory agency that controls the electric grid, wants some sort of generating facility inside the city lines. Sup. Aaron Peskin, backed originally by Mayor Gavin Newsom, sought to replace the Mirant plant with city-owned combustion turbines — so-called peakers — that would run only when needed. But Pacific Gas and Electric Co., fearing city ownership of power production, fought that proposal, and some environmentalists, arguing that the city should build no new fossil fuel plants at all, also opposed the plan.

On May 5, seven PG&E lobbyists descended on the Mayor’s Office and gave Newsom his marching orders: drop the peakers proposal or we’ll spend whatever is necessary to kill it. Newsom suddenly decided he didn’t like the peakers after all, and started pushing a PG&E-backed alternative: the Mirant plant, which runs on diesel and natural gas, could be converted to run entirely on natural gas, thereby reducing emissions.

The emissions numbers are pretty complicated. If the city ran the natural-gas-fired peakers for only a limited amount of time, they would emit less pollution than the Mirant plant. Obviously neither option is pollution-free; neither is sustainable; and neither is perfect.

Still, the worst of all possible alternatives would be allowing Mirant to continue to operate a private plant. At least the peakers would be city-owned and city-run. The city would have some control over how often they were fired up and could shut them down when more renewable technology becomes available. The Mirant plant — even after a retrofit — would continue burning fossil fuels; the private company would continue to profit; and the city would have no control at all.

Besides, it’s not clear that the plant even can be retrofitted for natural gas. The project that Newsom, PG&E, and Mirant are proposing has never been done before. Mirant may not be able to get the financing; the technology may not exist.

Which means that it’s entirely possible nothing will change. If all goes the way PG&E wants, the city will abandons the peakers, the dirty Mirant plant will continue to run without a retrofit, and the people of southeast San Francisco will continue to suffer.

But there’s a problem facing Mirant, and it could potentially change the whole picture. The plant sucks 200 million gallons of water out of the bay every day for cooling — and its Regional Water Quality Control Board permit expires at the end of this year. The board has said it’s not inclined to renew the permit, since the plant can’t meet modern water-quality standards. So as of January, Mirant could be forced to shut the plant anyway — unless the company, and Cal-ISO, find a way to force the water board to back down.

That’s where the city comes in. The mayor, the supervisors, and City Attorney Dennis Herrera should publicly inform both the water board and Cal- ISO that San Francisco does not want the permit renewed for the current Mirant plant. Even if Newsom thinks the facility can be upgraded, it’s hard to argue that the existing plant is anything but a disaster. And unless and until there’s a credible, peer-reviewed retrofit plan, Newsom has no business siding with Mirant and PG&E.

The water board could force the issue. If the Mirant plant has to close, the city either needs to come back with a peaker plan that environmentalists can accept or find a way to meet Cal-ISO’s mandates without new fossil fuel generation. That sounds like an excellent outcome to us. *

Tyranny of the majority

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› steve@sfbg.com

When the California Supreme Court agreed last week to decide the legality of Proposition 8 — which a slim majority of Californians passed Nov. 4, taking from same-sex couples the marriage rights that the court had established in May — the debate shifted to a concept far older than that of gay rights.

Essentially, it will decide whether this is a case of the "tyranny of the majority," a phrase Alexis de Tocqueville coined in his classic 1835 book Democracy in America, drawing on a concept from the ancient Greeks that was the philosophical underpinning of the US Bill of Rights and the central paradigm of constitutional democracy.

The founding principle is that basic rights — such as the freedoms of speech, religion, and association — are not subject to majority approval and can’t be taken away by a simple popular vote. So the question now before the judges is whether the right to marry, which the court ruled had been unconstitutionally withheld from same-sex couples, is among those core rights.

"The whole notion of equal protection is to protect minority interests from the periodic discriminatory impulse of the majority," Robert Rubin, legal director for the Bay Area chapter of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, told the Guardian. "And [upholding Prop. 8] would turn that on its head."

‘CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS’


Even before the votes were counted election night, the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office and its counterparts in Santa Clara County and the city of Los Angeles were developing their challenge to the legality of Prop. 8, which they filed Nov. 5.

Both Prop. 8 proponents and the California Attorney General’s Office agreed that the high court should immediately take the case rather than let it rattle around the lower courts for months or years. "Review by this Court is necessary to ensure uniformity of decision, finality and certainty for the citizens of California," Attorney General Jerry Brown wrote to the court.

Brown had previously ruled that the roughly 18,000 marriages performed since May were legal and that Prop. 8 is not retroactive, something proponents of the measure dispute and which the Supreme Court also has agreed to decide in this case. But two of the three "issues to be briefed and argued," as the high court ruled Nov. 19, were more fundamental: "1) Is Proposition 8 invalid because it constitutes a revision of, rather than an amendment to, the California Constitution? (see Cal. Const., art. XVIII, 1-4) 2) Does Proposition 8 violate the separation of powers doctrine under the California Constitution?"

Narrowly framed, the first question asks whether the process of banning same-sex marriage in the constitution should have gone through the more cumbersome revision process, which involves winning a two-thirds vote in the California Legislature before submitting the measure to voters. And the second concerns whether the legislative branch of government (in this case, through a direct vote of the people) can legally override this decision by the judicial branch.

But more broadly framed, both questions go to the same basic issue: can a simple majority of voters take away rights from a protected minority group, one the judicial branch has already ruled is entitled to the same marriage rights as heterosexual couples? The implications of that answer are so profound that City Attorney Dennis Herrera, in a City Hall press conference after the court announced its decision, cast the matter as no less than a "constitutional crisis."

"The cases before the Supreme Court today are no simple rematch. To be candid, the principles implicated here are of far greater consequence than marriage alone," Herrera said. "In short, this case has gone beyond the simple issue of marriage equality. And no matter what your view of same-sex marriage is, it’s important to understand that the passage of Proposition 8 has pushed California to the brink of a constitutional crisis."

He then explained why.

"This measure sought to do something that no other constitutional amendment has ever done here in the state of California, and that is to strip a fundamental right from a protected class of citizens and in doing so, it did not merely undo a narrowly disfavored Supreme Court ruling. Its legal effect is nowhere [near that] simple or elegant. Rather, it upended a separation of powers doctrine deeply rooted in our system of governance. It trounced upon the independence of the state’s judicial branch and it eviscerated the most fundamental principle of our state’s constitution. And if allowed to stand, Proposition 8 so devastates the principle of equal protection that it would endanger fundamental rights of any potential electoral minority, even for protected classes based on gender, race, or religion. And it would mean a bare majority of voters could enshrine any manner of discrimination against any unpopular group, and our state constitution would be powerless to disallow it," Herrera said.

That’s why he said 12 cities and counties have joined this suit — including Los Angeles and Alameda counties, which were not part of the original same-sex marriage case — along with supporting roles being played by the NAACP, the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, the Asia Pacific American Legal Center, and California Council of Churches.

There is some irony to the Council of Churches’ involvement given that religious groups, particularly the Catholics and Mormons, provided the backbone of financial and volunteer support for the Yes on 8 campaign. Yet the council argues that Prop. 8 is an attack on religious freedom.

"It is kind of ironic, and I don’t they they’re paying attention to the big picture, to be honest with you," Eric Isaacson, attorney for the Council of Churches, told the Guardian. "But history tells us that religious groups are often the victims of such persecution."

He cited laws that have taken rights from Jews in many countries and instances of majorities in the United States going after Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons, a group driven from state to state by discriminatory mobs until they finally settled in Utah to enjoy religious freedom.

Beyond the historical and precedent-setting nature of the case, the council’s executive director Rick Schlosser told the Guardian that Prop. 8 discriminates against Episcopal, Unitarian, and other churches that believe all people have the right to marry.

"We work on a lot of religious freedom issues and there’s a huge number of churches that support the right of people to marry," Schlosser said. "There are a lot of churches that think it’s their religious duty to perform same-sex marriages."

CONFLICTING TRADITIONS


Frank Schubert, who managed the Yes on 8 campaign, scoffs at attempts to frame this debate around larger constitutional issues: "This is simply about marriage and what the definition of marriage will be."

He called the chances of overturning the measure "minuscule," and said, "the constitution belongs to the people." Rather than an initiative upsetting constitutional traditions, Schubert blamed the Supreme Court for reinterpreting marriage: "It’s the first time in California that rights that did not exist were granted on a narrow court decision and the people corrected that."

Yet the traditional gender structure of marriage is now in conflict with traditions of equal protection and separation of powers, something same-sex marriage advocates say needs to be the subject of a concerted public education campaign.

"There is a major civics education to be undertaken," Rubin said, recalling how he was also criticized publicly in 1994 for his role in winning a restraining order against Proposition 187, which sought to withhold government services from undocumented immigrants. "Yet the notion that protecting minority interests is not subject to popular will is not that hard to understand."

Maybe, but some constitutional law scholars say the formulation is not quite that simple. "The notion that a majority can’t take away a minority group’s rights, that just isn’t true," said UC Berkeley’s Boalt School of Law professor Jesse Choper. He takes a less philosophical view of the case, noting that California law explicitly allows the constitution to be amended, essentially however the people see fit, a process far easier than the one to change the federal constitution.

Choper said the specific question before the court is whether voters can remove same-sex marriage rights from the constitution. "And the answer is yes, if they do it properly," he said. That determination will come down to whether the judges believe this change is a mere amendment, or a more serious revision. Choper said the case law on that question isn’t well-established, but his reading of it is that plaintiffs face a real challenge in arguing that a simple change to the constitution — albeit a weighty one — requires the revision process. "It’s uphill," he said. "They’ll have to cut a new cloth."

But Herrera and his fellow plaintiffs don’t agree. While he characterized the coming legal battle as difficult and complicated, he expressed confidence in their ability to show that Prop. 8 changes core constitutional principles.

"That’s why I think this is a revision rather than amendment, because it would so radically change the balance of power and responsibility between our branches of government," Herrera said.

Santa Clara County Attorney Ann Ravel, who joined Herrera’s press conference, agreed, stepping up the podium to say, "Let me just add something to that. If this is not a case of revision, it’s hard to imagine any case that the court might find there to have been a revision, and there have been some."

While Choper may not agree with the plaintiffs on how the court will decide the equal protection questions, he does agree that the outcome could have serious implications for minority rights and the ability of voters to target disfavored groups. "If they can do it to this minority, they can do it to other minorities," Choper said.

Rubin said the religious groups pushing Prop. 8 are being short-sighted: "What they may like today when they have 51 percent of the vote, tomorrow they may be on the 49 percent side and may not like that basic rights come down to majority rule."

And that’s why the issue gets elevated to the larger question of whether this is a case of tyranny of the majority, something that could become an issue for the federal courts, which is likely to see cases challenging whether lax California standards on precedent-setting initiatives might run afoul of bedrock principles in the US Constitution.

"Yes of course you could challenge it in the federal court," Choper said. "If Prop. 8 stands, someone will bring a case about whether discrimination against gay marriages violates the equal protection clause of the federal constitution."

Herrera said he doesn’t want to go there yet, but he left that door open in response to a question from the Guardian: "Are there potential federal issues down the road that could be raised or discussed? It’s no secret that’s potentially there, but at this point, I don’t think that’s something that we’re going to focus on."

THE LONG VIEW


While the judges and lawyers in this case may focus on narrow legal concepts and definitions, Herrera is seeking to present the case in a far grander context.

"Equal protection under the law is what separates constitutional democracy from mob rule tyranny and it is a principle that reaches back eight centuries to the Magna Carta and it has guided the founding of our nation and our state," he said. "So I understand that on same-sex marriage, the emotions on both sides run high, but it’s important to understand the legal stakes are even higher. The cases before the high court today are no longer about marriage rights alone. They are about the foundations of our constitution. And as citizens we share the blessing of a common jurisprudence, and I refuse to accept that it is beyond us to find common ground in its enduring and deeply American principles: equality under the law, separation of powers, and an independent judiciary."

Ravel reinforced Herrera’s perspective, telling reporters, "The Supreme Court is going to decide, as Dennis said, a question that goes to the very foundation of our democracy and that will also impact every city and county in the state. The court has held, previously, that all couples have to be treated equally when it comes to the important institution of marriage. A majority of voters can’t undercut the court’s role in protecting minorities in our society."

Essentially, this is no longer a case about same-sex marriage.

"The merits of the case are different than they were back in May. The fact of the matter is the California Supreme Court found there was a fundamental right to marry and that LGBT couples are entitled to that right. The issue here is should Prop. 8 be struck down because it was an improper amendment versus a revision," Herrera said. "So I think everybody is focused on the right issues." *

Taxi merger

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› amanda@sfbg.com

A plan to merge the Taxi Commission with the Municipal Transportation Agency will be heard by the Board of Supervisors on Nov. 25. Most city officials and taxi industry bigwigs support the change, but some drivers fear it could signal the end of the semi-autonomous medallion system that has been in place for 30 years.

The merger legislation by Sup. Aaron Peskin is brief, simply transferring duties from the Taxi Commission to the MTA beginning March 1, 2009. But Peskin also helped write another key piece of legislation — last year’s sweeping MTA reform measure Proposition A — that contains a provision allowing the MTA to wipe out all prior taxi regulations.

Skeptics fear that the real target of the merger is Prop. K, the 1978 law that created the current driver permitting system, which requires taxi medallions that are owned by the city to be in every car. With the MTA in control, the door could be open to privatizing taxi medallions. These permits are currently leased by the city for a fee — $658 a year for most cabs — to longtime drivers, but a scheme to sell or transfer them could mean huge profits for the select group of drivers who now hold medallions, with a potentially high transfer fee kicked back to the city.

Reguutf8g San Francisco’s taxi industry involves ensuring cabs are being properly operated, with medallions held by legitimate drivers, and investigating various complaints. But the Taxi Commission barely has enough money to meet its mandate. Proponents of the merger say the MTA can bring more resources and professional attention to the industry. Mayor Gavin Newsom, who as a supervisor in 1998 pushed for formation of the Taxi Commission, has long supported the merger as a way to have all transportation housed in one agency.

“The benefit of merging is the MTA already regulates all surface transportation,” said Jordanna Thigpen, acting director of the Taxi Commission, who was appointed by Newsom after the Taxi Commission ousted Heidi Machen in 2006. “Most cities in the country do incorporate taxis into the common transportation agency.”

Currently, cab companies, medallion holders, and rank and file drivers essentially function as a feudal system, with the serfs driving San Franciscans around in vehicles usually owned by the lording cab companies and permitted by older drivers who hold the coveted medallions. There are only 1,500 of these permits, which are literally tin medallions that correspond to the numbers printed on the sides of cabs. They are owned and regulated by the city, and leased for life to drivers who wait years to move up the list.

Medallion holders make about $20,000 to $50,000 per year leasing their medallions to cab companies, which then charge drivers daily “gate fees” that are set by the city. Drivers pay an average of $96.50 per day to use a cab, but are allowed to pocket all their fares. Drivers usually clear about $150 a day, but that’s before paying gas, tolls, and tickets, and before even sometimes allegedly slipping bribes to dispatchers to get the best assignments. Drivers have no health insurance and are essentially treated as independent contractors.

Drivers have criticized the newly formed Taxi Advisory Group, which has made recommendations to the MTA and is likely to be expanded after the merger into a 15-member council, which would have only three drivers, but seven medallion holders and cab company representatives. Five members of the public would also be seated and their unanimous support would be required for a driver-led initiative or idea to trump the medallion and cab company bloc.

“We want a much greater and fairer representation on this Taxi Advisory Council,” said driver and United Taxicab Workers chair Bud Hazelkorn. “Without that, all the issues that we bring will not be heard.” Those issues include providing health care for drivers and creating a centralized dispatch system so fares are allocated more equitably. He pointed out that drivers are the only people in the system making all their income directly from fares. Everyone else in the industry gets slices from other pies.

And the existing provisions outlined by Prop. K may soon be a thing of the past.

Prop. A included language that allowed for the Taxi Commission merger and stated that once the MTA was in control, “Agency regulations shall thereafter supersede all previously adopted ordinances governing motor vehicles for hire that conflict with or duplicate such regulations.”

During the 2007 election season, this was interpreted by the UTW and Judge Quentin Kopp, a former supervisor who authored Prop. K, as possibly undermining the current medallion system. “The taxicabs CEOs have tried EIGHT times to undo Prop. K, failing each time as voters upheld this good government measure,” Kopp wrote in a paid ballot argument at the time. “Now encouraged by City Hall, Prop. A slips in a deceptive clause undoing 30 years of voter policy.”

Back in 2007, when seeking the Guardian‘s endorsement for Prop. A, Peskin told us, “I have met with the mayor. The mayor has no desire, as do I, to undermine Prop. K, and what we would do if we ever were to transfer the Taxi Commission to MTA, we would transfer upon the condition that they adhere to and embrace by regulation all of the previously voter approved ordinances, such as Prop. K. So I think we have it handled.”

Peskin said he reaffirmed that commitment in a letter, cosigned by Newsom, but neither office could locate a copy of that letter as of Guardian press time.

But at a Nov. 17 Government Audit and Oversight Committee meeting, Peskin asked MTA executive director Nathaniel Ford if it was his understanding that this merger was not to undermine Prop. K. “That is my understanding,” said Ford. “I think it is important to all stakeholders.”

Yet the interpretation is still correct. “The MTA will now have the authority to enact provisions that supersede Prop. K,” City Attorney’s Office spokesperson Matt Dorsey told the Guardian.

This past summer, the Taxi Commission established a Charter Reform Workgroup with a primary goal of reviewing Prop. K. The group is expected to meet for about six months with any recommendations subject to a citywide vote.

Although the workgroup has yet to release any specific statements regarding Prop. K, chairman Malcolm Heinecke believes it’s already making strides simply by opening up public discourse among citizens, companies, medallion holders, and drivers.

“One of the problems with the taxi industry and discussions of reform is that they are very insular,” said Heinecke, who is also an MTA board member. “I believe we have a balanced group of voices [in the group].”

Heinecke said he thinks varied stakeholders are essential because of broad dissatisfaction with Prop. K. “You hear everyone — both inside and outside the industry — bemoaning some aspect of Prop. K. It’s a system we’ve had in place for 30 years; rather than just say it’s bad and not do anything, [the goal of the workgroup] is to look at where we are and revise.”

While it may be true that no one is satisfied, that hardly means members of the factional workgroup agree on how exactly Prop. K should be changed. For some, the problem begins with issues of representation. Not everyone agrees with Heinecke that this is a “balanced group.” Of 12 members, there are just three drivers and three members of the public, with the rest representatives from the upper echelons of the industry.

Driver and UTW member Thomas George Williams pointed out that “companies and medallion holders often have the same interests — most companies are owned by medallion holders.”

Furthermore, Mark Gruberg, a UTW member, told us, “Everyone would say some things can and possibly should be done to improve provisions of Prop. K. But it’s one thing to work around the edges to reform a law and another thing to throw it out the window.”

He pointed out that one proposal before the workgroup would allow medallions to be sold for profit, something he said “would be a complete reversal of Prop. K.” If other cities are an example, medallions could fetch as much as $500,000 apiece, enough for the holder to retire handsomely. “People that have them would clean up at the expense of the next generation of cab drivers,” Gruberg said. “It would be a completely indefensible windfall.”

“This is public property, these medallions,” Hazelkorn said. “They could be misused as a pension, but that’s not a pension that applies to everyone.”

When questioned, Heinecke was vague about concrete changes the workgroup might instigate. “This is a delicate position for me because the whole purpose of the task force is to hear the views of all the stakeholders,” he said.

Taxi drivers, the serfs of the industry, do not have high hopes about the merger. “If the merger happens, the MTA [officials] will be able to do whatever they please,” Williams said. “Everyone knows MTA is always in need of money … they don’t care about drivers or improving industry, only their budget.”

Williams worries that, under the MTA, the commission will lease medallions to companies instead of individual drivers, which would “totally ruin the concept of Prop. K.” Gruberg agreed. He pointed out that some proposals mention levying a tax on the medallion transfers, a potential revenue source the MTA could be eyeing. “It’s a whole new ball game with MTA and if they’re so desperate for cash and they see the taxi industry as a cash cow, they might go for any scheme.”

MTA spokesperson Judson True told us, “We have no intention of looking to taxi revenue to supplement existing Muni operations.”

Judge Kopp said, “By itself that does not disturb Prop. K, but if that’s a fig leaf for some recommendation from this ersatz Charter Reform Workgroup, then it becomes ominous.” He said dressing the changes in a group with a pithy name like Charter Reform “is not reform, it’s subterfuge.”

And, he added, Prop. K doesn’t need reform as much as it needs enforcement. “They’ve been at this for 30 years. Their revisions are always to start to restore the pre-1978 conditions and enable them to treat these permits as personal possessions for sale.”

Peskin, with the approval of other members of the committee, calendared the full board hearing on the merger for a date after the MTA announces the result, expected sometime this week, of its national search for a director of taxi and accessible services. Solid leadership has been elusive: two years ago the Taxi Commission fired executive director Heidi Machen, reportedly for being too tough on cab companies. Machen was replaced by another Newsom appointee, Jordanna Thigpen, who said she has applied to stay on the job but doesn’t know if she’ll be selected.

When asked if the merger would unnecessarily stretch the MTA’s resources, Thigpen said, “On the one hand you could look at it that way. On the other hand, we’re so chronically understaffed. Trying to add staff is so complicated because we’re funded by the taxi industry.”

The taxi industry brings about $1.6 million in revenue to the city, mostly from fees paid by 1,500 medallion holders and about 7,000 drivers. However, “Fees do not currently meet the city’s cost recovery needs,” according to a Taxi Commission merger report. “Both Taxi Commission and Taxi Detail are understaffed and additional enforcement personnel are needed.”

MTA’s True said, “We expect some cost savings or at least increased efficiencies,” when asked how the merger will affect the MTA’s budget. “When it comes to changing Prop. K, raising fees, or adjusting how medallions are allocated,” True said, “I can’t say that it’s not on the table … In the last several months the focus has been on procedural issues. I think that policy questions will largely come post-merger.”

Hot flash gallery

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> johnny@sfbg.com

It was the summer of 1974, when shy, skinny, cute Daniel Nicoletta first stepped through the doors of Castro Camera into adulthood and history. His parents were snapshot enthusiasts. In his words, he had grown up "surrounded by Instamatic moments." But he was about to enter the time of his life. "I stopped in to determine where I would be developing my Super 8 film," he remembers. "I couldn’t get over how friendly the two guys [Harvey Milk and Scott Smith] were. I was 19 years old — I had no idea what cruising was at that point. Of course, within two months I was completely up to speed."

Nicoletta immediately captured the speed of life. His vérité photos of Milk, Smith, and San Francisco from the mid-1970s onward are often great and sometimes iconic. He soon sold his first photo out of Boys in the Sand (1971)and Bijou (1972), filmmaker Wakefield Poole’s hair salon-toy store-art gallery Hot Flash. A regular "Mr. Multimedia," Nicoletta was as interested in half-inch Portapak video as he was in still photography. In 1977, using Castro Camera as one of his chief meeting spots, he worked with David Waggoner and Marc Huestis to found the Gay Film Festival of Super 8 Films, an event now popularly known as the Frameline festival.

Nicoletta’s role in Milk’s life and role in queer film history provide some of the subtler facets of Gus Van Sant’s new film Milk. Those viewers familiar with Van Sant’s earlier work know of his focus on the photographic process: for example, a significant sequence within his 2003 film Elephant is spent in the darkroom, observing the efforts of a young photographer who may as well be a 21st century version of the young Nicoletta. "Even though I don’t say a lot, Lucas [Grabeel, who plays Nicoletta in the film] is a constant presence throughout Milk," Nicoletta notes, when asked about the interplay between his life and Van Sant’s moviemaking. "Gus keeps me there in the film as a cultural observer. In life, Gus has an eye for the role of still photography in culture, and he used my entity as a way of cross-referencing that."

Some of Nicoletta’s photos of Milk and Smith inform or inspire the look of particular scenes in Milk, such as a pie fight between Smith and Milk. "The art department was immersed in stills of all kinds," says Nicoletta, who switched to digital photography to document the making of the film. "I was impressed with all the things pinned up to their walls — the checkerboard analysis was lovely to look at." Nicoletta also lent his copy of the August 1974 San Francisco issue of the barely-subtextual gay culture magazine After Dark — a publication partly defined by the studio portraiture of East Coast gay photographers such as Ken Duncan and Jack Mitchell — to Milk‘s costume designer, Danny Glicker. "He [Glicker] creamed himself over that," Nicoletta says with an affectionate laugh. "There’s a postage stamp-sized photo of Victor Garber [who plays George Moscone in Milk] in it. I’d never noticed, but it took Danny Glicker a second to zero in on that. It was hilarious."

The Milk crew’s devotion to verisimilitude extended to Nicoletta’s camera — and to one of Milk’s two main cameras, one of the first Nikons ever made, which Nicoletta now owns. "They literally had me take jpgs of my camera and Harvey’s camera so they could cast those instruments to the letter," he says. "Harvey’s camera has his name engraved on the bottom. Scott’s [Smith] mom gave it to me when Scott passed away. It’s a real treasure. I never use it, but I saw him use it. Harvey and Scott also had a second Nikon that was their primary camera, and I did use that one quite a bit. We both passed film through the same camera, which was kind of cool — kind of incestuous."

This radical sense of brotherhood informed both Nicoletta and Milk’s photography. "Harvey took great joy in photographing people," Nicoletta observes, noting that a chance to take aerial photos of Christo’s Running Fence was one of Milk’s artistic and free-spirited moments as his political duties increased. "If you look at Harvey’s body of work, one thing that comes through with political potency is that a presiding aesthetic in his life was male-to-male love. You can then zoom out even further and say that the stimulus for his political activism was the sanctification and preservation of male-to-male love."

It’s characteristically modest of Nicoletta to turn an interview about his photography into a discussion of Milk’s endeavors with a camera — everything he says about Milk’s photos is true of his own work, which captures Milk and Smith’s relationship, for instance, with great warmth. He gives vivid background to some of his best-known Milk photos, such as an image of the inaugural walk to City Hall in January 1978. "We were just arriving at the steps," he remembers. "What’s great about that photo is that it’s just one of so many details of the history of the queer community that have unfolded on those very steps. I think I could do a whole book on the steps of City Hall at this point."

The prospect of a Nicoletta monograph is something to savor, even if he jokes that his friends "all roll their eyes to the back of their head and say, ‘There she goes again about her book’," whenever he mentions the prospect. As a documentarian of history, Nicoletta understands the necessity and gravity of a book of his work. He has other excellent ideas, such as an era-based collection that would bring in stylized images by Steven Arnold — like him, one of the chief people to visually capture queer artistic forces such as the Cockettes and Angels of Light. "I loved working with Reggie [of the Cockettes] because the first photo I ever saw of him was in Gilles Larrain’s [1973] Idols," Nicoletta says. "That book just rocked my world. I thought, ‘Who are these people, and where can I find them?’ And I found them."

Nicoletta found those people — the evidence is in books such as Gay by the Bay and Adrian Brooks’ new Flights of Angels (Arsenal Pulp Press, 224 pages, $24.95), and in the photo collection of the San Francisco Public Library. As a chronicler of gay life, he can be seen as a West Coast public counterpart to East Coast photographers such as Peter Hujar, Mark Morrisroe, and David Armstrong, and Nan Goldin. "In a sense I’ve sort of stayed provincial. That’s a little bit self-preservationist," he says, after mentioning the direct influence of the Bay Area studio photographer Crawford Barton on his work. "It’s so great to have a 30-year arc and be mindful of where you are and grateful for things like the mentorship of people like Harvey Milk and Scott Smith, and the inspiration of people like the Angels of Light. I’m for slow growth."

>>Back to the Milk Issue

Political Theater

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

Pair an effusive and extroverted, larger-than-life politico like Harvey Milk — complete with community-forging charisma, panoramic outlook, and labyrinthine City Hall machinations — with a reserved, perpetually-outside-looking-in independent, à la director Gus Van Sant? That feature-film odd-coupling might have understandably strained some brains in Hollywood. Making the seldom-seen moments of otherwise-secret or neglected lives visible has seemingly been Van Sant’s calling, and his most memorable films — 1985’s Mala Noche, 1989’s Drugstore Cowboy, 1991’s My Own Private Idaho, 2003’s Elephant, and even the Oscar-gathering 1997 Good Will Hunting — have relied on his coolly unblinking, surprisingly cerebral yet gently empathetic eye, whether focused on Mexican immigrants, ’70s-era oblivion-seekers, Northwestern hustlers, a hidden savant, or disaffected teenagers.

Still, those leitmotifs — entwined with Van Sant’s terrible, tangible sense of romance with his outsiders, artists, and lost souls, as well as the way his camera seems to fall head over heels for his characters — made Van Sant a natural to make Milk, after Oliver Stone’s aborted feature-film attempt to tell the slain San Francisco supervisor’s story. "There is always that question: why I haven’t done a film like this earlier," Van Sant confessed, clearing his throat for the umpteenth time while agreeing that he hasn’t ever quite done a film like Milk. "Yeah, I hadn’t done a big movie, so there were people around who were like, ‘Can you handle it? Can it be done?’ They think that way. Since there was no business model, they were like, ‘No, he can’t, because he makes these scruffy, little movies. Too big a gamble, you know.’

"That’s a part of Hollywood, but it’s kind of like safe bets: it can make bad stuff happen as easily as good stuff, and it has its own closed policies like the old conservative City Hall-type policies. ‘New supervisors who haven’t handled the job before are incapable and they’re screwing things up.’"

Thankfully the gamble paid off and the tale of California’s first openly gay politician has been told with elegance, poetry, and not a little heart-stirring, inspirational grace, by the man whom biographer James Robert Parish describes as "the standard bearer of America’s ‘queer cinema’" — one who fuses extreme close-ups, handheld shots, and found footage in a collaborative, textural approach that lends a Kodachrome pop-culty feel to his films. The process makes for "beautiful pictures every time," as a windblown Sean Penn put it at a Ritz Carlton press conference after Milk‘s Oct. 28 world premiere at the Castro Theatre.

Seated at the middle of a long table between Penn and Josh Brolin, who portrays Milk’s killer Dan White, as they traded friendly jabs, Van Sant remained mostly silent — physically at the center, but an observer apart at the same time. Later in a hotel suite, face to face with a single interviewer, the director seemed equally out of place, folded uncomfortably into a plush chair, arms tightly crossed over a tan jeans jacket sporting a "No on 8" sticker, with a small, nylon, bright-blue dollar-store-style backpack by his side. He more closely resembles a 56-year-old teacher or elder-care worker than a Hollywood insider.

The latter role is evidently still alien to him. His first brush with Milk came in 1978 while he was driving across the country and heard on the radio that the supervisor was shot. Though he later saw the 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, it never occurred to him to make a film about the politician. "It seemed like a very big story," Van Sant said. Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy "were stories that were devised to be made with really low budgets, like $20,000. So it was never like, ‘Oh, we can make a story about City Hall with $20,000.’ I guess I was always coming at filmmaking from not really being in the business, but knowing that I could get a hold of or save up my own money to the point where I’d have $20,000 and I could actually make a feature."

In the process of making Milk, the filmmaker admitted that he had to leave out many details that "I really like and things that sort of explain the situation. We suggest things. We explain this new law that enabled people to elect their supervisors from their districts, but we didn’t explain that the people up to that point that had to run city-wide resembled a different and maybe more antiquated type of politician. They were more, I guess, conservative. They were more business-oriented."

If San Francisco is palpable as a character in Milk, then City Hall is that elegantly shambolic figure’s brain, and Van Sant effectively used the Beaux Arts space, which harks back to classical forms, to his own dramatic ends. A down-the-rabbit-hole corridor leading to supervisors’ chambers becomes a pulsing nerve center visually rhyming with the characters’ stratagems. The sweeping staircase and balconies become the backdrop for Milk’s and White’s clashing trajectories, and the building itself becomes the spotless stage for Milk’s political birth and death.

"What I usually try and do, in general, is to connect the characters to a timeless quality, so it’s not necessarily situated in the specific time they’re in," said Van Sant. "So if they’re in City Hall and there’s a beaux-arts classical relief on the ceiling, if you frame it correctly, they can kind of look like Roman senators. You can get this timeless quality of people trading votes and betraying each other for as long as there’s been a forum and a senate.

"There were certain things in the script and in Harvey’s life — the famous line is ‘How do you like my new theater,’ which is what he says to Cleve [Jones, played by Emile Hirsch]: ‘Always take the stairs, never dress up, never blend in, make a show of it, use the whole space.’ I thought of that as a centerpiece of the whole film. That scene is one of my favorites because it was kind of like Harvey, who was a stage manager and was in theater. This was his new forum, his new theater, his new proscenium, with which to create new stuff — in this case, gay rights and other things that he thought were important, like education and help for minorities and seniors."

The question that arises so often among those who care about gay rights is: Why wasn’t Milk released before the Nov. 4 election, when it might have energized voters to shut down Proposition 8, a battle so similar to Milk’s charge against Proposition 6? As Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black said, "I didn’t know this [movie] would be about Prop. 8, but I don’t think this fight is over."

"I don’t really decide when movies should come out," said Van Sant. "The distributors came up with that." He spelled out some of the thoughts behind the Nov. 26 theatrical release: worries included "whether or not the elements of the story were so like the political moment that the film wouldn’t have a life after the election," and "whether people are too busy with the election to go see the movie. Are people overtaxed with politics to go see a political movie?" As a compromise, the late-October Castro Theatre premiere was arranged to get Milk and its overall message into the media eye, while still opening it into November through January, the Academy campaign season.

"Yeah, I didn’t make the call," repeats Van Sant, somewhat regretfully and shedding perhaps a smidge of that cherished detachment. "Harvey would have opened it in October."

Milk opens Wed/26 at the Castro Theatre, with additional Bay Area openings Fri/28 and Dec. 5.


>>Back to the Milk Issue

Where’s Harry?

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History is written by the winners, the survivors — and sometimes the people who try the hardest. And while Milk hews pretty closely to reality, some of the people who lived through the story say a few key pieces are missing.

On the night Sup. Harvey Milk was assassinated, for example, a crowd gathered in the Castro for a march to City Hall. In the movie, the key protagonists — Cleve Jones and Anne Kronenberg — pull the spontaneous event together. Sup. Tom Ammiano, who was there, remembers it a bit differently.

"The whole thing started at Harry Britt’s house," Ammiano told us.

Britt, who was appointed as Milk’s successor on the board, "lived at 16th and Castro, and we were all gathered there on his steps" Ammiano said. "I asked what I could do, and he told me to run out and get some black ribbons. So I went to Cliff’s Hardware and bought out every black ribbon in the place.

"Harry was the focal point. It all started with him."

But Britt — one of Milk’s confidants and by any standard one of the most important gay politicians in the city’s history — isn’t mentioned in the movie.

There are, of course, plenty of events and people left out of what could only be, at best, a snapshot of history. Milk isn’t a documentary; it’s a feature film. Jones, who served as a script consultant, told us that "the hardest decision was what to cut…. There were a lot of people close to Harvey who didn’t make it."

It’s no secret that Jones and Britt are not close, and that the former supervisor has been out of the political limelight for years. He told me this week that he doesn’t want to talk about the film. ("I had the privilege to know Harvey myself, and I don’t want to see him through someone else’s eyes," he said.) But still, the absence of Britt, who picked up and carried Milk’s torch for many long years, is striking.

Ammiano, who loved the movie overall, agreed that it was odd not to see Britt depicted in any of the key scenes. "It’s funny when you live through history, when you were there, and then to see how it’s reported," he said. "History is written by he or she who tells it."

And while, to a certain extent, the movie feels like the Cleve Jones Show (and Jones happily told me he feels like he’s becoming "the most famous homosexual you know"), Ammiano credited Jones with pushing to make the film happen.

"Cleve wanted the story told, and for 15 years he’s been pushing it," Ammiano said. "It’s a huge personal accomplishment for him, and this is his reward."

Politics behind the picture

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› news@sfbg.com

The new Harvey Milk movie, which opens later this month, begins as a love story, a sweet love story about two guys who meet in a subway station and wind up fleeing New York for San Francisco. But after that, the movie gets political — in fact, by Hollywood standards, it’s remarkably political.

The movie raises a lot of issues that are alive and part of San Francisco politics today. The history isn’t perfect (see sidebar), but it is compelling. And while we mourn Milk and watch Milk, we shouldn’t forget what the queer hero stood for.

Milk started out as something of a pot-smoking hippie. “The ’70s were a hotbed of everything,” Sup. Tom Ammiano remembered. “Feminism, civil rights, antiwar.” Milk’s early campaigns grew out of that foment. “Sure, he wanted to be elected,” Ammiano told us. “But the main ingredient was courage. He was fighting with the cops when they raided the bars … what he did was dangerous.”

Milk never would have been elected supervisor without district elections — and the story of district elections, and community power, ran parallel to Milk’s own story, for better and for worse.

Milk tried twice to win a seat on the at-large Board of Supervisors and never made the final cut. But in the mid-1970s, a coalition of community leaders, frustrated that big money controlled city policy, began organizing to change the way supervisors were elected. The shift from an at-large system to a district one in 1976 was a transformational moment for the city.

“I think that San Francisco doesn’t always appreciate the sea change that district elections brought,” Cleve Jones, a queer activist and friend of Milk who helped Dustin Black write the script for Milk, told us. “It wasn’t just important to the various communities that had been locked out of power at City Hall — it was the glue that began to grow the coalitions.”

Milk was elected as part of what became the most diverse board in the city’s history, with Asian, black, and gay representatives who came out of community organizations. The board, of course, also included Dan White, a conservative Irish Catholic and former cop. And it was the assassination of Milk and Mayor George Moscone by Sup. White — and the civic heartbreak, chaos, and confusion that followed — that allowed downtown forces to repeal district elections in 1980. That gave big money and big business control of the board for another 20 years, a reign that ended only when district elections returned in 2000.

Milk was a gay leader, but he was also a tenant activist, public power supporter, advocate for police reform, supporter of commuter taxes on downtown workers, and coalition-builder who helped bring together the labor movement and the queer community. It started, ironically, with the Teamsters.

“Those of us who came out of the antiwar movement remembered that the Teamsters supported Richard Nixon until the very last moment,” Jones said. “And they were seen as one of the most homophobic of all the unions.”

But in the 1970s, the Teamsters were at war with the Coors Brewing Company, and trying to get San Francisco bars to stop serving Coors beer. Allan Baird, a Teamsters leader who lived in the Castro District, saw an opportunity and contacted Milk, who agreed to help — if the Teamsters would start hiring gay truck drivers.

“It wasn’t just San Francisco and California,” Jones recalled. “We got Coors beer out of every gay bar in North America.” And gays started driving beer trucks.

Today, the queer-labor alliance is one of the most powerful, effective, and lasting political forces in San Francisco.

Milk was never popular among the wealthier and more established sectors of the gay community; he believed in a populist brand of politics that wasn’t afraid to take the fight to the streets — and beyond San Francisco. A central theme of the film is the fight against Proposition 6, a 1978 measure by conservative state Sen. John Briggs that would have barred homosexuals from teaching the public schools.

Milk, defying the mainstream political strategists, insisted on debating Briggs in some of the most right-wing parts of the state. He refused to downplay the gay-rights issues. And when Prop. 6 went down, it was the end of that particular homophobic crusade.

Milk was always an outsider, and he ran for office as a foe of the Democratic Party machine. “His campaign for state Assembly was all about Harvey vs. the machine,” former Sup. Harry Britt told us. “His main supporter was [Sup.] Quentin Kopp. He didn’t run as the liberal in the race; he ran against the machine.” And for much of the next 20 years, progressives in San Francisco found themselves fighting what became the Brown-Burton machine, controlled by Willie Brown and John Burton.

It’s too bad the movie wasn’t released early enough to have had an impact on Prop. 8, the anti same-sex marriage measure that just passed in California. Some critics of the No on 8 campaign say the message was far too soft, and that a little Harvey-Milk-style campaigning might have helped.

But for us, one of the most striking things about the movie is the fact that Milk and his lover, Scott Smith, were able to leave New York with very little money, arrive in San Francisco, rent an apartment on their unemployment checks, and open a camera store. That wouldn’t be possible today; the Harvey Milks of 2008 can’t live in the Castro — and many can’t live anywhere in San Francisco. The city is too expensive.

In fact, for all the victories Milk won, for all the successes of the movement he helped to build, much of his agenda is still unfulfilled, even in his hometown.

The first time Harvey Milk gives a public speech in the film, he’s standing on a soapbox … literally. He brings out a box with “soap” written on the side; a funny gag, but a serious and telling moment for him and San Francisco.

The issues that Milk spoke so passionately about in that speech included police reform, ending the war on drugs, protecting tenants and controlling rents, and improving parks and protecting people’s rights to use them liberally — all issues with as much resonance today as they had back then.

The movie leaves us with a painful question. For all the celebration of Milk’s legacy by San Franciscans of various political stripes, why have we made so little progress on some of his signature issues? We celebrate the martyr — but often forget what the man really advocated.

Support for gay rights is de rigueur for anyone who aspires to public office in San Francisco. But a quarter of city residents still voted to take away same-sex marriage rights in this election. Many older gay men today are barely able afford their AIDS medication and rent. And transgender people and other nontraditional types are still ostracized, unable to get good jobs, and sometimes treated contemptuously when they seek help from their government.

Sure, marijuana is supposedly legal for medical uses in California and pot clubs proliferate around San Francisco. But even these sick patients are still targeted by the federal government and its long arms in San Francisco, including former US Attorney Kevin Ryan, whom Mayor Gavin Newsom named his top crime advisor and who is now seeking to crackdown on the pot clubs. Why, 30 years after Milk was shot, does one have to claim an ailment or illness to smoke a joint in this town?

Two-thirds of city residents are renters, a group Milk championed with gusto, but we barely beat a state initiative in June that would have abolished rent control. Housing is getting steadily more expensive. And in this election, Newsom and his downtown allies opposed Proposition B, an affordable housing measure, and Proposition M, a common sense measure to prohibit landlords from harassing their tenants. Such harassment is a common tactic to force tenants from rent-controlled units, even though the City Attorney’s Office is currently suing the city’s biggest landlord, Skyline Realty, for its well-documented history of harassment. Newsom may be the champion of same-sex marriage, but when it comes to issues like tenants’ rights, we suspect that Milk would be appalled at Newsom’s gall.

Ted Gullicksen of the San Francisco Tenants Union noted that in the wake of Milk’s death and before the repeal of district elections, San Francisco established rent control and limits on condo conversions. The tenant movement has grown steadily stronger and more sophisticated, he said, as it had to in order to counter increasing economic and political pressures and creative gambits by landlords.

“The city has gentrified phenomenally since that time, and that’s put tremendous pressure on tenants and on condo conversions,” Gullicksen told us. “It continues to be a real struggle.”

Police reform was also a huge issue for Milk and his gay contemporaries, who suffered more than most groups from the behavior of thuggish cops protected by weak oversight rules and a powerful union. And today, the Police Officers Association is stronger and meaner than ever, but the oversight has improved little, as both the Guardian and San Francisco Chronicle have explored with investigations in recent years.

And in our public parks, San Francisco officials in recent years have banned smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, playing amplified music, and even gathering in large numbers without expensive, restrictive permits. Even in the Castro, where Milk and his allies took it as a basic right to gather in the streets, Newsom and the NIMBYs unilaterally cancelled Halloween celebrations and used police to chase away citizens with water trucks.

Is this really the city Harvey Milk was trying to create? In the film, he talks about transforming San Francisco into a vibrant, tolerant beacon that would set an example for the rest of the country, telling his compatriots, “We have got to give them hope.”

Well, with hope now making a comeback, perhaps San Francisco can finally follow Milk’s lead on the issues he cared about most.

>>Back to the Milk Issue

I remember Harvey

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Toward the end of the supervisorial campaign in 1973, I got an intercom call from Nancy Destefanis, our advertising representative handling political ads. Hey, she said, I got a guy here by the name of Harvey Milk who is running for supervisor and I think you ought to talk to him.

Milk? I replied. How can anybody run for supervisor with the name of Milk?

Nancy laughed and said that wasn’t his big problem, it was that he was running as an openly gay candidate, but he had strong progressive positions and potential. Nancy, a former organizer for Cesar Chavez’ farm workers, was tough and savvy, and I always took her advice seriously. "Send him in," I said.

And so Harvey Milk came into my office, at the start of his political career, looking like a well-meaning amateur. He had a ponytail and mustache, wore Levi’s and a T-shirt, and talked breathlessly about his issues without a word about how he intended to win. His arguments were impressive, but he clearly was not ready for prime time. We gave him our "romantic" endorsement. He got 17,000 votes.

I also advised him, as diplomatically as I could, that if he wanted to be a serious candidate, he needed to clean up his act.

Two years later, Milk strode into the Guardian in a suit and tie as a serious candidate ready to win and lead. As our strong endorsement put it, "Now he’s playing politics for real: he’s shaved his mustache, is running hard in the voting areas of the Sunset, and has picked up a flock of seemingly disparate endorsements from SF Tomorrow, the Building and Trades Council, Teamsters (for his work on the Coors beer boycott) and the National Women’s Caucus." On policy, we said he "would put his business acumen to work dissecting the budget" and "would fight for higher parking taxes, no new downtown garages, a graduated real estate transfer tax, an end to tax exemptions for banks and insurance companies, dropping the vice squad from the police budget, and improved mental health care facilities." He couldn’t get enough votes citywide to win, but he came closer.

In 1976, Milk decided to run for a state Assembly seat against Art Agnos. We decided to go with Agnos, largely because he was familiar with Sacramento as an aide to former assemblyman Leo McCarthy and also because our political reporter covering the race, Jerry Roberts, said that Agnos was much better on Sacramento issues during the campaign. We decided that Agnos was right for Sacramento and that we needed Milk in San Francisco. I have often wondered if we had endorsed Milk, and he had won, if he would still be alive.

The next year, when the city shifted to district supervisorial elections, Milk won and became the first openly gay elected official in the country. He would always say, "I am not a gay supervisor, I am a supervisor who happens to be gay."

On the afternoon of Friday, Nov. 24, 1978, Milk dropped by to see me at the Guardian. He was a bit dejected. Things were getting tougher for him on the board. He was getting hassled by his friends and allies who were telling him, as he put it, "if you don’t vote for me on this one, I’m going to stop supporting you." He said he was going to press on, but from then on he was going to work more closely with the Guardian on legislation and on giving us information.

Then he smiled the famous Harvey Milk smile and said as he left my room, "I want to be your Deep Throat at City Hall."

Those were the last words I ever heard from Harvey Milk. He was assassinated three days later.

Race and Prop 8: What’s next? Plus: Transgender Remembrance Day

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The fight against Prop 8 continues — and here’s some touching and empowering video of fierce comedian Wanda Sykes stepping up to the lesbian plate in LA last weekend (via Ta-Nahesi Coates):

(Not in attendance: Prince)

And the somewhat-exhausting dialogue about what role race played in the passage of Prop 8 also continues (um, see funny black dyke above) — and there’s sure to be some intelligent voices included at the below forum on this Wednesday (11/19) at the LGBT Center, sponsored by StopAIDS.

prop8forum08a.jpg

Prop 8 and Race: What’s Next
A community forum
Wed/19, 7pm-9pm
SF LGBT Community Center
1800 Market, SF
www.sfcenter.org

Also, just a reminder: Thursday November 20 is Transgender Day of Remembrance, commemorating our transgender brothers and sisters who’ve lost their lives to live their lives — a surprising number of which are non-white. There will be a rally with community speakers followed by a march through the Tenderloin to City Hall this Thursday evening:

Transgender Remembrance rally and march
11/20, 6pm-8pm, free
Beginning at the TRANS:THRIVE offices
815 Hyde Street, 2nd Floor, SF
info@sfcenter.org

Plus, the fabulous LGBT synagogue Congregation Shaar Zahev will be holding a special Transgender Remembrance Shabbat at 7:30pm in Friday, November 21. (You don’t have to be Jewish to attend, trust me.)

If you can’t make it, at least light a mental candle for these recently passed-on TG warriors.

“Jesus was a homo!”

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By Marke B.

jesussatan2a.jpg

OK, now that I’ve got your attention by yelling the above, like the group Bash Back did in a sleepy Lansing, MI church last weekend — minus the giant upside-down pink cross — please join me at this amazingly huge international thingie below.

Join the Impact!
Protest Prop 8 at SF City Hall
(and at City Halls around the country and world)
10:30am – 1:30pm
Saturday, November 15, 2008
http://protest8sf.wordpress.com/
http://jointheimpact.com/

(Note to Bash Back — although I love my colorfully radical gay sisterhood, I’m not sure that screaming about Jesus penis in a Midwestern church is going to help us queers gain something as conservative as marriage in California or adoption in Arkansas. I could be wrong. Plus the whole us vs. religion-in-general thing is kind of unfashionable, sigh. )

noon8protestpostera.jpg

I just want to say here that currently the LGBTIQQLMNOP world is in delicious turmoil — as any community as diverse as ours should be. As of yesterday, we have legalized, available same sex marriage in Connecticut — and a new porn movie called Farts. We have silly conservative gays once again telling us that we’d be more acceptable to mainstream America if only we’d expunge those weird drag queens and writhing leathermen from our Pride parades — and a horrifyingly unrepentant new interview from underage-page-baiting conservative jerk Mark Foley (It’s ironic because he says he was abused by a Catholic priest! Prop 8 connections!).

There is an almost-unfabulous radical black dyke telling gay marriage supporters to go stuff it up their white asses in the Chronicle, and an almost-fabulous (yet disturbingly quasi-gynophobic) cheeky new ad campaign from the Gay Times in London intended to make straight men gay.

And just to add more heavens-to-betsy to everything, the “Join the Impact” No on Prop 8 protest listed above was organized by a furtive little e-mail in Seattle from one brave, beautiful soul. An e-mail is our international organizer!

Queers — always so viral.

Last stand at the Harding Theater!

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Richard Reineccius says “Don’t mourn, renovate the Harding” theater and save this historic landmark

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Well, hopefully this isn’t the last stand for the Harding Theater in the Western Addition. But I wanted to use the line that we used for years in the passionate and unending battle to save the Goodman Building off of Van Ness Ave.

The battle was lost to save the original building but there was a complicated deal done in which the people in the Goodman Building ended up in the Thick Description Theater Building at 1695 l8th st. on Potrero Hill.
The theater is the lineal descendant of the old Julian theater, one of the city’s finest and most avant garde neighborhood theaters founded by Richard Reineccius and Doug Giebel.

It most fitting that Richard is now a leader in the fight to save the Harding theater. Here’s his call to arms on a hearing for the latest proposal to demolish the building at a hearing on Thursday (11/13/08) before the city planning commission.

A FULL HEARING FOR THE HARDING

by Richard Reineccius

The SF City Planning Commission will this week hear the latest proposal for demolishing much of an historic theater at 616 Divisadero Street, erecting a multi-story apartment building plus retail space on the premises. The hearing will be on Thursday afternoon 11/13, Room 400 City hall. (www.sfgov.org/planning)

The Harding Theater in SF’s once artistically vibrant and stylish Western Addition hasn’t seen audiences for live performances or films in a number of years, but is an excellent candidate for saving, not only as an arts space but as a development catalyst for the neighborhood. While not currently listed as a historic landmark, it in fact is one, being the last intact theater remaining in the city designed by the famous Reid Brothers firm (Fairmont Hotel, Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, SF’s Roosevelt and Castro Theaters, Byron Hot Springs Spa Hotel, more)

Why we waited — too long

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OPINION The California Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in May finally allowed same-sex couples their constitutional rights to marry. This was justice for the 4,000 same-sex couples issued marriage licenses in San Francisco from Feb. 12 to March 11, 2004. We were lucky to be one of those couples — but within five months the courts had voided all 4,000 licenses. I marched with hundreds to City Hall that day and angrily waved my nullified marriage license in the air. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon provided a balm, saying with a laugh, "Oh well, guess we have to go back to living in sin."

Over the past four years, we’ve continued to wear our rings and celebrate our wedding anniversary. When the County Clerk’s office offered us a refund for our marriage license, we requested the refund go toward the city’s legal battle over same-sex marriage. It appeared that San Francisco had won that battle on May 20, 2008.

But we decided not to remarry until after the November election, when we would know if California agreed with the state Supreme Court. Attorney General Jerry Brown assured us that these wedding licenses could not be voided, but the memory of seeing couples in tears on March 12, 2004, when we had just been married the day before, was reason enough to wait.

In our hearts, we knew that Proposition 8 was likely to pass; since 1980 we have witnessed California consistently shoot itself in the foot by voting for petition-driven propositions.

In the past three months, one of us has devoted nearly 60 hours in an effort to defeat Prop. 8. The irony is that back in January, Troy was precinct captain for Obama in the California primary. He most likely talked to a good portion of voters out in the Sunset District who voted in favor of Prop. 8. And while the Mormon Church funded most of the Yes on 8 campaign, it is now clear that their message got through to many of California’s minorities, who turned out in record numbers to vote for Barack Obama. The No on 8 campaign should have targeted those communities; instead it only showed white people in its television ads. Now we are the ones with a dream deferred.

Marriage was not something we always believed in. When you’re used to outsider status, sometimes you learn to roll with the injustices perpetrated upon you. When Mayor Gavin Newsom and the city offered us a taste of it back in 2004, it didn’t take much to realize how much we were missing. The marriage itself was one of the best days of our lives, and having it voided was a very, very bitter feeling I won’t soon forget.

To those of you so motivated to vote for Prop. 8, we can simply tell you this: in a world of massive problems, of great economic and environmental woes we are only now beginning to feel acutely, can we bring it upon ourselves to actually join together with all of our brothers and sisters and confront all hatred with an idea of a greater social good? Can we imagine a world where our children aren’t judged by the gender of the ones they love, but by the content of their character?

Yes we can.

Victor Krummenacher is a musician and contributing designer for Wired magazine. Troy Gaspard is a surly activist and frugal trader.

The people’s election

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› news@sfbg.com

By midnight Nov. 4, the drama was long over: John McCain had conceded, Barack Obama had delivered his moving victory speech — declaring that “change has come to America” — and the long national nightmare of the Bush years was officially headed for the history books.

But in San Francisco, the party was just getting started.

Outside of Kilowatt, on 16th Street near Guerrero, the crowd of celebrants was dancing to the sounds of a street drummer. In the Castro District, a huge crowd was cheering and chanting Obama’s name. And on Valencia and 19th streets, a spontaneous outpouring of energy filled the intersection. Two police officers stood by watching, and when a reporter asked one if he was planning to try to shut down the celebration and clear the streets, he smiled. “Not now,” he said. “Not now.”

Then, out of nowhere, the crowd began to sing: O say can you see /By the dawn’s early light …

It was a stunning moment, as dramatic as anything we’ve seen in this city in years. In perhaps the most liberal, counterculture section of the nation’s most liberal, counterculture city, young people by the hundreds were proudly singing The Star Spangled Banner. “For the first time in my life,” one crooner announced, “I feel proud to be an American.”

Take that, Fox News. Take that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin and the rest of the right-wing bigots who have tried to claim this country for themselves. On Nov. 4, 2008, progressives showed the world that we’re real Americans, too, proud of a country that has learned from its mistakes and corrected its course.

President Obama will let us down soon enough; he almost has to. The task at hand is so daunting, and our collective hopes are so high, that it’s hard to see how anyone could succeed without a few mistakes. In fact, Obama already admitted he won’t be “a perfect president.” And when you get past the rhetoric and the rock star excitement, he’s taken some pretty conservative positions on many of the big issues, from promoting “clean coal” and nuclear power to escautf8g the war in Afghanistan.

But make no mistake about it: electing Barack Obama was a progressive victory. Although he never followed the entire progressive line in his policy positions, he was, and is, the creature of a strong progressive movement that can rightly claim him as its standard-bearer. He was the candidate backed from the beginning by progressives like Supervisors Chris Daly and Ross Mirkarimi (a Green). And only after his improbable nomination did moderates like Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sen. Dianne Feinstein jump on the bandwagon.

From the start, the young, activist, left wing of the Democratic Party was the driving force behind the Obama revolution. And while he has always talked to the Washington bigwigs — and will populate his administration with many of them — he would never have won without the rest of us. And that’s a fact of political life it will be hard for him to ignore, particularly if we don’t let him forget it.

For a few generations of Americans — everyone who turned 18 after 1964 — this was the first presidential election we’ve been able to get truly excited about. It was also the first presidential election that was won, to a significant extent, on the Internet, where progressive sites like dailykos.com raised millions of dollars, generated a small army of ground troops, and drove turnout in both the primaries and the general election. The movement that was built behind Obama can become a profound and powerful force in American politics.

So this was, by any reasonable measure, the People’s Election. And now it’s the job of the people to keep that hope — and that movement — alive, even when its standard-bearer doesn’t always live up to our dreams.

The evidence that this was the People’s Election wasn’t just at the national level. It showed up in the results of the San Francisco elections as well.

This was the election that would demonstrate, for the first time since the return of district elections, whether a concerted, well-funded downtown campaign could trump a progressive grassroots organizing effort. Sure, in 2000, downtown and then-Mayor Willie Brown had their candidates, and the progressives beat them in nearly every race. But that was a time when the mayor’s popularity was in the tank, and San Franciscans of all political stripes were furious at the corruption in City Hall.

“In 2000, I think a third of the votes that the left got came from Republicans,” GOP consultant Chris Bowman, who was only partially joking, told us on election night.

This time around, with the class of 2000 termed out, a popular mayor in office and poll numbers and conventional wisdom both arguing that San Franciscans weren’t happy with the current Board of Supervisors (particularly with some of its members, most notably Chris Daly), many observers believed that a powerful big-money campaign backing some likable supervisorial candidates (with little political baggage) could dislodge the progressive majority.

As late as the week before the election, polls showed that the three swings districts — 1, 3, and 11 — were too close to call, and that in District 1, Chamber of Commerce executive Sue Lee could be heading for a victory over progressive school board member Eric Mar.

And boy, did downtown try. The big business leaders, through groups including the Committee on Jobs, the Chamber, the Association of Realtors, Plan C, the newly-formed Coalition for Responsible Growth, and the Building Owners and Managers Association, poured more than $630,000 into independent expenditures smearing progressive candidates and promoting the downtown choices. Newsom campaigned with Joe Alioto, Jr. in District 3 and Ahsha Safai in District 11. Television ads sought to link Mar, John Avalos, and David Chiu with Daly.

Although the supervisors have no role in running the schools, the Republicans and downtown pushed hard to use a measure aimed at restoring JROTC to the city’s high schools as a wedge against the progressives in the three swing districts. They also went to great lengths — even misstating the candidates’ positions — to tar Mar, Chiu, and Avalos with supporting the legalization of prostitution.

And it didn’t work.

When the votes were counted election night, it became clear that two of the three progressives — Avalos and Chiu — were headed for decisive victories. And Mar was far enough ahead that it appeared he would emerge on top.

How did that happen? Old-fashioned shoe leather. The three campaigns worked the streets hard, knocking on doors, distributing literature, and phone banking.

“I’ve been feeling pretty confident for a week,” Avalos told us election night, noting his campaign’s strong field operation. As he knocked on doors, Avalos came to understand that downtown’s attacks were ineffective: “No one bought their horseshit.”

A few weeks earlier, he hadn’t been so confident. Avalos said that Safai ran a strong, well-funded campaign and personally knocked on lots of doors in the district. But ultimately, Avalos was the candidate with the deepest roots in the district and the longest history of progressive political activism.

“This is really about our neighborhood,” Avalos told us at his election night party at Club Bottom’s Up in the Excelsior District. “It was the people in this room that really turned it around.”

The San Francisco Labor Council and the tenants’ movement also put dozens of organizers on the ground, stepping up particularly strongly as the seemingly coordinated downtown attacks persisted. “It was, quite literally, money against people, and the people won,” Labor Council director Tim Paulson told us.

Robert Haaland, a staffer with the Service Employees International Union and one of the architects of the campaign, put it more colorfully: “We ran the fucking table,” he told us election night. “It’s amazing — we were up against the biggest downtown blitz since district elections.”

The evidence suggests that this election was no anomaly: the progressive movement has taken firm hold in San Francisco, despite the tendency of the old power-brokers — from Newsom to downtown to both of the city’s corporate-owned daily newspapers — to try to marginalize it.

Political analyst David Latterman of Fall Line Analytics began the Nov. 5 presentation at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association election wrap-up by displaying an ideologically-coded map of San Francisco, drawing off of data from the Progressive Voter Index that he developed with San Francisco State University political science professor Rich de Leon. The PVI is based on how San Francisco residents in different parts of the city vote on bellwether candidates and ballot measures.

“Several of the districts in San Francisco discernibly moved to the left over the last four to eight years,” Latterman told the large crowd, which was made up of many of San Francisco’s top political professionals.

The two supervisorial districts that have moved most strongly toward the progressive column in recent years were Districts 1 (the Richmond) and 11 (the Excelsior), which just happened to be two of the three swing districts (the other being District 3–North Beach and Chinatown) that were to decide the balance of power on the Board of Supervisors this election.

Latterman said Districts “1, 3, and 11 went straight progressive, and that’s just the way it is.”

In fact, in many ways, he said this was a status-quo election, with San Francisco validating the progressive-leaning board. “A lot of people in the city didn’t see it as a chance for a drastic change citywide.”

In other words, keeping progressives in City Hall has become a mainstream choice. Whatever downtown’s propaganda tried to say, most San Franciscans are happy with a district-elected board that has brought the city a living-wage law and moved it a step toward universal health insurance.

The fate of the local ballot measures was another indication that Newsom, popular as he might be, has little ability to convince the voters to accept his policy agenda.

Voters rejected efforts by Newsom to consolidate his power, rejecting his supervisorial candidates, his Community Justice Center (as presented in Measure L), and his proposed takeover of the Transportation Authority (soundly defeating Proposition P) while approving measures he opposed, including Propositions M (protecting tenants from harassment) and T (Daly’s guarantee of substance abuse treatment on demand).

Asked about it at a post-election press conference, Newsom tried to put a positive spin on the night. “Prop. A won, and I spent three years of my life on it,” he said. “Prop B. was defeated. Prop. O, I put on the ballot. I think it’s pretty small when you look at the totality of the ballot.” He pointed out that his two appointees — Carmen Chu in District 4 and Sean Elsbernd in District 7 — won handily but made no mention of his support for losing candidates Lee, Alicia Wang, Alioto, Claudine Cheng, and Safai.

“You’ve chosen two as opposed to the totality,” Newsom said of Props. L and P. “Prop. K needed to be defeated. Prop. B needed to be defeated.”

Yet Newsom personally did as little to defeat those measures as he did to support the measures he tried to claim credit for: Measures A (the General Hospital rebuild bond, which everyone supported) and revenue-producing Measures N, O, and Q. In fact, many labor and progressives leaders privately grumbled about Newsom’s absence during the campaign.

Prop. K, which would have decriminalized prostitution, was placed on the ballot by a libertarian-led signature gathering effort, not by the progressive movement. And Prop. B, the affordable housing set-aside measure sponsored by Daly, was only narrowly defeated — after a last-minute attack funded by the landlords.

All three revenue-producing measures won by wide margins. Prop. Q, the payroll tax measure, passed by one of the widest margins — 67-33.

Latterman and Alex Clemens, owner of Barbary Coast Consulting and the SF Usual Suspects Web site, were asked whether downtown might seek to repeal district elections, and both said it didn’t really matter because people seem to support the system. “I can’t imagine, short of a tragedy, district elections going anywhere,” Latterman said.

Clemens said that while downtown’s polling showed that people largely disapprove of the Board of Supervisors — just as they do most legislative bodies — people generally like their district supervisor (a reality supported by the fact that all the incumbents were reelected by sizable margins).

“It ain’t a Board of Supervisors, it is 11 supervisors,” Clemens said, noting how informed and sophisticated the San Francisco electorate is compared to many other cities. “When you try to do a broad-based attack, you frequently end up on the wrong end (of the election outcome).”

We had a bittersweet feeling watching the scene in the Castro on election night. While thousands swarmed into the streets to celebrate Obama’s election, there was no avoiding the fact that the civil-rights movement that has such deep roots in that neighborhood was facing a serious setback.

The Castro was where the late Sup. Harvey Milk started his ground-breaking campaign to stop the anti-gay Briggs Initiative in 1978. Defying the advice of the leaders of the Democratic Party, Milk took on Briggs directly, debating him all over the state and arguing against the measure that would have barred gay and lesbian people from teaching in California’s public schools.

The defeat of the Briggs Initiative was a turning point for the queer movement — and the defeat of Prop. 8, which seeks to outlaw same-sex marriage, should have been another. Just as California was the most epic battle in a nationwide campaign by right-wing bigots 30 years ago, anti-gay marriage measures have been on the ballot all over America. And if California could have rejected that tide, it might have taken the wind out of the effort.

But that wasn’t to be. Although pre-election polls showed Prop. 8 narrowly losing, it was clear by the end of election night that it was headed for victory.

Part of the reason: two religious groups, the Catholics and the Mormons, raised and spent some $25 million to pass the measure. Church-based groups mobilized a reported 100,000 grassroots volunteers to knock on doors throughout California. Yes on 8 volunteers were as visible in cities throughout California as the No on 8 volunteers were on the streets of San Francisco, presenting a popular front that the No on 8 campaign’s $35 million in spending just couldn’t counter — particularly with so many progressive activists, who otherwise would have been walking precincts to defeat Prop. 8, fanned out across the country campaigning for Obama.

“While we knew the odds for success were not with us, we believed Californians could be the first in the nation to defeat the injustice of discriminatory measures like Proposition 8,” a statement on the No on Prop. 8 Web site said. “And while victory is not ours this day, we know that because of the work done here, freedom, fairness, and equality will be ours someday. Just look at how far we have come in a few decades.”

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera, joined by Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo and Santa Clara County Counsel Ann C. Raven, filed a legal challenge to Prop. 8, arguing that a ballot initiative can’t be used to take away fundamental constitutional rights.

“Such a sweeping redefinition of equal protection would require a constitutional revision rather than a mere amendment,” the petition argued.

“The issue before the court today is of far greater consequence than marriage equality alone,” Herrera said. “Equal protection of the laws is not merely the cornerstone of the California Constitution, it is what separates constitutional democracy from mob rule tyranny. If allowed to stand, Prop. 8 so devastates the principle of equal protection that it endangers the fundamental rights of any potential electoral minority — even for protected classes based on race, religion, national origin, and gender.”

That may succeed. In fact, the state Supreme Court made quite clear in its analysis legalizing same-sex marriage that this was a matter of fundamental rights: “Although defendants maintain that this court has an obligation to defer to the statutory definition of marriage contained in [state law] because that statute — having been adopted through the initiative process — represents the expression of the ‘people’s will,’ this argument fails to take into account the very basic point that the provisions of the California Constitution itself constitute the ultimate expression of the people’s will, and that the fundamental rights embodied within that Constitution for the protection of all persons represent restraints that the people themselves have imposed upon the statutory enactments that may be adopted either by their elected representatives or by the voters through the initiative process.

As the United States Supreme Court explained in West Virginia State Board of Education vs. Barnette (1943) 319 U.S. 624, 638: ‘The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.'”

As Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin told the Guardian later that week: “Luckily, we have an independent judiciary, because the voters of California have mistakenly taken away a class of civil rights.”

But if that legal case fails, this will probably wind up on the state ballot again. And the next campaign will have to be different.

There already have been many discussions about what the No on 8 campaign did wrong and right, but it’s clear that the queer movement needs to reach out to African Americans, particularly black churches. African Americans voted heavily in favor of Prop. 8, and ministers in many congregations preached in favor of the measure.

But there are plenty of black religious leaders who took the other side. In San Francisco the Rev. Amos Brown, who leads the Third Baptist Church, one of the city’s largest African American congregations, spoke powerfully from the pulpit about the connections between the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and the fight for same-sex marriage.

The next time this is on the ballot, progressive and queer leaders will need to build a more broad-based movement. That is not only possible, but almost inevitable.

The good news — and it’s very good news — is that (as Newsom famously proclaimed) same-sex marriage is coming, whether opponents like it or not. That’s because the demographics can’t be denied: the vast majority of voters under 30 support same-sex marriage. This train is going in only one direction, and the last remaining issue is how, and when, to make the next political move.

The progressives didn’t win everything in San Francisco. Proposition H, the Clean Energy Act, was taken down by one of the most high-priced and misleading campaigns in the city’s history. Pacific Gas and Electric Co. spent more than $10 million telling lies about Prop. H, and with the daily newspapers virtually ignoring the measure and never challenging the utility’s claims, the measure went down.

“This was a big, big, big money race,” Latterman said. “In San Francisco, you spend $10 million and you’re going to beat just about anything.”

But activists aren’t giving up on pushing the city in the direction of more renewable energy (see Editorial).

Latterman said the narrow passage of Prop. V, which asked the school board to consider reinstating JROTC, wasn’t really a victory. “I would not call this a mandate. I worked with the campaign, and they weren’t looking for 53 percent. They were looking for 60-plus percent,” Latterman said. “I think you’ll see this issue just go away.”

Neither Latterman nor Clemens would speculate on who the next president of the Board of Supervisors will be, noting that there are just too many variables and options, including the possibility that a newly elected supervisor could seek that position.

At this point the obvious front-runner is Ross Mirkarimi, who not only won re-election but received more votes than any other candidate in any district. Based on results at press time, more than 23,000 people voted for Mirkarimi; Sean Elsbernd, who also had two opponents, received only about 19,000.

Mirkarimi worked hard to get Avalos, Chiu, and Mar elected, sending his own volunteers off to those districts. And with four new progressives elected to the board, joining Mirkarimi and veteran progressive Chris Daly, the progressives ought to retain the top job.

Daly tells us he won’t be a candidate — but he and Mirkarimi are not exactly close, and Daly will probably back someone else — possibly one of the newly elected supervisors.

“It’s going to be the most fascinating election that none of us will participate in,” Clemens said.

The danger, of course, is that the progressives will be unable to agree on a candidate — and a more moderate supervisor will wind up controlling committee appointments and the board agenda.

One of the most important elements of this election — and one that isn’t being discussed much — is the passage of three revenue-generating measures. Voters easily approved a higher real-estate transfer tax and a measure that closed a loophole allowing law firms and other partnerships to avoid the payroll tax. Progressives have tried to raise the transfer tax several times in the past, and have lost hard-fought campaigns.

That may mean that the anti-tax sentiment in the city has been eclipsed by the reality of the city’s devastating budget problems. And while Newsom didn’t do much to push the new tax measures, they will make his life much easier: the cuts the city will face won’t be as deep thanks to the additional $50 million or so in revenue.

It will still be a tough year for the new board. The mayor will push for cuts that the unions who supported the newly elected progressives will resist. A pivotal battle over the city’s future — the eastern neighborhoods rezoning plan — will come before the new board in the spring, when the recent arrivals will barely have had time to move into their offices.

Obama, of course, will face an even tougher spring. But progressives can at least face the future knowing that not only could it have been a lot worse; for once things might be about to get much better.

Amanda Witherell and Sarah Phelan contributed to this report.

No Prop 8: Arnold speaks, LDS forgiveness?

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Arnold finally “comes out” on his position and hopes for a Prop 8 overturn. First, a bit late. Second: er, is it just me or is there so much awful beige and bad fake chestnut rinse happening here that poor Schwarzy is basically camouflaged into the crappy background? Interior decorators, hairstylists, and makeup artists will have their revenge!


(via Andrew Sullivan)

In other news: A Mormon begs forgiveness, at forgivenessfor8.blogspot.com. There are rumblings among the more conservative gay assesvoices that we are wrong to target religions — especially Mormons — with demonstrations, but I think that yesterday’s peaceful protests outside St. Mary’s Church and the Mormon thingy in Oakland, scheduled to not interrupt services “out of respect” were effective in terms of drawing attention to Prop 8’s supporters, with more “catholic,” as in “universal,” targets to come….

PS Another rally tomorrow at City Hall:
Title: San Francisco Rally
Time: 2008-11-11 (Tues) 5pm – 8pm
Where: SF City Hall

Also: we totally stole this from Brock at SFist, but this pic by Darwin Bell is exactly appropriate, heh.

discofried.jpg

The uncounted ballots

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By Tim Redmond

So there are still a huge number of uncounted ballots at City Hall. No surprise there — we knew that was coming on election night.

And in most races, it won’t make much of a difference. But in some, like Prop. B, the outcome might change.

Here’s the problem: San Francisco is rapidly becoming a vote-by-mail town. That’s okay; in Oregon, all ballots are cast by mail. But we are operating as if this were still an earlier time, when almost everyone went to the polls on Election Day. If we are going to be voting differently, and we clearly are, the Department of Elections needs to change with the times.

There’s no reason why absentee ballots can’t be counted as they come in, so that when the polls close, most of those results will be immediately available. It’s not as if DOE is incompetant; the department has made great strides under John Arnst. But the supervisors should put this on the agenda for next year: How do we shift priorities and funding to handle modern elections?

(Oh, and the DOE could run the RCV tally on Election Night, too. It’s not hard.)

(Oh, and will somebody — maybe Aaron Peskin or Tom Ammiano, as a parting gift to all of us as they leave the board — please, please figure out how to get WiFi on Election Night in the North Light Court, where all the reporters are trying to post results and there is no Internet access at all? That room and the Board Chambers. I will volunteer to raise money to buy the router myself, and Alex Clemens has promised he will personally install it. Just show us where to plug the cable in.)

Prop 8: Nobody walks in LA?

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As Stephen Torres reports, even though Prop 8 won in LA County (WTF?) there was still plenty of protest action on the streets of West Hollywood, home of the bleached bi-level bob/Daisy Dukes combination …

As a native Angeleno, I would say that most of the time that “nobody walks in LA” is, sadly, very true. Last night, however, my hometown did me proud and, apparently, is doing so again today.

Like many, here in the SF, I joined the gathering in front of City Hall last night to hold vigil against the injustice of the recently passed Proposition 8 and marched to Castro Street to rally my fellow city dwellers to demonstrate our conviction.

San Francisco was and is at the forefront of this battle, but now it is clear that the city is not the crazy, singular enclave that some terrified religious-types would have you believe.

Newsom laments Prop 8 win

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by Amanda Witherell

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Mayor Gavin Newsom in the Prop 8 spotlight. Photo by Luke Thomas, Fog City Journal

Mayor Gavin Newsom expressed equal awe over seeing an African American elected president of the United States and a ban on gay marriage in California. “First and foremost it was an extraordinary night last night…for the country…and for civil rights,” he said at a crowded city hall press conference on the day after the election. But when it came to the rights of another population, he lamented, “I never thought in my lifetime that I’d see a constitution changed to take rights away.” He expressed particular dismay that California, “a state that has always been on the leading edge,” has become “the first state in the history of this country to take rights away.”

“Because they did nothing except fall in love and say ‘I do,’” he repeated several times.

He pointed out that the 2008 victory of Prop 8 passed with a slimmer majority than the last attempt in 2000. “We are moving in the right direction,” he said. “Millions and millions of people said it’s wrong to take rights away from people.” And he remained upbeat: “It doesn’t make me proud but it doesn’t make me, in any way, shape, or form, pessimistic.”

With some stirring words he connected the history of social change in America to the gay rights movement, concluding, “Everyone deserves the same opportunities, the same privileges, as everyone else. Separate is not equal.” For different genders, races, and ethnicities the basis of equality is a founding principle in the constitution, which has now been altered. He maintained that opponents of Prop 8 will someday be on the right side of history. “How can we, in 2008, argue for a separate track based on sexual orientation?”

And he cautioned Prop 8 supporters. “Don’t be gleeful at the expense of human beings whose lives have been devastated.”

When questioned, Newsom expressed support for City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s efforts to invalidate Prop 8. This morning Herrera, along with city attorneys from Los Angeles and Santa Clara, filed a writ of mandate with the California Supreme Court, arguing “that the California Constitution’s equal protection provisions do not allow a bare majority of voters to use the amendment process to divest politically disfavored groups of constitutional rights,” according to a press release.

Newsom cast off as “irrelevant” speculation that his run for governor would see some fallout from his vocal opposition to Prop 8, and said he hadn’t given much thought to what his continued advocacy for gay rights would be.

Randy Knox: “Anything is possible”

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Ricky Angel reports:

A block away from Randy Knox’s campaign HQ, a vivacious crowd cheered Barack Obama’s presidency. Inside Knox’s HQ, Knox told the Guardian: “Barack has shown that anything is possible.”

Knox, a biracial black candidate running for District 11 Supervisor, has been avidly campaigning. He told the Guardian: “It has been an enlightening experience.” Knox said he has learned a lot about his neighborhood and “community reaction has been positive because they share the same intent.” Knox, a long time resident of District 11 relayed that the intent was to revive a neighborhood neglected by City Hall.

Volunteer and friend, Marcus Wong, 23, supports Knox. Wong told the Guardian: “Randy has the ability to do something amazing in life.” Alex Humphrey, 39, turned down a paid position with the Obama campaign to volunteer for Knox. Humphrey stated: “There is no one, running for District 11 Supervisor, as qualified as Randy.”

Throughout the night, various campaign personnel commemorated Knox as a personable and genuine man.

Although results would not be in for a few days, Wong said, “I’m optimistic. Definitely optimistic.”

McCarthy’s “end of campaign” party

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Ricky Angel reports:

Tears of joy erupted from Denise McCarthy’s campaign as we learned Barack Obama won the presidency.

As for the McCarthy campaign, she told the Guardian, “This isn’t a victory party, it’s the ‘end of a campaign’ party.”

McCarthy, running for supe in D3, explained that her campaign was officially over, but it could be days before they learn the results. Her husband Tom McCarthy reiterated that it was too early to tell — although he stated that Denise has a strong history in the district that no one else has.

Paige Labourdette and nephew Harry Libarle supported by volunteering for the campaign. Labourdette told the Guardian, “I think she’s going to win. She has a lot of experience and community support.”

Passerby Frederick Geers of the Richmond said he would have voted for McCarthy – “There’s enough Aliotos in City Hall already.”

Approximately 30 guests enlivened McCarthy’s campaign party at Polk and Jackson.

“We ran the fucking table”

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Tim Redmond reports from City Hall:

I just talked to labor organizer Robert Haaland, who helped run the union-backed campaigns for progressive supervisors. His comment:

“It was grassroots hard work against big downtown money — and we ran the fucking table. It’s amazing, we were up against the biggest downtown blitz ever seen in district elections. It’s obviously a big night for labor and it’s a big loss for you-know-who.”

Obama wins, but no SF results yet

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by Amanda Witherell

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Soon to be Assemblymember Tom Ammiano greeted by supporters at Campos for Supervisor headquarters

Up and down Valencia Street you could hear cheers echoing from bars and balconies when Florida flipped for Barack Obama. We have a new president.

But here in San Francisco, the new slate of supervisors is still pending. Outgoing supervisor Tom Ammiano just stopped by the David Campos headquarters at 24th and Mission Streets. He said the word from City Hall is “There’s a long line at SFSU still waiting to vote and they’re not releasing any results until everyone has voted.” He’s predicting no results on local races until 9:45.

In the meantime, a crowd of Campos supporters just took in Sen. John McCain’s brief concession speech. “Good-bye,” several waved to the campaigner’s departing figure shown by projection on a blank wall in the back of the campaign office.

Surprising news from City Hall

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Tim Redmond reports:

With 20% of vote in, the progressive candidates are not only withstanding the downtown assault, they’re doing remarkably well.

Gerardo Sandoval appears to have won the judicial race ousting incumbent Tom Mellon. In D3 David Chiu is now 17points ahead of Alioto and is winning 38-21.

In D1, Erc Mar and Sue Lee are still too close to call, and very few precincts in D11 are reporting yet.

Prop B is looking better and better and will probably pass.

First results from City Hall

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Tim Redmond calls in:

The absentee votes are now in – and they show interesting trends in D1 Eric Mar and Sue Lee are in a virtual dead heat, with Lee about 1% ahead. Since the absentee voters tend to run conservative, this is good news for Mar.

In D3, David Chiu is well ahead beating Joseph Alioto, Jr., by 12 points.

In D9, David Campos is 7 points ahead of Mark Sanchez, with Eric Quezada a distant third.

In D11, John Avalos and Myrna Lim and Ahsha Safai are within 1 percentage point.

Prop 8 is going down 67 to 33 in SF.

On the ballot measures it’s a mixed bag:

Prop A is well ahead with 80 % of vote and will pass easily.

Prop B losing 55-45 anfd that will tighten up but be close.

Prop H has taken a beating from the $10mill PG&E campaign – it’s behind 67-33 …

The three revenue measurea — N, O, and Q — are all ahead and looking to pass.

It appears we will not be naming a sewage treatment plant after G.W. Bush: It’s down 70-30

If the trends hold as they usually do, with progressives picking up considerably on election day, this could turn out to be a very strong night for progressive candidates.

at this point it does not appear that downtown has successded in its efforts to buy the board.

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