San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is exploring a run for Governor of California in 2010. From the Los Angeles Times:
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who built a national reputation pushing cutting-edge — and controversial — policies on same-sex marriage, healthcare and other issues, launched an exploratory bid for governor Tuesday.
His move placed the 40-year-old, two-term mayor out in front of a large Democratic field eyeing the race to succeed Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is barred by term limits from running again in 2010. Newsom said he expected to decide by year’s end whether to proceed with a full-fledged candidacy.
The first open-seat governor’s race in 12 years is expected to draw a crowded field of Democratic hopefuls, including former governor and current Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown, Lt. Gov. John Garamendi and former Controller Steve Westly, who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2006.
The posters began appearing last week on public transport in San Francisco. The above photographs with the moniker “Yes they are THAT serious!”
On July 10 -15 2008 San Francisco, California will host the 42nd International Children’s Games. Athletes from 100 cities representing 50 countries and spanning six (6) continents will compete in eight sports and participate in cultural activities designed to foster understanding and friendship. World famous Golden Gate Park, the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University and AT&T Park will provide venues for this exciting event. The San Francisco Games will bring together 2,000 athletes, 12 to 15 years of age, from 100 cities representing 50 countries from around the world, to put forth their personal best in track and field, tennis, swimming, volleyball, soccer, table tennis, basketball and golf.
I don’t find it exciting at all. It’s rather exploitive. Children competing? We are not Spartans. And the ad campaign by GREY San Francisco is downright sickening.
An hour ago, the din of the dyke march could be heard roaring through the Castro. It’s a nice tradition so I braved the wilds and the crowds to check out it. Normally, I barricade myself in the house with a few select guests for an evening of our own more modest frivolity. But venture out I did, dragged down by an insistent partner and more adventurous friends over my protestations of a roast in the oven and soufflés to start. The soufflés can wait, they said. I question whether any self-respecting gay man could ever utter such horror.
And yet glad I am that I was dragged down to see the dyke march, the official kickoff of San Francisco’s Gay Pride Celebration. I am a sentimental old fool because it did move me to tears to see many lesbian couples march under “Just Married” banners. There are no words. Human joy is immeasurable.
Now the din I hear is the crowd below on Castro and Market that is left to linger and progressively drink themselves silly. That make take some time or perhaps their definition of silly and mine are far different. I live up the hill and north of Market Street, so technically this is Corona Heights not the Castro or Eureka Valley as the neighborhood was formerly known but few know that and even less care. Being up the hill offers a measure of safety from the drunken hordes. Drunks can’t climb hills too well I have found. Still some will crawl themselves up the hill in search of their cars where they’ll sleep it off.
Pride always brings reflections on my own journey. I did not take kindly to being gay. Whose sick joke was this? And yet the idea of dating girls was an anathema. Happily, I had my books and my athletic prowess to keep my mind off sexual urges that I neither wanted nor could really control to the level that I wanted to control them. In college, I did date more for show than anything else though in truth I also did date for necessity, attending a Viennese Ball alone is not exactly much fun and a Strauss waltz and polka were things I loved that unfortunately required a female partner. So date, I did. I should send those poor women condolences cards now. What was I thinking?
In college, I also met Dr. Ned Spofford, my classics professor and my academic advisor. Ned is the guy up on the left. Ned’s tale is quite the tale. It’s a PBS documentary actually, The Great Pink Scare. I love Ned to death, through my time at Stanford, we had dinner every Thursday night. Long after he ceased to be my academic advisor, he remains my mentor, my guide to civil liberties enjoyed by Western men and a reminder that everything we see now humanity has seen before and will see again. He introduced me to the beauty of fine glass, Japanese silk prints, Herotudus and Alberta Hunter. I still go down to Palo Alto now and then to see Ned but on Pride he is much on my mind. What happened to Ned should not have happened in the Western World.
On Labor Day weekend in 1960, Massachusetts state police troopers swept through the small, idyllic town of Northampton and hauled 15 men off to jail. Three of them were professors at Northampton’s elite Smith College.
THE GREAT PINK SCARE tells the story of the devastating persecution that followed, when the three Smith professors were charged with possessing and dispersing obscene literature, tried in Northampton District Court, and eventually convicted as felons.
“Police Break Up Major Homosexual Smut Ring!” screamed newspaper headlines, first in Boston, then across the country and even internationally.
On the surface, it was the routing out of pornographers, but in reality, it was a McCarthy-like witch-hunt against homosexuals.
The alleged ringleader, Professor Newton Arvin, was considered America’s finest literary critic. The other two accused were Smith junior faculty members Joel Dorius and Ned Spofford. All three lost their jobs.
It’s Pride so Happy Pride, the highest of the high-homo holidays as I call them, given its close approximation to summer solstice, I have often viewed it as the Gay New Year kicking off a series of events that last through the end of the calendar year. The San Francisco Gay & Lesbian Film Festival is currently on-going. And over the next few months, there are a plethora of events celebrating aspects of gay life and culture.
For a full schedule of San Francisco Gay Pride Events, please visit SF Pride. For more on the San Francisco Frameline Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, please visit Frameline 2008
The above 3 bedroom, 2.5 bath home boasting a two car garage, located at 737 Castro Street (cross is 20th Street so just above the heart of the Castro), built in 1900 and I assumed re-modeled is listed at $1,895,000 USD. Granted that price tag is slightly more than twice the $800,000 USD median price of a home in San Francisco, but it’s also not that big of a house. And so it is with not much surprise that this week-end, the San Francisco Chronicle hightlighted a growing problem in this fair city, there’s an exodus, more like a shove really, of the middle class.
It’s urban flight flipped on its head: The number of low- and middle-income residents in San Francisco is shrinking as the wealthy population swells, a trend most experts attribute to the city’s exorbitant housing costs.
Many worry it’s increasingly turning San Francisco into an enclave of the rich, where nurses, firefighters, cops, teachers and other professionals aspiring toward homeownership or in need of cheaper rent can no longer afford to stay.
“A kind of derogatory term for the city would be Disneyland for yuppies,” said Hans Johnson, demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California. “There is a legitimate public policy concern when a city that many people have lived in for many years and regard as their homes becomes so expensive they can’t afford to live there anymore.”
The Disneyland for Yuppies tag is quite familiar to me. A good friend quiped about a year ago that twenty dollar bills here in the City are like E-tickets at Disneyland, you need five of them for a decent ride and that’s if you take public transit. Add a cab there and back, that’s one more E-ticket.
Today marks the first day of gay marriage in California and my warmest congratulations to Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon who today are getting married here in San Francisco.
Newsom planned to preside at the wedding of lesbian rights activists Del Martin, 87, and Phyllis Lyon, 84, the only couple scheduled to receive a marriage license in the city on Monday. As of Friday, nearly 620 couples had booked appointments to obtain licenses at San Francisco City Hall over the next 10 days.
Clerks elsewhere around the state reported nowhere near as high a demand but said they were training volunteer marriage commissioners to officiate at civil ceremonies in anticipation of a surge in business.
Unlike Massachusetts, which legalized gay marriage in 2004, California has no residency requirement for marriage licenses, and that is expected to draw a great number of out-of-state couples. The turnout could also be boosted by New York state’s recent announcement that it will recognize gay marriages performed in other jurisdictions.
A UCLA study issued last week estimated that half of California’s more than 100,000 same-sex couples will get married over the next three years, and an additional 68,000 out-of-state couples will travel here to exchange vows. The study estimated that over that period, gay weddings will generate some 2,200 jobs and $64 million in badly needed tax revenue for the state, which is ailing financially.
That gay marriage will have an economic impact is nice but let us not forget the human impact. Del and Phyllis speak to a life-long relationship spanning over fifty years. That today the state of California celebrates their commitment and their relationship, well there are no words that can adequately express our unadulterated joy. Congratulations to Del and Phyllis!
“The coldest winter I have spent was a summer in San Francisco.”
— Mark Twain
It rolls in touching us with its magic dew, a blanket of delightful chill that warms our liberal souls. We think of it as our natural air conditioning, providing comfort and joy. As San Francisco heads into its summer, fog is our daily companion and much beloved by me.
Tourists often frown at the cold thinking that it’s summer in California and bronze gods and goddesses run wantonly and scantly clad through the sunshine but the vendors show nothing but glee as they ring up sales of fleeces and sweatshirts for our unprepared visitors. Until late August, fog can blanket the city until late morning giving way for a few hours of sun-filled delight before reclaiming the land with purpose and force. Wind tunnels are common in the city in the gaps between the hills that protect the eastern part of the city from the perpetual fog belt of the Richmond and the Sunset.
When I lived on Russian Hill on Union and Taylor, the back of my flat, where my bedroom and den were, faced San Francisco Bay. I lived in a three-story walk up off the street but the back of my flat was on a cliff. It was seven stories down to the garden in the back. The winds could swirl off the bay and the temperature off the backside was at least a few degrees colder than on the front side of the apartment. Luckily, there was a fireplace in the den. It was a joy to see the fog stream in and envelope Alcatraz in its powerful mist.
Now living in the Castro, the fog is largely above me. I see it on Twin Peaks where the mountain breaks its forward path. It is quite the sight to see it hover above the Castro as if big balls of fuzzy cotton being pressed against our terrain.
The Fog Bank Above The Castro in San Francisco
A Classic San Francisco View
And if you are coming to visit us, bring a sweater or a fleece and carry it even though you might not think that you will need it for in summer in San Francisco wearing flowers in your hair brings no warmth at all.
It’s not as easy as you think. Some states don’t allow it. In 1992, the United States Supreme Court held the state of Hawaii in a case BURDICK v. TAKUSHI, DIRECTOR OF ELECTIONS OF HAWAII, et al that Hawaii’s prohibition on write in voting does not unreasonably infringe upon its citizens’ rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. So in Hawaii, it’s not legal. Same in Arkansas.
If writing in Hillary is your goal, then here is your resource: Write Hillary In. This website will tell you what the laws are and what your options are. The link has been added to Election Resources and Monitoring section of the blogroll in case you need it for further reference.
I will also continue to provide updates on efforts around the United States on groups that may be sponsoring these efforts as well as provide information on how to make your vote count as a protest. Bookmark the site and check back frequently. The DNC will hear our voices one way or another and they will rue the day, May 31, 2008. The day they killed the party.
You may also want to rent this documentary and see how the President of the Board Supervisors of the City and County of San Francisco Tom Ammiano started a write-in campaign in his bid to unseat then Mayor Willie Brown. Mily Morse’s See How They Run documents the hard-fought election of 1999 between San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and Tom Ammiano who mounted a more forceful and compelling campaign than Brown initially expected. It might inspire you.
Here’s some background from Salon on the Brown v. Ammiano race below the fold: (more…)
No doubt, Orchestra Baobab is one of my favorite bands. I discovered them long ago when I made my first trip to Africa in the late 1980s. Music was still on cassettes. Their style is a mixture of West African rhythms and Cuban ones. Beginning tonight, Orchestra Baobab is in San Francisco at Yoshi’s in the Fillmore. The music is infectious with joy.
Orchestra Baobab are one of Africa’s great iconic bands, creators of one of the world’s most sublime and truly distinctive pop sounds. Founded in 1970, Orchestra Baobab fused Afro-Cuban rhythm and Portuguese Creole melody with Congolese rumba, high life and a whole gamut of local styles – kickstarting a musical renaissance in their native Senegal, which turned the capital Dakar into one of the world’s most vibrant musical cities. They produced more hits in less than a decade than other bands in a lifetime. While Baobab found themselves sidelined by the revolution they helped create and disbanded in 1985, a huge groundswell of international interest led to their triumphant reformation in 2001. Orchestra Baobab are still very much in business today.
‘When I arrived in Senegal in 1968, there was only Cuban music,’ says Orchestra Baobab’s Togolese guitarist Barthélemy Attisso. ‘Back home, we were listening to Nigerian high life and Congolese guitar music, but if you walked past a club in Dakar, you would swear there were Cubans playing inside. Yet they were all Senegalese!’
If you want to get to grips with the Orchestra Baobab story, you have to get under the skin of their home town Dakar. Westernmost city on the African continent, former capital of France’s vast West African empire, Dakar has earned a reputation as one of the world’s most dynamic musical capitals, home to superstars like Youssou N’Dour, Baaba Maal and Cheikh Lô who have given Senegal perhaps the highest musical profile of any country in Africa. Yet in 1970, when Orchestra Baobab were formed, Dakar was still, in many ways like a French city, a tropical Marseille of art deco apartment blocks, showpiece modernist architecture and pavement cafes. And musically, the city was a backwater.
For more on Orchestra Baobab, please visit Bonnaroo. Tour dates for their June 2008 North American tour can be found at their MySpace page.
Precincts are now reporting close to 90% of the votes casted in today primary election in San Francisco. The full results are available at San Francisco Department of Elections. The turnout was 26.34%.
8th Congressional District
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi won the Democratic Primary tonight winning 88.35% of the vote. Liberal activisit Shirley Golub won 10.83% of the vote. Golub had campaigned on an impeachment and anti-war platform. Pelosi will face a number of challengers in the general election including the Republican Dana Walsh. It is possible that anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan may also challenge for the seat.
12th Congressional District
Recently elected to fill Tom Lantos’ seat, Jackie Speier won the primary against a handful of challengers. She will face Republican Greg Conlon in the Fall.
State Senate District 03
This was the most closely watched race in the city tonight pitting incumbent Carol Midgen against State Assemblyman Mark Leno who ran for the seat after being term-limited out of his seat in the State Assemby. The race deeply divided the San Francisco’s gay community and attracted national attention. Tonight, Mark Leno won by a 25 point margin likely ending Carol Midgen’s political career. Carol Midgen, it should be noted, is an undecided California super delegate.
