California
Gays in the age of Obama
For many, the jubilation over the new president is greater than the sorrow over Proposition 8.
This is the image I’ll always remember from Election Night 2008.
A gay man standing outside the grand ballroom of the St. Francis Westin Hotel in San Francisco. He had one finger to his ear to block out the hubbub inside, and an iPhone clamped to the other. “Honey,” he was yelling into the phone, “I cried — when Obama spoke, I cried.”
Inside the ballroom it was bittersweet. Barack Obama was the president-elect. But same-sex marriage was being overturned by California voters. Proposition 8 was winning by a slim margin, but winning. In Arkansas, an adoption ban passed. In Arizona and Florida bans on same-sex marriage passed easily.
All this on a night when Obama swept the country in a landslide on a promise of change. On a night when pro-choice groups racked up victories. Even chickens had something to rejoice about in California.
In the end it seemed the gays were the scapegoats, the ones left behind at the back of the bus.
Had we asked for too much, too soon, from a country that was not ready to give us the full measure of our dignity?
It didn’t seem that way in the ballroom of the St. Francis. In the heart of San Francisco’s gay neighborhood, the Castro, it was New Year’s Eve come a few months too early. But not any New Year’s Eve -– a once-in-a-lifetime turn of the century.
“It was insane,” texted a friend. He said the streets had turned into a giant party. People were hugging, kissing, shaking the hands of strangers. Even in the ballroom of the St. Francis, where the most committed same-sex marriage activists had gathered, the emphasis was on the sweet in the bittersweet.
I think for one very precious moment we were larger than ourselves. In a country beset by identity politics, we’d soon be analyzing the Latino vote and the Asian vote. Did the black vote tip the balance on same-sex marriage? What about the youth vote? All that would come later, in the dissection and redissection of the polls. But for one emotional, uncynical moment we were reveling in something that was bigger than all of our labels.
It’s not a post-racial America by any means. But it was a moment when many of us could look at each other and after a long time say not “the president of the USA” but “our president.” That feeling, however ephemeral it might be, is more powerful than any ban on any marriage ceremony anywhere.
Gay men and women are resilient. They had relationships before there was even a name for the movement. They had babies and families and didn’t wait to ask for permission from the larger society. Their families are growing up all around us, marriage ban or no marriage ban. My gay friend’s twin daughters went out this Halloween in matching skeleton outfits, collecting their treats with confidence and charm. They will not stand for their families being outsiders in America. Even now 61 percent of people under 30 supported same-sex marriage.
In some ways what was astonishing is that it had come this far so soon. Over and over again I heard on television people say, “I didn’t think I’d see a black man become president in my lifetime.” I must admit I didn’t think we’d be voting on same-sex marriage, and coming within 500,000 votes out of 10 million, in mine. Even eight years ago, when Proposition 22 banned same-sex marriage in California, the margin was 61.4 percent to 38.6 percent. Now it’s less than 5 percent .
The election of a black man to the presidency was a powerful symbol of a psychological change that had started with the legislative changes of the civil rights movement. The gay community knows that. It is fighting its battles in courts to change laws. The day after the election, groups filed a lawsuit asking the courts to invalidate Proposition 8 even if it passes. But the vote on Prop. 8 showed it has some ways to go in changing hearts and minds.
That might have to happen the hard way — one person coming out at a time to their families, communities, co-workers.
But if the victory of Barack Obama shows anything, despite whispers of the Bradley effect and coded messages on robo-calls, it’s that yes, we can.
My friend who had volunteered for the first time in his life in the same-sex marriage campaign was disappointed. He had stood at the turnstiles at the BART station in Fremont to hand out fliers. He said: “Tonight would be perfect if we could win this one too.” That was true.
But still I say the man outside the ballroom summed it up best for me.
“Honey, I cried.”
Not for Proposition 8.
But for Barack Obama.
Sandip Roy is an editor with New America Media and host of its radio show "UpFront" on KALW (91.7 FM) in San Francisco. More Sandip Roy.
California’s college mess
How not to compete in the global economy: The richest state in the U.S. can't afford to educate its students
Jerry Brown (Credit: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson) If increasing access to quality higher education is as crucial to U.S. economic growth as everybody seems to think it is, then two news item from California this week deliver a simple, straightforward message: We’re screwed.
1) Ace education reporter Nanette Asimov reported on Tuesday in the San Francisco Chronicle that the California State University system is withholding around $90 million in cash grants previously allocated to graduate students in the CSU system.
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Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21. More Andrew Leonard.
California’s unregulated fracking problem
Drilling has long gone unregulated in this earthquake-prone state. And now Gov. Brown may be trying to hush it up
A gas flare burns at a fracking site in rural Bradford County, Pennsylvania January 9, 2012 (Credit: Reuters/Les Stone) Thanks to the smoking gun of Josh Fox’s sobering documentary “Gasland,” hydraulic fracturing has finally entered our renewable news cycle. Yet despite poisoning groundwater, freeing methane and literally creating earthquakes back east, fracking has a visibility problem in California.
The situation became less clear after a recent investigative report from D.C.-based nonprofit Environmental Working Group explained that California has experienced 60 unregulated years of widespread fracking, whose technical methods and geographical locations in the seismically active state exist outside of the public purview. It got darker after Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration wiped the state government’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) website of fracking fact-sheets and documents. Good luck finding anything about fracking on the governor’s official site either.
Scott Thill is the editor of Morphizm.com. He has written on media, politics and music for Wired, the Huffington Post, LA Weekly and other publications. More Scott Thill.
Swimming with the stars
A new photography exhibition examines the cultural significance of the Southern California swimming pool SLIDE SHOW
Lawrence Schiller, "Marilyn Monroe," 1962.(Credit: Courtesy of Judith and Lawrence Schiller; Lawrence Schiller © Polaris Communications, Inc.) By turns playful, suggestive and bewitching, the photographs in a new show at the Palm Springs Art Museum propel us back through the decades, to a time when the glamour of choreographed capitalist displays had a singular hold over the American imagination.
These images, though diverse in many respects, all have one thing in common: the swimming pool. That, and their mid-to-late 20th-century Southern California backdrop.
The exhibition is part of “Pacific Standard Time,” a multi-institutional project devoted telling the story “of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene and how it became a major new force in the art world,” sponsored by the Getty Research Institute. Over the phone, curator Daniell Cornell explained the place of the swimming pool in Southern California’s cultural history, and discussed the show’s principal themes — from architecture and suburban idealism to the cult of the Hollywood celebrity. Click through the following slide show for a sun-soaked trip back in time.
Continue Reading CloseEmma Mustich is a Salon contributor. Follow her on Twitter: @emustich. More Emma Mustich.
Occupy Southern California
At least a half-dozen separate protest movements have sprung up between L.A. and San Diego
San Diego Police clash with demonstrators at the Civic Center Plaza Friday, Oct. 14, 2011 in San Diego. (Credit: AP/Lenny Ignelzi) California has long been a hotbed of political activism, so it’s no real surprise that residents across the state are expressing their solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement. In fact, in the relatively small tract of land between Los Angeles and San Diego, a number of groups have staged protests of their own. Here’s a roundup:
Occupy Los Angeles: A group of 10,000 to 15,000 protesters — not just Angelenos, but Californians from near and far — marched in dowtown L.A. on Saturday. According to the Los Angeles Times:
Continue Reading CloseObama’s crackdown on medical marijuana
The Justice Department shifts course and goes after California's lucrative pot industry
Right: DEA agents remove marijuana plants from a dispensary in San Francisco (Credit: AP/Salon) Back in July, I interviewed a drug policy expert about an apparent change in Justice Department policy that suggested a crackdown on medical marijuana — which is legal in many states but illegal under federal law — might be coming.
Now, with the announcement last week by California’s four U.S. attorneys that pot dispensaries will be targeted with harsh criminal sanctions, the shift feared by drug policy reform advocates appears to have come to pass. The rhetoric from candidate Barack Obama about not prioritizing medical marijuana cases now seems a distant memory.
Continue Reading CloseJustin Elliott is a reporter for ProPublica. You can follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More Justin Elliott.
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