Table of Contents
Dates
With Alice
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Alice Candidates Forum
Sunday, April 1, 2007
1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
State Building
455 Golden Gate Avenue
between Polk and Larkin
The following candidates have been invited to address the Alice Membership this Sunday. This forum is being arranged to help you prepare for the early endorsement vote on Monday, April 9th.
District Attorney Kamala Harris
Sheriff Mike Hennessey
Assemblymember Mark Leno
State Senator Carole Migden
Mayor Gavin Newsom
Alice April Membership Meeting
Monday, April 9, 2007
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
LGBT Community Center
1800 Market Street @ Octavia
ENDORSEMENT VOTES:
Kamala Harris for District Attorney
Michael Hennessey for Sheriff
Mark Leno for State Senate
Gavin Newsom for Mayor
First Annual
San Francisco Democratic Party
Unity Luncheon
Monday, April 2, 2007
12:00 Noon
Sir Francis Drake Hotel
For more information, email info@sfdemocrats.org.
Town Hall for Registered Domestic Partners
Thursday, April 19, 2007
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
State Building
455 Golden Gate Avenue
Lower Level
State Board of Equalization Chairwoman Betty Yee will host a Town Hall for Registered Domestic Partners in San Francisco to educate domestic partners about important income and property tax issues that may affect their tax and estate planning decisions in 2007, reflected in their state income tax filings in 2008.
Includes Betty T. Yee, Chairwoman, State Board of Equalization, Equality California, National Center for Lesbian Rights, and Income and property tax experts from the Franchise Tax Board and the Board of Equalization
For more information and to RSVP, contact Gary Gartner at (415) 557-3000 or Online at gary.gartner@boe.ca.gov
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April Co-Chairs' Report
Everyone's asking: Why Early Endorse?
I could put together a dissertation on the historical precedent, bylaws, motions, amendments to motions and issues for debate and discussion fully and appropriately explaining the rationale for the early endorsement. I could tell them the Board made a recommendation ratified by the General Membership, after a noticed meeting. I could, and I have, and I will continue to do so, yet the questions remain. Why? Because the vast majority of the Alice Board believes that Mark Leno, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom and Michael Hennessey are so reflective of the values and beliefs upon which the Alice organization was founded, that they wish to have the membership consider their immediate endorsement.
Curiosity drives part of this discussion. Why now? Why do it without our usual process? Part of the curiosity is because people know the greater LGBT community looks to Alice for leadership in recommending candidates. Even before becoming a member of the Club, I remember relying on Alice's slate card because I knew its leadership had taken considerable time and energy engaging and interacting with the candidates, understanding their records and having a true sense of the individuals and not just campaign rhetoric.
The early endorsement recommendation does not by any means diminish the significant contributions of the opponents who have not been recommended. Indeed, the community benefits from having a greater pool of candidates with demonstrable support of LGBT issues and concerns. However, a hard choice must be made, with respect to the State Senate office. This particular race cannot be decided on the grounds of experience and record, as both candidates have proven track records. We, as a Board and membership, have chosen to put forward early endorsement consideration for Assemblymember Mark Leno because of his long track record on issues important to our community, his life long commitment to the community, and his impeccable relationship to this organization. It is based on Mark Leno's effective leadership, responsiveness to variety of issues, loyalty, and participation in the club that we offer an early endorsement vote on Mark Leno's candidacy.
It is the role and responsibility of the Alice B. Toklas Club's Co-chairs and Board of Directors to recommend positions that embody the goals of the organization and effectively and responsively, carry out the wishes and mandates of its membership. No lesser standard applies to Alice's most valuable prize; it's endorsement. In times where we must suffer the hatred and stereotypical slurs thrown by the likes of Marine General Peter Pace (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and Anne Coulter (Journalist and Author - of nothing much worth reading), it gives us great pride to offer four individuals who have championed our causes and shown unwavering and longstanding support to our Club, for an early endorsement by the membership.
It is best summed up by the most famous line of William Shakespeare's Hamlet, "to thine ownself be true."
Rebecca Prozan and Julius Turman
Alice B. Toklas Co-Chairs
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Reese's World: Perspectives from the Editor
My Name Is Chris Wilson
by Reese Aaron Isbell, M.P.P.
Chris Wilson was a year or two ahead of me in high school. He was gorgeous. Blonde, dark brown eyes, sculpted chest, cocky attitude, impish grin, and more. I wasn't in love with him; I was in lust with him.
Everyday in gym class, yeah, mostly in gym class, I would see him and see how his shirt would be unbuttoned… to just the furthest it could be so unbuttoned without it being all the way unbuttoned… and it was all too much for my mind. I remember particularly well one time when a female classmate enjoyed playing with his buttons for several minutes while they both smiled and lingered suggestively.
I never really met Chris Wilson. I'm sure he didn't know who I was. But his impact on my lustful mind during my high school years was treacherously close to madness. I still go blind reminiscing sometimes.
A few years later, I went through the early stages of the 'coming out' process. For the uninitiated, this can include short or long periods of time during which one toys with the idea of possibly coming out. It's like seeing what might happen if you put your toe in the pool and if it will be warm. For me, this initially involved late night phone calls to the Gay Hotline number I found in the phonebook.
I was so scared to call. Each time I called I panicked that somehow someone would find out. But I so desperately needed to talk to someone about what was happening. I was all of 18 years old and lost in a heterosexual suburban world.
My first phone call with them was all about how I hated myself and I hated these homosexual thoughts and I was a terrible person and sinful and I would cry and cry. And these gentle souls on the other side of our local LGBT hotline would try their best to listen and console and advise. They and I finally, during one later call, agreed that it might be good for me to meet other Gay people and they found a men's group that met clear across the other side of the city for me to go to. And I wanted to meet other Gay men by this time because I wanted to see who else was out there. And I was lonely.
I went to my very first meeting in the basement of a church where about 6 or 7 men sat around in folded chairs. Each one introduced themselves. "My name is Chris Wilson," I said.
Well, I couldn't use my real name of course. And 'Chris' was close enough to my name that I thought I could recognize it. And well, I didn't figure Mr. Wilson would ever know I usurped his name while in my closetary adventures.
For a long while after that I continued to be "Chris Wilson."
On November 12th, 1989, 4 months before I would officially Come Out publicly to my family and friends, with my toe still dipping into the water occasionally, I said my real name for the first time to someone Gay.
His name was David Weeda and he was marching with ACT-UP Kansas City during the "March for Women's Lives" rally in Jefferson City, Missouri at the state capitol. He and a few other Gay men from the newly formed ACT-UP chapter had joined the many women's groups from around the state to show a pro-choice, progressive voice to then Governor John Ashcroft (R-Missouri). As I saw David and his friends being out and proud and vocal, something rattled inside me, that maybe, in this crowd of people I didn't know, I could be myself. I went up to David, asked him what ACT-UP was, and walked with them briefly. And then I told him my name. My real name.
In that moment, I suddenly felt scared and devastated and nervous and joyous and clean and lighter all at the same time. I went to my first ACT-UP Kansas City meeting shortly after that March where I sat among numerous Gay men in a downtown complex talking about AIDS and activism. I told them my real name that night too. And David was sweet and talked to me before and afterwards.
I didn't really understand what ACT-UP was at the time or where all history of activism had come from or what happened in NYC with Larry Kramer and his speech and all the deaths and devastation around the country. I didn't really know much about any of it. All I knew was that it was the first Gay place where I didn't feel I needed to be "Chris Wilson" anymore. I was me.
Reese Aaron Isbell, M.P.P.
Editor
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20 Years of ACTing UP
(From the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center of New York City, March 1, 2007)
The cancellation came with just a week’s notice. Diana Leo was counting on author Nora Ephron to speak at the Center’s Second Tuesdays Lecture in March 1987, but that changed with one phone call. Little did she know that history was in the making.
“Larry and I were fairly desperate,” Leo said, referring to Larry Josephs, co-organizer of Second Tuesdays. “We needed somebody local and somebody who would not disappoint the crowd,” she said.
At the same time, Larry Kramer was getting more and more angry. He had just visited a hospital in Texas that was created to treat AIDS patients. “It was a for-profit hospital, and most patients could not afford to go there,” Kramer said. “I also met a man who was developing new drugs and he could not get the FDA to pay attention, so I was very angry when I got back to New York.”
Desperation and anger collided in one of the most fateful days in the history of the Center and the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
“We thought of Larry Kramer because he was a well-known writer and he was local,” said Leo. “He was really dissatisfied with the AIDS issue and he felt we needed to be more radical and outspoken.” So Leo reached out to Kramer.
On March 10, 1987, Kramer filled in for Ephron and spoke in the Center’s first floor auditorium. That day over 400 people turned up for Second Tuesdays, the largest crowd ever according to Leo. “We only had one week to get the word out,” she said, “but there seemed to be a growing buzz about the event.” The community had been ravaged by AIDS for years and the government was doing nothing about it. The only treatment available was AZT and its prohibitive cost made it inaccessible to many. “The word was out that there would be some sort of a call to action,” said Leo. And the community came united—in fear, in anger, in desperation, and in determination.
Kramer recalled the meeting a few weeks ago while sitting in his living room, just across from Washington Square Park. “I asked for the lights in the auditorium to be turned up,” he said. He wanted the format to me more of a town hall than a lecture. “I remember saying to two-thirds of the room, ‘Please stand up.’ And I said to them, ‘You could all be dead in five years at the rate we are going.’”
Robert Woodworth was working on the third floor that night when Chris Collins, a Center board member at the time, ran up to the office after the meeting had started. “He said that the energy in the room was really palpable and it seemed as if something bigger was going to grow out of the meeting,” said Woodworth. “The group wanted to book the room for a follow-up meeting later that week.” Richard Burns, the Center’s executive director, recalls people feeling as if this was “ground zero” of something historic. Woodworth was able to book the follow-up meeting, but a little while later Collins came charging back up to his office and said that they needed to book the room on a recurring basis. “So it was off and running in the course of two hours,” said Woodworth, “from nothing, to becoming a group, to becoming a regularly scheduled activity.”
During the second meeting, according to Kramer, the group was official and someone came up with the name on the spot—ACT UP, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. And just two weeks after first coming together, on March 24, 2007, the group made a name for itself on Wall Street, in the media, and nationwide.
“We scheduled our first demo on Wall Street,” Kramer recalled, “to protest the FDA and the drug company [Burroughs] Wellcome.” Hundreds of protesters gathered for the historic demonstration, which gathered media attention nationwide for ACT UP’s direct-action strategy and the police brutality with which the protesters were confronted.
This first demonstration was hugely successful and the next few years proved to be historic for the organization and the course of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. “ACT UP changed and defined activism in the late eighties and early nineties,” said Burns. “They used dramatic mediagenic street campaigns and actions combined with smart lobbying and communications efforts to make change.” Indeed, ACT UP’s activities improved medical research practices and accelerated the procedures by which drugs were tested and approved by the FDA.
ACT UP’s legacy can be seen in the major advances in HIV/AIDS treatment over the past 20 years, but also in its use of arts and culture to convey its message. Perhaps most recognizable is the Silence=Death campaign, which combined these words with the pink triangle that was used to label and oppress homosexuals in Nazi Germany. Components of this cultural legacy will be on display at the Center during March (see sidebar).
“I think one of the major reasons the organization was able to succeed and bring hundreds of people together is because it was able to launch on that day,” Woodworth said about that momentous initial meeting. “The Center was there to help harness and cultivate the energy of that moment; we enabled the group to build momentum and get established. The ACT UP story is emblematic of how the Center has to be open, accessible, and adaptable so that the community can express what it needs and the Center can find a way to accommodate it.”
For Leo it has been tremendously validating to see the evolution of AIDS treatment and to know that ACT UP played a tremendous role in making that happen. “I think in a nutshell that’s what the Center is there for,” Leo said, “to have elements come together, to inspire dialogue, and for people to take action.”
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From the Past: "ACT-UP Chapter May Fold"
(This article first appeared on page A1 on January 15, 1995 in the Kansas City Star by Alan Bavley, Medical Writer)
Mark Cheney never has cared about making AIDS respectable.
As an organizer of ACT-UP Kansas City, he has smeared his blood on the doors of the Kansas City Council chambers, burned a Vatican flag outside the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and rallied dozens of protesters outside the Food and Drug Administration's regional office to writhe in mock death throes.
Cheney has been using outrageous tactics to compel people to see the AIDS epidemic with the same urgency he does.
But after more than six years with ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), he's tired of leading the charge for AIDS awareness and frustrated that no one is following him anymore.
Cheney and the three other remaining members of ACT-UP said they're ready to fold the Kansas City chapter of this loosely organized national movement unless others come forward to take up the cause.
"AIDS is still as much of an emergency as it was six or seven years ago. It's still as much of a crisis for the individual who has the disease," Cheney said.
"But AIDS has become commonplace. It's mainstream. And nobody cares for protests."
In fact, ACT-UP Kansas City hasn't staged a demonstration in more than a year.
But the virtual demise of street-level AIDS activism in Kansas City is typical of what's happening nationwide, AIDS advocates say.
AIDS is no longer a disease identified just with gays or intravenous drug users, advocates point out.
And that's made confrontational politics less popular.
"I don't know if it's PC (politically correct) anymore to take it to the streets," said Jeff Getty of ACT-UP Golden Gate in San Francisco.
"People have switched to working on the inside, and they don't want to mess up their relationships on the inside."
Even some of the most vigorous ACT-UP chapters in San Francisco, Philadelphia and New York have seen a decline in membership.
The Washington, D.C., ACT-UP chapter operates on a shoestring and its telephone was recently disconnected. ACT-UP chapters in smaller cities have come and gone with little notice.
More visible in recent years have been celebrity endorsements of AIDS awareness, such as the profusion of small, red AIDS ribbons worn by actors at Academy Award ceremonies.
Replacing boisterous demonstrations are well-mannered fund-raisers, such as AIDSwalk 94, a parade of 38,000 persons through Washington last September that was led by Tipper Gore.
"In recent years, the mainstream has become more comfortable with talking about AIDS. And the public revulsion and fear surrounding AIDS, which prompted some of the street action, has lessened," said Ben Carlson, deputy director of Mobilization Against AIDS, a San Francisco-based lobbying group.
Demonstrations also are less frequent because the ranks of activist groups have themselves been decimated by AIDS and many of their early, charismatic leaders have died.
"It takes an enormous amount of energy to be so confrontational and angry," said Janet Riessman, spokeswoman for the AIDS Action Council in Washington.
Activists also find it harder to mobilize support because President Clinton is not the well-defined political target that previous Republican presidents were.
"Everybody thought that Clinton was going to be the savior," Carlson said. "Today, people with AIDS are of the opinion he's not a whole lot better (than the Republicans). But people are still somewhat pacified, at least by the greater lip service."
Some ACT-UP members believe that the election of a conservative Republican Congress led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich will make confrontational actions popular again.
"When you have a clear enemy, it's easier to rally your forces," said Richard Jackman of ACT-UP New York. "And he's perfect."
Meanwhile, the energy that activists once used to protest is being channeled into more sophisticated lobbying for AIDS research and social services.
"They're using calls and faxes to government and the media, rather than confrontational demonstrations," Carlson said. "But that's not something that inspires hordes of young activists."
AIDS lobbying, however, has paid off handsomely.
The U.S. Public Health Service reports that federal spending on AIDS increased from $234 million in 1986 to nearly $2 billion in 1992, nearly a 10-fold increase in just six years.
With that level of funding, AIDS service organizations are joining the ranks of such established charities as the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society.
In Kansas City, several organizations are involved in AIDS research, health care, social services and housing. And committees have been set up to let people with AIDS have a say in how they are run.
"All the things that shaped the original ACT-UP agenda haven't been answered, but there's been some response," said Betsy Topper, executive director of the AIDS Council of Greater Kansas City, the umbrella group for local service agencies.
"There are more opportunities for people living with the AIDS virus to have a voice in shaping programs. That wasn't always the case in Kansas City or the country as a whole."
When the city's public health establishment held a breakfast at a hotel in 1989 to observe World AIDS Day, David Weeda, then an ACT-UP member, protested the exclusivity of the event by offering quiche to passers-by.
At the 1994 AIDS breakfast, Weeda, who now is a member of the AIDS Council executive committee, was the keynote speaker.
"Not only did I feel I had a place at the table, but the chair was pulled out for me and a napkin put in my lap," Weeda said.
The first ACT-UP group was started in New York City in 1987 by activists alarmed by the escalating number of AIDS deaths and frustrated by government and medical research bureaucracies they considered unresponsive.
Their goal was a quick end to the AIDS epidemic. From the start, their tactics were confrontational.
ACT-UP's first major action - protesting the high price of the AIDS drug AZT - was a demonstration on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange that stopped trading.
While ACT-UP's tactics have certainly alienated many people, AIDS advocates say the organization has been effective. They give ACT-UP much of the credit for getting the FDA to allow for faster approval of new drugs.
Testimony to ACT-UP's influence also comes from activists for other diseases who have adopted its dramatic tactics.
For example, the Los Angeles Breast Cancer Alliance last year displayed a "War Memorial" - a series of plaster casts of torsos of women who had breast cancer surgery - outside the federal building.
Locally, ACT-UP protests have assisted several people who suffered job discrimination because they had AIDS, Cheney said. He also credited the group with helping pressure the Kansas City Council to begin funding AIDS services.
"Direct action and confrontational tactics can help end the AIDS crisis," Cheney said. "And they've given people the feeling they could have control over their lives."
Cheney and the remaining ACT-UP members in Kansas City plan to turn off their phone in the next couple of weeks and donate to other AIDS groups whatever money is left in their treasury after bills are paid.
But ACT-UP Kansas City may get a second chance. An operator of an escort service and a dance club has expressed interest in reviving the group.
Still, some local AIDS activists remain doubtful that ACT-UP will ever again be an effective advocacy group in Kansas City.
"There's still a lot of work to be done, but what it takes are people willing to do the work," said Gary Johnson, who took part in early ACT-UP demonstrations.
"I don't see that happening. "
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More ACT-UP History
For more information, tributes, and historical analysis of local and national ACT-UP chapters, see the below:
Bay Area Reporter, March 22, 2007
National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, thoughts from Sue Hyde, Creating Change Director
The Nation, Editorial, March 22, 2007
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Alice
Membership Form
Alice B Toklas LGBT Democratic Club
1800 Market Street PMB#18
San Francisco, CA 94102
Tel: 415-707-2010
www.alicebtoklas.org
Alice Reports Editor: Reese Aaron Isbell, M.P.P.
Month of April: Membership Meeting, April 9
You can now join online www.alicebtoklas.org/abt/joinonline.asp,
or fill out the application below
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