John Laird
Reti:
Where were you born?
Laird: I was born in
Santa Rosa, California. I was raised in Vallejo,
California, where I went all the way through school. In
1968, I came to UC Santa Cruz as a first-year student.
That was the fourth year of the campus. The first, full
four-year class didn’t graduate until June at the end of
my first year.
Reti: What drew you
to UCSC?
Laird: UCSC at the
time had a college system, close teacher-student
contact, residential colleges, narrative evaluations,
and no grades. It was basically: come and live in a
social environment where you have real close contact
with your teachers, and you are competing against
yourself, not against other students. That was very
alluring. I was rather blasé about it. I didn’t apply
anywhere else. At the time, there were something like
six or eight applications for every vacant seat. I got
in. Later I realized that, and was stunned. I had, I
think, a 3.4 grade point average in high school, and it
kept being the lowest of anybody’s I met at UCSC. I was
very active in things in high school, and was from a
working-class town that not many other people came from.
Somehow I [represented] balance. I don’t know how. But I
was always grateful for getting in.
Reti: When you first
came to UCSC you weren’t out as a gay person yet?
Laird: No. I should
have known. But you have to put it in perspective of
what the time was like. Stonewall [the Stonewall Riots]
happened between my first and second year at UCSC.
Growing up, I don’t think I knew anybody who was
consciously gay. It was in the months after I graduated
from UCSC that I really came out, in 1972. I discovered
that one of my best friends in high school was gay. Many
of my good friends at college were gay, but nobody
talked about it at the time.
Reti: Did people
know?
Laird: Among each
other they knew. The first time there was anything
openly gay at UCSC was during my last quarter. There was
actually a gay conference, or a gay meeting, at
Stevenson College. It was sometime in the spring or late
winter of 1972. I always remember a friend of mine
saying, “Did you see who was there?” It was this friend
of mine, Rik Isensee, whom I later discovered was gay
when we were both out of school. I still see him
periodically. He has become a therapist and actually
written a couple of books on coming out. It was funny.
Another friend of mine said, “Did you see who was
there?” It was Rik, so I said, oh Rik must be gay! I was
very excited, intrigued, even though I should have known
that’s what was going on with me. I dated women
periodically. It was never an overwhelming success. But
there were never any role models. It was never
discussed. Now I think—where was I? I had all these
close relationships with men. I just never put it
together.
There was one guy everybody said was gay, who rented a
place from me one summer when I moved out. I remember
seeing another man coming out of his room, and someone
said, “Oh yes, he’s gay.” It was clear that’s what was
going on. I read his obituary in the Bay Area Reporter
seven or eight years ago. He died in San Francisco. I
was always sorry I never had a chance to close the loop
with him. I should have known. We all joked later that
he decorated that apartment incredibly.
The sexual revolution was just beginning. The year after
I graduated, I left the area and went to work for a
congressman. But every weekend that I was in California,
which was ninety-five percent of the time, I would come
to Santa Cruz. I always would stay with these friends,
some of whom were going to UC. One person in the
household was gay. I began dating him. They would have
parties that were totally mixed. It became clear after
awhile who was gay in the community. There was a very
sub-rosa community burgeoning in Santa Cruz at the time.
1975 happened to be the first year of Gay Pride. The
first year was not a parade. The parades happened every
year since. It was in the park, or it was some kind of
celebration, and the board of supervisors was asked to
proclaim Gay Pride Week. This came at this interesting
time in history where one supervisor had resigned, Pat
Litkey, who interestingly enough came out later. That’s
a whole other story. The governor, Jerry [Edmund G.]
Brown, Jr., appointed another supervisor, who hadn’t
been sworn in yet. One of the conservative supervisors
said he’d vote for the resolution because the new
appointee had said he would support it if he were just
sworn in. So it passed, with the barest of majorities.
It was very controversial. That was in the days when
resolutions would come on the council’s or the board’s
agenda, as opposed to doing things by proclamation. It
made it a very political issue. There was a group at
Cabrillo College in that era.
Reti: A gay group at
Cabrillo?1
Laird: Yes, that was
one of the first ones. It was probably in the mid-1970s.
For me, the watershed moment as a community was the
defeat of the Briggs Initiative in 1978. There was a
group called CUDBI—Community United to Defeat the Briggs
Initiative. That went on forever, that campaign. [CUDBI]
was one of the first things I ever went to in the
community.
Then the next year, 1979, there was this drop-in gay
men’s group which started at Louden Nelson. Ken Sentner
and Patrick Meyer co-facilitated it. It was just,
drop-in every Monday night. It started with ten or
twelve people. That’s when I went. I was so shocked,
because my faculty adviser, David Thomas, was there,
from my student time at UCSC. I was just floored that
that whole time he’d been gay, and I hadn’t known.
Reti: So he wasn’t
really very out at that point?
Laird: No, not in
those early years. None of us were. That group grew, and
grew, and grew, and within two or three months it was up
to ninety men a week. There’d be an exercise, a topic.
People would do things together. Out of that group came
many social activities. We had a gay men’s
Spanish-speaking group. We would get together and speak
Spanish. That is where volleyball started. Ken Smith,
Ken Sentner’s partner, and I started gay volleyball.
Somewhere, in a box, I have one of the first flyers.
Yeah, I’ve done some great things. One of the first
openly gay mayors in the country, that kind of stuff.
But being a co-founder of gay volleyball, I always think
has been much more meaningful to a lot of people in the
community! [laughter]
There were always people at different levels from UCSC
involved in everything, either people who were in that
group, or in the gay organizations. There started to be
gay organizations at UCSC. But they were not unlike
anything else at UCSC. The community is so transitory.
Students are just learning different skills, and every
year it seemed to change to a different emphasis.
In the early years of the gay movement, before we even
were conscious of always saying “gay and lesbian,” or “GLBT,”
there were enormous struggles between men and women.
It’s not like there still aren’t differences, things to
be resolved, but boy, is it different from the way it
was then! I think some men were particularly
insensitive. Don’t get me wrong. A lot of things haven’t
changed, but many men were just completely unaware of
how much it was a man’s world—whether it was stepping
over a woman in individual conversation, how offices
were set up, or organizational structure and equal
participation—who is listened to. In the early days of
gay men just coming out, able to be open for the first
time, men were recognizing each other, and it was almost
to the exclusion of anything having to do with women.
And there was real nationalist feminist stuff going on
at the same time. It just made for unbelievable
struggles in trying to present a united gay and lesbian
movement.
Reti: Do you recall
those kinds of struggles going on during Gay Pride?
Laird: Yes. It
always went on in Gay Pride in the early years. Although
the other thing was that it was such a strong statement
just to be open in Gay Pride. I remember the first time
I marched. It must have been 1978. A friend of mine who
didn’t have the courage to be out at the time said to me
later, “I ran into the chair of the seniors commission
and he said, ‘Could you see who was marching?’” It was
me.
It was terrorizing to be out in your own community in
1978. Yet that’s three years after the first people
organized Gay Pride. I was a latecomer, although years
later, it doesn’t look like a latecomer to say, I was
there in the third or fourth year. It was such a strong
statement for people to be out, that for those who were
out, somehow there was also a feeling of, well, there’s
real advanced thinking here. There’s courage that’s so
uniform that that could mute some of the disputes.
There was always a struggle between the people who
clearly weren’t out. I remember Dan Dickmeyer calling me
and making sure he understood the county process about
resolutions or something, and I wasn’t fully out.
Although I always laugh, it’s the classic story. I
worked for the county administrative office, for the
county executive. There came this time when I decided
hey, I’m just going to purposely tell everybody in the
office. I started to work my way through the office and
just basically say, “I’m gay.”
Reti: This was the
late-1970s?
Laird: 1978,
somewhere around then. It was very funny, because one of
the first responses was, “Oh I thought everybody knew.”
I was stunned!
Santa Cruz was one of those early gay and lesbian
communities, other than San Francisco or Berkeley, but
we still had tremendous struggles here. In the 1980s,
the film The Times of Harvey Milk came out. Whatever
political group we had at the time, the Gay and Lesbian
Alliance, or the Freedom Democratic Caucus, got the
premier locally at the Nickelodeon as a fundraiser. We
gave free tickets to local elected officials because we
wanted them to come and see it. It’s very funny given
our later history, but Gary Patton came. Gary had always
struggled with gay issues in the early years. He wasn’t
comfortable with it. He just genuinely wasn’t
comfortable. He knew that it was a progressive issue. He
knew that it had civil rights overtones, but he was
socialized in the 1950s. It was tough for him to get
past some of his personal stuff. Not unlike many of us
that are gay or lesbian. So there was this startling
moment [in the film] when it flashes to the scene of the
White Night Riot.2 All of a sudden there’s the anger. I’m
crying in the theater. It’s a very emotional movie. It
still gets to me every time I see it. All of a sudden,
it flashes to that scene where the police cars are
burning. The theater breaks into thunderous cheers.
People are stamping and cheering. The theater goes wild.
I looked at some of these people who were there, and
they looked shocked. I don’t know if he’ll remember
this, but Gary Patton turned to me and said, “Okay, I
finally get it. This is a civil rights movement. I
finally get it.” I’ve always thought what a good thing
it was for us to do that.
There’s been such a long struggle here at every level.
Because UCSC was one of nine campuses, it took forever
to pass non-discrimination policies campus-wide. They
got domestic partners rights only a year or two ago. We
passed domestic partner benefits in the middle of the
1980s in the city of Santa Cruz. Admittedly, we were the
third city in the country behind West Hollywood, and
Berkeley. We were even ahead of San Francisco. We were
the first transit system in the country, I think, to
pass domestic partners benefits, and we were one of the
first counties. We were the first county to have
non-discrimination on sexual orientation in the country,
in 1975. Santa Cruz was always in the forefront, but
there was always a struggle. People didn’t necessarily
get it as an issue.
Reti: When you first
came out right after you graduated from UCSC in 1972,
where did you socialize in town? What was the scene
like?
Laird: Mona’s was a
bar then, Mona’s Gorilla Lounge, which later became Cha
Chas, the In Touch. It’s now a music club, Mo’s Alley.
Reti: On Commercial
Way.
Laird: Yes. When I
first went there, it had to be in 1972, 1973. That was
where most gay folks hung out locally. There was also
the One for One Club down by the beach, and another club
right across from where the Ideal Fish Company is now.
It burned down twenty or twenty-five years ago. 26 Front
Street, I think. Mona’s was funny, because the first
year or two it just had a jukebox. If you wanted to
dance you had to put money in it. I remember putting
money in, playing the Stones, dancing. It had after
hours where you could volunteer. People would sign up to
cook. A friend of mine cooked breakfast from two to six
a.m. One morning I came in and helped her out. It was
this after-hours place without alcohol, too.
The fire at 26 Front Street was rumored to have been
arson. It probably was burned in 1976, 1977, or 1978. I
remember being in there a bunch of times. It had these
faux leather booths, and people would go there and
drink. You probably could even eat. I remember one time
this guy saying, “What were you doing there?” I thought,
what were you doing there checking it out? I always
wondered what happened to him.
The Dragon Moon must have started around 1975. It was on
Soquel Avenue, in the building that’s almost right next
to where The Crepe Place is now. It closed in the
mid1980s, and there was one period of time where it was
not very gay. But it was gay almost the entire time.
That was a major place. People would shuttle between
there and Mona’s during that period. It was the bar
scene. There was nowhere else. At times the Catalyst,
but even that was rather rough-edged.
I think the bar scene has died because we are so
integrated into everything else you don’t have to go to
a bar to meet gay men and women. The attitude toward
alcohol has changed, and there are a lot more
socializing things. There was a particular time in the
1970s and in the 1980s where there was a social scene.
There was a season. People had parties in the summer at
their houses. You would go to their places. It would be
the bars in the dark, parties during the daylight hours.
I always loved that. It still goes on, but it is missing
in a lot of the ways that used to happen. But once
again, when there was no openness in the community, you
had to create private spaces, whether it was the bar or
parties.
The reason I first realized I was gay was [when] I was
at a friend’s party shortly after I graduated, and I saw
these two men kissing. I thought, Ooh, that seems
exciting! [laughter]
There was a place out by where Mona’s is. It was a
nightclub which later became a jazz club, before it went
to something else. I wish I could remember the name of
it. Sometime in the late-1970s, it was in the height of
the disco era, they had one of those lighted dance
floors. They did an advertisement that said: “Come
dance.” It had a man and a woman stick figure together.
It had stick figures of two men next to each other with
a circle and a line through it, stick figures of two
women next to each other with a circle and a line
through it. Of course, they didn’t think anything of it.
That wasn’t a big thing. They had a ladies night, where
it was free. So we arranged this takeover. Forty gay men
and lesbians met at Chris King’s house. The men paired
off with the women, and drove over there. Chris was my
date. She got in free and I had to pay. And while I was
in line to pay, she bit my neck. A very hetero thing, to
throw them off. We went in. We were all screaming. We
had a fixed [agreed upon] time. The DJ yelled “Party
Santa Cruz!” Then he realized the men were dancing with
the men, and the women with the women. We took the place
over for awhile. It was great fun, a real statement.
Those were the days when we felt power from strength.
There was great street theater at times. They still talk
about Alena Smith in the sheriff’s department. She’s
always had this naughty nun act. In those first four or
five [Gay Pride] parades there was a sheriff’s deputy
for security who walked at the end. Alena walked at the
end sometimes. Somebody shouted something homophobic.
Well, it turned out she was not wearing anything under
her nun’s habit. So she lifted up the back of the nun’s
habit and mooned them. She got picked up for exposure.
They always told the story in the sheriff’s department
after I came to work for the county, maybe not knowing
that I knew who she was. A deputy brought her in dressed
as a nun and they were sitting there at the booking
table going, “Oh, what is this about?” They said to her,
“And what did you do?” So she turned around and mooned
them! [laughter] At the booking table. Just part of the
color. There are a million of those kinds of stories
through the years. I feel like I’m getting older, more
respectable. But geez it was fun in those years of
organizing when we were young. Disco takeovers. Nuns
mooning cops. [laughter] The things that were going on.
Reti: What was it
like to come out nationally as the first gay mayor in
the United States?
Laird: When I ran
for the city council in 1981, I really struggled with
how open to be. I wanted to be out, but nobody else was
making announcements about their sexuality. Having a
press conference seemed totally inappropriate. There
were people who confused that with me not having
courage. A few people in our movement thought, what
they’ve done out in Santa Cruz, California.” I heard
from friends from college I hadn’t heard from for years.
I have two brothers. There are three boys in my family,
although, at fifty-one and forty-nine and forty-three,
the word ‘boys’ doesn’t seem to fit. My brother, who is
two years younger, is gay. It’s one of the more
wonderful things in my life. We are very close. He’s
lived in San Francisco with his partner for twenty-five
years. At the time, my parents (my mother still does)
lived in the East Bay, in Pleasanton. All of a sudden,
I’m the lead story, beaming in on the television news.
It had never occurred to me that they were not out to
all of their friends about the fact that they had two
gay sons. Just did not occur to me. So my brother calls
and says, “It’s kind of like a funeral over there.
People are bringing casseroles.” It was very startling.
My brother called another time and was just screaming.
He said, “I was just watching [newscaster] Wendy Tokuda
and she called you an avowed homosexual.” He was just
beside himself that I was an avowed homosexual, which
was the term the mainstream media would use in the 1970s
and the 1980s.
All the television cameras were there when I was elected
mayor. There must have been fifteen cameras in the
council chambers that night. It was jammed.
An interesting thing happened to my parents. They are
both from the Midwest. My mom’s from a small town in
South Dakota, and my dad, who passed away last year, was
from down-state Illinois. It was just not where they
thought life was going to take them, to have two out of
three of their sons be gay. There was never any break
when we came out, never any break in any way. They had a
tough time dealing with it, but they were very loving
all the way through it. It was a very good family
situation. The funny thing was that when I came out to
my mother, her comment to me was, “Geez, we thought your
brother might be gay, but we never thought you were.” I
couldn’t say, “He is gay. He just hasn’t told you yet.”
I had to struggle with that.
So when this happened, all of a sudden they started
getting amazing letters and support from friends of
theirs. My mom was an elementary school teacher. She got
a letter from another teacher, who said, “I always
thought those people in San Francisco were really
strange, and I always snickered at Harvey Milk. I know
you. I know your husband, and I know your son who lives
at home. You’re really wonderful people. You’re really
loving people. It’s clear your son came from this. I’ve
made a mistake, and I will never snicker at a gay person
again.” So my parents are starting to get this kind of
response and they are feeling, “We are going to have to
be adult about this.” It was like them coming out in a
way, except they had no choice. It was done for them. It
was a very growing experience. I laughed when I ran for
the legislature in 1993. Somebody walked in with Out Now
or some gay paper of the time, from San Jose. My mother
had given them an interview. My mother had given an
interview to a gay newspaper! Things have changed here.
How far we’ve come.
There were people in Santa Cruz who were very active in
the gay community here, who were from other parts of the
country or the state, but had never come out to their
families. All of a sudden, they were getting calls
saying, “You have a gay mayor. How do you feel about
that?” Suddenly they were talking with their families
about gay issues. I got tons of letters. I think I only
got two bad ones. They were almost all positive.
Somebody wrote and said, “I have three gay sons. You
make me proud.” It was not unlike the experience of
coming out. It was exhilarating.
At the end of my year as mayor, the Santa Cruz Sentinel
ended up writing a headline that it was a time of
cooperation. I had had a great year as mayor. They
endorsed me for reelection the next year. And the big
furor over the election was just gone when it was done.
There were things like negotiations with the
firefighters that year. Well, city management put on the
table that there be non-discrimination on sexual
orientation. They said to the firefighters across the
negotiation table, “Do you have a problem with this?”
And they all smiled and said, “Not this year we don’t.”
Among the political structure, I was not viewed as
somebody to be afraid of, by other elected officials. I
would work with them. It really helped. Although, as I’m
always fond of saying, they knew I’d mess with their bus
routes if they weren’t with me on domestic partner
benefits. [laughter]
I happened to be working at the county at the time.
Somebody at work said, “Boy, you are just a normal
person.” I said “Yes, I put my pants on one leg at a
time.” She said very innocently, “I know. We’ve been
reading all about it.” A good friend who had been active
in my campaign, who was straight, said to me that she
thought one of the most interesting things about that
whole coverage was that they were all writing about my
sexuality, but nobody was alluding to the fact that I
ever might have been sexual. This was exactly the way I
wanted it.
There was a civil rights bill in front of the
legislature at the time, that Art Agnos, then an
assembly member, was carrying, AB1, to protect against
discrimination in employment in California based on
sexual orientation. In the first interview I said,
“That’s the issue here. It’s not part of my contract,
but I ought to be able to do a good job for the people
of Santa Cruz and have my own non-discrimination clause.
That’s the issue. Can I act on merit, and be judged
electorally and politically that way?” So it unrolled in
a good way. It was a very good experience, although it
was completely unplanned.
After that, it was just great. There were some rumbles
occasionally. I marched in the gay march in the 1984
Democratic convention, not knowing that—I mean, I would
have done it anyway, no big deal— [but] not knowing that
a photographer from the Santa Cruz Sentinel was up
there, and I was going to be on the front page of the
Sentinel holding a sign that said, “Mayor of Santa
Cruz,” with the caption: “While walking in the gay
rights march in San Francisco.” A couple of conservative
council-members said, “Keep it to yourself.” There was
actually a very anti-gay ad run the Sunday before the
campaign when I ran for re-election, which, I think,
backfired massively. People worked hard on election day
because they were motivated.
Reti: Do you find
yourself being put in a box as a gay candidate?
Laird: That’s a very
interesting question. I don’t, where I have any
background at all. I am running for the assembly right
now. Over fifty percent of the district is in Santa Cruz
County, but it includes the Monterey Peninsula, and it’s
about to include Morgan Hill and San Martin. I find in
Santa Cruz County [being gay] is a non-issue. I’ve been
so systematic this time. I started by going to the
closest elected officials whom I feel will just say yes,
and worked out from them. I flew under the radar for
three or four months, and just [targeted] elected
officials, political leaders, leaders in labor, the
environmental movement. As I went through the first
thirty or forty people in Santa Cruz County, starting at
the very beginning, it didn’t come up. Not a single
person raised it as an issue.
I am in my seventeenth year of elected office, so I am
[known as] the person who was on the transit board, or
the Cabrillo school trustee who was chair of the board
when the bond passed. Or they are mad at me because I
voted for some project in their neighborhood that they
didn’t want. It’s about the issues. And yet, in Monterey
County people are…[being gay is] still an issue.
Initially, when I ran in the election eight years ago,
the way it would come up would be—”You can’t win,”
i.e.,—“You’re gay.” This time the way it’s coming up is
very interesting. It’s, “We think you’re good. We’re
going to back you. We think you’ll make a good assembly
member. But we’re worried you’ll get to Sacramento and
spend your time on civil rights, as opposed to public
education, or the environment,” or whatever issue is
important to everyone. I’m fine with that, because
that’s progress. They are going to support me. When I’m
working with them on preserving wetlands, or making sure
that there’s not seawater intrusion in their area, or
that we set aside places in the Ventana wilderness so
that it’s not logged or mined, they are going to forget
that they ever had that as a thought.
In 1993, when I ran for the assembly, it was a really
bad year for incumbents all across the United States. I
was not an incumbent at the time. I kept feeling like I
was the only person in the country who was not
benefiting as a non-incumbent. Because when I was an
incumbent, reporters would cover me on a water issue, or
they would cover me on the greenbelt. But it allowed the
media to just take my campaign and put gay on it. And I
didn’t have as easy an ability to throw that off. I
entered this campaign very attuned to that.
If I am elected to the assembly next year, it will still
make history in California. There has never been an
openly gay man elected to the California legislature.
It’s been done in Nevada. It’s been done in Arizona.
It’s been done in Texas. It’s been done in Missouri. But
we can’t seem to do it in California. Four women have
been elected, and I’m really pleased with that, but
we’ve never elected an openly gay man. So what I am
trying to say is, I’m the most qualified person. I’m
entering my seventeenth year in elected office. The
issues that drive this district—public education, the
environment, diversity, affordability, are issues that I
have a record on. I’m out front. I’m the best person on
the issues and experience for this office, and will make
history in the process. If somebody wants to say gay ,
I’ll say: I want to break that barrier. But I want to
break that barrier because I want to show that I can be
as good a legislator as anybody else is for their
district. That’s what you should learn about somebody
who is gay. This isn’t a stereotype. This isn’t, elect
me because of that. I am trying to walk that line in the
right way politically.
Reti: That’s
delicate.
Laird: Yes. But the
other thing is… It was very hard to maintain a
relationship when I was in public life, and I’ve been
together with my partner now… We’re just about to have
our sixth anniversary. That’s very different about this
race. I feel a little more stable as a result. It’s a
nice way to make a statement, without having to talk in
a lot of other ways about being gay.
Reti: I noticed that
you listed your relationship on your campaign
literature.
Laird: Yes, I didn’t
say anywhere in there, “I’m gay.” I said, “I live on the
Westside of Santa Cruz with my partner,” and named him.
That’s clear. But that’s the way it should be. That’s
the low-key way. The interesting thing is that, except
for the fact that I would make history and break
stereotypes, I don’t know if my voting record on GLBT
issues in the legislature would be different than the
current person who is there, Fred Keeley, or would be
different than our member of congress, Sam Farr. He
voted against the Defense of Marriage Act.4 Politically,
our area and our legislators are there. I’ll be in the
same place. Don’t think that this is some big radical
takeover. I’m just going to break a few stereotypes in
the process.
Reti: We are trying
to document both the history of the University and the
community. You are a very good person to bridge that
divide.
Laird: Yes, I have
lived in both worlds. It’s interesting, because we did a
number of community-based organizing efforts at
different times, probably starting with the Briggs
Initiative. The one that was also very interesting (it
was hilarious at the time) was the organizing against
the undercover arrests of gay men in the beach area of
Capitola. I was one of the two or three people who
worked on that all the way through. It was—call a
community meeting, break into teams, investigate, keep
trying to get things done—until we elevated it to the
level where we took 250 people down to a Capitola City
Council meeting and took it over, in early 1981. The
arrests happened in 1980, in the fall, and I think it
was something like January of 1981 that we went to the
meeting.
Reti: Please talk
about your work with the Santa Cruz AIDS Project.
Laird: The AIDS
project came out of a similar process. I believe the
political group at the time was the Freedom Democratic
Caucus. There were gay and lesbian Democratic clubs up
and down California. Alice B. Toklas and Harvey Milk in
San Francisco. Stonewall in Los Angeles. The San Diego
Democratic Club. They were even in San Luis Obispo,
Fresno. Sacramento had the River City Club. There was a
real movement, since the Republicans were so rejecting,
to organize within the Democratic Party. That’s the way
a lot of political activity was done. So we formed the
Freedom Democratic Caucus, which the Lavender Reader
came out of. That was actually our regular newsletter
initially, and it morphed into the Lavender Reader.
Michael Perlman edited it. We did a lot of things. There
was a big fight after three or four years and the
“Democratic” was taken out of it, so it became the Gay
and Lesbian Alliance, and gradually fell apart. There
were people who didn’t like the affiliation with the
Democratic Party.
But in any event, when the epidemic began, we decided it
was time for some kind of community response. I was even
interviewed by the Santa Cruz Sentinel as mayor, and I
said I would love to participate in a community-based
organization if something happened. In May of 1983, I
introduced a resolution to the city council for more
funding for AIDS education and prevention. It must have
barely been called AIDS by then. I actually got the city
council to pass that. So we called a community meeting
as part of the Freedom Democratic Caucus. We had a
reasonably good turn-out, fifty or sixty people, and out
of that came the Santa Cruz AIDS Project. There were six
of us who were the original board members, all gay men.
Interestingly enough, given the path of the epidemic and
the criticism early on, there were three men of color,
and three who weren’t. It was Jerry Solomon, Gerald
Landers, Wesley Harris, Ray Martinez, Sean Wharton, and
myself. Two people have since passed away of that six,
Wesley and Ray.
We started from scratch. I joked about all our records
being carried around in a shoebox for awhile. We tried
to figure out what to do. Sean went and took the Shanti
Project caregiver training [in San Francisco]. When we
had our first one, two, and three clients, Sean
literally was giving them [care] as per that training.
We tried to send people up there, and that’s how we
first developed client services. Then we started a
speaker’s bureau. After a year, we expanded the board,
and Sally Blumenthal, Ken Koenig... We expanded to
twelve or fifteen people. Then we hired the first staff
member and we got the first grants: a U.S. Conference of
Mayors grant to help us with Latino outreach, and the
Santa Cruz County Health Services Agency gave us a grant
for the basic infrastructure. With that grant, we hired
Gerald Landers as the first executive director and
rented a small office that was out by Food and Nutrition
and the Seniors Council in Aptos. Terry Cavanaugh was
the second staff member. He was doing volunteer
coordination. It just took off from there. But it was a
real idea, that there could be a community-based
response, that people actually could make a difference,
that you could volunteer.
Reti: Were there
other communities organizing this kind of grassroots
response?
Laird: Yes. San
Francisco was doing it, because they had both the AIDS
Foundation doing education and prevention, and the
Shanti Project doing care.
Reti: How about
communities of this size?
Laird: Santa Cruz
was probably one of the first, because it was 1985 and
1986, very early in the scheme of things. At the time we
thought it was kind of late. We helped Monterey County
start the same thing the next year. We had a retreat at
Jerry Solomon’s house with the people from Monterey, to
tell them what we had done and help them do the same
thing with the Monterey County AIDS Project.
Then it just took on a life of its own. I was executive
director from the beginning of 1991 to the beginning of
1994. In that time the budget doubled, the staff-level
doubled; we moved. We were on the Eastside. Most of the
executive directors of the AIDS Project have been really
good for the time they were there. There are different
life spans within the organization. Gerald was great for
the start. He had energy, enthusiasm. He was really
dynamic in getting other people involved. Jo Kenny was
the next director. She really took it to the next level
in a very good way.
Then I had to stabilize it and jump it up. We opened the
house when I was there. We increased client services
dramatically. It had been just one person who was a
social worker, and interns or volunteers. By the time I
left, we had a substantial client services department.
We became the spokespersons in the community. I would
always try to figure out every four or six weeks, what
is going on with the epidemic, and try to make a story
out of it, try to make sure it was in the feature
section of the newspaper, or there was a news story
where we were speaking clearly about what needed to be
done. We were raising $200,000 a year from the
community. The budget, I think, when I left was in the
$750,000, $800,000-a-year range. $200,000 of that was
from community fundraising, and we had six hundred
people who volunteered in some way with the agency.
It was a monumental human response. I was just talking
to somebody about it earlier today. It was one of the
most challenging things I’ve ever done in my life. I
took a massive pay cut to do it. I worked fifty-five or
sixty hours a week. I think it was easy to be on the
city council and work overtime on public stuff while the
epidemic was beginning, because it helped my denial. As
friends started to get sick, it helped me keep from just
facing into it. I brought many skills to the AIDS
Project. I brought connections. I upped our government
grants. I could speak to the press. I knew them all, and
made sure I got them there. I was in tune with the
community, with volunteers. But at the same time, I must
have said goodbye to fifteen or twenty people who were
reasonably good friends, in that particular time. I
faced up to it. I remember thinking, even when I was
director of the AIDS Project, okay, that’s my last
funeral. I am never going to another funeral. I can’t
take it. Of course, two or three weeks later I’d be at
the next one. It was a very difficult time, but it’s
when I became an adult. It’s when I truly grew up.
The AIDS Project has had its ebbs and flows in the
fifteen years it’s been going, but it’s been such an
important part of the community and of people’s lives. I
think one of the interesting things, getting back to the
tension between men and women in the community, is that
the number of women who volunteered in the epidemic,
primarily lesbians, actually outweighed the number of
men. Men were having it in their daily lives. It was in
front of them all the time. Some people found it hard to
seek it out. It was heroic, some of the work that was
done in that period.
Once again, if you look at thirty years of history in
our community, the AIDS Project is an important piece of
it. We struggled about being considered a gay agency, or
a gay and lesbian agency. One of the hardest things was
being true to the fact that the epidemic was
overwhelmingly hitting gay men, and a lot of the
volunteer response was overwhelmingly coming from
lesbians, and yet trying to be this broader agency in
the community that was not going to be considered solely
a gay and lesbian agency.
Reti: Yes, AIDS is
not a gay disease per se. You don’t want to reinforce
that stereotype.
Laird: Well, as the
epidemic [affected] people of color much more, that was
a struggle. There was a point when I was our executive
director when fifty percent of our board were people of
color. We got to a point when we had to move where the
epidemic was. It was really hard for some people who
were not gay to feel like they would be perceived to be
gay by being involved at the AIDS Project, even as a
client. It was a struggle, but it was one in which
everybody grew.
When I think of where people were on gay issues in 1972,
when I was just coming out and people wouldn’t talk
about it at UCSC; or in 1981, when I was trying to
figure out how to be out as a candidate; or in 1983,
when I was out as a mayor; or the late-1980s, when the
AIDS Project was struggling to get going; or in 1993,
when I ran for the Assembly—when I look back at every
one of these benchmarks in our community, where gay
issues were very heavily involved, I am very pleased,
because we are farther along now than I ever thought we
would be. It’s the result of all that work. 1981 was the
first Gay Pride rally where I spoke, and I’ve spoken
from the stage at every single one since. I always tried
to take a long view in those speeches. We have a
tremendous reversal, and I’ll say “Hey, you know, this
is just a step on the path.” Now I’ve been around long
enough where that’s so totally true. Yes, the Knight
Initiative was bad last year, but we’re just winning
more domestic partner rights. More people are getting
elected to office. We are moving ahead. And it’s because
everybody is just so out in their lives in ways that it
builds that change. It makes a sense of inevitability.
Even in the events of the last two or three days, with
the bombing of the World Trade Center, [on September 11,
2001] I’ve thought, oh my God, there had to be bunches
of gay men and lesbians who were killed in that blast.
Greenwich Village is right there. There had to be people
who worked in the financial industry. That’s a story
that hasn’t been written yet. I think that one of the
interesting things is going to be is that if truly the
toll is going to be around 4000, if there was a little
bio of every single one, it would be us. It would be
this whole mix of people.
Reti: What do you
think some of the other key moments in Santa Cruz LGBT
history have been?
Laird: Well, I’ve
talked a little bit about that men’s group. It was such
a key moment, because there were all of these people who
were around, and they truly publicly came out as part of
all that, to each other, to the community. There was
this strength. We figured there were 250 to 300 men who
were in that group over a course of a six- or
eight-month period at its height. We realized who the
community was. I still feel close to anybody who was in
that group. Twenty years later I feel real attached to
them.
The Briggs Initiative. That was the first great,
broad-based political thing. And in the Capitola
organizing, there was this moment when we had 250 people
in the council chambers, and the police chief was
sitting in the front row just cowering, just dying,
because he wouldn’t listen to us. We had tried every
possible way before that. We had the ACLU, we had the
Lawyer’s Guild. Even the Gray Panthers came. We did this
classic organizing. There was this moment when you
looked at the room, and all of a sudden these people
were looking at each other and saying: “We have power.”
It just had not occurred to them. It happened during the
Briggs Initiative. It happened during the men’s group. I
think it even happened in the formation of the AIDS
Project. It happened at a time when I was elected mayor
and people felt a part of that. There were certain
common organizing times when people got together in a
real group or community, and realized they could change
things. So whether it’s the Briggs Initiative, the
Capitola organizing, political campaigns, starting the
AIDS Project, or even Pride through the years in its
different incarnations, people realized they have power.
These were defining moments in the growth of this
community.
We are always perceived as being a strong,
well-organized, and large community by the non-gay
community. Sometimes I do not think we are dramatically
larger per capita than anywhere else except for a few
urban areas like Los Angeles or San Francisco, but we
are integrated into the community. It’s not like there’s
a neighborhood. It’s not like there’re a particular few
businesses. We are integrated across the board. We are
on the faculty at Cabrillo. We are on the faculty at
UCSC. We are on the staffs at both places. We are
throughout county government. We are in businesses
downtown. Reporters for the newspaper. You go almost
everywhere… My office right here in the county building.
There are thirty people; finally, there’s a second gay
man. But there are three or four lesbians. We are very
integrated, and we are very open. That makes for a very
unique community where there is a perception of
strength. I think the only place in the county that that
might not be true is Watsonville. People are still
struggling to be out there. If you look at the results
of the Knight Initiative, it passed in Watsonville with
sixty percent of the vote, while it was being defeated
in the rest of Santa Cruz County, by almost sixty
percent, which means it failed outside of Watsonville by
maybe sixty-five percent or so.
There are those defining moments. The challenge has
always been, and it’s a challenge I faced when I was
younger, is so many people move to San Francisco or
another place. They feel much more comfortable in larger
numbers. I’ve always been much more comfortable here in
a non-urban environment, and being out. Now sort of the
reverse migration is happening out of a lot of urban
areas, where people are coming out of communities,
because it is easier to be out here. I find a lot more
people moving to Santa Cruz just because it’s okay. They
seek it out.
One of the problems I’ve had personally is there are a
certain number of people who say, “Oh, gay, we’ll call
John.” As if somehow I am the community. I have to refer
them to other people. I have to say, “Hey, we don’t
speak with one voice.” I am a point of entry sometimes.
A lot of times when people are professionals and they
come into town… I think it is easier for somebody like
me, who has been here for over thirty years on and off.
I’ve got my social structure in place. I’ve got my
political or job connections in place. It’s not like I
have to struggle with coming out as I get to know people
in the community.
Reti: Establishing
yourself as a professional.
Laird: Yes, not just
like, “Oh, there’s the gay person who is our new
executive director,” because that comes first somehow.
Reti: As mayor, how
did you deal with the split between the University and
the town?
Laird: It was tough,
because I was the first UCSC graduate ever elected to
the city council, who was an undergraduate for four
years. Mike Rotkin had been a graduate student, and had
gotten there a couple of years earlier. A substantial
number of people in town at the time hated the
University. They said, “We’ve lived here forever. They
are changing our way of life. They are yahoos. We’re
more stable townies who stay here forever.” There was
this pronounced split. I campaigned on the basis that I
was going to try to bring us together as one community.
But the term I was mayor was begun by a ballot measure
that was anti-University growth, that when I was elected
mayor, I was charged with implementing. It was very
difficult. We even sued the University the second time I
was mayor. So it was a very fine line. They [the
University] were unwilling to compromise. They were
unwilling to look for common ground. It was like, “We
are exempt from local land use. We are exempt from laws
under the state constitution. Basically, we’re going to
do what we’re going to do.” That was the attitude.
The University has changed and matured. I think M.R.C.
Greenwood is the most community-friendly chancellor
there has been, with the possible exception of the first
one, Dean McHenry, who brought the campus here. But the
community has changed in thirty-five years. I think it’s
down now to where the more conservative or older part of
the community can’t be more than ten or fifteen percent
of the community. It’s really changed. Now the
University is really part of the community. And if you
look at the alumni numbers, I think over 8000 graduates
of UCSC are still in the Monterey Bay area.
Robert Sinsheimer was the chancellor for most of the
time I was on the city council. He wanted to build a
research and development park that was on University
land on an area that the city considered a greenbelt,
and using the contracts that the city had with the
University. The city was actually going to pay for a lot
of the infrastructure for this research and development
park that was going to be oriented to the University.
Even though it was public/private, the private part was
going to have the benefit of the public subsidy and the
University land. And so people were pretty outraged
about it in town. We’d have debates. The chancellor
would really like to portray it as the anti-University
town. So I went up to debate him, and I would open up
the debate by saying, “This is the time of the annual
fund drive for the University. The UCSC Foundation needs
your money for scholarships (or whatever). Here’s the
address of the UCSC Foundation.” Then I’d talk about the
issues, and make him crazy, because he was trying to
make the point that we were anti-UCSC, that we didn’t
like it here. I was trying to make the point that that
wasn’t the issue.
Reti: Haven’t you
been an officer in the [UCSC] Alumni Association?
Laird: I’m the
equivalent of president-elect now. They just changed the
name to executive vice president. I’ve been on the
alumni board now for five years and been real active.
I think [the relationship between the city and the
University has] gotten closer, although there are still
some tensions over a number of different things. They
tend to be development and economic issues that are
related. It will never be easy. The end result of our
efforts in 1989 and 1990 was the University having a
goal of seventy percent of the students being housed
through campus housing, and a higher number of faculty
and staff members. Something like forty-two or
forty-three percent were housed on campus when we made
that agreement. Last year, it was still in the forties.
It was in the high forties. And that involved conversion
of a lot of dorm lounges to dorm rooms, and things that
in my view were probably not real moves towards good
housing. But this year, with the opening of the new
colleges, and even though very controversial, a whole
other story, the Holiday Inn, the Town Center, they are
doing a lot of things to provide additional housing.
Additional housing will help the housing crisis that
exists in the region. That’s one of the things I want to
work on if I am elected to the legislature. They have
such a weird funding formula. You have to look at all
housing developments as a nine-campus-wide funding
formula. You have to pay a lot of the costs up front,
and the paybacks and rents are high. It’s not even a
good alternative in some ways. There have got to be some
ways at the state level that you can problem-solve these
issues so that you can relieve a little bit of the
pressure on the local housing market that comes from the
University.
Reti:
Has the fact that you have been active in gay politics, and that
you are a gay man, played into the split between the University and the surrounding
community?
Laird: It hasn’t
really, that I’m aware of. Interestingly enough, one of
the benefits to faculty members having tenure is that
there are out gay faculty members who have tenure.
That’s an okay thing in the town-gown thing. The
University is behind the times sometimes. When we sent
Mardi Wormhoudt to the Long Range Development Committee
meetings as the city representative in 1988 or 1989,
when she first served on it I think there were
twenty-six people on the committee and she was the only
woman! They did some changes. They managed to get four
or five women on it. The University is such an insulated
institution, insulated from trends, the public,
politics, in certain ways.
One of the funniest stories was, Edmund G. Brown, Jr.,
when he was governor kept trying to make appointments to
diversify the government. One of the appointments he
made to the board of regents was Sheldon Andelson, who
was a high-powered Los Angeles attorney and political
donor, but an openly gay man. He was the first openly
gay regent. When they were trying to build the research
and development park, and they thought the city was
giving them such a hard time, what do they do? This is
the time for the gay regent to come and talk to the gay
mayor. So I had dinner with Sinsheimer, and his wife
[Karen] might have been there, and Sheldon Andelson at
the Compton Place when it was new, this hoighty-toighty
restaurant in San Francisco. They were trying to hit on
me. It’s like, “Let’s trot out the gay regent for the
gay mayor.” Then Sam Farr and I flew to Los Angeles to
meet with him. Sam was a state assembly member at the
time. It was like somehow we were going to make peace.
They had some table at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Andelson
died eight or ten years ago of AIDS, but at that time he
was very powerful in Los Angeles. He was one of the most
influential regents. I thought that was very funny, that
somehow I would immediately say, “Anything I ever stood
for, and was elected on doesn’t matter because I’m
speaking gay-to-gay with a regent.” I thought it was
twisted. I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about that.
That’s the advantage of interviewing people ten or
fifteen years after things happen. The edge is gone. If
I had made the statement I just made within a year of
that, it would have been explosive. It would have been
anti-University. It would have been self-serving. It
would have been all these things. So I just shut up
about it during that time, and thought it was off.
One other thing, it was great when David Thomas started
his gay politics class. He would have me up most of the
time to speak in the 1980s. That was one of the things I
always loved to do. I loved to be involved in anything
that might be going on on campus that was organized. I
would generally come and speak to whatever gay group
there was, once a year when I was on the council.
Closet Free Radio [on KZSC] has got to be one of the
longest running, if not the longest running gay radio
program. I’ve lost track of how long I’ve been doing
politics on it. I just show up the second or third
Monday for half an hour. They don’t even call me
anymore. They just know I’m going to be there. Through
the years, I’ve spoken at tons of Pride celebrations on
campus during that week. It was important for people to
see a role model. I never had one. I would probably have
come out five years earlier if I had even had a clue
that stuff was going on, that it was safe. I think
that’s an important investment to make back.
Reti: Would you say
that the University has influenced Santa Cruz to be a
gay-friendly place? Or vice-versa? There are those who
say this community would never be like this if it wasn’t
for the University.
Laird: I think there
is some truth to that. University towns tend to be
places where there’s organizing, where there’s been
progress. You can’t generalize that much. One of the
places that first elected gay officials was Madison,
Wisconsin. Also Minnesota. The guy who retired last year
from the Minnesota State Senate after serving thirty
years was an out member of the Minnesota legislature. He
was the longest-serving member. He had to be one of the
first or second out officials. He was a professor at the
University of Minnesota law school. So if you look,
there are these connections especially since the
eighteen-year-old vote.
Reti: But there are
university towns that are very conservative. Of course,
UCSC is a very special kind of place.
Laird: Yes. I’ve
always thought that that’s part of it. I’m sure being a
beach town, a coastal town not far from San Francisco,
there would always be some influence anyway. But if you
look at Santa Cruz compared to Monterey, Monterey’s
community is still semi-closeted, to this day.
Reti: Let’s talk
about the more recent civil rights ordinances, in the
1990s. There were two efforts, right?
Laird: Yes. There
was one in the city that was very controversial, filled
the Civic Auditorium in the early-1990s. Then there was
one that was done by the county two or three years ago,
that was not very controversial, even though we worked
very hard on it.5 People say, why weren’t those done when
you were on the city council? It’s because at the time,
where they were getting adopted, they were being
repealed by referendum. I said I would happily support
them, but people need to be ready to work all the way
through on a campaign, and if we’re going to do this I
want three or four people that are going to stand up and
talk about specific instances of discrimination that
happened to them that would be prohibited by this law.
We could never do that. People would always say, no,
just do it. I would say, you don’t seem to understand
that you are putting the city council out there. Somehow
we’ll have to manage this campaign.
At one point, I was instrumental in forming a human
relations committee or task force, at the city, that
took testimony and tried to make recommendations, in the
hopes that if they did their job right, it would lead to
the ordinance. But there wasn’t enough documentation.
Then, interestingly enough, when Governor Pete Wilson
vetoed the statewide protections in the early-1990s,
then here comes the council, saying “We’ll do it at the
local level.” The looks part of it got added to it. To
be honest, I was very unhappy about that. I thought,
here’s our chance to be clear. Let them referendum and
we’ll see it at the polls. We’ve finally got where we
wanted. We’ve built a constituency in the community. And
it all got lost. We kept getting lumped together with
people who had tongue rings and all this other stuff. It
took what I thought was a very solid civil rights
discussion and diverted it into a more frivolous debate.
We were on the Rush Limbaugh [show]; all this kind of
crap was happening. I was very unhappy about it.
Actually there were people who were mad at me about
having that point of view. It was like, “Oh, you get up
the ladder and you kick the ladder down for the next
group. You’re not being sensitive. We work in
coalition.” And yet, I just didn’t feel like that was
the coalition to do this. I thought it was more likely
to get referended if the looks thing was in there. It
was a pragmatic view of how we were going to move it
along.
We actually had a couple of incidents that motivated the
county ordinance about public accommodations. One of
them was at a beach on the North Coast where there was a
couples rate, but if you were a gay couple it didn’t
count. You still had to each pay full tariff. We worked
very closely with Mardi Wormhoudt, a number of us in the
community, and helped draft the legislation. There was a
little fight about how wide to make it. It was a little
easier political discussion, because the city is one
thing, but when it’s the county board of supervisors,
that at the time included three Republicans out of the
five—Walt Symons, Ray Belgard and Jan Beautz. It was
like, sorry, going out there on who this covers is not
going to pass that board. That’s what we have to do. So
because it was clearly public accommodations, GLBT, it
passed. The funny thing about that was twenty-five of us
came down to watch them vote on it. I was the only man.
I was blown away by that. There were others involved who
just couldn’t come that morning. It was embarrassing. I
didn’t go pointing it out in the moment, but I talked
about it later on the radio and other places. I thought
this was awful.
Reti: Why was that?
Laird: Oh, there are
tons of reasons. I always feel like the men don’t have
it together the way the women do in political
organizing, locally. [They] just don’t.
I thought it was a tribute to how far the community has
come that nobody threatened a referendum. It didn’t have
the backlash of five hundred people coming into the
Civic Auditorium. Those [initiatives] aren’t being
referended as much anymore. That was the problem in the
1980s. They were overturned in Irvine, Davis—university
communities.
It was very strange to be sitting in the audience. I had
just left the council, a year or two before. It was very
strange to sit in the audience and have them talk about
me. The mayor said, “Well, John Laird was here. He was
incredibly competent and I find it very hard to believe
that somebody just wouldn’t hire him because he was
gay.” They are sitting there having this discussion. I
felt like saying, “What am I, dead?” [laughter]
Reti: What work do
you think needs to be done in the LGBT community at this
point? What do you see as the pressing issues?
Laird: There still
need to be a lot of practical things done. As much as
we’ve made progress, still only twenty percent of
employers offer domestic partner benefits. That’s in the
country. I could be off a little bit either way, because
that number changes all the time. There needs to be a
lot of work in non-discrimination benefits.
At some point, there will be a more formal recognition
of gay and lesbian relationships, and it’s just a
question of what you call the work to get there. I look
at my own family. Thirty years ago, who would have
thought this is a family that would be strongly pro-gay?
I mean, until my youngest brother had a couple of kids,
if you looked at my family around the holiday table
there were eight people, and half were gay! [laughter]
It’s just not what you would have thought from a
Midwestern-transplanted family. When you look at all the
progress that’s been made, it’s been made because I’m
out to my family or my friends. So is my brother. So are
all of us. And that’s just this long process that keeps
going. Every year we get a little further. That’s the
kind of work. I’m convinced the relationships and
everything follow from that. Ten years ago, there were
major boycotts if there was a gay character on a
television show program. Huge boycotts. Now people fight
to have them on. It’s hard to imagine some major shows
that don’t, even if it’s just a character in an episode.
It’s becoming much more accepted. I think there is this
long-term work about relationships and where it goes.
But that’s how you get there. Laws tend to ratify where
a country or community is, rather than moving the
community there. We have to do all this work at the
community level across the country, family, or
neighborhood level.
I’ve had a radio show for years. I had this guy on who
was director of the Council of Churches and was fired
because he came out. He was active and still is active
in organizing within different denominations for
recognition of relationships and ordination of gay and
lesbian pastors. He said, “We just lost that vote
fifty-six to forty-four in some national council. But we
lost that vote ten years ago ninety-to-ten. Everybody is
upset that we lost that vote. That’s progress. We’re
going to get there.” That’s the fact that is hard to get
across to people. Sometimes, I think people look at me
and think I’m callous about certain losses. But I’m
thinking, damn, got close on that one! I never would
have thought it. We’re going to get there. That’s the
long view I feel people need to have about what we’re
going to get done. There’ll be a time. There’s this
dividing line, age-wise, if you look in the polls. Ten
years ago it was forty; now it’s near fifty, of people
who have the most negativity toward gay men and women.
We’re just going to outlive them at some point. Even if
people who are younger than me have to outlive people my
age, there’s going be this time when we get there. It’s
remarkable in the thirty-two years since Stonewall how
far things have come, even though it’s frustrating at
times that we are not farther.
-
Lesbian and Gay Men’s Union [LAGMU]
-
On May 21, 1979,because of a technicality of California law,
a jury found Dan White guilty of manslaughter, rather than
first degree murder in the double assassination of Harvey
Milk and George Moscone. Dan White was sentenced to seven
years and eight months in prison. The resulting violent
protest that evening came to be known as the “White Night
Riot”—the first gay riot since the Stonewall Rebellion ten
years earlier.
-
In November 2002, John Laird was elected
from the 27th District to the Assembly of the State of
California. Laird, along with Mark Leno of San Francisco,
became the first openly gay men ever elected to the
California State Legislature
|
