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Monday, Sep 08, 2008
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San Diego Gays disrupt unveiling of Pete Wilson statue |
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| San Diego Gays disrupt unveiling of Pete Wilson statue | ||
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As Governor, Wilson vetoed 1991 Gay Rights Bill,
sparking protests statewide; as Mayor, he let police raid Gay bars by Rex Wockner - SGN Contributing Writer A group of San Diego Gays, Lesbians and Transgender people joined some 300 Latino protesters Aug. 25 in spoiling a downtown ceremony to unveil a privately funded statue of former mayor, assemblyman, governor and U.S. senator Pete Wilson. The protesters banged on drums, shouted through bullhorns and chanted, "Tear down the statue, tear down the hate" and "Pete Wilson's gotta go: Racist, sexist, homophobe." The hour-long, nonstop cacophony made the unveiling ceremony, taking place less than 100 feet away in privately owned Horton Square, inaudible to many of the 300 or so well-heeled attendees honoring Wilson for his key role in the revitalization of San Diego's downtown core. Wilson, 74, twice addressed the protesters directly, saying, "Isn't this a great country where anyone can stand up and make a perfect horse's ass of themselves at any time" and "You're all going to have nodules on your vocal cords and make a lot of money for throat surgeons." Some local Gays have unpleasant memories of Wilson, a Republican, because as mayor of San Diego from 1971 to 1983 he refused to meet with them to discuss routine police bar raids in which patrons were arrested on "lewd conduct" charges for kissing or dancing with each other. "It was the dark ages for the Gay and Lesbian community," longtime local activist Nicole Murray-Ramirez said in an interview. "Police Chief Ray Hoobler and the police department were out of control. "I got beat up by them," Murray-Ramirez said. "They would send vice cops by the dozens into the three Gay bars, see guys or women dancing together, handcuff them, drag them off the floor and charge them with lewd conduct. Of course, by the time they got to court, usually it was dropped. But the people had a police record and their lives were ruined because the [daily] newspapers would publish their name, street address and where they worked. This happened constantly. It was like a horror. Wilson let the vice squad go nuts. It was like a Gestapo police state." Murray-Ramirez, who now chairs the city's Human Relations Commission, said leaders of the city's nascent Gay movement tried to meet with Wilson about the police harassment, but "he refused to meet with us, refused to have any of his staff meet with us, and refused to acknowledge we even existed." "He just did not view us as citizens of his city," Murray-Ramirez said. Under Wilson, the city also refused to issue a permit for the first Gay pride parade, and only relented under threat of legal action. "He created an atmosphere for our community of intolerance," Murray-Ramirez said. "He kept us back 11 years towards that road and fight for equality, and we San Diegans who are still alive and lived during those days need to remind the citizens of San Diego that this man who coined the phrase 'America's Finest City' discriminated against us and slammed the door tightly shut." Openly Lesbian state Sen. Christine Kehoe said she has "heard about police going into the bars, but it was kind of before my time." "Pete Wilson was a moderate Republican who got pulled to the right by Republican party politics," Kehoe said in an interview. "I think the most outstanding example of that right-wing side of him was his very strong support [as governor] of Proposition 187, which I see as a political calculation that scapegoated immigrants that are here, and helped distract the citizen population from the economic turmoil that California was going through." Prop 187, a 1994 ballot initiative passed by California voters, banned undocumented immigrants from accessing social services. It was struck down by the courts as unconstitutional. "No Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual or Transgender Californian could call Pete Wilson a friend of our community or a supporter of our rights," Kehoe said. "GLBT San Diegans are not going to be supporting the statue." But Kehoe noted that "the fact that he wasn't a friend of the Gay community in the 1970s doesn't make him outstanding." "Who was?" Kehoe asked. "Some people might be looking at this from a contemporary perspective. A lot of Gay people then didn't feel faith being out or active. The closet didn't start to go away until the late '80s, early '90s, unless you were a very unique person, maybe in show business or something. Ordinary folks weren't out." But Pete Wilson took his opposition to fair treatment for Gays and Lesbians with him to the governor's mansion, where he served from 1991 to 1999. In 1991, he vetoed a Gay rights bill that had passed the Assembly 42-30 and the Senate 25-10. The veto provoked weeks of large-scale protests in Los Angeles, West Hollywood and San Francisco -- and big demonstrations in Sacramento and San Diego. "It was the first time the anti-discrimination bill had gotten through the Legislature, and then he vetoed it," said longtime San Diego activist Jeri Dilno. In killing the bill, Wilson said it would be bad for business by inviting a "flood tide" of lawsuits. (The measure finally became law in 1999, under then-Gov. Gray Davis.) "The simple filing of a lawsuit appears as an indictment in the morning newspaper and this is a powerful weapon even in the hands of the well-meaning," Wilson said in his four-page veto message. "In the hands of the malicious or litigious, it holds the potential for serious abuse. "My decision ... will cause profound disappointment to men and women of this state whose good will I value and I genuinely regret that," he added. "I regret even more any false comfort that may be derived from it by the tiny minority of mean-spirited, Gay-bashing bigots. ... The excesses of such bigots strongly tempt me to sign the bill, but their abhorrent conduct cannot be the basis for my decision." About 200 Gays and Lesbians rallied in San Francisco's Gay Castro district shortly after Wilson's veto. The next evening, 8,000 protesters rioted at the State Office Building downtown. They smashed every window on the ground floor, set the main entrance on fire, then broke into a second-floor office and tossed computers, chairs and files out the windows before torching the room. A CNN report said police standing inside the building "remained remarkably restrained." There were no arrests. The building sustained $250,000 damage, including the destruction of a stained-glass window valued at $50,000. In Los Angeles, 50 demonstrators marched on the Ronald Reagan State Building the night of the veto, splashing red dye on it and breaking the glass in the front door. Riot police arrested two protesters. Later, in West Hollywood, several thousand people marched across the city and burned the state flag. Large-scale protests continued in L.A., San Francisco and elsewhere all month. In one zap, at Stanford University in Palo Alto, demonstrators pelted Wilson with eggs, oranges and other food projectiles. Wilson caught one orange, broke into a smile and hurled it back at the crowd. On Oct. 11, National Coming Out Day, thousands descended on the state Capitol in Sacramento. They blocked traffic and staged a kiss-in. "When the system has shut down and there is nowhere to go but the streets, the Gay and Lesbian community will be in the streets," Torie Osborn, then-executive director of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, said at the time. "Our goal," said Roberta Achtenberg, then an openly Lesbian member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, "is to make the governor pay a significant political price for what he has done to us." John Heilman, then an openly Gay member of the West Hollywood City Council, said at the time: "We are not going to go away. We will continue to press on until we have our rights in this state." West Hollywood gave its employees the day off to participate in the Sacramento protest. A headline on the front page of the now-defunct San Francisco Sentinel, a Gay weekly, blared, "Fuck you, Wilson. Resign, Step Down, Get Out of Sacramento!!" |
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