Guest Opinion: Where’s our City Hall champion?

For the first time I can remember, the LGBTQ+ community does not have a champion in San Francisco City Hall.

It’s stunning that the landmark equal benefits ordinance, or EBO, is on the chopping block and none of the supervisors from our community have stepped up to stop the destruction of this hard-won law. Even worse, not only is gay District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey leading the charge and gay board President Rafael Mandelman is non-committal, but the rationale for this change is that giving up our rights will save money. Freedom is not free. Have we forgotten that the fight for our rights cost Harvey Milk his life?

Dorsey’s cost justifications are embarrassingly laughable. He suggests in the San Francisco Chronicle that $290 million in savings for the city are on the table. Seriously? And one thing I find odd is that we have not heard from City Administrator Carmen Chu, who is responsible for city contracting and actually manages the enforcement of the EBO. In 2017, we had an event in City Hall commemorating the 20th anniversary of the EBO, which went into effect in 1997 after being passed and signed in late 1996. Then-city administrator Naomi Kelly was one of the featured speakers and spoke glowingly of the measure and the positive impact of its implementation. This would have been the time for her to say that this law was an impediment to city contracting and/or that it was too costly to continue. I note that this event was two years after the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision upholding same-sex marriage, which Dorsey cites as a reason to eliminate this law.

In the Bay Area Reporter, Dorsey talks about his inability in 2005 to contract with a vendor of an early version of a Zoom-like web conferencing app while he was the city attorney’s flack. By that time, the law had led to major companies like AT&T, Chevron, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and all major airlines, among others, providing spousal benefits for countless lesbians and gay men. The State of California, Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle, and Minneapolis, to name a few, had passed similar laws. Too bad the EBO existed and it inconvenienced Dorsey. Aargh!!!

The EBO did not emerge out of thin air and took enormous efforts to defend. Its champions are a gallery of LGBTQ+ and straight ally superstars. Geoff Kors, a gay man who went on to lead Equality California and was mayor of Palm Springs, conceived the measure. Lesbian activist Carol Stuart drafted the legislation.

Gay former supervisor Tom Ammiano sponsored it and, with the support of lesbian former supervisors Susan Leal and Leslie Katz, worked it through the board and supported its implementation and defense. Then-mayor Willie Brown enthusiastically signed the law. Former city attorney Louise Renne put her ace deputy attorney, Dennis Aftergut, in charge of defending the law after it was challenged by United Airlines and the airline industry. Aftergut recruited lesbian attorney Therese Stewart to the case.

Stewart later led the city’s defense of same-sex marriage under then-city attorney Dennis Herrera. (Stewart is now a presiding justice on the California Court of Appeal.) As an aside, Herrera, Dorsey’s boss when he was inconvenienced, used to say there were two key factors in his first, very close election as city attorney, one of which was the LGBTQ+ community. This was due in no small part to Herrera’s pledge (which he kept) to vigorously support the EBO and to continue to lead in fighting for our rights. On the other hand, his opponent, who had lapped him in the first round, was outed by the B.A.R. during the runoff for taking contributions from boycotted United Airlines.

The successful boycott of United Airlines was pivotal in defending the legislation and the eventual decision by all major airlines to offer spousal benefits to all domestic partners of employees in 1999. United ticket offices (few may remember that airlines had a number of actual offices where physical tickets were purchased) were picketed and shut down in acts of civil disobedience with ensuing arrests. The takeover by a team of Tinky Winkys, the purported gay children’s TV characters from the Teletubbies, included the late rainbow flag co-creator Gilbert Baker. Obviously, it was not Baker’s first arrest, and as a seamstress extraordinaire, his contribution also included sewing the costumes.

Stan Kiino, a gay man and United flight attendant, helped organize lesbian and gay employees from United, whose depositions of the harms they had suffered from not having spousal benefits were crucial in the legal defense of the law. Kiino was also a labor activist who went on to lead Pride at Work, the AFL-CIO’s LGBTQ+ group.

The late ACT UP leader and activist Jeff Getty produced and directed an anti-United Airlines commercial that we managed to get funding to air in Los Angeles and Houston. Getty, who had undergone a dangerous stem cell transplant from a primate immune to HIV infection in 1995 – leading to organ transplants for people with HIV and providing the template for the stem cell-based cures that have taken place since – died in 2006.

When Peter Tatchell, the gay Australian-born British human rights activist, led his group, Outrage, in support, the boycott of United Airlines went international.

One of the big concerns with the law was the fear that gay men with AIDS would cost companies big bucks. In 1996, when the law was passed, antiretroviral therapies, aka “drug cocktails,” were just emerging. We saw the Lazarus effect – people with AIDS on their deathbeds were restored to health.

I was diagnosed with HIV in 1997 and did not have insurance. If I had not lived in San Francisco, with its historic model of care implemented by the Department of Public Health, and in California, with its fully funded AIDS Drug Assistance Program, I would be dead. As Dorsey has recounted, I was the first person he called when he was diagnosed. I helped him navigate the process of getting care and dealing with his diagnosis. I assured him he would live. Of course, he had insurance. It is striking that Dorsey wants to undo this law that has provided health care to so many at a time when Medicaid and subsidies for Obamacare are being cut, putting health insurance out of the reach of millions.

Many people, LGBTQ+ and straight, opt for domestic partnership. My favorite soap opera, “General Hospital,” even had a storyline recently about a heterosexual couple opting to enter into a domestic partnership. Marriage does not have to be enough – and it is not enough with several U.S. Supreme Court Justices determined to end it for same-sex couples.

Jeff Sheehy, a gay man, is a former San Francisco District 8 supervisor. He helped with the creation of the equal benefit ordinance and led the boycott of United Airlines.