Anger Turns To Violence Against Oppressive, Brutal, Overly-Entitled Police Across America

Just over 4 decades ago-- May 1979-- a conservative court decided to let ex-policeman, ex-County Supervisor Dan White off the hook (the Twinkie defense) after he assassinated Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. The ensuing violent riot wasn't about Moscone. The organizers intended to lead a peaceful protest march of a couple of hundred people up Market Street to City Hill. That didn't last and when the infuriated crowd reached City Hall, there were over 5,000 people-- mostly gay not absolutely not entirely so-- under no one's control and united more in anger than in grief... anger towards Dan White, towards Dianne Feinstein and, mostly, towards the police and their systematic abuse of the gay community.

That anger turned to violence very rapidly. I can't say I started it, but my gang-- punk rockers-- turned over the first police car and set it on fire. And the second and third. I think there were 6 or 7 police cars burned before the police who had barricaded themselves in City Hall-- along with the police chief-- were reenforced by a large continent of police looking to get even. They used tear gas and indiscriminately attacked everyone with night sticks. Just like yesterday, the police prepared for the battle by coving their badge numbers with black masking tape. The police were shocked that "the gays fought back" and several dozen police suffered the righteous indignation of decades of abuse from the department towards the community. Far more protestors/rioters were injured, but the official count of injured police was over 50. (None died... until October 1985 when Dan White was taken into custody by a small citizens' vigilante group and "committed suicide" in his garage.)

After the rioting petered out at City Hall, gangs of police headed to the Castro for revenge. The went to the most bourgeois gay bar in San Francisco, the Elephant Walk, the least likely place to find someone who had been to the City Hall riot. The clientele was... old fashioned drinkers of martinis and tropical drinks with fruit and paper umbrellas. The police went inside and beat everyone up brutally and smashed everything smashable, then spilled out onto the street and and beat up everyone they came across. The chief of police, Charlie Gain, rushed down to Castro Street and ordered the vicious cops off the street.

The cops celebrated their riot (and the deaths of Moscone and Milk and the tap on the wrist for White) but that was the beginning of the end of systemic police brutality towards the gay community in San Francisco. 100 of us were injured but that's what it costs for that kind of change. The following year, the police department started a campaign to heavily recruit-- successfully-- gays and lesbians to the force.





This morning, a team of reporters from L.A., Miami, Minneapolis, DC and Oakland wrote up last night's demonstrations and police reaction for The Guardian. "Tense protests," they began, "over the death of George Floyd and other police killings of black men spread across the US on Saturday night as mayors around the country imposed curfews and several governors called in the national guard amid scenes of violence, injuries and unrest. After a Friday night that saw anger at police brutality erupt into rioting and unrest in cities across the country, authorities appeared intent on re-establishing order through increased shows of force. Governors of six states, including Minnesota, where Floyd died on Monday, called out national guard troops. Many cities including Atlanta, Los Angeles, Louisville, Columbia, Denver, Portland, Milwaukee and Columbus, imposed curfews in anticipation of a restless night ahead... The violence happened across America from coast to coast and from big cities to small ones. Beyond the major metropolitan areas, protesters clashed with police in cities including Tulsa, Oklahoma; Little Rock, Arkansas; Albany, New York; Fargo, North Dakota; and Raleigh, North Carolina."

Where's Psycho?

The police seemed top prefer attacking peaceful demonstrators than confronting gangs of rioters. "Numerous media outlets, including CNN, Reuters and MSNBC," they wrote, "reported that their staff covering protests in the city had been hit by rubber bullets fired at them. Media outlets and journalists in numerous cities reported being targeted by police with chemical agents or less-lethal rounds, and several reporters were arrested."

Meanwhile, Donald Trump ignited tensions, lashing out at “anarchists” he blamed for stoking the deadly unrest and urging the Minneapolis mayor to act more forcefully against demonstrators there.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden struck a different tone, calling protests against police brutality “right and necessary” but urging an end to violence. “The act of protesting should never be allowed to overshadow the reason we protest,” he said in a statement.

Then and now

In Los Angeles, a protest started out peacefully in Pan Pacific Park before small groups of protesters set police cars on fire, and police fired rubber bullets in return. After the 8pm curfew, but before darkness had fallen, Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles asked the governor to send up to 700 members of the national guard, according to the AP.

In New York, bottles were hurled at police officers attempting to push back marchers in Times Square, while hundreds more protesters gathered in the East Village. Protests had broken out in different neighborhoods across New York, fires were set on streets and police were seen beating protesters with batons.

“We will not tolerate actions like these against New York City police officers,” the city’s police department said in a tweet announcing the arrest of “multiple people” for throwing molotov cocktails at police vehicles. The US attorney’s office subsequently announced that it had filed federal charges against three people over the incidents.

Elsewhere in the city, a video of two police vehicles driving through protesters blocking a road quickly went viral. Mayor Bill de Blasio defended the action of the police driving the cars, further angering New Yorkers. “If those protesters had just gotten out of the way we wouldn’t be talking about this situation,” he said. “I’m not going to blame officers who were trying to deal with an absolutely impossible situation.”

In Atlanta, where three officers were injured and 71 people arrested in violence early Saturday, up to 1,500 national guard troops were deployed throughout the city at the order of the [Trumpist] governor, Brian Kemp.

...In Detroit, Michigan, a 21-year-man was shot and killed during protests on Friday night when an unknown person fired into a crowd from a vehicle.

Nonetheless, expect the mass media to paint a basically one-sided picture, featuring the valiant police protecting "us" and, especially, our property from the unruly, dangerous mob. But there are two sides to this story. That side and the real side. The battle against oppression was also being waged online-- and very effectively so.





They-- presumably Anonymous-- crashed the Minneapolis Police Department website Saturday and today "users were asked to complete a captcha to ensure they were not automated bots orchestrating a DDoS attack."

Where's Psycho II?

Meanwhile, how much coronavirus was spread from these protests this weekend? Plenty of masks, thank God, but not much social distancing. In a related article-- Social Distancing Strictures Fall Away As Crowds Gather To Party And Protest-- Karen DeYoung, Chelsea Janes, Greg Schneider and Scott Farwell wrote that "Crowds of another sort gathered in a number of cities, where thousands took to the streets, at times amid violence, in protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, a black man, by white police in Minneapolis."

“We are still in the middle of a pandemic,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) reminded demonstrators in a news conference where he announced the full mobilization of the state National Guard to control the violent unrest.

Warning that hospitals were “on the verge of being overrun,” Walz said “demonstrators should wear masks and try to practice social distancing.”

One of my favorite pandemic binge-worthy tv series so far has been Bosch, a Los Angeles police-friendly detective production... but I was the very proud executive producer of this track by Ice-T's metal band, Bodycount. Have you listened to "Cop Killer?" Lately?





And I'll close with a few hopeful words from Forbes' Lisette Voytko. "Some [police] some squads joined in with Saturday protesters to express their stance against police brutality, and to show solidarity with the anti-racism movement.

• “We want to be with y’all, for real. I took my helmet off, laid the batons down. I want to make this a parade, not a protest,” Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson was seen telling protesters in Flint, Michigan, before he joined the assembled crowd to march, eliciting cheers.
• Officers in Camden, New Jersey, helped carry a banner reading “Standing in Solidarity,” and seemed to join in with the crowd chanting “no justice, no peace.”
• In Santa Cruz, California, Police Chief Andy Mills took a knee with protesters in the pose made famous by Colin Kaepernick, with the department tweeting it was “in memory of George Floyd & bringing attention to police violence against Black people.”
• Two Kansas City, Missouri, police officers-- one white man, one black man-- were photographed holding aloft a sign reading “end police brutality.”
• In Fargo, North Dakota, an officer was seen clasping hands with protest organizers while holding up a sign reading “We are one race... The HUMAN race.”
• Officers in Ferguson, Missouri, participated in a nine and-a-half minute kneel in Floyd’s memory, with cheers erupting from the crowd.
• Despite the moments of solidarity, conflict broke out between protesters and police in Kansas City, Fargo and Ferguson.

Gay Identity Politics-- McKinsey Pete

Monday, I responded to a tweet about some random guy primarying Jan Schakowsky (D-IL): "Jan Schakowsky is one of the best members of Congress & is one of the few who has NOT failed us." Notice what I didn't say: Jan Schawkowsky is one of the best female members of Congress" or even "Jan Schawkowsky is one of the best Jewish members of Congress"-- although she is both. But doesn't it sound better that she's just flat out one of the best members of Congress? You know where I learned that? Listening to Joni Mitchell explode when a reviewer would refer to her as the world's greatest female songwriter. From her reaction, you might think the reviewer had written that she has no songwriting ability at all. In her world, her rivals were always Bob Dylan and Neil Young and she sees herself as the best songwriter in the world. It wasn't uncommon to see Joni work on a song for longer than it took Neil to write and record an entire album.

If you read DWT much, you probably know how much I hate identity politics. Picking a candidate for any reason other than their qualifications sickens me and makes me worry for the health of a Democratic Party that is riven with leaders who are all about aggressively choosing people based on extraneous characteristics, even if it means winding up with less qualified-- or even unqualified-- people in positions. Many of my friends disagree with me on this'd I've been through the pros and cons countless times. Monday morning, a weak L.A. Times reporter, Janet Hook, wrote that McKinsey Pete is inspiring pride among gay voters.

I'm a gay voter and I don't feel a twinge of pride in that. I'm glad an openly gay person can run for office but...





My "but" is different than the but Hook wrote about. But but is that he's a crap candidate who spent much of his life in the closet, developing an ability to lie and deceive-- which is what people in the closet do-- and then fit in perfectly with the world's biggest-- and worst-- consulting firm, McKinsey, which trains its robots to lie flawlessly and without blinking. Hook says the but for gay voters is that they fear he can't win. Thank God for small favors!

Win or lose in the 2020 presidential race, Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., is energizing LGBTQ Americans. With his surprisingly strong run for the Democratic presidential nomination, he is helping a long-marginalized community advance in political stature and pride in a way some compare to the effect Barack Obama’s presidency had on African Americans.

“Mayor Pete Buttigieg is transforming America’s perception of LGBTQ people,” said Annise Parker, president of the Victory Fund, an LGBTQ political group that endorsed Buttigieg in June, the first time it had endorsed a presidential candidate.

Buttigieg does not put his sexual orientation at the center of his campaign, but he is not hiding it either. In recent weeks, as his campaign gained prominence, he has made high-profile appearances before predominantly gay audiences.

When he traveled to Provincetown for a campaign event and fundraiser Friday, Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, received a hero’s welcome from a town that, after the 2010 census, had the highest proportion of same-sex couples in the country.

It was a long way from Iowa, where Buttigieg was heckled by antigay activists this year. In P-town, as the city is known, a popular eatery painted a welcome message to the Buttigiegs in its window. An art gallery displayed an enormous portrait of Buttigieg. He met with students attending a local summer camp for LGBTQ youths. Throngs gathered during a morning stroll through town.

“It felt like our own little parade,” Buttigieg said at an afternoon event where hundreds in the hall-- and hundreds more in the overflow crowd outside-- waved “PETETOWN’’ signs. “It reminds me of what it is to be in a place that celebrates inclusion, that celebrates belonging.”

Buttigieg and his husband have become the most high-profile gay male couple in America. Images of the pair kissing at campaign events have been broadcast across the country. They have appeared together on the cover of Time magazine.

Asked about potential backlash, Buttigieg cites his experience coming out as gay in the conservative state of Indiana in 2015 just before running for reelection as South Bend mayor.

“I came out not knowing what the consequences would be and, in the end, got reelected with 80% of the vote,” he told reporters in Provincetown. “You have to give people a chance to show they can move beyond prejudice.”

But that could be a risky political bet in a campaign against President Trump. Many of Trump’s supporters are among the 31% of Americans who oppose gay marriage, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center poll, and even some of Buttigieg’s admirers question whether the country will accept a gay man as president.

“Homophobia is a very real thing; however, it is not as visible as racism,” said Damian Archer, a gay African American man at Buttigieg’s Friday rally who is undecided about which candidate to support in 2020.

Rufus Gifford, a gay former Obama administration official, who admires Buttigieg but has not committed to him or any other candidate, says: “I do worry with the stakes as high as they are, I ask myself every day: Is the U.S. ready to elect an openly gay president? I still question it. I’m scared to death we’ll reelect Donald Trump.”

Still, the response to Buttigieg’s candidacy is a remarkable sign of one of the fastest shifts in public attitudes ever measured in the U.S.: the growth in acceptance of homosexuality to the point that, at least among Democratic primary voters, Buttigieg’s orientation has ended up a political asset, not a liability.

Some 61% of Americans support same-sex marriage-- double the share in 2004, when only 31% did, according to the Pew Research Center.

Even within the Democratic Party, in 2008, none of the leading presidential candidates supported gay marriage. The ban on gays serving openly in the military ended only in 2011. It was just four years ago, 2015, that the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage could not be banned by states.

“I heard a woman from Alabama call Pete Buttigieg wholesome,” said Richard Holt, a board member of the Victory Fund. “I never thought I’d hear a Bible Belt mother refer to a gay guy as wholesome.”

Buttigieg often appears with his husband. With an active social media presence, Chasten Buttigieg has gained outsize celebrity and embraced the “candidate’s spouse” role with humor and style.

When the pair emerged from a black SUV for a June Victory Fund event in Brooklyn, attendees seemed almost as excited to see the spouse as the candidate.

The event, like the Provincetown visit, was a respite for Buttigieg, who has been battered by criticism for his handling of racial tensions in South Bend after a black man was shot by a white policeman. The fund’s endorsement had been scheduled for earlier in June but was postponed when Buttigieg returned to South Bend to cope with the crisis.

It was rescheduled to a propitious day-- the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, a landmark in the history of the LGBTQ rights movement that occurred after police raided a gay bar in New York City.

“We haven’t seen equality come to the land, not by a long shot, but think about what it means that 50 years after Stonewall, we could be gathered in a room with a top-tier candidate for the American presidency and be in a room with his husband,” Buttigieg said to cheers.

Buttigieg rose implausibly fast in the party’s big 2020 presidential field in part because he is gay. That fact helped him stand out from the pack and garner media attention, and drew a big infusion of early campaign donations from the LGBTQ community. He went on to raisean impressive $24.8 million in the second quarter, more than any of his rivals have announced so far.

Los Angeles political consultant David Wolf said Buttigieg has received significant fundraising support from Hollywood’s LGBTQ community, including TV producer Ryan Murphy and prominent agents Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane.

Buttigieg added to his coffers Friday at the Provincetown fundraiser organized by Bryan Rafanelli, a major Democratic donor who also hosted a Buttigieg event this year at Fenway Park in Boston.

For many Democrats-- gay and straight-- Buttigieg’s biggest liability is not his sexuality, but that he is too young, too inexperienced or not liberal enough.

“I’m still concerned about his ability to beat Trump,” said Mitchell Katine, a Houston lawyer who helped win a landmark 2003 Supreme Court ruling that decriminalized gay sex. “I want him to be in the running and continue this education process. But he’ll have to convince me he can beat Trump.”

Antigay sentiment is still a powerful force. There are only 20 states where LGBTQ people are protected against discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations. Just 46% of Republicans say they are open to electing a gay president, an April Quinnipiac University poll found.

Nor does Buttigieg have a monopoly on LGBTQ voters. Former Vice President Joe Biden earned the allegiance of many with his 2012 endorsement of gay marriage-- getting out in front of Obama on the issue. Sen. Kamala Harris of California enjoys strong support in San Francisco’s gay community.

A group of 47 LGBTQ activists and elected officials announced their endorsements of Harris last weekend ahead of her participation in the city’s Pride parade.

A June poll of LGBTQ voters by Whitman Insight Strategies and BuzzFeed News found a noteworthy gender gap. Buttigieg was the top choice among Democratic gay men, with 27% saying they were likely to support him.

Among lesbians, however, Buttigieg was fifth choice, with just 13% saying they’d likely support him, behind Harris, Biden and Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Some lesbians are torn between their interest in Buttigieg and a desire to elect a female president. But Kate Wise, a gay woman from Cleveland who was in New York for the World Pride celebration, said she was all in for Buttigieg from the minute he announced.

“We landed a bro on the top of the pile,” Wise said. But she added, “He would be my guy even if he was not gay.”

Whether he wins the party nomination and goes on to the White House, gay activists hope Buttigieg will help inspire other LGBTQ candidates running up and down the ballot.

“He can have coattails,” Holt said. “We have to have representatives at all levels.”

Harvey Milk was an incredible person who I spent great deal of time with when he was on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. When I arrived in San Francisco, penniless, he staked me the darkroom equipment I used to set up a photography business and later became his campaign photographer. Many of the unacknowledged photos you see of him were pictures I took. (The Times of Harvey Milk film credits me for my pictures by the rest are just routinely stolen. Sorry for the tangent.) I remember once sitting with Harvey in the back of his photo shop on Castro Street. He had a mail sack filled with letters from all over the country. I remember one from a kid in Kansas or Nebraska. My eyes still well up with tears, around 4 decades later, when I think about it. This kid read about Harvey's election and it made him revaluate his own self-worth and to rescind his decision to commit suicide. Harvey was an inspiring figure. It wasn't just because he was the first openly gay person to win elective office; it was because of who he was. That's not who McKinsey Pete is.

Is California Ready To Finally Replace And Upgrade From Dianne Feinstein?

A few months ago, conservative L.A. Democrat Adam Schiff, my congressman, was looking for operatives to help run his Senate campaign. He was telling people that Dianne Feinstein had told him she would retire after her current term expires in 2019, when she will be approaching her 86th birthday (as long as her new cardiac pacemaker holds out). She wants another conservative Democrat like herself to occupy the seat. Schiff fits the bill. Remember, being anti-Trump, which he certainly is, does not make someone "progressive," which he has never been. He was a conservative in the state legislature and joined the Blue Dogs as soon as he was elected to Congress. After his district was redrawn as one of the most liberal in America-- adding Hollywood, West Hollywood, Los Feliz and Silverlake and shedding some more conservative neighborhoods-- he fled from the Blue Dogs and joined the less well-known, but also quite conservative, New Dems. But somewhere along the line Feinstein changed her mind and Schiff called his contacts and told them he's not running for Senate after all. Yesterday, she hinted on Meet the Press that she will probably run again.

When I first moved to California, it wasn't to Adam Schiff's district; it was to San Francisco. After years of traipsing around the world and then living in Amsterdam, I was cold stoned broke and without many prospects. I wound up meeting camera store owner Harvey Milk, who fronted me the darkroom equipment I could use to set up a little business. We became fast friends and when he was elected Supervisor I would listen to his constant critiques of the two conservatives on the Board of Supervisors, Republican Dan White, who eventually assassinated him and Mayor George Moscone, and pseudo-Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who he disliked even more than White. I never voted for Feinstein for anything ever. After Harvey and Moscone were murdered, she ran for mayor. I helped Dead Kennedy's lead singer Jello Biafra run against her (1979). Biafra came in 3rd in the 9-person race. Feinstein took 81,115 votes (46.6%) to Biafra's 6,591 (3.79%). An ugly and aggressive old-style homophobe her whole wretched life, as mayor Feinstein vetoed San Francisco's domestic partnership bill in 1982. After losing a gubernatorial race to Pete Wilson in 1990, she was elected to her first Senate term in 1992 to fill Wilson's seat. She has always been notoriously corrupt, sending billions of dollars in contracts to her husband's (Richard Blum) companies in return for her support in funding corporate projects, overt bribery that should have landed her in prison many times over.

Meanwhile, half the likely voters in the state think she should just retire already. A poll by the Public Policy Institute of California 2 weeks ago found that 41% of adults say she should run and 46% say she should not. But among likely voters, 43% say she should seek another term and half (50%) say she should not. Most Democrats (57%) say she should run again, while most independents (55%) and Republicans (69%) say she should not. Mark Baldassare, president of Public Policy Institute of California said that "Partly, this is a holdover from last year’s election in which you saw many Democrats wanting a more liberal alternative at the presidential level and you saw many independents wanting an outsider. As people are looking to next year, there’s a desire for something new." Feinstein is the polar opposite of "something new."

When Meet the Press host Chuck Todd asked her about her poor polling, she replied, "There are polls and then there are polls. I'm ready for a good fight. I've got things to fight for. I'm in a position where I can be effective, and hopefully that means something to California." Her most likely challenger is state Senate President Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles), an unabashed and extremely effective progressive and someone widely seen as part of the future of California politics. There is no political leader in the state more feared and hated by the extreme right than de León and they attack him endlessly, a good indication of what an outstanding champion he will make for working families. Feinstein is rounding up all the corrupt establishment "moderate" Dems she can find to back her and many are willing to tarnish themselves by supporting a nearly dead horse.

Ro Khanna, the most progressive member of California's congressional delegation isn't falling for it. He told the media that Feinstein is "out of touch with the grassroots" on bread and butter issues Democrats need to be talking about with voters. "The fact that the establishment is rallying around her re-election shows that DC insiders continue to privilege protecting one of their own over the voters' concerns."

Dianne Feinstein And Joe Manchin Will Teach Bernie How To Be A Democrat

Just before Harvey Milk was assassinated by a right-wing freak at the end of November, 1978 I had been spending a lot of time with him at his camera store, next door to my business partner's record store, Aquarius, on Castro Street. Harvey didn't have enough foul stuff to say about a fellow Supervisor Dianne Feinstein who was, along with the murderer, Dan White, the persona who represented the Republican interests on the Board. Harvey told me many times why he could never trust her. And she was the greatest beneficiary of the assassinations that November. A not especially well-known Supervisor and mostly disliked by those who did know her, became took over the mayor's job when George Moscone and Harvey were killed by her ally.

In 1984 she campaigned shamelessly to be Walter Mondale's woman VP nominee but he rejected her for Geraldine Ferraro. She survived a recall and later won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, only to lose to the unpopular and ineffective Republican Pete Wilson, who went on to destroy California's Republican Party. Wilson had to vacate his Senate seat to become governor and Feinstein-- who was in the middle of a gigantic campaign finance scandal-- won Wilson's seat and became what has amounted to Senator-for-Life, primarily because Democrats vote for her as the lesser of two evils and Republicans don't really have any reason to oppose her strongly.

A multimillionsire reeking of gross corruption, she's now well-entrenched as part of a decrepit and rotten DC establishment. Right now she and her junior partner in crime, the more "liberal" of the pair, Barbara Boxer, are engaged in a full-time sabotage operation against Bernie in the lead-up to the Democratic primary. The two are so thoroughly disliked by voters that their efforts will drive California Democrats to vote for Bernie. In Washington, however, these two clowns are taken very seriously. Feinstein wants corrupt Nevada political boss, Harry Reid, to do something drastic to discredit Bernie before California Democrats vote June 7. "He is the Democratic leader of the Senate, and Senator Sanders is a member of the Democratic caucus. He’s not a Democrat, he’s an independent-- he’s really a socialist," she puked out with disdain, "but he’s a member of our caucus, and as such, he should listen."

Her ideological ally, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, one of the two Senate Democrats most likely to vote with the GOP on any given bill, and who must have been so sad to see West Virginia Democrats give Bernie a 123,860 (51.4%) to 86,354 (35.8%) victory, winning every single county in the state, despite Manchin stumping for Clinton, agreed with Feinstein about Bernie. This guy said "Bernie’s not a Democrat. What are we worried about? Why would Bernie want to play nice? I’m just saying if a person doesn’t even want to conform to be Democratic, it’s kind of hard to say, 'OK, all of a sudden you have to do all these things.'"

Can you imagine conservative dogs like Feinstein and Manchin, who serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful and spit on working families, lecturing Bernie on being a Democrat? Anything to get their crap candidate elected! What about that great Pennsylvania Democrat Arlen Specter?

Should David Petraeus Get Away With It Because "He's Suffered Enough?"

Elites rarely think other elites need to face the same kind of justice non-elites have to face when they break the law. Whether banksters on Wall Street or legislators on Capitol Hill, the worst criminals in our society-- those given the greatest amount of public trust-- are rarely held to account for their transgressions. And the lack of accountability is systemic and has become almost a tenet of our entire society. Sunday, Dianne Feinstein was a guest on CNN's State of the Union. She echoed comments by 2 other Military Industrial Complex shills from across the aisle, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, that David Petraeus should not be prosecuted and that the Justice Department had erred in recommending charges against him.

"This man has suffered enough in my view," said Feinstein, whose own husband has been bbagman for her entire political career and who, as a military contractor, has made millions of dollars in obscene profits off Feinstein's positions. Both should be rotting in prison now instead of going on CNN to excoriate the Justice Department for trying to bring justice to the high and mighty. Calling Petraeus "the four-star general of our generation" and "a very brilliant man," Feinstein used the common refrain elites always use when telling us to just get over it when one of their own gets into legal trouble: "It's done, it's over. He's retired. He's lost his job. I mean, how much does government want?"



This week, Michael Foley, an author and academic from the University of Groeningen, interviewed me for his next book which is on the politics of the San Francisco punk music scene of the late 1970s/early 80s. Among his recent books are Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s and Dead Kennedys' Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (33 1/3). A few days ago we had finished up and I was exhausted from talking non-stop for almost 3 hours. Foley asked me if I wanted to add anything but I was too tired to think. The next morning I remembered that he hadn't asked me about the White Night riots of May 21, 1979, sparked by the wrist slap to right-wing politician Dan White after he murdered Harvey Milk. Foley came back to my house a few days later for another segment of interview.

Although history paints the riots as part of a conflict between the gay community and the police, it was no such thing. The gay community organized a peaceful candlelight vigil and a march to City Hall. The gay community did not want violence, trouble or any kind of confrontation with the police. Individual gays, of course, had a different perspective.

Harvey was a close friend and mentor. If you watch the credits roll on the first PBS documentary of his life, you will see that I was credited with still photography. Harvey had staked me with a darkroom when I was flat broke and in return, I did his campaign photos. My partner Chris' punk rock record store, Aquarius, was right next door to Harvey's camera shop. I spent my days going back and forth between the two. Harvey has always distrusted and disliked Dianne Feinstein, a member, like himself and Dan White, of the Board of Supervisors (City Council). I had never heard of her until he told me what a pompous asshole she was. The assassinations of Harvey and liberal Mayor George Moscone launched the long, tedious career of the horribly conservative Feinstein.

May 21 found me distraught that White was given the most lenient possible sentence (7 years). I was beside myself and very much ready to do something about it. There may have been one or two other gay people with me and my friends but we were all from the punk rock community. Some cared about Harvey Milk or Dan White; some just wanted trouble. I wanted both. We were the first ones to turn over and burn the first (of a couple dozen) police cars. A picture of it wound up on the cover of the Dead Kennedys' debut album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables.

Dan White served 5 years of his 7 year term. Two years later, the story goes, he committed suicide by using a garden hose hooked up to his car engine. He did die of carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage... but he didn't commit suicide. By this time the gays didn't need the punk rockers to teach them about peoples' justice.

I'm Willing To Bet That Kyrsten Sinema And Sean Patrick Maloney Will Never Be On A Postage Stamp

I have credits on a lot of films and albums but none thrill me as much as when the end credits on the 1984 documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk roll and I see my name. I wasn't in the movie and I was shocked to see my name in the credits. It was there because the filmmaker had used some stills I had taken of Harvey over the years. I had been unable to bring myself to watch it-- too distraught-- for over a decade and had no idea my name was attached to it.

Harvey was an important person in my life when I first moved to the West Coast after having lived in Europe for nearly 7 years after college. I was penniless when I got to San Francisco but I had been teaching darkroom technique (as a form of meditation) at The Kosmos in Amsterdam and was eager to ditch a 9-5 job and work as a photographer. Harvey ran a camera shop right next door to my favorite record shop and hang out, Aquarius, on Castro Street. We got to know each other and he eventually staked me with the equipment I needed to set up my own darkroom. In return, I became the "official" photographer for his election campaigns. It was fun and, obviously, I had no idea Harvey would go on to become an icon for the LGBT community.

I'll never forget a day at the camera shop soon after he was finally elected Supervisor-- the first openly gay man in California to ever be elected to office. His victory was national news, even in Time and Newsweek-- which were meaningful back in those days-- and he was getting bagfuls of mail. He read me some of them, one from a high school kid in Kansas or Iowa or Nebraska... I can't recall, one of those traditional farm belt states. The kid just wanted to say thank you to Harvey for giving him hope, hope that he didn't have to kill himself. Harvey and I were both weeping when he read it. I'm weeping again right now writing about it.

After right-wing assassin Dan White got what was coming to him, despite the criminal justice system, I moved to Los Angeles. SFO is such an inconvenient, hassle-guaranteed airport-- like LAX-- that whenever I fly up to the Bay Area I fly into Oakland Airport. But if San Francisco goes through with Supervisor David Campos' bill to rename SFO the Harvey Milk-San Francisco International Airport, I will definitely fly into it-- at least once. For now, we'll have to settle for a postage stamp.

"Thirty-five years after Harvey Milk made history as California's first openly gay elected leader," wrote Kurtis Alexander, "he's closing in on another historical first. The U.S> Postal Service said Friday that the late San Francisco supervisor and civil rights leader will join the likes of John F. Kennedy, Rosa Parks and Jackie Robinson by being recognized with a commemorative stamp-- and honor that had apparently never before gone to an openly gay politician… While gay rights was always a priority for Milk, his agenda included a variety of issues, from affordable housing to public transportation to expanded child care."

Obviously he was nothing like today's sorry crop of gay Democratic conservatives like Sean Patrick Maloney (New Dem-NY) and Kyrsten Sinema (New Dem-AZ), who are good on gay issues but terrible on the kinds of crucial economic justice issues which had Milk a beloved and respected figure outside the LGBT community.

Hate Crimes

On April 29, 2009, the House passed the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, 249-175, 18 Republican abandoning their hate-filled and bigoted leaders, crossing the aisle and voting with the Democrats. Boehner, Cantor, Ryan and McCarthy were against the bill and they had support from 17 of the most racist and conservative Democrats in the House:

• Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK,) forced to retire
• Bobby Bright (Blue Dog-AL), defeated with the help of Blue America
• Chris Carney (Blue Dog-PA), defeated with the help of Blue America
• Travis Childers (Blue Dog-MS), defeated
• Artur Davis (New Dem-AL), defeated, now officially a Republican
• Lincoln Davis (Blue Dog-TN), defeated
• Joe Donnelly (Blue Dog-IN), pushed into the Senate in a quirk
• Brad Ellsworth (Blue Dog-IN), defeated
• Bart Gordon (Blue Dog-TN), forced to retire; now a slimy lobbyist
• Parker Griffith (Blue Dog-AL), switched to the GOP before being defeated at the polls
• Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog/New Dem-NC), still hanging on by the skin of his racist teeth
• Charlie Melancon (Blue Dog-LA), defeated
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN), still in Congress
• Mike Ross (Blue Dog-AR), forced to retire; now running for governor
• Heath Shuler (Blue Dog-NC), forced to retire
• John Tanner (Blue Dog-TN), forced to retire
• Gene Taylor (Blue Dog-MS), defeated

So, of the 18 homophobic bigots and racist renegades only 3 survived politically, two-- Donnelly and McIntyre-- just barely. The rest were almost all part of the Great Blue Dog Apocalypse of 2010 the following year.

I just want to say one thing about the Hate Crimes bill. In the 2006 and 2008 election cycles, the bill was very important to progressives and Blue America used it to help us vet candidates. One candidate who consciously lied to us and portrayed himself as a progressive to get our endorsement and money was a right-wing shithead from Pennsylvania, Chris Carney. One of the lies he told us is that he would unhesitatingly back the Hate Crimes Prevention legislation if he was elected. Years later, a staffer of his told us he was laughing at us when he made that pledge-- which he promptly broke anyway. He was the only Democrat from the Northeast who voted with the Republicans on that. By then it was obvious he played us for fools and we gave him an ultimatum: either return all the money he had gotten from Blue America donors or face the consequences. His response-- and I quote: "fuck you." We put almost a quarter million dollars into defeating Carney and happily, his miserable career in politics ended as part of the Great Blue Dog Apocalypse of 2010.

When Dan White, Harvey Milk's murderer, was let off with a slap on the wrist by a bunch of clueless and bigoted jurors, San Francisco was convulsed in riots. City Hall was trashed and six police cars-- I counted them but wasn't responsible for all six-- were overturned and burned. Eventually White was "found dead, an apparent suicide" in his garage, although more than a few people know very well he didn't take his own life any more than the police cars overturned and burned themselves. It made quite an impact on the governing elites at the time. Conventional media types-- as you see today-- hate this kind of extreme activism.

Murdered by right-wing bigots

Aaron Schock (R-IL) May Have Been Beating Off Watching Ryan Debate But He Didn't Make Any National Coming Out Day Announcement

Which is more real to you?

There was a time when strangers would stop me in the street and say they had seen me in a movie or video, especially the Wilco film. I met someone who became a lifelong friend because he asked me for my autograph at a party after having seen me in a Ramones video. A couple months ago Brendan Toller came over and shot me for his upcoming film Danny Says. But the first time I ever saw my name in lights-- or on the screen in any case-- was for a second when the credits rolled on PBS after a showing of the 1984 film The Times of Harvey Milk, which won an Oscar as Best Documentary that year. I wasn't in the movie and I was shocked to see my name in the credits. It was there because the filmmaker had used some stills I had taken of Harvey over the years. I had been unable to bring myself to watch it-- too distraught-- for over a decade and had no idea my name was attached to it.

Harvey was an important person in my life when I first moved to the West Coast after having lived in Europe for nearly 7 years after college. I was penniless when I got to San Francisco but I had been teaching darkroom technique (as a form of meditation) at The Kosmos in Amsterdam and was eager to ditch a 9-5 job and work as a photographer. Harvey ran a camera shop right next door to my favorite record shop and hang out, Aquarius, on Castro Street. We got to know each other and he eventually staked me with the equipment I needed to set up my own darkroom. In return, I became the "official" photographer for his election campaigns. It was fun and, obviously, I had no idea Harvey would go on to become an icon for the LGBT community.

I'll never forget a day at the camera shop soon after he was finally elected Supervisor-- the first openly gay man in California to ever be elected to office. His victory was national news, even in Time and Newsweek and he was getting bagfuls of mail. He read me some of them, one from a high school kid in Kansas or Iowa or Nebraska... I can't recall, one of those traditional farm belt states. The kid just wanted to say thank you to Harvey for giving him hope, hope that he didn't have to kill himself. Harvey and I were both weeping when he read it. I'm weeping right now writing about it.

Sometimes I dismiss Out Magazine as not much more than some lightweight pabulum between endless fashion ads. But then they never fail to throw a bucket of cold water in my face and remind me why I still always like it when my copy arrives in the mail. The current issue features a cover-story, "Prime Time," that includes a time line of the history of gays on TV from which I learned that another friend and mentor, Norman Lear, put the first gay character on a TV sitcom ever, the 5th episode of All In The Family in 1971 when Philip Carey played a former pro football player. (For the historian among us, the full episode is embedded below.) The cover story is basically composed of half a dozen essays on "how the evolution was televised." One of them Gay TV and Me, by Daniel Mendelsohn, is something everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, should read. His premise is that his life might be very different today if boys were kissing on TV when he was growing up, the way they are, despite the ravings and rantings of the religious right, today. The first kiss on Glee was a watershed moment for him. He didn't whoop and cheer. He cried.

At the drop of a hat, I’d go into my satirical History of Gay Non-Kissing in Popular Culture spiel, lingering with special indignation on the climactic moment in Making Love did; in it, the sexy, bee-stung, motorcycle-racing gay rake played by Harry Hamlin finally puts the moves on a prim, “questioning” doctor (Michael Ontkean) by… hugging him.

Things had got better since then, of course, and there had been other gay kisses on TV and in movies before the Kurt-Blaine lip-lock that night. But there was something special about the Glee kiss, something that made it feel like a fulfillment. The high school milieu, for one thing: Most of us begin our long histories of desiring in our early teens, and the longings that impel us then, and the fantasies they create, haunt us long afterward, often for the rest of our lives.

In the case of people my age, born in the 1960s, teenagers in the 1970s, before the tectonic sociological shifts of the 1980s that finally put gay people and their issues front and center in American culture, those longings were, more often than not, frustrated and ashamed. The idea of finding true love-- mutual love-- in high school was, quite simply, unimaginable. When, in the fall of 1977, I finally confessed my feelings to the swimming star I’d been crushing on all through high school, he crisply informed me that he’d never speak a word to me again.

...It’s difficult today to convey how utterly isolated you felt as a gay child growing up in the ’60s and ’70s. This isn’t to say that it’s not still an ordeal for many: As we know, the bullying and terror and torment are just as prevalent in many places. But one crucial thing has changed. The gay teen today has grown up in a culture that has become pretty casual about representations of gay people—in movies, TV, music, literature, advertising. And then there’s the Internet: Access to information, discussion groups, and forums can at least give a gay youngster some notion of what being gay might be like and who’s actually out there.

Part of the torture of growing up gay 40 years ago, by contrast, was precisely that there was nothing out there that you could look at and say, “That’s me.” If you secretly liked other boys, you were pretty much convinced that you were the only boy in the world who had these feelings about other boys-- or that, if you weren’t, there was no way to make contact with them. The only place to see another gay boy was in the mirror.

And what little there was on TV and movie screens was pretty scary. When I was six or seven, I was allowed to stay up late on Wednesdays-- till 7:30, that is-- to watch my favorite show, Lost in Space, a sci-fi updating of The Swiss Family Robinson. Already at some dim level I was aware that I was far more interested in the handsome dark-haired copilot, Don, than I was in his beauteous blond love-interest, Judy; much less dimly, I was aware that there was something “wrong” with the show’s villain, the stowaway Dr. Zachary Smith. Pretty much every episode was generated by some conflict between the Robinsons, a space-age idealization of the all-American family, and the cowardly Dr. Smith. I couldn’t know it then, but Smith was being played as a queen: mincing, fussy, his vocabulary too high (“Oh the pain! The agony!”), his motivations too low. (In every confrontation with aliens, he’d either collaborate or flee.) Even at seven, I perceived that he was, somehow, “gay”-- this, even though I didn’t really know what gay was.

A few years later, when I was 12 or 13, I had a better idea about myself, and was fervently hoping that the available options, once I grew up, were going to be more like Don and less like Dr. Smith. But the picture in the early 1970s wasn’t a very hopeful one. As far as I knew, the only person who was clearly, identifiably gay on TV was Paul Lynde. We’d already grown to know him as Uncle Arthur on Bewitched. He was another of those crypto-homosexual characters from whom so many of us absorbed our first images of gayness: a mincing prankster in double-breasted plaid suits with exaggerated gestures and a hyena laugh. In Lynde’s case, you didn’t have to guess what his predilections were: As a perennial guest star on Hollywood Squares, Lynde could be startlingly open in his hints about his homosexuality. (Host, giving a clue: “You’re the world’s most popular fruit. What are you?” Lynde: “Humble.”) Slightly more sinister to me, then, was the constant basso continuo of-- I didn’t know the word then-- kink, the dark allusions that slithered and hissed just behind Lynde’s humor. When given the clue, “George Bernard Shaw once wrote, ‘It’s such a wonderful thing, what a crime to waste it on children.’ What is it?” Lynde replied, “A whipping.”

And yet even as I puzzled over the thought that being gay was somehow tied up with being someone who enjoyed pain, I was also learning from Lynde. The endless indulgence in double entendre, the resort to coded language: I understood, these could be useful tools in a world in which forthrightness was impossible. There was also a lesson learned, perhaps, from Uncle Arthur: You could survive in a treacherous world by being amusing, by being an entertainer. What you felt, you hid, or you encoded; what you said must be witty, and harmless.

By the mid-’90s, when I moved to New York City to write full-time, AIDS had made gay people more visible than ever before. But how? Not the least of the epidemic’s cultural effects was to politicize the question of how gay people were represented in pop culture. No one, needless to tell, was ever happy. If a gay character was the tiniest bit swishy, people would be up in arms denouncing “gay stereotypes”; if a gay character was “straight-acting,” people would be up in arms denouncing assimilation. Even after the most intense period of gay activism had subsided, the issues remained. For some, Will on Will & Grace was too square, not “gay enough”; but then, perhaps Jack was too gay. The central problem, it seemed to me, was that there can’t ever be an accurate representation of gay people on TV, for the very good reason that there isn’t a monolithic “gay person” to be represented.

But by then, when I was often writing about the arts and gay culture (primarily for this magazine, when it first started), it didn’t seem to matter very much. Whatever you thought about them, whether they seemed “realistic” or not, there was a huge smorgasbord of gay characters, from “straight-acting” types to queens to fey boys to jocks, and of gay story lines, on TV, in all sorts of shows: from dramas to sitcoms to cartoons. (Even Homer Simpson got kissed by a man.) That, to me, has always been the point: Like anyone else surfing during prime time, you can at least get some sense of what the options might be. And one of those options, now, if you’re a high school kid with a mad crush on another boy, is that you can let that other boy know how you feel, and that, instead of him turning away and never speaking to you again, he might just give you a kiss.

I can’t imagine, really, how things would have turned out had I been able to watch such a thing in 1975, when I was aching to see what two boys kissing might look like. But I’m sure I’d have felt less like a freak, less like what I secretly wanted was utterly impossible. Well: I was born a generation too early. I like to think that 40 years from now, when the gay kid of 2012 is watching his gay kids watching gays on TV, no one will be crying.

Harvey Milk's America

Normally Out Magazine doesn't have too much worthwhile stuff in it. The new issue, however, had a story I'm glad I read, The Wedding. Not being a huge marriage proponent, at least not on a personal level, I nearly skipped by it. I'm glad I didn't. Basically Tim Murphy, the writer, took what was probably meant to be a cheerleader puff piece and turned it into something thoughtful and interesting. It's about two decadent, superficial, dizzy, spoiled circuit queens who drive a Hummer, a Rolls and a Jag. Challenged, they define themselves as "A list."

I started skimming. Then I got to this:

“I want this to look more documentary-form, not a wedding video,” says Phil. “I want it to be like you’re watching an important moment in time.” He says he wants copies of the video to go out to every gay youth organization in the country. “This is going to help the kids that are dreaming about being married,” he says. “We’re not really doing this so much for us. Some kid in the Midwest will see this and think, You know what? This isn’t a bad thing.”

It brought me back to a moment in time when I was living in San Francisco. I was sitting with a good friend in the backroom of his camera shop. He had recently been elected to the Board of Supervisors (City Council). He opened up a big bag of mail. Tears still come to my eyes when I recall that afternoon, opening and reading those letters, many from young gay people in-- yes, the Midwest who were inspired. One guy from Nebraska wrote about how he had been on the verge of suicide because of being rejected by his parents and his pastor. Harvey Milk's election to public office made him realize that he wasn't alone in the world.

The two party boys in their Dolce & Gabbana and Armani suits... if I thought that was what it meant to be gay I would have committed suicide when I first figured out I was. Judging from the trailer of Milk that I watched today I'm going to guess that people will have an opportunity to see the not Philandean gay America when the film comes out November 26.

Sally Kern (R-OK) Stopped By Police Officer Attempting To Smuggle A Semiautomatic Into Oklahoma Capitol

Dan White & Sally Kern, two dangerous homophobic psychopaths

You may remember the tawdry story of Oklahoma's homophobic maniac Sally Kern. The demented state legislator is back in the news today, having been caught trying to smuggle a gun into the state capitol again. She wasn't arrested yesterday when she was found to be carrying a .380 caliber semiautomatic handgun into the capitol. When my pal Mike Rogers told me about the incident I panicked. I immediately thought of a friend of mine, Andrew Rice, a state senator working in the same building. It was a visceral reaction to the hate-obsessed sociopath Kern has publicly shown herself to be.

My panic was based on another local legislator, Dan White, sneaking a gun into City Hall in November, 1978 and murdering a friend of mine, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, and Mayor George Moscone, the father of another friend. It was a traumatic day for the entire city of San Francisco but especially for the gay community, Harvey having been the first openly gay man elected to any high profile office in America. He was beloved by the entire city but especially by the thousands of gay men and women who he inspired and made feel like they were an accepted part of society. Harvey used to read me letters in the back of his camera shop, letters from young men and women around the country-- from places like Kansas and Alabama and... Oklahoma, letters talking about despair and rejection but about how the national attention Harvey got was bringing them hope and a will to actually go on living. I still can't help but cry when I think about it.

Dan White, like Kern, is a hate-filled and bigoted right-winger. And like Kern he snuck a gun into City Hall. Unlike Kern, he wasn't stopped. He got in with his gun, went to Harvey's office and shot him dead and then went to mayor Moscone's office and shot him too. He later got off on the "Twinkie defense," claiming he had eaten too much sugar and wasn't in control of himself when he murdered the two. After a short time in prison he was released... and quickly found dead, an apparent "suicide."

Patrol spokeswoman Chris West said Republican Rep. Sally Kern was not charged because there did not appear to be any "malicious intent" behind her actions.

West said officers are allowed to "use their brains" when determining if an arrest should be made in such instances.

Let's hope they have brains to use.