San Francisco Mayoral Candidate Debate

A debate between five candidates for San Francisco Mayor was held Monday evening at the new UC San Francisco Law Center building at the corner of McAllister and Hyde.

Supporters of all five candidates marched about on the sidewalk with signage, with Daniel Lurie having the largest turnout.

The gleaming new building is just a stone's throw away from one of the seedier blocks in the Tenderloin but the doorman for the free, fully booked event was genially competent.

San Francisco is a one-party town for Democrats, who were hosting the debate...

...and various schismatic organizations were represented...

...including the San Francisco Young Democrats who were represented by the amiable, not-young volunteers above.

The basement auditorium held about 500 people, and I was reminded once again what a small village San Francisco can sometimes be. I ran into a lovely ex-colleague I had not seen in 30 years who was there to support Mark Farrell. "I went to the same school as him," she explained, and I replied, "Oh, right, you were part of what I used to call the Convent of the Sacred Heart Girls School coven."

The moderator was KRON-TV reporter Terisa Estacio, who did a fine job keeping the answers to their time limits and firmly shutting down a few of Mayor Breed's more boorish supporters. For one of the better descriptions of the political implications of the debate, check out this article at Mission Local by Junyao Yang.

The first candidate to open with a 90-second opening statement was Mark Farrell, former Supervisor from the Marina District and interim mayor for 6 months when Ed Lee dropped dead while in office. In her rebuttal to an accusation by Farrell, London Breed sarcastically called him "temporary mayor" more than once. Farrell's major theme seemed to be "I'm a native-born San Franciscan and have lived here all my life," and "we need police officers who are native-born," which didn't make much sense.

Ahsha Safaí, the District 11 Supervisor from the Southeast, spoke well and presented his boilerplate speeches with skill. San Francisco has a ranked choice voting system so it's possible he could win with enough third place votes.

Daniel Lurie is an heir to the Levi-Strauss fortune and has been involved with left-leaning nonprofits through his adult life. He's being accused of trying to buy the election, but I think his motives are less about power and more about trying to fix the incompetence and corruption of San Francisco government under Mayor London Breed. Lurie, however, projects zero political charisma even though he seems like a smart and thoughtful person.

That incompetence and corruption certainly didn't start with London Breed. It's structural and she's merely been its caretaker. To give her credit, surrounded by white guys in dull suits and ties, she behaved and looked like a charismatic star and she projects pugilistic power which none of her competitors do.

District 3 Supervisor Aaron Peskin has seemingly been around forever, but he only turned 60 on this debate night. I'll be voting for him strictly on the basis of competence. He knows how this government works and he's honest. Will he be able to change the old-fashioned pay-for-play corruption? Probably not, but at least he might make a difference.

White Night Riots Redux

On Friday night, the streets around City Hall were shut down for filming When We Rise, an 8-hour minisieries for ABC about the history of the gay rights movement in San Francisco and beyond. The all-night shoot on Polk Street in front of City Hall was devoted to filming establishing shots of the May 21, 1979 White Night Riots with the violent sequences involving burning police cars and people being clubbed by the police having already been filmed in Vancouver, B.C. a couple of weeks ago.



For those unfamiliar with local history, Supervisor Dan White, who represented "traditional" San Francisco values, murdered leftist SF Mayor George Moscone and gay SF Supervisor Harvey Milk on November 27, 1978 in City Hall. He then turned himself in to an old Catholic high school buddy at a police station and was treated with kid gloves throughout a bungled, lengthy trial, where everything from junk food to leftist agitators were blamed for his assassinations rather than his peevish rage and homophobic bigotry. The verdict of manslaughter with its accompanying light sentence was shocking, inciting a protest march from the Castro to Civic Center which ended in a riot in front of City Hall. This was followed by a rogue contingent of SF Police Department officers beating the crap out of people on the sidewalks and bars of the Castro District before they were ordered to disperse.



For a concise post about what went down that night, click here for Uncle Donald's Castro Street website. There are a few details I would like to add that didn't make it into the historical record, but which struck me as interesting. The verdict was announced in the late afternoon, and I found out about it when a TV news van came screeching to a halt in front of the Twin Peaks bar and a reporter stuck a microphone in front of my face. "What do you think of the verdict?" they asked, and I countered with, "What was the verdict?" "Manslaughter." After expressing my disgust, the reporter's next question was, "Do you think there will be a riot?" and I responded, "I certainly hope so." I was on my way to work out at the City Athletic Club (known to initiates as the Sissy Athletic Club), but grabbed my gym bag and joined the spontaneous, angry march that went down Market Street to City Hall.

At the end of a protest march in those days, there would usually be a microphone or bullhorn set up in front of City Hall along with a roster of speakers, but none of that existed on this evening so nobody quite knew what to do. Somebody finally broke some windows at City Hall and immediately the TV news crew lights popped on. Then, when nothing else violent happened, they would go dark. Another crash and on came the TV lights again. The effect was predictably Pavlovian, and the media-induced vandalism was bizarre to witness as it spiraled out of control.



One of Mayor Moscone's first acts in office was to bring an outsider, Charles Gain, to reform the historically corrupt, insular, thuggish San Francisco Police Department. The Police Officers Association hated Moscone and Gain, and there were credible reports of policemen cheering Dan White when he first showed up at the station for his confession. On the night of the riots, the police inside City Hall were ordered at first by Gain to step down and not to confront the protesters because he didn't trust them to stay in any kind of control. Meanwhile, according to my late friend Mick McMullin, a teenaged Polk Street hustler who was next to him shouted, "Let's get some stuff for fire." The kid then broke plate-glass windows at a Goodyear tire store nearby, and joined with others to throw them into police cruisers, leading to the infamous conflagration of cop cars burning in front of City Hall. This was the final straw and the police were sent out to battle the protesters whose numbers had swelled to the thousands by this point.



Sensing that the scene was going to get seriously violent, I fled and jumped on Muni back to the Castro district, stopping at a few gay bars to spread the news of what I had seen. The response from most of the patrons was "tsk, tsk, this kind of behavior is not good for our image, people should work through the system." This turned out to be darkly ironic in that a rogue battalion of police officers invaded the neighborhood later that evening and beat the crap out of those mostly apolitical drinkers, with the Elephant Walk bar at 18th and Castro bearing the brunt of most of the official mayhem. (The Badlands bar bolted their doors to protect their patrons from the marauding police, trapping everyone inside.)

Before the police riot occurred, I met a friend on the quiet Castro Street sidewalks and we went to his place where we watched TV coverage of the City Hall riot. Leaving his place to go home, I stumbled across a remarkable scene -- thousands of neighborhood residents slowly pushing a phalanx of policemen backwards up Castro Street after their raid as they shouted, "Get out! Get out!" A few minutes after my arrival, word of this rogue operation had finally filtered back to Chief Gain and he ordered everyone out over the radio. I watched as various police officers banged mailboxes, flower boxes, and windows with their batons in violent anger at not being able to smash any more heads. It took six years of frustration and heartache for the owner of the Elephant Walk and its patrons to receive a pitiful settlement from the city of San Francisco (click here for Fred Rogers' account), and to this date there has never been any apology or acknowledgement of this thuggish behavior by the San Francisco Police Department. Chief Gain, by the way, was fired by Mayor Dianne Feinstein in 1980. (Pictured above is Alex, the amiable production assistant directing pedestrian traffic at City Hall on Friday.)



Something else that has been little noted about the evening was that the rioters were not only white, middle-class, young gay men from the Castro neighborhood, but that they were joined by the black underclass from housing projects in the Western Addition nearby. It's the the only time I have seen those two groups in San Francisco standing and fighting together in solidarity in my forty-plus years living in this city. After the White Night Riots, the gay population stopped being beaten up with impunity by the SFPD because the local establishment was publicly shamed internationally. The white, gay middle class was eventually co-opted into the local power structure, culminating in the dreary spectacle of gay Supervisor Scott Weiner cheerleading for embattled SFPD Chief Greg Suhr whose department continues to bash and murder people of color with alarming regularity out of sheer, backwards racism. It is time to put a stop to that kind of behavior too. If you are free, there is to be a march on Tuesday from Mission Police Station at 17th and Valencia to City Hall at 12:30PM with hunger strikers in wheelchairs who are demanding the resignation of Police Chief Suhr, with a rally at City Hall at 2PM.

Dean Preston for D5 Supervisor

On Haight Street near Fillmore stands a mysterious business named the Peacock Lounge and Gold Room, which turns out to be owned and operated by the Unity Mutual Social Club, a group of black Masons that dates from the 1960s.



On Saturday afternoon, there was a free public gathering there to rally volunteers for an SF District Five Supervisor candidate, Dean Preston, and it was a surprisingly smart, hopeful and inspiring occasion.



The Peacock Lounge is a tiny bar, where people were meeting and greeting, including political activists David Talbot and David Salaverry above.



Behind the bar is the "Gold Room," a large multi-purpose area which looked a bit like a church basement, where music and speeches were being given.



The first speaker was San Francisco author David Talbot, who wrote the recently published, brilliant muckracking history of Allen Dulles and the CIA, The Devil's Chessboard. Talbot helped form a group last year called Vision SF that is attempting to wrest control from the tech billionaires like Ron Conway who openly brag about owning City Hall and Mayor Ed Lee. Talbot apologized for reading from a prepared statement called Home, a moving essay about the necessity for a roof over one's head and the indignities associated with being homeless.



District 9 Supervisor David Campos gave a speech talking about how consistently effective Dean Preston has already been in his work as a lawyer and statewide tenant activist. "Dean came to me and asked, can't we come up with legislation to protect San Francisco schoolteachers from being evicted from their homes in the middle of a school year?" Campos related. "It's a simple enough idea, which just about everyone can agree with, and the legislation is being brought to the Board of Supervisors this week."



Former District 5 Supervisors Christina Olague and Matt Gonzalez followed with their heartfelt endorsements. Gonzalez mentioned that current District 5 Supervisor London Breed was a bad fit for the district, which has historically been one of the most liberal voting blocs in the city and the country. "That's a strange thing to say because Breed was born and raised in the district and she's smart and capable, but her constituents deserve someone who isn't twisting themselves into compromises with Airbnb and others ravaging this city."



Finally, the candidate himself gave a smart speech acknowledging that he was facing an uphill battle in trying to unseat an incumbent, but that the effort was worth it. "This wouldn't be possible without district elections, but there are only 35,000 people to reach and we plan on meeting almost all of them."



"This is a completely ground-up campaign, with meetings in every neighborhood to discover their individual issues and how they can organize themselves to make a difference at City Hall. It's amazing how different each neighborhood is, from the Inner Sunset to the Fillmore to the Haight, none of which really talk to each other. Part of what we're trying to do is organize these groups so they have some collective power going forward, whether we win this race or not." The candidate managed to steer away from the usual political posturing cliches, and his positive message was refreshing. He certainly has my vote this November.

Wicked City Hall

San Francisco City Hall has been lit a startling shade of green this evening. The occasion could be a St. Patricks Day themed corporate event party, or it could be a promotional effort for the umpteenth return of the musical Wicked at the Orpheum. It could also be sly artistic commentary by whoever is in charge of the outdoor City Hall lighting scheme, a striking visualization of our current greedy, dysfunctional, pay-to-play San Francisco government.

Politicking at the 2015 Castro Street Fair

The annual Castro Street Fair has turned into one of the sweetest little street festivals in San Francisco.



For decades, it was a huge, claustrophic scene like the Haight Street or Folsom Street Fair, but it has somehow managed to downscale into a manageable crowd where you can run into old friends you haven't bumped into for years.



It probably helps that the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival absorbs tens of thousands of free concertgoers in Golden Gate Park on the same Sunday, and that most gay sex tourists have literally come and gone the weekend before at Folsom Street.



There are a few nods to the gay, nudist, hippie-ish beginnings of the event in the 1970s such as a body painting tent in front of the Castro Theatre, but that particular bacchanalian energy no longer seems to exist on San Francisco's public streets, for better or worse.



What did stand out at the fair was how many people were politicking for various politicians and propositions in advance of next month's elections.



The handsome young man with the megaphone above looked like he could have fit seamlessly into the Castro of the 1970s, and he was busking for a pie-throw-at-the-politician fundraiser for the Harvey Milk Democratic Club.



District 6 Supervisor Jane Kim was one of the victims, but nobody seemed to want to throw a pie at her, possibly because violence towards women is a current topic of awareness.



A cute young heterosexual couple asked me why Kim was at the Castro pie-throwing booth since this wasn't her supervisorial district. "That's because this is for the leftie Harvey Milk Democratic Club, and she's friends and sometimes allies with them, while the right-wing real estate lesbians and gays are at the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club booth up the street, and they're BFFs with Scott Weiner, who is the supervisor for this district and who is thankfully nowhere in sight."



I continued, "Most of this is just sectarian schisms, though. It's all about being an insider and having a piece of power, which unfortunately flows directly from the old-time criminal cabal which actually runs San Francisco, badly. There's no way they become one of the insiders without being co-opted."



Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi (above right) was campaigning personally for reelection on Sunday, while his opponent Vicky Hennessy was represented by a pair of odd looking sign carriers. Mirkarimi used to be a part of the City Family when he was on the Board of Supervisors, but he crossed the cabal by running for Sheriff against an approved candidate and narrowly winning. His subsequent vilification for domestic violence by the DA, SFPD, San Francisco Chronicle, Mayor Ed Lee, the SF Ethics Commission, every city-sponsored domestic violence nonprofit in the Bay Area, and various Supervisors was strangely over-the-top and revealed more about how San Francisco is governed than was probably intended.



Up the street, the gay-focused Bay Area Reporter weekly newspaper, which has always had a capitalist, politically conservative slant, was offering a raffle for tickets to the San Francisco Opera House appearance of the ultimate current public distraction.

Gentrified Out of San Francisco

Seemingly half of the Mission District showed up at City Hall on Tuesday afternoon and evening for the weekly Board of Supervisors meeting. The legislative body was considering a short moratorium offered up by Supervisor Campos on the construction of market-rate, luxury housing developments in the neighborhood. The rationale was to try and come up with a plan, any plan, to slow the tsunami of gentrification and its attendant evictions of mostly working class Latins, many who had been born and raised in the neighborhood.



There were dozens of heartbreaking stories being told during the two-minute speeches, and one of the saddest was from the young man above who talked about not being able to sleep until 5AM the previous night while sharing a bed in a single room occupancy hotel with his father.



Not all of the speeches were downbeat. The gentleman above passionately excoriated the Supervisors and Mayor Ed Lee in Spanish, while his instantaneous English translator tried to articulate, "you are all whores for moneyed interests rather than advocates for your constituents." I'm paraphrasing from memory, but the Spanish was brilliant.



So was Sandra Sandoval above right whose theatrical condemnation of what has been done to her neighborhood by drunk white tech bros ("I can't even take my son to Dolores Park anymore") was being studiously ignored by appointed District 3 Supervisor Christensen, on her laptop top left. The Supervisor had announced at the beginning of the meeting that she was voting against the moratorium because it wouldn't do any good, and she then proceeded to stare at her computer and ignore every public speaker from her front row desk for the remainder of the evening.



Former District Six Supervisor Chris Daly called the Mayor's Office and the current Board of Supervisors "guilty of malfeasance," and he was joined by a few other gringos who were supporting the moratorium.



Almost all of the speakers urging a no vote on the moratorium were white, including a large turnout from the Irish-accented Residential Builders Association. A few of them looked genuinely troubled by the issue of families losing their homes and some of them offered suggestions, such as "Legislate against the tenancies-in-common loophole which is driving so many of these evictions, but don't stop building."



There were also a number of unempathetic souls who were intent on proving their point(s) about how economics really works, and their insensitivity to anyone other than themselves was disturbing to watch in this context.



What's happening in San Francisco is not unique, since the same sort of economic drivers are pushing people without enough money out of London, New York, Los Angeles and a host of other cities. There are too many people in the world, their number is increasing by the second, and widening income inequality only exacerbates the stressful situation.



The Mission moratorium was strictly symbolic, an unfortunate tendency of Supervisor Campos, but the anger and despair in the Board chambers last night were real. San Francisco natives just announced that they are getting very restless.

Police Murder Protest at SF City Hall

At 2:30 this afternoon, there were assorted clumps of San Francisco policemen surrounding City Hall.



They were on the front steps on Van Ness Avenue, scattered across Civic Center Plaza...



...and stationed on Polk Street between Grove and McAllister Streets.



There was a small protest on the Polk Street stairway entrance to City Hall with signage in Spanish and English decrying racist police executions both locally and nationally.



One of the doorways into City Hall was locked and a few kids were banging loudly on the door.



The doorway adjoining was open, so I walked in and was greeted by a wild scene.



The security checkpoints with metal detectors had been abandoned, while a contingent of Sheriffs stood unmoving at either side of the small crowd of mostly young people creating all the mayhem.



The most surreal sights were the women standing on top of the sheriff's security checkpoint desks leading chants against police brutality.



I walked outside and around the corner to the basement McAllister Street entrance, and was greeted by a pleasant, dreadlocked Sheriff's deputy who said, "I just saw you with your video camera on my security camera, you must have gotten some great shots," and I confessed to only carrying a still camera. I went upstairs through the North Light Court, where a catering operation was being set up for a luxury, private party in City Hall that evening, just another surrealistic detail.



The young protestors had arrived at City Hall around 1PM for speeches on the Polk Street stairs, and a number of them had found seating at the weekly 2PM Board of Supervisors meeting on the second floor, and when the meeting started, all hell broke loose with shouting and chants, so that the room was emptied and the Supervisors meeting went into temporary recess. (For an account by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez at the SF Examiner, click here.) By 3:00, when I showed up, the meeting had already resumed.



The protest and the mute, unmoving law enforcement presence reached a standoff. The rotunda area needed to be secured so party setup could get underway.



In a heartening postscript, there were a few bright, articulate, young black protestors who made their way into the Board of Supervisors chambers at 3PM and waited until 6PM to testify during two-minute Public Comments, which I just watched on the Channel 26 Government Access station. The speakers nailed the majority of Supervisors, particularly London Breed and Malia Cohen without naming them, to a wall of shame for selling out their constituents so completely.