The Gay Marriage Circus in Civic Center Plaza

Pro and anti Proposition 8 advocates were out in force Thursday morning in Civic Center Plaza...



...many of them watching a big screen live broadcast of the arguments at the California Supreme Court across the street on McAllister.



The majority of the crowd consisted of gay marriage proponents who wanted Proposition 8 overturned by the court, but on the fringes of the crowd there were small groups arguing with the anti-gay marriage advocates...



...most of whom seemed to be wearing red T-shirts emblazoned with Marriage 1 Man 1 Woman on the front and presumably the same message in Chinese on the back.



In San Francisco's City Hall, with its "Spiraling Echoes" soundscape bouncing around...



...there were three young people with red T-shirts standing around the Harvey Milk statue which seemed beyond irony.



The questions from the Supreme Court judges were not particularly promising for those who are hoping they will rule Proposition 8 unconstitutional...



...but that didn't stop the religious zealots from carrying their "Stop Judicial Tyranny" signage around...



...in the middle of the gay rights crowd.



Favorite signage of the day goes to Jack Fertig, above, who in another incarnation was a gay man working at the Jewish Community Center who became Sister Boom Boom and helped found the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Thirty-plus years down the road, Mr. Fertig has become a Muslim for the last six years, and in that role was pointing out the hypocrisy of Christians demanding religious laws trump all other. "Church and state need to be separated completely," he told me, to which I replied "Amen."

A Bomb Threat and a Gay Marriage Rally

MUNI bus rides during rush hour in San Francisco can be hellish at the best of times, but Wednesday evening on Van Ness was particularly nightmarish.



It took about fifteen minutes to go three blocks up Van Ness at 4:30 PM from Market to Grove, where police had set up roadblocks because there was supposedly a suspicious object at a bus shelter above.



The police and fire squads seemed to be having a jolly time but as usual they didn't bother interacting with the bus drivers or citizens who were actually trying to get somewhere so the scene was utter chaos.



Never mind that that a bomb has never gone off in San Francisco. Law enforcement have all been trained to be extra diligent in these Homeland Security times and to hell with anybody else's inconvenience.



The one-block stretch of Van Ness between Grove and McCallister was closed for over three hours in both directions, and yet nobody bothered to tell bus passengers standing further north on Van Ness that no bus was going to be picking them up and taking them South of Market or to the Mission District.



To add to the civic confusion, a couple of thousand people marched from the Castro district at 6PM down Market Street to City Hall for a rally in support of overturning Proposition 8 in the California Supreme Court on Thursday.



Though the march and rally had nothing to do with the "bomb threat," it all blended into one Civic Center stew, with both Van Ness and Polk streets closed by the police.



Even Abraham Lincoln got into the act.

The Coast Starlight

My mother has a brain tumor and recently it became inflamed which was causing her to fall down a lot.



A couple of weeks ago I jumped on Amtrak's Coast Starlight train at Oakland to help out over a long weekend.



The train trip was during a break in our welcome February rains that have been staving off a full-blown California drought.



The trip couldn't have been more beautiful and it was absurdly cheap, $32 for a one-way ticket from Oakland to San Luis Obispo, and for the first time in my experience, the southbound train was actually on time.



Traveling on a train is one of the more sensual experiences in the world, as much as traveling on ships, both with their constant motion and rocking.



Fellow passengers were an amusingly eccentric lot and lunch in the diner felt like a flashback to another time. I shared the meal with three strangers, including the delightful Noe Valley woman above who had just lost her job and was taking advantage of it by visiting an old friend in Los Osos.



The young man above was creating his own documented train trip...



...and seemed to be having a blast.



My mother's getting surgery tomorrow to shunt fluid from her brain to her stomach which should take the pressure off and help her recover for a while.

Update: My mother came through the surgery just fine, and I'm sure it had everything to do with the kind wishes and prayers from all of you. Thank you.

Zane Blaney and the Death of Access SF

Last Monday, February 23rd, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Rules Committee was the site of a hearing looking into the proposed drastic funding cuts to Channels 29 and 76, the public acess television stations on Comcast cable TV. Their proposed annual grant is being reduced from $800,000 to $120,000 in June of this year.



New California legislation had been written in 2006 that was heavily influenced by both AT&T and Comcast which included language that absolved it from funding any of the costs of labor or rent at the public access, educational, or government television stations that are carried through the cable channel.



Interestingly, this year's $929,626 Access SF budget includes $200,000 for rent at their studio on Market and Valencia Streets and over $550,000 in employee salaries including benefits (click here for the full budget). This is because after being something of an anarchic, volunteer-run collective from the 1970s to the end of the twentieth century, the operation was taken over by a nonprofit called the San Francisco Community Television Corporation.



This organization was headed by Zane Blaney (above) who was in cahoots with somebody at the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services (DITS) at City Hall. Mr. Blaney then proceeded to install himself and a half dozen, mostly gay aides to be in charge of the station, and they have proven to be a lethal combo of inept and dictatorial, driving out many of the volunteer producers who actually created content for the station. Some of the front-line "facilitators" have tried their best to be helpful, but they have a hard road navigating between the abusiveness of management and the lunacy of some of the producers.



In 2003-04, I created a 52-episode show called "FotoTales" which ran over the course of two years. When I first walked into the station, it felt like a civil war was raging between the new regime and the old producers. I didn't have a stake in either camp, but after witnessing management's ugly harassment of their most gifted employees, it became clear there was something very rotten going on. (Click here for a good account by Michael Faklis.) Before writing this post, I called a few longtime producers who still had shows and asked whether things were still the same at the station. "If anything, it's just gotten worse" seemed to be the consensus.



The previous incarnation of public access at the 15th and Folsom studios had a surprisingly large black contingent of producers, and the many "suspensions" and disciplinary actions taken by Blaney and Aaron Vinck, the "assistant CEO," were directed disproportionately towards its black population. (Click here for an SF Weekly story with an example.) As a white gay dude, I found myself embarrassed by many of their actions, especially towards people I adored such as Idell (above).



The hearing was being spearheaded by Supervisor Mirkarimi but it was essentially symbolic, asking the state and the feds to change the law, or as my friend h. brown put it, "closing the barn door after the horse has already gotten out." There will be a full Board vote on the resolution urging the fed and the states to Do Something on Tuesday the 4th.



There should be another large turnout of public commenters who have confused the survival of public access with the survival of Zane Blaney and his nonprofit. A few of them, such as Idell, have no such confusion, and used their commenting time to ask for a change in management at the station. The supervisors, however, insisted that was a completely separate issue, "and we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater."



Throwing the baby out with the bathwater may be the only way to dislodge Mr. Blaney and his aides from their nonprofit jobs for life. A major disaster is arriving with the global financial meltdown this year and one of the few compensations is that change often happens after old structures are destroyed. The only way the "San Francisco Chronicle" is ever going to get any better, for instance, is after it dies, which will allow a different group of people to start something new. The same is probably true for public media access in San Francisco.