The SF Chronicle interviews newly single Mayor Gavin Newsom and Planet Out honcho Lowell Selvin, both advancing the cause in various ways from the Bay Area. Some choice quotes:
“Since becoming mayor at 36, four acts have defined him in unexpected ways. Marrying men to men and women to women; joining a picket line of locked-out chambermaids and busboys; spending his weekends hanging out in Bayview and Hunters Point; and tackling the city’s most intractable problem, homelessness, with his controversial Care Not Cash program.
You could be cynical about any of Newsom’s actions, and notice that the constituencies to whom he has been appealing — African Americans, labor, gays — are those he did not do well with in the 2003 election. But every political moment is an opportunity and all political acts are opportunistic. What matters is which opportunities a politician chooses to seize.”
I was born in the projects in Brooklyn, N.Y., and mostly raised outside of Washington, D.C., in suburbia and then outside Chicago for high school in Des Plaines, Ill. I then went to University of Illinois, where I studied sensory perceptual psychology and aeronautical astronautical engineering.
That’s where I met my partner in 1979. I’m one of those who didn’t understand my gayness until much later in life. My partner would argue that as soon as he opened his eyes, he knew he was gay.
I didn’t realize that I was gay until I looked across a crowded room and saw someone that my soul fell in love with before I did. And that was my partner.
