Newsom and Then Some

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

Gavin Newsom and Bill Clinton came to Los Angeles this week. I wasn’t there. (I’m leaving my house these days about as much as Brian Wilson or Nikki Finke.) But I did get to answer an exciting telephone call from Janice Hahn’s polling firm: apparently Councilwoman Hahn is thinking about running for lieutenant governor, and they included my Gavin in their polling. Would I vote for him for governor? Yes. Would I vote for him for lieutenant governor? Yes. Will I vote for him on a boat, and with a goat, and however else he likes it? (You know he’s a total perv.) Yes, I will.

Gavin Newsom

But Hahn’s polling firm was a leetle bit pushy, wanting to know if I’d be “less inclined” to vote for someone who was affiliated with the dastardly legislature and its dastardly budget mess, at which point I yelped that the budget mess was the fault of the Republicans for holding it hostage and the California voters who had mandated a super majority for its passage, which of course the guy on my telephone was not interested in hearing, and chided me to listen to the whole question before answering. As if! My point is I hadn’t actually heard of Dean Florez until the call, but it made me want to vote for him over Hahn and her scuzzy pollsters, unless my Gavin is bigfooted out of the governor’s race by Jerry Brown, which, knowing Jerry Brown, he will.

My mama loves Brown like I love Newsom; she may write about him if she likes. In my house, he is the enemy. Like Hillary Clinton once, before she became Secretary of State and got awesome in a hurry.

How can you write about Gavin Newsom (D–Funkytown) without sounding like Maureen Dowd? How can you separate San Francisco’s mayor from his status as heterosexiest man alive? You can’t even think about that tall drink of man without conjuring up his six-foot-three inches, and his voice, rougher and raspier than a cat’s tongue, and his Edwardsian perfect coif. Men want to be him; women want to slip him a mickey. It would be so much easier if Gavin Newsom looked like Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster, who is old and sports a kind of John Boehner tan and somehow resembles an unsexy version of Old Handsome Joe Biden.

But Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster, despite the gravitas that comes from no one wanting to touch him with their 10-foot-pole, isn’t getting elected governor of California anytime soon, because he is boring, and nobody has ever heard of him (even Long Beachers haven’t heard of him), and he doesn’t do thrilling things like wake up one morning and say, “Fuck it, who wants to get gay married today?”

Of course, heading up the list of people who aren’t getting elected governor of California anytime soon is Mayor (D–Sex City) Gavin Newsom.

It isn’t that Gavin Newsom shouldn’t get elected governor of California anytime soon. He should! He should! For Christ’s sake, San Francisco’s got single-payer healthcare! If L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa hadn’t-not-run and Jerry Brown had (not run) in the Democratic primary, our Gavin would take it in a base-thrilling walk. Gay marriage! Kyoto Protocol! Single-payer, for fuck’s sake!

It isn’t really fair, because it was S.F. Supervisor Tom Ammiano who spearheaded Healthy San Francisco, which offers medical treatment to any single person making up to $52,000 a year (for a family of four, a little over $100,000) while charging less than we pay for car insurance, and yet it’s Sir Sex-A-Lot who gets the credit.

And while San Francisco’s signing of the Kyoto Protocol is sort of imaginary, since it’s not a nation and all, Villaraigosa’s actually got L.A. ahead of schedule on meeting actual Kyoto Protocol targets for renewable energy. But nobody knows that because everybody sort of stopped listening to him after he got busted with that superhot newslady—and then that second one—and then had to give up the dream. (You remember: the Golden Dream by the Sea, as nasally intoned by Maria Shriver.) Which is also not fair, because Gavin Newsom apparently has carte blanche to just bone himself whatever lady he wants, like he is the king and it is your olden-times wedding day. I guess Villaraigosa’s going to have to try to be more delicious.

But the question is moot, because everybody knows Jerry Brown is strolling in and taking the race in an easy walk, no matter how much Bill Clinton campaigns against him. Brown, of course, just cold takes whatever he wants, like Dick Cheney or a Mafia don.

But let’s stop talking about the governor’s race, because frankly I am the world’s worst prognosticator. (I called the last governor’s race for human nastygram Tom McClintock.) Let’s talk instead about something that’s actually important. Let’s talk about love.

Do you remember the morning in 2004 when Gavin Newsom announced that gay men and women could come to San Francisco City Hall, and they could pledge their lives and hearts and bodies to one another, just like they were real live people? I remember. I wept—sobbed—as I looked at the morning papers filled with above-the-fold photos of beautiful couples smiling shy-and-tenderly. I cried when I read that out-of-town folks could buy flowers from area florists to deliver to whichever ecstatic pairs were hanging out in line on the City Hall steps. I like to think I sent some flowers too, but it may be one of those false memories, like people who claim they were at Woodstock and actually believe it.

gay marriage cake

It was marvelous, and it went on and on, and the young mayor of New Paltz in upstate New York caught the fever and started marrying people too, and it was all so grand and imbued with the most beautiful civil disobedience (the mayor of New Paltz, Jason West, actually faced criminal charges filed against him by the local prosecutor for solemnizing marriages for people without licenses) until the California Supreme Court stepped in and annulled the marriages that San Francisco had consecrated.

Many blamed Newsom for the sad passage of Prop 8, when gay marriage opponents aired an ad that showed him laughing that gay marriage would eventually come to be “whether you like it or not.” Prop 8 overturned the California Supreme Court’s decision, four years after annulling San Francisco’s marriage licenses, that ruled that keeping marriage from gay men and women violated their civil rights. (The opinion was written by Chief Justice Ronald George, a Republican.) Many blamed the black community. But as far as I can tell, the only people to blame for the terrible victory of Prop 8 were the No on 8 campaign staff themselves. They refused to show any actual gay couples, or any actual gay families, and used instead a vague, confusing message based on “taking away rights” that never even used the words gay marriage. (Until all the way at the end of the campaign, when Mr. Samuel L. Jackson narrated a commercial that referenced, as it should have all along, California laws that banned black people and Latinos from marrying whites and the no-brainer that discrimination is wrong; it wasn’t until 1967 that the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional.) If the No on 8 numbskulls believed they had to hide what they were trying to sell, that they had to somehow trick people into approving gay marriage, that gay marriage was too dirty and divisive to behold, then how could they expect anyone else to embrace it?

What California lost is now law in Massachusetts and Iowa, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Maine (for a minute anyway; their No on Gay Marriage folks are using our No on Gay Marriage folks’ playbook to the letter), and what Gavin Newsom imagined has been made real. I love me some single-payer healthcare, and I love the Kyoto treaty, and I love all manner of other good progressive happy things, but this is the one. He did this. He didn’t jump on anyone else’s bandwagon; he built the bandwagon from the ground up. He’s not just handsome (so, allegedly, was Dan Quayle). He’s more than just a pretty face. Even if it is one you’d really want to sit on.

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