What’s coming to Bay Area art museums this coming season.
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Five years after Hurricane Katrina, gays and lesbians gear up for the hot Southern party.
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Fall preview: Museums
– ut e s. in al ko nl on ec r o ers Ch rte p po nd Re , a a s re fied y A ssi Ba cla he ts, s t ar It’ s, w ne
New Orleans is ready for ‘Decadence’
see Arts
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BAYAREAREPORTER
Vol. 40
. No. 34 . 26 August 2010
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Serving the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities since 1971
LGBT New Leaf closing its doors nonprofits hurt by A recession
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agement. All of that was compounded by the economic crisis. One of the contributors was the agency’s lease, which Lynch said was “expensive” at nearly $33,000 per month, and has three and a half years left. City budget cuts were also a factor, he said. “We’ve explored every possible way that we could to have the organization continue,” said Lynch, no longer hopeful that an “angel” philanthropist who could afford $300,000 or more a year to support the agency will appear. “But it’s not only about the organization continuing. It’s about providing good services. There comes a
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Issues remain in Prop 8 federal case analysis by Rex Wockner Attorneys Theodore Olson and David Boies speak at a news conference during the federal Prop 8 trial.
arious legal documents will be filed and then the federal Proposition 8 case will be argued in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals the week of December 6. And there’s little chance California’s statewide and local LGBT activists will talk about much else between now and then. So what’s the Prop 8 chitchat here on the Left Coast? There are several issues.
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Governor, AG Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Attorney General Jerry Brown (a former governor who’s running for governor again), and everyone else who was sued in the federal case known as Perry v. Schwarzenegger have refused to defend Prop 8 in court. Schwarzenegger and Brown say Prop 8 is unconstitutional, that gay and lesbian couples should be able to marry right now, and that there should not have been a stay issued pending appeal. Because of their refusals, Prop 8’s only defenders are the defendant-intervenors from protectmarriage.com, the folks who brought you Prop 8 in the first place. But in what has emerged as a central question in the case, the defendant-intervenors may not have legal standing to function as defendants at the appellate level. Nobody sued these folks in this case, and these folks have nothing to do with defending the state constitution, of which Prop 8 is a part. That’s Brown and Schwarzenegger’s job. The 9th Circuit has ordered these Prop 8 proponents to prove they even have standing to file an appeal. There is at least a 50-50 chance they’ll be kicked out of the case.
Imperial County That brings us to Imperial County, a poor, dusty place of about 167,000 people located in the desert between San Diego County and the Arizona border. Imperial County, represented by a Christian legal group, wants to enter the case as a real defendant so the ruling that struck down Prop 8 really can be appealed to the 9th Circuit. The 9th Circuit will make that call as well. Many observers think it’s a long shot, but, of course, courts are often unpredictable and the
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he vast majority of LGBT nonprofit organizations in the Bay Area have been negatively affected by the economic recession, according to a survey from the San Francisco-based Horizons Horizons Foun- Foundation dation. Executive Director The survey in- Roger Doughty dicates that 96 percent of respondents, which offer assistance in fields ranging from health care to legal advocacy, have been hurt by the recession. Layoffs and cuts to services are among the changes agencies have had to make. The survey is “an attempt to get information that could be useful for the organizations themselves,” and show them whether other groups are having similar experiences, said Roger Doughty, executive director of Horizons, which gathers funding from various sources and funnels it primarily – but not exclusively – to LGBT organizations. Doughty said the aim is also to get “a reality picture” in front of donors that will serve as “a call to action.” The survey was first launched in late April. Horizons approached about 75 organizations to complete the online survey, said Doughty. Of those, 52 responded. Most of the respondents were San Francisco nonprofits, but agencies from around the Bay Area took part, Doughty said. Among other findings, 46 percent of respondents reported layoffs in the past 18 months, while 43 percent reported having to reduce employee hours. An ominous sign of the difficulty in which nonprofits find themselves was the news that New Leaf: Services for Our Community, will close in October. [See story, page 1.] Thom Lynch, the interim executive director, said New Leaf, which provides mental health, substance abuse, and senior services, participated in the Horizons survey. Another indicator is data from the survey around future layoffs. While 32.7 percent of the respondents said layoffs are “unlikely but possible” at their agencies, 16.3 percent said there will “maybe” be layoffs. Another 8.2 percent said layoffs are “likely but not certain,” and 8.2 percent of the respondents reported they anticipate laying off staff. Another survey participant was the Stop AIDS Project, which works to prevent HIV transmission among gay and bisexual men in San Francisco. Kyriell Noon, the agency’s executive director, said Stop AIDS has seen declines “in all the arenas,” including government
point where the quality of the services is so damaged that we just can’t continue to do that fairly to the clients or the community.” New Leaf wasn’t at that point yet, but was rapidly heading toward it, Lynch said. At the beginning of August he informed Garcia, who worked with New Leaf ’s management on a 60day plan to dissolve the organization and vacate the Fox Plaza administrative offices at 1390 Market Street and the clinical offices around the corner at 103 Hayes Street. Garcia wanted to ensure a rapid, but smooth, transition of services to other agencies and to make the change as seamless as possible. It also provided time for the agency’s management to properly execute the dissolution plan. The city will acquire the agency’s assets once state Attorney General Jerry Brown approves the plan. But the truth is, in the end, one of the city’s pillar queer organizations is a pauper in need of $50,000 to close its doors, Lynch estimated. Garcia praised New Leaf ’s leadership for the agency’s handling of the difficult situation.
9th Circuit might really want to find a way for Prop 8 proponents to have their appeal of Chief U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker’s August 4 ruling that Prop 8 violates the U.S. Constitution.
Findings of fact If the Protect Marriage folks are allowed to function as defendants, they may attempt to sidestep Walker’s 80-some findings of fact from the trial court decision and start from scratch, arguing that gays are hard to define and nobody knows what makes you gay, that morality and religion provide a legally acceptable “rational basis” for governments to discriminate against gays in some ways, that marriage is obviously primarily about making babies the old-fashioned way, and what have you. It will be up to the 9th Circuit to decide how much weight Walker’s comprehensive findings carry in an appeal. Legally speaking, those are evidentiary facts. There’s something else that can be brought into a courtroom: legislative facts. For the sake of simplicity, a legislative fact is something of such general knowledge that it need not be proven, or
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cannot be proven even though everyone knows it’s true. “Love is real” might be an example of a legislative fact. The Prop 8 proponents could head down this road in an attempt to restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples, arguing, among other things that “marriage is between a man and a woman – period.” Of course, in the Bible, marriage is sometimes between a man and several women. And starting in 2001 with the Netherlands, 12 countries have decided that marriage also is between a man and a man, and a woman and a woman. One of those countries is the U.S. Same-sex marriage is legal in Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Washington, D.C. “Marriage is for procreation” could be another attempted legislative fact, despite the fact that millions of married straight people never have procreated.
Judge outed The mainstream media have outed Walker as gay, even though various outlets have presented no evidence and Walker hasn’t said anything about his sexual orientation one way or the
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by Seth Hemmelgarn
n LGBT nonprofit that provides mental health, substance abuse, and senior services announced this week that it has run out of money and will close its doors by the middle of October. The board of directors of New Leaf: Services for Our Community voted unanimously August 15 at an emergency meeting to begin the process to dissolve the agency, which turned 35 this year. The closure is due to the fact that the agency is no longer fiscally sustainable, Thom Lynch, interim executive director of New Leaf, and Barbara Garcia, deputy director of health at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, told the Bay Area Reporter Monday. “There were a lot of tears around the table. Some of the board members were former clients at New Leaf; one was a long-term client. This hits people personally,” said Lynch, who stepped into the troubled organization 10 months ago in an attempt to fix it. “It’s very, very sad, but I’m also really proud of the organization for taking
a really hard look at itself and making a tough decision.” The deadly mix: a dearth of necessary financial resources combined with rising operational costs on top of high operational expenses. Some former employees also pointed to poor man-
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by Heather Cassell