Monthly Newsletter of the Alice B. Toklas Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Democratic Club
May 2005

Table of Contents

• Dates With Alice
• Co-Chairs' Report: LGBT Democrats United
  A Triumph at the 2005 California Democratic Party Convention
• Reese's World: Perspectives from the Editor: Ode to Mabel
• California Democratic Party LGBT Caucus: Report From the Convention
• Tributes to Mabel Teng
• Farewell to our Friend Mabel Teng
• For Whom Mabel Toils
• Alice Membership Form
  

Dates With Alice

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Co-Chairs' Report
LGBT Democrats United
A Triumph at the 2005 California Democratic Party Convention

On April 17, 2005, something unprecedented happened: the California Democratic Party went on record in support of full marriage equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Californians. The party convention in Los Angeles overwhelming supported a resolution tracking Assemblyman Mark Leno’s pending bill that would end discrimination in the issuance of marriage licenses. Our advocacy for this resolution – former and current Alice board members worked hard for it – was instrumental in its passage, and we should all be proud of that.

Support of marriage equality by the Democratic Party, however, is just the beginning of the fight. Whatever happens with Assemblyman Leno’s bill, there almost certainly will be an anti-marriage constitutional amendment on the June 2006 ballot, one that would ban not just same-sex marriage but also domestic partnerships. It’s a chilling prospect.

Understanding that passage of the anti-marriage initiative would be a disaster, leaders of LGBT Democratic Clubs throughout California met at the convention in LA to begin organizing and plotting strategy. I represented Alice B. Toklas at the meeting. Former Milk Club Presidents Debra Walker and Michael Goldstein represented Milk. Others represented clubs stretching from San Diego, to the Inland Empire, to Fresno, to Sacramento, and beyond.

We talked about what we needed to do to ensure a strong and coordinated campaign to defeat the anticipated initiative. We agreed to create a statewide umbrella organization of LGBT Democratic Clubs to make sure that in fighting the initiative, we speak with one voice. The organization will allow us to participate in a coordinated campaign, including fundraising, field work, and so forth. The political experience of these clubs, individually and combined, is enormous, and we will make a significant contribution to the “No” campaign.

The convening of this meeting, however, has a greater, long-term significance. Whatever happens with the initiative, our fight will go on for years in California. It is critical for LGBT Democrats to be united, to have ongoing communication, and to coordinate strategy. Coordination among LGBT Democratic Clubs also ensures that we continue to have a powerful voice within the Democratic Party. When we work together, we are strong, and heaven knows, we will need strength in the upcoming years.

Alice B. Toklas will play a significant role in the new coalition, and we will be proud to represent San Francisco LGBT Democrats in this effort.


Scott Wiener
Alice Co-Chair

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Reese's World: Perspectives from the Editor
Ode to Mabel

Oh! How we will miss Ms. Mabel! Oh! How we will miss Ms. Teng! Oh! How we will miss our Mabel! She’s the reason that I sing. No matter when there might be doubt About our issues and cause; She’d always utilize her clout And offer help with the laws. When we were ready to marry Lesser Assessor’s might balk; But our civil rights she carried; She knows how to walk the walk. For marriage she did change the forms To make them neutral gender; More than her duties she performed; She was our best defender. O’er the years she’s showered Alice; She’s opened power hallways; Now we shall all raise our chalice; And show her we’ll thank her always. Moreover, she’s one with GAPA; LGBT API-- Groups hope this won’t be her capper; All hear our rallying cry. Oh! How we will miss Ms. Mabel! Oh! How we will miss Ms. Teng! Oh! How we will miss our Mabel! She’s the reason that I sing. Reese Aaron Isbell, M.P.P. Editor

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California Democratic Party LGBT Caucus
Report From the Convention

For folks who have never attended a California Democratic Party Convention it is difficult to describe the intensity of being steeped in pure politics for three days. Once a year we have a unique opportunity to network with other activists from around the state and our elected representatives. The official party business happens at the caucus meetings, committee meetings and general sessions but even more important is the scene in the hallways and late night parties. If you eat and breathe politics, the convention is like spending a weekend at Disneyland.

There are eighteen party caucuses organized around ethnic, affinity and interest groups. While some business is conducted at caucus meetings, they are principally vehicles for elected officials and candidates to show their respect by attending and addressing the group.

At the LGBT Caucus we completed a solid agenda at the LGBT caucus meeting and also heard from dozens of visitors.

Initially we conduced officer elections where I was honored to be re-elected caucus co-chair, joined in the leadership once again by other San Francisco superstars Debra Walker as vice chair and Joan Roughgarden as secretary. Joan, an Alice Board member and transgender biology professor at Stanford University, recently completed her most recent book, Evolution’s Rainbow, about sexual and gender diversity in the nature. It's well worth checking out.

During our business agenda, we passed resolutions adding our official support to civil marriage legislation (AB19) and transgender insurance nondiscrimination (AB1586). We presented the caucus work plan and announced the launch of our caucus website demqueers.com. We also heard an intriguing presentation from Joan Roughgarden on the issue of whether it is ultimately possible to legally define who is a man and who is a woman given the fluidity of gender identity.

We were honored to have the incomparable Alice Huffman, president of the California NAACP, to reiterate her courageous support for marriage equality. Despite the criticism from within her own community, Alice is standing firmly with us in support of the civil marriage legislation. Her one request was for LGBT folks to join the NAACP in a show of solidarity. So if you can spare thirty bucks, please to www.ca-naacp.org to join or renew. After doing so, please send the club a message at info@alicebtoklas.org which we will forward to Alice Huffman so she can relay to the national NAACP board our commitment to strengthening our coalition. We must not allow the right wing to succeed in cravenly using gay marriage to drive a wedge between the African American and LGBT communities.

Throughout our caucus meeting we were honored to have visits from our LGBT allies in the state legislature. Our beloved Assemblyman Mark Leno was joined by Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, Assemblyman John Laird, and Senator Carole Migden – herself a former caucus chair.

State constitutional officers also checked in. Treasurer Phil Angelides, Controller Steve Westly and Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi were well received by the caucus. We were also delighted to have Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown stop by as well as several state senators, assemblymembers, and local elected officials including San Francisco’s own Supervisor Fiona Ma.

I would like to sincerely thank Alice Co-Chair Scott Wiener for volunteering to greet and organize the guest speakers as they arrived – surely the most difficult job in the room.

We heard from new National Stonewall Democrats Executive Director Eric Stern. Eric comes to NSD from his post as LGBT liaison at the Democratic National Committee and we will certainly benefit from his knowledge and experience in Washington.

The LGBT caucus leadership is committed to using the next two years to help make sure that Democratic Party activists around the state stand with our community in support of issues important to us such as civil marriage and transgender rights. Inevitably the right wing will have one or more initiatives to strip us of our civil rights and we must do our part right now to make sure the Democratic Party speaks with one unified voice. The LGBT caucus is ready to be a significant part of that process.

As a personal aside, I am especially pleased that the entire San Francisco LGBT family worked together so effectively at the convention to help pass the groundbreaking resolution supporting civil marriage. When Milk and Alice team up, we often become an unstoppable force of nature. Even more important was spending time building the relationships that will help us weather the next inevitable disagreement over a local candidate or policy. Whatever our differences may be, the issues that join us are so much more powerful and vital and require our ongoing mutual trust. I salute my friends on both sides of the aisle who continue to find ways to unite Milk and Alice for the good of the entire LGBT community.

As we look forward to the party Executive Board meetings this summer, please email me at paulmhogan@yahoo.com if you have any ideas on how the caucus can better accomplish our goals or would like to help out.

Paul Hogan
Co-Chair, California Democratic Party LGBT Caucus
Former Alice Co-Chair

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Tributes to Mabel Teng

Many of us heard with shock and then sadness the news that our dear friend, Mabel Teng, was resigning her post as Assessor-Recorder. Her decades-long commitment to civil rights has been unwavering and our community has lost a true ally. Alice will never forget Mabel's energy, passion, dedication and support of LGBT causes and we encourage her to continue to work with us, in whatever capacity she chooses, to fulfill her vision of a tolerant society with equal rights for all. In this issue, Alice salutes and celebrates the effervescent Mabel Teng.

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Farewell to our Friend Mabel Teng
by Minna Tao

“After long and thoughtful considerations, I have decided to retire from public service. I will step down as the City's Assessor-Recorder,” said Mabel Teng on April 19, 2005. These words still cut into my heart. I was saddened and disappointed with the news. Like many of her friends and supporters of the LGBT community, she is our hero who has been working long and hard to extend liberty, challenging injustice and discrimination against LGBT families.

During her tenure as the Assessor Recorder of San Francisco, she challenged a system of bureaucratic mediocrity that lacked accountability and failed in its most essential duties as a city agency. She brought in qualified people to overhaul the system to increase productivity, improve efficiency, and implement accountability and training. As a result, the office generated $6.5 million in new revenues for San Francisco in this fiscal year. This year, the office is on its way to deliver even more. As of April 27th, we generated $26 Million above our original projected revenue.

She fought zealously and won many major appeals seeking property tax reductions by the wealthiest downtown developers, including the owners of the Bank of America building, Embarcadero, the Marriott Hotel and the Ritz Carlton, to name a few.

Mabel is committed to the work of San Francisco’s non-profit and community-based organizations, and was previously the Executive Director of the Career Resources Development Center (CRDC), a multi-million dollar non-profit job-training agency headquartered in the Tenderloin. She was also the Director of Asian American Donor Program, a non-profit community-based organization dedicated to education about the need for bone marrow donors in the Asian American community.

As a political activist since the 1980’s, Mabel was active in the Justice for Vincent Chin movement, the Rainbow Coalition, and the immigrant rights community. She has been extensively recognized and a recipient of numerous awards for her work in the community, her dedication to civil rights, and her coalition-building skills, including from the Asian and Pacific Islander Wellness Center, the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco, and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

However, she was most proud of her role in supporting Mayor Newsom's decision to end discrimination against marriage for gay couples. The Assessor-Recorder's Office took the lead in organizing the City gay marriage services that married 4,000 gay and lesbian couples. Mabel and her office stood firmly behind the effort to make this request a reality. From presiding over the first of these marriages to ensure that each couple received the love and special attention during the marriage ceremony, Mabel worked nonstop to facilitate the continuous process. Mabel Teng declared that “same sex couples should be afforded the same rights and benefits as opposite sex couples.” She will be remembered for her dedication and devotion to human rights in particular her courage, strength and leadership on gay issues.

“Mabel truly understands and empathizes with the pain of the discrimination that we feel. She stood for what an elected official should be: strong and committed to equality to all and she has a huge heart,” said Molly McKay, Executive Director of Marriage Equality California.

"When I stood in the room with those very first couples that were married by Mabel, I was struck with her passion and her professionalism. She is a force of nature. Since that time, I've become proud to call her my friend. She was dedidicated and devoted to fairness and human rights. As a member of the gay community, I thank her for her committment."-- Thom Lynch, Executive Director, LGBT Community Center.

Minna Tao is an Alice Board Member and works in the Assessor-Recorder’s Office

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For Whom Mabel Toils
By Wilson F. Fang

SHE’S been dubbed a giant-killer. And when I first met Mabel Teng, I was struck by just how oddly appropriate the sobriquet was. Petite, slight of build, with a self-effacing, soft-spoken manner, it’s easy for first time acquaintances to regard her status as one of the Bay Area’s most prominent Asian-American politicians with some surprise. Yet when she starts speaking of causes important to her, such as reforming a notoriously inefficient city agency or helping same sex couples achieve marriage equality, her eyes start to blaze with white-hot fire, with the dulcet tones of her voice becoming tinged with titanium. That’s when even the most casual observer realizes just how this diminutive lady David was able to take on Goliaths as disparate as entrenched downtown business interests and fringe right-wing lunatics and have them tremble before her.

Running for Assessor-Recorder of the City and County of San Francisco, Mabel waxed triumphant on November 5th, 2002, becoming the first Asian-American woman to win election to the obscure but important position. This operations of this agency are a mystery to most san Franciscans, but this office has responsibility for areas as varied as maintaining City records to establishing the taxable value of all real estate in San Francisco.

Even before being elected to the Assessor’s Office, however, she already enjoyed a well-earned reputation as one of the most hard-working go-getters in San Francisco’s multifaceted political and social activist circles. She was a former Executive Director of the Career Resources Development Center, one of the City’s largest job-training agencies, a stint that was followed by a similar position leading the Asian American Donor Program. Her entrée into electoral politics first came when she ran for and won a seat on the San Francisco City College Board of Trustees. A few years after, she went for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, winning and serving in this capacity from 1994-2000. Her time on the board was a fruitful and fondly-remembered one, earning her plaudits for her social activism and her unstinting support for a wide range of causes, such as immigration reform, gay rights, and adequate visibility and representation for the city’s burgeoning Asian population.

Long a friend of the gay community, she was a regular at everything from fundraisers for small gay organizations to gala events like the opening of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center. She marched in Gay Pride parades, served as celebrity emcee for events such as the annual Gay Asian Pacific Alliance banquet, and made sure her name was listed as a supporter for every significant gay cause, from expanding transgender rights to same-sex marriage.

Despite her stellar list of accomplishments, and more than adequate reserves of goodwill, when she took over as Assessor-Recorder in January of 2003, the omens were not good. The City was in the midst of one of the most trying economic crises in recent history, with the economy in a tailspin, revenues down significantly, and even the most optimistic fiscal projections projecting doom and gloom. But Mabel managed to surprise even her most strident critics by bringing in, at the end of her first full year in office, an astonishing $32 million worth of additional revenue. During a period that saw every other income-generating City department fall short of their already reduced earnings projections, the Assessor-Recorder’s office exceeded their set forecasts by well over $6.5 million dollars.

Far from stopping at the task of bringing in extra money for a cash-strapped city, Teng also set out to swab the decks at what was then thought of as a notoriously inefficient organization. Among the challenges she faced was a backlog of over 24,000 cases due for assessment, a large number of demoralized and indifferent staff, along with an outdated computer system that, among its many problems, allowed users to make unilateral assessment changes without requiring prior approval. Tackling the problem with her vaunted resolve, along with regular twelve-hour workdays, she updated outdated personnel descriptions, pushed for reforms in the processes by which real property was assessed, and even found time to manage upgrades to the old computer systems. Cracking the whip, she put a stop to inefficient work habits, chronic tardiness and absenteeism in the office, and the rather nefarious practice of staff rendering property assessments without making an actual visit to the property in question. And in the midst of all this, she still maintained close ties to her constituents, and along with her husband of 20 years, raised twin daughters.

Mabel’s efforts (and many long nights at work) garnered the Assessor-Recorder’s Office City-wide praise. Gavin Newsom publicly applauded her for leading the charge to shore up San Francisco’s finances. Her supporters in the educational field reveled in the $16 million in additional funding for public schools that came out of the unexpected tax windfall. Even small business and neighborhood groups were full of praise for the office’s fresh emphasis on efficiency and its focus on clearing the big backlog of cases.

What she still calls “one of my proudest moments”, though, came in February of 2004. That’s when the City and County of San Francisco, to worldwide publicity, started marrying same-sex couples. Mabel Teng and many members of the Assessor-Recorders’ office, working in close concert with the Office of the Mayor, toiled through the night to help bring the dream of officially-sanctioned gay marriages to reality, albeit briefly. In one short but shining month, San Francisco was the center of the Civil Rights universe, as everyone from Rob and Steve down the street to Rosie O’Donnell and her partner Kelli Carpenter were married under the gilded dome of City Hall.

Unfortunately, though, as the old song goes, some good things never last. The courts stopped San Francisco from marrying any more same-sex couples. And several months after, Mabel Teng faced a political storm of sorts as her office was beset by what many regard as a politically-motivated investigation over charges of mismanagement, cronyism, and nepotism. Even though a State investigation cleared her of most of the charges, and the City’s Civil Service Commission has not, even after months of investigation, been able to pin anything on her, the months of unrelenting (and, many have argued, politically-motivated) bad publicity, coupled with the continued intransigence from holdover staff in her office, as well as the disintegration of her 21-year marriage, eventually caused her decision to resign her position.

The news that she was leaving office blew through the City like a bolt out of the blue. Her many supporters decried the never-ending attacks on her, orchestrated by enemies ranging from prominent Financial District property interests, peeved at the Assessor’s efforts to more fairly value the worth of their multi-million dollar buildings, to key officers of San Francisco’s Republican party, who were incensed at her efforts to legalize same-sex unions. Local gay activists, such as Robert Bernardo from the SAME (San Francisco Asians for Marriage Equality) coalition, bemoaned her departure, saying, “She has been an incredibly good friend to both the Asian and gay communities.” Ultimately, though, as Mabel herself stated in a Chronicle interview, the decision boiled down to her needing “time and privacy to move forward.”

So the City loses a leading light in the fight for better government and a better, more equitable society. At least for now. Noted political pundit Ken Garcia calls Mabel Teng “An immensely likable person who enjoyed support from a wide swath of political interests in San Francisco,” and most of her supporters are hoping her self-imposed sabbatical is a short one. Even her most fervent opponents concede that they probably haven’t seen the last of her. Which is good, because San Fran needs someone like Mabel Teng to keep the big-city giants in their place.

Wilson Fang is a member of the Board of Directors of the Gay Asian Pacific Alliance

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Alice Membership Form

Alice B Toklas LGBT Democratic Club
1800 Market Street PMB#18
San Francisco, CA 94102
Tel: 415-707-2010
www.alicebtoklas.org
Alice Reports Editor: Reese Aaron Isbell, M.P.P.

General Membership Meeting 2nd Monday of each month

Month of May:
Monday, May 09, 2005
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
LGBT Community Center
1800 Market Street @ Octavia

You can now join online www.alicebtoklas.org/abt/joinonline.asp, or fill out the application below

Membership Application

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Please send checks payable to “Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club” and mail to:

Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club
1800 Market Street, PMB#18
San Francisco, CA 94102

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