This Pride Month, California’s few LGBTQ leaders are facing death threats and harassment – San Francisco Chronicle
As one of California’s few LGBTQ mayors, Emeryville’s John Bauters says June, the month of Pride, is difficult for him.
Bauters often feels torn. He wants to continue to be a role model for aspiring queer politicians but worries that “if I was to make visible all the things that I was exposed to, I’m afraid more LGBT people would not run for office.”
Bauters is talking about the slurs hurled his way on social media. Just last week, a Twitter user told him, “STFU fag.” He doesn’t want to talk about the attacks he fields privately. The pressure of being one of the few out queer elected leaders — even in a region that has long been a haven — is often exhausting.
That’s because even while the number of LGBTQ politicians has doubled over the past five years nationally, in some ways little has changed since Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors 45 years ago.
Last week, police investigated a bomb threat made against San Francisco state Sen. Scott Wiener, who is gay. He told The Chronicle that “on a normal ‘slow’ week, I’ll get three to five death threats. This week, it has been between 20 and 30.”
Police searched Wiener’s home for bombs the day after men believed to be from the far-right Proud Boys stormed a children’s story program hosted by a drag queen at the San Lorenzo Library and shouted slurs.
Even in the left-leaning Bay Area, it was a reminder that “those (homophobic) feelings have no geographic boundary,” said Jennifer Esteen, a Black lesbian who ran unsuccessfully for the state Assembly in Alameda County this year and lives a few miles from the library. “It’s chilling.”
Nationally, a record 340 pieces of anti-LGBTQ legislation have been introduced in state legislatures across the country, according to the pro-LGBTQ Human Rights Campaign.
“In many ways, a lot of progress has been made,” said Samuel Garrett-Pate, managing director of external affairs at Equality California, the state’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization.
But in other ways, Garrett-Pate conceded that “it’s a mixed bag.”
Nationally, the number of LGBTQ elected officials has doubled over the past five years to 1,042, according to Elliot Imse, executive director of the LGBTQ Victory Institute. But that’s still only .2% of the total number of officeholders.
To accurately represent the 7% of Americans who identify as LGBTQ, according to a recent Gallup Poll, would take electing around 38,000 people, Imse said.
California may be a historic mecca for the movement, but representation is underwhelming here in some places. Before Matt Dorsey was recently appointed to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, fellow Supervisor Rafael Mandelman was the only out supervisor in the nine-county Bay Area, according to Equality California. (Out LGBTQ county supervisor candidates will probably be on the ballot this November in Alameda, San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties; there are only seven currently serving in California.)
California has never had an LGBTQ U.S. senator or anything other than a straight white male governor. Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara is the only openly gay statewide officeholder. Only one member of the state’s 53-member House delegation is LGBTQ, while 10% of the state Senate and 4% of the Assembly identify that way.
California has never elected an out transgender person to the state Legislature, while red states like Kansas have.
California still boasts the strongest civil rights protections for its LGBTQ residents and is on track to be the first state in the country to have 10% of its state Legislature be LGBTQ in November, Garrett-Pate said. The leader of the state Senate, Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, and Todd Gloria, the mayor of the state’s second-largest city, San Diego, hold high-profile positions.
“This is a representative democracy,” Garrett-Pate said. “If a government doesn’t look like and reflect the diversity of the people it serves, that’s bad for policymaking. It’s bad for our democracy in terms of people having confidence that the government serving them understands their needs and their priorities.”
There are many reasons why governmental leaders aren’t more reflective of the community. Start with a challenge common to many marginalized groups: money.
“People tend to think LGBTQ people are wealthy,” Imse said. “LGBTQ people tend to have less money, have less donor networks and have less rich people in their pockets than the average white cisgender man.”
Imse also regularly sees inherent bias hurt LGBTQ candidates — some of it coming from their fellow, supposedly gay-friendly Democrats. (Only roughly 3% of LGBTQ office-holders nationally are Republican, Imse said.) They hear the same argument that female and candidates of color often hear: that they’re not “electable.”
“There will be whisper campaigns against LGBTQ candidates, where influential Democratic donors or influential party members will say that they are, of course, supportive of LGBTQ equality and LGBTQ people running — but that the straight cisgender person will have a better chance of winning in a general election,” Imse said.
Other candidates don’t run because they fear violence against them. Three in five female LGBTQ candidates who considered running said they were concerned about violent attacks against them because of their sexual orientation or gender, according to a 2021 Victory Institute study.
In a study the organization has completed but not yet released, Imse said half of LGBTQ school board candidates nationally reported receiving verbal threats and 6% had fielded death threats.
Which brings us back to Bauters. He faces a near-constant dilemma: How much does he reveal about the bigotry that’s still out there — without discouraging someone from running for office?
“It’s a challenge because I feel responsible for being authentic about showing this is what public service as an LGBT person is like,” Bauters said. “I learned a long time ago that being resilient means like you have to literally just go on to your next day.”
Bauters was recently named chair of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which is charged with protecting the air breathed by 7 million Bay Area residents.
At the end of the first meeting he led a few weeks ago, Bauters wished everyone a “Happy Pride Month” and said he wanted them to hear “about a boy I know. That boy, who when he was 7 years old, wrote another boy’s name in a heart on his spelling test.”
Bauters said the boy’s teacher called his parents in for a conference and told them that it was inappropriate because “boys don’t love other boys.” That boy’s feelings never changed, and Bauters told the group that he got “called ‘queer’ and ‘fag’ and beaten up on the way home from school” until he reached high school. He went through mental health issues, attempted self-harm and was housing-insecure for a time.
Today, Bauters said, that boy “is the chair of the air district board.”
Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli