LGBT POV

Longtime LGBT ally Congressmember Diane E. Watson (D-CA) formally announced Thursday that she is not seeking re-election. She wants Karen Bass, the outgoing Speaker of the California Assembly and another pro-LGBT ally, to replace her representing California’s 33^rd Congressional District.

Watson’s openly gay legislative deputy Charles Stewart describes below how his boss told her staff she was retiring. But first something about Watson.

I first met Diane Watson in the early 1990s at AIDS activist Phill Wilson’s house for a meet and greet with the California State Senator, where she’d been serving since 1978. First thing that struck me was how tall she was – statuesque and elegant and smart. Turns out she had a M.A. in School Psychology from California State University, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. in Educational Administration from the Claremont Graduate School.  She’d already broken barriers – becoming the first Black woman elected to the LA Unified School Board in 1975.

But Watson could also be both intense and feisty. She could get this very intense serious look that instantly brought forth dark clouds when talking about people with HIV/AIDS and then, like Zeus wielding lightening blots, she would smile and threaten to deal sharply with anyone who got in the way of helping people with AIDS. In those days, when being diagnosed as HIV positive seemed like an instant stigmatized death sentence and friends were dying every week – such strident advocacy was like a cool drink of water in the scorching desert.

And Watson wasn’t all talk. Oh, sure she had her detractors, especially among supporters of Rep. Maxine Waters whom many in the Black LGBT community considered Watson’s political rival.

But in fact Watson cared deeply about health care and went to the matt for some very unpopular issues – such as needle exchange, offering a bill in the California Legislature in 1992.

She kept at it and passed a needle exchange bill in 1997.  SB 885 – co-sponsored by the cities of Los Angeles, Long Beach, and San Francisco, and Santa Clara County – would have created Needle Exchange Pilot Projects in cities that want them.  A couple of years later, Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill prohibiting criminal prosecution of people who participated in needle exchange programs.

In 1999, President Bill Clinton appointed Watson to serve as the US Ambassador to Micronesia but she came home in 2001 to run for the Congressional seat vacated after the death Julian Dixon. She continued to support needle exchange programs and she also worked with AIDS Healthcare Foundation to pressure GlaxoSmithKline to “do the right thing” and lower the price of its antiretroviral drugs for developing countries.

At her side, advising her for most of her tenure, has been openly gay Legislative Deputy Charles Stuart, who is just as tall and statuesque as Watson.

Charles has been openly gay for as long as I’ve known him and has been involved in LGBT political organizations such as Stonewall Democratic Club. This is an email he sent out to friends and family about how Watson broke the news to her staff two days ago that she wasn’t going to run for re-election:

Diane gathered together her 18 staff members yesterday, half in her L.A. District Office on Wilshire (part of sedate Hancock Park when she took office, now absorbed into bustling Koreatown), the other half of us by conference call from our various igloos here in the Washington blizzard.

She was brief. At 76, in painful need of a knee replacement she couldn’t take time off to get, having just thrown her Mom a centennial birthday bash but feeling the need to be at her side more regularly and to spend time with her siblings, nieces and nephews in California more frequently, ten years in — it’s time to go.

She’ll serve out her term until the end of December, but won’t stand for re-election in June. Instead, she’s endorsing for her seat California Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, whose district largely overlaps Diane’s and whose terms as Speaker and Assemblymember are also up this year, at the end of this month for the former and the end of the year for the latter.

She thanked us for our ongoing service, intends to work hard on legacy legislation, jobs and mortgage relief for her constituents until the end of the 111th session of Congress, and will use her good offices to help staff head forward in our careers.

There were no questions. Some among us were shocked, nearly all were sad, but a few, including me, were relieved to have our suspicions replaced with fact. The media had been sniffing at us for two weeks, the silence rendering our denials less and less plausible. Apparently, a Member interested in inheriting Diane’s gavel as Chair of the House Government Management, Organization and Procurement Sub-committee decided it was time for her to go down the path of no return and had his staff leak the news to the D.C. blogosphere. So the boss couldn’t wait to tell us all face-to-face by videoconference as she’d planned, and had to slog through Snowmageddon electronically to get to us in a hurry.

But this moves the players around on L.A,’s political chessboard more than Washington’s. Though the Republicans will spin to the contrary, the 33rd Congressional seat is not only at no risk for turning Republican, but it is inconceivable that its occupant will not be (labeled) a liberal. Diane was widely expected to step down in favor of Karen anyway by the time of the 2012 election, when the 2010 census data will have re-shaped all electoral districts save those of the Governor and the two U.S. senators.

Because a ballot initiative is taking away re-districting authority from the State Legislature, Democratic Congressman Berman’s brother Michael won’t be drawing the lines for the first time in 30 years. The commission which replaces him will not only be equal parts Dems and Reps (in a predominantly Democratic state), but every line drawn must be OK’d by commissioners of both parties; The prospect, then, for 2012 is that many congressional, state and local districts will be radically re-configured, largely to the disadvantage of Democrats and, especially, progressive Democrats.

The frustration Diane’s endured since leaving California’s liberal State Senate in 1998 has been mounting since she came to Congress (only somewhat relieved by Dems’ takeovers of the House, Senate and Presidency, since Senate Republicans’ have effectively wielded the filibuster to stymie much of what she hoped to help make happen). The future here looks to hold more of the same, so now’s as good/bad time as any to bid adieu.

I’ve gotten to know Karen Bass probably a little better than any other of Diane’s staff over the last couple of years, as she took my sister-in-spirit (and Diane’s longtime protege) Holly Mitchell under wing, becoming actively engaged in Holly’s campaign to succeed her as Assemblywoman of the 47th District next year (Karen was Diane’s guest on the House floor during the President’s 1st State of the Union Address last month and greeted me with a hug and an urgent whisper, “We’ve got to get Holly to take a leave of absence so she can work full time on the campaign!” Holly’s now done so). So both women will be frontrunners for different seats on the June primary ballot — which, in districts as heavily Dem as these, will actually pretty much determine who gets sworn in after the run-off election in November.

Back to the chessboard. Nothing’s a sure thing and Diane’s withdrawal is not only likely to embolden her official Democratic opponent, the little-known L.A. deputy city attorney Felton Newell, but bring bigger names and money to the contest. Yet it’ll be hard for anyone to beat Karen. Not only does she have Diane’s blessing, the district she already represents in the Assembly largely coincides with the 33rd Congressional district, and she has the patina (and fundraising sinew!) of two years as California’s second most powerful politician, but she also belongs to and is beloved by the demographic of voters which historically decides elections in this district: African American women over forty.  Not to mention that she’s endowed with (hard-won) savvy, powerful allies, broad empathy and deep integrity.

I’ve also long known Karen’s successor next month as Speaker of the Assembly. John Perez will be California’s first, and the nation’s second, openly-gay leader of the state legislature. A cousin of L.A.’s mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, and a union leader, he’s only in his first term as a member of the Assembly, but was Karen’s choice to succeed her and defeated a more senior and better positioned legislator to win the post. John and I served together on the board of Stonewall Democrats in the mid-90s, and were the interview guests on former (Dobie Gillis Show co-star and) state Senator Sheila Kuehl’s West Hollywood talk TV show, “Get Used To It,” shortly before he was elected to office.

So it’s gonna be an exciting time in L.A. politically over the next few years. Yet I had only just concluded that being a Congressional leg director during Barack Obama’s presidency is one of the most exhilarating (if exhausting) jobs on planet earth and, more importantly, I am now the best snow-shoveler on the East Coast — I belong here! Still, it’s my plan to return to L.A. eventually, where Mom abides, Dad visits often from Paris, and my four nieces, twin nephews, and godson Ryan Mitchell have taught me in middle-age that family really is the heartwell of life and the future that matters.

Okay, so I’m lookin’ for a job again. Over fifty, in a nasty recession, a mortgage on one coast – and had just started apartment-hunting on the other. I got the lemons, anybody got a recipe for makin’ lemonade, I’m all ears — and hope…

Charles-who’ll-be-out-shoveling-you-know-what