Tag: Gay

Obama Fundraiser: Silverlake, October 4, 2008.

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For ten years a dead external hard drive lay abandoned in our garage, a device that once backed up our desktop computer from 2007-2012 and then suddenly died.

We cleaned our garage last month and found the dead drive. We took it to a tech in Toluca Lake who retrieved everything for $150.

Now we have tens of thousands of revived photos, seemingly taken yesterday, but actually 14 years old. I’m going through the files now and labeling them.

One folder contained a memorable evening from October 4, 2008. 

On that night, we attended an Obama fund raiser at a private home in Silver Lake along a winding street above Sunset.

There is my 36-year-old brother Rick with his wife, Pri, and her 27-year-old sister Rue. Muscular, smiling, shirtless Jeremiah and his girlfriend Ivy.

There are good friends and acquaintances in floor dragging denim and long t-shirts under short ones. Fun includes John McCain, Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney piñatas, lots of Shepard Fairey designed HOPE t-shirts with Obama’s face, and me in an Obama mask. There are masks of Biden too.

There is food and drink and Ivy in with her Smart Women Vote Obama button.  

The crowd is gay and straight, black, white, asian, male, female. There are high tech devices like digital cameras that are strictly digital cameras, not smartphones.

There are cute young kids and old dogs snuggled up on the sofa.

What I remember most from the event is that one of the guys there wanted to sleep with me, and a woman who had a high position in production wanted to hire me for photography but never hired me.

Through time all the famous faces from that night are connected in our long political show that never ends, jumping from event to event, begging for analysis, but often falling into irrationality, emotionality and missed opportunities.

Stamping Out Deviancy: 1966

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“The community was stunned last week when Capt. Eugene Linton, commander of the Van Nuys Police Division, said homosexuals, prostitution and wife swapping parties were real problems in the area”- LA Times/ October 13, 1966

In the mid 1960s, the Sherman Oaks/Van Nuys area was stunned, and shocked, to learn that vice was rampant.

To deal with sexual deviancy, the Sherman Oaks Chamber of Commerce, led by President Dr. Fred Adelson, proposed “citizen patrols” to inspect bars and nightclubs that might be contributing to societal breakdown.

Lest the general public think that there was a complete reversion to Sodom and Gomorrah, Adelson assured that morality and progress was well entrenched with many fine shopping and medical centers, high-rise buildings and “14 well-attended churches” attesting to the general goodness of ethics in the community.

How high-rise buildings, medial centers, shopping malls and churches might reduce the amount of wife swapping and homosexuality in Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys is one of the enduring mysteries, that 50 years later cannot be answered. Perhaps florescent lighting, elevators and sealed windows cooled Mid-Century sexual desire, even when high heels, desk drawer bourbon, short skirts and high finance stoked the fires.

Whatever became of the good-minded crackdown was drowned out by the long-haired, psychedelic party that swept the Golden State around the time Jeannie popped out of her bottle.

But in recalling the tenor of 1966, we are reminded again that the reassuring voice of business, law enforcement and religious leadership has never faltered. And as Ted Cruz reminds us… will continue to inspire us even in the 21st Century.

 

 

 

The Optimist

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The Optimist

If you were to bullet point Mike Hewson’s biography, the list would sound sad:

• Grew up gay in the 1950s
• Drafted into Vietnam as a medic
• Returned to Los Angeles and worked in a hospital
• Cared for his mother during her 4-year ordeal and death from cancer
• Watched his good friends, all young men, die from AIDS.

But it was Abraham Lincoln who said, “People are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” He might have been speaking about Mike, who was born on July 18, 1945, and moved to 16724 Morrison St. in Encino five years later.

He had an ideal childhood, with a stay-at-home mother and a father who worked as printing company salesman, and a younger sister, Deawn.

In those days, Encino was like a small town, with block parties and vast ranches and newly built houses. The 101 and 405 didn’t come through the Valley until the early 1960s.

He went to Encino Elementary and Birmingham High School. His family lineage, including many veterans of many wars, stretched back some 200 years.

He attended Valley and Pierce Colleges for two years and then studied to become an Operating Room Technician.

In 1967, he went into the Navy and later joined the Marines and went off to Vietnam for 27 Months. His nickname was “Flash”.

In his field hospital, 30 miles outside of Dan Nang, near China Beach, he assisted in neurological operations on wounded soldiers. Blood, suffering, the horrors of war, death and truncated and destroyed young men: all of these violent and horrific human tragedies marched before his young eyes.

He got down in the trenches and did anything he needed to do to help his fellow Marines. He was “Doc” but he was GI Joe too, never allowing his higher position to interfere in lending a helping hand.

He told me that everyone knew he was gay, but that he never heard one hateful remark. He believed that a lot of homosexuality went on in the armed forces, but that it was not an issue because survival and fighting mattered most.

Only politicians make an issue of it.

When he came back to the San Fernando Valley, in 1971, he was overjoyed to be back in the USA. He was still only 26 years old, and he went to work at Encino Hospital and lived as a single gay man in the Brady Bunch era.

Active in the Metropolitan Community Church, he also hung out with a group of friends who all died from AIDS. He and another buddy survived the lethal scourge of the 1980s.

Unlike many people who remember so fondly the San Fernando Valley and talk badly about its present condition, he finds that some things have gotten better. He misses the horse farms and orange groves, but he loves all the trees and greenery that has come up in the last 60 years. He remembers the view of the mountains that was so clear in the early 1950s, and now those views are returning as cars burn cleaner.

His last job was at Barnes and Noble in Encino, and he does regret the loss of the store, which was closed by greedy billionaire owner Rick Caruso and will be replaced with another CVS.

Mike is retiring to Puerto Vallarta. And at age 65, he will take his optimism down to Mexico, which is also a place where people have hard lives but smile frequently.

On the Train to Hollywood.

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Your Best, originally uploaded by Here in Van Nuys.

I rode the train down to Hollywood and Highland the other day, my way to enter the city that is part protest and part convenience.

Los Angeles is fast becoming a city. It is true that millions live here on mountain and plain extending from Palm Springs to the Pacific, but to disembark from a Hollywood subway and walk up into a dense conglomeration of bars, restaurants, stores, apartments, and theaters; that has eluded the City of Angels which prefers to offer up asphalt and sunshine and days spent inside looking at the TV in air-conditioned isolation. But things are changing.

Near Hollywood and Whitley, there was police action. A Mexican bicyclist had accidentally clipped off the side mirror of a Bentley and the owners, two black men, beat and bloodied his face. The bruised Latino sat on the sidewalk, while several cops filed reports and dozens of witnesses watched.

Across the street, another young man on a bike, Derrick, told me that he just came here from San Antonio, TX and was staying at the Roosevelt but had been robbed and had nowhere to stay so he just rode around the city all day. He had come to LA to get away from bad people in Texas and now he was living the dream here.

Hollywood Boulevard, incidentally, has some of the ugliest clothes in LA seen north of Melrose. Everything tacky from five years ago: graphic t-shirts, baggy jeans, garish jackets, they all are presented with vast indifference by smoking shopkeepers. The sidewalks outside of the store smell like urine. The north side is baked in sun and smog, and the south side in perpetual darkness and shade.

I was down here on one of my “jobs”, photographing a model who, in his demeanor and looks, emits privilege, elegance, health and happiness. And on his Twitter stream, asks for dog-sitting jobs, begs for car rides to Silver Lake, and tweets of eviction, depression, exhaustion, sinus infections, flu and seeing Jennifer Anniston on the street.

You want to warn young hopefuls not to be, to advise them to get out of here before they get old and fat and move to Woodland Hills to work for Anthem, but it is futile when you have a mouth full of white teeth on an unlined face and your body fat is only 3 percent.

On the train back to North Hollywood, there was a bicyclist, holding his new thin-tired machine evocative of Italy and leanness. He told me how he rides from Van Nuys to Hollywood and got hit by a car last year. He was sanguine and not-at-all bitter about his injury, and seemed to be a genuine chipper urbanite of the new, denser Los Angeles who looks beyond his car, engaging the urban life with feet and rapid heart beat.

Later that night, we went to my favorite cheap sushi restaurant in Valley Village. As I sat eating, a young man walked by the window. He had greasy long blond hair and sad eyes. He looked, not with lust but in need, directly at me.

After we left the restaurant and got into the car the haunted young man walked up to my window and asked me if I had any change to spare.

And I didn’t have the kindness, I admit, to give him anything.

So I was back in the Los Angeles, not in Hollywood, not in the train, but in the land where nobody has money but people with money.

A Pure Heart and a Clean Conscience.

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It is an privilege to choose to serve and a dishonor lying to serve. The morality of keeping in place a system of bigotry and lies, against those who were born with a gay sexual orientation, is purely irrational. With blood and sacrifice, selflessness and honor, bravery and courage, have our young men and women in uniform borne the cause of freedom and justice on the battlefield. And they, who put their lives at risk, deserve to fight and serve with a pure heart and a clear conscience.