Democratic Elite Eulogize Gay Rights Leader

“ It is right to be honest about who you are. It gives others around you the opportunity to be honest back. “

--Sheldon Andelson, November, 1979.

UC Regent Sheldon Andelson spoke those words at a charity fund-raiser roast in his honor shortly after telling his family of his homosexuality.

He was already a successful lawyer and Democratic Party fund-raiser. But in the little more than eight years after disclosure of his personal secret first to his family and then to the general public, Andelson would become best known as an untiring activist for gay political clout and respect.

It was against that backdrop that California’s Democratic elite turned out Sunday to join about 1,500 friends and family at UCLA’s Royce Hall in a memorial for Andelson, who died Dec. 29 of AIDS at age 56.

U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) eulogized Andelson as “a pioneer in national politics on the issue of gay and lesbian rights” who fought for the “principle that discrimination based on sexual orientation is as intolerable as discrimination based on race, or gender or religious belief.”

Former California Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. said Andelson was “full of the politics of life” and was a loyal adviser.

Others attending included U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston, state Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp, Controller Gray Davis, Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, state Sen. Richard Katz and Mayor Tom Bradley.

UC President David P. Gardner called Andelson an “uncommon man” and untiring regent who will live on through a Sheldon W. Andelson Fund in Public Policy at UCLA. Gardner said Andelson’s family is negotiating with the university and seeking contributions in hopes of raising $1 million for research and teaching of public policy and human rights.

The memorial itself was a scene that spoke of Andelson, a master of style and image who planned the ceremony in the final weeks before his death. His brothers, friends and political figures spoke from behind twin lecterns set with long-stemmed white tulips and amaryllis. And to top off the ceremony, Andelson himself appeared in a videotape of his 1979 speech.

“With me, he always stressed image,” Brown said. “What is it going to look like? What do the polls say? What do your image-makers say?”

Andelson reveled in black-tie fund-raisers, the former governor said. “A lot of people in politics claim to raise large sums of money. But Sheldon Andelson delivered,” Brown said.

“He recommended quite a number of people for (appointments)--and . . . received them,” Brown said to rising laughter, adding that his success in gaining appointments was “not because of fund-raising.”

Los Angeles Municipal Judge Rand Schrader said his close friend Andelson grew up when homosexuals were repressed and “built his early professional career using the gay skill of being straight with ‘straight’ (heterosexual) people and gay only with us,” said Schrader, who worked with Andelson on gay community causes.

Andelson later became one of the first directors of what would become the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, which started in a run-down Victorian house on Wilshire Boulevard.

“Driving up in his Jaguar with his pair of whippets on leashes, dressed casually in cashmere and hand-sewn shoes, Sheldon was not the typical gay liberationist,” Schrader said.

Establishment Credentials

A wealthy man whose many real estate holdings once included the posh Trumps restaurant in West Hollywood, Andelson had bona fide Establishment credentials. But his homosexuality became an issue when he was nominated to the UC Board of Regents.

Regent Yvonne Brathwaite Burke recalled headlines the day after she and Andelson were named to the board that read “Burke, gay, appointed to regents.”

Andelson used his credentials, however, to give legitimacy to the gay movement in the numerous political functions he conducted at his busy Bel-Air home.

Even Rabbi Harvey J. Fields, senior rabbi at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, noted in his otherwise somber remarks that Andelson had a “gifted capacity to work a room.”