L.A. Councilwoman Seeks to Move Beyond Stereotypes : Politics: She is open about her family life, but Jackie Goldberg says don’t label her ‘the gay council member.’

With one kiss, they made history.

It happened at Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg’s inauguration, a celebration of all the causes that the ex-Berkeley radical has championed since the 1960s. Civil rights, public schools, gay rights. But it was also unmistakably the debut of the first openly gay member of the Los Angeles City Council.

Goldberg’s housemate and lover of the last 14 years, Sharon Stricker, read from a feminist lesbian poet. When Stricker introduced herself saying, “I’m Jackie Goldberg’s life partner,” Goldberg walked over to her and the couple kissed. The crowd roared its approval.

“The kiss to many of our friends was the highlight of the evening,” said Stricker, a fiction writer and poet, chuckling. “After that,” Goldberg added, “they didn’t care what else happened.”

It may be more commonplace to live an openly gay life and even downright chic in some circles to be a lesbian these days. But in most cities it’s still extraordinary to be an openly gay elected official--particularly one who goes to official functions with her partner at her side and holds her hand when appropriate.

It’s even rather new for Goldberg. For most of her professional life as a teacher, a two-term school board member and board president, she has skirted the edge of complete openness, balancing the concerns of a young son and her needs as an unapologetic lesbian. She has never been as publicly gay as she has been during this past election for the 13th District, which spans a diverse constituency from Hollywood to northeast Los Angeles.

As befits Los Angeles politics in 1993, Goldberg’s council colleagues have greeted her with utter nonchalance. “Jackie is a lesbian and that’s not a problem with me,” said new council member Rudy Svorinich, who is not likely to be her frequent ally. “Jackie and I both agree we’re going to disagree on some issues, but we get along personally.”

Less nonchalant are the members of the gay community who look to Goldberg to represent them in ways concrete and cosmic. Goldberg, who does not want to be labeled “the gay council member” or “the woman council member” or “the Jewish council member” is nonetheless pointedly raising her profile as a lesbian by being so candid about her relationship.

“The society, one way or another, even if it’s willing to accept me, is not willing to accept us, “ Goldberg said, sitting on a sofa next to Stricker. “I do want to fight the idea that lesbians are invisible. We really do live and breathe and we’re out there.”

As her term unfolds, Goldberg will be put to a test that few have confronted: how much she can be a politician who happens to be a lesbian as well as a lesbian who happens to be a politician.

“Look, homosexuality is not a political plus in most constituencies,” said council member Zev Yaroslavsky, “and that’s why so many elected officials around the country do not publicly declare. I think what she’s done has possibly made it easier for future political aspirants.”

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Goldberg and Stricker live near the top of a hilly quiet street in Echo Park, their house cheerfully reminiscent of the 1960s-era that spawned them both. A mural of a rainbow goddess curls around the turquoise front door, a symbol of protection, Stricker explains as she leads the way into the house. There’s a gated swimming pool that is open to children on the block, an old, loyal dog napping on the deck and a stray pup with a limp who has found refuge with them.

The mantle over the fireplace is crammed with basketball trophies won by Brian, the 18-year-old son Goldberg adopted only days after he was born in a Miami hospital. Brian, who is black, calls both women “Mom.”

On this day, Goldberg breezes into the house half an hour late, papers under her arm. “Well, you’ve now seen an important feature of our life. I’m never home when I say I’m going to be home.”

Stricker, sitting on the sofa, smiles indulgently. The women met in 1976, both teachers then, both active in the women’s movement. A school desegregation project brought them together.

“We gave speeches and organized newsletters and just lived and breathed that,” said Stricker, 50, who has long blonde hair and an easy, throaty laugh. “And I just knew that Jackie was this super wonderful person.”

“And one thing led to another,” said a laughing Goldberg, now on the sofa next to Stricker, who was married for 10 years before she met Goldberg.

Most of the tensions in Goldberg’s and Stricker’s relationship come not from dealing with the public’s reaction to them but from the classic strains of political family life. During Goldberg’s 1987 school board reelection campaign Stricker felt so overburdened--caring for Brian, doing the household chores--that she was ready to break up the relationship. They survived the crisis: “I went into woo and pursue” Goldberg said.

In this last campaign, however, Stricker was so involved planning fund-raisers and events that school board member Jeff Horton, a former aide to Goldberg, compared the couple to President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“I would say they were more like the modern generation of political couples,” said Horton, an openly gay man whose live-in partner, Larry Pickens, is Goldberg’s receptionist. “Supportive but not fawning.”

At a recent public appearance at the Sunday farmer’s market in Hollywood, Stricker was very much a part of every conversation that people struck up with Goldberg. “We’re going to have a beautification project starting here,” Stricker said when a Goldberg supporter stopped to talk politics and about the district.

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When Goldberg was weighing whether to run for the City Council her gay lifestyle was a definite consideration--but not because of any political damage that might be inflicted on her. She was most concerned about her son’s feelings.

Goldberg and Stricker made a deal with Brian while he was in elementary school that has guided and influenced every personal move she has made in public ever since. “We would not pretend to be anything other than what we were,” Goldberg said they told him. “We would not answer untruthfully to anyone who asked any questions. But we wouldn’t wear an ‘L’ on our chests.”

In fact, Goldberg’s sexual orientation has always been something of an open secret. In the face of an initiative to keep gay teachers out of school in 1978, she revealed to her colleagues at the Compton school where she was teaching that she is gay. “We’d been friends a long time and I needed to make sure they weren’t going to vote to ban homosexuals and lesbians from teaching,” she said.

For years she has gone places with Stricker, lived with her, ridden in gay pride parades and supported gay causes. The only time she seriously hid her lesbianism was out of fear of jeopardizing the adoption of Brian. “I was definitely in the closet then,” she said.

The deal she struck with her son has led to some painful compromises that she and Stricker would have preferred not to make.

In her first school board term, when an organization that recognizes lesbians wanted to give her an award, she declined because she thought it might get covered in the newspapers.

And when a reporter interviewed Goldberg at her home after her 1983 election to the board, Goldberg presented Stricker as her best friend--who lived downstairs in their duplex. (Stricker keeps an office there.) It was her way of acknowledging that Stricker was important to her--without revealing the true intimacy.

“You just didn’t want to do anything where Brian could look you in the eye and say ‘you violated our deal,’ ” Goldberg said.

So when Goldberg was considering running for a council seat--a campaign that certainly would bring more scrutiny to her personal life--she consulted Brian.

“First, he said: ‘Oh, so it will be public--the whole basketball team will know?’ ” Stricker said. The two reminded him that they had already been at most of his games and often bought the team pizzas afterward. “I said: ‘Uh, Brian, I think they already know,’ ” Stricker laughed. Brian gave her his blessing. “He said: ‘OK, I’ll deal with it,’ ” Stricker recalled.

Ironically it was her two gay opponents in the primary who made her lesbianism an issue--it would have been political death for a straight opponent to bring it up in a liberal district--by criticizing her for not being open.

When a Times reporter questioned her about her sexual orientation in January, she confirmed that she is a lesbian and her comments appeared in a story on the race.

“This is what irked us,” Goldberg said. “The definition of openly gay was not how you lived your life. It was whether or not it had appeared in print. I thought that was pretty interesting.”

To be sure, not everyone approved of a lesbian City Council candidate. Goldberg said that people would send back her campaign literature with such comments as, “I’ll never vote for you, dyke.”

At one point, word filtered back to the campaign that canvassers for an opponent were going door to door “saying I was soft on crime and I was a lesbian--did they know that?” Goldberg recalled. The Goldberg camp ignored it, not knowing how widely or officially it was being done. “We didn’t fool with it at all,” she said.

A random phone sampling of the 13th District a few weeks before the election revealed a minority of people who said they would not vote for Goldberg probably because she is gay.

“They didn’t come right out and say they wouldn’t support Jackie because she was a lesbian,” said her chief deputy, Sharon Delugach, who co-managed her runoff election. “Usually they said ‘lifestyle’--code words.”

Only one thing was really unsettling--going to a coffee where a number of older people refused to shake her hand. “I found it unnerving,” Goldberg said quietly, “seeing fear in someone’s eyes just from trying to shake hands with them.”

Goldberg’s post-election honeymoon has been blissfully free of slings and arrows.

So far on the council, Goldberg has used her influence to get the council to vote against supporting the breakup of the Los Angeles school system--and, more impressively, against support of Clinton’s compromise on gays in the military.

She says she will fight for gay issues such as domestic partner legislation that would allow same-sex spouses to get insurance benefits. She would also like to see the city’s affirmative action policy include gays and lesbians. “That’s probably the least likely to be won,” Goldberg admitted.

And if her lifestyle and politics get her booted out of office, she insists in her best outsider mode that she would be perfectly happy to go back to teaching.

“I don’t need to be an officeholder,” she said. “I will always be political because I love politics.”