Short Tempers in Long Beach

And now the circus of performance politics sets up its tent in Long Beach, for another round of sound-bite street theater of yeaing and naying and a great deal of braying: the strait-laced Eagle Forum against the anything-but-straight gay rights set, the churches for and the churches against.

On waving placards and in video moments, it will be pitched as the battle of the lifestyles: Will Long Beach go the way of San Francisco? Will Iowa-by-the-Sea become Baghdad by the Bay?

Long Beach becomes the latest city to consider registering domestic partners. In its varying forms, domestic partnership bestows on unmarried couples some married rights, chiefly of the death-and-taxes sort, like next-of-kin hospital visits, a say-so in funeral arrangements, insurance benefits.

The elderly and disabled who are loath to marry for fear of losing benefits or entangling inheritances could qualify. So, too, could homosexuals, which is why domestic partnership is one of those political hot buttons that is of critical concern to about 10% of the population but which manages to eat up 90% of the air time of political debate.

Naturally, then, it brought more people to nighttime downtown Long Beach last week than may have been there since VJ Day--several hundred, an overflow from City Hall, even from the closed-circuit audience in the library auditorium.

People wearing round green badges, the outline of a mom, a dad, two kids and a dog as unmistakable as an international traffic icon, identified themselves as pro-family. The same-sex couples considered themselves families, too.

For two hours, speakers took to the microphone. “Amen,” shouted some of the green circles. “Bigot,” shouted some of the same-sex crowd.

And then Councilman Jerry Shultz spoke. His were not offhand remarks, but a 10-minute written speech he told a colleague he had been working on for a year--remarks that warmed the people with the green circles but burned others, and in fact still are burning their way across Long Beach.

Shultz, who is also a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, expounded on the human sex drive as a powerful instinct that “may become inappropriately affixed to underwear, corpses, animals, children, footstools and members of the same sex.”

He offered in exquisite detail certain fringe sexual practices and added another pairing to that chestnut about Adam and Eve or Adam and Steve: Adam and Ewe. “What do we say to the man who leads his favorite ewe down the aisle, demanding recognition and acceptance of his attraction to a female sheep?”

The irony is that the domestic partnership constituency is not the bathhouse-and-glory-hole set. This is legislation for people who want to be conventional, who want to be like the folks wearing the green circles--bonded, coupled, accepted. (A lesbian friend told me that the domestic instinct among gay women is reputedly so strong that there are jokes about it: What do lesbians bring on a second date? A U-Haul.)

Instead, the same-sex partisans heard their affections likened to dead bodies, live animals, lingerie and furniture. Love me, love my boxer shorts. I’d like to register my Barcalounger as my domestic partner, until reupholstering do us part.

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Long Beach, the city that Iowa migrants built and the Navy paid the mortgage on, is California’s fifth-largest. It’s outgrown both the Iowa-by-the-Sea suit and the honky-tonk Navy town bell-bottoms.

Long Beach has earned its long pants. It has suffered from the 1992 riots. Military jobs and the Spruce Goose have flown the coop. But it has the Queen Mary, the Grand Prix, some superb Art Deco architecture and a new ice hockey team. President Clinton visited this year and praised its school uniform program to the nation.

And like West Hollywood, it also has a goodly number of elderly and homosexual residents, including some in Jerry Shultz’s 9th District in north Long Beach.

As a parks and rec commissioner, Shultz championed batting cages for kids on vacant industrial lots. He has supported the city’s libraries, and on his local cable TV show he has spoken feelingly of reading bedtime stories to his children.

As a school board member, he voted “no” to high school counseling for homosexual teens. It was both “another frill we can ill afford” and “a recruiting ground for homosexuals.” And he raised the same objections to the domestic partner measure: It’s expensive, and it’s immoral.

The push-and-pull of public outrage is strong this year. Southern Baptists have voted to boycott Disney, from Tomorrowland to Hunchback of Notre Dame burger meals. Gay groups have staged their own boycotts of other cities, other companies. Long Beach is a port town, a convention town, with all its attendant economic vulnerabilities.

An astonished and exhausted City Council voted to punt the question to the city’s Human Relations Commission for public hearings and private consideration. It may be September when the issue returns to the council. The summer will be over. The political season will not.