Long Beach Still Feeling Impact of Anti-Gay Speech

Insurance agent Heidi Hoffman still remembers the shock she felt listening to Long Beach Councilman Jerry Shultz openly and deliberately attack the gay community during a City Council speech in June.

What was to be a debate over a proposed domestic partnership ordinance turned into what many say was the worst case of verbal gay bashing they had heard in years. With broad brush strokes, Shultz linked the gay residents of Long Beach to bizarre sex acts and “immoral behavior” in a 17-minute speech that stunned Hoffman and others in the audience.

Later, the insurance agent thought she should have stood up and screamed, “Stop!”

“I was so angry with myself,” said Hoffman, a longtime activist in Long Beach’s large gay and lesbian community. “All it would have taken was for someone to have stood up and said ‘stop’ and everyone would have joined in and stopped it. But no one did.”

It has been more than two months since Shultz’s speech, but the impact of the words is still reverberating through City Hall and the city’s gay and lesbian community.

Gay activists say hate crimes are up since the speech, although that has not been confirmed by police. They say the angry rhetoric was accompanied by anonymous threats to gay residents and intimidation from the religious right.

As for Shultz, one of two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies on the council, an expected backlash has not developed--and in fact, he may be more popular than ever. He beat back an effort to censure him by the City Council. A threatened recall effort has yet to materialize.

Many believe the proposed domestic partnership ordinance, because it opened up such deep divisions in the city, is dead, at least in the near term. But the issue left many in the city badly shaken.

Such public gay bashing just wasn’t supposed to happen in Long Beach. This was a city known for its tolerance, often ranked with the Castro district in San Francisco and West Hollywood as a gay-friendly place.

Each year the city hosts one of the nation’s largest gay pride parades. Gays and lesbians hold many important posts in local institutions. Same-sex couples are active in local churches. Last March, just days before the primary election, a Democratic Assembly candidate, attorney Gerrie Schipske, was hit with a mailing attacking her for being a lesbian. Despite the mailing, Schipske pulled 60% of the vote.

“People have perceived this town as a safe town,” said Patrick Mitchell, an attorney at McDonnell Douglas who is openly gay. “It’s never been perceived as a place you needed to be afraid in. But suddenly we are seeing that.”

The clash comes because while Long Beach has a thriving gay community, it also has a strong, conservatively voting middle class.

This was the city that gave two prominent Republicans, former Gov. George Deukmejian and Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, their first election victories. Some like to call the leafy suburbs on the east side “west Orange County” rather than east Long Beach.

It was this conservative strain that surfaced during the fight over domestic partnerships.

Councilman Les Robbins, the other member of the Sheriff’s Department on the part-time council, angrily denounced Shultz during a later meeting, saying his colleague “has unleashed the voices of hate that haven’t been heard in years.”

Robbins said he was deluged with phone calls attacking him for not supporting Shultz. An aide who got some of the calls said he had to hang up when they got too nasty.

City Councilman Alan Lowenthal, a Cal State Long Beach psychology professor who introduced the ordinance, said, “People called me at home and attacked me for my morals. They said I brought Sodom and Gomorrah to the city. It’s been a tremendous shock to all of us.”

In just over two months since Shultz’s speech, the Long Beach Gay and Lesbian Center, which collects reports on hate crimes, said it has received 10 such reports, compared to two during the two months prior to the speech. However, workers at the center were reluctant to draw a connection between the reports and the City Council controversy, saying the reports have not been checked out.

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The Long Beach Police Department said it has not seen a rise in hate crimes since June. “We haven’t seen anything out of the ordinary,” said police spokeswoman Karen Kerr.

But Robert Fox, president of an association of businesses along the so-called Broadway Corridor, a neighborhood popular with the gay community, said he has received some reports of hate crimes.

“Gay bashings have been on the increase since Shultz made his remarks,” Fox said, adding that many of the crimes are not reported because of the reluctance of gay men to step forward. Fox, who helped organize a candlelight march on City Hall to protest Shultz’s comments, said his home was vandalized and he received hate mail and threatening phone calls.

Shultz, since the blowup, has taken a low profile. He refused to be interviewed for this story. “Domestic partnership isn’t an issue that he would like to discuss at this time,” said Jodie Phillips, a City Hall aide.

Phillips said Shultz, who represents the city’s north side, has not suffered politically. If anything, he is stronger, she said.

“He doesn’t feel he has any political trouble at this time,” she said. “In fact, his political support has only increased. He gained a lot of support after the speech.”

From the beginning, Shultz has received strong support from local churches.

The proposed domestic partnership ordinance is comparable to ordinances that have been enacted in several other cities, including West Hollywood, San Francisco, Sacramento and Laguna Beach.

It would give limited legal recognition to couples, regardless of sex. One aim is to clear the way for partners to visit and provide for each other’s needs if one is hospitalized or in jail. A longtime complaint among gays is that they can be denied information on the condition of a partner because they are not family members.

“We just want the same rights everyone else has,” said Marc McEveny, a lifelong Long Beach resident who says he has had a monogamous relationship with his partner for 18 years.

The genesis of both the ordinance and much of the opposition is a study by the city’s Human Relations Commission during the early 1990s that urged the City Council to redefine what a family is, allowing recognition of couples like McEveny and his partner.

“I don’t think we should ever redefine family through an ordinance,” said the Rev. Garon Harden of the Greater Open Door Church of God in Christ in Long Beach. “I think traditional family values will be destroyed by ordinances like this.”

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Harden is president of the Long Beach Ministerial Alliance, which represents a number of black churches. He defends Shultz, although he tries to distance himself from the councilman’s remarks. “I would not have said all the things he said, but he has a right to say it, and I defend his right to say it.”

Rather than vote on the issue, the City Council referred the ordinance to the city’s Human Relations Commission. But the commission, reflecting deep divisions in the city, is stalemated and is preparing to send it back to the City Council with no recommendation.

“We could come to absolutely no consensus on the issue,” said Rebecca Lopez, chairwoman of the 12-member commission. “We pretty much split six to six.” Believing there is a need to legally acknowledge same-sex couples, she said she was frustrated. “It is clear the definition of family has expanded. It would have been nice for Long Beach to have been in the forefront . . . but I guess it will take more time.”

Insurance agent Hoffman said she does not plan on being silent when the ordinance comes up before the council again. “We are not going to let this thing drop,” she said.

Cheryl Abate, president of the gay and lesbian-focused Lambda Democratic Club, said, “The City Council would like to see [the domestic partnership ordinance] go away. There are a lot of council people who would rather deal with fixing sidewalks or filling potholes rather than human issues like this,” she said. “But we aren’t going anywhere.”