Executive Producer: Khari Johnson
Producer and writer: Juliet Blalack
Photographer: Sandra Garcia
By Juliet Blalack
California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano entered the political spotlight long before authoring a controversial bill to legalize marijuana.
He would become known as a stand-up comedian, city supervisor and now state assemblyman but first Tom Ammiano was a teacher. A gay teacher. And the press outed him before his parents knew.
“Kind of a shock to see your picture on the front page with the title ‘gay,’” said Ammiano about a June 1975 San Francisco Examiner article.
“Then, I thought it’s good to call home right now and tell them what’s happening,” he said laughing.
Ammiano spoke about teaching while closeted and stigmatized at a press conference put on by the Gay Teacher’s Coalition.
The press conference was one of many actions the Gay Teacher’s Coalition took to get the school board to ban discrimination against gay teachers. Hank Wilson, a founding member, said they also organized a picket line and lobbied individual school board members to vote for adding “sexual orientation” to a clause against discrimination.
The night before the school board was scheduled to vote on the matter, Catholic priest Father Thomas Reed called Wilson to declare his support. Reed was the only board member Wilson did not approach for help because he assumed Reed’s religious beliefs would preclude backing gay rights.
The next day, after board member Eugene Hopps suggested adding sexual orientation to the nondiscrimination clause, Father Reed made a strong plea in favor of the motion.
Reed referenced a hate crime that happened in 1961 while he was principal of St. Ignatius High School. A group of boys beat up a teacher who they thought was gay and left him unconscious on streetcar tracks. After the teacher was killed by a streetcar, three boys confessed to the crime—including St. Ignatius varsity swimmer Larry Magee, according to The San Francisco Chronicle’s May 5, 1961 edition.
“The whole thing turned my stomach that students should think that they had some right to attack their brothers simply because they had a different sexual orientation,” said Reed at the school board’s meeting, according to The Examiner.
The school board voted in favor of protecting gay and lesbian teachers and Ammiano became a known activist for gay rights.
Settling in San Francisco
After teaching English in Vietnam for a year, Ammiano returned to San Francisco State Unviersity to earn his teaching credential. Originally from New Jersey, he moved to San Francisco to earn his master’s degree in special education from SF State. He described the college at the time as lacking support for students who wanted to come out, especially teachers.
He would later teach at SF State himself, where his daughter Annie Jupiter Jones went to study for both her bachelor’s degree and teaching credential.
“[I] was looking at some of the professors and going ‘Didn’t I know you in the 70’s? Weren’t you a student teacher?”” said Ammiano about going back to SF State during his daughter’s time there.
Jones now works for a community theater group and lives in the Mission District. She grew up with two moms and, after she met Ammiano and his partner, two dads as well.
Ammiano was originally an anonymous sperm donor, but Jones’ birth mother was able to contact him when Jones was 10. It turned out they had all met before and lived within walking distance of each other.
“His partner Tim was a first grade teacher and just really knew how to work with kids,” said Jones, recalling the first times she met Ammiano and his partner.
Tim Curbo and Tom Ammiano were in a domestic partnership for over 15 years, until Curbo died of AIDS in 1994.
“When you talk about the ideal soul mates, that was it,” said Jones of Curbo and Ammiano’s relationship.
Now Jones has two daughters herself who call Ammiano “Nono”- the Italian word for grandfather- and visit him frequently. Justice, who is now eight, was featured in Ammiano’s speech when he was sworn in as president of the board of supervisors.
“He said, ‘This is my granddaughter Justice, justice has come to City Hall,” recalls Jones, laughing. “That was when I first realized how really into being a grandfather he was,” she said.
Run, Tom, run!
In 1999, a powerful grassroots campaign — and the possibility of an openly gay mayor in a big city — got The New York Times, CNN, and NBC to cover Ammiano’s mayoral campaign.
His run for San Francisco mayor shored up political consultant Clint Reilly, who Salon.com estimated spent nearly $4 million trying to get elected. This was around 250 times what Ammiano’s campaign spent during the run-offs, according to activist Hank Wilson.
“Tom was in his glory,” said Wilson, who worked on Ammiano’s mayoral campaign.
A website imploring “Run, Tom, run!” popped up before Ammiano decided to campaign. Wilson then told Ammiano he would be tabling for him at the Folsom and Castro street fairs. After around 200 people signed up to volunteer for the Ammiano for Mayor campaign, Ammiano finally threw his hat in the ring.
The headquarters of the campaign was Josie’s, a comedy club that regularly featured gay and lesbian performers. Here the campaign collected around $15,000 in piecemeal donations, and thousands of people dropped by to get signs, said Wilson.
“We’d never done this before,” he said. “It was very historical.”
Ammiano came second in the run-offs, beating two well-established and well-funded politicians. Willie Brown was still re-elected, but several Ammiano supporters were elected to the Board of Supervisors. Current supervisor Chris Daly and former supervisors Aaron McGoldrich and Aaron Peskin all helped Ammiano’s mayoral campaign.
Ammiano stayed on the board of supervisors for five terms, and was elected to the California State Assembly last November.
From San Francisco to Sacramento
This January, Ammiano promoted his last piece of city legislation by being the first resident to pick up a San Francisco city ID card, according to The San Francisco Chronicle. The same article describes a line of hundreds of people waiting to get their ID cards.
The San Francisco city ID primarily benefits undocumented immigrants who cannot otherwise report crimes, use the library, or identify themselves to authorities. Although three San Francisco residents brought a case against the IDs to The San Francisco Supreme Court, the court ruled in October 2008 that the cards did not amount to aiding illegal immigration. Currently, the City of Oakland is considering issuing similar cards.
The newly-elected assemblyman is now attracting attention as the author and sole sponsor of a state bill that would decriminalize and regulate marijuana. He wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, and that decriminalizing the drug would bring much-needed revenue into the State of California.
“It’s an interesting expression of a political career. I didn’t start until I was 49 or 50 and never knew that I’d be in elected politics this long,” said Ammiano.
“The interesting thing is that the opportunity was there. That sixth sense I had about if anything good is going to happen to you, it’s going to happen in San Francisco, that’s turned out to be true.”
My work as a journalist began as a writer but I’m also able to shoot pictures and capture high quality video and audio for use online or wherever you need it. I have published hundreds of stories in magazines and metropolitan daily newspapers in California, Colorado and Florida with New American Media, Tribune Company, Time Warner and Hearst publications.
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All content © 2010 by Khari Johnson