The Mad Professah Lectures

Openly gay Robert Garcia was elected the first openly gay mayor of Long Beach, and at age 36, its youngest by defeating Damon Dunn with 52.1% of the votes cast yesterday.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

In Long Beach, City Councilman Robert Garcia won the mayor's race outright with 52% of the vote. Former NFL player Damon Dunn got 47%, a difference of about 1,900 votes. About 17.6% of Long Beach voters turned out for Tuesday’s election.

That was a better turn out than in Los Angeles County where a mere 13.19% of registered voters completed ballots. Openly gay Sheila Kuehl is going to be in a November run-off to become one of the "five little kings" that run Los Angeles County by winning 36.18% to Bobby Shriver's 28.80% in the 3rd Supervisorial District. Openly gay Jeffrey Prang will also be in a run-off to become the L.A. County Assessor by coming in first  in a large field with 18.06% of the vote. Hilda Solis will replace Gloria Molina in the 1st Supervisorial District.

Municipal elections in Long Beach occurred yesterday and the results were somewhat surprising. The front runner, Bonnie Lowenthal, finished 3rd, missing the run-off. The top candidate was also the youngest, 36-year-old Robert Garcia, who happens to be openly gay. Damon Dunn, who placed second is only two years older, African-American and would be the city's first Black mayor if he wins the run-off.

The Long Beach Press-Telegram reports on the political earthquake that hit Long beach yesterday:

According to unofficial vote totals, Garcia, the 1st District councilman, had 25.4 percent of the vote, far short of the 50 percent mark required to win outright. Dunn had 22.3 percent. 

In third was Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal, who received 19.6 percent of the vote. The result is the first election loss for a Lowenthal since Rep. Alan Lowenthal won election to City Council in 1992. 

Finishing the top five was 6th District Councilwoman Gerrie Schipske, with 15.5 percent of the vote, and Long Beach City College Trustee Doug Otto, at 13.6 percent. None of the remaining five candidates reached 3 percent.

The run-off will be June 3rd, the date of the statewide primary election. Dunn raised the largest amount of money and appears to be aligned with the city's business interests while Garcia was endorsed by the outgoing Mayor, Bob Foster.

Robert Garcia	Gerrie Schipske

There is an electoral campaign underway to become the next Mayor of Long Beach, the second largest city (of 99!) in Los Angeles County, seventh largest in California and 36th largest nationwide. There are two prominent LGBT candidates running for Mayor of Long Beach: Vice-Mayor (and City Councilman) Robert Garcia, 35, and City Councilwoman Gerrie Schipske, 62. Garcia has represented District 1 since 2009 and Schipske has represented District 5 since 2006. If either is elected in April 2014 they would be Long Beach's first Mayor who is openly LGBT. Long Beach is considered to have a relatively large fraction of the population that is LGBT and according to official census data about 1% of all city households are same-sex couples.

From Garcia's campaign website:

Dr. Robert Garcia was elected Vice Mayor of Long Beach by a unanimous vote in July, 2012, becoming the youngest person ever to hold that position. He was first elected to the Long Beach City Council in April of 2009, and re-elected to a full four-year term in April 2010 to serve the citizens of the First City Council District.

Robert is also a California Coastal Commissioner.  He was appointed by the California State Senate Rules Committee in January of 2013, and in that role serves as one of 12 commissioners tasked with protecting the California Coast and overseeing all development up and down the state.

He is a member of the public policy and communications faculty at the University of Southern California, and has taught Communication Studies at both Cal State Long Beach and Long Beach City College. Robert's passion for education led him to pursue a Doctorate in Higher Education, which he was awarded in 2010 after publishing his dissertation on California's Master Plan for Education.

Robert also holds a Masters Degree in Communication Management from the University of Southern California and a Bachelor's Degree in Communication Studies from California State University, Long Beach.

In 2007, Robert co-founded and launched the Long Beach Post, a Long Beach based media website and newspaper. Today, the Long Beach Post has over 80,000 online subscribers, and a print edition of over 25,000 copies.

From Schipske's campaign website:

Gerrie was elected in 1992 to the Long Beach Community College District Board of Trustees where she focused on expanding vocational training programs and implementing the "seamless educational system" with LBUSD and CSULB. As President of the Board she guided the start of district elections.



She was elected to the Long Beach City Council in 2006 and re-elected with over 64% of the vote in 2010.

​
Gerrie is an adjunct faculty member at CSULB and has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on public administration, intergovernmental relations, human resources management, healthcare law and California government. She also teaches at the Senior University at CSULB (OLLI).
​
Gerrie has written three books on the history of her hometown: Rosie the Riveter in Long Beach; Early Aviation in Long Beach; and Early Long Beach. The books are available from Arcadia Publishing and local bookstores.

​
​Gerrie and her partner, Flo Pickett, have been together 33 years and raised a son and two daughters. They are Grandma and Nana to a wonderful 3 year old girl.

It appears as if the fight to be Mayor of Long Beach recently got more complicated when former Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal (who used to represent District 1) announced recently that she was entering the mayoral race. Former NFL player Damon Dunn who is also a City Councilman has raised the most money so far.

MadProfessah will be following this local race with interest!

Hat/tip to Karen Ocamb

This is interesting! The real estate blog Trulia did an analysis of 2010 U.S. Census data which recorded in what geographical census tracts same-sex couples lived and overlaid it with median price per square foor for homes listed to come up with the list of the Top 10 "gayborhoods" in the U.S. by percentage of the neighborhood which is either male or female same-sex couples. One interesting thing to note is that of the Top 10 the only jurisdiction where same-sex couples can get legally married right now (or in 2010 when the data was from) is Provincetown, Massachusetts (although I suspect many of the California couples would have been married in the June 15-November 3, 2008 173-day window when marriage equality was legal in my home state).

To summarize

Just three neighborhoods — Provincetown, Rehoboth Beach, and the Castro — are on both the men’s and women’s top lists. The top four women’s neighborhoods, including Provincetown, are in Massachusetts. But one of the biggest differences is that the top men’s neighborhoods are much gayer than the top women’s neighborhoods: just one women’s neighborhood breaks the 5% barrier, while five men’s neighborhoods have more than 10% same-sex male couples. Remember, there are roughly the same number of male and female couples in the U.S. So, that means that male couples are much more clustered in particular neighborhoods than female couples are: female couples are more likely to be the only ones on their block.


[...]


The gayest male neighborhoods are a mix of well-known urban neighborhoods (Castro,West Hollywood), less-well-known communities (Wilton Manors, FL; Pleasant Ridge, MI), and vacation areas (Provincetown, Palm Springs, Rehoboth Beach).

Trulia also did an analysis of the gayborhoods in my hometown of Los Angeles:

 The gay center of LA for men includes two zip codes in West Hollywood: roughly from Doheny Drive to Sweetzer (90069, $481) and from Sweetzer to La Brea (90046, $465), as well as the Hollywood Hills (90068, $410). By Los Angeles standards these are expensive areas, though New Yorkers might not think so. Much more affordable, and still very gay relative to the rest of the region, is Signal Hill (90755, $200), a small city surrounded by Long Beach, about 30 miles south of West Hollywood. 

Long Beach also hosts the six neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of female couples in the LA area. The top three are Belmont Heights (90814, $278), Plaza / South of Conant (90808, $299), and Eastside (90804, $207) – all of which are far less expensive than West Hollywood.

Where do you live?

Hat/tip to Towleroad

The above video shows that people are being told that they are signing petitions to increase penalties for child molestation when actually they are signing petitions to repeal SB 48, the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, Respectful Education Act of 2011 which mandates the inclusion of LGBT people in school history curricula.That's all the law does. If you think teaching kids about Harvey Milk and Bayard Rustin and Gertrude Stein will turn them into gays and lesbians you need to get your nose out of the Bible!

Long Beach has been the location of at least three attacks on gay men in the last two weeks.  Long Beach is the third largest city in California and is well-known for a prominent LGBT community. They have an openly gay, Latino city councilman named Robert Garcia who is quoted saying that "These incidents have no place in our city."

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Avila, who was walking ahead of the group, passed a man arguing with a woman on the sidewalk. The man stopped long enough to use a slur against Avila as he passed, he said.
[...]
The man ran away, but Avila and another friend chased him several blocks until police arrived, he said.

The suspect, Jorge Jhovanoy Ibarrias, 21, was arrested and charged with felony battery in addition to a hate crime. He has pleaded not guilty, authorities said.

Three days later, near East 4th Street and Orange Avenue, another man was beaten and called slurs. That case is being investigated as a battery and a possible hate incident, though not a hate crime, Fernandez said. The difference, he said, is that police do not believe that hatred specifically against gays was the initial motivation.

Four days after the second attack, on Sundayabout 1:30 a.m., several men walking on Broadway, two blocks from the site of the initial incident, were approached by another group that used slurs against them, police said. A fight broke out before the groups separated. But the group that made the insults returned shortly afterward with several other people and assaulted three of the men who had been walking down the street, police said.

Hat/tip to Rod 2.0 who posted the video of a local ABC affiliate coverage of the story shown above.