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Serving the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities since 1971
Vol. 50 • No. 8 • February 20-26, 2020
Giant AIDS quilt display set for April in SF’s Golden Gate Park Jane Philomen Cleland
Mayor London Breed spoke at the San Francisco Pride kickoff media event at City Hall Tuesday.
SF Pride kicks off 50th celebration
by John Ferrannini
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ayor London Breed, city officials, and members of the San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebration Committee kicked off festivities associated with the upcoming 50th San Francisco Pride parade with a City Hall media event February 18. About an hour later, protesters outside of City Hall carried signs accusing SF Pride of being “racist” and “anti-queer.” This year will be the 50th iteration of the celebration, which began in 1970 as a march on Polk Street and a “gay-in” in Golden Gate Park. The name of the event that commemorates the anniversary of the watershed Stonewall riots has changed over the years, eventually becoming Pride on its 25th anniversary in 1995. “As is tradition, the Dykes on Bikes will roar and lead the 275 contingents of the parade from the Embarcadero to the Civic Center,” new SF Pride Executive Director Fred Lopez said at the event. “As Harvey Milk said, ‘you gotta give ’em hope,’ and with your support at SF Pride, we always will.” This year’s parade is expected to have over 50,000 marchers and 1 million spectators, Lopez said. The theme is “Generations of Hope,” the culmination of a three-year “generations” theme intended to highlight Pride’s halfcentury. The 2018 theme was “Generations of Strength” and the 2019 theme was “Generations of Resistance.” Lopez also announced that KPIX-TV, which had been livestreaming the parade for the past two years, will also broadcast the event over the air this year. “Wear something cute and call your moms, because you’re going to be on TV,” Lopez said. Civic Center will once again host a festival Saturday and Sunday, becoming the home of “more than 20 community programs, stages, and venues,” Lopez added. SF Pride donated $203,000 to over 40 Bay Area nonprofits last year, and has donated more than $3 million since 1997, according to Lopez. Until March 10, voting for individual and organizational community grand marshals will be open on Pride’s website. Lopez did not have the names of performers at this year’s festivities ready to announce, but SF Pride is accepting submissions for its main stage. To accompany the festivities, an exhibit titled “Labor of Love: The Birth of San Francisco Pride 1970-80” will be open April 17 through January 2021 at the GLBT Historical Society Museum at 4127 18th Street in the Castro district. A few weeks later on May 7, another photography exhibit put on by the GLBT Historical Society and the San Francisco Arts See page 6 >>
by Cynthia Laird
Bob Lenzi, right, keeps track as volunteers Larry Wolfson, left, Beth Feingold, Matt Polsdorf, and Holly Branscombe unload AIDS Memorial Quilt panels before stacking on shelving at a San Leandro warehouse February 14.
A
s part of the activities for Golden Gate Park’s 150th anniversary, portions of the AIDS Memorial Quilt will be displayed in San Francisco for three days in April. The quilt display will consist of 1,920 panels, approximately the same size and shape of the first major quilt display in Washington, D.C. in 1987. The quilt was last displayed in full in 1996 on the National Mall in D.C.
The San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department, organizers of the park’s sesquicentennial, and representatives of the National AIDS Memorial Grove, which now has stewardship of the quilt, made the announcement late Monday. A news conference was held Tuesday morning at a warehouse in San Leandro, where blocks of the quilt began arriving last week. See page 14 >> Rick Gerharter
Vets kicked out for being gay can upgrade their discharges by Matthew S. Bajko
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arl Tebell finally received word in December that he had been granted an honorable discharge from the U.S. Navy nearly 70 years after he was drummed out for being gay. He is still waiting to receive his newly issued DD 214 discharge paperwork in the mail so he can access medical care at a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs facility in San Francisco. “I was kind of relieved. It didn’t dawn on me what it meant to have an honorable discharge,” said Tebell, 87, who resides in a senior living facility in San Francisco. “This all happened 67 years ago. To wait this long took a toll. At one point I said, ‘To hell with it.’ I gave up and thought I was going to be stuck with this for the rest of my life.” Advocates for LGBT veterans estimate that roughly 114,000 U.S. service members were “involuntarily separated” from the military due to their sexual orientation between the end of World War II and the repeal in 2011 of the homophobic “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that barred LGBT people from serving openly in the military. While many of those veterans could likely qualify to correct or upgrade their discharges, just 8% had done so as of 2018, according to a report presented that April at a conference held at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School. “If a service member was discharged solely because of their homosexuality or their sexual orientation then their discharge should be upgraded to honorable given there was no other misconduct,” said Robert M. Alexander, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel who now works as the Equal Justice Works Fellow for Swords to Plowshares in San Francisco. “However, just because a service member had misconduct in their service record it does not necessarily mean they can’t get their discharge upgraded. It is a case-by-case basis.” Over the last seven decades Tebell had initially gotten nowhere when he attempted to upgrade his bad conduct discharge he received in late 1953, just months after the end of the Korean War. Tebell had joined the Navy earlier that year, leaving his hometown of Aurora, Illinois for training at
Rick Gerharter
Carl Tebell, who was drummed out of the Navy for being gay, recently had his bad conduct discharge upgraded to honorable.
the Navy Hospital Corps School in San Diego. But that fall a fellow classmate had turned Tebell and 14 other men in to Navy officials for being gay. Throughout October and November Tebell found himself in a living hell, ostracized from the other naval recruits in a separate barracks, ridiculed as a “faggot” and a “queer” by other sailors outside the base chow hall, and forced to eat food scraps for weeks on end. “They threw the leftovers in one big pan for us to eat,” recalled Tebell. “It wasn’t a prison but it was like a prison. We weren’t allowed to associate with other people.” Navy investigators tried to get Tebell to reveal the names of other gay men he knew in the service, but Tebell refused to do so. “They were after a witch hunt. I wouldn’t turn anyone else in,” recalled Tebell in an interview with the Bay Area Reporter at his home across the street from the historic Mission Dolores Basilica. “My paperwork said I had a bad conduct discharge. The worst part about it was I had to turn in my pea coat and Navy uniform that I had paid for.”
Upon his being released, Tebell called relatives who lived in Southern California, but unbeknownst to him, someone from the Navy had informed them he was being discharged due to his homosexuality. Tebell was told he wasn’t welcome at their home, so he called a friend who let him stay at his place in San Diego. “My last paycheck from the Navy was about $34,” said Tebell, who had successfully begged his aunt and uncle not to say anything to his father back in Illinois. (His mother at that point had already passed away; his father died in 1972.) The Navy did purchase Tebell a one-way train ticket on the California Zephyr for him to return to Illinois and move back home with his father. Because he was not honorably discharged, Tebell had difficulty finding work, as employers would always ask to see his discharge paperwork. “I lost out on a lot of nice jobs because of that,” noted Tebell. He ended up working in the psych ward of a Chicago hospital but disliked it and quit. A friend he had met at a gay bar who relocated to San Francisco invited him to come join him, so Tebell headed west in the winter of 1960. He befriended the late gay drag queen Jose Sarria and was arrested one night during a raid of the Black Cat gay bar where Sarria worked in North Beach. Eventually, Tebell became a merchant marine, traveling the world working as a butcher on passenger freight ships. He retired in 1985 and joined the Alexander Hamilton Post 448 of the American Legion for LGBT veterans. Through a fellow member he was introduced to Alexander with Swords to Plowshares in 2018 and sought to upgrade his discharge. “It took a hell of a time to get it. What good will it do me now? I am retired and have a good place to live,” said Tebell, though he has applied for a disability pension from the Navy as his personnel paperwork revealed he had injured his left hand during rifle training. “Bob got it done and I am very grateful for it. But it was a long haul to getting here.” See page 7 >>