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Vol. 44 • No. 4 • January 23-29, 2014
Brown declares drought in CA Rick Gerharter
Larry Brinkin, right, walked into court Tuesday accompanied by his husband, Wood Massi.
Brinkin pleads guilty by Seth Hemmelgarn
G
ay rights pioneer Larry Brinkin is expected to serve six months in jail after pleading guilty this week to felony possession of child pornography. Brinkin, 67, who was a longtime staffer at San Francisco’s Human Rights Commission, quietly entered his plea Tuesday, January 21 before San Francisco Superior Court Judge Brendan Conroy. At his sentencing March 5, Brinkin is expected to be ordered to serve five years of probation, which would begin with six months in jail and be followed by six months of home detention with a monitoring bracelet. Brinkin must also register as a sex offender for life. Prosecutors had charged Brinkin with two counts of distributing child pornography and four counts of possession of child pornography. The remaining charges were dismissed Tuesday. San Francisco police initially arrested Brinkin on child pornography-related charges in June 2012. He quickly posted bail and was released from custody on those charges. Following further investigation by police at the request of the district attorney’s office, he surrendered to police in September 2012 and bailed out of custody shortly thereafter. Assistant District Attorney Leslie Cogan has said that there were “numerous items of photographs as well as videos” involved in the case, and that Brinkin’s activity had gone back to October 2011. Brinkin, who was a compliance officer for the Human Rights Commission for more than two decades before he retired in 2010, declined to comment before his court appearance Tuesday. His husband, Wood Massi, accompanied him, as he has for numerous hearings since 2012. After the hearing, Randy Knox, Brinkin’s attorney, said that Brinkin is “genuinely remorseful” and has a “much greater understanding of the damage that child pornography inflicts.” “Larry is a wonderful, kind, sensitive human being who made a terrible mistake,” See page 6 >>
Rick Gerharter
Governor Jerry Brown points to this year’s lack of rainfall at a news conference in San Francisco.
by Cynthia Laird
L
GBTs will likely see signs urging water conservation in area gyms and sex clubs in the wake of California Governor Jerry Brown declaring a drought state of emergency. With the state facing water shortfalls in the driest year in recorded state history, Brown held a news conference in San Fran-
cisco to make the official declaration and to urge all citizens to voluntarily conserve 20 percent of their water use. Brown said he was asking all state residents to help, whether they live in rural or urban areas. “Hopefully it will rain eventually but we have to do our part,” Brown said at the packed January 17 news conference at his
office in the State Building. The governor said the conservation effort was voluntary, for now, but that the state’s millions of residents would be affected. “From the Mexican border to the Oregon border there are a lot of consumers and a lot of lawns,” the governor said. “It’s important to awaken all Californians to the serious matter of drought and the lack of rain,” he added. According to Brown’s declaration, the state’s water supplies have dipped to alarming levels. Snowpack in the mountains, a leading indicator of drought conditions, is approximately 20 percent of the normal average for this time of year. Additionally, the state’s largest reservoirs have very low water levels for this time of year and the major river systems, including the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, have significantly reduced water flows. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, much of the state, including the Bay Area, is in “extreme” drought conditions. In recent weeks, weather forecasters have blamed the lack of precipitation on a high pressure ridge off the coast. Forecasting models show little in the way of winter storms on the horizon. See page 14 >>
Poz founder Strub pens memoir by Matthew S. Bajko
S
ean Strub, the founder of Poz magazine, occupied a unique perch that bisected political circles, gay high society, and activist groups throughout the early years of the AIDS epidemic in America. He has documented how his personal and professional spheres interconnected as he moved from the Midwest to first Washington, D.C. and later New York and rural Pennsylvania in his fascinating new memoir Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS and Survival (Scribner, January 2014). “About three years ago I seriously began working on the book. I had actually resisted writing this kind of thing about the epidemic,” Strub, 55, told the Bay Area Reporter in a phone interview ahead of his visit to the Bay Area next week to promote the book. He changed his mind after being interviewed by a New York Times reporter about his life – Strub was diagnosed with HIV in 1985 – for a story about long-term survival with the virus. “That history is not well documented and certainly isn’t well known,” said Strub, who with his partner, Xavier Morales, splits his time between New York and the couple’s home in Milford, Pennsylvania. “That was when I started feeling more of a need and urgency to write all this.” The Iowa native details how, early in his
Courtesy seanstrub.com
Author Sean Strub is promoting his new memoir.
youth, he discovered a love for politics and landed himself a job working a Senate elevator in the U.S. Capitol during his freshman year at Georgetown. He recounts being invited to a dinner party one night where he befriended the gay playwright Tennessee Williams and later enlisted his help for the first fundraising appeal on behalf of the newly formed Human Rights Campaign Fund. His entrée to a political career came from
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Alan Baron, whose insidery newsletter The Baron Reporter was the must-read publication of its day. From another mentor, Roger Craver, Strub quickly learned he had a knack for direct-marketing and fundraising appeals. By 1979 he had moved to Manhattan to enroll at Columbia and began frequenting gay bars, bathhouses, and sex clubs, something he avoided doing while in Washington, D.C. For him and many of his young gay friends, “bathhouses were an important part of life,” he writes. The sexual mores adopted by many gay men as a sign of sexual liberation, however, “created the perfect storm” for HIV to spread so rapidly, writes Strub. “The lack of knowledge about gay men’s sexual health and access to health care that respected gay sexuality compounded the problem.” Strub became active with the New York Political Action Committee, hung out at the offices of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, and befriended the doormen of famed dance club Studio 54 to gain free admission. In October 1980 he ended up in the hospital due to contracting hepatitis B and swelling in his lymph nodes. Bedridden for months, he only realized years later that his ailments in his glands likely signaled he had contracted HIV. Later that year he happened to walk by the Dakota apartment building shortly after John Lennon was shot and witnessed his being put See page 13 >>