Get Used to It: Ep. 153, "Voices of Our Lives: Eric Bauman"

(upbeat music) - Hi, welcome to "Get Used to It". I'm Sheila Kuehl. And as usual, I take you through this show and just show you all the wonderful people that we have brought for you to meet for you to get to know better. And today is one in our series of "Voices of Our Lives", where we talk to a person well known in our LGBT community. Find out a little more about them and really their contribution, not only to the community, but to the world. And today it's my great pleasure to have on the show as my guest, Eric Bauman, who is the vice chair of the California Democratic Party and the chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, and a whole lot more than that as you'll see. Welcome, Eric. - Thank you for having me, Sheila. - So one of the things that we like to do in these kind of "Voices of Our Lives" series is get an idea about where people start in their lives and how moving through their lives brings them to the kind of work that they do, the kind of activism and passions they have about what they do. It's sort of like your life only makes sense in hindsight is what my folks used to say. So just to start out, give us a little idea about where you grew up. - I was born in the Bronx, I grew up in Queens, moved to California when I was just shy of turning 18, had a renaissance and started all over again, which is kind of nice because that means instead of being 50, I'm really about 18 years younger than that, which kinda works out pretty well. It goes along with how I feel. - We'll give you that, but go back to New York for just a minute, a little more about your growing up, what were your folks like? - Well, I'm in many ways, a traditional New York Jewish kid and many ways not. The not part is because my mother was a lesbian, long term relationship. She and her partner were together 35 years, when she died. My father was a doctor, but he also retired from the military with a star on his shoulder. So it was a little bit different than traditional way. I was educated in military school. And I often, since our invasion of Iraq some years back, I've often told the story about how my classmates in military school were divided down the middle. Half of them couldn't wait to get out and get their M16 and go to Vietnam and be butch. And the other half were trying to figure out how they were getting that train ticket to Canada, because in all of our great junior ROTC training, we were taught 75,000 ways to kill a man. And it's not exactly something that you should be teaching 13 year old kids, but that's kind of how it goes. And I was dead in the middle because being from a traditional liberal Jewish family, my family didn't like the war. They didn't like Lyndon Johnson, they hated Richard Nixon and they thought we should be out. But then I had the sort of sense of responsibility because I looked up to my father in uniform and all this kind of stuff. And it was an interesting dichotomy for me. And I started to live it again when George W. Bush decided that we should commit 165,000 of our young men and women to invade Iraq. - Well, it's difficult. I can't even imagine going to a military school, but I can imagine, although I'm assuming if your mother was in a long term relationship with a woman, that there was a divorce in there somewhere. - My father was drafted in the very early 1960s, when the Berlin crisis struck, my mother was already in a relationship at that time. In fact, her then partner lived with us. It was kind of an unusual arrangement, I suppose. And then my father never came back to live with us after he got drafted. And that was probably for the better. - So, you see yourself as being raised by your mom and her partner? - I was raised by my mother and her partners. And as I've noted to you before, I always tell the story. In fact, at my mother's funeral, I told the story about how it was my mother who taught me how to box, how to protect myself, how to ride a bike, how to pick a suit, how to tie, how to tie the knot. Most people learn that stuff from their father or they don't learn it at all. I learned it from my mother and that's the reason I do such a good job at it. - And you also said, I think when we were talking that your mother taught you how to be a gentleman. - My mother did teach me how to be a gentleman. - Of course, a lot of mothers teach their sons how to be gentlemen in a way by insisting. - Yes, but most of them-- - But not necessarily (indistinct). - But most of them didn't necessarily emulate or allow you to emulate their behavior and my mother did. And we always joke that my mother and I were twins and I have a photo from my wedding, which you remember, since you presided over, it was your second wedding that you had performed for Secretary of State Bowens and then Michael and mine. But I have a picture of my mother and me in our tuxedos from our wedding that overlooks my desk. And it's a picture my mother was already well into being ill and looking older, but I so see myself in her because our faces are so identical. And with me being a little bit older now, starting to show the age in my face, I really recognize that it's incredible how much alike we look. - Well, we do, I mean, I remember, I can't even remember what the TV series was, where one of the characters said, "Oh, the damnedest thing was coming outta my sleeve this morning." And everybody said, "What?" And she said, "My mother's hand." - [Eric] "My mother's hand," yeah. - And I should correct you too because the director of this show, I performed his marriage, I think might have been the first one that I performed. And I know he's watching in the truck thinking, "Why doesn't she correct Eric?" But I think I remember your wedding very well and I was very, very happy to be there. - I've had the opportunity to tell the story of that wedding many, many times, but this past Sunday, I participated in a bootcamp training, mostly young LGBT activists who are engaged and about to engage in the effort to restore our right to marriage in California. And unbeknownst to me and unexpectedly, the speaker just before me was Rabbi Freehling. So I told the story to the audience about how Michael and I planned this very simple wedding that was supposed to be 60 people and engaged in great discussions about how we were gonna build the wedding and then ended up with 300 people. And the two best co-officiants that one could have at a wedding. Then I guess, assembly member, no, you were already a Senator, I think Senator Sheila James Kuehl and Rabbi Allen Freehling, and everybody always says, "Well, why didn't you have a gay rabbi? And I said, "I had a 74 year old rabbi who believed that people like Michael and I, and our relationship should be honored for years and years to come. And I was telling this story about the wedding and how it grew and all. And then in one of those off-script moments, since you were supposed to pronounce us, you went off script and said, "By the moral authority vested in me, by all the people who are good and true in the world." And then, which left not a dry eye in the house. And then if you remember Rabbi Freehling, when he followed you to do the benediction, he turned out to the audience. And he said, "Mr. Lieutenant, governor, Mr. Governor, and all of you legislators in the room, let this be the last wedding we performed by the moral authority vested in us." And any eyes that might have been dry after you pronounced us by the moral authority, it was over. Well, when I told this story to 150 young people sitting in this room last Sunday recently, not one of them had a dry eye either and it was amazing. And by the way, Allen Freehling was sitting right there with tears streaming down his eyes, it was marvelous. - Well, it's an interesting thing because talk about moral authority. Not to say that we are more moral necessarily than other people, but the notion of the fairness of the ability to marry touches so many people deeply, very much like the civil rights of other groups that we are not a part of. Have touched us and you just get to a point where I don't know, you have to do something about it, but I don't wanna skip ahead too far, although we'll be going obviously back and forth in time like a good movie, but I wanna see, I don't quite understand how you got from New York to California or why, but here you are in military school, so it brings to mind the question about... Two questions, one is, did you have to deal with kids knowing your mother was a lesbian, and what was that like? - That's interesting. Now, let me stop you there, because first of all, I was sexually active at very young age. Being in military school was a playground and many of my classmates were active. Although I often wonder there are only two or three that I have any contact with, but I often wonder how many of those folks actually ended up gay or ended up in straight relationships or troubled straight relationships. But that said, at age 12 and 13, I didn't yet have an identity. I mean, the word gay was not yet a commonly used term. And it's funny to hear the word queer so commonly used today. Well, that was the word we used then and described our behavior in that fashion, not particularly as a pejorative, but just as password. - Of course, it was a pejorative to other people. - Of course it was. But I remember somebody one day saying to me, telling me that my mother was a lezzy. - Well, I didn't know what a lezzy was, I was sure my mother wasn't it, whatever it was, she was not that thing because the way he said a lezzy, I didn't know it was a lizard or what it might be, but my mother wasn't it. And I remember going and asking my mother if she was a lezzy and in retrospect, she had a pain look on her face and she told me that was not a very nice word, and it's not a word I should use. And she never did quite answer the question at that particular time. - So did you feel different or was it so experimental in military school and so okay because of your mom? I don't know. I'm interested in how people feel as they're growing up and if they overcome, like you feel guilty and then you don't, or you feel shame, and then you don't. - It's interesting because for all of the tourists that I have had in my life, aggravation for those of you who don't know what service is, it was never about my sexual orientation. That was always an easy part for me. And part of it was because my mother's own sexuality aside, she raised me in a way that ensured that I always had age-appropriate information and comprehension appropriate information available to me my entire life. So as I grew up older, and as I had questions, there was never hesitation. I came out to my mother at 13 years old. I mean, we were riding in the car. I remember she had a a blue mercury Montego. We were riding across the Triborough Bridge. - [Sheila] Yeah, these are moments we don't forget. - And I told her, and by that point I was already waiting to see if my own suspicions about my mother were true. And it was actually a couple of weeks later, we watched the movie that certain summer with Hal Holbrook together. She came in and we watched it in my bedroom. And she came out to me that night. Was an amazing experience. And of course, it confirmed my own suspicions. My mother was with her prior partner at that time. And I remember her saying to me, "Would it make you uncomfortable if I told you Sue was my wife?" Now that was unusual verbiage to use in 1970, whatever it was, '71. And my response was not in this kind of language. My response was would be, it would seem inauthentic to me if you told me she wasn't, I didn't say it that way, but that was essentially what I said. And that sort of put the whole discussion to rest. And then my mother said to me, she asked me, "Would you like to be able to talk to somebody to make sure that you work through your issues?" Because there was great trauma from my mother's parts of why she ended up getting married. And so I went and I saw this wonderful therapist. I remember 82nd street in 1st Avenue in New York up in New Yorkville. And I won't mention his name, but sticks out to me. And in the course of being very accepting and very embracing, especially for that time, he said to me, "It's perfectly healthy if in fact you turn out to be a gay man." But never having had any experience with women, are you sure that it's not environmental because you're in military school and you have a bunch of testosterone running around in that place that it's not just functional. And a short while later, I met a friend of a friend whose father was a Baptist minister and her mother was the headmistress of the Baptist Church. - A female friend? - A female friend. And I experimented for the first time. And anybody who ever tells you that protection's important, trust me, they're correct. That said, it was my first of a number of experiences that I had with women over the years. But very clearly what became apparent to me was at an emotional level, I'm much more comfortable being with a man, my partner and I as you know, have been together going on 27 years now. We were very quite young when we met. I'm very lucky in that I met somebody who's very tolerant of my bizarre life and who has really been willing to allow me to go where I needed to go to do the things I'm called and compelled to do. And we've had a wonderful relationship. - Well, let's talk a little about your bizarre life, or maybe let's talk about the non-bizarre part of it, at least from my point of view, because I always think politics are so bizarre. You came to California. What brought you to California? And what did you do? 'Cause you said you were almost 18. - Yeah, well, you know-- - Aside from the fact that we're the golden mecca of the world. - All of us hit rough patches. And I hit a pretty rough patch somewhere around 15, 16, 17 years old. And I needed an opportunity to undo the damage that I had done to my life. And had I stayed in New York six months or a year longer, I probably would've been dead or in jail. And so to California, I came, it was the golden state, it was the place where one could come and remake oneself, have an opportunity to do things all over again, to not be around a bunch of people who remember all of those indiscretions and difficulties. And I was very lucky. The timing in 1975 was just right. One could go to a community college where a college-- - And afford it. - One could afford it. One could get in, didn't really quite matter how your educational experiences had ended. One could find a career. Medicine had been my first love. Clearly at that particular point, I wasn't heading down that path. - Now you didn't mention about your mom, but there was some connection to medicine with your mother. - Well, my mother was an RN. I always joke that at age 13, I had read all of her nursing books. I was well acquainted with nursing as a career. I became an... When I got here, I had no skill, best skill that I've always had was my ability to talk. And that's probably what kept me alive. My grandfather used to say, I could sell ice to Eskimos and that's probably true, but I came here, no career. I worked as a nursing assistant. I worked as a security guard. I did all kinds of bizarre things. I became an emergency medical technician, worked on ambulances and eventually became an RN. And I built a career, what I intended to be my entire career around the fields of emergency medicine, critical care medicine and trauma care. And I was very happily heading in a clinical and academic and research oriented pathway. I was the west coast coordinator for a critical care medicine from the unit, from George Washington University called Apache two, which was a very sophisticated method of modeling patients in the intensive care unit, whether or not patients should be in the intensive care unit based on the likelihood of survival and recovery. And that was the direction I was going in, and then I got involved in unionizing the hospital that I worked at and I was rather successful, kind of became the leader of the professional unit, meaning the RNs and such. And they worked very hard to find a way to get me. And after we won the election, they just waited for the right moment. And it was the day that I called in sick 10 minutes after the appointed hour. And they used that to terminate me. So suddenly I was without a job and didn't know what to do. - Well, let me ask you a question though, because this is another one of those motivation kind of, things maybe we understand about ourselves and maybe we don't, but there were probably a lot of people at the hospital who didn't get involved in unionizing, who were either afraid of it because it's certainly frowned on by the hospital administration. - [Eric] Spent a lot of money trying to block it. - So what drew you to it and made it possible for you then to be. - It's interesting, you know-- - [Sheila] Not to be so risk averse. - Well, first of all, I'm a bit of a gambler by personality. Anyway, if you notice that my fields were emergency care at very, very high end critical care, I like stress. It's part of why I like politics and campaigns. It's part of why I love slot machines. I mean, it all kind of works together. I started out against the union. I was clearly somebody who believed that that hospital was in such serious financial jeopardy that bringing in a union would undermine the ability of that hospital to survive. And it was a hospital whose catchment area was the eldest in Los Angeles County who had seven major minority groups that made up 90% of our patients and who had fewer than 15% of our patients with private insurance. So I started out in that place and it was my mother who by then was working at the hospital who schlepped me to the union meeting. And there I was debating the chief union organizer about the value of this union. And in short order, I suddenly realized and sort of put it together, what the administration had done. And it's a common pattern. When things got tough, they did a couple things. First of all, as they started doing layoffs, they didn't lay off the 22 year olds. They laid off the 62 year old locksmith who literally was six months from retirement. It was that approach and they did that across the board. They were in the middle of constructing a new hospital, which they had to do for seismic reasons. They went to the employees and they said, "Will you please contribute to build the employee cafeteria?" And like 75% of the hospital employees agreed to give anywhere up to 1% of their salary to pay for the construction of this new cafeteria. And then of course they commenced layoffs and all of the Southern nonsense. So when painted with this picture, and Michael and I were already together, in fact, we met at that hospital, as the story goes, we met at two o'clock in the morning in the coffee shop at the hospital. I worked in the medical intensive care unit. He worked in the surgical intensive care unit and we were both on the trauma team. It was a level one trauma center. And we met another nurse, introduced us about two o'clock in the morning. And Michael had been a union member at a hospital in Pennsylvania and was acquainted with both the positives and negatives of the unions. And so we sort of did this together. Unfortunately with Mike personality, I'm really persuasive. And my persuasiveness turned into them accusing me of beating nurses in the stairwell with flashlights in order to get them to commit to the union. Now I might have been aggressive. I never beat any nurses with any flashlights or anything else. And the more the hospital administration came at me, and as I realized that they had spent the half a million dollars that they supposedly didn't have to hire a company to come in and bust the union, I became ever more committed. And I was out given my evenings away, speaking Spanish to the housekeepers, convincing them to join the union too. - But, I'll tell you, Eric, there's something about, this could be a projection, but there's something even underneath this kind of thing, there's a kind of thing that's about unfairness in the world or getting a set of facts and seeing that what's going on is just wrong. Because you didn't have to do that. I mean, you described for me what you did and I get it, but there's something, and I've known you a really long time, there is something in you that does wanna fight for the underdog, that does I don't know. And I know you don't characterize it like you're some kind of a hero, but there's a motivation that not everybody has. - In being a Jewish man, there three precepts that all have common threads that are part of the basic precepts of Judaism. One is the concept of (Eric speaking in foreign language), which means the doing of good deeds or acts of love and kindness. And we're called to prayer and worship. We're called to honor God. And we're called to do acts of love and kindness or good deeds. At the time of the Jewish high holy days, we're called to Sedaqah, which is commonly interpreted as charity, but it really means justice. And it is about justice. And we're commonly called to Tikkun Olam, Tikkun means to heal, Olam, the world. So the precept of healing the world is a basis upon which all Jews and all of Judaism rests. And those three concepts are really key in everything I do. I probably should be a rabbi, but I'm not sure that the level of intellectual rigor required for that study works out real well for me now, although Rabbi Freehling says, I'm already a rabbi. - It's never too late. Never too late I'm telling you. - I minister and heal quite well now, and I do my best. - So going back to the, I just, I'm sorry-- - [Eric] That's where that comes from. - About the union. So you're fired. - I'm fired - At this place. - You're out and you? - So, I don't know quite what to do in the way of a job. And it turns out that an old colleague of mine is the director of nursing at a little hospital in San Fernando Valley and says, "We need a head nurse for the intensive care unit, would you be interested? I need somebody who's really clinically strong. And even though we're a small hospital, it's very aggressive, would you come?" Well, I never fancied myself a management guy at that point in my life, I mean, that wasn't quite how I saw myself. So I took this job, I go in, and on my first day, I had my staff meeting,, staff for the first time. And I was very typically Eric. I was very assertive. I told them where we were going, what we were doing and everything they were doing wrong and what they were doing right. So I remember there was this one wonderful nurse who became among my dearest friends while I was there named Lola, God bless her soul. And she was from like Arkansas and very countryish. And she took me aside afterwards and she said, "Honey, let me tell you what you just did. You just divided the room in half." She said, "Half of those people would follow you to the end of the earth and the other half would push you off the edge of it." And it was brilliant because it encapsulated exactly what I'd done, but I didn't have any experience as a manager. I mean, I was green at all. This my job was keeping people alive. That's what I knew how to do and knew how to do well. And suddenly my career changed because in short order, I realized I was a pretty good leader of people. I was good at creating plans and seeing things. I was also good about seeing strengths in other people and being willing to nurture that and bring that out and teach them to get them to a higher level. And I was secure enough in myself, not to have difficulty working with people that were smarter than me, which in medicine is really, and in nursing is really important, 'cause there's a lot of people who are smarter than you. They may not be as organized as you, or they may not be as good a leader as you, but they're definitely smarter than you. So that sort of really changed my outlook on life. Interestingly enough, I ended up back at the hospital that fired me as the assistant director of nursing. And it's very odd when you help unionize the hospital to be back in management. It took a while for people to realize that I hadn't sold out. Quite the opposite-- - [Sheila] People in the union you mean? - Yeah. In a very short order, they suddenly realized I was doing more for them as a member of the senior nursing administrative staff than I could have done as a rank and file member. - It's a very good lesson about leadership and about the difference that leadership makes, which brings me to politics kind of, because the question is we have these sort of parallels in our lives. We're doing our work, but somewhere along in that work, you must have because you've been such a democratic party activist for all the years that I've known you. Somewhere along in that parallel, something must have happened to take you not out of your profession 'cause you're still in it, but into that additional concern. - First of all, the sort of predicate for this is being a liberal Jewish New York boy. We grew up talking about John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt in my house and trashing Richard Nixon. And I always had a little bit of an interest in it because I grew up talking about it and feeling it. But I always define a couple of pivotal moments for me, 1983 or '84, the healthcare system in America dramatically changed and most people don't even know it. And that was when Medicare implemented a system called DRGs, Diagnostic Related Groups. And basically what that meant was Medicare stopped paying your doctor or your hospital for what they did to you and started paying them a lump sum based on what was wrong with you. At the hospital I was at, we were well positioned for that, but the changes that followed that, we were not, and being in a hospital that cared primarily for poor patients with no insurance, there were dramatic effects of these changes. - [Sheila] This was during Reagan years, right? - Probably so. Yes, yeah, it would've been the early 80s. When I then moved into this first management job of mine, it was 54 year old man was brought into the emergency room, a massive heart attack. He's admitted into the intensive care unit, which by now, all of these areas were under my responsibility. The emergency room physician and the administrator of the hospital was just administrator of the hospital were locked in a heated debate about whether or not this man should be admitted to this hospital, 'cause he has no insurance and he's not going right out. I mean, this guy was really sick. And I remember the emergency physician who happened to be an Orthodox Jew, which was an oddity there saying under no circumstances is this patient transferable, he must be admitted to the ICU until he stabilized. This was the first time in my life I'd ever worked in a corporate owned hospital. And I thought, well, maybe it's not so bad. The right thing got done. 30 minutes later, the ambulance company shows up with orders to pick up this patient and take him and transfer to county hospital. That was very odd and they loaded him, the next thing, the assistant administrator's back, the utilization review nurse is there and the guy gets loaded on the ambulance gurney, taken out and they high five in the middle of the intensive care unit. - The administrator and the utilization nurse? - They high five and say, "We turfed him." Turfing is a phrase that means to get somebody from your turf to somebody else's turf. In this case, from our hospital's turf to the county. About 40, 45 minutes later, the expected phone call came, he died in the ambulance. He had a cardiac arrest and died in the ambulance on the way. A 54 year old whose life might have been saved. I was stunned. It awakened something in me that took a while to figure out how I was going to... It was gonna manifest, but it made me realize that the healthcare system in America was dying. It was seriously ill and something had to be done. And I had to be part of figuring out how that would be. Now I'll tell you, it was a good many years till I perfected that in any real way. But along came a guy named Bill Clinton and September of 1991, Little Rock, part of a small group of healthcare professionals who met Governor Clinton. I remember this man in shorts with fat thighs and sandals and white socks and walking in and thinking, "Oh my goodness, where am I?" - And then you realized you were at Arkansas. - And then we had a conversation about healthcare. He might as well have been a healthcare professional. He understood more about what was wrong with healthcare in America and about potential solutions to fixing it than anybody I'd ever met. And I became a Bill Clinton guy and as his campaign for president continued along, suddenly got an invitation from David Mixner and the late Dr. Scott hit to attend an event. It was in May of 1992 at the Palace Theater in Hollywood. Governor Clinton was coming to address the LGBT community. Now I gotta tell you, I'm a pretty macho guy, I don't cry very often. Bill Clinton stood there and said, "I have a vision of America and you are a part of it. I believe we're all a part of the same community and must start acting like it now. And the tears streamed outta my eyes. I never imagined at that moment in my life that a guy who really had a shot at becoming the President of the United States would talk about having a vision of America, that included me from the perspective of being gay. He already had me from the perspective of being a healthcare professional. I was totally in. As they say in poker, I went all in. I had always, as I had already become active in politics, I had steadfastly distanced myself from gay politics because from the couple of folks that I knew who were involved in gay politics, I knew once you did that, you were locked in. You can't get outta that box. And I had much bigger notions about what I wanted to do, but in recognizing that Bill Clinton's chance of success to become the president was both because, and in need of strong support of the LGBT community, I got really involved with Stonewall Democratic Club here in LA, amongst other things that I had done. And in short order, I ended up the president and I served seven years as president. It was really quite a tenure, but it opened up this whole other wing of my political life that I never expected to have. And along the way, I helped create the organization, that's now National Stonewall. In fact, I served as its president for a year or co-chair for a year. I did a lot of stuff in and around LGBT politics, and all the same while, I was doing stuff in healthcare. And of course Clinton was perfect 'cause I got to do both. I still have my health security card. That's the card that he stood there and held up in the well of the house, when he said, "There's healthcare that will always be there that can never be taken away. And I believe that, I could tell you on what page at that time, what page of page 1,180, any part of that bill was? And in retrospect now I understand how we lost that battle. And I worry because for a team who came in so clearly set up to avoid those same mistakes, they're actually allowing some of the same mistakes to occur and that worries me. And if we have time, I imagine we'll talk about that. - Well, I think we should, but I want to also, I wanna explore because again, activism is a very interesting thing. A lot of people don't engage in it or if they do, it's kind of a roller coaster ride. They get outraged about something or they get inspired about something they participate and then they go home. That was not you. You were more and more and more and more engaged and you were more engaged in particular, in party politics, which is really different in many ways from activism. You said people who engage in gay rights activism, they get sort of stuck there, it wasn't your word. But in a way, people find ways to take leadership in places that really appeal to them. And my experience of knowing you is that there there's a lot about the tenants of the democratic party that are ideals, which we sometimes achieve and sometimes don't, that appeal. - [Eric] Sometimes live up to, and sometimes don't. - Sometimes live up to even, and some of us do and some of us don't, but what is it about... Because a lot of people are, I'll just use my own word, fooled into thinking that if we didn't have parties, it would be better because then people would make up their own minds about kind of what they believe and who they're gonna vote for. But for my experience, it's been more of a shorthand that helps me because I think there's a big difference. And we only have a two major party system and some other parties, but there's a big difference between what Democrats say and believe and do and what Republicans say and believe and do. And obviously, with both of us being Democrats, we would be on one side rather than the other, but what gets a person to actually now make their living in a party? It's something that not very many people do. - Well, to begin with, political parties are different things. They are repositories of a trust of a set of ideals, of a set of values. And that set of values range from positions on healthcare, and education, the environment, economy and economics-- - [Sheila] Civil rights. - Civil rights for sure and social justice, foreign policy. There are repositories of this and their melting pots and melding pots of different people and ideas and concepts. People who are less knowing think that all Democrats are pro-choice, that all Democrats are pro gay rights, that all Democrats are free of racial animus. That our animus is only directed at conservatives and people who believe in God and that we despise guns. I mean, that's what people think Democrats are. And some of us are all of those things and some of us are not. And I often counsel Democrats and Democratic activists that to remember that our party is made up of people who own guns, people who do not think abortion is a choice or a reasonable choice. People who do not think that you should ever be permitted to marry, me and Michael. People who in fact go to church every Sunday and listen to very conservative ministers preach. And they remember Leviticus 18:22, but they don't remember Leviticus 19:33, where it talks about the strangers who walk among us. We are all of these things. What brings the Democratic Party together is a party though, it's generally a set of beliefs that the government can do good work to help move people forward, that there should be a basic standard of life that all people should be able to have. And that as a party, as a people, as a nation, as a government, we should use all that is available to us to help people to grow. To become the most that they can be. And it's a positive view of people, as opposed to a party who thinks that government should be as small as possible, that it should have the most limited number of things that it does. That in some instances allows religious dogma, and at that conservative religious dogma, to drive who and what they think is acceptable behavior and that which the government should support and endorse. And these simplistic notions to say that Democrats wanna give a man a dinner and Republicans wanna teach the man how to fish so that they can cook many dinners, I got news for you. I wanna feed the guy tonight and teach him how to fish, so that tomorrow night he still has food. And that really is the democratic position. And look, anybody who knows me knows that while I am very strong in believing in and fighting for, and working to grow and enhance the Democratic Party, people who know me also know I'm a really challenging kind of guy. I don't just take anybody's dogma and accept it. And I am not afraid to call somebody out, including my own party's leadership when that's necessary. I happen to think that things like transparency and listening to that, which your members want and believe are important, that you should try to move people towards common beliefs. But if you really are a big tent party, that means those outliers who own a gun, or who don't believe in reproductive rights or who don't believe in same sex marriage, those people A, can be part of our party, and B, we should be working productively to reach out to them and bring them in. And I think I just wound up as I started talking about the party, but this is something I really believe in. I often say that my activism in the Democratic Party is my penance for when I screwed up when I was younger and the opportunity for me to go out and work every day of my life to make the world better, it is truly the greatest pleasure that I could imagine myself having. And I don't make as much money as I once did or that I would like to. And that's okay because that's not what is driving me at this point in my life. What is driving me is seeing a nation and a world and a state that is in extraordinarily difficult times and shape and watching as messages of anger and anti-hope have sort of taken control in six months. And really what it's about is about that whole phenomenon that we're experiencing today is really about a group of people who mostly look like me, and some who look like you. Realizing that they're rapidly losing political power. They're rapidly losing dominance in our society. It's no longer 75% of America look like us. And it's a frightening thought if you're frightened by it, I happen to believe that if you're talented, if you're gifted, if you're willing to work, you can be successful in all realms of politics and governance, no matter who and what you look like, but nobody's handed it to you. And those folks were used to having it handed to them. And they're really angry. And when they see an African American president, the well of the house, they may not be racists, they may not think that way, but they look at it and it's not their America. It's not the America they grew up with. - Well, Jimmy Carter certainly nailed it. I mean, he's even being criticized for saying it, but I think he's just the appropriate person to say, "Let's open this up and explore whether some of it has to do with race." I mean, there are a lot of people in our community who say, I'm a teacher and I just happen to be gay, well, you can't say I'm a politician. I just happen to be gay because it's a big deal to get people to vote for you when you're a gay politician. But I think that has... Well, I guess I'll ask you the question. How much of your identity in the world? 'Cause you said it was never a difficulty for you. How much of your identity in the world relates to being a gay man? And I'm gonna ask you the same question about your faith, I think. - In 1996, at the Democratic convention in Chicago that year. A reporter from Time Magazine asked me, I still smoked in those days and I was out in the smoking pit-- - I (indistinct) old smoking days. - They had us locked in a prison. A barbed wire prison to smoke. And this reporter said to me, "How openly gay are you?" And I said, "Well, my mother knows, my grandparents know, President Clinton and Vice President Gore know, and it's been published. I was on the front page of the Middle American News as the radical homosexual who led the secret homosexual meeting in the basement of the White House. So I think it's pretty widely known." How openly gay am I? And how much does that affect me? I don't wear a button that says, look at me, I'm gay. I never fail to recognize my partner from any podium. It is in my bio, it is a part of who I am. It hearkens me to an interesting radio interview I did this past summer when Proposition 8 was starting to heat up. I was doing the Michael Jackson show and he said to me, what makes you think-- - [Sheila] The other Michael Jackson. - The other Michael Jackson, the one who's still alive and well spoken. And he said to me, "What makes you think there's a chance that Proposition 8 can be defeated?" I said, "Because the world has changed." And he said, "Well, what makes you think the world has changed?" I said because I have dozens of young people who intern for me, who volunteer on campaigns for me, who are around me all the time, and they all come to me for relationship advice. Oh, I forgot to mention, and they're all straight. And they all know I'm married to a man. - Well, one of the things that I found during the Obama campaign and afterward, mostly afterward, because people were very focused on his election. A lot of young people completely focused on it, but after the amendment to the California Constitution, Prop 8 passed saying we could no longer marry in this state and it was in the constitution. It was like the day that I saw the fire hoses in Birmingham in 1963, as a fairly young person and said, "I had no idea. I had no idea that this was going on." And I think a number of them, lot of straight kids are outraged simply at the sort of violation of the fair world that they felt they're working toward, and sometimes for the first time. - But that even overstates it and here's why, Sheila, because for them, it's already normalized. I had one fellow every semester that is one of our intern pool that I select who has to spend time with me. - [Sheila] Working at the party. - At the party. - And spending time with me is not an easy thing. Trust me about that. - Oh, really? - My staff come to me and said, "Well, we interviewed them. There's this really bright kid, goes to school on the east coast. And in the list in the section of things that interest him about why he's gotten involved, he listed same sex, the right to same sex marriage at the top of his list, you might wanna talk to him. I went and talked to him and in about 30 seconds, I realized, number one, he wasn't gay. And he didn't look like somebody who would be even a non-gay, gay activist. And I said to him, "Why did you put that on your application?" He said, "Because everybody else has their rights. And it just doesn't make any sense to me that my gay friends who have been my friends since childhood, can't do the same thing that I can do. So it's my top issue today." He became my fellow, had a wonderful experience, wonderful summer with him. And I was sorry to see him go back to school in Pennsylvania, but it proves the point, the world really is changing. And my comment to Michael Jackson is true because these little 19 somethings who come and ask me, "Should I make this girl my steady? Should I propose to this girl or the girls who said to me, "What's the best way to ask a guy out for a date?" They all know Michael. They all understand my station and life and my relationship. And they look at me and Michael and they sense stability that they've often not seen in their own homes. - Still it also argues for being out, I think. Now it never was very much of a question for us. Well, for me, it was actually, I didn't really come out until my late 30s until I was 40. I mean, I felt very much in the closet until I went back to law school in my 30s, came back here and the atmosphere had changed. It was possible to do it. I don't wanna say it was such a major courageous act, except it always is with your parents and your family. And the first time you do it. But when I first ran for office, People Magazine did a story about me, which they always did because of my old television character. Whenever I changed my life, it would be like Zelda goes to Harvard, Zelda's teaching law, and this was Zelda leaps out of the closet and into a state assembly race. And I was delighted because it meant that I didn't have to put lesbian on every one of my pieces of mail that I sent out to everybody asking them for their vote. It was like, okay, everybody knows. But I remember when National Coming Out Day first started and it was Kate Clinton, was so wonderful and funny. - And her cousin, Billy Jeff, remember she used to say her cousin, Billy Jeff. - Right, my cousin, Billy Jeff. But she used to say that there were certain rules about National Coming Out Day. If a bus went by you on the street and while it was going by, you went, I'm gay, that didn't count. But I think in retrospect, it was one of the most important and simplest concepts that kind of in a way might have helped to lead to this, ain't no big deal kind of thing. - What's interesting is, and in looking at the polling that's been done since Prop 8 and actually even in preparation for it, but especially since, it validates the fact that the number one way to break down homophobia is for people to know someone who is gay and that if you know somebody intimately, relative, close friend, a very close coworker, it is much more profoundly affecting than if you know somebody casually, which is still more profoundly affecting than not knowing somebody. My grandfather used to tell the story about how in World War II, when he got drafted, he was first sent to a military base in Alabama, and they were in the big military shower where everybody showered together and all the barbers were staring at him and looking at him very strange in a shower. And my grandfather was a tough guy, came from the streets of Jersey City and had a second grade education. So he grew up fighting every day of his life. And he said, "What are you looking for?" And I left out the modifier-- (indistinct) And they said, "Well, we're looking for your horns and your tail." Well, they had never seen a Jew before, much less a Jew out of their clothes. Well, the same can be said, we hadn't never seen a queer before. And the reality is there are gay people everywhere, but when you live in a place like California or New York, it's really different than when you live in Mississippi. And I remember a meeting that we held in 1996 in Washington, D.C., there were 50 or 100 of us sitting around the big table, we were ultimately talking about how to make sure that the LGBT community stayed on board for Clinton, knowing that Don't Ask, Don't Tell had already occurred, and the Defensive Marriage act was coming up. And Ann Lewis, Congressman Barney Frank's sister was leading this particular discussion. Everybody's kind of going around the table, talking about their experiences and their focus and their interest. And this was really the pre-marriage time, domestic partnership was kind of at the top of anybody's agenda, but there was all this conversation about relationship recognition in various sundry ways. And everybody spoke very passionately. These were democratic activists that we brought to Washington, specifically because they were leaders who could help us re-elect Clinton in the community. And we got around to this woman from Mississippi who said something to the effect of, "I'm mesmerized listening to you all talk. You're so knowledgeable and so committed. And you're talking about marriage and domestic partnership and relationship recognition. But when I go home to my girlfriend of 20 plus years, I worry about them coming and kicking our bedroom door and arresting us for a felony." And as Ann Lewis and Brian could tell you to this day, the movement went dead silent, because everybody gets so absorbed in the life in which they live in the place where you are in the frame of reference that you had. And she snapped everybody to attention. Well, as far as we've come today, a Matthew Shepard could still happen and it can happen right here in California, not 50 miles from here where a young, effeminate, almost perhaps cross-dressing, young gay man was killed by a 13 year old classmate. And it happens in Georgia and Mississippi and places all across America. So we've made huge progress, but we have to remember, Los Angeles and San Francisco, New York city are very different than Carthage. - Well, when I used to train judges and police officers and women's activists about issues related to domestic violence, I was a national trainer for a couple of years. And one of the things that we would talk about and was difficult to talk about was gender, how women are treated differently than men. You just have to just open your mind for a minute, kind of about this. And I used to talk, I used to encourage them to be Martian anthropologists here on an assignment to write up about the use of difference in the United States, in the 20th at that time century, because it's always been my belief that it actually doesn't much matter what the differences are, that there is just a need in some arenas to exploit difference. And that if we were absolutely the same, except for the length of our ear lobes, there would still be a better and a worse in terms of the long or short earlobe. - I remember in my days as a staff nurse, physicians coming out to the nursing station and the intensive care unit with some concern or issue, and even though I was pretty junior, it would always come right to me. Do you think you could help me work with your colleagues there to do such and such to fix this problem? Well, because it was man to man, and as if I didn't develop an unusual sensitivity being raised by a professional woman, lesbian mother, then being a man in a predominantly, especially then female profession, one gets an interesting lesson in sensitivity and you could be easily become a bully. A man in nursing could easily have lots of power over lots of women who are willing to fall into the wifely role, but that's not a very productive and successful way to move forward. And it is amazing to me that in 2009, we're still having a lot of these same discussions. We have moved so far and yet there's still so much further to go. And that's true, whether we're talking about gay rights, whether we're talking about gender issues, whether we're talking about race issues and ethnicity issues. - We've only got about three minutes to go. It goes really fast and I'm having a great time. Tell me one more thing that you hope lies in your future. - Other than winning a lotto? - Yeah. I'm with that. Okay. I'm with that. But yeah, other are winning the lottery. - I think that the election of Barack Obama paired with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Majority Leader Harry Reid, has given us an opportunity to transform this nation, but we have a very short window to do it. And while they're there in Washington crunching to do it, I hope to be here in the hinterlands, trying to make sure that we have their back because you know what? Today 48 million people don't have insurance and 55 million people are underinsured. People die because they can't get healthcare. If that one single act happens, if we find a way to make healthcare available for every American, that thing which drew me to politics in the very beginning will have been satisfied, and then I can go on to a... I can be everybody's rabbi or something. Not that I would quit politics. - Eric, that's the perfect wrap up. And we'll have a whole nother discussion about healthcare as this thing moves along. 'Cause I think there's a very deep relationship between good healthcare and healthcare in our community. We haven't even talked about the massive cuts to aid services, et cetera. - The best part about Sheila Kuehl's legislative career is that it ended with them not talking about you being a lesbian. It ended with them talking about you being the champion for single payer healthcare, which is what of California and America really needs. - Well, I'm very, very proud of that, but that's another one of those things where you don't think of I thought I was a kind of a women's rights activist. And then the people who had really done, laid the groundwork, came to me and said, "Will you carry this bill actually?" They interviewed me to see if I was good enough to carry the bill, which I really loved. And any minute that you're alive, your life can change. So, Eric, thank you so much for being on the show. I really, really appreciate it. Thank you all for being here too. Remember, you can make a difference. So get used to it. (upbeat music)