Get Used to It: Ep. 62, "Voices of Our Lives: Jackie Goldberg"

uh [Music] so [Music] hi welcome to get used to it i'm sheila kuhl your host and as you know if you watch the show every so often we spend our entire hour talking to some fabulously interesting person in our community and today is one of those days very happy today to have as our guest jackie goldberg long time community activist educator a member of the los angeles school board presently member of the los angeles city council and running for the california state assembly but that's just the beginning of the news about jackie welcome jackie oh it's good to be here sheila i'm really glad to get to talk to you me too um the reason i think we do this on this show and uh spend the time sometimes talking to you know an individual instead of doing a show about an issue is that a lot of times our our lives are about issues and and kind of illuminate uh how we get where we are uh etc and i i just love talking to really neat people like you um so just tell me where where did this all start where were you born what was your family life like well i grew up in inglewood california a blue collar suburb of los angeles that was until i guess the late 60s or early 70s pretty much all white and when they mean white they mean white anglo-saxon protestant catholics and jews were not regarded too well either indeed restrictions existed until they were constitutionally struck down for jews asians and african-americans in englewood but it was the only place that my parents in the 40s could afford to buy a home so for them it was they just went and did it there were bean fields on both sides of the house when i was growing up so it was in the sticks we drove into la i remember i was over by the coliseum growing up at the same time not too far away and i have an older brother and my mother was a school teacher in los angeles elementary school teacher for about 35 or 36 years my father was not a very successful businessman uh who owned an industrial laundry and worked really really hard at it and between the two of them we were aspiring to the middle class those were the days when teachers didn't make as much in elementary school as they did as high school teachers so i grew up in in a nuclear family in in in a very reactionary community um but uh i you know it was it was a safe place to grow up so that was a positive at least mostly safe it was safe if you were white not so safe if you weren't i understand but what were your folks like my parents were adlie stevenson liberals they were pathological voters but otherwise not particularly politically involved at all um we idolized eleanor roosevelt um we worried about uh what would happen to people but i would say that they were liberal kind of centrist liberals pretty good on issues of race because and ethnicity because the tie-in of of being a discriminated group being jewish but on the whole not not very politically involved well i think probably the first public picture people have of you although we captured it a lot later those of us who went to see the film berkeley in the 60s thinking about jackie goldberg on top of a car or something so there's the decision was made to go to college clearly yeah had your family gone to college well my mother who is the youngest of eight was the first in the family to go to college and she went to ucla when it was at l.a city college campus and then finished at the westwood campus my father didn't finish high school there was a depression he could make a little money doing this and that and and he did but he cared a lot about education and cared about learning always regretted not having finished school and we there was no question in our household about whether we were going to college there was only a question of which college and how we were going to pay for it but never a question of whether you were going to college it was just a foregone conclusion and my mother was an activist a real genuine bona fide community organizer but she didn't put it in political terms she did it around the temple around city of hope around cedars of lebanon hospital but she was a real activist she taught me i would have to say 95 of that what i know about organizing i learned from my mother so you pack up to go to berkeley you applied to schools you got into berkeley well actually i i went to sc a year oh you did yeah my freshman year what a change yeah well that's just to get out of high school by the time i got to be a senior i really couldn't take it and there was a program there that let me go there a year early so i didn't have my senior year in high school i went to sc sc turned out to be my high school with ashtrays so i applied to a lot of places my dearest friend was at the university of chicago and i really wanted to go there but i didn't get any money i got in but i didn't get enough scholarship funds so i went to berkeley as my second choice not that i didn't want to go there but it was my second what year was that that was in 1963. mm-hmm uh six months two no 62 62 3 was my first year there and well it was really quite overwhelming um it we had already had and i i let me say i i had one in high school the american legion essay contest and i was rotary girl of the year i did not see myself as a political leftist at all my brother did he knew from the beginning he was on the left side of the of the aisle i i saw myself as uh you know an adlai stevenson liberal i didn't this apple didn't fall very far from the tree uh but several things happened to me that got me to be involved as a political activist one of them was at sc which was there was a november the first 1961 a one-day strike for peace by a bunch of women nationally and i moseyed on over there was at city hall in la and i met some of the most incredible women on that one day walkout that later started the organization women strike for peace around the country those days there wasn't a war in vietnam yet so at least not one that we knew about actually there actually was vietnam but we didn't know about it yet right so we were talking about strontium 90 and milk and we were talking about test ban treaties and we were talking about nuclear testing in the atmosphere as a high school teacher i would tell kids do you know we used to explode nuclear devices not underground which would have been bad enough in the atmosphere and they just think what could you have been thinking about you would do that you know it's just amazing but and at the time just to question it was treason yeah absolutely um so uh when i came back from that one-day strike piece i was so excited and my orange county roommate locked me out of our dorm room because you had gone to because i was now clearly a communist so i thought it's an interesting thing when people call you a communist when all you're doing is something you think is a good idea it makes you wonder what communists are like maybe they're really wonderful people no but no i mean this seriously i grew up very anti-communist uh like everybody else in the 50s in america and and i just thought well well this is an interesting idea you mean communists were the people who were there well i loved those people these were strong dynamic women i had never met a group of women like that that i met on those steps so now i go to berkeley and i immediately start with another woman campus women strike for peace and really we the next thing was to get involved in the civil rights movement which which was really quite exciting at those times at that time nationally it was going on my first vivid memory of questioning authority came when i watched on television on black and white tv as a kid the governor of alabama no arkansas standing in front of the schoolhouse keeping uh black children from coming in see this i i bought all the stuff in my government class i thought we had done with discrimination we had laws against it it was okay and while i knew i wasn't that naive i knew that african americans didn't have an easy time of it i certainly never believed in my lifetime that i'd watch a governor of a state try to keep black children out of a school simply because they were black that was a very profound effect on me and i think really as i talk to people i'm 54 as i talk to people my age group whole bunches of them tell you they can remember where they were sitting they can remember that going my god when they saw that and it had a profound effect on on their lives i remember the in 63 i had gone to birmingham because the cast of dobby gilles and a number of other tv shows went down to the alabama state fair and there we were quietly ensconced at the la ding guala hotel and uh we began to notice that when we walked down the street any african-american walking toward us stepped into the gutter right and not really understanding at all this was a state law right and going home and then later that year watching the fire hoses being turned on people yeah and had that same sort of galvanizing you know my injustice button right exactly it could really remember that it goes off it goes off it really does so that was very profound so then when in when i was living in berkeley the my first year i was there uh there was the lucky store shop in which is probably the most bizarre demonstrations over a period of months i've ever been involved in and lucky's market had a market right on telegraph avenue and it hired no people of color virtually none not one um and i don't know if that was chain white or just that store but anyway we decided we would core and snick and a bunch of us would go picket that one that wasn't doing any good so then we decided well we'll take the picket inside well then we started getting busted so we couldn't take the picket signs inside so then we decided on a shop inn and we would go and we would fill our cart with everything we could possibly get and get up check out and then not be able to find our wallet or our money and if you know 20 people do that you could empty pretty good size number of shelves that way so we would go and we would do that and then we would leave and then at night the kids from the sororities and the fraternities would come down and help reshelf all the stuff um and then the next day we'd all come back and you know and we'd always have a ringer a person who would actually buy the groceries so they couldn't tell which one of us it was going to be that you know and we did that for months and months and finally they changed their practice well that was the wrong thing to do with us success just really emboldened us enormously we went over to san francisco and took on auto car row and that was in 19 march of 1963 it was first time i was arrested uh first we did the sheraton we did the hotels then we did the auto car we did the sheraton palace hotel what'd you do to get arrested uh we sat we had a sit-in in the lobby uh and that was another interesting point in my life because getting arrested is not like anything else that you'll ever do in your life now it's not like today today when people do civil disobedience they get arrested they go home not in the 60s in the 60s you do civil disobedience they put you in jail they set very extraordinarily high bail for misdemeanors they require you to come to court every day for long jury trials and usually they convict you and give you long sentences for very little crimes at the same night that i was arrested in the sheraton palace hotel for sitting in to try to secure the rights of people of color to have jobs in the hotel industry of san francisco uh in another sheraton in champaign urbana illinois a group of of celebrating fans of university of illinois football team uh celebrated a big victory in a big ten game and literally destroyed the lobby of the hotel there were no arrests there were no convictions there were no trials we sat peacefully picking up the litter after ourselves we were all arrested uh half of us ended up doing time the rest of us spent most of the spring semester in court uh and so those kinds of things really had a tremendous impact on but there's a transition here that i'm missing um you're the adlie stevenson apple didn't fall far from the tree caring about people's rights there are a lot of people who may have some sympathy maybe a few less who might have some empathy very few are going to go into san francisco to sit in knowing that you might be arrested to you know do these kinds of demonstrations i mean you were caught up in something this is much more than just liberalism i mean there's a difference between liberals and caring and what we now call progressives but i guess in those days they called us radicals who would tommy pinkos i mean who would do what is it that moved you from caring to doing well i think it really was my mother i mean my mother was a true activist she really had no truck for people who sat around and complained and weren't willing to do something about it she did it in her own context it might be that people were complaining and griping that the temple bazaar was poorly organized and you couldn't find anything to buy even though there were some really good things there to buy so she would get a committee together and figure out how to organize it so that it would be effective but it was still the notion that you don't just sit around and complain about it i don't want to hear it i've heard she must have said that a thousand times in my life i don't want to hear it if you're not going to do anything about it i don't want to hear it well that's a very powerful message and then to see someone do it i mean she decided that that gateways was an important institution in the community wasn't very popular mental health never is but she had a group of women who were blue collar working class they were not rich people and they raised a ton of money every year for for gateways because that was something that she needed to do the there are people who have those needs and i can't write a check so i'm going to raise the money uh those are powerful messages and i saw it my whole life i mean my mother was and when she retired and moved to murrieta hot springs okay what's the first thing that that she did uh in the retirement community she ends up on the board of directors of the of the association then she ends up on the on the committee to deal with whether there's going to be an airport coming to that part of south riverside north south riverside county then she ends up on the on the board of a major hospital that's going in to talk about community input about it so there's this genetic impulse to do i don't know if it's genetic but i do know that the role models help a lot right and to see her i mean she was retired when she was taking on these boards out there uh and and people always come to my mother and say well what should we do about this whenever there's anything they don't like uh and and you know i mean she's 88 years old they still come up to her and say rose you know this thing's not going well what do we do about this and she'll think about and she'll come up with a plan about what you do about it so here you are at berkeley are you are you a lesbian yet oh god not no no although you know it's a wonderful thing when you look back on your life after you're elizabeth hindsight is always funny how did i miss all of this how did i not notice that i was in love with my seventh grade gym teacher how would i miss that i mean i even knew at the time i was in love with her but i didn't see that as that i just thought i really admired her and i cared about her and and you know because i was an awkward kid gawky overweight and she was the first person who ever said well you probably have some athletic ability that nobody's ever even looked at and instant love you know i became a jock after that but so while you're in college though this is not i mean it was too early for any uh evidence of sort of the movement yeah at school no i did live in a sorority with 78 women um of whom i'm aware that at least two are lesbians but i'm sure there were more that we haven't all kept up with each other one of whom was one of my roommates at the time but no no i was a confirmed heterosexual not doing too well socially i didn't do too well but no i didn't i didn't give it a thought now i had because uh my brother had written a paper in his high school english paper i'm sure for shock value but nonetheless about homosexuality so we had discussed it and so forth i wasn't disgusted by it but i certainly didn't think it had anything to do with me and i think basically i just didn't think it had anything to do with me so what was your first inkling then you were in your what 20s oh yeah um and by then you you had you were a teacher is that the first thing you did after college yeah i went i went to berkeley uh my senior year was the free speech movement god knows how any of us graduated and then the vietnam day committee which was even a bigger deal in some ways uh and then i went to the university of chicago for two years to get a master's in both history and education and i taught my first year there and then came back to los angeles in my first teaching assignment was an older woman who was a lesbian who was very willing to talk to me about who told me i was a lesbian i thought what does she know she says you're a dyke kid you know i said but carol how would you know that and she says i know and i remember that conversation i wasn't offended i just thought you know that's a kind of a crazy thing for her to say but i was involved in starting um the women's liberation union in los angeles which i would say was at least half lesbians and i had a lot of of friendships with lesbians i was very close to women women were have been throughout my whole life women have been more important than men as friends although i have men male friends but they the women are have been my closest comrades and allies throughout my life um and at some point i was in the bread and roses theater and uh one of the lesbians who began spending more and more time at my house and one thing led to another and we got into a relationship and i i was shocked that i did that i really was like because it wasn't how i saw myself i thought what does this mean who am i oh scary too well it was very scary but i was also shocked i just thought and then of course then you sit and you begin to see your life and you see that you're living entirely with women and all through college that that while you have some i had two relationships that could have ended up in marriage with men both good guys that but but they didn't but they didn't uh one was mostly uh but he didn't want to and the other was mostly i didn't want to um and you know but you just miss a lot when you're we're so programmed to heterosexuality well and don't you think it's a hard i mean we're so programmed to duality yes that if you let yourself understand that you are a lesbian right it means a lot it means a you're not straight right now that may or may not be the case it's like you're required right it's kind of like whose side are you on yeah this or are you that yeah in the younger generation really gen x and gen next yeah where they're starting to say don't give me those labels you know i'd like to go like a sliding scale yes um because we saw it as oh my god i'm one of those and that's a bad thing to be right or it's certainly going to be a beleaguered thing right why i didn't worry about either of those things the most important thing that i worried about well actually i worried about whether people were going to accept me that had known me as straight right but that turned out not to be a big issue that really did i was lucky i know a lot of people for whom that was not true whether they lost friends they lost family i didn't lose either family or friends i god i was very lucky who was the first person you came out to who was the first person i came out to ah gee i don't remember we were in a very collective kind of living arrangement in echo park silver lake we had a food conspiracy we had eating groups we had study groups it was a wonderful community it still is but it's not quite the same like that and i'm sure it was some group of people in there probably it was people in bread and rose's theater because the woman that i was had my first relationship with which lasted six years and she and i were both in this in the bread and roses chapter which is the the guerrilla theater group um and uh i think everybody in the theater knew instantly that we were having a relationship though neither of us had told anybody but i think everybody knew this the day it happened i kept wondering how everybody always knows these things i know but you can tell with other people i know did i write this on my form exactly what here well i think that people probably know you best at least certainly in california in terms of your elected positions and i think that people assume for people who are elected that they kind of followed a path that they're political science majors or they were you know class presidents or they were on this student council or something and that actually is not the case with an awful lot of people right who are in elected office but there is a there's a transition or maybe a moment when you see the connection between what you've been doing and this um way of doing or doing public policy did did you have trouble deciding to run for yourself oh god yes it was a school board right yeah tell me about that well first of all i kind of pooh-poohed electoral politics uh i just said that you know not for me not ever not now and i love teaching i mean for me the the big difficulty was i would have to give up something i truly loved do really well i mean i don't brag about myself much but i was a wonderful teacher as because i loved it so much it was that you know when things you love often you're good at and i had such a great relationship with the kids and we had such a fabulous time just going at government and economics and africa and latin america and all the different things that i taught in the high schools i just had a wonderful time doing it i was quite content i really was not looking for something else to do but school desegregation was going to come as a lawsuit and a case in los angeles and we had just watched with great horror my friends and i the whole uh bus burning bottle brick throwing in boston this is not the south folks this is the north this is massachusetts for god's sakes liberal massachusetts and they were just racist to the bone and i didn't have any illusions about what it was going to be like in los angeles and i was determined that at least there would be white folks not just white folks but for sure some white folks who would be early on organizing a voice that says this is not a bad thing this is not the end of the our way of life we don't have to fight it like it's poison it could be good for kids it could be good for communities it could be good for our society let's see if we can come up with a plan and a program that makes it more comfortable and less frightening to everyone involved and so i and a bunch of other people started a group called the integration project it was out of that that we began to look at electoral politics because the school board had been completely captured um by bus stop bobby fiedler roberta weintraub who eventually became a friend of mine not feedler but weintraub bus stop being the organization that that was just against buses i guess against and against school integration right people say it's against bussing but frankly they would be against it if we were dropping them in by helicopter if we were driving them there they were just well i think that became the word that we used for integration right that's right but it's a it's a neutral word see yeah being against the bus what's wrong with that right shouldn't be transporting so we call them segregationists which is what they were and that's why we used the name integration in our name it was through that that we looked at the fact that we needed to have some effect on that school board and there was a school board seat coming up where i lived and the seat was held by an appointee who filled the seat of kathleen brown when she got married to the guy from i guess his name was rice who was from nbc sports and they moved to new york right after she got elected and so we began thinking we would find a candidate and support that candidate and help them get elected and we interviewed a lot of people we interviewed probably 40 people who were looking at that seat and there were a lot of good people i remember one and one woman in particular i think was really sincere but you know to beat an incumbent even an appointed one is not an easy task and it was going to take someone who was going to throw themselves into it with enormous passion and this woman whose views we appreciated was too white glove she was not going to do they didn't have the fire in the belly she wasn't going to do that she did end up she did end up running and she did lose she came in third i mean i came in first in the primary the incumbent came in second and she was a distant third and she was the heir apparent everybody knew her everybody loved her i liked her i mean it wasn't that wasn't really the problem and she had pretty good politics but she was just not going to do what it was going to take so there were two of us who were who were considering it a wonderful guy who's uh now an executive in the uh college guild marty hitleman and myself and they sent us out to dinner the two of you yeah and i said one of you come back as a candidate so we each wrote down the things that we thought we could get attacked on at this dinner and the things that we thought that we could get as pluses and who might actually endorse a total unknown that was not involved and who was in favor of school integration the least popular sentiment in the entire city at the time we used to kid ourselves and say we were the last 35 people that were willing to say they were in favor of school integration um and i won by virtue of the fact that i knew diane watts and i thought she might endorse me which she did and that i knew howard berman and i thought he might endorse me which he did which gave me a little oots of credibility and i became the candidate this was no burning desire to be the candidate but once we did it of course we got into it with a great fervor and nobody believed that i would come in first in the primary in fact i got 43 i nearly knocked out there were eight people in the in the uh in the primaries so i got 43 percent with eight people uh you shocked everyone but you saw a connection between i mean i understand yeah it's an interesting thing when you tell your life story and many people are like this um it it almost makes it sound like an accident though we understand that you chose to do these things yes but it is no accident there's a there's a through line that you have to connect for yourself and maybe it's only in retrospect as we were saying you know hindsight is always 20 20. but the the line from activism and what it's for right you know to accomplish a goal which may be school integration it may be social justice in a larger context and public policy through elected office right my sense of it when i made the decision to run was that you can't abandon that very powerful place to people who aren't like us that's right you can't i mean it's about being queer or whether it's about being progressive or whether whatever it is having a social agenda exactly and but there there's a moment when you have to say to yourself i i can do this or this is a good place for a person to do this kind of work from right um you had to have made that decision well i think we decided that certainly the the school board was a place where people who felt as we did about what had to happen in terms of the inequities we lost the schooly segregation case completely we got completely cleaned out then there was that ballot proposition by allen robbins and that took care of it it was illegal now to desegregate the schools so we lost we got creamed but out of that we learned a tremendous amount about the inequities in the school system that some neighborhoods had overcrowded schools and others had miles of playground that some schools had enough books and supplies and others didn't that some schools were on half day sessions and others never heard of the expression half day sessions that some schools got all of the brand new teachers and others had seasoned veteran teachers i mean so we found out a lot about the school district in in the process of being in the integration project that of course from the point of view of all of us being activists meant we had to do something about it and do something about we had to get somebody on the board of education and it was clear to us at some point that you can't stay outside the system and change some things some things you can do from outside but some things you've got to be at the table uh and that was really clear and that's that that was a major change in perspective that was a major change in perspective well you know antonio villaraigosa who's the speaker of the california state assembly and my assemblyman your assemblyman who's turned out and for whose seat you've announced uh and will be running um talks about them and he was a community captain union organizer totally um president of the aclu board but he as he speaks everywhere around the state he talks about how we really can't exist except for the the authenticity of community organizing the identification of the issues absolutely you know by community it's not like we're dominant we don't understand it but there's a certain understanding that people have in their own lives and it's progressives who listen to that right you know and try to convert that into public policy yeah um did it work some of it did and some of it didn't i mean there's there are restrictions i mean one of the reasons i'm actually willing to look at sacramento which is not something that i really wanted to do as you personally well know i think is because so much of what my passion is about which is education is decided in sacramento right now i can't sit in l.a and say woe is me those dumb clucks in sacramento don't get it about education my mother i can hear her back in my ears i don't want to hear that if there's something wrong go fix it so you know i i don't have so much ego that i think i can fix it but i do know some things about that area and it is true that that's the policy area that makes a lot of difference as to what schools can and can't do and think and don't think about were you glad that you that were on the school board was it i was glad about being on the school board about half of the time i never loved the job i never did there's no staff no no elected official should never ever ever be without staff because then you're totally at the mercy of the bureaucracy and we were totally at the mercy of the bureaucracy before i left i was able to go from having an administrative assistant secretary scheduler in one person to having one field representative but i represented oh i would say a half a million people more than an assembly seat they're larger than assembly seats and we're not talking about their garbage we're talking about their children and had no staff you know so that's really terrible it's a the la board of education is the worst job a politician can have you don't get paid it's 24 000 a year when i started it was 12. less than a teacher in compton now that tells you we always thought there's nothing lower than a teacher in compton the school board was less than a teacher in comp no staff and it's a semi-competitive indoor sport to bash the public schools in general and la unified in specific so it's a terrible job in spite of all of that i think we did some things that were important were you out no uh it yes and no i did nothing to get anyone to think that i wasn't lesbian i went to all of the gay events i appeared in all the gay parades any event that the school board did that required a partner i went with sharon my spouse of 20 years this october um i uh you know we we we put on when it said name of parents on my son's uh our son's uh school cards uh we'd scratch out father and we'd put both of our names and i mean we did nothing to hide it but we made a deal with our son i guess he was about nine or ten years old and he said i don't want you to pretend you're not who you are he didn't put it quite this sophisticated i want you to lie i don't want you to lie but i don't want you to just go around telling people you're lesbians and particularly when you come to parent conferences i don't want you to argue and i and i thought that was the funniest thing why don't you like just because you argue like a married couple so smart yeah brian smart yeah yes so i said okay that's a deal and and he said when i'm out of high school you can do whatever you want and we had rules the rules were our house we weren't going to change anything we have one bed in our bedroom we're not going to pretend to anybody we got different rooms or different addresses if you don't want to bring your friends here don't but if you do we're going to be a family like we are a family and he called both of us mom you know and so forth so we lived our lives and i think most people who had anything to do with us knew that i was a lesbian but those were the days when the press didn't ask and they didn't ask they thought as a favor to you because i told him if anyone asked me directly on i would not deny it but until he says mom i'm a captive i can you know i can't move to another city or another school everybody knows who you are anyway because you're on the school board it says when i'm out of high school do whatever you want and actually it was uh about six months before he was out of high school that i was outed did he get a hard time at school actually no because nobody it was in the la times and none of the kids read the papers if it had been on television it would have been a big deal but it wasn't on television and we were all worried because it was his first varsity game at marshall high school was the day that the story broke and i thought oh somebody's going to razz him he's going to get a technical foul for hitting somebody he said mom we were at the game and came home i said well well he says nobody knows they don't read the newspapers so where did you make the transition to the city council and was that a hard thing too mike wu decided to run for mayor which meant that the council seat was open and i will tell you i really did not want to do that but what happened was is that first of all almost no women signed up and so actually was women on the west side of los angeles who called me up and said i didn't think i was in the district because it had been redistricted and i thought i was out of the district so i wasn't even looking at it and they called up and they said oh we really we really want you to run there hardly any women on the council we need a woman on the council all of us will support you and i said okay and i got a lot of flack from the gay and lesbian community because they wanted me to run out and it was six months before brian graduated high school and i went to the various meetings i remember one really ferocious one in someone's home and people attacked me because i wasn't going to be out and i told him the rule and if anybody asked me i would say i was a lesbian and i was not going to hide my life but uh i was really upset about that i these were the people who attacked me none of whom had children and i kept saying to them you don't understand he he and i and sharon we're a family he has some rights he doesn't have a right to tell me not to be who i am he doesn't have the right to tell me to lie but we made a compact with this young adult when he was a child and i feel responsible to keep my end of the bargain he's kept his uh this boy i just got savagely attacked by some people that i considered friends i mean it was a really disheartening moment for me i said as soon as he's finished from high school we're out no no you got to run out you got to run out well it turns out i did because uh somebody from stonewall told the press they said oh the press interviewed him and said well how do you feel about having two gay members of the community running for the city council seat and he said not two three and he said who was the third he says well there's this one there's this one and there's jackie goldberg the press called me immediately well the deal was if they asked right so i said yes of course i'm a lesbian you know you have such enormous respect in the city and um i i've always thought that it's at least in part because you have a very clear through line about your values uh your commitment to you know there's lots of soft words now but diversity inclusion empowerment maybe they're not soft words but um it's i i my experience is that even people who don't agree with you on some issues will value the fact that at least you tell them what you think etc it's but progressives in politics are still sort of rare that is who win but you've won you've always won i mean you are constantly won i live in the right district well yes and no i mean i don't think there's any right district for a former communist or whatever people think so or thought you were when i know you weren't but this is from your you know from your what you said to begin with how how do you connect with the people in your district i mean they're mostly not gay or less that's for sure they're mostly probably not even progressive oh the voters are uh in some we have a few we have a few progressive pockets but mostly they're conservative to middle of the road they would probably describe themselves as moderates a lot of republicans more democrats by a lot but a lot of republicans amongst the voters and the voters are much more anglo than the residential population which is primarily latino and latina um i would say that what you said earlier was is pretty much it and it's it is again what i learned from my mother you know my mother always told people to their face what she might have said behind their backs and a lot of people would get really kind of for the moment a little flustered by it but then they would say well at least you told me to my face and they would like that a lot better than finding out that rose said x behind their backs and a different thing to their face i think people really appreciate honesty that's number one and you know i i tell my constituents where i am you know a lot of my constituents don't support the living wage they didn't but i explained it to them i told them why it was important to me and i want a lot of people over and some i didn't win over but even the people i didn't win over the hollywood chamber of commerce i have a very close relationship with the hollywood chamber of commerce they came out against it first of all they expected that i was going to punish them for it and when i didn't they couldn't believe it they thought i would never appear at their events that i would never return their phone calls that i would never be involved in the issues that they were in i said no i'm not going to do that i said i'm very annoyed that we didn't have more time to talk about it before you took your position but and that was the only annoyance i had was that they did it really essentially without talking to me and i'm sure they're used to being punished because they don't take the side of the elected official there's a lot of that in our business you know which i don't approve of they're still our constituents whether we agree or not they're still our constituents the second thing that i think makes a big difference to people and it makes a huge difference is is that you deliver on the things that are important to them now that's really important for city council that's probably the most important thing folks in atwater who voted overwhelmingly for my opponent i mean i'm telling you if i got 20 of the vote in that water are my closest allies today because there were eight or nine things they wanted to do in the course of six years we've accomplished six of them not eight or nine of them but six of them we ground it out we worked it out we figured out a way we stayed with them we went with them to the hearings or whatever it was and we did it and we deliver we deliver my uh predecessor had sent people to all of their meetings i don't do that i tell them you're a community organization you get two meetings a year from my staff you tell them when you want them to be there because you know what you really want x project done and if my staff member is just sitting in on your general business meeting when is he or she going to get the work done that you want done it's a terrible blow to them that i wasn't going to have someone sitting in every one of their meetings every month that's a terrible waste of time in the amount of time they were doing that they could have researched four or five different solutions to problem x so we deliver we really deliver it people really like that they really like that and we don't take sides that's the other thing that's helped me the most in hollywood is all this deals and everybody's conniving and all these i tell everybody everything everybody gets the same information they get it on the same day at the same time i don't pick favorites that only help their projects and then ignore everybody else and i learned all that from my mother i mean it's i swear to god i tell her all the time she can't believe that i say this to her because she never put in a political context and she doesn't know it all translates you know i tell her all the time how everything that i've been able to accomplish has come from watching her with people she likes people it's not phony if she's mad at somebody she tells them she's mad at them and then she gets over it she doesn't carry it like a little you know some people carry anger like a little nut that they keep like a squirrel with a nut they bury they're gonna hold on to it forever here she says no you can tell them you're angry and then you get over you got to move on but you know there's it's funny when you're talking about this holding on to anger i was thinking as you were talking about being the only lesbian somewhere yeah um and when i was first elected i was the only or lesbian person up there yeah and you're the only one on the council right and you were the only one on the school board right and that's intimate work i mean despite the fact that you may be surrounded by a community that work with your colleagues on the board my work in the assembly that's intimate work that's the number of you whatever it is right the five or the 10 or the 80. and you're whether you're you know the gay person to them every minute you're the gay person oh yes i mean of all things in the world that you are you're the lesbian on the floor absolutely a lesbian in the council absolutely and sometimes that feels okay because they are dealing with you in a way that's educational for them and they're some mostly good people thinking well this is how i felt about race and this is how i felt about jews and you know i'm learning here but i find sometimes it's kind of a burden that i carry on my own because it's a my through line is very much like yours i think it's about social justice and whether i was the catholic girl or the feminist or the dyke or you know whatever the heck i'm going to be identified as next that's the through line and yet you're always the lesbian has that affected the way your colleagues work with you the way your constituents see you i don't know i think it you know i was telling someone the other day i think that my constituents have selective amnesia the ones for whom the ones who really really like me but who are homophobic to the corps forget that i'm a lesbian i swear to god i would have to come out weekly in some of the neighborhoods in my district for them to remember that i was a lesbian i mean that um i'll to give you a good example i registered the county of los angeles just had this domestic partner registry so my partner and i were went down the very first day it opened and we registered we've got a lot of publicity i had several people who i i've worked with for i can't tell you how many years who said that was lovely i didn't know you were a lesbian how did you miss this but you know it's it's it's you know so i think there's selective amnesia for people for whom i like you i respect you and lesbian don't mix they ignore the lesbian part of it i mean i don't pretend i'm not a lesbian but they ignore it that's one set of people another set of people my colleagues in particular i think uh if they were to describe me i don't think but one or two of them would probably use lesbian i think when they get annoyed at me they're much more annoyed at me for like pushing on something too hard that they think i should back off a little or being too strident about something i think i don't think that being a lesbian is the issue i think your situation is harder than mine first of all 80 is is people can be more anonymous in 80 than they can and 15 believe me uh you there's nothing that we don't know about each other although i hope you'll find out yeah that's actually not the case no i can tell you right now whose spouse is in the hospital whose child is dropping out of school and i mean on both sides of the aisle it's a very intimate oh maybe it's because you're all stuck up there yes exactly we don't even live there that's true i didn't think about that but with 15 you do two yeah with 15 you do two and and very quickly um unless your personalities and there are some personalities that just don't go well together in the on the council that's as it's currently composed unless that's the case it really it hasn't been a big deal i mean there have been some funny things one of my colleagues told a rabbi one of my jewish colleagues told a rabbi and the rabbis was talking to him about the politics of the city and said this is right after i came on and said gee it's so odd you know the city of los angeles has a large jewish population but nothing that would lead one to believe that seven out of 15 members on the council would be jewish and this person this council member said no six and he went through the list and he had left my name out and the rabbi said but you left out goldberg and says oh she's not jewish she's a lesbian the rabbi told me this story uh-huh oh that's the funniest thing i've ever heard i guess you can't be but i always thought you could be both yeah which are you which are you well with only a few minutes remaining let me ask you one last question of course whatever it is millennium fever as i do do you feel optimistic about the future for i don't know for the country for the city for yourself i have a much uh greater optimism long term than short term i think the kids for example today they're they're so into the environment so that my fears earlier on in my lifetime that this planet would die be killed not die be murdered mostly by western nations but now increasingly as i was in china recently the pollution there is just as bad as anything you can imagine by everybody who wants and we all want the same things electricity and plumbing and all of this and automobiles and so forth so i i have much greater hope for the future on environmental issues around that i think that as to the isms racism sexism agentism homophobia and so forth i think things have definitely improved in my lifetime in spite of the fact that they are never as good as we think that it ought to be by the 1999 but they've definitely improved they have definitely improved at least in cities like los angeles where you will hear people say racist things but they're embarrassed after they've said it well they weren't embarrassed when i was growing up believe me in this city uh and they're saying it less often and their attitudes are changing i saw when i went back to teaching uh 91 to 93. those kids were significantly different than the kids i had been teaching uh eight years earlier in their attitudes towards each other they're caring about each other in spite of fact that there was still a lot of racism and homophobia to be had so i'm i'm optimistic about that i'm not optimistic in one area and that is is that as wealth gets consolidated into fewer and fewer hands as that wealth becomes more powerful than nations see i think that's what gat and nafta was about was making the ruling class and i don't use that language very often but there is a real international ruling class and that ruling class became more powerful than nations just ask canada who recently lost a suit on an environmental issue to an american firm and had to pay damages to the american firm because it wouldn't let that firm violate canada's environmental laws i mean that's the horror of that is i still can't believe that they lost that suit so on on the near term with this tremendous consolidation of wealth and it is enormous and in cons every time you turn around buyouts mergers buyouts mergers big fish eating little fish bigger fish eating littler fish in the short term i get very nervous because at some point this is going to come apart you know everybody's thrilled about 1100 11 000 on the stock market ain't gonna last it's going to come apart because eventually the world is not going to be able to buy back what it's producing and then what and i that's my short if we get through the cataclysm of what all of this means on this worldwide gluttonous i can get rich gap widening rich versus poor if we get through that and it won't be in my lifetime but if we get through that then i have just enormous optimism because all the other indices in what i see happening not just in this country but in the world are really positive but oh i'm afraid of the near term a lot of work to do well i'm glad you're there and i'm very glad you were here today thank you thank you so much for joining us i'd love to do this to you all right you can do it to me get your own show that's what i'm saying and thank you for joining us too and i guess as you look around at your elected officials uh people like jackie goldberg you're just gonna have to get used to it [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you