Get Used to It: Ep. 84, "Voices of Our Lives: Daniel Zingale"

oh [Applause] [Music] so [Music] hi welcome to get used to it i'm sheila kuhl your host or hostess as you like um this is a show which you may know if you've ever seen it before that talks about issues of interest to the gay and lesbian community or about the gay and lesbian community of interest to everybody and occasionally we have one in a series that we call voices of our lives in which we talk to a person for the whole show who not only has spent a lot of time working in and for our community but often in a lot of other kinds of roles and try to bring it all together and see who these people really are and today is one of those shows we're very fortunate to have on the show today daniel zingali who at the moment in this avatar is the director of california's department of managed health care before that was the executive director of aids action in washington d.c before that was with the human rights campaign i think at the time campaign fund and uh i think i'll let daniel uh tell his story welcome daniel happy you're here thank you i'm really pleased to be here well i'm pleased you're here too considering although the show will be shown over and over and current events mean nothing you just sort of escaped a contempt citation in some court which we'll talk about okay at the end okay um but we're happy we didn't have to shoot this uh interview in jail no you're not it would've been good for the ratings and you were hoping for the behind bars sequence it's true but welcome i'm really glad to see you um well you've certainly had a number of uh different uh experiences and jobs as we all have in your life and i wanted to if you don't mind start kind of at the beginning okay uh where did you grow up and what your family was like i was born and raised in sacramento i was blessed with very good parents i'm still blessed with very good parents they're approaching 80 now both of them and their great grandparents to my kids and they're they're very centered gentle loving people but they're also interesting people not perfect but growing up with them was very interesting i have one brother who's still my best friend and lives here in los angeles older or younger he's older he doesn't admit it now but he's older well i'm pretty sure he was there when i got there if he looks as young as you do i'm sure people will tell you which of you is older right yeah we get that a lot now yeah i have a younger sister and we get that sort of the same you know now that she's all grown up yeah well everybody's taller than me of course but yes pretty much true so what was your um what was your family like what were they were they engaged in the world kind of removed from the world i mean how would you characterize them um my father's italian so he's just engaged in life period he's very passionate emotional warm always has an opinion about everything his opinions change still from day to day and my mom has a different temperament she's scotch irish she's more reserved and cool but very strong opinions about politics she's left-leaning partisan democrat union member union organizer so our table was always very lively with people's opinions and debates and whatever was going on in the world so you grew up in a and would you say in an activist kind of family yes yeah i mean my mom especially was always involved with union organizing uh supporting the ufw i didn't know what a table grape tasted like till i was 14 because of that boycott active in her church in a progressive way so yeah there was always our house was a mcgovern headquarters during the 92 campaign so there was always a lot of politics swirling around one of those houses that thought he was going to win because everybody we knew was for him absolutely i was you know i was too young to know but i didn't know what polls were really and so i believed everything was a nixon conspiracy so i kept hearing that nixon was ahead you know 20 or 30 points in the polls and i thought that was just more lies and was devastated when when the election happened because i was out there walking precincts and i was always 12 or 13 something like that was that the first uh sort of engagement that you had in the political process or your interest even earlier i was strange that way when i was uh eight years old i was watching the humphrey nixon election very closely i had one of those maps of the states a lot of kids have wooden maps but on the back of mine i put the electoral votes for each state and was just up late watching the returns because i was convinced it was a disaster for the country if nixon won and my dad kept saying go to bed and i kept saying you don't understand if nixon wins ohio the war is going to go on forever and those kinds of things that's interesting at eight years old yeah it's kind of strange huh would you say then that you had a i mean was politics something that you thought of yourself doing yes in your grown-up life yep yeah from for as long as i can remember and growing up in sacramento was probably part of it because there's there's politics all around there was you know there was the first governor brown was the first governor i remember and he was good pat brown pat brown and my parents always made us very aware of the fact we had a good governor who was building university system and an educational system and all those good things and then he was beat by ronald reagan who in my family's view was a bad governor and sacramento changed the people who came to work and lived there changed um and the values coming out of the the capital changed and um you know and then it went on like that as i grew up we went back to another governor brown that that identified with in a lot of ways so for me it was natural living and growing up in sacramento with a family that was civic minded to think about politics and sacramento even though it's a state capital is not the most open-minded of towns i mean pretty much agricultural all around the town and thought of as a pretty i won't say a hick town because two big rivers you know crossing in this town but still uh not an open-minded kind of place in many ways and here you are growing up um and eventually coming out as a gay man when did you first start having any consciousness about your own gayness and what was it like sort of in the context of your family and and your town junior high school for me and then high school i think i was more aware of what exactly was going on inside me but um i think sacramento gets a bad rap in a lot of ways for me it's a a great balance of kind of midwestern i think what you're talking about i don't see it as narrow minded but very grounded in sort of right and wrong and some some values that i actually share but i think balanced in a very positive way by the proximity to san francisco and the fact that it's california i mean in every presidential election sacramento always goes for that now i didn't mean to give it a bad rap and i know you're not that old but i was thinking you know for a guy in junior high yeah no and and there was you know the suburb where i grew up um as progressive as my my family and all were um it wasn't cool to be gay i certainly knew that i could read the chronicle we got the san francisco chronicle because that was the city and um and so folks read that paper and i could see that things were happening over there that made looking gay be okay and um you know the emergence of harvey milk and those things i was watching real closely when i was in high school in the newspaper but in sacramento it was yeah it was not embracing of of being gay did you were you out in high school or able no i came out when i went to berkeley i went to college in berkeley and um and there actually that's a great place to come out at least it was in the early 1980s if you need a safe place to come out there was a huge gay and lesbian student union with like a gay prom essentially just hundreds of people from all over the place out and you know comfortable with it and so that was that was great and your folks being as progressive as they were there was no problem right uh wrong although if they're watching i want to make everyone make it clear that they are wonderful you are watching have a great son they um they're great now and they they got great quick you know and are active in p flag and all the right things but um initially it was probably like most people's experience i was scared to tell them i didn't know how they'd react i wrote them a letter from berkeley even though it's an hour and 15 minute drive that i made all the time i sent them a letter and i'm glad i did it that way actually because i think it gave them some private space to grieve i would later find out that they needed to do but they called up soon as they got the letter and they said we're on our way we want to come over and see you so they came over to say they still loved me and they would stand by me but my mom was wearing uh the dress that she only wore to family funerals we have a large extended family and so my brother and i know the dress because she only gets it out for a funeral she'll deny this now she's watching but she was and um and it was treated like a tragedy therefore you know that first conversation and i had to start walking them through the process of understanding that this is what was right for me and this was who i was and they really did come around very very quickly in a good way so how how did you how did you help them to understand was there something in their own experience that because i always say this is what worked for me you know with my folks but well um in the case of my parents there was a great comparison from my point of view to make i still never asked them if it worked but what i said was my dad was a catholic italian catholic my mom was a protestant when they fell in love and were married in the 40s i guess their parents completely shunned them no one went to their wedding marrying from my mom's family's point of view marrying an italian catholic was just unthinkable i guess and from my dad's point of view a protestant was just you know not what you did so there's a very lonely picture of the two of them their wedding picture just the two of them standing alone and my mom's in a gray suit and so i said you know think back to that you guys knew that this was your path for happiness this is what you were about and nobody understood and i'm sure you don't understand um that this is what's right for me and i could make a direct comparison because i had met someone and fallen in love with the man that i'm still in love with chuck at berkeley and i felt that in my heart even though we hadn't been together very long i told him that it was the same for me and chuck well it's kind of dirty pool to use such a thing on your parents isn't it i don't know i mean i don't know guilt a little guilt no it was pretty smooth i mean my it's interesting my parents went through very much the same thing my mother a russian jew my dad a german catholic and they got married in 1939 wow but the people who stood up for them that's you know what the the maid of honor and the best man or whatever they were you know they were there and they're in the wedding picture so which was courageous i mean it's hard to to appreciate what a huge thing that was in that time totally because where they grew up in st louis it was just totally divided here were the italians and here were the germans and here were the jews and you know who were the african-americans or the blacks um but it is interesting so you met chuck at berkeley yes and you've been together ever since we've been together 20 years we were in a shakespeare in the film class that had 300 students and you could either write a paper or you could put on a video you could make your own shakespeare video so chuck figured out that making the video would be easier got together a group of guys to to make this video with and the way he tells the story they needed one more person for a bit part i had a lousy role in the in the play but they each said they'd pick the best looking guy in the class and ask him to be in and he says that the guy he asked said no so he was waiting for me in front of the class one day and as i was coming in i always came in late and he said you want to be in this this production with us i said sure you know i don't know anybody in the class and that way i don't have to take the uh or do the paper but he was nervous and you know i could tell he's just nervous about asking me and i could not get through my head what it was that made him nervous and i went home that night i couldn't stop thinking about him i thought why was that guy nervous about asking me to be in this uh this production now of course man of the world that i am i know yes of course that he was really asking me on a date so well it's um you know it's interesting because there are more and more stories in our community where sort of the the political folks many of whom had not really thought of being parents early on in the movement have kind of embraced the role of being parents and i know you have two two kids we have two and um it's not necessarily a predictable kind of arc for our community but before you were a father i think you were developing kind of your political uh exercising political muscles what what did you do from berkeley that kind of got you into this arena that you've been in ever since well i um i first went to japan when i graduated from berkeley um jerry brown had just lost an election ronald reagan was president there weren't a lot of political jobs for people with my philosophy and the economy was lousy anyway and i actually asked jerry brown for whom i was an intern what i should do i said i was going to go to work for you and the senator i hoped i was and um he said in a very sort of offhand way i'm going to japan that's what i would do is go to japan they know you know they're with it they've got all the answers he was very enamored with japanese public policy at that point something that effect and so essentially i did and i lived there for almost two years doing a variety of things not political at all but got to know the culture and got to know the language and um had a wonderful wonderful time in tokyo so you'd been active politically before i'm thinking when you said you were an intern to jerry brown you must have in college this must have developed oh yes i was in college i my real passion was not for the classroom it was for organizing the students for economic democracy it was one group young democrats i was active in the leadership of and then i did the internship in the in the governor's office and then you came back from japan why and to what i came back from japan because i was lonely and missed my country and looked around and there were other expatriates who had decided to stay and i decided i didn't want to do that much as i loved japan [Music] and so came back and went back to work in the capitol actually as a an assembly fellow for gray davis not at first though no no tell that story i think it's interesting um i started out with richard katz who was another assemblyman at the time right um and you know i've never said this to richard but i left his office shortly after starting because i was a baby you know i would just i i thought i wasn't being treated right and i wasn't being given enough responsibility and i don't know what and i would later learn what it's like in government and politics that you pay your dues when you come in and you know you answer the phones you do whatever you're supposed to do and and uh but i was still i think was kind of arrogant about it so we had the ability to switch so i switched um and went to work for for gray davis which ended up being the right thing for different reasons well it's interesting because now of course he's the governor of california but at the time he was just they were both assembled an assembly member uh why did you choose gray's office um you know i had done the internship in the brown administration and so i had seen gray's work from a distance i hadn't worked with him directly but i had a lot of respect for his style he he was representing the values that i identified with in the brown administration and doing it in a smart way he uh he was very disciplined he was the kind of guy who always focused on results and as i'm sure you know from the brown administration some of our ideals fell by the wayside because of a lack of i guess discipline or practicality and gray represented for me still represents for me where good progressive values and smart politics meet because i'm not very much interested in just espousing progressive politics if you can't get results i i couldn't agree more i know you represent that too well it's really a privilege to have the opportunity you know to be somewhere where you can actually enact policy and say these are my politics it's just interesting the word politics and policy you know we use them a lot of people use them interchangeably i don't think i think of politics as the road to do policy because i know a lot of people they say if if they say oh dan singali he's into politics that's not exactly right because what you've done most of your life it it's not just oh i'll go work for somebody because they're running for office no because i love the thrill of the you know the campaign or i'll just work for somebody who's in statewide office because i really like being in the capitol i mean you've chosen those things that you've done in a different way and i think mostly related to to policy yeah so you're working for gray i'm sorry did i were you going to say um well i think that's fair what you just said i for me politics without policy isn't very interesting but i would say the reverse too which is policy without politics doesn't at least doesn't do much for me it's like it's therapy it might make you feel better to talk about good policies but if you don't attach it to some kind of political strategy or implementation it it doesn't benefit anybody so for me well i've been telling people just eradicate the word should from your vocabulary because a lot of people come up to me and go well they should want this for us they should do this this guy should vote for this bill they go like throw the word away because everybody operates out of their own sense of what they think is right just take that for granted yeah whether we agree with it or not you want them to get to a place you have to take them from here yes you know to there so you but still assembly fellows they're kind of the the newbies on the block and they're you know so yeah i was doing the same things in gray davis's office that i was doing in richard katz but i thought there's a pattern here so i better get used to it right so maybe there's something to uh to learn here so where did you go from there when i finished the fellowship i went to harvard graduate school and actually started with a joint degree program in the divinity school and at the public policy school divinity school yes why there you know i guess when you first asked me about my upbringing and sort of the core values i should have talked about my faith i don't talk about it very often but it for me it's at the center of of everything um and it is for my family i was raised presbyterian my mom's a presbyterian and so i was raised in that church and in a progressive presbyterian church that fit me spiritually very well and so we presbyterians aren't particularly comfortable talking about our faith but but i will say that that's that's something that that drives me in a lot of ways and i thought i should explore making it formally the center of my life and work and i did think about that and explore that at the divinity school and decided that um churches don't have political action committees and i wouldn't be able to get all the things done there were a lot of reasons that i decided to kind of gravitate back to the government policy side and that the ministry was not my calling but um but i learned some things there and then took the degree on the policy side so what was the kennedy school like it's lively it's uh it's not as academically challenging as i thought it would be harvard sounds so intimidating i thought you know boy everyone there must be smart and work harder than i do and in fact it's a place where a lot of interesting people come together and share ideas and it wasn't academically as challenging for me as berkeley but but i learned a lot by by the interaction with the people there well it's to me the policy um aspect is sort of at the center of what the kennedy school wants you to look at i mean using sort of case studies it's not exactly you know read a book and then do this that's right uh so i don't know whether school policy schools by their definition if they're good are not academically challenging or whether they're more like i don't i don't want to say life challenging because that sounds like life-threatening but you know what i mean more like can you solve this problem can you work in a team and solve this problem yes and that's what it's about there and i suppose that is what it should be about and did it gel for you something that you wanted to do next or did you feel like you were walking off the plank again you know um i had a an advisor there who whose name i won't mention because i don't think it'd be fair to you know sum his life up with this particular anecdote but he's a progressive or a democratic uh prominent democratic professor and he told me at the end of my graduate work that i had to stop this gay thing he said uh you know you have a lot of promise you have a lot of talent but um you're gonna be a professional homosexual if you don't you know just put that away where it belongs and nobody's interested and you know and for me i didn't feel like i was making an issue out of my sexual orientation i was just being honest about it and i wasn't going to stop that but it scared me to have this guy who believed in me supposedly tell me that and the first conversation i had with someone about a professional step out of graduate school was with gray davis who was then running for state controller right and uh and so i tested it and asked if it was an issue because i knew if i was going to come back and work for him that i'd be interacting with his you know representing him with all kinds of constituents and and people and it wasn't an issue for him which i didn't think it would be he was interested in what kind of job i would do and so that was reassuring to me and i took the job and and with some diversions along the way that's why i'm working for governor davis now in a different capacity but well it's interesting i mean it isn't exactly a matter of coattails or whatever because what i've discovered and i've only been in the legislature for seven years but i think it's true in every profession and every aspect of life you really only have two things you have your relationships and your reputation and if you you don't have to work on your reputation your reputation is the sort of the culmination of your work you know you work and then you have a reputation and relationships are the same way you have them and then people say you know she's a good friend or he's just really somebody you can count on and and the field narrows as you get older to some extent at least you know you find that your standards might be a little bit more stringent and i know gray really relies on you and thinks a great deal of you but you didn't stay with california i i noticed we lost you for a while to the east coast i spent some important years working with him as his chief of staff then in the controller's office but that's right i went to washington for 10 years essentially the 10 years that coincided with the clinton administration for the most part and did a variety of things the most important for me were at the human rights campaign as the political director and as as the director of aids action and you know i could go on and on about either one of those experiences i think well i'd like you to go on and on for a while actually i want talking about uh start with human rights campaign did they did they invite you did you go to look for them how'd you end up in washington i think hillary rosen um heard about me being there um i moved for love really i didn't have a job chuck got a job in washington and what was his job his job was with the bush white house father bush father bush right the uh the real president bush working for the points of light foundation and chuck had always been involved in community organizing and campus organizing community service by students and other people and points of light was about that for chuck it wasn't about politics uh republican politics certainly but it was about his his work and he was complimented that they had identified him across the nation as somebody who was a leader in his field so he decided to do that and i decided to go with him and and then a little bit later hillary rosen and some others asked me to come over and talk to him and by then gays in the military had just happened to the new president and it was terrible as you know for everybody wasn't good for anybody the president was feeling burned the community was feeling rightfully burned congress did not want to talk about gay or lesbian civil rights for a long time the media was even over saturated even though it's a sexy fun issue for them you could tell they just wanted you know to move on after that meltdown and hillary and tim mcfeely and some others asked me how i would approach trying to start over again in terms of a federal civil rights bill which was moribund had you know hadn't gained any new co-authors in a long time and was just sitting there with no hearings and no votes and that got me thinking i had some ideas and got the political juices flowing for me and something that i cared about and decided to to take the plunge really for the first time to be in gay politics hearing the voice of that advisor in my head professional homosexual you know yes and he said well he was right so um so yeah we a lot of us got to work on on taking it from there and i think um did a good job of bringing the administration back around to making some meaningful progress for lesbian and gay americans well you know it's it's almost like you can't really make a difference unless there's a challenge um in good times it's more difficult and i don't know about you but i i don't when i look back i don't feel like i grow as much i'd much rather be happy i don't much care if i grow or not you know i'd rather be happy but it turns out that i'd do more growing when there's a real challenge no question there's something to overcome or whatever um plus you get better reviews in a job if you come into a bad situation because then everybody figures wow well how did you make this happen i mean it really actually did sort of rise from this moribund state into people's consciousness um we it was pretty simple actually i think what we did um and elizabeth burch came around very shortly thereafter to be the executive director of human rights yes campaign and um i'd say we did two things that i think were most important one we decided to make the movement research driven we knew gays in the military was a big failure but we didn't know where to find success and so for the first time the movement did some serious polling and focus groups of not just of lesbian and gay americans but other americans to find out where they agreed with us where they were willing to talk about us and our place in society again and it turned out that it was in the area of employment that the vast majority of americans whatever their view of gays in the military was felt that in the civilian sector people should not be fired from their jobs for being lesbian or gay and that they thought the government was negligent and not doing something about that since it was happening and it was perfectly legal and we were able to show that to members of congress and the white house and say you know we know you don't want to talk about that right now but you're gonna have to talk about this and we did a very simple project on capitol hill we asked each member of congress to adopt a non-discrimination policy for their congressional office and then we started publishing who did and who didn't and frankly nobody republican or democrat wanted with a few exceptions to be out there publicly saying i discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and employment and so we soon had this long list of congressional offices who had adopted a non-discrimination policy which we could go to the white house with and go back to congress with and say well look if you're willing to do this in your own office and the world didn't come to an end and the voters didn't get upset and you didn't lose your election then let's talk about what became the employment non-discrimination act and you know that was a way of talking to the president about putting it in his state of the union speech that you can talk about the employment non-discrimination act and it will resonate with america and we know you believe it's the right thing to do and and we got him there yeah it was quite a job i think that people people's attitudes have changed the last half of the 20th century was time very very interesting and i think productive time for civil rights kind of all around starting with you know the civil rights movement and the rest of us who've sort of mirrored the lessons and done what we could to to get there um but aids was happening at this time and it must have been a a very very difficult kind of under theme of the whole thing because you were you were working for civil rights but you were not really engaged in aids work how did that affect you uh that was something that was missing for me in in my daily work because when i when i came out in the early 1980s um you couldn't separate the two right now here you're going through the most important self-awareness experience of your life discovering who you are and being honest about that for me falling in love and right alongside that was the emergence of this terrible epidemic that would start taking people that we knew and loved and threatening our health and well-being all around us maybe for the rest of our lives and so the human rights campaign was and is doing some important aids work but civil rights was front and center and i always looked you know across the street to the aids action council um as a place it was enviable in that respect that they were solely focused on changing america's response to aids and so how did you get from the one to the other or what that made you want to do it um you know i was approached by the board of aids action they were looking for an executive director um and that was a career change for me because as political director i wasn't really running the place the way elizabeth was so so there was that but i struggled with the decision because i loved what i was doing at the human rights campaign and i love elizabeth and it was just great doing that every day and i went for a run early one morning deciding that this was i was going to make my decision about whether to accept aids action or not and uh was so you know self-absorbed with this this personal decision that i forgot the quilt was coming to town so i go out there to do this morning run which i often did on the mall and there are all these people in white laying out these giant you know things and as you know this early early in the morning the sun was coming up and i'm thinking what is this strange thing going on here only to you know have it click that um they were laying out the quilt and there you know as i'm looking down the mall in in most graphic sense possible is the magnitude of the epidemic that i was being offered the privilege of playing a role in in addressing and for me i felt that was god talking to me um doing that little display for me and making my decision easier and so i knew what i was going to do it's so interesting you know i was just flashing on this question of mortality maybe because i just had my 60th birthday this year no you didn't yeah i did but considering the alternative i'm really happy i did um and it's the alternative really that it was presented to me in very much the same way i was very i guess i was upset but i didn't really know and you know about this sort of crossing over into my 60s and i was in the capitol i was very restless and i didn't know why and i decided you know when i'm restless i'm an angelino i get in a car and i drive that's how i get rid of the restlessness i drive up pacific coast highway i drive out sunset but in sacramento i didn't really know what to do so i went down to the garage i got into my you know my state car or whatever and i just started driving out in you know in the city and there's an area of sacramento where there's some very pretty houses along in the you know in the 40s and i thought well i love looking at pretty houses i'll just drive back and forth on these various streets and i was going like this and finally i turned right into a street and it was a cemetery there's a cemetery right in the middle of sacramento i didn't know and the street is one way so once you drive in you have to drive through the entire cemetery i know right where that is i bet you do to get out and i thought and you know since i was having this real problem about this age thing i realized that probably god or somebody had said here's the alternative why don't you drive very slowly through and take a look at all of this and by the time i drove out i thought you know i think i'll be okay with my birthday isn't that great but it is interesting isn't it how these things happen i got such a vision of the quilt being laid out and i that the aspect of mortality that's sort of involved in that is it's not just about other people's deaths in a way it's about okay i'm still here what am i doing yeah um so i can very very well understand how you would want to to work on this what did aids action do what was it engaged in aids action had done a great job up to that point of securing federal funding for research and treatment and really turned around that whole situation where you had hostility and indifference from the federal government to the the point we're at today where the federal government really is engaged in fighting aids what it hadn't done is become more representative more representative of the epidemic it was still pretty much of by and for white gay men which is probably one of the things they liked about me um but but what we did a number of us is we we brought into aids action um then double acp we asked them to come and sit on the board the black nurses association congressman ron dellums who had been an active member of the black caucus brought them to the table as board members and what happened which is why i think diversity is important is we didn't just change the way the boardroom looked which doesn't do anything for me frankly but they came and said what are you doing about prevention in our communities we haven't got a handle on this prevention thing and the federal government keeps increasing the research and treatment and that's wonderful but they're not doing anything there are many increases even under the clinton administration for prevention targeted especially in communities being affected and what are you doing about africa and that was something the domestic aids movement had not really wanted to talk about right because it's a huge thing to take on and we already feel strained by the fight we have here and the dwindling resources and fatigue and all of those things complacency and the thought of taking on the global epidemic was just something people didn't want to think about but people like ron dellums were not going to let us do that and so aids action jumped in to the global pandemic i think played an important role in the clinton administration's 100 million dollars and plus building on that u.s response to aids in africa and and for me that's that's why diversity is important because you become better when you bring in new voices well and also it works i mean not that we do it selfishly but it works the other way as well i mean people say to me gee you have such a variety of bills you know that you carry i say well i get to carry 50 in every two year session i don't even i couldn't think of 50 gay bills you know i mean i can't even think of three um and you do have to show that you're you operate in the real world and interestingly enough then the real world begins to operate in your own community as well yes you get those relationships yeah and there's a tremendous benefit in washington today to the fact that the traditional civil rights community is engaged in the work of the human rights campaign i mean coretta scott king shows up when there's a vote on the employment nondiscrimination act and um and that synergy is so important but you're not still in washington daniel no how did that happen i'm glad it's your fault actually i'm sure you were glad to hear it um i asked you whether i should take this job and come back to california and you emphatically said yes that it was an important job and i should do it and so i think about you often and it wasn't a ploy it was really true you were right well i mean this this particular job and you'll explain to to our audience exactly what it is but it was created in a set of bills that i co-authored and kind of brokered in in many ways right or helped a broker and so it was very very important to me who would run the managed care health care agency for the state because there had never been one but describe a little bit about this agency that you now run it's very exciting for someone like me because washington still hasn't enacted the patient bill of rights they keep talking about it but it doesn't happen california in large part because of your leadership and the governors and others got ahead of the nation and enacted a meaningful patient bill of rights which meant that somebody like me could come out and from the ground up build the first of its kind in the country a place that is responsible for ensuring patient rights and hmos and gave us a great set of laws tough enforcement laws that we can use to to change the dynamic between patients and hmos and really just create and design from the ground up a government department that is there for patients when they have a problem with their hmo so i've been doing that for a little over a year now and um it's a challenging but gratifying job well i thanks for the credit that i actually well you did don't deserve no i sat at a table and i kind of helped to broker it but senator figueroa and you know assemblymember marty gallegos who is now he's now with the patient advocate for the state uh really sort of designed and you know really pushed this legislation and the show is on in sacramento i never like to take credit for things i didn't do but it is an interesting and i think exciting example for the country because not many states if any besides us have this but an interesting choice for gray to make to ask you to do it i mean your experience in health care has really been i think very much in the trenches and about aids but it does teach you the lessons that you really need to to learn about patient care yes that's what he said the governor essentially his message to me was in in aids activism you all have learned the hard way what it is to be up against the medical establishment or the hmos or indifference and and we need to break through that and you're not alone in that people with hiv and aids are not the only people who face a serious health crisis and then face the added burden of a denial of care you're entitled to from an hmo and he said if you can bring that in a responsible way to what we're trying to do here in california you could make an enormous difference and so what's it been like since you started running this agency um it's been exhilarating it's uh it has its ups and downs um and you know after being an aids activist for all those years and never being threatened with the jail term i get threatened with the jail term and my as a government official now how did that happen um that that was a fine that we levied against the state's largest hmo for um a failure in their emergency response system which we think is a serious one that we think is actually connected to the deaths of some patients who need it had serious conditions and needed emergency care and it's a large fine over a million dollars which is being challenged by the hmo but where it got interesting was they challenged it in state court normally the hmo got creative and took the challenge to federal court and were able to persuade a judge to bring me up on contempt of court charges arguing that i was in contempt of the federal preemption on medicare because the feds are the only ones that are really supposed to adjudicate medicare that's right and i understand no but we were and are using the examples of medicare patients to show where problems are in the hmo system so our view the administration's view is that the experience of medicare patients matters it's relevant if you're trying to reform hmos in california and that doesn't mean that we're usurping the federal government's enforcement or non-enforcement of medicare patient rights but um but i had to go to court in federal court and our lawyers had to prove that and the judge was satisfied that that the actions were not in contempt of court but it was really dramatic took him about five minutes to render the decision it was not an exaggeration no i think that's about right i think it took about five minutes well it of course it's an outrageous ploy and i understand that people want to do everything they can to you know get out from under a fine but i can't even imagine that anyone would think that the agency that you're supposed to call if you have a problem is going to say excuse me are you a medicare patient okay bye bye yeah which i mean you can't do no i i don't think that would be even if what you do is to help them through the medicare exactly if at a minimum so we can get medicare on the phone and ask them what they can do but um in the process of doing that if we learn something about a problem that you know an hmo is closing their emergency rooms during key hours or something like that to not use that information to protect all patients is just unthinkable and fortunately we get to stay the course on this yeah you made the headlines daniel you know in an area you never even thought that you would be in the headlines for it's interesting yeah it is interesting so have they um made any has anyone made any big deal about the fact that you're gay in this job i don't think so no it's sort of irrelevant yeah yeah i i haven't heard anything like that and um i won't even ask you whether there are other fines there i've heard people in the hmo industry quoted as saying that i'm overzealous for patients um but i like that epithet zingali the zealous yeah it's not bad then i think that has may has some something to do with the aids activist um history or something like that but you know that's that's a criticism i'm willing to bear so does it feel like you're in the right place now oh yes yeah i i if anything um i i feel like a sense of urgency because uh this being a government appointment it's subject to elections and timetables and i expect the governor will have another term but that still only gives me really five years to do the things that i want to do in terms of our part of reforming the hmo system in california and we have a lot to do so you know i'm this this job i'm going to stick with as long as i can well it's interesting uh another alumni of students who are democratic students for economic economic democracy yeah whoops i know i remember ced and i remember right right exactly but another alumni uh susan kennedy is the uh cabinet secretary and uh assistant chief of staff or associate chief of staff for gray davis yes as well i thought it must be a long uh history really of of activism and friendship there with me and susan yeah oh sure yeah we've known each other since we were college organizers and she was always as formidable as she is now she's really the chief operating officer for the state she there's the governor there's his chief of staff lynn shank and then there's susan running the day-to-day operations and all of us who have a piece of responsibility um answer to susan and um work with her on whatever we're doing we answer to susan too i know we we know where where everything is sort of needs to be directed is there somebody like susan doing that well you know it's interesting how many gay and lesbian people are in leadership in not just in our state in other states and city councils i mean there's a lot of trust i mean my theory is when you when you reduce a barrier you allow whoever would be the natural for the job anyway just to go through and have it yeah and perhaps this simply proves my point but do you um do you feel that there's been a particular kind of outreach in this government or that we're just sort of coming into our own around the country well great davis understands what we were talking about earlier in terms of diversity he knows that if you build a cabinet out of people who come from all segments of california life you'll have better ideas and you'll have better government and so um you know in my case he recognized that aids activists brought something to hmo reform that others might not the secretary of business transportation and housing maria contreras suite recently accompanied him to mexico for a very important meeting between california and mexico on a wide range of issues she was born in mexico she not only speaks the language but she understands a great deal of where they're coming from and can can do california proud that way um so yeah i think i think the governor understands that that's why he's appointed twice as many gay and lesbian judges as any governor before because it gives him a better pool of judges [Music] but you see this happening all over the country daniel the places i'm familiar with there are some good things happening i think it does depend on on the leader though not all elected officials see the world that way i have a good friend kathy willard in atlanta who was just elected president of the city council there um to me being a californian seeing that happen in atlanta georgia a white lesbian become president of city council is seems like a huge deal so i'm enormously proud of her um and yeah i know i know good things are happening in other parts of the country too and i know i mean spending as much time as you did in movement sort of uh politics um do you think that this this is sort of a natural evolution for a country or do you think the movement has something to do with it i suppose it's both i mean i think now that i'm not directly engaged day to day in gay and lesbian civil rights things look a little better to me from the outside on the inside i always felt like we didn't make enough progress that day in enacting this bill or that bill and it and it weighed me down sometimes that we are legally disenfranchised second-class citizens in the eyes of the law when you get out of that a little bit you see the sort of the flow of progress that every day in some ways that are not legal or legislative our place in society gets better i think day by day just in terms of people's understanding and also we stop exaggerating how good it is for everybody else yes you know i mean really as i can i can see working where you work for instance that you can see the numbers of disenfranchised not literally because they can vote but but powerlessness is powerlessness and people yeah you certainly see it when people are dealing with their hmos well and you get lots and lots and lots of calls from all around the state i guess it's picking up in just the way that we wanted it to but created kind of a nightmare uh agency we have our hands in a way for you i think we've had over 250 000 calls from people having some problem with their hmos and i'm afraid you're going to get a whole bunch more after the show yeah thank you oh wow i didn't know there was such an agency well it's not hard to find the number that's right um and all this time you've been a dad or how long have you been a dad it took us a while chuck and i to to get around to that we we were very happy the two of us we did a lot of traveling together we um we just love being together and spending time together so when i look back now i realize it it could have been easy for us to just not go through the parenthood route because we were pretty content with life so we kept talking about it and thinking now now we don't really need that and um we actually took our niece and nephew chuck's biological niece and nephew with us to south africa for a trip where we did a safari and we looked around there and they were 13 years old i think and they're twins and we had so much fun it was like seeing south africa through their bright young eyes and minds made the trip more exciting than any we'd been on and putting up with them was nothing compared to the joy we got from having their company so that was a turning point for us um and we we did it we have two boys one seven and one we'll turn two this week tell me more about oh they're wonderful i know more than that um the the seven year old you know this sounds so cliche but that thing about they grow up too fast and i know exactly what people mean now because it just you know last night he comes walking across the kitchen floor and goes to the refrigerator and opens it up and takes out the milk and pours it and i thought when did he start doing that you know it used to be papa get me some milk please and um and he's so tall he's on a basketball team which i co-coach wow with one of his friends fathers and uh we have great fun doing that every saturday and and he likes school and he's he's very independent holds his own in the family has strong opinions um he's just can't see why that would be i know he's a sweet wonderful kid and his little brother's just you know just turning two so we're still kind of getting to know what he's about but um he looks like he's gonna hold his own as well it's wonderful it is it's so you you uh no question if this is too personal let me know because i we didn't even talk about this ahead of time there are some things about the kids background that i don't talk about i'll let them deal with that when they go on your show absolutely well don't think they won't we often have you sort of children of gay parents telling us what they really think they'll give you a list of complaints oh i'm sure they will but all kids do well it's been i mean it's the family part of it that's really been i think the hardest for us to uh to get to in terms of civil rights at least by this moment in time it seems to be for all minority populations that it's like the last thing you get is the ability to marry or the ability to adopt or you know the ability to really sort of shape and and define your own families so it's not a new story really it's just the same story that's true kind of for us but in the larger sense this has become very critical for the community and in a way i always saw it as related to this to the issue of health care as well because we tend to in california for instance we look at whether or not we can provide health care to children we don't really think about whether we can provide health care to adults but as you know we try to expand it a little bit by if we provide it to children then maybe we could provide it to their parents which is so important and all of these family things sort of you know fit in do you think that that the new sort of emphasis in our community on family issues has changed the sort of the feeling of the community or the way we're perceived you know i haven't thought much about that sheila and i i can say personally it's changed my outlook on life in some ways you know something like september 11th happening in some ways it weighs more heavily on me than i think it would have before i was a parent because i look at my kids and i think you know my god what kind of world are they growing up in and what does this mean um in all kinds of things loss of civil liberties and danger and all the things everyone thinks about at the same time i can lose myself in them you know playing with them on the floor or whatever realizing that they're not thinking about september 11th that's not part of their consciousness right now and that's a nice place to be when when world events can get you down so it's um but but i'll have to think more about how it's changed well i'll give you one more one more question that you might also have to think about where where might you be in five years do you think i don't know i don't know i've never been good at predicting what's next um i kind of take it as i come i'd like to stay in sacramento i i grew up there as we talked about and i think that's a nice place for a kid to grow up and i like having my kids close to my parents they spend a lot of time with their grandparents it's good for the grandparents it's good for the kids and it's easier for the parents so i like the idea of staying there but um part of what keeps me there now is i have this great job where i feel like i can do good work and who knows if that would always be the case so i don't know daniel i know it's hard to believe what we've been talking for a whole hour oh my gosh i still can't believe you're 60. well you think you were surprised and that's right exactly i'm so glad you were here thanks so much for being with us and thank you for being with us and remember you know we don't have the same job for 100 years anymore it seems like but you can certainly make a difference and i hope you will try and i hope you'll get used to it [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you