December 18, 2002

Why Dufty won

IN THE DAYS after the Dec. 10 runoff, many of us in District Eight are asking: how could Bevan Dufty, the moderate, Willie Brown-backed candidate, win over longtime activist and progressive Eileen Hansen?

Granted, he didn't win by a landslide; still, he carried a district that has traditionally gone for more radical politicians. But this is not the Castro District of Harvey Milk. It's not even the activist neighborhood it was in the early 1990s.

It's an area that suffered massive gentrification during the dot-com boom. Long-term tenants, many of them with AIDS, were pushed out of the neighborhood by landlords anxious to cash in on the Bay Area's latest gold rush. With many of the activists gone, the glory that once was the Castro was destroyed by real estate speculation and some of the city's highest rents.

Now, Pottery Barn and Diesel face each other diagonally at the queer world's most famous corner: Castro and Market Streets. In many of the apartments where jeans-and-T-shirt-clad activists once strategized against big pharmaceutical companies that were screwing people with AIDS, a more upscale class of residents wonders why the streets aren't cleaner or how their property values will be affected by the homeless queer youth shelter on their block.

These were the concerns, I believe, that gave Dufty his victory. Among his followers were neighbors who opposed the homeless youth shelter. It's not surprising that they embraced Dufty; after all, he was the District Eight candidate who most ardently pushed Sup. Gavin Newsom's politically opportunistic Proposition N (Care Not Cash). Hansen, on the other hand, true to her progressive politics, remained firmly against Prop. N, even when polls showed it winning big throughout the city and the neighborhood.

Dufty had a lot against him: He was a former director of neighborhood services for Willie Brown and a lobbyist who helped bring a Walgreens to a neighborhood that opposed it. Running in a district that had overwhelmingly supported Tom Ammiano in his runoff bid against Brown just three years before, Dufty effectively used Prop. N to divert attention away from these liabilities. Not all of Prop. N's supporters were right-wingers or moderates. Even some liberal folks saw N as a plan for getting people off the streets and out of their doorways. That it was seriously flawed (the services aren't there and most likely never will be) didn't matter. It made people feel as if something was being done.

But Prop. N wasn't the only factor in Dufty's victory. There was also the gentrification that had changed the demographics of the district. The new voters had no sense of what the neighborhood once stood for, no sense of the radical politics of Harvey Milk, ACT UP, or Queer Nation.

Then there was misogyny. The Castro/Noe Valley prides itself on being beyond "isms," but Hansen is a strong Jewish lesbian-feminist in a neighborhood that has always had male leadership. For men who were already uncomfortable backing a tough woman, Dufty supporters promoted an image of Hansen as someone who wasn't reasonable when, in fact, she has a history of mediation and problem-solving (she even worked at Community Boards for a time).

And as if painting Hansen as unreasonable weren't enough, Dufty supporters allegedly made phone calls warning potential backers that Hansen was anti-Semitic because she once participated, as a legal observer, in a pro-Palestinian demo (see "Machine Muscle," 11/13/02). As absurd as the charge was, it stuck. In the end, Hansen was characterized as a leftist extremist.

Even in San Francisco, a city once dubbed the "land of nuts and fruits" by Philadelphia's infamous right-wing police chief turned mayor, Frank Rizzo; even in the Castro, where male nuns run around collecting money for charity; even in a district where men sometimes walk around with their butts bared, that red-baiting strategy worked as well as it would have in Ames, Iowa. That's the saddest – and scariest – part of it all.