Politics
My life as a delegate to the 1984 Democratic National Convention
Part 2
After winning the primary, I had some flirtations with real political power. Mondale’s delegate hunter met me for coffee. He asked me what I thought of Geraldine Ferraro. I said, “What can I tell you? She’s out of the Queens machine.” He said, “Well, she’s the only one who gives us another 2% in the polling.” I don’t know if he got my message but I certainly got his.
The second was more interesting. We had gotten word that Mondale was having second thoughts about having a platform plank supporting gays in the military and we engaged in a furious lobbying campaign, totally unable to get through to the young Andrew Cuomo, who was managing Mondale’s campaign.
Finally, I decided to try a Hail Mary.
Over the years, my reputation had shifted from being a nice young professor to being a hot-headed bomb thrower, and I decided to take advantage of it. I called two friends of mine, both recovering political scientists, who were full-time in Mondale’s NY headquarters and I reminded them that under New York law, delegates were pledged to Mondale, not bound to Mondale. I told them, truthfully, that both Jackson and Hart supported a gays-in-the-military plank and that Mondale was the sole holdout. If Mondale didn’t come around, I said that I would hold a press conference with the other three LGB Mondale delegates (who had no idea of what I was doing) on the steps of Mondale headquarters and announce that we were switching our support to Hart or Jackson.
The Mondale campaign saw the light and he endorsed the plank. Little did I know that my greatest achievement as a delegate would happen before the convention convened.
Meanwhile, the convention was becoming more and more expensive. With Ferraro on the ticket and Mario Cuomo as the keynote speaker, New York’s delegation got a prime location in the front rows of the Moscone Center. We also were assigned to the luxurious Hyatt in walking distance of the convention.
That was the good news.
The bad news was that the rooms at the Hyatt were frighteningly expensive. Just as I was deciding that I couldn’t afford to go, I learned that San Francisco’s Alice B. Toklas Democratic club was offering community housing to LGB delegates. I took them up on their generous offer. Then, the teachers’ union discovered that CUNY faculty were members of the union and offered every union member who attended the convention $500. That enabled me to stay at the Hyatt and to ingratiate myself to the Toklas club by inviting the member who would have been my host to be my plus one at all convention events to which I could bring a plus one. He turned out to be a very nice guy whose day job didn’t allow him to attend many of the events.
I arrived at the hotel the afternoon before the convention was to start, checked in at the delegation’s welcome table and was given a packet with holographic delegates’ credentials, a schedule of events, and invitations to countless parties that required donations that I couldn’t afford. As I was to learn, much of the convention was not designed for people living on academic salaries.
After the sticker shock wore in, I realized that I should have run a bigger fundraiser in New York before going to convention. I never realized how much it was going to cost to participate in the process and as the convention went on and on, I became angrier and angrier about the vulgar displays of wealth. I had thought that I would participate in a capstone process in American democracy. I found out over and over during the coming days that the delegates were the audience at a television show and the convention’s events were designed to keep us happy and quiescent. In fact, many of the events were designed to keep us away from the convention hall except for being the needed audience for the parts of the convention that were on prime time television.
I worked my way through Brooklyn College as a supernumerary at the Metropolitan Opera. I was a spear-carrier at the debuts of Leontyne Price, Franco Corelli, Giulietta Simionato. I shared the stage with Birgit Nilsson, Leonie Rysanek, Jon Vickers, Irene Dalis, Jon Vickers, Carlo Bergonzi, Cornell MacNeil, and many other great artists. I made a little money, but I got a real education in a great art form and I got to see great artists up close and personal and I took great pride in being a supernumerary. I learned to recognize a star and to recognize a great performance when I saw one.
As a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, I was told when and where to sit, when to stand, what and when to cheer, what signs to hold, and to keep my mouth shut. Unlike working at the opera, the only great speech that I saw was Mario Cuomo’s remarkable keynote address — and even that was undermined by the party that followed it — but I get ahead of myself.
Nevertheless, there was a lot to remember.
Most memorably, the local LGBT political establishment threw a welcome party for the LGB delegates and alternates in the basement of a gay bar the night before the convention was to open. The room was small and not particularly crowded. The organizers of the reception could not conceal their distaste for one another.
All of a sudden, a man I didn’t recognize walked across the floor, his hand extended, and said, “Ken Sherrill! Seth Charney.” Seth had been two years behind me at Brooklyn and we were both active in student government. I don’t think that we’d seen one another since I graduated in 1963. Seth brought me up to date. He went to Yale Medical School, came out, was drafted, served in Vietnam, settled in San Francisco, and had a nice practice as a psychiatrist. He was active in BAPHR, Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights. When AIDS hit, he began going to Sacramento to lobby for sensible and humane AIDS policies. He said to me, “I suddenly realized that the thing I enjoyed most about Brooklyn College was going to Albany to fight for free tuition. So I closed my practice and became a full-time lobbyist for BAPHR.” He then filled me in on who was who in the room, who hated whom, and why they were mortal enemies. We became constant companions during the convention. He came to New York regularly to see his ailing mother and he became a regular guest lecturer in my AIDS and Society and Politics of AIDS courses. Whenever we marched together in Pride marches, he would proudly wear his military uniform — more proud that he could still fit into it than he was about having been in the military — but prouder still to be making the political point that people who served in the military shared his views.
My friend and co-author Murray Edelman was the chief statistician, later director, of the CBS Election Unit. Murray had long thought that the police underestimated the crowds at protests and marches. The convention presented a magnificent opportunity for a natural experiment. Two marches were scheduled for the same day: a gay rights march in the morning and a labor march in the afternoon. Murray devised a sampling scheme involving overhead photography to produce estimates of crowd size which he then compared to the police estimates. To his surprise, the police overestimated the crowds at both marches but they overestimated the size of the labor march more. We talked about the findings and concluded that the police used the overestimates as evidence of the great job the police did at crowd control and to justify their budgets. The police overestimated crowds they liked more than crowds they didn’t like.
And while some delegates were going to protests, others were going to parties. I did a little of both.
One night, Bay Area Physicians threw a party for the LGB delegates at the home of one of the doctors. The crowd was small enough to fit in the kitchen. I got quite a lesson in the failures of Mayor Feinstein, the inept state government, the horrors of Ronald Reagan, the errors of Randy Shilts, and what a sane and responsible response to AIDS would look like. (I went to the party in full leather. A delegate from Minnesota said that he’d never seen a man in leather before and began to grope me. That was the closest I got to having sex in San Francisco.)
On another day, I decided to walk around the Castro during a lunch break. Off I went, in full jacket and tie delegate drag, complete with my holographic ID hanging from my neck and I dropped in on Mister S. Leathers. The manager was the only other person in the store. He asked me if I was a delegate to the convention and I said yes. He then asked me if I was going to see Mondale and I said that he was supposed to be at the New York party that night. The manager asked me if I would give something to Mondale for him and I agreed. He reached under the front desk and pulled out an 8” dildo with Ronald Reagan’s face carved into the head. I brought it to the party but Mondale didn’t show. Fortunately, I met my former student Norman Goldman there and gave him my extra ticket to the Oakland A’s -Boston Red Sox game the next afternoon. We got lots of swag and Norman introduced me to Eliot Cohen, who became publisher and editor-in-chief of Major League Monthly. I subsequently became the only political scientist to publish in MLM. Better yet, Eliot moved back to New York in 1985 and organized a group to buy a four-seat season ticket to the Mets 1986. As a result, My husband and I, along with Eliot and his then-fiance, had seats to Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. I’ll never forget Eliot starting the chant “Suckner Bucks” as soon as Mookie reached First Base in that fabled final inning. I still have the Reagan dildo but it’s never been used.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67tkQHvPg60
There was much to keep the New York Caucus busy. The New York Caucus met at the hotel every morning. Between Ferraro and Cuomo, we were expected to be tied at the hip to the Mondale-Ferraro ticket. Each morning, we met to get our marching orders but one morning there was a surprising eruption. The Jackson and Hart campaigns had some minority planks to the platform. The New York delegation voted to support those minority planks to the consternation of the party leadership. The explanation for this seeming revolt was that at the time of our caucus meeting, the buses were leaving for a tour of the Napa Valley sponsored by the California wine growers. All of the machine politicians were on the buses to Napa and the insurgents took control of the New York Caucus’ platform session. Wine beats issue positions. This is a lesson for all political scientists.
The next day had another great performance, but I can say nothing about the contents of the speech. The sound system at the Moscone Center was so bad that barely a word of what Jesse Jackson said could be understood. Nevertheless the sheer sound, the music, of his delivery had us all standing and cheering. We cheered the idea of him and the extraordinary performance even if we had no idea of what he was saying.
New Yorkers also showed just how fast we were. The health lobby organized a seven mile run from the Marina over the Bay Bridge and back. Not many serious runners were at this event so Jose Serrano, a member of Congress from The Bronx and a serious marathoner, John Ducote, a 21-year-old openly gay Mondale delegate from Baton Rouge, and I ran together, substantially ahead of the pack. On the return lap, a runner with the Olympic torch passed us on his way to the Los Angeles Olympics. It sounds cheesy, but this was an incredibly thrilling moment. Joe, John, and I finished 1–2–3. As I finished, I looked behind and saw that a Black man was running 4th and a woman was 5th. All of the straight white men finished behind us. That was the perfect metaphor for the 1984 Democratic National Convention.
After the famous Cuomo speech, Willie Brown, then the Speaker of the California State Assembly and a prodigious fund-raiser, threw a party called “Oh, What a Night!” He had commandeered a pier the size of three football fields and built a miniature San Francisco on it.To give you an idea of the size of this miniature, the miniature Golden Gate Bridge was large enough to hold the entire San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, which serenated us. Four bands, including Jefferson Starship, played simultaneously. Food and drink from San Francisco’s finest purveyors was carried around by the cater-waiters. Seth introduced me to Sister Boom-Boom and a group of her followers in the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. All of a sudden, I realized what it must have been like to be at the Palace of Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV.
I returned to New York to teach at Hunter. My first class was Political Parties and Elections and, to my surprise, Geraldine Ferraro’s son was on my class roster. He had been booted from his Ivy League college, I think for dealing weed on campus, and was at Hunter to find redemption and to enable his father to keep an eye on him. I walked into the first class and introduced myself to the students, including saying that I had been a Mondale delegate and then I distributed the syllabus. He raised his hand and asked how long the term paper had to be. I said that there was no set length but that it should be at least ten pages and no more than twenty-five. He got up and left the class, never to return.
