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Tom Ammiano (born December 15, 1941) is an American politician, and LGBT rights activist from San Francisco, California. Ammiano is a Democrat and a member of the California State Assembly, representing the 13th district.
[edit] Early lifeAmmiano was born and grew up in Montclair, New Jersey. He attended Seton Hall University in 1963 and received a bachelor's degree in communication. He also attended San Francisco State University in 1965 where he received a master's degree in special education. He taught English to children in South Vietnam as part of a Quaker program, but left shortly after the Tet Offensive in 1968. [edit] Political career[edit] Briggs InitiativeAmmiano is a former public school teacher. In 1975, he became the first public school teacher in San Francisco to make his sexual orientation a matter of public knowledge. In 1977, Ammiano founded the movement (No on 6) against the Briggs Initiative, started by John Briggs to ban all gay people from teaching in California, with activists Hank Wilson and Harvey Milk. The anti-Briggs movement, supported by people as diverse as Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, was successful in defeating the initiative in 1978. [edit] San Francisco Board of EducationIn 1980 and 1988, Ammiano ran for the San Francisco Board of Education, and was elected in 1990. He was subsequently elected its vice-president in 1991, and then president in 1992. As president of the Board of Education, Ammiano was successful in his efforts to include a gay and lesbian sensitivity curriculum for all students in the San Francisco Unified School District. He helped to make San Francisco public schools' sexual education curriculum, which begins diversity and sensitivity training in kindergarten, one of the most diverse and inclusive in the United States.[citation needed] [edit] San Francisco Board of SupervisorsAmong his accomplishments on the Board of Supervisors is the creation of the San Francisco Health Care Security Ordinance, which was passed by a unanimous vote of the Board of Supervisors and signed by Mayor Gavin Newsom on August 7, 2006. This makes San Francisco the first city in the nation to provide universal healthcare access.[1][2] Ammiano is also the main architect of the city's Domestic Partners Ordinance, which provides equal benefits to employees and their unmarried domestic partners. It also requires companies that do business with the City and County of San Francisco to provide the same benefits. In 1999, Ammiano came into conflict with some in San Francisco's Catholic community when the Board of Supervisors, at Ammiano's request, granted the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a charity group of drag queen nuns, a street-closure permit for Castro Street for their 20th anniversary celebration on Easter Sunday.[3][4] [edit] 1999 mayoral campaignMain article: San Francisco mayoral election, 1999 In the San Francisco mayoral race of 1999, Ammiano mounted a successful write-in campaign in the November election, preventing the incumbent Willie Brown from achieving a victory without a run-off. While Ammiano lost that second election in December, Ammiano's campaign galvanized progressive voters in San Francisco and had a major impact on the composition of the new, more liberal Board of Supervisors the next year. There is a documentary about the 1999 mayoral election titled See How They Run.[5] Ammiano ran for mayor again in 2003, but did not win enough votes to make that run-off after Supervisor Matt Gonzalez entered the race, splitting the progressive vote. [edit] California State Assembly
Ammiano introduced the Marijuana Control, Regulation, and Education Act, to the California State Assembly in February 2009, calling for the legalization of cannabis statewide. The proposal would regulate marijuana like alcohol, with people over 21 years old allowed to grow, buy, sell and possess cannabis. With the state's severe budget shortfalls the bill has been discussed in light of the revenue generated as well as the savings from decriminalising and prosecuting marijuana-focussed possession crimes. [edit] Schwarzenegger acrostic memoIn October 2009 Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Governor of California appeared at a Democratic Party fundraiser at San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel. Though the governor was a prominent member of the Republican party he had been invited by the organizers. Many in the room thought the governor’s appearance was, as Ammiano described it, a "cheap publicity stunt." When former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown introduced Schwarzenegger, Ammiano shouted "You lie!" in a copy-cat of Representative Joe Wilson's remarks during President Barack Obama's congressional address a month earlier. Ammiano walked out stating that Schwarzenegger could "kiss my gay ass." Four days after the fundraiser, Schwarzenegger vetoed a Assembly Bill 1176 authored by Ammiano that had cleared the State Senate 40-0 and the Assembly 78-0.[6][7][8] Ammiano was sent a memo from Schwarzenegger explaining the veto. The letter, in the form of an acrostic, contained the cryptic message "I Fuck You" spelled out using the first letter of each line along the left margin.[9] The memo was widely reported on and seen as both generally offensive and retaliatory. Some news media also noted the odds that spelling out "I Fuck You" in the memo being just a coincidence was quite unlikely. Using combinatorics to also account for "well-placed blank lines in-between the I and FUCK and the FUCK and YOU", a mathematician estimated the odds being nearly one in two billion the occurence could happen unintentionally.[10] [edit] Personal lifeAmmiano was in a 16-year domestic partnership with a fellow schoolteacher, Tim Curbo, who died of complications from AIDS in 1994. He has one daughter and is now a grandfather. Aside from his teaching and political careers, Ammiano has been a stand-up comedian since 1980. Ammiano portrayed himself in the 2008 film Milk. [edit] References
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Categories: 1941 births | Activists from the San Francisco Bay Area | Members of the California State Assembly | Gay politicians | Italian-American politicians | LGBT comedians | LGBT state legislators of the United States | Living people | San Francisco Board of Supervisors members | San Francisco State University alumni | Seton Hall University alumni | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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