MASON FUNK: Great. Thank you for making the time. And please start by stating and spelling your first and last names.
MARK LENO: Yes, I am Mark Leno, m-a-r-k l-e-n-o.
MASON FUNK: Great. What date and where were you born? And if you could include my question in your answer.
MARK LENO: I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on September 24th, 1951.
MASON FUNK: Excellent. And by the way, you had the same birthday as my husband.
17 years later. Mm-Hmm.
MASON FUNK:
MARK LENO: Yes.
MASON FUNK: What was it like?
MARK LENO: I arrived in San Francisco in February of 1977. I had left one of the coldest winters on record in New York, and I arrived here, without being aware of it, in a serious drought. There was no rain. Every day was sunny and mild and just beautiful. I thought I'd gone to heaven.
00:01:00MASON FUNK: And just outta curiosity, what had motivated you to move to San Francisco?
MARK LENO: Well, as I said, it was getting ever colder in New York. I lost my job, I lost my apartment. I received a message from my sister who was here in the Bay Area saying, "Get out of that cold, dirty city. Come to California and revivify," she said. I think I chose San Francisco of
00:01:30MARK LENO: all the places and all the places in California, probably because of
its reputation as being gay friendly and welcoming. I knew exactly just one
person here, but he did welcome me. It was his sofa
MASON FUNK: This was 1977?
MARK LENO: Yes.
MASON FUNK: This was really pretty close to the epidemic,
00:02:00MASON FUNK: but still a few years. What was the mood? What was it like to arrive? You were about 26 years old.
MARK LENO: 25.
MASON FUNK: 25. What was it like to arrive in San Francisco at that age in this city?
MARK LENO: It was thrilling.
MASON FUNK: Tell me what you're talking about.
MARK LENO: Yes, yes, yes. So, San Francisco clearly was a welcoming environment, and I was a part of a wave of young gay and
00:02:30MARK LENO: lesbian immigration to the city. The population was swelling, and
clearly we took over a blue collar Irish neighborhood called the Castro. And gay
men a few years older than myself were buying properties, starting businesses.
And then of course, there was a party atmosphere. I joked that I was only seeing
about eight men a week at the time,
MARK LENO: until I met the love of my life years later.
MASON FUNK: Right. What did you think you were gonna do when you came to San Francisco? What was your plan, if any?
MARK LENO: I did not have a clue. That was one of the challenges of my life at that stage. I had a college degree, I didn't have direction. I didn't know what I wanted to do. It was a depressed time for me, and add on to that, a little bit
00:03:30MARK LENO: too much sex, drugs, and rock and roll in New York, I really needed to start over, pull myself together. I started to run, I started running long distances, and that was as important for my recovering mental health as it was for my physical health. Soon, I was running 10 miles a day and it led to marathon running. I was restoring my being and San Francisco. Let me do it quite easily.
00:04:00MASON FUNK: Looking back, were you kind of in need of -- a word that comes out of the blue -- like some kind of restoration or healing?
MARK LENO: Very much so.
MASON FUNK: Tell me about that.
MARK LENO: I also left New York somewhat brokenhearted. The first love of my life, let's spare you the details of it. But I was mending that broken heart and trying to find
00:04:30MARK LENO: my way in the world as a young man. The running kept me grounded and feeling like I had a right to be on planet earth. But otherwise, I was collecting unemployment from the state of New York. I did some odd jobs, so I was pretty much of a bum who was able to sustain myself. Unfortunately, it'd be almost
00:05:00MARK LENO: impossible to repeat what I did then now. Just because of the cost of housing and the cost of living. My one bedroom apartment and I wanted to live alone and I could afford more than a studio $275 a month. So that was a privilege. I didn't recognize it as such at the time. I don't know what percentage of my little income went to pay my rent, but I'm sure it was pushing 50%. But I wanted to do that.
00:05:30MARK LENO: My living costs were quite minimal.
MASON FUNK: Yeah. Would you say that at the time, would you describe yourself as a confident person or did that come later? Describe yourself as you look back at you, at Mark Leno, when you arrived.
MARK LENO: Well, I wouldn't say it was a depressed state, but it was a difficult time. Again, at that age, I had friends who were not only in law school and in medical school and in
00:06:00MARK LENO: graduate programs, they'd graduated already. They were getting on with their careers and were working and with some purpose. I didn't have all that. It was hard because I beat myself up for not knowing what I was doing by that age. And of course, from where I am now, I was just a kid. But at that age, 25 is different from 22, which is different from 20. But I have a natural love of life and
00:06:30MARK LENO: a positive attitude even in my less than directed state at the time.
MASON FUNK: Yeah. The idea to start a sign company, where did that come from? How did that come about?
MARK LENO: The idea for starting a sign company came from my father. He was a business owner himself and had a strong entrepreneurial spirit. Only in hindsight do I now realize that I inherited that from him.
00:07:00MARK LENO: I'd make a lousy employee and it was easier for me to borrow a minimal amount of money and start my own business, than it was for me to go out and get a job because I had nothing to put on a resume. I just didn't know how to go about doing it. I was desperate. I needed something to do and I needed a way to pay my rent. This seemed reasonable. I bought some equipment, meaning a large flatbed letterpress
00:07:30MARK LENO: and some cold type. This is all Gutenberg technology, really 15th century technology. I got a week's training on it all.I rented a 500 square foot space at Gary Masonic. I opened my door. It was a hope and a prayer.
MASON FUNK: How did you come up with the name Budget Signs?
MARK LENO: The folks who sold me the equipment called themselves that.
00:08:00MASON FUNK: Call themselves what?
MARK LENO:
MASON FUNK: How were those first years? I mean, did you pretty quickly kind of begin to build up a little rhythm of clients? Tell us about that.
MARK LENO: In 1978, I opened my doors the day after
00:08:30MARK LENO: Labor Day of that year. If you needed a sign, you would open your yellow pages. No one even knows what that is today, but that's where one would advertise and turn to signs in the book. Unfortunately, for me, the deadline for placing an ad for that new book was July, so I was out of the Yellow Pages the entire first year, which demanded that I had to get creative.
00:09:00MARK LENO: I printed up little promotionals and I sent them out in the mail. I followed the listing of new businesses in the newspaper every week, and I sent to them. Then I had a bit of good fortune, a fellow who worked for, again, an anachronism today, a savings loan, took a lunch break and walked by my front door on his lunch break every day back to work.
00:09:30MARK LENO: One day, he stopped in and ordered some signs. There were eight branches of this savings and loan, so they needed quantities of eight for these stanchions in their lobbies, 22 by 28, which was half the size of my press. He would come in and order eight signs at once or 16 signs at once, which was just gold for me. And my press
00:10:00MARK LENO: was good at that because at the time, pre-computer, a sign was either hand painted or, in quantity, silk screen, but that was the niche that my press filled, somewhere between 2, 3, 4, and 20, 30 or 40. So I could do 'em more quickly and more cost efficiently than hand sign painting or silk screening. Now, I also did subcontracting because if someone came in my door and needed something,
00:10:30MARK LENO: no way were they getting out of my door without my getting an order, because if I couldn't do it on my press, I had subcontractors who could do it for me. Together, we could do just about anything.
MASON FUNK: Wow. Wow.
MARK LENO: And I was desperate for business, so I did my best to keep it.
MASON FUNK: Of course. I have to ask whether you ever got any business out of the eight guys a week that you were sleeping with?
MARK LENO:
MARK LENO: Since I couldn't be in the Yellow Pages, I joined business associations that had directories. I was an early member of the Golden Gate Business Association, which was I think the first gay and Lesbian Business Association Chamber of Commerce in the country. Yeah. So I was in their directory. Yeah.
MASON FUNK: Ans did you live, yourself, in the Castro at this time?
MARK LENO: I lived in my one bedroom apartment in the Tenderloin
00:11:30MARK LENO: at the corner of Hyde and Gary. My business happened to be at the corner of Gary and Masonic. At my corner, I caught the 38 bus and took it out to Masonic every morning and took the 38 back every evening. I was in that 500 square foot space amazingly for six years. It was only the last half
00:12:00MARK LENO: of those six years that I had an employee in the space with me. The business was beginning to grow. By 1984 a good friend who was also my attorney and also the fellow who let me sleep on his sofa when I arrived in 1977, said, "Mark, you cannot have your business future in the hands of a landlord. You have to own your own building." I said,
00:12:30MARK LENO: "How am I going to buy a commercial building?" And he said, "I don't care how, but you've got to." So he really incentivized me. I went out looking for a little building. There were precious few in my price range, but I found a space that I was able to buy in the autumn of 1984. We moved in April 1st, 1985.
MASON FUNK: Wow. Wow. Love those nuggets of advice, those good business advice.
MARK LENO: The business would not be here today,
00:13:00MARK LENO: and it is now 45 years old, if I hadn't had my own building, because I would've been priced out like so many other small businesses. I would not have been able to keep up with the rents.
MASON FUNK: Wow. Fascinating. That's a good little -- All you entrepreneurs out there. Of course, buying a building today, forget about it.
MARK LENO: Yeah.
MASON FUNK: Okay. So we're kind of coming into -- You setup, you bought your building mid-eighties.
00:13:30MASON FUNK: Something inside you, maybe, caused you to lift your head up and kind of go, oh, I could do something more than this. I could do community service or something like that. What happened?
MARK LENO: Well, one thing I don't want to overlook is that between 1978 and 1985, when I expanded the business, bought a second press and moved to this new building, a young man walked through my door in May of 1981. His name was Douglas Jackson.
00:14:00MARK LENO: Between 1978 when I started the business, and the spring of 1985, when I was able to expand it, a rather major event occurred on May 20th, 1980, when a young man named Douglas Jackson walked in my business to order some signs for a somewhat important event. The Muni Metro System, our underground system of public
00:14:30MARK LENO: transportation in San Francisco, was extending its service from Van Ness to Castro Street. And so there was a party called Metro Madness between Van Ness and Castro. The city ran the trains back and forth all night, and we had a party on the trains and in the stations, and they needed signs. A friend of mine was doing the promotion for it and sent an intern of his to my business to purchase signs for the event,
00:15:00MARK LENO: and I fell in love with him. Name was Douglas Jackson. He was a
couple years younger than I and just out of school. He himself had just recently
moved to San Francisco, and though he was living with someone else at the time,
I had determined it was not a serious relationship. I courted him through the
summer of 1980, and the night that Ronald Reagan was elected President
MASON FUNK: Then later he became part of your business?
MARK LENO: Yes. So we were together from November of 1980 onward. By 1985 when I was expanding the business, he played general contractor in the renovation of the property that I had just purchased and moved into. Then he insisted, I told him, "No, you've got a young career, it's budding and my business is very small." And he said, "No, I wanna work with you," and so he did.
00:16:00MARK LENO: We had five years of working together until he died in the spring of 1990 from AIDS.
MASON FUNK: I want to come back to him depending on time.
MARK LENO: Sure.
MASON FUNK: Because I know that his younger brother also passed away. It's just a unique story. I don't want to overlook that. But I also want to kind of stay on track.
MARK LENO: Keep going.
MASON FUNK: Great. So around this time, you kind of feel, you hear the call
00:16:30MASON FUNK: on some level of community service. What happened?
MARK LENO: So as the business grew, I was able to get out of my office and somewhat naturally gravitated to community service. It was also the height of the epidemic, so there was no shortage of work to be done. I volunteered for a number of different organizations. One of the first groups I got involved with was called Mobilization against AIDS. It wasn't an AIDS service provider,
00:17:00MARK LENO: but it was a political mobilizing effort to get more attention around the devastation of the epidemic and that it needed political attention and resolution. I got on the board of directors there, and in the process, I learned a very dangerous thing about myself, which was that I had a facility for fundraising. And I say
00:17:30MARK LENO: dangerous because then everyone wants you on their board of directors because no one likes to raise money. I happen to do it, enjoy it, and I did it well. That was instructional for me and my future also because what I was selling in these dinner tickets for the AIDS Foundation or the Human Rights campaign, or whatever it was, I was
00:18:00MARK LENO: selling an idea and I was passionate about those ideas and I was passionate in my selling of those ideas. Then it would take many years later to realize that that's what legislators do, they sell ideas.
MASON FUNK: You discovered that you were not only good at, but liked fundraising. To someone out here who might be
00:18:30MASON FUNK: listening and who wants to raise money, what were the seeds of your success? What were you able to do or enjoyed doing that was so essential to be good at raising money?
MARK LENO: Do you want me to tell the
MASON FUNK: Oh, yes, absolutely.
MARK LENO: Okay. When I would make these sales of tickets, I got a,
00:19:00MARK LENO: not so little, thrill inside. It was a vindication and a validation that what I was selling to them, this passionate idea, I had resonated with them. Their purchase of what I was selling for the good deed that we were doing came back very positively for me. I had a memory of that feeling when I was 10 years old and in the fourth grade,
00:19:30MARK LENO: I attended Hebrew school as young boys did at the time. It was every Tuesday and Thursday for four years. It was preparation and study for my Bar mitzvah, which came in the eighth grade. And every year in the spring, there was a contest among the classmates who could sell the most Bartlett's kosher chocolate Passover candy.
00:20:00MARK LENO: The prize for the student who could sell the most was a MagnaVox transistor radio, which was the height of technology at the time, a radio this big which operated on batteries and had a little earplug extension. I was eager to win this because that meant that I could secretively listen to the Milwaukee Braves baseball game in my bed
00:20:30MARK LENO: without my parents knowing it. So, well-motivated. I got to work. Whereas most of my classmates sold a box of candy to the house on the left and a box of candy to the house on the right. My father, who I told you was a salesman himself, said, "No, you take out the congregational directory and you start at A and you finish at Z." And I did just that. It was a lot of work, but you can imagine how charmed these fellow
00:21:00MARK LENO: congregates of my parents were to get a phone call from Manny and Esther Leno's 10 year old son, asking us if we would buy a box or two of candy. Almost everybody did. But every once in a while, someone would say, "Mark, I'll take 10 boxes." Oh boy, does that feel good? I got the very same feeling when I sold a ticket, or 5 or 10 to the AIDS Foundation dinner.
00:21:30MARK LENO: That fueled me, and it was a wonderful and inspiring and empowering memory. That was my beginning of fundraising for nonprofit organizations through the AIDS crisis.
MASON FUNK: So it wasn't just the belief in the mission or the value or the goal of why you were selling, but it was also just the fun and like the thrill of victory. It was like a kind of a
00:22:00MASON FUNK: perfect yin yang, it sounds like, where it was everything flowing together.
MARK LENO: All of it did come together. It was the memory, a pleasant memory, very pleasant memory of my childhood. It was the feeling of accomplishment in moving a good deed and a good cause forward. It also was connecting me with my community. I was building a network of people I could call when I needed to
00:22:30MARK LENO: for a good cause that would benefit the community and a lot of people and a lot of people got to know me. In a very positive way. At one point someone's response to my solicitation was, "Yeah, yeah, I'll buy your dinner ticket." And then he said, "You are such a salesman, you could sell anything to anybody." I took it as a compliment, but then I
00:23:00MARK LENO: had to stop and wonder if that's the case, why am I selling signs? Now, I love my business, and it sustained me nearly a half century now here in San Francisco. I wouldn't be here if it weren't for the business, but I couldn't tell you I was passionate about signs. But what I came to learn was that I was passionate about ideas, and when I really believed in something, I could sell it.
00:23:30Mark Leno
There were those who suggested you should start a fundraising business. And I thought, no, that wouldn't work. People are buying what I'm selling in promoting these worthy causes because I wasn't getting paid. I was doing it as a volunteer, and it was because I believed in it so much I could sell that sincerity.
MASON FUNK: That's awesome. So this
00:24:00MASON FUNK: eventually attracted the attention of Willie Brown is my simple understanding. But did you just get a call one day, or what happened?
MARK LENO: I would volunteer for these different community-based organizations, and it was for the AIDS effort, it was for politically related issues
00:24:30MARK LENO: to our queer community for the Jewish community as well. I got invited to join all these boards of directors and take on the task of raising money for those organizations. Then it also grew further. I had friends who were running for public office in San Francisco for the school board, for the county board of supervisors, for the community college board, and then there were ballot measures that needed money to be raised
00:25:00MARK LENO: for those efforts. I did all of that. Then subsequently, in 1995 Willie Brown, who had been the speaker of the California State Assembly for so many years was then running for mayor. I decided I would endorse him and then put together a gay and lesbian community fundraiser for Willie, and raised some significant money for him. And that got his attention.
00:25:30Mark Leno
That's how we met. A few years later, there was a vacancy on the county board of supervisors to which he appointed me.
MASON FUNK: I had a question from just slightly back. It was to do with Willie. Well, first of all, when you say you endorsed him -- Oh, actually, a little bit further back, the people who were running for office, I'm just curious about the picture at the time. These were mostly gay men and lesbians?
00:26:00MARK LENO: It was.
MASON FUNK: So was this sort of a burgeoning wave of gays and lesbian realizing, hey, we can run for these different positions around the city and we can start to gain more influence. It strikes me that that was probably a fairly new phenomenon. Is that true?
MARK LENO: The idea of people from our community running for office was novel. Of course, it was Harvey Milk who broke the
00:26:30Mark Leno
glass ceiling. Harvey ran first in 1973 for the Board of Supervisors. At the time, it was a citywide race. He still had a beard and ponytail and lost, but built name recognition. Then two years later, he tried again, did a little bit better, cut the beard, cut the ponytail, and lost again. But again, raised his name recognition. One year later, he ran for the state assembly
00:27:00Mark Leno
and lost to Art Agnos, who became our mayor in 1987, and then ran again for the Board of supervisors. So four campaigns between 1973 and 1977, that is backbreaking work, but that's who Harvey was. He had the personality and the persona to be able to do all that. Then voters had decided we would elect our supervisors
00:27:30Mark Leno
by district, 11 districts, rather than citywide. Harvey running in the first district elections in 1977 was finally elected and made history as the first out person to win a public office in California. From there, in the coming years, others ran again for school board and for the community college board.
00:28:00Mark Leno
Then after the assassinations of Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone, the city flipped back to Citywide elections because it was a district supervisor who killed them, so public sentiment reacted to that. We flipped back to citywide elections, two lesbians ran citywide, and won
00:28:30Mark Leno
in 1990, which was very dramatic, it was considered a lavender wave. I think there were a couple of candidates simultaneously elected to the school board and community college board.
MASON FUNK: those two lesbians. Who were they?
MARK LENO: It was Roberta Achtenberg and Carole Migden who ran Citywide in 1990 and were elected, and there was a lot of competition between them. Each of us fell into different camps because no one thought both lesbians could be elected
00:29:00MARK LENO: citywide on the same ballot, but in fact they did it.
MASON FUNK: That's amazing.
MARK LENO: Yes, it was amazing.
MASON FUNK: Okay, excellent. So Willie Brown comes along, recognizes your fundraising capacity, how does that translate to him wanting you on the board of supervisors?
MARK LENO: I got to know Willie, and he got to know me in his campaign for mayor in 1995. He took office
00:29:30MARK LENO: in 1996, January of '96, and left his yet completed assembly term. There was an open seat in the state assembly supervisor, Carole Migden, for whom I was a big fundraiser and promoter, decided she wanted to progress from board of supervisors to the state assembly. She had also supported
00:30:00MARK LENO: Willie for mayor. He supported her for his assembly seat. She got elected to the state assembly. That was in the spring of 1996? Yes.
MASON FUNK: But I guess what I'm trying to get --
MARK LENO: I can take it from there.
MASON FUNK: Okay. Go.
MARK LENO: Then there was the vacancy of her seat on the Board of Supervisors,
00:30:30MARK LENO: and she was encouraging Mayor Brown to appoint me to take her seat, which he had the authority to appoint in 1996. She asked me if I would be interested in taking that seat. I knew nothing about public policy. I was a fundraiser and I was very flattered that I had her support and
00:31:00MARK LENO: had the conception of my taking that seat on the board of
supervisors, I was a little intimidated by it, I think. I was a little
ambivalent. I didn't really know that I wanted to see my life change like that.
But I finally decided, yes. My name was in the newspaper. My name was floated
for that appointment, and Willie didn't appoint me. He appointed Leslie Katz
MARK LENO: I thought of it at the time, the best thing that never happened to me because I became more known citywide. I didn't get the seat in 1996, but in some ways leveraged that consideration of my name for the Board of Supervisors because I then got invited to join the board of directors of the Chamber of Commerce, which sometimes
00:32:00MARK LENO: makes some people nervous as a business organization. But I was the first small business owner on the San Francisco Board of the Chamber of Commerce. It was all CEOs of major corporations, and just the second openly gay person on the board of directors of the Chamber of Commerce preceded by, not yet then, Ambassador James Hormel. That was important for
00:32:30MARK LENO: the small business community. It was important for our gay and lesbian community. I also joined the board of the -- Was then known as the Community Center project. We were planning to build a queer community center in San Francisco. It was on the top of Harvey's to-do list at the time of his assassination. But because of that assassination and then
00:33:00MARK LENO: subsequently the epidemic, it got put off. It wasn't until the mid 1990s that a board was assembled to make it happen. During the campaign for mayor in 1995, Willie had endorsed the idea of a queer community center. And as mayor pledged 6 million of city money for it, if the community could raise at least half of that to match the city's funds.
00:33:30MARK LENO: On the board of directors of the Community Center project, I volunteered to chair the capital campaign, with a wonderful partner by the name of Jody Cole, the two of us set off to raise the first 3 million for the community center. I'd never raised that much money or committed to raise that much money in my life, but again, I was very enthusiastic about it. And Jody was a great partner and we did that together.
00:34:00MARK LENO: The community center became a reality. I don't know exactly when we broke ground, but I do remember that we chose architects and they gave us a number of proposals. We had community meetings to consider the different varieties of which direction the construction could go. The ribbon cutting was finally in the spring of 2002. But meanwhile another lesbian on the
00:34:30MARK LENO: county board of supervisors named Susan Leal ran for county treasurer in November of 1997. County supervisor Susan Leal, got elected county treasurer in November of '97. Took her oath of office in January of '98. Then there was another vacancy on the county board. Willie finally had six appointments out of 11 members of the board of Supervisors.
00:35:00Mark Leno:
This was the fifth opening. I was not promoting myself for it. I thought, been there, done that, not interested. Now, when Susan left her seat, Willie very quickly promised that he would replace Susan Leal with another Latina lesbian. The newspapers kept reporting about a Latina lesbian,
00:35:30Mark Leno:
a Latino lesbian. Willie had vowed to make sure there would be another one after Susan's departure. But what Willie had to find was a Latino lesbian who could drop whatever she was doing at the drop of a hat and to take a job that paid all of $30,000 a year, had enough citywide name recognition to have a chance
00:36:00Mark Leno:
of getting elected the following November, because the seat was immediately expiring. There were probably about three Latino lesbians who fit that description, and none of them were interested. Willie finally called a press conference, and he would do this sometimes without even talking to the appointee and said that he had tried and tried to keep his vow
00:36:30Mark Leno:
to succeed. Susan Leal with another Latino lesbian, he was admitting defeat and appointing Mark Leno. I remember when I got the call from City Hall saying, "You should come to the mayor's office. He's about to appoint you to Susan Leal's seat." As I was walking from my business to City Hall, which is about a six block walk, I'm scratching my head thinking, what a clever thing am I gonna say
00:37:00Mark Leno:
at this press conference as I meet the press for the first time to accept this appointment from the mayor. I'm standing next to the mayor surrounded by all these cameras. What I said was mayor Brown, of course, this is a great honor that you bestow upon me in appointing me to fill this vacancy on the county Board of Supervisors. Though I recognize I may not have been at the top of your list for appointment, I hope I was at the top of your list
00:37:30Mark Leno:
of small business owning Jewish ... I'm sorry, I'll start that one again. I said
to the mayor that though I may not have been at the top of your list of
appointments, I hope I was at the top of your list of Jewish gay small business
owners, which caught the attention of a local cartoonist who put that in a
cartoon series that he was doing Jewish gay small business owner
MASON FUNK: It's like the pamphlet of the movie Airplane, Jewish Sports Figures
MARK LENO: Then I was on the board
MASON FUNK: In connection with that appointment. One of the things I did wonder, as you talk about the fact that you had zero background in this kind of work, and that could be seen as a shortfall, but I wondered if -- So as you moved into the work and as you eventually learned how to do it, was there some benefit, if any, to not
00:38:30MASON FUNK: having a background in public policy?
MARK LENO: Was there any kind of benefit to not having a background in public policy? Not so sure if that is so, but it may have. Well, I was a blank slate so anything could be drawn on it. It was a steep learning curve, 80 hours a week at City Hall, of course. It was very exciting and a lot of adrenaline running.
00:39:00MARK LENO: I also had to keep my business going at Budget Signs. I remember friends asking me, "Aren't you overwhelmed?" I said, "I try to keep it underwhelmed, not overwhelmed." Yeah. I was learning a lot and it didn't take long for me to realize that I did have real opinions and perspectives
00:39:30MARK LENO: on these political issues and votes that I had to take. Though from April of '98 until November of '98, I was the mayor's appointment. There was some understanding that there would be allegiance to him because I was not elected by the people. I was there because of him. But it was very liberating once I was elected in November of 1998, because then I was indeed my own man
00:40:00MARK LENO: and my own person on that board of supervisors. Sometimes I was with the mayor and sometimes I wasn't. Now, because, again, of a vote of the people, we were shifting back to district supervisors in the year 2000. The board terms are four years, all of us elected in 1998 only got two year terms because we were
00:40:30MARK LENO: starting from scratch in year 2000 for the first district elections. I had enough political sense that I realized I was going to have to clarify my independence from the mayor to stand a chance of getting elected in a competitive race in the district election in 2000 and district elections, as you can imagine, being 11th of the city, were very competitive
00:41:00MARK LENO: because it was almost like a neighborhood fight. There were a full handful of people who were running against me. I needed to define myself and clarify to voters who I was independent of Mayor Brown to succeed in year 2000. Clearly, I was successful because I did win that race and it was very competitive.
00:41:30MASON FUNK: Great. You feel like you learned things about yourself or began to, that you could never have learned any other way. I wonder what some of those insights and lessons, so to speak, that you learned that you were referring to when you say you don't think you could have learned any other way?
MARK LENO: One of the joys of being in elected office, and it's a very privileged position, was that I had the opportunity to deal with
00:42:00MARK LENO: many dozens and scores of issues that I never would have dealt with outside of elected office. Of course, it challenged me mentally and always something new to learn. Also, despite the fact that I always defined myself as a lover, not a fighter, I came to realize, you do not want to get between me and an idea
00:42:30MARK LENO: I am committed to. It's a very dangerous place because I will fight like a mad dog with a bone and I'm very tenacious and I like to win. That's how I took on my legislative work. Who would've known that, otherwise? I was a small business. I still am a small business owner and takes some aggressive tendencies to keep a business afloat. But legislating was a whole new
00:43:00MARK LENO: arena and I found it fascinating. Of course, it's a collaborative effort. Number one, there's working with staff, a legislator is only as good as his or her staff because it really is a team sport. Then there is also the challenge of working with colleagues. In Sacramento, 80 members of the assembly, 40 members of the state Senate,
00:43:30MARK LENO: 120 Depots, everyone's a personality. Everyone thinks he or she is king/queen of the hill, but you gotta work with these folks. We all come from districts different from one another. Imagine the difference between a Central valley legislator and me from San Francisco. Of course, most of us are Democrats, but they're also Republicans.
00:44:00MARK LENO: Many issues are party line votes, but not always. I can't expect all Democrats to support what I'm doing because they've got different constituents and they've got different points of view. But you never know when you're gonna need that last vote. I learned early on that I should never overlook my Republican colleagues. I'll tell you one example. My freshman year
00:44:30MARK LENO: in the assembly, 2003 a group from San Francisco asked if I would carry a bill for them. It had to do with Single Room Occupancies, SROs. These are buildings built mostly after World War II to house a lot of former service members who are staying in San Francisco when they came back from the Pacific to work in factories or in different
00:45:00MARK LENO: industries here. They rented rooms with a bathroom down the hall, no kitchen facility. These are SROs, they have become, and we still, of course, have them today, housing of last resort. We have about 10 or 12,000 of them in San Francisco. There's a state law that was created around 1985, which gives landlords the authority to be able to go out of the
00:45:30MARK LENO: business of being landlords and thereby evicting all of their tenants. Well, smaller apartment houses were being plagued with these SRO evictions because of rent control in San Francisco, some landlords were gaining the system and evicting all their tenants by claiming they were going out of the business of being a landlord,
00:46:00MARK LENO: and then because there was really no oversight or enforcement, raising the rents, which they could not do as landlords because of rent control and re-renting them at higher price. But now we've got all these evicted people. Well, if SRO owners were going to use the [it's called the) Ellis Act to evict all of their tenants. We had 10 or 12,000 of our most vulnerably
00:46:30MARK LENO: housed San Franciscans at risk of being evicted wholesale. The bill I was asked to author would exempt SROs from the Ellis Act. It's the Ellis Act that gave authority to landlords to do these kinds of evictions. We look back at the original legislation from 1985 and it was never intended for SROs. I was very pleased
00:47:00MARK LENO: to be able to author such an important bill in my first year, and no one thought I could get it to the floor of the assembly through committee process and subsequently to the floor. It was very controversial. Keep in mind that the Apartment Association and the California Association of Realtors are very powerful players in Sacramento. They did not like this one bit. They don't like to be told, as any industry does,
00:47:30MARK LENO: by legislators how to run their business. But it was an important bill. Prior to taking the floor vote we have the opportunity as Democrats within our caucus to, it's called taking a card. I could present my bill in caucus and then run through the roster of democratic members and get a sense who's on board, who's not, who might, and they even had the option of abstaining
00:48:00MARK LENO: in Sacramento. I did my card, simple majority is 41, which is what I needed. For my card, that's what I had. Now, it's better to have 42 or 43 just in case there's a double cross or someone doesn't come through to their word. But I had my 41. Went to the floor, made my pitch, took the vote, we vote electronically in the assembly, not in the Senate because of the number of assembly members, and the votes are tallied and lit up
00:48:30MARK LENO: on boards in the front of the room. I got to 40, not 41. Well, then there's the process of placing a call, putting on hold, and the assembly goes on to other business, other votes, other bills. I check my list, where's my 41st vote found? Found it, went over to the desk of that member and I said, "Joe, I had you down for a yes vote here in caucus." "Can I count on you?" When I left my call,
00:49:00MARK LENO: he said, "Mark, I was not in caucus at the time you took that card, I had stepped out of the room. I don't support the bill and I'm so sorry I can't support the bill." I didn't have a plan B, and less than one -- Again, I was a freshman member. Never presume that just because a member is another Bay Area Democrat, that that member's going to vote
00:49:30MARK LENO: for my bill. I guess I had made an error and I didn't have a 41st vote. I didn't have another place to go. But that was that. By the end of the hearing that day, the call is lifted and any member who has not yet voted on this bill has the opportunity to vote now. Suddenly, from out of the sky, a 41st vote fell and the gavel went down. I passed the bill.
00:50:00MARK LENO: I looked at who voted for it, it was a Republican member, and I was in the very back, rear right corner. He sat in the very front left corner, so I had to cross the entire assembly floor to go over and thank this member, Republican member, for voting for my bill. I said, "If you don't mind my asking, since none of your other Republican members
00:50:30MARK LENO: voted for this bill, how is it that you did?" He was very nonplussed about it. Said, "No big deal. For me, when my father left my mother when I was four years old, she and my three siblings were left to fend for ourselves and we were living in an SRO. I remember that experience and the idea of evicting families like ours from our SROs, I couldn't support. I was happy to vote
00:51:00MARK LENO: for your bill." Lesson number two, never presume just because a colleague is a Republican member, that he or she won't vote for my bill.
MASON FUNK: Because sometimes it just comes down to like that person .
MARK LENO: So there are some benefits, there are some distractions from term limits. One of the negatives is that we only serve a limited amount of time together.
00:51:30MARK LENO: We don't get to know our colleagues as well as we might if we serve 10 or 20 or more years with them. But in this case, I was saved by this Republican member.
MASON FUNK: When you talk about, like you said, don't get in between me and an idea that I'm passionate about, is there a side of Mark that we don't see in this moment? You know, smiling, congenial. I mean, I don't know how to say this without saying it just outright. I mean, could you get
00:52:00MASON FUNK: really angry? How would you become if somebody did get in between you and an idea that you really, really believed in?
MARK LENO: Well, I hold my ground. I make my points.
MASON FUNK: Do me a favor. Set it up for me.
MARK LENO: When I'm fighting for sufficient votes for a bill that I'm authoring and I'm
00:52:30MARK LENO: authoring it because I believe in it wholeheartedly and I'm meeting some resistance from a colleague, we're all human beings and it's all too often that we react emotionally. That can oftentimes not be effective because if I were to lose my temper with someone,
00:53:00MARK LENO: it's so easy to be disrespectful because he or she's an elected colleague. I have to remember that we each come to our elected offices with our own life experiences, our own opinions, and our own constituencies. As passionate as I may be about an idea, I can't demand if a colleague vote for my bill, and I can't suggest that I voted for all your bills,
00:53:30MARK LENO: why won't you vote? There are colleagues who do that, and there are colleagues who won't vote for someone's bill because that someone didn't vote for his or her bill. That's a game I'm not good at playing, and I resisted playing. I just have to rely upon my sincerity and whatever charms I may have and hopefully make the case. Now sometimes I could throw as
00:54:00MARK LENO: many facts and figures at them as I like, and I'm sorry to say, it's a fact of life, that sometimes a lobbyist has gotten to that member before I did, and that member gave his or her word to the lobbyist that they were voting a certain way, which was not the way I wanted. And again, it's an unfortunate fact of life. But it doesn't do me any good to lose my temper with that member and
00:54:30MARK LENO: suggest that they're bought off by the lobbyist or infer anything else that is less than complimentary because I may need that member's vote tomorrow or the next week, so it takes some self-control. If I did have success in the legislature, I think I can attribute it to the fact that I really did my very best to keep my relationships positive with everybody,
00:55:00MARK LENO: even in those trying moments, to be as respectful and understanding of the bad news I was getting, that I wasn't going to have their vote. But if I could contain myself, I'd live to fight another day and be able to count on that member potentially for a vote down the road. Because as I said, I knew so many members who would never vote for that author's bills because there was bad blood.
00:55:30MASON FUNK: Yeah. You used the phrase patience and restraint. And that sounds like that's what you're describing, restraint.
MARK LENO: Yeah.
MASON FUNK: Yeah. Which must be so hard when it's burning inside of you so ferociously.
MARK LENO: Yes. Especially when it's a bill as important as our equal marriage rights bill. When I authored that bill for the first time in 2004 --
MASON FUNK: Let's pause and reset a little bit. Maybe you could start by saying,
00:56:00MASON FUNK: never was my patients and restraint tested, or some version thereof.
MARK LENO: My patience and restraint was probably never more challenged than when I authored our equal marriage rights bill for the first time in 2004. It was the first time that such a bill was ever introduced in a state legislature
00:56:30MARK LENO: anywhere in the entire country. It was groundbreaking and history
making in and of itself. And it's hard to imagine looking back now, just 20
years, that equal marriage rights, much less across the country, but here in
California, was highly controversial.
MARK LENO: legal benefits and rights as well as responsibilities and obligations a few years earlier. It was very contentious and contentious among Democrats, specifically because Democrats thought it was a dangerous bill to vote for, that it caused them trouble in their reelection. And legislators are, by definition, always looking at their next election.
00:57:30MARK LENO: I took the time to go office to office among all my democratic colleagues. Now, unfortunately in this case, won't surprise anyone that it was indeed a party line vote. No Republicans were voting for equal marriage rights. No Republicans voted for domestic partnerships, even when all domestic partnerships
00:58:00MARK LENO: allowed for was hospital visitation rights. Imagine not voting for hospital visitation rights, but that's how severe and behind the times my Republican colleagues were. I went and met with every one of my Democratic colleagues and made my case for marriage rights. I remember one Democratic colleague from San Diego,
00:58:30MARK LENO: a border district with Mexico, and I made my case and he let me go on for an entire hour. Then he said, "Mark, I'm sorry, you won't have my vote." Again, I would've liked to have run by the neck and said, "Couldn't you have told me that an hour ago? I got 40 other offices I gotta get to." But he let me go on for an hour to gimme the bad news, "I won't be voting for your bill.
00:59:00MARK LENO: I think you're driving us off a cliff and I won't be on the bus." And he was good on social issues, he was good on all sorts of things that Democrats support, but he wasn't supporting equal marriage rights and we got it passed without him. But I do want you to know that when the Supreme Court made its decision
00:59:30MARK LENO: in 2015, making equal marriage rights the law of the land, this colleague who is now in the House of Representatives called me from Washington that day to congratulate me and to say, "Mark, I was wrong. You were right, and congratulations. This is a day to celebrate." So people do evolve, of course. I have such respect for him
01:00:00MARK LENO: today because how often do you hear someone say, you were right, I was wrong.
MASON FUNK: What happened with these two efforts, both of which died on Governor Schwarzenegger's desk? Just give us a little bit of like the overall -- Just so we have it for the record.
MARK LENO: Okay. I've got my little Spiel here.
MASON FUNK: Yeah, your spiel.
MARK LENO: Three years, on this issue
01:00:30MARK LENO: of equal marriage rights for loving and committed same sex couples, first as an activist, then as an elected official, I always wanted the bottom line, the same rights, benefits, and privileges of marriage, along with the same obligations and responsibilities. But I wasn't certain we needed to fight a battle over a word, "marriage".
01:01:00MARK LENO: But what changed my art and mind irrevocably was the November, 2003 decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Massachusetts High Court, not unlike the Hawaii and Vermont Supreme Courts before it, ruled that there was no constitutional basis for this discrimination of denying same sex couples access to marriage licenses.
01:01:30MARK LENO: The Massachusetts High Court went on to say, in its decision, that our nation's history has taught us that separate is seldom, if ever, equal. Their ruling required the Massachusetts legislature to remedy this discrimination, they said, with marriage and marriage alone, no parallel construct such as civil unions or domestic partnerships would do,
01:02:00MARK LENO: they said, and I've never thought about it like this before, because anything short of marriage would, and this is their words, "Perpetuate a destructive stereotype that suggests there's something inferior and unstable about the way same-sex couples love." I haven't thought about that before. Imagine we're gonna have our government tell us that
01:02:30MARK LENO: some people love good enough and we're gonna give them marriage licenses. These other people, well, they might love or kind of love, but not good enough, so we're gonna give them domestic partnerships, we're gonna give them civil unions. At that point, I thought, no, that's not the job of government. I am ready to fight a war over a word, marriage and marriage alone. I contacted my buddy, Geoff Kors, who is
01:03:00MARK LENO: the executive director of Equality California, our state lobby for our issues. And I said, "Jeff, let's do a marriage bill." Now, the ink was barely dry on a law that had just been signed by then Governor Davis authored by Jackie Goldberg, AB 205, which extended domestic partner benefits and rights almost to equality with marriage,
01:03:30MARK LENO: just short, but still domestic partners not married. That had just happened months before, but I said, let's do marriage. We conspired and decided we would do it around Valentine's Day in February of 2004. We really did do outreach to Kate Kendall with the National Center for Lesbian Rights and some of the other advocacy groups
01:04:00MARK LENO: for LGBTQ rights to get them on board, because of course, reporters were immediately going to go to them and say, "Do you support Leno's new bill to allow for marriage in our community?" And we needed to have us all together, and we had to make a sales pitch. We're gonna make a real ardent argument to get everybody on board. People were resistant. We finally did all that, and so excited we were going to introduce this bill
01:04:30MARK LENO: before the Valentine Day weekend of -- Thursday, February 12th, 2004
was the last day of session. Then Monday of that week, I found out what our
mayor was planning to do on February 12th, beginning issuing marriage licenses
to same sex couples in San Francisco. We kind of got lost in the dust
MARK LENO: was such a big deal what Mayor Newsom did, and it was the beginning of what's now known as the Winter of Love in San Francisco. That afternoon of February 12th, 2004, when word got out, the city hall was issuing marriage licenses same sex couples, people were jumping on buses, getting taxi cabs, racing to city hall. No one knew how long that window of opportunity would to stay open. People were getting
01:05:30MARK LENO: out jets and crossing the country and then crossing oceans to get to San Francisco. There were lines doubling the blocks of City Hall waiting to get in to get marriage. Thousands and thousands of couples arrived in San Francisco for this exciting event. I still was going forward with our bill, and there's the process of literally putting it across the desk of the assembly clerk.
01:06:00MARK LENO: And before I did, because it was such a monumental bill, I sat down with the speaker of the Assembly Fabian Young Nunez that morning and said, "Fabian, I'm going to do this, and of course I hope I can have your blessing." And he said, "Mark, I know you want to do this and I'm aware that you're doing it, and I had a sleepless night." He had gay siblings and he was fully in support of our community, but he had democratic colleagues
01:06:30Mark Leno
coming to his office saying, "Don't let Leno do this. It's dangerous. I'm up for the election this year, and of course I wanna vote for the bill, but I can't vote for the bill, and because I don't think my constituents will like it." He was hearing from my colleagues, don't let Leno do this. He said, "Mark, please, let's put it off for a year." It was also a presidential year, 2004. John Kerry was challenging George Bush and
01:07:00Mark Leno
became an issue. George Bush was talking about an amendment to the US Constitution to define marriage between a man and a woman, which inspired Gavin Newsom. He was at that State of the Union address in January of 2004 and heard that that was a motivating factor for him to take his action. Fabian said, "Let's just wait a year. We'll do it and we'll get it to the Governor's desk in 2005. I'll put
01:07:30Mark Leno
my name beside yours. It'll be a Leno Nunes bill, and we'll do it." And I said, "Fabian, bless your heart. I love your support, but I gotta get to San Francisco because my straight mayor's about to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples." And I think the gay assembly member needs to be there. What Gavin was doing was breaking state law. A month later, the California Supreme Court said, no mayors
01:08:00Mark Leno
cannot break laws they think that are unconstitutional. You have to change the law. And that was my job as the state legislator, to change the law. But meanwhile, I raced to San Francisco that day. And along with the county assessor recorder, Mabel Ang, which is where marriage licenses live in city government. The two of us stood and married the first 92 couples in about a four hour time period.
01:08:30Mark Leno
Then the mayor kept city hall open. It was a three day weekend because it was President's Day weekend, it was also Valentine's Day weekend and all of this thrilling excitement. So that was the beginning.
MASON FUNK: One question. I remember the first time I heard you tell that story. I couldn't help wondering, as a non-politician who doesn't really know how these things work, did you feel at all like Mayor Newsom was muddying the waters
01:09:00MASON FUNK: and, or, stealing your thunder?
MARK LENO: I can't deny that. Maybe that thought passed through my --
MARK LENO: Which thought?
MARK LENO: Okay, I can't deny that the thought that maybe the mayor was grabbing the wherewithal to do this properly changed the law. I knew he couldn't just break it and get away with it, but I can only credit him to this day. It wasn't
01:09:30MARK LENO: about me and it wasn't about what we were doing. It was about the bigger picture. I credit Gavin Newsom as many do to this day for changing the conversation overnight because millions and millions of Americans for the first time saw what equal marriage rights, or as it was known at the time, gay marriage, looked like. It was a foreign concept to them.
01:10:00MARK LENO: They never imagined it. Keep in mind, in March of 2000, just four years earlier, there was a ballot measure statewide in California Prop 22, which amended the Family Code of California, which is where the definition of marriage lives, to read only marriage between a man and a woman will be valid and recognized in California. That was on the
01:10:30MARK LENO: California ballot in March of 2000. 61% of Californian supported that, only 39% opposed it. I was very much a part of that statewide campaign to make sure it was defeated. We got wiped out by 21 points. People were unfamiliar with the concept. Of course, who else would get married but a man and a woman? And that's how they voted. Here, you have to do this very dramatically,
01:11:00MARK LENO: overlooking what the state voters wanted and saying, this is a civil rights issue. This is the right thing to do. I'm not gonna deny these couples a marriage license. Again, the California Supreme Court a month later said, sorry Mr. Mayor, you cannot just go about breaking laws you don't like and think are unconstitutional, you have to go through the process, the legislative process to change the law. Bless his heart for doing the right thing. Again, we kind of got
01:11:30MARK LENO: left in the dust and quite honestly, and one of the reasons I'm really pleased to be able to share this story with you and with OUTWORDS, because it's never really been told. Then it got moved to the courts and of course there was a national freedom to marry organization which helped move all this forward. There were a lot of players in this, which led to the US Supreme Court decision in 2015.
01:12:00MARK LENO: That's all great news. But in fact when we got it passed, finally, in 2005, and again in 2007 after Schwarzenegger beat off the first bill and subsequently the second bill, no state legislature in the nation did what we did, but no one knows it. And if Schwarzenegger had not vetoed either of those two bills, we would've changed the course of history. And I can explain that to you.
01:12:30MARK LENO: We were offering him history.
MASON FUNK: Who were you offering?
MARK LENO: We were offering Governor Schwarzenegger history on silver platter. He could have been remembered as Abraham Lincoln. Instead, he's remembered as George Wallace standing at the door of the courtroom saying, "You queers cannot get married, go away." So what would've happened
01:13:00MARK LENO: if he signed into law in 2005? Our opponents would've gathered signatures, outraged and tried to overturn through the referendum process we have in California, that which the legislature and the governor had created, equal marriage rights. But we would've gone to the ballot with the support of the Republican governor, the Terminator,
01:13:30MARK LENO: Arnold Schwarzenegger, who would've been fighting fiercely to defend his signature. I think we would've had a good chance of getting that passed, if not in 2006, maybe in 2008. That didn't get to happen. What did happen, because the California Supreme Court, finally, in June of 2008, ruled on the constitutionality
01:14:00MARK LENO: of that Prop 22 of year 2000. They ruled it was unconstitutional that you could not under the equal protection clause of the California State Constitution, which reads that no citizen or class of citizens shall be provided any benefit or immunity not provided to all citizens on the
01:14:30MARK LENO: same terms. So how can you say one group of people can access marriage licenses and another group can't? It's unconstitutional on that basis. Our opponents didn't like that Supreme Court decision said it's not constitutional, we'll make it constitutional. Gathered signatures, put it on the November, 2008 ballot. Same words as Prop 22. Only marriage between
01:15:00MARK LENO: a man and a woman will be valid and recognized in California. But instead of putting it into the family code, they put it into the Constitution. The first time ever that an amendment to the Constitution was to limit rights, rather than expand rights. Look at our Bill of Rights and the US Constitution. It's all about expanding rights, protecting the rights of people of all color
01:15:30MARK LENO: to be able to vote, expanding the rights of the voting franchise to women. Expanding rights, that's what amendments are. This was the first time to limit. And it went back to the ballot. Prob 8, everyone's familiar with it. On the same night that we celebrated Barack Obama's historic victory to become the first black man elected
01:16:00MARK LENO: president of the United States, we had to swallow the victory of proposition 8. I, of course, had to speak publicly that night. I struggled to find something encouraging and hopeful to say in the heartbreak of the passage of Prop 8. What I came up with was, don't be discouraged. Look what we've done in the course of eight years,
01:16:30MARK LENO: March of 2000, the passage of Prop 22, we lost 61 to 39, 22%, 61 to 39. What happened in November of 2008, we lost again, but by 4 points, 52 to 48, in the course of
01:17:00MARK LENO: eight years, we picked up 18 points of public sentiment and support. They lost 18 points of public sentiment and support. They were never getting back again. We're winning. We lost Prop 8, but we're winning, changing the hearts and minds of voters. And today, close to 70%, not just of Californians, of
01:17:30MARK LENO: Americans support equal marriage rights. Wow. How did that happen? In a relatively short period of time, we just flipped it. And that has restored, for me, a belief in American voters. It sustains me today with all the ugliness we see going on in Tennessee and Texas
01:18:00MARK LENO: and Carolinas and Florida and all this hateful legislation attacking the trans community in particular. But you can't even say gay in Florida schools. First, it was kindergarten to third grade, now DeSantis wants to stretch it through high school. You can't even say it. Very discouraging. But I'm encouraged that, nationwide, there may be pockets in the country, yeah, red pockets. But countrywide,
01:18:30MARK LENO: that's not what Americans want. Just like Americans don't want women's right to choose autonomy and medical decisions over their own bodies, 60% of Americans oppose the repeal of Roe, so there's reason for hope. There really is reason for hope. There's a lot of hateful people out there who want us to go backwards, but that's how our Americans want to go.
01:19:00MARK LENO: We showed it with that equal marriage rights. If this US Supreme Court thinks that they're going to overturn that decision, they better think twice.
MASON FUNK: That's great stuff. That's a great story and I love how you brought it all the way up to the present, so thank you.
MARK LENO: You bet.
MASON FUNK: Man, the time is flying.
MARK LENO: Of course,
MASON FUNK: I want to make sure that we reference and have you be able to talk about some of the other things you were able to accomplish in the legislature. You mentioned the fair employment and housing issue.
MARK LENO: Mm-Hmm.
MASON FUNK: Well, I want to mention a few bills because I'm gonna have you kind of talk about them as a group fair act, of course. Fair and accurate, inclusive and respective education act, and bread and butter issues like raising minimum wage. I guess they all fall into
01:20:00MASON FUNK: the category of really substantial important issues you tackled not only on behalf of the queer community, but on behalf of all people, if that distinction is even valid.
MARK LENO: Well, we have talked about the Ellis Act. But I'm happy to talk about minimum wage. Very happy to talk about that.
MASON FUNK: Yeah. Well, I guess it all comes under the question of what are some of the things you look back on and feel like I did good work in the legislature.
01:20:30MARK LENO: I hope you get a sense of how passionate I can get on some of these issues. And I guess it all falls under the category of equity and fairness and treating all people with dignity and respect. So yes, that's very much under the umbrella of civil rights legislation.
01:21:00MARK LENO: But we have talked about the repeal of the Ellis Act for SROs so we can keep people in their homes. We're so struggling with this challenge of homelessness in all of our cities that's worse in California than anywhere else, but it's across the country. And that's a complex subject, very complex mental health issues, addiction issues, the fact that the federal government no longer invests in
01:21:30MARK LENO: building below market rate housing and market and housing for working class people. That was not always the case. It is the case today. And then the federal minimum wage, how many Americans know that the federal minimum wage has not been raised in over 20 years, and it stands at $7 and 25 cents per hour. That's $15,000 a year who can live, much less, a family of four
01:22:00MARK LENO: on 15,000? It's sub-poverty wages. We have laws that allow for sub-poverty wages. I fought this battle in California for four years, finally succeeding in 2016, raising California's minimum wage from $10 an hour, which we had done just two years earlier, raising it from $8 an hour to $15 an hour, that's $30,000 a year.
01:22:30MARK LENO: That's just above the federal poverty line. We put an escalator in ours so that it's readjusted for the consumer price index every year. It should hopefully, and by design never fall below the federal poverty line again. But that's a big issue that we deal with with income wealth disparity
01:23:00MARK LENO: in this country. I've forgotten the exact figures today, but that 1% of Americans hold more wealth than the bottom 50%. It's a severe problem. I was really proud of the fact that we were able to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. It's gone up incrementally since 2016, it's above that now. But it's still just minimal. I read a story
01:23:30MARK LENO: in the news today about, it used to be called the Fight for 15. Given that the federal wage is still $7 25 cents, there's a lot of work to be done, but now it should be $20 minimally, $40,000 a year just to keep above poverty living. I was able to work a lot on renewable energy and promoting
01:24:00MARK LENO: and writing state laws that can greatly facilitate use of solar power and wind power. I loved authoring Medicare for All bill in California, which at the time we called single payer. I can share with you that around 1960, our percentage of GDP that
01:24:30MARK LENO: we spent nationally on healthcare was around 5%. By year 2000, it was at about 12%. Today, it's around 18%. With epidemics of Alzheimer's and autism and diabetes all unchecked without serious reform, even beyond the success, the major success and impact of the Affordable Care Act of Obamacare,
01:25:00MARK LENO: we need to do more because healthcare costs keep rising far beyond the cost of inflation. We could find ourselves by mid-century spending half of our GDP on healthcare costs. It will sink our country, completely. I loved working on all these issues, but again, it all falls under the umbrella of treating all people with dignity and respect as human beings.
01:25:30MARK LENO: Healthcare access to education, housing. And dealing with the climate crisis.
MASON FUNK: Yeah, exactly. Which kind of trumps all the other issues when you --
MARK LENO: If there is time, I'd like to talk about our trans bill.
MASON FUNK: Absolutely.
MARK LENO: I got involved with transgender issues while I was still on the County Board of Supervisors almost a quarter century ago,
01:26:00MARK LENO: in 1999. My office, while on board of supervisors, put together a transgender civil rights implementation task force, and I'm underlining the word implementation because there had been public hearings on the needs of the transgender community regarding access to healthcare and housing and education and employment around 1994.
01:26:30MARK LENO: But this study went on, got printed in a book and put on a shelf and nothing came with it. We wanted to put together a task force of members of the transgender community, have them review all those findings, and then inform the board of supervisors what their top priority was. What they decided was access to healthcare for obvious reasons. And so I authored a local ordinance, which
01:27:00MARK LENO: came to have far greater impact because it changed the way not only public health plans operated, but also today almost all private healthcare plans. In 1999, there were literal exclusions written into health plans preventing any transgender healthcare to be covered by this health plans. Our bill would provide
01:27:30MARK LENO: equal access to the county health plan for county transgender employees. I think there were about 17 at the time, out of then 28,000 county employees. And though we worked with the press to clarify what we were doing, equal access to healthcare, every health plan screamed "San Francisco to pay for sex change operations" . And because of those headlines,
01:28:00MARK LENO: I got invited to be on the Bill O'Reilly Show on the Fox Network. For those who are unfamiliar with who Bill Reilly is, because he's now history, he was the Tucker Carlson of the day. I went to Bill O'Reilly's show. And of course, the first thing out of his mouth, screaming at me was, "Supervisor, why should my tax dollars go to pay for someone's sex change operation?" And I said,
01:28:30MARK LENO: "Bill, let me explain. That's not exactly what we're doing. If you are a non-transgender employee of the city, in the county of San Francisco, and you're in need of hormonal treatment or psychiatric treatment, if you need a hysterectomy or a mastectomy, the County Health plan pays for all of it. But if you're a transgender of the city and county of San Francisco in need of identical
01:29:00MARK LENO: medical care, the County health plan pays for none of it." And when I finished, Bill O'Reilly said, "Supervisor, you make a compelling argument." That's a success. And so we got it passed. Interesting footnote, as we went into that board meeting that day, we have 11 board members, a simple majority six, but I was informed rather at the last minute
01:29:30MARK LENO: that our city charter requires that, in San Francisco, to amend the county health plan takes nine out of 11 members' support. So I didn't need six votes, I needed nine votes. We got there, it got signed into law. And as I say today, I don't think you can find a private health insurance plan that still has
01:30:00MARK LENO: these transgender exclusions in them. That was 24 years ago.
MASON FUNK: Wow. It's remarkable. They're still trying to stop the train.
MARK LENO: Yes.
MARK LENO: discrimination in housing, employment, and public services on the basis of race, creed, color, nation of origin, languages you speak, mental disability, physical disability. We amended in sexual orientation as recently as 1999, but we hadn't included gender identity. I had the honor to author that bill and we got that signed into law like Ray Davis
01:31:00MARK LENO: in 2003. That was another big accomplishment.
MASON FUNK: That's an impressive list of accomplishments, and again, could not be more timely today to see how forward thinking were.
MARK LENO: Let me clearly point out that with regard to federal law, there are absolutely no federal protections from discrimination on the basis of
01:31:30MARK LENO: sexual orientation or gender identity. That means in states, and it's about half of the states which don't have the kind of protections we have in state law in California, banning these kinds of discrimination in housing, employment, and public services, that means you can be denied an apartment if your landlord doesn't like your sexual orientation or your gender identity, and it's legal.
01:32:00MARK LENO: You can be denied a job. Yeah.
MASON FUNK: Okay. Go ahead.
MARK LENO: One can be denied a job today, in half of the states of this country, because your employer doesn't like your sexual orientation or your gender identity. This was a big debate. We don't have it, of course. Organizations like the Human Rights Campaign are still trying to pass these kinds of protections at the federal level.
01:32:30MARK LENO: We're gonna need a very strong majority in the House of Representatives and given filibuster, unless we do something about it, 60 Democratic members, maybe a couple Republicans will join us, and a Democratic president to sign it into law. But at the time, there was a debate a few years ago when we did have control of both houses and Barack Obama as our president, whether we should go forward with
01:33:00MARK LENO: just sexual orientation and come back later to get gender identity or do it all together, because some members would say, well, I could vote for one, but not both. Then Speaker Pelosi gathered some local community leaders to her office to discuss which way to go. At one point I had the opportunity to speak and explained to her
01:33:30MARK LENO: that just sexual orientation without gender identity protections means absolutely nothing. She said, "What do you mean?" I said, "I'll explain. Let's say I'm applying for a job. This potential employer doesn't know who's in my bed. Yeah. I was a gay man, but the employer may not know it. Or, well, I guess that's rather unlikely given the internet, anyone would know, but
01:34:00MARK LENO: for less public people, that employer may not know. So if the law protects me relative to my sexual orientation, but not gender identity, the potential employer could deny me employment and do so legally because I'm not masculine enough. Or a woman might not be too feminine enough.
01:34:30MARK LENO: Maybe you get the job, but you can't climb the corporate ladder because you don't fit the employer's concept of gender norms. A woman just might be too masculine. A male might be too effeminate, and it's completely legal if you have one and not the other. You have to have both. At that point, speaker Pelosi's eyes open, "I get it."
01:35:00MARK LENO: It's also went moot right now, but it's just shameful that this federal government has no protections to this day.
MASON FUNK: Yeah. Well, I certainly appreciate you speaking up on that to the Speaker Pelosi, because obviously this has been a rift that has divided our community all the way back to the early days of HRC. You know what? Well, you wait your turn.
MARK LENO: That's right.
MASON FUNK: So to stand firm on that and say,
01:35:30MASON FUNK: "No, no, no, we're not going forward, we're not gonna leave you for the next bus that may or may not ever arrive" is the way it should be.
MARK LENO: And again, in operation, it just doesn't work. You may be protected for your sexual orientation, but I think you're too fey. You can't have the job and I'm legally protected.
MASON FUNK: Right. Yeah. Alrighty, jumping forward,
01:36:00MASON FUNK: total shift. You especially on Sunday, there was a lot of talk about your four prayers.
MARK LENO: Yes.
MASON FUNK: And in particular, one of them, I think, which is most central to who you are.
MARK LENO: Third one.
MASON FUNK: And so I really want to bring in this aspect of your living Jewish faith is the way I experience it. And how that has affected you in, it sounds like, your personal life, your political life,
01:36:30MASON FUNK: your career, these kind of road signs, foundational principles. Can you talk about that?
MARK LENO: All four?
MASON FUNK: Well, maybe a sort of a condensed version and really showing the one that means the most to you, which, as you said, is the third.
MARK LENO: I did study to be a rabbi or reform rabbi for two years in the early seventies at the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion. I was at their New York campus.
01:37:00Mark Leno
There's also one in Cincinnati and Los Angeles, didn't work out, decided that wasn't going to be my path. Curiously, I think I met someone not too long ago who had been in my rabbinical school class, and they also dropped out, and said, "You know, for those of us who didn't go on," it's a five year postgraduate course, "and get ordained as a reform rabbi
01:37:30Mark Leno
the majority of the rest of us either went into politics or just Broadway stage"
Mark Leno
that I came upon, through my upbringing and through school, that have stayed with me for a lifetime. I find them running through my mind repeatedly through the day, every day of my life. They are prayers, they're Hebrew prayers, and depending upon one's own religious beliefs and what God means and what prayer means,
01:38:30Mark Leno
is someone listening, is someone responding. There are people who devote their entire lives, monks who do nothing but pray for the world. They are convinced that their prayers have power and meaning. I'm a man of faith, but I can't tell you I have any certainty -- none of us can, that's our human state -- that
01:39:00Mark Leno
there is someone listening and there is someone responding to those prayers, but they have great power in my personal life. They're mantras of sorts, and they keep me centered, and they keep me clear in my thought and subsequently in my actions, both privately and in my public work. Two of the four prayers are really prayers of gratitude, which say, "Thank you, creator of the universe
01:39:30Mark Leno
for giving us life and sustaining us and bringing us to this time and place." You can say it every time of day. Curiously, when my partner, Doug, was on his deathbed in 1998, it just came to mind. I thought, even in this most horrific and heart-wrenching moment, as Doug was leaving me, I said that prayer for them, thank you for giving us life and sustaining us and bringing us to this time.
01:40:00Mark Leno
Because if it means only something in good times and not in bad times, well, then it really doesn't have any meaning. Then the other prayer of gratitude is thanking the creator for providing for me all of my needs. That's a human prayer. provided me all of my needs. That's so powerful, and I have to challenge myself as I say that 20 times a day,
01:40:30Mark Leno
are those just words or do I really mean it? Because if I really mean it, then I'm in heaven. I've got a roof over my head. I've got food on my plate when I need it. I've got health. I've got strength. I'm surrounded by loved ones. I can give to those who have less than I. I'm the luckiest man in the world. I'm not lacking anything. When I'm challenged with something, "Oh, if only,"
01:41:00Mark Leno
no, calm down, it's all been provided, it's all here. Remember that. One can be so much more successful in that belief. Then there's another prayer that translates to blessed are you, creator of the universe who has made me according to thy will. Certainly,
01:41:30Mark Leno
as an 18 year old man coming out in 1969 from a Stonewall baby, that prayer meant so much to me. Because of course, every community leader, every religious leader, every elected leader of 1969, family members, friends, were all saying, "Wrong, making a bad mistake here," as if I had a choice, I could either lie and live
01:42:00Mark Leno
my lie or I could just be who I was. Bless the heart of that 18 year old. I'm not patting myself on the back. I continue to be amazed by the resoluteness of young adults. In the midst of all that negativity, I could honestly say to the world, you are wrong. I'm right. Curiously, my life has been so blessed that from 1969,
01:42:30Mark Leno
the beginning of my young adulthood and my entire adult life has been the modern queer civil rights movement, and I've seen it evolve. I've seen the backlash, and I've seen the progress. That prayer has as much meaning today to me as it did in 1969. "Thank you for making me according to thy will."
01:43:00Mark Leno
I'm not a mistake. Everything about me is as it was supposed to be. That's the same for all of us. Every person I meet on the street, they're made according to the creator's will, you're made according to the Creator, every one of us. That's a good way to go about interacting with human beings and with community and with society. These prayers, as I say, they are mantras and
01:43:30Mark Leno
I couldn't control them if I wanted to. There's so much a part of me, I repeat them all through the day.
MASON FUNK: That's wonderful. I love that. I wrote this question down. What can the queer community learn from the Jewish people and the Jewish community and maybe even the Jewish faith? What is there within Judaism that we queer people can
01:44:00MASON FUNK: find either inspiration from, wisdom from, encouragement from? There's something there, I'm not quite sure what it is, but I wonder what you might think.
MARK LENO: Sure. Well, libraries have been written about how is it that this tiny little percentage of human beings on earth called Jews have survived three, 4,000 years, 5,000 years in our calendar, 5,700 years+ on our calendar. How is it?
01:44:30MARK LENO: So many oppressive leaders and other populations have certainly tried to get rid of us and put us in ghettos and raped our women through pubs and beat us up and kept us down, and just keep surviving. And I say, "I can't explain it. Libraries have been written about this. And not only that,
01:45:00MARK LENO: likely because we have placed education as such a top priority and treasured academic achievement and the study of sacred texts as well as secular texts. That's a strong theme through Judaism that this disproportionate number of Nobel Prize winners are Jews, and disproportionate
01:45:30MARK LENO: amount of artists in the visual arts and performing arts and musical arts are Jews and educators and leaders, elected leaders, despite discrimination and anti-Semitism, which never goes away. It's always there. We see this madness again today. I can't explain it. But the question
01:46:00MARK LENO: is there anything that our queer community can learn from this historical success of survival from the Jewish community? What I can point out is that despite all of the hatred and the discrimination, the vitriol against queer people, we're still here. We've always been here. We'll always
01:46:30MARK LENO: be here. And that's, can't find the gene, but we know it's biological. We know that despite having two heterosexual parents, there will be gay children. Despite those who would say you can't even speak our name in public schools, we'll still be there. We'll suffer more if this hatred is
01:47:00MARK LENO: put into law, but we will be there. There is as much similarity as there is difference. I think the Jewish community can learn from the queer community as much as the queer community can learn from the Jewish community. I also see a similarity, though, again, having participated in community-based nonprofit work as I have, one thing
01:47:30MARK LENO: we continue to need to learn from the Jewish community is philanthropy. Philanthropy and the concept of what an Hebrew is called sedaka, giving. Because though queer people are in every conceivable home throughout the world, they don't all have the same tradition of giving as Jewish homes
01:48:00MARK LENO: and Jewish families have. That's one thing that I and many, many others have tried to instill and help teach and put into practice in our queer community as I've learned from our Jewish community.
MASON FUNK: Excellent. Thank you for that. I'm gonna ask Kate if you have any questions.
KATE KUNATH: Nothing's burning right now.
MASON FUNK: Okay. That's a good sign
01:48:30MASON FUNK: that we've covered, usually.
MARK LENO: Oh, good. Yeah.
MASON FUNK: No, she won't.
MARK LENO: I feel that way too. You're wrung it out of me.
01:49:00MASON FUNK:
MASON FUNK: like in the rest of the country, we are just getting annihilated right now. And you said, essentially, the the battles have to be fought over and over again, that the work is never done. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, by way of encouraging people who may just feel like that boulder and that hill are just so overwhelmingly frightening and fearful right now.
MARK LENO: I can't put my finger on a single
01:50:00MARK LENO: moment growing up in my reform Jewish household. But I had very wise parents and a mother who was very sensitive about social justice issues. Somewhere along the line, they instilled in me the raw fact that Jews as assimilated as we have become in this country should never overlook the fact
01:50:30MARK LENO: that we have to fight the battle against anti-Semitism. Every generation. It's never over. They grew up as young adults through World War II and the Holocaust, and so they saw the worst of the worst. I did not lose, personally, family members in the Holocaust, but certainly have so many friends who did and still have friends who did
01:51:00MARK LENO: lose family members. But of course, my parents were alive and experienced it all. So the battle is never over. Now, we just see this nonsensical Middle Ages tropes being raised yet again. Dang, really, we haven't gotten beyond this. Then we see
01:51:30MARK LENO: this war being waged against our trans brothers and sisters today in very raw and cruel terms. Though the discrimination was always there. I don't think people were so bold as to speak about it as they are today. I do have a memory, sort of a cute memory, when I was traveling the state prior to the March,
2000
01:52:00MARK LENO: election of ballot measure prop 22, which defined marriage in a limited way and put it into the family code, that I was meeting with some labor leaders in San Diego, and they were on board. That really warmed my heart that we had these labor leaders often in the forms of really butch, rough men in
01:52:30MARK LENO: the trades and other aspects of labor who were supporting us and opposing the limited definition of marriages, foreign as a concept as it was in the year 2000. But one liberal leader took me aside and said, "Just a little bit of advice to you. You know, all this LGBT, I don't understand it all, but that 'T' thing, what's that? You should just drop that. It's no good." But he had to take me
01:53:00MARK LENO: aside to do it.
MARK LENO: the cruelest things. I read some ridiculous quote of Senator Ted Cruz the other day, he said it in a committee hearing, in the Senate committee hearing, well, I think they might have been talking about woke corporate practices that brought down the Silicon Valley Bank, and that's the reason that the trains derailed. And just all of this nonsense
01:54:00MARK LENO: that we could have met as many transgender witches as may be, and then completed a sense. But he had to put the words transgender and witches together to make his point. Really a US senator in a Senate committee hearing so emboldened, it's really disheartening. And yes, it must be frightful for transgender people.
01:54:30MARK LENO: So I don't want to be presumptuous that I, as a gay man, could tell a transgender man or woman to have hope. But I reflect upon Harvey's quotes about hope. Of course, he's said, you gotta give him hope and hope will never be silent. Harvey said. But then he defined hope. He said, "Hope
01:55:00MARK LENO: is the ability to see that there is light even in all of this darkness." When you stop to take that apart, and really what does that mean to have the ability, you're in total darkness, but to have the ability to see light somewhere in the tunnel or somewhere, that's hope. I think Martin Luther King said that
01:55:30MARK LENO: faith was descending a staircase in the dark and taking the next step. You call it faith, you call it hope, but in total darkness, you move forward and you have courage. It's what we gotta do because what's the alternative? You win, we lose. Sorry, don't step on me too hard. No, we can't do that. So we've gotta have faith, we've gotta have hope.
01:56:00MARK LENO: And yeah, times are dark. Imagine, just imagine the horror of those who were imprisoned and put into camps by the Nazis, whether you were Jewish or disabled or queer or all the other. Now they had a chart with a dozen different symbols, and then they had a hierarchy, the pink triangles at the very bottom. There were many different levels.
01:56:30MARK LENO: They were in power, they were in control, and they were wiping out tens of millions of people. How could you have hoped then? How could you just not take your own life and end it? Because it was so bleak and you were starving, you were real thin, you got beaten every day. And my predecessors, Jewish predecessors, withstood that and
01:57:00MARK LENO: so many perished. But guess what? We won that war and we won that battle. Yet, it keeps rising up. But as my mother taught me, every generation, that's just what we've gotta do.
MASON FUNK: Thank you for that. We have four final questions. Short and sweet and literally four.
MARK LENO: Okay. And I haven't heard them before.
MASON FUNK: No, you haven't heard them?
MARK LENO: So I'm on the spot.
MASON FUNK: Yeah.
01:57:30MARK LENO: Okay. I hope my brain is working.
MASON FUNK: You'll do fine. The first is, if you could tell 15 year old Mark
Leno
MARK LENO: What, if anything, do I have to say to a 15 year old Mark Leno? Well, that 15 year old Mark Leno knew he was different. He knew he liked boys. He knew that since he was
01:58:00MARK LENO: five years old, and he knew enough that his classmates thought that was strange and had a name for it, homo. It wasn't queer, wasn't faggot in my school, it was homo, was the scary word. So I could tell that 15 year old Mark, homo Mark Leno, have faith, believe in yourself. You are right.
01:58:30MARK LENO: They're wrong. And though it's not fun now, it does indeed get better. And guess what? You could even be elected a state senator and you could run for mayor of your city and come with an appointed winning. And you could be respected and you could have a business, and you could have your life on your terms and do so with respect and dignity for others. So hang in there.
01:59:00MARK LENO: Hang in there.
MASON FUNK: Great. Credit to Jewel Gomez for this question.
MARK LENO: Okay. Love Jewel.
MASON FUNK: I do too.
MASON FUNK: that we all share every single person across the spectrum, gender, sexual expression, that kind of is almost like our gift to each other and to the world there?
MARK LENO: There is that something that all of us queer people share, call it a secret sauce or a superpower. I don't know that we need to define it so much.
02:00:00MARK LENO: It's just recognize it because I think we all feel it. But I think what might be behind it, and I'm not here speaking definitively, but what might be behind it is that we all know that we are survivors. We all come from different backgrounds, every ethnicity, religion, but we all got stepped on somewhere along the way just for being who we were, the way that we were intended to be made
02:00:30MARK LENO: by our creators. I'm hoping that I was made according to the creator's will. We're all survivors and there's some strength that comes from that knowledge. Whether it's spoken or not, we all do have that awareness that without saying a word, just the recognition and the acknowledgement that we are who we are and that we are
02:01:00MARK LENO: in this minority of gender identity and sexual expression. We've learned some level of compassion and empathy that many others have not learned. But I think given that we all do come from these variety of backgrounds, Jewel probably has been stepped on not only for her sexual orientation, but for her ethnicity and for her gender. She's put it
02:01:30MARK LENO: all together. Those aspects also contribute to her superpower. Each of us have that too. That is what pride is all about, and that's why we celebrate pride. We're not just joining our stuff out on the street and taking time to make a day of it or a month of it, but
02:02:00Mark Leno
celebrating that difference.
MASON FUNK: Great. Why is it important to you to share your story?
MARK LENO: Why is it important for me to share my story? I haven't always been convinced that it was important. I was somewhat resistant to participating in OUTWORDS. I had gone online and looked at
02:02:30MARK LENO: many of the other interviews and I valued them all. But I thought either I'm too private about my personal life or my upbringing lacked so much drama and trauma that I didn't really have much to talk about. But I also know from experience that once you start asking me questions,
02:03:00MARK LENO: I do have a lot to say, whether it's about my work or even about myself personally. And quite honestly, every human being has value in telling their story. There is value in telling every human being story and listening to every human being's story. There's probably not a person walking the planet that doesn't have a valuable personal story to share.
02:03:30MARK LENO: I'm just one of them.
MASON FUNK: Great, thank you. And last but not least, you've already referenced OUTWORDS, but if you could answer what OUTWORDS being a project to capture stories like yours, people we call elders of the LGBTQ community nationwide, digging as deep as we can into as many different communities as we can, what do you see as the overarching value of that? And if you could mention OUTWORDS in your answer.
MARK LENO: The overall and overreaching value
02:04:00MARK LENO: of OUTWORDS really substantiates some of the points I've made earlier, which is there is so much value in all of our live stories, and certainly for those of us who have reached the age of elder, that we have that many more years and that many more decades under our belt to be able to share and to reflect upon and to incorporate into
02:04:30MARK LENO: our worldview and our understanding of humanity. And it's an invaluable thing you are doing. And so I will continue to support you in every way that I can imagine, because I recognize that value. And every community should be doing this. There should be oral histories for all communities, not just of Holocaust survivors, not just of Jews, not just of Homosexualism, transgender and gender variant people,
02:05:00MARK LENO: but every people should be able to collect individual and community stories to some degree because of the value and the dignity of every human creation. I'm very proud that there is an OUTWORDS and I'm really pleased that there is an OUTWORDS and
02:05:30MARK LENO: as I say, I'll continue to invest in it.
MASON FUNK: Thank you.
MARK LENO: No, I thank you. You're the one doing good work.
KATE KUNATH: Can I have a question.
MASON FUNK: Sure.
KATE KUNATH: I wonder if you could go back to the steps of the city hall when that marriage window was here and you were marrying those 60 some couples, if you could describe the feeling that you had that day,
02:06:00KATE KUNATH: and if anything, or any couples stood out to you in particular.
MARK LENO: Okay. So thinking back to Thursday, February 12th, 2004, when San Francisco's assessor recorder began to issue marriage license to same sex couples, and I had that privilege of the authority to officiate, legally officiate,
02:06:30MARK LENO: weddings as a state elected official, after so many repetitions of do you promise to love and comfort honor and trust and sickness and in health and good times and bad, and all that goes into the vows that we say at the time of the marriage ceremony, it was so thrilling to be able to participate.
02:07:00MARK LENO: I have married hundreds and hundreds of couples at this point. When I was marrying a couple of good friends of mine at a home in Pacific Heights with mostly a heterosexual group of attendees. I told them, I've married hundreds of couples, many of them heterosexual. I've done it. When I was
02:07:30MARK LENO: in office and we passed a state law that says even former members of the legislature have legal authority to officiate marriages legally. I still had that authority when I was in office and my office would get all sorts of requests, can the senator conduct our wedding ceremony? They were strangers, they were constituents. I don't even care if they were constituents. I loved it so much.
02:08:00MARK LENO: I never said "No," to anyone, we found the time, and my staff put together a marriage book. It had the files, it had the forms, and they would do the staff work to be able to familiarize myself with the couple I was marrying, so they weren't just strangers and I knew to pronounce their names correctly and I could make reference in some parts of their lives. And I loved it, because it is such a special moment.
02:08:30MARK LENO: Now, I've been a single man since my partner died, now 37 years ago. We did have 10 glorious years together. I know what that is. I'm familiar with that thing. When two people have that thing together, that propels them to want to publicly step forward and, in an official and legal way, take these vows,
02:09:00MARK LENO: it's such a privileged moment to be able to stand there and be the
one to make that happen. I'll do that any day of the week, at any hour
MASON FUNK: Did you have other questions?
KATE KUNATH: Oh, no. That was it.
02:09:30MARK LENO: It was a good one, Kate.
MASON FUNK: It was a good one, yeah. It was one. It was really a rich one. It was a warm one.