GUEST WORDS - (Editor’s note: This is a longer version of an essay in Frontiers' July 10 print edition. Full disclosure: Bill and I were journalism friends when he headed Century Cable/Adelphia, where he broadcast the LA Pride Parade and AIDS news and gave me a talk show. He also brought me onto the board of the LA Press Club. —Karen Ocamb)
Openly gay Los Angeles City Councilmember Bill Rosendahl retired on July 1, proudly turning over the legislative care of his beloved Council District 11 to his friend and former chief of staff Mike Bonin, who also happens to be gay. The council chamber was packed on June 28 with longtime supporters from the district and friends from various battles to “do the right thing” for social and economic justice and the environment.
I have previously covered that moving farewell, but now I want to share some of my thoughts on why I think Bill is so caring.
Bill and I are both Baby Boomers, though he is five years older and therefore was active in campaigns while I was merely an absorbent observer. In particular, Bill was just out of college when he joined Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Bill was with Bobby in that moment of triumph when he won the California primary on June 5, 1968, only to be gunned down as he made his way through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel.
It was a searing moment for our generation, which had already seen a decade of soul-wrenching, hope-dashing death—the assassinations of Bobby’s brother, President John F. Kennedy; Medgar Evers; post-Mecca Malcolm X and the inspirational, peace-loving Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Bobby carried that mantle of hope we believed in and lived by.
“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped,” Bobby Kennedy once said. “Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
We believed that, deeply. We cried when Ted Kennedy repeated words Bobby had written for his father but also applied to Bobby and now to us, too—“Beneath it all, he has tried to engender a social conscience. There were wrongs which needed attention. There were people who were poor and who needed help. And we have a responsibility to them and to this country. Through no virtues and accomplishments of our own, we have been fortunate enough to be born in the United States under the most comfortable conditions. We, therefore, have a responsibility to others who are less well off.”
And that’s what Bill Rosendahl turned out to be—the social conscience of the City Council. “Potholes have no politics,” Bill recently told LA Times and KPCC journalist Patt Morrison. “And neither does homelessness. Issues have solutions that need resources. The most frustrating part for me is not having the resources to do all that needs to be done. It's a disgrace to be the richest country on Earth and have homeless people. When I cut the ribbon on transitional housing for veterans, the immediate neighbors went hysterical. A year later, a [neighbor] came up to me and said, ‘I brought them cookies, and one of them gave me a painting he had made.’ You have to get people out of fear and ignorance.”
It was this kind of moral fervor that prompted Bill to be such a good, fair, independent journalist—an advocacy journalist who could unflinchingly wield the weapon of a good question and effect policy or change people’s lives. It was because Bill Rosendahl kept badgering him that Sheriff Lee Baca finally developed a controversial program in 2001 to provide condoms in city jails. Bill just would not take Baca’s repeated nonsensical answer that they couldn’t provide condoms because having sex in jail was against the law!
Bill sought to tell the truth—no matter who might blush in the telling of it. He was instrumental in providing public AIDS education by having AIDS Healthcare Foundation President Michael Weinstein on his shows to regularly talk about HIV/AIDS and the latest news and programs. Bill also unabashedly shared that he took medical marijuana to help him eat and relax in his fight against cancer.
And he wasn’t afraid to offend the big guys. Much of Bill’s social conscience came from his belief in God and the teachings of the Catholic Church. But when Pope John Paul II declared that homosexuality was “intrinsically evil,” Bill went ballistic. How could people like him—gays like him, who worked so hard to be and do good—be so cruelly and cavalierly dismissed as “intrinsically evil”?
Bill Rosendahl came out as gay on his cable show after his longtime partner Christopher Lee Blauman died of AIDS in 1995. He came out again in an interview with me for Frontiers. He considers being gay an intrinsically good aspect of his character. God makes no accidents, he always says. And by taking up Bobby Kennedy’s mantle and bearing witness and sharing his authentic truth with others, Bill Rosendahl seeks to prove God right.
That’s the Bill Rosendahl I know. (Read the rest of Karen Ocamb’s article … including how RFK’s assassination impacted his life … here)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 56
Pub: July 12, 2013
