Sheila Kuehl
It is not “different” and “same” that are the killing words, the killing words are “better” and “worse.”

December 2002
photo by Richard Bermack

State Senator Sheila Kuehl addressed the Local 535 Executive Board on September 14 after successfully gaining passage of a bill that established California as the first state to grant paid family leave to working people. Kuehl was the first openly gay person to be elected to the California legislature, “After I was in the Assembly no one in the Assembly could ever again say, ‘I never met one,’” she joked. The following are excerpts from her speech:

"Labor has always been about economic justice. The theory has been that with economic justice will come all the rest of the justices, but people who have had problems over the history of this country getting into labor movements, and being given equal treatment within the union, within the workplace, and in society have said that it is not enough.…

"The virtue of the labor movement is that I am for you and you are for me, and because we are a chain and not just a link, we make progress. I don’t have to tell you that. I have been a member of a union since I was seven years old. It was an actors union. I was the youngest person to go out on strike and I learned what it means to suffer in order to uphold your principle. But in my union, when people were fired because they were gay, our union would not show up for us and say, you can’t fire a gay actor, and believe me a lot of gay actors are fired. As much you think progress has been made it still goes on today.

"The point is, ‘Where do we go from here?’ If we are going to be for justice we have to be in this together. When a person is a member they get the same protection and defense as any other member.

"I introduced a bill in 1995 and again in ‘97 and ‘99 barring discrimination and harassment on the basis of sexual orientation in our public schools. It turned out, in order to get the 41st vote I had to take out the word sexual orientation and instead reference the hate crimes statute, which made it more palatable for people to vote for it. And so the hate crime categories were incorporated into the education code with this bill. Interestingly I had to expand the definition of gender in the hate crime code so that if you get beat up because someone doesn’t think you look right, or sound right for your gender, that is a hate crime under the bias of gender. I didn’t say transgendered people. It is also the guy who plays the violin and gets beat up because someone thinks he is gay, even if he is not, or the girl who is getting ready to be on the Sparks and everybody thinks she is a lesbian because she plays basketball. So they beat her. And don’t think it doesn’t happen. We had kids come up and testify from all over the state.

"By incorporating hate crimes into the education code suddenly we were faced with transgendered kids or transitioning kids. It was very interesting how many children, young people in junior high and high school mostly, feel that they are in the wrong camp [wrong sexual identity]. That there was a mistake made and they really want to transition and now they can. So we had to look at our own prejudices, about this issue of gender, because I know what gender I am. I just happen to love the wrong one if you know what I mean.

"Ursula LeGuin, a wonderful science fiction writer, wrote a book called The Left Hand of Darkness. In it she said, “Difference and the same are actually nurturing words, friendship words, interesting words.” When I was a kid growing up by the Coliseum in LA we didn’t have a pot big enough to cook spaghetti in the regular length so my mother would break it in half, and cook it that way to make it edible. When I went across the street to Ronnie Butterfield’s house his mother cooked it all wrong. It was too long to wind it on a fork. There was too much to get it in your mouth.

"Did I think that Ronnie was a bad kid because his mother made spaghetti wrong? No, it was just really interesting. It was different, and you know you experienced the same thing when you got old enough and visited a Greek family down the block. You had foods you couldn’t pronounce. It was interesting.

"Ursula LeGuin said, it is not different and same that are the killing words, the killing words are better and worse.

"So all of us who have banned together in a group and said you are discriminating against me on this arbitrary basis of my skin color, or my gender, or my sexual orientation, or my ability or disability, or whatever you call it, that doesn’t give me an opportunity to live up to my full potential. What we all have in common is in saying, let’s live up to our full potential and remove the barriers, for ourselves and each other because that is what I thought labor was always trying to do.”

"My mother was a garment worker from the time she was 11 and she was proud of it. We have a history. We learned very early that if we are there for each other we are like unbreakable links in a chain."