Angry protesters want Dixon’s vice mayor out
LOS ANGELES — A newspaper column in which a Central Valley city official advocated “straight pride” and derided men for wearing “tinker bell wings” and “go-go boots,” has sparked outrage and calls for his removal from office.
On Tuesday evening, hundreds of residents — some waving rainbow flags — packed the City Council chambers in Dixon to demand the resignation of Vice Mayor Ted Hickman, whose comments were widely viewed as homophobic.
Hickman published a column in Dixon’s Independent Voice late last month, in which he stated that July 1 marked the start of “Straight Pride American Month” and the end of “LGBTQF-WTF” month, when “grown men wear skin tight short-shorts and go-go boots and don tinker bell wings.”
“Now hundreds of millions of the rest of us can celebrate our month, peaking on July 4th, as healthy, heterosexual, fairly monogamous, keep our kinky stuff to ourselves, Americans,” Hickman wrote, according to an image of the column posted by The Sacramento Bee. “We work, have families, (and babies we make) enjoy and love the company (and marriage) of the opposite sex and don’t flaunt our differences dressing up like faries (sic) and prancing by the thousands in a parade in nearby San Francisco to be televised all over the world.”
Hickman’s commentary has generated significant controversy in the city of roughly 20,000 people, just west of Sacramento. At a Tuesday night council meeting, speakers spent several hours condemning his comments and calling for his removal.
Hickman defended his comments.
“I didn’t give up my First Amendment right when I became an elected official,” Hickman said. “To the contrary, I swore like the rest of the council to uphold the Constitution, which includes the First Amendment.”
In a phone interview Wednesday, Thom Bogue, the city’s mayor, said there would be a meeting to discuss legal options and “how we deal with this.”
Hickman has been vice mayor — a position that rotates each year — since January and has been on the council since 2014. Hickman is up for re-election in November.