Leno caps long service career with mayoral run
Mostly, Mark Leno focuses on one date: June 5. That’s when San Franciscans will choose their next mayor, either rocketing Leno to the city’s top job or sending him into political retirement.
But when he’s at Golden Gate Park’s AIDS Memorial Grove, Leno recalls the most significant dates of his past. Like May 20, 1980. The day a handsome 24-yearold named Douglas Jackson walked into Leno’s sign shop to order items for the opening of Muni’s Castro Street Station. Jackson was helping to organize a huge underground dance party in the subway called Metro Madness, and he needed banners and signs.
It was, as Leno tells it with the lingering grin of a crush, love at first sight.
“I joke I was only seeing eight men a week at the time — all of them exactly once,” Leno said with a laugh. “But as he walked out, I thought, ‘I want to see him again!’ ”
Nov. 4, 1980. The night Ronald Reagan was elected president, the same night Leno and Jackson moved in together and became inseparable.
June 14, 1990. The day Jackson died of complications from AIDS at Davies Medical Center. Leno was at the bedside of his beloved partner when he died.
“He’s very present with me always,” said Leno, 66, crouching down to touch Jackson’s name, one of more than 2,500 carved in stone at the grove. “It’s the way it is, and the way it always will be.”
The Chronicle asked each of the four main contenders for mayor to take us to their favorite place in the city with the hope of getting them out of their busy offices and pat campaign talk. While we’ll write in-depth stories in the coming weeks on where they stand on the most pressing issues, we also wanted to get a sense of who they really are.
Leno took us to the AIDS Memorial Grove, which feels a world away from downtown San Francisco. It’s clean, peaceful and lovely, and you can literally hear birds chirping and little kids squealing.
At the annual “Light in the Grove” gala on Nov. 30, Leno received the “Lifetime of Commitment” award from the National AIDS Memorial Grove for being a “tireless champion for civil rights.”
“They light the woods in only the way gay men could — it just looks like magic,” Leno said as we walked among the grove’s redwood trees and rhododendrons.
San Francisco itself seemed like magic to him when Leno arrived in the late 1970s, renting an apartment in the Tenderloin and opening Budget Signs. He’d left his family in Milwaukee for a short-lived stint in rabbinical school in New York City and was lured out West by his sister, who swore he’d love San Francisco. She was right.
By 1981, he and Jackson were living in the Noe Valley home where Leno still lives. They volunteered in local politics and relished living within the city’s thriving gay community. And just like that, the joy turned to devastation as a mysterious virus began striking down one man after another.
“It was a war zone,” Leno said of the time. “You’d see someone walking down the street, and then the next week or the week after that, they’d lost 30, 40 pounds. They had purple lesions on their face, and then they were gone.”
Jackson, gone. Jackson’s little brother, gone. “Hundreds and hundreds” of friends and acquaintances, Leno recalled, all gone.
Leno didn’t intend to enter politics, but his local activism, including fundraising for AIDS services and the San Francisco LGBT Community Center, got the attention of then-Mayor Willie Brown, who appointed him to the Board of Supervisors in 1998. Leno filled the same seat once held by slain gay rights leader and Supervisor Harvey Milk.
Leno was elected to the Assembly in 2002 and the state Senate in 2008. He was seriously prolific in Sacramento, writing more than 160 pieces of legislation.
Sometimes he lost, like his failed bid to create a singlepayer, universal health care program for California and his early attempt to legalize samesex marriage. Sometimes he won, like his “kill-switch bill,” which required smartphones to come with an anti-theft device, his bill limiting solitary confinement in juvenile detention facilities and the raising of the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Though a staunch liberal, he was praised for his ability to work with people of all political persuasions, along with his unwavering kindness and charm.
State Sen. Scott Wiener, who is politically more moderate than Leno, praised him for being “a strong leader with a great track record fighting for core progressive values.”
Supervisor Hillary Ronen called Leno “the exact foil” of President Trump.
“He’s as studious as they come, has deep policy knowledge, and then treats everybody that he meets with respect and dignity,” Ronen said.
Leno was termed out of the Legislature in 2016 and in May 2017, he began what he thought was his 2019 campaign for mayor. His consultants, SCN Strategies, have found success getting presumed front-runners started early and scaring off the competition. It worked for U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris and appears to be working for gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom.
“I thought if I’m going to do it, why be coy about it?” Leno said.
But Leno seems to be stumbling, and recent polls show him slipping behind Supervisors London Breed and Jane Kim. Mayor Ed Lee’s shocking death on Dec. 12 meant the campaign was moved up 17 months, and Leno hasn’t seemed to transition from marathon mode into a sprint.
On Jan. 23, the progressive faction of the Board of Supervisors voted to remove Breed from her role as acting mayor and replace her with Supervisor Mark Farrell. The move was intended to clear the way for Leno in June or perhaps Kim, the two progressives in the race.
But that may have backfired, as Breed’s campaign has benefited from donors and volunteers irate over the replacement of a black woman who grew up in public housing with a rich, white venture capitalist from the Marina.
Leno swears he had no advance knowledge of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering, telling us in a separate interview for The Chronicle’s new podcast, “On San Francisco,” that he learned Farrell would be the next mayor “the day that it happened.”
And he’s struggled to respond astutely to the anger of some African Americans and women about Breed’s removal.
“I am, of course, very sensitive to the emotional response, and it was that,” he said. “If it was a rational response, we would have digested it exactly as we did when a caretaker was put in place in 2011 because the circumstances are, in fact, identical. But issues of gender and race certainly have been very sensitive issues this season.”
A few things: Telling women and African Americans they’re emotional and not rational isn’t a smart political move. And the circumstances in 2011 weren’t identical. Back then, nobody died. Mayor Gavin Newsom just packed it in early to become lieutenant governor. And acting Mayor David Chiu was replaced by Ed Lee, trading one Asian American man for another. Chiu even voted for Lee, whereas Breed desperately wanted to hang on to her seat.
Since filing to run in the June election shortly after Lee’s death, Leno has tried to make hay of his campaign pledge to reject spending on his behalf by independent expenditure groups, which aren’t limited to the $500 perperson donations that campaigns are.
He’s slammed Breed for not taking the same pledge. He’s also accused a female-backed independent expenditure committee called It’s Our Time, which was formed in response to Breed’s ouster, of being shadowy.
“We do not know who’s behind the super PAC,” he said, saying he knows “in name” it is backed by women, but that he had seen no proof. Financial disclosures show it is funded almost entirely by women.
But Leno isn’t pure when it comes to independent expenditure money, either. He benefited from super PAC money in his race for supervisor in 2000 and for the state Senate in 2008. But he told us it’s a new day, and the pledge should be adopted by everybody in this race regardless.
Nicole Derse, the political consultant running the It’s Our Time committee to support Breed, said Leno’s campaign is faltering because he’s portraying himself as the “change candidate” when he’s a 66-year-old “white man who’s been in elected office for decades.” She said that paradox is hard for voters to accept.
“There’s a disconnect between the campaign that he’s running and how voters actually see him,” Derse said. “He has a lot to run on, but shaking up City Hall is not jibing.”
Leno says he’s a change candidate because he would return City Hall to progressive control for the first time since former Mayor Art Agnos lost his re-election bid in 1991. Leno said he wants to open a mental health justice center, a service-heavy alternative to jail for mentally ill people who are picked up by the police. He also wants to adopt zero-based budgeting, in which the city’s budget would be started over from scratch, and to build 50,000 units of affordable housing over the next decade.
If he’s successful in June, he’ll be the first openly gay mayor of San Francisco. He said he doesn’t think his sexual orientation will play much of a role in how voters make their choice.
“But I can tell you in the LGBT community, it’s a big deal,” he said. “I’ve always gotten a good reception walking down Castro Street . ... But now people are coming out of bars and slapping me on the back and saying, ‘This is exciting! How can I help?’ There’s a buzz about it.”
If he’s not successful, Leno said he has no backup plan except to keep running his sign shop.
“One way or the other, I’m sure it will involve public service,” he said of life if he loses in June. “There’s a Hebrew term — ‘tikkun olam,’ the repair of the world — which is what my life has been about.”
One example of that, of course, was Leno’s early support of the AIDS Memorial Grove and his continued regular visits there to “heal, hope and remember.”
“All of these people should never be forgotten,” he said. “The story of the epidemic should never be forgotten.”
Mark Leno, San Francisco mayoral candidate “There’s a Hebrew term — ‘tikkun olam,’ the repair of the world — which is what my life has been about.”