Tom Ammiano

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Tom Ammiano (born December 15, 1941), a Democrat, is a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

He represents District 9, encompassing parts of the Mission District and the Bernal Heights and Portola neighborhoods. He was elected to the city-wide Board in 1994, and re-elected in 1998, when he became Board President. His efforts to have the Board elected by district instead of city-wide succeeded, and, running as a resident of Bernal Heights, he was elected to the new Board in 2000 and 2004.

Ammiano will be ineligible to be re-elected in November 2008, since he will have served two consecutive four-year terms. In August 2006, he announced his intention to run for the 13th District seat in the California State Assembly in 2008. The seat is being vacated by openly gay Assemblyman Mark Leno, who has already endorsed Ammiano and will chair his campaign committee. [1]

Among his accomplishments on the Board of Supervisors is the creation of the San Francisco Health Care Security Ordinance, which was passed by a unanimous vote of the Board of Supervisors and signed by Mayor Gavin Newsom on August 7, 2006. This makes San Francisco the first city in the nation to provide universal healthcare access. [2] [3] [4] Ammiano is also the main architect of the city's Domestic Partners Ordinance, which provides equal benefits to employees and their unmarried domestic partners. It also requires companies who do business with the City and County of San Francisco to provide the same benefits.

Ammiano grew up in Montclair, New Jersey. He received a bachelor's degree in communications from Seton Hall University in 1963 and a master's degree in special education from San Francisco State University in 1965. He taught English to children in South Vietnam as part of a Quaker program until 1968, when he left shortly after the Tet Offensive.

Ammiano is a former public school teacher. In 1975, he became the first gay public school teacher in San Francisco to make his sexual orientation a matter of public knowledge when the Board of Education voted against including sexual orientation in the district's nondiscrimination clause; a year later the Board reversed its stand. In 1977 he fought the so-called Briggs Initiative, which would have prevented gays and lesbians from teaching in California's public schools. In 1980 and 1988, he ran for the San Francisco Board of Education, and was elected in 1990. He was subsequently elected its vice-president in 1991, and then president in 1992.

Tom Ammiano, as president of the Board of Education, was successful in his efforts to include a gay and lesbian sensitivity curriculum for all students in the San Francisco Unified School District. As President of the Board of Education he helped to make the San Francisco Public Schools District sexual education curriculum the most diverse and inclusive in the United States. In the San Francisco Public schools sexual diversity training begins in kindergarten. The members of the Board of Education in San Francisco have become, with Tom Ammiano's support and encoragement, the most sympathetic and supportive of strong sexual diversity education in the United States.

As President of the Board of Supervisors, Ammiano came into conflict with the leaders of San Franciso's Catholic community when the Board granted the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a tranvestitite group critical of the Catholic Church, a permit to close a block of Castro Street for a street party on Easter Sunday. Said Roman Catholic Archdiocese spokesman Maurice Healy, "While we are offended by what they do, we're simply asking 'Please don't do it on Easter Sunday, the holiest day of the Christian year.'" An Archdiocese newspaper compared the Sisters' activities to neo-Nazis celebrating on the Jewish holiday of Passover. [5][6]

In a close race for mayor in 1999, Ammiano garnered national and international media coverage. [7] In the November general election, he generated a write-in campaign which prevented the incumbent mayor, Willie Brown, from being elected outright. Brown did defeat Ammiano in the subsequent December 14 run-off election, but the whole process galvanized progressive voters throughout the city and had a major impact on the compostion of the new Board of Supervisors the next year. Ammiano tried for mayor again in 2003, but did not win enough votes to make that run-off after Superversior Matt Gonzalez entered the race, splitting the progressive vote.

Aside from his teaching and political activities, Tom Ammiano was an unsuccessful stand-up comedian since 1980. Sometimes called "The Mother of Gay Comedy," he attempted to pioneer open-mike gay comedy at the Valencia Rose cabaret in San Francisco. He played a small role in the Oscar-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk.

Ammiano was in a 16-year domestic partnership with a fellow schoolteacher, Tim Curbo, who died of complications from AIDS in 1994. He has one daughter and is now a grandfather.