Quisling Pride
San Diego’s ‘Gayborhood’ Being Sold Out by City’s LGBTQ+ Municipal Leadership
By Mat Wahlstrom (Published recently by the OB Rag)
Ever heard of “Cop City”? No, that isn’t the name for the unseemly rush to install surveillance cameras throughout Hillcrest before this coming weekend, in violation of the TRUST Ordinance — though there is a direct connection.
I don’t see that it’s been written about here before, so allow me to explain. Cop City is the nickname for the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, a project to bulldoze hardwood forest and historic structures to build a massive complex — the largest in the nation — for the sole purpose of training law enforcement as urban paramilitary, in a historically Black and unrepresented section of Atlanta.
In direct response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that erupted in 2020, the following year 150 acres of publicly owned property were proposed for this facility. Finally in 2023, 85 acres and $30 million of taxpayer money was ‘gifted’ to the private local police officers association by the mayor and city council of America’s “Black Mecca.”
This real estate deal was conceived behind closed doors despite previous promises to develop this land for community benefit, to redress a long history of racial violence. But despite years of protest, with dozens of arrests for domestic terrorism and a related police killing, it was approved 10–4 after 17 hours of overwhelming public testimony against it. (None of the four council members who opposed it returned to office.)
One might think that this was all because the mayor who secretly negotiated the deal and the complicit city council members were all white and Republican. Yet that mayor was a Black woman Democrat; and over half the council members are Black or non-white and the rest also Democrat.
Cop City could not have happened if it had been undertaken by a majority white and Republican leadership in this white-minority city. It would have been rightly shot down as the obvious throwback it is to the days of segregation and disenfranchisement before the Civil Rights Movement.
This brings us back to San Diego. (Which, like Atlanta, is one of the top economically unequal cities in America.)
All of our elected officials are registered Democrat; and our mayor and two of our nine council members are LGBTQ+. We should be the beacon of liberality they campaigned to promote. Yet even a cursory glance at their records in office reveals the same neoliberal Republican policies that have been trotted out for decades now dressed in Democrat drag.
Across the board, from the SDG&E franchise agreement to performative homeless policies to insider deals that reward their donors over voters, San Diego’s electeds are engaged in business as usual. The difference is the incense of sanctimony they waft over it.
The stench of that becomes overpowering the closer one gets to Uptown.
If someone had said ten years ago that Hillcrest, the nationally renowned “gayborhood” of San Diego, would be sold out specifically by a LGBTQ+ municipal leadership, people would have told them they were crazy. Yet that is exactly what is happening.
Of all the many developer-enabling densification plans in the pipeline, none is calculatedly punitive to a legacy population than ‘Plan Hillcrest’ is to the LGBTQ+ community.
First floated by Todd Gloria in 2015 when he was a councilmember and with a vengeance now as mayor, Plan Hillcrest is actually intended to accelerate the displacement of the LGBTQ+ community who reclaimed this area from urban decay in favor of those with more disposable income.
And as the dutiful spear-carrier he’s always been, the District 3 council member representing Hillcrest, Stephen Whitburn, always does what Gloria and their mutual campaign contributors tell him.
It will replace the long proposed Hillcrest historic district, “a common sense step,” with what is now being called a “cultural district.” But the shamefulness of this is even worse, as both Gloria and Whitburn know they were originally pitched this scheme by the Hillcrest Business Association as an “entertainment district.”
(Adding insult to this injury, this private business association has a history of excluding LGBTQ+ businesses, which is why it was necessary for our community to form what is now the San Diego Equality Business Association. That group has been excluded from Plan Hillcrest entirely.)
What tiny area that is still being considered for a historic district would be in name only, as development is allowed ‘by right’ — which is unheard of anywhere else and completely undermines preservation.
Just as what is now being called the Normal Street Promenade is a rebranding of the Hillcrest Business Association’s effort to privatize this space for a permanent farmers market.
And with a middle finger to everyone, Gloria had language added to Plan Hillcrest after public review, to promote “relocation of the DMV office from Hillcrest to a more auto-dependent location.” This is despite twenty years of effort by electeds from Christine Kehoe to Chris Ward to include affordable housing in the redevelopment of the DMV site.
The full City Council is set to rubber-stamp this plan on July 30, while the glitter is still visible on the pavement from this past weekend’s celebration.
As the Civil Rights and other progressive movements have been co-opted to simply mean some of different color or sexuality or gender orientation are ‘represented’ to sit at the table, this has served to legitimate there even being a table — and an economic order that leaves everyone else to scavenge for scraps.
The only “progress” that has been made is that it’s now necessary to find members of a dispossessed community who, to further their selfish ambitions, are willing to be complicit in perpetuating that dispossession.
Equality should mean more than a right to be just as corrupt as our former oppressors.
The only difference between Atlanta and San Diego, as shown by the Cop City vote, is that they still have a few representatives willing to stand up against injustice.
Remember all of this when you see Todd Gloria, Stephen Whitburn and their LGBTQ+ accomplices shamelessly waving from on high in Saturday’s parade. Ask what, after 50 years of marching for Pride in San Diego, are they leaving for us to be proud?
[Note: The term “quisling” comes from the name for the Norwegian prime minister during World War II, who instead of opposing, invited the Nazis in to occupy and despoil his own country.]
Category: Life Style, Local News
