I had spoken at least a few times remotely due to Covid restrictions but today makes the first in-person advocacy I did in front of the Vallejo City Council. I’m pleased to be working with LGBTQ Minus Tobacco in fighting for Vallejo to adopt a Smokefree Multi-Unit Housing Ordinance like our Solano County neighbor to the East, Benicia, and many other San Francisco Bay Area jurisdictions already have.

I find it particularly interesting that I accidentally shot the “No Smoking” decal on the door when I took this selfie, without even realizing it. I have the video of my speech available and had my daughter watch it. She and my husband were very proud. I’m sure I’ll be back to speak at City Council regularly, but so hoping this ordinance passes for the betterment of my city.

My new neighbor edited my article in the current Glen Cove Community Association newsletter. Funnily enough, he was introduced to me by friends in common at my birthday party earlier this month who realized we hadn’t met. We figured out soon after that he was the same guy who had been the president of GCCA and was still editing the newsletter, including my own article. However all the while with the article passing between us we did not know we had friends in common and that we were also both gay and would be meeting within days of finalizing the article!

This is a link to the issue with my article starting on page 6. I’m very proud to still be fighting Big Tobacco more than three decades after my father died at the very young age of fifty from smoking. His mother had died from smoking and drinking at the same age twenty years before him. I’ve now outlived them both.

Please check out LGBTQ Minus Tobacco‘s site as well. I recently learned about this organization through local political organizations. It was wonderful to find a local advocacy group that is fighting for a cause I’ve believed in for decades, especially since I specifically knew Big Tobacco targeted queer people long before I even came out to myself.

Yes, smoking in California is down to 9% of the overall population. With Covid, more people saw how important respiratory issues, including second-hand smoke, were all exacerbated by coronaviruses which can kill people in days.

While attending Solano Pride meetings I heard about LGBTQ Minus Tobacco, which is fighting for smoke-free areas and enforcement of tobacco licenses being taken away from retailers who sell to minors. We also know that Big Tobacco is trying to suggest that vaping is safe, even though they are specifically targeting a new generation of nicotine addicts by flavoring the nicotine. It is far from safe to become nicotine addicts at this time.

One of the opportunities I had to stand up for the rights of those who are a victim of passive smoke was to speak at the recent special session of Vallejo’s City Council where the City Council set an agenda of priorities. I spoke during the public comment section as a resident of Vallejo that multi-unit housing should have an ordinance that they become smoke-free, lest minors and others in adjoining units suffer from the smoke of their neighbors with whom they share walls and who are downstream from patios and such. Many cities in the Bay Area already have such ordinances.

It appears that Mayor O’Donnell seemed to take this seriously and we hope that this is adopted, as it is to protect people, especially those who are more likely to live in poverty with less medical coverage and less opportunity to get out of these multi unit dwellings where they might be exposed. I’m very proud to be able to contribute in ways like this.

Bob Dole has Stage 4 lung cancer it was just reported. During his presidential campaign against Bill Clinton, Dole was underwritten by a flailing tobacco industry and he actually said there was NO PROOF that cigarette smoking caused cancer. Now he’s being touted as someone who was an ADVOCATE for health care reform!?!?” WTF? Is that because he got paid to endorse erection medication?

I bet Rush Limbaugh, who just died a few days ago from the same thing at age seventy, also didn’t fall for the “fake news” they would describe the science about tobacco as being. It’s beyond the pale that he made a whole career out of generating it for his evil purposes. Rush Limbaugh just had a high school diploma and held himself out to be some kind of “intellectual” for his extreme racism-based causes. I don’t think most people realize he had no credentials or formal education on what he spoke about.

My father and his mother both died from smoking when each of them was around the age of 50, twenty years apart. They were not spoiled rich kids or heirs to the Dole fortune. Medical technology might currently enable some to live longer with the pain of treatment they cause themselves with choosing to start to smoke (although most start in childhood). As I’ve always said in my activism in this arena: I don’t blame smokers for succumbing to addiction, but the tobacco industry that convinced high-profile politicians and pundits into spreading their lies is beyond contempt.