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February 9, 1941– Sheila Kuehl:
“No gay or lesbian person had ever won even a primary for California for the State Legislature. The thing that actually made it easy was ‘Zelda Gilroy.’ Everybody already liked ‘Zelda.’ They liked her a lot. And once you realize your third grade teacher, the nurse that saved your life in the hospital, or your aunt are gay, you change your mind about stuff. ‘Zelda’ helped people feel they were electing a gay person who they already knew and liked.”
I will always remember who I thought was one of most intelligent female characters on television during my early viewing. She was Zelda Gilroy and she was on one my childhood favorite series, The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis (1959-1963), and what a cast: Dwayne Hickman, Tuesday Weld, Frank Faylen, Florida Friebus, Bob Denver, a cute young actor named Warren Beatty and Shelia James Kuehl as Zelda.
Zelda a smart, eager high school girl who was hopelessly in love with Dobie, much to his annoyance. Zelda did not find Dobie particularly attractive, but she fell in love with him because she thought he was helpless and in need of her care, but also because they were typically seated next to each other in class. Despite his protests, Dobie was obviously fond of Zelda. Zelda claimed Dobie was in love with her but just hadn’t realized it yet. To prove it, she would wrinkle her nose and squint at Dobie, who would do the same back to Zelda, though Dobie said it was only a reflex that made him do it. Dobie and Zelda would later appear as a middle-aged married couple in a pair of Dobie Gillis reunion projects in the late 1970s.
Unrequited love was all that poor Zelda Gilroy knew as she pined hopelessly 57 years ago for an indifferent Dobie Gillis. As it turned out, she didn’t really need him at all, but that memorably tenacious character helped pay a large political dividend for Sheila Kuehl, who played Zelda.
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Kuehl (R) with Dwayne Hickman and Bob Denver in The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis
Zelda and Dobie were teenagers in the fictional middle-American Central City when Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy were in the White House. Zelda called Dobie “Poopsie”, and they were perfectly mismatched: She was forever pursuing him, while he was always pursuing someone else.
In real life, Kuehl is Harvard Law School graduate who eventually came to represent a half a million people in the California State Assembly in 1994. You might think that she would have tired of her alter ego, but Kuehl has always embraced it.
As a politician, Kuehl discovered, there were practical reasons for holding on to the much-loved Zelda:
“When we did our very first polling, one of the things we found was that 76% of the people polled had seen the show and remembered it, and almost that many remembered my character.”
Plus, there is what she calls the “Zelda Factor”, using the character to counter homophobia. Kiehl:
“When people know gay people personally, they tend to feel differently about the whole community, and all of a sudden, here’s a person that they knew very well that they found out was lesbian.”
Kuehl figured out that she was gay while attending UCLA, where she studied while still appearing on Dobie Gillis. She has written that when she was 17-years old:
“I fell in love and was just totally freaked out by the fact that I was not ‘normal.’ ”
When her relationship with another girl was discovered, she was kicked-out of her sorority. Shortly after that, she filmed the pilot for a spinoff Zelda series:
“It just sank like a stone.The director took me out for a walk and said: ‘I don’t know if anybody’s told you this, but the president of CBS said no to this pilot and said you were just a little too butch’.”
Kuehl went on to law school at Harvard. After graduating, she returned to Los Angles and opened private practice and began raising money for the Sojourn Center For Battered Women, of which she served as chairperson.
Soon, the staff of other shelters were requesting Kuehl to do training in domestic violence law. She discovered what there weren’t many laws protecting women. She joined a small group of lawyers trying to put together ideas of legislation, including a bill requiring judges to consider evidence of domestic violence in custody cases.
In 1982, Kuehl was the Associate Director Of Students at UCLA when she met and fell in love with Torie Osborn, a student at the business school. At her 1986 inauguration as President of the Women Lawyers’ Association Of Los Angeles, Kuehl introduced Osborn as her partner, casually, just like the other women had been introducing their husbands. It made the front page of the California Law Journal.
In 1991, Kuehl and Osborn split up. But, in typical lesbian fashion, the remain close friends.
When she was passed over for a promotion at her law firm in favor of a man with less experience she began to see the obstacles for women in her field.
Kuehl decided to run for the California Assembly when the incumbent was nearing the end of his third term, his last under California’s new term limits. A Democrat, she received 56% of the vote in a district that stretches along the Pacific Coast and into parts of the San Fernando Valley, including the liberal enclaves of Malibu and Pacific Palisades, but also conservative towns like Encino and Woodland Hills.
Her opponent, Mike Meehan, didn’t explicitly make an issue of her lesbianism, but he made the biggest deal about her feminism, make her out to be a radical. Louis P. Sheldon, Chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, a conservative church in Anaheim, said:
“She has a right to run, but as the New Testament says; ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ I don’t know that anything good can come from Santa Monica.”
But for many, the acknowledgment of her gayness was one of the best things about Kuehl, Zelda or no Zelda. She proved to be a role model to all gay people, young and old.
Kuehl became the first openly gay person elected to the California legislature. She then became the first woman in California history to be named Speaker Pro Tempore of the Assembly. She was a founding member of the California Legislative LGBT Caucus.
When Kuehl was elected the California Assembly in 1994, there was a Republican majority for the first time in 20 years, part of the enthusiasm stoked up by that charming Newt Gingrich’s strategy for supporting Republicans for state offices. Kuehl:
“The Republican majority was quite a different kind of Republican, not a moderate, not a Rockefeller Republican. They were primarily Bible-thumpers and very right-wing. So, it was not the most welcoming Republican group, but they loved Zelda Gilroy, and it was very difficult for them because they already liked me so much. To their surprise, we all got along very well. The Republicans were pretty horrible about LGBT stuff. They said stuff like, ‘Well, they’re all spawn of the devil, oh, but not you, Sheila.”
After three terms in the Assembly, she was elected to the California State Senate in 2000, becoming the first openly gay person elected to the State Senate. She was re-elected in 2004, winning 66% of the vote. She was considered to be one of the smartest members of the California Legislature.
In 2002, Kuehl co-authored The Civil Marriage Protection Act that defined marriage as a civil contract between two persons. The bill passed in the state legislature, the first time a state legislative body in the USA voted to approve Marriage Equality. The bill was vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In 2004, Kuehl authored and help pass Senate Bill 1234, that protects Californians from hate crimes based on a victims’ actual or perceived disability, gender, nationality, race or ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation. It also protected undocumented immigrants from deportation due to reporting hate crimes. She sponsored a bill in 2006 to prohibit any school district in California from using instructional material that discriminates against anyone based on their gender or sexual orientation.
In the 2014 election, she became the first openly LGBT member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Because of term limits, Kuehl will be out of job in 2026 and she says:
“I suppose if I get termed out, I’ll be fairly elderly but still able to do things, and then I guess my ambition would be to be to return to acting and be the next Betty White for a couple of years.”
Along with Nancy Culp’s Miss Jane Hathaway from The Beverly Hillbillies (1962-1971), Zelda was a favorite of mine when I was an 8-year-old viewer, because even then, I liked my girls to be more like boys. I am proud to know that Kuehl would become better known for her legislation that protects students from anti-gay harassment and discrimination in California’s schools.
“I am very proud of the fact that I wasn’t too frightened to run for office as a gay person. You imagine people making anonymous phone calls in the middle of the night to tell you you’re a horrible person, or imagine getting spat at. It’s the same thing people go through about coming out. But it turns out to be much better than you expect.”
The post #BornThisDay: Politician, Sheila Kuehl appeared first on The WOW Report.
Adore Delano, 2014
