Dowd: Demi in Des Moines?

Demi in Des Moines?
By Maureen Dowd

SAN FRANCISCO

California’s having an identity crisis.

Once the West Coast glowed with prosperity and was the harbinger of hip new things. Now it’s in the grip of recession and repression. California’s cool has been stolen by, of all places, Iowa.


White-bread, cornfed, understated Iowa was the first state to ratify the black rookie Barack Obama and has usurped the role everyone thought California would play as a leader in the fight to give gays the right to marry.

Now it’s flyover country that’s starting high-flying trends.

The mayor of Des Moines, Frank Cownie, called the San Francisco mayor, Gavin Newsom, to leave him a message about the Iowa Supreme Court decision.

“That caught me, candidly, by surprise, proverbially flat-footed,” Newsom said in an interview at City Hall. “It was around April 1st, so I thought, honestly, it was an April Fool’s joke.”

It seemed so topsy-turvy.

“It’s pretty extraordinary,” the Irish Catholic mayor said, in an office filled with Kennedy memorabilia and the ghosts of the Harvey Milk-George Moscone murders. “Now you have four states that are legally sanctioning same-sex marriage, and New York and California are not among them. Who could have predicted that?”

The Dream Factory is being left in the dust by the Field of Dreams.

Matt McCoy, an openly gay Iowa legislator, was so excited by the court’s unanimous decision that he posted a video inviting everyone, “gay and straight,” to come get married and settle in Iowa.

Max Mutchnick, the co-creator of “Will and Grace,” who married the entertainment lawyer Erik Hyman in Beverly Hills just days before Proposition 8 passed last November — theirs is among the 18,000 or so marriages now in legal limbo — was tickled by the idea of Iowa as the new California.

“Will we see David Geffen rollerblading in the Des Moines skywalk?” Mutchnick mused. “Will paparazzi chase after farmers looking for candid shots? Will Ashton and Demi be BlackBerrying friends from their corner table at Applebee’s? Will there be a new line of Kiehl’s products for goats?”

Mutchnick, who is raising twin girls with Hyman, frets that President Obama may be behind the country on this issue, and that the Obamas do not have enough gays around them.

“If more homosexuals were in the Obamas’ lives,” the writer said, “there is no way Michelle would have worn a twin set when she met the queen.”

Newsom is running for governor, even though his cause foundered, and he may have trouble wooing those blacks and Latinos who supported Prop 8. He doesn’t like the image of California reeling backward and “becoming the first state in U.S. history to use the Constitution to strip people’s rights away.”

The dashing mayor, now 41, was a pariah at the 2004 Democratic convention because some Democrats thought his operatic parade of gay marriages had helped W. and Karl Rove buzz the base and eke out a victory against John Kerry.

Over what he called a “Vitamin V” vodka at the St. Regis hotel here, Newsom’s predecessor, Willie Brown (who prefers Jerry Brown for governor and thinks Newsom should run for lieutenant governor) disputed this, laughing: “You think John Kerry lost because Gavin Newsom married people? No way! It was because he was on that sky-diving piece of equipment. Wind-surfacing. He was wind-surfacing all over the world.”

Newsom said he hasn’t sat down with Barney Frank, who warned the mayor to win approval in court before issuing marriage licenses, but that he had reconciled with Dianne Feinstein, who said Newsom had pushed the issue “too much, too fast, too soon.”

While he says he doesn’t like being a chew toy for Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly and the religious right, or getting ugly Twitter messages or obscene gestures from people at airports, he asserts that his brazen approach in 2004 made it harder for Democrats “to speak from both sides of their mouths to justify their position that separate is equal,” and caused a “softening” in discrimination.

“People watched and saw a human face,” he said. “They saw somebody who looked like their next-door neighbor and said, ‘That’s not the person with chaps in the big gay parade.’ ”

He said he has been rereading Martin Luther King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” and feels he needs to “do more, now and better.”

“If we didn’t do it in 2004, do you think the party would have wanted us to do it in 2006 during the midterm elections to take back Congress?” he said. “God forbid. 2008? Well, it’s another presidential year. And now people are saying 2010? That’s another critical year to hold Congress, and we’ve got statehouses across the nation. 2012? Another presidential year. 2014? Another Congressional year. Wait does almost always mean never. That was Dr. King’s point.”