Policy changing after gay porn studio lauded
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San Francisco Chronicle
Policy changing after gay porn studio lauded
Mayor was unaware of proclamation, now wants oversight
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's administration will change its policy on issuing laudatory proclamations after a gay porn studio was honored last week without the mayor's knowledge, city officials said Friday.
Conservative activists and pundits nationwide belittled the city after Newsom's office declared Feb. 23 to be Colt Studio Day, honoring the 40th anniversary of a San Francisco movie company whose Web site invites visitors to "come inside to experience the hottest man-on-man action."
The official document, bearing Newsom's name, was presented by a representative of the Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Services to the company during its anniversary party. It said Colt Studio "has produced movies that have entertained the gay community over the past 40 years" and has contributed to the city by bringing in "hundreds of millions of dollars in business" and "stimulating the job market and the local economy in general."
Newsom's office issues nearly 2,000 proclamations a year, most covering such innocuous topics as Australian Heritage Day and Graffiti Watch Day. They are typically issued by the Neighborhood Services Office without the mayor or his top aides reviewing their content, which was the case with the document honoring the gay porn studio, Newsom's spokesman said Friday.
But in the wake of attacks by conservative media figures such as talk show host Bill O'Reilly -- who said the proclamation reinforced San Francisco's reputation as the nation's "Sodom and Gomorrah" -- Newsom has decided to change the policy and have any potentially controversial proclamation cleared by either his chief of staff or director of government affairs.
"If there are any questions about proclamations, they will be reviewed," said Newsom spokesman Nathan Ballard. "There's just going to be a stricter review process from now on."
Ballard stopped short of saying the administration had made a mistake in honoring Colt Studio, but said, "The mayor is concerned about it. And we've changed the policy to reflect that."
The proclamation was written by Neighborhood Services staffers after they learned state Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, and city Treasurer Jose Cisneros had issued similar commendations.
Neither of those elected officials expressed regrets Friday.
Leno attended the company's anniversary party Feb. 23 and publicly thanked Colt Studio for producing images he said contributed to his development as a gay man. On Friday, he issued a statement saying Colt produces "adult, gay, male home entertainment."
"The owners of the studio are taxpaying, law-abiding San Francisco employers who promote safe sex," Leno said. "With a war out of control and the planet's temperature rising, I would have hoped Bill O'Reilly had more pressing issues to discuss. Clearly, with his viewership currently plummeting, he thinks denigrating gay male entertainment will be his lifeline."
Cisneros, who sent a representative to the anniversary party, said Friday that issuing a proclamation to Colt Studio "was fine. We acknowledged a business that has been in business for a long time."
But the Anaheim-based Traditional Values Coalition sees it differently. The group issued a statement Thursday condemning Newsom and the other officials for honoring what it called "one of the largest producers of explicit homosexual porn in the country."
"San Francisco has proven yet again why they remain the mocked city of the country," the Rev. Lou Sheldon, the group's chairman and founder, said in a statement. "No other major city in the nation has gone so far as to blatantly glorify a homosexual porn producer and company."
O'Reilly also chastised city officials Tuesday during his show "The O'Reilly Factor."
"There is not another city in the country that has ever had a 'gay porn day,' '' he said. "And you wonder why San Francisco values is mocked and your city is mocked and it's looked upon as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah."
This is the second time in recent months that the pornography business in the city has been in the news. In December, the online porn company Kink.com bought the old armory on Mission Street, where it now films X-rated bondage videos. Neighborhood activists called the company's presence inappropriate, and Newsom took their side.
San Francisco has the reputation of being the world headquarters of the gay adult entertainment industry. Last weekend, the industry held the GAYVN Awards -- the Oscars for the gay porn industry -- at the Castro Theatre.
John Rutherford, Colt's president and creative director, did not return calls for comment Friday, but said in an e-mail that he appreciated everyone who attended the company's anniversary party.
Supervisor Bevan Dufty attended the porn industry award ceremony and fired back at the conservative critics, calling Colt "a classy company that has been a standard of male erotica for 40 years."
"Pick up a Colt 40-year anniversary book and look at it," Dufty said. "It's a throwback to the 1950s muscle pictorial. By (the critics') standards, they'd probably go after Michelangelo's David."
