Son of former supe an open book

Novelist and poet Tom Schabarum says people had his dad all wrong.

Yes, former Supervisor Peter F. “Pete” Schabarum famously locked horns with the gay community in the mid-1980s over funding for the rapidly escalating AIDS epidemic. But, Tom says, he was not anti-gay, as the critics alleged.

The son says he should know. Twenty-two years ago, while walking along the beach with his father in San Diego, he shared a secret.

“I came out to him,” Tom Schabarum recalls. “We talked for many hours. And he was great. He was awesome. He basically said, ‘This is not going to change our relationship,’ but in fact it did. It made it really, really good.”

These days, Tom is far removed from quiet talks on the shoreline. With his 50th birthday approaching, he’s now a Seattle writer whose debut novel, “The Palisades”, has just been named a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, which recognizes gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) writing nationally. Last year, his poetry won the Creekwalker Poetry Prize, and this month, he completed a third work of fiction.

No, he laughs, none of it is subconsciously about his father. In fact, “The Palisades” began as an exploration of his relationship with his mother, Gerry, who died at 70 in 2007. He speaks several times a week to his beloved dad, who is now 82 and living near Palm Desert. He rarely discusses their relationship, he says, simply because for them, his coming out is “old news.”

“But I understand how it might come up,” he says, when asked. And for those who wonder how a gay son relates to a father whom gay activists once viewed as a public enemy, his response is ready: “My dad and I have always been great friends, and continue to be.”

Pete Schabarum was a Los Angeles County Supervisor for nearly two decades; a 640-acre wilderness park in the San Gabriel Valley is named after him. A real estate developer from Covina and one-time professional football player for the San Francisco 49ers, he was elected to the state assembly in 1966, then appointed by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1972 to fill the First District seat of the late Frank G. Bonelli.

His tenure was a time of immense social change in Los Angeles County. By 1980, Reagan was in the White House, and the elder Schabarum was part of a conservative board majority. Small government was the watchword, but profound challenges were testing the county. In 1985, as activists became increasingly militant in their calls for more AIDS prevention funding, the state’s AIDS advisory board accused L.A. County of dragging its feet on a public health crisis. From now on, the board said, the state should give its money directly to community AIDS organizations rather than trusting the county to control the purse strings.

Offended, Pete Schabarum took aim at some of those local organizations, and when he denounced one particularly explicit safe-sex brochure as “plain, hard-core pornography,” the remark, picked up in Time magazine, turned the supervisor himself into a target. Positions hardened, and in 1989, after an especially noisy demonstration by AIDS activists in the board chamber, he angrily told them: “If you were to poll the man in the street, I think you would find the vast majority of the public really has no interest in the subject of AIDS and certainly could care less about the public financing the needed programs that you have articulated.”

Such remarks, Tom Schabarum says, stemmed from outrage at the demonstrators, not from a lack of concern about AIDS. The younger Schabarum says 1989 was the year he came out, and the criticism “was a real bummer for me because I knew he wasn’t homophobic.”

Two years later, demographics eclipsed that battle. As pressure built in L.A. for more diverse representation, a court ordered redistricting gave Latinos a greater voice in the selection of a supervisor. As a result, Pete Schabarum retired from his First District seat and was succeeded by current Supervisor Gloria Molina.

“I think my dad was a politician for noble reasons,” says the younger Schabarum. “Whether he was conservative or liberal doesn’t make any difference—he wanted to do good.”

Growing up, he says, his father’s support was a given. When Tom, at 20, caught the photography bug, he says, his father never questioned his request to transfer from the University of Utah, where he was an English major. “I don’t know what my parents said to each other, but when I said, ‘Hey, Dad, I want to go to photography school, he just said, ‘Okay’.”

The younger Schabarum eventually earned a bachelor’s degree in cinematography from the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara and went to work for firms that stage live corporate events such as sales meetings and product launches. He is still a freelance creative director and producer with clients ranging from banks to major tech companies.

But writing remained a passion, and in the early 1990s, he says, he began his first novel, a family drama about a gay son and his vagabond mother in Big Sur.

“The book stemmed from wanting to connect with my own mother, but it’s not autobiographical at all—in fact my mother is not even in the book and Nicholas [the gay character] bears no resemblance whatsoever to me.”

He worked on it, he says, during a workshop taught by L.A. author and former USC instructor John Rechy, and when he finished after four years, “I put it in a drawer and started another novel.” That book, “The Narrows, Miles Deep,” depicted another family, this time during the AIDS crisis, and it went into the drawer, too.

“I was writing for myself—I never felt like I was writing to publish,” he says. In fact, “The Palisades” stayed in the drawer for 12 years, through a third novel, countless poems and an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College.

“But then I went through a midlife crisis or whatever, and decided that if I wanted to be viewed as a writer, I needed to put my work out there,” he says. One day, he described the manuscript to a writer friend in Seattle, and, on the friend’s advice, decided to test the waters by self-publishing on Kindle in the hope of attracting a mainstream publisher’s attention.

The result was the announcement last month that “The Palisades” has been named a finalist in the category of gay debut fiction. (The poem below is available in the upcoming issue of “Poet Lore” magazine.) “I’m finally coming out—as a writer,” he says, laughing.

“I have so many more stories to tell.” The awards will be presented May 26 in New York.

Posted 3/30/11