queer silicon valley team – Page 3

JR Fruen

July 16, 2023December 9, 2022 by queer silicon valley team

Cupertino City Council (2023-present)

Cindy Weintraub

April 25, 2022April 22, 2022 by queer silicon valley team

Silicon Valley/San Francisco LGBTQ Employee Resource Group Alliance founder Cindy Weintraub moved to Santa Clara from her hometown of Brooklyn, New York in 1979, seeking a place where she and her girlfriend could live together without fear of reprisal.

At the time, Cindy didn’t know anyone in California. She had a few referrals from her former boss at TelePrompTer Corp. in Manhattan. It was the height of the tech boom in Silicon Valley, and everyone was trying to move to San Jose. Cindy and her college sweetheart lived in a Santa Clara Motel 6 until she was able to get a job in the budding cable industry.

Working in the entertainment industry came with many perks. Cindy attended the MTV awards, met Cher and Madonna, saw Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, and Whoopi Goldberg perform in Comedy Relief specials, and dined with the stars in Los Angeles, but her girlfriend never accompanied her. Even in California, thousands of miles from her parents, Cindy remained in the closet.

One day in 1986, her girlfriend of 10 years packed up all of her things and left. A few months before, she had encouraged Cindy to join the women’s group at the Billy DeFrank Center, and Cindy is forever grateful she did. “I was very depressed, being so isolated. Nobody knew I was gay, so I couldn’t say anything about my girlfriend. It was a terrible time for me.”

The night her girlfriend left, Cindy went out to the clubs and met up with a woman she knew from the Billy DeFrank group. Cindy told her what had happened and how she was still not out.

The woman said, “I will come over on Thursday and bring my guitar and some wine and you can talk to me.”

“That Thursday was the first night I was able to sleep in a week,” Cindy recalled.

She credits the Billy DeFrank Center and the community she found there with saving her life.

“I always felt that if there was a way I could help the Billy DeFrank Center, I would.”

In the late 90s, Cindy was recruited to work for Cisco, who later asked her to start their local Pride Employee Resource Group. Cindy had never officially come out at work, but she figured some Cisco employees must have seen her at a recent Billy DeFrank gala.

She and five gay men in the company joined her on the Cisco Pride ERG leadership team, and in 2008, Cindy got her chance to give back to the organization that had saved her all those years ago.

That year, the San Jose Mercury News reported that the Billy DeFrank Center was going to close due to a lack of funds. At the time, the Center was the only symbol of gay life in Silicon Valley.

Determined to keep the doors open, Cindy’s group and other local tech company LGBT ERGs joined forces and hosted a movie fundraiser at a screening of MILK. With the generous support of the gay-owned Hobee’s Restaurants, the event raised $7,000 to keep the Billy DeFrank Center afloat.

That fundraiser marked the first annual Silicon Valley/San Francisco LGBTQ ERG Alliance event, which has since included 8 more Hollywood movies, Hamilton in drag, a COVID-friendly drive-in movie night, and an incredible 12^th Anniversary variety show featuring stars from Opera San Jose, Bay Area Symphony, SF Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band, and drag countertenor and MC. By 2022, the Alliance had raised close to $250,000 to ensure the health and vitality of the Billy DeFrank LGBTQ+ Community Center for years to come.

Outside of the annual fundraiser, the Alliance’s ERGs, now representing over fifty blue chip, tech, and cutting-edge companies, have produced over 150 LGBTQ educational and uplifting programs for their members. During their monthly meetings, progressive LGBTQ employee policies are shared so that other members can leverage them to drive more inclusive environments. The Alliance also influences political change. In 2014, the group was instrumental in fighting the anti-trans public restroom bills in North Carolina.

After the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) got 80 business leaders to sign a letter to the governor saying they would refuse to do business in North Carolina if the bill passed, Cindy and the Alliance team reviewed the letter to see who was missing. At the time, Cindy was working at HP and CEO Meg Whitman had not signed that letter. Cindy encouraged other Alliance members to speak to their companies if their leaders weren’t on the list. She called the head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to tell them it was critical that Whitman sign on behalf of HP. Within 24 hours, Cindy heard back that HP had joined the other executives on the list.

The bills were overturned, demonstrating the power of Fortune 500 companies and their Pride ERG groups.

Most, if not all of the companies in the Alliance are international, so their impact extends far beyond the Bay Area.

Despite her position as founder and executive director of the Silicon Valley/San Francisco LGBTQ ERG Alliance, Cindy has never officially come out at work. In fact, she hasn’t explicitly come out to many people.

“The times I told people one-on-one, that was the end of our friendship. Maybe it wasn’t as accepted at the time, or maybe I just don’t know the right people.”

Even when her mother and father visited her and her girlfriend from New York, they weren’t aware of Cindy’s relationship. It took an intense therapeutic experience at a seminar called The Landmark Forum for Cindy to finally come out to her parents.

The Forum was all about “getting honest with yourself and getting rid of the facade you live under.” In one exercise at the event, participants were asked to write to the most special person in their life and tell them about their experience at The Forum.

Cindy wrote to her dad and came out, telling him, “I want to be closer to you, and I don’t want to be lying to you anymore.”

In her letter, she wrote that she would call him that weekend, as she did every week.

When Cindy called that Saturday, the phone rang on and on before going to voicemail.

She called back the following day. Her mother picked up and asked about the weather.

Cindy was baffled. “Did you get my letter?” she asked.

Her mother passed the phone to her father, and as Cindy says, “That was the beginning of a beautiful, life-changing relationship. A real and authentic relationship.”

At first, Cindy’s parents were accepting to a degree, but then her father “totally fell in love” with her girlfriend. “She became another daughter to him and a favorite one — an integral part of the family.”

Currently, Cindy and the Alliance is working with HRC to determine how the organization can best support transgender people facing the rash of 2022 discriminatory bills in Texas and Florida legislatures. The goal is to continue encouraging their companies to use their economic power to support LGBTQ+ communities domestically and abroad.

“We want to get past just having a float in a once-a-year Pride parade. That’s great for, I don’t know…showing up in the media, but you need to have a greater, more serious impact and you can only do that in political circles when you present a large and united front.”

Dani Castro

April 4, 2022March 31, 2022 by queer silicon valley team

Dani Castro, MA, MFT started doing drag in San Jose and throughout the greater Bay Area at the age of thirteen with her father’s support. He snuck her into bars, where she realized she could “not only perform and empower herself” but also feel seen and accepted for the first time. “I wanted everyone to have that experience, but everyone around me was dropping dead from AIDS complications.”

Dani’s own father is an AIDS survivor. She poured every tip she made from her local performances into saving his life and the lives of others around her. She later joined the Imperial Royal Lion Monarchy and was Lady in Waiting for the Absolute Empress Patrice 23 and Absolute Emperor 23 Eddie Tavares of The Court of Glitz and Glamor.

As a trans adolescent, drag was all Dani had because the word “transgender” did not exist at the time. She had to turn to medical journals to try to piece together what she was experiencing. When Dani called the Billy DeFrank Center for help, they told her they didn’t have any resources for “transsexuals” but would write down her information. When activist Miss Major Griffin-Gracy came to speak at the Center, the staff passed Dani’s number onto her. Dani received a life-changing call from Miss Major when she was sixteen. Miss Major told her, “Honey, you’re not alone,” and recommended a book called My Story, a memoir by trailblazing trans model Caroline Cossey.

At the time, the psychology field recommended that transgender women like Dani live as cisgender women and “erase their pasts.”

“We burned pictures of us as children and we had ceremonies where we would do the strangest things in the name of transitioning.”

Dani’s own therapist walked her through a metaphorical “burial” for her penis. “It was so demeaning,” Dani recalled. “Honestly the system hasn’t progressed much, and we are still forced to jump through hoops to prove our identities to medical professionals. In my opinion that’s transphobia that’s infiltrated the medical industrial complex.”

“It was very complicated to make my way into blossoming into being myself. The struggle to exist was and still is very real.”

Dani, like many trans people in Santa Clara County, survived by engaging in the community whether or not she felt welcome. She volunteered on top of working full-time and set up the now-defunct TransPowerment program, primarily for transgender women of color and their partners. The 2002 murder of trans teen Gwen Araujo in Newark, California served as a wakeup call for much of her activism. Araujo was brutally killed at age 17 after men she had been intimate with discovered she was transgender. In one trial, a defendant used the “trans panic defense,” which was later banned along with other panic defenses in California courts in 2014. Dani recounted to her father David Castro Sr. as she watched the news horrified, “That could have and should have been me so many times. I have to do something to stop people from murdering and hurting us.”

Dani credits her work and survival to her “transcestors,” including the women of the Stonewall and Compton Cafeteria riots, and the Bay Area women she calls her “‘moms” like JoAnne Keatley originally a social worker for the Health Trust and Absolute Sovereign Dowager Empress Tiffany Woods of the TransVision healthcare clinic in Fremont. Of Woods, Dani said, “She looked out for me when the drag queens didn’t accept me.” Her father’s unconditional love and support were paramount as she navigated a transphobic world that didn’t want her alive – much less, empowered.

Dani noted that the DeFrank center didn’t recognize Transgender Day of Remembrance as part of their regular programming and her friend Shelly Prevost paid out of her own pocket to host the event. “It wouldn’t exist without her, but they made us pay in our own center!” The center later gave in to demands following a protest outside the DeFrank center lead by Dani. From that point forward the DeFrank center commemorates and honors all the lives lost to transphobic hate on November 20th as was intended by its founder Gwen Smith.

Today, Dani feels progress for transgender visibility, rights, and resources in Santa Clara County are not proportionate to the amount of advocacy trans people have initiated including the amount of trauma they have survived. “We laid the path for all of the queer community with literally our lives, blood, sweat, and tears, not just us, and for us to be at the bottom of the barrel today…we deserve far better.”

Most recently, Dani has been conducting a transgender needs assessment for the Office of LGBTQ+ Affairs. Through her surveys, she discovered many trans people are leaving Santa Clara County to get services in San Francisco, Fremont, and other parts of Alameda County because of the lack of resources and the transphobia experienced within existing organizations. There is currently only one clinic serving the trans population in Santa Clara County. “It’s a shame. We can and should do better here!”

Her hope is that the local LGBTQ+ youth will continue to recognize the work of their trans ancestors like Felicia Flames Elizondo, Therese Wannocott, Noriel Tejero, Claudia Medina, Jennifer Rodriguez and countless others to continue working for trans equality and parity here in Santa Clara County.

“I want transgender, nonbinary, intersex, and gender-expansive youth to know we are gifted, we are powerful, and we are here in this universe to spread love and understanding because we literally exist on a different level of consciousness from other people. We exist beyond the gender binary. That’s a gift that comes with a great responsibility, and all you have to do is live your life authentically.”

She hopes her pioneering legacy will help the Santa Clara County LGBTQ+ community move forward, together.

“Don’t ever, ever forget Dani Castro was here and Like Grandma Major said, ‘I’m still fucking here’. Even when I am gone, I’ll be here and you have my power and spirit to use in the work that you do.”

Judge Jessica Delgado

January 16, 2023January 3, 2022 by queer silicon valley team

In the third of a series, read about Santa Clara County’s newest LGBTQ member of the bench, Judge Jessica Delgado.

One of six LGBTQ+ judges in Santa Clara County, Jessica Delgado draws from her experience of being on her own at a young age and her intersectional identity as a queer Latina to handle cases with a nuanced and empathetic perspective.

Outed in high school in central Texas in the mid-eighties and rendered homeless, Delgado said she came into her queerness the only way that existed back then: through bars and soccer teams. In 1991, she and her girlfriend at the time decided they wanted to move to a place where they could be safe and out. They chose Santa Cruz.

With the encouragement of teacher and mentor Sam Marian, Delgado eventually went to Berkeley to study law after completing her bachelor’s degree through Cabrillo College and UC Santa Cruz.
Although Delgado swore she would never be in criminal defense, she became a public defender in Monterey County. In 2001, she joined Santa Clara County, where she worked as a deputy public defender for twenty years.

Former Santa Clara County Public Defender and now State Appellate Court Justice Mary Greenwood had told her that it is always important to re-examine your career, so in 2019 she thought it was time to think about a new thing. “I was deeply invested in public service, so being a judge seemed like another way in which I could continue to serve the community,” Delgado said.

As fate would have it, it was Governor Gavin Newsom who appointed her a judge in April 2021. Though they have never met, Delgado and Newsom have a connection that made his appointment of her that much more meaningful. When Newsom was mayor of San Francisco, he defiantly allowed gay marriages on February 12, 2004. It happened to be a court holiday, so she and her partner, along with other lesbian couples, rushed around and drove up to San Francisco to get married.

“Newsom’s action had a tremendous impact on us personally,” she said, “because we felt a sense of hope that our family finally might be recognized.”

Delgado’s marriage, along with all the others, was ruled invalid by the California Supreme Court, but Newsom’s bold move had given her hope. She and Diana, a public defender, have remained domestic partners and have a 16-year-old son.

Delgado felt it was very rewarding to have Newsom evaluate her as a judicial candidate. “To be fully out from the very beginning of the application process all the way through the interview—I felt like a whole person in the process,” she said. “I felt like all of the parts of me and all of the work that I had done over the years was all valued in a way I don’t think any official process had ever felt before. It was special for me to have someone appoint me who had given my family dignity.”
In her work as an out Latina judge, Delgado witnesses the impact of representation on a daily basis. “Just my being up there and who I am means something to the people who are in front of me. I see it all of the time. I see it in the Latinx community when I pronounce someone’s name correctly.”

Despite the neutrality required of judges, joining the bench has been an extremely personal process for Delgado.

“It’s a sacred relationship you have with the public. You should really be asked challenging questions about who you are and who you will be in that position. It’s like an autopsy of the soul, while you’re still awake and alive.”
The experiences of her youth-built resilience and a strong work ethic, and at the same time, gave her high expectations for herself and everyone around her. Delgado has had to learn to manage those expectations when sentencing young people in her courtroom.

“I remember what it was like to be that age and be completely on your own, and there’s a way in which bringing that perspective and that empathy is very powerful from now sitting in this position of deciding what is your sentence going to be, what discretion might I exercise? How can I include this context?”
Delgado brings that same understanding when it comes to racial equity and LGBTQ issues in the system, but she wasn’t always out at work. During her first ten years as a public defender, she worried her identity might harm a client’s case.

Although it has been over a decade since then, the landscape is still far from ideal. “It’s still a very heteronormative criminal justice system and justice system at large.”
Delgado also said she sees students of color struggle with the same challenges she faced as a law student almost thirty years ago.

Delgado works to foster inclusivity by using her intersectional identity to bridge worlds. “I like to bring a little queerness to the table when I’m in the Latinx world. And I like to bring a little bit of a discussion of race and equity when I’m in the LGBTQ world. I try to remind both of those groups that trans women of color should be our priority. They are the most vulnerable in our community and I believe that to be true in Santa Clara County as well.”

In the courtroom, Delgado announces her pronouns and uses gender-neutral phrasing in standard scripts. Outside of court, she has a special focus on mentoring transgender applicants. Currently, there is only one trans judge on the bench in California, and Delgado wants that to change.

“I have my own work to do around being affirming to my trans brothers and sisters. We have to have the capacity to have empathy and compassion for people who are different to be a good ally.”