“Luck is believing you’re lucky.” Tennessee Williams
NEWS BRIEFS P7
MARCH 2024 VOLUME 4 ISSUE 35
LGBTQSD.NEWS
>>> NEWS P40
Talk of the town
>>> THEATER P12 (l to r) George Biagi, Gilberto Mercado, and Jeri Dilno, taken on Sept. 16, 2016, on her 80th birthday. (Photo courtesy George Biagi)
‘Thank you, Jeri’ Jeri Dilno’s astounding legacy will live on By Morgan M. Hurley and the San Diego LGBT Community
Idina Menzel shines
>>> DINING P13
Local LGBTQ community icon, Jerelyn “Jeri” Dilno, passed away peacefully on Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, 2024, surrounded by many of her chosen family. Following news of her passing, social media was ablaze with memories, historical and more recent photos, and loving, cherished attributes and stories of her decades of connections to so many.
Jeri was a true San Diegan, graduating from both Point Loma High School and San Diego State and after a short stint in the military – and then starting her activism in Pennsylvania – she returned to live out her life here in the city and LGBT community she loved. She was even one of the very first See JERI page 2
An interview with the producer of ‘Rustin’
Bruce Cohen honored in San Diego for a lifetime of contributions By Morgan M. Hurley
Some cheeky pizza
> INTERVIEW P15
Dan Levy’s grief explained
CONTACT US 619 61 9- 432-LG BT sales@lgbtqsd.news editor@lgbtqsd.news editor@lgbtqsd .news
On Wednesday, Feb. 28, the San Diego City Council Chambers hosted the Bayard Rustin Honors. Founded by Nicole Murray Ramirez and local Latina activist Carolina Ramos in 2018, the annual event was established to celebrate the life of Bayard Rustin and Black History Month. To date, all honorees have been African American, but this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award is being presented to openly gay Academy Awardwinning producer (Milk, American Beauty, Silver Linings Playbook) Bruce Cohen, who also co-produced the recent award-winning “Rustin,” a film about civil rights and LGBT icon, Bayard Rustin. Cohen will be presented the lifetime achievement honor by California’s Secretary of State Shirley Weber. Other honorees this year include National City’s Vice Mayor Marcus Bush, City of San Diego’s Chief of Race and Equity Kim Desmond, educator Myesha Jackson, transgender activist Tracie Jada O’Brien, Black Panther (San Diego Chapter) Henry Wallace, and Deputy District Attorney Dwain Woodley. National Black civil rights activist Mandy Carter of South Carolina will be a special guest speaker, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Choir of San Diego
will be featured, and Mayor Todd Gloria will also be in attendance. Rustin, who was arrested nearly two dozen times for his civil rights activism in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, was a mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King, and helped organize the March on Washington in 1963. In August of 2013, President Barack Obama presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rustin (posthumously, as Rustin passed away in 1987), in honor of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. Rustin’s lifelong partner, Walter Naegle, accepted the award on Rustin’s behalf later that year at a White House ceremony. It was then Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground, which they launched post-presidency, that co-produced the Rustin film with Cohen. The film’s star, openly gay actor Colman Domingo, is up for an Academy Award for his performance as Rustin. LGBTQ San Diego County News interviewed Cohen; we talked about the film and his upcoming trip to San Diego. (Morgan Hurley) As many say, telling Rustin’s story was long overdue. How and what made you get involved in telling it? (Bruce Cohen) I had seen “Brother Outsider,” a terrific documentary about Bayard in
(l to r) California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Bruce Cohen after she presented him with the Bayard Rustin Honors Lifetime Achievement Award, Feb. 28, at San Diego City Council Chambers..(Photo by Bob Lehman)
the 1990s, so he had been on my radar as an LGBTQ icon who was in danger of being lost to history and deserved his due. Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black, whom I had worked with on “Milk,” were working on a script about him and when Lance sent it to me, I absolutely loved it and told him I would be honored to try and help shepherd it to the screen. Why do you think it took so long to get his story told? (Cohen) Getting stories told about characters from underrepresented communities is always harder than it should be
and Bayard was both black and openly gay! But Hollywood has been making a concerted effort of late to present more of these stories to audiences – who are craving them, by the way – and that helped a long overdue movie about Bayard finally get made. What was it like to work with the Obamas? (Cohen) Working with the Obamas was one of the great thrills of my producing career. The movie would not have gotten made without their
See RUSTIN page 5