When is a kite just a kite?

Homophobic jab or innocent flier?

That was the question everyone was asking last week, when the red-hot Chico City Council race got its equivalent of a John Kerry botched-joke kerfuffle—in this case occasioned by a flier mailed out by the conservative Hooker Oak Alliance that Mayor Scott Gruendl and others took to be a homophobic smear.

The dust-up began in the KPAY radio newsroom Friday (Nov. 3), when reporter Matt Ray and several of his colleagues were sitting around jawing about mud-slinging in the local campaigns. Someone held up the flier, which features a photo showing a child who’s climbed on the gate to the hotly contested Bidwell Ranch property and is gazing out at the land. He’s holding a rainbow-colored kite. A sign on the gate says, “No Trespassing.” Above him a line reads: “The cost of bad leadership…"—which is followed below the photo by “Chico’s City Council majority is taking us down the wrong path.”

The flier was sent on behalf of the conservative council slate of Dan Herbert, Mark Sorensen and Michael Dailey.

Ray said his group was of mixed opinions about the flier. Some took the kite to be a reference to the Gay Pride rainbow colors and the flier to be a reminder that Gruendl, a member of the council majority, is gay. Others saw nothing homophobic about it.

So Ray called Gruendl. “Do you think the flier has homophobic undertones?” he asked.

As it turned out, Gruendl had been aware of the flier for a couple of weeks and had been concerned about it. Several people had called him with similar concerns, he said. But he’d made no effort to combat it. “I didn’t want my campaign to revolve around sexuality,” he explained. “If I had wanted this to be an issue, I would have brought it up two weeks earlier.”

Still, he answered Ray’s question: Yes, he thought the symbolism was pretty blatant.

Suddenly the news was everywhere, first on KPAY, then on local TV news and in the Enterprise-Record under the headline, “Mayor alleges PAC’s mailer is homophobic.”

The media, fired up by a spicy conflict, made the most of it. The TV stations played it at the top of their newscasts, and E-R reporter Jenn Klein contacted HOA member Alan Chamberlain, who dutifully declaimed, “We think it’s shameful for [Gruendl] to inject this into the game four days before the election.”

Nowhere in Klein’s article, nor in the TV reports, was it mentioned that the reason Gruendl made his comment was because a reporter asked him to do so.

The Hooker Oak folks denied any homophobic intentions and said they used the kite only because it was colorful. It was an innocent effort to show that people were being kept off city-owned land because of policies set by the council majority, they said.

The issue became the topic du jour in the local blogosphere, with several postings on former Councilman Dan Nguyen-Tan’s “Bullfight” blog addressing it and Chamberlain, a planning and design consultant who has emerged as a particularly thoughtful spokesman for local conservatives, discussing it on his “Dog’s Breakfast” blog.

One of the more revealing postings Nguyen-Tan passed along came from someone he identified as “a known businessman in our community” who was “listed online as a member of the Hooker Oak Alliance.” Warning that the posting contained “crude language,” Nguyen-Tan said he was publishing it only “to provide context as to why Gruendl and others might have reacted the way they did to the flier.”

“I just love this,” the businessman wrote. “…Scott is as close as you can get to John Kerry. … How to step on your own dick big time! I never knew his sexual preference before. How totally stupid of him to come out like this. Did you know that 75% of all gay guys were born that way? And the other 25% just got sucked into it!”

Nguyen’s comment: “Well, it appears at least one member [of HOA] has a knack for telling unfunny jokes about gays.”

For his part, Gruendl said that one has to understand the context to understand his reaction. The conservatives had been promoting themselves as “family values” candidates and picturing themselves with wives and children, sending out a “subliminal message,” he said, contrasting themselves to the three liberals, who are single or, in Gruendl’s case, living with a longtime partner.

When he saw the flier, with its line about “bad leadership” juxtaposed with the rainbow kite, he said, “my initial reaction was, ‘I’m a bad leader because I’m gay.’ “ A lifetime of being gay, he explained, made him sensitive to such things. And he was far from alone in responding that way, he added.

As Nguyen-Tan put it: “Is Gruendl overreacting? Possibly. But I haven’t walked in his shoes.”

Nor has Chamberlain, but that didn’t stop him from writing in his blog that for Gruendl, whom he calls “a friend and a colleague,” to conclude “that there is a homophobic agenda in [HOA’s] messaging is simply absurd thinking. Paranoia is a disorder.” He suggested Gruendl get “appropriate care to manage his anxieties” and mused that the mayor “may well have just snatched defeat from the jaws of certain victory.”

So much for prognostication. The kerfuffle went kerflooey, and Gruendl won handily.

Speaking a couple of days after the brouhaha had subsided, Gruendl said he was glad a discussion about symbols was occurring. Perhaps now, he suggested, people will understand how gay people feel about them.