Behind the Ballot with Scott Wiener, candidate for CA’s 11th Congressional District

By Lauren Toms

SAN FRANCISCO — At 6 foot, 7, Scott Wiener has always stood out in a crowd.

But the California state senator says it was a Muni ride nearly 30 years ago, and a moment emerging from the Castro Station into the sunlight that made him feel like he finally belonged.

“This was in 1997,” he tells CBS News Bay Area. “I came up at Castro station, and it was bright blue skies and warm and beautiful. And there were, like all these gay people walking around and just like a lot of very, very handsome gay guys, and so and I just, the energy was just tremendous. And I knew this is the neighborhood where I needed to be,” Wiener said.

Wiener grew up on the East Coast and moved west after law school, drawn to San Francisco, long known as a center of LGBTQ life and culture.

Now, he is running for Congress to succeed Nancy Pelosi, who first won her seat representing San Francisco in 1987, the same year Wiener says he was coming to terms with his own identity.

“Nancy Pelosi was elected to represent San Francisco in Congress in 1987, which is the same year that I, as a 17-year-old closeted gay kid, admitted to myself that I was gay,” Wiener said.

In the 1980s, Wiener says he was one of only two Jewish students in his high school class and was growing up during the height of the AIDS crisis, a time when Pelosi was pushing for increased federal funding to fight the epidemic.

“As a closeted gay teenager in the 1980s, when gay men were just dying, and we had a hostile federal government,” he said.

Today, after serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and now in the California State Senate, Wiener says he believes this is the moment to challenge what he describes as a federal government that has cut resources for LGBTQ communities.

Throughout his more than 20 years living in the Castro neighborhood, he finds time to enjoy the local businesses that helped shape his connection to the city.

“The cheese pastries right here — I guess they’re technically croissants. They’re really good. And also the strudels are really, really good. I’ve had more than my fair share,” he said of the sweet treats at Castro Tarts. 

Wiener says community and protecting what residents value about their neighborhoods has been the thread throughout his political career.

“When we talk about some of the contentious fights in San Francisco that we have, we have a lot of contentious fights San Francisco, so many of them boil down to, ‘We all love our neighborhoods and our community spaces and our small businesses and our neighbors so much, and we want to protect what we love about our communities,'” he said.

Walking down Castro Street today, Wiener says the neighborhood still represents something larger, a place where individuality is welcomed.

“This is a city where you can be who you are. You can be a little weird, and weird is a good thing. Here, we take people and accept people for who they are, and don’t try to force them to be a certain way. That’s the story of San Francisco.”

This story is part of “Behind the Ballot,” a series introducing voters to the people behind the campaigns in the race for California’s 11th Congressional District.