Dixon confronts a Trump trickle-down after vice mayor’s antigay comments

Ted Hickman (right) and wife Linda Hickman relax with their dogs Toto (center) and Lady (right) at their home in Dixon, California, on Monday, Aug. 20, 2018. Ted Hickman (right) and wife Linda Hickman relax with their dogs Toto (center) and Lady (right) at their home in Dixon, California, on Monday, Aug. 20, 2018. Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Dixon confronts a Trump trickle-down after vice mayor’s antigay comments 1 / 7 Back to Gallery

UPDATE: Dixon City Councilman and Vice Mayor Ted Hickman was voted out of office on Nov. 6, defeated by challenger Jim Ernest in a landslide. Ernest received 73 percent of the votes.

Thom Bogue asked several dozen stone-faced residents in the City Hall chambers whether they wanted to make a comment, but the mayor of Dixon in northern Solano County was met with jarring silence. Unlike during the past several City Council meetings, when people stormed to the podium and expressed anger and disappointment, Bogue and his colleagues were met with a hushed protest.

One woman wore a rainbow T-shirt bearing the words, “Love has no labels.” Another woman gripped a rainbow flag. More than a few people stayed seated while wearing red to signify their support for gay marriage and gender equality.

The demonstration at last month’s council meeting was the latest action Dixon residents have taken in opposing Ted Hickman, the town’s vice mayor, who declared in his weekly newspaper column over the summer that July should become Straight Pride American Month, or SPAM. He also referred to gay men as “tinkerbells” and “fairies.”

The column, published in a polarizing community newspaper, jolted many in the nearly 20,000-person bedroom community, which sits at what may be the farthest reach of the Bay Area, between Vacaville and Davis on Interstate 80. Some Dixonites who rarely gave much thought to local politics or the makeup of the City Council have been inspired to engage for the first time, if only to join in an effort to oust Hickman from office.

But as neighbors take sides — most, it seems, in opposition to the vice mayor’s views — Hickman has dug in his heels, demanding respect for his First Amendment rights. And the people of Dixon have adjusted to their place in a new arena of American politics, in which the quest for equal rights has often been confronted by elected officials who embrace being “politically incorrect.”

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle Ted Hickman (right) and wife Linda Hickman play with their dogs...

Five hours before last month’s council meeting, Hickman stood behind the screen door of his home as his two little dogs, Toto and Lady, barked behind him.

“I heard there was going to be another lynching tonight,” he said.

The episode in Dixon is a sign of the times, according to some residents, as the divisive rhetoric of American politics trickles down from President Trump and reverberates through the nation, even in the largely progressive Bay Area.

The town, which sends commuters northeast to Sacramento and southwest to the Bay Area, is laden with fields of sunflowers and grasslands fried brown by summer heat. Walmart supplies most families’ groceries, and the city’s most notable landmark is the Milk Farm Restaurant sign along I-80, which still depicts a cow leaping over a crescent moon more than three decades after the eatery’s demise.

Fruit stands selling watermelon, sweet corn and grapes dot the roadways adjacent to the highway. Dinner out often means a stop by Cattlemen’s, the steak house chain.

Politically, the city is closely split, with 37.8 percent of voters registered Democrat and 32.5 percent registered Republican. Hillary Clinton won 3,642 votes to Trump’s 3,250 in the 2016 election.

But the political tenor has changed in Dixon. Since Hickman wrote his column, people have flooded into City Council meetings and called for him to resign or be stripped of his vice mayor title. In July, residents organized an LGBT pride celebration in town — the first of its kind — in response to Hickman’s words.

Among those who attended the event was Teresa Wilkinson, 52, who moved to Dixon in November and lives in Hickman’s council district. She identifies as a bisexual who’s in a monogamous marriage with a heterosexual man, and she has a 25-year-old gay stepson and 22-year-old bisexual daughter.

Hickman’s column dredged up fear and sorrow from when Wilkinson was 18 and hadn’t yet come out to her family, she said.

“Fear kept me from speaking my truth,” she said. “The consequences were dramatic. Ted Hickman’s words brought up all that fear. Had I put my children at risk by encouraging them to live their truth? Were we living in a community where harm may come to us?”

She plans to vote against Hickman in November and posted photos on social media of a homemade sign saying he violated the city’s ethics code, which states that council members must treat all members of the public with “civility.”

“I deserve better,” Wilkinson wrote.

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle Dixon resident Ian Arnold stands for a portrait holding a sign...

Ian Arnold, who has lived in Dixon since 2003, said the biggest problem with the anti-LGBT comments in Hickman’s column was that he included his vice mayor title while disparaging a community of people.

“Dixon is not as conservative or crazy as you might think if you just see those articles,” the 54-year-old said. “The biggest problem in Dixon ... (is) the vast majority of us don’t know what’s going on in our own town, because we don’t pay attention to local politics.”

Arnold also attended the pride celebration, where he enjoyed food truck fare and listened to a local pastor speak about why “God loves everybody regardless of who they love and why City Council members should stay out of that.”

The last time anyone got riled up about city politics in Dixon was more than a decade ago, said Jim Ernest, the 66-year-old owner of Ramtown Karate, a self-defense school for children. When the city considered building a horse track in 2006, Dixonites expressed outrage and squashed the plans in a citywide vote because of environmental concerns.

The attention on Hickman’s column is “embarrassing,” said Ernest, who moved to Dixon in 1978 and is challenging Hickman in November’s election. “Is there bigotry in Dixon? I’ve never thought that. Maybe it’s a discussion of the times.”

On a recent day, the windows of businesses sprinkled through downtown, including the Mexican restaurant Taqueria Adelina, featured a common sign: “We Welcome All Races, Religions, Countries of Origin, Sexual Orientations, Genders. You Are Safe Here. We Stand With You!”

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle Waitress Atzimba Bocanegra whose grandparents own Taqueria Adelina...

Around the corner, the florist, printing shop and language center displayed the same sign.

In response to the public outcry against Hickman, the City Council passed a resolution Aug. 14 disapproving of the vice mayor’s comments. Hickman responded, “Do I have to run all of my columns by this council from now on?”

For some residents, though, the resolution didn’t go far enough because Mayor Bogue rejected a key component: hanging the sign seen across town at City Hall. The mayor argued that the sign needed to be amended. He didn’t feel comfortable welcoming “everyone” into the community.

“I don’t welcome hateful people,” Bogue told The Chronicle. “I don’t welcome pedophiles, active criminals. I don’t welcome those practicing Shariah (Islamic) law. ... They have the right to kill their wives, kill their children.”

A report published last year by UC Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society concluded that a push toward anti-sharia laws in the United States was based on unfounded fears and “part of the more organized, contemporary Islamophobia movement.”

Bogue’s desire to keep sharia law out of Dixon, he said, stemmed from reports he watched on Fox News. The mayor, who runs an auto repair shop in town, declined to take a position on whether Hickman should be booted from office for his positions.

The vice mayor of Dixon wrote his much-discussed column after he switched on his television June 24 and saw men dressed in leather chaps dancing on multicolored floats through the streets of San Francisco. It was the annual Gay Pride Parade.

Sitting in his home 65 miles northeast of the city, Hickman — who has alabaster cropped hair, a matching white handlebar mustache and piercing blue eyes — worried that the “offensive” behavior shown at pride celebrations would become people’s perception of all of California.

Five days later, the 74-year-old raised his concerns in what he described to The Chronicle as a “tongue-in-cheek” and “satirical” column published in the Independent Voice, a weekly newspaper published by Dave Scholl, who prints 4,500 issues and delivers them himself.

“We ARE different from them,” Hickman wrote. “We work, have families, (and babies we make) enjoy and love the company (and marriage) of the opposite sex and don’t flaunt our differences dressing up like faries [sic] and prancing by the thousands in a parade in nearby San Francisco to be televised all over the world.”

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle Ted Hickman the Vice Mayor of Dixon stands for a portrait outside...

Scholl said he always reads columns before publishing them.

“He puts jokes in there that are so funny,” Scholl said. “He calls them ‘spitters.’ You just can’t help but laugh out loud. Once in a while I will take some out mostly for space. If it’s a little bit too risque I’ll take it out, because we try to be as much of a family newspaper as possible.”

Since the piece appeared, some residents said they filed a formal request to stop receiving the paper. They were also upset by columnist Mike Ceremello, who referred to critics as the “Gaystapo,” a reference to the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police.

Hickman told The Chronicle he stands by his weekly column, which he first penned in the 1960s and titles That’s Life.

“There was no malice in what I wrote. It was straight fact,” Hickman said. “Pretty doubtful I’m going to change my way of doing things or my writing style for a couple of people that are unhappy about a couple of words.”

Hickman, who said he was an editor for the now-three-day-a-week Dixon Tribune at the age of 21 in 1966, said he’s dedicated his life to the city. In the 1960s, he said, he spent his 22nd birthday undercover, posing as a 17-year-old runaway at a juvenile detention center in Solano County to document abuses against youth.

He has organized a Christmas program in town for 50 years that gives free gifts to children in need. Now, he said, he’s being “crucified.”

Ian Arnold and several other residents said they never subscribed to the Independent Voice — and that it took multiple attempts to unsubscribe.

“I use it to light my barbecue grill,” Arnold said.

After hearing complaints about the paper continuing to show up in driveways, the city passed an ordinance to fine Scholl when he delivers to unsubscribed residents.

After two years on the Dixon Planning Commission, Jim Ernest had been toying with the idea of running for City Council. But he wasn’t sure until he read Hickman’s controversial column. On July 16, he took to Facebook and announced he was running to unseat the vice mayor.

“Bullying is not acceptable,” Ernest wrote. “Not in cyber form, not in verbal form, not even when published in a newspaper wrapped in a package of free speech.”

Hickman’s words hit Ernest hard, he said, because he was once bullied when he skipped sixth grade and experienced “vicious ridicule” as a boy. Now, through his karate school, he visits schools in town to discourage bullying and teach respect.

Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle A handful of people wore red shirts to the Dixon City Council...

Hickman said he isn’t deterred by those who have voiced support for Ernest and plans to campaign for re-election. If anything, he said, the uproar from residents made the decision to run again a no-brainer.

“Even at this age,” he said, “you don’t want to back me into a corner.”

After Dixon’s last City Council meeting, Hickman reacted little to the silent protest. Instead, he offered a resident a portion of the 400 pounds of elk meat he had brought home from a recent hunting trip.

He reminisced over the early days of his column, when a colleague once advised him that to be successful he could only “piss off” half the town in any given week. But never the entire town at once.

“I didn’t listen,” Hickman chuckled.

Sarah Ravani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sravani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SarRavani