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remind somebody else to pass a joint, you lose your own turn.” Since Bogart and Lauren Bacall were a classic Hollywood couple, I was inspired by that snippet of dialogue to say, “Don’ t bacall that joint.”

4. Intuitively, I was an advocate of equal rights and opportunities for both genders long before Women’ s Liberation became a movement. In 1959, I wrote, “From a completely idealistic viewpoint, classified ads for jobs should not have separate Male and Female classifications, with exceptions such as a wet-nurse.” In 1964, that practice became illegal. Masturbation was a powerful taboo for females, a subdivision of the war on pleasure, while it was somehow expected of males. But if it was okay for guys to jack-off, I wrote in a media fable, Tales of Tongue Fu, in 1974, then it was also okay for girls to jill-off.

5. In 1979, I covered for a weekly alternative paper the trial of ex-cop Dan White for the double execution of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the gay equivalent of Martin Luther King. In a surprise move, homophobic White’ s defense team presented a bio-chemical explanation of his behavior, blaming it on compulsive gobbling down of sugar-filled junk-food snacks. This was a purely accidental tactic. Dale Metcalf, an attorney, told me how he happened to be playing chess with one of White’ s attorneys, Steven Scherr.

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