Mark Tonai arrived for work on Saturday ready to have a good time.
And why not? How tough can it be to drive a fire engine in a parade?
It's a good question, one that a jury may someday answer.
Recall that the last fire crew to appear in San Diego's gay pride parade sued the city, seeking $3 million for its suffering. The four men assigned to join the caravan through Hillcrest and Uptown claimed that parade-goers harassed, demeaned and offended them.
That lawsuit is moving slowly, in part because City Attorney Michael Aguirre wants to compel the offended firefighters to answer his questions about selected images from Playboy, something their attorney doesn't want them to do.
I'll return to that later.
First, the parade must go on.
Tonai, a 17-year fire department veteran, signed up to ride in the 2008 gay pride parade under the city's all-volunteer parade policy, which San Diego Fire-Rescue Chief Tracy Jarman instituted in response to the 2007 controversy.
“A whole bunch of people wanted to do this,” Tonai told me.
But on parade day many of them were off battling wildfires up north, and the job went to Tonai and three female colleagues.
Tonai, who is 42 and an engineer, is gay. I asked him about the rest of the crew. “One is, one isn't, and the other” – he thought for a second – “I don't know.”
That seemed appropriate: Someone from every group.
Plus, a columnist in a straw hat. As Tonai pulled the fire engine onto the parade route, I walked alongside to take in the experience.
Like lawsuits, parades move slowly – this one averaged about 3 mph – and for the next 60 minutes I heard everything Tonai heard from the boisterous crowd, which was estimated at 150,000 and clearly composed of every sexual orientation.
I'd say 99 percent of what we heard was enthusiastic cheering or requests that Tonai blast the horn. Firefighters are much loved in this fire-weary town, I learned, and so are loud horns.
The firefighters who rode in last year's parade reported that they were deluged with sexually charged comments. Some of them came from the parade review stands, and many involved crude fire-hose imagery.
Knowing I wouldn't hear anything crass from the review stands' announcers, I instead listened closely to the crowd.
Minutes into the parade, a man yelled: “Work those hoses, boys!”
Shortly after that, a woman shouted: “Don't sue us!”
That was the extent of the off-the-wall audience participation – not counting scattered requests to see a Dalmatian.
Later I met up with Tonai outside the Hillcrest fire station, where we watched the rest of the parade pass by.
He was still buzzing from the experience.
“I got two date offers,” he reported, looking at his text messages.
I asked him what he thought of his parade duty.
“The crowd response was just awesome,” Tonai said. “To me, it justifies what I do. There's definitely nothing negative about this event.”
I asked about the lone wise guy, the man who shouted, “Work those hoses, boys!”
“That's not offensive,” Tonai said, noting that he heard none of the more descriptive catcalls alleged in the lawsuit.
But he said it would be wrong to compare this year's crowd with last year's.
“I don't know if it was any different. We weren't here to see it,” he said, choosing his words with care. “It's a daytime Mardi Gras to me, and Mardi Gras isn't offensive to anyone.”
The exceptions to that sentiment were a few yards away from the fire station: seven middle-aged men, one with a bullhorn, the others holding anti-gay placards. They stood side by side in the designated protest area, shielded by five police officers on horseback.
The man on the bullhorn was tireless, peppering the crowd with biblical warnings of doom as well as the sort of generalized insults you might hear from a nightclub heckler.
“You are miserable. You are miserable. You are miserable,” he chanted, making his case that the term “gay” is inaccurate. But the festive crowd wasn't buying it for a minute, walking past with no reaction.
Having determined that Chief Jarman's all-volunteer parade policy was doing the trick, I next checked on the progress of the lawsuit brought last year by the offended firefighters.
That's when I learned about Aguirre's effort to convince the state Supreme Court that the plaintiffs' reading habits are relevant to the case.
Aguirre, having learned that one of the firefighters subscribes to Playboy and brought copies to the station house, wants to question them about the magazine's racy photos and cartoons.
He contends the firefighters can't plausibly claim they were subjected to workplace harassment from sexually explicit behavior at the parade when they voluntarily view sexually explicit materials on the job.
It's a novel argument, and one that the firefighters' attorney, Charles LiMandri, has easily thwarted by arguing that a station house is a firefighter's home, and what happens there is private.
In one regard, however, Aguirre holds a small edge.
The firefighters' lawsuit contained 26 pages of photographs purportedly portraying “explicit and offensive sexual remarks and gestures” from the 2007 parade.
The city trumped that in a brief that contains 36 pages of “sexually explicit” images from six recent issues of Playboy.
Like the parade, this case has something for everybody.
Gerry Braun:
(619) 542-4563; gerry.braun@uniontrib.com
