Business Gals: But How’s Her Risotto?

In November, Darné and Weiss exchanged vows in a commitment ceremony held at a small church near the New Jersey–Pennsylvania border. By March, Darné hopes to get Weiss pregnant with her egg. They’ve already chosen the donor, from a Los Angeles bank. “It’s pretty healthy sperm,” says the diminutive publisher, who reports that Weiss is no Amazon, either. “He’s 6-foot-5.”

After the photo shoot, I follow Darné and Sigwart up to the San Vicente Boulevard offices of Growing Generations, a surrogacy agency catering to gay couples that just happens to also be — with 200 clients and 100 births — one of the largest surrogacy agencies in the world. We meet with Stuart Miller, a fair-haired, affable man in his 40s who blushes faintly when something moves him — things often do — and he explains that in the last five years, his world has changed. “It’s possible now to live that little dream of a home and a family and a white picket fence,” he says. “I was at a formal dinner party the other night, and out of 10 couples, half were parents. Five or 10 years ago the conversation would have been, ‘What are we doing politically?’ Now it’s ‘Which school are you trying to get your kids into?’”

Before we leave, Miller and Sigwart briefly confirm Growing Generations’ plans to buy a full-page ad in the next issue, expanding on the quarter-page that ran in the magazine’s holiday issue. “Up until now, we haven’t advertised a whole lot,” says Miller, “because —”

“Because,” Sigwart finishes as if on cue, “there hasn’t been any place for them to advertise.”

—Judith Lewis

Town Hall: And Justice for All

The La Mirada Holiday Inn sits just off the 5 freeway, a mile or so south of the billboard-sized LED display for the Santa Fe Springs Motor Home Center that blinks the command “God Bless Americans!” Saturday afternoon, in one of the hotel’s conference rooms, three representatives of the United States Department of Justice conducted a town-hall-style meeting at the request of several Muslim and Arab-American community organizations, including the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Arab-American Republican Club of Orange County. Johnny Williams, the western regional director of the INS, introduced himself to the audience of more than 100 people, most of them Middle Eastern, and confessed his eagerness to “listen to you . . . and to relieve some of the uneasiness that I know all of you have been going through these last few months.”

He began with a brief discussion of racial profiling. “The abuse of this term in the news media has been most unsettling,” Williams said. He defined racial profiling as singling out a given ethnic group for reasons “that have no connection to the crime being investigated.” For example, if a crime is committed in an all-white neighborhood and police arbitrarily stop and question all Asians, that’s racial profiling. But if a witness saw an Asian person commit the crime, “Officers may then go through Chinatown looking for people who meet that description.” Because “the heinous crimes of 9/11 were all committed by men from Middle Eastern countries with ties to al Qaeda,” Williams said, it is not racial profiling to concentrate on people from those countries. “It is following practical investigative leads . . . Let me say in closing, I truly care, and the INS cares.”

John Gordon, the sharp-jawed U.S. attorney for the central district of California, briefly introduced himself; the FBI’s Chicago-born Steve Steinhauser boasted that he was so dedicated to assuaging the fears of the community that he was willing to miss the Bears game. Then the three officials began to answer questions submitted by leaders of the community organizations with whom they shared the dais, and from audience members who were asked to write their questions on index cards. Discussing what he called “the 5,000 interview project” — the FBI’s “invitations” to 5,000 Middle Eastern men on temporary visas to come on in and get interrogated — Gordon reassured the crowd that “people are free, under United States law, to decline to be interviewed out in the street if they so choose” and promised that federal agents would behave in a “professional and, where appropriate, courteous way.

“The community also asks, ‘What is secret detention,’” Gordon continued. “There’s no such thing as secret detention.” He cited “confusion in the press” about the use of secret evidence in immigration courts (which he called “using classified evidence that is not disclosed to certain people,” such as, presumably, the defendant and his or her lawyer) and the attorney general’s refusal to release the names of those detained after September 11. Just as he was promising that “under no circumstances is the Department of Justice keeping incommunicado in secret detention facilities any detainees,” a man in the back shouted, “Would Nelson Mandela be a terrorist?”

After some deliberation, Gordon answered, “I’m sure the South African government considered him a terrorist,” to which another audience member exclaimed, “The illegal South African government!” Gordon bowed out, allowing that this “would be a dialogue that would have to be undertaken with the president, the secretary of state, the attorney general. I realize that different groups have different perspectives on who the terrorist is.”