Technological innovator and entrepreneur David C. Bohnett and fellow philanthropist Wallis Annenberg are friends, bridge-playing partners and art lovers. And now, only months after stepping down as Board Chair for the L.A. Philharmonic Association, on Nov. 18, Bohnett assumed the post of Board Chair for Annenberg’s Center for the Performing Arts, widely known as The Wallis. In only two theatrical seasons, The Wallis has already made a mark, winning five awards at the 2015 L.A. STAGE Alliance Ovation Awards, including one for Best Musical Production for Spring Awakening (now on Broadway) and top honor for Best Season.
“I look forward to working with the board and staff at The Wallis to help the organization realize its full potential,” says Bohnett. He wants to partner with other groups and expand the organization’s reach through streaming capabilities “to reach new audiences beyond our local borders, as well as continuing to fulfill our community responsibility through our education and outreach programs in underserved communities.”
As chair of the David Bohnett Foundation, Bohnett has given away more than $85 million, including for computers in the L.A. LGBT Center’s cyber center at The Village. Bohnett is on several boards, including the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Bohnett’s gift of $20 million to the Philharmonic was the second largest in the orchestra’s history. He is also credited with recruiting Gustavo Dudamel and extending the Venezuela-born conductor’s contract through the 2018-19 season.
Bohnett is also politically astute, helping establish a deep bench of future LGBT politicians through the LGBT leadership-fellows program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government—including Houston Mayor Annise Parker. Recently, the LGBT non-discrimination ordinance Parker championed was defeated by voters because of protections for transgender rights.
“Voters in Texas and elsewhere will eventually return to sanity and pass legislation to ensure equal protection for all,” Bohnett told me via email. “It’s very unfortunate that we need to spend money and time saving the ignorant segment of our population from themselves.”
Bohnett’s gay activism and emphasis on community engagement actually goes back before 1994 when he founded GeoCities, the innovative Internet gathering site that prefigured Facebook. Bohnett sold GeoCities to online giant Yahoo! for $3.6 billion in 1999.
GeoCitites was born out Bohnett’s profound grief after the death from AIDS of his beloved partner, Judge Rand Schrader (above). It was grief compounded by the isolation of being a closeted gay boy in his conservative family and hometown of Hinsdale, Illinois in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A computer nerd, he attended USC because they offered classes in computer science. Bohnett fell in love with a student from Notre Dame but the romance ended tragically when his lover hung himself out of Catholic guilt.
“He just couldn’t reconcile his religious beliefs with his homosexuality,” Bohnett told David Callahan for the book Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America. “And I just thought I’d do whatever I could to make sure that other people don’t go through this same tragedy.”
It was 1978 and the world was changing: Harvey Milk was elected in San Francisco, gays and their allies defeated the statewide Anita Bryant-inspired anti-gay Briggs Initiative—and then Milk was assassinated. Bohnett took his pain, anger and insight to the University of Michigan for graduate school, where he worked at the gay crisis hotline at the gay and lesbian center, now called the Spectrum Center.
“You could identify with that desperate voice on the other end who felt like he was all alone,” Bohnett, then 43, told Michael Kearns in 1999 for a story in the LA Weekly. “By listening, you could help somebody.” Bohnett compared the feeling of connection to “walking into a gay bar for the first time or attending a pride festival,” knowing “there are other people who are the same as I am.”
Heeding Milk’s call to come out and offer hope, the openly gay Midwesterner told freshman students in psychology classes, “I’m gay, ask me anything.”
In 1980, Bohnett graduated with an MBA in finance from Michigan University’s Ross School of Business and returned to Los Angeles where he got involved with the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, which had first seen the beginning of the AIDS crisis in their STD Clinic in 1979 and created the first local AIDS hotline that eventually became AIDS Project Los Angeles.
Bohnett’s MBA landed him a job at the accounting and consulting firm Arthur Andersen where social expectations made it “tough to evolve and succeed.” Deciding the cost of climbing the corporate ladder in the closet was too steep, he quit three years later—after meeting and falling in love with Rand Schrader, a 1973 graduate of the UCLA School of Law.
As a liberal law student, Schrader worked pro-bono helping gays who came to the new Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center, co-founded by Gay Liberation Front/LA organizers Morris Kight, Don Kilhefner and others. Gays needed legal help fighting discriminatory police arrests and problems with the draft during the Vietnam War. After graduation, Schrader was hired by L.A. City Attorney Burt Pines and became the first openly gay staffer in that office. And just as Bohnett had introduced himself to fellow MBA students, Schrader held parties to show gay laws students it was OK to be out, happy and successful.
“He was a star performer,” Pines said later. “In a relatively short period of time he had the respect of everyone he worked with, including real conservative prosecutors who thought they could never work with a gay.”
Schrader was also on the board of the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles (MECLA), the first gay political action committee, along with politico, banker and lawyer Sheldon Andelson, who also served on the Center’s board.
In Jan. 2014, Bohnett accepted the American Jewish Committee’s prestigious Ira Yellin Community Leadership Award (Bohnett pictured with Ira Yellin’s daughter Jessica Yellin) in memory of Schrader and Andelson—who the group had known as allies to MECLA—and he note their shared deep Jewish commitment to community, family and passion for social justice.
The award was presented by Gov. Jerry Brown, who in 1979 appointed MECLA board member Steven Lachs as nation’s first openly gay superior court judge and Rand Schrader, the second gay judicial appointee to the municipal court.
“On the night of our first date, Randy Schrader was late because he was at Sheldon’s home when the news came down of another key appointment by Governor Brown, that of Sheldon to the Board of Regents of the University of California,” Bohnett recalled that night.
How deep was Bohnett’s love for Schrader? During his acceptance speech, Bohnett quoted 13 year old Schrader’s Bar Mitzvah speech from May 1958, which went to the heart of his partner’s activism:
“…each day starts the same with light in the morning, and each day ends the same with darkness in the night. And each person is made of the same pattern and always starts life at birth and ends life at death. But there the similarity should stop.
There each individual should recognize his first duty – the duty he owes himself. It is because of this duty that I respect the Jewish religion. For Judaism as a way of life says that each individual should strive for the best – within himself. Since God gave man the facilities to think better than anything else in this world, man should use those facilities to better himself and his fellow man.”
When Andelson died of AIDS, Schrader delivered a moving tribute and call to action at the Jan. 1988 memorial at Royce Hall:
L.A. County Supervisor Ed Edelman appointed Schrader to the County AIDS Commission where he was a driving force in creating the AIDS Clinic at County-USC Medical Center that was subsequently named in his honor. In 1991, Schrader went public with his AIDS diagnosis and continued to be actively involved in LGBT activities, including opening the new headquarters for the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Community Services Center.
Bohnett, meanwhile, was by his side and happily re-settled in the software world.
“The energy between them was obvious at every moment,” former Center executive director Torie Osborn told Kearns. “They did lots of entertaining. While David put on the china and Rand cooked, we engaged in passionate discussion about city politics, gay literature, AIDS activism, whatever. The food was great, the gossip was hot, and the political conversation was savvy.”
But AIDS was unrelenting. Osborn told Kearns that the last time she remembers seeing Schrader, “David was pushing him in a wheelchair. They were both gamely trying to look brave but looked so sad.”
Bohnett told the AJC that Schrader endured eleven hospitalizations, crippling neuropathy, “and a final agonizing last few days at home prior to returning to Century City hospital to die in June of 1993. Needless to say, these were many years of great despair.”
Schrader died on June 13, 1993. He was 48.
“One of the lessons that AIDS has taught us is how little some things matter,” Bohnett quoted Schrader as saying at Schrader’s memorial, a year later, after he had founded GeoCities. He added:
Death has challenged me to define the significant parts of my life, and therefore by definition, to identify those behaviors and attitudes that don’t really matter, the ones I must let go.
We’re lucky if we know what really matters. Learning what to cast aside is what takes courage, a glimpse of the kind of courage we saw in our beloved Randy.
As Randy’s illness progressed he struggled with sorting out past goals and accomplishments, and evaluating the significance of fame, glory and material possessions. This knowledge became a part of his spiritual guide, and gave him the strength, when it was time, to let go.
I pray that I will gain that same wisdom, and incorporate it into my own life’s spiritual guide.
After a deep 10 year relationship, Bohnett was devastated by Schrader’s death. But he also found that the “passion of our grief provides the fuel for an examination of our life. The depth and measure of our struggle to learn from this loss is an accounting of what we have let go.”
Bohnett left his job at Legent and Goal Systems with “no specific plans in mind,” moved to a one-bedroom apartment in Beverly Hills, and traveled. In fact, Kearns reports, “it was on an October 1994 plane ride from Los Angeles to New York that Bohnett first read about the World Wide Web. ‘This is what I want to do,’ he said to himself. Ever the efficient administrator, he immediately wrote out a to-do list: ‘Buy a new PC, learn about the Web.’”
Knowing too well the pain of isolation, Bohnett created GeoCities as a place where people could connect. “I saw the Web as one big version of Prodigy or AOL,” he told Kearns, “a place where people from all over the world would connect in a variety of ways. I thought the Web was going to be this huge arena where everyone would somehow have access and be connected. I thought, ‘Let’s create something that takes the concept of interactivity and communication, and apply it to the World Wide Web.‘ I was looking to throw myself into something.”
Interestingly, like so many other gays who survive the death of loved ones (until Edie Windsor won her case before the Supreme Court), Bohnett was faced with a substantial estate tax burden and was prohibited from inheriting Schrader’s judicial pension. Using his “entire life’s savings” and $386,000 from Schrader’s life-insurance, Bohnett created Beverly Hills Internet, with the first ever live internet feed of Hollywood and Vine called the Hollyweird-cam.
In late 1996, Bohnett renamed the site GeoCities and started creating themed neighborhoods where individuals could set up free personal Web pages and interact with each other. But just before GeoCities went public with an $86 million IPO in 1998, Bohnett had to decide if he would go back in the closet for the money.
As he described when he received the Center’s Rand Schrader Award in 1999, he decided that the truth meant more—as did the lessons he learned in 1978 working on that gay crisis hot line:
I loved Randy with all my heart, and I admired him in all the ways that I think everyone hopes to love and admire someone. He was my inspiration. My beacon of truth. Shining a light so pure and clear that the right path was always illuminated for me.
When he died, I honestly did not know how I would go on. But, of course, I did go on — as we all do, even when we think otherwise…..
I had loved someone deeply – and I suffered when he died. Terribly. But I had friends. I had a family – mine and Randy’s. And we all shared our grief and comforted one another during our time of loss.
But what if I had been alone in that grief? What becomes of a man or woman when one loses a partner whom no one else knows was a partner? What happens to people who are afraid to tell the truth about who they are and whom they love?
Bohnett acknowledged his fortune in having friends and family to help him with his grief. But telling the truth was always a solo decision:
“[J]ust as proud as I am of GeoCities itself, I am equally proud of the fact that I built the GeoCities team and company without hiding who I was or what I believed in. By the time I created GeoCities, I didn’t want to just succeed in business. I wanted to do what I think we all want to do. I wanted to stand up and make a difference…..
There I was on the eve of our IPO, an event that would bring great visibility to the company, and to me. I was being watched and measured on all sides – by people in the industry, by the media, and particularly by our investors. So, of all the times I would ever be open and truthful, that moment was possibly the real litmus test. I had no idea what would happen. I just had faith and told the truth about who I am. I told the story that my passion for the idea of online communities, my idea for giving away free home pages, came from my own experience as a gay man.
It was through my personal experience of coming out that I recognized how important it was to give everyone on the Internet that same chance to speak up about who they are – to give a voice to their hopes, their dreams and their passions….
My message tonight is that it’s time for us to dream big – to create greatness within ourselves, and for ourselves. I am thankful for the success of GeoCities and for having the financial wherewithal to make a concrete difference in the world. But we all continue face the same challenge: To maintain faith in ourselves even when everything around us suggests that we should do otherwise…..
When I think about why God created lesbians and gay men, the best answer I can come up with, based on my observations of the role we play in society, is that God created gay people to show the world what it means to love – to love without guilt, shame or fear, and to love our fellow human beings with the same unconditional love that God shows us all…..
The honor I’ve received tonight is but a further call to action. There is only one award worthy of Rand Schrader and all the others lost to the devastation of AIDS, and that is to go forward – in our communities, in the boardroom, in our churches, within our families, and on the streets – with courage and spirit to claim the ultimate victory of human freedom.
Rand lived for no less, nor can I, nor can you.
Gay activism, falling in love and telling the truth may not make you a millionaire or adored by politicians and philanthropists, but it may give you something more precious—authenticity and the rich desire to share and connect with your LGBT community.