Last week, I wrote about how dissatisfied many of us have been with our “friends” in offices like attorney general and state superintendent for public instruction. But the good news is that will change with the next state attorney general.

In this race, most gay and lesbian voters will be voting for former governor Jerry Brown, who is the Democratic nominee.

His opponent is so to the right that he supports overruling Lawrence v. Texas. He may want California to again imprison gay men and lesbians for having consensual sex with other adults.

The irony is that when Jerry Brown was California governor back in 1975, he signed the law that made consensual sex between adults legal in California.

Brown was elected governor in 1974, succeeding Ronald Reagan.

As governor, Brown gained a national reputation as a progressive. For example, while Reagan lived in the lavish Governor’s Mansion and had a personal driver for his limo, Brown preferred a used Plymouth (the standard state car) and lived across from the capitol in a one-room apartment.

Brown was also progressive-minded about technology. He talked about how computers would change our lives and how we would talk on portable phones and use portable computers. Some thought he was nuts.

For these insights and predictions, pundits labeled Brown “Governor Moonbeam.”

Well, Governor Moonbeam was right about lots of things.

He appointed four progressives to the California Supreme Court, including the first woman, the first African-American and the first Latino.

The Brown court, under Chief Justice Rose Bird, ruled in favor of the rights of gay men and lesbians to be treated equally. The court condemned police practices that singled out gay men.

The reality is that the Rose Bird court would have approved same-sex marriage then, had the issue been presented. It wasn’t. In the ’70s, most gay men were having too much fun to be concerned about marriage or anything monogamous. And lesbians, most of who had divorced, thought marriage was simply a device created by men to oppress women.

Times changed. AIDS, Reagan and the rise of the religious right changed our lives.

History books on California law and politics report that the California Supreme Court Brown appointed never upheld a death penalty conviction. That’s true. Courts make errors, and it’s hard to free a dead man. The justices of the court were “recalled” in 1984 by voters; rejected, supposedly, because of the death penalty.

But the truth is the California Supreme Court was fair to consumers, gays and victims of police abuse. At the time, that angered insurance companies, bigots and some in law enforcement. They looked for a way to get rid of the justices, so they used the death penalty as the vehicle to anger voters. Truth be told, it was insurance companies that funded the recall campaign because the court had held that carriers must treat those insured reasonably and not in bad faith.

And despite the legality of the death penalty, there have been less than 10 executions in California since 1984. By my estimation, taxpayers have spent billions per execution when all costs associated with death penalty cases and their endless appeals are factored in.

We need an A.G. who tells it like it is. And that’s always been the hallmark of Jerry Brown.

My connection with Brown began when I was student president at SDSU. Student presidents met regularly with Brown and his staff. In fact, the SDSU president asked me to talk with the governor about SDSU projects. When you get 10,000 students to attend rallies in support of a governor running for re-election, you do tend to get help from the governor’s staff.

Brown pledged to keep California’s systems of higher education tuition free. He fought against fee increases and other budget cutbacks, and even after Prop. 13 passed, decimating state revenues, he continued his pledge, though higher education cuts manifested in many other ways.

I met with Brown last week when he was in San Diego. He is currently the mayor of the city of Oakland, where he and his wife live in a building that was once a department store. There are 500 felons within a two-block radius of his house.

I won’t go into detail here about my talk with Brown. I’ll wait ’til after the election.

But last week I wrote about how disappointed we are that other state officers are not enforcing laws designed to protect this community. That’s not going to be a problem with Jerry Brown and his staff.