The Golden State’s donkey party made for all sorts of colorful headlines this past weekend. Conservative media gasped at the irreverence of John Burton ending his eight-year reign as chair of the California Democratic Party with two middle fingers in the air as he led convention delegates in a chant of “F--- Donald Trump.” Veteran party operative Eric Bauman became his successor by a razor-thin margin over newcomer Kimberly Ellis, prompting boos, protests and calls for a redux. Silicon Valley delegates largely favored Ellis, who cast herself as the reform-minded outsider and appealed to the party’s new progressive wing of the Bernie Sanders faithful. Bill James, who chairs Santa Clara County’s Democratic Central Committee (DCC), says the confab put divisions between left and far-left in stark relief. There’s a sense among Berniecrats that they lost the presidential nomination, lost the national party contest and now lost to Bauman. “There’s a sense that they’ve been robbed,” James observes. “We have a lot of work ahead to achieve a genuine unity.” But South Bay Dem Jeffrey Cardenas—an elected member of the state party’s executive board and the campaign services director for the county DCC—celebrated Bauman’s victory as a win for progressives and the LGBT community. “This is huge,” Cardenas tells Fly. “We just elected openly gay man as head of our party.” Bauman’s election has inspired Cardenas to assemble an LGBT-focused Dem club in the South Bay. County Supervisor Ken Yeager, who literally wrote a book about running for office as an out-and-proud gay man, founded BAYMEC, a nonpartisan LGBTQ political group. The GOP runs a local chapter of Log Cabin Republicans, but no such Democratic counterpart exists, Cardenas lamented. “We need to start thinking about fostering the next generation of LGBT leaders,” he says. “The real work is about to begin.”