In a political post-AIDS, post-marriage equality electoral world, how does the game change?” asked West Hollywood City Councilmember and former Los Angeles County supervisorial candidate John Duran. While LGBT voters are known at times to pick straight over gay candidates, Duran’s endorsement of former Santa Monica City Councilmember and Mayor Bobby Shriver over longtime LGBT advocate Sheila Kuehl in the race for the 3rd District seems to mark a change in gay politics in Los Angeles.
After winning the endorsement of the LA Times, among other coups, Duran’s third place primary finish in the race to replace retiring Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky in the wealthy Westside area with its nearly 2 million residents makes his potential “king-maker” endorsement valuable.
“A lot of our old assumptions are no longer true,” Duran told Frontiers on July 7. “The idea of the first gay this or that has run its course. We just had a lesbian Speaker of the Assembly replace a gay Speaker of the Assembly. We have a gay City Controller and gay City Councilmembers in L.A. and West Hollywood. It was a big issue in the 1990s, and we fought hard for it—to have LGBT people immersed in the power structure. Now we’re in it. We are it. Now how people vote is based not on whether someone is gay or straight—but on whether we agree or disagree with them—and that’s how it should be.”
Duran said he decided on Shriver after having lunch with both candidates and participating with them in 25 debates. “In all those debates, I found myself agreeing with what Bobby was saying—in particular, his experience and how he perceives local government—and many times I was in disagreement with Sheila.”
But what “drove a wedge” between Kuehl and Duran, Shriver and Pam Ulich, a former Malibu mayor, was Kuehl’s constantly saying, “unlike these part-time council people,” which annoyed Duran. “She doesn’t understand that local government is closer to the people,” he said. “We work on finding common sense solutions to problems that most directly impact people’s lives.” Kuehl, however, held herself out as a Sacramento politician, he said.
Duran cited two examples of directly impacting people’s lives during his 14 year career on the City Council: founding the West Hollywood Alcohol and Drug Recovery Center, which now serves 8,000 people a month, and, along with Christopher Fairchild, putting an initiative on the ballot to create a West Hollywood Police Department.
“I learned a lot from that,” Duran said, “not by passing laws but from working directly with the Sheriff and the Captain. And now we have out deputies and transgender employees and a healthy, great relationship with law enforcement. But you have to be close to the ground and have hands-on governing. Our best supervisors—Ed Edelman and Zev Yaroslavsky—never served a day in Sacramento.
“So I set aside sexual orientation and gender and all the other usual characteristics,” he continued, “and evaluated them based on their ideas, their thoughts and their experience. And that’s why I came down on Bobby’s side.”
But “this is bigger than Sheila, Bobby or me,” Duran said, recalling how—during reapportionment in 1990—he and Cleve Jones approached Assembly Speaker Willie Brown and the Westside-based Berman-Waxman machine about getting a seat at the table—and were rejected. However, “We succeeded. We’ve done that,” Duran said. “But there have been allies fighting with us for equality this whole time. So now we have to extend it—which does raise questions about how we do political endorsements. Does anyone realize that about half the Stonewall Democratic Club board are straight allies? This is a sign of change. The best person on LGBT issues may not always be an LGBT person.”