Monday, May 9, 2005
Right-wing Spokane Mayor Luring Gay Boys Online
Posted by Joe under Gay IssuesA recent series of breaking news reports out of Spokane, Washington, say that City Mayor, Jim West, is being investigated for a series of claims involving gay sexual encounters with young boys. The Spokesman-Review news has published several reports from a 3-year investigation detailing allegations that the Mayor has used positions of public trust over the years to develop relationships with young men. He has served as a Army paratrooper, sheriff’s deputy, Boy Scout Leader, member of the state legislature and Mayor. Allegations range from using city computers to masturbate on gay.com in his City Hall office, having consensual sex with an 18 year old he met online, appointing young gay men to prominent positions within the government, as well as molesting a young boy when he was a sheriff deputy.
An 18-year-old Spokane high school senior meets someone who says he’s 53 in a gay chat room online.After talking for several weeks using the online alias “Cobra82nd,” the older man suggests the two meet for a dinner date, and the teenager accepts.
The older man arrives in his late-model blue Lexus convertible on a warm June evening, and the two talk face to face for the first time over dinner at a trendy restaurant in north Spokane.
Afterward, the young man picks up the tab. He smiles as he’s given the keys to the convertible in the restaurant parking lot.
Minutes later, while driving curvy roads north of the city, he asks the older man, whom he doesn’t recognize, what he does for a living.
“He basically asked, ‘Can I trust you?’.” the young man said in a recent interview.
“I’m like, ‘Yeah,’.” he continued. “I think this guy’s crazy. What now? Then he says like, ‘I’m the mayor of Spokane.’
“I was kind of silent for a minute,” the young man said, recalling his disbelief, “but then it clicked: his face, TV commercials, stuff like that.”
Until that moment last summer, the young man, who asked that his name not be used, said he had no idea he was on a date with Spokane Mayor Jim West.
The evening ended with consensual sex, according to the young man, who has not told his family about his personal life. “I’ve never wanted to see him again after that.”
The Editor of the Spokesman-Review added a note to the readers saying,
This is not a story about sexual orientation. This is a story about alleged sexual abuse of children and misuse of power and authority. Using the trappings of office to lure and groom young sex partners, barely of legal age, is the public’s business whether those potential partners are men or women. West is the city’s second strong mayor, a powerful political force, the face of our city whose secret life could open him to blackmail or extortion attempts and compromise his ability to do his job.
This isn’t about about whether the Mayor is gay or not. It’s about his abuse of power. It’s about the hypocrisy of government legislating morality. This is another example of how prominent members of the conservative right fake their religous and political beliefs for personal gain while leading a secret life on the side, often pursuing aggressive legislative agendas to discriminate against the gay and lesbian community. Politicians who say one thing and do the other, pushing laws to make private consensual sex acts between members of the same sex, illegal, even in the privacy of their own home, while at the same time secretly luring young boys into their homes to perform these same illegal acts.
I think it’s important that people be made aware of stories like this. “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The problem is that the corrupt seek power.
Read the investigative reports at Jim West: Spokesman-Review Investigative Reports.
Technorati Tags: gay rights, spokane, gay.com, city corruption, Jim West, Spokane Mayor
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May 9th, 2005 at 5:43 pm
Joe has scooped the New York Times! Well done, Joe. I read Joe’s links and these stories seem to have broken today. I bet it will be headlines tomorrow.
This is exactly what Carlos was talking about in his comments below: the hyprocracy of the religious right. It makes America look rediculous. It makes us look stupid. And it undermines 100 years of goodwill we’ve built up since WWI. I wish the zealots would stop their attempt to repeal Darwin and pretend that gays and lesbians are foreign to our culture. The truth is that gays & lesbian as well as blacks and Latinos and Asians are the backbone of America today. It’s our diversity that makes us strong. It’s their santimony that makes us hang our head in shame.
May 9th, 2005 at 7:22 pm
Please read the following:
Carlos Mock
By Rona Marech
copyrighted by the San Francisco Chronicle
Late in the ’80s, it was in. Within a decade, it was out. Now, outing —
the practice of exposing public figures as gay or lesbian against their
will — is back, and back with a vengeance.
In the past year, left-leaning Web sites, gay activists and a host of
accomplices have targeted everyone from legislators on down. Congressional aides working for those deemed public enemies of gay men and lesbians have found themselves staring uncomfortably into the spotlight, as have Republican party leaders and, in recent weeks, the granddaughter of a politician with a long record of voting against gay rights.
But the reaction in the gay community is very different than when
activists began outing powerful gay leaders they thought were failing to
act in the face of AIDS, among other issues. Whereas outing once inspired anguished and rancorous debate, gays and lesbians see themselves in a kind of war and are more likely now to agree that it is acceptable to out policy-makers they believe are attacking their rights. Particularly in the Bay Area, supporters argue that outing is a reasonable tactic because it can be effective but doesn’t necessarily end careers and lives, as it used to. The practice is unstoppable anyway, they said, because the Internet and the country’s culture of disclosure has turned privacy into a quaint anachronism.
At the same time, controversy over the practice hasn’t disappeared:
Several major gay organizations still roundly condemn outing, and even
among supporters there is disagreement about who deserves to be publicly yanked out of the closet and what tactics are legitimate.
“I’ve always been a staunch opponent of outing, and my feelings are now
really in transition, and that surprises me. … I am less horrified than
I was 12 years ago,” said Eric Rofes, a professor at Humboldt State
University, a long-time activist and a gay man. “What’s changed is the
marriage issue, which is seen by many people as the apex of our movement’s efforts. If ever we needed to pull out all the strategies and tactics and make good use of them, this is the time.”
In the November election, voters in 11 states approved constitutional
amendments that ban same-sex marriage.
The Federal Marriage Amendment, which would likewise change the U.S.
constitution to ban same-sex marriage, is still viable, especially after
the GOP gains last year.
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force doesn’t engage in outing, but
“there’s consensus within the organization that outing is appropriate for
people who are gay or lesbian and are in public office and vote against
the interest of the gay community,” said Matthew Foreman, executive
director of the D.C.-based advocacy organization. “You can’t be publicly
attacking and hurting gay people and privately courting them. I think that
is the litmus test.”
Others have a more aggressive, drag-’em-out-at-any-cost attitude.
“I outed someone who was a friend,” said Robin Tyler, executive director
of the organization and Web site http://www.dontamend.com. The reason: Her
“friend,” a public supporter of liberal candidates, backed someone who had voted for the Federal Marriage Amendment.
“If someone was African American and passing as white, what would be so shocking about saying, ‘Excuse me, you’re black and you’re supporting
George Wallace?’ ” Tyler said. “I think outing is terrific — especially
of prominent politicians. What are we protecting? Their right to
discriminate?”
Outing people viewed as hypocrites is more palatable now in part because
the consequences aren’t as grave, said Caryn Neumann, a doctoral student in history at Ohio State University and the author of an entry about outing in an online gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender encyclopedia.
“People don’t commit suicide over outing anymore,” she said. “You don’t
lose your job or career anymore.” Even gay politicians ousted after
outings can easily slide into other jobs and second or third careers, she
said.
The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio recently published an open secret — that
the chair of the Franklin County Republican Committee is gay. “It has had
absolutely no impact,” Neumann said.
The courts apparently concur: Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled
that stating that someone is gay doesn’t constitute slander or libel. U.S.
District Judge Nancy Gertner threw out a lawsuit filed by a former
bodyguard and boyfriend of Madonna, who had claimed that a published
photograph was defamatory because it misidentified him as a gay man.
Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, has a slightly different take: He views loss of privacy simply as the price of becoming a public figure —
like it or not. “If you don’t want (a secret) to come out and think it’s
no one’s business, then don’t enter into public life,” said Leno, who is
gay. “The public believes that everything is fair game. That’s a fact of
life.”
And the public has the Internet — enemy of secrets — at its disposal.
Without the help of the mainstream media — and in many cases, the press shies away from outing stories — the word gets out, and it gets out fast.
“Who’s going to go online and put pictures up looking for a date if
they’re in the closet? And people do that,” said Thom Lynch, the director
of the San Francisco Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center. “And everyone is blogging. Everyone has his own Web site. They go to a club and see somebody and they go and write it.”
But some gays and lesbians don’t buy it. They say homophobia is alive and well and that outing can be devastating to individuals and their families. Outing people such as congressional aides is not only cruel, but it’s self- defeating, because those people might be working to make change from the inside, critics said.
“Outing uses sexual orientation as a weapon, which is everything we try to fight against,” said Mark Shields, spokesman for the Human Rights
Campaign, one of several gay organizations officially opposed to outing.
“It turns the community against itself and turns off the rest of America
because it comes off as being mean-spirited and divisive.”
Kelly Rivera Hart, an interfaith minister from San Francisco, used to be
part of the radical, pro-outing group Queer Nation, but he has since
disavowed the practice. “It got to a point where I realized I was
operating out of anger, out of frustration,” Hart said. “It wasn’t all
that productive.”
Rofes, the Humboldt State University professor, decried some of the
tactics activists are using, citing the Edward Schrock case. In September,
tapes purportedly of the Virginia congressman soliciting sex from other
men surfaced on the Web site http://www.blogactive.com. Schrock, a married,
two-term Republican and backer of the Federal Marriage Amendment, denied the allegations but subsequently announced he wouldn’t run for
re-election.
“I’m certainly more comfortable outing someone who has had sex with other men or other women than outing what sexual fetishes they have or what their AOL profile says,” Rofes said. “It seems to be the very height of contradiction of what gay liberation is all about. … The use of sex as
something that embarrasses or shames is extremely dangerous.”
He has other lingering doubts. If a person like Schrock resigns, he asked,
couldn’t a politician even more hostile to gay rights take his place?
“I’m not sure what’s gained by outing,” Rofes said. “I think that’s the
issue that only time will tell.”
Michael Rogers, 41, the typing fingers behind BlogActive — based in his
Washington, D.C., home — has little patience for that attitude. Rogers
said giving gay closet cases a pass in the hopes that they’ll come around
and pitch in for gay rights is misguided. “When people are in the closet,
they’re bad to us,” he said. “Look at history.”
Outing proponents often point to figures such as Roy Cohn, a powerful
lawyer who persecuted gay people while indulging in a secret gay life, or
Pete Williams, the former assistant secretary of the Department of
Defense. A public defender of the ban on gays in the military, Williams
was outed in 1991.
“I’ll tell you, I’m a nice guy,” Rogers said. “The reason I started this .
.. was I worked in New York City at Harvey Milk High,” a school for gay
teenagers. Rogers has been — along with John Byrne, editor and publisher of the political Web site http://www.rawstory.com, and John Aravosis a political consultant who runs http://www.americablog.org — instrumental in the recent wave of outings. “This is about the future of our country. It’s not so much for me but for the lesbian and gay kids 100 years from now.”
Rogers said he sticks to outing people whom he believes are hurting gays
and lesbians, although he tends to interpret “hurting” somewhat more
loosely than some peers. Rogers received some angry e-mails after outing a Republican who had never cast a vote against gay rights. Rogers said she was outing-worthy because she campaigned for a politician with an anti-gay record and accepted his help during her own campaign for a judgeship.
But Rogers said most of the hundreds of e-mails he receives daily are
positive, and he’s hardly stopping now.
In fact, some people are calling for a broader outing campaign, and Rogers is listening.
When a reader sent a note urging more aggressive outing efforts singling
out celebrities through ads in newspapers and other nontraditional
methods, Rogers posted it on the Web site with just one line of comment.
“What,” he asked, “say the readers?”
May 9th, 2005 at 7:48 pm
Thanks for sharing that article Carlos. I spent many years in the closet and served as an officer in the U.S. Army, so I know first hand the fears of being outed. On the other hand, I was never involved in the public policy-making of discrimination. I agree with the various points of view in the article, that if someone is damaging the gay and lesbian rights movement because of their public position and influence, then they should be outed. If a priest was running a congregation but had somehow lied about his credentials and was not really ordained, shouldn’t those members of the church know the truth about the leader they have chosen to follow? When a person enters public life to serve their community and then lobbies against the rights of an entire population of people, then it’s no longer just about that person and their privacy.