Summary: Concerns have emerged in Cathedral City that city council candidate Theresa Hooks’s apparent support for reparative/conversion therapy for queerfolk may leave her unsuitable to serve as a councilmember in a community that is between one third and two fifths queer. Though Hooks’s views may be shared to some extent by outgoing five-star sociopath/mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa and presumptive incoming mayor Stanley Henry, we can’t afford to have a Council with a substantial anti-queer voting bloc among its membership. Do we queer residents of Cathedral City want a council that will attempt to reduce us to second-class citizenship in our own community? If that small contingent of Stockholm syndrome sufferers who form whatever nucleus of queer support Hooks may have are satisfied with such citizenship, then let them stand aside, for I think it is safe to say that the rest of the queer nation in Cathedral City may be unwilling to allow such dispensations to continue. Hooks does not get my vote, nor should she get the vote of any queer person or straight ally in Cathedral City.
Cathedral City’s electoral applecart may have been upset last week as concerns about council candidate Theresa Hooks’s anti-queer views became public when a constituent reported that Hooks had informed him that she supports conversion or “reparative” therapy for homosexuals.
Conversion/reparative therapy, banned in California and New Jersey as well as in a number of other western industrialized countries, seeks to “straighten out” the sexual orientation of gay and lesbian people. While not as primitive as overtly religious methodologies that purport to be able to “pray the gay away,” reparative or conversion therapy nonetheless sounds in a basic premise that somehow being gay or lesbian is “wrong,” and that because gayness or lesbianess represents a “broken” state of being, queerfolk need to be fixed.
The process by which Theresa Hooks’s support of conversion therapy came to light dates back to a letter to the editor authored Ms. Hooks and published in the September 23, 2006 edition of the Desert Sun, in which she defended Focus on the Family, an anti-gay hate group. The backstory of Hooks’s 2006 letter to the editor was that Focus on the Family had been sponsoring a so-called “ex-gay” conference here in the Coachella Valley, an action which unsurprisingly called forth expressions of significant disapproval not only from the Coachella Valley’s substantial queer community, but also from most right-thinking straight allies here in the desert.
The factual predicate for Hooks’s revelation has been set forth ad extenso in the Desert Sun, and I do not need to burden the record further recapitulating it here. What is notable is that no sooner had the issue of Hooks’s apparent support for reparative/conversion therapy become a subject of community knowledge than social media lit up with denunciations of both Hooks and of her political mentor, outgoing Cathedral City Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa, whose disdain for Cathedral City’s substantial queer population is no secret, except to a few of her queer Stockholm syndrome sufferer supporters.
Indeed, Hooks’s apparent support for reparative/conversion therapy raises disturbing questions for Cathedral City’s queer nation. We know that DeRosa, Hooks, and presumptive incoming mayor Stanley Henry all tend to be members of the same political clique or faction within the community. DeRosa, an apostate from the Roman Catholic Church, has eagerly joined with Mr. Henry and with Hooks in embracing a conservative, evangelical, religious right approach to Christianity. Should Hooks’s apparent support for reparative/conversion therapy be a bellwether for what we might expect from the city Council were she, which God in His infinite mercy forbid, to be elected to that body?
For Stan Henry, the challenge will be simple. If Stan wants to be anything more than a one term mayor, he will need to get over an awful lot of the weltanschauung he brings with him to the mayoralty after a career spent in law enforcement. It is no secret that the so-called law enforcement community has traditionally tended to view itself as the curator, conservator, and custodian of what it considers ought to be “correct” social and cultural values. In the mindset of much of the law enforcement community, queerfolk represent a form of deviance against which the state ought to set its face. Because queerfolk represent deviance, and because we are cultural dissidents, law enforcement has often preferred to control queer cultural dissidence through “law and order” mechanisms. Can Stan Henry get past decades of experience in a profession in which viewing queerfolk as presumptive criminals is almost a part of the DNA?
But since Stan Henry is running unopposed for mayor, we will have to put him on notice and hold his feet to the fire, even if that means getting a hitherto relatively complacent queer community in Cathedral City far more active than it ever has been. We Cathedral City queerfolk have a lot of examples for what carefully modulated, carefully directed queer activism can accomplish, going right back to Stonewall, when the NYPD learned the hard way that you never get crossways with a drag queen. Having before us the precedent of Stonewall, and the precedent of the sustained political activism that first elected Harvey Milk and which at the same time helped call the City of West Hollywood into being, we Cathedral City queerfolk should stop worrying about recipes and handicrafts. We should stop eagerly chasing after a minute pearls of condescending concession from the likes of our outgoing sociopathic mayor. We should say no to the unbelievably cynical effort DeRosa, Hooks, and even Mr. Henry have set in train to turn Cathedral City into a “godly” community and put us uppity queers in our place as far to the back of the municipal bus as we can be shoved.
But as concerned as I am about the personal political ramifications of a DeRosa/Henry/Hooks political machine clanking into action in Cathedral City — for machines can always be taken down by those who have the courage to expose their corruption — I am even more disturbed by the possibility that reparative/conversion therapy might actually have a supporter in municipal government.
Because reparative/conversion therapy takes as its major premise the idea that queerfolk are somehow broken or defective, it necessarily follows in the view of supporters of reparative therapy that we queerfolk can change, and that if we can change, we should change, and that if we will not change voluntarily, then the power of the state, including the power of law enforcement, should be set in train against us to force us to change, and that if after all manner of constraint we will not change, then we should be physically eliminated from the body politic. At the risk of getting all Godwin on us, this prospect frightens me as badly as the coming of Hitler and the Nazis to power frightened a great many German Jews, and triggered an exodus of some of Germany’s greatest minds to the more congenial shores of the United Kingdom and the United States. As an out, loud, and proud gay man, in no need of being "repaired" by
Theresa Hooks or anybody else, I find her position offensive, heretical, and un-American.
I don’t want to be made to feel unwelcome in a city that has been my home for almost two decades.
I don’t want to feel that if I call 911 in my own city, I will receive less service and less protection from my public safety agencies than would my straight neighbors.
I don’t want to feel, eleven years after Lawrence v. Texas, that my local police department has any room for an outlook or ideology that permits them to see me as some kind of criminal on account of the fact that as a gay man, I can, will, and do, have sex with men. (And some of those men have even been in law enforcement.)
I don’t want my municipal corporation to view me as a second-class stakeholder, and to ration public services to me on that basis.
All of these things are things that would be reasonably foreseeable realities were Theresa Hooks to be elected to the city Council in Cathedral City. This is not a prospect I find acceptable.
There will be some small number of queer Stockholm syndrome sufferers whom Hooks can bamboozle into supporting her. The rest of us queerfolk may not be so willing to give Theresa Hooks the benefit of the doubt. If a Hooks/Stanley voting bloc on the council seeks to engage in homophobic grandstanding, we must be out in force not only to ensure that Stanley Henry gets one term only as mayor, but also that Theresa Hooks leaves the Council as soon as possible, either at the end of her only term or by way of a recall.
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