SUMMARY: Incoming Cathedral City mayor Stan Henry made two fairly serious rookie blunders last night. First, he pissed off the queer nation by trying to blame us for the fact that his political ally, Theresa Hooks, did not get a seat on the city council. By attempting to demonize Cathedral City’s substantial queer nation for his political ally’s misfortune, Stan apparently forgot, or didn’t bother to consider, that Cathedral city’s queer nation represents a substantial voting bloc that can make or break a candidate or campaign. By carrying Hooks’s water, Stan also managed to convey a clear impression that he shares Hooks’s view that queerfolk are somehow “broken,” and need to be “fixed.” Message to the Mayor: we ain’t broke, we don’t need fixing, and you may have just made yourself a one term Mayor. You don’t get to insult roughly a third of your constituents with impunity.
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Incoming Mayor Stan Henry made a bunch of rookie mistakes last night, not least of which was forgetting that in municipal politics, trust is hard earned, but easily forfeited.
That’s a lesson Stan may have just begun to learn the hard way.
During last night’s special council meeting, the new Mayor let his common sense desert him to deliver a petulant diatribe on how awful it had been that Cathedral City’s substantial queer nation had somehow “demonized” Cathedral City’s Best Christian, unsuccessful council candidate Theresa Hooks, who, instead of participating in the interview/appointment process, now stands on the sidelines, pitching a fit and urging her low information supporters to write snippy letters to the editor of the Desert Sun bitching about how iniquitous the process has been.
Hooks had contrived to make herself objectionable to Cathedral City’s queerfolk because of her strongly anti-LGBT views, and her expressed support for Focus on the Family, a Colorado-based anti-gay hate group. Hooks was also objectionable because she was so obviously the political protégé of former Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa, whose disdain for Cathedral City’s queer and Latino communities had been apparent through the 10 long winters of DeRosa’s ineffective mayoralty.
In his petulant diatribe, the incoming Mayor then proceeded to add insult to insult by declaring that he had supported Hooks’s candidacy, causing many in the rather flabbergasted audience to wonder why he had not had the courage of his convictions to move her appointment at the special council meeting held on December 10 to settle the issue of how to fill the fifth Council seat.
That sucking sound we all heard in Council Chambers yesterday was the sound of the community’s trust in Stan Henry and his mayoralty disappearing down the municipal commode.
The reaction of many of us in Cathedral City’s queer nation was one of great disappointment and sharp personal insult. When Stan Henry cruised to an unopposed election victory (not exactly a triumph of vigorous American democracy) for Mayor, he took office on a tide of goodwill. A city that had grown tired of the ten ineffective winters of Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s ego-driven, sociopathic mayoralty greeted Stan Henry’s coming with a great deal of what now turns out to have been unrealistic anticipation. If Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s final months in office had played out like the senescence of the Ottoman Empire, we had hoped that Stan Henry might at least bring a little bit of the reforming energy of a Kemal Atatürk.
Instead of Kemal Atatürk, what we seem to have gotten is more like Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who infamously set his face against the very reforms that might have kept the Osmanlı Sultanate viable against a rising tide of irresistible demands for change.
Among the demands for change that crystallized during this last election cycle was for a Mayor and a city Council that would be more inclusive and more transparent. Both Cathedral City’s Latino community and its queer nation had grown tired of the way in which Kathleen DeRosa had tried to run things on behalf of and in the interest of a right-wing “Christian” constituency to whom she routinely and obsequiously pandered.
And because voters wanted change so much, they were prepared to give the new Mayor the benefit of a great deal of doubt. So eager were voters, in fact, to rid themselves of Kathleen DeRosa that they overlooked the fact that Mr. Henry had himself been a DeRosa protégé, as well as overlooking the fact that Mr. Henry was the only candidate on the mayoral ballot. Indeed, Mr. Henry had first joined the city Council following the 2012 election, when he, DeRosa, and former councilmember Charles “Bud” England ran as part of a DeRosa slate.
Indeed, DeRosa’s obvious intention in running such a slate had been to secure a permanent three vote majority on the Council, enabling her to run the city for the foreseeable future. However, as so often happens in criminal or political conspiracies, DeRosa’s plans undid themselves when Stan Henry knocked off Bud England, and left Stan Henry in an ideal position to put the shiv into DeRosa and take the mayoralty for himself.
It should not surprise us that the political soap opera in Cathedral City inevitably comes to resemble The Godfather meets I, Claudius, all set in Constantinople during the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. Cathedral City thus lends itself to becoming a hotbed of political intrigue, often carried out by politicians with no real skill therein.
But, unfortunately for Stan Henry, he made a rookie mistake by declaring rather public allegiance to the unsuccessful campaign of Theresa Hooks. Stan, to all intents and purposes, made it clear that not only does he not value the political support of the queer nation, but that he also, arguably, shares Hooks’s view that queerfolk are somehow “broken,” and need to be “fixed,” presumably by somehow praying our gay away.
In this blog, prior to the election, I noted that as a queer man, I don’t need anyone to pray my gay away, because I’m not broken and I don’t need fixing. My sexuality is an endowed state of being, and I believe to be part of God’s ineluctable plan for my destiny and the destiny of the world God created. I accept my orientation and I thank God for what I am, and I don’t need Theresa Hooks or Stan Henry preaching a political agenda which proclaims my brokenness and consequently insists that I and my queer sisters and brothers should be regarded in some way as second-class citizens in the Commonwealth. For the new mayor to demonize us in that fashion is a grave offense, one that will be very difficult to forgive.
Because Stan Henry saw fit to adopt the Theresa hooks narrative of blaming her electoral defeat on the queer nation, he broke trust with me, and I expect he has broken trust with an awful lot of other queerfolk in Cathedral City. If Stan Henry were so hot fired to put Theresa hooks on the Council, we may ask again why did he lack the courage to move her appointment at the December 10 meeting at which the issue was settled? If Stan Henry wants to blame queerfolk for his political ally not having been seated, then he has only himself to blame as and to the extent that queerfolk in Cathedral City do not see fit to give him the benefit of any doubt, or, even more tellingly, come to view him as little more than a pale political clone of his predecessor. If Stan Henry did not realize the growing weight and clout of a queer voting bloc in Cathedral City, and feels that he can insult us with impunity, then he has made yet another rookie mistake.
If Mr. Henry wants to try to regain the lost trust of so many of us in Cathedral City’s queer nation, he will need to proffer appropriate expressions of regret and contrition, and the Council, now with three gay members out of a total of five, will need to hold his feet to the fire, and will need to make clear that all five of them need to represent all 50,000-plus of us. Cathedral City’s queerfolk will be watching, and will expect the gay councilmembers to be more forthright in defense of the queer nation.
Trust is hard to earn, and Stan Henry made a rookie mistake by antagonizing the queer nation last night. One of my former colleagues predicted prior to the election the Stan Henry would be a one term mayor. I think my former colleague may well have been right. The queer nation has long memories, and those long memories are the collective custodian of all of the slights that have been visited upon us by ambitious, but maladroit, political operators like Stan Henry. We’ve come too far, fought too hard, lost too many, and put up with too much right wing bullshit to allow local politicians to insult us without cost.
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