Friday, November 20, 2009

A SPOKESMAN-REVIEW INVESTIGATIVE REPORT

West's public policy conflicts with private life

Karen Dorn Steele / Staff writer

May 5, 2005

© The Spokesman-Review 2005

In an Internet chat room last New Year’s Eve where he discussed his recent date with an 18-year-old man, Spokane Mayor Jim West criticized the “sex Nazis” who try to regulate private sexual behavior.

For years, that’s exactly what West tried to do in Olympia.

Over two decades, West rose to power in the Washington Legislature with a carefully cultivated image as a fiscally conservative Republican opposed to gay rights, abortion rights and teenage sex.

His abrasive style and temper were legendary in Olympia. But even his opponents speak highly of his legislative and budgetary skills, which have made him one of the state’s most powerful politicians.

Because of his clout as the former Senate majority leader and his reputation for attacking his enemies, no one has publicly confronted West about any discrepancy between his private sexual behavior and his political stances, people in politics and in Spokane’s gay community have said.

While members of Spokane’s gay community said it’s widely rumored that West is a closeted gay man, they also said his sexual orientation is only an issue when his behavior intrudes on the legislative process and public policy.

Although West was married for five years in the 1990s and was seen with women during his legislative campaigns, it was whispered in Olympia that West dated and mentored young men.

“It’s the worst-kept secret in Washington politics,” said Christian Sinderman, a top Democratic political consultant.

State Senate candidates Jim West and Laurie Dolan greet each other after a debate in 2002.

Sinderman helped run the campaigns of Sen. Maria Cantwell and Spokane’s Laurie Dolan, who challenged West for his state Senate seat and lost in 2002. Dolan is now a policy adviser to Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire.

The Dolan campaign decided not to use the issue of West’s sexual orientation for political advantage, Sinderman said.

“We decided his personal life wasn’t germane to the campaign because his private life is his private life. It’s not a public issue unless it involves the abuse of power. He was an incumbent with a record. We addressed that, and we lost,” he said.

“Spokane wouldn’t have believed us” if her campaign had tried to bring up West’s sexual orientation, Dolan said.

“People wanted to believe that Jim represented family values,” Dolan added.

Sen. Brad Benson, R-Spokane, said he’s heard rumors in Olympia that West preferred young men. But he and West aren’t close because West supported ex-Sen. Brian Murray, West’s former aide, in the 2004 GOP Senate primary, Benson said.

“The Republicans represent two camps,” Benson said. “One camp is about individual liberty and the economy. For them, whether you’re gay or not doesn’t make a difference. But for the conservative wing, adultery and homosexuality plays bad. They want to look at their leaders and say, these are people we can admire,” Benson said.

Jon Wyss, state committeeman for the GOP from Spokane County, says news of West’s private life comes as a complete shock. “You’re catching me off-guard,” Wyss said Wednesday night. “He’s very talented in what he’s done for the city, the Legislature and the party.”

In a wide-ranging interview Wednesday night, West acknowledged he’d recently begun to seek out young men on the Internet and said he couldn’t explain why. “I don’t want to go into the whole issue, but I wouldn’t characterize me as ‘gay,’.” West said.

While acting pragmatically with moderates and conservatives as a Republican Party leader, West aligned himself with party conservatives on a range of hot-button social issues since 1983, when he first went to Olympia as a newly elected House member.

In 1986, he supported a bill allowing criminal background checks for jobs involving children. The measure was necessary because child abusers “often try to gain a position of trust and authority,” West said in a Spokesman-Review interview at the time.

West and 14 other Republicans reacted strongly to Gov. Booth Gardner’s Christmas Eve 1985 executive order banning discrimination in state hiring based on sexual orientation.

Their 1986 bill, which failed, would have barred gay men and lesbians from working in schools, day-care centers and some state agencies. It called for screening prospective employees for sexual orientation and firing employees whose homosexuality became known.

The bill prompted a Spokesman-Review op-ed column by Jeannette Loehr, spokeswoman for the Spokane Gay Leadership Coalition.

West’s bill is “police-state” legislation that stirs up “the fears of the ignorant and the hatred of the bigoted,” Loehr wrote.

In 1986, West voted to bar the state from distributing pamphlets telling people how to protect themselves from AIDS during sex. He said such instruction “is something people go buy at dirty bookstores.”

West became chairman of the Senate Health and Long Term Care Committee in 1990, a key post for legislation involving medicine and public health issues. That year, the Washington State Medical Association named him legislator of the year.

During a 1990 hearing on AIDS education, West proposed that teen sex be criminalized.

The bill, written by the abstinence group Teen Aid, would have made sexual contact – not just sexual intercourse – a misdemeanor for unmarried teenagers 18 or younger. It defined sexual contact as “any touching of the sexual or other intimate parts of a person.”

The bill was ridiculed and got West a lot of negative press, including a National Lampoon Magazine spoof. “Get a Life, Sen. West!” a Seattle newspaper editorialized. But West said he was serious and would push it as far as he could.

“You know, there are a lot of kids out there that want a reason to say no,” he said. The bill died in the Senate on Feb. 1, 1990.

West’s bill was “stupid,” said James Duree, a former Pacific County prosecutor and Democrat who recently retired from private practice. Duree said he wrote to West in 1990, suggesting facetiously that the Legislature pass a law making it a crime for legislators to have sex with one another. “I thought they should stop doing sex in Olympia,” Duree said.

Politicians who take extreme positions on sex are not always what they seem, said Duree, 87.

“I saw people like West when I was a prosecuting attorney,” said Duree. “These people who were so goosy towards sex.….. They’re the ones you’ve got to watch,” he added.

During the Gay.com chat on New Year’s Eve, when West had been Spokane’s mayor for a year, the 18-year-old man who’d had a sexual encounter with West on a date in June 2004 said “you wouldn’t be in the position you are in today if the right-winged supporters knew you like to mess around with guys.”

West replied: “Two consenting adults must have the ability to protect their privacy or else the damn sex Nazis will be telling everyone what to do.”

Phil Talmadge, a former Democratic legislator and Washington Supreme Court justice, served as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee when West was in the Senate. He’s now in private practice in Tukwila, Wash.

Talmadge said he’d heard the rumors about West’s sexual orientation when he was in the Senate but didn’t know whether they were accurate.

“The rumors were there, but none of us knew and it didn’t really make any difference to us,” Talmadge said.

The Seattle liberal said he clashed with West on gay rights and other issues, but developed a “grudging respect” for West’s legislative skills.

“I knew the positions he took publicly, and I think he was pretty aggressive about those positions. I didn’t share his views. I felt a stronger sense of tolerance than he exhibited in his public attitudes about gay people. It was a different viewpoint,” Talmadge said.

On the Judiciary Committee, “people wanted to make criminal virtually everything. It was my job as the chairman to screen the use of the criminal sanction,” Talmadge said. West didn’t serve on that committee, but it served as the gatekeeper for many of the bills regulating sexual conduct that West favored.

Senate Republicans had some aggressive staff members who tried to push the envelope on criminalizing sex, Talmadge said. “We described them as having a prurient interest in prurient interest,” he said with a laugh.

The Judiciary Committee made efforts starting in the mid-1980s to toughen child pornography law and sanctions for sexual offenses against children. But it didn’t go as far as West and some other Republicans would have wanted – including the bill to criminalize teen sex – Talmadge said.

“In the real world, you have two 16-year-olds who engaged in sexual activity and you want to put them both in jail? I think that’s going overboard,” he said. “What we did do is (make it) a crime for someone who’s an adult to have sexual relations with kids,” he said.

In 1995, when allegations of sexual harassment involving Democratic Gov. Mike Lowry and a female aide were published in an independent counsel’s report, West called on the House to launch impeachment proceedings against Lowry.

“The governor should not be held to any lower standard than anyone else in our society. Governors cannot and should not flout the law,” West said. He was dressed down by his own caucus for making the proposal without consulting other Republican leaders.

As a Senate leader, West consistently opposed efforts to expand civil rights protections for gays in jobs and housing. In an interview Wednesday, he said he’s philosophically opposed to legislation that creates “special classes” of rights for minorities, including gays. “I don’t think you should discriminate against anybody. I have never been outspoken against gays, and I’ve never discriminated against gays,” West said, adding that he felt the gay rights bills were unnecessary.

In February 1998, West voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, a ban on gay marriage. Gov. Lowry vetoed the measure, but the veto was overridden and Washington became the 27th state to enact such a ban.

Also in 1998, West got into legal trouble after leaving a threatening voice mail on the telephone recording machine of building industry lobbyist Tom McCabe. “You son of a bitch, you better get me, ’cause if you don’t you’re dead,” a screaming West said on the tape.

West spent $20,000 in legal fees on the ensuing criminal misdemeanor charge. He paid $500 to an Olympia charity and apologized to McCabe in an agreement with the prosecutor’s office in Olympia. He also apologized in a letter to the Spokane community for his outburst.

West’s temper tantrum against McCabe was symptomatic of a conflicted man, said Sinderman, the Democratic political consultant. “West is tortured. He screams his way into power. I have a combination of empathy and distaste for him,” he said.

Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, a Seattle Democrat and University of Washington sociology instructor, saw West’s temper and his fervent opposition to gay rights up close in March 2003. He was Senate majority leader and she was introducing a resolution in favor of International Women’s Day.

“The first part had to do with honoring women of all races and sexual preferences. It was the same language we’d used in past years, and it never had been a problem,” Kohl-Welles recalled.

When the clerk read the resolution, West approached her on the Senate floor.

“He demanded that I pull it right then. I said, what’s wrong? He said it’s this phrase, you can’t do this. The phrase was ‘sexual orientation.’.”

“I was shaken up,” Kohl-Welles said. “The Democrats were in the minority. He said if you don’t (pull it), you’ll never be able to introduce anything else.” West told her the Republican caucus was upset over the language.

Kohl-Welles withdrew the resolution and checked its legislative history – discovering that many Republicans had voted for similar language in previous resolutions that had passed.

West apologized and the resolution passed the next day, Kohl-Welles said.

“He’s quick to react, but then he processes it in his own mind and apologizes,” she added.

West also clashed with Sen. Cal Anderson, an openly gay Seattle legislator who tried repeatedly to pass a gay anti-discrimination bill in the 1990s. Anderson died of AIDS in August 1995.

A similar bill sponsored by Anderson’s friend and political ally, Democratic Rep. Ed Murray, of Seattle, failed last month by one vote on the floor of the Senate. When West was Senate majority leader in 2003, his colleague Sen. Bob McCaslin, R-Spokane Valley, refused to allow a hearing on Murray’s bill – which had passed the House by a wide margin – and West said he considered it dead.

It’s wrong for politicians who are privately gay or bisexual to take strong anti-gay stances, said Eric Ishino, who was Anderson’s partner. Ishino is the chief financial analyst for the city of Seattle’s legislative department.

“It really bothers me,” Ishino said. “I don’t necessarily believe in the outing of closeted individuals. But when they are so vocal against gays and lesbians, I am torn. It’s really hurting a lot of people, especially gay youth, who are struggling with so many issues,” he said, citing the high suicide rate among gay teens.

Closeted gay conservatives tend to suffer from self-hatred, Ishino said.

“They also feel (political) support will come from them taking a very strong stand on this issue,” he added.

West has been no friend to Spokane’s gay community, said Dean Lynch, a former Spokane city councilman and the city’s first openly gay politician.

Spokane’s gay and lesbian community has “general knowledge that Jim West is a closeted gay man,” but they are quiet because of the “tremendous power that he wields,” Lynch said in an e-mail from Nicaragua, where he is working on a community development project.

West in Wednesday’s interview said he wants no part of the “extreme liberal agenda” of many gay activists. “There are conservative gays in the world that don’t buy into this whole liberal agenda, and they don’t need it,” West said.

The gay community is conflicted over whether someone should be “outed” because of the potentially grave consequences, Lynch said.

However, “when a gay individual is in a position of influence and uses that influence to harm other members of the gay community, then outing that person is justified,” Lynch said.

Marvin Reguindin, an openly gay businessman who owns a graphic design company in downtown Spokane, said he doesn’t know whether West is gay but agrees with Lynch on the outing issue.

“For a politician to be (privately) gay and to be so anti-gay is an abuse of power,” Reguindin said.

Reguindin is active in the Inland Northwest Business Alliance, a group of gay and gay-supportive businesses working on a proposal for a gay business district in Spokane.

When he moved here from California for a job in a conservative advertising firm 14 years ago, Reguindin said he went “back in the closet.” Now that he owns his own business, he’s slowly becoming more visible. But there’s still a danger in coming out in a conservative community like Spokane, and anti-gay rhetoric from politicians increases the risk, Reguindin said.

“The gay community is going through a lot of persecution now, especially from the Republicans and the Christian right,” he added.

As Spokane’s mayor, West recently said he’d veto a proposal to extend city benefits to unmarried domestic partners at City Hall, citing its cost. But the City Council last month approved the measure on a 5-2 vote, enough to withstand a mayoral veto.

West’s Democratic opponents in Spokane have heard rumors about West’s personal life but had few specifics that would point to an abuse of power, said Jan Polek, who ran a vigorous campaign against him in 1990.

Polek attacked West for his opposition to abortion rights and accused him of bringing ridicule to Spokane with the teen sex bill.

During the campaign, Polek said she received two anonymous calls from Spokane mothers who accused West of abusing their sons in the Boy Scouts years earlier. But they declined to come forward with more specifics, she said. Polek said she was extremely troubled by the calls.

“They felt so strongly that they just wanted me to know. But there was nothing we could do with the information,” she said.

During the campaign, rumors about West’s sexual orientation kept recurring, Polek said.

“I think it’s been common knowledge for some people over the years but they were hesitant to do anything about it. They felt if they didn’t have every piece of evidence they needed they could be retaliated against,” Polek said.

In February 1990, during the West-Polek campaign, West proposed marriage from the floor of the Senate to Ginger Marshall, formerly of Spokane. She had come to Olympia that day with the Junior League of Spokane to watch the proceedings.

It’s “commonly accepted” in Spokane’s gay community that West’s highly public wedding proposal “was merely a sham to cover his identity,” Lynch said.

Marshall could not be reached for comment Wednesday night.

West’s proposal got a standing ovation and made headlines in New York and London.

West won the election against Polek with 53 percent of the vote. His marriage ended five years later. The divorce was filed in Lincoln County.

In his 2002 campaign against Dolan, West accused the School District 81 administrator of having “Seattle values,” but ducked a Seattle newspaper columnist who wanted him to explain what he meant.

“That was a way to frighten Spokane voters, even though I was a wife and a mother. It was an unfair representation of who I am,” Dolan said.

With control of the Senate in the balance, the West-Dolan campaign became the most expensive in state history.

In April 2003, West stunned the Legislature by revealing he had colon cancer. He returned to his job as Senate majority leader a month later after surgery. Four months later, he announced his race for mayor of Spokane – a position he said was a “lifetime dream.” He said his powerful political connections would help the city.

“When you think life is short, you do what you want to do,” he said in an August 2003 Spokesman-Review profile. He also said he had little private life because he’d dedicated his life to public service.

“My private life? It’s public. I don’t have much of a private life,” West said.

After the November 2003 election, West had another round of cancer surgery. But he has continued to work hard as Spokane’s mayor.

West also has harbored ambitions to be Washington’s governor.

In March 1991, he opposed a term limits bill for legislators that would limit them to 12 years in office. He said the bill wouldn’t affect him. “Twelve years from now, I’ll be halfway through my first term as governor,” West said.

While that prediction didn’t pan out, West was still talking recently about being governor.

In an April 9 Internet chat, West sent his photo to “Moto-Brock,” the person he believed was an 18-year-old Spokane high school senior. Instead, Moto-Brock was a forensic computer consultant hired by the newspaper to verify the mayor’s identity and presence on Gay.com.

According to the Internet dialogue with the consultant, West repeated his earlier offer of an internship at City Hall for Moto-Brock.

West told Moto-Brock he had to be extremely careful about not revealing “a part of my life I don’t share at all,” the transcripts show.

“Someday I may run for governor and this would be bad if you know what I mean.”

Karen Dorn Steele can be reached at (509) 459-5462 or by e-mail at karend@spokesman.com.