Town in Oregon Elects Genderqueer Mayor
Silverton, Oregon has just elected Stu Rasmussen for another term, making Stu America’s first openly genderqueer mayor. After the harsh disappointment over the passing of Prop 8 this is welcome news. What’s especially wonderful is the support Stu’s town offered during the transition, even though he was first elected as a traditional male.
“Obviously, it was shocking to them,” Stu told Good Morning America “We all kind of went through it together. It was pretty obvious I was making a change, it had to happen in my head. They were ready before I was.”
Good work, Oregon. I feel just a little bit better now.
November 8th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Haha! I was just coming to post this in the Prop 8 thread.
Silverton’s like an hours drive away. I went there a few times to play some tennis matches in high school. I’d always kinda marginalized that place as an ordinary, boring, semi-backwoods small town, but shit…kinda feeling guilty about that now…and what else have I been wrong about? NEVER EVER did I think I’d see a town like Silverton do anything like this in my lifetime. ANYTHING is possible my friends! :D
November 8th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Read about this over on Genderfork. Very pleased, yes.
November 8th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Thats pretty cool, at least not all hope is lost!
November 8th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
I’m with Skerror on this one: Apologies to Silverton. You folks rock and I underestimated you.
I’m also glad Portland’s mayor being gay was a complete non-issue in the election. Still, for all this the state had their own Prop 8, Measure 36. We are moving forward, but the entire nation has a way to go yet.
November 8th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Genesis P. in 2016!
November 8th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
See, hope isn’t on the horizon, but here!
November 8th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
This is made of awesome. Way to go, Silverton. Today I was feeling pretty down about the state of things – given the various marriage shit that passed, and the rest of the world. This turned me around today. Change.gov turned me around yesterday. Something’s probably going to have to turn me around tomorrow when I get down again. Keep up the good work – we need places like Coilhouse and Genderfork and all the great blogs to keep the world from getting us down. If we keep telling the good stories, the positive stories, the hopeful stories, I believe, eventually we won’t have any other kind of stories to tell. Eventually we’ll figure out how to do this human experience right.
November 9th, 2008 at 10:01 am
yeh, yeh, congrats but…would a little mascara kill you, lady?
(I speak as a former ‘gender-bender’ myself there, by the way.)
November 9th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Elected by a large margin too. Great news — and a handy reminder that breaking with bigotry isn’t just the domain of large urban areas.
November 9th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
The thing here, I think, is the personal. This is a town of about 7000, and I’d bet that many folks have actually spoken to the Mayor. They know the person against whom they’d be asked to turn, and without provocation it’s tough to hate someone you know.
I was raised in a conservative household by two homophobes. Pleasant homophobes, sure, but that was the message I got at home. But at school those scary gays were my friends, part of a crowd that accepted me for me (tough to find in High School, more so when you are as massive a dork as I was . . . okay, am). Add to that being an ethnic minority and you could pretty easily have guessed at my future political leanings.
I don’t doubt many of the folks who voted for 8 have no experience with the LGBT community beyond either what they hear on FOX News or see in clips of the Castro at Halloween, at least that they know. It’ll happen, but it’ll happen only when more people realize that they’re screwing over their neighbors, friends and family members.
November 10th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
@Peter S.
A solid point.
January 7th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Stu’s theater is where I saw the Dark Knight. Its not so much a case that our town is more open minded its that stu has been involved in it since before I was born…