Spokane can”t afford to chase off gays

To be an official Spokane parent you’re supposed to fret over this city’s lack of career opportunities for young people. How are you going to keep your children nearby once they’re grown? Your grandchildren? As the father of a son and daughter who have moved with their spouses to the far side of the state and the far side of the country, I get it.

But people who care about Spokane’s future ought to think about more than what we can do to keep our talented young folks close. We need to take a sharp look at what we should stop doing that pushes some of them away.

We’ve learned many things about Spokane Mayor Jim West over the past nine days, among them that he is gay. There are other things, too – troubling things involving inappropriate use of his office. But at one level he was just a gay man in a high-stakes struggle to keep his private life from toppling his prominent public visibility.

“I led a life of hell,” he told Spokesman-Review Editor Steve Smith in a phone conversation last Sunday morning.

Believe it. Other gays and lesbians also lead lives of hell in Spokane, not because they need to protect important offices that can be used as leverage in the search for romance. Just because being openly gay is risky in Spokane.

Some manage it with class. Ryan Oelrich, for example.

Oelrich is the 24-year-old gay man whom West named to the Spokane Human Rights Commission and then pursued in a series of sexual overtures that Oelrich rejected. Oelrich demonstrated a set of solid values and was loyal to them, repeatedly reproaching West for inappropriate advances. Ultimately, dismayed that his appointment to the Human Rights Commission wasn’t based on his commitment to justice after all, Oelrich quietly resigned.

What parent wouldn’t be proud to see such qualities in a son or daughter? What community wouldn’t want to retain such a person, to capture his civic energy and dedication to principle? Well, Oelrich is still here, working on behalf of gay youth in other ways. I hope he stays.

But quietly and relentlessly, other gay and lesbian young people are leaving a city that constrains them, taking with them what Denver clergyman Craig Peterson calls their “gifts and graces.”

Peterson is a former Deer Park High School student body president and athlete. He didn’t become open about his sexuality until after his graduation, but he returned to Deer Park, where his father was a school board member, and advocated forcefully for school district assurances that students would be protected from bigotry. Later, he ran unsuccessfully for the Legislature, but he eventually moved to Denver.

“I had given Spokane all I could,” he said in a telephone interview this week. “I always felt at best I would have to settle for table scraps.”

It isn’t that Spokane is openly hostile; it’s that gays and lesbians have to maintain a low profile and not call attention to themselves by, say, running for public office and offering their leadership to the community. The values of honesty and integrity Peterson learned growing up in the Pacific Northwest weren’t matched by the reality that confronted him in the community.

At that level, at least, Peterson can identify with Jim West.

“Spokane has to ask itself what would prevent leaders from being honest in serving the community,” said Peterson.

But unlike West, Peterson wasn’t content to live a half-isolated life. He’s now an ordained pastor and a prominent leader in the United Church of Christ, for which he is moderator of the Metropolitan Denver Association.

“I am finally in a community that can appreciate and acknowledge an individual’s gifts and graces for what they are,” he said. By contrast, he has mixed feelings about Spokane – affection because he has family here, but pain and resentment because he’d like to be in Spokane playing the kind of civic role he’s playing in Denver.

For a gay person, Peterson points out, the nervousness about confronting community prejudice is compounded by a fear that other minority groups don’t have to worry about: “In a sense, not even your parents can be counted on.” That only means that if Spokane wants to maximize the human capital that each generation of youngsters has to offer, we need to shed the narrow attitudes of the past and be welcoming to all on their individual merits.

To those who encourage the flight of gays and lesbians as a good thing – sociological cleansing, if you will – Peterson has a word of caution: “A lot of folks don’t realize this very well could be their child or grandchild.”