Eli Sanders

[Originally published in The Stranger, July 25 2006]
Death of a Closet Case
What We Can Now Say About Jim West

It couldn't be said in print when he was alive, because libel laws would have made it too risky, but it can be said now: Jim West, the former mayor of Spokane, who died at age 55 on July 22 after a three-year battle with colon cancer, was one of the clearest examples ever seen in this state of a highly public, highly closeted homosexual.

West never described himself as gay during his lifetime—although, paradoxically, when his hometown newspaper, the Spokesman-Review, used an internet sting operation to catch West using online chatrooms for jerking off with young men, West threatened to sue the newspaper over a "brutal outing." Gay-rights groups, too, were always reluctant to suggest that West was classically gay; they worried the allegations of pedophilia that dogged West throughout his career would just create more grist for homophobes arguing that homosexuality and pedophilia go hand in hand.

What this situation never allowed for was a more nuanced discussion. All homosexuals are not pedophiles, but just as with heterosexuals, some small minority of gay people probably are pedophiles, and Jim West could have been one. The public record certainly suggests as much.

On the separate matter of whether West desired lasting, intimate relationships with other adult men, the public record is much more clear. To read the Spokesman-Review's transcripts of West trolling the gay internet chatrooms is to read a case study in the tortured psyche of a closet case. West, who graduated from Spokane's Lewis and Clark High School in 1969, the same year that the modern gay-rights movement began in New York, returns repeatedly in his chats to stories of a self-consciously hesitant attraction to men in high school. It was a time when West dated girls, he wrote, "because I was expected to." West also wrote repeatedly, and fondly, about sex with a male fraternity member in college. Explaining why, as a middle-aged man, he was now chatting with young men on the verge of coming out, he responded simply: "I like youth." Perhaps he liked remembering a time before he had committed so firmly to a life in the closet.

"What is one of your wildest fantasies?" one of his chat partners asks him. "To cuddle with you," West writes back. "To be hiking in the forest and come across a mountain lake and strip and skinny dip and have a guy jump in with me." To another chat partner, who happened to be an investigator hired by the Spokesman-Review, West wrote about a postcoital fantasy: "You'd fall asleep for a bit first. Then we'd wake up in each others' arms, and kiss and hug, and do it again."

Sex, he wrote in one chat, "is between you and your lover—no one else." But in his public life as a state legislator and mayor, he was promoting abstinence education in schools and working against domestic-partner rights for Spokane city employees. It was classic closet-case hypocrisy, and he knew it, or else he wouldn't have expressed the following worry in another one of his chats: "What I don't want to be known for is sex and not policy," he wrote. The statement is tragically naive, and altogether typical of people who are deluding themselves.