We Are All God's Children

I watched a Frontline special the other night on PBS. It was about Jim West, the former mayor of Spokane, Washington. I remember hearing about his dilemma at the time, on TV and the internet. I remember wondering why he just did not quit, like so many other disgraced Republicans had.

After hearing the whole story, I see why he fought so hard to keep his job. I ended up feeling sorry for this man who never really had a chance at a true and happy life.

Here was a man born into a conservative part of his state, who became a Boy Scout leader, then a sheriff's deputy, then a state legislator, then mayor of Spokane. All the while just doing what was expected of him. Going along in the state house when his fellow Republicans proposed anti-gay bills, but never leading the charge.

Shortly after becoming mayor, he discovered that he had colon cancer. This triggered a deep self-examination, as such traumatic events often do. Realizing that he had suppressed his sexuality for his entire life, he began logging into gay chat rooms, with the hope that he may actually meet someone.

Somehow, one of the guys he regularly chatted with realized that he was the mayor of Spokane. Being a good liberal he immediately went to the local paper with the story. They, in turn, set up a sting operation, posing as a seventeen year old boy. They tried baiting him into meeting up with their decoy, but he didn't take the bait. It was not until he was certain that the boy had turned 18, that he agreed to a meeting.

While all this is going on, he does offer a few of the guys he met online unpaid internships at city hall. I think he is so socially underdeveloped, that he is like a high-school boy trying to get people to like him. Even though he is in his fifties, he has never really had any experience with gay relationships. Coming out that late in life, he was like a long-distance runner shackled by years of suppressed emotions.

By the end of the show, he is recalled as mayor, then exonerated by the FBI of any wrongdoing in public office, and then he dies of colon cancer in July of 2006.

People called him a hypocrite, a child molester, a disgrace to his office. He does not come off as an especially likeable or attractive man, but nonetheless all too human. Another man destroyed by society's expectations. If only he had been allowed to live a free and open life as gay man, he may have found the joy that loving another human being can bring.

To think he only had one or two gay sexual encounters during his entire life. Those in the back seat of a car in a dark alley. Here lies a man who never got a chance to really live his life, something so many of us take for granted. God rest his soul.