Now just about everyone knows. If Oakley wins Saturday’s runoff election, Dallas will become the first top 10 city in America to elect an openly gay mayor. Even San Francisco has never had one, and the largest U.S. city currently with an openly gay mayor is Providence, R.I. But no one really thought about Dallas making history until after the first round of voting on May 12, when Oakley and former construction CEO Tom Leppert pulled ahead of the pack of 11 candidates to make it to a runoff. “Most of my colleagues didn’t know [about Oakley’s sexuality], and they’re political scientists,” said J. Matthew Wilson, a professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The latest polling shows the race too close to call; the two candidates have spent more than $2 million collectively.
What had been a ho-hum showdown between two men with similar views on the issues and equally subdued personalities has suddenly become a talker. Leppert is the former head of Turner Corp.—a multibillion-dollar construction firm—a Republican, and a relative newcomer to both Dallas (where he lived for a time in the ’80s before returning in 1999) and political life (this is his first run for office). Oakley, by contrast, is a Democrat, a small-business owner who moved to the city 25 years ago, and a grass-roots politician who can’t tap his own bank account to outspend his opponent. But none of that sparked interest in this election like the idea of a gay mayor suddenly has.
Now the gay factor is volleying across the blogosphere. It’s been discussed in candidate debates, made the front page of the local newspaper and hit national media outlets. “This has now become ’the’ issue in the campaign,” wrote Scott Bennett, in a June 11 posting to Dallasblog.com. Even some liberals he’d spoken to said they were planning to vote for Leppert because of the gay issue, including one socialite who didn’t want the headlines to blare that Dallas had become the next San Francisco.
That notion clearly upsets more than a few residents. An anonymous robo-caller warned voters to beware an alleged “radical gay agenda” and the Heritage Alliance, a conservative group, also made calls criticizing Oakley for his homosexuality. One man tried to file a complaint with the Dallas Ethics Advisory Commission saying Oakley was unfit to serve in government because of his sexual orientation. It was immediately dismissed as baseless; Dallas is a place that overturned its ban against hiring gay police officers in 1993, and later barred all such discrimination in hiring and housing. Leppert has apparently steered clear of the gay issue, and even criticized the Heritage Alliance’s phone campaign.
By all accounts, Oakley never tried to hide his sexual orientation, but he didn’t trumpet it either. Now that it’s become an issue in the waning days of the campaign, he is declining to grant interviews on the topic. In a television and radio debate, Oakley was asked whether or not his sexual orientation is an issue. “Absolutely not. I’ve been a public official for 15 years and it’s not been an issue, and it won’t be an issue as mayor,” he replied. Oakley never styled himself as a “gay candidate” and he doesn’t advocate for gay issues. Nonetheless, the national Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund raised more than $80,000 for his campaign, and the Stonewall Democrats, a gay political group, pushed local Democratic Party reps to break tradition and endorse Oakley in what has always been a nonpartisan race. But Jesse Garcia, president of the Dallas chapter, declined to be interviewed until after Saturday’s election. Earlier, he had told the Houston Chronicle “The best thing for us is to shut up.” (Garcia said that comment was off the record.)
Is a city in the home state of George W. Bush ready for a gay mayor? Dallas is a notch in the Bible Belt of evangelical Christianity, where many consider homosexuality to be immoral. Two out of three Dallas County voters approved a ban on gay marriage written into the state constitution in 2005.
But many social conservatives live in the ‘burbs, and they can’t vote in this election. And the city itself is home to a thriving gay and lesbian community. The Oak Lawn neighborhood in the heart of gay Dallas even throws a raucous Halloween parade, à la the much larger version in the Castro. The Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau says on its Web site that Dallas has the sixth-largest gay population in the country. Dallas even has evangelical gays, and the Cathedral of Hope, said to be the world’s largest gay church. In recent years, Dallas voters elected a lesbian sheriff, and the new county judge and county district clerk are both gay.
The black vote, key to Oakley’s base of Democratic and minority voters, appears to be split. Several prominent black leaders have endorsed Leppert, including Frederick Haynes III, head of a Baptist megachurch, and Don Hill, the mayor pro tem who finished third in the general election behind Oakley and Leppert. Stephen C. Nash, head of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance in North Texas, which represents predominantly black churches, reportedly made anti-gay remarks at a banquet Oakley attended in February. (Nash didn’t respond to requests for comment.) “People in this area are Biblical-oriented, and if it’s against the Bible they take offense,” says Dorothy Dean, president of the Dallas branch of the Progressive Voters League, an African-American political action organization. “It’s really too close to call,” she says, but adds that Oakley’s experience and longtime residence may give him an edge over relative newcomer Leppert. “You have to know what’s going on in Dallas to know what to do to improve Dallas.”
And many residents feel Dallas needs a lot of improvements—in safety, streets, sidewalks and schools. Those are the things Oakley and his campaign managers want to talk about—“tearing down crime-ridden apartments or fixing potholes,” says Oakley campaign spokesman Craig Murphy. It’s naïve to deny that the gay factor matters, Murphy adds. That’s why they mentioned it in their own telephone polls. “The question is to how many?” The campaign thinks only 5 percent of those who would have voted for Oakley will ditch him because of his sexual orientation. “If Oakley loses, it’s not necessarily because he is gay. Remember, Leppert was the leader in the first round when virtually no one in the city knew Oakley was gay,” cautions Wilson, the political scientist. The latest polls show them in a dead heat.
Though Oakley probably doesn’t want to be known only as the “gay mayor,” his victory Saturday would clearly mark a change in Texas politics.
