There are two Pacific Northwest trans politicians, long faded from the spotlight, that I think about every now and again. Stu Rasmussen and Richard Curtis. Stu is probably the one you've heard of. A civic leader in small-town Oregon, Stu was elected to various positions in Silverton throughout the '80s, '90s, 2000s, and 2010s. Library Board, City Councilor, Mayor. She came to national prominence in 2008 when she won the mayoralty for a second time as an out transgender person. A first for America.
Stu's gender position threw the national media for a loop -- "use any pronouns" she'd say, femme attire in public, no hormones, breast implants. In her own words then, "a dude, a heterosexual man who appears to be female". For many, Stu's gender would have been described as "local eccentric". Nowadays we'd probably say non-binary trans femme. That wouldn't be wrong, but it wouldn't be the whole truth. Stu was channeling her desires into a particular way of life that had been going on for decades.
In 2002, writing for Transgender Tapestry magazine under the name Carla Fong, Stu described the process of getting her breast implants. Tapestry was a magazine with a small circulation -- 10,000 or so at its peak. It was one of the most successful of a number of small magazines whose audience was the so called gender community -- it began publication in 1978 as TV Tapestry, a newsletter for a transvestite social club in Boston, MA. The grandmother of these newsletters, magazines, and social clubs was Virginia Prince's Transvestia -- first published in 1960 and a house organ for Prince's FPE and Tri-ESS cross-dressing organizations.
These specialty publications were created by and focused on middle-class, white, and white adjacent cross-dressers. The term they would have used for themselves was transvestite -- the "TV" in TV Tapestry. This was before that word became associated with the work of Ray Blanchard. Tapestry eventually renamed itself as TV/TS Tapestry (TS short for transsexual, in this context meaning someone who sought out bottom surgery), and finally Transgender Tapestry as an attempt to broaden their reach, mission, and circulation to all trans people. The distinctions between transvestites and transsexuals was often a topic of conversation and fierce debate in these publications. In the same issue of Tapestry where Stu describes her BA, there was an article by Holly Boswell that began
The middle ground I’m referring to is transgenderism. I realize this term (heretofore vague) also encompasses the entire spectrum: crossdresser to transsexual person. But for the purpose of this article -- and for what I hope will be a continuing dialogue -- I shall attempt to define transgender as a viable option between crossdresser and transsexual person, which also happens to have a firm foundation in the ancient tradition of androgyny (All my references will address the male-to-female orientation).
Even Stu's article touches on the topic -- hormones being off the table as "inappropriate" since she wasn't a "transsexual".
I was left with three possibilities: do nothing, take hormones, or have breast augmentation surgery. I didn't feel hormones were appropriate for me -- I’m a crossdresser, not a transsexual. I may be a lesbian trapped in a body with male plumbing, but it’s comfortable for me. Doing nothing (and daydreaming about how things could be different) was the easy option, but there was still that nagging desire to look right in that little black dress.
Stu was deeply enmeshed in and a contributing member to this now mostly gone culture. A secret crossdresser for the first half of her life, she credits the internet with putting her in touch with both these national communities as well as regional groups like the Northwest Gender Alliance (NWGA). They expanded the possibility space for her desires.
Richard Curtis's story is lesser known and more ignoble. There are many people who wouldn't include him under the banner of "trans" at all. Curtis first held office on the La Center, WA City Council, and then as a member of the Washington House of Representatives. His brief moment in the spotlight led to him retreating from public life and either leaving the Pacific Northwest or melting into its background.
Many news articles mention that Curtis built up a socially conservative voting record and go on to list his opposition to gay rights and domestic partnership bills. At the time, this was code for "Votes with his party, but doesn't seem to care about gays one way or the other". Or, as Dan Savage reported in his 2007 feature on Curtis
And not only did Curtis not act like any gay man I know, he didn't act much like a homophobe in the Washington State legislature. ... "While Representative Curtis had an anti-gay voting record," Washington state senator Ed Murray tells me on the phone, "he was never an ideologue." Murray served in the Washington State House of Representatives with Curtis. Curtis sat on the transportation committee, which Murray chaired. "He didn't seem driven by antigay stuff," recalls Murray. "He wasn't one of the jerks. He wasn't one of the members so obsessed about the gay issue that you started to wonder why."
Openly gay Washington State Representive [sic: Representative] Jamie Pedersen describes Curtis as "decent and kind" in an e-mail. "He was one of two Republicans who, after the [domestic partnership] vote, came across the floor to shake my hand and congratulate me," Pedersen recalls.
It's an idea from a different political age -- that your political party is less ideological and more a result of the possibility space of where you live. If you're interested in shaping civic life, you pick the party in power in your area -- even if you don't agree with everything they're doing.
We don't know a lot about how Curtis thought about his gender or sexuality -- what we do know is that Curtis sought out sex with men in cruising communities, seemed willing to pay for it, and wanted to crossdress while he did it. In 2007, while in Spokane at a Republican Party retreat, he allegedly paid a gay male sex worker for sex. The sex worker then extorted him for more money and the return of his wallet. Curtis reported the extortion to the police, tried to keep it quiet, and failed to. He resigned from office, declined to testify after the sex worker was arrested, sold his and his family's home in La Center, Washington, and left public life.
Savage's feature on Curtis focused on how his sexual misadventures were of a different ilk than those a gay man might embark on. He pulled in two outside sexologists to explain these discrepancies. The first, Anne Lawrence, clocked Curtis as a classic case of autogynephilia. The second, Ray Blanchard, was reluctant to speak on Curtis himself but happy to opine about the term he coined. Four years earlier Blanchard's work had reached a mainstream audience through J. Michael Bailey's even then discredited pop science book The Man Who Would be Queen.
Savage took the advice of these sexologists at face value and made no mention of the controversies surrounding their ideas.
In Jean Thornton's new novel, A/S/L, there's a passage about a particular form of trans desire.
She had been out as trans for years now -- how many years was it, exactly? When should she start counting from? -- and in those years, her memory had reviewed the facts of her identity again and again, made all the arguments for so many times that any arguments against had long withered, like leaves severed from circulation of the branch. These were things one never spoke of to cis people: that this had all once been a hypothesis, that whatever facts lay at the bottom of it were never unmixed with faith, which is never unmixed with desire.
Thornton's characters, teenagers in the late '90s, occupy a chronological frontier between two different ways of being trans in America. There was no watershed moment, no tipping point, but as the nineties became the aughties American attitudes towards gay and queer people began to soften. Legal protections were put in place, local bureaucracies were making different decisions. Gay marriage became the cause de jour. Trans people were able to ride in the wake of these changes. HRT's more than half century of practice started to be classified as non-experimental by private and government insurance, and began being covered. The new health care bureaucracy of the Affordable Care Act offered Americans a path towards continuous health coverage. The possibility space for trans lives was expanding.
When I think about Rasmussen and Curtis I think about the limited space their desires had to roam. Born in 1948 and 1959, respectively. Long before the lives of trans women had much penetration into the American monoculture. Rasmussen mentions seeing the Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1975 as offering her a glimpse into who she might be. Eventually the early internet and groups like the NWGA showed her there were others like her. We can only speculate on what led Curtis to believe that all he deserved was an occasional risky adventure to the backroom of a sex shop while otherwise maintaining the life of a civic-minded republican family man.
Rasmussen and Curtis lodged themselves in my memory because, as they were having their moments of renown, I was at what I didn't yet realize was the apex of my first attempt at leading an out trans life. Slightly older than the characters of Thornton's novel, my desires were beginning to exhaust the possibility space offered to someone born in 1975. Someone feeling the need to get on with their life. At the time I compared Rasmussen's smooth politician's "any pronouns are fine" to when friends asked me my own, and I felt the gap of shame between what I wanted to say and what I'd learned was acceptable. I remember my discomfort in reading Savage's feature on Curtis. Savage was a writer I'd been following for almost a decade and whose work helped me come to an awkward acceptance and detente with my queerness, but whose reporting only painted a distorted picture of my desires.
In 2025 I'm looking at Stu's picture on the Oregon Encyclopedia website. It was taken as part of her last election campaign -- an unsuccessful bid for a fourth consecutive, and seventh total, mayoral term in 2014. I'm doing that terrible thing we sometimes do to ourselves and one another -- wondering if the changes to the shape of her face I see are physiological or just the result of a high camera angle, lighting, contouring, and bangs.
Early in the second year of my second transition, a friend and I decided to attend one of the NWGA dinners. We had both grown beyond the drop-in group stage and wanted community beyond our immediate cohort. I wasn't quite sure what to expect as we parked in the suburban lot of the Chinese restaurant. What we found were four women, three trans, one cis. All of retirement age, all long-time members of the NWGA. The trans women were all former cross-dressers who, as they reached retirement age and considered how to fill the rest of their days, realized there was one regret they didn't want to leave on the table. The cis woman, a spouse, beamed when she described how much more engaged with life her now-wife was compared to the old days. Happy for a new audience, these women told us the stories of their lives, and the changes to other organizations like theirs as more and more members began or finished their long-delayed transitions. I remember this evening fondly.
As we drove home, my friend and I compared notes as an old perpetual stew of feelings bubbled up in me. I was long past the point of needing to be convinced that this was the right path, but it was none-the-less hearting to see other former transvestites find their way into what they always wanted. But I also found resentment swirling in my heart. Resentment at their stable retirements. Resentment at and how these women, a generation older than me, hadn't created a world I could transition into. Then I felt the shame that my generation hadn't found a way forward either, and then the shame of my own relative stability in middle-aged middle-class transition compared to many women I know.
I kept these feelings to myself, not ready to talk about them and not wanting to spoil the mood for my friend, fourteen year younger than me. Her initial nervousness had faded into a palpable relief and I asked if there was anything in particular that caused the change. She told me "They were just ordinary old ladies" -- the conversation with these retired women having removed a fear about her own future she had only just begun contemplating.
Stu didn't seem like the retiring type. She ran for the city council again in 2016, falling 8 votes short of securing third place in a "vote for three" election. She ran for mayor again in 2018, placing third with 19% of the vote. She did not run in 2020, having by then told colleagues of her prostate cancer. She passed in 2021 at the age of seventy-three.
I think I'm rudely scrutinizing this 2014 photo for evidence of fat redistribution because I can't help but wonder what Stu's final possibility space looked like. When she wasn't campaigning or talking to the press. When she was at rest. At home with her wife. Did she still think of herself in the language of the mid-century transvestites or her 2008 campaign soundbyte -- "a dude, a heterosexual man who appears to be female" -- or did she privately allow herself to long for, and finally take, more.