A Pioneering Path to the Mayor’s Office
by Hilary Brueck
When Stu Rasmussen retired from the Silverton [Oregon] City Council in 1996, he was ready to make some changes in his daily life. Since puberty, Rasmussen had been aware that he wasn’t like other guys. “I was an early-on cross-dresser deeply in the closet at that time,” he said of his teenage years. As he matured, Stu slowly began migrating toward a transgender identity: he liked to dress as a woman on Halloween, and he wished he could dress that way more often.
Living in a small town and being involved in politics, he was only out to a few close friends. As he left public office, he began a midlife transition to feminine attire. He started slowly, wearing nail polish and making jokes about his favorite shades, before he began dressing in heels and miniskirts, completing his transition with breast implants.
Rasmussen’s close friend, Aileen Conrad, described Stu’s transformation as purely cosmetic: “He is a man, has always been a man, and is still a man. He just dresses like a woman. But he is definitely masculine, and he thinks masculine and he behaves masculine...seems to me he’s still the same Stu that I met 20-some years ago.”
Rasmussen’s sharp intellect and honest, forthcoming demeanor were always well-known in town. The 61-year-old mayor set up the first cable TV system for Silverton, invented a new lottery machine for the Oregon State Lottery, and runs the town’s Palace Theater with his longtime girlfriend. For many years, he put up the town’s Christmas lights.
Within eight years of his retirement from politics, Stu saw Silverton begin expanding exponentially, and his hometown started to seem unrecognizable. So he considered a second foray into politics, this time as a transgender man.
“I did not want to see the community that I grew up in, and that I helped shape, move off in a different direction,” Rasmussen said.
He ran for city council again in 2005, and after four years on the council, he was elected to the mayor’s office in 2009. Mayor Stu, skirts and all, was the nation’s first transgender mayor in a town of just over 7,400 people. Stu had found a perfect, organic recipe for his own election: his gender identity did not define his politics or his campaign; they were simply one part of his well-known personality.
Of his own election, Rasmussen said, “Everybody said, ‘There’s Stu, and yeah, he wears dresses, and that’s fine; he’s still pretty good at what he does, and we’ll elect him.’”
“He always makes himself accessible,” said Conrad. “If you said, ‘There’s something wrong with something in town,’ he very often would go in and talk to the city manager and go talk before the city council. He stood up for the people in town.”
Conrad said Stu’s gender identity wasn’t the only way he differed from other people in town. “He was smarter than us: he was always inventive, [and] he was always creative, so he was always just a little bit different from most of us here.”
Although Rasmussen’s town provided a perfect petri dish to test his own quest for the mayor’s office, he acknowledges that the LGBT community, especially transgender people, still lack public acceptance. “I think we’ve got the L and G [in LGBT] pretty well taken care of—those folks are out of the closet and making their case in public, and getting elected to public office, and are pretty well on the way to full acceptance,” Rasmussen said.
“Bisexuals are live and let live; that shouldn’t be an issue. But trans people are their own worst enemies because they keep hiding in the closet and are afraid to see the light of day.” Rasmussen can attest to his own struggles disclosing his identity as a transgender man. After many years in the closet, he became more comfortable with himself through the support of the Northwest Gender Alliance, a Portland-based group dedicated to providing information and support to transgender people including cross-dressers and transsexuals. “The trans community is probably 30 years behind the times and hasn’t yet got on the boat and said, ‘We are humans; we are citizens and entitled to equal treatment.’ I think that’s coming.”
While Rasmussen hopes for more visibility and activism for his community, transgender activists and support groups around the country are already fighting for gender education, health care access, and equality. Efforts exist large and small: from the National Center for Transgender Equality to individuals like blogger Autumn Sandeen, who writes about daily struggles as a trans woman and political activist. As Sandeen said in a recent blog post: “The lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community isn’t a homogenous community, where we all think, act, and look alike. That there are splits in opinions is [a] healthy phenomen[on].”
For now, Rasmussen focuses his own political energies on his job as mayor: he’s intent on making the town’s earthen dam safer, moving downtown Silverton from one-way streets back to two-way streets, and working toward more business-friendly policies.
“He loves this town,” Conrad said. “Some people get upset because they say ‘Oh, you’ve brought shame upon our community because you dress as a woman.’ But if he thought it was going to bring shame upon our community, he wouldn’t have done it.”
