Letter From San Angelo

The End of The Affair

J. W. Lown was a popular, twice-reelected mayor with a bright political future—until he was forced to choose between his two passions: his city and his lover.

by John Spong

September 2009

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Joseph Wendel Lown was unlike any mayor San Angelo had ever seen. He first ran in 2003, at the age of 26, promising to serve full-time. That was unusual. San Angelo has a council-manager form of government, in which the city manager runs day-to-day operations. The mayor’s job, in fact, pays only $50 a month, and previous mayors had been either working men without his free time or retired men without his energy. But Lown didn’t need a job. He lived comfortably off of an inheritance from his parents, who’d both died before he turned 22, and oil and gas royalties secured by a great-grandmother, his namesake, Wendella Lown, a Swedish immigrant to San Angelo who had bought up area mineral rights with money she made selling chickens and eggs.

His mother, Alicia, was an immigrant too, from Mexico City, who met his father, George, while traveling with mutual friends in Vienna. Three days later they got engaged in Paris. Longtime San Angeloans recall the blond-haired Alicia looking as if she’d walked straight off a Neiman’s runway. But her Mexican blood kept her out of the Junior League, and she set out to make sure no such doors were closed to J. W. She had him load his lawn mower in the trunk of her Mercedes and put him to work in the old-money neighborhood where the Lowns lived. A strong golfer, he hung around the country club in high school, frequently getting invites to play with community leaders. The right people began to view him as a member of the family, and when he ran for mayor, they gave wholehearted support.

Once elected, he devoted every hour to the city. A close adviser said he attended 1,600 community events in his first year in office. He took notes when he met people, then quoted their concerns at council meetings. When he visited elementary schools, he didn’t always read to the kids because he said it made more sense to have them read to him. With the help of his political mentor and real-life godfather, D.C. lobbyist Mario Castillo, he arranged official visits by the European Union ambassador and the Texas Historical Commission. He made San Angelo feel important.

Though executive power lay expressly with the city manager, Lown used his high profile to push his priorities. He was fiscally conservative and socially libertarian and, if city officials were required to declare party affiliation, would almost certainly have registered Republican. He was a watchdog for the city’s half-cent sales tax, automatically skeptical of any expenditure that didn’t go to infrastructure or promotion of local business. Despite discovery of a couple puppy mills in town, he opposed an ordinance restricting the number of dogs people could own; he didn’t think the city should tell people how many pets they could have.

He was not without critics, however. Important members of the city establishment never did warm to him. A detractor I spoke with called him immature, power hungry, and—somewhat perplexingly—willing to spend too much time at the job. In fact, Lown recruited compatriots to run against establishment candidates, people like Charlotte Farmer, a retired bank manager who, on Lown’s strong endorsement, won 69 percent of the vote against a long-serving incumbent. Lown also had a widely known feud with police chief Tim Vasquez. The mayor had opposed his request for a third assistant chief, and Vasquez, according to insiders, had accused him of smoking marijuana. Lown took a drug test to clear his name, but Vasquez declined to comment when I brought it up. He did say, though, “There was a hard contrast between my conservative beliefs and his liberal beliefs.”

But all those accomplishments and criticisms became irrelevant when Lown fell in love. The young man (whose name has not been disclosed) had been in the U.S. for five years, and his immigration status wasn’t questioned when he enrolled at Angelo State University because he had graduated from a Texas high school. Working on a public-speaking project for a spring semester class, he’d been directed to the mayor by a mutual friend. By all accounts he was a remarkable person, not unlike a younger J. W., handsome, devoted to community service, and a fixture on the dean’s list. He was also a salsa instructor. The mayor, said by his sister to have flat feet, size 13, fell for him hard. In March, with the campaign in high gear, they started dating.

By then the town knew of Lown’s orientation. An unmarried 26-year-old running for office had not raised speculation. But a 32-year-old mayor who escorted his sister to city functions was probably gay. Judging from his increasingly large reelection margins, the city could have handled news of a boyfriend. But that the boyfriend was illegal was a whole other matter. Lown felt desperate. Ten days after another landslide victory, the two made their run for the border, leaving a letter of explanation on the mayor’s desk.

A day later, they were in Mexico, settling in for an indeterminate stay at an unnamed location and looking into getting Lown’s partner a visa—which, under current law, will take at least ten years. After a couple short phone interviews with San Angelo reporters and one with the Associated Press, Lown fell silent. He exchanged brief e-mails with me in the first weeks of his new life, then simply stopped responding.

Then in July, he called out of the blue. In a thoughtful, sonorous tone—his friends told me his voice, combined with his impeccable dress and prematurely gray hair, makes him seem innately statesmanlike—he explained what he would. “My partner was completely forthright with me about his status when we started. But I didn’t want to think about it. The Wednesday before the election, I confided in someone close to me, and the next morning he called and read me the immigration law. That scared me. The laws of our country are harsh for illegal immigrants. And I understand that. But same-sex couples don’t have the same benefits as heterosexual couples. Otherwise we could simply have a civil union and cure the problem. That’s not possible.”

He had tried to break it off that day but immediately had doubts. “I realized, ‘This is it.’ When you know, you know. So I spent the days before the swearing-in packing my house. And every time I put a book or an heirloom in a box, I asked myself, ‘Is this right?’ Neither of us knew until we crossed that border. I said, ‘If you want to turn back, we can. But then this cannot continue. I cannot take the oath of office to uphold the laws of this country and remain with you.’ ”

He called it a shame that he had had to choose between San Angelo and this man but said that when it came down to it, there was no choice. “I went seven years—it’s almost biblical—without being with someone. So I’d completely devoted myself to the city. I guess that was a way of coping. Or not coping. I’d just never met anyone that moved me.

“My partner is the only person who ever reached me. I didn’t know I could love someone in a personal way.”

Greg Gossett’s law office looks like they all do, a desk covered with files, shelves packed with casebooks, and walls filled with diplomas, licenses, and photos of the family. The only thing unexpected is a funky-looking exercise device on the floor in a corner. “When I was J. W.’s treasurer,” he told me one morning in May, “people would come drop off contributions, and occasionally, as they handed them to me, they’d say, ‘I heard he’s gay.’ ”

He asked if I’d read Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Plains. “It’s a book I reread every five years or so,” he said. “Webb makes the observation that in the West you have a conservative population of tolerant people. The environment is waterless, and everybody’s spread out, so you have to rely on your neighbors. Also, you know everybody. You’re always running into them. So people can’t afford to be judgmental. As long as you don’t get in somebody’s face, they’re fine with you.”

And so went San Angelo. Five weeks after Lown’s abdication, mayoral candidates were filing for the special election, and the city was moving on. Beauty shop talk had filled in holes in Lown’s story—some people pointed to the feud with Vasquez as a catalyst for his dramatic departure, others to a supremely unlikely love triangle—but by then the theories had been debunked and were rarely discussed. All they really proved was that a gay mayor falling for an illegal alien wasn’t sexy enough by itself. It was a difficult fact for an outsider to grasp.

“So let me ask you this,” I said to Lown when we spoke. “Did you leave so suddenly because you had a gay problem or an immigration problem?”

“It was an immigration problem. A legal problem.”

“So you could have been the gay mayor of San Angelo? In the open? With a partner?”

“I was the gay mayor of San Angelo,” he said, sounding surprised I’d even ask. “What are you talking about?”

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