San Joaquin County is set to welcome its first gay mayor to lead one of its eight cities and the first gay male city councilmembers in Stockton. Tracy City Councilmember Dan Tavares Arriola will take his mayoral oath of office when his five-member governing body meets December 17.
Arriola bested two opponents to succeed Mayor Nancy Young, who is termed out this month, in his second bid for the position with a two-year term. Elected to his council seat in 2018, Arriola had first sought to become mayor two years later but fell short.
This time around, he won with 47% of the vote. He is eligible to serve two mayoral terms, thus could lead the city that is home to many residents who commute to jobs in the Bay Area through 2028 if he's reelected in 2026.
"I am so incredibly thankful for the support of this community, and I would like to thank our residents who have placed their trust in me to lead this incredible city," wrote Arriola in a Facebook post December 3 following the last vote count update for his county.
A board member of the Equality California Institute, the educational arm of the statewide LGBTQ civil rights organization, Arriola is now part of an out political duo. His partner, Hayward public school teacher Charlie Jones, won election last month to a school board seat in Pleasanton, becoming the East Bay city's first LGBTQ elected official.
When Arriola had run in 2016 for a school board seat in Tracy, he was outed just days prior to the election by a local blogger who posted photos of Arriola at Los Angeles Pride under a headline asking how he could "represent Tracy family values." He won by more than 2,000 votes.
Born in San Jose to a white mother and Latino father, his parents divorced after Arriola was born, and his mother moved them briefly to Portugal. When he was 3 years old, they returned to Northern California and settled in Tracy where his father was living. His parents remarried and had a second son, but divorced again in 2019.
After leaving to attend college at UCLA, where he was the political science valedictorian in 2011, and then law school at the University of Southern California, Arriola moved back to Tracy in 2014 where he continues to rent an apartment, priced out of the local housing market.
A deputy district attorney for San Joaquin County, Arriola had made addressing the need for affordable housing, especially for the middle class, a top priority of his mayoral campaign. He hopes to be able to buy a home once he pays off his student loans next year.
"Seventeen years ago, as a high school student, I was working as a janitor and house cleaner simply trying to survive the challenges of poverty while living in Tracy. In the time since, I graduated from UCLA, earned my juris doctorate from USC Law, became a lawyer, and was elected to office as both a school board member and a city councilmember," noted Arriola in his Facebook message declaring victory. "As I move into the role of mayor, I hope to build a community where every young person living in our city — no matter their background or the challenges they face — knows that they too can pursue their dreams and achieve success. If I can do it, I know our young people can too!"
Stockton
Come 2025, Arriola will have two out municipal counterparts in the nearby city of Stockton, which also is adjacent to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. District 4 City Councilmember-elect Mario Enríquez and District 6 City Councilmember-elect Jason Lee will be sworn into office Tuesday, January 7.
"It feels great," said Enríquez, noting in a phone interview with the Bay Area Reporter he had spent nearly two years "campaigning to get to this moment."
His becoming an elected official feels "full circle," he said.
"Since I was 13, I was always trying to focus on bettering myself for my community, and learning and growing along the way. Truly, this is due to the investments people made in me and those I made in myself," said Enríquez, who will have lesbian former state senator Susan Talamantes Eggman administer his oath of office.
Eggman, a Democrat termed out of the Legislature this year, was the first out councilmember to serve in Tracy. Enríquez and Lee are returning out LGBTQ representation to the council for the first time since 2012, when Eggman departed to serve in the state Assembly.
Enríquez grew up in nearby Lathrop and works for his alma mater the University of the Pacific. After graduating in 2010 with a B.A. in sociology, Enríquez left Stockton to pursue new educational and professional opportunities.
One ended up being with the LGBTQ Victory Fund's educational arm, the Victory Institute, as its director of constituent engagement. He stepped down from the national nonprofit in early 2022 after being hired by the private college.
He won his council race with 51.56% of the vote. What put him over the top, he said, was spending time to knock on as many voters' doors in his district as he could leading up to Election Day. The importance of canvassing was something the Victory Fund's outgoing CEO Annise Parker, who was to have resigned December 1 but is remaining in place until her successor is named, would drill into would-be candidates during the trainings it held and that Enríquez helped organize.
"Mayor Parker at the trainings would say the way to win is door knocking," recalled Enríquez, using Parker's honorific as a former mayor of Houston. "She said to me, 'Mario, signs don't vote, people vote.' If you are not putting in the work to knock on doors and talking to people, if they don't know who you are, they are not going to vote for you. That is literally what put us in our favor; we outworked the competition when it came to that."
He told the B.A.R. he plans to begin the work of a councilmember on Day 1 of his term. He has been compiling a list of needs to address in his district, from filling potholes to fixing streetlights not working, and also plans to host quarterly town halls with his constituents in 2025.
"I want to hit the ground running," said Enríquez, who also has been writing his first newsletter to have it ready to send out next month. "In this district, it didn't seem there was much transparency with what the councilmember was doing. I want to be very visible and out there."
Lee won his race with 57.53% of the vote. Over the years he has had experience in labor relations as an employee with the Service Employees International Union and the media with his brand Hollywood Unlocked and talk show, "The Jason Lee Show," launched in 2023. His Los Angeles connections led to his flying in actor Tiffany Haddish on a private jet for a campaign forum he held, a video of which labeled "Jason Lee Forum #2" can be seen on his campaign website under the "Gallery" option when clicking "More" at the top of the main page.
He didn't have endorsements of LGBTQ groups and didn't make his being one of the first gay men to serve on the council a major aspect of his candidacy. Nonetheless, Lee has been outspoken about his experience as a gay, biracial man in the worlds of hip-hop and Hollywood, talking about it in interviews over the years.
"I didn't want to lead with my sexuality but I have always been proud of it," Lee noted during one discussion viewable here.
He appeared in several seasons of the VH1 show "Love & Hip Hop: Hollywood" and was also on MTV2's game show "Wild 'N Out," during which he gained attention for unsuspectedly kissing gay rapper and "Love & Hip Hop: Miami" castmate Bobby Lytes during a rap battle. It led to a 2018 "Pride Profile" of Lee in Billboard where he said out signer Frank Ocean's "Bad Religion" helped him come out.
"I was actually really emotional listening to that song; it was a really, it had a lot of impact on me," Lee told the publication.
His campaign bio focused more on the travails he overcame growing up in the Central Valley city, from surviving being shot by a drive-by shooter at 15 to seeing his brother, Rodney Townsend, murdered at Lee's going away party when he was 19.
According to his campaign bio, "Abandoned by his drug-addicted mother and absent father, Lee endured the horrors of molestation, gun violence, the foster care system, and abuse during his tragic childhood." Delivering for his district's and the city's youth was a major campaign promise Lee made.
An assistant for Lee told the B.A.R. he was unavailable for an interview due to taking some personal time off until December 21. Arriola did not respond to the B.A.R.'s interview requests about his victory and swearing in plans by press time Wednesday.
Special election set for San Jose council seat
A placeholder councilmember will be appointed to fill a vacancy on the San Jose City Council until a special election is held in the spring. Candidates who run for the seat are ineligible to be selected as the interim holder of the District 3 council seat.
The seat became vacant November 5 with the resignation of gay former San Jose city councilmember Omar Torres. He stepped down on Election Day due to being arrested on child sex charges, to which he has preliminarily pled not guilty, as the B.A.R. has previously reported.
Last week, Torres' former council colleagues opted for the bifurcated plan to find his successor, which had the backing of San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan. Those interested in being appointed to, or those deciding to run for, the seat will be able to file the required paperwork between December 16 and January 10.
At that time, the council will select one of the appointment applicants to serve as the interim councilmember until there is a winner of the special election. It will be held April 8, and should no candidate receive more than 50% of the vote, the top two vote-getters will move on to a runoff election on June 24.
The victor will serve out the remainder of the term through the end of 2026 and will need to seek a full, four-year term on that year's November general election ballot. Among those expected to seek the seat that covers much of downtown San Jose is gay Planning Commission Chair Anthony Tordillos.
Web Extra: For more queer political news, be sure to check http://www.ebar.com Monday mornings for Political Notes, the notebook's online companion. This week's column reported on the election of a number of out education officials in the Bay Area.
Keep abreast of the latest LGBTQ political news by following the Political Notebook on Threads @ https://www.threads.net/@matthewbajko and on Bluesky @ https://bsky.app/profile/politicalnotes.bsky.social.
Got a tip on LGBTQ politics? Call Matthew S. Bajko at (415) 829-8836 or email [email protected]
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