John Duran is styling himself as a law-and-order candidate for West Hollywood City Council, posing in front of sheriff’s cruisers on his campaign website and touting his endorsement by the deputies’ union.
It’s a stark contrast from the Duran of the early 1990s, when as a 30-something activist attorney, he helped sue the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department for alleged discrimination against a gay deputy and for withholding medication from a gay jail inmate with AIDS.
Duran, 63, spent two decades on the West Hollywood City Council and is now considered part of the political old guard of this famously liberal, famously gay city, as many younger residents embrace a brand of progressivism far to the left of its founding fathers.
The Nov. 8 election has become a generational battle in West Hollywood, which grabbed international headlines when it incorporated in 1984 with the first City Council in the nation to have an openly gay majority.
With three council seats being contested, many are hurling accusations that the other side has sold out — the moderates to big business and developers, and the progressives to outside activists and labor unions.
Duran and two other former councilmen are hoping to recapture their seats and influence a council they say has veered too far to the left because of its economic policies and decision to scale back sheriff’s staffing.
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