Del Rio Elects Openly Gay Mayor
The South Texas town of Del Rio, population 35,998, elected its first openly gay officeholder on Saturday when Bruno Lozano won the mayoral race. Lozano, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran who wore a pair of heels while marching in Del Rio’s Veterans Parade last year, is part of what the Houston Chronicle described earlier this year as a “wave” of LGBT candidates seeking public office in Texas in 2018. According to Houston’s OutSmart Magazine, as of January there were at least 52 LGBT candidates across the state, chasing everything from small-town mayor gigs to state representative seats to the governor’s office.
Lozano had become well known in Del Rio for his work to clean up the border town’s waterways, according to Into, an online magazine produced by the gay online dating app Grindr, and he decided to run for mayor in 2016. “I’ve gained a huge following ever since I put my name in the hat,” Lozano told Into in April. “The Baby Boomers have been running the government over the last 20 to 30 years. Del Rio needs investment and infrastructure, flood prevention, and then they also need economic growth.” Into reported that Lozano’s decision to run for office was “fueled by a demand for change,” a motivation that seems to be shared by many of Texas’s current LGBT candidates.
It’s been a particularly difficult past few years for the LGBT community in Texas. Policy makers nationally and at the state level have worked—with varying degrees of success—to repeal some of the rights that LGBT people have painstakingly gained in the last decade. In Texas, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick’s yearlong crusade to pass a “bathroom bill” in 2017 ultimately died in the Legislature, but the controversial bill pitted hard-line conservatives seeking to implement gender restrictions on public restrooms versus an LGBT community fighting against further marginalization. At the federal level, the election of President Donald Trump in 2016 signaled a shift from former President Barack Obama’s LGBT-friendly policies. In March, Trump signed an executive order banning transgender people from joining the U.S. military, and in June the Trump administration refused to recognize Pride Month.
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|https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/del-rio-elects-openly-gay-mayor/]
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Fourth paragraph in Texas Monthly article has a few errors because the candidates referenced lost their March 6th primaries.
