Editor’s Note: This story on 2008 Mayor-elect Stu Rasmussen ran in the January 2005 edition of Our Town Monthly.
In the November 2004 presidential election Silverton voters favored Republican incumbent George W. Bush over Democrat challenger John Kerry 1,987 to 1,797. They supported Measure 36, the initiative amending the state constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman, 2,294 to 1,529. They also elected an openly cross-dressing man to the city council. He was the second highest vote-getter in the seven-way race, garnering 1,603.
Stu Rasmussen, 56, spent eight years on the Silverton City Council and four years as Silverton mayor during the 1980s and 90s. He also spent four years on the Silver Falls Library Board, and ran for state office three times.
A contract software engineer, he’s designed music players, pay telephones, motherboard firmware for Intel and video servers for hotels. He’s now working on a game that should go to market early in 2005.
Rasmussen is highly visible as the co-owner of the Palace Theatre, taking tickets every evening at the door. It’s difficult not to notice his appearance change during his eight-year hiatus from the council.
It started with long, carefully manicured red fingernails. About four years ago, he added breast implants.
Rasmussen chatted about the changes and the election over lunch with Our Town editor Paula Mabry, writer Brenna Wiegand, and a tape recorder.
OT: Stu, what you do; it’s unabashed…
Stu: OK; true. I’m unabashedly me.
OT: So many people either can’t find out who they are, or once they do, go to great lengths to not be that person. Or step away and be whatever doesn’t cause any…
Stu: …Don’t make any waves. Yeah; and for the longest time I tried not to make any waves. I was a shy and retiring kid in high school, and nobody believes that. I mean, I’m the prototype of a nerd. I’m finally feeling comfortable in my own skin after a long, long time – and it’s not a bad thing.
OT: You’ve been at the Palace a long time.
Stu: I started working there when I was 16. My father was the manager, and I think it was just kind of in my blood, sort of a virus that I just couldn’t get rid of. We bought it in 1974; been there ever since.
OT: Business-wise, what else?
Stu: When I was a sophomore in high school, I built a computer out of pinball machine parts that played tic tac toe; it couldn’t be beaten. It won grand champion at the Marion County Science Fair. This was back in the days when we had Sputnik and Russians and Space Race and all of this – when science and math mattered way beyond football and basketball. There was a place for nerds… I had my own little electronics business when I was in high school, doing TV repair. I’ve always had at least one little business on the side.
I went to community college in Salem for a couple of years… which at that time was Salem Tech. Got tops in my class, graduated in ’68; was immediately hired by Tektronix…
What Salem Tech taught was to be a technician, not an engineer, you get an engineering background but basically your job is to calibrate oscilloscopes or do whatever. I spent all of 90 days doing that and said, “There’s no future in this for me. This is boring, and I can’t be bored.” Tektronix at that time had a division in the company that made educational films and videos. …which was way cool, you know, because my background was in theater and I knew a little about photography… I spent eight years at Tektronix doing film and video and then marketing staff engineer for video broadcast products… and had a great time…
I left there, started another business doing theater engineering and maintenance for a couple of the theater chains in Portland.
That’s where I met Miss Victoria (Sage); she was the candy counter girl at Fifth Avenue Cinema by Portland State, where I also attended.
Roger (Paulson) and I bought the Palace Theatre around then… dividing my time between the two… Then around ’76-’77, a guy that I had been at Tek with and I started pitching cable TV to the City of Silverton. Being the local boy, and being the low ball bidder on it, several mistakes there, (I) got the cable TV franchise for Silverton and then within a year got the franchise for Mt. Angel because we could feed them both out of the same place.
I spent the next several years of my life building cable TV systems; I mean it was me in the bucket slinging wire – 35 miles of it. So from 1980 to 1985 or 86 had the cable TV; then sold out to Falcon Cable; they sold it to Charter a couple years ago.
I should have taken the money and run; should have, didn’t; stayed here and took the money and renovated the Mt. Angel Performing Arts Center.
OT: Why should you have run?
Stu: I like it here. I probably wouldn’t have run anyway, but I shouldn’t have spent all the money on the Mt. Angel Performing Arts Center. But, it’s an amazing facility for a town this size, just too far from a major metropolitan area. Live and learn. …Like the theater (it) does not make me any money – it’s a fun project. I decided if I was going to be really rich and unhappy or have a lot of fun, fun wins every time.
We renovated the Palace about two years ago; it’s one of the crown jewels of Silverton. There aren’t many small towns that have an operating movie theater; there are even fewer that have one as nice as ours.
OT: After being on the council for 12 years, you ran for higher office…
Stu: I ran for the legislature a couple of times in a district that is traditionally Republican, so the Democrats had written it off. No matter how good the candidate was, you couldn’t get any (campaign) support. I’m not saying I’m a great candidate, but I’m probably as good as you’re going to find in the district.
OT: It was somewhere around that time that you started doing your nails.
Stu: Yeah, I think I started having manicures around ’94-’95…
OT: It was commented on as “different.”
Stu: Well, it is different. I guess we’re getting around to cross-dressing – otherwise there wouldn’t be a story, right?
OT: You must notice people’s responses – how does that affect you?
Stu: I guess I must be something of an exhibitionist. I rather enjoy it.
OT: It doesn’t bother you?
Stu: The basic fact is I get to be me.
OT: So what would be the correct terminology for what you do or who you are, when it comes to gender?
Stu: It gets very complicated, because you have your physical configuration; you have your mental gender orientation; you have your appearance; and you have your sexual preference; and so you’ve got 16 possibilities, two to the fourth power of what I could be. So what do I identify as? I try to avoid that. Because I am a male and I like females, that makes me a heterosexual; but if I appear to be a female and like females, does that make me a lesbian?
OT: Good question.
Stu: I’m not the beer-drinking, sports-watching, “uh-uh-uh” kind of guy. I do guy stuff; I do girl stuff. It’s like you’ve got somebody over here who’s really tall and somebody over there who’s really short. Most of us are somewhere in the middle of that. Girl side or guy side; I mean, you’ve got macho football players that tat in their spare time; what do you do? I don’t have an answer.
I enjoy looking in a mirror and seeing myself as a halfway decent-looking woman; I like to look at them. I like to look at them a lot, and, I like to emulate them. I’m a cross-dresser. I can’t explain that. You know, testosterone poisoning as a child or lack of – or exposed to X-rays in the womb – who knows? People are different. I suppressed it for a long time; hid it for a long time, and all it did was make me crazy on the inside. I figured I’d share that craziness with everybody on the outside.
OT: Most people are not comfortable with change, and they’re not comfortable with anything they don’t understand.
Stu: My problems have all been between my ears in the process of coming out as who or what I am; making myself physically what I feel mentally. I figured I was the only person (like this) on the planet.
Men wearing women’s clothing has always been a bit bizzare. A hundred years ago, women wearing men’s clothing was a bit bizzare. So you could say men were 100 years behind the time. But there’s a practicality issue, in that men’s clothing was somewhat more practical than women’s clothing. You’re hardly ever going to find loggers wearing high heels – you know, the footwear doesn’t fit.
OT: No one is ever going to find a sensible woman wearing high heels unless it’s for a very direct purpose.
Stu: It’s advertising; it’s packaging…
OT: You do a heck of a lot of packaging.
Stu: I enjoy that. It gives me personal pleasure and it gives other people something to chitter-chatter about, you know. If their lives are so dull and boring that all they can do is talk about me and what I’m wearing, I’m fulfilling my entertainment function here. I am in the entertainment business.
OT: So you made it a gradual transition?
Stu: I think everything is gradual, because I’ve been a cross-dresser since I was a teenager privately. Frankly, 3 to 5 percent of the male population cross-dresses on a regular basis. So if Silverton has a population of 7,000 and half are men, there’s another 89 cross-dressers in Silverton besides me. I know five or six of them because they’ve come out to me and said, “I wish I could do what you’ve done.”
OT: Are you pretty much sticking to dressing like a female?
Stu: Men’s clothes don’t fit anymore. I try to dress practically for whatever I’m doing but if I’m just going about my business, I try to look nice; and when I try to look nice I try to look nice as a female. I’ve made this leap into, I don’t know, the twilight zone, the female zone, so… what do you do?
OT: Where do you shop?
Stu: Goodwill, mostly. Some stuff I can’t get at Goodwill because I have size 11 feet. The Internet has been a boon for that also – the Internet was a source of information to find out, “Well, I’m not the only one in the world that cross-dresses and it doesn’t mean you’re gay; it doesn’t mean you’re weird; it doesn’t mean any of those things.” It just means you enjoy wearing women’s clothes.
OT: Your mode of dress is more dramatic than that of most 56-year-old females; I’ve heard men describe it as “in your face.”
Stu: Can’t disagree with that. I am. Well, let’s be candid about it: I’ve got a good body for a 40-year-old woman. I’ve got an incredible body for a 56-year-old man. It’s jaw-dropping. It’s eye-popping. When I walk down the street I can cause small accidents. You hear this snapping sound as necks twist around. Yeah, I know that; I don’t mind.
OT: It’s not just that you don’t mind…
Stu: I actively encourage it.
OT: You actively encourage it.
Stu: Yeah – I have so much fun being me, it should be illegal.
OT: What about public restrooms and fitting rooms?
Stu: I guess I never had a thing where I was particularly comfortable in public restrooms anyway; I acquired a great bladder capacity. If the need arises, I am much safer in a women’s room than I am in a men’s room. That is pretty much the way it works for cross-dressers everywhere.
OT: Your appearance threatens some people.
Stu: Yeah, and there’s no threat implied here; it’s just something different. But my advantage in Silverton is that I’m so well known that it’s not an issue. When I go other places I pass so well nobody notices. It becomes a non-issue, unless I start talking, because I don’t usually disguise my voice.
OT: About that T-shirt you wear, “Girls have more fun?”
Stu: It actually says, “Because girls have more fun,” and that answers the question people have been so afraid to ask me. They’ll ask everybody around me – they’ll ask Victoria, my coworkers, anybody – “Why is Stu doing that?” Anyway, that’s the answer.
OT: You really believe that?
Stu: I really believe that. And I have evidence on both sides. I can tell you what boys do and what girls do and I can tell you – girls have more fun.
OT: There’s a whole generation of women who have struggled in a career sense who would be at odds with that statement.
Stu: I can’t look at that from the female perspective because I wasn’t there. It is an unfortunate burden that has been imposed on women in society by men; there is this dichotomy between the male self – the powerful male – and the female, quote, weaker sex. Women are supposed to have the children, raise the children, and be the soft, nice person and men are supposed to be hard-edged, so a guy is assertive and a woman is a b – – – – , you know, and that’s not fair. But the people who are telling you this have their own little game that they want to play to keep themselves in a position of power; to do that they crawl on top of somebody else.
At home women are probably the commander-in-chief of the home, and I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I’m concerned about what’s happened to families; the disintegration of the family. It seems it’s no longer a cooperative venture.
The sexual revolution that was going on when I was a teenager has accelerated, unfortunately, to the point that people can have children without making plans to support them and it drops back on society, saying, “Well, I’ve had this baby and my job as a mother, because the father’s disappeared, is a very important job so society should pay me for it.”
There’s a certain amount of truth to that but the secondary consideration is “We didn’t hire you for this position – we didn’t even accept your application – you volunteered” and the societal costs and the economic costs are staggering.
How do we revise this trend to say, “It’s really a bad idea; this is bad for you, it’s bad for your child, it’s bad for the rest of the society and no, we don’t owe you and your child a living. You need to give yourself an education – you need to make yourself useful to society so we can hire you and do something” but it’s like oh – prohibited; “You can’t say that; everybody’s equal and every baby’s loved and it’s all society’s fault that this is the way it is.” That entitlement kind of stuff scares me.
OT: You took a pretty permanent step in getting breast implants a few years ago.
Stu: You have to understand that to a cross-dresser, cleavage is Nirvana; and real, visible cleavage is like, that’s what you’re striving for… I didn’t want to go the fat route and I didn’t want to take female hormones to grow breasts because I enjoy my guyness…
OT: Public cross-dressing is something one associates more with a metropolitan area than a rural small town.
Stu: Yeah, because you can be among strangers a lot faster. I did this for years; I’d go to Portland and there was no social stigma whatsoever. When you put on different hair, people don’t recognize you, the cue of the hair is so overpowering…
The first time I was actually out in drag was the cross-dresser’s national holiday, Halloween. …That’s one time of the year you can get out and everybody thinks, “Oh, isn’t that cute,” until they notice, “Damn, your makeup looks good; your hair sure looks good – are you sure this is the only time you do this?”
OT: Have you thought of using a different name?
Stu: I actually do have an alternate name but I’m thinking about using a different one. I latched on to the name Carl LaFong about 40 years ago when it was a character in a W.C. Fields film and it was an easy transition… from Carl LaFong to Carla Fong…
OT: Some people would say if you have two different personas, that…
Stu: That I’m schizophrenic?
OT: Yeah – that you’re crazy.
Stu: OK. They can say that if they wish. It’s certainly not the first time I’ve heard it.
OT: You don’t seem crazy.
Stu: Thank goodness for that.
OT: Two sides to the same person, or are these different people?
Stu: How about the same person with a stage name? Because which is the real Stu and which isn’t? They’re kind of blended together. I’ve been Stu all my life and I’m comfortable being Stu – it’s just the packaging that’s different.
OT: You’re extreme; people aren’t sure what they’re dealing with, and you’re in the political arena. Are you going to be able to be politically effective?
Stu: It’s difficult to imagine that my physical status is any secret to anybody in Silverton. I have a reputation for being a straight shooter, I have a reputation of being competent at what I do, and it’s like, if you’re hiring an attorney, you want an attorney that’s good; you don’t really care if he’s short, tall, fat, thin, male, female – you want the best person. And I think the community made that decision. I put myself out there, I said, “I’ll run”; there are enough things I think need changing, and enough people in town agreed with me, and I’m now on the council. It says a great deal about the community – it doesn’t really say a great deal about me; it says a lot about the community. It’s really a cool little town.
OT: What is your role on the council?
Stu: Well, you get a seat at the table; you get a vote on the issues, and my experience in the past has been a lot of times the council comes in with a fixed agenda and is led by staff reports. The primary source of information to the council is going to be what the city staff provides to them. If you’ve got a good staff, and they’re giving you all the options, you’re fine; you can make the decisions amongst that. But if you’re getting information that is slanted one way or another and you don’t have your ear to the ground and people don’t come and tell you or you’re not doing your research, you can make some really stupid mistakes. I’m concerned that we’ve made some ill-conceived decisions.
OT: For example?
Stu: I was unhappy about the Garden when we first started doing it, we’re stuck with it now, so let’s make the absolute best of it. I think it can be a world-class attraction. The initial promise was much like the initial promise of the mural program, which was going to be so many tourists you could walk across the street without touching pavement. It didn’t happen, so let’s scale back our expectations. Let’s get realistic financially. Let’s build on something that is going to be great.
OT: So how have your political ideas changed over the last 20 years?
Stu: In the 80s, I was the one who turned on the spigot to start Silverton growing… When you get right down to it, and you look at the minutes, my ideas were: Silver Falls Tour Route – 214, Mt. Angel, Silverton, Silver Falls and back to Salem. I got government grants for the signage; arranged transportation with ODOT; went to Woodburn, Mt. Angel, Silverton; got all of us talking together and cooperating on this, and that thing worked. Unfortunately, they replaced the signs 10 years after we put the original ones up. The original ones you could see at night, the ones they replaced them with, it’s like somebody’s high school student who got Ds in art designed the signs; they’re unreadable.
…Also I proposed, and we adopted as a council, in the early to mid-80s – Silverton’s growth was stagnant, Salem was growing, other places were seeing growth; we weren’t seeing anything. So I proposed at that time, why don’t we have a sale? We can defer systems development charges for a year or two. Amazingly enough, people started building in Silverton. We got new houses, we got the new apartments behind Roth’s, and we got the senior housing on Mill Street.
OT: What do you want to accomplish now?
Stu: My major disappointment when I was on the council my first time was I could not convince anybody that one-way streets were not the brightest thing to do in a commercial district that’s trying to attract customers to businesses.
When you go into a strange area, like you drive into downtown Portland or downtown Salem, and you get into a one-way grid, you know something has changed. And you’re used to two-way streets; 99 percent of the roads in the world are two-way, and you get on to this 1 percent and all of a sudden you’re paying a lot of attention to your driving and no attention whatsoever to what’s outside your car, other than the one next to it; so stores, theater, retail district; you don’t care – don’t even see it – all you’re worried about is “I’m racing the guy next to me.”
OT: How would you describe your political style?
Stu: Pretty much the same way I am here. Scary, huh?
OT: This is a lot more fun than council meetings.
Stu: Oh, no; not when you’re with me. I have fun wherever I go. I guess you’re going to have to watch. I am…the word that comes up sometimes is “confrontational,” but that’s not really correct. When I think I’m right about something, I will be adamant about it. But most of the time I come with an open mind; I will read the information, I will have thought about it. But I don’t have pride of ownership in anything up until the time I vote on it. So, people come to me with great ideas, and it’s my job to listen to them. If it’s a great idea, I’ll run with it; if it’s a problem, I’ll listen to it. Then through the testimony, listening to the other councilors, you’ll figure out, “That makes sense,” and “That makes sense,” but, “No, this doesn’t make sense…” I was never the strong football, basketball, baseball player; I was always the smart kid and I’m still the smart kid…
OT: Would you consider running for higher office again?
Stu: I don’t think there’s a politician around who’d say “I’m comfortable where I am and I’m not going to ever try and go any higher,” but frankly, I’d rather be me and well thought of than a state legislator, and you can infer from that what you wish. I mean, I’ve seen them up close and it ain’t pretty.
OT: You’ve changed your view on growth.
Stu: Now I’m turning away from that, saying Silverton’s grown about as much as it needs to, and the next thing we’re going to be faced with is we’ve built sewer and water capacity for about 10,000. You can’t really improve those facilities incrementally; you have to do a major renovation, which means double the size of the water plant, double the size of the sewer plant and go to a 20,000-population capacity. I don’t want to be there. I like Silverton about the size that it is and I want to see growth taper off. If you build it, they will come; we may not want them, so let’s not build it.
The most interesting aspect of Silverton is Silverton downtown is the same as when I was growing up in the 50s. We need to jump on that and say, “Here’s a way to step back in time – come visit our 1955 downtown.
OT: Were you surprised you were elected?
Stu: …I guess it’s sort of a self-validation to say, well, all the odd stuff that you’ve done, and the weird way that you are, people still seem to respond to, my heart’s in the right place. It’s right in Silverton, and I have a soft spot in my head and my heart for Silverton.
OT: You provoke comment, you provoke reaction, you provoke something…
Stu: I’ve often described what I do as “planting the seed,” because I come up with ideas a mile a minute, some of them are good and some of them are just crap…doesn’t matter if I get the credit for it or not…
OT: Is being who you are lonely?
Stu: Victoria and I were together about 30 years; 27 or 28 of those were great years. I didn’t have need for anybody else because I had Victoria, we were very much for each other; it was a very compatible relationship. She was very supportive with the implants, and very supportive about everything else. …She reached her midlife a little later than I did.
Most guys for midlife crisis are going to get a motorcycle, a trophy wife, or a sports car. I could have done any of those, but motorcycles scare me to death; I never wanted to get married; and I’ve already had a sports car. So I adopted “the twins (implants).” I’ve not regretted that but a total of 15 seconds in four years. But Victoria reached a point where she hated… everything – Silverton, Oregon, the United States, me… and moved as far from here as she could get where they still spoke English. It was an emotional time for both of us, especially for me, because I loved her. Part of the tearing apart was, here was a person who loved and accepted me the way I is, was…am. And it’s like, “Oh, God, now what am I going to do?” and I saw myself living out life as an elderly spinster…
I was not out as much when she was here because her feeling was it would be bad for the community, bad for business. Without her here and with no brakes on the situation – she left March of 2003 – I decided to just be me, damn the torpedoes; if people don’t like it, well, I will like me. And so I did, and found that after the initial shock – because it is shocking – people got over it. It was amazing. Of course it’s weird, but it’s still Stu, things are still the same, and there was just sort of an outpouring of affection and acceptance, and… “Aaahhh! Why did I wait so long?”
I really like what I look like now. I have a face like a horse, but the rest of it’s pretty good. It’s just become a lot of fun to be me. I try to be not overly serious about it, because it’s sort of a joke between all of us. …I hope people will not be quite as reluctant to come and talk to me about this stuff; I’m perfectly willing to talk. I consider myself one of the most approachable people in town. I’m standing on the same street corner every night.
OT: OK. What paths haven’t we gone down that we should have?
Stu: The usual question, the answer is 36D.
