Sherry Harris: Out, But Never Quite In

A COUNCIL race pits an African American lesbian engineer against a middle-aged straight white guy. In Seattle, he's the minority.

A black woman from a Newark, N.J., ghetto, who gets an engineering degree, is recruited for a job at Boeing, and then goes on to be elected to the Seattle City Council as its first openly lesbian member ought to serve as a role model and inspiration to a whole lot of folks.

Instead, Sherry Harris, 41, spent four years on the council disappointing three powerful and very demanding interest groups. By 1995, feminists, gays and African Americans had found other council candidates to support, which goes a long way toward explaining her reelection loss to John Manning.

Now, after a two-year hiatus from politics, Harris is back. She finished a close second in the September primary, and political consultants believe that with Initiative 677, which prohibits job descrimination against gays, on the ballot, she should again have the support of homosexuals and blacks.

That doesn't mean Harris is about to become a political icon. African Americans never quite forgave her for challenging and defeating Sam Smith, the first black person elected to the council. That she didn't personally answer her phone, as Smith did for 26 years, grated on people who had come to expect a direct line to the council. Being a lesbian didn't help her with some conservative black ministers.

Her support in the gay community should have been a given. It wasn't. Homosexuals expected her to be their champion on virtually every issue. When that didn't happen, Harris became an object of scorn in a community that felt let down.

"She was trying to deal with groups that individually aren't very happy," says political consultant Cathy Allen, who once worked for Harris. "Each one of them demanded 100 percent commitment. She wound up isolating herself."

Complicating matters was Harris, who played on her triple minority status to get elected even though her real interest in politics had nothing to do with gender, race or sexual orientation. Harris, a self-employed consulting engineer who lives in Maple Leaf, remains basically a neighborhood activist, someone more adept at dealing with traffic patterns than issues of discrimination.

"I had greater expectations put on me, yet who I am as a minority has nothing to do as to why I want to be on the council," she says.

George Bakan, senior editor at the Seattle Gay News, says many in the gay community tend to glamorize the council instead of seeing it as the tedious job that it is.

"The gay community had never had an open person on the council and people didn't know what to expect," he said. "But I do know that every gay person in the city thought they owned a piece of Sherry. They thought she could solve every problem. If a gay person had a pothole in front of their house, they would call Sherry and expect her to fix it."

At some point she gave up trying to please everyone and immersed herself in the day-to-day, nuts-and-bolts aspects of being a member of the City Council.

"I'll tell you," says Allen, "she's an engineer at heart. "She saw the town as an engineer's grid map. She was a system fixer without dealing with the people who use that system."

Sherry Harris today looks considerably different from the woman who celebrated her 1991 victory over Smith with a public embrace of her partner, Judith Scalise. Gone are the Afro and the fishnet stockings, replaced by designer clothes and a stylish new hairdo. Gone, too, is Scalise. After 17 years, the couple broke up, following Harris' loss in 1995 to Manning.

"The breakup has been devastating to me," says Harris, who helped raise Scalise's son and grandson.

What hasn't changed is Harris' inability to clearly define herself as a politician. Bakan, perhaps her staunchest defender, calls her "Abraham Lincoln" and the "welfare-to-riches success story Americans want to believe is possible."

Somehow, though, that image has never quite taken. In her last stint on the council she was instrumental in forcing through 50 additional low-income housing units at Sand Point. But instead of being hailed as a champion of the poor, Harris only managed to scare the heck out of a powerful, upper-middle-class neighborhood association.

This year supporters say Harris, who is running against Richard Conlin, is once again offering a confusing image. In her unsuccessful campaign to win the endorsement of the Harvey Muggy Democrats, a gay political organization, Harris failed to even mention that she is a lesbian. That detail also was omitted from her biography in the King County Voters Guide.

"Seattle is a transient place, and I think there are a lot of people who don't know she's a lesbian," says W. Torie Gould, chairwoman of the Muggy organization. "I have been encouraging Sherry to be more up front about being open. The people who are going to hate her for being a lesbian already know. Now she needs to be more visible and draw support from the gay community. She is hesitant about that approach because she is really more interested in public-policy issues."

Robert T. Nelson's phone message number is 206-464-2996. His e-mail address is: rnel-new@seatimes.com