Term Limits?
The conservative state senator from Crow Wing County, Minnesota, finds himself out of the closet Ñ and up for re-election. A Q&A with Paul Koering.
by Will Doig
October 25, 2006
Minnesota's District 12 is a blip on the electoral map, the kind that briefly sparkles on The Colbert Report's "Better Know a District" segment before shrinking to the size of a period into the center of the state. Encompassing the counties of Morrison and Crow Wing (combined population: 87,000) — as well as the city of Brainerd, home of Jerry Lundegaard — the working-class residents of District 12 are among the most conservative in Minnesota. When they went to the polls in 2002 to select a state Senator, they checked the box for a reliably conservative lawmaker, Republican Paul Koering.
Until last year, the pro-gun, anti-abortion former dairy farmer seemed poised to cruise to re-election this November. Then last year, one of the state legislature's far-right lawmakers moved to pull a bill banning gay marriage out of committee early and put it to an immediate vote. Unlike his Republican colleagues, Koering voted against the motion, and speculation about his sexuality immediately ran rampant. To quell the chatter, Koering decided to publicly confirm the rumors, though the fact that he's gay had been an open secret among his Republican colleagues for years. For his rural, right-wing constituents, however, the disclosure was highly unexpected.
In the September primary, Koering was challenged by a Brainerd city councilmember who ran on a thinly coded family-values platform that painted Koering as insufficiently conservative. No one, including Koering, was sure District 12 would re-elect a gay lawmaker. The local Republican Chair deemed Koering's coming out "political suicide," but he won the primary by a ten-point margin anyway. "If I had a wife and five beautiful sons, I could run for President," he says in his thick Midwestern drawl. Instead, he'll face the Crow Wing County Commissioner on November 7 in the state's general election. — Will Doig
Congratulations on winning your primary. Were you surprised at your victory?
Not at all. I guess I thought it was going to be a larger margin, but obviously there are some people who don't think I'm conservative enough.
Did you grow up in your district?
Yep. Grew up here, went to school here. I live in the house that my dad was born and raised in. My grandmother's house— after she passed away, I bought it, and that's where I'm at. The Koering roots are pretty deep.
Did growing up in such a conservative place shape your political viewpoints?
I think it did. I was brought up Catholic. I was raised in a great family. My mom and dad were both great role models for me. I'm not a hunter myself, but I have three older brothers who are avid hunters. My opponent said I don't have any family values, but I think I have a lot of family values.
You live alone in a small town with no wife and no girlfriend. Did people ever ask if you were gay before you came out?
I think a lot of people suspected. When I ran in '96, I never said, "I'm not gay." At the time I was milking cows, and if someone asked me why I was single, I just said that as soon as you tell someone you're milking cows, they run the other way. And that's the truth! Any girl, or anybody, you tell them you're a dairy farmer, and they say, "I don't want to date a dairy farmer."
Why don't people want to date a dairy farmer?
It's a very dedicated life. It's hard work and there's no going to Cancun, Mexico. I did it for fifteen years, and it just became my way of not having to . . . I just didn't think it was anybody's business.
Do you do any work other than your political job now?
I have a part-time funeral-car service. I have three hearses, and I provide them to funeral homes within a sixty-mile radius of Brainerd. It's almost the same thing as having a limousine service. I have three retired guys who drive for me, and I drive as much as I can, whenever we're not in session. I also work for the coroner in Crow Wing County. Any murder or suicide, any car accident or unnatural death, myself or this other gentleman will go pick up the person and transport them to the Twin Cities, which is about a two-and-a-half hour drive. And I still do a little farming. Do a little alfalfa. I just had a guy come by last night who picked up fifty bales.
I guess you probably meet a lot of your constituents through your business.
Absolutely. Just about everybody I represent, I'll see them one time or another at a funeral.
Were you shocked by the Mark Foley revelations?
I was shocked by him doing what I find a lot of people in society doing now, which is blaming somebody else, saying "I'm an alcoholic, and I was abused and, oh by the way, I'm gay."
Are you worried Foley will taint your campaign?
This won't have any effect on my campaign. It's a non-issue. With two weeks before the election, people have gotten to the point where they're starting to tune out all the political rhetoric.
Why do you think Foley was so careless as to leave a paper trail of emails and instant messages? To me, it's like the criminal who subconsciously wants to get caught leaving clues.
It appears the man was on a mission to self-destruct. I don't know the man, but in watching some of the news accounts and watching Donald Trump on Larry King, Donald Trump said that down in Foley's district it was no secret.
Which parallels your experience of having your sexuality be an open secret among your colleagues, though obviously your coming out has been handled much more elegantly.
But I think there's a big difference. His going after sixteen year olds is totally inappropriate. It makes people think that all gay people are pedophiles. That's why I'm disgusted by it. It lumps us all together and that's just bullshit. That's what really pissed me off. It's taken years to build up a positive image and have people realize that I'm not pushing some gay agenda, that I'm just working for my constituents.
Do you think this would be as big a media story if Foley were straight?
I don't know. Being that Republicans tend to run more on the moral issues, I imagine the media figures this is a bigger story.
Before you came out, did you live in fear of being outed?
No, because I was never trying to hide anything. If you talk to my colleagues in the Senate, if you talk to the governor of Minnesota, they all knew. Even the local media, they would say to me, "If you ever want to talk about it, we're here to talk to you." But voting no on [the marriage amendment last year] really opened the floodgates of speculation, and then somebody took a picture of me at a bar having a drink with some friends and sent it to a blogger. So the dam had burst and the water was coming, so I called a press conference and the first thing I said was, "If you liked Paul Koering yesterday, you're going to like him tomorrow, because I'm the same person I always was." And as a very conservative gay man in a very conservative part of Minnesota, I hope I can continue to serve.
You haven't always voted the way gay-rights advocates wanted you to. For example, you've been criticized for voting to give Minnesota citizens a referendum on a same-sex-marriage ban. Why did you do that?
Here's my question to those critics: How do I say to the 90,000 people I represent — a lot of whom have made it clear to me that they want a vote on the marriage amendment — how do I say to them, "No, I'm smarter than you, you don't have the right to vote on this"? Ultimately, I have to represent their best interests.
When you came out, did you get a negative response from any of those constituents?
There are some people out there who . . . I'm trying to be polite. I got quite a bit of hate mail before the primary telling me how God hates me and I'm going to burn in hell, and I went down and talked to my pastor. He said, "Paul, you're a good man, and God loves you for who you are." So I held my head high and I feel good.
As you've been knocking on doors while campaigning, have you encountered people who told you explicitly that they're not going to vote for you because you're gay?
[Pause] Yes, I did have some of that. Not a lot, but some told me that, and I just said, "That's fine." You never want to be confrontational when you're a politician. There are some people, they could agree with me on ninety-five percent of what I vote on, but because I'm gay they're just not going to vote for me.
You represent the kind of small, rural district where you must see your constituents face-to-face all the time.
Oh, all the time. Down at Fleet Farm, down at Ace Hardware. If I go out to lunch or dinner, it's, "Hi Paul! Hi Paul! Hi Paul!"
Do you think that's made coming out easier or harder?
I think it's made it easier. I'll give you an example. When some of my constituents got this hateful last-ditch-effort stuff at their churches saying that I was for teaching homosexuality in schools, they absolutely rejected it. They just said, "This isn't Paul, we know him better than that."
What do you mean by teaching homosexuality in schools? Were they implying you were for teaching kids to be gay, or just that you'd be in favor of teachers mentioning homosexuality in, say, sex-ed class?
I don't understand what they meant. I don't know how you go about teaching something like that. You either are or you aren't. I think for teachers to teach their students to be tolerant — is that bad? I don't think so.
Many of your Republican colleagues in the state Senate were very supportive when you came out.
Extremely supportive. Our leader, Senator Day, the minority leader, has been my number-one supporter, along with some of my other Republican colleagues who are extremely conservative. I know that a lot of my friends say, "How can you be in that party of intolerance?" You know what? It isn't all that way. There are a lot of good people in this party, and they reject the notion that this party isn't for everybody.
If you win in November —
When I win in November.
When you win in November, do you think your victory could be looked upon by other Republican politicians as a bellwether that you can be a pro-gay Republican and still win?
I don't know that I want to be a poster child for anything. All I want to do is represent the people of Morrison and Crow Wing Counties to the best of my abilities. I want to make sure that for the $31,400 a year that I make for doing that, I'm doing the best job I can. n°
©2006 Will Doig and hooksexup.com