Meet Ellen Evans, Candidate for California State Senate District 24
Evans wants to bring local community activism to the State Legislature
Written by Trudy Ring
This June 2, voters have a choice of two out candidates—and several others—in California’s State Senate District 24, one of the most crowded races in the state’s nonpartisan, free-for-all “jungle primaries.” The top two candidates will square off in the midterm elections Nov. 3.
The district is heavily LGBTQ+ and heavily Democratic; it includes West Hollywood, Santa Monica, the Los Angeles neighborhoods of Bel Air, Brentwood, Hollywood, and more, along with many surrounding communities. With incumbent Ben Allen term-limited, eight Democrats and two Republicans are seeking the seat, which will most likely stay in Democratic hands.
Ellen Evans, a longtime lesbian community activist, and John Erickson, a gay member of the West Hollywood City Council, are among the Democratic hopefuls. LGBTQ+ Freedom Fighters is speaking to each of them; Evans is introduced here, and Erickson will be featured next week.
“I think I’m pretty distinctive,” said Evans, who co-founded the Doheny Sunset Plaza Neighborhood Association and is vice president of her local Neighborhood Council. “We’ve been listening to candidates, supporting candidates, and electing candidates through a certain process that involves Democratic clubs and school boards and city councils for a long time, and we have gotten to the point in California where we’re just not getting things done. It’s time to elect somebody who didn’t come up through that system, and that’s what distinguishes me. I’m the only one who’s not in that ecosystem.”
“I’ve been listening to people and getting the job done for a really long time,” she said. “I’m really the most, I think, tenacious person in the group. And I also, being an LGBTQ+ activist, I’ve seen a lot of change, and having been involved with the movement, I know how that change was put together. So, I understand how to break down problems in order to create big change.”
Evans, 60, grew up in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., the daughter of an economist and a scientist. She has lived in the district since 1997 with her wife, lawyer Laura Brill—they married in the window for marriage equality before California’s Proposition 8 passed in 2008—and they have raised their two children there. In her work with the Neighborhood Association, she said, she has collaborated with first responders to improve public safety, supported affordable housing and small businesses, and helped to reduce homelessness.
Evans’ activism goes back farther. She became an advocate for LGBTQ+ and women’s rights while attending Brown University, where she met Brill at the campus women’s center. During the height of the AIDS crisis, a friend of hers was diagnosed with HIV, and she joined protests against the Reagan administration’s inaction on the disease.
“I’ve been interested in politics my whole life,” Evans said. “I was a public policy major in college. I interned for Barbara Mikulski [former U.S. senator from Maryland], and so I’ve been in and out of the political sphere my whole life. I was on the Equality California PAC board, working to elect and support pro-equality candidates and LGBTQ candidates, and I’ve been fundraising for candidates for a long time.”
When she and Brill moved to California, Evans became a union carpenter and then worked in film production. She trained as a union apprentice film editor and earned a master of fine arts degree in screenwriting from Columbia University. After the couple’s children were born, Evans became a stay-at-home mom while continuing her activism.
If she is elected to the California Senate, her top priorities will be “civil rights, protecting immigrant communities, the LGBT community, protecting reproductive rights in the face of Trump, making sure that we build the housing we need to build, and making sure that we are making ourselves fire safe,” she said. While California has strong protections for LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights, access to contraception and abortion is limited-to- nonexistent in rural areas and must be expanded, she noted. Transgender people, including those who come from out of state to seek gender-affirming care, and providers of this care need support too, she added.
She decided to run for the seat because “we were not solving our state’s biggest problems,” she said. “We had clean energy goals that we weren’t meeting, greenhouse gas goals that we weren’t meeting. And I thought, you know, I’ve been delivering pragmatic solutions at the local level to my community for a decade, and I wanted to bring that to Sacramento to get things done.”
Equality California’s PAC has made a dual endorsement in the race, both Evans and Erickson; the organization did not offer further comment by the time of publication.
“I would have liked them to have just endorsed me,” Evans said. “I have a long history of involvement with Equality California, but I was on the PAC board; I understand what considerations come into play when you’re thinking about an endorsement and what relationships you want to preserve and what relationships you don’t want to preserve.”
She almost won the endorsement of the Stonewall Democratic Club. “Erickson gave an outstanding presentation” to the endorsement committee, but Evans blew them away, said the club’s president, attorney Renay Grace Rodriguez. Rodriguez praised Evans’ detailed knowledge about the issues in the district, her interest in affordable housing that’s accessible to transportation, and relationships with people who are already in office. But the full membership has to approve endorsements by 60 percent, and Evans won 57 percent of the vote, Erickson won 42 percent. “We would love people to know how much support she has,” Rodriguez said.
The California Democratic Party, meanwhile, has endorsed Dr. Sion Roy, a physician at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and vice chair of the Santa Monica College Board. He’s a straight man, and his campaign website lists access to health care, reproductive rights, workers’ rights, and environmental protections among his priorities. The list does not specifically mention LGBTQ+ rights.
In addition to allies, it’s important to have out LGBTQ+ people in office, Evans said. “I think having a diversity of opinion and experience is incredibly important, and because you never really know what it’s like to walk in somebody else’s shoes as well as you know how it is to walk in your own shoes,” she said. “So we’ve come to a time when there are very few lesbians in the legislature, and I think that that’s to our detriment. And I think it’s also especially important to have somebody who’s lived through this incredible change that we’ve been through, because we know what’s at stake. We know how it was before, and we’re deeply committed to not going back there and to doing everything possible to move forward and to lead the way forward for the rest of the country.”
Please visit Ellen Evans’ campaign website for more information and updates.
The California Sec. of State’s website provides information on how to find your polling place or any other questions you might have about voting in the June 2 primary.
Trudy Ring is a freelance writer who previously worked for The Advocate.