Demo McCoy was GOP insider

Democratic state Sen. Scott McCoy, one of three openly gay members of the Utah Legislature, is coming out of the closet — for the second time.

Only those close to McCoy may know that he used to be a Republican.

And not just someone who often voted for GOP candidates. No, McCoy was a top aide in former GOP vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp's 1996 campaign and a top GOP staffer in the U.S. House in the 1990s.

"I'm going to my second national (political) convention," said McCoy, D-Salt Lake. "But this time it is a Democratic convention." McCoy is one of 29 Utah delegates due to attend the National Democratic Convention in Denver starting Aug. 25.

In 1996, McCoy attended the Republican National Convention in San Diego, where former Sen. Bob Dole was voted the GOP presidential nominee. Dole picked Kemp as his running mate. At that convention, McCoy was not a delegate but was the executive assistant to Kemp's vice presidential co-campaign directors. He was in the thick of national GOP politics.

"It's tough to scrounge up floor credentials, but I did get in to see Kemp's acceptance speech and Dole's convention speech," McCoy recalls.

McCoy also attended the vice presidential debate between Kemp and then-Vice President Al Gore in Florida. "Gore kicked Kemp's butt," recalls McCoy. It was not a good day for McCoy's candidate.

Now, 12 years later, after meeting his life-partner, Mark Barr, in New York City while attending law school, coming out openly as a gay man, moving to Salt Lake City and getting involved in Democratic politics, McCoy will cast a vote for that other party's presidential nominee in a few days.

It has been a long, transitional journey for McCoy — the son of rural Republican, horse-breeding parents, born in a small Missouri town and graduating from high school in Oklahoma. McCoy says that today he feels very comfortable in Utah, in the state Senate and in the Democratic Party.

McCoy says he always considered himself a reasonable Republican, not dogmatic on ideological lines. In fact, McCoy describes his current politics as moderate to conservative on fiscal issues — like spending and taxes. But he said he is more liberal on social issues, especially those involving equality of all people.

Politics grabbed McCoy as a young man. After graduating from a Tulsa, Okla., high-school (his family moved there when McCoy was in the sixth grade), McCoy attended the same small, liberal arts college in Kansas that his mom and dad went to, William Jewell College.

After graduating from there he let his passion take him to the big city, Washington, D.C., where he got a job with a Republican House member, an old fraternity brother of his dad's. McCoy then started graduate school at George Washington University.

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