Michael Davis
Christy Holstege
Not many of our city leaders have ever had to deal with as many challenges and adversity as Christy Holstege did when she became Mayor of Palm Springs in 2020. To be sure, there were several ‘firsts’ to be proud of. She was the first female mayor in the city’s history, the first millennial, and the first openly bisexual mayor in our nation’s history.
She also gave birth to her first child (a son, Aden) two weeks before taking on her new role and was immediately faced with guiding the city out of the depths of the pandemic. If that weren’t enough, she had to endure taunts from members of the community (including LGBTQ+) who ridiculed her bisexuality as “wishy-washy.” Her willingness to shed light on instances of the city’s racist history led to death threats against both her and her newborn child. It might have caused the most resilient person to hide in the deepest crevices of the San Jacintos.
Holstege was not intimidated. A third-generation Californian from Sacramento (her husband, Adam Gilbert, is third-generation Palm Springs), she graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a degree in cultural anthropology and earned her law degree from Stanford. A survivor of sexual assault and harassment, she worked through her school years helping women and their children escape domestic violence. In fact, she first worked in the Coachella Valley because of a Stanford Law School-Stanford Public Interest Foundation Fellowship that enabled her to found a legal aid clinic for survivors of domestic violence. Her passion for social justice eventually led her to seek a seat on the Palm Springs City Council in 2017.
Previous to that, she had never come out as a bisexual, but her name was included “for an endorsement process that was for LGBTQ candidates only,” she says. “And so then they asked me in a public meeting, ‘Well, are you or are you not LGBTQ?’ I think everyone deserves the right to choose when and how to come out. So, it was uncomfortable to have people debating my sexual orientation. There’s a lot of bi-phobia and myths about the bi community. I still get that almost every day.”
Holstege also drew intense fire (and still does) when she drew attention to some shameful aspects of the city’s relationship with people of color. One of the sadly neglected chapters of local history involves the city’s decades-long fight to dispossess the Agua Caliente Tribe of Section 14, a square mile of tribal land in downtown that was long coveted by past civic leaders such as Frank Bogert. The fight over it was so vicious that indigenous residents and people of color living on the land would sometimes come home from work to find their homes bulldozed by the city because of “a code violation.”
Holstege’s comments came in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and, according to Holstege, were meant to help shine a light into dark corners. “I was really shocked to have so much pushback because I thought, ‘Look at Section 14, just Google it.’ It’s obvious there was racism in our city and still is. We held a forum on racism in the city and a lot of people shared their experiences. It was really powerful.”
Despite the fierce headwinds the last 5 years, Holstege has decided that the issues about which she is most passionate—the environment, affordable housing, and economic opportunity—had to be fought for at the state level. Next week, Holstege hopes to win an assembly seat for the 42nd District and join Alex Lee, 25th District, as the Assembly’s openly bisexual legislators.
