Jimmy Biblarz is running for City Council in CD-5. Joe Marcellus really likes him
BY JOE MARCELLUS | PHOTO BY SARAH FORD
Full disclosure: I am friends with Jimmy Biblarz, candidate for LA City Council in District 5, the same district that is home to our High School, Alexander Senior High, where I first met Jimmy.
We weren’t close then, but Jimmy was more of a figure in my mind. A symbol of academic excellence and political involvement. I would get exhausted just looking at him. He has sharp, focused eyes and misses nothing. If there was an AP class, Jimmy took it. If there was an election, Jimmy could tell you for whom to vote and more importantly why, if you had an hour to spare. He was Valedictorian and he was on his way to Harvard. Like Elle Woods, sans the chihuahua.
So I wasn’t surprised when I got a call from Jimmy in June of this year, announcing that he would be running for City Council. I wanted to hear more, so I decided to write this profile and examine his campaign, if nothing else, to test my own conviction. I took a seat in Jimmy’s living room, a cozy and charming feature of his modest apartment on Sweetzer, which he shares with his boyfriend, Harry. A picture of Elizabeth Warren looked sternly over us and in the corner, an enormous white board loomed with a countdown to the election: 295 days.
Jimmy is a child of Council District-5, where he’s running and which includes communities in the Westside, central-eastern Santa Monica Mountains, and central-southern San Fernando Valley.
He was educated at public schools in the district and his family lived in a small duplex on Cardiff avenue before they faced eviction to make way for a development. This has motivated his desire to run for City Council and focus on the homelessness crisis. Jimmy is a progressive, but less of an idealist than one might imagine. He carries the same pragmatism and dedication to the toils and labors of public service that he practiced in High School and in the hallowed halls of Harvard, where he worked as a tutor to support his education and make ends meet. After graduating from Harvard undergrad, he worked at CNN for a year before returning to Harvard for a JD/PhD in Sociology & Social Policy.
“I felt like being Gay would limit a lot of things in my life and luckily I think that is changing. I always admired people that were able to come out of the closet early but I wasn’t ready.”
We had stayed in touch throughout college, particularly after Jimmy finally came out the closet, at twenty. I asked what had kept him in. “I think people forget the politics of the mid 2000s. 2008 was Proposition 8, which was right midway through High School. I felt like being Gay would limit a lot of things in my life and luckily I think that is changing. I always admired people that were able to come out of the closet early but I wasn’t ready.”
Jimmy feared that his ability to do what he loved most, public service, would be jeopardized by his queerness. He stayed in the closet hoping it would help him succeed at Harvard but, ironically, the very institution he concealed himself from freed him to embrace his highest self. “I felt suddenly that there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do, intellectually, professionally, but then there was this weight of me not living authentically. I just saw that so much of my life and my soul and my spirit were limited by not actually being myself and it was very painful.” He finally confessed to his roommate on a model Congress trip. “I’m gay!” he wailed. “Oh my god, duh! Congratulations!” replied his roommate. He was free.
I asked Jimmy what his values are and at the top of the list he named compassion and non-judgment. His parents struggled with addiction during his childhood, and through their recovery he learned to “meet people where they’re at.” He believes this is essential for addressing the homelessness crisis that plagues Los Angeles. “So often in politics we start with judgement. ‘People are homeless because they’ve failed, people are poor because they’re lazy, people are incarcerated because they’re bad people.’ That’s not how I think about people. I’m a sociologist and I think that people’s lives are dictated by a lot of forces not always in their control. So much of our policy on poverty and crime are predicated on being judgmental of people. I think that’s counter to how we can create change in people’s behavior and lives.” His solutions? Mainly minimum wage increases coupled with more affordable housing. “If there’s a job in LA, the person who has that job deserves to be able to live here.”
I asked how Jimmy’s queerness, once a source of distress, gives him an advantage in approaching his campaign and city policy. “It’s the empathy. Having had the experience of knowing what it’s like to feel that your civil rights are being limited I approach policy like that. When I think about the municipal code and how it results in misdemeanours that disproportionately affects Black and Latino men, I think that my empathy for them and my advocacy for them is elevated by my own experience as a queer person.”
Jimmy faces an uphill climb. His opponents will most likely out-fundraise him. He is the youngest and the least connected. However, with the recent election of progressive candidate Nithya Raman, for whom Jimmy volunteered and shares political ideology, who had been outspent 4 to 1 and relied solely on grassroots organizing, Jimmy’s team is confident that his values, coupled with his work ethic and his belief in Los Angeles, will emerge victorious.
After the more formal interview process had subsided, Nick Wyville—Jimmy’s campaign manager and fellow Harvard Alum–joined us to gossip about our fellow Hamilton alum and discuss queer things (Nick’s embarassing crush on Shawn Mendes, for example).
Always a fan of hypotheticals, I asked the room what they would do if they could be literally anything with no limitations. I said “ballerina.” Nick thought it through and finally landed on “international food blogger,” whatever that is. I asked Jimmy and, without pause, he replied: “I’m doing it.”
