Former WeHo Mayor John Duran Confirms 2026 Council Run

John Duran is coming back for one more fight.

The former West Hollywood mayor and two-decade council veteran has confirmed he’s running for City Council in November, telling WEHOonline the current council majority is steering the city away from what made it distinct in the first place.

“The council majority is on the wrong track trying to make West Hollywood look like the rest of Los Angeles,” Duran said. “We built this city to be a unique village and should never surrender local control to the demands of Sacramento.”

Duran was on the council from 2001 to 2020 and held the mayor’s gavel four times before being asked to step down from that post in 2019. His pitch for getting back in comes down to the math on recent votes: too many of them landing 3-2, he says, with the two most experienced members on the council losing out on decisions about housing, growth and transportation.

On affordability, Duran doesn’t think the city can build its way out of the housing crisis. He argues the push to build more has instead sped up the loss of rent-controlled units, and that strengthening rent control is the better tool. He’s also pointed to what he says is a backlog of more than 50 unfunded capital improvement projects sitting in the city’s budget, and wants to sort through which ones still make sense and push forward earthquake retrofitting work he says has stalled since he left office.

“The city cannot and should not strive to be like neighboring Los Angeles,” Duran said. “The greatest threat currently is to make West Hollywood common to look like any other part of Los Angeles and lose its identity. If the voters of West Hollywood decide they want me to return to stabilize city hall — I am willing to serve for one final four year term.”

Duran has practiced as a criminal defense and civil rights attorney since 1987, and has been sober for 29 years. His legal record includes Kolcum v. L.A. County, a suit he won against the county for denying HIV medication to inmates, and early work defending medical marijuana patients before Proposition 215. He wrote the country’s first ordinance banning the declawing of cats, and served as the first openly gay national chairman of NALEO, the National Association of Latino Elected Officials. His law firm’s bio lists him as currently serving on the boards of AIDS Project Los Angeles and NALEO, and he has previously sat on the boards of the ACLU Foundation and Lambda Legal.

His advocacy work started long before his time on the council. Duran co-founded Equality California, represented ACT UP during the AIDS epidemic, and served as board chairman of the Life AIDS Lobby from 1987 to 1992, the organization that wrote much of California’s early HIV and AIDS policy. As a councilmember, he secured the site for the city’s Alcohol and Drug Recovery Center and ran early town halls on crystal meth use that other cities later used as a model. If you follow Duran on social media you know he’s also kept up a steady presence pushing back on the Trump administration’s positions on LGBTQ+ rights and civil liberties, a position he’s been holding since Trump’s first term.

Duran ran for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in 2014 while still on the city council, finishing behind Sheila Kuehl and Bobby Shriver in the primary. He lost his council re-election bid in 2020, then ran again in 2022, leading in early returns before slipping out of the top three as later ballots were counted, and eventually conceding — the only other loss on a ballot record that includes five council wins between 2001 and 2017.

Duran is not without controversy. His return will bring back to mind, for some, one of the city’s biggest scandals of the last decade, one that eventually brought down West Hollywood’s council deputy system. WEHOville broke the story of “Deputygate” back when it happened — the story that started with Duran’s council deputy, Ian Owens, caught monitoring another deputy’s phone calls. The deputy system dated back to the city’s founding in 1984, when the members of the new council — the first LGBT-majority local government in the country — found themselves fielding requests from residents and reporters covering the launch with almost no full-time staff to help. It grew into its own political liability over the decades that followed. Paul Brotzman, the city’s first city manager, told WEHOville in an interview that at one point, a council deputy was directed by their boss to work against a policy the council majority had itself adopted.

That investigation ended up exposing Duran’s own conduct as Owens’ boss. The city and Duran paid $500,000 to settle Owens’ sexual harassment lawsuit, and former publisher, Hank Scott stayed on it for years after, including testimony from the wrongful-termination trial of another former deputy, Michelle Rex, which kept the allegations in court records and in the news long after the check was cut. Duran also stepped down as mayor in March 2019, after members of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles accused him of sexual harassment and misconduct. He’s denied those allegations. In 2024 he resigned as chair of WeHo PAC, the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce’s political action committee after disclosing to the group that he’d previously had relationships with two men who were running for City Council that year.

Duran hasn’t disappeared since leaving office. He helped to produce and appeared in “Studio One Forever,” a documentary on the iconic West Hollywood gay disco that used to sit on the site now home to the Robertson Lane (now Row) development. It premiered at Outfest in 2023 and got a theatrical release from Gravitas Ventures the following September. For years he also hosted “Sidebar with John Duran,” a popular weekly nationally syndicated talk show that covered politics, LGBTQ+ history and interviews with newsmakers, until it stopped running when COVID hit. Full disclosure: WEHOonline Managing Editor Brian Holt hired Duran to host that show on CHANNEL Q, the radio network Holt founded and programmed.

The comeback bid comes two months after he got married. In May, Duran married his partner of 27 years, Mark Morris, on their anniversary. The two had been domestic partners for the better part of three decades, together through the years Duran spent fighting professionally for the right to make it official. Duran has said the wedding didn’t change how he felt about Morris so much as it let the state catch up to something the two of them already knew — that no license was ever going to be the thing that made the relationship real. He’s talked about watching friends lose partners during the AIDS epidemic with no legal standing to even be in the room, and has said that history is part of why the wedding meant what it did. He’ll be making his case to West Hollywood voters this fall as a newlywed, with one campaign left in him by his own count, for a city he’s called home since the 1970s.