The Cypress and the Crow: John Vaughan on John Erickson and West Hollywood Politics

I am fond of a local crow.

Each morning he arrives with evident purpose at the tallest Italian Cypress on my street. His daily task is to perch at the very top. Each day, he fails.

He attempts to land at the top, and the top bends. Precariously. He never succeeds — sometimes he holds on for a few seconds as the cypress sways like a rubber tree. He is heavier than he looks. The tree is more flexible than it appears, and he wobbles from side to side until the tree flings him into the air.

And then he flies back and tries again. The display is tenacious and ridiculous. He is not engaging in this futile exercise because he expects to land at the top. He has a different motivation: to impress his mate. He performs for his mate, and for any crow who might want to take residence on his street — demonstrating strength, flexibility, and fixation. He makes himself look ridiculous to show that he has vigor.

The performance is the point.

John Erickson, current candidate for California State Senate, is a member of the West Hollywood City Council and a former mayor — though “former mayor” means something different here than it does elsewhere. West Hollywood has no elected mayor. The title rotates among council members by seniority. You get elected to the council, and then you wait your turn.

West Hollywood residents know something about waiting. There is a massive hole at the western edge of the city — multi-acre, deep, fenced off, still dangerous — near where a development project consumed the historic Studio One (The Factory) nightclub, a landmark of the city’s gay history, before quietly collapsing. The Factory is gone. The project is gone. The hole remains.

The city was founded in 1984 out of a desire for self-determination. Gays, renters, and a later wave of Russian immigrants wanted local control over their own destiny. It was a reasonable thing to want.

Over the past four decades, that desire has inverted. City government is now in thrall to non-local interest groups, and local politicos have turned West Hollywood governance into a civic karaoke stage — performing the idea of government rather than governing.

Developers seem to get everything they want. The residents who built the city’s tax base are often told they are standing in the way of progress. What they get instead are promises of a city beautified by ambitious projects announced with fanfare that either take decades to realize or disappear, their endings documented in studied obscurantism.

What happened to the French Market and Studio One (the Factory), the two most significant LGBT historic landmarks in a city populated by gay men? Why are they now, respectively, an exhibit of urban blight and a massive hole? Nobody knows. Accidents happen.

City council members, by contrast, do not wait long before making their next move. Lindsey Horvath and John Erickson emerged from the same West Hollywood political network — both protégés of the same patron, both with their eyes fixed on a larger stage. Horvath got there first; she is now one of the most powerful elected officials in California, which is worth pausing on.

She arrived on the West Hollywood City Council as a centrist — she had been vice president of the College Republicans at Notre Dame before switching parties — pivoted hard during the racial reckoning of 2020, and voted to defund the Sheriff’s contract. When residents objected to related public safety proposals, she told a council chamber — from the dais — that their concerns were “rooted in racism and othering.” The Los Angeles Times endorsed her for County Supervisor the following month. By November she was elected. The radical politics were a Shein dress: cheap, effective, disposable. She wore it once, leveled the accusations required to make it work, and moved on. West Hollywood got to keep the hole in the ground. Horvath got Los Angeles County.

Erickson studied the playbook carefully. A women’s studies degree, a later PhD in American Religious History from Claremont, a 2010 move to West Hollywood: he rose through the local progressive advocacy world and eventually became the first male president of the Hollywood chapter of the National Organization for Women.

Elected to the West Hollywood City Council in 2020, he became one of the loudest voices in the room, and one of its most colorful political personalities. It cannot be overstated how exceptional a feat that is. West Hollywood gave Stormy Daniels the Key to the City for her “leadership in the #RESIST movement” and declared May 23rd “Stormy Daniels Day.” The ceremony was held at Chi Chi LaRue’s.

With his (now-discarded) pearl necklace, (now gone) Andy Warhol white blond hair, raspy voice, and air of cheerful exasperation, he has the energy of a local Selina Meyer character — relentless, ambitious, and always performing politics slightly ahead of the results.

This formerly non-binary champion of women famously nominated himself as vice chair of the Planning Commission over local expert Lynn Hoopingarner, who was next in line by seniority. The male members voted for him.

He voted against his council colleague Lauren Meister at the Southern California Association of Governments, costing the city its regional representation. She called it sad and humiliating. He left the meeting without acknowledging her. When running for re-election, he told voters he would not run for state senate. Now he is officially a candidate for State Senate. He could win.

I met Erickson once, and found him polite, charming, fully engaged in our brief conversation. I do not remember the substance of it so much as I remember his hair.

A friend told me that Erickson immediately stepped in to help a dangerous situation in which motorists were speeding down a residential street. My friend reports that Erickson had an empty police cruiser parked near the stop sign to deter “California rolls” through a stop sign heavily used by pedestrians. The cruiser was there for a while. It’s gone now.

But Erickson has made himself available to constituents. A few years ago he launched an initiative to meet residents on their own terms: Saturdays in Plummer Park. No preconditions. Anyone welcome. He called it “Saturdays in Plummer Park with John.” This is genuinely admirable constituent service. It is also exactly as annoying as it sounds.

The name is a Sondheim reference. Sondheim works because he lived on the edge of farce: the rhymes too clever, the emotions too exposed, the orchestrations always one degree from collapse, held together by sheer technical mastery and the conviction of performers who have earned the register. Without that mastery it tips into parody.

A constituent meeting named after a Pulitzer Prize-winning meditation on artistic obsession and human disconnection is a man attempting the Sondheim register without the Sondheim chops. The gesture was right. The execution risk was real.

A related example came during Erickson’s interview with Ben Kawaller of The Free Press in May 2024. The exchange circulated widely among West Hollywood residents, and then beyond, for one particularly strange moment. Kawaller asked Erickson to name an example of “racialized space” in West Hollywood after the City Council announced an initiative to combat it.

Erickson responded with a question of his own: “Well, what is gendered space in architecture?”

But another line from the same interview deserves attention. In the course of discussing development, Erickson offered the following observation:

“I mean, you can build a building just to build a building.”

Surveying the local landscape: Studio One / The Factory is gone. The French Market sits blighted. A massive excavation where a redevelopment project once stood remains fenced off at the western edge of the city.

The buildings, in other words, are not being built either way.

Meanwhile the city’s two most significant gay landmarks have become, respectively, a hole and a ruin.

West Hollywood’s political class has arrived at a remarkably convenient philosophy: that their mandate extends not merely to residents, but to workers, to the region, to equity itself. It sounds generous. It functions as an alibi.

Consider what the philosophy has produced. West Hollywood currently has the highest citywide minimum wage in the country — $20.25 an hour for non-hotel workers, $20.22 for hotel workers, plus mandatory paid leave and healthcare contributions that few neighboring municipalities other than Santa Monica have matched. UNITE HERE Local 11, which helped elect the council members who passed these measures, has been among the largest independent expenditure operations in recent WeHo elections. The tourists pay a hotel tax that funds a government of gestures. The workers, on whose behalf the mandate is claimed, still cannot afford to live here. They commute in. The buildings aren’t being built.

West Hollywood is a small city. Its 1.9 square miles are surrounded on three sides by Los Angeles, which tends to notice what happens here. Political habits developed here have a way of migrating outward. In 2025, Mayor Karen Bass signed what she called the Olympic Wage — a citywide ordinance raising hotel and airport workers’ pay to $30 an hour by the time the 2028 Games begin. The ink was barely dry before airlines and hotel groups launched a referendum to repeal it. Business groups filed a competing ballot measure to eliminate the city’s business tax entirely — the one that generates over $700 million annually. A city council member called it “brinksmanship.”

The mandate expands. The hole remains.

This is not a story about a single political actor. It is a story about a conversation that drifted so far into abstraction that no one noticed the ground disappearing beneath it.

John Erickson is still running for State Senate.

When Pope Francis died, CBS featured an interview with Erickson, who spoke articulately and movingly about his meeting with the pontiff. Wearing a black sport coat, a white banded collar shirt, and a pectoral cross, he looked to a viewer in Sherman Oaks like a missionary bishop. Shortly after, the pearls disappeared. The Andy Warhol hair disappeared. He now dresses like a male politician.

It suits him.

In most bird species it is the males who sing the loudest, flash the brightest colors, and perform the most elaborate dances.

My crow has chosen a more local form of display. He finds the tallest cypress on the street and keeps testing its limits until everyone has no choice but to watch.

-John Vaughan

West Hollywood