The cynical, selective outrage over Gary McCoy’s troubled past

Gary McCoy, the improbable front-runner to be the next Castro supervisor, wears his troubled past as prominently as his oversized eyeglasses.

It is not a subject he shies away from; McCoy highlights his many years as a homeless, HIV-positive drug addict as prominently as John McCain used to bring up his war record. 

McCoy, 48, is a short man with close-cropped greying hair. His District 8 supervisor campaign materials depict him and his husband wearing crisp sweaters over collared shirts; his husband clutches a football-sized dog.

McCoy is 16 years sober, and it is challenging in the present day to envision this even-keeled, middle-aged man as a homeless street junkie and thief. 

Too challenging, some would say. 

Last week, the wealthy political pressure group GrowSF, whose top funders include cryptocurrency billionaire Chris Larsen, retired venture capitalist Michael Moritz and Kilroy Realty, put out a most curious poll in District 8.

Getting the headlines were questions gauging area residents on how they’d feel about voting for Emanuel “Manny” Yekutiel, whose campaign, gradually then suddenly, dissolved after a second on-the-record allegation of sexual assault was published on Oct. 1. 

Yekutiel, who was on pace to coast to a wide November victory, withdrew from the contest. But the deadline to excise his name from the ballot passed in June; he’ll still be on it.

Of more interest, however, was the tack the poll took to gauge voters’ interest in District 8 candidates — including Yekutiel.

It questioned how they’d be inclined to vote once they were informed of McCoy’s extensive “criminal history,” with a number of his lowlights rattled off, including a “heroin-dealing arrest” at 16th and Mission.

(This charge, McCoy says, was dismissed by San Francisco police in 2002 before he had a pre-hearing with a judge, who sent him to drug court diversion on a possession charge. But poll-takers weren’t informed of all that.)

This is not the first time GrowSF has raised alarms about McCoy’s past, an endeavor somewhat akin to being shocked, shocked that there’s gambling in the casino. In this case, however, GrowSF’s move is less farcical and more cynical. 

Gary McCoy is not the only San Francisco politician who is a recovering drug addict. He is not the only local elected official or would-be elected official who has been arrested, adjudicated and incarcerated. 

And yet, in McCoy’s case, his background has served as a scare tactic in a poll. That’s hardly the treatment GrowSF saw fit to dish out to other office-seekers, most notably Supervisor Matt Dorsey: In his case, dangerous and illicit drug use was portrayed as “real-world experience” making him more deserving of your vote, not less. 

So that’s strange. But I can’t say we’re shocked, shocked. 

Supervisor Dorsey is this city’s most prominent political figure emanating from the “recovery community.” In 2022, GrowSF urged District 6 voters to back him: “As an addict in recovery, Dorsey brings his real-world experience to bear on helping people escape the prison of addiction.” 

GrowSF also urged voters to elect Cedric Akbar to the county Democratic Party in 2024; Akbar was a formerly incarcerated heroin addict before conquering addiction more than 30 years ago and becoming a staunch advocate for recovery and substance-use abstinence. 

Like McCoy and Akbar, Dorsey has been extremely forthright about his real-world experience: in his case, years of struggling with alcohol and methamphetamine. His most recent and, hopefully, final relapse came just six years ago while Dorsey was a civilian member of the police command staff. 

A high-ranking police official being an out-of-control drug addict is the sort of thing you’d expect to see in a Harvey Keitel movie; in a less forgiving era, this would end a political career, not jump-start one.

And yet, 18 months after Dorsey’s crisis, Mayor London Breed appointed him District 6 supervisor. He subsequently won a contested 2022 race and is running again this year, facing only little-known organizer Alex Behrend.  

“I remember saying to Mayor Breed when she was considering me that I thought the recovery community was a sleeping giant,” Dorsey recalls. “I don’t think I fully appreciated that sleeping giant includes family members and loved ones who have people in recovery or people who they wish were in recovery.” 

As such, Dorsey wonders how wise it is to turn McCoy’s admitted drug use and criminal convictions into some manner of gotcha. He notes that McCoy has been sober a decade longer than he has.  

“There are a lot of people who struggle with addictions and alcoholism, and far more people with loved ones in those situations,” he says. “Most of us are rooting for those in recovery, so I’m unsure how politically salient an attack on someone’s pre-recovery past would be.” 

So, why do it? Perhaps the best answer is that it has less to do with the past and more to do with the present and future.

Dorsey and McCoy are friends, and McCoy has always been Dorsey’s No. 1 choice for District 8 supervisor. With that said, their real-world experience has led them to different views on how to handle addiction and drug-use as a municipal issue. 

McCoy is one of the city’s most prominent advocates of harm reduction. This is a term that opponents have successfully irradiated. Regardless of branding, it’s a movement derived from the AIDS crisis, in which needle exchanges prevented thousands from getting infected with HIV by using dirty needles. 

Harm reduction is a public-health approach that looks for ways to make drug use safer rather than criminalized, so users can survive long enough to move to a better place in their lives.

The practice, however, has lost favor in recent years to San Franciscans calling for “tough love” or more carceral approaches. Even harm reduction supporters have acknowledged that they had a “blind spot” regarding disruptive and antisocial public behavior by drug users. 

Dorsey has told me that he’s not opposed to harm reduction; he has, in the past, supported safe-consumption sites. But he also favors a harder line on public drug use and mandatory treatment and has worked to fund and increase abstinence-only programs.

These are the sorts of approaches favored by GrowSF, whose wealthy backers have been public that they feel McCoy’s policies will harm San Francisco.

So that’s one reason GrowSF may be inclined to take McCoy down a peg — and, in fact, on Monday it endorsed rival candidate Darshini Patel. Like McCoy, she didn’t bother answering GrowSF’s questionnaire. She neither courted this endorsement nor wanted it. It’s a wee bit of a surprise.

But, again, nobody should be shocked, shocked: McCoy’s drug-using, criminal past was rehashed in the endorsement in Cliff’s Notes form.

It’s a long way to Nov. 3, but many of Yekutiel’s endorsers and the local Democratic Party have coalesced behind McCoy; barring unforeseen lunacy, he will be the next District 8 supervisor. 

GrowSF, however, says its poll shows a tighter race than you’d think.

Of note, this is a district-level poll that employed the additional bank shot of ranked-choice voting permutations, in which respondents were also informed that McCoy “has a criminal history, including a felony conviction, six misdemeanors, grand theft, jail time, probation violation, and a heroin-dealing arrest at 16th & Mission.”

GrowSF will, purportedly, put six figures into slagging McCoy’s record heading into November.

That’s in character for an outfit far more comfortable tearing people down than building them up. And it’s also something of a win-win: If it can’t tank McCoy, it can at least hobble him before he assumes office.

Your humble narrator’s questions to GrowSF, regarding its rationale for dwelling on McCoy’s distant past, elicited a suggestion to review the August letter it sent to the county Democratic Party.

In it, GrowSF urged an endorsement for Yekutiel while slamming McCoy’s harm reduction advocacy and highlighting his “staggering number of contacts with the criminal justice system.”

The letter further insinuated that McCoy “minimized or fully omitted significant elements” of his record.

But this is a baffling accusation: McCoy, in fact, hired a private investigator to scrape his entire record, in Virginia and California. He has presented his own dossier to journalists to review. He has also included charges that were expunged — so we only know about them because he’s telling us about them. 

“Gary,” sums up Dorsey, “could not be more forthcoming.” 

Characterizing McCoy’s arrest and conviction record as “staggering” implies one hasn’t reviewed the documented histories of too many men who were addicted to heroin and then meth and chronically homeless between ages 18 and 31.

If anything, McCoy’s record isn’t so much staggering as depressing. There are many people with rap sheets like this, and very few of them matriculate into years of sobriety, stability and wearing sweaters over collared shirts with your spouse while cradling a tiny dog. 

McCoy is forthcoming with journalists about how he was popped for grand theft for taking part in a scheme to steal a computer to buy drugs (his friend stole the computer); how he stole a power tool from a pal; how he stole cigarettes from convenience stores; how he absconded from drug court for years and was arrested repeatedly.

He did his time in jail and paid thousands of dollars in restitution. More so than the severity of the incidents within McCoy’s record, what hits you is the sheer, repetitious volume.  

Until it stopped: Sixteen years ago, he found sobriety and has since worked as a political aide for supervisors Scott Wiener, London Breed, Julie Christensen and, most notably, Rep. Nancy Pelosi.  

McCoy’s politics and policies are fair game for any critic. So is his background: But to highlight his troubled past as a problem, while referring to similar transgressions as instructive “real-world experience” for  favored politicians is transparently hypocritical. 

It also sends a clear message to everyone presently in recovery or who may yet reach that stage: If you do not echo the worldview of a wealthy pressure group, you will always be a junkie and always be a criminal, no matter how long you’ve been sober and no matter how far you’ve advanced past your lowest lows. 

It remains to be seen how McCoy’s lost years resonate with residents of the leafier and more tranquil corners of District 8. But if GrowSF or anyone else wanted to make trouble for McCoy there, perhaps they could just say he wants to build more housing.