Door Opener
Ken Yeager has been opening political doors since he became a trustee of San Jose Evergreen Community College District in 1992, then San Jose city councilman, a county supervisor and now president of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors. Yeager came out of the closet in a 1984 Mercury News op-ed piece that struck back at a previous piece by a local assemblyman who called homosexuality “wrongful.” Yeager proved critics wrong by becoming the first openly gay man to hold the four offices he’s held. Winning broad respect as a thoughtful and approachable legislator, Yeager showed that competence, not sexual preference, carries the day even in a region more socially conservative than other parts of the Bay Area counties.
