Former Burien City Council Member Krystal Marx filed on February 6, 2023, to run for Burien City Council Seat 5, currently held by Mayor Sofia Aragon. In 2021, Marx, then the incumbent in seat 7, was defeated by Stephanie Mora. Besides being a Burien City Council Member beginning in 2017, Marx has been the Director of Seattle Pride.
Below are excerpts from an article by David Preston in The Burien Voice, along with an article link to Seattle Gay Scene.
“Last November, the Seattle Pride organization released Krystal Marx as director. This is according to an article in Seattle Gay Scene,* which rightly took Seattle Pride to task for not making a bigger deal out of all this. In 2017 Marx had just come out as bisexual a few years earlier, and the way in which she did that, shortly before a city council election in which she was a candidate, smelled of opportunism to some observers. This is not to say that Marx isn’t legit, but when you’re auditioning for someone to lead as large and venerable an organization as Pride, you don’t hire someone who just stepped out of the closet.”
“Marx won a seat on the council, and once seated, she quickly emerged as the most divisive political figure in Burien history:
- Suborning threats against the editors of this page (The Burien Voice).
- Promoting Antifa on her Facebook page.
- Bashing the cops in public statements.
- Trying to cast every criticism of her character or politics as an attack on her sexuality.
Marx lost the support of local kingmaker Dave Upthegrove (a legitimately gay man) when she endorsed his radical leftist opponent in the 2021 King County Council election. That cost her reelection, and things went downhill from there. “
“Although she still had her job at Seattle Pride for the time being, to keep it, she needed to deliver a post-pandemic / post-CHOP Pride Parade that would make Seattle-ites feel united again, but instead, she did the opposite by involving the organization in a disgraceful public squabble over whether gay cops would be allowed to march along in uniform. Marx declared that cops would NOT be welcome in the parade, and when she saw a few cops holding balloons and walking beside the parade (they again publicly, for resisting her authority.”
“In the last few months at Pride, Marx embarrassed the group by carping on lesbians for not being supportive enough of her as a bisexual. (Reading her tweets on this, we knew that her days were numbered; the organization was founded to draw the gay community together, after all, and not to pull it apart)”