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September 3, 2007

How to come out as a gay politician

Journal photo / John Freidah
Rhode Island House majority leader Gordon Fox, left, and Providence mayor David Cicilline, both openly gay Democrats who came out while serving as state reps, on the floor of House at the Rhode Island State House in June.

Jim McGreevey, former Democratic governor of New Jersey, writes a column (A Prayer for Larry Craig) in the Washington Post today that starts out honest enough:

My gut wrenched when I read of Sen. Larry Craig's bathroom arrest. I remembered my own late-night encounter with the law at a Garden State Parkway rest stop following a political dinner in north Jersey.

I pulled into the rest stop, parked my car, flashed my headlights, which was "the signal," and waited. Glancing in my rearview mirror, I saw a state trooper approaching. I desperately tried to convince the trooper of my innocence, showing him my former prosecutor's badge, a gift from the office when I left. The trooper radioed his office and returned. "I never want to see you here again," he said. I survived for another day.

Unfortunately, it ends with this sanctimonius head-scratcher:

I pray that the tide of American history continues to sweep toward the inevitable expansion of freedom that recognizes the worth and dignity of every individual -- and that mine is the last generation that is required to choose between affairs of the heart and elected office.

That's not honest, Jim. Your generation did not require that. You made the choice to live your life in defense of your secret.

I write this from Providence, R.I., a city that is heavily Catholic, where the capital city's mayor, David N. Cicilline, and Rhode Island House majority leader Gordon D. Fox each came out while serving as state representatives. Both were born in 1961, just four years after McGreevey. New Jersey is a lot more like Rhode Island than South Dakota.

Voters knew Cicilline was gay when they elected him mayor in 2002. Although he was raised Catholic, he chose to be Jewish, his mother's faith. They didn't hold that against him, either. He's now raising money to run for governor in 2010 when Republican Don Carcieri's term expires.

When Gordon Fox poked into a marriage-equality rally happening at the State House in 2004, as he tells it, he was handed a microphone and made an unplanned announcement that he was gay and in a six-year committed relationship with a man, which he had not hidden. He's also Catholic, the son of an Irish father and a Cape Verdean mother, and calls himself black. He is still majority leader.

The revelations that led to Mr. McGreevey's resignation were triggered by the threat of a sexual harassment suit by the Israeli Golan Cipel, whom he had appointed New Jersey's homeland security advisor. (McGreevey says they had an affair; Cipel says he was an "unwilling victim.") Being gay was incidental to the issues of judgment and dishonesty that underlaid his double life.

McGreevey writes,

But being in the closet uniquely assisted me in politics. From my first run for the state legislature until my election as governor, all too often I was not leading but following my best guess at public opinion. Politics was for me a way to secure the crowd's approbation...

Maybe the cant that resulted -- what people want to hear -- is built into the path he and Larry Craig both took. McGreevey married twice. In 1983, when he was 38 years old, Craig married a staffer with three children shortly after rumors of his being gay first surfaced. He voted for "Don't ask, Don't tell" in the military, and apparently lived it himself. That's the policy that expels you for telling the truth.

Could either have simply come out? Other politicians have done it, and their worlds have not collapsed. McGreevy probably could have, but foreclosed that possibility as a teenager. Larry Craig, now 62, from a very red state, and still declaring that he's not gay, probably not.

For closeted politicians who are gay and might have the courage to risk it all for the authenticity, peace of mind and character that courageous decisions can build, here are the short stories of two who did.

From the Journal archives, a 1999 account by then-reporter Maria Miro Johnson of how Cicilline came out:

...state Rep. David Cicilline told of how his sexual orientation first became public knowledge, in a column by Journal political columnist M. Charles Bakst.

It was done, he said, "in a way I honestly hope every person who's gay gets to have."

He said Bakst asked him whether he was gay, but said he didn't have to answer the question if he didn't want to "which I thought was sweet."

When editors raised concerns about including the fact in the story, Cicilline called them and said it was all right, prompting them to respond, "Are you asking us to put that in the story?"

" 'I'm not asking you to do anything,' " Cicilline said he replied, just as he wasn't asking to be described as Jewish and Italian.

"I refused to buy into the fact that this was a really bad thing and I had to give them special dispensation to do it. Finally, in the end, I said, 'Look, what I request is, respect the journalist, whatever he's written.' "

The newspaper printed the column in its entirety.

In Rhode Island, having longtime political columnist Charlie Bakst slip it into a profile had to have been breaking it to us gently. After listing issues Cicilline opposes and favors, Charlie wrote in 1999,

And, he tells me, he is gay.

He never broadcast it in, say, a House speech. "It's just one part of who I am," he says.

He doubts voters will care about his private life. He asserts, "I think people care about the quality of your commitment, the content of your ideas."

And now the longer April 3, 2004 story of a Journal interview with Gordon Fox soon after what he says was an unplanned spontaneous announcement at a marriage-equality rally. It's long, so I'll jump it.

Announcement that he's gay draws support for Rep. Fox

The House majority leader still can't explain why he chose to make the declaration Wednesday, but says he felt it was important to do so.

By LIZ ANDERSON
Journal State House Bureau
The Providence Journal
Saturday, 4/3/2004

* * *

PROVIDENCE - The e-mails have piled up in Rep. Gordon Fox's in-box: 35 within a matter of hours, and about 100 a day after that "from all over the country." He's received flowers from constituents, letters from colleagues, and a stack of telephone messages.

Virtually all were reaching out to congratulate and support the 42-year-old House majority leader and Providence Democrat, who for the first time on Wednesday night publicly announced that he is gay and in a six-year committed relationship with a man.

"It's been a tremendous response," he said yesterday of his declaration, made on the spur of the moment at a rally in favor of allowing same-sex couples to marry.

"I think politics and public policy is really about that human dimension," Fox said, "and I think it's people that have been touched personally either they're in the same situation or a similar situation, or they're supportive of the concept of equal rights and [feel] that everyone should be treated the same."

"In that regard I think it's had a positive effect, and it's had an effect that I didn't plan, but would have intended had I planned it," he said.

In an interview in his office yesterday, Fox struggled to identify why he had not revealed his sexual orientation up until now. He said he's never been one to put his family on his political brochures to mix the personal with the political.

"I'm just private," he said. "I was brought up in a very private Irish, Cape Verdean, Catholic household where family business is family business. It stays within the four walls. You don't wear your heart on your sleeve."

"I've never hidden the fact that I had a partner, and have gone to events with him, [being] open and obvious in that sort of way with no real declaration," Fox said. "If somebody ever came up to me and asked me point-blank, it wouldn't be like I would lie to somebody."

Fox says he still can't explain why he decided to leave the ongoing House session on Wednesday to check out the boisterous gay-marriage rally, or take the microphone when it was handed to him under the State House rotunda.

Declaring he is gay is "not something I've ever been that motivated to do," he said, "but I thought it was important at that moment [at the rally] to be motivated to do it."

Shortly afterward, he called his partner to let him know their personal life was now public.

Was his partner supportive?

"Yes," Fox responded slowly, "only because he's out to friends, family, everyone who knows him. But we also share [that] we don't need to wear our relationship, again, on our sleeves."

Fox declined to say more about the man, calling him a private citizen, but acknowledged the ring he wears on his left hand is "a symbol of our connection."

"I have no plans of having a wedding ceremony, and that's a personal decision between two people, including myself and my partner," Fox said. "My support of this bill is to give people the option."

His partner is eligible for, but does not receive, health coverage through Fox's state plan, the lawmaker said. Fox has made the man the beneficiary of his will, but they have yet to set up other legal documents, such as health-care proxies, which would give them some of the rights afforded a heterosexual married couple.

They share a home on Gorton Street, in Fox's East Side district, and are accepted as a couple by their families.

Marriage, Fox said, is "an evolving concept, an evolving notion of society." He cites his own parents, an interracial couple, as having the type of union once banned in many states.

Fox said he's long been supportive of civil-rights issues "whether it's regarding sexual orientation, sex, gender, race, national origin . . . because I think that's what makes us a society respect for one another, and all these rights."

As a mixed-race child, he said, he was asked, "Are you white or are you black?" Now, "brown-skinned people are in. . . . What was, 30 years ago, thought of as a stigma is now a cool thing to be."

"It just shows society evolves in what society accepts," he said. "Human beings are progressive by nature, and they should be, and I think on this issue progress will dictate that at one point, some day it may not be now that same-sex marriages will be allowed."

Fox said, "I've always been comfortable with who I am, and I strive to be more comfortable every day." He said he never declared his sexual orientation directly to his family; they just seemed to know.

Raised Catholic, Fox served as an altar boy in his youth. He said he struggles with the church's position on gays and gay rights.

"A lot of what the church does is wonderful - a lot of the teachings of love and respect. You can take these things and say, 'They teach this, and why can't they get here?' " he said. "And trying to reconcile them is sometimes frustrating."

Fox said he believes few political associates were surprised by his announcement: "I think most people in the building had a feeling, or knew." But he says he is still touched by the comments he's received after becoming the only current, openly gay member of the legislature.

"It's a heavy burden," he said of that new label. "But I have sturdy shoulders."

He scrolled through some of the e-mails on his computer, at a reporter's request, reading them out loud.

"Bravo, Representative Fox it takes courage to stand in front of the public, media, and your peers and declare who you are and what you believe to be right," wrote a man in Providence.

"Good for you!" declared a correspondent from Bristol. "As a straight, married woman I hope you will take a stand to fight for the rights of gays and lesbians always."

Even "conservative-type legislators or traditionalists or whatever they like to call themselves have been, on a personal level, extremely supportive, congratulatory and very affectionate, and that means a lot to me," Fox said.

So down here at the very end, where only the diehards are still reading... We should perhaps make a distinction between sexual identity and sexual behavior.

The Toronto Star (The elephant in the room) went looking for explanations for, among other things, Larry Craig's assertion that "I'm not gay." The sources range from Freud to Kevin Alderson, associate professor of counselling psychology at the University of Calgary:

....Gay activists and others emphasize that the men most often caught in these compromising situations are not openly gay, but rather those who identify as heterosexual or are married. They may associate being gay with "anonymous, cheap gay sex" in places like bathrooms, "so they project (that) it's wrong and publicly state how immoral gay people are, because to them that's what being gay is about," says Alderson. "But that's not what it's about. People having sex in washrooms? It's mostly married men."