Before she was married to New York City public advocate and Democratic mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio, Chirlane McCray was a lesbian. She wrote an essay about it for Essence in 1979, which the New York Observer dug up last year. Considering McCray’s husband’s opponents include a current lesbian and a reformed sender-of-crotch-shots — and considering this is New York City, where no one cares how you get your rocks off — it should have been no big deal. But a skeezy New York Post cartoon hinting that De Blasio had won McCray’s vote, so to speak, briefly dragged out the non-story. Now McCray has returned to Essence to candidly explain the fluidity of sexuality and the vagaries of the heart, in case any of us perverts are still confused.
McCray explains that De Blasio didn’t convert her to men (he converted her to Bill), that she’s still attracted to women/people (“I’m married, I’m monogamous, but I’m not dead”), and that she doesn’t consider herself bisexual:
“I am more than just a label. Why are people so driven to labeling where we fall on the sexual spectrum? Labels put people in boxes, and those boxes are shaped like coffins. Finding the right person can be so hard that often, when a person finally finds someone she or he is comfortable with, she or he just makes it work. As my friend Vanessa says, “It’s not whom you love; it’s that you love.”
Not that there are many fatal labels left in politics, anyway. Arizona Representative Kyrsten Sinema was elected while identifying as bisexual and, worse, nontheist.
